The Longue Goodbye

In honor of author Richard Stark, reader Joe Barrett, and their correct rendering of chaise longue in the audiobook version of Stark's novel Butcher's Moon, here's a story I wrote a few years back.
 =============

Rick Ollerman enjoys a
moment of nail-biting
suspense. Photos by
Peter Rozovsky for
Detectives Beyond
Borders.

Here are more photos from Sunday's Noir at the Bar in New York along with the other story I read there. I've included a face from earlier in the day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that would not have been out of place at the reading. (See if you can spot the interloper.)  See my other story and the first batch of photos on the previous post here at Detectives Beyond Borders.)

===================

The Longue Goodbye

Nick Kolakowski, Suzanne Solomon.

I pushed open the door to the pool deck and inhaled chlorine and death. Fen slumped in the chase lounge. He looked smaller and sicker than he had when I'd seen him three days before.

Hellenistic dramatic mask

Spit and blood caked around his broken mouth, and for a moment I thought he was dead. "Got anything to tell me, Fen?" I knelt by the chair.

Jeff Markowitz

His lips cracked when he tried to talk, and I knew Fen was more than halfway to where he was going. I leaned closer.

"It's chaise longue, not chase lounge, you illiterate fuck," he said. "It means long chair."

Jen Conley

He died happy.

— Peter Rozovsky

Albert Tucher, Jen Conley, Suzanne Solomon, Terrence McCauley

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

"Merry Christmas to All, and to All a Goodis Night" (An annual holiday tradition)

“Turn over, baby. You’re burning up," she cooed. “Let me do your front.”

 The fat red man purred. Then he opened his mouth and screamed. He awoke from the dream jammed down the chimney, flames licking at his back. From above, a shaft of weak, sooty light and murmured voices.

 “But, Rudy, what about—”

“Leave the fat guy. I’m out of here. Who’s with me?”

“I’m in,” a voice said.

“Dasher?”

“Yeah.”

"You on, Dancer? Prancer? Vixen? Comet? Good. Let’s go.”

 Back down in hell, the fat red man shut his eyes and heard them exclaim as they drove out of sight …

— Peter Rozovsky 

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Noir at the Bar NYC with a (new) story by me

Juliet Fletcher, Charlie Stella, Rory Costello
(Photos by Peter Rozovsky for Detectives
Beyond Borders)

Even more fun than usual was had at Sunday evening's Noir at the Bar at Shade Bar in New York. Why? Because I:

1) Met a couple of folks whom I had previously known only through social media and e-mail, notably Charlie Stella.

2) Met some new folks from the United States and elsewhere.

3) Had enjoyable reunions with all kinds of crime fiction folks and my favorite bartender in New York.

4) Stayed late, by Noir at the Bar standards, and still managed to make my bus back to Philadelphia.

and

Scott Adlerberg and Jen Conley,
the evening's hosts.

5) Read a story that I had assembled for the occasion, because Jen Conley invited me to read, and it would not have done to show up with an old story, would it?

The story—the opening section of a story, really—is a distillation of some fragments that I wrote years ago and that finally may come together as a coherent whole. Here we meet the characters and set the stage for the  main action.

Before we go, thanks to Jen for inviting me to read and to Scott Adlerberg for MCing the event with her.

Oh, the story's title. West Fourth Street is the nearest subway stop to Shade. Beyond that, if you don't recognize the allusion, you've got a a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.

===============

 Negatively Fourth Street

by Peter Rozovsky 

Fifteen miles outside NEWark, Delaware, the woman next to me started crying into her phone. I commiserated, I kept silent. Then I slammed my book down and headed for the café car.

On my way back, the train took a curve. I bobbled my coffee and sandwich, and the heavy metal doors between the cars clanked open. From in front came the last voice I wanted to hear. From behind, a voice I wanted to hear even less.

Suzanne Solomon

The train pulled out of NEWark with a long, shrill whistle. I rolled down the grass embankment, mopped the coffee stains and tuna flecks from my shirt, and watched the train disappear.

