Hell's Gate

by Richard E. Crabbe

  “The gangsters, they have doctors who take care of things for them. You have a list of doctors in that place, maybe five blocks around. He maybe no go so far with a bullet in him.”

  “Yeah. We’ve been checking the doctors. Nothing so far, but we haven’t covered them all. There’s others too, men who maybe have medical training from the war in Cuba or even the Civil War. They’ll be harder to find.”

  “We ask the women,” Primo said. “The women they always know the doctors. They take the little ones.”

  Mike glanced at Primo. He hated to admit that the idea hadn’t occurred to him so he made no comment.

  The day waned as Mike and Primo canvassed the neighborhood, working their way from door-to-door, from basement saloons to six-story walk-ups. After a while they stopped asking about Mickey Todt. The answers were all the same. Almost everybody claimed not to know him either by Todt or Stolzenthaler. The few who admitted knowing who he was claimed not to have seen him for weeks. Some just refused to open their doors.

  At one point they passed a flower cart among all the vendors of more necessary items parked along the curbs and on the sidewalks. Flowers were a frivolous luxury in this neighborhood and were more often sold by young girls, whose real line was prostitution. The old man beside the cart looked none too prosperous, but the flowers were fresh enough. Mike stopped for a moment and arranged to have a bunch delivered to Ginny. He took out one of his cards and wrote on the back, “Ginny, I had a wonderful time with you yesterday. I hope you like these. I’ll see you soon.” He looked at it with a frown, then crumpled it and took out another. He stood for almost a minute, his pencil in the corner of his mouth, trying to find the right words.

  “Tell the girl you love her,” Primo said with an exasperated sigh. “To love is okay, no? You maybe love her, maybe somebody else. It’s all okay to love.”

  “Great advice,” Mike said. “That a bit of Italian philosophy?”

  “No, Alfieri philosophy,” Primo answered with mock pride.

  Mike chuckled and shook his head. “What kind of partner did I hook up with?”

  “One who knows the woman, eh? So sign the card and we go.”

  Mike hesitated a moment, then signed, settling for “Warmly, Mike.” Primo sighed and shook his head. “Who is this Ginny?”

  “Tell you later,” Mike said as they opened the door to a basement cobbler’s shop, ringing a little bell on a spring. The smell of leather and shoe polish rolled over them. A workbench occupied one side, with an assortment of tools, shiny from wear spread about its top. A single chair sat opposite. The walls were covered with more tools, shoes and boots already repaired or awaiting attention, and sole leather, cut to various sizes and stuck in little cubbyholes. A man emerged from a back room, through a sheet that covered the doorway. Mike could see the foot of a bed and a small stove behind it. The man was perhaps sixty, but appeared much older. Stooped and bowlegged, with fingers that looked like the roots of a tree, he shuffled toward them, adjusting his glasses and tugging at a boot-blacked apron.

  “Shoes’re in no need o’ mendin’,” he observed after a quick look down, “so it’s somethin’ else ye’re after.”

  “Mickey Todt; you know him?” Mike said, forgetting that they’d decided not to mention him. He gave an apologetic smirk to Primo.

  “Stolzenthaler, that fuck! See these?” the cobbler said, holding up his hands. “Miserable prick tol’ me he’d break a finger a week till I paid ’im ’is protection money. Held out eight weeks,” he said proudly. “Couldn’t stand ’im breakin’ me thumbs though. Can’t make a livin’ without me thumbs.” The cobbler looked at them sharply. “What’s that gutter scum done now?”

  “Nothing good,” Mike said with a look at Primo. “You know where we can find him?”

  “You boys’re detectives then, huh? Do me a favor an’ shoot the sonofabitch when you see ’im.”

  “Done that already,” Mike said.

  “Whoa! Ya don’t say? Oh, I get it now. This is about that fracas over on Governeur Street the other night. Didn’t know Stolzenthaler got himself shot. Wait a minute,” the cobbler said with a satisfied gleam in his eye. He rummaged behind his workbench and pulled out a flask. “Real Jamaican rum this is. Good stuff. Have a drink wi’ me. Any man shot Stolzenthaler deserves a good drink.”

