New York Nocturne

by Walter Satterthwait

  I think that Albert, looking into my eyes, saw this.

  He stared down for a moment at his folded hands then looked back up at me.

  “Okay,” he said. He nodded a few times. “Okay. I get it. You love the guy. This I totally get, miss. This I totally understand. He is a guy that people just naturally love. Everybody. Men and women. Kids. With this guy, you could not help yourself.”

  No one at the table moved. No one spoke. Everyone was leaning slightly forward now, listening to Albert.

  Albert didn’t look around the table. He continued to look at me and cleared his throat. “He is very smart. But you know that, right?” He smiled quickly. “And you know he is smooth, like silk from China. And he is brave, miss. You never see that part of it, but he is totally, one hundred percent brave in every situation. Brave like an archangel. And in a really sour situation, when things are going bad on you right and left, this is a guy who can save your bacon. Always. In France once—and this is a totally true story, miss—he saves my actual life.”

  He moved his body slightly toward me and lowered his head a notch as though he were about to confide a secret. He said, “He is the Golden Boy, see. The Golden Boy. That’s what he is from the very beginning. The Golden Boy, miss.”

  He cleared his throat again. “That’s why I am there. Like she says.” He nodded toward Miss Lizzie. “To keep an eye on him. To make sure he is okay. And I did. I saw to it. I did my job. I took care of him.”

  He paused and looked down at his folded hands then back up at me. “But see, the thing is, miss, he is a guy who is missing something. Missing a part, you know? A piece of the equipment. It’s the part that tells you, ‘No.’ It’s the part that says, ‘No, you cannot do that.’ It says, ‘No, right here is where you got to draw a line. Right here is where you got to quit.’” Albert shook his head sadly. “He doesn’t have that part, miss. He never had that part.”

  He took a deep breath, puffed up his cheeks, and blew out the air slowly from his pursed mouth as he let himself slowly fall back against his chair, his hands sliding along the table and stopping atop the wooden chair’s arms.

  He looked defeated. Deflated. As though he had been tossed there by the tide.

  Glancing over at me, almost wearily, he said, “A few months ago, I hear there is a problem. A chunk of money is missing.” He sighed. “A very big chunk of money is missing. It is suggested to me, see, that I find out where it is disappearing into.”

  He glanced at Mr. Liebowitz then looked back at me. “They come to me, see. I don’t go to them.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  For a moment or two, he looked straight ahead, not at me, but beside me, past me, into some hidden piece of private history.

  He sighed again, and then he swung his eyes back toward me. “I find out, okay? No big surprise. He is smart, and he has been around the block a few times, but I been around that block, too, miss. I know how people hide money. And so I find it. I know where it is. But I inform no one, see. No one. Instead I go to a guy I know, and I say to him, ‘Look, there’s a guy at the Dakota. I want you to go to him and tell him this. I want you to tell him that Mr. Rothstein knows about the money. You tell him he’s got to make things right, or Mr. Rothstein will make them right himself, the way Mr. Rothstein makes things right.’”

  As I said, the Colt that I was holding was heavy. Now its barrel swayed a bit to the right and then to the left. I took a deep breath, tightened my grip, raised the barrel, and brought the weapon back to bear on Albert.

  Albert ignored the gun. He said, “You know what he does then, miss?”

  “No,” I said. “What did he do?”

  “He laughs. Can you imagine this? He laughs when the guy tells him. You get it? This is what I mean about missing a part. Who could laugh in that situation?”

  Albert lowered his head. I waited. When he raised it again, he said, “Okay. There’s a phone call I get. Last week this is. I am informed that two people are proceeding to the apartment, to deal with the money problem. I say, ‘No. No two people. I will deal with this problem myself,’ I say. They ask me am I sure? ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I am sure.’ See, miss, I owe him that. It should not be other people. It should be me.”

  He looked at me carefully, as though studying me. “It is okay, miss. He never knows what is happening. I hit him from behind, just a tap, and he is out like a light. No pain, no trouble. He does not suffer, miss. I promise you this. Using the hatchet, that is only to make the cops confused for a while. I know I will fix things for you later, see. For sure I will. And, listen, before I forget, there was something that he wanted you to have.”

