Black Hats

by Max Allan Collins

  “Am I laughing? That little Dixie doll loves your scrawny ass, and if she were any cuter, I’d marry her myself. My God, she cooks, she sews, she makes good conversation. The only thing she can’t do is sing and dance, which of course is what you have her doing.”

  Johnny’s mouth was open, but no words were coming out. This torrent of advice had blindsided the younger man.

  “None of my business,” Wyatt said, stiffly, “but as your father’s friend, I took the liberty.”

  “Wyatt…Dixie is…she’s dear to me, but I’m just starting out. You said it yourself—just getting a jump on life. Maybe…maybe five or six years from now, when I have a stockpile of cash not booze, I’ll settle down to a quiet life. And maybe I’ll take Dix with me. Maybe even take up dentistry again, like my late father. But, right now—”

  “All this booze, it looks like treasure to you.”

  “Yes, of course it does! Why, are you immune?”

  “Hardly. Fills my eyes up with ideas.” Wyatt turned to Johnny and put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I still like money. I still aim to get rich. But a man needs a partner.”

  “Well…we’re partners in this, Wyatt. You and I. And Mr. Masterson, of course.”

  Wyatt scowled. “I’m not talking about that kind of partner, son. I’m talking about somebody who can keep you warm at night and I don’t mean a horse and I certainly don’t mean an old walrus like me.”

  Johnny seemed astounded by this continuing onslaught of words from Wyatt, who generally parceled them out.

  And, frankly, Wyatt didn’t know what had got into him; and, suddenly—rarely for him—he felt embarrassed, his face red, flushed. Coming into contact with this storehouse of pre-Prohibition liquor had made him drunk, somehow, and he hadn’t even cracked a bottle.

  Johnny swallowed. Then he asked Wyatt a question, and going over it in his mind later, on several occasions, the older man could not understand how this query came to flow out of the talk come before.

  What Johnny asked was: “What was my father like?”

  And without pausing for even the briefest beat, Wyatt said, “Loyal.”

  This, as it turned out, was the only further conversation about the younger Holliday’s father the two men ever had; but, on reflection, Wyatt felt he’d covered the subject more than adequately.

  They got down to business.

  Wyatt paced a small area as he asked, “How many crates of booze a week do you go through?”

  “Around ten—I’ve been sticking a dozen in the flivver, under blankets, and run it over to the club, first of every week since we opened. I’ve never had to make the weekly run earlier.”

  Looking at the cement floor as he paced, Wyatt said, “We’ll want to vary the day. We’ll start with Monday, then jump around, Wednesday next time and then Friday and such like.” Now he stopped and looked at Johnny. “That in mind, do you think we need more than a dozen crates?”

  Johnny thought for a moment, shook his head, said, “No. A dozen is fine. I’ll give you a list of how many boxes of each variety to take—we sell twice as much gin as bourbon, for example.”

  Wyatt, pacing again, rolled his eyes, and said, “To each his own. Judging by the milk wagon…”

  The two men had checked one over thoroughly at the dairy.

  “…twelve cartons should pack in there without difficulty.”

  Johnny nodded. “I should think so.”

  “We won’t have the luxury of those false-bottom milk carriers your beer’s delivered in.”

  “Couldn’t we transfer everything into boxes, or bags…?”

  “No.” Wyatt planted himself before Johnny, stood with arms folded, his expression stern. “That’s at least as suspicious as crates, and anyway I believe we can do this unobserved, going in the way your regular milkman does.”

  The following Monday, before dawn, Wyatt had returned to the Washington Market with Bat. To most of New York, this was still Sunday night, the wee hours; but the area around Warren Street bustled with farmers and dealers and their trucks of perishable product. This was a sort of Times Square of produce, as freight cars disgorged their contents and fruit and vegetables were moved and stored and boxed and stacked. The vehicles coming in and out, backing up, pulling forward, sent lights here and there, a combined glow that provided illumination for frantically paced farmers, truckers, tally-keepers and inspectors.

