Dead Man Walking
The phone rang at ten past midnight, which meant somebody was dead. In this town, at that hour, it always meant somebody was dead.
I let it ring.
I was sitting in the dark with my shirt stuck to my back and a bottle of rye on the desk that had been full at nine. The heat had come in on the first of the month and stayed. Ninety-six that afternoon. The window was open on the alley and the brick wall across it was still throwing the day back at me. No air moved. Out over Jersey the thunder had been grumbling for an hour and nothing had come of it.
The iron ached. It always did in the heat. A dull pull under the breastbone, like a bad tooth in the wrong part of the body. Three years since a German mortar put it there, and every year it sat a little closer to my heart. Some nights I could feel it keeping time.
The phone rang a third time. I picked it up.
“Morrison.”
“It’s Santos.”
Maria Santos never said hello. She didn’t have time for it, and I’d never asked her to make some. Behind her voice I could hear a big room with hard walls.
“Kellerman Building,” she said. “Penthouse.”
“Thomas Kellerman?”
“You know another Kellerman with a sixty-story building?” She breathed once. It didn’t sound like her. “Bring whatever it is you bring.”
The line went dead.
I sat there with the receiver in my hand and listened to the hum.
Two years Santos had been calling me. Small things at first. A drowned man pulled out of the East River with frost on his eyelashes in July. A pawnbroker on Market Street who swore every clock in his shop had started running backward the night his wife died. She called me when the facts on a case wouldn’t add up and she didn’t want them added up by anybody with a pension to protect. I told her what I could. It was a lot less than I knew. She never asked how I knew it, and I liked her for that more than I ever said.
She’d never sounded like that on the phone.
I put the rye in the bottom drawer. Then I took out what was under it.
The knuckles were old iron, black and pitted, hand-forged by a smith in Red Hook who had known exactly what I wanted them for and hadn’t asked. They were heavy and they never got warm, not even in August. I slid them into the right pocket of my coat. Notebook and pencil went in the left. A pocketknife. A few glassine envelopes from the box I kept for stamps and for other things.
The .38 stayed in the drawer.
It’s a good gun. I’ve cleaned it more times than I’ve fired it since the war. But when Santos called after midnight, it was never the kind of trouble a bullet fixed. Lead goes into most of what I run into and comes out the other side, and all it does is make them mad.
I got my hat and my coat. A coat in that heat was a crime, and I wore it anyway. In my business a man needs pockets.
The hall light was out again. I went down four flights by feel with one hand on the rail.
When I opened the street door, the storm broke.
It came all at once, after a week of waiting. Warm rain, hard enough to sting, drumming on the roofs of the cars along Ninth Avenue and filling the gutters before the first thunder finished rolling. The sky over the river went white and then black.
I turned up my collar and walked into it.
Two chrome eagles the size of men stood over the door of the Kellerman Building, and tonight they were guarding a dead man.
The building went up sixty floors into the rain, stepped back in tiers, every setback pouring water off its edge in a gray sheet. Lightning came and the eagles lit up with their wings half spread.
Wall Street at that hour belonged to the night watchmen. A radio car sat at the curb with its lights off and its windows fogged. I left the Ford behind it and ran for the doors and got wet anyway.
The lobby was black marble and brass, half the lights off. Along the back wall ran a mural of muscled men pouring steel, which is how rich men like to picture the people who make them rich.
Two patrolmen stood by the elevator bank with their caps pushed back, sweating through their blues. They gave me the look patrolmen give a man in a wet coat who walks in like he’s expected. I knew it. I’d given it myself for six years on a beat in this city before the Army found a better use for me.
The night guard sat on a bench by the cigar stand. He was a little man in a gray uniform two sizes too big, with a Chesterfield going and three dead ones in the sand urn by his shoe. His face was the color of the ash. When he lifted the cigarette, it took him two tries to find his mouth.
Santos came out of the shadows by the mail chute.
Her gray suit had gone black at the shoulders where the rain had caught her. Five-foot-four, and I’d watched her back down longshoremen. Tonight there was something in her eyes I’d only ever seen in men coming back off a patrol that went bad.
