Fifty-to-One Page 12

  “Get back here,” Mitch shouted, aiming a long arm down at her, finger extended like Uncle Sam. He started to climb over the barrier and she scrambled to her feet, ready to run—then she saw a hand appear at Mitch’s shoulder, a wooden nightstick protruding from it.

  “Mister,” came the cop’s voice, shouting to be heard over the cacophony, “what do you think you’re doing?”

  “My—my wife, officer, she just—she jumped over—”

  Tricia ducked under one of the bridge’s huge concrete stanchions.

  “I don’t see anyone,” the cop said a moment later.

  “But she just...”

  “You been drinking, mister? Let’s see that car of yours.”

  Tricia couldn’t hear Mitch’s response as the two of them walked away. But she thought about that car of his. If she had any luck, the cop would ask to look in the trunk. Get rid of the stiff Nicolazzo had said. Robbie hadn’t been in the back seat; he had to be somewhere.

  Come on, she said to herself, you’re New York’s finest, look in the goddamn trunk.

  She dusted off her palms and started walking, fast as she could, first west to Second Avenue and then south toward her sister’s place downtown. She had no money for a taxi, not even for a subway. And she had four miles to walk. At least with the sun down, the heat wasn’t so powerful. She opened the top button of her dress. Let a little air in.

  Much of the city was shutting down for the night, shopkeepers dragging cartons and signs in from the sidewalk, pulling down metal gates over their plate glass windows. The bars on either side of the avenue, conversely, were coming to life, strains of jukebox music pouring out each time one of their doors swung open, neon lights blinking on overhead.

  There was life on the street—pedestrians and loafers, men in their undershirts and trousers taking an evening smoke on the stoop of their apartment buildings, cars motoring by at a casual pace. This was a neighborhood of four- and five-story brick buildings inhabited by working men and women, restaurant staff and seamstresses, dock-workers and laundry workers, Irish mostly; and those as were still out of doors gave her the eye as she passed, one or two of the men whistling low, one throwing her a loud kiss. She was used to it, and most nights it wouldn’t have bothered her, but tonight it added to her feeling of straining toward a goal and not making progress, like she was walking through sand or mud or in a dream. Cornelia Street was far away, in the city’s lower reaches, and here she was walking through a darkening forest of hungry-eyed men with bare arms and puckered lips. The El had run here once, she knew, its metal tracks casting the whole of the avenue into darkness; and though it had been demolished nearly twenty years back, as night fell it was almost as if you were still walking under its shadow, listening with half an ear for the clattering roar of ghost cars overhead.

  As she passed 49th Street, a man fell into step beside her; she glanced and for a moment was relieved to see the blue of his uniform—but only for a moment.

  “You all right, miss?” the flatfoot said.

  “Yes, sir,” Tricia said. She tried to keep her voice even, her head down.

  “This isn’t a neighborhood for a girl to go walking alone.”

  “I’m just a couple of blocks from home,” Tricia said, resisting the urge to walk faster, to try to get away. How many more steps would she get before he took a good look at her face and recognized her from the bulletin O’Malley must have circulated? When would he put out a hand and stop her, leaving her the choice of running for it or heading off to jail?

  She felt a trail of perspiration forming along her spine and prayed it didn’t show.

  “I’m fine—thank you,” Tricia said. “You don’t need to walk with me.”

  He stopped, and against every impulse urging her on, she stopped as well, tried to appear casual, at ease, not twitch under his stare.

  Had she gone too far? Should she apologize? She was on the verge of doing so when the policeman tipped his cap to her and said, “All right, miss. Have it your way.” He fell behind as she walked on. She glanced back and saw him peering into a parked car, going on with his rounds.

  Thank you, she whispered to herself, for blind policemen, thank you. Only please let the one on the bridge have been more observant.

