New York City Noir Read online

  This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2012 Akashic Books

  Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple

  City maps by Sohrab Habibion by Aaron Petrovich

  eISBN: 978-1-61775-146-2

  eISBN: 978-1-61775-183-7

  All rights reserved

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Cover page

  Foreword by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir

  Introduction by Tim McLoughlin

  PART I: OLD SCHOOL BROOKLYN

  Pete Hamill, “The Book Signing” (Park Slope)

  Pearl Abraham, “Hasidic Noir” (Williamsburg)

  Sidney Offit, “No Time for Senior’s” (Downtown)

  Tim McLoughlin, “When All This Was Bay Ridge” (Sunset Park)

  Ellen Miller, “Practicing” (Canarsie)

  PART II: NEW SCHOOL BROOKLYN

  Adam Mansbach, “Crown Heist” (Crown Heights)

  Arthur Nersesian, “Hunter/Trapper” (Brooklyn Heights)

  Nelson George, “New Lots Avenue” (Brownsville)

  Neal Pollack, “Scavenger Hunt” (Coney Island)

  Norman Kelley, “The Code” (Prospect Heights)

  PART III: COPS & ROBBERS

  Thomas Morrissey, “Can’t Catch Me” (Bay Ridge)

  Lou Manfredo, “Case Closed” (Bensonhurst)

  Luciano Guerriero, “Eating Italian” (Red Hook)

  Kenji Jasper, “Thursday” (Bedford-Stuyvesant)

  Robert Knightly, “One More for the Road” (Greenpoint)

  PART IV: BACKWATER BROOKLYN

  Maggie Estep, “Triple Harrison” (East New York)

  Ken Bruen, “Fade to . . . Brooklyn” (Galway, Ireland)

  Nicole Blackman, “Dumped” (Fort Greene)

  C.J. Sullivan, “Slipping into Darkness” (Bushwick)

  Chris Niles , “Ladies’ Man” (Brighton Beach)

  Manhattan Noir

  Introduction by Lawrence Block

  Charles Ardai, “The Good Samaritan” (Midtown)

  Carol Lea Benjamin, “The Last Supper” (Greenwich Village)

  Lawrence Block, “If You Can’t Stand the Heat” (Clinton)

  Thomas H. Cook, “Rain” (Battery Park)

  Jeffery Deaver, “A Nice Place to Visit” (Hell’s Kitchen)

  Jim Fusilli, “The Next Best Thing” (George Washington Bridge)

  Robert Knightly, “Take the Man’s Pay” (Garment District)

  John Lutz, “The Laundry Room” (Upper West Side)

  Liz Martínez, “Freddie Prinze Is My Guardian Angel” (Washington Heights)

  Maan Meyers, “The Organ Grinder” (Lower East Side)

  Martin Meyers, “Why Do They Have to Hit?” (Yorkville)

  S.J. Rozan, “Building” (Harlem)

  Justin Scott, “The Most Beautiful Apartment in New York” (Chelsea)

  C.J. Sullivan, “The Last Round” (Inwood)

  Xu Xi, “Crying with Audrey Hepburn” (Times Square)

  Bronx Noir

  Introduction by S.J. Rozan

  PART I: BRING IT ON HOME

  Jerome Charyn, “White Trash” (Claremont/Concourse)

  Terrence Cheng, “Gold Mountain” (Lehman College)

  Joanne Dobson, “Hey, Girlie” (Sedgwick Avenue)

  Rita Lakin, “The Woman Who Hated the Bronx” (Elder Avenue)

  PART II: IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT

  Lawrence Block, “Rude Awakening” (Riverdale)

  Suzanne Chazin, “Burnout” (Jerome Avenue)

  Kevin Baker, “The Cheers Like Waves” (Yankee Stadium)

  Abraham Rodriguez Jr., “Jaguar” (South Bronx)

  PART III: ANOTHER SATURDAY NIGHT

  Steven Torres, “Early Fall” (Hunts Point)

  S.J. Rozan, “Hothouse” (Botanical Garden)

  Thomas Bentil, “Lost and Found” (Rikers Island)

  Marlon James, “Look What Love Is Doing to Me” (Williamsbridge)

