Hard Case Crime: Fifty to One (30 page)

“That must be some question,” said the man, a compact fellow with a broad face and a florid mustache. Mr. Biro, presumably.

“We’ll see,” Mike said. “You ever hear of a boat called
A Diet of Treacle?”

Biro snatched the bill, made it vanish into the pocket of his vest quick as a dog swallowing a scrap of meat. “Mr. Kraus got a telephone call about it just a few minutes ago. You can talk to him over there.” He pointed to a table in a shadowy corner where a white-haired man sat alone. “I bring your wine.”

“Mr. Kraus?” Mike said, extending one hand as he approached. The old man looked up from where he sat, stooped, over a half-empty glass. There was a telephone beside the glass, its cord dangling beneath the table.

The man straightened as much as he could, which wasn’t very much. “Yes?”

“My name’s Mike Hanlon. I’m trying to find a boat called
A Diet of Treacle.
I was told to see you.”

“You were told right,” Mr. Kraus said. His voice was soft and he had a wet sort of lisp, as if his dentures hadn’t been fitted quite right. “It’s my boat. I imagine you’re curious why I gave it that name.”

Mike wasn’t, particularly, and more importantly felt the urgency of Charley’s situation weighing on him—but he figured saying he wasn’t interested was no way to gain the man’s confidence. “Of course,” he said, sitting down. A hand appeared over his shoulder and set a glass of red wine before him. He sipped it. It was nothing special.

Mr. Kraus said, “My first name is Dorman. Dorman Kraus. In school, the other boys called me Dormouse. Like in
Alice In Wonderland.”

“And...?”

“Are you not a reader, Mr. Hanlon?” Kraus said. “The Mad Hatter’s tea party. The Dormouse tells a story about three girls who live on a diet of treacle.”

“Sure,” Mike said unconvincingly, “that makes perfect sense.”

“What did you want to know about my boat, Mr. Hanlon?”

“Do you ever rent it out?”

“Certainly not.”

“That’s odd,” Mike said, “because I understand someone is making a trip in it this evening.”

“Nonsense,” said Mr. Kraus.

“What was the phone call you got about it?”

“Who says I got a phone call about it?”

“Biro.”

“He’s wrong.”

Mike dug a ten dollar bill out of his pocket and slid it across the table. Mr. Kraus stared at it.

“I don’t need to know much,” Mike said. “Just where you dock the boat. That’ll be plenty.”

“It might be too much.”

“How so?” Mike said.

“I may be an old man,” Kraus said, “but I look forward to living a few years still. Why should I risk that for ten lousy dollars?”

“Another man’s life is at stake, too. A friend of mine. A young man, who should have more than a few years ahead of him. He won’t if you don’t help me.”

“This is not my concern,” Kraus said.

Mike set a second ten dollar bill on top of the first.

Kraus took out a pocket watch, stared at its face, wound its stem, returned it to his pocket. “It is starting to concern me somewhat more,” he said.

“But not enough?”

“Not quite.”

A third sawbuck joined the other two. Krauss neatened up their edges, folded the bills in two and then in two again, set his palm down over them. “Come with me,” he said and slowly, painfully stood. He took two teetering steps away from the table with the aid of a cane. “Will you take my arm? I don’t walk very well anymore.”

“You don’t have to walk,” Mike said. “Just tell me where it is and I’ll go there myself.”

“No,” Kraus said. “I’ll take you there. Or you can have your money back.” When Mike hesitated, Kraus said, “Those are my terms.”

Mike reluctantly took his arm, walked with him to the door. On the sidewalk outside, Kraus looked at his watch again, then set off at a snail’s pace in the direction of the water.

They walked up First Avenue, pausing repeatedly to let Kraus rest and catch what little remained of his breath. In this fashion, they passed warehouses and slips and a cavernous import-export arcade where traders of various sorts maintained one-man booths and fanned themselves to combat the stifling heat. At the pier off 57th Street, a tugboat labored valiantly to pull an overladen barge out of its dock. At 53rd, the pier was walled off and Mike could only see the upper decks of the two ships tied up there.

When Kraus halted for the third or fourth time in one block, Mike considered abandoning him and continuing his search by brute force, hunting down every boat one by one. But there were too many—too many boats, too many buildings, too many blocks. He could spend the next three hours at it and not see them all. And what if the
Treacle
was docked behind one of the waterfront’s locked gates?

