Another overhand. Another riffle.
“All right already,” said Mr. Rothstein.
Gently, she set the deck on the table. “Your cut.”
He cut the deck, reached back into his pocket, and took out the roll. I counted as he quickly stripped bills from it. Forty of them. Twenty thousand dollars. He returned the roll to his pocket, straightened out the bills, lifted them, and put them in the center of the table. “Against everything,” he said.
Miss Lizzie moved all her winnings to the center, beside the huddle of currency.
He folded his arms over his chest. Once again, she dealt out each card carefully, one exactly atop the other. She set down the deck, picked up her hand, and held it over for me to see. Nothing. The only decent card was the ace of spades.
Mr. Rothstein picked up his hand and looked at it. “Three,” he said and tossed in the cards.
She dealt them. One. Two. Three.
“And I shall take three, as well,” she said.
She discarded three, put down the hand, lifted the deck, and dealt herself the cards. One. Two. Three. She lifted the hand and looked over it at Mr. Rothstein. “What do you have?”
He blew out some more air, disgusted, then pitched the cards onto the table. “King high.”
“Ace high,” she said, showing him the hand.
“Shit,” he said. His face red, he swept up the paper bag of figs and hurled it across the room. It banged against a filing cabinet and bounced to the floor.
Miss Lizzie put her hand to her breast. “Mr. Rothstein!”
“What’s the fucking question?”
“Who actually killed John Burton?”
His eyes narrowed into slits, and he spat out the name—and the anger I felt when I heard it was blunted by a sad sense of inevitability.
“Shit,” he said to Miss Lizzie. “That moron Fay was right. Sending those schmucks after you last night. I reamed his ass for it, but goddamn it, he was right.”
Then, abruptly, he stopped. He took a deep shuddering breath. “That’s enough,” he said. I believe that he was talking to himself, ordering himself to stop. Slowly, stiffly, as though following instructions, he began to roll down his left cuff.
“Pardon me?” said Miss Lizzie.
He glared at her. “You really thought you could pull this off? You really thought I’d spill all this shit and let you walk away?”
“But we had an arrangement. You said—”
“You were a sap.” He leaned forward, his hands on the edge of the table. “There’s no way in the world you walk out of here.” His face was red again. “You’re dead meat.” He sat back, pointed to his cufflinks, and turned over his hand, palm upward. “Gimme,” he said.
“But I won them,” she said. “Fair and square.”
“Fuck,” he said. “Gimme.”
“No.”
He winced with scorn. “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” He turned toward the door. “Jack?” he called out. “Get in here!”
I looked at Miss Lizzie. She looked at me.
Mr. Rothstein called out, “Jack?”
The doorknob turned and the door swung open. Mr. Cutter stood there, dressed all in black again, his pistol held down at his side. He smiled. “Jack sends his regards,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-One
“Holy shit,” said Mrs. Parker. She inhaled on her cigarette. “You played poker with Arnold Rothstein?”
“Yes,” said Miss Lizzie.
Miss Lizzie and I had not taken the first train for Boston, which had left that morning at five o’clock. It was now ten o’clock, and everyone was gathered in a large conference room down the hall from Mr. Lipkind’s law office.
We sat in big, thickly padded chairs around a broad circular mahogany desk as flat and shiny as a roller rink. I was sitting in the chair nearest the door, with Miss Lizzie settled to my right. To her right sat Mrs. Parker, wearing a very smart summer dress of pale blue linen. Then came the rough and rugged Lieutenant Becker in a nicely cut gray suit. After an empty seat, almost directly across from me, came Albert, looking exactly like Albert in a three-piece suit that was just a shade too small for his big square body. Next, to Albert’s right, were Mr. Liebowitz, Mr. Lipkind, and handsome Robert (extremely dashing in a black three-piece suit). And finally Mr. Cutter, sitting to my left in his usual uniform of crisply ironed midnight black.
Mrs. Parker said, “And he told you what you wanted to know? He actually told you?”
“Yes,” said Miss Lizzie.
