by Ann Aptaker
Alice doesn’t sit down in the chair as much as she slithers into it, a cobra’s supple body to match what Peg called her cobra’s eyes. I barely see her eyes in the dim light of the bedside lamp, but the waves in her auburn hair glimmer in the light like roadside danger flares.
I take a swallow of scotch. So does Alice. When she puts the glass down, I see a hint through the shadows of the baby doll smile that slew me five years ago and again this afternoon. I wonder now if it’s natural to her or one of her ways to soften up her prey.
Tempting as she is, I don’t soften. “First question,” I say. “What do you know of any connection between Tap Tenzi and Sig Loreale?”
“Oh my,” she says, “you’ve been a busy little beaver today.”
“Answer the question, Alice.”
“I have a question first. What are my answers worth to you, Cantor?”
“My freedom, which you probably don’t care about, and your life, which you do. If you want my protection, Alice, you’ll stop playing games and come across with the truth. You do still know how to tell the truth, don’t you, Miss Lamarr? Or is it Miss Leander or Miss Lorrie or Miss McKenzie? Or how about Letherby?”
Two things happen when a con artist’s jig is up. First, they shrink inside their skin, even imperceptibly, and then they breathe deep, fill their lungs along with their nerve. I watch it happen to Alice, watch her shrivel and then take that breath, fill her rather attractive chest while she readies whatever challenge she has in mind to what I just said. But the challenge fizzles. The breath leaves her body in a long, sad stream of defeat. “You really have been a busy beaver today. If you know all that about me, then you know I gave it up after I got out of the Indiana lockup. You were never a mark, Cantor.”
The catch in her voice seems real enough, but after all I’ve learned about Alice, what’s real and what’s a con is up for grabs. “Then don’t con me now,” I say.
“Or what, you’ll kill me?”
“I won’t have to. I’ll just leave you to Tenzi, or maybe Loreale. He’s involved in this mess, isn’t he, Alice.”
She takes another swallow of scotch, drains the glass. As she puts it down, the lamplight catches the rim. The glass is trembling in her hand. “How did you know? What gave it away?”
“Never mind how I know. But you’re going to tell me how Tenzi is connected to Loreale. What would a two-bit sometime hired gun for the Mob have to do with the most powerful boss in New York?”
Her slow nod carries the weight of fear, fear of no escape, fear for her life. Even in the faint light of this dingy room I can see Alice’s shoulders tighten, an attempt to fortify her against the danger she’s in. I’m her only lifeline, and she knows it.
She finally faces me, then looks away, runs her hand through her hair, doing everything she can to avoid a story that scares her, until she can’t avoid it anymore. “I think— I’m not sure,” she says barely above a whisper so threadbare it hardly has any human sound at all, “I thought Loreale might have told Johnny to kill the Quinn woman. But now I think it’s something else. I think maybe Johnny’s on the run from Loreale.”
And my tryst with Lorraine Quinn got in the way. I got in the way. That’s why Sig warned me off. Huber is Sig’s instrument to find Tap Tenzi, and the poor sap of a cop doesn’t even know it.
But that’s only the end of the story, not the beginning, not the Once Upon A Time that set the story racing toward Lorraine Quinn’s death. And why the hell was she killed on my doorstep?
“Alice, what was Tenzi’s connection to Sig in the first place? Sig has an army of killers at his command. Why deal with small change like Tenzi?”
“Yeah, Johnny was small change, all right,” she says with a bitter laugh. “But all of a sudden he was sure he could climb up from the small time and make the big time by getting in with Loreale’s operation. The crazy thing is, our divorce gave him the goods to make that play. It seems Quinn’s camera work might have caught something Loreale didn’t want revealed and Johnny knew it.”
Which made Lorraine Quinn and her pictures what Sig hates most: loose ends. And now Tenzi is a loose end. And Alice is a loose end. If Sig finds out Otis Hollander has photos of something Sig wants kept secret, Otis will be a loose end. And if I find out what it is Sig wants hidden, I’ll be a loose end. He warned me off the Quinn case so I’d stay alive to look into the Garraway killing. But I don’t kid myself. If I become a loose end, I’ll become part of Sig’s possible cascade of murder along with Tenzi, Alice, and Otis Hollander.
