Gallagher pointed to a chair at the table. “Sit down, Benny. Now,” he said as he sat down, “let’s talk.”
“About what?” Frank asked.
“Things,” Gallagher said. “Where were you tonight, Goldfarb?”
“I was dating.”
“Who?”
“Some kid on the block.”
“Who?”
“Some kid.”
“Stop stalling.” Gallagher’s voice sounded as if it were starched. “Who? What’s her name?”
“Fanny Kane.”
“That stinker!” Benny exploded and rose slightly from his chair. “That twelve-year-old jail bait!”
Frank’s lips drew back. “Shut your trap!”
“No rough stuff,” Gallagher interjected sharply. “So you were dating.” He turned to Frank. “Leonard and Finch here”—he gestured to them—“tell me they searched you and didn’t find a knife or other weapon on you.”
“Why should you think you’d find me carrying something?” Frank asked angrily.
Gallagher shrugged. “That’s what we want to know. You’re a member of the Dukes. So’s Benny here. We got out and picked up all your guys, and every one is carrying a knife or brass knuckles. All except that kid you guys call Crazy. So that’s what’s got us puzzled.”
“What’re you talking about?” Benny was glad he was seated, for he knew his legs could not support him.
“Because it’s odd.” Wilner leaned across the table and spoke with his face close to Benny’s. “All you boys were hipped except you and Frank. What’s the matter? Get scared after Mr. Bannon was knocked off?”
The color drained from Benny’s face and he looked wildly at Frank. Frank’s fingers were sticky and he felt as if the walls of the room were contracting and pressing upon him, squeezing him until there was no breath left in his body. They were trapped. It was all so simple. He saw Benny struggling to speak, to break the silence which stormed about them. Their innocence now only attested and emphasized their guilt. To be caught and trapped because they had not been guilty of a misdemeanor; it was too funny, even for the books.
“Struck dumb?” Gallagher’s voice attenuated the silence.
“You’re trying to pin a murder rap on us,” Frank choked. He saw an out.
“We aren’t trying to pin anything,” Wilner said. “We’re just curious why a couple of hard guys like you two weren’t carrying your gats.”
“We never owned gats!” Frank said.
“All right,” Gallagher agreed, “knives and knuckles.”
“We used to carry them,” Frank began, and noticed that Benny’s face was stiff with horror, “but we quit after Mr. Bannon was killed. You see”—he spoke rapidly to prevent Benny from interrupting him—“I carried a knife and Benny did too. But we never did anything with it. All the guys carried them. But after Mr. Bannon got killed we threw our knives into a garbage can because we knew we were in enough trouble already and we didn’t want any more. Why can’t you let us alone?” He began to cry. “We’re in enough trouble already and you’re never gonna let us alone just because we were fooling around that day! Now my father’s out there and you’re riding us when we didn’t do anything.” Frank bent over the table and sobbed.
Gallagher looked at Benny. “What’ve you got to say?”
Benny screwed up his face and began to cry. He didn’t want to cry, but he had to. Now his mind was clear and ticking like a metronome. As much as he hated and feared Frank, he had to admit that Frank had saved them. With every muscle and reflex he compelled himself to cry, and finally, as relief from the tension, the tears came voluntarily and he wept quietly and steadily.
Gallagher was disgusted and looked his annoyance. Finch and Leonard stared stolidly at the weeping boys. Wilner looked relieved.
“Snap out of it,” Gallagher finally said. “You’re going home.”
Benny raised his head. “You’re not booking us?”
“No.”
“What about the other guys?”
“They’re in.”
“They’re taking a rap because of us,” Frank said. “They wouldn’t have been in no trouble if it wasn’t for us.”
“You’re a pretty smart kid,” Gallagher said. “I guess your guys aren’t going to like you much.”
“Why can’t you give them a break?” Frank pleaded. “I swear by my mother and father they never done anything. Suppose they were carrying knives and knucks? We never done nothing. Carrying a knife and knucks is like wearing peg pants and a sharp hat. It’s like a part of a uniform,” he reasoned desperately. “And most of the guys used their knives when they were working.”