  The streets passed, one by one, and her legs grew sore from exertion, but she didn’t stop, didn’t even slow, didn’t dare. Somewhere down by Washington Square Park, a three-year-old boy was waiting for his mother to come home; and a box of photographs that could send who knew how many men to jail was sitting out on a table or hidden behind the public toilet tank down the hall or waiting in the dust under the bed. If the cops had let Mitch go—and they might have, they easily might have—he’d be heading down there as well, and faster than she could hope to make it. He didn’t have an address, but Cornelia Street was only one block long, maybe a dozen buildings on either side—he didn’t need an address, just time enough to canvass them all. And he surely had money with him; and he had a car; and his gun, he had that, too.

  Oh, please, she thought, please let them at least have found his gun. Let them have locked him up tight, and no phone call back to Uncle Nick in Queens, not yet.

  But Tricia had limited confidence in the value of prayers. So she walked, fast as she could, through the night.

  17.

  A Touch of Death

  The lights were on in all the second- and third-story windows, and in one or two of the storefronts besides: a pagoda-roofed restaurant on the corner of Cornelia and Bleecker, a 24-hour laundry halfway down the block. Tricia made her way to the grey stone building near West 4th where the taxi from the train station had dropped her off what felt like such a long time ago. The hand-lettered NO VACANCIES sign was still—or again—in the window by the front door. She looked around for Mitch, or Bruno, or anyone of comparable appearance, but there was no one in sight. Except for a collarless dog sniffing at one of the sidewalk’s scrawny trees, the block was empty.

  Which either meant she was in time or that she was too late.

  Tricia leaned on the buzzer till she could hear footsteps approaching from the other side and didn’t release it until she heard the cover slide away from the peephole. She stepped back so the person looking out could see more than the top of her head.

  “I’m Colleen King’s sister,” she said. “Trixie...Trixie King.”

  “Not here,” came a woman’s voice, accented as much from cigarette smoke as from what sounded like some sort of Eastern European upbringing.

  “I know, I was just with her, she asked me to come by, give something to her son. To Artie.” When there was no response, she added, “Please, I’ve walked a long way.”

  Whether that was what did it she’d never know—but the locks turned and the door swung open. Behind it a woman no taller than Tricia but quite a bit older stood in a flower-print wrapper, hairnet over a tangle of grey curls, slippers on her feet. She had the doorknob in one hand, the burning stub of a Marlboro between the knuckles of the other.

  “You sister?” She drew deeply on the cigarette, consuming half its remaining length in one pull. “She look nothing like you.”

  “She takes after our mother,” Tricia said. “May I go up to her room?”

  “You have key?”

  Tricia nodded, hoping the woman wouldn’t ask her to produce it.

  “Okay,” the woman said. “Is 3D, like Duck. But child is in 3F. Like Fox.”

  “Thank you,” Tricia said, wondering what sort of zoo-based primer the woman had used when learning English. She made her way to the staircase in the corner of the room. The woman retreated to a doorway near the foot of the stairs where she smoked the remnant of her cigarette and watched Tricia climb with a look on her face that seemed caught halfway between suspicion and apathy.

  When she reached the third floor, Tricia went from door to door, scanning the heavy brass letters screwed into the wood—‘A’ like Alligator, ‘B’ like Bat. She tried the knob at D-like-Duck, but it was loc
ked. ‘F’ was across the hall and she knocked briskly.

  “Sh,” a voice came, a husky whisper. “You’ll wake him.” The knob gently turned and the door swung slowly ajar, a soft creak escaping from the hinges despite all the care to avoid it. A scarred face appeared in the opening, the pink and white of old burns on both plump cheeks and across her chin. It was a face Tricia recognized from the Sun, from one of the times she’d visited the club early to scope it out while plotting Chapter 10. Tricia had even put her in the chapter, given her a little cameo to address the lousy treatment she’d seen her bear at the hands of the other girls on the cleaning crew.

  “Heaven,” Tricia said. “I didn’t know you lived here.”

  “What are you doing here, then?” Heaven LaCroix spoke English with only the faintest hint of a Belgian accent, having come over on a refugee ship at age seven. She stood just half a head taller than Tricia but she was as broad across the shoulders as Coral; she had the arms, too, thick and muscled.

