By Ed Staskus
Egidijus and Rokas watched the two U. S. Navy ensigns, young men in the no-man’s land between lieutenant and chief warrant officer, step into Connor’s Public House. The sailors paused in the doorway, the long evening going dark over their shoulders. They both wore white pants, a white shirt over a white t-shirt, a white belt, and a white cap with a black bill. They wore black shoes. There was a single gold bar on their shoulder boards.
“Hey, shut that door, you live in a barn?” somebody at the bar shouted at them.
The next minute, their eyes locking on the main prize, they took stools on both sides of a curvy redhead at the bar. They both gave her a smile. There wasn’t anything in her face that doubted her looks. She looked the sailors over with contempt to spare.
“Drift,” she said to the one on her left.
“We just want to buy you a drink,” the one on the other side of her said.
“You, too, driftwood, get lost if you know what’s good for you,” she said. They thought she would be good for them. She knew they would only be trouble.
“Butterbars,” Giles said, eavesdropping on the pick-up lines. “Nieku nezino.”
“Yeah, they probably play with toy boats at night,” Rocky said.
“As close to water as they’re going to get,” Giles said.
Egidijus had become Giles the minute he landed on Ellis Island. Rokas had been behind Egidijus in line and became Rocky on the spot. Neither of them minded. They were out of the frying pan. They were busy learning English, or what passed for English, in the Big Melting Pot.
Sam Ellis never meant his island in New York Harbor to be a welcoming place unless it was a last welcome. Before the first immigrant ever set foot there, it was where pirates and criminals were hung out to dry. New Yorkers called it Gibbet island, for the wooden hanging post where the dead were left on display for weeks at a time as a warning to others.
“She’s got a classy chassis, though,” Rocky said, eyeing the chassis. “If she ever goes back to the fabric store, she might be able to finish that dress of hers. Our man is not going to like us snatching him, ruining his night in more ways than one.”
A longshoreman walked in, skank-eyed the redhead, glanced at the sailors, and parked himself midway down the bar. The bartender poured a glass of Schlitz from the tap without asking. Schlitz had a brewery across the river in Brooklyn. The beer was as fresh as it could be. The longshoreman sloshed half the glass down his throat.
“Did you say something to that guy I just saw outside?” he asked the bartender after wiping his mouth clean with his shirt sleeve.
“The guy with the feather in his hat?”
“Yeah, that one, who said this joint stinks.”
“That one comes in, wants a glass of water, and asks me what’s the quickest way to Mount Kisco,” the bartender said. “I ask him if he’s walking, or does he have a car? He says, getting huffy, of course I have a car. So, I tell him, that would be the quickest way.”
“He was chunky about it, that’s for sure. Hey, isn’t that redhead there Ratso’s girl?”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t she tell those boys the gate is locked tight?”
“Yeah, but they didn’t give it any mind.”
“Oh, boy, they don’t know from nothing.”
“Stay outside the foul lines is what I say,” the bartender said, tapping his temple with two fingers.
“You said it, brother.”
Conner’s Public House was on the corner of Pearl Street and Plymouth Street. The Manhattan Bridge over the East River was a stone’s throw away. The Brooklyn Navy Yard was a cannon shot away. The new Con Edison Hudson Avenue substation, north of John Street facing the river between Jay Street and the Navy Yard, was a light switch away.
“Did you see the game on TV Friday?” Giles asked.
“I saw the problem crystal clear in black and white,” Rocky said. “No matter that Mickey is going to win the Triple Crown, no matter how many runs they score, if they keep giving up a dozen, they are not going anywhere in October, no matter who they play.”
The New York Yankees had been in Boston for the weekend, for their last season series at Fenway Park. On Friday night Mickey Mantle hit a home run that tape measured more than five hundred feet. The Bronx Bombers, though, set a dubious club record by stranding twenty runners on base. Yogi Berra threw a man out at the plate. Mickey Mantle threw a man out at the plate. The Yankees crossed the plate plenty enough themselves. But the Red Sox still beat them, sending almost twice as many runners safely across the plate, 13 to 7 at the final count.
