by Ann Aptaker
*
If Sig’s going to kill me, if he orders one of his assassins to blow my head off, I hope it’s not in my new car. She’s a beauty, the latest Buick Roadmaster model, her maroon curves shapely as a lover’s thighs, her cream convertible top sexy as a blonde in the sun, her cream leather interior soft as a woman’s lap, and her customized maroon, cream, and chrome dash classy as a yacht’s pilothouse. I haven’t had much chance to drive her since I picked her up before I left for Greece, so getting blood and brains all over the pretty interior before she’s even had her first oil change would be a cryin’ shame.
But it’s a chance I have to take if I want to figure Sig’s angle in Mickey’s killing; that is, if Sig has any angle at all. He certainly had motive. Mickey’s shenanigans in Coney Island might’ve been getting in the way of Sig’s real estate plans, and if Sig Loreale has plans, he sees them through, smoothly if he can, brutally if he has to. Interlopers and pests like Mickey Schwartz Day are efficiently removed.
I find a parking spot in front of Sig’s building on Fortieth Street, a classy black brick Art Deco office tower crowned with Gothic-style gilt work, and where Sig maintains a penthouse residence. The building is across the street from Bryant Park and the main branch of the New York Public Library, the famous one with the two lions out front facing Fifth Avenue. I’m sure Sig’s enjoyed a stroll through the park. Not sure he’s ever been in the library.
Inside his building, the black marble lobby is filling up with nine-to-fivers shivering after their walk from the subway at the Sixth Avenue corner down the block. Businessmen in wool overcoats and gray fedoras, women in colorful coats, some in the new princess style pinched at the waist, walk briskly to the elevators. I like the princess style. I like any style that accentuates a woman’s body.
I don’t join the crowd at the bank of public elevators. I keep walking to the end of the row, to the private elevator to Sig’s penthouse, guarded by a thug the nine-to-fivers pointedly ignore. They know who lives in the penthouse. Their fear of the crime boss upstairs is greater than their thrill at occasionally being in the presence of the most powerful man in New York when they see him walking through the lobby. Maybe the businessmen tip their hats when they pass him, maybe the women give him a polite smile. None of them know he doesn’t give a damn.
I don’t know the thug guarding the private elevator, but then again, I haven’t been to see Sig in quite a while. So the galoot doesn’t know me, either. He eyes me up and down. It takes him a minute to figure me, then looks at me like he’s examining me for germs. “What’s your business here?”
“Tell Sig that Cantor Gold wants to see him.”
I have to wait while the lobby galoot calls on the intercom beside the elevator and gives the upstairs galoot my message, and that galoot in turn gives the message to Sig’s personal galoot. I use the time to enjoy the lovely sight of an especially pretty office girl reading the front page of her newspaper while she waits for an elevator. But as much as I’d like to linger along her angelic face, have a little fun imagining what’s under her coat, my attention’s diverted when she opens the paper and I can see the whole front page. I’m grabbed by a particular story—down below all the headlines about President Truman and the Red Scare, the shoot-’em-up in Korea, and the never ending bedlam of city politics—printed way down at the bottom of the page, like a cockroach that slipped under the door: judge acquits guzik.
So Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, the Chicago Mob’s payoff man, a confidante of Capone during Al’s heyday, beat another rap. It was Guzik who peeled off the bills that went into the palms of Chicago’s cops and politicians, a job which earned him the Greasy Thumb moniker. I met the guy a coupla times on his trips here after Capone bit the dust back in ’47, and gangster power coalesced in New York.
The pretty office girl catches me smiling, which makes her cringe, and she turns away. That might hurt my feelings except I’m not smiling at her. Nope, I’m smiling because my chances of not being killed today by Sig Loreale just went up. He’ll be in a good mood.
*
Or in as good a mood as a killer can be. By the time the elevator reaches the penthouse floor, I’m asking myself whether coming here was such a hot idea after all. Probing Sig for his secrets is a dangerous play, whether he’s in a good mood or not.
But there’s no turning back. Sig wouldn’t let me, anyway. He knows I’m here and he’ll want to know why. I’d never make it out of the building.
