by Howard Fast
“What did you say he was, Elsie?” Mr. Potnik asked, losing color.
“A torpedo.”
“And that means the same as it means in the movies? I mean, his profession is …” He couldn’t bring himself to complete it, but Elsie May nodded.
“And you bring him up to my showroom?”
Elsie May was in tears now. “What else could I do, Mr. Potnik? You think my brother, Mike, don’t mean anything to me?”
“Please. I don’t want ever again to hear in this place the name of your brother, Mike.”
“All right. I understand how you feel, Mr. Potnik.”
“You understand? Maybe you also understand that Captain Bixbee, from the Fourth Detective Division, will be here inside of ten minutes—and what do I tell him?”
“Tell him that Margie is out with a buyer. It’s the truth, after all. For coffee. Maybe she’ll be back by then.”
CHAPTER 3
In which the Governor displays an ethnic empathy with knishes and kishke.
AT M. P. CREATIONS the corner of the loft partitioned off as Alan Compton’s design studio had a sign on the door which said, simply and directly, “No one enters.” That was not entirely true, but Compton was a strong-minded and difficult man. When he first went to work for Marvin Potnik, nine years ago, a young man fresh out of college and two years’ apprenticeship in Paris, M. P. Creations was still Potnik Frocks, and Compton’s pay was five thousand dollars a year. Two years later, Mr. Potnik’s business had doubled, Potnik Frocks had become Marvin Dresses, and Compton’s pay was twelve thousand a year. Compton was good, and by this year of 1965 his pay had increased to thirty thousand dollars and his design studio had four windows and two exposures. Only those who have worked in a corporate entity in New York City can comprehend what this means.
As designer of M.P. Creations, with two assistants, Alan Compton had certain unique privileges. Once the buyer from Clayton in Boston—he happened to be a man of thirty-five or so—had made certain slurring remarks about an apparent lack of masculinity on Compton’s part; and Compton, who was small but versatile, hit the buyer in the solar plexus, broke a T square over his head, and tripped him down in the narrow space between the cutting table and the bolts of sample cloth. The buyer weighed over two hundred pounds, so Compton could be forgiven for keeping his heel on the man’s cheekbone while he told him:
“Call me that once more, you miserable bastard, and I will take you entirely apart.”
M.P. Creations lost Clayton’s patronage forever, but Compton did not lose his job. When Mr. Potnik asked him why he was so quick to anger over a word or two, Compton replied, “Because a small man’s honor is always at stake.”
“Honor, Alan?”
“Absolutely,” Compton said.
And the curious innocence of Mr. Potnik was such that he accepted the honor of the Comptons. He was not to hear the end of that.
The innocence of Mr. Potnik could also be very destructive, and ten precious minutes went by before Compton overheard him telling Captain Bixbee that Margie had gone out for a cup of coffee. Being a man of action, Compton nailed Elsie May on her way to hide in the ladies’ room.
“What is this? A big brass cop inside and you sneaking out of here like a murderer?”
“I feel like a murderer,” Elsie May replied miserably.
“All right. Where is Margie?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about this coffee routine?”
“She’s having coffee.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“With who? With what?”
“With Joey Montoso.”
“Come on, come on, Elsie—who is Joe Montoso?”
Then she told him, and he told Hy Golden, and they went out of the service door and down the service elevator while Captain Bixbee, on the telephone, was explaining the situation to the Police Commissioner. They went down to the basement, dashed along a catwalk between two enormous furnaces, and then bolted up a flight of stairs into the main lobby, where Toby Garcia stared at them in amazement.
“I took you up,” he said. “How do you come out of the basement?”
“It is self-evident, isn’t it?” Hy Golden said. He was always precise in his English and he spent hours improving his vocabulary, and he kept Fowler’s Modern English Usage in his night table. This came from playing football four years at Rutgers and from being so oversized that no one ever expected him to have any vocabulary.
