Everybody Goes to Jimmy's (8 page)

But I was also curious and horny, so I got a cab.

The lobby of the Chatham Hotel was empty that late, and the elevator was self-service. I went up to the ninth floor and knocked on the door of the Taft Suite.

For what seemed like a long time, there was nothing. Then a woman said, “Come in.” It didn't sound anything like her. I took out the .38 and held it against my leg.

Inside, the first thing I noticed was the smell of perfume, something I didn't remember about her. I don't know how to describe it, but it did what it was supposed to do. I think there was only one lamp on. Other than that, the rooms hadn't changed. Same heavy furniture and drapes, and suddenly it was too warm. I took off my topcoat and hat and saw that the door to the bedroom was open slightly. It swung wider, and I could make out the indistinct silhouette of a woman. She moved and I saw the shape of her figure, the curves of breast, hip, and leg. She took another step and smoothly raised her arm. I saw that she had a little automatic, and she held it in a serious two-handed grip. It was aimed at the center of my chest. She stepped through the doorway into the light, and I could see that it was her. It was Anna, but she was different. She lowered the pistol. I dropped mine back into my pocket.

Her hair was very blonde and bobbed much shorter than it had been the last time I'd seen her. Dark lipstick made her mouth look wider. She wore a black satin robe with red flowers. The deep V of the robe and high heels made her look taller, and one corner of her mouth cocked up like she was about to laugh. That image of her standing there, so long and sleek in the loosely belted robe, I can close my eyes today and still see it.

She put the gun on a table and slumped into an armchair like her legs had given out. She said, “Hello, Jimmy. God, you're a sight. It's going to be OK now,” and she started to cry and laugh at the same time.

I stood there paralyzed, not knowing what to do and staring at the gaping robe. She was still the sexiest, most desirable woman I'd ever met.

Finally, she said, “I'm sorry, Jimmy. I didn't mean to break down like this. It's just that I'm so goddamned glad to see you. I was so afraid that you wouldn't be here, but you are, and now everything's going to work out, I know it will. Oh, it's going to be swell, Jimmy, and do you know why? Because we're almost rich, goddamnit!”

And then she started crying again. Somewhere then I got her some water, and we had whiskey, too. She pulled her robe tight, leaned back in the chair, and crossed her legs.

She said, “I know you want to know what's going on with that note and everything, and I'll get to that, but just look at you. Funny, isn't it, how you could beat me so easy in that race and now”—she gestured toward the cane—“it's just funny.”

“Things change,” I said. “You've changed.” Before, she'd been a pretty girl, but what you really noticed first about her was the bright lively energy. That was what made every guy fall for her at least a little. Now she was beautiful.

Sure, the hair and the lipstick and the perfume had something to do with it. I'm not such a sap that I didn't see that. For a while I thought it was maturity, that she was one of those women who'd always look good at any age. But I've come to understand that what I was seeing was determination.

She stared at me like she was intensely interested in anything I might say or do. She leaned forward in her chair and let the robe fall open again. Yeah, she knew what she was doing.

Then my glass was empty. She got up and refilled it and stayed behind my chair. Her hands came around and loosened my tie, unbuttoned my shirt. She pulled off my suit coat and my shirt and murmured, “Very nice. Top of the line Brooks Brothers. You're spending well.”

I didn't turn around, but I could tell she was rifling through my coat pockets. I relaxed and drank, and she went back to having her way with me. Such things may happen to movie stars and millionaires all the time, but they don't happen to guys like me very often. When they do, I try not to get in the way.

She kept talking about this and that. I really don't remember what she said. I remember how she looked and the feel of her hands pulling off my shoes and unbuckling my belt. The brace gave her a little trouble. When I was naked, she said, “Come on, the tub's full. I've been waiting for this for a long time.”

The black satin robe slid to the floor, and she stepped out of her heels. I saw that she'd filled out nicely. Her face and breasts were flushed a warm pink, but the rest of her body was milky white. She didn't look like the girl who'd raced me in the street. It was hard to imagine this woman ever doing anything like that.

