Criminal Gold

by Ann Aptaker

  A woman is sprawled over the hull. Her red dress shines.

  Chapter Two

  They’ve laid her out on the deck of the police boat. The famous cheekbones are all banged up. The silky body is broken at angles, her red sequined dress twisted in every direction, the sight of her as heartbreaking as a kid’s Raggedy Ann doll in a trash can. You’d hardly recognize her as one of the most beautiful faces to ever grace a gossip column. One of the cops on the boat, an older guy, shows a little class when he lays a blanket over her, tucks it around her torn shoulders.

  But she won’t need the blanket to warm her. Her skin can’t feel the chill in the air or the needles of river spray flying around us. She won’t feel her bones bang around from the bounce of the boat. She can’t feel the boat. She can’t feel anything.

  In life the lady had plenty of things to feel good about, expensive things like diamond jewelry and classy cars, most of it paid for by big shot Sig Loreale. But even a big shot gets stuck in the mud sometimes, and Loreale got stuck a couple of years back, caught taking the skim from some cheapjack garbage scow operation. The dough was small change for Loreale, who makes more serious money in all sorts of rackets, the biggest being his contract murder outfit, but it was enough to send him to Sing Sing for eighteen months. He’s getting out tonight, as a matter of fact, and for the last few weeks the newspaper scribblers, radio spielers, even those Brylcreemed yakkers on that new box, the television, have all been jabbering about Loreale finishing his stretch at midnight tonight. It’s a few minutes past that now.

  The poor guy won’t have his sweetie to come home to.

  Loreale’s dead ladylove goes by the name of Opal Shaw; though I wonder about the Shaw moniker, with its Highland Lass ring to it. Not with those cheekbones and hair as black and wavy as a shadow rippling on the river. By the look of her, I’d say the Shaw was probably wrenched out of something else—Schwartz, maybe, or Scalisi, the sort of names I knew in the Coney Island neighborhood of my rowdy childhood. By the look of her…

  She was something to look at, all right. Before Loreale went to prison, there were plenty of pictures in the papers of Opal and Loreale arm in arm at the city’s hot spots. They’d have late suppers at Sardi’s with the after-theater crowd, sip martinis in a blue-and-white zebra-skin booth at El Morocco with the swellest of the swells. Opal would be wrapped in expensive furs. Plenty of mink, sure, but the more exotic kinds, too: leopard, ermine, even tiger. From what I could see in the pictures and in newsreels at the movies, Opal Shaw looked as supple and elegant in fur skins as the creatures who’d worn them on their bones before her.

  She sure drove the gossip columnists crazy. A society scribbler wondered how a night-crawling party girl like Opal Shaw landed the notoriously reclusive businessman Sig Loreale, who was rumored to have ties to the underworld, or so the papers said. Another slobbering gossip-meister went gaga over Opal’s long hair, compared her to the sleek danger of a prowling panther. If that reporter saw her now, dead on the deck of a cop boat, her famous black mane wet and tangled around her busted-up face, he’d have to lose the panther angle and compare her to something else, maybe a squid.

  The bulky mass of Sergeant Bram Feek inserts himself into my reminiscences of Miss Shaw as gently as a boulder rolling over a flower bed. Feek has to shout to be heard over the engine, a shout that explodes from his mouth like an ogre’s belch. “What’s your story tonight, Gold?” Feek’s the skipper of the patrol boat. He’d beat me up if no one was looking.

  I’m soaked and cold to the bone, so it’s tough for me to shout or even make civil conversation through my chattering teeth. “I was…out for a sweet little cruise on a fine night, Sergeant.” I bet Feek is warm and cozy inside his big blue police slicker.

  River spray and moonlight are kind to the sergeant’s thick mug, make him look less like an unmuzzled pit bull, more like a dented Christmas-tree ornament. He kills my good impression of him when he grins, spits, aiming for my face, but the wind carries Feek’s spit backward into the river spray. He knew it would. I can see it in his entirely too satisfied grin. “So,” he says, “it’s a fine night, is it?” He’s grinning at me like he’s enjoying a fantasy of killing me. “One night you’ll play it a little too cute, Gold, and when you do”—his grin is really nasty now, a stretching slit of hate across his yellow teeth—“look for me at the head of the long line of cops muscling each other outta the way to be the lucky fella who gets you locked up.”

