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

books and stole liberally from them, inventing a narrator who’d grown up in the slums and found opportunity in crime. She never gave him a name, just had other characters refer to him as “kid” or “buddy” or “hey, you.” She figured she’d have them shift to calling him “mac” and then “mister” and then “sir” as he rose through the ranks. He came from Chicago to New York after the war, joined up with an old pro on a heist of grade-A beefsteaks (or was it a bank robbery? she went back and forth on this point), and ultimately became one of the senior soldiers working for a Sicilian crime family down on Mulberry Street...before finally getting lured away to work at the Sun by their chief rival, Sal Nicolazzo. And that’s where the fun began in earnest, with her nameless hero getting his hands dirty in the world of illegal gambling and all the associated pleasures. She found it exciting to write about this fellow, imagining her way into his sinister, violent life, full of gunplay and brawls and round-heeled women who welcomed him into their arms. (These she based, one by one, on her roommates, not even bothering to change their names. None of them were big readers, and she felt confident they wouldn’t sneak peeks at the growing manuscript she kept in the cardboard box beneath her cot.)
    Whenever she found herself starved for an idea, she paid a quick afternoon visit to the public library and pored through old copies of the New York Times and the Daily News, hunting for stories about mobsters and their misdeeds. Eventually the steady diet of newspaper articles, all filled with juicy betrayals, gave her the idea to have her narrator grow sick of Nicolazzo’s controlling hand and plan a robbery—a mammoth heist of his own operation that would involve opening the safe at the Sun and fleeing with a month’s proceeds from the big man’s casinos, tracks, and fight clubs. It was the sort of thing that, if it had ever really happened, Nicolazzo would of course hush up—a Mob boss clumsy enough to let himself get robbed by one of his subordinates?—and that, in turn, would account for the fact that the reading public had never heard about it. The only difficult part was coming up with a good plan for the heist—and for that she got help from a couple of experts, two young fellows she spotted bringing manuscripts to office 315 repeatedly and trailed one day to the Red Baron, a dark little bar down the block with propellers and pictures of biplanes hanging on the walls.
    “Gentlemen,” she said, putting a little hip action into her stride as she approached, “may I buy you a drink?”
    “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