Dreams Bigger Than the Night (18 page)

As they prepared to leave, T-Bone removed from the piano a small framed picture. “Looks like the place I grew up in,” he said.

Jay glanced at it: a pen-and-ink drawing of a ramshackle bungalow and bunkhouse.

“Somethin’ wrong? You sure is lookin’ at it hard.”

“No,” Jay exclaimed, “something is right. I’d bet ten bucks to a nickel that what we’re looking at are farm buildings in some small town near Atlantic City. I can’t remember the name of the burg, but if I see an atlas, I’ll know.”

“I ain’t followin’ you.”

“If I’m not wrong, Mr. Magliocco used to visit a friend there. Also, some guy, reputed to have scragged Arnold Rothstein, holed up in those houses.”

T whistled. “I see how you’re figurin’.”

Jay held up two thumbs, and T-Bone, smiling, said: “Maybe our little adventure ain’t gonna take as long as you figured. I hope you don’t mind if I bring along my checkerboard.”

“Not at all, let’s hit the road.”

In the Newark Public Library, he opened an atlas and located Norma. Longie, as good as his word, generously supplied them with two grand and a car, a 1931 Ford Roadster that Abe had bought off an ex-legger in Paterson whose growing family needed a larger vehicle. Although the car had racked up a few thousand miles, except for the discolored wide seat upholstered in Bedouin grain leather with narrow piping and the rumble seat, it looked none the worse for wear. Behind the seat, Longie had lodged a loaded shotgun with two shells. “Just in case,” he had said.

When Jay asked him how to find George “Hump” McManus, the man tried and acquitted for murdering Arnold Rothstein, Longie replied:

“He lammed it until he felt he could clear his name.”

“Mr. Magliocco knew him.”

“I had no idea. But frankly, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. Hump keeps to himself and has no phone. A while back, some of my friends and I wanted to see him about a private matter and had to drive to the shore.”

With nothing to lose, Jay decided to talk to McManus. For safety’s sake and fairness, he gave T five C-notes. As he wheeled down the coast road, he could have sworn that in the rearview mirror he saw a car trailing them.

Arriving in Sea Girt at dinnertime, they ran into difficulty with lodging. After numerous inquiries, they found a Negro boardinghouse. The owner, a skinny woman with a parchment face and varicose-trellised limbs, agreed to rent a room to T-Bone but not Jay. She said his presence would raise eyebrows. So he went to a small oceanfront hotel.

Instead of trying any of the restaurants, where T would likely be turned away, they bought some food at a small neighborhood grocery and ate in the car. A few people eyed them warily, but no one objected. The address that Longie h
ad provided took them to a small house on a wooded lot two blocks from the sea. The shingled cottage had a front porch and manicured lawns. Around eight, Jay knocked on the front door. It had begun to rain. The April showers drained the air of light but released the sweet smell of the earth. He could see through the shaded front windows two lamps in what he guessed was the living room. He breathed deeply to control his nervousness. Fully expecting to be greeted by a floozy-blonde gangster’s moll, he momentarily lost his tongue as a well-groomed elderly woman answered the door. She courteously asked him his business, but before he could respond, she glanced over his shoulder at the sidewalk, where T, huddled under a tree, began to back away from the door. “George,” she summoned. A husky, gruff fellow said “Yeah,” and would probably have closed the door in Jay’s face had he not said, as politely as he could, “Abe Zwillman asked me to see you. I work for him. My name is Jay Klug.” Before McManus could object, he added, pointing to T, “He works for Mr. Zwillman also.” He then showed him Longie’s business card, which McManus reluctantly took, studied, and, turning it over, saw Longie’s private number.

“Inside,” Hump said grudgingly.

Jay motioned to T, who came shuffling up the walk, doffed his cap to McManus, and acted deferentially, a routine that he witnessed many times in the coming months and one that always made him feel ashamed of being white. They followed McManus into the house, where the old lady stood at a distance, watching cautiously.

“Mother,” McManus said, “how’s about some coffee?”

Hump led them into the living room, a gloomy space with brown walls and ugly green and maroon furniture made of some kind of bristly tufted material. A card table stood off to one side. Jay gathered from the arrangement of the cards that someone had been playing solitaire. McManus rested his arms on his knees and waited.

