I nodded affirmatively. Everybody in the city knew where Dennison’s place was on Farnam Street. He shook his head several times as if finally getting a joke. He slapped the bar counter twice and left the whorehouse, one of his gun goons holding the door open. As he disappeared into the street, the words “Don’t forget now, come and see me soon” trailed behind him like a scarf tail in a stiff wind.
I saw the man soon enough when he returned to The Sallie Purple a week later, this time early in the evening with a pack of people in tow, including mayor Frank Moores. The mayor had a voice as shrill as a teapot on the scald whether he was giving a speech or ordering drinks. He took malt whiskey barefoot and had to explain to me that barefoot meant neat. I brought five more whiskeys and two bottles of wine to their table in the private smoking room, where Dennison had left his coat the week before. Smoke leaked from gigantic cigars, filling the room to the ceiling.
The other two men seated on the serpentine booth around the table were Tom’s right-hand man Billy Nesselhous and Ace Diamond, a civic reformer whose party alliance was as fake as his name, a man who flip-flopped his politics as frequently as if his loyalty were something hot on a spatula, depending on which party member’s ear he was bending. Four women were also with the group, all of them dolled up in glittery boas and crepe dresses. Two of the four were squeezed in on both sides of the mayor, his arms draped around them as if posing for a portrait. The poor dames appeared as bored as a group of schoolgirls listening to a lecture on household economics, and maybe just as young.
I uncorked the first bottle of wine and poured a dash into each stemmed glass. Dennison waved his hand over his, refusing the alcohol.
The mayor crossed his leg at the knee, a nearly feminine posture that didn’t match the bulk of his beefy thighs. He tapped a cigarette on a pewter case. “Ain’t you thirsty, Mister D?”
“I like to keep my wits about me,” Dennison said graciously. He was the only man without a moll tucked in next to him.
“No whores or booze, huh? Howsa fella supposed to sell products he don’t use himself?”
“Would you be asking me that if I worked behind the counter of a lingerie shop?”
The mayor let out a belly laugh. “Boy, you sure are nutty. That’s a good ol’ poke in the ribs, eh Ace?” he said and nudged the man with his elbow. “Imagine that, ol’ Mister D here walking around in a pair of frilly step-ins to show them off for the customers. What about you there, Ace? You wear woman’s undies?”
Ace Diamond—elephantine in a beige suit—patted his ample stomach. “I got on a corset right now. Reason how I got such a tiny waistline.”
“What a crack-up. You two are a couple a doozies.” The mayor laughed again and looked at me hard. Like a dunce, I was still standing at the head of the table holding the wine. I couldn’t take my eyes off the woman tucked under the mayor’s left arm. The first time I ever saw hair that yellow. There’s nothing in the world for words when you finally see real beauty. Her lipstick was smudged—she’d been necking with the mayor when I entered.
The mayor tossed a double eagle on the table. “That’ll be all, waiter.”
Dennison tucked the curls of his eyeglasses behind his ears. “Mr. Mayor, this is the boy I told you about. The one who found my coat last week.”
“Oh yes, quite right. Good to know that even in the lower ranks of society there’s still those with some amount of moral fortitude.”
I titled my head and groaned softly as I looked the mayor over. “You have a soft spot for the poor and grafters alike, do you?”
The room went silent. Dennison sighed disappointedly.
The mayor sat forward and crossed his hands on the table. “What exactly are you implying there, young man?”
I shrugged as if the answer was obvious. “You’re a friend to all walks of life.”
The mayor rubbed his mustache and smiled. Dennison lit a cigar and pulled at a chipped pottery ashtray.
I picked up the double eagle and was about the leave when Dennison asked, “Hey Pat, you’re probably the most honest person in the room. Tell us, what do you think of our new mayor here? Doesn’t he always speak the truth?”
“I don’t know,” I said, holding the drink tray at my side. I looked ridiculous in that silly apron and sillier bow tie. “I’ve never asked him for a loan.”
