The Shimmering Blond Sister

by David Handler

“I’m sorry for your loss, but what does this have to do with me?”

  “I owe the man, okay? Have to make sure the state police out here do right by him. I’ve been trying all morning to find out what’s up with the investigation. I hear you folks have an ongoing situation with a weenie waver, but beyond that I can’t get squat.”

  “Again, why are you talking to me?”

  “Because the detective who’s running the show, a Sergeant Snipes, won’t return any of my calls. And the unis won’t let me within ten feet of Dawgie’s apartment until she green lights me. I’ve got information, okay? I’m in a position to help. Word is you’re tight with the resident trooper. Besides, you and me go back a few years.”

  “You said that before. I’m still not placing you.”

  “Really? I sat next to you all of the time in postmodern European lit.”

  “You went to Columbia?”

  “Try to get the incredulity out of your voice, will you? It’s insulting.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .”

  “I was a year behind you. Majored in Romance languages—which did me beaucoup good. Wore my hair down to my shoulders in those days.”

  “Hold on a sec. . . .” Mitch shook a finger at him. “You’re the Jiggler.”

  “The what?”

  “Your knee. It used to jiggle all through class and drive everyone nuts. Sounded like there was a woodpecker in the room.”

  “I had an energy situation, as in I had too much of it. Still do.”

  “And how did you end up becoming a cop?”

  “It was a family thing.”

  “Your dad’s on the job?”

  “Not really,” Very said, leaving it there.

  “I’d like to help out, Lieutenant, but I really don’t know anything.”

  “I’m down with that. I’m just asking you to listen. Can you do that?”

  “Sure, I can do that. Come on out.”

  Very jump-started his Norton with a roar and eased his way across the wooden causeway behind Mitch. When they reached the cottage he killed his engine and climbed off, glancing around. “Stabbin’ cabin, dude,” he observed, his head bobbing up and down, up and down. “If you have to be out of the City, I mean. Me, I get ootsie if I’m not standing on good, solid pavement.”

  “I’m sorry, did you just say ootsie?”

  “Why, you got a problem with ootsie?”

  “No, no. It’s a fine word. How long are you planning to be here?”

  “For as long as it takes. I took some vacation time.”

  “Do you have a place to stay?”

  “Figured I’d find a motel room somewhere.”

  “On the Connecticut shoreline in August—without a reservation? Good luck with that.”

  Inside of the cottage, Very made straight for Mitch’s sky blue Fender Stratocaster, which was propped against his monster pair of Fender twin reverb amps, stacked one atop the other with a signal splitter on top. “Ow, mommy-mommy! Awesome setup, dude.”

  “I make some noise.”

  “I’ll bet you do.” Now Very went over toward the table where Mitch’s computer sat amidst heaps of printouts, notepads and DVDs. “Mind if ask what you’re writing about this week?”

  “Icebox questions.”

  “Icebox . . . hunh?”

  “It’s an expression coined by Hitchcock. His way of shrugging off really obvious lapses in logic or credibility. He believed that as long as the audience was loving the movie they wouldn’t care. Like, say, in The 39 Steps . . .”

  “Never saw it.”

  “You never saw The 39 Steps? You must. That scene with the finger totally slays. Anyway, Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll have to spend the night handcuffed together in a room in a remote country inn, okay? And she’s convinced that he’s an escaped killer on the run. It’s really tense. Also pretty damned sexy for 1935. They’re actually lying on top of the bed together, okay? And she’s even removed her wet stockings. You’re totally into the scene. So into it that, in Hitchcock’s words, it isn’t until you get up for a glass of milk in the middle of the night and are standing there at your icebox that you ask yourself: ‘What did they do when one of them had to go to the bathroom?’ Just like with his famous crop duster scene in North by Northwest.”

  “Okay, that one I did see. It was incredible.”

  “So incredible that it’s not until later that you ask yourself why James Mason went to the trouble of sending Cary Grant all the way to an Indiana cornfield when he could have bumped him off in any back alley in Chicago. And, by the way, who was flying that crop duster? Was it one of Mason’s henchmen? Where did he score a crop duster that’s outfitted with machine guns on such short notice? Did he steal it? Kill the real pilot?”