“But what happens now? What if he changes his mind?” She put her cigarette between her lips and inhaled deeply.
“And decides to kill me?”
“For example,” said Mrs. Parker, and exhaled a cone of smoke.
Miss Lizzie nodded. “Once I knew where Mr. Rothstein wished to meet with us—an office he owned on Pearl Street—I telephoned Mr. Liebowitz. He came here, to this building, and borrowed Mr. Lipkind’s wire recorder. Long before we arrived at the rendezvous, Mr. Liebowitz broke into the office. There is a rolltop desk there, and that is where Mr. Liebowitz concealed the wire recorder and the microphone.”
While Miss Lizzie and I were in that office, we had never once mentioned the recorder. Any of Mr. Rothstein’s people might have been lurking somewhere near.
Now she smiled across the circular table at Mr. Liebowitz. She said, “I confess that I was very pleased to see that machine.”
Smiling back, he canted his head briefly toward her. His bald scalp glinted. “I was very pleased to leave it there,” he told her.
Lieutenant Becker was stroking the sides of his jaw with his finger and thumb. He said, “You got everything on a wire?”
“Yes,” said Miss Lizzie. “Technology is a marvelous thing.”
“That’s police evidence,” said Becker.
“No,” she said. “It is my evidence.”
Becker frowned. “I can—”
“You can do nothing,” said Miss Lizzie, “for the reasons we discussed before, and for several others, which I shall soon explain. Besides, the wire is no longer in New York City. I have had it sent elsewhere.”
This was not true. The wire was in Mr. Lipkind’s office, in a safe, along with Mr. Rothstein’s gold cufflinks, which were the only things she had won last night that Miss Lizzie had insisted on keeping. Mr. Rothstein had worn them habitually; they were well-known, and she had decided it would be a good idea to have access to them.
Everything else, except for Miss Lizzie’s gold pocket watch but including all the money Mr. Rothstein had put on the table, she had told him he could keep.
For some reason, he still hadn’t seemed very satisfied with the way his poker game had turned out.
Now Mrs. Parker said, “But Rothstein could have sent someone up there, to that rendezvous of yours. He could’ve set up an ambush.” She used the ashtray in front of her to stub out her cigarette.
“He did,” said Miss Lizzie. “He sent a man named Diamond.” She turned to Mr. Lipkind. “What do they call him?”
“Legs,” he said.
“Of course, yes,” she said. “Legs.” She turned back to Mrs. Parker. “He’s evidently a very good dancer. In any event, it was he that Rothstein sent. But, you see, both Mr. Cutter and Robert”—she nodded to each of them—“were good enough to make an appearance of their own. And Mr. Cutter prevailed upon Mr. Diamond to change his mind.”
Mrs. Parker looked from Miss Lizzie to Mr. Cutter and then back to Miss Lizzie. “Prevailed upon. Gotcha. But, in the end, why would Rothstein tell you anything? He didn’t have to.”
“Have to, no. But, for one thing, he believed that Amanda and I would never walk out of that room alive. He could say whatever he wished, or so he thought. For another, he wanted a piece of information from me. He believed that sooner or later I would tell him wh
at he wished to know.”
“And what was that?”
“It is irrelevant now.”
Mrs. Parker looked at her for a moment and then said, “Son of a bitch. You’ve actually got Arnold Rothstein on a wire admitting that he ordered the killing of John Burton.”
He had also admitted to an involvement with both Owney Madden and Larry Fay, neither of whom would be pleased with Mr. Rothstein should the contents of the wire be made public.
“Yes,” said Miss Lizzie. “And he knows that if anything happens to me, or to Amanda, the wire will be released.”
“Why not just release it anyway? It’d serve Rothstein right.”
“I gave him my word.”
“He gave you his word,” said Mrs. Parker, “and his word wasn’t worth shit.”
“But mine is.”
What Miss Lizzie did not say was this: She didn’t believe that the New York police would act effectively against Rothstein, even if the wire were released. But she did believe—and, as it happened, she was correct—that she and I were both safe. Mr. Rothstein, she felt, would not risk his own life on the possibility that police corruption might save him. And, even had the police let him alone, there were still Owney Madden and Larry Fay for him to consider.
