Criminal Gold

by Ann Aptaker

  “Yeah, like water lapping around in a bowl. And that grinding noise. I can’t make it out. It’s just a grinding noise. Sounds like metal grinding. It comes and goes, loud and soft. That’s why I figured some sort of machine shop or maybe a factory.”

  “Any voices? Did you hear anyone talking?”

  “Uh-uh, just the water and that grinding metal noise. You make anything from it?”

  “I think Rosie opened the radio so we’d hear something if we tried to contact her, Judson, something to lead us to where they’ve got her. She’s counting on us trying to contact her.” My soldier. My smart, beautiful soldier. “Keep monitoring her radio, Judson. See if you can hear anyone talking, or hear any other noise that’ll give us a line on where they’ve stashed her. Stay on that radio, Judson.”

  “It’ll be on my ear all night, bet on it.”

  “And there’s something else. I need you to track down an address for a Celeste Copley, probably on the West Side. She was a friend of Opal Shaw’s, around the same age, so don’t waste time tracing old ladies and babies.”

  “I’ll get on it now.”

  “Good. Okay, what’s up? Why were you trying to reach me?”

  “I’ve got a line on Ortine.”

  “Yeah? How bad’s my trouble?”

  “Bad. I reached Red Drogan. He said Ortine is on the warpath, that Ortine was going to your apartment to get his dough back, even have his boys rough you up if he has to.”

  “Ortine wants to rough me up? Tell him to get in line behind the cops, Pep Green, Sig Loreale, and my ex-girlfriends.”

  “Get serious, Cantor. And watch yourself out there. Between Loreale and Ortine…”

  “Yeah, I know. Just get me Celeste Copley’s address fast. I’ll call you back.”

  *

  A quick hop on the Third Avenue El takes me down to the Brooklyn Bridge. The great bridge, the grande dame of the East River, looms out the window of the elevated train, her stone towers and steel cables shimmering in the moonlight.

  I’m all alone when I get off the train and go downstairs to the street. The area’s cleared out since I was here earlier. The cops are gone, the coroner’s wagon is gone, the reporters and photographers are all sniffing up someone else’s pants leg by now. Even traffic has thinned to a trickle. Only the docks are still lit up and noisy.

  The pedestrian walkway on the Brooklyn Bridge is a broad boardwalk straight up the middle. The walkway takes you above the roadways and the trolley tracks and the abandoned tracks for the old subway line.

  If I go up the walkway, I’ll have a breathtaking view of the city. The bridge’s towers will loom overhead in a thrilling show of gothic grace, but I won’t learn a damn thing about Opal Shaw’s death because a person can’t jump or fall or be thrown off the Brooklyn Bridge from the center walkway. They’d either land on the steel beams above the old subway tracks or bump over the edge to the trolley line. The only way anyone could fall from the Brooklyn Bridge and land in the river is from the automobile lanes at the sides of the bridge. And in order for Opal to land on my boat after I’d cleared the Manhattan tower, she had to drop from the ledge outside the traffic lane that comes into Manhattan from Brooklyn.

  I start walking up that roadway. The trickle of traffic is so thin by this hour that only one car has come over from Brooklyn since I arrived at the bridge. Another is just now approaching me. Its driver honks and gives me the business about walking in the traffic lane. Probably thinks I’m drunk.

  I have no idea what I’m looking for on the bridge, what trace of Opal Shaw I hope to find here, what I expect to learn. But it’s where Opal’s death and my life crossed paths, so it’s where I have to start.

  The roadway arcs upward, the river drops farther and farther below. The light of the full moon slides along the stone towers and through their cathedral-like arches. It shines along the steel cables. The bridge glows, lights my way. The wind moves through the filigree of cables like a bow across violin strings, making them vibrate, hum. I wonder if Opal heard the hum. I wonder if she heard the bridge’s melody as her requiem.

  A few feet beyond the Manhattan tower, I look down at the river. The lights of the city and the harbor sparkle all over the water, like diamonds on black silk, too beautiful to be disfigured by murder. I try to get a fix on the angle of Opal’s fall relative to the location of my boat. The crisscross of lattice-like steel slats along the edge of the roadway doesn’t leave much of an opening for a person to slip through, but it’s been enough over years since the bridge opened in 1883 for all the stunt jumpers who’ve dared death and lost in their bid for glory. There’s certainly enough space between the slats for someone as lithe and supple as Opal Shaw.

