As she pretended to watch Huey, the lipstick cutie was doing something else. Specifically, she was fanning her mark, checking for a fat wallet, and then she dropped her purse, and both her pretty head and the farmer’s square one disappeared under the sea of other heads. He was picking her purse up for her, no doubt, and she was flashing her smile and her baby blues.
A flirt is the best kind of stall there is, in a two-handed pickpocket mob.
Their heads appeared again, and he was smiling and blushing at her, handing her the purse-his hands kept busy, which is the way a stall frames her mark-and she was acting all coquettish, like. The blond pale boy of maybe twenty who could have been (and maybe even was) her brother moved through the crowd, behind them, brushing by just barely; he was wearing a white seersucker suit, not unlike mine.
By this time I had angled up to Joe Messina, who glared at me like a fifth-grade bully planning to get me after school.
“Want to do something useful, for a change?” I whispered.
“Huh?”
“See that dame? With the curls and the shape?”
“Yeah. So?”
“See that guy moving through the crowd, over there?”
“Yeah. So?”
“So they’re dips. Not your kind: pickpockets.”
He lurched forward and I grabbed his arm; his bicep was like a cannonball.
“Wait ’til they clear the crowd,” I said. I hung back a few seconds, then said, “Come on.”
We moved slowly through, as Huey was explaining to the crowd that FDR didn’t scare him (“Never touch a porcupine, less’n you expect to get some quills stuck in your hide”). We excused ourselves; we weren’t moving fast: we had our quarry in our sights.
Out on the midway, where on either side of us in open tents the barkers sang their siren song, the terraced hoopla stands behind them laden with such treasures as stuffed toys, bottles of perfume and pen-and-pencil sets, we trailed behind the pretty girl and the blond boy. We wandered past a brick pavilion as the scent of popcorn mingled with that of disinfectant and manure. We wove through kids with cotton candy and balloons on strings, and circumvented guys arm-in-arm with gals, the former in search of shooting booths where an eagle-eye might attain a prize that might coax an even better reward from the latter.
And we watched as the blond boy in seersucker white sidled up to the pretty girl in the dress with red polka dots; saw him hand her the fat wallet, and her hand him a smile.
He put his hand on her rump and her smile turned dirty. Maybe they weren’t brother and sister. In this part of the country, maybe just cousins.
“You take the boy,” I said.
“You take the girl,” Messina offered shrewdly.
“Nothin’ gets past you, does it, Joe?”
We slipped up beside them, and I took the dish by her soft arm and said, “On you, that dime-store perfume smells good.”
She frowned at me, tried to pull away. “Don’t handle the merchandise, buster!”
Beside her, Messina had halted her fella, too, clutching him roughly by the arm.
“Just dump the goods on the sawdust, sis,” I whispered, “and we’ll leave the coppers out of it.”
It was only half a smile, but with that mouth and that lipstick, it would have got a rise out of an archbishop.
Cotton candy had nothing on the sound of her voice. “Isn’t there some other arrangement we can make?”
I grinned, sighed. “If it was just me…”
Then she shoved me, hard, and her fella shoved Messina, and they both took off, down the midway, bulldozing fairgoers aside (“Hey!”), and rounding the corner down another sawdust pathway.
I was on my ass; Messina hadn’t gone down-buildings don’t topple, just ’cause you shove them.
He helped me up. Apparently he wasn’t holding a grudge.
“What now?” he asked thickly.
“We go after them, you lamebrain!”
And I was running. Messina, huffing and puffing like a steam-engine train, was bringing up the rear.
“I’ll take the girl!” I yelled.
“I’ll take the boy!”
What a fucking imbecile.
She was faster than her boyfriend, but I was faster than both of them, and I brought her down with a flying tackle that sent us tumbling onto the grass under the shadow of a Ferris wheel. It was fun, for a while. She was a sweet-smelling bundle of blonde hair and soft curves and silky-stockinged legs, but when a little hard fist went flying toward my nuts, I gave her the side of my leg to hit, and slapped her, once, hard.
The boy was still running.
Messina had stopped, and was standing there, bent over, hands on his thighs, trying to catch his breath; muscular as he was, the beer belly had stopped him.
“Get him!” I yelled.
And then Messina did something that damn near made me dirty my drawers.
He drew that pearl-handled revolver from its holster.
I was hauling the bundle of pretty pickpocket to her feet, and getting to mine, when I called, “No…”
But it was too late: Messina fired.
The gunshot cracked the afternoon into a million pieces.
Screams of surprise and fright seized the midway, and Huey’s amplified voice said, “Shit!” Knowing the Kingfish, who was not the bravest individual I ever met, he’d be cowering on the floor of that platform about now.
Amazingly, Messina had had the presence of (his excuse for a) mind to fire into the air.
And the blond boy stood there, on the grass, by a merry-go-round, frozen, and slowly put up his hands.
Messina lumbered over to him like a squashed version of the Frankenstein monster, the revolver thrust forward in a trembling hand; he was breathing like an asthmatic, and his frog eyes were bulging. Veins stood out in his forehead like exclamation marks.
“Joe…” I said.
He was headed for that blond kid, who had turned around, hands still in the air, to find himself looking down the barrel of that.38.
“Don’t shoot him, Joe,” I said.
“Don’t shoot him, Joe!” the girl called out, hysterically, as if she knew Messina. I had the wallet in one hand, and her arm in the other, and was hauling both toward Messina, who was facing his quavering captive, looking very much resolved to remove him from the planet.
“Joe,” I said, nearing him, “no…no. It would make the Kingfish look bad.”
“What the hell’s this about?” an authoritative male voice called.
“Drop those guns!” a second male voice chimed in.
We turned and a pair of uniformed cops, whose own guns were drawn, were closing in.
Messina lowered his revolver.
“We’re bodyguards for Senator Long,” I explained.
“That don’t give you leave to go wavin’ rods around,” said the older of the cops, “shooting ’em in the air like a goddamn Wild West show.” Like many a cop, he could say all this through his teeth, barely parting his lips. It’s an art.
I pulled the girl over, virtually handed her to the second cop. Messina monkey-see-monkey-do’ed, pushing forward the blond kid, who looked both frightened and relieved. Couldn’t blame him.
“Couple dips working the crowd,” I said.
Messina and I stood to one side, while the cops searched the pair. The kid had several watches and assorted jewelry in his coat pockets, and-when dumped out on the grass-the girl’s big purse was laden with wallets and watches.
“How’d you spot ’em?” the older cop asked.
“I used to be on the pickpocket detail,” I explained, “back in Chicago.”
He made a disgusted face. “Well, what the hell are you doin’ here?”
Good question.
2
On a pleasantly warm afternoon, the Friday before, a taxi I’d caught at Newark Airport deposited me in Manhattan on Eighth Avenue between Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth streets, just to the rear of Penn Station, near the garment district. I paid the cabbie off, tipping him well, in return for sparing me any sightseeing remarks on the ride in.