Little Odessa

by Joseph Koenig

  “The only one who’s manipulating me, who was, is you. If you don’t tell me what you’re up to, I’m going to the detectives with everything I know.”

  “You do that,” Bucyk said. “Tell them you were with Nicholas and I’ll be glad to back you up. See where that gets you—but don’t be surprised if it’s Bedford Hills.”

  “Where?”

  “In the tony part of Westchester, a country club for bright ladies like yourself, with inch-thick grillwork on the windows. But what do I know, maybe you’d like it there?” He paused to laugh to himself. “There’s things I haven’t been entirely up-front about. I admit it. But these are secrets you don’t want to have to keep. Trust me a little longer and you’ll find out everything, then make up your mind who your friends are.”

  “I don’t trust you now,” she said.

  “Well, that’s your problem.”

  “No, it’s—”

  Then a voice she didn’t recognize at first, an androgynous monotone, was reciting, “Please deposit five cents more for the next five minutes or your call will be …”

  “Hang on,” Kate said, fumbling in her purse for more change. “Shit, all I have is a half-dollar and some pennies.”

  “We talked enough already.”

  “Call me back,” she demanded. “Two-five-four …”

  The recording came on again, and then silence, and Kate backed out of the booth into driving rain. She peered up at a heavy sky convinced that hovering overhead was a dark cloud with her name on it. Bucyk had seen right through her bluff. The thing she had to do was to call his by going to the police. Only what was she going to tell them? That her boyfriend had been murdered at her place while she was out on the town with a Soviet spy who was actually a cocaine dealer? That a burglar and a crooked cop and an Israeli agent had been drawn to her like bees to honey? More like flies to shit, they’d say, and throw away the key. The only decision left was whether to laugh or to cry out loud, but a beat cop glaring from the shelter of a storefront chased the beginnings of a smile from her lips. In other cities she had heard that padded cells were reserved for unfortunates found weeping on the sidewalks. In New York, for reasons she was only starting to understand, it was the laughers who had to be out of their minds.

  She turned uptown on Broadway measuring the slick streets with long strides. Her shoes were squishing against the pavement by the time she came to Seventy-sixth and she ran down the block with her key already in her fist. Mounting the stoop she noticed a glow in an upstairs bedroom. With everything else on her mind, she must have forgotten to turn out the lights. She’d forget her dress, if she wasn’t locked into it.

  As she slid the bolt behind her, she thought she heard light footsteps on the stairs, but decided it was the pounding of her heart. Jesus, how she still felt jumpy each time she came back to the house! The sound was too soft to be footsteps, more like water dripping onto a carpeted floor. She tried not to think of what else she could have forgotten.

  She walked out of her shoes and pulled the black dress over her head and looked up broken stairs to a landing where a large white dog stood poised with a rawhide bone in its jaws. Kate’s breath came quickly in deep gulps and the more of them she took the less good they seemed to do. The animal barked twice and bounded toward her, his long tail slapping like a metronome gone haywire. In his place on the landing was a bearded man whose right arm was wrapped in a sling.

  “Long time no see,” the man said.

  Kate felt the doorknob press into her back. Her knees buckled and the cold metal traveled the length of her spine. It collided with the base of her skull and she slumped unconscious to the floor.

  She rolled onto her side and tucked the blanket under her chin, relieved to be safe in bed. It was another of her crazy nightmares, the most vivid ever. The pain in the back of her head was real, though, and she explored for its source with her fingers. An inch above the hairline they stumbled over a swelling that was agony to touch.

  “Yeah, you took a good one.”

  Her heart began hammering again as she opened her eyes. She was in Howard’s room wondering how she got there. Sprawled at her feet as if he had never been gone was Isaac Grynzpun, chewing on his rawhide. She sensed motion behind her, but more pain in her head was too high a price to investigate it.

  “Lay still. Anything you need, ask.”

  She saw him as he came around the bed looking rattier than she remembered in a rain-spattered field jacket. The dizziness returned and she thought she was going to black out, but she fought off the feeling with short breaths.

