The Hour of the Cat

by Peter Quinn

  She sat across from Fintan Dunne. A maid delivered scotch and sodas on a silver tray, set them down noiselessly on the taboret between their chairs, each glass with its own small, immaculate linen napkin. “He’s a rat, Mr. Dunne, a lying, scheming rat. I want him destroyed. Ruined.”

  Dunne rested his hand on hers for just a moment. She seemed neither to notice nor to be reassured. No six-week stay in Reno for Prudence Addison Babcock; no out-of-state settlement that set her husband free and rewarded his infidelity. She wanted him caught in flagrante delicto, with the corpus delectable. Pop open the door, photographer in tow, flash the Speed Graphic, send the photos to the Mirror and the Standard. He let her rant. Get the venom out. Like milking a cobra.

  The next time Dunne met with her his retainer had been paid. Morning, pre-Scotch, the maid poured coffee from a silver pot, cream from a silver pitcher. He drew his chair in close for a heart-to-heart and tried to make her understand. In some cases the husband and wife arrange a “handshake shot.” Hubby rents a room and a woman. They strip to their underwear and get beneath the sheets. The wife’s witness and a photographer enter through a conveniently unlocked door. Take half a roll of film to be sure there’ll be some usable snaps. Incontrovertible proof of adultery, the only grounds for divorce in the State of New York. Case quietly adjudicated. A mutually agreed-upon parting of the ways.

  “This isn’t one of those cases, Mrs. Babcock. Not an easy thing to get two people to stand still to have their picture taken in that sort of circumstance. And unnecessary. A carefully detailed record of his infidelity is what will stand up in court. Times, dates, witnesses, affidavits. Besides, once the circus gets started, the press won’t stop with your husband. Drag everybody in, kids, folks. They’ll be parked outside your door.”

  “Very well, Mr. Dunne. You’re the expert in these matters.” She dabbed at her eyes with a delicate lace hankie embroidered with violets.

  He lit a cigarette and handed it to her. “I’ll deliver an airtight case to your lawyers, Mrs. Babcock. You’ll get what you want, I promise.”

  “Yes, you’re right.” She puffed softly on the cigarette. Her eyes stayed wide, her cheeks soft. “I just want it over and done, that’s all.”

  Over and done. Turned out, she was a woman of her word.

  Noontime, six weeks later, a cop gave Dunne the bad news. His face was glaringly familiar, a vice-squad detective for sure, but his name? They were buying cigarettes in the Liggetts on Broadway and Duane, and the detective punched him lightly on the shoulder. He had that tight, irrepressible grin a cop wears when he’s got the pleasure of giving a private dick an item of information he should know, but doesn’t.

  “Hey, Dunne,” he said, “I just seen the Professor.”

  His name rhymed with crimes: Grimes? Symes? Pines?

  The detective tore the cellophane off the cigarette pack with his teeth. “He’s just back from the Commodore. Some society dame plugged her hubby, and the Professor’s fresh from covering it. You know him, always first on the scene.” He spit the cellophane out of his mouth and it fluttered to the floor. “And you know what, Dunne?”

  Is his first name Tim? Or Jim?

  “What?”

  “The Professor says to me, ‘What a shame. The one who done the shootin’ happens to be a client of Fintan Dunne’s.’” The detective pulled off the tinfoil on top of the pack the same way as the cellophane, ripping it with his teeth and spitting it to the floor. “Who’d a thought in a million years I’d bump into you right after him? But that’s the way life is, don’t you know? Full of happy coincidences, even in a city as big and sloppy as New York.” He delivered another, harder, punch to the shoulder. His grin got bigger. “Chief Brannigan is lookin’ for you,” he said. “Wouldn’t make him wait too long I was you.” He went out the revolving door without looking back.

  A puff of carbon-colored exhaust from a Broadway bus made Dunne’s cigarette taste like a blend of tobacco and coal. The detective’s name popped into his head. Tommy Hines. Nephew of Jimmy Hines, Tammany bigwig, freshly indicted for running the Harlem numbers racket, an activity Uncle Jimmy had been richly successful at since the days of Dutch Schultz. Uncle Jimmy was the only reason Tommy Hines got to carry a gold badge in the first place. If Tommy was nervous about his uncle’s fate, he’d given no sign of it. As cocksure as ever. And as dumb. Never be clever enough to invent a story just to tease a former cop who’d gone out on his own. Unfortunately, the roster of society-types Dunne had to search had only one name on it: Mrs. Prudence Addison Babcock, wife (and now self-made widow) of Mr. Clement Babcock.

