I followed in her wake as she limped, slow but inexorable, through the brightly lit dining area, through the clutters of conversation and raucous laughter. Her walking stick tapped lightly at the white tile floor.
At a corner in the rear was a kind of alcove. Two men were standing at its entrance smoking cigarettes and blocking my view of the booth inside. There was another booth adjoining it, beside us to the right, and that was empty.
One of the men—tall, lean, and dark, with a handsome, narrow face—saw us approach. He inhaled on his cigarette and held up his hand like a traffic policeman. “Sorry, ma’am,” he told her and smiled pleasantly. “These seats are taken.”
“Yes, I know,” she said. “By Mr. Arnold Rothstein. I should like to speak with him, please.”
At the mention of Rothstein’s name, the two men turned toward the alcove. Now I could see into the booth. On the far side of it, sitting alone in the center of the red leather bench seat, was a tubby little man in thick-lensed horn-rimmed glasses and a lumpy black suit.
On the near side was another man, but only part of him was visible above the back of the bench—the shoulders of a white linen suit coat, and above those, a pair of slightly protuberant ears on a head of slicked-down, thinning black hair.
The tall man who had stopped Miss Lizzie now leaned toward this man and whispered something. The man in the booth whispered something back. The tall man turned back to Miss Lizzie. “Your name, ma’am?”
“Lizbeth Borden,” she said. The tall man’s eyes flickered once, very briefly, and then he leaned toward the man in the linen jacket and whispered again. The man in the jacket nodded, raised his left hand, pointed a finger at the tubby little man across from him, and jerked his thumb back toward the restaurant and us.
The tubby man nodded quickly, and then he shifted and bobbed his heavy body from the bench. Still nodding, he stepped between the two men standing guard and then scurried between Miss Lizzie and me. He seemed pleased to be leaving. A droplet of sweat fell from his round chin.
The tall man said to Miss Lizzie, “If you’ll have a seat, ma’am. You, too, miss. Right in there.” He nodded to the empty bench.
I slid in first. As Miss Lizzie eased herself in, I looked at Arnold Rothstein.
In his early forties, a few pounds overweight, he was smiling pleasantly at me, his pale, oval face looking open and friendly. His hair was combed back from a smooth, round forehead. His eyes were brown and alert, beaming with intelligence. There was a faint, self-indulgent puffiness around his cheeks, but his features were regular: a sharp nose, a small mouth, and a sharp chin. Beneath the linen jacket, he wore an off-white silk shirt and a sky-blue bow tie. On the table before him was a tall glass of milk, a small black leather notebook, and a Montblanc pen.
He did not look like the “Napoleon of Crime,” like someone who could organize an international smuggling ring, like someone who could arrange a man’s death. He looked like a very well-dressed bank clerk.
“Miss Borden,” he said and smiled at her. His upper teeth, as Miss Dale had said, were false—brilliant white, slightly too large, slightly too even. “I’ve been expecting you.”
“I assumed so,” she said.
He turned to me. “And you must be Amanda.” His face screwed up with concern. “Hey, listen, I’m really sorry about your uncle. He was a swell guy.”
I said nothing.
He turned to the tall man. “Jack—”
The man stepped forward.
Rothstein looked back at Miss Lizzie. “Oh, sorry. This is a friend of mine. Jack Diamond. Jack, say hello to Lizzie Borden.”
“Lizbeth,” said Miss Lizzie. “Miss Lizbeth A. Borden.”
Mr. Rothstein grinned. “Say hello to Miss Lizbeth A. Borden, Jack.”
“Miss Borden,” said Jack and nodded. No expression crossed his thin, dark face.
“How do you do?” she said.
“Okay, Jack,” said Mr. Rothstein. “Herd ’em back for a while. Keep ’em there.”
Jack nodded and stepped away.
Mr. Rothstein looked at Miss Lizzie. “You want anything? The cheesecake here is terrific.”
