Billy Phelan's Greatest Game Read online

“It’s so and you know it.”

  “Who said I know it?”

  “I called Patsy. He denied it and then said to call you.”

  “Me? Why me?”

  “I thought you could tell me that. Right now we’ve got an eight-hour jump on you, Martin, or are you putting out an extra? You can’t keep a story like this all to yourself.”

  “There’s no story, Freddie.”

  “You really haven’t heard about it?”

  “I’ve heard a wild rumor, but we don’t print rumors.”

  “Since when?”

  “Blow it out your ass, Fred.” And Martin hung up. The phone rang right back.

  “Martin, I’m sorry. That was a joke.”

  “I accept your groveling apology. What do you want?”

  “Why did Patsy tell me to call you?”

  “Damned if I know. Maybe to get rid of you.”

  “I think we’re going with the rumor, as an editor’s advisory. Our source is a good one.”

  “That’s a bad idea.”

  “We can’t sit on it.”

  “You can if it means Charlie’s life.”

  “This is too big. Hell, this is national.”

  Martin snorted. Freddie Dunsbach, boy bureau chief. Arrogant yokel.

  “It’s all of that. But let me ask you. How long’ve you been in this town?”

  “Almost a year.”

  “Then you ought to know that if the McCalls are quiet on this thing, and the police are quiet, there’s one hell of a reason. Patsy must’ve sent you to me because I told him I wouldn’t print any rumors. I see the significance escapes you, but Patsy’s concern is obviously for the safety of Charlie, if Charlie has in fact been kidnapped, which is really not provable if nobody admits it.”

  “Does he expect us to bury our heads and ignore the story?”

  “What Patsy expects is known only to the deity, but I know what I’d expect if I broke this story and Charlie was murdered because of it. Would you know what to expect in a case like that?”

  Freddie was silent.

  “Freddie, would you?”

  “You’re talking about reprisals for reporting the news.”

  “You ever hear about the time Bindy McCall beat a man half to death for insulting his wife? What do you suppose he’d do to somebody who caused the death of his only son? The only child in the whole McCall family.”

  “You can’t run a news organization on that basis.”

  “Maybe you can’t. Maybe a five-minute beat—which is about all you’d get since we’d put it on the I.N.S. wire as soon as the word was out—is worth Charlie’s life. Kidnappers are nasty bastards. You know what happened to Lindbergh’s kid, don’t you? And he was just a baby who couldn’t recognize anybody.”

  “Yeah, there’s something in that.”

  “There’s more than you think. We could’ve had an extra out an hour ago with the rumor. But who the hell wins that kind of game?”

  “I see, but—”

  “Listen, Fred, I don’t run the show here. You talk to Emory when he comes in. He’ll be calling the shots for us and I think I know what he’s going to do, which is nothing at all until there’s a mighty good reason to print something.”

  “It’s going to be all over the world in a couple of hours.”

  “Not unless you send it.”

  “I’ll talk to Emory.”

  “You do that.”

  Martin dialed Patsy, and the great gravelbox answered, again on the first ring.

  “Are you sending people to me for a reason, Patsy?”

  “You’ll keep ’em quiet.”

  “Hey, this thing is already spreading all over town. Some of these birds don’t give a damn about anything but news. They’ll blow it wide open unless they’re convinced there’s a hell of a good reason not to.”

  Silence.

  “Call Max at the office in five minutes.”

  In five minutes precisely Martin called Max Rosen, law partner to Matt McCall.

  “The story is this, Martin,” Max said. “I answered a call here forty-five minutes ago. A man’s voice told me to tell Patsy and Matt they’d picked up their nephew and wanted a quarter of a million ransom, a ridiculous figure. Half an hour ago we had a letter from them, with Charlie’s signature, saying the same thing. They said if we told the police or put out any publicity that they’d kill Charlie. Patsy wants you to inform the rest of the press about this. He won’t talk to anyone but you, and neither will I, nor anyone else in the family. We’re not telling Chief Bradley much of anything, so don’t bother him anymore. I don’t need to tell you what this means, do I, Martin, this confidence in you?”

  “No need.”

