by Michael Mayo
“When John was ready to come back, I had the hotel hire the very best car they could find, not just a limousine but a Rolls-Royce, mind you. I wanted him to return in style. But do you know what he said when he saw the car?”
She paused, and I could tell that Hazel knew what was coming. “He said there were scratches on the door. Scratches. On one door. They ruined everything for him. Why hadn’t I noticed that and demanded that they bring around another car? He sulked all the way back to the city.”
She held out her glass and Hazel refilled it. “I couldn’t believe it then and I can’t believe it now. I know I shouldn’t let it upset me, but it does.”
Hazel put a hand on her shoulder. “Fay, don’t do this to yourself.” It didn’t work.
“That’s what happened over a few little scratches on a car that wasn’t even his. You can imagine how he would react to those pictures! And I know something else about them.”
By then she was swaying a little on the sofa. “The girl in the pictures, that’s the girl he really wants. She’s the girl he wants me to be.”
Hazel said, “Now, Fay,” and Miss Wray ignored her.
“Right after we were married, John said that he had the three things he’d always wanted. He was famous, he was rich, and he was married to a beautiful actress. But I’ve seen how he acts with other women, the ones he’s attracted to, and they’re all the same with their well-stuffed brassieres, the way he drools over them. That’s what he wants me to be.”
What she said squared with my memories of the man. Right then, I think, everything that had happened over the last two days caught up with her and the first tears came. Hazel put her arms around her.
I let myself out.
Chapter Sixteen
In the cab on the way back to the speak, I tried to figure out how everything I’d learned that day fit together, and I did a damn poor job of it.
For a while, I tried to put this Oscar Apollinaire character at the center. But I didn’t know enough about him. It made sense that the picture book was promotional material for a real movie that he was planning to show at “very private screenings.” That’s what he told Daphne. But why would he use the book to put the screws to RKO for six grand? Simple, he wouldn’t. Even if Apollinaire made the book, it didn’t necessarily figure that he was involved with the extortion. Unless he had split from his “silent partner,” Peter Wilcox.
Okay, so who was the guy who killed the goat? Not Peter Wilcox. The guy I saw was too young to be Wilcox. And if Arch was right, Wilcox was in Washington for the inauguration. And if Peter Wilcox felt the urge to slaughter a goat, he’d do it someplace else. That guy hated Peter Wilcox. Could he be Wilcox’s younger brother? His twin, even his evil twin? Damn, that was a screwy thought, but why the hell not? Everything else about this was screwy. And one other thing I knew, whoever this guy was, he didn’t have much trouble getting into Peter Wilcox’s foundation office and his house. And maybe I know something else, I thought. He needs money.
But there was no reason to keep worrying over that. This was the guy who threatened to make the pictures public, and he clued Saxon Dunbar in on them, and now Dunbar wasn’t interested, and the guy had been paid off. So, I figured that part was over for now. It was time to find Oscar Apollinaire and hear what he had to say. I hoped I wouldn’t have to go far. It was late and I was getting tired.
It was a little after two Saturday morning when I got back to the speak. Things had slowed down by then. I went to the end of the bar and motioned Connie over. She gave me a look and said something to Arch. He was standing next to her and took his time walking over to me. Connie turned around and talked to Marie Therese. I started to get steamed all over again but forced myself to calm down and thought, why the hell not? Why shouldn’t Connie be as screwy as everything else today?
Arch gave that little shrug that said Women. What’re you gonna do? “Good evening, sir, I’ve been considering what you asked when you called, and I’m almost certain that I’d know if Peter Wilcox had a brother, but I cannot say with perfect certainty. I know a bit, but I’ve not made a study of the man and his family.”
“It’s all right,” I said, “but if you could find out more by tomorrow, I’ll put something extra in your pay envelope. I need to know about cousins, any close relatives, I guess, and his deceased wife.”
“I don’t have the particulars at hand, but if you could tell me why you need this research, I might be able to expend my efforts more efficiently.”
