by Michael Mayo
Back up in the main room were the big double front doors. They were always kept locked unless visitors were expected. Smaller single doors off the conservatory and dining room opened onto porches and were always locked. Another set of wide double doors led to a ballroom. He opened them and I saw a wide, dim cold room with several sets of French doors on the far wall. The wind whistled through them, making the ballroom colder than the rest of the place.
He led me upstairs to the second floor. There was a porch off of Mrs. Pennyweight’s rooms but other than that, no outside doors. Mears had already closed and locked the shutters of the nursery and the empty guest rooms. Servants’ quarters were on the third floor. They had no outside access and small windows.
Downstairs in the kitchen, there was only one door. Oh Boy was sitting at the table. I asked him to show me the guns.
The gun room was at the far end of the basement, behind a wooden door thick enough to muffle the sound of gunshots. Like the kitchen, it had whitewashed walls. They were covered with mounted animal heads along with photographs, mostly of a smiling Mr. Pennyweight, his guns, and the dead trophies he’d shot with them. There were also pictures of a girl about twelve years old with a long, ruddy face. I guessed this was the older sister, Mandelina. She wore hunting clothes and posed with a deer or elk with a wide rack of antlers. She held a lever-action Winchester rifle, her father beaming proudly beside her. I studied the picture more closely. The resemblance to Flora was strong. But Mandelina seemed much more confident, almost cocky. You could tell that she was only a few years away from becoming a real looker.
Oh Boy took a key from a peg and unlocked the doors of a glass-fronted gun case. The racks inside held a collection of expensive shotguns and rifles. A second case held muzzle-loaders and older military pieces. Beside them was a workbench for cleaning the weapons and reloading ammunition.
Oh Boy opened a drawer and said, “Here’s the pistols.”
The drawer was lined with green felt, with spaces cut out for a dozen or so handguns. These were the familiar guns of my youth: Police Positive, Browning Hi-Power, and my own favorite, the Detective Special snub-nose .38. Another Mauser, the big broom-handle model, was in the center of the drawer. The largest cutout was empty. It was a simple angled shape meant for a Colt .45 automatic. I guessed that Spence had taken it on his trip.
I walked to the dark shooting range and hit one of two switches on the wall by the counter. Lights came down the narrow passageway. At the far end, a spotlight was aimed at a paper target already peppered with holes, suspended from an electric pulley-and-chain system. I snapped on the other switch. A motor whirred and the target glided back to me. I started counting the holes and stopped at thirty. There was a coffee can on the counter with a dozen or so .45 shell casings at the bottom. More littered the floor of the range. Spence had been practicing.“Oh Boy, what do you know about this trip?”
“Jeez, Walter’s been working on it for almost a year now. We’ve been going into the city to meet with the company lawyers two, three times a week. Sometimes Saturday, too. Leave first thing in the morning, don’t get back until after dark. Oh boy, do I hate those days. And the shysters have been coming out here, too. I talk to the other drivers, who say this is quite the big deal. I’ll be glad when it’s over, that’s for sure.”
I went back to the pistol drawer and found the cutout for the little Abercrombie & Fitch Mauser. Before I put it away, I offered it to Oh Boy.
He shook his head and frowned. “No, I don’t like guns no more. You know that.”
Some guys go a little nuts over guns. They’ve got to have the biggest, shiniest, loudest piece, wearing fancy shoulder holsters and such, making sure everybody sees what they’re carrying, particularly women. You’ve got to watch out for guys like that. Oh Boy was just the opposite. Had been for years and he hadn’t changed.
I took out the Detective Special. The compact weight was familiar but the grip felt different. It didn’t have any friction tape or rubber bands holding it together. I opened the cylinder. Five rounds with an empty chamber under the hammer. If I was going to be carrying a pistol again, I wanted it to be something I was comfortable with. Probably wouldn’t bring down an elk, but it didn’t clump up my coat pocket.
We locked the gun cases and turned off the lights. Oh Boy said, “It brings back some memories, don’t it?”
