Sinner Man

  “I don’t like you, Crowley.”

  I looked at him and waited for him to tell me why he didn’t like me.

  “I don’t like hoods. I especially don’t like imported hoods. We got plenty of domestic ones. We got homegrown hoods, tons of them. I don’t like them, either, but at least they belong to us. They live here. They play all the local rules. I tolerate them.”

  “You’re a tolerant guy.”

  “Yeah. I’m not tolerant of out-of-town talent. I don’t like new people moving in, changing things around. It bothers me.”

  “Take a pill.”

  I got hit again but it was only a love-tap this time around. “All right,” he said. “Let’s start at the top again. Let’s see what we can find out. We got all night, Crowley.”

  * * *

  The cops didn’t take all night. They took two hours and they went back and forth over the same ground until it was more a ritual than anything else. After a while they didn’t bother slapping me anymore, which was just as well. I was starting to get a little punchy. I sat there and listened to questions I didn’t answer. They milked the hard-guy routine until they managed to figure out I wasn’t impressed. Then they kept going but their hearts weren’t in it. Finally a young cop in a uniform came in and whispered something to one of them. The young cop left and my two grand inquisitors held an executive conference. They mumbled at each other, shrugged heroically and told me to get up.

  We stepped into another room. I was photographed and fingerprinted. I blinked away the flashbulb image and wiped the fingerprint ink on the desk blotter. Then we left that room and walked out into the hallway and down the stairs to the main floor.

  The cop who had been doing the driving the first time around found some fresh business and disappeared. The other grand inquisitor moved in for some fatherly advice. “Okay,” he said. “Get lost.”

  “You’re supposed to tell me not to leave town.”

  “I’ll do the opposite. Leave town, Crowley.”

  “It’s such a nice town. And the cops are exceptional.”

  He almost grinned. “I’m just an ordinary harness bull, Crowley.”

  “Sure,” I said. “In an ordinary china shop. Take it easy.”

  I walked down the big stone steps to the street. The police force wasn’t being too considerate. They drove me to headquarters but they were making me walk back on my own. I wondered how Barshter’s home town police would feel if they knew that the Buffalo cops had just released Donald Barshter. That rated a grin but the grin was painful—my face was a little sore from the slaps.

  I tried to decide what was supposed to be next on the agenda. The cops had found me and the cops had grilled me and the cops had let me go. When they had picked me up I had been on my way to Cassino’s, on my way to see what would happen, to listen to three men make music and to wait for an opener. The cops had managed to toss the timetable out of kilter but Cassino’s was still open and the music was still going round and round. I headed in that direction.

  Friday night made a difference. The usual quota of stool-warmers warmed barstools and the bartender polished the same glasses all over again. But there was a piano and a bass and a set of drums on the little stage with three Negroes putting them to good use. The tables near the stage weren’t empty now. About half of them were occupied, some with tweedy college types and their dates, others with older couples.

  I handed the bartender a hello look and he nodded shortly at me. A handful of stool-sitters looked my way. Some of them recognized me and gave me a short nod. Others didn’t and turned back to their drinks. I passed up the bar and found a table not far from the stage. I sat down alone, found a cigarette, lit it. They hadn’t let me smoke at the police station and I hadn’t got around to lighting one up on the way over. The smoke tasted good. I took a deep drag and held it in my lungs for a few seconds, then blew a cloud at the ceiling.

  The music really wasn’t bad. The drummer’s timing was fine and the bassist set up a nice run of changes in the background. The piano player stayed away from long solos and worked on some fairly complex chord progressions. The song underneath it all was “Body and Soul,” but you had to listen carefully to figure this out. I listened carefully and it was worth the effort. I liked what I heard.

  Maybe I got lost in the music. My foot started tapping, picking up the rhythm all by itself. The cigarette sat between my thumb and index finger and burned itself up. And I didn’t even notice the girl until she was sitting across the tiny table from me.

