Queenpin Read online

  “I know I’m going to hit soon,” he said. “So I’m not that worried. But I hope it’s right around the corner. I can’t dodge his boys forever. They’re slow but not that slow.”

  “How’d it get so bad,” I asked, stamping out my cigarette on the hitching post.

  “Ah, I had such a hot tip. Inside-inside, you know? From this gal who holds hands with one of the trainers. She said it was all wrapped up. The jockey was on the take and only a few people knew. The bomber was going down and this hot new Bismarck was going to take it all.”

  “And that sounded like a sure thing to you,” I said. God, these guys are my bread and butter, I thought. How did it come that Vic could be one of these guys? Why couldn’t he be as smart as his hands?

  “As sure as it gets,” he said. “Believe me.”

  I wondered how much he knew about what I did to think I wouldn’t know better.

  “But the bomber didn’t go down,” he added with a shrug. “The jockey, he didn’t take the dive. Changed his mind, I guess.”

  I didn’t say anything. What could I say? Didn’t he get it? There were no insider tips. Not for guys like him. You couldn’t win and if you did, it wouldn’t be for long. That’s why they call it a racket.

  So he told me how the major-league loss put the scare in him. He’d needed big money fast. So he hustled and borrowed and played again. Sometimes, at blackjack, the dog track, he won. But it didn’t matter. Instead of paying off the vig, he tried for more, he played it up higher, just like I’d seen that night at Yin’s. And it was a big slide from there. He just kept dumping it all, on overhead tips, bad tips, tips everyone knew were fixes. Hell, I dropped those kinds of tips. It was my job. They were all junk.

  “Why don’t you just lay off the scene for a while,” I said. “I’ll help you make some touches. We can scare up enough to get him to lay off and…” I was going to suggest he get a job for a while, some paychecks, but it seemed crazy even to mention. It hit me Vic probably hadn’t worked a day in his life. What kind of job could he get? What kind of job would he take?

  “Thanks, baby, but I don’t work that way,” he said, lighting a cigarette for himself. “If I can’t make it happen fast, I just blow town. Got some connections out west. There’s a lady I know. She’s flush and has it bad for me. Wants to marry me. She’ll help me out. She’s my escape hatch.”

  He was looking at me and I was looking at him and I wouldn’t give it to him, wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. But sure, I felt it. I was made of blood and guts. I didn’t want him hightailing it to some other woman with some big house on the ocean while I stayed here and slept alone.

  “But I doubt it’ll come to that,” he said. “I got a feeling.” He tapped his chest, ring catching the sun. Teeth flashing. “Something special’s coming my way.”

  “I know that song,” I said before I could stop myself.

  He laughed. “I bet you do. But baby, I mean it. I’m not one of those sad sacks you see at Yin’s, the poor suckers on a beeline from casino to poorhouse. I got bigger stuff in me. Sometimes I can feel it rushing through me, just standing there watching the wheel, the hand. Don’t worry. You’ll see.”

  There was something in his eyes, something flickering. It got me going again, my throat throbbing. It was something about not being able to stop himself, about going all-in, with each game, each race, each hand, each spin of the wheel, with everything.

  I just knew I had to get out of there fast before things got crazy again.

  “Okay,” I said, my voice barely there. “I’ll see you tonight.”

  I wanted to go home after seeing him, to pull myself together. But the rules were the rules and I had to go to her place. I had to give my report and she had to pass me some messages for my rounds that night. The whole way there I kept thinking about what a bad move I’d just made, not just being seen with him but doing what we did. And then to hear about the mess he was in, which made him a bigger target. A fellow that deep in the hole, she might hear about it.

  I thought about stopping for a drink to get my head back on straight. I didn’t want her to know I might be losing it. I didn’t want her to know I’d gone so crazy, and all for a sharpie, a plunger racking up big losses every day, even when everyone who mattered knew how it worked, how he’d never make it that way, loading it all on one horse, one race, playing the wheel all night, falling for sucker bets.

