by Ann Aptaker
“What kind of danger? Maybe I don’t mind a little danger,” she says, trying to cover a taste for nosiness with a brave front.
“This danger’s the bad kind,” I say. “The life and death kind. The Lorraine Quinn and Alice Lamarr are already dead kind.”
Her corn-fed cheeks go pale under the powder and rouge. “I’ll . . . I’ll be at my desk if you need me,” she says. “But do me a favor and don’t need me. And don’t take long anyway. It’s almost five o’clock, my quitting time.” She escapes to the safety of the reception area.
I open the file. A bunch of papers are on top: depositions, lawyer’s notes, notations of billable hours. Behind the papers are Lorraine’s photographs, each one stamped with a date and time.
Lorraine was good at her job. Stealthy and skilled. No invasive flash bulbs for her, no sudden bright light catching her prey but scaring them into stopping their miscreant activity. Lorraine was skilled enough to use the kind of film that can take pictures even in the low light of streetlights or the lights of motel parking lots at night. The film makes grainy pictures, but clear enough to identify who’s in them, clear enough to catch Tap Tenzi cheating on Alice Lamarr.
My first reaction is to laugh. There’s Tap, days and days of him acting like Don Juan, romancing a series of women, entering or leaving cheap motels in New York’s outer boroughs or across the river in Jersey.
The photographs would nail him in court. Alice would get the divorce. A judge, seeing the photos, would give her everything Tenzi’d socked away, including the socks he stashed it all in.
And then I stop laughing. I almost feel sorry for Tap, because all the women in the photographs bear a passing resemblance to Alice.
He told me at the jail that he loved her. I guess I have to believe him.
I take a closer look at the photos, look for whatever it is that Lorraine caught on camera that Sig doesn’t want seen. I don’t find anything. It’s just picture after picture of Tap and various women and his DeSoto and a motel. Lorraine was a thorough documentarian. Each picture is stamped with the day, the hour, even the minute.
But then I do see something, not something that’s there but something that isn’t. There’s time unaccounted for in a sequence taken on Wednesday, August eighteenth. At 9:32 p.m., there’s Tap and a woman getting out of Tap’s DeSoto in the parking lot of the Hi-Ho Motel in Astoria in Queens. At 9:33, they walk into the office, and at 9:37 they walk out again. At 9:39 they approach room 603. At 9:40 they enter. The sequence jumps to 10:12 p.m. with a handwritten note attached: Investigator Quinn exited her vehicle at 9:40 p.m. to take up a position outside the window of room 603 of the Hi-Ho Motel. Mr. Tenzi and the unidentified woman were heard laughing in room 603, followed by sounds of sexual activity. The note sets up uncomfortable images in my head of Lorraine crouching outside the motel window, a stalker with a predatory camera. But she’d set herself up to get the photo that would get Alice a profitable divorce. At 10:26 p.m., Lorraine got the prize-winning shot through a slit in the room’s window curtain of Tap and the woman naked, Tap’s torso wrapped in the woman’s legs. There’s another note: Mr. Tenzi and the woman remained in room 603 until 11:54 p.m. The next shot shows them walking out the door at that time.
It’s the next photo, stamped 12:01 a.m., that raises my hackles. It’s the back of Tap’s DeSoto. Seen through the rear window are the backs of two heads— Tap’s and the woman’s— as he eases the DeSoto into traffic on Northern Boulevard.
Lorraine’s surveillance, through photographs and handwritten notes, accounts for every minute on the night of August eighteenth. She stayed as tight on Tap’s ass as a lioness chasing its next meal. She’d never look away; she would not drop six minutes of activity of her prey. There’s six minutes in that motel parking lot unaccounted for. At least one photograph is missing.
I close the file, put it back into the drawer, and go out to the reception area. I ask Miss Sawicki, “Did Otis say where he can be reached?”
She’s not happy to see me and even less happy about the question. “I can’t tell you where he is because I don’t know where he is.”
“But he left you a phone number, yes? He’d need to stay in touch with you, find out if any clients called, what court dates are coming up. And you’d need to reach him in case of emergency, legal or otherwise.”
