Hooligans (3 page)

“What‟re her chances?” I asked.

“A Kansas City shoe clerk might take the odds,” he said, and went away.

“I got a man on the front door, another one in a green robe on this floor,” Dutch said. “Nobody can

get near her. Whyn‟t ya come with me? I gotta debrief my people.”

Mrs. Tagliani made the decision for mc. While we were standing there the heart monitor went sour. It

stopped bipping and the green lines settled into a continuous streak.

The machine went deeeeeeeeee.

“Schmerz!” Dutch muttered. I had heard the expression before. Roughly translated, it meant a sorry

state of affairs. I couldn‟t have put it better.

A moment later the intern and two nurses rushed in, followed by the trauma unit with their rolling

table filled with instruments.

We stayed around for ten minutes or so until they gave it up.

“Eins, zwei, drei,” Dutch growled. “One more and we‟d have us a home run. Looks like you made a

long top for naught, Mr. Kilmer.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I gotta call homicide, tell „em Tagliani‟s missus went across. I‟ll he a minute. You‟re stayin‟ at the

Ponce, right?”

“Right.”

“Nice digs.,” Dutch said.

He went into the ICU office, made two phone calls in the time it took me to straighten my tie, and

came back.

“1 hear you know the town,” he said as we headed for the parking lot.

“1 do if it hasn‟t changed in twenty years,” I answered.

He laughed, but it was a sardonic, humorless laugh. “You‟re in for a surprise,” he said. “Follow me

over to the hotel. You can plant your car and run out to the Warehouse with me.”

“The Warehouse?”

“That‟s what we call our layout.”

I told him that was damn white of him and we headed out into the hot, rainy night.

2

It was only a few blocks back to the hotel but I saw enough through the windshield wipers and rain to

tell me what twenty years had done to Dunetown. These were not the wrinkles of time; this was a

beautiful woman turned whore. Tagliani‟s death had started the worms nibbling at my stomach. One

look -at downtown Dunetown turned the worms to writhing, hissing snakes, striking at my insides.

Twenty years ago Ocean Avenue was a dark, romantic, two-lane blacktop, an archway of magnolias

dripping with Spanish moss, that meandered From Dunetown to the sea, six miles away. Now it was

Ocean Boulevard, a six-lane highway that slashed between an infinity of garish streetlights like a scar.

Neither tree nor hush broke up the eerie green glow, but a string of hotel billboards did, their flashing

neon fingers beckoning tourists to the beach.

Front Street was worse. I was so shocked by what had happened here that I stopped the car, got out,

and stood in the rain, staring at a street gone mad. It was so far from the Front Street in my freeze

frame, I couldn‟t relate to it.

The Front Street I remembered was like the backdrop of a Norman Rockwell painting. There were

two old movie houses that showed double features. There was Bucky‟s drugstore, which had a

marble-top soda fountain where you could still get a milkshake made out of real ice cream and sit in

an old-fashioned wire-back chair to enjoy it. And there was the town landmark, Blame‟s Department

Store, which filled an entire block. The people of Dunetown once got everything from their diapers to

their funeral clothes at Blames.

Gone. No more Bucky‟s, no more Blame‟s, and the two theatres were twenty-four-hour porno houses.

A neon blight had settled over the heart of the town like a garish cloud. Hookers peddled their bodies

from under marquees to keep out of the rain, hawkers lured out-of-towners and footloose horseplayers

into all-nudie revues, and “bottomless” and “topless” signs glittered everywhere. The blaring and

oppressive beat of disco music was the street‟s theme song.

I had been there before, along Hollywood‟s strip and in the Boston combat zone. The scenario was

always the same. You couldn‟t buy a drink in any bar on the street without staring at a naked bosom

or getting propositioned by a waitress—or a waiter, depending on your inclination.

My God, I thought, what‟s happened here? How could Chief and Titan have let this happen to a town

they had once treated like a new bride?

The neon blight held the next six blocks in its fist.

