Black Hats

by Max Allan Collins

  Wyatt said slowly, “Bartholomew.…”

  Bat ignored that, still leaning. “Few men in the West could whip Wyatt in a rough-and-tumble, forty years ago, and I think he could give these youngsters a hard tussle even today.”

  Runyon’s eyes tightened behind the wireframes, he nodded a little, and he returned his attention to the bout as the bell clanged.

  “These guys are genuine tango experts,” Bat said bitterly.

  But Wyatt thought it was a pretty good scrap, a view highlighted by them sitting close enough to feel the flying flecks of sweat and blood.

  Between the next rounds, Wyatt asked Bat, “What do you know about this kid Caponi who’s giving Doc’s boy a bad time?”

  Bat nodded toward Runyon. “Ask Al—he’s an expert on these hoodlum types.”

  Without looking at them, Runyon said, “It’s Capone, not Caponi. One of Yale’s crew. He’s a comer.”

  Wyatt asked, “Tough?”

  Runyon, lighting up his latest cigarette, nodded.

  Brennan knocked Miske down in the seventh round, and while the ref stood over the fallen fighter counting him loudly out, Bat admitted, “That gets him closer to a match with the Mauler, who will murder him.”

  This was a reference to Dempsey’s nickname, the Manassa Mauler. Wyatt was pretty sure Runyon had coined that moniker, but didn’t ask for confirmation.

  Bat hadn’t taken a single note during the fight, maybe because he’d already written his next column; but Runyon had filled half a notebook, writing without looking at the pages, just the match.

  The solemn dapper plaid-clad reporter rose with Wyatt and Bat, asking the latter, “Doyle’s?”

  Bat said, “Not tonight.”

  Runyon nodded, then nodded to Wyatt, and cut like a blade through the packed aisle, in a hell of a hurry. Maybe he was going off to file his story.

  As the two old friends took their time moving up the aisle in the smoky, echo-ringing arena, Bat said, “Al got a real charge out of meeting you.”

  “Yeah. Pissed himself, he was so excited.”

  Bat laughed, once. “No, Wyatt, really. He’s just a listener, is all. But he’s from out West himself; his daddy was with Custer.”

  “If so, daddy got scalped.”

  Bat shrugged. “That’s a point I never pursued.…But Runyon’s a good man, thinks of himself as a Westerner at heart, idolizes fellers like me and you.”

  Wyatt gave Bat a sideways look.

  “On my oath! I know him from way back in Colorado days—he was on papers in Trinidad and Denver, both. And now he’s a big shot, just signed a contract with Hearst.”

  “Well. Liked to talk my ear off.”

  Bat grinned. “Yeah, makes you look long-winded. Kind of nice seeing you put in that position. Anyway, if we need any help, he has connections, including underworld.”

  “What is ‘Doyle’s’?”

  Bat’s grin faded. He shrugged. “Just a joint.”

  “What kind of joint?”

  “…Billiards.”

  So that was it. Wyatt had never set foot in a pool hall since the night Morgan was shot in the back and sent sprawling onto the green felt.

  “Don’t let me stop you,” Wyatt said.

  “Naw. Not in the mood. Let’s get a bite.”

  Wyatt blinked. “After Rector’s?”

  “That was forever ago! Anyway, watching those bums do the Castle Walk famished me! Come on!”

  The next stop was on Sixth Avenue, opposite the Hippodrome—Jack Dunstan’s, where the decor was as plain as Rector’s had been opulent, and the aproned waiters looked more like fighters than either heavyweight had.

  Bat held court in a corner booth over seltzer lemonades and tongue sandwiches on rye; Wyatt had two Coca-Colas and a single sandwich, corned beef on rye. A parade of people came over to say hello, coming and going, and Bat introduced Wyatt to a score of Broadway characters, fight managers, press agents, actors, playwrights, and Wyatt shook enough hands to damned near work up the appetite for his sandwich. He recognized not one name and committed none to memory.

  A sort of impromptu floor show was provided by the waiters, who formed a flying wedge to escort a rowdy gaggle of disorderly collegiate types out onto Sixth Avenue.

  Finally the social hour passed, and Wyatt and Bat were left to themselves. This meant a round of steaming coffee, richer and hotter and frankly better than Rector’s, and Wyatt asked, “What is this Capone after? And who is Yale?”

