Queenpin (4 page)

I’d look at her and I’d think about all the stories. The favorite tale among the boys at Club Tee Hee was about a New Year’s Eve party at a big penthouse in the city back during the war. She was the hot ticket back then and she shimmied with every hood in the place, making rounds, drawing all eyes on her. Finally, one of them asked her to put her money where her mouth was. Story was, she threw her head back and laughed, saying, “I’ll put my mouth where the money is,” and made her way to every man in the room, on her knees. On her knees.

Word spread through the party and, after everything, one of the mobsters’ wives came up to Gloria, called her a whore. With the strongest arm this side of Rocky Marciano, Gloria slapped the wife around, grabbed her by the hair, and tugged her against her chest, growling, “I’m the best damn cocksucker in this burg, and I got the rocks to prove it. Your knees have rubbed plenty of carpets. Where are your diamonds? Where are they?”

Or so the story went.

Now that we were close, I thought maybe I could ask her about it, so I did. I must have been crazy, drunk on the low lighting, the hour upon hour of cigarettes and shoes off, legs tucked under us as we sat on opposite ends of the sleek mohair sofa. She looked at me like I was a goddamned fool.

“That was Virginia Hill,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette.

“Hillbilly tramp. I got better things to do with my mouth.”

I wasn’t really sure what that meant, but it shut me up.

I shouldn’t have believed it anyway. It was hard to imagine that much hot blood running through her. If she had a man in her life, I never heard tell. The job was the life. Four decades of carrying money, getting high rollers to place sucker bets, moving swag across state lines, and adjusting odds for the boys working the policy racket all through the east side. She herself was proud to say she’d never in her life laid down a bet on her own nickel. I’m no chump. I know the odds. I make them.

So, I followed her example. I wore the clothes, I did the jobs, I followed orders. All business. And no matter how many shiny-haired swains pressed against me, I never played around. Be the lady, she told me. They beat their wives, they beat their whores. I never took more than three socks from one of these goons in all my years. That’s why. Be the lady.

“But didn’t you ever fall for one?” I asked once, sucking on a swizzle stick and hoping for some sign of soft in the old lady, something beating under the finely pressed shantung suit. “Sure, kid,” she said, eyelashes grazing her cheeks. “There were a few. I lived this life, you know. But I watched myself and I never mixed business with anything else. There were men, but not these men. No. Straight men. Straight enough. Men who may not have lived by the book but lived by some book. In this life,” she said, crossing these glorious gams, shimmering in the filmy light, “you can’t let your guard down. If you can control yourself, you can control everyone else.” But then there he was, as if on cue.

∞◊∞

It started with the furrier.

Her name was Regina, a little five-footer with a perky chest, a beauty mark, and a funny twitter in her voice, like a comic-strip French streetwalker. The fur shop in the lobby of the Ascot Hotel sold her wares. And the Ascot Hotel was on my rounds. On its top floor, in a series of connecting suites, high-stakes poker and baccarat games drew big crowds of serious players seven nights a week. There was a bar, girls, the whole bit. I used to make pickups there and I’d see Regina now and then. She’d make her way upstairs sometimes, on someone’s arm or to appraise a fur piece someone was staking.

One night she caught me in the powder room. Twitching her nose as the party girls sprayed themselves with Chanel No. 5, she slunk next to me and made a gutsy pitch.

“I love the mink-lined gloves you were wearing last week,” she cooed. “I could make you a hat to go with them. No charge, of course.”

“Why so generous?” I said, hardly looking at her in the mirror as I reapplied my makeup. “I don’t know you from Eve.” She smiled, lipstick thick and bright. “I’ve seen you around a lot. I know who you are. I got something I want to bend your ear on.”

“My ears don’t bend,” I said, heading toward the door. Yeah, by now I was head of the class in Gloria Denton’s Charm School. It was like walking around with armor, bulletproof. Nothing could touch me.

“Listen,” she whispered, rushing up behind me, following me out to the bar.”It’d be worth your while.”

“How would you know how much my while is worth?”

“Believe me, I know,” she said eagerly, eyelashes swatting. “Ask

around about me. People’ll vouch for me. I’ll wait.”

So I mentioned it to Gloria the next evening, careful to sound neither excited nor too casual.