And then, as if some medieval architect had built an invisible wall right through the middle of the

city, the neon vanished and Dunetown turned suddenly elegant. It was as if time had tiptoed past this

part of town with its finger to its lips. Old trees embraced mansions and two-hundred-year-old

townhouses. The section had been restored to Revolutionary grandeur with spartan and painstaking

accuracy. Gas lamps flickered on the corners, the streets were mostly window-lit, and there were

flower-laced squares every three or four blocks, fountained oases that added a sense of symmetry and

beauty to the place.

My reaction was simple.

The town was schizo to the core.

3

Dutch was waiting for me under the awning in front of the Ponce, the political watering hole of

Dunetown, a grand, old, creaky hotel, dripping with potted plants, and one of the few things in

Dunetown that hadn‟t changed. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of a bagged-out, nondescript

suit, and a Camel was tucked in the corner of his
mouth.
If he had a care in the world, it didn‟t show. I

parked behind a large black limo, gave the keys to the garage man, checked in, gave a bellhop five

bucks to drop my bag in my room, and tossed my briefcase into Dutch‟s backseat.

As 1 crawled into the front seat, I was still shell-shocked from the sights and sounds of Dunetown.

“Okay, let‟s roll,” he said, pulling into the dark, palm-lined street.

He didn‟t have anything to volunteer; his attitude was still cooperative but cautious. And while I was

interested in getting the lowdown on Tagliani-Turner, for the moment 1 was more interested in what

had happened to the local landscape.

After a block or two of silence I asked, “What in hell happened to Dunetown?”

He stared over at me with a funny look on his face, then, as if answering his own question, said, “Oh,

yeah, I keep forgetting
you
lived here once”

“Not here,” 1 said. “Not in this town. Anyway, 1 didn‟t live here. I was, oh. . I guess you could say I

was a summer guest.”

“When was that again?”

I was trying to be casual, trying to keep away from personal history. I didn‟t know him well enough to

show him any scars.

“Twenty years ago, just for a couple of months. It‟s hardly worth mentioning,” I answered in an

offhand way.

“You were just a kid then.”

“Yeah, a senior in college.” While I didn‟t want to get too personal, I didn‟t want to play games,

either.

“Teddy Findley was my best friend,” I added after a second or two.

“Oh,” he said. “Then you know what‟s been going on.”

“No, I got out of touch with the family,” I said.

“You know the Findley kid is dead?”

“You mean Teddy?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes,” I said. “It‟s after that I kind of lost track of things.”

“Well, what happened was the racetrack, that‟s what. The town got bent. Twenty years ago there was

probably, what, seventy-five, a hundred thousand people?”

“Sounds about right.”

“Probably three hundred thousand now, about half of ‟em from the shady side of the tracks. What you

got here, you got a major racetrack, and a beauty. Looks like Saratoga. A classy track, okay? That‟s a

gimmee.”

“Where is it?”

“Back behind us, on the other side of the river. It‟s dark now, anyway.”

“Okay, so you got a classy track. Then what?”

“I think maybe what the money in town expected was kind of another Ascot. Everybody standing

around sipping tea, wavin‟ their pinkies in the air. What they got is horseplayers, which come in every

shape, size, and variety known to mankind, and about half of them smoke tea; they don‟t drink it.”

“So that‟s what Front Street‟s all about?”

“It appeals to some of that element. It isn‟t Front Street‟s gonna make your gonads shrink. It‟s what

happened to the rest of the town. They turned it into a little Miami.”

“They? Who‟s they?”

“The wimps that took over. Look, Chief Findley‟s an old man. Most of the rest of the old power

structure‟s dead. They turned it over to their heirs. Keepers of the kingdom, right? Wrong. Wimps, the

lot of „em, with maybe an exception or two.”

“1 probably know some of them,” I said.

“Probably. But it wasn‟t just them, it was anybody had a square foot of ground they could sell.

Condos all over the place. High-rise apartments. Three big hotels on the beach, another one going up.

Real estate outta sight. Two marinas as big as Del Mar. You feel bad now, wait‟ll you see Doomstown

in the daylight.”

