Manhattan Beach Page 8

  “Ooh-la-la,” Louie cried.

  Nell embraced him from the other side. Marco and the older non-handsome suitor both laughed. It was impossible not to wish Louie well.

  “I’m going to faint,” Louie said. “Catch me when I do, will you, girls?”

  * * *

  None of the furor within Moonshine leaked onto East Fifty-third Street; it was like passing from one world into another. Anna glanced at her watch and received a shock; it was after one A.M. “I have to get home,” she said.

  Nell made no answer; she was drooping to precisely the degree she’d been artificially enlivened at the start of the night. “Will you see him tomorrow?” Anna asked.

  Nell shook her head. “He can’t get away on weekends. That’s why I’m so steaming mad that he didn’t show, the rat.”

  “Did he buy you that dress?”

  “In Palm Beach,” Nell said. “He’d a business trip to Miami, and I went with him. Now I’ve shocked you, haven’t I?” she added with reckless gloom.

  “A little,” Anna admitted. “It seems . . . dangerous.”

  “Only for him—I’ve nothing to lose. And he says I’m worth any risk.” She smiled wanly. “Don’t tell me you thought I was an angel.”

  “I didn’t. Think that.”

  “There’s no such thing, anyway.”

  Anna said nothing.

  “Angels are the best liars, that’s what I think,” Nell said morosely. After a moment she asked, “Are you an angel, Anna?”

  Anna was aware of the rattle of fall leaves over the pavement, the gardenia smell of Nell’s perfume. No one had ever asked her that question before. Everyone simply presumed that she was.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not an angel.” Her eyes met Nell’s, and they understood each other.

  Nell took Anna’s arm, her spirits revived. They walked past town houses like handcrafted jewel boxes. “You hide it very well,” she said softly.

  “I suppose that’s good.”

  “You could be a spy or a detective. No one would know who you really are, or who you work for.”

  “I want to be a diver,” Anna said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  * * *

  Driving along Eighty-sixth Street in Brooklyn, Dexter Styles saw Badger check his wristwatch and then extend a hairy hand toward the radio dial, presumably to turn on the five-thirty A.M. news. Dexter knocked the hand away.

  “What’d you do that for?” Badger groused.

  “You don’t touch a man’s car without his permission. Or did they not teach you that in Chicago?”

  “Sorry, boss,” Badger said meekly, but his stubborn, merry eyes told a different story. Sure enough, he went on, “It’s just that . . . I’m touching the car by sitting in the car, if you take my meaning. I’m touching the seat when I lean back.”

  “If you want me to smack you, why not just ask.”

  “Say, you’ve been sore at me all night.”

  Dexter glanced at him. Among Badger’s maddening traits was a fair degree of accuracy at reading Dexter’s moods. He was sore—why, he couldn’t recall. Maybe it was the fact that Badger was clogging up his car at what would soon be Dexter’s favorite hour: the pause between night and dawn when you felt the possibility of light before any was visible.

  “The girl,” he said, remembering. “You were rude to the girl who approached my table. Miss Feeney.”

  Badger gaped incredulously.

  “At Hell’s Bells, that’s one thing,” Dexter said, referring to his roadhouse in the Flatlands, which they’d visited first after leaving Moonshine. “Even at the Pines, although you won’t hear Mr. Healey talk that way to a customer. But not at Moonshine.”

  “Too high-class?”

  “Something like that.”

  Badger heaved a sigh. “It was different in Chicago.”

  “So I’m told.”

  For seven nights running, Badger had yakked his ear off about Chicago’s swell gin joints and incomparable dames and dishy lake; above all, the silken accord between Syndicate and Law. Badger loved Chicago, but Chicago did not love Badger. Something had gone very wrong in the Windy City, and a less lucky kid would be feeding fishes at the bottom of Lake Michigan. But Badger’s mother was a favorite niece of Mr. Q.’s. Conversations had taken place, and Mr. Q. had secured his great-nephew’s safe passage to Brooklyn, where he’d handed him over to Dexter for education and guidance. The normal thing would have been for Badger to drive him, but Dexter would sooner have made the kid his lawyer. He never let another man behind the wheel of his new Series 62 Cadillac, painted Norse Gray, one of the last to roll off the line before Detroit moved strictly into war production. Dexter loved to drive. He doubted there were ten men in New York who drove as much as he did, or went through more black-market gasoline.

