- rusty santoro
- boy-o
Boy-O didn't come out of his hole for almost a week.
It was a bad week; one of attending classes and having to bite his nails while waiting for a break. He had considered cutting school and spending his time looking, but a stern warning from Carl Pancoast bit the end off that idea. Also, Rusty was certain whoever had put Miss Clements on him would do his damnedest to make sure he was stopped from looking too hard—though how they could know he was looking for Boy-O was something Rusty could not imagine—even if they had to send the police after him, to arrest him as a truant.
Moms lay still in her bed, though now she was well enough to take a little clear chicken broth from either his hands or Mrs. Givens'. The kids in school avoided him. Cougars passed him in the halls with softly murmured catcalls and Weezee was a total stranger now. Only Carl Pancoast was any help. Rusty spoke to him several times, and though the elder man dwelt harpingly on staying away from this business—allowing the police to solve the murder in their own time and way—he was a reassuring factor and Rusty knew he had at least one friend.
Then, the following Saturday, Boy-O crept out of hiding and Rusty pounced.
The boy had obviously known Rusty was looking for him, for Rusty no longer trusted anyone in the neighborhood, and had carried on his efforts surreptitiously. The neighborhood knew he was after something, that he had far from given up hope of trapping Dolores' murderer, but they had no way of knowing just what it was he sought.
So when Boy-O left his pad—a room in a cheap flophouse outside Cougar turf—and wandered back to Tom-Tom's for his dope-peddling run, Rusty knew it and he was there.
No planes to the face. Just a floating hunger for a face, with no bones to support it. The nose of a starving animal, and eyes that never rested, never closed. Boy-O lived where he was supposed to live—in the gutter. His clothes reeked of the litter and his face was always marred by patches of dirt or soot. A high-water mark ringed his thick neck. He had quick, soft hands, filthy and secretive.
He was passing a bundle to a Cougar named Clipper when Rusty came into the malt shop. He was removing the little white packets from the slit inside-edge of his pants-top, as the boy came through the open door. He looked up, started, then dragged himself into a semblance of nonchalance. It was instantly apparent to Rusty that whoever had been warning him off the finding of Dolores' killer had also warned Boy-O that Rusty was on the scent.
The quick thought flashed through Rusty's mind, Why don't they just put me down and stop this patty-cake? The thought flashed and was gone along with the fear. Fear was past. He was doing what had to be done, just as he had Giulio, the butcher, watching Tom-Tom's place from his shop across the street, watching for Boy-O.
Just as he had crossed into Cherokee turf. Just as he would find that last man, and do him the way he should have been done. Just as he was going to make Boy-O talk today.
Boy-O saw him and a film of craftiness clouded his eyes. He turned his head slightly, continued talking to Clipper. But he knew every step Rusty took and as the Puerto Rican came up behind him, Boy-O did not move, but said quietly, "Anything I c'n do for ya, Santoro?"
Rusty paused and wet his lips. He had to handle Boy-O delicately till he got him someplace where no one would interfere with the question and answer game he wanted to play with the pusher.
"Yeah. I wanna talk to ya about somethin'."
Still with his back to Rusty, Boy-O handed the little packets from his pants to Clipper, and accepted the two five-dollar bills with the other hand. It was all one fluid movement without pause or fumbling. Clipper looked up at Rusty and the boy saw the nerve-jumping tension in the Cougar. Clipper was on it hard and he needed a fast mainline to get rid of the monkey. Even as Rusty thought it, Clipper pushed up from the booth and left the shop hurriedly, the packets in his pocket, his hand jammed tight down on them in protective adoration.
Boy-O turned then. He faced around and leaned against the table. He was the biggest junkie of all, bigger than his customers, bigger than any Rusty had ever seen. The scumbag was constantly broke, though he raked in a staggering amount of money, just from the neighborhood kids and junkies such as Finkel, the barber, and the boys who worked on the docks …
… and Miss Clements
… and Pops Santoro.
Yet he was always broke and filthy and sleeping in fifty-cent pads. He spent all he made on more of his own product. The face that looked up into Rusty's was a lost one. It was devoid of purpose and strength, contained only the driving hunger for the dream-dust, the stuff that made a man temporarily twelve feet tall, and all trouble six miles away.