That was the first time I heard it called Doomstown, but it was far from the last.

“I‟m still surprised Chief Findley and the old power structure let it happen,” I said.

“Couldn‟t do anything about it,” Dutch growled, “They died or were too old to cope.”

An edge had crept into his tone, a touch of anger mixed with contempt. He seemed to sense it himself

and drove quietly while he calmed down.

I tried to fill in the dead space. “My father used to say you can inherit blood but you can‟t inherit

backbone.”

For the first few blocks we drove through the Dunetown I wanted to remember, the large section of

the midtown area that had been restored to its Revolutionary elegance.

I remembered driving through the section with Chief and Teddy one Sunday afternoon a long time

ago. It had fallen on hard times; block after block of broken-down row houses that were either

boarded over or had been converted into cheap rooming houses. We were in Chief‟s black Rolls

convertible and he was sitting on the edge of his seat, shoulders square, his white hair thrashing in the

wind.

“We‟re going to restore this whole damn part of town,” he had said grandly, in his soft, Irish-southern

accent, while waving his arm at the drab ruins. “Not a damn museum like Williamsburg. I mean a

livin‟, breathin‟ place where people will be proud to live. Feel like they‟re part of her history. Share

bed and board with her ghosts. This is the heart of the city, by Cod! And if the heart stops, the city

dies. You boys just remember that.” He paused to appraise the street, then added, half under his

breath, “Someday it‟ll be your responsibility.” And Teddy looked over at me and winked, in those

days I was one of the boys.

It seemed he had kept that bargain, although Cod knows what miserable trade he had made, allowing

the business section to go to hell. That part of it didn‟t make sense. This part did. The parks and

squares opened the town up, letting it breathe and flourish naturally, giving it a personality of its own.

Here and there, expensive-looking shops and galleries nudged up against the townhouses. You could

tell that zoning here was communal, that the rules were probably shaped by common consent.

“This is better,” I said. “But Front Street, Jesus!”

“They had to give the two-dollar bettors someplace to play,” Dutch said matter-of-factly.

We took a left and a right and were back to reality again. We were on the edge of Back O‟Town, a

kind of buffer between Dunetown and the black section. You could feel poverty iii the air. The fancy

shops gave way to army-navy stores and cut-rate furniture outlets. it was the worn-out part of town. A

lot of used-car lots and flophouse hotels.

We drove in silence for a minute or two, then I asked, “How long you been here, Dutch?”

“Came down from Pittsburgh almost four years ago, right after they passed the referendum for the

track.”

“They built it when?”

“It opened for business year before last and the town went straight to hell. From white Palm Beach

suits to horse blanket jackets and plaid pants overnight. You gotta bust an eardrum to hear a southern

accent anymore.” His own was a kind of guttural Pennsylvania Dutch.

“You mean like yours?” I joked.

He chuckled. “Yeah, like mine.”

“Town on the make,” I said, half-aloud.

“You got that right.”

“Flow long you been a cop?”

“Forever,” he said, without even thinking.

He turned down a dark residential street, driving fast but without circus lights or siren.

“Hell of a note,” I said. “Chief and his bunch pampered Dunetown. it was like a love affair.”

“Well, pal, that‟s a long time ago. it‟s a one-night stand now.” He paused and added, “You know the

Findleys that well, huh?”

I thought about that for a minute before answering.

“Well, twenty years dims the edges,” I said.

“Ain‟t that the truth.” Dutch lit a cigarette and added, “Sounds like you thought a lot of the old man.”

I nodded. “You could say that.”

“The way it comes to me, his kid was a war hero, got himself wasted over in Nam. After that the old

guy just folded up. Least that‟s the way I hear it.”

“Too bad,” I said. I was surprised at how indifferent my words sounded.

“I guess.”

“I gather you‟ve got reservations about Findley,” I said.

He shrugged. “It‟s the machine. I don‟t trust anybody‟s been in politics longer than it takes me to eat

lunch. And I‟m a fast eater.”

Old feelings welled up inside me, noodling at my gut again, a passing thing I couldn‟t quite get in