Everybody Goes to Jimmy's

by Michael Mayo

  Back downstairs, Marie Therese, Frenchy, Fat Joe, and Malloy wanted to know what was going on. Without getting into detail, I explained that there were rumors about some hard cash floating around, maybe as much as a hundred thousand bucks, with my name on it. Maybe it was even true, who could say? And I knew that four crates had been sent to me and were waiting to be picked up at the Railway Express Agency. I was going to get them and I’d need help, but none of them had signed on for this kind of work. There was a good chance somebody would try to take them. If anybody wanted to bow out, I understood.

  Fat Joe said, “Sounds more interesting than the usual Thursday-night bullshit,” and everyone agreed.

  “OK,” I said, “but you need to know this, too. If this money is real, it probably belongs to Jacob the Wise.”

  “So,” said Fat Joe, “are you going to fucking give it back to him if it’s got your name on it?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s get it first.”

  We decided that Marie Therese and Connie would stay at the speak and be ready to open the gate as soon as we got back.

  Frenchy’s truck was an old Chevrolet with a flatbed and cab he made out of wood. It was parked in the alley out back. He drove. I was in the cab with him. Fat Joe and Malloy rode in the back with a hand truck. Frenchy had the hog leg he kept behind the bar. Neither of us knew if it still worked, but it made a fine club. Malloy had his stolen Luger, and Fat Joe had a riot gun under a tarp. I knew that if we got into a gunfight on Third Avenue, we were screwed, but having come this close to whatever was in those boxes, I wasn’t going to let go of it easily.

  As Frenchy turned out of the alley, I thought I saw one of the guys in work clothes who’d been following me the day before on my way to the Cloud Club. A block farther on, I was sure I spotted one of Klapprott’s thugs who’d been in the warehouse that morning. Hell, if we’d gone another mile, I’d probably have seen Santa Claus.

  Afternoon traffic was slow by then, so it took a while to get to Thirty-Fourth Street. Frenchy double-parked outside the Railway Express office. Fat Joe told Malloy to get the hand truck, and the three of us went inside. I gave the four carbons to a guy behind a counter toward the back of the place. A few minutes later he came back carrying a wooden crate about twelve by twelve by eighteen. By the way he was straining, it was pretty heavy. He dropped it with a heavy-sounding thunk on the counter, and pulled a cart out from under the counter for the others.

  As the guy had told us earlier, the shipping label said Yampah Hot Spring Mineral Water, but it didn’t feel like liquid when I picked it up. It was solid—no sloshing, no bump of bottles—and it was heavy, damned heavy. The label read:

  HOLD FOR: JIMMY QUINN

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  The guy brought out three more crates, same size and weight. When we got all of them loaded on the hand truck, I told Fat Joe to quit being a dick and roll it out to the flatbed. He was the only one of us big enough to handle it. The boxes filled most of the bed, so Fat Joe and Malloy sat on them.

  The drive back seemed to take much longer. Of course, now that we had those boxes that were full of something, we were on a keener edge. I could see that Frenchy was extremely interested in everyone and everything on his side of the truck—cars that pulled up even, guys looking at us from the sidewalk. I was doing the same on my side. Nothing happened until we were almost at the mouth of the alley, and then there he was again, Johann Klapprott. He sat smiling and smoking a cigarette in the back seat of his Phaeton. When he saw me, he tipped his hat.

  Fat Joe noticed him and said, “Isn’t that the Kraut cocksucker? Want me to kill him?”

  “Not yet.”

  Frenchy slowed to turn at the alley. Connie saw us and swung open the heavy wooden gate. Frenchy pulled past it and backed in. Connie closed and locked it behind us. We opened the steel door to the basement and took the boxes down one at a time with the hand truck. By the time we finished and locked up, the evening dark was settling.

  We had to move several cases of product to make room for the four boxes on a counter in the center of the cellar. Everybody crowded around, and even though we were trying to act like we didn’t feel it, the idea of money excited us, even Fat Joe.

