Fifty-to-One

Raves For the Work of CHARLES ARDAI!

“Deliciously entertainin...[one of those] crime tales so sharp they’ll slice your fingers as you flip the pages.”

—Playboy

“Excellen...[Ardai] has done a fine job of capturing both the style and the spirit of the classic detective novel.”

—Chicago Sun-Times

“An instant classic. The...climax of this novel, as unexpected as it is powerful, will move you in ways that crime fiction rarely can.”

—The Washington Post

“Barrels forth at the speed of [a] Manhattan taxi...and contains some whiplash-inducing plot twists...Tightly written from start to finish, this crime novel is as satisfyingly edgy as the pulp classics that inspired it.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A wonderful novel, brilliantly plotted, beautifully written, and completely satisfying. I loved the book.”

—Richard S. Prather

“Dark energy and period perfection.”

—Chicago Tribune

“It isn’t just great—it’s phenomenal. Easily, this is the best crime novel [of the year] thus far.”

—Bookgasm

“Hands down, the best mystery novel of the year. It might be the best mystery written in America in years. [This] book...packs a punch that left me breathlessly turning the pages.”

—Book Reporter

“Another sure-fire winner...Reads like a collaboration between Henry Miller and Mickey Spillane.”

—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Expertly crafted in every way and ending with one of the most shocking...conclusions in recent memory.”

—Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

“Reads like O. Henry run amok in McBain’s 87th Precinct.”

—Ink19

“Classic pulp.”

—Kevin Burton Smith, January Magazine

“A wonderful chase from start to finish.”

—Charlie Stella

“Excellent...terrific.”

—The Globe and Mail

“Able to cut to the heart of a character or a situation with equal ease, he has a voice as unforgettable as his stories.”

—Billie Sue Mosiman

“[Ardai] builds his tale slowly and really throws it into high gear in the emotional final chapters.”

—George Pelecanos

“A pleasant visit to an unpleasant society where honor and loyalty count for more than life.”

—James Crumley

“Another standout [about a] man on a memorable downward spiral.”

—The Boston Globe

“[A] layered hard boiled work [with] an ending that leaves readers mouthing ‘wow!’...Essential reading.”

—Library Journal

“Gives Chandler a run for his money.”

—Paramour

“The best thing since bread sliced with a bloody knife...[Ardai] writes with genius.”

—Dick Adler

“It knocked my socks off. The last 30 pages, I don’t think I took a breath.”

—Megan Abbott

“The best Hard Case Crime offering I’ve read in a very long time. It’s fast, suspenseful, profound, violent, witty, disturbing, and heartrending.”

—About to Charge

“A crime novel with an end that you won’t soon forget...there’s something so classic about it that, when you read it, you can’t help but picture the story unfolding in crisp black-and-white.”

—Nights and Weekends

“This guy’s a gold mine,” Borden said, jabbing with the back of his pen at the newest book to grace his desk. “He’s the genuine article. Gold Medal wishes they could find a guy like this.”

The book was titled I Robbed the Mob! and was credited to that most prolific of authors, Anonymous, but Tricia was as proud of it as if her name had been plastered all over the cover. The illustration showed a man in a heavy overcoat, his face hidden in shadows, advancing on a buxom woman in a torn blouse. What that had to do with robbing the Mob, Tricia had no idea. But Borden said it would sell books.

Beneath the title it said

Torn From the Headlines!

The Scandalous True Story of One Man’s

LIFE in the UNDERWORLD!

“You know what Casper Citron said about us on his program yesterday?” Borden said. “He called the book reprehensible. Said we glorified crime. That’s good for a thousand copies, easy. The thing’s selling, Trixie. You did good—you and this guy you found.” Borden grabbed his jacket from a hook on the back of the door, shrugged it on. “You think he really ripped off his boss?”

“Oh, I’m sure he wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true,” Tricia said.

“Man,” Borden said. “The guy has guts. I tell you, I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes the day someone hands Nicolazzo a copy of the book.”

It was at that moment that the frosted glass pane in Borden’s door shattered...

SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:

SONGS OF INNOCENCE by Richard Aleas

FRIGHT by Cornell Woolrich

KILL NOW, PAY LATER by Robert Terrall

SLIDE by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr

DEAD STREET by Mickey Spillane

DEADLY BELOVED by Max Allan Collins

A DIET OF TREACLE by Lawrence Block

MONEY SHOT by Christa Faust

ZERO COOL by John Lange

SHOOTING STAR/SPIDERWEB by Robert Bloch

THE MURDERER VINE by Shepard Rifkin

SOMEBODY OWES ME MONEY by Donald E. Westlake

NO HOUSE LIMIT by Steve Fisher

BABY MOLL by John Farris

THE MAX by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr

GUN WORK by David J. Schow

KILLING CASTRO by Lawrence Block*

THE DEAD MAN’S BROTHER by Roger Zelazny*

THE CUTIE by Donald E. Westlake*

HOUSE DICK by E. Howard Hunt*

CASINO MOON by Peter Blauner*

* coming soon

FIFTY-to-ONE

by Charles Ardai

A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

(HCC-050)

First Hard Case Crime edition: December 2008

For Max Phillips, Without whom...

1.

Grifter’s Game

The day she got the job dancing, they asked her what her name was and she told them the first thing that came to mind: Trixie. It wasn’t her real name, of course, her sister had told her enough to know better than to give them her real name; but it was close enough that if someone called it out to her she wouldn’t think they were calling someone else.

Her name was Tricia Heverstadt, Patricia Heverstadt. She was five foot one and weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet. She was pretty enough, but her body wouldn’t make any man look at her twice—no bosom to speak of and nothing much in the way of hips. She had long legs for her frame, but what did that mean when your frame was as small as hers was? Her hair was brown, her eyes were brown, her skin was pale, her smile didn’t shine. But she could move.

You put Tricia Heverstadt on a stage with a spotlight on her and a quartet pounding out some dance hall melody and you’d have yourself a show. Hell, forget the spotlight and the quartet. You put Tricia Heverstadt on the street in broad daylight, just walking along, and you’d see men’s heads turn. It wasn’t obvious just why. She wasn’t beautiful. But when she moved, your eyes wanted to follow.

Coral Heverstadt, Tricia’s older sister, had come to New York four years before, had gotten work in the chorus of a rooftop cabaret in Times Square, had written back home to Tricia in Aberdeen, South Dakota, telling how her feet ached and her shoulders chafed from the straps of the cigarette tray they made her carry around between performances, and how she couldn’t get enough sleep because an hour after she finally made it home the garbage men were pulling up outside her window, making a racket. She wrote about the men, taking liberties in the club and whistling at her on the streets, and about one masher who walked out on her in the middle of a meal at Rosie O’Grady’s when she shook her head no to the suggestion he whispered in her ear. She wrote about all this and signed her letters “Your struggling sister” but the day Tricia turned eighteen and her mother could no longer prevent her, she was on a train to New York.

She arrived at Grand Central Station and for a good fifteen minutes couldn’t find her way out, just kept dragging her luggage in circles through its cavernous rooms and underground corridors, till finally a policeman pointed her toward the Vanderbilt Avenue exit. And as she headed off, the poor flatfoot’s eyes followed her and he beat a little tattoo on his palm with his nightstick.

She had her sister’s letters in a bundle in her purse, and she showed the return address to the cab driver at the head of the line. He heaved her two bags and her typewriter case into the trunk, ushered her into the back seat, slammed the door behind her, and took off down Lexington Avenue, aimed smack at the heart of Greenwich Village. At first Tricia didn’t even notice the buildings speeding by outside, she was so taken with the pair of fold-down jump seats leaning up against the back of the driver’s seat and the automatic taxi meter ticking away her fare. She didn’t even mind watching the numbers rise, higher and higher. A taxi ride through New York City! It was an extravagance, a luxury, perhaps the last she’d enjoy for a good, long time; but she did enjoy it so. It felt as though her childhood in Aberdeen was dropping away from her at last with each city block they drove, with each expensive tick of the meter.

Coral greeted her at the door of the rooming house on Cornelia Street, hugged her and lifted her off her feet while the cab driver unloaded her luggage. Coral took after their mother, had the broad shoulders and muscular arms, and she picked up one heavy bag in each hand and carried them up the front steps without the slightest show of effort, chattering nervously as she went. It was lovely to see Tricia, it had been so long, what a wonderful idea, to drop by for a visit—how was mama? Tricia picked up the typewriter case and followed her sister up to the big glass door leading into the building’s vestibule. “Mama’s good,” she said. “But Cory, I’m not here for a visit. I’m here for good.” And then when Coral didn’t respond, just stood there staring, she said, “I want to live in the city. I’ve moved here. To stay.”

And the smile that had slowly been eroding on Coral’s face as Tricia spoke fell all to pieces. “No,” she said, putting the suitcases down on either side of her. “No, no...you come for a visit, Patty, you see the Empire State, you eat at Lindy’s and you go right back home. You can’t move here. You can’t live here.”

“Why not? You do.”

That seemed to be a stumper. Coral Heverstadt heaved a sigh up from the depths of her abdomen. “I do lots of things, kiddo. You wouldn’t want to do them. I wouldn’t want you doing them, and mama sure as hell wouldn’t.”

“You mean dancing?”

“I don’t mean dancing.”

“Well, then what do you mean?”

Another sigh, long and plangent. “It would never work. What were you going to do for money?”

“I have some money,” Tricia said, patting her purse. “I’ve been saving up for a while now. Maybe it won’t last long, but it’ll hold me for a month, I figure, and by then I’ll have a job, and...I’ll get by. I don’t eat much.” She smiled hopefully.

“And where were you planning to stay?”

The smile widened.

“No,” Coral said. “Honey, no. I can’t put you up. I—I just can’t. Don’t ask me why.”

“Why?”

“Patty, listen to me. I live in one room. Bathroom’s down the hall. There are ten other people on the same floor and in the morning you’ve got to fight the whole lot of them just to pee.”

“That’s okay. I can hold it.”

“Patty, listen to me. I...don’t live alone.”

“Okay, so it’s tight, I understand, but I wouldn’t stay long. And it might even be fun, three girls in the big city—”

“Two girls,” Coral said. “It’d be two girls.”

“Two? But you said you don’t live alone...” Tricia’s hand leapt to her mouth. “Oh!”

“Yeah: Oh. So would you please just get yourself back on that train and go home to mama and tell her you saw me and everything was fine and you had a nice visit but now you’re home to stay? Please?” She reached a hand out and ruffled Tricia’s hair. “Please.”

But Tricia didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. Her face was blank, her breathing slow. Comprehension was just beginning to break through.

“Please,” her sister said again. “Go home.” Coral held her eyes for a second, then turned, went inside, drew the door shut behind her. Through the glass, Tricia watched her retreat up the stairs.

Tricia set the typewriter case down beside her other two bags. She looked around. The street was bustling, as every street in New York City seemed to be; but she might as well have been alone. She was alone.

In the first-floor window beside her head, a hand-lettered cardboard sign proclaimed “NO VACANCIES.”

She felt a sob start climbing up inside her chest and a sense of panic gripped her, but she sensibly forced it down. This wasn’t turning out the way she’d planned, but panicking wasn’t going to make it better. So Coral wouldn’t have her—fine. It was a big city, there were lots of places for a girl to stay. So she didn’t happen to know any of them—fine. Fine. How hard could they be to find? She looked around her. Maybe one of these people would know, maybe this man coming toward her, with his nice panama hat and glasses and his white seersucker suit with the wide braces peeking out under his jacket.

He swept his hat off his head with one hand and offered the other to her to shake. “Miss, I’m sorry to bother you,” he said in a rapid, delicate voice, “but I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation, and you seemed as though you might be in need of some help—”

“Am I ever,” Tricia said. “I was just trying to decide who I could ask for some.”

“Well, if it’s not too bold,” the man said. He pulled a wallet from his pocket and took out a card with writing printed on one side. “It sounded as though you needed a place to stay. As it happens, my family owns a residential hotel for young women. A thoroughly respectable establishment, I assure you, and though generally we have no rooms available, as it happens just this morning one of our tenants moved out.” He passed the card to her. In the center were the words THE KLONDIKE ARMS. Beneath this, it showed an address on Seventh Avenue and a telephone number, KL5-2703.

Tricia looked the man over. He looked to be in his middle thirties. His suit was certainly nice enough, his hat as well, and his manner seemed, if not refined exactly, at least proper. His voice had a plummy Eastern Seaboard accent to it, the sort she associated with certain radio program hosts and movie actors, and the way he expressed himself was awfully formal. “Your family owns this hotel?” she asked.

He shrugged slightly, as if embarrassed to admit it. “It’s one of several. But this is the only one where we allow unaccompanied young women to rent rooms. And the rules are quite strict—no men above the lobby after five, under any circumstances. No guests overnight. It’s quite safe.” He shook his head gently at her. “Not all your options would be. I don’t want to frighten you, but this city can be dangerous for a girl in your situation.”

“I’m sure it can,” Tricia said, thinking of her sister’s letters, thinking also of what she had just learned about Coral’s living arrangements.

“There’s just one thing,” the man said, apologetically. “I can’t be sure the room is still available. It was this morning—but it may have been rented since. There are so many young women in the city these days, and so few rooms.”

“How can we find out?” Tricia said.

“I can phone my father and ask him—but if he says the room is still available, I’ll need to be able to tell him you want it, so he’ll take it off the market immediately. Otherwise...”

“What?”

“It could be available now and gone by the time you make it uptown.”

“Surely your father would hold it,” Tricia said, “if you told him I was on my way.”

He shook his head ruefully. “You haven’t met my father. He can’t bear to turn down money. If I don’t tell him I have a month’s rent in my hands and that I’m on my way to the bank to deposit it right now, he’ll gladly give the room away to the next woman who shows up at the front desk with cash in her hand. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Tricia said, “I understand.” She reached into her purse, found the small roll of bills she’d stashed there. An elastic band held the roll together and she worked it off now. “I can give you the money, that’s not a problem. How much is it?”

He seemed embarrassed again. “It’s one of our nicer rooms, I’m afraid. It rents for a dollar and a half a night. But,” he hastened to add, “by the month it’s just thirty-six dollars. And it comes with meals. Breakfast and dinner, anyway.”

Well, that was something. She’d have to stretch to cover her other expenses, but with the food included in the monthly rate she could manage, for a while a least.

She handed over two ten dollar bills and two fives and then carefully counted out six ones.

“I’m going to be right over there,” the man said, pointing at a telephone booth near the corner. “If he tells me the room’s been rented, I’ll bring the money back and see if I can help you find some other place to stay. But if the room’s available, I’ll tell him you’ll take it.”

“Thank you,” Tricia said. She watched him run into the booth, pick up the receiver, wait while his call was put through, and then talk excitedly for a few moments. While he was doing that, she tucked the typewriter case under one arm and lifted the two suitcases, one in each hand, as Coral had. It was a struggle for her—she didn’t have Coral’s build or her strength—but she could manage it if she had to. By the time she’d wrestled the bags down to the sidewalk, the man was bounding back to her, a grin on his face.

“It’s all set,” he said. “But he says you have to get there immediately, there’s someone else looking the room over right now.”

“Will you come with me?” Tricia said. “I hate to ask, but with all this to carry...”

“I wish I could,” he said. “But he insists I deposit the money today, and the banks close at three. Perhaps I can put you in a taxi?”

She stiffened. “I’m afraid I can’t afford—”

The man’s eyes sparkled. “Here.” He handed her back one of her dollar bills. “Don’t tell the old man.”

He stepped into the street and flagged down the first checker cab he saw, shoved her bags into the back seat and closed the door firmly once she was inside. She leaned on the open window, stuck her head out. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your help,” she said.

“It’s no problem,” the man said.

“It’s funny,” Tricia said, “I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Carter,” he said, quickly enough. Then he seemed to have to pause to think for a second. “Carter Blandon.” But before she could remark on the peculiarity of a man not remembering his own last name, the cab had already pulled away from the curb and was racing uptown.

The driver pulled up alongside the Klondike Arms, helped her out with her bags, gave her back two dimes in change from the dollar she presented and touched his cap in a casual salute when she returned one as a tip. Then he was gone and Tricia was left to maneuver her bags through the building’s revolving door on her own.

It didn’t look like any hotel she’d ever seen in the movies or on television, never mind the two they had back in Aberdeen. The lobby was dark and narrow; there was no place to sit; there were no bellboys pushing luggage carts, no potted plants for atmosphere, no concierge’s desk, no registration window. Instead, there was only a standing ashtray between a pair of elevator doors at the room’s far end and a large board on the wall, under glass. Rows of metal letters behind the glass spelled out what appeared to be the names of firms:

...and so on, through WHITEMAN AND SON, DDS in 404 and something merely called ZIEGLER in 1111.

Beside the board, screwed tightly to the wall, was an angled metal dispenser containing a stack of business cards for anyone to take. Tricia took one and compared it to the one Carter Blandon had handed her. It was identical.

A residential hotel for unaccompanied young women? This was an office building! And the worst sort, by all appearances, the sort that rented tiny airless suites to desperate businessmen and get-rich-quick schemers—she knew the sort, she’d seen them often enough in the movies, read about them in the two-bit crime novels they sold in every drugstore.

The louse! The dirty...dirty...rat! To take a woman’s money like that, to pretend fellow-feeling and kindness and generosity only as a pretense for stealing from her! Tricia found the man’s audacity breathtaking, literally—she found she had to sit down on one of her suitcases and make an effort to breathe. And now the feeling of panic she’d quelled earlier returned, and the sob with it. She was alone in New York City and very nearly penniless, with three heavy bags and no place to stay and a sister who had fallen into god only knew what sort of depravity—but not far enough into it that she was willing to share it with Tricia. Because the sad truth was, if she’d offered it to Tricia now, Tricia would have said yes. However bad things were in Coral’s life, they could hardly be worse than Tricia’s situation was right now.

She couldn’t even return home as Coral had urged her to do—she didn’t have the train fare.

She wiped her eyes on a handkerchief she retrieved from her purse, then got up and hefted her bags once more.

It was three in the afternoon and slowly but surely night was coming. She had to take care of herself—no one else was going to. With her free elbow she jabbed the elevator call button, and while she waited for the car to arrive she scanned through the building’s list of tenants once more. A place to stay and a way to pay for it—that’s what she needed. And the latter, at least, meant getting a job. Not a month from now—now.

She was no dentist, no lawyer, didn’t know what a ‘notion’ or ‘sundry’ might be. Her knowledge of fashion was, as mama never hesitated to tell her, a disaster, and the only importing she’d ever done involved bringing herself from South Dakota to Manhattan.

But she could move.

When the elevator door slid open and the wizened operator on a stool inside drew back the metal accordion-fold gate, she lugged her bags inside, deposited them on the floor, and met his flinty stare with one of her own.

“Third floor,” she said. “And step on it.”

2.

Fade to Blonde

The hallway was, if possible, even shabbier than the lobby had been, the paint on the walls a tired olive green, the pebbled glass in most of the doorways dark. She passed doors labeled with faded gilt lettering and ones that weren’t labeled at all, just hastily numbered with black paint. Green glass shades hung from the ceiling at intervals along the hall, but fewer than half the bulbs seemed to be working. A few of the doorways were illuminated, and one was propped open at the bottom with a brick. From inside she heard a radio quietly playing what sounded like Perry Como.

She looked back, but the elevator door had closed behind her.

After a stretch, the hallway branched, and a sign directed her to the left for 310-317, right for 318-325. She turned left.

310. 311. 312. Maintenance closet. 313.