Chapter Five
JANUARY 15, 1918
NEW YORK CITY
On the third Tuesday of most months, Mother Moon left our building in Hell’s Kitchen to meet Mother Fineman in a millinery shop on Second Avenue. Mother Fineman was a fence who knew that Mother Moon’s mob of kids stole good merchandise. That Tuesday, I had been chosen to carry the bag of samples—a girl’s dress and blouse from two racks of clothes that we’d picked clean, a can of Savarin Coffee from the five cases we’d boosted from a truck, and two men’s pocket watches, one cheap and one good, part of a lot we’d bought from a jeweler’s assistant who’d stolen them from his own boss.
At the millinery shop the women would spend a couple of pleasant hours examining the goods, haggling over prices, and drinking tea while complaining about the quality of the smoke at the Sans Souci opium parlor, their favorite. I could work the neighborhood if I wanted to, or make myself scarce if I stayed in the store. It was cold that day so I stayed. The place was warm and it smelled good, and looking at the shapely dress forms that the women used in sewing gave me a pleasant itchy feeling I didn’t quite understand. Hell, I was seven years old, maybe eight. Bolts of cloth were stacked on the floor and shelves, and a small kid like me could work his way through them, tunnel toward the back, and find a comfortable place to curl up where no one would notice him but he could see everything that was going on. When you’re my size, that’s a useful skill.
I was stretched out on a shelf when the commotion started on the street. I heard yelling, a quick pop-pop, feet pounding on the sidewalk, and then saw the shop door slam open and bang against the wall. A fat little man crashed through, his straw-boater flying. He vaulted the first display and ducked behind it.
Another shot sounded. Louder, closer. A mirror in the back shattered. Two men with pistols shouldered through the doorway together. Mother Moon and Mother Fineman dove beneath the cash register, teacups forgotten.
The fat little man scuttled straight toward me. For a split second, we were eye to eye, and I flinched against the stench of spoiled garlic that surrounded him. I saw a shiny black suit and white shirt speckled with red and purple stains before he scurried away.
The gunmen turned in crazy circles. Where was their target? He knocked over a dress form and they both blazed away, running toward the headless model. The fat little guy bounced up, dashing across the store, ducking and twisting. One fellow emptied his pistol and reloaded. The other chased the fat man and kept firing. The bullets hit high on the wall and punched through the tin ceiling. The first guy rejoined the chase. The fat man bobbed and twirled and slid, his feet never still. The gunfire continued. I could see sweat pouring down their necks. One of the gunmen whirled and put a bullet through the store window. The gunfire abruptly stopped as his partner smacked him on the back of the head.
The fat little man peeked around the corner. The other two raised their pistols, but the hammers clicked on empty chambers.
The first gunman smacked his partner a second time. They rummaged through their coat and pants pockets. No more bullets. They looked at each other, one said something in Italian, and they disappeared out the front door.
The fat little man slowly stood, his breath huffing, eyes darting madly around the shop. At length, he retrieved his boater, and laughed a little when he stuck a finger through a bullet hole in the crown. After checking the street, he scurried out.
The women emerged from behind the cash register. Mother Fineman began to catalog losses, including the broken glass and mirror. Who could say how much of her stolen goods were damaged? She held up a bolt of dirty cloth. I stood in the
middle of the floor and committed it all to memory so I’d be able to tell everyone about the wonders I’d witnessed.
Mother Moon appeared beside me. “Do you know who that was, lad?”
“Yes, ma’am. It was Joe ‘The Boss’ Masseria and those guys were working for Umberto Valenti, the guy that Joe tried to kill last week.”
“And what did you learn from what you just saw?”
“Those guys can’t shoot for shit.”
She tousled my hair. “Aren’t you smart. I think I see an opportunity here for us.”
That very afternoon we started clearing one side of the basement in Mother Moon’s building for a shooting gallery.
