Part 35 (2/2)

Eddie invites his girlfriend, Nina, a fas.h.i.+on model. She was on the cover of McCall's last summer. She dated Max Baer, the heavyweight heartthrob, Eddie says, and Clark Gable once made a play for her in a Schrafft's. She wears a tight sweater and a silk scarf knotted around her neck and a hat that slopes up and then sharply down and then up again, like a golf course. Willie can't take his eyes off her. He tries. He can't.

Everyone drinks too much. Plank and his wife drink much too much. Soon the girls begin shedding their clothes. In their garters and bra.s.sieres they dance around the coffee table. Mrs. Plank grabs a fistful of hundreds, throws it at Nina, who grabs two fistfuls and throws them in the air.

Willie sees Eddie laughing, slapping his thigh. He goes to him, wraps an arm around his shoulders. Hey, partner.

Hiya, Sutty.

Willie leers at Nina. How about letting me have a turn, he says.

Eddie stiff-arms Willie, looks at him with confusion. What?

Willie lowers his head, trying to think. He looks up. Sorry, Ed. I don't know where that came from. I'm drunk.

Forget it, Eddie says. He walks away.

Willie sits heavily on the floor, lies back. He puts a pillow under his head, tries to balance his gla.s.s of whiskey on his chest, spills half of it. His eyelids. He can't keep them open. Moments before letting them close he sees Eddie maneuvering Nina over to the window. Silhouetted against the fading daylight they look like Gable and Lombard on the big screen. Willie tries to stay awake, to read their lips. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Plank chasing Mrs. Plank toward the bedroom. He sees Mrs. Plank's a.s.s, big and round, her bright purple garters, her disheveled white blond hair waterfalling down her back. A split second before pa.s.sing out Willie sees something else.

In the morning he won't know if he actually saw it or dreamt it.

Plank-wearing Willie's cop uniform.

Bartender: The other thing I always admired about you, Willie, was the nonviolence part. If only more crooks were like you the world would be a better place. These days they think nothing of grabbing an old lady on the subway, hitting her on the head, taking her pocketbook.

Sutton: You're telling me. The kids I saw coming into Attica the last few years. You wouldn't believe. Violent, hooked on drugs. And lazy? They'd seek me out, ask me to teach them the secret of bank robbing. I'd tell them, The secret is hard f.u.c.kin work.

Bartender: Now you got these radicals running around, planting bombs outside banks, government buildings. They say they're protesting-they're just hurting innocent people.

Sutton: I used to get up at five, fill a thermos with hot coffee, walk down to the bank, freeze my a.s.s off. I'd take reams of notes. I'd memorize them. I planned every job to the T so no one would get hurt.

Bartender: When I got back from Europe in '19, shrapnel in my hip, I couldn't find a job for two solid years. I got so angry, I had to fight to keep from putting my hands around someone's throat. I kept asking, What was the point? I might've thrown in with a guy like you. I almost did, to be honest. But I never could've thrown in with punks like we've got running around today.

Reporter: Mr. Sutton?

Sutton: Yeah?

Reporter: I'm just looking at this file here, and it says you and Eddie, while robbing a bank, fired off machine guns? And tear gas? Then led cops on a high-speed chase through the heart of midtown? That doesn't sound so-nonviolent.

Bartender: What's with this kid?

Sutton: I wish I knew.

Reporter: But I just-it's in the files.

Sutton: Have you never known newspapers to get anything wrong?

Bartender: What's the next stop on the nickel tour, Willie?

Sutton: Broadway and One Hundred Seventy-Eighth.

Photographer: Uptown again. Right by the stadium. I can't help mentioning that we just came from there.

Sutton: Patience and Fort.i.tude here are miffed that I'm taking them through my story in chronological order.

Bartender: How else would you tell a story? What happened there, Willie?

Sutton: That's where they shot poor Eddie.

The soda jerk from the corner drugstore comes to Willie's door, says Willie has a phone call. Willie bundles up, walks down to the drugstore, slips into the phone booth.

Sutty, it's Eddie.

How's tricks?

I need to go to New York.

How come?

I need new license plates.

Seems awfully far to travel for new plates.

What choice do I have? I can't show residence here in Philly.

Mm. Okay. Call me when you get back?

Will do.

Be careful.

So long.

December 1933. One year since Willie escaped Sing Sing. He holes up in his apartment, drinking brandy, playing Christmas records on an old Victor. Feeling nostalgic. Thinking of Happy, Wingy, Daddo. And Mr. Untermyer. Willie wonders if Cicero has read about the exploits of his former gardener.

Now he thinks of Bess. He pours another brandy. What he wouldn't give to spend Christmas with her. Ah Bess. My heart's darling. The door blows off its hinges. Ten cops burst into the apartment. Willie jumps out of his chair just in time to catch a right cross from a detective with a flattop haircut, then a haymaker from another detective with a face like raw meat.

Willie, cuffed, comes to in the backseat of a cop car. Detective Flattop is driving, Detective Meatface is riding shotgun, doing all the talking.

Might never have found you but for your friend, Plank.

Plank? Who's Plank?

That's a hot one. He's only the dumbest guy in East New York. He aint got no job but he drives a brand-new Cadillac and wears hunnert-dollar suits, that's who Plank is. His neighbors noticed sump fishy, called us. We put a tap on his phone. Bingo bango, here we are.

Doesn't sound like the kind of moron I'd have anything to do with.

Your pal Eddie Buster Wilson aint winnin no brain contests neither. He got you and Plank on the blower this mornin, shot the breeze like it never occurred to him the line might be tapped. You he told he was goin to New York. Plank he told to meet him at Motor Vehicles. So-two and two together. Four. A little Welcome Wagon we ranged frim. He shoulda give up, but he chosed to lead us on a merry chase. Too bad frim.

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