The Hour of the Cat

by Peter Quinn

  The train jolted forward, moving in herky-jerky fashion until it gathered speed. It stopped at the station in Ronkonkoma. Dunne climbed over the giant, who had his straw hat over his face and was snoring loudly, and stood on the iron-decked entryway.

  “Well, the schedule’s gone to hell now.” The conductor was behind him with his watch out. A train whistle sounded. “Here she comes, the Camp Siegfried special. They’ll be squawkin’ about being late, which the krauts can’t abide, but it’s their own friggin’ fault. Was them who held us up at Yaphank.”

  A moment later, the eastbound train clattered past. People hung out the windows and waved the Stars and Stripes and swastika flags. As the last car came into view, a lone figure appeared on the rear platform, which was draped in red, white, and blue bunting. Seeing the two figures watching him from the train on the siding, he sucked in his gut and stretched out his arm in a stiff salute.

  “Herr Bundesführer himself,” the conductor said. “Been my misfortune to ride that special in the company of Fritz Kuhn and crew. He excels at two things. Givin’ orders and grabbin’ girls’ asses, and not necessarily in that order.”

  The Bundesführer stayed where he was and maintained his salute. The conductor put his left hand in the bend of his right arm, and lifted them up. “Up where I was raised, in Italian Harlem, a half Jew, half mick kid on a block full of wops, we used to call this the ‘Second Avenue salute.’ He makes a fist with his right hand and raised his arm higher. “Hey, Fritz, sieg heil this!”

  Dunne exited Penn Station through the cavernous, dingy waiting room onto Eighth Avenue. There’d been a shower, and while the rain had stopped, the air was still gray and dank, rife with engine fumes. He fell in with the sodden, wilted column of pedestrians moving north.

  Sun or no sun, a horde of kids splashed in the spray of a fire hydrant, their mothers leaning out on the fire escapes above to keep watch. Tommy Scanlon had been from around here. Irish mother, Italian father, Scanzoni was his real name. For the sake of surviving among the micks of Hell’s Kitchen, he called himself Scanlon. He was killed the same day as Francis Sheehy, a single bullet in the head while helping to remove the wounded. His old man had a vegetable pushcart in the old Paddy’s Market on Ninth Avenue, beneath the El. Tommy’s death knocked the life out of his old man, but he stayed doing business until the city started building the Lincoln Tunnel and drove the street peddlers away. A grateful nation’s way of saying thanks.

  At Forty-second Street, Dunne went west, halfway down the block, to Holy Cross rectory, beside the church. He rang the bell and wiped the perspiration from his face. He was about to ring again when a short, prim housekeeper, her apron perfectly starched, opened the door. He asked to see Father McNevin. She said that the Father didn’t see anyone without an appointment, unless it was an emergency. She didn’t move out of the doorway when Dunne said he had an appointment.

  “Made no mention of it to me.” She was about to close the door, but hesitated. “Yet that’s the way today, isn’t it? No sense of doing things properly, not even among them who should be models for the rest of us.” She motioned him in and led him to the parlor. “Wait here. I’ll tell Father his appointment is here.”

  Dunne sat in a stiff-backed, horsehair chair, suitably uncomfortable for a parish-house parlor. Above the mantle was a picture of Father Duffy in helmet and uniform, looking pious and severe, two things he wasn’t. Colonel Donovan said Duffy had been a noted theologian and scholar till he wrote something they didn’t like in Rome and was banished to a parish. That didn’t matter to the men in the regiment; what did was that he was a different kind of priest, unafraid to laugh aloud at the raunchiest choruses of “Mademoiselle from Armentieres.” After the war, half of them—Donovan included—kept coming to him at Holy Cross for confession, every Saturday, right up until he died. Bless me Father, for I have sinned. Didn’t matter what the sin was, Duffy never scolded or made the penalty too stiff: “For your penance say two Hail Marys.”

  The ormolu clock beneath Duffy’s portrait ticked loudly. Dunne paged through a magazine with pictures of American nuns running an orphanage in some corner of China. The caption said the invading Japanese had killed the kids’ parents. There were a hundred kids for every nun. Father McNevin entered with a cigar in hand, medicine-ball stomach protruding against his cassock.

