The Devil’s Daughter, page 9
“But you know about those rumors, don’t you? About the girls?” I watch Lillian’s face for a reaction.
“That has nothing to do with me.”
“Have you seen Garrett with them? Somebody told me he makes movies starring those girls. What do you know about that?”
She’s barely touched her sandwich but reaches into her purse for her wallet. “Nothing, and I’m through talking to you.”
“Lillian, if you haven’t actually seen him with the girls, how do you know if the rumors are true?”
“Because I’ve seen the poor things after he’s through filming them,” she says and snaps her purse shut. It’s an inadvertent admission, but just the one I’m looking for.
Lillian gets to her feet and heads for the door. I call after her, “What can you tell me about the daughter, Lillian—about Lucy?”
“Lucy Garrett?” Lillian closes her eyes for a moment, then says, “Lucy Garrett is the devil incarnate,” and walks out.
CHAPTER 17
I’m sitting in Washington Square Park, watching a beagle sniff at a basset hound’s behind. Their owners, two young women with Beat affects—one is actually wearing a beret and black leotards—are holding their dogs’ leashes, smoking cigarettes, and chattering about an exhibition they saw at the Cooper Union. V is out in Montauk working for a few days, and I’ve been sleeping in. This morning I got up around ten, stopped in at Sal’s on Bleecker for a cruller and a white coffee to go, and walked over to the park to read the paper before going into my office on Canal. It’s a beautiful November morning, the sun is out and the air cool and crisp, but all I can think about is where Louis Garrett has those movies stashed and how I can get hold of them. Assuming I can somehow, I could hand them over to Jimmy Mullen, but the problem with that is the films alone don’t really prove anything. I’m sure the girls in them look plenty young, but unless I can find one who’s willing to come forward and tell the DA exactly how old she was when the films were shot, they aren’t enough. Still, it’s a place to start.
I’ll need to get inside, but the question is how? I could try to talk Lillian Crouse into helping me out, but that would take a lot of convincing, and I can’t really blame her if she doesn’t want to get involved. Lillian might think Lucy Garrett is the devil, but she’s the sole support of her mother and probably wants to hang on to her job. I couldn’t get a good read on Burton, Garrett’s butler, but he didn’t strike me as the type to turn on his boss either. Actually, he seemed more the type to be working the camera while Garrett got his jollies slapping those girls around. There’s Bob Carson, but I’m still not sure how he fits in. He claims he’s like an uncle to Lucy, but that might mean almost anything. If I’m going to have any chance of getting at those films, I’ll have to get into Garrett’s duplex when nobody’s around, and that’s a tall order. I’ll have to stake out the Beresford and watch not only for Garrett’s comings and goings but Lillian’s and Burton’s as well. I’ll have to get past the doorman too, and I’m trying to figure out just how to do that when the first shot whizzes past my cheek and ricochets off a tree behind me.
The guy from Philly is on the other side of the park, firing his automatic as he comes running toward me. The young women walking their dogs scream and duck for cover.
I hop over the back of the bench, dash through a thicket of bushes, scramble over a wrought iron fence, and tumble out onto MacDougal Street. The guy keeps firing away, but he keeps missing. It’s not necessarily that he’s a bad shot, but firing a handgun from a distance and hitting a moving target is a lot harder than it looks. I race down MacDougal just as he clears the fence. There’s a narrow alley between two of the old town houses lining the street, and I dart down it. It runs perpendicular to another alley, but one end of it is closed off by a fence topped with razor wire and the other is blocked by a lumbering garbage truck. I’m trapped.
I hear the guy coming. I’m not carrying a piece of my own, and when I look around, the only thing resembling a weapon is a No Parking sign set in a heavy cement stand. The guy barrels around the corner ready to smoke me, but adrenaline being what it is, I pick the sign up over my head and brain him with it.
I hadn’t really meant to kill him. Fracturing his skull would have been enough to do the trick, but blood and bits of his brain are matting his hair and spreading across the pavement. Now, I could call Jimmy Mullen and try to explain myself. Obviously, it was self-defense, but I already told Mullen and Rothstein that when I put away the slab of cement. I’m not sure they’ll buy that excuse a second time.