  “Frankie Yale,” Bat said, lighting a Lucky, “Brooklyn gangster, looking to expand his territory. These are new days, Wyatt, nasty days—like Dodge or Tombstone, only it’s tommy guns not sixguns.”

  Over the rim of his coffee cup, Wyatt asked, “What’s a tommy gun?”

  “Thompson submachine gun. Spits bullets.”

  “How fast?”

  “Fifteen-hundred rounds per minute, fast.”

  Wyatt offered up a small, slow whistle.

  “Trench gun, built for use in the Great War,” Bat continued cheerfully, “a little too late to get into the action…but right in time for Prohibition.”

  Wyatt frowned. “What do these gangsters want from Doc’s kid? Move in on him and take over? Put him out of business? Or just get their piece?”

  The protection racket had been around a long time. Wyatt and his brothers had been accused of it in Tombstone, though that was bunkum. A lawman deserved a taste.

  “Yale isn’t in the speakeasy business,” Bat said, “though he does have a dance hall on Coney Island that isn’t afraid to serve up a beer.”

  “What do they want from Johnny, then?”

  “To sell him booze. Only Johnny doesn’t need their booze, having plenty of his own.”

  Wyatt glanced at a round clock on an off-white plaster wall broken by a black electric cord. “Gettin’ on to midnight. So we’ll save dropping by Johnny’s speak for tomorrow?”

  Bat’s eyes narrowed and his grin widened. “You are an old man, Wyatt. Hell, we’re just getting going. The Forties don’t start roaring till midnight.”

  Wyatt’s eyes tightened. “Don’t you mean ‘Twenties?’ ”

  Bat laughed. “Wyatt, Wyatt.…Still a farm boy at heart.”

  Wyatt smiled just a little as he eased out of the booth. “Well, then, Bartholomew, being as you’re a city boy…I’ll just let you pick up the check again.”

  FIVE

  The Roaring Forties—as Bat explained to Wyatt on their next taxi ride—was the Times Square/Broadway area itself, Forty-second Street and the other “forties.” This seemed to be a loose definition, as the “speaks” in question were set up between Fortieth and Sixtieth Streets, chiefly in old brownstone residences.

  “Springing up like mushrooms,” Bat said. “Sometimes the poisonous kind.”

  The better-class brownstone speakeasies operated as clubs with private memberships and high-tone names like the Town and Country or the Bombay Bicycle Club or Louis’s or Anthony’s or, for that matter, Holliday’s.

  “But now that we’re a couple months into this grand new experiment called Prohibition,” Bat said, “the gangsters have really been moving in—sometimes taking over, other times just peddling their liquor.”

  The two men were in the back seat of a Ford taxicab.

  Wyatt asked, “Why don’t they open their own joints?”

  “Oh, they’re starting to—delightful upholstered sewers like the Hotsy Totsy, the Silver Slipper, the Fifty Fifty—you can get shots of both varieties there: alcoholic and ballistic.”

  Wyatt chewed on that for a few moments. Then he asked, “How many hoodlum factions?”

  “How many fingers you got? And maybe you should break out your toes.”

  “…Before long, you could have the Manhattan version of a range war.”

  Bat laughed without humor. “You’re tellin’ me. So far, though, the only turf invaded belongs to independents like Johnny. Now, across the river, the micks and the guineas are squabbling to beat the
band…which is why Frankie Yale is sending his young emissary Capone around, looking for new territory, this side of the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  Traffic on West Fifty-second, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, was as congested as Times Square itself. They weren’t close to their address when Bat paid off the hackie and the two men walked the rest of the way in the brisk April air.

  “Damn near without exception,” Bat said, gesturing, “every house on both sides of this ‘residential’ cross-street is a speak.”

  The houses were unfailingly dark, shades drawn and windows sometimes painted out, black. You’d have thought funeral wreaths should be hanging on every door; yet the curbs were bumper-to-bumper with parked autos, and the sidewalks were busy with laughing couples, on their way somewhere, and not a funeral.

  “Of course,” Bat was saying, “Johnny never refers to his joint as a speak—it’s strictly a nightclub.…”

  “There’s a difference?”

  Bat chuckled, shrugged. Derby at a raffish angle, he moved along jauntily but not quickly, that old gun-battle leg wound still slowing him some. “In Johnny’s view, there’s a world of difference. At a speak customers drink, at a theater they see a show, at a dance hall they dance—at a nightclub, they get the whole shebang, and more.”

