Criminal Gold

by Ann Aptaker

  Then again, maybe it was Opal who bought the flowers to welcome her Papa Bear back to their big bed and silk sheets. Some women have a taste for showy displays, though if I had to judge by all those pictures of Opal in the papers and what the gossip meisters wrote about her in the columns, I’d peg Opal Shaw as a classier type of dame. But I’ve noticed that when a woman is in love with a man, taste sometimes flies out the window. As for Opal’s taste in men—a Mr. Loreale, for instance—well, you get my drift.

  Underneath all the foliage, the living room is a luxe place, homier than I’d expect from a guy who exudes all the warmth of a meat freezer filled with body parts. The rust-colored sofa and chairs are the invitingly overstuffed sort you’d be happy to doze off in while watching Milton Berle do his Uncle Miltie shtick on the television set that’s in a big mahogany console, or after you’ve had your fill of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English landscape paintings around the room. Funny thing about English landscape paintings: they tend to show up on the walls of rich Americans whose immediate ancestors could barely speak English.

  A handsome John Constable oil from the 1820s, a rural scene in the Suffolk countryside, hangs over Sig’s fireplace. He paid a fortune for it at one of the big-name galleries in the Fuller Building on Madison. I understand Sig’s affection for the painting. In a vast landscape presumably controlled by powerful, baronial people, Constable depicted peasants dwarfed nearly to insignificance. It’s an accurate accounting of Sig’s view of the social order. The Constable is the last piece Sig bought legally after I saved him a bundle on a late-eighteenth-century Gainsborough: more tiny peasants, this time herding sheep in a mountain landscape. It hangs on the opposite wall.

  I’ve gotten him a few other bargains, too, if you’re in the bracket that considers anything under fifty G’s a bargain. Over on the mantel in a glass display case next to the pink roses is a twelfth-century Romanesque chalice of jeweled gold that was supposed to go to the Louvre but never made it. On the coffee table is a small granite Egyptian Eighteenth Dynasty statuette of Osiris, God of the Underworld, King of the Dead, who I swear looks a little like Sig. And in a case near the couch is a two-foot-tall seventeenth-century embossed silver vase from Venice that I slipped past General Eisenhower’s cultural watchdogs during the Allied occupation of Europe after the war. Sig wanted it as a birthday present for Opal.

  I can’t spend any more time reminiscing over Sig’s collection. He didn’t summon me here for a professional appraisal. If he ever wants one, he’ll send someone to find me. He’s been sending someone to find me since I was a little kid.

  And now he’s waiting. I open the French doors to the terrace, step outside, and feel the same twist in my belly I felt long ago in that gritty room in Coney Island.

  The fresh air helps settle me, and the fantastic view of the city through all those gilded arches around the terrace is a stunner. But the view puts me in my place: I’m as small as the peasants in the Constable painting, insignificant in the colossal skyscraper universe of Sig Loreale’s power.

  The wind is nippy out here. It blows through the collar of my coat as I walk around toward the uptown side of the terrace. Rockefeller Center glows golden ten blocks ahead, directly across the street from the spires of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Talk about your Power meeting your Glory.

  I don’t see Sig so I keep walking. The light rising from nearby streets grows stronger as I walk west along the uptown side of the terrace, the glow brighter, full of color. They’re the lights of Broadway, the Theater District, the jewel-box radiance of Times Square three blocks away. Down there, people are still laughing it up at nightspots that won’t close until three in the morning, if they close at all. Lots of dreamers are having boozy visions of their names spelled in lights on the marquees of Broadway’s theaters and supper clubs. But none of the laughers and dreamers have the faintest idea that there’s a silhouetted figure of a man in an overcoat and homburg standing against the ledge at the northwest corner of the terrace, looking down on them as if they were ants.

  “Sig,” I say.

  A thin line of cigar smoke curls around his head and gathers under the brim of his homburg as he turns to face me. After a last pull on the cigar, he tosses the butt over the ledge. The burning tip traces a red arc in the air before the cigar falls out of sight.