I do have an alternative though: friends in low places, friends I’ve helped out of more than one jam, and I’m fairly sure they’ll return the favor. I wedge the body under a dumpster and hustle over to a phone booth on West Fourth. I ring O’Doul’s from there, and when Kevin answers, I ask him if the Dugan brothers are around.
Joe and Eddie Dugan work as muscle for a few of the local shakedown artists, and I’ve known them since they were kids picking pockets in Times Square. Eddie gets on the phone, and I say that if he and Joe don’t have anything better to do, there’s a stiff under a dumpster in an alley behind MacDougal Street that needs collecting. I tell him there’s a couple of hundred in it for each of them, but Eddie says he won’t take my money. I give him the address, and he tells me I shouldn’t hang around, that he and Joe will take care of it. I thank him, hang up, and walk away.
That night I meet Carmine out in Sheepshead Bay. He’s fishing off Pier Two on Emmons Avenue. Seeing that Carmine spends most of his days at the Fulton Fish Market, you’d think trying to catch fluke and flounder in the middle of the night is the last thing he’d want to do, but he says fishing relaxes him. He also says that his wife Estelle’s snoring is prodigious and that the sea air beats staring at his television set’s test pattern.
“Some mook tried to kill me this morning,” I tell Carmine, but if he’s surprised, he doesn’t show it.
“Which mook is that?” he asks, and I tell him that I’m not sure.
“He was out of Philly, I know that, but that’s all I know.”
“Was?”
“Yeah. Let’s just say the guy won’t be going back home anytime soon, not upright anyway.”
I know that Vito Genovese has a lot of clout with Joe Ida, the head of the Philly mob. In fact, a lot of people think that Ida’s crew is just a franchise of the Genovese crime family. I have no problem with Ida and I’m pretty sure Joe has nothing against me, so the guy who tried to tap me must have been working freelance. Still, I figure he had to be connected—meaning Carmine might know who he is and who sent him.
“What did he look like?” Carmine wants to know. I tell him short, dark, a lousy dresser, good with a knife, not so good with a gun.
“Big schnoz?” he asks.
“Yeah, I guess you could say that.”
“Dante Cerone. Dante’s one of Ida’s guys, but he hires himself out when things get slow.”
“Who do you think sent him?”
Carmine bites into the salami-provolone-and-peppers panini he’s brought along, then says to me, “You didn’t leave that business with Garrett alone, did you?” and when I tell him that I didn’t, Carmine says, “There’s your answer.”
“But Garrett has no reason to gun for me—didn’t until recently, anyway. Besides, who’d hook him up with Cerone?”
“He doesn’t need to be hooked up, Jack. Garrett knows guys. None of those Wall Street types have clean hands.”
“That’s what Lansky told me.”
“Yeah? Well, Meyer would know, wouldn’t he?” Carmine tosses the rest of his sandwich to a passing seagull.
CHAPTER 18
I own a car, a 1949 forest-green Nash Rambler with four on the column. I keep it in the garage Lynn Murphy owns near the Lincoln Tunnel. Lynn changes the points and plugs a couple of times a year and charges me twelve bucks a month to garage it. I don’t drive it around town, that’s more trouble than it’s worth, but V bought a cottage in the Berkshires a couple of years ago and she likes to drive up there on weekends when we can both get away.
The Rambler also comes in handy when I’m on a stakeout. There’s nothing worse than standing on a street corner in the middle of the winter freezing my ass off waiting for a cheating husband and his paramour to appear so I can take their picture.
I find parking on West Eighty-First Street outside the Beresford where I can keep an eye on both the building’s front and side entrances. I’ve been here for the better part of a week now, clocking Garrett’s household. Lillian is easy to track. She comes into work at eight every morning, puts in a nine-hour day, and takes the subway back to Queens in the evening around five. Burton doesn’t show up until ten. He ducks into the side entrance and doesn’t reappear until one or two in the morning. A limousine picks up Garrett just before the stock market opens, and I assume his driver takes him to an office on Wall Street because he’s always home an hour after the market closes. I haven’t seen Lucy. There could be any number of reasons for this, but my bet is either her father has locked her in her room and thrown away the key or she’s taken off again.