  So what the hell was she doing up here on the night of her wedding? I hope the Copley woman can give me the story, otherwise I’m on a road with no end, trying to figure a mystery that has no beginning. I don’t want to be stuck in that hell again, the hell I was in after Sophie disappeared. I can’t let Opal Shaw’s death cause Rosie to disappear, too, or I’ll go crazy again.

  The wind is turning colder, wetter, the mist hitting my face like a sharp spray of ice. Did Opal feel the wind’s bite? Was she still alive to feel the cold scrape of the slats along her skin as she slid through?

  That fat sergeant Feek had toyed with the idea that maybe Opal was a jumper, but I don’t buy it, not if the washer at the funeral parlor was right about a hole in Opal’s neck. Suicides don’t stab themselves before jumping off a bridge. And besides, Opal was going to be a bride any minute. Why would she kill herself? And why would someone who wants to commit suicide make the complicated effort to slip through the latticework on the Brooklyn Bridge? Why not just make the easier jump from the more accessible edges of the Manhattan Bridge a few blocks from here? Or from that uptown giant, the George Washington Bridge? Why not just blow your brains out?

  What the hell happened here?

  I look around, look along the roadway, searching for what, I don’t know. There’s over sixty years of secrets drifting around up here in the moonlight. Maybe some of those secrets are better left dead, but if I want to get Rosie back, one of those secrets can’t be Opal Shaw’s.

  Another car is coming over from Brooklyn, its headlights sparkling on the dew on the black roadway. A beam catches a small glimmer of red.

  The red draws me like a magnet, and as I kneel down to it, reach down to touch it, an hysterical voice from inside the car shouts, “Get the hell outta the way! Are ya nuts?” and I smash myself against the side of the bridge at the last minute before the big sedan can run over me.

  I’m breathing so hard I’m actually yelping. It takes me a minute to calm down, slow my breathing, finally peel away from the steel lattice. But without the car’s headlights, I can’t see the blotch of red, so I get down on my hands and knees to try and spot it by shafts of moonlight coming through the steel beams. My fingers find a sticky spot. I bring my fingers to my nose, get the unmistakable smell of blood.

  I pull the book of matches out from my inside jacket pocket, strike one up. The flame finds a line of small red drips. I follow the line to the edge of the roadbed.

  Dammit! The burning match singes my fingertips. I leap up like a burned puppy, light another match, and follow its small glow along a slat in the steel lattice where it catches a tiny smear of red along the edge. It’s got to be Opal’s blood.

  The washer at the funeral parlor was right: a hole in Opal’s neck, Mom called it. Opal Shaw was stabbed in the neck. The wound dripped blood along the roadway when she was pulled from a car. Maybe she was stabbed on the bridge, maybe even before that. But she was definitely cut before she went through the lattice and over the bridge.

  I look down at the river, try to get a fix on the path of Opal’s long fall. If she was still alive, even barely alive when she went over, maybe the horror finally killed her, stopped her heart, spared her the crunching pain of crashing onto my boat.

  There’s another glimmer of red bel
ow me, but this one’s sending a small shimmer outward from the side of the bridge. It’s a sparkling rag of red, a sight that breaks my heart: a scrap of sequined fabric from Opal’s dress, snagged on the bridge as she went over.

  I can’t leave it there, flapping miserably in the night wind, a ragged remnant of violence against a woman.

  I slip my arm through the lattice and down to the scrap caught in a steel joint below. It’s a tough stretch; my armpit feels like it’s being sawed in half by the edge of the steel crossbeam. But the wind, the cold wet wind that’s eating at the flesh on my hand, does me a favor and blows the scrap of fabric upward. My fingers grab it.

  Chapter Eight

  The lightbulb’s still busted in the phone booth at the corner of Cliff and Ferry Streets where I’d called Judson after my go-round with the cops on the pier. At least now, though, I have the satisfaction of having more than a dime in my pocket, my clothes aren’t soaking wet, and my fingers aren’t freezing while I dial.

