When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (4 page)

The crowd was a mixed bag. Doctors and nurses fromRooseveltHospital across the street.Professors and students from Fordham. People from the television studios- CBS was a block away, and ABC a short walk. And people who lived nearby, or kept shops in the neighborhood.A couple of classical musicians.A writer. Two Lebanese brothers who had just opened a shoe store.

Not many kids. When I first moved into the neighborhood Armstrong's had a jukebox with a nice selection of jazz and country blues, but Jimmy took it out early on and replaced it with a stereo system and classical music on tape. That kept the younger crowd out, to the delight of the waitresses who hated the kids for staying late, ordering little, and tipping hardly at all. It also kept the noise level down and made the room more suitable for long-haul maintenance drinking.

Which was what I was there for.I wanted to keep an edge on but I didn't want to get drunk, except once in a while. I mostly mixed my bourbon with coffee, moving to straight booze toward the end of an evening. I could read a paper there, and have a hamburger or a full meal, and as much or as little conversation as I was in the mood for. I wasn't always there all day and night, but it was a rare day that I didn't get in the door at least once, and some days I got there a few minutes after Dennis opened up and was still there when Billie was ready to close. Everybody's got to be someplace.

SALOON friends.

I got to know TommyTillary in Armstrong's. He was a regular, apt to turn up three or four nights out of seven. I don't recall the first time I was aware of him, but it was hard to be in a room with him and not notice him. He was a big fellow and his voice tended to carry. He wasn't raucous, but after a few drinks his voice filled a room.

He ate a lot of beef and drank a lot ofChivas Regal, and they both showed in his face. He must have been close to forty-five. He was getting jowly, and his cheeks were blooming with a tracery of broken capillaries.

I never knew why they called him Tough Tommy. Perhaps Skip wasright, perhaps the name's intent was ironic. They called him Tommy Telephone because of his job. He worked in telephone sales, peddling investments over the phone from a bucket shop in the Wall Street area. I understand people change jobs a lot in that line of work. The ability to coax investment dollars out of strangers over a telephone line is a rather special talent, and its possessors can get work readily, moving from one employer to another at will.

That summer, Tommy was working for an outfit calledTannahill amp; Company, selling limited partnerships in real-estate syndications. There were tax advantages, I gather, and the prospect of capital gains. I picked this up inferentially, because Tommy never pitched anything, to me or anyone else at the bar. I was there one time when an obstetrics resident fromRoosevelt tried to ask him about his offerings. Tommy brushed him off with a joke.

"No, I'm serious," the doctor insisted. "I'm finally making abuck, I ought to start thinking about things like that."

Tommy shrugged. "You got a card?" The doctor didn't. "Then write your phone on this and a good time to call you. You want apitch, I'll call you and give you the full treatment. But I got to warn you, I'm irresistible over the phone."

A couple of weeks later they ran into each other and the resident complained that Tommy hadn't called him.

"Jesus, I been meaning to," Tommy said. "First thing, I'll make a note of it now."

He was acceptable company. He told dialect jokes and he told them reasonably well, and I laughed at my share of them. I suppose some of them were offensive, but they weren't often mean-spirited. If I was in a mood to reminisce about my days on the force, he was a good enough listener, and if the story I told was a funny one his laugh was as loud as anybody's.

He was, on balance, a little too loud and a little too cheery. He talked a little too much and he could get on your nerves. As I said, he'd turn up at Armstrong's three or four nights a week, and about half the time she was with him. Carolyn Cheatham, Carolyn from theCaro -line, with a soft you-all accent that, like certain culinary herbs, became stronger when you steeped it in alcohol. Sometimes she came in on his arm. Other times he'd get there first and she'd join him. She lived in the neighborhood and she and Tommy worked in the same office, and I figured- if I bothered to think about it- that the office romance had served to introduce Tommy to Armstrong's.

