Читать книгу Every Man for Himself - Mark J. Hannon - Страница 32

CHAPTER 28

BUFFALO, 1951

Pat had finished the last beer in the refrigerator, and was worrying that his father would notice he’d knocked off three bottles since dinner, when the phone rang. Picking it up, he looked at his watch. 7:15.

“Brogan! Lieutenant Constantino here. Get yourself dressed for work. We’re gonna pay someone a visit downtown. I’ll swing by your house in ten minutes.”

“Now?” Pat responded, looking again at his watch, as if it would change.

“Nine minutes from now. We work any time on this detail, just like the inspector said. You’re not sauced or something, are you?”

“No, not at all,” he answered quickly, thinking where he’d hung his holster, and if he had a clean shirt.

“Good, I’ll be there in eight.” Click.

Brogan ran up the stairs, rushing to beat whoever might want to use the bathroom, and brushed his teeth thoroughly. Flying into his room, he jumped out of his gabardine pants and sports shirt and rushed to put on his brown suit and a white shirt, strap on his shoulder holster, and yank a black tie off the rack. He had just finished putting a Windsor in the skinny necktie and was reaching for the coat when the doorbell rang. He was hurrying down the stairs as his father answered it, Buffalo Evening News (“the Republicans’ paper,” as he put it, grunting derisively) in hand.

“Yes?” Joe said, checking out Constantino, nattily dressed in a chocolate-colored, wide-brim fedora, with a small yellow feather in the black hatband, and a tan overcoat, tied in front.

“Pat Brogan here?”

“. . . and you would be?” Joe replied, tilting his chin up and looking down through wireless spectacles at the shorter man.

“Detective Lieutenant Louis Constantino, Gambling Squad,” he answered, putting out his hand. “I’m Bro . . . Pat’s new boss.”

“Joe Brogan,” the old man replied, giving the detective a firm shake. “Come in, Lieutenant. Are you here on business?”

Chuckling, Constantino eased up. “No, I don’t figure your house for slots, Mr. Brogan. We can work any hours. We go when my boss says jump.”

“That would be Inspector Wachter, I believe, or is Chief Mahaney running this?”

“Ah, yeah, Inspector Wachter’s the head honcho. Mike Mahaney’s moved over to Narcotics.”

“A fine man, Martin Wachter, and his father before him. Know them both from the Rowing Club. He’ll teach you lads well.”

At this, Pat reached the bottom of the stairs, hair slicked down, breath camouflaged, and necktie tight.

“Ready?” Constantino asked, glad to see Pat sharp.

“Ready for action. Dad, you met . . . Lou here? We’ve got some work tonight.”

“I have,” his father replied. “Well, go and do your duty, lads,” he said, as the two policemen went out the door.

Returning to his chair, he turned the radio down and said a prayer to St. Michael the Archangel, asking him to protect these cocky young men, and then he thanked God for getting Pat out to work, and away from the drink tonight.

Lou Constantino pulled away from the curb with a squeal, accelerating down Woodward towards Amherst as Pat tossed a newspaper into the back seat.

“Your old man knows a lot of people.”

“Yeah, he’s been in business, church stuff, politics for a long time.”

“He use any pull to get you this plainclothes job?”

“No, he stays out of my job. Didn’t want me in it to begin with. Wants me to finish college, settle down in some office job, make money, get married, have kids.”

“Huh. Anyway, we got a tip that they’ve got a couple of slot machines down in the basement of the Talon Inn, down on Pearl.

You know the place?”

Pat remembered. He had been working overtime downtown when the beat man on Chippewa called for help on a stabbing. By the time he’d gotten there, an Indian was sitting on the floor, holding his stomach, trying to stanch the blood, and breathing hard. The patrolman had his stick out, keeping four guys up against the bar. Nobody else was there except the bartender, who reluctantly was calling an ambulance.

“Pat, Joe,” the first patrolman, a wiry guy named Vicigliano, said to Pat and another patrolman named McAvoy, who arrived with him. “Look around for the knife,” he said, never taking his eyes off the four men, keeping them against the bar at arm’s length with his nightstick. “I got these guys trying to leave the back way. The rest of their pals disappeared out the front.”

They searched the four men, no knife. They searched the bar, no knife. Nobody, including the Indian, saw anything. They asked the people on the street, including a couple of hookers plying the area. Nothing. After the Indian went to the hospital, the detectives asked him again. Nothing. They took the four men downtown, and the detectives interrogated them separately. Still nothing.