The white tile still sparkled in the faint light from outside, and the Taft tub was still vast, and the bathroom was steamy from deep water. We sank into it, and she hugged me and whispered, “God, this is the first time I've felt safe in months. It's almost over. If you'll trust me.”

Then she showed me how much she'd missed me, and an hour later, in bed, she told me the damnedest story.

Chapter Seven

Anna said that the story her roommate told me all those years ago was true, or true enough. But the “real boyfriend” who had just got out of jail and flew to her side was actually her husband. Well, almost her husband. There was some question in her mind that the man who ran the Honeymoon Tourist Park actually had the power to marry them, and she had lied about her age, but still, she had a piece of paper. She considered herself married, unless he was locked up, and then she considered herself divorced until he got out. It made sense when she explained it, and we were naked and in bed, so I wasn't asking many questions.

His name was Paul Dombrovsky, but he called himself Pauley Domo because that sounded dangerous. He was five years older than her and came from a better neighborhood in the town where they lived near Chicago. In her eyes, he was mature and handsome, and free-spirited because he stole cars. Unlike me, he stole cars for fun.

Pauley Domo came calling for her one Friday night in a brand new Peerless sedan. He told her he was leaving that very night to go to New York, where he was going to meet his partner and make more money than she'd ever dreamed of. He was also going to become more famous than Charlie Chaplin. Was she ready to go with him? Next stop, Honeymoon Tourist Park.

The partner turned out to be one Morris Untermeyer, an older guy she never warmed up to. He was already in the city casing their first big job. You see, they were hoping to repeat Gentleman Gerald Chapman's famous 1921 heist.

The Gent and his cronies figured out the routes that the mail trucks took from Wall Street to the big post office. They knew that the trucks that left late in the evening carried most of the day's important business—bonds, money orders, securities, and cash. The problem was getting the driver to stop and hand over the loot. Gentleman Gerald came up with an idea.

One Monday night after ten o'clock, he rode in the back seat of a convertible with his two partners up front. They tailed a mail truck north on Broadway from the Federal Building until they reached the right spot, where they waved their guns around and told the driver to stop. When he refused, Chapman jumped out of his car and landed on the running board of the truck. He jammed a pistol into the driver's ear and ordered him to pull over. They broke open the back and waltzed away with more than a million dollars.

That had been five years before. Pauley Domo said the time was ripe to strike again.

“Like most of Pauley's ideas,” Anna said, “it almost worked.”

Morrie drove. Pauley was up front. Anna was in the back seat and saw it all. This is probably a good time for me to mention that I knew Anna was lying at least a little when she told me these stories. But she also told the truth. With this one, I don't know, maybe it happened just like she said it did.

When they got to the spot where they planned to jump the truck, dangerous Pauley Domo opened the door of their Ford, got out on the running board, and froze, hanging on with both hands. Anna told Morrie, the partner, to get closer. He swerved right and sideswiped the mail truck. They both hit the brakes. Pauley fell or jumped and wound up on the pavement with the stopped truck. He broke an arm and a leg in the process.

Anna and Morrie made it about half a block before the damaged front wheel seized up. Guards from the back of the truck braced Pauley. Cops got Morrie. Anna was too quick for them. She hotfooted it out of there.

They took Pauley to Bellevue Hospital to patch up his arm and leg, booked him at a station house, and then transferred him to the Tombs downtown. As Anna understood it, there was a lot of confusion as to exactly what Pauley and Morrie would be charged with. They claimed that they never meant to rob anybody. But the Ford was stolen, and the cops found a pistol under the front seat. Pauley said he had nothing to do with the gun, and there were no prints on it, but they had him bang to rights on the car. They nailed Morrie on another outstanding warrant, and Anna didn't know what happened to him after that. She never saw him again.

They parked Pauley in the Tombs for six weeks while they decided what to do with him. They finally charged him and found him guilty of interfering with a postal worker in the performance of his duties, or something like that. They sent him up to Auburn Prison for a year. Anna went to work at the Spanish Marketplace, met me and all that. Pauley got out eight months later for good behavior. Straight away, as the roommate put it, he flew to her side, thus ending her divorce. Having had time to think on it, he decided they should go back to the Midwest to continue their crime wave. Minneapolis, to be precise.

