Hard Case Crime: Fifty to One (26 page)

“Charley,” Tricia said, “I didn’t want you to get hurt”—but of course this wasn’t true and she knew it. Part of her had badly wanted him to get hurt. But she hadn’t envisioned it...like this. “What did you think you were doing, going to that, that...creature’s bed—”

“Rather than the chair you so kindly left me,” Charley said. “Oh, come off it, Tricia. You know what I was doing, and you know I was right to do it. I wasn’t
enjoying
myself, I was trying to find a way to get us out of there.”

Sure. And Paulie Lips was no thief, oh no, not him—just a blackmailer. Men! Singing their little songs of innocence. Could they possibly think they were convincing anyone?

“Charley,” Tricia said frostily, “the way out of there was not hidden inside Renata Barrone’s panties.
I
found a way out, and it didn’t involve sleeping with anyone.”

“Lucky you,” he said. He handed the tumbler to Mike, then unbuttoned several buttons on his shirt, reached inside, and pulled out the leather box of photographs. “But you didn’t get these, did you?”

“How...?”

He spread his arms and made a little unsteady bow. He really was quite drunk.

“A gentleman never kisses and tells,” he said.

“Renata
got them for you?”

“No,” he admitted, “I grabbed them on my way out, saw them sitting on Barrone’s dresser—but still. The point is I have them. Now, where’s my thank you? Where’s my ‘I’m sorry, Charley, I’ll never do it again?’ Huh? Tricia?”

“I think you ought to get some sleep,” Tricia said. Taking him by the arm, she tugged him toward the back room. “We can talk about it when you’ve sobered up.”

“Ah, sleep and sobriety,” Charley mumbled. “You see, Mike, she does care about me. You were wrong when you said all those scurrilous things about her.”

Mike said, “I didn’t—”

“No, I guess you didn’t, it must’ve been me.” Charley leaned heavily on Tricia, his boozy breath just inches from her nose, his bruised flesh a rainbow of purple and yellow. “You do care,” he said, “don’t you?”

She brushed something out of her eye—a reaction to the whiskey fumes he was breathing on her, she told herself, nothing more. “Go to sleep, Charley,” she said. “You’ll feel better when you wake up.”

“I’ll feel like hell when I wake up,” he mumbled.

“Well,
I’ll
feel better,” she said. “Do it for me.”

She deposited him heavily on the mattress and went back for the bag. By the time she returned, he was snoring.

While he was out cold, she went through all the material in the bag. There was a great deal of it. Coral had been putting the pinch on five men in all, some of them for years; six if you counted Paulie. He really seemed to believe he was the father of her child—but who’s to say the others didn’t? And Tricia had a feeling Coral had been hitting him up for more than just locker room space.

Thinking of Paulie as another of Coral’s marks helped answer a question that had been nagging Tricia: If Coral kept all her other incriminating materials in the locker at the Moon, why had she kept Nicolazzo’s box of photos in the glove compartment of the car she’d extorted from Barrone? The only answer that made sense was that Coral had wanted to make sure Paulie didn’t find them, couldn’t destroy them—especially the one he’d have been most likely to destroy, the photo of himself. Which suggested that Coral had wanted to have something on him.

Of course, maybe she just liked having something on everyone she knew.

Barrone, meanwhile, was a bit of a puzzle himself. If it was his son who had died a month ago, not him, where had Royal been for the past month? On an assignment for Nicolazzo? Or lying low somewhere, to keep away from Nicolazzo?

And Renata—what was she doing holed up in the old man’s headquarters downtown instead of living at home with her husband? Or, if she and Robbie had been on the outs (made her finger itch, indeed), why wasn’t she living at her parents’ house, or some place of her own...somewhere, anywhere, that wasn’t a Lower East Side boy’s club filled with gunmen and criminals?

But the big question wasn’t Paulie or Barrone or Renata—it was Nicolazzo. One question, of course, was who had broken into his safe and taken the money out, and Tricia had a feeling she’d need to answer it before this was all over. But more urgently, where would the man have gone with his hostages when his location on Van Dam Street was blown?