  In France, Private Aloysius McNevin had been known as “Old Grumbles,” on account of his constant griping and complaining. McNevin was the cautious, reliable type that others stuck close to in combat. They knew he’d never do anything silly, cowardly, or heroic. He seemed to have the natural temperament of a patrolman, which is what everyone predicted he’d be. But God works in strange ways, even in New York City. Dunne wasn’t the only one surprised by the news that McNevin had entered the seminary. They’d stayed in touch after McNevin was ordained.

  A curate in Sacred Heart Church, McNevin succeeded Duffy at Holy Cross, spending his whole career as a priest in the parishes of Hell’s Kitchen, a neighborhood of tightly packed tenements crammed with dock workers who shaped up every morning on the West Side piers. Mixed in were the professional thugs and gangsters, and behind them, the ranks of minor criminals angling for a way into the majors. McNevin’s prime clientele were the wives and mothers of the workers and roughnecks, an army of cleaning ladies, maids, cooks, and the usherettes who handed out programs in the Broadway theaters and made sure Father McNevin had the best seats for any show he cared to see. He kept on top of their kids and sent their husbands home from the bars, as much patrolman as priest, and they were grateful to him for that.

  “You lied,” McNevin said. “You told Mrs. Egan you had an appointment.” He puffed on the cigar.

  “Been eating fish all week. Don’t I get any points for that?”

  “It’s not Friday. You can eat any damn thing you want.” McNevin pulled his cassock over his knees and crossed one thick leg over the other. “Something tells me you’re not here on matters of faith.”

  “Trying to track down somebody by the name of Lynch.”

  “Several families in the parish by that name. None have been in trouble before, least not the jail-time variety. This personal?”

  “Professional. I need to talk to him.”

  “What’s his baptismal name?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Any last address?”

  “I was told he lived in the Hoover Flats, other side of Twelfth.”

  “The men in those shanties are from all over, farmers from Tulsa, Oklahoma, factory hands from Cleveland, Ohio, or from the city itself. Some keep on the move, jumping freights. Some give up and surrender to the bottle. Most show up at the soup kitchen we run. We don’t ask for names and they don’t give ’em. Once in a while, I get a call to administer the last rites. Can’t remember anyone named Leary.”

  “Lynch. The brother of the nurse who got murdered on the Upper West Side.”

  “Yeah, I remember. Bernie McElhone, a classmate of mine from Dunwoodie, anointed her. The boy who did it was Italian, if I remember correctly.”

  “Cuban.”

  “Close enough.”

  “Anybody you can think of might have some idea whether Lynch is in those shacks or where he might have gone?”

  “These men don’t have much else in this world save their privacy, so they don’t take to people sticking their noses in. But I’ll be on my afternoon rounds and there’s a knockabout named Toby Butts might be able to help you, if he’s where I think he’ll be. Wait here till I change.” McNevin returned in a badly rumpled white linen jacket over his black clerical vest and Roman collar, and an aging yellow-white straw hat. As soon as they reached the street, he began mopping his face with a handkerchief.

  A block north, under the Ninth Avenue El and past the dime-a-dance places near Forty-second Street, the sidewalk was crowded with people shopping amid the outdoor stalls selling fruit and vegetables, fresh-killed poultry, and fish packed in chips of rapidly melting ice. Grocery bo
ys hugged cartons of food for delivery and made a point of saying hello to the priest. Leather bag bulging with quarters collected from the meters he’d visited, a gas man stopped McNevin to thank him for visiting his mother. They went into a tenement on Tenth. In the lobby, an insurance agent was tallying up the dimes and quarters he reaped from those determined to avoid the parting indignity of a pauper’s grave and have their own cemetery plot. “Irish real estate” was what they called it when Dunne was a kid. Once his mother died, there was nobody to pay those installments, so brother Jack went where he did.

  They walked up three flights of crazily sloping stairs and down a dark hallway. An ancient, bent woman opened the door. She led McNevin to a sagging bed by an open window overlooking Tenth. The woman in the bed, who bore a striking resemblance to the one who’d opened the door, was taking deep, labored breaths. She took McNevin’s hand and kissed it. Dunne stood in a corner, next to a bureau that was one of the few pieces of furniture in the spare but immaculate apartment. Atop the bureau, on a lace runner, was a statue of the Blessed Virgin.

