Criminal Gold

by Ann Aptaker

  Celeste’s stiff as a stick, holding onto the armrest for dear life. She’d better get ready for more rattling because even though I don’t see the DeSoto in my rearview mirror, I see the glow of its headlights rake the brick walls of the warehouses behind me. I push the Buick even faster, take a two-wheeled right turn onto James Street then another screeching left onto Water Street, thread my way along the waterfront through Catherine, Market, and Pike Slips, slide under the Manhattan Bridge where I cut my lights, and back the Buick into an alley between two oyster bars that are closed for the night.

  There’s nothing to do now but wait.

  Celeste, breathing fast, tries to talk. “What the…hell was…?”

  “Shhh. Stay quiet. I need to listen for anything outside.” I hear light traffic and the Brighton Line subway to Coney Island cross the bridge overhead. The familiar music of buoy bells and the groaning horns of ships harmonize on the East River. Car horns honk and police sirens shriek around the city. A fire engine clangs across town. But I don’t hear rolling tires or an engine slowing. I don’t hear any cars coming to a stop. The only sound in the alley is labored breathing, Celeste’s and mine.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Waiting is tough on the body. My nerves beat a rat-a-tat-tat under my skin with the force of a million jackhammers. The jackhammers don’t stop until I’m sure I’ve lost the DeSoto.

  When my senses are finally quiet, I breathe easy again, let my lungs fill with air.

  I take my cap off, open my suit jacket, and roll down my window, let the night breeze coming off the river cool me down. I pull my pack of smokes from my pocket. Celeste jumps at the crackle of the cellophane wrapper. “Hey now,” I say and reach for her hand. She’s got it balled into a tight fist. “You can relax,” I tell her. “We lost him. It’s all over.” I offer Celeste a cigarette. She ignores it, too tense to move a muscle. I light a smoke for myself.

  Celeste’s silence has her wrapped so tight it even ties the air around her in knots. I’d talk to her, try to calm her down, but after the way she ignored me and my offer of a smoke, I figure talking to her won’t do any good. She’s too wound up, my words can’t get in. All I can do is pass the time with my smoke and wait her out.

  She finally cracks her silence with a sudden deep breath. When she lets it out, she says, “Loreale must be on to us.”

  “Could be.”

  Celeste turns to me slowly, almost carefully, then throws my words back at me like they’re a handful of sand: “Could be? You mean someone else could be following us?”

  “Look, the guy’s gone. That’s all that matters.” I start the car.

  Celeste grabs my wrist before I can put the Buick into gear. In the light from the dashboard, her red leather gloves wrap like bloody fingers around my wrist. Her face, still free of her hat veil, is pale as the moon. Her eyes, still smudged from tears, are alert now. She’s a cornered animal again, sensing danger. “I don’t like that answer,” she says. “It’s too slick. What aren’t you telling me?”

  I pull my wrist from her grip, say, “I’m knocking myself out trying to save your life, honey. That’s all you need to know.” I park my cigarette in the corner of my mouth and start again to put the car in gear.

  Celeste grabs my arm, doesn’t let me drive. “Save my life? Listen, you think I’m stupid? If the guy following us wasn’t one of Loreale’s apes, then maybe somebody’s coming after you. Well, that’s just great. I’m supposed to put my life in your hands while someone has you in the crosshairs? Some hero I’ve got protecting me. Dammit, Cantor, I’m not trying to be funny. Why the hell are you smiling?”

  The dashboard glow that found Celeste’s face betrays my face, too. Yeah, I’m smiling, because the sight of her swaddled like a papoose in my overcoat while she gives me a piece of her mind burrows into my sweet spot. “I already told you back at my office, you’re beautiful when you’re angry.”

  “I’m not angry. I’m terrified.”

  Celeste’s fear, that needy gnome who’s been pestering me all night, trips me up again. My smile shrinks, scurries away.

  “I’ll take that smoke now,” she says.

  I give her a cigarette from my pack. She doesn’t look at me when I hold the match to the tip and light the smoke for her. She even turns her head away before I blow out the match.

  I don’t mind her giving me the brush off; I just didn’t expect it to hurt.