“What the hell kind of a thing is this, self-evident?” Garcia asked. “You go up and then you come out of the cellar. I saw one of them silent movies on television—”
“Can it!” snapped Compton. “Where’s Margie?”
“How do I know?”
“You’re the starter. You saw her come out of the elevator, didn’t you?”
“So do I ask her where she’s going every time she comes out of the elevator?”
“Was she wearing the mink?” Golden demanded.
“Yeah, about that mink. What’s the story there?”
“She was with a guy?”
“Nasty-looking bastard with little black eyes.”
“Well, did they say anything? Think. Think.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” Garcia nodded. “What’s the matter—she in some kind of trouble?”
“Some kind of trouble.”
“Well, you know, I hear him say to her, ‘How about that, Countess?’ ‘I am no countess,’ Margie says. ‘You are a countess, sister,’ he says, ‘and I am going to buy you breakfast for a countess at the Plaza.’ ‘I had my breakfast,’ Margie says. That’s all. They go out.”
“Plaza? What Plaza?” Compton pressed him, and Golden demanded to know, “What were their relations?”
“Well, how the hell do I know what were their relations?”
“I mean, did he have her under duress?”
“Duress? What’s duress?”
“Oh, the hell with it,” Compton said. “Let’s get up to the Plaza.”
“It doesn’t follow.”
“It’s a beginning, isn’t it? Where else do we go?”
He ran outside and began waving for a cab. Golden followed him, and while Compton waved down a cab, Golden maintained that it took some temerity to interfere with a Joey Montoso.
“After all,” he said, climbing into the cab after Compton, “he may have a heart of gold under that nauseating exterior. His reputation in Cleveland may be wholly exaggerated, undeserved.”
“Drop us at Fifty-eighth and Fifth,” Compton said to the driver, and then said to Golden, “Why the devil don’t you stop trying to be an intellectual and settle for being a good salesman?”
“That’s a hell of a note to take. Why?”
“Because it’s grotesque, anyone six foot three and weighing maybe two hundred and fifty pounds talking the way you do.”
“And I don’t think selling the ensembles you and Marvin put together is just being a dress salesman. It’s great fun to knock that kind of thing together. Just go out and try to sell it. Then see how many payrolls you are going to meet with your racks full.”
Crosstown on Thirty-eighth Street, the cab had come to a halt behind a seemingly impassable mass of trucks, and Compton said to the driver, “For God’s sake, driver, we got the life of a clean, decent American girl at stake and you stand here!”
“What do you think I am, mister, a helicopter?”
“All right, all right.” Compton sighed. “Do the best you can.”
“Pushing a lousy cab in this lousy city—I guess it is what I am fit for. You get what you deserve.”
Golden said, “I am a patient man. I can endure the traffic but not philosophy.”
“I don’t blame you,” the driver replied. “If I was born ten years later, I could have been an astronaut.”
“That’s so true,” Golden said.
“What’s wrong with him?” the driver asked Compton.
“Drive. Please, drive,�
� Compton said.
II
It was a day when things of related interest happened simultaneously. At the same moment that Compton pleaded with a cab driver, the Governor of New York State was on the telephone, talking to the Police Commissioner of New York City. The Governor was at Delancey Street—his ethnic awareness was well developed—and had just finished his last street meeting, and he and his wife were enjoying an unusual second breakfast—or nauch-breakfast, as it is known locally—of knishes and coffee-in-a-glass-half-milk. They were eating in a place called Sammy’s Knish and Kishke Bar, a place of reputation beyond the narrow confines of the lower East Side. In fact, on lower Broadway and Wall Street there was many an estimable brokerage house that did not hesitate to send a runner to Delancey Street to load up with knishes of varied filling, as well as that definitive enemy of digestion, stuffed derma; and up on Second Avenue below Fourteenth Street, where the Broadway shows rehearsed, it was not uncommon for a cardboard box from Sammy’s to be ready, waiting for the time break. Now, however, it would have taken a professional football line to break through to Sammy’s. Delancey Street was packed with an eager, friendly crowd, peering through the glass window, delighted with the Governor’s appetite and rather amazed at the fact that his wife wore her husband’s coat.
