Read part one here.
Read part two here.
Eddie took the onramp and pushed the Buick up to 80 keeping an eye on the mirror for flashing lights. The doorman had been shouting to two cops as Eddie crossed the parking lot but he’d given them the slip for now.
The Julep was a shambling relic of decades past clinging to out dated decor the owner labelled ‘eclectic’. A few wanna be wise guys and gin soaked regulars huddled around tables and the bar while a fire fought the draft that never seemed to leave the place.
Eddie made his way through the evening crowd. On the paltry stage a small jazz group was setting up. Charlie Perkins stood behind the bar like a spectre. His eyes tracking Eddie from the moment he walked in. Charlie kept his chest puffed out but his Adam's apple was working through gulps like the barflies worked through the pretzel bowls. He smiled wide when Eddie was close and invited him to a stool in a flourish of Brylcreem and breath mints.
“Evening Edward. Gilby Collins, if I’m not mistaken?” Charlie turned his back and busied himself at the wall of booze. Eddie watched the sweat slide down his forehead in the mirror behind the bar but when he turned around he was all teeth. The glass had barely touched the napkin on the bar when Charlie hustled to refill someone else’s.
“Talk to you a few seconds Charlie, if you can tear yourself away.” Eddie said.
“Time waits for no man Edward. Come back at close, whatever you have will keep until then.”
“Until the bar’s full of half zipped gangsters with hair triggers you can hide behind, forget it. A minute here, or a day in the hospital Charlie. You pick.”
Charlie poured on the trademark slime of the spineless. “Now Edward.” he cooed, “ No need for the barbaric theatrics. If you need my assistance comprehending something I'd be happy to impart my services, for my usual fee of course.”
“I’ll owe you one Charlie, how about that?” Eddie watched Charlie’s eyes, he knew he had him even as Charlie pretended to mull it over while he mixed a Manhattan.
“What can you tell me about Margaret Hessen? She been around here lately.”
“Oh that one.” Charlie wrinkled his nose. “She came here weeks ago full of piss and vinegar about this place, nothing but a bunch of nonsense cooked up by a lesser brain with no one to keep her at home.”
Eddie shut his eyes, his shoulders ached. He had no patience for how Charlie talked about her. Charlie delivered the Manhattan to a guy in a three piece suit with pock marks dotting his cheeks.
“Good riddance, I'd say.” Charlie continued. “Dipsy women should mind their business and know their place.”
Eddie scratched his nose and inhaled sharply. He leaned over the bar. “Say Charlie, that favour I owe you?”
Charlie stopped in his tracks, a smile spreading above his weak chin. He began to name his price when Eddie spoke over him.
“Forget it.”
Eddie grabbed Charlie by his string tie and yanked. The whole bar heard his jaw clack together and stopped to look. Eddie landed a follow up jab that dropped Charlie as the bar erupted. His single act of violence was the trigger pin to the anger roiling through most of the drunks. Glasses smashed, tables were overturned, and a few rummys went for the top shelf hooch before stumbling into the night.
Eddie rolled his fists into Charlie’s lapels. “What’d she want Charlie huh? What'd she have on you?”
“She was confused, jumping at shadows.”
Eddie’s next hook brought a dull snap from Charlie’s ribcage. A sound that transported him through memory to standing on a canvas washed in sweat and feral instinct.
“He’ll kill me if he finds out.” Charlie pleaded through a split lip.
“Whoever it is is going to assume you talked anyway, so talk.”
Charlie’s answer was lost in a wail as Eddie threw him against a bohemian rug hanging on the wall. Instead of bouncing back Charlie’s body rocketed through a hole in the wall. On the other side he lay in a heap of liquor bottles and splintered wood crates.
In the shadows Eddie could see stacks of crates. Each stenciled in black paint with a date and map coordinates. The reek of whiskey reached Eddie’s nose and he turned to see Charlie struggle slowly to his feet. He cowered at Eddie's approach, shrinking under his comb over. Charlie hit the wall and his eyes desperately searched the cinder blocks for a hole to crawl into before his shoulders sagged and he turned around. “Oliver.” He whimpered “Bernard Oliver.”
The name registered with Eddie. He remembered a stocky guy in an expensive suit. The smell of Margaret's perfume, the heat of an explosion. His stomach dropped.
“What is this?” he asked as the room slowly started to spin.
“I don’t ask. Every Wednesday a couple of Bernard’s guys come in a truck and haul the stuff away and every Monday different guys bring more in. that’s it Edward, that’s my hand in this.”
“And Margaret?”
Charlie flinched “She cornered me at closing three weeks ago, tried blackmailing me into giving him up.” Charlie‘s voice broke and his face crumpled in fear. “All I did was call him, please Edward. She brought it on herself!”