  “It’s a long story,” Tricia said, “and it’s probably going to sound crazy to you, but I’m Colleen’s sister—I know, we don’t look anything alike. But it’s true. And she’s in trouble. I need to get into her room, get something she left there. You’ve got a key, right? You must, if you take care of Artie.”

  “Now hold on,” Heaven said, stepping out into the hallway and pulling the door shut behind her. She was wearing a heavy robe, something frilly peeking out at the collar, like she’d been in bed when Tricia knocked. “I don’t know you, except that you dance for a living and ask a lot of questions. That time you came by, I almost got in trouble myself, you kept me so long with your questions.”

  “I’m sorry, Heaven, I was just new and curious about a lot of things.”

  “I’ll say.” Heaven crossed her arms over her chest. “Now you want to get into my friend’s room and you’ve got a story about how you’re her sister, but how am I supposed to know that’s so? You could be anybody. You could be working for Mrs. Barrone, for all I know.”

  “I don’t know anyone named Barrone,” Tricia said, though she realized as she said it that it wasn’t true: Nicolazzo’s sister had married a man named Barrone, had raised two daughters also named Barrone: the unfortunate Adelaide, victim of a malarial fever in North Africa, and her older sister...Renata? Tricia thought that’s what she’d read in the News. Something like Renata, anyway.

  “I’d show you my birth certificate if I had it,” Tricia said, “but I don’t. I don’t have anything on me other than what you see. All I can tell you is that the man who runs the Sun has Colleen locked up right now because he thinks she stole something from him and he wants it back. He let me out to come here and get it. If I don’t bring it back to him in the next hour or so, he’s going to hurt her real bad, maybe even kill her. You want her son to grow up without a mother?”

  “You’re really something,” Heaven said, “you know that? Even if I believed you I still couldn’t let you rummage around Colleen’s room, taking things, without her telling me it’s okay.”

  “She can’t tell you,” Tricia said, “she’s locked in a cellar somewhere in Queens.”

  “Where?”

  Tricia sighed. “I don’t know exactly. Somewhere just the other side of the river.”

  “Well, if you don’t know exactly, how’re you going to get whatever it is you want to get from Colleen’s room back to her?”

  It was one hell of a good question and it stopped Tricia in her tracks. Without Mitch, she had no way back.

  She opened her mouth to answer, not sure what she was going to say—but before she could get a word out, a pounding came at the front door, loud enough that they heard it two stories up. Tricia crept to the staircase, listened over the banister as the woman downstairs opened the door.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” came a man’s voice, “but have you seen a young woman come by tonight, about so tall, blonde hair—”

  Tricia stepped back from the staircase. Try to look at the bright side, she said to herself. At least now you have a way back.

  “Quick,” she whispered, and tugged Heaven with her toward Coral’s room. “You’ve got to let me in. That’s one of the men who’s holding Colleen.” And when she didn’t budge, “Heaven, he’s got a gun.” They heard heavy steps on the stairs, coming up. “A gun, Heaven. He’ll kill us both.”

  “No he won’t,” Heaven said. “You just keep calm.”

  Mitch’s head emerged above the top step, then his shoulders and his torso and, held at the level of his waist, his clenched gun hand. The barrel of his revolver was pointing directly at them.

  “You think you’re clever, don’t you,” he said to Tricia. Then, to Heaven, who was standing in front of her, “Out of the way, Scarface.”

  “You put that gun down, mister,” Heaven said, “and we can talk about this like civilized people.”

  Mitch raised his gun till it was aimed directly at her head. She didn’t flinch, just looked sad, dug her hands into the pockets of her robe. “I’m sorry, mister,” she said.

  “That’s all right,” Mitch said, “just go back in your room and forget you saw anything.”

  “No, I’m sorry for what I have to do,” Heaven said and, pulling a Luger from the pocket of her robe, shot him twice in the chest.

  18.

