by Michael Mayo
He gave me a hard look. “So, you’re finally here,” he said. “Weeks, give him a drink.”
“Brandy. If it’s any good.”
Weeks poured. Jacob and I sat in armchairs facing each other. His brandy was crap. I set it aside and rested my stick on my lap across the arms of the chair.
Jacob said, “There was a young fella here yesterday who said he had a story to tell me. For a price. It turned out to be a very interesting story.” He paused while he put a match to a fresh Havana, making a real production number of it and creating a cloud of sticky smoke. “I didn’t pay for it. I thought about having Weeks beat it out of him, but once the guy started talking, I decided to do it myself.” He smiled around the cigar. “He said that my money was in transit, those were the words he used, ‘in transit,’ and when it gets here, you will take possession. And then today, I got a telephone call saying that you’ve already got my money—my hundred thousand dollars. I want it back.”
The smile disappeared, and he gave me another hard stare meant to be threatening.
I sat back in the chair and rested my hands on my stick. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“According to this young fella, the people who had it knew that it was hot and sold it to you for a penny on the dollar. The ransom money,” he said, and at least part of the picture came into focus.
“Ransom money? For who? What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He answered with another hard stare. I stared back.
Finally, he mushmouthed around the cigar, “Mercer, did you see anything?”
Weeks, who was staying away from us over by the bar, said, “No. Nothing’s changed at his place. It’s just like it was last week and last month and before the trip. If he’s got the cash, he’s not flashing it around.”
Jacob said, “That doesn’t mean anything,” and blew smoke in my face.
“Who is this young fella? What’d he look like, and why would you believe him?”
Jacob shrugged. “Who knows? It could be true. If you try to lie to me, I’ll have Weeks get the truth out of you.”
“No, you won’t. I’ll shoot him first.”
Jacob scowled at Weeks. “You didn’t search him?”
Weeks was unconcerned. “This is just Quinn, for God’s sake. If he shoots me, I’ll kill him.”
I said, “Jacob, I’m not going to insult you and Weeks by threatening you. That’s stupid, and I’m not stupid enough to steal from you, either. You know that. So what’s going on? I don’t know anything about any hundred thousand dollars.”
His big shoulders slumped, like he knew what I was going to say, and he knew I wasn’t lying. Well, I wasn’t lying about some of it, anyway.
“What do you know about what happened to us last year?” he asked.
“I heard you were taking some time off, a long trip out West. Benny Numbers and some of your guys went with you. You came back a couple of months later without him. That’s it. I heard other things from guys who probably didn’t know what they were talking about. But I don’t put any stock in that. What else is there?”
As Jacob told it, his business had been good. Despite the crash, people still gambled with their pennies and nickels, and because of the crash, his loan sharking was better than ever. He didn’t say “loan sharking.” I think he referred to it as the “banking side” of his operation. So, he decided, for the first time, to take some time off. He asked his friend, Signora Sophia, where she’d like to go, and she said she really wanted to stay in the city, but if they were going to go someplace, it ought to be someplace warm. He suggested Los Angeles and Hollywood, and that was that.
As Weeks had said earlier in my speak, somebody had to stay and watch the store, and that was him. They had to do some persuading to talk Benny Numbers into the trip. “We can’t afford it,” he said. “I don’t want to leave my fiancée for so long,” he said. There was too much to do. Jacob had none of it. He wanted a trip, and he wanted his favorite people with him. He also took bodyguards, four of them. An important man in his line of work didn’t go about without protection. Jacob the Wise didn’t get where he was by taking unnecessary risks.
So one fine evening in the fall of ’31, they boarded the Twentieth Century Limited at Grand Central and headed for Chicago, first class. The whole time they were on that train and the others, Benny Numbers acted like he was back in the basement offices on Grand Street where he kept track of Jacob’s business. He brought along four ledgers and a briefcase full of notebooks. At every stop, he hurried off the train and went to the closest telephone to call back and get figures from the guys who worked for him. He could have sent telegraphs from the train, but he said he didn’t trust them. It was too easy for other people to get their noses in Jacob’s business. For his part, Jacob didn’t care. He enjoyed the ride and the company of the Signora.
In Chicago, they changed trains for the Chief to Los Angeles, with a side trip to visit the hot springs and the Hotel Colorado at Glenwood Springs, where Theodore Roosevelt and Al Capone had stayed.
It turned out to be a little burg high up in the mountains. The hotel wouldn’t have been out of place in Saratoga Springs. It sprawled out beside a wide warm water pool. They attracted a fair amount of attention when they arrived, maybe not as much as Capone, but with his attentive gun thugs and the tall dark ermine-wrapped beauty on his arm, Jacob was something out of the ordinary. The manager ushered them around to a special private entrance.
Sometime during their first night there, Benny Numbers disappeared.
When he didn’t show up for lunch the next day, Jacob sent one of his gunmen to check the room. Ten minutes later, looking sick and worried, the guy came back and said Jacob had to see something.