The four men in the room laughed together. I was still staring at the girl on the mayor’s left and exited through the privacy curtain as the laughter subsided.
Slightly past the dinner hour, the main barroom was a saturnalia of pipe tobacco, cackling laughter, pine paneling, and ragtime pounded out on an upright piano. My sister, the most disinterested madam in the history of whoredom, was bent over the counter next to the beer taps, reading the Omaha Evening Bee while undressing an orange with her thumbnail. Billy sat at the far end of the counter, nursing a glass of brewed choc.
It’d been two weeks since I’d broke up the fight in the stockyards and every evening since he’d come into the whorehouse by himself. Sometimes he played checkers all night long until closing time and even then was skittish about heading home alone. It wasn’t exactly a friendship, though I slowly developed a fondness for him in the way a big brother does for a runt of a younger sibling. And those Bohemians were sure to come back some time or another. It wasn’t in a Bohemian’s blood to let well enough alone. Billy’s head hadn’t stopped hurting since getting pelted with the chunk of pavement, but he didn’t have money to see a doctor.
When I came behind the bar, he asked me for some headache powder. I slid the bottle down the bar top. He stirred two tablespoons into his choc and slammed it down in one draught. I poured him another mug from the tap and examined my appearance in the mirror behind the liquor bottles, straightening my hair with my fingers.
My sister looked up from her reading. “You’re so darned pretty.”
“Who’s that looker come in with the mayor?” I asked.
Sallie looked back toward the curtained entrance of the smoking room. She knew the names and faces of nearly everyone who ever set foot in her place. “Which one?”
“The one with the yeller hair.”
“That’d be Hattie McCoy. Or Hattie McCoven,” Sallie said. She flipped over to the next page of the evening paper and threw a scrap of orange peel onto the floor, her attention focused on the fruit as acutely as if she was crocheting a sweater.
“Who brings whores into a whorehouse, anyway?” Billy asked.
Sallie ruffled her paper. “Whoever can afford to.”
“Well, which is it?” I asked. “McCoy or McCoven?”
“Why don’t you go ask her yourself?” Billy added with a nasally wheeze that made his words sound as if they came out of his nose instead of his mouth.
Sallie sighed and finally quit fiddling with her orange. “Don’t get cutesy now, you hear? You go nosing around one of the mayor’s pin-ups and it’s bon voyage, little brother.”
I wasn’t hearing any of it. “That’s the most beautiful woman I ever seen. Woman like that, you could stare at her till you grew cornstalks on your eyes.”
“Yeah, she’s exotic as an apple,” Sallie said and chuckled absently.
“You don’t see it?”
Sallie folded her paper. “You ain’t supposed to be drinking on the job.”
“Maybe you ought to make her your wife,” Billy said.
“Maybe I ought to yet.”
“Or maybe you ought to go upstairs and get a foot rub and a frog dinner and a real piece of Nebraska cooze that won’t cost you your life,” Sallie said.
I brayed. “I ain’t one to pay for it.”
“Not with coin, anyway,” Sallie said.
“Money well spent,” Billy added and raised his glass. He’d emptied his pockets on such slick over the past two weeks. If he wasn’t at my side, he was upstairs getting bounce
d around by a meaty Ukrainian whore twice his size. Poor Billy Cavanaugh—a tiny man with tiny hands and a rumored tiny something else—loved himself all things large and had a rash or worse to show for it, constantly tugging and itching at his crotch.
The night drew on toward closing time. Dennison and his gang of political bags stayed past the final hour. I served them exclusively until everyone but Tom was beaming drunk. When they’d had their fill of whiskey and wine, it was out with the Swedish coffee and snifters of apricot brandy. Twice the mayor fell asleep for a spell. Dennison, Ace, and Billy Nesselhous spoke in hushed tones so as not to wake him. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the young woman my sister told me was named Hattie. She’d returned my look on several occasions, albeit very briefly and with as much impudence as if I were weather expected.
