Life and Death of a Tough Guy (19 page)

For more than an hour they argued it, the Spotter against both Quinn and Farber. This was no time to buy a brewery, Quinn kept repeating. Not when everything was skyhigh. A good brewery would come to three or four hundred thousand dollars. Besides, the presidential elections were one year off. If Al Smith got the Democratic nomination, prohibition would be on the way out. The Spotter retorted that dealing with the Dutchman wasn’t the cheaper proposition, not even if prohibition were to end in 1928. Weary and exhausted, he rose to his feet at eleven-thirty. “I’ll see Dutch Schultz. But I still say we got no choice. We’ll haffta buy a brewery, make our own beer again.”

Quinn’s eyes were moist with excitement. “Not me, not me, Spotter! If you buy a brewery, you buy me out! You can buy me out — ”

The Spotter blinked. He thought, it never rained, but it poured. “How much you want?”

“I ain’t figgered it out in dollars and cents. You name a figger.”

“How about five bucks cold cash?”

“You sonuvabitch, I don’t like that kinda joke — ”

Again the lawyer lifted his soft hands like a legal benediction — hands almost as white as the framed parchments on the walls — and as Quinn cursed, the Spotter faded out of the booklined office. When the door closed, Manny Farber scurried out of his chair and picked up the scattered pages of the newspaper from the carpet, glancing at the headline as if he hadn’t seen it before: LINDY TAKES OFF.

“Where do you think he is by now?” the cabbie asked his new fare.

“Who?”

“Say, who you kiddin’ mister? Who!”

The Spotter remembered. The propellers of the Spirit of St. Louis blew away the thoughts clouding his brain. Thoughts of Quinn.

“He started at seven fifty-two,” the cabbie was saying. “Soon be four hours. His plane can do three hundred twenty miles an hour easy….”

The Spotter’s mind picked up the phrase, converted it to his own problems:
three hundred twenty miles an hour easy
— three hundred for a brewery, maybe four, it’s a boom market. That bastid Quinn! Buy him out! What’ll I buy him out with if I have to dig up three hundred….

“In four hours,” the cabbie was saying, “Lindy’ll be more’n a thousand miles out. It’s a big pond, mister. I remember when I crossed it in a troop ship, a big pond, and a thousand’s just the beginning….”

And a thousand’s just the beginning
— beginning of what, I’d like to know? Dutch Schultz, end of prohibition maybe. No wonder Quinn wants to retire, leave me holding the bag. He’s skimmed the cream. Twenty grand he put up when he came in with me. A lousy twenty grand. He’s made a fortune. Made his lousy twenty back the first six months of prohibition. Averaged close to a hundred thousand a year the last five years. And I have to buy him out so he can sit on his fat butt the rest of his life out in Tom’s River bragging what a big man he is to the fat ass cops retired out there. Buy him out, buy a brewery.

“That’s a helluva big pond,” the cabbie was saying, on the gloomy side now. “It’s a big pond, Mister.”

“What?”

“It’s a big pond, I said.”

The Spotter stared at the cabbie’s red ears. “If he falls in who’ll find him?”

The red ears became one red ear attached to the side of a horrified red face. “Mister, don’t talk like that for Chris’sake.”

“We all fall in, don’t we?” the Spotter said, shrugging.

“I getcha. Yeh, but not him, Mister!”

The first thing Dutch Schultz said when the Spotter came into his hotel room was, “Damn lucky Lindy pushed John Terry outa the papers, Spotter.”

The Spotter removed his light gray hat and looked at the grinning face in front of him. A face with a neatly mended broken nose and a rocky jaw. It could have been a boxer’s mug.

“Lucky?” the Spotter inquired politely.

“Lucky for you,” the Dutchman grinned as he tossed this one, wild and reckless as a haymaker. That was the Dutchman all over, a guy like a haymaker.

The Spotter said, “I wouldn’t go around makin’ talk like that, Dutch.”

The Dutchman laughed. “John Terry, he had half a dozen speaks, they say, in your territory, Spotter.”

“They were safe by me, Dutch. It ain’t the old days no more when you broke a blood vessel over every mad dog.”

“That how you feel, Spotter?”

“That’s how I feel.”

“You’re full of….” the Dutchman grinned. “How about a drink?”

“Not if it’s your beer, Dutch.”

“Always complainin’ about my beer. Anyway, you don’t drink, do you Spotter?”

“Your beer made me a tee-totaller, Dutch.”

