Fifty-to-One

And turning on his barstool, Charley favored her with a baleful stare out of the one of his eyes that wasn’t swollen shut.

“My god, Charley,” Tricia said, her hand leaping to her mouth.

He took a swallow from the tumbler of whiskey in his hand. “You should see the other guy,” he said.

“I think I did,” she said, “if you mean Eddie. But you look a lot worse.”

“Thanks,” Charley said, getting down off his stool and limping toward her. His voice was thick with drink. “That’s what I needed to hear.”

“I didn’t mean for them to—”

“What did you think was going to happen? Eddie’d barge in and we’d have ourselves a merry little menage a trois?”

“Charley!”

“If that’s what gets your motor turning, honey, you could’ve just walked in and joined us yourself. Ah, but I forget, you’re a sweet young thing and cannot leave your mother.”

“Charley,” Tricia said, “I didn’t want you to get hurt”—but of course this wasn’t true and she knew it. Part of her had badly wanted him to get hurt. But she hadn’t envisioned it...like this. “What did you think you were doing, going to that, that...creature’s bed—”

“Rather than the chair you so kindly left me,” Charley said. “Oh, come off it, Tricia. You know what I was doing, and you know I was right to do it. I wasn’t enjoying myself, I was trying to find a way to get us out of there.”

Sure. And Paulie Lips was no thief, oh no, not him—just a blackmailer. Men! Singing their little songs of innocence. Could they possibly think they were convincing anyone?

“Charley,” Tricia said frostily, “the way out of there was not hidden inside Renata Barrone’s panties. I found a way out, and it didn’t involve sleeping with anyone.”

“Lucky you,” he said. He handed the tumbler to Mike, then unbuttoned several buttons on his shirt, reached inside, and pulled out the leather box of photographs. “But you didn’t get these, did you?”

“How...?”

He spread his arms and made a little unsteady bow. He really was quite drunk.

“A gentleman never kisses and tells,” he said.

“Renata got them for you?”

“No,” he admitted, “I grabbed them on my way out, saw them sitting on Barrone’s dresser—but still. The point is I have them. Now, where’s my thank you? Where’s my ‘I’m sorry, Charley, I’ll never do it again?’ Huh? Tricia?”

“I think you ought to get some sleep,” Tricia said. Taking him by the arm, she tugged him toward the back room. “We can talk about it when you’ve sobered up.”

“Ah, sleep and sobriety,” Charley mumbled. “You see, Mike, she does care about me. You were wrong when you said all those scurrilous things about her.”

Mike said, “I didn’t—”

“No, I guess you didn’t, it must’ve been me.” Charley leaned heavily on Tricia, his boozy breath just inches from her nose, his bruised flesh a rainbow of purple and yellow. “You do care,” he said, “don’t you?”

She brushed something out of her eye—a reaction to the whiskey fumes he was breathing on her, she told herself, nothing more. “Go to sleep, Charley,” she said. “You’ll feel better when you wake up.”

“I’ll feel like hell when I wake up,” he mumbled.

“Well, I’ll feel better,” she said. “Do it for me.”

She deposited him heavily on the mattress and went back for the bag. By the time she returned, he was snoring.

While he was out cold, she went through all the material in the bag. There was a great deal of it. Coral had been putting the pinch on five men in all, some of them for years; six if you counted Paulie. He really seemed to believe he was the father of her child—but who’s to say the others didn’t? And Tricia had a feeling Coral had been hitting him up for more than just locker room space.

Thinking of Paulie as another of Coral’s marks helped answer a question that had been nagging Tricia: If Coral kept all her other incriminating materials in the locker at the Moon, why had she kept Nicolazzo’s box of photos in the glove compartment of the car she’d extorted from Barrone? The only answer that made sense was that Coral had wanted to make sure Paulie didn’t find them, couldn’t destroy them—especially the one he’d have been most likely to destroy, the photo of himself. Which suggested that Coral had wanted to have something on him.

Of course, maybe she just liked having something on everyone she knew.

Barrone, meanwhile, was a bit of a puzzle himself. If it was his son who had died a month ago, not him, where had Royal been for the past month? On an assignment for Nicolazzo? Or lying low somewhere, to keep away from Nicolazzo?

And Renata—what was she doing holed up in the old man’s headquarters downtown instead of living at home with her husband? Or, if she and Robbie had been on the outs (made her finger itch, indeed), why wasn’t she living at her parents’ house, or some place of her own...somewhere, anywhere, that wasn’t a Lower East Side boy’s club filled with gunmen and criminals?

But the big question wasn’t Paulie or Barrone or Renata—it was Nicolazzo. One question, of course, was who had broken into his safe and taken the money out, and Tricia had a feeling she’d need to answer it before this was all over. But more urgently, where would the man have gone with his hostages when his location on Van Dam Street was blown?

Tricia scoured every letter, every photograph, looking for a clue and finally she found one, near the bottom of the pile. It was in a note Barrone had sent to Coral, dated a year earlier:

Can’t meet you in the city, it said, that’s final. N wants us all out at his place at the track while he’s waiting out the investigation. O’Malley’s getting too damn close to play games. I’ll call you with a location and you’ll come out there if you want your goddam money.

And penciled in the margin, in Coral’s handwriting, was the information she’d presumably copied down when he’d called: AQUEDUCT, STABLE 8, STALL 3.

Charley stirred, turned over on his side. He didn’t wake.

Tricia took the leather box from the corner of the mattress and slipped it into her pocket beneath the gun. One way or the other she’d be prepared.

She stepped out into the hallway.

“How’s he doing?” Mike asked.

“Sleeping,” Tricia said. “Probably the best thing for him.” She made her way to the front of the bar.

“What should I tell him when he wakes up?”

“Tell him I said to stay here. That I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“And if he asks where you went?”

“Tell him you don’t know. It’ll be the truth.”

“Are you sure it’s smart to go off on your own like this?” Mike said.

“No,” Tricia said, and went.

34.

Fright

If you want to get your money’s worth from a New York City subway ride, you’ll do as the song says and take the A train, whether it’s to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem or to Rockaway Beach way down in Queens. It’s a thirty mile ride from one end to the other, the longest you can take, and it’ll occupy the better part of two hours if you let it. If you get tired before it’s over or don’t want to spring for the extra fifteen-cent fare that kicks in right before you hit the beach, you can trade the promise of sun and sand for a day of playing the ponies at the Aqueduct Race Track in lovely South Ozone Park. Or at least you could before the State Racing Commission turned over control of the track to the newly formed “New York Racing Association” in 1955. One of the first things the new association did was to shut down the Big A and launch a renovation project that promised to deliver to gamblers the most modern racetrack of the Atomic Age. Almost three years and thirty million dollars later, the project wasn’t finished and the track was still shuttered, though plenty of pockets had gotten handsome new linings along the way. Mostly in nearby Ozone Park, which was South Ozone Park with redwood instead of aluminum siding on the walls but just