Fifty-to-One

by Charles Ardai

  “How so?” Mike said.

  “I may be an old man,” Kraus said, “but I look forward to living a few years still. Why should I risk that for ten lousy dollars?”

  “Another man’s life is at stake, too. A friend of mine. A young man, who should have more than a few years ahead of him. He won’t if you don’t help me.”

  “This is not my concern,” Kraus said.

  Mike set a second ten dollar bill on top of the first.

  Kraus took out a pocket watch, stared at its face, wound its stem, returned it to his pocket. “It is starting to concern me somewhat more,” he said.

  “But not enough?”

  “Not quite.”

  A third sawbuck joined the other two. Krauss neatened up their edges, folded the bills in two and then in two again, set his palm down over them. “Come with me,” he said and slowly, painfully stood. He took two teetering steps away from the table with the aid of a cane. “Will you take my arm? I don’t walk very well anymore.”

  “You don’t have to walk,” Mike said. “Just tell me where it is and I’ll go there myself.”

  “No,” Kraus said. “I’ll take you there. Or you can have your money back.” When Mike hesitated, Kraus said, “Those are my terms.”

  Mike reluctantly took his arm, walked with him to the door. On the sidewalk outside, Kraus looked at his watch again, then set off at a snail’s pace in the direction of the water.

  They walked up First Avenue, pausing repeatedly to let Kraus rest and catch what little remained of his breath. In this fashion, they passed warehouses and slips and a cavernous import-export arcade where traders of various sorts maintained one-man booths and fanned themselves to combat the stifling heat. At the pier off 57th Street, a tugboat labored valiantly to pull an overladen barge out of its dock. At 53rd, the pier was walled off and Mike could only see the upper decks of the two ships tied up there.

  When Kraus halted for the third or fourth time in one block, Mike considered abandoning him and continuing his search by brute force, hunting down every boat one by one. But there were too many—too many boats, too many buildings, too many blocks. He could spend the next three hours at it and not see them all. And what if the Treacle was docked behind one of the waterfront’s locked gates?

  Between 50th Street and 47th, the piers were overgrown with grass and weeds, but a profusion of boats still stood at them, bobbing gently, while others rode at anchor just off some the longer outcroppings of the shore. Mike scanned the hulls, looking for any names longer than a word or two. “How much farther?” he asked. And, each time they came to a pier, “Is this the one?” But Kraus just shook his head, kept his gaze trained on the ground, and concentrated on putting one frail leg in front of the other.

  Only when they reached the far end of the avenue did Kraus take one last look at his watch and say, “All right.”

  “Where’s the boat?” Mike said, staring at the empty pier they were approaching.

  “There,” Kraus said, and pointed out toward the horizon. There was a ship in the middle distance, chugging swiftly toward the open water. It wasn’t so far that Mike couldn’t make out figures on her deck. One of them looked like it might be Charley.

  Mike rounded on the old man, had to restrain himself from picking him up bodily by the lapels and shaking him. “You knew,” he said accusingly. “You—that’s why all the time with the watch. Jesus Christ. I bet you can probably walk just fine.”

  “Sadly, no,” Kraus said.

  “But you can do better than creeping along like this, can’t you? You were making sure they had time to get away!”

  “You said all you wanted to know was where I dock the boat,” Kraus said. “Well, now you know. I dock it here. You got what you paid for.”

  “But why...why would they leave now? I thought they weren’t going to leave till tonight—” Mike closed his eyes. “They changed their plans, didn’t they. That’s what the phone call was—telling you they were leaving early. As long as they’re collecting the money from Tricia tomorrow morning, they can pick up the purse from the race then, too.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kraus said. “And I don’t want to know. I’m going back now. You don’t have to walk with me.”

  “Walk with you?” Mike growled. “I ought to throw you in the goddamn bay.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Kraus said. “I’ll scream if you touch me. You’ll have the police on you so fast, young man, you won’t know what hit you.”

