19

New York, 1953

“It gets worse.”

“Worse? Worse than half the New York Police Department falling asleep when they’re guarding the most important mob witness of the century? Worse than officers hearing a body fall on the roof—and not wanting to go see about it because it might mean having to go out in the cold? Worse than that?”

Tom spread the letters out across his desk for Hogan: two of them never sent, the third paper-clipped to the envelope it had been mailed in. Hogan stared at them—crude, handwritten scrawls on stationery from the Half Moon Hotel.

“Somebody surely didn’t learn penmanship in a Catholic school.”

“They’re from Sholem Bernstein, one of the rats in the suite with our Mr. Reles.”

“I remember. How’d this happen to come to light?”

“Ellie found them, after about ten straight hours of digging. They were buried deep, but she came up with them.”

“Good work, Miss Abramowitz.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Ellie glancing at him over Hogan’s shoulder and shooting up one triumphant eyebrow. The three of them working the late shift together now. Ellie beaming quietly, Tom saw whenever he caught her eye.

They were more strictly correct than ever with each other, around the office. Working longer hours than before, due to some indefinable sense of guilt over their affair. Rushing back up to the Village only when they felt their brains would crumble to ashes if they went through one more box of documents. Sometimes they might go out to the White Horse to hear the Clancys, or the intellectuals blabbing, but more often they went straight to her apartment in the basement, Ellie pouring them each a finger of Black Bush in the dim yellow light of her living room. Still excited, still talking about anything and everything until they wrestled each other into bed. Taking great pains to come to the office separately, from different directions, the next morning. Ellie careful to place herself just ahead of him, hips swaying more wickedly than ever as she walked.

“What’s it say?” Hogan asked, staring down his nose through his glasses at the sixth-grade scrawl.

“It’s a bit of loan-sharking,” Tom told him. “A gentle reminder to an individual who had fallen behind on the matter of a few dollars he borrowed from Mr. Bernstein—at a rate of twenty percent interest, compounded weekly.”

“‘Why don’t you get wise? Do you know what I can do to you? I could have you pinched tomorrow if I want to,’” Ellie read aloud. “‘Don’t kid yourself. I’m going to give you EXACTLY ONE WEEK to give my wife two hundred and five dollars every week. If you don’t, I’m going to put you in with me. My wife gives me a visit next week, and if you didn’t give it to her, as true as my mother (may she rest in peace), you will be right in here with me.’”

“Well, at least he thinks highly of his mother,” Tom said.

Ellie handed the note to Hogan, who peered at it for a long moment, then let the piece of paper drop back to the desk in disgust and picked up a mug shot of the man. Bernstein slight and dark. A young thirty at the time, with a long, straight nose and big ears on a thin face, his eyes large and dreamy.

“Looks like a member of the junior faculty,” Hogan said, studying a mug shot of the man in his best testifying-go-to-court clothes, a suit and vest and neatly knotted tie. “How’d he happen to end up in the Rats Suite?”

“He was born in the borough,” Ellie rattled off. “A small-time gambler, a carny shill—”

“Another little man, trying to be big,” Hogan sniffed. “What was his connection to Reles and the rest?”

“He started borrowin’ from the shylocks. The usual vig, six for five, just to pay off his markers,” Tom put in. “Then all of a sudden he got big. Started callin’ himself a real estate man, an’ borrowed fifty thousand in one go.”

“Who would ever give him that?”

“The Food Dealers Association bank.”

“Another mob front?” Hogan asked rhetorically.

“Next he popped up in Bensonhurst,” Ellie continued. “Set up in a candy store with Al Glass. It became a popular hangout for undesirables of all sorts—burglars, second-story men, stickup men—”

“Sure, I remember Cherry Glass.” Hogan nodded. “That was his specialty. Setting up employment bureaus for felons.”

“Bernstein himself did a little bit of everything. Making book, loan-sharking, breaking and entering, safecracking. Strong-arming down in Florida. He was involved in at least three murders that we know of,” Tom listed.

“A one-man finance company, with muscles and guns!” Hogan snorted. “What sort of time did he serve?”

“Nothing,” Tom told him. “He was arrested on three different occasions, but he walked each time. Got caught red-handed on a burglary job, and a larceny charge—got probation. He was even picked up in a stolen car with two known stickup men. All of ’em had guns. Sholem pleaded guilty to auto theft—”

“And let me guess—he got more probation,” Hogan finished, and Tom nodded. The DA gave a low, speculative whistle. “Some serious money must’ve changed hands on that one. Somebody really wanted to keep our boy on the outside.”