The three patrolmen stopped in the precinct locker room for a short break before they went back to their beats. The two older patrolmen lit up while Pat sat back and listened to what the veteran police had to say.

Vicigliano slapped Pat on the shin, saying, “Thanks there, young buck, it coulda got ugly in there without your help.”

“And let me tell you something too, lad,” McAvoy said, pointing with his hat at the young patrolman. “If you ever find yourself surrounded in a joint like that, throw something through the window to get somebody’s attention. Somebody’ll hear the commotion and get the cavalry.”

Taking his hat off and running his fingers through his wiry black hair, Vicigliano nodded and gave his take on it. “All those guys are friends of Stretch Buscarino, who owns the bar. He gets somebody in there he doesn’t like, like this Indian, he calls these guys to get rid of ’em and convince him not to come back.”

“Yeah, that Wahoo’ll do his drinking at The Quarry House

or someplace on East Chippewa, like the Red Rose from now on, I’d say,” McAvoy added.

The veteran policemen crushed out their smokes, put their hats back on, and exited the locker room, not dwelling on a crime they’d never solve.

In the car, Constantino said that, in addition to the tip about the slots, he had learned there were two guys at the back door, one outside, one inside at the top of the stairs to the basement. To get the guy inside to let you in, you used a password, “Just like during prohibition,” the lieutenant said, “And I got a snitch who gave me the password.”

Brogan remembered the layout of the place. “There’s a stairway by the back door, pretty narrow, I think. Goes down to the cellar.”

“Right. The back door goes out onto an alley, and the alley leads out onto Chippewa one way, Tupper the other.”

When they got downtown, they drove around the block, watching for the lookouts. The people on the streets seemed like they were changing shifts. Hundreds of shoppers and business people were walking down the streets, pausing to look at the lit up displays in the department store windows, hauling packages onto orange and green streetcars and heading for their neighborhoods. Theatergoers, diners, drinkers, dancers, and bowlers were rolling in, looking to have fun under the neon lights. In the alley behind the bar, there was a guy with a pork pie hat on, leaning against the wall by the back door. They drove around some more, until a parking spot opened up on Tupper where they could see down the alley, at what the lookout was doing.

They sat for a while and watched a couple of middle-aged men exchange a few words and greetings with the doorkeeper, then pass inside.

“Where’s your newspaper?” Pat asked, grabbing the paper from the back seat.

“I was checking out the movies downtown. What, you think you can sneak up on ’em, pretend you’re reading the paper? That’s nuts . . .”

Brogan rifled through the paper’s sections until he got to the entertainment section and started reading.

“What the . . .”

“Here it is, just right,” he said, looking at his watch. “The Palace Burlesque. Around the corner. They’ve got a show that lets out in ten minutes. The Paramount’s got one letting out five minutes after that, and Shea’s . . . is just letting out now. There’ll be a crowd coming outta there onto Pearl, and we can slide through these streets with nobody noticing. Should we call Patrol and get a few more guys down here? These guys aren’t gonna be happy when we crash their party, el-tee.”

Constantino sat for a few seconds, looked at his watch, and thought. “Outstanding idea Brogan, but we don’t call anybody outside the squad until we make the pinch. Boss’s orders. There were a few parties we tried to crash like this; word got out once a call went in, real fast. Too many leaks at the precinct, too many leaks downtown. He says, ‘The only guys we trust is ourselves,’ so until we close the bag, we do it alone. Don’t worry, though, Paddy boy, the D and D boys, Dudek and Dowd, should be on their way. Know why we call ’em the D and D boys?”

“Because their names begin with D.”

“Nope. It stands for ‘death and destruction.’ They’ll be all the help we need for this clambake.”

“Okay, boss. How do we handle this?”

“I go to the back door and use the password. I may be a flatfoot, but I don’t dress like one,” he said, looking at Brogan’s clothes, “And I’m a paisan. That, and the password should fool ’em long enough for me to get through the door and into the basement. Dudek will follow me in and collar the lookouts at the door and the top of the stairs. You and Dowd come in the front, nice and easy, and work your way through the bar to the back; making sure nobody escapes that way. You two guys’ll go first, and I’ll give you about three minutes to get around front and inside. Then, I’ll slide down the alley with Dudek following.”

