Shamrock Alley

by Ronald Damien Malfi

  He grinned.

  Winner, he thought.

  Back at the bar, the jukebox was rumbling through some psychedelic 1970s number. The lights had been dimmed and the clamor of numerous conversations mingled with the chime of clinking beer bottles. Corky McKean was behind the bar, smoking a fat Cuban cigar and still wearing his mistletoe necktie. Corky enjoyed working nights during the holidays: the tips were slightly more generous.

  Mickey spent the remainder of the evening in a corner booth surrounded by a few guys from the neighborhood. He drank modestly, which was unusual for him, and smoked only one cigarette for the duration of the festivities. One by one, the Cloverleaf’s patrons dispersed into the night, stumbling home along the dark, wet streets beneath a winter sky. At one point, Mickey saw Patty Nolan’s girl rise from the table, squeeze Nolan’s shoulder, and slip out the door. Nolan remained, pulling himself from his table and staggering over to the bar. There, he met with a number of his friends. Drinks were bought and passed around. Someone shouted something about the Yankees, but Mickey could not make out the words.

  A few more people left the bar. Christmas Eve, and the dregs of Hell’s Kitchen all had someplace to be. Mickey O’Shay’s most vivid memory of Christmas was when he was fifteen and spent the holiday in a juvenile facility upstate. He recalled a snowfall from a window in the cafeteria and how some grotesquely fat kid eating beside him had started throwing a fit, screaming for his mother—his mother—where was his mother? Some of the inmates had snickered at the fat kid, some had cursed at him and thrown things at him, and some had simply stared in mild amusement. Mickey, too, had stared … but there had been no amusement on his face, no compassion, and no ridicule. He’d just stared, hypnotized by the way the fat kid’s body shook, the way the flesh hung in winged flaps from his arms, the way two guards dragged him out of the cafeteria. That night, as a Christmas present to himself, he replayed the image of the trembling, shrieking fat kid over and over again in his head. And enjoyed it.

  At eleven o’clock, Mickey slid from the corner booth and moved down the narrow hallway toward the trapdoor stairwell that led to the underground club. Dragging one hand along the wall, he descended the stairs and remained below ground for some time. When he finally emerged, not too far behind him was Jimmy Kahn, straightening his sport jacket.

  “Killian’s,” Mickey called to Corky McKean, slapping one hand on the bar and sitting in the empty stool beside Patty Nolan.

  Nolan turned and eyed Mickey up and down, then focused his eyes further down the bar where Jimmy Kahn stood leaning against the jukebox.

  Corky McKean disappeared from behind the bar and returned a moment later with Mickey’s beer. Swinging a dishtowel over one hunched shoulder, Corky turned and headed for the Cloverleaf’s storage room.

  There was a vibe in the air, and Patrick Nolan’s few companions were not comfortable with it. Simultaneously, the group of them set their unfinished drinks on the bar, shrugged on their coats, and began moving toward the door. Nolan, too, apparently had designs to leave, for he knocked down the last of his gin and tonic in one gulp and began buttoning his own coat.

  “Wait awhile,” Mickey said, not looking at Nolan. “Hang around.”

  “It’s late,” Nolan said, continuing to button his coat.

  Jimmy walked the length of the bar and occupied the bar stool on the other side of Patrick Nolan. Only then did Nolan’s hands slow up and finally cease buttoning his coat. Not looking at either Jimmy or Mickey, he placed his palms on the top of the bar, his fingers splayed.

  Sipping his Killian’s, Mickey did not utter a word. Occasionally, his gaze would shift to Nolan’s in the mirror above the bar, but for the most part he was occupied with his beer.

  Jimmy smiled and reached into his coat pocket. “You got a nice tan,” he told Nolan. “Where you been?”

  “Around. What’s going on, Jimmy?”

  “Mickey and me, we got somethin’ for ya.” Jimmy produced a small white box tied with a red ribbon. He placed it on the bar, tapped it twice with an index finger, then slid it in front of Nolan. “This is for you.”

  Mickey got up from his stool and moved to the jukebox. He selected a Sam Cooke number, then turned and made his way to the front door. Nolan jerked his head in Mickey’s direction at the sound of the turning dead bolt.

  “Go ahead,” Jimmy said. “Open it.”