  “You look like you seen a ghost,” he smirked. “No ghosts here, huh Isaac?”

  Kate tried raising herself on an elbow. “What do you want? Haven’t you done enough already?”

  “Let’s begin with what I don’t want, which is your dog,” Harry said.

  Kate glared at Isaac as though he had joined a conspiracy against her. She patted her scalp and checked her hand for blood. “What happened to my head?”

  “Not my department. You were so happy to see Isaac here, you fainted. You hit the door on the way down.”

  Kate was trying to appear in command, not having much success. She studied his face, but what he had in mind for her was hidden behind his beard. It had come in fuller, so that the thin spots which remained seemed white and shiny and heightened the moth-eaten effect. “Will you go now?” she asked.

  “That’s all you got to say? Isn’t there something you’re forgetting?”

  “What else could I possibly have to tell you?”

  “Thank you,” Harry said. “Thank you for returning my dog and for putting me in bed after I knocked myself out like such a jerk.”

  “Just go.”

  “If that’s the way you feel …” He backed off from the bed, but stopped after two steps. “Soon as I get what I came for.”

  Kate turned away but kept an eye on him, like she did to the creeps who never failed to find her in a crowded subway.

  “You remember,” Harry was saying, “what brought me here in the first place.”

  “You have everything. What more do you want?” She saw him looking at her curiously and clutched the blanket around her shoulders.

  Harry said, “I got here ten minutes ahead of you. I didn’t get a chance to start looking.”

  “The night you shot Nathan.”

  “The f—What?” He took a quick step back, as if he had been thrown off balance. “It must’ve slipped my mind,” he said. “Who’s Nathan?”

  Kate cursed and rolled onto her other side. Harry grabbed her arm and put her on her back. She swatted at him, and as he twisted away with a startled laugh she skinned her knuckles on the hard cast.

  “God damn it,” she cried.

  Harry clamped her wrist in his hand and stuffed it under the covers. Then he sat on her legs. “Who?” he asked when she had stopped struggling.

  “He was my boyfriend.”

  “He got shot? When did this happen, two nights ago? That why everything’s so neat downstairs?”

  “Do I have to tell you?”

  “No,” Harry said. “Not really.”

  “I’m glad he broke your arm. I wish it had been your head.”

  Harry used his good hand to maneuver the cast tenderly onto his lap. “It wasn’t any Nathan that did this.”

  “You can’t deny it. The house was torn apart just like the other time …Nathan got you good before you …”

  “Yeah, I came by,” Harry admitted, “but the block was crawling with cops.” He slid off her legs and sat beside her on the edge of the mattress. “The closest I got was across the street.”

  Kate tried to edge away, but Harry tugged at the blanket, holding her there. “I wouldn’t believe anything you said,” she told him.

  “Same here. Where’s the dough?”

  “How many times must I tell you? You have it all.”

  “Then what the hell you think I came back for?”

  You’re here
to rape me and then shoot me like Nathan, Kate wanted to say, to make sure you didn’t leave anything that isn’t nailed down. You’re here because you’re thoroughly demented, a maniac. She said nothing.

  “You sure you never fell on your head before?” Harry was saying.

  Humor him like the other time, Kate thought. Play to his vanity and his pretense of innocence. “If you didn’t shoot Nathan, who did?”

  “Lot of guys break inside houses and some of the amateurs carry loaded guns. They don’t all report to me.”

  “But why here?”

  Harry threw up his good hand in disgust. “We been through it a million times. A guy has a brownstone, a restaurant on Broadway, you got to figure he has some bucks on hand.”

  “It was more than some money,” Kate said. “How did you find out?”

  “To be honest,” Harry began, and Kate looked at him sharply until his eyes backed hers down, “I heard a camel jockey talkin’ about it once in a place I used to live.”

  “What jockey? What place?”

  “It isn’t important.”

  “It is to me.”

