Hard Case Crime: Fifty to One (15 page)

“And you wanted to be with me...why?”

“Think about it,” Mitch said.

“The photos,” Tricia said. “Incriminating photos of his own men. Are some of them photos of you?”

“Could be,” Mitch said.

Something dawned on Tricia. “You’re the one. The one she recognized.”

“Saw it in her eyes as soon as I picked her up in the ring,” Mitch said. “I was saying to myself, how the hell does this twist know me? I never saw her before in my life. Well.”

“And you want, what, when we get the pictures you’ll take yours out before we give them to Nicolazzo? Won’t that be a little obvious?”

“We’ll take a few out. Not just mine.”

“That’s fine for you,” Tricia said. “But what about me and my friends? He’ll say I’m holding out on him, that I welshed on our deal.”

“Just tell him that’s all you found,” Mitch said.

“He’ll kill us!”

“You?” Mitch said. “With how well you dance? He won’t kill you.”

“My sister—”

“Why would he want to lose a good fighter?” Mitch said. “She brings in a decent gate.”

“But Charley and Erin—”

He shrugged once more. “You can’t have everything.”

“I’m not going to let him hurt them,” Tricia said.

“The man lost three million dollars. He’s got to hurt someone.”

“What if I tell him you made me give you the photos of you,” Tricia said.

“I’d say you were lying,” Mitch said, “and that he should beat the truth out of you.”

They were nearing the end of the bridge, slowing as they approached the turn-off for Second Avenue.

“But there’s no reason it needs to come to that,” Mitch said, flipping on his turn signal. “You’ve got nothing to gain by—hey!”

Tricia had been inching her fingers toward the door handle and now had turned and in one swift movement tugged up the door lock, unlatched the door, and dived out onto the macadam. She fell on her shoulder and rolled twice, narrowly missing being run over by the station wagon behind them. The other driver leaned on his horn angrily and a few more cars joined in. She saw the door of Mitch’s car still swinging open. The car came squealing to a halt.

She got up, ran to the concrete barrier at the side of the bridge. A few yards away she would’ve been looking down a hundred feet at the cold and unforgiving surface of the East River, but here it was just a twenty foot drop to the 60th Street underpass. She climbed onto the barrier, turned, and let herself down carefully, dangling by her fingertips before allowing herself to drop. For a second she was falling through the air. Then she hit the sidewalk and sprawled backwards onto her rump. Looking up she saw Mitch’s face appear above the barrier. The honking had become a full-on chorus, drivers angry at this wiseacre who’d left his car standing in the exit lane, blocking their way.

“Get back here,” Mitch shouted, aiming a long arm down at her, finger extended like Uncle Sam. He started to climb over the barrier and she scrambled to her feet, ready to run—then she saw a hand appear at Mitch’s shoulder, a wooden nightstick protruding from it.

“Mister,” came the cop’s voice, shouting to be heard over the cacophony, “what do you think you’re doing?”

“My—my wife, officer, she just—she jumped over—”

Tricia ducked under one of the bridge’s huge concrete stanchions.

“I don’t see anyone,” the cop said a moment later.

“But she just...”

“You been drinking, mister? Let’s see that car of yours.”

Tricia couldn’t hear Mitch’s response as the two of them walked away. But she thought about that car of his. If she had any luck, the cop would ask to look in the trunk.
Get rid of the stiff
Nicolazzo had said. Robbie hadn’t been in the back seat; he had to be somewhere.

Come on, she said to herself, you’re New York’s finest, look in the goddamn trunk.

She dusted off her palms and started walking, fast as she could, first west to Second Avenue and then south toward her sister’s place downtown. She had no money for a taxi, not even for a subway. And she had four miles to walk. At least with the sun down, the heat wasn’t so powerful. She opened the top button of her dress. Let a little air in.

Much of the city was shutting down for the night, shopkeepers dragging cartons and signs in from the sidewalk, pulling down metal gates over their plate glass windows. The bars on either side of the avenue, conversely, were coming to life, strains of jukebox music pouring out each time one of their doors swung open, neon lights blinking on overhead.