So I think twice before I ask, “Do you know what Tenzi had on Sig?”
Alice waves off the question. “No, and I don’t want to. Safer that way. But Johnny called me and told me not to go through with the divorce because he was setting up this big thing with Sig Loreale. It could keep us in the chips for life, he said. But if I insisted on the divorce it would be the end of me. That’s when I scrammed out of our apartment and took a room at the Collier Hotel. Only my attorney knew where I was, until you found me.”
“And the police found you.”
“Yeah, and the police.” She says the words as if they taste bad.
I pour her another drink, then pour another for me. We both need it.
Alice takes a deep swallow. It restores her enough for her to say, “So what about those other questions, Cantor?”
“Just one,” I say, easing into the subject that’s stood between us since I walked into her room at the Collier. “Why did you marry Tenzi? And don’t give me the same song and dance you gave me this afternoon about showering you with money and taking you to popular hotspots. Johnny Tenzi never had the kind of money you wanted, and living in the open isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And besides, the shadows are your natural territory, Alice.”
I guess it’s another subject she wants to avoid, because she gets up from the table and wanders near the bed, turning her back to me.
I get up from the table, too, walk over to her, stand right behind her, close, close enough for her to feel my breath on her neck. “Why did you marry Johnny Tenzi, Alice?”
“I—” she starts, shivers, then starts again. “A few weeks after you and I were through, I started seeing another girl at the Copa, a showgirl like me. We’d get together on the quiet because the management would toss us out if they knew. Well, it was around that time that Johnny started coming to the club. He and his lowlife Mob buddies. The Mob guys would sometimes come backstage after the show, take the girls out for drinks. One night, Johnny asked me out. One of his gangster thugs was standing right next to him. I felt trapped. You don’t say no when a Mob guy wants your company. So I went. After that, Johnny came around every night. He thought he owned me now, thought I was his girl. The girl I was seeing got scared that if Johnny or his mobster friends found out about us they’d kill her, or maybe both of us. So she scrammed, left town. Anyway, pretty soon Johnny asked me to marry him. I tried to, y’know, laugh it off, keep things light between us. I told him that things were okay the way they were. But he wasn’t having it. He said that if I didn’t marry him, I’d be sorry. You know what that means, Cantor.”
Yeah, I know. It means Alice would never be seen or heard from again.
“So I married him.”
Everything she said rings true. You don’t cross the Mob. You don’t say no to killers. So why is my skin tingling? Why is there an itch at the base of my skull? A question creeps up on me. “And you weren’t afraid to divorce him?”
That turns her around. The light of the bedside lamp catches the fear and fury in her eyes. “Of course I was afraid. I’m still terrified! But I couldn’t take being swatted around anymore. I couldn’t take his drunken rages. And I couldn’t take . . . couldn’t take . . .” She’s crying now, soft tears of exhaustion and agony. “I couldn’t take . . . his touch.”
That’s the first thing Alice has said that I fully believe. Maybe the rest of it is true, maybe it isn’t, but I know Alice’s body, know what it wants, what it nee
ds, and I know Johnny Tenzi wouldn’t have a clue. No man could.
Lamplight brushes Alice’s face. Tears glisten in her eyes, tears and something else. What Alice’s eyes are telling me is that the shadows are my natural territory, too.
The bed is shadowed. We sink into it. We’re where we belong.
• • •
Alice whispers my name, groans my name as my mouth, my fingers, claim her body. I groan her name when her mouth takes me in, her hands rocking me even as I shout my ecstasy.
We doze, we wake, we take each other again. We’re in our territory of shadows.
• • •
We’re jolted awake by a rumble of music, loud and thumping, with a guy shouting about rocking around a clock. The music’s coming from the club downstairs. It’s that new music, rock and roll, blasting from the jukebox.
Chapter Ten
More thumping, no, not thumping, not as loud, just something knocking in the darkness of my sleep.
