The Black Stiletto (6 page)

When I got to the corner and saw the really tall buildin’, it came back to me. One Wall Street used to be the Irving Trust building. But now it wasn’t. Now it was the Bank of New York Mellon. Interestin’. I just hoped to hell they had my stuff. I went inside—it looked like a bank lobby, so that was promisin’. There wasn’t much of a line in front of the tellers, so I waited patiently. I admit I was nervous. This would be my first business exchange with someone on the outside—except for the Arab taxi driver, that is.

The teller was a young girl. She looked mighty pretty. I could barely speak to her.

“May I help you, sir?”

“Yeah, I, um, I used to have a safety deposit box back when the Bank of New York was at Forty-Eight Wall Street. What would have happened to it?”

I could see the question threw her for a loop. She blinked and asked, “When was the last time you accessed it?”

“Nineteen fifty-seven.”

Then her eyes really bulged. “Oh, my. Have you been away somewhere?”

“Yeah. Prison.”

She swallowed. “Just a second. Let me get the supervisor.”

It took a few minutes, but she eventually came back with a squirrelly lookin’ bald guy in a fancy business suit. I didn’t think it was a coincidence that a security guard accompanied him and stood in back a few feet away.

“What seems to be the trouble, sir?” Squirrelly Man asked.

“No trouble. I just want to access my safety deposit box. But it’s been fifty-two years since I’ve done so.” I handed over my old driver’s license, the key—which opened the old box, and the business card with my account number.

“What’s this about prison?”

“Why does that matter?” I asked. My temper was risin’ and I felt my heart start to pound again. “Yeah, I was in prison and I just got paroled. I came to get the stuff out of my safety deposit box. You still have it, right? It’s supposed to be
safe
. That’s the idea, ain’t it?”

The fellow pursed his lips. “Let me look up your account.” He punched the keys on the computer and then checked the information with my driver’s license. “This license has expired.”

“No kiddin’. I haven’t had time to go get a new one.”

Finally, the guy glanced at the security guard and nodded. Everything was okay. The guard walked away but hovered
nearby, just in case. Then came the kicker. “I’m sorry, all the safety deposit boxes that were once at Forty-Eight Wall Street are now at the Chase Bank branch at Forty-Five Wall Street.”

“What?”

He repeated what he said.

“You gotta be kiddin’ me.”

“Didn’t you get a notice in the mail about the move?”

“No. I don’t think so.” I couldn’t remember if I did or not. Besides, the lawyers would have got it. Maybe they didn’t tell me.

“I’m sorry, sir. You’ll have to go to the Chase branch.”

Jesus H. Christ.

“Fine. Thanks for your trouble,” I said to both him and the female teller. She smiled at me, which sent a lightnin’ bolt down to my groin. I didn’t think I’d still have feelin’s there, but I did. Must’ve been the Italian in me. Nevertheless, I was too pissed off to respond in any way. I wanted to break somethin’.

But I took a deep breath and calmly walked out of the building. Went
back
to 45 Wall Street. I don’t remember what it was in the fifties—in fact, I seem to recall the buildin’ was under construction the last time I was across the street—but now it was a tall high-rise apartment buildin’ complex with shops and stuff on the bottom. And a Chase Bank. So I went inside and did my song and dance yet
again
for a teller—this time a man; I’ll call him Four Eyes because of the thick glasses he wore—and after a few minutes of exchangin’ IDs and fillin’ out papers, it seemed I’d finally hit pay dirt.

I followed Four Eyes through a door and down a corridor to another part of the buildin’. He talked me through the procedure, directed me into a vault containin’ what appeared to be a zillion safety deposit boxes. The guy had a different key, which he stuck in one slot.

“Your key goes there,” he said, pointin’ to a different keyhole.
This was different from what it used to be. In the old days, it just took one key to open the door. Now it took two—mine and his. I guess it was a minor marvel that my key still worked.

“Do you need a private room, sir?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

I carried my box to a series of booths with doors. The banker let me in one and showed me a button on the wall. “Press that when you want to return the box.”

