Everybody Goes to Jimmy's (10 page)

Chapter Nine

Jacob “the Wise” Weiss had an apartment on the Upper East Side. The story I heard was that when he first tried to buy it, the owners or the board or whoever was in charge turned him down, either because he was a hoodlum or because he was a Jew. That really pissed him off, so he bought the entire building. Now, I can't say that I know it's true, but I do know there were people on the Upper East Side who didn't care for Jews or hoodlums, and I know that Jacob was rich enough to buy apartment buildings. Maybe not the really big ones, but his was only six stories tall. It was on Fifth Avenue up in the Seventies or Eighties, overlooking the park. In those days though, he didn't look down to see nice big trees and green lawns and such. A small army of guys who were out of work had set up camp and were squatting there. They put up shacks and sheds and tents and turned the park into one of the biggest Hoovervilles in the country.

When we rolled up in front of the building, the doorman recognized Weeks getting out of the cab he hopped to, opening the door and touching the shiny brim of his cap. “Good evening, Mr. Robertson,” he said even though it was pushing three in the morning. “How are you doing, Mr. Robertson?” he asked, almost tripping over himself to get the elevator doors open. Weeks didn't use his real name there. Neither did Jacob the Wise.

The walls of the small lobby were done up in long narrow mirrors, both regular mirrors and bronze-colored mirrors and diamond-shaped pieces of polished wood and glass that reflected the light. The ceiling was painted sky blue with white clouds.

Up on the fifth floor, Jacob's place had tall ceilings, a herringbone pattern inlaid floor, and gauzy white curtains floating in the breeze that came in through open windows. The chairs and sofa were covered with some kind of shiny fabric and looked new. I don't know how big the place was, but I could see two rooms off the main room. It wasn't as grand as Luciano's digs at the Waldorf Tower, but it wasn't hard to take.

Jacob the Wise was staring down at the guys in the park. He turned and looked at me, and I could tell he was angry. I'd never seen that before, and I didn't like it.

I always thought that he and Longy Zwillman could have been related. They were both big athletic guys. Jacob boxed when he was young, before he wised up. He had a high forehead, dark wiry hair gray at the temples, eyes you couldn't read when he didn't want you to, wide sloped shoulders, and big mitts with a couple of split knuckles on the right. He favored nice clothes, not as nice as mine but nice enough, I guess. Longy got his start in the numbers game, too, over in Newark, in the Third Ward. But once Prohibition came in, he was quick to figure out what a sweet racket booze was going to be and went with it. Jacob stuck with policy and money lending. Maybe that's why he and Longy were friendly. They didn't compete with each other. They'd even been to my place with their girlfriends. Of course, that was before Jacob met Signora Sophia Sugartits.

He gave me a hard look. “So, you're finally here,” he said. “Weeks, give him a drink.”

“Brandy. If it's any good.”

Weeks poured. Jacob and I sat in armchairs facing each other. His brandy was crap. I set it aside and rested my stick on my lap across the arms of the chair.

Jacob said, “There was a young fella here yesterday who said he had a story to tell me. For a price. It turned out to be a very interesting story.” He paused while he put a match to a fresh Havana, making a real production number of it and creating a cloud of sticky smoke. “I didn't pay for it. I thought about having Weeks beat it out of him, but once the guy started talking, I decided to do it myself.” He smiled around the cigar. “He said that my money was in transit, those were the words he used, ‘in transit,' and when it gets here, you will take possession. And then today, I got a telephone call saying that you've already got my money—my hundred thousand dollars. I want it back.”

The smile disappeared, and he gave me another hard stare meant to be threatening.

I sat back in the chair and rested my hands on my stick. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“According to this young fella, the people who had it knew that it was hot and sold it to you for a penny on the dollar. The ransom money,” he said, and at least part of the picture came into focus.

“Ransom money? For who? What? I don't know what you're talking about.”

He answered with another hard stare. I stared back.

Finally, he mushmouthed around the cigar, “Mercer, did you see anything?”

Weeks, who was staying away from us over by the bar, said, “No. Nothing's changed at his place. It's just like it was last week and last month and before the trip. If he's got the cash, he's not flashing it around.”

