by Michael Mayo
I found the telephone and called the speak. Frenchy answered. He said it was still slow. I told him to get Malloy. When Malloy picked up, I lowered my voice so Abramson couldn’t hear what I was saying and asked Arch what he knew about Peter Wilcox. Arch was one of those guys who knows a lot of stuff and liked to share it with everybody.
“Now that’s about the last question I expected to hear,” he said. “Let’s see. His father, Learned Wilcox, founded the Ashton-Wilcox Bank with Robert Ashton. Ashton was considered the more cautious of the two. Learned was so openly rapacious, he gave other robber barons a bad name. Ashton-Wilcox made billions financing arms sales to warring governments. Peter took over when his father retired. When Pierpont Morgan called his friends to prop up the stock market in ’29 to forestall the crash, Peter Wilcox was one of them. He’s a widower. His wife died sometime recently, I can’t say exactly when, but within the last year. He’s been active with the Progressive Party and the reform Democrats. Big backer of Roosevelt. He’ll have a prime seat at the inauguration in Washington tomorrow. What else do you need?”
“Does he have a brother?”
Malloy paused before he answered. “I don’t think so, but I’ll have to check to be sure. And what, I must ask, is this in aid of?”
“I really don’t know. I’ll tell you when I see you,” I said and hung up.
I guess I could’ve worked on it more that night, but I’d done what they paid me for, or said they were going to pay me for, and I’d leave it to Abramson to tell them the rest. While I sat and drank and tried to get the memory of that damned bloody goat out of my head, Abramson went back to pacing and leafing through the pages of serial numbers that he’d copied and staring at the door to the suite. He perked up every time he heard the ding of the elevator bell and was waiting at the door when they finally opened it.
Seemed like everybody was talking together when they came in. I could tell that Miss Wray and Hazel were floating on a cloud because they understood how incredibly popular their big ape was. I think it finally hit Miss Wray that this wasn’t just any other moving picture. This one was really special, more than anything she had ever done or most people in her business ever would do. When she thought about it, she still remembered the work, sitting in this big hand and screaming into a microphone for hours. I understood what it was because I’d been to Skull Island and to the top of the Empire State Building. And I realized right then in that room full of flowers that maybe the guy who made the dirty pictures understood that, too, and was trying to steal a little part of it.
Miss Wray’s big smile disappeared when she saw me and remembered the other business I was taking care of. Hazel cracked a bottle of champagne and filled a couple of glasses for her and Miss Wray. Probably wasn’t their first.
Abramson was ready to be the center of attention, and I was happy enough to stay in the chair with the good brandy. Sleave and Uncle Julie Bennett Grossner seemed not to understand when he explained that we took the cash to a Fifth Avenue mansion, or maybe they didn’t believe him.
The kid had been through most of it when he said, “I really could not have handled this without Mr. Quinn. He anticipated that the ruffians would attempt to intimidate us and he was prepared.”
Then they all crowded around me. I could tell how worried Miss Wray was, so I said, “There was really nothing to that. Things just got a little interesting for a few minutes. The important part is the other copies of the book, right? And the brains of the outfit said he’d burn them.”
Uncle Julie frowned. “Do you have any reason to believe him?”
“Maybe I could’ve hung around and demanded that he turn them over, but I thought Miss Wray said she’d be happy if they were destroyed.”
She spoke up. “That’s exactly what I said, and if Mr. Quinn believes that he’s settled the matter, I’ll take his word for it.”
“There’s also the matter of my fee,” I said, and everybody went quiet.
Sleave cleared his throat. “Yes, about that. It really does seem to us that six hundred dollars is excessive for what amounted to a few hours’ work. Let’s be reasonable.”
“You’re not going to stiff me,” I said without raising my voice. “Just send it to the Chelsea Hotel.”