“Well, sure, but I’d lose my job if I—”
“C’mon, I just saved your life by keeping you out of trouble about those photos. Return the favor.”
Suggesting that someone’s life could be on the line always does the trick. Miss Sawicki’s hand shakes as she writes a phone number on a slip of paper and hands it to me.
I say, “You never saw me, you understand? If anyone besides Otis asks, if any cop or stranger asks, you never saw me. And you never saw those photographs.”
• • •
Outside my living room window, early evening drifts down on the city. Lights come on in the apartment house across the street. Streetlight filters up from the sidewalk. Neon signs tint the air with a rainbow of colors. It’s a perfect New York evening, the kind of evening that teases with the possibility that your big city dreams might come true or shatter like cheap jewelry on the pavement. Dream big, die trying. The thrill of living here.
I’m in a favorite club chair. The phone’s in my lap, the receiver against my ear, and a glass of Chivas at my side. The number Miss Sawicki gave me rings four times before the line’s picked up and I hear Otis say, “Yes?” He sounds as if he’s wondering if he should’ve answered at all.
“It’s Cantor,” I say.
“Cantor?” He says my name like he’s relieved it’s me and not someone who might kill him. “How did you get this number?”
“Your receptionist thought it was a good idea to save her life, maybe yours, too. Look, Otis, I won’t ask you where you are—”
“And I wouldn’t tell you. It’s best for both of us,” he says. “And I won’t be at this location much longer anyway.”
“Uh-huh, moving around for a while. Probably a good idea.”
“Yeah,” he says with the bleak conviction that getting killed might be the only other alternative. “So what’s on your mind, Cantor?”
“I had a look at Lorraine Quinn’s photographs of the Tenzi surveillance.”
“You what? How? That drawer is locked, and Miss Sawicki doesn’t have— oh. Never mind,” he says through an amused snicker. “I just remembered how you make your living.”
“Then you know I didn’t break the lock,” I say with a friendly little laugh. “But I needed to have a look at those pictures. I’d hoped they could help get Sig Loreale off my back. Yours too. Look, Lorraine’s surveillance was first rate, every minute accounted for. So it’s all wrong that there’s a gap in the August eighteenth photographs. Six minutes of activity is missing. Lorraine wouldn’t have been that sloppy. What happened to those six minutes, Otis?”
My question brings only silence. I wait a little bit, give the guy a chance to collect his thoughts or his courage. When he doesn’t come across, I say, “Otis?”
A few seconds of more silence, then, “There were two pictures,” he says as if all the air in his lungs has been squeezed out. “I burned them both. The negatives, too.”
“Okay, but you saw them. What was in them?”
“Listen, Cantor, when I saw those pictures, I knew they were explosive; they could get me killed if Loreale ever got wind of them, so I burned them. The other pictures already gave me enough on Tenzi for Alice’s case, so I didn’t need those two. I thought that was the end of it until you called and told me Alice Lamarr was dead. Now drop it, Cantor. Please. I don’t want to die, and neither do you. Just let it go.”
“I can’t,” I say. “What happened during those six minutes might be my only leverage when dealing with Sig. I want to know what was in those photographs, Otis”
“I won’t tell you, Cantor. With Alice dead and Tenzi in jail, the divorce case is moot. The surveillan
ce doesn’t matter anymore.”
“It matters to me.”
“Well, make it unmatter,” he snaps. “I don’t know what kind of game you want to play with Loreale, but if he knows you saw something he didn’t want seen, he’d want to know how you know about it.”
“I’d never rat on you, Otis.”
He gives that a sullen laugh. “I’m supposed to rely on your integrity, huh? You know as well as I do, better probably, that Loreale has ways of making even the mute talk. You’d talk, Cantor. You’d talk, and then you’d never be able to talk again.” He hangs up.
Barely a second after Otis slams the phone down in my ear there’s a buzz at my door.
I take the glass of Chivas with me. When I open the door, there’s a gun in my face.
Chapter Seventeen
The face behind the gun is cool and calm, the head beneath the small round green hat aristocratic, the eyes behind the netted hat veil steady. “It’s your fault,” Dierdre Atchley says.
