New York Nocturne

by Walter Satterthwait

  “You need to get out of here,” Mr. Liebowitz said. “All of you.”

  “What about you?” Miss Lizzie asked.

  “I’ll help Cutter clean up.” He turned to the third man. “This is Cutter.”

  An inch or two over six feet tall, he wore a pair of black slacks and a black shirt, opened at the collar, buttoned at the cuffs. A large semiautomatic pistol, like Robert’s, had been jammed under his black belt, to the left of the buckle. Now that he was closer, I could see his features: a lock of black hair falling in a curl over his forehead, deeply set eyes, a sharp nose, a strong jaw, and a precisely defined and almost feminine mouth.

  Dressed all in black with his eyes masked by a shadow, he seemed a part of the night himself, an elemental creature, an angel of death.

  In a matter of seconds, with no hesitation, he had smashed out the lives of four or five men. But, by so doing, he had probably saved ours.

  “Ma’am,” he said to Miss Lizzie in a sandy, whispery voice. He nodded once, almost a bow. In the circumstances, it seemed an extravagantly courtly gesture.

  “How do you do?” said Miss Lizzie. “Lizbeth Borden. This is—”

  Mr. Cutter had turned to me, his eyes still in shadow. I could see, within the darkness, just the faintest faraway glimmer of light, like that from a distant star.

  “No time,” said Mr. Liebowitz. “Robert, get them back to the hotel.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He turned to Miss Lizzie. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

  I glanced at Mr. Cutter. I still could not clearly see his eyes. He nodded toward me, once.

  “Well, Lizbeth,” said Mrs. Parker, “I’ll say this for you: you certainly know how to show a girl a good time.”

  We were back in Miss Lizzie’s suite at the Algonquin. Mrs. Parker was sitting opposite the sofa where Miss Lizzie and I sat, and she was holding her silver flask in her hand, resting it upright on the arm of her chair.

  “You were very brave,” Miss Lizzie told her.

  “Brave?” Mrs. Parker laughed, sounding somewhat frayed. “My sphincter was plucking buttons off the car seat.” She raised the flask to her lips and sipped from it.

  “You were very brave,” Miss Lizzie repeated. “Are you sure, dear, that I can’t get you a glass?”

  Mrs. Parker shook her head. “No time,” she said. “I need to replace all that classy Scotch I lost in the park.” She sipped again, took the flask’s cap, and screwed it on. “Anyway, I’ve gotta go. Poor Woodrow’s been alone for hours. The apartment will look like an explosion in a shit factory.” She stood up.

  “Will you be all right?” Miss Lizzie asked.

  “I’ll survive. But I may just sit tomorrow out, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course. I’ll speak with you in the morning.”

  “Assuming I’m capable of speech. Which is unlikely.” She offered a tired smile. “But the change will probably improve my social life. G’night, Amanda.”

  “Good night, Mrs. Parker.”

  “Dorothy,” she said automatically, and then she smiled at Miss Lizzie. “That’s a bitch, isn’t it? About Robert? About his being . . .” For the first time since I had met her, she appeared to be searching for a word.

  “Not entirely heterosexual?” offered Miss Lizzie.

  Mrs. Parker exhaled another frayed laugh. “Yeah. That.”

  “He was very careful not to state the gender of his friend.”

  Mrs. Parker frowned. “You noticed that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t I?”

  “Perhaps you didn’t wish to.”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Perhaps.” She sighed once again. “Okay. See you tomorrow.”

  After she left, I said to Miss Lizzie, “She’s not a very happy person, is she?”

  “No. Not very.”

  “Is there a Mr. Parker?”

  “I asked her once. She said she’d misplaced him somewhere.”

  I smiled. “She’s funny.”

  “Yes. But she’s lived a lonely life. Her mother died when she was quite young, and she hated her stepmother.”

  Both statements were true of me as well. And, I realized, they were also true of Miss Lizzie, whose relationship with her stepmother had been famously unhappy.

  “She’s very smart, though,” I said.

  “She is, indeed.”

  “She’s really not coming with us tomorrow?”

