by Ann Aptaker
I also wonder how many guys with guns are patrolling nearby, unseen in the thick stand of cedars on either side of the steel gates. A big shot as careful as Sig Loreale doesn’t trust his safety to just sticks of steel and a piddly little intercom at the side of the driveway. If I want to find out how many gunmen are in the bushes, all I have to do is make one wrong move.
I leave my hands on the Buick’s steering wheel.
The big steel gates swing open. I’m tempted to wave as I drive through, but think better of it.
I have to hand it to Sig; his seaside place isn’t the usual fantasy Gothic castle or fussy fake Rococo, Georgian or Beaux Arts palace most of Long Island’s grandees built for themselves. Sig’s place, on a grassy slope above the sea, is a Modernist tour de force. Approaching it along the long driveway, the clean lines and geometry of the pale blue-green multilevel massed forms rise as testaments to clear thinking, the kind of thinking ruthlessly practiced by the crime boss who lives inside.
Sunlight off the bay glows gold on the sleek windows as I drive into the circular driveway in front of the house. Sig’s security thugs aren’t hidden in the bushes here; they’re right out front— two bulky guys in coats and fedoras patrolling the area, two other bulky guys at either side of the walkway to the front door. I park the Buick next to the walkway.
I recognize one of the guys guarding the place, an assassin named Mike Mulroney. He recognizes me. As I get out of the car, Mulroney looks me over with annoyingly pale blue eyes that have no business being in the face of a brutal killer. His look is a silent command to hand over the gun he knows I’m carrying. I don’t argue. There’s no point, since it’s an argument that would end with me roughed up and splayed out on the driveway. And anyway, I know I’ll get the gun back when I leave. It’s all part of the ritual.
“Cantor,” is all Mulroney says as I pull my .38 from its rig under my suit jacket. Sunlight glints on the gun’s three-inch barrel and blued finish.
“Mike,” is all I say in return, and start for the house.
A gardener in khakis and tan apron is busy trimming the low hedges along the walkway. He gives me a side-eye as I walk toward him. I know that look: slightly baffled, more than slightly disgusted at the sight of a dame in a gentleman’s black coat and tweed cap. I smile at him and open my coat to give him a good look at the full picture: my pale gray suit, white shirt, gray and green tie. “Good afternoon,” I say as I walk past him. Such moments are always fun.
Less than a minute after I ring the doorbell, a butler opens the door. Anyway, he looks like a real butler. He’s trim as a steel rod in his butler’s getup, but I’d bet even money there’s a .38 nestled neatly inside his livery. “Mr. Loreale will see you in the living room. Please follow me.”
I follow the guy through a wide, stone-walled vestibule, the stone a warm, sandy color made brighter by the sun streaming through big plate glass windows. The vestibule empties into the large living room, its sloped, beamed ceiling ending in a curved wall of paned glass facing the bay. Bookshelves and a built-in television set line a side wall, an even paler version of the seaside blue-green of the exterior. Early twentieth-century Modernist paintings hang on the opposite wall. I supplied three of the paintings: a wildly colorful landscape of the French seashore by Matisse, an aggressive image of a train by the Italian Futurist Gino Severini that an English financier had to get rid of with no questions asked, and an early Picasso sketch of a horse.
Seated in a big club chair, reading the sports pages of the Daily News in the midst of all this elegant design, is the man whose chilly presence defies the warmth of the pumpkin color upholstering on the modern chairs and couches: Sig Loreale. Even his lord-of-the-manor casual attire of brown trousers and roomy pale blue shirt open at the collar can’t soften the menace in his steely gray, heavy-lidded eyes in his fleshy face, his jowls thickened into less forgiving regions of later middle age.
He doesn’t bother to get up when I walk in. He just puts down the newspaper, nods to the butler, who discreetly scrams. Sig looks at me like he’s trying to look through me, then says in that slow, overly articulate way of his that gives me the creeps, “Why are you here, Cantor?” His cold, guttural voice has all the charm of ice cracking. Sig never indulges in small talk, not even a hello, or asking if I’d like a drink or a cuppa coffee, not even an invitation to take my coat off and sit down.