“No, thank you.”
“Amanda?”
“No. Thank you.”
His hand dipped into the right pocket of his suit coat and emerged with a small white paper bag. He opened it and held it out to Miss Lizzie. “How about a fig? They’re good for you.”
Miss Lizzie shook her head. “Thank you, no.”
“Amanda? Come on, try one. Look.” He reached into the bag, plucked out a dried fig, popped it in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “Safe, see?”
“No, thank you,” I said.
“Fine.” He shrugged, a bit petulantly, I thought. “You don’t want anything, you don’t get anything.” He closed the bag, slipped it back into his pocket, and put his hands together on the table, one atop the other. They were beautiful hands, nearly as white as the glass of milk, the fingers long and slim, the nails manicured. He looked at Miss Lizzie. “Okay,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“You can tell us why John Burton was killed.”
He nodded. “You’ve been asking a lot of people the same question, I hear.”
“We have, yes. And some of them have responded to it very badly.”
“The circus in the park last night?” He nodded. “I heard about that, too.” For an instant, contempt flashed across his face. “Pure stupidity.”
“On our part or theirs?”
“Theirs. Someone got spooked, didn’t think things through. They overreacted. Muscle over brains. Stupid.”
“Whom do you suppose that might’ve been?”
He shrugged. “Lot of idiots out there.”
“Well, then. Perhaps you can answer the question for us. Why was John Burton killed?”
He raised those graceful hands lightly off the table, palms toward us. “How would I know anything about it?”
“Wherever we inquire, Mr. Rothstein, everything seems to lead directly to you.”
He smiled and let his hands fall to the table again. “That’s flattering, naturally, but I’ve got to tell you, Miss Borden, you’ve been misinformed.”
“Shall I tell you what we know?” she said.
“Sure,” he said agreeably. He leaned back against the bench. “You do that.”
“We know,” she said, “that John Burton worked for you. We know that in the past he helped arrange deliveries of contraband liquor. We know that recently he was helping you arrange deliveries of contraband drugs: heroin and morphine from Europe and opium from China.”
“Wow,” he said, eyebrows raised. “That is really some kind of story.” He grinned at me then at Miss Lizzie. “China, huh? Where’d you get all that?”
“What we don’t know is why you had John Burton murdered.”
“Oh, I was the one who did it, was I?”
“I believe so, yes. What we should like to know is why.”
His face settled into seriousness, and he nodded. “Okay. Let me ask you this, Miss Borden.”
She waited.
“Even if all that stuff was true,” he said reasonably, “which it isn’t, naturally, and even if I did have John Burton killed, which I didn’t, naturally, because I personally liked the guy a lot, why would I tell you anything?”
“You’ve nothing to lose by telling us. You have my word that I won’t go to the police.”
He was amused. “Your word?”
She raised her head. “My word, yes. And consider that if I were to violate that, if I were to go to the police, of what use could my information possibly be? I’ve no proof of anything.”
He smiled. “Okay,” he said, “then tell me this. If you don’t want to go to the police, how come you want to know all that”—he lightly waved a hand—“all that
weird, fantastic stuff?”
“Amanda was fond of her uncle. She has a right to know why he was killed.”
He glanced at me then looked back at Miss Lizzie and smiled. “Well, I’m a great believer in family, you know. I really am. But sometimes the best thing in a case like this is just to let it go. You know what I mean? You do your grieving, and you move on.” He turned his cunning brown eyes to me. “Sometimes that’s the best thing.”
“All we want,” said Miss Lizzie, “is to know why John was killed. And the name of the man who killed him.”
He smiled. “And why d’you want the name?”
“So we will know.”
He grinned. He was clearly enjoying himself. “You plan to whack him? The guy who whacked John?”
“No. We want only to know who he is.”
“A little knowledge, you know, Miss Borden, that’s a dangerous thing.”
“Less of it, sometimes, can be still more dangerous.”
