Black Hats (22 page)

He pointed a finger ceilingward. “Dixie’s still here.”

Tex raised a pencilled eyebrow. “That’s because she and Johnny are an item, and she’s probably best protected with all you big strong men around.” The latter had a lilt of sarcasm to it, but also the ring of truth.

“My understanding,” Wyatt said, “is Johnny’s treating your girls just fine. He’s kept them on the payroll, hasn’t he?”

“Yes, well that’s all fine and dandy, but that’s not Johnny being a philanthropist. Every girl on my line but Dixie is either in the
Follies
or
Scandals
or
Vanities
, you know—this is a second job for them; they come over here after curtain.”

“But not Dixie…”

Tex rolled her eyes. “Wyatt, you’ve seen her dance. You’ve heard her sing.”

“Well, uh…I’ve never heard her sing a solo.”

Tex batted the air. “Brother, Dixie’s always singing solo! Very few of the notes she hits have anything to do with what the other girls are singing.”

“Then why did you hire her?”

Tex raised a forefinger. “First, she’s one of the cutest kids in town, and no healthy male in the audience will give two diddly damns about her dancing or her singing as long as they can take in the gams and the cute bottom and that girl-next-door kisser.”

Wyatt shrugged; she had a point.

“Second,” Tex said, holding up another finger, a rude one, “I didn’t hire her—Johnny did. We held auditions, and I advised against hiring her, but Johnny had that look you boys get—you know, the one with the open mouth and the popped eyes, like any moment you may start drooling or bust out crying or both?”

Wyatt, wondering if he’d been looking at Tex’s bosom that way, asked, “Then Dixie doesn’t have a future in show business?”

“She has a big future, sleeping with guys like Johnny who hired her because they’re thinking below the belt. Look, a kid like Dix will marry the boss someday, and that’s the way of the world since the Big Guy booted Adam and Eve outa Eden. But the way things are going, she won’t marry Johnny, because Johnny is gonna wind up dead.”

“A possibility,” Wyatt said.

“And I don’t want my girls to wind up prematurely deceased, neither.”

“Can’t blame you.”

“Plus…I gotta level with you, Wyatt. I got offers. I got good offers to go other places and make a fool out of myself in public for good money.”

“Better money than Johnny’s giving you?”

“Yes. A lot better. You should see what Larry Fay’s waving at me.”

“Tex, I don’t want to see what any man is waving at you. Any- way, isn’t that guy a hoodlum?”

She blew out a burst of indignant air. “Ain’t speakeasies illegal?”

“Is that what this is about, Tex? Better offers you’re getting?”

Her chin crinkled with anger, and she jumped to her feet and leaned across the table and glared at him, so close he could barely keep her in focus. “Hell with
you
, Wyatt Earp!” She slapped the table. “I put this joint on the map! I deserve more than that! And I don’t mean money!”

Wyatt backed up, displaying palms of surrender. “Whoa there, Tex—you deserve the best money you can get for your talents. I don’t like seeing you drop Johnny when he’s down, but—”

She moved away from the table and crossed her arms over her bosom and now she was the one prowling the edge of the dance floor. “I’m
not
dropping Johnny! I just want to know you will do your utmost to protect my girls!” Then she looked right at him. “You and your big goddamned gun, Wyatt Earp! Will you
protect
us?”

“Sure,” he said.

All the air went out of her and she began to laugh, not a laugh that echoed, this time, rather a soft one that was the cousin of crying. She staggered over in a graceful dancer’s way and deposited herself on his lap.

She put her arms around his neck and she kissed him on the mouth, leaving half of her red lipstick behind.

“We had fun once, Wyatt,” she said.

“We did at that.”

“You weren’t half bad for an old boy.”

“You weren’t half bad for a young girl.”

“I wasn’t that young.”

“Well, I was that old. I was then, and I am now, an old married man…only when we got together, Tex, I was on the outs with Sadie.”

She raised her chin, gazing down at him. “I heard you just had a fight with her.”

“Johnny told you that?”

“I have my spies. You argued on the phone, the other day, didn’t you?”

“…Might have we did.”

She kissed him again. Her tongue flicked at his. She ground on his lap a little and got the desired result. He put his hands on her breasts and they were soft and pliant and yet firm.

“Let’s take the elevator up to your room,” she said.

“…No.”

