The Cassidy Posse (3 page)

“Ah, but you’re uh vision of looveliness,” said Mike as she disappeared behind a dressing screen to change.

“Mike, would you be a sweetheart and hand me that dress on the bed. The green silk one.”

Mike picked up the dress off the large brass bed, pausing a moment to remember some of the splendid moments he had spent on its overstuffed mattress. Nell was four years younger than him. He had seen her grow up - the fantasy of every Irish lad in Bridgeport. She talked and teased but always seemed to remain aloof as if saving herself for something better. With her beauty and intelligence, she had managed to fare a little better with the ruling elite of the city than many other Irish lasses. Her fall from grace had been the usual story though. She had become the lover of a rich man and disgraced her family. He had made promises that were broken. Then there was the descent into the levee district’s sporting houses with the rest of the soiled doves. If it had ever gotten to her, she never showed it. She still had that regal bearing she adopted at sixteen that drove the boys wild as she walked down Archer Avenue. Somewhere deep within her was a stubborn belief that she was made for something better than this.

“Mike, what ever happened to that dress?” she asked impatiently. “I have business to attend to.”

With that the spell was broken. In the vision he was playing in his head, he and Nell were on the bed. Now he realized another man would be tapping him on the shoulder to take his place. It would be a man of wealth and substance who could afford fifty dollars for an evening’s entertainment.

“Oh, you have a client coming over?” Mike asked sarcastically. He sat on the big brass bed and batted the tassels that hung from the silk canopy.

“You know that’s amazing how you can lose that brogue from the patch when you want to,” she said, changing the subject. “I had to spend good money on an elocution coach so I didn’t sound like shanty Irish. I think you would go a lot farther in the police department if you didn’t sound like you had just gotten off the boat.”

“That’s just it, darling Nell. I just did get off duh boot.”

“No you didn’t. You got off the boat when you were six,” she said. “I hardly think that would give you a permanent affliction of your speech.”

There was a heavy knock at the door.

“Did yuh want me to get that?” asked Mike.

“No!” she replied sharply. “I’ll get it. I’m almost dressed.”

Mike wondered who was on the other side of the door. He walked over to the long windows and pulled back the velvet drapes. There were no fancy carriages in the street below. Just a tired-looking workhorse hitched to a delivery wagon. Not the type of customer that would be knocking on Nell Quinn’s door. He had heard that Nell was seeing someone of importance, but his usual sources of information had failed to turn up a name. Whoever the gentleman was, he was very shy about publicity. Mike decided he was going to have to spend more time on South Clark Street.

The knock at the door came again. Nell came out from behind the dressing screen in such a hurry she almost knocked it over. “I’m coming,” she yelled before she was halfway across the room. She opened the door and Mike could hear a deep male voice but he could not hear what was being said. By the way Nell tilted her head, Mike surmised that the man was very tall. Nell walked back to her oak dresser and took a piece of folded blue paper from the top drawer. She returned to the door where she gave the paper to the man in the hall.

When she turned around, she gave Mike a quick, nervous smile and sat beside him on the bed.

“I’m serious, Mike,” she said, picking up their previous conversation without missing a beat. “You really should be thinking about your future. Now take your friend Bockleman. When you first brought him up here, he was such a country boy he may as well have had hay sticking out of his pockets. Now he’s speaking better and trying to dress better too. You have to sound the part if you hope to improve your position in life. You can tell he’s thinking about a promotion.”

“Well, Bockleman has more call tuh worry about such things,” said Mike. “He’s a married man with a kid tuh support.”

“Well, don’t you want those things someday?”

“Jayzus!” cried Mike rolling over and grabbing Nell playfully by the waist. “Yuh dun’t look like me mother, how come yuh sound like her?”

“Somebody’s got to help you, for God’s sakes,” she said, struggling to free herself. “You dumb Irish lunk.”

Mike pulled her on his lap and placed his head on her breasts.

“This dumb Irish lunk was just wonderin’ how grateful you were tuh have that nasty Dutchman shagged off yer porch?”

So that was what was on his mind
, she thought. He was a man. What else. But she had other things to do. She had planned a nice dinner at the Palmer House with Edith. Then, with the right mood, maybe she could talk her partner into buying out her share of the business. The new status she anticipated would not allow her to be part owner in a whorehouse. Not even a very high class and profitable one.

“Mike,” she whined, wiggling free from his grasp. She pushed him back on the bed and began straightening her fancy dress. “You think I got all dressed up to wrestle around with you?”

He was lying on the bed looking like a dejected puppy. Mike McGhan was no lady’s man by any stretch. Nell doubted if he had any idea of the hold he had on her. Mike had helped her get off a check forging rap a couple years ago. He had assumed her gratitude was extended from that. He would have never remembered years before when a skinny thirteen-year-old girl squeezed through the crowd to see him fight three grown men who had insulted his sister. The first was a big, loud mouth named Hanrahan. He was half a head taller than Mike but slow and drunk. He swung mightily but Mike stepped under the punch and hit him in the ribs with a left. The moment he lowered his guard to grab his injured side, Mike threw a bone-jarring overhand right to his jaw that dropped him to the ground like a bag of her mother’s laundry. Hanrahan’s two tagalongs were momentarily stunned to see their large, obnoxious friend lying limp on the ground. The short, redheaded one recovered quickly and threw a punch that grazed Mike’s chin. Mike caught the smaller man by the ear and whipped him around in a circle until he tripped over the body of his fallen comrade.

