by Michael Mayo
I said that was a good idea, and Lansky said that if I was going to see Marinelli, I could go ahead and take something downtown for him. “You’d be doing me a little favor, that’s all,” he said. “It’s right here.”
He got up and went through a desk drawer. It only took him a few seconds to find what he was looking for and to seal something, probably money, in an envelope.
He handed it to me and said, “Give this to Marinelli. This time of night, you’ll probably find him at that chop-suey place by his office. If you can’t find him tonight, Monday is fine. Tell him it’s for this week and next. Got that? This week and next week. Make sure he repeats those words back to you. Things have been confused down there since the mayor left, and I need to be sure this is handled properly.”
He didn’t expect a receipt. Fact is, Lansky almost never wrote anything down. Anything on paper in his handwriting could come back to bite him if the wrong people got their hands on it. As they said, he kept his business under his hat.
I tucked the envelope into my pocket with the book and told him I’d see him later.
Out on the street, the Majestic doorman had a knot of people gathered at the curb. Looked like he needed more than one taxi, so I headed toward the next corner to hail one for myself.
I hadn’t got far when a car pulled up to the curb next to me. It was a big brown Olds Deluxe with four lights up front and big wooden spoke wheels. The passenger door opened. A guy in a suit stepped out and said, “Get in the car, Quinn.”
He had a little automatic in his mitt.
“Fuck off,” I explained and kept walking.
“This is about the pictures,” he said. “If you want to take care of them and collect your six hundred dollars, you’ll get in the car.”
I stopped walking.
Chapter Five
I looked the guy over. He was medium height, making him taller than me, and built thick and solid. His hat shadowed his face, so I couldn’t make out his features. I didn’t know what was happening, but sure as hell I wasn’t going for a ride with anybody.
I thought about where we were and what was close and said, “If you want your six grand, you’ll put the piece away and meet me there.” I pointed with my stick to a place a couple of storefronts down the cross street. He stood still, unsure what to do, then turned back to the car, looking for help. I walked away before they said anything more.
Light from the place, a diner called Allen’s Lunch Room, spread across the sidewalk. I didn’t look back, though I wanted to. Didn’t matter how close the Oldsmobile was.
Allen’s Lunch Room had big windows to the street, shiny tile walls, a counter down one side and booths down the other. Inside, there were less than half a dozen guys and a couple of countermen in white jackets. I slid into a booth near the front where I could watch the door. One of the countermen came over. I ordered black coffee and cherry pie while I waited and worried over the fact that somebody had been following me.
What the hell? How did these guys, whoever they were, know what I was about? My first thought was that one of the lawyers or somebody in the RKO office was in on it. Or maybe these guys just watched the Pierre Hotel. When Miss Wray left, in a big hired car no doubt, they followed her to my place. If they knew who I was and what I did, it wouldn’t be hard to figure out the rest, including my ten percent. Then they tailed me. But none of that mattered, because I shouldn’t have been there in that diner, not with Lansky’s money in my pocket. I was ready to get up when the guy from the car sat down facing me.
Close up, in brighter light, I saw that he was younger than me with messy fair hair and an acne-scarred mug. His jacket elbows were shiny, his shirt cuffs were frayed, and his hat looked like it had been run over by a bus. He stared hungrily at my pie when the counterman brought it, and he ordered coffee for himself. A second guy got in the booth and shoved him toward the wall. I’d never seen either of them before.
The second guy was bigger, older, and horsefaced. His wrinkled suit had seen the same hard wear, and he stank of cigarette smoke. His tobacco pouch and papers were in his breast pocket. He had a whispery voice and a dead-eyed stare meant to frighten me. You knew right off, just by looking at him, that this guy liked to hurt people. He said, “You’re Quinn, right? The go-between? You’re gonna make sure we get our money.”
I ate my pie. It was pretty good. The coffee wasn’t, and it was too hot. “They haven’t decided what they’re going to do,” I said. “The RKO lawyers. She wants them to pay. They don’t.”
