Manhattan Mayhem (42 page)

Poe hesitated a long moment before he answered. “I was terrified of disappearing.”

“So, you changed.”

“I wrote a big book—still a mystery at heart, but with thriller elements, and sort of multigenerational, almost a saga. My agent called it a saga and took me to lunch. Then he informed me he could not sell my big book under my little-books name.”

“What’s a little-books name?” Stark asked.

“I’d written some gothics. But gothics, like all genres, come and go, nice and steady for a while, not much money—four grand and a promise of lead book of the month sometime down the road—then your month finally comes along just in time for bodice rippers or sci-fi fantasies to knock gothics for a loop. Anyhow, my agent told me to use the pen name D’arcy de Chambord. The publisher who bought the mystery saga asked me to shift into big family sagas. D’arcy de Chambord cleaned up. Sold one to the movies, which paid for a house with a swimming pool in Connecticut.”

“Just there on weekends?” Stark, who liked empty houses, asked.

“A fellow comes by to feed the wolf hounds.”

“Well … if you’re making so much money writing sagas, what are you doing these E. P. Allan short stories for?”

“I’m a
writer.
I like short stories.… My agent hates them. My book publishers hate them. So, I write them secretly as E. P. Allan.”

“Which means, you don’t have to pay your agent’s commission?” Stark, whose mind ran along such lines, remarked.

Poe took offense. “First of all, the commission on forty-nine dollars a story isn’t a hell of a lot of money. Second of all, as soon as I started making big bucks with the sagas, my agent raised his commission to fifteen percent.”

Stark nodded admiringly.

Poe said, “The short stories feature the same character. A detective named Block. I figure, when I publish about eighty of them, E. P. Allan will start to get a following. Maybe even an offer for a full-length paperback original. But at the moment, they’re just nice little classy stories that are fun to write.”

“And thanks to your family sagas, you can afford to write for fun,” said Stark.

“I wish that were so. Unfortunately, family sagas have gone out of style again. My agent couldn’t give away the last one. If I don’t come up with some new kind of big book, I’ll go broke.”

“You can always sell the Connecticut house.”

“Mortgaged to the hilt. I really need another big book deal.”

“I know the feeling,” said Stark. “I really need another big heist. You know that alley we took to Greenwich Village? Where else does it go?”

“Funny you should ask,” said Poe.

This time when they went down the rickety ladder, Stark reached up and pulled the door over the hole. “So we don’t get interrupted.”

Poe led him into the stone alley. “Where to?”

“There’s a branch of the Emigrant Savings Bank on Third Avenue I was casing before I went away for a few years. If we went back there in 1971, I know it cold. Two-man job. Everything planned, prepped, and rehearsed. In quick, out fast.”

Poe shook his head. “That’s only ten years ago. Witnesses, cops, guards will still be around to finger us.”

“Let me get a look at the job. If it’s still like I remember, we’ll be in quick, out fast, no one will see us.”

“What if it’s not like you remember?”

“Then we try a better one.”

“The problem is,” said Poe. “I can’t keep doing this all day. We’ve already gone back to Greenwich Village. If we go to Third Avenue in 1971 and it doesn’t work out, I’m done for at least twenty-four hours. Exhausted.”

“Okay. Let’s go so far back all the witnesses die of old age.”

“Ahead,” said Poe. “We go ahead.”

“Why?”

“They can’t come back for us.”

“Nice. Where? When?”

“Place I visited once.”

Stark followed Poe through the stone alley with a funny feeling that Poe had a plan. They emerged on the waterfront at the corner of Twelfth Avenue and Fifty-First Street facing Midtown skyscrapers ablaze in light, and their backs to the Manhattan Cruise Terminal piers. Disoriented, Stark looked up. Overhead, he saw only the night sky. “What happened to the West Side Highway?”

“They tore it down in ’89.”

Stark looked around. The shapes of the cars did not look familiar. “When is now?”

“Early two-thousands. Oh-five or oh-six. Before they changed the currency.”

“What are they doing to the currency?”

“Making it harder to counterfeit.”

Stark shrugged. Counterfeiting was indoor work. You might as well slave in a factory.

Poe said, “What we take here, now, we can still spend in ’81.”

Across the many lanes of car and truck traffic, a two-story stucco structure stretched a full block wide from Fifty-First Street to Fifty-Second. It managed to look vaguely Roman, an impression heightened by the stucco and a columned portico on its roof. It didn’t appear to have any windows, and Stark, who maintained a professional interest in buildings without windows, assumed it contained something valuable.
Must have been a warehouse many years ago when the waterfront was still active, which meant a lot of big, open space inside. Might even connect to the tall loft building behind it. Which was also blank walled.

There was a single door on the street corner at the downtown end.

“What’s that?”

“That is where guys making fortunes on Wall Street spend it.”

Stark noted limos pulling up. Laughing men in suits reeled through the door. He said, “A strip club.”

“For the highest rollers. They call it a gentlemen’s club.”

“Cash,” said Stark.

“Mostly,” said Poe. “There’s some credit cards, but most use cash. Private from their wives.”