Mike’s undersized friend Kevin O’Day had diverted the skinny snaggle-toothed one from the fight. Knowing he was no match for a grown man, Kevin had borrowed a cane from an old man that was watching. When he came face-to-face with the punk, he froze. The hoodlum grabbed the cane and twisted it out of his grip. Armed with this weapon, he launched his skinny body at Mike with new confidence. He swung the cane with two hands at Mike’s head like it was a baseball bat. Mike ducked and the drunken man’s forward momentum caused him to sprawl in ungainly fashion on top of Mike’s crouched body. Mike lifted him up and threw him over his back into a wagon wheel. The short redhead had regained his feet and was standing with his fist clenched, thinking of having another go at Mike. Then, as if he had just remembered something he had to do, he turned and disappeared into the crowd. Mike stood there like a young gladiator. Nell remembered her pulse racing as people closed around him to shake his hand. There was a look of pride and vindication on the face of Mike’s sister that for some reason made Nell jealous. These same oafs had insulted her on the street before. She should have felt vindicated too. Instead she felt envious of the girl standing on the wood plank sidewalk above the boisterous crowd.

“What are yuh thinkin’ about?” asked Mike as he scrunched up one of her down pillows.

“Oh, just another time and place,” she said wistfully. “I think I’m getting soft-hearted with age. That means I’m done for in this town.”

“Well, Nell, I dun’t think it would hurt you tuh be takin’ uh occasional break from plannin’ and schemin’.” He had his arms wrapped around the pillow and was caressing it gently.

“What are you doing to my pillow?” Nell asked. “Those are from Marshall Field. One of those pillows would cost you a day’s wages and that’s before I put the silk cover on it.”

“It’s Saturday night and I feel uh need fer some soft comfort. It looks like this pillow may be the best I’ll do.”

There was a soft, polite knock at the door.

“Miss Nell,” said the servant girl on the other side of the door. “Miss Edith says she’s ready to go to the Palmer House. She wants to know should she call up the carriage?”

Nell walked over to the door and looked back at Mike reclined on her bed. “Tell Miss Edith to go on without me. I’ll catch up to her later. Tell her something came up. Some old business I had to take care of.”

“Young man, may I have two glasses of champagne over here?” asked the man in the straw skimmer impatiently.

“Oh, I’m sorry sir,” said Sean Daugherty. He managed to get two more respectable glasses out of the bottle of Mumm’s he had already opened. He glanced up and saw the elongated shadows of the finely dressed croquet players on the lawn. If he were lucky, he might not have to open another bottle. He put the filled glasses in front of the man at the bar and gave him a perfunctory smile before turning back to eavesdrop on the conversation under the canopy of his portable bar.

“Isn’t this weather fantastic for April?” asked the slim man in his mid-thirties of the older gentleman of considerable girth standing next to him.

“Well, tell me,” said the portly gentleman, not to be put off by small talk, “how high do you think it is safe to build these skyscrapers, as you call them, without endangering the public safety? My son calls on a client in the Montauk Building. He says he’s afraid to go in there. How can you pile stone ten stories in the air and keep it from falling over? Now they tell me the new Masonic Temple will be higher still.”

“The new Masonic Temple may be over twenty stories,” said the architect matter-of-factly.

“What! That is preposterous. It won’t be safe to walk down the street for fear of being crushed.”

“Oh, the Temple will be built like the Home Insurance Building with a steel structure inside. It’s quite revolutionary. It will pose no threat to public safety.”

“And the Montauk building is a threat?”

“I assure you the Montauk Building is perfectly safe. It rests on a sort of floating raft,” said the dapper architect. “It’s a twenty inch slab of concrete reinforced with steel rails. This spreads the weight evenly instead of putting it all on the outside walls.”

“A raft?”

“Bartender,” commanded the architect. “Give me a coaster and a clean glass.”

“Yes, sir,” said Sean Daugherty as he quickly set the required props on the bar.

The architect was amused at Sean’s close attention.

“Now then,” he began, turning the glass on its rim and setting it on the table. “If this table were the marshy soil on which the Montauk Building is resting, all the tons of stone would be resting on the footings which we will represent by the rim of the glass. Now, placing this drink coaster under the rim, the weight is distributed by the raft over the entire area under the building.”

“Amazing,” concluded the portly gentleman, “and a very effective demonstration. You should consider teaching architecture.”

“I have already,” he replied, “but I’ve come to your World’s Fair to actually build something.”

“Very good, sir. Have you obtained a position yet?”

“No, not as of yet,” he admitted, “but I do have an interview with Adler and Sullivan tomorrow.”

“Oh, goodness,” sighed the portly gentleman. “You may be boarding a sinking ship. Henri Sullivan was here earlier this afternoon ranting about the classical style of the fair. He says the White City theme will set architecture back fifty years. Thank God we are only giving him one building.”

“Which building is that?”

“The Transportation Building. I suppose he and his young protégé Frank Lloyd Wright will rebel against Daniel Burnham’s wishes and give it some modernistic look.”

“Oh, William! William!” a matron shouted across the lawn. “Do come here, I have someone I wish for you to meet.”

A trace of annoyance crossed the portly man’s face. “Excuse me, sir, but duty calls.” He walked off muttering about someone’s nephew needing a job.

“I must be slipping but I didn’t get that gentleman’s name,” said the architect. “I didn’t come to this affair to play croquet.”

“Excuse me, sir,” said Sean politely. “Were you talking to me?”

“Yes, and don’t pretend you missed anything, young man. You obviously have a keen ear. If I had had students in my classes half as attentive, I might still be teaching.”

“I am sorry, sir, but how’s a fella like me supposed tah get along in this world if I don’t laarn, uh, learn nothin.”

“A point well taken, young man.”

“Tell me, sir, why didn’t yuh tell ‘im how Major Jenny made the Home Insurance Building fireproof too.”

“Because his son wasn’t visiting the Home Insurance Building,” said the architect. “One thing I learned as a teacher is not to give them any more knowledge than they have the desire to absorb.”

“Aye, sir, yer a man ov wisdom.”