Life and Death of a Tough Guy (22 page)

Georgie grinned foolishly. “Who told yuh?”

“Charley. You better cut it out, Georgie. The Spotter don’t like it, and lay off the bottle, Georgie. You don’t want ‘em yappin’ you’re a crazy lush. Cut it out!” he repeated in a voice so intense despite its low tone that Georgie forgot to inhale on the cigarette between his lips. “I’m warnin’ you for your own good! Whatever the hell you do, stay away from the Spotter!”

“Yeh,” Georgie agreed uneasily. “Yeh — ”

“Don’t
yeh
me like a muttonhead, Georgie. You’re gonna get yourself in real dutch.”

Georgie’d heard enough. “When do we get rid of this guy Finestein?”

Joey shrugged. “Who the hell cares?”

“Whatta you mean, Joey? We don’t want to hang ‘round here forever — ”

“Don’t worry. This Olsen’ll deliver him all right.”

“Who’s this Olsen?”

“He runs the slot machines up here,” Joey said and wondered why he was yapping now? It must be catchy.

“Finestein work for him?”

“Nope.”

“How’s this Olsen fit in then?”

“He’s got slot machines, the Dutchman’s got numbers.”

“I don’t get it, Joey.”

Joey thought he shouldn’t be yapping to Loose Lips Georgie.

The hell with them! The hell with Charley and the Spotter and the whole damn Office! “The Office supplies the slot machines, Olsen pays ‘em rent. See? There was no numbers up here ‘til the Dutchman sent Finestein to organize. That Dutchman beat The Office to the gun, see? Aw, the hell with it! That Dutchman — him and Al Capone.”

“What’s Al Capone got to do with it, Joey?”

“Georgie,” Joey said, shaking his head. “Sometimes I wonder if you breathe.”

“Sure I breathe,” Georgie retorted. “Only what’s Al Capone got to do with the Dutchman?”

“Who got Al Capone to go to jail for a year? He comes out and where is he? Alcatraz!”

“Yeh, but the feds put’m in Alcatraz,” Georgie yawned. “I don’t see how the Dutchman or — ”

“Skip it!”

“Joey, why don’t you and me sneak down, t’hell with Pete and Tunafish, and cop us a lay?”

Joey had to grin. Al Capone didn’t rate more than a minute’s worth of talk to Georgie. Al Capone was finished business with Georgie and why he was putting on the crying towel Christ only knew. Still it showed you how that damn Office operated. They get Al Capone to give himself up to the coppers, and the guy does it, and comes out of the can to have the coppers smash his stills and the feds jump on his income tax returns. The guy runs to Florida and gets treated like a bum, gets arrested for vagrancy, gets a couple thousand tax evasion and bootlegging charges tossed at him, and ends up in Alcatraz. Christ, The Office must’ve celebrated with a champagne cocktail when they got the news. And now it was the Dutchman’s turn coming up.

“Hey, you’re not listenin’ to me,” Georgie complained.

“I’m listenin’. Dames.”

“Yeh. These hick whores must be like pickin’ daisies,” Georgie grinned.

“You think so?”

“Yeh, not like that wisepott Annabelle, remember?”

They both thought of Annabelle whom they’d once kept in partnership with Ted Griffin.

“She was too wise,” Georgie reminisced, scratching at himself. “Hey, Joey, you know what gets me?”

“What gets you?”

“You and that redhead of yours. You must like that redhead?” Georgie winked.

“Just a habit.” Joey answered flippantly and knew he was lying. As he lied to Sadie Madofsky whenever he had to leave town. (“I’m just like a salesman,” he had said before his first trips, his voice so beaten he could have been a bona fide salesman about to be let go by a bona fide manufacturer on the verge of jumping out of the window. “I see how much booze they want and I fill orders, that’s me. It’s gettin’ real businesslike with prohibition about to blow up.”) “A habit’s funny,” he now explained to Georgie.

“Yeh, but what’s she got to keep you all these years?”

“What they all got. Who’s your big flame now, Georgie?” As Georgie answered, he hardly listened, asking himself: What did that redhead have? Georgie was right. She’d been with him long enough to be his wife or something. Maybe that was it, his lil jewgirl of a wife. Something in the blood, something. And she was beginning to show it lately, getting a little fat. Yeah, but some of that was from the wine she was always drinking. Plenty sugar in wine and all those calory-vitamin things.
I trust her
, he thought suddenly with a hammering naked honesty that knocked down his superstitions and prejudices. That was it. He trusted her as he’d once trusted Georgie. And didn’t trust the Spotter, Charley, The Office, the whole damn world where a guy always had to watch his step.

