One Night Stands and Lost Weekends

One Night Stands and Lost Weekends Page 32

Right now I’m one hundred percent in the clear. I haven’t heard a rumble on the play yet, and already Lennie Blake is dead-burned to ashes and flushed down the toilet. Right now I’m busy establishing Warren Shaw. I sign the name, over and over, so that I’ll never make a mistake and sign the wrong name sometime. One mistake is above par for the course.

Maybe you’re like me. I don’t mean with the same fingerprints and all, but the same general attitudes. Do you fit the following general description: smart, coldly logical, content with coffee and eggs in a cold-water walk-up, and ready to work like hell for an easy couple of bucks? If that’s you, you’re hired. Come right in and get to work. You can even have my room. I’m moving out tomorrow.

It’s been kicks, but too much of the same general pattern and the law of averages gets you. I’ve been going a long time, and one pinch would end everything. Besides, I figure it’s time I took a step or two up the social ladder.

I had a caller yesterday, a guy named Al. He’s an older guy, and hangs with a mob uptown on the West Side. He always has a cigar jammed into the corner of his mouth and he looks like a holdover from the twenties, but Al is a very sharp guy. We gassed around for a while, and then he looked me in the eyes and chewed on his cigar. “You know,” he said, “we might be able to use you.”

“I always work alone, Al.”

“You’d be working alone. Two hundred a night.”

I whistled. This was sounding good. “What’s the pitch?”

He gave me the look again and chewed his cigar some more. “Kid,” he said, “did you ever kill a man?”

Two hundred bucks for one night’s work! What a perfect racket!

Wish me luck, will you? I start tonight.

THE LOST CASES OF ED LONDON

Introduction

CALLING ED LONDON

HE SHOULD PROBABLY STAY LOST.

In fact, you can argue that he never should have existed in the first place. I didn’t set out to write about him. His first appearance was in a book originally called (albeit not by me) Death Pulls a Doublecross, and I was writing about another fellow named Roy Markham.

That wasn’t my idea, either. The idea originated with someone at a paperback house called Belmont Books, where they’d arranged with some TV people to do a novel that would tie in with Markham, an episodic television series about a private eye with that name, played by Ray Milland.

TV tie-ins were standard paperback fare at the time. God knows why. The notion, I suppose, was that people who already knew the character from television would want to read more about him. The books were what you’d expect—uninspired and uninspiring.

At this point I’d written and sold one crime novel, Mona, slated for publication by Fawcett Gold Medal. I got the assignment to write about Roy Markham, and I wrote the book, and by the time I was done I found myself thinking that it was too good to waste on a Belmont TV tie-in for a $1,000 advance. I showed it to Henry Morrison, who was representing me at the time, and he agreed; he showed it to Knox Burger at Gold Medal, who had recently bought Mona, and he agreed, too.

I met Knox in his office on West 44th Street next to the Algonquin, and we talked about what it would take to change Roy Markham into somebody else. I recall that he took exception to the name Roy, maintaining that it brought to mind a lot of crackers who gave him a hard time in the service.

I went home and turned Roy Markham into Ed London, and made a couple of other changes that Knox suggested, and that I no longer recall. (This was in 1960. There is much of 1960 that I do not recall, and it’s probably just as well.) The book went in, and the book came out, and that was that.

Except that I owed Belmont a TV tie-in, which I then had to write. I knocked it out, and they published it as Markham, and subtitled it The Case of the Pornographic Photos. (It has since been republished as You Could Call It Murder, even as Death Pulls a Doublecross has since been republished as Coward’s Kiss. These are better titles, but I don’t know that they’re enough to transform this pair of sows’s ears into silk purses, or even plastic ones.) Poor Belmont. The network pulled the plug on Ray Milland well before the book came out, so they had nothing to tie in with.

Meanwhile, I had a private eye. Ed London, private eye.

Lucky me.

THING IS, I’d been figuring all along that what I needed was a series character. I liked reading about the same character over and over, and figured I’d like writing about one, too. So, having published one book about Ed London, I thought the thing to do was write more of them.

Turned out I couldn’t. Blame it on my youth, or on my low estimate of self, but in those years I only managed to hit a mark if I was deliberately aiming below it. Mona started out as a pseudonymous sex novel for one of my regular crap publishers; a few chapters in I thought it might have potential, and changed its direction. Ed London’s first appearance started out as a TV tie-in. But when I aimed high in the first place, I froze. There were a couple of abortive first chapters for a second Ed London novel, but that’s as far as it got.

Except for these three novelettes.

I have precious little recollection of the circumstances of writing them. I believe they were all produced while I was living in a suburb of Buffalo in 1962–63, but who knows? I think, too, that they were all initially published in Man’s Magazine, and at least some of them were reprinted a couple of years later by the same publisher in Guy Magazine.

