by Michael Mayo
“Did he do it?”
“If they paid him enough.”
“And he knew about this money, and he knew my name?”
“Yes, I suppose so. When Nana told one of them, she told all of them.”
Weeks said, “What are you getting at?”
“Guy found himself killed near my place the other night about the same time that a little stick of dynamite went off. Detective Betcherman was hanging around, too.” Anna asked who Betcherman was. I ignored her. “It seems to me it’s possible this guy was trying to knock down my gate at the alley. But if he didn’t know the city and he didn’t know my address, maybe he was in the wrong part of the alley, which brings up Benny Numbers’ ledgers. There was a problem with the address on them, too. How did they find their way to me?”
Weeks said, “What the hell are you talking about? This is making no goddamn sense at all. How do you two know each other, anyway? This is looking like some kind of setup.”
“I met Anna—what was it, six years ago, seven? We had some laughs for a little while until she left town. I didn’t see her again until last night.”
Weeks had his eyes locked on Anna’s, and something was going on between them that I didn’t understand.
“I was just a kid then,” she said. “So was Jimmy. I trusted him then and I still trust him to help me out of this jam.”
“She trusted me enough to send me the ledgers, even if she wasn’t sure where the place was.”
Her lips twisted into a self-mocking ghost of a smile. “I should’ve paid more attention when Jacob brought me there. When I heard there was a speak named Jimmy Quinn’s, I was curious. You weren’t there the afternoon that we dropped in, and I wasn’t sure it was the same Jimmy Quinn, but I guess I was sure enough.”
“But why put the ledgers in the mail? Why not hold onto them?”
“Because they broke into my room at the Palmer House.”
The books were valuable to Jacob. She knew that. If everything else fell apart, he’d pay to get them back. So she kept them in her suitcase, and after she checked into the hotel, she bought another bag big enough to hold them and carried it with her when she left the room. She also carried her cash, most of it anyway.
She spent the first days in Chicago sleeping, eating, regaining her strength and sanity, and working out her possible moves. The clothes she was wearing made her look like a crazy hobo woman. She called the hotel dress shop and ordered some suitable outfits. She didn’t leave the room. They sent up girls with underwear, dresses, suits, blouses, skirts, and shoes in her size. She made her choices, signed the bill, and felt wonderful.
Given the circumstances of the past ten months, it didn’t take long for cabin fever to set in. She took a stroll over to Michigan Avenue one afternoon and came back to find that the twenty and two tens she’d left in a drawer were gone and somebody had been through her underwear. That’s when she knew that Nana had talked, and the Saengers and Gunderwalds were onto her. She could have used Railway Express for the books, but she thought that she remembered my address, and the hotel was happy to follow her mailing instructions.
“OK then,” I said, “let me see if I’ve got this straight. There you were in Chicago with your cousins who were trying to steal your money …”
Weeks said, “Where the fuck is the money?”
“Yeah,” Anna said, “where the fuck is the money?”
“… And they knew it had been sent to one Jimmy Quinn in New York, so they hotfooted it here. Somewhere along the way, you picked up the youngest, the one you like—what’s his name—Eddy?”
She nodded.
“Then that explains everything except your husband.”
That got their attention. Both of them nearly spilled their drinks.
Mercer said, “What husband?”
“Pauley ‘Three Fingers’ Domo.”
“Oh, shit,” Anna said. “He’s here?”
“He was in my place last night. Gave me a ten-spot that had some kind of crap all over it and a key that he wanted me to hold for him for twenty-four hours. Made it all sound as mysterious as hell.”
Anna laughed. “God, that’s Pauley, all right. I’m sure it’s part of some brilliant plan he cooked up.”
Weeks said, “I’m starting to get steamed. What the hell are you two talking about? Where’s Jacob’s money?”
They stared at me.
I said, “Let’s go take a look at it.”
Anna cut her eyes at Weeks. He was suspicious.
“It’s close. We can walk or take a cab.”