Between 50th Street and 47th, the piers were overgrown with grass and weeds, but a profusion of boats still stood at them, bobbing gently, while others rode at anchor just off some the longer outcroppings of the shore. Mike scanned the hulls, looking for any names longer than a word or two. “How much farther?” he asked. And, each time they came to a pier, “Is this the one?” But Kraus just shook his head, kept his gaze trained on the ground, and concentrated on putting one frail leg in front of the other.

Only when they reached the far end of the avenue did Kraus take one last look at his watch and say, “All right.”

“Where’s the boat?” Mike said, staring at the empty pier they were approaching.

“There,” Kraus said, and pointed out toward the horizon. There was a ship in the middle distance, chugging swiftly toward the open water. It wasn’t so far that Mike couldn’t make out figures on her deck. One of them looked like it might be Charley.

Mike rounded on the old man, had to restrain himself from picking him up bodily by the lapels and shaking him. “You knew,” he said accusingly. “You—that’s why all the time with the watch. Jesus Christ. I bet you can probably walk just fine.”

“Sadly, no,” Kraus said.

“But you can do better than creeping along like this, can’t you? You were making sure they had time to get away!”

“You said all you wanted to know was where I dock the boat,” Kraus said. “Well, now you know. I dock it here. You got what you paid for.”

“But why...why would they leave now? I thought they weren’t going to leave till tonight—” Mike closed his eyes. “They changed their plans, didn’t they. That’s what the phone call was—telling you they were leaving early. As long as they’re collecting the money from Tricia tomorrow morning, they can pick up the purse from the race then, too.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kraus said. “And I don’t want to know. I’m going back now. You don’t have to walk with me.”

“Walk with you?” Mike growled. “I ought to throw you in the goddamn bay.”

“Don’t you dare,” Kraus said. “I’ll scream if you touch me. You’ll have the police on you so fast, young man, you won’t know what hit you.”

“You know something,” Mike said, “it’d almost—

—be worth it,’ I told him.” Mike shook his head. “But of course it wouldn’t have been. It would’ve been a disaster. So I left him there and grabbed the first train back.” He swallowed the shot of whiskey he’d poured himself from the row of bottles on his back bar. “I hope you had better luck.”

“Not exactly,” Tricia said.

“So you didn’t find the money?” Erin said.

“Do you see three million dollars on me?”

“What happened?” Mike said. “Where did you go?”

“To Fulton Street,” Tricia said.

The brownstone was where she’d left it, looking much the way it had at dawn. She watched from across the street as men entered and departed, one by one or in pairs. She didn’t recognize any of them. The limousine wasn’t parked out front or, the one time she circled the block to peek at the building from the rear, out back either. There were some cars along the curb, but no way to know whether they belonged to Barrone and his men or to the neighbors.

The curtains were drawn in the windows all the way up, except for one room at the top where the window was open. It was too high up for Tricia to see in, though.

She thought about walking up the stone steps and ringing the doorbell, trying to talk her way in, but it wasn’t hard to imagine more ways that could turn out badly than well. So she waited, and she watched.

Renata came out twenty minutes later. She was by herself, Tricia was happy to see, wearing a patterned sundress in red and white and cat’s eye sunglasses with her hair pinned up. She looked a bit like an actress trying to go incognito. Tricia fell into step behind her. She kept half a block back, kept other pedestrians between them, but at the same time kept an eye on Renata, watched to see where she’d go. And when she stopped outside a dressmaker’s window to light a cigarette, Tricia took the opportunity to come up behind her and plant the nose of her gun in the small of Renata’s back.

“Don’t turn around,” Tricia said.

“Ah, Tricia,” Renata said, flipping her lighter closed and replacing it in the clutch purse she was carrying. “You think I didn’t know you were there?” She didn’t turn, didn’t look back over her shoulder, but they could each see the other’s face reflected in the darkened store window beside them. “I spotted you the moment I stepped outside.”

“I don’t believe you,” Tricia said. “If you had, you’d never have let me get the drop on you.”

“Drop? What drop?” Renata laughed. “You dumb cluck. There are three men watching us right now who’ll shoot you the moment I give the signal.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s the signal?”

She wagged the cigarette between her fingers. “I drop this on the sidewalk. Grind it out under my toe. It’ll be the last thing you see. Unless you walk away right now.”

