Queenpin (12 page)

She didn’t respond. Instead, she leaned over me, turning my face from one side to the other, appraising my wounds, every ding and purple dent. “A few more days, chickie baby, and you’ll be back in the saddle.”

“Was that why you sent me?” I tried again.

She sighed shallowly, then slowly began loosening her hair from a handful of tight bobby pins. “I got the impression, nothing to put my finger on, that Mackey had been eyeing you, had an itch for you. Thought it might make him less inclined to stronghand us. Only looking out for us both, kid.”

I kept my eyes fixed on the wall behind her, on the scalloped shelf with the tall marble gazelle on it. If I looked at her, I’d lose my guts.

I forced the words out of my mouth. “Gloria, everyone there was looking at me like they knew. How can you think we’re not getting collared for this?”

She ran a pair of fingers through her hair, stretching out each auburn twist, almost with a languor. I couldn’t get a rise out of her. Who would’ve believed she’d been breathing fire twenty-four hours before?

“Listen, kid,” she said, “as much as Amos Mackey’s got on us, we’ve got a dozen more tales to tell on him. As a for-instance, you think he wants the gendarmes to get wise to the five little Indians he’s got buried in the wine cellar of Amos’s Italian Grotto? I know everything there is to know about each one of those clips. He’s got big ideas and he can’t have anyone squawking about the things he did before he got those big ideas. Or the things he did to get the pot of honey to bankroll those big ideas.”

She was so confident, so cocksure. For a second, it worked on me. I started wondering if I was acting crazy, like some hysterical girl. But then I reminded myself of the dress. If she was so confident, why keep a bargaining chip? I thought of that dress and everything started jumping in me. “How about those errand boys from last night?” I said. “Who knows who they’ll tell?”

“Don’t worry about the meat,” she said, watching me more closely now. Seeing something on me. “They do as they’re told. That’s their

job. Since when do you worry, anyway? Have I ever queered you before? Have I ever laid you open?”

“Yes, Gloria,” I said, my voice crackling, popping. I couldn’t stop it. It was happening and I couldn’t stop it. “You have, Gloria. Last night. You ruined everything, don’t you see? You broke all your own rules. You said never to lose control. And you did. You fucked up and we’re both going to hang for it.”

I thought, as I heard myself, as the terrible words came out of my mouth, I might turn to stone on the spot. But they were out there. They were out there and there was no taking them back.

“How many cocktails have you had anyway, dear heart?” she said, unbuttoning her cuffs but with her eyes on me. “Been crying in your beer over your boyfriend?”

“Don’t talk about him,” I blurted out. “Don’t you talk about him. Don’t you dare.”

She tilted her head. “So that’s how it is, huh? A real love match and I tore you apart. Romeo and Juliet.”

“That’s not how it is,” I bristled. After everything, I still found myself feeling insulted by what she’d said, what she was suggesting. “I’m talking about business. About doing things smart. You broke all your own rules, Gloria. Anybody could’ve seen us, heard us. And you brought in other parties, parties we have no reason to trust. We’re behind the eight ball because of you.

She shook her head, still seemingly unfazed by the growing hysteria in my voice. “This was your first time and I didn’t prepare you,” she said, plain and even. “I didn’t set you up first. I should have, sure. But I needed you in the dark. Otherwise you would’ve given your boy a warning and he’d’ve copped a heel. The point is, there’s nothing to worry about. This is how these things go.”

“Why didn’t you just shoot him?” I said, the words slipping out of me in a trembling voice I didn’t recognize. “Why’d you have to do it to him that way? Like some …” I stopped myself. The whiteness in her face, the bullet-hole eyes. I stopped myself. Her eyes said to stop and I did.

There was a long, terrible silence. All the sound seemed sucked out of the world and I knew if I tried to open my mouth, tried to force a word up my throat, I would come up mute.

She rose and walked over to me, put one cold, gloveless hand on my shoulder. “You’ve been through a lot, kid. You’re going to be okay If you think about it, you’ll see how right I was. Because I’m taking care of us. I always take care of us.”

I went to sleep that night resolving to keep my mouth shut and my eyes open, biding my time. That was her best lesson to me, after all. If I was careful, maybe I’d see it coming, whatever it was.