“He was the best car thief in Brooklyn,” Tom explained. “Best in the City. They even used to farm him out, just like the killers. He was spotted in Florida, California, the Catskills in the summer—though he used to say he was just on vacation.”

Hogan gave a short, mirthless laugh. “Yes, I suppose even murderers must need vacations. What was his secret?”

“The usual,” Tom told him. “Quick hands, delicate fingers. He could pick any garage lock, boost any car. Move ’em from this garage to that street corner, switch their license plates. Make ’em appear and disappear at will. He’d trace the route of a getaway the night before, learn every possible exit by heart. The next day, they’d pull a hit, or a stickup; he’d make the gunmen disappear before anybody knew they were there.”

Ghosting his cars back and forth over the sepulchral streets of Brownsville and Ocean Hill, unseen but seeing everything. Scouting the far reaches of the City, the lonely places by the bay and the high sea grass, where a body might be dropped in peace.

“His real sin was helping Pep Strauss and Tick-Tock Tannenbaum bury one of Lepke Buchalter’s old business partners, up by the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Sheldrake.”

“Which one?”

“Hyman Yuran, and no, that’s not a joke. Back when it all started to come apart—when Lepke first went on the lam and made himself crazy thinking anybody he ever knew might rat him out.”

“What did the euphoniously named Hyman Yuran do for him?”

“He was his front in the Garment District, ran a dressmaking shop there.”

“What a thing to die for. How’d they do it?”

“Pittsburgh Phil’s weapon of choice, the old reliable ice pick,” Tom said, consulting the file. “It was August 1938—Yuran was on vacation up in the Ambassador Hotel in Fallsburg. They made a call, sent a blonde in a car to pick him up.”

“Ah, the tried-and-true methods.”

They could all see it. The middle-aged dress manufacturer, perspiring in his underwear and dark socks, under a slow-moving fan in some dump of an upstate hotel. A phone call from the blonde he had met that day in the bar, or maybe out by the pool with its hordes of screaming kids, parents lying comatose and sun-blistered in their pool chairs. Throwing on his other suit, the one he hadn’t worn that day. Picking out his best silk tie, splashing on the bay rum. The last stand of Hyman Yuran.

And then, out in the car, had they been waiting in the back seat? Or in whatever little tourist cabin, deep in the woods, where she finally pulled over? Watching her eyes lift just as he reached for her. Her expression changing effortlessly from sultry passion to a steady, level-eyed curiosity so that for the first time—for that one moment—he could see how truly hard she looked, and how old. Barely flinching as the first thin line of blood fell across her cheek. His blood, seeing it even as he felt the stunning pain of the ice pick striking home again at the top of his neck, heard the grunt and laughter of his killer behind him.

“They tried to bury him in a cemetery—” Ellie volunteered.

“How genteel.”

“—but the ground was too rocky. So Tannenbaum took them to Loch Sheldrake—a hotel and cabins his parents owned. He knew they had just finished digging a pool drain there.”

The body not ten yards from where more legions of families and kids would lie and jump and scream all about the pool. Maybe the same ones who had given Hyman Yuran such a splitting headache on his last afternoon alive.

“Buried him right in his parents’ backyard, did he? What would Dr. Freud’s head doctors have to say about that?” Hogan shook his head mournfully. “And Mr. Tannenbaum, Mr. Bernstein—who’s the other one?

“Mickey Sycoff.”

“These were the state’s witnesses?”

“They came in when Lepke started killing everybody who ever knew him, just like Reles himself,” Tom said. “I guess they thought they’d be next.”

“Yes, that’s the trouble when you go killing anybody who ever worked for you. Sooner or later, even the executioners start getting antsy.”

“We chased Bernstein all over the place, afraid his old friends were going to catch up to him first,” Tom told him. “Down to Miami, then out to L.A., up to San Francisco. He told us he knew the syndicate was looking for him everywhere. He took a bus all the way to Dallas—they spotted him nine hours later. Went up to St. Louis; they were on to him in two days. We even had word they found a corpse in Chicago. Then, a week later, he walks into our office.”

“Funny, isn’t it?” Hogan frowned. “A man as resourceful as all that—a man familiar with the whole country—getting found so easily when he didn’t want to be found.”

