Black Hats (14 page)

Perotta was shaking his head, pissing and moaning. “Don’t you think I’m gonna forget this, Capone! It ain’t fair, it ain’t right, I known you for a long time. I know where you and that mick wife of yours live!”

Al took the gun out again and shot Perotta in the head. The guy’s mouth was open to start another bullshit sentence, but nothing came out. A spatter of blood and brains and bone on the wall hung and dripped, after Perotta slid to the floor and sat, making himself comfortable for the last time.

When Al gave his boss the money, in a booth at the Harvard Inn that same night, Yale looked like he might for the first time really lose his temper with his favorite boy.

“What the hell’s the idea!” Frankie said. “I’m not gonna get my other five hundred now, am I?”

“He had a big mouth,” Al said.

“A lot of guys have big mouths!”

“This one threatened my family. The prick deserved what he got. Mr. Yale, you can dock my pay till the five hundred is clear. I’d appreciate it, though, if you spared me the twenty percent vig.”

Frankie’s expression hadn’t been that different from Perotta’s open-mouthed final one—only Perotta didn’t break into laughter, like Frankie did.

“So you’re willing to do a piece of work,” Frankie said, “now and then.”

This meant murder.

“You’re the boss, Mr. Yale.”

“Quit that. Quit that. It’s Frankie. I love you, you big bum. I love you. You don’t owe me nothin’, kid, but loyalty. Got it? Sit down and let’s talk about where you’re headed.”

Even now, Al still worked a few weeks a night behind the Harvard Inn’s famous twenty-foot bar. But the job, like the bowling-alley pin-setting duty, was mostly a front. He did all kinds of things for Mr. Yale.

Such as last February, when the trouble with the Irish boys—who called themselves the White Hand just to thumb their noses at the Italians—had boiled up bad. A huge truckload of Old Grand-Dad had been hijacked, Yale’s drivers beaten-up and humiliated, the truck abandoned in front of Yale’s booze-truck garage.

Yale smuggled in lots of legit product from Canada, though what had been hijacked was bootleg hooch, but of the highest order, purchased from the Purple Gang out of Detroit, makers of the finest illicit whiskey in the country.

Yale went bughouse and dispatched Al and two cronies of his, Baldy Pete Ragosta and Curly Sam Binaggio, to exact punishment.

Sitting in their booth at the Harvard Inn, Frankie and Al and no one else discussed the details.

“Here’s what I got in mind,” Frankie said. “We got to hurt these assholes. We got to make a real point, a definite point.”

“Okay,” Al said.

“They’re having a Valentine’s Day dance at Sagaman’s Hall, this weekend.”

“Okay.”

“You ever been in there?”

“Few times. You’d don’t have to be Irish to rent out the joint.”

Frankie nodded. “Right. You know the layout? The balcony?”

“Sure. What are you thinkin’—ambush?”

Frankie nodded again but more animatedly, his black eyes glittering. “From the balcony, you’ll have a view on the far side of the dance hall—all the big-shot micks’ll be sittin’ there.

Lovett and Pegleg and Ashcan, the whole sorry bunch.”

“They’ll have wives and girls with ’em, won’t they?”

“Your point being?”

“Nothing. Just asking.”

Frankie’s right eyebrow hiked. “Yeah. It’s a dance. They ain’t pansies. There will be wives and girls—does that offend your delicate morals?”

“No.”

“I think the shooting has to be general in nature. I want you to take one of the tommyguns.”

Al gestured with an open hand. “I can make sure I get Wild Bill and some of them if I use a revolver or—”

“No. It’s a dance but they’ll likely be heeled. You want to start our party, and stop theirs, in a hurry. Tommy’s the best way.”

“Just me?”

“No. You man the tommy, and let Baldy and Curly do the sharpshooting. Al, thirty seconds after the first shot, I want you fellas out of there.
Capeesh
?”

“
Capeesh
.”

The party was going strong when Al led Ragosta and Binaggio through the unguarded entrance and up the stairs to the swinging doors onto the balcony. Al swung the Thompson up out from under his light-brown overcoat to open those doors with its snout, and was relieved to find the balcony empty. The three men in their long overcoats and wide-brimmed Borsalinos took positions in the dark along the railing.

The hall below was decorated with paper hearts and red and pink streamers, and red floral centerpieces, and the lights were down, for romantic dancing; but the mood was festive, laughter and hollering. A blue fog of cigarette and cigar smoke drifted and caught dancing dust motes. The hall was not packed—this was for the White Hand elite. Thirty-some people; fifteen couples or so.

