The Amboy Dukes (16 page)

Frank sneered as he got onto the stool at the counter. Except for his red-rimmed eyes and the lines of weariness which furrowed his forehead, his gaze was cold and untroubled. The cops were dumb. Benny was dumb. The Dukes were dumb. All he had to do was think, and he could outsmart anyone. He was going to admit nothing, for they knew nothing, and what they did not know would never hurt him.

He twirled around on the swivel seat and softly, so that only Stan could hear him, he said, “Nobody’s asking you for advice.”

For Frank the first of June meant only one more month of dread remained before the end of the school term. Frank associated the end of June with escape, but he now wondered if he could maintain a grip on himself and avoid discovery. Everything conspired against him, and as he walked with Betty along the path which followed the perimeter of the Prospect Park lake that first June night, her words made no impression upon him.

How could he rest and be at ease? Only six days after they had bumped Bannon they had almost been trapped: Maybe, he thought, it might have been better to have been caught. Then this constant wariness and alertness which were sapping his strength and refusing him the relaxation of sleep would cease. Wherever he walked or rode or stopped he would see Gallagher, Leonard, Finch, or Wilner. When he went into Davidson’s, Gallagher might be sitting there drinking coffee and would invite him to sit at his table. The talk would be aimless, so aimless that Frank would feel his jaws stiffen, his spine tingle, and his armpits wet with sweat, for he knew that this seeming lack of direction in Gallagher’s conversation was aimed at catching him in a contradiction, a flaw in their alibis. One day as he entered Selma’s with Benny they saw Wilner sitting at the counter noisily sucking a chocolate soda through a straw. They had wanted to back out of the doorway, but Wilner insisted upon buying them sodas and talking, and Wilner talked only about the murder and that it was the police theory that the murder had not been premeditated and that the boy would be certain to receive the mercy of the court if he confessed.

“Yes,” Wilner had said, “maybe the kid that did it wants to confess, but maybe someone else is implicated in the killing and one guy can’t confess because of the other guy. Tough.” His straw rattled as he sucked upon it.

After he had left them Frank and Benny had sat silently in the booth, afraid to speak, unable to look at each other, for Wilner had sowed carefully in each of them a new seed of suspicion and distrust. Each feared the other would crack, and they sat silent, afraid to speak, for they could not trust their voices to be steady, as if they were unshaken by Wilner’s suggestion of clemency.

Selma scooped the glasses off the table and leaned toward them. “That was a dick, wasn’t it?” she asked them.

Benny nodded.

“I thought so,” she said nervously. “Look, Benny, Frank, I hate to say this. But I think you better not come in here any more until this blows over. I got my customers to think of, and since the cops picked up you Dukes here, and now this dick—well, I don’t like it. So maybe you better not come around for a while.”

Frank stood up. “Come on,” he said to Benny.

Gallagher, Leonard, Finch, and Wilner were everywhere: on Pitkin Avenue, in the Winthrop, near their school, strolling along their block, at Roseland, the Coney Island boardwalk, the Rugby Bowling Alleys. And always they would stop Frank and Benny, talk to them, ask the same questions over and over again, playing a sort of game whereby they seemingly deputized Frank and Benny and asked their opinion as to whether they thought Frank Alongo or Sam London or Socks Levy or Larry Riordan or Danny Abrams or Steve Cohen or Sam Abruzzi might have shot Mr. Bannon. Suddenly, and with terror, Frank realized they had eliminated practically every boy in their official class, and he warned Benny not to give his opinion any more.

And there was nowhere to go, for after the story broke in the newspapers about the Dukes being picked up by the police and all except three held on various charges, their landlord had made them move out of their basement club-rooms. In vicious desperation the Dukes had hacked and broken the walls of the basement rooms, stuffed the plumbing, ruined the floor by pouring melted tar onto the parquet, and had warned the landlord that his body would be found in a lot if he made a complaint. Now the Dukes were without a formal meeting place, and this, coupled with the fact that they were all out on bail and facing prosecution, made them turn on Frank and Benny as the direct cause of their present plight. Bluntly, with his lips purple with anger and his eyes glassy, Larry Tunafish had told them they were responsible for his facing a prison rap.

