Wyatt knocked on a sliver of woodframe, rattling the window that said sports editor but lacked Bat’s name, and Bat swiveled on his chair and the familiar light-blue eyes widened under the thick slashes of dark eyebrow.
From the start they’d been dissimilar in appearance—Wyatt tall and slim, Bat a good four or five inches shorter with a broad chest and compactly muscular. When they’d met in the buffalo camps in ’72, Wyatt was at twenty-four an old hand at frontier life, Bat at seventeen a greenhorn.
But not enough years could pass to prevent Wyatt recognizing those blue-gray eyes—intelligent, perceptive, sharp and, when called for, cold. He recognized them because he had them, too. Doc had once commented on the effect the two “spooky-eyed lawmen” could have, side by side, upon some “poor pitiful miscreant.”
In his shirtsleeves, a dark brown Windsor-knot tie loose around his collar, and crisp-creased light brown trousers (a matching coat hung with a black flat-topped derby on a coat tree), Bat was out of his chair like a man shot out of a cannon. He ushered Wyatt in, shaking his hand pump-handle-style and guiding him to a leather-cushioned couch under the row of windows, putting the city room to his guest’s back. Hands on his hips, Bat grinned and shook his head and chuckled, as he appraised his old friend.
“Wyatt,” Bat said, “you just don’t change—your hair goes white, and that’s about the sum total. I know it sure as hell isn’t clean living!”
Bat, considering he was in his late sixties, hadn’t changed much, either—a slight paunch and his hair was more salt than pepper, and the trim mustache was gone. But even now Bat had a snub-nosed, dimple-chinned boyish quality.
“Bartholomew,” Wyatt said, “you look well-fed.”
Half a smile dimpled a cheek as plump and rosy as a baby’s. The wordsmith seemed to appreciate the layered insult expressed so succinctly, starting with Bat despising his given name “Bartholomew” and having long ago affected “William Barclay” Masterson.
Bat drew his swivel chair up and sat facing Wyatt with hands on knees and both sides of the smile going, now. “If you’re implying I’ve gone to seed, I’ll have you know I cleaned the clock of a younger man just last week, in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria.”
“I was thinking more along the lines you’d got fat. Who was this crippled youth?”
Bat drew a package of Lucky Strikes from his breast pocket, did not bother offering a cigarette to Wyatt, knowing his friend smoked only cigars, and lighted up. “Remember Colonel Dick Plunkett? Arrested Ed O’Kelly in Crede for killing Bob Ford?”
“I remember him. I don’t remember him being a colonel.”
Bat let out a smoke-exhale laugh. “He was just another deputy. Deputies were a dime a dozen in those days.”
“Yeah, and we were two of ’em. Only this Plunkett’s surely no youngster.”
“No, but he was in the company of a cocky young editor from some Texas paper or other, feller setting up interviews. The two were telling every reporter in town except yours truly, of course, that Bat Masterson was a fraud and a fake and a phony and held in low opinion by real Westerners.”
“A shame,” Wyatt said.
Bat shifted in the swivel chair. “I believe the point was to get Plunkett enough publicity to land himself a spot in a Wild West show. Which is a fine place for a broken-down nobody like Plunkett and I would not begrudge him—but making a goat out of me to get himself some glory? Would I put up with that?”
“Likely not.”
“Anyway, Plunkett was carrying this old six-shooter with him, and you know, I still carry a marshal’s badge in the state of New York, Teddy Roosevelt arranged it some years ago…it’s mostly honorary now, but as I say, I showed the ‘Colonel’ the badge and shoved him, just a tad.…Are you listening?”
“I can listen with my eyes closed.”
“Oh. I thought maybe you dropped off for a nap there, elderly gentleman that you are.”
Wyatt opened his eyes. “No, I was just trying to picture this fascinating tale. Maybe with Bill Hart in the lead.”
Bat grinned and the cigarette almost fell from his mouth as he said, “You know, he’d be good as me. That would make a hell of a movie, Bill Hart playing me. Where was I?”
“Shoving some codger around in the Waldorf lobby.”
“Right. Well, the young pipsqueak from Texas, the editor, name of Dinklesheets…Dinklesheets! What the hell kind of name is Dinklesheets, anyway?”
