Murder and Gold

by Ann Aptaker

  Mom takes her place at the head of the table. She settles herself into a chair, exhaling a throaty sigh of age, weight, and effort. She pours herself a cup of tea from the floral pot next to the tray of honey cake. “If you want some tea,” she says with a shrug, “maybe a slice of honey cake, go get your own cup and saucer and a plate from the kitchen.”

  “I’ll pass,” I say and head for the liquor cabinet in the sideboard, an ornately carved mahogany affair as regally old-fashioned as everything else in the house, including Mom. “I need something a lot stronger.”

  Mom says, “Bad day, Cantor?” through a laugh that has all the geniality of a spit in the eye.

  I pour myself a big belt of Chivas, take a pull, let the good scotch smooth out the rotgut that singed my throat at Oyster Charlie’s. “Murder always makes a bad day,” I say.

  “Depends who’s dead,” Mom says. “Listen, mamaleh, if you’re getting me mixed up in some murder, you can turn right around and go back outside. I don’t need the aggravation.”

  “I’m not getting you mixed up in anything,” I say. “I came here to root around in that all-knowing brain of yours. What do you know about Eve Garraway?”

  “Boss John Garraway’s kid with the fency-shmency collection of goods? You do business with her and you don’t tell me?”

  “It wasn’t a fence job, Mom. And it doesn’t matter now, anyway. Eve Garraway’s dead. Knifed. You’ll probably read about it in the afternoon papers. But maybe you can tell me if anyone had any interest in the Garraway stuff besides me and the usual crowd of museum people and collectors. Maybe you heard something about someone making a play on Garraway’s collection? You pick up any noise about any threats to her?”

  “There’s always talk about her goods,” Mom says with a tsk and a wave of her hand. “She hoards her tchotchkes like food during a plague. But threats? Nah. Not that I heard. Not a word, not a peep. Why you want to know all this, Cantor? She get killed before you got paid? You lookin’ to collect from whoever shivved her?” This last rides on a chuckle as she takes another sip of tea.

  “I’m looking to stay out of the electric chair,” I say. “You remember Lieutenant Huber?”

  Mom lowers her teacup slowly, the porcelain barely making a sound when it comes to rest on the saucer. Her small eyes tighten under a frown of anger and misery. It was Huber who viciously grilled Mom right here in this room on the night of her daughter Opal’s murder five years ago. It was only through a discipline fine-tuned over years of playing it smart with cops that Mom didn’t strangle Huber with her bare hands then and there.

  It was the same night Opal was supposed to marry Sig, the same night Mom spilled what she really thinks of me. It was a lousy night all the way around.

  “Huber wants to pin me for the Garraway killing,” I say.

  The old woman’s frown softens, recedes, as she slowly returns to the here and now. She picks up her teacup again, looks at me as she takes a sip. If I didn’t know better, if I hadn’t heard from Mom’s own lips of her less than loving regard for me, I might believe I see worry in her eyes. “Why?” she says as she sets the cup down again. “What’s that mamzer got on you?”

  “I was there,” I say. “I was still in the house when Eve was knifed. It probably happened when I was on my way out the door. I heard about it from the Garraway butler, Desmond Mallory. You remember him? Worked bank jobs in the old days. I was still on the street when he came outside and waved me back into the Garraway house.”

  The mention of Desmond Mallory gets Mom’s attention. Even makes her smile, though it’s a surprisingly chilly one. I figured Mom and Desmond go way back, crossed paths in the old days, came up through the old ways. “Sit down, Cantor,” she says. “Tell me what’s what.”

  The way she says it has an if you know what’s good for you tone under it. So I refresh my scotch, take a seat near Mom at the dining table, and give her the whole story, Lorraine Quinn included. I spend the next fifteen minutes spilling the goods, from finding Lorraine dead on my doorstep with Huber hovering over the body to delivering the little Sumerian to Eve Garraway, to the arrival of Vivienne Parkhurst Trent, and finishing with Huber’s arrival at the Garraway place and his threat to take me in for two killings. “If it wasn’t for Vivienne’s clout with the top brass, Huber might’ve hauled me to the city lockup and wrapped a death sentence around my neck.”