  But if I had a drink, she’d know. If I stopped at all on my way back, she’d know. She knew everything.

  When I got to her place, she was pretty busy, which made it easier. She was on the phone bawling out some guy who’d boosted some jewelry and then gone ahead and tried to pull the rocks from their settings himself.

  “Okay, Mr. Gemologist, what do you think we can do with these geegaws now?” she said, waving me in with her hand. “Our guy says each one’s got a chip in it. What makes you think you know what the hell you’re doing? What’d you use, bolt cutters?”

  I sat down on the sofa, back straight, and waited. Watching her, hearing her lay down the law in that way of hers, voice so cold you prayed for her to yell instead, I got to thinking about how I had to do better, had to get my act together.

  She hung up the phone and walked toward me. “How’d it go?”

  “No problems. Smooth sailing.”

  “You’re a little later than usual,” she said, sitting down beside me. And as she did, I felt my chest go tight. I thought maybe—what a thing to think—that she could smell him on me. Could she? Could she do that?

  “You know, brushing off a fella or two,” I said. “Is that for tonight?” I pointed to a manila packet on the coffee table.

  She looked at me. “Yeah,” she said, slowly. I thought for a second, was she leaning in toward me? His bay rum, his cheap cigarettes, everything else.

  But then she sat back, reached over, and picked up the packet, tossing it over to me.

  “Yeah, that’s it. I want you to make three stops. First, over on the west side…”

  I could hear her voice in my head, low and cool. You want to throw it all away? All for some hard arms, some hot hands on you. But who said I took a vow of chastity? Who said I couldn’t control it? It won’t interfere, I told myself. The minute it does, he’s gone. If the boys can have their high kicks, garter flashes on the side, why can’t I have something too? Something to get my heart going, chest heaving. Can you hear my breath go fast, even now? Christ…

  The next night when I got to his place, I could tell he was half in the bag, stinking of Jim Beam. He wasn’t a big boozer, so I wondered what was doing. “Baby doll,” he said, collar askew, grin wide, “I’ve been redecorating.”

  As I followed him into the living room, my heels slipped hard into long ridges in the carpet.

  “Trail of tears, baby,” he said genially. “All that’s left.”

  That’s when I noticed the living room furniture was gone.

  “Repossessed, as they say. Like I was one of the spooks who plays your policy games.”

  “The store or Amos Mackey?”

  He laughed, shrugging. “You got me, beautiful. It was all gone when I got back from the Rouge Room. So I figured I’d celebrate my… liberation from material possessions.”

  He was talking too big, even for him. I read it like this: he’s a lot more shook up than he’s been letting on.

  He took my hand, jamming my fingers together painfully. “I figured we’d celebrate.”

  “The Rouge Room, eh? Moving with real high rollers now, are we?”

  His eyes narrowed, just slightly. “What, you think I can crawl outta the cuff I’m in by laying down fins at the Coronet Dry Goods cockfights?” There was a new, gravelly tone in his voice.

  I brushed by it, hadn’t seen him hot under the collar yet and didn’t want to. It looked like it might not be pretty. “So how’d you do,” I asked, setting my bag down on the window-sill.

  “I did okay, Ma,” he said, trying for teasy but not meeting my e
yes. He turned toward the bottle set on the radiator and poured me a paper cup full. “You know what kept distracting me, though?”

  “What?” I asked, downing the drink.

  “This little redheaded number next to me was blowing dice for her man and I could see down her dress.”

  “I get it.”

  “No you don’t. Nothing special, believe me. But she was wearing this baby blue negligee under her dress. I could see the lace on the top edge.” He poured me another and took a swig himself.

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, baby, damned if it wasn’t just the color of this vein…”

  “Vein?”

  “You can hardly see it, but it’s there.”

  “On me?”

  “Yeah you.”

  “So where is this vein?”

