Chapter Sixteen

By then, I’d eaten all the little crustless green sandwiches and was looking for something else. I made another drink instead.

“OK, it still comes this. Why me? Even though I haven’t seen this money,” I lied, “I believe what you say. But why send all this money to me instead of your dear old grandmother?”

“Because my dear old grandma is more than halfway senile on her best day. It wouldn’t be safe with her.”

She had to be talking about the old lady I’d seen giving me the evil eye outside the Chrysler Building. The same old lady who’d been in the car with Anna a few hours ago. I wondered if she and the baby and the kid were in another room of the suite.

I turned from the booze when I heard scratching at the door followed by the sound of the lock snapping open.

Mercer Weeks stepped through and slipped the lock picks back into his coat pocket. His eyebrows rose in surprise when he saw Anna. She stood up and held herself straight and square-shouldered, looking pretty damn terrific in that red dress. The two of them traded long stares like fighters sizing each other up. Though Weeks probably had eighty pounds on her, they were evenly matched.

“Long time, no see, Signora,” he drawled.

She said, “How the hell did you get in here?”

What followed was one of the strangest conversations I ever heard. I’m not sure there was a single moment when all three of us understood exactly what the other two were talking about. At least, that’s how I saw it.

Weeks sat in one of the classy chairs, took his works out of his breast pocket, and rolled a smoke. “Marie Therese. I called Quinn’s place, and she told me he was here with a woman named Anna. I didn’t expect to find you.”

He struck a match on the sole of his brogan and said, “Where’s Benny? Where’s the money?”

Her voice gave nothing away. “What are you drinking, Mercer? Gin? Jimmy, fix something for the gentleman.” She sat facing him, one arm stretched across the back of the sofa. A corner of her mouth lifted like she was trying not to smile. “You want to know about Benny. Let’s see, what can I tell you that you don’t already know?”

Weeks stared at the ashtray on the table in front of him. Why wouldn’t he look at her? I put his drink down and sat where I could watch both of them.

“Benny is dead. I was just telling Jimmy about it. I’m sure you remember how it went that last night in Colorado. I didn’t want to have anything to do with the ransom, the money, any of it. I was ready to leave. You and Jacob insisted that I deliver it. Do you remember that?”

He didn’t respond. She repeated, louder, “Do you remember that?”

He looked up and nodded, poker-faced.

“I followed a crazy half-breed Indian to a place way the hell up in the mountains. He knocked me out and kept me chained in a cabin for ten months. Ten months!”

“How did you get away?”

“I killed the son of a bitch. I strangled him. He was crazy, Mercer. If he’d been around normal people, they’d have been measuring him for a straitjacket. But he was up in the mountains. Like I told Jimmy, he must have had a partner, somebody to plan it out for him. Did you find anybody to fit that description while you were out there?”

“No,” he said, sounding more confident. “And I did look for you. All of us did. Right after you disappeared, Jacob brought in more of the guys. We drove so many miles and asked so many questions the cops got suspicious. We even hired the Pinkertons to look for the car. Then it snowed and we really couldn’t do anything. Jacob had to come back here to tend to business. I went back in the spring and searched again.”

“Since you were part of the Denver Mint job, you knew something about that part of the world.”

Weeks stubbed out his smoke. “Not enough. You and Benny and the money just disappeared.”

They stared hard at each other, and I realized that there was something else going on behind the words. They were testing each other.

Weeks said, “You’re sure Benny is dead?”

“Yes.”

“Then where is the money?”

“I don’t know,” she said, which was, I guess, true enough.

“Two people told Jacob that Quinn has it,” Weeks said. They both turned and looked at me. It pissed me off that they knew something I didn’t, something important.

“A lot of people have been saying things and doing things,” I said. “Planting bombs and killing other people. Mercer came to my assistance this afternoon when I was waylaid by a pack of Krauts. Later on I saw this kid jump a guy in a bus station and run out in the middle of the street.” Anna narrowed her eyes at me. “It’s all getting complicated because I don’t even know who these guys are. Actually, I do know one name. My friend Detective Ellis found out that a guy who broke into my room this morning is Saenger, Justice Saenger. Does that mean anything to either of you?”

Weeks didn’t react. Anna gasped and said, “Where is he?”

“Cops put him in Bellevue. If he’s still alive. He didn’t look good the last time I saw him.”

“Good. One less to worry about,” she said.

“One less what to worry about?”

Weeks said, “Wait a minute. Is Quinn in this with you?”

I ignored him and focused on Anna. “One less what?” I repeated.

She glared at me and Weeks. Finally, she muttered, “My family. My goddamn family.”

Without mentioning the money, Anna said that she drove to the Denver train station. The next eastbound train was going to Chicago. She took it. She was tired, spooked, and dirty for the entire trip. By the time she reached Chicago, she couldn’t stand herself. She went directly from the station to the Palmer House. That’s where she had a long hot bath and slept in a real bed.

“I tried to stay out of sight,” she said. “There are people in Chicago I’d rather not associate with. One of them found me. The Saengers are cousins on my father’s side. They’re Reds—dyed-in-the-wool ‘Death to the Capitalist’ oppressor types.”

“And they found out that you’ve got—”

She shook her head a little, not wanting Weeks to see.

I said, “He knows. Hell, half the population of New York thinks that I’m holding a fortune.”

“Are you?” said Anna.

“Yeah, are you?” Weeks wanted to know, too. I let ’em wait.

“Let’s go back to what we were talking about before Mercer joined the conversation. Why did you send the money here?”

Anna folded her arms across her chest and shot me an icy look. Mercer was intrigued.