  “Say, you’re going the wrong way, boss.”

  “That all depends where I’m trying to go.”

  “I thought you were taking me home.” Badger meant Bensonhurst, where he was sleeping in the spare bedroom of Mr. Q.’s ancient maiden sister.

  From Gravesend, where they’d just visited the Pines, Dexter had driven unthinkingly into Bay Ridge. He’d discovered an excellent view of the Narrows a few weeks ago, after visiting an associate on a hilly street above Fort Hamilton. He’d been about to get back in his car when he found himself staring into the dark of the Upper Bay, where boats and waterfront were blacked out. He’d perceived a new, dynamic density in the darkness. All at once his eyes had organized the mystery and he’d seen it: a procession of immense ships slipping from the harbor at regular intervals like beasts or ghosts. A convoy headed out to sea. There was something profound, unearthly, even, in its muted passage. Dexter waited until every ship passed—twenty-eight, he counted, but who knew how long the parade had gone on before he’d arrived. At last, the little gate boat had come along to close the anti-submarine net. After that, he’d made a habit of returning to this spot every few nights, hoping to catch sight of another convoy.

  “You’re young and healthy, Badger,” he said as the engine idled. “Why haven’t you signed up?”

  “I’m not a soldier, that’s why.”

  “A soldier is exactly what you are. As am I.”

  “Not that kind.”

  “Your great-uncle is our general.”

  “Not the marching kind.”

  Dexter turned to him sternly. “If Mr. Q. told us to march, we’d march. If he told us to wear monkey suits, we’d put them on. You wouldn’t happen to be 4-F, would you, Badger?”

  “Me?” Badger said shrilly. “Why, I’ve eyes like a Siamese. From the roof of the Drake Hotel, I could read blinker signals all the way from the middle of Lake Michigan.”

  Chicago again. Dexter watched the harbor while Badger rhapsodized, thinking over what he’d just heard at both Hell’s Bells and the Pines: business was down. Men hadn’t enough gasoline to drive to roadhouses. It would likely be the same story at the clubs on Long Island and the Palisades, which he would visit tonight and on Monday.

  Heels, his man at the Pines, had told him something else: a former card dealer, name of Hugh Mackey, was making trouble. He’d gambled too much, borrowed too heavily, stuck his paws too deep in the till, and gotten canned. Now he was threatening Heels with blackmail if he didn’t rehire him at a better salary. Claimed he’d seen enough in eight months to put them all in Sing Sing. Dexter tried to picture Hugh Mackey. He could always put a name to a face, but a name alone sometimes wasn’t enough.

  “What did she want in the end?” Badger asked lazily. “That twat who kept coming back.”

  “Watch your mouth.”

  “She can’t hear me.”

  Dexter marveled at his insolence. It made him grasp something that had eluded him until that instant: Badger thought he was protected. He’d mistaken Mr. Q.’s helping hand for immunity of some kind—apparently unaware that Mr. Q.’s own brother had vanished in the course of his ascent, along with at least two cousins. This mis
apprehension explained Badger’s exaggerated deference toward Dexter, the twist of mockery inside it.

  “Get out,” Dexter said.

  Badger looked bewildered.

  “Beat it. Now.”

  The kid sputtered a moment, but he must have known Dexter meant it. He opened the door and stepped into the dark. Dexter drove away quickly and quietly, glancing just once in the rearview mirror. He barely made out Badger gazing after the car in the cheap suit Dexter had bought him the week before at Crawford’s. It would take him some doing to find his way back to Bensonhurst, if he even knew the address. Those squeaky new brogues would get broken in fast. With a kid like that, you’d no choice but to hit him hard, as many times as it took. Whatever Mr. Q. had saved him from in Chicago could not have been worse than the hellfire that would rain down on Badger here in New York if he failed to observe the chain of command. There was no such thing as immunity. Thinking you had it was suicide.