The Mick had three hits. Bill Skowron had five hits. The only time the Moose failed to reach base was when Bean Town’s Ted Williams made an all-out running diving catch of a screaming line drive in left field. “He was running like a bunny with his tail on fire,” Red Barber told his listeners, after the outfielder got up, checking his body parts for damage.
“That ball is go-ing, go-ing, gonnne!” Mel Allen blared when Mickey Mantle hit his tape ribbon blast. “It’s got to be one of the longest homers I’ve ever seen! How about that!” Mel Allen and Red Barber, who was known as ‘The Ol’ Redhead,’ called the night game on WPIX. The station’s transmitter was on top of the Empire State Building from where it spread the play-by-play to the five boroughs. The next morning it would be Officer Joe’s turn. The year before, the weather forecaster Joe Bolton had put on a policeman’s uniform and started hosting shows based around the Little Rascals and the Three Stooges. Gotham’s kids loved Officer Joe’s taste in comedy.
Rocky had watched the game at Conner’s Public House, on Friday night two nights earlier, at the far end of the bar, where one of the bar’s two RCA Victor portable TV’s squinted down at him from high up on the wall.
“Did you say something?” one of the sailors said, turning to Giles and Rocky in the booth opposite them. “And turn that boob tube down,” he demanded of nobody and everybody.
“Mind your own business,” somebody at the bar watching the TV shouted.
“Hello there everybody,” Mel Allen said on the televised live baseball game broadcast. “This is Red Barber speaking,” Red Barber said. “Let me say hello to you all. Mel and I are here in the catbird seats.” The game went into extra innings. The cats curled up under the seats and the birds flew back to their nests.
“Hey, did you hear me? I’m talking to you.” The sailor with a chip on his shoulder turned his Tab Hunter face to stone while he waited.
“Three and two. What’ll he do?” Mel asked as the game neared its end and the last Yankee hitter squared up in the batter’s box.
“He took a good cut!” the broadcaster exclaimed when the pinstriped slugger struck out to finish the game. “Tonight’s game was yet another reminder that baseball is dull only to dull minds. Signing off for WPIX, this is Red Barber and Mel Allen.”
“Hey, you, did you say something about toy boats?” the sailor demanded, standing up, his friend standing up, too. In the meantime, Ratso Moretti was walking the length of the bar from the men’s room towards them, having spotted shore leave buzzing around his queen bee. The redhead swung her stool around to the bar, uncrossed her legs, and played with the swivel stick lolling in her gin martini glass.
“Who the fuck are you two rags?” Ratso barked at the sailors, glaring up at them from under the brim of his black pork pie hat, baring his sharp front teeth. “Why are you sitting with my lady friend? You two achin’ for a breakin’?”
Giles and Rocky leaned back on their seat cushions, their backs against the wall. Rocky stretched his legs out. Giles popped a toothpick into his mouth. The show in front of them was better than anything on TV.
“Do you plan on doing the breaking by yourself, little man?” asked the bigger of the two sailors. Ratso wasn’t a midget, but he was far from tall. The sailors were both tall. Ratso took one step back, reached for his fly, unzipped it, and pulled out the handle of a Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special. It was the kind of gun carried by plainclothes and off-duty policemen. He kept his hand on the gun while looking straight at the two sailors.
“Hit the road, Clyde,” he said. “You, too, whatever your name is.”
The sailors backed away, keeping their eyes on Ratso’s groin, and backed out of the bar. Nobody paid any attention, but everybody kept all their attention on the tactical retreat out of the corner of their eyes. When the white uniforms were gone, and he had zipped his pants back up, Ratso sat down next to his lady friend and wrapped his arm around her waist.
“Meanwhile, back at the ranch,” Rocky said.
“At least now we know where he hides it,” Giles said.
Bartek and Karol were at the far end of the bar. The Poles had come with Rocky and Giles, the Lithuanian boys, but gone into the bar separately. They didn’t want anything to happen just now. They wanted Ratso to stay cozy with his lady friend, drinking like closing time was never going to happen. They wanted him to waste the night and get wasted doing it. There were four of them and only one of him, but he was a psycho killer. Karol knew it for sure, and told the others, and it was the number one thing, he said, that they had to remember. There was no sense in letting their back door appointment go down the drain.
“Did you find a plumber this morning?” Rocky asked Giles.