“It usually is,” I say. “Why don’t you come in, and we can talk about whatever it is that’s my fault. And if you shoot me, at least the neighbors won’t have to deal with blood spattered all over the common hallway.”
She keeps her revolver aimed at my face as she walks inside. She doesn’t look around, doesn’t take in the furniture, doesn’t admire the art on the walls. The body inside the sealskin coat moves with the single-minded fortitude of a soldier.
I say, “Now suppose you tell me what’s my fault. May I take your coat?”
“I’ll keep it if you don’t mind. I wouldn’t trust you not to steal it.”
“Pelts are not my line. Didn’t your sources of information tell you that?” I take another pull on my scotch, keep my sights on Mrs. Atchley over the rim of the glass.
Her chiseled face of careful breeding quivers ever so slightly at her mouth and chin. She’s fighting hard to control it, and she’s got the spine to carry it off. “James has been arrested,” she says. Her usually mellow, moneyed voice has a hard edge to it. “Your Lieutenant Huber seems to think my son killed that upstart Garraway woman. He had the gall to go to James’s boat with two police officers and arrest my son like a common criminal.”
“Murderers are not common criminals,” I say. “They’re their own special breed.”
Mrs. Atchley is not amused. The look she gives me slices right down to the bone. She pushes her gun closer to my face. “Our family attorney was able to secure his release into my custody until trial,” she says. “But there were news people at the jail when he was released. His picture will be all over the papers and the television news. My family will be humiliated beyond repair, and we will have you to blame. You set that detective on us, Cantor Gold, and you will pay for it.”
“By killing me? I have no doubt you have the stuff it takes to pull that trigger, Mrs. Atchley. There’s nothing deadlier than an enraged momma. But you’d be better off using that gun to protect your son. And maybe spend some of the Atchley fortune to hire an army of bodyguards, too, because your son is in danger. As soon as those news stories hit the streets, maybe even sooner, your son is a dead man.”
The line deepening between her brows says it all. An unfamiliar sensation is insinuating itself into Mrs. Dierdre Atchley: fear. Fear of things foreign to her gilt-edged world of society balls and private clubs, fear that she can’t save her son from the deadly side of a New York she doesn’t live in and that even her money and social position can’t control. “Why is he a dead man?” she says.
Her gun hand trembles just a little bit, but it’s enough for me to move fast to knock her hand and grab the gun away. The shock on her face overtakes the fear, but not for long. The fear seeps back. Behind the net veil of her hat, her eyes tighten, and the furrow at her brow deepens. “Why is my son a dead man?” she says again.
“Because there are people who want the Garraway case to go away. Powerful people, and brutal people.”
She looks at me as if I’m speaking gibberish. “Who are such people?”
“You’d know that better than I would,” I say. “Some of them are people in your world, up where the air is thin and reputations fragile. The Garraway case has tentacles that stretch back through years of political deals, business deals, and family scandals covered up. Every family has dirty laundry, Mrs. Atchley, even fancy families: y’know, wrong love affairs, sleazy payoffs for even sleazier favors, maybe even a long-forgotten murder or two. The arrest and trial of your son could bring back those old scandals, ruin a lot of reputations and the careers of powerful people. And then there are those other people, the dangerous people. They’re powerful, too, but deadlier. The Garraway case stirs up that other side of New York, Mrs. Atchley. The side with guns, the shadowy side where people don’t like the Law looking into their business. People in that world can make James disappear, quietly, even while he’s in police custody, and with him goes the investigation of the death of Eve Garraway. Just another unsolved murder in the big city. You look like you could use a drink, Mrs. Atchley.”
I pour her two fingers of scotch, help her into one of my club chairs. She lifts her veil back over her hat, takes a good pull on the drink. The whiskey takes some of the gray out of her cheeks.
I refresh my own drink, sit down in the other club chair. “First of all, Mrs. Atchley, this is the first I’ve heard about your son’s arrest, and I’m not any happier about it than you are.” My Devil’s bargain with Huber turns out to be all Devil and no bargain.
