Criminal Gold

by Ann Aptaker

  I can never let him find her.

  If I’m going to keep Sig from picking up Celeste’s scent, I have to turn his nose in another direction. I have to get something on Pep Green, something that stinks so much it’ll clog Sig’s nostrils.

  But first I have to calm Celeste down. “Soon, Celeste, I’ll get you away soon. Trust me. I told you, I keep my promises. In the meantime, we have to tie up Pep nice and tight, take away his ability to hurt you, and take away Loreale’s reason to kill you. So I have to know about Pep’s scam. Why did he want to scrap Sig’s wedding? Did he think Sig was going soft?”

  “Uh-uh, that wasn’t it,” she says, sniffling but calm enough to talk. “He didn’t want Loreale to marry Opal because of the deal with Opal’s mother, with Esther Sheinbaum.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  “An expensive one, believe me. Opal said she’d marry Loreale on the condition that he cut Mrs. Sheinbaum in for a percentage, and not a little one, either. A yearly percentage for her mother’s old age, Opal said. As if the old bat didn’t already have millions. But Opal was afraid that the Law could finally catch up to her mother. She was afraid the old lady was losing her edge, still doing business the old-fashioned way, that she wasn’t sharp to the new tricks the Law’s learned, like maybe the tax man would find a loophole and take Mrs. Sheinbaum’s millions away.”

  The idea of Esther Sheinbaum losing her edge, slipping up, has a wrong ring to it. I doubt Esther Sheinbaum ever had a weak or clumsy thought in her life.

  Something else is wrong, too. Why would Pep give a damn about Sig’s financial arrangements with his future mother-in-law? Unless… “Celeste, did Pep say where Mrs. Sheinbaum’s cut was coming from? From Sig’s personal cash, or from the operation?”

  “Yeah, from the operation. Right off the top. Before Pep and the other boys got their cut. Pep was not tickled pink with that, let me tell you, but Loreale told him that he had plans for the outfit to increase business anyway. But that wasn’t good enough for Pep.”

  I get a chill thinking of how many dead bodies it might take for Pep to be happy with the size of his profit.

  “The other boys went along with it,” Celeste says. “You know how it is, if you work for Loreale you go along with what he wants or you wind up dead.”

  Or people you care about wind up dead, people like Rosie.

  Celeste says, “But Pep—always the smart guy. He was having none of that. As far as he was concerned, Opal was picking his pocket. Oh God, Cantor, please. I’m too scared to keep going like this. I don’t care how safe you say this place is. I want to get away from here. Now.”

  “Just a little bit more, Celeste. You’ve got to give me a little bit more.”

  “How much more? Can’t you see I’m worn out?”

  “You’re the only lead I’ve got. Look, it won’t be much longer.”

  “But I can’t…” Then she drops whatever argument she was ready to make and puts me under her microscope again instead, looks at me like she’s examining every eyelash, every pore of skin, every scar on my face, searching for I don’t know what, but she seems to find it. The sadness in her eyes fades, replaced by a glint of satisfaction as she leans toward me, strokes the scar on my cheek, then the knifelike scar above my lip with the tip of her finger. She says, “This is a dangerous game you’re asking me to play, Cantor. If I go along with it, if I help you deliver Pep to Loreale, you’ll need to do more than just get me away. I’ll need some dough to start that new life. Can you get it for me? Say—”

  “Ten thousand?” I say it with a smile. Why not? This gorgeous creature is not only stroking my mouth with a touch that makes the rest of me shiver, she strokes my outlaw soul. “You’ll have to work for it,” I say. “You can start by telling me where you ditched Opal’s car. We have to make sure it can’t be traced to you.”

  She takes her fingers from my lips, to my disappointment, then leans back on the couch and gives me a sly little grin that says we understand each other. “It’s in an empty lot in the Bronx. I took the license plates off and took the registration out of the glove compartment. Tossed it all down a sewer in case the cops find the car.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “I wiped it down, inside and out. Then I went home and waited for the so-called guy who was supposed to show up with my so-called dough. What a dope I’ve been to believe a liar like Pep. And if that’s not humiliating enough, let me tell you, riding the D train from the middle of nowhere in a never heard of rump end of the Bronx is no picnic.”