When it came time to assemble the stories for One Night Stands, the three Ed London stories were nowhere to be found. I knew I’d written at least one and it seemed to me I’d written two, but I didn’t have copies, and none had turned up, so that was that.

Then, after One Night Stands came out, the other stories began to turn up, thanks especially to Terry Zobeck and Lynn Munroe. It turned out there were three of them. Three! How did that happen?

And here they are. I can’t delude myself for a moment with the notion that the literature of crime fiction is riched for their reappearance. I, however, will be a few dollars richer, and, crass bastard that I am, that strikes me as reason enough for bringing them out in this extremely attractive format. (It’s a handsome volume, isn’t it? Satisfying to pick up and hold in the hand, a pleasure to see on the bookshelf. Hey, nobody says you’ve got to read the damn thing.)

Enjoy!

Lawrence Block

Greenwich Village

2001

THE NAKED AND THE DEADLY

ONE

The wind was right and I could smell the polluted waters of Brooklyn’s Jamaica Bay a few blocks to the east. It was a warm night in August, and I was in the Canarsie section getting ready to meet a blackmailer. I puffed on my pipe, turned around, looked at the bar again. A neon sign—Johnny’s. A picture of six would-be Miss Rheingolds, chastely flat-chested and smiling buoyantly. I opened the door and went inside.

The bar had a small-town feel, like the neighborhood. It was a place for men who wanted to get away from their wives and kids and installment-plan television sets long enough for a couple of beers. There were two booths in the back, both empty. Seven or eight men sat at the bar and drank beer. They all wore gabardine slacks and open-necked sports shirts. Two others were playing a shuffle-bowler near the booths. I walked to the furthest booth and sat down.

A Budweiser clock rotated hypnotically over the bar. Nine-thirty. My blackmailer was late.

The bartender came over. It looked like the wrong bar for cognac but that’s all I drink. I asked for Courvoisier.

“You want the Three-Star or the VSOP?”

Life is filled with surprises. I asked for the good stuff and he went away. When he came back, he brought the cognac in a little snifter. I paid for the drink and sipped it.

At 9:55 my glass was emptier than the Rheingold girls’ bras and my man was still missing. I was ready to take the subway home and tell Rhona Blake to save her money. The bartender came over, his eyes hopeful, and I started to shake my head when the door opened and a little man entered.

“Give me a refill,” I said.

The little man had cagy eyes and he used them on the whole room before he got around to me.

He came up the aisle, stopped at my booth, sat down across from me. “You gotta be Ed London,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“You got the dough, London?”

I patted the left side of my jacket and felt my .38 snug in a shoulder rig. I patted the right side and touched the roll of bills Rhona Blake had given me. I nodded.

“Then we’re in business, London. This is a place to meet and not a place to do business. Too many distractions.”

He waved one hand at the bowling machine. I told him I had a drink on the way and he was willing to humor me. The bartender brought the drink. I paid for it. The little man didn’t want anything and the bartender went back to tend the bar.

I studied the little man over the brim of my glass. He was a few years too old for the Ivy League shirt and tie. He had a low forehead to fit Lombrosi’s theories of criminal physiognomy and a pair of baby-blue eyes that didn’t fit at all. His nose was strong and his chin was weak and a five o’clock shadow obscured part of his sallow complexion.

“The broad could of come herself,” he said.

“She didn’t want to.”

“But she could of. She didn’t need a private cop. Unless she’s figuring on holding out the dough.”

I didn’t answer him. I’d have liked to play it that way, but Rhona Blake wouldn’t go for it. You can pay a blackmailer or you can push him around, and if you pay him once you pay him forever. And the little man looked easy to push around. But I was just a hired hand.

“You almost done, London?”

I finished my drink and got up. I walked to the door and the little man followed me like a faithful dog.

“Your car here, London?”

“I took the subway.”

“So we use mine. C’mon.”

His car was parked at the curb, a dark blue Mercury two or three years old. We got in, and he drove up Remsen Avenue through the Canarsie flatlands. A few years back the area had been all swamps and marshes until the developers got busy. They put up row on row of semi-detached brick-front houses.

There was still plenty of marshland left. Canarsie by any other name was still Canarsie. And it didn’t smell like a rose.

“This is private enough,” I said. “Let’s make the trade.”

“The stuff ain’t with me. It’s stashed.”

“Is that where we’re going?”

“That’s the general idea.”

He took a corner, drove a few blocks, made another turn. I looked over my shoulder. There was a Plymouth behind us…It had been there before.

“Your friends are here,” I said. “In case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Huh?”

“Your protection. Your insurance.”

He was looking in the rear-view mirror now and he didn’t like what he saw. He swore under his breath and his hands tightened on the steering wheel. He leaned on the accelerator and the big car growled.

He said: “How long?”

“Since we left Remsen.”