Black Hats

by Max Allan Collins

  Earlier that very evening at their ringside table downstairs, before Johnny joined them, Bat had sat shaking his head, saying, “This boy thinks there’s five or six years in this club, Wyatt. You know that’s wishful thinking.”

  Wyatt nodded.

  “At some point, the law’s going to shut this place down, next time a reform mayor comes in,” Bat went on, “or some honest federal is going to slap on a padlock. Sure, Johnny can relocate, but has he factored in having to do that once or even twice a year?”

  Wyatt shrugged.

  “And I won’t deny,” Bat said, “I get a sort of charge out of riding shotgun—I mean that in a figural way, since all I’m packing is what you insist on calling a ‘lady’s revolver,’ but it’ll shoot a bang-up hole in a man.…What was I saying?”

  Wyatt raised an eyebrow.

  “Oh! Yes. I admit riding along with you, as if we’re delivering a silver shipment, well, it brings back old memories and it’s better than bourbon, almost. But do you really picture us making these, shall we say, milk runs, once a week, for the next five years?”

  Wyatt shook his head.

  “And surely at some point Yale and that fat-assed hard case Capone are going to get tired of waiting and watching and do something.”

  Wyatt held up a hand, gently, an apologetic traffic cop. “Bartholomew, Yale has his own problems with the Irish White Handers. He and Capone could be dead in some ditch tomorrow morning.”

  Bat nodded.

  “And furthermore,” Wyatt said, “in just a year that kid can get rich, and so can we…and then maybe we can talk sense to him. He’s not ready to listen to reason.”

  “If I were him,” Bat said, “I’d sell that battery of booze to one of Yale’s competitors, those White Handers perhaps, or maybe some Manhattan bootlegger, brokered by Arnold Rothstein. Be a lead-pipe cinch.”

  “A good idea, but as I said—he’s not ready.”

  Bat was shaking his head, not disagreeing, rather expressing frustration. “He oughta grab that little chorus girl and go make little Johnnies and Dixies somewhere. Son of a bitch has a dental degree, and—”

  Wyatt raised the palm again, because Johnny was approaching to take his seat with them, which of course ended that line of conversation.

  Bat’s thinking, as was often the case, paralleled Wyatt’s own. He may have seemed argumentative to his old friend, but the truth of it was, Wyatt was relieved—he knew, when the time came to move Johnny out of the speakeasy business and back into teeth-pulling, Bartholomew would be at Wyatt’s side.

  Even in the poker lounge, Bat served as Wyatt’s fill-in, much of the time. Bat tended to hang around Holliday’s till near dawn drinking, eating, conversing, enjoying his celebrity, but never taking a seat at the poker table—that was for the customers—except to spell Wyatt when he needed a bathroom break or a bite to eat or a step out into the fresh air for a cigar.

  Occasionally celebrities other than Bat sat at the green-felt table. His old friend from Alaska, Wilson Mizner, lately making it big on Broadway as a playwright, took a chair and kept it, about every other night.

  A lanky, cheerfully dissipated character with thinning dark hair, sullen eyes, long nose and disgusted twist of a mouth, Mizner invariably wore a tuxedo and sat with his head cocked to one side, as if straightening it were too great an effort even to consider. This man had been a miner, con man, hotel manager, rich widow’s new husband, songwriter and even prizefight manager—when his fighter Stanley Ketchel was shot and killed by a jealous husband, manager Mizner said, “Somebody count ten over him—he’ll get up.”

  Mizner played well, and won frequently, but his dry, wry witticisms tended to throw other players off their game, so Wyatt welcomed him.

  “I love to gamble,” Mizner said, after taking a particularly bad beating from Wyatt. “It’s the only sure way of getting nothing for something.”

  Sportswriter Al Runyon (“Damon” to his readers) played occasionally, but usually only for an hour or two; unlike Mizner and most other players, the bespectacled, thin-lipped, gray-complexioned dude did not order drinks from the cute cocktail waitress in blue satin and red satin sash, who made regular rounds of the little lounge. But he did send her for cup after cup of coffee, and whenever Runyon was at the table, half of the blue floating smoke had been generated by his cigarette upon cigarette.