  Amid all this moved Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, in black business suits and Stetson and derby respectively, creating no notice. In Ronald Droste’s outer office, they traded their business attire for milk-delivery uniforms; and soon had hitched up the bay to the empty auto-like wagon. Within minutes they were to the warehouse, Bat using the keys Johnny provided to swing open one of the big metal doors for Wyatt to guide the horse and wagon within.

  Wyatt had warned Bat, but no description did the storehouse of wooden liquor crates justice. After a good minute of shocked admiration, Bat joined Wyatt in loading up the milk wagon with an assortment of crates numbering twelve. So quickly was this accomplished that the bay didn’t even have time to leave behind a road apple or two; and the sun was not up when they began their journey back to West Fifty-second.

  Or to be more precise, West Fifty-third.

  As the milk wagon clip-clopped by, Wyatt unobtrusively noted the parked-at-the-curb black Ford containing the curly-haired hoodlum who’d accompanied Capone that first night, slouched hatless behind the wheel, with a skinny sharp-nosed fedora-sporting companion, in the rider’s seat. The vehicle was half a block down the street with a good view on the narrow passageway that cut between the warehouse and another building and led to the utilities easement behind Johnny Holliday’s brownstone.

  The curly-haired hood was literally asleep at the wheel. The sharp-nosed one barely acknowledged the passing milk wagon, his narrow face a study in put-upon boredom. With the casual skill of an experienced teamster, Wyatt worked the reins and coaxed the bay into backing the wagon into the warehouse driveway, at a slight angle that actually cut across and blocked the adjacent passageway to the easement and the brownstone.

  Wyatt steadied the bay, then climbed out of the wagon, casually monitoring the men in the parked Ford, who appeared to be paying them no notice.

  The unloading was quick and precise.

  Neither Wyatt nor Bat actually participated in hauling the crates down and out of the rear of the vehicle—both stood guard back there, not visible from the street, revolvers in hand, Wyatt’s long-barreled Colt .45 and Bat’s short-snouted Detective’s Special .38.

  On cue from the brownstone, down the passageway, came a little team in workclothes and caps, bartenders Fred and Harry and bouncers Franz and Gus and Bill the porter, and the bouncers unloaded crates and the bartenders and porter carried them away, taking four quick trips to do it.

  When the last sight of Gus’s behind disappeared up through the kitchen door, Bat returned in back of the now-empty wagon, and Wyatt—the gun held just behind him—got up inside and shortly was guiding the horse and wagon past Frankie Yale’s sentries, one still slumbering, the other still bored.

  As they made their way through the city canyons, Wyatt could only wonder if he and Bat had been lucky, on this first trip. Yale’s boys were tired and sloppy at this early hour, but maybe that would not always be so.

  Still, they had made their first delivery, without incident. Nothing remained but to return the horse to its stable, the wagon to its garage, and trade their milkman duds in for their own clothes.

  At Bat’s insistence, he rode with his old friend in a taxi to Jack Dunston’s for scrambled eggs and Irish bacon.

  “Wyatt,” Bat said, chowing down, “I have to thank you. I haven’t felt this alive since the Dempsey/Willard bout.”

  “Let’s hope, Bartholomew,” Wyatt said, biting off the end of a strip of crisp bacon, “that we feel alive after the next week’s delivery, as well.…”

  THIRTEEN

  Holliday’s held no grand re-op
ening, and of course was not in a position to advertise. But hints in various newspaper columns by the likes of Runyon, Winchell and a certain Masterson fueled New York’s version of the Pony Express—the rumor mill—and on Monday night, when the club started up again, business boomed, as good as or better than a Friday or Saturday night.

  The violence done to the establishment had only added a luster of danger and mystery in a trade already inherently exciting, thanks to its illicit nature, not to mention the newness of the speakeasy experience itself with its peepholes and passwords and subterranean locales. Patrons could be seen touching the patched walls, trying to detect where the infamous machine-gun holes had been, and often succeeding.

  Wyatt, Johnny and Bat sat ringside, and shook many hands, even signing some autographs for the usual crowd of bankers, rich businessmen and sports stars and their fur-draped jewel-bedecked wives (or not wives). But kids in their twenties seemed in more abundance than before, skinny giddy girls with bobbed hair and babydoll make-up and short skirts, boys in tuxedos in search of a wedding cake to climb onto.