Tom nodded. “All he told us was, ‘They can’t get me if I’m with the law.’ Still, even then he wouldn’t talk. Bernstein kept insisting he wanted to see Reles, that he couldn’t believe he was singing. He wouldn’t say a word until we put him in with the little man himself. Then, fifteen minutes later, he comes out an’ tells us, ‘I will become a rat and tell everything.’”

“Strange choice of words. But an understandable choice, I guess, when you consider he could keep his loan business going while in the state’s custody.”

Hogan picked up Sholem Bernstein’s extortion note again and turned to Ellie.

“Young lady, this is the one trouble with having women working in the office now. I can’t curse like a sailor when I really need to.”

“I understand, sir. I felt like cursing myself when I found that.”

“I’d like to hear that someday.” He tapped the threatening letter. “Were these missives ever mailed?”

“That one was,” Ellie told him. “It was turned in later by the individual he sent it to—a grocer named David Bellel. The other two were found up in Bernstein’s room after Reles went out the window. They were much the same—a threatening note to a headwaiter who got his girl in a family way. A house painter who was out of work. He told the investigators he wrote them with a detective standing over his shoulder.”

“This case stinks six ways to Sunday, and the more you stick a finger into it, the worse it gets,” Hogan said with disgust. “Who knows how many of these he sent out—or what other information he might’ve passed on? They had a phone, too, up in the Rats Suite—didn’t they?”

“That they did,” Tom confirmed. “The guards let ’em make calls out on it.”

“Faith, Tom, why didn’t they just let them send telegrams and semaphore signals, too? What were they thinking of, letting those jokers communicate freely with the outside world?”

“The guards were told to keep ’em happy,” Tom said, bristling a little under the implied criticism of his brother, but forced to admit it. Oh, Charlie, why couldn’t you have followed up on a single detail in your life?

“Happy, is it? They should’ve been happy enough your brother didn’t let Lepke and Anastasia cut their throats!”

“Charlie was afraid they’d go stir-crazy,” Tom stuck up for his brother. “Cooped up there twenty months—with Abe Reles. There’d been an incident the year before, the ice pick went missing. Reles was sure one of the other rats palmed it to use on him. He kept raisin’ a rumpus about it, until it turned out a cop took it to chop ice an’ forgot to put it back.”

“So they let them do whatever they wanted? Make phone calls, run their shyster rackets—”

“The idea was to keep ’em talkin’. No matter what it took.”

 

There had even been beach outings that first summer. Tom had gone along on one of them. Driving out to a deserted tract of Hecksher State Park, on Long Island, using a battered old school bus to call as little attention to themselves as possible. Everybody jumpy the whole way out, expecting an ambush. Thinking how easy it would be for one of the squealers to simply walk away down the beach, or even make a run for the Great South Bay and swim for it. The whole afternoon more than a little unreal: the uniformed guards standing along the edge of the sand in the hot sun, holding their shotguns across their chests. Forming a perimeter around the haimish little grove of picnic tables and metal grilles where the four killers gamboled and cavorted.

Yet nothing happened, and after a couple of hours out there, they began to relax. The guards laying down their guns and stripping off their blue tunics. Joining in with their prisoners until it began to resemble the annual company outing—men playing ball in their T-shirts and flopping suspenders, laughing and shouting. Reles fat and sleek as a well-fed pigeon by then, whatever his lung ailment was under control for the time being. Slamming a softball into the gnarled beach trees and chortling like a little boy as he ran around the bases. Whipping the ball at the guards’ heads with his huge hands and braying with laughter. Frying up hamburgers on the little metal grilles, flipping them onto buns and holding them out to the guards—then spitting on them just as they reached out to take them, and laughing and laughing some more.

The other rats not nearly as jubilant, Tom noticed later, once the softball game was over and they settled down to their hot dogs and hamburgers. Churning through it methodically, eyes flickering about as if they were in a prison commissary, keeping a constant lookout.

Tick-Tock Tannenbaum, the resort owner’s son, continuing the ceaseless stream of patter that earned him his nickname. Thin and immaculate, with a dark face, a high brow. A long nose that crooked at the end and hooded, Asiatic eyes that could look impish and merry one moment, infinitely sad the next. He’d had some college even, before settling in with the mob. A cheap shlammer for easy jobs, specializing in letting stink bombs loose in stores and waylaying strikers in back alleys, but an accomplice as well in at least six murders.

