Excerpt from Murder And Gold

My street, like the others in my Theater District neighborhood, is ordinarily pretty quiet at this early hour. Windows in the old brick or brownstone five-story walk-ups, or in more recent apartment buildings like mine, are still dark, the blinds closed or the shades pulled. My night owl neighbors, those troupers who sing and dance on Broadway’s stages or croon in the nightspots, don’t put a toe on the pavement until noon at the earliest, and that’s only if they have a two o’clock matinee. But this morning there’s a drama in front of my building, right outside the door. Uniformed cops keep a handful of rubberneckers back while a plainclothes cop makes notes as he stands over the dead body of a woman. I know the body’s dead, not just some sweetie passed out from too much booze or fainting from hunger. I know it by the way the her legs and feet are splayed at odd angles and by the blood that’s spreading from her midsection onto the sidewalk.

And I know the body. She slammed my apartment door about an hour ago.

###

Lieutenant Norm Huber of Homicide, tall and skinny with a dry, stubbly, hollow-cheeked face, bears an uncanny resemblance to a dead tree. His brown tweed coat is cop-drab and shapeless. Smoke from the stubby ten cent cigar between his teeth clouds under the brim of his beat up brown fedora. Seeing me through the cigar smoke as I walk through the lobby, he pushes his hat back on his head and lets the smoke drift away, the better to show me the hate in his hooded eyes.

He doesn’t really see me, at least not all of me, and it’s not because of the cigar smoke. He sees my face and form all right, but he doesn’t see the shock and misery behind my eyes at the sight of the woman lying dead on the pavement with a bloody wound in her chest, her face contorted in terror, the woman who’d lain beneath me in my bed. He doesn’t see that part of me because I don’t let him. And even if I did, he wouldn’t see it anyway. His soul went blind years ago, if he even has one, which I doubt.

Maybe homicide cops’ souls always go blind, a survival tactic protecting them from being crushed by all the savagery they see. But hate like Huber’s isn’t from a blind soul, it’s from a tight, empty space too small for a soul.

Murder and Gold, A Cantor Gold Crime Mystery #5
Genre: Noir
Release: July 2021
Purchase Link

New York City, 1954.

Two women are found murdered. One is Lorraine Quinn, Cantor Gold’s most recent one-night-stand. The other is political power broker and aspiring New York socialite Eve Garraway, a regular client of Cantor’s stolen art trade.

Police nemesis, Lieutenant Norm Huber, wants to pin the murders on Cantor, send her to prison, and put her in the electric chair. He’ll get evidence on her any way he can. Into this cauldron of danger and death come two other women, each with ties to Cantor’s past. One hates her until passion intervenes; the other harbors darkly hidden feelings.

Set during the earliest stirrings of the Homosexual Rights Movement, Cantor begins to question her own tenuous identity, and the trade-offs she must make to get what she wants.

Cantor Gold, dapper butch art thief and smuggler for whom survival is everything, must now grapple with two fronts: surviving the shifting sands of the criminal underworld, and navigating the changing tides of society.

About the Author
Native New Yorker Ann Aptaker’s Cantor Gold crime/mystery series has been the recipient of Lambda Literary and Goldie Awards. Her short stories have appeared in two editions of the crime anthology Fedora, Switchblade Magazine’s Stiletto Heeled issue, Mickey Finn: Twenty-First Century Noir crime anthology. She is one of six writers invited to provide a novella for the second season of Down & Out Books’ crime series Guns & Tacos. Her flash fiction, “A Night In Town,” appeared in the online zine Punk Soul Poet, and another flash fiction, “Rockin’ Dyke Roll,” is featured in the Goldie winning anthology Our Happy Hours: LGBT Voices From The Gay Bars.

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