Jimmy the Stick

by Michael Mayo

  And after that, I was only with Rothstein for two or three of his famous marathon poker games, and he lost both times, mumbling that the bastards would just have to wait until he was goddamn ready to pay. By then, I was old enough to know how these things worked and understood that A. R. was breaking the rules. But he was still Rothstein, “The Brain,” and he was treated with respect. The guys at Lansky’s garage said he was stretched too thin. Two of his men had been arrested with a big shipment of heroin, and he had to make bail. Nobody had ever seen A. R. like that.

  “Something else you need to understand is that before I was hurt,” I explained, holding up my cane, “I was the best runner in the city—or courier, if you want to make it sound more legit. I delivered more money and private messages than anyone else. I was never caught or ambushed. Guys chased me, sure. They hit me and shot at me, but they never stopped me or stole my stuff.”

  I felt good in that warm library with two women listening as I bragged on myself. I realized I’d better not like it too much or I’d say something I shouldn’t.

  Working for Meyer and then Longy meant that Spence and I went everywhere, from Long Island to New Jersey, with fine-looking women flocking to us, two successful young gents in sharp suits. We brought them alcohol and we carried guns. OK, the truth is the women flocked to Spence, but he made sure some flocked my way. Spence also gave me rubbers and explained how to use them. “The one good thing I learned overseas,” he said. “There’s all kinds of nasty bugs out there. You’d think these society girls wouldn’t have anything to do with it but they do.”

  But I figured Mrs. Pennyweight and Connie Nix didn’t need to know about that part, so I didn’t mention it.

  Mrs. Pennyweight looked amused. “So you and Walter worked for Mr. Rothstein and Mr. Meyer and Mr. . . . Luciano. Did you do well?”

  “Can’t complain. But I worked so hard and I got so tired that I didn’t get to spend much of what I earned.”

  Actually, I still turned over most of everything to Mother Moon. She gave me back what she thought I needed and moved me and Oh Boy into one of the big rooms. She and Fanny also bought us good suits and work clothes from Brooks Brothers and other classy places.

  Mrs. Pennyweight said, “Yes, Walter told us much the same. He thought his horizons were too limited and that Prohibition was sure to end. I ask you again, why didn’t you take him up on his offer to work for Pennyweight Petroleum?”

  I thought for a moment and told half the truth. “I probably should have, but I just couldn’t imagine leaving the neighborhood where I grew up. It was the only world I knew. Walter had been to France. He wasn’t afraid to go anywhere. When he and I came here that afternoon, he found something he wanted more than what we were doing.”

  “And you felt what . . . betrayed?” Her smile was mocking.

  “I guess I did. I was still a kid then.”

  “Is that all? You were miffed at your old friend and so you turned down a good position?”

  How to explain? I poured another drink, knowing it was probably not the right thing to do, and finally said, “I’ve never told anyone about this, because it’s not a good story. I guess it goes back to Arnold Rothstein.

  “It was the first Sunday in November, three years ago, in 1928. Around ten, ten thirty that night, I went to Lindy’s deli where A. R. conducted his business. He was at his booth in the back, shuffling through a stack of papers and notes. That was the way he worked. He told me to go to the Drake apartment building on Fifty-Sixth. Back then it was a new place. I knew where it was but I’d never been there. A. R. wrote a note, folded it once, and told me to take it to Stanislaw, the doorman. I had to make sure it wasn’t Edward the doorman. Stanislaw would give me something to bring back. As I was leaving, he told me that he might have to go out later. If he wasn’t there when I got back, I should hang on to whatever I got from Stanislaw and give it to him the next day.”

  That kind of thing had happened before, lots of times.

  “So off I went, a couple of long blocks east and few blocks north. Stanislaw was on duty. I gave him the note from A. R. He said wait a minute, went inside to his little office, and came back with a sealed envelope. I put it in my inside coat pocket, and went back on Fifty-Sixth the way I came. As I was coming up to Seventh, what did I see but A. R. crossing the street, and going into the service entrance of the Park Central Hotel. I was too far away for him to see me, and anyway, you didn’t yell in the street to Mr. Rothstein. Actually, you didn’t yell at Mr. Rothstein anywhere. I figured that maybe he knew I’d be coming this way and he’d been waiting for me. I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense now, but at the time it did.”

