8
THE CRAWFORD GRILL
Satch’s day began with the clear blue sky and ended in the smoke of the Crawford Grill, otherwise known as “Third Base,” for many the last stop before home. Satch was cruising Wylie Avenue with Josh in his ’32 Packard convertible that had once belonged to Bette Davis, wondering if the devil, noted for leading to temptations, had pulled on his foot, relaxing the pressure on the accelerator, down to the walking speed of a woman in red high heels with the air of a brassie who’d been around the block so often her arches were as calloused as her thighs.
“Hey, good-lookin’.”
The woman smiled, glanced at him, but kept walking toward the Calvary Baptist Church. Satch cruised on to Harry’s Crystal Bookshop, where Josh placed a dollar-bet on “805,” the number that a few years earlier had ruined virtually all of Pittsburgh’s numbers runners. Hundreds of people played the number corresponding to the month and the day—August fifth—and when 805 came up, only Gus Greenlee and Woogie Harris had enough cash to cover the hit. The others blew town, leaving Gus and Woogie the numbers bosses. Gus plowed his profits into his team, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, and into a new stadium, Greenlee Field.
Satch blew the horn and Josh got into the Packard. “Let’s check out the Peacock room.”
The Peacock room was upstairs at the Skyrocket Café, a hop house on the other side of the Hill, where the majority of Pittsburgh’s blacks lived. The Skyrocket Café was the hangout for the rival Homestead Grays.
“You givin’ up?” said Josh, referring to Satch’s ostensible mission—asking Gus to bankroll his team.
Satch looked at his watch. “It’s early. Better to let Gus get a few drinks in him.”
“Let’s see what’s cookin’ in East Liberty.”
Satch drove through Brashton, Manchester, and East Liberty. They watched the jitterbugging on Shetland. Josh got a hankering for kielbasa and pierogies in the Polish district, but not Satch. All he ate was catfish, and this night he wasn’t hungry at all. They ended up parking at the soup kitchen that Gus ran, across the street from the Crawford Grill. Josh was still hungry.
“You’re not thinkin’ what I think you’re thinkin’,” said Satch.
“Smells good. And you know that chicken fat’s good for your arm. You said so yourself.”
Satch shook his head. Josh had been inspired by the sounds of “Shortnin’ Bread,” wafting out when someone opened the door to the Grille. Satchel Paige wouldn’t go near a soup kitchen, especially when it was Gus’s soup kitchen and he had secretly jumped from the Crawfords to the Bismarck club.
“Sure you don’t want to come in?”
“Ten bucks for a pint of whiskey? Too rich for my blood.” Josh shook his head. “Besides, Gus is liable to bust a cap on your ass, and I don’t want to get in the way.”
“Cab Calloway and Lena Horne?”
“Twenty-dollar cover? I’ll listen from the street. But she sure do have a sweet voice. Kind of bashful, too, what I hear.”
Satch laughed. “Yeah, like a volcano’s bashful.”
“Let me borrow that shine. I want to read about the Series.”
Satch handed Josh the rolled-up newspaper. Josh was rooting for the Tigers over the Cardinals. As a friend of Dizzy Dean’s, Satch favored the Redbirds.
They could hear strains of “I’ve Got the World on a String.” Satch got out and headed for the Crawford Grill, with October etiolating light shining on the huddled oak leaves, echoing the feeling Lena Horne had for her father, Teddy, who had invited her to Pittsburgh for a week and got her the gig with Cab.
On the second floor of the Crawford Grill three men counted, stacked, and re-bagged two roomfuls of pennies and nickels. The ground floor was packed to capacity with patrons dancing to Cab and Lena. The Cotton Club chorus girl was already starting to make a splash as a singer, but dancing at the Cotton Club was regular work, which was hard to come by, and with Hollywood already beckoning, Lena was not sure that singing was to be her true vocation. But with Cab and Lena, the Crawford Grill had never been so jammed. The top floor was set aside for dining, and Gus had just finished a whole plate of blue-point oysters. He got up to pee, and Jew McPherson noticed him limping slightly on the way back. Gus sat down to the main course of bear loin that chef Harry Winslow had prepared for him.
“What’s wrong with your leg?” asked McPherson, who ate nothing, but shared Gus’s bottle of Bordeaux. McPherson ran interference for state senator James Coyne, the kingpin of Allegheny County and Gus’s longtime ally.
“Acts up once in a while. Took a load of shrapnel at Verdun. Still got about a pound of it,” Gus exaggerated.