  There’s just enough light coming through a living room window for me to see the exhaustion in his heavy face and in his baggy, bloodshot eyes. The set of his shoulders, usually straight as a general’s, is rounder now under his black overcoat. I guess the grind of Sing Sing prison can humble even a boogeyman. Then I see his nostrils flare like an enraged bull’s.

  All I want is to get this meeting over with, drive home with Rosie, have a stiff drink, and let Rosie and the whiskey soothe away any remnant thought of the killer who’s staring at me like I’m a bug he could squash with his foot.

  But I don’t move. I just stand and wait for Loreale to talk, tell me why he’s commanded me here. All I can do is watch and wait, and wonder why he’s wearing a tuxedo under his open overcoat.

  A tuxedo. An hour after peeling off scratchy prison garb, the man isn’t wearing something soothing to the skin like flannel pajamas or a silk robe. No, he’s decked out in a tuxedo.

  He says, “What is it you are staring at, Cantor? You want the name of my tailor?” He says this, as always, slowly and with precision, his voice a nerve-racking grind of ice shards. He’s the only guy I know who can make a conversation about suits sound threatening. “And here I thought that the famously sharp dresser Cantor Gold would know the work of all the better tailors in town.”

  “Sig, you didn’t bring me up here to discuss the art of cutting cloth.”

  I don’t like the way his nostrils are flaring again while he looks at me, or the way his mouth turns down while he inhales a deep breath, then lets it out as if he’s breathing the fires of destruction on the world.

  “I have a job for you, Cantor.”

  “A job? Tonight? I figured you brought me up here to ask about what happened to Miss Shaw on the river. My condolences, by the way. Seems like an odd time to hire me to get you some fancy goods.”

  “It’s not that kind of job. I am asking you to find out who killed Opal. That’s all.”

  Those last two little words, That’s all, drop with the whispery force of a guillotine rushing down to chop off an unfortunate head. He wants me to find the owner of that head.

  In the absence of a badly needed slug of whiskey, I take my pack of Chesterfields and matches from my pocket instead, fire up a smoke, and hope the brim of my cap hides my shaking hands. “Sig, I’m not a detective.”

  “You are the person who must do the job, Cantor.”

  “But I wouldn’t know where to start. Except for what I’ve read in the papers, I don’t know which circles you and Miss Shaw ran around in. I don’t know who she palled around with while you were upstate, or who might have had it in for her. And maybe, just maybe, it was a terrible accident. Have you thought about that?”

  “I don’t believe in accidents.”

  He should know. He’s staged plenty of ’em. Ask the widows.

  A long drag on my smoke gives me a few seconds to think, find a direction Sig may go for, a direction away from me. “What about having some of your own people nose around? They know your territory and the people in it. They’d know right away who to keep an eye on. Or better yet, give the job to one of the cops on your payroll. They have the resources for this sort of—”

  “No.” The word comes at me like a bullet to the gut.

  Sig turns his back to me, but I know the conversation’s not over. He just wants me to shut up.

  He’s leaning against the ledge again, pointing toward Times Square. “You see those lights down there, Cantor?” he says. “I always did like those lights, especially when I would take Opal to a show. We used to go out a lot before I went upstate. I took Opal to see that cowboy show, that Annie Get Your Gun, with
that dame with the loud voice—you know, that Merman woman. I took Opal to all the best nightclubs. Saw all the big names. When we walked into a theater or into a supper club, those lights would splash all over her. It wasn’t that the lights made Opal look nice—she made the lights look good. You understand what I’m saying, Cantor.”

  I don’t want to touch that last remark. No good ever comes of sharing opinions about a beautiful woman with the man who sleeps with her. I let the remark hang in the air, let it blow away on the night breeze.

  Sig keeps looking out to Broadway. “And it was not only because Opal was a knockout. She had something…something…”

  If I wasn’t standing right here, you’d never convince me that Sig Loreale could have a lump in his throat. But it’s there, and then it isn’t. Sig squelched the nasty little emotional threat before it did him in.

  “Look,” he says, still nostalgic but in command of it, “you remember how her face lit up the room when I gave her that silver vase at her birthday party? I tell you, she was crazy about that vase, Cantor. You could tell, right?”

  “I wasn’t invited to her birthday party, Sig.” If I’m lucky, I won’t be invited to her funeral, either.

