Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight

by Jimmy Breslin

  “All right,” Big Jelly said. He clapped his hands together. “Let’s have a taste, sweetheart.”

  “What’ll it be?” the bartender said.

  “Double scotch and a large sauterne on the side.”

  Kid Sally giggled. “The same.”

  “Yeah!” Big Jelly said.

  There was a whine from the loudspeaker system, and a four-piece band, back from a break, got set on the bandstand. The name of the band was Looey and the Birds. With a crash of electric guitars and drums, they started playing a tune whose key line was, “Your fat ass!”

  The music pepped up Kid Sally. “Yeah!” he yelled out and swallowed the scotch. He banged his shot glass on the bar for more. The bartender poured scotch into the glass, then turned around and took a pencil from his ear and marked the drink down on a sheet of paper. A big sign on the register said: WE GIVE CREDIT ONLY TO A REAL CORPSE. The bartender knew enough not to bring it up. Kid Sally brought the shot glass to his mouth. He tilted his head back a little, then more, and finally, his head all the way back, his eyes looking up into the blinking psychedelic lights, he threw the scotch down and came rocking forward and slapped the shot glass on the bar with one hand and raised the sauterne with the other and threw the wine down and then he let out another shout.

  “Could you see us when they hear what we done to that old greaseball?” he said to Big Jelly.

  “There’d be a line-up of guys wantin’ to kiss my ass that’d be longer than the two-dollar window at the track,” Big Jelly said.

  “Yeah!” Kid Sally said.

  “And you,” Big Jelly said. “They’d be lightin’ candles and prayin’ to you. You hear me? Prayin’ to you.”

  “Yeah!” Kid Sally said.

  “Let’s have a taste, sweetheart,” Big Jelly yelled to the bartender.

  On the bandstand, Looey and the Birds screamed, “… Your fat ass! …” and Kid Sally and Big Jelly swallowed more scotch, and the red pills were putting glass into their eyes. A girl in a Curley McDimple wig came past the bar from the ladies’ room, and Kid Sally grabbed her by the arm and pulled her to him.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey, what?” Kid Sally said.

  “Buy baby a drink,” she said. She chewed gum methodically and her head bounced in time to the music.

  Big Jelly shook more pills onto the bar and he grabbed a couple and Kid Sally grabbed a couple and the girl looked at the remaining pills, made a face, and said, “Oh, medicine? All right, baby takes her medicine.” She pushed the pills into her mouth and reached for a scotch to wash them down. Kid Sally began clapping his hands to the music. Big Jelly grabbed the bottom of her skirt and lifted it up.

  “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” he said.

  “Fresh,” she said, hitting his hand.

  “What about me, can’t I show my thing to somebody?” Kid Sally said.

  The three began slapping the bar and yelling for something to drink and the girl kept chewing gum and rocking to the music. Big Jelly was having trouble keeping his eyes straight, and when Kid Sally tilted his head back to throw down the double scotch, some of it ran out of the corners of his mouth and he was licking with his tongue and he kept his head tilted back, looking straight up into the maze of blinking lights, and he saw himself, very clearly, riding to Baccala’s funeral in an open car, with the sidewalks of South Brooklyn lined with people clapping for the new boss of the outfit.

  Mrs. Maxine Finestone was telling Mrs. Lucille Goldman, over tea and watercress sandwiches in the Plaza, that “We would never go to Lauderdale, but the boat was there, so you see we really had no choice. Now, to get on the boat, you had to go across this skinny little plank, just a splinter really, and in the darkness, my Lord, you could see nothing but all this water underneath you, and who knew how deep it was? So here’s this little splinter of wood and do you know what Jack said? ‘Maxine, you go first.’ I said, ‘Me? Why should I have to?’ Jack said to me, ‘I want to make sure the board won’t break.’ Well, dopey me, I start going out on this piece of wood. And here is my husband, standing there holding out his hand. ‘Maxine, first give me the diamonds.’ ”

  “Oh, that’s your husband,” Lucille Goldman said.

  “You’re telling me,” Maxine Finestone said. “Oh, hello, isn’t this nice? Grant, how are you?”

