Blind Moon Alley (9 page)

The rummies have gone quiet; all eyes are on Myra. As I watch her sing, I remember how much she cared about me, how she, more than anybody else, understood how it felt to be different. I think of how we skipped civics class and snuck down to the pier, sat under an overhang, and planned our Hollywood getaway until the sun was long gone from the sky.

But I'm not here to fall in love again. I force myself to turn away, to take inventory of the joint, to picture the night Garvey came here and gunned down his freedom.

The redhead brings me my gin and I down a slug as Myra finishes the last song of her set. She's not just singing, she's flirting with the crowd—smiling, teasing, toying—and the light-headed Joes are eating it up. When the lights go back up, I swear the temperature in the place is at least ten degrees higher. I wait for the applause to die down; I figure I'll get her once she's back on her stool. But instead of walking to the bar, she comes over to my table and takes the seat opposite me.

“Jersey Leo,” she says and gives me a smile right off a movie still. Her teeth are now lined up straight, and she's got a new beauty mark on her right cheek. If she sees the bruises on my face, she doesn't show it.

“Myra Banks,” I say as the piano player launches into an up-tempo rag. “You've got some voice.”

“I may have the voice, but you're the front-page story.”

“Pure bullshit,” I say.

She dismisses me with a light chuckle. Then she taps a cigarette into a long, slender holder and lights up. The stem of the holder looks like it's made of ivory and I wonder how much of Garvey's money it took to buy it.

“You look wonderful,” I tell her.

Her face takes on a bored expression that says she's heard those words so often they've lost their meaning. But I recognize the truth that's hiding behind her eyes; I see it every morning in the shaving mirror. There's no compliment big enough—and no stage grand enough—to undo the abuse she took as a kid.

“So what brings you around?” she says. “Another kidnapping?”

I can see by the way she's waiting for an answer that she hopes it's true. I guess she's gone numb to the lights and sounds of Lovely's speakeasy.

I lower my voice and tell her we need to talk about Garvey. “He needs our help,” I say.

She takes a quick look across the bar, but the cops are so deep into their bottle they're not hearing any voices outside of it.

“Follow me,” she says.

She motions to the tender that she'll be back, then takes me around the far end of the dining room past the piano. We duck into a small hallway; I follow her past two small changing rooms and into a large dressing room on the far right.

The space smells of makeup and cheap perfume. A shiny silver mirror sits on the desk in the corner. Next to the desk, a row of dresses, feather boas, corsets, and a pile of fishnet stockings hang from a wooden rack. We all have places we go to hide the bruises we were dealt as kids. Me? I run behind a bar. Myra must come here.

She locks the door behind us, takes a bottle of gin off the bookcase that lines the left wall, and pours a splash into two juice glasses. She opens an ice bucket next to the bottle, plops a cube into each drink, and gives both glasses a swirl with a twist of her wrists. Through the door, I hear the sounds of shouting voices, tinkling piano keys, and a spinning roulette wheel.

“So whatever happened to that guy in New York?” I say and toss my fedora onto the red velvet couch next to the door. “Y'know, Joe Toughguy?”

She shrugs. “Disappeared with the rest of them.”

“Really?” I say. “It's hard to believe they
all
disappear.”

“I'm talking about the ones worth keeping.”

“So am I,” I say.

She shrugs again. “What can I tell you?” she says. “They leave.”

“Well, in his case, you're better off,” I say.

“S'pose so,” she says.

I'm glad she doesn't follow with a similar line of questioning for me. Instead, she hands me one of the glasses and raises hers.

“To old friends,” she says.

“Old friends,” I say, then clink her glass and take a shot. This gin is cold and refreshing. I tell her so and she says not to thank her, to thank Lovely.

“Not anytime soon,” I say.

She laughs. “I don't blame you,” she says as she drops another cube in her glass. “So what's the story? Garvey's on the run, right?”

“That's the short version,” I say. “The long version includes the part that says it takes money to run, and he doesn't have any.”

“So how can I help?”

If she knows where this is heading, she's as smooth as the booze she's pouring.

“He needs the dough back,” I say. “The twenty grand.”

She gives me a troubled nod. “Makes sense,” she says. “But I don't have it anymore. I used it to buy into this place. And when you do business with Lovely, you don't buy out.”

“But you were going to pay Garvey back, right? Where were you going to get that money?”

She stares into her glass as if she's about to read tea leaves but doesn't come back with an answer. There's more to this story, and getting her to open up will be about as easy as shucking a clam with a dollar bill.

“Hey, I'm in this, too,” I say. “I ran into a cop named Reeger. He's out for Garvey and he doesn't care who he mows down to get at him.”

She's barely listening. She's looking out the window at the blinking lights on Rittenhouse. I'm not sure how I wound up here—grilling Myra about Garvey's money—and my guess is that she's wondering the same thing. I down the drink. It burns my chest and I enjoy it.

She doesn't bother turning her head when she speaks. Normally, that would get my goat, but in this case, I'm grateful that she's talking at all.

“I did something really stupid.”

“Who hasn't?” I say.

A crash comes from the bar. People are shouting and glass is breaking. I've been around speakeasies long enough to know these sounds. It's a raid. I'd like to meet the cop who decided to drop a hammer on Lovely. The bull must have nuts the size of cantaloupes.

A voice yells from the barroom. “I'm looking for Aaron Garvey and a white nigger freak called Snowball.”

Myra turns to me, her eyes wide open. “That's Reeger,” she says.

