Willy just didn’t want to know the details about Johnny Blue Jaw’s different collections. But practically every week, usually on a Tuesday or Wednesday night, “my take-it-easy night,” Johnny’d have him up to his hotel suite. It was a hotel in a sidestreet opposite Madison Square Garden. There with the fans blowing and a bellhop bringing in the gin and ice and lemons, it was like the old days up the river with Johnny doing all the talking, and Willy all the listening. “Know why I trust you, Willy,” Johnny Blue Jaw liked to say when he was tanked up. “S’because, Willy, you’re the one guy who don’ wanna damn thing outa me. You re okay, Willy, even if you’re a hick.” Stripped down to a pair of red or green silk shorts, Johnny Blue Jaw could’ve been a lightweight boxer himself escaped from the Garden. And the black-haired blue-eyed little mobster was in a fight sure enough. He was fighting a non-stop decision against the other big collectors.
Mainly, he was worried by his old enemy Nolan who owned the Chelsea docks, Nolan who had the Grace and U.S. lines in his pocket. “That bandit ain’t gonna feel good ’til he sees me inna silver coffin wi’ golden handles.” Johnny was worried, too, by the Big Mob. “See, Willy, I’m in good wi’ them. They kept Nolan from grabbin’ up my piece o’ the docks when I was in stir. Didn’ do it for nothin’ though. Hadda give ’em a fifty-fifty split on everything I make. I’m in good with ’em but you never can tell from one day t’ the next. Aw, let’s have another Tom Collins, Willy.” He had the drinking capacity of a big man. And Willy, his head reeling, would reach for his refilled glass and wish to God he was at Reagan’s where the drinks weren’t free, but where at least a guy could get stewed without filling his brain with another guy’s griefs. With another guy’s schemes, another guy’s secrets. And it was a guy who was about as hot as they come...
He was leaving Reagan’s back-room one August day when Johnny Blue Jaw caught up with him. “C’mon, Willy, I’ll give you a ride in my new boat.” The new boat was a cream-colored Cadillac upholstered in dark green leather. As they drove uptown, Johnny Blue Jaw smiled. “A car’s not broken in right ’til it’s had dames in it. Bring a dame to the hotel tonight, Willy. We’ll do the town. Know any classy dames?”
Willy thought of Babe down at Florence’s. “Only whores,” he admitted.
“Whores!” Johnny Blue Jaw said disgustedly. “Whores is out! I’ll have a dame for you.”
The dame was Clancy’s office girl, the blonde whom Willy’d last seen in March. He didn’t recognize her until Johnny Blue Jaw said. “Imagine a beaut like this workin’ in an office with only fat Clancy to look at her. Alice, I want you to meet Willy, a good pal of mine.”
The blonde smiled a come-on smile at him. Willy thought excitedly she didn’t remember him, and the hell with that. What counted was that he rated now. He was Johnny Blue Jaw’s pal.
They were all Johnny Blue Jaw’s pals; Willy his listening pal, and Alice his old bed-time pal and Dolores the new one. Dolores was a blonde, too, but she couldn’t have been more than seventeen, long-legged, thin-armed, slender and fresh as new grass with a KEEP OFF sign on it. There wasn’t a wrinkle or a line under her gray slanted eyes or at the corners of her lips. Next to her, Alice looked old, her body on the heavyish side, with only her white summer dress blooming like a fresh flower.
They had cocktails in the hotel bar, and then they drove north out of the city in the new Cadillac to a club where they had dinner and highballs until they were all floating. Johnny Blue Jaw listened to the blues singer, a tall girl naked except for three glittering metallic patches. “I might buy that,” he smiled. “If I do I’ll gi’ you Dolores, too, Willy. S’all inna fam’ly.”
Alice smiled at Dolores, a smile that was too sweet. “We’ll have a hotel for all the girls Johnny-boy’s played around with.”
Dolores giggled drunkenly, “He thinks he’s so great. Bet Big Boy can show him plenty. Can’t you, Big Boy?”
“Yeh! His arm pits!” Johnny Blue Jaw hooted.
“Let’s dance, Big Boy,” Dolores said.
Willy hadn’t said much all night; he’d concentrated on hoisting the drinks. But now he grinned foolishly. “First, I got to dance with Alice here, Dolores.”
“Dance with botha the tomatoes!” Johnny Blue Jaw yawned.
Out on the elbow-poking, packed dance floor, Alice pushed her body close to Willy. She smiled up at him and in the dim light, her eyes seemed as bright and fresh as Dolores’. Willy breathed in her perfume, and an unbelieving smile touched his lips.
“How long do you know Johnny-boy?” she asked him.
“I’m prackally his best friend,” Willy mumbled drunk and happy. “You’re somethin’, you know that, Alice? What Johnny sees in a bag of bones like Dolores, robbing the cradle, aw—”
“You down the waterfront, Willy?”
“With Johnny,” he said cagily. Willy was drunk and he wasn’t extra smart even when he was sober, but nobody had to explain some things to him. “I’m a big-shot on the waterfront you wanna know,” he said with all the delicacy of a dock walloper leaning on his hook.
He slept with Alice that night.
He began dating her, and towards the end of August, he rented a furnished apartment on West 23rd Street and she moved in with him. Johnny Blue Jaw grinned when he heard. “Willy, you’re gettin’ to be a great lover for an old guy.”
“Great lover, my foot! She knows you’re behind me.”
“Well, I am!” Johnny Blue Jaw stated. “You’re one guy I like. That’s why I’m a lil worried about this dame. She’s no bargain.”
But Willy thought Alice the best little bargain he’d ever made. And Babe agreed with him. He’d gone to see her for the last time to explain things all fair and square. “The girl’s got a steady job,” Babe said as she sat on Willy’s lap. “She cooks for you. And a girl over thirty ain’t burnin’ up like a young kid which is okay for you, Willy. For a ball of fire you ain’t no more neither.” Babe nodded, a philosopher in a red silk robe. “Nothin’ like home-cooked eats, I say.” Babe thought for a second. “She got a nickname?”
“No.”
Babe stroked Willy’s cheek with a hand whose nails were a brighter red than her robe. “If you wanna, for old times sake, you can call her Babe.”
The No More Trouble Kid gave her a big hug. He said sincerely, “Babe, you’re a good girl.”
“I did you a lot of good and you don’t appreciate it. I ask you to do something and you won’t do anything. Gwan back to where you came from. And take that fat-ass blonde with you.”
Willy was still too stunned by what Johnny Blue Jaw’d asked him to do to think of a good answer. Besides there were no good answers. It was either yes or no and neither of them was any good. Willy glanced at the bandage on Johnny’s neck. Then, at the gunman smoking a butt over on the couch.
The bandage and the gunman went together somehow like black crepe and an undertaker. The gunman’s name was Mack, one of “the Sullivan boys” from Reagan’s back-room. He was a narrow-built guy with blue eyes like any other blue eyes. If his mouth was tight and thin, so were the mouths of half the town, a town where everybody was hustling to make a buck. He looked like a shoe salesman or a junior executive. Only he happened to be a gunman and a killer.
“Beat it, you yellow bum!” Johnny Blue Jaw said to Willy.
“You got no right to call me that.”
“Why not?”
“You know why not.”
“Don’t start in on them parole blues again. I thought we were pals. Some pal! Soon’s I get in a spot, he turns yellow!”
“I’m not letting you down,” Willy said quietly.