New York Nocturne (24 page)

Epilogue

And now the final summing up.

As I said in my earlier volume, Miss Lizbeth A. Borden died in 1927. On June 1, to be precise.

Arnold Rothstein died on November 6, 1928, two days after being shot in a cheap hotel on West Fifty-Sixth Street. He had been lured there by a man named George “Hump” McManus, with whom Rothstein had played a game of poker and lost, and to whom he still owed the money. For weeks, Rothstein had refused to pay. MacManus finally lost patience with him. And so, despite the millions of dollars he had accumulated—the millions he had invested in the drug trade—despite his reputation as one of the greatest gamblers in the history of New York City, Arnold Rothstein died because he welshed on a bet.

I, of course, was not surprised.

The American drug trade, the massive enterprise that he had personally organized, got along quite well without him. (But perhaps it wouldn't have got along quite so well if it hadn't been Mr. Rothstein who had organized it.)

I saw Mrs. Parker several times in New York, when I was attending Columbia Law School, and a few times in Los Angeles years later. She died in New York City on June 7, 1967. She bequeathed her entire estate to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom she had never met.

As for the estate of John Burton, John had changed his will during the week I spent with him, and he had left everything to me. Everything, however, turned out to be only his apartment at the Dakota. Although he was a broker himself, he owned no stocks or bonds, and somehow his bank account had been stripped on the Monday following his death, by whom, no one knew. The police, Mr. Lipkind told me, suspected Albert. But they suspected Albert, too, of emptying John's safe after he killed him, and if Albert had done so, he had left the ten thousand dollars inside it. Albert, of course, was not talking.

Mr. Lipkind came up to Boston, with Robert driving, to bring the ten thousand dollars and to argue with me about keeping the apartment. I told him I would never stay in it again. He suggested that I could rent it out and essentially live off the income. Finally, more to end the argument than for any other reason, I agreed to rent it, provided the rent money went into an account to which I would have limited and only occasional access. I felt that this was very noble of me. Over the years, however, I was—occasionally—very glad to have that access. I finally sold the apartment in September of 1960.

I did not really want the ten thousand dollars, either. But Mr. Lipkind was persuasive about that as well, and later—once again—I was thankful.

That September, before I signed the final papers, I went back to the apartment. It was empty—bare, stripped. I wandered through the rooms: the library, the living room, the bedrooms. Someone had left an old wooden crate in the kitchen. I sat down on it and remembered watching John sip King's Ransom Scotch, his vest open, his collar undone, his shirtsleeves rolled back, his smile flashing.

Sorrow does not ever really pass. It merely encysts itself until a memory blunders against it, and its bitter shell splits open.

My uncle had not been who he pretended to be, as I had said to Miss Lizzie. But, as she had said to me, few of us ever truly are. And it was he who had first handed me the city of New York in all its flash and dazzle, all its beauty and wonder.

Mr. Lipkind remained my lawyer until his death in 1948. I saw him and Robert several times. Mr. Liebowitz I saw occasionally, and then more frequently after I had entered into a line of work not unlike his own. My second husband and I became quite close friends with him. He died in 1965.

And then there is Mr. Cutter.

In 1932, after my first husband was murdered and I required some specialized help, I located him. He provided the help I needed, and we began an association that lasted for some thirty-five years.

Once, on Lamu, an island off the mainland coast of Kenya, we talked about Miss Lizzie. He said that he had never doubted for a moment that she had killed her parents.

“Why?” I asked him.

We were lying side by side on towels spread atop the hot white sand. The sunlight lay on our naked bodies like a weight. He rolled his head toward me, his forelock swaying. “I watched her,” he said. “She got what she wanted. Every time. From you, from Rothstein, from everyone.” He shrugged his brown shoulders. “If she wanted her parents dead, then pretty soon her parents would get dead.”

I told him what she had said, years before, while she and I were sitting in that Packard in Chinatown waiting for him to bring back the scabrous Mr. Walters.

We were talking about the police, she and I—talking specifically about Lieutenant Becker and Commissioner Vandervalk.

“What they tried to do to you, Amanda,” she had said, “make you say that your uncle had . . . violated you, that was entirely unforgivable.”

“Like Mr. Lipkind said, they don't have anyone else.”

“That doesn't matter,” she said firmly. “There is no worse thing with which to charge someone. There is no worse thing that someone can do to a child.”

She looked to her left, out the car window at the people scurrying across the street, at the passing cars, and then she closed her eyes. For a moment, she sat there silently, and then her body made a small, quick shudder.

On Lamu fourteen years later, the sun leaning down on us, James said to me, “You think that her father . . .”

“I don't know, not for sure.”

“Why both of them?”

“I don't know.”

A year ago, when his illness had become quite serious and we both knew that he did not have much time, he finally told me the truth about Albert Cooper.