  “Not where we’ll be going, I’m afraid.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “We must leave, Amanda.”

  “Leave?”

  “Leave the hotel. Leave New York.”

  “Miss Lizzie—”

  “We’ve no choice.”

  “You’re still angry at me,” I said. “For not getting down on the floor of the car. Back in the park.”

  “I wasn’t angry,” she said. “I was frightened.”

  “I’m sorry. I—”

  “It doesn’t matter now, dear. It’s over. And in any event, that isn’t the reason we’re leaving.”

  “Then why?”

  “Amanda, it’s no longer a question of potential danger. Those men wanted to kill us. They followed us from Mrs. Norman’s apartment building with that purpose in mind.”

  “But how’d they know we were there? How could they know?”

  “I suspect that Mr. Fay or Mr. Madden sent them. Perhaps the two of them conspired. They are evil men, Amanda. Mr. Fay may seem comical, and Mr. Madden may seem suave and civilized, but the two of them are steeped in violence. It is their milieu. They couldn’t have survived within it unless they were prepared to use it themselves—immediately and ruthlessly—against anyone who threatened them. Either of them would blot us out in an instant, with no more compunction than someone swatting a horsefly.”

  “But why? Why would they want to?”

  “There is clearly something about your uncle, about his death, that they wish to keep hidden.”

  “But if we leave now,” I said, “we’ll never find out what it is.”

  “Perhaps not. But if ignorance is the alternative to death, then I have no difficulty in opting for ignorance.”

  I could not have explained back then why I was so determined to stay and finish the investigation.

  I felt that I owed something to John, yes. It was not right for someone to take his life so callously, so brutally, so senselessly and then be permitted to walk the world unpunished.

  But today I know that there was more to it than that.

  I was terrified during that battle in the park. My hands were clammy, and my heart was racing. But, along with the physical symptoms of fear, and perhaps because of them, there had been a kind of horrible fascination, a breathless excitement; there had been, God help me, almost an exultation.

  Some people revel in a life lived along the borderline. They seek out what others prudently avoid: the extremes, the ends and the beginnings of things, the heights and the depths. I did not know it then, but I was becoming such a person. It would take many more years for me to become that version of myself and for me to understand who and what it was I had become. By then, of course, I could not have been anyone else.

  But in Miss Lizzie’s living room that early morning, I was merely petulant and willful.

  “Miss Lizzie—” I said.

  “Amanda, I cannot in good conscience let you remain here.”

  “You’re not really my guardian, you know.”

  There was a sour twist of scorn in my voice. I heard it, and immediately I regretted it.

  Miss Lizzie had the grace to ignore it. “No,” she said. She peered at me, unblinking, through the lenses of her pince-nez. “But I like to think that I am your friend. And friendship, it seems to me, carries with it concern and responsibi
lity. I would be an inadequate friend if I did not take you to safety.”

  Once again a blatant and undeserved generosity did me in. I felt the familiar pressure gathering behind my eyes.

  “Okay,” I said. I swallowed. “We’ll go. We’ll leave in the morning.”

  “It may be that Mr. Liebowitz and Mr. Lipkind can learn something after we leave.”

  “Maybe, yes. But you’re right. We should get out of here.”

  I could not sleep.

  As I lay there, the events and the characters of the night kept replaying themselves, gaudy, inescapable, along the screen at the back of my mind. The thuggish Mr. Fay warning us off. The smooth Mr. Madden promising his help. The cheerful black man in the green suit, gallantly handing a paper cup to Miss Lizzie. The stately Mrs. Norman sitting poised and upright on the bed. The race through the park, the gunfire, the moonlit grass, the bodies hurled about, the pale enigmatic face of Mr. Cutter emerging from the murk . . .

  At last, I picked up the book I had set upon the nightstand. Miss Daphne Dale’s The Flesh Seekers. I opened it and began to read.

  In any other circumstances, I should have tossed the book aside or possibly hurled it out the window. It was dreadful.

