“Of course,” Johnny said. “Shall I show you around?”
This took only fifteen minutes—part of which was upstairs, where Johnny saw what Bat had reported, the forced-lock on the back door—and within half an hour of his arrival, Lieutenant Harrigan (his weekly envelope tucked in an inside suitcoat pocket) had taken his leave. The two beat boys were gone, as well.
When he joined Wyatt and Bat again at the little table amid the rubble, Wyatt said, “We’ve been talking.”
“And?”
Bat said, “Clearly what Yale is interested in is your liquor supply.”
“Okay,” Johnny said. “And?”
“And,” Wyatt said, “he’ll likely be watching when you go to replenish it—which is one reason why he broke every bottle in the joint, right now. To force that.”
“He sent Capone searching,” Bat said, sitting forward, “to see if your liquor supply is on the premises.”
“It isn’t,” Johnny said.
“He’s determined as much,” Wyatt said. “Oh, he could come back and look upstairs; but I think Yale and Capone are smart enough to know that either a storeroom off the club itself, or a hidden one taking up a pantry in the kitchen, would be the best bet.”
“Oh, I have much more of a supply than that,” Johnny said.
“How much?” Wyatt said.
“I told you—five years’ worth, even doing land-office business.”
“Everything but beer,” Bat said.
“Right.” Johnny shrugged. “I’m willing to give Yale that concession, once my current supply runs out. Six months or so.”
Wyatt was studying Johnny. “So where is your five-year supply? You don’t have to be specific.”
“Oh, I trust you, Wyatt!”
“Too early for that. When the time comes, you can say where, exactly. But generally speaking.”
“Generally speaking, specifically speaking—it’s a warehouse. It was part of my winnings in the big game that started this whole shooting match.”
Bat said, “Shooting match indeed.”
Wyatt said, “Yale will be watching this place. Waiting for you to make the next transfer of stock to the club from the ware-house. Once he knows where that warehouse is, you’re done.”
“You make it sound inevitable.”
“It may well be. At best, it’s a tricky proposition.”
Bat sat forward. “Why not cut Yale in? Meet him halfway?”
Johnny sat back. “Are you serious?”
Wyatt said, “Deadly so. This is business. This isn’t about whose cock drags the widest swath in the dirt. This is about money, and surviving to spend it.”
“After the life you’ve led?” Johnny said, wincing. “That’s your philosophy?”
“If it wasn’t,” Bat said, “you might be talking to Ike Clanton right now, or maybe Curly Bill Brocius.”
Johnny knew the names; he knew everything a man could know, from books and articles, anyway, about these two old legendary gunfighters. Their blue eyes, scary goddamned blue eyes, were boring in on him as if they were sighting rifles.
Wyatt said, “Start buying your beer from Yale, this week. You’ve got bottles. He can give you barrels of draft. You’ll sell both. It’s good business.”
Bat said, “And offer him a percentage of your liquor sales with an understanding that, when you run out of stuff, you’ll buy from him.”
“Tell him,” Wyatt said, “that these rumors about how you have this endless supply of hooch are just that—rumors, stupid ones. Why, you’ll be ready to do business with him in a year or at most two.”
“But I won’t,” Johnny said.
“He doesn’t know that.” Wyatt’s shrug was expansive. “All of a sudden Frankie Yale and Al Capone are just business expenses.”
“Overhead,” Bat said, “like that red-nose police lieutenant you just greased.”
“Two years from now,” Wyatt said, “Yale may be dead, maybe shot by his ambitious boy, Al. Two years can be a lifetime in a business like yours.”
“And maybe the swelling his pecker has taken on,” Bat said, “will go down, when he doesn’t think you have five years’ worth of Johnny Walker stowed away someplace, like pirate’s treasure.”
Johnny thought it over.
Then he said, “What do we do?”
“Call Capone,” Wyatt said. “Or better, Frankie Yale. Arrange a meeting where we all sit down together. But someplace public.”
“There’s a dance hall on Coney Island,” Johnny said. “Harvard Inn. Capone tends bar there, they say…and it’s one of Yale’s chief hangouts.”