“How many girls?”

“At least a hundred, a busy night like tonight,” said Poe. “Plus hostesses, cocktail waitresses, and bar maids.”

“Did you case the joint, or were you just hanging out?” asked Stark.

“Research. I’m a writer.”

“Right,” said Stark, and ran the numbers aloud. “Five hundred customers spending five hundred a head. Quarter million in that one building. Minus a hundred grand stuffed in the girls’ drawers, we’re still looking at a hundred and fifty thousand.”

“Drawers these days,” said Edgar Allan Poe, “don’t hold that much.”

“They’ll find someplace to put it.”

Poe looked troubled. “You wouldn’t rob the girls, would you?”

Stark returned a look that would freeze vodka. “Even if we wanted to, can you imagine parting cash from a hundred women who worked that hard to get it? No, we’re not here to rob the girls. We’re here to rob the club’s cash room.”

“They have heavy security,” said Poe.

“I would, too, in their position.”

“I should tell you that the mob owns a piece of the business.”

“The mob controls a strip club?” asked Stark. “I am shocked.”

“I’m just warning you.”

“Wait here.”

“Where are you going?”

“We need chauffeur uniforms,” said Stark, and he stalked across Twelfth Avenue.

Poe waited anxiously, wondering whether he had underestimated or overestimated the heist man. But surely Stark couldn’t just rob the club and leave him stranded? How would he get back to 1981? An hour passed. A second crept by, and Poe reflected gloomily that the crook had decided to stay in 2005 forever and rob the club on his own.

A long limousine stopped at the curb. Stark was at the wheel, wearing a chauffeur’s uniform that fit perfectly and licking blood from a knuckle. “Get in back.”

Poe slid into the passenger compartment, and Stark steered the limo into traffic. On the seat were a chauffeur’s jacket, pants, and visored cap. They fit perfectly.

“Got a gun?” Stark asked once Poe was dressed.

“No.”

“Good. Have you ever pulled a job like this before?”

“I’ve written it dozens of times.”

Stark glowered in the mirror.

“This is my first. In real life,” Poe said.

“Listen up. When we get in there, your job is to keep your eyes open and watch my back. You see trouble, tell me who to shoot.”

“Are we just barging in there?”

“No. We are entering on a mission to retrieve our criminal bosses, because the feds got the word they’re in the club. The feds are going to bust in in ten minutes. Our criminal bosses are armed. There will be gunfire and innocents will die, which means the cops will shut down the club for a very long time unless their loyal limo drivers get their bosses out quietly.”

“Security will ask what our bosses’ names are.”

“Our bosses use assumed names in strip clubs.”

“Security will ask why we don’t just text them.”

“What?”

“It’s the year 2005. They have cell phones that receive voice and text messages.”

Stark digested this information and said, “We can’t ‘text’ them because the feds are wiretapping their cell phones.”

“The feds can’t exactly wiretap cell phones. They have no wires.”

“They can call it whatever the hell they want to call it, but I can guarantee you the feds are still tapping the phones. In your day, they would have netted homing pigeons.”

Poe said, “The club has security cameras covering the whole place. They’ll probably make us go to their office and look for our bosses on their video screens.”

“Now you get it,” said Stark.

Stark had driven down Twelfth Avenue while Poe put on his chauffeur uniform, and he talked the writer through the job. Now he turned the limo around at Fourteenth Street and headed back up toward Fifty-First. Two blocks from the strip club, he pulled to the curb and switched on the hazard blinkers.

“What?” asked Poe.

“Cops.”

Patrol cars with flashing lights had converged on the corner of Fifty-First. A phalanx of men in blue charged in the door.

“Now what?” asked Poe.

“We wait ’til they leave.”

“What are they doing in there?”

“Whatever they want to.”

“Security won’t believe our story if the cops have already been there.”

“They’ll believe it more,” said Stark.

An ambulance pulled up. Men and women rolled a gurney across
the sidewalk.

“Oh my God, it’s a shootout,” said Poe. “We better—”

“Just relax.” Stark thought that Poe was getting dangerously nervous for a man who was supposed to be watching his back. Yet another reason not to pull a job without rehearsing. He kept his eyes on the scene two blocks ahead and tried to distract the writer before he got too frantic to be of any use at all. “What kind of book will you write next?”

“Mysteries are coming back big time,” said Poe. “Best sellers, even. So, my agent thinks we can find a publisher willing to shell out big for the right book. He’s trying to talk me into writing one. I have an awful feeling I’m going to have to.”

“You don’t like mysteries?”

“I like them. But I know I’ll never win an Edgar.”

“What’s an Edgar?”

“MWA Edgar Allan Poe Award.”

“MWA?”

“Mystery Writers of America. They organized to promote mysteries and protect writers. They’ve got a clever motto: Crime does not pay—enough.”

“Bull,” said Stark. “Crime pays top dollar. But you gotta put the work into it. Plan. Prep. Rehearse. If you don’t, you’re a two-bit stick-up artist broke and in the slammer—wait a minute. Did you say they named the award after you?”