Next to him Mickey Sycoff, stolid and pudgy, his face as round and bland as a vanilla pudding. Ploughing through his potato salad with mechnical efficiency. He looked as placid and imperturbable as a tie salesman, though Tom knew he was another loan shark, famous for his vicious beatings, an accomplice in three more murders. And then Sholem—his whole aspect morose and paranoid, even when the others were enjoying the games. Tapping his foot nervously, barely eating, his dreamy eyes clouded and resentful now.

“He gets like this whenever he knows he’s about to testify against his old pals,” Reles had told him, sidling up to his elbow. His breath like fouled grease itself on his neck and ear. “He don’t like it. Anybody tries to talk to him, he curses ’em out, won’t listen to reason. He don’t like me, neither.”

“Can you blame him?” Tom told the little man, glancing down his nose at him. Reles’s second-banana face fell in mock surprise, then lit up again in its usual, vicious glee.

“What’s not to like?” he said. “I’m just tellin’ ya, you better be careful with that one.”

“How so?”

Reles shrugged. “Sholem likes to mull over things in his life,” he said. “When he does, it’s a sure sign he’s about to crack. You just better be sure you keep him away from me when he does.”

Reles’s thick lips twisting malevolently.

“I’ll kill him if I have to. I’ll break his goddamned neck an’ throw him right out the window.”

 

“So did Bernstein’s wife bring him the money he wanted from his correspondent?” Hogan was asking now. “Did he have cash in there, too?”

“Wait—that’s something we missed,” Ellie said, touching his arm, Tom smiling involuntarily at the feel of her hand.

“What is?”

“The note says his wife was coming to see him—”

“Sure. Once a week, same as Reles’s wife did. Mrs. Kid Twist always brought Abie a bottle of Rémy Martin brandy. I’m thinking that must be where the alcohol in his stomach came from.”

“What did they talk about? Did any of the guards report it?” Hogan asked, catching on.

“No. They went into Reles’s room and shut the door,” Ellie told him, consulting her notes without the blush, Tom was proud to note, that one of the Seven Sisters ADAs would have summoned up.

“Of course. Conjugal visits. Why not? Room service, a seaside hotel, trips to the beach—they must’ve thought they were on a second honeymoon!”

“The night before Reles went out the window, Mickey Sycoff told the investigators Reles and the missus were in there much longer than usual. Three hours, he said,” Ellie continued triumphantly. “And—when she left she was very upset.”

“Upset?”

“Crying, even. Sycoff said it was the first time she’d visited that she didn’t ask him or Tick-Tock Tannenbaum how their families were. She just rushed out of the suite.”

Tom remembered vividly the night she’d first come in, to arrange her husband’s surrender. A short, plump woman, with a childlike face and a superior air, and a tendency to go to pieces when she was crossed. She had shown up one evening in March unannounced, while he was waiting to go home with Charlie. Sweeping dramatically into the DA’s office like some cinematic grande dame, dressed in a fine beige coat with a wolf collar and a matching turban on her head, much to the amusement of the cops downstairs at the desk.

They were at an ebb then, the big raid on the waterfront locals having fallen to pieces. The truth was that they were floundering until Rose Reles swept through the door. Demanding to speak to his brother alone, refusing to substitute even Burton Turkus, the prosecutor whose picture was in all the papers. Her fine-boned face scrunching up hysterically, dropping the grande dame pretensions and screeching like a child when she was denied: “No, no! I wanna speak to District Attorney Char-lie O’Kane!”

Mad, over-rouged face staring imperiously around the room until at last Charlie came hurrying down from his office, so she could look up at him with tears in her eyes and a voice as throaty as any movie heroine’s. “I want to save my husband from the electric chair,” she pleaded, showing them for the first time the protrusion of her stomach under her coat. “My baby is coming in June. I want to save him!”

Charlie turning and looking at him then, his eyes wide. Wondering, Tom knew, just as he was, if it wasn’t another setup. But thinking, too, as Charlie told him later, Well, well, look what just dropped into the lap of Charlie O’Kane.

 

Tom recognized her easily when Hogan brought her down from Utica, where she was living under another name and another husband. The teasingly plump body gone shapeless and heavy now, the fine, baby-doll face sagging. The wolf’s collar and the turban replaced by a plain cloth coat that was the color of nothing, really, and a cheap bandana wrapped around her disheveled hair. But there was still a haughtiness bordering on madness in the way she carried herself, the same air of entitlement mixed with incipient hysteria.

