Criminal Gold

by Ann Aptaker

  I tried not to cringe when he walked right up to me, put one of his eerily cool fingers under my sweaty chin, and lifted my face. Looking up at him was like staring into the inhuman face of the night-walking boogeyman who frightens little kids into pulling the bedcovers over their heads. He was Sig Loreale, master killer. I was in his gang-war headquarters.

  He spoke to me slowly, and the way he put space between his words gave them a threatening power. His voice was rough but whispery, like gravel grinding sand. “You are quite the little operator. Oh yeah…sure…I know all about your finders-keepers racket.”

  My stomach turned over. I’d been found out by a grown-up. The deadliest of all grown-ups!

  And then things got even worse. He said, “That is some nerve you got, scrounging on the beach while the people pack up to go home. Those are poor people. Immigrants, most of ’em, hardworking immigrants. Same as your momma and poppa. Same as mine.”

  He knew who my parents were. He knew what I was doing on the beach. He really was the boogeyman. He knew everything. He could come to our apartment. He could kill us all.

  I wanted to run away from that room, run home and warn my mom and pop, but Loreale kept his eyes on me, those droopy gray eyes whose hard stare was a warning not to move, just to listen. “How do you think your momma would feel if she knew what her American-born bundle of joy was up to, eh? What would your poppa think if he knew that you pick things up that fall from people’s pockets and bags? What would he say if he knew that you don’t give the items back, as he would want you to do, but that you stash everything in a strongbox you got buried under the boardwalk? Well, I will tell you what he would think. He would be ashamed of you, that’s what.”

  And then Loreale tilted his head back, his eyes crinkled, his lips widened into a smile. His mouth opened but no sound came out. He was laughing, a silent, gruesome laugh that almost scared the water outta me. It took every ounce of my pint-sized willpower not to pee in my pants, an effort that had nothing to do with my pride but with the raw terror that Mr. Loreale wouldn’t like it if I peed in my pants, and I’d wind up being the next victim whose eyes were nibbled by fish.

  He shook his head as he finished laughing, then said, “But…I got to hand it to you. You got a good head on your shoulders. I hear that you weed out your trinkets, take only the best to the secondhand peddlers down the Lower East Side. I’ve seen you lug your satchel of stuff up the stairs to the Stillwell Avenue train station. A regular little Santa Claus you looked like.” The way he smiled at me was almost fatherly, if my father was a murderer. My old pop couldn’t kill anybody, not for all the money in America.

  Loreale lifted my chin again. His fingers were still cool. He didn’t sound fatherly anymore. “Look, I don’t give a damn about your little beach racket. Go ahead, make a living. You’re entitled. Just get out from under the boardwalk. Find another spot to hide your trinkets.” He didn’t threaten me, didn’t say or else to scare me into obedience. He didn’t have to. His reputation and my imagination were scary enough.

  Even all those years ago, Loreale was spinning his web. He knew everything going on in Coney Island and who was doing it. But I wasn’t thinking about that then, about how he knew about my family and my finders-keepers operation. I was just grateful that Loreale nodded at the jamoke who’d brought me up to that hot room above the dance hall, the nod meaning the guy could take me right back out again. I was still alive. I could start sixth grade in September.

  Sig and his mob won the turf war, won it so clean the Law couldn’t connect him to any of the bloody, burned, and dismembered corpses that littered the back rooms of the clam bars and fun houses and, yeah, under the boardwalk. The war was Sig’s masterstroke. It gave him the means to fine-tune his murder operation, lay the foundation for a killing-for-hire business he eventually built into a shadow corporation more powerful in this town than City Hall. These days, his murder and rough-’em-up services are contracted by bosses and big shots, by bosses of crime and by big shots you didn’t know are in crime. Think about that the next time you’re enjoying a cuppa coffee while you read the gossip column or business news in your favorite morning paper.

  Rosie’s rolling along West Fortieth Street toward Fifth Avenue. I’m in the backseat, just another anonymous late-night fare in the darkened backseat of a cab, not worth a cop’s notice. We’re on our way to an office tower, a doozy built in the ’20s, the Jazz Age, when the town stayed drunk on bootleg whiskey and dressed for the party in high-style architecture. When the Depression crashed the party and sent everyone home without even enough for carfare, Loreale was able to buy the building for pennies on the dollar and set himself up in the penthouse.

