Black Hats (9 page)

Bat held court in a corner booth over seltzer lemonades and tongue sandwiches on rye; Wyatt had two Coca-Colas and a single sandwich, corned beef on rye. A parade of people came over to say hello, coming and going, and Bat introduced Wyatt to a score of Broadway characters, fight managers, press agents, actors, playwrights, and Wyatt shook enough hands to damned near work up the appetite for his sandwich. He recognized not one name and committed none to memory.

A sort of impromptu floor show was provided by the waiters, who formed a flying wedge to escort a rowdy gaggle of disorderly collegiate types out onto Sixth Avenue.

Finally the social hour passed, and Wyatt and Bat were left to themselves. This meant a round of steaming coffee, richer and hotter and frankly better than Rector’s, and Wyatt asked,

“What is this Capone after? And who is Yale?”

“Frankie Yale,” Bat said, lighting a Lucky, “Brooklyn gangster, looking to expand his territory. These are new days, Wyatt, nasty days—like Dodge or Tombstone, only it’s tommyguns not sixguns.”

Over the rim of his coffee cup, Wyatt asked, “What’s a tommygun?”

“Thompson submachine gun. Spits bullets.”

“How fast?”

“Fifteen-hundred rounds per minute, fast.”

Wyatt offered up a small, slow whistle.

“Trench gun, built for use in the Great War,” Bat continued cheerfully, “a little too late to get into the action…but right in time for Prohibition.”

Wyatt frowned. “What do these gangsters want from Doc’s kid? Move in on him and take over? Put him out of business? Or just get their piece?”

The protection racket had been around a long time. Wyatt and his brothers had been accused of it in Tombstone, though that was bunkum. A lawman deserved a taste.

“Yale isn’t in the speakeasy business,” Bat said, “though he does have a dance hall on Coney Island that isn’t afraid to serve up a beer.”

“What do they want from Johnny, then?”

“To sell
him
booze. Only Johnny doesn’t need their booze, having plenty of his own.”

Wyatt glanced at a round clock on an off-white plaster wall broken by a black electric cord.

“Gettin’ on to midnight. So we’ll save dropping by Johnny’s speak for tomorrow?”

Bat’s eyes narrowed and his grin widened. “You
are
an old man, Wyatt. Hell, we’re just getting going. The Forties don’t start roaring till midnight.”

Wyatt’s eyes tightened. “Don’t you mean ‘Twenties?’”

Bat laughed. “Wyatt, Wyatt…. Still a farm boy at heart.”

Wyatt smiled just a little as he eased out of the booth. “Well, then, Bartholomew, being as you’re a city boy…I’ll just let you pick up the check again.”

Five

THE ROARING FORTIES—AS BAT EXPLAINED TO Wyatt on their next taxi ride—was the Times Square/Broadway area itself, Forty-second Street and the other “forties.” This seemed to be a loose definition, as the “speaks” in question were set up between Fortieth and Sixtieth Streets, chiefly in old brownstone residences.

“Springing up like mushrooms,” Bat said. “Sometimes the poisonous kind.”

The better-class brownstone speakeasies operated as clubs with private memberships and high-tone names like the Town and Country or the Bombay Bicycle Club or Louis’s or Anthony’s or, for that matter, Holliday’s.

“But now that we’re a couple months into this grand new experiment called Prohibition,” Bat said, “the gangsters have really been moving in—sometimes taking over, other times just peddling their liquor.”

The two men were in the backseat of a Ford taxicab.

Wyatt asked, “Why don’t they open their own joints?”

“Oh, they’re starting to—delightful upholstered sewers like the Hotsy Totsy, the Silver Slipper, the Fifty Fifty—you can get shots of both varieties there: alcoholic
and
ballistic.”

Wyatt chewed on that for a few moments. Then he asked, “How many hoodlum factions?”

“How many fingers you got? And maybe you should break out your toes.”

“…Before long, you could have the Manhattan version of a range war.”

Bat laughed without humor. “You’re tellin’ me. So far, though, the only turf invaded belongs to independents like Johnny. Now, across the river, the micks and the guineas are squabbling to beat the band…which is why Frankie Yale is sending his young emissary Capone around, looking for new territory, this side of the Brooklyn Bridge.”

Traffic on West Fifty-second, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, was as congested as Times Square itself. They weren’t close to their address when Bat paid off the hackie and the two men walked the rest of the way in the brisk April air.