  “What is it?”

  “Open it.”

  Nolan’s gaze lingered a moment on Jimmy. Then he turned and looked down at the small white box with the red ribbon. He brought one hand up and pulled the knot out of the ribbon. In the polished mahogany of the bar, he could see Mickey passing behind him. Taking a deep breath, he unwrapped the gift and took off the lid.

  Patrick Nolan stared inquisitively at the object in the box. “The hell is it?” Then he suddenly knew exactly what it was: someone’s tongue. “Oh shit…”

  “You don’t get it?” Jimmy said, picking up the box and the lid. “Lemme show you.” He placed the lid back on the box, brought it to his ear, then worked the lid of the box like the mouth of a puppet. In a high-pitched voice, Jimmy said, “You been rippin’ us, Patty! You been rippin’ us off!”

  Patrick Nolan suddenly looked very angry. “Fuck is this all about, Jimmy?”

  Jimmy just smiled and slid the box back over to Nolan.

  Behind them, Mickey picked up a chair from one of the tables, lifted it over his head, and slammed it down on the bar beside Nolan. Nolan shrieked and jumped in his seat, holding one arm up over his eyes. The chair splintered into pieces. One of his hands bleeding, Mickey grappled with a busted chair leg, freed it, then wielded it like a baton.

  “You been ripping us, Nolan!” Mickey shouted, pointing the chair leg at the man.

  With as much placidity as he could muster, Nolan assured Mickey that he had no idea what he was talking about.

  Mickey prodded Nolan’s shoulder with the chair leg. “The counterfeit money. How much you been moving? How much you got left?”

  “There’s nothing left,” Nolan said, “and I wasn’t ripping you guys. I worked out a deal with Corcoran. You got a problem with that, you work it out with him.”

  “You’re full of shit,” Mickey scowled. Nolan had known he was ripping them off all along—Mickey could tell in Nolan’s eyes, in the way he looked when Mickey confronted him in the restroom, and in the way he had avoided Mickey all evening.

  “That’s not how this works, Patty,” Jimmy said. Nolan glanced at him but seemed uncomfortable leaving his eyes off Mickey for too long. “You fucked up our deal. How much money you make moving this stuff?”

  “No,” Nolan said quickly, “forget it. My deal was with Corcoran. I didn’t know he was ripping you.”

  “You’re lying,” Jimmy said.

  “Don’t play bullshit games with me, Jimmy,” Nolan said. His face had turned red, and his eyes had narrowed. “I ran these streets longer than you; I know the setup. You think you can shake me down, you’re out of your minds. I’m not one of them kids who wants to smell your shit.”

  Nolan stood and pushed away from the bar. His anger was coming off him in waves, boiling the air. Hands stuffed in his pockets, he moved quickly toward the door, then paused and turned to face them. He jabbed a finger at Mickey. “This little weasel follows me out, I’ll rip his fuckin’ head off.”

  Breathing heavily, white-fisting the chair leg, Mickey stood heaving like an ape. He turned and looked at Jimmy.

  Jimmy waved one hand. “Let him go,” he muttered quietly, getting up to unlock the front door.

  Nolan stared Mickey down, his eyes rimmed with hatred, his sallow cheeks quivering. Finally, after a moment, Mickey dropped the chair leg on the floor. But he did not move his eyes from Nolan’s.

  “You—” Nolan began, but was immediately knocked against the bar following a sound like the crack of a whip. Behind him, Jimmy stood holding the wooden coat rack, its polished wood post marred by a vague circle of hair and bloo
d. Without hesitation, Jimmy brought the clawed feet of the coat rack down on the small of Patrick Nolan’s back.

  Nolan screamed and crumpled to the floor, one hand clawing for Jimmy.

  Mickey grabbed his chair leg from the floor and proceeded to swing at Nolan’s head. He managed to hit him only once before Nolan grabbed the chair leg and yanked it clean out of Mickey’s hands. Lurching forward, runnels of blood running from his scalp and into his eyes, Nolan rushed Mickey and drove his head into his chest. In an expulsion of breath, Mickey was slammed back against the wall, suddenly victim to Nolan’s pummeling fists.

  Jimmy swung the coat rack again, breaking it in half across Nolan’s back. Again Nolan cried out, but his fury was relentless and he refused to cease beating Mickey.