  But I’m in a bigger hurry now. I step all over Judson’s hello when he answers, don’t even bother with a hello of my own, just get down to business. “Have you figured those noises on Rosie’s radio? Did you get a line on where she is?”

  “I’m working on it, Cantor,” he says like he’s answering an insult. “I promise, I’m working on it.”

  “I know you are, kid,” I say, letting my breath out. “Okay, how about the Copley woman. Any luck there?”

  “Yeah, I got her, and it wasn’t all that hard. A few phone calls below street level was all it took. It seems Miss Copley has a reputation.”

  “Yeah? What kind? Classy or sassy?”

  “She won’t make it into the society columns anytime soon, though she keeps trying. Looks like her latest relapse into hard times was about a month ago when she moved into a dump on the West Side.”

  “Any idea how she fell from grace?”

  “Nope. I stopped asking questions when I got the address, didn’t want to press my sources too hard, risk wearing out our welcome.”

  The address Judson gives me is on a crummy street in a down-at-the-heel neighborhood.

  Ordinarily, I’d wonder why the pampered Opal Shaw would run with someone currently at the shabby end of the social order, except that Opal’s apparent taste in friends fits nicely with her low taste in bridegrooms. It seems Mom Sheinbaum’s carefully tended boarding school rosebud blossomed into a wildflower who liked the company of weeds.

  I ask Judson, “Anything new on Ortine I should worry about?”

  “Nah, nothing new. But I’ll keep hunting and pecking.”

  *

  New York has plenty of tough neighborhoods with bleak and dirty streets you wouldn’t drive through, and if you did you wouldn’t dare get out of your car. But if the city held a contest to determine which neighborhood has been the toughest longest, Celeste Copley’s neighborhood, Hell’s Kitchen—from the West Thirties northward to the West Fifties, from Eighth Avenue to the Hudson River’s midtown docks—would take the crown. This raw-nerve chunk of town, home to slaughterhouses that make the air stink and sooty factories that make your eyes burn, has been grinding out gang wars and dead bodies for nearly a century. Old-time hard-as-nails gang bosses with beat-’em-over-the-head names like Mallet Murphy, One Lung Curran, and my favorite, Battle Annie Walsh, known as the Queen of Hell’s Kitchen—a brick thrower of uncanny aim, it was said—ruled the local trade in murder and mayhem.

  The Irish have held sway here since those early days when they were crammed into teetering wooden shacks. For the past fifty years or so they’ve been crammed into four- or five-story brick or brownstone tenements that sag like exhausted washerwomen.

  The neighborhood can boast moments of glamour, too. During Prohibition, so much whiskey sloshed through these streets you’d think the Hudson River burst its banks with straight alcohol. Low dives dotted every block, but fancier speakeasies lined the avenues, drawing customers from the nearby Theater District. Actors and Broadway swells in tuxedos, their women studded with diamonds, swilled illegal booze at tables shared with gangland tough guys. Those were Hell’s Kitchen’s glory days.

  The glamour’s gone now, but the Irish are still here, clinging to the rough jobs on the docks and in the slaughterhouses and factories while they look over their shoulders with suspicion at the city’s newest immigrants, the Puerto Ricans, who’ve been trickling into the tenements. The old-time Irish are determined to hold on to their turf. The Spanish, like all the other waves of immigrants who’ve washed over this city, are just as determined to own a piece of America. Fists have started swinging on the neighborhood’s streets, switchblades are flashing in the schoolyards. Bodies are piling up again in Hell’s Kitchen.

  Celeste Copley’s place is on Forty-Fourth Street off Ninth Avenue. The street’s dark and quiet, but four teenage toughs in a beat-up prewar Dodge coupe parked halfway up the block—Irish kids by the glimpse I get of ’em as I walk by—are drinking beers and cursing the Puerto Ricans. They keep it out of earshot of three young Spanish guys sitting and smoking on a stoop across the street from Celeste’s brownstone. Hard, suspicious stares from both camps crawl all over me like tightening snakes.

  According to Judson’s information, Celeste lives on the first floor of the run-down five-floor walkup. The building, like a lot of other tenement fleabags all over town, sports a bit of dilapidated dignity with its arched cornices above the entry door and windows. Funny thing about old New York, even our tenements were tricked out in architectural pizzazz, familiar old-world details for the old-world masses who crammed their lives and their American Dreams inside. For the lucky ones, the fancy bits of architecture were harbingers of dreams that would come true. For the losers in the game, it was their first taste of the American racket of false advertising.