  Grant Monroe was trying to say hello when Mario, lockstepping behind him, tripped on one of his open shoelaces and shoved Grant into Maxine Finestone’s lap.

  “Maxine,” Grant Monroe said, “this young man is from Italy, and— Oh, Maxine! Isn’t that a striking pin! Yes, this young man is from Italy. His name is Mario Trantino. This is his very first work and I was thinking to myself, Now who could look at this? Of course I could only think of one person.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  Mario bent down to kiss Maxine Finestone’s hand, but because of his uncle’s glasses he couldn’t see and missed the hand completely. He stuck his tongue out and caught the hand with a dog lick just as his mouth went by. He swung into a chair. Grant Monroe began walking backward. Grant shook his head at Mario’s paint-splattered hair. He could see Mario had twirled a paintbrush through it just before coming to the Plaza. Grant was not happy to duck away from Mario. Grant was in ecstasy.

  “This painting is a very low price because it is the first I ever have done,” Mario said to Maxine Finestone. “But someday, when I am very famous, this painting will be a very rich thing to have in your own house.” Mario had rehearsed the line with Grant out in the lobby. It is the major line all artists have used on buyers since Michelangelo tried it on the Pope. Maxine Finestone smiled as she heard it. Her qualifications as one of the city’s best-known supporters of young artists consist of a taste acquired in commercial courses at George Washington High School, a year behind the counter of her family’s dairy delicatessen, and a husband named Jack, who runs a big junk business. Jack loves any painting that is explained to him in terms of an investment. For pure art, Jack Finestone will place Delco Battery posters on his walls.

  “Well,” Maxine Finestone said, “the face is quite interesting.”

  “Think of what this will be worth when I am famous,” Mario said. Maxine Finestone nodded.

  Mario tripped out of the hotel with his chest pounding. Maxine Finestone had taken the work home to her Fifth Avenue apartment. She told Mario she would have her mind made up the following afternoon. Mario almost expected to hear her say she would pay about $300 for the work. If he could put ten of the same painting on the market in a hurry, he would have the beginning of a career that one day might even become completely honest.

  “So if she buys it,” Angela was saying later, “that means I’ll never see the first thing you ever did.”

  “The next one you’ll see,” Mario said.

  “But it won’t be the same thing,” she said.

  “It’s all the same thing,” he said.

  He dropped the subject before it got him into trouble. They were walking into the doorway on Marshall Street, and Beppo the Dwarf stuck his head out of the vending-machine office and called Mario. Angela kept going upstairs. She did not want to hear any of it.

  In the office, Kid Sally was tilted back on a chair so the rear of his head would press against the wall. This relieved some of the throbbing from the hangover the whisky and pills had left. The last thing he remembered about the night before was being in somebody’s apartment and watching Big Jelly try something involving a kitchen chair and a naked girl. Big Jelly was still in the apartment.

  “Now is tomorrow all right still?” Kid Sally said. Mario shook his head yes. “Then why do we got to be in suspension all day here? Why didn’t you come here early?”

  “Forget. Say something important,” Big Mama said. She was standing by the door. She motioned Mario to sit down.

  “Let’s see how we do this,” Kid Sally said. His eyes, puffy, closed.

  Big Mama snorted. She pointed to Mario. “You just sit i
n-a restaurant. When two men come in deliver the fish, you get-a you ass up and you get-a you ass out of the restaurant.”

  Kid Sally’s eyes opened. He pointed two fingers at Mario. “Two guys with white coats on, they’ll be carrying baskets of ice and fish. They’ll come in like they’re delivering to the kitchen. You get up like you got to go to the bat’room. Only you keep goin’.”

  “Where to?” Mario said.

  “Right out to the subway. Go right home and stay there until you hear from one of us,” Kid Sally said.

  “No stop!” Big Mama said.

  “If you said it, don’t stop,” Kid Sally said. “You just make sure you’re not inside that restaurant when the two fishmen get to the table.”

  “Sally Kid,” Beppo the Dwarf said, “when we bring this old man here, how are we goin’ to get all his moneys out of him? He won’t have all his moneys on him.”