One of his galoots greets me at the apartment door, tells me Sig is waiting for me in his den. “Through the livin’ room and to the left. And I gotta hold your piece.” The guy has all the charm of a shark chewing a leg.
I’m not crazy about handing over my gun, but Sig demands all visitors check any hardware at the door. He likes his guests defenseless. Resistance would only get me a fist in the gut, and frankly I’m just not in the mood. I give the galoot my gun and walk in.
The last time I was in this living room was a night in March of ’49. Crammed among the fine furnishings, English landscape paintings on the walls, and various antiquities here and there—a number of them supplied by me for hefty sums of Sig’s cash—were bushels of flowers for a wedding that was abruptly cancelled: Opal died that night, her wedding night. Sig took his revenge the next morning, soothed his broken heart with murder. I was there. I saw the woman Sig blamed for Opal’s death fall at my feet, a bullet in her skull. I saw Sig and his gunman drive away.
But before he drove away, Sig made a promise, the same promise he made again a year and a half ago when I handed over a Dürer watercolor that should’ve gone to a dead client’s heirs, or at least a museum. It was his promise to look into what happened to Sophie, a promise he hasn’t kept. Sig prides himself on his word, so either he really has no information, or his fabled square dealing is just that: a fable, a story line to calm unsuspecting marks before he cleans them out, runs them outta town, or kills them.
If it turns out Sig sees me as one of the marks, or even just a pest, then Mom’s right; he’ll kill me. Maybe not today, but when a moment comes up that suits him.
Bringing these thoughts into a meeting with Sig is a bad idea. Worrying over my own demise will blunt my energy, and any encounter with Sig Loreale requires operating at full spark. A deep breath and a swallow are the only weapons I have to squelch my dangerous thoughts. They do the trick, because they have to.
I knock on the door of the den.
“Come in, Cantor,” comes through the door in Sig’s terrifyingly quiet, scratchy voice, like claws scraping the wood, each word slow and precise, nothing sloppy, the same scalpel-sharp way Sig does business. He’s cultivated his manner of speech and his method of business to obliterate the messy, immigrant Coney Island background we both came from. I wonder, if I look hard enough, if I’ll see any of the same honky-tonk remnants in Sig that still lurk inside me. I doubt it. Sig’s too disciplined, his soul too cold to cozy up to any nostalgia, a soul grown only colder since Opal’s death.
He’s at his desk, a large burled maple affair in a burled maple paneled room that’s as much about power as taste, though the taste, I think, isn’t entirely Sig’s. Like the elegantly furnished living room, the den appears to be the work of the dearly departed Opal, whose mother, Mom Sheinbaum, bred Opal to marry into the American Dream. Mom sent her to all the right schools to acquire the culture and taste that come with them, rid Opal of the salami taint of the Lower East Side. To Mom’s disappointment, Sig Loreale, the up-from-the-gutter crime lord and killer, was the beneficiary of all that culture, instead of the square-jawed, blue-eyed American dreamboat Mom wanted for her precious Opal.
Sig, in shirtsleeves, a half-finished cup of coffee on the desk, is reading a newspaper when I come in. What for other people would be an otherwise benign activity is, in Sig’s hands, a tableau of his ruthlessly efficient control of life: his, and while I’m here, mine. His white shirt, crisp in the light from the windows and the glass-paned door to the terrace,
doesn’t have a single wrinkle, and wouldn’t dare. The gray-and-white houndstooth pattern of his tie is precisely aligned with the knot. The pinstripes on his charcoal suit-vest, fully buttoned, are in military straight lines. And though the cigar smoke curling around his face softens his jowly cheeks and the baggy pouches under his eyes, the smoke can’t hide the predatory menace in those eyes, despite his smile. It’s not a big smile, just a small sneer of satisfaction as he reads the same article about Greasy Thumb Guzik beating the rap that the pretty office girl read downstairs; only the office girl has no connection to Guzik or the judge who dismissed the charges against him. Sig, no doubt, does. Sig, no doubt, owns both Guzik and the judge. The judge, having done what he was told to do, will continue to live his plush, well-paid-for life for the foreseeable future. Jake Guzik will owe Sig his freedom. Both men will keep their mouths shut about anything they know regarding what goes on in the underworld. And Sig, to my relief, is in his ice-cold version of a good mood.
