A Pure Double Cross (7 page)

“Who's that?”

“The woman you're pulling this crazy get-rich-quick scheme for.”

“Why does there have to be a woman?”

Lizabeth lit a long black cigarette that smelled like French perfume. “Young men don't really care about money. They want power. Only women and old men really care about money.”

I tipped the hat I didn't have. “I call her JJ.”

Lizabeth crossed her legs, dangling a high-heeled slipper from her toes. I took a bite of cocktail. The spiked jibbet encasing my skull relaxed its grip.

“What's she like?”

“She's married.”

“A lot of that going around.”

She smoked. I drank. She was good. Sometimes silence is the most effective form of interrogation. I waited as long as I could.

“She's a wisenheimer. She's a wisenheimer and a tomboy and a choir girl and a sucker for puppies and old timey music and she's always, always up for a dare.”

“The All-American girl next door,” said Lizabeth, dryly.

“And then some.”

She smoked. I drank.

“It must have been quite a shock to find yourself a member of the Brush-Off Club.”

“I don't blame her. I was gone a long time.”

Lizabeth gently, almost accidentally, kicked that high-heeled slipper right off her foot. She rubbed the sole of her foot absent-mindedly, sparing me the heavy artillery, keeping those aquamarine heaters on the far wall. “And you weren't worth the wait?”

I heard the scratch of a key in the door. I shot to my feet. The Schooler entered.

If he objected to the casual intimacy of the scene he didn't show it. He took off his gray homburg and his topcoat and hung them in the closet. Lizabeth replaced her shoe and shook up another Manhattan. She set it on the cocktail table and drifted away.

The Schooler took her place on the couch and slapped down a copy of
The Cleveland Press.

“
Robbing the Poor Box!
” screamed the headline. “Time to call in the Bulldog?” was the sub-head, accompanied by a photo of J. Edgar Hoover. He really did look like a bulldog.

“You knew about this,” said The Schooler. It wasn't a question. He draped his arm over the back of the couch and waited.

“The feds want to make the Fulton Road Mob look as bad as possible so that when…”

“I understand that,” said The Schooler. “Why didn't you tell me beforehand?”

I was too tired to lie. “Because you might have said no.” The Schooler snorted and shook his head. “Not that it matters,” I said. “The royal grand vizier of criminal ops in Washington has called a halt. Thanks to Jimmy Streets.”

The Schooler showed no sign of surprise or disappointment. “I have spoken to Jimmy.”

“When was that I wonder?” I polished off my drink and plunged ahead, drunk on exhaustion, Tennessee sippin' whisky and truth.

“My superior at the FBI said Jimmy shot the agent because Jimmy knew I worked for the feds. Yeah Jimmy knew, so what? I couldn't figure it at first, so obvious I couldn't see it. The
so what
is that Jimmy knew he could do whatever he damn well pleased. He knew the feds wouldn't arrest him and expose me and their undercover scheme before a packed courthouse. So long as I'm around,” I said, thumbing my chest, “Jimmy thinks he's bulletproof.”

“As you say,
so what
?”

I kept on. “But I wonder if shooting the guard
wasn't
Jimmy's idea. I wonder if maybe someone in authority told Jimmy to pull the trigger, to test my loyalty, to see if I'd shoot him in return.”

I sat back in my armless chair, head spinning, waiting for the angry denial or confirmation I had baited.

The Schooler looked at his drink and didn't drink it. He shook his head sadly and said, “Such a mistrusting young man.”

Was this how The Schooler kept his itchy young men in line? Posing as a stern father confessor, dispensing shame and
blessings? It worked in my case. I felt like a kid caught filching from the poor box. Me!

“It took the FBI a lot of time and manpower to chart this course. They've invested a lot of money and prestige.”

Was this a question? The Schooler encouraged me with his eyebrows. I riddled it out aloud.

“Let's see, the
Cleveland Press
is raising the roof about the heartless thieves who stole Christmas, the Cleveland PD is red-faced and cheesed off and…and if the feds call a halt right now the Fulton Road Mob makes off with sixty grand and the FBI is left holding the bag.”

“Which means...?”

I liked the stern father confessor better. At least I didn't have to answer all these bloody questions. “It means that, uhh, we do nothing and wait for the feds to come around.”

