The Twenty-Year Death (62 page)

But Healey and Dobrygowski thought she’d done it for the money. Why would she then kill herself? Maybe if she knew they were on to her, especially if they brought up that old husband case. It had really given her pause when I told her about that. Yeah, she found out they were on to her, and she killed herself.

Well, by the time I had it worked out that far, it was almost noon and I had to meet Vee for lunch in the main dining room. I didn’t like that we’d be so exposed, but I couldn’t do anything that would arouse her suspicion, and skipping our celebratory lunch would have done just that. Before I left, I put my plan into action. If I was going to do it, I ought to do it. I asked the bartender for a phone. He brought it to me, and retreated discreetly.

I had the operator put me through to the
Sun
. “Taylor Montgomery please.” The switchboard did whatever it does, and Montgomery answered in a voice that sounded much gruffer than in person. “Montgomery here.”

“Taylor, son, it’s Shem Rosenkrantz.”

His voice softened into the fawning young man I knew. “Mr. Rosenkrantz! What can I do for you?”

“Would the paper be interested in running a follow-up on Joe’s death? The police think it was a murder now.”

“Oh no, that’s horrible,” he said, genuinely pained.

I made sure to increase the sorrow in my own voice, although it was probably unnecessary. “They think this woman I know, Victoria Abrams, did it. She apparently did the same thing in Cleveland a while back under a different name. Killed her husband and burned the house down.”

“Abrams, you said?” He was writing it down.

“Victoria Abrams.” If the police found out I’d made this call,
planting the story would look bad for me, so I made my intentions very clear. “If this woman did this thing, I want her nailed for it, and I don’t trust the police to carry it through. But if the
Sun
runs a story about it, maybe something’ll actually get done.”

“Of course, of course,” Montgomery said, his voice somewhat muffled, so I knew he was holding the receiver with his shoulder, using both hands to write or check a file or something.

“Will they let you run it? It’s not big news, I know.”

“They’ll run it. You’re still a celebrity and the Hadleys are a big deal in this town, even if they are on the way down. I mean—”

“No offense taken.”

“I’ll make sure they run it.”

“Good. And check on this thing in Cleveland.”

“As soon as we hang up the phone,” he said.

“That a boy.” And we rang off. I knew he’d do all that he could to get it on page one of the city section. And it would be thorough and it would be damning and I would be an innocent victim, and me a great man. And if Vee was guilty in the paper, it hardly mattered if she was guilty or not, the police would have to do something. At least, that’s what Vee would think. And that’s why she was going to kill herself. A stretch, but a plan. I felt the high of a good writing session, the same energy and self-assurance, as I left the bar to cross the hotel lobby.

We arrived at the dining room at exactly the same time. She’d changed again, now wearing a royal blue tea dress with an oversized white belt cinched around her waist, an outfit I’d never seen before that was no doubt a gift from Browne. She tried to look demure, biting her lip to keep from smiling and failing. All her teeth came out in a huge sappy grin. She moved towards
me, but then checked herself. She might have thrown Browne over in her head, but she couldn’t be seen getting too familiar with another man just yet. I felt the same way, my confidence waning, worried that the police had their eyes on us right then.

“Mr. Rosenkrantz,” Vee said.

“You look stunning, Vee,” I said.

She actually hung her head at the compliment. “I’m glad you think so,” she said, and then stepped forward and took my arm. “Well, I guess I can be escorted by a gentleman friend without anyone thinking anything of it.”

Despite her hanging on me like that, I was surprised to find that I didn’t actually feel anything about what I planned to do to her later. It was as though that part of me was closed off, protected from what I was doing right then. I led her into the dining room.

They sat us at a four-person table in the center of the room. The lighting from the chandeliers was just enough to see by, augmented by a shaded candlestick in the center of the table, which cast a flickering circle on the tablecloth. A good number of tables were filled with hotel guests and maybe some locals there for the cuisine. Tuxedoed waiters moved quickly between the tables. Jacketless Negro food runners and busboys carried platters at shoulder height.

I held the chair for her like we were two regular people, and then sat across from her. She leaned forward, and the candle lit her face from below as though she were telling a ghost story at a campfire. “We’re gonna eat at places like this all the time,” she said, “and I won’t have to sleep with any more gangsters to do it. We’re coming up in the world finally.”