  “You know something,” Mike said, “it’d almost—

  40.

  Money Shot

  —be worth it,’ I told him.” Mike shook his head. “But of course it wouldn’t have been. It would’ve been a disaster. So I left him there and grabbed the first train back.” He swallowed the shot of whiskey he’d poured himself from the row of bottles on his back bar. “I hope you had better luck.”

  “Not exactly,” Tricia said.

  “So you didn’t find the money?” Erin said.

  “Do you see three million dollars on me?”

  “What happened?” Mike said. “Where did you go?”

  “To Fulton Street,” Tricia said.

  The brownstone was where she’d left it, looking much the way it had at dawn. She watched from across the street as men entered and departed, one by one or in pairs. She didn’t recognize any of them. The limousine wasn’t parked out front or, the one time she circled the block to peek at the building from the rear, out back either. There were some cars along the curb, but no way to know whether they belonged to Barrone and his men or to the neighbors.

  The curtains were drawn in the windows all the way up, except for one room at the top where the window was open. It was too high up for Tricia to see in, though.

  She thought about walking up the stone steps and ringing the doorbell, trying to talk her way in, but it wasn’t hard to imagine more ways that could turn out badly than well. So she waited, and she watched.

  Renata came out twenty minutes later. She was by herself, Tricia was happy to see, wearing a patterned sundress in red and white and cat’s eye sunglasses with her hair pinned up. She looked a bit like an actress trying to go incognito. Tricia fell into step behind her. She kept half a block back, kept other pedestrians between them, but at the same time kept an eye on Renata, watched to see where she’d go. And when she stopped outside a dressmaker’s window to light a cigarette, Tricia took the opportunity to come up behind her and plant the nose of her gun in the small of Renata’s back.

  “Don’t turn around,” Tricia said.

  “Ah, Tricia,” Renata said, flipping her lighter closed and replacing it in the clutch purse she was carrying. “You think I didn’t know you were there?” She didn’t turn, didn’t look back over her shoulder, but they could each see the other’s face reflected in the darkened store window beside them. “I spotted you the moment I stepped outside.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Tricia said. “If you had, you’d never have let me get the drop on you.”

  “Drop? What drop?” Renata laughed. “You dumb cluck. There are three men watching us right now who’ll shoot you the moment I give the signal.”

  “Oh, yeah? What’s the signal?”

  She wagged the cigarette between her fingers. “I drop this on the sidewalk. Grind it out under my toe. It’ll be the last thing you see. Unless you walk away right now.”

  “I can pull this trigger before they get me.”

  “I doubt it,” Renata said. She didn’t seem nervous at all. She took a long pull on the cigarette, exhaled a mouthful of smoke. “Not going? All right. Have it your way. What do you want?” She raised the cigarette. “You don’t have much time left.”

  “The money,” Tricia said. “Where is it?”

  “What money?”

  “The money you took from your uncle’s safe. The three million dollars.”

  Now Renata began to laugh in earnest, really laugh, so hard her shoulders shook from it. �
��Oh, god. That’s rich. You think I took it.”

  “Yes, I do,” Tricia said. “You took your uncle’s money, and then spent the past month holed up in your father’s headquarters for protection. I don’t know if you planned it together or you did it on your own, but he must know about it now because he’s been keeping out of sight too—lying low with you for the past month, trying to keep you safe. That went on until this morning, when poor Eddie barged in on you and you decided you had a sacrificial lamb you could turn over to Uncle Nick to get the heat off you once and for all.”

  “What an imagination,” Renata said. “A headshrinker would probably say it’s because of all the loving you’re not getting—oh, yes, Charley told me about you, Miss Knees Together.”

  Tricia pressed the gun against the base of Renata’s spine. “Keep talking. You’ll spend the rest of your life in a chair.”

  “Touchy, aren’t we?” Renata burned off some more of the cigarette with another drag, then held it up to show off its rapidly diminishing length. “Sure you don’t want to go now? I would if I were you.”