  “Drink up,” I say and get up from the couch. “We’ve got traveling to do.”

  “To the Bronx? Oh no, I don’t think I could bear looking at Opal’s car. Please, no.”

  “We’re going to Brooklyn, to the place you took Opal.”

  “That’s just as bad! No, please, I don’t want to go there.”

  “I need to look it over, see if there’s any scrap of evidence connecting Pep to Opal’s death, maybe figure how and where and if he killed her.”

  She’s up from the couch, fast. “Of course he killed her!”

  “I need evidence, Celeste. Sig won’t buy it otherwise.”

  “What if there isn’t any evidence, no trace of what happened there? You know how good Pep is at killing. He isn’t sloppy. Listen to me”—she’s standing in front of me, close, daring me to make her back off—“we have to come up with something even if it’s not there. The only way we can get Pep is to frame him.”

  “That’s a dirty game.”

  “Are you telling me you’re a stranger to dirty games? If that’s what you’re saying, you’re a liar.”

  If our faces were any closer we’d be inside each other’s mouths. I’d love to taste hers, suck the lipstick right off those full pouty lips. “You’re goddamn gorgeous when you’re angry,” I say. “You’re goddamn gorgeous all the time. I’ll have a fine time keeping my eyes on you tonight, and I’ll miss you when you’re safe and sound in the sunshine. May I help you on with your coat?”

  “Don’t let me stop you.”

  “You couldn’t.” I take the mink from the couch. It’s my first chance for a good look at it. It’s a stunner, all right, perfectly matched pelts all around. The sugar daddies may walk out on Celeste, but before they do they sure pay up for the pleasure of her company.

  I help her on with the coat, take her arm, and walk out with her into the outer office. “Um, wait here,” I say. “I won’t be long. Judson, entertain the lady for a minute. Sorry, folks, nature calls.”

  Celeste’s not crazy about killing time with Judson, and he’s not happy about babysitting Celeste, but they’re not about to argue with me over a trip to the can.

  I go back into my office, close the door behind me, but I don’t go to the can; I open the wall safe behind my desk. I move the photo of me and Sophie aside to get to the strongbox, take out Ortine’s ten thousand, put it into an envelope, and put the envelope into my inside jacket pocket.

  What the hell. Celeste is going to earn it tonight but good, and I wasn’t planning on giving it back to Ortine anyway.

  *

  Celeste and I arrive back at Louie’s garage and go in through the alley door. Inside, she walks toward Judson’s Chevy. I take her arm and lead her to my Buick. When I open the passenger door, Celeste catches her breath at the sight of the custom interior’s dark brown leather seats and burled-maple steering wheel and dash.

  Celeste gives me a slow appreciative smile with plenty of calculation behind it, figuring the possibility that if she plays me right she may yet have it all.

  I help her into the car, thinking, You can’t have it all, baby. I don’t give it all to anyone anymore. But you sure could’ve had a lot of it.

  Chapter Eleven

  Brownsville may not be as boisterous as the Lower East Side, or as tough as Hell’s Kitchen where just about everyone’s a brawler, but you couldn’t have picked a better spot for a kid like Leon “Pep” Green to get a first-rate education in mu
rder. Since the wild days of the bootleggers’ shootouts during Prohibition, through the tommy-gun years of the Depression, and into the years just before the war, a bunch of Brownsville gents were engaged in activities that still give everyone nightmares. Maybe you’ve heard of those gents, contract killers known as Murder, Incorporated; at least, that’s the moniker that stuck, a flashy name dreamed up by the newspapers. But among the killers themselves, and to everyone in the underworld, they were known as The Combination. Just hearing the word combination, even in casual chitchat, still makes a lot of people wish they had eyes in back of their heads.

