When the Sacred Ginmill Closes

by Lawrence Block

Page 6

 

  YOU decide something in your mind and then your body goes and decides something else. I wasnt going to have anything to do with Tim Pats problem, and then I kept finding myself sniffing around it like a dog at a lamppost. The same night I assured Skip I wasnt playing, I wound up on Seventy-second Street at a place called Poogans Pub, sitting at a rear table and buying iced Stolichnaya for a tiny albino Negro named Danny Boy Bell. Danny Boy was always interesting company, but he was also a prime snitch, an information broker who knew everyone and heard everything.

  Of course hed heard about the robbery at Morrisseys. Hed heard a wide range of figures quoted for the take, and for his own part guessed that the right number was somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars.

  "Whoever took it," he said, "theyre not spending it in the bars. My sense of it is that its an Irish thing, Matthew. Irish Irish, not the local Harps. You know, it went down right in the middle of Westy country, but I cant see the Westies taking off Tim Pat like that. "

  The Westies are a loosely organized mob of toughs and killers, most of them Irish, and theyve been operating in Hells Kitchen since the turn of the century. Maybe longer, maybe since the Potato Famine.

  "I dont know," I said. "With that kind of money involved-"

  "If those two were Westies, if they were anybody from the neighborhood, it wouldnt be a secret for more than eight hours. Everybody on Tenth Avenue d know it. "

  "Youre right. "

  "Some kind of Irish thing, thats my best guess. You were there, youd know this. The masks were red?"

  "Red handkerchiefs. "

  "A shame. If they were green or orange theyd be making some sort of political statement. I understand the brothers are offering a generous reward. Is that what brings you here, Matthew?"

  "Oh, no," I said. "Definitely not. "

  "Not doing a bit of exploratory work on speculation?"

  "Absolutely not," I said.

  * * *

  FRIDAY afternoon I was drinking in Armstrongs and fell into conversation with a couple of nurses at the next table. They had tickets for an off-off-Broadway show that night. Dolores couldnt go, and Fran really wanted to but she wasnt sure she felt like going by herself, and besides they had the extra ticket.

  And of course the show turned out to be The Quare Fellow. It didnt relate in any way to the incident at Morrisseys, it was just coincidentally being performed downstairs of the after-hours joint, and it hadnt been my idea in the first place, but what was I doing there? I sat on a flimsy wooden folding chair and watched Behans play about imprisoned criminals in Dublin and wondered what the hell I was doing in the audience.

  Afterward Fran and I wound up at Miss Kittys with a group that included two of the members of the cast. One of them, a slim red-haired girl with enormous green eyes, was Frans friend Mary Margaret, and the reason why Fran had been so anxious to go. That was Frans reason, but what was mine?

  There was talk at the table of the robbery. I didnt raise the subject or contribute much to the discussion, but I couldnt stay out of it altogether because Fran told the group I was a former police detective and asked for my professional opinion of the affair. My reply was as noncommittal as I could make it, and I avoided mentioning that Id been an eyewitness to the holdup.

  Skip was there, so busy behind the bar with the Friday-night crowd that I didnt bother to do more than wave hello at him. The place was mobbed and noisy, as it always was on weekends, but that was where everyone else had wanted to go, and Id gone along.

  Fran lived on Sixty-eighth between Columbus and Amsterdam. I walked her home, and at her door she said, "Matt, you were a sweetheart to keep me company. The play was okay, wasnt it?"

  "It was fine. "

  "I thought Mary Margaret was good, anyway. Matt, would you mind awfully if I dont ask you to come up? Im beat and Ive got an early day tomorrow. "

  "Thats okay," I said. "Now that you mention it, so do I. "

  "Being a detective?"

  I shook my head. "Being a father. "

  THE next morning Anita put the kids on the Long Island Rail Road and I picked them up at the station in Corona and took them to Shea and watched the Mets lose to the Astros. The boys would be going to camp for four weeks in August and they were excited about that. We ate hot dogs and peanuts and popcorn. They had Cokes, I had a couple of beers. There was some sort of special promotion that day, and the boys got free caps or pennants, I forgot which.

  Afterward I took them back to the city on the subway and to a movie at Loews 83rd. We had pizza on Broadway after the film let out and took a cab back to my hotel, where Id rented a twin-bedded room for them a floor below mine. They went to bed and I went up to my own room. After an hour I checked their room. They were sleeping soundly. I locked their door again and went around the corner to Armstrongs. I didnt stay long, maybe an hour. Then I went back to my hotel, checked the boys again, and went upstairs and to bed.

  In the morning we went out for a big breakfast, pancakes and bacon and sausages. I took them up to the Museum of the American Indian in Washington Heights. There are a couple dozen museums in the city of New York, and when you leave your wife you get to discover them all.

  It felt strange being in Washington Heights. It was in that neighborhood a few years earlier that Id been having a few off-duty drinks when a couple of punks held up the bar and shot the bartender dead on their way out.

  I went out into the street after them. There are a lot of hills in Washington Heights. They ran down one of them and I had to shoot downhill. I brought them both down, but one shot went wide and ricocheted, and it killed a small child named Estrellita Rivera.

