41
RELICS
I started back toward Dunetown but when I got to the boulevard I went east instead of going back toward town. I really didn't have anything to do after I left Skeeler's, but I had to put some distance between me and Dunetown. I needed a little time to myself, away from Stick, Dutch, and the hooligans. Away from Doe. Away from them all. I was tired of trying to make some sense out of a lot of disparate jigsaw pieces, pieces like Harry Raines, Chief, and Stoney Titan. Like Donleavy and his sweaty banking friend, Seaborn. Like Chevos and Nance, a bad-luck horse named Disaway, and a black gangster I didn't even know whom everybody called Nose, but not to his face. I suddenly had the feeling that using people had become a way of life for me and I didn't like the feeling and I needed some room to deal with that. I needed to get back to my safe places again, at least for a little while.
When I got to the Strip I headed south, putting the tall hotels that plundered the beach behind me. I drove south with the ocean to my left, not sure where I was going. I just smelled the sea air and kept driving. Finally I passed a decrepit old sign peering out from behind the weeds that told me I had reached someplace called East Beach. It was desolate. Progress had yet to discover it.
I parked my car in a deserted public lot. Weeds grew up through the cracks in the macadam, and small dunes of sand had been collected by the wind along its curbs. I sat looking out at the Atlantic for a while. The sea here was calm, a mere ripple in the bright sunlight, and the beach was broad and clean. It revived memories long buried, the good times of youth that age often taints with melancholy.
My mind was far from Dunetown. It was at a place called Beach Haven, a village on the Jersey coast where I had spent several summers living on a houseboat with the family of my best friend in grammar school. I couldn't remember his name but I did remember that his father was Norwegian and spoke with a marvelous accent and wore very thick glasses and that the family was not in the least modest and that he had a sister of high school age who thought nothing at all of taking a shower in front of us. Sitting there in the hot sedan with sweat dripping off my chin, I also recalled that I had spent a good part of that summer trying to hide a persistent erection.
After a while I got out and took off shoes, socks, jacket, and tie and put them in the trunk. I slammed it shut, then opened it again, dropped my beeper in with them, and went down to the beach.
I rolled my pants legs to the knee and walked barefoot with the sand squeaking underfoot. I must have walked at least a mile when I came upon a small settlement of summer cottages, protected by walls of granite rock that were meant to hold back the ocean. It had been a futile gesture. The houses were deserted. Several had already broken apart and lay lopsided and forlorn, awash with the debris of tides.
One of them, a small two-bedroom house of cypress and oak, was still perched tentatively over the rocks, its porch supported by six-by-sixes poised on the granite boulders. A faded sign, hanging crookedly from the porch rail, told me the place was for sale, and under that someone had added, with paint, the words "or rent." There was a phone number.
I went up over the big gray rocks, climbed the deck railing, and looked through the place, a forlorn and lonely house. The floor creaked and sagged uncertainly under each step and the wind, sighing through its broken windows, sounded like the ghost of a child's summer laughter.
I stripped down to my undershorts, went down to the deserted beach, and ran into the water, swimming hard and fast against the tide until arms and legs told me to turn back. I had to brea-ststroke the last few yards and when I got out I was breathing heavily and my lungs hurt, but I felt clean and my skin tingled from the saltwater. I went back up to the house and stretched out on the deck in the sun.
I was dozing when the woman came around the corner of the house. She startled us both and as I scrambled for my pants she laughed and said, "Don't bother. Most of the gigolos hanging around the hotel pools wear far less than that."
She was an islander, I could tell; a lovely woman, delicate in structure, with sculptured features textured by wind and sun, tiny white squint-lines around her eyes, and amber hair coiffured by the wind. I couldn't guess how old she was; it didn't matter. She was carrying a seine net—two five-foot wooden poles with the net attached to each and topped by cork floats. The net was folded neatly around the poles.
"I was halfway expecting my friend. He sometimes waits up here for me," she said, peering inside without making a show of it. Then she added, "Are you flopping here?"
I laughed.
"No, but it's a thought."
