by Ann Aptaker
Her voice is less panicky than when she opened the door, a nice voice, actually, smooth, the way velvet would sound sliding against my ear. “How come you know my name but I don’t know yours?”
“My name’s Cantor Gold. I know your name because someone told me.”
“Who told you? I’m, um, pretty sure you and I don’t run in the same crowd. No one I know would sport that haircut of yours. And you’ll excuse me for saying so, but those scars on your face mark you as an alley cat who goes looking for trouble.”
“That about sums me up.”
She stands against the door as she closes it, giving me that once-over again. If she’s window-shopping, I wouldn’t mind if she decides to buy, even just on layaway. Meantime, I can at least enjoy the way the lamplight settles on her high cheekbones, brushes her black eyelashes and that eat-me-alive mouth, and illuminates two big red flowers on her robe filled out to voluptuous perfection by a pair of breasts so ripe they make my mouth water.
I drag my attention back to her face, which is as dangerously tempting as everything else about her. “I got your name from Opal Shaw’s mother, Esther Sheinbaum,” I say. “Know her?”
“I never met her.”
“But you know who she is. You know she was Opal’s mother.”
“What is this? You grill like a cop, but honey, you’re no cop. So what are you?”
Honey. A sweet word from sweet lips for a sweet me.
I say, “Mind if I sit down?”
“You’re asking? The way you pushed your way through the door, you don’t strike me as the type who asks for permission for anything.”
I sit down on the couch while Celeste gets a cigarette from a pack of Pall Malls on the battered heap of sticks that still thinks it’s a coffee table. As Celeste bends down for the pack of smokes, lamplight finds parts of her body, lovely parts that press through the flowery robe. She bends near enough for me to breathe her scent of bath powder, an intoxication that makes my hands twitch with an urge to pull open the belt of her robe and let all of Celeste Copley spill out for my delectation.
An alley cat looking for trouble, that’s me.
But not tonight. I thrust my hands into the pockets of my overcoat to keep them from misbehaving. My right hand slides against the scrap of Opal’s dress I’d pulled from the bridge. The sequins scrape my palm, wake me from the dream of a naked Celeste, kick me back into the nightmare of my kidnapped Rosie.
I get back to business. “What do you know about Opal Shaw’s death?”
Celeste takes a deep pull on her cigarette, says, “Nothing,” through an exhaled cloud of smoke. She’s kidding herself if she thinks she can hide behind the smoke and get away with her next lie. “Must’ve been a rotten accident. I wouldn’t know. I only know what I heard through the grapevine. It’s starting to get around that she took a dive from the bridge.”
“Cut the crap, Celeste. I’m pretty sure you were with Opal tonight, at least for a while, so let’s forget about hide-and-seek. Just answer my questions.”
“And who appointed you the chief of police?”
“Sig Loreale.”
Amazing, the power of a name, Sig’s name. It slaps Celeste across the face, stings her with the danger of giving me the clam-up. She plays it careful now. “That monster was really crazy about her,” is all she says.
“And he’s hot to get to the bottom of how she died. Loreale doesn’t believe for a minute that Opal’s death was an accident. And I don’t believe it, either. And neither do you. So let’s get back to where we started. If you give a damn about your friend you’ll help me find out what happened to her. Start at the beginning, Celeste. You were with Opal tonight, driving somewhere, according to her mother.”
“She told you Opal was a friend of mine?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m surprised she ever heard of me. I didn’t know she was Opal’s mother until a week or so before Loreale got out of prison. Opal had to tell me, I suppose, since she’d asked me to be at the wedding. Her mother would be there, too, so the secret would be out anyway.”
“Listen to me. If old lady Sheinbaum knows you were with Opal tonight, then Loreale knows it by now, too. If I were you, Miss Copley, I’d count myself lucky that you’re talking to me and not to Loreale about Opal’s death. A smart girl like you knows he has rather persuasive ways of getting people to talk. So if you don’t want me dragging you off to Loreale for him to cut your pretty face to shreds, you’ve got to make me happy. You can start by telling me who was driving tonight. Were you in Opal’s car or yours?”
