Crossings (A Harry Reese Mystery Book 2) Read online

  “Their wives?” He leaned back to think this over. “Mrs. Barclay, definitely.” He smiled.

  “Yes, she is rather memorable.”

  “And I believe Mrs. Farrell was there, but perhaps in another room. I really have a hard time differentiating, I go on so many of these visits.”

  “Did you know William Huber at all?”

  “The name doesn’t sound familiar. Was he another Sovereign client?”

  “No, he was the agent who wrote the policies on Farrell and Barclay.”

  “Oh, I never noticed. They send around a form with a name, an address, and a telephone number. I make the appointment and examine the man. Then I fill out the form, sign it, and send it back.”

  “Were you surprised by how they met their deaths?”

  “I was told they both died through accidents.”

  “Yes, but both were apparently intoxicated.”

  “I can’t say it’s noteworthy that one night a man drinks to excess and has an accident. I suppose it’s a coincidence that it should happen to two men I visited a short time before. But what else can it be but a coincidence?”

  I couldn’t think of an answer, so I thanked him and headed back across the river for home. I’d planned on a quiet evening, but I could tell Emmie was anxious to follow me someplace. She’d discovered that following me to work in the morning was fruitless, but she was ready for any nighttime excursions. She had her satchel in the entryway, no doubt loaded with a costume change.

  I thought I’d play to her expectations. After dinner, I told her I needed to go out. She said that was fine, as she had some packing to do. I went up and took the Fulton Avenue L to Rockaway Avenue, then a car out to Canarsie, and finally came home via Church Avenue. It was after ten when she followed me in. And she didn’t seem terribly amused.

  6

  When I arrived at the Bureau Wednesday morning, there were two messages for me, one from Ratigan and another from Tibbitts. Ratigan had some information on the bucket shop for me, so I walked up to his office to see it. The principals of the bucket shop were Barclay and a fellow named Stauton. Stauton was the front man. He had inherited a legitimate brokerage but couldn’t make a go of it. Barclay came along and suggested they exploit the firm’s reputation with a more lucrative venture. They aimed for a more select clientele than the traditional bucket shop, and some of their clients may have believed they were actually buying and selling securities. Stauton had managed to leave town when the shop went bust and no one knew where he was.

  The client list had sixty-odd names, but it was assumed to be an incomplete list. They were mostly women, with a scattering of men. I didn’t see any Hubers or Farrells on the list. Of course, many names were probably aliases.

  “Is it any help?” Ratigan asked.

  “Not really,” I said. “I suppose these would be the same type of people who’d visit the races, or maybe a poolroom.”

  “Sure. Just a little more socially acceptable, especially for a woman.”

  “What did you learn about Haight & Jensen?”

  “They’ve been around a long time. They’re about as legit as they come. And there are no Hubers among their clients.”

  “If they’re so legit, why would they hire Barclay? I was told they wanted to attract women clients. Still, it’s an odd choice in a business where reputation is everything.”

  “Maybe that was part of it. But Barclay’s brother-in-law is a member of the firm, so that might have had more to do with it. And there aren’t many firms without some taint in their past. You have to keep in mind that on Wall Street cheating is just another form of cleverness, unless you have the bad luck to get caught.”

  I thanked him and returned to the Bureau to find Emmie rifling my desk. I watched her for a while, along with the other fellows. But when she started pulling out drawers and emptying them, I thought it best to intervene.

  “Hello, Emmie. How lovely of you to stop by.”

  “Oh, hello, Harry. I was just looking for that letter I gave you to mail.”

  “A letter to mail? I don’t remember any letter.”

  “Don’t you, dear?” Then she looked in her bag and made a show of surprise. “Oh, yes, here it is. It’s a letter to Aunt Nell. I realized I forgot to include something, and thought I had given it to you to mail.”

  This was a pretty typical Emmie explanation. I could poke all the holes in it I wanted, but I’d get nowhere. It would just keep getting more elaborate, and more illogical, until I gave up in exhaustion.

