The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress (33 page)

She blinked hard, pushing the tears back in, forcing herself to gain control. Ritzi looked around the room, searching for a way out. Two tables, a chair, and a pushcart piled with towels and surgical equipment were the only furniture visible. Behind John was a second gray metal door.

“Don’t even think about it,” he said, following her gaze.

She made her way to the operating table and leaned against it to steady herself. She had one chance. “What was the deal?”

“Deal?”

Ritzi pushed aside her fear. Took a deep breath. Summoned every ounce of charm and composure she possessed. “Did you tell him you’d sever an artery? Or maybe something a little cleaner? Like suffocation?”

He laughed. Unkind. “Listen—”

“I’m not stupid, you know.” She lifted herself onto the table and crossed her legs. “People assume that. Girl works on Broadway, she must not have brains. Let’s cut the bullshit, okay?”

John stood back and surveyed her. He crossed his arms. “This is new. Got a little fight in you, eh?”

She waved an arm around the room. “I’m curious how he told you to kill me.”

“He left the specifics up to me.”

“What’d he pay you?”

“None of your business.”

“Oh, come on. I’d like to know what I went for. A cool hundred? Did that do the trick?”

“Three.”

“And what would it cost to let me out of here? Alive.”

“I work for Owney.”

“How ’bout I double what he paid you?”

“A two-dollar whore like you ain’t got that kind of cash.”

She was surprised at the sharp edge to her laugh. “John, I cost a
hell
of a lot more than two dollars. Besides, I’ve been saving up.”

He shrugged, uninterested, and finished removing the tools.

“Six hundred cash and we both win. Owney’s none the wiser.” Ritzi opened her purse and pulled the bank bag from its spot in the torn lining. Counted out six hundred dollars. She fanned the bills with her thumb, noting the greedy look in his eyes.

“Owney wants proof.”

“I imagine you can arrange something.”

“Or I can take his money and yours and not run the risk of you blabbing.”

“Maybe I got someone waiting for me on the outside.”

“Maybe when they come looking, I tell them you were just another slut that got knocked up and wanted an easy out. Happens all the time with your lot.”

“Hardly the kind of thing you want to go around admitting. Since you run an illegal operation.”

“No wonder you didn’t make it in this business. You can’t act worth shit.”

Ritzi scratched her neck. “You like killing babies, John? Sometimes women too, by the sound of it? I think that maybe you’d like to go to sleep tonight without blood on your hands. Add some extra cash to the deal, and I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t take me up on my offer.”

A wicked grin spread across his face. “Take your clothes off.”

CLUB ABBEY

GREENWICH VILLAGE, AUGUST 6, 1969

Crater’s casual relationships with numerous showgirls and his visits to places such as Club Abbey and similar clubs in Atlantic City make clear that frequenting a house of prostitution would hardly have been out of character for him
.

—Richard J. Tofel
, Vanishing Point

Stella slides the envelope across the table with the tips of her fingers. She seems offended by its presence, despite the fact that not two seconds ago she took it from her purse.
Stella Crater
is written across the front in faded black ink, the letters a fine, feminine script. The corners are torn and bent—as though it’s been crammed in a drawer for years—and a water stain across the front renders the postmark illegible. There is no return address.

“What’s this?” Jude asks, staring at the red two-cent stamp of George Washington’s profile.

“Your long-awaited confession.”

He reaches for it, but Stella swats his hand, her movements alarmingly quick for one so ill. “Not yet.”

“Why?”

“I don’t plan on being here when you read it.”

“You can’t be leaving already?” Jude asks. “We were just starting to have fun.”

Stella is limp and tired, and a bit of truth slips through her hard veneer. “I don’t want to
see
you read it.”

“Then close your eyes.”

She puts a fingertip on the envelope and brings it back toward her an inch. “A few more minutes won’t kill you.”

They sit, bent over the table like two greedy children competing at slapjack: palms flat, fingers twitching, waiting for the next jack to land faceup on the table. But Jude isn’t certain he’s quick enough. And he doesn’t want to lose this particular card, so he draws his hand away and drops it to his lap. Stella doesn’t budge.

The early-August humidity has seeped down the stairwell and under the door, making Club Abbey smell like a wet ashtray. Someone wastes a perfectly good dime at the jukebox on John Lee Hooker’s “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer,” the clichéd last call. Not like they need the reminder. Stan shuts the joint down promptly at midnight. It’s been years since anyone protested.

Jude inspects the crumbling envelope. “How long have you had that?”

“Thirty-eight years. Give or take.”

He grunts. “Ever heard of guilt by omission?”

“No.”

“Means you can be found guilty of a crime by failing to report a felony. Withholding evidence being an obvious example.”

Stella barks out a laugh and thrusts her hands toward him. Her wrists are like knobs on a twisted tree root, bones pressed against the loose paper of her skin, fingers little more than arthritic twigs. “Go ahead. Arrest me.”

“I’m not interested in sending you to jail, Stella. Not anymore. I just want to know what happened to him.” In four decades, they have never touched, but Jude cups her hands in his and lowers them to the table. They are tiny and frail and splayed open. “You’ve kept this up for a long time. What could possibly be worth all this trouble?”

Stella spins her watch to face upward. She notes the minute hand inching closer to midnight, regards Stan behind the bar as he washes the glasses and tips them upside down on a rack to dry. It’s half past eleven, and there are only two other melancholy souls in the room—human dregs. One watches Johnny Carson on a grainy television above the bar, and the other is asleep at his table. She looks at the letter, still on the table between them, and is finally ready to tell the truth.

