by Michael Mayo
A girl with a cigarette ankled unsteadily by on the way to the ladies’. She gave me a glance, kept on walking, then stopped and turned around.
“You’re him,” she said, pointing at me. “You’re the guy who beat that girl … Anna, at that race, and then treated her to a night at the Plaza Hotel. Boy howdy, did she have a lot to say about that. Yeah, you’re him. Well, pal, she’s dead. Did you know that? I guess not. Yeah, somebody shot her. Girls like her, they get all the breaks for a while—champagne and big cars and nights of luxury.”
Hearing her say that Anna had been killed hit me like a gutshot, and the world slid sideways, but even then I didn’t fully believe it. There was something about the look on that girl’s face and her voice that made it sound like a lie. Maybe she’d heard it or maybe she made it up on the spot because she was jealous that Anna got a night of luxury while she got boozy roadhouses. Either way, it still hurt to hear it.
Chapter Five
Meet me tonight.
—Anna
I was still staring at those words, wondering what they meant, when some guy I’d never seen invited himself to take a seat at my table.
It was a little after eight. Business had picked up, and we had a nice midweek crowd at the bar and in the booths. The place had the happy babble that you want from a good bar—that mix of talk, argument, and drink orders, brightened by a woman’s laugh every now and again. I didn’t notice the guy at first when he eased himself out the crowd and approached my table.
He was between twenty-five and thirty, medium height and build. His clothes were well worn, and he looked like he’d appreciate a shave and a bath. When he smiled, he squinted in a sly practiced way. I’ve seen other guys do that same thing because it works with some women. He said, “Mind if I sit down?” and dropped his butt into a chair before I could answer. He hiked the chair around so he could see the door, put down his half-finished beer, and leaned toward me. He kept one hand in his pocket.
He stared hard at me and said, “You’re Jimmy Quinn. I’ve been told that a fellow can trust you. If you take a job, you’ll stick with it. That right?” He had some kind of accent. I couldn’t place it, but he didn’t sound like he was from New York.
“I’m not looking for work. I’ve got a place to run.”
“This is different. I’ve been told you can take care of certain things.”
“What’s your name, pal? I don’t do business with people I don’t know.”
He snorted. “Name wouldn’t mean anything to you. I could say anything. I could say I was Jimmy Quinn.”
“If you’re trying to convince me do business with you, you’re making a damn poor job of it.”
His expression changed then. He’d been coming on like a tough guy, but it looked to me like he thought of something or remembered something and it worried him. “Look,” he said, trying to sound more sincere and leaning across the table, “suppose a guy had a particular item that he needed another guy to hold for him without asking a lot of questions.”
“I’m not—”
“Good,” he said quickly and slid something small under my hand. He did it as smoothly as a three-card monte dealer. If you’d been standing beside us, you might not have seen it. “This oughta buy me twenty-four hours, and there’ll be more later tonight.”
He scraped his chair as he stood. The chair caught on the carpet, and he had to grab it to keep his balance. I saw that he was missing a couple of fingers on one hand.
He hurried through the crowd toward the front door, and that’s when the strangeness of the whole day caught up with me. What the hell was happening? Something was going on, Klapprott had said as much, and it was something I didn’t know anything about. I was a simple saloonkeeper. Things like this didn’t happen to ordinary guys like me, but somehow, I was part of it, and that was a damn scary thought.
Frenchy and Fat Joe had their eyes on the crowd and would take care of things if any of the customers got so overexcited that they started fighting or put the wrong moves on another guy’s woman. Marie Therese and Connie were still conspiring with each other. I opened my hand and looked at the thing the guy had put on the table. It appeared to be a lumpy brown marble. I put it in my pocket, gathered up the late papers, and took them back to my office. I needed quiet, not happy babble, to chew over the day’s events.
Upstairs, I poured another brandy. As I sat, I felt the note in my pocket. I took it out and read it again. Meet me tonight.