By two in the morning, the place was empty save for Dennison’s party. Billy always stayed planted at the counter until I walked out and locked the door behind him. Sallie had retired upstairs in her boudoir for the night, leaving the closing duties to me. I was drying off glasses with a rag when I looked out to the street and saw them: two of the blond Bohemians I’d roughed up at the stockyards. They stood on the far sidewalk against a streetlamp, smoking, waiting. Billy’s back was to the window. He was playing rummy against himself, flipping over cards as worn as old soap slivers.
I set down the rag and walked to the far end of the bar and got the thirty-thirty out from under the till. I kept the rifle at my side so Billy wouldn’t see it and told him I was headed out back to take out the trash. As soon as I left the bar, the Bohemians dropped their cigarettes and walked across the street, looking in both directions.
They came through the front door as quiet as quick thieves and scanned the front room. Billy was the only man in sight. The bigger man who’d gotten his nose busted wore a piece of plaster between his eyes. The second man had his arm in a sling and his other hand was filled with a truncheon the size of a baseball bat. I came around the back of the bar and stood just outside the front door, waiting for them to make any kind of move that would justify emptying my rifle into their backs.
“Hiya there, Billy boy,” the big one said as the pair stepped behind Billy’s stool.
Billy turned from his cards and his eyes went dead.
“Your protector ain’t here,” the second one said and slammed his club on Billy’s hand against the counter, breaking bones in more than one spot. Billy held his hand against his chest. It throbbed and bled. He couldn’t bend his fingers.
“I ain’t never meant your sister no harm. We just wasn’t compatible is all,” Billy whined through the pain.
“Wasn’t compatible?” the first one said. He leaned over and took Billy’s mug and drank from it and set it back down and wiped his mouth. “You were set to be wed, and now our poor sister hasn’t come out of her room in a month.”
“I just ain’t got the marriage gene in me.”
The two Bohemians looked at each other. The big one yanked out Billy’s stool from under him. His head hit the edge of the bar with such force that he bloodied his mouth and loosened three of his front teeth. The second man kicked the stool out of the way and jumped over the bar and helped himself and his brother to a couple pours of whiskey while Billy flopped around on the floor. They both laughed at his misery as he cupped his broken hand over his throbbing mouth.
I bolted through the front door five seconds too late, my rifle raised, the buttstock pressed against my shoulder. “That’ll be a dollar and a half for the drinks and fifteen dollars for my friend to get his hand fixed,” I said.
The Bohemians set down their glasses simultaneously.
“Fifteen dollars?” the big one repeated.
“Plus ten more for a dentist to put his teeth back right,” I said and cocked the rifle.
“You gotta be fooling us.”
“I wasn’t fooling you the last time, and last time I didn’t have the business end of a smoothbore pointed at your heads. So you can imagine I ain’t anything but fooling now.”
The Bohemians, unarmed except for the club and a pair of brass knuckles, had no choice but to acquiesce. I led them out of the saloon around to the back alley with their hands raised over their heads. The alley sloped down a hill toward a little spit of creek so narrow a man could step over it without widening his stride. A rail fence separated the alley from the water. Billy limped after us, spitting out clots of blood and holding his broken knuckles against his shirt. I knelt the Bohemians down in the mud and searched their pockets with one hand while I gripped the thirty-thirty with the other. All total I fished out eight dollars between them and handed the sum over to Billy.
“This will cover either your hand or your teeth, whichever’s more pressing,” I said as Billy took the money and shoved it down his pants. “Don’t go spending it on a whore or this sister of theirs.”
“You calling our sister a whore?” the big one asked without turning around.
I put my left boot up on a crate, steadying the thirty-thirty against my thigh. “No sir, I’d never say that about anybody’s sister, even if she was that very thing. But that hot-headiness right there is what’s got you in this mess and the one before it. Not everything’s an insult. It’d do you well to learn it.”