Without looking at me, he rests his cigar in a crystal ashtray on his desk, closes the newspaper, folds it neatly, and lays it beside his coffee cup. “Have a seat, Cantor,” he says. “If you want a cup of coffee, I can have it brought in for you.” It’s not a courteous offer. Just an agenda item he’d like to settle one way or the other.
“No thanks,” I say, and take off my coat and cap and lay them over one of the club chairs opposite Sig’s desk before I sit down in the other. The chairs, big, square, upholstered in steely gray leather, are more intimidating than welcoming, just like Sig.
He takes a sip of coffee, puts the cup down as meticulously as a surgeon positioning a scalpel on flesh, then finally looks at me, his ruthlessness all too visible in his narrowing eyes and the remnant of his sneer. “So, Cantor, why are you here?” Typical Sig. Right to business. No Good morning. No It’s been a long time. No How’ve you been. None of the pleasantries between people who’ve known each other nearly thirty years, since I was a little kid and he was a young tough muscling into the Coney rackets.
Lighting a smoke gives me time to gather my wits before I start the conversation that could either lead to my enlightenment or my demise. Sig’s watching my every move: my inhale, my exhale, the snap shut of my lighter. I don’t dare try his patience any longer. “Solly Schwartz’s kid, Mickey—Mickey Day, he called himself—”
“Is dead. Yes, Cantor, I know.” Two things make what he’d just said scary as hell: the fact that he already knows about Mickey’s death, and the slowness with which he said it. About the first: maybe Sig’s behind the killing, and poking my nose into it might be my death sentence, or maybe Sig’s web of connections just keep him informed, but poking my nose into anything in Coney Island could be my death sentence anyway. About the second: If he’d said it any slower, he wouldn’t have to kill me. I’d be dead of old age, my face frozen in a grimace of fear.
He picks up his cigar again, puffs it slowly while he keeps looking at me, the glowing tip of the cigar throwing a red flicker around his eyes, deepening the shadows under their pouches, making him look like a monster in a horror picture. I can’t tell if he’s waiting for me to speak or waiting to give me permission to speak. I go for the former, because I’ve never known Sig to waste time. “Mickey stole something from me,” I say, “and I need it back. It’s worth a lot of money to me from an important client. And it’s bad for business if word gets around that goods have been lifted right under my nose. But I don’t know where he’s hidden it. And I don’t know if he was killed for it or”—I’ve got to clear my guts out of my throat before I can finish the sentence—“or for some other reason.”
Sig’s cigar goes back into the ashtray again, mercifully taking the red glow from his eyes. But the cold smile is back, and it’s shaping itself into another of Sig’s terrifying habits. His head tilts back, his eyes crinkle, his mouth opens. He’s laughing but no sound comes out, a silent laugh that’s been making my skin crawl since I was a kid. As the laugh shrinks again into his chilly smile, he says, “And you want to know if I am responsible for the hit.”
I give him a nod. “If you are, it’s for your own reasons and I can assume it’s got nothing to do with my missing treasure, so I’ll need to look elsewhere for information. But if you’re not, then we both have a problem.”
He doesn’t look like a movie monster now, more like a professor who has a reputation for sadistic punishment if a student comes up with the wrong answer, and I’m the student.
But I can’t shrivel from the guy, can’t back down if I want Sig’s cooperation, or even just useful tidbits of information. So I stub out my smoke in the ashtray on the little glass table next to my chair, give Sig a show of confidence I barely feel, and keep talking. “Mickey told me he knew all about your real estate plans in Coney Island, and he didn’t like what you and your business partners have in mind, especially in the Gut. He figured you’re going to level every shack and bungalow in the neighborhood to make room for your apartment houses, throw everyone in the Gut out in the street.” Nothing’s moved on Sig’s face, no telltale tightening at the corner of his mouth, no inadvertent crinkle of his eyes, nothing to concede even the slightest guilt at throwing a couple thousand people out of their homes. He doesn’t care.
