The Trouble Boys

by E. R. FALLON

  “I hope so.”

  “How’s the Bowery?”

  “Everyone asks about you, like I said. Maureen told the police what Carmine did to her, but she doesn’t want the whole neighborhood knowing he hurt her. Turns out a lot of people didn’t like Carmine regardless. They all want to know when you’re getting out of here and coming home.”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to break their hearts and tell them I’m never returning, at least not alive.” Colin managed to smile.

  “Don’t talk like that.” She paused. “I’ve been meaning to tell you something. It’s about that night when you walked me home.”

  “We don’t have to talk about that now. I understand, Lucille. I’m too young for you. We’re friends, and I’m fine with that.”

  “Colin, let me finish.”

  He nodded at her to go ahead.

  “When you walked with me to my place, and then when you asked if you could come inside and I wouldn’t let you . . . I’ve been thinking a lot about that night. I like you, and if things were different, if you were older, I would’ve invited you to come in.”

  * * *

  The prison officer informed them Colin’s lawyer had arrived for a visit, and Colin didn’t get a chance to tell Lucille how deeply he felt about her. Her voice held something back as she rose and said goodbye to him. Colin waved to her and hid his affection behind a serious expression.

  Because Colin couldn’t afford his own lawyer, the city of New York provided one for him. During their only prior meeting Emmett Hull told Colin he’d never handled a murder case before. “I’m going to be honest,” Hull said to him today through the cell bars. “I don’t have much background on your case. I was just recently assigned to you, and the trial is in a few days. And you won’t tell me anything.”

  If he was looking for sympathy, he wasn’t going to get it from Colin. “You’re the lawyer. You figure it out. I’ve got enough to think about, like how the hell I’m going to get myself out of here after you don’t.”

  “How am I supposed to help you when you won’t help me?” Hull pleaded.

  Colin didn’t want to tell his lawyer all the details about that night with Carmine and risk upsetting Maureen in court. Her face bore marks from Carmine’s fists, and the police thought Carmine had only beaten her and didn’t know the whole story. All that mattered was that his sister was safe. If Colin had to go to jail forever then at least he knew Carmine could never harm Maureen again.

  “I need more from you.” Hull’s voice rose with irritation.

  “What do you need to know?”

  “Well, why did it happen in the first place?”

  “He angered me.” Colin could sense Hull’s lack of confidence being masked by his pedigree.

  “Being a smart punk isn’t going to help you in court. If you want to spend the least amount of time possible in prison then you better stop acting like one.”

  Colin smiled at him with sincerity. “I’m glad to see you’re toughening up. We might actually get along.”

  “I know it’s been difficult for you in here.”

  Colin found it amusing that Hull was trying to ‘get through to him’. But Colin wanted to avoid prison as much as anyone confronted with the threat would, no matter how stubborn he was. “What do you need to know?”

  “First of all, how long was your mother’s boyfriend—”

  “Carmine.”

  “Yes. Mr. Bianchi. How long was he living with you and your family?”

  “About a year.”

  “He was abusive to your mother?”

  “Not really.”

  “Does that mean a little?”

  “It means not really. Sometimes. I don’t know.” Colin didn’t want it to appear as though he couldn’t defend his family.

  “Did he hit you?”

  “Not really. I just didn’t like him. I didn’t like him so I killed him. All right?”

  “There was no reason?” Hull appeared puzzled.

  Colin was too proud to admit to the fact that Carmine had mistreated him and his sister. He figured he’d already taken care of it by killing Carmine. What kind of man would the entire city think he was if it became known in the newspapers that he’d allowed Carmine to hurt him and his family for so many months before finally acting? It would make him look weak.

  “There was no real reason,” he told Hull.