“Why didn’t they take it out?”
“Woulda had me on the table for six months. Too much. They said it wouldn’t kill me to leave it in and I believed ’em. Been right so far.” Gus laughed.
The bear was cooked with morels and juniper berries in a brown sauce. Gus cut a piece, dabbed it in the sauce, and savored it.
“What kind of shrapnel is it?”
“I try not to walk by magnets.”
“Iron.” McPherson nodded and sipped his wine. “A lot better than lead. Lead will seep into your blood and poison you.”
“Either way, he don’t swim too good,” said Woogie Harris, sitting down next to McPherson. Woogie was nearly as tall as Satch, with broad shoulders and a sunken chest, accentuating a belly that protruded far enough that you could place a shot glass on it with Woogie standing. He wore wide ties that tended to feature a sailboat motif, held to the curvature of his belly with an ostentatious diamond stickpin.
McPherson turned his glass by the stem and stared at it. “Elections are coming up soon. Coyne wants to know how big the third ward’s going to be.”
Gus was head of the third-ward voters league. His interest-free loans and his gifts of hundreds of turkeys at Christmas and Thanksgiving were motivated in part by sheer generosity. If a guy was really stuck, Gus would forgive the loan entirely, as long as the numbers dough was rolling in, which could amount to as much as $20,000 in a good week. But part of the generosity was to help garner the votes he traded to Senator Coyne and Alderman Harry Fitzgerald for protection, which was provided by the head of the Hill District’s vice squad, Pappy Williams.
“He can count on eighty, maybe ninety percent.”
McPherson smiled. “That’s what I was hoping to hear.”
Gus ran his fingers through his short, thinning, receding, reddish hair. “I was hoping Fitz would get Pappy Williams off my back. He busted us last week. Cab almost canceled on me.”
McPherson took a slug of wine and sat back in his chair. “What can he do? There’s a lot of pressure from all quarters on account of all those bodies they dug up at Greenlee Field.”
Gus’s reply was stifled by a mouthful of bear loin. He closed his fist around his fork and hammered it on the table, chewed for a few seconds, then swallowed. “That ain’t my work. Ask Pappy. None of those guys were connected to me in any way. Fucking city hall ought to give me a medal for what I done, giving the Hill a real field. White folks don’t do nothin’ for the Negroes. PPA put a fence around an old dump and call it a ball field. A dump is a dump, no matter what you put around it.”
“That’s a pretty nice field now,” said McPherson.
“It ain’t nothin’. That’s why I built Greenlee Field. Give niggers something to be proud of.”
“Damn right,” said Woogie.
“It’s election time,” said McPherson. “Coyne and Fitz have to please the white folks, too. Gotta look tough on crime. You wait a few months, it’ll all blow over. Long as you pay the net you’re okay.”
Satchel Paige was dancing, and he was dancing with hot goods, dancing with Lena Horne. Though recently married, Satch had little use for fidelity. An affair was like a quick pitch or a spitter. If you could get away with it, there was no reason to abstain. Satch, of course, had the finest suit in the club. Off-pink, with a maroon shirt and a bright red tie. The man could dance, arms and legs moving and shaking in harmony. He drew a lot of eyes. Even with his legs bent considerably at the knees, he was taller than most of the men on the floor. He had learned a few jive moves from Bill Bojangles Robinson, who had been best man at his wedding. This night, Satch “might should” have been carrying a gun, as Bojangles always did, since Lena was off-limits on orders from her father, enforced locally by mobster Dutch Schultz. “Nobody hits on Lena, okay?”
Now, even in Pittsburgh no one was taking chances. No one, that is, but Satch. Disdainful of weapons, he had always relied on fast talking to get him out of a jam, and, if necessary, fast feet—something Bojangles never did, though he could. Negro League games often featured pre-game sideshows, one of which was Bojangles running backward and beating guys running forward.
Lena Horne’s father, Teddy, was a charmer, in his handmade shoes and collection of Sulka silk ties. Black parvenu. At home in black and white worlds. Born into upper black class. Light-skinned. Handsome. When it came to ladies, he was a human vortex. White showgirls. Black showgirls. Upper-class black girls. All of his siblings were college-educated professionals whom he disparaged as “briefcase niggers.” Now his daughter was on the verge of stardom, in a forbidden world, one that he was right at home in, one he’d tried to keep her out of. Girls like Lena, he knew, were easy prey for the likes of himself. Lena had weaseled into the chorus line at the Cotton Club, where even light-skinned coloreds like Teddy usually couldn’t get a seat. Her temperament was giving Teddy cause for worry.
