New York Nocturne (21 page)

“So we will know.”

He grinned. He was clearly enjoying himself. “You plan to whack him? The guy who whacked John?”

“No. We want only to know who he is.”

“A little knowledge, you know, Miss Borden, that's a dangerous thing.”

“Less of it, sometimes, can be still more dangerous.”

He smiled. “Let me ask you this.” He frowned abruptly. Shaking his head, he waved his hand. “Never mind. Forget it. It's kind of personal.”

“What is it?” she said.

Another shrug. “Okay. Fair enough. You ask me a question, I ask you a question.” He smiled again, his sharp brown eyes narrowing. He put his elbows on the table and clasped his hands together. “It's a famous case, isn't it? The trial of the century. I wasn't even alive when it happened, but I've heard about it. Everyone's heard about it. Forty whacks, right? It was a very big deal.”

“What is your question?” said Miss Lizzie.

He leaned forward, his brown eyes looking shrewdly up at her from beneath his brow. “Okay, right, here it comes. You ready?”

“Yes.”

“Did you kill 'em, Miss Borden? Did you whack 'em with a hatchet?”

Miss Lizzie sighed. “I was put on trial, as you may know,” she said. “I was acquitted.”

He sat back and spread his hands. “Acquitted, sure. But
not guilty
—that's not the same as
innocent
, is it?”

“I have answered your question.”

He smiled again. “Well, now, you know, I was listening real close, Miss Borden,
real
close, and you know what? I didn't really hear an answer. I didn't hear a definite
yes
or a definite
no
.”

She looked at him for a moment. He held his gaze, smiling easily.

At last she said, “I understand that you're a gambling man, Mr. Rothstein.”

The smile didn't change. “I've been known to make a wager or two.”

“Then permit me to propose something.”

He waved the hand again. “Propose away.”

“I propose that we play a game of poker. Not for money. For information. If I win, you will answer my questions. If you win, I shall answer yours.”

His eyes were sparkling. “And what's going to keep us honest?”

“We shall be alone. Just you and I. No one will ever know the outcome.”

“Still no guarantee.”

“Are you a welsher, Mr. Rothstein?”

Flatly, he said, “Arnold Rothstein never welshes.”

“I am prepared to take your word for it, then, that you'll be honest.”

He smiled. “No offense, naturally, but how do I know
you'll
be honest?”

“I am no welsher myself.”

He nodded. “You play much poker, Miss Borden?”

“Not recently,” she said. “But I played rather a lot when I was younger. I should tell you that I was considered quite good, as it happens. Something of a ‘shark.'”

He smiled again. He glanced over at me and then asked her, “One hand, one question?”

“Yes.”

“Stud or draw?”

“I prefer draw. But I should like to be the one who provides the cards. If you don't mind.”

“We play this game and then, tomorrow, you take off, both of you. Out of New York. No more questions, no more running around and bothering people.”

“You have my word.”

He grinned. “Okay,” he said. “You're on.”

“Very well. Shall I go purchase some cards? There must be somewhere nearby that—”

He laughed. “Hey,” he said. “Not here. Not in Lindy's. Gambling is illegal in the state of New York—you didn't know that? Lindeman, the owner, he'd shoot me dead if I played in here.”

“Where, then?”

He opened his leather notebook, flipped to the back, and tore out a blank page. He set that on the table, picked up his Montblanc, snapped off the cap, wrote something across the page, then pushed it across the table to Miss Lizzie.

“There,” he said.

She lifted it and read it. “When?” she said.

“One o'clock. Tonight. Can you make that?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Bring Amanda along,” he said.

She shook her head. “You and I,” she said. “Alone. That was the arrangement.”

“Miss Borden, listen to me. I don't hurt young girls.” He smiled. “And I don't hurt old women, either. What are you to me, you and Amanda? What kind of threat? None at all. Like you say, you can't give the cops anything, even if you
had
anything. I hurt you, what's the percentage in it for me? None at all.”

“She is not coming,” she said.

He shrugged. “Fine. Then no game.”

Miss Lizzie looked down at the sheet of paper then looked up at him. “Why do you want her there?”