Of course it had to be at the very end. Tricia’s arms were getting sore, and she had to put her luggage down twice to rest them before she finally reached the door labeled 317. On the glass it said

MADAME HELGA DANCERS,

MODELS, CHANTEUSES, ETC.

“WE’VE GOT HER NUMBER!”

The glass was, against all odds, brightly lit. Tricia could even see shadows inside that looked like human silhouettes. She fixed her hair briefly and, glancing into her compact, traced a pinky along her lower lip to straighten the rouge she’d applied on the train. She looked a wreck, she thought. Her cheeks were flushed from exertion, her dress disarrayed, and the day’s strain was telling around her eyes. But it wasn’t as though the passage of still more time, never mind a night spent on the streets of New York, would make her look any better.

She put on the brightest smile she had and knocked briskly.

“G’way,” a woman’s voice called from inside, “audition’s over!”

“I don’t know what audition you mean,” Tricia called back to her through the door. “I just got into the city and I’m looking for some work.”

“What sort of work?” came the voice.

“What sort have you got?”

There was silence, and it stretched on a good long time.

Finally, the voice said, “Well, what do you do? Sing? Dance?”

“I can dance,” Tricia said.

“What?”

She said it again, louder. “I can dance!”

“Well how do you expect me to see that through a closed door?”

Tricia tried the knob, cautiously pushed the door open. Inside was a big open room with a desk in the middle. A window on one wall had words lettered on it in reverse, so they could be read from the street outside. There was a wooden bench under the window and two young women were sitting there, folios of sheet music clutched in their hands. Behind the desk was a third young woman, only a year or two older than Tricia herself, wearing a black sheath dress with a bright red leather belt. Her hair neatly matched the belt.

“And you are?” the redhead asked.

“My name’s...Trixie,” Tricia said.

“Sure it is. Mine’s Scarlett O’Hara. At least you’re not another goddamn singer. No offense, girls.” The girls on the bench didn’t look offended. They looked terrified.

“So?” the redhead said. “Show me what you’ve got.”

Tricia pulled her bags inside, shut the door, stepped up to the desk, then realized she had no idea what to do. “I’m not sure,” she said, “exactly how this works.”

“How it works? You show me your dancing, I tell you it’s not good enough, and you take your pretty little keister back to Podunk, Wyoming or wherever the hell it is you came from. That’s how it works.”

“South Dakota,” Tricia said icily. “Aberdeen, South Dakota. And if you’ve got your mind made up already, I don’t see why I—”

At that moment, a buzzer sounded and a light lit up on the Bakelite intercom box beside the redhead’s telephone. She thumbed a button.

A man’s voice boomed from the loudspeaker. “It’s gonna be Kitty. You can send the other one home.”

“You heard him, girls,” the redhead said. Both of the young women stood up, one looking elated, the other crushed. “Noon, tomorrow, Kitty, at Mizel’s, they’ll fit you for your gown. Sorry, Jean, better luck next time.”

“You think so?” Jean said. “I’ve been waiting a long time for better luck.”

The redhead shrugged. It was no problem of hers.

The two women filed out and the redhead turned her attention back to Tricia. “So, you gonna show me your dancing or what?”

But the buzzer interrupted again. “What?” the redhead asked the little box.

“We’re gonna be here a couple hours more,” the man said. “Order us some food, will you? Maybe some of that brisket from Lester’s, and...what do you want, Robbie?”

Another man’s voice, heavily accented, said “Brisket. What is that, beef?”

“Yeah,” the first man said. “Make it two, Erin, and a couple of beers. Hey, listen, Erin, you know what else, Robbie’s gonna need some girls to round out the number, can you ring up a few?”

“What kind of girls?” the redhead asked. “You want clotheshorses?”

“Jesus, no, they just stand there like coat racks. Get me some who know how to shake their little asses.”

“When do you need ’em?”

“Yesterday.”

The redhead looked up, released the button. “Can you shake your little ass, Wyoming?”

Tricia thought about walking out. She thought about it for all of two seconds. Then she nodded vigorously.

The redhead pushed the button again. “I’ve got someone here right now, says she can dance.”

“Well, fine,” the man said. “Send her in.”

Tricia left her bags outside, walked through the door Erin held open for her. She put a little swing into her step, the sort she knew would win her a whistle on any street in downtown Aberdeen. The two men inside watched her approach. The younger one had a cigarette between his lips, a grey felt hat pushed back on his head, and his pulled-open necktie dangling halfway down his shirt. The other was nicely put together in a snappy suit and bowtie, his black hair slicked back, a pencil mustache punctuating his upper lip. This second man was swarthy, olive-skinned. He twirled a finger in the air in a gesture Tricia interpreted to mean “turn around.”

Neither man whistled.

Tricia turned in place. She could be graceful, she could be delicate—but she could also be earthy and sensual. She tried for a combination of the two. She saw their eyes following her, but couldn’t read their reaction. She put together a couple of dance steps, something slow and languorous, something that looked like dancing even without any music to accompany it. She was tired and knew it probably showed, so she aimed for a sleepy-eyed strut that conveyed hints of opium dens and Oriental pleasure palaces. She raised one arm and ran the fingers of her other hand along it, down it, stroking slowly. She curled her fingers and twisted her neck, swept this way and that before them. Out of the corner of one eye she caught sight of the swarthy man nodding.

“What do you think?” the younger man said.

“She’s good,” he said. “She’s good. How you say, very...romancing? Romantic. Very romantic. She make you want to kiss.”

“Don’t let your wife hear you talking like that.”

“Or her uncle, eh?” The swarthy man stood, came up to Tricia, walked in a tight circle around her. “Not much up top,” he said. “But put her in a nice dress, something satin, something bright...it could be okay, could be. Now, the hair...” He touched her hair, ran his thick fingers through it to her scalp. “This is not for Roberto Monge, this, this...plain, brown hair.”

“No,” the other man said. “Honey, you’re gonna have to go blonde, or you know, red, like Erin—”

“Not red,” Roberto said. “Blonde.”

“Alright, blonde,” he said. “You ever been blonde?”

Tricia, who’d spent the last minute mightily resisting the urge to slap Roberto’s hand away, shook her head.

“You know how?”

“I’m sure there are instructions on the bottle,” she said.

The man thumbed the intercom button on his desk. “Erin, I need you to get this girl’s hair bleached.”

Erin’s voice came back in a crackle of static. “What, she can’t do it herself?”

“We need her on stage tomorrow night. We can’t take any chances something goes wrong.”

Erin sighed. “You got it, Billy.”

“Good.” He turned back to Tricia. “Five nights a week, two shows a night, you’ll be backing up Robbie’s orchestra at the Sun. You know the Sun?”

She shook her head.

“See, Robbie? Not everyone knows who you are. Kid: It’s a big nightclub on 49th Street near the river. Lots of swells go there. Broadway stars, Hollywood stars, big shots who want a nice time. They want to see something classy, not your low-down burlesque, you understand?”

She nodded.

“There’ll be at least one or two other girls. You can work out a routine together, whatever Robbie wants. But nothing too sexy. We wouldn’t want the place raided.”

Roberto laughed.

“How much does it pay?” Tricia somehow worked up the nerve to ask.

“Pay?” the man said. “You want to get paid?” Then he chuckled at his little joke and Tricia’s heart started beating again. “Five a night, sister. And you should be glad to get it. It’s only that high because Robbie here’s a generous man.”

“I am glad to get it,” Tricia said. “Believe me. You won’t be sorry, Mister...?”

“Hoffman,” the man said. “Billy Hoffman.”

“Mr. Hoffman. Just one question, if I can, and I’m sorry if it’s a little forward, but—is there any way I can get an advance on the first week’s—”

“An advance?” Hoffman roared. “What do I look like, the Chase Manhattan bank?”

“It’s just that I’m new in the city and don’t have a place to stay...”

Hoffman rolled his eyes. He depressed the intercom button again. “Erin, is there any room at the chateau? For our newest dancer?”

“Am I going to have to cut up her food for her, too?” Erin said.

“Probably.”

“She’s little,” Erin said. “We’ll fit her in somewhere.”

“So,” Tricia asked, stepping out into the main room again, picking up her coat from where she’d left it draped over her bags, “what’s this chateau Mr. Hoffman was talking about?”

“Oh, it’s a gorgeous place,” Erin said, “it’s got fountains out front and big feather beds and a barn where we keep the animals—”

“Really?”

“Yeah, Wyoming, a big barn.” Erin lifted the typewriter case, left the heavier bags for Tricia to carry. “You’ll feel right at home.”

“Is it far?”

“Not too far.”

“Because I don’t have the money for a cab ride, I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” Erin said, “we’re going to walk.”

Tricia’s face fell. “I don’t know if I can make it.”

“You’ll make it.” Erin held the front door open for her and followed her out into the corridor. Tricia started trudging in the direction of the elevator.

“Wrong way, kid. Come back.”

Tricia looked around. What other way was there? But Erin was waiting, fists on her hips, tapping one foot against the threadbare carpet. So she came back.

Erin turned one of her hands palm-up and aimed it across the hall at one of the doors with no gilt lettering, just the number ‘316’ painted on it. A light was on behind the glass, though not a very bright one, and now that she listened for it Tricia could hear some voices inside and a brief, high-pitched bray of laughter.

Erin knocked on the glass and a moment later the door swung inwards. A girl stood behind it in a half-slip and stockings, her hair up in curlers. She had one arm crossed over her breasts but let it drop when she saw there were only women there. She left the door standing open and padded back toward a cot in the corner where, Tricia saw, another girl was seated, painting polish on her toenails.

“Welcome to our chateau, kid,” Erin said. “The modest one’s Annabelle. She’s a sweetheart. And Diane,” she said, pointing at the girl doing her nails, “and Irene, and Lotty, and Rita.” She pointed out the other girls as she ushered Tricia through the door. The office they stepped into was huge, obviously having been created by knocking down the walls between three or four smaller offices. There were standing floor screens here and there to divide the room up, but they didn’t do much—a dozen army cots were ranked barracks-style in two uneven rows, and from where Tricia and Erin stood you could see most of the occupants, sitting on the cots or lying down or pacing having a smoke. The girls waved as Erin introduced them.

“There’s Cristina—” a young Spanish girl looked up “—and Stella—” a brunette in men’s pajamas nodded at them from the makeup table where she was covering a bruise on the side of her face with foundation “—and Marlene—” a dour-looking teenager raised one hand to her forehead in a sort of salute “—and, um, and...” Erin snapped her fingers twice, trying to remember the last girl’s name.

“Joyce,” the girl said, coming forward. She was almost six feet tall barefoot and had golden hair that poured halfway down her back. She was smoking a Pall Mall and held the pack out to Erin, who took one. “Who’s this?”

“She calls herself Trixie,” Erin said. “She’s a dancer. She’ll be staying with us a little while, so you girls make her feel welcome.”

Joyce extended the cigarette pack in Tricia’s direction. Tricia had to crane to look her in the face. “No thank you,” she said. “I don’t smoke.” The pack hung there. “Thank you, though. Really. I appreciate it.”

“A dancer, huh? Well, Trixie, the rest of us here are just models, so you’ll be queen of the roost in no time.”

“Oh, I don’t think...”

“So, Trixie, you don’t smoke, let’s see...do you drink?”

Tricia shook her head no. “Not much. We had wine sometimes back home.”

“Wine sometimes. That’s pretty daring.” Joyce reached out and stroked one finger along Tricia’s cheek. “Is there anything else you don’t do?”

“All right,” Erin said, plucking Joyce’s hand away, “leave the kid alone. She doesn’t need you teaching her the feminine arts.”

“Why, Erin,” Joyce said, with a little drawl creeping into her voice, “I didn’t realize. If I’d known you already had your hand in the honeypot I’d never have laid a finger on the child.”

Erin took Tricia by the elbow, steered her to an empty cot. “Don’t worry about Joyce. She’s all talk. She’s just glad she’s not the new girl anymore.”

“I heard that,” Joyce called after them.

“Good,” Erin called back. “Now, drop those bags and let’s take care of your hair. You’ve really never had a dye job, a bleach job, anything?” Tricia shook her head. “That’s okay, it’s easy. You’ll see. I’ve done it lots of times. I wasn’t born this way.” She primped her copper-colored hair, let it fall. “Hey, Rita, you still got that L’Oréal stuff your sister sent you?”

Rita dug through a footlocker next to her cot, found a little container and brought it over. Her own hair was so blond it was practically silver, which made a strange combination, Tricia thought, with her dark complexion.

Rita laid one hand on Tricia’s arm. “It’s good, trust me. Just keep your eyes closed, ’cause this stuff really burns if it gets in them.”

Erin snatched the jar from Rita’s hand and hustled Tricia off through a doorway to a white-tiled office bathroom. “Thanks, beautiful,” Erin called over her shoulder.

The bathroom was large, too, with three sinks and three toilet stalls and, in the center, where a space had been cleared and pipes rerouted to supply them, a pair of bathtubs standing side by side on claw feet. There were also two devices Tricia couldn’t fathom, tall ceramic troughs mounted vertically on the wall, with flush handles at the top like toilets. Erin saw her staring. “Never mind about those, they’re for boys. And maybe Joyce, if she wants to try peeing standing up. Come over here.”

One of the showers was in use—they could hear the water going and someone soaping up behind the curtain. The other was empty and off. Erin turned the two knobs and a spray of water began. “Here, let’s get you out of that dress, this stuff’ll ruin it.”

Tricia hesitated, then began unbuttoning. She’d come to New York because it wasn’t Aberdeen, South Dakota, because it was a place where you might find yourself working for a nightclub full of Broadway stars and bandleaders with slicked-back hair, where you might room with a dozen girls you’d never met before and dye your hair blonde and dance for a living. And if you were going to come to New York good and proper, you had to leave Aberdeen at the doorstep once and for all.

She was in her brassiere and panties in no time, head held under the water, Erin roughly rinsing it, then patting it dry with a towel. While it dried, Erin stripped her own dress off, swapped it for an old robe she found hanging behind the door, and started mixing the bleach. Then she had Tricia sit down on a hassock beside one of the sinks and tilt her head forward.

“Close your eyes, honey, and don’t open ’em till I say so.” Erin started applying the bleach from the back of her head forward, daubing it on in little smears. From time to time she’d tilt Tricia’s head to one side or the other. She kept up a running monologue as she went. “...he’ll dock you fifty cents a night for rooming here, but that’s fair enough. Can’t get a room for that price anywhere in this town. You’re on your own for food, but nights you should be able to cadge some at the club and for breakfast there’s always Lester’s, where the rolls are fresh and he’ll throw in coffee for free if he likes how you look.”

“You think he’ll like me?” Tricia said.

“Like you? When we’re done, he’ll leave his wife for you.”

The bleach stung in a few places, just felt wet in others. It was strangely relaxing, though, to have someone working her way through your hair like this, and Tricia felt herself drifting off. She came to with a start when she heard the bathroom door fly open and slam against the wall.

“Hey, Erin,” a voice said, “I’m not here. Understand?” A man’s voice.

Tricia gasped, sat up, groped for the towel around her neck and used it to pat her eyes. Behind her, she heard a shower curtain pull to one side and the girl inside squealed, “Hey! What’s the big idea?”

“Sh,” the man said. “I’m not here, you didn’t see me.” Tricia heard him climb into the tub and then the curtain closed again.

“Who was that?” Tricia said, looking around, her eyes finally open and only stinging a little. “What’s going on?”

Outside, they heard another door slam open and one of the girls screamed. “You can’t come in here!”

“Where is he?” A different male voice, this one angry.

“Just put your head back down,” Erin said, “and keep your mouth shut.”

But Tricia didn’t. She watched as a broad-shouldered fellow in shirtsleeves bulled his way into the bathroom, trailing two of the girls behind him. He had a big, rectangular head with a buzz cut on top and craggy features. Looked about forty years old, with muscled forearms and clenched fists. Tricia stood up, held the towel draped inadequately in front of her. “Mister,” she said, and she could feel her heart racing in her chest as he came toward her, “you shouldn’t be in here. There are ladies present.”

“Ladies?” the man said. “Where? I see some dames, a skirt or two, maybe a doll. I don’t see any ladies.”

“Then you’re not looking very closely,” Tricia said. “Now kindly leave.”

“I’ll leave, lady, when you hand over that scum-sucking lowlife who calls himself a book editor. I know he’s in here.”

“There’s no one in here,” Erin said. “Just us dolls.”

The man wasn’t paying attention. With the flat of his hand, he was slapping open the toilet stalls one by one, revealing no one inside. He peeked behind the bathroom door, where Erin’s dress was hanging. Then he went up to the shower and yanked the curtain open.

The girl inside was dripping and naked. Her mouth dropped open and she ripped the curtain out of his hand, pulled it around her chest. With her other hand she slapped him across the face. It sounded like a gunshot but didn’t seem to faze him in the slightest.

“Get out of here!”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the man said, not sounding sorry so much as baffled. His prey seemed to have vanished and he didn’t know how. He turned back to Tricia. “You’re telling me you didn’t see a man, a little shrimp of a guy, brown hair, about so tall—” he held up his hand well over Tricia’s head—“come in here in the past five minutes?”

“I didn’t see anyone come in here, until you did,” Tricia said, which was true enough. “Now I need you to leave so I can wash this bleach out of my hair before it does some permanent damage. And—and—Rita there needs to get ready for an audition, and Lotty’s got to change, and none of us are dressed to receive visitors and here you are, barging in...it’s uncivilized. Now get out!”

He hesitated for a moment, seemed to be weighing a snappy comeback, but finally he just said, quietly, “You’re absolutely right, ma’am. My beef’s not with you. But if you see him,” and here some of the fire returned to his voice, “I want you to let him know I’m not done with him. He can’t imitate me and expect to get away with it. I’ll find him, and when I do he’ll be sorry he ever took me on in a fight. You tell him that!”

“And who should I tell him said it?” Tricia said.

“Who...?” He seemed affronted. “Just America’s best-selling writer, doll. Tell him that. He’ll know who.”

And with that the man walked out, with one last glance at the bevy of young women around him in various stages of undress.

The woman in the shower let go of the curtain, turned off the water. She then drew back one foot and planted a kick in something soft lying in the bottom of the tub. They could all hear the dull thump as it landed. “Up,” she said.

“Jesus, Milly,” a voice said from inside the tub, “it’s not enough that I’m half drowned down here? You have to kick me, too?”

She kicked him again. “Up.”

Tricia watched as a man sat up inside the claw-foot bathtub, draped one waterlogged arm over each side. His suit and shirt were completely soaked, and his hair was plastered down over his forehead. The woman sharing the tub with him, a handsome blonde who looked like she’d been born that way, had her arms crossed and one hip cocked. She didn’t seem the least bit bashful. What she seemed, mostly, was annoyed at having her shower interrupted.

The man climbed out of the tub, slipping a little on the pool of water that had collected on the floor beside it. He pulled his hair out of his eyes, shook some more water onto the floor, peeled off his jacket and dropped it in a wet heap. His shirt was plastered to his chest and the buckles of his wide suspenders gleamed wetly against it. He looked around at the women in the room.

That was when Tricia got her first good look at his face, and he at hers. They recognized each other in the same instant.

She dropped the towel she was holding, strode up to him in her underwear.

He said, “I can—”

Tricia cocked her arm back and swung. The punch connected on the point of his chin, his feet went slip-slip-slip on the slick floor, and he fell backwards into the tub.

3.

Top of the Heap

“You’re Carter Blandon! Your family owns a hotel! The city can be dangerous for a girl like me! Tell me more, why don’t you?”

“Keep her away from me,” the dripping man said, having climbed out of the tub a second time. He was keeping Tricia at arm’s length, but she was pacing him, stepping forward each time he backed away.