  “By the way, Harry,” she said. “There’s a message from Detective Sergeant Tibbitts here.”

  “Yes, they’re on to me, Emmie. Apparently Mr. Ahearn talked. I’ve decided to turn myself in.”

  Little and Cranston were sitting there open-mouthed. They’d both met Emmie before, but never seen her at her best. I escorted her downstairs and gave her a peck good-bye.

  “I won’t be home for dinner, Emmie.” As soon as the words had left my mouth I knew what I’d done.

  She was elated. “Won’t you, dear?”

  “You don’t have to sound so happy about it, Emmie.”

  “Oh, I’ll just be able to get more packing done if I don’t need to make dinner.”

  I went back upstairs and called Tibbitts. We arranged to meet for lunch and then I spent the rest of the morning putting my desk back together. The restaurant he had named was on Thames Street. I took a circuitous route as a precaution, just to make sure Emmie couldn’t follow. There are a lot of dark, cavern-like streets in lower Manhattan, but Thames Street is one of the darkest. And the place Tibbitts had chosen was on the dark side of the street. And the proprietors didn’t go in much for illumination. When my eyes finally adjusted, I found him waiting.

  “I hear you’ve been looking into Barclay’s bucket shop,” he said.

  “I guess you were the source of the list of clients?”

  “Yeah, I told you it was my case. But don’t count on that for much. Places like that don’t like to keep too many records.”

  “Yes, I know. It just seemed worth a try.”

  “What about the poolroom in Greenpoint?”

  “That’s a possibility. I’m looking into that, too.”

  “So you’re thinking maybe this Huber went to the bucket shop?”

  “Maybe. And if I’m lucky, maybe Farrell, too.”

  “Well, there is one person who might know.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A girl. She was mixed up in the bucket shop, as a shill. She knows how to put on an act, visited the right card parties and teas. Dropped hints about making money at the bucket shop. She got all weepy in court and the judge let her off.”

  “Would she agree to help?”

  “Sure, if I tell her to. I have an arrangement with her.”

  “What sort of arrangement?”

  “Last fall we uncovered this divorce ring. It was run by a lawyer named Zeimer. Say a woman is sick of her husband. She goes to this lawyer and he has a girl who will testify she’s been sleeping with the woman’s husband. Sometimes she probably did sleep with him. Well, it comes to trial and this Zeimer gets ten years. The girl goes all weepy and the judge lets her off. It’s the same damn girl using a different name.”

  “And no one noticed?”

  “No one but me.”

  “And you’ve kept it to yourself?”

  “Sure. That kind of thing keeps a pigeon loyal.”

  “Yes, I can imagine it would.”

  “I’ll talk to her and set something up.”

  I thanked him and when we parted I went over to Roosevelt Street and caught the ferry back to Williamsburg. From there, I hopped on a Metropolitan Avenue car, the one that went out to Maspeth. I arrived at the Queens County Pastime Club just as things were getting under way. This was another one of Minden’s places. It was larger than the other poolrooms, and the odds tended to be a little less unfriendly. Which I imagined was the reason people traveled the extra distance.
r />   Next I went over to Germania Hall in East Williamsburg, just over the line from Brooklyn. When you walked in the door, a man handed you a card. This entitled you to membership in the Tammany Club, and you were now eligible to lay your money down with the other suckers. This place was a little smaller and the clientele more local—lots of Germans from Williamsburg. I had no trouble finding people here who knew the Hubers. I didn’t ask specifically if they’d seen William there, just used the line I knew him in college and made my face known.

  I had another winning day. I liked this work, and decided to do what I could to keep the case open as long as possible. Not that there seemed any danger I’d come across a solution soon. I took a car back to the river and went into the Carleton. The bartender there recognized me and introduced me to a couple members of the Seawanhaka Boat Club. I sat and played cards with them and brought up Huber. I didn’t learn much, but one of the fellows had seen Huber with a particularly attractive woman a few times. Later, I ate dinner at the bar.