“You would think that she could afford a mink,” one woman and another observed.
“Or at least a Persian lamb,” still others speculated.
Meanwhile the Governor was hunched over Sammy’s phone, while at the other end of the wire a voice barked:
“This is Police Commissioner Comaday. Talk louder.”
“This is the Governor.”
“I know that. But I can’t hear anything else. Are you whispering?”
“Yes,” the Governor whispered.
“Why?”
“I am in a public place,” the Governor whispered. “Is District Attorney Cohen there?”
“He’s here.”
“I want you to know I appreciate what you are doing, Commissioner.”
“What do you mean, you appreciate what I am doing?” Comaday demanded, with truculence assumed specifically to impress Cohen with the fact that a Republican governor was no different than any other citizen. “Aside from trying to run a police force—which could put the nine labors of Hercules to shame—what have I done for you specifically?”
“Oh, come off it,” Cohen pleaded.
“I mean,” the Governor said hoarsely, “the coat—I mean it should not get around.” Yet he could not help adding, “There were twelve labors, you know.”
“Nine, twelve—the hell with it! You ask the Department for a favor, we co-operate. Why not? It’s the right of every citizen to have the co-operation of his police force.”
“Of course, Commissioner. And I am grateful. Have you located—the two items?”
“We haven’t been sleeping. The coat and the bracelet are being brought here to my office.”
“I’m so glad. There is a chill in the air. Would it be all right if I came up there now with my wife and picked up the stuff?”
“Where are you, Governor? Maybe I could send the coat to you?” Comaday asked, his small triumph achieved and suffused suddenly with the milk of human kindness.
“Oh no. No. Not at all. No, I wouldn’t dream of putting you to that trouble. We’ll be right up there, Commissioner. If you don’t mind?”
“Not at all.”
“At your office?”
“I’ll be here waiting,” Comaday said magnanimously.
“And”—the Governor’s voice dropped to a tiny whisper—“and you’ll keep it from the press?”
“I’ll do that,” Comaday answered, feeling, like St. George, that having slain the dragon, there was no need to drag it in the dust.
Back at Sammy’s Knish and Kishke Bar, the Governor’s lady looked at him inquiringly and then nodded at the smile of reassurance that crossed his handsome face. “This is delicious,” she said, taking a mouthful. “Is it a knish?”
“It’s kishke,” the Governor whispered, “and for heaven’s sake, if you don’t know what you are eating, ask me later.”
Outside the speculation became rife as to why the Governor’s wife was wearing the Governor’s coat.
III
“I hate to say it to the Commissioner,” Larry Cohen stated as Comaday cut off the telephone, “and it probably means I’ll never get a ticket fixed—”
“I don’t fix tickets!” Comaday snapped. “You know that damn well.”
“—and I suppose I’ll eventually be beaten to a pulp in your Star Chamber Room, but you are a curious son of a bitch.”
Comaday was still too suffused with his glow of conquest to take offense. “He owns a good deal, Larry, but he still doesn’t own me or the city police. There’s no special treatment here—but since no crime has been committed I am under no obligation to inform the press. It would be spiteful, Larry, and I am not a spiteful man.”
“No?”
“Larry, Larry—I treated him gently. I admit I don’t have your flexibility with your political enemies, but then neither was I born with a golden spoon in my mouth.”
Cohen had just begun to cite the Commissioner’s Brooklyn Heights boyhood, where Comaday had grown up in an excellent brownstone house as the son of a Brooklyn sheriff, when the phone rang. The loud-speaker was still connected, and as Comaday flicked it on, the apologetic, troubled voice of Captain Bixbee sounded.
“Chief …”
“When he’s put his foot in his mouth, I’m chief,” Comaday muttered to Cohen.