Tricia scoured every letter, every photograph, looking for a clue and finally she found one, near the bottom of the pile. It was in a note Barrone had sent to Coral, dated a year earlier:

Can’t meet you in the city,
it said,
that’s final. N wants us all out at his place at the track while he’s waiting out the investigation. O’Malley’s getting too damn close to play games. I’ll call you with a location and you’ll come out there if you want your goddam money.

And penciled in the margin, in Coral’s handwriting, was the information she’d presumably copied down when he’d called:
AQUEDUCT, STABLE 8, STALL 3.

Charley stirred, turned over on his side. He didn’t wake.

Tricia took the leather box from the corner of the mattress and slipped it into her pocket beneath the gun. One way or the other she’d be prepared.

She stepped out into the hallway.

“How’s he doing?” Mike asked.

“Sleeping,” Tricia said. “Probably the best thing for him.” She made her way to the front of the bar.

“What should I tell him when he wakes up?”

“Tell him I said to stay here. That I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“And if he asks where you went?”

“Tell him you don’t know. It’ll be the truth.”

“Are you sure it’s smart to go off on your own like this?” Mike said.

“No,” Tricia said, and went.

If you want to get your money’s worth from a New York City subway ride, you’ll do as the song says and take the A train, whether it’s to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem or to Rockaway Beach way down in Queens. It’s a thirty mile ride from one end to the other, the longest you can take, and it’ll occupy the better part of two hours if you let it. If you get tired before it’s over or don’t want to spring for the extra fifteen-cent fare that kicks in right before you hit the beach, you can trade the promise of sun and sand for a day of playing the ponies at the Aqueduct Race Track in lovely South Ozone Park. Or at least you could before the State Racing Commission turned over control of the track to the newly formed “New York Racing Association” in 1955. One of the first things the new association did was to shut down the Big A and launch a renovation project that promised to deliver to gamblers the most modern racetrack of the Atomic Age. Almost three years and thirty million dollars later, the project wasn’t finished and the track was still shuttered, though plenty of pockets had gotten handsome new linings along the way. Mostly in nearby Ozone Park, which was South Ozone Park with redwood instead of aluminum siding on the walls but just as much garlic in the marinara sauce.

Tricia watched the construction site loom as she climbed toward it from the subway station.

One problem with a 200-acre racetrack, of course, is that even when you’ve shut it down you can’t shut it down—you can stop racing horses there, but just try to keep people out. Even if you fenced the thing in, curious neighborhood kids would find a pair of diagonal cutters and make their way inside on a dare. And the construction crew at the Aqueduct hadn’t bothered with a fence, relying instead on the low walls and shrubbery already in place to keep people out.

Which made it pretty easy for Tricia to enter. The track was surrounded on three sides by huge empty parking lots, all converging on an entry gate to the main building, which looked like it was destined to be a combination clubhouse for high rollers and grandstand for the rank-and-file. The first two stories had been constructed and girders poking out the top showed it was due to keep climbing for at least a few stories more. There was a giant crane standing immobile by the side of the building, its steel cable dangling with a weighted ball at the end to keep it from swinging free. As you’d expect on a Sunday, no one was sitting in the cab of the crane or walking along the girders. At first glance, no one seemed to be on the grounds at all, though Tricia had to assume there was at least some security staff around, maybe making their rounds on the other side of the lot.

Past the torn-up dirt of the racetrack itself, Tricia saw the dozen wooden buildings of the stable area and she headed over with what she feared was an excessive sense of purpose. Knowing where Barrone had met Coral once a year earlier wasn’t the same as knowing where Nicolazzo was holding her today. But what she did know was that there was a precedent for Nicolazzo going to ground here, and like the proverbial drunk with his missing keys, Tricia figured she had to start searching where the light was best.

Tricia had to squeeze past a turnstile to get into the main area. She hiked around mounds of dirt and piles of cinderblocks, large spools with thick metal wire coiled around them, pallets filled with sacks of cement baking in the sun. The old, wooden stable buildings stood at the Belt Parkway end of the property and she headed toward them. These would be demolished sometime soon, presumably, but they hadn’t been yet, suggesting that some, at least, were still in use. Perhaps to store tools and supplies, perhaps to stall the horses that would have been housed on premises had the track still been in operation—even if they were doing all their racing at other tracks now, they had to live somewhere, and it wasn’t as though there were a lot of farms in the middle of New York.