  I didn’t tell them that this was the same hotel where I listened while Rothstein predicted Prohibition to Meyer Lansky.

  “Later I heard that A. R. was at Lindy’s when he got a call and told the guys there he was going to the Park Central. He sent his car away and told his bodyguard he wouldn’t need protection. Nobody knows why he did that. It doesn’t make any sense. And then he walked to the Park Central by himself.

  “I went through the service door and took the back stairs. I figured I’d just take a look, see if he was around, maybe in a card game. He was known to play there. I went down the hall on the second floor. Nothing. I went up one more flight and I was in the stairwell when I heard men’s voices arguing, and then a shot, a pistol shot close to where I was standing. I pulled open the door just far enough to see another door open slowly, two guys sticking their heads out to check if anybody was around. A second later a third man came out, and they all started down the hall toward me. I ran like hell.”

  The first two were Vinnie Coll and Sammy Spats Spatola. I didn’t know the third guy by name but I’d seen him playing cards with A. R. and knew he held A. R.’s markers.

  I charged down the stairs, hanging on to the metal handrail as I ran. I might have heard footsteps behind me or I might have imagined them. I was never sure about that part. Seconds later, I was back out on Fifty-Sixth Street. Without breaking stride, I turned left and then right, heading downhill on Seventh Avenue.

  Later, I’d tell myself that I wasn’t running because I was scared. I was getting out because I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there. I had no idea if A. R. had been shot. I’d been told to go to Lindy’s, and that’s what I was doing. But I knew the truth even if I didn’t admit it to myself. I was frightened. I panicked and I ran. I was nothing more than a terrified, foolish boy.

  Something went wrong as I turned on Seventh Avenue. Maybe my shoe caught against a curb, on a step, or a break in the pavement. Whatever it was, as I twisted, flinging myself around the corner, I felt a sharp pop in my right knee. My leg collapsed, and I crumpled into a useless tangle of flailing limbs.

  Nobody had hit me. Nobody pushed me. Nobody touched me. There was nobody to blame but my own damn fool self.

  That’s what happened. But all I said to Connie Nix and Mrs. Pennyweight was, “When I got to the street, I fell and tore up my knee.”

  I don’t remember how I managed to get back to Mother Moon’s house, only that my knee hurt like hell. I was crying from the pain, and also because I knew I’d done something seriously wrong to myself. Even then, I knew I would never run again.

  “About an hour later, they found A. R. in the same stairwell with a bullet in his gut. He died two days after that, and never spoke a word about who shot him.

  “Like I said, this all happened on the first Sunday in November. The next Friday or Saturday, your daughter and Spence got married. I still couldn’t walk, and by then there had been another death in the family.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  NEW YORK

  NOVEMBER 7, 1928

  I have never been so goddamn miserable and sorry for myself as I was in the days after A. R. was shot. My knee swelled up like a water balloon and wouldn’t support me at all. I was still wallowing in pain and confusion when Fanny and Dr. Ricardo came into my room. The doc looked shaky, like he was
overdue for a smoke. Fanny looked serious, but then she almost always did.

  I twisted around on the bed, reaching for the crutches Ricardo had sold me.

  Fanny said, “She’s dead,” and I knew what she meant. Mother Moon had stopped frequenting her opium parlor and had taken to the pipe almost every day in her room. We could tell she wasn’t her normal self, even if we didn’t really mention it to each other.

  Ricardo said, “It was a cancer. You can get a real doctor to check it if you want, but I’ve seen it before.”

  I swung my legs over carefully and sat up using the crutches. The bitterness, self-pity, and anger were as strong as they’d been, and the news of Mother Moon’s death did nothing to change that.

  Fanny said, “Jacobson told me she had him draw up a will, all legal and proper. She left me the building. I’ve got the money she saved for you.”

  “How much?”

  “Ten thousand.”