Teddy also had a strange habit of speaking in proverbs and aphorisms. It made him mysterious and went over big with certain ladies. So when Satchel Paige was dancing with Lena and giving her his biggest, killer grin, Teddy elbowed Woogie Harris and said, “Trust no bush that quivers.”
Woogie wrinkled his brow and turned to Teddy. “What are you talking about?”
“There’s a nigger in the woodpile,” he said, pointing to the shimmying dancer, whose identity he well knew. Teddy was intimately involved in baseball. He contracted players and led negotiations between various owners of the teams in the Negro leagues. He got his feet wet in baseball in 1919, when he was linked, along with Arnold Rothstein, to the fixing of the World Series.
Woogie took the hint. He nodded to his brother, Teeny, who approached Satch. “We got business,” he whispered in Satch’s ear.
“I ain’t got no business with you. I got business with the lady.”
“Anyone’s got business with this lady’s got business with the Dutchman. You catch my drift?”
Teeny was about 5’4”. Satch stretched out to his 6’3” and lagniappe. “Why don’t you drift on out of here, little man?”
Woogie approached Satch from the other side and whispered, “That’s protected material.”
“That so?”
“Dutchman’s property. So, I got a new step for you, snake-hips—the Aleman scram.”
Woogie lifted his jacket by the lapel to show the steel he carried. Lena sensed the tension, and she knew what it was about. The same scenario played out nightly at the Cotton Club, with a different cast of characters, enforcers readily identifiable as Schultz’s henchmen. Lena excused herself. She approached the bandleader and nodded that she was ready to start. She took the microphone, wearing a white crepe dress and open-toed high-heel pumps. Her eyelashes were beaded with liquid soot for a Garbo effect. Chen-Yu lipstick provided the Joan Crawford effect, and an expensive Guerlain perfume showed the cognoscenti of scents that the girl had class. She looked at Cab and nodded that she was ready. Cab lifted the brim of the bizarre field-worker’s hat with the Indian feather and looked at the band. “Are you all reet?”
A couple of voices said, “Yeah.” Cab brushed something off the arm of his zoot suit and started a beat with his European black-and-white shoes, and Lena smoothed her way into “Night and Day,” then an Ethel Waters-like “Stormy Weather.” A sorrow spawned in the region of her heart from which dad was evicted. It resonated in her throat and came out as a tremolo, not a whole note—nothing could be whole—but a beautiful bluesy flat note nonetheless.
Teddy Horne ducked into a corner, which he did every time his daughter sang in his presence. It was peculiar. You could see it in his eyes, those moments when Lena was singing with that nonpareil clarinet voice. You wouldn’t want to interrupt Teddy then. You’d be risking limbs if not life to interrupt his sky-long gaze when Lena hit a high blue note and held it, as if to torment him, to penetrate his thick skin and reach him when he might be a thousand miles away—the blue note of a fatherless daughter, and Teddy would be staring up at a cracked, cigarette smoke-patinated ceiling whose irregularities were pressed by a needy consciousness into service as stars, looking up at that filthy ceiling as if it were the Sistine Chapel. You could see then in Teddy’s eyes that the water of life had dried up and he was asking himself the big question, “What went wrong?” over and over. Why had he virtually abandoned the daughter he loved, let her grow up without a father? The stylus was stuck in that groove, and even had it been nudged, no answer would have been forthcoming. There was just the overwhelming sadness of a life that had taken a wrong turn and kept going, and was now so far afield that there was no recourse but to keep going till he sailed over the world’s edge. The words “I’m sorry” started up in a dry heave that would never come out. The narcissist kept drinking of himself and wouldn’t dream of throwing it up. Notes were held only for seconds that seemed sempiternal. For Teddy, it was like lead poisoning, a chronic buildup, note by note. He felt as if the involuntary tightening of his muscles was squeezing the lead out of them, and he felt it dropping into his scrotum. What the blues would feel like—materialized. Blues balls. Then the song would carry Teddy back to the present, day and night, night and day, to the crooked reality of his life.
“Come up here, fool!”
Satch looked around, then pointed at himself. “Me?”
“Yeah, you.” Gus made a wide sweep with his hand. “All these shakin’ girls, and you go interferin’ with Teddy Horne’s daughter—you could be dead already, before I get my turn. Teddy’s got a handshake with the Dutchman. The fact that you’re living and breathing means one thing—you got the same rabbit’s foot up your skinny ass as you got in that skinny right arm.”