  Runyon played conservatively and sometimes broke even but usually lost. He said little, though once he’d said to Wyatt, “Try me at gin rummy sometime.”

  Wyatt, who smiled more when he was dealing than otherwise in life, smiled and said, “No thanks.”

  Heavyweight champ Dempsey sat at the table that first night, drinking moderately and playing indifferently, displaying none of the intense snarling force he brought to the ring. The swarthy lad struck Wyatt as a big good-natured brute with his mop of blue-black hair, narrow eyes, palooka’s nose, and easy grin; his suit was louder than a brass band, yellow with black pinstripes and a red-and-yellow necktie. The kid was easygoing, giving autographs and chatting with anybody—in fact, Dempsey was a distraction at the table and Wyatt was fine with him leaving after an hour, the boxer three hundred bucks the wiser.

  On Friday night, with his poker lounge a great success, Wyatt faced a complication that had not come up before. Guardian of the gate Gus was suddenly leaning over Wyatt and asking, “Can a woman play? I have a woman here who wants a number.”

  Wyatt glanced toward the open double doorway and saw a distinguished-looking well-preserved matron in a white muslin frock with tiny red dots and a white sash, white stockings and white shoes but with a black straw bonnet framing a pretty powdered face with dark blue eyes, red bud of a mouth and a long, distinctive but not unattractive nose.

  As in Big-Nosed Kate.

  Wyatt’s long suit in cards was his poker face, but on recognizing Johnny’s mother, not safely in Arizona but dangerously poised in this Manhattan doorway, his poker face went bust.

  Wyatt smiled and nodded.

  Kate smiled and nodded.

  But the chill from the cold of those dark blue eyes damned near made him shiver.

  “Give the little lady the next open chair,” he said.

  “But Mr. Earp, there are seven numbers ahead of her.”

  “Next open chair, Gus. Seat her in the dining room, see she gets whatever she wants to drink, and tell her she’ll have a place here soon.”

  Within half an hour, Kate was seated next to Wyatt at the table. Her conversation was friendly and polite, though her presence unsettled some of these men—most of whom were none too happy that these upstart women seemed about to get the right to vote—and the action was dampened for a time.

  But Kate knew her poker, and while the table talk became less masculine, the playing didn’t. By four-thirty a.m., three hours after Kate had taken a chair at Wyatt’s table, she was up four hundred dollars.

  She cashed in her chips, gave Wyatt an icy smile and, in her thickly charming Hungarian-goulash way, said, “We must talk.”

  An hour or so later, Wyatt dealt one last hand—he never allowed games to go past six a.m., and this was a tad early; but he wanted to talk to Johnny, who proved not to be in his office. Wyatt tried downstairs.

  Tex’s last show had gone on at five a.m. and was winding down. The club no longer packed, the revue took on a pleasant intimacy; a few guests were asleep in their seats, even though the jazz band blared away, waiters and bartenders standing in the dim light like figures in a wax museum.

  Bat was still at ringside but at a different table, and Johnny was with him; both were having coffee. Bat, as much a night creature as any other bat, seemed chipper. Johnny, however, slumped on his elbows, head in his hands, his cream-color coat wrinkled, his tie loose, the flesh trying to melt off his haggard face.

  So. The boy knew.

  Wyatt leaned in and curled a finger.

  Johnny looked up at him and rolled his eyes and nodded. Wyatt followed the younger man, who staggered
up the stairs, drunkenly, though Wyatt doubted the club owner had had a single drink.

  In the office, Johnny fell into his padded swivel desk chair and Wyatt lowered himself into the red leather one opposite.

  “Were you expecting this family reunion?” Wyatt asked.

  Johnny shook his head and kept shaking it as he said, “No, God, no. She just showed up, something like two a.m. I’ve barely spoken to her. She just gives me this terrible stiff smile.”

  “How did she get in?”

  “She told Lou at the door she was my mother.”

  “That would do it.”

  “Then she got Bill to carry her bags up to the guest room.”

  “Next to mine? Bully.”

  Johnny started shaking his head again. “I have no idea what she’s doing here, why she even thought to come. We’d argued about this in person, and over the phone, and I thought it was settled. And now here she is, under my roof, to hound me and drag me down.”

  “That’s a mother’s prerogative.”