“Where did your glasses go? Or were they all part of the act? Like that fancy accent you put on?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said. “I’ve never worn glasses in my life.” Tricia swung at him again and he ducked it. “Will somebody help me, please?”

“No way,” Erin said. “We want to see how this one plays out. Carter.”

“Where’s my money?” Tricia yelled.

“Gone,” the man said. “It’s gone. I spent it. All right? I spent it, every penny. To get my books out of hock before they went into a furnace. You would’ve done the same, I promise.”

“You promise? You want me to tell everyone here what your promises are worth?”

“Oh, we know,” Erin said. “We’ve heard them often enough.”

“Listen to me, will you? Come on. Please. Let me explain.” He sneezed. “I’m going to catch pneumonia. At least let me get into some dry clothes, okay?” He dropped his hands. “You might want to get into some yourself.”

Tricia looked down at herself and remembered suddenly what she was wearing—or, more precisely, what she wasn’t. Then her hand leaped to her head, where her hair was still slowly bleaching away. “Oh, no! Erin, we’ve got to wash this out—right?” She shot a glance at Blandon, or whatever his name really was. “Don’t you dare set one foot out of this bathroom, do you understand me?”

“Be reasonable—what am I supposed to change into here? I’ve got another suit in my office. It’s right across the hall. Erin can come with me, make sure I don’t go anywhere. You come over when you’re ready, I’ll answer any questions you have. Okay?”

Tricia weighed her options. It didn’t take long.

“Erin?”

“Sure, honey,” the redhead said. “Go ahead and wash. I’ll watch him for you.”

“Which office?” Tricia said.

“Number 315,” the man said. “Hard Case Crime.”

Number 315 was a smaller office than Madame Helga’s, just a single room with a single window and not too much light coming through it. Lettered on the glass it said HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS, and sure enough, the place was filled with books, shelves of them, stacks of them, and a handful spread out across the top of the wooden desk Blandon was sitting behind. Erin stood next to him, in her black dress once more, leaning one arm on his shoulder. He was in his shirtsleeves, with brown suspenders and a brown tie dotted with tiny red fleurs-de-lis, a brown fedora on his not yet completely dry hair.

“Have a seat,” he said.

“That’s all right,” Tricia said, “I’ll stand.” Her own hair was not completely dry yet either and the new dress she’d unpacked had creases showing from the long train trip. She felt like a rube, a country girl facing down the slickest of city slickers, and it made her reluctant to give any quarter, any at all.

“I’m sorry about the money,” Blandon said. “Believe it or not, I didn’t like doing it. But I was desperate. If we don’t have books to sell, we don’t have a business, and my printer was threatening to destroy the lot if I didn’t pay him at least a portion of what I owed.”

“So you stole from me.”

“Stole? You handed me your money, I didn’t steal it. As I recall, you were standing on a New York City sidewalk, talking loudly about how much money you’d saved up. Lady, if I’m starving and you put a roast beef sandwich in front of me, I’m going to eat it and damn the consequences.”

“So I’m a roast beef sandwich.”

“In this metaphor, yes.”

“And what do you think the police would call what you did?”

“They’d call it fraud and throw me behind bars for it. But that’s just because they don’t understand the realities of the modern business world. A small company like ours...thirty-five dollars can be the difference between life and death.”

“What do you think it is to me?”

“An investment,” he said. “And a smart investment, too. Think of it as buying a piece of New York’s next great publishing company. Dell, Fawcett, Pocket Books... these are million-dollar operations. And why? Because of these.” He lifted a couple of the skinny paperbacks from his desk, let them drop again. They looked like drugstore crime novels, the covers colorful and lurid and peppered with ladies in negligees and men with guns. Each book had an image of a yellow ribbon in the top left corner and one more on the spine. “Just twenty-five cents apiece, just five little nickels—but men have built castles on that foundation of nickels. They’ve built empires. And what have they got that I don’t?”

“Ethics?” Erin said.

“Don’t you believe it,” Blandon said. “They’ve got no more ethics than a cat. They bite and claw and fight for every penny and if it takes a thumb in the eye or a knee in the groin to do it, that’s what they deal out. It’s every man for himself, winner take all. But for the winner who does take all, the one who comes out on top of the heap...” He fell silent, a dreamy look on his face. “And that’s going to be me. That’s going to be Hard Case Crime. We’re going to come out on top.”

“Even if you have to fight dirty to get there,” Tricia said.

“That’s right, sister. Even if. You see this book?” He picked out one of the books on his desk, held it out to her. The cover showed a nearly bare-breasted blonde dressed as Blind Justice, an old-fashioned scale in one hand and a bloody sword in the other. She was peeking out from under her blindfold at a couple of frightened-looking men. The title was Eye The Jury and in smaller type below that it said A Mac Hatchet Mystery by Nicky Malone.

“This was our first book, came out four months ago. That fellow who came after me in the bathroom? This is what he’s all hot under the collar about. Just because he wrote a book ten years ago with a similar title about a guy named Mike Hammer. Am I imitating it? Damn right I am. His book sold millions of copies. Ours? So far we’ve shipped twelve thousand. Doesn’t hurt Spillane at all. Guy hasn’t written a book in six years, he’s probably still raking it in. I guarantee our little book doesn’t even make a dent in his income. But what it does do is get us started. At twenty-five cents apiece, twelve thousand copies are worth three thousand dollars, and half of that comes to us.”

“So why did you need my thirty-five bucks?”

He shrugged, looked uncomfortable. “A copy shipped isn’t a copy sold. And even when they do sell, the stores take their sweet time paying. And the printer gets his cut off the top. Then there’s the warehouse and the trucking and the binding and the paper...”

“I’m sure,” Tricia said, “and the author and the artist, too, but—”

Blandon blew a raspberry. “That’s peanuts. Trucks and paper and printing—that’s where the real money goes.”

“Listen, Mr. Blandon,” Tricia said, and then stopped. “Hold on, what’s your real name? It’s not Blandon, I’ll bet.”

He shook his head. “It’s Borden. Like the milk. Charley Borden.”

“Mr. Borden, then. I’m sorry to hear about your troubles. But we’ve all got troubles. And I’m happy to hear about your dreams, but we’ve all got those, too. I didn’t set out to make an investment in your company, and it’s not like you handed me a stock certificate back there on the sidewalk. What you did was lie to me and take my money. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to get a job next door, I might’ve starved. You should be ashamed—”

“Of what? It’s quite a good job you’ve gotten—yes, Erin told me. You’re going to be dancing at Manhattan’s premier nightspot. And would you ever have gotten that job if I hadn’t given you the card for this building? Think about that. We both know you came to this city for a reason; I heard what you said to your sister. Well, I’d say you’re well on your way to realizing your dream. And tell me, would you really be there this soon, this fast, if it hadn’t been for me?” And he smiled, a big guileless smile with a little desperate twinkle in his eye.

Tricia wanted to tell him he was wrong. She wanted to slug him again, knock him off the straight-back chair he was sitting in and show him you didn’t take advantage of a South Dakota girl, no sir. But there was just enough truth to what he said, and she was tired, and the cot across the hall was no feather bed but right now it was calling to her as if it were.

“All right, Mr. Borden. Here’s my offer to you, you can take it or you can leave it. I didn’t plan to invest thirty-five dollars in your company and I don’t mean to do so now. So we’ll call it a loan. You’re going to pay it back to me, with interest, at the rate of five dollars a week. Let’s say eight weeks instead of seven—that should cover it. If, at the end of eight weeks you haven’t paid me in full, I’ll go to the police and tell them what you did.”

“They’ll arrest you for usury,” Borden said. “That’s something like one hundred percent interest.”

“Well, your other choice is that I can go to the police right now,” Tricia said. “Take it or leave it, Mr. Borden.”

He turned to Erin. “How old would you say she is? Our little usurer? Nineteen going on forty-five?”

Erin grinned. “I think you’d better agree to her terms, Charley, before she tightens the screws some more.”

“All right,” Borden said. “All right. I’ll pay. But there’s something you’re going to do for me in return.”

“What’s that?” Tricia said.

“You’re going to be working at the Sun, right? That’s Sal Nicolazzo’s joint.” He fished around on his desk, found another book and tossed it to her. Tricia caught it. This one wasn’t a Hard Case Crime title; it said Gold Medal Book in the upper left corner and I, Mobster across the top. The author was identified as “Anonymous.”

“You’re going to work for your money,” Borden said. “You’re going to keep your eyes and ears open, and you’re going to bring back a story that’ll sell a million copies.”

4.

Little Girl Lost

The lights went down everywhere but on the little podium where Roberto Monge stood, baton in hand, and the men of his orchestra waited, poised for the downstroke, trombones and clarinets raised, lips puckered. Then the stroke, and music began to flow, like an undulating river, the percussionist in the corner adding a jungle beat by smacking the skins of a bongo. A spotlight splashed the center of the dance floor, so recently filled with swing-dancing couples, illuminating first the ankles, then the legs, then the spangled torso and cleavage and shoulders and beautifully made-up face of Miss Kitty Dufresne, looking so different now from the terrified girl on the bench in Madame Helga’s office. She waited four beats and then launched into her song: When they begin the beguine...it brings back the sound of music so tender...

It was when Kitty stepped back and returned the microphone to its stand that Tricia and Cecilia came out from the wings on either side, each dressed in a flowing, feather-trimmed skirt and halter top, each swaying to the music. And Tricia looked different, too. Whatever had been left of the innocent eighteen-year-old girl from South Dakota was definitely gone now. Tricia was not only blonde but coiffed like a starlet out of a Hollywood musical. Her lips were pomegranate red, her eyebrows tweezed and shaped and accented with pencil, her eyelids powdered a sultry charcoal blue. Cecilia was the older of the two—by seven years, as she’d confided to Tricia in the dressing room they shared backstage—but when they were out on the floor, you couldn’t tell. They might both have been twenty; they might both have been forty, or no age at all.

As the orchestra’s playing swelled, they danced in tightening circles around one another, not touching, and then briefly with one another in a brisk imitation of a tango, first Cecilia leading, then Tricia. They ended with some side-by-side bump and grind moves as the orchestra changed tempos yet again, giving Cole Porter’s music a jazzy sizzle. Nothing too naughty (Billy Hoffman had warned them, unnecessarily, that their clothes had to stay on), but they gave it all they had and the crowd applauded noisily.

The first night, Tricia had to concentrate on remembering the choreography, and didn’t manage even so; there were some unseemly stumbles. But by the third night she had it down and by the end of the week, even while dancing the more strenuous parts of the routine she found herself paying more attention to the rapt faces in the audience than to her dancing, wondering what secrets each might hide, her mind returning to the meeting in Charley Borden’s office.

She’d caught the book he’d thrown at her, I, Mobster. “What’s this supposed to be?” she’d asked. The tag-line on the front cover said The Confession of a Crime Czar. And on the back it said,

When we received the manuscript of this book in the office, we knew immediately we had something far out of the ordinary. We asked a prominent New York attorney to read the manuscript and arrange for the endorsement of a prominent judge, district attorney, or other high public official. Our friend, the lawyer, sent the manuscript back. “Too hot,” he advised...

“It’s supposed to be the true story of a mobster’s life, from pinching candy as a kid up to running a criminal organization as an adult,” Borden said. “That’s what it’s supposed to be. What it is, though, is pure, unadulterated malarkey, from the first page to the last. Probably written by some hack whose knowledge of crime is limited to the nights he’s spent in a drunk tank for disorderly conduct. Not a word of it’s true—not one. But how many copies did it sell? Go ahead, ask me.”

“How many?” Tricia said.

“A lot,” Borden said. “It sold a lot of copies. And now they’ve made a movie out of it, too, which is bound to sell some more.” He leaned forward over his book-strewn desk. “But imagine how many they’d have sold if they’d had a true story that was actually true. A story from someone deep inside Sal Nicolazzo’s outfit.”

“This Nicolazzo is a mobster?” Tricia said.

“He’s from Calabria, right next door to Sicily. What do you think?”

“I don’t think every Italian’s a mobster,” Tricia said.

“Well, this one is. He runs illegal gambling joints up and down the east coast, two or three here in New York alone. People say there’s cards and dice at the Sun, if you find the right room. And what better way to find it than from the inside?”

“So what you’re saying is you want me to write you a book like this one,” Tricia said.

“Who said anything about writing? More like taking dictation. You find the right person in the outfit and get him talking, all you’ll need to do is copy down what he says.”

“And you want me to do this for five dollars,” Tricia said. “Not even. For the portion of my five dollars of interest that you feel is usury.”

“Nah, forget that. You bring me a story, I’ll pay a penny a word,” Borden said. “The same as I pay the rest of our authors. Up to five hundred dollars, max, for a book. How you split it with the guy whose story you tell is up to you.”

Tricia had smiled, thinking about the portable she’d been lugging around the city, the compact little Olympia SM3 DeLuxe with its two-tone ribbon, and about the half-ream of paper wedged inside the typewriter case, filled with all the short sketches she’d written during the endless train ride. Dancing wasn’t her only ambition. She meant to visit the Algonquin Hotel, where Dorothy Parker and those other writers had congregated; she meant to write some Talk of the Town pieces for the New Yorker, perhaps about a country girl’s impressions of the big city. She hadn’t considered writing a story about mobsters, but...why not? For a penny a word, she’d give him all the story he could handle.

They’d shaken on it. “You’re on,” she’d told him.

But now here she was, deep inside, or as deep as a girl could get in one week, and so far there was no sign of illegal gambling, nothing to suggest anything untoward was going on at all. Sure, there were some men who loomed when they stood and whose tailored tuxedo jackets bulged suspiciously at the armpit. But those might be off-duty cops, hired to protect a rich man and his date for the evening—or even on-duty cops, for all she knew, casing the place for the same reason she was. There were some sideways glances she’d noticed from men as she left the floor at the end of her act, and once or twice a napkin pressed into her palm with a telephone or hotel room number written on it, but what girl didn’t have that sort of thing happen, even if she wasn’t dancing under a follow-spot in a halter top? It hardly made the Sun one of your worse dens of iniquity.

Nicolazzo himself (a brooding, heavy-browed man with what looked like a jagged scar along one cheek, judging by the newspaper photos she’d dug up at the library) so far hadn’t shown his face in the club.

Taking off her makeup after the second show one night, Tricia asked Cecilia if she’d seen anything out of the ordinary.

“Like what?” Cecilia said. She was peeling off a set of fake eyelashes as she spoke.

“I don’t know,” Tricia said. “You hear stories about clubs like this. What goes on in the back rooms.”

“Sure,” Cecilia said. “The last place I worked, the boss lined all the girls up at the start of every week and he pointed—you, you, and you. And if you were one of the ones he pointed at you had to go back to his office with him, where he had this big fold-out couch, a Castro, you know? And if you didn’t go, you were fired. And everyone knew it.”

“Is that why you left?”

She nodded. “I haven’t seen anything like that here. I mean, once in a while Robbie will give you a pat on the rear, but my god, if that’s as far as it goes, I’ll be on cloud nine.”

“What about gambling?” Tricia said. “Or drugs? Anything like that?”

“Why? Have you seen anything, Trixie?”

“No,” Tricia said. “You just hear stories.”

Cecilia shrugged. “There’s probably some of that. You get that sort of thing everywhere. My advice to you? Don’t go looking for it. Keep your head down, do your job, collect your pay, and go home happy. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Tricia said. “I was just wondering.”

But Tricia had a second job to do. She had a book to write. And not having found any true crime to write about wasn’t going to stand in her way. So she began to pound out a few pages a day, setting her Olympia up on the chateau’s sole writing desk around two each afternoon, while most of the other girls were out on jobs, shooting covers for magazines or private stills for “collectors.” The ones who didn’t have any work watched her type with a mixture of idle curiosity and indifference, peering over her shoulder now and again but never long enough to read more than a few words. Which was just as well. If it got back to Borden that she was at work on something, he wouldn’t be surprised—but he might be if he knew how often the story she was cooking up changed paths or a scene reached a dead end and needed to be scrapped and restarted, something that presumably would not have been the case if she’d just been, as he’d put it, taking dictation.

She read I, Mobster and some of the Hard Case Crime books and stole liberally from them, inventing a narrator who’d grown up in the slums and found opportunity in crime. She never gave him a name, just had other characters refer to him as “kid” or “buddy” or “hey, you.” She figured she’d have them shift to calling him “mac” and then “mister” and then “sir” as he rose through the ranks. He came from Chicago to New York after the war, joined up with an old pro on a heist of grade-A beefsteaks (or was it a bank robbery? she went back and forth on this point), and ultimately became one of the senior soldiers working for a Sicilian crime family down on Mulberry Street...before finally getting lured away to work at the Sun by their chief rival, Sal Nicolazzo. And that’s where the fun began in earnest, with her nameless hero getting his hands dirty in the world of illegal gambling and all the associated pleasures. She found it exciting to write about this fellow, imagining her way into his sinister, violent life, full of gunplay and brawls and round-heeled women who welcomed him into their arms. (These she based, one by one, on her roommates, not even bothering to change their names. None of them were big readers, and she felt confident they wouldn’t sneak peeks at the growing manuscript she kept in the cardboard box beneath her cot.)

Whenever she found herself starved for an idea, she paid a quick afternoon visit to the public library and pored through old copies of the New York Times and the Daily News, hunting for stories about mobsters and their misdeeds. Eventually the steady diet of newspaper articles, all filled with juicy betrayals, gave her the idea to have her narrator grow sick of Nicolazzo’s controlling hand and plan a robbery—a mammoth heist of his own operation that would involve opening the safe at the Sun and fleeing with a month’s proceeds from the big man’s casinos, tracks, and fight clubs. It was the sort of thing that, if it had ever really happened, Nicolazzo would of course hush up—a Mob boss clumsy enough to let himself get robbed by one of his subordinates?—and that, in turn, would account for the fact that the reading public had never heard about it. The only difficult part was coming up with a good plan for the heist—and for that she got help from a couple of experts, two young fellows she spotted bringing manuscripts to office 315 repeatedly and trailed one day to the Red Baron, a dark little bar down the block with propellers and pictures of biplanes hanging on the walls.

“Gentlemen,” she said, putting a little hip action into her stride as she approached, “may I buy you a drink?”

“I didn’t know this establishment was high-class enough to maintain B-girls in the middle of the day,” one of the men said, a slightly chunky guy of maybe twenty with the beginnings of a beard ambitiously darkening his cheeks.

“She’s not asking you to buy her a drink, Larry,” the other said. He was clean-shaven, slight, slightly older. “She’s offering to buy you one. And me one, I believe.”

“Then I’m hopelessly confused. Miss, don’t you have it backwards?”

Tricia hopped up on the stool beside them, put a dollar on the bar. The place, having just opened at noon, was empty aside from them and the bartender. “Not in the slightest. I do want you to help me out, but not by buying me drinks. I’ll supply the alcohol, if you’ll help me work through a problem I have in a book I’m writing for Charley Borden.”

“A book!” Larry exclaimed, taking a beer from the bartender with a grateful nod. “Did you hear that, Don? This young lady is writing a book. We have an authoress in our midst. What sort of book is it, madam? Ah, no need to answer that. If Borden’s your publisher, it can only be one of two things: a crime novel or a sex novel. And I don’t picture a nice girl like you writing pornography.”

“Pornography?” Tricia said. “I thought he only published Hard Case Crime.”

“That’s all he writes on the window,” Don said, “and it’s what he shows off on his desk. One of these days you might ask him about the books he keeps in his desk drawer.”

“By authors such as we,” Larry said. “Us? We or us?”

“Us,” Don said.