“Yeah, I know her,” she said, turning the steering wheel. We were headed to Googie’s Chop House, where we went most Friday nights. She liked to order the London broil, although she never ate much of it or anything else. Anything that didn’t line her pocketbook really wasn’t worth her time.

“So could she have something?”

“Light me one, will you?” she said, gesturing toward her cigarettes. I put one in my mouth, lit it, then tucked it in her mouth. She took a deep puff. “She runs with a pretty high-tone pack. Makes pieces for society coin. She might have a hot steer. Open your ear, see what she pours in.”

I didn’t have to go looking. When I got to the Ascot the next night, Tino, the concierge, said there was a package waiting for me. I opened the rose-scented box and there under the pink tissue was a hat of Black Cross mink, lined with satin the precise crimson of my evening gloves.

Sure enough, she was upstairs, chewing on a curly-foil toothpick at the bar, practically chomping at the bit.

“Thanks for the lid,” I said, setting the box down on the bar next to her.

And she walked me through it, made her case. The setup looked airtight.

It was like this: There was a family in Highcrest Hills, a few miles out of the city. The Duttons. Their fortune came from Dutton bread and muffin mixes, that cheap stuff you find on grocery store shelves all over the state. The boxes with the freckle-faced kid with his tongue hanging out of his mouth. They were big money and Regina delivered her custom-designed skins to the lady of the manor every season, red beaver coats and blue fox hats in the winter, brocade coats with Chinese leopard trim for spring, ermine wraps for cool summer evenings, ponyskin suit jackets and short chinchilla coats for fall. It was endless.

But fur was the least of their riches. The big loot was in jewels. Mama Dutton was a jewelry hound and Papa Dutton was built to please her.

“When she’d look at my furs,” Regina told me, “she’d pull them out and drape them over each piece to see how it looked. Three-, four-, five-carat rocks. Big pendants and stickpins the size of snowglobes. Heavy-banded chokers and thick charm bracelets, chunky brooches, enough rings for a hundred fingers and toes. All prime-cut.

“So last week I delivered her latest skins in time for her spring passage to Old Europe. Rome, then Capri, don’t you know. She wanted them fast because they were leaving Saturday. Last Saturday. Gone for four weeks with only a skeleton crew of servants holding down the fort, keeping their half-drunk eyes on Bluebeard’s stash. And nobody knows the gold mine that’s up there. Who figures? They sell biscuit flour.”

I was new to this kind of game, but it looked awfully good to me. I passed the info on to Gloria and Gloria corralled the talent and within four days the Dutton domicile had been hit. They tied up the housekeeper and the groundsman, while the safecracker went to work on the two wall safes Regina had eyeballed. It only took him ten minutes and, in twenty, they were out of the house. Sure, they had to get a little rough with the groundsman, had to crack him once and he lost some teeth, or so the papers said, but otherwise, it was as clean as they come.

And my finder’s fee was a tidy treat. I bought myself a charmeuse dress but the rest I spent on her. I wanted to give her something. And I wanted to pay for it myself.

I went to her favorite high-end antique store, the one with the green baize walls and full afternoon tea for customers. I wasn’t so flush I could match her tastes, but I knew I could find something and when I saw the letter opener, it said class all over to me. It was old, the guy behind the counter promised me that, and with his half-specs and his tweed suit, he looked like he knew what he was talking about it. He took it out of the case and set it on a velvet tray for me to eyeball. It was shaped like a sword with a sword’s sharp tip. But the handle had a fancy design in bronze, two heads crowning the handle tip, each with curly, snaky hair, facing each other.

“Who’re they supposed to be?” I asked, touching the coiling curls.

“It’s the same woman, looking at her reflection,” the man said. “Art

nouveau. It’s an excellent choice.”

“It might be two different women,” I said, squinting.

“If you like,” he said, smiling as I took out my billfold.

She was keen on the gift. Anybody else might not be able to tell, but I could. She looked at it a long time and a few days later I saw it in her bag in a pale gold sleeve she must have had made special for it. She used it every time she made her bank pickups, slicing through the paper and counting the bills out with fluttering gloved fingers. I knew I’d done it right.

You see, I wanted to show her that I knew if it wasn’t for her, I’d still be stuck with my head over the ledger at the Tee Hee, postponing the inevitable roll in the sack with Jerome or Arthur for a shot at a bigger paycheck. She saved me from all that. She turned me out and you never forget the one who turned you out.