  Pep must’ve been a young tough on Brownsville’s streets when Combination big shots Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro, Frank “Dasher” Abbandando, and their cadre of murderers killed everyone marked for death by the higher-ups in the New York rackets. If Charlie Lucky or Meyer Lansky whispered your name into the ear of boss Lepke Buchalter, you didn’t stand a chance. Lepke would make a phone call to the back room of a Livonia Avenue candy store, pass your name along to the boys, and they’d hunt you down. The boys loved their work, turned it into a frolic of bloodletting that scattered burned, swollen, or chopped-up remains in vacant lots as far away as the swamps of South Jersey.

  No doubt Sig Loreale studied the Combination’s methods, and then—as is Sig’s methodical way—he improved upon them. The end result? Dasher Abbandando got the chair in Sing Sing’s death house. Lepke fried in the same chair. Gurrah died of a heart attack in Sing Sing, serving fifteen to life. Reles turned state’s evidence and sang like a canary in a deal to avoid the death house, then fell out of a Coney Island hotel window while his police protectors weren’t looking. But Sig Loreale sits pretty in a golden penthouse.

  Guess whose ear Lansky whispers names into now?

  Celeste’s wrapped snug in her mink as we drive along Pitkin Avenue, Brownsville’s main thoroughfare of mom-and-pop shops that sell everything from salami to scissors. A movie palace dolled up in red Moorish tile is down the block. Seems no matter how rough the neighborhood, there’s always a movie palace, a place to go to escape the dull reality of your rotten life and get lost in the make-believe of someone else’s more interesting rotten life. The movie palace and the shops are shut up tight for the night, except for a saloon where a drunk in a ratty gray coat and a crumpled fedora stumbles out as we drive by. The drunk makes Celeste fidgety. “Relax,” I say. “You’re just spooked from your rough night.”

  But the drunk makes me a little queasy, too. For all I know, Sig’s planted a drunk in all of New York’s five boroughs to eyeball me. Or maybe Gregory Ortine’s trying something fancy to get a line on me. I’ve always thought Ortine too simple a thinker to organize anything as cute as planting eyeballs around town, but I suppose a botched $35,000 smuggling deal can wise up even a simpleton.

  Celeste directs me to an alley behind a row of shops. “Park here,” she says when we’re behind a poultry butcher’s place.

  The shop has a pull-up type basement door set into the ground. “Some spot for a bridal party,” I say as we get out of the car. “I wouldn’t figure Opal to go along with a gag like this. Isn’t the joint a bit low class for her taste?”

  Celeste waves that away. “Didn’t I tell you she liked cheap thrills? Anyway, a slick article like you oughta know that some of the most interesting parties in town are in basements.”

  True. I’ve fox-trotted with some very classy women at clandestine basement soirees, especially since the war ended and the ladies have been telling their now home-front husbands they’ll be out at a card party playing canasta. In basements across the city, dames in gowns dance with dykes in suits, hidden from the hissing eyes of a vindictive world and the bare-knuckled fists of husbands and the Law. “How long before Opal figured out there wasn’t any party in this particular basement?”

  Celeste doesn’t look at me when she answers, just pulls the mink around her, shivering as if feeling a chill. “She had it figured as soon as we started downstairs.”

  “Yeah, and I bet you walked behind Opal, blocked her escape back up the stairs. You’re a real pal, Celeste.”

  She starts to say something, but the disgust on my face tells her not to bother.

  I pull the basement door open.

  The wooden steps creak like bones cracking as we walk downstairs. I find the light switch at the bottom of the stairway. When I flip it on, an ugly yellow glare lands on butchering tools and general hardware stacked around the room: empty egg crates, gizzard shears, boning knives, shovels, buckets, hammers and saws, their jagged shadows rising on the dirty brick walls like hell’s skyline. The basement smells like hell, too, the stench of chlorine and old chicken feet clogging my nose and throat. The whole setup reeks with the rotten stink of killing.

  Bloody chicken feathers are on the dirt floor. Spots of dried blood, some the size of nickels and dimes, are visible on the butcher block. I don’t know if it’s chicken blood, Opal’s blood, or even human blood, but the sight of it gives me a prickly feeling, hints that murder’s been done down here, and not just of chickens, and not just tonight.

  Celeste’s standing behind me. I take her arm and pull her next to me, show her the blood. “Were those bloodstains on the butcher block when you and Opal arrived?”