  “None of which matters,” Very conceded. “Because it’s not real life. It’s just a movie.”

  “Sorry, did you say just a movie?”

  Very held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Whatever, dude.”

  “Can I get you something to drink, Lieutenant?”

  “I could go for anything cold.”

  Mitch went in the kitchen and poured two glasses of chilled well water. Came back and handed Very one. “I have to tell you something you’re not going to like,” he said. “The resident trooper had serious issues with Augie. They even had an altercation on Friday. She said he’d been drinking.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. But I’m not surprised. Dawgie didn’t exactly roll with the times. He could be sexually inappropriate, politically incorrect, you name it.” Very paced around the living room as he talked, bristling with intensity. “He started drinking a lot after his wife, Gina, passed. His fuse got shorter and, well, last year, he got into it with a black female officer over some totally minor detail on a case. Called her an inappropriate name in the squad room. You don’t use that kind of language in the workplace. Or anywhere else. She slapped him. He slapped her back. Our captain tried to smooth it over. You know, let’s keep this inside the room. She wouldn’t hear of it. Was going to file all kinds of official charges. So the captain had to convince Dawgie to take early retirement.” Very paused to gulp down some water. “All of which is to say he had a grudge against black female officers. Especially young, good-looking ones—which I’m told the resident trooper is. Damned shame, really. Dawgie was in a position to provide her with some valuable intel. If he’d established a better rapport with her he might still be alive.”

  “What sort of valuable intel?”

  Very yanked a fat manila file folder out of his knapsack and set it down on Mitch’s coffee table. “You ever hear of the Seven Sisters?”

  “Sure. There’s Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Smith. . . .”

  “Not those Seven Sisters. I’m talking about the crime family.”

  Mitch shook his head. “No, I can’t say I have.”

  “Again, I’m not surprised. The Seven Sisters are one of the great untold stories in the annals of twentieth century crime.” Very flopped down on Mitch’s love seat, then jumped right back up again, pacing, pacing. “Dude, I am talking about a vast, highly sophisticated Jewish crime empire that dates back to New York’s Lower East Side in the early 1900s. According to the birth records there were seven Kudlach girls—Eva, Sonia, Esther, Thelma, Fanny, Bea and Helen. All of them the daughters of Moses and Sarah Kudlach. Moses was a Russian immigrant who sold stuff off a pushcart on Orchard Street. Anything he could get his hands on. The old lady, Sarah, was descended from a long line of Roumanian street gonifs. Jewish gypsies, really. Her girls started learning the family trade as soon as they were old enough to walk. By the time they were six years old, each of them was fanned out across the city all day long, scamming people for money, picking their pockets, snatching their purses, watches, jewelry. Then they’d bring everything home for Mom and Pop to unload. A nice, tight, one-family crime ring. All of it small stuff. But they flourished. Especially after Sarah married each girl off. She chose their husbands carefully. Each on
e was a neighborhood guy with a legit trade—a tailor, watchmaker, pawnbroker, kosher butcher, auto mechanic, truck driver. Their businesses formed a network for moving stolen merchandise of greater and greater value. By the twenties the family had ownership stakes in high-end dress shops, jewelry stores, restaurants, parking garages. They’d also expanded into bookmaking and loan sharking. No bootlegging or drugs or prostitution. They concentrated on what they knew. They were careful. And smart. And, with one notable exception, they never came to the attention of the law. Just kept growing from one generation to the next, expanding their empire out of New York into Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas. You wouldn’t believe the family tree, dude. Dawgie’s got it here in his file somewhere.”

  “Lieutenant, are you telling me they still exist?”

  “A lot of the third and fourth generation are totally legit—doctors and lawyers, college professors. Some operate businesses that were financed by criminal activity but are now totally clean. But, yeah, quite a few of them are still living the life. It’s in their blood.”

  “And you’re telling me all of this because . . . ?”

  “You’re tight with Beth Breslauer—or so it appears from the last roll Dawgie FedExed me. Here, I just got these yesterday. . . .” Very opened the file and handed Mitch a batch of eight-by-ten color photos.