She looked around the place.
"This was a very dear house once," she said. She said it openly and without disguising her sadness.
"Do you know the owners?" I asked.
"It once belonged to the jackowitz family, but the bank has it now. "
Her sad commentary told me all I needed to know of its history.
"What a shame. There's still some life left to it."
"Yes, but no heart," she said.
"Banks are like that. They have a blind appetite and no soul. They're the robots of our society."
"Well, I see my friend down on the beach. I'm glad you like the house."
A skinny young man in cutoffs with long blond hair that flirted with his shoulders was coming up the beach carrying a bucket. She went down over the boulders to the sand.
"Hey?" I said.
She turned and raised her eyebrows.
"Is your name Jackowitz?"
"It used to be," she said, and went on to join her friend.
I got dressed and walked back through the surf to the parking lot. I found a phone booth that still worked and called the number that was on the sign at the house. It turned out to be the Island Trust and Savings Bank. I managed, by being annoyingly persistent, to get hold of a disagreeable little moron named Ratcher who, I was told, was "in beach property."
"I'm interested in a piece of land on East Beach," I said. "It might have belonged to a family called Jackowitz."
I could hear papers rustling in the background.
"Oh, yes," he said, probably after turning up the foreclosure liens. "I know the place." I could tell he knew as much about that cottage as I know about Saudi Arabian oil leases.
"Are you in real estate?" he asked curtly.
"No, I thought I might just rent it for the rest of the summer," I told him.
"The place is condemned," he said nastily. "And this establishment prosecutes trespassers." He hung up. I stood there for a minute or two, then invested another quarter and got Ratcher back on the phone.
"Ratcher?"
"Yes!"
"You're a despicable little asshole," I said, and hung up.
I drove back down toward the beach and, by trial and error, found a neglected road that led to the house and sat there, watching the woman whose name was once Jackowitz and her young man with the long hair, dragging their seine nets slowly along the water's s edge, picking the shrimp and mullet out after each drag and putting them in the bucket. After a while it started to rain and they quit. I waved to them as they walked off down the beach. I'm not sure they saw me but it would be nice to think they did and that they knew the house still meant something to someone. Finally I drove back toward town in the rain, feeling beach-tired but recharged.
I thought about that place a lot in the days that followed, but I never went back. I didn't have to. Driving back to Dunetown, I realized I had left the safe places behind forever.
42
FIGHT NIGHT AT THE WAREHOUSE
I drove back to the Warehouse, and into bedlam.
A dozen men, including a couple of brass buttons, were jammed in the doorway. There was a lot of shoving, pushing, cursing, threatening. The Stick was standing outside, back from the crowd, watching the melee with a smile.
"Be goddamned," he said as I rolled up. "Dutch's put the arm on Costello and all his merry men!"
I jumped out of the car and we ran into th
e building.
A lot of racket from the back.
A cop stopped the Stick long enough to tell him they had Costello; his number one bodyguard and shooter, Drack Moreno, who looked and talked like a moron but had a genius IQ; two of his top button men, Silo Murphy, a.k.a. the Weasel, because he looked like one, and Arthur Pravano, whose moniker was Sweetheart, for reasons I'll never understand; and two other musclemen. In addition, they also had Chevos and Bronicata on tap with their various gunsels. Nance was missing, as was Stizano.
A small army of twelve, all of them but Costello raising almighty hell.
We headed for the war room, which is exactly what it had turned into from the sound of things.
The hooligans were well represented: Pancho Callahan, Salvatore, Chino Zapata, Charlie One Ear, Cowboy Lewis, and Dutch Morehead. Everyone but Kite and Mufalatta, who seemed to have vanished from the earth. With the Stick and me, it kind of rounded the teams off at eight to eight.
The yelling, cursing, and threats had continued down through the Warehouse and into the war room, which was as chaotic as the floor of the stock exchange at the closing bell.
Dutch had separated the big shots and shoved them into one of the cubicles. The gunsels were all in the war room. Dutch was standing in front of the room bellowing like a wounded whale.
