The Hoods (21 page)

At about two o'clock in the afternoon the outside doorbell rang. I went over to the door peephole. I saw Peggy admit a couple of girls. They were nice looking, quietly dressed, not at all like streetwalkers. They were what the trade called, “high-class stuff.” They took then-coats off. Peggy gave them large bath towels. She patted them on their plump buttocks and shoved them into the bathroom together. You could hear the shower going; one of them was in pretty good voice. After awhile they came out wrapped in bath towels. I described what I saw. Everybody jumped up from the game. We took turns at the door peephole.

Maxie laughed; he put his fingers to his lips and whispered, “Take it easy. Don't get yourselves excited.”

Cockeye and Patsy grabbed chairs and went to the peepholes on each side of the room. The girls went into the bedrooms on the opposite sides of the foyer, out of peepholes' range. Maxie and I chuckled quietly at Patsy's and Cockeye's disappointed exclamations. We went back to our cards but our minds weren't on the game. A few moments later, the bell rang again. Girls started coming in, singly and in pairs, laughing and talking. In their street clothes, one would judge them to be salesgirls from some very fashionable shop. They were fresh and pretty, and shapely enough to be in the front line chorus of a Broadway musical.

They all went through the same routine. Peggy gave each a large towel, and they retreated to the bathroom to their showers. When they came out, Peggy assigned them to separate rooms.

Max and I discussed them.

“Stupid broads,” he said.

“Yeh,” I answered. “If they could only see themselves a couple of years from now.”

One appeared very young. She could not have been over eighteen.

“Fresh from a Pennsylvania farm,” Max commented.

“Yeh, a couple of years of this life, and this kid'll look and feel like fifty. Very few have Peggy's stamina. Funny how they all take to junk or whiskey after awhile.”

“How else can they take on men one after another? The life is too rigorous. They become physical and mental wrecks.”

“Hey, Noodles,” Maxie said, “if I see any more like that, I'll become a physical and mental wreck just from watching her.”

“From frustration, hey, Max?”

We both laughed quietly.

Cockeye and Patsy were glued to their peepholes. Maxie lay down on the floor to look through the hole to the downstairs bedroom. I had the most uninteresting vantage point of all—the foyer.

From the way the boys were glued to their peepholes and the exclamations and comparisons whispered back and forth, it must have been very exciting. Cockeye got too noisy for comfort. Maxie tied a handkerchief around his mouth to quiet him. He threatened to remove him from the peephole. Cockeye promised he would keep still. We had to take our shoes off to lessen the noise of our movements.

There was nothing visible from my peephole, so I went over to Cockeye's. I pushed him aside and looked. I was amazed. I looked at Cockeye. He whispered something that was unintelligible through his gag. I looked again. Yeh. There she sat on a chair, fully dressed, manicuring her nails. I went over to Patsy, nudged him aside.

“What the hell,” I whispered. “There's nothing to see. She's all dressed and reading a magazine.”

Patsy whispered, “You should have seen her before she got dressed. Some pair of boobies on that baby.”

I knelt down by Maxie. That one was also dressed. Maxie whispered, “You should have seen her a minute ago. She isn't as pretty as a picture, but what a frame!” And he threw a kiss to the room below.

“Yeh,” I said, “Peggy understands male psychology. She knows the chumps get a thrill out of watching a woman slowly strip.”

Maxie said, “That's what made Gypsy Rose popular.”

About four o'clock, the first client came in. He looked like a salesman taking in a matinee between customers. He handed Peggy his sample briefcase. Peggy patted his cheek. She showed him an album of full length nude pictures of the girls she had in stock. He went through the book slowly, like a connoisseur. Peggy pointed out the fine points of their various anatomies like a clever saleswoman proud of her fine stock. Carefully he picked one out.

Peggy escorted him to the girl of his choice. She had the bedroom across the foyer, out of our view.

Peggy tapped at our door, stuck her head in and whispered, “Much too early for the bum to arrive. He usually comes at the peak of the rush, when the house is full. Would you boys care to be entertained by a couple of nice girls meanwhile?”

