On the Waterfront (7 page)

As always, the city had put smoothly into motion its machinery for handling personal tragedy. Joe Regan, the cop on the beat, had called for the ambulance while Mrs. Geraghty, a neighbor, had sent her boy running for Father Barry over at St. Timothy’s, a block and a half away. The intern and the neighborhood priest had arrived only minutes apart, the rangy, fast-talking and usually chain-smoking young parish priest pushing people aside with a rough “Outa my way, outa my way,” and having time to administer the last rites while the body was still warm and the intern was listening in vain for a faltering heart beat. As Father Barry was praying for God’s mercy and the gift for Joey Doyle of a life everlasting, the intern was telling Regan, the cop, to pencil his report D.O.A. Another Dead on Arrival from River Street.

Regan had asked a few routine questions of the onlookers—had anyone seen the fall and did anyone know whether young Doyle had been alone on the roof?—questions that had to be asked to cover Regan in case he was checked. Then, for the same reason, because it looked like an accident but probably wasn’t, he sent for the homicide squad. They drove up a little later, a pair of first-grade detectives who took over, especially the older man Foley, a fatgut who had started out doing a job on these waterfront cases until his captain had straightened him out. Most of the action in town was on the piers: the horse play and the dice and a cut of the pilferage, not to mention the pay-off on the ship jumpers and the nose candy from the Italian mob who maintained an uneasy truce with the Irish and Johnny Friendly in Bohegan. Foley had been ready to play it straight at the beginning but with a take-artist like Donnelly as Commissioner you would just louse yourself up and push yourself back into a uniform if you didn’t play along.

So Foley knew what kind of a report he was expected to bring in, but he also knew enough to make his questions hard and official. There would be days of this, all the motions of a thorough investigation, for there was nothing the Bohegan police force was better schooled in than covering up its tracks. The neighbors were watching warily as Lieutenant Foley turned to Pop Doyle.

“You’re Doyle, aren’t you? The boy’s father?”

Pop stared at him, angry behind his mask. “That’s right.”

“Would your son usually’ve been up on the roof at this time of night?”

Pop shrugged. “Once in a while. He’d be up there with his boids.”

“Any idea whether he was alone or not?”

“How should I know? I wasn’t up there.”

Mrs. Collins was pushing forward to have her say. She was a thin, once-pretty, nervous and overworked woman in her early thirties whose husband had been a hatch boss fished out of the river in the late 40’s. “Billy Conley and Jo-Jo Delaney are up on the roof all the time. Maybe they could tell you something about it.”

Pop glared at her. Helping cops was a waterfront taboo, no matter how you felt about the bums who muscled your union. “Buttinsky, you keep outa this,” he told her harshly.

The Conley and Delaney kids were standing near the front of the crowd. Foley knew them. They were marked tough juves who bore watching. The familiar blank look of caution-with-cops slipped over their faces.

“We aint been up on the roof for a nour. We didn’ see nothin’.”

Foley turned away from them. Punks. He’d have trouble with them one of these days. Everybody was staring at Foley and his partner with the same cold, disdainful look. The lips of old man Doyle were pressed together in a melancholy sneer. He was waiting for the next question.

“You’re sure you got no idea what he was doing up on the roof after dark? And whether he was expecting to meet anyone?”

A low growl of resentment came out of Pop. Cops! Who wants cops? Any ideas, he wants to know. A helluva lot he’d do if I filled him up to the eyebrows with ideas. Just get in more trouble, like poor Joey here.

“Any ideas, Pop?” Foley said again. “Any suspicions? Anything like that?”

“None,” Pop said.

Mrs. Collins pushed forward again.

“It’s the same thing they did to my Andy five years ago.”

Pop wheeled on her. Busybody. All of them. Why couldn’t they leave him alone with his heartache and his kid? All these questions and people poking their noses in. For what? Another whitewash. “You shut up,” he told Andy Collins’ widow. “You keep your big yap outa this.”

Mrs. Collins glared at everybody. She was always talking about her Andy and the thing they did to him five years ago. He had been a hatch boss on Pier C who hadn’t forgotten his years with a hook in his hand for one-thirty-seven an hour. He liked to give the men a break. Johnny Friendly had warned him, but he wouldn’t play. Beaten him up, but he kept on. There was talk he was ready to buck the outfit and try to take over the local and run it like a union. Mrs. Collins was a little out of her head on the subject. “Every time I hear a key in the door I think it’s him comin’ home,” she’d keep saying. Pop Doyle could shout at her all he wanted. She was going to have her say.

