When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (3 page)

"Not me, Billie."

"Really?"He put a hand on my shoulder for support. "But you're a cop."

"Used to be."

"Private cop now.Even the rent-a-cop, security guard in a bookstore, guy tells you to check your briefcase on the way in, he's got a gun."

"They're generally just for show."

"You mean I won't get shot if I walk off with the Modern Library edition of The Scarlet Letter? You shouldof told me before I went and paid for it. You really don't carry a gun?"

"Another illusion shattered," Skip said.

"What about your buddy the actor?" Billie demanded of him. "Is little Bobby a gunslinger?"

"Who,Ruslander?"

"He'd shoot you in the back," Billie said.

"IfRuslander carried a gun," Skip said, "it'd be a stage prop. It'd shoot blanks."

"Shoot you in the back," Billie insisted. "Likewhatsisname, Bobby the Kid."

"You mean Billy the Kid."

"Who are you to tell me what I mean? Does he?"

"Does he what?"

"Pack a piece, for Christ's sake. Isn't that what we've been talking about?"

"Jesus, Keegan, don't ask me what we've been talking about."

"You mean you weren't paying attention either?Jeezus."

BILLIE Keegan lived in a high-rise on Fifty-sixth near Eighth. He straightened up as we approached his building and appeared sober enough when he greeted the doorman. "Matt, Skip," he said. "See you guys."

"Keegan's all right," Skip told me.

"He's a good man."

"Not as drunk as he pretended, either. He was just riding it, enjoying himself."

"Sure."

"We keep a gun behind the bar at Miss Kitty's, you know. We got held up, the place I used to work before John and I opened up together. I was behind the stick in this place onSecond Avenue in theEighties, guy walked in, white guy, stuck a gun in my face and got the money from the register.Held up the customers, too. Only have five, six people in the joint at the time, but he took wallets off of them. I think he took their watches too, if I remember it right.Class operation."

"Sounds it."

"All the time I was being a hero inNam, fucking Special Forces, I never had to stand and look at the wrong end of a gun. I didn't feel anything while it was going on, but later I felt angry, you know what I mean? I was in a rage. Went out, bought a gun, ever since then it's been with me whenI been working. At thatjoint, and now in Miss Kitty's. I still think we should have called it Horseshoes and Hand Grenades."

"You got a permit for it?"

"The gun?"He shook his head. "It's not registered. You worksaloons, you don't have too much trouble knowing where to go to buy a gun. I spent two days asking around and on the third day I was a hundred dollars poorer. We got robbed once since we opened the place. John wasworking, he left the gun right where it was and handed over whatever was in the till. He didn't rob the customers. John figured he was a junkie, said he didn't even think of the gun until the guy was out the door. Maybe, or maybe he thought of it and decided against it. I probably would have done the same thing, or maybe not. You don't really know until it happens, do you?"

"No."

"You really haven't had a piece since you quit the cops? They say after a guy gets in the habit he feels naked without it."

"Not me. I felt like I laid down a burden."

"Oh,lawdie,I'segwine lay my burden down. Like you lightened up some, huh?"

"Somethinglike that."

"Yeah.He didn't mean anything, incidentally.Talking about ricochets."

"Huh?Oh, Tommy."

"Tough TommyTillary.Something of an asshole, but not a bad guy. Tough Tommy, it's like calling a big guy Tiny. I'm sure he didn't mean anything."

"I'm sure you're right."

"Tough Tommy.There's something else they call him."

"Telephone Tommy."

"Or Tommy Telephone, right.He sells shit over the phone. I didn't think grown men did that. I thought it was for housewives and they wind up making thirty-five cents an hour."

"I gather it can be lucrative."

"Evidently.You saw the car. We all saw the car. We didn't get to see her open the door for him, but we got to see the car. Matt, you want to come up and have one more before we call it a day? I got scotch andbourbon, I probably got some food in the fridge."

"I think I'll just get on home, Skip. But thanks."