If you didn’t know the guy, you’d never guess that the hard-eyed, steel-souled crime boss seated in his big chair was once a lovestruck suitor who’d had his heart broken. You might even think he hasn’t got a heart. I guess he had one long ago, but I figure he lost it when he lost the love of his life to betrayal and violence on his wedding night. So I guess you could say we both had a love that was stolen from us; we both have a wound that will never heal, though the idea of sharing an emotional experience with a guy like Sig makes my stomach tighten. We already share a Coney Island past. That’s all the sharing with Sig I can handle.
I take my cap and coat off and sit down in the chair opposite him. “I’d like some information,” I say. “There isn’t a killing in New York you don’t know about, and the police are trying to throw two of them into my lap.”
The stare he gives me is one that’s pinned me many times over the years. Cold, probing, slightly annoyed as if I’ve interrupted his day. I used to shrivel under it when I was a kid. Now I just wait it out, even light a cigarette to establish my own place in our tête-à-tête.
And then he does something that makes my skin crawl, has always made my skin crawl since the first time I saw him do it when I was a kid no taller than his belt. His mouth opens, his eyes crinkle, and his head tilts back in a silent laugh.
It’s always a relief when that laugh is done and he reverts to his comfortably icy self. “Your life is a joke, Cantor,” he says, every word like a scythe slowly cutting me down to size. “Your problem is you don’t know how to stay out of trouble.”
“I wasn’t looking for it, Sig. It found me.”
His hand moves as slow as his speech as he opens a humidor on a small square steel and glass table next to him and takes out a cigar and a cutter. He snips the end, puts the cigar in his mouth, takes a lighter from his pocket, and lights his smoke. I’m sure I’ve aged a year by the time he says, “One of those deaths wouldn’t be Eve Garraway’s, would it?” The words come through puffs of smoke that halo his face as if he’s the Lord of Hell.
I stop myself from saying, “You heard about the Garraway killing?” because of course he’s already heard about it. I just nod.
“And the other worked for that shyster, Otis Hollander, am I correct?”
I nod again, marveling at how deep Sig’s information goes, how wide his net. Lorraine Quinn wasn’t important enough to get Sig’s notice. So it’s probably Hollander who’s on his radar. If the lawyer is having a gangster like Johnny Tenzi followed, you can bet Sig will know about it.
He takes another puff of the cigar, the red tip sending a glow up to his eyes, making him even scarier than usual. “So, am I to assume you were doing your normal business with Eve Garraway,” he says, “which is why you were at her house?”
“That’s right.”
“And the Hollander dame?”
“Yeah, Lorraine Quinn.”
“What was your business with her? Or was it business at all?”
Sig’s lopsided smirk is even scarier than his laugh. His thick lips part just a little at one side of his mouth, showing a thin line of teeth. Makes me wish I had a stiff scotch to blunt its bone-chilling effect.
But I don’t have any scotch. All I have is my cigarette and my determination to get the information I came for. A long drag of my smoke gives me the seconds I need to get out from under Sig’s cruel humor and bring the conversation back to business. “Tap Tenzi might be involved,” I say. “Hollander’s tailing him on behalf of Tenzi’s wife, Alice. Used to be Alice Lamarr. I think Lorraine Quinn might have set up the tail.”
“And in
your opinion, Tenzi killed Quinn for— what— vengeance? Spite?”
“Could be. Tap’s just stupid enough to think that putting Quinn away would help his case by getting her off his tail. But that leaves the Garraway killing still dangling. I can’t see where Tenzi might be part of that.”
“Does he hate you enough?”
The question seeps through me, slow but sharp, like acid corroding my bones down to my marrow. I haven’t had a lot of dealings with Tap Tenzi, just now and then through the threads of our shared criminal world. But we have one connection, one intimate, beautiful, treacherous connection: Alice Lamarr.
They say the two favorite motives for murder are love or money. Add jealousy under the love heading. Maybe Tap’s jealousy is vengeful enough to come after me for my carnal knowledge of Alice.
But where does Eve Garraway fit in?
Is Tenzi stalking me? Framing me?
Sig’s voice comes through my tangle of thoughts. “How many other people hate you, Cantor?”