“And did he tell you who killed Amanda’s uncle?” asked Mrs. Parker.
“Yes,” she said. “Of course he did.”
Mrs. Parker frowned. “But won’t he warn the man? Won’t he tell him that you know who he is?”
Miss Lizzie shook her head. “Mr. Rothstein knows what would happen if he did that.”
“But who?” said Mrs. Parker. She looked around the table then back at Miss Lizzie. “Who was it?”
Slowly, Miss Lizzie turned from Mrs. Parker, sitting next to her on her right, to look at Albert, who sat two chairs farther down, just beyond the empty chair. She smiled at Albert—a brief, brittle smile—and said, “Why do you suppose, Mr. Cooper, that we invited you here?”
Albert had his hands folded together on the table. He was looking at Miss Lizzie, and his square, broad face was as empty as it had seemed back on the very first day I met him, weeks ago, when he arrived with my uncle at Grand Central Station. Now he smiled faintly at Miss Lizzie, and then he shrugged—shrugged exactly as he did back then, as though he had virtually no idea how he could properly answer her question.
“We do know,” said Miss Lizzie, “that you killed him, Mr. Cooper.”
Albert’s heavy eyebrows slightly furrowed with puzzlement.
“Under orders from Arnold Rothstein,” she said.
He looked from Miss Lizzie to Mr. Liebowitz, then to Mr. Lipkind, and then directly across the table at me, still apparently confused.
He said nothing—not to Miss Lizzie, not to me.
I wondered why he wasn’t speaking.
Miss Lizzie continued, “What we don’t know is when it was that you started working with Mr. Rothstein.”
Albert turned to her, his face blank again.
“Probably even before the war,” she said. “You were Rothstein’s creature. Likely you have always been Rothstein’s creature—his safeguard, keeping an eye on John for him.”
Mr. Lipkind, sitting two chairs away from Albert, spoke up now. “John probably never knew that you were reporting to Rothstein,” he said. “But he was careful. He kept all his private business hidden—the drug deals, the money. He hid all of it from everyone. Including you.”
Albert looked at him blankly.
And now Mr. Liebowitz, sitting to Albert’s immediate right, joined in. “But somehow you found out. Found out that he was stealing Rothstein’s money. And you told Rothstein. Rothstein didn’t like that.”
Albert produced a small frown just then as though realizing he was under attack from essentially everyone in the room, which is very much how we had rehearsed all this.
We had no proof of anything other than Rothstein’s word. The only way for us to get Albert to admit to the crime was to force him, or trick him, into the confession. All of us working together, pressuring him, effectively surrounding him.
So far, however, the results were less than spectacular. Albert remained silent. He steadfastly held his folded hands together on the table.
I think that he was deliberately refusing to speak because his silence gave him some level of control over what was happening. We could all gang up on him and we could all attack him, but if he refused to respond, our efforts seemed simply futile. And the longer his silence stretched, the more futile they seemed.
I remember thinking, too, that waiting through his silence made us desperate to hear anything that he was willing to say. I recall telling myself that when he spoke, if he did ever begin to speak, we needed to be very careful not to let him expand his control.
Miss Lizzie spoke, and again Albert lifted his eyes and stared across the table at her. “And you used a hatchet to kill him,” she told him, “because at some point, John had told you about Amanda’s history—about the hatchet used in a murder three years ago, in Massachusetts. John was in contact with Amanda’s parents, and at some point, presumably, they told him the whole story.”
Mr. Lipkind spoke up. “Maybe John found the story amusing,” he said, and Albert turned to him. “You, Mr. Cooper, found it merely convenient. Of all the people involved in this, you were the only one who could have known about Amanda, and about the hatchet.”
This was not true, of course. John might also have told Daphne Dale, or indeed anyone else. But Daphne Dale wasn’t here, and we weren’t trying to coerce anyone else into a confession.
