Prologue | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20A | 20B | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25-26 | 27 | 28-29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35-36 | 37 | 38A | 38B | 38C | 38D | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42-43 | 44-45 | 46 | 47 | 48-49A | 49B | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57A | 57B | 58-59| 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68-69 | 70A | 70B | 71A | 71B | 72 | 73
PART II
ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS
74A
TREY SETTLED IN with business while the evening did its usual downward spiral into happy hedonism. It was a smooth ride tonight. The food was coming out of the kitchen at a steadier pace now that he’d hired more help for Ida. Trey was auditioning a new saxophonist by the name of Charlie Parker, and he was the slickest cat Trey had heard yet. There were clients going up and down the stairs. The burlesque show was as sharp as usual. The bookie was doing a brisk business. The poker tables were filled with jovial men and women.
He stopped tallying numbers and looked around a little.
Jovial, but not really happy.
He’d started watching people more closely since Marina had pointed out none of these people was happy. They might be having a good time right then, but they were not happy.
And he didn’t care, so long as they came to his speak to display their unhappiness with generous flashes of green. What he cared about was getting home as quickly as he could every morning, his quiet home, with his woman who was carrying his baby, and all the real things in life that mattered. He was happy, he realized. Now. When he had someone to go home to.
It had been a month since he’d fired Carville, and he was rethinking his decision, since Marina wasn’t having lessons, which put a kink in his plans. Miss Stanley had lowered herself to come to the speak to discuss it with Trey, but he gave her a helpless shrug and told her it was Marina’s decision.
“Say, Carville told me you didn’t like me much more than he did. How come you cared enough to come to me?” he’d asked her.
She sniffed haughtily. “I like you personally. I don’t like what you do. I have never met a man who had that much faith in his wife and enough respect for women as to explicitly nudge one toward college, much less law school.”
“My girls are smarter than about three-quarters of the cats I know, and I knew Marina was smart the first time I talked to her. I wouldn’t have married an idiot, and I’d be an idiot to waste intelligence like that.”
“And that is why I respect you. I am sorry Marina is angry, but I am not sorry I spoke up. She is extremely bright and will go far if she doesn’t have too many babies.” That was when she had glared at him.
He raised his hands as if in surrender. “No magic drug to keep it from happening.”
“There are other ways.”
“Well, if you still had a job,” he said snidely, irritated at the reminder that Marina hated children, “you could have given her all that information, now couldn’t you?”
Her mouth tightened.
“I can teach her all that. I do run a whorehouse.”
“In case it helps, I can give you references for other tutors.”
He waved that off. “Marina’s too mad at me right now. I’ll take them, but she liked him and she liked you and breaking in new tutors will irritate her more.”
To her credit, Miss Stanley had sighed. “Maybe that wasn’t the best thing to do after all,” she muttered.
“She may yet come around,” he’d told her. “I’ll give her a little tap here and there.”
“I can only hope. At the moment, I need to leave before someone sees me, and I lose my job at East.”
Taking Marina’s other complaints to heart, Trey had been careful to resume their routine of book club and picture shows and Fairyland. On Tuesdays, they went to Dot’s church activities, which he liked since the men usually played baseball after doing maintenance on the church building or whatever the old widows needed done at their homes.
The fucking was less frequent, and he was still putting sugar in her NuGrape, but it was enough for him to understand what Gio had been trying to tell him: Fucking was for the little moments in between.
It was enough that he’d been able to seduce Marina into being a little more adventurous. She was initially hesitant about each new variation, but he could tell when she thought the dope was kicking in because she relaxed and followed his lead almost eagerly. Then the next morning she would barely look at him, flushing to the roots of her hair. He would give her an innocent hug and kiss and immediately start talking about the day’s business, then she was back to her contented self.
Trey was happy with his life, and he was pretty sure Marina was about as happy as she could bear to be, considering she was always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
He was, in fact, thinking about how to coax her into blowing him off when one of his hostesses appeared at his elbow. “Two cats at the front wanting to talk to you. Look important. Fancy duds. Sicilian, accent like Gio’s.”
“Asked for me by name?”
“Yeup.”
“Okay, bring ’em up.”
Trey watched as she disappeared into the mass of bodies, then reappeared, struggling to get through the sardine-packed people. One cat wasn’t much older than Trey and had a blank expression. The other was maybe sixty or so. Their duds were indeed expensive.
It wasn’t the first time the speak had had patrons from New York; after all, the Paris of the Plains was a tourist attraction. But it was the first time he’d been requested by name. By cats he thought looked familiar. With Brooklyn accents.
