The Hour of the Cat (30 page)

“Right this way, Mr. Dunne, your table is waiting.” The maître d' hurriedly pocketed the hefty tip Dunne gave him. He seated them on the terrace, next to the dance floor. The evening was so mild and clear that the awning had been rolled back. Dunne let the maître d' select a bottle of red wine for them.

“Here's to Lady Luck.” Dunne touched the rim of his glass to hers.

“We're on the side of goodness and truth, remember?”

“Ever know that to be the winning side?”

“Elba thinks it is.”

“Have you told her the truth?”

She took a cigarette from the crystal cylinder on the table. “About what?”

Dunne lit it for her. “About you, Wilfredo, everything. She'll figure it out for herself sooner or later. She's a smart girl, like her mother.”

Roberta rested the cigarette in the ashtray. “Excuse me. I need a moment.” She removed a tissue from her purse and touched it to the corners of her eyes.

“Take your time.” He sipped his wine.

“You figured it out for yourself?”

“Should have known from the start.”

“Why didn't you?” She put the tissue back in her purse.

“Detectives and dimwits. You're the one said they're hard to tell apart.”

“What clued you in?”

He pointed upward. “The stars.”

“What'd they tell you?”

“A story about a girl who learns early how to make her way in the world and wants to spare her daughter all the bitter lessons she's had to learn for herself.”

“You're not such a dimwit.”

“I didn't buy that bunk about ‘goodness and truth' for a minute. There had to be another reason why you'd be so interested in Elba. In the end, I could only think of one.”

“In the end there is only one.”

“Let's have it.”

“Long or short version?” She put out her cigarette.

“The truth, that's all.”

The maître d' came to take their dinner order. Dunne said they needed more time. “If you wish,” he said, “I could bring you our special steak.” Dunne nodded. “Where were we?” he said.

“
Genesis
, chapter one, verse one. My parents met in the needle trade. She was a country girl from Sicily. He was a Jewish tailor from Polish Silesia. He died when I was two, and my mother moved us from the Lower East Side to a flat in Brooklyn, in East New York. She thought I'd follow her into the trade, meet a hard-working stiff like my father and save our money in a jar above the sink. I thought I'd go to college, become a Fifth Avenue doctor, have a penthouse overlooking Central Park, a country home on the North Shore, and sail first-class to Europe every summer.

“Neither of us got our way. I dropped out of high school after a year but there was no way I was going to schlep on the subway every day to Grand Street to sew dresses. I traveled with a fast crowd on Rockaway Avenue. Before long, some of them got arrested for possession of stolen property. They pinched the rest of us for vagrancy.

“Mamma went to the parish priest. He told her to pray harder. Then she went to see my father's brother, Uncle Manny, who was in with all the politicians. He had a talk with the judge in the Magistrate's Court, and I was sent to Cedar Knolls, the female part of the Jewish reformatory, up in Hawthorne. Far as I was concerned, might as well have been Alaska. ‘Not to worry,' Uncle Manny told my mother. ‘They got a better class of delinquents than you'd find among the goyim.'

“I made a lot of friends at Cedar Knolls. Two of the closest were from Allen Street, where all the brothels were, and they clued me in how working girls found a way to support themselves better than any seamstress or shop clerk could hope for. We escaped together from Cedar Knolls. I won't bore you with the particulars since I'm sure you already made it your business to see my record, except the part that isn't in there, when I got out of Cedar Knolls a second time.”

She turned her wine glass slowly, breathed the aroma, and finished what was left. The maître d' quickly refilled their glasses. “One night,” Roberta said, “some friends and I were at the Club Trocadero when this gorgeous Latin type sends over a bottle of champagne. He asked me to dance. He moved like no man I'd ever met.”

“Enter Wilfredo.”

“Yes.”

“How old were you?”

“Sixteen, but I looked twenty. I was an early bloomer. Elba got that from me.”

“Wilfredo was at Columbia?”

“How'd you know that?”

“Elba told me that much.”

“He didn't do much studying. We ended up spending the next few months together. I told him I was an aspiring actress. He actually thought I was rehearsing for a part when I told him I was pregnant. He was shocked and horrified the way boys are when they get reminded of the connection between sex and babies. That's when he told me he was scheduled to go home the next week. I asked for money for an abortion. He begged me not to. Said he'd pay all the expenses and arrange to have the baby adopted. His conscience bothered him enough to stick around a few extra months. But not enough to stay for Elba's birth. I was alone for that.

“Few years later, I would have known what to do and done it pronto. But I was a kid. Immediately after the baby was born, she was sent to the Foundling Hospital, which Wilfredo had arranged, and then it was over. Wilfredo and the baby were gone.” She leaned back her head, as if to see the stars. Dunne took another cigarette from the cylinder, lit it. and handed it to her. She took a long drag, then looked down and exhaled. “Did the stars already tell you any of this?” she said.

“Once I figured out why you were so hot to keep Elba from the clutches of the good-time Charlies, the outline was pretty clear.” Dunne glanced up at the stars. It was a story repeated an endless number of times in an endless number of places. The philosopher-types called it “the human condition,” which didn't quite describe the disparities in the way the worst parts of that condition were handed out, nor dull the pain when you got more than your share. In that case, Dunne knew, a cigarette offered more instant solace than any philosopher.

After a final puff, she rubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “Where was I?”

“Alone.”

“Alone, yes, and faced with having to support myself, which I managed. I never imagined I'd hear from Wilfredo again, but he wrote me from Cuba and not just a now-and-then note. I got a stream of apologetic, remorseful letters. He sent me money but I sent it back. I told him to stop writing, told him I was working as a hooker and what I needed was clients, not pity. He stopped. Unfortunately, he's always been an incurable idealist. He also has a compassionate heart. Unknown to me, he arranged to have the baby brought to Cuba and raised by his aunt as a cosseted, privileged convent girl. That lasted until the political situation destroyed their privacy and safety.