“Okay. Looks like it’s getting busy in there,” Pat said. A couple more men were passed by pork pie hat through the back door.

The lieutenant, looking at his watch, said “It’s almost eight; where the hell are those guys?”

They sat a few minutes, waiting for the crowd to exit the theaters. Brogan could feel his heart speed up and his mouth started to get dry, like before the shooting started over in Europe. What the hell was the name of that lieutenant who always lost his voice, couldn’t get a word out once the bullets flew? After trying to choke the words out, he’d just point, wave with his carbine, and run forward. It broke the tension, made the guys crack up a little the second or third time it happened, even when shells were going off.

Glancing over at Constantino, Brogan saw the thick overcoat over his chest rising up and down faster, too.

The show crowd started to come down the street, laughing and talking about the comics, gesturing about the shapes of the strippers, and firing up smokes.

“Shit!” Lou said, watching three more men enter, one slapping the lookout on the back. “We wait any longer and they’ll lock the door and not let anyone else in. Let’s go now. The D & D boys’ll be here any minute and know what to do. Go!”

Brogan went out the door, going upstream against the crowd and around the corner, to the front of the building.

Constantino waited a few moments, his foot tapping the car floor, then slid out the driver’s door, tugged his overcoat on tight by the belt, and went across the street to the mouth of the alley, slipping through the show crowd. The lookout was glancing back and forth to both ends of the alley, and Constantino approached the back door, a disarming smile for the lookout. Constantino moved towards him, then saw two guys come up the alley from the other direction on Chippewa, also headed for the back door. The lookout turned and gave a look of recognition to the two men, both in overcoats with the collars turned up, both taller than Lou. One glanced down the alley, spotting Lou’s natty attire then knitted his brow in recognition. Cop! The lookout had already opened the door and looked inside, nodded, and was ready to let the two guys go in, when Constantino put his head down and charged the three of them like a lineman breaking up a kickoff wedge. Arms outstretched, he grabbed the lookout with one hand, and with his head between the bodies of the other two, took them all down to the pavement, knocking his hat off onto the dirty cement. Jumping up, he spun around and saw a pair of hands pulling the door closed from the inside. Charging the door and yanking it wide open, Lou pulled the hands loose from it. He turned to see the bared teeth of the doorman, his face flushed with anger and growling, extended hands reaching for him.

Lou knocked his attacker’s right arm to the side with his left and threw the hardest punch he could with his right, connecting solidly with the man’s big teeth. Stunning him, Lou grabbed the doorman’s right shoulder with his left hand, pulling the man behind him onto the three guys in the alley, who were trying to get him from behind as he jumped inside. He saw the cellar stairway to his left, and there was heat, cigarette smoke, and noise coming at him from down there. Right in front of him was the barstool where the doorman with the big teeth had sat, up against a plaster wall with the wood lath exposed in spots and stacks of beer cases filled with empty bottles. To his right he looked into the bar, and despite the dimmed lights, he could see a lot of people, standing and sitting at the bar and at tables. Most of them were turned to him with What the hell is this? looks on their faces.

Ah shit, I better announce myself, before this gets real ugly, he thought, But I don’t know if we’re gonna make this work myself, Paddy Boy, and just where the hell are you, anyway? He heard glass shattering from the front.

Brogan moved easily through the show crowd, turning his shoulder and avoiding eye contact, and got right in front of the bar: a brick-faced front painted red, two big picture windows with beer signs, specials written on cardboard, and a neon one advertising cocktails in red and a stemmed glass in white. There was a stainless steel door with glass, and the foyer floor was set with tiny, black and white, octagonal tiles spelling out the address. Keeping his head down, Brogan pushed through the door and stood right in front of it inside, blocking the way out. He looked up, and slowly let out a breath as he sized up the place. Lights dimmed, red neon light framed the bar’s mirror on his left. Crowded, must be twenty, maybe thirty people, he thought. There were wooden tables on his right, people two deep at the bar in some places.

Two guys he spotted, right off, at the bar. They were two of the four guys who had knifed the Indian. One was talking to the bartender, and the other faced him, squinting at him in vague recollection through the cigarette smoke that came from the long Pall Mall that dangled from his mouth. He nudged the other guy. The other guy turned and the bartender looked up at Pat, as well.

This ain’t good, Brogan thought, reaching with his left hand for his badge, and feeling for his sap in the right overcoat pocket.

