by Michael Mayo
The guy on the other end of the line said it sounded strange to him, but what the hell. Wire him the money and he’d get in touch with a half-breed Indian moonshiner who lived in the mountains north of Glenwood Springs. He was a little on the strange side himself, so he’d fit right in with this.
After that, it played out just like Benny predicted. The simple note and the apparent professionalism of the snatch led Jacob to believe he was dealing with fellow crooks who wouldn’t hurt Benny unless he, Jacob, refused to pony up.
When Jacob called Weeks and explained what had happened, Weeks was relieved and terrified. Until the phone rang and he heard the hardness in Jacob’s voice, he hadn’t believed that Benny could pull it off. But it was happening, so he went to work, digging up the cash they had stashed here and there, and damn near tapping out their loan bank.
From then on, things clicked into place too neatly. Mercer and his guys took the train to Denver, where he bought a used car, and they drove to Glenwood Springs. That’s where the final steps in the plan should have been easy. They get the note telling them to go to Miner’s Camp No. 3. Mercer is chosen to deliver the money. He drives away, and neither he nor Benny is ever seen again. By the time Jacob begins his search for them, they’re on the way to the California coast.
But the guy—a guy Mercer does not know—didn’t show up, so he sent the next note, Send the Woman. What the hell did that mean?
He told Jacob it was too dangerous to send her alone. He’d hide in the back seat. She agreed right away, but Jacob said no. The guys who snatched Benny probably had people on the staff watching everything we do. He said, “Soph, you’ve got to do this for me. I swear to you, with Mercer as my witness …”
After she finished, I chewed it over and said, “I gotta say, Benny came up with a good plan. Right up to that point, but then the half-breed took a shine to you, and when Benny objected, he killed him? Is that it? What happened?”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” Anna said. “He’s dead, leave it at that.”
“No, there’s more. What is it?”
She glared at me. “All right, but you can never, never tell anybody, especially Mercer Weeks.”
“All right.”
“The first night I was there, the night he chained me up, I heard screams, terrible screams from the house up the hill. It was Benny. He was alive when I got there, but the half-breed killed him. I say that because Benny would not have let him do what he did to me, just like you wouldn’t. It was wrong, and he wouldn’t allow it. And finally …”
She searched for words. “Finally, I found evidence, oh hell, not evidence, I found Benny’s head. The goddamn half-breed killed him and cut off his head and put it in a glass jar full of that foul home brew he made. I found it the morning I escaped, on one of the shelves. If I hadn’t known Benny, I wouldn’t have recognized him. Looking at it made me sick, even more when I thought about some of the meat I put in that stew.
“You understand why you can never say anything to Mercer. I told him that Benny was trying to save me. It’s probably true. Let him believe it.”
“So how do things stand between you two?”
“The way we left it, his business is his business and my business is my business, and they don’t have much to do with each other. He and Jacob are rebuilding the policy game and their bank. I’m leaving town.”
I hit the button for the dumbwaiter. The cage rumbled up from the cellar. “Where?”
“West. California, Mexico, someplace to start over. Want to come along?”
When the lift stopped, I pulled on the strap to open it, took out the first box, and put it on the bar. Her eyes brightened.
“Let’s see, you’ve got your grandmother, your daughter, your little brother, and your husband.”
“He’s not my husband, and he’s not in this, not anymore.”
She ran her hands over the top of the crate and then the other one after I put it down. Maybe she still loved Pauley Domo, but she’d be a damn fool to allow him to get anywhere near that much money.
She cut her eyes at me, and I could tell that she thought I was going to pull something. She’d gone through a lot to get where she was—more than I could imagine—and I wasn’t about to get in her way.
“Here you go,” I said. “Take it away.”
She hurried out the front and whistled to the hired car. The boy and the driver got out and came down the steps, following Anna back inside.
The kid honed right in on the crates, stepped up on the rail, and pulled a box to the edge of the bar. The damn thing must have weighed half as much as he did, but he was tottering out the door with it before the driver, an older gent with wiry gray hair, had picked his up.
Yeah, every guy who met Anna fell for her a little, some of us a lot more.
I watched as she made sure they got the crates into the trunk of the car. Like her, I kept an eye on the street, but that early, there wasn’t anyone else around. Still, I kept the Smith down by my side until they were finished. I put it back in my coat pocket when she came back. She wiped away more tears, and her voice caught when she spoke.
“Thanks, Jimmy. I know this has been pretty crazy and I know … I know … Hell, I don’t know anything. Half of me says I ought to stay right here with you.”
“I know. I want you to.”
“Then come with me, dammit.”
“No, you’ve got people to take care of. So do I.”
She kissed me again, slipped a waxy folded bill into my hand—a hundred as it turned out—and got into the car.
I went back into the speak and checked all the locks again before I walked back to the Chelsea. They wouldn’t have finished cleaning my room, so I figured I’d have to sleep in that room up on the fifth. I hoped like hell I’d find Connie there.
Acknowledgments
First, apologies to Dashiell Hammett, Murray Burnett, Joan Alison, Howard Koch, Julius Epstein, and Philip Epstein for the liberties I took with their excellent plot.
At Mysterious Press, associate publisher Rob Hart made excellent suggestions, specifically concerning the first few chapters. Lauren Chomiuk and Lisa Kaitz at Open Road Media tried to correct Jimmy’s questionable grammar and his many insensitivities. They did their best to make this a better book.
Several historical figures are mentioned in this fiction, among them Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Abner “Longy” Zwillman, Dutch Schultz, Otto “Abbadabba” Berman, and Louis “Diamond Jack” Alterie.
The descriptions of the Wall Street bombing, the Denver Mint robbery, and “Gentleman” Gerald Chapman’s mail-truck heist are accurate. Pauley Domo’s kidnapping scheme is loosely based on George “Machine Gun” Kelly’s disastrous snatch of Charles Urschel.
Rachel Warren read an early version of the manuscript and gave excellent advice. Ernie Linger and Shelley Hachman helped to spread the word.
Reginald Marsh, Berenice Abbott, Rian James, Gordon Kahn, Al Hirschfeld, and William Seabrook showed me their city in the early twentieth century.
Nick Carr at Scouting NY (ScoutingNY.com) spends his time looking beyond the surface of things in the city and was as intrigued as I was by the bus terminal beneath the Hotel Dixie.
Finally, special thanks to publisher Otto Penzler for his support of crime fiction.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by M
ichael W. Mayo
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
978-1-4976-6267-4
Published in 2015 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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