“I wish I could, Arch. Oh, yeah, and there’s something else. What does it mean when you sacrifice a goat? I mean, why would somebody do that?”
That got his interest. His eyebrows popped up, and his mustache bristled at the question.
“And one more thing, I know Connie’s still pissed at me, but tell her—no, ask her—to call up to the kitchen and have them make a couple of sandwiches and coffee for us and bring them to my office. I gotta talk to her.”
Arch said, “Go for the roast beef if there’s any left. It was a little dry but very tasty.”
“I had the steak a few hours ago.”
“Then stick with the cheese.”
“Done,” I said and went upstairs to my office.
When Connie bumped open the door with her hip a few minutes later, she had a tray with one sandwich and one cup of coffee. She set the tray on my desk and said, “You wanted to see me?”
“No, I need to talk to you.” I picked up half the cheese sandwich and dug in. “I didn’t have time to tell you this earlier, but you should know what went on today.”
She pulled up the chair and sat close to listen.
I told her about it all, including the business with the goat, which didn’t bother her as much as I thought it would since she saw a lot of that being raised on a farm in California. I finished up with the guy on Fifth Avenue and how he said he was going to kill his brother.
Connie thought about that while she finished off the sandwich and the coffee. Then she said, “That’s the craziest story I ever heard. We’ve got to talk to this Oscar Apollinaire. You said he may live in the Chelsea, right?”
In the elevator, Nelson said, “Hi, Connie. Apollinaire? Yeah, he’s on six, in 624, I think.”
It was about 3:30 in the morning then. We’d left Frenchy, Marie Therese, and Malloy to close up and gone back to the Chelsea.
Connie said, “What’s he like?”
Nelson closed the doors. “Odd fellow. Sports a fez and fancy waistcoats. Keeps even more irregular hours than you two.”
I asked if Apollinaire was in, and Nelson said he had gone up about an hour ago.
Then Nelson asked which floor. Usually we both got off on five, Connie’s floor, and then I’d take the stairs down to three later. From time to time, we’d both get off at three, but that hadn’t happened for a few weeks.
Connie said, “Five, please, Nelson. I need to freshen up.”
That made me think that maybe she’d want to change clothes and I could help her with that, but, no. As soon as I took my topcoat off, she went into the bathroom. After a time and without my assistance, she did up her hair and put on a very nice white silk blouse.
I told her she looked terrific. She smiled and nodded and didn’t say anything else. We took the center stairs up to the sixth floor and went down the hall to 624. I could hear dance music from a phonograph through the door. I rapped on the door with my stick and we waited. Connie was so jazzed and curious, she grabbed my arm tight and bounced on tiptoes. I kept the other hand in my coat pocket with the .38.
The girl who answered the door was not what I expected. She was young and dark and tall and slender. She wore gauzy harem pants and an unbuttoned gold lamé vest with nothing underneath either of them. She had a silver chain with jangly coins around her hips and silver rings on her toes. The thick smell of hashish explained her dark pupils and pleasant smile.
She said hello in a dopey kind of voice, and I said we were looking for Oscar Apollinaire.
Her brow wrinkled for a second, then she smiled and twisted around, saying, “Baby, there’s some people here to see you.”
When she turned, the vest swung open. Connie frowned and blushed and looked down.
A man’s voice came from another room. “Who is it, Honeybunch?”
Without answering, she strolled away from us and we could see the room. At first, all I could make out were the bright colors, orange, red, and yellow, in the flickering light. I thought it was from a fireplace like the one I’d just seen in the grand library, but this came from an electric fixture with a revolving colored shade. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that the room looked like the inside of an Arab tent, a Hollywood Arab tent with big pieces of silk hanging from the ceiling and the floor covered with carpets and cushions.
Honeybunch said over her shoulder, “Entrez vous, and please take off your shoes.”
Connie and I entrezed. She took off her shoes. I didn’t.