The three of them met her in a small room in the Roosevelt, another one of the looming brick hotels that surrounded Grand Central like a castle keep. Hogan didn’t want the press picking up a whiff of her around the office, so he’d brought her down on the train and registered the room under Ellie’s name. Once inside, he treated her with his usual antique respect around women. Carefully hanging up her shabby, mottled coat, making sure she had some water, offering to send the detective stationed out in the hall to get something to eat. But she only shook her head, spooked and jumpy from the very beginning of their cross-examination, answering everything in as few words as she could get away with.

“Now, when did you an’ Abe get married, ma’am?” Hogan tried first, asking his questions in as gentle a voice as he possessed.

“I can’t remember,” Rose told him, sitting up stiffly in her hotel chair.

“You can’t remember your own wedding date?” he asked, incredulous.

“That bum? I blotted out everyt’ing t’do wit’ him!”

“He was the father of your children. You must remember that.”

“Sure,” she sniffed disdainfully.

“So then you must’ve been married to him at least seven years before his death.”

“I suppose.”

Hogan made an impatient movement in his chair, one Tom had seen a few times before in the office—always preliminary to his bursting into rage.

“How long after you and Abe married did you have your first child?”

“About a year an’ a half.”

“So that means you married him ten or eleven years before he died.”

“I imagine.”

“You imagine.” Hogan ran a hand slowly through his hair. “So let me ask you this, Mrs. Reles: How did you imagine he was making his living all those years you were together?”

“I don’ go by that name no more,” she protested. “I’m Mrs. Lewanda now. The neighbors found out that name, an’ they wouldn’t stop askin’ me about ’im.”

“How did they find out, if you don’t go by it anymore?”

“I dunno.”

“All right, Mrs. Lewanda. How did you think Abe Reles made his living?”

“He was a bookmaker an’ a shylock, I suppose. Then he decided ta go straight, an’ become a gambler an’ opened a luncheonette,” she said, as if reciting something she’d memorized long ago.

“You never had any inkling that he was a professional killer? You’re sure of that?”

“I am almost sure,” she replied, looking haughtier than ever, though Tom was sure he could sense a deep fear beneath the words.

“You didn’t know that your husband was the most notorious criminal in Brownsville? In Brooklyn? You never knew that even though everybody else in the neighborhood knew it?”

“I never felt that way.”

“I didn’t ask how you felt. I asked, didn’t you know that your husband, Abe Reles, was considered the most notorious killer in Brooklyn?”

“How would you know somethin’? I mean, is somebody supposed ta tell it to ya? Nobody ever said nothin’ ta me about Abie,” she insisted.

“No, I don’t suppose they would. So all you knew was that he was a bookmaker and a loan shark?”

“I suppose.”

“Mrs. Lewanda, next time you suppose something, I suppose I might put you up before a grand jury.”

The edge of hysteria suddenly flicked across her eyes again, and she pulled her pocketbook up in front of her.

“He used ta bring home every paper there was, an’ when he was t’rough readin’ ’em I’d pick ’em up. But I could never find anyt’ing in ’em because he’d cut out pieces an’ I could never find the next page,” she blurted.

“He used to cut up all the newspapers he’d bring home,” Hogan confirmed, his voice heavy with incredulity. “And he’d cut out everything in them about himself—is that what you’re trying to say to me?”

“I guess.”

“For what, his scrapbook?”

“He didn’t keep a scrapbook. Not that I knew about—”

“All right, Mrs. Lewanda!” Hogan held up a hand to stop her. “Let’s get to the last night you saw Abe—the last night he was alive. How long did you spend with him that evening?”

“I dunno. Not very long. I just came an’ went.”

“Everybody who’s talked to our investigators said you were there at least three hours—a very long time indeed.”

“I dunno how anybody can say that. They’re just guessin’,” she said, her voice low but dogged.

“I’m trying to make this as easy as possible for you, Mrs. Lewanda. But I don’t know what I can do if you don’t want to cooperate. Our information is that you were there for a much longer visit than usual.”

“That’s not true. That is absolutely not true!” she insisted, Hogan rising to stand over her, slapping a piece of paper in his hand.

“Mrs. Lewanda, why aren’t you being truthful with us? I have a copy of the visitors’ log right here in my hand. You were there over three hours!”