*

Blake wore a red T-shirt and blue jeans. He hunched forward, hands jammed in his pockets, and he moved fast. Fetch held a rolled-up Rangers jacket in the crook of one elbow, a Tim Horton's bag half falling out of one pocket. He ambled and shambled, but he still kept up with his friend somehow. He put a hand on Blake's shoulder, and they stopped.

Fetch indicated a door, and Blake shook his head. Fetch held up one finger and ducked into the doorway. Blake shrugged, leaned against a pillar, and lit a cigarette.

*

Terrence McCauley

Kasey Thompson's voice told a smoky tale of cigarettes and whiskey, but it lied. She never touched either.

"Think I'd be able to do this if I wasted my time in bars?"  She whacked the speed bag and made me feel sorry for the leather. Chin tucked, knees flexed, back straight. Elbows in, her back heel lifting slightly each time she struck. Her two fists became four, then six. Her breath came in short, spitting wheezes with each punch. I got tired watching her.

But she did waste time in bars, and I wanted to know why. "What's with the gym stuff?" I said. "You don't fight."

She stopped punching, and she smiled as she blew a wisp of platinum hair from her left eye. "Would you want to be whipped by a fat dominatrix?"

*

I jabbed the .45 at the base of Fetch's skull, and I cackled as his eyes grew wide.

"Out of the car. And leave the boxes."

I jerked the gun to the right as Blake went for his jacket. "Hold it right there, Tiger."

"The fuck?"

"What am I going to call you? Paddy? Mick? Now, out of the car, Celtic, and keep your hands away from your — "

"From my Marlboros, you gobshite. All right, I'm getting out."

I waved out the window of Fetch's black 2008 Lexus as I pulled away.

"See you later, gents. Put this in your books."

*

Albert Tucher

Two nights later I'm shouting to be heard over the crowd at the Grand Hyatt.  We're hooting and cheering as a small, curvy woman dressed in black lifts her blouse to reveal her tattoos: Kasey Thompson. The crowd pushes in around her, all except two guys looking the other way, toward the door.

The snake tattoo is flicking its tongue at Kasey Thompson's scapula, but I've got one eye on the two guys.

One of them says: "I'M OUT OF HERE FOR SOME CIGARETTES."

His friend, a husky, saltish-pepperish dude with a Rangers jacket and a Tim Horton's bag, shrugs, and they head my way.  Shit. Fetch and Blake.

============================

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

The Maltese Falcon and me

Statue of the God Horus
as a Falcon, Egypt,
Ptolemaic period
(335-30 BC), Art
Institute of Chicago

In honor of TMC's nationwide rerelease of The Maltese Falcon in theaters, here's a short-short I wrote five years ago that invokes a line from the movie, though the line does not occur in Dashiell Hammett's novel. 

The Philadelphia showing to which I had bought a ticket was cancelled because, said the manager of the Cinemark Penn 6 theater, of legal obligations to show the first-run movies on the theater's regular schedule. Those movies, should you be interested, included Zoolander 2 and Kung Fu Panda 3.

Down the Shore

by Peter Rozovsky

Sally took the Lavender Room and left the Leather ‘n’ Spice Suite for me. I thanked her for that much; a guy’s got a reputation to keep.

Sally was all right. Sure, she’d cooed over the scented candles and chintz-covered throw pillows. But she drew the line at the teddy bears – five on the parlor settee, seven on a second-floor notions table, and one that scared the hell out of her when it fell on her head from the top of an ivory-inlaid cabinet in the breakfast nook.

That’s why I suspected her when I found a bear with its guts ripped out the next morning. She just looked at me funny as we headed out for an iced coffee before hitting the beach.

*

Two more teddy bears disappeared that evening, though one turned up under the porch swing soaking in a puddle of spilled mint tea. The glass pitcher that had held the tea lay on its side, next to a knocked-over white rattan table.

Diane shook her head as she mopped up the mess, muttering that some guests lack the simple good manners to come forward when they have an accident. But no one can stay grumpy for long and still run a successful bed and breakfast. “I’m no escapee or anything,” she said, laughing. She slapped the puddle with her mop. “I won’t rip their heads off.”

