'ROMEO IN SHUBERT ALLEY'

by George Yanok

Chapter One

“TELL ME WHAT I DON’T KNOW”

Patrolman Francis Feeney stood staring at the dead body on the sidewalk wishing that somehow it would just stand up and walk away. But dead men don’t walk away. Feeney hadn’t been a cop for long but he’d learned that much. There it was and there was no denying it; a corpse with three bullet holes in it lay in front of the Pathe Newsreel Theater in Times Square in midtown Manhattan in the broad daylight of a November Wednesday.

New York had turned chilly overnight with the approach of winter but sweat trickled down the young patrolman's back and chest under his blue wool double-buttoned choker jacket. Feeney regarded this lifeless thing on his sidewalk as no less than a personal affront. He had been blocks away when the shooting occurred and now worried that this somehow constituted dereliction of duty. Once he had alerted 16^th Precinct Homicide from the corner call box on West 45^th Street, the only constructive action he could think to take was to cover the body with his yellow rain slicker.

Feeney could find no wallet or identification in the pockets of the dead man's plain gray suit and thus could not even determine the victim's name. And even though the corner of Broadway and 45th was arguably the busiest in the world and it was the noon hour, Patrolman Feeney had so far been unable to find a single reliable witness to the shooting.

Clearly the young Patrolman was in dire need of answers but... Hell. Right now he didn't even know the questions. He was sure of one thing: he had better be ready with some kind of report for Homicide Detective Paul Romeo who was en route to the scene. He took out a small spiral notebook and a stub of pencil. Better make sure it was all down, he thought. He turned to the first of the newest pages where he’d written at the top in block letters: '12 Noon, Wednesday, November 14, 1951.'

oss Duffy Square from the corpse that Patrolman Feeney wished was not there, Detective Paul Romeo sat behind the wheel of an unmarked green Ford sedan cursing the traffic. He cursed it collectively, directing a stream of profanity at the unbroken flow of vehicles and he cursed it singly, tailoring individual obscenities toward each cab, bus, truck and car whose speed or lack of it prevented him from executing a U-turn. Romeo was aware that in the half-dozen years since V-J Day there had been endless debate and discussion at City Hall about making Seventh and Eighth Avenues one way: Seventh uptown and Eighth downtown. To implement this simple plan would greatly relieve what had grown into a vehicular avalanche threatening to smother midtown Manhattan. Politicians and highly paid "efficiency experts" continued to dispute and deliberate but no action had been taken on the proposal and none seemed imminent. Thus Detective Romeo was forced into yet another losing skirmish with machinery and pedestrians here in the busiest metropolis in the We rn Hemisphere. The badge in his pocket allowed him the authority to stop traffic wherever he wanted but Romeo did not activate the magnetized red light and siren on the roof of his green sedan.

Though the crime scene was only a couple of blocks from the 16^th Precinct station house, Detective Romeo had been way uptown at The Tombs when Patrolman Feeney’s call was relayed to him. He was left now to wonder in his fury why in hell he’d thought that driving the unmarked Ford down to Times Square would be faster than jumping onto the 8^th Avenue subway. He remained a beat cop at heart and preferred not to work from an official car at all. The detective was convinced that the physical connection of shoe leather to concrete made cops better investigators. If nothing else, he believed, being on foot forced police work to proceed more carefully and deliberately. Strange, he often thought, how these days he constantly sought to slow down while the great city gained speed all around him.

As Patrolman Feeney watched, Romeo abandoned his attempt at a U turn and double-parked the Ford squarely in front of the Astor Theatre. An enormous billboard loomed above it advertising a movie called “Quo Vadis” with a picture of the actress, Deborah Kerr, four stories high. The detective placed a police placard in the windshield of the Ford and strode across Broadway, raising his left shoulder against a stiff breeze that ruined the Camel sign's smoke rings as fast as they puffed out of the giant painted mouth.

Romeo squinted at the young patrolman’s features under the brim of his visored cap. "You Feeney..? Your beat, right? Whadda we got?”

The policeman's words tumbled out all at once like peanuts from a bag at Ebbet's Field. “Yessir, Feeney, Francis. Badge 219. We got a deceased male victim, no ID, multiple gunshots in the chest. ...It’s a dead guy, Detective.”

Romeo’s eyebrows raised and his eyes twinkled in amusement. “Well, I’m not surprised, Patrolman. A deceased victim, by definition, would be dead, right?"

"...Right...yes sir."

"See, that's when they send me.”

Feeney clenched his eyes shut and silently cursed himself for sounding like a jimook from Bay Ridge instead of the law enforcement professional he so desperately wanted Detective Romeo to believe he was. When he dared look again, he was immensely relieved to see Romeo smiling at him reassuringly.

“Take it easy, Feeney, you’re doing just fine.”

Paul Romeo was a burly man with a shock of coal black hair that wanted to curl behind his ears before, at urgings from his wife Josette, he got it trimmed by a barber in Grand Central Station. Not quite centered on his broad Mediterranean face was the broken nose of a prize fighter or T-formation tackle, neither of which he’d ever been. His eyes, incongruously blue against an olive complexion, were lit with savvy and intelligence. Romeo was not a native born New Yorker; he'd entered the world and lived until the end of the War in Hartford, two hours up the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut. Almost no one here in New York knew that he’d answered to the name 'Paulie' for most of his life and fewer still were allowed to call him that.

“Sorry, Detective. I never been first at a homicide before. I ain't -- I'm not used to it yet.”

“You don’t ever want to get used to homicide, Feeney. A dead body on the street isn't a normal thing, not even in Times Square.”