  PART IV: THE WANDERER

  Sandra Kitt, “Home Sweet Home” (City Island)

  Robert J. Hughes, “A Visit to St. Nick’s” (Fordham Road)

  Miles Marshall Lewis, “Numbers Up” (Baychester)

  Joseph Wallace, “The Big Five” (Bronx Zoo)

  Part V: All shook up

  Ed Dee, “Ernie K.’s Gelding” (Van Cortlandt Park)

  Patrick W. Picciarelli, “The Prince of Arthur Avenue” (Arthur Avenue)

  Thomas Adcock, “You Want I Should Whack Monkey Boy?” (Courthouse)

  Queens Noir

  “Introduction by Robert Knightly”

  PART I: QUEENS ON THE FLY: BY SEA, HORSE, TRAIN, PLANE, AND SILVER SCREEN

  Maggie Estep, “Alice Fantastic” (Aqueduct Racetrack)

  Denis Hamill, “Under the Throgs Neck Bridge” (Bayside)

  Jill Eisenstadt, “Golden Venture” (The Rockaways)

  Joseph Guglielmelli, “Buckner’s Error” (Shea Stadium)

  Patricia King, “Baggage Claim” (JFK Airport)

  Kim Sykes, “Arrivederci, Aldo” (Long Island City)

  PART II: OLD QUEENS

  Megan Abbott, “Hollywood Lanes” (Forest Hills)

  Mary Byrne, “Only the Strong Survive” (Astoria)

  Robert Knightly, “First Calvary” (Blissville)

  Alan Gordon, “Bottom of the Sixth” (Rego Park)

  Victoria Eng, “The Flower of Flushing” (Flushing)

  Stephen Solomita, “Crazy Jill Saves the Slinky” (College Point)

  Tori Carrington, “Last Stop, Ditmars” (Ditmars)

  PART III: FOREIGN SHORES

  Shailly Agnihotri, “Avoid Agony” (Jackson Heights)

  K.j.a. Wishnia, “Viernes Loco” (Corona)

  Glenville Lovell, “Out of Body” (South Jamaica)

  Liz Martínez, “Lights Out for Frankie” (Woodside)

  Jillian Abbott, “Jihad Sucks; or, The Conversion of the Jews” (Richmond Hill)

  Belinda Farley, “The Investigation” (Jamaica)

  Staten Island Noir

  Introduction by Patricia Smith

  PART I: FAMILY AFFAIR

  Bill Loehfelm, “Snake Hill” (Eltingville)

  Louisa Ermelino, “Sister-in-Law” (Great Kills)

  Patricia Smith, “When They Are Done with Us “ (Port Richmond)

  Ted Anthony, “A User’s Guide to Keeping Your Kills Fresh” (Fresh Kills)

  Shay Youngblood, “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” (South Beach)

  PART II: FIGHT OR FLIGHT

  Michael Penncavage, “Mistakes” (The Ferry)

  Bruce DeSilva, “Abating a Nuisance” (Tompkinsville)

  Michael Largo, “Paying the Tab” (Four Corners)

  Binnie Kirshenbaum, “Assistant Professor Lodge” (Grymes Hill)

  PART III: BOROUGH OF BROKEN DREAMS

  Todd Craig, “ . . . spy verse spy . . . “ (Park Hill)

  Eddie Joyce, “Before It Hardens” (Annadale)

  Linda Nieves-Powell, “The Fly-Ass Puerto Rican Girl from the Stapleton Projects “ (Stapleton)

  Ashley Dawson, “Teenage Wasteland” (Tottenville)

  S.J. Rozan, “Lighthouse” (St. George)

  FOREWORD

  LETTERS OF INTRODUCTION

  This ebook is neither the first nor the last ti
tle in the Akashic Noir Series, but it represents some pretty weighty full-circle karma.

  At the time Akashic publisher Johnny Temple and I were establishing just what kind of book Brooklyn Noir was going to be, we were sometimes daunted by the scope of the project, resulting in ideas that veered wildly between, among other things, the broadest and most narrow geographic focus. Some of the concepts we discussed were whether to give each Brooklyn neighborhood its own volume (Bushwick Noir?), or to try and cover the whole of New York City in one book.

