Queenpin by Megan Abbott

Author:Megan Abbott
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Adventure, Historical
ISBN: 9780750532907
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2007-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Regina.

He looked over at her, lifting his eyebrows. “Regina who?”

She smiled nastily. “Regina the furrier.”

“You knew Regina?” I said, my voice quavering in spite of myself

“Sure,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “She made the rounds. We’ve yapped on occasion.”

“I’d say so. You were flopping at her apartment until a few months

back.”

“What does this mean …” I said, my voice trailing off.

“It means the whole setup was a setup,” she said. “This chiseler got Regina to make nice with you.”

“To take her share of the Dutton job?” I asked, feeling a cold wetness at my temples, on my palms.

“And to get in with you, Little Miss Muffet,” she said, and I couldn’t look at her because I knew it was true. I looked at him instead, and it got my blood up. It got some steel in my bones to see him so bare. How many ways can you play the sap? I asked myself. You played them all.

“You been working me from the start?” I said, cold as she taught me.

“I never played a dame,” he said, shaking his head, backing up a little. “There’s no dividend in it. Not even the ones with bank accounts of their own. They all got some fella behind the scenes ready to make trouble. Sugar daddies, lawyers, private bankers, vag husbands back in town.” He was talking way too much. It was all

laying out there now, splayed out.

“So where s Regina now? What, she’s gone home crying to Ma?”

“Buried under two feet of lime for all I know,” he said, and the hardness hit me like a sucker punch. “But not from me,” he added. “She was spreading her sweet butter all over town. Sure, I heard about the stones, but I wasn’t in on that and I sure as hell would’ve stopped her from jawing about it door to door, flashing her new belly button emerald to every fast-money boy on the strip.”

“That’s bunk,” she said, walking toward him slowly. “And you know it. She took her shot because she’d borrowed heavy to cover your debts and then she was in deep with the sharks herself. So she got a nice haul from the jewelry deal, but before she could pay off her cuff, you’d taken her honey pot for yourself and dumped it all on another chalk bet at the track.”

He smiled again, but it was a sickly smile, toothless, like the broken men who played Texas twist for bottles of applejack in the lowest sawdust joints in the lowest part of town.

“She had to pull a Houdini,” she went on, “or they’d have strung her up. So you figured you’d move on to the bigger catch. The one you’d had your eye on all along. That’s why you kept your pretty face out of the rock heist. You were saving your grand entrance for my girl. You knew she’d have sweeter candy for you than little Regina ever could.”

“Ha. I should be so slick,” he said, looking over at me, rolling on the balls of his feet like a kid trying to bluff at the blackboard.

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