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

by R. D. Herring

  We walked into a very stylish showroom with glass counters and a whole corner devoted to leather jackets and pants. The place was painted British Racing Green with posters and accents using the scarlet and gold of the manufacturer; two weeks earlier, the space had been unfinished walls of bare lumber. There were four motorcycles parked on the tiled floor, one a dark blue color, with model names like, ‘Bullet’ and ‘Meteor’.

  “Right back there, Woody. That’s what I see you on.” He pointed to a shiny dark-red and black beast hunkered on a raised platform. It was a beauty with its big, automobile-size tires and chrome wire rims that had a single painted dark-red accent line running around each.

  I walked over and spotted the saucer-sized logo on the gas tank: ‘Royal Enfield Indian Chief’. “What’s this all about, Butch?”

  Butch, the salesman, looked a little uncomfortable. “Truth is, an outfit called Brockhouse Engineering got hold of the rights to the Indian name after it went under in ’53. They worked out a deal to modify the Enfield models and rebadge them for sale as Indians in the U.S.”

  That made my head hurt. “The place is lookin good, Butch. Say, is Ray around?”

  “Yep, he’s in his office. I was just down there trying to convince him that we can’t let every Tom, Dick and Harry take off on a test ride. First motorcycle we lose, I bet he’ll listen to me.”

  “Well, good luck with that. See ya later, Butch.”

  “Take care, Woody.”

  I went back outside and walked twenty feet to the left. Ray’s private entrance had a green awning over it; I knocked and stuck my head in. Ray was sitting at his desk eating a sandwich. A platter with several sandwiches and a grape Nehi sat on the desk. “Yo, Ray, there’s a prostitute out here asking for you.”

  “Yeah, I know. Last night she said, ‘Give me twelve inches and hurt me’. So, I screwed her three times and smacked her in the head.” Nobody thinks faster than a machine gunner. “How ya doon, you ol’ yellow leg?” He motioned me to take a leather chair beside his desk.

  One wall of his office was a Marine Corps museum. The USMC flag hung in the middle with framed award citations, photos, a North Korean bugle and officers’ sword fanned out around it. Against the wall stood an oversized oak sideboard with a twelve inch beveled back mirror. An M1919A4 .30-caliber light machine gun sat perched on its tripod on top of the sideboard.

  I closed the front door. “Doin good, Ray. I thought I’d back the Hawk out‘n the alley and hose er down. I just checked out your motorcycle store; it’s lookin very ritzy.”

  “Well, you know me; ritzy’s my middle name. Hey, you wanna horse cock sam’ich?”

  “No thanks, just ate.” I walked over and laid my hand on the cool metal surface of the light .30, my old friend, forty-eight pounds of belt-fed, air-cooled death and destruction. It was as comforting as a mother's touch, a rare, but familiar artifact from another world. “Those Royal Enfields are beauties.”

  “Yeah, they really are, and there’s a lot a’ interest in them. We’re gonna do okay if I don’t get sent up the river for murder first. I just had a dust-up with Butch Townes.” I went ahead and took the big green leather chair. I guessed the issue with Butch was bigger than I had thought.

  Ray continued, “Butch thinks it’s nuts to let a customer take a motorcycle out for a spin around the block.”

  “Whadyou tell him?”

  “I told him two things. One, I’m the honcho. Two, the customer is the one with the money, and it’s obvious he’ll want a test ride before he parts with that money. That’s when he pissed me off with a statement about his twelve years of sales experience. Wood, I came this close to grabbin that lad by the stacking swivel and shittin on his shoeshine.”

  I lit a Lucky and looked over at the light machine gun for a couple of seconds to let that mental picture drain away. “Ray, you know he’s just tryin to look out for ya.”

  “I got insurance to look out for me. I need that knucklehead to do a pole-dance if that’s what the customer asks for; the customer has a right to a Goddamn dog and pony show. I guess Butch just doesn’t have my nose for business.” I looked up quick to see if Ray had made a joke, but he was intently noshing on his sandwich. Then, the son of a bitch looked up, winked and started laughing.