“Coney Island,” Wyatt said. “Sounds like a good time.”
NINE
Bat Masterson had once been a regular at Coney Island, but since back in ’09, when the anti-betting laws closed the three racetracks down, he’d found little to bring him to Brooklyn’s notorious southernmost peninsula.
Hard to believe this tawdry playground had, within relatively recent memory, been the proud home of fine restaurants and elegant hotels, a haven where the worlds of fashion, theater and sport could meet for a gay old time. Many an afternoon he’d sat on the veranda of one ritzy hotel or another, the Brighton or Oriental or Manhattan Beach, watching the shimmer of sun on foamy blue water and pretty young women in bathing apparel splashing and laughing while he sipped sparkling champagne, as sporting types like himself mingled with the wealthy and well-to-do.
Coney Island had been the scene of so many storied races—the triumph of Salvator over Tenny, and Ballyhoo Bey winning the 1900 Futurity, its jockey Tod Sloan inspiring George M. Cohan to write “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” What days! And some of the best prizefights Bat ever witnessed (which was saying something) were held at Coney Island—for instance, the Jeffries-Corbett twenty-three-rounder, the last great bout before the bluenoses closed in.
And what had they accomplished, when it came to that, the do-gooders? Coney Island had gone from a glittering Garden of Eden to a second-rate Sodom. Cheap trolley fares and the subway extension had sealed that—a nickel ride to a gaudy Nickel Empire, where everything from hot dogs to a roller-coaster ride to a peek at a hootchie cootch cost five cents (well, maybe ten, for the latter).
This was not to say that honky-tonk pleasures for the proletariat hadn’t been a part of Coney Island’s appeal since as long as Bat, or anybody, could remember. For many decades now, several great amusement parks, notably Luna, set the sky on figurative fire every summer night—and, on occasion, the grounds literally so, conflagrations having given Coney Island numerous (if unrequested) fresh starts.
The season proper wouldn’t begin for a month or so, and not every vendor was open as yet, some in obvious stages of sprucing up. Whether stall or pavilion, however, the majority were open for business, particularly on Surf Avenue and, one block over, the rowdy Bowery; taking advantage of good weather was a must for these capitalists, as rainy weekends would inevitably take unwelcome bites out of their official fourteen-week season.
For that matter, a good number of businesses were open year-round—restaurants and dance halls and, even in these “dry” days, certain saloons, notably tonight’s destination, the Harvard Inn.
The Bowery (officially Ocean View Walk, but no one called it that) ran less than a quarter mile, packed with amusement booths and eating joints. This was Saturday night, so even pre-season the promenade was mobbed in the mid-evening noon of electric lights, which were everywhere, even draped overhead, challenging a fellow on stilts striding through, his signboard advertising nathan’s nickel hot dogs. No verbal pitch emanated from the stilt-walker, who did not attempt to compete with the din of barkers spieling and the swoop-and-rattle and shrieks-and-squeals of roller coasters, or the frequent rifle shots, whistles, gongs, and music, from calliope to jazz band.
Walking along between Bat and Johnny Holliday was young Dixie Douglas, the pretty brunette chorus girl who looked to be about twelve, except for her figure, which appeared to be of age. She
wore a green cloche hat and green-and-white polka-dot dress with white ruffly collar, the skirt just below her knees, where flesh-colored stockings were rolled up; her lips and cheeks were rouged and she had that contradictory combination Bat was seeing in young women these days, of a certain knowing innocence.
Wyatt was on Bat’s other side, and seemed not to notice the ruckus around them, able to ignore the very things that Dixie was reacting to with wide-eyed wonder.
Dixie was supposedly from Des Moines and fairly new to the big city, so perhaps she should be excused for her naive sightseer’s take on the Bowery bedlam. But, hell—surely she’d been to a state fair! You would think she had never seen a shooting gallery or a penny arcade or a waxworks or a freak show or a ring toss (“Everybody wins! Three for a nickel!”) (what else?) or had her fortune told or her weight guessed (and it wasn’t just the professionals doing the latter).
