Sammy Two Shoes, page 18
He took a heavy breath. I could tell he was in pain. And his shirt was wet, so he was bleeding through his bandage.
‘Plumber?’ I said after too long a silence.
He nodded. ‘Arnie. He’s, like, eighty at this point, but in the younger days he installed the copper pipes in that building before it was Tanner’s, back in the thirties when it was built.’
‘Uh huh.’ I had no idea where he was going.
‘So when Tanner bought the building and did the new build of the top floor, he needed a plumber to move some pipes so he could turn one of the walk-in closets on the top floor into his safe. He found out that Arnie did the original work, highly recommended, and so Arnie was summoned.’
‘You know all this how?’ I asked.
Sammy turned to me with a whisper of a smile on his face. ‘Arnie Cohen, New York’s finest plumber, is my uncle twice removed. See? God gave me that. God wants me to get Tanner.’
‘I’m very uncomfortable with the way you keep bringing up God,’ I confessed. ‘But it is a nice coincidence, the plumbing thing. I assume that Arnie gave you some inside scoop about the safe, if I may cut to the punchline.’
‘Right.’ Sammy nodded and sat back. ‘Right. So in order to get Tanner’s sauna and his indoor pool set up, the main water line had to be redone for the whole floor. Tanner’s penthouse floor.’
‘He’s got an indoor pool?’
‘Not the point,’ Sammy snapped. ‘Arnie had to run a water main underneath the floor. Which meant he had to put most of that plumbing in from the ceilings of the apartments below Tanner’s floor, get it?’
‘OK.’ Still waiting.
‘That’s how he discovered that the floor of Tanner’s safe wasn’t three feet of iron. It was three inches of subflooring, just like any other room, with a thin layer of metal on top to make it look like the rest of the walls in the safe.’
‘I’m not sure I understand,’ I said. ‘Arnie figured this out how, exactly?’
There was Sammy’s smile again. ‘The guy who installed the safe had a daughter.’
I waited while Sammy took a couple of deep, painful breaths.
‘The daughter had just gotten married,’ Sammy went on. ‘The safe guy asked Tanner for an apartment in the building instead of pay for the work.’
‘In a building owned by Tanner Brookmeyer?’ I asked.
‘What could be more secure?’ Sammy sniffed. ‘Tanner paid off all the cops, and no hood is going to mess with the building. The apartment would be as safe as the safe, get it?’
‘OK.’ I sighed. ‘And?’
‘And Tanner said yes, the happy couple could have an apartment right below the penthouse. But the safe guy, don’t remember his name, realized that three feet of iron would make his daughter’s ceiling height less than six feet. And her new husband? Six foot five. So the safe guy, he adjusted. He changed three feet of iron into three inches of iron. And get this: it’s less than that along the line where Tanner’s water main is, to make room for the pipes.’
‘Arnie the plumber knew the safe guy,’ I assumed, ‘and gave you all this information.’
‘Arnie’s a loveable guy,’ Sammy said. ‘He got to know everybody working on Tanner’s penthouse. I have a couple of stories about Tanner’s butler, Howard, that you wouldn’t believe. You met Howard, right?’
‘I almost got to taste one of his croissants.’
‘There you go.’ Sammy nodded. ‘So, to the point. The safe guy’s daughter and her husband moved in, happy as clams. But they go to Florida every year about this time. They’re gone for, like, the whole month.’
‘Wait.’ I sat up. ‘Wait just a minute. You’re not suggesting that we bust into Tanner Brookmeyer’s safe from the apartment below.’
Sammy leaned on his side and fished a set of keys out of his pants.
‘These get us into the apartment below. I made some calls from the YMCA. We’re meeting a group of guys at Tanner’s building. I been planning on this for quite some time. The fact that you caused such a ruckus around the building just recently is a nice coincidence. I think that might even make things easier for us.’
I leaned forward fast. ‘Stop the cab.’
‘Don’t stop the cab,’ Sammy told the driver.
The driver didn’t even slow down.
‘We’re only three blocks from the place, Fog,’ Sammy went on. ‘Come on.’