If she saw the red dress was gone from her closet, she didn’t say anything. I couldn’t see it on her, couldn’t draw it out from the rest, from her whole cool, watchful way. I would stare at her face when she wasn’t looking, and when she was, and I couldn’t read a thing in it. In spite of everything, I envied her that. To wear that kind of face. It seemed like something impressive to me still. I couldn’t shake that.

In the dream that kept coming, Vic was throwing down playing cards at the long green table, card after card skating through the air. He was watching me, not the cards, and he was smiling in that genial way of his, the way that said, Sure, I’m lying, baby, I’m always lying but just because I’m lying doesn’t mean it isn’t true too. And the cards fly up and I can’t see his face for a second and when they flutter down again he looks different. He looks funny, like he’s made of wood. I see the long line across his face, hooking from earlobe to earlobe like a ventriloquist’s dummy, with the smile suspended from corner to corner. And then he throws the last card and he’s still looking at me and he reaches up to this jaw and twists it first one way, then the other, with a sickening creak. He’s holding it in his hands, that jaw, and I start to shut my eyes and he says something but I can’t hear it and I look again and he’s handing me the jaw across the table. He’s handing it to me, and it’s white and polished like a dog’s picked-clean bone. I know he wants me to lift it up to my face to see if it fits, if it locks into place, but I’m afraid to. And his face is hanging half open, like it’s come loose, but he’s flipping those cards again. And smiling. Always smiling.

∞◊∞

Three days went by and I was still sleeping on her sofa. I’d made some noise about going back to my place, but she’d just slanted her head at me and said, “What’s there that’s not here, Kewpie doll?”

What could I say? Sure, I was scared of what she might do. But I was also being smart. I didn’t want to seem too eager. I was working on my poker face. I was getting better at it. I’d spent all three days stuck in that marbled mausoleum of hers, thinking, thinking.

On the fourth day, I got my day pass. She put the Pan-Cake on me herself. It took a half hour. She held my face in her silver-tipped hands and turned my chin this way and that way and I couldn’t see what she was doing, but first it felt rough and gritty and eventually it was like she’d dipped my face in soft wax and carved out my features anew. Like wearing a face on top of my face.

She held her hand mirror to my face and I pretended to look but I didn’t look.

She was giving me an easy ride that night. A few pickups to test the waters. I half wondered if she might follow me, but she ended up leaving first, saying she was going to check on three floating casinos on the river, a good sixty miles away. They weren’t the money spinners they once were and the fellas upstairs were raising eyebrows.

I can’t pretend it didn’t feel good to be back in the mix, walking through my favorite velvet-walled, gold-telephone casinos. The shift bosses and the floor men and the regulars all wanted to buy me drinks, sorry to hear I’d been under the weather, tucked into bed for nearly a week with a bad case of the grippe.

I got to admit, though, when I hit the casino at Yin’s Peking Palace, it was hard to keep up the dance. The minute I walked in, I remembered seeing Vic there for the first time, winning and losing everything down to the lint in his pockets. But I tried to put it out of my head.

I let Larry, the manager, buy me a gin swizzle before I left.

“Word among the stickmen is it’s been a slow week.”

“Not too,” Larry said, lighting a cigarette. “Some of our regs haven’t been in. There’s a hot poker game over at the Mutual Federated Building on Sixth. Your bosses somehow got themselves the whole third floor, the old book depository. Vic Riordan hasn’t darkened this doorstep all week, so I figured he was losing his shirt there. But looks like not.”

I stared straight down into the glass and didn’t even twitch. Something scraped inside me, a razory feeling up my back, but not for long. I wouldn’t let it. I let the gin nip at me, licked my lower lip and raised my eyes and there was nothing there for Larry to see but my Pan-Cake and long lashes. I was proud I’d done it.

“Riordan?”

“Yeah, you know. Classic case: fish who thinks he’s a shark,” he said, shaking his head. “But he ain’t been swimming anywhere

lately.”

“So maybe he finally hit it.”

“It ain’t like that. He’s not just in absentia. There’s more to it. The boys in blue were sniffing around. We thought they came to bust us. But I guess you know that’s all covered,” he said, looking at me meaningfully. Sure, it was true. We paid down every last billy club that mattered in that precinct every week.

“So what were they here for?”