Then Trey caught a glimpse of the older cat’s right hand—which wasn’t much of one, just a claw— Trey blinked and took a closer look. “Goddammit,” he breathed and shot out of his chair to welcome the newcomers at the top of the mezzanine stairs, Marina all but forgotten.
“Welcome to 1520 Main,” Trey said smoothly, putting on his best airs. “Thank you, Tina. I’ll take it from here.” Trey led them to his table and seated them. “I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage.”
“You are the Dunham to whom Remus sells his whisky, no?” the claw-handed one said with a heavy Italian accent.
“I am. Can I get you supper? Whisky?”
“Supper later. For the moment, I will enjoy a Remus with you. Salvatore?”
Holy shit. Trey was in hot water.
“Same, thanks,” he said in an accent just like Gio’s, and waited to take his seat until the older man took his.
“I’ll return shortly with drinks.”
His heart thundering, he headed down to the bar with feigned cool. “Vern. Two Remuses, a side of Boss Tom and cops, and Gio gone.”
“Who are they?”
“Giuseppe Morello and Lucky Luciano.”
Unflappable Vern paled. “I’ll send him down the whisky tunnel.”
Trey smoothly returned to his table and served his unwelcome guests their whiskies, making small talk.
After a few sips, the older cat nodded approvingly and said, “You have not asked my name, Mr. Dunham.”
“I figured we’d get to that eventually, as well as why you came here and sought me out by name. I’m pretty sure you didn’t come here to sample my Remus.”
“Ah, you know who I am.” He raised his right hand.
Trey cast a glance at Luciano. “I’ll be polite and let you know Boss Tom and KCPD’s on their way over.”
Morello nodded, his lips pursed. “I expected nothing less. This is my associate, Salvatore Luciano.”
Trey nodded his head respectfully at each. “You have business with me?”
“No more business than we have with any speak we visit on our way west to find my nephew, Matteo Terranova. Do you know the gossip?”
“News travels, sir, but not always dependably. Botched a hit? Ran?”
Luciano snorted. “Botched.”
Morello raised his left hand and tilted it back and forth. “Some of this, some of that. Might you have seen him? Tall, good-looking Sicilian boy.”
“We have a lot of good-looking Sicilian boys running around and I don’t know what your nephew looks like.”
They both nodded wearily, as if Trey were the hundredth person to say the same thing.
“If I were on the run, I’d be digging ditches and going to church on Sundays, not traipsing through speakeasies all the way to California.”
“Unless you were too lazy for manual labor and not smart enough to find an honest occupation.”
Trey’s eyebrows rose. “Don’t think much of your own blood, do you?”
Morello’s lip curled in contempt. “The boy has never been too bright.” At that moment, several police cars rolled up outside and stayed. Morello didn’t miss it. “You may call your dogs off now, Mr. Dunham. As you can see, we have no problem with you or any of the other speakeasies we have visited.”
“We’re mighty welcoming here in Kansas City, but we keep the peace. We don’t work the way you do in New York and Chicago, and we don’t want to.”
“Mmm, so I heard. Your Mr. Lazia took Mr. Capone to task.”
“He did. This town runs like it does because Pendergast doesn’t care who’s Irish, Italian, Negro, Russian, Jewish, or anything other -ish. That said, Boss Tom should be here any minute, and you can have a party. On the house.”
There was a bit of a commotion at the door: Boss Tom, turned out as if to enjoy an evening, and John Lazia.
“Dunham!”
“Excuse me, gentlemen.”
“You look jake up there,” Boss Tom murmured as Trey met him. “Looking for your gig?”
Trey nodded, then looked over Pendergast’s shoulder to Lazia. “Obliged.”
“You certainly are,” Lazia said smugly.
“Oh, for God’s sake. Go’n now while I get a table ready.”
Boss Tom and Brother John squeezed their way to the staircase while Trey directed his hostess to clear out one of the mezzanine’s back corner tables. By the time Trey rejoined them, they were greeting each other boisterously with kisses and back slaps as if all four cats were long-lost brothers. Trey let that go until he got the signal from his hostess that their table was ready.
“Come this way, if you please.”
He personally took their order, sent it to the kitchen, returned with a bottle of Remus, glasses, and a small cherry-wood humidor, then went back to his own chair at his own table and tried not to puke up his terror.
It also wasn’t the first time cats had come through looking for Gio, but it was the first time a capo had. They weren’t playing footsie. And if they found out Trey had known all along—
Trey feigned being a king reigning over his kingdom, completely engrossed in what was happening in his jam-packed speakeasy. Nothing else was out of the ordinary or interesting. But his heart was racing and his mouth was dry and for the first time in years he was truly terrified. What did he want with this life? Why did he stay?