“You took your time,” she said.
“It’s raining.”
“I noticed.” She jerked her chin at the guard. “Eddie Pruitt. Night man. He found him.”
“Medical Examiner?”
“Morgue wagon’s two hours out. Maybe three.” She said it flat. “The heat’s stacking bodies all over the city. Old women in walk-ups. A kid in Haarlem who rolled off a roof trying to sleep where it was cool. Kellerman can wait his turn.” She glanced at the patrolmen and lowered her voice. “I sent those two down here to keep the lobby. I wanted your eyes on it before anybody else’s.”
“What’s up there, Santos?”
“Ride up and find out.”
Pruitt ran the car. The day operators had gone home at six, and he had the only key that worked the night elevator. He leaned on the lever with his whole weight. The numbers climbed on the dial over the door. Ten. Twenty. My ears popped.
“Tell him, Eddie,” Santos said.
Pruitt licked his lips.
“I go up at half past eleven,” he said. “Every night, top floor down. Mr. Kellerman works late sometimes. He don’t like being bothered. But the light was on under his door, and I knocked, and he don’t answer. And the door’s locked.” He swallowed. “So I used the passkey. I figured maybe his heart. A man his age, in this heat.”
“And?”
He didn’t answer. He watched the dial. Forty. Fifty.
“That’s enough, Eddie,” Santos said.
The car stopped at sixty with a little bounce. Pruitt slid the cage door back and stayed where he was, one hand on the lever.
“I’ll wait here, Detective,” he said. “If it’s all the same.”
“It’s all the same.”
The hall up there was carpeted and quiet. At the end of it was a door with frosted glass and gold letters. KELLERMAN INDUSTRIES. EXECUTIVE OFFICES. It stood open six inches on a rubber wedge Santos must have kicked under it.
She stopped me ten feet short and gave it to me the way she’d give it to a lieutenant.
“Door was on the spring latch when Eddie got here. Locked, but only the latch. The deadbolt wasn’t thrown. There’s a private elevator in back for Kellerman and a fire door off the service hall. Both shut. Windows are sealed. Sixty floors up, they built them so they don’t open. No sign of a struggle. His pen’s still got the cap on.”
“Blood?”
“None.” She let that sit. “Not on the desk or the rug. Not in him either, near as I can tell. He’s white, Morrison. White as paper.” She touched her own throat under the jaw with two fingers. “And two little holes. Right here. His collar was up over them. I almost missed them.”
I didn’t say anything. I was looking at the door.
Nobody else would have seen it. A thin line of blue light running around the frame, faint as the pilot on a gas range. It traced the jamb and the lintel and the sill in one unbroken seam. I’d seen that light on a few doors in this city. Never on a door that belonged to an ordinary man.
Division work. A ward. The Supernatural Affairs Division hung those on the rooms of the people it trusted most: the ones who had signed the treaty papers and spent their days keeping the hidden side of New Amsterdam hidden. Treaty liaisons. There weren’t many of them. I didn’t know all their names.
Now I knew one.
Thomas Kellerman, steel money, sixty floors of chrome eagles, had been one of the people holding the Veil together. Somebody had pried his hands off it.
With the door wedged open, the ward ran slack. I could step across it and the iron in my chest would never know. Shut, it would have been another story.
“What are you looking at?” Santos said.
“Paint job.”
She gave me a long look. She’d learned not to push. That didn’t mean she liked it.
I pushed the door the rest of the way open and went in.
The outer office was a secretary’s desk with a cover on the typewriter and a vase of gladiolus going brown in the heat. The inner door stood open. A green-shaded lamp burned inside.
Kellerman’s office took the corner of the building. Windows on two sides, floor to ceiling, and nothing in them but rain and dark.
He was sitting behind his desk.
It was teak, big enough to make him look small. He’d been a big man. Sixty or so, heavy through the shoulders, with the jowls a man gets from twenty years of business lunches. He sat slumped in a leather chair with his chin on his chest. His left hand lay in his lap. His right rested on the blotter, closed in a fist.
