Tarnished Gold

by Ann Aptaker

Back in the living room, I put on my coat and cap, and after a last look around, a last sad glance at Hannah Jacobson’s blood on the floor and the walls—all that’s left of her—I put the folio inside my coat and walk out of her apartment.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Judson’s working the phone again when I come in. He shrugs and turns his palms up to let me know he’s got nothing new on the freighter. I nod acknowledgment on my way into my private office.

  I toss my coat and cap on the couch, pour myself a stiff scotch, and bring the scotch and the Dürer folio with me down to the basement.

  With its glaring overhead bulb, dusty concrete floor, bare brick walls, and assorted boxes of spare bulbs and electrical cords lying around, it looks like any other basement. So if the cops ever get lucky and find out about this place, all they’ll see is a clerical office upstairs and an ordinary basement downstairs. Except it’s not an ordinary basement. When I press a brick near the bottom corner of the back wall, a section of the wall opens like a large door. Inside that door is another door, a vault door. I dial the combination, pull the vault door open, and step into my treasure chest.

  Shelves on either side hold a king’s ransom of art, antiquities, and jewels that once sat snugly in museums, churches, castles, or villas of the well-to-do. Assorted royalty, presidents, prime ministers, and lesser lights among the world’s elite are still scratching their heads wondering how this stuff disappeared from their clutches, and they’d surely hang me if they knew. Some of these treasures are waiting for shipment, some are waiting to be paid for, and some I’m still negotiating among various buyers. Among the latter is a curator of Medieval art at Vivienne’s museum who’s interested in a small ivory Madonna I brought over from France about six months ago. It’s barely eight inches high, dating to the fourteenth century. The carving is as smooth as silk, the curve of her body under the folds of her robe as sensual as it is motherly, which is a good indication of the difference in how Europeans and Americans think of motherhood.

  I take another pull of the scotch, put the Dürer folio on a shelf, and wonder what to do with it. The obvious choice is to give it to the Stern family. If it’s anyone’s, it’s theirs. I’m sure Francine would treasure it, but if her mother gets her hands on it, she’d sell it, and probably to just anybody and certainly too fast and too cheap.

  My bank account would best be served by dealing with Hagen. With his connections, he’d get top dollar, and my 50 percent would keep me in silk suits and new Buicks for quite a few seasons.

  Vivienne’s museum would probably come up with the dough, too. The Dürer is quite a prize, a masterpiece by one of the most important artists of the Northern European Renaissance. I bet the museum’s trustees would rather rob their own banks than let it go to a rival museum, or worse, to a private collector outside their own old-money social circle. And Vivienne’s right about one thing: if it’s at her museum, everybody, every average Joe and Jane—not just Katherine and Francine Stern, not just Hagen’s cash-rich collectors—could see and experience Dürer’s brilliance.

  But it’s my personal interest that has the strongest pull, and my personal interest urges me to hand the Dürer over to Sig. It will buy his power to find the freighter that sailed away with Sophie.

  And if I don’t turn it over to Sig, he might kill me.

  The idea, though, of giving it to Sig, of letting the most murderous man in town profit from the death of Hannah Jacobson and Marcus Stern, turns my stomach.

  Meantime, none of the contenders know I have it, which means the killer doesn’t know I have it either. Keeping it secret keeps me alive.

  There’s a small strongbox at the end of the shelf. It contains an item I’ll never sell, an eighteenth-century Italian necklace of rubies set in filigreed gold. It was going to be a present for Sophie. I was going to give it to her the night I’d planned to ask her to live with me, the night I knocked on her door and no one answered, the night she was stolen from me.

  I don’t open the strongbox much anymore for the same reason I took the photo of us off my desk. Seeing it hurts too much. But there’s new hope now, a new chance I’ll find Sophie and bring her home. I open the box.

  The rubies sparkle like fresh blood, the gold’s old patina shimmers. Then both blur through tears I thought I’d conquered.

  I close the box, take a deep swallow of the scotch to deaden my teary moment, and go back upstairs, where I grab my coat and cap. There’s a place I need to go, and a lot of other things I need to do.