  Say It With Bullets

  Four or five things happened then, all at once, it seemed: A child’s voice rose behind the door of 3-F, wailing like a police car siren; doors swung open up and down the hall, then shut again when the people behind them saw Mitch tumble forward, his gun striking the floor and discharging, sending a bullet speeding at ankle level into the far wall; Heaven grabbed up Mitch’s gun and stowed it with her own in the pocket of her robe; and more footsteps began pounding up the stairs, two or three people’s worth.

  “Here,” Heaven said, and unlocked the door to 3-D. She shoved it open with the heel of one hand and stepped back. “Get him in there, close the door, stay inside. Don’t take anything. I’ve got to see to Artie.”

  Slightly dazed, Tricia lugged Mitch’s body into the room, left it lying beside a potted plant and a stack of old magazines. She had to bend his knees to get the door to close. It looked uncomfortable, but the man was past complaining.

  Staying in the room wasn’t much of an option. There was a trail of blood outside leading right to this door—she could hardly expect to hide here. But at least while she was here she could look for what she’d come to find.

  There was an icebox in one corner of the room and a small chest of drawers in another. She opened each of these in turn and found no leather box and no photos. A vaguely rectangular object in the icebox turned out to be the re-frozen remnants of a Swanson TV dinner. (There was no TV in the room, Tricia noted—but then 98 cents for the dinner was a lot easier to scrape together than the 98 dollars it would cost for a television set to eat it in front of.) The drawers held blouses and skirts and scanties with labels from Orbach’s; they held a necklace and earring set with plastic beads that didn’t look much like pearls but were clearly supposed to; they held a slim bible and a New York City telephone book. But no box, no photos.

  Tricia riffled quickly through the pages of the bible and the phone book and then, one by one, the magazines. There were footsteps outside and a babble of voices and some knocking on doors, Coral’s and others. She ignored it all. She got down on her hands and knees and peered under the bed—nothing. She pulled up the coverlet and the sheet under it, stripped the cases off the pillows, lifted the corners of the mattress. What else? What else? There was a tiny, shallow closet that took just a minute to search thoroughly. A night table with some makeup on it. A rug with no suspicious bulges showing. She lifted it anyway, let it drop. Damn it, where would Coral have left the box?

  There was one window in the room, shaded by venetian blinds and a curtain, and she pulled the latter and raised the former. Outside, a rusted fire escape led up and down. On the windowsill behind the curtain Tricia
spotted a metal key ring with a pair of keys on it, together with a plastic disk embossed with the name and address of a local garage: ROYAL AUTO STORAGE (TUNEUPS — REPAIRS — SUPPLIES — 24 HOURS). Which made no sense—what would a single woman living in Manhattan need with a car? And where would someone who couldn’t afford a TV set find the money to buy one?

  The knocking at the door was louder now, and the landlady’s voice called out, “The police has been called, young lady. You better open door.”

  What Tricia opened was the window. Pocketing the key ring, she climbed out onto the fire escape, taking a second to draw the curtain, lower the blinds behind her, and pull the window down as far as she could from the outside.

  A choice loomed. Up or down? The sound of a police siren coming around the corner decided it for her: Down would put her right in the path of their headlights.

  Tricia shot up the metal steps, one hand to her hip to keep the keys from jingling in the pocket of her dress. She thought about Heaven as she went, still trying to digest what had happened. Where had the gun come from? You heard about people bringing trophies back from the war, and a German gun, well, that could certainly have been someone’s trophy. But this one hadn’t just been polished up and left on a shelf, it had been loaded and ready. This was clearly a tool, not a conversation piece, and what’s more, Heaven must’ve had it close at hand, to be able to jam it in her pocket when a knock came out of the blue. What other secrets was she hiding? Hell—had she been working at the Sun the same afternoon Coral nabbed the box out of Nicolazzo’s safe? Somebody had taken the money—and Tricia could certainly see Heaven LaCroix lugging fifty or sixty pounds without breaking a sweat.

  But she’d seemed so decent—

  Yeah, said a little voice in Tricia’s head, she seemed decent until she shot a man dead in front of you.

  But that was self-defense—