The Case Of The Little Italy Bounce (Woody Stone, Private Investigator Book 1)

by R. D. Herring

  “Well, you just hurry and get better. Good job, Woodrow.” He turned as in marching and was out the door. His draft caught the two burr-headed suits and sucked them out behind him. Dan was grinning like a prom queen as he hobbled around the far end of my hoisted leg to the roomier side of the bed.

  “What the hell, Lieutenant? I thought you said I was gonna to meet somebody. I may as well have been in the next room durin that encounter.”

  “No way, bo. You just met a man who’s gonna be mayor, maybe governor, someday. That was John R. Fillmore, the New York County District Attorney, taking the time to come check on your grunt ass. You have been recognized.”

  I stared at Dan. I only knew Fillmore by name and reputation. I knew he was tough, no bullshit, and had handed the Eyetalian mob their asses when he worked as a prosecutor in the ‘30’s. He was commonly referred to as the Manhattan D.A.

  “Woody, I got ‘a grab my hat, but just know that Fillmore wouldn’t go see his own grandmother in the hospital,” spoken through a grin. “I’ll check on you tomorrow,” and he started for the door.

  “Hey, Dan, has Fillmore seen McCoy’s mug yet?”

  Dan looked back minus the grin and the gleam in his eye. “No,” he shook his head a little and left.

  ***

  I think the DA’s Office, and even NYPD, liked having a utility player that didn’t have to work behind a badge. The DA’s Office budgeted a slot for a full time investigator. They asked me about filling it, but I felt that the more official I got, the less effective I’d be. I refused to even form the thought that it might cut into my drinking time. Besides, my side business was on the rise, word of mouth, name in paper, easy money.

  Mid-1957, I signed a lease on a second floor Wythe Avenue office space in South Side, Brooklyn. It was just south of the Williamsburg Bridge that crossed the East River into Manhattan, and it was in decent shape after several broomings. It sat on the east side of Wythe across from the backside of a windowless brick, block-long mattress factory. The factory was one story under a six-foot chain link fence that ran completely around the flat roof. The fence was topped with rolled barbed wire.

  The view from the paper products company on the ground floor of my building was a lot like the scenery of a prison yard, but there was a swell view from my main office space on the second floor. You could look west and see Lower Manhattan out across Wallabout Bay. I paid $11.00 to get my name and business painted on the door glass in black and gold letters.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  (Saturday, June 11, 1960. Hotel Taft. Manhattan.)

  I pushed through the main entrance of the Taft just past 51st Street and was struck with night blindness. It’s not that the cavernous, two-story lobby was dark. The warm glow bouncing off the red and beige interior was a very different quality than summer daylight, and it took a minute for the eyes to adapt.

  I started my nocturnal navigation to the elevators, and then spotted the long, muted-plaid pant legs and black and white wingtips. The stacked ankles extended five feet out on the tiled lobby floor. Leland Parris III was burrowed deep in an overstuffed red leather chair reading a theatrical trade paper. Only his wildly spiking black hair, piercing blue eyes and patrician nose showed above the copy.

  “Hey, Lee, you’re up early. Lose your comb?”

  He lowered the newsprint and showed me his matinee idol face. “Woodrow, you will die a Goddamn square. Business meeting, lawyer’s s’posed to meet me here for lunch. Goddamn union strike. Look at these Goddamn bags under my eyes!”

  Lee, at 40 years old, had no reason to worry about the ample good looks he’d been given, but I understood his concern. As of the past February, he’d been playing the part of Cyrus Warrens in the hit Broadway production of ‘Toys In The Attic’, plus, serving as understudy to the lead actor, Jason Robards, Jr.

  From my observations, the only thing actors cared about was what others thought of them, or they convincingly pretended to. They guarded all aspects of that like trolls under the bridge. Lee was a drinking buddy and friend. He was a gentleman who loved the theatrical trappings, but I’d seen him best bigger men with just his one good arm.

  “Yeah, wish I had your troubles, bo.”

  ***

  Leland Parris III was independently wealthy thanks to his family’s industriousness and shrewd investments in Appalachian copper mining. The first time we met, I asked him if it were his family name attached to the South Carolina island location of the Marine Corps Recruit Depot.