‘I’m not going to break into Tanner Brookmeyer’s safe, Sammy,’ I insisted. ‘When the cab stops, I walk.’
‘Walk where?’ he wanted to know. ‘Where are you gonna go?’
‘I’ll go to a bar called Tap-A-Keg,’ I said. ‘It’s close by. I’ll have a hair of the dog, because my hangover is threatening to kill me worse than Tanner is.’
Sammy looked at me lengthwise. ‘You do look a little off color.’
‘Are you familiar with the negroni?’ I asked him.
He nodded. ‘I told you one of my uncles is a caterer. I used to tend bar for him sometimes. I can build you a negroni like you never had. My secret is that I burn the orange peel before I put it in the drink. It brings out the essential oil.’
I stared at him. ‘I’m not going to break into Tanner Brookmeyer’s safe,’ I repeated. ‘It would only make him want to kill me more.’
Sammy shook his head. ‘I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think he could want to kill you more than he does now. You got into his house. You shot at him, for God’s sake.’
‘He shot first,’ I answered, a little weakly.
‘Yeah.’ Sammy laughed. ‘Like that makes a difference to him. I mean, you gotta face the fact that you already broke into Tanner’s home. And you shot at him. I wasn’t planning on doing that. I just want to ruin his life.’
I sat back and watched the sidewalk roll by as the cab sped along. ‘The thing is, Sammy, that what you’re doing is a little sample of what’s wrong with the world in general, if you don’t mind a little philosophy here.’
He shrugged. ‘Why would I mind? Go on.’
‘Take a look at this. Tanner hit you so you hit Tanner. But the thing is, when you hit him, he just hits back. Then you hit back. Where does it end? All over the world people say, like I just did, “He started it.” And it keeps going, see? He hit me so I hit him so he hits me. Where does it end?’
‘Well, in this particular instance,’ Sammy answered, ‘it ends with Tanner destitute and out of luck: no friends, no money, no life. After that I walk away. Because after that, Tanner Brookmeyer can’t do bad stuff anymore.’
‘Yeah, but that’s what everybody thinks. Once I put this guy down, he won’t get up again. That’s what the world thought about Germany after the First World War. And how did that work out?’
Tanner leaned toward the cab driver and said, ‘This is it right here, thanks.’
The cab slowed; Sammy handed the driver a fifty.
‘No,’ the guy said, irritated. ‘I can’t break this.’
‘You misunderstand,’ Sammy said sweetly. ‘It’s all for you.’
The driver stared at the bill. ‘It is?’
‘Maybe you’re so overwhelmed by the generosity of this particular tip,’ Sammy answered, ‘that you can’t remember anything else about us.’
The driver nodded. ‘My memory’s not so good even without the incentive.’
I sighed and got out of the cab. We were a block away from Tanner’s building, and not far from Tap-A-Keg. I stood on the sidewalk in silence for a minute or two, and Sammy stood beside me, his hands folded in front of him like a pall bearer waiting to pick up the casket.
On the one hand, I could go to Tap-A-Keg and have a drink, talk to the regulars, find out a little more about Nan the understudy. Then I could go to Nan’s place and get her to admit that Tanner instructed her to give Emory the poisoned coke that killed her. And then I could flap my arms and fly to the moon, which was just as likely to happen as a confession from Nan, I realized.
Or I could say goodbye to Sammy, take a pleasant walk back to the Benjamin, maybe grab a nap for my hangover, then pile into my T-Bird and point it south. I could be back at the donut shop by breakfast, joke around with Bibi there, maybe finally ask her out on a date.
Or I could go on a suicide mission with my newly discovered little brother.
Sammy read my thoughts. ‘Made up your mind yet?’ he asked me. ‘Are you coming with me or not?’
‘All I wanted was to come to New York, see Bob Dorough, have a slice of Ray’s, and then go on back home to Florida,’ I began softly.
‘And then I happened,’ Sammy commiserated. ‘Sorry.’