  If Mom’s, “Lucky you,” was any drier, sand would come out of her mouth. “So you’re telling me that the only person who was in the house when the Garraway woman got killed was Desmond. Am I right?”

  “And the killer. Or if you’re saying Desmond killed Eve, uh-uh. Old Man Garraway took him in when no one else would touch a broken, washed-up bank robber. Desmond’s been loyal to the Garraways ever since.”

  Mom’s tsk and dismissive wince accuse me of wasting her time. “What’s the matter with you, Cantor? Didn’t you learn anything since you were a kid schlepping your bundle of tchotchkes? Didn’t I teach you? Dogs are loyal. People are another story.”

  I could tell her I know all about mistaken loyalty, learned it from her the night she skinned me alive, but I’m not here to talk about my hard knocks education. I just stick to business. “I don’t buy that Desmond had anything to do with Eve’s death, but even if he did—”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time he’s killed,” Mom says through a snort of a laugh. “You know that story about the guy he knocked off years ago? A guy who’d hired him for a stickup job, no less. Yeah, he’s real loyal.”

  I get a kick out of Mom’s use of the old-fashioned term stickup job. Haven’t heard those words since I was that kid schlepping that bundle. “Like you say, Mom, that was years ago. And anyway, Desmond’s only connected to Eve Garraway. He’s got nothing to do with Lorraine Quinn. And Quinn, by the way, worked for Otis Hollander, the divorce shyster.”

  “Some company she kept,” Mom says with a shrug and a sip of tea.

  “It gets worse,” I say. “It seems Quinn set up the tails on cheating spouses. Otis Hollander is representing Alice Lamarr. She’s divorcing Tap Tenzi.”

  “So who’d be stupid enough to marry a no-good like Tenzi? Guess she finally wised up. You think maybe Tenzi killed Quinn for tailing him? Wouldn’t put it past him. Spiteful little shit. He was always a kleyn denker, a small thinker.”

  “Yeah, spite’s right up Tap’s alley. I heard he once sliced a guy’s hand just because the guy beat Tap in a poker game. Even Sig figured—”

  Mom snaps, “You spoke to Sig?”

  “I was at his place on Long Island a little while ago.”

  “Me, I never been out there.” There’s a trace of bitterness in Mom’s voice, a wince she can’t quite cover up. She’s never forgiven Sig for putting her daughter Opal in danger by romancing her. Mom worked hard to keep her precious American-born bundle of joy out of the criminal life, and then Sig came along, fell in love, and swept Opal off her feet. Mom’s hopes for her precious, American-born daughter was a future with an upright, square-jawed, blue-eyed dreamboat whose place in America was unquestioned. Those hopes died the minute Opal and Sig laid eyes on each other. “So what did the high and mighty Mr. Sig Loreale have to say?”

  “He thinks someone hates me enough to frame me.”

  “For both killings?”

  I answer with a nod, then say, “That’s why I need to get ahead of Huber, see if I can separate the Quinn and Garraway deaths. That’s why I need to know if you can get a line on any activity around Garraway’s collection, see if anyone planned to make a play.”

  “And what do I get for my trouble, Cantor?”

  “What do you want that I haven’t already given you over the years?”

  Her smile is knowing, sly, greedy. I’ve seen it a thousand times. It used to amuse me. “You say you got paid for the Garraway job?” she says and extends an arm across the dining table, rubbing her thumb and forefinger together.

  Now it’s me who’s smiling. It’s not a friendly s
mile, no warmth in it, no joy, no pleasure. It’s just my move in the emotional chess game Mom and I play.

  I take out the envelope of cash from my coat pocket, peel out a grand and slide it across the table.

  She wraps her finger around the bills. “I’ll be in touch.”

  • • •

  Two blocks west of City Hall, on a loud, gritty stretch of Chambers Street, Otis Hollander occupies a fourth-floor office in an Italianate building whose white façade and fussy pedimented windows are stained from fifty years of soot. It’s a pretty good announcement of the dirty side of the legal racket where Otis Hollander does business. The other law firms in this building aren’t any cleaner. They’re either the ambulance chasing type or the cheating spouse type. Strictly gutter trade.