  The narrator, Sophie Hill, admits at the outset that she comes from the upper levels of Alabama aristocracy. She also admits, fetchingly, to an inborn brilliance and a bubbly native congeniality. That she is beautiful we know from the countless courtly swains who seek her delicate hand. All of these she spurns, driven by a fierce desire to “make it” on her own. Within a few pages, she has hied herself off to the wicked social whirlwind of New York City, where she hopes to achieve great success as a novelist. Her father, the old colonel, is furious, but her mother, with the wisdom of mothers throughout the South, secretly sends her ribboned packets of cash.

  At a party in Greenwich Village, surrounded by hirsute Bolsheviks, both male and female, Miss Hill meets Jerry Brandon, “a scion of the city.” Mr. Brandon is tall, dark, and, of course, handsome; a stockbroker “with mysterious ties, rumor had it, to the powerful, clandestine people who, behind the scenes, manipulated the political and economic strings of Manhattan.”

  Miss Hill is, understandably, smitten. After only one more page she is in the library of Mr. Brandon’s luxurious apartment—in a building called the Nebraska—girding herself for her upcoming ravishment.

  I felt his hot breath upon my neck. With one simple, powerful movement, his strong, masculine hands ripped open the back of my dress. It fell to the floor, a puddle of mauve silk, and he stepped back. I stood there immobile as his burning eyes roamed over my white nakedness. “I must have you,” he declared. “I WILL have you.”

  An erotic shock jolted down my spine. “Take me,” I challenged.

  After a demure set of ellipses and then a shared cigarette on the carpet, the naked Mr. Brandon rolls over, gets up, and pads to the bookcase. He removes some books and pulls out a section of the case to reveal a large black safe. . . .

  “She lied about it,” I said. “She knew there was a safe in the library.”

  “I am not altogether astonished,” said Miss Lizzie. “Miss Dale was not exactly forthcoming. What was it that Mr. Brandon removed from the safe?”

  “An emerald necklace. A gift for Miss Dale. For Sophie Hill, I mean.”

  It was ten o’clock, and we were eating our breakfast in her living room. When she ordered it, Miss Lizzie had told the clerk at the front desk that we would be leaving this morning.

  “But why lie about the safe?” I asked her.

  “For the same reason, no doubt, that Mr. Fay and Mr. Madden lied: to distance herself from John and from his death. Is there any mention of Arnold Rothstein in the book?”

  “I flipped through the rest of it, but I couldn’t find anything. Just that line about the clandestine people and the strings.”

  She smiled. “And a lovely line it is.” She raised her cup and sipped her tea. “Well, we’ll let Mr. Liebowitz know about the safe. Perhaps he can pry something loose from Miss Dale.”

  “I suppose we can’t go down and see her,” I said. “On our way out of town, I mean.”

  She smiled again. “Amanda.”

  “Okay, okay. We’ll tell Mr. Liebowitz. I—”

  Someone knocked at the door. Miss Lizzie and I looked at each other. She had not yet called room service to request that the breakfast things be removed.

  “I’ll see,” I said. Wiping my mouth with my napkin, I stood.

  “Ask who it is first, dear,” she said.

  I nodded, and, at the door, I called out, “Who is it?”

  A raspy, whispery voice came back: “Cutter.”

  I turned to Miss Lizzie. She nodded. I opened the door.

  Mr. Cutter stood there. He was wearing clothes nearly identical to those he had worn in the park—another black shirt, another pair of black slacks. (Those clothes had been somewhat rumpled when last seen; these were not.) The lock of shiny black hair still curled loosely down over his pale, square forehead. But in the light of the hallway, without a pistol thrust into his belt, he no longer looked like an angel of death. He looked like a sleek, improbably handsome young man in his midtwenties. His eyes, I saw now, were blue, nearly as blue as the eyes of my uncle.

  But standing beside him was a taller, broader man who wore a gray suit and a gray fedora. It was Lieutenant Becker, the man who had taken me from John’s apartment on Saturday.

  Becker stepped past me, a few feet into the room. Mr. Cutter followed him. I simply stood there.