  “Woody, I’ll do you one better; I’ll have Geraldo back your Stude out and give’er a good field day. You been to Dempsey’s lately?”

  “Every once in a while. Hold that thought; I’ll be right back.”

  I walked back up to the motorcycle showroom and talked to Butch. He assured me that he could tell a serious buyer in pretty short order and told me that a customer just had to prove he had a New York driver license in order to take a test ride.

  “Butch, take it from me, Ray’s gonna unscrew your head and shit down your windpipe over this test ride issue. Why not just familiarize yourself with the insurance requirements for reporting a stolen vehicle, then copy down all the information from the customer’s license before he leaves the shop with a motorcycle?”

  Butch pursed his lips and glanced at the ceiling, “Maybe I could just hang on to his license while he goes around the block…”

  I smacked him on the shoulder, “It’s a good plan, and believe me, it beats the alternative. Now, I’ve got a ride to catch.” I wondered if I might see Kate at Dempsey’s that evening.

  ***

  (Friday, June 17, 1960.)

  Friday morning, I hung around the Hotel Taft Coffee Shop, drinking joe and reading about Ted Williams hitting his 500th homer off the Indian’s pitcher, Wynn Hawkins. I was confused about the whole Kate business and felt lower than whale shit.

  I glanced up when someone slid in the booth across from me. It was the smiling face and bloodshot eyes of Lee Parris - decked out in a tuxedo. The waitress was already serving his black coffee.

  “You going out or coming in? Cause if you’re going out, you better put tourniquets on those eyeballs.”

  Lee snorted a laugh, sipped his coffee and lit a fat cigarette with a French looking name on the pack. “You mere mortals worry about the craziest things. I’ve been celebrating the end of the strike and the rebirth of The Great White Way.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “Wonderfully, fantastically! I went to the grand re-opening of ‘Bye-Bye Birdie’ at the Shubert last night.” He made a circular flourish with his fat fag.

  “And you’re this jazzed up about a musical that ended nine hours ago?”

  Well, that and the lovely Conchita Rivero. You’ve heard of her, right?”

  “No.”

  “West Side Story? Three years ago? Legs like bands of steel?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Shit, Woody. You, my friend, lead a Goddamn boring life.”

  “Tell me about it.” I slid the front-page section across the table.

  ***

  Lee’s father came home from World War I and married a Charleston, South Carolina girl he’d met when he attended The Citadel. He moved his bride to Copperhill, Tennessee where he became very rich working with his own father in the production of sulfuric acid. Lee was born in 1920; his mother died eight years later. Her death and the financial troubles of 1929 turned his already workaholic father into a stranger. It was a series of boarding schools for Lee including The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina. Lee said he had little interest in the military, but went to please his father. He said he had simply assumed the role of a young military officer and had graduated 5th in his class in 1942 - now that’s acting. Lee accepted a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps and forged ahead, intending to make the most of his accomplishments.

  Lee told me so many different people had raised him, he felt like a bundle of personalities; but he’d found a way to express himself in the arts. My first thought was, that’s a hell of a way to live your life, as an expression of yourself. It made more sense, the older I got.

  ***

  At the office, I waited around readin
g Jim Thompson, but Kate didn’t call. Mid-afternoon, I called the number on her business card.

  “Kathryn Margolies...”

  “Kate, It’s Woody Stone. I was hoping you’d call me.”

  “And I was hoping you wouldn’t call me.”

  “Did you read about Vito Rossi, Kate?”

  “Yes, I did. So that about concludes our business. I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong idea.” She hung up. ‘Uhhhh...’ The doll had me twisted, but something seemed hinkey. What was her grift, anyway?

  I still needed a secretary and I still needed Gina to explain the files to me. I reached her at her hotel room on the third try. She said she’d stop by the office on her way to her mother’s house the next morning, Saturday.

  Next I called Rita Mae Riley at Dan Logan’s office for the address of the female I asked her about a couple of days before.