  The tenants in Celeste’s brownstone whose windows face the street must be either asleep, hiding, or dead. There’s no light in any of the windows. Only a weak yellowish glimmer from the hallway seeps through the smeared glass pane in the front door. It’s too dark to see the tenants’ names on the buzzers next to the door, so I strike a match, run the flame down the list. Most of the buzzers have no names, or the names have worn off. There’s no Copley listed, but it doesn’t matter; Judson gave me the apartment number, 1-D. And I wouldn’t ring, anyway, can’t take a chance that Celeste won’t ring me in, or that she’d run out the building’s back door while I cool my heels at the front.

  Getting into the building won’t be a problem, my penknife should do the trick. The locks on the doors of these dumps are the cheap kind, as easy to slide as a shower curtain, but I have to make it fast. The Spanish kids across the street are still giving me the eye, smoking their cigarettes a little faster than they were a minute ago.

  The teenage thugs from the Dodge swagger by, too, pumped up and confident that they’re hip and dangerous in their cuffed dungarees and two-tone gang jackets, their cigarettes dangling from the sides of their mouths. I stand close to the door while I work the lock with the penknife, try to look like someone simply turning the key in the front door. But let’s face it, I’m not fooling these kids. I don’t look like anyone who lives in this neighborhood.

  The lock slides. I open the door but make a last sweep of the street. The Spanish guys are still looking me up and down while they also keep an eye on the Irish gang boys strutting past Celeste’s brownstone. One punk, a blond kid with a mashed-potato face, looks back at me, which starts a trend. One by one, the other boys look back at me, too, their suspicious expressions bleached pale in the light of street lamps. The Spanish toughs across the street abandon their stoop and go inside their tenement, deciding that whatever trouble the white kids might have in mind for me is no concern of theirs.

  I step inside and close the door.

  The hallway of Celeste’s brownstone has a sour smell, that hard-luck smell from the sweat of crummy lives. The odor clings to the faded striped wallpaper, rises from the threadbare carpet on the sta
irs. Even the drab yellow glow from the single overhead bulb seems to add to the stink.

  Apartment 1-D is at the end of the hall, at the back of the building. A slit of dim light slides under the door. I guess Miss Copley is finding it tough to sleep tonight. I’m about to make her night even tougher.

  I press the door buzzer, but before my finger’s even off the button the door swings open and a woman luscious enough to be a calendar pinup stands in the doorway. Her wavy brunette hair, still damp from a fresh washing, frames big brown eyes that have the look of a dirty-minded puppy. Every breath she takes draws my attention to the floral robe that clings to a body juicy as summer peaches. Her every inhale and exhale makes the flowers on her robe sway as if alive. I could be hypnotized by that sway if I wasn’t already under the spell of what’s going on inside those eyes.

  The woman isn’t really looking at who’s at her door, just blurts, “You were supposed to be here over an hour ago, not—what is it—a quarter to three in the morning! And how did you get into—?” But she suddenly sees that I’m not who she expected. Her eyes go hard while her mouth, so red and tempting it should be arrested on a morals charge, shuts tighter than a bank teller’s window at closing time.

  But beautiful women make me very friendly. “I’d have come sooner, Miss Copley,” I say, “if I’d known you were in such a hurry for company, though I get the feeling I’m not the company you’re in a hurry for. Pity, I can be such charming company.”

  “Who the hell are you?” She looks me over as if I’m a window display in an unfamiliar store.

  I push the door open, say, “I’m the company you’ve got,” and walk past her into the dingy living room. To be polite, I take my cap off.

  The living room furnishings are well past shabby and just this side of dead. The green sofa looks like one more sitting could kill it. At least, I think the sofa’s green. Hard to tell in the meager light of the only lamp in the room, a floor lamp with a painted shade of a corny landscape scene, the sort that sold by the dozen in cut-rate stores twenty years ago. The pictures on the wall of homey scenes and haloed saints look like the same vintage as the lamp. Somehow, none of it seems like it would be the taste of the gutter goddess who took my breath away at the door.