Murder and Gold Read online

  Table of Contents

  Titlepage

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About Bywater Books

  This book is dedicated to everyone who won’t let jerks push them around.

  Chapter One

  Cantor Gold’s apartment, New York City

  Late September 1954

  A few minutes before dawn

  There are lots of women in my life, and I like it that way. I don’t want to fall in love, not again. I was in love once, and she was perfect. But she’s gone. Gone in a storm of gunfire on a tropical street. My heart’s as good as dead. I can’t even say her name. If you know my story, you know her name. And if you don’t know my story, her name doesn’t matter.

  And besides, domestic bliss would interfere with my criminal life. Domestic bliss would distract me from keeping my senses sharp, senses that protect me against danger: from cops, from gangsters, from rival thieves and smugglers. So no thank you, lady, you can share my bed but not my heart. It’s out of business.

  I didn’t say any of this to last night’s red-haired, blue-eyed amusement, only that she was swell but this was it, there’d be no more. She slapped my face— not the first woman to so honor me— and told me I give butches a bad name, that we were supposed to be chivalrous. I told her I’m chivalrous to a fault, one woman at a time, one night at a time. I guess she didn’t like that explanation because she slapped my face again, got out of my bed, put her dress on— a nice little form-fitting black satin number with a flaring skirt— grabbed her coat and scrammed fast, hollering, “They should arrest creeps like you!” as she slammed the door of my apartment on her way out.

  She doesn’t know the half of it. She doesn’t know how many times the boys with badges have tried to arrest me, flatten me, run me out of town. She doesn’t know because I didn’t tell her about my life, how I make my dough. I didn’t tell her I steal high-priced art and other treasures from faraway places, smuggle it into New York for clients who pay me fistfuls of cash but don’t give a damn that I risk my life to satisfy their acquisitive lusts. I didn’t tell her any of these things. I don’t talk about my outlaw life with any of the women who share my bed. Except one.

  The exception is Rosie Bliss, one of the most skilled cabbies rolling on New York’s streets, and that’s saying something. What Rosie does behind the wheel of her big yellow Checker is a performance worthy of a top-ticket Broadway show. She can make the cab dance, she can make it glide or make it kick, and best of all she can use those skills to ferry me out of sight and out of reach of cops and other nosy parties when I’m carrying hot goods. Rosie Bliss is the best wheel spinner a thief could hope for.

  Rosie used to be in love with me, but she gave it up a couple of years ago after my heart went cold for good. But Rosie and I have operated on the taboo side of the Law for several years now, and we’re loyal to each other in our way. We take care of each other’s needs, if you catch my drift.

  We also protect each other, make sure the cops have no idea what we’re up to. Protecting my business is what’s on the menu this morning. I need to move a small clay statue, a forty-five-hundred-year-old wide-eyed Sumerian votive figure I brought into New York a week ago— smuggled it out of Baghdad right under the noses of the British military and Hashemite princelings currently running the place. From there, the eight-inch fellow standing in perpetual prayer with big staring eyes and long wavy beard sailed with me wrapped in canvas and oilcloth in a damp cabin of a tramp steamer, then slipped into the Port of New York aboard Red Drogan’s tugboat, and finally rode with me in the backseat of Rosie’s cab in the dark of night. The little Sumerian has been residing peacefully ever since on a shelf in the basement vault beneath my dockside office, cooling off while the Baghdad authorities scour the ancient smuggling routes of the Near East, searching everywhere but New York and my underground vault.

  But at nine o’clock this morning my praying Sumerian will have his prayers answered and find a home with a woman who has big money, big political connections, and a Gramercy Park townhouse. I don’t want to drive my Buick down there, not with the goods in tow. The cops make it their business to know my car, even the new one I buy almost every year, and they pull me over sometimes just for the fun of it. But they can’t pick out Rosie’s cab, one of countless Checkers working the streets of New York. So I’ll meet Rosie at my office, a well-hidden spot in an unnoticeable little corner building shadowed by the elevated West Side Highway and across from the Hudson River docks. She’ll slip the cab through the alleys behind the building, then drive me downtown to Gramercy Park.

