Jimmy and Fay

by Michael Mayo

  Even the lettering of the captions was crisp and sharp at the edges, and the words were framed by an elaborate angled design at the corners. When I looked at that part more closely, I noticed the letters AOS were repeated in the design, the kind you used to see in silent movie intertitle cards. Remember, talking pictures had only been around for a few years then. For me, they were still almost a novelty because I’d been going to nickelodeons ever since I was tall enough to put a coin on the counter or could sneak in the back.

  Yeah, moving pictures caught me when I was a kid and they never let go.

  And sitting at my desk, it came to me that some of the photos in the book could have been lobby cards for real Hollywood pictures. Lobby cards weren’t nearly as sexy, but the quality was the same.

  It figured that the first thing to do was to ask the guys I knew to see if any of them had a hand in it. I knew where to start.

  I was getting ready to go out when Connie came in. She told me that Frenchy was running short on beer. “He’s tapping a new keg now but wants to know if we should order more for the weekend. He’s counting on a big crowd Saturday afternoon because he’s been telling everyone that we’ll have the inauguration on the radio.”

  “Yeah, we should be ready,” I said and then explained about the blackmail attempt, if that’s what you called it, on Miss Wray and what the studio lawyers wanted to do about it. At first, she was interested, but it didn’t take long for her to cross her arms across her chest and give me the cold look I’d been seeing so much lately.

  I thought she’d snapped out of it when I took her to the moving picture, but that was just about the only time she was like her normal self and it didn’t last. The rest of the time lately she tried to act like there was nothing but business between us. “Yes, sir,” she’d say. “No, sir,” she’d say. “Where do we store these new glasses?” she’d say.

  Sure, Connie worked for me, but there was a lot more to it than that. We’d been keeping each other company for some time. She considered herself to be a “good girl” and we’d had several long discussions about that and I thought we were getting a lot friendlier. You see, a few months earlier, six months to be exact, I got caught up in some dicey business involving a girl I used to know, a bunch of Nazi bastards and four crates full of money. Before all that, Connie lived in a nice hotel for women that Marie Therese had arranged. But one morning as this business was warming up, Connie happened to be waiting for me in my room at the Chelsea when some guys broke in and three of them got themselves killed. In the confusion of the moment, and to keep her out of it, I got Connie another room in the hotel. It was supposed to be for a few hours until the cops left. But then, somehow, without anybody saying anything or making a decision about it, she wound up living there. A few at a time, her clothes and things found their way to the fifth floor of the Chelsea. The hotel was closer to the speak than the women’s place, and it just felt better for her to be there upstairs. And, yes, I was footing the bill.

  For a while, it was pretty terrific. Even though neither one of us ever spent the whole night in the other’s room, we got more comfortable with each other. Not as comfortable as I might have liked, but I can honestly say that I wasn’t in a hurry and tried not to pressure her. Things were warming up nicely until about a week ago when she slammed the door, so to speak.

  That night in my office, I got fed up and asked her straight out. “What is it?” I said. “Why are you acting this way?”

  “I don’t know what you could be talking about,” she said and turned for the door.

  “No, Connie, come on, I’m serious. What’s going on?”

  Then she cocked her head and gave me that big-eyed look that said I should know what was going on without her having to tell me.

  We stared at each other until I said, “All right. I give up. I guess you’ll tell me when you’re ready. I’m going out now. I may be able to get a line on this business for Miss Wray. If you or Frenchy need me for anything, you can reach me at Polly Adler’s place at the Majestic. Frenchy’s got the number.”

  At the mention of Polly’s name, Connie’s eyes narrowed and I swear I saw a little steam rising from her ears. She swore, “Goddammit, Jimmy Quinn—”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, cutting her off. “It’s not that. If it was that, do you think I’d be telling you about it? No, this is for Miss Wray.”

  Polly’s place was such a high-toned establishment that nobody even called it a bordello, let alone a whorehouse. It was just Polly’s.

