Crime of Their Life Page 5

  CHAPTER 6

  The main dining room in the Queen Alexandra runs the length of a city block on A deck. In the center of the huge room, the captain presides over his table of selected guests, some of whom are designated by him, some of whom are “suggested” by the home office.

  The other tables set aside for designated guests are hosted by the first officer, the purser, the chief engineer and the cruise director. Of these, the most eagerly sought seatings are at the cruise director’s table.

  When Johnny Liddell walked in for the first serving at 6:45, all of the guests at the captain’s table were seated; all but three seats at the cruise director’s table were filled. Jack Allen stood up as Liddell felt his way through the tables, waved to him.

  “Well, here’s our new shipmate, ladies and gentlemen,” Allen told the people at his table as Liddell walked up. “Mr. Liddell joined our little party this morning at Barbados. Let’s make him welcome.” He applauded lightly, the others at the table followed suit. “Now that they’ve met you, how about meeting our little group? Right here on my left is Rita and Peter Keen—”

  Liddell stared at the hawk-faced man the cruise director had indicated. A mass of thick black hair rolled back in oily waves from his low hairline. He wore it in a three-quarter part revealing the startling whiteness of his scalp. His thin, bloodless lips were split in what was intended to be a smile, but there was no sign of it in the eyes that squinted across the high bridge of an enormous hooked nose. A faint sheen of perspiration glistened on the man’s upper lip.

  The cruise director looked from Liddell to Keen and back. “You folks know each other?”

  Liddell hesitated for a moment, shook his head. “Never saw Mr. Keen in my life.” It was true. The last time Johnny Liddell had seen the man with the hooked nose, his name wasn’t Keen—it was Handel, and he was squirming and sweating in the witness box giving a jury the information it needed to send Big Howie Ryder to the prison cell where he died three years later. After the trial, Maurie Handel had been disbarred and disappeared. There had been a price on his head in those days, but time, a new leadership in the mob and the gradual disappearance of the old-timers had caused almost everybody to forget Maurie Handel.

  The squinty eyes stared nervously at Liddell, and decided to play along. “This is Mrs. Keen.” He indicated a flashy, upholstered redhead who was doing interesting things to a tight-fitting green dress. The redhead eyed Liddell with no show of interest, smiled briefly.

  Jack Allen was moving on. “This is Mrs. Hilda Phelps, Mr. Liddell. Mrs. Phelps has been with us so often she’s like one of the staff. We wouldn’t consider a trip without her to be official.”

  In the bright light of the salon, the woman’s make-up stood out like blotches against the pallor of her skin. She simpered, showed the too-perfect teeth in a smile.

  “And Mr. Martin Sands and his lovely niece, Helen.” The cruise director indicated the other couple at the table.

  Martin Sands was in his early sixties, a fact which careful diet and constant massage failed to hide. His eyes were encased in a fine-lined web of pouches, his chin line was losing the battle against jowliness. When he wasn’t smiling, heavy lines from his nostrils ran to the comers of his mouth to imprint a triangle. The girl alongside him was easily thirty years younger, pretty in a vapid way. Her dark hair was styled in a gamin cut, the emphasis in her makeup was on her eyes, brought out their extraordinary hazel color.

  “Our other two table-mates haven’t shown up yet. Sometimes they forget to come to meals at all. They’re newlyweds, you see.” Allen looked around the table expectantly. The line always drew a laugh. He wasn’t disappointed but the laugh was beginning to sound a little tired by now.

  Liddell slid into the seat next to Mrs. Phelps, across from the disbarred lawyer. He glanced over to the captain’s table where Captain Rose was trying to disguise his impatience with the apparently interminable story a beefy man in a black silk suit was telling. To the captain’s left, Liddell recognized the fading beauty of one-time movie star Robin Lewis. Her hair was still the taffy blonde of her heyday, her lips as bright and shiny. But the lines in her face were tired, the ends of her mouth drooped and the lines that formed at the comers of her eyes were more wrinkles than crinkles. She was feigning interest in the story the beefy man was telling, but the way her eyes wandered gave her away.