• • •
Time spent with Sig always leaves a bad taste in my mouth, like I’ve just swallowed gunpowder. The powder burns even deeper today because Sig’s question eats right through to my gut. Sure, the Law and all its lackeys— cops, judges— hate me, and so do all those upright citizens who jeer at my love life.
But all that is abstract, just a chill air that hovers around me but which I ignore. Sig’s question is full of heat, a red-hot branding iron with my name on it. Sig’s question, How many other people hate you, Cantor?, makes the hate personal, a fire in my soul that even the sea breeze can’t cool as I drive back along Manhasset Bay.
How many other people hate me? Who hates me enough to commit murder and toss the bodies at my feet, set me up for the handcuffs and the Sing Sing chair? Who the hell is stalking me?
Maybe nobody. Maybe two killings in one morning has simply rattled me. Maybe the deaths of Lorraine Quinn and Eve Garraway have nothing to do with each other, and I’m just the unlucky sap to be around for both. And maybe, for once in his bitter life, Lieutenant Huber will be a good detective and slam the cuffs on the actual guilty parties.
That fantasy’s about as comforting as cold coffee.
There is one comforting thing to come out of my trip to Long Island, though: Sig agreed to look into the Quinn and Garraway killings. Not that he’s doing me any favors. He’s doing himself a favor. He doesn’t like loose ends, and two murders thrown at the feet of someone he’s done business with, me, are more than just loose ends. It’s a fraying knot. If that knot frays loose, it could expose all those dirty cops, tainted judges, greedy politicians and corporate thieves Sig’s been tying up for years in his web of cash and corruption. They’d all go down, and some of them might be stupid enough to try to take Sig with them.
Having Sig Loreale against you can bring doom to your business, your career, your life. But having him on your side is second only to having God in your corner, and frankly, God’s never done me any favors.
Chapter Six
There’s a downtown saloon along the East River docks, Oyster Charlie’s, where tugboaters grab a plate of oysters, a quick beer, or a cup of coffee between runs. They don’t get drunk. The busy waterways of New York won’t let them.
The saloon’s the kind of place where dockside gossip and baseball stories about Yankee Stadium’s Bronx Bombers, Brooklyn’s Dem Bums, and the Polo Ground’s G-Men are traded across bar stools and at wooden tables darkened by years of spilled drinks and calloused hands stained with soot. Charlie, the original proprietor, has been dead for at least fifty years. The current owner, Charlie’s grandson, goes by the name of Gus. His daughter’s name is Pauline, a sweet kid just old enough to work the bar, which is what she’s doing when I walk in a little after two-thirty in the afternoon. I take my cap off and nod to her in greeting. Pauline cocks her head toward a table in the corner. She knows who I’m looking for, who I meet here when he’s not on the water.
Red Drogan’s at the table, enjoying a cup of coffee and a jabber with an old salt I don’t know. Seeing me, Drogan says something to his pal, gets up, and waves me over to an empty table.
“Cantor,” he says in greeting, his throaty rattle making my name sound like a storm at sea. Red’s got a friendly face, deeply lined and crusty with smarts. We’ve worked together for a long time, made many a midnight run through the harbor on his tug. We trust each other with our lives. He trusts me with his money.
So he doesn’t get all showy when I hand him an envelope he knows contains twenty-five hundred cash, his cut for slipping me and the little Sumerian votive figure into port. All he says is, “You want coffee? How ’bout a drink?”
“I could use a stiff one,” I say. “I just came from a meeting with Loreale. That’s enough to make anyone want to get blotto.” I signal Pauline to bring me a double scotch, no ice, no water. “Listen, Red, something’s probably going to hit the afternoon papers. The client for your twenty-five grand, Eve Garraway, she’s dead. Knifed. I was there when it happened. Didn’t see it, but Huber wants to hang it on me. He’ll likely question everyone I ever shook hands with, so he might find his way to you.”
Pauline brings me my drink, then scurries away. Eavesdropping has been thoroughly bred out of her saloonkeeper family’s bloodline.
