Black Hats (15 page)

On the third-floor landing, Bat Masterson—more fully dressed, in his shirt and trousers and even socks and shoes (but minus his tie or suitcoat) faced them with his much smaller revolver in hand. Bat had taken Johnny up on his offer of the other guest room, when they all realized how long the night had run. Obviously Bat had flopped onto bed mostly dressed.

“I was just coming up after you two,” Bat said. “That’s a goddamn tommy gun!”

But as Bat was speaking, the sound finally ceased, at least for the moment.

Wyatt headed on down, with Bat trailing and Johnny close on his heels. At the main floor, Wyatt wheeled and pointed toward the office.

“Get your gun,” Wyatt whispered to Johnny.

Who followed orders and retrieved his nickel-plated pearl-handled revolver from the desk drawer, then met Wyatt and Bat at the place where the elevator, kitchen door and open landing to the basement nightclub converged.

Wyatt’s gun barrel, which on closer look was a mere ten or eleven inches, still pointed up; and the old boy’s left hand was also up, but like a uniformed copper stopping traffic.

They could hear movement down there—not gunfire, but heavy feet moving through clutter.

And laughter. Harsh echoing laughter.

Wyatt went over and, quietly as possible, opened the cage door of the self-service elevator.

Bat whispered, “We can’t—”

Wyatt shook his head.

He leaned in, adjusted the lever, and sent it back down, withdrawing in good time; while the vacant car made its noisy, mechanical way below, Wyatt slowly headed down the stairs, with Bat a step behind and Johnny, his heart pounding, one step behind Bat.

The noise of heavy footsteps in the club continued and male voices, words tumbling on top of each other, “What the hell,” “Son of a bitch” and so on.

Johnny understood now: Wyatt had sent the empty elevator down to distract and mislead the intruders….

The staircase took a jog and then was open to the lower floor, a banister providing scant cover, and Johnny (with the two older men out front) didn’t get the view as soon as Wyatt did.

But he heard Wyatt yell, “Drop it, or die!”

Then the machine-gun fire came their way, and Wyatt was motioning and yelling, “Down,”

and the three men were hugging the steps as the bullets flew over them and through the wooden railing, chewing it up into scattered kindling, sending chunks and shards and splinters of wood flying, and stitching bullet holes overhead into the wall, plaster dust spraying.

More machine-gun fire followed, but not directed at them, and when the deadly chatter paused, Johnny saw Wyatt extending his arm between broken railing posts, an arm that seemed longer than humanly possible because of the endless barrel of the revolver in his fist.

Two shots from the .45 revolver reverberated through the nightclub, two periods on the end of the tommy gun’s long-winded sentence.

Next Johnny knew, Wyatt was on his bare feet and taking the stairs two at a time and rushing across what Holliday could begin to see was the ruins of his club. Bat was right after Wyatt, though circling to make sure no one was tucked away behind them for an ambush as Wyatt headed toward the entrance of the club, where the door haphazardly hung, sprung open and in ruins from the machine-gun fire that had rudely opened it.

Johnny followed Bat and Wyatt through the succession of speakeasy doors that had been similarly opened by the key of the Thompson submachine gun. Even the steel barrier onto the street hadn’t stood up to it, the lock, anyway; and by the time they had made their cautious way up the stairs to the sidewalk—not caring to be sitting ducks—early morning sunshine was all they found.

The street was dead, in part because so many of these brownstones were speaks themselves and their proprietors were also nighthawks unlikely to be up at this hour, unless they hadn’t got to bed yet. But also the gunfire had chased away even the most curious of pedestrians.

Too late for milk wagons, too soon for cops. When bullets flew in this part of town, the coppers waited till the lead had done them the courtesy of falling to the ground and cooling off into evidence.

Bat was saying to Wyatt, “Some getaway driver waiting out front?”

Long-barrel revolver in hand, its snout up, Wyatt nodded. “We’d spot ’em on the sidewalk, otherwise…unless they ducked into one of these buildings.”

“Possible. Not likely.” Bat’s light blue eyes narrowed under the dark slashes of brow; his small revolver he too held nose up. “Surely they didn’t come in this way.”

Wyatt shook his head. “I think you’ll see they came in the kitchen and took the stairs down.”

Johnny was beside them now, a guy in black pajamas next to one partly dressed man and one almost dressed. “Why do you say that?”