  When I looked up at her she smiled. It was a nice smile on a nice face, neatly heart-shaped, with strong sound features. Her hair was black and her eyes were blue, a combination as perfect as it is rare. She was wearing very dark red lipstick and a little too much eye makeup. She was short and slender and probably twenty-five, give or take a few years.

  “Hello,” I said. “Have a seat.”

  “I already did.”

  “So you did,” I said. “What else would you like?”

  “Gin and tonic.”

  “That’s a warm-weather drink.”

  “I’m a warm-weather girl.”

  There was probably an answer for that one but I didn’t want to bother hunting for it. I turned around and there was the waiter, patiently waiting. “She’ll have gin and tonic,” I told him. “I’ll have rye and soda.”

  He went away. My pack of cigarettes was on the table. She took it, selected a cigarette, tapped it twice on the top of the table and put it to her lips. I gave her a light.

  I said, “I didn’t know they used B-girls here.”

  “I’m not a B-girl.”

  “Or hustlers, then.”

  She didn’t frown. She smiled. “Or a hustler.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “Just a sweet all-American girl,” she said. “My name is Anne. Anne Bishop.”

  “Nat Crowley.”

  She nodded as if she had known this all along. “New in town, Nat?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “From where?”

  “All over. Mostly Miami.”

  The waiter came back about then and put drinks in front of us. I reached for my wallet and he told me he would run a tab. I nodded to let him know that was fine with me. He left us alone again. The trio had moved into an up-tempo thing. The piano ripped off a harsh, driving solo, then stopped to swap four-bar choruses with the drummer. It was nice.

  “You working, Nat?” Anne asked.

  “No.”

  “Retired?”

  “For the time being,” I said.

  “What do you do for a living, Nat?”

  “This and that.”

  “And where do you do it—here and there?”

  I nodded and watched her smile. Blue eyes and black hair and very dark red lipstick. Sweet small beauty against a background of smoky jazz. I sipped my drink and looked at her.

  “This and that, here and there,” she said. “You’ve got your hand out and your fingers curled, Nat. You’re looking for the connection.” She paused and her eyes softened. “‘The ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.’ But I guess you don’t read poetry, Nat. Do you?”

  The phrase she quoted was from a long poem by one of the better clowns on the West Coast. I told her I didn’t read poetry. And wondered how come she did and what she was doing at Cassino’s and why.

  “I didn’t think so. Not a reader of poetry. But a very poetic person, in your way. Here and there. This and that. You have poetry in your soul, Nat Crowley. And I’m going to make that connection for you. You stay right here, Nat. You sit in your chair and drink your drink and listen to the music until a man comes to talk to you. And in the meantime I will make myself disappear.”

  She started to get up. I said, “How do I find you again?”

  “Why should you want to?”

  “To buy you another warm-weather drink. You hardly touched that one.”

  A smile. “Noomie’s,” she said
. “An after-hours club. I generally hang out there from three on. The liquor’s expensive but the music moves me.”

  “Better than these guys?”

  She looked at the stage. The trio was working on “These Foolish Things,” turning it into a slow gutty blues. “Much better,” she said.

  “Maybe I’ll fall by. Any problem getting in?”

  She was standing now. She looked at me, at my hat, at my shoes, at what was in between them. “Not for you,” she said. “Not for you.”

  And then she turned on her heel and headed across the room. I watched her encase herself in a phone booth, drop a dime and dial a number. She talked for maybe fifteen seconds, then returned the receiver to the hook and left the booth. She walked out of Cassino’s without looking back at me.

  I traded my empty glass for a new drink and nursed it along in time to the music. I thought about Anne Bishop and her exit line with the little ritual that preceded it, the up-and-down look with the eyes bright and sharp. I wondered what she saw when she looked at me.

  The trio tried “How High the Moon.” A grubby little kid with a shoeshine box came into the place and pestered a few of the customers until the bartender told him to get the hell out. The kid got the hell out.

  Questions.

