West 47th

by Gerald A. Browne

  “How was it up in Kinderhook?” Visconti inquired.

  “Fine.”

  “Nice country, especially this time of year.”

  How, Mitch wondered, did Visconti know Straw’s place was in Kinderhook, not just upstate somewhere, but specifically Kinder-hook? Just as puzzling, why did he know?

  “You missed out on a great weekend Mitch. Besides the people I told you would be there, there were some others you know.”

  “Such as?”

  “The dealer, Ben Ziegler, for one. He dropped by. You know Ben, and Sy Plansky, the colored stone guy from L.A.”

  Mitch knew Plansky from the Laughton and Sons days. A business acquaintance of his father’s who, when a better piece was missing one of its colored stones, could be depended upon to come up with a close enough match.

  “Sal Crosetti was also out,” Visconti said. “You know Sal, of course, but I bet you didn’t know he could do magic.”

  “He’s never done any time. I guess that’s magic.” Mitch did a little laugh.

  So did Visconti. “Sal dazzled us with his sleight of hand. The only thing he didn’t make disappear was his hard-on. You should have seen the quality bimbo he had with him.”

  “What else did he have with him?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like anything?”

  “We didn’t do any business if that’s what you mean. Shit, Mitch, you want to know you should ask. I’m not saying I’d tell you true, but, you and me, we’re close enough for you to ask straight out.”

  Such bullshit, Mitch thought.

  “What is it,” Visconti wanted to know. “Does Sal have something you’re after?”

  “No.”

  “Like the Kalali goods?”

  “If he did you’d know it,” Mitch said. “You’d be the first to know, wouldn’t you?”

  “Fucking right. If he didn’t bring it to me I’d shove his tongue up his ass.”

  Silence in reverence for that image.

  “Come to think of it,” Visconti went on, “the Kalali thing isn’t Sal’s style. There’s never been blood on any of his goods. His crew never carries.”

  “You’re making too much of this. I just inquired and you stretched it.”

  “You’re right, Mitch. Yeah. Hey, you play squash or handball?”

  “Used to.”

  “How about one of these afternoons going with me to my club? Later this week maybe.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Pick a day, I’m yours.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “If you don’t happen to be in the mood for a match we can just take some steam and a plunge. They got a special pool they keep at around forty degrees. Turns any size dick into an acorn.”

  Mitch nearly winced. He struck the pay phone’s push button panel with the heel of his hand, clicked down the cradle a couple of times and hung up. It would sound as though electronic trouble had disconnected him. He’d heard enough. Evidently Crosetti hadn’t moved the goods in Visconti’s direction. Not yet, anyway.

  He went to the intersection and was crossing when Hurley’s police Plymouth turned the corner and intercepted him in the crosswalk.

  “Where you headed?” Hurley asked.

  “The office.”

  “Fuck that.”

  Crossers were having to go around Hurley’s car, were grumbling about it being in the way. Some pounded on the trunk.

  “Get in before I get lynched,” Hurley told Mitch.

  He hung a left on 46th and went north on Park. While stopped at a light, he glanced out at a talker. A young guy who looked three times his age, wearing clothes he probably hadn’t had off in a year. Matted hair and a long-ignored beard. He was striding along hard, ranting hatefully to someone in his head.

  “Sal Crosetti …” Mitch began.

  “A loonybin,” Hurley said. “That’s what we got, a fucking open zoo for crazies, know what I mean? Someday I’m going to get uncommitted.”

  “Sure,” Mitch said indulgently.

  “What I could go for is a place down on the Maryland-Chesapeake shore. Plenty of land with a keep-out sign every five feet. Have some horses. Ever been down there, around Prince Frederick, that part?”

  “No. You ever owned a horse?”

  “A piece of a claimer once. Wiseguy bookie talked me into it, the fuck. I owned a tenth or something like that. The horse never won, never. Dropped in class and ran out three times.”

  Mitch tried to imagine Hurley on a Maryland horse farm. It was most unlikely. “Take a lot of money to own a place like that. If you had that much you probably wouldn’t want to.”

