Better Dead (18 page)

She seemed used to this kind of thing and her smile was sunny as she swayed off to cool her pretty heels.

I said, “Be right with you, Mr. Costello.”

His two boys were seated on a bench against the rear wall, as if waiting their turn. With my back to their boss, I handed the spokesman a white Waldorf stationery envelope as lumpy as his face. He gave me a wary look.

I nodded to his confederate, who was concentrating on whether to shit or go blind. “Split 'em with Chuckles here. And remember that
this
is the way I sent them back to you.”

The spokesman felt the .38 slugs through the paper and nodded, then slipped the envelope in his suit coat pocket. He managed a smile for me and even winked with the droopy eye, which was creepy but appreciated.

Back at the booth, I slid in across from the mob boss as if I was the new manicurist and said amiably, “Mr. Costello, you had your boys throw a little scare my way. Was that really necessary?”

He shrugged shoulders that had no real need for the suit coat's padding. “I was trying to make a point, Nate. Hope they didn't overdo. And it's ‘Frank,' please. Come on. How long have we known each other?”

We didn't really know each other at all.

“Way back,” I said with half a smile. “I believe Frank Nitti introduced us.”

Melancholy made a momentary visit to Costello's face. “He was a good man, Nitti. Wish he was still around. Chicago could use him. They say you two was tight. Father and son, almost.”

“An exaggeration. What point, Frank?”

“What's that?”

“You said you were making a point.”

It was frankly absurd seeing New York's most powerful gangster with his fingers dipped in two little clear-glass finger bowls. But somehow I managed not to laugh.

“Yeah, right, I was,” he said, nodding. “And the point I was making is that you could get yourself in hot water, Nate, if you don't watch yourself.”

This is where Sam Spade on the radio would say,
Seems to me you're
already
in hot water, Frank—your fingers, anyway.

I said, “Why's that?”

He drew a breath. He had the kind of big chest that drawing a breath made huge. Then he exhaled and it was merely big again. “Somebody asked me to
really
make a point, Nate. Beat you within an inch, dump you on a side road, to think things over.”

“What kind of things?”

Naturally arching eyebrows arched farther. “You're looking into this Rosenberg deal. Trying to find new evidence, new witnesses.”

“I suppose I could ask you how you know that, Frank. But what I really want to know is … why do you care?”

“I don't give two runny shits whether those Commies live or die. Fine with me if they go to the chair, though I admit I'm not much for frying females. Call me a sentimental slob.”

“Well, you did say ‘somebody' asked you to hand me my ass. So it's obviously not your idea. Why didn't you?”

“You said it yourself, Nate. We go way back.”

I had to say it. “We don't know each other all that well, Frank. I respect you. You run things like Nitti did, like a business executive—and you don't sell poison.” Narcotics trafficking was out under Costello. “And maybe you respect me, too. But is that enough to give me a pass?”

He drew another chest-expanding breath, a natty gorilla with his pinkies soaking. “The somebody who made this request of me is a good friend of somebody else, who I
do
respect.”

I actually could follow that. “But you don't respect the party who
asked
you to get my attention.”

Costello frowned in thought. “Well, I do and I don't. He's young. He's smart as a goddamn whip. And mean as a damn snake. Has the makings of a top mouthpiece, kind we can always use in my business. But he's reckless, this slimy little cocksucker. And the idea that somehow I owe
him
enough that this little shit can come to me with a demand like this?” He sighed deep enough to make the water in the tiny dishes ripple. “Truth is, Nate, this person who imposed on me? Is the one I'd like to dump on a side road with a swolled-up head and something to think about.”

“Whereas you're giving me a free ride?”

He raised a hand from a bowl and pointed a dripping finger. “What I'm giving you, Nate, is free advice. There is nothing, no fucking thing, this sleazy little smart-ass kike won't do.… Excuse me, that was out of line. You're of the Hebrew persuasion yourself, right?”

“Nobody persuaded me,” I said with a smile. “I just got my old man's name hung on me. Thank God for my mother's Irish mug, huh?”

