by Michael Mayo
“If you think it’s time to catch the train back to California, I’ll buy the ticket and help you pack. You see, this isn’t over, and it’s probably going to get nastier. I’m tired of people following me and pounding on me and knowing more about what’s going on than I do. If this money everybody talks about really exists, then maybe I’ve got a line on where it is. That’s the next step.”
“Fine,” she said with a smile. “I’ll help.”
I spent another five minutes explaining why I had to do this by myself. It did no good. Hell, I might as well admit it. I’ve always been attracted to strong-willed women, and I’ve seldom been able to get them to do what I want them to do. A contradiction that comes with the territory, I guess.
When I went to change clothes, I saw that the light gray suit was ruined, and that pissed me off even more. I was down to my skivvies before I noticed that Connie was directing her complete attention to something outside the window. My near-naked condition made her blush. If I’d been more of a gentleman, I guess I’d have gone into the bathroom or something, but it was too late for that.
“OK,” I said, tying my tie, “I expect there’s going to be somebody outside watching for me, and they’ll follow us. We’ll let them, and then we’ll shake them. After we’ve done that, we’ll find out if I’m right about the location of the loot.”
I checked the straps on the brace, opened the gun to make sure there was an empty chamber under the hammer, and put on my coat. I looked pretty good as long as you didn’t notice my face.
“Without being obvious about it,” I said, “you’re going to be on the lookout for this guy or these guys that will try to follow us.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’ll start uptown.” On the way out, we stopped at my room, and I got some cash from the lockbox in my closet and stopped again at the front desk to use the phone. I called the speak.
“Frenchy,” I said. “Got some business to take care of, so I’ll be late getting in. … Connie’s with me. … No, it doesn’t mean that. …” She rolled her eyes. “Did Fat Joe tell you about the truck? Good …. No, I’ll tell you later, I don’t know yet. Bye.”
Outside on the street, I hailed a cab. As we were getting in, Connie said, “There are two guys watching us. No … one guy and maybe a kid.”
“Workmen’s clothes? Caps?”
“Yes, they’re getting into a car.”
The cabbie said, “Where to, Mac?”
“Plaza Hotel, around back on Fifty-Eighth Street, and there’s a guy following us.” I turned to Connie. “In what? What kind of car?”
“I couldn’t tell. It’s black.”
The cabbie checked the mirror and said, “Yeah, I’ve got him.”
“There’s an extra buck in it for you if you lose him.” I held up a bill, and he hit the gas.
If I was halfway right in what I was thinking, these guys were from out of town. They didn’t have a chance of keeping up with a well-trained native. We had a wild ride up Sixth Avenue, bouncing around the back seat. The hack juked through the traffic just like I used to on foot, leaving a chorus of angry horns in our dust. Connie was sure we were going to die and grabbed me and held on as tight as she could. I thought that was pretty nice.
My idea had been that if we couldn’t shake the tail before we got to the rear entrance to the hotel, we’d get out, go through to the lobby, and slip the bell captain a bill to jump the cab line before another car could get around the block. But that wasn’t going to be necessary, so I told the cabbie to take us back to East Thirty-Fourth Street, and we wouldn’t need the speed demon act.
“What act?” he said and hit the gas.
At Thirty-Fourth Street, I gave him a tip that doubled the fare, and he roared off. Connie asked what we were doing.
I put my arm around her shoulder and said, “First, we’re going to go around the block to make sure nobody else is following us.” We ambled and turned around three or four times until I was sure we were on our own.
“OK,” I said. “Over the past few days, I’ve heard a lot of stories—knocking over the Denver Mint, kidnapping a bootlegger, a trip out West, a stolen inheritance. I don’t know how true those stories are, but for now, let’s assume that there’s something behind them, right?”
She nodded reluctantly, probably thinking I was a little nuts, but I didn’t mind. It was a nice afternoon on the cool side. I was walking with a pretty girl and, for the moment, nobody was trying to beat me up.
“Now, we’ve got Jacob and Weeks saying that they forked over a hundred grand for Benny. I believe that. I believe it because they’ve got the money and because Benny is that important to their business.
“And I’ve got Anna, this old girlfriend who’s not really an old girlfriend, saying that she sent seventy-five thousand dollars to me from Toledo. In four boxes, by the way. For now, we won’t try to figure out why she would do something as crazy as that. But why would she lie about it? She didn’t ask for a loan. In fact, she seems to be pretty well set up. I don’t think she was trying to impress me, so again, let’s assume it’s true. There’s probably a connection between the two stories, but, for now, we won’t worry about that either. Instead, we’re going to think about how she did it. How did she send four boxes from Toledo to New York?
Connie shrugged her shoulders. “Post office?”
“Nope. That.” I pointed my stick at the red and white diamond sign above the door of a storefront across the block:
RAILWAY
EXPRESS
AGENCY
You saw their green trucks all over the city. The Railway Express was kind of like the regular mail, but they had to accept anything you could ship on a train. I’d never done any business with them, but I thought they were more secure than the regular mail. Assuming that Anna wasn’t traveling by car and she wanted to keep a large number of bank notes safe, shipping them by train was maybe her best bet.