“Here we go again,” Leonard snorted.
“Let ’em go,” Benny begged. “The guys’ll have it in for us.”
“Maybe we could strike a deal,” Gallagher suggested.
Frank was wary. “What?”
“Tell us who shot Bannon.”
Frank looked at him as if he were insane. “We don’t know,” he said.
“Maybe Benny knows.” Gallagher turned to him.
“I don’t know either,” Benny said rapidly. “You guys are really giving us a hosing. Why don’t you let us alone? All of us? Let us alone!”
Gallagher opened the door. “Meeting’s adjourned. Go on home and stay out of trouble.”
“We stay out of it, but you put us right back in.” Benny continued to cry, for he found safety in tears. “And you wonder why we don’t like cops!”
Frank turned to Gallagher. “I want to wash.”
“Me too,” Benny said.
Leonard opened a door at the other end of the room. “In here. Make it snappy.”
Frank shut the door behind them and started to speak, but Benny put his hand across his mouth and pointed to the walls. For a moment Frank looked startled, then he nodded and they washed silently. Their eyes were red and their faces drawn and peaked. Within them the terror and fear of discovery glowed like a red light of warning and danger, and it was with an effort that they left the washroom.
Frank stopped as he entered the outer chamber and saw Stan Alberg sitting with his father.
“Don’t say nothing,” he cautioned Benny. “I’ll see you in school tomorrow. Hello, Pop.” He attempted to be flippant as he spoke to his father. “The bastards let us go.”
“What did they want?” his father asked him.
“Why we weren’t carrying knives or guns or blackjacks,” Benny answered. “I don’t know what to do about guys like those cops. They’re driving me nuts!”
“Let’s get some coffee,” Stan soothed him. “I got my car outside and we’ll go to Fulton Street. Then I’ll take you home and I’ll square things with your folks, Benny.”
“They’re driving me nuts,” Benny muttered.
“Don’t worry,” Stan reassured him. “I’ll straighten things out.”
Mr. Goldfarb opened the rear door of the automobile and stood with one foot on the running board. “What are we going to do?” he asked Stan. “All those boys locked up in jail. What’re we going to do?”
Stan sighed as he slid into the driver’s seat and pulled up his trousers at the knees. “I don’t know, Mr. Goldfarb. This thing is way over my head. If the police raid all the gangs and clubs in Brownsville there won’t be enough cells in the city to lock up all the kids they pick up for carrying concealed weapons and other things. They got two of your guys on other charges.” He turned around to speak to Frank. “Counterfeit gasoline coupons and narcotics. Two very tough raps.”
“God help us,” Mr. Goldfarb whispered, and turned to his son. “First we were poor because we didn’t have any money, and now we’re poor because there is no one home to look after you or the other boys. Frank”—he grasped his son’s arm—“tell me you’re not in trouble!”
“I’m not,” Frank said roughly. “Stop bothering me.”
Stan coasted to a stop before the White Tower. “Let him alone, Mr. Goldfarb. Get out, Benny.”
Mr. Goldfarb entered the restaurant first, and Stan spoke to Frank. “Lucky thing you got rid of that gun. Benny too.”
“Thanks,” Frank whispered.
“You’re a first-class suspect,” Stan said, “and I’ve got a feeling you’re not telling all you know. Remember, Frank, talking now might save you a lot of grief later on.”
Frank sneered as he got onto the stool at the counter. Except for his red-rimmed eyes and the lines of weariness which furrowed his forehead, his gaze was cold and untroubled. The cops were dumb. Benny was dumb. The Dukes were dumb. All he had to do was think, and he could outsmart anyone. He was going to admit nothing, for they knew nothing, and what they did not know would never hurt him.
He twirled around on the swivel seat and softly, so that only Stan could hear him, he said, “Nobody’s asking you for advice.”
Chapter 9
For Frank the first of June meant only one more month of dread remained before the end of the school term. Frank associated the end of June with escape, but he now wondered if he could maintain a grip on himself and avoid discovery. Everything conspired against him, and as he walked with Betty along the path which followed the perimeter of the Prospect Park lake that first June night, her words made no impression upon him.