"Like what ya wanna talk about?" Boy-O said. "I don't know we got anythin' to talk about?"
"Sit down," Rusty instructed him, with a friendly tone to the words. He waved his hand to the booth and then half-turned to call to Tom-Tom. "Hey! Tom-Tom! What'll ya have, Boy-O?"
Boy-O shrugged his shoulders, surprised at this sudden friendliness on Rusty's part, suspecting it, but philosophically deciding a free soda was a good deal anyhow. He slid into the booth, said, "A black an' white, heavy onna syrup."
"Tom-Tom, a Coke an' a black an' white shake, heavy on the syrup." He slid down across from Boy-O and let a friendly smile play across his hard young face. "Hey, man, I haven't seen much of ya lately."
Suspicion flickered across Boy-O's face, but he replied, "Oh, yeah, well, I been busy. You know." Rusty knew all right. Busy getting the stuff to peddle and lying on his back in his pad with the light pastel dreams flitting by overhead and the holes like a million mosquito bites in his arms and thighs. Yeah, sure, busy. Hiding out!
"So? Whaddaya want?" Boy-O was too anxious to terminate the conversation. It showed nervousness and that he had something to be afraid about. That was good. For an instant Rusty felt bothered that he was going to have to use force again, but realized immediately there was no other way to get through to this hophead. The street called its own rules and a stud was a fool to play a kill-game by gentlemen's rules. If it was going to be rough, then it was going to be rough. But was there no end of it, finally? Was the web always getting stickier, dragging him back always?
"Well," Rusty began, feigning nervousness, twining his fingers, looking down at his hands, "I—uh—well, I didn't wanna say anythinghere , y'know …" he nodded his head at Tom-Tom, busily fixing the milk shake. "But, I—uh—I gotta have some stuff. I been gettin' kinda nervous, an' I need a fix …"
Boy-O's face jumped sharply and his eyes narrowed. Rusty was not a hophead. What did he want with the dust? Boy-O knew it was all wrong, right from the first sentence. This was some sort of trap, some sort of tie-in with Rusty's sister and the hunt that had been going on the past weeks.
"What're you tryin' to pull?" the pusher said softly, his filthy face tense under the imperfect light of the malt shop. "You tryin' to pull me into your trouble? You got some idea I was in that rumble with your sister?"
Rusty had to fight to hold back his desire to grab the junkie and throttle him. He held back and let an expression of hopelessness and doom cross his features. He shook his head sadly, lost, needing solace. "No, man, no, no …" his voice was a thready whisper, dripping with remorse and unhappiness. "I—I been sniffin' a little and when my sister Dolores got it, I—I don't know what happened to me, man. I just started hittin' it like mad, y'know, an' n-now I gotta have more. I been gettin' it from—"
Tom-Tom came around the counter, bringing the Coke and the milk shake, and Rusty cut himself off. He did it only partially because the soda jerk was within earshot. The other part of his reason was that he had to quickly figure out a source for the stuff he was supposed to have been mainlining. Where could he get it, that Boy-O would not doubt, could not check on?
The baby-fat hand of Tom-Tom came into sight with the milk shake gripped in the fist and Rusty took a dollar from the pocket of his jeans. He laid it out alongside the glass, and kept his eyes on the light brown surface of the shake as he heard Tom-Tom clinking change. When the coins were down Tom-Tom was gone and he saw the wet ring on the table where Boy-O had lifted his shake, he began again.
"I been gettin' some stuff from a friend of mine crosstown in Harlem, but it's all g-gone now, an' ya gotta help me out, man."
Boy-O did not reply. He sucked on the lip of the glass and his little feral eyes stared across the dark milky fluid and at Rusty. He knew the kid was lying. It was obvious. But he couldn't refuse and not get himself creamed. Boy-O wanted out of this mess. There was no way to stay out of Santoro's path, it seemed, without giving, him what he wanted to know.
Rusty Santoro had changed. He was no longer a gutter fighter. He had changed. He was a steam roller now and that roller was bent on crushing anything—or anyone—that got in the way. Boy-O was wary of this kid. There was no sense tangling with him if it could be avoided.
"What you wanna know, Rusty?"
Rusty's eyebrows went up. Startledly he said, "I dunno what you mean, man. Like all I want is some dust, and we're wheelin' an' dealin', y'know."