  A hot shower is followed by a cup of coffee. I turn on the radio, snap my fingers a few times to a current hit number, “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” before this new music— rock and roll, they call it— gets on my morning nerves. I turn the dial to something smoother but with just enough pep to get me going: Ella Fitzgerald crooning a Gershwin tune, “Nice Work if You Can Get It.” Yeah, my work’s damn nice, and I get enough of it to keep me in new cars, custom-tailored silk suits, and good scotch. But the nicest thing about my work is that I get to poke my finger in the eye of the Law that wants to jail me— or worse— just for my love of women and taking them to my bed. So I figure if the Law has no respect for the most beautiful part of my life, I have no reason to respect the Law.

  While the velvet-voiced Miss Fitzgerald sways me in the tune, I more or less comb my always disobedient crop of short brown hair. Women have called my hair a mop, or an old broom, or a pile of sticks. I work in a little hair tonic, not too much. I don’t like the oily look. It’s the best I can do to keep it all down.

  Groomed, I rub a warm cloth over my face, soothe the scars I’ve collected over the years: the curved scar above my right eye, the jagged one on my left cheek, the straight line cut into my chin, and Rosie’s favorite, the one she likes to tickle with her tongue, the small knife-shaped number above my lip. I think of my scars as the artistry of my outlaw life and brazen freedom.

  I slip into the trousers of my pale gray silk suit, button up a crisp white shirt, adorn it with a gray and pale green striped tie, and strap into the shoulder rig holding my .38 Smith & Wesson revolver, the chambers full. My suit jacket, which I finish off with a pale green pocket square, is tailored to hide the bulge of my gun. I put my wallet, keys, and extra rounds of .38 slugs into my trouser pocket, grab my black wool overcoat and my gray tweed cap, and I’m ready to start another day in my underworld Shangri-La.

  • • •

  My street, like the others in my Theater District neighborhood, is ordinarily pretty quiet at this early hour. Windows in the old brick or brownstone five-story walk-ups, or in more recent apartment buildings like mine, are still dark, the blinds closed or the shades pulled. My night owl neighbors, those troupers who sing and dance on Broadway’s stages or croon in the nightspots, don’t put a toe on the pavement until noon at the earliest, and that’s only if they have a two o’clock matinee. But this morning there’s a drama i
n front of my building, right outside the door. Uniformed cops keep a handful of rubberneckers back while a plainclothes cop makes notes as he stands over the dead body of a woman. I know the body’s dead, not just some sweetie passed out from too much booze or fainting from hunger. I know it by the way her legs and feet are splayed at odd angles and by the blood that’s spreading from her midsection onto the sidewalk.

  And I know the body. She slammed my apartment door about an hour ago.

  Chapter Two

  Lieutenant Norm Huber of Homicide, tall and skinny with a dry, stubbly, hollow-cheeked face, bears an uncanny resemblance to a dead tree. His brown tweed coat is cop-drab and shapeless. Smoke from the stubby ten-cent cigar between his teeth clouds under the brim of his beat-up brown fedora. Seeing me through the cigar smoke as I walk through the lobby, he pushes his hat back on his head and lets the smoke drift away, the better to show me the hate in his hooded eyes.

  He doesn’t really see me, at least not all of me, and it’s not because of the cigar smoke. He sees my face and form all right, but he doesn’t see the shock and misery behind my eyes at the sight of the woman lying dead on the pavement with a bloody wound in her chest, her face contorted in terror, the woman who’d lain beneath me in my bed. He doesn’t see that part of me because I don’t let him. And even if I did, he wouldn’t see it anyway. His soul went blind years ago, if he even has one, which I doubt.

  Maybe homicide cops’ souls always go blind, a survival tactic protecting them from being crushed by all the savagery they see. But hate like Huber’s isn’t from a blind soul; it’s from a tight, empty space too small for a soul.