I took a good long look at Sammy then. His lapels were dotted with blood and food, the dark circles under his eyes had nearly turned purple. He was leaning over like a hundred-year-old man, gasping every third breath. And the smile on his face said that he didn’t have a care in the world. That’s the kind of happy you get when you know what you’re doing in this world. It was the same smile I’d seen in photographs at my mother’s place; photographs of my father.
‘You know what, Sam?’ I concluded. ‘I think I came to New York to find out about you. So I don’t really have a choice. I have to come with you.’
‘Yes!’ he shouted. ‘God made you come to New York to do this with me!’
‘There’s God again,’ I mumbled.
And off we went.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The ruckus around Tanner’s building had not completely subsided. People who had been evacuated because of the gas leak were still complaining. There were cops and firemen milling around. You could even still smell the gas on the street. Sammy was right: it did make it easier for us. We just walked into the building, right through the open security door. The elevators were taped off, so we had to use the stairs, which was a little rough for Sammy. But we made it to the floor underneath the top floor. There were seven or eight people milling about there, too, but when Sammy made his appearance, everyone looked his way.
Sammy took in all the faces, checking to make sure he knew everyone. Then he introduced me. ‘This,’ he said, pointing, ‘is none other than Foggy Moscowitz.’
There was an audible collective response. Sammy cut it short.
‘He’s here to help,’ he went on. ‘In fact, he’s the reason for all the confusion on the street around here. The gas leak is bogus. He’s the reason Tanner’s not in his place right now. We don’t even have to use the fire alarm gag that Dickie Sunshine set up.’
Lots of nodding.
‘So!’ Sammy announced.
Everyone scrambled. We were in the apartment within seconds. An A-frame ladder appeared, and a guy was up to the ceiling with a reciprocal saw hacking into the sheetrock. The saw was almost silent, had some kind of hood over it. The guy sawed a rectangle about three feet long by a little more than a foot wide, right inside the ceiling studs. The sheetrock was handed down and the saw dug into the subflooring underneath the room above. Took less than two minutes to hand down that rectangle of wood, and the guy with the saw was down the ladder. Another guy with a blowtorch was up. The blowtorch was quiet too, and the guy operating it was faster than the guy with the saw. Down came a rectangle of iron. But the guy with the blowtorch lifted his protective visor and sighed.
‘There’s something else up there,’ he complained softly. ‘Another layer of something. Feels soft but it makes me nervous.’
Silence.
Then it occurred to me. ‘It’s a rug. A fancy Persian rug.’
Everybody stared.
‘The entire place up there has expensive rugs, every floor surface I saw in Tanner’s place. My guess is that he’s got a nice one in his safe too.’
The guy with the blowtorch reached up and gingerly tested my theory. He poked, he nudged, and finally he flipped the corner of the rug back to reveal the interior of the darkened safe.
There was another demonstration of affirmative nodding in my direction, and the blowtorch guy came down off the ladder.
Up the ladder was a little guy I mistook for a kid at first. He couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, and skinny as a rail. He was very dark, like maybe Southern Italian, and he was wearing a T-shirt and skintight jeans, no shoes. In a couple of seconds he had pulled himself up into the safe. Somebody else went up the ladder and handed him a flashlight and some kind of bulky bag that turned out to be a construction chute. In no time, the chute had been deployed and stuff started barreling down it and on to the floor.
First there were large bricks of coke, maybe twenty of them. These were hustled into official mail bags, and a couple of guys dressed as mailmen shouldered them and were out the door, all without a single word.
Next came cash, bundles of twenties and fifties and hundreds, they just kept coming. These were neatly stacked against a short wall in the apartment next to a hallway. The bundles were laid side by side in layers and stacked until they almost reached the ceiling, the last ones had to be carefully put in place with another ladder.
Then, out of nowhere, two-by-fours appeared, and a quick frame was put together over the stacked bills. Out came sheetrock, tape, mud, and in five minutes two guys were painting the new wall that hid Tanner’s cash. I couldn’t have guessed at how much was being hidden in the new false wall, but it would have been seven or eight million dollars at least.
Finally down the chute and a little louder than anything previous: a good number of firearms.
These were immediately set upon and taken apart. All the guns were dismantled and hidden in dozens of toolboxes, covered up with screwdrivers and hammers and packs of nails.