We were still living in the house in Chartres, down by the river, where I have done most of my work. I was sitting beside him on the bed.

“Yeah,” he said in his quiet whisper of a voice, looking up at me from the pillow. His hair was thinner now, and white.

“So I
did
hit him,” I said.

“In the stomach. The exit wound was hidden by Albert's chair.” He smiled wanly. “You were a real marksman, even back then.”

“Everyone lied to me.
You
lied to me.”

“You were a kid. No one wanted you to carry it around.”

“But how did the police explain it—the other wound in Albert's body?”

He smiled. “That was a big surprise for Becker. But he was Vandervalk's boy, and Vandervalk wanted the case closed.”

One more morsel of guilt for my collection. “So I was the one who killed him.”

“Don't forget Liebowitz. He put five slugs into him. It's a toss-up, I'd say.”

I looked off.

His frail hand slowly slid along the duvet until it found mine.

“Self-defense,” he said.

I turned to him. “Did Miss Lizzie know?” I could not think of her by any other name.

“Liebowitz told her, before the two of you left for the train that day.”

I shook my head. “The woman was impossible.”

“She saved your ass.”

“Several times.”

“She loved you.”

I looked at him. “I suppose she did.”

His hand tightened briefly, gently, on mine. “So do I.”

I smiled. “I know.”

Everyone is gone now. Although my promise to Mr. Lipkind more or less expired back in the forties, when he did, I have kept it until now, and I have made arrangements that it be kept until long after I take my own leave.

By the time you read this, all of us will be only memories.

But there is something else that Miss Lizzie once said:

Perhaps being a memory is not a such bad thing after all
.

Acknowledgments

I have stolen from the following books:

Michael and Ariane Batterberry.
On the Town in New York.
Routledge, 1999.

The Federal Writers Project.
The WPA Guide to New York City
. Pantheon Books, 1982.

Liza M. Greene.
New York for New Yorkers
. Norton, 2001.

Sanna Feirstein.
Naming New York: Manhattan Places & How They Got Their Names
. New York University Press, 2001.

The Historical Atlas of New York City
, Eric Homberger, Owl Books, 1998.

Jim Haskins. The Cotton Club
. Plume, 1984.

Robert E. Drenna, ed.
The Algonquin Wits.
Kensington, 2001.

Marion Meade.
Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?
Penguin Books, 1989.

Dorothy Parker.
The Portable Dorothy Parker
. Penguin Books, 1976.

Emily Wortis Leider.
Becoming Mae West.
Da Capo Press, 2000.

Jill Watts.
Mae West: An Icon in Black and White.
Oxford University Press, 2001.

Howard Teichmann.
George S. Kaufman, An Intimate Portrait.
Atheneum, 1972.

Lewis Yablonsky.
George Raft
. McGraw-Hill, 1974.

Frederick Lewis Allen.
Only Yesterday.
Perennial Library, 1964.

Edward Behr.
Prohibition: Thirteen Years that Changed America.
Arcade Publishing, 1996.

Polly Adler.
A House Is Not a Home.
Popular Library, 1955.

Michael Arlen.
The Green Hat
. Boydell Press, 1983.

T. S. Eliot.
The Waste Land and Other Poems.
Penguin Books, 1998.

David W. Maurer.
The Big Con.
Anchor Books, 1999.

Jimmy Breslin.
Damon Runyon: A Life.
Laurel, 1992.

Graham Nown.
The English Godfather.
Ward Lock, 1987.

Albert Fried.
The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America.
Columbia University Press, 1999.

David Pietrusza.
Rothstein
Carroll and Graf, 2003.

Leo Katcher.
The Big Bankroll: The Life and Times of Arnold Rothstein
. Cardinal, 1960.

Jean Hugard, ed.
Encyclopedia of Card Tricks.
Dover, 1974.

John Scarne.
Scarne on Cards
. Signet, 1973.

About the Author

Walter Satterthwait is an author of mysteries and historical fiction. While working as a bartender in New York in the late 1970s, he wrote his first book: an adventure novel,
Cocaine Blues
(1979. After his second thriller,
The Aegean Affair
(1982), Satterthwait created his best-known character, Santa Fe private detective Joshua Croft. Beginning with
Wall of Glass
(1988), Satterthwait wrote five Croft novels, concluding the series with 1996's
Accustomed to the Dark
. In between Croft books, he wrote mysteries starring historical figures, including
Miss Lizzie
(1989), a novel about Lizzie Borden, and
Wilde West
(1991), a western mystery starring Oscar Wilde.
New York Nocturne
(2016) is his most recent novel.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2016 by Walter Satterthwait

Cover design by Michael Vrana

978-1-5040-2810-3

Published in 2016 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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