  Mitch flipped through them. They were surveillance shots of Beth and him drinking smoothies together at The Works on Friday afternoon. Buying fish. Chatting in the parking lot. Her kissing him good-bye. “I don’t understand,” he said slowly. “Augie was following me?”

  “Following her. How well do you know the lady?”

  “We used to be neighbors in Stuyvesant Town. I was friends with her son Kenny.”

  “That would be Kenny Lapidus,” Very said, nodding, nodding. “He’s shagging your yoga teacher, Kimberly Farrell, whose parents live in the same building as Beth Breslauer—which so happens to be where Dawgie lived, too.”

  “Welcome to small town life, Lieutenant. But why on earth was Augie following Beth?”

  “Because Beth Breslauer’s great-grandmother was Esther Kudlach, one of the original Seven Sisters. Esther’s married name became Pincus. Beth’s grandfather, Saul Pincus, was a major New York racketeer in the thirties. The only high-profile one of the bunch. Movie-star handsome. A real tabloid star—right up until the night he was gunned down eating a bowl of matzoh ball soup in Lindy’s. Saul liked to live large. A thirteen-room apartment on Park Avenue for the wife and kids. And a penthouse on Central Park West for his mistress—a hot little bad girl who danced in the Billy Rose Aquacade. Her name was Bertha Puzewski. You know her as Bertha Peck.”

  So that explained it, Mitch reflected. Beth landed her condo in the Captain Chadwick House because Bertha Peck had been her grandfather’s girlfriend. If any of this tale was actually true, that is. Big if.

  “A freakin’ gold mine,” Very went on. “That’s what Dawgie called the place. He had Dex Farrell, the world-class Wall Street swindler, in one unit. He had Saul Pincus’ granddaughter living across the hall from Farrell. And Saul’s old girlfriend parked upstairs, passing herself off as WASP royalty.” Very sat back down in front of Augie’s file, leafing through it. “Yeah, here it is—Saul and his wife, Minnie, had two boys, Sam and Nathan. Sam was Beth’s father. He made his living as a bookie. Same as her first husband, Sy Lapidus.”

  “You mean Kenny’s dad? No, you’ve got that wrong. Sy’s an accountant, albeit a louse. He deserted them when Kenny and I were kids. Moved out west.”

  “He didn’t desert them, dude. He was serving a nickel at the Fishkill Correctional Facility. Didn’t move out to California until years later.”

  “That’s not what Kenny told me.”

  “Then Kenny doesn’t know the real story. Or he’s not being straight with you. It’s all right here in the file,” Very tapped it with his finger. “His dad’s whole criminal history.”

  “Beth sold handbags at Bloomingdale’s,” Mitch said stubbornly. “She was a nice lady. Still is. She’s not a criminal.”

  “I didn’t say she was.” Very looked at Mitch curiously. “You still with me? Because you look a little shook. I don’t blame you. This is some crazy stuff.”

  “Very.”

  “Yeah, dude?”

  “It’s very crazy stuff.”

  The lieutenant resumed his pacing. Clemmie came padding down from the sleeping loft and watched this hyper stranger in her midst, highly suspicious. After giving the matter considerable thought, she voted with all four paws to go back upstairs to her nice, calm bed.

  “The day Dawgie moved in he called and told me Bertha Peck smelled wrong,” Very recalled. “The man just had a sixth sense when it came to phonies. She had him do a job for her, touching up some paint in her bedroom, and he spotted those old cheesecake shots of her on the dressing table. Professional studio stuff. When he asked her about them she clammed right up. So he got curious. Spent his days off at the Lincoln Center branch of the New York Public Library combing through old Playbills until he found her—Bertha Puzewski. One of his drinking buddies, an old-timer who used to work on the Daily News, remembered the tabloid items about her and Saul Pincus. A couple of months go by and, sure enough, Saul’s granddaughter, Beth, bought a unit there. Right away, Dawgie got interested. Started filing reports of Beth’s comings and goings. FedExing me rolls of film . . .”

  “You just said ‘rolls’ of film again. It’s a digital world. Who still . . . ?”

  “Gina gave Dawgie an old school Nikon camera as a birthday present not long before she died. No way he was switching to digital. He’d have been dishonoring her memory. Plus the man was a total trog. He wouldn’t buy a laptop. Didn’t do e-mail. He wrote everything out longhand. It’s all right here in the file. Everything he sent me.”