  “And it’s a son’s to ignore it. Wyatt, you have to talk to her. You knew her before I was born! She’ll talk to you, I know she will.”

  Wyatt tasted the inside of his mouth; it wasn’t pleasant. “I know she will, too.”

  If Johnny had leaned any farther over his desk, he’d have fallen across the thing. “You have to convince her it’s too dangerous, her being here. What if Yale’s boys knew she was here, and snatched her, and—”

  “Enough,” Wyatt said. He stood. “I’ll deal with this in the daylight.”

  Johnny nodded to the window behind him, where the sun was slanting in the cracks of the blinds. “It’s daylight now.”

  “And it still will be after noon. I believe she went up to bed, hour or so ago.”

  His eyes widened; they bore a red filagree. “You saw her? I mean—you’ve already spoken to her?”

  “She came and sat at my table.”

  “Your table! And played?”

  “And won. Making this my worst night. I’m only up a few hundred. Your mother can play cards, Johnny. You didn’t inherit all your skills from your daddy.”

  Johnny stared at nothing, his mouth slackly open. “Ah, hell. I don’t need this.”

  “Nor do I.” Wyatt walked to the door, paused, said, “When we’re all up, early afternoon say, we’ll deal with it,” and exited.

  But Wyatt did not go immediately up to his room. He unlocked the front door and went out onto the small porch and smoked a cigar.

  By God, even knowing it would be there, the broad sunlight was a surprise, after the endless night of the club; and the toilers of the city, on foot and in automobiles, were scurrying to their daily work. Real life getting its start, now that the imaginary world of the speakeasies had shut down.

  He tried to make his mind sort through what needed saying to Kate; but he was too dragged out to get the gears turning. A night of poker was mental work, after all, and he was no spring chicken. He needed his damned sleep.

  So he went inside and up the stairs to his guest room. Put on the blue silk pajamas Sadie gave him for his birthday, two years back, and got himself between the cool sheets and under the warm covers. The troubles he had, from Big-Nosed Kate to Carved-Up Capone, were no match for how worn out he was: Wyatt Earp went right to sleep.

  When the door opened, he heard it but fitted it into a dream he was having, of Sadie and him working the Happy Days mine and finding a rich vein of gold. Somebody opened the door in the dream, which made no sense because he and Sadie were in a cave, but then it was a dream and didn’t have to make sense.…

  He opened his eyes and a beautiful young woman was outlined by sunlight at the mouth of the cave, the silhouette of her slim figure clear under a sheer nightgown.

  When he came fully awake and sat up, leaning on his elbows, the woman in the nightgown wasn’t young though she was still beautiful, even at sixty; and she left the door half-open as she padded over in her bare feet and sat on the edge of the bed and stared at him, the blue eyes no less lovely for the near darkness. Nor any the less accusative.

  “You were always a bastard, Wyatt Earp,” Kate said.

  Not a whisper but at least she wasn’t shouting—on this floor, no one would be around but Kate in her guest room and Wyatt in his. Or rather Kate in his. The rest of the brownstone’s second floor was given over to dressing rooms, and Tex and her chorines were long gone by now.

  Her dark lustrous hair was curling down around her shoulders, very girlish. For a woman her age, Kate had weathered the ride just fine, though certain lines around her mouth and eyes were carved deep, not so much with years as with concern.

  And anger.

  “You as well as anybody, Kate,” he said softly, “ought to know I’m no hero.”

  “But I thought I could trust you!”

  “Why?”

  She thought about that, couldn’t find an answer and, in a quavering voice, said, “Out of loyalty to that boy’s father, at least, you should have done right by him!”

  Wyatt sat up straighter. He engaged her eyes. He said, “I am doing right by him. And he’s no boy.”

  “He’s my boy!”

  “He’s your son. I think of him as a ‘boy’ sometimes myself, but he’s a man, well in his third decade. When I was his age—”

  “You were a murdering son of a bitch!”

  “…No argument.”

  “You took my money!”

  “I’m prepared to give it back. I can do that with interest, Kate.”

  Her upper lip curled in contempt. “You think that will satisfy me? Return on my dollar?”

  He put a hand on her shoulder and she shrugged it off furiously. “Kate, Bat made your argument. I heard him. He made it well. And the ‘boy’ would have none of it.”

