by Ann Aptaker
“Maybe she was happy, Mom. Tonight was going to be her wedding night. Sig adored her.”
“Him? I didn’t want her to wind up with a man like that. A killer. A murderer!” She shakes her head and dabs her eyes again. “Isaac and I waited a long time to make a baby, until we had the money to bring it up right, pay for a high-class education, buy her nice things. I wanted Opal to have the big American Dream, mingle with the first-rate people, not with hoodlums like you.”
“You didn’t seem to think this particular hoodlum was so bad,” I say, stroking her cheek again.
She bats my hand from her cheek and with a tsk says, “Don’t kid yourself, Cantor. You’re just a mug, no better than all the other mugs I’ve had to deal with. What?” she says, addressing what must be a peculiar look on my face. “You think just because you’re in the fancy art business you’re not a mug? Heh, I remember when you still had Coney Island sand on your shoes, tracked it all over my carpets. I didn’t want my Opal anywhere near a schlepper like you.”
“Even after I got cleaned up?” I try to make it funny, opening my coat to show off my expensive, well-tailored silk duds, but I feel like a circus clown with a painted-on smile.
“Especially after you got all cleaned up. First with the men’s suits, then all those girls you were always running after. You think I liked seeing stuff like that? You think I’d let you go sniffing around my precious girl? I wanted Opal should grow up normal.”
Now even the painted smile can’t help me, can’t shield me from the ax Mom just used to split me open, spill my entrails all over the rug. The wild, mischief-making kid I’d been and the outlaw I grew up to be have just been disassembled, bone by bone, by this woman, this mentor, this teacher, this Mom who used to pour me tea and serve me honey cake, who used to let me pour my teenage heart out about my butchy ways and unrequited high school crushes that my own tradition-haunted mom and pop would never understand; this woman who, right now, in that frilly black lace robe, looks as hard-hearted as a black widow spider who just might eat her adopted young.
It takes me a minute to rally, to take my breath back, put the pieces of me back into place. Some parts don’t hook together anymore, no matter where in my memories I try to fit them.
I finally give up trying, pulled back by the singsong drone of Mom still talking. “But what could I do? The minute Opal and that murderer laid eyes on each other at that nightclub I took her to so she’d meet the right people, that club with those blue-and-white zebra-skin booths, the whaddya call it, the El Morocco, so who does she meet? Him, that’s who, another big shot from the gutter.” I squelch a bitter laugh, wondering how Sig would take to Mom’s low opinion of him.
Mom doesn’t notice, just keeps talking. “He was in a booth, schmoozing it up but good with some dolled-up floozie. Well, he forgot all about the floozie when he saw Opal. He knew class when he saw it, believe me. And when she saw him, oh boy, I could tell she’d made up her mind there and then that Loreale was for her. All that fancy schooling with all those top-drawer people, and she breaks her mother’s heart.” The old lady shakes her head with the memory, lets out a sigh, then looks at me and smiles as if she just remembered that I’m here. “Have some honey cake, Cantor. It’s from Weinstein’s on Rivington Street.”
“I don’t want any cake. Look, you know why I’m here. Let’s stick to business. Do you have any idea why Opal was on the bridge an hour before she was supposed to get married?”
“No, I can’t figure it at all. Cantor, I know she didn’t jump and I know it wasn’t any accident. I know she was murdered. They told me!”
“Who told you, the cops?”
“No, the woman. At the funeral parlor, the washer. One of the women who washes the dead and says the blessings. She called me up a little while ago, before the cops showed up here. She called because she saw a hole, a hole in Opal’s neck where blood had come out.”
“Opal was pretty banged up from her crash landing on my boat. She was bleeding all over the place, not just her neck. It could’ve happened from the crash.”
“No, Cantor, no. The woman, the washer, she knows her business,” Mom says, wagging her finger at me like I have some nerve contradicting her. “The woman knows what’s what when it comes to preparing the dead for the grave. She knows the difference between bruises and stabs. Cantor, I tell you, Opal was murdered tonight!” Mom brings the balled-up hankie back to her eyes, takes a few quick breaths to steady herself before she can talk again. “I can’t figure why, but I’m sure the whole thing was a setup. I’m sure of it.”