  “The hell you say. It should be four, five times that.” I pulled the notepad out of my coat pocket. “I’ve got a record of every penny I gave her.” I was getting really steamed, but I could tell there was something else. Fanny might not be lying but she wasn’t telling the whole truth. Not that I was either. I hadn’t told anyone about the money I’d been holding back for years, or about hiding A. R.’s last envelope. It was still snug against my ribs, there in my coat pocket, unopened.

  “Show me her strongbox.”

  We went to Mother Moon’s room. Ricardo had covered her body, and with the heavy drapes closed and all windows shuttered, the room remained thick with fruity opium fumes. Mother Moon lay on her daybed, banked with cushions and swayed by years of use.

  Fanny said, “I told Tommy . . . Patrolman O’Brien what happened. He’s sending a car for her.” She stopped, chewing on a fingernail. “Tommy wants me to move in with him, to sell this place, and move in with him. What do you think I should do, Jimmy?”

  Fanny was still taller than me. But as Mother Moon’s health declined, she’d treated me more as an equal.

  “O’Brien? He’s married.”

  She shrugged. “I dunno, he says he loves me. And he’s nice, and he’s gonna leave her. So I think I’m going to sell this place. You know Oh Boy is working for Spence now, don’t you? Yeah, he’s moving to Jersey.”

  That surprised and stunned me almost as much as Mother Moon’s death. I stood openmouthed, trying not to fall off my crutches. Dr. Ricardo pulled the strongbox out from under the bed and ignored us.

  When I returned to my room, still reeling, I rolled up my pant leg for Ricardo. He was a pale guy who never liked to go outdoors. Some people said he’d been a real doctor once, and others that he was a medical student when he started smoking hop. Didn’t matter much to us. He knew about drugs and injuries and wounds and women’s problems. And he lived in the building.

  He said, “Can you stand up?”

  When I pushed up from the bed, the knee bent to one side in a way that made both of us sick to see. I sat back down fast.

  Dr. Ricardo shook his head and told me to take off my shoe. “See how your heel is bruised all the way around the sides and at the back? You were turning but somehow your foot planted down solid, and your leg twisted too far. When you do that, something’s got to give. In your case, it was your knee. You see, you’ve got these four big ligaments that hold everything together . . . no, it’s three ligaments that hold your knees together, or four, yeah four. . . . Anyway, you broke one of them, tore it right in half.”

  “How do I get it fixed?” I asked, knowing what the answer was going to be.

  “You can’t fix it. The muscles will grow stronger, and you can get a brace that will keep your leg straight. I know a man in Chinatown who can make one for you. That will help. So will a cane.”

  “Will I be able to run?”

  “A little, maybe, but not very well.”

  It was all I could do not to cry like a damn baby.

  I waited until Patrolman O’Brien showed up with the hearse that took Mother Moon away. The mortuary gave him a kickback for every customer he delivered. When he and Fanny left with the body, I went back to Mother’s room and used my duplicate key to open her strongbox. The upper tray held letters, some in Chinese, along with a box of jewelry and folded documents I couldn’t understand. Below this stuff were folded silk scarves, three tins of opium pills, a switchblade, a straight razor, and a collection of small blue glass bottles. All the stuff that Fanny, Ricardo and I had just gone through.

  For years, I’d seen Mother Moon put things inside that box, and take things out too. I figured that it had to hold special secrets. It didn’t take long to release the false bottom where I found eight banded stacks of cash.

  There was another $2,000 loosely stuffed in a tasseled pillow at the foot of the daybed. Deep inside the fat silk pillow that had fit the small of her back, I found a couple dozen folded pieces of white paper. Each held a stone. Some were clear, some green.

  Back in my room, exhausted by the stairs, I collapsed on the bed and opened my own stash of cash that I kept behind a section of loosened baseboard. But such a simple hiding place wouldn’t do any longer. Putting the money I’d taken from Mother Moon’s room in one stack, I clicked open the switchblade to slice open A. R.’s envelope, never returned to its rightful owner. It held more cash, mostly hundred-dollar bills. I counted quickly: $6,772. The money from Mother Moon’s strongbox came to $5,440. Toting up the numbers in my notepad, I found a total of $16,436. Combined with the money from Meyer and A. R. that I’d been holding back from Mother Moon, I had $22,874. Plus the stones in folded paper.