“A stupid one.”
“This Dinklesheets hauls off and pastes me one.”
“Do tell.”
“So I pasted him back, knocked him down. Promptly, he was hearing birdies tweet and bleeding out his mouth. But old Plunkett still had that gun on him, so I shoved my hand in my jacket pocket and indicated I had the drop on him, and the old boy just put up his hands and didn’t even bend to dab the blood off from the corners of his companion’s damaged mouth.”
Wyatt said, “You still carry a gun?”
“Time to time,” Bat said, then lifted the deck of cigarettes from his breast pocket again, “but I was just pointing a pack of these at ’im. That’s about the whole story. Hotel detective came up and requested I leave.”
“And of course you’re not one to stay where you’re not wanted.”
“Not me!” He tapped cigarette ash onto the filthy wooden floor. “Listen, your timing is good as ever. I just put the finishing touches on my Sunday column. The evening stretches out ahead of us in possibility like an endless prairie.”
“I don’t mind you being a writer,” Wyatt said with a frown. “But please God don’t talk like one.”
Bat ignored that, slapping his thighs, getting to his feet. “You’ll stay with Emma and me at our apartment, of course.”
“I’m not one to impose…”
“Of course you are, but you won’t be. Emma has a fondness for you resulting from never ever having spent much time with you. And I’ve misled her, because I speak so highly of you since, of course, it only enhances my standing.”
“Of course.”
“Let me just arrange for an office boy to walk your bag over to the apartment—just a few blocks from here, but we’re not headed that way.”
“Where are we headed?”
But Bat didn’t answer, stepping out of the glassed-in office with Wyatt’s alligator bag and returning in two minutes empty-handed, having sent a harried-looking lad off with it.
“Hope you didn’t eat on the train,” Bat said.
“Not since lunch. After four days, even Fred Harvey’s cooking gets tiresome.”
“Well, we’ll have a wonderful meal, take in a fight, and along the way I’ll fill you in about this kid of Doc’s. Chip off the old block.”
“A mean drunken lunger with a nasty sense of humor?”
Bat shook his head. “Not a chunk, a chip—grab your hat.… Couldn’t you have worn a Stetson?”
“This is a Stetson.”
“No, I mean a Stetson, with a nice wide brim. I’m going to be introducing you around as Wyatt Earp and in that goddamned homburg, you just don’t look the part.”
With this, Bat snugged his tie and donned his trademark derby; he seemed to have abandoned the other trademark, his gold-topped cane, but Wyatt noted the limp from the King gunfight was still present.
“When did you ever wear a Stetson?” Wyatt asked his friend, who was holding the office door open for him.
“Never. I always had more dash than you, Wyatt—but you have to give people what they expect. Reality isn’t the point—it’s the perception of reality.” He shrugged. “That’s show business.”
They took a taxi and the noise of traffic—the blat of automobile horns, the clang of trolley cars, the wheeze of double-decker buses, the harness rattle and wheel-clank of horse-drawn wagons—made conversation too much trouble. Wyatt watched the bustling burg go by and understood, suddenly, Bat’s Stetson talk—hard to stand out in a city of six million.
Though Wyatt had wound up on the W
est Coast and Bat here on the East, their paths had been much the same. Both had ridden every trail the frontier had to offer, bucking the odds in high-stakes games, going to the aid of friends and family, troubleshooting with and without a badge in cow towns and boom-towns and assorted hellholes of every stripe.
Bat’s luck, like Wyatt’s, had run hot and cold and back again, again and again…but by the time adventuring and drifting had lost its appeal, each man had enough of a stake built up to settle in one spot.
Times Square, just after six o’clock, was in all its electric glory, the sun having set to turn the illumination job over to Edison. Already Manhattan was taking a blazing bath—lights of blue, green, yellow, red, even white, letters whirling and tumbling and encouraging this soda pop and that candy bar, painting flashy, flashing tributes to Wrigley’s Chewing Gum and White Rock Water and assorted cigarettes and tires and toothbrushes and automobiles and even a laxative or two, electric placards extending from buildings, sometimes at angles, in a modern geometry at once exciting and garish.