“No, because not only does God rest on Sundays, so do all the plumbers in Brooklyn.”
“What did you do?
“I fixed it myself.”
One of the toilets in the women’s bathroom in the parish hall next door to St. George’s Catholic Church on York Street sprang a leak after mass. The Lithuanian Roman Catholic house of worship was around the corner from the Irish Roman Catholic St. Ann’s church on the corner of Front and Gold Streets. Lithuanians made up more than half of everybody who lived in Vinegar Hill, but they had never been welcomed by the Irish, who were there first, so they built their own.
St. George’s had three arched doorways, three arched second-story window assemblages, and a stepped façade with a cross on top. It looked first-class when the sun was shining on it. It looked first-class in a thunderstorm. It looked first-class every midnight mass on Christmas Eve.
“What was the problem?”
The parish priest had dragooned Giles on his way out of the parish hall. “Prasome, gali padet?” the priest asked.
“The wax ring, that’s all it was,” Giles said.
“Where did you find a wax ring on a Sunday?”
“My old man. He’s always loaded for bear. He had two of them.”
“Did you miss breakfast?”
“No, mom warmed it back up for me, fried some more eggs, fresh coffee, and a torte.”
When Ratso hopped off his bar stool, and his lady friend slid off hers, and they walked out the front door, Karol and Bartek went out the back door. Giles and Rocky followed Ratso out the front door. The bartender knew something was up, but he didn’t know what it was. Whatever it was he hoped the gun crazy Ratso didn’t come back anytime soon. The man was a menace.
“Goddamn it!” Ratso cursed turning the corner into the quiet side street next to Conner’s Public House. It was where he had parked his new car. He looked down at the driver’s side front tire Karol had stuck his switchblade into just before going inside.
“Motherfucker!”
“What’s the matter mister?” Giles asked.
“Flat tire,” Ratso said. He recognized the young man and the other one from the bar.
“Need a hand?”
“I’ve got all the hands I need,” Ratso said.
“Suit yourself.”
Giles fired up a cigarette, watching and waiting. Rocky leaned against a lamp pole. Ratso opened the trunk of the car, looking over his shoulder at them, and hunched down next to the tire to loosen the lug nuts.
“This ain’t no show,” he said.
“It is to us.”
“Suit yourself.”
As Ratso struggled with the last stubborn lug nut, Giles flicked his still lit cigarette butt at the redhead, who was staring into space, bouncing it off her midriff. She squealed in surprise and outrage. Ratso turned toward her. Giles, Rocky, Karol, and Bartek rushed him, two from the front and two from the back. As Ratso started to stand up, Karol kicked him as hard as he could in the groin, the holstered gun he was reaching for adding insult to injury. He doubled over, grabbed his stomach, fell over, and lay squirming on the ground in a fetal position. His eyes ran with pain and he threw up half-digested pickles mixed with whiskey.
Karol tied his hands behind his back with clothesline. Bartek reached into the front of Ratso’s pants and pulled out the small revolver. He threw a muslin cloth bag over the man’s head and tightened the drawstring. He went to the passenger side front door of the new Chevy and tossed the gun into the glove box.
While Giles and Rocky hauled him to Karol’s 1947 Kaiser Special behind Connor’s Public House, Bartek turned to the redhead. He looked her over one last time. She would be worth going to confession for.
“Vamoose,” he said. “And keep your mouth shut, or we’ll take you next.”
She backed away, smoothed her skirt, gave him a smile, cute snaky cunning, light on her feet, and went back into Conner’s Public House.
“Durna mergaite,” Giles said.
“Yeah, but steamy hot,” Rocky said.
“Going to make a hell-wife.”
“Thanks, boys, we’ll settle up tomorrow,” Karol said when Ratso was safe and sound in the trunk, his feet tied together and hog-tied to his bound wrist. He lay like a sad sack of potatoes on his side limp and groaning. Giles touched his forefinger to his thumb and pointed the remaining three fingers of his right hand straight up.
At the mouth of the intersection, the Kaiser Special backfiring down the street, they heard a bullhorn on the corner. “Get your knishes, I got to send my wife on vacation, get your hot knishes.” The street vendor’s truck was light blue, dented, and dirty. It was three-wheeled, a cab pulling a cart, with a Saint Bernard-sized pretzel on top. A sign on the side said, ‘Hot knishes & pretzels, 10 cents, 3 for $.25.’