“City dames’re no good,” Georgie was saying, speaking of his newest girl. “These hick dames! They must be like pickin’ daisies, Joey.”

“You say that only because you’re here in the sticks.”

“Betcha they’re like pickin’ daisies or buttercups.”

“Betcha a buck you don’t know the name of a third flower.”

“A what?”

“I bet you one buck cash you don’t know the name of a third flower, Georgie.”

“Wise guy!” Georgie’s forehead wrinkled as he concentrated. “Les see now. Daisies, buttercups — roses!” he cried triumphantly.

“How about a fourth?”

“Pay the buck you lost first.”

Joey tossed him a dollar bill. “Two bucks you don’t name a fourth flower.”

“You’re easy,” Georgie laughed. “Lemme see. Roses and daisies and buttercups and there’s — I can see ‘em with my eyes, but what the hell’s their name? Violets!” he exclaimed.

Joey paid over two more bills and bet four bucks Georgie couldn’t name a fifth flower. He kept doubling the bet and on the seventh flower Georgie lost. “You took me,” Georgie said ruefully. “Double bets’re sucker bets.”

Joey smiled and then of a sudden he didn’t feel so damn smart any more. Who the hell was he robbing? He returned Georgie his money. And felt as if somewhere, somehow, he had lost in a game that he’d been playing a lifetime….

It was nearly eleven that night before they checked out of the inn, driving up Main Street, the plateglass fronts of the stores bright under the dark spring sky, and then even as Joey was thinking: It must be awful lonely living in a one-horse town — they had left the lights and were out in the country. “Trees and fields that’s all,” Joey remarked to nobody in particular.

“My ole man usta talk of buyin’ a lil farm some day,” Tunafish contributed to the conversation.

“And make his own wine?” Georgie hooted. “All wops’re the same.” He was at the wheel. “All wops!”

“Hommade wine ain’t so bad,” Tunafish answered.

“To wash your feet with!” Georgie declared.

Joey thought, the big sonuvabitch’s getting steam up already. He stared out at the countryside coming at them in dark sheets, the clumps of trees darker patches. Before the car’s probing headlights, the moonless fields unwound.

“Joey, I keep on this road?” Georgie asked.

“Watch your mileage. At three point seven, we hit a crossroad where you make a left.” Olsen had phoned again, a half hour ago, with exact instructions. “Three point seven!” But this was a driver with no head for figures. Joey had to direct him practically every inch of the way. They passed a huge stucco hotel whose name came out of the night printed on a signboard: HOTEL PARAMOUNT and then vanished. It was deserted now before the summer season. “That’s a Broadway name,” Pete Bowers said. “The hebes call all their hotels with Broadway names.”

Joey wondered if Pete Bowers knew he was a hebe. From Loose Lips Georgie maybe. Else why was the lil sonuvabitch always sounding off. Must be a sonuvabitch on hebes like the Bug … Bughead Moore, his old pal. He’d’ve been the prize enforcer of them all, so the sonuvabitch was enforcing the worms and served him right.

“Why they call him Milty the Poet?” Georgie asked again.

Even Pete couldn’t answer that one. The headlights gleamed down a long straight stretch of asphalt, a lake shone on their left, and Joey thought: This whole show tonight’s for a hebe and served him right for getting mixed up with The Office.

“Why they call him Milty the Poet — ” Georgie asked again. “ ‘Roses’re red, violets’re blue,’ ” Georgie chanted.

Joey remembered their betting back in the inn, and in his own head finished the rhyme: ‘Milty’s a hebe and so’re you.’ To Georgie, Joey said, “Should be there soon. Keep your eye peeled for Olsen’s farmhouse.”

“I start the job,” Georgie said to Pete and Tunafish in the rear. “Okay?”

It was okay with Pete and Tunafish. The road narrowed. A few minutes later the farmhouse they wanted, like the last piece in a jigsaw puzzle, dropped out of the night. Their headlights shone on the canary-yellow side of a parked roadster.

It was Olsen’s car and Olsen was waiting for them inside the farmhouse with Milty the Poet Finestein.

The farmhouse windows shone brighter than ever when Georgie switched off his lights. Georgie walked to the car trunk, unlocked it and pulled out a duffle bag. The three others had gone on ahead. Georgie heard the wooden stairs of the porch creaking under their feet. Georgie grinned, and his grip on the strings of the duffle bag tightened like a hunter’s fist on his rifle. He left the bag on the porch and followed Joey. Pete and Tunafish into a Hollywood-style interior. The walls were knotty pine; a mounted deer’s head hung over the huge fireplace.

