The Gutter and the Grave Read Online Free PDF Page A

the first time I heard it, as if I were waiting to hear that name all my life, and suddenly there it was. And the girl went with it. She came off the Triborough waving a football pennant, that long blonde hair caught on the November breeze, caught and held there, a spun gold web. Green eyes that echoed the green scarf around her throat. A leopardskin coat, and she wore it as if the animal were still alive, a sleek study in motion, trim and clean, full thighs beneath the woolen dress, slender ankles and the clatter of high-heeled shoes, the subtle swing of leg and thigh and hip, Toni McAllister with a bright orange pennant and a bunch of college boys smoking pipes and wearing tweeds. The smell of perfume and class, both delicate scents, both wafted on the air insinuatingly, touching me, reaching for me, Matt Cordell, the kid from the wrong part of the East Side, but not a kid anymore, a man who watched this invasion from the outer space of upper Park Avenue, Toni McAllister, a fresh breeze in the garbage-smell of the slums.
    She stopped before me where I was leaning against the concrete support of the ramp. Her lips pulled back over small even white teeth, widening into a smile. There was another scent now, the smell of alcohol, andthen her voice came and there was a taunting lilt to it, a tease that was repeated in the flashing green eyes.
    “Are you a Princeton or a Rutgers?” she said. She continued smiling. She leaned close to me, and our eyes locked, green with brown.
    “Come on, Toni,” one of the college boys said.
    “Go to hell,” she told him without looking over her shoulder. “Are you a Princeton or a Rutgers?” she said again.
    “I’m a Peter Stuyvesant High School,” I said.
    She laughed. She threw back her head and laughed, and one of the college boys said, “Come on, Toni, will you?”
    “Princeton won,” she said to me. “I’m a Princeton. If you’re a Princeton, I’ll buy you a drink.”
    “I’m not a Princeton,” I told her.
    “That’s a damn shame,” she said. “Don’t say I didn’t ask.”
    “I thought the
gentleman
asked,” I said.
    “Are you a gentleman?”
    “Not usually. But I’m asking. Let
me
buy
you
a drink.”
    “How original,” Toni said, and she hooked her arm through mine, and we left three college boys standing on the pavement waving pennants.
    That was the beginning.
    The beginning and the end are clearest in my mind. What came in between was something I’d never known before, and it’s impossible to pick any isolated experience and say This was more meaningful thanthat, or This caused more pleasure than that. It was all a high-speeding jet plane, and the wash dissolved behind it; it was Matt Cordell and Toni McAllister and the hell with the world. It was Park Avenue mixed with the slums, it was cocktail parties and pool parlors, theatre openings and all-night movies on Forty-Second Street. It was her world and mine, mixed like a Zombie, four thousand kinds of rum, but blended because underneath the exotic name, it was all rum. It was talking about everything under the sun, and it was long periods of silence, the ferry ride to Staten Island with the lights of Manhattan looming against the sky and Toni against me with my arms around her, a cutting wind blowing in over the bay. It was Matt Cordell and Toni McAllister, the impossible suddenly possible.
    And after a year, it became Toni Cordell.
    And then, of course, the end.
    I’d hired a man named Dave Parker to supplement the three men already working for me. He was a clever guy who wasn’t afraid of tackling any case. We got along fine. It was one of those working arrangements where we both seemed to think together. Toni liked him, too. Then I went out of town on a case for about two weeks. I came home one night without calling Toni first—the old bit, so corny it makes me vomit, but it happened, as real as life: hubby coming home unexpectedly, the light burning in the bedroom upstairs, the big surprise