  I put my cap back on and drive us out of the alley.

  *

  The atmosphere in the car is thick with the bad air of our sour moods by the time I make a left off Lexington Avenue and onto East Thirty-Seventh Street in the Murray Hill section of town. The kicker of it is, Celeste and I are both annoyed at the same goddamn thing: me. I promised Celeste I’d keep her safe, and I’m failing.

  Bringing Celeste here isn’t going to sweeten her feelings for me. She might even want to scratch my eyes out. I can’t blame her; I’m parked in front of the nest she shared with Pep Green before he broke her heart and threw her out, sent her tumbling back to her fleabag in Hell’s Kitchen.

  Pep’s apartment is in a four-story town house that started life as a private residence during the heyday of the Robber Barons. Like a lot of town houses around the city, it was broken up into apartments when the gold flaked off the Gilded Age. The house is typical of the Italianate variety popular in those days, faced in light gray limestone with Classical lintels above all the windows and a lintel and scrollwork above the arched front door: Renaissance Rome in Midtown Manhattan. The old Robber Baron money dressed itself up in the classiest history money could buy.

  Celeste may not be happy to be here, but she doesn’t ask me why we’ve come. She’s smart enough to figure it. I want those wire recordings before the landlord hears about Pep’s death and finds the recordings when he cleans out the apartment. The smartest thing the landlord could do is throw them out, but if he decides to get cute and tries to make a few bucks from them he’ll wind up dead, courtesy of Sig Loreale.

  One of the recordings, the one Pep played for Opal, is probably still in his apartment, and there might be information, maybe a storage receipt, for the backup copy, the one he told Opal he stashed offshore.

  Celeste pipes up and answers a question I didn’t ask, at least, not out loud. “No, I don’t have a key to the place anymore, in case you’re wondering.” Smart girl.

  I say, “What’s Pep’s apartment number?”

  “You don’t know? You drove like you’ve been here before.”

  “I know which pile of stones is his, but not the apartment.”

  “Apartment 2-A. In the front. You’re going to break in, I suppose.”

  “You can wait here if you don’t want to be part of it.” She hasn’t looked at the place since we got here.

  “I’d rather not go in there,” she says. “Just leave me a cigarette, will you?” I leave her my pack and the book of matches but take the keys to my car. “You think I’d steal it?” she sasses me as I get out.

  “I don’t know. Would you?” I don’t wait around for an answer. It doesn’t matter, anyway. For all I know, she knows how to hot-wire a car. Wouldn’t surprise me.

  Unlike Celeste’s claptrap building in Hell’s Kitchen, Pep’s town house is well tended and well locked. It takes a little finagling with my penknife to open the front door, but it eventually gives.

  The thick carpeting on the stairs and along the second-floor hallway muffles my footsteps and the footsteps of the guy coming down from an upper floor. He’s as surprised to see me at Pep’s door at nearly four thirty in the morning as he expects I am to see him coming down the stairs. He squelches his surprise, then gives me the double take. I get that double take a lot. It comes in two flavors: disgusted, with a hint of looking for trouble; or the mocking chuckle. This guy’s the chuckle type. I don’t give a damn how much he snickers at me under his breath as long as he just moves along, stays out of my business. I stand at Pep’s door like I’m about to ring the buzze
r. The guy walks by me and down the stairs, clearing his throat. I guess I not only make the guy chuckle, I also make him gag. Fine, let him choke.

  I wait to hear the guy open the front door and go out to the street before I crack the lock on Pep’s door.

  The door opens into the living room. There’s a floor lamp nearby. When I turn it on, it shows me a room all decked out in Contemporary Impersonal, the current rage among that class of interior decorators whose clients’ money is so new it’s still breast-fed. I don’t get much business from that crowd, and when I do it’s from the likes of Gregory Ortine, who looks in the mirror and swears he sees an aristocrat who was accidently switched at birth with a pauper’s kid.

