Don't Die Under the Apple Tree (23 page)

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Authors: Amy Patricia Meade

BOOK: Don't Die Under the Apple Tree
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The sergeant fell silent.
“Hello?” Rosie prompted after several seconds had elapsed.
“Yeah, I'm here. Hold on a second, please.”
She could hear him conversing with another man, most likely about her request. “Yeah, okay. What's the message?”
“Tell him that Delaney's in on the shipyard scheme. And that he might be following him.”
“Okay. Hold on a second?”
“Sure,” she agreed breathlessly, but as the seconds ticked away, she felt her sense of urgency grow.
After what felt like an eternity, Sergeant Cooper returned to the phone. “We tried radioing the lieutenant, but there was no reply.”
Rosie's pulse quickened. “What? No! There has to be another way to reach him. Can you send a car? It's important.”
“Hold on, please.”
Again she heard the sergeant speaking with someone in the background. This time, however, the reply came quickly. “I'm sorry, ma'am, but I can't do that.”
“You can't? Why not?”
“If he needs backup, he'll request it.”
“You don't understand. He may be in danger,” she insisted.
“If you'd like to speak with Captain Kinney—”
“No,” she replied. The reason for the sergeant's lack of cooperation became suddenly clear. “No, that's all right.”
“Good night, ma'am.”
Rosie slammed the receiver into the cradle without a word. She had one option left: to go after Riordan herself.
Taking the hip flask as evidence, her apartment key, and a bit of change (the only money she had left after paying part of Billy's bar tab) from her handbag and placing it in the pocket of her dress, she set off to the train station.
The day's warmth and humidity had visually manifested itself in the shape of storm clouds forming a few miles east of the Hudson River. Amid the rumbling of distant thunder, Rosie rushed down the steps of her apartment building and onto the sidewalk. A block away from the Eighth Avenue/Twenty-third Street station, Rosie felt a strong arm reach around her shoulders and a hand clamp over her mouth. Before she could put up a struggle, a hard cylindrical object pressed against the small of her back.
“Where do you think you're going, Rosie?” came a whisper in her ear. Although she recognized the voice as belonging to Michael Delaney, its usual whining cadence had been replaced with a tone far more sinister. “Going to warn your friend?”
Rosie's eyes were wide with fear. Although she couldn't speak, she managed to shake her head slowly from side to side.
“Liar,” Delaney spat back. “I saw him leave your apartment and I know where he's headed. You were gonna meet him there and warn him, weren't you? Warn him about me. You know what? I think that's a great idea. Let's you and I go join him. Okay?”
She didn't react, prompting Delaney to push the gun harder into her back.
“Okay?”
This time she nodded in agreement.
“Good. Now, I'm going to take my hand away from your mouth and we're going to take a walk to the train station. Quietly. Got it?”
Again, she nodded.
“And when I say quiet, I mean quiet. Don't make me hurt you, Rosie. I don't want to hurt you.”
She nodded, this time vigorously, prompting Delaney to slowly remove his hand.
Rosie drew a deep breath through her mouth.
“That's it. Breathe.” He draped his jacket over her shoulders so as to conceal the gun he had pointing in Rosie's back. “Now walk.”
Putting one foot carefully in front of the other, she proceeded slowly yet surely down the remainder of the block. Delaney, walking at her side, with the gun planted firmly in her back, made sure to nod and smile to passersby.
“Okay, down the steps,” he instructed as they reached the IRT station. “You first, and don't try to get ahead of me. There's nowhere you can run.”
With Delaney close behind, she descended the steps to the train platform. There, he joined her, and they waited side by side in silence until the next train to Brooklyn pulled to a halt and deposited its passengers.
It being a warm Saturday night—the first of the year—the trains heading into Manhattan were packed with lovers, singles, and groups of men and women looking for a night on the town. Trains heading out of Manhattan, however, were empty and would not be full until the bars made last call at three a.m.