  One of Mickey’s hands managed to snake up the wall and close around a clutch of darts stuck into the dart board above his head. Eyes closed, he swung the fistful of darts in a curve toward Nolan’s face. There was a wet, crunching sound, and a spray of warm liquid along Mickey’s knuckles as he drove the darts into the side of Patrick Nolan’s face and neck.

  Nolan’s fists suddenly stopped coming, and Mickey opened his eyes. Before him, Patrick Nolan’s eyes had gone wide, the pupils ridiculously small, the left side of his face decorated with the colorful feathered plumes of the darts and smeared with his own blood. Nolan’s jaw worked noiselessly, and blood poured from his mouth. He looked lost, pained, frightened, shocked. But those were just passing emotions, and in an instant, his body seemed to spasm with an electrical jolt, and his eyes refocused on Mickey.

  “Uhhh …” His hands closed around Mickey’s throat and began strangling him. Mickey landed an elbow to Nolan’s face, tried shoving the darts further into his face, but there was no stopping the man—

  Until Jimmy appeared at his side and drove a ten-inch knife into Patrick Nolan’s belly.

  Immediately, Nolan’s hands dropped away from Mickey’s throat.

  Gasping, sputtering, Mickey curled against the wall and pushed himself out of Nolan’s reach. But Patrick Nolan would be reaching for things no more: with a number of quick, upward jabs, Jimmy continued to bury the large knife-blade into Nolan’s gut. Nolan’s shoulders hitched with each stab. Jimmy finally pulled away, his arms covered in blood. With the knife still embedded in his abdomen, Nolan staggered comically against the wall, his eyes suddenly distant and blind.

  In a rage, Mickey sprang up and rushed Nolan. He grabbed the man by a clutch of hair with one hand, another hand against one shoulder, and drove the man’s face straight into the brick wall. Yelling, he spun Nolan around and pushed him across the floor, driving Nolan’s face through the glass bubble of the Cloverleaf’s jukebox. The shatter of glass was followed by a display of electrical sparks. Sam Cooke’s voice slowed in an instant to a dull, impeded baritone, then died completely. Nolan’s body twitched a number of times, his face through the juke and impaled on shards of glass. Blood ran down the length of the jukebox and pooled on the floor.

  Nearly out of breath, Mickey managed to summon a choked laugh. “Check it out,” he muttered. “Patty Nolan just broke into the music biz.”

  “Come on,” Jimmy said, reaching out and grabbing the ruffled collar of Nolan’s coat. With a sturdy yank, he managed to pull Nolan from the jukebox. Broken glass clattered to the floor. Like a ventriloquist’s dummy, Patrick Nolan was lain out on the floor, his sightless eyes unfocused and facing the ceiling. The force of his face through the jukebox glass had torn most of the darts from the side of his face and neck. A few jagged pieces of glass poked up from ragged wounds at his neck and cheeks.

  “Don’t look so good no more,” Mickey muttered, staggering over to the bar and finishing his Killian’s. In the hallway, Corky McKean watched them in silence, his arms folded, one foot tapping on the floor.

  Sometime later, just as a light snow began to fall along Manhattan’s West Side, Mickey O’Shay and Jimmy Kahn dumped Patty Nolan’s body into the Hudson River. They worked mostly in silence and spoke only after the body had been discarded and they were in the Cadillac on their way back home.

  “I been thinking about the counterfeit we got left and this guy Esposito,” Jimmy said. The glare of streetlights washed over his pale face as he drove.

  In the passenger seat, Mickey nodded while looking out the window. “Esposito,” he muttered to himself. “Esposito-ito-ito …”

  “I been thinking,” Jimmy repeated. Turning onto Tenth Avenue and pulling up outside Calliope Candy, he said, “Here’s what we’re gonna do …”

  Somewhere over the river, winter lightning filled the sky.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  THE CLOVERLEAF WAS NOT TOO BUSY.

  Standing in the doorway, John pulled off his leather gloves and skirted his eyes around the room. The bartender stared disconcertedly out the window at the freshly fallen snow, lusterless in the tarnished gray of midafternoon. Across the room against one wall stood a table where the jukebox had been previously. Mickey and Jimmy sat there, picking at the labels of their beer bottles and watching a basketball game on the small television set mounted in the rafters above the bar. Mickey noticed John but did not hold his eyes to him; rather, he took a swig of beer and turned back to the television.