  He reached slowly into the front of his coat, the left-hand side.

  An interesting thing happened at this point. Despite my earlier warning to myself, I had been lulled by Albert’s voice and by the story he was telling. When he reached into his coat, I was genuinely curious about whatever it was that he might be bringing out. And I think that by this point, most of the people sitting around the table felt the same way.

  But another part of my mind, one over which I had little or no real control, noticed instantly, as Albert’s hand began to emerge from the jacket, that what Albert held in his hand was the brown wooden grip of a revolver. Without thinking about it at all, without debating it, that part of my mind immediately made me pull the trigger of the big Colt pistol.

  At the same time, it seemed, Mr. Liebowitz was leaping up out of his chair, next to Albert, firing a small automatic down at the man, firing again and again and again.

  Albert’s hand flopped down, empty, from his suit coat as his body jerked and twitched and bounced, and then he lay slumped in the chair, his mouth awry, his head lolled to the side. His eyes stared up at the ceiling.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” said Lieutenant Becker and pushed himself away from the table.

  The room stank of gunpowder.

  I was still staring at Albert. I looked around the table. Mrs. Parker, her face pale, was staring at him, too. Without looking away, she opened her purse and fumbled inside it. Mr. Lipkind was staring at me then frowned and looked down. Miss Lizzie leaned toward me and put her hand on my arm.

  Mr. Cutter was somehow standing behind me. Gently, he took the gun from my hand, shoved it behind his back, walked around me, bent over Albert’s body, and examined it. He turned to me. “You missed,” he whispered. He turned to Mr. Liebowitz. “You didn’t.” Curtly, he gestured with his hand: gimme. “The pistol,” he said.

  Mr. Liebowitz put his pistol on the polished mahogany table and slid it across. Beside him, Mrs. Parker had the lip of the upraised silver flask in her mouth.

  Mr. Cutter snapped up the weapon. He asked Mr. Liebowitz, “Traceable?”

  “No.”

  Mr. Cutter walked around my back, past Miss Lizzie and Mrs. Parker, and held out the automatic to Lieutenant Becker. “Yours.”

  “Fuck you,” said Becker.

  “You just solved the Burton case,” said Mr. Cutter. “A clean kill.”

  Mr. Liebowitz said, “I’ll back you, Becker. I was here. I saw it.”

  Becker looked back and forth between the two of them. He said to Mr. Cutter, “Gun’s not mine.”

  “You found it,” said Mr. Liebowitz.

  “Where?”

  “In the safe at Burton’s apartment.”

  “What safe?”

  “In the library,” said Mr. Liebowitz. We went there this morning, you and I. We found it. I opened it for you. You asked Albert to come down here, to Morrie’s office, to answer some questions. He confessed then tried to pull out a gun. You pulled out that one, and you killed him.”

  “Thin,” said Becker.

  “Thick enough,” said Liebowitz. “You’ll get a commendation.”

  Mr. Cutter said, “And your friend Rothstein will owe you.”

  Becke
r leaned forward and took the pistol from Mr. Cutter’s hand then sat back and hefted the weapon in his right hand. He looked at Liebowitz. “How come I used this instead of my own pistol?” He jerked his thumb toward the left armpit of his rumpled suit coat.

  “You had it in your coat pocket,” said Liebowitz. “You didn’t trust Cooper. As soon as he started talking, you slipped your hand, casual-like, into your pocket.”

  For a moment, Becker looked down at the gun again. Then he nodded. “That I can sell.”

  Mr. Cutter tugged a handkerchief from his rear pocket and handed it to Becker. “Wipe it. Don’t forget the clip.”

  Mr. Liebowitz searched around near his chair and found the five spent cartridges he had fired. Using his own handkerchief, he wiped them clean and then tossed them back on the floor.

  Mr. Lipkind stood up, his round face grim. “Okay,” he said and looked around the table. “Okay. This never happened. Miss Borden, Mrs. Parker, Amanda—none of you were here. You got that? Miss Borden?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Parker?”