Connie and I went inside and had to wait on line for one of three clerks. It didn’t take long.
When we got to the counter, I asked a tired, bored-looking guy if he had anything for Jimmy Quinn.
He moseyed back to a set of accordion files on a shelf and went to the Q section. He came back with several sheets of smudgy gray carbon paper stapled together. I could see a big square block stamped across the front: HOLD FOR with my name written beneath it.
“Sign here. Need to see your ID,” he said, passing a form across the counter.
I showed him my driver’s license, the only official paper I carried, and scrawled my name.
“What is it?” I asked.
He looked at the bottom of the sheets and spoke slowly, sounding out the first word. “Yampah Hot Springs Mineral Water. Four crates.”
“Where’s it from?”
“Denver.”
“Can you deliver it to an address here in the city tonight?”
He shook his head. “Tomorrow, day after more likely.”
A sign on the wall behind him said they were open until nine. “We’ll pick it up later,” I said as he handed me the carbons.
“Take these to the desk around he corner.”
“One more thing. Do you have any storage lockers for rent?”
He shook his head. “Closest are at Penn Station, and you might try the new bus terminals. I hear they got ’em too.”
As we left, I thought for the first time that those crates might really be stuffed with cash. Damn, I could take Frenchy’s truck and load it up and drive away a rich man, maybe with Anna, maybe with Connie, maybe by myself. I know that a lot of guys have had such ideas and given in when they’ve had the opportunity. Maybe some of them even got away with it, but I knew better, and it wasn’t really a serious temptation, just a wild hair that could get me in a lot of trouble.
Connie was thinking the same thing. She
had a bright dreamy look in her eyes, and I could almost see cartoon dollar signs floating overhead. She sobered up pretty quick and said, “Do you think those crates really do have money in them?”
“We’ll find out soon enough, but there’s another matter we’ve got to take care of.”
I explained about Three Fingers. She said, “Yeah, I saw him at your table.”
“Yeah, that guy. He gave me a ten-spot to hold something for him for twenty-four hours. It’s a key with a tag and a number. Might open one of those lockers you can rent for an hour or a day. I think it would be good to know what it is.”
We walked a few long blocks west on Thirty-Fourth Street, then down to Thirty-Third and the big stone building that took up the whole block. We crossed Seventh and went through the doors to the wide staircase that led down to the main concourse. Connie grabbed my arm tight, and as we went down the stairs, she held back, surprised and a little scared at the size of the place. She’d only been in the city for a few months. We hadn’t stepped out very often because we were working so hard. With the ridiculously cheap prices we charged for the good booze we sold, the joint was open just about every hour that we thought we could sell a drink. If we decided to close for a Sunday, I mostly went to the movies or walked or slept in. I knew Marie Therese had shown Connie around, but that day with me was her first look at Penn Station. From the outside it was a massive spread of granite walls and columns. Inside, it was glass and girders and streaming afternoon sunlight. It almost made you dizzy because it was so big, but then you got swallowed up in the tides of people hurrying to catch trains, and if you didn’t move as fast as they did, you were in the way, and they’d knock you down and not look back.
Connie made me stop on the stairs while she drank it all up.
“Wow,” she whispered.
The truth is, I walked or drove past it every week, but I didn’t go into the place very often myself, and I had to agree. It was worth a wow.
They’d moved the information booth to the center of the main level since the last time I’d been there. Once we found it, they told us there were three places where we could rent storage lockers. One of them was at the Pennsylvania Motor Coach line, right there in the station. The keys there didn’t match the one back in my vest pocket. Neither did the other two. Back at the booth, they came up with a list of the other bus stations. There were nine more. The truth is, I didn’t know from buses. The whole idea of a bus that would take you from, say, Chicago to New York was new. I’d seen them around in the streets, but I’d never been on one.
Most of the bus companies were within a few blocks, so we didn’t need taxi or trolley. We just started with the closest and worked our way out. As we were leaving the station, I got a strong sense of somebody watching us. I stopped and turned around at the top of the Seventh Avenue stairs, and there below me was a huge open area filled with people who were paying no attention to us. Connie asked what was wrong. I told her, and she said she felt it too. We stood there staring down for a minute or so, maybe longer, but we were wrong. Nobody was following us. Not then.
The closest terminal was owned by an outfit called Nevin. It was right across the street. There was a second Nevin terminal a block away on Thirty-First near Sixth. No lockers at either. They did have lockers at the Herald Square Terminal and the Public Service Terminal near the library, but they weren’t the right kind. We had a short slog over to Forty-Second Street.
I felt eyes on the back of my neck again, but that was still just nerves. Both Connie and I were short enough that we were submerged in the thick slow crowd. I grabbed a handful of the back of her jacket with my right hand to keep us from being separated. I had to work to keep up with the foot traffic because with the stick, I was slow, and Connie was gawking at all the burlesque shows and dancehalls and the guys with sandwich boards for cheap Chinese joints and street preachers telling us we were going to hell. At night, the lights and the neon made the street dreamy, exotic, and sinful. In the afternoon, it just looked dirty and tired. I don’t think she saw it that way.