“You sound like Sig. And it doesn’t sound any better from your mouth than it did from his.”
“But it’s the truth. So you’ve got to do what we ask. You’ve got to find out what happened to my Opal, who hurt her, who killed her. Otherwise, who will be for my daughter, Cantor? The cops? You think they’ll be for her just because they come here with their questions? No, no, they will not be. You must be for Opal, Cantor.” Her tiny green eyes make their powerful demand behind their desperate pleading. But I don’t see warmth for me in her eyes. I wonder now if I ever did, or if I was just a lonely little tomboy all those years ago, picking up warmth wherever I’d imagined it should be.
I’ve got to get this deal back onto steadier ground, where my feelings mean nothing, just do the job so I can get Rosie back—
Rosie…Rosie…my beautiful soldier.
—so I talk to Esther Sheinbaum now with the only truth that’s always been ours: outlaw to outlaw. “Then it’s got to be a square deal,” I say. “You’ve got to do something for me, understand? You have some of the best contacts in the city, people high and low. Use those contacts to find out where Sig stashed a friend of mine.”
“You mean the cabbie?”
“You know about that?”
“Sure. Sig called after you left his place, said he’d given you a…an incentive to do our job. But don’t ask me where he’s got her, Cantor. He didn’t tell me. He wouldn’t even if I asked. Sig keeps his plays to himself.”
My mind spins a daydream, a fantasy of being a little kid again with Esther Sheinbaum and Sig Loreale standing side by side in front of me, and I erase them both with my brand-new rubber eraser. I even smile a little. “You know, I have friends in high and low places, too,” I say. “Maybe not as many as you do, maybe not as high, but sooner or later, while I’m going through the motions of looking for Opal’s killer, someone I know, maybe someone who owes me a favor, will find Rosie—that’s her name, Rosie Bliss—and finding Rosie, getting her back, is all I care about. I’ll drop your problem like a hot potato, let you make do with the cops, let Sig get eaten alive by the vultures who’ll surely come after their lovesick boss. Now, a major player like you can get a line on where Sig’s got Rosie a lot faster than I can. Are you getting the picture, Mom?”
After she blows her nose into the damp, wrinkled hankie, she looks at me straight, says, “Well, well, we taught you good, growing up, Cantor. Taught you when to make the good play. Okay, you just made the good play. So yeah, sure, you got yourself a deal. I’ll make some calls.”
“Some calls?”
“All right, Cantor, all right, I’ll make a lotta calls.”
“That’s better. Okay, let’s get things going. Sig thought you might have some ideas about where I should start, where to get some information about what happened on the bridge.”
The old woman’s tough hide is pierced again by grief for her daughter. Tears flood her eyes but she wills them back, takes a deep breath, and speaks slowly, trying not to choke on every word. “I hoped to have a little supper with Opal before Sig got home from the prison. But Opal said that she had plans right up to the last minute, that she’d be running around.”
“At that hour? Since when does a bride go running around just before her wedding?”
“Yeah, I thought it was meshuga, too, running around on her wedding night, but she sounded so happy about whatever the hell she had planned. She said I
shouldn’t worry, just a bride’s high spirits is what she called it. So you see, Cantor, Opal was already away from the penthouse. If someone grabbed her, it was while she was running around.”
“And that’s it? That’s all you have?”
“And a name—Celeste. Celeste Copley. Opal talked about her, said they were good friends, that she and this Celeste sometimes took in a movie while Sig was away in the prison. I think Opal might’ve been running around with this Copley woman tonight.”
“Did you get in touch with this Copley and get her story?”
“She’s not in the book, I checked before the cops came. But I think Opal might’ve said something about an apartment somewhere on the West Side.”
“That’s a lot of somewhere.”
“It’s the best I can do, Cantor. I was gonna call up one of my operatives to put a trace on this Copley when the cops showed up here. But I don’t have time now anymore. I got a lot to do before I bury Opal. The funeral’s in the morning. You’ll have to trace the Copley woman yourself. Have that clever young man of yours handle it. He’s good with these things.”