  “Probably not,” Hurley said dourly. “I’d go live in Monaco or some such place. Lay around and get waited on.”

  Hurley was about as down as Mitch had ever seen him. Maybe, Mitch thought, hearing about Addison and Sal Crosetti would lift him. Those would have been Mitch’s next words, however …

  “How about this?” Hurley said. “A lady, a well-off type, shops at Bergdorf. Buys a few things, walks over to the park and up to her apartment house in the sixties. Goes into the lobby, gets into the elevator. A guy gets in with her. Another guy is covering the lobby attendant. These two cowboys had spotted her in Bergdorf, and the ring she’s wearing—a six-carat diamond, emerald-cut, a Tiffany stone. The guy in the elevator orders her to hand over the ring. She refuses. He doesn’t tell her a second time. He takes out a pair of pruning shears and lops off her finger.”

  “This happened?”

  “Saturday.”

  “Christ!”

  “Yeah, Him, Mary, Joseph and the rest.”

  “Promise me something.”

  “Sure, what?”

  “Don’t tell this New York true romance to Maddie.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Promise.”

  “I said I won’t.”

  Mitch did a grin and kept it on, challenging Hurley to decipher it.

  “What did you do, find the Kalali swag in your Rice Krispie box this morning?” Hurley said.

  “Not quite.”

  Mitch related the question-and-answer session he’d had with Roger Addison that morning, how Addison, on behalf of Mrs. Kalali, had arranged a gimmie with Sal Crosetti.

  “Crosetti?” Hurley considered that dubiously for a long moment. “I guess there’s always the possibility that one of his swifts lost it and began whacking out people.”

  “Going to have him picked up?”

  “How do you want to play it?”

  “You know. I’d like the chance to shake him down before you start shaking him up.” Mitch was concerned with making the recovery. According to the terms of his agreement with Columbia if the police recovered he got nothing. Hurley knew that. “Do what you have to,” Mitch said resignedly.

  “You want a first shot at Crosetti, you got it,” Hurley told him. “Just don’t take all week.”

  “A couple of days.”

  “Maybe not even that. I have an idea where Crosetti might be later tonight, around eleven or so.”

  “Where?”

  “I’ll come by for you.”

  Those were possibly six-hundred-thousand-dollar words, Mitch thought. Things were falling into place. “Want to go have a coffee?”

  “Can’t. Got another case and paperwork up to my ass at the preese.”

  Hurley dropped Mitch off outside his office and continued on crosstown. He didn’t know by memory where Crosetti now lived, had to look it up in the directory he kept on such people, a small, simulated-leather-covered address book badly in need of a refill. Soiled pages, smeared and crossed-out entries, alphabet tabs missing.

  He drove uptown on Tenth Avenue. Tenth became Amsterdam. At 71st he took Broadway for two blocks and parked on 73rd. He entered the Ansonia.

  Crosetti’s suite was on the fifteenth floor of the old, face-lifted, renovated hotel. Hurley called up on a house phone, allowed a full minute of rings. To make double sure he also dialed Crosett
i’s number on one of the pay phones and let it ring twenty times.

  He took the self-service elevator up to fifteen, located Crosetti’s suite and went right to work on the three locks. Two old, one new, all three relatively easy for Hurley to tumble.

  The suite was two rooms, a bedroom and a sitting room. A bathroom but no kitchen, just a small refrigerator in a closet.

  Searching wasn’t difficult. There weren’t many hiding places and Hurley was familiar with all the usual ones: the flip-top trash pail, the air conditioner, the ice trays, the toilet tank, toes of shoes. He went through each room swiftly and methodically, not being overly careful because no matter how careful he might be Crosetti would know someone had been there.

  On a table in the sitting room positioned close to one of the windows was a millimeter gauge, a Mettler PC 400C electronic scale, some tweezers, a triplet ten-power loupe, a jar of diamond-washing alcohol, a bottle of sulfuric acid and its companion piece of slate for determining gold content. A fence’s usual essentials.