“Why not? You’re married, not dead….”

He kissed her, just a little one, then took her by her waist and set her on her feet on the floor, and stood.

She looked him up and down and gave him a dirty smile. “That your gun, Wyatt Earp, or are you just glad to see me?”

“Either way,” he said, and waggled a scolding forefinger, “I don’t shoot unless I mean it. I
am
a married man, and anyway, I got my mind on other things. We better agree to be friends, here and now. I don’t need distracted.”

She shook her head. Hands on her hips again, she said, “You can’t blame a girl…a grown-woman, either…for trying.”

“I enjoyed the attempt. You might try again. Maybe I won’t feel so noble, once I got less on my mind, and been away from home long enough to work up a real appetite.”

That made her laugh, an echoing one this time, and she took his arm and they went upstairs where Johnny was in the dining room with the chef, a Greek named Nick, almost unrecognizable out of his kitchen whites and into a gray suit. Across the hall, in the front room, the assorted waiters and bouncers were playing poker for nickels and dimes, the air blue with cigarette smoke.

Nick the chef nodded, and smiled at Wyatt and Tex as they approached, then got up and left.

Wyatt held out Tex’s chair and she sat and then he did, next to Johnny, saying, “Ol’ Nick looks happy.”

“He should be. I doubled his salary.”

Wyatt said, “What do the boys in the service call it? Hazardous duty pay?”

Johnny, whose coat was off and the sleeves of his white, tieless shirt rolled up, looked haggard. He’d been working hard.

“He deserves the pay hike anyway,” Johnny said. “He’s damn good, got laid off at Rector’s.

Still…. You know, some joints rent out their restaurant action as a concession. Maybe I oughta consider that. Hatcheck, too.”

“Maybe,” Wyatt said. “But let’s start with my concession.”

“What’s that?” Then Johnny remembered, and said, “Room across the way. Yeah, we’re all set. It’s another two C’s for Lieutenant Harrigan.”

“Cheap at half the price,” Wyatt said.

Tex, not following any of it, asked, “What are you putting in, Wyatt? A couple two-dollar hookers?”

Wyatt rubbed his hands together, as if the restaurant were about to serve him up a meal. “I’m going to give these New York boys the rare honor of losing money to Wyatt Earp playing poker.”

“Strictly legit,” Johnny said, raising a forefinger.

“I won’t need to cheat the clientele you attract,” Wyatt said. “You’ll notice your staff ’s already turned the front room into a poker den.”

Texas said, “It’s your game, Wyatt?”

“Yes. Five card draw. I deal every hand, but I also play.”

“Brother, does that give the house the odds.”

“Nobody’s going to hold a gun to anybody’s head. Johnny’s bankrolling me, and he gets fifty percent of all action.”

Johnny said to Tex, “If it goes well, we may put in more, upstairs.”

Tex’s eyebrows went up. “Fine, but don’t you go giving away my girls’ dressing rooms! And if Wyatt suggests a concession where men get to pay to come
watch
them putting on and taking off, well, Johnny, you just take a pass on that one.”

Johnny laughed out loud at that and Wyatt smiled so hard he damned near showed some teeth.

“Monday night, then?” Tex asked the proprietor, rising. “Back in business?”

“Back in business,” Johnny said.

With that, Tex took her leave. Both Wyatt and Johnny watched her go, which was always a worthwhile expenditure of time.

Alone with Johnny, Wyatt asked, “You’ve got everything you need to re-open your speak with one small exception—liquor.”

“I know,” Johnny said, and sighed. Shook his head. “With Yale watching our every move, it’s a problem. If he backtracks to my liquor stockpile, I’m finished.”

“How did you handle it in the past?”

“I transported it personally. I didn’t even use any of my boys here from the club, not till I got back from the warehouse and needed them to quickly unload.”

“How did you transport the hootch?”

“I just loaded up the back seat of my flivver with cartons and threw a blanket over it. Once every week or so has done the trick, fine, so far.”

“This warehouse, Johnny—nobody knows but you where it is.”

“That’s right.”

“I notice you haven’t told me where it is.”

“Wyatt, if you want me to tell you, I’ll tell you.”

“It may come to that. Let me ask you something, Johnny—why don’t you use Klingman’s Dairy?”