  “Jesus, yes. I’ve got it.”

  “Amanda?”

  I was staring again at Albert. There was not much blood. His black vest seemed simply stained as though he had spilled coffee on it. He looked like someone merely feigning death, playing some morbid trick. In a moment, he would blink his eyes and sit up and smile at everyone.

  “Amanda?” said Mr. Lipkind.

  I turned to him. “Yes,” I said. “I understand.”

  “Promise me,” he said.

  “I promise.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Mr. Cutter drove Mrs. Parker, Miss Lizzie, and me to Grand Central in the Packard. Along the way, we stopped at the Algonquin to pick up Woodrow, Mrs. Parker’s dog. Mrs. Parker sat up front, the Boston terrier panting happily on her lap. Miss Lizzie and I sat in the rear.

  None of us spoke much. But as we drove down Forty-Second Street from Fifth, Mrs. Parker turned to Mr. Cutter and said, “Do you have a first name, Mr. Cutter?”

  “James,” he said.

  “James, that was very brave. Going to Mr. Rothstein’s office that way.”

  “Robert came along.”

  “Yes, well, Robert was very brave, too, of course. But going up against a professional criminal, even with Robert there—it was still very brave, I think.”

  He turned to her and I could see his handsome face in profile. His shiny black forelock trembled. “It’s my job, Mrs. Parker.”

  “Dorothy,” she said.

  He smiled. “Dorothy.” And then he turned back to watch the traffic. I thought I heard Mrs. Parker sigh before she turned to look out her window. Over her shoulder, I could see the dog. He was staring straight ahead.

  We had said our goodbyes in Mr. Lipkind’s office. The farewell was a bit hurried; Lieutenant Becker was still in the conference room, waiting for the signal from Mr. Liebowitz to telephone headquarters.

  “Look, Amanda,” said Mr. Lipkind. “You just go back to Boston, and you forget all about this.”

  “I don’t think I can,” I told him. “Forget about it, I mean.”

  “You will,” he said. “Sooner or later.” He was wrong, of course.

  “And don’t you worry about your uncle’s lawyer,” he told me. “I’ll be seeing that shyster tomorrow. I’ll give you a jingle, let you know what happens.”

  “I don’t want anything from John.”

  “Let’s see what happens first. In the meantime, you have a safe trip back.” He held out his hand.

  I took it, and we shook.

  I turned to Mr. Liebowitz and his round shiny head, and I held out my hand. “You were great,” I said. “Thank you.”

  He took my hand between both of his and squeezed it. “My pleasure. I hope I see you again.” He smiled. “But in different circumstances next time.”

  “I hope so,” I said. He released my hand, and I turned to Robert. “You were great, too, Robert. Thank you.” Again, I held out my hand.

  Smiling, he took it. His big black hand was gentle, and his dark eyes were warm. “It’s been good to know you, miss. You take care of yourself.”

  “You, too.”

  Miss Lizzie said her goodbyes, and then Mr. Lipkind said, “Now get out of here, both of you. Mrs. Parker’s waiting.”

  Just before we left the office, Mr. Liebowitz said, “Amanda?”

  I turned back. “Yes?”

  “It’s over,” he said. “Cheer up.”

  I shook my head. “I keep thinking about Albert. About . . . you know. Firing that gun.”

  He shook his head. “You missed. I killed him.”

  “Yeah, but why did he reach for a gun? I was pointing that big pistol right at him. Maybe he wasn’t too worried about me. But he had to know that Lieutenant Becker had a pistol, too. And he probably knew that you had one.”

  He stroked his shiny, bald scalp. “Well, I can think of two reasons.”

  “What two reasons?”

  “First off, maybe he thought he could get away with it and escape.”

  “And second off?”

  He smiled. “Second off, he knew he couldn’t get away with it, but he knew he could end it right there.”

  “But why? Why end it?”

  “Maybe he wasn’t happy with what he’d done. And maybe he thought you were the only person who had a right to fix things.”