Anna said, “Let me check on Nana and the baby,” and went through the door to one of the bedrooms.
A second later she screamed.
Chapter Seventeen
While Anna and Weeks and I had been yakking away, Nana had decided to take a powder with the kid. She left a hand-scrawled note that didn’t even look like writing to me.
Anna pointed out the words: Worry Not We See Paul Baby Need You Husband.
It made no sense to me. Anna translated. She said that despite everything they’d done together, Nana thought that she, Anna, was still Pauley Domo’s wife and should be obedient and respectful to him.
“I told her he was dead,” she said, “and when the son of a bitch learned about the money, he tracked her down.”
“How’d he find out about the money?”
“The Saengers. He’s practically another brother. That crazy old woman, I do not understand her. For years, she’s afraid to touch a telephone. Now she’s calling Pauley, she’s calling Jacob, she wants me to give the money to the church. Jesus Christ, why did she do this now?”
It was strange, watching her then, half-focused on the money, half on the kid.
“All right,” she said out loud to herself, “she’s safe enough with Nana.” Then she turned to me. “Where’s the money?”
Weeks demanded the same thing, and that did it. I’d had enough. As you’ve figured out, I am an even-tempered, good-humored guy. Unless provoked, I don’t set out to make trouble or anger people. Bad for business, bad on general principle. But by that time that night, I’d heard so many crazy stories and been bombed and punched and shot at and Mickey Finned, and lied to and threatened and had two of my best suits ruined that I was well pissed off.
I stood up, grabbed my hat, and said to her, “Where’s your kid?” and to Weeks, “Where’s Jacob? Why don’t you two straighten out whatever it is that you’re not telling me. Find Jacob and meet me in a couple of hours at 405 Lex, top floors, and we’ll work this out.” They didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. Like I said, there was hardly a moment when each of the three of us completely understood the other two.
I went back downstairs, had the doorman hail a cab, and went back to the speak.
Fat Joe unlocked the front door. He had a sawed-off double barrel in his big mitt.
He said, “You took your sweet time. It’s been a fucking parade out there.”
“Anybody you know?”
“The fat fucking Kraut who was in the other night with the gent. He’s been driving and walking by. Got a fucking big bandage on his nose. Malloy says there’s action in the alley.”
“Anybody try to get in?”
“Only regulars. Read the fucking sign and went away.”
“OK, we’re going to move the stuff later. It’s probably going to get rough. Expect you’ll be able to shoot somebody.”
Fat Joe smiled. I went to the back door.
Malloy had made himself comfortable on the landing with a couple of barstools. He sat on one and had a drink and his Luger on the other. He was reading a book.
“Good evening, sir,” he said when he saw me. “I hope you don’t mind my borrowing one of the books from your office. Even with the savages circling our outpost, it gets boring.” He’d taken Will
Durant’s The Story of Philosophy, and it looked like he’d made it farther than I had.
“Not to worry. What’s going on outside?”
“This being my first night on the job, it’s not really my place to say, but this does seem to be an uncommonly busy alley. Couple of times I’ve heard guys rattling the gate and trying to climb over it. Can’t tell how many of them. When they hear me open the door, they fly on winged feet.”
“Fine. In a couple of hours we’re going to move the money. Be ready.”
The kitchen was a mess. There were wax shavings and dirty towels and pans of milky water all over the worktable. Somebody had strung up lengths of cotton string like clotheslines. Wet dripping tens and twenties were paper-clipped to the string. All four of the boxes had been opened, but it looked like they’d only been working on the first one. The oilcloth had been peeled back on the other three, revealing more solid brownish wax.
Marie Therese said that it took too long to scrape away the stuff with knives. That’s where the shavings came from. They put the block in a big wash pan, boiled up a pot of water, and poured it slowly over the block. That softened it up enough for them to pry loose the first six inches or so and work with those bills, the ones that were hanging up to dry.
