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

by R. D. Herring

  “Thanks, doll.” I couldn’t take much of that voice.

  My breakfast cannolis were wearing thin, so I decided to grab a lunch at Jack Dempsey’s Broadway Restaurant. I had to get out of that neighborhood.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Dempsey’s was also my favorite watering hole. I leaned on the familiar oval oak bar, worn smooth as glass by decades of wool serge suits. I’d know the feel of that bar in the dark. My wingtip was right at home on the brass foot rail. Sculpted gold gilt reached all the way to the floor under the bar top and reflected wild beams of light and color.

  The giant racetrack-shaped bar stretched out twenty-five feet in front of me. I liked it; there was no mirror behind the bar to stare back and point a finger. The bow-tied bartender was Johnny-on-the-Spot wiping down the bar in front of me.

  “Good day, Mr. Woody. The usual?” His Irish brogue sounded like singing.

  “Not today, Seamus. I’m cutting back. Put an ice cube in it.” He gave one more exaggerated wipe and winked. I cupped the tumbler with the three ounces of Jack Daniel’s and touched the cool glass with my other hand. Such a pretty lady deserved a little foreplay.

  The Champ treated folks like they were guests in his own home. I had stood at the other end of that very bar and asked Dempsey, “Say, what do you think the secret to this life is, Champ?” Truth is, I guess Jack Daniel asked him.

  He took the time to glance at the ceiling and pretend to mull it over. “Be happy with whatchu got,” he gave me a fake round house left to my right shoulder, “and whatchu can get!” His fake about put daylight under my shoe leather. He grabbed his gut and laughed big. He was a happy man.

  I took my drink and parked it at a small round linen-draped table behind a brass rail that ran all the way around the room. The floor behind the rail was about 3 feet higher than the main deck. The middle of the room, at the lower level, was taken up with that giant oak oval.

  William Harrison Dempsey, the ‘Manassa Mauler’, Heavyweight Champ of the World thirty-five years before that, before I was born. In his prime, if ‘Kid Blackie’ hit a man and that man didn’t fall, you could always walk around and see what he was propped up against.

  In ’26, he lost the title to former U.S. Marine, Gene Tunney. He lost to Tunney again a year later in the ‘Long Count Fight’. Dempsey failed to go to a neutral corner after he knocked Tunney down. I knew I wouldn’t be reminding ‘Kid Blackie’ of that particular memory if he had walked in that day.

  Dempsey was aces with me, though. He volunteered for the U.S. Navy in 1942, when he was almost fifty. He served aboard a ship during the invasion of Okinawa in ‘45. I read his book, ‘How To Fight Tough’. Jack Dempsey was tough.

  The sports crowd from Madison Square Garden always hung around. They drifted in and out and I knew many of them. A number of them were ponying up for drinks. The good ol Garden, that’s where Mike Sekach and I first got appointed and had our NYPD buzzers pinned on our blue uniforms. ‘Enter to learn. Go forth to serve’.

  Sally Spit was working his way between the little round tables with a manual carpet sweeper.

  “Hey, Woody. How’s by ya?”

  Sally was a fixture around Dempsey’s Broadway Restaurant. The odd hours I kept probably made it seem that way. I mean, he didn’t stock the bars or sweep the carpet during rush hour - not as a matter of course.

  He always had a smile and a greeting, so I got to know him over time. After I did, it seemed everybody knew ‘Spitfire’ Spitieri or had heard of him.

  Salvatore Spitieri, son of Malta, was 48 years old. He was 5’5” and strong as two bulls. His left ear was cauliflowered, and his broken nose could go around a corner a step ahead of him. He cut his graying hair in a crew and was always dressed neat.

  “Doin good, Sal. You workin hard?”

  “Hardly workin! Gotta save these hands for playin da piano...” Then he held up gnarled fingers that looked like root balls and laughed, his favorite joke.

  ***

  Sally’s debut as a pro boxer in 1931 didn’t go well. He was 19 years old. He fought Al Lovino in Jersey and Lovino knocked him out in the fifth. Lady Luck smiled because Jack Dempsey, Heavyweight Champion of the World, was in the crowd. Jack spotted the youngster’s aggressive attitude and strong, tireless punching. Sally’s next fight was four days later. He won by a six-round decision. The Champ was back at ringside.