  “But why?”

  “Well, maybe because he believed that you were the only person who loved John as much as he did.”

  For some reason, this hit me very hard. I felt a bit as though I had been kicked in the chest. I took a deep breath. “Oh,” I said.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes. Yes, I think so.” I took another deep breath. “Really? You really think that’s what happened?”

  “I don’t know, Amanda. None of us will probably ever know.” He smiled. “Go,” he said. “Get to the station.”

  The Grand Central Terminal was the same bright, bustling cavern it had been when I first arrived. People still scurried back and forth, striding with determination across that huge marble floor. But now I wondered whether all of them knew where they were going, knew what might meet them when they arrived.

  The train would be leaving in fifteen minutes. Miss Lizzie bought tickets, and Mr. Cutter found a porter for our bags.

  Mrs. Parker embraced Miss Lizzie and then turned to me. “When you come back here,” she told me, “you get in touch.”

  “I will.”

  She put out her hand and we shook. “I can’t say it’s been fun,” she said, “but it’s certainly been interesting.”

  I smiled and then turned to Mr. Cutter. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  He nodded.

  Miss Lizzie and Mrs. Parker watched as we stepped away from the counter, toward the information booth. I stopped about halfway there, amid the rush of people, and he stopped beside me.

  “Mr. Cutter,” I said.

  His blue eyes looked into mine. “Yes?”

  “Did I really miss Albert when I fired that gun?” I asked.

  He smiled. “By a mile,” he whispered.

  Epilogue

  And now the final summing up.

  As I said in my earlier volume, Miss Lizbeth A. Borden died in 1927. On June 1, to be precise.

  Arnold Rothstein died on November 6, 1928, two days after being shot in a cheap hotel on West Fifty-Sixth Street. He had been lured there by a man named George “Hump” McManus, with whom Rothstein had played a game of poker and lost, and to whom he still owed the money. For weeks, Rothstein had refused to pay. MacManus finally lost patience with him. And so, despite the millions of dollars he had accumulated—the millions he had invested in the drug trade—despite his reputation as one of the greatest gam
blers in the history of New York City, Arnold Rothstein died because he welshed on a bet.

  I, of course, was not surprised.

  The American drug trade, the massive enterprise that he had personally organized, got along quite well without him. (But perhaps it wouldn’t have got along quite so well if it hadn’t been Mr. Rothstein who had organized it.)

  I saw Mrs. Parker several times in New York, when I was attending Columbia Law School, and a few times in Los Angeles years later. She died in New York City on June 7, 1967. She bequeathed her entire estate to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom she had never met.

  As for the estate of John Burton, John had changed his will during the week I spent with him, and he had left everything to me. Everything, however, turned out to be only his apartment at the Dakota. Although he was a broker himself, he owned no stocks or bonds, and somehow his bank account had been stripped on the Monday following his death, by whom, no one knew. The police, Mr. Lipkind told me, suspected Albert. But they suspected Albert, too, of emptying John’s safe after he killed him, and if Albert had done so, he had left the ten thousand dollars inside it. Albert, of course, was not talking.

  Mr. Lipkind came up to Boston, with Robert driving, to bring the ten thousand dollars and to argue with me about keeping the apartment. I told him I would never stay in it again. He suggested that I could rent it out and essentially live off the income. Finally, more to end the argument than for any other reason, I agreed to rent it, provided the rent money went into an account to which I would have limited and only occasional access. I felt that this was very noble of me. Over the years, however, I was—occasionally—very glad to have that access. I finally sold the apartment in September of 1960.

  I did not really want the ten thousand dollars, either. But Mr. Lipkind was persuasive about that as well, and later—once again—I was thankful.

  That September, before I signed the final papers, I went back to the apartment. It was empty—bare, stripped. I wandered through the rooms: the library, the living room, the bedrooms. Someone had left an old wooden crate in the kitchen. I sat down on it and remembered watching John sip King’s Ransom Scotch, his vest open, his collar undone, his shirtsleeves rolled back, his smile flashing.