Hard Case Crime: Fifty to One by Charles Ardai Read Free Book Online

ride. Dancing wasn’t her only ambition. She meant to visit the Algonquin Hotel, where Dorothy Parker and those other writers had congregated; she meant to write some Talk of the Town pieces for the New Yorker, perhaps about a country girl’s impressions of the big city. She hadn’t considered writing a story about mobsters, but...why not? For a penny a word, she’d give him all the story he could handle.
    They’d shaken on it. “You’re on,” she’d told him.
    But now here she was, deep inside, or as deep as a girl could get in one week, and so far there was no sign of illegal gambling, nothing to suggest anything untoward was going on at all. Sure, there were some men who loomed when they stood and whose tailored tuxedo jackets bulged suspiciously at the armpit. But those might be off-duty cops, hired to protect a rich man and his date for the evening—or even on-duty cops, for all she knew, casing the place for the same reason she was. There were some sideways glances she’d noticed from men as she left the floor at the end of her act, and once or twice a napkin pressed into her palm with a telephone or hotel room number written on it, but what girl didn’t have that sort of thing happen, even if she wasn’t dancing under a follow-spot in a halter top? It hardly made the Sun one of your worse dens of iniquity.
    Nicolazzo himself (a brooding, heavy-browed man with what looked like a jagged scar along one cheek, judging by the newspaper photos she’d dug up at the library) so far hadn’t shown his face in the club.
    Taking off her makeup after the second show one night, Tricia asked Cecilia if she’d seen anything out of the ordinary.
    “Like what?” Cecilia said. She was peeling off a set of fake eyelashes as she spoke.
    “I don’t know,” Tricia said. “You hear stories about clubs like this. What goes on in the back rooms.”
    “Sure,” Cecilia said. “The last place I worked, the boss lined all the girls up at the start of every week and he pointed—you, you, and you. And if you were one of the ones he pointed at you had to go back to his office with him, where he had this big fold-out couch, a Castro, you know? And if you didn’t go, you were fired. And everyone knew it.”
    “Is that why you left?”
    She nodded. “I haven’t seen anything like that here. I mean, once in a while Robbie will give you a pat on the rear, but my god, if that’s as far as it goes, I’ll be on cloud nine.”
    “What about gambling?” Tricia said. “Or drugs? Anything like that?”
    “Why? Have you seen anything, Trixie?”
    “No,” Tricia said. “You just hear stories.”
    Cecilia shrugged. “There’s probably some of that. You get that sort of thing everywhere. My advice to you? Don’t go looking for it. Keep your head down, do your job, collect your pay, and go home happy. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”
    “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Tricia said. “I was just wondering.”
    But Tricia had a second job to do. She had a book to write. And not having found any true crime to write about wasn’t going to stand in her way. So she began to pound out a few pages a day, setting her Olympia up on the chateau’s sole writing desk around two each afternoon, while most of the other girls were out on jobs, shooting covers for magazines or private stills for “collectors.” The ones who didn’t have any work watched her type with a mixture of idle curiosity and indifference, peering over her shoulder now and again but never long enough to read more than a few words. Which was just as well. If it got back to Borden that she was at work on something, he wouldn’t be surprised—but he might be if he knew how often the story she was cooking up changed paths or a scene reached a dead end and needed to be scrapped and restarted, something that presumably would not have been the case if she’d just been, as he’d put it, taking dictation.
    She read I, Mobster and some of the Hard Case Crime