Chapter 2

Joe helped me to turn John Doe over so we could look on the other side and make sure there was nothing else involved in his homicide.

Then the attendant came in and told us that he had to “ice them down” in the freezer for the autopsy in the morning. I looked over my shoulder at him pushing the bodies back into their shelf in the wall like he was parking cars as a valet. Only these bodies were not going to wake up anytime soon and give him a tip.

“So whaddayouthink, Kiddo? Ya think John Doe got strangled before or after the perp gave him the last drink he would ever have or did he or she just was trying to speed things up a bit because he was taking too long to cash out.”

That was what I liked about my Uncle Joe. He could cut through all the bullshit and get right to the point. Not like these scientific goons that beat around the bush and still left you confused on what they really meant when they gave you a spiel about anything.

“To be perfectly honest with you Joe, I can’t figure that one out until the real doc takes a look at him under the scope. My suspicion is that she got tired of waiting and decided to move things along a little bit. My gut tells me she in a hurry to get away from the crime scene and she wanted to make certain our John Doe was good and dead before she left.”

I knew he was at least half-listening to me because he was at least shaking his head in agreement with my theory. I looked like he was already thinking about something else because his driver was giving him the “let’s get going” look that I recognized from memory. It was nice being driven everywhere he went with an armed guard. That was the price of getting up high in the organization and he played the game really good.

The unmarked car moved away from the curb smoothly with only the added antenna on the roof giving it away as a police car. I knew the driver and I also knew he didn’t like me because he was jealous of giving away any time with my Uncle to anyone not wearing a blue uniform and vetted properly in his book.

I had to admit my old jalopy was not exactly an advertisement for acceptability in the real world but I had gotten attached to it. It was a gift from my Uncle Jim from New Jersey. He was not my real Uncle but a close friend of my widowed mother who let him take her dancing up at Roseland right in the middle of Broadway where the music was sweet and the girls were a dime a dozen. He was a good guy but I suspected he was connected over there in Jersey and he usually made a point out of staying out of the city because of previous complications. When I was still living with my mom downtown, he would show up at the door with some goodies he told us had “fallen off a truck on the docks”. One time it was bananas and another it was this incredibly long pound cake like they used in restaurants that lasted almost an entire week.

Some prick taxi driver with a scared looking couple in the back seat gave me the horn more than once as I pulled out into traffic. I purposely drove like an old lady with eye problems just to irritate him and see what he would do. He just pulled around me and stepped on the gas roaring away like a scalded cat for the nearest alley.

I had wanted to stop at a convenient Horn and Hardart place near the morgue to get something filling into my gut. My hope of getting my Uncle Joe sitting down for a serious conversation was busted by his always watchful driver.

It was still early enough for me to find a parking space right outside the front door.

In a couple of hours, the church-going crowds would be filling up the chairs and wolfing down the pancakes and syrup. I think the place lost money on the pancakes but it didn’t stop me from doing the same thing when the urge hit my hunger button. Their coffee was always hot and black just the way I liked it.

There was a usual splattering of drunks and bums not making any trouble and looking in their empty pockets for the nickels that fed the coffee machine and got them the toast that they piled high with the free butter and jam that came on little paper cups. I went to the special-order window and ordered eggs over easy because I knew they were using the powdered stuff to make the scrambled eggs and it reminded me of my time in the Army during the Korean War. I was too young to make the big war but was just the right age to get into the follow-up “police action” nastiness in the 1950s.

I grabbed a window table so I could keep an eye on my old Buick. I wasn’t worried about anybody stealing the thing but I had a couple of long guns in the trunk and I didn’t want them to be missing when I got back.

The solitary dame sitting at the table behind me tapped me on the shoulder and asked if she could borrow my sugar that I had carried over from the counter to make it easy to sweeten up my coffee and sprinkle on my oatmeal that I loved to start the morning with when I had the time.

I had noticed her when I came in the joint but my hunger at the moment was in my belly and not further south. That was something I reserved for nocturnal settings but seemed to be getting further and further apart as I got older. I was not really that old biologically. I was born in the midst of the great depression in 1932 and was fast approaching thirty but I felt like I was truly an old man after having been in combat for almost three years on the other side of the world and then my stint in the NYPD that left me retired at half pay on disability with both knees shot up but still working.