Boy-O went back to his drink. He wasn't getting through. "Come on," Rusty urged, a heavy edge to his words, "let's fall up to your pad and find a pack. I need a shot right now."
Boy-O looked up through half-slitted eyes and did not have the stomach to refuse. He slid out of the booth. He had snuff with him, Rusty knew that. Rusty wanted him away from here. To talk, it had to be!
Well, get the talk over and then he was free and clear. He preceded Rusty out of the malt shop, as Tom-Tom tried valiantly to raise Glazounov or Bach on the tiny radio behind the counter. As they hit the sidewalk, the radio let fly with—"Ohohoh,yes! I'm the grayyyte pre-ten-en-der …"
"Why din't we go to my place?" Boy-O asked. Fear rippled deeply in his voice, and his face was white beneath the dirt film.
The basement was cool and dark and from somewhere behind stacks of old newspapers, rats moved in search of food. A bulb burned low, swinging at the end of a thick cord, its shadow-image here then there then back then there then back again as the bulb described an irregular arc. The ruined furniture that had been stored down here lay jumbled like strange burial mounds, chair legs and table extensions sticking up like the snarled, clutching arms of half-buried corpses. The ceiling was low and covered by softly rippling coverlets of cobwebs.
Boy-O looked around in open fear. Maybe Rusty didn't just want to talk. Maybe—
"Siddown," Rusty ordered the junkie. He pointed to a crate and when Boy-O hesitated, he shoved. Boy-O stumbled backward, tangled his scrawny legs and fell in a clattering heap, knocking aside the crate. He stared up from the floor, his eyes large and white with terror. He never should have humored this stud! Now he was solid trapped.
"Now, look, man, I don't want no trouble, ya dig? I mean, I don't know what kinda business you got goin' and all, but I had nothin' to do with it. I'm just a guy minds his own—"
Rusty brought out the knife.
It had come to be more important to him than the pencils and pens and inks which he had used for mechanical drawings, with which he had thought he would build a future. It had slowly come to mean more to him than his brain, or his eyes, or anything. It was the only tool that seemed to work in the streets. The only one they understood, and the only one they respected. He had not wanted to use it ever again—he had wanted to throw it away, but they had forced him to resort to it, again and again. It was his lone companion against them all. It was the only mouth-opener in the world. The only thing that could find for him the things he needed and the information so vital to the location of Dolores' murderer.
"Now I wanna know where you get your dream-dust from, scummie. I wanna know right now." He stood silent, then, letting the shaft of the shank talk for him.
Boy-O lay there and his mouth remained closed. His life was the dust. It was the only thing he had, as Rusty had the knife, and if he lost it, he was less than nothing. The neighborhood despised him. They would put up with him only so long as he brought them the vital narcotics. Rusty could never make him speak.
The next hour was short for Rusty, terribly long for Boy-O. But they reached a stalemate.
Rusty stood over Boy-O, and what he saw was the end of all the violence he had known. He knew now that he could never raise his hands to another person. It had all been futile, of course. Boy-O lay flat on his back, his chest heaving up and sucking in with great effort. His eyes were closed and his face was a mass of broken veins, welts, sticky blobs of blood and stripped flesh. A gash had been opened along the right side of his neck, and a warm pulse of blood pumped steadily. He was not deeply hurt, but the pain that filled him was a living thing. Yet he had not uttered a word. Moans and screams, perhaps, but not a word.
Rusty sank down against the wall of a coal bin. He could no longer hold his fists up. They were black with blood, and he was certain he had broken his thumb—or at least thrown it far out of joint. Desperation and futility and horror at what he had done mingled in his brain, and he laid an arm across his eyes to block out the sight of Boy-O, lying in the dirt and the dim one-bulb light. He had to make the junkie talk. He had to find out the next link.
"Who d'you get your dope from?" he asked for the hundredth time, really expecting no answer. There was only silence.
How to make the pusher talk? How to get that name from him? Rusty was up against a steel wall. But whatever happened, he was not going to hit Boy-O again. He gagged on a rueful chuckle, as he realized he was too late. He had sunk all the way back to his former level. He was nothing but a street bum again. The web had claimed its own.
