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 locked. ‘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—
Yeah, said the voice. Still.
Tricia reached the top of the fire escape and climbed the narrow metal ladder leading up from there to the roof of the building. She threw one leg over the edge of the cornice. Before she could follow it with the other she heard an amplified voice from the street below.
“You! Freeze!”
She hesitated a moment, half on the ladder, half on the roof, her dress up around her thighs. Glancing back and down, she saw a pair of policemen, hunched behind their open car doors, guns drawn and pointing up toward her. One had a bullhorn in his other hand.
“Come on down, lady, nice and easy, we don’t want to have to shoot you.”
Well, that was all well and good, since Tricia didn’t want to be shot. But she didn’t want to be arrested either, particularly now that the charges against her had presumably escalated from assaulting a police officer to manslaughter. She heaved her other leg up and over and an instant later heard bullets splintering the stone of the wall the ladder was anchored to.
Well, that was one way to send the message that they meant business.
Staying on her hands and knees, she crawled past a huge ventilation fan in a dented tin housing, crossing to the rear of the building. The wall separating this building from the next one over was barely a separation at all, just a few rows of bricks that Tricia went over like a champion high-jumper. She didn’t hear any more gunshots, at least, so she took a chance and rose from her knees, scampering across the next roof in a low crouch, a little like Groucho Marx if Groucho Marx had been running for his life across a tenement roof.
Another low wall, past it another roof—but now Tricia was running out of buildings and pretty soon would have to find some way down. The current roof was covered with tarpaper and stank from the tar, still tacky from a day in the sun. A little shed marked the top of the stairwell and Tricia wrenched the door open, listened for footsteps before starting to descend. She only heard her own until she reached the second floor landing, at which point her steps were joined by the sound of another pair, coming up. She darted out into the second floor corridor and started trying all the apartment doorknobs, one by one. The third one she tried turned, and she stepped inside as the service door to the stairwell sprang open, banging against the far wall.
She looked around desperately. This apartment did have a television set and it was on, showing the tail end of an Ellery Queen episode. All the lamps in the place were burning. Whoever lived here clearly had just stepped out for a minute, perhaps to pick up his laundry in the basement or a pack of cigarettes around the corner. Or maybe he was in the bathroom and would appear any moment—
The knock at the door was brisk and professional, not an assault on the wood the way Mitch’s had been at the rooming house. A peek out the peephole showed a policeman in full regalia—but not, she thought, one of the pair who’d been shooting at her. Tricia took a deep breath. How would Borden do it? she asked herself.
She opened the door.
19.
Witness to Myself
“Oh, officer, I’m so glad to see you, it was terrible,” Tricia said, reaching out to grip the
policeman’s hands tightly in her own. “This woman came by, just a minute ago, all wild-eyed and upset. She asked me to let her in, but I said no, I couldn’t, my husband’s not home and I couldn’t let a stranger in. Who is she? What has she done?”
The officer, whose nameplate said LENAHAN, drew his hands back and took the regulation notepad off his belt. He was a young man, maybe two, three years older than Tricia, and she could see in his eyes that he still had the impulse to comfort, to ease suffering. How many cops had that impulse, Tricia wondered. Most of them, probably, the year they joined the force; none of them, probably, a few years later.
“It’s okay, ma’am,” Lenahan said, “we’ve got half a dozen men from the Sixth on the scene and more on their way. She’s not going to escape.”
“Oh, good,” Tricia said. “That’s a relief.”
“Just stay inside and if anyone comes to your door other than a policeman, don’t open it, understand?”
Tricia nodded. She understood.
“Now, what can you tell us about this woman—how tall would you say she was?”
“Oh, taller than me,” Tricia said, “maybe your height.” The cop was nearly six feet.
“What color hair?”
“Brown,” Tricia said. “Light brown, like, um, hazelnut.”
“Hazelnut,” Lenahan said, and wrote it in his book. “Eyes?”
“I didn’t notice, I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay. How much would you say she weighed?”
“I don’t know. More than me. She was quite large in the—in the chest, if you know what I mean.” She dipped her eyes demurely.
“In the chest,” Lenahan said as he wrote.
“Oh, and officer, she had a limp, like maybe one leg was shorter than the other.”
“Or maybe one of our men winged her with one of his shots,” Lenahan speculated.
“Sure. Maybe,” Tricia said, and thought of Mitch. Could be, he’d have said. Could be.
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