  A brown paper bag contained a handful of gold and platinum ring and bracelet mountings. Bereft of their stones, they appeared merely metallic, forsaken.

  No sign of what Hurley was hoping for.

  He took a last look around and went out.

  Chapter 20

  At twenty after eleven that night Mitch was waiting outside the Sherry. He’d been there for over a half hour, talking bygone baseball and recent violence with the doorman.

  Hurley’s police Plymouth pulled to the curb.

  “I was about to give up on you,” Mitch told Hurley.

  “I said around eleven. Twenty after is around.”

  Wait had again chafed Mitch. “Where we going?”

  “Hopefully to get you your six hundred large. Does Maddie know you’re with me?”

  “Sure.”

  “You tell her everything?”

  “No, you do.”

  They took 59th over to Third and went uptown. To a high-rise apartment house on 70th. Thirty-six stories trying for the impression of upscale. Its oversize lobby contained a lot of overstuffed furniture, mirrors and several hanging light fixtures comprised of clear plastic unsuccessfully imitating crystal.

  Both of the lobby attendants on duty knew Hurley by name. They also assumed to know what he was there for. The elevator was self-service. Hurley punched in the button numbered 22. The coalesced smell of diverse food preferences was pronounced. Even more so in the corridor of the twenty-second floor. Various sounds leaked through the many closed doors.

  All the way down the corridor and around another to the last possible apartment. Hurley pressed the square chime button in the face of the door. They were looked out at through a peephole.

  The woman who admitted them acted a bit too glad to see Hurley, gave him a quick hug. She was a one-name person that Hurley introduced as Gloria. Chunky and plain-faced. The cotton print dress she had on concealed her shape. Her shoes were black flats.

  There was a narrow table in the entryway. Business cards on it. Mitch picked up one of the cards on the way in. It had the word INTERIORS and a phone number.

  No doubt about the place. A typical, twenty-five-hundred-a-month unfurnished. Three bedrooms, living room, dining alcove, narrow New York kitchen. Effortlessly decorated in black and beige and chrome. Two eight-foot sofas were separated by a low glass table. An artificial ficus with lima bean—shaped pebbles around the base of its trunk. Framed $19.98 prints of tropical scenes: a black native’s head eternally burdened by a stalk of bananas.

  Mitch was on the sofa that was vacant. The sofa opposite was occupied by two working girls. One was blonder but the hair of both was a mass of split ends and done to death by repetitive chemical warfare.

  The two were neither pretty nor ugly. One way or the other would depend on the light, the angle and the degree of arousal that had been attained. They were overdressed, as though there was to be a party. Their long fingernails were rectangular-shaped and enameled white.

  Interiors, Mitch thought. Evidently this was one of the places Hurley came to get serviced or called for a delivery. At the moment he was off somewhere having a few private words with Gloria.

  The girls did smiles at Mitch. It was Monday night slow. Any action would be a godsend.

  “What’s your name?” the less blonde asked.

  Mitch told her his first.

  “What do you do Mitch?”

  “I have a business on 47th Street.”

  “You a diamond dealer?”

  “Yeah,” Mitch fibbed for the hell of it.

  “Can you get me a diamond?”

  The predictable question. Mitch shrugged.

  “Actually, what I want is studs. Two-carat studs, although I’d settle for one-carat.”

  Said as though her wanting was enough. Mitch doubted she was really that spoiled. “What’s wrong with those you have on?” he asked.

  “These? These are fakes. You can tell can’t you?”

  “They look okay,” Mitch told her.

  “No shit, can you get me some studs?”

  “He’s a stud,” the more blonde put in.

  “Keep out of this,” the less blonde snapped.

  The more blonde didn’t. “A guy I saw a few weeks ago told me he was a diamond dealer,” she said. “He promised me a ring but didn’t come through.” She did a pout.

  “You gave it a try but he gave it a lie,” the less blonde smirked competitively.

  “Mitch wouldn’t do that, would you Mitch?”

  “Never know,” Mitch replied.

  “I’d like to find out what you’re made of, so to speak,” the less blonde said.