To hell with everything else. Was Anna there right now? Stretched out waiting for me in that huge tub? They didn’t need me for the rest of the night. I could leave. I could catch a cab and be at the Chatham in fifteen minutes. Or I could call and ask to speak to the Taft Suite. Or I could talk to Mr. Stebbins, but no, he’d retired and I didn’t know the new bell captain.
If she was back, I wanted to see her, not talk to her on the telephone.
And should I have been thinking about her at all?
What was with Klapprott and the Free Society of Teutonia, whatever the hell that was? If all the other crazy stuff hadn’t been going on, I might have taken him up on his offer right on the spot.
Somehow, the whole idea of owning and running a legitimate completely legal enterprise just didn’t appeal to me. I’d never done anything like that. I’d always operated on the other side of the law, but I’d never been that far on the other side. Except for all the cars I’d stolen and the guys I’d shot, most of the laws I’d broken weren’t that serious, and I didn’t have much trouble sleeping. Early on, I learned that there were a lot of places where cops were being asked to do things they didn’t want to do, to enforce laws that made no sense to them. If you approached them in the right way and gave them a little something extra to turn their heads while you were doing something that seemed OK to them, they were happy to go along with it. Ellis understood that. That’s why he had invited me to the Cloud Club, to ease me over the line the other way—to make me a law-abiding citizen, but not too law-abiding.
Still, given the state of the country and the economy, maybe the smart move was to take the money and walk away.
I dug around in my pocket and found the thing that the guy had passed to me. At first, I couldn’t tell what it was and thought it might be a nut of some kind. Then I saw the number and realized it was a crumpled banknote, a ten-dollar gold spot, maybe the dirtiest ten-dollar gold spot I’d ever handled—and, believe me, I’ve handled some dirty money. This one was wadded into a tight little ball that seemed almost stuck to itself like it had been dipped in glue. It crackled as I carefully pulled it open with my fingertips, and something fell out onto my desk.
It was a small key with a round brass tag attached to it. The tag had the number 43 stamped in the middle. So did the body of the key. It might have opened a steamer trunk or a lock box.
The bill was more interesting. As I pulled at it, I saw that it was stained red and brown. The red might have been blood. The brown was thicker, like layers of paint. I had to scrape it off with my thumbnail. When I finally got the thing flattened out, it looked like a piece of used butcher paper. After thinking about it for a minute, I put both the gold spot and the little key in my safe and got the .38 Detective Special. It was clean and loaded. Probably a good idea to carry it until this business was straightened out.
Back in the bar, I was thinking that I’d turn things over to Frenchy and Fat Joe and wander up to the Chatham just to see what I could see when Mercer Weeks put a hand on my shoulder.
“Got a minute, Quinn? I need a word with you.” He was sitting at a two-top with the Professor. She was a mannish-looking woman who always wore tweed coats and skirts, no matter what the weather, and a beret. She came to my place because she loved nothing better than listening to criminals and lowlifes and cops tell stories of their adventures. She’d hang on every word, and she was usually good for a round or two if the stories were really d
epraved and lurid. I never heard her called anything but the Professor, and I don’t know where she taught, or if she even taught at all.
Weeks was one of those rawboned guys who always seemed too long for his clothes at the wrists and ankles. He had a sharply angled, bony face, and he kept his graying black hair short on top and shaved on the sides. He wore cheap dark suits and heavy brogans. He was the enforcer for the loan-sharking side of Jacob Weiss’s policy racket. Word was that Weeks would stomp deadbeats with those big brogans, and after he’d done a job on a guy, there was no cleaning them up, so he bought the cheapest ones he could find and had a dozen shoeboxes in his closet.
At least that’s what they said. Personally, I never borrowed any money from Jacob Weiss or anybody else. I’ve been lucky. At the times when I’ve had the need for large amounts of cash, I’ve always been able to steal it.
