Life and Death of a Tough Guy (24 page)

She had a reply in the return mail. Her brother was going to City College at night, working during the day, but the only job he had now was helping in the store, and business was bad. She had mailed him a money order for fifty dollars. Herman had thanked her, writing he would like to see her. They had met in the lobby of the Delmore, but their meeting was unhappy; their lives had separated, and he refused the money she had offered him. Still, before they parted, the brother had accepted ten dollars. “No more,” he had said with the bitter pride of the poor: a pride full of holes like a bleeding heart. And every week when she mailed him a ten dollar money order, she would weep a little that she had to be the one helping the proud ones.

So she walked on Ninth Avenue now in the twilight, on another pretend visit to her family, the people on the streets staring at the pretty redhead going by, wondering where the hell she came from and what the hell she was doing here. She didn’t belong. Not this dame in the fine feathers. She was from another part of town where maybe there were no apple sellers on the corners. She didn’t belong on Ninth Avenue, that was a cinch.

There were soup lines on Time Square and when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president and prohibition repealed in 1933, the bars over on the West Side had to cut prices to get any trade. A guy about to be evicted couldn’t be expected to pay more than fifteen cents for a shot of whiskey. And two shots for a quarter was a bargain to tempt any jobless scrounger sent by his missus to buy hamburger for supper. The butcher stores on Eighth and Ninth Avenues sold what they called
Dog Hamburger
at ten cents a pound. But many a tenement pooch had watched that very same
Dog Hamburger
being fried to a crisp brown and then dished out with nobody in the family asking him to sit down.

“Fifteen cents for real whiskey!” was the new battlecry of independence in the bars taking the place of the old speaks.

As for the big bootleggers, independents like the Dutchman waved good-bye to prohibition as casually as a quicky lover leaving a whorehouse. For several years now they been playing the field anyway: the numbers racket, the labor racket, narcotics, prostitution. That sweet little Bootleg Baby’d been getting a little worn around the edges anyway — the usual fate of a first sweetheart.

As for The Office, ever since the Atlantic meeting, they’d been organizing the whole works. Now with prohibition kissed off, they began to concentrate on organizing the remaining independents into the poorhouse. The biggest independent of them all, Al Capone, was safe in Alcatraz. In New York, though, the Dutchman was still operating. There’d been Jack Legs Diamond and Waxey Gordon also, but those two guys’d been taken care of with the help of Dewey, the racket buster.

“Dewey should be on our payroll,” the big boys in The Office wisecracked back in 1931 when the newly appointed Dewey went after Jack Legs Diamond. Thomas E. Dewey was only twenty-eight years old when he was appointed Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney, the head man of the largest prosecuting office in the Government, with jurisdiction over a judicial district spreading from Manhattan to Albany. “The Demon Racket Buster,” the big boys in The Office wisecracked. And: “Lil Buster Brown from Michigan.” Predicting: “If he can be a hero the easy way why should he make it tough for himself. He’ll go after the big noises. He’ll play it smart.”

For a while it seemed as if they’d known what they were talking about. Dewey, with sixty young lawyers under him, helped by the FBI, Treasury Intelligence, Narcotics Bureau and a staff of New York detectives had convicted Legs Diamond. Legs, appealing the conviction, was killed by what the newspapers called “unknown gunmen.” But the big boys’d smiled and said. “Somebody’s helpin’ out the lil racket buster!” The smile was still on their faces when Dewey, after examining close to a thousand witnesses, had put Waxey Gordon away for ten years. “That Waxey cheated a bullet in his head,” was how the rumble went. From the way they talked, the big boys sounded as if Dewey were a part of The Office. And when Dewey came after Dutch Schultz, their smiles were smeared on thick as jam. For if Waxey deserved a bullet, the Dutchman deserved all the bullets in the arsenal. Strictly poison — that was the Dutchman. Back in the bootlegging days, he’d gypped or double-crossed nearly everybody dealing with him. A lone wolf operator, he’d jumped the gun on the numbers racket, invading Harlem where his gunmen had gone around saying, “You dinges’re through. The Dutchman’s rennin’ policy from now on.” He’d spread upstate and was making deals across the river in New Jersey.

DUTCH SCHULTZ, the newspaper headlines headlined his jump to power.