As Honeybunch settled on a pillow and picked up her hash pipe, a man came in from the back. “Who is it?” he repeated, sounding suspicious and worried. He was bald and brown from the sun with a thick black Vandyke. Dress slacks, suspenders, and a starched white shirt. No shoes, no tie.
He took a long slow look at Connie before he turned to me. Then he said, “Jimmy Quinn, long time, no see,” and held out a hand. I almost recognized the voice.
When he smiled, I saw the gap between his front teeth and remembered him.
“Well, I’ll be damned. Bobby Colodny.”
Chapter Seventeen
The first time I met Bobby Colodny, I couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven. I can’t remember what I was doing that morning over on the west side near Tenth Avenue, and it’s not important anyway. They still called Tenth “Death Avenue” around there, not because it was such a tough neighborhood but because there was a freight train that ran on street-level tracks. It went real slow, but kids goofed around and ran in front of it, and a few years before, one of them had slipped and the wheels cut off his head. So I was careful around there. But I wasn’t prepared when I went around a corner and found a horse standing across the sidewalk in front of me.
There was a boy on its back, turned out to be Bobby. He yelled out in a loud voice, “Hey, kid, this is the Dummy Boys’ street, and if you want to walk on it, you pay us a nickel.” A bunch of kids behind him yelled at me to get the hell out of there.
Now, I don’t know if they were real Dummy Boys. Yeah, the Dummy Boys were a gang that rode horses, but a lot of people had horses then. You saw about as many of them as cars on the streets.
Anyway, I was so surprised I stepped back, and I think they expected me to run away. But I didn’t. I figured, Okay, it’s his street and I need to use it. I’ll give him five cents.
So I dug a fistful of pennies out of my pocket, counted out five, and held them up to him. He reached down, kind of surprised, and I went around the horse. The guys behind him didn’t know what to do and just stood there as I hurried through them. I was past them when a big kid heaved himself up from a stoop and stood in my way.
He was a few years older, fat and wide, and he was holding an empty bucket of beer. By the way he smelled, it wasn’t his first of the day.
“Hey, Colodny,” he yelled. “Did this kid pay?”
The kid on the horse said I did, and they all looked at each other. I guess nobody paid them before.
The drunk kid said, “What’re you doing here?”
I said I had business.
The kid called Colodny, still on the horse, said, “Ain’t you the kid that works for the Brain?”
That’s what some people called A. R. in those days. But not me. Truth is, though, I was kind of proud to be recognized that way. I didn’t know the word had got around.
I answered by shrugging like it was nothing because I didn’t really know what to say, and I had been taught not ever to say anything about A. R.’s business.
The big kid laughed real nasty and said, “The Brain, huh, well, what’re you gonna do if we take your nickel and kick your little ass off our street anyway?” The other boys laughed with him then, but not Colodny. I saw that I had a clear street behind me, so I yelled back at the big kid, “It’d mean you won’t get any more money off me, so that would be pretty damn stupid, you fat tub of lard.”
The other guys laughed harder, making the big kid so mad he threw his empty bucket at me. By then, I was halfway down the block. In those days, when I ran, nobody caught me. I sure wasn’t worried about a fat drunk kid.
The next time I saw Bobby Colodny was a few weeks later on the same street. I stopped at the corner and was ready to take another route if those guys were still there, but the sidewalk was empty, no guys, no horse, no fat boy on the stoop. So I went on and I hadn’t got far when somebody yelled my name. That stopped me because I didn’t know anybody there. It was the kid I’d seen before, Colodny, without the horse. I was ready to run as he crossed the street. I saw that he was a few years older than me and a lot taller, with curly brown hair under a newsboy’s cap. He had a wide gap between his front teeth.
He said, “You’re Jimmy Quinn, ain’t ya? Yeah, I thought so. Look, Delmar was outta line the other day, acting like he did, and you oughta know he ain’t any kind of boss around here. He don’t call no shots. Anything Mr. Rothstein needs in this neighborhood, you just talk to me. I’m Bobby, by the way, Bobby Colodny.”