The Schooler inclined his head ever so slightly. “Would you like your money now?”

What a question.

The Schooler climbed to his feet. I resigned myself to another blindfolded ride to an abandoned factory but he returned a minute later carrying a fat pigskin satchel that he deposited at my feet, saying, “Thirty-two thousand six hundred and forty dollars.”

I opened the satchel. The cash was neatly stacked and rubber-banded. It was more money than I had ever seen. But where the hell was I going to put it?

“Count it,” said The Schooler.

“No need,” I replied cheerily. “You're an honest crook.”

The Schooler liked that. Leastwise he cracked a smile for the first time that afternoon.

“You'll want a cab,” he said and went to make the call.

A tiny alarm bell sounded, barely tinkled, in the lower chambers of my skull. Something to do with The Schooler keeping a big wad of hot cash under his own roof. But I paid
that tiny bell no mind. I was too busy zippering up my fat pigskin satchel.

I picked it up and looked around for Lizabeth. A faint wisp of perfumed cigarette smoke was the only trace of her.

A yellow cab was waiting at the curb when I bounded down the steps of the Moreland Courts, my fat pigskin satchel in hand. I scanned the four corners for a late model black Buick and climbed in the back seat. The hackie lowered the flag and asked me where to.

“East.”

We set sail down Shaker Boulevard. I kept my eyes peeled for a bank. Some discreet Shaker Heights' establishment that would welcome a well-dressed young man with a fat pigskin satchel and no questions asked.

They say all good things come to those who wait but they, in my experience, are full of shit. There had to be a way to move the ball down the field. The FBI wasn't going to approve a big deal payroll heist so long as hothead Jimmy was in the picture. And the Fulton Road Mob wasn't going to bench Jimmy on my say so. Not yet anyway.

We passed a bank. I let the hackie drive another three blocks. “I need you to hang a U-turn at the next intersection,” I said. “And use your turn signal.”

No cars slowed, no cars followed. “Slow down a bit.”

I looked out the back window. “Now speed up and turn right at the next street.” I saw no sign of Jimmy's Buick, no sign of a plaster. “Stop here.”

I paid the fare, gave the hackie a fat tip and lugged my pigskin satchel across Shaker Boulevard and into National City Bank to inquire about a safe deposit box.

I tried to sneak out of Mrs. Brennan's rooming house the next morning, almost made it too. I was two steps down the stoop when I heard,
“Mister
Schroeder.” My rent was paid in full, I was free, white and twenty-one. I could have continued on my way without a backward look. But I stopped short, the back of my neck all prickly.

“What is it Mrs. Brennan?”

“Turn around now.” I did so. “Where's the rest of your ear? And your roughneck friend, come to mention?”

“Mrs. Brennan, listen, I…”

“
You
listen, boyo, I run a respectable rooming house.”

“I understand that.”

“Do you now?” said Mrs. B, meaty arms akimbo. “Then how do you explain yourself?”

This wasn't a question I got asked every day. I entertained several creative responses that withered and died under Mrs. Brennan's baleful eye.

“I can't explain myself just yet, Mrs. Brennan.”

“Then you'll pack your grip. I've got GIs come in here every day, war heroes, looking for a place to hang their hats.”

Ahh,
war heroes.
I marched up the steps. Mrs. B was about to get an earful. She didn't flinch as I approached, just lowered her head to butt me down the steps if I got out of line. I stopped and took a breath.

“Mrs. Brennan, there's a reason all these heroic GIs are swarming the burg right now as opposed to, say, blasting their way through fortified pillboxes outside Karlsruhe.” I tapped my chest. “Agents of the OSS risked their necks behind enemy lines to commit acts of sabotage and target bombing runs that
cleared many of those fortifications and paved the way for our heroic GIs to march to victory and free beer at St. John's Canteen. And if you…”

“You were a spy?”

“Yes ma'am.”

She closed one baleful eye and examined me with the other. “That I can believe.”

I walked up Winslow to St. Malachi's. Kids in parkas were chasing each other around the schoolyard. Three boys stood atop a mountain of plowed snow, shouting ferocious defiance, playing King of the Hill, preparing to defend the summit to the death against a dozen eager lads arrayed below. Why not? They were eight, nine or ten. For all of their conscious life the world had been at war.