And didn’t that cutie’s cute button nose register the stench around them that was making Bat’s eyes all but water? That sickening, ungodly mix of gun powder, Woolworth perfume, frying knishes, human body odor, popping popcorn, corn-on-the-cob, candy apples, and Shetland pony dung?
“Don’t you just love the fresh salt air?” she said, her arm looped in Johnny’s.
Bat traded glances with Wyatt, who lifted his left eyebrow an eighth of an inch.
Wyatt, incidentally, had earlier that day accepted Bat’s gift of a new black Stetson, which he was currently wearing. The brim was not as wide as those the Earp brothers had favored back in Tombstone, but—with that homburg residing atop a bureau in a guest room at Holliday’s—this lanky white-mustached gent in undertaker’s black was recognizably someone who might be (or at least might have been, once upon a time) Wyatt Earp. And anyway, in this crowd, a wider brim would have got the damned thing knocked off.
His flat-topped black derby at its customary jaunty tilt, Bat was in a well-tailored gray suit, his tie a golden yellow that went well with the gold-crowned cane in his left hand. He didn’t often use the cane, but considering the crowds, and the prospect of Coney Island’s unreliable streets and sidewalks, he’d removed the heavy, straight black stick from the front closet in the apartment. He’d even polished up the knobby crown with a kid cloth.
This he’d done sitting on the edge of a Queen Anne chair in the living room, a Victorian space he did not usually frequent, being the domain of his wife Emma, who liked to sit in the peaceful room and do her needlepoint, which she at that moment was.
When he’d married Emma in Denver, some thirty years before, she’d been a lithe blonde song-and-dance gal he’d booked into the Palace Theater, which he then owned and operated. Now she was heavyset but handsome, a graying dignified patron of the arts whose worst habit was playing bridge for pennies, and whose best quality was never asking questions about where he was going and when he’d be back.
But seeing him with the gold-topped cane had perked her interest enough to freeze her needle-in-hand and lock her pretty blue eyes upon him.
“Why the cane, my darling? Is the old wound bothering you?”
“No, dear. I’m accompanying Wyatt out to Coney Island, and you know how that hustle and bustle is.”
“Oh yes,” she said, although they both knew she’d never been to Coney Island in her life. “And, of course, with that rough crowd, you are clearly keeping in mind what your friend Teddy always said.”
She meant Teddy Roosevelt, but otherwise Bat didn’t know what she was talking about.
His wife smiled at his confusion, the same teasing smile she’d so often shown him at the Palace on (and off) stage. “ ‘Walk softly and carry a big stick?’ ”
He laughed. “Emma, you are right again—as always.”
And he’d departed the apartment with no further inquiry from her, although she had (for the twentieth time or so) inquired as to when he’d be bringing Wyatt around for a “decent meal,” as if the restaurants in New York were not up to the fare of their colored cook, Alberta (and, truth be told, they often weren’t).
At Holliday’s, Bat had witnessed the discussion between Johnny and Dixie as to whether or not the latter would join the former on this trip to Coney Island.
“Oh, Johnny, please! I’ve heard about that magical place since I was a little girl!”
Bat—thinking Dixie still was a little girl, and that describing Coney Island as “magical” was worthy of argument—had glanced at Wyatt, whose expression gave away nothing. They were standing near the foot of the stairs on the main floor.
Johnny—looking eerily like (a healthier version of) his father in a cream-colored suit, a pastel blue shirt and a darker blue tie with diamond stickpin—was preparing to put on a dark brown snapbrim fedora. He seemed appalled to hear Dixie make this suggestion; she was in the green polka-dot dress, clearly poised to go along.
“Dix,” he said firmly but not cruelly, “that’s ridiculous. In the first place, it’s a business meeting. In the second—”
“Bring the girl along, John,” Wyatt said.
Bat’s head swivelled to see if Wyatt was foaming at the mouth or otherwise displaying symptoms of dementia.
But Wyatt seemed calm.
Dixie was clapping and saying, “Goodie, goodie,” while Johnny approached Wyatt, apparently to get his own close look for symptoms.
“Wyatt, you can’t be serious,” the younger man said. “This is much too dangerous for Dixie.”
“Are you intending to fire her?”
“What?”