“Us,” Larry concurred. They clinked beer glasses.

“So you’re not mystery writers?” she said, fighting to keep the disappointment out of her voice.

“Oh, we’re that, too,” Larry said. “We’re every kind of writer.”

“Except the well-paid kind,” Don said. “For five hundred dollars we’ll write mysteries, war stories, space operas, sex books. Hell, I wrote a travel guide to Berlin once for three hundred.”

“And he’d never even been to Berlin,” Larry said.

“Perfect,” Tricia said. “You see, I’m writing a book about a mobster and it’s supposed to be a true story. And I want to have him steal all the money out of his boss’ safe and get away with it. But you have to figure the safe would be guarded, and...well, I’ve seen you two at the office, I know you’ve written several books for Mr. Borden, and I just thought maybe you’d have some thoughts about how it could be done. Something nice and clever, but not too clever—it’s got to be plausible enough that readers could believe it really happened.”

“And why,” Larry said, “should we come up with a perfectly good plot and hand it over to you, when we could get a book out of it ourselves?”

“You’re forgetting,” Don said, “she’s supplying the alcohol.”

“Ah, yes,” Larry said. “I was. That’s fine then.” He scratched at his beard. “Let’s see. A robbery. What can you tell us about the place this guy’s supposed to rob?”

So Tricia told them, told them everything she could think of from her weeks working at the Sun—about the layout and the staff and the schedule, about the parts of the building she’d seen and the parts she hadn’t, everything she’d read in the newspapers—and bit by bit a picture emerged. She told them about Nicolazzo, the various charges against him, what she knew about his private life, his family. They peppered her with questions and tossed out one outlandish idea after another.

“What about a hot air balloon?” Larry said. “Finney did that in Five Against The House.”

“That’s idiotic,” Don said. “How about a submarine?”

And so it went, for four days in a row, from ten past noon each day till the bar started filling up around three or four and the boys’ voices and their imaginations, no matter how well lubricated along the way, finally gave out. Tricia began to despair of getting anything for her money except slightly high from beer fumes. But at the end of the fourth afternoon, Don’s eyes lit up and he said, “I’ve got it!”

And he really had.

Tricia wrote as quickly as she could, typed till her fingers ached.

Mornings, she slept in, recovering from the late-night activities of the prior night at the Sun and appreciating as she never had before the strain poor Coral had been laboring under all this time. At least you couldn’t hear garbage trucks in the morning from the side of the building the chateau was on; on the other hand, some of the girls were restless sleepers, snoring or moaning or talking in their sleep, and with a dozen in one room, silence was hard to come by, even in the wee hours.

Afternoons, she worked on the book, sometimes getting so wrapped up in it that she had to race through her shower and jump into her clothes willy-nilly or she’d have been late for the first show at the club, which started at the supper hour. Evenings she spent at the club, usually staying till one or two AM, taking a late dinner in the kitchen with the waiters and musicians. Then there were her days off, when she sometimes didn’t get out of her nightgown, just sat at the desk banging away from the time she woke up till the other girls threw pillows at her back and begged her to stop the racket.

In this way, her days passed, and her weeks, and eventually eight of them had gone by.

She was surprised, at the end of the eighth week, when Charley Borden, having avoided paying back a penny of the debt he owed her along the way, invited her into his office and, beaming with pride and the goodwill of a man who’d recently been fortunate enough to cash a check, handed her two twenty-dollar bills. “Now, what do you have to say about that?” he asked her grandly. “What do you think my promises are worth now?”

But she was not nearly as surprised by that as by the contents of the box she held tightly in her right hand, a stack of paper whose first page began with the words “Chapter 1” and whose last finished with “The End.” She dropped it on Borden’s desk.

“I say thank you. And,” she said with a huge smile, “I say you owe me five hundred dollars more.”

5.

Two for the Money

“This guy’s a gold mine,” Borden said, jabbing with the back of his pen at the newest book to grace his desk. Three months had passed since she’d turned the manuscript in. “He’s the genuine article. Gold Medal wishes they could find a guy like this.”

The book was titled I Robbed the Mob! and was credited to that most prolific of authors, Anonymous, but Tricia was as proud of it as if her name had been plastered all over the cover. The illustration showed a man in a heavy overcoat, his face hidden in shadows, advancing on a buxom woman in a torn blouse. What that had to do with robbing the Mob, Tricia had no idea. But Borden said it would sell books.

Beneath the title it said

Torn From the Headlines!

The Scandalous True Story of One Man’s

LIFE in the UNDERWORLD!

“You know what Casper Citron said about us on his program yesterday?” Borden said. “He called the book reprehensible. Said we glorified crime. That’s good for a thousand copies, easy.”

“How many did you print?”

“Seventy thousand. But we’re already going back to press. The thing’s selling, Trixie. You did good—you and this guy you found.” Borden grabbed his jacket from a hook on the back of the door, shrugged it on. “You think he really ripped off his boss?”

“Oh, I’m sure he wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true,” Tricia said.

“Man,” Borden said. “The guy has guts. I tell you, I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes the day someone hands Nicolazzo a copy of the book.”

It was at that moment that the frosted glass pane in Borden’s door shattered.

Shards fell on the floor with a clatter. A fist reached through the newly formed opening, groped for a moment, found the doorknob and turned it. The door swung open.

There were two men at the door, but the first filled the doorway so thoroughly you could barely see the second standing behind him. The bigger of the men stood well north of six feet, Tricia judged, and the resemblance to Tor Johnson didn’t end there. His face was round and pink, with no hair on it except for a pair of dense eyebrows overhanging deep-set eye sockets. Each of his fists looked like half a cinderblock, and the bloody scratches across the knuckles of the one he’d just shoved through the glass didn’t seem to bother him at all. He wore a heavy overcoat. If his face had been in shadow, he’d have been a dead ringer for the man on the cover of the book.

The other man was smaller, only an inch or two bigger than Borden, but with much the same look about him as his hulking companion. There was something of the brute in his eyes, and if his knuckles weren’t presently bleeding it was clear from all the pink scar tissue across them that they’d done their share of bleeding in the past.

“You Charley Borden?” the smaller man said.

“Me? Borden? No. Borden. No. Borden stepped out, just a moment ago.”

“That’s funny,” the smaller man said, “there’s no one in the hallway.”

“Well, it was more than a moment. What would you say, honey, five minutes?” Tricia nodded mutely. “Five minutes. Said he had to go downstairs. Said we should wait for him. So we’re, you know. Waiting.”

The two men exchanged glances.

“My wife here’s a painter,” Borden said, “isn’t that right, honey? And I’m a writer, and we came here to offer our services to Mr. Borden.” He stuck out his hand. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Robert Ste—um—”

Damn it, Tricia thought. “Stephens,” she said, just as Borden said, “Stevenson.”

“—son,” she said.

Borden said, “That’s right, Robert Stevenson. And my wife. Louise. Say hello, Louise.”

“Hello,” Tricia said, with a little wave.

“You look like Borden,” the smaller man said.

“Really? I don’t think so. Do you think I look like him, honey?”

Tricia shrugged.

“How do you know what he looks like anyway?” Borden said. “It’s not like he’s a famous fashion plate or anything like that, he’s just one of New York’s more promising young editors...”

The big man took a creased photograph out of his coat pocket and unfolded it. It was a side-by-side mug shot, full-face on the left, profile on the right. In the photo, Borden’s hair was mussed and one of his eyes was swollen shut; the sign he was holding up in his hands said

N.Y. COUNTY 013887

BORDEN—4/28/1950

“Oh, he was much younger then,” Borden said. “Practically a kid. Looks completely different now. Wouldn’t you say?”

“Absolutely,” Tricia said. “For one thing, he doesn’t have a black eye today. Yet.”

“Oh, we’re not here to hurt him, miss,” the smaller man said, unconvincingly. “It’s not Borden we’re after. We’re here for the money.”

“What money?” Borden said.

“The money this fellow stole from us,” the smaller man said, and he nudged the other man with his elbow. “Show them the book.”

The big man stowed the mug shot in his pocket and took out a well-thumbed copy of I Robbed the Mob!, its spine cracked, its pages dog-eared. It pained Tricia to see it in such condition.

“This Mister Anonymous here,” the smaller man said, pronouncing it like it was two names, Ann an’ Amos, “is a turncoat and a rat. He took money that didn’t belong to him from a man who’d never done anything but help him, and we’re here to get it back.”

“But that’s impossible,” Tricia said. “He’s not—”

“He’s not what, miss? Not a thief? Read the book. He admits he’s been a thief all his life. Just this time he stole from the wrong person.”

Tricia hadn’t been about to say that he wasn’t a thief. She’d been about to say he wasn’t real. Which of course meant he couldn’t have stolen anything from anyone. But in that case, what the hell were these two refugees from a Robert Mitchum picture doing here?

“So, Borden,” the smaller man said, “you want to tell us who this guy is and where we can find him, and we’ll be on our way?”

“I’d love to help you, gentlemen, but I’m really not Charley Borden. I’ll be glad to give him a message, though, if you’d like to leave one.”

The smaller man snapped his fingers at the bigger one, who walked over to Borden’s desk, bent at the knees, tilted it forward slightly so he could get his fingers underneath and then turned it upside down. The telephone and the brass desk lamp went tumbling to the ground along with a pair of whiskey glasses and a rain of books. One of the drawers sprang open and more books spilled out. The one on top was titled Hot-House Honey and showed a lady wearing nothing but a gardenia behind one ear. She looked a lot like Rita.

“O-ho,” the smaller man said, bending to pick it up. “You’re a naughty boy, Borden.”

“Stevenson,” Borden said.

“Hit him,” the smaller one said.

The big guy shot out a fist and caught Borden’s lapels, pulled him close. He drew back his other fist like a piston.

“Hey,” Erin said, “what’s going on here?”

Tricia turned to see her standing in the doorway.

“What the hell are you doing?” Erin said.

“We’re having a private conversation, miss,” the smaller man said. “Run along.”

“Call the cops,” Borden shouted.

“Oh, I already did that,” Erin said. “Soon as I heard the glass break. They’ll be here any minute.”

“That’s unfortunate,” the smaller man said, looking murderously at Erin. “I suppose we’ll have to continue our conversation another time.”

At a signal from his partner, the larger one released Borden’s jacket, patted down the crumpled fabric.

“You’ll give Borden our message, right?” the smaller one said. “Tell him Mr. Nicolazzo won’t take no for an answer. Not twice.”

Borden nodded. “I’ll tell him.”

“You do that. And ladies,” the man said, “you might want to rethink the type of character you pal around with. It’s not always...safe.”

He fixed Erin with a stare that was full of unsavory implications.

“Hey,” Borden said. “What about the desk?”

“What about it... Stevenson? You’re telling us it’s not your desk, what do you care?” The man tipped his hat at Tricia, his eyes narrowing for a moment as though he half recognized her; then he shook his head and backed out through the open door, slipping Hot-House Honey into his pocket on the way.

The big guy patted Borden twice on the cheek. “Think about it,” he said, his voice like a gravel pit. He followed his partner out.

6.

The Confession

“Did you really call the police?” Tricia asked.

“Of course not,” Erin said. “I just said that to make them scram. Last thing we need here is police.”

“Why’s that?”

“Never you mind,” Erin said. “What’d you do to make those guys so mad, Charley?”

“They’re book reviewers,” he said. “The door-to-door variety.”

“I’m so sorry,” Tricia said. “This is all my fault.”

“Nonsense,” Borden said. “You mean because of the book? You just did what I told you to. If that weasel you got the story from ripped off Nicolazzo, how is that your fault? Look—” He fished around on the floor till he found a book with a toga-clad brunette on the cover, triremes sailing in the background. The title was The Bedroom Secrets of Helen of Troy. “You think Larry Block should apologize for the Trojan War? Or maybe Don Westlake should apologize to the Russkies.” He dropped Helen of Troy on top of a book called Communist Party Girls. “The guy could’ve kept his mouth shut. He didn’t have to talk to you. Now he’ll get what’s coming to him. It won’t be pretty, but you know what? Better him than us.” He bent and tried to set his desk upright again but was unable to budge it. He gave up, slapped his palms together as if he’d accomplished what he’d set out to do. “All we’ve got to do is give those two fellows the man’s name and they won’t bother us again.”

“I can’t do that,” Tricia said.

Borden looked over at Erin, gave her a nervous little smile. He turned back to Tricia. “What do you mean you ‘can’t do that’?”

“I can’t,” Tricia said. “It isn’t that I don’t want to—I genuinely can’t.”

“Honey,” Borden said, coming forward, “of course you can. You have to. Those guys weren’t playing a game. Next time it’ll be me they turn upside down and dump all over the floor.”

“I know,” Tricia said. “And it’s all my fault.”

“Forget about whose fault it is,” Borden said. “Just give them the man’s name.”

“I told you, I can’t.”

“Why? Are you afraid of him, what he’ll do to you? Or what—you feel bad being a snitch? Getting him in trouble? What?”

“No, no, it’s nothing like that,” Tricia said. “I mean, I would feel bad if someone had trusted me to keep his name secret and I...” She shook her head. “But that’s not the point. I can’t give you his name because he hasn’t got one. There’s no man. I made the whole thing up.”

There was silence for a moment.

“Oh, come on,” Borden said.

“I’m so sorry, I know you wanted a true story—”

“Come on,” Borden said. “What do you take me for?”

“There’s nothing going on at the Sun!” Tricia said. “There’s nothing, I swear. I looked. I couldn’t find one lousy poker game, one girl turning tricks. Well, okay, there was one—but she was doing it on her own and they fired her for it. Nicolazzo has never shown up once while I’ve been there—I’m not saying not often, I’m saying not once. I haven’t seen any drugs, I haven’t seen any guns. I haven’t even seen any money, other than people paying their drink tabs and tipping the hat check girls.”

“But it says right here,” Borden said, picking up a copy of I Robbed the Mob!, “that Nicolazzo has a private suite in the back, with poker and craps games all night long—”

“I made it up—the whole thing, I made it up.”

“The counting room with the stacks of hundred dollar bills—”

“The whole thing.”

“Even the girl with the...?”

Tricia nodded. “Everything. Out of whole cloth.” Her voice cracked. “Pure, unadulterated malarkey. I’m sorry.”

“But then why,” Borden said, “did those two goons just try to shake us down?”

“That’s what I want to know!” Tricia said. “It doesn’t make any sense. There never was any robbery. There wasn’t any money stolen. There couldn’t have been. I mean, I made it as realistic as I could—I based it on what I know about the place and what I’ve read in the newspapers—but everything about the robbery itself? I made it up. It never happened.”

Borden looked at her sideways, started to say something, then lapsed into silence again.

“Maybe,” Erin said, after the silence had stretched on long enough to become uncomfortable, “those two guys don’t really work for Nicolazzo—but they’d like to. Maybe they’re small timers, they read the book, they figured the robbery really happened, and they thought if they could find the man who stole the money from Nicolazzo they’d have an inside track to his affections—”

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Borden said, kicking a couple of books against the wall, “have you been reading these things again? I don’t pay you to read, I pay you to answer the phones and keep the riffraff out.”

“You hardly pay me to do that,” Erin muttered.

“Wait a second,” Tricia said. “I’m confused. He pays you? I thought you worked for Mr. Hoffman.”

“Who do you think Mr. Hoffman works for?”

“Some woman named Madame Helga.”

“Kid,” Erin said, waving a hand in Borden’s direction, “you’re looking at Madame Helga. He’s the Edmund of Edmund and Edmund, too.”

“Ladies, ladies, if I can interrupt this little tea party,” Borden said, “we’ve got a big problem here. There are men—large men, angry men—who would be happy to do me great physical harm if I don’t give them a piece of information you’re telling me I can’t give them. This is not an acceptable situation.”

“So what do you want me to do about it, boss?” Erin said. “I already gave you an idea and see what that got me. Last time I ever—”

“Trixie,” Borden said, “Trixie, Trixie, Trixie, I’m asking you one more time, my hat in my hand—” he lifted his fedora off a peg on the wall, actually held it out toward her “—you’ve got to give me something here. Something I can use to get those apes off my back. Because if they came after me right now, I’d have no name to give them—other than yours.”

Tricia blanched. “You wouldn’t.”

“I wouldn’t want to,” Borden corrected her. “But after I’d gone a few rounds with the big guy, who’s to say what I would or wouldn’t do?”

While they all stood there pondering that question, a knock came on what was left of the glass of the door.

Through the jagged hole they saw a blue sleeve with metal buttons at the cuff.

Then the sleeve went away and a face appeared in the hole. The skin was ruddy and pocked beneath the glossy bill of the man’s uniform cap. “Hello?” the man said. “Is this the office of the Hard Case Crime book publishing company?”

Above the bill, the cap had a little metal insignia on it that featured an eagle, a shield, and what looked like a frontiersman standing with a musket by his side—it was a little hard to make out all the details. But you didn’t need to make them out to know what insignia it was.

“I thought you said you didn’t call them,” Tricia said.

“I didn’t!” Erin said.

Borden put his hat on, swung the door open.

“Yes, this is Hard Case Crime,” he said. “What can I do for you, officer?”

The man stepped inside. He was beefy and barrel-chested and he moved with the careless manner of an outdoorsman used to having plenty of room to swing his arms. You could picture him felling redwoods with an axe.

He doffed his cap, pointed with it at the overturned desk. “What happened here?”

“We’re renovating,” Borden said.

“I’ll say,” the policeman said. “Listen, I want to talk to the man in charge.” He took a leather-covered pad from a clip on his belt, flipped through its pages till he found the one he wanted. “A mister Charles Borden.” He shut the pad. “That you?”

“For variety’s sake,” Borden said, “let’s say yes.”

“And who are these two?” Pointing at Erin and Tricia.

“Colleagues of mine.”

“I suppose that’s all right then,” the policeman said. “Just as well for you all to hear this. I need some information about one of your authors.”

Tricia’s heart fell.

“And which of our authors would that be,” Borden said. “As if I didn’t know already.”

The policeman reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a battered copy of I Robbed the Mob!.

“The one who stole three million dollars from Salvatore Nicolazzo last month,” he said.

7.

Home Is the Sailor

“Funny story,” Borden said. “That book isn’t what you think it is. You probably think it’s a true story, and I can certainly understand why, what with the word ‘true’ on the cover and all. But it isn’t. It’s actually a novel, same as all the other books we publish. One hundred percent fiction. Some of us just thought it would be,” he took a deep breath, “amusing to present this one as if it had really happened.” Borden smiled weakly. “But it didn’t.”

“Well, now, that is a funny story,” the cop said. “Because someone did steal three million dollars from Sal Nicolazzo last month.”

“Really,” Borden said.

“Oh, yeah. Walked into the Sun after hours, made his way to the counting room, opened the safe, emptied it out, and got away with three million smackers, pretty much to the letter the way it’s described in this fictional book of yours. Nicolazzo’s managed to keep it under wraps, but we’ve got people on the inside and word is the big man’s beside himself.” He pointed to the desk again. “You want some help with that?”

“Sure,” Borden said. “Why not.” Together, he and the cop turned the desk over, set it on its stumpy legs again. Borden was breathing hard when they were done, but the exertion didn’t seem to have bothered the cop at all.

“Mr. Borden,” he said, “I’ve been doing this a lot of years. I know where renovations like these come from. They come from men with names that end in vowels.”

“Like O’Malley?” Borden said, aiming a thumb at the nameplate pinned to the cop’s jacket.

“Wiseass,” O’Malley said. “ ‘Y’ isn’t a vowel.”

“Sometimes it is.”

“Well, the ones I’m talking about are your ‘I’s and your ‘A’s and your ‘O’s. Especially,” he said emphatically, “your ‘O’s.”