The younger one loaded up his coffee with cream and sugar cubes until the cup almost overflowed. He slurped it down and added more. The older guy reached across him and grabbed the bowl of sugar cubes and put it down in front of himself where he could dip into it. He put a cube between his yellow front teeth and whispered around it, “Yeah, well, you better see that they say yes. We’ll make contact again tomorrow. No funny business with the payoff. It’s simple. We want it in ones, twos, and fives. No twenties, they’re too hard to break.”
“Yeah, no twenties. That’s what you’ll do if you know what’s good for you,” the younger one said, his eyes bright at the thought of so much money. He reached across for another sugar cube and the older guy brought a hand up fast, like he was going to backhand him. The kid cringed and flinched away and brought up an arm to shield himself. The sight of him doing that brought up somebody I hadn’t thought about for a long time, Oh Boy Oliver. Oh Boy grew up in the same building with me. His old man was nice enough most of the time, but whenever he got loaded, he’d backhand Oh Boy just like that and Oh Boy would jerk back with the same flinch. It made me mad when I was a kid and it still did.
The older one said, “Be in her hotel at 6:00. We’ll call.”
“You’re missing a trick,” I said and waited. I had no idea what I was talking about, but their showing up like that and thinking about Oh Boy had put me off balance and I wanted to do something, even something small, to do the same to them.
It seemed to surprise them that I said anything. The younger one glanced over at the older guy. The older guy stared at me. Finally, he said, “What are you talking about, missing a trick?”
“You should have some of this pie. It’s pretty good.”
He said, “Don’t get smart with me, asshole.” He was loud enough that the countermen and the other customers looked at us.
“I’m not getting smart. I’m recommending the cherry pie. It’s good. I mean it.”
The first one believed me. He wanted a piece of pie. The older guy got more pissed and growled, “The bitch will be ruined if those pictures get out. People know she’s a common whore, she’s finished.”
“Yeah, finished, they’ll lock her the fuck up,” the younger one said, and they both sniggered. He went on, “You make goddamn sure they know we’re serious. We don’t get our money, we’ll plaster the whole fucking city with those pictures. We got a hunnert of them, you tell ’em that.”
The older guy sucked on another sugar cube. “She’ll get what’s coming to her, all right. They always do. We know what we’re doing.”
I thought, Damn, these dopes really do believe it’s Miss Wray in the pictures. They’re just as dumb as they look. Best leave it at that. But were they just idiots or did they believe what somebody told them? It was also interesting that they didn’t care that I could identify them, but then if they knew who I was, they knew I wouldn’t go to the cops. Still, it’s hard to predict what stupid guys are going to do, so I slipped my knucks onto my right hand.
When the counterman came back with the coffeepot, I gave him a quarter. I told the two guys not to worry, I’d tell the lawyers exactly what they told me.
The older one twisted around in the booth and grabbed my forearm as I stood up and went past. “Don’t fuck this up. We mean business.” He gave me another cold-eyed stare and smiled. “They don’t fork it over, you’re in the shit.”
He whipped a steel sap out of his coat pocket and snapped it at my
knee, the good one. He was too close and too fast for me to dodge it, but my stick was beside my leg and that’s what he hit. It still hurt like hell and pissed me off, so I threw my coffee in his face, and gave him a quick shot to the ear with the knucks. The younger one looked like he was trying to go for the automatic, but he was jammed against the wall.
One of the countermen yelled something. I said it was okay and we needed somebody with a mop.
Then I leaned close where only the older guy could hear me and said, “Listen, you dumb fuck, you want to rough up the go-between, you do it after you’ve got the money.”
I stepped back from the booth. Everybody else in the place was staring at us. Both countermen were hurrying toward us. I pocketed the knucks, held up a hand, and said, “It’s all right.”
The older guy had sugar and coffee all over his face and a trickle of blood from his split ear.
I peeled a buck off my money roll and dropped it on the table. “Here,” I said to the countermen, “Give that one a piece of that cherry pie. It’s really good. And some coffee for this one.”