His skin was white. Lips and nail beds, too. I’d seen a lot of dead men between Tunisia and Normandy, and the dead go gray or blue or a kind of yellow. Not white. Not unless something has taken every drop out of them.
Santos stayed in the doorway.
“I looked already,” she said. “Before I called you.” Her voice was tight. “I’m not looking again.”
I went around the desk.
His tie had been loosened. His vest was unbuttoned, and somebody had done up the shirt again afterward, one button off all the way down, the way a man dresses a child in a hurry. I unbuttoned it.
They’d cut him.
Lines carved into the skin of his chest, from the collarbones down past the breastbone. A ring first, nearly perfect, as wide as a saucer. Inside it and around it were marks that might have been letters in some alphabet nobody should learn. Hooks. Crossbars. A shape like a gate with its hinges on the wrong side. The cuts were clean and about as deep as a fingernail, and the edges had gone a soft gray.
They hadn’t bled a drop. There’d been nothing left in him to bleed.
I folded his collar back with one finger and found what Santos had found. Two small holes under the left side of the jaw, an inch apart. No tearing. No bruise around them. Whoever made them had taken their time.
I knew what made holes like that. I knew the ones who made them in this city had papers and contracts and rules, and the first rule was that nobody died of it.
Somebody had been hungry. Somebody had wanted him found this way.
“Morrison.” Santos, from the door. “His hand.”
The fist on the blotter was stiff and cold, and I had to work the fingers open one at a time. Something lay in his palm.
A Purple Heart.
A heart of purple enamel edged in gold, with Washington’s profile in the middle, on a purple ribbon gone dull with handling. I turned it over.
On the back, under FOR MILITARY MERIT, there’s a smooth space where they engrave the man’s name. Somebody had taken a file to it. The space was scraped down to raw metal, and the scratches were fresh and bright.
The pin had been bent, too. Bent nearly double at some point and straightened again, badly. There was a kink in the middle, and the point didn’t sit true against the catch. I noticed it the way you notice a crooked picture in somebody else’s house. Then I let it go.
“It was in his hand when Eddie found him,” Santos said. “Closed up tight. Fist out on the desk, like he was holding it out to somebody.”
“Not to Eddie.”
“No.” She came two steps into the room, then one more, toward the desk. “Not to Eddie.”
There was a letter opener at the far corner of the blotter.
It caught my eye because it was the only thing on that desk that didn’t look like money. Eight inches of black wrought iron, hammered by hand, the handle twisted like a length of rope and finished in a little tulip. Old Dutch work, from when this city was a fort and a windmill. The kind of thing a rich man buys to make his money look older than it is.
Iron. The old kind. In my line of work, you notice.
I left it where it was and put the medal in my coat pocket.
Santos came the rest of the way to the desk.
“That’s evidence,” she said.
“So’s the hole in his neck. You want to explain that one to the D.A.?”
Her jaw worked. She didn’t answer. She stood at the corner of the desk with her hand on the butt of her .38 and looked anywhere but at the dead man, and I went to the window to see if she was right about the glass.
She was. Heavy plate in steel frames, no latches. Sixty floors down there was nothing to see but rain. Nobody had come in that way, and nobody had gone out.
Behind me, the iron went cold.
Half a second, a drop like ice water down the middle of my chest. Then it pulled. I’d felt it do that a few times since the war, and only ever in a room where something big was waking up.
I turned around.
The marks on Kellerman’s chest were glowing.
A dull red, down under the skin, like coals under ash. The light ran along every line of that carving and filled in the ring and the hooks. It pulsed, slow. Once. Twice. Like something taking its first breaths.
Santos was looking past me at the window. She hadn’t seen it. She couldn’t. Nobody could but me.
Kellerman’s fingers twitched.
“Santos,” I said. “Get away from the desk.”
She looked at me. “What?”
Kellerman came up out of the chair.
No push of the hands. No lean forward. He rose straight up off the leather as if something had hooked him under the breastbone and hauled. The chair went over behind him and hit the window. His chin came up off his chest. His eyes were open, and there was nothing in them at all.
Santos made a small sound in her throat. I’d have taken a scream over it.