The project took more than a week to complete even after we emptied a narrow space along the back. Mother Moon found an article in Modern Mechanix magazine. She hired Mr. Merkl, the carpenter on the third floor, to frame up a wall of lath and plaster, and put in a waist-high counter at one end. Oh Boy and I rounded up bales of newspapers and stacked them from floor to ceiling outside for soundproofing. We rigged coal-oil lights, with sandbags reaching up the wall at the far end. Mother Moon bought targets and a couple of beat-up Colt revolvers, a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun, ammunition, and a gun-cleaning kit from a guy who worked at Frank Lava’s gun shop.
The guy from Lava’s told me about the rudiments of marksmanship, and showed me how to clean the pistols. I thought this was just about the greatest thing that ever happened, and I spent hours in the basement getting used to the big noise, the sudden power, and the recoil. I was able to make mistakes on my own, even when my grip wasn’t strong enough and the Police Positive jumped out of my hand. Or when I shot into the floor and almost hit my own damn foot. I learned to be careful, even when that meant going slow. For a little kid, I became unusually patient. I remembered the way the guys in the millinery shop acted, how fast and uncontrolled they’d been. If one of them had just stopped for a few seconds before he aimed, he’d have dropped the fat little man where he stood. But they were both too excited. Hell, I’d been excited watching them. I could still feel the leftover buzz, and I wanted to feel it again. But excitement didn’t help when it came to hitting what you were aiming at. The trick, I came to learn, was not to hurry and not to hesitate.
I practiced for another week and then we spread the word. The target range was open for business. You could bring your own piece and ammo and rent the range, or Mother Moon would let you practice with her equipment, for a price. We always kept the money away from the shooting gallery, never allowing in more than one guy at a time.
One of our first customers was a gawky, skinny teen from a good neighborhood, not the kind of customer Mother Moon had in mind. She thought she’d attract mugs who wanted to get into local gangs. This was a working-class kid whose father had a good job at the Chelsea Piers. That didn’t keep him from being drafted into the Army to fight in the Great War.
Mother Moon and I met the kid when he showed up on a gray cold afternoon, looking unhappy, hands stuffed into the pockets of his coat. He was pretty young but was already six feet tall, looming over both of us.
“Look,” he said, “I gotta go for training in a couple of weeks, and then I’m sent overseas. They tell me they’re gonna give me marksmanship training but I don’t know from guns. So I figure to get a leg up here by learning to use a pistol, it can’t hurt.”
“A wise young man,” Mother Moon said as she pocketed his money. “Are there other boys from your neighborhood in the same situation?”
“Sure. Dozens of ’em.”
“If you recommend our little enterprise to your friends, I’ll give you extra time with the instructor.”
The deal was done on the spot, and I led him downstairs.
“You’re the instructor?” the guy asked. From the tone of his voice, he was just curious. He didn’t seem to care that I was so much younger and smaller. He stuck out his hand. “Walter Spencer. Spence.”
“Jimmy Quinn. In here.” I pointed the way.
I lit the acrid coal-oil lamps, got out the .32, and showed him how to open the cylinder and load the bullets.
“First, all the things you’ve seen in the movies, Tom Mix shooting guns out of guys’ hands and stuff like that, it’s crap. This,” I said, like I knew exactly what I was talking about, “is a Colt Police Positive. You hold it in your right hand. Now, you can either pull the trigger or pull the hammer back and then squeeze the trigger. Either way, you need to hold it steady. You gotta use both hands or lean on something or kneel down and brace your elbow. Then you line up the sights right in the middle of whatever you’re aiming at . . .” And on and on I went with my half-informed lessons.
Spence listened and watched, following everything I said. We spent the afternoon down there until the stink of the lamps and the gun smoke made it too hard to breathe. When we were done, we took the pistol and the remaining ammo back to Mother Moon and walked down Eighth Avenue in the cold evening to find something to eat.
“You’re right,” said Spence. “It ain’t nothing like the movies. Why don’t they ever have to reload?”
“That’s the movies for you, I guess. You know, I was there when they tried to get Joe the Boss.”
“Really? You saw it?”
“Yeah, let me tell you it was . . .”