  “It might have been,” he said. “My family was originally from Up Country South Carolina. My granddaddy, the original Leland, taught Chemistry at the Clemson Agricultural College in Calhoun in 1907. He was hired by the Tennessee Copper Company to develop a method to retrieve sulfur dioxide from the exhaust of smelting mills. The exhaust was mixing with water vapor, causing acid rain. Over a period of years, it turned 50 square miles of the Tennessee Copper Basin into a red dirt desert. Law suits were flying and government action was about to drop on the company like a ton a’ slag.”

  The new Parris extraction process was so successful that the sale of distilled sulfuric acid eventually overtook copper mining as the moneymaker. It made millionaires of Leland I and his son, Leland Jr., who joined the business after serving in World War I. He had graduated The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina.

  ***

  “You do look a bit like hammered dog shit, Wood.”

  “There ya go. That makes it unanimous. Catch ya later.”

  “Later.” He submerged behind the printed happenings of the Theater District.

  Lee Parris and I both bunked at the Hotel Taft. The big difference being, he owned a suite on the 20th floor, and I rented halfway up.

  A ding, a closing door, the elevator brought that sinking sensation as it rose. Lee, like his father before, graduated The Citadel in 1942. He was commissioned a Second Lieutenant of Marines and ordered to undergo sixteen weeks of training at The Officers’ Basic Course at Marine Corps Base, Quantico, Virginia. Ten weeks later, his luck ran out.

  As we sought the bottom of a bottle one night, he explained his brief Marine Corps career to me, “I had met a Vivien Leigh look-alike music major at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg. She was easy to look at and heiress to the Otis Elevator fortune. One Saturday night, after some heavy drinking and canoodling with Miss Otis, I headed back to Camp Upshur and rolled my old cabriolet in Triangle, Virginia. I was so close to the base that the Goddamn Military Police responded. My left arm and shoulder were crushed to the point where I had to fight to keep it attached. I threatened those Goddamn doctors with everything from a lawsuit to a gunshot wound.”

  He said when he was medically discharged a year later, he had very little feeling in the arm. He had willed himself to use his left hand by trial and error while staring at it and concentrating with all he had.

  “I didn’t even go home to see my father. He hadn’t come to see me for the year I sat on the porch of the Quantico Base Hospital staring at the Goddamn Potomac River. I headed straight to Manhattan to get started in a life of business on Wall Street.”

  Lee said his favorite day being a stockbroker was the day he quit in 1945. He became an instant millionaire when his father dropped dead of a heart attack climbing scaffolding on a copper smelter.

  “I had always enjoyed stage productions, and I was intrigued by the Theater District lifestyle. I met wonderful, talented, caring people - once you scratched their cutthroat surface,” he laughed.

  “I started taking classes at the Actor’s Studio and really hanging around the Theater District, backstage as well as out front. I grabbed the brass ring one night in ‘47 when I got drunk with a guy named Tommy Heggen. He’d been offered a shitpot full a’ money to turn his best selling book into a script for a stage play. He said I reminded him of a shipboard buddy during the war.”

  ‘Mr. Roberts’, starring Leland Parris III among others, opened on Broadway in February 1948 and kept the foo
tlights burning until January 1951 - 1,157 performances later.

  On the 10th floor, I offered the key to my room door and pushed it open. An envelope lay on the floor two feet inside, nothing written on it. It could wait, I thought, tossing it on a lamp table with the ‘Field and Stream’. I shucked off my clothes and hardware, including the .32 auto strapped to my ankle. Funny thing (lucky for me on more than one occasion), even when a professional, say a cop, fans you for a heater, he’ll overlook an ankle holster 80% of the time.

  I didn’t quite make it to the hot shower within the hour, but close enough. That particular shower felt like the best one in the history of the known world. I was hypnotized. Rockefeller Center was a ten-minute walk, just the other side of Radio City Music Hall; I had time to kill.

  The water was as close to scalding as I could get it without suffering consequences. I felt like grabbing a chair and spending the weekend right there. I liked hot showers even as a kid growing up on South Perkins Road in East Memphis. I graduated from high school just two blocks north of there in 1947. My brother and I were the third generation of Stones to graduate from White Station High School. My Daddy graduated in 1919 and my Granddaddy, Henry, back in 1895.