Just then the uproar caused by Constantino’s entrance started at the rear, and Brogan could dimly see several bodies in violent motion a good thirty feet away from him there.

Oh shit, he’s in trouble, he thought, I gotta get to him. To hell with that not needing help crap, he thought.

The guys at the bar slid off their stools with their hands reaching into their pockets. Gotta get a patrolman’s attention the old fashioned way. He looked to his right and saw a petite woman with silver-blonde hair piled up high, a strand of fake pearls hanging down on an oversized bosom, and glitter on her eyelids. She was sitting on a barstool with her legs crossed, smoking a cigarette in a holder. Stripper. There were three guys standing around her with their hands in their pockets, jolted from their reverie by the sudden violence. There was a midget with a big smile sitting on a stool next to the girl. Dressed in a white Union suit, he was smoking a cigar and enjoying a martini.

No empty chairs, gotta go with the dwarf ’s, Pat thought. He took his hands clear of his overcoat pockets and grabbed the little man’s stool. The midget’s eyes went wide, and he grabbed onto the seat with a death grip as Pat pitched him and the stool through the front window, onto the street. Pat then turned to the stunned crowd, pulled out his sap, and slugged the guy with the Pall Mall, as the thug pulled out a switchblade. Swinging back, he caught the other thug across the face and drove him back, raising an arm to shield his face.

XYZ

Patrolman Joe McAvoy rubbed his eyes as he stood outside the back of the Palace Theater on Pearl and adjusted his hat securely forward on his head, having finished a nap in the back row of the theater. He was there ostensibly checking for overcrowding, pickpockets, and perverts, as he would report, if anyone asked. The manager was swell with this deal, and if there was any trouble in the theater, he’d wake Big Joe. Joe looked at his watch and hoped the rest of the shift would go quietly. He planned to take the wife out on the town to Ma Broderick’s Club Deluxe on Seneca after he got off. Then, he heard a crash and saw a kid in his pajamas rolling on the street and moaning.

The crowd on the street stopped in their tracks. What the…, McAvoy thought. He pulled out his nightstick and ran to the front of the bar, where he spotted Scotty, the midget acrobat from the Palace, on the ground, the front window of the Talon Inn smashed out, and all hell breaking loose inside. He ran in and recognized Brogan, in civilian clothes, ready to swing his sap at two guys with knives, the toughs having rallied from the sap’s first blows. Before they could react to their new opponent, McAvoy grabbed his stick top and bottom and rammed it into Knife One’s stomach, and when he bent over from that blow, McAvoy slammed it over his head, swinging the billy club with both hands as hard as he could. When Knife Two hesitated, Brogan stepped in with the sap, and this time belted his target across the ear, sending him to the floor.

McAvoy swung his stick back and jabbed a man in the chest who was headed for the door and shouted, “Nobody move, or by God, I’ll give the lot of you an all mighty crack!”

Brogan rushed to the rear, scattering tables, bottles, and glasses to the sound of women’s shrieks, and spotted two guys holding Lou’s arms from behind.

Lou furiously kicked his powerful legs at a third guy coming at him from the front, and had another sprawled before him. “Goddamitt! I’m the police! You fuck up my clothes and I’ll kill you bastards, every one of you!”

Brogan grabbed the guy in front of Lou by the collar and yanked him backwards, slamming him down with his sap. Getting his feet beneath himself, Constantino swung the guy on his right arm forward towards Brogan, who backhanded him with the sap across the jaw, then got hold of the guy on his left and threw him at the cellar stairs, where people were scampering towards the back door.

As McAvoy pushed the would-be escapee back into the barroom with his stick, he stepped towards the front door to block it, then heard feet crunching on glass and saw motion behind his left shoulder. Ducking instinctively, he felt a beer bottle come down, catching his hat and just missing his head from behind. Crouching lower, McAvoy swung his stick around, catching his assailant right across both shins. Letting out a yelp, the bartender dropped backward into a sitting position and wrapped his arms around his legs moaning, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” and rocking back and forth.

McAvoy stood up, pulled out his long barreled revolver, and holding it at port arms, yelled, “All right, that’s enough!” Pointing his nightstick towards the back, he said “Everybody get back where I can see you!”

The stunned, the injured, and the frightened stepped away from the door, except for the blonde on the barstool, who hadn’t moved through the entire fracas and kept her smoldering cigarette, with holder, held high.