  It became quickly obvious that the way to go was to focus on the borough of Brooklyn and do our best to represent as many communities and voices as we could. Even before Brooklyn Noir was published, though, we were scoping out the other boroughs.

  Life intrudes, however, and plans change in publishing much the same as in the real world. After Brooklyn, Chicago was the next locale featured in the series. San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Dublin, Ireland were covered before Manhattan Noir came on board. Lawrence Block writes in his introduction to that volume that Manhattan is the city, and he’s right. Manhattan is the sun around which the outer boroughs rotate, but it is the very nature of the vast difference between Manhattan and its neighbors, and the symbiotic relationship of energy and labor moving back and forth, that prevented us from encompassing all of New York in one volume.

  It has taken eight years, and the publication of nearly sixty titles in the series, to complete this project, to tell the tale of a town that contains Wall Street and the Upper East Side, the slums of the South Bronx and the beauty of its botanical garden, the dizzying changes of Brooklyn’s gentrification, the weekly ethnic shifts of neighborhoods in Queens, and the inexorable transformation of Staten Island from quasi-rural suburb to the new old-Brooklyn, a package complete with traffic jams and racial violence. Eighty-seven stories ranging from art theft to horse theft, from random serial killings to good old-fashioned crimes of passion.

  As editors, Lawrence Block, S.J. Rozan, Robert Knightly, and Patricia Smith have done a remarkable job, uniformly keeping the tone of each book authentic to its borough. And their work has been critically rewarded. A number of these stories are Edgar, Anthony, and Shamus award winners or nominees. Three have been included in annual Best American Mystery Stories collections, and two were adapted as short films. Lou Manfredo, Maggie Estep, and Robert Knightly expanded stories presented here into novels.

  It first occurred to me that this book is a road map or an underground travel guide, then I realized that, collectively, the stories are more than that.

  When I was seventeen years old, I went to Europe for the first time, and traveled with a friend who had family in what was then Yugoslavia. We spent much of the summer hitchhiking or taking buses along the Adriatic coast. We began by staying with some of my friend’s relatives, but after the first night, they gave us a letter of introduction to acquaintances a few towns away, and upon presenting that, these strangers welcomed us into their home, fed us, and showed us around their village. They then gave us a letter of introduction to their friends down the road. The tradition continued, and night after night we found ourselves hosted by people with whom we had absolutely no prior connection, who took us behind the curtains of their villages and families, and who then made certain we had a contact for the next leg of our journey.

  Consider these stories letters of introduction. Each is a cautionary tale describing the dangers of a specific part of the city. Each story is presented to you as a gift, by a stranger.

  From the largest mistake to the most insignificant slight, the price for not knowing your territory in this town can be brutal. New York City is the capital of the world, and everybody knows you don’t stay on top by being a nice guy.

  Heed the warnings.

  Tim McLoughlin

  “Dere’s no guy livin’ dat knows Brooklyn t’roo an’ t’roo, because it’d take a guy a lifetime just to find his way aroun’ duh f——town.”

  —from “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” by Thomas Wolfe

  INTRODUCTION

  LOVE & CRIME

  I recently received a phone call from one of my father’s old friends. He’s an interesting man who has led a dangerous life, and since my father’s death I only hear from him every year or two. He was calling to tell me that his kid brother’s daughter, fourteen years old, had gone missing. Thankfully, he called again the next day to say she’d been found safe at a friend’s house. It had merely been a case of teenage angst acted out by briefly running away. I expressed my relief, and told him I’d take down the homemade flyers I’d posted. We talked for another few minutes, then signed off.

  “Take care, you know I love you,” he said as he hung up.

  He is six-feet four-inches tall, and is a pretty formidable guy still, at age sixty-three, with a face full of scar tissue and a triple bypass behind him. You know I love you. I thought about the fact that the only men I’ve known, other than my father, who are comfortable telling me that they love me, are also men capable of extreme violence. Is it a personality trait? Are these men just so much more emotional that they are capable of greater feeling? Love and hate, compassion and violence.

