Queenpin

  “That’s a nice hat you have, miss,” he said, standing in the row behind me.

  “Thanks,” I said, turning slightly, tucking my purse tight under my arm. “I’ll tell it you said so.”

  The man grinned but showed no sign of moving on. Too knowing for a fella looking for a pickup, too smooth a linen suit for a cop. I hoped.

  “You play the ponies regular?”

  “No, but I love horses,” I said, playing it as easy and as unimpressed as I was with the tipplers who used to hang out by the back office at the Tee Hee. “You know about girls and horses, don’t you?” I added, as if with a wink.

  “Only what Catherine the Great tells me,” he smirked, waving his racing form. “Who’d you put your bills on?”

  This sure didn’t feel like idle chatter. I didn’t like what it felt like. I swallowed hard and hoisted a smile. “A drib here, a drab there. Mostly, I just like to show off my hat.”

  “Can’t blame you for that,” he said, tipping his own boater toward me. I was glad my new hand-span sunglasses stopped him from seeing my eyes. Was he a racing commish official? Some kind of private dick? Not a cop, I kept telling myself. Cops don’t rate those wing tips.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” I said, careful to smile. “I have to be going.”

  “Hot date?” He lifted his eyebrows. “Who’s the lucky horse?”

  “All my horses are lucky,” I said, turning to walk away, playing it calm, loose, carefree.

  “I’ll bet they are, honey,” he called out after me as I made my way down the grandstand, slow and easy, like the old lady herself. I knew he was watching me the whole way.

  By the time I got to the car, the dapple of sweat on my temples had spread and I spent ten minutes sopping myself with pressed powder and catching my breath. What I wouldn’t give for a half a gulp of good whiskey, I thought. I took off my slippery sunglasses and caught a look at my eyes in the rearview.

  Goddamn, kiddo, can you go the distance or are you just a tease?

  I drove straight to her apartment, like she asked. She was there, a pirate’s cache of jewelry spread on her coffee table. Sitting next to her was a balding man in shirtsleeves, a gem scope in his hand. He was holding up an egg-shaped sapphire. Next to him on the table was a small saw blade and some needle pliers.

  She tilted her head toward the bedroom and followed me in, not bothering to make introductions.

  “Those the rocks I brought back from Rennert Falls last week?” I asked.

  She didn’t say anything, headed toward the phone. I sat down on the bed, tried to keep a poker face. I hadn’t gotten pinched. I’d placed the right bets. Wasn’t that enough? How could she know I’d been made anyway? Had I been made?

  She dialed and spoke into the receiver.

  “So?… Yeah?… Yeah?… That so?… Okay. Thanks, Harry.” She hung up and looked at me.

  “I think I did it okay, Gloria,” I said.

  She stared at me. I tried to stop my chin from shaking. Why couldn’t I be like her, have her ice?

  “Everything went like you said,” I added, taking off my hat, poking myself with a pin.

  “Did you talk to anyone?”

  “As little as possible, like you said.”

  “Any fellow approach you? Try to play the wolf?”

  “No,” I said slowly. “One fella tried to make conversation. I don’t know who he was. He asked who I was betting on. I didn’t give him anything. And I left.”

  She folded her arms and kept her eyes locked on me for a few long, long seconds. Then finally, she said, “You did good, kitty.”

  I couldn’t fight off the smile. “It was okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding slow, like a sports coach might do. I felt like the star quarterback.

  “So I go back?”

  “Tomorrow,” she said, tossing me a meaty stack of rubber-banded bills. “But next time, scale back the flirt routine. All Harry can gab about is you and your horses.”

  I looked at her. It fell into place for me and I saw what a stooge I still was. The man in the boater was a plant, testing me. Christ.

  But I’d passed, right? I’d passed. The next test wouldn’t be planned by her. It’d be out there, out there in that hot glitter, and I’d have to sink or swim by it.