“Cantor?”
My name wiggles into my head from somewhere outside of sleep. The knocking’s coming from outside now, too.
“Cantor?”
The call of my name finally tugs me awake. I know the voice, know who’s calling me. It’s Peg. She’s at the door.
Alice, groggy, turns over. She shields her eyes from the light of the bedside lamp. “What’s—”
“Shh,” I say. “It’s just Peg.”
I pull on my trousers and undershirt, open the door.
Seeing me half dressed, Peg looks over my shoulder, gets the picture of what’s been going on. “You never learn, do you, Slick. It’s been one mistake after another since—”
“Stop right there, Peg. Don’t say it. Don’t say her name. What do you want?”
“Rosie’s downstairs at the bar.”
“She knows I’m here?”
“Uh-huh. She’s been looking for you. Finally ended up here. Now get yourself dressed,” she says with a friendly laugh as she heads down the stairs, “and come down to the bar.”
I call after her, “What time is it?”
“Two-thirty. We close in a half hour.”
“Cantor?” This time it’s Alice calling my name. “Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine. Go back to sleep. I have to go downstairs.”
She stretches her arms out to me, says, “Come here,” in a way that promises a garden of pleasure and sins of the gutter, twin temptations I’d love to roll around in.
But if Rosie’s come looking for me at the Green Door Club at two-thirty in the morning, it’s not because she’s in the mood to dance.
I tell Alice, “I have to go.”
• • •
The three-piece combo is playing a sweet Gershwin ballad, “Someone to Watch Over Me,” for the last dance. Peg’s already dimmed the lights, leaving the swaying couples in a dreamscape of shadows and glimpsed swirls of colorful dresses rippling against silhouettes in suits.
Rosie’s at the bar. Peg’s showing her something in a magazine. My coat and cap are already on a bar stool.
I greet Rosie and ask Peg to pour me a Chivas.
Rosie says, “I’ve been looking all over town for you. Even checked Drogan’s tug.”
“Yeah? What’s up?”
“You can’t go home tonight, Cantor. You can stay here,” she says with a shrewd look in her eye and a little twist of a smile at the corner of her mouth, “or I can put you up tonight. But you can’t go home.”
“Why not?”
“Look, I drove over to your place when I got off shift at midnight—”
“I thought you had plans.” I could kick myself for saying it, even as the words tumble out of my mouth. Rosie doesn’t deserve cheap digs from me.
“Plans change,” she says, her tone flat, not letting the hurt in. Rosie’s finished being hurt by me. “Never mind my plans. Just listen to what I’m telling you. You can’t be seen coming back to your place. I saw a couple of guys, maybe cops, maybe even nastier sorts of fellas, parked out front, watching the door to your building. I circled the block a few times and every time I came around, they were still there.”
“What kind of car was it?”
“Pontiac, recent model, maybe ’53, ’54. Dark blue, I think, hard to say at night. But definitely a Pontiac. It had those chrome stripes down the center of the hood.”
“Then it wasn’t cops. The department usually outfits them in Fords or Plymouths.”
“Okay, then it’s bad guys, really bad guys, Cantor. So what do you want to do? Stay here, or come to my place?”
The combo’s stretching out the final bars of “Someone to Watch Over Me,” letting the swaying couples enjoy a last embrace. “I’ll go home, Rosie.”
Peg says, “Don’t be a fool, Slick. You could be walking right into a whole heap of trouble. And haven’t you had enough trouble for one night?”
“You can save the tender loving care,” I say. “I’m not the hiding type. I can’t let the bastards think I’m afraid of them.”
There’s a hand sliding along my shoulder. I turn around to see Alice. She’s back in the purple dress. Her hair’s a little disheveled, but the swirls of dark red look good on her. So does the dress. “I doubt you’re afraid of anything,” she says. “Hello, Rosie. Thanks for ferrying me over here.”
“Any time,” Rosie says, friendly enough, but just.
I slide Alice’s hand from my shoulder, hold her hand between mine. “I have to go home,” I say.