  Who was Anne? How did the outfit connections go together with the poetry and why was there so much makeup under the blue eyes? Where did she fit in and where was I going to fit in and where in the world did we go from here?

  Questions.

  I must have got lost—in the questions if not in the music. When the bit came I almost missed it. But not quite.

  Two of them came through the door. They wore dark suits and dark ties and dark hats. One of them had a mustache. I saw the other one flash a look at the bartender. He gave a very gentle nod in my direction which I managed to catch out of the corner of one eye.

  It was hard not to turn around. I let my fingers play with a cigarette and a match. I got the cigarette going and sat very still while they came over and took seats on either side of me. For a few minutes we let it lie. Nobody said anything.

  “Crowley?”

  It was the one with the mustache. I nodded a little and let my eyes look at him. His face showed nothing.

  “We’re supposed to take you with us. Mr. Baron wants to see you.”

  Their faces didn’t show me a thing. I had never seen such a total lack of expression anywhere. At least the Mona Lisa is puzzling. Their faces were simply empty. They could have been taking me to meet Mr. Baron or to swim in the Niagara River. There was no way to tell.

  And it was their party. I nodded again, put enough money to cover the tab on the table and stood up. The twins stood up with me. Mustache led me to the door while his buddy walked behind me. They took me down the street to a black Ford parked next to a No Parking sign. Mustache got behind the wheel. I sat next to him. The other twin sat next to me.

  I wondered how long you had to live in this city before they let you sit by the window.

  6

  It took me three blocks to get lost. The street signs were invisible in the darkness but they wouldn’t have meant much to me if I had seen them. I did figure we were heading west, but my knowledge of Buffalo’s geography didn’t take in the lower west side, which is where we went.

  There was a river in that direction but we stopped before we got to it. We turned down a very old and very narrow street and pulled up in front of a sprawling brick house with a sad old elm in front. Mustache cut the motor. His twin got out of the car and motioned me to follow. I followed.

  One of them poked the doorbell and we waited for something to happen. I glanced at the house and at the houses on either side of it. Baron’s house was better than his neighborhood. The other houses needed painting and their lawns could have used a haircut.

  A servant noiselessly opened the door. He looked at us and stepped back. Small eyes looked at us, eyes set close together in a broad forehead.

  “We got Crowley,” Mustache said. “Mr. Baron around?”

  The servant pointed down a hallway. We stepped past him and he closed the big door behind us. We walked down the hallway, Mustache in front, me in the middle, and the other hood behind. The meat-in-a-sandwich gambit was giving me a complex.

  The house was even better inside than out. The neighborhood was an old one and the house had aged along with it but, on the inside, carpets ran wall-to-wall and good mahogany furniture filled space nicely. There was a living room at the end of the hallway and we walked into it. The man in the big armchair looked at us without interest. He put his cigar in a big brass ashtray and waited.

  “Mr. Baron,” Mustache said, “this is Crowley.”

  The statement was unnecessary. I was very obviously Crowley, just as the mountainous man with black hair and heavy eyebrows could only be Baron. I looked at him and felt uneasy. He looked back, his eyes hard and sharp. He seemed incredibly powerful in a more than physical sense.

  He didn’t stand and we didn’t sit. Baron picked up his cigar again and put it in his mouth. He chewed it and puffed on it and put it back in the big ashtray. When he spoke he didn’t exactly talk. He rumbled.

  “Your name is Nathaniel Crowley,” he said. “You hit town Monday night. You’re staying at the Malmsly. You got some letters, bought some clothes, went to some movies. You hang at Cassino’s and act like you belong. A Canuck gets in your hair and you push his face in. The cops work you back and forth and you don’t give an inch.”

  He stopped. Maybe I was supposed to be impressed. I wasn’t. He knew all the things I wanted him to know, nothing more, nothing that he had had to sweat to find out.

