They found Big Dom at a table near the back of the pool hall. He nodded at the lieutenant, racked up the balls and then broke them. He’d been trying to knock one ball loose from the neat triangle. Instead, the balls scattered all over the table when the cue smashed into them. He looked up, shrugged and said, “Lousy break.”
“This is the D.A., Dom,” Gunnison said. “He wants to talk to you. He wants to hear the story you told me.”
“Yeah?” Big Dom studied Hank’s face. “Somebody beat you up, Mr. Bell?” he asked.
“Don’t get wise, punk,” Gunnison said. “You read the newspapers same as anybody else. Just tell Mr. Bell the story you gave me.”
“Sure,” Big Dom said.
He was truly a short boy, with wide shoulders and a thick neck and waist. He seemed to be having trouble now as he reached over the table for a long shot. He wore his hair very long, combed into a high black crown, with sideburns that dropped past his ears. In his left ear lobe he wore a circular gold earring. The ornament did not look feminine on him, however. If anything, there seemed to be a bull-like strength emanating from the boy. And immediately upon seeing him, Hank knew that Frankie Anarilles had been wrong in his judgment of this boy. For whatever his faults — and playing bad pool seemed to be one of them — this boy was definitely not lacking in leadership qualities. In the presence of a police lieutenant and a district attorney, he continued to shoot his solitaire pool as if he were an oil baron being visited at his estate in the California hills. He missed two shots in a row, studied his cue and said, “No wonder. The stick’s warped.” He went to the rack, held up a new cue, looked down the length of it with one eye closed and then went back to the table.
“So you want to hear my story, huh?” he said.
“Yes,” Hank answered.
“Mmm,” Big Dom said, and he triggered off another shot, missing. The new cue had not seemed to improve his game noticeably.
“You know who I am?” he said. “I’m Big Dom.” He paused. “Five ball in the side pocket.” He shot and missed. “This damn table is crooked,” he said. “The floor’s on a bias.”
“I’ve heard of you,” Hank said.
“Sure, everybody has. I had my name in the papers a total of sixteen times. They got my address wrong one time.” He wiped his nose on his forefinger and squatted so that he was just peering over the edge of the table as he sized up his next shot. Then he said, “Eight ball in the corner,” shot and missed.
“You know why they call me Big Dom?” he asked, straightening up.
“Come on, cut the jazz,” Gunnison said. “Mr. Bell’s a busy man.”
“They call me Big Dom ’cause I’m a shrimp,” he said. He laughed. “But everybody knows if they ever really call me a shrimp, they’re dead.” He laughed again. “Dead. So they call me Big Dom.”
“You’re a very tough punk,” Gunnison said sarcastically. “Tell Mr. Bell the story before I bust that pool cue over your head.”
“These kids you’re trying to send to the chair, Mr. Bell. They’re all nice guys.”
“They committed murder,” Hank said.
Big Dom shrugged. “Lots of nice guys all through history have killed people. In a war, the more people you kill, the more medals you get. That don’t make them any less nice, does it?”
“What makes you say these boys are nice?”
“They all got heart,” Big Dom said. “Courage. You can count on them. They’re not going to turkey out when you’re supposed to go down on another club. They’re okay, every one of them.”
“Is Di Pace a Thunderbird?”
“No, man. He don’t swing with our club.” He studied the table. “Twelve ball banked up to this corner.” He shot and missed. “Not enough chalk on the stick,” he said. He began chalking the stick, the blue dust particles covering the front of his dark shirt. He didn’t seem to care very much. “We got a tight club here, mister,” Big Dom said. “Danny wasn’t one of us, but he never punked out of nothing, either. Whenever we jitterbugged, he was there with us. He never let us down.”
“Is he a good fighter?” Hank asked.
Big Dom shrugged. “Who gets time to notice when everything’s jumping? But he knocked the crap out of a kid named Bud when he first moved around here. I wasn’t around that day, but Diablo told me all about it. That night, we sent a little squad around to take care of Danny. But he’s all right. Take it from me. A good kid.”
“Who — with two other good kids — killed Rafael Morrez.”
“Maybe Morrez needed killing,” Big Dom said. “What do you think he was? An angel or something?”
“He was blind,” Hank said.
“So? Being blind makes him an angel?”
“What are you saying?”
“Tell him your story,” Gunnison said. “We haven’t got all day.”
“Okay, okay.” Big Dom put down the pool cue. “It happened like only this spring. There was this Spanish girl like a lot of the guys on the club used to make it with, you know. She was no prize package, but she was always available. So some of the guys from the Horsemen, they found out about it. Like this girl didn’t mean crap to them, you know what I mean? But all of a sudden, just because the Birds are making it with her, they get excited. So we had a meet. Me and Frankie, and Diablo and Gargantua. There was a cool on at the time, until this thing with the girl happened.”
“A cool?”
“Yeah, like no fighting. What do you think, we fight all the time? Man, don’t you think we got anything better to do?”
“All right, so what happened?”
“So we tried to decide where it was gonna be and all that. First, it was gonna be a fair one, like you know where two guys put on the gloves, but we decided the hell with that, so it was gonna be a real bop, only we couldn’t settle where, so we decided to have another meet the next night. Only you can’t trust those Spanish guys, I mean they’re all hopheads, how the hell can you trust them, they’d knock off their own mothers for some pot. So that very night, right after we had the meet, I mean with everything still up in the air about where the bop was gonna be, that very night...”
(It is a mild spring night in Harlem, and we can hear music on the air, drifting from the open windows of the tenements to find its way into the street. There is a peaceful feel to the block. We hear occasional laughter, an occasional baby crying from one of the apartments. But it is an idle night, heavy with the magic of spring, because spring comes to Harlem too, and the people of Harlem know her headiness, know her rare smile, know the beauty in her eyes and on her mouth. The Thunderbirds are sitting on one of the tenement stoops, seven of them: Big Dom, Diablo, Botch, Bud, Reardon, Aposto and Concho. Danny Di Pace is with the Thunderbirds, too. The boys are passing around a cheap bottle of wine. The girls with them do not accept the bottle, not because they don’t drink but only because they don’t want to drink on the front stoop, in public. Besides, the girls are playing it rather cool this evening. They have heard about the impending rumble between their boys and the Horsemen, and they know that the cause of the dispute is a fourteen-year-old slut named Rosie who is Spanish and probably diseased. Carol is particularly offended because she and Diablo are supposed to be going steady, and she understands that Diablo hasn’t been exactly reticent with that Spanish pig, either. In fact, Carol has not spoken to Diablo since she learned about the incident, and she is the one who sets the pace now for the other girls. The boys play the game in their own way. If the girls want to be cool, so be it. They can be equally cool. And the wine they drink, thirty-nine cents a quart, helps them to ignore the girls. It also helps them to drop their usual attitude of caution. For if there is one noticeable trait about all gang members, it is their constant vigilance. Walking down the block, sitting on a stoop, idling on a corner, their eyes constantly flick the streets, looking, watching, waiting for any sudden attack. Tonight their usual wariness is not present. Aided by the wine, drinking in retaliation against the coolness of the girls, they have dropped their guard — and this can be a fatal error in Harlem.