  As though it was an unpremeditated, brand-new, marvelous idea, the more blonde proposed that they go into the bedroom for a triple.

  “Not tonight,” Mitch said.

  From that point on, as far as the girls were concerned, he wasn’t there.

  Hurley came and sat, told Mitch: “He’s here. Getting his oil changed.”

  “We’re not going to confront him here, are we?”

  “No. I promised Gloria we wouldn’t.”

  They waited nearly a half hour. To Mitch it seemed much longer. Crosetti came from one of the bedrooms, tie and jacket off. He looked as though he’d just gotten well-laid. There was a sort of loose, slow float to his head.

  He was surprised but not taken aback to see Hurley and Mitch there. He greeted them amiably. Hurley suggested they go someplace for a talk.

  They went down to the lobby and settled in armchairs in the far corner.

  Crosetti took out one of his Cohiba Robustos. It fit perfectly into the hole he shaped with his lips. He worked it in and out a few times, rotated it, licked it, went through the entire ritual except for lighting up. He looked to Mitch, looked to Hurley, asked, by raising his chin, what this was about.

  “Saturday before last,” Hurley began, “there was a robbery over in Jersey.”

  “Where in Jersey?” Crosetti asked.

  “Far Hills.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Don’t shit us.”

  “I’m strictly Westchester,” Crosetti said. “You both know I’m strictly Westchester. Yeah I might reach up into Greenwich or someplace once in a while but as a rule I don’t cross state lines.”

  “Far Hills,” Mitch insisted.

  “Believe me, Mitch, I wouldn’t go all the way over to Far Hills for the fucking crown jewels in a bureau drawer.”

  “That’s not what we’re getting, Sal.”

  “From who are you getting?”

  “How about a young civilian named Roger Addison?”

  “The name means nothing,” Crosetti replied too quickly. “Some snitch is playing with your heads. When did you say this Far Hills job was?”

  “A week ago last Saturday.”

  “I was in A.C.”

  “But where was your crew?”

  “I gave them the weekend off.”

  “Sure you did.�
�

  “They didn’t do Far Hills,” Sal said unequivocally.

  “I want to believe you, Sal, but I don’t,” Hurley said.

  “How much swag is involved?”

  “Six million.”

  “So I heard,” Sal admitted.

  “With blood on it.”

  “That I also heard.”

  “Sal …”

  “Jimmy, honest to Christ, me and my crew had nothing to do with Far Hills.”

  “Let me bring you up to speed,” Mitch told Sal. Told him point by point the information he’d extracted that morning from Roger Addison. The two lunches at the Four Seasons, the gimmie that was arranged, all of it.

  Sal listened level-eyed and expressionless. Then came a moment of decision, a silent, paragraphic moment during which he cocked his head and looked off to his left as though a prompt would be forthcoming from that direction.

  He held his cigar upright. “Okay,” he said, “there was a gimmie. At least there was supposed to be. Why the fuck not? Gimmies are good for the economy. The people make out; I get, my swifts get, whoever buys gets, the street gets. The only one out is the insurance company and they already got so fucking much they don’t deserve. Know what I mean? Circulation, good for the economy.”

  Mitch had to admit to himself there was some validity to Crosetti’s reasoning. Long ago he’d arrived at a similar philosophy. Of course, that the insurance companies lost appealed to him.

  Crosetti continued:

  “This kid what’s-his-name and me made an arrangement. I had it scheduled in my head for Friday night. That was the Friday before last. But my best swift’s wife is having a baby, the Lamaze way, you know, and he’s got to be there, and another got punched out pretty bad Thursday afternoon and he’s a mess. I’m shorthanded. So, I reschedule it in my head for sometime the following week and with nothing happening take off for A.C. I’m back on Monday and I drive over to Far Hills to take a look at the job. The place is all tied up with crime scene ribbon and there’s all kinds of law all over it. Needless to say, I don’t even stop.”

  Mitch looked at Hurley to see if he was buying it. Hurley did a could be shrug.

  “You’re saying the thing never came off, somebody got to the place ahead of you?”