  No. It’s a code; an example of the language of inclusion. It has been used to the point of tedium in novels and films depicting organized crime families, but in the real world, membership in social alliances forged in the street can be between two people or twenty. And can stand for generations or dissolve the same evening. But the first thing that will emerge in such associations is a commonality of language, or pattern of speech, that suggests acceptance and loyalty, even if the individuals are from vastly different backgrounds.

  The communities across Brooklyn depicted in this book are for the most part not representative of the popular image of the borough today. Most stories from Brooklyn don’t focus on places like Canarsie, as Ellen Miller’s moody, disturbing tale does, or East New York, as in Maggie Estep’s clever, evocative story. And when the places are familiar, the enclave within often isn’t. The Park Slope of Pete Hamill’s “The Book Signing” is not a latte-drenched smoke-free zone celebrating its latest grassroots civic victory over some perceived evil, but the neighborhood of those left behind—the handful of old-timers living over the stores on Seventh Avenue and in the few remaining rent-controlled apartments, having to walk further every day to find a real bar or grocery store. The Williamsburg of Pearl Abraham isn’t the hipster hang, but the Hasidic stronghold. What these underground communities share, though, and these writers capture brilliantly, is the language.

  With the exception of a few characters, like Arthur Nersesian’s predatory protagonist, all of the actors in these pieces belong to some sort of community, and it is their membership that defines, and saves or dooms them.

  Some of these neighborhoods overlap and some are from opposite ends of the borough, and it doesn’t mean a thing in terms of language. Two or three of these stories could take place within a half-dozen blocks of each other, and the players would barely know where they were if their places were shifted. Ken Bruen’s “Fade to … Brooklyn” is actually set in Ireland, and though I know a number of people who consider Ireland just another part of the neighborhood, I like to think of it as our virtual Brooklyn story.

  The tales presented here are as diverse as the borough itself, from the over-the-top violent world of gangster rap, to a Damon Runyonesque crew of hardboiled old men. There are sexual predators, dirty cops, killers, and a horse thief. So the stories are different, but as I read them again, preparing to let this book go—reluctantly, because I don’t want it to end—I’m also struck by the way that they are similar. And that is in the most important way; because as any scholar sitting at the bar in a Flatbush gin mill knows, it’s about telling a good story. It is my privilege to share ours with you.

  Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn, January 2004

  PART I

  Old School Brooklyn

  THE BOOK SIGNING

  BY PETE HAMILL


  Park Slope

  Carmody came up from the subway before dusk, and his eyeglasses fogged in the sudden cold. He lifted them off his nose, holding them while they cooled, and saw his own face smiling from a pale green leaflet taped to the wall. There he was, in a six-year-old photograph, and the words Reading and Book Signin and the date and place, and he paused for a moment, shivering in the hard wind. The subway was his idea. The publisher could have sent him to Brooklyn in a limousine, but he wanted to go to the old neighborhood the way he always did, long ago. He might, after all, never come this way again.

  The subway stairs seemed steeper than he remembered and he felt twinges in his knees that he never felt in California. Sharp little needles of pain, like rumors of mortality. He didn’t feel these pains after tennis, or even after speed-walking along the Malibu roads. But the pain was there now, and was not eased by the weather. The wind was blowing fiercely from the harbor, which lay off in the darkness to his right, and he donned his glasses again and used both gloved hands to pull his brown fedora more securely to his brow. His watch told him that he had more than a half hour to get to the bookstore. Just as he had hoped. He’d have some time for a visit, but not too much time. He crossed the street with his back to the place where the bookstore awaited him, and passed along the avenue where he once was young.

  His own aging face peered at him from the leaflets as he passed, some pasted on walls, others taped inside the windows of shops. In a way, he thought, they looked like Wanted posters. He felt a sudden … what was the word? Not fear. Certainly not panic. Unease That was the word. An uneasiness in the stomach. A flexing and then relaxing of muscles, an unwilled release of liquids or acids, all those secret wordless messages that in California were cured by the beach and the surf or a quick hit of Maalox. He told himself to stop. This was no drama. It was just a trip through a few streets where once he had lived but had not seen for decades. After seventeen novels, this would be his first signing in the borough that had formed him. But the leaflets made clear that here, in this neighborhood, his appearance might be some kind of big deal. It might draw many people. And Carmody felt apprehensive, nervous, wormy with unease.