  It was December 31, the last day of the year. A light snow had fallen intermittently over the past two days, depositing powder and slush on the streets and sidewalks. John and Katie had spent a draining Christmas morning at the hospital, sitting at his father’s bedside. Unable to do anything more for the old man, the doctors had transferred his father to a room just down the hall from the IGU. “A nice, quiet room,” one of the doctors had told John. “Intensive Care’s hectic. You can sit with him and not be disturbed here.” Quiet or not, in reality it was the room where people went to die.

  “This wouldn’t have happened if they’d just kept him here, looked after him,” he’d muttered.

  “You don’t know that,” Katie had said. She was standing behind him, one hand on his shoulder.

  “He was alone too much.”

  “He wasn’t,” she’d insisted. “We were both there as much as possible.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “John, you were there that night when it happened, just the same as me. There was nothing we could have done. We knew it was going to come down to this. We knew …” She had more to say, but her voice trailed off nonetheless.

  “Do you think he’s in pain?” he had asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she’d said truthfully. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

  “I always worry about you.”

  They’d eaten Christmas dinner with Katie’s family. John had spent half the evening thinking about his father, and the other half thinking about the West Side boys and their counterfeit money. He recalled the evening on the roof, and how Mickey had pointed the gun at him. Five silencers. There had been no prints on the silencers themselves; however, the boxes were covered in not only Mickey’s prints but the prints belonging to a man named Glenn Hanratty, known to his friends on the West Side as “Irish.” Irish was the proprietor of Calliope Candy. Kersh had matched up the prints on the silencer boxes to a set of prints taken from a box of Junior Mints he’d purchased at the candy store, sold directly to him by “Irish” Hanratty himself. Still … they had nothing solid on Kahn, and John couldn’t help but feel that time was running short.

  John pulled out an empty chair and sat at the table with Mickey and Jimmy. The pain was back in his hands, and he alternated pressing his thumbs into his palms to work out the numbness.

  “Haven’t heard from you guys in a while,” he said. “Thought maybe you changed your minds.”

  “You want a beer?” Jimmy said, and held up one finger to Corky McKean behind the bar.

  John glanced up at the basketball game, then over at Mickey. The skin under his right eye was purple-black and shiny, the lid slightly swollen. Two cuts, now hardened and scabrous, b
roke open the flesh at the tip of his cheekbone.

  “What happened to you?”

  Mickey chuckled and drank some beer. “Christmas present,” he said.

  “Could be a good look for you,” John said, and Mickey chuckled again. The bartender came over and set a bottle of Killian’s on the table, then sauntered away without a word. John took a swig and winced at the taste. It was too cold and too early to start drinking with the West Side boys. Resting the bottle back on the table, he turned again to Mickey. “So what’s up?”

  Mickey had called him just an hour before, requesting they meet at the Cloverleaf. The agents monitoring the wire taps had immediately contacted Bill Kersh, who’d met John at the office and wired him up in case Jimmy Kahn started talking about the counterfeit money. Though there had been no mention of them discovering the money or plates, and though negatives had been taken from the Bowery warehouse over the wire taps, there was a good chance Mickey and Jimmy had already found out. It was in the hope that Jimmy might talk after all that John had worn the wire. Now, as he sat at a table beside Jimmy Kahn, such an idea seemed ridiculous. Was this guy playing smart, or had he just been lucky so far?

  “Nothing’s up,” Mickey said, his eyes still on the television. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Wanted to make sure you were still around.”

  “Where would I go?”

  Mickey rolled his shoulder and brushed his greasy hair from his eyes. “Don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes people just disappear.”

  “Well,” he said, “I’m still here. And I’m still interested.”

  Chewing the inside of his cheek, Mickey only nodded. He seemed terrifically unenthusiastic. If they didn’t want to discuss the million-dollar counterfeit deal, then why had they called him here? In all the time he’d known them, and through all the drop-of-a-hat mood swings, one thing had remained constant: they were not sociable. They did not chill out with friends from the neighborhood, did not do anything. Even their drinking was less for fun and recreation than for occupying those long hours of daylight prior to an evening of crime and corruption.