Life and Death of a Tough Guy (16 page)

Joey said. “Why the hell you playin’ with the light?”

“Okay, Joey….”

Joey was glad the damn flash was off him. He was feeling sick inside at what he had to do. “Keep the light on his face, will ya!” He stared down at the mark on the haystrewn dusty planks.

The light shone steady. It glinted on the gun in Joey’s fist. The bound man on the floor saw the gun. He began to thrash about. He was gagged but his frantic movement was like one prolonged scream.

Joey blinked, he pressed the trigger. God! The sound of the shot! Joey lowered his gun arm. Springing huge out of the light, then shrinking to a silent still shape, the corpse confronted him, the hole in it forehead a third eye: the eye of death itself.

The light lifted to Joey’s face as sweaty now as the dead man’s face’d been. “Get that outa here!” he snarled at Ted. Like a living thing the light slid silently down to the dead man.

Mutely, accusingly, the three eyes peered up at Joey. The killer began to tremble. He couldn’t control himself. The trembles became the shakes. His arms hit his side like two pieces of wood, his forehead ridged with stiff wrinkles, his mouth crooked, all his face inhuman. The mask sobbed, and all that was left of the killer was a distorted and silent shadow on the barn floor.

“He’s cryin’!” Lefty exclaimed. “Fer Chris’ sake!”

“Whatta you know!” Ted Griffin murmured.

The Spotter’s understanding went deeper. “You got a case of buck fever, that’s all. Forget it, kiddo. That Longo was just a crumb. What happened with the Bug? You have a cryin’ jag on with him?”

“No, Spotter.”

“You got the Bug in hot blood,” was the Spotter’s reasonable guess.

A few more gun jobs and Joey Kasow managed the calm that comes with the mastery of any trade, the face of a lead soldier matched by a leadening heart.

In the winter he had his first important job, a guy by name of Fallon. Fallon was a sandy-haired knife-scarred gangster come up lately like a house afire in the Spotter’s territory. Not the first nor the last. A mad dog, that Fallon bitten by the mad dog dream of flashy cars and flashy dames, who figured he could start a chain of speaks if Spotter Boyle could. What the hell was so great about Spotter Boyle and Fat Quinn anyway? That was what Fallon was preaching to honest speakeasy owners who wished to God they could be left alone two months running. Joey had no sooner done a little scouting, when he realized that knocking off Fallon wouldn’t be enough. With Fallon there were two guys just as tough, a squint-eyed Dutchman by name of Hemmler and an ex-con by name of McGuire. It had to be a clean sweep or else the guns’d be firing both ways. “It gotta be three-in-one,” he had explained to the Spotter.

“You’re right,” the Spotter had agreed and patted Joey on the back. For a second the Spotter had let his light hand linger. “That’s usin’ the ‘ol head, Joey.”

Joey had split up the job, keeping Fallon for himself. Big Georgie, a cap low over his eyes and looking like another truckdriver, shot down Hemmler as he walked out of his girl friend’s house. But Ted Griffin missed McGuire when his gun jammed. As for Fallon, the luck was just as bad. Fallon was nowhere. Like he’d dropped into a great big hole. Every big town has them. He was out of sight but not out of mind. Twenty-four hours later, Fallon’s boys smashed up a bunch of the Spotter’s speaks and that wasn’t all. The Spotter, leaving the lobby of the Berkeley, was scratched by two bullets from a Fallon gunman outside in a cab. “Their aim’s punk,” the Spotter had commented in complete agreement with a sardonic-minded reporter who’d written up the story for his paper, praising the superior marksmanship of Chicago. Accompanied by Quinn, the Spotter in a sedan full of bodyguards, pulled out of town. The shooting improved. Sarge Killigan whom everybody liked, was killed when he resisted the Fallons who came to wreck the speak he was managing for the Spotter. Two more Fallons were shot down by Joey’s gunmen, and on the tenth day of the war, Ted Griffin and a helper caught McGuire on a sneak visit to his brother. Fallon, the invisible man, they never caught up with. Had he lost his nerve? Hotfooted out of the Spotter’s territory? For all anybody knew, he was still on the lam. Anyway, he was gone for keeps, a name to be batted around over a glass of beer.

“That Fallon, he was a mad dog! Wonder what happened to him?”

The coppers had wondered, too. “What about Fallon?” they had questioned the Spotter’s boys down the station house. “What about Hemmler…. McGuire….” With the Spotter’s demon lawyer, Farber, fighting legal tooth and illegal nail for his clients. It seemed nobody knew a damn thing about Fallon. Certainly not Joey Kasow.