Gus had been looking for Satch himself. The word on the street was that Satch had already signed with a Bismarck, North Dakota team. Bismarck was an anomaly, an out of the way, semi-redneck town that lured black ballplayers with very good salaries. Players and management were no more faithful to their contracts than Satch was to his wife. Players simply followed the money. Owners who were complaining about one player jumping were simultaneously blandishing a player from another club to get him to jump.
Satch smiled and held out his hand. Gus reluctantly shook it. “I knew you was in a good mood. Cab Calloway at the Crawford Grill. You on the map now.”
“I been on the map for quite some time. You just ain’t been here to see it. You think you can jump the paper on Gus Greenlee, with impunity?”
“With impunity? Hell, no. I can jump all by myself . . .” Satch laughed. “Just kidding, Gussy. I know how you and Cum like those big words. But put yourself in my shoes. I got no pension. I got no retirement. I got no Crawford Grill. No numbers. No booze trucks. I got a wife. I got to look out for myself. This flipper could go dead tomorrow. What do I got? I got nothin’. That’s what I got. Man comes up to you and offers to double your pay, what you gonna say to him?”
Gus leaned over the table. “I’d tell him Gus Greenlee’s got a paper on me. I got an obligation to the Pittsburgh Crawfords. I’m a team player, and I’m not looking out just for me. Besides, if Gus catch up with me, he gonna bust a cap on my ass but good.”
“Gus, my druthers is playing for you. But you’ve got to pay a man what he’s worth. If you don’t, the man is going to jump. That’s just the way it is. Business.”
Gus gritted his teeth and shook his head. “You jumping the paper on me and jumping on Lena Horne. That’s two strikes. The third one you take will be lead. You just lucky you ain’t already floating in the Allegheny, chum.”
Satch was seeing for the first time that other side of Gus Greenlee, the side he’d heard about and been warned about but found hard to believe. “You ain’t got to threaten me, Horse. I’m your man—Satchel Paige.” Satch gave him his biggest grin. “Just give me a little raise, and I still be in Pittsburgh with the Crawfords.”
Gus shook his head. “You ain’t leaving town. You’re staying right here. Try and leave, and the next pitch you throw will be from six feet under the mound at Greenlee Field. That was Willie Neal’s resting place, till he got relocated. I got that spot reserved for you.” Gus laughed hard and bit into his Dutch Masters. “Satchel, you just turned white enough to play for McGraw. Did you think we didn’t play rough in Pittsburgh?”
Satch leaned back against the high booth’s back and tried to compose himself.
“Here, have some water.” Gus poured him a glass of ice water.
Satch took a slug. “Look, Gus, I know you’re a little ticked off, but you’re a businessman, right? Okay, you lost some money on me, but I’m gonna let you get it back.”
“Keep talking.”
“We got a game. Black All-Stars against white All-Stars. Henry Ford is sponsoring the white boys. Now, I said to myself, who’s the black Henry Ford? It’s Gus Greenlee.” Satch slapped him on the upper arm. “The patron saint of colored baseball—Gus Greenlee. He the man.”
“Gus is gonna foot the bill,” Gus deadpanned.
“Biggest-hearted guy in Pittsburgh.”
“How much?”
“Five hundred for me. Three hundred for everyone else. Throw in travel money, run you about four thousand.”
“What do I get out of it?”
“Exactly!” Satch smiled and eased forward to the edge of the bench. “You’re a businessman. I wouldn’t come to you unless I had a business angle.”
“Cut the bullshit. What is it?”
“Wagers. Side bet with Henry Ford.”
“Henry Ford don’t gamble that kind of money.”
“Okay. George Raft. He’s connected to the white team. His asshole buddy Durocher’s playing. He dropped twenty grand on the Tigers. He’ll drop twenty more on this game.”
“It’s fixed?”
“Fixed? Hell, yeah. Ol’ Satch is pitchin’.”
“Against who?”
“Dizzy Dean. I beat him four to one with nothing like the team I got behind me.”
“Who’s Dean got behind him?”
“Bunch of Redbirds. Frisch, Martin, Medwick, Durocher. Few other guys.”
“Like who?”
“Lombardi, Gehrig . . .”
“Gehrig? They got Ruth, too?”
“I think so. Except he claims he’s retired.”
“So, when you say, ‘a few other guys,’ they could come up with Foxx, Waner, and Greenberg, and you might not know about it.”
