Between 50th Street and 47th, the piers were overgrown with grass and weeds, but a profusion of boats still stood at them, bobbing gently, while others rode at anchor just off some the longer outcroppings of the shore. Mike scanned the hulls, looking for any names longer than a word or two. “How much farther?” he asked. And, each time they came to a pier, “Is this the one?” But Kraus just shook his head, kept his gaze trained on the ground, and concentrated on putting one frail leg in front of the other.
Only when they reached the far end of the avenue did Kraus take one last look at his watch and say, “All right.”
“Where’s the boat?” Mike said, staring at the empty pier they were approaching.
“There,” Kraus said, and pointed out toward the horizon. There was a ship in the middle distance, chugging swiftly toward the open water. It wasn’t so far that Mike couldn’t make out figures on her deck. One of them looked like it might be Charley.
Mike rounded on the old man, had to restrain himself from picking him up bodily by the lapels and shaking him. “You knew,” he said accusingly. “You—that’s why all the time with the watch. Jesus Christ. I bet you can probably walk just fine.”
“Sadly, no,” Kraus said.
“But you can do better than creeping along like this, can’t you? You were making sure they had time to get away!”
“You said all you wanted to know was where I dock the boat,” Kraus said. “Well, now you know. I dock it here. You got what you paid for.”
“But why...why would they leave now? I thought they weren’t going to leave till tonight—” Mike closed his eyes. “They changed their plans, didn’t they. That’s what the phone call was—telling you they were leaving early. As long as they’re collecting the money from Tricia tomorrow morning, they can pick up the purse from the race then, too.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kraus said. “And I don’t want to know. I’m going back now. You don’t have to walk with me.”
“Walk with you?” Mike growled. “I ought to throw you in the goddamn bay.”
“Don’t you dare,” Kraus said. “I’ll scream if you touch me. You’ll have the police on you so fast, young man, you won’t know what hit you.”
“You know something,” Mike said, “it’d almost—
40.
Money Shot
—be worth it,’ I told him.” Mike shook his head. “But of course it wouldn’t have been. It would’ve been a disaster. So I left him there and grabbed the first train back.” He swallowed the shot of whiskey he’d poured himself from the row of bottles on his back bar. “I hope you had better luck.”
“Not exactly,” Tricia said.
“So you didn’t find the money?” Erin said.
“Do you see three million dollars on me?”
“What happened?” Mike said. “Where did you go?”
“To Fulton Street,” Tricia said.
The brownstone was where she’d left it, looking much the way it had at dawn. She watched from across the street as men entered and departed, one by one or in pairs. She didn’t recognize any of them. The limousine wasn’t parked out front or, the one time she circled the block to peek at the building from the rear, out back either. There were some cars along the curb, but no way to know whether they belonged to Barrone and his men or to the neighbors.
The curtains were drawn in the windows all the way up, except for one room at the top where the window was open. It was too high up for Tricia to see in, though.
She thought about walking up the stone steps and ringing the doorbell, trying to talk her way in, but it wasn’t hard to imagine more ways that could turn out badly than well. So she waited, and she watched.
Renata came out twenty minutes later. She was by herself, Tricia was happy to see, wearing a patterned sundress in red and white and cat’s eye sunglasses with her hair pinned up. She looked a bit like an actress trying to go incognito. Tricia fell into step behind her. She kept half a block back, kept other pedestrians between them, but at the same time kept an eye on Renata, watched to see where she’d go. And when she stopped outside a dressmaker’s window to light a cigarette, Tricia took the opportunity to come up behind her and plant the nose of her gun in the small of Renata’s back.
“Don’t turn around,” Tricia said.
“Ah, Tricia,” Renata said, flipping her lighter closed and replacing it in the clutch purse she was carrying. “You think I didn’t know you were there?” She didn’t turn, didn’t look back over her shoulder, but they could each see the other’s face reflected in the darkened store window beside them. “I spotted you the moment I stepped outside.”
“I don’t believe you,” Tricia said. “If you had, you’d never have let me get the drop on you.”
“Drop? What drop?” Renata laughed. “You dumb cluck. There are three men watching us right now who’ll shoot you the moment I give the signal.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s the signal?”
She wagged the cigarette between her fingers. “I drop this on the sidewalk. Grind it out under my toe. It’ll be the last thing you see. Unless you walk away right now.”
“I can pull this trigger before they get me.”
“I doubt it,” Renata said. She didn’t seem nervous at all. She took a long pull on the cigarette, exhaled a mouthful of smoke. “Not going? All right. Have it your way. What do you want?” She raised the cigarette. “You don’t have much time left.”
“The money,” Tricia said. “Where is it?”
“What money?”
“The money you took from your uncle’s safe. The three million dollars.”
Now Renata began to laugh in earnest, really laugh, so hard her shoulders shook from it. “Oh, god. That’s rich. You think I took it.”
“Yes, I do,” Tricia said. “You took your uncle’s money, and then spent the past month holed up in your father’s headquarters for protection. I don’t know if you planned it together or you did it on your own, but he must know about it now because he’s been keeping out of sight too—lying low with you for the past month, trying to keep you safe. That went on until this morning, when poor Eddie barged in on you and you decided you had a sacrificial lamb you could turn over to Uncle Nick to get the heat off you once and for all.”
“What an imagination,” Renata said. “A headshrinker would probably say it’s because of all the loving you’re not getting—oh, yes, Charley told me about you, Miss Knees Together.”
Tricia pressed the gun against the base of Renata’s spine. “Keep talking. You’ll spend the rest of your life in a chair.”
“Touchy, aren’t we?” Renata burned off some more of the cigarette with another drag, then held it up to show off its rapidly diminishing length. “Sure you don’t want to go now? I would if I were you.”
It wasn’t that Tricia wasn’t tempted—what if there really were three gunmen drawing a bead on her right now?—but she shook her head. “Are you telling me,” she said, “that you didn’t take Eddie to your uncle’s earlier today? That you didn’t kill him? Because your uncle told me otherwise.”
“No, Tricia, I’m not telling you that. I’m telling you I didn’t take his money.”
“And I’m saying you’re a liar,” Tricia said. “You lied to your uncle about Eddie, certainly. And why would you have lied about who stole the money if you didn’t do it yourself?”
“How do you know Eddie didn’t do it?” Renata said. “The man confessed.”
“Yeah, he confessed—to stealing both your uncle’s money and his photographs,” Tricia said. “But I know who stole the photos, and it wasn’t him.”