What a stinking mess he had made of things. His sister was dead, all because he had gotten her into the Cougie Cats, and his mother was sick. He had alienated everyone in the neighborhood. His record at school was ruined and Carl Pancoast would be perfectly justified in having nothing further to do with him. He had beaten up strangers, that Mirsky kid, and people he knew. And where was he? Nowhere.
"G-give—up—bas … bastard …?" Boy-O croaked from the floor. His face was pale, still, and his eyes, despite their junkie weirdness, were filled with pain. Rusty dug his hands into the fabric of his jeans, pulling at the flesh of his thighs. Damn it, damn it, damn it! He had to make Boy-O talk.
He rose, to start again, and the terror-filled eyes of the junkie filled his world. They filled his world and they gave him an idea, a new idea, a payoff idea that had to mean success. Because if it didn't, he was finished.
He bent down, slapped away the feebly moving arm of Boy-O, offered in resistance, and began searching the junkie. After he had found three dozen little white packets of dust in pockets, and another half dozen in hidden flaps in the clothing, he realized that he would have to strip the junkie down.
It took him longer than he thought it would, for the pusher dredged up a supply of strength from somewhere, and caused him trouble in removing the filthy rags that were pants and shirt and jacket. But finally, Rusty had the junkie lying naked to the flesh on the basement floor. He took the dope and the clothes and put them high up on a pile of furniture in the farthest corner of the basement.
Boy-O watched it all with mounting fear. Every few seconds his eyes strayed to the dead-silent furnace. It was summer, and no one would come down here to the basement, but if Rusty tried to shove him in there—
"Wh-what're ya g-gonna … do …?"
Rusty sat down again, back to the coal bin and crossed his arms. He shook his head. "Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. I'm gonna sit and wait."
Boy-O was bewildered. What was Rusty talking about? He was confused and in pain and bewildered, but he knew one thing: he would never talk. Because if he talked, just as sure as the street was hell, he would lose his junk, and that would be the end of him.
He had to have his junk to live.
And Rusty knew that, too. Unfortunately.
Cold had come crawling. It was bitter. Not only the cold of the moist basement floor, but the cold from within. Boy-O was shivering, lying huddled like a foetus, knees drawn up and hands thrust into armpits for what little warmth there might be. His face, beneath the grime, was strained and peaked, and his lips quivered. Nerves in his upper arms and temples jerked spastically, giving him a constantly moving, restless appearance. He moaned softly from time to time and every few minutes a shudder would run down his body.
He was not cold from the air. He was junkie cold. He was dream-dust miserable. He was cut off from the dirt that counted and Rusty watched as he got worse. Much worse. The first hour it hadn't been so bad, till Boy-O had realized what Rusty was trying to do. Then he had started to crave it more than he would have ordinarily. He had hungered deeper than ever. It had been a long time since that spoon had been out, that dust had been soaked down, that needle had hit the big vein on the inside of his arm. He wanted!
"Gimme! Gimme!" Boy-O half-rose up from the floor, his mouth stretched flat on his face, in a weird grimace. His scream rattled across the hollow basement and Rusty got up himself from the floor as Boy-O tried to rise, tried to fall to the pile of furniture where the dope was secreted. He grasped the junkie by his forearm and thrust him back. Boy-O's flesh was clammy with sweat, his limbs quivered. He was a ghost human, warped out of shape and sanity. Rusty quivered as much, inside. But he let the feelings within him wither. Boy-O would sweat away the monkey till he squawked and gave out the poop Rusty needed.
The junkie fell back, lay in a sweating heap, his head buried in his thin arms. His black hair was tumbled out of its crude duck's-tail, and lay in a triangular shape over him. His body shook, his sobs climbed in intensity. "Oh God, God, gimme, don't be a b-bastard, gimme some, gimme a shot, g-gimme a pop. Please, I swear to God I don't kn-know nothin', please ya gotta, ya g-gottahelp me , HELP ME—" his voice rose out again, ending in a high, womanlike screech. He clawed at his face, dragged bloody furrows down his cheeks. He was going insane from lack of the stuff.
But he was not ready to talk. Rusty waited, his mind closed to the screams, his eyes shut to the hideous sight that had been Boy-O, writhing in the dirt.
It took only four hours.