“You trying to say something, officer,” Borden said, “or is this the Police Benevolent League’s version of a crossword puzzle?”

“All right, Borden. I’ll make it plain, so that even a two-bit smut peddler like you can understand it. I think the men who did this to your office work for Nicolazzo, and unless you gave them what they wanted, I don’t think they’re through with you. Now, I want the same thing they do—but me, I don’t put holes in people’s doors, or in people. What I do is put people in holes. And I can put you in a deep one for a good long time if you don’t come across with a name.”

“Mother of mercy,” Borden said. “What a day. O’Malley, I’m going to tell you something and you’re not going to believe me, but it’s going to be the god’s honest truth. There’s no name to give you. None. This book was not written by a man whose name ends with a vowel, or by one whose name ends with a consonant, or by any other sort of man. It was written by a sweet young girl with an overactive imagination and no more knowledge of gangsters than you have of ballet. If there was an actual robbery at the Sun it’s a pure coincidence, and I’m sure Nicolazzo will figure that out soon enough. Now would you please leave us alone so we can clean the place up and go home?”

“I don’t think you appreciate the position you’re in,” O’Malley said. “You think this guy is a run-of-the-mill heel? He’s not. The man’s a killer, Borden. He’d think no more about snuffing you than he’d think about blowing his nose. He’s been convicted on fifteen federal racketeering charges and sentenced to three consecutive life terms. In principle, he can’t even set foot in the United States or he’ll be arrested on the spot.”

“You’re telling me this guy I’m supposed to be afraid of isn’t even in this country?”

“Actually, I’m not telling you that,” O’Malley said. “I’d have told you that for sure three weeks ago—he’s been living for years on a yacht he keeps just outside U.S. coastal waters, where we can’t touch him. Sails off for the open sea any time we come close. But that was before someone stole three million dollars from him.

“Word is, he’s come home. We don’t know when and we don’t know where, other than he’s somewhere in New York City. One of our sources says he was smuggled in in a pickle barrel. How do you like that? Another says he was brought in in the trunk of an automobile. Either way, it’s a lot of trouble and discomfort and risk for him to have gone to, and it can’t have put the man in a better mood. But he apparently felt it was worth it in order to find out who robbed him.”

O’Malley slapped his copy of I Robbed the Mob! on the newly righted desk, where it had no competition for the attention of everyone in the room.

“And who do you think he’s going to look to for the answer?”

Borden grimaced.

“The name, Borden. I don’t care if it’s a man or a woman or a newborn baby, I want a name. I’ve been after this son of a bitch for seven years, this is the best chance we’ve had in all that time of getting him, and I’m not leaving here without a name.”

Tricia stepped forward. “I’ll give you her name.”

“Don’t, Trixie,” Borden said, but she ignored him.

“I’ll give you her name, if you tell me what you’re going to do with it.”

“Do with it? I’m gonna find her and—” O’Malley halted, checking whatever it was he’d been about to say. He licked his lips. When he spoke again, it was more slowly and quietly and carefully. “I’m going to talk to her, and find out what she knows and how she learned it. Then I’m going to, to, um, keep an eye on her—so Nicolazzo can’t get at her without our knowing about it. And then when he tries,” he said, heating up again, “I’m going to put him away for the rest of his miserable life!”

“And you won’t come after the woman who wrote this book,” Tricia said.

“Come after her? Only to give her a medal,” O’Malley said. “Anyone who helps us put Nicolazzo away deserves the key to the goddamn city. Excuse my French.”

“You won’t say she must’ve had something to do with the robbery,” Tricia said. “You won’t try to charge her with anything.”

O’Malley seemed to be struggling to restrain his impatience, or maybe it was his temper. “What do we care if someone robs a crook like Nicolazzo?” he said. “It’s dirty money to begin with. Let her have it.”

“Maybe she doesn’t have it,” Tricia said.

“Fine,” he said through clenched teeth. “Then let someone else have it, I don’t care. Just as long as we get Nicolazzo.”

“You swear,” Tricia said.

“On my sainted mother’s grave,” O’Malley said. “Now, talk, lady.”

“All right,” Tricia said. She stiffened her spine and stood as straight as she could. “I wrote the book.”

“You did,” O’Malley said.

“That’s right,” Tricia said. “I did.”

“Well,” O’Malley said, slapping his cap back on his head, “that makes things easy. You’re under arrest, lady.”

“What?”

O’Malley whipped a pair of handcuffs off his belt with one hand and started drawing his service revolver from its holster with the other.

“But you said—” Tricia started.

“I don’t remember saying anything,” O’Malley said, or anyway he started to. He hadn’t quite gotten the whole thing out when the brass desk lamp in Erin’s hands collided with the back of his head.

8.

Kiss Her Goodbye

The big man sank to his knees and tipped forward, landing face-first on the carpet.

“Great,” Borden said. “That’s going to make us popular with the police.”

“How popular were you before?” Erin said.

Borden took Tricia by the arm. “What the hell were you thinking, Trixie? Did you really think he was going to let you walk out of here after you told him you wrote a book detailing a three million dollar robbery?”

“He said—”

“He said,” Borden scoffed. “If I said I’d step out that window and fly to Minnesota, would you buy tickets to see it?”

“No,” Tricia said, “but he’s a policeman and you’re a liar.”

“Well, kiddo, I think you’ve just had a valuable lesson in how honest New York’s Finest are.” Borden knelt beside O’Malley on the floor, yanked the man’s belt out of his pants and used it to bind his hands behind his back.

“Should we take his gun?” Erin said.

“Absolutely, that’s a great idea. Because we’re not in enough trouble as it is.” Borden looked around the dark little room. “I really liked this office, too.” Beneath him, O’Malley started groaning. His eyes were still closed, but how long would that last?

“Ladies, would you please wait for me outside in the hall?” Tricia and Erin stepped outside, shut the door behind them. Through the hole in the glass, Tricia saw Borden give O’Malley another clout with the heavy base of the lamp. O’Malley stopped groaning and lay still. A moment later, Borden joined them in the hallway.

“Is he dead?” Tricia asked.

“Just napping,” Borden said. “Though he’ll have a hell of a headache when he wakes up. Erin—will you let Billy know what happened?” Erin nodded. “Tell him I’ll be working out of 902 till the heat’s off, assuming it ever is. Now, Trixie: I need you to explain to me how this made-up robbery of yours could somehow actually have happened.”

“I don’t know,” she said miserably.

“You’re telling me you didn’t steal three million dollars from the Sun,” Borden said.

“Would she still be living here if she had?” Erin said.

“I need to hear it from her,” Borden said. “Trixie, do you swear on your life—on your mother’s life—on my life, that you didn’t steal any money from the Sun?”

“Of course not,” Tricia said. “What do you take me for?”

“I didn’t take you for a novelist, and look how that turned out.”

“I’m not a thief,” Tricia said.

“All right, fine. If you didn’t steal the money, someone else did. And if it happened the way you described in the book, it means whoever did it must’ve read the book.”

“Thousands of people have read the book by now,” Erin said. “Probably tens of thousands.”

“Sure—by now. It’s on every newsstand in America now. But a month ago? That would have been a bit harder, considering it hadn’t been published yet. The question is, who could have read the book a month ago? Who had access to the manuscript?”

“The printer?” Erin said.

“Moe? Moe’s seventy years old and walks with a cane.”

“Any of the girls could have read it,” Tricia said. “They all saw me working on it, and I just kept it in a box under my bed. But I didn’t think any of them were interested—”

“Apparently one of them was,” Borden said. He crossed the hallway. “Maybe more than one.” He knocked briskly on the door to the chateau. “Everyone decent in there?” he called. “I’m coming in.”

“Just a minute,” a voice called back. It sounded like Rita.

“Come on, Charley,” Erin said. “You really think one of the girls could pull off a heist like that? Forget about climbing eleven stories and opening a safe—just picture one of them trying to lug three million dollars around. How much would three million dollars even weigh?”

“Couple of tons, if it’s pennies,” Borden said. “Couple of ounces if it’s diamonds. If we’re talking about hundred dollar bills?” He thought for a second. “Maybe fifty, sixty pounds. I know men who couldn’t carry that much and girls that could. Besides, who’s to say our girl didn’t have help? Any of them could’ve gotten a boyfriend involved in it.” He knocked again, on the glass this time and louder. “Or a girlfriend.”

An image of Joyce sprang into Tricia’s mind—and Tricia knew Erin was thinking the same thing. Strapping, six-foot-tall Joyce, who from the first day had seemed so resentful of Tricia. She certainly could’ve carried fifty pounds if she had to.

Borden turned the knob, swung the door open. Rita was buttoning a blouse she’d obviously thrown on hastily—the buttons were one hole off all the way down. Annabelle was lying on her cot in a transparent nightie and slippers, blissfully unconcerned about being seen that way. The other cots were empty; from the bathroom came the sound of a shower running.

“Jeez,” Rita said. “Can’t a girl have a little privacy here?”

“No,” Borden said. He strode over to the writing desk, where Tricia’s typewriter was still set up. A small stack of pages next to it held her latest attempt at a short story. It hadn’t been going very well, and she’d been on the verge of giving up on it and starting another book instead, maybe something about a rugged, two-fisted detective this time, or maybe an assassin, cruel but principled. She had no shortage of ideas, and the prospect of another five hundred dollars was a powerful incentive. But now that opportunity seemed to have shattered along with the glass across the hall.

“Which one’s yours?” Borden asked.

Tricia pointed out her cot and he bent to look under it. He pulled out a box of manuscript pages labeled “I Robbed the Mob!” in his own handwriting. Her original title, which he’d crossed out, had been Dark Temptation.

Borden turned to Annabelle and Rita. “Girls, do either of you remember ever seeing anyone going through Trixie’s things when she wasn’t around?”

“Why?” Annabelle said. “Is something missing?”

“No,” Erin said, “we’re just trying to figure out who might have been reading Trixie’s book.”

“Her book?” Annabelle said, in a tone of voice that sounded roughly as puzzled as if she’d been asked which of her roommates had been riding Trixie’s unicorn.

“Yes, her book,” Borden said. “This thing.” He opened the box, took out a batch of pages, waved them in the air.

“Did you ever see anyone other than Trixie reading it?”

Rita and Annabelle exchanged a glance.

“What is it, girls?” Borden said. “Spill.”

“Couple of times, while you were out working, Trix, Joyce would pull it out, read from it out loud,” Rita said. “She’d read a line or two and laugh, and some of the other girls would laugh along. I never did.” After a second she added, “Annabelle, neither.”

“You ever notice anyone paying particular attention when she did this?” Borden said.

“Sure, Stella,” Rita said. “Back when she was here, she was always egging Joyce on to read more.”

“Any particular part she seemed interested in?” Borden said.

“The part where the guy steals all the money? She got a real kick out of that.”

Borden turned to Erin. “So, what happened to Stella? Why isn’t she here anymore?”

“Nothing happened, Charley. She just moved out,” Erin said. “Girls come, girls go—” She kissed her fingertips and blew it off in whatever direction girls go. “I didn’t think anything of it.”

“And when was this?” he said. “That she moved out?”

Erin shut her eyes, as if she didn’t want to see Borden’s reaction. “About a month ago,” she said.

9.

361

Tricia and Erin waited till they were down on the sidewalk before discussing what they were going to do. No point in letting the elevator operator in on their plans, not when he was the first person O’Malley would grill upon regaining consciousness.

Before calling the elevator, Borden had run back into his office, stepped over O’Malley’s prone form, and pulled two copies of a book called Death Stalks a Bride from one of the room’s packed shelves. He’d torn the covers off both, handed one to each of Tricia and Erin, and tossed the remains of the two books on the floor. The cover showed a virginal brunette hiking up her wedding gown with both hands while running from a wild-eyed shirtless brute in overalls. The brute’s face looked a little like Billy Hoffman’s; the bride’s was unmistakably Stella’s.

“Call me immediately if you find her,” Borden had said before opening the door to the fire stairs. “Erin knows the number. If it’s busy, it just means I’m on the phone with Moe. I want to find out if there’s anyone other than him who might have seen the manuscript over there.”

“You sure it’s safe for you to stay in the building?” Erin said.

“I’m not sure it’s safe for me anywhere,” he said and pounded upstairs.

Now Erin was pulling Tricia along toward the subway entrance.

“Where are we going?”

“Brooklyn.”

“What’s in Brooklyn?”

“Cheap rent,” Erin said. “And plenty of bars. And what do you find where there’s cheap rent and plentiful booze?”

“What?”

“Artists,” Erin said.

“Stella’s not an artist.”

“No, Stella’s a model. And who knows better where to find a model than artists?”

“I don’t know,” Tricia said. “If she’s got three million dollars now, I’m not sure she’d be modeling anymore.”

“Neither am I,” Erin said. “But if she is, the boys at 361 will know how to find her.”

Between Knickerbocker Avenue and Irving, between Decatur Street to the northwest and the long, lonely stretches of cemetery grounds to the east, there’s a desolate block where Cooper Avenue curves and quietly turns into Cooper Street—this, Erin said, was where they were going. They rode out on the BMT until it wouldn’t take them any closer, decamping finally at an elevated station in the shadow of a stained and leaking water tower; and then they walked the rest of the way, the better part of a mile, sweating under the smothering blanket of late summer heat. By the time they arrived, the sun had hit its apex in the sky and begun its slow descent toward the distant skyscrapers of Manhattan. Tricia watched its progress with no little anxiety: When night fell, she was due back at the club, and she didn’t know which would be more dangerous, showing up or not.

As they neared the end of the street they approached a building the likes of which Tricia had never seen outside of classroom filmstrips intended to teach the children of Aberdeen about the dangers of narcotics. The windows were dark with filth, the rain gutters dangled, the paint on the walls was peeling. Patches of scrubby grass grew from cracks in the paving stones out front. There were less leprous buildings on either side, but Tricia knew, somehow, that this was the one they were headed for even before the tarnished brass numerals “361” became visible on the front door.

“You’re saying artists live here?” Tricia said, and Erin nodded. “Wouldn’t you think they’d keep it looking a little nicer? Being artists, and all?”

“Have you got a lot to learn,” Erin said.

The doorbell, when they pressed it, surprised Tricia not at all by being broken. Knocking didn’t yield any better result until finally Erin began hammering the side of her fist against the door and shouted: “Rise and shine, boys! Rise and shine!”

“Easy, sister,” a man with a mellow voice said, drawing the door away from her descending hand. “We can hear you. We’re not deaf.” He wore a tunic that covered him from neck to knees over faded dungarees and a pair of wooden sandals. His hair, longer than any Tricia had ever seen on a man, was tied back with a leather strap. Between two of his knuckles, a hand-rolled cigarette slowly burned while between the next two extended the narrow wooden shaft of a paintbrush. There were smears of bright red on the tunic that matched the still-wet color on the brush.

“Hi, there,” Erin said. “Is Rudy around? Or Jim?”

“Everyone’s in the back,” the man said, “but if you wanted in on the session, you should’ve been here two hours ago.”

“That’s okay, we’re not here to paint. We’ve just got a couple of questions for the boys.”

“Questions?”

“Won’t take but a minute,” Erin said, and pushed past him. He let them go.

Erin led the way down a dark corridor lined with canvases, squares of painted Masonite and bent-wire sculptures.

“Did you think his cigarette smelled funny?” Tricia whispered.

“Hilarious,” Erin said.

They passed through a kitchen whose sink was home to a stack of dishes crusted with the residue of a month’s meals. The door to the back yard was open and Tricia saw five or six easels set up in a circle around a pair of models, a man straddling a tall bar stool and a woman sprawled backwards at his feet, one arm outstretched in front of her as though to ward off a blow.

The man in the tunic followed them out, took his place at the yard’s one empty easel, tamped out his cigarette, slipped the butt behind one ear, and resumed painting.

Tricia followed Erin around the perimeter, glancing at each canvas as they passed. On the first, the man was a cowboy on a rearing horse, the woman a squaw about to be trampled. The next showed an eight-foot-tall metal man shooting bolts from his eyes and a spacewoman in a gold jumpsuit returning fire with her ray gun. The third showed a German soldier in a First World War uniform leaping into a trench; the woman was a resolute doughboy this time, bayonet fixed to spit the Boche when he landed. Each showed the pair from a different angle, of course, depending on where the painter was standing; no editor, art director, or reader would ever know the paintings came from a single sitting. But meanwhile the painters got to split one modeling fee, Tricia supposed.

Erin stopped, finally, beside a bear of a man in a denim smock, the pocket in the front erupting with a profusion of brushes, palette knives, and other implements. He dabbled the wide fan brush he was using in a jar of water, stuck it in the apron pocket, and said without turning, “Afternoon, Erin. What brings you to the hinterlands?”

“You know I always like seeing you, Rudy,” Erin said. She looked over his canvas, which showed the woman on a heart-shaped mattress, naked and quite a bit bustier than the model was in life. The man in his picture was at the top of a stepladder, training a movie camera downwards. “Nice work. Is this for Charley?”

“He wishes,” Rudy said. “I’ll get five times as much for it from Hefner.”

“Fair enough. Rudy, listen, there’s someone I need to find, a model. I thought you might know where she is. Stella Dane?”

“Stella Dane,” Rudy said, scratching his chin with a thick and discolored fingernail. “Stella Dane. I remember her—I think. Was she the one I used on The Big Blade? Or was she Death Rides the Rails?”

Erin pulled out the cover of Death Stalks a Bride. “I don’t know those two, but here’s one Bob Maguire did of her.”

“Oh, yeah, her. Sure. I painted her two, three times. We had her here for a session like this once. Jim, you remember Stella Dane?” A man across the way looked up, blinked twice, shrugged.

Tricia crossed to his easel, showed him her copy of the cover.

“Oh, sure, the tall girl,” Jim said. “With the feet. She had these unusally long feet.”

“Do you know where we could find her?” Erin said. “It’s important.”

“No idea,” Jim said. And Rudy nodded.

“Let me see that,” one of the other painters said, and Tricia brought the cover around to him. “Yeah, right—Stella. Isn’t she the one who was talking the whole time about how she wanted to be in television? How she was really an actress and a singer and I don’t know what-all else. Like maybe one of us would pull a record contract out of his back pocket if she kept talking about it. You remember Norm made her pose with a cigarette in her mouth just to shut her up?”

A couple of the others nodded.

“Any idea where she is now?” Tricia said

“Nope.”

Tricia looked around the circle, saw heads shaking. Then a small voice said, “Excuse me?” They all looked down. From where she was lying on the ground, propped on one elbow, the squaw/spacewoman/doughboy said, “I think I know where she is.”

“Keep your mouth closed, honey,” one of the painters said. “I’m working on your face.”

But Tricia darted over to the woman.

“Hey,” the painter said, “get out of there, you’re lousing up the pose.”

“Just one second,” Tricia said. Then, to the model, “Stella Dane, right? This girl?” She showed her the cover.

“Yeah, that’s her,” the model said. “I saw her just the other day.”

“Where was this?” Tricia said.

“At the fights,” she said. “In the basement at the Stars Club.”

“She was in the audience?” Tricia said.

“No,” the model said. “She was in the ring.”

It took them a bit more than an hour to get back to Times Square and from there it was a short walk west to the Stars Club, a squat building in the shadow of the piers. It stood a scant quarter mile south of the Sun and though it was supposed to be independently owned, Tricia knew from the newspaper articles she’d read that Sal Nicolazzo was involved behind the scenes. He hadn’t really gone out of his way to hide the connection—he also had a piece of one of the city’s last remaining ten-cent-a-ticket dance halls, and a year ago he’d renamed it the Moon.