  ***

  Henry’s Daddy, Woodrow, my namesake, had been a country doctor in Asheville, North Carolina when he joined the Confederate Army as a Field Surgeon. He was gut-shot during the Battle of Memphis. After a year of recuperating, he sat out the rest of the war, as much as anyone in the South could. Then he decided to return to Memphis. After all, it was the hardwood and mule trading capitol of the United States. And, Tennessee was the only Confederate state that had no carpetbagger governor during Reconstruction. He set up his medical practice in German Town, then a village to the east of Memphis. Family lore has it that Dr. Woodrow would never again touch a patient hailing from the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon. Imagine that.

  In 1878, when the yellow fever epidemic hit Memphis, Woodrow sent his wife and three children, including infant Henry, back to North Carolina for a year. He stayed and made house calls around the clock with no known cure and no painkillers to comfort the dying. People either died or survived their encounter with the disease. No one had any idea mosquitos spread it. The plague raged all summer, killing up to 70 a day. The death rate slacked a little in September, but continued until a hard frost hit in late October. By then, the plague had wiped out 75% of the folks in the area. Woodrow was a dedicated man, and very lucky.

  ***

  My older brother, Ronnie, and I had a one-year overlap in high school, and what a year. Most mornings, we could hit the back steps running, jump the railroad tracks and be sitting in class almost before we woke up. Always made Mama mad when we’d see just how late we could sleep.

  Even before I graduated, I dreamed about joining the Marines. I used to ride my bike down Poplar Drive and sit on the grass in front of the Post Office. I stared at the silent challenge of that square-jawed Marine in the Dress Blue Uniform on the metal A-framed sign. Made my hackles stand up. ‘Be the first to fight...’ made my heart soar!

  After graduation, Mama’s heart did not soar when I told her I had made the decision to enlist. She begged me not to. I didn’t. What I did do was get a job as a deckhand on a riverboat. Somebody had discovered that a small investment in green felt tabletops and slot machines attracted all the tourists from the Heartland and beyond. They brought money by the bushels and left it on the Mississippi. I got my small share of that money the hard way. I kept socking it away and dreaming of all sorts of things yet to come.

  I knew Mick McBride from school. He had been one year behind my brother, Ronnie, and two years ahead of me at White Station High School. I first made his acquaintance when I was a freshman. His family had moved to Germantown from North Memphis. Sara, his sister, was my age and I was sweet on her. I’d walk her home from school whenever I could.

  One afternoon, after Sara had gone into her house, Mick came around from the side and told me to leave his sister alone or else. I was mortified that anyone would think that I was bothering Sara. I wasn’t scared of Mick, but being new at courtship, I was embarrassed at the unknown implications of Mick’s directive. I mumbled the situation, as well as I could articulate it, to Ronnie in our room that night. The next morning, with me in tow, Ronnie hunted Mick down at his hall locker.

  Ronnie whipped Mick around in an arm lock. “I will crush you like a bug if you even talk to my kid brother again,” then pushed him away; away was where Mick seemed very glad to go. I was surprised, relieved and impressed. Sadly, some of the blowback must’ve gotten to Sara. The cold shoulder was all I got after that. She didn’t like the drama, and that was the crop of it. The message must’ve stuck with Mick because he never said another word to me until after Ronnie graduated and joined the Marines the following summer.

  ***

  Shortly after I graduated in 1947, I ran into Mick at the Germantown Hardware. He told me that he had been sorry to hear about my Daddy dying. He asked what my plans were. When I told him I was looking for a job, he told me he’d been working as a deckhand on a paddlewheel excursion boat on the Mississippi.

  He said they had been looking for another deckhand just before he came home for a long weekend. He said the pay wasn’t great, but it was steady; and tips could be good - big turnover of passengers up and down the river. Then, there was the gambling once the steamboat was underway... (wink, wink).

  Two days later, I was on the bus with Mick heading to the waterfront. I had packed a change of clothes, although I told Mama I’d probably see her that night. Mick and I walked the final four blocks and stood on the dock taking in the full beauty of the Avalon.

