Black Hats (8 page)

“When did
you
ever wear a Stetson?” Wyatt asked his friend, who was holding the office door open for him.

“Never. I always had more dash than you, Wyatt—but you have to give people what they expect. Reality isn’t the point—it’s the perception of reality.” He shrugged. “That’s show business.”

They took a taxi and the noise of traffic—the blat of automobile horns, the clang of trolley cars, the wheeze of double-decker buses, the harness rattle and wheel-clank of horse-drawn wagons—made conversation too much trouble. Wyatt watched the bustling burg go by and understood, suddenly, Bat’s Stetson talk—hard to stand out in a city of six million.

Though Wyatt had wound up on the West Coast and Bat here on the East, their paths had been much the same. Both had ridden every trail the frontier had to offer, bucking the odds in high-stakes games, going to the aid of friends and family, troubleshooting with and without a badge in cow towns and boomtowns and assorted hellholes of every stripe.

Bat’s luck, like Wyatt’s, had run hot and cold and back again, again and again…but by the time adventuring and drifting had lost its appeal, each man had enough of a stake built up to settle in one spot.

Times Square, just after six o’clock, was in all its electric glory, the sun having set to turn the illumination job over to Edison. Already Manhattan was taking a blazing bath—lights of blue, green, yellow, red, even white, letters whirling and tumbling and encouraging this soda pop and that candy bar, painting flashy, flashing tributes to Wrigley’s Chewing Gum and White Rock Water and assorted cigarettes and tires and toothbrushes and automobiles and even a laxative or two, electric placards extending from buildings, sometimes at angles, in a modern geometry at once exciting and garish.

Bat saw Wyatt taking it all in and the New Yorker’s smile had smug pride in it. “Twenty-thousand electric signs in this space,” Bat noted. “Twenty-five million candle power….” Then Bat’s expression turned a shade melancholy, as he added, “Still, it’s not as bright as it used to be.”

Between the blinking billboards were the marquees of movie palaces and theaters, sometimes sharing the same names, as film stars like Douglas Fairbanks and Fatty Arbuckle were currently trodding the Broadway boards.

“Seems bright enough to me,” Wyatt said.

“In any case, you should be comfortable here.”

“Yeah?”

“Broadway started as a cowpath.”

They were let out on the east side of the Square between Forty-third and Forty-fourth Streets in front of a long low-slung yellow structure whose electrical sign, oddly, bore no name, just some hybrid creature, half lion, half eagle, flapping its lighted-up wings over the pavement.

“What the hell’s this?” Wyatt asked, glancing up.

“That’s a griffin. Mythological beast—you know, like the Western gunfighter. The restaurant is Rector’s, which I imagine even an uncouth dweller from the hinterlands like yourself has heard of.”

A grandly uniformed doorman holding back a nonexistent crowd undid the velvet rope for them and allowed them to pass.

As Bat led him into a revolving door, Wyatt said, “Thought for a minute there you joined a lodge.”

But the interior was no Moose or Elks hall, rather a spacious expanse made to seem more so by floor-to-ceiling mirrored walls; the walls were gold and green brocade, the Louis XIV

decor elegant under the sparkle of endless crystal chandeliers.

Wyatt had of course heard of the famous restaurant, and was surprised to see it barely half-filled, supper hour, Friday night. Further, the crowd did not seem terribly distinguished, running largely to older businessmen with young well-rouged women who could have carried their skimpy clothes in their handbags, except for the bulk of an occasional silver fox or mink jacket.

At their table with its linen cloth and fine china and sparkling silverware (all bearing that

“griffin” symbol), Bat was in the midst of polishing off a dozen oysters, indulging in a side serving of nostalgia.

“Not long ago,” Bat was saying, between oyster slurps, “you’d see Lillian Russell gliding down that aisle with a long train behind her, layers of whispering silk. Gypsy band would be playing. Unforgettable.”

“Hmm,” Wyatt said, in the process of putting away half a dozen soft-shell crabs.

“Right over there, you could see Diamond Jim Brady, an oversize napkin stuffed in his collar, polishing off six or seven lobsters. Your pal Mizner, from Nome, used to say Brady liked his oysters sprinkled with clams and his steaks smothered in veal cutlets.”

“Umm,” Wyatt said, working on another crab.

“I just squint and I can see them all…. Ziegfeld and Anna Held. Charles Frohman. Victor Herbert. Another Alaska pard of yours, Rex Beach, he liked to hang out here, and O. Henry, the short story writer. What a grand place.”

“What happened?”

