by Michael Mayo
That night, I used my knife to slice the twine that was tied around the box and the tape that sealed it.
I didn’t find any napkins. Instead there were four long narrow books without titles. The ruled pages were filled with columns of letters and numbers written in such a tight dense hand that I had to hold the books up to the dim light in the basement, and I still couldn’t make it out. So I took the box and the books up to my office where the light was better. Sitting at my desk, I read:
GS/CPP 22.55
DT/CSO 20.00
AW/RAK 11.50
OF/WTL .05
It went on like that for column after column, page after page, and loose typed sheets of more letters and numbers were folded between the pages. It meant nothing to me, but I figured I’d best hold onto them and put them in my safe.
Connie made a point of staying away from me when we closed, and left with Frenchy and Marie Therese. I checked the locks one more time and went back to my place at the Chelsea.
Chapter Two
The next evening—a Tuesday, I think it was—I got up, showered, shaved, and put on one of my favorite suits, a nice charcoal three-piece, and finished it off with a patterned blue silk tie. Knowing I’d walk to the Cloud Club, I strapped on my knee brace. As often as not I didn’t wear it, simply out of vanity. You could see the outline of it under my trousers and that bothered me. But some days it was necessary.
By six, I was back in my office. I asked Vittorio, the maître d’ from the Cruzon Grill upstairs, to bring me a ham sandwich and coffee. Before my eats showed up, Frenchy came in. His wide, dour face was even more fretful than usual. Frenchy, by the way, looks nothing like you’d think a guy named Frenchy ought to look—some skinny number with a big nose and a little mustache and a lounge-lizard line for the ladies. This Frenchy was big and wide enough to put Marie Therese in his hip pocket.
He said, “They tried again after we closed up,” and I knew what he meant.
Two nights before, sometime after midnight, I’d been up in my office—alone—when I heard noises out back. I got the .38 out of the safe and hurried to the back door. When I hit the switch for the outside light, I heard more noise, louder. By the time I got the door open, all I could see was some guy’s ass and feet as he was going over the gate. Sounded like he landed on his head in the alley, and I know I heard at least two guys running away. I went back inside and told Frenchy about it. He agreed that it was probably just kids, but then the next night, there’s the bomb.
So, as soon as Frenchy came in to get ready for the lunch crowd, he checked the alley and the doors to the cellar, and he saw that somebody had been at them. We went outside to look. The steel doors were set flush with the paving stones right beside the back steps. Somebody had tried to break through them. You could see shallow gouges in the heavy steel of the hinges and lock where they’d used a hammer and chisel.
Frenchy said, “I checked the locks and I’ve been down in the cellar. They didn’t get in, didn’t come close. I mean, hell, these damn things are as thick as the doors on a safe. You gotta pick the locks or blow ’em up or something. Seems like a hell of a lot of effort to get to a few hundred cases of liquor and wine. Kind of screwy, isn’t it?”
I looked at the lock on the back door. No marks there. This guy or these guys had been interested in getting into the cellar, not the speak. And there were really only a few marks on the steel doors, like they were making enough noise that maybe somebody heard them and yelled for them to pipe down. Or they realized that banging on the steel wasn’t going to work. Yeah, kind of screwy, all right.
Guys had tried to knock us over before. Twice they’d tried to hijack the merchandise while we were taking it off the truck and had the gate and the doors to the cellar steps open. That’s the kind of thing you expect, and we were ready. Both times, as soon as we saw guys coming into the alley, we brought out the shotguns, and they backed off. Frenchy kept a big .45 caliber hog leg under the bar, too. I don’t know that he ever fired it at anybody, but he had used it to crack a few heads. And like I said, all that, you expect. To see that somebody had really tried to break in to my place, that made me mad. I admit it may be more than a little hypocritical for me to say that, considering how many cars and trucks I stole over the years for Lansky’s bootlegging operation.
But stealing a car that’s just sitting there, waiting to be driven away, that’s one thing. It’s different when somebody’s trying to break into your place.
Frenchy went back to the bar, and I went to my office, where I ate my ham sandwich and drank my coffee and worried about people sneaking around, and trying to break in and planting bombs and such.
The evening crowd was wandering in by the time I finished. Fat Joe Beddoes and Frenchy didn’t need me, so I told them I was going to meet Detective Ellis, and if I learned anything about the bomb and the dead guy, I’d fill them in when I got back. Connie and Marie Therese acted like I wasn’t there.
I went outside and picked up a tail before I’d gone half a block.
He was taller than me, maybe five-foot-six. He wore a dusty-gray canvas jacket with the collar turned up, a dark sweater, heavy laced boots, and a black cap that was real easy to spot. With my stick, I don’t walk very fast. It’s hard for anybody to stay with me without giving himself away, even on a busy sidewalk, and this guy just wasn’t very good at it.
It came to me then, smart guy that I am, that he might have something to do with the bomb in the alley or the half-assed attempt at a break-in. I had my brass knucks in my pocket and wished I’d gone ahead and brought the .38, drape of the jacket be damned.