  Becker looked at Miss Lizzie. “I figured it was about time,” he said, “I had a little talk with the famous Lizzie Borden.”

  BOOK THREE

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Standing behind Becker, Mr. Cutter whispered to Miss Lizzie, “I saw him downstairs. I followed him up.”

  Mr. Cutter must have come to the Algonquin at the suggestion of Mr. Liebowitz. For how long had he stationed himself downstairs? For how long had he gone without sleep?

  “Thank you, Mr. Cutter,” said Miss Lizzie.

  “I’m a police officer,” Becker told Miss Lizzie. “No two-bit trigger is going to keep me out.”

  “Evidently not,” she said.

  Becker turned to Mr. Cutter. “You can beat it now.”

  Mr. Cutter produced his hard, cold smile. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “You want trouble, Cutter?”

  Another cold smile. “You got some?”

  When Mr. Liebowitz had bantered with the big guard outside Mr. Fay’s office, I had giggled, briefly but helplessly. I did not giggle now. The two men were standing only a few feet apart, glances locked, faces grim. Becker weighed perhaps forty pounds more than Mr. Cutter, but Mr. Cutter seemed unconcerned. It was obvious that neither man would back away from the other.

  “Excuse me,” said Miss Lizzie.

  They turned to her.

  “Let me remind you,” she announced to Lieutenant Becker, “that Mr. Cutter is a representative of my lawyer. As such, he has a legal right to be here. And I insist upon his exercising that right.”

  For a moment, Becker said nothing. Then he shrugged. “Fine. I’m Becker. Lieutenant Becker.”

  “I had gathered that, yes.”

  Becker walked into the suite and looked around. “Mind if I sit down?”

  “I do, actually.”

  He grinned and walked over to the sofa and sat anyway. I had not seen his grin before, and I did not like it. It was a bully’s grin, one that showed simple, pure delight at the exercise of power.

  Mr. Cutter had followed him in, and now he sat down in a chair opposite Becker, his back straight, his hands on the chair’s arm.

  I was still standing at the door. I shut it and walked back to the breakfast table, making a wide circuit around Becker, who sat leanin
g forward, watching me with the same lack of expression I remembered from Saturday. I returned to my chair.

  Becker tipped off his fedora, hooked it over his outstretched index finger, and spun it casually around the finger as he glanced about the room. “Nice,” he said and nodded. He turned to Miss Lizzie. “Never been in the Algonquin before.”

  “If you ask downstairs,” she said, limping slightly as she walked to the breakfast table, “perhaps they could arrange a room for you.” She lifted the teapot and turned to me. “More tea, Amanda?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She lifted the teapot and poured some into my cup. Her hand was rock steady; she did not spill a drop.

  “Mr. Cutter?” she said, holding up the pot.

  Without looking away from Becker, smiling, he whispered, “No, thanks.”

  Miss Lizzie set down the pot and then sat down.

  If Becker was disappointed by not being offered tea, he did not show it. He tossed his hat to the far end of the sofa, ran his hand through his dense blond hair, and then relaxed and swung up his right leg, hooking his ankle over his left knee. Smiling expansively, he spread his arms along the back of the sofa. “I guess you’re wondering why I’m here,” he said.

  “I expect you’ll be telling us,” said Miss Lizzie.

  “Here’s what I’m wondering,” he said. “I’m wondering how the local papers’ll like it when they hear that the famous Lizzie Borden is right here in the city. The famous ax murderer. Hanging out with a kid who’s suspected of killing her uncle. Killing him with a hatchet.” He grinned. “That’s the best part, the hatchet.”

  “Yes,” said Miss Lizzie. “I suppose you would think so.”

  “It only takes a telephone call,” said Becker. “One little telephone call.”

  “Do make sure,” she said, “that they get the name right. It’s Lizbeth, not Elizabeth. They often make that mistake.”

  He smiled his brief, bleak smile. “You think I’m kidding?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “You’re obviously quite serious.”

  “You got some idea of skipping town, you and the kid? Forget it. She’s a material witness. She goes anywhere, we’ll get her back. You ever heard of extradition?”