She took the gun out of her pocket, found a comfortable position for it in her palm, and crept up to the nearest of the long, barn-like buildings. Listening at the door, she heard snuffling and neighing inside, then a man’s voice saying something she couldn’t make out. So she wasn’t alone. Just as well to know for sure.

Staying close to the walls, keeping to the shadows as much as possible and walking softly, she went on to the next building. This time she heard nothing at the door. She continued to a third, lower building, where she heard the ring of metal against metal, and she imagined a burly smith hammering a horseshoe, the sort you might find in an illustrated Longfellow. She peeked inside through a space between two boards, but couldn’t see anything. It was too dark within, too bright outside.

The taller buildings resumed and she scurried past several of them, scanning the numbers painted beside each door as she went: 4, 5, 6. At the door to Stable 8, she paused to listen, heard no sign of people inside, and carefully slid the door open on its rollers, just wide enough to admit her if she squeezed through sideways. She slipped in through the opening, dragged the door shut behind her.

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. There were stalls along both sides of an open central passage. The roof was high enough overhead that she couldn’t make it out. The only light came through cracks and crevices in the walls, plus one small, high window on the far end that threw a single spot of daylight on the straw-strewn floor. Two long banks of electric lights were turned off, and Tricia wasn’t about to turn them on.

She passed along the row of stalls on one side, most of them empty. Halfway down she saw a silver horse, a filly two heads taller than her, with fine white hair crisscrossing over her forehead like a lace veil. The filly nickered as Tricia went by. In a wooden rack beside the stall a cardboard placard said
Spiderweb
and beneath this, on a chalkboard hanging from a nail, were supplied a dozen lines of information in a crabbed cursive handwriting: the horse’s feeding schedule, her training history, her ownership. Tricia peered close to make out this last. Spiderweb was owned by an outfit called the Nickels Group. Nickels—Nicolazzo? Maybe. Tricia moved on.

The only other horse on this side was a red roan stallion named
Make A Wish,
also credited to the Nickels Group. She moved to the opposite side and found two more:
Braddock’s Bane
and
Shooting Star.
Four Nickels. One more, she thought, and you’d have a quarter. Or a quarterhorse.

Come on, Tricia. Don’t get loopy.

She made her way back to the entrance and was about to slide the door open again when she heard a sound outside: footsteps, heavy tramping ones, two men at least, and they were approaching quickly, almost at a run. She glanced around, looking for a place to conceal herself if they came in, but there was nothing—not so much as a bale of hay she could crouch behind, just the stalls themselves, and the nearest one was occupied.

The footsteps stopped directly outside the door and she heard a voice bark, “Where is she? Where did you say you saw her?”

Tricia’s heart stopped. She felt the weight of the gun in her hand, the pressure of the trigger against her finger. At least two men—and she had just the one bullet.

“She was right here, goin’ from building to building,” came a voice Tricia recognized with dread as Bruno’s. “Right here,” he said again.

Tricia heard the door’s rollers creak and shift in their track, saw the crack of daylight at the door’s edge begin widening. There was no time to think. She turned, ran to the chest-high door of the stall behind her and, climbing on the groom’s stool beside it, pushed herself over the top. She toppled onto the ground beside Shooting Star, a tall black horse with a deep chest and white markings on his lower legs. The horse shifted nervously and neighed as she gathered herself and brushed urine-scented straw off her knees. At the risk of being seen, she stood up, held one hand to the horse’s cheek and the other to his neck, and stroked gently, whispering, “Sh...sh...” She thought back to childhood and the first stable she’d ever been in, just outside Aberdeen, one Coral had taken her to when she’d been little. The horses had frightened her then. It wasn’t the horses that frightened her now.

Shooting Star whinnied and Tricia redoubled her efforts to calm him. The door, meanwhile, had slid open to its full width, letting in a wide slash of sunlight that fell across the floor like a guillotine blade. Through the open top portion of the stall door, Tricia could see a long shadow step forward, one arm bent at the elbow and holding a pistol before it. She dropped back to a crouch. She heard the man go by, followed a moment later by a second.