Blind Moon Alley (3 page)

“Oh, I done it,” he says, tugging on the cuffs of his gray prison garb. “But I ain't what they think.”

Then he wipes his forehead with the crook of his arm and starts talking about the old days. I let him talk, but I'm missing half of what he's saying. We must be closing in on seven-thirty. That gives Garvey thirty minutes before he's driven over to Rockview and strapped to Old Smokey. As he rattles on, I pick at the dinner he ordered for each of us: a boneless steak, two fried eggs, a baked potato, a wedge of lettuce with blue cheese dressing, a slice of cheesecake, and a chocolate milkshake.

I'm sawing away at my steak with one of the state's butter knives when Garvey asks me if I remember playing hooky to watch the Giants at the Polo Grounds. He's wasting time. I wouldn't care, except he's fidgeting in his seat like a twelve-year-old itching for recess.

“Hey, Milmo,” I say.

“Yeah?” the guard says, not bothering to stand up or turn his head my way.

“Don't you need to check on your buddy outside?”

“I've got a job to do,” Milmo says. “And it's to watch the two of you.”

I saw this coming from the minute Milmo took my hooch. Reaching into my overcoat, I pull out the envelope with my father's name scratched across it. A pang of guilt bites at me as I picture the champ trying to meet the Hy-Hat's rent with nothing but a cashbox filled with IOUs.

I rip open the envelope, pull out a pair of sawbucks, and jam the rest into my pants pocket. Then I walk over to Milmo and extend the bills between my index and middle finger. “I'll bet you twenty dollars nobody will ever know if you were here or not.”

It's a fat offer, but Milmo doesn't budge. Maybe he gets greased more often than I thought.

A grin twists the side of his mouth. “In here freaks pay double.”

I stare him down. “In here I'm not the freak.”

Garvey gets up from the table. “Damn right.”

My friend is a bit shaky when he walks—I wonder what kind of beating he took before dinner tonight—but the loose skin under his eyes has gone tight. For a split second, I see the kid who stood up to those heartless teachers back in Hoboken—and the man who squeezed that trigger at the Red Canary.

“It's okay, Garv,” I tell him, motioning him back to his chair. He doesn't sit down, but at least he stays quiet.

Milmo looks up at me. “Well?”

The clock is ticking, so I reach back into my pocket for the ripped envelope. I pull out the last of the money I'd earmarked for the Hy-Hat.

“Thirty bucks,” I tell Milmo as I hold out my entire week's pay. “Split it with your boy outside, however you like.”

“Sold,” he says and takes the cash. He slips it into his breast pocket, underneath his badge.

Before he leaves, he finishes off his booze and puts the empty coffee cup on the table. Then he leans in front of Garvey and takes the flask, passing it under Garvey's nose before heading for the door.

I block his way. “You can't take it all, Milmo. Christ, even a Fed would leave a taste.”

Milmo chuckles and splashes some of the brown into the two coffee cups, making a point to spill a bit of Garvey's onto the table. Then he tells us, “You've got three minutes.”

Finally, he disappears, shutting the door behind him and leaving me alone with my friend.

I sit back down, my neck soaked with sweat. It's hot as Doolie's kitchen in here and dealing with Milmo hasn't exactly cooled me down.

“Owe you one,” Garvey says.

“Not the way I see it,” I say. “You saved my ass more times than I can count.”

“Not true,” he says. “But I'm glad you think so.” Then he leans forward and whispers as if Milmo were still sitting behind him. “'Cuz I need a favor.”

I nod, figuring I can handle pretty much anything he asks.

“You remember Myra Banks?” he asks me.

“Sure do,” I tell him.

Myra and I were the two misfits of Elementary School Four. She was a sad, quiet kid; she took a lot of guff because she had a club right foot and dreamt of being a Ziegfeld girl. She'd spend most of her time alone in the school library, her face buried in
Photoplay
magazine. She was my first crush, my first kiss, and, I suppose you could say, the only girlfriend I've ever had. We ran into each other in New York five years ago. It was late November, a week after Thanksgiving, and snow was coming down in lazy flurries. She didn't have a penny, but she'd come to see the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. I was making decent money rolling kegs in Hell's Kitchen—I'd just dropped out of City College but I told her I was still studying there—and I bought her dinner on the West Side. We ate pot roast at a place called Rosie's; then we took the A train up to the Hotel Theresa and escaped into each other's arms. We spent the night under a quilt, doing things we'd never heard about in elementary school. She'd grown into quite a looker; her skin was a light tan, her eyes the shape of large almonds, and her wavy hair as long and loose as Mary Pickford's. But what I remember most was her foot—how it looked out of its shoe—twisted and mangled, with a red bony bump sticking out where the instep should be. Looking back, it makes sense we found each other.

“What's become of her?” I ask Garvey, my mind flashing dusty images of her crooked front tooth, soft pink nipples, and tender red ankle.

“You won't believe it,” he says with a light chuckle. “She owns a piece of the Red Canary.”

“Are you joking with me?”

Garvey doesn't say anything, but his lack of response is answer enough.

“How the hell did that happen?” I say.

It just doesn't fit. The Red Canary is where Garvey gunned down that cop. The owner is Otto Gorsky, a twisted killer who goes by the name of Mr. Lovely. I don't know a lot about him, other than he's connected to Chicago mobsters and has a chauffeur drive him around in a burgundy Packard town car that's dressed up with fat whitewalls and has a gleaming serpent on the hood. But the details don't matter. A guy like Lovely isn't about to partner with a Negro dame who's broke and crippled, I don't care how good she looks. I've heard the rumors that he's near death, that he's got some kind of weird disease, but word on the street is that he's still the same cold-blooded reptilian bastard he's always been. He'll make you rich if you do him right, but he'll butcher you like an animal if things go wrong. Just last week, he supposedly sat in an armchair, laughing and munching on jelly beans as his triggermen sliced up a two-timing rumrunner named Floyd Rumson with an ice hook and a pair of rusty hedge clippers.