  He moved closer, bottle still in one hand, pressing my stomach. With the other hand, he pushed me against the windowsill, then reached down and tugged up my skirt. His hand was there and then gone.

  “Right here, baby. I can feel it now. I don’t need to see it, ’cause I can feel it right here. Can you?”

  “Yeah.”

  It was Friday late afternoon, an hour before I met up with the old lady for our weekly dinner. My head was all jammed up about Vic. I kept thinking maybe there was something I could do without showing my cards. Maybe buy him some time. But I didn’t know Amos Mackey like that. And if I did, I couldn’t risk it getting back to Gloria.

  The only dealing with him I’d ever had was a month or two back at the While-a-Way Cocktail Lounge. I passed by his table on my way to talk to the owner in his back office. As usual, he was surrounded by grinning municipal types and buying rounds, shaking hands like he was running for mayor, which maybe he was. When I got to the office, the owner, a real deadbeat, started griping about his payments, complaining about the boys who collected it. Everything. He was giving me a song and dance.

  Finally, he wrung his hands at me and moaned, “Sweetheart, don’t you see? If I have to pay that kind of protection, I’ll have to close.”

  I looked at him and shrugged. “If this’ll kill Grandma, then Grandma must die.”

  He paused for a second, then waved his hand at me. “What, I’m supposed to be scared by a little broad five feet two, eyes of blue?”

  “Smarten up,” I said, hand out. “You know it’s not me talking to you now. I think you know who’s talking.”

  When I walked out of the office, envelope in hand, Amos Mackey was right there, you couldn’t miss the teal green suit and the inch of canary yellow fluttering from his breast pocket. He’d been making a phone call in the stand-up booth. He glanced over at me and hung up the phone.

  “You’re Gloria’s, right?”

  I didn’t say anything, just finished tucking the envelope in my purse.

  “I like it,” he said, nodding, the ghost of his smile there. “I like it.”

  That was it. My only dealing with Mr. Amos Mackey to date. It was something, but not enough to get a sit-down with the man over a bridge jumper with a vig you could choke on.

  Then I thought if I could put Vic wise to a fast-money operation, maybe there’d be a shot. Maybe the furrier…

  So I headed over to the Ascot to see if I could get a line on her, see if she was going to be around that night. Walking through the lobby, I went by the Ladies’ Boutique first. That was when I noticed a red squirrel stole in the window with a placard that read Furs by Fiona. I ducked inside and asked the tall blonde at the counter about it.

  “What’s with Furs by Fiona? I thought Regina had the works.”

  The blonde shook her head. “Regina won’t be peddling her buckskins anytime soon.”

  “What gives?”

  “Didn’t you hear?” She looked at me, eyebrows raised into perfect half-moons.

  “Hear what?”

  Lips glistening, she leaned forward eagerly. “Depends on who you talk to, but she’s pulled an Amelia Earhart.”

  “Yeah?” I was surprised. So she got her cut and skipped out while the getting was good.

  “Some say she got into some trouble and took a powder. Others say, if so, why is her apartment still full of clothes and things.”

  “Who says that? How do they know what’s in her apartment?”

  The blonde shrugged, leaning back. “Some people were looking, I guess.”

  “Looking for what, honey?” I said, squinting at her. What kind of game was she running?

  “How should I know,” she said, retreating. “I hear things.”

  I nodded. Seemed Regina was involved in more setups than she could handle. A real player, that one. You had to admire it. If she’d gotten out still standing.

  I went upstairs to the casino. It was too early for any real customers, but I thought maybe if I poked around, careful-like, I might get the word on Amos Mackey and how rough he played. As long as I didn’t mention Vic’s name, there was no tying him to me.

  The closest I got was a whisper from Stitch, one of the stickmen. He was setting up for the night with that kind of orderliness you always see in those guys, the good ones.

  “Yeah, Mackey’s a player. You don’t need me to tell you that.”