  Texas Guinan would have seemed in rare form if Wyatt hadn’t been familiar with her unstinting brand of bawdy showmanship. In the process of refitting the nightclub, Johnny had granted his star one embellishment by way of a spotlight operated from the back wall.

  So when she swept onto the stage, where the seven musicians were playing her on with a jazzed-up rendition of Victor Herbert’s “Sweethearts,” her strings of pearls swinging, Tex was in a blazing circle of light that made her brand-new flame-red taffeta dress and red satin slippers sparkle. Her marcelled platinum blondness was topped off by a fire-engine-red Stetson glittering with diamonds (or not diamonds).

  When she brayed “Hello, suckers!” the avalanche of laughter she generated indicated she had been greatly missed, and also that this crowd was already half blotto.

  “Three cheers for Prohibition!” she yelled.

  Newcomers were confused, but regulars only laughed, even before she tagged on, “Without it, where the hell would I be?”

  “Nowhere!” a score of audience members shouted.

  “You’re damn right!”

  She climbed up on a stool already waiting for her and began singing in her appealing throaty way a special piece of material: “ ‘Hello sucker’ is my nightclub salutation to one and all…I mean it to say, hello, pal—aren’t we all alike after all?”

  Tex had put together an almost entirely new show during the break so thoughtfully provided by Frankie Yale and his boy Capone, with new costumes for the six showgirls, including tiny rhinestone-flocked flesh-colored wisps mostly hidden by big lace fans. The latter routine hadn’t been previewed for Johnny, and Wyatt sensed young Holliday was not pleased—not out of any sense of propriety, but because everybody was getting a glimpse of his Dixie, both north and south of her Mason-Dixon Line.

  Wyatt was in the club, and not up in his new domain—the front room converted to poker den—to pay respects to Tex on opening night…and to allow her to inform the group of his new venture. Later tonight, upstairs, he would say hello to some suckers himself.

  Right now, watching Tex and her “little girls” do their work was a real pleasure. Some of the established bits remained, such as the popular “Cherries” number; but a new one that had the shapely girls singing a silly, racy song about having two eyes (pointing to same), two ears (pointing to same) and on down their anatomies, went over particularly well, invoking “woo woo’s” and whistles. A nonsense refrain—“And she knows her onions!”—was quickly picked up by the partying crowd.

  As usual, Tex threaded through the tables rubbing bald domes and handing out noisemakers, making flirty fun of the men and coyly complimenting the women on their own onions, with a police whistle added to the mixture when she deemed things were getting out of hand. By the end, a snowball fight with the audience (felt snowballs had been passed out) concluded a raucous show.

  Tex came out for a bow and got a “great big hand” for not just her “little girls” but the boys in the band, outrageously telling the crowd, “The union won’t let me pay these mugs a proper wage—they can hardly make ends meet—little kids at home starving-rent overdue—so let’s pass the hat and help ’em out!”

  And, five-buck cover charge forgiven or perhaps forgotten, the well-oiled audience passed the hat and filled it with dollar bills.

  Wyatt sat in awe of the woman’s audacity. Nicely done, Tex, he thought. Nicely done.

  As this was in progress, Tex took the opportunity to further try out her new toy, having her spotlight cast upon the audience, introducing celebrities, starting with boxing champ Jack Dempsey, who half stood and waved shyly, and various actors and actresses, all of whom milked it and took elaborate bows—stage giant John Barrymore, movie star Pearl White, Follies sensation Peggy Hopkins Joyce—and finally the white light hit the ringside table where Wyatt, Bat and Johnny sat.

  “Meet the boss man, ladies and gentlemen—Johnny Holliday!” she called out, waving her red jeweled Stetson. “His pop was Doc, a dentist you may have heard of, which may explain why the drilling this joint got a few weeks ago didn’t bother him none!”

  This got laughs and applause, and Johnny stood and lowered his head in a dignified little bow and sat back down.

  “You may already know the best sports columnist in town… I’m sure he’s the best, because he told me so. He knew Johnny’s poppa way back in towns like Dodge City and Wichita, and has a certain reputation for handling shooting irons himself. Manhattan’s own…Bat Masterson!”