“Thanks.”

He left me alone and shut the door. I sat at a small table and eagerly opened the box.

It was all there.

Unbelievable. I breathed a sigh of relief.

First I stuffed all the cash into my jacket pockets, and what didn’t fit I crammed into my trouser pockets and even inside my underwear. By the time I was done, I was pretty well padded down. Forty-eight thousand dollars. Back in nineteen fifty-seven, that was a hell of a lot of money. A fortune. Today, probably not so much. Still, it was enough to get me back on my feet for the time being.

My beloved snubby Colt Detective Special and one box of thirty-eight special cartridges were there, so I loaded six into the cylinder, spun it once—it needed oilin’, that’s for sure—and snapped it in. The rest of the bullets I poured into one of the pockets with the money.

I stood and made sure I didn’t look funny. Yeah, my pockets were bulgin’, but I didn’t think it would be too suspicious. I’d go straight to a hotel and regroup. Havin’ my money and revolver made me feel like the king of the world. I hadn’t felt this good since—well, way before New Year’s Eve of nineteen fifty-seven, that’s for damn sure.

I pressed the button to call Four Eyes.

Next on the agenda—the hotel, some decent food, and contact
some of the boys if I could find them. And then I had to figure out how to locate the bitch. The Black Stiletto. I’d waited fifty-two years to avenge my brother’s death. And by God, I was gonna get that woman. I wondered where she was. Was she alive? I hoped so. Was she still in New York? If she was still there, I’d find her. If not, I’d search every goddamned town in the country until I did.

At least I knew her real name. That’d help.

Judy Cooper.

5
Judy’s Diary
1958

Dear diary, New York City wasn’t what I expected. Actually, that’s not true. Let’s just say I naïvely thought it would be easier to leave home and start anew in another city. New York wasn’t Odessa in any way, shape, or form. New York was like another planet, totally alien to anything I’d ever experienced. There were people everywhere, all kinds, of every race imaginable. Cars and buses and trucks and bicycles and lots and lots of people. And the buildings—they were huge and they were everywhere, towering over me like gods. It was overwhelming at first. I didn’t have the first clue of what to do when I got off that bus at Port Authority.

I was fourteen, alone, with very little money. What the hell was I doing there?

Needless to say, I had to mature early and quickly. I remember going to a tourist information booth in the bus station and asking about a hotel. I stayed in some fleabag joint on 42nd Street for about a week as I explored the city, trying to conserve what little money I had. Eventually I found my way farther downtown and started kicking around East Greenwich Village. Somehow the Bohemian nature of the area appealed to me. I pleaded homelessness and got a temporary place to stay at the YWCA on Broadway and set about looking for a job. I’d been in New York about three weeks and the money was nearly gone. Then one day I saw a restaurant on the corner of Second Avenue and East 4th Street
with a sign on the window that said
HELP WANTED
. It was called the East Side Diner and was one of those places that served breakfast, lunch, and dinner, opened early, and closed late. I thought,
what the hell.

I went inside and the place was packed. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, so there were still customers eating breakfast and quite a few having lunch. There were two waitresses running back and forth like chickens with no heads. They constantly yelled orders to the short-order cook in the kitchen while dishing out sass to customers. “Where’s my eggs over-easy?” “Cheeseburger, hold the mayo!” “Are you done, mister? Sorry, my legs ain’t on the menu.” That kind of stuff. They even had one of those new jukeboxes, which I later found out was very unusual for New York diners. I’d never seen or heard one before. I remember the song that was playing when I walked in—it was “Cry” by Johnnie Ray and the Four Lads.

One waitress, a pretty woman with blonde hair and a great figure, saw me standing by the door. She was probably twenty one years old or so.

“You comin’ in, honey?” she asked.

“I want to apply for the job.” I gestured to the sign in the window.

“Oh. Honey, we’re really busy right now, as you can see. Can you come back after the rush? Say, two o’clock?”

“Sure.”

“I’m Lucy. What’s your name, honey?”

“Judy.”