Regretfully Max refused. “We are here strictly on business. Some other time, Peg.”

To hell with business,” Cockeye mumbled in disgust.

At about six p.m. the customers began arriving in earnest. They were of all types and ages: embarrassed college boys, shipping clerks, and middle-aged businessmen looking foolish and acting guilty. Others, assured and confident executives, were brusque and to the point. All the bedrooms were filled. Peggy was doing a capacity business. Men were sitting around the foyer, nonchalantly reading, smoking, and talking baseball as if they were in a barber shop, waiting for their turn.

I kept looking through the peephole appraising the men, watching their actions, trying to figure out the reasons that prompted them to come to Peggy's.

This was something I could never understand, the cold, businesslike state of mind of a man who goes to a public place for an assignation. Then I laughed to myself. How about me and that chorine the other night? I wondered what the marital status of these men was. The majority looked married. What were their reasons? Wives away? Sick wives? Wives drained of all sex desire? Or just looking for a change, for an exotic sex adventure? Something they're ashamed of? Something their wives won't permit? To me they looked like ordinary men with ordinary desires. What the hell, I thought, this was the hidden part of the life of the New York male. Men are only animals. Yes, come to think of it, a male animal naturally requires more sex excitement than a female of the same species. A bull requires a large herd of cows to keep him satisfied. A rooster needs a whole coop full of hens to be gratified. A male animal needs a harem to keep sexually contented. Yeh, I chuckled quietly, don't I go chasing along Broadway almost every night for a different piece? Ain't I got my private harem? To pick from the million women from all over the world along Broadway every night?

Was it Mr. Ellis's book? Freud or Kraft-Ebing? What the hell is the difference anyway, some authority on the subject said he found out that men who have no moral or aesthetic objections to intercourse with prostitutes figure less often in the divorce courts. Yeh, that's pretty logical. I guess that way they avoid emotional entanglement with one particular woman.

Emotionally they're monogamous. Physically they're promiscuous. Just like me, I'm tied emotionally to a broad I never even had a date with, one I only see from a distance. What the hell has Dolores got that attracts me so? Or am I queer? Every other broad I lay and leave. The hell with all of them. I'll turn continent. I laughed at myself.

I turned to see what my companions were doing.

Patsy and Cockeye were standing on their chairs. Their entertainment had begun. They were hysterical with suppressed laughter. Even Maxie, usually self-composed, was rolling on the floor holding a pillow over his face.

I bent down and watched with Maxie. The client finally started getting dressed. He had given up in disgust. When his back was turned, the girl in the room quietly opened the window and beckoned to someone outside. I could feel Maxie, stretched out alongside me, getting tense. He nudged me.

We saw a foot come through the window, then the rest of the body. He was a big guy with a gun in his hand.

He walked up behind the man who was getting dressed and struck him on the head with the butt end of the gun. The man with the gun went through the pockets of the unconscious man. The girl hurriedly started getting dressed.

Maxie snapped his fingers softly.

“This is it.”

He ran out of the room. I followed as Cockeye and Patsy jumped off their chairs. We burst into the foyer in our stockinged feet, pulling our Roscoes out of our holsters.

The waiting customers looked at us in startled amazement. We reached the room downstairs. The guy was still inside. The door was closed.

Maxie motioned us to get on both sides of the door. He ripped a drapery off the window and held it in his hands. In a few seconds, the door slowly came ajar, inch by inch. The big guy stepped into view. Maxie swooped down on him, covering his head and arms with the drapery. Cockeye went for his knees, Patsy and I on top of him. Maxie whacked him over the head through the drapery. The guy dropped his gun to the floor. We tied him with the drapery and the drapery cord. He lay on the floor motionless. We rolled him in a rug.

Peggy went around calming the girls and her clients, apologizing for the disturbance and shooing them back to their diversions. Maxie went in to talk to the girl who was in cahoots with the guy. She was crying and pleading with Max.