Out on the sidewalk, I turned back toward the lights of Central Park West. I hadn’t gone far when I saw the big Olds parked on the other side of the street. I stopped in a shadow and waited. A few minutes later, the two idiots came out of Allen’s and jaywalked across the street. The kid was stuffing pie into his face as he hurried behind the older guy.
When they reached the other side of the street, the back door of the Olds opened and a third man got out. All I could make out was a dark shape and the orange glow of a lighted cigarette. At first, it looked to be in his mouth, but as the two guys talked, he took it out and waved it around. I could hear voices but couldn’t understand any words. They stood there in the street for about a minute. For all I could tell, he might have been reaming them out or telling them that they did a hell of a job.
The three of them got into the backseat, and the big car headed uptown. I went back to Central Park West and caught a cab down to Mulberry Street.
That late, Marinelli wasn’t in his office or the chop-suey joint Lansky had mentioned. I knew there was an Italian place he favored over on Broome Street, but there was another beanery where Marinelli might be found, Celano’s on Kenmare, and it was closer. Bingo.
I spotted him at a table with two other guys. When he saw me, he motioned for them to leave. I checked my coat and hat and made my way across the big, noisy, smoky place. But the noise was different. It didn’t have the same slaphappy energy that you felt a few years before when they were making a lot of money. Now, everybody knew that the reformers were on the way, and they were trying to figure out how to stay out of sight and still turn a buck.
Marinelli was a big guy with the easy offhand gab of a seasoned pol. His father had worked as a translator for the newly arrived paisans, so early on, Al learned how to make himself useful. He started out as a port warden and alderman. Eventually, he was in charge of the inspectors who counted votes in city elections, and he had a hand in choosing people who sat on grand juries. A very useful guy indeed. When Charlie Luciano was looking for a fellow wop to keep an eye on things in Tammany Hall, he chose “Uncle” Al to work among the micks. He was my regular contact when I was handling business for Charlie and Lansky.
Marinelli was sitting behind the remains of what had been a good-size porterhouse. I looked at it and thought that was what I should’ve been doing—slicing into a steak upstairs from my place in the Cruzon Grill, and if things were even a little bit slow, I’d tell Connie to take the evening off and join me, and that made me think about whatever had Connie in such a lather. What the hell was I going to do with her?
Marinelli finished the chunk he was chewing, cut another, and said, “What are you doing here? Didn’t expect you until next week.” He spoke with the low murmuring voice that he used when he was talking in private. Guys at the next table couldn’t make out a single word.
“Yeah, I know,” I said as I sat and slipped him the envelope under the table, “but some other business came up and I had to see Lansky tonight. This is for this week and next, got that?”
He grunted and tugged at the envelope. I held on to it. “Got that?”
He frowned as he chewed. “Yeah, I got it. Two weeks,” he said, palming the envelope.
I felt the weight of responsibility float away. Maybe the abrupt change in routine had got to me more than I understood, and it felt terrific to be rid of the thing. You see, in all the years I’d been doing this work, I never missed a meeting. Sure, a lot of lines got crossed and somebody didn’t show up where I expected him to be, and sometimes other guys tried to hijack me and I was late, but in the end, I always delivered. Always. It would be a hell of a time to ruin my record.
He washed his steak down with a gulp of dago red.
I said, “This other business I mentioned, you might know something about it.”
“Yeah, how’s that?”
“Suppose a guy came across a stash of dirty books, ‘art’ picture books, real good ‘art’ picture books, who would he talk to about unloading them? Carlo?”
You see, after we knocked off Maranzano and Charlie took over, he handed over his peepshows and pinball machines to Carlo Gambino. He kept the slots for himself.
“How many books?” Marinelli asked.
“Can’t say. I’ve only seen one and been told there’s more, but who knows? It’s not my racket. Before I do anything, I gotta be sure I’m not horning in on somebody else’s territory. Is anybody else peddling stuff like that?”