  The good news was that Dexter would likely be free of the kid for a couple of days while Badger licked his wounds. Dexter preferred women, was the truth—they were easier to be around. He would have liked for women to run the whole of his business, if he could find any as tough as the speakeasy owners of his youth: Texas Guinan, Bell Livingstone, dames who’d run over rooftops to escape the dry agents. But modern girls seemed not to like weapons very much, and to be fair, it was hard to carry a gat inside a dress. Even Dexter didn’t wear a shoulder holster; why bother having a suit tailored at F. L. Dunne only to spoil its line? As for keeping a gun in a pocketbook, that only happened in the pictures. A weapon needed to rest against the hide.

  The magic hour struck as he approached Manhattan Beach: a swell of promise in the sky that Dexter experienced physically, an expansion inside his chest. He liked to await first light at the eastern end, where the grand hotels used to be. His pop had worked in the kitchen of the Oriental when Dexter was small, and although the hotel had been razed when he was eleven, he could call it to mind precisely—as if its ghost still faced the sea, arms outstretched, awnings, spires, flags snapping in the wind. Inside, miles of red-carpeted hallway were infused with a hum likely generated by the cast of hundreds—his pop included—who toiled just out of sight. Dexter had never been allowed on the Oriental’s beach. Too exclusive.

  Last February, just after Pearl Harbor, the Coast Guard had sealed off the eastern end of Manhattan Beach and built a training center amid the vacationers’ cottages. Dexter idled by its gate, looking east as first light appeared. It was gradual, but it never felt like that. One second to the next, and it was day.

  His house was on Manhattan Beach’s western end. He kept the front door unlocked. In the kitchen, Milda had left him a pot of coffee, which he warmed on a burner. He poured himself a cup and raised the blackout curtains that covered the windows facing the sea. He only really knew what a day looked like when he’d seen it through these windows. With each quarter turn of dawn, the density of boats was more fully revealed: lighters, barges, tankers, some quarantined at anchor. Wooden-hulled minesweepers moved back and forth across the width of the Ambrose Channel. Tugboats gadflied like circus clowns alongside ships headed into the Upper Bay.

  He brought his coffee and binoculars onto the back porch, which overlooked the sea. Tabatha appeared a few minutes later, sleepy-eyed in her frilly lavender robe. Dexter was pleased; normally, his daughter slept late on Saturdays. Her auburn hair—the exact shade of her mother’s—was still indented from the pins she must have yanked from it moments before, to prevent him teasing her. “Tabby cat,” he said, kissing her proffered cheek. “What’s this, you’re drinking my coffee?”

  “It’s mostly milk.” She curled into the chair beside his, hugging her knees. Her flimsy chemise was no match for the wind.

  “No slumber party last night?”

  Lately, it seemed she was always with a girlfriend (often Natalie, whom he didn’t trust), or else two or three girls were over here, making lapel pins out of melted wax or “broomstick skirts,” which involved dipping the skirt in a pot of dye and twisting it around a stick to dry. The result was nothing short of hideous.

  “Any picture stars last night?” she asked.

  “Well, let’s see. Aline MacMahon was there, Wendy Barrie. Joan Fontaine, she won the Academy Award.” He was teasing her, mentioning only girls.

  “No one else?”

  “Well, I did catch a glimpse of Gary Cooper. Very late.”

  She clapped her hands. “What was he doing?”

  “Sitting happily beside his wife and keeping her in martinis.”

  “You always say that!”

  “It’s always true.” But it was practically never true. Dexter told no one what he saw through the hidden window on the club’s second floor. He left that to Mr. Winchell, his friend and regular, who was a genius at the art of saying something and nothing at the same time.

  “Anyone else?” She was hoping for news of Victor Mature. She had gone with Natalie to I Wake Up Screaming last year, and the sight of Mature in a swimming rig had proved a conversion experience. Now his sappy stills decorated her schoolbooks under cellophane.

  “No sign of Victor, if that’s who you mean,” he said.

  “I didn’t,” she said piously. “He has more important things to do than go to nightclubs. He’s joined the Coast Guard.”