There was life on the street—pedestrians and loafers, men in their undershirts and trousers taking an evening smoke on the stoop of their apartment buildings, cars motoring by at a casual pace. This was a neighborhood of four- and five-story brick buildings inhabited by working men and women, restaurant staff and seamstresses, dock-workers and laundry workers, Irish mostly; and those as were still out of doors gave her the eye as she passed, one or two of the men whistling low, one throwing her a loud kiss. She was used to it, and most nights it wouldn’t have bothered her, but tonight it added to her feeling of straining toward a goal and not making progress, like she was walking through sand or mud or in a dream. Cornelia Street was far away, in the city’s lower reaches, and here she was walking through a darkening forest of hungry-eyed men with bare arms and puckered lips. The El had run here once, she knew, its metal tracks casting the whole of the avenue into darkness; and though it had been demolished nearly twenty years back, as night fell it was almost as if you were still walking under its shadow, listening with half an ear for the clattering roar of ghost cars overhead.

As she passed 49th Street, a man fell into step beside her; she glanced and for a moment was relieved to see the blue of his uniform—but only for a moment.

“You all right, miss?” the flatfoot said.

“Yes, sir,” Tricia said. She tried to keep her voice even, her head down.

“This isn’t a neighborhood for a girl to go walking alone.”

“I’m just a couple of blocks from home,” Tricia said, resisting the urge to walk faster, to try to get away. How many more steps would she get before he took a good look at her face and recognized her from the bulletin O’Malley must have circulated? When would he put out a hand and stop her, leaving her the choice of running for it or heading off to jail?

She felt a trail of perspiration forming along her spine and prayed it didn’t show.

“I’m fine—thank you,” Tricia said. “You don’t need to walk with me.”

He stopped, and against every impulse urging her on, she stopped as well, tried to appear casual, at ease, not twitch under his stare.

Had she gone too far? Should she apologize? She was on the verge of doing so when the policeman tipped his cap to her and said, “All right, miss. Have it your way.” He fell behind as she walked on. She glanced back and saw him peering into a parked car, going on with his rounds.

Thank you, she whispered to herself, for blind policemen, thank you. Only please let the one on the bridge have been more observant.

The streets passed, one by one, and her legs grew sore from exertion, but she didn’t stop, didn’t even slow, didn’t dare. Somewhere down by Washington Square Park, a three-year-old boy was waiting for his mother to come home; and a box of photographs that could send who knew how many men to jail was sitting out on a table or hidden behind the public toilet tank down the hall or waiting in the dust under the bed. If the cops had let Mitch go—and they might have, they easily might have—he’d be heading down there as well, and faster than she could hope to make it. He didn’t have an address, but Cornelia Street was only one block long, maybe a dozen buildings on either side—he didn’t need an address, just time enough to canvass them all. And he surely had money with him; and he had a car; and his gun, he had that, too.

Oh, please, she thought, please let them at least have found his gun. Let them have locked him up tight, and no phone call back to Uncle Nick in Queens, not yet.

But Tricia had limited confidence in the value of prayers. So she walked, fast as she could, through the night.

The lights were on in all the second- and third-story windows, and in one or two of the storefronts besides: a pagoda-roofed restaurant on the corner of Cornelia and Bleecker, a 24-hour laundry halfway down the block. Tricia made her way to the grey stone building near West 4th where the taxi from the train station had dropped her off what felt like such a long time ago. The hand-lettered
NO
VACANCIES
sign was still—or again—in the window by the front door. She looked around for Mitch, or Bruno, or anyone of comparable appearance, but there was no one in sight. Except for a collarless dog sniffing at one of the sidewalk’s scrawny trees, the block was empty.

Which either meant she was in time or that she was too late.

Tricia leaned on the buzzer till she could hear footsteps approaching from the other side and didn’t release it until she heard the cover slide away from the peephole. She stepped back so the person looking out could see more than the top of her head.

“I’m Colleen King’s sister,” she said. “Trixie...Trixie King.”

“Not here,” came a woman’s voice, accented as much from cigarette smoke as from what sounded like some sort of Eastern European upbringing.

“I know, I was just with her, she asked me to come by, give something to her son. To Artie.” When there was no response, she added, “Please, I’ve walked a long way.”

