Black Hats

by Max Allan Collins

  Frankie chuckled without humor. “And then there’s his new wife.”

  Little John frowned, something he rarely did. “Yes. The man isn’t even really my uncle, anymore—not since he threw my sainted aunt over for the new Mrs. Colosimo. Something has to be done.”

  “Say the word. I’ll do it myself.” He gestured toward the otherwise empty room, specifically to the empty chair opposite his desk. “Maybe that’s the answer with young Alphonse—get him out of Brooklyn and into Chicago, where he can help you with your former uncle.”

  Little John said nothing, his dainty hands folded in his lap, his mild blue eyes unreadable.

  “Premature,” he said finally. “But I wanted you to know my situation. And that I may need your assistance.”

  Frankie put his hand on his heart. “You have it. Whenever you need it.”

  A knock at the alley door prompted Frankie to call out: “Yeah, what?”

  Little Augie leaned in. “Kid is here,” he said.

  “Send him in.”

  Al Capone came in, his big white Borsalino in hand; he was wearing a white Palm Beach suit, very natty, which went well with the large white gauze bandage on his left cheek and upper neck. His shoes were black and white, mostly white.

  He looked sheepish. “Mr. Yale. Mr. Torrio.”

  With a sweeping gesture, Torrio said, “Come and sit, Al. And we’ll discuss this.”

  The big kid lumbered over and deposited himself onto the hard wooden chair that had been placed opposite Frankie—with Little John seated in the ornate chair to Frankie’s left, the kid was facing his two surrogate fathers at once. To the left was a wall with the window onto the alley, a few framed pictures of Frankie with local politicians and celebrities hanging crookedly, and a couple filing cabinets; to the right was a wood-and-windows wall onto the garage with the trucks, where a few mechanics in greasy coveralls were doing maintenance.

  Capone sat there slumped, his chagrin apparent. “I apologize for what I done,” he said glumly.

  “How many stitches, Al?” Little John asked.

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “How many scars?”

  “Three.” A thick finger indicated. “One about four inches, two below that are two inches each. I’ll always have ’em, the doc says. On my face.”

  “Any concussion from the cane blow?”

  “Naw. Just a goose egg.” He touched the back of his head, delicately. “Hell of a one, though.”

  Little John nodded. “Your cheek—does it hurt, son?”

  “Naw. Well, yeah. But not as bad as my pride.”

  “Did you learn anything?”

  “Hell, Mr. Torrio. Lots of things.”

  Frankie said, “How about starting with not shitting where you fucking eat?”

  “That’s one,” Capone admitted.

  “And not putting the moves on somebody else’s twist, particularly when that somebody has come around, invited, for a business meeting?”

  Capone swallowed. “That’s another.”

  Frankie sighed. Shook his head. “You know what disappoints me most, Al?”

  “No, Mr. Yale.”

  “You’re a married man! A recently married man, with a beautiful young wife at home. And a beautiful young son.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “And in public you go around waving your cock at cooze? Is that dignified?”

  “No, Mr. Yale.”

  “You want a little on the side, aren’t there places for that? Where you can have whatever you want on the house? Would I deny you any of the women that work for us?”

  “No, Mr. Yale.”

  “You should be ashamed.”

  “Yes, Mr. Yale.”

  “Well, are you?”

  “Yes, Mr. Yale. Ashamed, yes. Real ashamed.”

  Frankie heaved a sigh, then glanced at Torrio, who shrugged a little. Boys will be boys.

  Capone swallowed and said, “Just the same, we got to do something. I been disrespected. I been…what you call it, humiliated.” He sat up. Chin up, too, a move that tugged the bandage. “More than that, Mr. Yale, Mr. Torrio—I been fucking assaulted. I can’t stand for that. We can’t stand for that.”

  Little John studied his old pupil. Shook his head. Sighed wearily. Said, “Haven’t I taught you anything, Al? You make me sad.”

  Crushed, Capone was turning the Borsalino around in his pudgy hands as if he were driving a car, wildly. “Mr. Torrio—what? I…how…?”

  A small forefinger raised on a dainty hand. “Business first. Pleasure later.”