  “Shu-wa. Margolies, right? Hold on, I know right where that file is.”

  ‘We represent the Lollipop Guild...’

  “Woody, there was a file address at the Ansonia, Broadway and 74th, but it was scratched out. Someone penciled in a Far Rockaway address in the margin with a question mark.”

  “Okay, doll, just give me that one.”

  “Shu-wa, it’s Numba 6 Beechwood Drive, Lawrence, New Yawk.”

  It was a plenty swank part of Far Rockaway, Queens. A person literally had to buy his way into that community. Folks out there had the bees.

  “And, Woody? Someone also penciled in ‘VWC’ in the margin.”

  Holy shit! There was some insider code. I just happened to know that meant ‘very well connected’ - more than that, it usually meant not politically wise to mess with.

  “Yeah? Don’t know what that is. Thanks, Doll. See ya soon.”

  “Bye, Woody.”

  I wrote down the fancy Far Rockaway address. Well, Kate said she was doing well in the theatrical business... Didn’t she?

  I went through the motions with the twenty-five pound dumbbell before heading on over to Dempsey’s to grab a steak and pipe the crowd. I called Mama from my hotel room that evening and arranged to take her out to eat on Sunday.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  (Saturday, June 18, 1960.)

  Saturday morning Gina came through the office door saying she was on her way to see her mother, in case I had forgotten. She was quiet, but went over the case files with me. She didn’t want to talk about much else.

  “How did you file these cases before I came to work for you?”

  “Don’tcha remember? Active stacked in the left desk drawer, pending in the lower right. Too hard, I threw out the window.”

  That made her giggle. Her blue eyes twinkled. It was nice to see her. I finally talked her into walking up the block to grab a pastrami and rye at the Bridge Deli. Then, I got her to accept a ride to her mother’s house in Bath Beach.

  In her mother’s driveway I thanked her again and told her to stop by anytime. I gave her a double C-note. She hesitated but took the money. She opened her pretty lips to speak then thought better of it. She just got out of the car and walked toward the house. What a knockout in that sundress.

  On the way back to the City, I stopped by Scotty’s Pastime on Flatbush Ave. It was getting warm outside and the little bar had dim lights and air conditioning. I sat the glass of Jack on the bar and lit a Lucky. I stared between the blinds at the lone 1960 Hawk in Arma Studebaker’s showroom across the avenue. Times were changing; that year, the rest of the floor was full of what they called ‘Larks’. Looked like something a grandpa might drive down to the Piggly-Wiggly.

  “Buyin another car, Woody?” The little burr-headed man behind the bar was sticking Schlitz bottles in the cooler.

  “Naw, Paddy. Mine’s bout new. I was just wondering what happened to automobile styling.”

  “You right bout dat, Woody.” Paddy had never owned a car in his life.

  Paddy Milligan was Sally Spit’s counterpart At Scotty’s Pastime. He did the odd jobs and heavy lifting. Big difference being that Sally never got beat senseless. Paddy grew up in the very mean streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant and looked to boxing as a ticket out. He fought lightweight and welterweight.

  Paddy picked up the skills, but he was born with a glass jaw - bad whiskers, as they called it. He fought his heart out, but stayed in the game too long. He lost a lot of his faculties to eight-ounce gloves and when the game was done with him, he crawled inside a bottle.

  “So, Woody, not fer nuttin, but a guy goes in a cafe, orders a cup a’ coffee and tells the Polack waiter to hold da cream. Long time later, da Polack comes back and sez, we got no cream. Okay to hold da milk?” Paddy’s eyes got as big as they could get.

  “That’s a good one, Paddy.” I didn’t have a clue if he got the humor, or had just seen someone else laugh hearing that story.

  “You right bout dat, Woody.”

  He knew Sally Spit well. Paddy had lost a couple of matches and teeth to him in the glory days. But, when I needed to get the wire on some Irish or Jewish tough in the area, Paddy knew the score. The local thugs were too self-important to pay attention to the punch drunk little bum pushing the mop behind the bar. There were thousands of eyes and ears all over the five boroughs - all as invisible as the air.

