by Nick Carter
"Counting House?"
"Yeah. It's great. The only one of its kind in the world, I'll bet." He took my elbow and led me down the street a few doors. "It's right here, Four fifteen West Broadway."
It didn't look like much. Another one of those big old loft buildings you see in the Soho section of downtown New York. There was a big blue door over a wide ramp, which I guessed to be the freight elevator. To the right of it was an ordinary residence-type windowed door, with the standard apartment house bank of mailboxes.
Louie led me through the door. Inside the foyer he pushed a button.
A disembodied voice answered. "Yeah? Who is it?"
"Louie Lazaro and a buddy of mine."
"Oh, hi, Louie. C'mon up." A buzzer sounded, long and rasping, and Louie opened the unlocked door. From there, it was five steep flights of narrow stairs. By the time we reached the top, I was having trouble catching my breath and Louie was practically in a state of collapse, his breath coming in gasps and his face dripping sweat.
An amiable looking little man greeted us in the fifth-floor hallway and Louie, in between gasping for breath, introduced me. "This is Nick Canzoneri, Chickie. Chickie Wright, Nick. Chickie runs the Counting House for Uncle Joe. I thought you'd like to see it."
I shrugged. "Sure."
Chickie was a little gnome of a man, with wisps of gray hair floating over his balding head and bushy gray eyebrows sprouting from a humorous little face. He was dressed in a dark blue silk shirt, a black-and-white checked vest, and gray flannel trousers. A bright red bow tie and red garters on his sleeves made him look like a parody of a riverboat gambler. He gave us a huge smile and stood aside to usher us through the big, unmarked blue door that had stood half-opened behind him.
"Come right on in," he said expansively. "This is one of the neatest operations in New York City."
That it was. I hadn't known what to expect of a fifth-floor loft called the Counting House, but it certainly wasn't what I found. Chickie took us through, step by step, explaining the entire operation.
"What we've done," he said with obvious pride, "is computerize our bookie and numbers operations."
The entire loft had been turned into a modern, brightly polished business office. At the front, a huge computer bank whirred and clicked, manned by earnest young men in neat business suits who handled the computerized readouts with consummate familiarity. Attractive secretaries worked attentively along the squarely spaced rows of desks, their electric typewriters competing with each other. The place held all the accoutrements of any executive office building.
Chickie waved an expansive hand. "Every numbers bet made below Houston Street is processed here, and every bet on the horses. All the results from the races come in direct by phone, from Arlington in Chicago all the way east. All the money bet is funnelled through here, all records kept, and all payoffs made from here."
I nodded, impressed. "Electronic data processing comes to bookmaking. Very nice!"
Chickie laughed. "Very efficient. We process around eighty thousand dollars a day here. We figure we have to run it like a business. The days of the little guy in the candy store with a notebook in his hip pocket are over."
"How does the Off-Track Betting affect you?" New York's OTB offices around the city had originally been approved by the voters not only as a way of making money for the city and as a convenience to the bettor, but also as a means of driving out the underworld bookie.
Chickie grinned again. He appeared to be a happy man. "It hasn't hurt us much at all, though I was worried about it once, when it first started. People like to deal with an old established firm, I guess, and they're sort of suspicious of a government running a betting operation.
"And of course, we're heavy into numbers, and the government isn't into the numbers game."
"Not yet, anyway," Louie chimed in. "But the way things are going, they probably will be before long." He clapped me on the shoulder. "What do you think, Nick? Pretty slick, isn't it? Uncle Joe may look and act like an old Mustachio Pete, but this has got to be the most modern setup in the business."
Louie's ebullience was exceeded only by his naiveté. The Counting House was a step up in underworld organization, but it was hardly the last word. I could show Louie a Mafia-operated communications center in an Indianapolis Hotel that would make New York Telephone look like a PBX switchboard. The results of every gambling event in the country — racing, baseball, basketball, football, you name it — pour into that hotel every day, and then are relayed in microseconds to betting parlors from coast to coast.