He found that amusing and laughed. Unless that was a cough.

“The thing is,” Costello said, “this certain smart-ass kike is well connected. In my world, sure, but also Uncle Sam's, plus in this city generally. He was the right hand of a guy I helped rise to a high position which is useful to me. Do you know what two guys I'm talking about?”

Roy Cohn had been U.S. Attorney Irving Saypol's second-in-command, and not just at the Rosenberg trial. Saypol, of course, now sat on the New York State Supreme Court. You couldn't get that kind of appointment in this state without Costello's nod.

“I know who you're talking about,” I said.

He pointed a dripping forefinger again. “This smart-ass kid is concerned that you might actually clear that Commie couple.”

“Still a long shot.”

“I'm a good American and I hate Commies like the clap, but this is your business, so I won't interfere.”

“Other than to get my attention short of a ride in the country.”

He beamed at me, at the moment reminding me more of Bela Lugosi than George Raft. “That's right, Nate. I can see why that other Frank liked you. You have brains. Try to hold on to them.… Okay, honey!”

That last wasn't for me—he was summoning the manicurist, who was seated off in a corner, using an emery board on her own nails. The redhead looked up brightly and padded over, all lipstick and curves. A month's worth of her tips from just Costello would likely finance a few nights at the Waldorf, too.

“Before you go,” he said to me (I'd already slid out of the booth), “be my pleasure to stake you to a haircut and shave.”

This is where Sam Spade would say,
No thanks, Frank. I've had enough close shaves for one day already.

Checking my watch, I said, “Rain check, thanks. In about five minutes, I'm meeting a girl almost as cute as Mildred here.”

I'd deduced the redhead's name by checking out the plastic name tag on her left breast. I'm a professional detective.

“Well, then, make yourself an appointment on the way out,” he said magnanimously, as the girl withdrew his right hand from the water, “and tell them to put it on my tab.”

“Thanks, Frank,” I said.

And I did.

*   *   *

Washington Heights, extending from 155th Street to Dyckman Street, was bordered on the west and east by two rivers, the Hudson and Harlem respectively. Built upon a series of bluffs and cliffs, the immigrant neighborhood—with its steep concrete staircases connecting different areas—had seen an influx of European Jews fleeing Nazism in the 1930s and '40s.

Approaching by cab in the early evening, I watched block after block of apartment buildings appear against the sky like battlements of long-ago European villages. The ten-floor hillside apartment house where Natalie and I were dropped wasn't far from City College, where Sophie Rosenberg's boy Julius had once gone, though at the time she'd lived nowhere near.

Mrs. Rosenberg sat across from us on her wine-colored flocked sofa in her modest living room with its busy wallpaper clashing with busier drapes. She wore a black dress—in advance mourning?—with a floral brooch and round, wire-rimmed glasses a bit too large for a face reminiscent of her son's. Her dark hair, up in a bun, had heavily grayed and her eyebrows seemed raised in perpetual bewilderment, bony hands with parchment skin clasped in her lap. In her early seventies, she looked at least that, the many lines in her face like deep cuts, her short compact frame having once supported a rather stout body whose flesh had been whittled by grief.

She insisted on getting us coffee and cookies, a tray of which rested on a small drop-leaf table by a street-side window, over to our left as we sat on a pair of mismatched English armchairs about as comfortable as what awaited her son and daughter-in-law.

I had traded in my latest Botony 500 for a custom charcoal number from Richard Bennett Custom Tailors in the Loop, a nice and smooth fit despite the nine-millimeter under my left arm. Natalie was all in black—sweater, skirt, tights, sandals.

“This much space I don't need,” Sophie Rosenberg said with a dismissive shrug. I had complimented her on her tidy apartment. “Four rooms is too much. But I have the boys with me at first, you know, before they get too much for me.”

Her grandchildren, she meant.

She'd recognized Natalie as a friend of her son's, but when I questioned her about her in-laws, David and Ruth Greenglass, she had little to say.