  About eight, I sauntered over to Minden’s Hotel. I went up the unmarked stairway and had no trouble gaining entrance mentioning the name Larabee. There was a faro bank, a craps table, and, of course, the roulette wheel. The room was large and dark, with a bar along one side. There didn’t seem to be much of a crowd, but it was early. I placed a couple bets and made some idle conversation. There was a young fellow I took to be a manager who hovered about watching the tables and talking with the customers.

  Another fellow addressed him as Al and asked him about business. “Kind of quiet tonight, isn’t it?”

  “Well, you know how it is,” Al answered. He was a nice-looking fellow, with a quick smile and an easy manner.

  “Yeah, I heard someone had the bad manners to raid you here last year.”

  “You know how it is.”

  “Sure. Is Bernie around?”

  “Down at the Le Roy,” Al said. “There’s more action down there now.”

  I studied the roulette wheel to see what Demming had been talking about. It didn’t seem like a work of art to me. The wheel was very slightly askew on its axis, so that one side of the wheel was always a little lower than the other. It seemed reasonable to conjecture the ball would be somewhat more likely to fall into a number on this side than the other. I made a couple bets based on my theory, but it didn’t pay.

  I took the L down Broadway to the Le Roy. The barroom was packed, but the gaming room I found upstairs didn’t seem much busier than at Minden’s Hotel. I spent some time chatting, lost some more of my winnings, and about eleven decided to head on home. I walked out of the Le Roy and ran into Sally Koestler. She and a small party were entering what looked like another German dance hall and she invited me to join them. The sign beside the door read Bayerischer Frauenverein Sorgenfrei. Applying my half-remembered college German, I roughly translated this as a club to relieve the anxieties of the women of Bavaria, the native soil of many of Williamsburg’s Germans.

  We entered a large hall, but there seemed to be nothing going on at all. From there, Sally led us into a smaller room, where some older women were playing whist. One of them looked over our group and then opened a door. Just beyond this door, there was a second, steel door. We went through and ascended a stairway, and at the top, yet another steel door opened at the sound of an electric bell. There was a little vestibule, and from there you entered a large room with a sort of mezzanine above. There was a band and a dance floor, and a bar tucked into a corner. Little tables and potted palms were scattered about, and there was no shortage of carved wood and marble. Though I didn’t see any gaming tables, it seemed obvious from the precautions that this was a resort—just nothing like the others I’d been to, more akin to the tea room at the Astor. And the similarity didn’t end with the tasteful interior. The clientele was almost all female.

  We sat down at a table and Sally introduced me to her friends, three young women and a fellow named Charlie Sennett she seemed particularly chummy with. He was about thirty, tall and well-dressed, with a thin mustache. Then Sally, rather abruptly, led me away from the table and upstairs to the mezzanine. This is where the gaming tables were, but she didn’t seem interested.

  “Listen, don’t mention to John you saw me here. He wouldn’t approve, and I don’t want any lectures.”

  “All right,” I agreed. “Did William ever come in here?”

  “Sure, but don’t tell John that either.”

  “All right,” I said. “Did you and William come in here together?”

  “No, he usually had some cooler on his arm. William and I were just friends.”

  “Did you catch the names of any of these coolers?”

  “I don’t remember any names, but usually tall and blonde.”

  By then her friends had joined us, so I excused myself and wandered about on my own. The crowd was a little thicker up here, but likewise mostly female. I made a few bets on the roulette wheel and then was startled to hear a fellow call out a greeting to “Larabee.” He was referring to the gentleman I knew as Demming. He greeted the other as Bernie. They spoke a while and then Demming came up beside me.

  “Let’s go downstairs for a drink,” he said.

  We bought drinks at the bar and took them to a table.

  “You didn’t tell me about this place,” I said.

  “Well, I didn’t think I’d need to. But it is quite a resort, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. How did Minden pull it off? Not many women would risk it.”

  “Oh, more than you might guess. But why do you think it was Minden’s idea?”

