Little Odessa Read online

  “Last month was the best you’ve ever done. Your accountant says stay away as long as you like, and then a little longer.”

  “So do the machers,” he told her. “So I will.”

  The door chimed and Kate pressed the receiver tightly to her ear. “Howard,” she said quickly, “someone’s downstairs. I have to go.”

  “At this hour? Enjoy yourself, Kate.”

  “Good-bye.”

  She slipped into one of Howard’s robes, yellow velour cut short above the knee, his knee, and went out of the room a couple of steps behind Isaac Grynzpun. One look in the fine antique mirror on the staircase sent her back. “Just a minute,” she called out, dabbing at cheeks glistening with a disappointment that had taken her by surprise. Balling a wad of tissues in her hand, she hurried downstairs. “Who is it?”

  She heard someone clear his throat, say “Florist.”

  “But I’m not expecting any …”

  When Harry Lema saw Kate’s tears, he forgot the hop-head speech he’d been polishing on the stoop. He stood with one foot on the runner looking at the flowers and the gun hidden behind them, trying to figure where he had tipped his hand. “Are you Mrs. Howard Ormont?” he asked, moving cautiously up the steps.

  “No.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I said no.”

  “Are you the daughter?”

  “No.”

  “No?” Suddenly he saw the whole thing clearly. “Hey, don’t look so sad,” he told her. “Nobody died. These are for you.”

  “Who are they from?”

  “There’s a card.” Harry stepped onto the landing and pushed the flowers at her and, as he did, showed her the snubbed barrel of his pistol. “I don’t know what’s eatin’ you,” he said, “but this is definitely not your night. They’re from me.”

  Isaac Grynzpun bounded down the steps and Harry dropped his sandwich on the floor as he flung the steak at him. The dog snuffled the silver package, then turned up his nose and gobbled the egg salad, went back upstairs as Kate’s heart sunk in her chest. “Who are you?” she demanded.

  Harry didn’t hear her. Now that she’d stopped crying, she hardly seemed upset. Maybe she had more important things on her mind. He’d change that fast. “You alone?” he asked. “We’ll see,” he answered for her, marching her upstairs ahead of him. “You’ll show me.”

  “Who are you?” Kate tried again.

  “Who the hell you think I am? I’m the burglar.”

  “Oh,” Kate said.

  “Oh? All you gotta say is ‘Oh’?”

  Oh God, a maniac with a gun, she almost said out loud. Instead, she tightened the sash around her waist and asked, “What do you want?”

  “Don’t be wise. You know what I want.”

  Kate turned to look at him and he nudged her ahead. A burglar, he’d said. If that was all, this might not be too awful. A big if. “Oh,” she said again.

  He stuck his head inside the bedroom, saw no one there. “Okay, know where I gotta go now?”

  “No.”

  “The goddamn toilet.”

  She showed him to the bathroom. He stood her at the door and ordered her to turn her back. “No peekin’,” he said as he tugged at his zipper.

  He thought he was going to fill the bowl. He flushed twice and washed his hands, patted them dry in the fluffiest towel he’d ever felt, touched it to his face. He tore off a few sheets of toilet paper and blew his nose.

  “What the—” He balled up the paper and tossed it in the bowl. “Place like this, run you at least eight hundred K, unfurnished, has lousy John Wayne toilet paper like some subway craphouse.”

  “Who? The cowboy?”

  Harry rolled his eyes up into his head. Good eight and a half, nine, a little higher if he could see more of what was inside the robe—and thick as a brick. “John Wayne toilet paper,” he explained. “It’s rough, it’s tough, it don’t take shit off no one.” He flushed again. “Well,” he said, “it’s been fun talkin’ to you, but now it’s time to play You Bet Your Life. The topic I selected is your jewelry.”

  “What about it?” Kate asked.

  “I’d like to steal it, you don’t mind.”

  Kate felt tears again. “I don’t have any jewelry, just costume stuff.”

  “And I’m the lady in black, never go anywhere without a bunch of flowers.”

  He sat her on the bed, tore apart the bottom drawer from a blond dresser on the wall opposite the window. Doing three-a-day B&Es for chump change he’d learned always work your way up to the top drawer, don’t waste seconds shutting the lower ones. But this was a home invasion, his first, and the pace was all wrong, herky jerky, like a Charlie Chaplin short but without the laughs. Then the girl squirmed to the end of the mattress flashing sweet, milky thighs and he had all the time in the world. He pulled out the second drawer and poked inside, the third. “Gettin’ warm?” he asked.