And that was the beginning of a curious friendship that grew over the next three months. Somehow, the ten-year difference in age never mattered to either of us. Every now and again some guy would make a crack about Mutt and Jeff. If we could catch him, we’d beat the hell out of him. We went to the movies all the time, ate hot dogs and sandwiches at the deli, stayed up late, and rolled drunks for cash. I showed Spence the finer points of sizing up a properly boiled mark, and we regularly earned more than $100 each week.We sat up all night to watch the sun rise from the roof of Mother Moon’s house. Spence said that his father worked extra hours at White Star Pier, drank a lot, and complained about his son. His mother drank too, and he thought that she worried about him, but he wasn’t sure. That was all he ever said about his parents and his home. Both his mother and dad died while he was overseas.
Spence was a stand-up guy overall. He also delivered other boys from his neighborhood who wanted to play with guns. I provided the lessons, and Mother Moon prospered.
Spence shipped out for training in South Carolina in September. I got one letter saying that it was hot as hell down South, and most of the guys in his unit were apple-knockers from upstate. He hated them all, hated the Army and the whole goddamn thing.
Chapter Six
THURSDAY, MARCH 3, 1932
VALLEY GREEN, NEW JERSEY
It was almost four in the morning that first night, and I couldn’t get the image of that damned bloody headless doll out of my mind. I went into the dim library, where Mrs. Pennyweight had fallen asleep. She was in the armchair in front of the fire with a thick lap robe tucked around her, shotgun across her legs. The baby was sleeping in his crib. Throughout the earlier commotion, little Ethan hadn’t made a sound. Must have been pretty strong stuff that Dr. Cloninger doped him with.
I put a log on the glowing fire, mixed a weak rye, and searched the bookshelves for a dictionary. I found one on a stand in a corner and took out my notebook. Where was it? There: “recapitulate,” the word I’d picked up earlier from the guy on the radio. I flipped the pages of the dictionary, running my finger down to where I needed to be. I was pleased that I’d spelled the word right, and that I’d almost known what it meant. Repeat the principal points or stages of. Summarize. Yeah, that made sense.
Mrs. Pennyweight stirred. “What are you doing?” she asked, her voice cross.
I gimped back to warm my butt by the fire that had crackled back into life. “Looking up a word. ‘Recapitulate.’ Do you know what it means?”
“Of course. What are you talking about?”
“I didn’t last too long in school but I learned how to read and I enjoy it. Still, I have to look up words I don’t know so I keep
a list.” I showed her the notebook. I’ve still got it and almost all of the others that I’ve kept over the years.
“How fascinating,” she said, still cranky.
“Do people around here know about Spence?”
She shook her head. “They know he made money in the market.”
That was true enough. Spence invested everything he made working for Lansky and Longy. They paid us pretty well and he turned his share into a nice little pile. I gave mine to Mother Moon. Most of it anyway. I always held on to a little something.
Mrs. Pennyweight said, “They don’t know how he got it, but that’s not really important. You see, Morris County used to be extremely wealthy. Vanderbilts and Rockefellers lived here. Not long ago, this was a place of mansions and luxury you couldn’t believe.” She stared into the fire. “We had our own train, the Millionaires’ Express, so that the men who worked in the city but summered here could relax on the trip back and forth. Of course, that’s gone now. Everybody lost their money in the crash. We’re hanging on, and Walter is part of the reason. He was able to provide an infusion of capital when we needed it, and with my husband’s help, he learned the business. Now, if he isn’t able to bring in these new wells, I don’t know what we’ll do.”
Her face had a haunted look in the firelight. “We’ve been through worse, but to have this come on top of this awful business with Anne and Charles . . .” She hugged herself and frowned at the flames. “Hell and damnation, if it were up to me, we’d sell this place and move to a cottage in New Hampshire. There’s no reason for us to be here, but there’s no one to buy the house.”
Her voice and expression were bitter. “Perhaps we really are cursed.”
Later, I stood at the window of my darkened room. Outside, the headlights I’d seen before were still there. But were they the same lights? I couldn’t really tell. They did seem to be moving at the same slow speed. Then the lights of a second vehicle appeared, approaching the first, and the second car stopped. It looked like the two drivers had stopped to talk to each other.
