Criminal Gold

by Ann Aptaker

  He follows me into the dining room. I feel his hatred clinging to my back like a sweaty palm, but the schmo and his stupidity are unimportant, so who cares? My brain is busy with Judson’s information. Yeah, there’s plenty of riverfront around the harbor, and lots of places where trains roll by. But Judson said the trains roll by slowly, and there’s only one place that I know of that’s along a river near slowly rolling trains and has a connection to Sig Loreale.

  So, my condolences to Mom and Sig. Maybe I’ll send flowers to Opal’s funeral, but it’s time to make my move.

  The drama in the dining room has had a bad change of script. Instead of the heartbreaking scene I walked out on a few minutes ago, there’s a tableau of menace: Ida Blick standing and sneering, a white-knuckled Esther Sheinbaum clutching at her robe in her lap, and an ashen-faced Celeste, whose voice has turned as thin and brittle as a dead leaf in the wind as she finishes her story. “Please, Mrs. Sheinbaum, please believe me! Opal was my best friend. She…” But her plea dies in the air, the fading cry of someone falling off a cliff.

  “Cantor,” Mom says, “this girl here killed my Opal. The woman at the funeral parlor, the washer, she was right. I knew it. I knew Opal didn’t die by falling off any bridge. She was killed, and this girl—this girl did it. See? There’s blood on her.” Mom’s pointing at the blood on Celeste’s hat.

  “No,” I say, “that’s Leon Green’s blood. Didn’t she tell you she stabbed Opal by accident? A crazy fluke of an accident that happened while she tried to save Opal’s life?” But my rant’s useless. As far as Esther Sheinbaum’s concerned, Celeste Copley is the Angel of Death and that’s that.

  “Sure,” Mom says, the word erupting in a dismissive snort. “She talked all about that accident business. And you believe her? Didn’t you learn anything I taught you, Cantor? Didn’t I tell you how to spot a liar? But I must’ve been talkin’ to a wall ’cause you’re still a sucker for a pretty face. Well, thank you for bringing her to me. You did a service for a grieving mother. I’ll call Sig now, let him know you solved his problem. He can send one of his boys over here to pick her up. Once he’s got her, you can see about having him release that girl of yours, though I don’t know how he’ll feel about you killing his man Green.”

  “What? I didn’t kill Pep Green. At least not—” You could spin my head around like a corkscrew and I wouldn’t feel as twisted and dizzy as I do right now, looking at Celeste. “Is that what you told her? That I shot Pep?”

  “Well, you did. You grabbed his gun after I slammed him.”

  “Funny, that’s not the way I remember it. I remember the three of us dancing around together and Pep’s forty-five trying to cut in.” Feeling sorry for Celeste is finished. I’d better break free of her lies if I know what’s good for me. “I should just leave you to Sig, let him have his revenge on you, break you in two. But I have plans for you, arrangements you have no say in, but I’m not asking your permission. I’m in this to save a life, Rosie Bliss’s life, and that’s exactly what I’m gonna do, Celeste. You’re coming with me.”

  Morris stands up, whining, “Esther, you gonna just let ’em walk away?”

  I don’t give the old lady the chance to think it over. I pull my gun, aim it first at Morris, who backs off. Then at Ida, who sits down. Then at Mom, who looks like she’s thinking that maybe she should’ve served me honey cake. “It was you, Mom,” I say with a smile so cold my teeth hurt, “it was you who taught me never to argue with a gun. This is a good time to practice what you preach. Celeste, get beside me. Make it quick.”

  Celeste doesn’t look at me as she stands up and moves next to me, her red gloves a blur in the lamplight, but there’s a tiny smirk of triumph at the corner of her still freshly lipsticked mouth. She’s won again. I’ve saved her life again.

  I keep my gun on the trio of geezers staring at us. “If any one of you follows us to the door, I’ll use this,” I say. “You might wind up crippled, you might wind up blind, or you might wind up dead.”

  Mom reaches out her hand to me and smiles, the kind of maternal smile she’s been giving me for years, the smile I used to believe was real. “You won’t kill us, Cantor. I know you better.”

  “Actually, no, you don’t.”