I finally turned to Sammy. ‘This is incredible, this organization, man.’
He smiled. ‘Phoebe.’
‘What?’ I asked him.
‘Phoebe planned all this. I mean, I told her the idea when they were still rehearsing the play. I been planning something like this in my head for a while, but Phoebe took off with it. She made a playbook, assigned parts; we rehearsed it a bunch of times at that dinky theatre where they did Hamlet. You know, during the day when there wasn’t anybody there. It’s something, huh?’
‘I think I’m stunned,’ I confessed. ‘Phoebe’s, like, a genius.’
He beamed. ‘I know.’
The little guy dropped the chute, then managed his way out of the safe and down the ladder. The guy with the blowtorch winked at me.
‘Good call on the rug thing,’ he told me. ‘And it makes it easier on me; welding the iron flooring back into place ain’t gotta be so neat, see? Because it’s covered up with a rug! I just gotta be careful when I’m doing it since we obviously gotta flip the rug down first, then weld the iron. OK.’
And he was up the ladder with his blowtorch and the rectangle of iron he’d cut away. Another guy went up behind him to help, and I turned my attention to Sammy once more.
‘Where’s all that coke going?’ I wanted to know.
‘Most of it’s being sold,’ he told me, ‘to pay these guys, pay Phoebe’s bail, invest in a couple of Broadway shows. Um. A bit of it’s going for your mother’s medical care. That kind of thing. Some, I guess, will be more of a personal use kind of thing, but there you are.’
‘And the money?’
He shrugged. ‘Seems like it’ll make good insulation for the apartment, don’t you think?’
‘You didn’t take any of it,’ I said.
‘I’m not a thief, Foggy,’ he said, a little hurt. ‘I just wanted to take it away from Tanner. I probably won’t ever tell anyone it’s there. It’ll just be, you know, hidden forever. See? I took down Tanner’s primary sources of income, and now all his money’s gone. He’s got no friends; he’s got no juice. He’s finished. For good.’
I’d never really seen anyone in my life smiling the way Sammy was smiling then.
Everybody was packing up. The blowtorch guy was done. Sheetrock guys were replacing the subflooring and ceiling sheetrock. The entire enterprise took about thirty minutes. It was one of the most efficient capers I’d ever witnessed.
Everyone was packing up when the little guy who’d been able to fit through the opening and actually get into the safe sidled up to Sammy. He had something in his hands.
‘Thought these might be interesting,’ he said in a surprisingly deep voice.
He handed Sammy three ledgers. They were each about the size of a copy of the New Yorker.
Sammy opened one. ‘These are Tanner’s books.’ Sammy looked up at me. ‘These are Tanner’s main accounts. Money, people …’
‘The last one is just for people Tanner has on his payroll,’ the little guy said. ‘It’s cops and judges and politicians. In addition to the more obvious criminal element, obviously.’
With that, the little guy nodded and was out the door. Two more minutes and everyone had scattered. The apartment looked like no one had been there.
Sammy and I were the last ones in the place before he handed me Tanner’s books.
‘Maybe you should take these,’ he said.
‘What am I supposed to do with them?’ I asked him.
‘I don’t know. You’re the one who’s on the right side of law and order now. Give them to Phoebe’s lawyer?’
I shook my head. ‘She’s not a prosecutor. But OK. Let me think.’
I didn’t want to be carrying the things around out in the open, not with all the people around Tanner’s building. So I stuffed them down the back of my pants just so I could get clear of the neighborhood with them, and out the door we went. Down the stairs, out into the back alley. There was still one fire truck there, and a couple of cops, but no one gave us a second look.
TWENTY-EIGHT
We were out on the street and I steered us in the direction of Tap-A-Keg before Sammy and I resumed our conversation.
‘Wouldn’t you refer to what we’ve just done as a caper?’ he asked me, half-seriously. ‘You know, when you tell people about it.’
‘I think I’d call it more of an operation,’ I said. ‘It was so well organized.’
‘You want something run right,’ he said, ‘get a stage manager.’