Still, the Counting House was an interesting innovation: centralized, organized, efficient. Not bad. "Great," I said. "Terrific!" I tugged at my ear lobe. "I guess you run your trucks business through here, too, huh?"
Louie frowned. "No, but… I don't know, it might not be a bad idea at that. Sort of a central command post, you mean?"
"Right."
Chickie looked a little pained. "Well, we really haven't got a lot of room to spare up here, Louie, to say nothing about how hard it is to get someone you can trust these days."
I had to laugh. He was right up to his throat in underworld business but acting like any office manager in any legit concern… worried that he might have more work to do, or might have to change his ways of doing it. Honest people aren't the only ones who resist change.
"Nick's new in town," Louie explained, "and I thought I'd show him our showcase operation. Anyway, Uncle Joe's going to have Nick and me going over all the operations one of these days, just to see if we can't tighten things up a bit."
"Yeah." Chickie looked dubious.
"We're mostly going to be worrying about security," I said.
Chickie brightened. "Oh, good. I could use some help there."
"You've been having some trouble?" I asked.
He sighed. "Yeah. More than I want. Come in my office and I'll tell you about it."
We all went into a nicely paneled office in one corner of the big loft. A neat carpet was on the floor, and steel filing cabinets lined all of one wall. A fat safe squatted blackly just behind Chickie's desk. On the desk top were the pictures of an attractive gray-haired woman and a half-dozen children of varying ages.
"Have a seat, guys." Chickie gestured at a couple of straight-back chairs and settled himself into the swivel chair behind the desk. "I got a problem, maybe you can help me with."
Louie hunched his chair up and gave him a confident grin. For the moment, he'd forgotten that Popeye had given him some pretty explicit instructions. Uncle Joe wanted someone killed.
"What's up, Chickie?" Louie asked.
Chickie leaned back and lit a cigarette. "It's Lemon-Drop Droppo, again," he said. "At least I think it's him. He's been ripping off our runner again. Or at least someone is."
"Hell, Chickie," Louie interjected. "Someone's always ripping off the runners. What's the big deal?"
"The big deal is that it's getting to be a big deal! We got hit fourteen times last week, already five times this week. I can't afford that."
Louie turned to me. "We usually figure three, four times a week we're going to have a runner get taken for whatever he's carrying, but this is a lot more than usual."
"Can't you protect them?" I asked.
Chickie shook his head. "We got a hundred forty-seven guys bringing cash in here every day from all over the lower Manhattan territory. There's no way we can protect 'em all." He grinned. "In fact, I don't even mind if a few of them get ripped off once in awhile, makes the others more careful. But this is getting to be too damned much!"
"What about this Lemon-Drop Droppo?"
Louie laughed. "He's been around a long time, Nick. One of the Ruggiero bunch, but sometimes he goes off sort of independently. He was a runner himself once, for Gaetano Ruggiero, and it seems like every time he's short of cash, he picks on a runner. They're pretty easy pickings, you know."
"Yeah." Runners are at the very bottom of the crime ladder. They pick up the money an
d the betting slips and run it to the policy bank, and that's it. They're usually half-batty old winos, too far gone down the chute of aged poverty to do anything else, or young kids picking up a fast buck. There are thousands of them in New York, loathsome little ants feeding off the discarded carrion of crime.
"Think it would help if we got rid of this Lemon-Drop character?"
Chickie grinned again. "Couldn't hurt. Even if it's not him, it might scare someone else off."
I nodded and looked at Louie. "Might even kill two birds with one stone, Louie."
This kind of reality didn't come easily to Louie Lazaro. He looked sour. "Yeah," he said.
"How come they call him Lemon-Drop?" I asked.
Louie answered. "He's a nut about lemon drops, eats them all the time. I think his real name is Greggorio, but with a name like Droppo and a bag of lemon drops in his pocket all the time… I'd really hate to hit him just for ripping off a few runners. I mean, hell, I went to school with the guy. He's not so bad, just kind of nuts."
I shrugged. I'd been doing a lot of that on this assignment it seemed. "It's up to you. It was just an idea."
Louie looked unhappy. "Yeah. We'll think about it."