  Kate bit her lip.

  He turned the gun on her till he got some reaction, glistening pearls of sweat above her mouth. “You might want to point me in the right direction,” he said, “give me a clue …I won’t tell.”

  “I don’t live here,” Kate told him. “I’m house-sitting. I don’t know where anything is.”

  He dumped the top drawer on the floor and stirred a mound of white broadcloth shirts with his toe. “You expect me to buy that?”

  “Please, it’s the truth.”

  “How long you been here.”

  “Not long. A few weeks.”

  “Long enough,” he said. “You should’ve figured it out by now.”

  “Howard … Mr. Ormont doesn’t wear jewelry, not even cufflinks. He says gold chains do for a man’s chest what curlers do for a woman’s head …I have these earrings.” She took them off and held them out to him. “They’re real silver. Take them and go.”

  Harry swatted her hand away. “I got my own,” he said and began pacing the room. “Guy owns a restaurant, lives in a house like a friggin’ palace and you’re telling me he don’t have a pot to pee in. That don’t go down easy.”

  “He puts everything back into the Arabian Knights.”

  “He’s good at that, pleading poverty? Listen, in case you just been born, everybody owns a cash business is all the time skimming the cream off the crop. You pay the IRS like Goody fuckin’ Twoshoes, you better have a stomach for peanut butter three times a day. There’s a pile of cash money layin’ around somewhere and whether you like it or don’t, you’re gonna help me find it.”

  He ripped a picture off the wall, a signed lithograph of Picasso’s Ambroise Vollard. “Let me explain what I’m doin’, you don’t get the idea I’m like some vandal gets off spray-paintin’ his name all over the IND. I’m lookin’ for a safe.”

  “That’s a very valuable piece,” Kate said. “Why don’t you take it and go …? It’s insured.”

  It occurred to Harry that he would be glad to, if he had the right guy to move it, a guy with nice round arches on both feet. “I already got a picture,” he told her. “Miss January …What’s your name?”

  Kate said nothing.

  “I asked you nice, what is it?”

  “Kate Piro.”

  “Make a deal with you, Piro,” he said. “You’re his bimbo, it’s only fair you get your cut, say ten percent. Call it a finder’s fee.”

  Kate shook her head.

  “Fifteen, robber, but that’s high as I go.”

  He pulled another frame off the wall, a poster from a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. He held it at arm’s length admiring the color reproduction of At the Moulin Rouge, and then put his foot through it. “You ain’t gonna help, I don’t see why I should be nice to you,” he said, touching the gun to her ribs. “Get up, we’re takin’ this act on tour.”

  She led him through the house in a cold sweat, chewing the inside of her cheeks as he ransacked closets and toppled the furniture, unpotted the ficus trees and tore down paintings, cursed his rotten luck. Th
en he hustled her back to the bedroom where Isaac Grynzpun was asleep on the floor.

  “You gotta be the dumbest broad I ever met,” Harry said, waving the gun wildly, “or the most stand-up. Either way, it’ll cost you.”

  “How many times do I have to say it, I don’t know where Howard hides his money? I don’t know if he has any.”

  “You’re lyin’. What it is, you’re on some weird suicide trip. The way you were bawlin’, I should’ve recognized it, you want to see what this gun can do. Okay, have it your way.” He leveled the barrel, then dipped it toward the sleeping dog’s ear. “One last time …”

  “I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

  Harry’s face softened. “You win,” he said.

  And then he squeezed the trigger. The hammer clicked twice, three times, four times, clicked longer than Kate could scream.

  “I’m what you call a sore loser,” he told her later. “A thief, too, but that’s where I draw the line.” He offered his handkerchief and tried to look insulted when she shied away. “You don’t believe me, let me show you the piece. What we have here is called a starter’s pistol, can’t do nothing to you ’cause it can’t fire real bullets. And I don’t mess with blanks. Sensitive ears. Looks scary if you don’t know about guns, but, hey, I don’t have to tell you.”