“Longie would have called to tell you about us, but you have no telephone.”

“Yeah,” the old gambler grunted, “whatta you want?”

Again Jay breathed deeply. “I understand you once met Piero Magliocco . . . at the Norma place.”

McManus squinted and tore a cuticle with his teeth. Jay could see the wheels in his head turning. “Yeah, I met him once. So what?”

From his tone of voice, Jay decided the sooner he moved the discussion from Mr. Magliocco to Arietta, the better chance he had of eliciting any information. “His daughter worked for Longie. Some pretty nasty people would like to kill her. Longie wants to protect her but can’t unless he knows where she is.”

McManus lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “Mother,” he called, “where’s that coffee?”

She told him to hold his horses.

Hump was stalling, deciding whether to talk. Otherwise this weather-beaten relic would have immediately denied seeing Piero Magliocco since Norma and denied knowing anything now about him or his whereabouts. But Jay knew Hump was unlikely to blab without first looking into his story, and unlikely, even if the story checked out, to be completely forthcoming. There was nothing to be gained.

“Longie always takes good care of the people who help him,” Jay said, hoping to encourage McManus.

What Jay didn’t know, nor did Longie, was what had transpired between the two men when they had met in Norma. Perhaps the encounter was innocent. On the other hand, since McManus was lamming it at the time, Piero could have proven valuable to him, feeding him information, making calls, and generally acting as a go-between in the weeks after their meeting and preceding McManus’s trial. Or was Jay reading too much into one fact?

The old lady brought them all coffee and some rather bland cookies. When she put the tray down on an end table and poured everyone a cup, she gave T an awfully long look. Taking his cue, he hastily said:

“This smells like the most wonderful java I ever had the pleasure of enjoyin’.”

“How do you know till you taste it?” she said tartly.

“Smart thinkin’,” T mumbled and took a sip. “It’s even better than it smells.”

Her chilliness did not disappear, but she did stop staring.

Taking refuge in his role as a journalist, Jay tried to give McManus a chance to open up by asking about his most famous moment: his trial and acquittal for the death of Arnold Rothstein. Before leaving Newark and the paper, he had looked through the archives and fortified himself with a great deal of detail. “Would you mind if I asked you a few questions about the Rothstein affair?”

Exhaling smoke through his nose, Hump said with a skewed smile, “A guy can’t be tried twice for the same crime, so ask away.”

“The papers said Rothstein got a call while eating at Lindy’s. Did you make the call?”

“That soft blob of shit,” McManus blurted. “He has me line up a card game with two California gamblers, loses a bundle to all of us, and walks out without peelin’ the green from his wad. A week goes by, maybe longer, and we don’t see the kale. When I call him, he says the game was fixed and he ain’t gonna pay.” His face reddened and his narrative grew impassioned. “My reputation’s on the line. I run card games and make book. If someone I brought into the game don’t pay,
I
have to. Understand? Me! Even Mr. Big’s pals couldn’t forgive him for welshin’.”

At the time of the shooting, two people had agreed to testify that McManus had gunned down A.R.: a chambermaid and one of the players, Alvin C. Titanic Thompson. Before the trial, the chambermaid changed her story, and on the witness stand Thompson suffered an inexplicable memory loss.

“That trial,” continued Mcmanus, “was the worst thing that ever happened to me. A guy in my line of work has to stay out of sight. The newspapers made me famous. From that day on I was finished. The police began watchin’ me and my business petered out. No one wants to make bets with a bookie who’s been in the news. So I retired down here with the old lady.”

“Quite a coincidence,” Jay said cautiously, “that both witnesses went blank.”

McManus lit another butt. “Ask Longie, he’ll tell you.”

“Why not save me the trouble of asking?”

Hump immediately extinguished the cigarette in the dregs of his coffee cup. “All I’ll say is this, look at who took over the Brain’s empire . . . which guys . . . it will tell you somethin’.”

They left the subject of Rothstein and chatted about the people McManus had known during his heyday and the nightspots of New York. The guy liked reminiscing about the high rollers and the city, but would say nothing about Norma and the Maglioccos, even when Jay hinted broadly. As he started with T for the door, feeling low about having come up empty-handed, McManus said, “Come back tomorrow.” When Jay reached the car, Hump shouted, “Nice chariot.”