“Ethel's family, they don't have much to do with us,” she said. “Tessie—Ethel's mama—not a nice woman. She brings Ethel up too strict, David too soft. Ethel, she tries to do better. That's why the boys, they such wild ones. You spoil a boy, you know, and later they go wrong sometimes.”

The irony of that was unintended, of course. I doubted she'd know irony if she tripped over it.

“Oh, Doovey and Ruth? Always talk kind to me. My heart, it breaks thinking about what they do to Julie and Ethel. You think you
know
people.”

She was vaguely aware of the business disagreements between Julie and “Doovey” at their machine shop, but never overheard any real arguments.

“I so wish I could help, Mr. Heller. But this, it is hard for me. A educated woman, I'm not. I don't follow this sad story in the papers. I turn off the radio. I don't go to the court for the trial, not one day. Nobody in the family goes. Just too hard. Too sad. Too tragedy. Visit Julie, this much I can do. Mr. Bloch drives me over, kind man.… Drink your tea, Mr. Heller. Natalie, you too, eat some cookies. Help yourself. I make them this afternoon.”

I went over to the table for a macaroon. Looking past the tablecloth, I noticed the wood was mahogany, the style spare and modern, nicer than anything else in this place, with its older furniture, probably sometimes secondhand.

No,
I thought.
Not possible.…

I refilled my tea and collected another macaroon and returned to my uncomfy chair, trying not to indicate any excitement. “Delicious, Mrs. Rosenberg.”

“Trick is the coconut. Always at Passover, I make dozens and dozens.”

Was this Passover?
A question that revealed just how Jewish I was …

“That's a nice table, Mrs. Rosenberg,” I said offhandedly, between nibbles. “Where did you get it?”

“Oh, that table belongs Julie and Ethel. If …
when
they get out, back it goes.”

Natalie's big brown eyes swung to me.

I said, “I understand all the furniture in the Knickerbocker Village apartment was sold to a junk man.”

“Yes, this I handle personal. Those things, they bring five dollars.”

“Was that
all
of Julie and Ethel's things…?”

Her tiny shrug seemed to require big effort. “All but this and that, like toys and bicycles and some chest drawers for the boys' bedroom—not here now, boys
or
chests—and that table. It's a very nice one. From Macy's, it is.”

I turned to Natalie, her eyes wide, her mouth poised in mid–macaroon bite.

“Mrs. Rosenberg,” I said gently, “are you aware of a console table that your son owned that was—”

“Right
there,
” she said, frowning and pointing to it.
Was her guest crazy? We were just talking about that!

I tried again. “Didn't you know that the table in your son's apartment was said to be a special one used for microfilming?”

Small dark eyes blinked behind big round lenses. “Your what?”

“You didn't know that anyone was looking for that table?”

She shook her head. “Nice enough, that table. But who would make a fuss finding?”

“You mind if I take a closer look?”

“Be my guest.”

I rose. “Could I impose on you to clear it? Move the tray to the kitchen?”

Rising quickly, Natalie said, “I can do that,” and Mrs. Rosenberg just looked on as if wondering whether she'd admitted two lunatics to her apartment.

The table was a small, ordinary drop-leaf affair designed to rest against a wall. Nothing rigged for spying or anything else. No ornamentation. On the underside were grease-pencil numbers—1997—possibly indicating its price, $19.97. With tax, that would add up to just about what Julius said he'd paid Macy's for it.

I was trembling a little. I admit it. You work very hard to bring thorough established procedure to an investigation, and the only part of my training that I'd applied this evening was noticing something right in front of me. So that didn't make me Sherlock Holmes, but it also didn't make this discovery any less exciting.

Natalie was crouching down and getting a good look herself.

“It fits the way Julie described it in court,” she said, “and with none of the special spy attributes Ruth reported it having.”

I raised a waist-high hand and gave Natalie a look that said,
Calm cool collected, now.

We returned to our armchairs.

I asked, “Other members of your family come visit you here, I assume?”

“Oh, yes.”

“You have … two daughters, is that right?”