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

by R. D. Herring

At Gina’s desk, I pushed the heavy Underwood forward. Pulling open the top desk drawer, I glommed a piece of her Juicy Fruit; a very large animal had taken a crap in my mouth. I carefully dialed Mama’s newly extended telephone number.

  “Hi, Mama, it’s Woody.”

  “Where in the world have you been? You haven’t called all week!” Here we go. Have to explain something I don’t understand.

  “Mama, I tried to call you. Seems I have to include ‘2-0-1’ when I ring you up now. It’s called an aerial code, some new thing. Foolish.”

  “Well, I don’t think so, and it’s ‘area code’. I have to use the 2-1-2 Area Code when I call the Taft Hotel. Lot a’ good it does me - just rings off the hook. Peggy Sue, next door, explained to me how to use it to call the City.”

  Crap. That’s what I forgot, pick up my messages at the front desk, “Mama, you can leave a message. I can get it at the front desk.”

  She could read my mind. “You better check the front desk, Mister, before you go tell a story.”

  “Mama, look, I can’t carry you to your appointment tomorrow. You’re gonna need to call a cab. It’s only three miles, tops. You’ll be fine.”

  “Woodrow Rollin Stone!” Uh-oh, all three names, I had screwed the pooch. “You said you were going to carry me over there.”

  “I’m sorry, Mama. I’m having car trouble.” Made me cringe to tell her that.

  “Oh, Woody, I know how much you love that car.” Huh! Guess she liked that story, but still... I didn’t make it a habit to lie to my mama.

  “I’ll get it taken care of. Hey, remember Mrs. Kowalski? She invited us to her house for a cookout on July Fourth. Gina said she has a new backyard grill that runs on gas.”

  “I’m not cooking around any gasoline.” Mama said, one word at a time.

  “You won’t have to, Mama. Sounds like fun doesn’t it? Ocean view. Sea breeze.” I wondered if distrust of the new-fangled was genetic.

  “Maybe, if I survive a taxi ride by myself. Your daddy would never send me off alone.”

  “Mama, three miles. You’ll be fine. Call the cab fifteen minutes before you need it. Talk to you soon. Love you, Mama.”

  “I love you, Woody.”

  At 8:30, Gina arrived carrying a bag of cannolis. An angel with food, what a combo!

  “Woody, I saw Dupree at the bakery. He asked about ya.”

  “Uh-huh. How was the weekend at your mother’s?”

  “It was wonderful, all that fresh air in Brooklyn. Ma wanted me to remind you about the cookout at the house. I saw your car parked in the alley. What gives? You don’t leave your car out much.”

  “Say, Hon, did you write yourself a check last week?” I wanted to change that subject.

  “Shu-wa did. The $200.00 Turnbull check came in Friday morning. I took it to the bank and wrote myself a $48.00 payroll check. The register is in the second drawer on the left.”

  “Sorry, I forgot about it on Saturday”.

  She brushed the apology away with a flick of her pretty hand as she arranged the three cannolis on the flattened brown paper bag on her desk.

  I grabbed another cup of joe. Famished, I just stood in front of her desk wolfing down two of the pastries. Gina went about hanging up her jacket and hat. She did a wide theatrical circle of me while moving behind her desk to retrieve her coffee cup. She stared at me in mock astonishment.

  “Sorry”, I shrugged my shoulders. “I haven’t eaten much lately.”

  “You want I should go get you a fried egg sandwich?”

  “No thanks, Sweetie. I’ll pick up something later.”

  I took my third cup of java to my office, sat in the old oak chair and lit a Lucky with the Suribachi desk lighter. Should I call Dan Logan? ‘I need you to come in’, he’d said. I guessed I wouldn’t be calling him until I could get the tale unraveled.

  ***

  Dupree Davis was a thin, wiry black man. He was a pisser. Very bright guy, but he’d come home from Korea with a bad drinking habit and minus an arm. My office building, the square two story brick building at 481 Wythe Avenue, was unremarkable. It housed only Stone Investigations on the second floor.

  The first floor had a very high ceiling. There was a 12-foot roll-up door centered on the front of the building so a delivery truck could back right inside. From the mid-1930’s until about six months after I set up shop, the much larger first floor had been home to the Liberty Paper Company. They also ran a large printing business in the back. Responding to the tanking of the neighborhood economy, Liberty folded and moved several blocks east following the population and traffic to Bedford Avenue.