  In the outer office, Judson’s off the phone, but he’s not alone. He’s talking to Rosie, who’s perched on the edge of his desk. Neither of them look too happy. Judson looks like he’s expecting the schoolteacher to make him wear a dunce cap and send him to the back of the room. Rosie looks like she’s already been sent there.

  “Something I should know?” I say.

  Rosie slides off the desk, comes near me, and strokes my battered cheek. There’s enough sadness in her eyes to make a stone wall cry. “You sure take a beating,” she says, “and it never seems to stop.”

  I take her hand from my cheek, kiss her palm. I mean that kiss, every warm patch of it, but not in the way she wants. “No, it never seems to stop,” I say.

  Judson gets up from the desk, says, “Um, I’m going for coffee. Anybody want anything?” and walks to the door, escaping the awkward moment.

  “Don’t go yet, Judson,” I say. “I need to talk to you.”

  “I’ll only be a minute, Cantor.”

  It’s Rosie who saves the situation. It seems it’s always Rosie who saves any number of situations in my life. Taking her hand back from mine, she says, “No, Judson. You and Cantor have business. I gotta get going anyway. Workin’ a double shift. ’Bye, Cantor.” And with that, she walks past Judson and out the door.

  Judson shuffles back to his desk, leans against it like a guilty schoolboy. “Sorry, Cantor. I screwed up.”

  “Yeah? How? And what’s it got to do with Rosie acting like there’s a death in the family?”

  “Because she knows.”

  Judson catches on that I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  For a guy who always considers his words carefully, I’ve never seen Judson so tongue-tied. “I was, um…look, I was on the phone when Rosie came in. She heard me digging for information about the boat and Sophie, and when Rosie asked about it, I couldn’t cover it up. I can’t lie to her, Cantor, not to Rosie. So I blabbed it, told her about the first break in Sophie’s case in two years. And soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I’d screwed up. I should’ve let you tell her. I didn’t think, Cantor. I just—I didn’t think.”

  Yeah, I should’ve been the one to tell her, not that it would’ve been any easier on her to hear it from me. Rosie knows the score with me, about my freedom to take other women to my bed. She handles it because she knows she has my trust and they don’t. She also knows that though none of them could ever replace Sophie, she can’t either. It didn’t matter so much when Sophie was just a memory, a dream receding with each passing month. But the dream has suddenly taken on flesh. There’s a chance that Sophie, the living, breathing woman, will become part of my life again. And now Rosie, like Vivienne, knows she’s been pushed to the side of the road.

  Judson’s blab to Rosie is the only indiscretion he’s ever made since he started working for me. It might be the only indiscretion he’s ever committed in his life. And I figure he’ll make up for it by never committing another indiscretion ever again, about anything, even the most trivial, like telling me the odds he gets from his bookie.

  I put a friendly hand on his shoulder. “Don’t beat yourself up about it,” I say. “You’ve got something else to worry about right now. It seems there’s a leak in your gang of contacts.”

  He snaps out of his hangdog mood, his eyes open wide, curious and alarmed behind his glasses.

  “I just came from a meeting with Mom Sheinbaum and Sig Loreale,” I say. The color drains from Judso
n’s hollow cheeks at the mere mention of crime’s royal twosome. “Seems someone you talked to about the freighter also talked to Sig, or one of his minions. Anyway, it got back to him. It’s okay that he knows. It might even prove helpful, but—”

  “Yeah,” Judson jumps in, “nobody should be privy to our business but us. I’ll find the leak, Cantor. And I’ll plug it.”

  “Good. And by the way, in case anybody calls and asks about the Dürer—Loreale, Hagen, Mom, anybody—just keep telling them you have no new information.”

  “Got it.” Then, “Huh?” Judson’s a smart kid, my own personal genius, and he catches on fast. A smile full of curiosity creeps across his face.

  I say, “It’s downstairs.”

  He’s grinning now, not only at the news, but at the trust I’ve just shared with him again. “So where was it? Who had it?”

  “Hannah Jacobson had it. It never left her apartment. She prepared a hiding place for it until she could have it secured.”

  “Wow. She was one smart old girl.”

  “And a great lady,” I say. “She died defending the last vestige of her husband and children.” That idea hangs between us, the sadness of it threatening to devour everything else Judson and I need to do. “I have to go,” I say, breaking the dark spell. “I’ll check back later.”