Bat saw Wyatt taking it all in and the New Yorker’s smile had smug pride in it. “Twenty-thousand electric signs in this space,” Bat noted. “Twenty-five million candle power.…” Then Bat’s expression turned a shade melancholy, as he added, “Still, it’s not as bright as it used to be.”
Between the blinking billboards were the marquees of movie palaces and theaters, sometimes sharing the same names, as film stars like Douglas Fairbanks and Fatty Arbuckle were currently trodding the Broadway boards.
“Seems bright enough to me,” Wyatt said.
“In any case, you should be comfortable here.”
“Yeah?”
“Broadway started as a cowpath.”
They were let out on the east side of the Square between Forty-third and Forty-fourth Streets in front of a long low-slung yellow structure whose electrical sign, oddly, bore no name, just some hybrid creature, half lion, half eagle, flapping its lighted-up wings over the pavement.
“What the hell’s this?” Wyatt asked, glancing up.
“That’s a griffin. Mythological beast—you know, like the Western gunfighter. The restaurant is Rector’s, which I imagine even an uncouth dweller from the hinterlands like yourself has heard of.”
A grandly uniformed doorman holding back a nonexistent crowd undid the velvet rope for them and allowed them to pass.
As Bat led him into a revolving door, Wyatt said, “Thought for a minute there you joined a lodge.”
But the interior was no Moose or Elks hall, rather a spacious expanse made to seem more so by floor-to-ceiling mirrored walls; the walls were gold and green brocade, the Louis XIV decor elegant under the sparkle of endless crystal chandeliers.
Wyatt had of course heard of the famous restaurant, and was surprised to see it barely half-filled, supper hour, Friday night. Further, the crowd did not seem terribly distinguished, running largely to older businessmen with young well-rouged women who could have carried their skimpy clothes in their handbags, except for the bulk of an occasional silver fox or mink jacket.
At their table with its linen cloth and fine china and sparkling silverware (all bearing that “griffin” symbol), Bat was in the midst of polishing off a dozen oysters, indulging in a side serving of nostalgia.
“Not long ago,” Bat was saying, between oyster slurps, “you’d see Lillian Russell gliding down that aisle with a long train behind her, layers of whispering silk. Gypsy band would be playing. Unforgettable.”
“Hmm,” Wyatt said, in the process of putting away half a dozen soft-shell crabs.
“Right over there, you could see Diamond Jim Brady, an oversize napkin stuffed in his collar, polishing off six or seven lobsters. Your pal Mizner, from Nome, used to say Brady liked his oysters sprinkled with clams and his steaks smothered in veal cutlets.”
“Umm,” Wyatt said, working on another crab.
“I just squint and I can see them all.…Ziegfeld and Anna Held. Charles Frohman. Victor Herbert. Another Alaska pard of yours, Rex Beach, he liked to hang out here, and O. Henry, the short-story writer. What a grand place.”
“What happened?”
Bat shook his head. “What happened to every decent lobster palace in this town? Prohibition! The men go off to war and the women stay home and push these damned abolitionist laws through, and restaurants like Rector’s and Delmonico’s can’t cook with wine anymore! And a man can’t have a decent meal with a bucket of champagne at his elbow!”
As if to underscore this travesty, Bat took a swallow of iced water.
Then he began to rant again: “And now Delmonico’s is closing! And this joint may change its name to some French non-sense. Can you imagine?”
“How are the steaks?”
The steaks were excellent, huge and bloody, the way both men liked them; but Bat wasn’t through.
“All the great old bars, the fine restaurants, the wonderful cabarets, shutting their doors while these goddamned speakeasies and blind pigs take over.”
“Speakeasies,” Wyatt said thoughtfully. “Doc’s son—Johnny. That’s what he’s gone into?”
They were on to coffee now.
Bat nodded, stirring in sugar. “He used to have an honest trade, like his father.”
“Denistry, you mean.”
“Hell, no! Gambling!” Bat leaned forward conspiratorially, though the tables fore and aft were empty. “He’s damned good at it, Wyatt. He can read the cards and he can read the people.”
“Does sound like Doc’s son.”
“While back, Johnny got in a high-stakes game with a feller at the St. Francis Hotel. Running with a real roller crowd, Wyatt—Rothstein himself was in that game.”
“Arnold Rothstein?”
Bat nodded.
