Fifty-to-One

So Tricia told them, told them everything she could think of from her weeks working at the Sun—about the layout and the staff and the schedule, about the parts of the building she’d seen and the parts she hadn’t, everything she’d read in the newspapers—and bit by bit a picture emerged. She told them about Nicolazzo, the various charges against him, what she knew about his private life, his family. They peppered her with questions and tossed out one outlandish idea after another.

“What about a hot air balloon?” Larry said. “Finney did that in Five Against The House.”

“That’s idiotic,” Don said. “How about a submarine?”

And so it went, for four days in a row, from ten past noon each day till the bar started filling up around three or four and the boys’ voices and their imaginations, no matter how well lubricated along the way, finally gave out. Tricia began to despair of getting anything for her money except slightly high from beer fumes. But at the end of the fourth afternoon, Don’s eyes lit up and he said, “I’ve got it!”

And he really had.

Tricia wrote as quickly as she could, typed till her fingers ached.

Mornings, she slept in, recovering from the late-night activities of the prior night at the Sun and appreciating as she never had before the strain poor Coral had been laboring under all this time. At least you couldn’t hear garbage trucks in the morning from the side of the building the chateau was on; on the other hand, some of the girls were restless sleepers, snoring or moaning or talking in their sleep, and with a dozen in one room, silence was hard to come by, even in the wee hours.

Afternoons, she worked on the book, sometimes getting so wrapped up in it that she had to race through her shower and jump into her clothes willy-nilly or she’d have been late for the first show at the club, which started at the supper hour. Evenings she spent at the club, usually staying till one or two AM, taking a late dinner in the kitchen with the waiters and musicians. Then there were her days off, when she sometimes didn’t get out of her nightgown, just sat at the desk banging away from the time she woke up till the other girls threw pillows at her back and begged her to stop the racket.

In this way, her days passed, and her weeks, and eventually eight of them had gone by.

She was surprised, at the end of the eighth week, when Charley Borden, having avoided paying back a penny of the debt he owed her along the way, invited her into his office and, beaming with pride and the goodwill of a man who’d recently been fortunate enough to cash a check, handed her two twenty-dollar bills. “Now, what do you have to say about that?” he asked her grandly. “What do you think my promises are worth now?”

But she was not nearly as surprised by that as by the contents of the box she held tightly in her right hand, a stack of paper whose first page began with the words “Chapter 1” and whose last finished with “The End.” She dropped it on Borden’s desk.

“I say thank you. And,” she said with a huge smile, “I say you owe me five hundred dollars more.”

5.

Two for the Money

“This guy’s a gold mine,” Borden said, jabbing with the back of his pen at the newest book to grace his desk. Three months had passed since she’d turned the manuscript in. “He’s the genuine article. Gold Medal wishes they could find a guy like this.”

The book was titled I Robbed the Mob! and was credited to that most prolific of authors, Anonymous, but Tricia was as proud of it as if her name had been plastered all over the cover. The illustration showed a man in a heavy overcoat, his face hidden in shadows, advancing on a buxom woman in a torn blouse. What that had to do with robbing the Mob, Tricia had no idea. But Borden said it would sell books.

Beneath the title it said

Torn From the Headlines!

The Scandalous True Story of One Man’s

LIFE in the UNDERWORLD!

“You know what Casper Citron said about us on his program yesterday?” Borden said. “He called the book reprehensible. Said we glorified crime. That’s good for a thousand copies, easy.”

“How many did you print?”

“Seventy thousand. But we’re already going back to press. The thing’s selling, Trixie. You did good—you and this guy you found.” Borden grabbed his jacket from a hook on the back of the door, shrugged it on. “You think he really ripped off his boss?”

“Oh, I’m sure he wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true,” Tricia said.

“Man,” Borden said. “The guy has guts. I tell you, I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes the day someone hands Nicolazzo a copy of the book.”

It was at that moment that the frosted glass pane in Borden’s door shattered.

Shards fell on the floor with a clatter. A fist reached through the newly formed opening, groped for a moment, found the doorknob and turned it. The door swung open.

There were two men at the door, but the first filled the doorway so thoroughly you could barely see the second standing behind him. The bigger of the men stood well north of six feet, Tricia judged, and the resemblance to Tor Johnson didn’t end there. His face was round and pink, with no hair on it except for a pair of dense eyebrows overhanging deep-set eye sockets. Each of his fists looked like half a cinderblock, and the bloody scratches across the knuckles of the one he’d just shoved through the glass didn’t seem to bother him at all. He wore a heavy overcoat. If his face had been in shadow, he’d have been a dead ringer for the man on the cover of the book.

The other man was smaller, only an inch or two bigger than Borden, but with much the same look about him as his hulking companion. There was something of the brute in his eyes, and if his knuckles weren’t presently bleeding it was clear from all the pink scar tissue across them that they’d done their share of bleeding in the past.

“You Charley Borden?” the smaller man said.

“Me? Borden? No. Borden. No. Borden stepped out, just a moment ago.”

“That’s funny,” the smaller man said, “there’s no one in the hallway.”

“Well, it was more than a moment. What would you say, honey, five minutes?” Tricia nodded mutely. “Five minutes. Said he had to go downstairs. Said we should wait for him. So we’re, you know. Waiting.”

The two men exchanged glances.

“My wife here’s a painter,” Borden said, “isn’t that right, honey? And I’m a writer, and we came here to offer our services to Mr. Borden.” He stuck out his hand. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Robert Ste—um—”

Damn it, Tricia thought. “Stephens,” she said, just as Borden said, “Stevenson.”

“—son,” she said.

Borden said, “That’s right, Robert Stevenson. And my wife. Louise. Say hello, Louise.”

“Hello,” Tricia said, with a little wave.

“You look like Borden,” the smaller man said.

“Really? I don’t think so. Do you think I look like him, honey?”

Tricia shrugged.

“How do you know what he looks like anyway?” Borden said. “It’s not like he’s a famous fashion plate or anything like that, he’s just one of New York’s more promising young editors...”

The big man took a creased photograph out of his coat pocket and unfolded it. It was a side-by-side mug shot, full-face on the left, profile on the right. In the photo, Borden’s hair was mussed and one of his eyes was swollen shut; the sign he was holding up in his hands said

N.Y. COUNTY 013887

BORDEN—4/28/1950

“Oh, he was much younger then,” Borden said. “Practically a kid. Looks completely different now. Wouldn’t you say?”

“Absolutely,” Tricia said. “For one thing, he doesn’t have a black eye today. Yet.”

“Oh, we’re not here to hurt him, miss,” the smaller man said, unconvincingly. “It’s not Borden we’re after. We’re here for the money.”

“What money?” Borden said.

“The money this fellow stole from us,” the smaller man said, and he nudged the other man with his elbow.