  He shook the apples out of the pack and zipped the gun inside. “One for you,” he said, polishing the smaller, greener one, a Granny Smith, on his sleeve.

  “The way I see it,” he told her, “is round one goes cleanly to you. But it’s no KO, so you’ve got to come out of your corner when you’re feelin’ better. Just ’cause you know I won’t hurt you, don’t think you’re off the hook.”

  “If you meant that, you’d leave me alone,” Kate said. “Don’t you see I couldn’t help you if I wanted to?”

  Harry bit into his apple and chewed thoughtfully. “It pains me to have to admit this, but you’re startin’ to convince me.”

  “It’s the truth. Why can’t you just go away?”

  “Because,” he said, “I put a lot of time and sweat into this and I’m not gonna see it go down the tubes ’cause you’re not pullin’ your end.”

  “You make it sound like we’re partners.”

  “You might not like the split, but that’s the way it is.”

  Kate inched away. No sense in trying to reason with him, he really believes it.

  “What I’m gonna do,” Harry went on, “is give you more time to find where Ormont keeps his dough. A few days, that’s what it takes. I’ll be in touch and, when you have everything ready, I’ll stop by and pick it up.”

  “You won’t be offended,” Kate asked warily, “if I tell you you’re crazy?”

  “Feel free to speak your mind,” Harry said. “We’re friends. Fact is,” he told her, stretching out on the bed, “I’d like to get to know you better.”

  Kate’s heart began pounding and her arm snaked out toward a glass ashtray on the nightstand. Harry got there first and moved it out of reach. “Why don’t we do dinner one night, catch a movie?”

  “That’s a swell idea. Just leave your name and number and I’ll call you.”

  “No, I mean it. Guy in my line of work doesn’t meet too many women like you.”

  “That’s your problem,” Kate said. “Do you think I’m enjoying this? Do you think I’m going to write Dear Abby and tell her some screwball with a gun broke into my place and I’m worried he won’t call?”

  “You should understand, I can’t take no for an answer.”

  “It’s the only one I have.”

  “That,” Harry said, “is ’cause you haven’t heard the rest of it. Till you come up with the goods, I’ll be holdin’ a deposit, something you’ll want back.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Him,” Harry told her, prodding the sleeping wolfhound with his foot.

  “Isaac?”

  “That his name?”

  Kate nodded.

  “Isaac’s gonna be bunkin’ with me for a while. You don’t see him again till I get what I want.”

  “You’ll be sorry,” Kate said. “He’s vicious.”

  “Yes,” Harry said, reaching down to scratch the dog’s ears, “I see that.” He sat bolt upright. He turned up the volume on the police scanner till the bedroom reverberated with a call for detectives to respond to a liquor store holdup on Seventh-sixth and Broadway. “Had me goin’ there,” he said sheepishly.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s … like Dragnet.”

  “Dragnet’s been off the air for years.”

  “For you,” Harry said. “Me, nothing I like better than keepin’ an ear on the cops, specially when I’m havin’ a lousy day at the office.”

  He unhooked the radio from his belt and put it beside Isaac Grynzpun’s ear. “Come on, boy,” he said. “Wake up. Time to go.”

  “You can’t possibly believe this is going to work.”

  Am I gonna see one red cent from the job? Not likely. Am I gonna see you again? Seventy to thirty says I don’t. Long odds, but I’ll take them, even if I end up out a few bucks for the Kal Kan.

  “I know it don’t sound real bright,” he said aloud. “But you have to realize when Ormont comes home and finds his dog gone, there’ll be hell to pay. What are you gonna tell him, the burglar’s holdin’ the mutt for ransom?”

  “Do you think he’d be happier if you cleaned him out?”

  “No,” Harry said, “not from what I hear about the guy. Thing is, you tell him the dog’s gone, he’ll figure you screwed up and lost it and it’ll be your ass. The dog’s here and you say you got taken off at gunpoint, he’ll kiss it, this is your ass I’m talkin’ about, he’ll feel so guilty leavin’ you all alone.”

  “Not Howard.”

  “Then you’re gonna have a lot of explaining to do, about the dog.”

  He slapped the animal on the rump. “Hey, c’mon big fella. Let’s go.”

  Isaac didn’t budge.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Ask him,” Kate said.

  “I’m askin’ you.”

  “I’ve never seen him like this.”