  The place is a sleek black brick pile dolled up with Gothic-style gilt work on top. During the day, when sunlight hits all those gold pinnacles and arches, the penthouse shimmers like a luminous royal crown. By night, lit only by the lights of the city and the glow of the moon, the building’s dark mass disappears, leaving just the rooftop glowing in the sky, a brilliant golden crown for the king of killers who lives inside.

  Rosie’s craning her head for a look out the windshield, trying to see the top of Sig’s tower. She says, “You think Loreale’s gotten in yet? I can’t make out from down here if the lights are on in his place.”

  “It’s only about an hour’s drive down from Ossining,” I say. “Sig must’ve had one of his boys pick him up.” I check my watch; it’s one in the morning. “If Sig and his driver aren’t back yet, they should be here any minute.”

  “What about the doorman? How you gonna get by him at this time of night, looking the way you do? I mean, that’s a swell outfit you’re wearing, Cantor, but you’ll confuse the poor Joe, just like you confuse all the poor Joes. And you know as well as I do, better, even, that Joes don’t like to be confused. Makes ’em nasty, turns ’em dangerous.”

  “There’s no doorman after business hours, Rosie, maybe just a night watchman—”

  “Same difference.”

  “—who’s probably one of Loreale’s boys. Could be I’ve met him before. Anyway, Loreale must’ve passed the word that I’m expected. I doubt there’ll be a problem.”

  She makes a sharp pull to the curb in front of Sig’s building. The maneuver knocks me sideways on the backseat. It’s Rosie’s way of letting me know she’s not crazy about my take on the situation.

  “This won’t take long,” I say when she brings the cab to a stop and I’m able to sit up again. “I’m sure Loreale wants to grill me about what happened to Opal Shaw on the river, and since I have no idea what was going on with Opal before she crash landed on my boat, there isn’t much for him to grill me about. Believe me, I have no intention of lingering after I give him my story. I figure to be back in twenty minutes, maybe a half hour.” I start out of the cab.

  Rosie’s arm moves fast over the top of the front seat, her hand grabs the sleeve of my overcoat. “And if you’re not?”

  There’s something about a woman’s face at night, when the furtive light of street lamps uncovers thoughts she wants to keep secret, that makes me want to kiss her. Light from a curbside street lamp is uncovering Rosie’s secrets. They’re irresistible. I take her face between my hands, kiss her.

  I want to satisfy the desires of her mouth, especially when her tongue lightly traces the scar above my lip, but I don’t dare linger. I’m not sure which is more dangerous: being tardy when summoned by Sig Loreale or letting Rosie take too much of me. I take my lips from hers, whisper, “Since when have I ever kept a lady waiting?”

  Rosie loosens her grip on the sleeve of my coat. I get out of the cab.

  I wonder if the daily tenants who walk through that soaring glass-and-bronze entrance into Sig’s big black tower—ordinary business folk in three-piece suits and gray fedoras, their white-gloved secretaries and red-lipsticked steno girls whose high-heeled shoes click along the marble hallways—I wonder if they ever feel a stomach-churning dread of the quiet, well-groomed businessman
who owns the building and who makes his home in the penthouse. Or maybe the simple prudence of writing their rent checks on time, getting through the workweek, and otherwise minding their own business numbs them to the idea that a killer owns the air they breathe five days a week.

  On the other hand, people seem to like rubbing elbows with gangsters. So maybe Sig’s tenants get a kick out of their proximity to the underworld’s biggest big shot. Maybe tomorrow morning, if they pass Sig in the lobby on his way out to breakfast at Bickford’s cafeteria, when he’ll likely be dressed in the conservative businessman’s attire he favors, the women will smile nervous little smiles at him, the men will tip their hats to welcome him home. And that night, when they sit down to dinner with their families, they’ll tell them all about the Mr. Big Shot in the lobby and feel the thrill all over again.

  Sure, it’s easy for them. The nine-to-fivers only work in Sig’s building; they don’t live on his side of the Law. I do. I know the power of his reach too well to fool myself about the deadly reality of Sig Loreale. Right now, my stomach’s churning with plenty of sickening dread, just like it did on that hot afternoon in Coney Island when Sig’s thug dragged my terrified, squirming ten-year-old self into the boogeyman’s presence. My stomach turns over every time I’m face-to-face with Loreale.