Rusty had to club the junkie twice, both times when Boy-O had struggled erect and tried to grab a packet from the furniture pile. The second time he almost made it, grasping a broken chair in his hands and swinging it full at Rusty. The chair connected with Rusty's head and for a long minute everything fuzzed out gray at the edges of his sight. He stumbled in and clinched with the suddenly strong junkie and by sheer weight forced him back.
The chair came up again and grazed off Rusty's shoulder, sending a bright lancet of pain down through his left side. The pain in his head was growing. He could see infinitely brilliant pinwheels of fire cascading down and down and then suddenly it ebbed away, and he brought up a knee straight to the junkie's groin.
Boy-O went down, slobbering, crying, begging for a mainline pop. Rusty sank back, drawing grateful lungfuls of air, fighting away the nausea the pain brought him. He shoved all furniture up out of reach then, and waited.
It took only four hours.
Finally, Boy-O dragged himself across the floor and a crooked finger touched Rusty's shoe. "Help me." His voice was weak, a catch in the throat, a mere whisper, a pleading.
Then, "Okay. Okay, I'll t-tell ya. I'll let ya know, just gimme a shot, man, please, just one …" he sagged off into a gasp and his teeth chattered. His body shook with the effort to stay on one elbow.
"First talk. Then we'll see," Rusty said. He despised himself. Boy-O was a wreck.
"M-Morlan's his name. Emil Morlan. He lives uptown. I get it through a feeder—guy supplies me an' a pusher in Cherokee country. I n-never met this Morlan, but I f-followed the feeder once." His mouth was a black line and the sweat was big as grapes on his upper lip. The dirt ran streakily on his face. It mixed with the blood and smelled.
"Where's he live? What's the address?"
"You're killin' me, please a shot! A shot, for Christ's sake, I'm beggin', beggin' ya!"
"The address. Now. Quick!"
"Y-yeah, yeah. He lives up on Central Park West." The junkie gave a fashionable address. "Fifteenth floor."
Rusty moved closer. "Now you tell me, man, all this runnin' around I been doin', and everybody no-talk, and them threats I got to shut up—all that came from you. Right?"
Boy-O did not, could not, possibly would not answer.
Rusty waited. The shakes claimed Boy-O once more.
Trembling, he answered, finally, "Yes, God it's s-s-so bad, so bad, help me! Gimme a pop, p-please."
Rusty ploughed forward inexorably, "You were behind it."
"Yes, yes, I said yes, what ya want from me?"
"Why? Tell me why—"
Boy-O's eyes rolled up and his filth-caked fingernails bit into his palms. He bit his tongue, for the snakes had come … in a moment the screams, if he didn't get a pop.
"Answer me," Rusty said.
Boy-O sucked air and said, "That night the Cherokees were high on tea, I'd b-brought 'em a big bundle and they got high an' went to crash the dance. We was afraid after it was over that you was gonna tell the cops they was on pot, and throw me in the can, an' Mr. Morlan, too. So they told me to get some p-people to keep you away. We din't know,you know, we was a-afraid you was gonna go ta the cops, cause you was sad or somethin'."
It was just as Rusty had supposed. Rusty repeated the address on Central Park West and Boy-O nodded. "Fifteenth floor?" Again, Boy-O agreed, then his eyes closed.
Rusty threw the pusher his clothes and the packets. He watched as Boy-O dug in a pocket for his spoon, cigarette lighter, needle. He watched for a while, and as Boy-O sank back with tight lips, a God-living expression of peace passing over his planeless face, he said softly, "If you're lying to me, I'll kill you, junkie. S'help me God, you'll die."
Then he took a length of rope from around a pile of newspapers, and bound the junkie to the furnace pipe that ran across the floor. He shoved a portion of a furniture-covering rag into the junkie's mouth, and left him there. Along with the switchblade. Buried in the arm of an old chair—
—broken at the shank.
Forever.
A gelatinous sky, quivering with indignation at having been left to shimmer above the city. Dark as a muddy river, but moving, with storm clouds that would burst before morning, with stars that disdainfully denied all knowledge of Earth or city or the boy huddled in the bushes watching the glass and stone front of an apartment building. A city almost on the verge of sleep, with the smell of gasoline fumes in the nostrils of its inhabitants, with the clamor of late-evening beer hall denizens, with the transient swoosh of cars and buses tooling the streets to a hundred thousand destinations.
