Fifty-to-One

table, Don drawing two glasses of beer along the way.

“You want another drink?” Don said, pointing at the finger of coke left in her glass.

“I still have some,” Tricia said.

“You know what they say, Don,” Larry said, “some people look at a glass as ninety percent empty, while others prefer to see it as ten percent full.”

“How did you know you’d find us here?” Don said.

“I didn’t,” Tricia said, “but I figured it was worth a try. This is the time we always used to meet when we were working on the book. Remember? Ten past noon.”

Larry took a long swallow of his beer. “Some people see it as ten past noon,” he said, “while others prefer to see it as fifty to one.”

She gave him a funny look.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing,” Tricia said. She turned back to Don. “You seem very much at home there behind the bar. You get a job here?”

“Not exactly a job,” Don said.

“What my friend is too modest to say,” Larry said, “is that he owns this place now. Bought it fair and square from the previous owner. Tore down that wretched bric-a-brac from the walls, turned it into a proper establishment one isn’t embarrassed to be seen in.”

“Really,” Tricia said. “And where, might I ask, did you get the money to buy a bar? You’d have to write a lot of travel guides to make that kind of dough.”

“My beloved aunt,” Don said, “passed away.”

“Ah,” Tricia said. “I’m sorry to hear it. And you, Larry? What are you doing these days? Still writing?”

“Of course—we both are,” Larry said. “We’re writers through and through. We will never stop.”

“That’s so,” Don said. “But what he’s too modest to tell you is that he has also opened a bookstore. Down in the Village. Sells used books. Some rare, some not so rare. A real addition to the neighborhood.”

“And where’d you get the money to do that?” Tricia asked.

“My beloved uncle,” Larry said.

“Dead?”

“The poor man.”

They all took a drink in silence.

“One of you want to tell me about it?” Tricia said.

“Not particularly,” Larry said.

“You know,” Tricia said, “all along we kept asking ourselves, who could possibly have read the book before it was published? It never occurred to me to ask, what about the guys who helped come up with the plot in the first place.”

“What finally made you think of it?” Larry said.

“You were overheard,” Tricia said. “Making your plans. This woman said she’d seen two men, one with a beard, one without, both New Yorkers by their voices, around noon in a back booth in one of her father’s bars. At first I thought she was just making it up to save her skin. But then it dawned on me about the names of the bars.”

“The names?” Don said.

“Her father’s name is Royal Barrone, and he’s in the habit of naming all his bars after himself: Royal’s Brew, the Rusty Bucket. The same initials. And then I thought about where we’d met to do all our plotting. The Red Baron.”

“I see,” Larry said.

“Why did you do it?” Tricia said, and she couldn’t keep her voice from quavering as she did. “Do you have any idea what sort of trouble you caused me? I almost got killed. My sister, too. Quite a few people did get killed. And for what? So you could run a bar?”

“And a bookstore,” Larry said.

“You risked your own lives, too,” Tricia said, “and on the basis of what, a crazy plot cooked up for a crime novel?”

“Not a crazy plot,” Larry said. “A brilliant plot. You remember I asked you at the time, why should we come up with a perfectly good plot and hand it over to you, when we could use it ourselves?”

“For a book! Not in real life!”

“And why not? After you left that day, when we finally put the last pieces in place, Don and I sat here a while longer, talking, and it dawned on us that this was much too good a premise to waste on mere fiction.”

“But the combination to the safe—that was just a guess on my part! Didn’t you realize that? It could’ve been completely wrong!”

Larry shrugged. “But it wasn’t. And I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be. It just made too much sense.”

“You climbed up the side of a building, broke in through a window, sawed and chiseled through a door, and braved angry mobsters on the way out, all on the basis of a guess, just because you thought it made sense?”

“Well, when you put it that way, it sounds foolish,” Larry admitted. “But here we are, owners of a bar.”

“And a bookstore,” Don said.

“Aren’t you afraid the man you robbed will figure it out?”

“Why? He hasn’t yet.”

“Well, for one thing, directly or indirectly, he’s the man you bought the bar from. Royal Barrone works for Salvatore Nicolazzo. He used to until today, anyway.”

“You’re kidding,” Don said.

Tricia shook her head.

“You mean I used the man’s own money to buy his bar from him?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

The smile that broke out on Don’s face was a thing of beauty. “That’s just perfect. You couldn’t make something like that up. You put that in a book, no one would believe it.”

“Not in a million years,” Larry agreed.

“Just be glad that Nicolazzo got arrested today,” Tricia said, “and that the people under him are going to be too busy fighting for control of his empire to bother paying attention to the two of you.”

“That does sound good,” Larry said.

“I’m sure it does,” Tricia said. “But remember, there’s one person who does know what you did.”

“Oh?” Don said. “Who’s that?”

“Me.”

They all took another swallow. It was the last one for Tricia. She pushed her empty glass aside.

The two men eyed her balefully.

“You wouldn’t turn us in, would you?” Larry said.

“You mean to the cops? Or to the gangsters?”

“Either.”

“Of course I wouldn’t,” Tricia said, and instantly the atmosphere around the table lightened noticeably. “But,” she continued, “there’s something I want in return.”

“What’s that?” Don said.

“I’m going to be working for Charley now,” she said. “I’ll be working with him on his books.”

“Presumably not the pornography,” Larry said.

“No, Hard Case Crime,” Tricia said. “And it occurs to me that the day may come when Hard Case Crime might need to ask one of you for a favor. Maybe it’ll happen tomorrow, maybe it won’t be for a year. Maybe ten years. Maybe fifty years. But when that time comes, and we ask for your help in some way— maybe we’ll want to publish one of your books, or maybe we’ll ask you to make a personal appearance somewhere to help us out—I want you to do it, no questions asked.”

“No questions?” Larry said.

“No questions.”