Dollface: A Novel of the Roaring Twenties (36 page)

I’d been waiting for nearly ten minutes when a familiar voice coming from behind said, “I told you, I have my limits.”

I turned around and there was Warren Steel, puffing on his pipe. He was standing next to a short woman who was broad across the shoulders and had the ruddy complexion of a fisherman who’d been at sea too long. I had no idea how he’d managed to find me.

“You decide you’re done with the liquor trade and think it’s all right to leave me with a warehouse full of whiskey? That doesn’t make for good business, Miss Abramowitz.”

“I’m working on it.”

A streetcar passed before us, the conductor clanking the bell.

“What is there to work on?” he asked. “I’m getting tired of hearing that.” He and the woman took a step forward that drove me one step backward.

“I just don’t have the money right now. I have about half, but—”

“I’m not looking for half the money.” Warren and the woman advanced another step while I retreated from the sidewalk into the alley. “I don’t do business this way. I didn’t think you did, either.” He looked at his companion and nodded.

I didn’t see the woman’s hand come up, but I sure did feel it. She knocked me backward. I saw a flash of white and before I could steady myself, she came at me again, tore the pocketbook from my hand and cracked me across the jaw with it. I tasted blood as it filled my mouth. She charged at me again with a force that knocked the wind out of me as she pushed me into a row of garbage cans. I doubled over, lost my balance, and landed on my side. The putrid smell of spoiled food filled my nostrils as more blood trickled from my lip. I started to get up and she was on me, pounding me with her fists as a string of bloody spittle spewed from my mouth. She hit me again and again. I cowered with my hands up, trying to shield my face. I didn’t even put up a fight.

Before they turned and left me, Warren said, “I’ll expect my money by the end of the day tomorrow.”

My lip was sliced open and my knees and shoulder throbbed from where I’d hit the ground. A pigeon hobbled at my side, cooing. Pages of the magazine I’d been carrying lay scattered about the alley. Everything in my pocketbook had spilled out onto the ground. My lipstick, hairbrush, and compact were lying in a pool of slop. I crawled over to my pocketbook lying next to a coal chute with the grate unhinged. Warren hadn’t even bothered with the few dollars I’d had tucked inside. Staggering toward the curb, I found a taxicab and headed home.

The cabbie turned around and looked at me. “Miss, you okay? You sure you don’t need to go to the hospital?”

“I’m fine,” I said, trying to wipe away the blood running down my chin. “Just take me home.”

The housekeeper gasped when I stepped inside. She helped me upstairs, helped me clean off the blood. I looked in the mirror and saw that the bruises, red and plum colored, were already coming up. She worried that I needed stitches and telephoned Shep down at Schofield’s. He rushed home and found me in bed, holding Hannah in my arms.

“What happened?” His expression turned from concern to alarm when he bent over and got a closer look.

Hannah pointed to the ice pack on my lip. “Mama got boo-booed.”

“Yeah, she sure did.” He leaned over and scooped her up in his arms. “Why don’t you go downstairs and see what Daddy brought you and let me talk to Mama.” He set Hannah down and nodded to the housekeeper.

Once they were out of the room, Shep closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed, brushing the hair from my eyes. “What in the hell happened?”

I lowered my eyes and studied the backs of my hands. From where I sat now, I realized what a foolish move this had been. I wasn’t cut out to be a bootlegger. And now that I’d gotten in over my head, I was terrified to tell Shep I needed him to step in and save me.

Shep leaned in closer, gently lifting my chin, forcing me to look him in the eye. “Who did this to you?”

“Oh, Shep.” I began to cry. “I’m in trouble.”

•   •   •

T
hat night, while the doctor came to the house to put a few stitches in my lip, Shep and Squeak headed for Milwaukee to pay Warren Steel a visit. Evelyn came and stayed with me. Even though the doctor gave me something to make me sleep, I fought it all the way. My mind was so keyed up, I wasn’t even groggy. Not even a bottle of whiskey could have put me out.

“You did the right thing,” Evelyn said, lighting a cigarette off the one she was about to rub out. Dark circles had settled beneath her eyes and her skin had a dull, grayish cast to it. Everyone mistook that haggard guise of hers for grief.