“Brought on what?” Eddie asked, his mouth suddenly dry. A door slammed in the bar and Charlie bolted like a scared fawn. He was screaming that Eddie was behind him and to shoot already. Eddie had enough time to register the pock marks on one of the gunman’s faces before he and another suit opened fire. The guns were big and ugly and like nothing Eddie had ever seen before. Charlie crumpled to the floorboards as both guys dropped the spent rectangular magazines.
Eddie ran for the stage, his ears ringing and his head thick. He hit the side entrance with his shoulder and was out in the cold rain. An empty black sedan flanked his Roadmaster parked at the curb. Eddie barely registered it as he threw the driver’s door open and keyed the ignition.
Eddie knew going home was a risk, but he had to regroup and get out of the stench of sweat and blood. As gambling clubs and speakeasies turned to soup kitchens and liquor stores he began to remember the way home.
Eddie lived in the basement of a home butchered into shoebox apartments. Threadbare grey carpet divided the living room from the peeling linoleum of a kitchen dominated by a General Electric refrigerator. A wooden table with a matchbook under one leg wobbled as he dropped his coat in a heap on the marred surface. Beside it a battered and dented filing cabinet shared space with a punching bag hanging from the rafters. Outside his solitary window hardly muffled the sound of a car backfiring to a stop.
Tacked to the wall were yellowing sports pages covering Eddie’s boxing career. Beyond that a bathroom was stuffed into a cubby sized hole and a corduroy easy chair worn at the arms sat in front of a radio. Eddie didn’t so much sit down as have his legs give out into the chair. He looked around the apartment grasping at meaning in the unfamiliar life. On the sports pages a name leapt out at him. They were written by Fred Hessen. Eddie remembered Margaret scribbling away in shorthand as Fred asked the questions, catching what he missed.
Eddie smiled as he looked at the clippings. “Better still be with us Margie.” Charlie’s words put a knot in his gut he couldn’t untie. Eddie went for his closet and found a suitcase that he stuffed with clothes and a pile of mail scooped from his dresser. In the back a small safe fit a key he had on his ring. He found two loaded magazines for the Colt and a small stack of cash. He moved to the bathroom and chambered a bullet into the Colt.
Eddie stepped into his living room in brown slacks and an undershirt, the Colt tucked into his waistband.
There was a man sitting at his kitchen table eating apple pieces off the blade of a knife. He had sharp features and his eyes dismissed Eddie before he even opened his mouth.
“Don’t.” his voice was higher than Eddie expected as he lowered his hand from his waistband. His heart rate doubled. Eddie saw Charlie’s body vibrating with gunfire. Fear cradled his heart in skeletal hands, so he started talking to keep the guy from going for his revolver on the table.
“You been here long?”
“Nah, I let myself in halfway through that Benny Goodman number you were whistling. I prefer Sinatra myself.”
Eddie grunted. “I’ll skip asking you to make yourself at home, see you helped yourself.”
“If you want to call it that. But ah, I’m here to help you. That is, my employer wants to help you. See, he sent me here as kind of a uh, emissary.
“Not the word I'd use. Who’s your employer?”
“Ah well now divulging that kind of information isn’t important.”
“Divulging.” Eddie rolled his mouth around the word, the guy was making his head ache. Though it could have been his aftershave. “Bernie Oliver I bet. He sent you over to shut me up with cash or a coffin, and now you’re wondering if you should have gone with the gun first.”
The pause stretched on before the apple peeler spoke again. “It would be in your best interest, I think, if you stopped visiting the locals. It was me? I’d use the wad to get gone, stop sticking my nose where it ain’t welcome.”
“I would too, I had a sniffer like that.” Eddie said.
The guy chewed the last of his apple, his swallow filling the silence. He sighed as he rose to his feet. The clock in Eddie’s bedroom ticked away the seconds, the punching bag spun in lazy circles. Eddie heard the shot and winced wondering how the guy had fired without picking up the gun. Out the window the sedan pulled away from the curb backfiring again. His guest shot a glance at the window. Eddie drew the Colt, thumbing the hammer back with a reassuring click.
The guy eyed the revolver longingly as he backed toward the door. “Shoulda taken the dough Banner, coulda used it to repair that rust bucket. A car like that? One day it’s running fine, the next, It’s bound to explode.”
“Lucky I got a good mechanic.” Eddie motioned with the pistol for the guy to pick up the pace. When he was gone Eddie watched out the window as he got into a navy blue Chevy and peeled away. He exhaled and his eyes fell on the sports pages across the room, to an advertisement curling over itself in the corner. Eddie saw where a wanted man could hole up and look for the woman he loved.
He took in the apartment one last time trying to hold on to some grain of who he had been since he last crossed the threshold, savouring the silence before walking out the door.