“Every dime I got in the bank,” he told off Frank and Benny, “and plenty of my old man’s, we had to give to a smart lawyer who thinks he can get me off. And it’s all your fault. Aw, shut up!” He refused to let Benny speak. “You can tell the cops that you don’t know who bumped off your teacher, but I got a hunch you know. And because you’re keeping your holes shut I’m liable to get shoved in the can.”

Frank looked at him with disbelief. “You want us to rat?”

“I don’t know what I want!” Larry said. “Except to get this rap off my neck. You know I can go to the Island for this rap?”

“You’ll beat it,” Benny said without believing his prediction.

“What’s the use of talkin’?” Larry summed up the feelings of the Dukes: “You guys got us in bad with your goin’ to school. School!” He spit in the street. “Look what it got us. A rap!”

Cut off from the Dukes, prohibited from entering Selma’s, with the neighbors on their block looking at them with bold hostility, Frank and Benny were compelled to seek each other’s company. After Detective Leonard had visited Ann Kleppner and Betty Rosen to check on Frank’s and Benny’s alibis, Ann would no longer date Benny. Betty continued to see Frank, but now there was no longer a smooth convertible for them to race around in, and walking with Betty in the park, Frank was silent and only dimly aware of her presence.

“You’re not listening to me.” Betty pressed Frank’s arm and drew to a halt.

Frank put his arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry, kid. I was thinking.”

“Thinking so hard that you haven’t even kissed me?”

Frank guided Betty from the path into a thicket of bushes that stood close to the rim of the lake and knelt to feel the grass. “It’s dry, Betty”—he began to remove his jacket—“but we’ll sit on this.”

“That’s a new suit,” she protested.

“What the hell’s the difference?” Frank lay on his back with his hands locked behind his head. “Come on, sit next to me.”

Betty leaned across him, framed his face in her hands, and kissed him. “Feel better now?” she whispered.

His reply was to embrace her and to press his lips against her cheek as he held her close to him. “I wouldn’t know what to do without you,” he whispered. “I wouldn’t know.”

Again she kissed him and finally she relaxed and lay beside him with her arms locked tightly around him, feeling his body tense and electric against her as his free hand caressed the nape of her neck, her breasts, and her thighs.

“I love you, Frankie.” Betty was hoarse with passion. “Love you more than anything!” She pressed close to him, eager and longing, possessed with the desire, magic, and promise of a June night.

He wanted to tell her more than that he loved her, but he could not. Through his memory raced distorted and rudimentary fragments of speeches and lines of poetry he had been compelled to read in his English classes and which he had never remembered. Across one corner of the moon hung a wisp of dark cloud, and the sky was lonesome without stars. The stillness carried to them the sound of the ripples softly striking the stone wall that girded the lake; the gentle warmth of June soothed him—and still he could not speak. For how could he tell her he was troubled, when an explanation would mean his death? It would have been a relief to tell someone, to share the secret with a trusted confidant, and Frank felt he could trust Betty, but to tell anyone would be the first fatal error, the first breach in the wall of anonymity that protected him, for to tell her of him meant revealing Benny’s role in the tragedy—and he was afraid of Benny. No longer was Benny his friend, but someone bound to him by circumstances which enmeshed and entangled them both as they struggled, singly and together, to prevent their betrayal by a breach in their alibis and their distrust of each other.

That night at the White Tower when Stan Alberg had appealed to him in a brief moment to confess what he knew, if he knew anything, he had laughed mockingly at the well-intentioned advice, and now it was too late to turn back. Twenty-nine more days. He had to hold out. Frank kissed Betty’s throat.

“Frank,” she gasped, “what’re you waiting for?”

“Here?”

“I’m dying for you.” Her nails dug through his shirt. “We’re alone. I never asked anyone before.” She writhed in his arms with a desire she could no longer control.

Frank rolled over and looked down upon her as she lay with her hair flung back and her eyes half shut. He kissed her again, wildly, and pressed her to him. His hands trembled as he caressed her, and then there was no thought, but only a series of sharp involuntary reflexes as he strained Betty to him, kissing and biting her lips. His breath whistled and he moaned with the violence of his passion.

Sighing, they relaxed and listened to the night sounds multiply about them while they watched the cloud efface the upper half of the moon. Betty lay on her side with her arms around Frank. Occasionally she kissed him, but he continued to stare above him, through the branches of the bushes which enclosed them.

“Frank,” she said softly, “it’s late.”