  “You don’t pack a gun,” he went on. “Not on you, not in your room. You give Miami for an address. Miami doesn’t know you’re alive. Neither does New York, neither does Vegas, neither does Chi. Or Los Angeles or Frisco. Nobody knows you.”

  He was a hell of a lot harder than my pair of cops. I didn’t have a cute answer for him. Nothing but respectful silence.

  “We made you at first for a gun. A trigger. But it doesn’t add that way. You make too much noise, you set up too loud a front. You wander around and get yourself known. We thought somebody sent you to do a job on somebody but if they did you’re the dumbest trigger ever. It doesn’t add.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was still standing and he was still sitting down. I wondered when he was going to offer me a seat.

  “A floating hotster looking to put down roots. Heavy stuff looking for a home. Who in hell are you, Crowley?”

  “You just told me.”

  “What did I leave out?”

  “My mother’s maiden name,” I said, “and the amount of lint in my navel.”

  He looked bored. “Johnny,” he said softly, “take him.”

  Johnny was Mustache’s twin and he took me. I had less than a second to tense my stomach muscles before he planted his right hand in my gut. It wasn’t enough time. I sagged in the middle and folded up just in time to catch his left with my face.

  I had no time to think, just to react. I hit the floor and bounced back up with my face hanging out. Johnny tried to hang a right on it.

  And missed. It was my turn now and I didn’t miss. I put everything into a punch that landed a good four inches below his navel, which is as good a spot as any. He wasn’t expecting it. He held on to himself with both hands and left his face wide open, I belted him and he hit the floor.

  He started to get up and I had a foot back. I was just about ready to kick his teeth all the way down his throat when Baron’s big voice stopped me.

  “Stop it, Crowley.”

  I stopped long enough to look at him. He had a gun in his hand but he wasn’t even pointing it at me. His smile was huge.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Relax, I got a job for you, one you should like. Steady work, easy work, and the pay is two bills a week. Sit down and we’ll talk about it.”

  * * *

  “This bar,” Baron said. ??
?On the west side. Name is Round Seven. Ever hear of it?”

  I shook my head. I was sitting in a chair near his, drinking rye and soda and smoking a cigarette. Johnny and Mustache sat together on a couch across the room.

  “No reason you should of,” Baron went on. “Just a bar—no music, no floor show, no hustlers. It was a fight mob bar. That’s where the name comes from. Now there’s just three or four fights a year so there’s no fight mob. The bar has a neighborhood trade. A guy comes in for a quick beer, that kind of bit. Right now it’s closed.”

  I took a final drag on my cigarette. I blew out smoke and then leaned over to stub out the cigarette in an ashtray. I relaxed in my seat and sipped my drink.

  “Round Seven,” Baron said. “It changed hands. For five years the place slips downhill, loses a little dough every year. So some people in Cleveland buy it. A corporation. It’s got this big tax loss behind it and the corporation stands to make a profit on the bar even if it loses money. You understand?”

  I nodded.

  “So it’s a tax loss,” he said. “It’s other things. Sometimes it’s handy to own a nice quiet place where nothing much happens. A quiet neighborhood bar with a quiet neighborhood trade. Very small, very quiet. You understand why something along those lines might be handy?”

  “A front.”

  The big head moved in a nod. “A front. Or a drop. Or whatever you want to call it. Say two or three guys need a place where they can talk, a place nobody nosy knows about. Or say somebody has a warm package and wants a cool place to park it for a while. Or say anything. This bar is two things. A tax loss and a handy place. But you understand all that.”

  I watched him take another cigar from the cedarwood humidor on the table next to him. It was wrapped in a cellophane wrapper and he unwrapped it carefully and methodically. He crumpled the cellophane and dropped it into the copper wastebasket beside his chair. I thought he was going to bite off the end of the cigar and spit it into the wastebasket. He didn’t. He took a tiny gold knife from his jacket pocket and cut the end of the cigar. He put the knife away and lit the cigar with a wooden match.

  “You ever tend bar, Crowley?”