He glanced at me again before answering her. “Because,” he said, “I want her to see it.” He narrowed those brown eyes once more, and once more he smiled. The smile now was cruel, like the grin of Lieutenant Becker. It was in this moment, for the first time, that I truly believed that Arnold Rothstein was an evil man. “And because I want her to hear you say it.”

Miss Lizzie was silent.

I turned to her. “I want to come with you.”

He held out his hand as though offering me, like a gift, over to her. “There you are. So what is it? Do we play or not?”

Miss Lizzie looked at me. I nodded. She turned back to Mr. Rothstein. “We play.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Forty-two Pearl Street, the address on Arnold Rothstein's piece of paper, was a small office building. A lamp above the double door burned brightly. I stood beside Miss Lizzie on the stoop as she opened her purse and found the key that Mr. Rothstein had given her. She slipped it in the lock and turned it. The door opened. We stepped inside and closed the doors behind us. Miss Lizzie flipped the knob that threw the deadbolt.

The lights were on in here, too, glowing softly inside glass fixtures overhead. The walls were green, the linoleum floor was yellow, the ceiling was white. There were eight offices on this floor, four on each side.

There is something disquieting about an office building at night. You know that the emptiness is only temporary, that tomorrow morning people will be making vastly important deals behind closed doors, buying and selling, winning and losing. Muffled voices will rise and fall, someone will cough, someone will laugh, and a distant drawer will slam shut.

But at night, with everyone snatched away, hauled up by some huge deep-sea dredge, the hallways seem almost spectral. The sound of your feet on the hallway floor is not only too loud, is it too corporeal, too much an intrusion of the real into the dream left behind by the people of the day.

And, in our case, we could not be certain that the offices behind those doors were, in fact, empty. Mr. Rothstein might have sent someone ahead of us.

At the end of the hallway was a stairway. We climbed it, Miss Lizzie in the lead. At the second floor, as we came around the corner, we saw a hallway identical to the one below. Eight offices. On the frosted glass of the second office to the right, in neat block letters, were the words
Redstone Enterprises
.

“Redstone,” said Miss Lizzie. “Rothstein. The same name, essentially.”

She put the key in the lock, turned it, opened the door, and flipped on the light.

Inside was a small room starkly painted white. There was no window, and the air smelled of dust and disuse. On the far side, opposite the door, were a wooden rolltop desk and a swivel chair. Atop the desk sat a banker's table lamp. Beside it was a narrow door. On the right and left walls stood rows of gray metal filing cabinets. In the center of the room was a rectangular wooden table, its top covered with green felt. Six wooden chairs surrounded it, two on each side and one at each end.

“Have a seat, Amanda. I shall take a quick look around.”

I sat down at the table in one of the two seats facing the door.

Her purse hanging from her left arm, Miss Lizzie went hobbling about the room, opening cabinets and drawers. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing.” She pushed up the rolling top of the desk, fiddled around inside for a moment, then carefully drew the top back down. “Mr. Rothstein,” she said, lightly clapping her hands twice, “has evidently had everything removed from here some time ago. The dust is a quarter of an inch thick.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“I couldn't say.”

She limped to the door by the filing cabinet, opened it, and pulled the string hanging overhead. A light flashed on inside. She pulled the string again, and the light disappeared. “A water closet,” she said as she closed the door. “It wants a bit of cleaning.”

She came over to the table and sat down to my left, setting her purse on her lap and putting her hands neatly atop it as though she were awaiting a train.

I looked at my wristwatch. One o'clock.

Miss Lizzie reached into the pocket of her skirt, removed her own watch, and glared for a moment at its face. “Mr. Rothstein is late,” she said. She laid the watch on the table.

“Yes,” I said. “He's probably scared silly.”

She laughed. Once again, it was a good, easy, up-from-the-stomach laugh. Hearing it, one would never guess that we were awaiting the arrival of a man who could, without a flicker of hesitation, order us killed.

Or perhaps kill us himself.

“Yes,” she said, “I'm quite sure you're right.”

For a few moments, we sat there.

After a while, I said, “Miss Lizzie?”

“Yes, dear?”

“I just want to say that if things don't go the way they're supposed to . . . well, I just want you to know that I think you've been a good friend. A really good friend.” I felt my throat thicken and my eyes begin to sting. “And I'm really grateful for everything you've done.” One more word and I would start melting away.

