by Ann Aptaker
Table of Contents
Synopsis
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
About the Author
Books Available From Bold Strokes Books
Synopsis
Midnight, New York Harbor, 1949. Cantor Gold, dapper dyke-about-town, smuggler of fine art, waits in her boat under the Brooklyn Bridge for racketeer Gregory Ortine. In the shadow of the bridge, he’ll toss Cantor a satchel of cash, and she’ll toss him a pouch containing a priceless jewel. But the plan, and the jewel, sink when a woman in a red sequined dress drops from the bridge and slams onto Cantor’s boat. She is Opal Shaw, Society Page darling and fiancée of murder-for-hire kingpin Sig Loreale. Through a night of danger, desire, and double-cross, Cantor must satisfy Loreale’s vengeance, stay ahead of an angry Ortine, and untangle the knots of murder tightening around Opal’s best friend and keeper of her dirty secrets, Celeste Copley, a seductress who excites Cantor’s passion but snares her in a labyrinth of lies. The lies explode in a collision of love, loyalty, lust…and death.
Criminal Gold
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Criminal Gold
© 2014 By Ann Aptaker. All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1-62639-273-1
This Electronic Book is published by
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First Edition: November 2014
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Credits
Editor: Ruth Sternglantz
Production Design: Stacia Seaman
Cover Design By Sheri ([email protected])
Acknowledgments
I’d never have made it without this incredible, talented, loving crew in my life, who were there when it really counted: Allan Neuwirth, Risa Neuwirth, Jody Gray, Debby Solomon, Peter Winter, Barbara Rosenblat, Mikaela Lamarche, Dorian and Jeffrey Bergen, and my fabulous sister Yren Berry, who’s a lot smarter than I am.
Special thanks to Susan Herner, who stood by me in the difficult beginning, to Shelley Singer, who taught me how to do it in the first place, to Janice Hall, for her patience with me on a cold night in Greenwich Village, and to my brilliant editor, Ruth Sternglantz, who challenges me, because I need it.
Dedicated to a memory.
Chapter One
New York City
March 1949
Just before midnight
I am Cantor Gold. I’m one of those females who confuse you, maybe even intrigue you, even if only a little, which is still more than you might care to admit. According to upright citizens—you know the type, busybodies like your next-door neighbor or the schlemiel who signs your paycheck—I’m a dangerous person, a threat to the very fabric of society. Well, maybe I am; my way of life and way of love certainly tug at society’s threads. But if you ask me, those threads could use some serious tugging. The fabric of society is too damned tight for my taste, threatens to cut off my air. Especially lately, what with all your hot-for-love GIs rolling stateside during the last four years, all pepped up since they clobbered the Nazis and the rest of the Fascist gang. The fellas expect their cozy little nest to be exactly the way they left it, with their wives waiting in the kitchen or their girlfriends daydreaming on the front-porch swing. The Johnnies are marching home and they want their women back, back from me, if they only knew, from a dame tagged butch.
Look, there were lots of lonely ladies during the war who needed a soft shoulder and a little companionship to help them through all those empty, scary nights, so let’s just say that whenever I could I did my bit for the war effort.
And don’t get all drop dead about the butch tag, its whiff of the brutish or clumsy, because I’m neither. Brutes don’t have the soul to court a woman’s passions as I like to court them. And clumsiness, in my outlaw love life and rogue profession—I smuggle art and other priceless treasure into the Port of New York—clumsiness could get me killed or locked up.
I’ve been locked up, just once, spent a night in the city slammer about six months ago, and it didn’t have a goddamned thing to do with the smuggling racket or the rough stuff that comes along with it. Nope, it was for dancing at the Green Door Club with a sweet little redhead whose blue eyes were as clear and pretty as the Central Park lake in springtime. Christ, what a night, courtesy of one of City Hall’s periodic anti-vice flimflams. The cops raided us, hauled everyone off to the lockup, where they bloodied us but good. I’ve been beaten up before, by cops, by gangsters—it happens in my line of work—I knew I could handle it. But a lot of the girls were just innocents led to a slaughter.
Yeah, you heard me, I said slaughter, because when the cops raped those girls, it was as bad as beating them to death. A potbellied sergeant in a sweaty white shirt and a wedding ring too tight for his pudgy finger started the party. When he unzipped his fly and his pecker popped out, it was so swollen and red it looked like it had been skinned alive. This sonuvabitch sergeant pulled the red-haired kid from the crowd while another sweaty cop held me back with a billy club pressed across my chest. The sergeant slammed the kid against a wall, pulled up her skirt, and pulled off her panties with such force the silk cut her thigh. Then he pressed her head to the wall. Her eyes got big and round, searching frantically for me, but I couldn’t push past the cop with the billy club. I felt helpless and sick to my stomach when the sergeant ran his fat fingers around the kid’s nipples while he hollered at the rest of us, “Take a look, perverts! This is how it’s natural, how it’s legal!” Then he rammed his pecker into her, over and over, her back scraped bloody against the wall. One of the other cops turned a radio on, turned the music up loud to drown out her screaming, but it didn’t help. I still hear her screams in my sleep through Perry Como singing his hit parade tune, “A, You’re Adorable.”