  “A place you never heard of called the Duffy-Lawes Residence on West Ninety-sixth Street, which is sort of a sleep-away camp for us unfortunates that are society’s victims and vice-versa.”

  “Like other burglars, you mean?”

  “The beginners, yes. The point is that I was there learnin’ all about good grooming and such job-market skills when one of the other antisocial elements brought up Ormont, and how he was beatin’ the IRS for a nice piece of change and rollin’ it over into cocaine, which from time to time is something I’m also interested in.”

  “And he was a jockey?”

  “A towelhead,” Harry said. “An Arab. An Ali somebody.”

  “What else did he mention was in the safe?”

  “The dough, the coke, it’s enough for me. I’m not a greedy bastard.”

  “He didn’t say anything about kry … about electronic devices?”

  “He did, it didn’t register. I’m not a TV repairman either.” Harry reached down to stroke Isaac’s head affectionately. “Now you tell me something.”

  “What?” Kate asked.

  “Everything—and from the start.”

  12

  “WHAT I CAN’T GET through this thick skull of mine is how if Ormont’s such an operator, the whole world knows what’s inside his vault. There’s the towelhead—”

  “Ali was Howard’s partner,” Kate said. She was sitting in the Barcalounger, still wrapped in her blanket, watching Harry squirm agoraphobically on the big double bed. “Howard pressed charges against him when he found out he was being swindled.”

  “And then there’s me. And the guy who killed your boyfriend.”

  “That’s not so many. Only two.”

  “No,” Harry said patiently. “You’re a little slow catching on, but that makes three. Who else would know?”

  Kate gestured with hands spread apart. “Howard is very private. He kept me in the dark about so many things, the first I heard about the vault was from you. I thought you were out of your mind.”

  Harry stopped squirming. “Now what do you think?”

  “He should have told me.”

  Harry took an unsharpened pencil from his pocket and dug under the cast urgently. “There’s always the chance it was some jerk with a gun who lucked into the job. Only I don’t believe in that kind of coincidence, not till I’m the party who makes out.” It was still a contest between them, but with the money gone he wasn’t trying for a quick knockout. The trick was to go the distance until she hadn’t the strength to be hostile. “…Or Ormont’s bookkeeper. He’d have an idea, at least.”

  “Keep dreaming,” Kate said.

  “Am I? How about the guy who sold him the coke?”

  “You’d know more about that kind of person than I would. Anyway, Howard didn’t say where he got it.”

  “Which brings us back to the leading suspect.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “You,” Harry said. “Where were you the other night?”

  Kate’s jaw firmed. “I won’t even respond to that.”

  Harry poked Isaac Grynzpun with his toe and the big dog scampered to the floor. “That won’t do. I’m no cop, I never heard of your right to remain silent.” Then Harry walked over to the Barcalounger projecting a sullen threat through the dark beard. “Starting now, the shoe’s on the other foot,” he said. “Answer the question.”

  “Homer might have known,” Kate went on in a little girl’s singsong. “Only Homer wouldn’t have done such a thing.”

  “The fucking question,” Harry said, “is where you were—”

  “If you must know, I was on a date with a Russian spy. The FBI put me up to it.” She giggled drunkenly. “Except it wasn’t the FBI. It wasn’t even a spy, just a crooked cop.”

  “Who, the Russian? What is all this shit?”

  “The FBI man. He was working for the Russian. But the Russian is really a … a …Oh, my God,” she cried. She got out of the Barcalounger holding her head at an angle as if she had a stiff neck, and plucked at a box of tissues on the nightstand. “I did it. I must have been blind …”

  “This ain’t Perry Mason,” Harry said. “Start making sense.”

  “I killed Nathan,” she sobbed, and staggered against the bed.

  “Let’s hear it from the top,” Harry said. He had taken her place on the Barcalounger while she sat back in bed again with Isaac at her feet. Crumpled puffs of Kleenex lay scattered on the mattress like shriveled snowballs.

  “Go away.”

  Harry said, “I’m tryin’ to be friends.”