“I’ve been up in the world. This is still coming down for me.”

She crunched her face into a pout. “Well, excuse me, Mr. Big-time New York Writer. Not all of us had movie star wives and vacationed on the Riviera.”

I shouldn’t have done that to her, taken the air out of her balloon. She had a right to be happy for a little while. But I felt like being mean for some reason. I said, “
Have
a movie star wife. I’m still married to her.”

Her face turned into that familiar hard-boiled stare, and she said, “I’m your woman now, you got that? I don’t want to hear about any wife or anybody. We’re in this thing together. That money’s mine just as much as it is yours.”

“Oh, just the two of us? But I know you’re always for hire. If we’re each other’s one and only, how are you going to ditch your boyfriend?”

“You pimp—” she started, but she saw where this was going, and she visibly stopped, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Let’s just forget all of that,” she said. “This is a chance for us to start again.”

Seeing her try so hard like that really made me feel like scum, and I said, “Of course. You’re right.” I reached across the table and gave her hand a squeeze.

Her expression softened, and soon she was smiling. She laughed to herself, and I knew she was thinking about all that money that was hers.

I grabbed a passing waiter and ordered a Gin Rickey. Vee asked for a Manhattan. Then we both fell silent over our menus. And the whole thing felt perfectly natural. We were a wealthy couple enjoying a wealthy meal in a wealthy hotel. It’s true that there was a time in my life when that was a regular occurrence, but just then, I couldn’t help but feel as though we were playacting.
And that started me wondering if I was playacting at the other thing also, but...I couldn’t think about that right then. I couldn’t risk Vee thinking something was up.

And then suddenly, a loud voice cut through the room from the doorway, and I turned to see Carlton Browne striding for our table.

He came at us, with the maître d’ following him.

“Would you look at that,” Browne said. “It’s your cousin, Vee.” He emphasized the word ‘cousin’ as though it were a shared password that should be taken to mean something else. He came right up to me and gripped me around the arm where Joe’s ice pick had sliced me. The pain shot through my arm. I sucked in and held my breath as my stomach turned. “This really is a small hotel, huh? How you doing?” He ground his fingers into my bicep leaving no doubt that he knew exactly what he was doing.

He looked at the maître d’, who was standing a few steps back, his hands out and his mouth open as though he were trying to catch something delicate. “I’ll join this table. How about a bottle of red and a bottle of white? And a scotch for me. Anyone else?” He looked between Vee and me, then turned to the maître d’. “A scotch for both the men.” He released my arm, and I let out my breath.

“We’ve already ordered drinks,” Vee said.

“Good. So you’ll have some more.” He took the chair to my right with Vee on his right. “You don’t mind. The lady and I like to sit together.”

Vee kept her eyes on the tablecloth, her hands fidgeting with the napkin in her lap.

I did what I could to avoid looking at Browne, which wasn’t much. He was younger than I had thought, no more than forty,
probably younger. He was balding, his hairline eroded in two fierce arches from his forehead back to the top of his head. He was big in every way, tall, muscular, and fat, if you can imagine that.

Our drinks came, and I took half of mine in one gulp.

“It’s funny us all being here like this,” Browne said. He seemed to revel in our discomfort. “Huh, Vee?” He gave her a playful tap on the chin with a closed fist, but the intent was far from playful, carrying what it did behind it. “Sorry, what was your name?” he said, turning to me. “I was a little distracted the other night, I’m not sure I got it.”

“Shem Rosenkrantz,” I said.

He frowned. “That’s a Jew name, isn’t it? Vee, I didn’t know you were a Jew.”

“I’m not,” Vee said, leading with her whole body. “You see—”

He raised a hand, silencing her without even looking at her. “Sure, sure. It’s not important. We’re all white. What’s it matter? Still, I’d like to have known you were a Jew, Vee. You should have told me that.”

Vee looked at her hands in her lap. A small ring of silence had fallen at the tables around us, like Browne sucked all of the energy out of his surroundings.

“So how are you related? I’m still not clear on that,” Browne said.

“Carlton—” Vee started.