  Mike was going to refuse, but relented, not wanting to dampen the man’s enthusiasm. He took a good pull at the flask and handed it over to Primo, who took a polite swig and gave it back to the cobbler. The old man held the flask to his mouth with a bent and lumpy hand, emptying it in one long pull. “Damn that’s good! Even better to hear the prick’s got himself plugged.” The cobbler stopped then and squinted at Mike, pursing his lips. “He ain’t dead, is he,” the cobbler said, his mood turning doubtful and somber, “otherwise what’d you be doin’ lookin’ for ’im.”

  Mike shook his head. “Might be dead, might not. Sad to say he was alive when I last saw him.”

  “But you’re sure he’s shot?” the old man said, seeming very anxious on the point.

  “Sure as I can be.”

  “There is a doctor in the neighborhood he would go to?” Primo asked. “Maybe not a doctor, like a dentist, a nurse maybe?”

  The cobbler scratched his head and winced, then rubbing one hand against the other. “Well, that’s coverin’ a lot o’ ground, see. But what yer really wantin’ ta know is where would a prick like Stolzenthaler go to get stitched up an’ nobody be the wiser.”

  “That’s about it,” Mike said. “Any ideas?”

  “There’s two, maybe three, the gangs use. They ain’t docs though. One was a medic in the war with Spain. The other’s a dentist, sort of. Not sure where he got his trainin’. He’s a terrible drunk. Then there’s a woman’s got lots o’ medical know-how. Been midwifin’ fer years, but she was a nurse in the big war. She’s old now, like me,” he said. “She’d stitch the devil himself fer a dollar. Laudanum addict, cocaine too when she can get it.”

  “You got names and addresses?”

  “You bet. Who ya think fixes their shoes?”

  * * *

  The medic proved to be of little use. He was working on a child with what appeared to be a broken leg. The boy was screaming and a crowd of women and children clogged the little tenement office, filling it with a constant babble. The medic, sweating and distracted, shooed Mike and Primo off, saying he hadn’t seen a wounded gangster in at least a week.

  “Whadya think?” Mike said as they left.

  “We try the dentist. This one, he’s too busy to lie to us now.”

  “Probably,” Mike agreed. He looked at the addresses the cobbler had given them. “That dentist is right down the block.”

  The dentist, a man the cobbler had called Lefty Letters because he wrote letters for the illiterates in the neighborhood and happened to be left-handed, lived and worked in a slightly less ramshackle pile than most on the block. It was crowded on one side by a scrap yard, piled high with iron, brass, copper, and lead in almost infinite variety and form. On the other side were another two tenements and a small coal yard on the corner. A huge black dog, caked with mud, barked at them as they passed. It lunged against its chain, foam dripping from its mouth.

  “The dog, he is friendly, no?” Primo said with a grin. “Nice doggy. Good doggy.” The dog charged so hard the chain nearly yanked himself off his feet. “Maybe he no understan’ English.”

  “Right,” Mike said.

  “We see.” Primo took a step toward the dog and said in a commanding voice, “Vai! Vai al canile!” The dog pulled back his lips in a low snarl. He snapped and growled and strained at his chain, the veins bulging on his neck. Primo shrugged indifferently. “Must be an Irish dog.”

  Mike punched him in the shoulder, laughing. “I think I like you, you wop bastard.”

  “Yeah. Us wop bastards are the funny guys, eh?”

  “So funny you can go first. Maybe Mickey Todt’ll laugh so much he’ll forget to shoot y
ou.”

  They went up the staircase in the front of the building, each checking their pistols. It was instinctive, a loosening of the jacket, a feel to see that nothing was hung up on the weapon. A bit of shirtsleeve twisted the wrong way, a suspender too loose, a tear in the lining of a jacket, these could be the difference between getting a pistol out in time or not. Neither planned on dying of a loose suspender.

  The apartment where the dentist worked was on the fourth floor. The building stood oddly quiet. Their footsteps echoed up the staircase, mixing with the groans and creaks of the old wood. The dog still barked from the scrap yard, his snarling seemingly right at their heels. They met no one on the stairs. Little of the late-afternoon sun filtered in, keeping the stairs in a perpetual twilight. Although they could hear people in their apartments, even those sounds seemed muted. Mike and Primo moved even slower as they went up. Twice Primo checked the stairs behind them, craning over the balustrade to watch the floors below.