“This ritual is all I have left.” The corners of her mouth flicker into a smile. “You couldn’t have told me back then that things would go so wrong. We were right there on the edge of having everything. The trouble started in Tammany Hall, but it ended with the theater. Truth be told, I didn’t much care for Broadway, but I liked to be there with Joe. Liked that it was an event every time we went out: the heels and the pearls and the chauffeur and the attention—attention that only doubled once he got his appointment to the court. Joe was a magnet for the stuff, and I lapped up the excess, intoxicated.

“This”—she swirls her hand above her head, indicating the whole of Club Abbey—“is my penance.”

“For what?”

“For enabling Joe’s corruption. For ignoring his infidelity. For helping him broker our future so he could buy a seat on the New York State Supreme Court. I thought we could have it all. Wealth and social standing and respect. And all I had to do was turn a blind eye. Keep the status quo. Show up at the right events in the right dress and smile pretty like a proper political wife. But it doesn’t work like that, you know. There’s always a price to pay. And, in Joe’s case, a paper trail. Word got out the judgeships were on the block to the highest bidder. The wrong people started asking around, and one day Joe got a summons to appear before the Seabury Commission. Needless to say, there were people who had a vested interest in making sure he never testified.” Stella eases the envelope back across the table. “You’ll find the rest of what you need to know in there.”

Jude sits quietly through all of this. He doesn’t write in his notebook or interrupt or reach for the letter. For thirty-eight years, she’s treated this like a shell game, shuffling the truth with sleight of hand, and he marvels at this revelation. Stella has tipped the cups over, shown him the ball. There is only one question to be asked.

“Why now?”

“Because I won’t be here next year. This isn’t the kind of thing one relishes taking to the grave.” Stella glances upward. “Just in case.”

“I can’t absolve anything.”

“I’m not asking you to. I just wanted you to know that I chose, all those years ago, to hide the truth. That it’s eaten me from the inside out. Cancer has nothing on guilt, let me tell you that much. Shit. Forget the cigarettes. The guilt probably caused the cancer.” Stella’s hands tremble as she searches for another smoke. They’re all gone. “So go ahead. Tell the story. Take it to the papers, for all I care. Consider this your victory.” Stella’s mouth is twisted wryly, as though she suspects he won’t do it in the end.

There is a sudden emptiness within Club Abbey, and Jude and Stella realize that they are alone with Stan. He wanders through the bar with a broom, sweeping under tables and picking beer labels off the floor. They sit beneath a halo of dim light. Intense. Mournful.

“So now you know. Most of it, anyway.” Stella lifts her glass from the table. She draws on the silence, summoning the ghosts of Club Abbey for support. “Good luck, Joe, wherever you are.”

She tips back the glass of diluted whiskey and drains it in three wet gulps. A shudder runs through her body, and Stella presses the back of her hand to her mouth. Squeezes her eyes shut. There are no goodbyes for her. No formalities. She gathers her purse and slides out of the booth, setting one unsure foot to the floor and then another. Stella straightens her dress. Nothing but habit keeps it from sliding right off her wasted body. She doesn’t grace them with a parting word or a nod, simply crosses the bar and leaves Joe’s drink untouched on the table behind her. As always.

Jude wonders if she has enough strength to pull the doors open. And then he remembers that only fools underestimate the strength of Stella Crater.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

PORTLAND, MAINE, SUNDAY, JANUARY 18, 1931

THE
State of Maine Express idled at Portland Union Station, sending sheets of white steam into the frozen air. The few passengers milling about did so with the slow shuffle of exhaustion. Absent was the usual grumbling of commuters as they jostled for position in the coach cars. No honking horns or whistles or delivery trucks rumbling down St. John Street. Those distractions would come in an hour or two, when civilized people went about their business. Five o’clock in the morning was too early for all but the fishermen, and they were already a mile offshore in Portland Harbor, lobster pots on the line, ready to set. But the hour suited Stella perfectly fine. She would slip away from her hiding place in the still of the morning and return home with no one the wiser.

Emma stood beside her on the platform; they waited as the porter gathered their luggage and placed it in an unsteady pile on the trolley. He led them toward one of the private cars and helped first Emma and then Stella aboard.

They followed an attendant through the narrow corridor, with its high windows and emerald carpet, toward a compartment at the back. The young man unlocked the frosted-glass doors and slid them open. Stella shed her outer layer and handed the wool hat, scarf, and gloves, along with a knee-length coat, to the attendant so he could put them on the luggage rack above her seat. Emma did the same.

“Don’t touch it!” Stella snapped when she saw him reach for the brown leather satchel she’d placed beside her. “That stays with me.”

“My apologies,” he said. He waited awkwardly before ducking from the compartment without a tip.

Once the door snapped shut, Emma said, “I swear to God, if the contents of that satchel bring more trouble to your life, I will never forgive you.”

Stella tapped one finger on the strap and stared at the dark circles beneath her mother’s eyes. “There is no trouble. Except what Joe left me.” She turned to the window and pressed her cheek against the headrest. She closed her eyes and listened to the rumble of the engine, aware of Emma’s piercing gaze on her. Though wide awake, Stella remained in that position when the train jerked forward and when she heard the click of Emma’s knitting needles as they worked their way through a mound of purple yarn.