  (Sunday, June 19, 1960.)

  I got an early start Sunday morning and, with the light traffic, I got to Mama’s house in time to take her out for a late breakfast. When we got back to her place, I told her I might lie on the couch and nap for twenty minutes, that we’d go get some supper later on. I told her to be thinking about which restaurant. When I woke up, the shadows were getting long out the window. As I sat up and lowered my head into my hands, Mama said, “Woody, I just didn’t have the heart to wake you, even though you must have been having some frightful dreams.”

  It was a vice tightening on my brain, inescapable. Every memory and, worse, dream of that shit hole of horror was a nail through my skull - moving along those long winding mountain roads without end, slogging in sucking-calf-deep mud after the morning rains, then being choked when the intense afternoon heat dried the mud and turned it to dust.

  ***

  The landscape was colorless. Trees, sky, each other, everything was the same shade of gray, until we took incoming fire. Then red was the one color that defied the palette of Korea, bright living red, until it percolated into the gray earth, died and turned black. The air stunk unbelievably the first week in-country. After that, the stench of the human waste the Koreans used as crop fertilizer took its rightful place at the bottom of the list of things we needed to worry about.

  I was in Korea for part of the second and the third, and last, year of that undeclared war. The last year was a time of intense peace negotiations and no appreciable real estate was changing hands. In truth, more and more, the Republic of Korea Army soldiers and Marines were proving themselves and shaping up to hold their own against the ChiComs. The ROK’s were getting better trained and better supplied and they were merciless with the enemy and not much better dealing with each other. They were tough.

  It was all the same to us on the ground. We had no real idea of the extent of Russia’s or China’s involvement, nor how peace talks could drag on forever while we continued to kill and be killed. The artillery, mortars, sniping and human-wave attacks continued, and we remained static more than not.

  That business may have been all the more terrifying because we never had the release of a major operation to prove, for even a fleeting moment, that we were in charge, or more than a breathing bulls-eye.

  In November of 1952, we felt something approaching hope when the word was passed that our newly elected President Eisenhower had fulfilled a campaign promise and traveled to Korea to investigate ending the conflict. That started the scuttlebutt flying - many felt that Ike was going to talk nuclear with the gooks. They said we’d be packing our mount-out boxes for the trip home the following week. That didn’t happen.

  What did happen was the Korean winter
hit with a ferocity and completeness that I’ve never come close to being able to explain to someone who wasn’t there. No other experience prepares someone to understand the despair brought on by extended exposure to temperatures hovering at minus twenty-five degrees and frequently dropping to minus forty. Away from the rear echelon, we generally went hungry because food and canteens of water froze solid.

  We were issued World War II era clothing and boots. None of it was designed to work in that climate, and frostbite was common. Amputation was a reasonable expectation if you didn’t find a way to get dry socks on your feet.

  In that environment, we didn’t fight for country, mom or apple pie. We fought because the survival of the Marine to our left and right depended on us. That refusal to let down a fellow Marine kept many men going when absolutely nothing else was worth the abject personal misery. The Korean winter was the real killer attacking us. First, you fought the winter, and then you fought the enemy. Death would have been a release from physical and psychological torture, but it was taboo to talk about that openly. Still, a few did act on it. It wasn’t a difficult thing to do, just hide and go to sleep.

  ***

  I woke up on Mama’s couch with a splitting headache. “Sorry, Mama, Guess I got a touch of indigestion at breakfast. Plus, I’m getting a headache. Where do you keep the aspirin?”

  I was thinking of the emergency pint in my glove compartment.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  (Monday, June 20, 1960. Lawrence, Queens, New York.)

  It took most of two hours in Monday morning traffic to drive out there. Far Rockaway was clear on the other side of the airport. Number 6 Beechwood was a rambling two story with triple dormer windows and a slate tile roof. The big house and manicured yard sat on a private five-acre lake. A cream colored Eldorado Biarritz was on display in front of a three-car garage on a stone paver circular driveway.