  I saw the place being showed one time, then the two front windows were boarded and the two front and two alley doors just stayed locked. There was little incentive for anyone to move into the space. All needed stores and services were available one block south on Division Avenue.

  It had been sitting empty for a year, or so I thought, as I made a pre-dawn exit of the door at the bottom of my stairs. I had to squint in the half-light to verify what I thought I saw. Fifteen feet away, a skinny splib was leaving the first floor space and carefully closing the door behind him. I skinned my heater and braced him fast. Actually, Dupree Davis had seen me coming and just leaned back against the brick wall.

  “A little midnight B and E, huh, scumbag?” I had my forearm against his throat.

  “Mister, you got it all wrong,” he said.

  “Why don’t you set me straight, then, dog nuts.” I let him breathe a little.

  “I live here.”

  He may as well have been speaking Russian. I couldn’t immediately grasp that nugget. He must’ve seen my thousand yard stare.

  “Let go and I’ll show you.”

  I took a step back and saw his left shirtsleeve folded up and pinned to his shoulder. His gray shirt had a red star and ‘Mel’s Texaco’ over the left pocket. He gave me the patient smile reserved for the addle-brained and produced a butter knife. Addled or not, that brought the .45 back to his chest.

  “Easy now, Big Boss, that’s just my door key.” He slid the thin blade in beside the doorjamb and pulled the metal fire door open. He picked up his butter knife and moved back for me to step inside. I indicated with my gun barrel that he should go first. I followed him halfway down a dark hall and he reached in a door and snapped a light switch.

  I’ll be damned; they had never turned the power off. I saw a GI sleeping bag laying on wooden pallets and an old suitcase lay on a steel-topped table. The shelf-lined room had obviously been used for storage. Now the shelves held Mad Dog 20/20 and Wild Irish Rose bottles - mostly empties.

  “My name’s Dupree Davis, and I ain’t hurtin a soul,” he said to me. “I work at my cousin’s service station over on Division Ave. Give a veteran a break, will ya?”

  “Looka here, Dupree, I got no beef with what you’re doin. But if you ever get within ten feet of my office door with your key, you’re gonna look funny with it up your ass sideways. I got business now. I’ll let myself out.” He gave me a big grin, and I found myself smiling as I walked away.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I got up from my desk chair, pushed my door shut and called Dan Logan’s office anyway. I was told he hadn’t shown yet that morning. I called his apartment and woke him up.

  “Hey, Leatherneck. Did you miss reveille?”

  “Late night, Woody.” Then, reality must’ve cut through his grogginess.

  “Goddamit, Stone, where are you? And it better be in my office...!”

  “Listen, Dan, I only have a minute,” I lied. I gave him the run-down on my theory that Joey Gallo had lured his cousin, Spillazzo, to the Washington hotel room. “He iced Spillazzo to appease Vito Rossi and the Five Families for the publicity the botched Pig Alley murder had produced. He cut out Spillazzo’s tongue and left it on the floor because everybody knows that’s Gallo’s signature. When I showed, he must’ve thought that scotched his plan, but he just made it work for him and shifted suspicion to me.�
� Silence on the phone.

  “Dan, you still there?”

  “Woody, there was no tongue on the floor. The hotel dick said you had blood all over your shoes when you came to get him. Witnesses said you were blotto. They’re saying you cut out Spillazzo's tongue to frame Gallo, but forgot to leave it with the corpse cuz you was too shitfaced. You need to come in. It’s gonna look a lot better. We’ll sort it out.”

  Now there was silence on my end.

  “Say, Woody, a Navy Yard worker found Jack McCoy’s body south of Bed-Sty this morning. Know anything about that?”

  “That’s a rough neighborhood. Was he in his old Hudson scash?”

  “No, he was just laid out in the weeds. No car; we identified him cause the prison stamped his name in his suit coat.”

  ‘Shit, that IS a rough neighborhood. Steal a dead man’s car’, I thought.

  “Sounds like he finally pissed off the wrong man,” I said.

  “That’s the way I got it doped. Now get your ass in here, Woody”.

  Silence. Disconnect.