  Locked up. Hearing those words come at me from a cop’s mouth makes me edgy, makes me remember my lousy night behind bars, and makes me wonder, too, how long I can outrun the danger of my life. If the sad day comes when the Law snares me, I hope it’s not until my twilight years when sharing a cozy prison cell with a pretty little murderess might not be so bad.

  Meantime, I’ll take my pleasures where I find ’em and right now I’m about to grab a small one at Feek’s expense. “I wouldn’t jump the line too soon, Sergeant. The department should be less concerned with locking me in and more concerned with who’s getting out. It’s a sure bet that Sig Loreale will be interested in what happened to his ladylove.” My numb lips and chattering teeth must make my own smile as grotesque as Feek’s, an idea that gives me great pleasure as I flash the smile at him. His clumsy counterpunch, a showy sneer meant to vanquish me, or at least annoy me, makes me giddy instead. I have to turn around and look at the action on the waterfront or I’d laugh right in his rotten face.

  We’re coming up fast to the docks. The pier at Dover Street is already mobbed with so many reporters and press photographers pushing their way out of the wharf shed that the morgue’s meat wagon is having a helluva time getting through. The photographers are popping their flashbulbs fast as a firing squad. What a bunch of ghouls. I swear, those characters must sleep with their clothes on and police-band radios crackling beside their beds. Look at ’em, elbowing the morgue boys and each other to get a good spot, get the first grim picture of the big shot’s dead dolly. The twirling light on the meat wagon shows up their true colors, smears all of ’em blood red.

  Feek’s looking at the hubbub on the pier, too. His bulldog nose flares like he’s caught the scent of something cops fear more than the danger of the job: aggravation. There’s nothing that tangles up a cop more than the aggravation of buttinsky reporters, except maybe buttinsky politicians, and Opal Shaw’s big splash is a sure hook for both. Feek rubs his mouth like he’s craving a stiff drink but would settle for a tall bicarbonate of soda. “Goddamn sonsabitch reporters. They had to go squawk about Loreale gettin’ outta prison tonight. And now his woman is nothin’ but a dead fish on the deck of my boat. Christ! Next thing, I’ll have the goddamn police commissioner round my neck and the mayor round my ankles.” Feek eyes me, studies the scars on my face as if they’re drawing him a picture.

  He says, polite as a professor, “You’re a member of the criminal class, Gold, so what do you think happened to the hoodlum’s dame? Maybe she might’ve wanted to cash it in? Maybe she wasn’t as happy about Loreale comin’ home as she was supposed to be? Or maybe she might’ve had a little help goin’ over the bridge?”

  “How the hell should I know? Nobody paid me to catch her.”

  Feek sneers at me again. I guess he didn’t like my answer.

  The patrol boat slows as we get close to the pier.

  The last thing I need in my line of work is my face plastered all over the city’s morning dailies. I hang back until Feek’s crew carries Opal up the ladder, then I wait until the camera crowd and pen pushers and radio gossips swarm around the main action of Opal being laid out on a gurney and wheeled across the pier. Nobody’s paying any attention to me when I start to climb up, but I pull my soaked woolen watch cap lower, keep my head down anyway.

  A rough yank on my sweater pulls me backward, fast. I slam against Feek. His knuckles dig into my spine as he twists the back of my sweater, stretching it across my chest, tightening the wet wool around my neck. He slides his stubbly chin
over my left shoulder, gets cheek to cheek with me. His day’s growth of stubble scrapes my face like sandpaper. His breath, a sour gas stinking of cheap cigars and old cheese, turns my stomach almost as much as having his body pressed against my back.

  “Not so fast, Gold! Don’t think you’re gettin’ away from me just like that.”

  If Feek wasn’t choking me, I’d vomit from the stench coming out of his mouth. His stubble grinds my cheek as he tilts his head down. The brute’s ogling my chest. He spits a small laugh, the filthy sort that made your mother wash your mouth out with soap. “Well, you coulda fooled me,” he says. “I doubted you had a pair!”