  The crates were nailed shut, and it took some work with a pry bar to get the top of the first one off. Inside was a bright yellow squarish shape tied up with rough hairy hemp rope. Frenchy and I tried to pull it out, but the fit was so tight that Malloy and Fat Joe had to hold the sides of the box while we lifted.

  The yellow squarish shape was oilcloth, the kind they used to make rain slickers. We cut away the rope, found an edge of the oilcloth, and pulled it away. It came loose slowly because the oilcloth was stiff. When we finally got it unwrapped, we saw that the oilcloth had covered a solid rectangular block of brown wax. It looked to me like the oilcloth had been put inside the wooden box and then about an inch of melted wax had been poured in. We could see the faint numbers and designs of ten- and twenty-dollar bills embedded inside like they’d been placed there in thin layers of money and brown wax, money and wax, money and wax …

  Marie Therese scrapped at it with a thumbnail and muttered, “Papier-maĉhé.”

  Fat Joe said, “This is fucking nuts.”

  Maybe so, I thought, but it’s not a bad way to disguise the stuff. The color was close enough that the markings on the bills seemed to blend with the wax.

  Malloy pulled out a penknife and worked at a corner, scraping away slivers of wax as he pulled at a bill.

  Marie Therese and Connie put their heads together and said that Malloy’s method would take forever and would be hell to clean up. Marie Therese said, “Put it in the dumbwaiter and send it up to the kitchen. Maybe we can put it in a big sauce pan and melt it.”

  “Or,” Connie said, “hot water. Put it in the sink and pour boiling water over it.”

  Malloy said that would clog up the pipes and certainly piss off Vittorio. Fat Joe suggested melting it with a blowtorch, but Malloy said that would burn the money and maybe the brown stuff, too. Then Frenchy said that Marie Therese and Connie had the best idea of using hot water, but instead of doing it in the sink, they should put it a big galvanized tub.

  They were loading it into the dumbwaiter and I was trying to open the second box when somebody started pounding on the front door and we all stopped, like we were kids doing something dirty. Marie Therese went upstairs and yelled back that it was Detective Ellis. I told the others to go ahead and work on the thing in the kitchen but not to make much noise. We didn’t want Ellis to know anything was going on.

  “And remember what I said,” I told them. “There is a good chance that this belongs to Jacob the Wise, and if you try to steal his money, he and Mercer Weeks will not rest until they have tracked you down. Do you understand that?”

  They nodded but they didn’t really agree with me. Malloy said, “Looks to me like someone might already have removed some of these bills. Who could say, really, if a few more were to become separated from their waxy imprisonment?”

  “Be careful,” I said. “No more than twenty apiece.” That meant they’d take fifty, if they could get it loose.

  I went upstairs, let Ellis in, and we went to the bar. He’d had time to change clothes, and he looked better than he had that morning, but he was steamed. Even after I poured him a gin, he was steamed. He kept his hat and overcoat on and glared at me. The entire time we were talking, he paced up and down the bar, hardly ever sitting down.

  “Tell me about Justice Saenger,” he said after he knocked back the drink.

  I poured a second drink and said, “What’s that, a judge?”

  “It’s a name. He’s the guy whose trachea you crushed.”

  Trachea? I’d have to look that one up in the dictionary.

  “The guy in your room this morning, the guy who was going after Connie. Yeah, I know she was there, don’t bot
her to deny it, and I’ll need to talk to her.”

  “She’s not here,” I lied. “What about the other guy, the one who got stabbed?”

  “He died. We don’t have any leads on him or the other one, just Saenger.”

  “I told you, I never saw him before, never heard of him.”

  Ellis said, “He’s not talking either, and he probably won’t. Doesn’t look like he’s going to make it. We got his name from an IWW card in his pocket. Chicago chapter.”

  “The guy in the warehouse had the look of a working man, too. So we’ve got Wobblies and Nazis.”

  “Don’t joke. This looks worse than it did when the wops were killing each other, not that you’d know anything about that.”

  He was talking about some business that took place the year before when a couple of Italian gangs tried to get rid of each other and, in the process, take over Charlie Lucky’s operation. I played a small part in settling their hash, but that’s another story.

