“You been listening to a bunch of sheiss kopfes,” he said. “That gent in the tweeds, second row there,
that‟s Charlie One Ear. He‟s never had a drink in his life.”
I looked at him. He was short and squat, a barrel of a man, impeccably dressed in a tweed suit, tan
suede vest, and a perfectly matched tie. His mustache was trimmed to perfection, his nails
immaculately manicured. He had no right ear, just a little bunch of balled-up flesh where it should
have been. I had heard that story too. When Flowers was a young patrolman in St. Louis, a mugger bit
his ear off.
He was chatting with a middling, wiry tiger of a man who was dressed on the opposite end of the
sartorial scale: Hell‟s Angels‟ leather and denim. His face looked like it had been sculpted with a
waffle iron.
“Flowers remembers every face, rap sheet, stiff he‟s ever seen or met,” said Dutch. “Photographic
men-wry, total recall—whatever you call it—he‟s got it. Anyway, h e didn‟t make Tagliani, but he
made a couple of Tagliani‟s out-of-town pals. A lot of heavyweights from out of state spent time with
Tagliani at the track, none of them exactly movie-star material. Tagliani was also a very private kind,
but he flashed lots of money. Big money. So Charlie One Ear got nosy, shot some pictures one day
out at the track. Stick sends the photos up to D.C. to Mazzola and tells him Turner, which is how we
knew him then, is keeping fast company and spending money like he owns the Bank of England.
Cisco takes one look and bingo, we got a Tagliani instead of a Turner on our hands. That was last
week.”
“Great timing,” I said.
“Ain‟t it though,” Dutch said woefully.
“Who‟s that he‟s talking to?” I asked.
“You mean the dude in black tie and tails?” Dutch said with a snicker. “That‟s Chino Zapata. He
mangles the king‟s English and thinks Miranda is a Central American banana republic, but he can
follow a speck of dust into a Texas tornado and never lose sight of it. And in a pinch, he‟s got a punch
like Dempsey.”
Where‟d you find him?”
“LAPD. The story is they recruited him to get him off the street, although nobody in the LAPD will
admit it. When I found him, he was undercover with the Hell‟s Angels.”
“How‟d you get him down here?”
“I told him he could bring his bike and wear whatever he pleased.”
“Oh.”
By this time the room had gathered three more men—about half of Dutch Morehead‟s squad—a
strange-looking gang whose dress varied from Flowers‟ tweeds and brogans to Zapata‟s black leather
jacket and hobnail boots. They stood, or sat, smoking, drinking coffee, making nickel talk and
eyeballing me. It was my first view of the hard-case bunch I would get to know a lot better, and fast.
Morehead sidled around so his back was to the room and started quietly giving me a rundown on the
rest of his gang.
“Sitting right behind Zapata is Nick Salvatore, a real roughneck. His old man was soldato for a smalltime Mafioso in south Philly, blew himself up trying to wire a bomb to some politician‟s car. You‟ll
probably get the whole story from him if you stick around long enough, but the long and short of it is
he hates the Outfit with a passion. Calls our job the dago roundup. He‟s more streetwise than Zapata. I
guess you might call Salvatore our resident LCN expert. He doesn‟t know that many of the people,
but he knows the way they think.”
Salvatore was dressed haphazardly at best: a T-shirt with GRATEFUL DEAD printed over a skull and
crossbones, a purple Windbreaker, and jeans. A single gold earring peeked out from under his long
black hair. It was hard to tell whether he was growing a beard or had lost his razor.
“The earring is his mother‟s wedding band,” Dutch whispered.
“He‟s touchy about that. He also carries a sawed-off pool cue with a leaded handle in his shoulder
holster.”
On my card it was a split decision whether Zapata or Salvatore was the worst dresser, although Dutch
gave the nod to Salvatore.
“Zapata doesn‟t know any better,” he said. “Salvatore doesn‟t give a damn. If you blindfold him and
ask him what he‟s wearing, he couldn‟t even guess.”
Dutch continued the thumbnail sketch of his gang:
“Across from him is Cowboy Lewis.” The man he referred to was as tall as Dutch, thirty pounds
trimmer, and wore a black patch over his left eye. He was dressed in white jeans and a tan
Windbreaker zipped halfway down, had very little hair on his chest. A black baseball cap with a gold
dolphin on the crown covered a tangled mop of dishwater-blond hair. There wasn‟t a spare ounce of
fat on the guy.
“Pound for pound, the hardest man in the bunch. He doesn‟t have much to say, but when he does, it‟s
worth listening to,” Dutch said. “He thinks in a very logical way. A to b to c to d, like that. If there‟s a
bust on the make, Lewis is the man you want in front. He‟s kind of like our fullback, y „know. You
say to Cowboy, we need to lose that door, Cowboy, and the door‟s gone, just like that, no questions
asked. I suppose if I told him to lose an elephant, he‟d waste the elephant. He‟s not afraid of anything
that I can think of.”
“Are any of them?” I asked.
Dutch chuckled. “Not really,” he said. “Lewis is kind of.
He paused a moment, looking for the proper words, and then said, “He‟s just very single-minded.
Actually, he started out to be a hockey player but he never made the big time. His fuse was too short,
even for hockey. Y‟see, if Cowboy was going for a goal, and the cage was way down at the other end
of the rink, he‟d go straight for it. Anybody got in his way, he‟d just flatten them.”
“Doesn‟t sound like the perfect team man,” I said.
“Nobody‟s perfect,” said Dutch.
The last man in the room was also lean and hard-eyed, in his mid-to late thirties, and over six feet tall
. He looked like he had little time for nonsense or small talk.
“The tall guy in the three-piece suit and the flower in his lapel, that‟s Pancho Callahan,” Dutch
contini.ied. “He‟s a former veterinarian, graduated from UCLA, and can tell you more about horse
racing than the staff of Calumet Farms. He spends most of his time at the track. He doesn‟t say too
much unless you get him on horses; then he‟ll talk your ear off.” Callahan seemed restless.
It was obvious he would rather have been elsewhere, which was probably true of all of them.
Altogether, about as strange a bunch of lawmen as I‟ve ever seen gathered in one room. And there
were a few more to go: the Mufalatta Kid and Kite Lange, more of whom later, and, of course, Stick,
who was still an enigma to me. Eight in all, nine if you counted Dutch.
“Tell me a little about the Stick,” I said. “What kind of guy is he?”
Dutch stared off at a corner of the room for a moment, tugging at his moustache.
“Very likable,” he said finally. “You could call him amiable. Bizarre sense of humour. But not to be
messed with. I‟ll tell you a little story about Stick. He has this old felt hat, I mean this hat looks like
an ape‟s been playing with it. One day he leaves the hat in the car while he goes to get a haircut. He
comes back, somebody lifted the hat. Don‟t ask me why anybody would want the hat, but there you
are. About a week later Stick is cruising up Bay Street one afternoon and there this guy is, strolling up
the boulevard wearing his hat.