  In the old days, when she’d been a regular early riser, Tabby had joined Dexter out here most mornings with her cup of milk. He’d been impressed by her shrewdness, by the grave thought she gave to small topics, and had imagined going into business with her one day—legitimate, of course. But his hopes for Tabby had dimmed over the past year, when she’d begun styling her hair like Veronica Lake and devoting herself to the Ouija board. Yet every couple of weeks she still appeared out here in the morning, as if observing a ritual.

  “What’s on tap for today, Tabs?”

  “Something with Natalie.”

  “Something like what?”

  “A picture. Maybe the drugstore.” The studied way she avoided his eyes told him boys would be present. Natalie was boy-crazy, and Tabby had grown prettier than Dexter would have liked. Not that he wished ugliness on his only daughter, but showy beauty was an invitation to dependence. He’d have liked her to have the hidden kind, visible only to those who looked closely. She’d made a lapel pin out of an aspirin box painted over with red nail varnish, and called it a Wish Box. Apparently, there was a secret wish inside, written on a slip of paper. The idea of Tabby maintaining a secret vexed him a little.

  “Care for a look?” he asked, offering the binoculars. She shook her head. She’d produced an emery board and was filing her nails into perfect ovals. “English, if you please,” he said.

  “No, thank you, Daddy.”

  “Lots of ships.”

  “I see them.”

  “How, when you’re staring at your fingernails?”

  “I see them every day.”

  He raised the binoculars, scanning the nervous gray water for the conning tower of a submarine. The net across the Narrows protected the Upper Bay, but as far as Dexter knew, there was nothing to stop a U-boat from slipping around the corner of Breezy Point, where Fort Tilden was, and coming right to where sea met rocks below his house. Watching the sea in dread of a submarine felt at times like anticipating one—hoping for it, even.

  “Here,” he said, thrusting the binoculars at Tabby to break the spell of her self-absorption. “Make sure no Germans are coming ashore like they did on Amagansett Beach.”

  “Why would they, Daddy? There’s nothing important here.”

  “To help with your fingernails? Those seem to be very important.”

  She yanked her fragment of a robe around her and stalked back indoors. Dexter seethed at her vanity and his own impulsiveness. It was a weakness.

  He tossed his cold coffee onto the rocks and went inside. In his dressing room, he removed his gat from its ankle holster and locked it in the cabinet he kept for tha
t purpose. He hung his trousers and jacket in the closet, threw his shirt into a corner to be laundered, and stood at the sink in his Sulka undershorts, washing with cold water. Then he entered his musky, sunken bedroom. The lush expanse of the bed he and Harriet shared was a repudiation of the barracks-style sleeping arrangements favored by her Puritan forebears. He heard her breathing and slipped into bed beside her. The light from the dressing room caught on the wingspan of her cheekbones, her sultry mouth. Very pretty, his Harriet. Distractingly pretty—why had he supposed her daughter would be any less so? She was composed even in sleep; it was Dexter’s job to discompose her. He’d been doing it since she was sixteen, begging to come along on his liquor runs, which he’d interrupted to fuck her by moonlight in Long Island pumpkin fields, her debutante dresses bunched over her head, full of leaves. A night’s worth of aggravation had gathered inside him like racehorses twitching at a starting gate. This would do for action, it always would. He was on top of Harriet before she was even awake.

  “Morning, baby,” she said in the husky voice that had been so unnerving in her youth, before she’d grown into it. “Rude awakening.”

  “Long night,” Dexter said.

  * * *

  Before Mass the next morning, the new deacon took Dexter aside to discuss the bell. It had an “invisible crack” that not only compromised its sound but might result in a break, a fall, a crushed parishioner. Clergy always assumed Dexter would be an easy mark for church improvements, sin being inherent to his livelihood. Already there had been a chipped altar slab, new robes for the choirboys, and now this bell, which sounded fine to him. In fact, he wouldn’t have minded if they’d rung it less.

  “I’m surprised, Deacon,” he said as they stood in a bushy nook outside of Saint Maggie’s. “A church not twenty-five years old.”

  “During the Depression, we made no improvements at all,” the deacon murmured.

  “Not so. Your predecessor, Deacon Bertoli, tapped me for vestments and a new chalice, not to mention those stations of the cross wall hangings in the apse.”