Could Reeger have followed me here? I hear him working his way through the joint, shaking down the waiters for the skinny on Garvey. I pull out my gun and wait by the door. I'm no triggerman, but if Reeger comes at me I'm going to plug his sinuses. I'm about to open the door, but it hits me that Garvey wound up on death row for doing the same thing I'm thinking of doing now. I re-holster the rod and look for a way out.

I motion toward the window. “Where does that fire escape lead?”

“The back alley,” she says. “But Reeger's probably got a guy down there.”

I slip out the window, but my eyes start shaking as they adjust to the darkness.

Myra leans out of the building behind me. “I'm coming, too.”

She kicks off her pumps and follows me down the fire escape—she's so close I can smell her perfume. The humidity has slickened the iron rungs, and the leather soles of my oxfords are slipping with every step. When we reach the bottom landing, I take a look around. There's not a bull in sight, so we drop down into the alleyway and scoot back to the Auburn. She jumps into the seat I had reserved for Angela.

We pull away, leaving Reeger back at the Red Canary. I've got my eyes peeled for cops, but Myra's laughing like a kid who just bolted out of the school cafeteria doors for summer recess.

Myra's leaning on the Ink Well bar as I scoop some ice into a shaker. I thought about bringing her to Madame Curio's so she could settle things with Garvey, but I couldn't risk being tailed. I snaked through side streets, circled City Hall, and snuck into the bar through Blind Moon Alley. We're here for the night. I'd let her sleep at my place, but we'd have to step outside to go upstairs. And I'm not unlocking that door until sunrise.

It's my first time inside the Ink Well after closing time, and I like it more than ever. Rudy Vallee is on the radio—“If I Had You”—and the flickering candles on the front tables bathe the place in a soft glow. There must be fifty guys back at the Canary who'd want to trade places with me right now, tucked away down here, alone with Myra. And yet all I can think about is how much I wish it were Angela sitting behind that martini glass.

Myra nods toward the newspaper that put my face on Philadelphia's doorstep. “I'm not surprised,” she says. “You always had it in you.”

I forgot how nice it felt to impress a woman—and I'm glad it's Myra. “Thanks,” I tell her.

She walks through the joint as I pour two fresh martinis. She's still in her sequined dress, shoeless, and I wish I had some comfortable clothes to offer her. I wonder what she's thinking as she takes in the place. It's a far cry from the Red Canary, which buzzes with gamblers, dancers, and spenders until the wee hours. Me, I prefer this.

I drop an olive into each glass. “So Garv needs money,” I say. “Badly.”

“I know,” she says with her back to me. She's examining the glossies of Duke Ellington, Jack Johnson, and Ethel Waters hanging over the booths across from the bar. She's a silhouette in the subdued light; her dress shimmers along her hip. “And I do owe him the twenty grand.”

“At least we all agree on that,” I say. I bring the martinis to the booth closest to the front room, nearest the fan, and she joins me.

We sit across from each other; she leans her back to the wall and raises her legs onto the padded bench.

I raise my glass. “To Elementary School Four?”

“To never going back,” she counters.

We clink glasses and sip our martinis. They're ice cold, but not frigid enough to cut the heat down here.

“So can you get it?” I say. “The twenty grand?” This is the third time I'm trying—I asked in the Auburn, too—and I'm getting tired of the half-answers.

“Like I said, I gave it to Lovely for a piece of the place—not that I've ever gotten anything for it aside from a bunch of free drinks. He's got the money and I can tell you he's not about to give it back. It's not like I bought stock or something.”

“So that's what you meant when you said you did something stupid?”

She leans her head against the wall and looks up, sighing.

“Well?” I say.

I guess she realizes no raid is going to cut her off again, because this time she keeps talking.

“I was going to pay Garvey back in installments,” she says. “A hundred a week.”

“He told me,” I say.

She lets out a bitter chuckle. “Everybody wanted those payments. Connor wound up dying for them.”

“He told me that, too,” I say.

“Well, now Reeger's muscled in. He's taking them—and he bumped them to one-twenty-five. And I've been stupid enough to pay him. But what am I supposed to do? Call the cops?”

Garvey said Reeger was coming down on Myra, but he didn't know how bad things had gotten. The Sarge is doing more than evening a score, he's generating a revenue stream. And I've got to give him credit—he's doing it without squaring off against Lovely.

Myra takes another belt of gin, but there's no drink strong enough to get her out of this mess.

“Garv doesn't need all twenty grand,” I say. “Can't you get some cash off Lovely, maybe five or six grand, so Garv can get out of the country?”

Even I hear how ridiculous I sound. Lovely would dismember a penny-ante crook who crossed him for fifty cents. I remember Doolie telling me about a gambler who was into Lovely for eight grand. The poor bastard left the hospital missing his left ear and bottom lip.

Myra answers me with a smirk.

“I'm just trying to help Garv,” I say. “Are you forgetting how many times he saved our butts?”

“I like Garvey as much as you do,” she says. “But the only place I can get that kind of money is off Lovely. Even if he gave it to me—which he won't—I'd be left paying him and Reeger. I'd be dead in no time.”

She's right. Sooner or later she'd miss a payment to one of them, and either way, she'd make up for it with her life.

The radio begins playing “Every Day Away from You” and it reminds me of the gang up at the Hy-Hat, playing ping-pong, listening to the music box. It's only been a few days since the champ was up there, but it feels like ages ago.

Myra sits up and looks at me. “I'll pay you instead of Reeger,” she says, her eyes brightening. “And you can get the money to Garvey, one payment at a time.”

She shimmies out of the booth and paces the floor in a wide circle; she's got the look of a scientist stumbling upon the secret of eternal youth. Her words pick up speed as the idea forms in her head.