Genuine Gold

by Ann Aptaker

“Attended? As in already been?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So who else died, may I ask?”

  “Miss Theresa.”

  “Who?” He looks at me like I’ve suddenly started speaking a foreign lingo he doesn’t understand. “Who the hell is Miss Theresa?”

  “It was a private affair. Mona Carlotti and I were the only attendees last night. Go talk to her. She can tell you all about it.”

  “Last night? But Miss Day says you were with her last night.”

  Bingo.

  Now I know why Lilah surprised Eddie when she talked to the cops this morning.

  While I try to work out why Lilah would spill that story to a cop, and just how much of it she spilled—what was her description of with her?—I realize Esposito is looking me over. Actually, he’s just looking over part of me, my midsection, from the lapels of my suit, down my arms to my hands, and landing at my crotch. His sneer, oozing as much curiosity as disgust, might make my skin crawl if I hadn’t seen that sneer a million times before on a million other sanctimonious faces, sometimes followed by a punch to the gut I long ago learned to either avoid or bear. But Esposito’s sneer answers my question about what Lilah told him, or at least intimated. Which leaves me with two other questions: Why would she tell a tale that risks getting us arrested on a morals charge? Unless she said I forced her. And if that’s the case, why isn’t Esposito arresting me?

  My dance with Esposito has gone suddenly out of step. It seems we’ve each been dancing to different music, and I’ve only heard mine. What’s his tune? And who’s playing it?

  The arrival of Sergeant Pike with two mugs of coffee brings our do-si-do to a stop.

  Pike gives a mug to Esposito, who makes a face after his first sip, his pudgy lips like two long balloons twisted into an unnatural shape. “When did Eddie brew this stuff? Last week?”

  “Coney Island requires strong bones, Lieutenant,” I say.

  “Don’t you worry about my bones, Gold. Worry about your own. We wouldn’t want them to crack.”

  “You telling me you care for my safety?”

  “Sure.” His smile has all the sincerity of a devil promising salvation. “I’m a nice guy, haven’t you heard? C’mon, Pike, let’s go.” As they leave, Pike actually touches the brim of his fedora in a gesture of toodle-oo. Esposito doesn’t bother.

  When they’re gone, I wander back over to Eddie, ask him to tell me just what Lilah said to Esposito.

  “She gave him an earful, that’s what. Said she was with you last night, that you were, y’know, a client.”

  “Did Esposito buy it?”

  “Don’t ask me. When she told him that tale, I was too busy picking myself up off the floor. Listen, Cantor, sorry about sending Esposito over to you. Said he was looking for you, and I was afraid he was gonna take me in if I said I didn’t know where you are. You know how it is, once you’re in the hands of the Law, you ain’t never gettin’ out.”

  “Yeah, Eddie, I know.”

  “That Esposito, he thinks he’s a big cheese since he got his lieutenant’s stripes. Too bad he didn’t earn ’em.”

  “Most of them never do, Eddie. They may pass an exam, but they flunk honor questions.”

  “No, I mean he really didn’t earn his stripes. He never took no exam. Catch my drift?”

  Eddie knows damn well I catch his drift. “So who’s his sugar daddy? Who owns him?” My question doesn’t surprise Eddie. It scares him.

  *

  When I was a kid, my mother wouldn’t let me wander into the Gut, though obedience was never one of my habits. The place had its lures for a ruffian child like me. Back then, it was still a ramshackle neighborhood of rotgut speakeasies defying Prohibition with brass knuckles and tommy guns, rough-’em-up gambling joints where losers paid up or were cut up, and larcenous notch rooms where johns had their pockets emptied while they were emptying something else inside a hooker. Wild times had been the neighborhood’s lineage since the 1880s, or so the old-timers said. During my kiddie days, the Gut’s shady profits went into the pockets of Solly Schwartz and his cutthroats, until the even more cutthroat Sig Loreale grabbed those profits for himself.

  The neighborhood’s still ramshackle, though sturdier residences with solid families have since taken root. Small brick houses and more durable bungalows share this block of Second Street with the old shanties still standing. Looking around, seeing the television antennas now sprouted on rooftops, and the line of cars—mostly inexpensive Ford or Chevy coupes, some pretty beat-up—parked at the muddy curb, it’s clear the Gut, like every place else since the end of the Second World War, is making its grab for the American Dream, but it’s still home to a lot of Coney’s hard knuckles and threadbare pockets.