“Joey Doyle was the only one with the guts to talk up for his rights around here. He was for holdin’ regular meetin’s. An’ he was the only one with the moxie to talk up to them Crime Investigators. So this whole stinkin’ mess could …”

“Shet up!” Pop was trembling, the pain of his loss meshed in with his rage and frustration.

“Everybody knows that.”

“Who asked ya? Shut ya trap. If Joey had taken that advice he wouldn’t be …”

Pop looked at what was left of Joey Doyle and turned away with his face growing damp as tears and sweat mingled in a slow, salt flow. The whistle of another ocean liner went WHOOM WHOOM WHOOOOOOM on the river. In his mind the river and Johnny Friendly were one, endlessly dangerous and never sleeping.

“Everybody knows that,” Mrs. Collins was whimpering to herself.

Mutt Murphy had come along and was shouldering his way in and trying to talk to people who turned aside to avoid his stale breath and the sight of his livid, swollen-from-drinking lips.

“ ’s a good boy,” he muttered, accustomed to talking to himself. “Oney one ever tired t’ get me me compensation, God bless ’im …”

Lieutenant Foley had had enough of Pop. He turned to Moose McGonigle and Runty Nolan.

“How’s about you fellas, any of you ever hear any threats to …”

Moose had a bull-necked voice, made emotional by a hard life, and his ordinary conversational tone was louder than most men shouting.

“One thing I loined—all my life on the docks—don’t ask no questions—don’t answer no questions, unless you …”

He stopped, and looked at the lump of flesh lying under the alley-newspapers, waiting for its senseless ride to the city morgue.

“He was all heart, that boy,” Runty said reverently, lowering his face full of broken bones, unable to see the body at his feet because he had been beaten for back-talking until his sight was only a shifting screen of shadows.

“Guts,” Pop said it as if it was a curse. “I’m sick o’ guts. He gets a book in the pistol local and right away he’s gonna be a hero. Gonna push the mob off the dock single-handed.”

“In other words, you’re pretty sure it wasn’t no accident,” Detective Foley said, not so much probing as covering himself either way.

“Listen, Foley,” Pop said. “I aint sure o’ nuthin’. And if I was I wouldn’t tell ya. You’d bury it in the files and they’d bury me in the river.”

Foley made a few routine notes. The whole thing was routine. Everybody knows and nobody says and you fatten the waterfront file, just as the old man says, push another report in the file and wait for a next time.

“Okay, you c’n take it in,” he said to the intern. “Another D.O.A.”

Father Barry, a tall, lean, fast-talking product of Bohegan, praying for Joey while anointing him, told God he thought Joey deserved mercy in heaven since it had been so rudely denied him in his short visit on this earth. He was born and raised in Bohegan, Father Barry, and he was no pious-tower religious. His old man had been a cop, honest, therefore in trouble, getting the Siberian treatment, pounding a beat on the outskirts, believing in his religion as an ethical guide as well as a sacramental experience and not afraid to tirade against the birettas and the high cloth when he thought them too worldly and over-impressed with wealth and position. A natural-born rebel, an independent man had been Patrolman John Francis Barry. His son, the priest, thinking what a poor end this was for young Doyle, remembered the funeral of his father nineteen years earlier, when he was only eleven. Look at a priest and you may think, what does he know of the world, his collar cutting him off from knowledge of the world, secure for life in the bosom of the Church. But a priest is a man, small-minded or truly catholic, easily frightened or lion-brave, buttering up the parish richlings, or as concerned for the poor and the wretched as was Christ Himself.

Mrs. McLaverty, a plump woman whose slip was always showing, said to a neighbor woman, “Poor Katie. They was as close as twins.”

The other woman moaned. “The poor sweet thing. It’ll kill her, it will. Her only brother and she too good for this world.”

Mrs. Collins nearby could not be quieted. A little off her head since Andy was taken from her, everybody said, and good reason, with four kids half-orphaned, half-dressed, half-fed.

“You wait and see, God’ll be the judge.” She was talking sort of crazy. “The rats, they’ll burn in hell until kingdom come.”

Mutt Murphy staggered closer to the widow Collins and crossed himself elaborately. “Amen,” he said. “Lord’ve mercy on him. He was a saint, that Joey. Oney one tried to get me me compensation. He filled out me report fer me ’n …”

He was talking to himself again.

