When the Sacred Ginmill Closes

Page 26

"The hot-car sheet. It takes a while for a car to get on it, though."
"Maybe they planned in advance. Stole the car a week ago, took it in for a tune-up. What else could they get charged with? Desecrating a church?"
"Oh, Jesus," I said.
"What's the matter?"
"That church."
"What about it?"
"Stop the car, Skip."
"Huh?"
"Stop the car a minute, all right?"
"You serious?" He looked at me. "You're serious," he said, and pulled over to the curb.
I closed my eyes, tried to bring things into focus. "The church," I said. "What kind of church was it, did you happen to notice?"
"They all look the same to me. It was, I don't know, brick, stone. What the hell's the difference?"
"I mean was it Protestant or Catholic or what?"
"How would I know which it was?"
"There was one of those signs out in front. A glass case with white letters on a black background, tells you when the services are and what the sermon's going to be about."
"It's always about the same thing. Figure out all the things you like to do and don't do 'em."
I could close my eyes and see the damn thing but I couldn't bring the letters into focus. "You didn't notice?"
"I had things on my mind, Matt. What fucking difference does it make?"
"Was it Catholic?"
"I don't know. You got something for or against Catholic? The nuns hit you with a ruler when you were a kid? 'Impure thoughts, wham, take that, you little bastard.' You gonna be a while, Matt?" I had my eyes closed, wrestling with memory, and I didn't answer him. "Because there's a liquor store across the street, and much as I hate to spend money in Brooklyn, I think I'm gonna. All right?"
"Sure."
"You can pretend it's altar wine," he said.
* * *
HE returned with a pint of Teacher's in a brown bag. He cracked the seal and uncapped the bottle without removing it from the bag, took a drink and gave it to me. I held on to it for a moment, then drank.
"We can go now," I said.
"Go where?"
"Home. Back to Manhattan."
"We don't have to go back, make a novena or something?"
"The church was some kind of Lutheran."
"And that means we can go to Manhattan."
"Right."
He started the engine, pulled out from the curb. He reached out a hand and I gave him the bottle and he drank and handed it back to me.
He said, "I don't mean to pry, Detective Scudder, but-"
"But what was all that about?"
"Yeah."
"I feel silly mentioning it," I said. "It's something Tillary told me a few days ago. I don't even know if it was true, but it was supposed to be a church in Bensonhurst."
"A Catholic one."
"It would have to be," I said, and I told him the story Tommy had told me, of the two kids who'd burglarized a Mafia capo's mother's church, and what had supposedly been done to them in return.
Skip said, "Really? It really happened?"
"I don't know. Neither does Tommy. Stories get around."
"Hung on meat hooks and fucking skinned alive-"
"It might appeal to Tutto. They call him Dom the Butcher. I think he's got interests in the wholesale meat industry."
"Jesus. If that was his church-"
"His mother's church."
"Whatever. You gonna hang on to that bottle until the glass melts?"
"Sorry."
"If that was his church, or his mother's church, or whatever it was-"
"I wouldn't want him to know we were there tonight while it got shot up. Not that it's the same as burglarizing the premises, but he still might take it personally. Who knows how he'd react?"
"Jesus."
"But it was definitely a Protestant church and his mother would go to a Catholic one. Even if it was Catholic, there's probably four or five Catholic churches in Bensonhurst. Maybe more, I don't know."
"Someday we'll have to count 'em." He drew on his cigarette, coughed, tossed it out the window. "Why would anybody do something like that?"
"You mean-"
"I mean hang two kids up and fucking skin 'em, that's what I mean. Why would somebody do that, two kids that all they did was stole some shit from a church?"
"I don't know," I said. "I know why Tutto probably thought he was doing it."
"Why?"
"To teach them a lesson."
He thought about this. "Well, I bet it worked," he said. "I bet those little fuckers never rob another church."
Chapter 18
By the time we were back home the pint of Teacher's was empty. I hadn't had much of it. Skip had kept chipping away at it, finally flipping it empty into the backseat. I guess he only threw them out the window on the other side of the river.
We hadn't talked much since our conversation about Dom the Butcher. The booze was working in him now, showing up a little in his driving. He ran a couple of lights and took a corner a little wildly, but we didn't hit anything or anybody. Nor did we get flagged down by a traffic cop. You just about had to run down a nun to get cited for a moving violation that year in the city of New York.
When we'd pulled up in front of Miss Kitty's he leaned forward and put his elbows on the steering wheel. "Well, the joint's still open," he said. "I got a guy working the bar tonight, he probably took as much off of us as the boys from Bensonhurst. Come on in, I want to put the books away."