Whether that was what did it she’d never know—but the locks turned and the door swung open. Behind it a woman no taller than Tricia but quite a bit older stood in a flower-print wrapper, hairnet over a tangle of grey curls, slippers on her feet. She had the doorknob in one hand, the burning stub of a Marlboro between the knuckles of the other.

“You sister?” She drew deeply on the cigarette, consuming half its remaining length in one pull. “She look nothing like you.”

“She takes after our mother,” Tricia said. “May I go up to her room?”

“You have key?”

Tricia nodded, hoping the woman wouldn’t ask her to produce it.

“Okay,” the woman said. “Is 3D, like Duck. But child is in 3F. Like Fox.”

“Thank you,” Tricia said, wondering what sort of zoo-based primer the woman had used when learning English. She made her way to the staircase in the corner of the room. The woman retreated to a doorway near the foot of the stairs where she smoked the remnant of her cigarette and watched Tricia climb with a look on her face that seemed caught halfway between suspicion and apathy.

When she reached the third floor, Tricia went from door to door, scanning the heavy brass letters screwed into the wood—‘A’ like Alligator, ‘B’ like Bat. She tried the knob at D-like-Duck, but it was locked. ‘F’ was across the hall and she knocked briskly.

“Sh,” a voice came, a husky whisper. “You’ll wake him.” The knob gently turned and the door swung slowly ajar, a soft creak escaping from the hinges despite all the care to avoid it. A scarred face appeared in the opening, the pink and white of old burns on both plump cheeks and across her chin. It was a face Tricia recognized from the Sun, from one of the times she’d visited the club early to scope it out while plotting Chapter 10. Tricia had even put her in the chapter, given her a little cameo to address the lousy treatment she’d seen her bear at the hands of the other girls on the cleaning crew.

“Heaven,” Tricia said. “I didn’t know you lived here.”

“What are you doing here, then?” Heaven LaCroix spoke English with only the faintest hint of a Belgian accent, having come over on a refugee ship at age seven. She stood just half a head taller than Tricia but she was as broad across the shoulders as Coral; she had the arms, too, thick and muscled.

“It’s a long story,” Tricia said, “and it’s probably going to sound crazy to you, but I’m Colleen’s sister—I know, we don’t look anything alike. But it’s true. And she’s in trouble. I need to get into her room, get something she left there. You’ve got a key, right? You must, if you take care of Artie.”

“Now hold on,” Heaven said, stepping out into the hallway and pulling the door shut behind her. She was wearing a heavy robe, something frilly peeking out at the collar, like she’d been in bed when Tricia knocked. “I don’t know you, except that you dance for a living and ask a lot of questions. That time you came by, I almost got in trouble myself, you kept me so long with your questions.”

“I’m sorry, Heaven, I was just new and curious about a lot of things.”

“I’ll say.” Heaven crossed her arms over her chest. “Now you want to get into my friend’s room and you’ve got a story about how you’re her sister, but how am I supposed to know that’s so? You could be anybody. You could be working for Mrs. Barrone, for all I know.”

“I don’t know anyone named Barrone,” Tricia said, though she realized as she said it that it wasn’t true: Nicolazzo’s sister had married a man named Barrone, had raised two daughters also named Barrone: the unfortunate Adelaide, victim of a malarial fever in North Africa, and her older sister...Renata? Tricia thought that’s what she’d read in the
News.
Something like Renata, anyway.

“I’d show you my birth certificate if I had it,” Tricia said, “but I don’t. I don’t have anything on me other than what you see. All I can tell you is that the man who runs the Sun has Colleen locked up right now because he thinks she stole something from him and he wants it back. He let me out to come here and get it. If I don’t bring it back to him in the next hour or so, he’s going to hurt her real bad, maybe even kill her. You want her son to grow up without a mother?”

“You’re really something,” Heaven said, “you know that? Even if I believed you I still couldn’t let you rummage around Colleen’s room, taking things, without her telling me it’s okay.”

“She can’t tell you,” Tricia said, “she’s locked in a cellar somewhere in Queens.”

“Where?”

Tricia sighed. “I don’t know exactly. Somewhere just the other side of the river.”

“Well, if you don’t know exactly, how’re you going to get whatever it is you want to get from Colleen’s room back to her?”