Free Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics by Tim McLoughlin

Alliances have been forged on thinner bonds than that, and ours served to propel us out of Armstrong’s, with a stop down the block for a fifth of Maker’s Mark—her choice—and a four-block walk to her apartment. There were exposed brick walls, I remember, and candles stuck in straw-wrapped bottles, and several travel posters from Sabena, the Belgian airline.
    We did what grown-ups do when they find themselves alone together. We drank our fair share of the Maker’s Mark and went to bed. She made a lot of enthusiastic noises and more than a few skillful moves, and afterward she cried some.
    A little later, she dropped off to sleep. I was tired myself, but I put on my clothes and sent myself home. Because who in her right mind’d want Matt Scudder around by the dawn’s early light?

    Over the next couple of days, I wondered every time I entered Armstrong’s if I’d run into her, and each time I was more relieved than disappointed when I didn’t. I didn’t en-counter Tommy, either, and that, too, was a relief and in no sense disappointing.
    Then, one morning, I picked up the News and read that they’d arrested a pair of young Hispanics from Sunset Park for the Tillary burglary and homicide. The paper ran the usual photo—two skinny kids, their hair unruly, one of them trying to hide his face from the camera, the other smirking defiantly, and each of them handcuffed to a broad-shouldered, grim-faced Irishman in a suit. You didn’t need the careful caption to tell the good guys from the bad guys.
    Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, I went over to Armstrong’s for a hamburger and drank a beer with it. The phone behind the bar rang and Dennis put down the glass he was wiping and answered it. “He was here a minute ago,” he said. “I’ll see if he stepped out.” He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and looked quizzically at me. “Are you still here?” he asked. “Or did you slip away while my attention was diverted?”
    “Who wants to know?”
    “Tommy Tillary.”
    You never know what a woman will decide to tell a man or how a man will react to it. I didn’t want to find out, but I was better off learning over the phone than face-to-face. I nodded and took the phone from Dennis.
    I said, “Matt Scudder, Tommy. I was sorry to hear about your wife.”
    “Thanks, Matt. Jesus, it feels like it happened a year ago. It was what, a week?”
    “At least they got the bastards.”
    There was a pause. Then he said, “Jesus. You haven’t seen a paper, huh?”
    “That’s where I read about it. Two Spanish kids.”
    “You didn’t happen to see this afternoon’s Post .”
    “No. Why, what happened? They turn out to be clean?”
    “The two spics. Clean? Shit, they’re about as clean as the room in the Times Square subway station. The cops hit their place and found stuff from my house everywhere they looked. Jewelry they had descriptions of, a stereo that I gave them the serial number, everything. Monogrammed shit. I mean, that’s how clean they were, for Christ’s sake.”
    “So?”
    “They admitted the burglary but not the murder.”
    “That’s common, Tommy.”
    “Lemme finish, huh? They admitted the burglary, but according to them it was a put-up job. According to them, I hired them to hit my place. They could keep whatever they got and I’d have everything out and arranged for them, and in return I got to clean up on the insurance by overreporting the loss.”
    “What did the loss amount to?”
    “Shit, I don’t know. There were twice as many things turned up in their apartment as I ever listed when I made out a report. There’s things I missed a few days after I filed the report and others I didn’t know were gone until the cops found them. You don’t notice everything right away, at least I didn’t, and on top of it, how could I think straight with Peg dead? You know?”
    “It hardly sounds like an insurance setup.”
    “No, of course it wasn’t. How the hell could it be? All I