  Jack Dempsey recommended Sally to his friend, Al Jolson, the jazz singer. Jolson signed Sally to a contract, and Sally started training with the best.

  ‘Spitfire’ Spitieri fought pro for four and a half years. He was a 5’5” buzz saw. He was set to be on top with a record of fifty-two wins, seven losses – thirty-one wins by KO’s.

  “Jimmy McLarnin, Barney Ross, Tony Canzoneri... I fought em all on their way to the top. The greats and the near greats, at one point or another, I whipped em all - before I danced with the Devil.”

  His luck ran out. He got tangled with a trainer who convinced him that a little nose candy would give him legs in the later rounds. It produced what looked like stamina, but it also produced a drug addict with a one-way ticket to Palookaville. Sally spent the next six years sticking horse in his veins.

  He told me his shame was unbearable when America went to war.

  “I swore to God I was gonna get the monkey off my back or kill us both trying. I went to confession then holed up in a flophouse for ten days. I was delirious most of the time, prayed when I could, and puked up rotgut whiskey as fast as I drank it.” More than half dead, he finally sought the help of a Priest.

  “Close yer mouth, Woody. They say I lived, ya know.”

  Sally spoke English and Italian. He also spoke his native Maltese, which was really just a Sicilian dialect dosed with Arabic, Spanish and French - all the conquerors of his island country over the last 2,000 years.

  Dempsey had personally vouched for Sally Spit, not that I had asked. I hired Sally from time to time when I needed some backup or some extra muscle. He could snap a man’s wrist with one hand - he was no one to question.

  Sally Spit belonged to an underground culture, a network all over the City and beyond. His cohorts were washouts, rejects, discards and hangers-on of the Sweet Science of Boxing. Sally was by no means punch drunk, but many of them had gotten their brains beat to mush. There were thousands of them. They tended bar, swept the floors, guarded whorehouse doors - permanent fixtures, unnoticed background.

  Nobody paid them any attention and few hesitated to talk around them. To me, it was like listening in on the mob’s party line. I’d pony up a little WAM, walking around money, and get an instant wiretap. Sally Spit was the one who told me where to find Joey Gallo at Roseland Dance the previous week.

  ***

  I thought I’d have another hook before I ate, so I walked down to the bar for a refill.

  ***

  Early on in the budding recruit training history of Platoon 129, we knew that Sergeant Bozelli and Corporal Lyner wouldn’t let us recruits get away with anything. Our Senior Drill Instructor, Staff Sergeant Lewis, had the duty and remained overnight with us every third night. There was the rumor, seldom spoken, that on those nights we were assured of getting the full one hour of free time to write letters, and the smokers would get their one cigarette and five minutes at the wash racks overlooking the swamps.

  One such day, about two weeks into training, Sgt. Bozelli brought Platoon 129 back to the barn from evening chow as his last act before leaving for the day. We were at attention at the end of our racks expecting the command for Port Side to make a head call. The Senior Drill Instructor came out of his office and called Private Collins front and center.

  “SIR, Private Collins reporting to the Senior Drill Instructor as ordered, SIR!”

  “Private Collins, have you been instructed to always lock your footlocker?”

  “SIR, YES, SIR!”

  “Then why did I find your footlocker unlocked?”

  “SIR, NO EXCUSE, SIR!”
r />   “ARE YOU FUCKING STUPID, RECRUIT?”

  “SIR, NO, SIR!”

  “THEN YOU MUST BE GARBAGE, PRIVATE COLLINS. GET’N THAT GI CAN!”

  “SIR?”

  “GET... YOUR... SLIMY GARBAGE ASS IN THAT GI CAN!” Collins finally gained the presence of mind to scramble into the 45-gallon metal trash can and resume the position of attention.

  “Now, carry your worthless garbage ass out to the dumpster.”

  “SIR?”

  “GRAB THE FUCKING HANDLES ON THE CAN AND CARRY YOURSELF OUT - AWAY FROM PLATOON 129! DO IT!”

  It seemed reasonable that Collins be punished for his stupid neglect. Besides, in our black hearts and minds, it was shaping up to be funny.

  Wrong.

  Staff Sergeant Lewis turned to us and unleashed an outburst that would have made a Tasmanian devil proud and put the Assistant Drill Instructors to shame. He strutted down the center of the squad bay with his hands on his hips and his head on a swivel.