  There were a lot of regular parts of the job, placing bets at the small tracks, moving goods, passing information, making deliveries to and from the casinos. That was my favorite. I loved the swank carpet joints in the big city. I didn’t have to go much to the grimy betting parlors in town, or the grind joints filled with suckers, the kinds of places made for low rollers who gave it all up the minute they had it in their pockets. They had regular boys with swollen arms to take care of those rougher places. But the bosses wanted me at the casinos because I stood for something, like Gloria did. I stood for a class operation. Me, the dingy issue of a vending machine man. The girl in the Orlon dress who’d been taking the bus to a chump job just a few months back.

  I’d show up at the joints late. I’d head to the manager’s office, collect wads of cash all earmarked for the pad. At first, she just had me bring it all to her. I didn’t know where it ended up. Eventually, I began helping her make the rounds with it, mostly to the PD, the district attorney’s office. There was a complicated formula based on rank and pull and you never let the low-level boys know what the higher-ups were getting, or who else was on the pad.

  No one ever gave me a hard time, but every night I’d get invitations, either from the casino fixtures, the bulls, or the hard boys at the door. At first, I was too scared even to one-step with them, to give them back a little of their patter. But the better I got, the more I was willing to toss it around. At least with the prettier, slicker ones. I had a weak spot, right off, for the worst of them. The ones that still had faces worth looking at. The ones without the dented noses or cauliflower ears. Mostly, I had it for the cruising gamblers who didn’t rate with the big boys, just threw them their money every night like some nonstop tickertape parade. They were the smooth ones and I didn’t mind a little dance with them.

  “So I’m guessing you’re the soft spot at the end of the day for some very sugared daddy.”

  “I’m not so soft.”

  “I could rub you some round edges, you give me half a sec.”

  “I bet you could. From the way you’ve been chasing losses all night, I can see you’re a born grind.”

  “I can take being called a grind player long as I got some odds on seeing you grind a hurdy-gurdy for me one of these eves.”

  Yeah, okay, it wasn’t Lunt and Fontanne. If these fellas could really give you a line, they wouldn’t be at a casino every night, losing their shirts.

  Besides I never let it get far. At the toniest joints, I’d once in a while let a butter-and-egg man buy me a steak. For his troubles, he’d get a dry kiss on the cheek. And when it paid, I went on dates with the high-stakes gees. But I never laid for one. I really felt like I could keep coasting like this, above everything. She taught me how you could move through it all and not let your feet sink in it. Not let your fine snakeskin stick in their muck.

  You have to decide who you are, little girl, she told me once. Once you know that, everyone else will too.

  We were sitting in her plush pink and gray living room. I remember looking at her under the milky cast of the brass wall sconces, looking at her while she passed on pearls of wisdom (You always want to know the strategy behind it, honey. You do things for them without knowing why, there’s nothing in it for you.) and I’d think maybe I was getting to see what she was like back in 1945, bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked, slinging those gorgeous stems one across the other and making hay while times were good.

  I’d look at her and I’d think about all the stories. The favorite tale among the boys at Club Tee Hee was about a New Year’s Eve party at a big penthouse in the city back during the war. She was the hot ticket back then and she shimmied with every hood in the place, making rounds, drawing all e
yes on her. Finally, one of them asked her to put her money where her mouth was. Story was, she threw her head back and laughed, saying, “I’ll put my mouth where the money is,” and made her way to every man in the room, on her knees. On her knees.

  Word spread through the party and, after everything, one of the mobsters’ wives came up to Gloria, called her a whore. With the strongest arm this side of Rocky Marciano, Gloria slapped the wife around, grabbed her by the hair, and tugged her against her chest, growling, “I’m the best damn cocksucker in this burg, and I got the rocks to prove it. Your knees have rubbed plenty of carpets. Where are your diamonds? Where are they?”

  Or so the story went.

  Now that we were close, I thought maybe I could ask her about it, so I did. I must have been crazy, drunk on the low lighting, the hour upon hour of cigarettes and shoes off, legs tucked under us as we sat on opposite ends of the sleek mohair sofa. She looked at me like I was a goddamned fool.

