So when, precisely, had she become a lady boxer?
Coral sank back onto the thinly padded bunk beside her sister and told the rest of the story.
Some of the pinches had actually been pokes, and not all of them with a finger, either; at age twenty-one, on her own in New York City, she’d found herself in the family way, and she could only conceal her growing belly beneath the cigarette tray she wore at her job for so long. They fired her when they found out—what else could she expect?—and she found herself struggling at once both with morning sickness and a fast-declining balance in her bank account.
So she went to the man who’d knocked her up—no use for nicer language than that, it’s what he’d done—and told him she’d pay a visit to his fiancée, the daughter of a powerful and unforgiving man, if he didn’t restock her account on the double and keep it filled for the duration. It wasn’t blackmail, she felt; it was just collecting what she was due. A man should pay for his own child.
That child, Arthur Lyle Heverstadt, came howling into the world on January 4, 1955, in the middle of a terrible snowstorm that snarled traffic on the way to the hospital. She gave birth, in fact, in the frigid back seat of a checker cab, the driver—who kept repeating that he’d been a medic at Guadalcanal—helping with the delivery from the folded-down jumpseat beside her.
“Not really,” Tricia said, interrupting her sister at this improbable juncture. “You didn’t really have a baby in the back of a taxicab, did you?”
Coral nodded. “It sounds worse than it was. He got me to St. Vincent’s eventually, and the baby was fine. He’s three now, Artie. Almost four.”
“Artie.”
“He’s the sweetest child, Patty.”
“And that’s the man you live with,” Tricia said. “The one you couldn’t tell me about the day I came to town. The reason you didn’t let me stay with you, not even for one night.”
“I didn’t want you to know,” Coral said. “I didn’t want mama to know.”
“I wouldn’t have told her.”
“You say that now,” Coral said.
“Who watches him while you’re working? Who’s with him now?”
“A couple of other girls who live there. They help me out and I give them a few bucks when I can.”
Tricia nodded slowly. “And you became a boxer how?”
Coral shrugged. “A baby has to eat. His mother, too. I took the work I could get. I’m not eighteen anymore, Patty. I’m not twenty-one. I’ll be twenty-five next year, I’ve had a kid, and there’s a new crop of bright young things each year for the men in this town to look at.”
“Like me, you mean.”
“Like you,” Coral said. “Look at you, blonde as anything. What’d he call you? Trixie?”
“It was your idea, giving a fake name,” Tricia said. “Colleen.”
“The two of us,” Coral said softly. “If mama could see us now.”
“I still don’t understand how you ended up...like this. I thought you were working as a dancer.”
“I was—I worked at a club called the Moon run by a man named Nicolazzo.”
“Uncle Nick,” Tricia said.
“You know him?”
“I’m sorry to say I do,” Tricia said. “I work for him too. At the Sun.”
“No—really? Doing what? Dancing?” Tricia nodded. “That’s funny. I worked there for a while, but only after hours. Cleaning.” Coral brushed her hair out of her face, uncovering a darkening bruise on one cheek. “Well, I’m sure dancing at the Sun’s a whole other story. At the Moon it was horrible.”
“Worse than getting punched in the face?”
“Oh, yeah,” Coral said. “Much. On your feet for hours at a stretch every night. Every sort of man pressing up against you, thinking you’re his for a handful of dimes. I’d rather take a punch any day.”
“So Nicolazzo made you a fighter,” Tricia said. “And now he thinks you robbed him.”
“He does?”
“Either that or he thinks you know who did. That’s why he’s got you here. It’s why he’s got me. And he just killed a man for less. I saw him do it.”
Coral sank her head into her hands. “Patty,” she said, after a moment, “I need you to promise me something. If you get out of this and I don’t, you’ll take Artie back home to Aberdeen.”
“Don’t even talk like that.”
“I’ve got to,” Coral said.
“No.”
“I do,” Coral said. “You see, Nicolazzo’s right. I did rob him.”
“What are you talking about?” Tricia said. “What do you mean you...Cory, why would you do that?”
“Stella told me about this book she’d seen. That gave me the idea,” Coral said. “I didn’t seriously plan to do it. But all that money—you know what I could do with a tenth part of that much money? You know the clothes and things I could buy for Artie? For me?”
“But stealing from a man like Nicolazzo—”
“I know, I know.” She wiped the back of one hand against her eye. “It was stupid. But you know, it came in baby steps. There was an opening on the cleaning crew at the Sun. So I asked if I could do a couple afternoons a week, and they said yes. And there I am, washing the dishes and cleaning the carpets, and I can’t stop thinking about that book. The big safe in the back, like Stella described it. I didn’t want to think about it, but you spend a couple of hours polishing floors and your mind starts to wander.”
“Cory...”
“No, listen. I was thinking about it but I wasn’t going to do anything—it was just something to daydream about. But then one day I’m working there and I hear some banging. You know, hammering. And my first thought is, It’s maintenance, they’re fixing something. But my second thought is, This is like that book. Maybe someone’s breaking in. And part of me is thinking, I’d better stay away. But the other part’s thinking, Why? Maybe this is my one big chance.” She reached out for Tricia’s hands, held them in her lap. “So I finish up what I’m doing and start hunting around, where I heard the sound coming from, and when I get there what do you think I find? There’s a door standing open with the knob cut out and sure enough the safe’s there, and its door’s open, too. And the thing’s been emptied!”
“Emptied?” Tricia said. “Then someone else robbed him, not you.”
“Well,” Coral said. “Not completely emptied. There was a box in the very back, a flat leather box in the corner. It was dark. Whoever’d been there before me must have missed it.”
“And you took it?”
“It was small,” Coral said, squeezing Tricia’s hands tight enough that it hurt. “I didn’t even look inside till I got it home. I just grabbed it and ran.”
“And what was in it?”
Before Coral could answer, they both heard the key in the lock, then the click of a gun being armed. “Ladies,” Mitch said through the door, “I’m coming in.”
15.
The Gutter and the Grave
“What was in it?” Tricia whispered. “Coral, quick!”
“Pictures,” Coral whispered back.
“Ladies?” Mitch called. “Make some sound so I know you hear me.”
“We hear you,” Tricia shouted. “And we’re nowhere near the door.” Then in a low voice to Coral, “What sort of pictures? You mean like dirty pictures?”
“Not the way you mean,” Coral whispered, her words all rushing together. “It was dead people, murdered, lying in the street. There was one where they shot a man outside a bar, he was lying in the gutter, must’ve had fifteen bullet holes in him. And you could see who shot him. They were standing over him with their guns out.”
“You recognize who they were?”
“Yeah, one of them was—”
But the door had swung open and Mitch had walked in, gun extended before him in one hand. “What are you girls gossiping about?”