There was a pause as Rose stared wildly up at him. Then she dropped her eyes and shrugged. “Well, it was a long time ago. I didn’t mean ta lie.”

Hogan sat back down. “So what did you talk about during that time?” he asked, forcing himself to modulate his voice.

“I didn’t talk.”

“You didn’t talk? In three hours?”

“He did all the talkin’.”

“All right. What did he talk about?”

“He talked about how he was in the hospital, an’ how sick he was.”

“That’s it?”

“Yup. Far as I remember.” She looked around the room as if she’d just emerged from a light coma. “Anybody got a cigarette?”

Hogan ignored her request.

“Did he say anything—anything at all—that might shed some light on his going out the window the next morning?”

“What? No, no.”

She continued to look around the room, fingers fidgeting with her pocketbook clasp.

“Nothing at all?”

“Nah.”

“Did he seem agitated in any way? Despondent? Frightened?”

“Nah, nothin’ like that.” She gave a little snort. “You didn’t know Abie.”

“Nothing at all?”

“No. Well, he was mad at me. Because of the divorce.”

“What divorce?”

“I went there ta ask him for a divorce that night,” she said, her eyes suddenly misting over. “I wanted ta get his signature.”

“You wanted to get his signature on divorce papers?” Hogan asked, incredulous again, but Rose nodded vehemently, before pulling a clot of half-used tissue out of her bag and holding it to her face.

“You brought him divorce papers? From your lawyer?”

“They wasn’t full divorce papers. I didn’t go ta no lawyer,” she said as she blew her nose.

“What do you mean, not ‘full’ divorce papers?”

“Well, it was more like I brought ’im a blank piece a paper. I asked Abie just ta sign his name an’ said I’d fill in all the particulars, grantin’ me a divorce. But he wouldn’t hear nothin’ about it. So I didn’t talk ta him no more after that.”

“Let me get this straight,” Hogan said through gritted teeth, sure he was being toyed with. Tom wasn’t as certain, looking over at Ellie. Her face was neither exasperated nor amused, but she was leaning forward in her chair, concentrating on Rose, her chin in her hand as if she were trying to figure something out.

“You wanted your husband to sign a blank piece of paper,” Hogan recounted. “You told him you were going to fill in the rest of it, granting you a divorce and listing ‘the particulars.’”

“That’s right. I thought then when I got started, I’d have his signature, an’ the rest would take care of itself.”

“But he would have none of it.”

“Well, no. He just looked at me like he was sick—he was sick, comin’ out of the hospital then,” Rose said hurriedly, then lifted up her head dramatically. “He looked at me an’ he said . . . he said, ‘At a time like this, you would do a thing like that?’”

“What did he mean, ‘at a time like this’? Did he elaborate?” Hogan pressed.

“What?”

“Did he explain in any way?”

“Nah.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Nah.”

“He must’ve given you some hint of what he was talking about. ‘At a time like this—’”

“Nope.”

“Did you get his signature on your homemade divorce decree?”

“No.”

Hogan’s face was so red now that Tom was sure he was about to start screaming at the woman. But just then Ellie moved her chair forward, actually daring to place a restraining hand gently on his forearm.

“Do you mind if I ask Mrs. Lewanda something, Boss?” she asked quietly, all the while keeping her gaze focused on Rose, now sniffling away behind her clump of tissues.

“Be my guest,” Hogan said, disgusted.

“Rose, may I ask you something?”

“Sure. Why not? Ya got me locked up in here, ya can do whatever youse want!”

Ellie produced a couple of cigarettes from her purse, taking one herself and handing the other to Rose, who accepted it with a look of deep trepidation but went ahead and lit up, pulling in a long drag of smoke. Ellie took a draw as well, then put the pack and an ashtray on a table near her, and smiled.

“Rose—may I call you Rose?”

There was another terse nod.

“Rose, my name is Ellie. I work with Mr. Hogan. Thank you for coming down here today.”

The woman gave a slight nod but said nothing, looking at her almost as suspiciously as she had regarded Hogan.

“Rose, did you really go to ask your husband for a divorce? At a time like that?”

She continued to look at Ellie suspiciously but gave a quick, fierce shake of her head. “No! I would never do nothin’ like that, not with ’im locked up.”

“You never wanted a divorce, did you, Rose? Not with the kids still little and no money coming in. You wanted him out so he could help you run the luncheonette. Didn’t you, Rose?”