Wyatt shrugged. “When we came down the stairs, you could see the front door hadn’t been breeched. They wouldn’t have had to shoot their way out, if they’d come in the front of the club, somehow—with stolen keys, say, or just breaking in.”

“Not likely,” Bat said, “they’d break in through all those doors. Too many locks to pick.”

“And there might have been a watchman,” Wyatt said.

Johnny rolled his eyes. “I guess I should’ve hired one.”

“You’ll hire more than one now,” Wyatt said. “Let’s go in and see what the damage has to say.”

The damage had plenty to say.

The tommy gun had fanned around to do as much random mischief as possible—most of the chairs and tables were chopped to pieces, tablecloths shredded, the bandstand and its seats puckered with .45-caliber kisses, stage lights shattered. The plaster and the decorative touches were well-pierced, though about half of the framed Western scenes were untouched and a few of the nicknacks had survived unnicked.

Worst was the bar—the pinewood cracked and split and splintered, the picture of the nude senorita dotted with bullet holes in a diagonal stuttering slash, and every bottle on the shelves broken, shattered, bleeding liquor. The smell of it was strong, almost medicinal. The only survivors were some beer bottles in a refrigeration unit tucked away under the bar.

Clearly the bar had received the only targeted attention—the rest was random, as if some street kid had come in to vandalize the place.

“Watch your feet,” Wyatt advised at Johnny’s side, putting a hand on his host’s silk shoulder.

“Glass and wood. Maybe we better tiptoe over and—”

“
Oh my
!”

The voice was Dixie’s. She was on the steps in a red and yellow kimono and red slippers, eyes wide, mouth an “O,” and cuter than a box of puppies. “What have they done to us, Johnny? What have they done to
you
?”

“Just the competition, Dix,” he said gently, patting the air. “Trying to cause a little trouble.”

Wyatt said, “Young lady?”

“Yes, sir?”

“I’m in the bigger guest room. Would you find my shoes and some stockings, please, and bring them down? You can leave the garters.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And do the same for Johnny, here…. Bat, you’re properly shod?”

“Yes,” the newsman said with a nod; his sky-blue eyes were slowly sweeping the ravaged landscape.

Wyatt smiled up at the chorus girl. “Would you do that, honey? Be much obliged.”

She smiled back at him. “You bet.”

“Go on, Dix,” Johnny said pleasantly. “Do what Mr. Earp says.”

“You bet!”

And she was gone.

Dixie was a pretty girl and, in her way, fearless. How many kids off the chorus line would have run downstairs into the sound of gunfire to see what was wrong? And it wasn’t that she was stupid—she was a smart girl, a secretarial-school graduate who’d done that to please her mother and then had had the gumption to leave Des Moines and try her luck in New York.

“Johnny?” Wyatt’s voice.

“Uh…yes? What?”

“Do we need to call any certain cop?”

Johnny sighed. Nodded. “Yeah. Harrigan. Fifth Avenue station. He’s a lieutenant.”

Bat chimed in. “I know him. Should I make the call?”

“You’re the one with shoes, Bartholomew,” Wyatt said.

“Righto,” Bat said, and made his way through the breakage to the stairs and headed up.

Wyatt, watching where he put his bare feet, found a table that had been knocked over but had not been shot up. He righted it, collected four survivor chairs and, with Johnny’s help, assembled them in a clear, clutter-free area off to the far wall, which had received no gunfire whatsoever.

Wyatt gestured for Johnny to sit and he did; then so did Wyatt.

“Did you see them?” Johnny asked the older man.

“Same three who were here earlier,” Wyatt said, checking the bare soles of his feet, having run on them through the wreckage, finding them fine.

“You saw Capone. You definitely saw Capone.”

“He was the one chopping wood with that tommy gun. Those shots I fired, I threw at
him
…but he was halfway out the door. I looked for blood trail and didn’t see any. I doubt I hit the fat fucking son of a bitch.”

“Is this a…declaration of war?”

“It’s not a love letter.” Wyatt gave up half a humorless smirk. “Anyway, Capone may think the war’s over…. Is it? Has he put you out of business?”

Johnny waved dismissively. “Not hardly. I got tens of thousands in the bank. I told you, Wyatt, this place is a gold mine.”

“I was here last night. Saw you minting the stuff.”