How could he rest and be at ease? Only six days after they had bumped Bannon they had almost been trapped: Maybe, he thought, it might have been better to have been caught. Then this constant wariness and alertness which were sapping his strength and refusing him the relaxation of sleep would cease. Wherever he walked or rode or stopped he would see Gallagher, Leonard, Finch, or Wilner. When he went into Davidson’s, Gallagher might be sitting there drinking coffee and would invite him to sit at his table. The talk would be aimless, so aimless that Frank would feel his jaws stiffen, his spine tingle, and his armpits wet with sweat, for he knew that this seeming lack of direction in Gallagher’s conversation was aimed at catching him in a contradiction, a flaw in their alibis. One day as he entered Selma’s with Benny they saw Wilner sitting at the counter noisily sucking a chocolate soda through a straw. They had wanted to back out of the doorway, but Wilner insisted upon buying them sodas and talking, and Wilner talked only about the murder and that it was the police theory that the murder had not been premeditated and that the boy would be certain to receive the mercy of the court if he confessed.
“Yes,” Wilner had said, “maybe the kid that did it wants to confess, but maybe someone else is implicated in the killing and one guy can’t confess because of the other guy. Tough.” His straw rattled as he sucked upon it.
After he had left them Frank and Benny had sat silently in the booth, afraid to speak, unable to look at each other, for Wilner had sowed carefully in each of them a new seed of suspicion and distrust. Each feared the other would crack, and they sat silent, afraid to speak, for they could not trust their voices to be steady, as if they were unshaken by Wilner’s suggestion of clemency.
Selma scooped the glasses off the table and leaned toward them. “That was a dick, wasn’t it?” she asked them.
Benny nodded.
“I thought so,” she said nervously. “Look, Benny, Frank, I hate to say this. But I think you better not come in here any more until this blows over. I got my customers to think of, and since the cops picked up you Dukes here, and now this dick—well, I don’t like it. So maybe you better not come around for a while.”
Frank stood up. “Come on,” he said to Benny.
Gallagher, Leonard, Finch, and Wilner were everywhere: on Pitkin Avenue, in the Winthrop, near their school, strolling along their block, at Roseland, the Coney Island boardwalk, the Rugby Bowling Alleys. And always they would stop Frank and Benny, talk to them, ask the same questions over and over again, playing a sort of game whereby they seemingly deputized Frank and Benny and asked their opinion as to whether they thought Frank Alongo or Sam London or Socks Levy or Larry Riordan or Danny Abrams or Steve Cohen or Sam Abruzzi might have shot Mr. Bannon. Suddenly, and with terror, Frank realized they had eliminated practically every boy in their official class, and he warned Benny not to give his opinion any more.
And there was nowhere to go, for after the story broke in the newspapers about the Dukes being picked up by the police and all except three held on various charges, their landlord had made them move out of their basement club-rooms. In vicious desperation the Dukes had hacked and broken the walls of the basement rooms, stuffed the plumbing, ruined the floor by pouring melted tar onto the parquet, and had warned the landlord that his body would be found in a lot if he made a complaint. Now the Dukes were without a formal meeting place, and this, coupled with the fact that they were all out on bail and facing prosecution, made them turn on Frank and Benny as the direct cause of their present plight. Bluntly, with his lips purple with anger and his eyes glassy, Larry Tunafish had told them they were responsible for his facing a prison rap.
“Every dime I got in the bank,” he told off Frank and Benny, “and plenty of my old man’s, we had to give to a smart lawyer who thinks he can get me off. And it’s all your fault. Aw, shut up!” He refused to let Benny speak. “You can tell the cops that you don’t know who bumped off your teacher, but I got a hunch you know. And because you’re keeping your holes shut I’m liable to get shoved in the can.”
Frank looked at him with disbelief. “You want us to rat?”
“I don’t know what I want!” Larry said. “Except to get this rap off my neck. You know I can go to the Island for this rap?”
“You’ll beat it,” Benny said without believing his prediction.