"I don't blame you." He drew on his cigarette. He lived at theParc Vendome, across the street and a few doors west of my hotel. He threw his cigarette away and we shook hands, and five or six shots sounded a block or so from us.

"Jesus," he said. "Was that gunfire or half a dozen little firecrackers? Could you say for sure?"

"No."

"Neither could I. Probably firecrackers, considering what day it is. Or theMorrisseys caught up with Frank and Jesse, or I don't know what. This is the second, right? July second?"

"I guess so."

"Gonnabe some summer," he said.

All of this happened a long time ago.

It was the summer of '75, and in a larger context it seems in memory to have been a season in which nothing very important happened. Nixon's resignation had been a year earlier, and the coming year would bring the convention and the campaigns, the Olympics, the Bicentennial.

Meanwhile Ford was in the White House, his presence oddly comforting if not terribly convincing. A fellow named AbeBeame was inGracieMansion, although I never had the feeling he really believed he was mayor ofNew York, any more than Gerry Ford believed he was president of theUnited States of America.

Somewhere along the way Ford declined to help the city through a financial crisis, and the News headline read, "Ford to City: Drop Dead! "

I remember the headline but I don't recall whether it ran before, during or after that summer. I read that headline. I rarely missed the News, picking up an early edition on my way back to my hotel at night or scanning a later one over breakfast. I read the Times now and then as well, if there was a story I was following, and more often than not I'd pick up a Post during the afternoon. I never paid much attention to the international news or the political stuff, or anything much aside from sports and local crime, but I was at least peripherally aware of what was going on in the world, and it's funny how utterly it's all vanished.

What do I remember? Well, three months after the stickup at Morrissey's, Cincinnati would take a seven-game Series from the Red Sox. I remember that, and Fisk's home run in game six, and Pete Rose playing throughout as if all of human destiny rode on every pitch. Neither of theNew York teams made the playoffs, but beyond that I couldn't tell you how they did,and I know I went to half a dozen games. I took my boys to Shea a couple of times, and I went a few times with friends. The Stadium was being renovated that year and both the Mets and Yanks were at Shea. Billie Keegan and I watched the Yankees play somebody, I remember, and they stopped the game because some idiots were throwing garbage onto the field.

Was Reggie Jackson with the Yankees that year? He was still inOakland playing for Charlie Finley in '73, I remember the Series, the Mets losing badly. But when did Steinbrenner buy him for the Yankees?

What else? Boxing?

Did Ali fight that summer? I watched the second Norton fight on closed circuit, the one where Ali left the ring with a broken jaw and an unearned decision, but that was at least a year earlier, wasn't it? And then I'd seen Ali up close, ringside at the Garden.Earnie Shavers had fought Jimmy Ellis, knocking him out early in the first round. For God's sake, I remember the punch that took Ellis out, remember the look on his wife's face two rows away from me, but when was that?

Not in '75, I'm sure of that. I must have gone to the fights that summer. I wonder who I watched.

Does it matter? I don't suppose it does. If it did I could go to the library and check the Times Index, or just hunt up a World Almanac for the year. But I already remember everything I really need to remember.

SkipDevoe and TommyTillary.Theirs are the faces I see when I think of the summer of '75. Between them, they were the season.

Were they friends of mine?

They were, but with a qualification. They were saloon friends. I rarely saw them- or anyone else, in those days- other than in a room where strangers gathered to drink liquor. I was still drinking then, of course, and I was at a point where the booze did (or seemed to do) more for me than it did to me.

A couple of years previously, my world had narrowed as if with a will of its own until it encompassed only a few square blocks south and west of Columbus Circle. I had left my marriage after a dozen years and two children, moving from Syosset, which is onLong Island, to my hotel, which was onWestFifty-seventh Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. I had at about the same time left the New York Police Department, where I'd put in about as many years with about as much to show for it. I supported myself, and sent checks irregularly to Syosset, by doing things for people. I was not a private detective- private detectives are licensed and fill out reports and file tax returns. So I did favors for people, and they gave me money, and my rent always got paid and there was always money for booze, and intermittently I was able to put a check in the mail for Anita and the boys.