“I don’t have a car. Look, I already told you, I don’t know what happened on the bridge. You’re wasting your time here.”
“But you do know what happened. Opal Shaw went over the Brooklyn Bridge. What you mean is maybe you don’t know how it happened. But we’re going to find out, you and I.”
“Says who?”
“Says me and—”
“Yeah, yeah, Sig Loreale.” She says this like she’s talking about some dullard she got stuck with at a boring party. But the deep, tense drag she takes on her smoke tells the real story: she’s trapped and she knows it.
If I press too hard too soon, I risk spooking her more than she already is, which could kill her cooperation. So I keep things as easygoing as I can swing, keep the tone friendly. “Okay, let’s take it from the top, Miss Copley. You were in Opal’s car. She was driving. You were in the passenger’s seat. But where the hell were you two going on the night of her wedding?”
“I need a drink.”
“Go ahead if it will help you chatter. And you can pour one for me, too. Scotch, Chivas if you’ve got it.”
She snorts a laugh as she walks across the room to a beat-up breakfront. “Look around, kiddo,” she says, cocking her head. “Does it look like I’ve got dough to spend on Chivas? I’ve got a bottle of scotch, sure. Plain old rotgut scotch. I don’t care if you drink it or not.” When she reaches up to open the breakfront cabinet, the sleeve of her robe slides along her right arm to her elbow. What it reveals makes my throat go dry: a bruise on her forearm about three inches from the wrist. The bruise is wide, red as cheap wine, encircling her forearm where a brute gripped her and wouldn’t let go.
She pulls a bottle and two glasses from the cabinet. As she puts the bottle down on the coffee table, the sleeve of the flowery robe drops to Celeste’s wrist, covers the bad news on her arm. She stubs her cigarette out, then pours the whiskey into the two glasses.
Seeing that bruise changes everything. Much as I’d like to soothe her into cooperating, that red welt tells me she’s deeper into Opal’s death than she’ll ever admit. So it’s time to push a little. I say, “Did you get that red souvenir on your arm before or after Opal went over?”
Her brown eyes aren’t puppylike anymore, more like the wide eyes of a frantic, cornered rat. “Get lost,” she says. “I don’t need an alley cat out for trouble. Go on, leave me alone. Get lost!”
“Not until you tell me what you know about Opal’s killing.” I spring up from the sofa, grab Celeste’s arm, lift it and point to the red welt on her flesh like it’s an object for show-and-tell at a school for rough trade. “Who gave you that bruise? The same gorilla who tossed Opal? And did you know she was stabbed, too? That’s right, took it in the neck.” With my free hand, I pull the scrap of Opal’s dress from my pocket, hold it up to Celeste’s face, wave it in front of her like a bloody shirt. “This is all her mother’s gonna have of her, Celeste, a crummy scrap torn from Opal’s dress as she went off the bridge.”
Seeing the scrap is like seeing a ghost, the ghost of Opal Shaw demanding revenge. But whatever horror Celeste sees in that scrap of Opal’s death, it’s still not enough to break her fear of whoever branded her arm.
Her fear bores deep into me, finds my tender spot. Before I know what’s happening, I’m very close to her. My hand seems to rise of its own accord to stroke her cheek. “Listen, Celeste, if you need a safe place to stay, I can ge
t you to one. Just tell me what you know, tell me who hurt you, who you’re afraid of.”
She yanks her arm out of my grip. “You still don’t get it! Look, sport, my life may not be worth much but I’m not ready to trade it in. Talking to you would be my death sentence. So please, just get out of here.”
“I can’t. Not until I get the information I came for. Remember who sent me, if it’ll help you talk. Maybe the scotch will help, too. Here. You look like you need it.” I hand her a glass of whiskey, take the other glass for myself. “Your continued health,” I say, then take a swig.
The sight and sound of me gagging on the cheap firewater must be a real corker. At any rate, it makes Celeste laugh. It’s a surprisingly sweet laugh, charming, even girlish. “Well, my fancy friend,” she says, “how long has it been since you lived on the cheap side of the street? Even your throat’s gone soft.”