He raised his left arm and looked at the illuminated dial of his watch. “Almost eleven. Once it wasn’t late for me.” His bitterness dulled the recent joy. “Now I’ve got to get in early and keep away from those damned dicks.”

Betty sat erect and stroked Frank’s hair. “Don’t let them bother you,” she attempted to console him. “It’ll be all over soon. They’re bound to get the one who did it.”

Frank’s grip on her arm tightened and relaxed immediately. He was glad it was dark so that she could not see the way his face twisted in agony as fright smashed him with its omnipresent fist. “What makes you say that?”

“Well, the cops are pretty good, and you never read in the papers about a murder not being solved.”

“But they haven’t any clues,” Frank said.

Betty rubbed his nose with hers. “How do you know?”

Frank pushed her away roughly. “Stop it. Now you sound like that bastard Leonard. He’s always popping up wherever I go. The bastard’s driving me nuts!” Frank rolled over and lay with his face in his folded arms.

“I’m sorry I brought it up, hon.” Betty spoke quietly. “Come on, you better take me home. Oh, Frank”—she embraced him as they stood up—“I like you more than anything.”

“I like you too,” Frank replied absently, brushed the loose grass from her skirt, and lifted his jacket from the grass. He snapped the jacket twice, brushed the back casually, and put it on. “Let’s go.”

Betty held his arm and walked so that their thighs brushed. “You’re sure some guy at loving.” Her laugh was shy yet bold. “What’s the matter?” He had stopped, rigid with panic.

“That man ahead of us looks like one of the dicks,” he whispered apprehensively. “Let’s go back.”

“No,” she insisted. “You’re seeing things. And even if he is, if you run away he’d think something’s wrong. Come on.” She dragged him along the path. “We’ll walk fast and pass him. Maybe it isn’t him.”

Shaking, Frank permitted himself to be led. As they approached the man who was strolling ahead of them Frank saw it was neither one of the four detectives, and through the panic which still made his chest pound, he realized that he was seeing Gallagher, Leonard, Finch, and Wilner even when they were not present. He remembered the dream he had had in the middle of May, when the vividness of their presence had forced him awake and he had sat up in bed, shivering and trembling with terror. He had to snap out of it, for he knew his nerves were drawn, stretched to the point of snapping, and there were only twenty-nine days left. Twenty-nine days more of alertness, and then he could stretch his arms, yawn, lie in the sun on the beach, and be free.

“See,” Betty said to him after they had passed the man, “it wasn’t one of them. Was it?”

Frank offered her a cigarette from his pack. “No. Look, babe,” he said to her, “it’s late. Suppose I stick you in a cab and I’ll take the trolley home?”

Before she could protest Frank whistled sharply at a passing cab, which stopped suddenly, ground gears as the driver shifted rapidly into reverse, and backed to the curb where they stood. Frank opened the door and Betty stepped inside the cab.

“How much to Sterling and Nostrand?” Frank asked the driver.

The driver looked disgusted. “About sixty cents.”

Frank gave him a dollar. “Take this girl home. So long.” He leaned through the open window and clasped Betty’s hand. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Between five and six.”

Betty leaned forward and her lips brushed his. “Good night. Don’t worry about anything.”

Frank watched the cab swing into Flatbush Avenue and then entered the drugstore near the subway entrance. Why he wanted to know where Stan Alberg lived was something he could not explain. But in Stan Alberg he sensed a person who was willing and anxious to help him, and although the hope was a faint one, possibly Stan Alberg could suggest an escape from the secret that oppressed him. Frank felt no guilt, only a feeling of anger that he should have permitted Benny to get him into a jam that offered so few escape exits. In his mind there were many schemes: to throw the onus of suspicion on the few Negro boys in his official class; to send an anonymous letter to the police, telling them that Mr. Bannon was killed by a girl he had ruined; to somehow identify the dead teacher with a spy ring. And he had to reject every scheme because he could not fill in the necessary details to make the new angle appear logical and possible. His finger ran down the columns in the telephone directory and there it was, Stan Alberg’s address and telephone number. He lived on Crown Street, and Crown Street was nice. Impressive elevator apartment houses and substantial one-and two-family semidetached brick homes with porches, window boxes, Venetian blinds, and two-car garages. As he read the address the idea which had lain within him for weeks, dormant and stifled, now became alive and insistent. Frank wanted to see where Stan Alberg lived. If it were earlier he probably would have called him, but now he wanted to see the house.