“Seems they think Riordan’s gone invisible.”

“Probably trying to beat a vig.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But how’s that get the cops so interested?”

“So what kinds of questions were they asking? Who he owed?” I

said, treading carefully.

“Yeah, but not just that. They were bothering all my dealers, the cocktail waitresses, everyone. Wanted to know who his friends and

not-so-friends were.”

“Huh,” I said.

That was all I said. But I knew where to go next.

“Poor sap,” Larry said, sighing. “He was a lousy gambler and a lousy cheat. Once, he even tried to roll shaved dice like we were running some two-bit crap game. But I still kinda liked the guy. You know?”

Sergeant Pulaski wasn’t hard to find, parked in the corner pocket of Fahey’s Bar on Sutton Street. Everyone knew: you buy him three short glasses at the nearest cop bar, he’d hand over his firstborn on a serving fork. That night, I was buying.

“I always liked you, kid,” he said, eyes shining over his rye. “Always thought it was a crying shame such a sweet-faced filly got knotted up with such rotten trade.”

“You mean the trade that pays your mortgage, your bar tab, and your daughter’s tuition at Saint Lucy’s?”

“Yeah, they’re the ones.” He grinned. “Listen, I never said I was a clean liver. But I got rules to live by. As a for-instance, soft as I might find your skin, I’d never try to lay down my hand.” He took a quick

nip and then his eyes turned still more soulful. “I don’t like to see it. You know, I got a daughter. At Saint Lucy’s.”

“That so?”

“Dancing eye and freckles on the nose and never anything but grins for Pops. I tell you, I—”

“Sarge, I got this pin money in my purse and it’s a little heavy,” I said, flashing him a twenty spot. “I’m inclined to pass it over to our fine barkeep and call it a night. It’s long past a Saint Lucy’s girl’s bedtime. What do you think? Can you help me with that?”

“My dear, I believe I can,” he said, straightening up on the bar stool.

“If only I could get a bedtime story first, to send me on my way.”

“Just call me Aesop. Pick your tale.”

“How ‘bout the one about the card player, the wheel spinner, the bounder who went poof.”

“I just might know the magic man of whom you speak. No end yet, though there is a moral.”

“Okay, Sarge, lay it out for me.”

Pulaski shook his head. “He’s nowhere to be found, honey. His landlady called. Rolled it out like this: she hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him for a couple days and wanted to see what’s what. And then there was the little matter of a box spring of hers that had fallen into his possession. So she lets herself into the place and it’s cleaned out. Then she remembers, all of a sudden like, she’d heard some funny noises coming from the joint a few days back.”

“What kinds of noises?”

“Bang-bang noises, what else?”

“Someone got tired of waiting to collect?”

“Could be. But those boys don’t usually do such a full cleanup. Maybe the shylocks are getting more thorough. Or maybe they came meaning business, but our fella made it out the fire escape in time.”

I knew what she’d say. There’s nothing to worry about, even less than before. The cops had been to Vic’s and hadn’t found a thing. What could be better?

But I didn’t like it. There was something out there, something hanging in the air. I could feel it. It was like the stories you read when you’re a kid, the Saturday matinees about the couple on the run, the tough guys pulling one last job. They all taught you how it would end up. You don’t get out of this kind of snare so easy.

And sleeping on the sofa that night, thinking of how I might’ve played it different. How I might have played it smarter. If only Vic hadn’t tagged me an easy mark. Didn’t he know he could square-deal me, that I took him for what he was and he didn’t need to do his dance for me? God help me, Vic, the things you could do to me, I would’ve given it over to you without all the pink lights and music, the whole carnival show you put on. Couldn’t you feel it on me? Couldn’t you see it in my eyes, behind the black enamel, metal lashes clicking shut? The things I did for you in there, when we were all alone, didn’t they show you I didn’t need to be played like a country girl in petticoats waiting for your traveling show? Didn’t they show I was ready from the start?

It was close to midnight when she came home. Even before she turned on the floor lamp, I knew there was trouble. You could feel the nerves shooting off her.

“What’s going on?” I asked, throwing the blanket off me.

“We’re moving the body,” she said briskly, as if she’d just given me tomorrow’s weather report.

“What? Why?” The cops. The cops must know My heart was clanging like a trolley car as I jumped to my feet.