  Frowning, Frankie said, “Al may have a point, Johnny. Word is all over town that Holliday and these fucking old codgers, Earp and Masterson, cut my best boy up in my own joint. It looks bad. It looks like shit, is how it looks. Hard to maintain discipline when—”

  “Business first,” Little John cut in, this time the words directed at Frankie. “You…we…are in the business of supplying liquor to speaks all over New York and New Jersey. Holliday has the biggest and best supply of pre-Prohibition liquor in the city.”

  Frankie waved that off. “Hell, J.T., it’s a lousy year’s worth. That’s a lot of hooch, sure, but not enough to suffer this kind of insult—”

  “Don’t you have enough on your hands,” Little John interrupted sharply, “with the backlash you’re facing from these White Handers?”

  The words were an indirect rebuke—the Sagaman’s Hall ambush had been Frankie’s idea alone; he had not cleared it with Torrio, whose style it clearly wasn’t.

  “J.T., I’m just saying, why chase a year’s worth of liquor, when these people won’t do business? We take them down, and maybe we find their storehouse, along the way.”

  “Taking them down is the second step,” Little John said. “The first is snagging that liquor…and you are wrong, Frankie, about the treasure at stake. Where did you hear it was a year’s supply?”

  “Well…uh…”

  The Neapolitan leprechaun’s eyes twinkled. “From them, by any chance?…Frankie, I know where Holliday acquired that supply, it was in a poker game, and I know who he won it from, and I am telling you that the liquor involved would represent five, perhaps six years’ worth of the best product for the biggest of speaks.”

  Frankie thought about that. “That is a lot of product for our wholesale business.…”

  “Yes it is.”

  “We could water it down and stretch it here to Sunday.”

  Torrio nodded. “Or sell it at a premium to our most discriminating clients.”

  “Lot of product,” Frankie said. “Lot of possibilities.…”

  Capone cleared his throat.

  Their eyes went to him.

  “With all due respect, Mr. Torrio…Mr. Yale. I have some say in this. It was me who—”

  “Fucked up,” Little John said.

  Capone blinked; almost looked like he would cry.

  Frankie had to grin; the times Little John used such language wouldn’t tick off the fingers on one hand.

  “Okay,” Capone said, sitting on the edge of the hardwood chair, his face flushed around the white of the oversize bandage, “but I was the one whose puss that prick cut. I’m the one who’s gonna get called ‘scarface’ for the rest of my goddamn life. I got a right to settle that score. He has to die, Mr. Torrio. Johnny Holliday has to fucking die.”

  Torrio raised his hand in Pope-like benediction. “I would not deny you that. Only the ‘when’ is up for discussion, the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ are understood. Our Sicilian friends have a saying: ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold.’ Al, my boy, I wouldn’t dream of denying you the pleasure of dining in that fashion. But before any fine meal, first…something to drink, eh?”

  “And what is it comes before pleasure?” Frankie said to Capone.

  Whose sigh was deep, making his cheeks, including the bandaged one, quiver.

  “Business,” Capone said.

  “Business,” Frankie confirmed.

  “Good,” L
ittle John said, and he settled back in the plush chair and tented his tiny fingers over the mound of his belly. “Now, Frankie, Al…tell me how you’re going to find, and take, all of that nice liquor for us.”

  THREE

  MONKEY WITH

  THE DEADWOOD*

  *gambler lingo for: cheat;

  literally, using discarded cards

  ELEVEN

  The week following the Coney Island incident proceeded quietly, not counting the construction and carpentry work on the brownstone’s basement level, as the pieces of the nightclub got put back together. Life was calm and pleasant, in its way, Wyatt thought—as within a fort under siege, in the lulls between Indian attacks. About the worst you could say about the experience was the smell of fresh, wet paint filtering up from downstairs got a mite pungent.

  Since the club was not open for business, Wyatt kept regular hours, rising at six a.m. and going for a morning constitutional, taking breakfast at a diner several blocks from the brownstone. Sometimes he indulged in an afternoon stroll, and he often took dinner out, as well, at various restaurants within easy walking distance. Exercise and eating were in part an excuse for reconnaissance—these normal activities allowed him to keep track of how well and closely they were being watched.