“Yeah,” Jay said, “courtesy of Longie,” emphasizing the name.

Jay drove around the corner, returned to McManus’s street, and parked in the next block, to see him, no more than fifteen minutes later, leave the house and walk to a gas station to use the telephone.

“That guy and the old woman,” said T-Bone, “give me the heebie-jeebies.”

Jay wondered if all American Negroes spent their lives in a state of anxiety.

The next day, making it a point not to arrive early and earn the displeasure of an ex-gangster accustomed to waking at noon, Jay and T-Bone bought a bouquet of flowers that they gave to the old lady. Although unsmiling, she seemed resigned to their presence. They arrived about one and found McManus sitting on the couch, still in his bathrobe and slippers, sipping coffee and smoking. The ashtray next to him looked as if the chain smoker had gotten an early start on his habit. Hump waited until his mother had left the room and then said sotto voce:

“Longie says you’re legit.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Nothin’. It’s you I’m doin’ business with, right?”

Hump McManus clearly played his cards close to the vest. It took almost an hour and a C-note to wheedle this out of him:

“Piero stayed here one night with his daughter. He parked his car out front. When my neighbors got a gander at that buggy, they thought I had hit the jackpot.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“To tell you the truth, I can’t be sure.” McManus shook a cigarette loose, lipped it right from the pack, ignored the handsome silver table lighter, lit his weed from a matchbook, and, in a cloud of smoke, said, “They mentioned several places.” Hump walked to the window. “Still mistin’ out there?”

The aimlessness of his question suggested to Jay that he was finding it difficult to talk about the Maglioccos. Jay hazarded a guess. “He did you some favors, right?”

“Yeah. I met him in a dump called Norma. We got along good and stayed in touch.”

Although willing to confirm his friendship with Piero, McManus said nothing about the nature of the favors. But neither of those facts really mattered; what counted was where they had gone.

“Do you remember which places they mentioned, besides Norma?”

“I didn’t say he was headed there. Frankly, Piero’s fear of American Nazis sounds pretty farfetched.”

“Abe ought to know. He’s had people on the inside of those organizations for a long time.”

McManus walked to the kitchen door, peered in, and returned to the couch. “Mother don’t like it when I talk to strangers.”

“Longie’s no stranger.”

“No, but you are. How come he didn’t drive down himself? I always like seein’ what kind of car he’s got.”

The rain had begun in earnest and splatted loudly against the windows. McManus opened the front door, explaining that the smell of wet earth was good for his lungs. Jay sensed that McManus regarded his talking about Piero as the betrayal of a friend. T-Bone must have had the same idea, because he said:

“It ain’t as if you’re tellin’ us where they went. Like you said, they coulda’ gone anywhere. It’s just that a few names makes anywhere somewhere. Now I can assure you, Jay here doesn’t want to waste his youth lookin’ for a needle in a haystack. But if you’d rather Mr. Longie come down to Sea Girt and talk to you, well . . .”

McManus, clearly feeling put upon, replied dyspeptically. “God, I hate bein’ caught in the middle. Piero said nothin’ about Nazis. He whispered to me, here on this very couch, that his daughter was wanted for a murder she didn’t commit. So do I believe him or Abe?”

“That’s up to you,” Jay said.

“Abe I know from business. Piero risked his neck for me.”

“What if he had refused?”

“Huh?”

“Just because someone does us a favor, does that make him a friend?”

“Of course.”

“Sometimes people do us a favor by not doing us a favor.”

“I’m not followin’ you.”

“Supposing you want me to join you in a bank heist, but I refuse on the grounds my gut tells me the job will go bad. You’re furious with me, but change your plan. As matters turn out the bank that day had an audit requiring the presence of extra cops. By not doing what you wanted, I probably saved you.” Jay waited a second to let the idea sink in. “How do you know that you wouldn’t have been better served if Piero had refused to do what you asked?”

The blankness of McManus’s face suggested incomprehension, but a lengthy silence seemed to readjust his sight. “Yeah, but in this case it was a favor, though I admit it could have gone wrong and cost me.”

“Think of it this way, Mr. McManus. Maybe by telling us where Piero and Arietta might have gone, you may actually be doing them a favor.”

McManus came back to Mr. Magliocco’s story. “Have you heard about any murder concernin’ the girl?”