Weeks and the Professor had nearly empty glasses in front of them. His was rye and ginger. She drank vodka in honor of her Soviet comrades, she said, because she was a member of the Russian Mutual Aid Society, or some such. At the time, she was the only person who ordered the stuff. We got it special for her. She raised a hand to Frenchy to order another round for the table. I figured Weeks must have been spinning quite a tale. Frenchy brought their drinks and a brandy for me.
Weeks took a pouch of tobacco and papers out of his breast pocket and rolled a slow, careful smoke.
“I noticed that a couple Dutch’s guys were in earlier tonight, Lulu and Landau,” he said, and I realized he’d had more to drink than usual. “Was it business?”
I shook my head. I’d never seen him like that in my place before.
“They didn’t ask you to handle Schultz’s numbers?”
“Of course not, that would be nuts.”
“You sure? Jacob might be interested in making an offer.”
“This street’s already taken, isn’t it? Somebody’s running numbers in the bakery around the corner. I thought that was you and Weiss.”
“It is,” he said, nodding. “I was just thinking, maybe, you know, something different.” It took him a try or two to fire up a kitchen match with his thumbnail to light his smoke.
Nobody ever explained to me why they called it “policy.” It was just a rigged pick-three numbers game. I never understood why it was so popular, either, but it sure was. The way it worked was you chose any three numbers and you bet on that combination. Your bet could be as little as a penny. I don’t know what the top limit was in Weiss’s game. But say you bet that penny. If your numbers came up, you won six dollars. Now, you don’t exactly need to be a genius to figure that the odds are 999 to 1, and the payout is 600 to 1.
Of course, Weiss had a lot of overhead. People played their numbers all over the city at shoeshine stands and grocery stores and dress shops and laundries. Jacob had kids who’d go into the tenement apartments where women couldn’t get out or didn’t want to be seen betting their pennies. There were runners who moved the money and betting slips, and bookies and bankers and shop owners who got their cut. The winning number combination was something that was published in the papers every day and, supposedly, couldn’t be fixed, like financial statistics from the treasury, or the win, place, show numbers at a particular horseracing track. I’m pretty sure that Jacob Weiss’s operation used three numbers from the stock exchange, but I’m only going on what I heard. I never took part in the racket myself, and things always look different from the outside. But I do know this—Jacob the Wise became a very rich man with his policy business.
Now, everybody thinks that Dutch Schultz and Abbadabba Berman were the geniuses who figured out how to make the odds even better than 999 to 1 by placing heavy bets on particular races to screw around with the results. I heard Abbadabba brag that he’d added 15 percent to their weekly take.
Maybe that’s true. I doubt it, but it could be. I also know that Dutch and Abbadabba didn’t do anything that Weiss and Benny “Numbers” Rosenbluth didn’t do better.
Benny had some way of keeping tabs on heavily played number combinations during the day and then buying or selling stocks to jigger the numbers at the end of the day. According to him, he could bump the odds from 1,000 to 1 to 2,000 to 1, depending. He also had some way of making sure that key people in certain neighborhoods won regularly. These were the women and men that other people paid attention to, so Weiss’s game was a hell of a lot more popular than Dutch’s.
What it all amounted to was that at the height of the Depression, Weiss’s policy operation was knocking down seventy thousand dollars a day, six days a week. That’s a hell of a lot of pennies and nickels.
Sure, it cost a lot to keep the operation running, but Weiss did well enough to run a busy loan-sharking business, too. It was a hell of a sweet racket.
I told Weeks that I didn’t think there would be much interest in that kind of gambling at my place. “Sometimes guys want to use the room upstairs for craps or poker, but we don’t get much call for that either. It’s not really big enough.” I hoped that would be the end of it. I was ready to go to the Chatham.
Weeks slugged back his drink and said, “Everything’s gone to hell since we lost Benny Numbers.”
“What?” said the Professor, perking up. “Who’s Benny Numbers?”