“Damn near without exception,” Bat said, gesturing, “every house on both sides of this

‘residential’ cross-street is a speak.”

The houses were unfailingly dark, shades drawn and windows sometimes painted out, black.

You’d have thought funeral wreaths should be hanging on every door; yet the curbs were bumper-to-bumper with parked autos, and the sidewalks were busy with laughing couples, on their way somewhere, and not a funeral.

“Of course,” Bat was saying, “Johnny never refers to
his
joint as a speak—it’s strictly a
night
club….”

“There’s a difference?”

Bat chuckled, shrugged. Derby at a raffish angle, he moved along jauntily but not quickly, that old gun-battle leg wound still slowing him some. “In Johnny’s view, there’s a world of difference. At a speak customers drink, at a theater they see a show, at a dance hall they dance—at a nightclub, they get the whole she-bang, and more.”

The three-story brownstone where Bat stopped also looked asleep, windows dark; hell, it was well after midnight, why wouldn’t they be?

Still, Wyatt started up the seven or eight steps to the raised entrance…only to have Bat tug at his friend’s coat sleeve and shake his head, as if scolding a backward child.

“No one gets in that way,” Bat said, and led Wyatt down the half-dozen steps to basement level.

Dreary and unlighted, the basement entry sported a forbidding black metal door. Bat rang the unmarked bell and a peephole panel shuttered open, exposing a single hard appraising eye.

No password or display of any membership card was necessary in this instance. The peephole slid shut, the heavy door swung open, a simian in a tuxedo said, “Good to see youse, Mr.

Masterson,” and led the two guests through a series of inter-locking doors on to adjacent vestibules and finally into Holliday’s itself.

“Have a good evening,” said the slope-foreheaded guardian of the gate, and disappeared back inside his world of locks and doors and entryways.

The interior of the nightclub (and “speakeasy” truly did not do it justice) damned near tempted Wyatt to smile.

In tribute to his late daddy, Johnny had provided an understated but distinct Wild West decor—the spirit of Dodge’s Long Branch and Tombstone’s Oriental lived in this forty-by-eighty-foot tin-ceilinged cellar.

About as authentic as a Tom Mix picture, Holliday’s was nonetheless a nice blend of cantina and saloon. The walls were pale yellow stucco, decorated with a sprinkling of rustic-framed Western and Mexican paintings, with arched recessions in walls home to little statues of cowhands on bucking broncos and slouchy Indians on sleepy ponies. The many tables were small, square and covered with brown-and-white checkered cloths, their chairs simple, rounded wooden straightbacks.

Even the Chinese lanterns, providing much of the low-slung chamber’s scant illumination, weren’t out of place: Wyatt had seen them used in many a watering hole out West.

Entering, you looked across the seated patrons through the blue haze of cigarette smoke to the bar—no stools, strictly a serving station—a roughhewn pine affair that resonated within Wyatt’s memory. Of course, this was more Pony Express way-station-style than, say, Tombstone’s Crystal Palace, where the bar had been an endless expanse of mahogany. But in a business wherein occasional raids, for real or for show, might include ax-wielding intruders, pine seemed the prudent choice.

Two bartenders, both with handlebar mustaches and black hair slicked back and aprons over white shirts with black bow ties, selected bottles from the pair of pine-shelf bookcase-like displays that left room between for a gilt-framed oil of a reclining Spanish lady wearing a shawl and a rose and a smile. Above the entire affair, all that remained of a longhorn steer was on impressive display, horns looking sharp enough to give a visiting bullfighter a shiver.

Wyatt had set foot in a speak or two in L.A., and knew the rows of liquor bottles behind the bar were an exception, not the rule—real labels with such familiar names as Johnny Walker and Jim Beam beamed at patrons not used to actually seeing what they were drinking.

Wyatt knew the rules in an establishment like this—some gents might bring their own flasks, and the club would charge for set-ups, maybe two bucks for a pitcher of water and/or ice, or a buck and a half for ginger ale and/or a buck a bottle for White Rock. Most patrons bought liquor at the clubs, however, particularly one with Johnny Holliday’s impressive supply of the genuine article.

Pretty things in peasant blouses and short red flared satin skirts with mesh hose were weaving in and around the tables selling various wares from trays shoulder-slung like feedsacks: cigarettes ran a buck a deck; rag baby dolls (for your baby doll) a fin; and red-rose corsages also a fin—artificial flowers a buck. Purchases were not encouraged, they were expected, as were generous tips—guys did not want to look like tightwads to dolls, either the one they’d come in with,
or
the one pushing cigarettes or rag dolls or flowers, real or false….