  The woman on the story-teller’s other side made no attempt to disguise the fact that she had heard the story too many times even to pretend to be listening. Her blue hair was bent over her plate, she was eating with no apology to anyone. No one would have to be told she was the beefy man’s wife.

  Liddell’s inventory of the captain’s table was interrupted by the arrival of the honeymooning couple. Harry Doyle was tall, hulking, with a shock of yellow hair that refused to stay down no matter how much water he poured on it. He grinned shyly at the people at the table as he ushered his wife Belle to her seat. She was a tall, fair-skinned, big breasted, big-hipped farm girl who used no make-up, combed her long blonde hair back from her face to sit in a heavy coil on the back of her neck. They acknowledged the introduction to Liddell in low tones, quietly slid into their seats.

  “Thought you’d forgotten about eating altogether.” Jack Allen winked lewdly.

  Doyle fumbled for his fork with heavy knuckled fingers, colored slightly. “It was real hot on that island. Me and Belle we got real tired—”

  The color deepened at the guffaw this brought from the cruise director and the farm boy grinned.

  “We just figured to catch a little rest. I guess the sound of the ship woke us. I hope we didn’t delay nothing.”

  “I don’t blame you, Belle,” Martin Sands’s “niece” told the newlywed. “I thought it was awful hot on that island. I was sweat—” She broke off momentarily, recovered. “I was perspiring something fierce. I hope the other islands are cooler.”

  She wondered if anyone had caught the slip. She knew Martin did. He always winced when she used the old expressions. Despite the long and arduous training at Miss Renfield’s Secretarial School designed to eliminate the Brooklyn accent and the Brooklyn expressions, they always managed to crop up at the wrong time.

  She studied him from the comer of her eye. Aside from the fact that his mouth had lengthened into a thin, hard line he gave no sign that he had heard. For the tenth time in the six days since they’d left New York she wished she had never agreed to come.

  Helen Burns, which was her right name, had been properly impressed when Miss Renfield’s School told her she was to be interviewed for the job of secretary to Martin Ritter, vice president of Lorelei Fabrics. His office was on the 28th floor of the Textile Building on Park and 56th Street. The girl in the outer office had eyed her quizzically as she directed her down the hall to Ritter’s office.

  She had gotten the job and had been flattered when he started asking her to dinner. They stuck to the dark comers of the boîtes that line the Sixties between Park and Lexington, always hiding around corners, using shabby hotel rooms for the nights he could arrange to stay in town.

  It had happened two weeks ago.

  Martin was sprawled out on his back, arm flung over his head. He was snoring lightly. The sheet was pulled halfway up, exposing the heavy matting on his chest. Outside the window it was dark and gray. Helen slipped from under the sheet, walked to the window, looked out through its dusty, streaked panes to the cold, cheerless street below. Above the window, the hotel sign was clicking on and off, alternately spilling a bright yellow light then darkness into the early dusk. She shivered, rubbed the backs of her arms with her palms in an effort to warm herself.

  When she turned around, Martin was sitting up in bed. He was eying her nudity approvingly. Automatically she tried to cover the heavily nippled breasts with her arms, dropped them to her sides when the absurdity of it struck her.

  “I’m going to get another job, Martin,” she told him. “I can’t go on like this anymore.”

 
She walked over to the chair where she had thrown her clothes.

  “You can’t walk out on me now. Knowing how much I need you, how much you mean to me,” he told her.

  “You can’t talk me out of it this time, Martin. I—I’m getting so I can’t even face myself in the mirror.” She looked around the squalid room. “How much longer do you think I can go on living in places like this, sneaking out in the morning, hoping no one will see me?”

  The man got out of the bed, crossed to where she stood with, her back to him. Gently he turned her around.

  “You’re just depressed, tired. It’s this damn weather.”

  He put his finger under her chin, lifted her face. “You know what you need? A change of scenery, some place where the sun’s shining. How would you like that?”

  “I couldn’t. I’ve never been away alone and—”

  “Who said you were going alone? We’ll go together.” The girl looked up, searched his face with her eyes. “But —aren’t you afraid someone might see us, someone who would tell your wife?”

