When the Sacred Ginmill Closes

I had a lunch of beans and rice and hot sausage. I got to Saint Michael's by midafternoon. It was open this time, and I sat for a while in a pew off to the side, then lit a couple of candles. My $150 finally made it to the poor box.

I did what you do. Mostly, I walked around and knocked on doors and asked questions. I went back to both their residences, Herrera's and Cruz's. I talked to neighbors of Cruz's who hadn't been around the previous day, and I talked to some of the other tenants in Herrera's rooming house. I walked over to the Six-eight looking for Cal Neumann. He wasn't there, but I talked to a couple of cops in the station house and went out for coffee with one of them.

I made a couple of phone calls, but most of my activity was walking around and talking to people face-to-face, writing down bits and pieces in my notebook, going through the motions and trying not to question the point of my actions. I was amassing a certain amount of data but I had no idea whether or not it added up to anything. I didn't know what exactly I was looking for, or if there was anything there to look for. I suppose I was trying to perform enough action and produce enough information to justify, to myself and to Tommy and his lawyer, the fee I had already collected and largely dispersed.

By early evening I'd had enough. I took the train home. There was a message at the desk for me from Tommy Tillary, with his office number. I put it in my pocket and walked around the corner, and Billie Keegan told me Skip was looking for me.

"Everybody's looking for me," I said.

"It's nice to be wanted," Billie said. "I had an uncle was wanted in four states. You had a phone message, too. Where'd I put it?" He handed me a slip. Tommy Tillary again, but a different phone number this time. "Something to drink, Matt? Or did you just drop by to check your mail and messages?"

I'd been taking it easy in Brooklyn, mostly sticking with cups of coffee in bakeries and bodegas, drinking a little beer in the bars. I let Billie pour me a double bourbon and it went down easy.

"Looked for you today," Billie said. "Couple of us went out to the track. Thought you might want to come along."

"I had work to do," I said. "Anyway, I'm not much for horses."

"It's fun," he said, "if you don't take it serious."

THE number Tommy Tillary left turned out to be a hotel switchboard in Murray Hill. He came on the line and asked if I could drop by the hotel. "You know where it is? Thirty-seventh and Lex?"

"I ought to be able to find it."

"They got a bar downstairs, nice quiet little place. It's full of these Jap businessmen in Brooks Brothers suits. Every once in a while they put down their scotches long enough to take snapshots of each other. Then they smile and order more drinks. You'll love it."

I caught a cab and went over there, and he hadn't been exaggerating much. The cocktail lounge, plush and dimly lit, had a largely Japanese clientele that evening. Tommy was by himself at the bar, and when I walked in he pumped my hand and introduced me to the bartender.

We took our drinks to a table. "Crazy place," he said. "Look at that, will you? You thought I was kidding about the cameras, didn't you? I wonder what they do with all the pictures. You'd need a whole room in your house just to keep them, the way they click 'em off."

"There's no film in the cameras."

"Be a kick, wouldn't it?" He laughed. "No film in the cameras. Shit, they're probably not real Japs, either. Where I mostly been going, there's the Blueprint a block away on Park, and there's another place, a pub-type place, Dirty Dick's or something like that. But I'm staying here and I wanted you to be able to reach me. Is this okay for now or should we go somewhere else?"

"This is fine."

"You sure? I never had a detective work for me before, I want to make sure I keep him happy." He grinned, then let his face turn serious. "I was just wondering," he said, "if you were, you know, making any progress. Getting anyplace."

I told him some of what I'd run into. He got very excited when he heard about the barroom stabbing.

"That's great," he said. "That ought to wrap it up for our little brown brothers, shouldn't it?"

"How do you figure that?"

"He's a knife artist," he said, "and he already killed somebody once and got away with it. Jesus, this is great stuff, Matt. I knew it was the right move to get you in on this. Have you talked to Kaplan yet?"

"No."

"That's what you want to do. This is the kind of stuff he can use."

I wondered at that. For openers, it struck me that Drew Kaplan should have been able to inform himself of Miguelito Cruz's no-bill for homicide without hiring a detective. Nor did it seem to me that the information would weigh heavily in a courtroom, or that you could even introduce it in court, for that matter. Anyway, Kaplan had said he was looking for something that would keep him and his client out of court in the first place, and I couldn't see how I'd uncovered anything that qualified.

"You want to fill Drew in on everything you come up with," Tommy assured me. "Some little bit you hand him, might not look like anything to you, and it might fit with something he already has and it's just what he needs, you know what I mean? Even if it looks like nothing all by itself."

"I can see how that would work."

"Sure. Call him once a day, give him whatever you got. I know you don't file reports, but you don't mind checking in regular by phone, do you?"

"No, of course not."