“I'm sorry. Please don't tell Peggy. He had me bulldozed,” she sobbed. “I barely knew the guy. He made me give him all my money besides.”

“Okay, kid. Forget it,” Max said. “He's a lousy pimp, too, eh?”

She nodded.

Cockeye said, “I lost all my respect for that bastard. I thought he was an honest heist man.”

Patsy and I picked the guy up and carried him out into the deserted street. Peggy whispered after us, “Thank you, boys. Don't be strangers.”

We threw him in the back of the Caddy.

Cockeye asked, “Where are we going, Max?”

“Let's take him to the funeral parlors. I want to scare the shit out of him before we give him a good talking to.”

We went in through the back way, into the store room where the coffins were kept. Maxie told Izzy the nightman, “Take a powder.” He knew enough not to ask questions after Maxie's curt order.

We untied the guy. We took the rug and blanket off him. He was still out cold. In his unconscious state, he had an awful expression of fear on his face. Maxie kept looking at him.

“He's a big bastard, isn't he? The lousy pimp, he looks scared to death. Wait. I'll really scare him.”

He motioned to me. I took his feet, Max took his arms and we threw him into a cheap pine coffin. We fastened the cover down.

Max laughed. “First, let him come to in that box.”

Max took his coat off, pulled a large, expensive, plush-padded coffin out. “Yep, I may as well relax a bit until the bum comes around.” He eased himself into it.

Cockeye said, “You look nice, Maxie.”

“Thanks,” Maxie said. “Help yourselves.”

He waved to the coffins scattered around the room. “Let's scare the bastard good.”

We each lay down in a coffin in a semi-circle around the pine coffin in which the guy was lying. The lights were dim and restful. It seemed to take a long time. I thought I heard Cockeye snore. I began thinking of the show we had at Peggy's. It was real solid entertainment, better than a Broadway show. I was thinking of one of the redheads in Peggy's joint, the one with the wondrous Elgin movement. I imagined she came floating closer and closer to me. I was beginning to feel drowsy in a sort of half sleep like when we kicked the gong around at the Chinaman's.

Then I heard a muffled sound. I sat up. We all sat up in our coffins. Sounds were coming out of the covered coffin in the center of the room. We sat in the dim light, watching and listening to the sobs and moaning noises. He tried to push the cover off the coffin. We could hear him straining and pushing.

Finally, the cover shot open with a bang. His head appeared. I have seen frightened people in my day, but he wasn't frightened, he was terrified. His eyes were almost out of their sockets in dread. He turned slowly, and looked at us sitting in our coffins. We stared back at him, deadpan.

He whispered in fear, “Who are you? Where am I? Dead?”

We just stared at him. He started to tremble. He stared a good five minutes at Maxie.

He stuttered, “I recognize you—I heard about you,” and pointed at Max. “You're Big Maxie, the undertaker, who, they say, buries people alive.”

His hand dropped limp, his mouth stayed open, but no sounds came out. He stared in horror. Boy, was he a crumb bum, I thought. Where the hell did he get that story?

Maxie stood up slowly, walked closer, and in a menacing, slow, staccato said, “I bury people alive is right.”

He stared into the guy's eyes. “I will nail down your coffin, then I will lower it down in the grave.”

Maxie stopped. A heavy stillness took hold of the funeral parlor like a cemetery at midnight. It reminded me of some kind of a seance. I felt psychic. I swear I could sense the guy's thoughts and his extreme terror.

Maxie continued in a spectral tone. “I will lower your coffin slowly. The box will reach bottom. We will shovel the dirt back in the hole with you at the bottom.”

The guy was staring at Max in a trance.

“Then you will be all covered. The worms will start creeping in. You will find it hard to breathe. You will suffocate,” Maxie hissed dramatically.

I was just about to get out of my box and compliment Max on his dramatic ability when I saw the guy tremble violently. His head jerked. A rattling, gurgling sound came chokingly out of his mouth. You could see death in his staring eyes. His eyeballs turned up the way they do in a fit. A chalky pallor stole slowly over his face. He dropped back into the coffin with a thud.