  “That was Virginia Hill,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette. “Hillbilly tramp. I got better things to do with my mouth.”

  I wasn’t really sure what that meant, but it shut me up.

  I shouldn’t have believed it anyway. It was hard to imagine that much hot blood running through her. If she had a man in her life, I never heard tell. The job was the life. Four decades of carrying money, getting high rollers to place sucker bets, moving swag across state lines, and adjusting odds for the boys working the policy racket all through the east side. She herself was proud to say she’d never in her life laid down a bet on her own nickel. I’m no chump. I know the odds. I make them.

  So, I followed her example. I wore the clothes, I did the jobs, I followed orders. All business. And no matter how many shiny-haired swains pressed against me, I never played around. Be the lady, she told me. They beat their wives, they beat their whores. I never took more than three socks from one of these goons in all my years. That’s why. Be the lady.

  “But didn’t you ever fall for one?” I asked once, sucking on a swizzle stick and hoping for some sign of soft in the old lady, something beating under the finely pressed shantung suit. “Sure, kid,” she said, eyelashes grazing her cheeks. “There were a few. I lived this life, you know. But I watched myself and I never mixed business with anything else. There were men, but not these men. No. Straight men. Straight enough. Men who may not have lived by the book but lived by some book. In this life,” she said, crossing these glorious gams, shimmering in the filmy light, “you can’t let your guard down. If you can control yourself, you can control everyone else.”

  But then there he was, as if on cue.

  It started with the furrier.

  Her name was Regina, a little five-footer with a perky chest, a beauty mark, and a funny twitter in her voice, like a comic-strip French streetwalker. The fur shop in the lobby of the Ascot Hotel sold her wares. And the Ascot Hotel was on my rounds. On its top floor, in a series of connecting suites, high-stakes poker and baccarat games drew big crowds of serious players seven nights a week. There was a bar, girls, the whole bit. I used to make pickups there and I’d see Regina now and then. She’d make her way upstairs sometimes, on someone’s arm or to appraise a fur piece someone was staking.

  One night she caught me in the powder room. Twitching her nose as the party girls sprayed themselves with Chanel No. 5, she slunk next to me and made a gutsy pitch.

  “I love the mink-lined gloves you were wearing last week,” she cooed. “I could make you a hat to go with them. No charge, of course.”

  “Why so generous?” I said, hardly looking at her in the mirror as I reapplied my makeup. “I don’t know you from Eve.”

  She smiled, lipstick thick and bright. “I’ve seen you around a lot. I know who you are. I got something I want to bend your ear on.”

  “My ears don’t bend,” I said, heading toward the door. Yeah, by now I was head of the class in Gloria Denton’s Charm School. It was like walking around with armor, bullet-proof. Nothing could touch me.

  “Listen,” she whispered, rushing up behind me, following me out to the bar. “It’d be worth your while.”

  “How would you know how much my while is worth?”

  “Believe me, I know,” she said eagerly, eyelashes swatting. “Ask around about me. People’ll vouch for me. I’ll wait.”

  So I mentioned it to Gloria the next evening, careful to sound neither excited nor too casual.

  “Yeah, I know her,” she said, turning the steering wheel. We were headed to Googie’s Chop House, where we went most Friday nights. She liked to order the London broil, although she never ate much of it or anything else. Anything that didn’t line her pocketbook really wasn’t worth her time.

  “So could she have something?”

  “Light me one, will you?” she said, gesturing toward her cigarettes. I put one in my mouth, lit it, then tucked it in her mouth. She took a deep puff. “She runs with a pretty high-tone pack. Makes pieces for society coin. She might have a hot steer. Open your ear, see what she pours in.”

  I didn’t have to go looking. When I got to the Ascot the next night, Tino, the concierge, said there was a package waiting for me. I opened the rose-scented box and there under the pink tissue was a hat of Black Cross mink, lined with satin the precise crimson of my evening gloves.

  Sure enough, she was upstairs, chewing on a curly-foil toothpick at the bar, practically chomping at the bit.

  “Thanks for the lid,” I said, setting the box down on the bar next to her.