Jacob said, “That doesn't mean anything,” and blew smoke in my face.

“Who is this young fella? What'd he look like, and why would you believe him?”

Jacob shrugged. “Who knows? It could be true. If you try to lie to me, I'll have Weeks get the truth out of you.”

“No, you won't. I'll shoot him first.”

Jacob scowled at Weeks. “You didn't search him?”

Weeks was unconcerned. “This is just Quinn, for God's sake. If he shoots me, I'll kill him.”

I said, “Jacob, I'm not going to insult you and Weeks by threatening you. That's stupid, and I'm not stupid enough to steal from you, either. You know that. So what's going on? I don't know anything about any hundred thousand dollars.”

His big shoulders slumped, like he knew what I was going to say, and he knew I wasn't lying. Well, I wasn't lying about some of it, anyway.

“What do you know about what happened to us last year?” he asked.

“I heard you were taking some time off, a long trip out West. Benny Numbers and some of your guys went with you. You came back a couple of months later without him. That's it. I heard other things from guys who probably didn't know what they were talking about. But I don't put any stock in that. What else is there?”

As Jacob told it, his business had been good. Despite the crash, people still gambled with their pennies and nickels, and because of the crash, his loan sharking was better than ever. He didn't say “loan sharking.” I think he referred to it as the “banking side” of his operation. So, he decided, for the first time, to take some time off. He asked his friend, Signora Sophia, where she'd like to go, and she said she really wanted to stay in the city, but if they were going to go someplace, it ought to be someplace warm. He suggested Los Angeles and Hollywood, and that was that.

As Weeks had said earlier in my speak, somebody had to stay and watch the store, and that was him. They had to do some persuading to talk Benny Numbers into the trip. “We can't afford it,” he said. “I don't want to leave my fiancée for so long,” he said. There was too much to do. Jacob had none of it. He wanted a trip, and he wanted his favorite people with him. He also took bodyguards, four of them. An important man in his line of work didn't go about without protection. Jacob the Wise didn't get where he was by taking unnecessary risks.

So one fine evening in the fall of '31, they boarded the Twentieth Century Limited at Grand Central and headed for Chicago, first class. The whole time they were on that train and the others, Benny Numbers acted like he was back in the basement offices on Grand Street where he kept track of Jacob's business. He brought along four ledgers and a briefcase full of notebooks. At every stop, he hurried off the train and went to the closest telephone to call back and get figures from the guys who worked for him. He could have sent telegraphs from the train, but he said he didn't trust them. It was too easy for other people to get their noses in Jacob's business. For his part, Jacob didn't care. He enjoyed the ride and the company of the Signora.

In Chicago, they changed trains for the Chief to Los Angeles, with a side trip to visit the hot springs and the Hotel Colorado at Glenwood Springs, where Theodore Roosevelt and Al Capone had stayed.

It turned out to be a little burg high up in the mountains. The hotel wouldn't have been out of place in Saratoga Springs. It sprawled out beside a wide warm water pool. They attracted a fair amount of attention when they arrived, maybe not as much as Capone, but with his attentive gun thugs and the tall dark ermine-wrapped beauty on his arm, Jacob was something out of the ordinary. The manager ushered them around to a special private entrance.

Sometime during their first night there, Benny Numbers disappeared.

When he didn't show up for lunch the next day, Jacob sent one of his gunmen to check the room. Ten minutes later, looking sick and worried, the guy came back and said Jacob had to see something.

Jacob and the Signora had adjoining suites, but Benny had made arrangements for the rest of them in less luxurious rooms. The gun guys were close to Jacob, but Benny had a smaller room in another wing. When they got to it, Jacob found that things had been knocked around, like there might have been a fight, but the bed hadn't been slept in.