“It’s a tossup who gets the Dutchman first,” the big boys’d agreed. “Dewey or us.” But Dewey, a Republican, lost his job when the new Democratic President hung his hat in the White House. The Dutchman dropped right back into the lap of The Office. He was the kind of hot potato they just couldn’t get rid of right away. The Dutchman knew too much; he had smart lawyers, he was protected by the politicians, and all the time he was getting bigger and bigger in the numbers racket.

DUTCH SCHULTZ, NUMBERS KING, the headlines crowned him.

• • •

“Prohibition’s dead,” the organizers from The Office were preaching all over town. “But numbers, gambling’s here to stay.” They had organized the Spotter among others, giving him the okay to run the racket in his piece of the West Side. At a price of course. Natch. It was nothing for nothing with a depression on. The Spotter could still be number one man in his territory but The Office sent in a guy by name of Frank Fanelli to help with things. And Frank Fanelli had some guys to help him.

But what else could he do? That was a question a hundred and one other big shots were asking themselves who’d been given the same organizing treatment. It was knuckle down to The Office, take your slice of the pie, or fight like the Dutchman, a mad dog from the year one. The way Spotter saw it, there was no percentage fighting The Office. In the years since the Atlantic City meeting, The Office’d gotten too damn strong. Take Chicago, for instance. With Al Capone out, Aiello and Moran and Torrio’d been The Big Three. Those guys weren’t independents exactly but neither were they rubber stamps. So where the hell were they? Aiello was dead, sixty-two machine gun bullets in him. Moran and Torrio were in hiding. Take right here in New York. Legs Diamond dead, Waxey Gordon in the can, with only Dutch Schultz still raising a stink.

• • •

“Let’s go for a walk,” Joey said, and even with the Dutchman on his mind, he had to smile at the way she was looking at him. As if he’d suggested jumping out of the hotel window. But he couldn’t hang around here any longer. It must be the Dutchman, he thought. Who the hell else? Since when did Charley haul him out to Brooklyn in the middle of the afternoon and order him to stand by. There in the backroom behind the Napoli, Charley’d said: “Joey, you phone me every hour. Have your troop stay in their rooms where you can reach ‘em if you have to reach ‘em in a hurry.” He’d wanted to ask Charley if it was the Dutchman, but he didn’t have the nerve. Nobody asked Charley for information Charley wasn’t giving. “Let’s go for a walk, Sweetie,” he repeated. He cracked his knuckles nervously. “It won’t kill you — ”

“Joey,” she said mildly, the mildest drunk in town, smiling above her glass of sherry. “Why don’t you have a drink?”

“Don’t want any!” he snapped. A drink before a job was all he needed! A drink to foul him up, to gum the works! If his hunch was right and it was the Dutchman, he’d need all his damn brains. God, he hoped it wasn’t the Dutchman. And suppose it was? What was the diff? Was the Dutchman his damn brother or something? …

For if there ever was a guy born without a brother, it was the lone-wolf mobster by the name of Dutch Schultz.

“A walk’ll do you good,” he heard himself saying.

“We used to do a lot of walking,” she said sentimentally, and looked down into her sherry. There, and there only the memory of their courtship was preserved: the long summer walks, the summer bus rides on Fifth Avenue.

“Come on!” he urged her. “You’re gettin’ too fat anyway. Get a move on you! Hurry up!”

She smiled, a good-natured drunk full of love for the whole wide world, and for him in particular. While he watched her with eyes that were blazing
hurry up
. She was so tight, he knew she didn’t really see him. She only heard him. If he wanted to do something crazy like going for a walk, that smile of hers was saying as plain as words, all right, all right. She got up from her chair and waving a fond hand at him, stepped into the bathroom.

She was gone, and he thought: God, the years I been living with that wino! His eyes shifted to the double bed and he glimpsed all the dames who’d come and gone with only the redhead lasting like the rock of the ages. He remembered when she’d been thin as one of those Italian breadsticks. Curving up now, becoming — what was the hebe word?
Zaftig!
Yeh, that was it. Yeh, that was it.
Zaftig! Juicy!
Fat, soft and juicy.

He glanced at his wristwatch. It was 9:18. At ten he’d phone Charley again. At ten, at eleven, at twelve. Orders were orders and he was standing by, a lousy no-good yellowbellied enforcer not fit to wipe the Dutchman’s shoes. He lit a nervous man’s cigarette and tried to forget how long an hour could be.