“All right, I’ll call him now.” I start for the phone in the hall.
“No, you gotta go now, Cantor. I’m tired, and I got plenty of stuff to do before the morning. Now go.” A quick wave of her hand makes her point. I’m dismissed.
That’s it, then. I’m finished here. On my way out of the dining room I start to turn around for a last look, but I change my mind. I just walk out.
Halfway through the living room I call over my shoulder, “Make those phone calls. Have something to tell me later, you understand?”
I don’t get an answer by the time I’m in the vestibule. Maybe I didn’t hear her or maybe Mom didn’t answer me at all. It doesn’t matter anymore as I walk out the door.
I take my cap out of my coat pocket and put it on, figure I’ll walk over to an all-night deli I know in the neighborhood. The place has a row of phone booths where I can call Judson, get him started on finding an address for Celeste Copley.
I start down the front stairs. Memories I no longer want grab hold of me, memories of Mom Sheinbaum watching from a window, eating a slice of honey cake, while I played stoopball on these stairs with the neighborhood kids, and how the ball would hit the edge of a step and go careening into traffic. Drivers honked their horns and cursed at us kids while we laughed our heads off. I laugh about it now, whether I want to or not, until my breath catches in my throat and I forget about the past and smile from ear to ear about the here and now that’s right in front of me: a Checker Cab is pulling up.
Chapter Seven
I’ve never bought the idea of miracles, and maybe what I’m seeing is no miracle anyway. Rosie Bliss is one smart article with the brains and the guts to slip Loreale’s rope. She also has the knack to track my scent in order to find me. Tonight wouldn’t be the first time. She even tracked me to an all-night poker game in a Bronx basement and got me outta there five minutes before an irate husband and his wife’s two equally irate brothers arrived to rip my guts out. But in order for Rosie to track me here, she’d have to sniff out that Mom Sheinbaum and Opal Shaw are family. Has it hit the streets already or did Rosie’s kidnapper slip his lip?
Plenty of time to get the story from her later. Right now, I catch only a glimpse of blond hair under the familiar cabbie’s cap, but it’s enough to make my heart dance like it’s New Year’s Eve. By the time the driver’s door opens my heart’s doing high-stepping kicks, which is why it’s a hard crash when a young blond-haired guy wearing a cap like Rosie’s gets out from behind the wheel.
Yeah, sure, I remind myself, choking on it. A lot of cabbies wear that sort of cap.
Meantime, an old sourpuss of a guy built like a fireplug gets out of the backseat of the cab. His black-and-green checkered lumber jacket and gray fedora are as rumpled and worn out as the rest of him. The guy’s one of those thick-necked, stoop-shouldered old lugs with a face full of lumpy folds carved by suspicion of everything. For a guy of his bulk he has a mousey way about him, like he’s been caught hitching up his pants.
After the cabbie pulls two valises from the trunk, the old sourpuss guy takes his time about paying the fare, performing a Rube-from-the-Sticks ritual that drives New Yorkers nuts. He’s so slow about pulling a roll of bills from his pocket that George Washington’s picture has time to grow a beard; then he has to carefully take off the rubber band that’s wrapped around the roll of bills; after that, he unfolds the roll and straightens out the bills like he’s trying to iron out wrinkles from wet laundry; then he wets his thumb against the tip of his tongue before he finally peels off a bill from the wad.
The cabbie’s getting edgy. He thrusts his hand right up against the old guy’s wad of bills, says, “C’mon, c’mon, snap it up, fella. You’re in New York now. Even our grass grows faster than how you’re peelin’ them bills.”
While the guy fiddles and the cabbie stews, a frowsy old dame in a shapeless gray wool coat slides out of the backseat. One look at her face and I’ve got her nailed as sure as a mug shot. Her hair’s not as silver, more the color of cold ashes, and her face, though plump, isn’t as broad, but she has the same chin-in-the-air, nothing-gets-past-me, small-eyed arrogance as Esther Sheinbaum. Despite the frumpy coat and the lumpy black handbag, this woman could only be Esther’s sister, Ida Blick, which makes the schlemiel paying the cabbie Ida’s husband. They must’ve taken a night train down from the Catskills, caught a cab from Grand Central.