  Then I had another idea and said, “Do you think I’m two-timing you? Is that’s what’s been bothering you?”

  Her eyebrows popped up and she raised her hands like she was asking for guidance in dealing with such an ignoramus. I’d seen Marie Therese do exactly the same thing with Frenchy a hundred times.

  On her way out, she said, “I’m sure I don’t care who you spend your time with.”

  I checked my money roll and my knucks and slipped the picture book back into my breast pocket with my notebook. I didn’t even think about getting the .38 out of the safe.

  Frenchy and Arch Malloy were working behind the bar. I told them I’d be back in a couple of hours.

  Chapter Four

  I caught a cab and told him to take me to the Majestic Towers on West Seventy-Fifth Street. It was around 9:00. I thought this was going to be one of those two-bird situations. Polly Adler had a huge apartment at the Majestic Towers. That time on a Thursday night, there was a fair chance you’d find Charlie there. If anybody local was peddling the pictures, Charlie probably knew who he was. Or Polly. Like I said, the book wasn’t anything like the cheap junk they sold out of the back rooms of the peep shows and burlesque joints. It was meant for the carriage trade, and that was Polly’s clientele.

  The cabbie let me out at the corner on Broadway near the apartment building and the awning over the sidewalk. The doorman was a guy name of Orlendorfer. He wore a gray topper and a bright red coat with gold buttons. Considering the getups that a lot of doormen had to wear, his wasn’t bad and it looked warm.

  “Hello, Jimmy,” he said as I approached. “I’ll bet you’re here to see Polly. Guess you hadn’t heard.”

  “She moved again,” I said.

  “About three months ago to the East Side. I got her cards. Just a second,” he said and went inside.

  I buttoned my topcoat against the cold, and by the time Olly got back, I wished that I’d thought to bring gloves. He gave me a card with a phone number and a picture of a red parrot.

  “She’s at Madison and Fifty-Fifth,” he said. “Dropped by a couple of weeks ago and gave me some cards to give to the guys and girls who hadn’t got the word. Said she was just about ready to open up again.”

  He sidled a half step closer and lowered his voice. “If you’re heading her way, you might want something to give you a boost,” he said and produced a little glassine envelope of cocaine from his coat pocket.

  I said no thanks and slipped him a buck. He asked if I wanted him to hail a cab and I said no again. I had another stop to make before I saw Polly and headed east toward the park.

  Meyer Lansky lived a few blocks away on West Seventy-Second and Central Park West. His place was called the Majestic. Yeah, I was walking from the Majestic Towers to the Majestic. It could be confusing. Lansky lived in the Majestic when he was in town. His son Buddy was three years old, and he had cerebral palsy. Getting the right medical help for the kid had pretty much taken over Lansky’s life. Since the business with Masseria and Maranzano, he and his wife had been going from one specialist to another. The best man they found was in Boston, and Lansky bought an apartment there close to the hospital. But if he was in the city, I wanted to ask him about the dirty pictures. Now, don’t get me wrong. I never heard of him being involved with any business like that. Booze and gambling took up all of his time, and lately the gambling was more important. Still, he liked to know what was going on. He didn’t move to the Upper West Side by being ignoran
t.

  The guy working the desk in the lobby of the Majestic called Lansky’s apartment and told me to go on up to the third floor. The place was classy and really big with lots of rooms. I’d been there before and knew that in the sitting room in the daylight, you looked right down into the trees in the park. I guess it was the biggest and fanciest part of the place, and that’s where Lansky met me, but he spent most of his time in the library. I envied that room and he knew it.

  That night, his tie was loose, his vest was unbuttoned, and his cuffs were turned up. I tossed my overcoat on the back of the sofa and we went into his library. It had beautiful wooden bookshelves on most of the walls, all crammed full, and I knew he’d read most of the books. He also had a fireplace, a big desk, a couple of comfortable armchairs, and a good floor lamp. I told myself that if I was ever able to move up from the Chelsea, I’d have a library like that.

