Billy stood staring out beyond the creek as if on third watch, cradling the rifle. I had only one thought on my mind, and it wasn’t the dead Bohemians.
“Who was that blonde with the mayor?” I asked.
Dennison smiled at me as if I were the stupidest person he’d ever seen. “Just some skirt tail blown in from Little Poland. I saw how you fancied her. Mayor Moores did too. Either that or he’s just as absentminded about his women as he is his politics.”
“It’ll be daylight soon,” Billy said.
Dennison flipped open his timepiece. “Four hours on yet. But you’re right. No time to waste. I’ll get on the horn, take care of everything. You boys just go on back inside and get that blood by the door mopped up, whosever it was.”
Billy spit another clot. “That’s mine. The bastards.”
“How much does something like this cost?” I asked.
“Cost?” Dennison repeated the word curiously. He put a hand on my shoulder. “I told you that sometime or another you’d need me.”
“Actually, you said you could use a man like me.”
“Same thing. Now, you come see me Monday morning. And I mean this coming Monday morning. Not Tuesday or Thursday or the Monday after.”
I nodded and thanked him twice, and we shook. Billy had wandered down to the creek edge and was urinating in the water, holding the thirty-thirty across his shoulders lengthwise. I called out to him. He buttoned up and followed me toward the alley.
We weren’t twenty feet away when Dennison hollered, “Say, Pat? I’m not sure if you’re crazy or stupid or both, but that gal with the mayor you were fawning over all night? There’s a dance this weekend at the Hotel Boutique. She’ll be there most likely, done up as pretty as a ribbon on a candy box. I’m not advising you in either direction and, well, pursuing this one is probably about as silly and dangerous as anything else, but I’ll be goddamned if I don’t allow for a man to make his own mistakes.”
I turned. “What’s her last name? McCoy or McCoven?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” Dennison said as he crouched down to examine the corpses.
“Well, how do you know she’ll be at that dance?”
Dennison stood and wiped his hands together. “Because it’s my hotel.”
VII
AN HOUR BEFORE dawn I rose and left young Eddie chained to his chair in the room next to the panting radiator, securing the door from the outside with a padlock. I gave the young man my last three cigarettes to tide him over for the rest of the morning. Billy was still passed out on stump whiskey and would remain in some faraway fantastical sleep for the rest of the day and probably longer if I left him unmolested. He was one hell of a glorious drunk. Every night for the past month he’d drank his eyeballs to float. Sometimes he shat himself up his backside after he passed out for the night, blamed it on the quality of the grog. He’d have gulped pig urine if it would muddy his mind.
A man like that, there was little to be done for him.
I went to the wood frame barn at the back of the cottage and greeted our stabled pony with the distinctive silver star on its forehead. She whinnied me a good morning. I hadn’t thought to name her. Not right to own a nameless horse. I weighed it in my mind. Silversmith, I finally said to her. I’ll call you Silversmith. I led her outside into the cold and fed her a breakfast of sugar and corn in the snow. I stroked her neck and hummed calmingly into her ear.
“Yes, that’s right, you’re a fine old nag, ain’t you?” I cooed, cinched on her saddle, and tied her reins to the trunk of a vase oak just beyond the shed door.
Inside the lean-to, I kicked around some old tools and found an axe handle I’d carved to a point on one end. I wound a length of string around the stick five times until it was taut and put a pin through the ransom letter. I carried the stick out with me to our horse and ambled back into the Omaha city limits, toward the Cudahy mansion.
When I reached the front lawn where just hours ago we’d nabbed young Eddie Junior, I stood in the stirrups and launched the stick like a javelin at the front door. It landed upright in the cold ground, pitched straight as a fence post.
There was no commotion on the street or in the home. All the lights were off, the windows dark. I circled my horse three times, its hooves squeaking on the ice. The Cudahy yard had not been walked all night. Suncups were still visible in the snow. I snorted and fled the neighborhood at a trot. Gigged my pony’s flanks gently and traversed back toward our cottage on winding abandoned roads and slick hillsides.