  If you ask Huber why he hates me, he might say it’s because I got in his way on a murder case a few years ago and I’ve been a thorn in his side ever since. Or he might say he hates criminals generally, and people of my romantic persuasion especially. But if you ask me, I’d say hate is just Huber’s nature, the only emotion with enough heat to warm his cold heart.

  Taking the cigar from his mouth, he gives me a toothy, tobacco-yellowed grin a month too early for Halloween, but its effect is just as spooky. “When the call came into the precinct,” he says, his phlegmy voice gurgling through his teeth, which makes that grin even creepier, “I told the captain this one’s mine. And you know why, Gold?”

  “Lemme guess. You recognized my address.”

  His grin spreads wider, nastier, his eyes narrow with sour joy. “And here you are, all spiffed up on a sunny morning, a stiff at your doorstep. I suppose you’re gonna tell me you’ve got nothing to do with this and you’ve never laid eyes on this woman?”

  “Listen,” I say, keeping it light and easy, burying my acquaintance with the deceased behind an I’ve got nothing to hide performance my showbiz neighbors would appreciate. “I can’t be two places at once, can I, lieutenant? I just came off the elevator, and the woman is already lying here dead.”

  Huber sticks his cigar between his teeth again, keeps it clamped while he stares at me as if I’m a sewer rat he’d love to drown. After a second or two of his laughably silent bullying, he pulls the cigar from his mouth. “How do I know you didn’t knife her and then—”

  “Oh, is that how she was killed?”

  His hard look warns me not to give him any more back talk. “Yeah, that’s how she was killed,” he says. “My gut says you did it, Gold; then you went back upstairs to wash the blood off and change your bloody clothes for another of your snappy suits.” He says this like he wants to arrest me just for dressing better than he does. “And when you heard the sirens you came back down and ambled through your lobby innocent as Sunday.”

  “Except today is Tuesday,” I say, “and your story assumes I’m stupid enough to kill someone on my own doorstep and leave her here. You hate my guts, Huber. You’ve called me everything from sewer filth to perverted scum, but you’ve never called me stupid.”

  He’s been grinding his teeth all the time I’ve been talking, and now that I’ve stopped, he spits out his other accusation. “And I suppose you don’t know who the dame is?”

  “And I suppose you do?” It’s easier on my guilty soul to throw his question back at him than admit I’m a cad who never even asked her name.

  “Her name’s Lorraine Quinn, age thirty, according to the driver’s license we found in her handbag. With an address on the bleaker end of Bleecker Street.”

  I know more about her now than I did when I’d buried my face in her lush chestnut hair and held her body against mine while we danced at the Green Door Club. I still didn’t know any of it while I luxuriated in her breasts when she was in my bed. I feel pretty crummy that she had to die for me to find all that out. But feeling crummy could show up in my eyes, come across as the wrong kind of guilt, give Huber the wrong idea. So I squelch it.

  With a tip of my cap, I say, “I’ll be on my way now, lieutenant. You have a murder to solve, and far be it from me to stand in the way of the police.” I start to walk away, but Huber grabs my arm.

  “You’re not off the hook yet, Gold.”

  I give him my best Broadway smile, full of razzamatazz charm. “Am I the worm or the fish?”

  He puts the cigar back in his mouth with a sharp jerk of his arm, making it clear he’s not impressed with my little joke. “Get out of my sight,” he says, turning away from me and back to the business of the dead Lorraine Quinn.

  • • •

  After the hell of finding cops at my doorstep and the ache of seeing the woman who shared my bed dead at their feet, I take a little comfort from the sight of the familiar busted pink neon sign that reads Pe e’s Luncheonette instead of Pete’s. The wacky sign sets my world back on its regular axis.

  The joint is down the block from my place. Its broken sign helps dissuade tourists from venturing inside, which is why Pete never had the sign fixed. Mom and Pop Tourist linger too long and tip too little, making the counter help cranky.

