Read Hard Case Crime: Fifty to One for Free Online Page B

backstage—but when they were out on the floor, you couldn’t tell. They might both have been twenty; they might both have been forty, or no age at all.
    As the orchestra’s playing swelled, they danced in tightening circles around one another, not touching, and then briefly with one another in a brisk imitation of a tango, first Cecilia leading, then Tricia. They ended with some side-by-side bump and grind moves as the orchestra changed tempos yet again, giving Cole Porter’s music a jazzy sizzle. Nothing too naughty (Billy Hoffman had warned them, unnecessarily, that their clothes had to stay on), but they gave it all they had and the crowd applauded noisily.
    The first night, Tricia had to concentrate on remembering the choreography, and didn’t manage even so; there were some unseemly stumbles. But by the third night she had it down and by the end of the week, even while dancing the more strenuous parts of the routine she found herself paying more attention to the rapt faces in the audience than to her dancing, wondering what secrets each might hide, her mind returning to the meeting in Charley Borden’s office.
    She’d caught the book he’d thrown at her, I, Mobster. “What’s this supposed to be?” she’d asked. The tag-line on the front cover said The Confession of a Crime Czar. And on the back it said,
When we received the manuscript of this book in the office, we knew immediately we had something far out of the ordinary. We asked a prominent New York attorney to read the manuscript and arrange for the endorsement of a prominent judge, district attorney, or other high public official. Our friend, the lawyer, sent the manuscript back. “Too hot,” he advised...
    “It’s supposed to be the true story of a mobster’s life, from pinching candy as a kid up to running a criminal organization as an adult,” Borden said. “That’s what it’s supposed to be. What it is, though, is pure, unadulterated malarkey, from the first page to the last. Probably written by some hack whose knowledge of crime is limited to the nights he’s spent in a drunk tank for disorderly conduct. Not a word of it’s true—not one. But how many copies did it sell? Go ahead, ask me.”
    “How many?” Tricia said.
    “A lot,” Borden said. “It sold a lot of copies. And now they’ve made a movie out of it, too, which is bound to sell some more.” He leaned forward over his book-strewn desk. “But imagine how many they’d have sold if they’d had a true story that was actually true. A story from someone deep inside Sal Nicolazzo’s outfit.”
    “This Nicolazzo is a mobster?” Tricia said.
    “He’s from Calabria, right next door to Sicily. What do you think?”
    “I don’t think every Italian’s a mobster,” Tricia said.
    “Well, this one is. He runs illegal gambling joints up and down the east coast, two or three here in New York alone. People say there’s cards and dice at the Sun, if you find the right room. And what better way to find it than from the inside?”
    “So what you’re saying is you want me to write you a book like this one,” Tricia said.
    “Who said anything about writing? More like taking dictation. You find the right person in the outfit and get him talking, all you’ll need to do is copy down what he says.”
    “And you want me to do this for five dollars,” Tricia said. “Not even. For the portion of my five dollars of interest that you feel is usury.”
    “Nah, forget that. You bring me a story, I’ll pay a penny a word,” Borden said. “The same as I pay the rest of our authors. Up to five hundred dollars, max, for a book. How you split it with the guy whose story you tell is up to you.”
    Tricia had smiled, thinking about the portable she’d been lugging around the city, the compact little Olympia SM3 DeLuxe with its two-tone ribbon, and about the half-ream of paper wedged inside the typewriter case, filled with all the short sketches she’d written during the endless train