  And she walked me through it, made her case. The setup looked airtight.

  It was like this: There was a family in Highcrest Hills, a few miles out of the city. The Duttons. Their fortune came from Dutton bread and muffin mixes, that cheap stuff you find on grocery store shelves all over the state. The boxes with the freckle-faced kid with his tongue hanging out of his mouth. They were big money and Regina delivered her custom-designed skins to the lady of the manor every season, red beaver coats and blue fox hats in the winter, brocade coats with Chinese leopard trim for spring, ermine wraps for cool summer evenings, ponyskin suit jackets and short chinchilla coats for fall. It was endless.

  But fur was the least of their riches. The big loot was in jewels. Mama Dutton was a jewelry hound and Papa Dutton was built to please her.

  “When she’d look at my furs,” Regina told me, “she’d pull them out and drape them over each piece to see how it looked. Three-, four-, five-carat rocks. Big pendants and stickpins the size of snowglobes. Heavy-banded chokers and thick charm bracelets, chunky brooches, enough rings for a hundred fingers and toes. All prime-cut.

  “So last week I delivered her latest skins in time for her spring passage to Old Europe. Rome, then Capri, don’t you know. She wanted them fast because they were leaving Saturday. Last Saturday. Gone for four weeks with only a skeleton crew of servants holding down the fort, keeping their half-drunk eyes on Bluebeard’s stash. And nobody knows the gold mine that’s up there. Who figures? They sell biscuit flour.”

  I was new to this kind of game, but it looked awfully good to me. I passed the info on to Gloria and Gloria corralled the talent and within four days the Dutton domicile had been hit. They tied up the housekeeper and the groundsman, while the safecracker went to work on the two wall safes Regina had eyeballed. It only took him ten minutes and, in twenty, they were out of the house. Sure, they had to get a little rough with the groundsman, had to crack him once and he lost some teeth, or so the papers said, but otherwise, it was as clean as they come.

  And my finder’s fee was a tidy treat. I bought myself a charmeuse dress but the rest I spent on her. I wanted to give her something. And I wanted to pay for it myself.

  I went to her favorite high-end antique store, the one with the green baize walls and full afternoon tea for customers. I wasn’t so flush I could match her tastes, but I knew I could find something and when I saw the letter opener, it said class all over to me. It was old, the guy behind the counter promised me that
, and with his half-specs and his tweed suit, he looked like he knew what he was talking about it. He took it out of the case and set it on a velvet tray for me to eyeball. It was shaped like a sword with a sword’s sharp tip. But the handle had a fancy design in bronze, two heads crowning the handle tip, each with curly, snaky hair, facing each other.

  “Who’re they supposed to be?” I asked, touching the coiling curls.

  “It’s the same woman, looking at her reflection,” the man said. “Art nouveau. It’s an excellent choice.”

  “It might be two different women,” I said, squinting.

  “If you like,” he said, smiling as I took out my billfold.

  She was keen on the gift. Anybody else might not be able to tell, but I could. She looked at it a long time and a few days later I saw it in her bag in a pale gold sleeve she must have had made special for it. She used it every time she made her bank pickups, slicing through the paper and counting the bills out with fluttering gloved fingers. I knew I’d done it right.

  You see, I wanted to show her that I knew if it wasn’t for her, I’d still be stuck with my head over the ledger at the Tee Hee, postponing the inevitable roll in the sack with Jerome or Arthur for a shot at a bigger paycheck. She saved me from all that. She turned me out and you never forget the one who turned you out.

  But it wasn’t made for forever. I didn’t have her stuff.

  The thing was, the whole deal with the furrier turned out to be bad business. It gave me a taste for more when all I could think about already was getting more, getting my hands on, and in, more. It’d been so easy and the paycheck so big. Why, I’d be a chump not to look for other chances, I figured. As much as she’d given me in the ten, twelve months I’d worked for her, I was already looking to up the ante. If I’d thought about it, I’d’ve been ashamed of myself. But I didn’t. I just kept going.