He followed sports. He bet with a bookie- mostly ball games, sometimes horses- and he let you know when he won. He was a little too friendly, a little too indiscriminately friendly, and sometimes there was a chill in his eyes that belied the friendship in his voice. He had cold little eyes, and there was a softening around his mouth, a weakness there, but none of that got into his voice.

You could see how he'd be good over the phone.

SKIPDevoe's first name was Arthur, but BobbyRuslander was the only person I ever heardcall him that. Bobby could get away with it. They'd been friends since fourthgrade, they grew up on the same block inJacksonHeights. Skip had been christened Arthur Jr., and he'd acquired the nickname early on. "Because he used to skip school all the time," Bobby said, but Skip had another explanation.

"I had this uncle was in the navy and never got over it," he told me once."My mother's brother.Bought me sailor suits, toy boats. I had this whole fleet and he called me Skipper, and pretty soon so did everybody else.Coulda been worse. There was a guy in our class everybody called Worm. Don't ask me why. Imagine if they still call him that. He's in bed with his wife: 'Oh,Wormy, put it in deeper.' "

He was around thirty-four, thirty-five, about my height but lean and muscular. The veins showed on his forearms and the backs of his hands. There was no spare flesh on his face, and the skin followed the curve of the bone, giving him deeply sculpted cheeks. He had a hawk nose and piercing blue eyes that showed a little green under the right lighting. All of this combined with assurance and an easy manner to make him quite attractive to women, and he rarely had trouble finding a girl to go home with when he wanted one. But he was living alone and not keeping steady company with anyone, and seemed to prefer the regular company of other men. He had either lived with or been married to someone and it had ended a few years ago, and he seemed disinclined to get involved with anyone else.

TommyTillary got called Tough Tommy, and had a certain tough-guy quality to his manner. SkipDevoe actually was tough, but you had to sense it underneath the surface. It wasn't on display.

He'd been in the service, not the navy you'd have thought his uncle would have preconditioned him for but the army's Special Forces, the Green Berets. He enlisted fresh out of high school and got sent toSoutheast Asia during the Kennedy years. He got out sometime in the late sixties, tried college and dropped out, then broke in behind the stick at anUpper East Side singles' bar. After a couple of years he and JohnKasabian pooled their savings, signed a long lease on an out-of-business hardware store, spent what they had to remodeling it, and opened up Miss Kitty's.

I saw him occasionally at his own place, but more often at Armstrong's, where he'd drop in frequently when he wasn't working. He was pleasant company, easy to be with, and not much rattled him.

There was something about him, though, and I think what it may have been was an air of cool competence. You sensed that he'd be able to handle just about anything that came along, and without working up a sweat. He came across as a man who could do things, one too who could make quick decisions inmidaction. Maybe he acquired that quality wearing a green hat inVietnam, or maybe I endowed him with it because I knew he'd been over there.

I'd met that quality most often in criminals. I have known several heavy heist men who had it, guys who took off banks and armored cars. And there was a long-haul driver for a moving company who was like that. I got to know him after he'd come back from the Coast ahead of schedule, found his wife in bed with a lover, and killed them both with his hands.

There was nothing in the papers about the robbery at Morrissey's, but for the next few days you heard a lot of talk about it around the neighborhood. The rumored loss Tim Pat and his brothers had sustained kept escalating. The numbers I heard ranged from ten thousand to a hundred thousand. Since only theMorrisseys and the gunmen would know, and neitherwere terribly likely to talk, one number seemed as good as the next.

"I think they got around fifty," Billie Keegan told me the night of the Fourth. "That's the number keeps coming up. Of course everybody and his brotherwas there and saw it."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean so far there's been at least three guys assured me they were there when it happened, and I was there and can swear for a fact that they weren't. And they can supply bits of color that somehow slipped by me. Did you know that one of the gunmen slapped a woman around?"

"Really."

"So I'm told. Oh, and one of the Morrissey brothers was shot, but it was only a flesh wound. I thought it was exciting enough the way it went down, but I guess it's a lot more dramatic when you're not there. Well, ten years after the 1916Rising they say it was hard to find a man inDublin who hadn't been part of it. That glorious Monday morning, when thirty brave men marched into the post office and ten thousand heroes marched out. What do you think, Matt? Fifty grand sound about right to you?"