"What's this two birds with one stone bit?" Chickie asked.
"Never mind," Louie snapped.
"Yes, sir." Chickie was still very much aware that Louie was Popeye Franzini's nephew.
There was an awkward pause. I waved a hand at the row of gleaming file cabinets, each stack locked with a formidable looking iron rod running from the floor up through each drawer handle and bolted to the top of the file. "What you got in there, the family jewels?"
Chickie stubbed out his cigarette and grinned, glad of the change of atmosphere. "Those are our files," he said. "Records of the whole thing from A to Z."
"Everything?" I tried to sound impressed. "You mean for the whole betting operation?"
"I mean for the whole organization," he said. "Everything."
I looked around. "How good is your security?"
"Fine. Fine. That part of it I'm not worried about. We're on the fifth floor here. The other four floors are empty except for a couple of apartments we use in emergencies. Every night we put steel gates across each landing. They fit right into the wall and lock there. And then there's the dogs," he added pridefully.
"The dogs?"
"Yeah. On each floor we got two guard dogs, Doberman Pinschers. We let 'em loose each night, two on each floor. I mean, man, there ain't nobody's gonna come up those stairs with those dogs. They're mean sons of bitches! Even without them, there's no way anyone's going to blast through those gates without alerting Big Julie and Raymond."
"Who're they?"
"My two guards. They live up here every night. Once everyone leaves and they lock those gates, there's no way anyone could get in."
"Looks good to me," I said. "If Big Julie and Raymond can take care of themselves."
Chickie laughed. "Don't worry, man. Big Julie's the strongest guy this side of the circus and Raymond used to be one of the best ordnance sergeants in Korea. He knows what guns are all about."
"Good enough for me." I got to my feet and Louie did the same. "Thanks a lot, Chickie," I said. "We'll be seeing you, I guess."
"Right," he said. We shook hands, and Louie and I went back down the staircase. Alerted now, I could see the steel gates inset into the walls on each landing. It was a nice tight setup, but I had an idea how it might be breached.
Chapter 13
Dinner was delightful, a small table in the back of Minetta's, on a night when there was hardly anyone there — a light antipasto, a good oso buco, zuccini strips fried in deep fat, and espresso coffee. Philomina was in that loving, glowing mood that puts a little excitement in life.
It all turned into a petulant Siciliano rage when I kissed her goodnight in front of her door. She stamped her foot, accused me of going to bed with six other girls, burst into tears, and finally ended up throwing her arms around my neck and smothering me with kisses.
"Nick… please, Nick. Just for a little while."
I disentangled myself firmly. I knew that if I went in, I'd be there much too long. I had things to do that night. I kissed her firmly on the end of her nose, spun her around so that she faced her own door, and smacked her smartly on her round behind. "Go on. Just leave the door ajar and I'll see you when I get through with the things I have to take care of."
Her smile was all-forgiving and, happy again, she said, "Promise?"
"Promise." I went back down the hall before my resolve weakened.
The first thing I did when I got to my room at the Chelsea was call Louie. "Hi, this is Nick. Look, how about meeting me tonight? Yeah, I know it's late, but it's important. Right! Oh, about midnight. And bring Locallo and Manitta. At Tony's, I guess. It's as good as any. Okay? Good… oh, and Louie, get hold of Lemon-Drop Droppo's address before you come, will you?"
I hung up before he could react to that last request. Then I went downstairs and around the corner to the Angry Squire. I ordered a mug of beer from Sally, the congenial English Barmaid, and then made a call to Washington from the phone on the wall at the end of the bar. It was just a routine precaution in case my hotel room phone was bugged.
I called AXE's Emergency Supply Section and, after identifying myself properly, ordered a 17B Demolition Kit sent to me that night by Greyhound Bus. I would be able to pick it up in the morning at the Port Authority bus terminal on Eighth Avenue.
The 17B Kit is very neat, very destructive. Six detonator caps, six timer fuses that can be set to trigger the caps at any interval between one minute and fifteen hours, six pieces of primer cord for less sophisticated jobs, and enough plastique to blow the crown off the Statue of Liberty's head.