"Everybody ease off, y'hear me, or some heads are gonna get loosened!" he roared.
The room settled down to a low rumble.
With Costello's bunch and the hooligans, the room was full of the meanest-looking gang of cutthroats I've ever seen gathered in one place.
I was standing in the doorway, eyeballing Costello and Chevos. In all the years I had been bonded to this gang, I had never seen either of them closer than fleetingly and from across the street or through binoculars. Now they were both fifteen feet away. I made no attempt to conceal my contempt for them.
Costello alone seemed calm. He was a tall man and better looking than I would have liked, his sharp features and hard-set jaw deeply tanned, his longish black hair bronzed by a lot of sun, his lean body decked out in a blue blazer, a pale blue shirt open at the collar, white slacks, and white loafers. He was one of those people whose age is superfluous. There were a lot of reasons to dislike him. Only his brown eyes were a clue to his anger. They glittered with suppressed rage. My rage was open, my hatred obvious, but I kept my mouth shut for the time being.
Chevos stood stoically in a corner of the cubicle, alone, staring at the wall, and Bronicata was jabbering like a monkey in heat.
The rest of the Tagliani mob was dressed casually for the beach, looking like graduates of a Sing Sing cellblock disguised as the Harvard crew team.
The hooligans rounded out the scene. A novice would have had one hell of a time separating the good guys from the bad.
"Kick that door shut there, Pancho," Dutch said, and Callahan closed the door.
Everybody chose up sides and lined up against opposite walls of the room, hooligans near the door, Costello's gunsels against the far wall.
Cowboy Lewis, wearing aged jeans, a faded Levi's jacket, a Derringer-type cowboy hat, and a brilliant red sunburn, was carrying a large grocery sack.
"We dumped 'em comin' offa Costello's rowboat," Cowboy said, in a voice that sounded like he swabbed his throat with number four sandpaper. I was to learn that Costello's "rowboat," as Lewis had genteelly put it, was a sixty-foot yacht that slept ten.
Cowboy carried the brown paper bag to the front of the room and dumped its contents on Dutch's desk.
Eight pistols of every kind and caliber, slip knives, brass knucks, two rolls of quarters, and other assorted tools of the trade. "The heavyweights were all light," he said.
Dutch's eyebrows rose with the corners of his lips.
"Neat. Did you all hear the Russians are in Charleston or some such?" he asked nobody in particular. Nobody answered, but there was a lot of grumbling and grousing.
"Definitely concealed weapons," said Lewis, who was nursing a split lip.
"Where'd ya get the fat lip?" Dutch asked.
"The little asshole with the mouse clipped me when I wasn't looking," he said, jerking a thumb toward one of the goons, who was wearing a black eye the size of a pancake. "I had to use reasonable force to subdue him."
The little asshole with the mouse got very tense.
"Okay, let's start makin' a list'r two here," said Dutch. "First off, we got concealed weapons—"
"They's all registered," said one of Costello's rat pack, cutting Dutch off.
"Shut up," Sweetheart Pravano said quietly. "L.C. says we don't say nuthin' to these monkeys, period."
Salvatore's eyes narrowed to slits and his fists balled and unballed. Cowboy Lewis stared at a spot in the corner of the ceiling and looked bored. Callahan just chuckled, and Chino Zapata took the gold tooth out of the front of his bridgework, put it in the change pocket of his jeans, and shook out his hands. Charlie One Ear mumbled something that could have been "shithouse mouse," although I'm not sure.
The Stick and I ambled into a neutral corner on the opposite side of the room from Dutch and laid back, waiting for something to happen.
Callahan started it.
"Tag these and put 'em away," Dutch told him. The dapper cop found paper and pencil and went up to the desk to complete his chore. He picked up a palm-sized .25 with a pearl handle, a cute little weapon, accurate for maybe three feet if the wind isn't blowing.
"Which one of you girls belongs to this?" Callahan said with a snicker, holding it between thumb and forefinger, like a dead fish.
