Black Hats (30 page)

“Everybody knows you’re a goddamn cheat, Rothstein!”

Rothstein, slowly, carefully, rose, still with his palms forward, patting the air gently.

“Normally I would take offense. But I understand you’ve been drinking, and a hand like this is, I admit, an unlikely one…”

“
Unlikely
!” Holliday leaned on the table with one hand and trembled all over as he sneered at Rothstein. “You think because of who you are, you can steal everything I’ve worked for? You think I’ll walk away from this?”

From the doorway, Miss Douglas, pale as death, whispered, “Oh, Johnny…please don’t do anything—”

Whether that was all she had to say, Al would never know. The waitress might have added

“stupid” or “rash,” but her boy friend had already done something that was both those things.

Holliday drew that same gleaming blade from a sheath under his left sleeve, steel winking and flashing, poised to slash Rothstein, but Al wasn’t having any, not this time.

The .38 came out of his pocket and Al fired three times at Holliday, one at his head and one at his chest and one at his belly, and the last two found their mark, as Holliday clutched his heart while his other hand, still tight around the hilt of the knife, found his stomach and as Miss Douglas raised clenched fists to her cheeks and screamed bloody murder, Holliday took a sort of bow, blood spreading on his shirt in two bright slick scarlet patches, as he folded in two and dropped to the floor, with a dead-weight
thump
.

Al stood frozen, the .38 snout twirling a smoky question mark.

The little waitress was already at her fallen lover’s side, cradling his head in her arms against her breasts, crying her eyes out, screaming, “Call a doctor!” again and again, not caring about the blood all over him and her now. Holliday’s eyes were closed, his face slack, but Earp was moving in, kneeling there to check for a pulse in wrist and neck.

“No doctor, Dix,” Earp said gravely, and shook his head.

Rothstein was at Al’s side. Almost whispering, he said, “I owe you. You saved my life, and I won’t forget it.”

“He was gonna…”

“I know. But you have to get out of here.” Now Rothstein really was whispering. “Everybody here knows you were defending my life, but these are not your friends, and with this many witnesses…”

Behind Rothstein were the bobbing heads of Mizner and Runyon.

“…you can’t risk it.”

Al, his mind racing but not getting anywhere, said, “What should I do, Mr. Rothstein?”

“Get the hell out. Out of here, out of town…just
go
.” Rothstein took the .38 from Al’s slack fingertips. “I’ll ditch this.”

“I don’t know if—”

“Go talk to your boss—Yale. Tell him what happened, and ask him what to do.”

Al nodded and kept nodding. “I will. I will.”

Then Earp was at Al’s side and the old man gripped the young man’s arm and squeezed.

“Listen to him.”

Al swallowed and said, “You saw what happened! You know I had no goddamn choice!”

“No? You couldn’t have shot him in the shoulder? Listen, punk, it’s time.”

“Time?”

“You need to get out of Dodge.”

And Al Capone hurried past the crying girl and her dead bloody boy friend and, getting his Borsalino handed him at the door by a grim Texas Guinan, got the hell out of the brownstone.

Even forgot to cash in his chips.

Sixteen

FROM THE POKER ROOM WINDOW, PEERING BETWEEN blinds, Wyatt Earp watched young Al Capone skedaddle down to the black Cadillac parked across the way, and moments later, when the hood and his vehicle were out of sight, Wyatt signaled the “all clear.”

Laughter—nervous, relieved, raucous, depending on its source—rang off the walls, and some applause did, too, as Dixie helped a stone-sober Johnny (who had put away a record amount of lukewarm tea over these last hours) to his feet. Johnny was grinning but looked almost as dead as he was supposed to be, trembling with his face haggard and of course his pastel shirt sporting twin blotches of blood.

Or that is, of stage blood, as prepared by Tex.

She was at Wyatt’s side now, an arm around his waist, beaming and beautiful. “Amazing what a little Karo, Hershey’s and red food coloring’ll do.”

Wyatt slipped an arm around her shoulder and gave her a squeeze. “Young Scarface said he wanted to see you put on a show, Tex. Well, he got his wish.”

Little thin-rubber bladders of stage blood had been adhesive-taped to Johnny’s chest, ready for him to prick with a small sharp spike on the back of a ring and with the tip of his knife blade, respectively.

Wyatt assumed, correctly, that Capone would shoot until Johnny dropped, and—missing with a head shot—would go for the body.