  Kid Sally’s lip came up in his sneer and he began to giggle. “We bring Baccala here, and we all say to him, ‘Baccala, you nice old guinea, where you keep all your moneys hid?’ ”

  “But he no say,” Big Mama said. “But we no get mad at him. We take-a off his shoe. Rub the foot. Nice rub. Then we cut off the little toe!”

  Kid Sally gazed fondly on his grandmother. “He still don’t tell us. What do we do? We’re stuck. The man won’t talk. We tell him, ‘Old man, you go home now. You look tired, old man.’ But we can’t let him go home like he is. He walks all crooked with the one toe off one foot. So we even up his balance. We take off his shoe and cut off the other little toe!”

  “He no like that,” Big Mama said.

  “He tells us where he got his money,” Kid Sally said. “He tells us because he got ten whole toes and he got ten whole fingers, too. We either get it in ransom or we go right to where it’s hid. Whichever. But we’re going to keep slicing until we get moneys.”

  “And then we come right back here and we cut out Baccala’s heart and throw it to the lion!” Big Mama said.

  Big Mama cackled. Beppo clapped his hands. Kid Sally giggled uncontrollably. The giggle became a roar.

  Mario was not quite sure whether or not he actually passed out during the conversation. He did know that both his little toes had severe pains shooting through them. Dimly he heard Big Mama lecturing him about getting a night’s sleep so he would be alert. He left the office and wandered up the street like a piece of frozen wash. He heard Angela running up after him and Big Mama calling to her, “Where you go?” and Angela, putting her hand on his arm, calling back, “I’m going, that’s all.” All the way to the subway, Mario struggled for breath. “A roomful of money,” he kept repeating. He imagined Mrs. Finestone’s voice on the telephone, telling him how beautiful his work was and to come up for the money any time. The two thoughts kept him on his feet until he got home. He fell onto the bed and was asleep immediately. Angela pulled the blanket over him. Exhaustion from fear made his face break into a heavy sweat while he slept.

  Chapter 18

  THE DELLA PALMA RESTAURANT is on Queens Boulevard, in the Queens section of New York. To get there you take the Queensboro Bridge, a maze of gray spiderwork which rises out of the East Side of Manhattan and climbs across the East River. You begin the trip watching a maid cleaning the picture window of a $2000-a-month Sutton Place apartment. When you come out on the other side, there is a workman staring out of a factory window and eating a hero sandwich for lunch. Queens Boulevard starts there, amidst the el pillars and industrial slop of a place they call Long Island City. Queens Boulevard becomes a broad, crowded avenue which runs past the Irish bars of Sunnyside, grows side walls of apartments in Rego Park and Forest Hills, and comes to an end with one last apartment house, a gas station, a supermarket, and, sitting by itself, in a one-story building erected for a store, the Della Palma. Queens Boulevard then ducks down onto an expressway that goes into Kennedy Airport, two miles away. The Della Palma has always been a quiet, almost sleepy restaurant with most of its trade coming from nearby apartment houses. It became an odd-hours favorite of Baccala’s because of its closeness to the airport. Big guys from out of town flew in, had shrimp and clams oreganato with Baccala, then flew out without being seen.

  At ten on Thursday morning a black-haired, dark-eyed guy of about twenty-five sat in a booth against the window of the Empress Diner, three blocks from the Della Palma. He looked out at housewives talking in the bright, cold, windy morning on Queens Boulevard. Jackie Dunne is from the Horseshoe Bend section of Jersey City, which is perhaps the world’s leading supplier of Irish gunmen. He is so dark that he uses Italian names, particularly the one he had chosen for the day, Vincent Scuderi. The only thing that gave Jackie Dunne away as being Irish, and you had to be Irish yourself to notice it, was the way he sat in the booth and drank his coffee. The coffee was too hot, so he spilled some of it into the saucer and picked up the saucer and began blowing on the coffee to cool it. He slurped coffee from the saucer. He did it carefully, holding the saucer far out over the table and craning his neck to it. When he set the saucer down, he ran the thumb and forefinger of each hand down the lapels of his gray suit. He began to fuss with an already immaculately knotted tie.