It was a lucky break for Delaney.
When the train had expelled its passengers and the doors had cleared, Delaney directed Rosie into the third car, which had been abandoned save for three people. Dead center on the bench that ran the length of the left side of the car sat an elderly woman who appeared to be going on an overnight trip. Diagonally across from her, at the rear of the right-side bench, an adolescent boy and girl were busy necking.
The elderly woman, visibly uncomfortable with the public display of affection, played awkwardly with the handle of her small valise and cleared her throat periodically.
Delaney motioned to Rosie to take hold of the leather strap and stood close behind her, one arm keeping the gun positioned in her back, the other wrapped tightly around the front of her waist.
The sight of what she deemed to be another set of amorous young people caused the elderly woman to clear her throat even more loudly and then busy herself with the task of cleaning out her handbag.
“Look at that,” Delaney said in Rosie's ear. “The old bird thinks we're lovers. Should we give her a show?”
Rosie leaned her head away from Delaney's. She couldn't stand the feeling of his breath on the side of her face.
“But we're not, are we, Rosie?” he continued. “Not for lack of trying, though. No. I've been here all this time, loving you, wanting you,” he added in a whisper. “But you've never wanted me, have you? You always seem to want someone else. First it was Billy Keefe and now this cop, Riordan.”
“Riordan?” she exclaimed. “There's nothing going on with him. He's just trying to keep me out of jail.”
“Liar! Liar. I saw you two by the Navy Yard, watching the sunset, and talking. That didn't seem very law enforcement-like to me.”
Rosie thought she might vomit. How long had Delaney been watching her? How long had he been following her every move? How could she not have seen him there in the shadows? How could she not have known?
“And now, here you are rushing after him, trying to save him. But it's too late, Rosie.”
“What do you mean?”
“I already called Del Vecchio. He'll have the warehouse emptied by the time your cop gets there. Well, empty except for Del Vecchio and his .38.”
Rosie had been terrified, but at least she had hope that Riordan might have called for backup. At the prospect that Riordan might be dead, genuine panic started to set in.
She had to get away from Delaney. She had to. But how?
The train had emerged from its subterranean channel and hummed along the elevated tracks that led to Red Hook. Rosie thought about her escape as she watched the landscape flicker past the windows. The train offered no exit route and the station only one, but the walk to the shipyard was filled with alleys, side streets, and apartment buildings. What's more, the war effort had tapped into the city's supply of skilled male workers, thus bringing infrastructural repairs to a grinding halt and leaving streets and sidewalks in various stages of disrepair.
If she could use the potholes, cracks, and missing pavement to break away from Delaney, she might stand a chance.
With the sound of escaping air, the train drew to a halt at the Romanesque revival City Hall station, which, with the work week ended, now stood eerily empty. Before the war, City Hall station had been a favorite stop of Rosie's. The curved section of track offset the elegant style of the polychrome tiled arches, brass fixtures, wrought-iron chandeliers, and three cured skylights made of cut amethyst glass. Since entering the war, those skylights, which corresponded to three gratings in City Hall park, had been blackened with tar to avoid attention from enemy bombers. The move to obliterate the light source, although strategically sound, had left the station with a timeless, dark feeling that Rosie found deeply foreboding.
Delaney pushed Rosie out the sliding doors and waited until the train left the station before directing her to walk. With the train gone, the only sounds in the empty station were the clacking of their heels against the platform cement.
As they scaled the steps that led to the green square of land in front of City Hall, Rosie mentally retraced the walk to the shipyard. Two blocks ahead, there was a hole in the sidewalk that might afford her an opportunity to knock Delaney off balance—providing, of course, that he wasn't aware of its presence. Considering her abductor traveled from the opposite direction each morning, Rosie was willing to stake money on the fact that he wasn't.