But I bet the red-haired kid’s dreams are a lot worse than mine, and not just about the rape. When the cops were done with her, she tried to wash herself at the only sink in the holding tank, but someone had puked in the sink and the police matrons never bothered to clean it up. The matron at the desk nearest us outside the tank was a skinny dame whose well-pressed uniform marked her as the type who valued cleanliness, so I asked her if someone could come clean the sink. She didn’t even bother to laugh.
That crummy night killed off any stray thoughts I might’ve had about maybe going legit, working a regular job, fitting myself into the fabric of society. Why bother? The straight-backs who run the world with their laws and their hired truncheons mark people with my romantic predilections as criminals just for living, so I figure I don’t owe the rest of their rules and regulations any alle
giance. Frees me up all the way around.
Like tonight, out here on the East River on this beautiful March night, a bottle of good Chivas scotch to keep me company while I sit in my boat, tucked up against a stone support tower under the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge. My boat’s a dandy fifteen-foot utility job with a hefty engine for speed, low to the water and with good lines for maneuverability. She’ll outdance a cop cruiser anytime, but I don’t figure we’ll have to rhumba to that numba tonight. Red Drogan and I have the night’s business timed as tight as a racetrack clock.
Meantime, with my black sweater and watch cap blending me into the shadows and the Chivas going down smooth, I can relax a little and take in the terrific view of the ships and tugboats sailing the harbor beneath the Manhattan skyline. The sea air provides the pleasure of a bracing sting along the scars on my face: a small one shaped like a knife above my lip, a jagged slash on my left cheek, and a sharp curve, like a sickle, above my right eye. Each one is a souvenir of my outlaw ways and my brazen freedom.
The pleasures of the river are also my protection. The rhythm of the harbor, the wind telling tales in my ear: these things keep me sharp, alert me to danger. Cops think they can outwit me by hiding inside the harbor’s booming noise. What those boys don’t get, most of ’em anyway, is that a smuggler stays alive by listening for what’s on the other side of the foghorns and the buoy bells, hearing past the bellow of the big ships and the growling engines of tugboats. I’d hear a prowling cop boat through all of this tumult and still pick up the rolling lilt of midnight traffic crossing the bridge a hundred feet over my head, a steady whoosh soothing as a sweetheart’s whisper.
The whiskey is doing a good job of warming me against a chill that’s rolling in on a light fog. I like fog. It dresses up the harbor, puts a silvery halo around the big March moon, and wraps the famous skyline of Lower Manhattan in a luminous stole. Just look at all those tall, slender skyscrapers, classy and arrogant as society dames watching the dazzling theatrics on the docks below. And what a show! The waterfront shimmers bright as footlights on Broadway, lighting an all-night razzle-dazzle dance of steel cranes and brawny men who wrestle the nation’s goods in and out of port.
I am a speck in this enormous harbor and all its goings on, an unnoticeable outlaw speck who clears a hefty income by slipping some of the world’s most fantastic loot into the hands of private collectors and swooning curators of famous museums. Next time you’re on upper Fifth Avenue along Central Park, wandering through the rooms of—well, let’s keep the name of the joint quiet; if you and your family pause to look at a famous Italian painting or maybe an ancient Greek urn that catches your eye, chances are you can thank me for the pleasure.
So you see? Life is full of pleasures, enough to go around for people like you and people like me. And the night’s still young, barely midnight. A rather delicious pleasure is waiting for me after my business on the river is done, a royal bauble passed, and a sack with the royal sum of twenty-five thousand dollars tossed in my lap. That kind of money will warm me very nicely and heat up my after-hours night on the town with the lovely Rosie Bliss, a cabbie with the skills of a first-rate getaway driver, a taste for my outlaw life, and an interesting fondness for the scar above my lip. Rosie also worries about me, says I’m getting reckless, says that maybe I have an unconscious death wish. I tell her that people with a death wish don’t shop for a new car, and I’ve been looking at the line of ’49 Buicks.
So, no, no death wish for me. If I’m out for a wilder ride these days, it’s because I’m free of recent distractions, free from things that sapped my energy and ate me up alive, unreliable things like dreams of hearts and flowers and growing old with the ladylove of my life…
Sophie…Sophie de la Luna y Sol…her long black hair swaying along her shoulders, the way she’d tilt her head when she fussed with an earring, a timeless gesture, as if she’d learned about earrings in a previous life as a contessa.
Those distractions disappeared when she did, when the city swallowed her and the night hid the crime. I went a little mad after that, aching to the bone with missing her, hating myself because I couldn’t protect her, and going crazy because I didn’t even know who or what I couldn’t protect her from. I spun in every direction to look for her, scraped every corner of the city for any trace, even badgered every doorman on her block for any scrap of information. I called in every favor from every pair of eyes and ears along the docks and on the streets. I questioned her mother and father and kid brother so many times, they finally got a restraining order against me. The madness almost deep-sixed me until I saw that my only way out was to rip life’s sweeter emotions from my soul. Love wouldn’t matter to me anymore. I wouldn’t lose anyone I loved ever again.
