Everybody Goes to Jimmy's (15 page)

I felt eyes on the back of my neck again, but that was still just nerves. Both Connie and I were short enough that we were submerged in the thick slow crowd. I grabbed a handful of the back of her jacket with my right hand to keep us from being separated. I had to work to keep up with the foot traffic because with the stick, I was slow, and Connie was gawking at all the burlesque shows and dancehalls and the guys with sandwich boards for cheap Chinese joints and street preachers telling us we were going to hell. At night, the lights and the neon made the street dreamy, exotic, and sinful. In the afternoon, it just looked dirty and tired. I don't think she saw it that way.

The Dixie Hotel fit right in at Times Square. It had been open for about a year and had already gone bust, but it was still open. The Central Union Terminal was directly underneath, so it was easy for people to find, I guess.

There was a ramp leading down from the sidewalk to a crowded waiting room. Two sets of doors, one on our left and one across the room, were marked
To Busses
. Connie saw the sign for the women's across the way and said she'd be right back. As I went to the ticket office, I tried to look for familiar faces, but the place was too busy. I asked the guy at the ticket window about storage lockers. He said they were in the baggage room on the Forty-Third Street side of the turntable. I asked what the turntable was, and he said, “That way,” pointing to the far set of doors to the buses.

I went through them and saw what he meant. Two ramps went up to Forty-Third Street. On my level was a big metal turntable, more than thirty feet wide. As I stood there, a bus came down one of the ramps and stopped in the middle of the metal plate. As soon as the bus rocked on its brakes, the turntable rotated a few degrees and the bus pulled into one of ten slips that branched off of the hub. I guess it was a good way to maneuver a lot of buses and people in a limited space, but it stank of gasoline and exhaust. The baggage room was straight ahead through a glass door. Inside, I saw that a guy working behind a counter handled the big suitcases and stuff. A bank of smaller coin-operated lockers stood against one wall. Bingo.

Number 43 was padlocked. I asked the counterman what that meant. He checked a clipboard and said it was past due by one day. It'd cost four bits to get the lock off. I gave him a buck for another day. He took off the padlock and went back behind the counter. I opened the locker and found a banged-up valise filled with wadded dirty clothes. I poked gently with my pen for a few seconds, then closed the bag and put it back. Three Fingers might have had a fortune in emeralds at the bottom, but I wasn't about to go rooting around through his skivvies to find it.

About then, another bus came in, and I heard them making announcements in the waiting room. People were pushing through the doors, and I had to go against the tide to get back into the waiting room. Connie was standing outside the door of the women's looking for me. Three Fingers was behind her, scanning the crowd. If he'd seen her, it didn't look like he recognized her. He knew me right away, and by the surprised look on his face, he wasn't expecting to see me.

After that, everything moved fast.

They made more announcements, and it seemed like everybody who'd been sitting on the benches picked up their bags and headed for the doors. Three Fingers took a step toward me. Connie saw me and headed my way. Somebody bumped into me hard from behind and pushed on past me. It was the boy, the same boy who'd stopped me outside the Chrysler Building. He ran straight at Three Fingers and swung at him with something, a knife or maybe a razor, that drew blood. Three Fingers screamed “Fuck!” at the top of his lungs, and that made everybody stop and stare at him. The boy turned back toward me and ran like hell. All that happened right next to Connie, and she stood there, shocked, with her mouth open. Three Fingers cursed again and ran past me, following the boy back through the doors to the buses. I stuck with them.

People were lined up for the bus in the closest slip. They yelled as the boy pushed his way through and dashed out onto the turntable just as another bus on the opposite side backed out of a slip. The kid was fast, not as fast as me in my prime, but he knew his way around, and Three Fingers had trouble staying close. People were yelling at the bus driver to stop, and he did. Right in the middle of the turntable, like he was supposed to do. It rotated and I lost sight of them, but I knew what the boy was up to. As soon as the turntable stopped with the bus pointed at the ramp, he jumped in front it and charged up to the street. Three Fingers was right behind, running hard. The bus driver stopped and laid on the horn. I got onto the turntable just as it jerked into motion, and I staggered against the side of the bus and braced myself with the stick. People were yelling even louder. More horns blared, and it took me several seconds to figure out which way I needed to go to get back to the ramp. By the time I got to it, I could see Three Fingers up on Forty-Third Street. I gimped up the ramp, sure that I'd turn around and see the grille of the bus bearing down on me, but I made it to the street.

The kid turned like he was going to go after Three Fingers again, when a high-pitched piercing whistle cut through the traffic noise. The boy stopped and then ran toward to the sound. The whistle had come from a hired car that was pulling away from the curb. As the boy ran for it, the back door opened, and he jumped in.

By then, the car was no more than ten feet away from me. Tugging the door shut was the crazy old woman who'd scared the boy away from me before, the same old woman who gave me the evil eye. Anna was next to her.

And sitting on Anna's lap was a fair-haired baby girl, two or three years old, maybe more. The two women were so intent on helping the boy get into the car that they didn't notice me. But in that moment as the car went past, I got a good close look at them, and I could see the resemblance that the three of them shared. The older woman must have been Anna's grandmother or an aunt, and the little girl had to be Anna's daughter. I thought I could see something of the teenage Anna in her face.

But no matter. As soon as I saw her, one part of this screwy story made sense. I knew why Anna had come back to New York. To get her little girl.

Chapter Thirteen

It was about four o'clock when Connie and I got back to the speak. We only had a handful of customers, so I bought a short round for the house and kicked everybody out ten minutes later. Marie Therese locked the front door and put up a sign that said we were closed for a private party. I went upstairs and told Vittorio that we had to shut down that night. He could stay open if he wanted to, but the cellar was locked. He said I was putting a hell of a crimp on his business and decided to close early, too.

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 bother 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.”