Toughs Page 6

"You're too serious!" As if against her better judgment, she returned to the ledge and retook her seat. "I needed to get out of the house," she added, explaining why she had married a man so much older. "Too many bad memories here. And it didn't hurt a bit that he had money and his own home nowhere near the Bronx."

  Loretto understood that the bad memories involved her father. He wanted to say something but couldn't imagine what.

  Gina touched the birthmark over her lip again. "There's a point, though," she said, "where, after that, you can't do it anymore."

  "Yeah?" Loretto said.

  "Sure," Gina answered. "That's what I've been telling Maria. The dingbat's in love with Patsy DiNapoli. Can you believe that?"

  "How do you know Maria?"

  "I introduced her to Patsy. Her husband's my ex's client. She's still always calling and asking me to come over."

  "How come?"

  "Jesus, you're one question after another." Gina got up and stretched. She stood on her toes and reached toward the sky. "She's lonely," she said. "Or at least she was lonely before she went and fell in love with Patsy. Can you believe that?" she asked again. "Have you seen Maria? She's a doll—and she's smart."

  "Okay, so," Loretto said, "doesn't sound like she'd go for Patsy."

  "You wouldn't think so," Gina said. "Patsy's sweet, but he's not too bright and he's a slob."

  "You're too hard on a guy. He's not so bad."

  "You all stick up for each other." Gina bent to touch her toes, and her breasts threatened to come loose from her slip. "What are you looking at?" she asked, grinning, when she straightened up. "You think Patsy was in the car with Vince today? I don't put anything past Vince Coll, especially now he's running with that Lottie dame, but Patsy and them— I wouldn't have thought—"

  Loretto figured she was really thinking about Mike. "They were going after Richie Cabo," he said. "Vince wants Cabo's end of the beer business in the Bronx."

  "But why'd they start shooting with all those kids around?"

  "Vince is bent on being a big deal," Loretto said. "He's dead set on muscling in."

  "What's that got to do with shooting kids?" Gina flopped back down and retook her seat.

  Loretto moved his chair flush against hers. "We don't know for sure that Mike was in the car."

  "Yeah, of course we do," Gina said. "I told him Vince was trouble. You guys, you all like him because he looks like a movie star. You think you're all big shots hanging around with him." She slid back in her seat to get a better look at Loretto. "What are you doing with the likes of Vince Coll? I figured you as smarter than that."

  "I'm not in Vince's gang."

  "You're his friend," Gina pressed. "You and Dominic, both of you. You're always at his club over on Dykman."

  "How would you know about that?"

  "Never mind how I know. Everybody knows everything about everybody in this neighborhood. You know all about me, don't you?"

  Loretto figured she was talking about what had happened with her father, but he wasn't sure. "I've known Vince since he got sent to the orphanage when he was a kid, him and his brother, Pete." The first time Loretto had seen Vince was in the dorms at Mount Loretto, when Vince came through the door in knickers that were a size too small, carrying a battered suitcase. The dorm was set up like a military barrack, with a dozen cots on each side of a long room, forming an aisle down the middle. He hadn't gotten past the first few cots before one of the older boys snatched his suitcase. Vince flew at the kid, though he was nearly twice his size, and got a black eye for his trouble. What Loretto remembered best was that Vince didn't cry. He gave up the suitcase and marched to the opposite end of the dorm while the older kids divvied up his stuff. He sat on the empty cot across from Loretto and winked at him with the eye that wasn't swollen. He didn't even look mad. He looked like maybe what had happened wasn't even as bad as he'd expected, and he might even have been feeling lucky. "He lived in the orphanage with me," Loretto added, "for a few years, till he was eleven or twelve, I think."

  "So you spent some years together in an orphanage as kids," Gina said. "That doesn't mean you have to be friends now that you're grown up."