*

“Let me do your neck,” Sally said.

*

I winced as we sat in the Mexican coffee shop reading our newspapers the next morning. “Did you see— Damn!” I threw the paper down and rubbed my left forearm hard. “Itching. We stayed out too long yesterday. Pass the Gold Bond, will you?”

A skinny guy with a faded green baseball cap and a laughing gull tattooed on his left temple stared at the little white clouds as I slapped the powder over my arms.

*

I recognized the tattoo when I saw it again late that night. Its owner lay face down on the bed and breakfast’s porch, his hands cuffed behind him and a police sergeant kneeling none too gently on his back.

“It was the bears,” the sergeant’s boss said. “This guy’s been a small-time heister for years. He heard a load of heroin was coming down the Shore in one of them teddies, and somehow he got it into his head that this was the town.” He nudged the perp thoughtfully in the ribs with his boot. “It gets pretty shitty for a guy like him in the winters here, and this was his chance to get away. I don’t know what we can charge him with; B&E and cruelty to animals, maybe.” He bent down and hauled the skinny perp up by the arm pits. “Come on, Grizzly Adams. We don’t have much of a downtown, but we’re taking you there.”

*

If the dope was in Cape Friendly, the skinny guy never found it. Maybe he’d be no worse off than he was before. But maybe whoever had paid for the heroin would make an example of him. Either way, I didn’t envy the skinny guy with the laughing-gull tattoo.

They’d taken him away when Sally came down the stairs. Her mouth made a silent O. “What happened? What is all—” She waved her arm out over the guts of a dozen toy bears.

"It’s nothing, baby, just the stuffing that dreams are made of. Now, let’s go to bed. Your suite or mine?”

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Noircon, Day I

Christa Faust, Frank De Blase

So I'm sitting in the hotel bar Thursday night with Christa Faust, Frank De Blase, and the ex-LAPD detective who says his father killed Elizabeth Short, and I'm thinking, "This Noircon thing is kind of fun."

Earlier, I'd attended a panel that offered Flannery O'Connor's biographer, Jean W. Cash; and Patricia Highsmith's biographer, Joan Schenkar; in a conversation moderated by Jim Thompson's biographer, Robert Polito.  Were Highsmith and O'Connor radically different in temperament? Were they so far apart that they began to approach each other from the opposite direction? If you begin to suspect that NoirCon is not like other crime fiction conventions, you just may be right.

Later, after a fine, light convention-provided lunch, events included a kind of reading slam called "Three Minutes of Terror," in which twenty or so writers read from their work for no more than three minutes each, with the threat of ringing buzzers, flashing lights, and a chain-saw attack for anyone who exceeded the time limit. Among the well-received selections was a modified-for-oral-presentation version of this story, by your humble blogkeeper, the first time I had ever read fiction in public.

And now, before I head to track down more of my peeps, collapse in happy exhaustion, or both, here are a few good things people have said at the con, context to come later:

"The dog lived. I knew that was a bad sign."

*

"Half man, half sponge."

*

"He was so wicked, he had to go live in Switzerland."

© Peter Rozovsky 2014 

Dash and flash

(Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Photo by
your humble blogkeeper)

One of the few pieces of fiction I've written is a flash-fiction tribute to Dashiell Hammett three years ago. It's still Hammett's birthday on the West Coast, so here's the story again. Happy birthday, Dash.
========================

Down the Shore

by Peter Rozovsky

Sally took the Lavender Room and left the Leather ‘n’ Spice Suite for me. I thanked her for that much; a guy’s got a reputation to keep.

Sally was all right. Sure, she’d cooed over the scented candles and chintz-covered throw pillows. But she drew the line at the teddy bears – five on the parlor settee, seven on a second-floor notions table, and one that scared the hell out of her when it fell on her head from the top of an ivory-inlaid cabinet in the breakfast nook.