Myra can't stand up to that kind of depravity. I remember the bullies riding her; they laughed at her clumsy black shoe, her limp, and the way her thick upper lip trembled when she was frightened. They called her a gimp. They threw stones at her. They stole her shoe right off her foot and loaded it up with a fresh, steaming pile of horseshit. She was an easy target. And she took it all without fighting back.

Garvey's looking at me. “I know what you're thinking,” he says. “But it's true, she owns a chunk of the place. Why else would I have been there?”

“Okay,” I say, still having trouble putting the broken girl with the quivering lip and oversized tears in the same room as Lovely. “I guess I'll buy it. Myra owns a piece of the Canary. And?”

He leans forward and lowers his voice. “And she bought it with my money. Twenty large.”

“You gave her twenty thousand?”

“Loaned her,” he corrects me, still in his hoarse whisper. “She was supposed to pay me back.”

“Forget it, Garv.” I'm not about to yank twenty grand from a woman who was naked and moaning that she loved me the last time I saw her. “Let Myra have her piece.”

His jaw is tight. “You're not getting it. The money's gone—Myra used it to buy into the Canary. The problem is the dead cop's partner, Reeger. Since I landed here, he's been on her back, raiding the joint, locking her up for weeks, really swinging his hammer—all because she knows me. If I were on the outside, I'd take care of this myself.”

His eyes go so cold they send a chill up my spine. I put my elbows on the table, leaning forward so my armpits can breathe. I want to help my friend, and there's no question I owe him, but he's desperate and I'm not exactly sure what he's asking.

“What do you want me to do, Garv?”

“He's sending me a message,” he says. “I want you to send one back.”

Garvey's got to realize that Reeger isn't going to walk away because a bleached bartender shows up in the name of a dead man. The only way to end this is to plug Reeger, and I'm not about to gun down a cop, I don't care how long I've known Garvey. My friend must know somebody with bloodier hands than mine.

“Why me?” I say.

“You always cared about Myra. And from what I've read, you're the man for the job.”

“I'm not. And I haven't seen Myra since the sixth grade.”

I'm lying and I'm not sure why—it's not as if Garvey will be around long enough to sing. But I remember Myra asking me not to give her up; she was worried about a guy she called Jonesy, the latest in her list of soul-sucking cretins. This one had moved into her place, promising his love but delivering nothing other than a left hook and fractured cheekbone. I still wonder if it was her fear of Jonesy that pushed her to crawl under the blanket for one more go-round with me that night.

“Let's leave and never come back,” she said when we'd finished, picking up a
Life
magazine and pointing to the photo of the Hollywoodland sign on its cover. Her hazel eyes were alive with possibilities, but all I did was sit there wondering which one Jonesy had blackened. “We can get on a train right now,” she said.

It wasn't the first time she'd brought it up—she'd talked about running off to Hollywood for as long as I could remember. But that night her dream was raging. Had I said okay, I just may have found myself tending bar on a beach in Santa Monica. But reality has a way of taking the fun out of life. I had kegs to roll and rum to run, so I said no. I didn't realize what I'd done to Myra until she buried her face in her hands, hiding the shame of another rejection behind her shiny, wet fingers. I wanted to add that I'd never felt more at home than when we were under those hotel sheets, but I stayed mute, and still curse myself for doing so. She deserved to hear it. As things turned out, we never spoke again after that weekend, although I did send my thoughts her way that Christmas. They arrived in the form of two local triggermen asking for Jonesy. I doubt the bastard ever touched her again. If he did, it was with ten broken fingers and a shattered kneecap.

Garvey is still waiting on my answer, no doubt hoping I'm softening. “You'd be pulling Myra out of the fire,” he says. “She might even toss you a few bucks.”

I'm sure the Hy-Hat could use the dough, but if my father doesn't like taking the cash I earn bartending, he's certainly not going to want any money I boost from a speakeasy.

“Sorry, Garv.”

“You'd be helping the Canary, too,” Garvey says. “Reeger keeps showing up, making a scene, can't be good for customers. Charge the joint in hooch,” he says. “Or women.”

The door opens and Garvey stops talking. He takes another bite of cheesecake and motions for me to do the same.

I spear a forkful as Milmo hands me back my flask, now empty.

“Back so soon?” I ask.

He shrugs his shoulders and wisecracks, “I missed you guys.” Then he sits back down on Garvey's cot.

Garvey's looking at me, no doubt hoping for a sign that I'll wrap up his unfinished business.

“I'll think about it,” is all I say.

“All I'm askin',” he says before picking up his cup and taking a slug of brown.

Then we finish what's left of our meal without saying a word. We both know I'll have to leave soon, and talking just seems to speed up the clock. I grab my whiskey, hoping it will help me shake the fact that I'm not able to save the only kid who ever stood up for me.

Garvey taps his cup against mine and we sit in silence, nursing our final drops of hooch.

The clock at the end of the bar reads just shy of midnight. The Ink Well is empty except for Homer and me, so I pour him a shot of moon and match it with one of my own. I'm drinking to Garvey, who'll be saying his final words when the minute hand strikes twelve. The radio is playing “Please Don't Talk about Me When I'm Gone” and I promise Garvey that I won't.

“Sure sounds like Garvey's a good Joe,” Homer says. He runs his hand over his nappy black hair and gazes upward again. If I didn't know better, I'd expect him to order some of the whiskey glittering on the top shelf behind me.

“Doesn't matter,” I say. “It won't help him now.”

“I don't blame him none for what he done,” he says, his fist clenched around his shot glass. “No, I don't.”