David Alexander - Masters of Noir - Volume 2

“You’d better keep it,” Benson said, “I’m going to need a lawyer to defend me — in a divorce suit.”

“At your service,” Malone said. “Remember I never lost a client yet.”

He bent down and picked the flowers out of the waste basket. The card was still attached to them: “Flowers to the Fair, From John J. Malone.”

“I know a young lady who will appreciate these,” Malone said, “Her mother lives in Monte Carlo.”

I want to get this written down on paper fast, while there’s still some Sneaky Pete in the bottle, just in case my hand gets shaky and I need it. Not that I’m stooling, understand. When you’re a wino on Skid Row you don’t holler copper. But this is different from stealing the shoes off a mission stiff or jack-rolling a lush. This is murder.

I want to have this all written down on paper with a date on it and somebody to witness it, then I’m going to seal it up in an envelope and leave it with a character I can trust. Maybe a Holy Joe at the Sally Ann — the Salvation Army — or the bartender at Grogan’s gin mill on the Bowery. Just in case the cops get to smelling around with their big noses, understand. Because this is the first time that I was ever mixed up in a murder and I got to protect myself. I’m not really mixed up in it, I guess, but just kind of a witness. And I’m not even sure it’s murder.

Don’t start laughing and thinking I’m going off into the rams or counting the lavender leopards on the ceiling just because I’m a wino. This happened. It happened just today. And by now maybe they got the old doll that was chilled in the top drawer of the ice box at the morgue on East Twenty-ninth Street.

I’ll take another snort of the sweet wine I got right here beside me in the cubbyhole at the Castle Rooms I just paid the man six bits to occupy until tomorrow morning. Then I’ll begin at the beginning. There, that’s better. Stuff warms up your insides, know what I mean?

I woke up in this same flophouse this morning. Only I didn’t wake up in a six-bit private room. I woke up in what they call the dormitory where a bed costs thirty-five cents. I didn’t wake up until nine o’clock when they come around to fumigate the place. They run you out of here every day at nine so they can fumigate and you can’t get back in until four in the afternoon.

I felt awful, worse than I ever did feel before, but when the man started hollering to hit the deck I did all the usual things mechanically before I tried to get up. I felt for the Army shoes with the waterproof soles and they were tied around my neck like usual. I reached down inside the old gray sweatshirt and the little tobacco pouch where I keep what’s left from the stakes I make by bracing guys was there, pinned to me, but it was empty. That didn’t surprise me because I knew I’d spent my last cent on a pint of Sneaky to get up on. I felt my leg. I always tied the morning pint to my leg, inside my trousers, in a special way I had invented. I hadn’t even opened the bottle the night before, but it wasn’t there. Some mother-lover had split my trousers leg with a razor blade and got the pint while I was sleeping off my binge.

I damn near blew my top right there. I had the green-paint horrors and I didn’t have a cent and the brand new full pint that would have saved my life was poured down some mother-lover’s gullet. I tried to get out of bed and I could hardly stand on my own two feet, I was shaking so. I didn’t know what the hell to do. I’d be lucky to make the street without a shot the way I felt, and in order to brace enough of a stake for a drink I’d have to get off the Bowery. You can’t bum from bums. Maybe I’d have to walk up Fourth Street all the way to Washington Square and I couldn’t ever make it without a drink.

I staggered into the lavatory and splashed some water on myself and looked around at the empties on the floor, hoping maybe some guy might have left even a few drops in a bottle. I’d been on Skid Row long enough to know better. Somehow or other I managed to get down the steps and out into the street. I kind of leaned against buildings until I was outside Grogan’s Palace Bar about a block away. I’d been drinking there the night before. It’s funny how they give Skid Row pads and wino traps such high-faluting names. The Castle and the Palace, for instance. And just a little further on there’s a flea flop called the Berkshire Arms. The Bowery businessmen have got a funny kind of humor.

All around me were little groups of guys pooling the change they’d saved from their bracing operations of the day before so they could make a crock. There’s two kinds of winos on the Bowery. One kind tries to hold on to enough change overnight so they can get in a morning pool that’s trying to make a crock to pass around. The other kind buys their pint or fifth the night before and tries to hang on to it till morning. I’m the second kind. I got something wrong with my throat and I can’t take big swallows. Usually you only get one swallow at a crock when you’re in a pool, so I always get gypped. Also, some of these pools buy Sweet Lucy, which is port, and I go for Sneaky Pete, which is sherry or muscatel. Not that it makes much difference. When I feel like I felt that morning, I’ll drink anything, including kerosene.

I shuffled into the Palace and I walked right into murder, although I didn’t know it then and I was too fogged to think about murder or anything else, anyway. I said to the bartender, “Suds, some mother-loving bastard ripped my jeans and stole my life insurance, a whole pint of it. Suds, I got the heaves and jerks and I’m going off into the rams if I don’t get one quick. You give me just one big-boy on the cuff, Suds, and I’ll be in shape to brace a stake and pay you inside half an hour. I spent a lot in here last night. Almost three bucks, Suds.”

Suds just laughed like that was funny. He said, “You been around long enough to know better than ask for a cuff in Grogan’s trap. Grogan wouldn’t cuff his sweet old drunken grandmother. Fall down in the gutter and drool a little and maybe Kerrigan, the cop, will take you up to Bellevue. They got some stuff there called paraldehyde makes your eyeballs pop like the buttons on a fat man’s vest.”

I was really shaking now and the sweat was rolling off me so hard it bounced on the bar. A guy at the bar was looking at me. He was just another Skid Row grifter, dirty as I was, needing a shave. But he had a kind of air about him like he’d seen better days. He had a big, fat purple goblet of vino in front of him that made my tongue hang out a foot, and he had a dog. It was the damned ugliest dog I ever saw in all my life. A kind of mongrel bull, I guess. It was so old it could hardly walk. It had nasty-looking sores and a swelling in its belly like a tumor. Its eyes were two big milky moonstones. Cataracts. The old dog was blind.

The dog’s owner had evidently been belting himself with the Pete for quite a spell because he was beginning to glow like a wino does when the stuff gets in his bloodstream. His cheeks were pink in his dirty-gray face. He kind of smiled at me and showed a set of jagged teeth stained purple-brown by wine. He waved a fan of dirty fingers at me and said to Suds, “This man is sick. I was a doctor once and I know. Alcohol is a strange element. It’s the only poison that serves as its own antidote.”

Suds said, “So what you want that I should do? Give every sick creep that crawls through the door a shot of bonded bourbon on the house?”

The man put money on the bar. He gulped the whole goblet of wine, then he said, “Refill my glass. Give our friend a blockbuster on me. He requires strong medicine.”

I almost started to laugh and cry at the same time. If you’d given me a choice between a million cash or the most beautiful broad in the world with all her clothes except her stockings off or a blockbuster, right then, I’d have taken the blockbuster. A blockbuster is a beer goblet full of sherry with a shot of cheap rye poured right into it. If that don’t fix you up, it’s time for the embalming needle.