“Nope. Everybody calls me that. I told you once, Babe— No More Trouble suits me fine.”
Johnny Blue Jaw Gibbons came outside in July and spent a busy week or so picking up what he termed “the loose strings” and organizing new ones. Nights, he was dashing around like a terrier in a kennel of bitches. Then he sent for Willy. He was sitting in the back-room at Reagan’s with Al Linn and Red Rizzo when Willy came in. Johnny Blue Jaw shook hands with Willy, pounded him on the back, and invited him to have a double shot of the best whiskey in the house. “You know these guys?” he asked, jabbing his thumb at Al Linn and Red Rizzo.
Willy knew them all right. He knew also that he was just another face to them, if that. He felt as if he didn’t know Johnny Blue Jaw either. Johnny, the jailbird, yes. This big-shot Johnny, no.
The mob leader was dressed like a gigolo in the money — of a couple well-heeled dames. His gray summerweight suit was brand new, his dark gray shirt and maroon necktie out of a box, and on his right hand a huge diamond glittered. When Willy’s eyes shifted to the diamond, Johnny Blue Jaw raised his right fist. “How do you like it?” he said with a cocky grin. “The latest style in brass knucks.”
They all laughed and Willy said, “I heard a rumble you were out, Johnny.”
“Ask the girls that, Willy. Ask the girls. Clancy tells me you’re doin’ okay as a dock walloper.”
Al Linn sneered. “How would fatso know? He hasn’t been on a dock since the year one.”
“That blondie up there at Clancy’s—” Johnny Blue Jaw whistled between his teeth, his blue eyes shining. He seemed to’ve forgotten all about Willy. “I’m takin’ her out tomorrow.”
“She’s a hot piece,” Red Rizzo said in a flat voice as if talking about the morning’s shape-up, no more expression in his face than on a bulkhead. “That blonde likes to go out with big-shots.”
“That what you are?” Johnny Blue Jaw wanted to know.
“How do you spell big-shot?” Al Linn joined the kidding. “With an o or two i’s?”
Johnny Blue Jaw leaned across the table and pinched Willy’s cheek. “My old buddy. Aw, Willy, nineteen months a helluva time.” He shook his black-haired head. “Willy put in seven years!”
“I put in two, three years myself,” Red Rizzo volunteered.
Al Linn shrugged. “Okay, okay, we all put in time and we all had the clap. That’s supposed to’ve made men out of us.”
Johnny Blue Jaw laughed. “How do you like that Al? Hey, Willy, no more runnin’ around with a hook for you. When you hit the docks again, you’ll have yourself a lil cigar box.”
“A cigar box?”
“For the numbers.”
“What numbers?”
“Don’t you love them hicks?” Johnny Blue Jaw said delightedly to Red Rizzo and Al Linn. “What numbers, Willy, you shoulda give yourself back to the Indians. You’re gonna be a number collector, see.” Numbers was one of the new strings Johnny Blue Jaw’d promoted since his return to town.
“Oh!” Willy said. He wasn’t much of a newspaper reader. But lately the boys’d been chopping up a lot of words about an investigation into the gambling rackets. “I’m satisfied with what I’m doing, Johnny,” he said in a rush.
“You don’t want it?” Johnny Blue Jaw asked him unbelievingly.
“No, Johnny. Honest—”
“I’ll be damned! Here he is, guys! You can hunt high and low and up Mabel’s crotch and you won’t find another. The one guy who don’t want you should do him a favor! Willy, you dumb lug, you crazy?”
“I’m satisfied longshoring, Johnny. Honest—”
“You dumb sonovabitch, you’ll get your full day’s pay as a longshoreman and only work a coupla hours for it.”
“Johnny, I’m satisfied. I don’t need much to get along.”
The three mobsters stared at him as if what he really needed was a straitjacket.
“I know what’s eatin’ the poor guy,” Johnny Blue Jaw announced. “He’s got the balance of twenty years over his dumb head if he breaks parole. Willy,” Johnny said softly as if he were talking to a baby, “don’t sing them parole blues to me. Whatta you think I got protection for down the waterfront? The Big Mob’s behind this numbers deal. Who do you think kept my piece of the docks for me when I was up the river?”
That week Willy started to collect numbers. What else could a guy do? You did what you were told with Johnny Blue Jaw. What else was there? Stickups? He was finished with that. And besides there was Lulu whose nickname was Babe whom he’d gotten used to and Babe didn’t come free. “I’m carrying my cross these days,” he said to her when she asked him why all the worry.
“What is it, sweetie? You tell Babe.”
“It’s the numbers, the damn numbers. I smell trouble ahead,” he said with a sigh.
Every morning Willy put on his dock walloper’s clothes and ate a solid dock walloper’s breakfast; oatmeal, three eggs and bacon, rolls and two cups of coffee. “I got to force myself to eat,” he was complaining to Babe. Then he walked to his pier, and in the July sun, hot even in the early mornings, prepared for business. This was simple. He set his cigar box down on top of a barrel. He was ready. The dock wallopers, hanging around for the shape, came over to make their bets. They kidded him as they picked their lucky numbers, but Willy felt they were on different sides of the fence now. The men with the hook had a name for the guys like him — “the ex-cons’ club.” Even Pete Harris, an ex-con himself who was always softsoaping Willy in hopes of Willy putting in a word for him for a collecting job, was on the other side now. You were either in the club or you were out. With a double triple out.
The club met in the back-room at Reagan’s. Number collectors from every pier between 42nd and 57th Streets. Stealers from the Stealing Department. Gunmen whom Johnny Blue Jaw tagged “the Sullivan boys” or “the Sullivans” because they carried guns in violation of the New York State Sullivan Law.
That back-room was a parolee’s nightmare.
“Got to allow for what the boys put under their shirts,” Al Linn might be saying when he felt mellow and in a mood to chew the fat about the secrets of his trade. “Got to allow for what the company expects to be lifted. You can’t steal the anchors off the anchor chains. You got to leave ’em the eyes in their heads.”
Buyers of stolen goods, fences and middlemen dickered with Al about shipments of Swiss watches or Scotch whiskey. Loan sharks who wanted an exclusive on the two thousand members of the union local showed up to get things straight with Johnny Blue Jaw. Gamblers with floating crap games, pimps, sure-thing operators, and always a character or two about whom Willy didn’t want to know more than he had to. Maybe a sailor or a steward off a ship whose specialty was thinking up new ways to outsmart the Narcotics Squad. Willy always felt better after he got rid of his policy slips and could beat it out.
And when some newspaper featured a series of articles on the waterfront rackets, Willy only wished that Johnny Blue Jaw’d never come back to town. For not only was he collecting numbers for Johnny. He’d also been elected to his old job of number-one listener.
As Johnny Blue Jaw was the number-one collector. Collecting from number collectors and number players both, from dope smugglers and loan sharks, from Al Linn and his Stealing Department and from the steamship lines for keeping something called “Labor Peace” while he collected a thousand a month of the union dues from Clancy the representative of the laboring man.