But it wasn’t made for forever. I didn’t have her stuff.

∞◊∞

The thing was, the whole deal with the furrier turned out to be bad business. It gave me a taste for more when all I could think about already was getting more, getting my hands on, and in, more. It’d been so easy and the paycheck so big. Why, I’d be a chump not to look for other chances, I figured. As much as she’d given me in the ten, twelve months I’d worked for her, I was already looking to up the ante. If I’d thought about it, I’d’ve been ashamed of myself. But I didn’t. I just kept going.

Never fuck up, she told me once. That’s the only rule.

“You’ve never made a mistake, not one, in all these years?” I asked. “Mixing up numbers, late to the track, one drink too many and you start talking too much to the wrong fellas?”

She looked at me in that icy way of hers. Then, in a flash of the hand, she tugged open her crepe de chine jacket, buttons popping. There, on her pale, filmy skin, skeined over with thready wrinkles, I saw the burn marks, long, jagged, slipping behind her bra clasp,

slithering down her sternum.

“How—,” I started, my mouth a dry socket.

“A state trooper pulled me over for speeding downstate,” she said, palm flat on her chest, patting it lightly. “Made me open the trunk, tapped the sham bottom, and found sixty K in hot rocks, each one a fingerprint.”

“But that wasn’t your fault,” I said.

“I should have been more careful,” she said. “I learned the hard way. The boss then, the big one, he watched while one of his boys did it. Pressed me against a radiator until the smell made us all sick.

“I learned the hard way,” she repeated. “Now you’ve learned it easier. You don’t need this on your fine chest,” she said, fastening the mother-of-pearl buttons. “So don’t fuck up, baby.”

“I won’t,” I said. “I won’t.” And I meant it.

But he was the one. I could feel the way it was going the minute I saw him losing his shirt at the tables. Loose and easy grin and a gambler’s slouch, a back-patting, hand-shaking way of moving through a room. But when his eyes narrowed on me, his smile disappeared and I could feel him. I could feel him on me. My palms itching, I rubbed them together. I could feel it everywhere, something sharp pulsing under my skin. I’ll crawl on hands and knees for this one, I thought. I can feel I’m going to be on my hands and knees for this one. He saw it on me too. He figured fast he had the upper hand. He was the first man I ever met.

Things got pretty crazy right off. I couldn’t help myself. I let him do whatever he wanted. Who was I to say no. There was nothing he could do that I didn’t want. Not even that.

Okay, I’ll tell you how it went. I was making my rounds at a new casino running in the lower level of Yin’s Peking Palace. It was my last stop of the night and I was tired. She was on a plane east that night for the kind of big deal I wasn’t let in on yet. Now that she had me around, she had a lot more time to do fancier jobs for them. Once, one of the jewelry fences told me they had her flying to Switzerland, but that seemed like movie stuff. I didn’t buy. The operation was big but it was still small potatoes compared to the networks running out of Chicago, New York, Miami. I knew my bosses had bosses and even they had bosses.

Point was, I had no place to go and it was only one o’clock. I figured myself for a whiskey sour and a walk around the joint to see what was flying. Maybe I’d stumble upon something. I’d been hoping the furrier might pop up. It’d been three weeks since the deal went down and maybe she had something new cooking.

What was great about walking around these places was that, by now, people started to know who I was. At the track, I had to be discreet, blend in. But at the casinos, I was there to show myself. And people took notice. The men and women both. Sometimes, you’d hear the regulars trying to explain who I was to one of the newer marks.

“She’s Gloria Denton’s girl. She works for Gloria.”

And if they didn’t know who she was, they weren’t worth anybody’s time, might as well be in the back alley with the dishwashers, giving up their coins at three-card molly.

That night, there was a lot of action at the roulette wheel in the back. Somebody had a real spinner going. Larry, the manager, was standing by the table, which meant whoever was winning was winning big enough to demand a close eye.

I slipped through the crowd of spectators, all eager to catch some of the luck. That was when I saw him standing at the table, eyes on the felt. All black mick hair and sorrowful eyes and a sharkskin suit cut razor sharp. He had some candy on his arm, a sometimes-pay broad I knew from the lobby of the Fabian Hotel.