I keep going, even though I feel like I’ve been forced to swallow sharp shards of ice. “But just because Mickey didn’t like your plans didn’t mean he couldn’t see a way to profit by them.”
“And just how did Mr. Day expect to profit?” His acid tone could shred whole trees.
“He was hoping to be your man on the ground,” I say, “the inside guy in Coney who could feed you the real who’s who and what’s what among Coney’s real estate people, in exchange for taking his father’s rackets back. He…uh…lured me out there to ask me to set up a meeting with you, lay out his offer.”
Sig brings the cigar back to his mouth, but after a single puff he stubs it out, as if disgusted not just with the cigar but with me. “May I ask how he lured you? Was it money?”
“No, not money.” A dangerous little smile curls at the corner of my mouth. I try to snuff it, because the last thing I need is for Sig to think I find anything he says amusing. But the memory of Lilah’s body against mine ambushes me, and I can’t muzzle the smile the memory provokes.
All Sig says is, “Oh. Of course. His sister. I am told she is good-looking.”
My only response is an awkward nod and finally losing the silly smile.
“Cantor, I do not care who you—” he stops as if he’s tripped over something he doesn’t recognize and can’t figure out, then dismisses it and moves on—“well, whatever it is you do. But when your rutting collides with my business interests, then you are correct, we both have a problem. So to answer your question: No, I did not order Mr. Day’s death. He and his…his shabby operation were too small even to be annoyances. But his death, Cantor, that is another matter. His death will attract the notice of the police, which I will of course do my best to control, make sure their investigation is correctly focused. But there are new people on the force out there who are proving less cooperative than their predecessors.” His jaw tight, his eyes narrowed, the businessman in Sig has just made a mental memo to deal with those new people. “In the meantime,” he says, “I assume you will be going back to Coney Island to see if you can locate your lost article?”
“Yeah. Any idea where I might start?”
“I can’t help you there. The last time I saw Solly Schwartz’s boy was at his father’s funeral.”
I start to blurt, You went to the funeral of the man you killed? but immediately think better of it, just let Sig keep talking.
“I’ve been aware of Day’s business,” he says, “but not his personal habits, so I don’t know, or care, where he hid things. But I advise you to keep your head down, Cantor. I have people in Coney Island protecting my interests. They will be making sure Day’s killing doesn’t affect my business. Do not get in their way.”
“Wouldn’t
dream of it.”
“Good. So if there’s nothing else—”
“There is something else, Sig.” This is it. This is the moment that’s been gnawing at me for too long. If it goes sour, if I annoy Sig, I could wind up buried in some obscure landfill in an out of the way corner of Staten Island, maybe even Jersey. But I can’t let the moment pass by. I may not get this chance again anytime soon, or ever. And besides, risking my life is a small price for any scrap of information about Sophie. The loss of her has been eating me alive for too long. “When are you going to make good on your promise, Sig, to find out what happened to Sophie? When are you going to come through?”
He leans forward, slow as a locomotive gearing up its massive power, and I feel myself leaning back to escape his relentless force. I brace myself for whatever threat he’s getting ready to push at me.
I do everything I can to hide my tension. I cross my legs, flick a nonexistent speck of dust from my knee, take a deep, long breath.
But no threat comes. Instead, to my surprise, he leans back in his chair again, his body relaxing, his expression softening, which for Sig means he looks only slightly less deadly than a rabid dog. “You are still very much in love with this woman, yes, Cantor?”
“Do you really need to ask, Sig?”
“You know I always keep my promises, Cantor, always pay my debts. But you must understand that finding one boat in a very big ocean is not an easy business.”
“You want me to believe you’ve gotten no hints in all this time? There isn’t a dockworker who doesn’t owe his livelihood to you, Sig. There isn’t a dockside Mob boss who isn’t in your pocket. Someone must’ve seen something that night.”