  I saw three stacks of paper on his desk, and I could tell by the letterheads that it was correspondence with doctors in California, Chicago, and Austria. Without asking, Lansky poured a couple of good brandies, the same Delamain that he sold to me, and we toasted nothing in particular. We sat and I apologized for interrupting his evening.

  “You’re not interrupting anything,” he said, sounding tired. “I’m just trying to make sure that I’m doing the right thing. It’s damn difficult when the doctors disagree with each other. You trust the ones who seem to make the most sense, but what do you know? Anna and Paul are in Boston with Buddy. I’m going back tomorrow.” Paul was his younger son. “What brings you up here?”

  I didn’t know exactly how to explain what I was doing so I asked him if he knew anything about King Kong. He shook his head and smiled like he thought the words were funny. I guess they were.

  “Well,” I said, “it’s a moving picture, a really expensive moving picture about this giant ape who falls for this blonde and they come to New York—”

  “Wait a minute, what’re you talking? A giant ape falls for a blonde? That’s nuts.”

  “I know but while you’re watching it, it makes sense, and here’s the important part. The actress who plays the blonde is this girl named Fay Wray. Picture opened this morning at Radio City Music Hall and she was there to introduce it. When she gets back to her hotel, she finds that somebody has put together a dirty book that looks like it was based on the movie with pictures, photographs of a blonde that looks just like her, but she’s mostly naked. Guys who sent the book say they want six Gs from the studio or they’ll give copies to the newspapers and gossip columnists.”

  “But it’s not this girl?” he asked.

  “No, but it’ll embarrass her, so she wants the studio to keep it quiet, even if they have to pay up.”

  He frowned. “That still doesn’t make any sense. Have you seen the book?”

  I passed it across to him. Still frowning, he thumbed quickly through the pages and handed it back.

  “I still don’t get it. What has it got to do with you?”

  I said, “Some big cheese at the studio got in touch with some big cheese at the police department and asked for help from a cop, somebody who’d keep this mum and look out for their interests. They got Ellis, the detective, you know who I mean, big guy, dresses sharp. That guy. He set up a meeting at my place and said I should be the go-between because of my vast experience in delivering money.”

  Lansky nodded. He saw the sense in that.

  “But before I do anything,” I said, “I want to know if Charlie or Ben or any of your guys are in on this. If they are, we can settle this tonight. I’ll tell the studio guys to pony up and they will.”

  Lansky thought and shook his head. “Not that I know of. Nobody in our outfit has said anything, but Charlie might know something I don’t.”

  “Where would I find him?” I asked, knowing the answer.

  “Polly’s, this time of night. You know she moved, right?”

  I nodded.

  “I haven’t seen much of Charlie lately. He’s talking about cutting himself in on the hookers and whorehouses once Prohibition is over. It’s a stupid idea. . . . Like, say, the numbers, too much work with too many people getting a piece for not enough money. He oughta find something else.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Casinos and carpet joints. The profits aren’t as good as booze, but they’re steadier, and if you run a good efficient operation, you can’t lose. We do fine at the Piping Rock in Sarasota Springs. We can do the same in other places. Simply a matter of finding the right locations and the right men in office. I’ve got some things in mind. When you’re ready to leave the city, let me know. There’s always room for you.”

  I said thanks and I’d think about it, but the truth was that the idea of leaving New York scared the hell out of me. Still does, really.

  He went on, “Right now, with the bills for Buddy’s treatment, I can’t afford to spend time on something that isn’t likely to pay off any time soon. Casinos are steady.”

  Lansky was right. It brought me up short when I realized that I was worrying over dirty pictures involving a guy in a gorilla suit while he was figuring out how to help an ailing son. If I’d thought about that more seriously, it would have put things in perspective. He settled back in the chair and sipped the good cognac. “It’s not like it was. The easy money days are past us. Do you remember that night with A. R. in the Park Central when he talked about what Prohibition was going to be? Hell, you were just a little kid then.”