Dammit, Drogan’s late. He should’ve been here by now. He’s cutting it too close. We’d timed tonight’s handoff down to the seconds between the scheduled runs of the harbor cops. One of their patrol boats should be sliding under the Williamsburg Bridge up at Delancey Street any minute. Won’t be long ’til it’s under the Manhattan Bridge, that lacy piece of work less than two minutes north of me at Bowery and Canal Street.
Another pull of the Chivas helps kill the tension, then I tuck the bottle under my arm and slide my hands into the pockets of my chinos. My right hand takes comfort in the cold steel of my Smith & Wesson .38 while my left hand wraps around a leather pouch containing a silver-and-emerald doodad that’s a hundred and seventy-five years old.
I’ll tell you a secret: a hundred and seventy-five years may as well be the day before yesterday in the better class of the art and treasure trade. But with an emerald the size of a walnut and a lady’s name engraved in the silver in French and Russian, then we’re talking about a brooch that graced the bosom of a particularly zesty Russian empress. I took possession of the thing about a half hour ago from the bursar of an incoming liner, a guy who’s been a reliable courier for my goods. The tricky part came after, when I sailed it past a couple of US Customs lookouts and between the boats of the New York Harbor Police. Talk about your pleasures.
There, up ahead—and it’s about time—Red Drogan’s tugboat. With Gregory Ortine on it. I can almost hear the sleazy social climber salivate. Ortine’s the fussy type, been pestering me for weeks about these arrangements. I had to explain to him a thousand times that we’d make the handoff under the bridge soon after I got the brooch, that I’d set things up this way so the brooch would never touch land, never be traced to American shores from the time I picked it up until Ortine takes it wherever he’s planning to take it. I told him to tie up his yacht outside the twelve-mile limit of territorial waters, then motor his launch to a set of coordinates south of Ellis Island to meet Drogan. I don’t want the registration number on Ortine’s launch showing up in New York Harbor tonight, so I told him to come into port aboard Drogan’s tug. And I warned Ortine not to tell me or Drogan where he moored his yacht or where he’s planning to go afterward. That’s the kind of information that could jam me up later in case of trouble. I told Ortine that if he lets that information slip, even blurts it by accident, the deal’s off. I’d toss the pouch into the river—minus the brooch, of course, but Ortine wouldn’t know that.
Drogan’s tug, on the other hand, is a working boat and a familiar sight in these waters, so there’ll be no reason for any patrolling cops to pay attention when he glides the tug under the bridge. The shadow of the bridge will cover us when Ortine tosses me the sack with the twenty-five G’s and I toss him the pouch with the brooch. Everyone will then just sail away. Drogan will ferry Ortine back to the Ellis Island rendezvous spot and collect his own payoff from the guy. If Ortine stiffs Drogan out of his cut, Drogan will roll him for the brooch and throw him overboard. I hope that doesn’t happen. Ortine’s flush with clip-joint money and has social aspirations that need a show of good taste, like having an art collection. He’s exactly the kind of long-term customer I like to develop.
For my part, Ortine’s twenty-five gra
nd will nestle snugly beside his ten-thousand dollar down payment sleeping peacefully in the safe in my office.
I muzzle the urge to make a dash for Drogan’s tug. I’ve been in the smuggling racket long enough to know when to hang back, make the money come to me.
But all bets are off when a siren howls! The shriek rips the air, bangs back and forth against the bridge’s stone tower, and tears into my eardrums. Goddamn harbor police: a patrol boat is barreling toward the bridge.
I don’t know if her crew’s spotted me. Don’t know if they’re even after me. The cops could have their eyes on any one of the vessels on the river tonight. I can make a run for the pier nearest me, Pier 21 at Dover Street, slip my boat through the pylons under the pier, and then disappear into the action on the docks where rough guys with grappling hooks who load big ships and take their orders from the Mob aren’t known to go out of their way to clear a path for the cops. I’m dressed just like a lot of roughnecks on the waterfront. If I keep my head down, chances are the cops won’t spot me.
But I’d be going home twenty-five grand light. No pleasure in that. No way around it. If I want my dough, I’ll have to outrun that shrieking police boat. I can lose the cops after I get my cash. Believe me, I know how.
I take a quick slug of whiskey to kick my gut, then push off from the tower. The prow clears the bridge and I’m ready to start my engine, make a run for Drogan’s tug.
Something slams down on my boat, loud as a hard smack on the ass. The city and the sky wrench sideways—what the hell am I doing in the air?
The black river is rushing at me, then I slam into it with a wallop that almost tears the skin off my face before I’m sucked down where it’s goddamn freezing and goddamn dark. My legs pedal like crazy. I get my arms into the act, finally break free of the river, cough it out of me so I can grab some air. A blazing bright searchlight nearly blinds me, but I can see through the glare what’s left of my capsized boat.