“I didn’t know this establishment was high-class enough to maintain B-girls in the middle of the day,” one of the men said, a slightly chunky guy of maybe twenty with the beginnings of a beard ambitiously darkening his cheeks.
“She’s not asking you to buy her a drink, Larry,” the other said. He was clean-shaven, slight, slightly older. “She’s offering to buy you one. And me one, I believe.”
“Then I’m hopelessly confused. Miss, don’t you have it backwards?”
Tricia hopped up on the stool beside them, put a dollar on the bar. The place, having just opened at noon, was empty aside from them and the bartender. “Not in the slightest. I do want you to help me out, but not by buying me drinks. I’ll supply the alcohol, if you’ll help me work through a problem I have in a book I’m writing for Charley Borden.”
“A book!” Larry exclaimed, taking a beer from the bartender with a grateful nod. “Did you hear that, Don? This young lady is writing a book. We have an authoress in our midst. What sort of book is it, madam? Ah, no need to answer that. If Borden’s your publisher, it can only be one of two things: a crime novel or a sex novel. And I don’t picture a nice girl like you writing pornography.”
“Pornography?” Tricia said. “I thought he only published Hard Case Crime.”
“That’s all he writes on the window,” Don said, “and it’s what he shows off on his desk. One of these days you might ask him about the books he keeps in his desk drawer.”
“By authors such as we,” Larry said. “Us? We or us?”
“Us,” Don said.
“Us,” Larry concurred. They clinked beer glasses.
“So you’re not mystery writers?” she said, fighting to keep the disappointment out of her voice.
“Oh, we’re that, too,” Larry said. “We’re every kind of writer.”
“Except the well-paid kind,” Don said. “For five hundred dollars we’ll write mysteries, war stories, space operas, sex books. Hell, I wrote a travel guide to Berlin once for three hundred.”
“And he’d never even been to Berlin,” Larry said.
“Perfect,” Tricia said. “You see, I’m writing a book about a mobster and it’s supposed to be a true story. And I want to have him steal all the money out of his boss’ safe and get away with it. But you have to figure the safe would be guarded, and...well, I’ve seen you two at the office, I know you’ve written several books for Mr. Borden, and I just thought maybe you’d have some thoughts about how it could be done. Something nice and clever, but not too clever—it’s got to be plausible enough that readers could believe it really happened.”
“And why,” Larry said, “should we come up with a perfectly good plot and hand it over to you, when we could get a book out of it ourselves?”
“You’re forgetting,” Don said, “she’s supplying the alcohol.”
“Ah, yes,” Larry said. “I was. That’s fine then.” He scratched at his beard. “Let’s see. A robbery. What can you tell us about the place this guy’s supposed to rob?”
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.”