Life and Death of a Tough Guy (13 page)

“You won’t be mad at me, Joey?” the blonde smiled.

“Why should I be mad?”

“That big guy before, what he said — ”

He glared at her smiling lollipop of a face.

“Oh, it don’t make no diff’rence to me, Joey,” the blonde assured him. “Just, I never thought — You don’t look — You never said you were or nothing.”

His hand on her back tightened. “Go fly a kite!” His eyes shifted to the Bug, seeing the Bug drinking at the bar, Sarge Killigan and Georgie with him. My bodyguard, he thought bitterly.

“Joey, don’t be mad at me.”

He hardly heard her.
Jewboy, jewboy, jewboy…
. the sax on the spinning record blared for his inner ear alone. Each time he turned and glimpsed Bughead at the bar, the
jewboy
blowing in his skull exploded like a sax gone mad, into demented but controlled sound: jewboy, jewboy, JEWBOY….

And all was clear as light. He knew now that sooner or later the Bug’d come for him. Spotter or no Spotter. Staring at the Bug hoisting himself another drink, Joey looked, with the clairvoyance of fear, into a future that could be forecast — the Bug drinking on another night, the Bug working himself into a lather again, coming for him again. All because the Bug was the Bug and he was the jewboy.
Jewboy, jewboy JEWBOY…
. What should he do? Wait? Wait, and get another pat on the head from the Spotter? Wait, a fall guy, dumb guy, until the Bughead put a bullet in his back? He couldn’t wait any more. Tonight’d proved it double. He couldn’t wait. He had to be smart. Yeh, smart. And the smartest kind of smart was to do the bastard in first. Spotter or no Spotter.

The dance ended — had he been dancing? — he slapped the blonde on her black-silked hips, but felt neither flesh or desire. “See you later,” he said and joined the drinkers at the bar, with one smile for the Bug and another for Georgie and Sarge Killigan and the others, and only himself knowing which was the smile with the poison in it. He drank, they all drank, and after another shot, he said, smiling, “Bug, you and me oughta be friends, Bug. I’m willin’ if you are.” Smiling, even though he could feel the Bug’s hate like a living thing, huge, spiky-eyed, a giant bigger even than the two hundred and twenty pound two-legged horse towering over all of them. “You beat me once in a fair fight, Bug,” he said and that smile of his, for a second of revealed hypocrisy, hung false on his lips. But Bughead was too drunk to see — or was he? “Les call it quits, Bug, whatta you say?”

Mike the volunteer barkeep applauded, Sarge Killigan approved, Georgie ditto, Agnes, the Bug’s girl nodded, while various other miscellaneous barflies nodded at this testimonial to the code of John L. Sullivan and Jack Dempsey, the fighting Irish champs. It was an act Joey was putting on, of course, good enough for tonight. And he was an actor who sensed that his audience really didn’t give a damn about him. If tomorrow the Bug were to put a bullet in his back, they’d all send flowers, and be God damn glad it wasn’t their funeral. Even Georgie. He could only depend on himself. “Whatta you say, Bug?”

In the hubbub of voices urging the Bug to be a sport, that bully and killer reluctantly, hypocritically, too, nodded his head. Mike filled up all their glasses to celebrate sportsmanship. They drank, and Joey’s mind raced with fantasies of murder. He could challenge Bughead to a gun fight and with the bastard drunk as a pig, he’d be easy as pie, but there were too damn many witnesses tonight. Or tail the Bug some night and blow his head off, get somebody else to do the job, Georgie maybe….

The blonde in black came searching for him. Smiling, Joey said to Bughead, “Show you how I feel — you can dance with my girl, Bug.”

Mike the barkeep said, “Yeh, we’re all friends here.”

Sarge Killigan, the new speakeasy prop, said, “What’s a piece among friends?”

Georgie leered drunkenly at both girls and gave them each a hand on their rear-ends. Agnes slapped at him, the blonde laughed and the miscellaneous barflies snorted and smirked their lust.

“How about a dance,” the blonde asked Bughead.

“Nah,” the Bug said, but she danced up to him, pressed against him, and with a helping shove from the barflies, the Bug was launched.

Joey danced off with the Bug’s girl. “How’s tricks?” he asked her.

“No complaints from Buffalo.”

He’d seen her around; she’d never interested him. But tonight, keyed-up with thoughts of killing the Bug, she seemed different, this woman of his enemy. She was tall, her face level with his own, smooth-cheeked, white of brow, her eyebrows jet black, a face suddenly as exciting to him as a woman’s exposed breast; a third breast with the bright red mouth its nipple. “How do you stand a mug like him, Agnes?” he asked and his hand on her back moved, stroking.