  “YOU TURDS LET PRIVATE COLLINS LEAVE HIS FOOTLOCKER UNLOCKED. DON’T YOU GIVE A SHIT ABOUT PRIVATE COLLINS? WHAT DID PRIVATE COLLINS EVER DO TO YOU?”

  It was delivered with such Shakespearean conviction and over-the-top method acting, it would have been humorous had we not each been paralyzed with a scared-shitlessness never before experienced by mankind.

  “YOU ASSHOLES ARE GONNA PAY FOR WHAT YOU DID TO PRIVATE COLLINS!”

  An icy pall fell over every swinging dick in Platoon 129.

  “Pick up your footlockers chest high. DO IT! On the count of ‘one’, you will raise it over your head, arms fully extended. On the count of ‘two’, you will return it to chest level. On my count - ‘ONE’... ‘TWO’… ‘ONE’... ‘TWO...”

  That and other forms of physical exercise, some quite creative, continued for three hours until lights out, unhindered by the sweat, tears, puke and more than one emergency head call accumulating on the deck. As we fumbled to get undressed in the dark, we heard the Senior Drill Instructor tell Collins to go lock up his shit.

  So, there it was. The Senior Drill Instructor was the one who could really bring the pain. Later, we squad leaders escorted Private Collins to the head and encouraged him to pay more attention to detail. Quickly we recruits learned to look out for one another, and, as training progressed, we displeased the Senior less and less. By the time Platoon 129 graduated, we worshiped Staff Sergeant Zane Lewis.

  ***

  Both Gary Painter and I got promoted to Private First Class; but I graduated from Boot Camp as the Honor Man of Platoon 129 and got issued a free Dress Blue Uniform. Painter was plenty long in the face when he was assigned to a six-month Communication Technician School and got put on administrative hold; his class wouldn’t start for over four months. I found out later that he served as Assistant Drill Instructor for Platoon 156. He had been hand-selected by his new boss, Senior Drill Instructor Staff Sergeant Al Bozelli.

  Instead of being sent to Camp Geiger, North Carolina for Infantry Training, I got orders to a Machine Gun and Infantry Training Course at Camp Pendleton, California. I had three weeks to report in there when I boarded a Greyhound bus in Beaufort and made a beeline to Huntsville, Alabama.

  Ginger picked me up at the Huntsville terminal in a 1951 Willys station wagon her father had recently bought. With its Jeep ‘Hurricane’ engine, I thought it the most perfect vehicle I had ever seen. Later, in Korea, I would see so many Jeeps, and ride in so few, that I lost my appreciation for the little workhorse.

  She stood just inside the arrival door waving a small red Marine Corps flag. I threw my seabag against the wall and ran to scoop her into my arms. We kissed without shame.

  “Baby, I missed you so much.”

  “Oh, Woody, I love you! You look so good in your uniform.”

  “Say, where in the world did you get a Marine Corps flag?”

  “Daddy got it for me. He said to celebrate; this is a bigger time in your life than even I can understand. Do you like it?”

  “I love it, but nothing like I love you.”

  With seeing Ginger again, and in that amazing vehicle to boot, I was on top of the world. On the way to her house, I had Ginger stop by a dry cleaning shop where I turned in my Dress Blues. I told her I was going to take her out in style Friday night.

  I spent 10 days with Ginger living at the Wilson’s house. We did a few things that raised her father's eyebrow; God bless him, he never said a word. On the day I left, he took me in his office and told me he was proud of me. Assuming I was headed to Korea, I guess, he told me to remember there are very few things worth dying for. That made me think coming from a man who had stormed the beaches of Normandy. At that time, it seemed to me like an inconsistent warning from a man who had risked his own life for his beliefs.

  The few days I spent at home with Mama flew by. So did the twelve weeks I spent undergoing Machine Gun and Weapons Platoon in Support of Infantry Training at Camp San Onofre, a subdivision of Camp Pendleton, California.

  A dozen shots in the arm and butt later, as part of a six hundred-man replacement draft, I boarded the USS Breckinridge and set sail for Korea. We were bullet proof and indestructible. The North Koreans and Chinese Communists were waiting with mocking hostility to disabuse us of that idea.