He chewed and thought and shook his head. He allowed that you could find some higher-quality stuff, real hardback books and the like, in some stationery stores, but nobody was making payments to him to make sure the cops left them alone. The truth was, he said, that the market just wasn’t that big or profitable. I said he was probably right. The whole business didn’t smell right.
He pushed his plate away. “It’s not really your line of work anyway. I hear you’re going legit.”
“I’m trying to, but they’re sure as hell making it rough on me.”
“I know. It’s a hell of a thing. Now I’ve got this prick LaGuardia breathing down my neck. He gets in office, who knows what the fuck will happen.”
Uncle Al looked around the big room at all the guys who were trying to figure out what was going on and if they were making a living today, would they still be able to do it tomorrow. He leaned across the table and for the first time, his voice got louder and guys at the next tables turned to listen. “It started with that goddamn Roosevelt and now the fucking reformers are crawling out of the woodwork. A hell of a thing, just a hell of a thing. I mean, think about it, what did we do wrong? Nothing. We gave the people what they wanted. They voted the right way and we made jobs for them and their kids. Yeah, we took our cut, but fair’s fair, right? Isn’t that what made this fucking city great?”
“It was just too good to last,” I said, and he nodded his head.
Chapter Six
I collected my hat and coat and went out to Mulberry Street to hail a cab. My first thought was to follow my original plan and look for Charlie at Polly Adler’s new place. But the meeting with the two dumb-ass blackmailers—and their cigarette-smoking boss, if that’s who he was—made me think that it might be a better idea to stop by my place and pick up a .38. But, thinking they were done with me for the night, I changed my mind. When the taxi pulled over, I told him to take me to Polly’s address on Fifty-Fifth and to let me know if he noticed anybody following us.
He asked if I wanted him to shake them and I said, no, that wasn’t important. I just wanted to know if anybody was interested. Nobody was. The cabbie was disappointed.
For a time, Polly had probably been the most famous madam in the city, and that’s saying something. She had strong competition. But I knew her before then. Hell, I knew her before she was Polly Adler. I couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven at the time. She was older. Here’s how it happened.
When I first met her, she was Pearl Davis. I don’t think Davis was her real last name, but everybody called her Pearl. She was an immigrant from Russia. She wasn’t the prettiest girl you ever saw, but she was funny and curious and she was always in the middle of things. She was also busty and short. Truth is, at four-foot-eleven, she was one of the few women I’ve ever known that I could honestly say, “I towered over her.”
Anyhow, she had been working as a seamstress at a dress factory when her foreman took a shine to her and asked her out. The first time they were alone together, he made a pass and she said no. Then he knocked her out and he knocked her up, and when she told him about it, the bastard fired her.
She dug up the money to take care of her immediate problem but had a hard time finding another job, and she spent about a year living hand to mouth in a ten-dollar-a-month mouse hole down on Second Avenue. I guess it was worse for more people in the Depression, but Pearl’s year of being broke came at a time when it seemed to her like everybody else was flush with cash and that made it damned hard to take.
Now, the night she told me most of this was several years later. We had been drinking and she probably said more than she meant to. I listened a lot.
For her, the bad times ended in January, 1920, when a friend took her to meet a dress manufacturer who lived up on Riverside Drive. She said the place where he lived with his family was maybe the nicest apartment she’d ever seen. He didn’t have any work for her, but while she was visiting his place, she met one of his acquaintances, Kitty Robinson, a tall, blue-eyed blonde about Pearl’s age. Kitty was an actress and singer who’d just arrived in town from Chicago and had already landed a part in a new Broadway revue that was about to start rehearsals.
Kitty and Pearl hit it off, and before long, she was inviting Pearl over to her place, which was every bit as high-toned as the dress manufacturer’s, nine rooms done to the nines. Better yet, Kitty palled around with all the beautiful, witty show business people. The two girls got along so well that Kitty invited Pearl to move in and keep her company until her mother arrived from Chicago in a few months. Pearl took her up on it and thought it was all pretty terrific until she got to know Kitty better.