“Would you believe it? She’s grieving over her fiancé’s death. Kind of an almost widow.”
He pretended that didn’t mean anything to him. “Well, I hope she’s wearing black undies. Otherwise, she seems a little disrespectful.”
I let that pass. “Business always this shitty, Joe? Nothing like being yesterday’s big thing, huh?”
“We do all right on the weekends,” he said. “And the tourists keep us going in between.”
The success of the Peppermint Lounge had been a fluke. It had been a gay bar Joey Pep took over from a pal of his who had to lam it out of town. Once he took over the joint, Joey worked out of the back room, where he gave the Bonetti family’s blessing (for a piece of the action) to various illegal activities — loan-sharking, fencing, bookmaking.
Then the hot band he hired, just for show, started pulling in the kids, and the Twist craze took off, and suddenly a mob front was a legitimate goldmine. But right now, that goldmine seemed tapped out.
“Did you come here to depress me, Hammer, or do you just like to watch young stuff shake it on a dance floor?”
I grinned at him. “I can do both at the same time, Joey. I can include chewing bubble gum if you like.”
He smiled back, but of course the sneer was in it. “Well, thanks for stopping by, Hammer. Always good to renew an acquaintance. You need a cab? I’ll have one called for you.”
“Joey, I just got here. I’m trying to show the little lady a good time.”
“Is that what you’re doing.” He picked up the cigarette, drew in smoke, then sent it my way. “Blow, why don’t you? You’re very old news.”
I looked around us. “Then I’d seem to be in the right place. Why don’t we keep it friendly, Joey? I just stopped by to see how you’re doing, after your tragic loss.”
“What tragic loss would that be?”
I nodded toward Gwen, sipping her schnapps. “The loss of a longtime, valued business associate.”
“Maybe you know what you’re talking about, Hammer, but I don’t.”
I uncrossed my arms and met his sneer with my own. “Don’t be coy, Joey — Leif Borensen goes way back with the Bonettis, and I hear you were his contact man. He was a kind of one-man Peppermint Lounge himself, wasn’t he? A guy who could provide a front and be a cash laundry when needed, and other times a cash cow, pulling down some real Hollywood bucks.”
He looked past me and nodded. I glanced back and saw two big men in skinny ties coming my way. Their dark suits looked sewn on. But their bulges seemed to be muscle and some occasional fat, so at least they weren’t packing.
“Lenny, Turk,” he said to them.
One was on either side of me. They were tall and they were wide, and the fists hanging at their side were like hams.
Pepitone looked up and gave them the sneer-smile. “You remember Mike Hammer, don’t you, fellas? He used to be a big deal, a long, long time ago.” He lowered his eyes to meet mine and gave me the same nasty smile. “Lenny and Turk here, they were big deals, too, not so long ago. Pro wrestlers. All my bouncers are ex-wrestlers, Hammer. One look at them and most smart-asses piss themselves.”
“I don’t have to go,” I said.
“Oh yes you do... Put Mr. Hammer in a cab.”
A big hand latched onto my left elbow, and another one latched onto my right.
“Don’t worry about Miss Foster,” Pepitone said as I was hauled up and out of the chair. “I’ll see she gets home safely.”
Right now she was on the dance floor with a college kid, doing the frug. She didn’t notice the bum’s rush I was getting, and that was all right. I wanted her kept out of it.
The boys lifted me up and walked me, if walked is the right word when your feet aren’t touching the ground, through the tables and chairs and out into the bar and through the front door, where we paused under the canopy. Turk, shaved bald with dark eyebrows on a shelf of forehead, a handlebar mustache over thick lips, slipped behind me, took both my arms and yanked my elbows behind my back, making the upper half of me lean forward, while Beatle-haired Lenny, with beady black eyes crowding what must once have been a nose, lumbered to the curb to flag a cab that was a good half-block down.
Lenny was doing that when I rammed my head up under Turk’s chin and as his neck snapped back and his grip loosened on my arms, I pulled away and swung around behind him and kicked him with the flat of a gum-soled foot behind the knee, one of the few places he wasn’t muscle-bound. Turk went down on the other knee, like he was waiting for a king to knight him, but I crowned him instead, with two fists coming down like sledges on the back of his bald skull. He belly-flopped onto the cement, by which time Lenny, wide-eyed, wild-eyed, was charging at me like a bull. When he was almost on me, I swung my leg around and let his ugly face taste the gum sole. He staggered back, spitting teeth like bloody Chiclets, and then I shoved my left forearm into what little neck he had and he started coughing and gargling the foamy blood in his mouth. To one side, Turk was getting up, and I grabbed onto him by the tie and a fistful of too-tight suit and flung him into Lenny, sending them both down in a pile. I let them wrestle for a few seconds, catching my breath, then went over and started kicking the shit out of them. Muscles or not, they had ribs and they hadn’t been in the ring for a while, so their stomachs had some flab going, and I kicked them there, too, just till they puked all over each other. Somehow they managed to get to their feet, so I got out the .45 and let them see where bullets blossom. That froze them, and I slapped them with the side of the barrel, in one swift hard continuous move, like Moe slapping Larry and Curly in one hilarious swing, only seeing those guys tumble to the cement unconscious was a hell of a lot funnier.
The cab had pulled up by now, and the cabbie was looking out at the two fallen, bleeding, vomit-spattered human wrecks like he was having an hallucination. He was a mick who’d been around, probably in his fifties, and looked like he was about to take off, when I waved at him with the .45, not meaning to threaten him exactly. The gun just happened to be there.
“Give me a hand with these clowns,” I said.
Leaving the cab running, he came around and helped me lug the two bouncers, one at a time, into his backseat. It was like hauling beef carcasses at a slaughter house. They filled that back nicely, sprawled on top of each other like teenagers at Lover’s Lane.
The cabbie was breathing hard. “God, they smell.”
“Well, they’re covered in puke.”
“What do you want me to do with them?”
I got in my pocket and fished out some dough. “What do you think? Take ’em to the nearest emergency room.”
He had the expression of a guy who couldn’t decide whether to shit or go blind, but when I gave him the fifty, he saw that just fine.
As he rolled off, I smoothed myself out — neither one of the slobs had laid a glove on me — and then I went back inside the lounge and wove through the tables and chairs over to Joey Pep’s table. He was goggling at me with his tongue showing, like I was a naked babe in a window.
I sat down. “Where were we?”
A guy like Joey Pep has seen a lot of things. Such people don’t impress easily at all. But right now he seemed to be.
“Damnit, Hammer — where are Turk and Lenny?”
“On their way to the hospital. That cab came in handy.”
He didn’t know what to say. His hands were shaking and the cigarette had fallen out of his mouth onto the floor.
I patted his shoulder and grinned in his face. “Joey, ease up. Don’t you know those wrestlers need a script to pull anything off? Me, I like to improvise.”