Smiling, she reached out and gently touched me once on the cheek. “I thank you for that, Amanda.” Her hand fell to her lap. “And permit me to say that you've been a good friend, too. An excellent friend. I've been extremely grateful for your company these past few days.”

“I know I'm a pain in the neck. I know I'm stubborn . . .”

Smiling, she said, “But think how tiresome things would be if you weren't. I regret none of it, dear. Truly. None of what's happened. I regret only the circumstances in which we came together again.”

“Do you think—”

The front door opened, and Arnold Rothstein stepped in, grinning. “Hello, ladies. Guess you found the place all right.” He shut the door, and the sounds of wood meeting wood, of the metal latch catching in its metal slot, were somehow final and irrevocable.

“Your directions were perfectly accurate, Mr. Rothstein,” said Miss Lizzie.

“Glad to hear it.” He stepped over to the opposite side of the table, slipped the paper bag of figs from his jacket pocket and plopped it onto the table. He took off the jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. He pulled out the chair, sat down, and slid it a bit closer to the table. He untied the bow at his neck, letting the ends hang loose, and unbuttoned his collar. He slipped a flat, round, gold cufflink from his left cuff, set the link on the table, and rolled his cuff back. On his thin, pale wrist was a gold watch with an alligator leather band.

“Nice watch,” he said, nodding toward Miss Lizzie's.

“Thank you.”

He slipped the cufflink from his right cuff and dropped it beside the other. “My father had a watch like that.”

“Did he?”

He rolled up the cuff. “Used to keep it hidden in a drawer in his bedroom.”

“Not hidden terribly well, it would seem.”

He smiled. “I used to snatch it once or twice a week, pawn it, and use the money to play cards.”

She nodded. “As you said, Mr. Rothstein, you are a great believer in family.”

The smile became a grin. “I redeemed it, every time, and put it back in the drawer before he got home. He never knew. And I made a nice little profit of the deal. Every time.”

“Very enterprising of you.”

The smile faded. He glanced at his watch. “Okay,” he said, “you've got the cards?”

Miss Lizzie opened her purse and took out two decks of Bicycle brand playing cards. “A red one,” she said, “and a blue one. Have you a preference?”

“I don't care.” He reached into the bag and pulled out a fig.

“Shall I choose, then?”

“Fine.” He popped the fig into his mouth.

“Then I choose . . .” She held the red package in one hand, the blue package in the other, as though weighing them. “I choose blue. Is that acceptable to you?”

He swallowed. “Fine.”

She tucked the red package back into her purse, leaned over, and set the purse on the floor. She was about to open the blue package when Mr. Rothstein said, “Hold on.”

“Yes?” said Miss Lizzie.

“You want to, we stop this right now. You forget the game. You forget your questions. You leave. You get out of the city, you go home. Both of you. No one'll stop you.”

She smiled. “Well,” she said, “that's very kind of you, Mr. Rothstein, but if we did that, then we should never have our questions answered, should we?”

He nodded. “Okay.” He shrugged and gently waved his manicured hand. “Okay. Whatever you want.”

Miss Lizzie tugged at the cellophane strip at the top of the package. It tore off before it finished its circle. “Drat,” she said. She knifed her thumbnail along the wrapper, working it.

Mr. Rothstein smiled. “Need some help?”

“I am perfectly capable, thank you.”

At last she peeled away the clear wrapper. She balled it up in her left hand and looked around for a place to deposit it.

“Toss it on the floor,” said Mr. Rothstein. “Someone'll get it in the morning.”

“That seems rather cavalier.”

“I own the place. Someone'll get it. Toss it on the floor.”

“Well,” she said reluctantly, “if you say so.” She opened her hand and let the wrapper fall to the wooden floor.

She pushed back the lid of the package and pried out the deck. One of the cards, a seven of clubs, skittered loose and tumbled to the green felt of the table. She set down the empty package, picked up the seven, slotted it back into the deck, and began a clumsy overhand shuffle.

“If you don't mind,” she said to Mr. Rothstein, “I feel that I should deal first. I am, after all, the visitor.”

He shrugged.