The guy came up right beside me when I stopped for the light at a cross street, and he absolutely refused even to glance over at me as we waited. He had a pale regular-looking face, kind of gaunt and underfed and in need of a shave, like a lot of guys in those days. Short hair, tiny ears under the cap. I couldn’t see his eyes. He kept his hands jammed in his pockets and bounced on his feet, more from jittery nerves than the cold, I judged.
I was giving him a quick sideways look when somebody else bumped into my chest. It was a kid, and I felt a quick quiet hand slipping under my heavy coat. I cracked his arm hard with the crook end of my stick, and his hand jerked back as he ducked away. In the same second, the first guy shoved my shoulder, and both of them cut away in different directions and disappeared into the sidewalk crowd. I did a quick pat down of my pockets and found nothing missing. Wallet, keys, knucks, money clip, pen, and notepad were all where I’d put them. People pushed past me on the sidewalk, pissed that I was slowing them down. What the hell was going on? Smarter pickpockets worked in pairs, so it could have been that they just recognized the Brooks Brothers topcoat and made me for a swell. But I had doubts.
Nothing else happened on my way up Lex to the Chrysler Building. Detective William Ellis was waiting for me in the busy lobby.
He was about thirty and, for a cop, on the small side, five ten or so. His overcoat and hat made him look bigger. He wasn’t really a regular at the speak, but I could count on his dropping by once every week or two after midnight. If I was around, I made sure he got a round on the house. Gin. That’s what he drank. Took a double measure of the good stuff over ice. If I wasn’t there, he didn’t make an issue of the gratis business with Frenchy, and he always tipped well, even when he didn’t pay. As far as I could see, he was a right guy, but I didn’t know him that well.
That evening, he had a troubled, distracted look on his face. I guessed it had something to do with the papers he was examining. When he saw me, he stuffed them into his coat pocket and forced a smile.
“Quinn, good to see you. I’ve been meaning to stop by. Got a proposition that might interest you.”
So this wasn’t about the bomb. Then what did he want?
“Here, we’ll use this elevator.” We had it to ourselves. Everybody else was leaving. “Have you ever been to
this place? No? It’s something, let me tell you, but first you gotta see this.”
We got in an express elevator and went straight up to the fifty-seventh floor. The elevator car rose so fast you felt like it was pushing you into the floor, and it made me a little queasy. Then we had to switch to another car to get to the sixty-first floor. It was empty. I followed Ellis around to one side where we were damn near blinded by the setting sun.
“Hold onto your hat,” he said as he pushed open a glass door, and we stepped outside onto a long shallow terrace. The wind snapped at our coats, and I grabbed my hat to keep it from blowing away.
Ellis spread his arms. “Look at this. Ain’t it something?”
We were near a corner of the building looking south and west, so you could see the city stretching out to New Jersey. I had to admit it was pretty damn impressive, but remember, in those days, I’d never been in an airplane or even up that high in a building. Yeah, I know, the Empire State Building, tallest in the world, was a few blocks from my speak, and I’d never set foot in it. Go figure.
This place was kind of scary when you took a good look at it. I mean, the terrace wasn’t that deep, and the little wall between it and nothing at all was no more than two feet high. I wasn’t about to get any closer to the edge. The angle really made it hard to pick out any details beyond the shapes of the buildings and the curve of the river, particularly when the sun caught on a bright stainless steel eagle gargoyle. It jutted straight off the corner of the terrace like an insane diving board.
Ellis said, “They’re going to put flood lights there on the back of that thing. They’re going to point up at the top. Look.”
I turned around and peered up at a series of stainless steel arches and dozens of sharp triangular windows. It made me dizzy.
It got to Ellis, too. He said, “Yeah, let’s get inside.”
We went back through the glass doors, and I thought that whatever he was trying to do, Ellis had shown me an angle on the city I’d never seen. I realized then that I was a street guy, not a skyscraper guy.
We went up a few more floors and got off the elevator inside the Cloud Club, the ritziest, most restricted speak in town. Rockefellers, Dodges, Nasts, and the like wet their whistles there, or so I was told. It was a private club, open at lunch for members only and closed in the evening. I figured Ellis had invited me there to show off his connections. A place like that, and he could get in after-hours whenever he wanted. Only a big cheese could do something like that, and he acted like he owned the joint. And the truth is I was curious about it.
The club was on two levels with the kitchen on the third. There was a bar on the first floor and a small restaurant above it, crowded with twenty-three tables by my count, six two-tops along the walls and tucked next to the big square pillars, and seventeen four-tops. It was nicely turned out but not the best I’d been in and not that much better than my joint. The bar was done up with dark paneling and thick beams and wood floors, something you’d see in a movie. Like the restaurant, it had a cramped feeling to it. I’m not bragging when I say that my place was more comfortable and accommodating, not to mention a hell of a lot easier to get to.
We took a couple of stools at the bar. A colored guy in a white waiter’s jacket was loading up a rack with clean glassware. A white guy in a dark suit was making sure he did everything right, and he looked like he wasn’t happy that Ellis and I were there.
