The Hour of the Cat (3 page)

Corrigan shook his head. “Buzz off,” he said and went back to filing his story.

“Close enough. Wherever ‘the snows of yesteryear' may be, they aren't here. Come, Dunne, why don't we retire to McGloin's for some lunch? It's a rule of mine to always work on an empty stomach.”

 

 

“Your tab is ready to be settled. Goin' on three weeks.” McGloin wiped the bar with a tattered gray rag. Except for an old man sitting in the corner, who was either blind or had his eyes closed, the barroom was deserted.

“I'll meet my obligation Thursday, when my wages are paid,” the Professor said.

“Be nothin' in your glass 'less you do.” McGloin poured two shots and put a beer next to each. The Professor slouched close to the bar, lifted the shot with a practiced swoop and threw the whiskey in his mouth before his shaking hand spilled a drop. He shivered slightly. “Encore,” he said. McGloin poured another and walked away.

“I began as a patron here in the reign of McGloin the Elder,” the Professor said, “a man whose great girth was equaled by his conviviality. The shrunken stature and squeezed sentiments of the present proprietor make me wonder how he could have been sired by such a colossus.”

Dunne took a sip of beer, left the whiskey untouched. “You were in the room at the Commodore?”

“There hasn't been a noteworthy murder in this borough since the mayoralty of William Gaynor where I haven't been on the scene. I wrote the Babcock story on the train to Park Row, filed it at the
Standard
's office and was back to the Shack whilst my hapless competitors still lumbered to the scene. Been at this as long as I, you develop a certain knack.”

The Professor grasped Dunne's shot glass with a hand almost free of tremors. “I'll find a use for this if you can't.”

“Be my guest.”

He downed the whiskey and wiped his mustache with steady fingers. “The widow Babcock invoked your name with the police. A client, I presume?”

“Was.”

“Our own beloved Chief of Homicide, Inspector Robert I. Brannigan, was there to take credit for the arrest. A blowhard who exaggerates his own exploits and expropriates those of others, often, in Melville's phrase, ‘spending funds of reminiscences not his own.' He uses Corrigan as his personal press agent but knows better than to expect such sycophantic treatment from me.”

McGloin filled their glasses. Dunne said, “I had this tied up. Now, I'm in a hole. Except for a retainer, I haven't been paid.”

“I'll let you know what I hear from the sinkholes of matrimonial misconduct. Always played it on the up and up with me when you were a cop. One of the few.” He held his glass high in an unwavering grip. “To better times.”

McGloin poured another round. The Professor began a recitation of murders that echoed the circumstances of the Babcock case: a familiar burrow of whiskey, history, and stories in which to bury his head. After a few minutes, Dunne took his leave and stepped outside. A green-and-white NYPD patrol car moved slowly up the street. Brannigan was in the passenger seat, head turned to the side studying a row of storefronts. For a moment Dunne imagined that the sight might be a mirage, a mental mix of McGloin's 100-proof rotgut and undiluted sunlight. The instant he saw it wasn't, he ducked around the corner onto Broome, into the small Italian church nestled unobtrusively in the middle of the block.

The incense-sweetened church was packed with statues of saints. Most looked as though they were relatives of the little ladies in black who knelt before them fingering their rosary beads. Dunne walked halfway down the aisle, to a semi-darkened niche that held a statue of St. Anthony, who cradled the Christ child in one arm and held out a loaf of bread with the other. He crouched on the kneeler before the statue, took the change from his pocket, and dropped it in the offering box. He cringed at the racket it made. He lit a candle and listened for the tread of cops' shoes on the linoleum floor. There was only the low rattle of rosary beads, murmur of
Ave
s.

The repose of the soul of Mr. Babcock? Eternal damnation for his trigger-happy wife? An increase in marital infidelities among the well-to-do? The divorce business had suffered from the Depression along with everything else. Pray for a quick and not-so-happy death for Inspector Brannigan? God hears every prayer uttered with a sincere heart, his mother always told him. In the trenches, all the Catholic doughboys prayed or made some gesture of divine petition, rosaries around their necks, Miraculous Medals, holy cards in their helmets, prayer books in their pockets. Some filled canteens with holy water. They got hit the same as Protestants, Jews, and agnostics. Francis Sheehy was as devout as you could get, so quiet and kind no one mocked him when he knelt each night to say his prayers. He had his legs blown off and lay bleeding to death, in the same smoking hole as Major Donovan, crying,
O shit, O shit!
A prayer of sorts.