  Inside Hollander’s pea-soup green outer office, a receptionist at a battered desk abruptly stops typing when I walk in. The look she gives me could straighten her hair, a shiny cascade of brown waves coming to rest on the shoulders of her fuzzy pink angora sweater, which I notice fits her very nicely. Framing her shocked hazel eyes is a corn-fed face, mascaraed, rouged, and lipsticked to pass for big city savvy. “Can I— may I help you?”

  I decide to have some big city fun with her. I give her my most chivalrous smile. “Well, that depends,” I say, making a big show of looking at my watch. “It’s nearly four-thirty, almost your quitting time. You busy after work?” Yeah, sure, I know, I’m being a cad again. But once in a while it’s fun to pull society’s leg. They want to jail me; I want to kid them.

  “I think you’d better leave,” she says. “We don’t do—”

  “Oh yes you do. Otis Hollander’s sleazy law office does business with all kinds. And by the way, why aren’t you crying?”

  I guess the corn-fed girl has been in New York long enough to develop some savvy after all. A hard-edged twin emerges through the shocked sister. The corn-fed face disappears behind the mascara and lipstick.

  I lean over the desk, put my face close to hers, put my hand under her chin to stop her from looking away. My next words are a gamble. “I guess Miss Quinn’s murder means nothing to you. There isn’t even a hint of a tear in either of your pretty eyes.”

  There’s no surprise on her face either, which tells me that the police have already been here, already traced Lorraine to her place of employment. The only expression on the receptionist’s face is boredom with a sideswipe of contempt. “I won’t shed any tears for Lorraine. She isn’t worth crying over. She’d stab you in the back as sure as I’m sitting here. And I said so to that detective, too.”

  “His name wouldn’t be Huber, would it?”

  “Yeah, that’s him. Nasty sort. Looked at me like maybe I killed Lorraine.”

  “Maybe you did. You could have done it before you came to work.”

  That does it; she’s had enough, and she swats my hand away. “I didn’t kill her, but I’d like to send flowers to whoever did.”

  “Is that so? Why? What was your beef with Quinn?”

  She turns back to her typing, the color in her face gone flat, her skin as pale as a sheet of paper. “You’ll have to ask Mr. Hollander.”

  “That’s exactly what I came here to do. Tell Otis Cantor Gold is here to see him. And by the way, what’s your name?”

  “You’ll have to ask Mr. Hollander that, too.” She presses a button on the intercom on her desk, speaks into it, announcing me to Hollander.

  There’s a silence behind the hum of the intercom, until Hollander’s iron hard, “Send her in.”

  With a tip of my cap to the receptionist, I saunter over and open the door that has Otis Hollander’s name emblazoned on it in flaking gold letters.

  The décor in his office is what you might call Low Rent Attorney Traditional. The walls are painted forest green, but the woodwork isn’t classy walnut or mahogany or deep cherry. It’s just plain old pine wainscoting painted brown. The expected pair of brown leather overstuffed chairs, the leather cracking, face a big desk painted black, the surface cluttered with folders and papers and a cheap brass ashtray that needs emptying.

  Otis Hollander, a balding guy of about fifty with a clipped salt-and-pepper mustache and wolfish gray eyes in a round face, gets up from his desk to greet me. His office may be at the edge of shabby, but his crisp white shirt, navy-and-red striped tie and navy blue pinstripe suit aren’t, which gives you an idea of where Otis Hollander likes to put his money. He’s not interested in impressing the desperate, love-forsaken people who come to his office. He cares about impressing the people who see him in court or in the nightspots about town, usually with a buxom number on his arm.

  “Hello, Otis,” I say, extending a hand.

  “Cantor, always a pleasure,” he answers, taking it. He nods for me to have a seat in one of the leather chairs.

  I take out my pack of smokes when I’m seated. Hollander takes out a silver cigarette case from his inside jacket pocket. We both light up, eyeing each other as smoke drifts around us.

  He says, “What brings you here, Cantor? I’m pretty sure you don’t have marriage problems.” He says it to be funny.

  “I’m here about Lorraine Quinn. She was knifed at the front door of my apartment building.”

  Hollander takes deep drag of his smoke, lets it out slowly, his eyes on me while he deals with what I just said. “The police didn’t mention that it happened at your place,” he says as matter-of-factly as if he’s talking about the weather.