  With my gun raised in my right hand, I grab Celeste’s arm with my left hand and back us out of the dining room. When we’re in the hall, I hear Morris whine, “She was on the telephone, Esther, talkin’ about where that cabbie girl is stashed! I think she mighta figured it!”

  We’re out the door before I hear whatever Mom has to say about it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  There’s plenty I’d like to tell Celeste about her song and dance that I killed Pep Green. There’s plenty I could do to make her pay for her crummy trick. I could throw her to Loreale or dump her on the cops’ doorstep and laugh when they send her to fry in the chair, but none of it would matter. Nothing matters now except getting Rosie back.

  “Get in the car,” I growl at Celeste when I open the door.

  But Celeste doesn’t get in the car. She just stands at the curb, fierce and stubborn in the halo of a street lamp. “I’m not getting in that car until you tell me where we’re going,” she says. “I’m sick of being dragged all over the place like a piece of luggage.” Celeste folds her arms across her chest, my overcoat bunching at her shoulders like giant epaulets.

  “You’re in no position to give the orders,” I say. “And if you lie to me again or pull any more tricks like the doozy you tried to get away with in there, I’ll drop you in Loreale’s lap and let him cut you up like a tender steak. Now get in.”

  “No. Look, I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean to jam you up with that story about shooting Pep, but when you left the dining room I thought you’d skipped out on me, left me for dead. I was losing the old lady and those two hangers-on and I was scared to death that you’d dumped me, so I grabbed anything that could give me an edge.”

  “Yeah, so you could cut my throat with it.”

  “Listen, you told me Sig wouldn’t care about Pep’s death, so I didn’t think it would matter if I said you shot him. So what if we both had our hands on Pep’s gun when it went off? I was trying to make points with Opal’s mother, appear blameless in her eyes about Opal, about everything. Why can’t you believe me?”

  “Believe you?” I say through a laugh so stinging Celeste puts her hand to her cheek as if I’d slapped it. “I wouldn’t believe you if you told me my name is Cantor Gold. I’d have to check my driver’s license.”

  “Very funny.”

  “You think so? Okay, here’s another laugh. If Mrs. Sheinbaum tells Sig that you and I are in some sort of cahoots, he’ll think I’ve double-crossed him. We’ll be dead the minute Mrs. Sheinbaum hangs up the phone. Then he’ll kill Rosie because he won’t need her anymore. Just like that, bam-bam-bam—you, me, Rosie, dead. Are you laughing yet? No? Well, maybe you’ll get a kick out of this—remind me to go out of my way to save your life tonight, Celeste. Y’know, in case I forget.”

  “That’s not fair.” She uncrosses her arms and lets them fall to her sides, the bunched shoulders of my coat collapsing around her. The sleeves nearly cover her gloved hands, leaving just red fingertips sticking out. She looks as abandoned as an orphan in a hand-me-down sack and sounds just as miserable. “Please…I really thought I was on my own, Cantor. I thought you’d skipped. You say I’m a liar. Okay, maybe you’re right, maybe sometimes I am a liar. But I’m not a very brave one.”

  Yeah. There’s the catch. Just because she’s a liar doesn’t mean she’s not scared. She is scared, crazy scared, scared enough to do wacky things, say wacky things, like Pep’s death was murder, or Opal’s killing was an accident. Celeste puts truth and lies on a seesaw, and she’s stuck me in the middle to slide up and down. Sooner or later I’ll lose my balance and fall off, too dizzy to figure this woman out and find my way through her mystery.

  I can at least get rid of the haunting souvenir of our dance with deat
h: I take her bloodied hat off, toss it into the gutter.

  Celeste tries to grab the hat as it rolls into the sewer, but her gesture’s automatic, no real stretch to it. The hat’s just another loss, like her luggage, the mink, and the high life she once had with her handsome gunman.

  When she turns back to me, there’s no more splatter of Pep’s blood to advertise his killing. There’s no veil between me and Celeste’s beautiful face. Her eyes, those big brown naughty-puppy eyes, plead with me to believe in her innocence. Her eyes glisten. But phony diamonds glisten, too. Funny, it was Mom Sheinbaum who taught me how to spot liars and fake jewels.

  Celeste says, “Where are we going?”

  “I’ll tell you along the way. It’s too dangerous to hang around here now, so get in the car and let’s get out of here.”

  She doesn’t argue with me this time, just gets in the car.

