When the Sacred Ginmill Closes

Chapter 20

When I got back to my hotel there was a message from Anita and another from Skip. I called Syosset first, talked with Anita and the boys. I talked with her about money, saying I'd collected a fee and would be sending some soon. I talked with my sons about baseball, and about the camp they'd be goingto soon.

I called Skip at Miss Kitty's. Someone else answered the phone and I held while they summoned him.

"I want to get together with you," he said. "I'm working tonight. You want to come by afterward?"

"All right."

"What time is it now?Ten to nine? I've been on less than two hours? Feels like five. Matt, what I'll do, I'll close up around two. Come by then and we'll have a few."

I watched the Mets. They were out of town.Chicago, I think. I kept my eyes on the screen but I couldn't keep my mind on the game.

There was a beer left over from the night before. I sipped at it during the game, but I couldn't work up much enthusiasm for it, either. After the game ended I watched about half of the newscast, then turned the set off and stretched out on the bed.

I had a paperback edition of The Lives of the Saints, and at one point I looked up Saint Veronica. I read that there was no great certainty that she had existed, but that she was supposed to have been aJerusalem woman who wiped Christ's sweating face with a cloth while he was suffering on his way toCalvary, and that an image of his face remained on the cloth.

I pictured the act that had brought her twenty centuries of fame, and I had to laugh. The woman I was seeing, reaching out to soothe His brow, had the face and hairstyle ofVeronicaLake.

MISS Kitty's was closed when I got there, and for a moment I thought that Skip had said the hell with it and gone home. Then I saw that the iron gates, though drawn, were not secured by a padlock, and that a low-wattage bulb glowed behind the bar. I slid the accordion gates open a foot or so and knocked, and he came and opened up for me, then rearranged the gates and turned the key in the door.

He looked tired. He clapped me on the shoulder, told me it was good to see me,led me to the end of the bar farthest from the door. Without asking he poured me a long drink of Wild Turkey,then topped up his own glass with scotch.

"First of the day," I said.

"Yeah?I'm impressed. Of course the day's only two hours and ten minutes old."

I shook my head. "First since I woke up. I had some beer, but not too much of that, either." I drank off some of my bourbon. It had a good bite to it.

"Yeah, well, I'm the same way," he said. "I have days when I don't drink. I even have days when I don't have so much as a beer. You know what it is? For you and me, drinking's something we choose to do. It's a choice."

"There's mornings when I don't think it was the most brilliant choice I could have made."

"Jesus, tell me about it. But even so it's a choice for us. That's the difference between you and me and a guy like Billie Keegan."

"You think so?"

"Don't you? Matt, the man is always drinking. I mean, take last night. All the rest of us, okay, we're pretty heavy drinkers, but we took it easy last night, right?Because it's sometimes appropriate and sometimes not. Am I right?"

"I guess."

"Afterward, another story.Afterward a man wants to unwind, loosen up. But Keegan wasshitfaced before we got there, for God's sake."

"Then he turned out to be the hero."

"Yeah, go figure that one. Uh, the plate number, did you-"

"Stolen."

"Shit. Well, we figured that."

"Sure."

He drank some of his drink. "Keegan," he said, "has to drink. For myself, I could stop anytime. I don't, because I happen to like what the stuff does for me. But I could stop anytime, and I figure you're the same."

"Oh, I would think so."

"Of course you are. Now Keegan, I don't know. I don't like to call the man an alcoholic-"

"That's a hell of a thing to call a man."

"I agree with you. I'm not saying that's what he is, and God knows I like the man, but I think he's got a problem." He straightened up."The hell with it. He could be a fucking Bowerybum, I still wish the car hadn't been stolen. C'mon back, we'll spread out and relax a little."

In the office, with the two whiskey bottles on the desk between us, he leaned back in his chair and put his feet up. "You checked the license number," he said. "So I guess you're already working on it."

I nodded. "I went out toBrooklyn, too."

"Where?Not where we were last night?"

"The church."

"What did you think you stood to learn there? You figure one of them left his wallet on the floor?"

"You never know what you'll find, Skip. You have to look around."

"I suppose. I wouldn't know where to start."

"You start anyplace. And do anything you think of."

"You learn anything?"

"A few things."

