Everything was very nice, very new, and as mismatched as a Sears and Roebuck warehouse sale-a royal-blue mohair couch with walnut trim, a big flamingo-trimmed mirror over it; a mint-green button-tufted lounge chair; a console radio-phonograph in a mahogany cabinet, emitting the soft strains of a Benny Goodman platter; occasional pieces in stylings both modern and colonial, walnut and oak, dark and blond.
All of this-and the impressive array of gleaming white appliances winking at me from the kitchen-had either been boosted, or bought from (or the results of swaps with) one or more hot-goods fences. Bobby Savarino and the rest of the McCadden Group had discovered the way to achieve their postwar dreams: stealing.
The pleasantly trampy-looking blonde showed us her firm bottom, packed as it was into the gray slacks, as she headed toward the bedrooms, saying, “I’ll get the kids for you.”
As she disappeared, I said to Wilson, who had plopped himself in the lounge chair and was lighting up a Chesterfield, “Kids?”
“She means the happy married couple,” Wilson explained, smoke streaming from his nostrils, dragon-style. “Bobby and Patsy… Patsy used to be Patsy Green, the stripper.”
I blinked. “Not, ‘No Pasties for Patsy’ Green?”
“That’s the one.”
“Jesus, she played Chicago. The Rialto.”
Maybe five years ago, I’d seen her perform-never met her-a bosomy jailbait redhead who was notorious for doffing her pasties right before she took her bow.
Bobby Savarino was holding his wife’s hand as they walked through the dining room into the living room. The petite former stripper was still a beautiful woman, mane of red hair brushing her shoulders, her large, luminous, almond-shaped green eyes heavy with mascara and green eye shadow, her full lips brightly red-lipsticked, her famed bosom bigger than ever, which was not surprising, considering she was easily seven months’ pregnant, in a blue-and-pink floral maternity top, blue-jean pedal pushers, and open-toed sandals.
I recognized Savarino from his newspaper pictures: good-looking kid with dark curly hair and dark long-lashed eyes, almost pretty. He was in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a black tie loose around his collar, pleated black trousers. He had a slump-shouldered, vaguely embarrassed, air.
Trailing after Savarino was another guy I recognized from the papers: his accomplice, Henry Hassau, a hook-nosed little guy with a wispy mustache. It soon became clear Hassau had somehow managed to snag the bosomy blonde as his wife.
Seemed the Hassaus had the upstairs apartment, and the couples spent a lot of time together, mostly downstairs, in the Savarinos’ quarters.
Introductions were made. I shook Savarino’s hand and Hassau’s, and took off my hat out of respect to the “little” woman, if any seven-months-pregnant dame can so be described. Somebody found me a hardback chair across from Mr. and Mrs. Savarino on the couch, with Wilson smoking in the lounge chair, nearby. The Hassaus sat at the dining room table, but the rooms were so openly adjacent, they could hear everything we said, and pitch in their two cents occasionally, as well.
Mrs. Hassau asked me if I wanted a beer, and I declined; she seemed to be the only one drinking.
As we got to business, Mrs. Savarino made the opening salvo in a Betty Boopish yet hard-edged voice. “Mr. Heller, we need to come to an understanding.”
“All right. What do you have in mind?”
“Bobby will talk to you for one hundred dollars,” she said, lifting her hand locked in his.
“That’s kind of steep.”
“We need to raise some money.”
“Why don’t you borrow some from your jeweler friends, the Ringgolds?”
She shifted uncomfortably on the sofa-not entirely due to the pregnancy, I gathered. “We, uh… have borrowed quite enough from them, getting Bobby bailed out.”
“Okay, then. A C-note it is.”
She raised a red-nailed finger. “And none of us can be quoted-not in print, not in private to the police. We’ll help you gather some facts, but that’s all.”
“All right,” I said. “Can Bobby talk now?”
“If you’re going to be a wise-ass,” she said coolly, “it’s going to cost you more.”
I raised my hands in surrender-this was no average housewife-then got out my billfold and handed her two twenties and a ten.
“That’s fifty dollars, Mr. Heller,” she said, handing the money to her husband, who folded it and slipped it in a trouser pocket.
“Fifty more after we’ve talked-after I know it’s worth fifty more. Fair enough?”
She gave it a moment of thought, nodded.
“So, Bobby,” I said, “who was it offered you twenty-five hundred to bump off Mickey Cohen?”
His wife answered, green eyes flashing. “That son of a bitch Jack Dragna!”
I said to her husband, “Jack Dragna personally? What, did he come here to the house?”
Which was about as likely as Louis B. Mayer dropping a film print off at a theater.
“It wasn’t Dragna hisself,” Savarino said. He had a husky, medium-pitched voice. When he spoke, he emphasized points with wags and nods of his head, making his curly hair bounce. “Three guys I never seen before come around, it was three weeks ago last night, Thursday night… I know ’cause we was listening to Burns and Allen. Henry and Helen and Arnie here was over, having beers and just listening to that daffy dame on the radio.”
“That Gracie Allen kills me,” Hassau said, smiling absently.
The blonde he was married to sipped her beer.
Taking no time to reflect on this cozy evening at home among felons, I asked Savarino, “And you never saw these guys before?”
“Don’t look so surprised. We’re not local. We come out from the East Coast, been here less than a year, knocking over scores. These guys offered me twenty-five hundred to take Cohen out.”
“You’re no torpedo, Bobby-why you?”
He shrugged, sighed, holding on to his wife’s hand; the beautiful redhead was gazing at him supportively. “I was pals with Benny Gamson, you know-the Meatball.”
So-called because he was shaped like a meatball, his legs like toothpicks stuck in it.
“When I knew Gamson in Chicago,” I said, “he and Cohen were buddies-the Meatball was a card mechanic in Cohen’s bust-out joint.”
Savarino was shaking his head. “They weren’t buddies out here. Cohen gets something like two-fifty a week protection payoff, each, from all the other bookies in town… only the Meatball tells him to go stuff hisself.”
Gamson had been shot to death in October.
“How did you and Gamson get friendly?” I asked him.
“He was my bookie. He was willing to extend credit, no strongarm stuff, no leg-breaking. Hell of a nice guy. But I didn’t love him-I wouldn’t whack Mickey Cohen over him, even for that kind of money.”
His wife said, rather proudly, “My Bobby’s not a killer.”
From the other room Hassau said, in his thin high-pitched voice, “These guys Dragna sent, they knew we was associated with Al Green, and that Al was pals with Benny Siegel, and that meant we had easy entree to Cohen, who is also pals with Siegel.”
Apparently bored with this criminal flow chart, Hassau’s wife got up to go into the nearby kitchen.
“Incidentally,” I said to Hassau, “did your friends the Ringgolds bail out Green and that other guy from your string?”
“Marty?” Hassau said. “Marty Abrams? Naw, him and Al can afford their own bail. The Ringgolds was helping us out, so that Al didn’t have, you know, the whole financial burden.”
The blonde in the angora sweater returned with a fresh glass of beer. She said to her husband, “Tell ’em about what happened after you turned those bastards down.”
But it was Savarino who picked up on the story. “A couple days later, Patsy answers the door, and they push right past her-Christ, her pregnant like that, they coulda hurt her or the baby or something, just bulled right in.”