“Come on, outa the way, comin’ through …” The morgue wagon attendants were pushing through the crowd of curious and bereaved. A cop shoved the bleary Mutt Murphy roughly out of the way, so the basket could pass.

Mutt tried to slobber his condolences to Pop, but Runty also pushed him away. There was something about Mutt that was irresistibly pushable. And pushed or cuffed away he always swung back in your direction like a heavy punching bag. “Beat it, ya rummy,” Runty told him, throwing out his small tough chest in a characteristic bantam-cock gesture. “Leave the old man alone.”

Mutt shrugged and walked away, shaking his head at the world. Runty and Moose helped Pop along by their closeness as they all followed the body to the morgue wagon. Most of the people in the neighborhood were gathered solemnly on the sidewalk to watch the wagon drive away.

“C’mon,” Runty said to Pop. “Le’s go get a coupla balls in us.”

L
ONGSHOREMEN WHO HAD HURRIED
to the tenement courtyard were streaming back to the Friendly Bar, in need of a drink. There wasn’t much talk about Joey Doyle. There were wiser things to do, with so many goons on the Earie, than to express any sympathy for him, safer just to dummy up and go about your business, have a drink, watch the fights, keep your nose clean. If there was any law in this jungle, that was it. There was a fight on TV, selling the beer, and the men who had stayed in the bar, for reasons of their own, and those whose curiosity had led them outside into the cluster around the priest and the intern and the cops were now drawn together into their common escape, the 21-inch screen where the violence was vicarious and relatively harmless.

Terry Malloy usually watched the fights Monday, Wednesday, Friday nights, looking on in a careless, hands-in-pocket, face-in-the-beer sort of way, shrugging off the guys who kept telling him what he could have done to those hamolas in the ring, but privately thinking a lot of young bums were getting away with murder to pull down the $4000 television money with nothing to go on except willingness and sometimes not even that. Not that Terry had been a ring master. He had been easy to hit; there was scar-tissue swelling over both eyes to prove it, but he had been strong and he had had the spirit for it and he knew a little about pacing himself and closing in on an opponent when he was ready to be taken. Only lost seven fights in forty-three, a pretty fair average for a kid brought along too fast, thrown in over his head a couple of times, and under wraps for the long odds in a couple of others. So Terry watched the fights, and once in a while dreamed the expug dream of a comeback: maybe he’d get his gear out and fool around in the gym just to get the feel of it. Hell, he was still in pretty good shape, only three four pounds over his best weight, and at twenty-eight—look at Rocky Marciano, Jimmy Carter. They were all around thirty now and seeing more money than they ever knew at twenty.

“Hey, Terry, watcha doin’ out there? Riley’s makin’ a bum outa that Solari.”

It was Specs, who had been up there on the roof with Joey, Specs and Sonny. Now they were both inside belting whiskey with beer chasers and watching the fight as if nothing had happened. Specs didn’t look like a pistol, slight and pasty-faced, but he had the guts or the craziness to take men’s lives without flinching, which means without thinking too much about it. He was a nervous man with poor eyesight and he gave Terry the creeps, but he would do anything Johnny Friendly told him, that was for sure. Sonny was just a big meathead who went along, mostly because he had so much respect for Specs. People didn’t realize that it took something extra to go all the way with another guy’s life. The average bruiser like Truck or Gilly couldn’t do it. They could beat you so you died of it, sure, leave you to spit out your life in an alley somewhere. But this other, premeditated thing, the average guy in the mob wasn’t up to that. You had to have something special, something big or sick in your character. Terry knew that. He knew Specs and even Sonny were tougher or more desperate than he was. He himself was just a hanger-on, a crumb-catcher, usually trusted only with the smallest errands, which was perfectly all right with him. Small potatoes were all right with him. The rest of it was too much trouble, like being President. Who the hell wanted to be President? Look at this Ike and all the headaches he was into. Five stars on his shoulder and he’s a hero, George Washington, with the whole world calling him Champ. A year in the White House and he’s a bum and Pegler is calling him all the lousy names he used to save for the Democrats. President, or even delegate of Local 447 like Specs Flavin, who wants it? A couple of clams in his pocket and a good-looking oyster lined up for the night-o, that was for Terry. Only now he was in a little more than he had figured. The hell with the fight and Specs and Sonny. He’d tie on a good one tonight and wash it out of his system. It wasn’t his fault, not as long as he figured they was only gonna be talking to Joey. Of course he knew Specs and the jobs he would do for Johnny Friendly. But it wasn’t his fault if something happened without his knowing it was going to happen.