He and Grossner started to say something else, but Miss Wray took over. “Gentlemen,” she said, and they shut up. “I will take it as a personal favor, one which I am sure I will mention to Mr. Cooper, if you will see to it that Mr. Quinn is taken care of properly.” She turned to me. “Actually, he and I also spoke of another issue . . .”
“It’s settled,” I said. “Completely.”
“How nice,” she said, and her smile was a wonder to see. “Mr. Grossner, I think a bonus is in order for Mr. Quinn, and it should be substantial.”
Uncle Julie didn’t know exactly what she was talking about, but he knew that Mr. Cooper was his boss. He said he’d see to it first thing in the morning.
Miss Wray said, “That’s just wonderful, and thank you all so much for an absolutely delightful evening. I can’t remember when so many people have been so nice to me, and now I’m exhausted and must say good night. No, Hazel, I’d like you and Mr. Quinn to stay for a moment more.”
Hazel hustled the rest of them out. As soon as they were gone, Miss Wray said, “Saxon Dunbar, tell me about him.” Hazel reloaded their glasses, and they sat perched next to each other on a sofa.
“That was easy,” I said. “He was fed the line that the pictures were real. I showed him a couple of them where you can really make out the girl’s face. He saw it wasn’t you right away and lost interest. Somebody making cheap pictures based on the movie isn’t a scandal.”
Hazel chewed on a knuckle and cut her eyes over to see how Miss Wray was reacting. I wasn’t sure either, but I could tell she wasn’t completely happy.
Hazel chimed in, “Do you think they’ll do what they said? Not send the pictures out to the magazines or columnists or demand more money?”
“The guy who’s in charge is pretty strange, all right, but he says he only wanted the money, and I had a little talk with one of the other guys, so now he knows the score. He says he was just doing a job and I believe him. About that much, anyway.”
Miss Wray said, “I suppose that’s the best I can ask for.” I hoped she’d leave it at that.
Before she could think of something else, I said, “Good. Now, tell me how I know your husband.”
Hazel said, “Fay, do you want me to leave?”
She shook her head, gave me another look, and said, “Think back two years ago, the summer of 1931. It was unbearably hot.”
I nodded, wondering if she was talking about the Maranzano business, but it had nothing to do with that.
“My husband is John Saunders, John Monk Saunders. Does the name mean anything to you? No? He won an Academy Award for Dawn Patrol. He wrote the script.”
“Oh, yeah, I saw that. Nice picture.” It wasn’t as good as Hell’s Angels, but I didn’t say that.
“John also wrote a book entitled Single Lady about a woman named Nikki. It was a motion picture too, The Last Flight, and it was produced as a musical play here in New York in 1931. They called it Nikki and asked me to take the lead.”
She thought it was going to be a perfect season for her and her husband and that made her feel a little guilty. While the rest of the country was trying to deal with cities full of guys looking for work, she was living in a thirty-dollar-a-day suite at the Pierre. The world was her oyster and her oyster was a bowl of cherries, you might say. She was a popular actress, and she’d be spending the summer with her husband. For a time, it was as fine as she thought it was going to be. They went out for a weekend with Alfred Steichen, and he took pictures of her. They threw a party for the cast of The Last Flight when it opened, but when she was rehearsing and on most other nights, John went out on his own to sample what he called “the complete New York speakeasy experience.”
As soon as she said that, I knew w
ho she was talking about and said, “Okay, now I remember him. He said that in my place. More than once as I recall. Good-looking fellow. Had some very nice tropical worsted suits. His face was sunburned or tanned, if that’s what you call it.” I remembered how his choppers shined when he cocked his head and smiled. Always at a woman. He never missed a chance to catch his reflection in one of the mirrors behind the bar, and he admired what he saw.
“Yes, that’s John. What did you think of him?”
“He was my favorite kind of customer. He had money in his pocket and expensive tastes, and he brought friends.”