Jacob and the Signora had adjoining suites, but Benny had made arrangements for the rest of them in less luxurious rooms. The gun guys were close to Jacob, but Benny had a smaller room in another wing. When they got to it, Jacob found that things had been knocked around, like there might have been a fight, but the bed hadn’t been slept in.
Under a hotel ashtray in the middle of the bed was a note, handwritten, barely legible. It read:
No Cops
We have yr man and his books
$100,000 dollars
five days
Jacob sent his guys to look around the grounds just in case it wasn’t what it looked like it was. Nothing. He talked things over with the Signora. She agreed this was very bad and went to speak to the manager for Jacob. Acting like it was nothing serious, she asked the manager if there had been any noise complaints the night before. She was asking because her friend in 115 thought he heard something. The manager checked with the night man. More nothing. Jacob’s guys came back empty-handed, too. He told them to check with the lower-level hotel staff to find out where the local whorehouses and speaks were, anyplace Benny Numbers might have got a notion to visit and then found himself in trouble. While they were working on that, he called Mercer Weeks and explained what happened.
Weeks started collecting the cash.
It took four days for him to gather the money and for him and two other guys to bring two suitcases full to Glenwood Springs. They took the same trains to Chicago and Denver, where they bought a Ford and drove the rest of the way. Knowing nothing about the area, Jacob wasn’t able to do much during that time. He couldn’t tell if any of the other guests or hotel staff or the people who passed by on the street were watching him. Everything looked suspicious.
He and Signora Sophia and the guards stayed close. Jacob was able to ask around and learned that there was one occasional local, “Diamond” Jack Alterie, also known as “Two Gun” Alterie, who might have pulled a snatch like this one. Alterie had worked with Capone in Chicago, but he’d been kicked out of the organization after making nutty threats when his boss, Deanie O’Banion, got killed. Alterie told the papers that he�
��d meet the killers at high noon on State Street, where they’d shoot it out. Big Al suggested it might be a good time for Diamond Jack to get the fuck out of town, and he went to Colorado. Several years later, when Jacob went there, Alterie had a ranch and sponsored rodeos in Denver and sometimes showed up in Glenwood Springs. He strutted around with a big Stetson hat that looked like an upside-down umbrella, flashy diamond rings, and two .45s strapped to his hips. Not the kind of guy to pull something like this.
When Weeks got to the hotel, Jacob knew no more than he had that first day. The waiting and the damn fact that he couldn’t do anything were making him crazy. Jacob wasn’t a particularly emotional guy, but he was choosy about who he worked with. He got to know the guys who stuck with him. He really did think of Benny and Weeks as the sons he and his wife never had. And then there were the ledgers. If Jacob were to lose those and if the wrong people got their hands on them, the whole operation would be in trouble. So all they could do was wait and hope they were dealing with professionals.
Of course, Weeks sweated the bodyguards, too. But these were Jacob’s most trusted guys, who’d been with him forever. If something like this had happened at home, more suspicion would have been directed at them, but not this far away, and not when they’d been playing cards with Jacob on the night Benny got snatched.
They didn’t hear anything for another full day. By then, Jacob was ready to kill somebody, anybody. The Signora locked the door to her suite, ordered room service, and refused to say anything else. Worried about the warrants that might still be out for him on the Denver Mint job, Weeks stayed in his room as much as he could.
On the afternoon of the sixth day after Benny Numbers had been taken, a taxi driver came up to the front desk with a note for Mr. Jason Wentworth, the name Jacob was registered under. When Weeks found the cabbie later, he said a man approached him at the train station. It was dark, and he didn’t get a good look, so all he could say was that he thought the guy was old. Yes, it was strange for somebody to offer him a whole dollar to drive a few hundred yards to the hotel, but strange things happen everywhere, even in Glenwood Springs.
The note, written in what looked like the same crude handwriting as the first, read:
Bring money to Miner’s Camp No. 3 at 11:00
Wait
Send the Woman
Nobody liked that last part. The Signora flatly refused to do it, and Weeks backed her up. This was his kind of job. That night, he got directions to Miner’s Camp No. 3, a little name on the map that wasn’t much more than a crossroads higher up in the mountains about nine miles away. He loaded the suitcases into the Ford and drove off.
He came back the next morning. Nobody showed up. They heard nothing for two days. The next note came in the mail with a local postmark. It said:
Send the Woman
Jacob, Weeks, and the Signora sat down to talk it over. They tried to persuade her for more than an hour. Finally, it came down to Jacob saying, “I am asking you to do this thing for me. I am asking you as an honorable man. If you agree to do this, I will be in your debt. You can ask anything of me. Anything. Weeks is my witness.”
She agreed. Weeks asked if she wanted a gun. She said she had one.
That night, they loaded the suitcases again. She drove away, and that was the last they saw of her and the money and Benny Numbers.