  She was a sternwheeler with two towering smoke stacks. She was white with a broad red stripe running horizontally around the top of both upper decks. There was a covered promenade and sitting area topside that looked like a third deck. The Captain’s Bridge sat forward of the towering chimneys like a fancy top hat.

  “Hey, McBride, you slacker. Where you been, boy?” That came from a thick-shouldered man sporting a pencil mustache and standing by the aft gangplank. Mick grabbed my arm and pulled me in the direction of Abner Gray, First Mate of the Avalon.

  “Howdy, Mister Gray, this here’s Woody Stone. He’s looking to fill that open deckhand slot. He’s a good man.”

  Mister Gray laughed big. “Then he’s the FIRST good man who’s applied... You ready to start, Stone?”

  “Yes, sir, Mister Gray. Got my bag right here.”

  “How’s your kinfolk, McBride?” He ignored me.

  “They’re just fine, Mister Gray, Daddy’s looking forward to retiring from the Post Office.”

  “So, you think your mate can do the job?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve known him a long time.”

  “Give his information to the Purser, show him his berth and take him to Wyn Stanley for assignment.”

  Mick was already herding me across the gangplank when the First Mate yelled, “Welcome aboard, Stone. I’ll get word to you when Captain Barrows will talk to you. We get underway at noon tomorrow, boys.” I got the impression that Mister Gray thought Mick was a pretty good man, too.

  J. Herod Gorsage out of Louisville, Kentucky owned the Avalon when I signed aboard. The welding and further craftsmanship that brought the Avalon to life in 1914 had occurred on the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh. She was built for the West Memphis Packet Company and her original name was ‘Idlewild’. For a number of years, she carried passengers, cotton, lumber and grain between Tennessee and Arkansas.

  She then became a ‘tramp’, which is the term used for steamboats that take excursions out of various ports along the river systems. The Idlewild had a steel hull that only required five feet of water to float, so she could hit most all the ports on all the waterways. She tramped the Mississippi, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri and many other river systems.

  From the early 1930’s right up through World War II, the Idlewild had run regular excursions out
of Louisville. During the war, she was outfitted with equipment that allowed her to push oil barges on the river. She also served as a USO nightclub for troops stationed at military bases near the rivers.

  Captain Ben Winters was her Master for many years. He was a very strict man, feared by his crew and most others. He was more of a disciplinarian than a law-abiding citizen as he installed gambling games and slot machines on the boat. Just months before my signing on, during a raid by the local Sheriff, Captain Ben Winters suffered a heart attack and died in his cabin. His dying wish had been that the vessel be renamed ‘Avalon’ because that had been the name of the first steamboat he’d served aboard.

  Mick said, “They went ahead and changed her name, but everybody on the river knows it’s bad luck to do that after a ship’s been christened.”

  For the two years I was aboard, Captain Winters was seen repeatedly, late at night, below decks whistling and tapping fittings with a pipe wrench. Not by me, thank goodness.

  Speaking of shipmasters, twenty-five years later Captain Mick McBride was made master of that very same legendary river steamer after she underwent a year of dry dock repair and improvements. In her third ‘life’, she was christened ‘Belle of Louisville’.

  My favorite port in that whole river network was the pontoon pier by the Fontaine Ferry Park in West Louisville, Kentucky. The grand scale amusement park opened in 1905 and contained fifty, or so, rides and attractions. John Miller, architect of Palisades Park in New Jersey, designed it.

  The locals called it ‘Fountain Ferry Park’. After World War II, the throngs of visitors came mostly by car, but for the first thirty-five years, they came by steamboat and debarked at the Market Street Beach pontoon landing on the Ohio River. Fontaine Ferry was also the end of the line and turn-around point for the Market Street Trolley Line, so folks would ride down in the open-sided “summer car” trolleys. They came in droves.

  The Avalon, and other steamboats, would dock at the end of the pontoon pier on Market Street Beach. Ashore, there was a long stairway leading up the hill to a fieldstone clubhouse on top. When Mickey and I had time off, we’d run down that pier and dash up those long steps so fast we’d be breathless standing on the huge clubhouse porch. We would mill around and watch the girls in bathing suits on the beach below and the young men, maybe locals, in their Panama hats and pith helmets. We were in like Flynn.