“Meantime, I'd done what most desperate, lonely girls do. I got married. He was a shining prince, a decorated doughboy, blonde, blue-eyed, and full of fun. We moved to his hometown of Hartford. It wasn't long before I discovered the prince was a frog. Second time he knocked me around, I was on the next train back to New York. Looked up Lenny Moss when I got back. Fixed me with a job right away.”

“Noticed right off that when you mentioned his trial, you left out he was a pimp,” Dunne said.

“He never hit a girl or held anybody against her will.”

“A regular Francis of Assisi.”

“Compared to Charlie Luciano he was.”

“How long you work for Lenny?”

“Not long. Set myself up in a couple of different houses. The madams were sensible and businesslike. Knew most of the girls were there only until they got the money to do something else. Some were on the greedy side, for sure, but there was no strong-arm stuff, and they always provided a doctor or a lawyer if you needed one.”

The maître d' stood by as a waiter brought their dinner. Dunne ordered another bottle of wine, which was quickly delivered.

“That's when Lucky Luciano elbowed his way in?”

“Luciano and his crew ran over the madams, pimps, girls, all of us, forced us into one big combine and squeezed the life out of everyone, especially the girls, and when there was no work left in them, tossed them into the street, or into the river.”

“You were working for Rita Vander at the time?”

“You remember Rita?”

“Remembered the name soon as I saw it on your sheet. She was murdered not long after I left the police department. Case was never solved.”

“Murdered is too nice a description. Rita was tortured and mutilated. She'd run one of the best houses in the city and took guff from no one. When the combine moved in, she threatened to make a stink. Next day, they found her floating hog-tied in the East River with her tongue cut out. Nobody had to be told who was responsible, but somehow the police managed to be baffled and left it unsolved.”

“That's when you went out on your own?”

“I probably should have applied to medical school, but despite all I'd learned about anatomy, I figured they still wouldn't take me. At first, myself and a few other girls simply dropped out of sight. I kept thinking about how to make the system work for us instead of the other way around. Figured out that if we set up ourselves as a system of independent operators, pooling a part of our money to retain a doctor, a lawyer, and our own central booking service, we could protect ourselves as well as keep the largest share of the profits. It would require being highly discreet, sticking to a select list of customers, preferably businessmen, and only taking those recommended by at least two other customers, but I was confident we could pull it off.

“We built up a dependable clientele. One or two of the girls got scared and ran back to the combine, but they never ratted on us. Before long we had a very nice business. Couple of the girls even married their clients. An executive at Time Inc. A congressman. By their own decision, the girls decided to give me an extra cut of the profits for overseeing the operation. The only customer I kept was my first, Clem Babcock. The money was good and, believe it or not, I was afraid I'd hurt him if I ended our arrangement. Funny thing is, now I suspect he kept seeing me for the same reason.”

“When did Wilfredo show up again?”

“Two-and-a-half years ago. A phone call out of the blue. Thought it might be a joke at first, a heavily accented voice asking for Rosalinda Dorsch.”

“How'd he find you?”

“Part luck, part effort. Wilfredo was a steady customer of the West Side cathouses. He knew I was in the business. I'd written him that much. He kept asking the girls he was with if they'd ever heard of Rosalinda Dorsch. One day, bingo, he found a girl named Lina Linnet, who had.”

“That's when he told you about Elba?”

“We arranged to meet at the Bickford's on 34th and Eighth. I didn't recognize him when he walked in, a bloated man in an ill-fitting suit, so unlike the Wilfredo I remembered. The real shock was to hear about our daughter, and the kicker came when he told me that because of the political situation in Cuba, he'd brought her to New York. Had her in a Catholic girls' college in the Bronx but couldn't afford to keep her there and, besides, she wanted to get out on her own and open a dress shop.”

“So you gave the money to Wilfredo to set her up in her shop?”

“Yes.”

“Then became a customer and had your associates buy their clothes there too.”

“Yes.”

“Nice work if you can get it.”

“At the start it was a charade, yet Elba ran a first-class business and built her own clientele. First time I saw her, I was struck by how much she looked like Wilfredo. Over time, as I came to know her, I saw how ambitious she is, how determined to make her own way, how sure that if she persists, things will turn out all right.” She paused and rubbed the edge of her wine glass with her index finger. “I was like that once.”

The maître d' reappeared to inquire if there was something wrong with the food they'd barely touched. They cut into their steaks. He poured more wine. They ate in silence for a few minutes before Roberta put down her knife and fork and wiped her lips with her napkin. “There's not a chance Wilfredo did what he's been convicted of. I've been with every kind of man, good, bad, the worst. Wilfredo was always a gentleman, and though he drank, he was one of the few who, the more he had, the quieter and more passive he became. The prosecution painted him as half man, half animal, and the reporters' only interest was in hurrying him along to the electric chair.”

“Wilfredo helped in that regard.”

“He wants to die out of shame at the monster the papers pictured him as.”

“He's close to getting his wish.”

“Elba can't let go. She's been torn apart by this. She hired one detective who took her money and tried to take her to bed. I straightened him out and got her money back. Then he disappeared.”

“‘Disappeared'?” Dunne pretended to look shocked.

“Left town. Leave it at that.”

“And you figured me for another?”

“I hoped you weren't. It was as though fate sent you. There I am, standing at my window, waiting for Clem to show up, and I'm staring at this Joe on a bench across the street. He's taken off his hat and is soaking up the sun. I felt as if I knew him from somewhere. Soon as Clem pulls up, he's got his hat back on and is scratching on a notepad. Next week, same time, same story.”

“So you turned the table and tailed me? I still find that hard to swallow.”