Then his hands changed.
I heard it first. A wet creak, green wood bending. The fingers stretched a joint at a time, and the white skin split over the knuckles and peeled back, and the nails curled out black and hooked and three inches long. The light under his chest burned brighter. I could see it running down his arms now, right out to those hands.
He turned his head toward Santos. She was nearest. She was alive.
He went for her.
She had the .38 out before he cleared the desk. Credit her that. Her hands were shaking and she fired anyway, three times, close enough that the flashes lit his face from underneath.
All three hit. Three black holes in the white shirt, right over the heart, a group you could cover with a playing card.
Nothing came out of them. He didn’t even rock.
He came across the corner of the desk with his arms out, and those hooks were a foot from her face when I hit him.
I hit him low, from the side, shoulder first and all my weight behind it. It was like tackling a sack of wet cement. He went over and I went with him, and we came down on the rug together. He smelled of cold meat and lilac hair tonic.
Whatever was making him move didn’t touch me. It never could. The tricks have slid off me since the beach.
His arms were another matter. They were real.
He rolled me. He did it with no effort at all, and then he was on top and those hooks were coming down at my face. I got both hands on his wrist. It didn’t matter. The hooks came down anyway, an inch at a time, and his white face hung over mine with no more interest in it than a clock has in the hour. I turned my head. The hooks went into the rug beside my ear and tore it.
I bucked him off. He got an elbow into my mouth on the way. My teeth cut my tongue and my mouth filled up with copper. I got a knee on his chest and hit him in the face, once, twice, and it was like punching a ham in a cold locker. His nose went flat under my fist and he didn’t notice. He got one of those long hands on the front of my coat and threw me.
Threw me, the way a kid throws a doll. My feet left the floor. I went backward across the room and hit the edge of the teak desk with the middle of my back, and the world went white.
The iron flared.
A hot nail driven in under the breastbone and twisted. For a second I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see. Santos was yelling my name from a long way off, and under that, louder than anything, I could hear my own heart and the iron right up against it, knocking.
My right hand went for the knuckles. The coat had wrapped half around me and the pocket was pinned under my hip against the desk. I couldn’t get to it.
Kellerman was getting up.
He did it the same way, straight up off the floor. He’d left four furrows in the rug where one hand came down, torn clean through to the boards. His nose was a smear. His head turned, and the empty eyes found Santos again. She’d backed into the corner by the windows with the gun out in both hands. Three left in the cylinder. Three would do what the first three had.
I threw my right hand back to haul myself up, and it came down on the blotter.
On the letter opener.
My fingers closed on it without being told. Eight inches of cold black iron, and that twisted handle sat in my fist like it had been made for it.
He’d taken one step toward her.
I came off the desk and got my left arm around his neck from behind and yanked his head back. He was strong. God, he was strong. He started to turn in my grip, and one of those hooks came over his shoulder at my face. I jerked my head aside. It went past my ear and took the shoulder of my coat with it, and I heard the cloth tear all the way down.
I drove the letter opener into his right eye.
The eye burst. Cold jelly ran over my knuckles. The blade went in to the handle, grated on bone, and then the bone gave and it went in deeper, into whatever was back there.
He bucked in my arms. The hooks came down on the desk and tore long pale splinters out of the teak. His jaw opened wider than a jaw is made to open, and a sound came out of it with no voice in it, only air being shoved out of dead lungs. It stank of the cold room. I held on. I leaned on the handle with everything I had left.
The iron did the rest.
A hiss, like water thrown on a hot stove. Black stuff came boiling out around the blade, thick as tar, and it smoked where it ran down his face and over my hand. It burned cold. The room filled with the smell of a struck match, sharp and yellow, a smell that got into the back of your throat and stayed there. The red light under his skin flared once, so bright I had to squint, and went out.
He stopped.
His arms dropped. The long fingers hung down past his knees. I let go of his neck and stepped back, and he folded at the waist and the knees together and went down onto the rug on his side, with the twisted iron handle standing out of his eye.
I spat blood on the rug next to him.
