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PART II
ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS

74A

TREY SETTLED IN with business while the evening did its usual downward spiral into happy hedonism. It was a smooth ride tonight. The food was coming out of the kitchen at a steadier pace now that he’d hired more help for Ida. Trey was auditioning a new saxophonist by the name of Charlie Parker, and he was the slickest cat Trey had heard yet. There were clients going up and down the stairs. The burlesque show was as sharp as usual. The bookie was doing a brisk business. The poker tables were filled with jovial men and women.

He stopped tallying numbers and looked around a little.

Jovial, but not really happy.

He’d started watching people more closely since Marina had pointed out none of these people was happy. They might be having a good time right then, but they were not happy.

And he didn’t care, so long as they came to his speak to display their unhappiness with generous flashes of green. What he cared about was getting home as quickly as he could every morning, his quiet home, with his woman who was carrying his baby, and all the real things in life that mattered. He was happy, he realized. Now. When he had someone to go home to.

It had been a month since he’d fired Carville, and he was rethinking his decision, since Marina wasn’t having lessons, which put a kink in his plans. Miss Stanley had lowered herself to come to the speak to discuss it with Trey, but he gave her a helpless shrug and told her it was Marina’s decision.

“Say, Carville told me you didn’t like me much more than he did. How come you cared enough to come to me?” he’d asked her.

She sniffed haughtily. “I like you personally. I don’t like what you do. I have never met a man who had that much faith in his wife and enough respect for women as to explicitly nudge one toward college, much less law school.”

“My girls are smarter than about three-quarters of the cats I know, and I knew Marina was smart the first time I talked to her. I wouldn’t have married an idiot, and I’d be an idiot to waste intelligence like that.”

“And that is why I respect you. I am sorry Marina is angry, but I am not sorry I spoke up. She is extremely bright and will go far if she doesn’t have too many babies.” That was when she had glared at him.

He raised his hands as if in surrender. “No magic drug to keep it from happening.”

“There are other ways.”

“Well, if you still had a job,” he said snidely, irritated at the reminder that Marina hated children, “you could have given her all that information, now couldn’t you?”

Her mouth tightened.

“I can teach her all that. I do run a whorehouse.”

“In case it helps, I can give you references for other tutors.”

He waved that off. “Marina’s too mad at me right now. I’ll take them, but she liked him and she liked you and breaking in new tutors will irritate her more.”

To her credit, Miss Stanley had sighed. “Maybe that wasn’t the best thing to do after all,” she muttered.

“She may yet come around,” he’d told her. “I’ll give her a little tap here and there.”

“I can only hope. At the moment, I need to leave before someone sees me, and I lose my job at East.”

Taking Marina’s other complaints to heart, Trey had been careful to resume their routine of book club and picture shows and Fairyland. On Tuesdays, they went to Dot’s church activities, which he liked since the men usually played baseball after doing maintenance on the church building or whatever the old widows needed done at their homes.

The fucking was less frequent, and he was still putting sugar in her NuGrape, but it was enough for him to understand what Gio had been trying to tell him: Fucking was for the little moments in between.

It was enough that he’d been able to seduce Marina into being a little more adventurous. She was initially hesitant about each new variation, but he could tell when she thought the dope was kicking in because she relaxed and followed his lead almost eagerly. Then the next morning she would barely look at him, flushing to the roots of her hair. He would give her an innocent hug and kiss and immediately start talking about the day’s business, then she was back to her contented self.

Trey was happy with his life, and he was pretty sure Marina was about as happy as she could bear to be, considering she was always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

He was, in fact, thinking about how to coax her into blowing him off when one of his hostesses appeared at his elbow. “Two cats at the front wanting to talk to you. Look important. Fancy duds. Sicilian, accent like Gio’s.”

“Asked for me by name?”

“Yeup.”

“Okay, bring ’em up.”

Trey watched as she disappeared into the mass of bodies, then reappeared, struggling to get through the sardine-packed people. One cat wasn’t much older than Trey and had a blank expression. The other was maybe sixty or so. Their duds were indeed expensive.

It wasn’t the first time the speak had had patrons from New York; after all, the Paris of the Plains was a tourist attraction. But it was the first time he’d been requested by name. By cats he thought looked familiar. With Brooklyn accents.

Then Trey caught a glimpse of the older cat’s right hand—which wasn’t much of one, just a claw— Trey blinked and took a closer look. “Goddammit,” he breathed and shot out of his chair to welcome the newcomers at the top of the mezzanine stairs, Marina all but forgotten.

“Welcome to 1520 Main,” Trey said smoothly, putting on his best airs. “Thank you, Tina. I’ll take it from here.” Trey led them to his table and seated them. “I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage.”

“You are the Dunham to whom Remus sells his whisky, no?” the claw-handed one said with a heavy Italian accent.

“I am. Can I get you supper? Whisky?”

“Supper later. For the moment, I will enjoy a Remus with you. Salvatore?”

Holy shit. Trey was in hot water.