  I come around and get into the driver’s seat. “It’s almost over,” I say, trying to calm her a little as I start the car, put it in gear.

  Celeste rests her face in her hands, tired to the bone. Can’t blame her. It’s been a rough night. If she catches a nap while I drive, that’s fine by me. I could use the peace and quiet while I figure a way to grab Rosie from her jailers.

  “Almost over?” comes back at me. Celeste’s suddenly wide awake, her exhaustion kicked aside by some new annoyance with me. She’s a lioness again. “You mean you know where Loreale’s stashed your girl?” My peace and quiet just got clawed.

  “I have a pretty good idea, yeah.”

  “Then why do you still need me? You think you can use me as bait? The hell you are! Now I am getting out of here!”

  I start to pull away from the curb before Celeste can open the door, but I’m cut off by flashy chrome and glaring headlights that come out of nowhere from the wrong direction along Second Avenue. A big dark Cadillac sedan screeches to a stop in front of me, blocking my Buick.

  Before I can give a piece of my mind to the Wrong-Way Corrigan whose driver’s license should be stuffed down his throat, a giant thug in a long overcoat and a fedora tears out of the Caddy’s backseat. He’s at my door fast, yanks it open.

  Celeste screams, but that doesn’t put a wrinkle in the thug, who’s only a little smaller than a Rocky Mountain. He grabs both of my arms and pulls me out of the car, nearly wrenching my arms from my shoulders. While I’m wasting time trying to get an arm free so I can grab my gun, out of the corner of my eye I see Celeste run out of the Buick. I have a glimmer of hope that she’ll kick the thug in the shins, do something to distract him so I can get out from his grip, but my stupid hope crumbles to dust when I see her run up the street.

  She doesn’t get far. Another Rocky Mountain is out of the Caddy, runs after Celeste, and grabs her.

  If this is a taste of what Loreale and his thugs have in store for us, the rest of our night will be painful—at least, what little of it Loreale lets us survive. Maybe I can convince Sig to be a gentleman about Celeste and kill her fast and clean, skip the torture.

  My Rocky Mountain drags me to the Caddy, throws me on the floor of the backseat. The overhead light is on. I look up and see a guy grinning like the Cheshire cat. It’s not Loreale. It’s Gregory Ortine.

  In his belted camel coat and horn-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses, Ortine sits with a society swell’s poise, something I’m sure he spent hours practicing in front of a mirror. Even the distinguished gray at his temples is probably a put-up job, maybe his blond hair, too. The only reliably real thing about Ortine is the coldness in his eyes, gray and hard as concrete blocks, magnified through his thick glasses.

  I’m about to give him a frosty hello when a screaming Celeste is tossed next to me on the floor of the Caddy. Ortine smacks her across the mouth with the back of his hand to shut her up. There’s nothing poised about Ortine’s smack or the grunt that accompanies it, just the brute vestiges of his real self, the one that grew up in the rough part of a rotten town in the middle of a crummy nowhere. The smack shuts Celeste up but leaves her with a bloody cut at the corner of her mouth.

  Guys who beat up women tick me off. And ever since that lousy night in the lockup, with cops smacking women left and right, seeing a woman get hit maddens me like a rabid dog. Ortine just let loose that dog. I make a move to ram my fist into him, ready to smash Ortine’s balls and pecker, rip out his guts, but the thug standing at the door slams his foot into my side, kicks me back down. My ribs are on fire.

  The blow sends me crashing against Celeste, jolting her. I groan through my aching ribs but manage to sit up, try to steady Celeste. She’s shaky, fragile as a teacup that’s been glued back together too many times. I wonder how much more of this brutal night she can take.

  I don’t have my handkerchief anymore, so I put my wrist against Celeste’s cut lip as carefully as I can, let the smooth silk of my suit jacket blot the blood away. I think she smiles a little, or maybe her mouth just trembles from the painful cut. I can’t tell.

  The thug reaches into the car, pulls me away from Celeste so he can frisk me. I force myself not to groan. I won’t give him the satisfaction of knowing that my ribs hurt like hell. When he finds my holstered gun under my suit jacket, he takes his paws off me and hands the gun over to Ortine.