  I’d like to wash Feek’s mouth out with his own blood.

  I grab as much air as I can, but Feek’s fingers are tightening the neck of my sweater. He’s not trying to kill me, just prove he has the power to shut me up.

  I won’t let him shut me up, not as long as I’m alive and kicking. Between choked gasps and gurgles, I manage to grind out, “Get your…eyes…off my pair, Feek, and I…won’t ram the…heel of my shoe…into yours.” My right foot is up between Feek’s knees.

  Feek snaps me loose but grabs my arm again fast, spins me back around, shows me his pit-bull’s teeth, shows me who’s boss. He even barks, “Get up there on the pier! A detective radioed the boat. Two of ’em wanna talk to you. They got a few questions.” He pushes me toward the ladder, pushes my head hard enough so my face slams against the wooden slats. What is it with cops slamming people’s heads?

  I’m spitting splinters out of my mouth as I climb up.

  If the two gold shields standing over me wonder why I seem unsociable, I could tell ’em I’ve got twenty-five thousand reasons at the bottom of New York Harbor and one more reason right under my derriere: the iron stanchion they shoved me down on is ice cold through my soaked chinos.

  These two boys are just like all the other night shift detectives who’ve tried to lord it over me through the years: out-of-style overcoats, scuffed shoes, faces as ashy gray as their shapeless fedoras, and feral, bloodshot eyes that never seem to blink until sunup. One guy’s snarly, the other’s quiet, scribbling notes with a stub of a pencil on a pad of paper. The snarly one does all the talking.

  “Did you know the victim?”

  “I’ve seen her picture in the papers,” I say.

  “What about Sig Loreale? Know anything about him?”

  “What everyone knows. Papers say he’s getting out tonight.”

  “What were you doing in the harbor at this hour?”

  “Nice night, nice moon. Say, did ya see it shine through the fog?”

  “What about that tug heading your way?”

  “Which tug? This is New York Harbor, for chrissake.”

  The cops give me a blanket from the morgue truck to wrap myself in while we jabber. I give them nothing but conversation. When the conversation is over, the snarly cop takes the blanket back and the quiet cop hands me a dime for the subway, since everything I’d had in my pockets—my billfold, the brooch, and my gun—is now at the bottom of the East River.

  They let Opal keep her blanket, though, when the morgue boys slide her into the meat wagon.

  *

  Cash and crime never stop flowing in the City of New York. They just make less noise at certain times of night in certain parts of town. Around here, for instance, in these dark streets and alleyways behind the docks, where waterfront gangs do business for the Mob bosses, you can’t hear the crackle of dirty money changing hands in the damp rooms above the tradesmen’s shuttered shops. You won’t hear the muffled groans of some poor schnook who’s behind on his loan payments, getting beaten to a pulp in a moldy corner of one of the old brick warehouses. You can’t hear the whispered deals being made in the back rooms of City Hall or in the basement of the criminal courts building a few blocks away. The only noises out here on Ferry Street tonight are the moans of the foghorns drifting in from the harbor and the squish on the pavement of my waterlogged deck shoes. My only companion is my own shadow sliding around me on the sidewalk whenever I pass under a street lamp. The only money I can lay my hands on is the police department’s dime in my pocket.

  The last time I had only a dime in my pocket I was a randy kid under the Coney Island boardwalk, and even though a dime got you a whole lot more then, it didn’t get as much as I wanted. Same story now. Best it can get me tonight is a phone call or a ride on the subway.

  I’ve been keeping an eye out for a phone booth. I spot one at the corner, start to pick up my pace, but I’m stopped short by a guy’s phlegmy voice suddenly behind me. “Stand still, don’t turn around, you don’t gotta see me. All you gotta do is listen. Be at Mr. Loreale’s place later.” The guy makes his point with a gun to my spine. The cold barrel stings through my wet sweater. But it’s not just the icy steel that makes me shiver. It’s feeling the vibration of the vast web Loreale’s spun through the city. He’s been out of the slammer only minutes, and he already knows what’s happened tonight and my part in it. He knew where to send this guy to shadow me.

  I say, “What’s later.”