Marching forward through the wind and thunder, Rosie could pick out the pivotal spot in the near distance. Calculating where Delaney might walk, given his proximity to her, she altered her pace so that she could step daintily, and discreetly, over the small pothole while, with any luck, her abductor stepped in it.
Unfortunately, when she reached the spot, Delaney followed her lead and bypassed the hole with no difficulty.
Disappointed but not hopeless, Rosie zeroed in on the next obstacle, just a few feet ahead. A section of pavement that had buckled, causing an uneven walking surface.
Having walked this path for ten days, Rosie had learned, without even looking down, where to walk to avoid getting the toe of her shoe caught on the cement.
Delaney, meanwhile, tripped and stumbled forward. It was precisely the break Rosie needed. Kicking off her shoes, she ran, hell for leather, down the street, doing her best to stay in the shadows.
Chapter Sixteen
Riordan pulled his Ford Deluxe to a stop along Beard Street and approached the young man standing outside the Pushey Shipyard gate. Between eighteen and twenty years old, he possessed a pencil-thin mustache that did little to hide or age his youthful countenance and, unlike the typical guard on duty, he was conspicuously lacking a uniform.
“Lieutenant Jack Riordan, NYPD.” He flashed his badge. “What happened to the MP who's usually on duty?”
“Oh, h-he's out sick.”
“Really? Here I was thinking that whatever is going on behind that fence might not be condoned by the United States government.”
The young man's face blanched.
Riordan reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “Here, my badge and this twenty-dollar bill say you leave here without a word and I pretend I never saw you.”
The young man gazed at the bill, looked back over his shoulder, and hesitated for a moment, at which point Riordan raised his voice. “Go on! Get out of here!”
He took off like a shot, leaving Riordan, by the glow of a nearby streetlight, to figure out how to jimmy the complex lock.
Riordan rolled his eyes. Next time he would have to remember to pay off the guard
after
demanding that the gate be unlocked. For now, however, the sole of his size eleven-and-a-half shoe would suffice.
After several tries, he managed to finesse the gate and enter the yard, his Colt Detective Special at the ready in his right hand and a long, black flashlight in his left. As the impending storm rolled closer to the city, he moved to the right of the building known as the employee holding area and focused his attention on the smaller outlying structures.
Although Riordan's men had searched the shipyard thoroughly, Riordan himself, preferring to reserve his time and energy to focus on clues, was still somewhat vague about the yard's layout. As such, it was only after discovering the toolshed, worksite lavatory, and blueprint building, that he happened upon an expansive building made of corrugated steel.
Shining his flashlight in the window, Riordan saw a wooden rack system, approximately six feet deep and twelve feet high, built neatly along the far wall. The first two slots of the rack were filled with sheet metal. The rest were empty.
To the right, on a perpendicular wall, metal corrals held burlap bags labeled as containing fasteners of every size, shape, and variety. However, there were just two or three bags of each kind.
Giving the door latch a turn, he entered the building and examined its contents. In a warehouse capable of holding tons of materials, the presence of only a few pieces of sheet metal and several hundred fasteners—end of week or not—seemed dubious. Given that the country was ramping up for war, one would have thought that this storage area would be filled to the rafters with supplies.
Shining his flashlight onto the cement floor of the sheet-metal racks, Riordan bent down to take note of several lines of dirt on the front and back beams of the rack, running perpendicular to the sides of each section. Moreover, those lines looked fresh and damp, indicating that there had, indeed, been more sheet metal stacked in the area and that that metal had been moved quite recently.
Upon this discovery, Riordan checked the fastener corrals. There, too, existed irregularly shaped damp spots upon the concrete, as if multiple bags of supplies had once rested there and had recently been carted off. As recently, perhaps, as the past few hours.
Riordan stood up to check out the small-parts bins that were mounted on the wall above, but before he could do so, a shot rang out. Acting quickly, he dropped to the ground and rolled toward the sheet-metal racks, getting some shots off along the way. Squeezing into the first of the bins, he wedged himself between two thick pieces of sheet metal. The narrow opening acted as a makeshift shield, while allowing him to counter the gunfire emanating from the warehouse door.