  The three-story brownstone where Bat stopped also looked asleep, windows dark; hell, it was well after midnight, why wouldn’t they be?

  Still, Wyatt started up the seven or eight steps to the raised entrance…only to have Bat tug at his friend’s coat sleeve and shake his head, as if scolding a backward child.

  “No one gets in that way,” Bat said, and led Wyatt down the half-dozen steps to basement level.

  Dreary and unlighted, the basement entry sported a forbidding black metal door. Bat rang the unmarked bell and a peephole panel shuttered open, exposing a single hard appraising eye.

  No password or display of any membership card was necessary in this instance. The peephole slid shut, the heavy door swung open, a simian in a tuxedo said, “Good to see youse, Mr. Masterson,” and led the two guests through a series of interlocking doors on to adjacent vestibules and finally into Holliday’s itself.

  “Have a good evening,” said the slope-foreheaded guardian of the gate, and disappeared back inside his world of locks and doors and entryways.

  The interior of the nightclub (and “speakeasy” truly did not do it justice) damned near tempted Wyatt to smile.

  In tribute to his late daddy, Johnny had provided an understated but distinct Wild West decor—the spirit of Dodge’s Long Branch and Tombstone’s Oriental lived in this forty-by-eighty-foot tin-ceilinged cellar.

  About as authentic as a Tom Mix picture, Holliday’s was nonetheless a nice blend of cantina and saloon. The walls were pale yellow stucco, decorated with a sprinkling of rustic-framed Western and Mexican paintings, with arched recessions in walls home to little statues of cowhands on bucking broncos and slouchy Indians on sleepy ponies. The many tables were small, square and covered with brown-and-white checkered cloths, their chairs simple, rounded wooden straightbacks.

  Even the Chinese lanterns, providing much of the low-slung chamber’s scant illumination, weren’t out of place: Wyatt had seen them used in many a watering hole out West.

  Entering, you looked across the seated patrons through the blue haze of cigarette smoke to the bar—no stools, strictly a serving station—a roughhewn pine affair that resonated within Wyatt’s memory. Of course, this was more Pony Express way-station-style than, say, Tombstone’s Crystal Palace, where the bar had been an endless expanse of mahogany. But in a business wherein occasional raids, for real or for show, might include ax-wielding intruders, pine seemed the prudent choice.

  Two bartenders, both with handlebar mustaches and black hair slicked back and aprons over white shirts with black bow ties, selected bottles from the pair of pine-shelf bookcase-like displays that left room between for a gilt-framed oil of a reclining Spanish lady wearing a shawl and a rose and a smile. Above the entire affair, all that remained of a longhorn steer was on impressive display, horns looking sharp enough to give a visiting bullfighter a shiver.

  Wyatt had set foot in a speak or two in L.A., and knew the rows of liquor bottles behind the bar were an exception, not the rule—real labels with such familiar names as Johnny Walker and Jim Beam beamed at patrons not used to actually seeing what they were drinking.

  Wyatt knew the rules in an establishment like this—some gents might bring their own flasks, and the club would charge for set-ups, maybe two bucks for a pitcher of water and/or ice, or a buck and a half for ginger ale and/or a buck a bottle for White Rock. Most patrons bought liquor at the clubs, however, particularly one with Johnny Holliday’s impressive supply of the genuine article.

  Pretty things in peasant blouses and short red flared satin skirts with mesh hose were weaving in and around the tables selling various wares from trays shoulder-slung like feedsacks: cigarettes ran a buck a deck; rag baby dolls (for your baby doll) a fin; and red-rose corsages also a fin—artificial flowers a buck. Purchases were not encouraged, they were expected, as were generous tips—guys did not want to look like tightwads to dolls, either the one they’d come in with, or the one pushing cigarettes or rag dolls or flowers, real or false.…

  Behind and right, as Wyatt and Bat stood just inside the place, was a hatcheck stand, where Wyatt and Bat left theirs with a redhead in a fringed buckskin vest over a yellow blouse with a gaily colorful bandana knotted at her neck. To the left a hostess station was “manned” by a similarly garbed brunette. This was the standard waitress attire, as well, and four such cuties in short buckskin skirts were conveying drinks of trays to the clientele—cowgirls out of Ziegfeld.