“Same, thanks,” he said in an accent just like Gio’s, and waited to take his seat until the older man took his.

“I’ll return shortly with drinks.”

His heart thundering, he headed down to the bar with feigned cool. “Vern. Two Remuses, a side of Boss Tom and cops, and Gio gone.”

“Who are they?”

“Giuseppe Morello and Lucky Luciano.”

Unflappable Vern paled. “I’ll send him down the whisky tunnel.”

Trey smoothly returned to his table and served his unwelcome guests their whiskies, making small talk.

After a few sips, the older cat nodded approvingly and said, “You have not asked my name, Mr. Dunham.”

“I figured we’d get to that eventually, as well as why you came here and sought me out by name. I’m pretty sure you didn’t come here to sample my Remus.”

“Ah, you know who I am.” He raised his right hand.

Trey cast a glance at Luciano. “I’ll be polite and let you know Boss Tom and KCPD’s on their way over.”

Morello nodded, his lips pursed. “I expected nothing less. This is my associate, Salvatore Luciano.”

Trey nodded his head respectfully at each. “You have business with me?”

“No more business than we have with any speak we visit on our way west to find my nephew, Matteo Terranova. Do you know the gossip?”

“News travels, sir, but not always dependably. Botched a hit? Ran?”

Luciano snorted. “Botched.”

Morello raised his left hand and tilted it back and forth. “Some of this, some of that. Might you have seen him? Tall, good-looking Sicilian boy.”

“We have a lot of good-looking Sicilian boys running around and I don’t know what your nephew looks like.”

They both nodded wearily, as if Trey were the hundredth person to say the same thing.

“If I were on the run, I’d be digging ditches and going to church on Sundays, not traipsing through speakeasies all the way to California.”

“Unless you were too lazy for manual labor and not smart enough to find an honest occupation.”

Trey’s eyebrows rose. “Don’t think much of your own blood, do you?”

Morello’s lip curled in contempt. “The boy has never been too bright.” At that moment, several police cars rolled up outside and stayed. Morello didn’t miss it. “You may call your dogs off now, Mr. Dunham. As you can see, we have no problem with you or any of the other speakeasies we have visited.”

“We’re mighty welcoming here in Kansas City, but we keep the peace. We don’t work the way you do in New York and Chicago, and we don’t want to.”

“Mmm, so I heard. Your Mr. Lazia took Mr. Capone to task.”

“He did. This town runs like it does because Pendergast doesn’t care who’s Irish, Italian, Negro, Russian, Jewish, or anything other -ish. That said, Boss Tom should be here any minute, and you can have a party. On the house.”

There was a bit of a commotion at the door: Boss Tom, turned out as if to enjoy an evening, and John Lazia.

“Dunham!”

“Excuse me, gentlemen.”

“You look jake up there,” Boss Tom murmured as Trey met him. “Looking for your gig?”

Trey nodded, then looked over Pendergast’s shoulder to Lazia. “Obliged.”

“You certainly are,” Lazia said smugly.

“Oh, for God’s sake. Go’n now while I get a table ready.”

Boss Tom and Brother John squeezed their way to the staircase while Trey directed his hostess to clear out one of the mezzanine’s back corner tables. By the time Trey rejoined them, they were greeting each other boisterously with kisses and back slaps as if all four cats were long-lost brothers. Trey let that go until he got the signal from his hostess that their table was ready.

“Come this way, if you please.”

He personally took their order, sent it to the kitchen, returned with a bottle of Remus, glasses, and a small cherry-wood humidor, then went back to his own chair at his own table and tried not to puke up his terror.

It also wasn’t the first time cats had come through looking for Gio, but it was the first time a capo had. They weren’t playing footsie. And if they found out Trey had known all along—

Trey feigned being a king reigning over his kingdom, completely engrossed in what was happening in his jam-packed speakeasy. Nothing else was out of the ordinary or interesting. But his heart was racing and his mouth was dry and for the first time in years he was truly terrified. What did he want with this life? Why did he stay?

This was all he’d known since he’d been run off his property, alone, having had the good fortune to fall in with a nice bootlegging couple who needed an extra pair of hands. His goal was to be a lawyer. He could sell 1520 back to Boss Tom or to Lazia at half its asking price and go to law school, but the longer he put it off, the less right it seemed. Except … He had a wife now. He was going to be a daddy. He should do something respectable whether he felt like it or not.

What would it be like to be out of the Machine? Would he have to move somewhere else and get a clean start? Did he want to live in terror over each decision he made? Or would life be just as fraught living on the right side of the law and making no money? He couldn’t live off his tiny fortune forever; lawyers didn’t make much and families were expensive.

But he did have a family to support. He certainly didn’t want his children to grow up poor, never knowing where their next meal was coming from, but he also didn’t want them to grow up with a thug for a daddy, never knowing if he’d come home, whether he be in the hoosegow or in a grave. No, he had to make enough to be able to get out of the Machine before his baby was old enough to understand daddy might not come home one day.

74A

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