Satch shook his head. “No way. Henry Ford hates Jews. Greenberg’s out of it.”
“But you’re talking the best players in the world, and I should put up twenty G’s against them. Are you out of your fucking mind? I ought to shoot you right now.”
Satch leaned back, spreading his hands on the table. “Big Red . . .” Satch laughed. “Take it easy, man. I ain’t askin’ for twenty G’s. I’m just sayin’ you could make that. Four thousand is all it would take.”
The stress aggravated the gout in Gus’s big toe. He’d had to take his shoes off, but it seemed to keep getting worse, and it made him less patient with Satch. “Goddamn it! Wasn’t a week ago you came to the Grille and jumped the broom with Janet. Next Saturday you be jumpin’ the paper on me. You the jumpingest man alive. Where’s your gratitude?”
Satch was getting irritated himself. “Where’s my raise, Gus? I tried to negotiate with you, and you wouldn’t give me nothin’. A married man’s got obligations a lot more’n what he had before.”
“If you go to Bismarck, you better pack your bags for good. Bring your long johns, ’cuz the wind is so strong out there it blows prairie-dog holes inside out. That’s it for your options, unless you want to play donkey-ball for Ray Doan or play in drag for a bloomer girl team, like Hornsby did.” Gus shook a stubby finger at Satch. “Mark my words. You’ll never play in the Negro Leagues again. We got a organization, we got contracts, and we honor ’em.”
The options were looking grim to Satch, and got grimmer when Woogie Harris bent and whispered in Gus’s ear while staring at Satch. Gus’s eyes dilated like a cartoon character’s. He was versed in the languages of the eyes, including the dead ones. He was fluent in fear and conversant in intimidation. He shook his head slowly, with an affect of finality.
“You done it now.”
“What?”
“That was Arthur Flegenheimer on the phone. Looks like all those alternatives you had are whittlin’ down to one.”
“What’s that?” asked Satch, who knew that “Flegenheimer” was the name Dutch Schultz had jettisoned as unbecoming of a gangster.
“St. Peter’s nine,” said Gus, pointing heavenward.
Oh, Mamie Lena, where’d you get the ostrich-feather thing on your head that Raphael Leonidas Trujillo would die for, a whole aviary anchored to your temples. The feathers curl like the thick smoke of the Crawford Grill, like notes of soft, soaring jazz from the throat of the Cotton Club diva. And, mama, where’d you get that feather boa, the one I’d change places with in an instant, snaking down that caramel cleavage?
Lena saw Gus remove a long-barreled pistol from his waistband and lay it on his lap, clutching the handle. She sashayed to their table, mid-number, and forced herself between the table and Gus’s belly and began singing “I’ve Got the World on a String,” sitting on his lap, Gus’s finger around the trigger.
There are ecstatic moments of music, like Marcel Dupré and Fats Waller at Notre Dame Cathedral in ’32. Marcel took Fats up to the “God Box” and Fats sat down to play Bach’s Toccata and Fugue. Nobody there to hear it but God. A communion. The “happy frog,” behavin’. Two years later, Lena Horne was sitting on a lap on a pistol, not just singing her heart out but singing the mayhem out of the heart of a man known for misbehavin’, searching for the notes that would rise and ring off the walls of the Crawford Cathedral and soothe one savage heart. Lena rolled her tush on Gus’s lap, turned and looked into his eyes. Every phrase of her siren song was a road to take, a reverie, a plan, a thought; each change to a minor key unlocked a sadness to wallow in. Every line was a hand-me-down to the larynx from the place in her head where she heard the notes as through a keyhole, and imitated them, the notes then handed down to Gus, registered on the drums of his ears. Hand-me-down silk, mountains of it, ruffled with her vibrato.
The song ended on a low note ground into Gus’s lap. Everyone but Gus, no one-handed Zen master, clapped, and the band toodled away on a new number. Couples took to the floor. Satch heard, as clearly as the hum of his be-ball, in the husky joy of Cab’s hey-de-ho, intimations of the great game, and understood that the game too had its secret codes. Hey-de-ho! It made perfect sense. He wanted to shout it. He could not fathom why everyone was not wailing it. Hey-de-ho! It seemed the intersection of breath and life, revealing itself as sound.
“Gus, is that a pistol in your lap?” Lena said, smiling broadly and gyrating a two-seventy that brought a hint of a smile to Satch’s face. Gus wiggled his hand free, taking care to remove his stubby forefinger, with its middle knuckle permanently swollen from a fight decades earlier, unsure whether an accidental discharge would penetrate his own thigh or Lena’s backside.