“Joey, you looking for trouble now?” she said quietly.

“You mean this?” he said, his hand stroking. “He’s blind drunk, baby.”

If Bughead was blind drunk, Joey, with the Bug’s woman in his arms, felt as if he had a hundred eyes, like the hawks over the Jersey Palisades, all hawk eyes himself, seeing how things were for the first time in his life. Seeing that the smart guy was the guy who made things work out his way.
His way…
. the sax sang out loud as a fiend in hell, so loud he could hardly hear
jewboy
any more.

Seeing also what could be seen at Killigan’s party. The heavy loaders at the bar, the dumb drunks, all the dumb bennies who never used their heads like Georgie. But not like Lefty who was trying to get the little wop girl he’d brought to the party to take another drink. A cherry, that wop girl, like Sadie. That Lefty knew how, all right, all right. For a flash, Joey forgot Agnes, his eyes on Lefty’s girl, wondering if he could ever push a slug of whiskey into Sadie? Hell, she wouldn’t go to a speak, he couldn’t get her up to a party like this in a million years, for even if she came, one look’d be enough for her to run. Let her run, he vowed fiercely, she’ll be mine anyway. Seeing, feeling, knowing the truth of the ages, that for the smart guy the dumb were always bait. Wop girl and jewgirl, dumb guy and tough guy. Yeah! Even the Bug was bait!

His way…
. And smiling at what he knew, he tightened his dancer’s hold on Agnes. She tried to edge away from him and he laughed “How about it, baby? How about it one of these days?” And with shining gray eyes he saw himself doing what he wanted with her, this woman of the Bug’s and he saw the Bug dead….

• • •

But in the light of morning his will to murder drained away like dream blood in a nightmare. Yet leaving a bloody spot in his mind, a red root that grew wild in a second to be slashed down in the next, but never completely dug out or destroyed. Murder walked with him in the daytime, casting no shadow on the summer sidewalks, whispering in his ear. What you waiting for, Joey, murder whispered. For the Bug to make the next move? Is that smart? You make the first move. The guy who wins the fight’s the guy who gets in the first punch, you know.

Every day he awoke, shaved, dressed, joked with Georgie as they ate their late breakfasts while the clock-punching city sat down to lunch. He reported to the Spotter at the Young Democrats, and if there wasn’t a job for him, chewed the fat with the guys, played cards, took in an afternoon movie to kill a little time, or visited rooms smelling of powder, perfume and disinfectant, with the dame stretched out on the bed for him like a Coming Attraction in a darkened movie house. And always the whispers: Here you’re having yourself a good time but what about the Bug? He’ll knock you off one of these days. He’ll get stinko, come for you and there’ll be no crowd to take his gat away like at Killigan’s party.

When he was on a job for the Spotter, calling on the speaks falling behind on their whiskey quotas, or kicking around some slob trying to pull a fast one, murder whispered even more persistently almost with the outcry of nightmare: The Bug’s got a hate on you that’ll never stop, Joey. Bigger you get in the gang, bigger his hate. He hates you, always has, hates you for a jewboy and you are a jewboy, too yellow to show some guts. Knock the Bug off for Christ sake, what the hell you waiting for.

He would stare superstitiously at that gun of his, given to him by the Spotter, and still unused. The Spotter still had no gun jobs for him. That God damn gun of his was going to rust to pieces, he was thinking. He would lay in bed thinking, always thinking, listening to Georgie snoring like a judge; but what there was to think about, God only knew. All the God damn thinking’d been done long ago. Up in the sticks after the hijacking. Up at Killigan’s party. Done, done in spades, and here he was still waiting for the Bug to make the next move. Don’t wait, murder whispered. Work it your way! Take the Bug, take his girl, murder whispered slyly in the hot summer nights.

Murder will out — the saying goes. True. The wish to murder, suppressed, will out, also. The murder Joey Kasow couldn’t quite make up his mind to consummate drove him hard and rough with the whores he visited. And when he was with Sadie, Wednesday nights, murder’s twin — rape — whispered constantly in his ear. “I can borrow a car,” he said. “How about a lil joy-ride, Sweetie?”

“No, no, Joey.”