Under a hotel ashtray in the middle of the bed was a note, handwritten, barely legible. It read:

No Cops

We have yr man and his books

$100,000 dollars

five days

Jacob sent his guys to look around the grounds just in case it wasn't what it looked like it was. Nothing. He talked things over with the Signora. She agreed this was very bad and went to speak to the manager for Jacob. Acting like it was nothing serious, she asked the manager if there had been any noise complaints the night before. She was asking because her friend in 115 thought he heard something. The manager checked with the night man. More nothing. Jacob's guys came back empty-handed, too. He told them to check with the lower-level hotel staff to find out where the local whorehouses and speaks were, anyplace Benny Numbers might have got a notion to visit and then found himself in trouble. While they were working on that, he called Mercer Weeks and explained what happened.

Weeks started collecting the cash.

It took four days for him to gather the money and for him and two other guys to bring two suitcases full to Glenwood Springs. They took the same trains to Chicago and Denver, where they bought a Ford and drove the rest of the way. Knowing nothing about the area, Jacob wasn't able to do much during that time. He couldn't tell if any of the other guests or hotel staff or the people who passed by on the street were watching him. Everything looked suspicious.

He and Signora Sophia and the guards stayed close. Jacob was able to ask around and learned that there was one occasional local, “Diamond” Jack Alterie, also known as “Two Gun” Alterie, who might have pulled a snatch like this one. Alterie had worked with Capone in Chicago, but he'd been kicked out of the organization after making nutty threats when his boss, Deanie O'Banion, got killed. Alterie told the papers that he'd meet the killers at high noon on State Street, where they'd shoot it out. Big Al suggested it might be a good time for Diamond Jack to get the fuck out of town, and he went to Colorado. Several years later, when Jacob went there, Alterie had a ranch and sponsored rodeos in Denver and sometimes showed up in Glenwood Springs. He strutted around with a big Stetson hat that looked like an upside-down umbrella, flashy diamond rings, and two .45s strapped to his hips. Not the kind of guy to pull something like this.

When Weeks got to the hotel, Jacob knew no more than he had that first day. The waiting and the damn fact that he couldn't do anything were making him crazy. Jacob wasn't a particularly emotional guy, but he was choosy about who he worked with. He got to know the guys who stuck with him. He really did think of Benny and Weeks as the sons he and his wife never had. And then there were the ledgers. If Jacob were to lose those and if the wrong people got their hands on them, the whole operation would be in trouble. So all they could do was wait and hope they were dealing with professionals.

Of course, Weeks sweated the bodyguards, too. But these were Jacob's most trusted guys, who'd been with him forever. If something like this had happened at home, more suspicion would have been directed at them, but not this far away, and not when they'd been playing cards with Jacob on the night Benny got snatched.

They didn't hear anything for another full day. By then, Jacob was ready to kill somebody, anybody. The Signora locked the door to her suite, ordered room service, and refused to say anything else. Worried about the warrants that might still be out for him on the Denver Mint job, Weeks stayed in his room as much as he could.

On the afternoon of the sixth day after Benny Numbers had been taken, a taxi driver came up to the front desk with a note for Mr. Jason Wentworth, the name Jacob was registered under. When Weeks found the cabbie later, he said a man approached him at the train station. It was dark, and he didn't get a good look, so all he could say was that he thought the guy was old. Yes, it was strange for somebody to offer him a whole dollar to drive a few hundred yards to the hotel, but strange things happen everywhere, even in Glenwood Springs.

The note, written in what looked like the same crude handwriting as the first, read:

Bring money to Miner's Camp No. 3 at 11:00

Wait

Send the Woman

Nobody liked that last part. The Signora flatly refused to do it, and Weeks backed her up. This was his kind of job. That night, he got directions to Miner's Camp No. 3, a little name on the map that wasn't much more than a crossroads higher up in the mountains about nine miles away. He loaded the suitcases into the Ford and drove off.

He came back the next morning. Nobody showed up. They heard nothing for two days. The next note came in the mail with a local postmark. It said:

Send the Woman

Jacob, Weeks, and the Signora sat down to talk it over. They tried to persuade her for more than an hour. Finally, it came down to Jacob saying, “I am asking you to do this thing for me. I am asking you as an honorable man. If you agree to do this, I will be in your debt. You can ask anything of me. Anything. Weeks is my witness.”