Bat shook his head. “What happened to every decent lobster palace in this town? Prohibition!

The men go off to war and the women stay home and push these damned abolitionist laws through, and restaurants like Rector’s and Delmonico’s can’t cook with
wine
anymore! And a man can’t have a decent meal with a bucket of champagne at his elbow!”

As if to underscore this travesty, Bat took a swallow of iced water.

Then he began to rant again: “And now Delmonico’s is
closing
! And this joint may change its name to some French nonsense. Can you imagine?”

“How are the steaks?”

The steaks were excellent, huge and bloody, the way both men liked them; but Bat wasn’t through.

“All the great old bars, the fine restaurants, the wonderful cabarets, shutting their doors while these goddamned speakeasies and blind pigs take over.”

“Speakeasies,” Wyatt said thoughtfully. “Doc’s son—Johnny. That’s what
he’s
gone into?”

They were on to coffee now.

Bat nodded, stirring in sugar. “He used to have an honest trade, like his father.”

“Denistry, you mean.”

“Hell, no! Gambling!” Bat leaned forward conspiratorially, though the tables fore and aft were empty. “He’s damned good at it, Wyatt. He can read the cards and he can read the people.”

“Does sound like Doc’s son.”

“While back, Johnny got in a high stakes game with a feller at the St. Francis Hotel. Running with a real roller crowd, Wyatt—Rothstein himself was in that game.”

“Arnold Rothstein?”

Bat nodded.

Rothstein, the so-called brain of the New York underworld, was the famed fixer who rigged last year’s World Series. Which struck Wyatt as both un-American and a hell of a feat.

“Anyway,” Bat continued, “it was a few weeks before this goddamned Volstead Act went into effect. A guy who owned six saloons around town bet all six and his whole stockpile of liquor on aces full over jacks.”

“Who could blame him?”

“Guy himself could.” Bat raised an eyebrow. “Johnny had four deuces.”

Wyatt sipped; his was black. “Saloon guy must’ve been in a reckless frame of mind, with the Prohibition coming.”

“Drunk, reckless and despondent about his whole general state of affairs. That, and four deuces, was all it took.”

“What happened?”

“Paid up. Killed himself, week later.”

Wyatt shook his head impatiently. “Not the saloon guy—what did Johnny do with six saloons on the eve of Prohibition?”

“Oh. He held on to the liquor supply and sold the saloons to Rothstein, for a pile…and used the pile to buy an old brownstone on West Forty-fifth.”

“And that’s the speak?”

“That’s the speak. Holliday’s. I’ll take you there.”

“Now?”

“Hell no!” Bat threw his napkin down and grabbed the check. “We have the fights, first.”

Madison Square Garden was a palace of yellow brick and white terra cotta with a nude statue of Diana the Huntress on top of its central tower—and to Wyatt, one unlikely venue for a boxing match.

The block-long affair, bounded by Madison and Fourth Avenues and Twenty-sixth and Twenty-seventh Streets, housed (among other things) a theater, restaurant, concert hall, and a roof garden where ten or fifteen years ago its esteemed architect, Stanford White, was shot by his former mistress’s husband, Harry Thaw, a loony Pittsburgh millionaire. You didn’t have to be a New York native to know about pretty showgirl Evelyn Nesbit and the ruckus she’d caused—just needed to have read the
Police Gazette
.

Wyatt had.

Even with the Garden’s history of carnage, the boxing match seemed at odds with the structure’s fussy pink rococo interior. But once inside the vast arena itself (first erected, Bat said, for horse shows), clouds of cigarette and cigar smoke compensated, as did loud enthusiastic fight fans, peddlers of roasted peanuts and hot dogs, and ringside seats. Tiers of balconies on all four sides were draped red-white-and-blue, while high over the ring, under skylights, black bell-shaped speakers emitted occasional, largely unintelligible announcements.

Wyatt sat between Bat and a thin, thin-lipped, grave-featured chain-smoker whose brown hair was shellacked back and who wore wirerim glasses behind which yet another pair of pale blue eyes lurked.

“Wyatt, this is my friend Al Runyon,” Bat said, over the arena din. “Al, this is Wyatt Earp who I’ve told you about.”

Cigarette clenched tight in the slash of his mouth, Runyon nodded and Wyatt shook hands with him, a quick, solid shake.

Bat leaned in and whispered: “Kid’s a big booster of yours. A real fan. He writes under his middle name—‘Damon.’ Maybe you’ve seen his work.”