This was all he’d known since he’d been run off his property, alone, having had the good fortune to fall in with a nice bootlegging couple who needed an extra pair of hands. His goal was to be a lawyer. He could sell 1520 back to Boss Tom or to Lazia at half its asking price and go to law school, but the longer he put it off, the less right it seemed. Except … He had a wife now. He was going to be a daddy. He should do something respectable whether he felt like it or not.
What would it be like to be out of the Machine? Would he have to move somewhere else and get a clean start? Did he want to live in terror over each decision he made? Or would life be just as fraught living on the right side of the law and making no money? He couldn’t live off his tiny fortune forever; lawyers didn’t make much and families were expensive.
But he did have a family to support. He certainly didn’t want his children to grow up poor, never knowing where their next meal was coming from, but he also didn’t want them to grow up with a thug for a daddy, never knowing if he’d come home, whether he be in the hoosegow or in a grave. No, he had to make enough to be able to get out of the Machine before his baby was old enough to understand daddy might not come home one day.
74A
If you don’t want to wait 2 years to get to the end, you can buy it here.
Donations can be made here, if you so desire.
Looks like Ol’ Trey starting to feel some doubts. Lots of questions for him to answer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OngCYK-UJw4
Thanks, Moj, Trey is like a lot of others
Knowing you’ve already crossed someone you shouldn’t cross isn’t a doubt, that’s a near death experience.
Hmm, now how would Trey recognize two men he’s never met?
Post Office pictures? I’ve never met Biden and hope I never do but I would still recognize him.
Old school mafiaso weren’t the kind to have their pictures plastered around – Capone excepted of course.
Lol
Giuseppe Morello and his clutch hand
born Salvatore Lucania
He put all the pieces together.
And presumably before the war that established the Five Families, since Luciano wouldn’t have had time for a leisurely trip out west afterwards.
OK, now I’m getting the time sorted. Parker reference is too early for him – Prohibition was long over by the time he was on his way to NY. He couldn’t even have been a teenager. Which also makes me think that Trey has to get out of the speak before Prohibition is over, and FDR campaigned on that in ’32. So that pushes this back well before that.
It doesn’t have to be *the* Charlie Parker.
[I looked up his DOB too.]
Parker, sax and born in KC – yeah, not like there would be another.
Theeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Hyperbole would be proud of me.
That was a flat mistake on my part. I think I misread his birthdate when I was researching, or I just got it in my head he was older than that.
Yeah, this has to be before the Market crashed – because that had to change a lot.
Yes. I worked in the crash later in the book, but didn’t dwell too much on it because I didn’t want to work that hard. Also, book was long enough as it was. As mentioned many weeks ago, Trey’s grandfather has been telling him to get his money out of the bank for reasons Trey doesn’t really understand.
Yep it’s your world, You should have made it David Sanborn.
Now, back to my usual – the phrase “none of these people was happy” can’t be right, I’m no English major but shouldn’t it be either ‘people were’ or ‘people are’? “People was” just plain sounds wrong.
“None” is a singular collective noun, requiring a singular verb. “None was,” not “People were.”
I figured there was some grammatical reasons why it are correct, however it still sounds wrong and that’s the important thing in writing… That, and trolling your readers.
Stop whinging.
He’s a real cunte.
Matt Welch, is that you?
That one struck me because everyone else is wrong and Moj was right.
My quibble is that nobody in NYC says “supper”.
Dammit! Sometimes it doesn’t occur to me to ask about such details.
You get a pass because Trey started it.
Nice! I was ‘fraid like Trey too.
Trey was auditioning a new saxophonist by the name of Charlie Parker
🙂
We used to tell each other lies
With our orange plastic button eyes
In a former life on a motel chair
I was Charlie Parker’s teddy bear
Yeah, me and Bird we’d stay up late
I used to watch him contemplate
While his horn would sit by the window and wait
‘Til it was time for him to blow it
He Forgot That It Was Sunday
Bad guys always make a story a little more intriguing. What are they going to do, and how are they going to do it?
Man I love ST:TOS. I want to read Captain Kirk’s book on picking up hot space chicks. I’m also interested in Scotty’s book on finding scotch all over the galaxy.
I would like to subscribe to Scotty’s newsletter.
That’ll be 3 quatloos.
All Kirk has to do is arch an eyebrow and rip his tunic in one or two strategic places.
The excellent eyebrow technique definitely belongs to Spock.
And now on to the famous 60s cutaway so two stunt doubles can fight.
Which of you organized this?
https://dailycaller.com/2024/03/01/deer-creek-school-responds-video-students-licking-toes-fundraiser-oklahoma/
Yeah, that’s not abnormal at all. America’s future. Excelsior.
Stan Lee is that you?