“Okay, Judy, see you later.”

I felt excited. Maybe I’d get hired and start making some money. I immediately liked Lucy. She had a thick New York accent and it sounded funny to my ears. Funny in a good way. Lucy didn’t seem to notice I was probably too young to work. I appeared older than I was. I suppose this is a good time to tell you,
dear diary, what I look like. I was tall—still am—ridiculously tall for a fourteen-year-old. I’m not sure exactly how tall I was then, but now, at age twenty, I’m five-eleven. I was maybe an inch or two shorter when I was fourteen. So, yeah, I looked older. I had, and still have, dark hair—almost black—that comes down a little past my shoulders. My eyes are brown with flecks of green. My skin is pale—I used to get sunburned pretty easily. My legs are long, of course, and I’m fit. Since I did a lot of sports and all that gymnastics stuff, I was, and am still, well-toned. My boobs were growing fast at that time and were already something I noticed men stealing glances at. Today they’re a nice full size that fit a 36C cup. Lots of men tell me I’m attractive. Some say I’m beautiful. That’s nice, I guess. To tell you the truth, it makes me a little uncomfortable. The incident with Douglas put me off men for quite some time. That would change, though.

I killed time walking around the neighborhood. Two blocks south on Second Avenue was a gymnasium. It was called the Second Avenue Gym. Curious, I opened the door and looked inside. It was a pretty large space. There was a boxing ring in the middle of the room, and around the sides were all kinds of workout equipment like punching bags of all types and sizes, wall pulleys, rowing machines, and other stuff. A bunch of men were in there—a couple in the ring sparring and several others just exercising. White men, Negroes, Hispanics. I’d never seen colored men and white men working out in the same room before. That was surprising. For a few minutes I stood there and watched, fascinated by their sweaty, muscular bodies as they punched and jabbed at each other.

Anyway, I went back to the diner at two o’clock, and the place was much calmer. There were only a few customers in some of the booths. Lucy stood by the counter studying a stack of order tickets, trying to figure out something. She looked up and smiled.
“Hi, Judy. You came back, huh? The lunch rush didn’t scare you away?”

“Nope.”

She patted one of the swivel stools at the counter. “Have a seat.”

“Are you the boss?” I asked.

“No, no. I’m the head waitress. The boss comes in at night, his name is Manny. He’s a pretty nice guy, but he’s strict and doesn’t tolerate laziness or mistakes. That won’t be a problem, will it, Judy?”

“No!”

“Good.”

We spent the next half hour talking about the diner, my background, and how I’d run away from home. I was perfectly honest. At one point she frowned and whispered, “How old are you, honey?”

I looked down and told her the truth. Lucy took a deep breath and pursed her lips. “I think we’ll just pretend you’re sixteen, okay?”

“All right.”

She handed me an application and a pencil and told me to subtract two years from my birth date when I filled it in. Lucy left me alone to fill in the pertinent information. For a residence, I put the YWCA.

Well, I was hired. I became a waitress at the East Side Diner and learned the ropes. I figured out when it was okay to flirt with customers so you could get a bigger tip, and I learned when to give them sass if they were getting out of line. I got to where I knew the menu by heart. Pretty soon, I was as good as any of the other ladies working there. And Lucy—Lucy Dempsey was her full name—became my best friend. She took me under her wing, so to speak. She lived alone in an apartment on St. Marks Place
and had a boyfriend named Sam, who came in the diner every now and then. I didn’t like Sam. He gave me the same kind of bad feelings that Douglas had. Sam was cocky and full of himself. He bossed Lucy around and acted like she was his property. I could tell she was embarrassed by his attitude but I also saw that she really liked him, although I don’t know why. One day, I think it was in the summer, she confided in me. I had been in New York six months and was still living at the Y, but the city was starting to feel more like home than Odessa ever did. Anyway, Lucy and I were off one Sunday and we went walking around the Village. She told me that Sam could be very mean and hit her sometimes. I told her she shouldn’t put up with that at all. Lucy just shrugged and said, “He’s my man. I love him.”