  “I may have been a kid, but I remember it. I thought he’d gone nuts. Close down the saloons? Crazy.”

  Lansky said, “I knew he was right in what he was saying, but I didn’t know how easy it was going to be. All you needed was to get your guys in the right places at the right times and shoot the hell out of any guys who got in your way. You just needed cars and trucks and guns.”

  “No,” I said. “There were a lot of guys with cars and trucks and guns. We were smarter.”

  He shrugged it off.

  I went on. “Smart enough to buy off the right people.”

  He nodded and maybe even smiled a little. “But it was a young man’s game then, and besides, it’s over. Once they got rid of the mayor, the jig was up.” He shook his head. “Fucking greedy vice cops.”

  He was talking about Jimmy Walker, who’d been cashiered six months before. That was Roosevelt’s doing when he was governor of the state. I guess you could say that it went back to the Committee of Fourteen and the Society for the Prevention of Vice and the Wilcox Foundation for Wayward Girls and finally the Seabury Commission. All of them were outfits that tried to reform New York. They got started back when I was a kid and sex was for sale just about everywhere you turned in my neighborhood. These guys did their damnedest to get rid of it. That was impossible as long as the Tammany boys were in charge of the Magistrate’s Court and the vice cops. You see, being a vice cop wasn’t like being a real cop. Vice was a patronage job, one of the best.

  Between the court and the cops, those guys had a hell of a racket. Being a vice cop gave you all the quiff you could handle, and a license to steal. Say a vice cop busted a hooker or a madam and her girls. First thing, he sent them down to the Magistrate’s Court at the Jefferson Street Market where every one of the judges, lawyers, bail bondsmen, and jailers were in on the deal. Most of the women knew how the system worked. They spent a few hours down in that grim pile of Victorian brick and paid their money to everybody who had a hand out. If they’d shelled out enough, they were declared not guilty and went back to work a few hours later.

  But the goddamn vice cops got greedy and started framing women who weren’t in the business. They went after single women—landladies and nurses mostly—whose work put them in situations where they were alone with men. The cops and their stoolies would say that they were propositioned, and then they hauled the gals down to the Magistrate’s.

  I guess most New Yorkers didn’t get too upset when the bulls were shaking down fallen women. Bu
t once word got out about how they were screwing over widows and Florence Nightingale, people took it seriously. And that’s exactly what the Seabury Commission did. For months, it was all you saw in the papers. Then the Commission Report really stuck it to the mayor, and the governor made it clear that if he didn’t resign, he’d be kicked out.

  Mayor Walker and his girlfriend decided it was a good time to visit Europe. The rest of the Tammany mob shut up and kept their heads down.

  Truth is, I got along well enough with most cops, but that was easy for me to say. I mean, as long as I was running a respectable speak, they were happy enough to leave me to my business and to accept a free drink from time to time. I made sure that the patrolmen who worked my block got a little something extra every week. If there was an honest upright police officer who believed in enforcing every letter of every law, well, I never met him. Sure, there was the occasional cop who’d take your money and turn on you as soon as it suited him. Those you had to deal with.

  But I had no respect for the goddamn vice cops, and I didn’t know anybody who did, and that included their brother officers.

  Lansky said, “You know with this book, you ought to check it with Al Marinelli.”

  “Why?” I asked. Al Marinelli was what you might call the accountant for Tammany. If you were paying off any of their guys, the money went through Al. He and I had been associates for a long time.

  “Look, chances are that whoever put this book together is also working with the dirty books you find in Times Square,” Lansky said. “So somebody’s making sure the cops leave them alone, and it’s not coming cheap, considering how the monsignor gets so tight-assed about ‘art magazines.’ Marinelli could tell you who that is.”