The doorman stationed outside the front door of the Stars looked like the least likely man in New York to be found wearing a top hat, but a top hat was what he was wearing. Beneath it he sported the crumpled face and cauliflower ears of a boxer who’d taken one too many trips to the mat. His fighting days looked to have ended around the time of Carnera, if not Dempsey, and he glared at anyone entering the building as though nursing a deep resentment that boxing attendance hadn’t come to a halt the day he left the sport.

The lineup advertised on a card beside the door promoted three afternoon fights, the first already underway, Mick “the Brahmin Brawler” Brody against Jerry “the Jackhammer” Lamar. After that it was Norman “the Mountain” Peakes against Steve Curtis, who had no nickname, apparently, and then the headline bout, featuring former middleweight champ Bobo “the Hawaiian Swede” Olson, fresh out of a short-lived retirement, against Ramy “the Chemist” Farid. Those were the fights in the main arena on the ground floor. In a box at the bottom of the card there was also a mention of an exhibition bout in the basement, pitting a fighter called the Houston Hurricane against one called the Colorado Kid. Those two fighters conspicuously were identified only by their nicknames, not by name and not with photos. According to the girl out in Brooklyn there was a reason for it—the Houston Hurricane was one of the cover models from Death Stalks a Bride, and not the one in overalls.

“I’m surprised they let women box,” Tricia said.

“They who? The boxing commissioner doesn’t; the city of New York doesn’t. But a lot of things go on behind closed doors that they don’t allow.”

Tricia aimed a thumb at the ex-pug, who was letting a well-dressed couple enter. “Looks like an open door to me.”

“Just try getting past our friend there if he thinks you’re an undercover cop, or an inspector.”

“And what exactly is he going to think we are?”

“The two of us?” Erin said, putting one arm around Tricia’s waist. “He’s going to think we’re girls who like watching other girls hit each other.”

Erin tugged at Tricia to get her moving and whispered, “Put a little sex in it.” The advice was superfluous; it didn’t take guidance on Erin’s part to make Tricia do the things that got heads swiveling. It wasn’t something Tricia turned on and it wasn’t something she could turn off. Cars that would’ve honked angrily at your typical New York jaywalker honked appreciatively instead. Passersby stopped passing, if they were of the male persuasion, and those with female companions were jerked promptly into motion again, departing with an involuntary glance back over one shoulder. The boxer at the door to the Stars Club didn’t budge from his post, but his thick-veined eyes widened as they approached and his massive jaw swung down like a drawbridge.

“We’re here for the fight,” Erin said.

The boxer said, slowly, “Upstairs...or down?”

“What do you think?”

“I, I...look, I,” the man said, and then started over. “They got a rule here. No ladies allowed unaccompanied, see?”

“Do we look unaccompanied?” Erin said. “I’m with her. And she’s with me.”

“But—”

Erin stepped forward, walked her index and middle fingers gently up the front of his too-tight jacket. “Or you could say we’re both with you. If anyone asks. And no one’s going to ask, will they?”

“I don’t know—”

“Mister,” Tricia said, “we’re old friends of one of the fighters.”

“Oh, yeah? Which one?”

“Stella Dane,” Tricia said. “She and I used to live together. We...shared a room.” It was true, Tricia told herself, only slightly ashamed of the deception. It wasn’t her fault if the man leapt to conclusions.

Which he seemed to be doing, judging by the blush that reddened his ravaged cheeks. “You and she...”

“They were very close,” Erin said. “Like family. You’d let a fighter’s wife in, wouldn’t you?”

“Sure,” the boxer said. “But...”

“Well,” Erin said, pulling the door beside him open, “then you should let my friend in.”

The man shoved the door shut again, firmly, wagged an index finger at the two of them. “If anybody asks, I’m gonna say I didn’t see you. You snuck by me. If there’s any trouble, I’m not taking the fall for, for, for a coupla...”

“A couple of what?” Erin said, hands on hips.

“You know what,” the boxer grumbled. “I don’t need to say it.”

“All right, then,” Erin said.

Inside, a narrow staircase led down and a wide one led up. The wide one was better lit. From upstairs came the sound of feet slapping canvas, of wooden chairs sliding against a concrete floor, of men and women hooting and gasping. And of punches landing. Then a bell rang and you could hear a collective sigh—of relief, of despair, Tricia couldn’t tell.

“Ladies and gentlemen...” came the amplified voice of a ring announcer. “The winnah and still champeen...Jerry, the Jackhammer...”

The voice faded as they began picking their way downstairs. Tricia held onto the railing and took care not to trip. She heard Erin’s steps behind her. The basement ceiling was low and the lights hanging from it were all trained on the ring in the center of the room. There was an announcer here, too, and a microphone dangling at the level of his mouth, but the ring was empty otherwise, except for a stool in each corner and a metal pail beside it.

They made their way around the room, hugging the wall, murmuring apologies to the people they had to step past. The place was packed, all the rows of folding chairs filled and much of the standing room besides.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer said, and the crowd hushed.

“You’re about to witness something few have seen.” His words echoed before fading out and he allowed them time to do so. “A battle in the squared circle unlike any you’ll find anywhere else in this fair city. Now, some of you may have heard of fights down Texas way where ladies box like men—Buttrick and Kugler and all that jazz. And you’ve dismissed it as a passing fad. A bit of gulf madness. Like cockroach races, or those wrestling matches where a man goes up against a bear. But anyone who thinks that is mistaken. I’m here to tell you, it’s nothing less than the future of this sweet science of ours.

“And we have here for you this afternoon two of the finest figures in the field...two fierce young fighters of the feminine fashion...in short, two women who will wow you with a demonstration of the distaff brand of brutal battery! Are you ready, I say are you ready, to meet the contenders?”

The crowd roared back in the affirmative, and a door opened just a few feet to Tricia’s left. Three figures came out, a woman in a hooded satin robe followed close behind by two stocky cornermen. Stitched on the back of the robe in sequined letters half a foot high were the words HOUSTON HURRICANE. The woman held up her gloved fists as she passed and pushed the hood back. Her shoulder-length black hair was coiled up and pinned to the top of her head and there were some sort of marks on the side of her face—in the second before the three of them moved past, Tricia couldn’t make out what they were. But it was Stella, all right. No question.

Stella made her way down a cleared path between the rows of chairs and then pulled herself up to the apron and climbed between the ropes. She shrugged the robe off her shoulders and took a few casual practice punches at an invisible opponent. Somewhere in the crowd someone whistled loudly. Stella had on gray trunks and black canvas shoes with white laces up the front and white athletic socks; on top she was wearing a tight sleeveless jersey with her substantial bosom strapped down beneath it. In place of the placid expression Tricia was used to seeing from her when she was lounging around in her pajamas, Stella wore a steely, determined stare, and the narrow muscles of her arms stood out as she flexed them.

“Can you believe it,” Tricia whispered to Erin, but turning, she saw that Erin was no longer standing beside her. She felt a tug on her shirt from behind her.

“Come on,” Erin said, pulling her out into the aisle toward the still-open door.

“We can’t go in there,” Tricia whispered.

“Sure we can. We’re like family.” They ducked inside and took a hard right just as another robed and hooded fighter marched by, a trainer and a cutman trailing in her wake. The back of her robe said THE COLORADO KID. She was past before they could get a look at her face.

“What are we doing?” Tricia said.

“You’re following me.” Erin led her down the backstage corridor, peeking in open doorways as they went, hurrying past one small office in which a radio was broadcasting the sixth inning of a ballgame out at Yankee Stadium.

At the end of the hall was a door labeled FIGHTERS ONLY. Erin turned the knob and went in.

There were two tables, one on either side of the room, each with a wide mirror against the wall surrounded by a border of bare light bulbs. A bank of lockers—four up, four down—stood on the far wall between the tables and a small older man with a tattoo of an anchor on his forearm stood before the lockers, a push-broom in one hand and a dustpan in the other. He’d swept together a small pile of cigarette butts on the floor and had a new one in the making between his lips.

“Hey,” he said, looking up with the myopic stare of a man who needed glasses but was too embarrassed or stubborn to get them. “Who let you back here? This ain’t Grand Central Station.”

“Damn,” Erin said, “and here’s us looking for the train to Poughkeepsie. What’s the matter, squinty? You don’t recognize one of the greatest female fighters of our time?”

“Who? Her?”

“Yeah, her,” Erin said. “This is Barbara Buttrick, the Mighty Atom of the Ring. Just flew in from Texas.”

The guy walked up to them, gave Tricia a quick up-and-down glance. “Her?” he said again.

“She could punch you into next Tuesday,” Erin said. “Want to show him, honey?”

“That’s all right,” Tricia mumbled. “Wouldn’t want any sort of trouble.”

“I thought Buttrick was a Brit. You don’t sound like a Brit.”

“She’s tired,” Erin said. “It was a long trip.”

He narrowed his eyes, peered closely at Tricia. “She looks awful young.”

“They all do in her family,” Erin said. “Now, you want to leave us alone so she can change? Or were you hoping for a free peep show?”

He headed for the door, leaving his sweepings where they lay. As he went, he pitched his new butt onto the pile. “Ain’t got much to show, has she?”

“Never mind him, honey,” Erin said. “Probably prefers watching the men anyway.”

“Some of ’em got bigger tits than her,” the guy called over his shoulder.

“And bigger pricks than you,” Erin said, but he’d swung the door shut, muttering.

“Do you think he believed you?” Tricia said, after a second.

“Sure,” Erin said. “Why not? What else would we be doing here?”

“What are we doing here? Why not wait for her outside?”

“Where outside? There have got to be at least three exits from this building, maybe more. Besides, how long do you think we could stand on the sidewalk before somebody noticed?”

“So we’re just going to wait here,” Tricia said.

“No,” Erin said, “we’re not just going to wait. We’re going to look through her things, see if we can find anything that—” Erin had been sifting through the various cans and jars on the nearer tabletop as she spoke, moving rolls of gauze and tape out of the way. She grabbed something from under one pile, held it up triumphantly. It was a copy of I Robbed the Mob!, the tassel of a bookmark lodged about three-quarters of the way in. Erin tossed it to Tricia. “How about that? She bought her own copy.”

Tricia opened the book to the marked page. It was the start of Chapter 10. Her heart began to race. With a mixture of pride and dismay she read her own words on the page: The afternoon of the heist was hot, as hot as hell, but I was wearing gloves and had my collar up...

10.

Plunder of the Sun

The afternoon of the heist was hot, as hot as hell, but I was wearing gloves and had my collar up.

It was easier to keep my collar up than my spirits.

I’d done many bad things in my career, to many people, but never anything like this. Today I’d be a rich man or a dead man—there was no in-between.

Mr. N kept his hands clean when it came to goings on at the Sun. You could walk around the place all day and if you didn’t know where the secret rooms were you’d never find them. Entrance to his private suite was by invitation only. Money did change hands on the premises, but only between trusted old friends. If you were a member of the general public and wanted to play a hand of poker or put your paycheck down on a roll of the dice, or put a little something in your nose that didn’t belong there, you had to go to one of Mr. N’s other clubs. The Moon. The Stars. There were others. I don’t think any of us knew what all of them were. Except maybe his accountants. Maybe.

Anyway, those other clubs were where the big bucks were made and lost. Made by Mr. N—lost by everybody else. That’s where the cash flowed like water, and all in one direction. And once each day, after everyone closed up, each of those little streams flowed back to the main river. One by one, each of the clubs made a delivery to the Sun, handing over the lion’s share of any ill-gotten gains they’d collected, minus only the thin sliver they were permitted to keep for themselves. Then, once each month, on the last Thursday of the month, the contents of the big safe at the Sun were trucked out to a secret spot where Mr. N kept his private stash. Except this month that wouldn’t happen because when the truck showed up, the big safe would already have been emptied.

By me.

I pulled my coat tighter around myself, tugged my hat down lower on my brow.

All I had to do was get in, get out, and live to tell about it.

Which was like saying all I had to do was fly to the moon, drink the ocean and catch a bullet in my teeth.

But, hell. I had to try. After what he’d done to me, I owed him. I owed him big. He deserved to have this happen to him—and damn it, I deserved it, too.

I went over the plan in my mind as I turned onto 49th Street.

The first delivery of money each night took place at 2AM, and they kept coming until 9 or 10. The men on duty stayed in the counting room till noon, sometimes 1PM. By then they were tired and eager to call it a day, so they shut the safe, spun the big dial on the front to lock it, shut off the lights, locked the door of the counting room, and left the Sun in the care of the afternoon cleaning crew. Around 4PM the rest of the staff would start filtering in and at 6 the place would open for business and the whole cycle would start over again. But between 1 and 4, the only protection the place had was the cleaning crew. That and a pair of security guards sitting outside the locked front door, and one more in a little wooden booth on the street downstairs.

Three men. Mr. N figured he didn’t need more security than that, and for all these years he’d been right. Because who in his right mind would try to rob Salvatore Nicolazzo?

Who.

Me.

I saw the security booth from half a block away, saw Roy Tucci sitting inside it, trying to look vigilant when, in fact, he was always on the point of nodding off. It wasn’t an exciting job and the man was in his sixties. Besides which, the booth had no ventilation and the heat was brutal. Even with the door propped open, you’d cook in there.

But for once I didn’t walk over and commiserate, the way I had so often before. Instead, I walked past on the far sidewalk, my pulled-up collar and pulled-down hat leaving little of my face for him to see or recognize. At the corner I crossed the street. The Sun occupied the top two floors of a twelve-story gray stone building and there was another building just like it next door—but not right next door. Wedged in between them was a narrow one-story building occupying the ground floor space of what was, above it, the airshaft that provided ventilation to the buildings on either side. All over town they rented out these little ground-floor spaces to one-man operations catering to the drop-in trade: shoe repair shops, locksmiths, places like that. This one was the shop of a glorified news peddler, offering candy out of a wooden tray and papers and magazines from a rack on the wall. There was a tiny counter inside with three wooden stools crammed in front of it, where you could get a soda on a hot day or a coffee on a cold one. For a nickel extra Jerry’d put a slug of something he called bourbon in the coffee, but it wasn’t bourbon really and you were better off blowing the nickel on one of the dirty books he kept behind the counter.

When the coffee ran its course you could hold it till you got back to your office, wherever that was, or you could use the little toilet in a closet at the back. Jerry could be counted on to have his hands full opening coke bottles, breaking dollar bills for parking meters, and—this time of day—watching all the cute secretaries going by on their way back from lunch. So he didn’t pay much attention when you went to use the can. Or when you came back.

Or when you didn’t.

The toilet was filthy and dim, but not completely dark despite having no bulb overhead, and not completely airless, either. What there was overhead was a piece of frosted glass laced through with chicken wire. This piece of glass was hinged at one side and wedged open about an inch, letting in what little light and ventilation the room got.

I swung the lid of the toilet down, climbed onto the seat and then onto the tank, and pressed both hands—both gloved hands, I was taking no chances—against the glass. And shoved.

It took three tries before the hinge creaked open far enough for me to pull myself up through the opening. I used my heel to swing it shut again behind me. The surface of the roof was caked with bird droppings and piled with years of refuse thrown from windows higher up. Behind one such pile I saw a long-tailed rat eying me hungrily, its whiskers twitching. “You’re on your own, friend,” I told it.

I’d been up here once before, when casing the job, and I knew where the rain gutter was. It was a narrow pipe that ran the height of the building and you’d have to have been a Chinese acrobat to climb it if a pipe was all there was. But the pipe was clamped to the stone every three feet with a sturdy metal bracket and those brackets had just about enough room on either side to hold a carefully placed shoe-tip. There was also a bare inch or so of space between the pipe and the wall and I’d worn a girder-man’s safety belt around my waist. I threaded the buckle behind the pipe and clicked its latch shut. I’d have to re-open and close it one-handed every three feet all the way up, but it was worth the extra effort. A fall from ten feet up might only break my leg—from fifty, it’d kill me for sure.

Or else leave me wishing it had, when my long-tailed friend came to feed.

I climbed.

Eleven stories may not seem like much when you’re riding up in an elevator; even climbing stairs, it’s no more than a good work-out. But let me tell you, climbing eleven stories one handhold and toehold at a time is agony. Your fingers seize up. Your calves start to ache. You want to let go, but you can’t, not even for a moment, because what if the belt’s not strong enough to hold you after all?

And four stories up, the windows start. Windows into offices, and unlike nightclubs, offices have people in them at two in the afternoon. You pray they’ll be empty or if, when you glance in, they’re not, you pray the people inside will leave quickly. Or if they don’t, you pray they won’t look your way.

And you keep climbing. Praying and climbing. And your fingers cry out with pain and stiffness, and your back and shoulders, and your ears from the tunneling wind of the airshaft around you, and your head’s about to burst, and your bladder too because you didn’t bother to actually use the toilet before climbing on top of it—and then you realize with a start that you’ve made it.

And then the real fun begins.

I reached into my jacket pocket and took out the fist-sized stone I’d picked up on the way downtown. No fancy devices for me. I smashed it into the window, used it to knock out some particularly nasty shards of glass, then dropped it down the airshaft. I had to grope for a second before I found the latch. Raising the window from the position I was in turned out to be harder than I’d expected, but once it was open I had no trouble climbing inside. I took a moment to let my eyes get used to the darkness of the room and my breathing return to normal. I flexed my fingers inside the gloves, tried to work out the kinks.

Then I made my way to the door.

The room I was in was the storage room behind the kitchen. Boxes of canned food and bottled beer were stacked from floor to ceiling, like in a warehouse. I pulled down one of the boxes and started taking bottles out of it, stacking them on the floor.

I carried the empty box with me into the kitchen.

Here, the remnants of the morning’s work were tidied up: rows of metal pots and saucepans, washed and lined up face-down to dry; sacks of kitchen whites that were headed to the laundry because after a night of cooking they weren’t so white anymore; wooden packing boxes like the one I was carrying, some broken down for disposal and others filled with empty bottles or other trash and stacked by the dumbwaiter for pick-up. I set the box down and tugged at the dumbwaiter rope till the little compartment surfaced, then tied the rope off so it couldn’t go down again.

I listened at the swinging doors to the main dining room, heard the labored wheeze of a carpet sweeper being pushed back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I knew the girl pushing it, a scarred twenty-year-old Belgian by the name of Heaven LaCroix whom all the other girls on the cleaning crew—bohunks and Slavs, every one of them, and none too attractive themselves—made a point of calling ‘Heavy’ to her face. So she was carrying a few pounds—what business was it of theirs? Looked like it was all muscle anyway, the sorts of labor they had her doing.

I glanced at her through the circular window in the kitchen door, then ducked when she turned in my direction. I’d figured she’d be finished with the dining room by now, but it looked like she still had plenty to go. I’d have to take the long way around.

Hefting the box, I picked my way to the far side of the kitchen, past the cold storage room where steaks and butter and ice were kept, past the grills and deep industrial sinks, past the trestle table where the dancers and musicians bolted their suppers between shows, to the door that led backstage. This door was locked overnight but everyone who worked at the Sun knew where the key was kept. I pried up the cover of the light switch with one fingernail, fished out the key, and used it to open the lock. The area beyond ran behind the orchestra platform and the dance floor, past the wings, and to a corridor that, during working hours, always had a man in it, someone to keep any straying patrons—or employees, for that matter—from straying too far. This time of day it was empty. I made my way to the far end.

And here I faced another locked door.

This was the one that counted.

It could all end here. Or it could all begin.

I knelt in front of the keyhole. From the inside pocket of my coat I took a rolled-up square of felt, cinched around the middle with twine. I drew the knot open and unrolled the cloth. It clanked lightly against the floor.