I handed the rifle to Billy and asked him if he had the ability to keep it trained on his friends long enough for me to go back inside and dial the police. The only telephone in the bar was powered by a large glass jar of batteries on a shelf in the storeroom and sometimes it took more than a minute to get a connection, even within the city limits. Billy held the gun as if it were heavy as an elephant tusk and said he could manage, broken hand or not. I nodded and headed back inside. A thin rain pinged against the whorehouse roof as if it were made out of pie tins. Huddled next to a bin fire at the top of the alley were three panhandlers wearing oilcloths for snow coats.
The first shot rang out when I wasn’t halfway up the slope. I didn’t turn fast enough to see the second. All within eyeshot was the glint of the creek and the gun smoke rising fast above Billy’s head. He’d shot both Bohemians in the back of the head without a word spoken. I raced back down to the fence line. The bodies had fallen face first into the mud as if tripped. Their sprayed heads were missing entire sections of skull and jaw. The exposed parts of their brains were a dullish gray color. Billy lowered the gun and picked up a discarded cartridge at his feet. The other he couldn’t find in the dark.
I yanked the gun away from him. “What in the hell have you done?”
“I killed them,” Billy said as plainly as if he’d mended a pair of socks.
“I can see that.”
“Police or no, they’d keep coming back. I haven’t slept more than an hour at a time in two weeks. This was the only way.”
“In the back of my sister’s goddamn cathouse?”
“When the opportunity arises,” Billy said and stopped short as if leaving the other half of his thought unspoken.
I held the rifle in my hands lazily. “I told you not to do anything.”
“Don’t get spooky on me. Let’s just throw them in the river,” Billy suggested.
“I ought to throw you in with them.”
Billy hung his head. “I’m sorry. I’m just sick of being scared all the time.”
“This is some goddamn mess,” I said.
Billy’s eyes darted back and forth like he was working out long division in his head.
I felt nothing for the boys dead at my feet even though I tried hard to conjure up some emotion. Just wasn’t no feeling for those that had it coming no matter which side you might be upon. I’d never seen a dead body before and was thankful I wasn’t around when the passing occurred. It struck me seriously enough just hearing the shots and seeing the after of it all.
“There just weren’t no other way,” Billy said.
I spat and turned back to th
e whorehouse. “There’s always another way.”
“Where you going?”
“Just stay put, and this time I fucking mean it,” I said and hustled back inside. I threw open the curtain to the smoking room. Tom Dennison and his cohorts were still deep in conversation, their table littered with empty bottles and dirtied glasses and muddy ashtrays piled up like anthills. The mayor was asleep again with his head against the booth, his mouth open. Spittle on his tie. His shirt stained with drool. The women had left, Hattie included, swept off aboard some late-night carriage to wherever women like that were kept.
Dennison squashed his nickel cigar into the bottom of the mayor’s whiskey glass, which still held an inch of amber. It sizzled out in a sigh. “You ready to lock up?”
“Not entirely,” I said, unsure of how to broach the subject. “Mr. Dennison, sir, we have a bit of a problem outside, and I’m not quite sure how to handle it.”
“What kind of problem?”
“Maybe it’s best if you came and saw for yourself.”
Ace Diamond and Billy Nesselhous rose to come outside as well, but I asked, politely as I could, for them to stay behind.
“A tricky situation,” I told them.
When Dennison came around to the back and saw the pair of bodies and Billy holding the Winchester, he didn’t need any further explanation. The man was as pragmatic as a sewing machine. He waved his hat over the corpses as if they were already giving off a stink.
He said, “Hell, Pat, remember when I asked you if you knew who I was and you said I was a political boss?”
“I said I guessed you to be Tom Dennison.”
“Well, that too. At first I got the feeling you thought me some kind of Boss Tweed whose only aspiration in life was to stuff ballot boxes and get my picture on the cover of some tobacco label in my favorite top hat. A kind of disdain you might say. Well, I’m glad I was wrong because you figured out awful quick what I’m good for and what I’m not. This mess here? I got a couple associates that’ll make these two poor sonsabitches disappear before daylight. And what your sister don’t know stays what she don’t know.”
World, Chase Me Down Page 6
