Hard Case Crime: Fifty to One (6 page)

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.”

“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.