"Like what? Never mind, I don't want to be sitting on your shoulder while you do all this. You find out anything useful?"

"Maybe.You don't always know until later on what's useful and what isn't. You can look at it that everything you learn is useful. For instance, just knowing that the car was stolen tells me something, even if it doesn't tell me who was driving it."

"At least you can rule out the owner. Now you know one person out of eight million couldn't have done it. Who was the owner? Some old lady, only drives it to bingo?"

"I don't know, but it was lifted fromOcean Parkway, not far from the clam bar they sent us to first."

"Means they live out inBrooklyn?"

"Or they drove their own car out there, parked it and stole the one we saw. Or they went out on the subway or took a cab. Or-"

"So we don't know a whole lot."

"Not yet."

He leaned back with his hands behind his head. "Bobby got another call-back on that commercial," he said. "The basketball referee in the fight against prejudice? He's got to go in again tomorrow. It's now down to him and four other guys so they want to look at everybody again."

"That's good, I guess."

"How can you tell? You believe a profession like that, running your ass off and fighting the competition so you can be on the tube for twenty seconds. You know how many actors it takes to change alightbulb?Nine.One to climb up and replace it and eight others to stand around the ladder and say, 'That should be me up there!' "

"That's not bad."

"Well, credit where it's due, it was the actor told me the joke." He touched up his drink, sat back in his chair. "Matt, thatwas strange last night. That was fucking strange last night."

"In the church basement."

A nod."Those disguises of theirs.What they needed wasGroucho noses and moustaches and glasses, you know the kind the kids wear. Because it was like that, the wigs and beards, they didn't even come close to looking real, but they weren't funny. The gun kept it from being funny."

"Why'd they wear disguises?"

"So we wouldn't recognize them. Why does anybody wear a disguise?"

"Would you have recognized them?"

"I don't know,I didn't get to see them without the disguises. What are we here, Abbott and Costello?"

"I don't think they recognized us," I said. "When I went into the basement, one of them called out your name. It was dark, but they'd had time for their eyes to get used to it. You and I don't look alike."

"I'm the pretty one." He drew on his cigarette, blew out a great cloud of smoke. "What are you getting at?"

"I don't know. I'm just wondering why they would bother with disguises if we didn't know them in the first place."

"To make it harder to find them later, I suppose."

"I guess. But why should they think we'd bother to look for them? There's not a hell of a lot we can do to them. We made a deal, traded money for your books. What did you wind up doing with the books, incidentally?"

"Burned them, like I said.And what do you mean, there's nothing we could do to them? We could murder them in their beds."

"Sure."

"Find the right church, take a shit on the altar, and tell DominicTutto they did it. That has a certain charm, now that I think of it. Fix 'emup,get 'ema date with the Butcher. Maybe they wore disguises for the same reason they stole the car.Because they're pros."

"They look familiar to you, Skip?"

"You mean looking past the wigs and beards and shit? I don't know that I could see past it. I didn't recognize the voices."

"No."

"There was something familiar about them, but I don't know what it was. The way they moved, maybe. That's it."

"I think I know what you mean."

"An economy of motion.You could almost say they were light on their feet." He laughed. "Call 'emup,see if they want to go dancing."

My glass was empty. I poured a little bourbon into it, sat back, and sipped it slowly. Skip drowned his cigarette in a coffee cup and told me, inevitably, that he never wanted to see me do the same. I assured him he wasn't likely to. He lit another cigarette and we sat there in a comfortable silence.

After a while he said, "You want to explain something to me, forget about disguises. Tell me why they shot the lights out."

"To cover their exit.Give them a step or two on us."

"You think they thought we weregonna come stampeding after them? Chase armed men through backyards and driveways?"

"Maybe they wanted it dark, thought they stood a better chance that way." I frowned. "All he had to do wastake a step and flick the switch. You know the worst thing about the gunshots?"

"Yeah, they scared the shit out of me."

"They drew heat. One thing a pro knows is you don't do anything that brings the cops. Not if you can help it."

"Maybe they figured it was worth it. It was a warning: 'Don't try to get even.' "

"Maybe."

"A little touch of the dramatic."

"Maybe."

