Lovers and Liars (3 page)

After just a few minutes she turned and looked at the phone. So what if her father didn’t care? Didn’t she have some kind of inalienable right to share the biggest moment of her life with him? She crossed to the phone with long, aggressive strides.

The receptionist put her right through. The next phone rang four times before it was answered by one of the dozen secretaries working for Glassman. As usual, a tone of harassment seeped through the veneer of professional courtesy.

“Mr. Glassman, please,” Belinda said, wondering if her own voice sounded tense. For some reason the phone had gotten a bit clammy in her hand.

“Whom may I—”

“Belinda. Glassman. His
daughter
.”

That got the secretary off balance. She heard the indrawn breath. She never called her father, ever, not at work, not outside work, and she hadn’t been to his office since she was fifteen. But now, after a three-minute pause, the secretary informed her that she would have to call back later. Mr. Glassman was in a meeting and could not take the call. “Would you like to leave a message?”

“Forget it,” she said quickly. She hung up. Just as well. It was a bad idea.

Should she call her mother?

She started to think about the night ahead. She wanted to celebrate. Too bad today wasn’t Friday, because there was that North-Star party she had been invited to and had no intention of missing. But today wasn’t Friday, and she had always been a loner, even as a child, and it never bothered her—except at times like these.

She suddenly had a nostalgic longing for Dana—her best friend as a teenager. They had drifted apart when Dana had gotten married, and now she was a mother three times over. Belinda guessed that marriage and motherhood suited Dana, but she couldn’t imagine herself ever in that role. It wasn’t because she was such a loner and just couldn’t get close to people; it was rather because she knew men too well and had long ago given up her childish dreams of finding some kind of Prince Charming to share her life with. Most men wanted one thing, and Belinda knew exactly what that was. But that was okay. Belinda wanted it too. It was the lies that she could live without—and she intended to do just that.

Still, this moment cried out to be shared with someone special.

But there was no one, so Belinda shrugged the need away. Of course it would have to be a man. Her mind formed an image of massive male pectorals, thickly matted with black hair. Sometimes there was nothing interesting at all out and about. Other times they all came out of the woodwork.

She hadn’t had a really good fuck in too long. What she needed was to be super turned on.

Thinking about men and her needs made her look at the answering machine, and sure enough the light was blinking. She already knew who it was. Vince. Vince was good in bed, but …

She found her black book and flipped through. Rick, Ted, Harry (who in hell was Harry?), Brad, Tony …

Tony. Tony was very, very good. A bar pick-up, because Belinda didn’t believe in attachments. They were all one-nighters or short flings. Tony was really good. The more
she thought about it, the more she remembered how much he liked giving head.

But somehow Tony didn’t appeal to her just then, and she threw the phone book on the chair across the room. To hell with it. Tonight she would work; she could celebrate anytime.

He couldn’t even leave a goddamn meeting to talk to his daughter …

2

A
be Glassman ignored his secretary, who was on his heels, striding rapidly down the thickly carpeted corridor and toward the oversized rosewood doors at its very end. His craggy, hawkish face was grim. “No calls, Rosalie,” he snapped before slamming the door in her face.

Rosalie knew that that meant he did not want to be disturbed, and her job depended on it.

Abe Glassman stood six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and lean, except for a paunch. But then he was over fifty—and every man, he thought, had a right to a little slack by then. He walked behind his desk to stare through the wall of glass at the panorama of Manhattan spread at his feet. New York. His city. Where it all began.

“Fuck,” he said very succinctly.

He could not believe that little prick. Who in hell did he think he was? He was nothing more than some smart-ass, baby-faced kid practically fresh out of diapers. Damn! Abe could not believe he had really turned down the money—that he had actually handed back the envelope filled with ten grand in sweet green cash. Damn! And he’d even had it in his hand. Abe cursed Will Hayward for being such a fucking idiot as to get himself into so much trouble that he, Abe
Glassman, had to try and bail him out by paying off some two-bit cop. Jesus! He’d paid off fucking senators, for crissake, and now some bratty detective was getting moral on him, in a city without morality? New York City was filled with a hundred thousand dirty cops, and it was just his luck to try and grease this one!

Would Detective Smith do something about it?

Fucking nigger, Abe thought, had better keep his trap closed, or he won’t know what hit him. And that was a promise.

Abe remembered growing up in a crowded apartment with an ill father, who had suffered a massive stroke right after the Crash in ’29. His father had been a shoemaker from Russia. He had done his business right out of the apartment, in the front room. Abe had spent most of his time playing hooky from school and fighting wops and niggers in the streets who’d jeered at his clothes and his heavily accented speech. It was okay. He hated them too.

He had one brother and two sisters and they had always been hungry. Hunger was something Abe had constantly lived with as a child. Even today he would always clean his plate. He could not stand for anything to be wasted.

With his father ill, there had been only a bare income from his mother’s efforts as a seamstress. Abe, the eldest child, was a good thief. He had to be. He would steal fresh produce and meats from the vendors to bring home. His mother had never said a word, but she knew. And Abe knew she had silently prayed that he wouldn’t get caught.