  Ellis went on. “This time I’ve got five bodies in the last twenty-four hours, one of them a cop.”

  “Five?”

  “Yeah, the guy who planted the bomb. The guy in the warehouse with your ID, Detective Betcherman, and the two guys who knifed each other in your room at the Chelsea.”

  “But you’re only worried about three. The guys in my room did each other, and we don’t even know their names, so to hell with ’em.”

  “Three’s enough. The men upstairs want an arrest soon, and it’s my nuts in the crusher. You’re going to help me on this whether you want to or not.”

  I surprised him by agreeing right away. “Right. I’ve got a couple of things you need.”

  You see, even though those of us in the booze business had working arrangements with a lot of cops, when it came to other crimes, mostly when we killed or shot each other, we didn’t talk to the law, we settled it ourselves. Ellis understood that, and that’s why he thought he’d have to get tough and lean on me to get any cooperation. But Klapprott and his goons—I didn’t owe them a damn thing.

  “First, Betcherman was in this up to his eyeballs. You know that. Find out what he’s been doing for the past week and month, find out who he’s been dealing with and you’ll find somebody who’s in on this. You see, there’s something you may not know. The night the bomb went off, Betcherman was here. Ten minutes later, he was in the alley at this end.”

  Ellis gave me a cold stare. “Betcherman told me. That night. Said he was in the neighborhood and heard it.”

  “Did he tell you he tried to put the arm on me about some deal that he was part of? No? What were his words—‘An item was delivered to your place. A piece of it’s mine.’ That’s what he said.”

  Ellis ignored that and said, “I’ve heard there was some sort of disturbance at the Kraut warehouse this morning.”

  “Yeah, I was there. Some guys took me for a ride. They had the same idea that Betcherman did—but they were more specific. And they’re working for this guy Klapprott who maybe owns the warehouse. He’s also in charge of some outfit called the Free Society of Teutonia that’s got something to do with those Nazi guys over in Germany. He’s got this goon, name of Luther, who was the guy in charge when they snatched me. They did it because they thought that I know the whereabouts of a certain amount of cash money, a large amount. Did you hear that, too?”

  He stopped walking and paid more attention. “Maybe.”

  “And maybe you heard of some other party that came up missing a certain amount of cash money last year.”

  He tried to hide his surprise and said, “Are you talking about Jacob Weiss?”

  “What do you know about what happened to him and Benny Numbers last year?”

  “Not enough. I’ve heard a lot of stories. All I really know is that they went on a trip and nobody’s seen Benny since. Lot of people say he ran off with Weiss’s woman.”

  I thought about everything Jacob had said and how much I could repeat to a cop. Not much. “It boils down to this. Somebody snatched Benny, and Jacob shelled out a hundred thousand dollars to get him back. After that, nothing. No money, no Benny. But now, somebody is telling Jacob that the money is here in the city and that I’ve got it. A lot of other thugs and lowlifes seem to think the same thing, maybe even the guy with the dynamite, but that’s neither here nor there since Weiss is involved.”

  Ellis agreed. To keep his numbers and loan-sharking operations running, Jacob made payoffs and kept secrets and did favors for some of the most powerful men in New York. He had guys in his pocket everywhere: the mayor’s office, D.A., council, police department, and probably other places I didn’t even know about. Ellis knew that a detective who brought Weiss’s name into a case was doing himself no favors.

  “It was what, two nights ago, we were talking in the Cloud Club, just a couple of guys, the proprietor of a fine speak and a moderately corrupt cop. That hasn’t changed, and once this matter has been cleaned up, we’ll be in the same situation. So for now, I have decided to take you up on your offer, if it’s still on the table, of helping me get through the tricky parts of dealing with the city government when booze becomes legal again.”

  “So, Jimmy Quinn is going to go legit.”

  “I didn’t say that. I said the speak would be legit. And there’s something else I think I can do. If things work right, you can clean up Betcherman’s murder tonight and keep Jacob’s name out of it.”

  His face lit up with hope and then immediately darkened. He didn’t believe me.

  “You need an arrest. Maybe we can pin something on that bastard Klapprott, if nothing else. Interested?”