At the rear of the bar, Brogan and Constantino had also pulled out their revolvers and, trying to catch their breath, ordered the people coming up the stairs, back down. Kicking the guys they had wrestled and sapped, they forced them back into the bar while the sound of sirens approached, none too soon for the exhausted policemen.

The next policeman on the scene was Vicigliano, who slid on the broken glass through the front door. Once he saw the wreckage of the bar, three guys busted up on the floor and McAvoy with his gun out, he pushed his hat back on his head and said, “Forget making the late show at Broderick’s, Mac. Judge Chimera’s not gonna like this . . .”

As police car after police car pulled up to the scene, plainclothesmen and foot patrolmen ran up, the plainclothesmen gravitating towards the rear, and the uniformed men to the front of the bar. With the reinforcements having taken control of the situation, Brogan went to the front of the bar to identify his two assailants while Constantino went down into the cellar with Dudek, who had just arrived, while Dowd was throwing the three men in the alley against the wall, faces first.

It was hot, smoky, and crowded, with eleven men in their shirtsleeves in the cellar, and cases of beer and liquor stashed up against the stone walls everywhere. The only exit besides the stairs at the rear was a metal trap door at the front for bringing down cases and kegs.

Constantino could see a padlock hanging down from it. He grabbed Dudek’s shoulder and told him, “Search up front, we’re looking for slot machines, and maybe pinballs they got down here,” which got a quizzical glance from the blonde-haired policeman, who looked around the crowded cellar and saw nothing.

The shirt-sleeved men mumbled to each other quietly while Lou pulled cases away, rolled beer barrels, and pushed people out of his way, but found nothing.

Finally, Dudek came forward, saying, “Hey, Lieutenant, look at this,” holding a bundled up olive drab blanket. Disappointment showed on Constantino’s face when he first saw Dudek hadn’t found a machine, but he shoved a couple of the cellar’s occupants back while Dudek laid the blanket on the floor, opening it up to reveal playing cards and money.

“Hey, looks like we gotta game goin’ on here,” the lieutenant said in triumph, crouching down to examine the blanket’s contents. “Must be a couple of hundred bucks here. Big game, eh boys? We’re gonna have to run all you guys in,” he said, standing up. “The judge is not gonna like this at all.” Then, he made eye contact with one of the gamblers in the back of the crowd. Oh Jesus, he thought, it’s Uncle George. The family’s going to kill me if he gets arrested, and the elderly man stared right at him.

“Dudek, keep an eye on this a second,” he ordered, walking towards the stairs to consider his dilemma. When he got to the steps, Brogan was there, asking, “Whadja find?”

“Card game, Ziginat, bunch of old guys having big time fun. No machines, though.”

“Well, we gotta have something after we set off the atom bomb in here. How many guys we got?”

“Uh, look Pat, there’s a guy down here, my Uncle George, and,

XYZ

uh. . .”

“Lieutenant? Remember what Inspector Wachter said about ‘willful neglect?’” Pat was enjoying the turnabout with his supervisor. “He’s out front right now and wants to talk to us.”

Lou trotted up the stairs, where a patrolman silently handed Constantino his crumpled fedora, soiled and featherless. He cursed and tried to knock some of the dirt off of it. He said to Brogan, “I just got this hat the other day, around the corner,” nodding towards Court Street, “a brand new top of the line Peller & Mure hat.” He headed for the front with Brogan, contemplating what to say to his boss.

The rough stuff, okay, we can handle it, he thought, They started it. No slots, not yet anyway, maybe they’re upstairs. he gave himself a jolt of hope, thinking, And there’s the Ziginat game. Ah, shit, Ma’s gonna kill me for running Uncle George in.

As they got outside, they saw the bartender being loaded into the wagon and Vicigliano pulling McAvoy aside. “Mac, you might not want to do this,” the wiry patrolman advised.

“Bullshit,” the red faced McAvoy exclaimed. “He takes a swing at me, he’s in. Period.”

“Joe,” Vicigliano whispered, “This guy’s the judge’s cousin, and his favorite bartender besides. He’s just gonna turn him loose.”

“I don’t give a rat’s knuckle who this son of a bitch thinks he is, he’s goin’ in. And if I gotta stay in court after the end of watch, and miss going to Broderick’s, all these bastards can keep me company, no matter who they know,” McAvoy said, at which his cooler partner shook his head.

“Okay, I’ll call the wives and tell them the bad news,” Vicigliano said.