He smiled. “Let me ask you this.” He frowned abruptly. Shaking his head, he waved his hand. “Never mind. Forget it. It’s kind of personal.”
“What is it?” she said.
Another shrug. “Okay. Fair enough. You ask me a question, I ask you a question.” He smiled again, his sharp brown eyes narrowing. He put his elbows on the table and clasped his hands together. “It’s a famous case, isn’t it? The trial of the century. I wasn’t even alive when it happened, but I’ve heard about it. Everyone’s heard about it. Forty whacks, right? It was a very big deal.”
“What is your question?” said Miss Lizzie.
He leaned forward, his brown eyes looking shrewdly up at her from beneath his brow. “Okay, right, here it comes. You ready?”
“Yes.”
“Did you kill ’em, Miss Borden? Did you whack ’em with a hatchet?”
Miss Lizzie sighed. “I was put on trial, as you may know,” she said. “I was acquitted.”
He sat back and spread his hands. “Acquitted, sure. But not guilty—that’s not the same as innocent, is it?”
“I have answered your question.”
He smiled again. “Well, now, you know, I was listening real close, Miss Borden, real close, and you know what? I didn’t really hear an answer. I didn’t hear a definite yes or a definite no.”
She looked at him for a moment. He held his gaze, smiling easily.
At last she said, “I understand that you’re a gambling man, Mr. Rothstein.”
The smile didn’t change. “I’ve been known to make a wager or two.”
“Then permit me to propose something.”
He waved the hand again. “Propose away.”
“I propose that we play a game of poker. Not for money. For information. If I win, you will answer my questions. If you win, I shall answer yours.”
His eyes were sparkling. “And what’s going to keep us honest?”
“We shall be alone. Just you and I. No one will ever know the outcome.”
“Still no guarantee.”
“Are you a welsher, Mr. Rothstein?”
Flatly, he said, “Arnold Rothstein never welshes.”
“I am prepared to take your word for it, then, that you’ll be honest.”
He smiled. “No offense, naturally, but how do I know you’ll be honest?”
“I am no welsher myself.”
He nodded. “You play much poker, Miss Borden?”
“Not recently,” she said. “But I played rather a lot when I was younger. I should tell you that I was considered quite good, as it happens. Something of a ‘shark.’”
He smiled again. He glanced over at me and then asked her, “One hand, one question?”
“Yes.”
“Stud or draw?”
“I prefer draw. But I should like to be the one who provides the cards. If you don’t mind.”
“We play this game and then, tomorrow, you take off, both of you. Out of New York. No more questions, no more running around and bothering people.”
“You have my word.”
He grinned. “Okay,” he said. “You’re on.”
“Very well. Shall I go purchase some cards? There must be somewhere nearby that—”
He laughed. “Hey,” he said. “Not here. Not in Lindy’s. Gambling is illegal in the state of New York—you didn’t know that? Lindeman, the owner, he’d shoot me dead if I played in here.”
“Where, then?”
He opened his leather notebook, flipped to the back, and tore out a blank page. He set that on the table, picked up his Montblanc, snapped off the cap, wrote something across the page, then pushed it across the table to Miss Lizzie.
“There,” he said.
She lifted it and read it. “When?” she said.
“One o’clock. Tonight. Can you make that?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Bring Amanda along,” he said.
She shook her head. “You and I,” she said. “Alone. That was the arrangement.”
“Miss Borden, listen to me. I don’t hurt young girls.” He smiled. “And I don’t hurt old women, either. What are you to me, you and Amanda? What kind of threat? None at all. Like you say, you can’t give the cops anything, even if you had anything. I hurt you, what’s the percentage in it for me? None at all.”
“She is not coming,” she said.
He shrugged. “Fine. Then no game.”
Miss Lizzie looked down at the sheet of paper then looked up at him. “Why do you want her there?”