I was so involved with the Maranzano business that I was not in the speak as often as I should have been that summer. The first night I saw Saunders, he’d already been in and both of our waitresses jumped on him as soon as he walked through the door. Who was working then? I thought it was Bridget and Dinah. And I remember how Marie Therese shooed them away and got giggly and girly over the guy herself, and I remembered how Frenchy narrowed his eyes when she did. For a month or so, Saunders showed up early, around four almost every afternoon, always dressed sharp. He usually had one or two boisterous pals with him, and by the time he left a couple of hours later, he had collected a few new friends who went with him “to the next watering hole,” as he called it. He usually picked up the tab for the group and he tipped well, especially if Dinah had been waiting on him. She fell hard for the easy smile.
Most nights, that would be the end of it. He started at my place because we had the best booze, and we wouldn’t see him any more until the next day. But a few times he’d show up again at three in the morning, after he’d sampled some of the gamier examples of the complete New York speakeasy experience. On those nights, he’d be all over the women. We’d make sure he had enough money to pay the fare before we loaded him into a cab and sent him back to the Pierre.
“No, seriously,” Miss Wray said. “What did you think of him? I know that you impressed him. He said everybody knew you bought your liquor from Charlie Luciano. He said you were dangerous, one of those real tough little guys who doesn’t say much and watches everything. And I know there were women, with John there always are, so don’t bother with them. Before we married, he explained that he is simply oversexed. The other women mean nothing to him. He knew I’d understand.”
She said it like it didn’t mean a damn thing to her, but I didn’t buy that, and I could tell that Hazel had heard it before and she didn’t buy it either. But what did I think of her husband? That was hard to answer. Saunders and I only had one real conversation, and now that I knew about the flying movies he wrote, it made a little more sense.
It was around five in the afternoon and he was sitting at a table with two other men, one older with burn scars on his face and neck, and the other about Saunders’s age, thirty or so, I guessed. The younger guys were telling flying stories. You could see them acting out what they were saying with their hands, making turns and banks and such. I can’t remember if we were shorthanded that evening, but I wound up taking a tray of drinks to their table, the best gin all around.
As I collected the empties, Saunders said something along the lines of mine being the finest speakeasy in Manhattan. He’d heard that Jimmy Quinn’s was the place to go for good booze and he’d been searching high and low for something better but he hadn’t found it. After buttering me up like that, he asked me to join them. It wasn’t something I did very often, but I made exceptions for big spenders, so I took a short gin with them.
Like most of the swells who wanted to talk, he asked if it was true that I was on friendly terms with all the gangsters in town. I said not all of them and changed the subject by asking how he and the men sitting with him knew each other. Saunders said that the younger guy and he had been in the air corps together. The older guy was a pilot, too, but he’d been overseas in France. If he told me their names, or his own, I don’t remember. That got him talking about how close he was to the men he’d served with and how he literally cried on the wing of his airplane when he learned about the Armistice that ended the war and he wouldn’t get to join the fight. He was training other pilots in Florida at the time and they had this special bond that only certain groups of men can form.
That led to one of them, I think it was Saunders, saying that from everything he’d heard, he envied men like me because we made our own rules. We had our own code and defined things by our own standards. He said that the air corps expected some things of him but he was really more concerned with what his fellow pilots thought, and did I agree that courage was grace under pressure?
I figured from the way he said it, I was supposed to know that phrase and I said, “If you put it that way, yeah, I guess I do. You see, there was this kid I grew up with named Oh Boy Oliver. Oh Boy was a normal kid like the rest of us, but his old man took to drink in a bad way and he used to smack the hell out of Oh Boy and his mom and his brothers. If you do that enough times to a kid, you make him scared of everything and that’s what happened to Oh Boy. He’d jump away from his own shadow, but there was a time a few years later when we ran into an opportunity to make some good money by relieving some guys of some items they were transporting down near Atlantic City. We needed an extra hand and, even though he didn’t really want to come along, we talked Oh Boy into joining us. It turned out to be more interesting than we thought it was going to be. When the shooting started, I was pretty sure Oh Boy would be the first to crap out, but I was wrong. He was so scared he was shaking, but once we mixed it up, he was right there next to me. Sure, after it was over, he was sick and he said he’d never do anything like that again, but, yeah, I guess I’d call that grace under pressure.”