I take a pull on the scotch, take out my pack of smokes, and light one up. The whiskey’s not my preferred Chivas Regal, not in a dockside joint like this, but it’s sharp and strong, and the alcohol will help focus my thoughts, while the smoke will keep the conversation easy.
Drogan says, “If Huber comes around, hell, I ain’t never heard of no Eve Garraway.” His wind-bloodshot eyes twinkle and crease over a smile full of sly amusement.
“Never doubted you, Red. I just figured I’d warn you so you can be ready if Huber comes at you.”
“If he’s smart, he won’t start askin’ no questions along the docks. He’ll get nothin’ but the big silence.”
Now it’s my turn to be amused. “Who said he’s smart?”
• • •
There’s another angle I should take a look at. One that has nothing to do with Lorraine Quinn but might get me a line on Eve Garraway and her collection of treasures. And there’s one person in town who knows who’s got what, what’s moving around, who’s moving it, who’s stealing it, and who’s paying.
It’s a short drive from the downtown East River docks to the Lower East Side neighborhood of Esther Sheinbaum, known to one and all in the underworld as Mom.
I pull up in front of her Second Avenue brownstone, but don’t get out of my car. Instead, I flip the switch to put the Buick’s convertible top up, and when it’s in place I lock it down and just sit quiet in the driver’s seat, leaving the window open. I take a minute to breathe in the comforting scents of tangy pastrami and corned beef wafting from the neighborhood’s delicatessens, catch the shouts of kids playing stickball in the street, the squeals of girls playing potsie on the sidewalk, and the singsong spiels of the last of the neighborhood’s pushcart peddlers, a disappearing breed still hawking vegetables, kitchen knives, used clothing, and old books. These ancient sensations help me keep my fingers from clenching and my jaw from tightening at the idea of dealing with the mountainous old woman who lives in the brownstone.
Mom Sheinbaum is the most successful fence of contraband goods in New York, and has been since the twilight of the horse and carriage days. She taught me a lot when I was still a kid lifting trinkets in Coney Island and trying to sell them on the streets of Manhattan. She taught me the difference between the good stuff and schlock. When I grew up, she introduced me to New York’s high and mighty: its politicians, their pockets stuffed with cash; high society types who want to hoard the world’s treasures; social climbers who want to buy their way into the city’s better circles; all of them my pool of future clients. Mom taught me how to deal with them, how to flatter them, never to trust them, and how to pry their money from their tight fists. Yeah, you could say sh
e mentored me; you could even say she was like a second mother to me, the outlaw mother for an outlaw kid. She was all that to me until a few years ago when I heard from her own lips that I was just business, and unpleasant business at that. Mom likes my racket, my smarts, the money I make, but she gags on my preference for gentlemen’s suits and that I take women to my bed.
Nothing’s changed. We still do business, underworld family members who can’t be rid of each other.
I finally roll up the window, get out of the car, and climb the front stairs to Mom’s door.
I use the time after I press the door buzzer to straighten my tie and make sure the buttons of my black wool coat are lined up, the lapels flat, my gray tweed cap on straight. Mom may not approve of the way I dress, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to meet her sloppy.
The door opens, and I’m met by a boulder of flesh in a sensible blue cotton dress whose belt accentuates her bulk. The waves of Mom’s silvery hair around her puffy face catch the afternoon sunlight, creating an aura fit for the city’s Empress of Crime. Her tiny green eyes pin me with suspicious surprise. “I was not expecting you, Cantor,” she says in the singsong accent of the old neighborhood, the syllables of my name coming across as Kentuh. “You have goods for me?”
“How about if I come in? Let’s not talk on the stoop about why I’m here.”
She looks at me as if I’m a disappointment which might yet measure up, though doubtful. “Yeah, sure,” she says with a cock of her head and a wave of her pudgy hand, her jeweled rings flashing in the light. “C’mon in.”
I follow her into the house, through the vestibule and into a parlor where a console television set looks out of place in a room still furnished in the overstuffed style of the gaslight days. Beyond the parlor we arrive at our usual place for conversation, the dining room. The house, as always, has the nostalgia-sweet aroma of honey cake because, as always, there’s a loaf on a tray on the dining table, the mahogany polished to a mirror shine.