There were three narrow pockets, and from two of them I drew a machinist’s hammer and a broad-edged chisel. The head of the hammer was a barrel-shaped slug of metal and heavy as hell. I wedged the chisel point into the groove where the shaft of the doorknob met the wooden surface of the door, then swung the hammer down, hard.

It took four blows before the knob came off. I paused after each, certain the clang of metal against metal had been heard. But this deep into the floor the place was silent and still. I went back to work like some ghostly blacksmith, hammering and pausing and hammering again in the darkness until the metal shaft bent and then snapped off, its counterpart falling to the floor on the other side of the door.

With the knob off, I had an opening into which I could insert the third of my tools, which I drew from its pocket now, a tapered hacksaw. Only its long, narrow nose could fit into the hole, but that was enough. I began the process of cutting a squared-off horseshoe shape into the wood around the latch.

I had a bad moment when the blade caught and I couldn’t get it free. I was scared to pull too hard and maybe break the blade. For half a minute, while precious seconds ticked away, I knelt staring at it and did nothing. Then I began easing the blade slowly back and forth. After a tense minute I was able to dislodge it. I wiped my forehead on my sleeve. I started sawing again. Coming back at the same point from underneath, I was able to break through.

I was breathing heavily when the door finally swung open. The luminous dial of my wristwatch showed I’d taken almost an hour at my task. It was 3PM now and it wasn’t unheard of for some of the staff to show up to work before 4. I had to move more quickly.

Or else—

Or else I’d be making the trip back down the airshaft without benefit of handholds and toeholds.

I picked up the broken halves of the doorknob, wrapped them up along with my tools in the felt square, and deposited the bundle in one corner of the empty box. Once inside the counting room, I closed the door and walked up to the safe.

It was the height of a man—a taller man than me. The dial was almost the size of a captain’s wheel from an old schooner, only made of cast iron rather than wood. There were eight stubby metal arms you could use to turn the thing and numbers painted onto the rim in white, zero through 99. No hacksaw or chisel would get you into this beauty. Nothing short of knowing the combination would.

So it was a good thing that I did.

I turned the dial clockwise to 75.

Sal Nicolazzo—Zio Nicolazzo, as he liked to call himself, Uncle Nick—was a sentimental man. A mean bastard, sure, a vicious man, a gambler who’d wager on anything anytime, the bloodier the better—all true. But he fancied himself a good family man who took care of his own. He had family members by birth and marriage on his payroll and even the ones who didn’t work for him he sent money to now and then, a little present when they needed it to keep them in the black.

I spun the dial back the other way to 23.

There was one relative, though, that he couldn’t send presents to, except for flowers once a week, regular as clockwork, to dress her headstone. Her name had been Adelaide Barrone and she’d been his kid sister’s younger daughter. Born in the U.S.A., served in the U.S. Army, died of malaria in North Africa in 1945. She’d been a WAC, and her dogtag number had been A-752344.

I turned the dial to 44.

The door to the safe swung open.

Sentimental bastard. I almost felt sorry for him.

Almost.

The dough was stacked neatly and it took me only ten minutes to transfer it to the box. I stopped when the box was full and the safe was empty, a happy coincidence. I didn’t know how much I’d gotten. There’d be time to count it later.

If there was a later.

A grunt escaped my throat as I lifted the box. I felt a muscle spasm in my back, but didn’t put it down again. No time. I could buy all the heating pads I wanted when I got home.

I retraced my steps as quickly as I could, one lurching step at a time.

Corridor. Backstage. Kitchen.

The dumbwaiter, bless it, was waiting where I’d left it. I slid the box inside, then unwound the rope holding it up and climbed in next to the box. It was a tight fit. Hand over hand, I let the rope play out and the dumbwaiter slowly descended. When we settled at the bottom of the shaft, I peeked through the closed door—lights off, no signs of movement—before raising it. I backed out, pulled the box out after me. Groped through the darkness till I found what I was looking for: one of the deep, fabric-sided carts the maintenance men used for bringing tools and supplies in and garbage and laundry out. The one I found was half full, which was perfect. With a mighty heave I lifted the box over and in, then rearranged the cart’s prior contents to cover it up. I stripped off my coat and hat, balled them up, and shoved them down deep in the cart. Underneath I had on a khaki uniform that marked me as some sort of working stiff—I figured no one would ask precisely what sort. From inside my shirt I pulled a matching khaki cap, unfolded it, and tugged it down over my head, its bill hiding my eyes.

I pushed the cart out of the room, through a long, empty corridor, and up to the gate of the freight elevator. I knocked briskly on the metal gate and a few moments later it slid open, the tired-looking operator inside greeting me with a glazed look. I wheeled the cart inside. He reached for the handle to pull the gate shut again.

Just then, someone called, “Hey, you!”

My heart stopped. Simply stopped.

A man hustled up to the still-open elevator, dragging a lumpy sack behind him.

“You headed back to Jersey?” he said.

“That’s right,” I said.

“Can you take this with you?”

Without waiting for my answer, he swung his sack up and tossed it in my cart.

“Thanks, buddy,” he said, and shuffled off.

“Next time,” the elevator man said, “you guys get everything ready before you make me come. Understand?”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You’re sorry, I’m sorry, everybody’s sorry.” He punched the freight car down to the basement. I stayed at the back of the car, where he’d have had to turn his head to look at me. He didn’t bother.

When he opened the gate again, I pushed the cart out of the elevator, onto the rear loading dock and into the parking area behind the building. I half expected one of the security guards to be waiting for me. Or maybe Mr. N himself, disappointment in his eyes and a pistol in his fist.

But I made it to the street without seeing anyone I knew.

Whistling softly to myself, I wheeled the cart home.

11.

Branded Woman

“Trixie,” Erin hissed, and then Tricia heard it, too: footsteps, coming toward the locker room. Tricia put the book down and darted over to where Erin was standing beside the door. When it opened, they’d be behind it.

It opened. They were behind it.

Two figures staggered in, one with the other’s arm slung across his shoulders, Stella and her trainer. The trainer kicked the door shut without looking back and led her to the bench in front of the lockers. She sank onto it heavily and he started kneading her shoulders as she went at the laces of her glove with her teeth.

“Hello, Stella,” Erin said.

Stella didn’t move, just stopped biting at her laces. Her trainer turned around. He was a fireplug of a man, low and broad, and looked like he might have been an athlete once himself—not a boxer, maybe, but a wrestler, a weightlifter. “Excuse me,” he said, “who are you?”

“We’re friends of your fighter there.”

“Is that true?” he asked Stella.

Stella slowly turned, brought her legs over to the other side of the bench, looked at them. Her face was bruised and there was a trail of blood under one nostril. And the marks on her cheek—looking at them now, Tricia thought they almost looked like letters, like a monogram in raised red welts.

Tricia ran to her. “My god, Stella, what happened to you?”

“I was in a fight,” Stella said. “It’s why the gloves, and trunks, and all.”

“No, I mean your face. What is that?” She bent to look at the welts: a low, wide ‘Z’ next to an ‘N.’ In fact, it wasn’t even two letters, it was the same letter twice, just turned sideways. And her blood ran cold as she realized the significance of those particular letters. ZN. Zio Nicolazzo.

“It should’ve been you, Trixie. Not me. You. You’re the one knows who wrote the book.”

“Nicolazzo did this to you?”

She turned to her trainer. “Could you leave us alone for a minute?”

“You sure you’re okay?” he said.

“Yeah, I’m sure. Go on. I’m fine.” He left reluctantly, watching from the door for a moment before letting it close. “Listen, kid,” Stella said. “You need to know this. I gave you up. I didn’t want to give the bastard anything, but...” She touched the padded tip of one glove to her cheek.

“You know how he did it?” she said. “He’s got a ring with his initial on it, this big goddamn ring, and he held it over the flame from a cigarette lighter, a fancy gold Zippo, and he said, ‘You tell me which of my men betrayed me or you’ll never work as a model again.’ I told him I have no idea. They roughed me up a little, but Jesus, I’ve taken worse than that in my fights, and they knew it. So the ring. He said back in Italy, you’d use it to seal a letter, press it in hot wax. Leave your mark.”

“Oh, god, Stella, I’m so sorry,” Tricia said.

“Well, I’m just telling you, I talked. I told him everything I knew and some things I didn’t. Anything to make him stop.” Stella started biting at her laces again, finally got them loose, stripped off her gloves. Her hands were taped up underneath and the tape was dark with sweat.

“What exactly did you tell him?” Erin said.

“I told him I’d seen Trixie working on the book, that I’d read bits of it before it came out.”

“That’s it?”

“No.” She turned to Trixie. “I said you were sleeping with the guy. That you told me you’d planned the robbery together.”

“What?” Tricia exploded. “Why would you say that?”

“I had to say something. To make him stop.”

“Did he?”

“Eventually.”

“You shouldn’t have lied,” Tricia said.

“You try it sometime, having hot metal pressed into your face, and then tell me what I should or shouldn’t have done.”

“Why’d he even come after you? Why did he think you’d know anything about the robbery?”

“He had his men get copies of all of Charley’s books, and they recognized me on some of the covers. I’ve been fighting here for a while, so they knew where to find me. And then, of course, they found the book in my locker.”

“Yeah,” Erin said, “we found it, too. You think maybe you’d want to get rid of it?”

“I wish I’d never seen it,” Stella said. “I wish I’d never met any of you.”

“Why’d you leave, Stella?” Tricia said. “A month ago. Right around the time of the robbery. Why’d you pick that time to move out?”

“What—you think I had something to do with it? Jesus Christ, after I took this because of you?” She was on her feet suddenly, aiming one taped hand at her scarred face. Tricia saw her fist clench and stepped back, out of range. Stella dropped her hands, disgusted. “Get out of here. Both of you.”

“Not till you answer my question,” Tricia said, trembling but hoping it didn’t show. “We went through a lot to find you. We’re not leaving without an answer.”

“Why’d I move out? Look at me. This is what I look like after a fight—when I win. It’s worse when I lose. Used to be I’d get a fight once a month, once every six weeks. Then about a month ago they offered me a regular gig, this whole ‘Houston Hurricane,’ ‘Colorado Kid’ thing. Good money, good hours, it’s maybe a stepping stone to a stage gig what with all the Broadway types in the audience—but how many modeling jobs am I going to get with bruises like this? Or a split lip, or maybe a broken nose? It was either or. I had to make a choice.”

“Did it occur to you,” Erin said, “that maybe they gave you this regular gig because they wanted to keep closer tabs on you?”

“Not until last night,” Stella said. “While they were doing this.”

“This just happened last night?” Tricia said. “Why’d they wait that long?”

“What, you think they should’ve done it sooner?” Stella growled.

“I don’t mean that, it’s just...why didn’t they?”

“Maybe Nicolazzo wasn’t back in the city yet,” Erin said. “Or maybe they’re getting desperate because no other leads have panned out. They must be pretty desperate to have sent those two goons to Charley’s office.”

“They got Charley?” Stella said.

“No, we chased them off.”

“You got lucky, then. Nicolazzo’s boys are awful mean. Charley’d crumble soon as they laid a finger on him. You, too,” Stella said to Tricia. “They’d break you in two. Not sure about you, Erin. You might last a while.”

“Thanks,” Erin said. “I think.”

“One more question,” Tricia said, “then we’ll go. Who else saw the book before it was published? Or did you tell anyone about it?”

“All the girls saw it. You left it lying around, for Christ’s sake.”

“Anyone else?”

“Well, Colleen—I told her. Don’t ask me why. I just thought she might get a kick out of it. This was back before we got the regular gig.”

“Who’s Colleen?”

“Colleen King, the Colorado Kid. You might see her on the way out—she’ll be the one coming to in the ring. She was one of Nicolazzo’s taxi dancers before he put her in the fight game.”

“Does Nicolazzo know you told her about the book?”

“Nicolazzo knows everything,” Stella said. “Everything. I’m no pushover—but we’ve all got limits. I’ll take it on my face if I have to, but when he started moving that ring south I sang like Mahalia Jackson.”

Tricia nodded. What could you say to that? She walked to the door, Erin close behind. Stella watched them go.

“I’m sorry this happened,” Tricia said, her hand on the knob. “I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt. I—” She stopped abruptly.

“What?” Stella said.

Tricia felt the knob turning under her hand. Oh, no, she said to herself. Let it be the trainer coming back. Or Colleen King, coming in to peel her gloves off and change. Or Squinty, with his broom.

But it wasn’t.

12.

Dutch Uncle

“O-ho,” said the smaller one, “look who’s here.” The larger one ground his knuckles together like a kid warming himself in front of a fire.

“We were just leaving,” Erin said.

“I’m sure you were. You’re not anymore, but I’m sure you were.”

The big one reached inside his coat and brought out something wrapped in brown burlap.

“You can’t keep us here,” Tricia said.

“Who said anything about keeping you here?”

“You did,” Tricia said. “You just said we’re not leaving.”

“What are you, a lawyer? I meant you’re not leaving us.” He snapped his fingers at his partner, who was untangling the burlap. “Bruno, come on, the boss is waiting.”

Bruno finished pulling apart the wad of fabric, but there was nothing inside it—it was just burlap, all the way through. He walked up to Tricia, handed her a piece, then gave another to Erin and crammed the rest back in his deep coat pocket. “Put them on,” he said in his gravel pit voice and mimed pulling something over his head.

Tricia saw the drawstring then, sticking out at the bottom, and realized it was a sack, the sort potatoes come in.

“I’m not putting a bag over my head,” Erin said.

“If she doesn’t,” the other one said, “put it on her.”

“What are you going to do to them?” Stella said.

“What business is it of yours?” the smaller man said. “You didn’t have enough last night?”

Stella said nothing.

“That’s better.”

“People will be looking for us,” Erin said.

“You mean your boss, Borden? You’ll be seeing him soon enough.”

So they’d gotten Charley after all. Tricia’s heart sank.

“I mean the cops,” Erin said. “We’re wanted for assault. After you left, a cop named O’Malley tried to take her in—” she nodded toward Tricia “—and we knocked him out, tied him up. They’re going to be looking for both of us. I don’t know that you want to be seen in our company.”

“Then it’s a good thing you’re going to have bags over your heads, isn’t it? Now, quit talking and put ‘em on.” And he whipped out a revolver to emphasize his point. Reluctantly, Tricia opened her bag. She saw Erin doing the same.

The bag smelled musty and earthy as she pulled it over her head, as though it actually had held potatoes sometime recently. Through its coarse weave she could only see a hint of light. She felt a rough hand at her elbow, steering her toward the door.

“You really knocked out a cop?” she heard the smaller man say.

“Yeah,” Erin said. Her voice was muffled. “We really did.”

“With what?”

“Desk lamp.”

“That brass one?” the man said. “Good for you.”

He didn’t say any more till they were in the car. “All right, now you’re going to go in and up two flights of stairs. You’re going to keep the bag on till I tell you to take it off, understand?”

They’d been driving for the better part of an hour, making enough turns along the way that Tricia had no idea where they were. Which, presumably, was the point.

Something hard poked her in the side. “Understand?”

Tricia hadn’t realized he was waiting for an answer from her. “Yes, I understand. Two flights of stairs, keep the bag on.”

“Until what?”

“Until you say so.”

“Good. Now, you.”

Apparently he’d poked Erin, since she said, “Cut it out. I understand.”

“No, for you the rules are different. You’re going downstairs, to the cellar, where Bruno will keep an eye on you. You do whatever he tells you to. Understand?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No.”

“Well, then,” Erin said.

“Hey, Mitch,” came a low voice from the front seat, “where does he want them, out front or in the back?”

Tricia felt the leg pressed against hers in the back seat tense. Apparently Mitch didn’t much mind them knowing Bruno’s name but hadn’t meant for them to know his.

“In the back,” Mitch barked. “And keep your mouth shut from now on.”

“What?” Bruno said. “Why?”

“You know what,” Mitch said. “And you know why.”

“I don’t, Mitch—”

Tricia felt the man next to her lean forward, heard a slap of metal against flesh. The car swerved a little. Bruno kept his mouth shut from then on.

When the car drew to a stop, she was led out by the elbow, across a stretch of what felt like gravel underfoot, and through a door that could’ve used a bit of oil on its hinges. On the way up the stairs inside, Tricia counted 37, 38, 39 steps and she was suddenly reminded of a movie she’d seen when she was a kid, at the local picture palace in Aberdeen. It was an old one, made before she was born, but she’d enjoyed it, people chasing each other around with guns, all sorts of peril and adventure. It had all seemed like so much fun then, when all she had to do was sit in the dark and watch it happen to people up on the screen. She’d never thought someday she’d be marched up a flight of stairs at gunpoint herself.

“Stop.” Mitch walked around in front of her and she heard a door opening. “Okay.” A hand at her shoulder pushed her forward. After she’d taken a few steps—onto a thick carpet, it felt like—he said, “You can take the bag off.”

Tricia didn’t wait to be told twice. She dropped the sack on the ground and took in big gulps of air as she looked around the room they were in. It was a sort of a library, with bookshelves running from the floor to the ceiling all the way around. The spines of the books were mostly dark leather with gold lettering, though a few looked newer, with paper dust jackets, and on one table she saw a disorderly stack of familiar-looking paperbacks. The one on top was I Robbed the Mob! and she winced when she saw its condition. The cover was bent back, several pages folded down or torn. Next to it she saw Stella staring up at her from the front of The Crimson Cravat by Bill Grewer. Someone had circled Stella’s face in red ink.

“Young lady,” a man’s voice said, and Tricia hunted about for its source. She found it finally in a doorway off to one side, where a fat man stood wiping his hands on a towel. He was wearing a scarlet vest, a watch chain stretched across it like the equator on a globe. His shirt looked like silk, his hair like the sleek black coat of a wet seal. He tossed the hand towel onto a chair and came forward.

“Young lady,” he said again, “I hope you don’t think me rude, but let me tell you I am very disappointed in you. Very disappointed.”

Tricia recognized him from the newspaper photos she’d seen, but only barely. The scar was there, the heavy brows—but his body had ballooned from years of luxurious shipboard living and his already swarthy skin was baked a deep, nut brown. He had on a medallion on a gold chain, glittering under his open shirt, and he had rings on three of his fingers. He looked like a portly pirate captain, she thought, lacking only the beard and eyepatch to complete the picture.

“Mr. Nicolazzo,” Tricia said, “I’m sorry you—”

“Nick,” he said. “Uncle Nick.”

“Nick,” she said.

“Uncle Nick,” he said. “It’s what everyone calls me.”

“Okay, Uncle Nick. I’m sorry you—”

“Don’t apologize. It makes you sound weak, like a little girl. Stand up for yourself. You’re going to steal from powerful men like me, you’ve got to face the music like a grown-up.”

“I didn’t steal from you,” Tricia said.

“Ah, that’s even worse than apologizing. Lying, and so poorly too. Come, now, child, do you think your Uncle Nick is a fool? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“No, sir. Not at all.”

“Stand up straight.”

She straightened, a sense of annoyance and embarrassment mingling with fear. She could see, as he waved his hands about, the backwards letter N protruding from the ring on his right index finger.

“I’m told I owe you something—Trixie, is it? I’m told audiences come to the Sun each night just to see you. Not to listen to Roberto’s wretched music, not to see the other dancer—to see you. You’ve made me a good deal of money, with your dancing. I have been encouraged by my manager at the Sun not to harm you physically. I’d be stabbing myself in the pocketbook, if you take my meaning.