  It wasn’t that Tricia wasn’t tempted—what if there really were three gunmen drawing a bead on her right now?—but she shook her head. “Are you telling me,” she said, “that you didn’t take Eddie to your uncle’s earlier today? That you didn’t kill him? Because your uncle told me otherwise.”

  “No, Tricia, I’m not telling you that. I’m telling you I didn’t take his money.”

  “And I’m saying you’re a liar,” Tricia said. “You lied to your uncle about Eddie, certainly. And why would you have lied about who stole the money if you didn’t do it yourself?”

  “How do you know Eddie didn’t do it?” Renata said. “The man confessed.”

  “Yeah, he confessed—to stealing both your uncle’s money and his photographs,” Tricia said. “But I know who stole the photos, and it wasn’t him.”

  “But then—then you must know who stole the money, too,” Renata said, “and that it wasn’t me.”

  “Uh-uh,” Tricia said. “Not so fast.”

  Renata fell silent. She was taking no more drags on her cigarette now, Tricia noticed, though it continued to burn slowly toward the filter.

  “And,” Tricia said, emboldened, “I think you’re lying about the three men watching us, too. I don’t think there’s anybody watching us. I think nothing will happen when you finish that cigarette.”

  “You prepared to bet your life on that?” Renata said.

  “Are you?” Tricia said.

  They watched each other in the window. Tricia held the gun without wavering. Steadiest hands in the east.

  “No,” Renata said briskly. “I’m not.” She dropped the cigarette butt on the ground, where it continued to smolder. Nothing else happened. “Let’s you and I sit down, why don’t we.”

  They sat across from one another at a cafeteria on the corner of Dutch Street. The nearest other patron was five tables away and engrossed in a paperback novel, so Tricia was able to keep her gun aimed at Renata behind a menu without anyone noticing or complaining. Except Renata herself, and her complaints fell on deaf ears.

  “Why don’t you put that thing away?”

  “Why don’t you start talking,” Tricia said, “so I don’t have to use it?”

  “As if you’d really shoot me in a public place,” Renata said.

  “It’s been a long couple of days, Renata,” Tricia said. “Don’t bet on me making good decisions.”

  Renata poured some sugar in her coffee, stirred it. “You know my uncle thinks you have his money. That’s what Eddie told him.”

  “Yes, I know. It’s not true—but I don’t expect to be able to convince him of that unless I can find out who does have it.”

  “Well, don’t look at me,” Renata said.

  Tricia pulled back the hammer of her gun.

  “I didn’t take his money,” Renata insisted. “I wish I knew who did.”

  “If you didn’t, why do you care who did?”

  Renata seemed to make a decision. “I’m going to tell you something that could make my life a lot more difficult if you repeated it. I’m not just doing it because you’ve got a gun on me. I’m doing it because if you’re serious about finding out who took the money, you might be in a position to make my life a lot easier than it’s been for the past month.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I didn’t steal my uncle’s money,” Renata said, “but not for lack of trying.”

  “Go on.”

  “I took a shot at it,” Renata said. “I arranged to get into the Sun after hours, went in all set to open the safe and clean it out. Had an escape route planned and everything. But there was no money for me to get. By the time I got there, the safe was already empty.”

  Tricia had a powerful feeling of déjà vu. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about an empty safe. Nothing in it. Someone else had already been there, broken in, and emptied the thing out.”

  “You expect me to believe that? That you tried to rob the Sun but some other thief got there first?”

  “You see why I’ve been lying low?” Renata said. “You see? It’s the truth, but you don’t believe it. Why would Uncle Nick?”

  “Why, indeed.”

  “I’m not worried that he could have found my fingerprints—I wore gloves, I’m not a complete idiot. But who knows what else he might have found that could lead back to me? And someone might have seen me going in or coming out of the building—I can’t swear no one did.” Renata gulped some coffee. “So ever since, I’ve been cooped up in that place on Fulton Street, waiting for the old bastard to catch whoever robbed him and put an end to it. But a month’s gone by, he hasn’t caught anybody, and according to my father he’s been getting crazier and angrier about it by the day, rounding everyone up with the slightest possible connection—”

  “Tell me about it,” Tricia said.