  The wooden porch stairs of the Schwartz-Day bungalow on Second Street could use repair, the red paint faded and chipped. The house’s white siding and red trim are in no better shape, the splintered wood poking through the paint like bristly warts. If Mickey Day was making money off Lilah’s back, he certainly wasn’t spending any of it on providing brother and sister with a decent place to live.

  Second Street is two blocks inland from the boardwalk and beach, so the wind back here is less biting, but not by much. I pull down my fedora, but the wind pushes itself under the brim, does a good job of chewing my face while I wait for Lilah to answer my knock on the door. The wind feasts especially on my scars, as if the Coney wind is trying to taste all the life I’ve lived since I left.

  Lilah finally opens the door. She’s wearing a white terry robe, her head wrapped in a terry towel, which slips down to reveal freshly washed hair. Even limp and damp, her short blond waves give Lilah the windblown look of an adventuress, though one who’s had a rough night. Her eyes are red rimmed, sleepless, but with a glint that hints she’s happy to see me. I’m happy to see her, too, which takes me by surprise, and worries me. Desiring Lilah is one thing; feelings for her could get in my way.

  “Come in out of the cold, Cantor,” she says in that lilting voice that won me over last night at the Green Door Club. And she smells good, fresh with soap and radiant skin, as I walk inside.

  The air in the living room is warm, stuffy warm in that overheated way a small room can be when the heat’s cranked up to keep drafts from seeping through the cheap walls. And the fussy floral wallpaper, its fading pinks and blues and greens all tangled up in each other, makes the place feel even stuffier, the thick foliage seems to squeeze the air out of the room. I take off my hat and coat, lay them on the back of the worn-out couch, a dark purple velvet number that was fashionable when I was still a schoolyard tomboy. The mahogany coffee table in front of the couch is of equal vintage, its long, hard life etched in scratches and cigarette burns on the tabletop.

  “My mother picked them out,” Lilah says. I must have a puzzled look on my face. “The coffee table and couch. My mother picked them out. They came with us from the house in Sea Gate. We had lots of nice furniture in Sea Gate. At least, that’s what Mickey said. I was too young to remember. I only remember growing up here.”

  “Yeah, you were still a baby when—”

  “When Sig Loreale took everything from my family.” There’s enough edge to her voice to slice a throat.

  “You sound like your brother,” I say.

  Her green eyes are suddenly too bright, her jaw tightens, straining the lovely curl at the corner of her mouth. “Listen, Mickey might’ve been a heel,” she says, the edge in her voice replaced by a hiss worthy of a coiled snake. “Okay, sure, my brother was a heel, but he was right about what Loreale did to us. Loreale won the turf war. Wasn’t that enough? Did he have to send my family into the poorhouse?”

  “Ask yourself this,” I say. “If your father had won the war, don’t you think he would’ve done the same to Sig? Taken him for all he had?”

  “No. No, my mother told me my father was tough, but he wasn’t that kind of man.”

  She’s right. Solly Schwartz wasn’t the same kind of man as Si
g. He wasn’t as smart or cunning. He wasn’t a man who wins.

  But I drop the issue. I’m not here to drag up old Coney history, though enough of it has been clawing at me since I wandered around the old neighborhood last night. Instead, I take a seat on the couch, say, “Lilah, we need to talk.”

  She gives me a nod. “I know,” she says, and sits down next to me. Her voice is sweet again, the hiss gone, her usual alluring lilt finding its natural place in her body. And that body, shaping her terry robe into a sculpture as sinuous as any classical Venus, is sweet, too, her freshly showered scent brushing my face like warm fingertips.

  No sense kidding myself, I want more of Lilah in my future. Yeah, the body, sure, but there’s an inconvenient sentiment picking at me, some sort of caring I hadn’t counted on when we were tossing around in my bed. Maybe it’s because she’s just lost the last of her family. She’s a woman alone in a dangerous game. And I’m a sucker for women in dangerous games.