The anonymous shooter scrambled behind one of the metal warehouse doors, but the sheltered angle made aiming at Riordan next to impossible. Looking for another hiding spot, the figure crossed the entranceway, but, after several volleys, he eventually fell over, landing face forward. Riordan, gun still drawn, rose from his spot in the sheet-metal bin and carefully approached the body.
After a few kicks with the toe of his shoe, he rolled him over.
It was the short, stocky figure of Tony Del Vecchio.
 
 
A barefoot Rosie sprinted down Wright Street, trying the handle of every door she passed along the way. The shipyard and dockworkers, however, had long left for the day, leaving the area vacant. Desperately, she decided to scream for help, in case somewhere nearby, some person still remained.
As she opened her mouth, she felt an incredible force come crashing down on her back, knocking her face first into the pavement. “You didn't think I'd let you get away that easily, did you?” Delaney taunted as he lay on top of her.
Meanwhile Rosie, having had the wind knocked out of her, gasped for air.
“Come on!” He stood up and dragged Rosie to her feet, scraping both her knees against the hard, rough surface of the asphalt. “Come on!”
Rosie stood up and, having finally caught her breath, swallowed the pool of saliva that had formed in her open mouth. The substance had the taste of dirt and salt. She raised a finger to the corner of her mouth and removed it, only to find it covered in blood and tiny bits of gravel.
“Come on,” Delany urged again and shoved the cold steel of the gun in her back.
Slowly, she started to walk toward Beard Street. She felt exhausted and her entire body ached. “Why are you doing this to me? Why not just kill me? Kill me like you did Finch.”
“I didn't kill Finch.”
“No? You were his accomplices, weren't you? You and Del Vecchio?”
Delaney shook his head. “It's not as easy as that, Rosie. It's not that simple.”
“Try me,” she challenged as she spun around.
“Keep walking and I will.” He waved the gun.
She obeyed and Delaney launched into his story. “It all started with the
Normandie
fire. Remember the whole scare about it being sabotaged by the Nazis or the Nips?”
“Yes, but the government found no evidence of that. They said the fire was caused by a spark from a welding torch.”
“Yeah, but did anyone believe it?”
“Sure, lots of people did.”
“But they still wondered, didn't they? Admit it, you did, too.”
“You're right. I did. Still do.”
“Do you know why? Because every day the people of this city look out at that ship's hull lying in the Hudson River. And every time they go down to the water, be it Jersey or Long Island, they see German U-boats right off the shore. As you can imagine, the government doesn't like having their navy's ability to protect its citizens thrown into question. Problem is, until all their ships are built, there's not much they can do. So they decided they needed a fleet of vessels that could temporarily handle the job of scaring off the U-boats. And because of the talk that Nazis and Nips were here on land, they needed a bunch of people who knew the waterfront and could identify potential spy activity.”
“Where would they possibly find either?” she asked as the storm closed in.
“Easy. The mob.”
Rosie stopped dead in her tracks. “You're telling me that the United States government made a pact with—with—”
“Yep, Naval Intelligence, the Manhattan D.A., and good old Lucky Luciano all in bed together.” He prodded Rosie to keep walking. “Joe Lanza, the king of the Fulton Fish Market, now rules the harbor with his fleet of fishing boats, and Frank Costello—”
“Luciano's right-hand man,” Rosie commented as she recalled her conversation with Riordan.
“—along with some guy named Anastasia is in charge of the waterfront.”
“All of it?”
“From the docks, to the streets, to the very land Pushey Shipyard sits on. In exchange for all this ‘protection, ' Luciano gets a transfer from Dannemora to some place down south with a hedge fence instead of barbed wire.”
“And the rivets ... ?”
“Costello's scheme. You give a mobster full rein over a neighborhood and they're going to want to make money off the deal.”