That’s why I suspected her when I found a bear with its guts ripped out the next morning. She just looked at me funny as we headed out for an iced coffee before hitting the beach.

*

Two more teddy bears disappeared that evening, though one turned up under the porch swing soaking in a puddle of spilled mint tea. The glass pitcher that had held the tea lay on its side, next to a knocked-over white rattan table.

Diane shook her head as she mopped up the mess, muttering that some guests lack the simple good manners to come forward when they have an accident. But no one can stay grumpy for long and still run a successful bed and breakfast. “I’m no escapee or anything,” she said, laughing. She slapped the puddle with her mop. “I won’t rip their heads off.”

*

“Let me do your neck,” Sally said.

*

I winced as we sat in the Mexican coffee shop reading our newspapers the next morning. “Did you see— Damn!” I threw the paper down and rubbed my left forearm hard. “Itching. We stayed out too long yesterday. Pass the Gold Bond, will you?”

A skinny guy with a faded green baseball cap and a laughing gull tattooed on his left temple stared at the little white clouds as I slapped the powder over my arms.

*

I recognized the tattoo when I saw it again late that night. Its owner lay face down on the bed and breakfast’s porch, his hands cuffed behind him and a police sergeant kneeling none too gently on his back.

“It was the bears,” the sergeant’s boss said. “This guy’s been a small-time heister for years. He heard a load of heroin was coming down the Shore in one of them teddies, and somehow he got it into his head that this was the town.” He nudged the perp thoughtfully in the ribs with his boot. “It gets pretty shitty for a guy like him in the winters here, and this was his chance to get away. I don’t know what we can charge him with; B&E and cruelty to animals, maybe.” He bent down and hauled the skinny perp up by the arm pits. “Come on, Grizzly Adams. We don’t have much of a downtown, but we’re taking you there.”

*

If the dope was in Cape Friendly, the skinny guy never found it. Maybe he’d be no worse off than he was before. But maybe whoever had paid for the heroin would make an example of him. Either way, I didn’t envy the skinny guy with the laughing-gull tattoo.

They’d taken him away when Sally came down the stairs. Her mouth made a silent O. “What happened? What is all—” She waved her arm out over the guts of a dozen toy bears.

"It’s nothing, baby, just the stuffing that dreams are made of. Now, let’s go to bed. Your suite or mine?”

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

I enter the Reginald Marsh flash-fiction challenge



(Junkyard Scene by Reginald Marsh,
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts)

Patti Abbott has created a flash fiction challenge for a good cause. She asked readers to create stories inspired by the American painter Reginald Marsh, and she promises to donate five dollars to Union Settlement for each entry. (Union Settlement is where her daughter Megan works. Yep, that Megan Abbott.) Here's my story.

============

"Smithers Should Have Listened"

by Peter Rozovsky

 You'll drive."

“Like fuck, I will,” Cappy said. "I’m—“

Smithers put his mug down hard. “You’ll drive, or you’ll stay the fuck home. Now, here’s what we’ll do…"

***

The job went off without a hitch. Cappy pulled up to the bank's side entrance. Smithers and Ben slipped in the front and mingled with the customers. Ben queued up to see the business manager, his hat in hand, with a story about the men's haberdashery he could open with just a $2,000 loan.

At 10:06 two guards accompanied the bank president to the vault, and Smithers nodded to Ben. The president clicked the dial, the guards turned a massive steel wheel, and Smithers pulled a shotgun from his long coat. Ben brought his hand down on the business manager's wrist and said, "Don't."

Smithers stepped into the vault and raked up the cash — $175,000, the papers said. Gus stood by the front door, keeping the way clear, while Ben covered the business manager and the tellers with a revolver, making sure no one went for an alarm. In the meantime, Cappy pulled the car around the front and collected Smithers, Ben, and Gus as smoothly as if they'd been heading out for a drive in the countryside.

At least, that's what I read in the papers the next day. I sat out the job because of a hunting accident. Me, the shooter in the gang, and laid up with a keister full of buckshot!