  “Why you?”

  “I happen to have a personal interest in the Seven Sisters.”

  Mitch narrowed his gaze at him. “Which is . . . ?”

  Romaine Very didn’t answer him. Just let the question slide on by.

  “Well, what did he find out about Beth?”

  “For starters, she has herself a boyfriend. His name’s Vinnie Brogna. Ever meet him?”

  “Can’t say that I have, no.”

  “Vinnie calls himself a hairstylist. He owns Salon Vincenzo, which is that overpriced barber shop in the Comstock Hotel on Sixth Avenue. I happen to know that he runs a profitable bookmaking operation out of the salon. Also rotates a crew of high-end working girls in and out of the hotel for the pleasure of out-of-town businessmen. The dude’s totally mobbed up. And I’m not talking any Seven Sisters here. He’s in with the Albanese crime family. His wife, Lucia, is the niece of Big Sal, the family boss. Vinnie and Lucia have four kids, a nice big house in Great Neck. And, on the side, he has Beth Breslauer. He spends at least two evenings a week with her at her apartment in Manhattan. And he’s out here on weekends whenever he can swing it. Vinnie likes the action at the Mohegan Sun Casino. The man’s been known to drop twenty large in one night. Usually, he and Beth get a room together there.”

  Very handed Mitch more photos from the file. A photo of Beth climbing into a black Lexus on Dorset Street, halfway down the block from the Captain Chadwick House. A photo of her and a dapper middle-aged guy getting out of that Lexus at the palatial front entrance to the Mohegan Sun. Photos of them eating dinner together in a fancy restaurant, their heads close together, eyes gleaming. Waiting for an elevator. Embracing, kissing . . .

  “My sources tell me that Beth and Vinnie have been a steady item for something like ten years.”

  Mitch’s eyes widened. “How many?”

  “Did I just stutter?”

  “No, but that would mean—”

  “She was seeing him while she was married to Irwin Breslauer, I know. And I’m sorry if that’s a buzzkill but stay with me—there’s more. I hear she’s been pressuring Vinnie to marry her ever since Irwin died. Only, he won’t leave Lucia. The
man’s a devout Catholic. Doesn’t believe in divorce.”

  “But it’s okay to screw around?”

  “People are going to do what they’re going to do,” Very said with a shrug. “And, according to Dawgie, screwing’s not the only thing those two have been up to. . . .” He fanned out another set of photos of Beth and Vinnie walking past a well-dressed couple in the casino parking lot. Beth apparently bumping into her. The lady’s handbag falling to the pavement. Beth picking it up for her. Apologies all around. The two couples going their separate ways. “Pay particular attention to the other lady’s right wrist, dude. Before the bump she’s got a gold bracelet on. See it? After the bump, she doesn’t.”

  “Lieutenant, are you suggesting that Beth stole the lady’s bracelet?”

  “Dawgie sure thought so.”

  Mitch studied the photos more closely. “Hell, these don’t prove anything. Look, the lady’s sleeve is hiked up before the bump. Here, afterward, it’s not. For all we know she could still be wearing the bracelet and it’s just covered up.”

  “Could be,” Very conceded. “Except Dawgie believed otherwise. He was convinced that Beth’s still active in the age-old family business. And has been fencing her pickings through a cousin of hers who runs a pawnshop on Eleventh Avenue and West 41 Street.”

  “Lieutenant. I know this lady. She’s no thief. Besides, she doesn’t need the money. Kenny told me that Irwin left her very well off.”

  “You’d better get used to the idea that when it comes to his parents, your friend Kenny knows bupkes. Either that or he’s gas facing you.”

  Mitch looked at Romaine Very reproachfully. “Do you have actual hard evidence that Beth has done anything wrong?”

  “That’s exactly what Dawgie was going after last night,” Very responded. “Until somebody beat his brains in.”

  “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. . . . You’re suggesting that his murder may have nothing to do with the Dorset Flasher and everything to do with Beth Breslauer trying to protect her secret criminal identity.”

  “Exactly.”

  Mitch shook his head at him. “I don’t believe this.”