“I can't believe it. You mean the government would—”
“Oh, you better believe they would.”
“And you? Why are you doing this?
How
could you do this? Don't you care about those sailors' lives?”
“Same reason anyone does anything these days: money. That's why you showed up at the yard in the first place, wasn't it?”
They turned onto Beard Street. “I'm doing an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. I'm not hurting anyone with what I do. It's hardly the same thing.”
“Isn't it? Eh, maybe not.”
Rosie recalled Del Vecchio's cigarette lighter. It was just as shiny and flawless as Delaney's hip flask. “So you and Del Vecchio were Finch's accomplices, weren't you?”
“Yes. Finch was in on the deal from the start, but when it started getting bigger and more steel was being shipped in and out of the yard and in less and less time, he knew he couldn't handle it on his own, so he offered Del Vecchio and me a part of his take.”
“Delaney,” Rosie sighed. “I thought you were different. I thought ...”
“Hey, if it was your mother who was up to her eyeballs in medical bills, you'd have done the same thing,” he argued. “Don't tell me you wouldn't. The problem is Finch was getting too much attention. Between the booze, the women, and flashing fifty-dollar bills around like it was chump change, it was only a matter of time until he ended up in jail or spilled the beans.”
She could see the shipyard up ahead. “But the government must have known what to expect when they turned the waterfront over to the mob. Surely—”
“It's not the government they were worried about. It was the people. It's one thing to suspect that the Mob is operating in your neighborhood. It's another thing to know they are.” He shook his head. “No, if Finch had talked about what we were doing here—even the smallest slip—it would have been all over.”
“So you killed Finch,” she presumed.
“No, I told you I didn't kill him. That's the truth.”
“Then who did?”
“Del Vecchio. He knew Finch got his payoff down by the pier each week. So he waited for him there and ... let him have it.”
“Del Vecchio,” she repeated quietly. “And I'm sure he bashed him on the head because of what I had done earlier in the day.”
“He may have,” Delaney confessed.
“Good God.”
“Hey, that doesn't make him a bad guy, Rosie. It doesn't because he isn't. He's not like that. He's a good guy. A family man,” Delaney insisted. “He was just following orders. When Frank Costello's men tell you to do something, you don't argue.”
“Is that how he got his promotion?”
“Part of it. Costello's gang wanted to start putting inside men in all the key spots. Because Del Vecchio bumped off Finch, I guess they figured he should get his job.”
They had arrived at the Pushey Gate only to find the gate forced open and no guard on duty.
“Looks like we have company.” Grabbing Rosie by the arm, Delaney raised his gun and entered the yard in search of Del Vecchio.
Dragging Rosie behind him, he peered through the windows of every building in the complex as he made his way to the warehouse. As expected, he found nothing along the way and finally entered the warehouse, only to see Riordan standing over Del Vecchio's body.
Riordan, gun still drawn, aimed it at Delaney. Delaney, meanwhile, grabbed for Rosie in an attempt to shield himself with her. It was enough to give Riordan pause.
Rosie, however, would have none of it. Recalling a technique her Dad once showed her, she took advantage of her position and gave him a hard kick to the side of the shin, just below the kneecap.
The move worked. Delaney lost his footing and crumpled to the ground, but not before getting a shot off at Riordan. Rosie watched in horror as the lieutenant fell to the ground.
“Riordan!” she screamed. But there was no time to turn back and check on him. She had to get away. She had to get help.
As the skies opened and lightning touched down over Gowanus Bay, Rosie ran out the warehouse door and toward the familiar haven of nearby Pier Number One. Once there, however, she knew the only place she could go was up.
Damning the risk of electrocution, she took hold of a bottom rung and started to climb. Raindrops crashed off the scaffold, soaking Rosie through to her skin and making it difficult to keep her hands and feet from slipping off the metal bars, making the ascent a slow one.

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