“Well, that’s not exactly it, chief. This is not something I did. They told me she was out to coffee, so I said she was out for a cup of coffee. What they didn’t tell me was that she was out having coffee with Joey Montoso.”
“Who?” Comaday shouted.
“Joey Montoso, chief.”
“Look, Captain,” Comaday said, his voice becoming cold and—to anyone who knew him—dangerous, “don’t call me chief. You are supposed to be a captain of detectives. I’m Commissioner. I am not a chief. Now are you trying to tell me that this kid with the mink and the diamonds is having coffee with Joey Montoso?”
“That’s right, Commissioner.”
“Montoso? The Cleveland hoodlum? The torpedo? The same one who knocked over Fishhouse John and Bald Curley and Frankie the Snot?”
“The same one.” Bixbee acknowledged miserably.
“Will you tell me how in hell Joey Montoso from Cleveland just happens to date this little doll—what’s her name?”
“Margie.”
“… this Margie. Well, what is he doing at M.P. Creations?”
“Chief, the receptionist—the telephone girl here—her name is Elsie May—she’s got a brother who consorts with bums, and this Montoso is a friend of his. So she tells him to come up here to get an outfit wholesale.”
Comaday heard a voice in the background whining, “My brother ain’t no bum. What right have you got to call my brother a bum?”
“What are you talking about, Bixbee? Where’s the girl?”
“I don’t know, Commissioner.”
“The coat? The diamond bracelet?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he snatch her? What the devil are you doing about it?”
“I’m on it, Commissioner. I got every man available checking every lunch bar and coffee place in the neighborhood. We’ll turn her up—”
“Sure. You will.”
“We’ll turn her up, Commissioner. But I don’t know what to do with it. You wanted it quiet. It’s the Governor’s stuff—and I suppose there’s something senseless about the whole thing. I don’t know whether you want me to open this up or not.”
“Suppose you hold it until I get up there.”
“You? Yourself?”
“Myself.”
The Commissioner cut the phone, took out a handkerchief, and wiped his face.
“How the mighty are fallen and come of l
ow degree,” Cohen murmured.
“Larry,” the Commissioner said thoughtfully, “it is not the wicked we suffer from, only the stupid.” And with that the intercom buzzed and informed them that the Governor and his wife were waiting to see them and could the receptionist outside send them in.
“Be nice to everyone,” the District Attorney said. “The first rule of practical politics. If one has to let off steam, denounce the communists. It is even within the realm of possibility that we may have a Republican mayor in this town.”
“Bring them in,” Comaday said meekly.
IV
The cab carrying Hy Golden and Alan Compton drew up in front of the Plaza, on the Fifty-ninth Street side, and Golden paid the fare and then raced after Compton up the steps and into the lobby just to the right of the newsstand, only to have the small man resist with a sort of body block and then hang onto Golden, whispering, “Hold it, you dummy. There he is.”
“Who?”
“Joey Montoso. No—don’t start looking. That’s a dead giveaway. Just pretend you’re talking to me.”
“What do you mean, pretend?” Golden asked indignantly. “I am talking to you.”
“I know, I know. In a manner of speaking. Then just glance over my head. Do you see him?”
“In the chair?”
“Right.”
Golden studied the man in the chair who sat facing the revolving doors that led into the hotel. He wore a black cashmere coat, a narrow-rimmed black felt hat; and his blue eyes were brightly open and fixed on the door.
“How do you know he’s the guy?” Golden asked practically.
“He fits the description.”
“You take one look at him and he fits the description?”
“I got a sense of things.”
“Then maybe you got enough sense to know that if he’s Joey Montoso—”
“That’s right! Yell it all over the place.”
“O.K. So if he’s Joey Montoso, he is not interested in us. All he’s interested in is the door. The way I see it, if that’s him, he’s waiting for someone to come through the door—maybe he’s got one of them contracts.”