“It’s been a while,” I say, still trying to cough out the rotten scotch. “Where’d you get this stuff? Mrs. McGillicuddy’s bathtub? Doesn’t she know Prohibition’s been over for sixteen years? She can buy real whiskey now.”
“Oh, don’t make fun of sweet ol’ Mrs. McGillicuddy,” Celeste teases. “She’s been quenching the thirst of the sorry souls around here since the potato famine brought ’em over from the auld sod.” Celeste’s smile is wide and warm, a real winner once the shackles of fear are off it.
So my comedy’s been useful. Okay, now I’ve got to keep Celeste friendly. “You don’t seem like the type to live in a dump like this,” I say as if just tossing an easy, tenderhearted line of curiosity.
“I grew up in this dump. I kept paying the rent after both my folks were gone. It’s a place to come back to when the mugs I always wind up with do me dirty, leave me stranded, which they do with predictable regularity. You’d think I’d finally learn.”
“So why don’t you?”
“Never had anyone teach me how to walk away from a good-looking face, a wad of cash, and the good times that came with the face and the cash. And if he’s a danger boy, which he usually is, I’m like metal to a magnet.”
“Yeah,” slips out under my breath. I know about women who like to play with danger, adventurous women like Rosie, who’s paying for her preference right now.
Celeste looks at me in a way that makes me feel caught in a searchlight. I take a drink of the rotgut scotch to put a barrier between me and her probing gaze, hiding behind the glass of liquor as surely as she hid from me behind cigarette smoke. We make quite a pair.
But the burn of the firewater does its job, kicks me back to business. “Is the danger boy who did you dirty this time around the same guy who tortured your arm?”
Celeste may be down on her luck, but she still knows how to work all the angles. She looks right through my little ruse with the glass of whiskey. A smile even curls at the corners of her mouth.
If she’s trying to make me feel naked, she’s succeeding. I start to hide behind another drink, then lower the glass. It’s time for this seesaw of power to tilt me back on top. “That’s a fresh mark on your arm, Celeste. He gave you that mark tonight. The guy’s mixed up in Opal’s death, am I right? And now you’re scared he’s going to come after you. You know too much.”
Her smile shrinks—fear finally kills it. There’s no expression on her beautiful face at all.
“Who is he, Celeste?”
She takes a deep breath, the kind that’s supposed to cleanse the body, refresh the mind, but the name that rides on the breath just seems to foul it. “Green. Leon Green. They call him Pep.”
Chapter Nine
“You’re telling me Pep Green killed Opal? That’s not something you spit out like chewing gum, Celeste, just to see if it sticks to my face. You’re talking about a guy who’s as loyal to Loreale as a seeing-eye dog.”
“You know Pep?”
“We’re acquainted.” She didn’t expect that. She shrinks from the news, her shoulders fluttering like the weakened wings of an exhausted bird.
She doesn’t fight me when I lead her to the couch, but she doesn’t help, either. She doesn’t seem to care if she’s led to safety or ruin as long as someone else makes the decision.
I sit down beside her, hand her her glass of scotch. “Drink this. Take it slow, let it work.” She sips the whiskey, her face so pale she could pass for dead. “Talk to me, Celeste.”
Maybe I’m impatient, or maybe the earth really has turned a dozen times until she says anything. “When I was a little girl, my mother always told me to shut up.” She sounds as dead as she looks, all dried up and hollowed out. “The way she said it, raspy, and full of hate…it was like she cut my throat with a jagged knife and all I could do afterward was whisper. It feels like I’ve been whispering ever since. No one ever really hears me.”
“I’ll hear.”
“You?” The word comes out on a strangled little laugh that’s more sad than sneering. “If I tell you everything I know”—she’s turned to me, her eyes desperate and pleading, full of cold fear that’s digging into me, trying to find a warm place to hide—“can you protect me? I need a guarantee.”
“I told you, I can get you to a safe place. No one will know where you are. Pep won’t be able to find you. Is that who you were waiting for tonight?”