  ***

  The day after reporting to Camp Pendleton, a convoy of USMC buses transported us from Mainside. Forty minutes later, the caravan pulled in to a large brown, grassless field surrounded by a sea of Quonset huts. From the paved road, the half-round corrugated steel structures extended back to where the rising ground had been excavated to make a flat spot for them. They were side-by-side, five deep and grouped in pods of fifty. There were three pods to our left and two to the right as we debarked onto the sunbaked field.

  There was rumored to be 150 of us, soon to be formed into a training company. We were all put into a west-facing formation. I stood staring at the strip of blue on the horizon, several miles away, yearning for the cool ocean breezes.

  Camp San Onofre answered my daydreams with stifling heat waves radiating from the hard-packed scrabble soil beneath my feet. A brown-skinned Staff Sergeant holding a clipboard seemed to be running the show.

  “Welcome to Weapons Training Battalion. Camp San Onofre will be your home for the next 90 days, when you’re not in the field. Keep the area policed up and treat it with respect, I insist. I am Staff Sergeant Rodriguez, Company Gunnery Sergeant for this training company.” He paced back and forth. “Can everybody hear me?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Call me, Gunny. I will call out names. As I do, you will move to the rear of this formation and form into four training platoons. I will be calling names alphabetically, except, I have ensured there are at least three PFC’s in each platoon to act as squad leaders. The exception will be the Fourth Platoon where your Platoon Sergeant will appoint one Private as a squad leader. Everybody understand?”

  “Yes, Gunny.”

  He then addressed three Sergeants and one Corporal standing online at parade rest to our right front. “Platoon Sergeants, take charge of your platoons once I have them formed.”

  After a bunch of us “N’s” through “S’s” were herded into a formation giving birth to Third Platoon, we were approached by Sgt. Ray Tasker, our Platoon Sergeant and general overseer for the duration of our training. Wearing herringbone utilities, he was an average looking man except the tip of his nose, right ear and left earlobe were missing. All were lost, as we found out, to frostbite in Korea during the retrograde movement out of the Chosin Reservoir with the 5th Marine Regiment a year earlier. We also would find out that Tasker could do more push-ups than Charles Atlas and run like a deer, which he proved, to our disadvantage, on many occasions.

  ***

  “You ladies don’t want to make my formation on time? Fine, we’ll all run up to Nameless Knob. Let’s see if you can function any better with your dicks in the dirt.”

  Off we’d go, up the dry, dusty road that wound around those sc
orched hills – two and one-half miles up, two and one-half miles back. And there would be no stragglers on Tasker’s runs. If he spotted someone lagging, he’d circle the whole platoon back around to pick up the man that we all hated most at that moment.

  ***

  So, there stood the brand new Third Platoon, staring into the early afternoon sun, when a man with a fairly obvious facial deformity called us to attention.

  “My name is Sergeant Tasker. I am the best machine gunner in the United States Marine Corps. Bradley, Olson, R. and Stone, you’re my squad leaders. When I give you the word, you all will go and retrieve your seabags in an ORDERLY fashion, return here, and standby on your gear until your squad leaders come to get you. Squad leaders, report to my office in Quonset 33A in twenty minutes. That’s in the group to your right, third hut, back row - come in through the far end”

  Bradley, Olson and I told our squads to find our seabags where they had been offloaded from 6x6 trucks and hang loose. We were knocking on Tasker’s screen door within ten minutes. He was sitting at a field desk looking at Service Record Books. His office was also his sleeping area with a curtain separating his end of the Quonset hut. The single metal rack was neatly made with the standard green horse blanket - it had three short stacks of paper on it.

  He pointed to the stacks. “I’ve mimeographed information for each of you. Take one stack and get the word to your squads. You’ll find a map of our camp area, including your billet assignments, the chow hall, the barber shop, the P. X., the chapel and the bus schedule, if you EVER get liberty.” He paused indicating we should pick up our paperwork.

  “You men have an important job these next three months. You’re being trained for combat, and combat is a life and death business. I expect the best performance from you three and you should make your squad members understand that’s what you expect of them. Today is housekeeping. Get your people to their assigned Quonsets, one squad per hut. You’ll find footlockers and sheets and blankets on the racks - any extra will be turned back in to the Company Gunny. I don’t want to hear about any squad leader that locks up excess gear so he’ll have it in case of some kind a’ emergency and couldn’t otherwise get it.”