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

Crime.”
    “That’s all he writes on the window,” Don said, “and it’s what he shows off on his desk. One of these days you might ask him about the books he keeps in his desk drawer.”
    “By authors such as we,” Larry said. “Us? We or us?”
    “Us,” Don said.
    “Us,” Larry concurred. They clinked beer glasses.
    “So you’re not mystery writers?” she said, fighting to keep the disappointment out of her voice.
    “Oh, we’re that, too,” Larry said. “We’re every kind of writer.”
    “Except the well-paid kind,” Don said. “For five hundred dollars we’ll write mysteries, war stories, space operas, sex books. Hell, I wrote a travel guide to Berlin once for three hundred.”
    “And he’d never even been to Berlin,” Larry said.
    “Perfect,” Tricia said. “You see, I’m writing a book about a mobster and it’s supposed to be a true story. And I want to have him steal all the money out of his boss’ safe and get away with it. But you have to figure the safe would be guarded, and...well, I’ve seen you two at the office, I know you’ve written several books for Mr. Borden, and I just thought maybe you’d have some thoughts about how it could be done. Something nice and clever, but not too clever—it’s got to be plausible enough that readers could believe it really happened.”
    “And why,” Larry said, “should we come up with a perfectly good plot and hand it over to you, when we could get a book out of it ourselves?”
    “You’re forgetting,” Don said, “she’s supplying the alcohol.”
    “Ah, yes,” Larry said. “I was. That’s fine then.” He scratched at his beard. “Let’s see. A robbery. What can you tell us about the place this guy’s supposed to rob?”
    So Tricia told them, told them everything she could think of from her weeks working at the Sun—about the layout and the staff and the schedule, about the parts of the building she’d seen and the parts she hadn’t, everything she’d read in the newspapers—and bit by bit a picture emerged. She told them about Nicolazzo, the various charges against him, what she knew about his private life, his family. They peppered her with questions and tossed out one outlandish idea after another.
    “What about a hot air balloon?” Larry said. “Finney did that in Five Against The House.”
    “That’s idiotic,” Don said. “How about a submarine?”
    And so it went, for four days in a row, from ten past noon each day till the bar started filling up around three or four and the boys’ voices and their imaginations, no matter how well lubricated along the way, finally gave out. Tricia began to despair of getting anything for her money except slightly high from beer fumes. But at the end of the fourth afternoon, Don’s eyes lit up and he said, “I’ve got it!”
    And he really had.
    Tricia wrote as quickly as she could, typed till her fingers ached.
    Mornings, she slept in, recovering from the late-night activities of the prior night at the Sun and appreciating as she never had before the strain poor Coral had been laboring under all this time. At least you couldn’t hear garbage trucks in the morning from the side of the building the chateau was on; on the other hand, some of the girls were restless sleepers, snoring or moaning or talking in their sleep, and with a dozen in one room, silence was hard to come by, even in the wee hours.
    Afternoons, she worked on the book, sometimes getting so wrapped up in it that she had to race through her shower and jump into her clothes willy-nilly or she’d have been late for the first show at the club, which started at the supper hour. Evenings she spent at the club, usually staying till one or two AM , taking a late dinner in the kitchen with the waiters and musicians. Then there were her days off, when she sometimes didn’t get out of her nightgown, just sat at the desk banging away from the time she woke up till the other girls threw pillows at her back and begged