“Joey, I’m ready,” she said, coming out of the bedroom, her round face freshly made up, her red hair glinting from the brush. She crossed to the closet and took out a lightweight green sport coat.

Joey looked at her steadily. He wondered what she’d say if he told her about Dutch Schultz. About Charley Valinchi. What did she know about him? Next to nothing. What did he know about her? The question pounded at him suddenly like an unexpected fist. Yes, what did he know? She’d gone to high school once upon a time, kept house for her old man once upon a time, and here she was a wino. She’d stuck by him all these years. Why? What was there in it for her? Clothes, a hotel room, all the sherry she could drink? Christ, dames were dumb. Dames must believe in this love racket, the dumb bitches. Yet as he looked at this redhead of his, buttoning her green sport coat from the bottom button up and not from the top button down — a habit of hers he had noticed over the years — his wound-up nerves relaxed and he felt glad she was around. And instantly killed the feeling. His lips curled with contempt. A dame! Just a dame. A sucker.

They went down in the elevator. Two bookies were arguing in the lobby about Mayor La Guardia. The desk clerk nodded a head smooth as a glass doorknob and in a glassy hotel voice said, “Good evening Mrs. Case, Mr. Case.” The hell with you, Joey thought wearily. That Case name he’d wished on himself’d turned out a jinx. For hadn’t the waterfront deal backfired, Mr. Case? He was Mr. Nobody working like everybody else for The Office.

That Office was like a department store. Some guys ran the gambling tables, other guys took care of the cocaine and heroin counter, and if you wanted a dame, please take the escalator to the next floor. The dames worked on a salary and so did the numbers men, the slot-machine men, the con-men. And the politicians and mouthpieces and accountants. Order-givers and order-takers and nothing in-between. There had to be Order. And that was where the enforcers came in.

Enforcer Joey Case and his steady girl friend walked over to Broadway. It was a spring night and guys with jobs were stepping out with their girl friends, the jobless kids snaking up and down through the crowds, joking and laughing as if they’d been promised jobs in the morning. Enforcer Joey Case, age thirty-three, glanced at them with the boiled-in-vinegar eye of a man who’s had his share of disappointments. Peddlers barked their bargains as they watched out for the coppers. The huge signs glittered, forming brilliant arcades of light. Spring on Broadway.

“It’s nice walking,” she said and slid her arm through his, her eyes lifting almost shyly to his face.

“Yeh.”

“Joey, why do you keep looking at your wristwatch?”

“Gotta call a guy at ten.” He could see that the fresh air was sobering her up and wished to God he could buy himself a drink.

“We haven’t walked like this in years,” she said. He glanced at her smiling face, brightly seen as if in daylight, the yellow light from an auctioneer’s reflected on her teeth.

“Like it, huh?”

“Yes, Joey.” She pressed his arm with hers.

“You like me, don’t you? He couldn’t help asking, and before she could answer he laughed harshly. “If you think I’ll break down one of these years and marry you — ”

“I never think of that any more, Joey.”

“Good for you. Marrying’s for the crumbs. God damn rabbis — all these rabbis, priests! They got themselves a racket. Everything’s a racket,” he said with a bitter sigh as if he were the first mobster to coin the phrase.

“Joey, something’s worrying you tonight — ”

“Because I look at the damn wristwatch? I like lookin’ at it,” he jeered. “Cost me one fifty, didn’t it?”

Three or four minutes before ten he said, “You wait outside. I’ll be right out.” He hurried into a drugstore lit up like a carnival. His head was rigid on his stiff neck, his eyes seeing a dancing meaningless weave of faces and objects. He stepped into a phone booth, closed the door behind him, and in the narrow coffin-like space dialed Charley Valinchi. “Hello,” he said. The voice on the other end replied, a flat nasal voice like a thousand others, but unmistakably the voice of Charley Valinchi. Charley Valinchi, his God damn boss! Charley Valinchi, the God damn bastard of a killer-diller! Joey would’ve recognized it anywhere. It was the voice of judgment. “Joey,” it was saying now. “Don’t have to buzz me again, Joey. You’re free.”

Joey felt as if some huge and heavy cross had been lifted from his shoulders. A boyish smile wavered on his lips, he gulped, he wanted to shout out with a big voice. And heard the quiet level voice he always wore with Charley as if it were a necktie, the voice of an enforcer a man could depend on. “Okay, Charley.”

“Joey, phone the boys, will you?”

“Sure. So long, Charley.”