  McNevin spoke in whispers with the women. He traced the sign of the cross over them both. Outside on the stoop, he removed a half-smoked cigar from his jacket pocket and lit it. “The Murphy sisters are typical Irish. I keep telling ’em that Marion, the one in bed, should be in the hospital. But to them ‘hospital’ sounds the same as ‘morgue,’ the last stop when your time is up, and not a moment sooner. Probably got their life savings hidden in that statue of the Virgin. Be the first thing to disappear if they die in that place and the cops get there first.”

  At Forty-fifth Street, they turned east, past a stand-up eating joint and a print shop that specialized in putting any headline tourists wanted on fake newspapers. McNevin pushed open the door of a bar & grill packed two deep. He stood in the entryway and bellowed, “Lunchtime is done, boys!” The din at the bar subsided. A few of the patrons downed their drinks and left. Slowly, except for a handful, the others straggled out. He greeted most of the departing patrons by name. “Pay day,” he said to Dunne. “Before long, the money is all gone and they go home with a load on. The wife complains, she gets a black eye, maybe worse. Sometimes bringing in the sheep won’t suffice. Sometimes you gotta give ’em a boot in the rear.”

  They headed north on Broadway. Around the next corner a crowd of two or three dozen men stood around in small groups. The words on the metal sign above them were faded but still legible:SAM STONE • PROMOTER • AGENT • MANAGER ALL ASPECTS OF THE PUGILISTIC ARTS

  “Ever know Sam Stone?” McNevin asked.

  “Only by reputation as the promoter the promoters looked up to.”

  “Always looking for an angle, Sam was. Had a great dislike for, as he put it, ‘uncertain outcomes.’”

  “Let no fight go unfixed.”

  “De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Of the dead say nothing but good. I can’t speak about Sam’s habits as a promoter, but I baptized him when he changed his name from Stein to Stone, gave up being a Jew and became a Catholic, account of his wife. After they divorced, Sam married a Protestant girl and moved uptown. Next time I hear from him, he’s in the Presbyterian Hospital and sends word he’s dying and wants to see me. I get there and Sam’s sitting up in bed, a minister on one side and a rabbi on the other.

  “‘Sam,’ says I, ‘what is it you want from me?’

  “‘Fireproofing.’ Like I said, Sam didn’t like uncertain outcomes. He’s been gone awhile now but this is where part of the fight crowd still gathers to make deals and arrange matches, mostly local stuff, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Jersey City.”

  McNevin snaked through the crowd, shaking hands and exchanging a succession of short greetings. The cops referred to this stretch of pavement as “The Stone Yard,” a place they went when they had no real suspects in a stick-up or heist but wanted to pinch somebody who at least looked the part and was probably guilty of something anyway.

  McNevin stopped to talk with a short, bulky plug whose squashed, sideways nose looked as though it had been run over by a bus. “This is Toby Butts,” McNevin said. “Just who I hoped to find.”

  Dunne put out his hand. Butts held it in a tight grip. He shuffled his feet, shifting his weight and bobbing his head back and forth. “You smell like a cop,” he said.

  “Must be the aftershave.”

  Butts increased the pressure on Dunne’s hand. “Cops don’t smell like aftershave. They stink like dead fish been lyin’ around in the sun.”

  McNevin put his arm around Butts. “Toby’s the best fighter Holy Cross parish ever produced. ‘The Manhattan Mauler’ was what they called him. Got on the wrong side of the law and was sent to Sing Sing. Isn’t that right, Toby?”

  “A frame-up deluxe, Father. Cops railroaded me for a heist I’d nothin’ to do with. Seven years in the can for nothin’. My best fightin’ years.”

  “I’m a private eye, not a cop.” Dunne winced from the pain of his squeezed fingers.

  “Fintan Dunne is an old friend, Toby, a buddy from the war.” Butts released his grip, put his fists up, and threw a short jab that stopped an inch shy of Dunne’s jaw. “Wish they’d stick me in the ring with a different cop every day, wouldn’t stop till I’d smashed up the lot of ’em.”