“What’s the use of talkin’?” Larry summed up the feelings of the Dukes: “You guys got us in bad with your goin’ to school. School!” He spit in the street. “Look what it got us. A rap!”
Cut off from the Dukes, prohibited from entering Selma’s, with the neighbors on their block looking at them with bold hostility, Frank and Benny were compelled to seek each other’s company. After Detective Leonard had visited Ann Kleppner and Betty Rosen to check on Frank’s and Benny’s alibis, Ann would no longer date Benny. Betty continued to see Frank, but now there was no longer a smooth convertible for them to race around in, and walking with Betty in the park, Frank was silent and only dimly aware of her presence.
“You’re not listening to me.” Betty pressed Frank’s arm and drew to a halt.
Frank put his arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry, kid. I was thinking.”
“Thinking so hard that you haven’t even kissed me?”
Frank guided Betty from the path into a thicket of bushes that stood close to the rim of the lake and knelt to feel the grass. “It’s dry, Betty”—he began to remove his jacket—“but we’ll sit on this.”
“That’s a new suit,” she protested.
“What the hell’s the difference?” Frank lay on his back with his hands locked behind his head. “Come on, sit next to me.”
Betty leaned across him, framed his face in her hands, and kissed him. “Feel better now?” she whispered.
His reply was to embrace her and to press his lips against her cheek as he held her close to him. “I wouldn’t know what to do without you,” he whispered. “I wouldn’t know.”
Again she kissed him and finally she relaxed and lay beside him with her arms locked tightly around him, feeling his body tense and electric against her as his free hand caressed the nape of her neck, her breasts, and her thighs.
“I love you, Frankie.” Betty was hoarse with passion. “Love you more than anything!” She pressed close to him, eager and longing, possessed with the desire, magic, and promise of a June night.
He wanted to tell her more than that he loved her, but he could not. Through his memory raced distorted and rudimentary fragments of speeches and lines of poetry he had been compelled to read in his English classes and which he had never remembered. Across one corner of the moon hung a wisp of dark cloud, and the sky was lonesome without stars. The stillness carried to them the sound of the r
ipples softly striking the stone wall that girded the lake; the gentle warmth of June soothed him—and still he could not speak. For how could he tell her he was troubled, when an explanation would mean his death? It would have been a relief to tell someone, to share the secret with a trusted confidant, and Frank felt he could trust Betty, but to tell anyone would be the first fatal error, the first breach in the wall of anonymity that protected him, for to tell her of him meant revealing Benny’s role in the tragedy—and he was afraid of Benny. No longer was Benny his friend, but someone bound to him by circumstances which enmeshed and entangled them both as they struggled, singly and together, to prevent their betrayal by a breach in their alibis and their distrust of each other.
That night at the White Tower when Stan Alberg had appealed to him in a brief moment to confess what he knew, if he knew anything, he had laughed mockingly at the well-intentioned advice, and now it was too late to turn back. Twenty-nine more days. He had to hold out. Frank kissed Betty’s throat.
“Frank,” she gasped, “what’re you waiting for?”
“Here?”
“I’m dying for you.” Her nails dug through his shirt. “We’re alone. I never asked anyone before.” She writhed in his arms with a desire she could no longer control.
Frank rolled over and looked down upon her as she lay with her hair flung back and her eyes half shut. He kissed her again, wildly, and pressed her to him. His hands trembled as he caressed her, and then there was no thought, but only a series of sharp involuntary reflexes as he strained Betty to him, kissing and biting her lips. His breath whistled and he moaned with the violence of his passion.
Sighing, they relaxed and listened to the night sounds multiply about them while they watched the cloud efface the upper half of the moon. Betty lay on her side with her arms around Frank. Occasionally she kissed him, but he continued to stare above him, through the branches of the bushes which enclosed them.
“Frank,” she said softly, “it’s late.”
He raised his left arm and looked at the illuminated dial of his watch. “Almost eleven. Once it wasn’t late for me.” His bitterness dulled the recent joy. “Now I’ve got to get in early and keep away from those damned dicks.”
The Amboy Dukes Page 15