That led them into stories about flying, and by and by Saunders said, “You’re not much of a man’s man are you, Quinn?”
I don’t know if he meant it to be as insulting as it sounded. The older guy noticed and was surprised. Saunders paid no attention to him. But, hell, I wasn’t insulted. I’ve been hearing the same thing since I was a little kid. Saunders expected an answer, so I obliged and said it was true.
“You see, I didn’t grow up with a bunch of guys. I lived in a tenement where there was a dozen families. It wasn’t a bad place but it wasn’t the Ritz, and when I got old enough, part of my job was to make sure that nobody bothered us. I mean, I earned a fair amount doing this and that mostly on my own, but when I was around the place, I was expected to make sure that the kids could play on the stoop or the roof without anybody messing with them or stealing from them, and that’s what I did. I wasn’t big enough to scare anybody, but I did know how to handle a pistol pretty good by then, so we didn’t have much trouble. Shoot a few people, word gets around, you know.
“When it’s guys you don’t know, that’s a different ballgame. You get a bunch of men’s men together and they’ll start goofing around and pretty soon it’ll turn into horseplay and they’ll start punching on each other and messing around with each other, and then one of them’s going to look around and figure who’s the littlest guy there. And he’s gonna start picking on him. And that little guy’s going to be me.
“Now, if there’s any way I can run away, I will. An old woman taught me that a long time ago and it has served me well, but if I can’t run, then I gotta do something, right? I mean, you just can’t let a guy do whatever he wants to you. So you use your knucks”—I took mine out of my pocket and put them on the table—“or your stick”—I held it up—“or your pistol, depending on the situation. Then, if you handle it right, you don’t have to dispose of a body later. So I try to avoid those situations, and I guess that means I’m not much of a man’s man, but I don’t hold it against those that are.”
Saunders and his pal didn’t know what to say. The old guy laughed like merry hell.
That’s all I could remember of the conversation. I was quite a blabbermouth that evening, but I didn’t mention any of it to Miss Wray. Instead, I lied and said, “Your husband tended to be quiet when he was in his cups
. I liked that about him.”
She drained her glass. I knew she didn’t buy it. “And the women were all over him then. No, don’t say anything. That’s the way it always is for John.” She’d had enough champagne to forget the “oversexed” business, and her voice was sad.
Hazel tried to change the subject. “Are you sure that we’ve nothing to worry about with those awful photographs?”
“No,” I had to admit. “The guy behind all this is nuts, but I got the feeling tonight that he really is only interested in the money and now that he’s got it, he won’t bother you anymore. And there’s one other thing . . .”
I knew I was making a mistake as the words fell out of my mouth. “I may be able to find the guy who took the pictures. Does the name Oscar Apollinaire mean anything to you?”
Miss Wray and Hazel looked at each other and shook their heads. Miss Wray said, “I can’t tell you how important this is to me. I must meet the woman in those pictures. No matter what those studio men say, if word of this gets back to John, he’ll be furious. Sometimes the smallest, most inconsequential thing will set him off.”
She focused on me. “At the end of that summer, when the play closed in October, John had been so successful at capturing the fullness of the complete New York speakeasy experience that he had to go to a ‘health farm’ in upstate New York for a week to recover.”
I thought even a month might not have been long enough to do the trick.
She said, “It’s funny, but now I remember that week I spent alone here at the Pierre as the most rewarding part of the trip. John had been disappointed that the play had not been well received, but I enjoyed it. I thought I did well, and that’s where I met Cary, who was just wonderful. It was a lovely but bittersweet week by myself. You see, they had done much of the preliminary work on King Kong, and I knew that Mr. Cooper wanted to talk to me about it as soon as I returned to California.
