Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics by Tim McLoughlin Page A

homosexuals to beat up. He’d had a dread of homosexuality, probably flowing as it generally does out of fear of a part of himself, and he stifled that dread by fag-bashing.
    “He still doan’ like them,” a woman told me. She had glossy black hair and opaque eyes, and she was letting me pay for her rum and orange juice. “He’s pretty, you know, an’ they come on to him, an’ he doan’ like it.”
    I called that item in, along with a few others equally earthshaking. I bought myself a steak dinner at the Slate over on Tenth Avenue, then finished up at Armstrong’s, not drinking very hard, just coasting along on bourbon and coffee.
    Twice, the phone rang for me. Once, it was Tommy Tillary, telling me how much he appreciated what I was doing for him. It seemed to me that all I was doing was taking his money, but he had me believing that my loyalty and invaluable assistance were all he had to cling to.
    The second call was from Carolyn. More praise. I was a gentleman, she assured me, and a hell of a fellow all around. And I should forget that she’d been bad-mouthing Tommy. Everything was going to be fine with them.

    I took the next day off. I think I went to a movie, and it may have been The Sting , with Newman and Redford achieving vengeance through swindling.
    The day after that, I did another tour of duty over in Brooklyn. And the day after that, I picked up the News first thing in the morning. The headline was nonspecific, something like kill suspect hangs self in cell, but I knew it was my case before I turned to the story on page three.
    Miguelito Cruz had torn his clothing into strips, knotted the strips together, stood his iron bedstead on its side, climbed onto it, looped his homemade rope around an overhead pipe, and jumped off the up-ended bedstead and into the next world.
    That evening’s six o’clock TV news had the rest of the story. Informed of his friend’s death, Angel Herrera had recanted his original story and admitted that he and Cruz had conceived and executed the Tillary burglary on their own. It had been Miguelito who had stabbed the Tillary woman when she walked in on them. He’d picked up a kitchen knife while Herrera watched in horror. Miguelito always had a short temper, Herrera said, but they were friends, even cousins, and they had hatched their story to protect Miguelito. But now that he was dead, Herrera could admit what had really happened.

    I was in Armstrong’s that night, which was not remarkable. I had it in mind to get drunk, though I could not have told you why, and that was remarkable, if not unheard of. I got drunk a lot those days, but I rarely set out with that intention. I just wanted to feel a little better, a little more mellow, and somewhere along the way I’d wind up waxed.
    I wasn’t drinking particularly hard or fast, but I was working at it, and then somewhere around ten or eleven the door opened and I knew who it was before I turned around. Tommy Tillary, well dressed and freshly barbered, making his first appearance in Jimmy’s place since his wife was killed.
    “Hey, look who’s here!” he called out and grinned that big grin. People rushed over to shake his hand. Billie was behind the stick, and he’d no sooner set one up on the house for our hero than Tommy insisted on buying a round for the bar. It was an expensive gesture—there must have been thirty or forty people in there—but I don’t think he cared if there were three hundred or four hundred.
    I stayed where I was, letting the others mob him, but he worked his way over to me and got an arm around my shoulders. “This is the man,” he announced. “Best fucking detective ever wore out a pair of shoes. This man’s money,” he told Billie, “is no good at all tonight. He can’t buy a drink; he can’t buy a cup of coffee; if you went and put in pay toilets since I was last here, he can’t use his own dime.”
    “The john’s still free,” Billie said, “but don’t give the boss any