  Lucky for me, Ortine hires for brawn and not brain. The stupid lug missed the envelope with his boss’s ten G’s in my jacket pocket. Celeste’s getaway cash. Maybe.

  Meantime, Ortine’s grabbed Celeste’s handbag. He rummages through it with phony delicacy. Finding no weapon, he tosses the handbag back into Celeste’s lap, then pockets my gun and nods to the thug to get beside him in the backseat. When the big galoot slides in and closes the door, the overhead light goes off, leaving the streetlight the only illumination through the privacy blinds on the rear window. The galoot and Ortine form a striped silhouette that looks silly, but I don’t laugh.

  The other thug is at the wheel. He drives us away.

  “Well, Cantor,” Ortine says too slowly, his diction as practiced as his posture, “where is my treasure?”

  “At the bottom of the East River. Didn’t you see my boat capsize and toss me in the drink?”

  “Yes, but I’d hoped you’d secured the brooch. Pity. I already had a display case for it installed in my apartment. You know, I had to special order the velvet lining. You can’t buy that sort of quality off the street. Well then, since I’ve nothing to show for it, I believe you owe me a refund. I want my ten-thousand-dollar deposit returned.”

  “Deposits are nonrefundable. You know that, Ortine. The cost of doing business.”

  “Your business, maybe. That ten thousand is my business and I want it back. I will not take no for an answer.”

  My ribs threaten to crack when I talk, but I do my best to keep myself chatty. It’s my only play to distract Ortine from the cash I don’t want to give him. “What brings you to this part of town, Gregory? You should be up to your ears in business at your fancy clip joints at this hour. You know, the ones the liquor board doesn’t know about. The private ones that go all night. The society crowd’s heavy drinkers usually walk in for their predawn nightcaps right about now. Aren’t they your favorite clientele?”

  “Don’t be naïve, Cantor. As soon as our transaction on the river met with disaster, I made it my business to find out what happened.”

  “I hope you didn’t work too hard, Gregory. All you had to do was turn on the radio.” Taunting the slimy snake feels good. Useless, but good.

  It stops feeling good, though, when Ortine takes his revenge and kicks me in the stomach. The vicious combination of bruised ribs and smashed guts doubles me over. I’m a dizzy lump of hurt. A grunt and a gag are all I can manage. They don’t come anywhere near expressing all the crappy things I feel, but they do the trick and allow air back into my lungs and take just enough edge off the pain so I can unfold and look up at Ortine. His glasses reflect the passing light of street lamps: bright, dark; bright, dark.

  Ortine keeps coming
at me with his irritating, high-hat tone. “Behave yourself, Cantor. I went to the Sheinbaum house because I was told you were there. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Who told you?” The question chills me. I never told Mom or Celeste about Ortine and our intended business on the river, and though Sig knows about it, he wouldn’t give five minutes to a clip-joint Johnny like Ortine. And I know Judson would never spill my whereabouts, so where’s the crack in the wall?

  “Never mind where I heard it. It came to me about a half hour ago. You know, word’s getting around that the unfortunate Miss Opal Shaw was not only Loreale’s fiancée but the secret daughter of Esther Sheinbaum. Let me tell you, Cantor,” he says with a gossipy laugh that’s as shrill as nails against a blackboard, “that little tidbit is going to keep the town chattering for weeks! It’s all I’ll hear at my supper clubs, and since people like to lubricate their gossip with liquor, I’ll make a fortune in bar tabs.”

  “Good for you,” I say.

  He ignores my bit of sarcasm and just goes right on yammering. “Now, I know you do business with old lady Sheinbaum, Cantor. You’ve been close to her since you were a kid, I understand. I figured you’d show up here sooner or later to offer your condolences, help her through the night, that sort of thing, so I sent a man to watch her house. When he arrived, your car was already here, so my man drove to a delicatessen nearby and called me. And here I am. Just in time, too, it appears.”

  His mock friendliness nauseates me more than his kick to my gut. But his story clears something up: the guy chasing me in the DeSoto wasn’t Ortine’s. He was Sig’s, checking my movements for his boss. I wonder how many other eyeballs Sig has out for me, and I wonder if the guy in the DeSoto told Sig that I shook him off. If he has, the guy’s probably dead. Sig doesn’t tolerate mistakes.

  Ortine says, “Well, are we going to come to terms?”