In his office, I suggested he might want to put the ledger in the safe. He gave me a look and worked the combination dial. "Just overnight," he said. "Tomorrow all this shit goes down a couple different incinerators. No more honest books. All you do is leave yourself wide open."
He put the books in the safe and started to close the big door. I put a hand on his arm to stop him. "Maybe this should go in there," I said, and handed him the.45.
"Forgot about that," he said. "It doesn't go in the safe. You gonna tell a holdup man, 'Please excuse me a minute, I wanna get the gun from the safe, blow your head off'? We keep it behind the bar." He took it from me, then looked around for an inconspicuous way to carry it. There was a white paper bag on the desk, stained from the takeout coffee and sandwiches it had once held, and Skip put the gun in it.
"There," he said. He closed the safe, spun the dial, tugged the handle to make sure the lock had engaged. "Perfect," he said. "Now let me buy you a drink."
We went out front and he slipped behind the bar, pouring out two drinks of the same scotch we'd had in the car. "Maybe you wanted bourbon," he said. "I didn't think, didn't think when I bought the bottle, either."
"This is fine."
"You sure?" He moved off, put the gun somewhere behind the bar. The bartender he had on that night came over and wanted a conference with him, and they walked off and spoke for a few minutes. Skip came back and finished his drink and said he wanted to put his car in the parking garage before somebody towed it, but he'd be back in a few minutes. Or I could come along for the ride.
"You go ahead," I told him. "I may go on home myself."
"Make it an early night?"
"Not the worst idea."
"No. Well, if you're gone when I get back I'll see you tomorrow."
I didn't go right home. I hit a few joints first. Not Armstrong's. I didn't want any conversation. I didn't want to get drunk, either. I'm not sure what I wanted.
I was leaving Polly's Cage when I saw a car that looked like Tommy's Buick cruising west on Fifty-seventh. I didn't get a good look at the person behind the wheel. I walked along after it, saw it pull into a parking space in the middle of the next block. By the time the driver got out and locked up, I was close enough to see it was Tommy. He was wearing a jacket and tie and carrying two packages. One, fan-shaped, looked to be flowers.
I watched him enter Carolyn's building.
For some reason I went and stood on the sidewalk across the street from her building. I picked out her window, or what I decided was her window. Her light was on. I stood there for quite a while, until the light went out.
I went to a pay phone, called 411. The Information operator reported to me that she did indeed have a listing for Carolyn Cheatham at the address I gave her, but that the number was unpublished. I called again, got a different operator, and went through the procedure a policeman uses to get an unlisted number. I got it and wrote it down in my notebook, on the same page with my witless little sketch of ears. They were, I thought, rather unremarkable ears. They would pass in a crowd.
I put a dime in the phone and dialed the number. It rang four or five times, and then she picked it up and said hello. I don't know what the hell else I expected. I didn't say anything, and she said hello a second time and broke the connection.
I felt tight across my upper back and in my shoulders. I wanted to go to some bucket of blood and get in a fight. I wanted to hit something.
Where had the anger come from? I wanted to go up there and pull him off of her and hit him in the face, but what the hell had he done? A few days ago I'd been angry with him for neglecting her. Now I was enraged because he wasn't.
Was I jealous? But why? I wasn't interested in her.
Crazy.
I went and looked at her window again. The light was still out. An ambulance from Roosevelt sped down Ninth Avenue, its siren wailing. Rock music blared on the radio of a car waiting for the light to change. Then the car sped away and the ambulance siren faded in the distance, and for a moment the city seemed utterly silent. Then the silence, too, was gone, as I became aware again of all the background noises that never completely disappear.
That song Keegan had played for me came into my mind. Not all of it. I couldn't get the tune right and I only remembered snatches of the lyrics. Something about a night of poetry and poses. Well, you could call it that. And knowing you're all alone when the sacred ginmill closes.
I picked up some beer on the way home.
Chapter 19
The Sixth Precinct is housed on West Tenth Street between Bleecker and Hudson, in the Village. Years before, when I did a tour of duty there, it was in an ornate structure farther west on Charles Street. That building has since been converted into co-op apartments, and named the Gendarme.
The new station house is an ugly modern building that no one will ever carve into apartments. I was there a little before noon on Tuesday and I walked past the front desk and straight to Eddie Koehler's office. I didn't have to ask, I knew where it was.
He looked up from a report he'd been reading, blinked at me. "Thing about that door," he said, "anybody could walk through it."
"You're looking good, Eddie."
"Well, you know. Clean living. Sit down, Matt."
I sat, and we talked a little. We went back a long ways, Eddie and I. When the small talk faded, he said, "You just happened to be in the neighborhood, right?"
"I just thought of you and figured you needed a new hat."
"In this weather?"
"Maybe a panama. Nice straw, keep the sun off."