She’d wasted no time finding a new place to live, a small efficiency with a Murphy bed and one tiny window with a cracked pane of glass. She’d moved out of the apartment she’d once shared with Izzy, and closing the door, she put what she’d done behind her. Evelyn had been questioned so many times by the guys and then the police that she had her story down. It was like the lie you tell yourself over and over again until it becomes your new truth. I knew that, because I’d been doing the same thing.

For two girls who had grown up discussing everything from first kisses to our monthly cycles, we never talked about that night with Izzy. She never mentioned Tony Liolli either. We had swept the entire incident from our minds, but there was no denying what she’d done, what I had done. You couldn’t do something like that without being changed forever. I knew there would be payback for this somewhere down the line. There was no way Evelyn and I could walk away from this scot-free. Life didn’t work that way. I still closed my eyes at night and saw Tony with that cleaver. I could still smell the blood. I still saw Izzy’s mouth gaping wide for his last gasp of breath, one eye shut, the other open, watching the whole thing.

By the time Shep got home, Evelyn had dozed off on the divan, but I was still wide awake.

“What happened?” I asked. “What did you say to him?”

Shep removed his hat and set it on the hook on the back of the closet door. I couldn’t read him. Couldn’t tell if he was angry, tired, or just disappointed in me. At least he knew that no one else had been providing for us while he was away, though that didn’t change the fact that I’d had an affair with Tony.

“A debt is a debt,” Shep said finally. “And yes, I could have bartered with him, could have sold the liquor for him myself, but thank God, I don’t need to do business with a
shtoonk
like Warren Steel.” Shep went over to the bar and poured himself a drink. “But I’ve never chiseled a man in my life and I wasn’t about to start now. So I paid him his five grand.”

“Oh, Shep, I’m sorry.” He’d barely been home for a month and I figured that I’d just taken a big bite out of whatever money he’d been able to make since. And then some. “How did you even manage to get hold of that kind of money?”

“Let’s just say I’d rather owe Vinny a few bucks than that putz Warren Steel.”

Evelyn began to stir, her eyes fluttering open.

“I squared away with your buddy Felix, too.”

Evelyn was awake now, sitting up, reaching for a cigarette.

Shep came back over and sat down. “Now would be an excellent time to tell me if there’s anything else you ladies have been up to while I was away.”

I couldn’t look at Evelyn. I just shook my head.

“So it’s over?” asked Evelyn.

“For now.” Shep swept his hair off his forehead, exposing his widow’s peak. “Tomorrow Squeak and Knuckles are going to sit down with Mr. Steel and teach him a thing or two about how to treat a woman.” Shep raised his glass and took a sip. “And from now on, ladies, you two are officially out of business.”

RETURN TO MOUNT CARMEL

T
he next day I got a frantic telephone call from Basha. I’d just walked into the house and she was jabbering a mile a minute.

“Slow down, Basha.” I held the receiver to my ear while I worked my way out of my coat. My lip was still swollen and it hurt to talk. “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

“They got him. They shot him.”

My thoughts went straight to Izzy. My heart took off, pounding away.
I knew we’d get caught. I knew it!

“Cecelia’s a mess.”

“Cecelia?”

“Didn’t you hear what I said? They got him. They shot Vinny. . . .”

Vinny!
I nearly dropped the phone. Everything in the room turned hazy and dark. Not another one. Each man we lost brought the danger that much closer to home. If they could kill Vinny, was Shep next?

I still couldn’t believe it. Vincent “Schemer” Drucci, gunned down and dead at the age of twenty-nine. He was killed in broad daylight at Wacker and Clark. As it turned out, Capone and the South Siders weren’t responsible. Not directly anyway. This time the bullets belonged to a Sergeant Dan Healy. But no one doubted that Capone had paid him plenty to pull the trigger.

I was numb for days. It was as if I were only going through the motions when we attended the wake and then the funeral.

“Poor Cecelia,” I said, as we girls rode in the back of the limo out to Mount Carmel for the funeral. The fellas were in the car ahead of ours.

“We’re losing all our men,” said Basha.

Dora nodded. “Doesn’t it feel like we were just here?”

“I had to buy a new black dress just for this one,” said Basha.