The Dixie Hotel fit right in at Times Square. It had been open for about a year and had already gone bust, but it was still open. The Central Union Terminal was directly underneath, so it was easy for people to find, I guess.
There was a ramp leading down from the sidewalk to a crowded waiting room. Two sets of doors, one on our left and one across the room, were marked To Busses. Connie saw the sign for the women’s across the way and said she’d be right back. As I went to the ticket office, I tried to look for familiar faces, but the place was too busy. I asked the guy at the ticket window about storage lockers. He said they were in the baggage room on the Forty-Third Street side of the turntable. I asked what the turntable was, and he said, “That way,” pointing to the far set of doors to the buses.
I went through them and saw what he meant. Two ramps went up to Forty-Third Street. On my level was a big metal turntable, more than thirty feet wide. As I stood there, a bus came down one of the ramps and stopped in the middle of the metal plate. As soon as the bus rocked on its brakes, the turntable rotated a few degrees and the bus pulled into one of ten slips that branched off of the hub. I guess it was a good way to maneuver a lot of buses and people in a limited space, but it stank of gasoline and exhaust. The baggage room was straight ahead through a glass door. Inside, I saw that a guy working behind a counter handled the big suitcases and stuff. A bank of smaller coin-operated lockers stood against one wall. Bingo.
Number 43 was padlocked. I asked the counterman what that meant. He checked a clipboard and said it was past due by one day. It’d cost four bits to get the lock off. I gave him a buck for another day. He took off the padlock and went back behind the counter. I opened the locker and found a banged-up valise filled with wadded dirty clothes. I poked gently with my pen for a few seconds, then closed the bag and put it back. Three Fingers might have had a fortune in emeralds at the bottom, but I wasn’t about to go rooting around through his skivvies to find it.
About then, another bus came in, and I heard them making announcements in the waiting room. People were pushing through the doors, and I had to go against the tide to get back into the waiting room. Connie was standing outside the door of the women’s looking for me. Three Fingers was behind her, scanning the crowd. If he’d seen her, it didn’t look like he recognized her. He knew me right away, and by the surprised look on his face, he wasn’t expecting to see me.
After that, everything moved fast.
They made more announcements, and it seemed like everybody who’d been sitting on the benches picked up their bags and headed for the doors. Three Fingers took a step toward me. Connie saw me and headed my way. Somebody bumped into me hard from behind and pushed on past me. It was the boy, the same boy who’d stopped me outside the Chrysler Building. He ran straight at Three Fingers and swung at him with something, a knife or maybe a razor, that drew blood. Three Fingers screamed “Fuck!” at the top of his lungs, and that made everybody stop and stare at him. The boy turned back toward me and ran like hell. All that happened right next to Connie, and she stood there, shocked, with her mouth open. Three Fingers cursed again and ran past me, following the boy back through the doors to the buses. I stuck with them.
People were lined up for the bus in the closest slip. They yelled as the boy pushed his way through and dashed out onto the turntable just as another bus on the opposite side backed out of a slip. The kid was fast, not as fast as me in my prime, but he knew his way around, and Three Fingers had trouble staying close. People were yelling at the bus driver to stop, and he did. Right in the middle of the turntable, like he was supposed to do. It rotated and I lost sight of them, but I knew what the boy was up to. As soon as the turntable stopped with the bus pointed at the ramp, he jumped in front it and charged up to the street. Three Fingers was right behind, running hard. The bus driver stopped and laid on the horn. I got onto the turntable just as it jerk
ed into motion, and I staggered against the side of the bus and braced myself with the stick. People were yelling even louder. More horns blared, and it took me several seconds to figure out which way I needed to go to get back to the ramp. By the time I got to it, I could see Three Fingers up on Forty-Third Street. I gimped up the ramp, sure that I’d turn around and see the grille of the bus bearing down on me, but I made it to the street.
The kid turned like he was going to go after Three Fingers again, when a high-pitched piercing whistle cut through the traffic noise. The boy stopped and then ran toward to the sound. The whistle had come from a hired car that was pulling away from the curb. As the boy ran for it, the back door opened, and he jumped in.
By then, the car was no more than ten feet away from me. Tugging the door shut was the crazy old woman who’d scared the boy away from me before, the same old woman who gave me the evil eye. Anna was next to her.
And sitting on Anna’s lap was a fair-haired baby girl, two or three years old, maybe more. The two women were so intent on helping the boy get into the car that they didn’t notice me. But in that moment as the car went past, I got a good close look at them, and I could see the resemblance that the three of them shared. The older woman must have been Anna’s grandmother or an aunt, and the little girl had to be Anna’s daughter. I thought I could see something of the teenage Anna in her face.
But no matter. As soon as I saw her, one part of this screwy story made sense. I knew why Anna had come back to New York. To get her little girl.
Chapter Thirteen
It was about four o’clock when Connie and I got back to the speak. We only had a handful of customers, so I bought a short round for the house and kicked everybody out ten minutes later. Marie Therese locked the front door and put up a sign that said we were closed for a private party. I went upstairs and told Vittorio that we had to shut down that night. He could stay open if he wanted to, but the cellar was locked. He said I was putting a hell of a crimp on his business and decided to close early, too.