  His lawyer grimaced. “In that case, you’re definitely not getting off easily. You’re young, but you look older, and this isn’t your first crime. I’m not sure you understand how serious this is. I’d like to put you up on the stand because I think you have a sympathetic face despite your imposing stature. But if you go into court and say you killed a man for no reason other than you felt like doing it then everyone in the room is going to despise you.” Hull sighed. “If I’m even going to try to get you a lesser charge of manslaughter, there has to have been a justifiable reason for what you did. You know what manslaughter is, right? It’s usually five to seven years—”

  “I know what it is,” Colin interrupted.

  “Your crime has to have been unintentional. Not premeditated.” He spoke as if Colin didn’t understand him, which he did. “You have to have killed him by accident, not have planned it.”

  “I did it. He beat my sister, and he was . . .” Colin was about to tell his lawyer what Carmine had really done to Maureen but he stopped himself before he could.

  “He was what? What were you going to say?” Hull’s eyes lit up.

  “He was a bastard.”

  Hull looked at Colin and shook his head. “You’re up for murder. Did you know that?”

  “I assumed it. I bet they can’t wait to fry a poor bastard like me.”

  “I’m optimistic that you’ll manage to avoid the electric chair because of your age.”

  “Maybe I’d rather be dead than rot in prison.”

  “I doubt that. And you’re only hurting yourself by not telling me anything.”

  “Where do you live, Mr. Hull?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you.”

  “Park Avenue.”

  “Of course you do.” Colin chortled.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That you rich fellows run the show. Come on, you know as well as I do that the judge is going to hit me as hard as he can regardless of what I give as my reasons for killing. I’m an immigrant living in the Bowery. They love to make an example out of guys like me.”

  “I guess I can see your reasoning.”

  “Sure it’s reasonable,” Colin said.

  “If you’re really not going to help me, and yourself, I can try to make sure you serve no more than twenty years. I think you should reconsider though—”

  “Swell. Where would I be serving? Ossining?” Colin tried to seem upbeat, but when Hull had said ‘twenty years’ he’d wanted to scream at the top of his lungs. That was more years than he was old.

  “Yes, most likely it would be there.”

  “Upstate is damn pretty. I spent time in juvenile hall there.”

  “Right. I read that in your file. Don’t curse. It doesn’t look good in court.”

  In November, Colin appeared in front of a judge at court in Manhattan. Hull had informed him the minimum he could get was ten years. The judge presiding was Charles L. Stone. Colin thought the man’s expression looked a lot like his last name.

  The prosecution team, who wanted Colin charged as an adult, seemed a little too smug to him.

  Carmine’s decaying body had been found by a homeless man in an alleyway just outside of the Bowery. Colin had confessed at the police station when he was brought in by detectives – friends of Carmine’s gave his name to them. He was surprised Uncle Rick hadn’t snitched on him. Johnny had used his car to help Colin dispose of Carmine’s body. Colin had insisted he keep Johnny out of it, and the police never knew of Johnny’s involvement. He’d spent hours cleaning up Carmine’s blood.

  Colin
confessed on the spot and said the crime was intentional. He admitted he’d had a problem with Carmine from the beginning of Carmine’s relationship with his mother, because he was angry Carmine had become his mother’s lover after his father’s death.

  He knew the more the detectives dug into the case the more details they’d find out, like the fact that Carmine had tormented him and abused Maureen. And Colin knew people would treat Maureen differently if the revelation went public and that they might even say horrible, untrue things, like she’d wanted Carmine to hurt her. He had to protect his sister, so he ‘confessed’ to the detectives immediately. He said he wanted Carmine dead, and he knew he wanted him dead. He signed a statement saying so.

  Colin sat and listened to Hull’s closing remarks. He hadn’t been asked to testify. He watched the trial as though it was a play that had nothing to do with him.

  Colin nodded at his family in the courtroom. He assumed a neighbor was watching Patrick at home. Maureen and Danny smiled at him. Their mother looked stoic as she sat there. Colin was surprised to see her. Lucille waved to him from the back row. The judge had ordered Carmine’s family to leave the courtroom for yelling at Colin and cursing him.