“But Trixie, you have been a bad girl. A very bad girl. You’ve cost me a good deal of money, and more than just money. There’s also the respect of my peers, you’ve cost me that as well—and that’s not the end of it either. As I believe you know, there was more than money in my safe the day of the break-in; and there is less than money in it now. This is not acceptable. What was taken I must have returned. If you refuse, I promise you, pocketbook or no pocketbook, you will suffer.”

“Mr. Nic—” she started, but he raised a warning finger. “Uncle Nick. I don’t know who robbed you. Honest, I don’t know. I didn’t even know till today that you had been robbed.”

“Your friend Stella told me otherwise. Are you calling her a liar?”

“Absolutely,” Tricia said. “But it’s hardly her fault. I mean, with what you were doing to her.”

“What I was doing? What I was doing?” He looked around incredulously, seeking a bit of justice in an unjust world. “My nightclub gets broken into and robbed, and I’m the one that’s doing wrong? Madonn’.”

“You branded her on the cheek!”

“I let her off easy,” he said. “Do not expect me to do the same for you.”

“What do you want me to say? I can’t tell you something I don’t know.”

“Very simple,” Nicolazzo said. “Who was it? Which of my men seduced you into helping him rob me, and then had the palle to write a book about it? You’ll notice I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt—I am assuming you didn’t seduce him into doing it.”

“Nobody seduced anyone,” Tricia said. “I had nothing to do with the robbery. Nothing.”

He picked up the paperback, waved it at her. “But somebody told you this story.”

“No,” Tricia said. “I just made it up—all of it, out of my imagination. None of it really happened. None of it was supposed to, anyway.”

“But it did happen,” Nicolazzo said. “Just the way it’s described in here: the broken window, the chiseled doorknob, the sawn-open door, the missing cart. And the empty safe. For heaven’s sake, child, if you made it all up, how could you possibly know the combination to my safe?”

“You mean it was right?” Tricia said, and he glared at her. “I just guessed! I’d read the Daily News article about your sister and her daughters and the flowers every week for the one who died, and I needed a combination for the safe, and I just thought, well, what would I choose if I were him?”

“That’s preposterous,” Nicolazzo said. “You should be ashamed of yourself, concocting such an absurd story.”

“It’s the truth.”

He waved a hand in Mitch’s direction. “Bring one of them up here,” he said. Then to Tricia: “We will see how long you continue to lie when the life of someone you care about is at stake.”

Mitch left the room. She heard him stomp down the stairs, then the creak of the door, then a few minutes later two sets of footsteps returning. When they reached the top she expected to see Erin or Charley come marching out, hands raised, but instead it was Roberto Monge, his wrists tied behind his back, stumbling as Mitch prodded him with his gun.

“Ah, Roberto,” Nicolazzo said, patting the bandleader on the side of his face. “Pretty soon they’ll be waiting for you at the club. For both of you. What will they do when you don’t show up? Elect another bandleader? Maybe Joey with the clarinet? Or Hugo with the drums?”

Monge didn’t reply. His skin was pale and Tricia saw sweat beading at his hairline. His eyes kept darting over to her, then back at Nicolazzo.

“Robbie. Robbie. Did you do this thing to me? You and your little dancer?”

“No—no, Uncle Nick,” Monge said. His voice was shaking. “She is nothing to me, this one. You know I love my wife.”

“Your wife,” Nicolazzo said. “She was my niece before she was your wife, Robbie. And maybe you love her, maybe not, but your little minchia, she likes to wander, no? Maybe I should get a knife, cut her off, so she can wander far away?”

Monge was shaking his head. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I don’t have to,” Nicolazzo said, “but maybe I should.”

“I haven’t touched another woman in three years, I swear it!”

But Nicolazzo had already turned his attention back to Tricia. “Is this the one? Did you devise this robbery with him?”

“I barely even know him,” Tricia said. “I do a dance number twice a night for his band, that’s it.”

“If that’s so,” Nicolazzo said, reaching into his pants pocket and drawing out a bit of polished black wood with metal caps at either end, “you won’t mind seeing him bleed a little bit.” He pressed one of the studs along its length and a spring-loaded stiletto blade shot out.

“Of course I mind,” Tricia said. “You can’t do that.”

“I can’t? Ah, but you know I can, I see it in your eyes. Good girl. I make you a deal: You tell me who robbed me and if it’s not him, I let him go.”

“I told you, I don’t know.”

Mitch gripped Monge by the elbows and Nicolazzo drew the blade lightly against his chin. A thin line of blood formed.

“Stop it!” Tricia said.

“Tell me who did it,” Nicolazzo said, “and I’ll stop.”

“All right,” Tricia said desperately. She pointed at Mitch. “He did it. Mitch did. With Bruno. They did it together. It was them. I didn’t want to tell you with him in the room, but it was the two of them.”

“Boss, it’s not true—” Mitch said.

“Of course not,” Nicolazzo told him. To Tricia he said, “Enough. I lose patience. You’ll tell me what I want to know or say goodbye to your boyfriend here.” He nicked Robbie again, beneath the ear this time.

“He’s not my boyfriend!”

“Who robbed me?”

“I don’t know!”

“You don’t believe I will do it,” Nicolazzo said. “It’s too bad. Next time you will.” He looked in the doomed man’s eyes. “Stronzo. I’ve wanted to do this since the wedding.” And switching to an overhand grip, he buried the blade in Monge’s chest.

“No,” Tricia shouted, and ran to him, but Nicolazzo grabbed her, his arms like steel bands around her chest, his bulk an impassable obstacle. Mitch let Monge’s body down slowly to the floor, where his blood spilled onto a circular throw rug that almost looked as if it had been put there for the purpose of catching it. He pulled the knife out of Monge’s shuddering chest, wiped it off with a handkerchief, and made it disappear inside his jacket.

“Now we send you down to the cellar, to think,” Nicolazzo said, his breath hot against her face. “You think carefully for your old Uncle, eh? You come back with answers, my dear, or more of your friends will die. You don’t want that, do you?”

Tricia felt her stomach heave. How had everything gone so terribly wrong?

Nicolazzo pushed her into Mitch’s arms. “Take her downstairs,” he said. “Put her in with the boxer, not with Borden or the other girl. I don’t want them hatching any schemes together.” He wiped his palms against the seat of his pants. “Then come back and—” he waved a hand at his employee’s body, at the bloody rug “—clean this up.”

“Yes, sir,” Mitch said.

Nicolazzo raised a finger and wagged it in stern correction. “What’s this ‘sir’?” he said. “Yes, Uncle.”

13.

The Colorado Kid

The boxer, Tricia thought as Mitch led her downstairs, the burlap sack over her head once more. That’s what he’d said: Put her in with the boxer. It wouldn’t be Stella—it had to be the other one, this Colleen King. The Colorado Kid. Another innocent, dragged into this for no reason. Unless, of course—

Unless she was the one who had robbed the place. Unless she’d pumped Stella for information about the book and decided to carry out the heist she’d heard described. But how could that be? Anyone who thought the book was a true story would have thought the robbery had already taken place—and anyone who thought it was fiction would have no reason to think the plan would actually work. Especially the combination to the safe. Who would risk everything on the remote possibility that a made-up combination might just possibly be correct? Of course, it apparently had been. But no one could have counted on that. And you don’t risk your life on a guess.

Tricia heard a key going into a lock and the cylinder turning, then the hammer of a gun being drawn back. “Miss King,” Mitch called out, “I’m coming in. I’m bringing you a roommate. I’ve also got a gun. If you’re not at least five feet away when I open this door, I’ll shoot you dead, do we understand each other?”

A woman’s voice came through the door: “Yes.”

“All right. Just step back, keep your distance, and no one’ll get hurt.” Tricia heard the door swing open. “That’s good, like that. With your hands up, please.”

From the other end of the room, the woman said something that was a little hard for Tricia to make out, the sound muffled by the sack. It sounded like, “Who is she?”

“Girl named Trixie,” Mitch said. “No one you know. She’s a friend of your sparring partner.” He touched Tricia on the shoulder. “You can take the bag off when you hear the door close.”

Tricia waited till she heard the latch click into place, then turned and ran to the door, tearing off the bag as she went. She tried the knob. Already locked. She rattled it, tugged at it, rammed the door with her shoulder. Nothing.

“Don’t bother,” the other woman said, from behind her. “I’ve tried, and I’m bigger than you are.” The voice was improbably familiar, and when, after a second, she realized why, Tricia’s blood ran cold. It couldn’t be.

Tricia turned to face her.

They stared at each other, dumbstruck. The other woman (the Colorado Kid? why not Nebraska, at least?) stood up from the bunk where she’d been sitting, came forward into the light. “Patty?” she said.

“Cory?” Tricia said.

14.

The Girl With the Long Green Heart

Coral Heverstadt, Tricia’s older sister, had been born the year before Alfred Hitchcock made his movie The 39 Steps and been gone by the time Tricia found herself sitting in the dark in the Aberdeen Cinerama watching it. She’d lasted at home two years longer than Tricia, moving out the day of her twentieth birthday rather than her eighteenth. She’d been better made for rural life, with her wide, powerful legs and muscular frame. She could push a loaded barrow through mud half a foot deep or lift a hundred-pound bag of feed, if not barehanded then with the assistance only of a pair of heavy work gloves, and so had found work reliably on the farms on the outskirts of town. Tricia, at fourteen, still child-small and fencerailthin, had looked up to her with an admiration bordering on awe.

Her odd jobs had meant Coral always had some cash in her pocket—not much, perhaps, but enough to treat her kid sister to lunch or a movie or a treat from the drugstore, with its spinning wire racks of brightly colored novels. She’d enjoyed the feel of folding money under her fingers, the freedom it imparted—to do what she wanted, to go where she wanted. But the amount you could make for pushing barrows and lifting feed bags was limited. A few dollars here, a few there. She wanted more. And so she began a quest for more remunerative employment, finding work as a waitress, a bar hostess, a day-shift worker at the 3M plant running the machine that wound the Scotch tape onto those little spools. In each of these roles, she confided to Tricia as they lay in their beds at night in the room they shared, she found herself the center of a certain amount of attention—male attention, to put a finer point on it. Coral took after their mother and was big all over, not just her muscles but her feminine parts, and the local farmboys and mill workers and 3M middle managers gazed at her appreciatively as she approached and longingly as she passed.

These were men with wives at home and families, but they also had money in the bank—not the farmboys so much, but the middle managers for sure—and not just the drugstore-treat variety either. They had dough, in the vernacular of the paperback novels Tricia devoured so eagerly—cabbage, lettuce, mazuma, the long green. And they spent it on her happily. They took her out for meals, bought her gifts, once even paid for an overnight business trip to Sioux Falls. And in return they expected, well...to hear Coral tell it, never anything worse than a kiss or a hug, maybe gave her a pinch now and then, but she sternly told them off if they made any advances less proper than that. Anyway, that’s what she told her sister at the time, and it was the picture she continued to paint of her experiences in her letters back home after she left the Great Prairie for the Big Apple. She was a good girl, if occasionally put upon by a certain predatory type of male, and well equipped to handle herself, thank you very much.

So when, precisely, had she become a lady boxer?

Coral sank back onto the thinly padded bunk beside her sister and told the rest of the story.

Some of the pinches had actually been pokes, and not all of them with a finger, either; at age twenty-one, on her own in New York City, she’d found herself in the family way, and she could only conceal her growing belly beneath the cigarette tray she wore at her job for so long. They fired her when they found out—what else could she expect?—and she found herself struggling at once both with morning sickness and a fast-declining balance in her bank account.

So she went to the man who’d knocked her up—no use for nicer language than that, it’s what he’d done—and told him she’d pay a visit to his fiancée, the daughter of a powerful and unforgiving man, if he didn’t restock her account on the double and keep it filled for the duration. It wasn’t blackmail, she felt; it was just collecting what she was due. A man should pay for his own child.

That child, Arthur Lyle Heverstadt, came howling into the world on January 4, 1955, in the middle of a terrible snowstorm that snarled traffic on the way to the hospital. She gave birth, in fact, in the frigid back seat of a checker cab, the driver—who kept repeating that he’d been a medic at Guadalcanal—helping with the delivery from the folded-down jumpseat beside her.

“Not really,” Tricia said, interrupting her sister at this improbable juncture. “You didn’t really have a baby in the back of a taxicab, did you?”

Coral nodded. “It sounds worse than it was. He got me to St. Vincent’s eventually, and the baby was fine. He’s three now, Artie. Almost four.”

“Artie.”

“He’s the sweetest child, Patty.”

“And that’s the man you live with,” Tricia said. “The one you couldn’t tell me about the day I came to town. The reason you didn’t let me stay with you, not even for one night.”

“I didn’t want you to know,” Coral said. “I didn’t want mama to know.”

“I wouldn’t have told her.”

“You say that now,” Coral said.

“Who watches him while you’re working? Who’s with him now?”

“A couple of other girls who live there. They help me out and I give them a few bucks when I can.”

Tricia nodded slowly. “And you became a boxer how?”

Coral shrugged. “A baby has to eat. His mother, too. I took the work I could get. I’m not eighteen anymore, Patty. I’m not twenty-one. I’ll be twenty-five next year, I’ve had a kid, and there’s a new crop of bright young things each year for the men in this town to look at.”

“Like me, you mean.”

“Like you,” Coral said. “Look at you, blonde as anything. What’d he call you? Trixie?”

“It was your idea, giving a fake name,” Tricia said. “Colleen.”

“The two of us,” Coral said softly. “If mama could see us now.”

“I still don’t understand how you ended up...like this. I thought you were working as a dancer.”

“I was—I worked at a club called the Moon run by a man named Nicolazzo.”

“Uncle Nick,” Tricia said.

“You know him?”

“I’m sorry to say I do,” Tricia said. “I work for him too. At the Sun.”

“No—really? Doing what? Dancing?” Tricia nodded. “That’s funny. I worked there for a while, but only after hours. Cleaning.” Coral brushed her hair out of her face, uncovering a darkening bruise on one cheek. “Well, I’m sure dancing at the Sun’s a whole other story. At the Moon it was horrible.”

“Worse than getting punched in the face?”

“Oh, yeah,” Coral said. “Much. On your feet for hours at a stretch every night. Every sort of man pressing up against you, thinking you’re his for a handful of dimes. I’d rather take a punch any day.”

“So Nicolazzo made you a fighter,” Tricia said. “And now he thinks you robbed him.”

“He does?”

“Either that or he thinks you know who did. That’s why he’s got you here. It’s why he’s got me. And he just killed a man for less. I saw him do it.”

Coral sank her head into her hands. “Patty,” she said, after a moment, “I need you to promise me something. If you get out of this and I don’t, you’ll take Artie back home to Aberdeen.”

“Don’t even talk like that.”

“I’ve got to,” Coral said.

“No.”

“I do,” Coral said. “You see, Nicolazzo’s right. I did rob him.”

“What are you talking about?” Tricia said. “What do you mean you...Cory, why would you do that?”

“Stella told me about this book she’d seen. That gave me the idea,” Coral said. “I didn’t seriously plan to do it. But all that money—you know what I could do with a tenth part of that much money? You know the clothes and things I could buy for Artie? For me?”

“But stealing from a man like Nicolazzo—”

“I know, I know.” She wiped the back of one hand against her eye. “It was stupid. But you know, it came in baby steps. There was an opening on the cleaning crew at the Sun. So I asked if I could do a couple afternoons a week, and they said yes. And there I am, washing the dishes and cleaning the carpets, and I can’t stop thinking about that book. The big safe in the back, like Stella described it. I didn’t want to think about it, but you spend a couple of hours polishing floors and your mind starts to wander.”

“Cory...”

“No, listen. I was thinking about it but I wasn’t going to do anything—it was just something to daydream about. But then one day I’m working there and I hear some banging. You know, hammering. And my first thought is, It’s maintenance, they’re fixing something. But my second thought is, This is like that book. Maybe someone’s breaking in. And part of me is thinking, I’d better stay away. But the other part’s thinking, Why? Maybe this is my one big chance.” She reached out for Tricia’s hands, held them in her lap. “So I finish up what I’m doing and start hunting around, where I heard the sound coming from, and when I get there what do you think I find? There’s a door standing open with the knob cut out and sure enough the safe’s there, and its door’s open, too. And the thing’s been emptied!”

“Emptied?” Tricia said. “Then someone else robbed him, not you.”

“Well,” Coral said. “Not completely emptied. There was a box in the very back, a flat leather box in the corner. It was dark. Whoever’d been there before me must have missed it.”

“And you took it?”

“It was small,” Coral said, squeezing Tricia’s hands tight enough that it hurt. “I didn’t even look inside till I got it home. I just grabbed it and ran.”

“And what was in it?”

Before Coral could answer, they both heard the key in the lock, then the click of a gun being armed. “Ladies,” Mitch said through the door, “I’m coming in.”

15.

The Gutter and the Grave

“What was in it?” Tricia whispered. “Coral, quick!”

“Pictures,” Coral whispered back.

“Ladies?” Mitch called. “Make some sound so I know you hear me.”

“We hear you,” Tricia shouted. “And we’re nowhere near the door.” Then in a low voice to Coral, “What sort of pictures? You mean like dirty pictures?”

“Not the way you mean,” Coral whispered, her words all rushing together. “It was dead people, murdered, lying in the street. There was one where they shot a man outside a bar, he was lying in the gutter, must’ve had fifteen bullet holes in him. And you could see who shot him. They were standing over him with their guns out.”

“You recognize who they were?”

“Yeah, one of them was—”

But the door had swung open and Mitch had walked in, gun extended before him in one hand. “What are you girls gossiping about?”

“Nothing,” Tricia said.

“Get over here,” Mitch said, “pick that up,” gesturing toward the sack lying on the floor, “and put it on. He wants to see you again.”

Tricia stood. “It was good to meet you, Colleen,” she said. “I hope to see you fight someday when this is all over.”

Coral didn’t say anything. Tricia pulled the bag on and followed Mitch out the door.

Upstairs, when the bag came off, Tricia found herself looking at Charley Borden. He gave her a wan smile. His hands were tied behind him and his hair was disheveled. He had on a vest and pinstriped pants, but the suit jacket that went with them was nowhere to be seen. Strewn on the ground at his feet were the contents of his pockets: a leather wallet, a comb, some coins, a pack of playing cards, some keys on a metal ring.

Nicolazzo paced in a little circle between them, a few steps forward and a few back, saying nothing, just glaring at each of them in turn. In one hand he held his stiletto, playing idly with the blade, springing it out and pulling it back in. There wasn’t a trace of blood on it that Tricia could see, or on the circular patch of carpet where the throw rug had been.

“So, my dear,” Nicolazzo said, “have you decided to tell me what you know, or shall we have another round of mumblety-peg?”

“You can save your breath,” Borden said. “She doesn’t know anything.”

“My friend, it’s your breath you should be worried about conserving, not mine.” Nicolazzo held the blade up to Borden’s throat and turned to Tricia. “So? What have you got to say?”

“I don’t know where your money is,” Tricia said, “or who took it. That’s the plain truth.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Nicolazzo said.

“But I do know,” Tricia continued, and her voice only trembled a little as she said it, “what else was stolen from your safe.”

Nicolazzo’s eyes narrowed.

“It’s photographs, isn’t it?” Tricia said, her mind clicking along, trying to make sense of what Coral had told her. A man lying in the gutter, dead. Other men standing over him with guns—one of whom Coral had recognized. Coral, who’d worked for Nicolazzo and so would have known some of Uncle Nick’s other employees. “Incriminating photographs,” she said. “The sort you’d keep in your safe in case you ever needed to use them, but that you otherwise wouldn’t want anyone else ever to see. Photos of your own men—something you can hold over their heads to keep them in line, maybe?” Off to one side, she saw Mitch shift uncomfortably.