  Pep Green obviously didn’t have aristocratic illusions, but he sure as hell hired one of those nouveaux decorators. The living room has lots of expensive blond wood furniture in the latest style of straight lines and black-and-green plaid upholstery, but there isn’t a shred of human personality in any of it. It’s probably just as well, since the primary feature of Pep’s personality was his love of killing. A room reflecting his personal tastes might end up looking like a torture chamber.

  The big books Pep said hid the recorders stick out on a wall shelf like two sore thumbs. The books aren’t weapons manuals after all—in fact, they’re not even books. They’re boxes tricked out to look like a set of oversize dictionaries in tooled-leather bindings. Decorator props, as hollow and phony as Pep’s romantic invitation to Opal or his loyalty to Sig. The dictionary boxes stick out because one of the two wire recorders is still behind them on the shelf. The recorder’s a small portable job with a leather handle. The wire reel is gone. I figure the missing recorder is probably a portable model, too—must’ve been the one Pep brought with him when he visited Opal and gave her the shakedown.

  But Pep wouldn’t leave the recorder and wire reel with Opal. That’d be a sloppy play, and though he may have had the heart and soul of a pig, Pep wasn’t a sloppy player. I’m sure he brought the goods back to his apartment.

  A search of the living room, including a look in closets, inside the television console, under furniture, behind drapes, and in the sideboard in the dining nook, turns up nothing but lost change between the sofa cushions. The wire reel and the recording machine aren’t in this part of the apartment, and neither is any information regarding the backup copy.

  Same story in the kitchen and bathroom.

  I move into Pep’s bedroom, turn a lamp on next to the bed. Somebody pinch me, please. The bedroom is even duller than the living room. No plaid upholstery, no patterns at all, and everything is either brown or beige. The beige bedspread is so boring it could put me to sleep, which may be why Pep liked it. Maybe the guy had insomnia. Frankly, I’d rather have insomnia. I can’t imagine a more boring place to make love to a woman than on a beige bed.

  The only interesting item in the room is on the night table: the other recorder. Yeah, it’s a portable job. The wire reel’s on it, too, played about halfway through. The machine is plugged in, the dial’s turned to Playback.

  Some people listen to the radio to lull them to sleep, other people read a book until their eyelids droop, but Pep Green, the sick bastard, listened to the cravings of Opal Shaw. It turns my stomach, thinking he got his rocks off listening to her seductive cooing, but it makes me even sicker to think maybe he fell asleep counting the money all that cooing was supposed to bring him, every word another dirty dollar floating down to his pillow.

  It must’ve knocked Pep silly when Opal laughed off his shakedown. I wish I could’ve been a fly on the wall for that one. I never met Opal Shaw until we were introduced tonight with a crash, but any woman who tells off a thuggish guy like Pep Green is the right stuff in my book. As soon as Celeste spilled it about Opal spitting in Pep’s face in that poultry basement tonight, I knew why Sig was nuts for her. It wasn’t just her curvy body and pretty face; a big shot like Sig Loreale can buy as many pinup girls as he likes. It was Opal’s guts and sass that Sig fell in love with. The combination’s irresistible. It’ll keep you in love for the rest of your life.

  Even Pep couldn’t resist her. After playing his hard-to-get act for the microphones, he gave in and brought Opal into his bed. His boring beige bed.

  Now there’s a vision I don’t want to get stuck with.

  I just want to pack up this gear, see if I can snag a line on the whereabouts of the other recording, and get the hell out of here.

  I park myself on the edge of the bed and start to pack up the recorder, then stop.

  I have to hear her. I have to hear the woman who crashed into my life, whose death caused the kidnapping of my beautiful soldier, whose family secret ripped open Mom Sheinbaum’s phony affection for me, whose need for kicks found both a friend and doom in Celeste Copley, the woman who killed her, the sassy woman whose guts have been tested over and over tonight and whose life is now in my hands. All of this is in the voice of Opal Shaw.

  I flip the on switch.

  Her voice flows around me, a voice rich, dark, smooth, and tasty as melted chocolate:

  Because…you’re dangerous. You’re dangerous and I like that. I bet you know how to do plenty of dangerous things. Come on, Pep, touch me in dangerous places. I want you to. Come on…

  I don’t know—

  I turn it off. That’s Pep talking. I don’t want to hear him trick Opal, tangle her up in her own words. I’d wind up wanting to kill him. Too bad he’s already dead.