She sniffled vigorously. “Yes,” she said, in so piteous a voice that Tom almost felt sorry for her. “He told me he was goin’ straight. That’s how Abie convinced me to go to the police in the first place.”

“So he talked you into it then, Rose? It wasn’t you going on your own,” Ellie confirmed.

“No. I didn’t wanna do it at first. But Abie told me it was best, what with Lepke havin’ everybody who knew anyt’in’ rubbed out. It was the only way he could stay alive.”

“In fact, it was he who asked you for the divorce. Wasn’t it, Rose?” Ellie asked, her voice so warm and maternal that the nervous, agitated woman sitting in the chair before her burst into sobs, nodding her head vigorously up and down.

“Ye-es,” she squeaked. “He wanted it. After I stayed with ’im through all that! The no-good bum. After all that!”

She sobbed quietly for a little while more, and they let her, saying nothing. Then she put her head up, blinking back the tears and looking around for another cigarette. Ellie had it already lit and waiting.

“He was just out outta the hospital, an’ he looked terrible. He had me lie down with him again, the bum. I didn’t wanna, but he looked so bad. His hair was thinned out, an’ his skin was pale, an’ he said his lungs was real bad. He had me lie down one more time, an’ took the bottle I brung him. Then he tells me that’s it, he’s decided he wants a divorce.”

“Did he say why?” Ellie asked.

“He just said with the deal he cut, he would get off free, an’ he wasn’t comin’ back ta the old neighborhood. He said he was takin’ off, an’ he didn’t want no more baggage with him.”

“I see,” Ellie told her softly. “And you tried to argue with him.”

“I told him I was the only one who could take care a him,” Rose said, her voice breaking, arms stretched out in front of her as if appealing to them. “I said he was sick, an’ I was the only person who really knew what he was—the only one who could really take care a him.”

“And what did he say?”

“He just laughed an’ said he was fine. He laughed an’ said he could take care a hisself, an’ if he got divorced, the government would put him someplace I could never find ’im.”

“And how did you feel about that?”

“How would you feel?” Rose snapped bitterly. “I told ’im he was a rotter. I told ’im he was a bum. But he wouldn’t listen.”

“But that was the only plan he mentioned to you? Just to let the government move him somewhere? No plans to escape?”

Rose shook her head and wiped her eyes, the tissues smearing the thin lines of mascara. But she looked straight at them now, the hysteria and the grief and the hurt subsiding.

“Nah. He was afraid a those guys. That’s why he turned hisself in. He was afraid Albert Anastasia an’ his shtarkers would kill him for Lepke, an’ he didn’t wanna go back ta jail. Besides, he was sick, he couldn’t run or go climbin’ outta windows. He couldn’t go nowheres. He was sick, which is the only reason why he ever asked me for a divorce. He didn’t know what he was doin’.”

Ellie pulled her chair back, deferring to Hogan with that motion, and he cleared his throat.

“Thank you, Mrs. Lewanda,” he said, his voice almost contrite. “But tell me, why were you reluctant to talk to us?”

“How do I know what’s gonna happen to me?” she said, leaning forward, the fear bulging her eyes. “How do I know, maybe I say the wrong thing about ’im goin’ out the window, they knock me off, too.”

“Mrs. Lewanda, you’re under a full police guard, in a locked hotel room, under the protection of the district attorney’s office,” Hogan told her.

Rose leaned back, shrugging, and Tom thought he saw the ghost of a smile around her lips.

“I know,” she said. “So was Abie.”

 

After it was all over and Rose put safely back on her train to Utica, he strolled with Ellie down to the main concourse of Grand Central. It was the evening rush hour by then, and as they came down the stairs they gazed out over the thousands of commuters with their hats and suits and briefcases, hustling for their trains. The haze of their cigarette smoke wafting slowly up toward the ceiling, where the once magnificent blue, celestial map there was all but obliterated by the same tar they were now pumping into their lungs.

Among the oblivious Westchester crowd, the porters were laying out the crimson carpet for the Twentieth Century Limited. Passing out the usual corsages and bottles of perfume to the women and boutonnieres to the men—the excitement of many of them palpable as they strutted up the carpet, ready to be whisked across the country to Chicago with the night.

It was a scene he had always enjoyed watching, yet he couldn’t help thinking how tonight everything somehow seemed a little weary, even grim. The great red rug looked frayed and faded, the hall and even the celestial blue ceiling darker and grimier than he had seen it since the war.