Sweetheart Pravano, well over six feet tall and built like a Russian weightlifter, stepped up and slapped the carnation out of Callahan's lapel.
"Whyn't ya eat that daisy, ya fuckin' fag," he said.
His comment was greeted with a right hook that hurt my jaw and sent Sweetheart soaring across the room, head over heels over a table.
All hell broke loose.
Dutch was so appalled, he just watched it, openmouthed.
Cowboy swept the artillery back into the paper bag and threw it in a desk drawer.
I held my corner of the room.
The Stick waded right in.
Makeshift weapons appeared from under jackets, armpits, pants legs.
Salvatore drew his sawed-off pool cue from his shoulder holster and whapped Weasel Murphy across the back of the head as if he were swinging at a fastball. A tuft of Murphy's hair lifted straight up and Murphy slid across a table, sweeping file folders, baskets, and other stenographic paraphernalia before him to the floor.
Callahan took the meanest-looking of Costello's mutts, squared off in a fighting stance, and as the goon closed in on him, kicked him in the jaw. The toe of his sneaker was loaded with ball bearings. It burst open like a squashed grapefruit, and steel marbles rattled all over the floor. Callahan's target destroyed a typing stand and landed in a corner, spitting out his front teeth.
The floor was covered with ball bearings. It looked like amateur night at the roller derby, everybody dilly-dancing on the things like three-year-olds at ballet school.
Charlie One Ear, who had seemed a little overweight to me and far too elegant to mix it up with this bunch, slid out of his tweed jacket, spun around on the ball of one foot, kicked a goon in the diaphragm with a perfectly aimed toe-shot, slashed him across the temple with the flat of his hand, and was back on both feet before the goon hit the floor. A lovely little pas seul.
Zapata relied on nothing more than his fists, waltzing across the ball-bearinged floor and hitting any and all targets of opportunity.
The Stick picked Drack Moreno and they went at it, Moreno outweighing him by twenty pounds and outreaching him by three inches, a condition Stick quickly remedied by first kicking Moreno in the kneecap, then pulling a handkerchief loaded with silver dollars from his pocket and swinging it around and around like a bolo. It caught Moreno more than once. Moreno's face bunched up in pain. The Stick hit him in the throat. Moreno's tongu
e almost hit the far wall. His eyes crossed. He gasped for air. Zapata stepped in and flattened Moreno with a lovely one-two, a short jab to the face, followed by a gorgeous right uppercut to the jaw.
The Stick's silver dollars and Salvatore's pool cue finished off Weasel Murphy, who made the mistake of trying to get up off the floor.
Charlie One Ear gave another of his brief karate demonstrations and put another one away.
Salvatore held the last of Costello's strongarms by the collar of his shirt at arm's length and was socking him, almost casually, in the face, over and over again, with his pool cue.
Dutch ended the melee with two shots into the ceiling.
All motion was suspended.
"Verdammt, Salvatore, drop that guy!" he boomed.
Salvatore opened his hand and let him go, the tough dropping face first into a typewriter that lay on the floor.
Weasel Murphy groaned and slid down the wall.
The asshole with the mouse now had a pair of mice and no front teeth.
Drack Moreno's face looked like Omaha Beach on June seventh.
To my knowledge, not one of the hooligans had suffered so much as a bruise, except for Cowboy Lewis' fat lip.
The entire gala had lasted maybe a full minute, no more.
Dutch stood in front of the room, gun in hand, dust drizzling down on his shoulders from two holes in the ceiling.
"What's the matter with everybody? You all comin' unwired? Book these punks here for resisting arrest."
The door opened cautiously and three uniformed cops peered in nervously before entering the room. There were a lot of clinking handcuffs and groans as they cleared out the Tagliani goons.
Lewis and the others helped Callahan clean up his ball bearings.
"Brand-new sneakers," he complained, surveying the split toe of his Nikes.
All clubs and other weapons had magically vanished back to their nesting places.
The Stick returned to my solitary corner. He was smiling. "I feel much better," he said.
"I thought maybe one of them stole your hat," I said.
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