  But whatever future is in our cards will have to wait. There are crimes between us that need sorting out: I have a stolen treasure to find; Lilah has a murdered brother to bury.

  With a smile as grateful as it is sexy, she says, “By the way, thanks for taking care of me last night. I don’t know how I could have gotten through it without you.”

  “You can thank Eddie Janko, too.”

  “Okay,” she says without any warmth behind it, “but it was you, Cantor, who set things up so I could avoid the police.”

  There it is, the thing that twists my sense of logic.

  I take my pack of Chesterfields and lighter from my inside pocket, say, “Yeah, about the police.” I offer a smoke to Lilah, shake another out for myself, light them both, then say, “I understand you told the cops we were together last night.”

  “Well, yes. I had to.”

  “Yeah? Why? Why’d you put us both at risk of being hauled into the city lockup on a morals rap?”

  “Because I needed an alibi, that’s why. I don’t trust that Esposito. He—he actually insinuated that maybe I had something to do with Mickey’s killing! As if I’d kill my own brother, and Gus, too. Gus, who’d never hurt a fly.”

  “Yeah, but Mickey hurt a lot of flies,” I say. “He sure as hell hurt you. Pimping his sister isn’t a particularly loving thing to do.”

  I’ve plucked a nerve, the one that loves and hates her brother at the same time. Her jaw tightens again, turns her supple mouth into a hard crease. But a deep drag of her cigarette gives her a moment to untangle, eases her, and she eventually slides me a glance that acknowledges we’re in this mess together, whether we like it or not.

  She says, “Look, this Esposito—he just seemed too anxious to pin it on me, just so he could close the book on it real fast, report it to his higher-ups.”

  “Sure. The cops always look to family first for suspects.” And with good reason. Family members have been killing each other off since the invention of the throne. Seems everyone wants to sit in it. “Maybe Esposito figured you wanted to take over Mickey’s operation.”

  “Which is why I needed an alibi! And since I really was with you last night, it was the first thing I thought of.”

  The memory of it rouses my lust, brings my hand to her face, my fingers brushing her cheek. She seems to like it. “But our little tryst was hours before Mickey’s death,” I say. “You must’ve really twisted up the time when you sold that bill of goods to Esposito.”

  “I twisted more than the time, Cantor. I never told Esposito about your earlier meeting with Mickey. See? I protected you, too.” She takes my hand from her cheek, brings it to her lips, kisses my palm. I don’t pull my hand away, let it linger and enjoy her smooth mouth, its warmth, its need. I want this woman now as much as I did last night, maybe more, despite the crime and murder between us, or maybe because of them. Crime heats the blood. Coney Island crime heats the senses.

  With a sideways glance that promises a stimulating journey to wherever she’s leading me, she says, “And we were never in any danger of jail, Cantor. Esposito wasn’t going to arrest either of us on a morals charge. Not without permission.”

  I must look even more puzzled than I did when she blurted that business about her mother and the furniture.

  “Don’t you know?” she says. “Esposito is one of Sig Loreale’s boys. He can’t arrest a flea without Loreale’s say-so.”

  A Sig-and-cops cocktail will kill a mood faster than a cold shower. I slide my hand from Lilah’s cheek.

  Everyone knows Sig stirs badges from every precinct in the city’s five boroughs into his brew of rackets, and it usually works to the underworld’s advantage, keeps things from being looked at too closely, or keeps our time in the slammer from going on too long. But sometimes the cocktail’s deadly. This one feels deadly, with Esposito dropped in as a poison pill.

  Lilah says, “What’s going on, Cantor? You look frightened.”

  “Is night shift homicide Esposito’s usual beat?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything? He came around this morning.”

  “Yeah, but he came around last night, too, when I had you stowed at Mona’s.”

  Lilah’s softly beautiful face slowly, slowly hardens as she figures out the danger behind what I just said. When her features finally settle, Lilah looks frightened now, too.

  Chapter Ten

  “How do you know Esposito is on Sig’s payroll?” I say.