  By the time he reached Police Headquarters, Centre Street was awash in blue with hungry cops on the prowl for lunch. He skirted the south side of the building and went around the corner into a ramshackle building on Centre Market. Inside was as cluttered and dingy as a sweatshop: crumpled paper on the floor, figures hunched over tables, typewriters’ incessant metal chatter. The Professor was on the phone. He stood by the first desk on the right, a spot ceded by consent to the longest-serving tenant of the Shack, home of the hard-shells who crawled Manhattan’s crime beat, scavenging for whatever morsels they could use to turn the latest rendition of Cain and Abel into a screaming headline and a two-day follow-up.

  A few reporters looked up at the clock over the door. The low-hanging pall of gray-blue tobacco smoke grew more dense; the banging on the machines, keys, carriages, bells louder and more frenetic.

  Dunne slumped into a rickety chair. The Professor put the receiver down with a slightly trembling hand.

  “Babcock in the Commodore?” Dunne lit a cigarette and offered one to the Professor.

  The Professor shook his head. “No to the cigarette. Yes, I’m afraid, to Mr. Babcock. Room 328. Five times in the epicardium, at such close range there were scorch marks on the silk pajamas. A sartorial as well as human tragedy.”

  “Who did it?”

  “The police arrived to find a distraught but defiant Mrs. Prudence Addison Babcock, wife and now widow of the deceased, cradling the smoking weapon, while Mr. Babcock’s nubile bedmate was whimpering behind the locked door of the bathroom. The perpetratorix was instantly pinched. Be the lead story in this evening’s New York Standard, a well-crafted piece by the city’s most seasoned chronicler of murder and mayhem, yours truly, John Lockwood.”

  “The woman in the bathroom, who was she?”

  “A stenographer in the Babcock Publishing Company named Linda Sexton, a bosomy oread from the wilds of Washington Heights, not much older than eighteen.” He looked questioningly at Dunne. “May I infer from your question that trysts of this sort were a usual part of Mr. Babcock’s routine?”

  “Hey, quit yappin’. I’m tryin’ to file a story.” The heavyset, crimson-faced man at the next desk clapped his hand over the receiver.

  “Good God, Corrigan, had I suspected I was in any way cramping the literary efforts of the senior crime correspondent of Gotham’s august morning journal, The Daily Mirror, I’d have stifled the urge to speak.”

  “Shove it, Lockwood.”

  “I return your gracious sentiments, in perpetuum.” The Professor removed his homburg from the desk and put it on his head, adjusting it in the small, grime-ridden mirror tacked to the wall beside his chair. He framed his droopy-eyed reflection in the gray glass, stretched his long, thin neck, and straightened his collar, the old-fashioned winged variety. “Mais où sont les neiges d’an-tan? ” he said. “Know what that means?”

  Corrigan shook his head. “Buzz off,” he said and went back to filing his story.

  “Close enough. Wherever ‘the snows of yesteryear’ may be, they aren’t here. Come, Dunne, why don’t we retire to McGloin’s for some lunch? It’s a rule of mine to always work on an empty stomach.”

  “Your tab is ready to be settled. Goin’ on three weeks.” McGloin wiped the bar with a tattered gray rag. Except for an old man sitting in the corner, who was either blind or had his eyes closed, the barroom was deserted. />
  “I’ll meet my obligation Thursday, when my wages are paid,” the Professor said.

  “Be nothin’ in your glass ’less you do.” McGloin poured two shots and put a beer next to each. The Professor slouched close to the bar, lifted the shot with a practiced swoop and threw the whiskey in his mouth before his shaking hand spilled a drop. He shivered slightly. “Encore,” he said. McGloin poured another and walked away.

  “I began as a patron here in the reign of McGloin the Elder,” the Professor said, “a man whose great girth was equaled by his conviviality. The shrunken stature and squeezed sentiments of the present proprietor make me wonder how he could have been sired by such a colossus.”

  Dunne took a sip of beer, left the whiskey untouched. “You were in the room at the Commodore?”

