William Kennedy: Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

The last time Martin went to Hibernian Hall for Saint Patrick’s Day a woman danced for an hour with her mongoloid son, who was wearing a green derby on his enormous head. When the music stopped, the boy bayed like a hound.

The call about Charlie came at midnight. Go to Hudson Street near the meat market with your friend and park in the empty lot. Your friend stays in the car. You walk to Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue and get a cab and go such and such a route. You should be back in maybe an hour with the property.

Martin felt the need to walk. He got out of Morrie’s car and crossed the empty lot. He looked across the street at a car and saw its back window being lowered. Resting on the window as it rolled downward were the double barrels of a shotgun. Martin felt the useless weight of Patsy’s pistol in his pocket, and he walked back to the DeSoto.

At four-fifteen a taxi pulled up to the lot and stopped. When two men got out, the shotgun car screeched off in the direction of the Battery Martin opened the back door of the DeSoto and helped Charlie Boy to climb in and sit down. Martin snapped on the interior light and saw Charlie’s face was covered with insect bites. The perimeter of his mouth was dotted with a rash where adhesive tape had been. He reeked of whiskey, which Morrie said the kidnappers used to revive him from the stupor into which he had sunk.

“Are you hurt anyplace?” Martin asked him. “This is Martin Daugherty, Charlie. Are you hurt?”

“Martin. No. They treated me all right.”

“He’s hungry,” Morrie said. “He wants a corned beef sandwich. He said he’s been thinking about a corned beef sandwich for three days.”

“Is my father with you, Martin?”

“He’s in Albany waiting for you. Your mother, too. And Patsy. Your whole family.”

“It’s good to see you fellows.”

“Charlie,” said Martin, “the whole world’s waiting for you to go home.”

“They hit me on the head and then kept me tied to a bed.”

“Is your head all right?”

“One of them put ice cubes on the bump. I want to call up home.”

“Were they tough on you?” Morrie asked.

“They fed me and one of them even went out and got me a couple of bottles of ale. But after I’d eat, they’d tie me down again. My legs don’t work right.”

Martin’s vision of his own life was at times hateful. Then a new fact would enter and he would see that it was not his life itself that was hateful but only his temporary vision of it. The problem rests in being freed from the omnipotence of thought, he decided. The avenue of my liberation may well lie in the overthrow of my logic. Not until Charlie Boy was kidnapped did Patsy and Bindy think of electrifying the windows of their homes. Given the benign nature of most evenings on Colonie Street, there is a logic to living with nonelectrified windows. But, of course, it is a dangerously bizarre logic.

“It’s time to move,” Martin said, and he put out the car light and sat alongside Charlie Boy in the back seat. Morrie took the wheel and moved the DeSoto out of darkness onto the West Side Highway. It now seemed they were all safe and that no one would die. History would continue.

“Stop at the first place that looks like it’s got a telephone,” said Martin, to whom the expedition now belonged.

We move north on the Henry Hudson Parkway. When we free the children we also drown Narcissus in his pool.

On the day after Charlie Boy returned home, Honey Curry was shot dead in Newark during a gun battle with police, Hubert Maloy was wounded, and ten thousand dollars of ransom money, identifiable by the serial numbers of the bills as recorded by the Wall Street bank, was found in their pockets.

When Charlie Boy was returned to Patsy McCall’s cabin in the Helderberg Mountains, Morrie Berman and Martin Daugherty became instant celebrities. The press tracked them everywhere, and even Damon Runyon sought out Martin to interview him on the climactic moments on Hudson Street.

“Martin Daugherty,” wrote Runyon, “climbs out of the DeSoto with the aim of stretching his legs. But he does not get very far with his stretching before he is greeted by a double-breasted hello from a sawed-off shotgun peeking out of the window of a parked car. Being respectful of double-breasted hellos of such size and shape, Martin Daugherty goes back where he comes from and ponders the curious ways kidnappers have of taking out insurance on their investments.”

Eight hours after Charlie Boy’s return, the Albany police arrested Morrie Berman at the ticket office in Union Station, just after he had purchased a ticket to Providence. He was taken to the McCall camp for interrogation, and, Martin later learned, dunked in Patsy’s new swimming pool, which was partly filled for the occasion, until he revealed the kidnappers’ names. Curry and Maloy were among the names he disclosed, along with the nicknames of four hoodlums from New Jersey and Rhode Island.

The Newark shootout proved not to be the result of Morrie’s disclosures, for no amount of dunking could have forced him to reveal a fact he did not know. He thought Maloy and Curry had gone to Providence. Maloy, under interrogation on what he erroneously thought was his death bed, said his flight with Curry from Greenwich Village to Newark was his own decision. He was tired and did not want to drive all the way to Rhode Island at such an hour.

None of the kidnappers had been in Newark before, during, or after the kidnapping. None of them had any way of knowing that the hangouts of criminals in that city had been under the most intensive surveillance for several days.

When Martin heard of Billy’s status as a pariah on Broadway, he wrote a column about it, telling the full story, including how Berman saved Billy’s life in a brawl, and wondering: “Is betrayal what Billy should have done for Berman by way of saying thank you?” He argued that Billy’s information on Newark, and only Billy’s information, brought Maloy and Curry to justice and saved the McCalls ten thousand dollars. Yet even this was not a betrayal of Berman, for Berman had told Billy the truth about Newark: Maloy was not there, and had no plans to go there.

“Though I doubt he believes it,” Martin wrote, “Billy knew Maloy would go to Newark at some point. He knew this intuitively, his insight as much touched with magic, or spiritual penetration of the future, as was any utterance of the biblical prophets which time has proved true. Billy Phelan is not only the true hero of this whole sordid business, he is an ontological hero as well.

“Is it the policy of the McCall brothers to reward their benefactors with punishment and ostracism? Is this how the fabled McCalls gained and kept power in this city of churches for seventeen years? Does their exalted omnipotence in this city now have a life of its own, independent of the values for which so many men have struggled so long in this country? If the McCalls are the forthright men I’ve always known them to be, they will recognize that what is being done to Billy Phelan is not only the grossest kind of tyranny over the individual, but also a very smelly bag of very small potatoes.”

Emory Jones refused to print the column.

“If you think I’m going to get my ass into a buzz saw by taking on the McCalls over a two-bit pool hustler,” he explained, “you’re a certifiable lunatic.”

Martin considered his alternatives.

He could resign indignantly, the way Heywood Broun had quit The World over the Sacco-Vanzetti business. But this was not in character for Martin, and he did like his job.

He could send the column in the mail to Patsy or Bindy, or handcarry it to them and argue the case in person. Possible.

He could put it in the drawer and forget about it and recognize that children must free themselves. True, but no.