Less than a mile away, I halted on a shallow bluff to study the world below. Alpenglow streaked the horizon. In that blue hour before sunrise, I marveled at creation. I couldn’t recall ever feeling such a sensation. The entire city so small I could pinch it between my fingers. The moon bright in a belt of predawn shadow. The skyscape burst with the first columns of winter daylight through low cloudbreak.
I clucked at Silversmith. The silence and lack of activity at the Cudahy home unnerved me. I chewed over the possibilities. The papers should’ve been pasting the story all about town in an hour when the morning edition hit the pavement. The police wagons should’ve been crowding Dewey Avenue in every direction. I never imagined it all to be so easy. I spat again and doubled back down into the city, stopping at a Czech bakery on William Street. I tied our pony to a large wooden Indian on the walk in front of the store. She dropped five huge clumps of green dung while swishing her tail. I laughed at that and went inside to use the telephone.
At the counter, I purchased a five-cent cup of coffee as weak as rainwater and a sweet roll, and tried to envision the coming conversation in my head. An oak phone booth took up the back of the store. I kept staring at it over my shoulder.
The bakery’s proprietor watched me suspiciously. He was covered in flour dust and wore a paper wedge cap. “It’s a phone booth, not a ghost,” said he, rudely.
“My horse took a shit on your walk out there, right by the front door,” I replied and got up to seclude myself in the booth. I lifted the earpiece off its cradle, wiped the bell rim with my handkerchief, wound the crank, and asked the operator for a local connection.
“Central? I need a line through to Spruce 7132,” I said.
Two minutes passed while the operator punched in the route of the call. The baker watched me the whole time. He hollered out from his post behind the counter, “Rarely get through in anything but dry weather. Snow’s been taking down wires all over the city.”
I ignored him and waited a minute longer. Checked my nickeled timepiece. Five minutes to eight. Finally a connection came clear on the wire.
“Is Edward Cudahy there?” I asked in a low tone, altering my voice so as not to be recognized. I sounded like I was gurgling water.
A woman replied, “He is. Who’s calling?”
It was their colored maid who’d answered. I graveled my voice deeper, “Never you mind who I am. Just get the man on the horn.”
A moment passed. A heavy cough sounded on the line. “Hello? Hello?”
“I want to speak to Mr. Cudahy.”
“Speaking,” Cudahy said.
I put my coat collar around my mouth to distort my voice further, speaking through the fabric. “Do you know where your son is, Edward?”
Another long pause. “Who is this?”
“Darkness is falling all around you.”
“My son is asleep in his bed.”
“After you find his bed empty you might want to go out to your front yard. There you’ll see a post with an attached letter. Follow the instructions.”
“Say,” Cudahy stammered, “you hold on there. I want to talk with you longer.”
“Follow the instructions,” I said again and rang off.
VIII
THE DANCE AT Tom Dennison’s hotel turned out to be a necktie sociable. The Hotel Boutique was a lopsided four-story brick s
tructure with a tiny ballroom. I outfitted myself in a silly jacket and ascot tie that made me appear comically aristocratic when the look I had hoped for was that of a cosmopolitan businessman. On my walk over to the hotel, the once cloudless autumn sky filled up from one minute to the next, and a downpour fell about as hard as it could for half an hour without knocking out the bottom of the universe. I sprinted through the cloudburst and entered the hotel soaked down to my nightclothes. I stood dripping on the lobby carpets like I’d fallen out of a fishing boat.
The lobby was a tall atrium of overstuffed sofas, spills of oriental rugs, amber marble, cathedral glass. The hands of a gilt edge clock marked the time as a quarter to seven next to a painting of a timber wolf howling at a thumbprint of acrylic moon. Canvasses under the hotel roof bagged with rain. Everyone else arrived aboard covered coaches and under umbrellas and were all as dry as September hay.