  I press the brass button for the night bell. The button is cold from the chill in the air. Stings my fingertip.

  Then I wait, obedient, a vassal outside the glass door.

  A light finally goes on in the vestibule. A regular sort of old fella in a blue janitor’s uniform shows up, but he doesn’t unlock the door. I’ve never met this gray-haired geezer before. It’s pretty clear by his sneery annoyance that he’s pegged me as someone who’s not a tenant dropping by the office for a little late-night paperwork. He waves me away. I knock on the glass. All I get is the sight of him walking back into the lobby. I ring the night bell again, then pound on the glass, hard, make enough noise to reclaim his attention, and when he turns around I mouth the name “Loreale.” He stares at me for a second or two, he looks scared, the kind of scared that comes with aggravation you can’t escape. The guy turns back around to the lobby, shouts for someone, but I don’t catch the name. The sound is muffled by the thick glass door.

  But I hear Rosie shouting, “Cantor, what’s goin’ on there?” Before she finishes her question, I see another guy step into the light in the vestibule, a guy with pomaded red hair and a jaunty twinkle in his light blue eyes. He has the congenial manner and style of a successful used-car salesman tricked out in a dapper charcoal double-breasted suit, starched white shirt, and finished off with an up-to-date yellow tie with a black stripe down the center.

  Now I’m getting somewhere: I know the guy.

  I give a quick wave over my shoulder to Rosie, a signal that everything’s okay. Then I hear the cab’s ignition turn over, the engine idle smooth and steady. I bet Rosie’s keeping the doors unlocked, too, in case I have to jump in fast. My beautiful soldier isn’t at all convinced that everything’s hunky-dory. She’s wise to the ways of business done at night.

  I don’t waste my time anymore with women who aren’t wise to the night. They can’t take care of themselves, get swallowed up and disappear, leave me empty-handed and alone on the sidewalk.

  The guy in the vestibule is Leon “Pep” Green. I’ve seen him around town running errands for Sig, even while Loreale was upstate. Sig gave him the moniker Pep because of the joy and energy—the pep—he brings to his job, which isn’t salesman. He kills people. A silenced bullet to the head is Pep’s trademark method, though word’s gone around that he’s developed the taste and skill for the even stealthier quiet of a well-aimed ice pick.

  The cheery smile Pep gives me lets me know he recognizes me, too.

  He signals to the old fella to unlock the door. The guy pulls a ring of keys out of his pocket, unlocks the door, then scurries away, shrinking into his janitor’s uniform like a jittery crab pulling deep into his shell, wanting no part of the goings on between the merry murderer Green and a peculiar article like me.

  I open the glass door, step inside.

  “Hello, Cantor,” Green says. “Always nice to see you. Business been good?”

  “Your boss is expecting me.”

  “What’s the matter? Can’t you even give a civil greeting? I’m just trying to make a little friendly conversation.”

  “I wasn’t aware we’re friends.”

  “You’re not friends with Loreale, either, but somehow you got a personal invitation. C’mon, follow me. He wants me to send you up on his private elevator. I gotta frisk you first, though.”

  Pep’s a pleasant guy, as murderers go, but I don’t want his paws on me. I open my overcoat and suit jacket, take my gun out, and hand it to him. “Here, I’ll save you the trouble.”

  “I still have to pat you down, Cantor.”

  He’s smiling his best close-the-deal smile while his hands come at me. I push him away.

  “C’mon, Cantor, you know I gotta do this.”

  “And you know I won’t let you. You want to know what I got underneath? This is the best you’re gonna get.” I pull at the crease of my trousers, hike the cuffs up above my ankles. “See? No gun, no hidden shiv strapped under my socks.”

  Pep’s suddenly not too peppy at all. Like most guys, especially guys who are just henchmen for a more powerful guy, he doesn’t like being pushed aside by a dame, whether it’s by a dame in tight skirts or a dame like me. Particularly by a dame like me. Pep’s cheery smile is gone. His mouth tightens into a thin, straight line. The light blue of his eyes shines a dark silver. A savage face is bleeding through the friendly one, both of them convincing, both of them real.