Miss Lizzie’s face was grim. She said, “You deliberately arranged things such that Amanda would be blamed for the murder. That was, of course, utterly despicable.
“And then,” she said, “you made a pretense of helping us. You gave us Sybil Cartwright’s name, but only because you knew that sooner or later we would discover it on our own. We already knew about Daphne Dale, but you believed that Miss Dale was no danger to you or Rothstein; her relationship with John had ended some time ago.”
“Miss Cartwright,” said Mr. Lipkind, “was a more recent relationship. And maybe she knew what John was up to. And so, while Miss Borden and Amanda were busy with Miss Dale, you went to Miss Cartwright’s hotel, killed the desk clerk, and then you killed her.”
Mr. Liebowitz cleared his throat, leaned forward, and said, “Lieutenant Becker here went over to Queens this morning, to talk to your friend Mrs. Hannesty.”
Albert glanced at Lieutenant Becker, sitting slumped back in his chair, who grinned and cheerfully saluted him with two fingers.
Mr. Liebowitz said, “You may be interested in learning that Mrs. Hannesty has changed her testimony somewhat. According to what she told the lieutenant, it had slipped her mind that you weren’t actually her guest on the night that John Burton was killed.”
Albert looked at Becker, his face expressionless. If he knew anything about Becker, he knew that the lieutenant was perfectly capable of forcing other people to say whatever he wanted them to say. True or not.
For a moment, no one around the table spoke.
Then Mrs. Parker turned to Miss Lizzie and said, “What do we do now?”
That was the line Mrs. Parker had insisted on delivering. She said that it took full advantage of her “bright-eyed gamine” quality.
Miss Lizzie said, “That is up to Amanda.”
Without a word, Mr. Cutter, sitting beside me, reached his right hand behind his back and pulled out a Colt semiautomatic M1911 from beneath his belt. He eased back into the chair a bit, held the weapon in front of him, jerked the slide with his left hand, and let it snap forward. Then, silently, he handed it to me.
Around the table, everyone was absolutely still.
I took the pistol in both hands. It was very heavy. I rested the base of its grip on t
he wood surface before me, and I aimed its barrel down the table. At this distance, and despite my basic ballistic ignorance at the time, I didn’t need to sight along the top of the barrel to know that it was pointed directly at Albert.
We had rehearsed this several times, Mr. Cutter, Mr. Liebowitz, Miss Lizzie, and I. There had been only one bullet in the magazine before Mr. Cutter cocked the weapon. Now that bullet was nestled in the chamber. If Albert refused to talk, I was to fire it up into the ceiling, to demonstrate my seriousness. (We were, fortunately for this piece of theatre, on the top floor of the building.)
Lieutenant Becker said to me, “Hold on there, now.”
“Back off,” said Mr. Cutter in that whisper of his. Whisper or not, it shot across the table to Lieutenant Becker like a thrown knife.
Becker glared at him, glanced at me, glanced at Albert, and then sat back, frowning. He crossed his arms over his chest.
Albert was staring directly at the muzzle of the pistol. He looked up into my eyes.
“You killed my uncle,” I said. “Why, Albert?”
My uncle had been a cheat and a drug dealer. He had—despite what Miss Lizzie said—lied to me by pretending to be someone other than he was. But he had been kind to me, too, and he had been generous. He had been charming and thoughtful and funny. He had made me feel, for the first time in my life, like I was a grown-up.
Albert—a man he called his friend—had taken advantage of him, of their relationship. Albert had walked up to him late on a Friday night, as he had on many nights and days before, but this time, he had reached out and slammed him with a hatchet. And then he had hacked him with that horrible thing, brutally, again and again, smashing away his life.
He had done this knowing that I was asleep not fifty feet away, knowing that I would be accused of the crime.
This whole thing—the table, the witnesses, the dialogue—everything here might have been a fine display of stagecraft. But at that moment, at the very center of my heart, I knew with absolute conviction that if it would help me get to the truth, I would pull the trigger of that Colt, without any hesitation at all, and I would shoot Albert.
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