Is there a Zoom/Teams-like app for playing virtual card games with your friends? I.e. pinochle, spades, cribbage, etc., etc… If not, who wants to make a zillion dollars with me?
There’s got to be. I’ll bet Neph or slumbrew would know.
Wait, does anyone play cards anymore? I might be in a age/geographic bubble.
Played a lot of cards back in my younger days. My folks played cribbage, taught me at about 7-8 so they’d have another card hand. My brothers were a little older when they learned. Pinochle was played in the old army days, always double deck. I remember playing Hearts, not sure about Spades. Card playing is still done in some circles but not much with the younger crowd. TV was a game changer, now internet/games.
I think you’re in a NoDak bubble
TT taught me to play cribbage, but it’s been a while since we played. I may have to suggest that this evening. It’s been long enough that I’ll have to relearn the rules.
We had an informal euchre club in HS.
Hearts and spades were common. Everyone my age knew gin and a few others too.
But some of us played D&D later that day or found a friend with a C64.
Almost part of two ages, as it were. I like that.
California is so screwed (again).
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/2898285/steve-garvey-in-statistical-tie-with-adam-schiff-in-california-senate-race/
Move up here by me. We’ll drink Scotch and listen to Steel Panther every Friday. I’ll teach you how to play cribbage and how to survive in a sub-60 degree climate.
I didn’t think of North Dakota as a retirement option but you’re making me rethink it.
Wait a minute, Fridays are for Eddie Trunk’s radio show. Saturdays are for Steel Panther.
This plan is coming together nicely.
Friday Rye Day and Scotchy Saturdays. Make it so.
MikeS could sell snow to eskimos.
Don’t get me going on Sunday Fun Day.
STEVE HAVE FUN DAY EVERY DAY. FUN MEAN…
Just having fun doing business taxes… my life is a whirlwind.
Deepest sympathies…and good morning.
Good morning gt, 4 score.
Morning Lack and GT,
Did my taxes last week end, almost screwed up on the state, I was ready to mail in but I felt something was wrong, found my error and tore up my check. My inputs done change much, the numbers a little but the info stays the same.
I do Turbo but couldn’t file electronically, seems I didn’t have the previous year’s info Oh, well, I get a little refund, just have to wait a little longer
Good morning, 4(20)!
Lucky man, my situation seems more and more complex every year.
Yeah; I had interest income from two sources and nearly forgot to enter the $23 of interest from one of the sources.
One of my mutual funds resulted in a $1 credit for foreign taxes paid, and one of the “free” tax filing services said that to take it I’d have to move up to a paid tier and pay $30 for their software. Fat chance of that.
Good morning Glibbies!
☕👀
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF2A4i1Itlk
🎶🎸
Good morning, Sean!
😃
“X quietly reinstates ‘misgendering’ rules a year after Musk ended policy”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/2896509/x-quietly-reinstates-misgendering-rules-a-year-after-musk-ended-policy/
For a guy that’s so smart Elon sure is a dumbass.
I will call you “you” to your face. You do not get to control what I refer to you behind your back – not in a civilized society.
It really is that simple, the world.
Forcing people to accept one’s own reality.
I guess it’s bigotry, now, to refuse to accept that someone is actually Napoleon.
The World Health Organization now recommends that governments limit polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS or “forever plastics” that are resistant to breaking down in either the environment or the human body, at a level of 100 parts per trillion. This is the same level limited by the European Commission. Japan set a temporary PFAS limit of 50 ppt in 2020, and Sweden limits most PFAS at an average of 90 ppt. As far as more restrictive measures go, Canada is trying to lower its limit to 30 ppt, while Denmark is trying to ban PFAS in specific, isolated sectors such as in paper food packaging.
…..
According to a Black & Veatch consulting report commissioned by the American Water Works Association, the EPA’s proposed standards would increase water costs by anywhere from $80 to $11,150 per year for each household.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/beltway-confidential/2890130/pentagon-panicking-biden-proposal-that-would-increase-water-costs-household/
“anywhere from $80 to $11,150 per year for each household.”
Money well spent on that study.*
* More likely this is just reporters being reporters
It’s rather a broad range.
I wonder if it depends upon which part of the country one lives in.
Quite a range ain’t it?
The pentagon is scared of this proposed rule change.
There was no mention of the reactions of the octagon or the parallelogram.
Obligatory.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EM2MGN_w4sU
Well, there’s no way they are going to charge people $1,000 per month for water. So the colossal cost of this will have to be subsidized by taxes.
Have PFAS’s actually been proven to be bad for you?
Good morning all!
Good morning, Beau!
Mornin’, Beau and all the rest of you reprobates!
Good morning, ‘patzie!