  “So not someone you want to be racking up vig on?”

  He looked down at his chips, smoothing them with his smoke-yellowed hand. “No, my dear, you do not.”

  “Meaning?”

  He looked up at me, eyes hard and clear. “Go ask the folks buried under three feet of concrete in the wine cellar of Amos’s Italian Grotto.”

  “I’m guessing they aren’t talking.”

  He grinned mirthlessly. “No, but I guess you could ask Manny, who runs stick over at the Tattle Lounge.”

  “The guy with the eyepatch?”

  “He got lucky. His wife cashed in some bonds for him before the other eye went pop.”

  The warning bells were ringing from all corners. But as loud as they were, I couldn’t do anything about them. Even if I could figure an angle on how to help Vic, it would mean shining a light on me with the old lady. Running to put out one fire would start another. Sure, there was one fix. Stop seeing the sharpie. But who was I kidding? He had a hold of me. He had a hold of me and as much as I wanted to stop, I didn’t want to stop. I couldn’t go back. He had something on me. He knew my number and there was no turning back.

  She picked me up at nine to head over to Googie’s Chop House. I was so distracted about Vic and what I’d heard, I wasn’t careful. Sliding across the bench seat of her El Dorado, my skirt rode up and she got an eyeful. Five bruises, glaring through my stocking, dotting my thigh, an oval for each finger, in a perfect radial pattern.

  Green, violet, raw, hot to the touch. Yeah, I’d seen it in the bath that morning. And when I got dressed. My palms itched every time I looked at them. I could feel them throbbing.

  At first, she was silent. Then she switched gears and began pulling away. “Who did it,” she said. “Who did it to you?”

  “I got caught in a turnstile at Casa Mar,” I said, pulling my skirt down.

  She looked at me for a second, flinty, severe. I found myself counting the faint lines crimping her crimson mouth. A line for every lie told to her by a two-faced shill like me. Then she turned her eyes back to the road, gloves wrapped lightly on the steering wheel.

  I knew she didn’t believe me. She could read everybody, most of all me, who she’d made from scratch. She’d given me my poker face, molded it herself, so she knew it when she saw it.

  It wasn’t until two hours later that she brought it up. We were in one of the round booths in the back and she’d had three vodkas, two more than I’d ever seen her drink since I’d met her. She didn’t seem tight. Instead, the booze seemed to make her sharper than usual, more focused, her words barreling across the table at me. We were talking about other things, business things, when suddenly she set her glass down and looked straight into my eyes in that way she had, her neck curved toward me, jaw forward, like a cobra hoo
d. It always got my pulse going.

  “Listen, baby doll, somebody hurts you,” she said, “they don’t get a second chance.” Then she slid closer, so close I could smell the ambergris in her perfume, the expensive vodka on her tongue. “You’re mine,” she said, putting one gloved finger on my thigh until I winced. “Roughing you up is roughing me up. And I don’t let anyone rough me up. You’re mine and someone puts his dirty paws on you they might as well be on me. You’re my girl. I won’t think twice.”

  And I knew she meant it.

  It was scarcely two days later when it happened. Guess I knew it was coming, could feel it in my gut even if I didn’t let myself think it out loud. I’d been talking myself out of worrying. She’d backed off. Hadn’t asked me who the guy was. Part of me was worried maybe she didn’t need to ask, already knew, had known all these weeks. But she wasn’t pressing me, so I could make myself believe. I hadn’t explained the bruises. I let her think whatever she thought.

  But as for him. As for the powder keg he was sitting on, he was betting, dodging, and losing his way straight to the basement of the Grotto. And when I came by his place Sunday night, late, there was no answer at his door. For the first time in thirty nights or more. So then I thought about Amos Mackey’s boys and got spooked. I took a bobby pin from my hair and popped the lock, a trick one of the loading dock fellas had taught me once in exchange for a gratis box of Old Golds.