  And then the friendly salesman seeps through again, smiling, his light blue eyes twinkling again.

  He gives me the creeps.

  He cocks his head for me to follow him across the lobby.

  The click of our shoes against the black tile floor echoes into the dark maw of the vaulted ceiling, three stories high. The main lighting is off for the night. There’s only a dim luster from the frosted-glass sconces along the lobby’s black marble and mirrored walls. But even the glow from all those lamps can’t make it up to the ceiling, can’t penetrate the darkness looming over my head.

  Pep inserts a key into a bronze plate on the wall beside Loreale’s private elevator. The doors slide open. I step inside, turn around, see Pep reach for the intercom phone next to the elevator, probably alerting any muscle upstairs that I’m on my way. He flashes me his best salesman’s grin as the doors close.

  I forget about the murderer downstairs, concentrate on the murderer upstairs, spend the time it takes to ascend to the top of the tower reminding myself that after each of my encounters with Sig Loreale I’ve walked away alive. Good odds. But as a gambler friend of mine is fond of telling me, the odds eventually turn. Always.

  Chapter Five

  I’ve never been invited up to Loreale’s place before tonight and never really wanted to be, either. I’m not keen on heavy socializing with death. Sure, I’ve met with Loreale since that hot August afternoon in Coney Island, especially since he started buying my goods in the autumn of ’45, around the time he met Opal, but it’s always been in impersonal places, at one of his front businesses for instance, like his garment factories, or one of his warehouses or trucking firms, where I’d hand Sig a work of art and one of his flunkies would hand me a valise stuffed with cash. The cash was the only pleasurable part of the deal. Being face-to-face with Sig Loreale might not be as scary as when I was a little kid, but not by much.

  The elevator finally opens on a green marble hallway that could be equally at home in a bank or a mausoleum. There’s a door at each end of the hall. Both are black and polished to a shine, but one doorway is a lot bigger and the door has an oversized chrome doorknob that’s faceted like a diamond. The other door has a plain ol’ doorknob for plain ol’ people, probably the kitchen help. I have no busin
ess with Sig’s kitchen help, so I head for the fancy doorknob.

  I don’t know what kind of setup is waiting for me on the other side of Sig’s door, and without my gun I might as well be wearing a sandwich sign that says Shoot Me. This burial chamber of a hallway does nothing to improve my sense of well-being, so after I press the door buzzer I pull my cap lower, close my overcoat, and try to get cozy. Soon my skin’s heating up and I feel ridiculous shrinking into the protective shell of my clothing as laughably as the old geezer downstairs.

  A young woman in a housemaid’s uniform opens the door, which surprises me. A thug would be more in line with Loreale’s choice of household help. Maybe the maid was one of Opal Shaw’s civilizing ideas, like Sig buying art and archeological treasure. Before he met Opal, Sig didn’t know the difference between a coloring book and Corot. He probably still doesn’t.

  The maid gets pushed out of the way by a brawny guy in a dark suit that’s in better taste and tailoring than his cauliflower mug would suggest. If the suit is also one of Miss Shaw’s remodeling flourishes, she didn’t entirely succeed. The guy’s still a thug.

  The maid scrams. The thug growls, “You must be Gold. The boss is outside on the terrace. Know where it is?” He jerks his thumb behind him, directing me through the living room.

  “I’ll find it.” An aroma of flowers floats toward me as I walk in.

  “Don’t keep him waitin’.”

  Wouldn’t dream of it.

  The living room is a jungle of flowers, big bouquets in gaudy arrangements all over the place. Quite a splashy welcome for the homecoming mobster. I get a laugh picturing Sig’s gang of vicious killers picking out posies in honor of their boss’s return. Maybe the thug at the door selected that spray of pink roses on the mantel. Frankly, he didn’t strike me as the pink type.

  Or maybe as news got around tonight about the death of Sig’s ladylove, his jittery crowd of indebted clients and terrified potential targets bought all these flowers, ponied up real fast to arrange costly late-night deliveries as a better-safe-than-sorry strategy to make sure Sig’s aware of their heartfelt respect and sincere condolences. No doubt they’ll send even showier flowers to Opal’s funeral.