  Reaching the fourth-floor landing, they turned into a long hallway running front to back. It had a single window at the other end, the glass so fouled that the world outside appeared fuzzy and brown. Mike nodded toward the rear. This building was an old law tenement, with the improvement of a single toilet on each floor and an air shaft in the middle, four apartments to the floor. Older tenements had no bathroom and no ventilation of any kind, except windows front and back. Rooms were often sublet though, so it wasn’t unusual to have fifteen to twenty people for the one toilet. They checked the single bathroom as they went. Mike opened the toilet door. A cascade of foul air engulfed him and he stepped back as if struck. Primo held his nose and hurried down the hall. Mike could have sworn he said something that sounded like “Irish.”

  “Probably is,” Mike said. “From what I hear the Italians just shit in bed and kick it out in the morning.”

  Primo gave him a hard look and took out his pistol. With a nod toward the last door in the hallway, he moved to one side. Mike listened on the other, grinning. There were footsteps inside and muffled speech, then a gurgle. He glanced at Primo, then pounded his fist on the door. “Letters, open up!”

  They heard footsteps and the door was opened a crack. Half a face peered out. The eye was shot with red, the chin sported a dirty stubble. The nose was a ripe-strawberry red. “You Doctor Letters?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  Mike shoved the door hard, pushing the man back though he tried to hold on.

  “The police want to know.” Mike’s hand had gone to the butt of his pistol. The dentist’s eyes followed it like a man watching a snake. He backed up, bumping into his patient.

  “Hey, I ain’t done nothing. Just drill some teeth is all. I’m a legitimate dentist.” He waved at a diploma in an elaborate frame hanging skewed on the wall. “I’m in the middle of a delicate procedure,” he added, seeming to regain some of his professional composure. “This man has a seriously infected molar.”

  Mike and Primo looked around the dentist at the man in a reclining chair, not a proper dentist’s chair, but a wooden one with cracked leather upholstery. A tall, mechanical drill stood to one side. It was pedal-operated, like a sewing machine. A small table held a porcelain tray and an assortment of stained steel instruments. The man in the chair looked back at them, wide-eyed.

  “Mickey Todt,” Mike said. “Where is he? Tell me now and we’ll let you get back to your delicate procedure.”

  Letters shrugged. “Fixed an incisor for him a while back,” he said, turning back to his patient, who was just then taking a wad of cotton out of his mouth. “Can’t say I’ve seen him in months. A very intemperate young man. Quick to anger when he’s imbibing, which is most of the time.”

  The patient started to shove himself out of the chair, but Letters put a hand on his shoulder and said, almost pleadingly, “Surely you can’t be thinking of leaving in your condition. I haven’t finished the extraction.”

  “Sit down,” Primo said. The man settled back.

  “Yes, sit. These gentlemen won’t be long, I’m sure. The man they’re looking for is clearly not here, so…”

  “Yeah, so where is he? Where could he be, I wonder.” Mike started looking about the office, peering into a cabinet full of instruments and looking at medicine bottles in no apparent order, spread about the topmost shelf. Primo started doing the same. “We do not want you,” Primo said in a tone designed to put Letters at ease. “You have done no things wrong, as you say, eh? No things you want to hide?”

  “Quite right,” Letters agreed. “Quite right indeed. I’ve done nothing, but help those in pain. I ease their sufferings and pull their rotted teeth.”

  Mike looked at a curtain covering a door to an adjoining back room. “Not back there, is he?” He didn’t wait for a response. He swept the curtain aside with one hand, the automatic in his other. Primo stood by the door, his back to the wall.

  Mike searched the room, which housed only a bed, a steamer trunk, a washbasin, and a collection of gin bottles, most of them empty. A chimney protruded from one wall. The hearth had been covered over with a cast-iron plate and a stove added, its flue stuck through a hole chopped through the brick. Mike looked through the trunk and under the bed before checking the back room. It possessed the only window in the place and allowed a measure of dirty light to filter in. This room was quite different, with more furniture in varying stages of decay and a quantity of women’s clothing hanging from lines strung about the room. Mike guessed from the clothes that the woman worked the streets. There was no other entrance except the way they’d come in. Mike searched the room just as he had the first, finding nothing pointing to Mickey Todt ever having been there. Disappointed, he turned and walked back through the other room. He had a hand on the curtained doorway when he realized there was one place he hadn’t looked. He stepped to the little stove and bent to open the door. He stopped with his hand on the latch. A small, bright drop of blood glistened on the floor. Mike went down on one knee for a closer look. It was fresh, or nearly so. Looking up, he noticed for the first time a small smear on the lower edge of the stove door.