  “Eventually, one way or another, he’d get to me. I had to feed him someone. And then Eddie walked through my door.”

  “It wasn’t Eddie’s fault. He thought you’d asked him to come,” Tricia said. “You know that, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s what he said. That you told him I’d sent for him. As he stood there gawping at us. It was awful.”

  “Well, you certainly paid him back for it.”

  “That’s right,” Renata said. “I did.”

  “Let’s get back to the robbery,” Tricia said, trying hard to push aside her feelings of guilt over her own role in Eddie’s death. “You’re saying you just happened to decide to rob your uncle on the same day someone else happened to do the same thing?”

  “Not exactly,” Renata said. “I didn’t choose that day out of thin air.”

  “Oh?” Tricia said.

  “Look, I’ve been thinking about Sal’s safe for years now. I grew up thinking about it—about all the money he kept in there, about what the combination might be. I’d made up lists of possible combinations—I know something about how the man thinks, so I was pretty sure one of my guesses would be right. And I knew I could get into the room, I’d just copy my father’s keys. But I’d never gotten myself over the hump and actually decided to do it. Because what if I did and something went wrong? If I got caught? He’d kill me. I mean, he loves me, I’m his niece, but if I stole from him? He’d kill me without thinking twice. That’s the kind of man he is.”

  Seeing how he’d treated her husband for a lesser offense, Tricia was not inclined to disagree.

  “Then about a month ago I’m sitting in one of the bars my father runs—you know he runs all sorts of businesses for my uncle, right? Bars, a garage downtown, couple of motels in Jersey. Anyway, I’m sitting there, middle of the day, having some lunch and a couple of drinks, minding my own business, and I hear these two guys in the booth behind me talking. And what they’re talking about is this robbery they’re planning. I mean, they were being quiet, but I was sitting right on the other side of the
divider, I could hear every word. And after I’d listened for a few minutes I realized it was Sal’s place they were talking about robbing. There was this whole complicated scheme—up a wall, through a window, I mean crazy stuff. But I started thinking: This is my chance. All I have to do is go in first, clean the place out, then let these two clowns take their stab at it. They’re the ones who’d get caught—no one would ever look twice at me.

  “So I waited to hear when they were planning to do it. And they said it very clearly: the eighteenth at 3:30. They said it twice.

  “So, fine—I got everything ready for the eighteenth, only I went in at 2:00. Plenty of time, right? Figured it shouldn’t take me more than 45 minutes, and I allowed myself twice that.” Renata shook her head sadly. “They must have changed the plan. When I got to the counting room, they’d already been. The safe was cleaned out. And I was the one left holding the bag.”

  “You’ll pardon me for saying so,” Tricia said, “but what a load of crap.”

  “I swear to god,” Renata said, “it’s true. May I be struck dead if I’m lying.”

  “You overheard two guys in a bar. Talking about robbing Sal Nicolazzo.”

  “Yes.”

  “A bar run by one of Nicolazzo’s main deputies. By his brother-in-law.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you decided you’d beat them to the punch, take your shot at the money, only they beat you instead.”

  “Yes!”

  “Christ, Renata,” Tricia said. “Do you see any hay stuck in my hair? Do I look like some hick you can bamboozle with a crazy yarn about two mysterious crooks who are stupid enough to discuss their cockamamie plot in a place owned by the man they plan to rob, but slick enough to pull it off and vanish without a trace?”

  “All I can tell you is what happened,” Renata said. “Whether you believe it or not, that’s your business.”

  “So what did these two men look like?”

  “I didn’t get a good look at them.”

  “Of course not,” Tricia said.

  “They were sitting behind me!”

  “Naturally,” Tricia said. “So what bar was it?”