He glanced at me again before answering her. “Because,” he said, “I want her to see it.” He narrowed those brown eyes once more, and once more he smiled. The smile now was cruel, like the grin of Lieutenant Becker. It was in this moment, for the first time, that I truly believed that Arnold Rothstein was an evil man. “And because I want her to hear you say it.”
Miss Lizzie was silent.
I turned to her. “I want to come with you.”
He held out his hand as though offering me, like a gift, over to her. “There you are. So what is it? Do we play or not?”
Miss Lizzie looked at me. I nodded. She turned back to Mr. Rothstein. “We play.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Forty-two Pearl Street, the address on Arnold Rothstein’s piece of paper, was a small office building. A lamp above the double door burned brightly. I stood beside Miss Lizzie on the stoop as she opened her purse and found the key that Mr. Rothstein had given her. She slipped it in the lock and turned it. The door opened. We stepped inside and closed the doors behind us. Miss Lizzie flipped the knob that threw the deadbolt.
The lights were on in here, too, glowing softly inside glass fixtures overhead. The walls were green, the linoleum floor was yellow, the ceiling was white. There were eight offices on this floor, four on each side.
There is something disquieting about an office building at night. You know that the emptiness is only temporary, that tomorrow morning people will be making vastly important deals behind closed doors, buying and selling, winning and losing. Muffled voices will rise and fall, someone will cough, someone will laugh, and a distant drawer will slam shut.
But at night, with everyone snatched away, hauled up by some huge deep-sea dredge, the hallways seem almost spectral. The sound of your feet on the hallway floor is not only too loud, is it too corporeal, too much an intrusion of the real into the dream left behind by the people of the day.
And, in our case, we could not be certain that the offices behind those doors were, in fact, empty. Mr. Rothstein might have sent someone ahead of us.
At the end of the hallway was a stairway. We climbed it, Miss Lizzie in the lead. At the second floor, as we came around the corner, we saw a hallway identical to the one below. Eight offices. On the frosted glass of the second office to the right, in neat block letters
, were the words Redstone Enterprises.
“Redstone,” said Miss Lizzie. “Rothstein. The same name, essentially.”
She put the key in the lock, turned it, opened the door, and flipped on the light.
Inside was a small room starkly painted white. There was no window, and the air smelled of dust and disuse. On the far side, opposite the door, were a wooden rolltop desk and a swivel chair. Atop the desk sat a banker’s table lamp. Beside it was a narrow door. On the right and left walls stood rows of gray metal filing cabinets. In the center of the room was a rectangular wooden table, its top covered with green felt. Six wooden chairs surrounded it, two on each side and one at each end.
“Have a seat, Amanda. I shall take a quick look around.”
I sat down at the table in one of the two seats facing the door.
Her purse hanging from her left arm, Miss Lizzie went hobbling about the room, opening cabinets and drawers. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing.” She pushed up the rolling top of the desk, fiddled around inside for a moment, then carefully drew the top back down. “Mr. Rothstein,” she said, lightly clapping her hands twice, “has evidently had everything removed from here some time ago. The dust is a quarter of an inch thick.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“I couldn’t say.”
She limped to the door by the filing cabinet, opened it, and pulled the string hanging overhead. A light flashed on inside. She pulled the string again, and the light disappeared. “A water closet,” she said as she closed the door. “It wants a bit of cleaning.”
She came over to the table and sat down to my left, setting her purse on her lap and putting her hands neatly atop it as though she were awaiting a train.
I looked at my wristwatch. One o’clock.
Miss Lizzie reached into the pocket of her skirt, removed her own watch, and glared for a moment at its face. “Mr. Rothstein is late,” she said. She laid the watch on the table.
“Yes,” I said. “He’s probably scared silly.”
She laughed. Once again, it was a good, easy, up-from-the-stomach laugh. Hearing it, one would never guess that we were awaiting the arrival of a man who could, without a flicker of hesitation, order us killed.
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