  “No? Well, maybe you should have been. You could have seen that look in her eyes. Happy as a little kid. You did good work on that one, Cantor. I should have invited you to the party. As a token of my appreciation, you understand.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Sig. That satchel of cash your boy gave me at the handoff was all the appreciation I needed.”

  He takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly, as if he’s hoarding it. When he turns around, the brim of his hat shadows his eyes but I feel them on me, bearing down with the crushing force of an oncoming truck. “Listen to me, Cantor. You are part of what took place on the river tonight. You are part of Opal’s death. And you are the only person who can get to the truth of what happened to her. You are the only person I trust to do it because not one word can get back to anybody in my organization about what I am asking you to do. We will let them think you are doing your usual work for me, maybe protecting my interests in the purchase of some fancy item. They are not to know anything else for the time being.”

  The first part of what he said, about being the only one who can get to the truth, is crap. But the second part hits me like bad weather: in Sig Loreale’s dangerous world of vengeance and murder, where rivals and treachery nip at him every day, he can never be seen as sentimental or weak. For hard men like Sig and his army of thugs, love from a woman is one thing; love for a woman is something else. It’s personal, it makes a soft spot in the heart. Rivals, or the Law, could get to you through your woman. Your urge to protect her would be taken for a sign of weakness. Love for a woman could get an outlaw killed. Ask John Dillinger’s ghost.

  So whaddya know: New York’s boogeyman, the Gutter God of Death, was truly and dangerously in love with Opal Shaw. If anyone, even those most loyal, knew the truth of it, fear of the man would dry up. Sig’s business runs on fear. Without it, vultures would peck at his business until there was nothing left but Sig’s carcass.

  He takes another cigar from his inside pocket, lights it, leans back against the ledge, a silhouette again, the glow of Times Square behind him. He says, “You know the only things I missed in prison? Elbow room and Opal. I was looking forward to both when I got out. Did you know, Cantor, that Opal came up to visit me every weekend? She drove up on Saturdays, then stayed at some spot nearby so she could come back to the joint to see me on Sunday.”

  “That’s the part I don’t understand, Sig.”

  “What, you don’t think Opal was sincere?” He’s looking at me again, I can feel it, even though he’s still a silhouette hidden in a shadow.

  “No, I mean the prison part,” I say. “I don’t understand how you were cornered into that penny-ante embezzling charge. Ten thousand they said you skimmed from some low-end garbage-hauling outfit. That’s pocket change to you, Sig.”

  “And to you, too, Cantor.”

  “What? I’m not in your league. And now I’ll have to spend an arm and a leg to replace my sunken b—” I shut up because I see the silhouette of his head tilt back, light from the window catching Sig’s mouth and chin. His mouth is open in the shape of a laugh, his teeth glinting in the light, but there’s no sound coming out. It’s that soundless laugh of his. After all these years it still gives me the creeps.

  So it’s a relief to hear his voice again, his cold humor. “I am surprised at you, Cantor. You don’t recognize a vacation? My chance to get away from all the hoopla of New York?”

  He takes a long pull on his cigar. The burning tip throws a red glow under the brim of his hat and around his eyes. He gives me a steady, amused stare, a devilish professor poking a student’s brain. So I think fast about the time he left for prison, remember the trial that sent him there. The daily papers ran a picture of the judge, Hizzoner Ezra Marsh, after he sentenced Sig to eighteen months—an easy ride for a pro—and then I remember Sig telling me years ago how he dealt with judges: You buy ’em by the pound, like any other meat, he’d said, and now I think maybe the trial was a fixed deal for a light sentence, and Judge Marsh must have been pricey because he’s a fat slob, but other than all that, I have only a memory of that crisp early autumn, when everyone in town was enjoying those perfect September days before the yearly onslaught of winter’s cold and snow.

  Cold and snow. Autumn and winter 1947. That’s it.