  It’s time for me to take care of a loose end that’s been tickling me in all the wrong places. I have to confront Vivienne, find out one way or the other if she’s a killer. It’s best if I skip calling her, just show up at her office before she can concoct a story, or even beat it out of town.

  The phone rings on my way out. I leave Judson to handle it, but before I’m out the door, he calls, “Cantor! It’s Drogan on his ship-to-shore. Says it’s urgent.”

  Drogan’s not the dramatic type. If he says something’s urgent, he’s not kidding. So I go back to Judson’s desk and take the phone. “Yeah, Red, what’s up?”

  “Listen, you gotta come to my boat, Cantor, right now. Somethin’—somethin’ you gotta see.”

  “What’s it all about? You get a line on that freighter?”

  “I’ll tell you when you get here.”

  “You at your dock in Brooklyn?”

  “Nuh-uh. Remember that abandoned barge dock by Little West Street? I’m tied up over there.”

  “On my way.”

  *

  It’s nearly five o’clock when I park my Buick at the end of Little West Street, near Manhattan’s southern tip. The autumn sun’s getting low over the Hudson, sending golden ripples along the river and out onto New York Bay. The area’s quiet, almost deserted. Automobile traffic’s been passing this old dockside neighborhood by since the new Battery Tunnel to Brooklyn opened this past May. Trucks now carry freight to or from the Manhattan and Brooklyn docks at twice the speed and half the cost of tow barges. Barge life is drying up, the old salts who live on their tugs a passing breed.

  “Red?” I call out as I step aboard his tug.

  “Come below, Cantor.”

  I go down the few steps to the cabin, where a dark and deadly tableau is spread in front of me. In the sharp light and shadow of late afternoon, a bulky guy in a gray coat and fedora holds a .38 revolver to Drogan’s head. A second bulky guy in a similar getup holds another .38 to the head of Jimmy Shea. Shea’s tied to Red’s old wooden chair, a gag across his mouth, his head drooping, his face black-and-blue, his eyes swollen shut. They sure gave the guy a good working over.

  I don’t like anything about this scene except the fear on Shea’s face. Now the scum knows what it’s like to be on the receiving end. I’m tempted to have a good laugh, but I don’t dare. The guy with the gun to Drogan’s head might think I’m being a smart aleck and respond by pulling the trigger.

  The guy with the gun on Shea says, “Gold?”

  “Yeah, I’m Cantor Gold. What’s going on here?”

  There’s a muffled pop, the savage whisper of a silenced gun, and Jimmy’s head has a hole in the temple, blood spraying.

  The shooter looks straight at me, the whites of his eyes gray and steely in the shadow of his hat. “Compliments of Mr. Loreale,” he says. “Shea won’t do business with cops no more.”

  The other guy lowers his gun from Drogan’s head, then both thugs push past me, thump up the stairs, and get off the boat.

  It takes me a minute to find my breath, let my eyes blink, get my heart beating again. By the time my nerve ends are back in place, Red’s already pouring two glasses of whiskey, his hands shaking.

  We each down the whiskey, a decent bourbon. It steadies us.

  Red says, “Those guys tracked me through that sonovabitch harbor master, who radioed me to come in to Pier A. That’s where those guys dragged Shea aboard, put guns to our heads, and ordered me to steam over here and call you.” Red pours us each another drink. He downs his fast.

  I sip mine slowly, thinking, figuring something out. “Sig wanted me to see this, Red. He could’ve had Jimmy knocked off quietly, gotten word to me later, but he wanted me to see this.”

  “Yeah, I figured. But why?”

  “Because he has a sense of humor after all. A criminal sense of humor.” And now I laugh, a slightly crazed chuckle that builds into a more than slightly crazed guffaw that fills me with an almost drunken pleasure. I’m laughing the laugh of outlaws, enjoying the right we give ourselves to do things upright citizens are too scared to do. I say to Red, “Even though it’s Sig who had Jimmy killed, it’s me he’s giving the honor of actually getting rid of him. Fire up the engine, Red, and sail us out to sea!”