  "You don't know Vince." Loretto heard the volume in his voice rise, and there was a firmness in his tone that he welcomed. "Vince's two older brothers, Charlie and Tom, died within a few months of each other while Vince and Peter were living with their Aunt Mary because Florence wouldn't take them in. He had two younger brothers who died when they were little, and a sister, too."

  "A sister that died?"

  "Died when she was a baby, I think. Pete was the last of his brothers, and now Dutch killed him, too. All that's left of his family is Florence—and she's a piece of work, isn't she? She's got a mouth make a sailor blush, and no great love for Vince, either."

  "What's any of this got to do with you being his friend?"

  "You don't get it," Loretto said.

  Gina said, "I guess not," and laughed, and it sounded a lot like she was laughing at Loretto.

  Loretto folded up his chair and leaned it against the pigeon coop.

  "Don't be a baby," Gina said. "Sit down."

  "For a bright girl," he said, "you don't understand much. Maybe girls care about who's good-looking and who's not, but it don't mean a thing to guys."

  "Oh, is that so?"

  Loretto pulled the folding chair in front of him and fiddled with it. "Guys care about who's tough."

  Gina yawned and covered her mouth.

  Loretto moved closer to her, still dragging the chair. "You know who Bo Weinberg is?"

  "I've seen him around. He works for Dutch."

  "When Vince got out of Elmira, he wanted to get Dutch to hire him, so he goes to Joey Noe's place, finds Dutch and Bo with a couple of dames, and he starts makin' eyes at Dutch's girl. He knows what'll happen, right? Dutch sends Bo over and Vince flattens him, busts him up and leaves him stretched out on the floor. This is Bo Weinberg we're talking about. It's stuff like that impresses guys," Loretto added, "not good looks, which don't mean a thing." He dragged the chair back to the pigeon coop. "You know what Dutch did after that?"

  "Sure," Gina said. "He hired Vince to work for him."

  "That's right." Loretto closed his eyes and let himself drift a second in the darkness. It was still hot, but there was a night breeze, too, that felt good on his face and in his hair. He put his hand on his chest and felt his heart beating hard. "Look," he said, "I'm getting tired. I'm going back down to sack out."

  Gina stood and straightened out her slip, running her hands over her stomach and down her thighs. Loretto watched her at the roof ledge in her white slip with the dark of the sky above her and the dark of rooftops behind her, the white of her slip luminous against her skin. Earlier, when he'd first seen her again after many years, he'd thought she was cute. Now she appeared beautiful to him with the breeze tousling her hair and the way she was looking at him, which seemed to cut and penetrate. Only after she turned away and gazed out at the city did he start again for the skylight.

  "What about taking me on that date?" she asked, still looking at the ragged lines of chimneys against the sky. When she faced Loretto, she added, "You wouldn't welsh on your offer, would you?"

  "I won't welsh," Loretto said. "You still want to go on a date with me?"

  "Sure. What about the new Raymond Novarro movie, Son of India? You want to see that?"

  "That's okay," Loretto said. "Friday night?"

  "You sure Novarro's not too handsome for you?"

  "Friday night," Loretto said, and he disappeared through the skylight.

  Gina listened as Loretto descended the ladder. She heard him step down from the last rung and knock into something followed by the snap of a sheet as she imagined him stretching out on his blanket and settling on the floor between her brothers. She thought, "Boys," and the single word summed up for her all the foolishness of her brothers and their friends. She'd thought she'd left the world of boys behind when she married a man already
in his forties, a dependable man with a career and home, a man who would never be a physical threat to her or to anyone, a good, law-abiding man—and then she had gone and left him and now here she was again, surrounded by boys, and dangerous boys at that.

  So why was she thinking about what she'd wear Friday night when she went on a date with Loretto, a boy who probably carried a gun and who worked for bootleggers and was friends with Vince Coll? Aloud she said, "What are you doing, Gina?" and then she sat down in the rickety folding chair without waiting for an answer and allowed herself to remember the feel of Loretto's hands on her body. She glanced back to the dark of the chimneys as if she might see herself there again with her arms around Loretto's neck, pulling him down to her for a kiss in the shadows. In another minute, she'd follow Loretto through the skylight and settle herself again on Mama's shabby couch with its lumpy pillows. For now, though, she'd sit up here on the roof and go over the evening again, moment by moment.