  ***

  I slowly got to know Dupree Davis, mostly through chance meetings in our shared alley. One night, I was parking the Hawk close to the building when Dupree bopped in off Wythe. I had several sheets in the wind.

  “Hey, Dupree, grab a jug and come on up.”

  I got the wire on the Dupree Davis story in spades, no pun intended. Sitting in my office smoking Luckies and Camels, we each drank our favorite straight from the bottle.

  I told him I was from Memphis and had worked on the river a while. He said he’d sailed the Mississippi many times in his head thanks to Mark Twain. He poked me for as many memories as I could conjure up.

  He grew up in the tenements of the Mott Haven Neighborhood off East 138th Street in the South Bronx. Dupree called it ‘Jungle Street’.

  “We weren’t in Harlem, but we was close enough to smell the pigtails cookin. It was me and Ma and my half brother, Marcus. Ma busted our asses at the sniff a’ us gettin in trouble. I always liked the Branch Library over on East 140th cause it was air-conditioned but Marcus couldn’t stop hangin on the streets. Did you know that an American engineer by the name of Willis Carrier built the first modern air conditioner in 1902 right here in Brooklyn? His machine was called ‘Apparatus for Treating Air’?” Dupree smiled and took a snort when he saw my slack jaw.

  “Anyways, when I graduated from high school in 1950, I beat feet for the Army. I planned to get an education on the GI Bill; bad timing and bad luck for me. Four months later, I was humpin ammo in sub-zero weather in North Korea. We sat on the Yalu River staring across to China waitin for the word to start World War III. Well, somebody blinked and we got our asses pushed back south, but not before this.” He flapped his pinned up shirtsleeve like a chicken wing. “A commie mortar round blew up the two boys squatted to my left and shredded my arm and ass cheek in the doing.”

  He took another long snort of his Mogen David. “I healed up in a hospital in Philly eventually and got a med discharge. When I got back to the South Bronx, I still had the fire in my belly. I actually thought I had put myself above the bullshit in the streets. I enrolled in Monroe Business College. Tuition was $15.00 a week. I met a pretty little thing named Maybelle and I was beatin the odds and happy doin it. Did I tell you Marcus got shot dead arguin with some Irish boys from over Willis Avenue?”

  Pulling on the Mad Dog, “Fore you know it, little Dupree Junior came along and took the place of me goin to school. A year later, little Jerome took the place of me doing anything but sittin on the stoop with a bottle of ‘Wild I’.”

  I liked the guy, but I couldn’t feel sorry for him. Sorry was in the dictionary between shit and syphilis. If he didn’t have the gumption to keep his life straight, well, that was just the crop of it.

  Dupree said, “I’d been years on the street when I stumbled into my cousin Melvin’s gas station right down here on Division. My thinkin was to whine and put the touch on him. He slapped the pig snot out a’ me and locked me in his back room for three days. He finally pulled me out to the daylight shakin like a dog shittin razor blades. He told me, since I was doing my best to kill myself, he was gonna help do it. He asked if I was ready to die. I told him no, and he hugged me. Mel gave me a job and I stay straight when I work for him.”

  Turned out Dupree was mailing most of his paychecks back to the Bronx for Dupree Junior and Jerome. I asked him why he didn’t just go back and be their daddy. He frowned a little when he spoke.

  “The moving hand, having writ, moves on. Omar Khayyam.”

  The hell you say... It was many years before I knew that he hadn’t been quoting some street bum from South Bronx. I told myself that having Dupree on the property worked out pretty good. He was another set of eyes in the area - usually.

  I lost track of Dupree in the 60’s. He said he was taking a one-bedroom down by the Navy Yard. I wonder if he lasted long enough to know his granddaughter, Merryl, who was born in 1972. In 2004, as a U.S. Air Force Major, she had over 3200 flight hours and 330 combat hours. She was the first black woman to be assigned to fly America’s elite U2 Spy Plane.

  ***

  I went out front and told Gina that I had a full day ahead and would probably be flopping at the office that night. I asked her if she minded going by the Taft and picking up my clean gray flannel for me.

  “Oh, and go on down to the liquor store and pick up a couple of jugs of Jack for my office.” She was busy scribbling all that down, and I was thinking it’d be a good idea to go by Mazzella’s Restaurant and shake up Gallo’s crowd a little more. I also needed to get the skinny on the mysterious Kate Margolies; at least, I wanted to.