I’d heard a lot of stories about what had happened to Numbers, none of them from guys that I had any reason to trust, so once Weeks started talking, I sat back and listened and tried not to think about the Chatham. A little anyway.
Weeks had been working for Jacob the Wise for a long time, and he’d never say anything bad about him in public. Hell, Weeks hardly ever said anything. Besides being one of those silent types, he had a funny way of talking slowly through clenched teeth, like every word was painful. Word was that he’d been shot in the jaw robbing a bank with Harve Bailey, and he did have a funny mark near his neck that might have been a scar.
Jacob Weiss was one of those smart guys who came from a respectable family that had disowned him years before he became a hoodlum. They took the money he gave them, but they still disowned him. And they were outraged when Benny Rosenbluth, one of the brightest kids in the neighborhood, from another respectable family, fell in with Jacob. He wasn’t related. For some reason, the Jews who worked on the wrong side of the law didn’t bring their relatives into the business the way the Italians did. At least, that was my experience, and I worked with a lot of ’em. But, the point is that Jacob loved the kid like the son he didn’t have. Benny was a natural for the policy racket. I heard that they called him “Numbers” from the time he was a little kid.
Weiss was married, but his wife disapproved of his work even more than the rest of the family, so he kept company with younger women. And that, as Weeks saw it, was where the trouble started. Spring, a year ago, Weiss went up to Saratoga and came back with the dark and mysterious Signora Sophia on his arm. Weeks and Benny Numbers called her Sugartits.
Weiss followed the routine with her that he did with all of his honeys, but he treated her a lot better. First, he set her up in an apartment, but it was a nicer place than he usually got, in a good neighborhood on the east side. He spent most afternoons with her there, and at night they went out. I knew this to be true because Weiss would sometimes bring his young ladies to my place for a quiet bottle of champagne and a dark corner. But he hadn’t been in with this Signora Sophia. I’d remember a Sugartits. Apparently she was meant for classier joints than mine. In any case, Jacob was just nuts over her.
Things were clicking along smoothly enough until Jacob decided that they should all take a trip out west. They’d take the Twentieth Century to Chicago and then to Los Angeles, where Signora Sophia could play the ponies.
“He’d never wanted to do anything like that before,” Weeks said, “but then, she wasn’t one of his usual showgirls. She was a pretty classy broad.”
“But you called her Sugartits,” the Profe
ssor said.
“Not when they could hear us,” he answered, a little offended.
But even when Jacob first brought up the idea, Weeks knew he couldn’t go. First, somebody had to stay there and keep the policy racket going. If Jacob and Benny Numbers and Weeks were gone at the same time, the guys who worked for them would steal them blind, and deaf and dumb and any other way they could steal them. Somebody had to stay, and Weeks was the logical guy.
Second, Weeks said, the train would go through Colorado, and he’d been in on the job when Harve Bailey hit the Denver Mint.
“Sure, that was ten years ago, but it’s still an open case, and I’ve been told that the Colorado cops have made the alias I was using then, so I figure it is not a good idea for me to go back.”
At the mention of the Denver Mint job, the Professor perked up even more. “Are you having me on, Mercer?” she said with her back stiff to keep her balance on the chair. “The Denver Mint?”
“Oh, yeah, but the papers got it wrong saying that we robbed the mint. We hit a Federal Reserve Bank truck outside the mint. Old Harve had it worked out pretty good, or so we thought.”
As Weeks spoke, his voice changed and his eyes lost focus, like he was talking to himself, or was lost in the memory, or he’d had too much to drink.
He said that Harve Bailey who was, hands down, the best in the business, knew that they made regular cash transfers from the mint to the Federal Reserve Bank once, maybe twice a week. The bank guys didn’t have to take it very far, so they weren’t as careful with it as they might have been. They were smart enough not to have a regular schedule. It could be any morning of the week. But instead of using a real armored car to move the cash, they’d jury-rigged a truck with a wire cage around the back, and they only used a few guards. As Weeks described it, Harvey’s plan was pretty simple.