  She crossed her arms over her bosom. “I thought he’d listen to you.”

  “And he has. I’m helping him make a success of this place. And I am encouraging him…and when the time is right I will encourage him more…to walk away from it.”

  She snorted a laugh. “You have a funny way of showing it. There was no gambling here before you! You took advantage of the situation to—”

  “I did. When I saw the situation, I decided to help Johnny make the best of it. I believe the day will come, perhaps a year from now, when he and that young girl of his will—”

  “That little tramp!” Her eyes and nostrils flared and the upper lip curled back again. “I saw her go upstairs to him! She’s sleeping with him! Is she living with him? In sin?”

  Wyatt just stared at her.

  Then he began to laugh.

  She slapped him and it rang like a gunshot and stung like hell.

  He grabbed her arms, firmly, not to throttle her, just to get her damned attention, and prevent further slapping.

  “Kate, you were a whore when I met you. Christ, my brother James was your pimp! Save your self-righteousness for somebody who hasn’t bedded you for money.”

  Her chin trembled and she swallowed and said, “Can’t a…can’t a mother…a mother want more for her son? Want better?”

  He let go of her arms and took her into his. She began to weep, not a retching cry, merely a soft sobbing. He patted her back and whispered into her ear, “Sure a mother can want more. And should.”

  Then he held her away from him enough to look into her moist eyes.

  “Kate, it’s too early for him.”

  She was trembling all over now, her eyes confused. “…early?”

  “I been where he is.”

  “Wyatt, I…I don’t understand.”

  “Kate…it’s…it’s something I’d rather not put words to.”

  Her chin tightened and so did her lips. “You owe me, Wyatt. Tell me. Talk about it, whatever it is, goddamn you.”

  He took a breath. Let go of her. Turned away and said, “He lost a wife and child.”

  “I know. Who do you think told you? I know he did.”

  Now he looke
d at her. Hard. “So did I, a long time ago.”

  She said nothing, but her face changed. Softened, losing years.

  “It was a journey back that took doing. And only I could figure it out. Do you understand, Kate? I think he and that sweet kid from the chorus, someday they’ll have a normal life. A life more normal than you and I ever had. But Johnny needs to make that journey himself, in his own way. I mean to help him. But I can’t take the trip for him. And neither can you. Not even his mother. Not even his father, were he here.”

  “Oh, Wyatt,” she said, and threw himself into his arms, “Johnny would listen to you! I know he would!”

  “No…no.”

  She kissed him, hard, a kiss salted with tears, and it was desperate and yearning and not half bad. His pecker was just getting interested when he pushed her away, gently.

  “Kate, Kate…I’m a married man, who loves his wife, even if she probably told you enough on the phone to get you worked up and out here like this.”

  Now she was embarrassed, head hanging, and muttering apologies as she got to her feet and padded out, closing the door behind her.

  Wyatt got back in bed; he could use a few more winks. Kate Elder was a fine-looking woman, for sixty; but he’d be goddamned if he’d give in to her charms, not when he’d turned away a younger gal like Tex.

  “Sadie,” he said, “the things I do for you.”

  Took forever getting back to sleep.

  Three minutes, anyway.

  FOURTEEN

  The rain heightened the smells of Washington Market, fruit and fish and produce sheds and the nearby river adding to a damp, slightly rank bouquet. Buildings dating before the Civil War, with their arched doorways, elaborate cornices and sculpted lintels, offered up their dirty brick and stone surfaces to the storm, but to no avail: even a hammering downpour couldn’t wash away years of grime.

  By nine a.m., these streets would be crammed with traffic, even in weather like this, and the retail shops a block over would have no shortage of buyers for their radios and fireworks and garden supplies and sporting goods and who knew what all.

  But before dawn, the shops were dark, the streets owned by the trucks of farmers and haulers. Few of the men in caps and workclothes bothered with slickers as they loaded and unloaded in the shifting, rain-stippled glow of headlights, though their pace seemed even more frantic than usual, as the noise level of squawking fowls and yelling humans and slamming crates combined with the rumble and shriek of freight cars and the mechanical roar and squeal of trucks backing up and lumbering forward, to lend competition to the thunder that God was hurling around like He owned the place.