And as one year after another skipped down the West Side gutters like kids playing jump rope in a hurry, Fallon and his crowd became just another memory. Mad dogs, they all had their day.

“What about this stabbing of Micky Carroll?” the coppers asked Joey six months later.

Down the West Side, it seemed that every time a gangster was taken for a ride in a car — the new closed models supplied speedy rooms for murder — or found in a hallway, or dragged out of the river, the first thing that popped inside the ironplated copper head was to haul Joey Kasow to the station house.

“Angelo Petrucci….”

“Charley Kobleson? … And while we got you here what about that other Charley? Charley the Chicken Butcher….”

They would question him for an hour or two, keep him overnight in cold storage while he singsonged, “I wanna see my lawyer, Mister Farber. I don’t know why you’re pickin’ on me. My record’s clean. I got no felony on me! Not even a lousy misdemeanor! There’s nothin’ on me!”

Which was true. The gold ring on Joey’s finger was the heaviest weapon they’d ever found on him. They had to let him go since they couldn’t book him on the general charge that he was another Hell’s Kitchen rat come up out of the sewer. Or because a stool pigeon was phoning a true friend (who paid cash) at the station house that the guy to question was Joey Kasow. More cash was pouring through the other end of the funnel. The Spotter had his own true friends behind the twin green lamps of the station houses.

They had to let him go while, behind him, the plainclothes dicks who didn’t go in for plain living any more decided like the well-heeled philosophers they had become: “That Joey’ll get his one of these days.”

“You said it, Mike. Let them racketeers knock each other off I say. But to tell you the truth, that sheeny gets me a lil sore. Him and his damn clean record. Where does he hide his gun?”

Clean-Record Joey, the dicks nicknamed him. No-Gun Joey.

And in the furnished rooms where the punks kept their guns in five-and-dime toy holsters, they also talked his name up, his name and his nicknames. In the furnished rooms, in the speaks, in the floating crap games. Punks and bootleggers and tinhorn gamblers — all had their two cents to say:

“Try and prove a thing on Joey! Hell, he’s got the Spotter behind him!”

“He’s a tough bastid, wunna toughest in the whole West Side.”

“No-Gun Joey — ain’t that a laugh for a guy like him?”

No-Gun Joey…. “Don’t believe all the stuff you read,” Joey had said to Sadie when she’d first read a story about him in the newspapers. “You ever see a gun on me? The cops hate my guts just because I’m clean. I’ve told you a hundred times — I’m practically legit, Sweetie. I work for a closed-down brewery. We got a
judge
, one of the owners! We’re legit! We don’t haffta go in for no rough stuff. Never have. Aw, it ain’t worth talkin’ about. Les have a drink and then les grab a T-bone steak somewhere.” With a glass of sherry in her hand — the lonely redhead was no whiskey drinker — she could almost believe him. And when she refilled her glass in the long evenings when she sat alone, the lonely evenings of the winos, she did believe him. To awake in the mornings, without belief or disbelief, a woman in a furnished room.

Whose face did she see in the mirror? A woman’s mirror in the first hour of a new day is like a crystal ball in which the remembered past is sometimes more mysterious than the unknown future. Where was the girl Sadie Madofsky? Another face was hanging on a hook next to the day’s dress. Another face, another life. When she rubbed her lipstick on, whose lips? The lips of the girl who had worked in her father’s store, or the lips of the
kurva
, the whore? She would stare at her face in the mirror and remember kisses that seemed to burn her lips away, leaving lips of teeth. Kisses of the furnished room evenings.

Mirror after mirror remembered the girl Sadie Madofsky. They were her true calendars to be consulted in the waking hour of every new day. Sometimes she would move her face close, closer, closer to the mirror, as if it were a door through which she could pass and catch up with her lost self. Her face would touch the cold glass and she would know again that there was no return.

Sadie Madofsky? There was only the girl he called Sweetie: The girl with the bobbed red hair who sat of an afternoon in the darkened movie houses, who waited for him to come home, with a glass of sherry in her hand. Between one sip and the next, all the phantoms of respectability came and went without agitating her, without heartbreak. Her dead mother, her kid brother, her father, the teachers at Washington Irving, a constant coming and going without meaning like the footsteps of other roomers on the stairs. A glass of sherry in her hand, and she would sometimes even feel the Phantom Presence of God, not the God of the synagogues and churches, but the All-Seeing One of the furnished rooms. The Lonely One who understood the bottle of sherry in her closet as He understood the little dog who lived with the widow down the hall. Sometimes, whinily, she would pray. “Dear God, please let Joey marry me some day. I love Joey, dear God, and he loves me a little. Dear God, forgive us….”