My world, as I said, had shrunk geographically, and within that area it confined itself largely to the room where I slept and the bars where I spent most of my waking hours. There was Morrissey's, but not all that often. I was off to bed more often than not by one or two, sometimes hung on until the bars closed, and only rarely went to an after-hours and made a full night of it.

There was Miss Kitty's, SkipDevoe's place. On the same block as my hotel, there was Polly's Cage, with its red-flocked bordello wallpaper and its crowd of after-work drinkers who thinned out by ten or ten-thirty; and McGovern's, a drab narrow room with unshielded overhead lights and customers who never said a word. I stopped in sometimes for a quick drink on a hard morning, and the bartender's hand shook when he poured it, as often as not.

On the same block there were two French restaurants, one next to the other. One of them, Mont-St.-Michel, was always three-quarters empty. I took women there for dinner a few times over the years, and stopped in alone once in a while for a drink at the bar. The establishment next door had a good reputation and did a better business, but I don't think I ever set foot inside it.

There was a place over onTenth Avenue called the Slate; they got a lot of cops from Midtown North andJohnJayCollege, and I went there when I was in the mood for that kind of crowd. The steaks were good there, and the surroundings comfortable. There was a Martin's Bar on Broadway and Sixtieth with low-priced drinks and good corned beef and ham on the steam table; they had a big color set over the bar, and it wasn't a bad place to watch a ball game.

There was O'Neal'sBaloon across fromLincolnCenter - an old law still on the books that year prohibited calling a place a saloon, and they didn't know that when they ordered thesign, so they changed the first letter and said the hell with it. I'd stop in once in a while during the afternoon, but it was too trendy and upbeat at night. There wasAntares and Spiro's, a Greek place at the corner of Ninth and Fifty-seventh. Not really my kind of place, a lot of guys with bushy moustaches drinking ouzo, but I passed it every night on the way home and sometimes I'd stop in for a quick one.

There was the all-night newsstand at the corner of Fifty-seventh and Eighth. I generally bought the paper there, unless I bought it from the shopping-bag lady who hawked them on the sidewalk in front of the 400 Deli. She bought them for a quarter each from the newsstand- I think they were all a quarter that year, or maybe the News was twenty cents- and she sold them for the same price, which is a tough way to make a living. Sometimes I'd give her a buck and tell her to keep the change. Her name was Mary Alice Redfield, but I never knew that until a couple of years later, when someone stabbed her to death.

There was a coffee shop called the Red Flame and there was the 400 Deli. There were a couple of okay pizza stands, and there was a place that sold cheese steaks that nobody ever went to twice.

There was a spaghetti joint called Ralph's and a couple of Chinese restaurants. There was a Thai place that SkipDevoe was crazy about. There was Joey Farrell's onFifty-eighthStreet - they'd just opened the past winter. There was, hell, there were a lot of joints.

Mostly there was Armstrong's.

Christ, I lived there. I had my room to sleep in and I had other bars and restaurants to go to, but for a few years there, Jimmy Armstrong's was home to me. People who were looking for me knew to check for me there, and sometimes they called Armstrong's before they called the hotel. The place opened up around eleven, with a Filipino kid named Dennis behind the stick days. Billie Keegan took over around seven and closed at two or three or four, depending on the crowd and how he was feeling. (That was the weekday routine. There were different day and night bartenders on weekends, and the turnover among them was high.)

Waitresses came and went. They got acting jobs or broke up with their boyfriends or got new boyfriends or moved toLos Angeles or went home toSioux Falls or had a fight with the Dominican kid in the kitchen or got fired for stealing or quit or got pregnant. Jimmy himself wasn't around much that summer. I think that was the year he was looking to buy land inNorth Carolina.

What can I say about the place? A long bar on the right hand side as you came in, tables on the left.Blue-checkered cloths on them.Dark wood-paneled walls.Pictures on the walls, and framed advertisements from old magazines. A deer's head was mounted incongruously on the back wall; my favorite table was right under the thing, so I didn't have to look at it.