At thirteen, Abe got his first real job. The local bookie on the corner was a reed-thin giant named Eddie. Abe picked up the slips the bets were written on and delivered them to Nathan Hammerstein, farther uptown. Nathan lived in a pleasant apartment—a palace in Abe’s eyes—and he wore suits and polished brown shoes and sported a fine mustache. Now, in retrospect, Abe could laugh at the airs Nathan had put on. But back then he had looked up to Nathan, vowing one day to have a suit just as fine and an even better home.

The job paid well, a few dollars a month, and it kept
food on the table for his sisters, his brother, and his mother. His father died of a second stroke in the winter of 1944.

Abe was not yet eighteen. Because of his age he had missed the draft, which was fine with him—he’d wanted nothing to interfere with his plans. Like everybody who didn’t go to fight, Abe had found himself working in the factories of a newly mobilized economy. But with Abe there was a difference; he continued to pick up slips on the side. A man named Luke Bonzio offered him Nathan Hammerstein’s job, but Abe had politely declined. Bookmaking was not in his future plans.

Nobody understood when Abe went to college. His two sisters were married at the ages of sixteen and fifteen, and his younger brother had taken over Abe’s old job of picking up slips. His mother had looked at him and said nothing, stitching by candlelight. He had chosen a public school, made only one friend, and took his studies very seriously. His friend was Will Hayward, a clean-cut handsome boy, a distant relation of one of the oldest families of New York, the Morgans. Hayward was nothing more than a party boy, already showing signs of alcoholism, but Abe knew that he could use Hayward and his society connections, that he would be important to him.

The alcoholism and the gambling did not bother Abe. To the contrary. He filed that information away.

Abe graduated from City College of New York June 3, 1948. He was almost twenty-two. Hayward had already gotten a job with a bank, thanks to a push from one of his distant relatives. Abe had no job, but he wasn’t without offers. He was approached by Luke Bonzio again.

“You got brains and determination,” Bonzio had said. “We could always use somebody like you. You could go far with us.”

Abe smiled. “I’m gonna go far, all right, but on my own.”

Bonzio shook his head. He was angry. “Someday you’re gonna need us, and you’ll be sorry.”

Abe made sure he didn’t smile until Bonzio had turned away.

He waited two weeks before he went to the bank where Hayward worked. That was the first time he had ever laid eyes on Nancy Worth, a cousin of Will’s, just as she was leaving his office. She was not only beautiful but elegant, even at eighteen—an elegance that had been fostered through many generations. Abe decided then and there that he wanted Nancy Worth, and it didn’t matter that she was from the other side of town. “I need a loan,” he said to Will.

Hayward looked incredulous. “With what as collateral?”

“My mother’s shop,” Abe said.

“How much?”

“Three thousand dollars.”

Hayward started laughing. “Abe, we’re good friends, but I can’t give you more than a hundred or so for that!”

“Let’s go have lunch,” Abe said firmly.

Turning on all his personal magnetism, which was considerable, Abe offered Hayward a partnership in return for the loan. Hayward capitulated, as Abe had expected. They made up a list of fraudulent assets, which they both signed, and Abe got his three-thousand-dollar loan. He promptly put the three thousand down on the corner candy store, which was worth fifteen, buying the lease. He turned around and sold it a few months later for twenty.

The next lease he acquired was a restaurant’s, and when he sold that, he made double the profit he’d hoped for. Soon he had several leases going at once, all in Brooklyn. He also had his eye on some property that he wanted to develop in Brooklyn. He knew he could make a fortune putting up an apartment building if he could only get the zoning laws changed. He had Hayward approach a couple of the city councilmen, to sound them out. Hayward told him they’d be amenable to bribes.

Abe built his first apartment buildings.

His ambitions expanded across the river to Manhattan. The economy was booming. The value of property was soaring, and Abe wanted to build offices in the heart of the city. But he would have to tear down some tenements on one of the lots, and this time he couldn’t move the city council, not
even with the color of his money, because there was an Historic New York movement afoot, led by a couple of fat society matrons.

Bonzio told him he could get the council to approve Abe’s plans. Abe wasn’t a fool. “What do you want in return?” he asked.

“Just a piece of the property,” Bonzio said. “Just a small piece, six percent of the profits.”

Abe regarded him with suspicion.

“And you come in on a deal with us in Florida,” Bonzio went on. “We need somebody like you with a good head for real estate.”

Abe didn’t want to do a deal with the mob, but he was starting to get overextended—he had five loans going at once. And his ambitions were uncontrollable; he wanted very much to make another deal—this one even bigger and more lucrative than the rest. And the thought of expanding his reach into new territory was heady and exhilarating. He agreed.

Bonzio, as promised, got the council to remove their moratorium on the building in the district where the historic houses were located. Abe, as promised, went in on the deal to build a hotel in Fort Lauderdale. When it came to his attention that the wife of one of the New York City councilmen had had a serious accident and was hospitalized for six months, he frowned and shrugged the incident away as coincidence, not blackmail.

She had been the victim of a hit-and-run.

3