She’s disappointed, but soon the disappointment in her eyes is crowded out by the same lure her eyes sent me earlier: the lure of shadows. “Take me with you,” she says.
“Too risky. I don’t know who’s out for me, and I might not be able to keep you safe. I’ll come by tomorrow.”
I feel a tug on the sleeve of my suit jacket, hear Rosie say, “If you’re gonna go, then let’s go, Cantor.”
“Yeah,” Peg says. “Get going. I need to close up. I’ll make sure Alice is safe.”
I give Peg a nod, give another nod to Rosie.
I slip into my coat and cap, walk beside Rosie as we move with the crowd leaving the Green Door Club.
• • •
Outside in the alley, Rosie says, “No chance I can talk you out of going to your place?”
“Save your breath,” I say. “Look, I appreciate the offer, really I do, but I don’t like being pushed around. I have to go home and face these guys. Nobody’s going to keep me from going where I want to go.”
Rosie says, “Funny, Peg was talking to me about the same thing. She gave me this magazine.” She takes the magazine from under her arm, shows it to me in the dim light of the alley. Not a bad-looking cover from what I can make out, with a drawing that plays to my taste: two women in classical Greek dress against a Greek vase called a lekythos. “There’s poetry in here,” Rosie says, “and articles and stuff about people like us getting together to come out of hiding and push back against the creeps that want to throw us in jail.”
“I push back every day, Rosie.”
“Yeah, but if everybody pushed back together, maybe the creeps would stop.”
“And then what?”
“And then, I don’t know, I guess they’d let us lead regular lives.”
“Now why would I want to do that?”
Rosie grabs my arm, turns me to her, runs her finger along my lips and cheek. “So that you don’t get any more scars on your face?”
I have no answer to that.
• • •
Even at nearly three in the morning, my Theater District neighborhood never goes dark. Actors took their bows on Broadway’s stages hours ago, but the theater marquees still glow bright, blazing the names of big-time stars like Joan Fontaine in Tea and Sympathy at the Barrymore on Forty-Seventh Street, and John Raitt singing his heart out in The Pajama Game at the St. James on Forty-Fourth. Not to be outshone by the live stages, the movie houses light up Hollywood’s famous names and faces on gigantic billboards.
Marlon Brando lords it over the Astor at Broadway and Forty-Fifth Street in On the Waterfront, a movie about the dockside Mob that I have it on good authority the real dockside Mob does not care for. The gorgeous Grace Kelly and the lucky James Stewart are ogling murder in Rear Window at the Rivoli on Broadway and Forty-Ninth. Closer to the ground, neon lights from nightclubs and jazz joints float their colors on hats and coats and across faces in the crowds still lingering on the streets after their last nightcap.
I spot the Pontiac parked in front of my building, see the silhouettes of two guys in fedoras and bulky coats in the front seat.
I walk up to the car. The guy in the passenger seat sees me, opens the door and gets out. He doesn’t need the bulky coat to prove that he’s built like a linebacker, and his fedora can’t hide the stone-cut angles of his big face. “You Gold?” he says. His voice is gritty, like he just swallowed a gravel pit.
“And you are . . . ?”
“I’m the guy who’s telling you to get in the car.” He opens the back door.
“We can talk out here,” I say. “We won’t get arrested for talking on the street.”
“We’re not here to talk, Gold.” He makes his point by pulling a snub nose .38 from his coat, camouflages it with his sleeve, out of sight of passers-by. But I see enough of it to know it’s aimed right at my gut.
He calls to the other guy, who’s still behind the wheel, “Get over here, Marv, and check her for a gun.”
Marv’s another linebacker, but his face is more waxy than stony.
I save him the trouble of searching me for my .38 and just hand it over. Besides, I don’t want his hands on me.
He pockets my gun, goes back around to the driver’s seat.
The other guy’s never taken his eyes off me. “Now get in the car,” he says.
What was it I said to Rosie about not being pushed around, not told where to go?
The guy with the gun can’t figure out why I’m chuckling when I get into the backseat of the Pontiac. I bet these guys are taking me somewhere I really don’t want to go.