Rothstein, the so-called brain of the New York underworld, was the famed fixer who rigged last year’s World Series. Which struck Wyatt as both un-American and a hell of a feat.
“Anyway,” Bat continued, “it was a few weeks before this goddamned Volstead Act went into effect. A guy who owned six saloons around town bet all six and his whole stockpile of liquor on aces full over jacks.”
“Who could blame him?”
“Guy himself could.” Bat raised an eyebrow. “Johnny had four deuces.”
Wyatt sipped; his was black. “Saloon guy must’ve been in a reckless frame of mind, with the Prohibition coming.”
“Drunk, reckless and despondent about his whole general state of affairs. That, and four deuces, was all it took.”
“What happened?”
“Paid up. Killed himself, week later.”
Wyatt shook his head impatiently. “Not the saloon guy—what did Johnny do with six saloons on the eve of Prohibition?”
“Oh. He held on to the liquor supply and sold the saloons to Rothstein, for a pile…and used the pile to buy an old brownstone on West Forty-fifth.”
“And that’s the speak?”
“That’s the speak. Holliday’s. I’ll take you there.”
“Now?”
“Hell no!” Bat threw his napkin down and grabbed the check. “We have the fights, first.”
Madison Square Garden was a palace of yellow brick and white terra cotta with a nude statue of Diana the Huntress on top of its central tower—and to Wyatt, one unlikely venue for a boxing match.
The block-long affair, bounded by Madison and Fourth Avenues and Twenty-sixth and Twenty-seventh Streets, housed (among other things) a theater, restaurant, concert hall, and a roof garden where ten or fifteen years ago its esteemed architect, Stanford White, was shot by his former mistress’s husband, Harry Thaw, a loony Pittsburgh millionaire. You didn’t have to be a New York native to know about pretty showgirl Evelyn Nesbit and the ruckus she’d caused—just needed to have read the Police Gazette.
Wyatt had.
Even with the Garden’s history of carnage, the boxing match seemed at odds with the structure’s fussy pink rococo interior. But once inside the vast arena itself
(first erected, Bat said, for horse shows), clouds of cigarette and cigar smoke compensated, as did loud enthusiastic fight fans, peddlers of roasted peanuts and hot dogs, and ringside seats. Tiers of balconies on all four sides were draped red-white-and-blue, while high over the ring, under skylights, black bell-shaped speakers emitted occasional, largely unintelligible announcements.
Wyatt sat between Bat and a thin, thin-lipped, grave-featured chain-smoker whose brown hair was shellacked back and who wore wirerim glasses behind which yet another pair of pale blue eyes lurked.
“Wyatt, this is my friend Al Runyon,” Bat said, over the arena din. “Al, this is Wyatt Earp who I’ve told you about.”
Cigarette clenched tight in the slash of his mouth, Runyon nodded and Wyatt shook hands with him, a quick, solid shake.
Bat leaned in and whispered: “Kid’s a big booster of yours. A real fan. He writes under his middle name—‘Damon.’ Maybe you’ve seen his work.”
Wyatt had indeed read Runyon’s sports columns. The dude was well known nationally as a real expert on baseball, boxing and the ponies. And Runyon was a dude: the columnist’s suit, a natty light brown plaid, was without a wrinkle and his floral tie bore a diamond stickpin. He was poised to take notes with a hand that bore a huge pinkie ring.
Wyatt said to the “kid” (who was around forty), “Read your stuff. It’s good.”
Runyon, deadpan, flicked Wyatt a look, and the cigarette bobbled as he said, “Thanks,” then returned his attention to the ring, where the fighters were already in their respective corners and an announcer with a megaphone was wandering between them.
That was the extent of the conversation between Wyatt and his “big fan.”
The fight was a good one, two heavyweights, Billy Miske—who had given champ Jack Dempsey a run at it in two hard battles—and another real contender, Bill Brennan.
Bat, however, wasn’t impressed with either man, and between rounds said to Wyatt, “Your prime, you could’ve taken out either one of these bums.”
Then Bat leaned across Wyatt to say to Runyon, “Al, you’re sitting next to the best natural boxer I ever saw. Known him since the early ’70s, and nobody could scrap with his fists like this feller.”
Black Hats Page 6