They stayed for another month, generating a wealth of rumors among the staff and guests. Weeks and Jacob bought another car and went to Miner’s Camp No. 3, where they found nothing but a few empty buildings. It wasn’t even big enough to be called a ghost town. They wandered through all the mountain roads and trails they could find, hundreds of miles, but they were virtually empty except for a few villages and mining outfits. They considered hiring the Pinkertons. But Jacob would have nothing to do with the idea at first. He was afraid that word would get back to the cops. Weeks said that he’d bought the Ford under a false name. It couldn’t be traced to either of them, so Jacob agreed. Weeks went to Denver and hired the Pinks but only to search for the car. Not that it mattered. The private dicks came up empty, too.
Then the first big snow hit, and that was it. They packed up and went back to New York. Jacob set about straightening up his policy racket. While he’d been gone, everyone involved from the runners on up were skimming as much as they could. With Weeks gone, nobody had been making their payments on loans. Angry and frustrated at what had happened, they threw themselves into work. They talked about going back to Colorado with more men to search, maybe to find more locals who could help. But without Benny Numbers, the policy business took up all their time and energy, and it had been almost a year since Benny had been snatched.
By the time he finished the story, Jacob was really steamed. Talking about it made him mad all over again.
“Then yesterday,” he said, “I’m sitting here, right where I’m sitting now, and the phone rings.” There was a phone on the table beside him.
“I pick it up, and this voice says, ‘Are you Jacob Weiss?’ And I say that I am, and she says, ‘Jimmy Quinn has your money’ and hangs up.”
“You said she, so it was a woman.”
“Yes, an old woman. She was hoarse, whispery, hard to understand, and that makes two people putting the finger on you.” He jabbed the cigar at me.
“And you believe them; you think I’ve got your money?”
“We don’t know.” Weeks came over to stand by Jacob. “But this is the first thing we’ve heard. So somebody knows something, and you’re in on it.”
“OK, let me ask you something—did you check out this guy Alteri who worked with Capone?”
“Yeah, but there was nothing to him. He spends his time playing cowboy.”
“Then, as I see it, you’ve got two possibilities. First, one of the locals had been waiting for somebody like you to show up, somebody with money who won’t call the cops. He snatched Benny Numbers and killed him. Then he killed the Signora after she delivered.”
They stared at me, looking grim. This was nothing they hadn’t considered.
“Or, this is a deal that Benny and the Signora cooked up together, and now they’re whooping it up with your money in Paris or South America or somewhere, and somebody else is pulling your leg, saying that I’m in on it when I’ve never been west of New Jersey.”
At that, Jacob shook his head. “No, I know Benny and Sophia. If there was anything going on between them, I would know. I was too close to both of them not to know. And besides, the way Benny worked, he didn’t have time to fuck around. And Sophia—I gave Sophia everything she needed.”
I rolled my stick and said, “Tell me about Signora Sophia.” I thought I probably already knew a lot about her.
When I said her name, Jacob’s expression went soft for just a tiny second. But as soon as he started talking, he closed back down and tried not to let anything show in his face or voice.
He met her at Saratoga Springs, at the races. Now, you’ve got to understand that being seen at the races was quite the big deal for New York society folk. Jacob had been going ever since Rothstein opened a casino there back in the ’20s. As a runner for A. R., I was strictly a city kid and never went out of town with him, but I heard it was a real elegant joint. Must have been, he had to pass out fifty thousand dollars a year in bribes to the local bosses to keep it open. Jacob and A. R. got along pretty good because Jacob didn’t gamble. He just enjoyed Rothstein’s company, and like Longy Zwillman, he wasn’t competition. I think Jacob and A. R. liked to watch all the swells playing the tables at A. R.’s place, knowing that sooner or later, they were going to be handing over their money. A. R. once said to me that every game is fixed, and when you own the house, the fix is locked in. A. R. also told me more than once that the people who lost their dough at his place were dubs and dumbbells. I guess Jacob probably thought the same about his customers. Like I said, they were pals, and after A. R.
got killed, Jacob still went to Saratoga Springs. Signora Sophia was staying at his hotel.
She was a brunette Garbo—silent, cool, and glamorous. She dressed in dark colors and usually wore sunglasses. She ate alone, and Jacob watched dozens of guys get the brush-off. Everybody had stories to tell about her. Some said she was a white Russian countess whose family lost everything in the revolution. Or she was an Italian duchess whose husband was killed in the war. I don’t know what Jacob said to get on her good side. He didn’t give away any details, but he persuaded her to join him for dinner one evening, and they ate together that night and the next night and the next.
It turned out that the stories about royalty were bunk. She told him she was a widow from Wisconsin. Her husband had been in the war, but when he came back, he wasn’t the same, and two years ago, he had shot himself. She came to that hotel because they spent their honeymoon there, and that was why the management made an exception to their policy about not allowing single women. As for the other stories, she knew about them and didn’t discourage them because they made her sound exotic, and she guessed they kept some of the Lotharios from pestering her.
Jacob said, “I knew she wasn’t cheap. From the first time I talked to her, I knew that. She had taste. Her clothes and jewelry were the best, and she knew how to order from a good menu, but she wasn’t one of those society broads who look down their noses at you.”