  “Primo! Nobody in or out.”

  “Okay. What you got?”

  “We’ll see,” Mike muttered back. He used his sleeve to cover his fingers as he opened the stove door, not wanting to mix his prints with any that might be there.

  The door squealed. Behind it, stuffed in a hard ball, was a bundle of clothing. Blood was clearly visible. Mike heard a scuffle from the next room, stamping feet, a cry, and a shuddering thud. He was at the door in an instant.

  “I had to! He said he’d shoot me. He will, too. He’ll shoot me. I’m a dead man.” Letters was lying on the floor, holding his head. Blood was oozing through his fingers. “I had to. You don’t know Mickey. He’d have killed me if I hadn’t fixed him up. He came in bleeding all over the place, put a gun to my head. My head! I had to!”

  Primo lifted an eyebrow at Mike. “He try to run. I stop him.”

  “You broke my head. I didn’t do anything and you broke my head,” Letters cried, his shoulders shaking as he wept into the floorboards. He bounced his forehead on the floor and said again, “He’s going to kill me.”

  “Yeah, you mentioned that,” Mike said.

  The man in the chair hadn’t moved. He sat still, gripping the arms as if he was under the drill. “I don’ know nothin,’” he ventured, looking from Primo to Mike. “I jus’ got a real bad toothache.”

  Mike went back and pulled the bloody clothes out of the stove, putting them in a paper bag he found in a corner. The dentist quieted down after a few minutes. Primo got him a bandage and some Mercurochrome for his head. Mike questioned the patient first. He clearly was what he said he was, a man with a bad tooth. Mike got his name and address and let him go.

  Before they started questioning the dentist, Primo reluctantly told Mike to wait while he used the toilet down the hall. He tried to hold his breath as he opened the door and it worked for maybe twenty seconds. W
hat made him forget about the foul air was actually an insignificant thing, a shifting of the shadow that crossed the window. The window opened on an air shaft, which ran from the basement to the roof. The shaft was only about four-feet-by-five with windows opening to it from the toilets on each floor and the four apartments on every floor. There was just one floor above and the sunlight wasn’t bad, the air a little better than the floors below where the sun reached only at high noon if at all. But what Primo realized was that there was no good reason for a shadow to shift, not in that small shaft, no reason he could think of except perhaps for pigeons or maybe laundry on a line. But pigeons made noises and cooing sounds and laundry wouldn’t be moving because there was no breeze. There almost never was. Primo pissed and tried to think. The window glass was the kind that you couldn’t see through. It had little starburst designs cast into the surface so that it diffused light and color. He buttoned up and was about to open it, had his hands on the sash, ready to push up when he stopped. There was blood on the sill, just a small smear, but still red and wet. The sash was open just a crack. Primo drew his pistol, pointing it at the frosted glass while he peered at the sill and the sliver of light at the bottom. The sill was scuffed and part of a shoe print was clear in the dirt. The shadow didn’t move again.

  Primo didn’t stay long in the toilet. If Mickey Todt was in the air shaft he wasn’t going anywhere. And if he was there, then there’d be a pistol on the other side of the glass. Primo backed out and slammed the door, letting it bounce off its hinges so it opened a few inches. He waited, watching the window.

  “Primo,” Mike called from the dentist’s office, “that’s the longest piss on record. You flush yourself down the pipe or what?”

  Primo didn’t respond and when Mike stuck his head into the hallway, Primo waved to him and put a finger to his lips.

  * * *

  Mickey Todt was getting tired. His legs ached and his side was a huge ball of pain, shot through with nails whenever he moved. He was weak and sick from the chloroform and laudanum that Letters had given him. He needed a drink bad, could imagine the gin going down his throat, feel the burn in his belly. His head swam at the thought and he had to catch himself from falling.