TommyTillary had been there, and I figured he'd dine out on it. Maybe he did. I didn't see him for a couple of days, and when I did he never even mentioned the robbery. He'd discovered the secret of betting baseball, he told everybody around. You just bet against the Mets and the Yankees and they'd always come through for you.

EARLY the next week, Skip came by Armstrong's inmidafternoon and found me at my table in the back. He'd picked up a dark beer at the bar and brought it with him. He sat down across from me and said he'd been at Morrissey's the night before.

"I haven't been there since I was there with you," I told him.

"Well, last night was my first time since then. They got the ceiling fixed. Tim Pat was asking for you."

"Me?"

"Uh-huh." He lit a cigarette. "He'd appreciate it if you could drop by."

"What for?"

"He didn't say. You're a detective, aren't you? Maybe he wants you to find something. What do you figure he might have lost?"

"I don't want to get in the middle of that."

"Don't tell me."

"Some Irish war, just what I need to cut myself in on."

He shrugged. "You don't have to go. He said to ask you to drop by any time after eight in the evening."

"I guess they sleep until then."

"If they sleep at all."

He drank some beer, wiped his upper lip with the back of his hand. I said, "You were there last night? What was it like?"

"What it's always like. I told you they patched the ceiling, did a good job of it as far as I could tell. Tim Pat and his brothers were their usual charming selves. I just said I'd pass the word to you next time I ran into you. You can go or not go."

"I don't think I will," I said.

But the next night around ten, ten-thirty, I figured what the hell and went over there. On the ground floor, the theater troupe was rehearsing Brendan Behan's TheQuare Fellow. It was scheduled to open Thursday night. I rang the upstairs bell and waited until one of the brothers came downstairs and cracked the door. He told me they were closed, that they didn't open until two. I told him my name was Matthew Scudder and Tim Pat had said he wanted to see me.

"Oh, sure, an' I didn't now ye in that light," he said. "Come inside and I'll tellhimself you're here."

I waited in the big room on the second floor. I was studying the ceiling, looking for patched bullet holes, when Tim Pat came in and switched on some more lights. He was wearing his usual garb, but without the butcher's apron.

"You're good to come," he said. "Ye'llhave a drink with me? And your drink is bourbon, is it not?"

He poured drinks and we sat down at a table. It may have been the one his brother fell into when he came stumbling through the door. Tim Pat held his glass to the light, tipped it back and drained it.

He said, "Ye were here the night of the incident."

"Yes."

"One of those fine young lads left a hat behind, but misfortunately his mother never got around to sewing a name tape in it, so it's impossible to return it to him."

"I see."

"If I only knew who he was and where to find him, I could see that he got what was rightfully his."

I'll bet you could, I thought.

"Ye were a policeman."

"Not anymore."

"Ye might hear something. People talk, don't they, and a man who keeps his eyes and ears open might do himself a bit of good."

I didn't say anything.

He groomed his beard with his fingertips. "My brothers and I," he said, his eyes fixed on a point over my shoulder, "would be greatly pleased to pay ten thousand dollars for the names and whereabouts of the two lads who visited us the other night."

"Just to return a hat."

"Why, we've a sense of obligation," he said. "Wasn't it your George Washington who walked miles through the snow to return a penny to a customer?"

"I think it was Abraham Lincoln."

"Of course it was. George Washington was the other, the cherry tree. 'Father, I cannot tell a lie.' This nation's heroes are great ones for honesty."

"They used to be."

"And then himself,tellin ' us all he's not a crook.Jaysus." He shook his big head. "Well, then," he said. "Do ye thinkye'll be able to help us out?"

"I don't see what help I could be."

"Ye were here and saw them."

"They were wearing masks and they had caps on their heads. In fact I could swear they both had their caps on when they left. You don't suppose you found somebody else's hat, do you?"