  And they were, on all sides. Yale was deploying three shifts of at least four cars, and whether anyone was maintaining surveillance from windows across the street, Wyatt had not yet determined. But the front of the brownstone, as well as the openings of the four-foot-wide utilities easement behind it, were being watched. So was the passage off West Fifty-third that led to that easement.

  Yale was not so bold, or foolish, as to post Capone in any of the parked cars, not that his number-two boy would demean himself with such flunky’s work. But Wyatt did recognize both the curly-haired and bald hoodlums from Capone’s first visit to Holliday’s, in separate vehicles, on several occasions.

  Tempting as it was to brace these boys, or perhaps seek help from Johnny’s bent cop pal Lieutenant Harrigan, Wyatt let these sleeping watchdogs lie.

  At Wyatt’s insistence, Johnny brought in several of his harder-boiled employees to live on-site for the time being, which meant the other guest room was converted into a sort of barracks. The brownstone’s new residents included two burly bartenders, Harry and Fred, the latter a veteran of the Alaskan Gold Rush, though Wyatt didn’t remember ever running across him in those parts; bulky Lou, the downstairs doorman; a bald waiter-cum-bouncer named Gus, a former wrestler who’d tired of taking dives and preferred a job where he regularly won any matches; Franz, another waiter with bouncer abilities, an ex-German infantryman with terrible scars and a grateful manner for being accepted in his new homeland. A Negro porter named Bill was a veteran of the same war as Franz, and despite having served on opposite sides, the two had become great friends, and in fact none of the white men complained about sharing quarters with Bill.

  All of these saloon and restaurant workers declared themselves comfortable with firearms, when asked, and Wyatt inquired of Bat as to where five or six rods might be picked up for the happy little barracks brothers.

  “We can get off cheap,” Bat said. “I do business in guns all the time with a cubbyhole pawn shop around the corner from the Telegraph.”

  They’d been sitting, alone, in the otherwise deserted dining room of Holliday’s having some mid-morning coffee.

  “Bartholomew,” Wyatt said, “why would you be doing business in guns, at your advanced age? Isn’t that lady’s revolver you pack enough to prove your manhood, when the subject comes up?”

  “My age,” Bat said, “may be advanced, but I’m still five years younger than you. As for guns, well, somebody’s always coming around wanting to buy one off me.”

  “Why would somebody do that?”

  Bat smirked. “Because idiots are always looking for souvenirs. ‘Do you still have your six-shooter from the Old West? The one with all those notches on it? Tell me, is it twenty-three notches, or twenty-four?’ ”

  Wyatt chuckled, sipped his coffee. “All the badmen you gunned down, Bartholomew, I can see it would be hard to keep track.”

  To Wyatt’s knowledge, Bat had wounded any number of opponents, but only the late and unlamented Sergeant King had earned a notch.

  “Well, of course I tell them twenty-five,” Bat said, after a coffee sip. “And then the dubs usually want to buy the damned thing…so I say, come back tomorrow about this time and I’ll have it for you.”

  “Hope it’s a good price, for you to give up so precious a museum piece.”

  “What I do is, I send my copy boy around the corner to the pawn shop, have him buy any old cheap Colt, and then I take my pocketknife and carve twenty-five notches on the handle…and sell it for a C-note to my admiring public.”

  “Fools and money need parting,” Wyatt said. “But we need good working weapons. Smaller pieces that the fellers can put in pockets and such, but with stopping power.”

  Bat waved a hand. “I’ll take care of it. I have a standing discount.”

  Wyatt gave his old friend a sly smile. “How many of these notched guns have you sold, anyway, Bartholomew?”

  Bat shrugged and smiled back. “I think we’re at a baker’s dozen.”

  As the week progressed, with no retaliation from the Yale/Capone camp—and with the Holliday’s staffers armed—Wyatt ventured out for more than a meal, on a few occasions. Bat stopped in every day, usually more than once, but had to keep afternoon hours at the paper as well as take in various sporting events for his column. This included several prizefights and, notably, the Withers Stakes at Aqueduct, which Wyatt could not resist attending; Man O’ War won, and so did Wyatt, and not just at the bettor’s window: the brownstone and its inhabitants had survived an afternoon without him.