Why don’t they ever clean anything? he wondered to himself. Isn’t the City rich enough for that? Remembering how, when he was mayor, Charlie was always bemoaning the lack of money in the City coffers. But how could that possibly be, in so rich a city—the wealthiest place on earth?

Beside him Ellie seemed just as pensive, having said almost nothing since they’d left the hotel.

“You did well up there—very well,” he told her. “The boss was impressed.”

“Thanks,” she said, but to his surprise her voice sounded glum and flat.

“You didn’t think so?”

“No, I knew it was the way to get to her,” she conceded as they continued down the ramp to the lower hall and into the Oyster Bar, where they took two seats at the counter. “I just felt bad for her.”

“The former Mrs. Reles?” Tom asked, surprised.

“I know she’s a silly old woman. But think of how it must feel—to be that close to someone and not know what they are,” she said, looking down.

“You really don’t think she knew exactly what Abe Reles was?”

“Oh, I know she must have—at some time, in some part of her brain,” Ellie agreed. “But not right away. Not when they got married.”

“I suspect Mr. Reles always had hoodlum writ large on him.”

“But not like this. Sure, she thought he was another wise guy around the neighborhood,” she explained. “Making a little book, fencing stuff that fell off a truck. Someone exciting to be with, flashing his roll around. A guy who could take care of himself, if it came to that. But not a professional killer. Not some animal, killing anybody for the money, without an ounce of remorse.”

They ordered up a couple of bowls of the clam chowder and some coffee, then sat in silence for a few minutes, while the ebullient evening crowd swelled up around them. The bar and restaurant packed with people greeting one another loudly after work or after a journey of a thousand miles, filling themselves with lobsters and steaks, and cocktails.

They sat almost huddled next to each other among all the happy people, and an errant thought gripped him: of Slim gliding along the main concourse upstairs, in a shining gown. Of the first time Charlie had introduced her to him, right here in the Oyster Bar.

Sitting there in her flawless rose suit, with matching hat and matching bag. This woman like none either of them had ever met before, exquisitely composed, and sensuous, and knowing. He had taken one look at her and thought, consciously, Charlie, you’re in trouble. But he knew, even then, that he was really the one in trouble.

“I suppose Reles could dissemble the same as the rest of us,” Tom said, turning to his coffee. “Even to those closest to him.”

“Especially to those closest to him,” Ellie corrected, stabbing at the small bowl of chowder with her spoon. “Doesn’t it always seem that’s how it is, Tom? We lie the most to those nearest to us, and why is that?”

“I don’t know. I guess it’s because those are the people we’re afraid will know us best. They’re the ones we need to fool the most.”

“And isn’t that sad,” she said, looking up at him in the crowded bar, her dark eyes lovely and a little moist.

“Yes, I guess it is,” he said. The words wrenched from him, him feeling like she was reading his thoughts. What he said then surprising even himself: “But are we capable of showing anybody exactly who we really are? Wouldn’t we rather die of shame?”

“Spoken like a true Catholic.” She smiled. “I don’t think I’d die. I think I’d rather know everything.”

“That’s because you’re a good prosecutor,” he told her, putting an arm around her shoulders, breathing in the scent of her and the warmth as he brought her close. “And because you have nothing to be ashamed about.”

“And what about you?”

“Ah, that you’ll have to find out on your own,” he said, letting her go and wagging a finger at her, trying to sound playful. He stared out at all the drunken, happy, shouting people around them.

“Tell me, do ya still have that hotel room?” he asked her.

“What? I guess so. Mr. Hogan put Rose on the train back to Utica—she was too frightened even to stay the night,” Ellie said, startled at first, the realization of what he was saying just beginning to dawn in her eyes. She started to grin that smile he loved. “Why do you ask?”

“Whattaya say we take advantage of it?” he asked. Picturing them wrapped up in the hotel sheets and each other, two anonymous souls, hidden away from everything and everyone in the middle of the City.

“Don’t you mean, take advantage of me?” she asked, her eyes glinting merrily. He smiled back at her, thinking a hundred different things, but only wanting her.

“C’mon. I’ll treat you to room service.”

And so they went, making their way up through the throngs and past the red carpet now being rolled back up by the porters, the train dinging its way slowly out of the station toward Chicago. Up through the dimly lit halls of the hotel, arm in arm, her head on his shoulder. They were starting to undress each other before they got the door closed.