Johnny leaned in toward the older man. “And I went out of my way, not to plow much into the place knowing we’d get raided now and then. You can see the bar’s just cheap pine. The tables, chairs, tablecloths, nice enough but standard restaurant fare. Nothing fancy.”

Nodding, looking around, Wyatt said, “Holes in the wall, some plaster, lick of paint, good as new.”

“He put me out of business, all right—for a
week
, at most. I’ll get on the phone with my suppliers and carpenters and painters and…only, Wyatt—Capone and his boss, Yale? They
have
to know this is just an inconvenience. They
must
know. Then…what was the point?”

“To scare your ass out. They didn’t bust up the joint with baseball bats or axes. They used firepower. The bullets that chewed up this nightclub could do a lot more with people in it.”

Johnny blinked. “Would they do that?”

“They want you thinking they would. They want you thinking about how you’d like to be standing in front of a machine gun and receiving what it delivers, you and maybe your clientele.”

Johnny shook his head as he surveyed the wreckage. “Hard to imagine, isn’t it?”

Wyatt shrugged. “No. Gatling had a gun of such kind. I saw Indians turned to stewing meat with its ilk. I am never surprised by what one man will do to another out of greed.”

“Hell, I’m greedy. Aren’t you?”

Wyatt nodded. Again his eyes traveled around the shatterment. “Not this greedy.”

“Then…should I quit? Should I sell these bastards my liquor supply?”

“Are you considering that?”

“No, but I—”

“Then don’t insult your father’s memory with such stupid talk.”

From the stairway Bat called out: “Lieutenant Harrigan is heading our way. And our guests came in through the kitchen, all right! Forced the back door. Searched the joint, too!”

“The whole place?” Wyatt called back.

But Bat didn’t answer till he’d joined them at the little pristine table. “Well, they poked around; but the kitchen, pantry in particular, got the real once-over.”

Wyatt’s eyes narrowed.

Bat studied his friend for several long moments. “What are you thinking, Wyatt?”

“I’m thinking this isn’t about shutting Johnny down.”

“Well, it’s a goddamned good imitation!”

“Bartholomew, you told me yourself, these Brooklyn boys are not in the speakeasy business.”

“No, they’re in the business of selling their wares to speakeasies. And Johnny Boy rubs ’em wrong, because he doesn’t
need
their damned wares.”

“Exactly. But they need his.”

Bat squinted. “Pardon?”

Johnny said, “I don’t follow you, either, Wyatt.”

“Think like a detective, Bartholomew—you used to be one. Think like a pink.”

Johnny guessed that meant Pinkerton.

“Well…” Bat began, and started in mulling out loud. “They were looking for something—I mean, they didn’t come in and start ripping the joint apart until they’d had a damned good look around for…for Johnny’s liquor supply?”

“Give the man a Kewpie doll,” Wyatt said, and sat back with arms folded. “And they made sure they shot up every bottle of hooch in the joint.”

“I’d expect them to do that,” Johnny said. “Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, but they’re not federals. And in fact, they might well have brought carpet bags to steal away every bottle to sell themselves. That is, after all, their business.”

Bat was frowning. “Why
didn’t
they steal that booze?”

“Maybe that would have tipped their hand,” Wyatt said.

Johnny still wasn’t getting it. “They shot up a speakeasy. And all the liquor got killed. Isn’t that—”

But the conversation was interrupted by a pair of blue-uniformed beat cops finally making the scene. Wyatt directed Johnny to show them around, and the flat-capped coppers took in the damage but asked very few questions, because Johnny had mentioned his friend Lieutenant Harrigan was on the way over from the Fifth Avenue station house.

About the same time Dixie came down with a black silk robe for Johnny as well as shoes and socks for both Johnny and Wyatt. Time was taken to put on these things, and then Dixie was sent away, and she started off without protest, possibly because she was no fan of cops, since her father, who used to beat her, was one back in Des Moines.

That police background, however, may have prepared Dixie for a sub-rosa task Wyatt gave her, namely to return his long-barreled gun to his bag. Wyatt had been holding it surreptitiously beneath the table, since the blue boys arrived, and now he slipped it to Dixie.

“My, that’s a big one,” she breathlessly told Wyatt, who made no comment in response, and she scampered off, holding it to her side along her leg, away from the cops who were poking around on the other side of the club.