I asked what the count was, and Frenchy answered too quickly, “Two hundred and sixty dollars, with that much more in the pan. Now that we’ve got the block cut down, it will fit in the oven and we can melt it. Marie Therese thinks we should keep it down to two hundred and fifty degrees. Don’t want the wax to catch fire.”
I told them not to bother with it. “There’s still some question as to who’s got the most legitimate claim on this nasty stuff, but since Jacob the Wise is one of the interested parties, we’re going to move it out of here and let them settle things. Like I said earlier, none of you signed on for anything like this.” I was looking at Connie when I said it. “And I think it’s likely that somebody’s not going to be happy at the way this turns out. Any of you want to stay here and get ready to open tomorrow night, you’re being smart.”
Everybody said no. Connie was the most bright-eyed and excited of the bunch.
“All right, then, I’ve got to make some calls. Shut the boxes back up and take them back to the cellar. And let’s spruce up a little. We’re going to take all this up to the Cloud Club, where the interested parties will make their case. We should have the joint to ourselves, but if somebody questions us, we need to look like we belong there. “And could somebody make me a sandwich, a real sandwich? I’m starving.”
Back in my office, I called Ellis’s precinct and asked for him. The sergeant who answered said he was busy. I told him who I was—he knew me—and said it was really important for Ellis to talk to me. I had information on two cases he was working.
Connie came in with a ham and swiss on rye, a glass of milk, and a thermos of coffee. She was the most wonderful woman in the world.
The most wonderful woman in the world stretched out on my divan and said, “I guess all this got started when we were here the other night, when the bomb went off.”
I nodded while I chewed.
“But,” she said, getting to her point, “it really started when you met that woman, your ‘old girlfriend.’”
“That was five, six, seven years ago, I don’t remember exactly and it’s not important. She and I …” I stopped. What were Anna and me?
“She’s Jacob’s mistress. Or she was. She’s got a kid who’s about three years old, I think. And she’s got a husband, the guy who was part of all the commotion at the bus station this afternoon.”
Connie sat up quick. “Three Fingers is her husband? That’s what Marie Therese calls him, says he gives her the heebie-jeebies. He’s been in for the past three nights, nursing beers, acting strange but not doing quite enough for Fat Joe to throw him out. What’s he got to do with this?”
“It’s a really involved story. What it comes down to, I think, is that this is money Jacob paid to get Benny Numbers back after he was snatched out West. Three Fingers seems to think it’s his. So do a lot of other guys.”
Connie asked if I knew why the cash had been sealed up like that, and I admitted that I did.
“That’s another involved, crazy story. Crazy as hell. When there’s time, I’ll tell you all about it, but here’s what it comes down to: Anna, my ‘old girlfriend,’ delivered the money, and she was held captive in the mountains by some kind of hermit. She thinks he saw her in this little town where she and Jacob were staying and he became—what’s the word—obsessed with her and decided to lock her up for his own. Does that sound possible to you?”
Connie seemed to pull inside herself on the sofa, knees and feet together, arms clasped around her chest. “Oh yes, it’s possible. It’s … never mind. Believe me, it could happen.”
I thought she had another story to tell, but she didn’t say anything more about it. That night wasn’t the time. She said they needed her in the kitchen.
I guess I’d believed Anna from the beginning. She lied to me with things she didn’t say and things she left out, like a husband in the Tombs, but I didn’t doubt what she said about the months in the cabin. She didn’t make that up. I still wasn’t sure why she sent the money and the books to me, and what she was holding back about Benny, but I thought the story about the half-breed was true, because the girl who’d challenged me to race in the street would have done just what she did. She’d be patient, she’d think it through, and when she got the chance, she’d kill him.
As for me, I think it was while I was sitting there by myself that I finally understood just how important the speak had become to me. It was my place, our place. I may have lived at the Chelsea, but this was home. And I knew that Marie Therese and Frenchy thought of it as home, too. Connie hadn’t been there long enough for me to know what she thought, and nobody knew what Fat Joe thought. I just realized then that I needed the place, and as long as I could hold onto it, I wouldn’t sell out.