Bat, damn near giddy, came over and gave Tex a big kiss on the cheek. “Slick work, how you pulled the switch on that son of a bitch.”

Basking in praise, Tex bowed and said modestly, “Thank your friend Runyon. If he hadn’t been wise to Capone carrying a .38, how would we’ve known what caliber blanks to substitute?”

There had been a second set-up to fall back on, of course, if Capone brought some other pistol or even came unarmed, though Tex had been ready with several other calibers of blank cartridges, as well. The movie cowgirl knew her way around shooting irons.

Wyatt bussed Tex on the lips, then left her with Bat to go see how Johnny was doing. The younger man was standing there obliviously dripping fake red onto the floor, looking dragged-out but relieved, exchanging words and little kisses with the satin-clad waitress.

Wyatt put a hand on Johnny’s shoulder—one of the few safe places not to come back with a sticky red palm—and said, “Son, you have the makings of first-rate swindler.”

“Thank you!”

“But I recommend dentistry.”

Johnny nodded toward Dixie, whose pretty face sent contradictory signals as she smiled with eyes wet. “Did you know that Dix has secretarial training? Third in her class!”

“Perfect to work in your office, John.” Then Wyatt turned to Dixie and touched the tip of her nose lightly. “Get him upstairs and cleaned up. You two have a train to catch.”

The couple followed Wyatt’s orders, though Dixie paused to remove Johnny’s front shirt tails so he could cup it and curtail the mess.

A voice at Wyatt’s side said: “We were wrong.”

Wyatt turned and found the deadpan Runyon, lighting up his hundredth cigarette or so of the evening.

“How so?”

Runyon flicked a smile. “We all said little Dixie didn’t have the talent God gave a termite.

And maybe she can’t sing or dance…but hell, you saw her, Wyatt. She can act.”

Wyatt offered his hand to Runyon, who seemed surprised but then accepted the offer to shake.

“Mr. Runyon, without you we couldn’t have been able to stage this little show. Thank you.”

“Melodrama’s my specialty. Glad to help.”

Runyon had not only agreed to be part of conning Capone, he’d suggested enlisting their mutual friend Mizner, who had been both a confidence man and cardsharp in his time. More to the point, Runyon had helped plead the cause when Earp presented the idea to Rothstein in a back booth at Reuben’s just…my God, was it just yesterday?

Wyatt had revealed to Rothstein that Johnny’s liquor was gone, destroyed, which put Johnny fatally on the spot with Capone. Would Rothstein be willing to buy Johnny’s brownstone, nightclub and all, for a modest hundred grand…

Certainly!…on
two
conditions? First, Rothstein would have to be a player, in several senses of the word, at the poker party; and second, after the scam went down, Rothstein must spread the story that Johnny had sold out everything to him, and disappeared.

Yale, of course, would know the “truth” that Rothstein was covering up: that Al Capone had killed Johnny. No matter what the kid said, Yale would likely make Capone lam it out of New York, probably to Chicago and under Little John Torrio’s protective wing…that is, if the unreliable hothead didn’t wind up dead in a ditch, courtesy of his unhappy boss.

Rothstein knew a bargain when he heard one.

“Anyway,” the bright-eyed, gray-skinned mastermind had said over a plate of figs and glass of milk, “I don’t mind keeping these Brooklyn crumbs in their place. And who doesn’t like a good confidence game?”

With the exception of Johnny and Dix, who were upstairs changing, the entire cast assembled in the dining room where Tex served up sandwiches and coffee, an unlikely waitress in her spangly red gown.

Though they’d just spent hours pulling this scam—and Wyatt had never in all his gambler’s days dealt more crooked hands of poker in a single night—everybody seemed wound up from the experience, really charged. Moments from the evening were re-enacted in anecdote form, as if they were all looking back on something that happened long ago.

“Well,” Bat said, raising his coffee cup in a sort of toast, “any way you figure it, that’s the last we’ll ever hear of one Alphonse Capone.”

Everybody was vocally agreeing with that…except Wyatt, who wasn’t so sure. He did feel confident that Capone had been thoroughly bamboozled tonight, and that Johnny Holliday could safely re-emerge as Johnny Haroney somewhere out west, and open his dental practice with his lovely new young wife.

Before everyone left, Wyatt led them back to the poker lounge, where he returned their money and gave both Mizner and Runyon a bonus thousand.