So he called on a druggist the Spotter was supplying with whiskey and told him what he wished. Then he rented a room in a cheap dive of a furnished rooming house. He was ready. Wednesday night, when he and Sadie were seated in the booth of an ice cream parlor, he sent her up front to buy him some cigarettes. She asked why he couldn’t go himself and he pleaded he was dead tired, to please do him a favor. She left the booth and he dropped the pill he had from the druggist into her soda. A minute later, smoking one of the cigarettes she’d bought him, his heart violent in his chest, he watched her drink her soda. He watched her eyelids droop, she said she was sleepy. She was almost asleep on her feet leaning heavily on his arm when they hit the night air. He had to support her when he whistled for a cab, explaining to the cabbie his girl’d had too much. At the furnished rooming house, he tipped the cabbie a buck to help him carry her up. The door closed. He looked down at the girl in the bed, her red hair on the pillow, her breasts rising and falling. “Sweetie,” he called softly, but there was no answer. For a long minute he hesitated — it was a dirty thing to do. Some girls deserved what they got, but she was no teaser. She’d always played it straight, he thought. She was dumb maybe but she was on the level. He stared about the room, the floor lamp shining, the end table burned in scores of places by the cigarettes of forgotten transients, two-bit whores, perverts, gangsters on the lam, old bummers. He looked again at the girl. He leaned over her and touched her cheeks with the gentlest of fingers, as gently as her dead mother might have done. Christ, a dirty thing, he thought and then cursed himself for going soft. A slob! A dumb slob! And murder whispered: What’re you waiting for? For the Bug to put a bullet in you? For her to come across? Act tough, you dumb fool, murder whispered. Don’t be such a yellow Jew.
Tough, tough, tough
, murder screamed, no longer whispering.

The Bug died in a hallway where his killer trailed him to put three bullets in his back. Later, the dicks clomped into that same hallway, climbed to the second floor, questioned the Bug’s girl, and climbed downstairs again. “Who killed Bughead Moore?” the boys with the badges were asking all over the West Side.

Nobody knew and everybody knew. Then one of the nobodies phoned the police with an anonymous tip. They hauled Joey Kasow in on an August afternoon. “You got nothin’ on me,” he repeated until the dicks who’d heard that song of innocence from a hundred other suspects in a hundred other homicides felt like knocking it off his lips. They didn’t lay a finger on Joey Kasow though. He was one of Spotter Boyle’s Young Democrats. He had an organization behind him, and the coppers respected organization.

The Spotter’d put Joey through the third degree himself, but all he got was a big no. “Not me, Spotter, not me. Sure, I’m glad he’s dead, but it wasn’t me. Not me when you said we shouldn’t. Honest to God, Spotter, all I know’s what I read inna papers.” The Spotter’s partner, Tom Quinn, had advised giving Joey his walking papers, but the Spotter saw no sense in that. If Joey was lying he had to get his ears pinned back, but he was too good a man to dump. The Spotter had grinned wryly:
Too good a man to dump
. Maybe that was what Johnny Torrio out in Chicago’d thought about Al Capone, too, in the beginning. The Spotter wondered if Joey had the makings of a second Al Capone. No, Joey was just snotty, with only his snottiness in his favor, the snottiness of a young guy feeling his muscle. A hell of a big favor that was, the Spotter had to admit to himself.

“He’s got nerve, too much nerve, maybe,” he had said to Quinn. “But we can use the bastid. Only we gotta put a crimp in his style.”

But at night in his room, the clock ticking on the dresser, the Spotter was haunted by the ghosts of all the Al Capones who’d doublecrossed their Johnny Torrios. There was no denying that Joey was moving like a house afire for a stinking hobo hardly a year off the rods. He’d backtalked the Bug his first night in town, the Spotter remembered. And now the Bug was finished.

• • •

The Spotter, like the Bug before, began to look into the friendship of Joey Kasow and Georgie Connelly. Funny how a smart guy always teamed up with a lunk. If it isn’t a lunk, it’s a dame. The weak spot was Georgie….

He waited until Friday night, payday night, when Quinn passed out the pay envelopes. The Spotter left word that as soon as Georgie showed up he wanted to see him. “Sit down,” he said when Georgie stepped inside his private office. Big Georgie lowered his hulk into a chair next to the Spotter’s desk as if he were a heavy load on the end of a winch. The Spotter lit a cigarette, spoke of one thing and another. Then, smiling, he said: “Bug had it comin’ to him. I’m the last guy inna world to blame Joey.”

Georgie said not a word.

“What the hell’s the big secret?” the Spotter asked him. “Everybody knows who got the Bug. So what’s the big secret?”