Two men had gotten to their feet like a welcoming committee, a slender dark man in his forties wearing a sports shirt and corduroy pants, and a man who could only have been the owner of a yellow roadster. Olsen was fair and fat, wearing a fine gray sweater and plaid knickers cut so full and wide they looked like bloomers made out of tweed, his golf stockings patterned with red and green diamonds.

“Boys, we been expecting you,” Olsen greeted them. “This is Milty Finestein, boys.”

The slender man said, “Olsen here convinced me. He convinced me to tell what Dutch Schultz’s doing here. I’ll tell you and we’ll get this whole thing straightened out.” He had a long narrow face, his eyes large and dark, but he spoke quick and clipped like a businessman. Milty the Poet was all set to talk business. He had no idea the business’d been settled in Charley Valinchi’s backroom. Chuck Tillio’d done his best but it hadn’t been good enough.

“I’ll be seeing you,” Olsen said, and he waved a ringed hand at all of them.

“You said you’d stick around and put in a word,” Milty the Poet reminded him quickly.

Christ! Joey thought. The poor sonofabitch still don’t know he’s a gunner. That Olsen should be a lawyer.

“Milty, it’s okay,” Olsen assured the slender man in the sports shirt. His red and green calves twinkled as he made for the door which he carefully shut behind him as if he wanted to avoid any unnecessary noise. As if a baby maybe were sleeping upstairs.

“Well,” Milty the Poet began nervously. “I don’t know what you guys know.” He smiled. “Suppose we sit down — ”

“I forgot somethin’,” Georgie said. He filed through the door, picked up the duffle bag, blinked at the bright lights of the yellow roadster, watching it curve out on the road. Georgie came inside again, dumped the duffle bag to the floor. He winked at Milty the Poet. “Did I miss anything? I hate to miss anything,” he rattled on while Joey listened with amazement. Talk of loose lips! Joey thought. But if big black-haired Georgie was making like a phonograph record, there wasn’t a word now out of Milty the Poet.
He knew
. His eyes, like two lead weights he could never lift again, had fixed on the duffle bag. It was a dark blue bag, crumpled, sitting on the floor, a tongueless thing, yet shouting its secrets.

Joey couldn’t stand the guy’s eyes any more. Their centers, glittering like dark glasses, seemed to splinter, piercing his heart. His emotions frightened him for who the hell was Milty the Poet? Nothing but a lousy stool pigeon! A mark, a target, the night’s job. Then why was he feeling sorry for the son-of-a-bitch, stalling around when Georgie, Pete, Tunafish were all waiting for the go-ahead?

The silence in the room had become enormous for Georgie’s voice was no true voice. Pete and Tunafish had a mopey look on their faces like any workmen, eager but unable to get to work. And Milty the Poet
knew
— that blue duffle bag’d told him — what kind of work it was going to be. Joey lit a cigarette to ease his nerves. He sensed rather than understood this sudden and inexplicable sympathy for Milty the Poet. For he too was afraid whose own life’d gotten lost somehow in a blind alley.

“Nice place you got here.”

It was Georgie, and who else could it be but Loose Lips Georgie breaking the ice.

“Yes, this is a nice place,” Georgie was saying and he winked at Pete and Tunafish.

It had become a game like the time in Baltimore when Georgie and Pete’d taken pot shots at a wounded mark they’d pushed up against a hillside. Pete strolled around the living room. He stroked the antlers of the deer head over the fireplace. “A real one,” he smirked.

“This is a place where with a dame and a coupla cases beer, huh, Milty?” Georgie winked at the silent man with the heavy staring eyes.

Joey watched, the go-ahead in his throat like a pit he’d swallowed and couldn’t cough up. He was fascinated. It was as if enforcer and mark had swapped places and he were looking with Milty the Poet’s eyes at the men who had come in the night. At Pete punching the soft red leather of an easy chair while the Tunafish chuckled softly and coyly, and Georgie, a wolfish grin on his lips asking which Milty liked better, “Beer or the hard stuff?”

“Olsen convinced me,” Milty the Poet said in a strained voice. “That’s why I’m here. This thing can be straightened out. I know all about what Dutch Schultz’s up to.”

Christ, Joey thought; he’s not only talking he’s smiling.

But Milty the Poet wasn’t exactly smiling. The sound of his own voice was like a hypo, and the smile on his lips was as false as his courage was desperate. He didn’t really believe he could save his skin, still how could he be sure? Abruptly, he became hysterically cheerful. “There’s hard stuff here. Many a time Olsen and me — how about a drink, boys?”

“Sure,” Georgie said. “Make mine a whiskey straight.” And he kicked at the duffle bag. “I brought the sannawiches.”