The Lonely One always listened to her and then He would vanish in noiseless slippers as if He, too, were another Roomer.

As the girl with the bobbed red hair reached for the bottle of sherry.

No-Gun Joey…. The Spotter had to laugh when he read that nickname for the first time in the papers. He even cut the story out, and from that time on, he began clipping each new item about Joey Kasow. He kept the clippings in a big manila envelope in his room at the Hotel Berkeley. After a while, the Spotter’s scissors were cutting out the stories and pictures of other West Side racketeers. Including his own. It was a strange and seemingly indiscriminate hobby for he tossed all the clips into the same manila envelope. Of an evening, he would pull out his paper jungle, and sort through them, glancing idly at the photos. With their felt hats pulled low over their pokerfaces — still remaining pokerfaces even when they gave the cameraman a great big publicity smile — there was a resemblance among all the boys in the racket. Between the big-shots and the little shots, the bootleg millionaires and bootleg’s ten-buck-a-day men. Then, the Spotter would return all the photos, except Joey’s and his own, into the manila envelope, and with narrowed eyelids study the fresh young face of No-Gun Joey Kasow and the peaked sunken face of Spotter Boyle.

There was one other compulsive move in this new and strange hobby of his. Whenever some West Side racketeer was murdered (or given a long stretch up the river) the Spotter would patiently gather together all the dead man’s stories and photos, reach for his scissors and slowly cut the clippings into pieces.

Two years after the Bug killing, Joey was averaging a hundred and a quarter a week for policing the Spotter’s territory. He was the Spotter’s number one gun, with fifteen guys under him, strongarms and weakheads mostly, good at smashing a rib or breaking an arm. Old-time blackjack boys and brassknuck bruisers who’d taken to guns like kids to a giant size lollipop. Of the whole kaboodle, Joey only used four or five for the rub-out jobs. Not that the others weren’t okay. But he favored the guys with some brains. Like Ted Griffin who went out on a killing as if climbing into another kind of ring. Or his old pal Big Georgie who, although you couldn’t exactly call him smart, still wasn’t dumb, a butcherboy who liked his work. Two or three others.

He was in the dough, but he hadn’t forgotten that the Spotter owned him like he owned his pearl-handled .38. (Between jobs, he had it cached in the flat of Ted Griffin’s sister, a respectable widow who worked for the cloak and suiters. She never looked inside the suitcase her brother’d take once in a while from the top of the closet in her kitchen.) Even that pearl-handled .38 of his was a present from the Spotter. Often Joey had thought of buying his own iron. But, superstitious like most gunmen, he was afraid his luck might change with a new gun. For it was the Spotter’s luck he was traveling on.

When the Spotter quit his private office at the Young Democrats, he turned it over to Joey. The Spotter had rented new offices over on Broadway near Columbus Circle. Slick offices for insiders in the racket, for the Spotter and Tom Quinn who operated the brewery that was making most of their beer, and two or three other guys come out of nowhere the last year or so who’d never been Badgers or even Young Democrats. Over on Broadway the letters out front were: ELWOOD REALTY COMPANY. To Joey they spelled: THE BIG SHOTS. Hell, he’d wonder with his feet up on the Spotter’s old desk. Was that skinny bastard going to keep him on the gun his whole life? When the hell would a guy by name of Joey Kasow get a real break anyway?

“A guy has to go up, down’s for the bums,” Joey began sounding off to his redhead especially when he was lit. With the whiskey warm as a woman’s hand on his belly, he’d feel himself floating up, up. Why shouldn’t he become a bigshot? “All I need’s a break, Sweetie. I got the brains, and that God damn Spotter knows it. That’s why he’s keepin’ me down. What he don’t know is I can wait.” And in their room, they would drink together and time would stop, flowing neither backward or forward. “You stick with me, Sweetie. You’ll see, Sweetie. I’ll get my break wunna these days. I can afforda wait, I’m young, God damn it!”

In that boom year, the town was full of self-made men and if Joey dreamed too, a self-made gun, who could blame him? Didn’t he have the brains and the nerve? Hadn’t he made good on every job he’d ever tackled? Even the Spotter said so.