“The night air must have been especially invigorating,” Miss Doyle was saying, as she gave her funny tableau the once over. “Everyone and his brother was out for a stroll. The band was taking a break by this bottle of vermouth. Darling Reggie had slipped behind the soda siphon. Stevie Pounder’s father was out by the ashtray helping the boatman tie up the launch. Harry Junior and that girl he was so mad about were stealing a minute somewhere around the Beefeater, although I guess they don’t have to steal any more. I heard they got married on the proceeds when Reggie bought this joint.”
Ketcheson sniggered. “They had to, I suppose, after everyone got a look at the grass stains on the back of that pretty red dress of hers. They weren’t playing croquet that night.”
“Tsk, tsk,” said Miss Doyle, but Gunboat figured she was more ticked off at Ketcheson than the pretty housemaid. Miss Doyle felt certain allowances ought to be made for pretty girls, likely because she was very pretty herself. Tonight she looked like a flower, more like a rose than a girl. Her pink, freckled cheeks made her look younger than the twenty-three he knew she was, and her gold eyes had an agreeable way of sizing up a fellow. Gunboat liked, too, that she showed off her first-rate gams with a paper-thin, slinky number that quit just below the knee. Though he didn’t like Ketcheson’s hand, rock-hard from the hoosegow quarry, resting just above the hemline on her first-rate knee.
The boss wouldn’t like it either. But he was busy making with the friendly, chatting up the Wall Street big shot and the son of the man who owned the Waldorf-Astoria, and keeping a fatherly eye on Stevie Pounder, who suddenly stood up halfway, before the wire on the radio ear pieces jerked him back.
“Hot dog! There’s the Polo Grounds!” Stevie cried. “The fighters are going to their corners.”
“Holy Mike, is it fight time already?” Miss Doyle said. “I’ve just got time to plunk down a few smackeroos on the champ.”
She clicked open the glittery crystal clasp on the cloth purse no bigger than Gunboat’s fist. When the pencil and notepad came out it reminded him of clowns coming out of a paper car at a vaudeville show he had seen at the Winter Garden when he and the boss were on the road. He kept a poker face as the tiny pearl handle of a gun peeked out of the bag, too. As long as she didn’t point it at the boss, it was none of his business, and a girl who went to speakeasies and talked to jailbirds and bet on prize-fights couldn’t be too careful.
“You’re throwing your money away on Dempsey,” said Ketcheson, stabbing a calloused finger at the scandalsheet still spread across the bar. “Says right here, the champ doesn’t want it like he used to. It’s more fun fighting to the top of the hill than standing up there and defending it.”
“I suppose I’m not the best judge,” Miss Doyle said, crossing her legs beneath the satin and giving the brush-off to Ketcheson’s long-fingered paw. “I only get halfway up a hill when I think, cripes, why I am bothering with this stupid hill? What do you think, Gunboat, has the tattlesheet got it right?”
Her silver charm bracelet jingled as she started to slide him the newspaper, but the boss slipped in and took it, brushing against her in a way that said he would like to brush up against more than that. He must have seen the offending hand get the bum’s rush from the first-rate knee, and another man would have said something cutting. Not the boss. He was one of nature’s gentlemen.
“It’s right about the challenger, Case, darling.” The boss pointed to a line of ink halfway down the page. “No one knows what Luis Firpo will do in the ring if he’s hurt, because no one has ever hurt him. He lets other fighters come to him and takes what they dish out. Then he bangs away until they collapse.”
“Dempsey is an overrated chump,” Ketcheson said. “They always say whoever holds the title is the greatest fighter of all time. Bunk and twaddle of the worst kind. Dempsey’s never been up against anything but slow-moving, slow-thinking bums.”
“You don’t say,” said the boss. If there was a note of warning in his voice, Miss Doyle didn’t hear it. Or maybe she did.
“Gunboat went a few rounds with the champ before the War,” she said stoutly. “The only knockout of your career, wasn’t it, Gunboat?”
“So they tell me,” said Gunboat.
“I remember all right,” said Ketcheson. “They said you telegraphed your best punch.” He acted it out, drawing back his right and lifting his butt, thin in the pants that had fit him before prison, an inch from the barstool.
“I heard Gunboat punched like a charging elephant,” Miss Doyle said. “A telegraph from a charging elephant doesn’t do much good.” Ketcheson had got Miss Doyle’s Irish up. “Gunboat, give me one hundred smackers on Dempsey.”
She clicked shut the twinkling clasp, tossed the bag down as if she were packing nothing heavier than face powder and handed him a scribbled note he could not read. “You know, there’s nothing I like better than a grudge match. Two fellows going toe-to-toe to knock the chips from each others’ broad shoulders.” She fashioned her right into a tiny fist that would not have given a mosquito trouble and floated a powder puff that melted before it got halfway across the bar towards Gunboat.
“Can I set you up, Lester?” the boss asked, waving towards the bottles lined up in front of the bar’s mirror.
“Very open-handed of you. But I’m after more than a watered-down drink.”
“Feel free to buy me one,” said Miss Doyle.
The boss smiled and nodded, and Gunboat took the solid silver cocktail shaker from the shelf over the mirror behind the bar. In the mirror he saw Ketcheson’s dark eyes glued to his back. “As soon as I collect the money owed to me,” the jailbird said agreeably, “I’ll buy a round for the house.”
“There’s the bell!” Stevie Pounder was too loud, as if the sounds coming though the radio and into his ears filled him up with noise. It beat Gunboat how something in New York City could fly through the air and into those skinny pieces of wire. He thought it almost sinful, but everyone else, everyone but Miss Doyle, was bunched about the boy, hanging on his every word.
“What money?” Miss Doyle was asking. Gunboat didn’t like the interested look on her pretty face.
“My cut from the Dempsey fight.”
Stevie squeaked again. “Dempsey rushed in with a right, but Firpo beat him to the punch! The champ is down on one knee!”
“You have a pretty swelled head, Les,” said Miss Doyle, those gold eyes narrowing. “The fight has barely started, and here you are collecting your winnings.”
“Not this fight,” laughed Ketcheson. “The one before I got sent up, the one where Gunboat took a dive.”
Whatever the boss was going to say, he couldn’t beat Miss Doyle to the punch. “That’s loopy,” she said, waving away the words with a flick of her bangled wrist. “Gunboat makes the finest martinis in the Thousand Islands and is as stand-up as they come. It’s not in his nature to take a dive.”
The crowd around the radio lowered their noise to a dull roar to hear Stevie’s next report. “The champ is back on his feet, throwing like a crazy man, and Firpo is down!”
“Lester,” the boss said, “watch yourself.”
Gunboat took the top off the silver bucket and saw the ice had melted into a solid block. He took the ice pick in his large, hard fist and splintered it with one short stab.
“The last thing I want to do is get Gunboat’s blood boiling,” Ketcheson said with a wink. “But we both know he took a fall. It was me that told him to.”
The boss looked