  “When there’s something to be said it will be said to you, provided you can convince the rest of the press to preserve silence.”

  “I’ll do what I can, Max. But it’s quite a big world out here. Full of nosy, irresponsible newspapermen.”

  “The family knows that.”

  “Do they also know I don’t work miracles for a living?”

  “I think they presume you do now.”

  Emory Jones’s hair was white, with vague, yellowish implications that he might once have been the fair-haired boy of somebody, a mother perhaps, somewhere. He said, whenever the whiteness of his hair arose for discussion, that peabrained reporters who didn’t know the doughnut from the hole had given it to him prematurely. For years he had put up with them, he argued, because he had a basically sacrificial nature. He outlasted almost all of them, he argued further, because he had the forbearance of Jesus Christ in the face of the drooling, foaming, dementia praecox activity that passed for reporting on his one and only newspaper. The noted cry: “That son of a bitch doesn’t know the goddamn doughnut from the goddamn hole!” emanating from editor Jones’s cubicle, meant a short professional life for somebody.

  Martin Daugherty placed Emory in this context as he spotted the white hair, saw Emory rumbling across the crooked, paintless, freshly swept wooden floor of the city room. Here he came: pear-shaped, bottom-heavy, sits too much, unhealthy fear of exercise in the man, choler rising, executorially preempted by Martin’s pledge, unspeakably happy at the unfortunate turn of events that had already boiled his creative fluids, which fluids, Martin could see, were percolating irrationally in his eyeballs.

  Martin remembered a comparable frenzy in Emory’s past: the period when Legs Diamond had been an Albany celebrity; the most outlandishly sensational running news event in the modern history of Albany. Emory, who whipped his slaves like a galleymaster to ferret out every inch of copy the story could bear, finally triumphed prophetically the night Diamond was acquitted of a kidnapping charge. He oversaw personally the hand-setting of the great fist-sized wooden type he saved for major natural catastrophes, armistices, and The Chief’s sneezes: DIAMOND SLAIN BY ENEMIES; for the rumor had been abroad in Albany for twelve hours, and was indeed current the length of the Eastern seaboard and as far west as Chicago, that Diamond was, on that particular night, truly a terminal target. Emory had the headline made up a full six hours before Diamond was actually shot dead in his bed on Dove Street by a pair of gunmen. It was then used on the extra that sold twenty thousand copies.

  Martin had already calculated that the extra that never was on Charlie Boy would have sold even more. When the news on Charlie did break, the coverage would dwarf the Diamond story. There had never been anything like this in Albany’s modern history, and Martin knew Emory Jones also knew this, knew it deeply, far down into the viscous, ink-stinking marrow of his editorial bones.

  “Did you undo that goddamn pledge?” were Emory’s first words.

  “No.”

  “Then get at it.”

  “It’s not possible, Emory.”

  Emory moved his cigar in and out of his mouth, an unnerved thumbsucker. He sat down in the wobbly chair alongside Martin’s decrepit desk, blew smoke at Martin, and inquired: “Why in the sacred name of Jesus is it not possible?”
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  “Because I don’t think you’re interested in being the editor who put the bullet in Charlie McCall’s brain. Or are you?”

  Martin’s explanation of the sequence of events forced Emory to recapitulate the future as he had known it all morning. Martin let him stew and then told him: “Emory, you’re the man in charge of this silence, whether you like it or not. You’re the man with the reputation, the journalistic clout. You’re the only one in town who can convince the wire services and whoever’s left among the boys up in the Capitol press room to keep their wires closed on this one for a little while. They’ll do it if you set the ground rules, make yourself chairman of the big secret. Maybe set a time limit. Two days? Four? A week?”

  “A week? Are you serious?”

  “All right, two days. They’ll do it as a gentleman’s agreement if you explain the dread behind it. You’ll be a genuine hero to the McCalls if you do, and that’s worth money to this newspaper, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Keep your venal sarcasm under your dirty vest.”

  “It’s not sarcasm. It’s cynical humanism.”

  “Well, hell, I don’t want to murder anybody. At least not Charlie.”

  “I knew you’d get the picture.”