Ellis fired up a smoke. He wore a mustard-colored jacket, brown slacks, a creamy-white shirt with a gold collar pin, and heavy gold links that you couldn’t help but notice when he adjusted his cuffs. He did that a lot. His tie and pocket square were silk with a dark bronze pattern, and the whole outfit had to cost more than most detectives could afford. The straight cops, the strictly by-the-book boys called him “Dollar” Bill Ellis. But he had friends higher up in the force and a good rabbi looking after him.
Personally, I thought the clothes were a little flashy, but then I was taught to blend in. I also had better taste in suits than he did and I bought the best. But, if you looked at his clothes closely and knew what they cost, then you understood that he was only modestly corrupt. Once you got past that, you saw that he still had a cop’s eyes, and he knew you were guilty of something.
He held up two fingers to the sour-looking guy and got to his point. “Have you decided what you’re going to do when they end Prohibition?”
So that’s what he wanted. The question made me uncomfortable, and the truth was I avoided thinking about it. I told Ellis that I wasn’t sure. I guessed I’d figure it out when I had to.
“That’s sooner than you think,” he said. “Roosevelt’s going to get elected next month, and a year from now, booze is going to be legal again. And you know what’s going to happen then? You want to sell a drink, you’re going to have to buy a license. The word has come from on high. We’re going to start closing down places like yours.”
I hadn’t thought of that, but as soon as he said it, I saw that it made sense. Until then, running the speak had been pretty easy. You kept things on the quiet side so you didn’t get the neighbors mad. You paid your beat cops every week, and their sergeant and his captain and your alderman, and everybody was happy. But if the bastards decided to make liquor legal again, hell, that would be an anvil in the ointment.
“At first, it’s going to be hard to get a license, too,” he said. “I hear they’re only going to issue a couple of thousand for the whole city. The big guys like the Stork Club, Jack and Charlie, they’ve got it all worked out already, but somebody like you with a nice little neighborhood place, maybe it’s going to be a little tougher to get on board. That’s where I can help you.”
Everything he was saying was true enough, but I still didn’t want to hear it.
“After you get the license, you’re going to have to deal with fire marshals, and the health board, and the alcohol commission, and the nightclub and restaurant commission, and any other goddamn commission they can dream up, and you’ll be buying licenses and paying fees and taxes out your ass. An establishment like this doesn’t need the kind of help I can provide, but I am making sure they get a friendly fire inspector. I could do the same for you.”
The guy put a couple of gins in front of us and took a stool at the far end of the bar, where he whipped out a racing form and studied it.
We drank. It was the good stuff but no better than you could get at my place.
Ellis gestured toward sourpuss and said, “Sid and his bosses have lawyers and other stooges to handle those details, but a working stiff like yourself, that’s another story.”
He pointed at me with his cigarette. “You know me, Quinn. I’m like you, I go along to get along. You deal with these new guys from the alcohol control board on your own, who knows how much you’ll have to duke ’em to make sure you’re treated fairly. A man in my position can see to it that the proper consideration is given. Help you jump the line when you need to. Grease the skids, if you know what I mean. I will be your representative with these people, your agent.”
“And for this,” I said, “you will be paid.”
He waved a hand. “That’s a detail we’ll work out later.”
I nodded, not agreeing, not disagreeing. “Let me think about it.”
“Lotta guys aren’t going to make it. They’re selling drugs out of their places, or they’re crazy, killing each other over business—you know who I’m talking about, I don’t need to name names. Guys like that, I don’t want anything to do with them. But you understand how things work, you’re a guy that people want to do business with. Hell, everybody goes to Jimmy’s. You’re what, about a block off Broadway?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s prime property. If you decide to go legit and work with me, you’ll make more money than you’re making now. Trust me. People are always going to drink, you can count on that.”
Everything he s
aid was right, except “Trust me.” The world Ellis was describing was coming, and it was nothing I’d ever known. I was used to bribing cops and buying off party bosses, stealing the occasional car, and selling liquor, not applying for permits. The idea scared me. No matter what Ellis said, I knew it would be a lot easier just to sell out. I had no idea how to be an honest businessman. Still don’t, truth be told.
“Ellis, it’s comforting to know that you’re so concerned about my future, but right now I’m more worried about that damn bomb and the guys who have been messing around my place.”
He hadn’t been expecting that and turned serious. “What’re you talking about?”
I explained about the guys I’d heard two nights before and the guys who’d tried to chisel their way into the cellar that morning.
“I didn’t really think much of it at the time, but after last night, maybe there’s something else.”
“What do you mean? That didn’t have anything to do with you. It was at the other end of the alley.”
“What about the dead guy?”
Ellis reached into his pocket and pulled out the papers he’d been looking at in the lobby. They were pictures. He put them on the bar in front of me.
There were two shots. The first showed a man on his back. It looked like he was in an alley or next to a building because he was lying on pavement by a brick wall. The picture had been taken from above the guy because you could see the three legs of the big tripod they mounted the camera on. His eyes were open, and his vest was pulled up over his loose shirttail. His legs were folded underneath him. There were a few dark spots that might have been blood or soup on his white shirt but nothing to show what might have done him in. The second was a close-up of his face, probably taken in the morgue. Sharp nose, high forehead, thin hair, dull, dark eyes.