Ten seconds. Twenty. My chest was full of broken glass, and I breathed through it in small sips, and I watched him.
He stayed down.
The rain kept on against the glass. Somewhere far below, a car horn went once and quit.
Santos was still in the corner with the gun up. The muzzle was moving in small circles because her hands were shaking so hard, but she held it, and she kept it on the thing on the rug. I’ve seen men with ribbons on their chests who couldn’t have done that much.
“Maria,” I said. “It’s done.”
She didn’t lower it.
“That thing was dead.” Her voice cracked down the middle and she pushed on through the crack. “I touched him, Morrison. Before I called you. I checked for a pulse. He was cold. He was dead. And it was walking.” She swallowed. “What the hell did we just see?”
I could have told her about the hidden side, and the contracts that keep it quiet, and what makes two little holes under a man’s jaw. I could have told her why she couldn’t see the light I’d seen.
It would have been the end of her. Maybe not right away. But the people who keep the Veil take a hard view of cops who know too much, and they have long memories.
“Somebody wanted him to get up,” I said.
“Somebody—” She stared at me. “Who the hell wants a dead man to get up?”
I didn’t have an answer she’d want.
I got down on one knee beside the body. My back had stiffened where the desk caught it, and the iron still sat high and hot under my breastbone, but it was settling back to the old ache. I breathed until it got there.
Then I went to work.
I rolled him onto his back. The black stuff had stopped running and dried into a crust that still smelled of matches. The carving on his chest was only carving now. Gray lines in dead skin. No light.
I took out the pocketknife and cut a sliver of skin from the edge of the ring, about the size of a fingernail, and slid it into a glassine envelope and folded the top over twice. Then I opened the notebook on my knee and drew the marks. The ring. The hooks. The crossbars. The backward gate. I got them right, because I had a feeling they were the only part of this that was going to stay put. My hand wasn’t steady. I made it steady.
Santos watched me. She’d finally let the gun come down.
When I was done, I put the notebook away and took hold of the letter opener and pulled. It came out of his skull harder than it had gone in, with a wet suck and a scrape of bone. I wiped the blade on the tail of his shirt. The black crust flaked off it, and under it the iron was dull and clean. No burn. No mark.
I put it in my inside pocket.
“That’s evidence too,” Santos said.
“Not anymore.”
“Morrison—”
“Detective?”
A thin voice from the outer office, scared out of its wits.
Santos moved fast. She was across the room and in the inner doorway before Pruitt got through the outer one, and she stood in it so he couldn’t see past her. I stayed down behind the desk.
“Eddie,” she said. “I told you to wait at the car.”
“I heard shots.” His voice was going high. “I been standing at the car, Detective. I couldn’t make my feet go. Is he— did somebody—”
“Eddie. Listen to me.” Her voice went low and calm, the voice cops use on jumpers. I’d used it on a ledge on Tenth Avenue in 1939. “You smell that?”
A pause. “Like matches.”
“That’s gas. It’s in the ventilation. The heat gets in the ducts up here and something goes wrong and it leaks. You’ve been getting headaches on your rounds, haven’t you?”
A longer pause. “I— yeah. I guess I have.”
“It makes you see things. I came in here and saw something that wasn’t there, and I fired my weapon. That’s what you heard. Mr. Kellerman was already gone when you found him. His heart, most likely.”
“Gas,” Pruitt said.
“Gas.”
I listened to him take it. Whatever he’d seen when he opened that door at half past eleven didn’t fit anywhere, and this did. He wanted to believe her. People mostly do.
“Go back down,” Santos said. “Tell those two boys everything’s fine up here, and wait for the morgue wagon. And Eddie? Open a window when you get home tonight. Get some air in your lungs.”
“Yes, Detective. Thank you, Detective.”
His feet went away down the hall. The elevator door rattled shut.
Santos stood in the doorway a while longer with her back to me. Her shoulders went up and came down once. When she turned around, her face was a cop’s face again, mostly.
“Gas,” I said.