  She shrugs, says, “I don’t know. I wasn’t looking at the butcher block.”

  “What about Pep? What was he doing when you and Opal got here? Did you see a weapon? A knife or maybe an ice pick? Word’s out that Pep’s expanding his skills to include quietly killing by ice pick. Maybe he practiced on Opal’s neck.”

  “No. I didn’t see anything like that. Pep grabbed her, then he hollered at me to scram, which is exactly what I want to do right now. So hurry up and look for whatever it is you’re looking for, please? This place is giving me the heebie-jeebies.” If she taps her foot any faster I’ll have to buy her a pair of tap-dance shoes.

  “Patience, dearie,” I say. “I have to find something that’ll tell me whether Opal took a stab here in the basement or someplace else.”

  “Maybe there’s nothing here,” she insists. “Or maybe Pep killed her on the bridge, before he tossed her over.”

  “Maybe.” I run my fingers along the surface of the butcher block. The blood spots are soaked into the wood, dry now, too dry to have been spilled tonight. If Opal was killed here, I’ll have to find some other remnant of it. “What kind of coat was Opal wearing over her dress? If she tried to fight Pep off, maybe the coat was torn in the struggle and I’ll find a scrap, something Loreale will recognize. What color was the coat?”

  “Black, as I recall. Black wool.”

  Wool doesn’t usually make me itch, but the way Celeste describes Opal’s coat, like she’s trying hard to picture it, I’m starting to itch as bad as if the black wool is scratching the back of my neck.

  Celeste closes the mink more tightly around her. I don’t like the way she’s doing that, either, as if she’s afraid that if she lets go, the coat will run away.

  “Celeste, lying to me is a very bad idea. Remember who I’m working for tonight, and that he wants me to find out what happened to Opal no matter what it takes. You got that? No matter what it takes, no matter what I have to do or who I have to do it to. Now, you can talk to me, or I can take you to Loreale and you can talk face-to-face to the most dangerous guy in town. Do you want the most dangerous guy in town to see you in that mink?”

  She answers with the nervous smile of someone caught naked in the wrong bedroom.

  “You’re a ghoul, Celeste. A gorgeous ghoul. That’s Opal’s mink, am I right? Probably a gift from Loreale. No wonder you’re in such a hurry to leave town.”

  Her forced smile hardens into a leer, her body goes rigid, a trapped animal caught hiding in a dead animal’s skin.

  “Aw, c’mon, honey,” I say. “Haven’t you figured it yet, that I don’t want to see your pretty face cut up or your delicious body chopped to bits? Play it right with me and I can make s
ure that doesn’t happen. Keep lying and I’ll throw you to Loreale, though it’ll break my heart, and we have better things to do than break my heart.”

  There’s a slight twitch of her nostrils, the cornered animal sensing a shift in the wind. Carefully, she says, “Do we, Cantor?”

  “You know we do, but if I have to use a chisel to dig information out of you, there might not be enough of you left for me to play with. So do us both a favor and tell me how and when you got your hands on Opal’s mink. Was it before or after her death?”

  It’s probably been a long time since Celeste reminded anyone of a sweet and innocent little girl, but right now, with her chin tilted up, she could almost pass, except for the spiderweb shadow across her eyes from her hat veil. She says, “Does it matter when I got it? The coat wasn’t going to be of any use to Opal anymore. It may as well do me some good. I still have to lead life somehow, and this coat could bring me a nice few bucks.” By the time she’s finished there’s no more little girl. The lioness is back, claws out.

  “You’ll need the cash for a good lawyer to get you off from an accessory-to-murder rap,” I say, moving close to her. “That is, if you’re still alive to face trial. Loreale will kill you for vengeance, and you know Pep is already planning to shut you up. So here’s how it works.” I crowd her against the butcher block, lift that net veil from her face. There’s nothing between us now but the mink, its hairs swaying under my breath, writhing like damned souls. “Promising you safety wasn’t enough for you,” I say. “You just kept stringing me along, and then you even held me up for cash. But I told you you’d have to work for your getaway money, so okay, start earning it. You give me the truth or I don’t come up with the cash.”