Looking down, watching her hands, she split the deck and did a slow riffle shuffle. Toward the end of it, the topmost cards snagged together and stood upright, creating a small, stiff, triangular tent.

“Oh dear,” she said. Carefully she straightened them out, aligned the deck, split it again, then did another riffle shuffle, more successfully this time.

She looked up at Mr. Rothstein and smiled proudly. “Rather like riding a bicycle, isn't it?”

He nodded. “How about an ante?”

She frowned. “But we're not playing for money.”

“Just to make it interesting.”

“I brought no money with me.”

“The watch. You put in the watch; I put in my cufflinks.” He scooped them up and rolled them like a pair of dice into the center of the table.

“This watch,” said Miss Lizzie, “was my mother's.”

“You take it off her body?”

Miss Lizzie stared at him.

He waved his hand. “Never mind. Bad joke. The cufflinks are genuine gold coins. From ancient Rome. Ante or not?”

Holding the cards in her left hand, she took the watch in her right, moved it to the center of the table, and placed it beside the cufflinks. She sat back and shuffled the cards again, overhand.

“I think they're plenty shuffled,” said Mr. Rothstein.

She set them on the table, using both hands to arrange them neatly, and then sat back. “Cut them, please,” she said.

He reached out, tapped the deck, and smiled. “I trust you,” he said.

“How nice for me,” she said and picked up the deck. Slowly, carefully, she dealt five cards to each of them, leaning over and placing his directly before him, one atop the other:
snap
,
snap
,
snap, snap, snap
. Mr. Rothstein waited. When she finished and put down the deck, he picked up his cards and fanned them, tightly, only enough for him to see a sliver of each upper right-hand corner.

Miss Lizzie picked up hers, fanned them much more broadly, and said, “Oh, Amanda,
look
!” She showed me her hand: three queens, the ace of diamonds, and the four of clubs.

“
Hey
,” said Mr. Rothstein. “You can't do that.”

She looked across the table, puzzled. “Amanda has as much interest in the outcome as I do.”

“You just can't
do
that, lady.”

“You cannot seriously object to her seeing my cards. What harm does it do?”

He looked between us, back and forth, and finally sighed. “Forget it.” He picked up his hand, plucked out a pair of cards, and placed them face down on the table. “I'll take two,” he said.

She laid down her hand then slowly and meticulously dealt him two cards. She returned the deck to the table, lifted her hand, and studied it thoroughly. “Hmm,” she said.

Mr. Rothstein hooked his fingers into the paper bag, pulled out another fig, poked it into his mouth, and chewed.

“Hmm,” said Miss Lizzie. “Yes. I shall take . . . no . . .
yes
. I shall take one.” She removed the four of clubs, laid it face down, carefully placed her cards on the table, picked up the deck, and dealt a single card neatly on top of her four. She picked up the hand, looked at it, showed it to me, and then asked him, “What do you have, Mr. Rothstein?”

“Two pair,” he said and spread them along the table. He smiled. “Kings and jacks.”

“A full house,” said Miss Lizzie and spread out her own hand. She had picked up another ace, the club.

Mr. Rothstein looked down at her cards. He leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. “One hand, one question.”

“Yes,” she said. “Was John Burton helping you bring drugs into this country?”

“Only one question, and that's the one you want to ask?”

“It is, yes, the one I wish to ask.”

“Yeah,” he said. “He was.” He gathered up the cards. “My deal.” Smoothly, he shuffled overhand, split the deck and riffled it once, twice, again, then put it in the center of the table. “Cut,” he said.

Demurely, precisely, taking her time and using both hands, she cut the cards.

“Ante?” he said.

“Ante what?” she asked him.

He unbuckled the strap of his watch and laid the watch in the center of the table.

Miss Lizzie pushed his two cufflinks forward.

“That's a
Cartier
,” he said. “You know how much it cost?”

“Those are genuine gold coins,” she said. “From ancient Rome.”

He stared at her.

“But,” she said, “if you choose not to ante . . .” She reached for the cufflinks.

“Leave 'em there,” he said, and then, his fingers a blur, he swiftly dealt out the cards, each of Miss Lizzie's clumping with the others into a small, trim group directly in front of her. He dropped the deck, picked up his hand, and fanned it.