We might have said something else then, but I don’t remember. That’s when I first began to figure out that because I worked for A. R., other boys looked up to me, even older boys. When you’re a short kid, that means a lot, but I didn’t understand it well enough to let it swell my head.
The next time I saw Bobby was at the movies, and from then on, that’s where I always saw him. Almost always. You see, he was like me, wanting to be the first to see the new pictures the first day they opened. We must have run into each other a dozen times in theater lobbies over the next few years. We usually didn’t say much to each other because Bobby had a girl on his arm as often as not. When we did talk, we figured out that we liked the same kind of pictures and the same stars. And for Bobby, I remember it was always the women in the movies. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that was a lot of the attraction for me, too, but when Bobby talked about them, this dreamy look came over him and you could tell he was a man in love. Bobby was one of those guys, puberty hit him like a falling piano. He’d make a move on any girl who didn’t run away from him and some who did. He told me once that he thought it was some kind of compulsion, he couldn’t control himself. “Yeah,” he said, “I get slapped plenty, but I get my ashes hauled plenty, too.” He even snaked a girl away from me and knocked her up. He was just one of those guys who’d do that and not see anything wrong with it.
In the years after that, we’d run into each other in the penny arcades, too. By then, I was helping to move slot machines and pinball machines in and out for repair. Bobby was doing the same thing with peep show machines, the racy kind from the back rooms where they kept some of the slots, too.
That’s what he did during the day. At night, he hung around the girls’ dressing rooms at Minsky’s and Eltinge’s burlesque houses. He told me he did favors for them, buying them cigarettes, booze, marijuana, cocaine, soft drinks. Anything they needed, he’d find it. Any time I wanted, he said, he’d get me into the late show downstairs. That’s where the real action was.
I’d have taken him up on it, but by then I was working with Lansky, Luciano, and Longy Zwillman stealing cars and driving liquor. After a while, when I hadn’t seen him for a long time, I asked around and heard Bobby had left town and gone into the movie business.
That didn’t surprise me. I mean, I liked the movies. Give me a couple of hours on my own, I’d duck into the closest theater and watch whatever was playing. But Bobby loved the movies, loved them as much as he loved girls, and maybe for him they were the same thing or close to it. Where moving pictures were concerned, he
wanted to know everything.
So I guess it was about ten years later that I was seeing Bobby again in this crazy room that could’ve belonged to Rudolph Valentino. He didn’t look like I remembered him, but a lot of that was due to the cue ball head.
He took a long look at me and I could tell that he was judging the price of the suit and he knew it wasn’t cheap. His mouth widened into a sly gap-toothed half smile, and he said, “So it’s Jimmy Quinn, the famous gangster.”
I shook my head.
“Hell, if I know you, you’re famous.”
“But I’m not a gangster. I run a respectable gin mill.”
He didn’t care to argue the point and turned to Connie. There was no mistaking the wolfish look on his face. “And who is this lovely young lady?”
“She’s Connie Nix. Connie, this is Bobby Colodny. He’s from my old neighborhood, or close to it, anyway.”
“Then who’s Oscar Apollinaire?” she said as he took her hand in both of his.
“Yeah, Bobby, who’s Oscar Apollinaire? That’s who we came up here to see.”
“You’ve heard of me, that’s wonderful! It’s my nom de plume or nom du cinema. Oscar Apollinaire is an artiste of the avant-garde.” Sounded like Bobby had picked up a lot of French since he’d been away. He told us to have a seat and ushered Connie onto a low chaise where she almost had to lie down as she tucked her skirt under her legs. I took a chair. He sprawled across three big pillows on the floor.
He said, “I thought you lived here, too, and I’ve been meaning to look you up, but my work keeps me very busy.”
“So I’ve heard,” I said, and his eyes narrowed.
“What’d you mean?”
“We’ll get to it by and by. First you’ve gotta tell me where you’ve been. I mean, for a while there, it seemed like I was seeing you every week or so at the pictures or the arcades, and then you were gone. What happened?”