For the necktie sociable, each eligible lady brought two distinct bow ties with her. One she wore and the other was thrown into a large basket with all the others. The bachelors then paid for the dinner by purchasing one of the bow ties, and the woman who wore his match was his date for the evening.
I searched the lobby for Hattie. The hotel was full with a whole payload of maiden ladies, each wearing a unique bow tie around her neck. I thought I might never find her until I glimpsed her startling yellow hair—she was standing at the edge of the room by a rough pine table set with stacks of dinner dishes. The string band started playing. Men and women searched each other out. The bow tie I drew from the basket was deep red, not the match of Hattie’s periwinkle blue knot. I wanted to crush it in my hands and go home, for I was dripping and silly looking and without any chance to court the woman I came to see. The bow tie matching game was something I’d never expected or heard of in my life.
On my way out the door, I spotted a little man with a stringy comb-over holding a periwinkle bow tie. He was scanning the crowd on his tiptoes like a lost child looking for his mother in a department store. I went right up to him and offered to trade him ties.
“Hardly,” the little man said. “If you want to trade you’ve seen your match and went running. I will not be duped.”
I dug a gold piece out of my pocket, the same coin the mayor had given me for a tip two days before. “I’ll give you twenty dollars.”
“Thirty.”
“Twenty’s all I got.”
The little man sniffled. “Fine. Trade. I’m no prize, and maybe a fat ugly woman is the only chance I got without having to pay for it.”
“I haven’t seen my match,” I admitted. “I’m only in love with yours.”
“Love? Don’t you even know her?”
“I intend on pursuing that end.”
“You intend on it? My boy, my dear silly boy. I’m an alchemist of sorts, and I’ve got just the remedy for your ailment. The name’s Doc Ruggso, and I have—” the little man said in his best salesman’s tone, but I had already bolted off for the bar.
I yanked off my asinine ascot and fastened the new bow tie to my collar. After two short bourbons chased with a chalice of beer, I mustered enough dizzy in my bones to circle up to that celestial system, holding my hat with both hands on the brim. Hattie was seated alone on a camelback divan next to a stone fireplace gone cold for the night and a stand-alone ashtray full of twisted cigarette butts.
I said to her, “Hello, miss. I believe I’m your date for the evening.”
Hattie McCoy. Or Hattie McCoven. Her flaxen hair was held back with a taffeta ribbon. A chiffon velvet dress adorned her slim freckled shoulders. The architecture of her corset held up her bosom as tautly as catapult ammunition.
She smiled at me and fit another cigarette into her opera-length holder. “I was wondering when you’d come over. Do you think me an Apache?”
I swallowed like it was my first time swallowing. “An Apache?”
“You’re scared to death of me.”
“You, well, you wreak havoc in the heart of every bachelor in this hotel,” I stammered with a twisted tongue and gestured around the lobby with a sweep of my hat.
Hattie sat back against the divan and crossed her legs as if waiting for a camera bulb to flash. “At least you don’t stutter.”
“I’m sweating more than is pleasant,” I said and wiped at the glaze on my forehead with the back of my hand.
“Honest, too. You’re quite the catch. Aren’t you going to sit down?”
I sat down.
She laughed. “It’s a small wonder you haven’t soiled yourself yet.”
“My jitters? That’s just compliment in costume is all,” I said and pawed at my face again.
“How’s that now?”
I tugged at my heavy shirt. “Beautiful women cause all men some measure of dewiness. That’s something I’m certain with which you have considerable experience. Why, the more beautiful the woman, the more copious the perspiration.”
Hattie curled her lips. “That’s an impressive vocabulary for a barkeep.”
I regressed. “My mother made my sisters and me read from the family dictionary every night. That and the Saint James Bible. Only two books we kept in the house. By the time I was thirteen when she passed, I had gotten all the way through the Rs.”