  He waited a long thoughtful moment before he agreed.

  “OK, can you arrange for the Cloud Club to be open for a small private party later tonight?”

  After Ellis left, I tried to sort out what I knew and what I guessed.

  I knew that Anna had sent what looked to be a large amount of cash sealed in wax. She sent it from Colorado. It was likely that she was the one who sent me Benny Numbers’ ledgers. But she mailed those from Chicago. Klapprott said that Justice Schilling, his guy who claimed the money, was from Chicago. Justice Saenger, the guy who attacked Connie in my room, was from Chicago. Two names for the same guy who was trying to be tricky. The ten-dollar bill that Three Fingers gave me to hold his key came from Anna’s waxy money.

  Anna had a daughter. Maybe while Anna was in Colorado and Chicago, her daughter was here in New York. Jacob said Signora Sophia had a secret side to her life. That could have been the little girl.

  It was time to ask her about it, so I went back to my office and found the telephone message about her hotel.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The lobby of the Hotel Lombardy was a lot swankier than the Chatham.

  When I left the speak, I walked back to the corner where I’d seen Klapprott. He wasn’t there. Still, I hailed a cab and told him to head uptown and make sure nobody was following us. He managed it without as much drama as I’d had that afternoon, and twenty minutes later, he let me off on East Fifty-Sixth in front of the hotel. I told the deskman my name and had him call Room 512. He gave me the eye over my bruised and battered phiz but let me go upstairs anyway.

  Anna’s digs turned out to be a suite, a damned big one with thick carpets, classy furniture, and a nicely stocked bar. Anna looked great. Twilight suited her. Her hair was fixed up, and she wore a knockout of a tight silk dress, so deep red it was almost purple. It had long sleeves and an Oriental collar high on her neck. She frowned when she got a look at my mug. “What happened?” she asked.

  “It’s been a busy day. I could tell you about it better if I had a drink. The label on the rye looks to be genuine. Let me have a dram with a splash of soda.”

  I settled on the settee while she did the honors. She made mine a double. Most of hers came from the siphon. Given the situation, I unders
tood.

  She sat close, her thigh rubbing against mine, and leaned closer. She took my face in her hands and kissed me hard. Then she pulled back and traced the bruises and cuts on my face with her fingertips. “I guess it was wrong of me to get you involved in all this, but it’s too late for regrets. I’m glad I did it. I knew I could trust you.” She gave me her most sincere unblinking soulful gaze.

  “Of course you can,” I lied.

  “I didn’t mean to give you the bum’s rush this morning, but you surprised me when you said that anybody who claimed to be you might be able to pick up something addressed to you. Everything’s been so crazy that I had to make sure it was still OK.”

  In other words, I thought, she picked up on the hint that other parties had their eyes on her score and might have found out that she was at the Chatham, so it was a good time to make herself scarce.

  I took a sip of the drink. It was the McCoy, not some doctored crap. I wondered what and how much I should tell her, what I owed her, and what she owed me. She was probably thinking the same things, but then she was always two steps ahead of me in that department. I couldn’t come up with a useful reason to mention seeing her and the little girl that afternoon, or that I had taken possession of her waxy loot. We’d get around to those soon enough.

  “I don’t know about you,” I said, “but I’m starving. Have they got room service in this joint?”

  She shot me a cool look and then called downstairs and ordered the special.

  “When we left off this morning, you were telling me that you sent some money here, addressed to me, for safekeeping, I guess. You and Pauley Domo had kidnapped a bootlegger, but he managed to get loose and contact his thugs. You got the money and escaped in a hail of gunfire. Pauley was seriously wounded and succumbed in an Ohio tourist court. Is that right?”

  She gripped her glass hard. Her hands didn’t shake. Neither did her voice. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “I heard another story today. I won’t bore you by going over the whole thing, but it ended with a woman driving out of a little Colorado town one night about a year ago with two suitcases full of money—a hundred thousand dollars is the figure I heard—and it was meant to ransom Benny Numbers for Jacob the Wise. Does that mean anything to you, Signora Sophia?”