“It’ll go in the report. A leak in the ventilation. The officer on the scene was overcome and discharged her weapon. Nobody hurt.” She looked at the body. “The M.E. is going to find three bullets in a dead man and a hole in his eye, and he’s going to call me. I’ll think of something.” She rubbed her forehead with the back of her wrist. “God help me, I’ll think of something.”
“You’re good at this.”
“I’m not good at anything tonight.” She looked at me straight. “You’ve got three days.”
“For what?”
“For whatever it is you do. Commissioner Walsh reads every report with Kellerman’s name on it. Kellerman sat on half the boards in this city, and Walsh sits on the other half. My report goes up the line Thursday. Saturday, he’ll want to know why it reads like a dime novel.” Her mouth twisted. “And he will ask, Morrison. He always asks.”
I’d never met Theodore Walsh. I’d seen his picture in the Sunday papers, cutting ribbons, a big square face with a smile that never got as far as the eyes. Cops on the beat talked about him the way sailors talk about weather.
“Three days,” I said.
“Three days.” She holstered the .38. It took her two tries to get it into the leather. “I’ve never asked you, Morrison. Two years. I’ve never once asked.”
“I know.”
“I’m still not asking.” She went to the door and stopped in it and didn’t turn around. “But whatever you are, Morrison, find who did this.”
The storm had moved off east by the time I came out. It was over Kingsland now, lighting up the bottoms of the clouds across the river. The rain had thinned to a drizzle.
It hadn’t cooled anything. All that water had come down on pavement that had been cooking for a week, and now the street was giving it back as steam. It came up off the asphalt in slow white curls and hung around the lampposts. The gutters were still running full, carrying cigarette butts and newspaper and a dead pigeon down toward the harbor.
The eagles dripped over my head.
I stood on the steps and tried to light a cigarette. The first match broke. The second one caught, and the smell of it hit the back of my throat, and I was on the rug again with my arm around a dead man’s neck and that yellow stink coming up off him.
I shook the match out and threw it in the gutter.
My hands were shaking, and it was anger doing it. It had been coming up in me since I opened that shirt.
They had made a dummy out of him.
Kellerman wasn’t anybody I’d have liked. A man who owned eagles. But he’d been a man, and somebody had drunk him dry and cut those marks in him and buttoned his shirt up wrong and sat him behind his own desk with his fist on the blotter, and then they had wound him like a toy and left him for the first cop through the door. For Santos. A cop with a pension and two years of my phone calls behind her and no idea what she was walking into.
They hadn’t cared who it killed. That was what got me. Whoever did this had wanted him to get up and tear into somebody, and they had not cared who.
I came home from the war with a piece of German steel in me and a way of seeing I never asked for, and I made myself one rule about it. Whatever lived on the hidden side of this town stayed there, and the people on this side got to go home at night and never know. I’d kept that rule for two years. Somebody had just broken it on purpose, sixty floors up, and used a dead man to do it.
My jaw hurt. I’d been clenching it so hard my back teeth ached, and the cut on my tongue had opened again. I spat red on the steps of the Kellerman Building and didn’t feel sorry about it.
This city’s got teeth. It always has. Tonight they were showing.
I put my hand in my coat pocket.
The medal was there. I closed my fingers on it, hard, and the bent pin went into the ball of my thumb. I let it. It didn’t weigh anything. An ounce, maybe. Somebody had filed the name off it and closed a dead man’s fist around it and left it for me to find. Or for somebody.
It bothered me. I couldn’t have told you why. It sat in my pocket like a stone in a shoe.
The iron gave a slow pull under my breastbone, the old ache settling in for the night. I let it pull. I looked up the side of that building, sixty floors of wet limestone into the cloud, to where the lights were still on in the corner office.
I would find whoever did this. I would find them, and I would not hand them to Santos or the Division or anybody else. That was not a promise. Promises are for people who expect to be around to keep them.
It was just what was going to happen.
I took my thumb off the pin. There was a bead of blood on it. I wiped it on my trousers and went down the steps to the Ford.
Somebody was making the dead dance. And they’d wanted an audience.
Hard-boiled urban fantasy. Author of the Cold Iron Trilogy, set in the hidden side of New Amsterdam, 1947.