“What if I told you I don’t have the key?”
“I’d shoot you,” Tricia said, “and take the key out of your pocket.”
“Just asking,” Paulie said. He pulled out a ring of keys, opened the padlock, and stepped aside.
Tricia drew the gun out of her pocket, leveled it at him, used it to shoo him back a few more steps. She opened the locker door without taking her eyes off him, then swiftly shot a glance inside. There were several stacks of papers—mainly letters, it looked like, along with a pile of photographs and a telegram or two.
“What is all this stuff?” Tricia said. “And don’t say you don’t know.”
“Colleen called it her nest egg,” Paulie said.
Tricia reached in, grabbed the first batch of photos off the top, thumbed through them one by one. A couple slipped onto the floor. She didn’t pick them up.
Coral was in most of the pictures, though not all. She was younger in them—these dated back a few years, clearly, maybe to when she’d first come to New York or a little after. She’d been even prettier then and her figure had looked terrific, even in candid shots like these with their bad lighting and blurred portions where one of the subjects had moved as the shutter closed. There was a man in each of the photos, not the same one every time. By and large their figures didn’t look as fine as Coral’s, but like her they seemed not at all bashful about showing them off, at least in what they’d clearly thought was the privacy of a bedroom. They were the sort of photos you could be arrested for taking, or selling, or sending through the mails, and she felt her cheeks reddening as she looked at them. She stuffed them in her pocket, waved the gun at Paulie. “What are you looking at?” she snarled. “You just stay there and don’t move.”
“Calm down, lady,” he said. “I’m not doing anything.”
She reached into the locker again, grabbed a handful of the letters. They were on onionskin, carbon copies of letters whose originals had been written in ballpoint pen.
The handwriting was Coral’s.
She glanced down at the first letter and up again at Paulie, reading it in snatches so she could keep an eye on him.
She peeled back the top sheet with her thumb, crumpling it slightly.
She waved the letters at Paulie, who looked more miserable than terrified now, like a magician caught with his hand up his sleeve.
“Just how many fathers did this kid have?” Tricia said.
“One,” Paulie said, with a measure of defensiveness in his voice. “And you’re looking at him.”
“You...?”
“Me,” Paulie Lips said. “He’s my kid.” He patted himself on the side of the face and this time the smile that emerged seemed genuine. “If you’d ever seen him, you’d know. He’s got his poppa’s chin. The poor boy.”
“And what was your part in all...this?”
“Someone had to take the pictures,” Paulie said.
“You watched her go to bed with all these other men? With Monge and Barrone?” Tricia said. “The mother of your child?”
“She wasn’t the mother of my child yet. Not in most of them, anyway.”
“How can you live with yourself?” Tricia said. “That’s disgusting.”
His face darkened into a scowl. “Put down the gun and say that.”
“So you’re bigger than me, so what. Doesn’t make it less disgusting.”
“What do you want?” Paulie said. “To stand there and insult me? Well, the gun gives you that privilege. But don’t push me too far. I could take it away from you, you know.”
“You could try,” Tricia said.
They faced each other down. It felt to Tricia like a scene from the circus, the lion tamer in the cage with a tiger on one barrel and a lion on the next and nothing in his hand but a little wooden chair and a whip.
“I’m taking all this stuff with me,” Tricia said. “Colleen wanted me to have it. She’s in bad trouble and must’ve figured it could help. If you care about her at all, you won’t try to stop me.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“Your boss, Nicolazzo,” she said. “You probably heard he was robbed. Hell, maybe you were in on the robbery. Maybe you both were.”
“Uh-uh,” he said. “No way. We’re not thieves.”
“Just blackmailers.”
“That’s right,” Paulie said. “There’s a difference. Being guilty of the one doesn’t mean you’re guilty of the other.”
“Sure,” Tricia said. “You’re the picture of innocence.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well, someone took three million dollars from Nicolazzo’s safe and he’s decided Colleen knows something about it. Maybe he doesn’t think the distinction between blackmailer and thief is so crystal clear.”
“He wouldn’t know about the blackmail,” Paulie said. “We never tried tapping him.”
“Well, that’s something, anyway. But he’s still holding Colleen.”
“And how will having this stuff help get her out?”
“I don’t know,” Tricia admitted. “But if Colleen thought it would, there must be a reason. Maybe there’s something in here that could be used against Nicolazzo, or something she thinks might point to the real thief. Or at least something that points to where Nicolazzo might have taken her.”
“You don’t even know where she is?”
“Not right this moment, no,” Tricia said. “But I’ll find her.”
Paulie’s stare could’ve cut glass. “You’d better,” he said.
“Does that mean you’re going to help me?”
“It means I’m going to forget you pulled a gun on me,” Paulie said.
“You’ll do more than that,” Tricia said. “Get a bag.”
She left with an old Gladstone bag in one hand, packed with the contents of the locker. The bag shielded the gun in her other hand from view as she walked out, Paulie walking before her. She wasn’t taking any chances.
As soon as she’d reached the sidewalk and sent Paulie back up, she flagged down a cab. Paulie might let her go, as he’d promised—but he might also sneak back down and try to follow her, or think he was being cute by staying put himself but sending someone else after her, maybe one of his dancers; they certainly had time on their hands. Or he might telephone any of a number of people to tell them where she was. There were too many bad possibilities and she was determined to be far away before any of them materialized.
The press of people running back and forth in the street made progress slow for a few blocks, but before long things cleared up and they had a clear run up Sixth Avenue to 44th Street.
She paid the cabbie at the corner, walked the rest of the way only after he’d driven off. She climbed the stairs and knocked on the door and didn’t wait for the panel to slide open before saying, “It’s Trixie, Mike. Are you in there?”
The door opened. Mike stood behind it, apron smeared and stained, looking much as he had the night before. The bar behind him looked much the same as well, except that instead of several solitary drinkers with their backs to her, hunched over their glasses, Tricia only saw one. She wondered if he was a holdover from last night or the sort that liked to get an early start on his drinking Sunday mornings.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Mike, but I need a place to go through some things in private.” She dropped the Gladstone and it landed heavily on the floor, raising a puff of dust. “Any chance I could use the back room? Twenty, thirty minutes should be plenty.”
“In private?” said a familiar voice. “I wouldn’t think you knew the meaning.”