“No, no, not Pep, that louse.” She drowns his name in a deep swallow of her drink, closing her eyes, shutting out the sight of the latest danger boy who hurt her. “He called it quits with me a month ago. He had his fill of me, and well…”
“He stopped paying the bills?”
That opens her eyes again, but not to look at me. She doesn’t see me, she doesn’t see anything except her bitter memories. “Then tonight, he promised…” She can’t finish it.
But she has to finish it. I need every scrap of information I can get. “He promised what, Celeste? C’mon, you’re not alone in this anymore. I’m with you. I can help you.”
Her eyes flash with a sudden awareness of me, as if she just woke up. “You’re here to help Sig Loreale.”
“Sure, but it doesn’t mean I can’t help you, too. Look, you’re nobody’s fool, kiddo. You know as well as I do that Loreale won’t stop until he has Opal’s killer. Then he’ll deliver a death sentence same as a judge and jury, and a lot quicker, too.” I’m getting to her, and she doesn’t like it, fidgeting under the grim story I’ve just tossed in her lap. But I don’t dare ease up, not yet. “So if you’ve got something on Pep, Celeste, something to prove that he killed Opal, let me have it. It’s the only way we’ll both be free of Loreale. But it has to be airtight, understand?” I’m really pushing now, tearing down the rickety defenses she hopes will hold me off while she escapes into another drink, but I push the drink away. “Are you listening to me, Celeste? Pep is Sig’s right-hand guy. I can’t sell just any old bill of goods. I’ll need every detail you can give me, starting with who you were waiting for when I showed up, and what’s it got to do with Opal’s killing.”
She looks down at the glass in her hand, then around the room in a frantic search for a way out of the hell she’s trapped in other than the risky ride I’m offering. But there aren’t any other ways out for her. She finally knows it, sees it, and gives in. “It’s got to do with money,” she says, exhausted by all the disappointments and dangers that are chasing her tonight. “Pep said a pal of his would come by tonight with money. Pep didn’t even tell me the guy’s name, just that he was supposed to show up with ten thousand, cash.”
“You think he stiffed you?”
“Looks that way, doesn’t it? The guy was supposed to be here over an hour ago.” She shakes her head in disgust. Disgust at getting stiffed out of the cash. Disgust at getting stiffed one way or another all of her life. “I wanted that dough so I could get away, start over somewhere else, Miami maybe, or California, someplace where the sun always shines, where the sun could bleach me clean.”
Ten thousand dollars is a lot of cash for a cleanup. It’s the kind of money you shell out for so
meone to shut up. And if you really want to make sure the party in question doesn’t talk, you don’t bother with money. You pay them off with a bullet.
Celeste isn’t ten grand richer and she isn’t dead. The cash-payoff deal looks like a phony, which means the bullet could still be coming for her.
When I was a kid, I used to daydream about being a knight in shining armor, saving damsels in distress. Then I grew up and I couldn’t even save the one damsel who mattered more to me than silk suits and money. I couldn’t save Sophie. Now I’m faced with two more damsels whose lives are in my lap: Celeste and Rosie. If I screw up, one or both of them will wind up dead. This is no daydream. It’s a nightmare.
I keep coming down hard on Celeste and I wish I didn’t have to, but I don’t know how else to pry information out of her scared little heart. “You’re going to tell me what’s going on, Celeste, because without me you’re dead. You’re already so scared your body’s ready to fold up. How long do you think you’d survive on your own with that target Pep’s painted on your back? Yeah, that’s right. He’s marked you. You’re prey.”
I’ve got her attention now. She turns and looks at me with those big brown eyes like a puppy begging to be allowed in from the cold. “Please, take me away from here now,” she says. “I’ll tell you everything after you get me to that safe place, okay? Look, I can be dressed and ready in five minutes!” She gets up from the couch, starts for the bedroom.
I grab her arm, ready to tell her that if she’s just stringing me along she can pack up her dreams about living life in the sunshine. But the sleeve of her robe slides along her arm when I grab her, reveals that ugly bruise. My throat closes up. I don’t say a damn thing, just release my grip.