"And God knows it was dramatic enough. When the gun was aimed at me I thought I wasgonna get shot. I really did. Then when he shot up the ceiling instead I didn't know whether to shit or go blind. What's the matter?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake," I said.

"What?"

"He pointed the gun at you and then he fired two shots into the ceiling."

"Is that something we're supposed to have overlooked? What do you think we've been talking about?"

I held up a hand. "Think a minute," I said. "I'd been thinking of him shooting outthe lights, that's why I missed it."

"Missed what? Matt, I don't-"

"Where have you been lately that somebody pointed a gun at someone but didn't shoot him? And fired two bullets into the ceiling?"

"Jesus Christ."

"Well?"

"Jesus Christ on stilts.Frank and Jesse."

"What do you think?"

"I don't know what I think. It's such a crazy thought. They didn't sound Irish."

"How do we know they were Irish at Morrissey's?"

"We don't. I guess I assumed it. Those handkerchiefmasks, and taking the money for Northern Relief, and the whole sense that it was political. They had that same economy of movement, you know? The way they were so precise, they didn't take extra steps, they moved through that whole robbery like somebody choreographed it."

"Maybe they're dancers."

"Right," he said. "Ballet Desperadoes of '75. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around all of this. Two clowns in red hankies take off the Morrissey brothers for fifty grand, and then they jack off me andKasabian for- hey, it's the same amount. A subtle pattern begins to emerge."

"We don't know what theMorrisseys lost."

"No, and they didn't know what wasgonna be in the safe, but a pattern's a pattern. I'll take it. What about their ears? You got pictures of their ears from last night. Are those the ears of Frank and Jesse?" He started to laugh. "I can't believe the lines I'm speaking. 'Are those the ears of Frank and Jesse?' Sentence sounds like it was translated from another language. Are they?"

"Skip, I never noticed their ears."

"I thought you detectives are working all the time."

"I was trying to figure out how to get out of the line of fire.If I was thinking of anything. They were fair-skinned, Frank and Jesse. And they were fair last night."

"Fair and warmer.You see their eyes?"

"I didn't see the color."

"I was close enough to see the eyes of the one who made the trade with me. But if I saw them I wasn't paying attention. Not that it makes any difference. Did either of them speak a word at Morrissey's?"

"I don't think so."

He closed his eyes. "I'm trying to remember. I think the whole thing was pantomime.Two gunshots and then silence until they were out the door and down the stairs."

"That's how I remember it."

He stood up, paced around the room. "It's crazy," he said. "Hey, maybe we can stop looking for the viper in my bosom. We're not looking at an inside job. We're dealing with a daring gang of two who're specializing in taking off bars in Hell's Kitchen. You don't suppose that local Irish gang, whatdo they call them-"

"TheWesties.No, we'd have heard. Or Morrissey would have heard. That reward of his would have smoked it out in a day if any of them had anything to do with it." I picked up my glass and drank what was in it. God, it tasted good right now. We had them, I knew we did. I didn't know a single goddamned thing about them I hadn't known an hour ago but now I knew that I was going to bag them.

"That's why they wore disguises," I said. "Oh, they might have worn them anyway, but that's why they didn't want us to get a look at them. They made a mistake. We're going to get them."

"Jesus, look at you, Matt. Like an old firehouse dog when the alarm goes off. How the hell are you going to get them? You still don't know who they are."

"I know they're Frank and Jesse."

"So? Morrissey's been trying to find Frank and Jesse for a long time. Fact he tried to get you to go looking for them. What gives you the edge now?"

I poured myself just one more little slug of the Wild Turkey. I said, "When you plant a bug on a car and then you want to pick it up, you need two cars. One won't do it, but with two you can triangulate on the signal and home in on it."

"I'm missing something."

"It's not quite the same thing, butit's close. We've got them at Morrissey's, and we've got them in that church basement inBensonhurst. That's two points of reference. Now we can home in on them, we can triangulate on their signal. Two bullets in the ceiling- it's their fucking trademark. You'd think they wanted to get caught, giving the job a signature like that."

"Yeah, I feel sorry for 'em," he said. "I bet they're really shitting in their pants. So far they only made a hundred grand this month. What they don't realize is Matt "Bulldog" Scudder is on their trail, and the poor bastards won't get to spend a dime of it."