  I pack up the reel and the recorder, then make a thorough search of the bedroom for any clue to the whereabouts of the backup recording. I don’t find anything in the closet, nothing in the pockets of Pep’s clothes. The drawers of his bureau have nothing but shirts and socks, cufflinks and tie clips, until I open the underwear drawer. In the corner, next to Pep’s carefully folded silk boxer shorts, is a small metal strongbox. It’s locked. I jimmy the lock with my penknife. Inside is a checkbook and a key with H-1102 etched into the brass. Both the checkbook and the key bear the insignia of El Banco de Habana.

  Bingo. Pep kept an offshore account and a safe-deposit box in a bank in Cuba. According to the checkbook, Pep hid over a hundred grand from Uncle Sam, or maybe from Uncle Sig. I slip the checkbook and key into my pocket, then pick up the recorder and walk out of the bedroom.

  I stop by the phone in the living room, call Judson, hoping he’s cracked Rosie’s location. I mutter, “Crap,” under my breath when all I get is a busy signal. I hang up, then immediately dial another number for one more housekeeping chore. When the number answers, I give the cops the short and sweet. “There’s a stiff with his face and part of his head blown off in the cellar of a chicken butcher’s joint on Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn.” I hang up before I give them enough time to trace the call but giving them enough information to find Pep’s body. His driver’s license will identify him. Sig will hear about it seconds later, if he hasn’t already, if a neighbor who was rudely awakened by a gun blast got antsy and called the Law. The Law always keeps Sig informed.

  I’m done here. Time to get the hell out.

  On my way down the stairs I feel a sudden chill, but there’s no draft from anywhere and the door to the street is closed. The chill seems to seep from the recorder itself, from its wire reel of conversation between Pep and Opal, a conversation of the dead.

  *

  I stash the recorder in the trunk of my car, then get into the driver’s seat. Celeste stubs out her cigarette in the ashtray. “Find what you’re looking for?” she asks.

  “Yeah.” I put my key in the ignition.

  Trying to sound matter-of-fact but stumbling on her heartbreak, she says, “I guess—I guess you listened to the wire recording?”

  I take my hand off the ignition, lean back against the seat. How do I tell her I heard the woman she killed make goo-goo noises to the guy she loved? “Yeah, I listened. I listened to a piece of it, anyway.”

  Celeste lowers the veil of her hat, takes whatever refuge she can find behind the sc
anty net, then asks, “Was it bad?”

  “The smartest thing you can do, Celeste, is forget about it. What’s on that recording is old news. Its scores are all settled.”

  It takes her a minute to absorb all that, work through the horror and the hurt. She finally gives me a small nod and a heavy sigh that sinks her more deeply into my overcoat. “What about the backup recording? Did you find out where Pep stashed it?”

  “It’s in a safe-deposit box in Havana. I found the key.”

  “What’ll you do with it?”

  “It might come in handy as a crowbar, or maybe a very sharp knife. C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Lights are still on in the first-floor windows of Mom Sheinbaum’s brownstone when I pull up. Maybe the old lady’s grief is keeping her awake. Or maybe the Blicks are busy swilling Mom’s expensive liquor while they play a round of canasta. Or maybe everyone just fell asleep in their chairs.

  Celeste says, “What is this place?”

  “Opal never mentioned it?”

  “No. Why?”

  “It’s her mother’s place. Esther Sheinbaum lives here.”

  “What? Oh no…I can’t go in. Why did you bring me here? Opal’s mother will want to kill me even more than Loreale does.”

  “Listen to me, Esther Sheinbaum might be our only way out of this mess.”

  “Our only way out? What makes you think I’m interested in saving your scarred-up skin? Look, you have your charms, sure, but the only skin I’m interested in saving is my own.”

  “You’re referring, of course, to the skin that’s staying nice and warm in my coat?”

  Celeste slides me a glance that tells me to drop dead, but she gets my point.

  “You know the deal,” I say. “My protection has a price.”