I took a long draw off my cigarette. The violence wasn’t just getting to the North Siders. The whole city was on edge, bracing itself for the next round of gunfire. Some of Capone’s men had set off a bomb at a speakeasy on State and Division, not far from our house. The week before, they shot up a barbershop because Capone thought Bugs was inside, getting a haircut and a shave. What was next? Were tommy guns going to turn up in the dance halls, in restaurants and movie houses? I was afraid to pick up a newspaper anymore. It seemed like somebody we knew was either washing up in Lake Michigan or found in an alley or the trunk of a car.

I opened my compact and looked at my bruises. Even though they were fading, hidden beneath my makeup, I didn’t look like myself. I had too many different faces: wife, mother, accessory to murder, former bootlegger, former adulterer. I didn’t know which one was the real me anymore.

“It’s a shame,” Evelyn said, gazing out the window at rows and rows of headstones. “Vinny was a good guy.”

“They were all good guys,” said Dora. “Even Hymie. When he liked you, he was good to you.”

I nodded, detached from it all. I’d seen too much blood lately, been to too many burials, told too many widows and gun molls how sorry I was. At times I thought I was losing the ability to feel anything at all. Everything was unraveling. I didn’t recognize my own life anymore.

“I don’t know how Schofield’s can keep up with these funerals. Did you see all those flowers back at the chapel?” said Basha. “I heard they cost something like thirty grand.”

When we arrived at Mount Carmel there were two rows of limos and cars stretching a quarter mile down the drive, leading from the cemetery back to the main street. It was a sunny afternoon and breezy. Someone had dropped a handkerchief and I watched it get carried off by a wind gust, cartwheeling over the grounds.

Drucci’s funeral had plenty of fanfare. Thousands of people turned out to pay their final respects: friends, relatives, city officials, policemen, and every crime reporter in town. Drucci had served in the navy during World War I, and the police figured since one of their own had done the shooting, it was only proper to give the Schemer a twenty-one-gun salute.

I never got used to the idea that the very people who killed you, or wished they had, turned up at your funeral. The tent where Drucci’s casket sat waiting to be lowered into his grave was reserved for family, close friends and gang members, with everyone else standing outside, looking on.

As I stepped inside the tent with Shep I glanced around; one dark suit butted up against another. And there, just six feet away from us, on the opposite side of Drucci’s casket, stood a band of South Side Gang members: Al Capone, “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, Antonio Lombardo, and next to him, Tony Liolli.

Tony saw me and when our eyes locked, all the blood rushed to my head. My heart took off, beating fast. I never expected to see him again after that day in his hotel room. And I never expected that the three of us—Tony, Shep and me—would ever be in the same place at the same time, breathing the same air. It shook me. I wasn’t a good enough actress to pull this off.

While the priest conducted the service, Cecelia sobbed, breaking down in Bugs’s arms, shrieking, “Oh, no, not my Vinny—they killed my Vinny!” It took both Bugs and Knuckles to hold her up during the ceremony.

She reminded me of Viola O’Banion, so brokenhearted at Dion’s burial that she had to be carried away from his grave at the end. We could see Dion’s tombstone from where we stood. It was the tallest monument in the cemetery and came to a sharp point at the top. It was near Hymie Weiss’s mausoleum.

Cecelia let out another agonized sob and I looked away. But I couldn’t keep from glancing back at Tony, just to see if he was still looking at me. He was.

All through Drucci’s burial, Tony Liolli and I stole glances, but I couldn’t tell if he was still angry with me for walking out of his hotel room, or if he still wanted me.

Shep reached for my hand and laced his fingers through mine, squeezing tight. Tony looked away. He had me feeling sorry for him and that made me angry. I knew it was painful for him to see me with Shep, but Tony had had his chance. He chose to walk out on me when I needed him most. I couldn’t look at him anymore. Instead I watched Drucci’s casket being lowered into his grave, going down, disappearing below the earth’s surface.

THE HATBOX TRICK

T
he days following Drucci’s funeral were grim. Shep moved about the house in a listless state with his shirttails sticking out, his suspenders hanging down. He hadn’t shaved or combed his hair and the last time I’d seen him looking so unkempt was when I’d visited him in jail.

I tried reading to him, but could tell by the way he gazed out the window that he wasn’t listening. I couldn’t reach him no matter how I tried. Even Hannah, who always found a way inside, would tug at his pant leg, crying, “Daddy! Daddy, come play!” only to have him smile and tell her to run along before he’d go into his study and shut the door. Other times he paced endlessly.