As Anna described it, Minneapolis was even more accommodating to crooks than New York. I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now, but as she put it, the pols and cops were happy to look the other way for just about anything as long as you could pony up the pelf. She was vague on the details, like you are when you're talking about something you don't want to be talking about.

I got the idea that they arrived in Minnesota with a stake, but it didn't last long, and they weren't able to buy the kind of protection that Pauley had talked about. Eventually, Pauley made the acquaintance of some guys who were more successful at armed robbery than he had been, and he and Anna joined up with them. She said they robbed banks, used car lots, big grocery stores, anyplace that handled decent amounts of cash. When I asked who these guys were, she said the names didn't matter, I wouldn't know them anyway, and they weren't all guys. She wasn't the only woman, and they all helped with something. They went as far as Texas in search of enterprises with more cash than guards. It got harder and harder to find places that were worth the time and expense it took to plan a job and pull it off. Eventually, the gang, if you could really call it that, broke up, leaving her and Pauley with another couple about their age, Vaughn Billings and Hildy Jostic. The four of them went to western Ohio because Hildy had family there. Her parents and her idiot brother lived between Dayton and Columbus on a farm with pigs and chickens. Farming was a front for their real business. The place was isolated, and it had enough buildings and water to handle a dozen or so people. It became a popular hideout for guys who needed to stay out of sight for a while and could pay for a little privacy.

The four of them were casting about for something to do when Pauley came up with another almost brilliant idea.

The most important local bootlegger in that part of the state was a young druggist who'd figured out a way to distribute alcohol legally, or almost legally. No sneaking the stuff in from boats or smuggling it across the Canadian border. He actually owned a couple of distilleries that produced “medicinal” hooch. Some of it he and local doctors prescribed to the locals. Some of it he arranged to have stolen and resold it to speaks and regular bootleggers. He was a gentleman from a good family and it was such a sweet setup that he could spend his dough out in the open, and everybody considered him to be a respectable citizen. He didn't hang around with gangsters and low-life hoodlums like me and A. R. and Lansky. Guy's name was Livingston. He supported all the local charities and churches and lived in a mansion in the middle of several hundred acres, where he threw famously extravagant parties.

Pauley Domo poked around and learned that the next one was going to be a fancy masked ball. He also managed to get an idea of the layout of the house and cased the roads around the place. It was common knowledge that Livingston was fond of young women, ten-year-old Scotch, and cocaine. Pauley figured, rightly as it turned out, that a couple of sexy flappers in a flashy car wouldn't have any trouble getting into such a gathering.

So, around eleven o'clock on a warm night, Hildy and Anna breezed up to Livingston's digs in a stolen Model A roadster. They wore feathered masks and beaded dresses so daringly cut that they were both falling out of them. They arrived with several other carloads of bright young things, and nobody said squat about invitations. Anna had objected to the way they were dressed, saying that they looked like cheap floozies, but once they got inside, she saw she was wrong. Everyone was in high spirits by then. One jazz band was playing inside and another one was out on the terrace. Waiters and waitresses carried food and drinks around, and you were never far from a bar. The only thing missing was their host. Anna, being the bolder of the two, led the way, and they found Livingston outside dancing.

They grabbed a couple of guys and maneuvered them onto the dance floor where Hildy managed to bump into Livingston and then apologized for spilling booze down his back. To prove that her apology was genuine and to show how thankful she was for this wonderful party, she wondered if he might want to join her and her friend Anna in a little toot and tickle.

Livingston suggested they repair to his special quiet spot in the garden. Pauley Domo and Vaughn met them on the way.

That part went as smooth as any job Pauley Domo ever pulled. Vaughn stuck a gun into Livingston's kidney while Pauley dropped a burlap bag over his head. They guided their man through a gap in a hedge to their car and sent Anna back for the stolen Model A. She said that was the part that really got to her more than the rest, going back into the party where everything was still going strong. She was sure everybody was looking at her funny, even though she had a mask on. A couple of guys grabbed her and tried to pull her onto the dance floor. She made it out, found the car, and saw that it had been blocked in by another car. She said to hell with it, banged fenders, and crashed out.