It seemed that the boys had made it clear to the last traffic light in town, a big brewery truck bearing down from the right, Cappy laughing like a madman behind the wheel, Ben and Smithers going crazy in the back seat, the truck bearing down, Gus throwing himself from the car just as the truck hit.

None of the boys made it out alive, of course, and there wasn't much left of that fine black sedan of theirs, either. Gus's body was torn clean in half at the waist, and the traffic signal, knocked from its post but still blinking from red to green every thirty seconds, lay in a pool of gasoline, brain tissue and beer next to what was left of Cappy.

Poor kid. I knew him better than I'd known the others, known him since he was a boy, in fact. That's how I knew what he'd been trying to say when Smithers ordered him to drive: "Like fuck, I will. I'm color blind!"

Smithers should have listened.

==============

(This is the second story I've written for a flash-fiction challenge. Read the first one, "Down the Shore," here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

I enter the Do Some Damage "Noir at the Beach House" challenge!

Over at Do Some Damage, Steve Weddle, last seen in these parts asking fellow Noircon attendees to sign his bat, challenges readers to write crime stories with a summer-vacation theme. Here's my entry. How about yours?

=======

Down the Shore

by Peter Rozovsky

Sally took the Lavender Room and left the Leather ‘n’ Spice Suite for me. I thanked her for that much; a guy’s got a reputation to keep.

Sally was all right. Sure, she’d cooed over the scented candles and chintz-covered throw pillows. But she drew the line at the teddy bears – five on the overstuffed settee in the parlor, seven tumbling over each other on a second-floor notions table, and one that scared the hell out of her when it fell on her head from the top shelf of an ivory-inlaid cabinet in the breakfast nook.

That’s why I suspected her when I found a bear with its guts ripped out the next morning. She just looked at me funny as we headed out for an iced coffee before hitting the beach.

*

Two more teddy bears disappeared that evening, though one turned up under the porch swing soaking in a puddle of spilled mint tea. The glass pitcher that had held the tea lay on its side, next to a knocked-over white rattan table.

Diane shook her head as she mopped up the mess, muttering that some guests lack the simple good manners to come forward when they have an accident. But no one can stay grumpy for long and still run a successful bed and breakfast. “I’m no escapee or anything,” she said, laughing. She slapped the puddle with her mop. “I won’t rip their heads off.”

*

“Let me do your neck,” Sally said.

*

I winced as we sat in the Mexican coffee shop reading our newspapers the next morning. “Did you see— Damn!” I threw the paper down and rubbed my left forearm hard. “Itching. We stayed out too long yesterday. Pass the Gold Bond, will you?”

A skinny guy with a faded green baseball cap and a laughing gull tattooed on his left temple stared at the little white clouds as I slapped the powder over my arms.

*

I recognized the tattoo when I saw it again late that night. Its owner lay face down on the bed and breakfast’s porch, his hands cuffed behind him and a police sergeant kneeling none too gently on his back.

“It was the bears,” the sergeant’s boss said. “This guy’s been a small-time heister for years. He heard a load of heroin was coming down the Shore in one of them teddies, and somehow he got it into his head that this was the town.” He nudged the perp thoughtfully in the ribs with his boot. “It gets pretty shitty for a guy like him in the winters here, and this was his chance to get away. I don’t know what we can charge him with; B&E and cruelty to animals, maybe.” He bent down and hauled the skinny perp up by the arm pits. “Come on, Grizzly Adams. We don’t have much of a downtown, but we’re taking you there.”

*

If the dope was in Cape Friendly, the skinny guy never found it. Maybe he’d be no worse off than he was before. But maybe whoever had paid for the heroin would make an example of him. Either way, I didn’t envy the skinny guy with the laughing-gull tattoo.

They’d taken him away when Sally came down the stairs. Her mouth made a silent O. “What happened? What is all—” She waved her arm out over the guts of a dozen toy bears.

"It’s nothing, baby, just the stuffing that dreams are made of. Now, let’s go to bed. Your suite or mine?”

© Peter Rozovsky 2011