Wyatt had indeed read Runyon’s sports columns. The dude was well known nationally as a real expert on baseball, boxing and the ponies. And Runyon
was
a dude: the columnist’s suit, a natty light brown plaid, was without a wrinkle and his floral tie bore a diamond stickpin. He was poised to take notes with a hand that bore a huge pinky ring.

Wyatt said to the “kid” (who was around forty), “Read your stuff. It’s good.”

Runyon, deadpan, flicked Wyatt a look, and the cigarette bob-bled as he said, “Thanks,” then returned his attention to the ring, where the fighters were already in their respective corners and an announcer with a megaphone was wandering between them.

That was the extent of the conversation between Wyatt and his “big fan.”

The fight was a good one, two heavyweights, Billy Miske—who had given champ Jack Dempsey a run at it in two hard battles—and another real contender, Bill Brennan.

Bat, however, wasn’t impressed with either man, and between rounds said to Wyatt, “Your prime, you could’ve taken out either one of these bums.”

Then Bat leaned across Wyatt to say to Runyon, “Al, you’re sitting next to the best natural boxer I ever saw. Known him since the early ’70s, and nobody could scrap with his fists like this feller.”

Wyatt said slowly, “Bartholomew….”

Bat ignored that, still leaning. “Few men in the West could whip Wyatt in a rough-and-tumble, forty years ago, and I think he could give these youngsters a hard tussle even today.”

Runyon’s eyes tightened behind the wireframes, he nodded a little, and he returned his attention to the bout as the bell clanged.

“These guys are genuine tango experts,” Bat said bitterly.

But Wyatt thought it was a pretty good scrap, a view highlighted by them sitting close enough to feel the flying flecks of sweat and blood.

Between the next rounds, Wyatt asked Bat, “What do you know about this kid Caponi who’s giving Doc’s boy a bad time?”

Bat nodded toward Runyon. “Ask Al—he’s an expert on these hoodlum types.”

Without looking at them, Runyon said, “It’s Capone, not Caponi. One of Yale’s crew. He’s a comer.”

Wyatt asked, “Tough?”

Runyon, lighting up his latest cigarette, nodded.

Brennan knocked Miske down in the seventh round, and while the ref stood over the fallen fighter counting him loudly out, Bat admitted, “That gets him closer to a match with the Mauler, who will murder him.”

This was a reference to Dempsey’s nickname, the Manassa Mauler. Wyatt was pretty sure Runyon had coined that moniker, but didn’t ask for confirmation.

Bat hadn’t taken a single note during the fight, maybe because he’d already written his next column; but Runyon had filled half a notebook, writing without looking at the pages, just the match.

The solemn dapper plaid-clad reporter rose with Wyatt and Bat, asking the latter, “Doyle’s?”

Bat said, “Not tonight.”

Runyon nodded, then nodded to Wyatt, and cut like a blade through the packed aisle, in a hell of a hurry. Maybe he was going off to file his story.

As the two old friends took their time moving up the aisle in the smoky, echo-ringing arena, Bat said, “Al got a real charge out of meeting you.”

“Yeah. Pissed himself, he was so excited.”

Bat laughed, once. “No, Wyatt, really. He’s just a listener, is all. But he’s from out West himself; his daddy was with Custer.”

“If so, daddy got scalped.”

Bat shrugged. “That’s a point I never pursued…. But Runyon’s a good man, thinks of himself as a Westerner at heart, idolizes fellers like me and you.”

Wyatt gave Bat a sideways look.

“On my oath! I know him from way back in Colorado days—he was on papers in Trinidad and Denver, both. And now he’s a big shot, just signed a contract with Hearst.”

“Well. Liked to talk my ear off.”

Bat grinned. “Yeah, makes you look long-winded. Kind of nice seeing you put in that position. Anyway, if we need any help, he has connections, including underworld.”

“What is ‘Doyle’s’?”

Bat’s grin faded. He shrugged. “Just a joint.”

“What kind of joint?”

“…Billiards.”

So that was it. Wyatt had never set foot in a pool hall since the night Morgan was shot in the back and sent sprawling onto the green felt.

“Don’t let me stop you,” Wyatt said.

“Naw. Not in the mood. Let’s get a bite.”

Wyatt blinked. “After Rector’s?”

“That was forever ago! Anyway, watching those bums do the Castle Walk famished me!

Come on!”

The next stop was on Sixth Avenue, opposite the Hippo-drome—Jack Dunstan’s, where the decor was as plain as Rector’s had been opulent, and the aproned waiters looked more like fighters than either heavyweight had.