A slow smile preceded Johnny shaking his head and laughing, gently. “Boy, you don’t miss much, do you, Wyatt?”

“More to the point, why do you use Droste when everybody else in the West Fifties uses Klingman?”

Johnny held up a hand, then got up and closed off the double doors of the dining room. He also checked the push-doors into the kitchen, appeared to be satisfied the room was secure, and returned to his chair at the table next to Wyatt.

Leaning in close, almost whispering, Johnny said, “Ronald Droste is a good friend and a good customer. Over on Warren Street, in the city’s dairy-wholesaling district, he’s a butter-and-egg wholesaler…”

“One of Tex’s ‘big butter-and-egg’ men.”

“Righto. He also has a dairy, and services several parts of Manhattan, but not this neighborhood. The reason he has one of his boys make a long run over here is that Ronald isn’t just delivering milk to the restaurant—he’s also delivering beer.”

“I thought you had a six-month supply of bottled beer.”

“I do. That’s what Ronald’s delivering, in dribs and drabs—he’s been good enough to give me space in a modern refrigerator he installed in his dairy’s basement, to keep eggs fresh.”

“Those wire-and-wood boxes have false bottoms?”

“That’s right.”

Wyatt chuckled. “So that’s what that milk kid meant by ‘starting regular deliveries back up’…. Johnny, is the warehouse you’re using, for your treasure trove of liquor, in that same part of town?”

Johnny reared back. “How the hell did you know that?”

“I didn’t. Figured you’d be somewhere on the West Side, and maybe this pal of yours, Droste, rents warehouse space to you, too.”

“Well…actually…yeah, he does. I kind of, well, lied when I told you I’d won the warehouse in that same poker game I got the booze in…sorry. My God, is it that obvious?…What’s on your mind, Wyatt?”

Wyatt fished a cigar out of his inside coat pocket, a nice quarter’s worth of smoke that he lit with a flourish and a smile.

After blowing a ring, he said, “Do you think your butter-and-egg buddy could spare me a milk wagon? And a horse?”

Twelve

THE HORSE-DRAWN MILK WAGON THAT MADE ITS leisurely journey from Warren Street to West Fifty-third, on this crisp, almost cold Spring morning, was unusual in several respects, only one of which might have been noticed, and only then if someone were really paying attention.

To the casual observer, what the clipping-clop-ping bay was pulling was just any other delivery wagon, although Droste Dairy had the most modern such in the city, a white metal body with red-and-black lettering and four equal-sized rubber tires. A glance might give the impression that a square squat truck had broken down and was being towed away by a horse; but the intended effect was to make the vehicle blend in better with the modern automobiles with which it mingled, though few were around at so early an hour, dawn having just broken over the concrete cliffs of the city.

Most milk wagons included one man and one horse, but here a second (apparent) dairy employee rode behind the man at the reins. That it was doubly manned was one of the unusual aspects of this particular milk wagon; another was that it wasn’t making any deliveries….

Of course, the vehicle might be on its way to a specific route, which was the case, although the “route” in question included but a single stop.

And the driver was older by decades than the typical milk-man, though few would look past the black cap and white jacket and black trousers. No one would guess the slumping figure, guiding the reins with casual authority, was Wyatt Earp.

This was not a buckboard affair, as the driver sat on a padded bench within the largely enclosed wagon; but, modern automobile-style wheels or not, the ride was old-fashioned rough, often over bouncy brick. What few autos were out this time of morning often pulled around with a honk of their horns, drivers frowning and sometimes cursing—nothing better told the tale, Wyatt thought, that the day of horse-drawn wagons in this automotive age was drawing to a close.

Wyatt had been a teamster at age sixteen, driving freight wagons between California and Arizona. In those days, he and his brother Virge had had their share of scrapes with Indian raiders and highway bandits. And hauling this liquor-laden milk wagon through an early-morning ghost town of a big city brought back old feelings, including that tingle of anxious excitement he’d learned to control, back then…and, oddly, relish.

Moving down main thoroughfares and side streets alike, guiding the bay—he’d asked for a young, strong steed and this one fit the bill—Wyatt was taken back to not just freight-hauling days, but to the years when he and his brothers would ride with shotguns up top of Wells Fargo stagecoaches, rattle-clattering through canyons, wondering who was watching from above, and did they wear feathers or a black hat with mask, and was an ambush in the offing…?