He sneered at her. “I wasn’t asking you. Was I asking you?” She said nothing, her head down, chastised. “You’d think you could knock some sense into her, huh?” He grabbed her bicep as he had grabbed mine, and Vee’s face turned sour, and she looked away from him. I had never seen her so cowed, and it frightened me even more than Browne’s patter. When the
maître d’ set down our Scotches, and then turned to a busboy behind him holding the bottles of wine, I picked up my Gin Rickey and drank the rest of it down.

“Shem Rosenkrantz...” Browne said, ignoring the wait staff and still holding Vee by the arm. “Oh, wait, did I read something in the paper about your son getting killed?”

“My son died, yes,” I said. “But he wasn’t killed.”

“Oh, sure. I read the paper,” and he gave me an exaggerated frown. “But I get the real news, too. Outside the paper. He was killed and someone tried to burn his body.”

I tried to tell if he was just talking or if he knew something. It made me nervous, and as I shifted in my seat, I tried to catch Vee’s eye to see if she had told him, but she was sitting with her eyes down like a kid in trouble with her folks.

Browne leaned back, and grabbed a passing busboy by the sleeve. “I want to order,” he said.

“I’ll find your waiter, sir,” the busboy said.

“I don’t want you to find my waiter. I want you to tell him. Whatever’s not on the menu, that’s what we want. All around.” He spun his finger to indicate the whole table.

“Yes, sir,” the busboy said, nodding more than he needed to.

“Ha. ‘Sir.’ And they say kids aren’t learning any manners these days. You’re smart, kid, you’ll go far if you keep that up.” He released the boy, who hurried back in the direction of the kitchen.

Browne grabbed a bottle of wine, and poured Vee a glass before filling his own. “That’s tough about your son,” he said to me. He shook his head. “Nothing’s more important than family. I’ve got three little angels myself, and they’re my whole world. Ask Vee, she’ll tell you. I talk about ’em all the time, don’t I?” He waited. “Don’t I?”

“He does,” Vee said, as though she needed to plead his case to me.

“You see that. I talk about ’em all the time, because there’s nothing more important than family. Isn’t that right, Rosy?”

I exhaled through my nose.

“Yeah, you’re in mourning. I see that. If anything happened to my kids, I’d kill the bastard who did it. I mean with my own hands, right here, I’d kill him.”

The comment made me think about how all three of us at the table had killed someone at some point, and I was planning to do it again. This was what my life had become.

I drank, while Browne stared at me intently. I was supposed to speak. “I feel like my life is over,” I said, and I really did. I’d probably have been happy if Browne’d stood up and shot me right there. Not that he’d ever do that, he was too cagey for that. That’s why he could sit out in public like this, like a respected citizen, because he was a respected citizen. Nothing ever stuck to him.

“You always feel like that,” Vee said, deciding that the best course of action was to ridicule me, which she had a lot of practice doing despite our newfound camaraderie.

“Hey,” Browne snapped. “He’s in mourning.”

“But he does. He whines about everything—”

“If you don’t shut it,” Browne said, “I’m gonna shut it for you.” He brandished his fist. Then turning to me: “You tell me about your son. I want to hear. It’ll be good for you to talk. I’ve learned that the hard way. You can’t keep it all pent up inside you. Go on, tell me.”

I looked at Vee. She looked like she was going to throw up at any moment. She crossed her arms, and rubbed as though she were cold.

“What can I say? I never really knew Joe,” I said.

Browne was nodding with deep understanding.

“He lived with his mother all his life. I wasn’t even there when he was born. I think he was maybe two when I saw him the first time. It seems stupid now. Stupid that I didn’t know him. But I guess I would say that my parents didn’t know me, and I grew up right in the same house with them. They could never understand my love of books. But they read everything I wrote and were proud of me, even if they didn’t understand them.”

“You’re a writer, huh? What do you write?”

“Novels. Movies.”

“What movies?”

I shook my head and shrugged.

He didn’t seem to care that I didn’t have an answer. “My mother lives with us now,” he said. “You got to keep the whole family together, tight.” He reached over and patted Vee on the cheek. The gesture was to show ownership. “You don’t even have a mother, do you, Vee? Nah, no mother’d let her baby be like you.” He looked back at me. “You can’t even imagine loving somebody until you have a kid. You can hardly love a woman,” he said. “Maybe your brother. It’s family, always family.” He looked me straight in the eye. “We never know what we’ve got when we’ve got it, and we always kill what means the most to us, huh?”