  “I have all the friends I need.”

  “Friends like those …”

  “Just go.” She reached for another tissue and blew her nose.

  “You have to lay it off on somebody,” Harry said. When she didn’t tell him to go away again, he added, “It’ll eat you up inside.”

  Kate wiped her nose and then cried some more and then she asked, “Did you ever hear of a cocaine dealer who calls himself Mike Nicholas?”

  She said the name distastefully, so that Harry had to guess if it was the sound of it or having to ask him that rubbed her the wrong way. “Tell me more,” he said.

  “We went out just that one time. He wined me and dined me and then he brought me back to his mansion in Queens and—”

  “You can leave the next part out,” Harry said.

  “And nothing happened. I went home and haven’t heard from him since.”

  “He let you walk out the door, didn’t slap you around or nothing first?”

  “He insisted I take money for cab fare,” Kate said.

  “That doesn’t sound like any dealer I know.”

  “What does it sound like?”

  Harry was in no hurry to answer. Kate turned toward him anxiously, annoyed at the interruption. She welcomed his questions and was debating whether to ask if they came to him so easily because he’d had experience answering the same kind from the police.

  “Like somebody who got turned off in a hurry,” he told her after some thought. “Or who wasn’t real hot to trot in the first place, you don’t mind my suggesting it could be possible.”

  “In this case, I rather like the idea.”

  “Or somebody who wanted you out of the house for a few hours, say long enough to steal back his coke and whatever else he knew was in the safe.”

  “He was with me all evening.”

  “Not his line of work. He’d bring in a pro, somebody like me,” Harry said.

  “Are you saying that he did?”

  “You got a one-track mind, know that?”

  “There’s something else … the policeman I was telling you about, it turned out he was working for Nicholas.”

  “You enjoy lettin’ men dump all over you?” Harry said. “Or you just hate yourself in general?”

  “Don’t think I haven’t spent hours th
inking about it. But what it is, it’s just rotten luck.”

  That was everyone’s out, he wanted to tell her, everyone in the joint. Bring it up in group and even the shrink would have to laugh. No wonder the Mr. Rights were taking numbers to run her life. Well, he thought, at least the line was moving fast.

  “Do I have the whole story now?” he asked. “What about those electric parts?”

  “That’s nothing.”

  “Must be, the way you drop the subject whenever it comes up.”

  “Let’s drop it again.”

  Harry opened his hands and their eyes followed an imaginary object on a collision course with the floor. “What are you gonna do now?” he asked.

  “Do I have a choice? I’ll tell the detectives everything.”

  “You understand the kind of person you’re droppin’ a dime on? The odds are you’re fish food before the DA can whip up a grand jury to hear you. Got any better ideas?”

  What dime? Kate wanted to ask. What fish? But he was talking too excitedly for her to get a word in.

  “I got one,” he said, and Kate experienced a moment of reassurance until he added, “Let’s do dinner tonight. I know a great little place in Chinatown, take your mind off your troubles.”

  “I have one that’s even better,” she said, smoothing the blanket with the side of her hand.

  “Yeah?”

  “Leave now, and I’ll wait fifteen minutes before I call the police.”

  “That’s gratitude? Here I been racking my brains for a way out of this pickle you got yourself in and you can’t wait to give me the bum’s rush.”

  “If you want to help, you’ll go. Please,” she said. “I have to think.”

  Harry stood up and zipped his jacket. He went over to the bed and Kate retreated to the edge of the mattress. “Well, Isaac,” he said, and scratched the big dog’s ears, “it’s been a pleasure. You too, in a way,” he told Kate, offering his other hand.

  Kate hesitated, then squeezed his fingers where they protruded from the cast. “They’re cold,” she said. “What happened, were you robbing someone else’s house?”

  “This kid,” Harry began uncomfortably, and then stopped. “These three kids were after my stash.” He liked that better and gave her a little more. “Big kids, with baseball bats. I look worse for wear, just remember who took the decision.”