  It’s not quite seven-thirty when I walk in. The scattering of early morning patrons eating breakfast at the counter or at the few small tables are agreeably quiet, except for the clink of spoons stirring coffee, the rustle of newspaper pages being turned, and the occasional shuffle of feet or scrape of chairs on the scuffed green-and-black checkerboard linoleum floor. The room has the welcoming aromas of strong coffee and tobacco. Cigarette smoke curling through the air makes the place look almost pretty.

  Behind the counter, Doris, the pink-uniformed, gray-haired, thin-faced waitress who’s been here since the linoleum was new, is pouring a cuppa for a guy in a dark blue coat and gray fedora, a neighborhood guy I nod to. He nods and taps a finger against the brim of his hat, and that’s all the acknowledgment needed or given. Nosiness is not a feature of my neighborhood. Not this early in the morning anyway.

  On my way to the phone booth in the back, I hang my coat and cap on the rack and give Doris my order for black coffee and two eggs sunny-side-up on a warm bialy. Her smile of acknowledgment, with her cherry red lipstick as usual smudged between her teeth, provides additional assurance that my world is steadying itself.

  After the clink and rattle of my dime dropping down into Ma Bell’s lap, I dial Judson Zane. Judson’s my right hand, a young guy of twenty-five with the clicking brain of an Einstein and a talent for secrecy that makes the government’s spy boys look like a bunch of blabbermouths. He loves obscure details, loves digging for information, and he’s put together a network of sources that police departments from here to Shanghai would lust after. Working a phone, Judson can generally find out just about anything about anyone. Oh, and he’s popular with girls. Behind his wire-rim glasses, they think his alert brown eyes and chiseled cheeks are adorable.

  I dial his apartment.

  He answers on the third ring.

  I say, “Judson, it’s me. Listen, I’ll meet you at the office around eight-thirty. Rosie will get there around the same time to ferry me and the goods down to Gramercy Park.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he says. “So why the call?”
The guy doesn’t miss a trick.

  “I want you to get started on something right away. Start working your contacts and dig into the life of one Lorraine Quinn, age thirty, lived somewhere on Bleecker Street.”

  “Lived?”

  “Yeah. Lived. She was knifed to death just outside my apartment building. Huber caught the case. Or rather, he laid claim to it.”

  Judson takes a moment to absorb this news and calculate its ramifications, then says, “So he wants to pin you for the killing?”

  “That’s the gist. But I want to get ahead of him. That’s why I need you to find out anything you can about Miss Quinn. Where she was from. Where she worked and what she did. Who loved her. Who didn’t. Who might’ve wanted her dead.” I tell him I’ll see him at the office and hang up.

  My breakfast is waiting for me when I slide onto a stool at the counter. Doris is pouring me a cup of coffee.

  “Just brewed a fresh pot,” she says through her cigarette-ragged voice. She puts down the coffeepot, looks me over through a smile loaded with street savvy. “You look like you could use a good cry.”

  I stop my forkful of egg-soaked bialy halfway to my mouth. “C’mon, Doris. When have you known me to cry?”

  “Never seen it, but I bet you do.”

  “Haven’t in a long time, a couple of years.” I take my bite of breakfast.

  Doris says, “Maybe you should. Not healthy not to cry. Anyways, you look lousy, like someone or something caught you in a hard grip.” Leaning across the counter, she puts her hand under my chin, says as tenderly as her savvy smarts allow, “It wouldn’t have anything to do with all that excitement— cops and everything— going on down the block? That’s your place, ain’t it?”

  Doris doesn’t know how I make my dough, but after years of sharing coffee together, she’s wise to the general contours of my love life. She doesn’t judge, and she’s even provided wise counsel and a sympathetic ear now and then when some cutie has cut me off at the knees. So the best thank you I can give her for her generous spirit and bottomless cups of the best coffee in town is to keep her uninformed of my criminal activities. That way, if the cops ever question her, she can tell them with a straight face and clean heart that she has no idea what they’re talking about. Works out great for both of us.