“You’re gonna get first-class beer,” Dutch Schultz assured him, grinning. “You’re not gonna have no more complaints, no more, Spotter.” He made these promises or rather he seemed to throw them: verbal uppercuts dissolving in thin air. The Spotter left within ten minutes of his arrival. He had been wasting his time.

Downstairs, the Spotter thought: there’s nothing for it but to buy a brewery. He went into a phone booth and called Arnold Rothstein. The man who had fixed the World Series in 1919, parlaying a hundred grand into a million, was a banker now to every racketeer in town. Luck was with the Spotter. The big-shot had a late lunch date, but if the Spotter came right over they could talk.

The Spotter hopped a cab to Rothstein’s hotel, the Park Central. Outside the radio stores, people were listening to the loudspeakers. Lindy hovered over the city as if in an airplane hanging on wires in the sky.

The Spotter went up to Rothstein’s apartment. He shook hands with the dark-haired gambler. The Spotter was nervous, he couldn’t forget for a minute that when he was still trying to squeeze three nickels out of a dime, Rothstein was rolling in money.

Like any other banker, Rothstein had to know exactly what his money was wanted for. The Spotter explained in detail why he might be needing three or four hundred thousand to buy himself a brewery.

“I’m not going to loan you that kind of money,” Rothstein said finally. “Not that you’re not good for it, Spotter. I don’t want to get into the middle of a situation between you and the Dutchman.”

“That your final word?”

“Next to final anyway, Spotter.”

“What do you mean by next to final?”

Rothstein smiled. “You come to me when things’re quiet down the West Side.”

“If you mean this John Terry thing — ”

“I’m not asking you anything, am l?” Rothstein said with honest indignation. He had fixed the World Series, broken the hearts of a million kids mourning the White Sox become the Black Sox, but he drew the line somewhere and practiced what he preached. He would lay dying a year later, a bullet hole in his side, refusing to give the police any information.

The Spotter returned to his own hotel. He lay down on his bed and thought of three hundred thousand dollars. He had close to half million in a dozen banks but it was a principle with him not to use his own money. The three hundred G’s could be raised. Every speak in his chain would chip into a war chest. But that’d take leg work, not to mention tonguework, especially if the word got around that Quinn wasn’t in. Quinn…. The Spotter thought about Quinn. The Spotter left his bed, phoned the Young Democrats Club, asked for Joey. Joey wasn’t around, he was told. The Spotter phoned the Hotel Delmore. Mr. Joe Case wasn’t in his room, and neither was his wife, Mrs. Case. The Spotter phoned the Young Democrats again and instructed Ted Griffin there to hunt up Joey, that he was coming over right away.

He had forgotten about Lindbergh, but when he stepped into the clubroom, the radio was going heavy and fifteen or twenty of the guys were listening as if their lives depended upon it, like it was the last game of the World Series. Hats shoved back on their foreheads, cigarettes slanting out of their mouths, they helloed the Spotter and gave him the latest report. Although there was nothing really to report — Lindy was somewhere over the Atlantic, a single man in a flying speck of metal, out of all contact with his country and countrymen. Including this batch of strongarms listening now with one ear — the other ear cocked anxiously for the Spotter’s opinion — as the radio voice stated: “… The expectation is that Lindy will fly for the Irish coast.”

“He’ll be in Paris tomorrow,” the Spotter delivered his opinion, turning his back on the glad-handers. Their eager faces irritated him. “I’ll be in my old office,” he said. “Send Joey in when he gets here.” He walked out of the clubroom, a narrow figure in his dark suit, his face almost as gray as the light gray felt tilted so jauntily on his head.

That sonfabitch Joey, the Spotter thought as he sat down wearily in the swivel chair at his old desk. Just when I want him, he’s disappeared. The Spotter put his heels up on the desk. His head sank on his chest. His pale eyelids that somehow seemed as if they had been boiled in water a long time, closed. He dozed, and dozing, his face was oddly like a boy’s — a middle-aged boy whose jaws and chin had become bonily fragile with the years, almost childlike.

His eyes opened but the footsteps that had awakened him weren’t Joey’s. Through the wall, faint but distinct, he heard the radio: “… the father of Lindy, Charles A. Lindbergh, might have been the Governor of Minnesota, but he failed to be elected….”

Governor of Minnesota, the Spotter thought bitterly. They all wanna be Governor of Minnesota, they’re never satisfied. John Terry, Dutch Schultz, all of ‘em. That Schultz! I’ll bury him like I buried John Terry….