  “He off his feed?”

  “You saw. Maybe your sandwich didn’t agree with him. All I give him to eat is red meat.”

  “Egg salad on whole wheat’s good for you,” Harry said. Then, “Oh no, the steak.”

  He ran to the staircase, came back shaping a small silver ball and fired it into the wall. “I put enough downs in that chuck to stun a buffalo. I didn’t know the fleabag was comin’ home with me.”

  “Poor Isaac,” she said. “It serves you right.”

  “Off the bed.”

  He sent her to the kitchen for some ice, and held it to the sleeping dog’s neck. Isaac Grynzpun cocked open one large eye and let it close again. Harry wrapped his arms around the wolfhound’s middle and wrestled him to his feet. Isaac went rubbery at the hind legs and sat down.

  “Get me his leash,” Harry said. When Kate stayed where she was he turned down the scanner and made himself comfortable on the bed. “Or, we can kill the night waitin’ for him to sober up.”

  Kate unsnarled a silver chain and clipped it to Isaac’s collar. Harry jerked the dog erect and steered him out of the room.

  “Soon’s he gets a whiff of fresh air, he’ll be all right,” Harry said. “I know, ’cause that’s how I am when I get a little blotto. Now go down and hold the door.”

  Leaning all his weight against the leash, he let the wolfhound slowly downstairs. Then he gave some slack, and Isaac bellyflopped onto the stoop.

  “Be talkin’ to you,” Harry said.

  5

  THE 911 OPERATOR COULDN’T be bothered—not unless someone had been shot, stabbed, strangled, raped, poisoned, burned, drowned, beaten or bludgeoned, had suffered a heart attack, overdose, stroke or crippling fall, had choked in a restaurant or been hit by a car or bitten by pit bulls within a two-mile
run of an EMS ambulance. As Kate tried again to explain what had happened, she was cut off and a recording came on with the phone number of the ASPCA.

  “If this is an emergency, or you need further assistance, please stay on the line and an operator will help you.”

  Kate kept her ear to the phone for four minutes before someone said, “Yeah?” She recognized the voice as that of the woman she’d just spoken to and slammed down the receiver.

  Information gave her the number of the Sixteenth Precinct. The desk officer sounded young and understanding, and heard her out, interrupting only to dig for detail.

  “Now let me get it straight, you’re saying this Isaac Grynzpun was sick and the intruder forced him to leave the house against his will?”

  “He’s a dog,” Kate said.

  “That’s pretty mild.”

  “Isaac Grynzpun is the dog, my boss’s dog.”

  “Is anything gone with a value greater than one hundred dollars?” he asked with less understanding.

  “My peace of mind.”

  “We’ve had forty-nine homicides in the Sixteenth so far this year,” he told her. “There were three hundred rapes we know about, so you can multiply that by five, probably one thousand felonious assaults and God knows what else and you’re asking us to go hunting for a pooch? We chase the killers. We’re good at that and we have a way with sex fiends, too. And that’s about it. Every hairbag on the West Side knows it’s open season on the citizens. So tell me, how come the citizens don’t know?”

  Kate didn’t know either. “I … I’m from Brooklyn. He said he’d call again. I think the only reason he took Isaac is to get to me. He’s got me spooked.”

  “I don’t blame you,” the desk man said, “but we’re not bodyguards.”

  “Assuming I don’t want to wait for him to kill me, can’t you try and catch him now?”

  “The best I can do is give you some advice, the same advice I give my own mother, who also doesn’t have the good sense to take it.”

  “What’s that?” Kate asked.

  “Move to the country.”

  She sat on the floor sorting underwear and shirts, mountains of them, and filing them away in the dresser. She went to work with the vacuum cleaner and then milked it of two bags of dusty soil that she spread over the naked ficus roots. The furniture fit neatly in the floor plan flattened into the shag. There were chrysanthemums in the sink, though she couldn’t remember putting them there. They looked better in a cut-glass vase. She tried them in the living room, the salon, the bedroom before she found the place she liked best, in the trash. She hung the pictures back on the walls. The poster was a total loss, but was worth about fifty dollars and could be replaced. She wished she could say the same for Isaac Grynzpun. If anyone asked, she’d be just as happy with a new wolfhound pup, but she doubted Howard wouldn’t notice the difference.