  “They don’t know you and I are acquainted, Otis.”

  “Aren’t we lucky.”

  That’s worth a shrug and a lazy, “Uh-huh,” from me.

  “Any idea what Miss Quinn was doing at your building?” he says.

  “Leaving.”

  There’s a slight crinkle at the edges of Hollander’s predatory eyes and a barely perceptible twitch of his mustache over a small smile. The smarmy pleasure in the smile comes from his dawning awareness of how I know Lorraine was leaving my building.

  His smile snaps into something darker, a cynical leer oozing suspicion. “Did you know she worked here, Cantor, when you two were— well, doing whatever the hell it is you do?”

  The way he’s looking at me now, eyes slightly narrowed, probing, amused, I’m sure his imagination’s running wild, running sleazy bedroom scenarios he can’t quite figure out but is having fun trying. I’m not about to enlighten him. I just say, “I had no idea she worked here, Otis. She never mentioned it. We didn’t have that kind of chatty relationship. So you can relax. She took your law firm’s secrets to the grave.”

  He stubs out his smoke and settles back in his chair, his composure as undisturbed as fresh snow. But his deep breath gives the game away: he’s relieved. “So what do you expect to get from me?”

  “Alice Lamarr.”

  Now his smile is genuine, appreciative in an underhanded way. “You’ve done your homework,” he says. “So I guess you also know Miss Quinn arranged a tail on Tap Tenzi. It paid off. We got enough goods on him to make the soon to be ex-Mrs. Tenzi a moderately rich woman. The photographs nailed him.”

  “Tailing Johnny Tenzi is dangerous business, Otis. Dangerous even for you. Alice must be paying you big time for you to risk your law firm, not to mention your life. So what’s the story, Otis? Why risk everything on this case?”

  He doesn’t like the question, hesitates to answer, but my stare won’t let him off the hook. Wincing, he says, “It’s not the money. Alice doesn’t have a lot of money. Let’s just say Alice has had an interesting life. It’s best to treat that life carefully.”

  I need to tread easy. If I press too hard, whatever’s making him nervous about Alice will get the upper hand and he’ll clam up, toss me out of the office. I need to massage him back to safer conversation. “I guess Lorraine got more than she bargained for by shadowing Tenzi.”

  “You think Tenzi killed Miss Quinn?” he says.

  “Do you?”

  He answers with a shrug that lets me know it’s crossed his m
ind. “From what Alice told me, Tenzi could be a vindictive son of a bitch, even murderous when crossed. If he had it in for Quinn, and he tailed her to your place, you might be in his crosshairs, too, Cantor.”

  “No kidding. I’m already in Lieutenant Huber’s crosshairs. Does he know about Tenzi? Did you tell him about Alice wanting a divorce?”

  “Just the outline, not in detail. I can’t give him specific information about Alice’s divorce case. That would violate attorney-client privilege.”

  For the first time all day, something is finally playing my way. “Well, I already know about Lamarr and Tenzi, so you won’t be breaking any privilege if you give me her current address. I’ll find it out sooner or later anyway, Otis, so why don’t you save us both a lot of time, and maybe our necks, by helping me get ahead of this thing. I need to talk to Alice. Where is she holing up since she left Tap?”

  Lawyers don’t like to be outfoxed, don’t like to divulge information, but I’ve left him no wiggle room to object. Reluctant but giving in, he takes up a pen and a pad of paper from his desk, writes the address, tears the sheet from the pad, and hands it to me. “Miss Sawicki will see you out,” he says, eager to be rid of me and the trouble I bring.

  “Oh, that’s her name,” I say with a chuckle as I get up from the chair. “She said I’d have to get it from you. She also said you’d know why she hated Lorraine Quinn.”

  The glint in his wolf-eyes and the smile slowly spreading on his face says it all, as if he’s sharing a dirty secret he mistakenly thinks I’ll appreciate: the selfish pleasure of ditching one woman for another.

  He’s more of a cad than I am. But from what I’ve seen, most guys are.

  But whaddya know, Lorraine Quinn played both sides of the street. Things she learned on one side she brought to the other, to my side, where last night I indulged my pleasure in her experience.