  “There hasn’t been a noteworthy murder in this borough since the mayoralty of William Gaynor where I haven’t been on the scene. I wrote the Babcock story on the train to Park Row, filed it at the Standard’s office and was back to the Shack whilst my hapless competitors still lumbered to the scene. Been at this as long as I, you develop a certain knack.”

  The Professor grasped Dunne’s shot glass with a hand almost free of tremors. “I’ll find a use for this if you can’t.”

  “Be my guest.”

  He downed the whiskey and wiped his mustache with steady fingers. “The widow Babcock invoked your name with the police. A client, I presume?”

  “Was.”

  “Our own beloved Chief of Homicide, Inspector Robert I. Brannigan, was there to take credit for the arrest. A blowhard who exaggerates his own exploits and expropriates those of others, often, in Melville’s phrase, ‘spending funds of reminiscences not his own.’ He uses Corrigan as his personal press agent but knows better than to expect such sycophantic treatment from me.”

  McGloin filled their glasses. Dunne said, “I had this tied up. Now, I’m in a hole. Except for a retainer, I haven’t been paid.”

  “I’ll let you know what I hear from the sinkholes of matrimonial misconduct. Always played it on the up and up with me when you were a cop. One of the few.” He held his glass high in an unwavering grip. “To better times.”

  McGloin poured another round. The Professor began a recitation of murders that echoed the circumstances of the Babcock case: a familiar burrow of whiskey, history, and stories in which to bury his head. After a few minutes, Dunne took his leave and stepped outside. A green-and-white NYPD patrol car moved slowly up the street. Brannigan was in the passenger seat, head turned to the side studying a row of storefronts. For a moment Dunne imagined that the sight might be a mirage, a mental mix of McGloin’s 100-proof rotgut and undiluted sunlight. The instant he saw it wasn’t, he ducked around the corner onto Broome, into the small Italian church nestled unobtrusively in the middle of the block.

  The incense-sweetened church was packed with statues of saints. Most looked as though they were relatives of the little ladies in black who knelt before them fingering their rosary beads. Dunne walked halfway down the aisle, to a semi-darkened niche that held a statue of St. Anthony, who cradled the Christ child in one arm and held out a loaf of bread with the other. He crouched on the kneeler before the statue, took the change from his pocket, and dropped it in the offering box. He cringed at the racket it made. He lit a candle and listened for the tread of cops’ shoes on the linoleum floor. There was only the low rattle of rosary beads, murmur of Aves.

  Pray for what?

  The repose of the soul of Mr. Babcock? Eternal damnation for his trigger-happy wife? An increase in marital infidelities among the well-to-do? The divorce business had suffered from the Depression along with everything else. Pray for a quick and not-so-happy death for Inspector Brannigan? God hears every prayer uttered with a sincere heart, his mother always told him. In the trenches, all the Catholic doughboys prayed or made some gesture of divine petition, rosaries around their necks, Miraculous Medals, holy cards in their helmets, prayer books in their pockets. Some filled canteens with holy water. They got hit the same as Protestants, Jews, and agnostics. Francis Sheehy was as devout as you could get, so quiet and kind no one mocked him when he knelt each night to say his prayers. He had his legs blown off and lay bleeding to death, in the same smoking hole as Major Donovan, crying, O shit, O shit! A prayer of sorts.

  Hail Mary, Dunne prayed. The words came automatically, without having to think about them. Full of grace. He prayed for his father. Big Mike Dunne, lungs full of phlegm, half a skeleton before he died. The Lord is with thee. And Francis Sheehy, late of East 11th Street, now a permanent resident of a military cemetery in France. Blessed art thou amongst women. His mother. Knocked down by a delivery wagon on Houston Street. Broke her leg. Died the next week from a blood clot. Maura, his sister, wherever she was. The fruit of thy womb. And Jack, his kid brother, dead from diphtheria within days of his mother. Now and at the hour of our death.

  St. Anthony sported a faintly sympathetic smile. It reminded Dunne of the kind a bartender (although not McGloin) might wear when he tried to look interested in a story he’s heard a thousand times before. “Blessed are they who cry in their beer for they shall be comforted.” How’d the Professor once put it? “The short and simple annals of the poor.” His line or someone else’s? Whose ever line it was, they were annals to avoid. Aunt Margaret took in Dunne and his sister Maura after their mother died. She already had eight of her own and a recently absconded husband, but she gave it a go. At first, Maura cried a lot but after a week or so she stopped. A week later she went silent as a mute. Nobody could get a word out of her. A month after that, she had her first fit. Rolled on the floor, eyes wide and fearful, pupils back so far, his Aunt Margaret said, you could barely see them. Diagnosed as a “feebleminded epileptic,” she was sent to the State Hospital in Buffalo and, after her discharge, never heard from again.