  He shook his head. “We’ll take a short cruise to the Caribbean. The kind of a cruise none of my wife’s friends would be found dead on. Besides, you’ll be traveling as my niece. Who’d be the wiser?”

  That day, standing barefoot on the cold floor of the hotel, with a bitter wind whipping down the man-made canyons outside, it had seemed a good idea. But the Queen had barely made Antigua before she got the hemmed-in feeling, like a kid surrounded by a gang of bullies ready to pounce on her, every time she felt someone’s eyes on her. The other women were wives, legal and legitimate. She had the feeling they could see through her, know her for what she was, resent her for what she was doing to one of their own kind. Men, she was sure, spotted her immediately and were measuring her for their bed from the moment they laid eyes on her, convinced that getting her there was a foregone conclusion and only a matter of time.

  She wished she hadn’t come. She wondered if she could fake an appendicitis attack convincingly enough to make him put her on a plane at the next port of call.

  The woman with Maurie Handel was just as uneasy. When she was sure he wasn’t looking, she flashed curious glances at Liddell, wondering about him. She felt the way Handel stiffened when he came face to face with Liddell. She knew they both lied when they pretended not to know each other.

  Rita had known for years now that his name was Handel, not Keen. There had been the clippings she found locked in the tin box he kept at the bottom of the closet. Curiosity plus an expertly wielded hairpin had given her most of the story. The night she found the clippings she got the rest of it out of Handel.

  Maurie had been the legal wonder boy for the organization. His nimble brain and silver tongue had kept the big boys out of jail and immune from prosecution for years. He knew what they were and what his chances for existence would be if he didn’t have enough on all of them to put them away for life. Then one day he learned that having all that knowledge could be a double-edged sword.

  Big Howie Ryder had been indicted by a federal grand jury on an income tax rap and before the ink was dry on the indictment, he disappeared. For eighteen months federal agents put out a dragnet for him, but he had completely dropped out of sight. Then suddenly he reappeared and surrendered in Albany, rather than in New York City.

  His acquittal was one of Maurie Handel’s most masterful manipulations. He had arranged for the Albany surrender so that Ryder would be under the jurisdiction of the northern federal district. Before Ryder surrendered, it was also arranged in which town in that jurisdiction the trial would be held. The day Ryder surrendered, his men descended on the town, spending money like it was going out of style. Drinks for the house were the order of the day the minute these boys walked into a bar. Contributions to local charities, big tips, parties and picnics for the kids and all at the expense of the man “who’s having the same trouble all of us have—them income tax guys trying to get blood out of a stone.”

  Then, as soon as bail could be arranged, Big Howie himself showed on the scene. He was quiet, generous, a big tipper and a free spender. The local gentry, who would be the jury to decide his guilt or innocence, were stunned. They had expected a movie gangster, hands dripping with blood, driving around in a car bristling with machine guns and filled with hoods. Instead they found Big Howie, adhering strictly to the script written for him by Maurie Handel—a big, friendly, generous visitor.

  They acquitted him on the first ballot.

  That night Maurie Handel stayed at the courthouse tying up all loose ends and Big Howie and the others returned to the hotel to celebrate. By the time Handel got back to the hotel, it was almost 3 a.m. and the hotel was deserted. As he reached the top floor, which Big Howie had rented along with the floor under it, he heard his name. He listened outside the door.

  “What do you want to kill the mouthpiece for, Howie?” a drunken voice asked petulantly. “Look what a job he done for you. If it wasn’t for him and his ideas they’d have nailed you sure.”

  From the sound of Big Howie’s voice, he was on his second bottle. “That’s just the trouble with him. He’s too smart—and he knows too much. One of these days the heat might get too much and he’d talk.”

  Handel tiptoed back down the stairs, caught a milk train to New York. The next morning he was in the special prosecutor’s office spilling everything he knew about the operation of Big Howie’s rackets. The prosecutor put him into protective custody, hid him out on a farm in New Jersey until the trial.

  At the trial, it was Handel’s testimony that sent Big Howie to the cell he never walked away from.