  “But what will I tell them?”

  “Emory, I have faith that you’ll think of something. We both know you’ve got more bullshit than the cattle states.”

  “Maybe Dunsbach’s already put it out.”

  “Maybe. Then your problem is solved, even if his isn’t. But I doubt it. I was persuasive.”

  “Then you do it.”

  “I can’t do it, Emory. I’m just a piss-ant columnist, not an omnipotent editor.”

  “Willard Maney will go along. He’s an Albanian.”

  “And a McCall fancier.”

  “And Foley at the News.”

  “Another kinsman.”

  “But those bastards up at the Capitol. I don’t know them. You know them. You play cards with them when you’re supposed to be out getting under the news.”

  “Use my name up there if you like.”

  “The wire services can pass the word up there.”

  “Exactly. And the boys will very likely follow suit. Despite what you think, they’re a decent bunch. And Emory, it’s really not your responsibility anyway what out-of-town writers do. Then it’s on them, and on their children. And what the hell, even an editor’s advisory like Dunsbach’s talking about wouldn’t be all that bad if they made it clear to their clients that Charlie’s life was at stake. Which is now a rotten fact.”

  “That poor bastard. What he must be going through.”

  “He may already be gone.”

  Martin looked at the clippings on his desk, Charlie’s face staring up from one as he attends a Knights of Columbus party. On almost any given evening when Charlie walked into the K. of C, somebody would make a fool of himself over this gentle young man who might carry a word of good will back to his father and uncles. Life preservation. Money in the bank for those who make their allegiance known. Shake the hand of the boy who shakes the hand of the men who shake the tree from which falls the fruit of our days. Poor sucker, tied to a bed someplace. Will I live through the night? Will they shoot me in the morning? Where is my powerful father? Where are my powerful uncles? Who will save the son when the father is gone? Pray to Jesus, but where is Jesus? Jesus, Charlie, sits at my desk in the person of an equivocating Welsh rarebit who doesn’t understand sons because he never had any. But he understands money and news and power and decency and perhaps such things as these will help save the boy we remember. We are now scheming in our own way, Charlie, to keep you in our life.

  “I was putting together a backgrounder on Charlie,” Martin said, breaking the silence. “Is there anything else you want me to do? There’s also that A.L.P business today.”

  “The hell with that stuff now.”

  “It’s pretty big, you know. Quite a show of power.”

  “They’re a handful of reds, that’s all.”

  “They’re not reds, Emory. Don’t you fall for that malarkey Probably only two or three are really Communists.”

  “They’re pinks, then. What’s the difference?”

  “We can discuss this fine point of color another time, but it’s definitely worth a story, and good play, no matter what else happens along with it.”

  “Whatever happens I don’t want you on it. You stay on Charlie.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Find the kidnappers, what the hell else?”

  “Find the kidnappers.”

  “Check around Broadway. That’s where they hang out.”

  “Check around Broadway.”

  “And don’t get lost. Call me every hour. Every half-hour.”

  “Every half-hour.”

  And then Emory Jones, sucking on his stogie, rumbled off and slammed the door of his cubicle, then sat at his desk and picked up the phone to begin spreading the blanket of silence over a story whose magnitude punified even his own recurring glory dreams of news at its colossally tragic best.

  “Please don’t talk about me when I’m gone,” Mildred Bailey was singing over WHN, with the Paul Whiteman band behind her. And Billy Phelan, writing horses in his, or, more precisely, his sister’s and brother-in-law’s living room, wearing pants, socks, and undershirt, no shoes or belt, remembered the time she came to town with Whiteman. Played the Palace. She always sang like a bird to Billy’s ear, a hell of a voice. Hell of a voice. Sounded gorgeous. And then she showed up fat. Dumpy tub of lard. Whiteman too, the tub. Billy remembered the night he played games with Whiteman at the crap table in Saratoga. He was dealing at Riley’s Lake House, youngest dealer in town that season, 1931, and of course, of course he knew who Whiteman was when the big boy rolled the dice and lost the last of his wad.

  “Let’s have five hundred in chips, sonny, and an I.O.U.,” Whiteman said.