  ***

  Rita Mae Riley was the perky secretary assigned to Dan Logan in the DA’s Office. I thought she might be able to get the scoop on Miss Margolies. Rita Mae and I had struck it off early on when I worked there. When Dan hired me on the ‘Mad Bomber’ case, Rita had been with the DA’s Office only a few months. She had previously worked at U.S. Customs Headquarters a few blocks away. I, and every other male, was instantly attracted to her. She was firm and round and fully packed; she was the walking, breathing, heaving incarnation of Betty Boop. The only downside to her plump little butt was her voice straight out of Munchkin Land.

  At the end of my first year associated with the DA’s Office, and more specifically the Assistant DA’s Office, Dan insisted I come to their Christmas office party. I didn’t want to; I never thought of myself as a social drinker. Without drinking, I knew I wasn’t social. I did go and the party was shaping up pretty much as I expected. Then I noticed that, with two or three drinks, Rita Mae was flying to the moon.

  The only thing tighter than her red dress was Rita Mae. I got Rita Mae another drink. Soon we discovered the door to the Thermofax room could be locked from the inside. She was out of her dress in a wink. With her panties hanging on the doorknob, I boosted her to a sitting position on the counter by the sink. She was biting my ear while I tore a foil package with my teeth. I finally managed to get the safe on with the grace of a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. As I was just getting acclimated to the heat of her steaming garden of paradise with my lowers dragging on the cold counter top, she jerked her head back violently, thrust out her chest and growled, “Bite my tits.”

  “What...?”

  “BITE MY TITS, GODDAMMIT!”

  “SHHHHH...” So, I bit her tit. A looping, open-handed roundhouse landed on the side of my face.

  ‘What’s the matter, Rita Mae?”

  “You bit my tit! But its okay, it’s okay... Pinch my ass!”

  ‘Oh no I will not,’ I thought to myself. I went about taking care of business as she squeaked off some fairly outrageous demands - some physically impossible.

  Back out at the party, Dan, holding a water glass full of liquor, spotted us. “Hey, you two. You know what? You make a nice looking couple.”

  I went to get Rita Mae another shot of giggle juice.
>
  ***

  “Do you want cigarettes, too?” Gina asked, still making her shopping list.

  “Sure, Hon. Couple of cartons, and a can of Three-in-One Oil.”

  I figured, since I woke Logan at his hotel, I could haul ass, get to Manhattan and talk to Rita Mae before he got to work. I told Gina thanks for the cannolis and I’d see her the next day.

  “Be careful out there, Wood.”

  I parked the Hawk a block away and made my way to the side entrance of the DA’s building. The best place to hide is right out in the open if you do it with confidence. Besides, my goose was cooked if I didn’t get the right grip on what was going on.

  “Hey, Stone!” snapped my head around. A cop was sitting in a radio car on the curb. He motioned me over. Flight was foremost in my mind when I recognized Roger Pomeroy. He had fought with the U.S. 8th Army in Korea. He and I had gone through the Police Academy together and had shared more than a few bottles of Jack Daniel's. One time, we had a few snorts and Pomeroy went with me to see Jack Webb in ‘The D. I.” when it hit Radio City in 1957. His critical review of Marine Corps Boot Camp, “You gotta be shittin me!” I laughed my ass off.

  My survival instinct nudged its way in line in front of my confidence, but I leaned in the open sedan window. “Hey, Pom.”

  “Hey, bo. You know there’s a manhunt on for your ass, don’tcha?”

  “I heard.”

  “Well, look, unless you’re in the process of surrendering, you stand right there. I’ve got to turn this car in around at the garage. I’ll be back in fifteen, twenty minutes to take you in.” He reached over and patted my arm.

  “I owe you one, bo.” I turned as in marching and headed north towards the Studebaker.

  I found a phone booth and called Rita Mae Riley. ‘Follow the yellow brick road...’.

  “Woody, do you know about the dragnet out for you?” she asked in a stage whisper.

  “Yeah, Rita Mae, that’s why I only have a second. Look, it’d be a tremendous help to me if you would see what you could run down on a Miss Kathryn Margolies. That’s K-A-T-H-R-Y-N Margolies. She’s twenty-five, thirty, in the theatrical production business.” Rita Mae indicated she’d give it a shot.