Behind and right, as Wyatt and Bat stood just inside the place, was a hatcheck stand, where Wyatt and Bat left theirs with a redhead in a fringed buckskin vest over a yellow blouse with a gaily colorful bandana knotted at her neck. To the left a hostess station was “manned” by a similarly garbed brunette. This was the standard waitress attire, as well, and four such cuties in short buckskin skirts were conveying drinks of trays to the clientele—cowgirls out of Ziegfeld.

At the far left was a little stage, the fairly low ceiling allowing room for only a baby grand piano and two tiers of musicians, saxophone, trombone, drum set, violin, trumpet and clarinet, who happened to be filing onto the platform right now, like a little tuxedo army. A parquet dance floor out front would accommodate maybe a dozen couples, if they didn’t mind rubbing shoulders and other surfaces.

The brunette hostess knew Bat from way back and led the two men to a reserved table ringside. One of the bandana-sporting waitresses got there right away, and Bat ordered bourbon straight up and Wyatt asked for a beer.

Wyatt surveyed the scene. The well-dressed crowd was largely young—bored with well-paying jobs, hell-bent for fun, ready to pay sky-high prices for the privilege. A certain number of sugar daddies with dollies were sprinkled around at the postage-stamp tables, too. Still, this was mostly kids—some exercising their silver-spoon heritage, others making a decent living and out to blow some of it…but kids. Who else could hang out at joints that didn’t open till midnight, and carouse club-to-club till five in the morning?

The answer to that question could be found among assorted famous faces sprinkled around the room—famous at least in Manhattan terms.

“Those two boys,” Bat said, leaning in confidence, “are Yankees stars—hour and a half ago, their dates were on stage with the
Follies
…. That dame is a Park Avenue hostess with more dollars than sense, and the pansy with her is her favorite art dealer, who specializes in

‘modern’ stuff, you know, squiggles and squares?…
That
dame is married to the biggest banker in town, only the smoothie she’s with isn’t him…. And that distinguished dub? An editor at the
Times
, whose wife no doubt thinks he’s burning the midnight oils pounding out an editorial on world affairs.”

Instead, said editor seemed to be pounding out a domestic affair with a blonde.

“No food served down here, by the way,” Bat said, as if Wyatt had asked him.

“After Rector’s and Jack Dunstan’s,” Wyatt said, “I may not eat till next Tuesday.”

Bat lifted a forefinger. “Well, when you get around to it, you can get sandwiches and steaks upstairs.”

“Where’s our host?”

“Johnny’ll make an appearance. After Tex.”

“Tex?”

The answer came not from Bat—because the band chose that moment to start playing a jazzed-up version of “Pony Boy”—but from the glittering, leggy apparition that appeared from the wings, “riding” onto the stage slapping her hip and waving a bejeweled white Stetson.

“I told you, Wyatt,” Bat whispered. “A Stetson makes a statement….”

Everything about the woman onstage made a statement. Attractive in a sleepy-eyed, cartoonish way, her full figure ensconced in a sequined form-fitting gown, several loops of pearls around her neck and riding her generous bosom, her wrists heavy with glittering bracelets, her marcelled hair almost touching her shoulders, she snugged the jewel-sparkling Stetson onto the peroxide ’do at a rakish slant and a wide red-rouged mouth that somehow opened wider to say: “Hello, suckers!”

The audience exploded in laughter and applause.

From the bandstand, a trumpet player brought down a spare stool for her to perch on and, as she got settled, she made a lewd throaty throwaway remark—“Horny little devil, aren’t you?”—that killed the crowd.

Wyatt shook his head, thinking,
Big city, small world
….

“For you newcomers,” the brassy blonde was saying, in a deep but full-bodied drawl, “my name is ‘Texas’ Guinan. I was raised in Texas, schooled in a convent, and ruined right here in Manhattan!”

That got a big laugh, but she topped herself: “Most recently, at two o’clock this afternoon!”

More howls.

Newcomer though he was, Wyatt needed no introduction to Tex Guinan. She had been a discovery of his friend William S. Hart’s, an actress with both rodeo and vaudeville experience who had briefly become a sensation as the silver screen’s first cowgirl in such epics as
Wild Flower of the Mountain Range
and
South of Santa Fe
.