  To repay all the time he was taking up with her husband, Wyatt gave Bat’s wife Emma an evening at the Masterson apartment, where his thoughtfulness was repaid with a delicious meal of roast beef and brown potatoes and various trimmings. Emma smiled and flirted with Wyatt, which he didn’t mind, and Bat didn’t seem to, either—it brought out the pretty girl of the past in the heavyset matron of the present.

  And Emma did not question it, when Wyatt said he might need to impose upon her for Bat’s continued company in the days to come.

  “I know William prizes your friendship, Wyatt,” she said, embarrassing both men as they all sat in a frilly, fussy living room that seemed an unlikely hideout for an old buffalo hunter such as Bat. “And I’m not about to stand in the way. Just look after him—you know how impulsive my William can be.”

  While Wyatt couldn’t bring himself to call his old deputy “William,” he did restrain himself and used “Bat,” not “Bartholomew,” in Mrs. Masterson’s presence.

  Midweek he’d called home, his second call of the trip, having checked in with Sadie early on to confirm his safe arrival.

  The connection was a good one, little crackle or pop on the line, and it was as if dark-haired, dark-eyed Sadie were standing there talking to him.

  He could almost see his wife’s eyes flash, and not with affection.

  “ ‘Katherine Cummings,’ is it?” she said, her husky, musical voice long on the husk right now, and short on the music.

  “What, sweetheart?”

  “Don’t ‘sweetheart’ me, Wyatt Earp. Don’t pour me vinegar and try passing it off for champagne. She called wondering if I had heard from you. She wants to know if you’re helping her son.”

  Wyatt—alone in Johnny’s office, at his desk, using the phone—closed his eyes and shivered. So Kate Elder had called the bungalow, and now Sadie knew that Doc Holliday’s woman—with whom Wyatt had his own history—was on the one hand his client, and on the other had dropped by the Earp residence when Sadie wasn’t around.…

  “Sadie darling—”

  “Don’t ‘darling’ me today, Wyatt Earp. I won’t be lied to!”

  “I didn’t lie. Her married name is Katheri
ne Cummings.”

  “Sin of omission, then. Something else interesting she shared—you said she paid you ‘several hundred.’ More than once in our conversation, which I will have you know was entirely civil, she said she certainly hoped she was getting her five hundred dollars’ worth. Five hundred dollars!”

  Wyatt leaned an elbow on the desk and covered his face. “Sadie, no use arguing. I didn’t tell you because I needed a good stake for this trip. And I didn’t say my client was Big Nosed Kate because I knew damned well you’d have conniptions.”

  Silence on the other end.

  “Sadie?”

  Finally: “…well. Any time I rate a speech like that out of you, I guess I can forgive you a couple of sinful omissions.”

  “Nothing sinful. Small omissions. But Sadie, listen to me, Kate’s son has a real gold mine going out here. He calls it a second Gold Rush, and he’s right.”

  Briefly, he filled her in, leaving out only the Coney Island affair, since he knew she didn’t like fights involving knives. But Sadie was well up to hearing about a saloon getting busted up, even if it did involve machine guns.

  “We’ll be reopening soon,” Wyatt said.

  “ ‘We?’ ”

  “Well, the boy needs me. He’s got nerve but has much to learn. And, anyway, I think this joint is ripe for gambling—some cards anyway, and maybe down the road a casino layout.”

  “Wyatt—listen to yourself. We have a life in California—you have your detective work, and then there’s our Happy Days mines.…You’re not of an age to run a saloon anymore, and anyway, it’s illegal!”

  “Sadie, our diggings haven’t given us much but bored looks for the past three years, and you damned well know it. I’ve hit a rich vein of silver out here—”

  “Now it’s silver. Before it was gold.”

  “Well, it is a golden opportunity. Damnit, woman, this could be the last chance I ever get to…to really strike it big.”

  “Last chance you get?” Her voice mingled indignation and hurt feelings. “What about me, Wyatt? What about us?”

  “When things settle down, I’ll bring you out here. We’ve seen our share of big burgs, but New York is all of ’em wrapped up. You will love it out here, my darling child.”