  “Late enough so he can get back in town, soon enough so he don’t hafta wait long. Know where his place is?”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “Don’t gimme any smart lip. Just be at Loreale’s place.”

  “You have a car? Give me a ride to my apartment so I can change into dry—” But the gun is gone from my spine, the guy is gone from the street. Just as well; I wouldn’t want that fishy article knowing where I live.

  I head for the phone booth I’d spotted in front of a rope supply place on the corner. Funny, how a sight as common as an empty telephone booth can beckon like a haven in the darkness, its shiny blue-and-white enamel Bell Tel sign holding out a promise that when I close the door my freezing flesh will get a little relief from the night chill.

  I step inside. The door keeps the chill out, all right, but the overhead bulb is busted. How many other little indignities are gunning for me tonight? I have to tilt my head just right to allow enough light to dwindle in from a street lamp so I can see the dial. I pull the cops’ dime from my soggy pocket, feel around for the coin slot, and drop the dime. It clatters down, ringing its bells and jangling my nerves, until it lands in Ma Bell’s lap and she gives me a dial tone so I can dial Judson Zane, a talented young jack-of-all-trades who works for me. No one types faster than Judson. No one is better at digging deep into the city to find people who can perform certain necessary services but don’t ask questions. The only person Judson hasn’t been able to find is Sophie, though he works his sources first thing every morning and last thing every night. He hasn’t turned up anything yet, and until he does, we just don’t talk about it.

  Judson’s phone rings, keeps ringing. The way my luck’s running, it would fit right in if he’s not home. Or maybe my call is interrupting one of his interesting nights. The town’s debs and coeds are crazy about Judson, his skinny build, wire-rimmed glasses, and all. I don’t know what he tells them he does for a living, but I don’t worry about it, either. Judson’s code of secrecy is more impenetrable than the vault at Fort Knox.

  He finally answers on the sixth ring.

  “It’s me, Judson,” I say. “You alone?”

  “Yeah. Did everythi—”

  “I’ll fill you in later. I need you to drive downtown, come pick me up. I’m at the corner of Ferry and Cliff. And look, I’ve already had cops in my face and a gun in my back and I’m out twenty-five grand, so do me a favor and make it snappy. And bring your office keys.”

  “What the hell—? What are you talking about, out twenty-five grand? Didn’t Ortine come through with the cash? Cantor, I spent weeks setting up a cold trail of customs stamps just so Ortine could squeeze that big emerald in his tight fist.”

  “You’ll read all about it in the morning papers, Judson. Hell, you might even hear about it on the radio while you’re driving down here. Listen, get a hold of Rosie. I’m supposed to see he
r later, but if she’s still hacking, you’ll have to stop by the office and put in a radio call to her cab. Tell her to meet us at the office right away. And bring your rain slicker.”

  “But it’s not raining.”

  “Just bring it. Believe me, you’ll thank me later.”

  “See you in fifteen minutes.”

  Fifteen minutes to go nuts with myself just standing around in the dead of night in Lower Manhattan, watching old newspapers fly around on the cobblestones, my eye catching headlines: the scribblers are still bellyaching about Joe Louis retiring from the fight ring a couple of weeks ago; old Joe Stalin died last week, which is sad for his wife and kids but maybe nice for millions of Russkies who won’t be rounded up to rot in Siberia; President Truman is busy sunning himself in Key West, Florida, though I’m sure he took the time to send a thoughtful note to Stalin’s widow; and Sig Loreale is getting out of prison.

  I wish I had my bottle of Chivas to warm my innards and maybe drown the sickening memory of Opal Shaw broken and bleeding on the hull of my sinking boat. And I could use a cigarette from the pack of smokes that the East River swallowed up along with everything else. The fifteen minutes creep along, a torture of shivers from lousy memories and my increasingly cold flesh, until the glow of the curbside street lamp slides along the chrome on the fender of Judson’s blue Chevy. He bought it this past December, when the showrooms were making rock-bottom deals to move the last of the ’48 models. Saved himself a bundle.

  His rain slicker is on the front seat. I put it on, get into the car. An old Cole Porter tune, “All Through the Night,” is playing on the radio when we drive away.

  I say, “Were you followed?”