  Rita Keen knew all about that. She knew for how many years Maurie had hidden out, fearful every day that the next knock on the door would reveal some of Big Howie’s boys. It wasn’t until the last couple of years that he had felt safe, secure enough to agree to come out of hiding and to start enjoying life again. Like this.

  She stole another glance at Liddell, wondered whether in him Maurie had finally come face to face with the firing squad he had been expecting all these years.

  Jack Allen was listening to Mrs. Phelps with half an ear. He was wondering how Liddell could have spent any time in Barbados and still have no trace of a tan, let alone a sunburn. Normally, even a one-day stay on the island would show some effect—

  Mrs. Phelps broke off in the middle of a sentence, frowned at the cruise director. She wasn’t used to having people listen to her with only half an ear. Especially since she was in the habit of more than paying her way, and had gotten used to people fawning over her instead of half ignoring her. She flashed an especially warm smile at the young waiter who reached past her to remove her soup plate. Word of Mrs. Phelps’s generosity had already filtered down into the galley and the salon. He returned the smile and Mrs. Phelps made a mental note to ask her room steward to see if “that nice dining room steward” couldn’t arrange for her to have a warm milk and sandwich every night.

  The honeymooners talked to each other in low voices giggling at some secret joke. The conversation at the table lagged, became desultory with each of the diners lost in his own thoughts.

  CHAPTER 7

  After dinner, Jack Allen, the ship’s cruise director, sprawled comfortably in a chair on the lower promenade deck, enjoying his first few minutes of solitude for the day. In the west, the sun was getting ready to make its exit in a Technicolor spectacular. Already, the sky was a blaze of red and the billowing water picked up the rosy glow and seemed to catch fire.

  For the past ten years, the winters had all been like this for him. The days hot and the perspiration dried on his skin by the trade winds, the evenings ushered in by pyro-technical displays like this one, the nights cool and black.

  But it hadn’t always been so. His mind went back to the winters of his childhood on the East Side of New York. The cold winds that blew off the East River sent the kids running off the streets to huddle around the oversized stoves in the kitchen of the railroad flats. H
ardly a week passed that some old bum was found dead in a hallway along the Bowery, or some family was found asphyxiated when the cold drafts that roamed the ramshackle buildings blew out an oil heater while they slept.

  The kids almost all wore rubbers from right after Thanksgiving until the April showers were finished. The rubbers served a double purpose—kept their feet dry and postponed the need for putting on new half soles. A piece of cardboard cut to fit on the inside and rubbers on the outside doubled the lives of their shoes. Most of the kids took their rubbers off the minute they were called into the house because it was a widely known fact that rubbers worn indoors could ruin a boy’s eyesight.

  Allen watched the slow, leisurely descent of the sun. Back in the old days there was nothing like this. Night came with startling swiftness, the gas jets were lighted in the flats and in the hallways. There was always a faulty one some place in the building that gave the halls a permeating smell of gas.

  On the streets, the hardy old pushcart peddlers stood watch over their wares, which included everything an ordinary household could use—clothing, crockery, food, even furniture. Their faces almost invisible under the stockings pulled down to protect their ears from the cold, old fedoras pulled down over the stockings, they stood sentry over their merchandise, ready and anxious to haggle with any soul hardy enough to make an appearance.

  Sometimes it was not a customer who made the appearance. It might be a band of hoodlums intent on upsetting the pushcart. One would hold the struggling, begging merchant while the others dumped his merchandise into the slush. Other gangs would show up to offer the peddlers insurance against these raids. Sometimes the protectors would be challenged by other gangs wanting a slice of the protection money. This led to gang fights, the most famous of which was between the Monk Eastmans and the Paul Kellys on Allen Street where over a hundred armed men fought a pitched gun battle.

  But this didn’t stop the East Siders from being proud of their neighborhood. In spite of the decaying, unheated hallways and the peeling paint and overcrowded flats, this was the neighborhood of Cherry Street where George Washington once lived; of Mulberry Street where Al Smith started his climb that reached almost into the White House, and of Hester Street where Jacob Epstein first molded a piece of modeling clay into a semblance of the human figure.