He glanced about this old office of his, the walls painted a fresh oyster white. He remembered when the office’d been painted green. That first year, back in 1920, and how when the paint was still fresh, some wise guy’d stuck a French picture postal into it. Cockeye Smith most likely, although Cockeye’d sworn himself black and blue it wasn’t him. A lot of difference it made now. Cockeye was six feet under, killed in the trouble with Charley the Chicken-Butcher. Cockeye Smith and John Terry and all the other wise guy sonuvabitches who wanted to be Governor of Minnesota. One by one, he had taken their clippings out of his manila envelope and cut them to pieces. One by one, and now it was that greedy hog’s turn, that fatass of a greedy hog, Quinn.

When Joey showed up, he found the Spotter asleep, his head pillowed on his arms on the desk. “Spotter,” Joey said softly.

The Spotter awoke, he pushed a cigarette between his lips, inhaling the smoke as if it were blood. He was pale as a zombie after his nap.

“Where were you?” the Spotter asked.

“Seein’ a guy who promised me a coupla tickets to the Maloney-Sharkey fight tonight.”

“Didn’t they call it off?”

“The fight? What for?”

“For Lindy.”

The thinnest and coldest of smiles touched Joey’s lips. The Spotter appraised that smile as he glanced into Joey’s eyes, clear and bright and gray — and absolutely emotionless. The Spotter thought that ever since the Local 23 to-do a year ago, the heart was out of Joey. Which hadn’t been a bad thing. It’d made Joey a perfect gunman. “You and Lindy must be about the same age,” the Spotter said.

“Exactly the same. He was born in 1902 like me.”

“That so.”

“Yeh.” Joey sat down alongside the desk.

Outside they heard the radio describing the Spirit of St. Louis: “… in this invention of man, as delicate as a fine watch, a heroic American defies the ocean and all the elements….”

“Real guts,” Joey commented.

“Joey,” the Spotter said in a low voice. “On this Terry job we had a deal. I promised to put you back into Local 23 and I did. Pull up your chair, Joey.”

The chair scraped along the floor. The Spotter leaned towards Joey, their heads close, almost touching, the sunken-cheeked head of the Spotter and the smooth-cheeked head of Joey. “You oughta know, Joey. Quinn wants somebody else, kiddo, for the local.”

Outside, the radio like a wound-up toy was beginning again: “At eight o’clock this morning, Charles A. Lindbergh electrified the nation by hopping off in his airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis….”

“Joey, this is ‘tween you and me,” the Spotter whispered. “Nobody else knows. And I’m gonna tell you somethin’ else. Somethin’ I learned today that can work out for you and me both. Nobody knows this, not even Manny Farber, only me and you. John Terry wasn’t the only one on the Dutchman’s payroll. Why do you think we sold the brewery? Why we buyin’ the Dutchman’s lousy beer? You know why? All this time, Quinn’s been gettin’ a cut from the Dutchman.”

His whisper faded out but not before, sharp and spitting as a bullet, Joey had heard Quinn’s death warrant.

“Nobody knows about this, Joey. Only you and me. You’ll have to do the job yourself. And Joey. There won’t be no other hitch on that local, not with me runnin’ things. Okay, kiddo?”

“Okay.”

Those gray eyes of Joey Kasow alias Joey Case could have been made of glass like the eyes a taxidermist puts into the heads of his stuffed hawks and owls.

For the first time the Spotter thought fearfully that maybe the kid ought to be dumped for keeps. No-Gun Joey was getting too damn perfect on the job. Another wise guy who wanted to be Governor of Minnesota! Waiting for his chance, always waiting.

“The man didn’t have an enemy,” the Spotter told everybody. It was a big expensive funeral. The box in which Thomas Quinn was placed like a dollar cigar was worth five thousand dollars. It was a year of killings. Little Augie Orgen was killed in a doorway; Frankie Yale was shot down on a hot Sunday afternoon and buried in a silver coffin; the flowers cost thirty-seven thousand dollars. The flowers were beautiful in Kansas City, too, and in Philadelphia. In Chicago, at the funeral of Dion O’Bannion, there was a wreath from Al Capone with the simple and moving words, “From Al.” While back in New York, Arnold Rothstein, with a hole the size of a saucer in his side, hung on for two days without naming his killers. Seemed there were no killers. Only funerals and flowers and headlines. 1928 was sensational but 1929 topped it. On St. Valentine’s Day in Chicago, three Al Capone gunmen disguised as coppers walked into a garage where seven O’Bannions were waiting for a load of booze and mowed them down with machine guns. ST. VALENTINE’S MASSACRE the headlines screamed from coast to coast.