It was difficult to make myself understood over the din created by a very good but very loud jazz combo some six feet away, but I finally got my message across and hung up.
At eleven-thirty I left the Angry Squire and wandered down Seventh Avenue, making plans for Lemon-Drop Droppo. At the corner of Christopher and Seventh, I turned right on Christopher past all the new gay bars, then turned left again on Bedford Street and down the short block and a half to Tony's.
It was an entirely different scene from what it had been just the night before at Philomina's party. Now it was quiet and intimate again, back to its usual dungeon-like ambiance, the dull orange lights on the dark brown walls casting barely enough light to allow the waiters to maneuver between the tables that were back in their accustomed places in the main room.
In place of the hordes of tuxedo-clad Italian hoods and their long-gowned women, the place was now sparsely populated with a half-dozen long-haired young guys in blue jeans and denim jackets and an equal number of short-haired young girls similarly clad. But the conversation wasn't much different from the previous evening. Where the talk at the party had centered primarily on sex, football games, and horses, tonight's crowd talked mostly of sex, football games, and philosophy.
Louie was at a table by himself, up against the wall to the left of the entrance, hunched morosely over a glass of wine. He didn't look too happy.
I sat down with him, ordered a brandy and soda and clapped him on the shoulder. "Come on, Louie, cheer up. Things aren't as bad as all that!"
He tried a grin but it didn't come off.
"Louie, you really don't want to do it, do you?"
"Do what?"
Who was he kidding? "Take care of Droppo."
He shook his head miserably, not meeting my eyes. "No, I mean, it's just that… oh, hell! No!" he said with more force, glad to get it out in the open. "No! I don't want to do it. I don't think I can do it. I just… hell, I grew up with the guy, Nick!"
"Okay! Okay! I think I've got an idea that will take care of the Lemon Drop kid, make your Uncle Joe happy, and get you off the hook. How's that for a package?"
Hope gleamed in his eyes and that delightful smile of his began to spread across his face. "Honest? Hey,
Nick, that would be great!"
"Okay. You did me a favor in Beirut, getting me over here. Now I do you one, right?"
He nodded.
"All right. First, I got this in my box at the Chelsea today." I handed him a note I had written myself.
Canzoneri: You'll find Spelman
In Room 636 Chalfont Plaza Hotel.
He's bare-assed and dead as hell.
Louie stared at it in disbelief. "Jeez! What the hell is this all about? Do you suppose it's true?"
"It's probably true, all right. There wouldn't be any sense in sending that to me if it weren't."
"No, I guess not. But why the hell would they send it? You just got here!"
I shrugged. "Beats the hell out of me. The room clerk just said some guy came by and left it. Maybe whoever it was figured I was just handy and would pass it on to you anyway."
Louie looked puzzled, as he should have. "I still don't get it." He paused a minute, thinking. "Listen, Nick. Do you suppose it was the Ruggieros?"
Atta baby, Louie! I thought. "Yeah," I said. 'That's what I figure."
He frowned. "So what's this got to do with coming down here tonight? And with Lemon-Drop Droppo?"
"Just an idea. You got Locallo and Manitti with you?"
"Yeah. They're out in the car."
"Good. Now here's what we're going to do." I explained my idea to him, and he was delighted.
"Great, Nick! Great!"
It was only a few blocks over to 88 Horatio, which is just about a block or so off Hudson. I explained to Locallo and Manitti as we drove over. "Remember. We want him alive. It's all right if he's a little damaged, but I don't want any bodies. Understand?"
Locallo, behind the wheel, shrugged. "It sounds crazy to me."
Louie punched him lightly on the back of the head to let him know who was boss. "No one asked you. Just do like Nick says."
Eighty-eight Horatio was a faceless gray building with a line of identical high-stepped front stoops and iron railings. It took Manitti something like forty-five seconds to get through the lock on the outside door and another thirty to open the inside one. We filed up the stairway as quietly as possible, pausing finally on the sixth-floor landing to stop panting from the climb. There were just three of us — Locallo, Manitti and myself — since we had left Louie downstairs in the car.