Рон Гуларт: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 5. Whole No. 777, May 2006

“Nothin’ going on there, lover. I swear on my soul, but I hear you. Joe and me won’t even speak on a single thing but Prison business — Big Dom business.” She paused and waited for the dismissive grunt she knew was coming, then left the room. Softly.

Guiseppe Cataldo Rudialaro was thirty years old and known throughout both the criminal and societal worlds of New York City as Joe Rudi. He had shared a misspent childhood and youth prowling the South Brooklyn streets and brothels with his lifelong friend, Alphonse Capone. And then, eight long years ago, in 1919, a local misfortune had befallen young Alphonse and driven him off into the protective womb of Chicago’s underworld.

Young Rudi had then taken up with Charles Luciano, a bootlegger and pimp known to one and all as “Lucky.” Joe had initially served as a low-rung enforcer and debt collector, gradually working his way up to occasional hit man. But later, as signs of Rudi’s awkward addiction to alcohol and games of chance had become apparent to Luciano, genuinely fond of young Joe, Lucky had assigned him a lesser role as overseer in Big Dom’s classy joint down in the Village. It had, after all, been Luciano’s money and booze, political juice and muscle, which had set Big Dom up in business, and as any Astor or Carnegie might do, Lucky had had the foresight to put friendly and loyal eyes and ears into the midst of his investment. Sometimes, Luciano well knew, a man made his own luck.

With Rudi serving as an extremely competent and enthusiastic bouncer for the speakeasy and brothel, Big Dom had harbored no complaints. It had been a win-win situation: a Luciano trademark. So far, for nearly three years, it had worked well.

Now, just before midnight, Rudi sat hunched over good English gin and clear ice while seated at the small, dim corner bar tucked at the rear of the brothel’s lounge. He watched with hooded, half-drunken eyes as two hookers worked a customer, swelling an imagination of sexual anticipation in the poor sucker that Joe knew even they, with the combined might of their considerable abilities, would never satisfy.

He slowly sipped at his gin and turned his attention back to Lily, who was perched sensuously on the black leather barstool beside him.

“I ain’t scareda no punch-drunk ex-pug,” he said, the cigarette- and alcohol-ravaged vocal cords in his throat grating on each syllable. “He can name his poison: fists, knives, guns, or better. I can take him three ways from Sunday.”

Lily smiled at him sweetly and patted gently at his hand where it was clenched tightly on the bar’s edge.

“I know that, sweetie,” she purred, her eyelids fluttering seductively as she thought: What predictable fools these thugs all are. “But, dearie, that’s not the point. The point is, Momma likes the moola, and Big Dom’s got the big pile. You come up just a little short in that department. So, we need to break it off — clean — grand as it all was.”

She leaned in closer, allowing her cleavage to compress and her five-dollar-a-bottle imported perfume to reach into his brain. Rudi’s face, at best impassive and bulldoggish, turned colder and meaner.

“There’s a name used for a dame talks like that,” he said, allowing more hiss into his usual rasp.

Lily pursed her lips. “But Joe, lover, you’re too much a class act to use that on me. You know, baby, nobody ever loved me better’n you, Joe. We’ll always have that.”

Joe Rudi had the education of a street orphan and the finesse of a Roman galley slave, but behind his hard dark eyes an animal’s cunning danced lightly and vigilantly.

He smiled at her, cold and cruel, sneering as he spoke.

“Bullshit, baby. You run those lines on the headwaiter and that newspaperman you got your eye on. Me and you, we ain’t got a damned thing. But startin’ night after tomorrow, right after the raid is done with, you can start skimmin’ a little more of the nightly take. Let’s say a C-note more. And then we’ll have us somethin’. That’s my price.”

Lily frowned. This did not sound right. She had been prepared for the roar of wounded manly pride and a painfully cut-off libido. But this. This sounded like greed. This she could respect, and it frightened her.

“Your price? But baby, your price for what?”

Rudi slipped an Old Gold between his thick lips and dug out a diamond-encrusted lighter. Its gold face was inscribed, “To my paisano, with friendship forever, Al.” He struck the flame and raised his eyes to hers. Still smiling around the cigarette, he now spoke softly.

“My price to not go see Big Dom. My price to not tell him about that cute little dimple you got on your left ass cheek. To not tell him... stuff. You know, dolly... stuff.”

Lily sat back on her stool. She had a sudden vision of a hospital emergency room, with doctors peering down at her face, horror in their eyes, blood running warm on her skin. Then, suddenly, the hot and smelly steaming kitchen of the Alimony Prison pushed into her mind’s eye and the chop-chop cadence of Chinese laborers began to echo within her head.

She didn’t know which image terrified her more, but she did know one thing: Neither was to her liking. No, she thought, this was not quite what she had in mind.

Lily was up and about early the next morning, eight o’clock, without a care that Dom would ever know she had left the cozy confines of their Sullivan Street townhouse. They had both rolled in at five A.M., after closing the Prison down and locking up the night’s receipts in the hidden safe. Big Dom had been good and drunk, and Lily knew he would not awaken until noon at the very earliest. And she planned to be back home long before that.

Lily quickly and quietly dressed in her best uptown clothes, as the nature of her errand made it best conducted away from the small-town intimacy of the twisting, tree-lined Village streets. Yes, it was better that she head for the hustle and bustle of Midtown, away from her local celebrity status — just another face in the great metropolitan crowd. She invested seventy-five cents in taxi fare and luxuriated in the comfort of an Oldsmobile’s rear seat, thankful for the grizzled cabby’s silence as he skillfully snaked through the workday traffic.

Later, a second cab sped her homeward, and she took leave of it at the corner of Sullivan and West Third, walking the last half-block to the townhouse. And when Big Dom awoke at one-fifteen that afternoon, Lily greeted him with a smile from their kitchen table.

“Morning, baby,” she said. “I’ve got some nice strong coffee for my big strong man. You sit down and let me serve it to you.”

Big Dom paused in the doorway, waiting for the bourbon to stop pounding in his temples. His bloodshot eyes took in the beauty of Lily, her full, lush body swelling the silk and satin nightgown she wore. He smiled. What a lucky son of a bitch he was, he thought. Had the world by the short ones, he did, and he would never give it up.

“Thanks, dolly,” he said. “While I’m drinkin’ it, you go get yourself ready for me. I need a little lovin’this morning.”

Lily went to the stove and poured black coffee into his favorite mug. Turning, she allowed the nightgown to slip itself open a bit. She smiled at his hulking mass, still hovering in the kitchen doorway.

“I’m sure glad to hear that, baby,” she cooed. “Nobody ever loved me better than you, Daddy. You hurry down this coffee. I’ll be waiting for you.”

At exactly ten o’clock that evening, three police vehicles rolled to a stop in front of the Alimony Prison. Lieutenant Francis Dermott McAdams, thirty-two years old and a strapping six feet two inches tall, climbed from the lead vehicle, a black Studebaker. Closing the door behind him, he leaned into the open passenger window and spoke to the patrolman sitting in the driver’s seat.