  A probation report once devoted three full pages to Jackie Dunne’s fastidiousness. The report urged he be sent to a place where young psychiatrists could study him. “He is the perfect psychopathic gunman,” the report concluded. The judge, a sixty-seven-year-old product of political clubhouses, detested psychiatrists. He threw out the medical testimony and sentenced Jackie Dunne seven and a half to ten years at Attica. Jackie Dunne for three years was the star halfback of the same D Block football team on which Kid Sally Palumbo played quarterback. Jackie had seen Kid Sally off and on for the last year. Two days ago Kid Sally had sent a messenger, Joe the Sheik, over to a poolroom in Jersey City to make Jackie Dunne an offer. Kid Sally would pay $1500 for Jackie’s services on Thursday. Payment would be within three days. He was to tend bar in the Della Palma Restaurant and put things in the drinks of any bodyguards Baccala came into the place with. Jackie Dunne had a face none of the Baccala people knew. When the bodyguards were out of the way, Jackie Dunne could split.

  “What if the geepos with Baccala don’t drink nothin’?” Jackie Dunne said.

  “Hey, don’t axt me, go axt Eisenhower,” Joe the Sheik said.

  Jackie Dunne thought the arrangements were sloppy, but he still took the job. For $1500, Jackie Dunne would fight tigers.

  Now, right on schedule, Jackie Dunne sat in the diner booth with envelopes of chloral-hydrate crystals in his pocket and a .38 stuffed into the front of his belt, right behind the buckle.

  Ten blocks down Queens Boulevard, Tony Lombardo came out of the elevator and pushed the door to the basement garage of his apartment building. Tony didn’t have to be to work at the Della Palma until eleven. But he liked to get in early and dawdle over coffee and arrange the small bar so he could handle the lunchtime rush without having to keep reaching for bottles left in the wrong places. Tony liked the job at the Della Palma. The lunch hour was busy, but it tailed off sharply at two, and the restaurant was usually totally empty until five.

  Tony Lombardo had the door open and he was walking into the garage when somebody put a gun to his left ear.

  “You’re dead,” Big Jelly said to him. “Take a deep breath and you’re dead.”

  A few minutes later a blue fish truck came slowly past the Empress Diner on Queens Boulevard. Beppo the Dwarf began waving out the window of the truck. Jackie Dunne, sitting at the diner window, nodded.

  Big Jelly was wiping his forehead while he drove the truck. “I should of gone to the Turkish bath,” he told Beppo the Dwarf. “I’m still shot from the other night.” In the back of the truck Tony Lombardo was tied up like a chicken. He was so frightened that he fell asleep.

  One of the waiters in the Della Palma was fixing up the tables in the front, so he answered the phone when it rang. “This is Sailor, the agent for Local Fifteen,” a voice, Kid
Sally Palumbo’s, said. “Your regular bartender, Tony, he won’t make it today. Guy’s sick. He called in a half-hour ago. So we’re sending a very good man down to you. Name of Scuderi. He should be there ten, fifteen minutes from now.”

  The waiter said he guessed it was all right and hung up. He walked back to the kitchen and told Nick, the owner. Nick said he hoped Tony was all right. Ten minutes later, exactly, Jackie Dunne walked into the restaurant. “You got coffee made yet?” he asked a waiter. Jackie hung his jacket in the checkroom and put on the red bartender’s jacket that was on the hook. He checked to make sure the jacket came down far enough to cover the pistol in his belt. He went behind the bar and moved his shoulders around inside the red jacket. This was, he told himself, going to be the easiest $1500 he ever earned.

  On one side, the Della Palma is separated from the supermarket by a large parking lot. On the other side of the restaurant there is an empty lot. The restaurant is in a long, narrow building. You enter a small vestibule which has a cigarette machine and two pay telephones on the wall. You step to the left and come into the bar area. Used mainly for service, it is a small bar, which faces you as you come out of the vestibule. At one end the bar stops at the storefront plate-glass window half covered with drapes. Opposite the bar is the checkroom and a staircase going down to the men’s and ladies’ rooms. The bar area ends at a breakfront. Behind it is the long, narrow restaurant, running back to the kitchen. Deliveries to the restaurant are made through the front door, to save the deliverymen the trouble of slogging to the back of the store. There is no room behind the Della Palma for anything to park. The Della Palma keeps its back door locked and barred. Which is another reason why Baccala always liked the restaurant.