Hail Mary
, Dunne prayed. The words came automatically, without having to think about them.
Full of grace
. He prayed for his father. Big Mike Dunne, lungs full of phlegm, half a skeleton before he died.
The Lord is with thee.
And Francis Sheehy, late of East 11th Street, now a permanent resident of a military cemetery in France.
Blessed art thou amongst women
. His mother. Knocked down by a delivery wagon on Houston Street. Broke her leg. Died the next week from a blood clot. Maura, his sister, wherever she was.
The fruit of thy womb.
And Jack, his kid brother, dead from diphtheria within days of his mother.
Now and at the hour of our death.

St. Anthony sported a faintly sympathetic smile. It reminded Dunne of the kind a bartender (although not McGloin) might wear when he tried to look interested in a story he's heard a thousand times before.
“Blessed are they who cry in their beer for they shall be comforted.”
How'd the Professor once put it?
“The short and simple annals of the poor.”
His line or someone else's? Whose ever line it was, they were annals to avoid. Aunt Margaret took in Dunne and his sister Maura after their mother died. She already had eight of her own and a recently absconded husband, but she gave it a go. At first, Maura cried a lot but after a week or so she stopped. A week later she went silent as a mute. Nobody could get a word out of her. A month after that, she had her first fit. Rolled on the floor, eyes wide and fearful, pupils back so far, his Aunt Margaret said, you could barely see them. Diagnosed as a “feebleminded epileptic,” she was sent to the State Hospital in Buffalo and, after her discharge, never heard from again.

Aunt Margaret's twins had mastered the art of stealing fruit from pushcarts, an art in which they were schooling their cousin Fintan Dunne when he got nabbed and sent to the Catholic Protectory in the Bronx. “You're in for it now,” the twins whispered to Dunne as they leaned across the railing in court to bid their cousin goodbye. “Nobody ever comes back from the Bronx.”

First night there, kid in the next bed coughed till dawn. A veteran of Mount Loretto orphanage on Staten Island, he had his own craps, handmade in the orphanage's machine shop, expertly weighted, nothing left to chance. He'd been in and out of orphanages since he was five, when his old man walked out on the wife and five brats and headed to points unknown. “I got 'em fooled,” he said to Fintan Dunne that first morning when his coughing subsided. “They think I'm twelve and I'm only nine.”

Fintan Dunne stood with the kid beneath a statue of the Virgin, blue cloak draped over a white gown, her head encircled by a halo of stars, her foot crushing the head of a serpent. The kid shot a stream of spit through the gap in his front teeth onto the bed of marigolds around the pedestal. His eyes were as blue as the Virgin's cape; hooded eyes, lids half drawn, eyes that could have been eight or eighteen or eighty, nothing to give away their age: a timeless menace, ancient as the stars. “My name is Vinnie Coll,” he said. “Don't fuck with me.”

“Cowboy Coll” is the name they put on him because of his fierce, lonesome style. The moniker stuck through his early days as an independent gunman, until he earned himself the label of “Mad Dog,” shooting five kids and killing one in an attempt to rub out an associate of Dutch Schultz. He grabbed Owney Madden's partner and held him for ransom, inventing the business of gang-land kidnappings, which soon grew into an industry. They said he'd learned his trade as a gunman for the IRA. But he was a Protectory brat who'd never been east of Rockaway. Met his end in a phone booth in the London Pharmacy on 23rd Street, two bursts of a machine gun that blew his stomach open and let his intestines ooze across the floor: Mad Dog Coll dead at the ripe old age of twenty-three. There was no doubt he was fingered, maybe by a friend, maybe by the cops.