The micks were passing bottles and slapping backs and some were standing beside their tables doing impromptu jigs to an Irish ditty the orchestra, up on the stage way at the far left, was plowing through doggedly.

Al’s eyes took in the tuxedos and the frilly ball gowns. His wife Mae’s face entered his mind, but he refused to let it linger. He’d already told Baldy and Pete to try their best not to hit the women. More than that he could not do….

Al let rip with the machine gun and its stuttering roar echoed, while Baldy and Curly stood a few feet away on either side of him, at the railing, shooting fish in a barrel with their nickel-plated revolvers. From below they would be vague figures showering fire and lead. The fusillade of .45s from the tommy gun ripped open wood and flesh and paper and glass and red splashed the Valentine’s Day dance, but not at all in a festive way.

The screams were strictly female. No men went for their guns, not a one, rather diving below the tables or running for exits. None of the cowards grabbed their wives or girl friends, letting the females fend for themselves. The men knew that death was raining down and the only way to survive was to get out of the downpour.

Less than thirty seconds had passed when Al and his two assistants rattled down the balcony stairs and outside to a waiting LaSalle sedan. Behind them the echo of gunfire had just faded, the screams dissolving into wails.

The death toll was modest—only three—but the list of wounded touched almost all of the thirty or so in attendance.

“We walked right in,” Al told Frankie later that night, in their Harvard Inn booth. “They didn’t even have guards on the doors.”

“They thought they were safe,” handsome Frankie said with a nasty laugh. “Like kids yelling

‘king’s X’…what heartless bastard would ruin a St. Valentine’s Day party?”

Frankie had been right, Al knew; a point had definitely been made.

Now, less than two months later, tensions remained high between Yale’s gang and the White Handers, but Frankie was handling it. Al had been dispatched to look after new interests and opportunities in the Roaring Forties across the river.

Today he and Frankie were meeting at the Adonis Club, a grimy ramshackle two-story clapboard restaurant on Twentieth Street overlooking Gowanus Bay, its less than inviting rotten-eggs aroma hardly an eating place’s best calling card.

The Adonis was no great shakes inside, either—its wooden tables ancient and wobbly, chairs with shredded canebacks that had torn more than one female customer’s dress. The walls and ceiling were adorned with murals by an amateur artist who had found bizarre new ways to combine religious imagery with scenes of the Colosseum and Mt. Vesuvius. Al had heard drunks rhapsodizing about the artwork, staring up at the ceiling of this low-rent Sistine Chapel in awe; but only drunks.

The food, however, was wonderful. Fury Argolia, the restaurateur, served up endless varieties of salad and antipasto, and Al had put away more lasagna, baked clams, veal rollatini and calamari here than at any of the classier half-dozen Italian joints he frequented.

He and Frankie sat at a table. Al had a beer, Frankie his usual tumbler of whiskey. Frankie, typically, looked like a million bucks, his suit a mauve number with pale purple lapels, a four-carat diamond stickpin in his yellow silk tie. Class all the way.

“Wyatt Earp,” Frankie was saying, his forehead tight, as if mentally constipated.

“Yeah. He’s an old codger, but truth is? Don’t look his age.”

“He and that sports reporter took down Baldy and Curly?”

“
And
me,” Al said, never one to bullshit the boss. “These guys may not be kids, but Frankie—you heard the stories about out West. Cowboys and Indians and shit. I mean, didn’t that guy Wyatt Earp kill eight or ten guys at the O.K. Corral or something?”

“Fairy tales for grown-ups,” Frankie said, and waved a dismissive hand. “If all this Holliday clown has going for him is a couple of rickety-old Western sheriffs, we don’t have much to worry about.”

“I’m not saying worry about them,” Al said. “But Little John always says, ‘Don’t underestimate your opponent.’”

“Little John, with all due respect, is not an expert on the strongarm side of things.”

“Granted. But this Holliday character, he didn’t seem ill at ease with a rod, neither.”

Frankie sneered. “Yeah, and he’s supposed to be Doc Holliday’s kid, right? The deadly dentist? Al, the joint is all decked out Western-style, ain’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“So it’s a gimmick. Guy says he’s Doc Holliday’s kid. Two old boys say they’re Western gunfighters. And you believe it?”