  *

  Out beyond New York Harbor, south of Long Island’s beaches and east of the New Jersey coast, Drogan parks us in a lonely spot in the Atlantic Ocean that sits over the Hudson Canyon, an undersea trough that plunges nearly a mile down from the ocean floor. In the last light of a red sunset at the tug’s stern, I tie Jimmy’s body to a rusty old anchor Drogan kept around for scrap, then hoist him and the anchor overboard. Jimmy hits the water with a big splash, which would’ve made him happy. Then he sinks fast, which wouldn’t.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It’s nearly eight o’clock by the time I’m home and in the shower. The hot water washes away the grime of sea spray and the soot from the smokestack of Drogan’s tug, but it can’t wash away the dirty truth that I’m part of yet another death. Sure, Jimmy’s death was personally satisfying, but it was murder nonetheless, and murder is always dirty.

  And the hot water can’t stop the shivers coming over me when I think Lieutenant Huber might be right about death squads following me around. Maybe I should start wearing a black hood and carry a sickle.

  Huber. I wonder what Sig’s got in mind for the guy. Shea’s treachery with Huber ended in Jimmy’s death, but a mobster’s killing is just day-to-day business in this town. The cops even think you’re doing them a favor. But killing a cop is another story entirely. It’s dangerous. It crosses a line, sets the blue boys on a rampage through the underworld, busting up rackets and rounding up citizens whether they had anything to do with the killing or not. Sig’s too smart for such a destructive move; then again, he could have it done so quietly and efficiently, the cops might not realize Huber’s missing until his grandchild gets married and he doesn’t show up for the wedding.

  After the shower, a double Chivas and a leftover chicken leg take care of basic survival. A change into a dark green silk suit, clean white shirt, and dark green and black tie freshens my mood. My .38 under my arm and extra rounds in my pocket stiffen my resolve.

  The overcoat and tweed cap I wore all day are grimy from the Shea killing and its briny aftermath, so I slip into a black coat and cap instead, then shut the living room light on my way out the door.

  *

  “Is Miss Trent in, George?”

  “I will inform her you’re here.”

  I walk past him and into the vestibule. “No, don’t tell her I’m here,” I say. “Just tell me where she is.”

  “I’m
sorry, you know I can’t do that.”

  “Sure you can. It’s not hard.”

  With a deep breath indicating his solemn commitment to duty and rectitude, he says, “I cannot and will not betray the wishes of my employer, and her wish is that I inform her of all visitors. You are aware of that, I’m sure.”

  “Yeah, I’m aware of it, but if you tell her I’m at the front door, she may hightail it out the back, and then I’d have to chase her all over town. And after the hellish day I’ve had, a hectic chase isn’t appealing, even if it’s chasing one of the prettiest skirts in town. Now, tell me where she is, George.” I haven’t pulled my gun or laid a hand on the guy, but a theatrical touch of thuggery in my voice and manner scares him enough.

  His face pale as porridge, he says, “She—Miss Trent is in the library.”

  Giving him a smile and a friendly pat on the arm, I say, “Thank you, George. See? I knew you could do it if you tried.” That stings him, and rather than suffer further insult to his butler’s pride, he pointedly forgoes taking my coat and cap, turns on his heel, and walks away.

  I really like the guy.

  I take my cap off, start to hang it on the elephant tusk coatrack, then back away as if the thing is about to gore me. It reminds me of Vivienne’s mother’s crackup at seeing her husband torn apart in the jungle, a horror that caused her already fragile mind to crumble. It reminds me of the violence of the up-from-the-gutter Trents, ridding themselves of rivals, with more recent generations dignifying their bloodlust through the aristocratic sport of killing game. Those elephant tusks remind me that madness and violence might be part of Vivienne.

  The library is across the hall from the living room. When I walk in, Vivienne’s working at her desk, a great big black-walnut affair with fancy brass fittings and a brass desk set with an oversized ashtray and lighter. Floor-to-ceiling shelves of old books wrap the library in a leathery aura of lineage. A bunch of open books strewn across a big library table give the room a scholarly air, while a radio playing on a bookshelf behind Vivienne’s desk—a saxophone’s purring a lovelorn tune—struggles to give the blue-blooded room a touch of common humanity.