I hoofed it west to Fulton Road and rode the rattler south to mob headquarters. I had a precise plan in mind, make myself indispensable and demand the ouster of Jimmy Streets. How to do that I would figure out when the time came.

I gave the conductor two dimes and jumped off at Clark. I walked a block south to Cesco and a half block west to H&R Manufacturing. I rang the bell at the front door. No answer. I knocked, hard. I saw an eyeball behind the peephole.

I mugged, I waved, I did jumping jacks. No response. I put the barrel of my 9 millimeter Walther to the peephole and the door swung open to reveal Pencil Mustache with a .22 pistol.

“Go shoot a squirrel,” I said and pushed past. I worked my way through the cobwebbed lathes and drill presses on the shop floor, Pencil Mustache bobbing behind me like a toy balloon. I heard a guttural groan from somewhere. I followed it to a closed door.

“I wouldn't go in there I was you,” said Pencil Mustache. “Jimmy's hacked off, The Schooler ragged him out bad.”

“So I heard.” Another groan from inside. “Who's he taking it out on?”

“A cop,” said Pencil Mustache.

“A
cop
?”

“Dave Madsen. He's on our pad. Jimmy caught him double timing with the Bloody Corners Gang.”

I opened the door on a big storeroom with bins of scrap metal and spools of welding cable stacked along one wall. The cop wasn't hard to spot. He was the one in the blue uniform tied to the chair. Jimmy was the beaknose slopehead standing over him.

Officer Madsen was in bad shape, head lolling, bloody mucus all down his front. Jimmy was wearing sap gloves, pouches of lead filings above the knuckles. He took a break from his exertions and looked over with his good eye.

“Get lost asshole.”

“I was lost,” I said. “I was lost but now I'm found.”

Jimmy responded by slugging the cop in the midsection. He was a real champ when it came to guys who couldn't fight back. The cop coughed blood.

“Jimmy you're gonna kill the guy.”

“What's it to ya?”

“It's a payday to me. Asshole. You kill a cop and you-know-who will definitely pull the plug on any future plans.”

Jimmy grinned. “You're sayin' I shun't hit him no more?”

Officer Madsen, his eyes rolled back in his head, coughed, groaned, mewled like a kitten.

“That's what I'm saying.”

“Okay then, maybe he's had enough.” Jimmy grinned some more. We faced each other across twenty feet of dirty brown concrete. Jimmy made no move to go. A truck rumbled by on Cesco, making an empty rattling sound, hauling postholes.

I started forward. Jimmy grabbed the cop's limp wrist and bent it back. The cop didn't seem to notice. Jimmy increased the pressure. The cop blinked, shuddered and sat up straight. I stopped, ten feet away.

“Don't do it Jimmy. You snap the wrist he could die of shock.”

I should have said the opposite maybe. Snap his wrist, I dare you. I should have known Jimmy Streets wasn't going to obey a direct order from Hal Schroeder.

Officer Madsen convulsed once in the desk chair when Jimmy did what I told him not to. Madsen's eyes went wide open as eyes can go. He died that way.

Jimmy was in big trouble. The Schooler had arrived with Kelly the bouncer and another goon I recognized from somewhere. He was fat and bald and big as a house. The Schooler called him Manny though mostly The Schooler didn't speak. He let his silence and his twin monsters do the talking for him. Jimmy was sweating bullets, standing over the dead cop's body, making excuses.

“I just gave him a goin' over, I din't mean to croak him.”

I didn't volunteer the information about the wrist snap. I had superior knowledge on Jimmy Streets for the moment. And I intended to keep that shiv in my sock till the time was right.

“You dug this hole,” said The Schooler to Jimmy. “You fill it in.”

Kelly and Manny lumbered closer, Manny rotating his neck and shoulders as if about to climb into the ring. Shit a brick. He was Manny the Mauler, famed wrestler of yesteryear! Jimmy was in
big
trouble.

“Any ideas Jimmy?” said The Schooler calmly, menacingly.

“I'll take care of it,” said Jimmy. “Dump the body in the lake.”

“The lake's frozen.”