“I can pull this trigger before they get me.”

“I doubt it,” Renata said. She didn’t seem nervous at all. She took a long pull on the cigarette, exhaled a mouthful of smoke. “Not going? All right. Have it your way. What do you want?” She raised the cigarette. “You don’t have much time left.”

“The money,” Tricia said. “Where is it?”

“What money?”

“The money you took from your uncle’s safe. The three million dollars.”

Now Renata began to laugh in earnest, really laugh, so hard her shoulders shook from it. “Oh, god. That’s rich. You think I took it.”

“Yes, I do,” Tricia said. “You took your uncle’s money, and then spent the past month holed up in your father’s headquarters for protection. I don’t know if you planned it together or you did it on your own, but he must know about it now because he’s been keeping out of sight too—lying low with you for the past month, trying to keep you safe. That went on until this morning, when poor Eddie barged in on you and you decided you had a sacrificial lamb you could turn over to Uncle Nick to get the heat off you once and for all.”

“What an imagination,” Renata said. “A headshrinker would probably say it’s because of all the loving you’re not getting—oh, yes, Charley told me about you, Miss Knees Together.”

Tricia pressed the gun against the base of Renata’s spine. “Keep talking. You’ll spend the rest of your life in a chair.”

“Touchy, aren’t we?” Renata burned off some more of the cigarette with another drag, then held it up to show off its rapidly diminishing length. “Sure you don’t want to go now? I would if I were you.”

It wasn’t that Tricia wasn’t tempted—what if there really were three gunmen drawing a bead on her right now?—but she shook her head. “Are you telling me,” she said, “that you didn’t take Eddie to your uncle’s earlier today? That you didn’t kill him? Because your uncle told me otherwise.”

“No, Tricia, I’m not telling you that. I’m telling you I didn’t take his money.”

“And I’m saying you’re a liar,” Tricia said. “You lied to your uncle about Eddie, certainly. And why would you have lied about who stole the money if you didn’t do it yourself?”

“How do you know Eddie didn’t do it?” Renata said. “The man confessed.”

“Yeah, he confessed—to stealing both your uncle’s money and his photographs,” Tricia said. “But I know who stole the photos, and it wasn’t him.”

“But then—then you must know who stole the money, too,” Renata said, “and that it wasn’t me.”

“Uh-uh,” Tricia said. “Not so fast.”

Renata fell silent. She was taking no more drags on her cigarette now, Tricia noticed, though it continued to burn slowly toward the filter.

“And,” Tricia said, emboldened, “I think you’re lying about the three men watching us, too. I don’t think there’s anybody watching us. I think nothing will happen when you finish that cigarette.”

“You prepared to bet your life on that?” Renata said.

“Are you?” Tricia said.

They watched each other in the window. Tricia held the gun without wavering. Steadiest hands in the east.

“No,” Renata said briskly. “I’m not.” She dropped the cigarette butt on the ground, where it continued to smolder. Nothing else happened. “Let’s you and I sit down, why don’t we.”

They sat across from one another at a cafeteria on the corner of Dutch Street. The nearest other patron was five tables away and engrossed in a paperback novel, so Tricia was able to keep her gun aimed at Renata behind a menu without anyone noticing or complaining. Except Renata herself, and her complaints fell on deaf ears.

“Why don’t you put that thing away?”

“Why don’t you start talking,” Tricia said, “so I don’t have to use it?”

“As if you’d really shoot me in a public place,” Renata said.

“It’s been a long couple of days, Renata,” Tricia said. “Don’t bet on me making good decisions.”

Renata poured some sugar in her coffee, stirred it. “You know my uncle thinks
you
have his money. That’s what Eddie told him.”

“Yes, I know. It’s not true—but I don’t expect to be able to convince him of that unless I can find out who does have it.”

“Well, don’t look at me,” Renata said.

Tricia pulled back the hammer of her gun.

“I didn’t take his money,” Renata insisted. “I wish I knew who did.”

“If you didn’t, why do you care who did?”

Renata seemed to make a decision. “I’m going to tell you something that could make my life a lot more difficult if you repeated it. I’m not just doing it because you’ve got a gun on me. I’m doing it because if you’re serious about finding out who took the money, you might be in a position to make my life a lot easier than it’s been for the past month.”