  “Who the hell are you? I don’t know you,” Billy said. Sonny me, you son of a bitch. Hubie Maloy, the crazy, was at the table that night. From Albany. Always carried a gun. But Billy liked him. Hubie smiled when Whiteman called Billy sonny. Big-timer, throwing his weight around, that big gut, and figures everybody on earth knows his mustache.

  “I’m Paul Whiteman.”

  “Wyman?”

  “Whiteman. Whiteman.”

  “Ohhhhh yeah, Whiteman. You’re the guy’s got that hillbilly band playing over at Piping Rock. You don’t mean nothing to me, bud. Go see the manager if you want chips.”

  They fired Billy twenty minutes later. Orders from above. From those who didn’t want to make enemies of Paul the Man. Lemon Lewis came over to the table and said, “I hate to do it, Billy, but we gotta can you. I’ll call over to Newman’s and the Chicago Club, see what they got going.”

  And two hours after that Billy was back to work, with cards this time, sleek and sharp, full of unpredictable combinations. Billy, maybe the best dealer around, pound for pound, you name the game, such a snappy kid, Billy.

  He was in Saratoga that year because one night a month earlier he was hanging around Broadway in Albany when Bindy McCall came by, Bindy, in the tan fedora with the flowerpot crown, had connections and investments in Saratoga gambling, a natural by-product of his control of all the action in Albany, all of it: gambling houses, horse rooms, policy, clearing house, card games, one-armed bandits, punch boards. Playing games in Albany meant you first got the okay from Bindy or one of his lieutenants, then delivered your dues, which Bindy counted nightly in his office on Lodge Street. The tribute wasn’t Bindy’s alone. It sweetened the kitty for the whole McCall machine.

  Billy touched Bindy’s elbow that night.

  “Hey, Billy.”

  “Got a second, Bin? I need some work. Can you fix me up for Saratoga next month?”

  “What can you do?”

  “Anything.”

  “Anything at all?”

  “Craps, poker, blackjack, roulette. I can deal, handle the
stick.”

  “How good are you?”

  “Haven’t you heard?”

  Bindy chuckled.

  “I’ll ask around someone who has. See Lemon Lewis.”

  “All right, Bindy, fine. Obliged. Can I touch you for fifty?”

  Bindy chuckled again. Billy’s got brass. Bindy reached for the roll and plucked a fifty out of the middle.

  “Use it in good health.”

  “Never felt better,” said Billy. “I pay my debts.”

  “I know you do. I know that about you. Your father paid his debts, too. We played ball together when we were kids. He was one hell of a player. You ever hear from him?”

  “We don’t hear.”

  “Yeah. That’s an odd one. See Lewis. He’ll fill you in.”

  “Right, Bin.”

  Billy saw Lewis an hour later at the bar in Becker’s and got the word: You deal at Riley’s.

  “What about transportation?” Billy asked. “How the hell do I get from Albany to Saratoga every night?”

  “Jesus, ain’t you got a car?”

  “Car? I never even had roller skates.”

  “All right. You know Sid Finkel?”

  Billy knew Sid, a pimp and a booster and a pretty fair stickman. Put his kid through dentists’ school with that combination.

  “Look him up. I’ll tell him to give you a lift.”

  “I’ll half the gas with him,” Billy said.

  “That’s you and him. And don’t forget your source,” and Lemon hit himself on the chest with his thumb.

  “Who the hell could forget you, Lemon?” Billy said.

  It went fine for Billy for two weeks and then came the Whiteman scene and Billy went from Riley’s to the Chicago Club, on earlier hours. The Club got a big play in the afternoon, even though the horses were running at the track. So Billy had to find new transportation because Sid Finkel stayed on nights. Was Billy lucky? He certainly was. Angie Velez saw him dealing at the Chicago Club and when he took a break, she asked him for a light.

  “You weren’t out of work long,” she said.

  “Who told you I was out of work?”

  “I was there when you gave it to Whiteman. Funniest damn thing I’ve heard in years. Imagine anybody saying that to Paul Whiteman. You’re the one with the hillbilly band. I laughed right out loud. He gave me an awfully dirty look.”