Ida sees me standing on the stoop. She nudges her husband, says, “Look, Morris.”
Morris, a valise in each hand, looks me over. My effect on him causes his face to move in various directions: his eyebrows up, his chin down, his mouth open.
The cabbie looks up to see what the old guy and frowsy dame are gawking at, but he quickly loses interest because he can’t make money standing around sizing up the citizenry. As far as he’s concerned I’m just another one of the city’s nighthawks, one who he figures real quick doesn’t want a cab, and now that he thinks about it maybe he doesn’t want the likes of me in his cab anyway. He gets back behind the wheel and drives off.
Ida and Morris Blick keep staring at me, examining, calculating: Ida, her button eyes on me like she’s trying to figure if maybe she should alert the Vice squad; Morris, like he’s worried I’ll show up at his mom-and-pop cabins in the hills.
So we’re all eyeballing each other as I put on my cap and walk down the stairs. No one says a word, even though it’s on the tip of my tongue to ask Mr. and Mrs. Blick about Opal, about how the little girl they shepherded through a fancy boarding school grew up to be a gangster’s dolly. And I’d like to know if Mr. and Mrs. Blick’s arrival at Mom Sheinbaum’s brownstone in the dead of night is early for Opal’s funeral or late for Opal’s wedding. But the looks they give me are as blunt as the No Trespassing signs I’m sure they’ve nailed up around the property of their boondocks hotel. I’d get nowhere with these two.
So I step down to the sidewalk, pass close enough to Ida and Morris to give their suspicious looks back at ’em before I walk down Second Avenue. I hear Ida say, in that same immigrants’ singsong as her sister, starting high, curling low, sliding around, “Let’s go, Morris. Esther’s waiting.”
*
Fein’s Delicatessen has been squeezed into a sliver of Ludlow Street since the days when gas lamps flickered along the skin of fat salamis hanging above the marble counter. Nowadays, fluorescent light wraps around the salamis and gives everybody in the place that dried-out look like they haven’t slept in days. Well, maybe they haven’t; it’s the middle of the night and the downtown night owls—the hipsters, grifters, philosophers, and streetwalkers—keep the joint hopping while they slurp their borscht, chomp their salami or corned beef sandwiches, argue with the waiters about the service, and argue with each other about everything else, especially politics. If a good argument is part of the moxie of New York, in our delis it’s the seasoning of our m
eals, a condiment as satisfying and tasty as sour pickles.
I get a mug of coffee from the counter guy, take it with me into one of the phone booths along the back wall. I need the jolt of strong black coffee not because I’m sleepy but to kick the sentimentality out of my gut, the false nostalgia for an affection from Mom Sheinbaum that was never real. The hot coffee burns that sappy nonsense out of me while I dial Judson.
He answers on the first ring. “Yeah?”
“It’s me, Judson.”
“Dammit, I’ve been trying to reach you and Rosie on her cab radio for the last half hour. All I get is a lot of weird noise, like water splashing and a grinding sound. Where the hell are you two? Catching the night shift at a machine shop?”
“Listen, Judson, they’ve got her. Sig’s got her. They grabbed Rosie—”
“What? What are you talking about, got her?”
“Sig had one of his thugs sneak into the backseat of Rosie’s cab while I was up in his penthouse. When I came back down to the street, the guy put a gun to the back of Rosie’s head and forced her to drive off. Sig wanted me to see it. Esther Sheinbaum’s in on it, too. Now they’re holding Rosie as insurance that I’ll do what they want me to do.”
“What the hell does old lady Sheinbaum have to do with it?”
“Opal Shaw was her daughter. They want me to find out who killed her.”
There’s a gagged silence on Judson’s end of the line before he’s able to say, “Damn.”
“Yeah. Damn. Damn them both to hell. Look, what about the noise through Rosie’s radio. Water and a grinding noise?”