“Hey, what kind of knishes do you have?”
“I have kasha and potato.”
“I’ll take three potato.”
“Sorry, all I have is kasha.”
There was a tin saltshaker secured by a string to the cart. The pastry was hot with buckwheat groats inside of it. The brown bag the street vendor put them into instantly became saturated with enough oil to deep fry three or four more knishes. He poured in a handful of salt.
“You’re outside of your neighborhood, working late,” Giles said.
“It’s my wife,” the Jew said. “ She has dreams of going to the Browns Hotel in the Catskills where it’s all-you-can-eat.” Giles and Rocky both got bottles of Orange Crush. They tossed the bottle caps into the street. When they finished their knishes they threw the bags into the street, too.
Karol and Bartek drove to Sunset Park, turned onto 53rd Street at 3rd Avenue, and finally pulled into and parked behind a three-story abandoned brick building. On the side of the building a painted billboard advertising “LuSair & Sons, Men’s Clothes” was fading away. The storefront’s windows were boarded up. The other windows on every floor were dark. They bull rushed Ratso through a back door and into a dank room. A table lamp on the floor tried to make sense of the dark. Stan Riddman was standing in a corner in the gloom smoking a cigarette. They dropped Ratso on the floor. Bartek went to the door and stood guard.
“Let him loose, except for his hands,” Stan said.
Karol untied Ratso’s feet, yanked the bag off his head, and moved away to stand next to Bartek at the door. Stan stayed where he was, in the shadows. Ratso stayed where he was, too. He felt better, but he still felt horrible. He had an awful stomachache. His nuts hurt like hell.
“Tell me about Jackson Pollack,” Stan said.
“I don’t know no Polacks,” Ratso said, struggling to get to his knees.
“You know us now, brother,” Karol said under his breath.
“Not Polacks. I said Pollack, as in Jackson Pollack, the painter.”
“I don’t know no painters.”
“Why did you jump my associate the other night?”
“I don’t know no associates,” Ratso hissed. “Who the fuck are you, anyway?”
“I don’t know how your sack is feeling, but if it was me, I wouldn’t want it to happen again, especially not now, not so soon,” Stan said. “Know what I mean?”
“What do you want?”
“What were you doing in the middle of the night outside the shrink’s office? Why did you jump my man? What does Jackson Pollack have to do with Big Paulie?”
“You’re a dead man when Luca finds out,” Ratso exploded, quivering with rage.
Stan stepped forward, bent down, and framed an inch with his fingers. He put his fingers within an inch of the mob man’s washed-out face.
“You’re this close to being a dead man,” he said.
Stepping away from the Ratso, he aimed a kick at his groin. The yobbo weasel rolled over like a seal. Stan kicked him in the side, aiming for his kidney. Ratso gasped in pain and rage. Stan stepped over him, bent down again, and went man to man with the pain and rage.
“You’re going to tell me what I want to know,” Stan said.
It didn’t take long. Stan had learned some things during the war that made him a quick and effective interrogator. After Ratso ratted out Big Paulie and Park Avenue and they had hog-tied him again, Stan and his Polack’s left. Stan whistled down a cab. He stopped at a phone booth on his way home. The cab driver waited at the curb. He called the desk sergeant at the 17th Precinct. He told him where to find Ratso, told him he wanted to confess to assaulting Ezra four nights earlier, and wanted to be held in custody for his own safety.
“Does he need medical attention?” the desk sergeant asked.
“No, he’ll be fine, just a few bumps and bruises.”
“What do I tell the captain? Is anybody going to be looking for this Morelli, trying to spring him?”
“Nobody except his bedroom girl knows anything, but she was a good girl the last time we saw her and promised to stay quiet as a lamb. Ratso’s Chevy is just outside Conner’s Public House in Vinegar Hill. His gun is in the glove box. It’s a Chief’s Special.”
“You don’t say.”
“You ought to have that gun checked out. Ballistics might find it matches something.”
“OK, we’ll have a car there in five minutes-or-so.”