  “Toby lives down by the river, in Hoover Flats,” McNevin said.

  “Beats the Bowery or the flops on Tenth. Less chance of gettin’ your throat slit.”

  “Dunne here is trying to find a pal of his he thinks might be living down there. Lynch is the name.”

  “Pat Lynch?” Butts asked.

  “Always knew him by Lynch. Didn’t use any other moniker,” Dunne said.

  “Gotta be Pat. Gettin’ a word outta him was like wringin’ water from a rock.”

  “Still there?”

  “Cops showed up one day and took him in. For what, I don’t know. Pat wouldn’t say. They banged him around. Then he skedaddled. No forwardin’ address.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “Maine, California, somewhere in between. That’s his business, not mine.” Butts tipped his cap to McNevin and said he had to be going. He threw another practice jab at Dunne. “Wasn’t for Father McNevin, I’d swear you was a cop.”

  McNevin exchanged small talk with a few more of the men. On the way back to Holy Cross, he stopped at the 18th Precinct House, on West Forty-seventh Street, “I’ll ask about Pat Lynch while I’m here,” he said. Dunne waited in the vestibule. A sporadic influx of patrolmen went by without noticing him, their attention focused on the hoodlums they had in tow, mostly punks who’d dropped out of school to practice the neighborhood arts of rolling drunks, pilfering from the docks or staging nickel-and-dime holdups, the small timers who’d spend their lives keeping the cops busy and causing them to hate their jobs.

  “I talked to the captain,” McNevin said when he returned. “He never heard of Pat Lynch. He said it was probably the boys from Headquarters brought him in.”

  “Headquarters usually lets the local captain know when they operate in his territory.”

  “I don’t think he’d lie to me. I hear his confession every Saturday.”

  “Didn’t say it was a lie, just that it’s odd they’d go around him like that.”

  “That’s why he’s a captain. He knows how to play the game, especially when to keep his trap shut.” McNevin put on his hat and gave it a gentle tap. “It’s same as in the church. Best parishes go to the best politicians.”

  The housekeeper greeted Dunne with undisguised displeasure. Learning he’d been invited to stay to dinner, displeasure gave way to distress. She disappeared into the kitchen, grumbling to herself. McNevin took Dunne into the back parlor and made highballs. He did most of the talking, the bulk of it about their time in France, and seemed to appreciate Dunne’s company. The heavy meal of potatoes and lamb chops, served by the silently hostile housekeeper, left Dunne drowsy. McNevin had a cigar and a glass of port, which Dunne declined. Afterwards, he took his leave. The tropical wetness on Forty
-second Street did nothing to revive him.

  He followed the street west, toward the river. An attractive blonde in a low-cut red dress smoked a cigarette in the entrance of a taxi-dance hall on the corner of Ninth. She smiled at Dunne, an inviting, suggestive smile, the smile of all the girls in the red dresses in the taxi-dance halls around Times Square, the too many halls and too many girls. Oversupply, too many goods, not enough demand, that’s what the papers said drove the country into such a long Depression: the more people out of work, the lower the demand; the lower the demand, the more people out of work. The girls in the red dresses knew all about it. They got only a nickel on every dime ticket, often less, some places as little as two or three cents. Too many girls in red dresses meant she’d be working all night.

  “How about a dance, handsome?” The white lights on the marquee shone on her pale skin. She had the complexion of a farm girl raised on milk and cream in one of those cold, northern places where the kids were bundled up most of the time, till they grew up and moved away to find their fortunes in the big city, their uncovered flesh as clear and unspotted as snow. Didn’t take too long before the city turned it to slush.

  “Some other time.”

  “I’ll be waiting for you.” She licked the tip of her cigarette.

  The cobblestones on Twelfth Avenue were slippery wet. The hum of the highway overhead flowed like an electric current down the iron supports into the street. Behind a frayed, corroded wire fence was a huddle of tarpaper shacks; beyond, on the mist-shrouded river, the gigantic bulk of a passenger liner glided slowly toward the harbor’s mouth. The sudden, explosive blare of its horn momentarily drowned out the heckle of horns, whistles, bells, the argument of the New York waterfront.