Brannigan “happened” to be nearby. He had that kind of luck, especially during the Tommy-gun era, the glory days of Prohibition, twilight time for the squabbling gangs of guineas, micks, and kikes, gangs galore, the Candy Kids, the Bon-Bon Brigade, the Prince Street Boys, the Laughing Gang. They raided each other's garages, clubhouses, card games, fought for control of booze, bets, girls, muscled in on legit businesses, clothes, coal, garbage, kosher chickens. Cowboys like Coll were admired and in demand. But wiser, cooler heads could see the future and it didn't include penny-ante operations, crazed gunmen, and shoot-'em-ups in the streets. Consolidation was the order of the day. Organization. Syndication. Get with it. Or get lost. Or find yourself dead.

The Police eventually claimed they brought the mayhem under control. Brave boys in blue and their Gunman's Squad, with scores of heavily armed, ask-no-questions cops, supposedly busted up the gangs and returned order to the streets. That's what they told the papers, and what the papers printed, but all the while the Syndicate worked with quiet purpose to impose order and end the warfare and the unwanted attention it brought. The independent gunsels joined the fold or followed Coll to the grave. Force was used selectively; the demand for sex, liquor, drugs satisfied with efficiency; public opinion served, not outraged. Lawyers and accountants occupied the Syndicate's front offices. Police and politicians joined the payroll. Reporters, too.

The day finally came when a cadre of incorruptible prosecutors and investigators busted up the rackets. The Syndicate found itself under the scrutiny of the government and was punished for its success in replacing chaos with order. But while the Syndicate had the tide of history on its side, there were plenty of those with the right mix of ambition and greed to make sure they were aboard for the ride. Among the cops, Brannigan was anointed the fair-haired boy.

 

 

A small bell tinkled. An altar boy emerged from the sacristy. Behind him, the priest in white vestments carried the veiled chalice. The clatter of rosaries against the wooden pews subsided. The server knelt beside the priest at the bottom of the three steps before the altar.

They began the ancient exchange.

Dunne walked back to where he'd been sitting, lay his forearm on the pew in front, and rested his head on it. His knees were stiff from kneeling. Out of practice. “Offer it up for the poor souls in purgatory,” had been his mother's response to every emotional or physical complaint. The Church's cure-all for everything from colds to cancer. He decided to offer up the ache in his joints for himself, as penance for wasting the whole morning staking out Roberta Dee's place in Brooklyn.

Babcock visited Roberta Dee with such regularity it made shadowing him about as complicated as a shoeshine. She must have had the whole performance choreographed
, one, two, clothes off, three, four, once more, five, six, we've had our kicks.
The woman was a pro, the kind who apparently had Babcock running back and forth according to her clock, which made it seem unlikely he'd be bothering with a teenage stenographer. Mrs. Babcock was right about that much: her husband couldn't keep his fly buttoned. She made sure the SOB was DOA. Too bad it had to be today.

That morning, after leaving the BMT at Grand Army Plaza, Dunne had gone directly to Roberta Dee's and sat across the street. Babcock's routine never seemed to change. He always looked both ways as he left the taxi and entered her building, as though he might see someone he knew. In Newport or Palm Beach, maybe. In Brooklyn, not likely.

Fifteen minutes passed, still no Babcock. A nattily dressed gent hurried out of the building. Late for something. An appointment. A client. Maybe a girl of his own. The doorman stepped into the street and blew his whistle. The flummoxed pigeons loitering near Dunne's bench rose into the sky. The gent stood under the canopy that stretched from the building to the curb. Dunne had seen him before. A garden-variety specimen of the type that had taken root in the buildings this side of Prospect Park, a doctor maybe or a lawyer in the service of the Brooklyn Democratic machine. Two bull markets that never went away: pain and politics. The perennials.

The doorman blew again, emptying his lungs into the whistle. A cab appeared and screeched to a halt. Dunne half-expected Babcock to pop out. But when the doorman swung the door open, it was empty. The gent slipped him a coin, entered the cab and sped away. Dunne tossed the newspapers he was carrying into a trashcan and crossed the street. Was it possible Babcock had caught on to being tailed? More probable that he was just delayed or forced to change his plans.

Dunne unfolded the wrapper from a stick of chewing gum and stuck the gum in his mouth. He took a bill from his pocket that he'd already folded into a square, put the wrapper around it, and handed it to the doorman. “Can you get rid of this for me?”