  “Just a guess. I heard you call that other fellow Bernie, and I heard a Bernie mentioned at Minden’s other resort.”

  “That was Bernie Bannon. He’s Minden’s right-hand man, a bookkeeper of sorts,” Demming said. “Minden manages this place, but it’s owned by the Frauenverein.”

  “A charitable organization?” I smiled.

  “Oh, yes, it is indeed. They get half the take. The key to its success is that the ladies regulate the clientele. Unescorted men are forbidden. As is smoking, and anything the ladies consider ungentlemanly.”

  “I suppose this Bernie Bannon would know if William Huber was in debt?”

  “Perhaps, but he’d never tell. By the way, what do you think of the roulette wheel at the place by the river? That was my design.”

  “Making it lopsided?”

  “Making it appear lopsided. It gave you the impression that numbers on one side would be more likely to hit than those opposite, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “But in fact, the face of the wheel is carefully crafted and the numbers on the opposite side are more likely to hit. By a factor of 6 to 5.”

  “So you rigged it to make it appear to the gambler he has an unfair advantage, when it’s actually working against him.”

  “Just so. You see, that’s the essential ingredient of any bunco. The mark must believe he’s the one with the edge. Once you convince him he’s taking advantage of someone else, he’ll go along with anything. The wheel here is far too crude.”

  “I didn’t notice anything odd.”

  “Well, if you look closely, you’ll see the man at the wheel jerk it slightly in one direction or the other before he spins it.” He then explained how the wheel had a mechanism that allowed the slots of one color to be widened and the others narrowed. So if the suckers had more bets on red numbers than on black, the man spinning the wheel could make sure a black number came up.

  “It sounds rather ingenious,” I said. “Why did you call it crude?”

  “Well, it’s an old trick. And it’s very easily detected on examining the wheel.” Sally and her party had sat back down at their table and Demming nodded in their direction. “Who’s your young friend? I saw you upstairs with her.”

  “Sally Koestler. She was a friend of Huber’s. I happened to meet her outside.”

  “If you care about her, steer her away from that Sennett character.”

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sp; “Do you know him?”

  “Of him. He has an unsavory reputation in the fraternity. A gambler, a bookmaker. But a cheat, as well.”

  If that was meant to convey opprobrium, it seemed an odd choice of word for a man who designed crooked roulette wheels. We were both ready to leave, so we made our way through the steel doors and back downstairs. The whist game was still going strong and several of the women greeted Demming by name. As Larabee, that is. I was about to ask Demming who his escort was, when he introduced me to Mrs. Larabee, who I assumed to be one and the same as Mrs. Demming.

  “Oh, Mr. Reese. How nice to meet you at last,” she said.

  I said something equally pleasant, but had to wonder what she meant by “at last.”

  “The Frauenverein was her idea, Harry,” Demming boasted.

  “Very ingenious,” I said. She was a small, older woman, and looked as if she’d be more at home knitting stockings before a hearth than running a resort.

  “Perhaps you could bring your wife to dinner some night?” she asked as we were leaving.

  “Oh, yes, that would be lovely,” I said—but without much conviction. Among people I least wanted Emmie to meet, proprietresses of casinos were ranked prominently.

  7

  It was late by the time I entered the apartment, and Emmie was in bed.

  “You’re really being childish, Harry,” she said. “I thought we’d have a modern marriage.”

  “You mean one where a wife loses her husband’s future earnings at the track and he finds it terribly amusing?”

  “You’re still punishing me for one tiny mistake I made months ago.”

  “I’m not punishing you, Emmie. I’m protecting you.”

  “Protecting me? Bah.” She turned away and muttered, “Now I know how Mrs. Ertel felt.”

  “Who’s Mrs. Ertel?”

  “She’s the woman who murdered her husband when he was unfaithful to her.”

  “I haven’t been unfaithful to you, Emmie.”

  “Oh yes you have. You’ve betrayed my expectations.”

  “Wasn’t the man Mrs. Ertel killed someone other than her husband?”