"Great," he said. "That's great, Matt. Let me get us a couple more of these." He went to the bar, came back with fresh drinks. "So you been out in my part of the world, huh? Like it out there?"

"I like your neighborhood better than Cruz and Herrera's."

"Shit, I hope so. What, were you out by the house? My house?"

I nodded. "To get a sense of it. You have a key, Tommy?"

"A key? You mean a house key? Sure, I'd have to have a key to my own house, wouldn't I? Why? You want a key to the place, Matt?"

"If you don't mind."

"Jesus, everybody's been through there, cops, insurance, not to mention the spics." He took a ring of keys from his pocket, removed one and held it out to me. "This is for the front door," he said. "You want the side door key too? That's how they went in, there's cardboard taped up where they broke a pane to let themselves in."

"I noticed it this afternoon."

"So what do you need with the key? Just pull off the cardboard and let yourself in. While you're at it, see if there's anything left worth stealing and carry it outta there in a pillowcase."

"Is that how they did it?"

"Who knows how they did it? That's how they do it on television, isn't it? Jesus, look at that, will ya? They take each other's pictures, they trade cameras and take 'em all over again. There's a lot of 'em stay at this hotel, that's why they come in here." He looked down at his hands, clasped loosely on the table in front of him. His pinkie ring had turned to one side and he reached to straighten it. "The hotel's not bad," he said, "but I can't stay here forever. You pay day rates, it adds up."

"Will you be moving back to Bay Ridge?"

He shook his head. "What do I need with a place like that? It was too big for the two of us and I'd rattle around there by myself. Forgetting about the feelings connected with it."

"How did you come to have such a large house for two people, Tommy?"

"Well, it wasn't for two." He looked off, remembering. "It was Peg's aunt's house. What happened, she put up the money to buy the place. She had some insurance money left after she buried her husband some years ago, and we needed a place to live because we had the baby coming. You knew we had a kid that died?"

"I think there was something in the paper."

"In the death notice, yeah, I put it in. We had a boy, Jimmy. He wasn't right, he had congenital heart damage and some mental retardation. He died, it was just before his sixth birthday."

"That's hard, Tommy."

"It was harder for her. I think it woulda been worse than it was except he didn't live at home after the first few months. The medical problems, you couldn't really cope in a private home, you know what I mean? Plus the doctor took me aside and said, look, Mr. Tillary, the more your wife gets attached to the kid, the rougher it's gonna be on her when the inevitable happens. Because they knew he wasn't gonna live more than a couple of years."

Without saying anything he got up and brought back fresh drinks. "So it was the three of us," he went on, "me and Peg and the aunt, and she had her room and her own bath an' all on the third floor, an' it was still a big house for three people, but the two women, you know, they kept each other company. And then when the old woman died, well, we talked about moving, but Peg was used to the house and used to the neighborhood." He took a breath and let his shoulders drop. "What do I need, big house, drive back and forth or fight the subway, whole thing's a pain in the ass. Soon as all this clears up I'll sell the place, find myself a little apartment in the city."

"What part of town?"

"You know, I don't even know. Around Gramercy Park is kind of nice. Or maybe the Upper East Side. Maybe buy a co-op in a decent building. I don't need a whole lot of space." He snorted. "I could move in with whatsername. You know. Carolyn."

"Oh?"

"You know we work at the same place. I see her there every day. 'I gave at the office.' " He sighed. "I been sort of stayin' away from the neighborhood until all of this is cleared up."

"Sure."

And then we got on the subject of churches, and I don't remember how. Something to the effect that bars kept better hours than churches, that churches closed early. "Well, they got to," he said, "on account of the crime problem. Matt, when we were kids, who ever heard of somebody stealing from a church?"

"I suppose it happened."

"I suppose it did but when did you ever hear of it? Nowadays you got a different class of people, they don't respect anything. Of course there's that church in Bensonhurst, I guess they keep whatever hours they want to."

"What do you mean?"

"I think it's Bensonhurst. Big church, I forget the name of it. Saint Something or other."

"That narrows it down."

"Don't you remember? Couple of years ago two black kids stole something off the altar. Gold candlesticks, whatever the hell it was. And it turns out Dominic Tutto's mother goes to mass there every morning. The capo, runs half of Brooklyn?"

"Oh, right."

"And the word went out, and a week later the candlesticks are back on the altar. Or whatever the hell they were. I think it was candlesticks."

"Whatever."

"And the punks who took 'em," he said, "disappeared. And the story I heard, well, you don't know if it was anything more than a story. I wasn't there, and I forget who I heard it from, but he wasn't there either, you know?"

"What did you hear?"

"I heard they hauled the two niggers to Tutto's basement," he said, "and hung 'em on meat hooks." A flashbulb winked two tables away from us. "And skinned 'em alive," he said. "But who knows? You hear all these stories, you don't know what to believe."