  Bat got up and waved and grinned and enjoyed the attention.

  Wyatt dreaded what was coming next. He hated attention and public notice and fuss; he despised being known for the past when the present was where he was currently doing business. But to do business, he had to put up with this goddamned nonsense; a man had to play the cards he was dealt, and fame was his only ace.…

  “And this spindly gent, my children, is the man who walked away from the O.K. Corral gunfight without a scratch, the Lion of Tombstone himself…Marshal Wyatt Earp!”

  He stood in the white glare and forced a smile and nodded once and waved once and plopped down again. The applause echoed off the walls like Capone’s machine-gun fire, and a good number of these New Yorkers tried to whoop like Indians and holler like cowboys and it was sillier than the “onions” song.

  “Wyatt,” Tex said, as the din died down, “is our guest here at Holliday’s, and will be for…well, until either the Clanton Gang or old age catches up with him, we don’t know which!”

  That got laughter and scattered applause and Wyatt forced another little smile. Being a good sport took its toll. But then the white beacon swung back onto the stage and Tex, and he was out of the literal spotlight.

  Finally Tex delivered the pay-off: “And we have something new here at Holliday’s—for those of you who’d like to sit down with a legend, Wyatt’s hosting a friendly game of cards in just about fifteen minutes. Upstairs across from the dining room.”

  That first night, and the rest of the week, brought land-office business to Wyatt’s little venture in the former music room of the main floor.

  About half the size of Johnny’s office, Wyatt’s poker lounge was dominated by the round green-felt table with half a dozen captain’s chairs, his own covered in padded black leather. The only other furniture was a red-and-black brocade sofa against the right wall, as you entered; a row of shuttered windows, at left, was to the dealer’s back. A fireplace, to the dealer’s left, remained unlighted, the only heat generated by an elaborately gilt-framed nude oil of a voluptuous, mostly undraped damsel, hanging over the mantel and suitable for behind the bar in Dodge’s Longbranch. A dome-style lighting fixture over the table provided a nice, soft yellow glow that complemented gold-and-black brocade wallpaper worthy of a San Francisco bordello.

  Just outside the room, whose double doors stood open, bouncer Gus kept watch, keeping track of who got the next open ch
air by giving out numbers. Usually two or three chairs were taken and held early on, by real gamblers, with the tourists and dilettantes staying just long enough to have the honor of playing at Wyatt Earp’s table (and losing a few hundreds dollars for the privilege).

  Wyatt himself was the banker, as well as the dealer, and occasionally a customer questioned the house dealer participating fully in the play.

  “Not the house’s game,” Wyatt said. “It’s my game, and always my deal. Mine will be the only ante, which means lots of free rides for the rest of you. And no one has to play.”

  Plenty did.

  Chips were five dollars a white, ten a red, and twenty-five a blue. Ante was a red chip. Raise limit was one hundred dollars and no side bets allowed. A friendly game, with stakes just low enough for the suckers and high enough for the gamblers.

  The game was strictly draw. Wyatt knew that many of his brethren considered five-card stud the most scientific poker game, and he’d played his share—seven-card stud, too, less scientific by miles but full of action with chips piling sky-high in pot after pot.

  But Wyatt had always preferred draw, because his approach was to play people not cards. True, the draw—and the betting going on before and after—provided the only clues to the other players’ hidden cards. But their faces, and the pattern of their play, normally gave Wyatt all the information he needed.

  And if he occasionally had to give himself a card off the top or bottom to help out the odds, this he might do, sparingly. He preferred to play according to Hoyle, but sometimes a streak of bad luck needed a boot in the seat of the pants.

  Such tactics proved unnecessary at Holliday’s, that first week, at least. The natural advantage of the dealer’s chair, added to the shoddy playing of most who sat down with him, put Wyatt up well over two thousand by Friday, even after paying Johnny his share. With his and Bat’s fifteen percent of the club’s gross, Wyatt could be rich in a matter of months.

  And this raised a question he and Bat had pondered at length: just how long could the Holliday’s gravy train roll?