Five minutes later three policemen and a plainclothes officer spilling out of two cars flash-lighted their way into the building, hauled Ratso Moretti out, untied him, handcuffed him, tossed him face first into the back of one of the radio cars, and drove him to the 17th Precinct. They manhandled him into a basement cell at the end of a hallway and forgot about him for the rest of the next week.
A half hour later Stan was home in Hell’s Kitchen, leaning back in one of his two orange wingback armchairs, a bottle of Blatz on the coffee table, while Mr. Moto groomed his hindquarters on the sofa on the other side of the table. Stan took a pull on his bottle of beer and watched the cat. He had considered getting another one to keep him company, but Mr. Moto didn’t seem to mind his solitary life.
The black cat slept and ate and slept some more every day. He went on the prowl. Sometimes he sat on the fire escape, seeming to be thinking. When it came to chow, Mr. Moto liked Puss ’N Boots best, and fish followed by chicken followed by beef followed by any other meat. He wasn’t picky. He didn’t think it did any harm to ask Stan for what he wanted, since the story of cats was the story of freeloaders. Stan kept the tomcat happy with his poker winnings.
Mr. Moto wasn’t a mixed-up cat. He lived day-to-day, every day a new day, taking what came his way. He liked fresh water and food in the morning. “Puss ‘N Boots adds the Plus!” He liked taking a long nap from late morning into the late afternoon, and liked a clean box of kitty litter when he couldn’t get down to the flowerbeds.
“Ask Kitty about the new Kitty Litter. She knows! It absorbs and deodorizes. Takes the place of sand.”
Stan had stopped at Manganaro’s Grosseria on his way home for a slice of Hero-Boy. The mom and pop and family was a grocery, sandwich shop, and restaurant on 9th Avenue. The end-to-end six-foot Hero-Boy, if you wanted it, was 22-pounds and cost $16.50. The in-bred wait staff was surly, but the sandwiches were worth the wait. He took a bite, chewed, and washed it down with his beer.
Ezra Aronson was out of the hospital. He would stop and see him in the morning, tell him they had snatched Ratso, who had spilled his guts, but that it still wasn’t clear what was going on. It looked like Dr. Baird had engineered Jackson Pollack’s death somehow, but why? Where was the pay-off in it? Vicki Adams said that since Jackson Pollack died young there weren’t going to be any more paintings by him. Since there weren’t going to be anymore, and since he was well known, by collectors and museums, prices for his art were going to go up.
“He was in demand, now he’s in big demand, especially the drip paintings,” Vicki said. “But nobody kills a painter to make a profit on his art, not even here in New York. It’s a long-term investment, not like kidnapping somebody today for the ransom tomorrow.”
He and Betty would sort it out soon enough. He finished his sandwich, finished his bottle of beer, and went to bed. Mr. Moto followed him, curling up just inches from Stan’s face, and was asleep fast faster fastest. He had never been bothered by insomnia. He could fall sleep in the blink of an eye.
In the middle of the night, in the middle of a dream, he pricked up his ears. Mr. Moto could smell mischief when something was afoot. When he went to the bedroom window, though, it was just a ladybug on the sill. It was red with black spots. He stretched up on his hind legs and sniffed the bug, which opened its wings, flew in circles, and landed on his nose.
“Ladybug! Ladybug! Fly away home. Your house is on fire. Your children shall burn!”
Mr. Moto believed ladybugs were lucky bugs. He believed when a ladybug landed on you your wishes would be granted. He also believed it was unlucky to harm them. He licked the bug off his nose and spat it out through the open window. He jumped on the ledge, crouched, and watched the bug fly away into the big city.
In his jail cell at the bottom of nowhere, Ratso Moretti tried to stare down the foot-long rat staring back at him. The rat wasn’t having any of it. Nobody was going to stare him down in his own kingdom. He and Ratso spent the rest of the night keeping tabs on one another.
Four hours later, near the end of the night, near the break of dawn, while a dead on his feet policeman watched, now that it was all over and the car had been searched and dusted for fingerprints, a tow truck hooked the new Chevy with a flat tire and dragged it off Vinegar Hill to the NYPD Tow Pound.
Excerpted from the crime novel “Cross Walk.”
Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”
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