  Aunt Margaret’s twins had mastered the art of stealing fruit from pushcarts, an art in which they were schooling their cousin Fintan Dunne when he got nabbed and sent to the Catholic Protectory in the Bronx. “You’re in for it now,” the twins whispered to Dunne as they leaned across the railing in court to bid their cousin goodbye. “Nobody ever comes back from the Bronx.”

  First night there, kid in the next bed coughed till dawn. A veteran of Mount Loretto orphanage on Staten Island, he had his own craps, handmade in the orphanage’s machine shop, expertly weighted, nothing left to chance. He’d been in and out of orphanages since he was five, when his old man walked out on the wife and five brats and headed to points unknown. “I got ’em fooled,” he said to Fintan Dunne that first morning when his coughing subsided. “They think I’m twelve and I’m only nine.”

  Fintan Dunne stood with the kid beneath a statue of the Virgin, blue cloak draped over a white gown, her head encircled by a halo of stars, her foot crushing the head of a serpent. The kid shot a stream of spit through the gap in his front teeth onto the bed of marigolds around the pedestal. His eyes were as blue as the Virgin’s cape; hooded eyes, lids half drawn, eyes that could have been eight or eighteen or eighty, nothing to give away their age: a timeless menace, ancient as the stars. “My name is Vinnie Coll,” he said. “Don’t fuck with me.”

  “Cowboy Coll” is the name they put on him because of his fierce, lonesome style. The moniker stuck through his early days as an independent gunman, until he earned himself the label of “Mad Dog,” shooting five kids and killing one in an attempt to rub out an associate of Dutch Schultz. He grabbed Owney Madden’s partner and held him for ransom, inventing the business of gang-land kidnappings, which soon grew into an industry. They said he’d learned his trade as a gunman for the IRA. But he was a Protectory brat who’d never been east of Rockaway. Met his end in a phone booth in the London Pharmacy on 23rd Street, two bursts of a machine gun that blew his stomach open and let his intestines ooze across the floor: Mad Dog Coll dead at the ripe old age of twenty-three. There was no doubt he was fingered, maybe by a friend, maybe by the cops.


  Wonder who?

  Brannigan “happened” to be nearby. He had that kind of luck, especially during the Tommy-gun era, the glory days of Prohibition, twilight time for the squabbling gangs of guineas, micks, and kikes, gangs galore, the Candy Kids, the Bon-Bon Brigade, the Prince Street Boys, the Laughing Gang. They raided each other’s garages, clubhouses, card games, fought for control of booze, bets, girls, muscled in on legit businesses, clothes, coal, garbage, kosher chickens. Cowboys like Coll were admired and in demand. But wiser, cooler heads could see the future and it didn’t include penny-ante operations, crazed gunmen, and shoot-’em-ups in the streets. Consolidation was the order of the day. Organization. Syndication. Get with it. Or get lost. Or find yourself dead.

  The Police eventually claimed they brought the mayhem under control. Brave boys in blue and their Gunman’s Squad, with scores of heavily armed, ask-no-questions cops, supposedly busted up the gangs and returned order to the streets. That’s what they told the papers, and what the papers printed, but all the while the Syndicate worked with quiet purpose to impose order and end the warfare and the unwanted attention it brought. The independent gunsels joined the fold or followed Coll to the grave. Force was used selectively; the demand for sex, liquor, drugs satisfied with efficiency; public opinion served, not outraged. Lawyers and accountants occupied the Syndicate’s front offices. Police and politicians joined the payroll. Reporters, too.

  The day finally came when a cadre of incorruptible prosecutors and investigators busted up the rackets. The Syndicate found itself under the scrutiny of the government and was punished for its success in replacing chaos with order. But while the Syndicate had the tide of history on its side, there were plenty of those with the right mix of ambition and greed to make sure they were aboard for the ride. Among the cops, Brannigan was anointed the fair-haired boy.