“You have to respect money,” Mizner said with a sideways smile, delicately inserting the stack of fifties into a front pocket of his tuxedo trousers. “It’s the only stuff that can keep a cold cruel world from turning your name into ‘Hey you.’”

The hundred grand Rothstein had “bet” tonight stayed on the table: this was Johnny’s payoff for the brownstone, the deed of which had already been signed over to Rothstein.

Soon only Bat, Wyatt and Tex remained, but for the two kids upstairs.

Tex, tapping her spoon on her coffee cup lightly, did not look at Wyatt when she asked, “So you’ll be going, too, then?”

“Yeah. Rothstein has his own ideas about this place. And without Johnny here…”

“Wouldn’t be the same,” she said. Her smile was wistful yet bitter. “Doc Holliday’s boy….

How the hell much like his father
is
he?”

“
Just
like his father,” Wyatt said.

Bat gave him an are-you-kidding look.

“If,” Wyatt amplified, “life had dealt his old man a straight card or two.”

“Johnny’s healthy,” Bat granted. “And he’s got a good woman. Better than Big-Nosed Kate.”

Wyatt wasn’t sure about that, either; not that Dixie wouldn’t make a good partner…but Kate did have her merits. Still, he let it stand…though it did occur to him Johnny’s mother might owe him that five hundred, after all.

At the front door, Wyatt gave Tex a little kiss that she turned into something bigger. She seemed to mean it, and wanted him to have it, so he let her; wasn’t half bad.

He walked her outside, where the sun had come up, and escorted her down to where a woman in a red sparkly gown could catch a cab to her apartment.

Before she got in, she paused and touched his face and, in the daylight, out of the dim light of a nightclub, she looked every year her age. Still, not half bad.

“We could’ve had something, Wyatt Earp.”

“Seems to me,” he said, “we did.”

Then she was just a face in the rear window of a cab, gliding away into one more memory.

On the walk back Wyatt established to his own satisfaction that Frankie Yale had pulled his men from their watch of the club; in the aftermath of the warehouse shoot-out, Yale—who was likely under the impression the Irish White Handers were rallying against him—had apparently been too short-handed to keep up the surveillance.

That meant when Wyatt in his black Stetson and Bat in his jaunty black derby accompanied Johnny and Dix to Grand Central Terminal, the little party had scant to worry about, though of course both the two old gunfighters had revolvers in their coat pockets.

Johnny would have been hard to spot in his inconspicuous brown business suit with a brown derby, and Dixie was just another pretty but unremarkable young woman in her simple dark blue frock with white trim with white cloche hat. They had only two suitcases, plus the briefcase of money, and the former they checked, the latter Johnny held on to.

At the gate Dixie gave Wyatt a kiss on the cheek, Bat, too; she told them both they were wonderful and they did not disagree.

Johnny and Wyatt shook hands.

“We never really did get a chance to talk about my father,” Johnny said.

“Maybe next time.”

“Funny thing is, being around you these weeks…I feel I do know better what he was like.”

“You need to know what he was like,” Wyatt said, and tipped his Stetson, “just look in the mirror.”

Johnny liked hearing that, and he and Dixie waved as they went off and disappeared onto the steam-floating platform.

“Dunstan’s?” Bat asked, as their footsteps echoed among the many others in the vast marble terminal.

“What, more food? Bartholomew, we just had sandwiches.”

“I could use some eggs and bacon.”

So they had breakfast together, and reminisced about old times, and recent times, too, and Bat promised he would come west someday soon, and Wyatt promised he would come east again.

Neither happened, of course, because a year or so later, more or less—at his desk at the
Telegraph
, chasing a deadline—Bat Masterson slumped over a half-written column and fell asleep forever.

And when Wyatt read about it—in a several-days’-old newspaper over a cup of Sadie’s terrible coffee out at the Happy Days mine—it was way too late to head out from California for the funeral.

Not that it mattered.

Hadn’t he and Bartholomew already bid each other a bang-up goodbye?

Tip of the Black Hat

Despite its fanciful nature, this novel does have a basis in history beyond the famous names of Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson and Al Capone. Like these three, the majority of characters here are real-life figures and appear under their own names, though a few major players are wholly fictional, notably Johnny Holliday and Dixie Douglas. For the sake of the narrative, the deck of history has occasionally been shuffled, with events taking place sooner or later than in reality; and, while I have attempted to maintain a reasonably clear picture of New York in the early months of Prohibition, at times research dating to the later twenties has come into play.