  I look straight at Sig, watch his eyes widen as he realizes I get the drift of what he’d hinted, what started in the autumn of ’47, not long after Sig went to prison, and ran through the winter and into early ’48. It was like Coney Island all over again but on a much grander scale, the stakes not just a neighborhood or a city, but a major shift in the forces of power and money across the whole damn country. Murder-for-hire, like the rest of American business after the war, was organizing into giant corporations that swallowed puny competitors, and there was only one way to rid the murder business of any independent small-time operators and gangs. Guys, their women, their families, were found dead in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, in cities and towns and in the middle of nowhere, from the Canadian border to the Rio Grande. And all during that season of organized killing, when all Sig had to do was give coded instructions during his permitted weekly phone call, he had the tightest alibi there is: prison.

  I am in the presence of the man who now holds the nationwide monopoly on murder. He can have anyone killed, anywhere. He can reach us all.

  A wave of nausea rolls through me. Sig, though, seems to be enjoying himself for the first time tonight. “And I told them what they could do with their parole. I told Judge Marsh I would do the whole eighteen months and then walk out a completely free man. I wouldn’t tolerate a parole officer who is out for glory looking over my shoulder and up my ass.”

  “Is that what you were going to celebrate tonight? Slipping the Law’s leash?”

  “What are you talking about, Cantor?”

  “The tux. You’re all dressed up for a party.”

  He takes a deep breath again. But this time, looking at the windows of his apartment, he seems to be trying to suck the aroma of all those flowers out of the living room and into his lungs. “A party,” he says, letting the words out slowly. “A party. It was…it was supposed to be a wedding party. Opal and I, we were going to be married tonight, Cantor. That is why all those flowers are in the living room. That is why I’m dressed in this monkey suit. I had my driver bring it along when he came upstate to fetch me, so I could change clothes before I walked out of prison. I’d promised Opal I would be ready as soon as I arrived home. She was going to be here already, all dressed up in her wedding gown.” The words fall out of his mouth with the thud of dead dreams. But his eyes burn.

  If I was scared of Sig before, I’m terrified of him now. There’s no brew more murderous than sadness mixed with vengeance, and Sig’s drunk with it. The longer he
talks, the longer he spills his misery, the more my skin crawls.

  So I’m grateful when he takes a long pull on his cigar, giving us both a calming break from his brutal agony. But the break doesn’t last long. “That fat Judge Marsh was waiting here to perform the marriage rites. A photographer was here to take wedding pictures. Even Opal’s mother was here. Opal was close to her mother, you know. The boys in my outfit figured I was just…that my marrying Opal was just to put my tag on her, have a wife around to make dinner and spread her legs when I told her to, the way the other boys do with their women.” He lifts his cigar for another pull but interrupts himself, says instead, “Whoever did this terrible thing to Opal, whoever killed her, they hurt me.” He tosses the unfinished cigar over the ledge as if it’s simply too heavy to hold anymore. “What the hell was Opal doing on the Brooklyn Bridge at that hour?”

  “I couldn’t say, Sig.”

  “Something is wrong there, Cantor. Something I have to find out. And I am depending on you to do it.”

  “Sig, please, I have aggravation of my own that’s chasing me tonight.”

  “Yes, I know all about Mr. Ortine. His line’s the clip-joint rackets.”

  There it is again, that reach of his, that web he has all over town, snagging everybody.

  “I don’t know why you do business with him, Cantor. The guy’s nothing but a fancy pimp. No muscle in his belly, but that’s the kind that’s moving in on things these days,” he says with annoyance. “The world is changing, Cantor, changed a lot since the war. If you listen to all those experts, those guys with the lab coats and the PhDs, they say modern life is about to get plenty exciting. You know the guys I’m talking about, Cantor?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Yeah, plenty exciting, the smart guys say, what with that atomic energy and new electric appliances for the housewife. So you know what my smart guys are investing my money in now?” He gives me a snide laugh, then says, “Real estate,” as if the two words have a bad odor. “I used to clean up my money through my warehouse operations or labor unions, things with a little muscle. Now I own a lot of ugly little plots of scrubland out on Long Island for all those bungalows the ex-GIs want for their new families. Everybody wants a lawn to mow, everybody wants a charcoal grill on the lawn, and a television set to entertain them instead of going out dancing or to a movie. I ask you, Cantor, does that sound exciting to you?”