“I had the same instinct, but Frankie—Masterson’s for real. It’s been in the papers, lots of times. Hell, the old boy just roughed somebody up at the Waldorf-Astoria. It was in all the—”

Frankie’s interrupting laugh rattled off the ceiling. “That says it all! Guy about a hundred years old, in a dust-up at the Waldorf, and it’s got your attention? Al. Come on. Listen to yourself, kid.”

Al sighed. “I hear what you’re saying, boss. You think I don’t wanna kick those coots’

keisters down Broadway? Embarrassing as hell to me…but this is just one joint in a town full of joints. And, anyways, Holliday says he’s willing to buy his beer from us, six months down the line, when his supply goes dry.”

Frankie shook his head and the black eyes were hard as coal. “If this bastard has a supply of booze that’ll last him years…I want it. I
need
it. Al, that’s all we have to offer our customers, is the best stuff. We’re importing it. And when we ain’t importing it, we’re going with the Purple Gang’s topnotch swill.”

“I know. I know.”

“The White Hand yahoos, why do you think they’re hijacking us? Because the micks are selling local brew, cooked up in cellars and warehouses and garages and goddamn fuckin’

bathtubs
! Their stuff don’t got the bouquet, the body, the kick of our product, from Canada and Detroit.”

Al nodded.

“If this Holliday has a supply that big, somewhere on his property or in a warehouse or whatever…I want it. I want to find it.”

Again Al nodded. “What do you want me to do, boss?”

“Go back to Holliday’s,” Frankie said, and he grinned, wide enough for his gold tooth to show and catch the light and sparkle. “You made a point at Sagaman’s Hall, Al—go back over to Manhattan…and make another one.”

Eight

JOHNNY HOLLIDAY AWOKE TO WHAT HE THOUGHT was thunder.

At least that was how the dream he was having translated the racket, as he and his father and a young Wyatt Earp rode the range on a sunny Arizona day, only to have the sky turn immediately dark and lightning-streaked, when God’s war drums began to beat and the horses started to rear, needing steadying.

“That ain’t drums,” Wyatt said, no longer young, rather the white-mustached man Johnny had so recently met, and Johnny’s father was suddenly Bat Masterson, also current variety.

Bat said, “Not coming from the sky.”

“Where, then?” Johnny asked.

Wyatt, young again, pointed a finger to the earth. “Down below.”

“Below…?”

Old again. “You know, Johnny—
hell
.”

That was when Johnny awoke, and the noise beneath him was indeed thunderous yet at once mechanical, like a hammering by a steady, swift, powerful carpenter; beside him in bed was Dixie Douglas, the girl from Tex’s show that he’d been seeing—she stirred sleepily.

No telling what time it was; they’d gone to bed, as usual around six-thirty a.m., and the shades were of the blackout variety. Enough sunlight leached in to tell him it was day; but he already knew that.

As Johnny, in black silk pajamas, climbed out of bed, the noise continued and now Dixie was awake, leaning on an elbow, her dark brown eyes half-lidded, her brunette curls tousled, custard-cup breasts straining the chemise.

“What
is
that, Johnny?” Her voice was a sexy second soprano and musical, more musical in fact than when she was singing downstairs during Tex’s act, where often her pitch (unlike her figure) was flat.

The thundering continued, muffled yet distinct, and she said, fear in it now, “What, Johnny?

What
?”

But Johnny didn’t answer her, a voice from the doorway did: “Not mice.”

Wyatt Earp, in his trousers and suspenders and t-shirt and bare feet, leaned in the bedroom doorway, his white hair sleep-askew, and in his right hand a revolver with a gun barrel that seemed endless, long as a rifle’s, pointed upward.

Dixie fell back against the black-lacquer headboard, pulling the covers to her throat, half in terror, half in modesty; but Johnny knew his well-armed house guest’s attention was not focused on the beautiful young chorus girl, rather the continuing, insistent, mechanically drumming sound from several floors below…

…
which was, Johnny now believed, machine-gun fire
.

Within moments he and Wyatt were on the stairs, Johnny in his loose flapping pajamas working to keep up with the old boy, as if the latter were the man of the house and Johnny the guest.

Still, Wyatt—who Johnny had insisted stay here in the brownstone—had taken time to come up to Johnny’s top-floor apartment to get him, before looking into the commotion below.

Whether this was out of courtesy or the desire for back-up, Johnny had no idea, and was hardly about to ask.