  1:38 a.m.

  Richie Cabo waited between Dutch Schultz and Bo Weinberg in the back seat of Dutch's Lincoln, with its bulletproof, lead-filled doors and one-inch-thick windows. They had just pulled to the curb in front of the Cotton Club's marquee, under bright neon lights spelling out the club's name and lighting up the street. In the front seat, Dutch's driver looked bored as he got out of the car and exchanged a few words with the driver of the hack parked in front of them. Bo yawned and covered his mouth with his fist. It was late and he was annoyed with Dutch for pulling him away from a card game when he'd been winning. A big guy with short, wavy dark hair and a broad face, Bo had dark, serious eyes that made him appear perpetually sad about the state of things. Richie Cabo didn't like Bo. He didn't like Dutch, either. But he preferred working for them to being dead, which was the way things were heading when he tried to go out on his own.

  "I'm gonna put a kimono on this son of a bitch," Dutch muttered. He was talking to himself mostly, but to Richie and Bo, too. He wanted Vince Coll dead, and to put a kimono on Vince, who was the son of a bitch he was muttering about, was his way of saying he wanted to encase his feet in cement and drop him in the river.

  "We got to find him first," Richie said. He was short and squat, bookended by Bo on one side and Dutch on the other. In a wide-brimmed hat with a purple shirt and a white tie under a dark blue suit, he looked clownish next to Bo, who was dressed conservatively in a dark Oxford-gray suit, with a crisp white shirt and a silk tie. Dutch, who was looking nervously out the side window, was dressed as usual in cheap, rumpled clothes with his tie loosened at the collar. He was worth millions and he bragged about never in his life paying more than thirty-five dollars for a suit.

  On the street, the hack pulled away and the Lincoln took its place. One of Dutch's men checked Lenox once more and then nodded to the driver, who cut the engine, got out of the car, and took up a spot at the back of the Lincoln, next to its gleaming chrome luggage rack.

  Bo got out of the car before Dutch. He went to the triptych of entrance doors and pulled one open. When he saw several kids in their twenties, with dames on their arms, exiting the club in a swaying, laughing tangle, he motioned for Dutch to stay in the car.

  Richie Cabo said to Dutch, "I want those two punks that set me up dead and in the ground, and I wanna do it now."

  Dutch pushed his homburg back and ran his fingers over the strands of unruly dark hair that were always coming loose and falling over his forehead. He turned slowly to look at Cabo as if he were a slightly annoying stranger, and then he looked back to the entrance of the Cotton Club. When Bo waved him on, he got out of the car, straightened out his jacket, and started for the entrance with Cabo following.

  Inside the club, Cab Calloway's band was dressed in white tuxedoes with matching white shirts, wing collars, and bow ties, with Cab at the center of the stage scatting and pointing to a band member who looked like he was dancing with as much as playing his big stand-up bass. Dutch and Richie followed Bo to the hat-check window, where Big Frenchy DeMange was waiting for them. A bulky guy with a broad face and bull neck, Frenchy shook hands with Dutch and Bo and nodded to Richie. He didn't like Cabo—there had been something between them in the past—and he felt no need to hide it. "The Duke is waiting," he said, and he led the men past a heavy red velvet curtain and through a door behind it, where they climbed a flight of stairs to a private room.

  Owen Madden was seated at a round polished wood table with a couple of newspapers in front of him. He was dressed impeccably and looked more like a banker than a gangster. "Well, what do you know?" he said, and he pushed the late edition of the Daily Mirror to the center of the table. The headline shouted, "Gang Rats Shoot Five Children in Beer War's Worst Outrage," and under the headline was a picture of a heavily bandaged child in a hospital bed with tubes in his arms, looking near death. "Appears our pal Vince Coll has made a mess for all of us."