  “Your Honor, I ask you to be lenient,” Hull said. “My sixteen-year-old client has led a difficult life. He is an immigrant and comes from an impoverished background. His father committed suicide when he was just a young boy.”

  Colin cringed inwardly when Hull said ‘suicide’.

  “He does not have the same advantages as our own children. Therefore, I ask you to consider that it was the circumstances of the life he’s had to live, the life he was brought into, that caused him to commit this unfortunate act. He is young, and if he’s sentenced reasonably, I am positive that after his release he will have the ability and the mindset to live a decent, productive life. Yes, he needs time to rehabilitate, but not his entire life.”

  Hull had asked Colin to make a statement, but Colin had declined because he wasn’t sorry for what he’d done. Hull didn’t call any witnesses on Colin’s behalf, and even Colin knew that wasn’t good.

  Maureen had visited Colin in jail and she said she wanted him to tell the truth to save his life. But, in the end, nobody seemed interested in hearing what Carmine had really done to Maureen. That’s what life was like for poor women. No one seemed to care that Colin had killed Carmine to protect his sister from repeated abuse.

  Next came the prosecutor’s concluding remarks.

  “Your Honor, Colin O’Brien killed forty-year-old Carmine Bianchi in cold blood. We’ve heard from a bartender who said Colin O’Brien told him he ‘had no choice’. But did he really? We welcomed this immigrant into our great country, and this is how he returns our hospitality?” He spoke with outrage.

  The prosecutor pointed Colin out to the courtroom as though he was a beast to behold.

  “Mr. Bianchi led a productive life. He’d been working as a porter for one of our city’s most respected hotels for many years. That is, until Colin O’Brien decided to brutally murder him.”

  Colin could feel all eyes in the courtroom on him.

  “Although Mr. O’Brien is young, he has already been in and out of incarceration,” the prosecutor said. “Clearly the time he has served in these institutions hasn’t rehabilitated him. In fact, his delinquency is escalating, as his record shows he has gone from petty thievery and affray to now killing a man.”

  He’d stolen and fought to provide for his family, and he’d killed to save his sister. But he doubted even those reasons would be good enough for the morally upright.

  “To release this criminal back into our city’s streets too soon would be to do this good city a disservice, and it would be a great danger. This time it is the murder of one man, and then he is released in ten years; who is to say he won’t go on to kill again, and again? The defendant has never apologized for killing Mr. Bianchi. He doesn’t seem to feel any remorse for his actions.”

  He paused and stared at Colin for emphasis.

  “This is a dangerous, unrepentant individual. We must be vigilant about releasing him into the same streets the many innocent citizens of this city walk,” he continued. “He needs to pay for a long time for what he has done. We can’t willingly expose our children and our families to the danger Mr. O’Brien presents. He is a menace to all that is decent.”

  Colin was convicted of murder and sentenced to fifteen years.

  8

  The Bowery, 1956

  On Colin’s departure from prison he was given fifty dollars from the state, which he had earned from making brooms while he was serving his prison sentence. No one was waiting for him when he left.

  The war had ended while he was imprisoned, and the world around him had changed, but he hadn’t changed very much. He returned to the city and lived on cheap, warm beer and New York City hotdogs for a few days. Then he moved into a flophouse in Chinatown for a week, and lived on delicious food.

  One afternoon he returned to the Bowery and sought out his childhood home. But his family wasn’t there. There would be no welcome home party for him. They hadn’t even left his father’s old ashtray behind for him. Instead an old, hunched-over Slavic woman resided in their apartment. He guessed the place wasn’t reserved solely for the Irish anymore.

  The building’s landlord informed him he was in luck because the man who lived in the apartment above, Johnny’s old place, was relocating downstairs to his son’s apartment. And Colin could move into Johnny’s old place if he wanted to. It was also from this landlord Colin had heard about Lucille Byrne getting married years ago and moving to Long Island. Lucille was the only person who knew his secret about Uncle Rick.

