Manhattan Is My Beat

Tony persisted.
    “Walking around,” Rune said. “I didn’t feel like coming back. I mean, he was dead. I saw him. Right in front of me.”
    “Whoa. You see the bullet holes and everything?”
    “Oh, Jesus Christ. Hang it up, okay?”
    “Are they like in the movies?”
    She turned away, kept wiping the counter with Windex. Tony and Frankie both smoked. It made the glass filthy.
    “Well, you shoulda called. I was worried.”
    “Worried? Like, I’m
sure
,” she said.
    “Just call next time.”
    Rune had a feel for it now. He was backing down. No trips to unemployment this week.
Them’s the breaks
… She felt like pushing so she pushed. “There won’t
be
a next time. I don’t do any more pickups, okay? That’s a rule.”
    “Hey, we’re all simpatico here, no? The Washington Square Video family.” Tony glanced at Frankie as the skinny young man came out of the back room.
    “Think I can fix that monitor,” Frankie said.
    “Yeah, well, that’s not your priority. Locking up’s your priority.”
    The large man slung his dirty red nylon backpack over his shoulder again and disappeared out the front door.
    Frankie said, “Like, I heard you talking to Tony.”
    “And?”
    “How come you didn’t make up something? About coming in late today? Like say your mother got sick or something?”
    Rune said, “Why would I lie to
Tony
? You only lie to people who have power over you…. So what happened with the Palladium?”
    Frankie was crestfallen. “We only got one pass and Eddie, like, won the toss. Man. It was Blondie too.”
    He glanced at a stack of porn tapes that had been returned and needed to be reshelved. One title seemed to interest him. He put it aside. He said, “That guy who was killed. He was that old guy you liked, right?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I don’t remember him too good. Was he cool?”
    She leaned on the counter, playing with her bracelets. She looked outside. The city had these weird orange streetlamps. It was close to eleven P.M. but the light made the city look like afternoon during a partial eclipse. “Yeah, he was cool.” She dug under the counter and found the bootleg tape she’d made for Kelly. Turned it over in her hands. “Also, he was kind of different.”
    “Like, what? Weird?”
    “Not weird the way
you
mean.”
    “What, uhm, way do I mean?”
    She didn’t answer. A thought was in her mind. “But there was one thing weird about him. Not him personally. He was the nicest old guy you’d ever want to meet. Polite.”
    “So what was weird about him?”
    “Well, he’d only been a member for a month.”
    “And?”
    “He rented the same movie a lot.”
    “A lot?”
    Rune typed on the keyboard of the little Kaypro portable computer on the counter. Then she read from the screen. “Eighteen times.”
    “Wow,” Frankie said, “that’s weird.”
    “
Manhattan Is My Beat
,” Rune said.
    “Never heard of it. About a, like, reporter?”
    “A cop. Walking a beat. One of those old-time cop movies from the forties. You know, all the men wearing those big drapey double-breasted suits and have their hair slicked back. Nobody really famous in it. Dana Mitchell, Charlotte Goodman, Ruby Dahl.”
    “Who’re they?”
    “You wouldn’t know them. They’re not part of the Brat Pack. Anyway, the movie just came out on tape a month ago. I’m not surprised nobody was in a hurry to release it. I watched it but it wasn’t my style. I like the black and white though. I hate colorization. It’s a political issue with me.
    “Anyway, Mr. Kelly shows up the day after it’s released. We had a poster up in the window. The distributor sent it…. Uh, there it is, in the back….”
    Frankie glanced. “Oh, yeah, I remember it.”
    Rune continued. “He comes in and wants to rent it. He wasn’t a member so he asks about joining. Then— this
is
weirdness for you—he asks how he puts tapes in his TV. Can you believe it? He doesn’t know about VCRs! So I tell him if he doesn’t have a player he’s got to get one and I tell him where Audio Exchange and Crazy Eddie’s are. Well, he doesn’t have much money, I can tell, cause he goes, ‘Do you think they’ll take a check? See, I just moved and it doesn’t have my address on it….’ That kind of stuff. And I was thinking, yeah, right, the reason they won’t take the check isn’t the address, it’s that there’s no money in the account. So I tell him about this place on Canal where they have all kinds of used stuff and