  At the far left was a little stage, the fairly low ceiling allowing room for only a baby grand piano and two tiers of musicians, saxophone, trombone, drum set, violin, trumpet and clarinet, who happened to be filing onto the platform right now, like a little tuxedo army. A parquet dance floor out front would accommodate maybe a dozen couples, if they didn’t mind rubbing shoulders and other surfaces.

  The brunette hostess knew Bat from way back and led the two men to a reserved table ringside. One of the bandana-sporting waitresses got there right away, and Bat ordered bourbon straight up and Wyatt asked for a beer.

  Wyatt surveyed the scene. The well-dressed crowd was largely young—bored with well-paying jobs, hell-bent for fun, ready to pay sky-high prices for the privilege. A certain number of sugar daddies with dollies were sprinkled around at the postage-stamp tables, too. Still, this was mostly kids—some exercising their silver-spoon heritage, others making a decent living and out to blow some of it…but kids. Who else could hang out at joints that didn’t open till midnight, and carouse club-to-club till five in the morning?

  The answer to that question could be found among assorted famous faces sprinkled around the room—famous at least in Manhattan terms.

  “Those two boys,” Bat said, leaning in confidence, “are Yankees stars—hour and a half ago, their dates were on stage with the Follies.…That dame is a Park Avenue hostess with more dollars than sense, and the pansy with her is her favorite art dealer, who specializes in ‘modern’ stuff, you know, squiggles and squares?…That dame is married to the biggest banker in town, only the smoothie she’s with isn’t him.…And that distinguished dub? An editor at the Times, whose wife no doubt thinks he’s burning the midnight oils pounding out an editorial on world affairs.”

  Instead, said editor seemed to be pounding out a domestic affair with a blonde.

  “No food served down here, by the way,” Bat said, as if Wyatt had asked him.

  “After Rector’s and Jack Dunstan’s,” Wyatt said, “I may not eat till next Tuesday.”

  Bat lifted a forefinger. “Well, when you get around to it, you can get sandwiches and steaks upstairs.”

  “Where’s our host?”

  “Johnny’ll make an appearance. After Tex.”

  “Tex?�
��

  The answer came not from Bat—because the band chose that moment to start playing a jazzed-up version of “Pony Boy”—but from the glittering, leggy apparition that appeared from the wings, “riding” onto the stage slapping her hip and waving a bejeweled white Stetson.

  “I told you, Wyatt,” Bat whispered. “A Stetson makes a statement.…”

  Everything about the woman onstage made a statement. Attractive in a sleepy-eyed, cartoonish way, her full figure ensconced in a sequined form-fitting gown, several loops of pearls around her neck and riding her generous bosom, her wrists heavy with glittering bracelets, her marcelled hair almost touching her shoulders, she snugged the jewel-sparkling Stetson onto the peroxide ’do at a rakish slant and a wide red-rouged mouth that somehow opened wider to say: “Hello, suckers!”

  The audience exploded in laughter and applause.

  From the bandstand, a trumpet player brought down a spare stool for her to perch on and, as she got settled, she made a lewd throaty throwaway remark—“Horny little devil, aren’t you?”—that killed the crowd.

  Wyatt shook his head, thinking, Big city, small world.…

  “For you newcomers,” the brassy blonde was saying, in a deep but full-bodied drawl, “my name is ‘Texas’ Guinan. I was raised in Texas, schooled in a convent, and ruined right here in Manhattan!”

  That got a big laugh, but she topped herself: “Most recently, at two o’clock this afternoon!”

  More howls.

  Newcomer though he was, Wyatt needed no introduction to Tex Guinan. She had been his friend William S. Hart’s discovery, an actress with both rodeo and vaudeville experience who had briefly become a sensation as the silver screen’s first cowgirl in such epics as Wild Flower of the Mountain Range and South of Santa Fe.

  She was talking about that right now, telling the audience she had a new picture out.

  “It’s called The White Squaw,” she said, “and, as you might expect, I have the title role. My last few horse operas have been flopperoos, so I need you good people to crawl out of bed at noon tomorrow, and take in a damn matinee! Why, I risked my…” She shifted on the stool. “…life makin’ that picture for my public. I did. Truly did—we shot this one in the wilds of Long Island.”