I spot Lillian leaving the building and hailing a cab. She’s too conscientious to take off in the middle of the morning, and it’s too early for lunch. She must have an appointment of some sort, which I take as my cue to make a move. The building’s loading bay and freight elevator are around the back. The Beresford’s management hired a guard to keep watch there, but the guy’s a rummy and drinks on the job. I’m not exactly a master of disguise, but I’m good enough to get past him. I put on a work shirt and a pair of overalls with “Al” stitched in red thread on the front pocket, which I have stowed in the trunk of my car, grab the toolbox and bathroom plunger I borrowed from Lynn, and tell the rummy I’m the plumber.
He buys this because he’s in the bag and has no reason not to. I get on the freight elevator, close the cage, ride it up to Garrett’s floor, and step into a narrow utility alcove off the duplex’s kitchen. There’s a locked door here, but the lock doesn’t take long to pick. Nobody’s in the kitchen, so I slip into the duplex as quietly as I can. I might get lucky and somehow run across Garrett’s dirty movies, making this little caper especially worthwhile, but the apartment is so enormous that doesn’t seem likely. Still, it’s worth a shot.
Lillian’s desk sits outside Garrett’s library. I pad over to it and take a look in her diary. I’m right. “Dr. Anderson” has been penciled in at eleven thirty, and I’m guessing that she won’t be back for at least another hour.
Burton is around here somewhere so I have to be careful, but I’m in luck: there’s music coming from the library, something classical I don’t recognize, and the library door is ajar. I peek through the crack in it and see Burton sitting with his feet up on Garrett’s antique desk, smoking one of his boss’s cigars and reading the newspaper. He doesn’t see me, but when I turn around and start to creep away, I nearly collide with Gertie, Garrett’s housekeeper.
“That upstairs toilet is clogged again, ain’t it?” she asks.
“Yeah. I’m kinda lost though. Maybe you could show me the way.”
Gertie Hess, dressed in a gray maid’s outfit complete with a lace cap, leads me up a staircase to the duplex’s second floor and into Garrett’s bedroom. It’s bigger than my apartment, and I let out an involuntary whistle. She smiles and says, “How the other half lives, huh?” and points me toward Garrett’s bathroom. I rattle around in there for a while, banging on the pipes and the porcelain in case Gertie’s suspicious and still in the bedroom.
After a few minutes, I pop my head out, see that she’s gone, and begin looking around. The bedroom’s decor is understated and masculine. There’s art on the walls, signed Lautrec and Matisse lithographs. The books on Garrett’s bookshelf are bound in leather but look like they’ve never been cracked and read. I open an inlaid teak jewelry box that he keeps on his bureau. In it are sterling silver cuff links, gold shirt studs, and three expensive-looking watches. Garrett’s bedroom window overlooks the Hayden Planetarium, and there are kids playing in the park that surrounds it. It’s all very impressive, but there’s no way he’s stashed those films in here, not with Gertie coming in to clean, and the duplex is so massive that it could take me days to find out where he does keep them. I don’t have that kind of time, so instead of craft, I’m going to have to charm Gertie into telling me where they are—that’s if she knows.
Gertie lives out in Canarsie. She’s forty-five and plump but wears a wedding ring, so sweet-talking her into showing me around isn’t going to be easy. I head back downstairs to look for her. I hear her in the kitchen, wander in there, and ask her for a glass of water.
It’s a working stiff’s kind of request, and Gertie says sure, but tells me there are beers in the fridge and maybe I’d like one of those instead. It’s just the icebreaker I’m looking for. She retrieves a couple of bottles of something imported, grabs a church key from out of a utility drawer, and we both sit at the kitchen’s Formica table. I crack open the beers and hand her one. Gertie pulls a pack of Camels out of her apron pocket, offers me one, and we both light up.
“How long have you been working here?” I ask, and she tells me that it’s only been a couple of months.
“Nobody lasts too long,” she says, “but the pay’s good so I’ll stick it out for as long as I can.”
“Did all the others quit?”
“That or they got fired. Mr. Garrett isn’t easy to work for. He’s very particular. Like if I don’t make his bed so tight that you can bounce a dime off it, he gets annoyed.”