By the time she got back to the farm, Livingston had been locked in an outbuilding and the idiot brother had been given the job of taking care of him. They made sure that the brother gave Livingston plenty of food and as much booze as he wanted, figuring that was the easiest way to keep him in line. They never had any thought of killing him. None of them had the stomach for that. Vaughn left to go to a pay telephone at a gas station to call Livingston's lawyer. That's when they really got nervous. They knew this was the hard part.

Vaughn got through to the mouthpiece and told him that they had his boss and he had to get seventy-five thousand dollars. No cops. They didn't want to hurt anybody. Just the cash. Then he hung up and went back to the farm, where they sat down to wait.

The plan was that when the lawyer had the loot, they'd send him to another phone booth in Rike's department store in Dayton where Anna and Hildy would be watching. Vaughn would call the lawyer and send him to a second telephone in a drug store a few blocks away where he'd find a note taped to the bottom of the seat in the booth. The note told him where to make the money drop. Anna and Hildy would follow him from the first department store to the drug store to make sure that nobody else was tagging along. Pauley Domo would be waiting for the money at the drop. As soon as they'd counted the loot, Livingston would be sprung.

The next day, Vaughn called the lawyer, and the lawyer said he had the scratch, but there was no deal unless he could talk to Livingston. Vaughn hung up without answering and went back to the farm. They talked it over and came up with a plan. That afternoon, they put on masks, took the burlap off of Livingston's head, and poured an extra fifth of rotgut into him. Actually, Anna said, he sucked it right down.

After it got dark, they put the bag back on and drove him to the phone Vaughn had been using at a gas station. With a gun pressed against his back, Livingston yelled into the telephone, “Goddamnit, give these assholes whatever they want! Just get me outta here.”

They took him back to the farm, and the idiot brother locked him up again.

The next afternoon, Vaughn got into the banged up Model A. Pauley, Anna, and Hildy took the sedan they'd driven from Minnesota. It was clean, and Anna didn't want to be seen in the car that might be connected with the party. The women let Pauley off at the spot they'd picked. It was a small bridge on a rural road with woods on one side, where he could hide, and a field on the other. He was to tie a strip of torn sheet to a low tree limb and wait out of sight.

The women went to the drug store where Hildy taped the note to the seat in the phone booth. From there, they went to Rike's. Hildy went inside. Anna waited in the car outside the main door of the department store. She knew what the lawyer looked like. He was supposed to be in a dark brown Lincoln Model L. Around six thirty, she saw the big car pull to a stop, and a man she thought was the lawyer got out. He was carrying a bulging briefcase, and he was jumpy as he looked around on the sidewalk and went into the store. His chauffeur stayed in the Lincoln. Anna waited for what seemed like hours until Hildy came bustling out and got in the car.

She was excited, smiling. “It's gonna work,” she said. “He's got the money and he's in the phone booth talking to Vaughn.”

The lawyer came out directly and got back into the Lincoln. Off he went. Anna and Hildy followed. Again, everything looked like it was following the plan. The Lincoln double-parked in front of the drug store, and the lawyer, this time without the briefcase, went in and came out a few moments later. He and his driver went off in the right direction. While Anna stayed in the car and looked around to see if another car followed, Hildy went into the drug store and called Vaughn to tell him what was happening. If things had gone bad, Vaughn was ready to get to Pauley before the lawyer got there. It was just getting dark when she and Anna headed for the bridge.

Anna couldn't believe it when they got there and Pauly Domo came trotting out of the woods with the bulging briefcase in his arms and a slaphappy grin plastered across his face.

“We got it,” he said as he slid across the backseat. “It's here. The money. It's real. We did it!” And all three of them started yelling.

They were home free. It had worked perfectly.

When they got back to the farm that night, they found the stolen car that Vaughn had been driving parked out front. Anna pulled up next to it. Hildy jumped right out, and somebody shot her. She fell back halfway in the car, legs on the ground, hips on the running board.