“When you’ve refurbished and reopened—are you intending to fire her?”
“Why no! Of course not!”
“Then you intend to continue employing her as an entertainer in a speakeasy—a speakeasy that was recently shot to pieces.”
“…Well. Yes.”
“Then your protective instincts for her only go so far.”
“That’s not fair!”
Wyatt put a hand on Johnny’s shoulder and spoke softly; Dixie couldn’t hear but Bat could. “Bring her along. Her presence makes it less likely our hosts will get lively.”
“You really think so?”
“I asked for a meeting with Yale in a public place on a Saturday night. His public place. Dixie will fit in just fine.” His eyes went past Johnny and he granted the young woman a smile as he raised his voice to say, “Glad to have you along, Miss Douglas!”
She was figleafing a small beaded bag to herself. “Oh, Mr. Earp—you’re such a gentleman!”
Bat muttered, “I was just about to say that myself.”
Wyatt said to her, “Dixie, thank you for that sentiment. You look beautiful.”
She beamed at him.
“But I need a moment with Johnny and Mr. Masterson. Would you wait here?”
She nodded, and Wyatt led Bat and Johnny into the latter’s own office.
Wyatt gathered them into a huddle near the desk. “Johnny, I do feel we’re not facing any great danger, otherwise I wouldn’t suggest bringing Miss Douglas along. But feel free to overrule me—”
“As if I could,” Johnny said with a smirk, “at this point. You think there’s any dissuading that girl?”
“No,” Wyatt admitted. “She has a child’s will and a woman’s wiles. But I do think we need to take precautions. Bartholomew, I note the cane, which tonight may serve as a club.”
Bat nodded.
“And I assume you have your revolver. In your pocket?”
Bat patted under his arm. “Holster.”
“Excellent tailor job. I didn’t spot it. Johnny, you’ve seen my revolver—the best tailor on the planet couldn’t disguise that.”
“It does have a singular snout,” Johnny said with an admiring smile.
“Could I borrow your nickel-plated job?”
Johnny lifted it from his suitcoat pocket. “Frankly, Wyatt, I was planning to—”
“Thanks,” Wyatt said, taking the weapon and depositing it in his own coat pocket.
“Am I to go bare naked?”
“Do you have another piece?”
Bat said, “Yeah, Johnny—you know the old saying, physician heel thyself?”
Johnny frowned to himself momentarily, then said: “I do have something at that.” He began to slip out of the suitcoat, saying, “Be with you in a minute,” clearly wanting some privacy, and Bat and Wyatt exited the office.
For a few minutes Wyatt and Dixie chatted, Wyatt informing the girl that he’d grown up near Des Moines himself, in nearby Pella, and she mentioned how lovely the tulips were there, this time of year, and he said yes they were. Then he asked her if her people were farmers and she said no, her father was a policeman.
“That was my trade,” he told her, “off and on.”
“Oh. Do you like to hurt people?”
“No.”
“Well, Daddy did.”
Wyatt nodded, once. “Maybe he hurt them when they were causing trouble, or had it coming.”
Bat was struck by how lovely and sad her smile was when she replied, “Well, I never.”
Johnny emerged from the office, straightening his suitcoat and in particular snugging the left sleeve. He planted himself a few steps from where Bat, Wyatt and Dixie were congregated, and opened his arms in presentational fashion.
“Anything show?” he asked Wyatt.
“No. What caliber?”
A smile twitched. Bat had seen the smile before, or at least its predecessor: a nasty little thing, on Doc Holliday’s slightly scarred upper lip.
“You’ll find out,” Johnny said, “if it comes to that.”
Wyatt took a step and placed a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “We’re not looking for trouble. That’s why this sweet child’s coming along. We’re a friendly delegation.”
“I understand that. But the last delegation these animals sent came ’round with a tommy-gun calling card.”
“Noted.” Wyatt tossed a thumb at Bat. “I’ve asked Bartholomew to do our talking. He and words are well-acquainted.”
Johnny frowned. “But, Wyatt—it’s my place.…”
Bat wasn’t sure Johnny meant literally his place—the club—or his rightful role. Not that it mattered.
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