I said, “Working with what you’ve told me and what I’ve seen, I figure that when you first set your sights on Jacob at Saratoga Springs, you had a kid. You brought your crazy grandmother along to take care of the kid. Jacob told me that while you and him were together, you were up to something, something you admitted to him without spilling any details. That was the kid and the grandmother who, I’m guessing, you had stashed somewhere in an apartment that was close but not too close. Am I right?”

She narrowed her eyes and didn’t need to say anything.

I continued, “And that’s why the money is here and not in Paris or Brazil or wherever the hell it is that people run away to. The whole time the half-breed had you chained up, you were going crazy worrying about how the kid and grandma were getting by. Or had Jacob been so generous that they were well set up?”

Anna said, “Nana and her landlady get along. I knew she wouldn’t kick them out onto the street, but I wired money the first chance I got.”

“That was in Denver?”

“No, I wanted out of Colorado as fast as I could. I waited until Chicago. That was my mistake. The first thing the crazy old bitch did was tell my family I was alive.”

Even though she had registered under a false name, the Saengers found her. As she explained it, she was the only girl who survived past infancy in her generation. She had two brothers, and the whole family shared a house with the Saengers. Of her six Saenger cousins, only one of them was worth a damn. That was the youngest, Edification, known as Eddy, the kid I’d seen a couple of times. The others hated her, and she hated them right back. They were Justice; Knowledge, known as No-No; Fortitude; Deliverance; and Harmonious. At one time, Justice had been tight with the Wobblies and other Reds, but sometime while Anna was out of the picture, he took up with the local branch of the Free Society of Teutonia. He was so taken with Hitler and the Nazis that he really did want to donate Anna’s money to the party and move back to Germany, where the Saengers and Gunderwalds were from.

I chewed that over and said, “Do any of them have any experience with explosives?”

“Yes, No-No. The cops tried to pin a bomb that was set during a miners’ strike in Montana on him, but they couldn’t make it stick.”

“Did he do it?”

“If they paid him enough.”

“And he knew about this money, and he knew my name?”

“Yes, I suppose so. When Nana told one of them, she told all of them.”

Weeks said, “What are you getting at?”

“Guy found himself killed near my place the other night about the same time that a little stick of dynamite went off. Detective Betcherman was hanging around, too.” Anna asked who Betcherman was. I ignored her. “It seems to me it’s possible this guy was trying to knock down my gate at the alley. But if he didn’t know the city and he didn’t know my address, maybe he was in the wrong part of the alley, which brings up Benny Numbers’ ledgers. There was a problem with the address on them, too. How did they find their way to me?”

Weeks said, “What the hell are you talking about? This is making no goddamn sense at all. How do you two know each other, anyway? This is looking like some kind of setup.”

“I met Anna—what was it, six years ago, seven? We had some laughs for a little while until she left town. I didn’t see her again until last night.”

Weeks had his eyes locked on Anna’s, and something was going on between them that I didn’t understand.

“I was just a kid then,” she said. “So was Jimmy. I trusted him then and I still trust him to help me out of this jam.”

“She trusted me enough to send me the ledgers, even if she wasn’t sure where the place was.”

Her lips twisted into a self-mocking ghost of a smile. “I should’ve paid more attention when Jacob brought me there. When I heard there was a speak named Jimmy Quinn’s, I was curious. You weren’t there the afternoon that we dropped in, and I wasn’t sure it was the same Jimmy Quinn, but I guess I was sure enough.”

“But why put the ledgers in the mail? Why not hold onto them?”

“Because they broke into my room at the Palmer House.”

The books were valuable to Jacob. She knew that. If everything else fell apart, he’d pay to get them back. So she kept them in her suitcase, and after she checked into the hotel, she bought another bag big enough to hold them and carried it with her when she left the room. She also carried her cash, most of it anyway.

She spent the first days in Chicago sleeping, eating, regaining her strength and sanity, and working out her possible moves. The clothes she was wearing made her look like a crazy hobo woman. She called the hotel dress shop and ordered some suitable outfits. She didn’t leave the room. They sent up girls with underwear, dresses, suits, blouses, skirts, and shoes in her size. She made her choices, signed the bill, and felt wonderful.

Given the circumstances of the past ten months, it didn’t take long for cabin fever to set in. She took a stroll over to Michigan Avenue one afternoon and came back to find that the twenty and two tens she’d left in a drawer were gone and somebody had been through her underwear. That’s when she knew that Nana had talked, and the Saengers and Gunderwalds were onto her. She could have used Railway Express for the books, but she thought that she remembered my address, and the hotel was happy to follow her mailing instructions.

“OK then,” I said, “let me see if I’ve got this straight. There you were in Chicago with your cousins who were trying to steal your money …”

Weeks said, “Where the fuck is the money?”

“Yeah,” Anna said, “where the fuck is the money?”

“… And they knew it had been sent to one Jimmy Quinn in New York, so they hotfooted it here. Somewhere along the way, you picked up the youngest, the one you like—what’s his name—Eddy?”

She nodded.

“Then that explains everything except your husband.”

That got their attention. Both of them nearly spilled their drinks.

Mercer said, “What husband?”

“Pauley ‘Three Fingers’ Domo.”

“Oh, shit,” Anna said. “He’s here?”

“He was in my place last night. Gave me a ten-spot that had some kind of crap all over it and a key that he wanted me to hold for him for twenty-four hours. Made it all sound as mysterious as hell.”

Anna laughed. “God, that’s Pauley, all right. I’m sure it’s part of some brilliant plan he cooked up.”

Weeks said, “I’m starting to get steamed. What the hell are you two talking about? Where’s Jacob’s money?”

They stared at me.

I said, “Let’s go take a look at it.”

Anna cut her eyes at Weeks. He was suspicious.

“It’s close. We can walk or take a cab.”

Anna said, “Let me check on Nana and the baby,” and went through the door to one of the bedrooms.

A second later she screamed.