  Those things happen. There was a departmental hearing, there always is when you kill someone, and I was found to have acted properly and with justification.

  Shortly thereafter I put in my papers and left the police department.

  I cant say that one event caused the other. I can only say that the one led to the other. I had been the unwitting instrument of a childs death, and after that something was different for me. The life I had been living without complaint no longer seemed to suit me. I suppose it had ceased to suit me before then. I suppose the childs death precipitated a life change that was long overdue. But I cant say that for certain, either. Just that one thing led to another.

  WE took a train to Penn Station. I told the boys how good it had been to spend some time with them, and they told me what a good time theyd had. I put them on a train, made a phone call and told their mother what train theyd be on. She assured me shed meet it, then mentioned hesitantly that it would be good if I sent money soon. Soon, I assured her.

  I hung up and thought of the ten thousand dollars Tim Pat was offering. And shook my head, amused at the thought.

  But that night I got restless and wound up down in the Village, stopping in a string of bars for one drink each. I took the A train to West Fourth Street and started at McBells and worked my way west. Jimmy Days, the 55, the Lions Head, George Hertzs, the Corner Bistro. I told myself I was just having a couple of drinks, unwinding after the pressure of a weekend with my sons, settling myself down after awakening old memories with a visit to Washington Heights.

  But I knew better. I was starting some half-assed purposeless investigation, trying to turn up a lead to the pair whod hit Morrisseys.

  I wound up in a gay bar called Sinthias. Kenny, who owned the place, was minding the store, serving drinks to men in Levis and ribbed tank tops. Kenny was slender, willowy, with dyed blond hair and a face that had been tucked and lifted enough to look no more than twenty-eight, which was about half as many years as Kenny had been on the planet.

  "Matthew!" he called out. "You can all relax now, girls. Law and order has come to Grove Street. "

  Of course he didnt know anything about the robbery at Morrisseys. He didnt know Morrisseys to begin with; no gay man had to leave the Village to find a place where he could get a drink after closing.
But the holdup men could have been gay as easily as not, and if they werent spending their take elsewhere they might be spending it in the joints around Christopher Street, and anyhow that was the way you worked it, you nosed around, you worked all your sources, you put the word out and waited to see if anything came back to you.

  But why was I doing this? Why was I wasting my time?

  I dont know what would have happened- whether I would have kept at it or let go of it, whether I would have gotten someplace or ultimately turned away from a cold trail. I didnt seem to be getting anywhere, but thats often the way it is, and you go through the motions with no indication of progress until you get lucky and something breaks. Maybe something like that would have happened. Maybe not.

  Instead, some other things happened to take my mind off Tim Pat Morrissey and his quest for vengeance.

  For openers, somebody killed Tommy Tillarys wife.

  Chapter 4

  Tuesday night I took Fran to dinner at the Thai restaurant Skip Devoe liked so much. Afterward I walked her home, with a stop for after-dinner drinks at Joey Farrells. In front of her building she pleaded an early day again, and I left her there and walked back to Armstrongs with a stop or two en route. I was in a sour mood, and a stomachful of unfamiliar food didnt help any. I probably hit the bourbon a little harder than usual, rolling out of there around one or two. I took the long way home, picked up the Daily News, and sat on the edge of my bed in my underwear taking a quick look at a couple of stories.

  On one of the inside pages I read about a Brooklyn woman whod been killed in the course of a burglary. I was tired and Id had a lot to drink and the name didnt register.

  But I woke up the next morning with something buzzing in my mind, half dream and half memory. I sat up and reached for the paper and found the story.

  Margaret Tillary, forty-seven, had been stabbed to death in the upstairs bedroom of her home on Colonial Road, in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, evidently having awakened in the course of a burglary. Her husband, securities salesman Thomas J. Tillary, had become concerned when his wife failed to answer the telephone Tuesday afternoon. He called a relative living nearby who entered the house, finding the premises ransacked and the woman dead.

  "This is a good neighborhood," a neighbor was quoted as saying. "Things like this dont happen here. " But a police source cited a marked increase in area burglaries in recent months, and another neighbor referred obliquely to the presence of a "bad element" in the neighborhood.

  Its not a common name. Theres a Tillary Street in Brooklyn, not far from the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, but Ive no idea what war hero or ward heeler they named it after, or if hes a relative of Tommys. There are several Tillerys in the Manhattan phone directory, spelled with an e. Thomas Tillary, securities salesman, Brooklyn - it seemed as though it had to be Telephone Tommy.

  I took a shower and shaved and went out for breakfast. I thought about what Id read and tried to figure out how I felt about it. It didnt seem real to me. I didnt know him well and I hadnt known her at all, had never known her name, had known only that she existed somewhere in Brooklyn.

  I looked at my left hand, the ring finger. No ring, no mark. I had worn a wedding ring for years, and I had taken it off when I moved from Syosset to Manhattan. For months there had been a mark where the ring had been, and then one day I noticed that the mark was gone.