  He had lost touch with the Bowery while in prison. His family hadn’t visited him. Once, early in his sentence, Maureen had visited to thank him for saving her. Patrick had been too young to come, but Colin guessed the rest of his family were either ashamed of him or too busy. Lucille had never come. He wasn’t angry with her. She had mentioned to him more than once how jails gave her the creeps since her father had died of tuberculosis in one.

  Johnny’s old apartment was available at fifteen dollars a month. Colin had spent ten of the fifty dollars at the flophouse and five on food. He put fifteen dollars down on the apartment, which now had a private bathroom, and had some left over for whatever else he would need until he found employment.

  His first night in the apartment he missed noise. The prison had been noisy with conversation, screaming, and cursing. Before that, home had been noisy with all the children when he was young and then later on with Carmine.

  It was strange how when you got on in your years, the things you once hated didn’t seem so hateful anymore. Spite for them had lessened. As had Colin’s hatred for Carmine. For the first term of his incarceration Colin thought constantly about his act of vengeance; but as the years passed his rage towards Carmine diminished. He had paid the price for his actions.

  Colin was alone with the silence in the apartment. He had heard from the landlord that Colin’s mother and Maureen and Patrick had gone to live with relatives in Wales. Colin remembered the current landlord’s father. He had been the landlord for all the years when Colin had lived there with his family before prison. He was the one who had insisted the burning candles be removed from the entranceway the evening Colin’s father’s body had been discovered. Colin had once wanted to hurt the old landlord for that. Now he thought how young and foolish his feelings seemed.

  Danny hadn’t gone to Wales. He wasn’t around the East Side, Colin was informed, or even still in the state of New York. He had been up until two years ago, but then he moved to Boston with his wife and children. Wife! Colin couldn’t believe it. Grumpy Danny had actually gotten married. It caused Colin to think about all the years he had lost while in prison.

  He didn’t know how he felt about Danny these days. He had contemplated their relationship in prison. Danny wasn’t there to help him deal with Carmine’s body. But Coli
n wasn’t ready for forgiveness just yet. Danny must have heard about Colin being released. If there was going to be an apology or reunion, Danny would have to be the one to initiate it.

  His parole officer had instructed him to find lawful work. But the only work he could find paid poorly. He didn’t want to be cleaning toilets. Many of his old friends and acquaintances were either dead or gone. Even the Dubliner had returned to Ireland. Most of the new people who had moved into the Bowery weren’t keen on hiring convicted murderers. Not even the broom factory would take him. And he was too old to begin training as a boxer, although he had the genetics for it.

  Then one night at the pub he heard of a job offer for any local who wanted it. There was no catch and no questions asked, just as long as you lived in the Bowery and were Irish. The job was for a sweeper at the small Quinn’s drugstore in the heart of the Bowery, and Colin sought it out right away. He was hired by the owner and pharmacist, the aging Seamus Quinn, who had once employed Danny. Colin swept the floors, dusted the counters, and stocked the shelves. He worked mornings and nights.

  It was there he met Tom McPhalen.

  Tom was from Galway. He had come to the Bowery late in life with his adult family, when he was sixty-one years old. His accent was still thick. Because his voice always sounded phlegmy, some poor bastard had once joked to him that ‘he must’ve put too much cream in his tea’. But it wasn’t wise to joke about Tom, and that was the last joke that man ever made.

  In Ireland Tom had been released from prison for serving a ten-year sentence for bank robbery. Two days after he was released he’d joined a friend’s gang. Then two years later he stabbed a rival gangster to death and served twenty more years in prison. He couldn’t find work in Ireland after that because his crimes were so well-known – he was branded a ‘murderer’ and a ‘gangster’, and no one wanted to hire him. So he brought his family to the United States where he had ties to the Bowery.