  Lilah’s dismissive tsk seeps through her fear and reminds me that I’ve been away from Coney Island for a long time, not up to date on who owns who around here. It also reminds me that when I spoke to Sig this morning, he conveniently left out the names of his Coney operatives. Any beat cop on any corner could be in his pocket. For that matter, anyone, any Joe or Jane playing skee ball or walking around on the boardwalk, could be taking orders from the crime lord in the golden penthouse.

  Sometimes I think Sig puts me in the crosshairs just for sport.

  Lilah says, “Ask Eddie Janko. He can tell you all about it.”

  “I will, but I have other business first.” And if I solve that business, I can finally get the hell out of Coney Island for good, escape its grip on my memories, escape Loreale’s schemes. Mickey’s murder can go unsolved, for all I care, though his sister’s a sweet number, a woman who’s reached deeper into me than I’d bargained for. I guess she wants Mickey’s killer found, but I’d rather someone else do the looking. I have my own business to see to, and a rich client ready to cross my palm with a wad of cash the sooner I see to it. “Listen, Lilah, can you think of anyplace in this house where Mickey would hide something? Some hole in the wall? A secret spot in the attic?”

  “Uh-uh. I know every inch of this shack, and there’s nothing like that.”

  “Mind if I have a look around?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  An hour later, after I’ve gone through the bungalow from back to front, searched through closets, bedroom furniture, kitchen cabinets, under creaky floorboards, over, under, and behind every stick of furniture in the living room, and knocked on its walls until I’m dizzy from all that floral wallpaper, I’ve come up with zip—just loose change, hairpins, Mickey’s lost socks, a pair of nylon hose I assume belong to Lilah and which set my fantasies going, and a lot of dust. But no ancient Greek Dancing Goddesses pottery.

  I was so busy searching the place, I didn’t notice that Lilah wasn’t near me, wasn’t even in any room with me, until now, when she walks back into the living room, her hair dry and styled, her face carefully made up with mascara and a bright red lipstick that goes nicely with her brown and red striped dress and a pair of red plastic flower-shaped earrings she holds up as she considers them. The dress, belted at the waist and cut low, could give a biology student a damn good education in the structure and motion of flesh. “I’m not complaining,” I say, “but that dress ain’t exactly mourning weeds.”

  She shrugs, says, “Mickey’s body hasn’t been released from the morgue, so I can’t
bury him yet. Meantime, I still have to make a living, and a client’s meeting me in twenty minutes. One of my tattoo shop regulars.”

  Every inch of me, inside and out, feels a sudden chill, an icy draft blowing through my bones, nipping my heart along the way. “Lilah, you don’t have to do that anymore. Mickey can’t force you anymore.”

  “Who says I have to be forced?” she says, putting her earrings on. The two red flowers are like blood drops on either side of her face, contrasting her creamy skin, accenting the red lipstick across her mouth. “Besides, this john’s not so bad, a real—What’s wrong, Cantor? You look like you just heard that your mother died.” Finished with her earrings, Lilah slowly lowers her arms to her sides as she looks at me, the expression on her face changing from chatty nonchalance to canny awareness and then to something that might be taken for tenderness if it wasn’t so streetwise.

  Walking toward me, she says, “Oh,” her voice gentle and low. She puts her hand on my cheek. “So many scars,” she says, tracing them with her fingertips. “Am I giving you more, inside you, where they can’t be seen?”

  The touch of her fingers is warm and soothing, but not soothing enough to blunt the truth of what she just said. The idea of Lilah’s body—a body I explored and whose heat I shared—soon pawed over by some ravenous john, cuts right down to my guts.

  And then I take control, pull her to me, kiss her, gently at first, then harder and deeper, and with an appreciation for Lilah’s gifts no john could ever imagine.

  She stays with me, presses against me, even as she releases from my kiss and whispers my name. The emotion she brings to it surprises me, digs into me.

  “You don’t have to earn your living on your back,” I say. “I can get you away.”

  “What are you saying, Cantor? That you would take care of me? That you’d love me? I’ve needed someone to love me for so long.” She rests her head against my shoulder as if it’s a pillow on a bed of peace.

  And then I guess she feels my body stiffen, because even though she’s still in my arms, she’s no longer pressed against me. The look on her face isn’t tender anymore, it’s pleading.