Rest and peace, of a sort, to all the inhabitants of the city, but not to Rusty Santoro. He crouched watching, waiting for a break, a nameless something to happen that would allow him to bolt across the street and gain access to the building. In his path lay a bush, a street, a door and a toady doorman, pledged with wages, steeped in snobbery, dedicated to keeping "the riff-raft" away from the door.
Over the door, on a plate glass as clear as the light of the stars, in black script, the words SAXONY HOUSE sprawled contentedly. It was money, this place. And on the fifteenth floor, where no light showed, lived a man named Emil Morlan, a man who made his living not at stocks, or insurance, or services of a general nature, but by the dissemination of death.
Rusty Santoro waited, a leather-jacketed, blue-jeaned fury, waiting for that goddamned break so he could go up and talk to Mr. Morlan.
Oh, he wanted to talk so badly. He wanted to talk about the city Morlan did not know, about the gutters and the fat women and beer-bloated husbands, and kids in the streets, and a girl who had died in a nasty way. He wanted to talk, and he prayed to God he would not have to use his fists, because all that was through, please dear Lord, let it be through at last. But he knew it would come to that. It had to because if it wasn't Morlan, then it was another link along the way, and when he needed the way to find the link, the only help he had lay at the ends of his arms.
He studied the front of the building, the way the architect had fused the beauty of granite with the flamboyant extremes of glass to make a wonderful façade. He studied it and thought of the future he had left behind, trailed into the slush of the gutter. Was it only a few weeks ago he had been so eager to learn the potentialities of a slide rule and protractor? Too late now. All gone like the fog of a Manhattan morning. All gone, but the man in the camel's hair coat was still alive.
This building. A camel's hair coat fitted this place just right. Was this the end of the trail? Seemed like.
A fat woman with a fur coat thrown over a pale blue silk nightgown, her feet thrust into mules, came clattering out of the elevator inside the building, in Rusty's sight, and the doorman opened the glass door for her.
Rusty could not hear what they said to one another, but the woman reached into a pocket of the coat, brought out a bill and handed it to the doorman. She pointed off in the direction of lights far down at the corner, and Rusty saw a drugstore's sign glowing. The doorman nodded, touched the brim of his cap reverently and strode off in the drugstore's direction. The fat woman stared after him for a moment, then went back inside. The elevator door was just closing on her as Rusty got to his feet—ignoring the cramp in his legs—and strode quickly across to the building.
He was inside in a moment and looking around the lobby for a stairway. The door was a shiny metal one, and before it had sighed pneumatically closed, he had three-stepped to the third floor. He paused there to catch his breath.
The climb to the fifteenth seemed much longer than he had imagined it would be. But once there, a great calm came stealing in through his nostrils and he sank down on the top step. He lay back, feeling the cold of the stone landing against his neck and hands.
He had reached the top. He was sure of that. This was the place where he would finish the tragedy that had begun with Dolores in the alley behind Tom-Tom's shop. He felt certain, deep inside him, that when he left this building, it would be between cops, his hands manacled, his life ended. Because—clear as hell, no doubt at all, sure as God made little green apples—he was going to beat the man in the camel's hair coat to death. Now, if Emil Morlan wore such a coat, that was it. A stupid way to figure it, he knew. A stupid way to arrive at conclusions, and no damned motive for this Morlan to kill his sister (hell, with his money any broad in the city was available, what did he want with Dolores?), but the search had been a long one, and the word was that she had been killed by a man in a camel's hair coat, and the track had led here, so that was the way it would be.
Why?
It all seemed so stupid, suddenly. He had only one man's word about it. The Beast. He had tracked a path of dope-peddling from Mirsky to his father to Boy-O and now to Morlan. But what did one have to do with the other? Anything? Sure, it had to, but why? There was no coherency here at all.
Thoughts swirled darkly and his mind tumbled them back and forth as he tried to discover some rationale. But it always ended up with Morlan and the need to end it all.
The elevator sighed open and he heard heavy footsteps beyond the metal door to the fifteenth floor. He pushed himself up and took a long step to the door. It opened a crack, at his pull, and he saw the tastefully-decorated hall. He saw the single door to the apartment that covered the fifteenth floor, and he saw the man who applied the key to the ornate lock.
The man wore what Rusty had come to hope he would not wear.
In the summer, a man would be crazy to wear a camel's hair coat.