Hard Case Crime: Fifty to One (5 page)

“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.”

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.”