  "The son of a bitch is a lunatic." Dutch pulled up a chair opposite Madden while Cabo and Bo took a seat on either side of him. Big Frenchy retrieved a couple of bottles of Canadian whiskey from a cupboard against the back wall, slid the bottles onto the table along with glasses, and then excused himself, explaining that he had a club to run. Dutch picked up the Daily News, read the headline—"Harlem Gang Gunners Mow Down 5 Children"—and tossed the paper away.

  Madden said, "I thought you'd have killed the Mick by now, Dutch. I'm disappointed in you."

  Dutch pulled a glass to him, filled the bottom with whiskey, and tossed it back to calm himself. "I can't get to the bastard. No one's giving him up. I even walked into the Morrisania station house and offered to buy any cop who killed him a house in Westchester."

  "I heard about that," Madden said.

  "Everybody's heard about it," Cabo said, and Madden and Schultz looked at him as if surprised to see him at the table.

  Bo picked up a whiskey bottle. "Cabo's got a problem," he said, hurrying the meeting along.

  "And what's that?" Madden asked.

  Dutch said, "He wants to put Loretto Jones and Dominic Caporinno on the spot."

  "Who?" Madden turned to Cabo for an explanation.

  "They're the Mick's boys!" Cabo shouted. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back as if to make himself more imposing. "They fingered me when I left my club!"

  "He don't know that for sure," Dutch said as if Richie Cabo gave him a headache.

  "So?" Madden said. "What are you coming to me for? What's it got to do with me if you bump off a couple of Coll's boys?"

  "That's what I think!" Cabo said from behind his crossed arms. "But Dutch, he says—"

  "Dominic Caporinno is Gaspar Caporinno's nephew." Dutch patted his suit pockets, looking for a pack of cigarettes.

  "Ah," Madden said. "I thought I recognized that name. So he's Castellammarese."

  Dutch said to Cabo, "You can't kill Dominic Caporinno without causing problems for everybody, including me and Owen."

  "I got a right to bump off anybody tries to bump me off. Where's it say I don't?"

  Bo found a pack of Luckies in his shirt pocket and slid it across the table to Dutch. "You don't want trouble with those guys," he said to Cabo.

  "They're right," Madden said. "Forget about Dominic Caporinno."

  Cabo leaned over the table. "I'm not forgetting about him," he said calmly. "I'm gonna kill him, and I'm gonna kill this Loretto Jones."

  "Who the hell's Loretto Jones?" Madden asked Dutch.

  "Him and Dominic, they both work for Gaspar. They're a couple of kids."

  Madden turned to Cabo. "I thought you said they were with the Mick."

  "They're friends of the Mick. They all grew up together in the neighborhood."

  "But they work for Gaspar," Madden said, raising his voice. "And Gaspar works for Maranzano, who's the boss of the Castellammarese family now that Joe Masseria's in the ground. Is there something you don't understand about this, Richie? You want to start a war with the Castellammarese?"

  "They fingered me for the Mick,"
Cabo said, unmoving. "I want them dead."

  Dutch pulled a .38 special from a holster under his jacket. He placed the barrel of the gun against Cabo's forehead.

  "Mannag' la miseria!" Cabo shouted. "They fingered me for the Mick!"

  "We heard you," Dutch said calmly, "but I don't think you're hearing us."

  Bo gently pushed the gun barrel away from Cabo's head. "You can't rub out Dominic Caporinno," he said to Cabo. To Dutch he said, "What kind of a last name is Jones? He's not Italian?"

  Dutch put the .38 down. To Madden he said, "Maybe we can take care of this Loretto kid."

  Madden said, "I don't give a damn about either of these two joes." To Cabo he said, "You cannot, however, start a war with the Castellammarese. My friend Arthur here," he added, gesturing toward Dutch, "will blow your head off to make that point, if necessary."