“Is he married?”
Gertie hesitates, then says, “You know what? I don’t think I should say. I mean the man deserves his privacy and I work for him, so—”
“Aw, c’mon Gertie. The housekeeper always knows the gossip. What’s this guy’s real story?”
Gertie takes a long pull on her beer, swallows hard, sizes me up for a moment, then cracks a smile. “Who are you, Mr. Nosy? Why do you want to know anyway?”
“I’m just curious is all. I mean, a guy with all that dough. It’s not like he found it in a paper bag in the gutter. How’d he come by it anyway?”
“How should I know? Rich guys don’t talk to the help.”
“But you hear things, right?”
Gertie takes another sip of beer, then says, “I think he was once. Married, I mean.”
“What happened to her?”
“The wife? No idea. Look, if I tell you something, do you promise to keep it to yourself? I’m serious now, don’t repeat it to anyone.” After I nod and say that I won’t, Gertie stubs out her cigarette and says, “He’s got girls coming in and out of here all the time.”
“Why’s that a big secret?”
“They’re young. I mean, really young. And they don’t look too happy when he’s done with them.”
I don’t want to jump on this too hard. If I do, Gertie’s liable to get suspicious and clam up. My best move is to let her run with it without too much prompting.
“They’re all really upset when they leave,” she says. “You know, crying like he did something terrible to them. I don’t know what that something is, and to tell you the truth, I’d just as soon keep it that way.”
“How young is young?”
“They look like school kids to me. The thing that I don’t get is that he’s got a daughter the same age.”
“And she’s here while all this is going on?”
“She was. A couple of guys showed up the other day and took her away. I don’t know what that was all about either, but she was screaming her head off when they did.”
This isn’t necessarily surprising. When the wives or kids of the well-heeled are too hard to handle or just plain nuts, sometimes they get sent off to a sanatorium to cool down, but I’m pretty sure the explanation for dragging away Lucy is a lot more complicated than that.
“Did her father say anything when they took her?”
“He said she’d brought it on herself. I don’t know what that means, but he said it.”
It means Rex Halsey’s story wasn’t entirely horseshit. He and Lucy must have thought they could leverage Rex’s pimping for Garrett against him. Not only was that a mistake, but it’s why Lucy was carted off and why Halsey ended up floating face down in the East River.
“You’ll keep all this to yourself, right?” Gertie reminds me. “Because I’m not supposed to know about any of it. Mr. Garrett would kill me if he thought I did.” She doesn’t mean this literally, but it may not be too far from the truth. “Not that I worry about it too much though. He doesn’t really notice me. I mean, I’m the maid. I doubt the guy even knows my name.” Gertie slips her pack of Camels back into her apron pocket and gets to her feet. “Listen, it’s been really nice talking to you, but I got a lot of work to do.”
“Me too,” I say and collect the empty beer bottles off the table while Gertie rinses out our ashtray in the kitchen sink. I dump the bottles in the trash and head for the door, but before I go, I can’t resist asking, “Where does all this happen? I mean, where does he take those girls?”
“There’s a suite of rooms upstairs that I’m not supposed to go near, but I saw him come out of there once. I think he films them. I didn’t get a real good look, but I thought I saw a camera on a tripod and there’s padding all over the walls like they’re soundproof or something.”
The Baroness was right. Garrett gets off filming the girls, then later—later I don’t want to think about. And that suite must be where he has the movies stashed. “Do you think you could take me up there? I don’t want to get you in trouble or anything, but I’d love to get a look for myself.”
“I couldn’t even if I wanted to. It’s all locked up tight as a drum, and Mr. Garrett’s got the only key.”
CHAPTER 19
When I get home, V is sitting on the couch in the living room. She has her feet tucked up underneath her, and she’s reading. V reads a lot. She regrets dropping out of high school and is determined to do something about it. She takes classes at the New School whenever she has the time and stops in at the Eighth Street Bookshop for a paperback a couple of times a week. Her tastes are eclectic: the Russians, the English Romantics, Agatha Christie, Hemingway and Fitzgerald of course, and that kid Mailer everybody keeps shouting about. Tonight she’s reading John O’Hara.