  I stared at the bundles of cash and wondered what I would do. It was a complicated question. When Fanny sold the building, where would I live? What would I do with all that money? Where could I keep the cash? What would I do for work? A better man than me might have tried to get Rothstein’s money to his widow or his girlfriend. A better man might have tried to arrange some kind of split with Fanny and Oh Boy and Dr. Ricardo. I didn’t even think about it.

  All I knew was that I still had one good leg, $22,874 and twenty-four stones that might be diamonds and emeralds. The world was changing around me, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Mother Moon was dead. Spence was gone. Oh Boy and Fanny were leaving. And A. R. had been killed.

  First thing, I got the Detective Special and checked the load. I found a suit that wasn’t too sharp or too shabby. I filled my pockets with the stones and as about half the cash. The rest of the money went into a brown paper bag.

  Outside, on crutches with the paper bag under one arm and the pistol in my coat pocket, I tried not to look like I was rushing anywhere. People knew me in that neighborhood, so I told myself that this was just another day and I was just heading out to steal another car. But I knew that now I really had something to lose. It wasn’t A. R.’s money I was carrying anymore—it was mine, and it was all I had in the world.

  I walked until the sidewalks got wider and the people were better dressed. Then I hailed a cab to the Harriman National Bank on Fifth Avenue. Mother Moon had never trusted banks, but A. R. kept a safe-deposit box at the Harriman. If the place was good enough for him, it was good enough for me.

  I remember feeling enormous relief after I paid for the box, took the key, and locked up the stones and most of the money. As I left the bank, I began to realize how ignorant I was about these things. I knew what a meal cost at a deli, but $22,874 didn’t have any real meaning. It was just a lot of money. I didn’t know what I could do with it, or even what I wanted to do. That’s what I’d have to figure out. The next morning I moved into the Chelsea Hotel.

  Two days later I took a cab to Chinatown and swung my crutches down Mott Street. I’d been in the neighborhood often enough that it didn’t seem foreign or particularly exotic. I knew you didn’t steal from Chinese shopkeepers. They saw everything and smacked you on the head as hard as hell if you even thought about putting the pinch on something in their places.<
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  Dr. Ricardo had told me to go to the fifth door past the intersection with Grand Street. The place wasn’t easy to spot behind racks of vegetables, fish, and stuff I couldn’t name. But then there it was, a narrow green door, just two steps below the sidewalk. I fumbled down clumsily, almost toppling over on the stairs. Then I walked down a dim hall with a faint light at the far end. I was sweating despite the cold by the time I reached a second door, and I smelled burning charcoal as I entered.

  Inside I found a room with a rough plank floor that opened onto a courtyard bordered by alleys and the backs of neighboring buildings. It had probably been a stable at one time. Harnesses and strangely shaped pieces of metal that might have been weapons were hanging on the wall. All had paper price tags. Outside in the courtyard, a Chinaman worked with hammer and tongs at a circular piece of metal on an anvil by a forge. He was a young guy with a wide face and massive shoulders. He wore a leather apron over a black robe, felt slippers, and some kind of wooden clogs.

  He looked at my crutches and said, “What kind of brace do you need?”

  I said, “You don’t sound Chinese.”

  “I’m Japanese. Who sent you to me? Christiansen?”

  I didn’t know that Japs could speak such good English. “No, Ricardo. It’s, uh, my knee.”

  He set his tools aside, came inside, and cleared some stuff from a small bench. “Sit down and roll up your pant leg.”

  For the next twenty minutes he worked with a tape measure and calipers, and wrote down numbers. When he finished he said, “What kind of brace do you want? I can make one that will keep your knee from buckling for ten dollars. I can make one that will last for years and it will be so light you’ll hardly notice it but that’s a hundred dollars, and I can give you anything in between.” He took a long look at my suit, overcoat, and hat, saying, “I imagine a man in your position will want the best. I also have some canes you might be interested in.”