“My,” Hattie said mockingly. “You’re a horse of a different color, Mister—”
“Pat Crowe,” I said. “I’ve come to find out if your last name is McCoy or McCoven.”
“Is that all you came for?”
“For starters.”
“Don’t you want to know my first name?”
“I already know it to be Hattie.”
“Call me Hat. I hate Hattie.”
“Okay, Hat. Hat McCoy or Hat McCoven?”
“Neither,” Hattie said through her cigarette smoke. “My last name is Munro.”
I thought on the sound of the name and all its variations. Hattie Munro. Hat Munro. Hattie Crowe, given enough time and luck. Hat Crowe. Hat and Pat Crowe.
“I saw you pay the man with the curtain hair a gold piece for my ribbon,” she said.
“I can afford it,” I lied.
“You’re a barman at The Sallie Purple. I’ve seen you there.”
I bowed my head.
“Don’t tell me you’re in love with me.”
“No, ma’am. By the end of the night you’ll be telling me.”
Hattie laughed. “Boy, I can’t get a read on you.”
“They wrote all about me in the book of Amos.”
“I never went in much for the prophets.”
“Yeah,” I defected. “Know-it-alls.”
After the dinner and dancing—deviled ham sandwiches cut into tiny triangles, pheasant, pear salad, partners for a quadrille, an opera reel, all the happy footfalls and violin music and creaky banjos—we went outside and sat at a small bistro table on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. Hattie sipped from a cup of tea, and I from a glass filled with whiskey and a whisker of water. The sky had cleared. The stars looked as close as I’d ever seen them. The entire galaxy strewn about the bottom of a cup. Decorative paper lanterns hung in the trees lining the sidewalk.
I told her about all my ambitions in life, my lonely stag condition, and my pet tabby cat, and finally asked: “You don’t think to be married to a gorgeous young critter like yourself would be far ahead of loneliness?”
“Who am I to say? I’ve never been a bachelor with a tabby cat.”
I swirled my whiskey as if it were a glass of green and yellow paint I was trying to mix into an even blue. “You don’t parade yourself around in show goods.”
“You’re quite the artist with the compliment.”
I sat the whiskey down and took off my hat and examined its stained felt lining as if the proper response was stitched into the fabric. “You have lips upon which the honeybee might lik
e to linger.”
Hattie smiled. Lipstick on her teeth. “That’s more like it.”
“Maybe you like it enough to sprint up to the altar with me.”
“You haven’t even tried my cooking.”
“I don’t think of women as washers and darners.”
“Don’t speak nonsense to me.”
“Am I pressing too hard?” I asked.
Hattie popped a new match, lit another cigarette, and extinguished the match in the last tepid inch of her tea. “You’re distressingly attentive. I’ll give you that.”
I hung my head again. Hattie smirked.
“You’re a serious boy,” she said.
“You go in for the goofballs, then, do you?”
“You’ve seen who I go in for.”
I shrugged. “The mayor’s already got himself a wife.”
Hattie laughed. “Yes, isn’t it just the holiest of sacraments?”
“How’s that?”
“Marriage,” she said, flicking ash. “It’s all one big gaffe.”
“There’s some measure of silliness in everything, I suppose.”
“You’re a smart boy. But I might not always agree with you as well as your tabby does.”
I sighed and stood, offering my hand to help Hattie out of her chair. “I’ll get rid of the goddamn cat.”
Early the next morning, I lay in bed with Hattie in my boardinghouse room. She was still asleep, her wealth of yellow hair spilled out over her pillow. I put on my pants and went down to the parlor shirtless except for my suspender straps and filled two chipped mugs with coffee from a communal kettle sitting atop a potbelly stove. I brought the coffees back upstairs and set one down for Hattie on the toadstool table next to the bed and pulled a chair up to the window. The disintegrating curtain was as greasy as a cook’s apron. Peeling it back, I peered down onto the street.
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