It was a little after eleven when Ellis called back. I asked if he’d set it up for us to get back into the Cloud Club.
He said, “Yeah, I know one of the supervisors on the janitorial crew. He’ll help us out, but what the hell’s going on? Why the Cloud Club?”
“For the same reason you took me there, to impress people,” I said. Actually, I didn’t really know what I was doing, but it seemed likely that things would get rough, and I didn’t want anybody shooting up my place. Didn’t want to clean up either.
“The situation has changed a little. And I’m not sure it really makes a difference, but now I am certain that this money everybody is so interested in is Weiss’s ransom for Benny Numbers.”
“How did it get here?”
“I can’t tell you that. Not now, maybe later. As near as I can tell, it has nothing to do with Betcherman’s killing. Sure, he was looking for it when he got killed, but Jacob didn’t rob a bank to get it. He just did what he does every day, and you’re not interested in that.”
“So, the money is clean, that’s what you’re saying.”
“Wellll … Yes, it’s clean. Jacob and another interested party are going to join us at the Cloud Club. Our friend Herr Klapprott has his guys keeping an eye on my place, so they’ll follow us. He’ll bring along his number one thug, a guy named Luther who killed Betcherman.”
“You know this?”
“Yes, I do.”
“How will I find him?”
“That’s easy. First, he’s going to be coming after me, and second, he’s wearing a big bandage where his nose ought to be.”
I finished my coffee, checked to see that I hadn’t left any of my sandwich on my shirt or tie, and went back down to the cellar. I collected Malloy along the way.
The rest of them were waiting with the four crates. Marie Therese and Connie had dolled up. Connie was wearing a man’s duster to hide the gun
she was carrying. The gents, even Fat Joe, had put on ties. He and Malloy started to load the crates onto the hand truck until I told them to wait.
I knew guys had been watching us when we brought the stuff down from the Railway Express office. Maybe they’d been close enough to see that we had four crates. So we’d have to take four crates back uptown, but they didn’t have to be the same four crates.
It had been years since we’d used the storage space behind the false wall, and it took me a while to find the spring latch. When the door popped open, it smelled even more strongly of raw excavated dirt than the rest of the cellar. I told Frenchy and Fat Joe to stow the third and fourth crates of Yampah Hot Springs Mineral Water inside and took two wooden boxes of Gordon’s Gin from inventory. I was probably being too cautious, but if anybody had been watching carefully, they’d see that we had four wooden crates on the bed of the truck, and all six of us were along for the ride. Nobody was staying behind to guard anything. I can’t say that I had any sort of plan in mind. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I figured that splitting up the money couldn’t hurt.
As we took the crates up to the truck, Fat Joe said to Malloy, “Sometimes he ain’t as fucking stupid as he looks.”
Chapter Eighteen
Fat Joe and Malloy stayed on the bed of the truck as Frenchy eased out into the alley and I locked the gate. Connie squeezed into the cab with Frenchy and Marie Therese. Since she was more comfortable with rifles and long guns, Fat Joe gave her the riot gun he’d carried that afternoon. It was loaded with birdshot, but I hoped like hell that she didn’t have to use it. That thing really made a mess. Marie Therese had the little Spanish .25 automatic she always carried in her purse. Fat Joe pulled me up and I sat on a crate of money.
As we drove toward the streetlights, it seemed that everyone on the sidewalk was paying extra attention to us. I told myself that was just nerves, that it was odd for people to see three guys riding on the back of a truck on Third Avenue in the middle of the night, and that nobody was really paying attention. Right. About then I heard the rumble of a V-8 and saw the big bright headlights coming up behind us, and there was Klapprott’s Phaeton pulling up alongside. He was smiling in the back seat as he touched the brim of his hat with a gloved hand. Luther wasn’t with him. I think it was the same driver who’d been in the car that morning.