Mrs. Atchley says, “Have you changed your mind then about James’s guilt?”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” I say, which evidently disappoints her, if the slump of her sealskin clad shoulders is anything to go by. “But Huber seems to be playing a fast game. Too fast. He doesn’t know all the players.”
“The dangerous ones,” Mrs. Atchley says.
“Yeah, the dangerous ones.”
“But you know them.” She takes another pull on her drink. I take another pull on mine. We watch each other over the rims of our glasses. The formidable Mrs. Dierdre Atchley appears to be challenging me to do something about those dangerous people and their threat to her family. I’m trying to figure if she can handle what I have in mind.
There’s only one way to find out, and the risk could kill us both. “Mrs. Atchley, if you want to save your son, it’s time you met the most dangerous guy in town.”
• • •
Mrs. Atchley’s tense and quiet in the passenger seat of my Buick. Her gun’s back in her handbag, an alligator number with a claw for a clasp. Between the alligator bag, the sealskin coat, and lambskin gloves, I’m tempted to think Mrs. Dierdre Atchley buys her clothes at a zoo.
My gun’s in my shoulder rig. Sig’s thugs will take it, and Mrs. Atchley’s, too. I’ve already told her not to try to hide it from them. The boys will not be impressed. They’ll search her in ways she’s not used to. And they’ve probably never heard of the name Atchley.
I don’t know what Mrs. Atchley’s feeling, if she’s scared or numb or maybe both. Her hat veil’s down, and in the darkness inside my car, with only the light of street lamps and neon signs sliding through the windows as I drive down Broadway, her face moves from shadow to light and back again. Impossible to read her mood.
I know what I’m feeling, though. I’m damned scared. Bringing Dierdre Atchley to see Sig is a high-stakes play, maybe a deadly one if it annoys the lord of all crime. But Mrs. Atchley needs to come face to face with the threat to her son, and Sig has to come face to face with a woman who’ll think he’s dirt.
I’m also angry. I’m angry at Huber for double-crossing our little arrangement. If he really has a case against James, our Devil’s bargain should’ve let me in on it. Instead, he’s left me twisting in the wind, and he doesn’t even know it. He doesn’t know Sig’s command that I bring Eve Garraway’s killer to him. He doesn’t know the penalties for failing Sig Loreale.
So yeah, I’m scared and I’m angry. But Dierdre Atchley w
on’t see any of that. And neither will Sig. What they’ll see is the Cantor Gold who’s had enough of both of them, and enough of Lieutenant Norm Huber, too.
• • •
The street entrance to Sig’s tower is closed for the night. The businessmen in their crisp fedoras, their secretaries in white gloves, and the stenographers with pencils behind their ears have all gone home. I ring the night bell. Mrs. Atchley’s at my side. I hear her sharp intake of breath when she sees one of Sig’s boys come to the door. I guess they don’t grow them so bulky on Park Avenue.
I recognize the guy. It’s Ham Face, the other member of the thug parade when I was here two nights ago. He says, “Mr. Loreale didn’t say nothin’ about expecting you, Gold.”
“He’s not expecting me, but he’ll see me when you call upstairs and tell him I’m here with Mrs. Brooks Atchley.”
He looks Mrs. Atchley up and down like he’s trying to figure why his boss would want to meet with this snooty matron in a sealskin coat. He can’t figure it, so he gives up, cocks his head for us to follow him to the elevator.
We walk through the lobby. Mrs. Atchley slides me a look that finally clues me in to her mood: annoyance, even disgust, but with a trace of curiosity. In her world, Ham Face is the kind of guy she’d have her butler phone up to fix the plumbing.
Ham Face calls up to the penthouse on the intercom next to Sig’s private elevator, announces us to whoever picks up the line. After an, “Uh-huh,” he says to me, “Gotta wait,” then puts the receiver under his chin. He gives Mrs. Atchley another look-over. She raises her hat veil and gives him a stare that changes his mind about looking her over. He puts his attention back on the intercom instead, his flushed face practically begging for someone to come back on the line.
Someone finally does. Ham Face says, “Yeah, okay,” hangs up, and says to me, “I gotta take your piece.”
I open my coat, reach into my suit jacket, take out my .38 and hand it to him. “I know the drill,” I say.