Satch took advantage of the cover that Lena’s dallying with Gus provided and mixed with the couples dancing. He wondered if he could steal out of the Crawford Grill the way Cool Papa Bell stole home. He watched Cab flailing his arms and stamping his foot, saw Gus brooding and plotting, saw Woogie with thunder inside his jacket, and Lena moving to the words of the song Cab’s band was playing. He recalled Gus’s prediction that he would be playing with St. Peter’s nine, and he wondered what game it was that they were all playing, what God’s game was, for surely the only divine plan for all of this was a fantastic game where no one knew the rules. How else could it all make sense? And when the game was over? Would Gus be joking with St. Pete about the universal numbers game that his earthly vocation was an ironic metaphor of, a game in which he’d hit, big time?
So many questions, so near the end. There ought, by Satch’s lights, to be time for a man to figure it out. “Hey-de-ho!” shouted Cab. And the notes became urgent in that Gus didn’t hear them. Wasn’t listening. Satch could see the music pass right by Gus.
“This one is for all you Detroit Tigers fans. St. Louis Blues,” said Cab, who took a moment to sip a “Diz Fizz”—a new drink created in honor of Dizzy Dean—two raw eggs in beer. Lena smiled, gripped the microphone, and began to sing.
Satch was momentarily buoyed by the feeling that he could get out of the Crawford Grill alive. But then what? Would he hear his name called? Would he even hear the shot if it entered his brain or his heart from the rear?
He savored the sounds of Calloway’s band all the way across the room and out into the starry night, thinking of the warmth and the scent of Lena. He hadn’t imagined the crash of the footsteps, that leather on cement could be so loud. He noticed the percussion his own shoes made on the gravel, followed by that of the executioner, the beat, he thought, of his own death. First, the footsteps. Then the beauty of a hammer’s click. Which stopped him. He had to know. He turned and saw Woogie’s arm rising, pistol at its extremity. He heard the beat of four doors slamming the way he imagined the four hooves of a galloping horse coming down, the solid thuds of a heavy, four-door Ford. He turned to his right and saw four unknown men with fedoras and black or purple trench coats on and nothing in their hands. Two of the men remained on the far side, behind the car’s hood, and Satch could not see their hands. He couldn’t recognize them. Woogie recognized the two in front as Eddie Fletcher and Sammy Cohen. They just clasped their hands in front of them as if that were message enough. Four to one. Woogie did not like the odds, or the chance that the two behind the hood held Tommy guns. Or the cool, professional menace, the presumption that gunless hands could force him to fold. It seemed the message was enough.
Woogie concluded that a dead Paige and two dead gangsters did not outweigh a dead Harris. He gave a cynical smile, holstered his pistol and turned, making a softer crunch in the gravel, pianissimo. Satchel watched the four men get into the black Ford after the briefest eye contact with him, and he watched the small rectangle of a Michigan license plate get smaller. Maybe there is, he thought, a guardian angel. At least for ballplayers. And the angel was from Michigan. Even God, he concluded, wanted this game to go on.
But Satch was wrong. It was Henry Ford who wanted the game to go on. And the guardian angel had a name. Harry Bennett. Harry had ears everywhere. Satch was alive and in the dark. He hadn’t recognized Harry’s emissaries—Eddie Fletcher and Sammy Cohen—one half of Detroit’s Purple Gang.
By the next time he saw Harry, he had it figured out. Harry caught up with him as he let the screen door shut on Al’s Barber Shop on Wylie.
“Satch!”
Satch recognized the voice. He shook Harry’s hand. “That was the Purple Gang that saved me.”
Harry smiled and nodded. Satch spat some tobacco. “Trouble is, I’m alive but the game ain’t. Gus is out.”
“I figured that.” Harry started toward his Model A and motioned for Satch to follow him. He reached through the open window for a briefcase on the seat. He gripped a wad of fifties. “Keept this quiet. If Henry wants to see a game, he’ll see a game, even if he has to pay for it. Slush fund. Nobody counts how much is in it, so nobody knows what goes out.” Harry pulled back the lapel of Satch’s sport jacket and stuffed the cash inside his pocket, then slapped him on the lapel. “Nobody knows how you came up with the dough. Catch?”
Satch smiled and put his arm around Harry’s shoulders. “Let’s get some lunch and I’ll tell you about el maestro.”
“Martin Dihigo.”
“You’ve done your homework.”
“More than you’ll ever know.”