The two men turned their gaze toward an area of sidewalk now blocked off by three or four more uniformed cops who had materialized in the confusion of pedestrians and onlookers. They worked quickly to place wooden traffic barriers around a cleared space, at the center of which lay the corpse under Feeney's rain slicker.
“So, over there we got a dead guy," said Romeo to Feeney. "More than one bullet hole in him pretty much rules out suicide or accident.” They watched one of the cops, curious, lift the slicker to reveal the body face up in a sticky smear of blood. The sudden revelation stilled the chatter of bystanders into eerie silence. Romeo spoke again, his gaze fixed on the body. “Feeney, I want you to forget everything I can see for myself and tell me something I don’t know about whatever we got here.”

Feeney opened his notebook and thumbed backward through pages covered with his boxy, penciled scrawl. Once he located the start of his notes he cleared his throat and read aloud haltingly like a schoolboy called upon to recite in front of class. “Statement of hack driver...Morton Kazmer... Kazamersk --” He bent to his notebook and frowned. “He spelled it for me but I’ll be damned if I can pronounce it. I got his medallion number and home address up in the Bronx. He ain't got a telephone, the hack...” He turned the page toward the detective who waved it off.

“Fuggeddit, Feeney. Up in the Bronx if you ask for 'Morty you'll eventually meet everybody."

Feeney studied his scrawl again. “Driver states victim got in his cab at the Idlewild hack line in front of the TWA terminal...tells him to go to Times Square...guy sits with the paper doing the crossword or something...doesn’t say nothing all the way to midtown then says he wants out in front of the Pathe -- ” Feeney gulped for air and realized he'd said all this in one breath. He flipped to the next page in his notebook. “This part, I tried to take down exactly what the hack said in his own words...” Now he carefully followed his scrawl with a stubby index finger: “‘I show the freakin' guy the meter and he wants to pay me with a freakin' fifty...I tell him, 'What am I, freakin' Rockefeller?' so he comes up with a twenty and tips me a freakin' buck out of the change.’"

Romeo couldn’t help but smile as he took the notebook from the young patrolman and peered at the page. "Officer Feeney, you telling me Morty --? I can’t pronounce his last name either. You telling me Morty the hack from the Bronx used the word 'freakin''?"

"I cleaned it up for my report."

Romeo handed the notebook back. "Okay. So when does our guy here get dead? Morty the hack is steamed about a stingy tip and shoots him?"

"Cabby said he got back behind the wheel, looked down Broadway to pull into traffic, then he hears three loud pops. When he turns around, the guy is on the sidewalk."

"Three pops?"

"Pop...pop...pop. I took it down exactly." Feeney pointed to his notes.

"That’s it? Three shots and he sees nothing until the guy is kissing the concrete...” Romeo sighed. “Some eye witness. Did the hack mention anything about luggage?"

"He said the guy didn't have any suitcases when he picked him up at Idlewild."

"Come on...! Guy gets off a plane without even a toothbrush?” Feeney shrugged and held up his notebook again as if to affirm the facts as he recorded them.

A Coroner's wagon pulled to the curb and a fat man wearing a wrinkled suit and loudly patterned necktie emerged carrying a black Gladstone medical bag. His name was Steiss, which was all Romeo knew about him except that they detested each other for reasons gone murky over time. Neither man made eye contact as Steiss lumbered over to the body and wheezed himself down to his knees to peel back the rain slicker. Romeo looked back at Feeney. “You got anybody else maybe saw it better? Somebody in the Pathe ticket line for instance?”

“Nobody could say they actually saw the shooter, but... you might want to talk to my expert.”

“Your expert?”

“I'm only on the job a year, Detective, but I figured out my first day on street beat that a lot of times, when something happens, there can be people all over the place but nobody sees nothing. So I look for the citizen who’s telling everybody else who comes along what happened. There's always one. I call 'em ‘experts’. Most of the time it turns out they didn’t see nothing...they’re just running their mouth to feel important.” Feeney pointed to a large, swarthy man whose long green coat

decorated with braid and epaulets identified him as someone charged with guarding the entrance to the Astor Hotel across Times Square. “There's my expert. The Astor doorman. When I get here he's telling anybody who’d listen all about the shooting. But when I question him he's all of a sudden short on details. I think he wishes he saw more than he did. He says he’s off duty now but I told him to stay put. Maybe it turns out he's full of crap but I figure it’s smart to let you decide that.”

“And you're a smart cop, Feeney.” The young patrolman beamed. "Your expert got a name?”

“Bennie Ferrara. He lives in Jersey.”

The detective turned a mock glare on Patrolman Feeney. “Jesus, first the Bronx, now Jersey! Can’t you find me a witness that speaks freakin' English?”

If there was one place that symbolized "New York class” for Paul Romeo it would have to be the Astor Hotel. Over a sweltering Labor Day weekend twelve years ago, he and Josette had spent their honeymoon in a minimum priced room without air conditioning, choosing it over a longer stay in a lesser hotel simply because this was...The Astor. It had been Josette's idea in the first place and Romeo had readily concurred. He had, after all, married an actress and her flair for the theatrical was but one of many reasons he loved her.

Even now Paul could smile at the memory of their relentless lovemaking, of romantic room service meals, of happily splashing about in the huge bathtub they'd filled with cool water. For three blissful days they cocooned in the stately old hostel, planning a future they were certain would be rife with exactly this sort of luxury.

The Astor endured, as Paul knew it always would, catering if not exclusively to the wealthy then at least to those who could manage to look like they were. Even now Josette would arrange to meet him on matinee days in the Tea Room off the Astor lobby. If Josette was in a show, lunch would be early as she would need to report backstage at least an hour ahead of her two o'clock curtain. If she was not in a show, more often the case, Josette and Paul would attend a matinee together.

Once they had moved to New York from Hartford, he to become a Manhattan cop and she to pursue her acting career, Paul dutifully sat through just about every theatrical production that could be mounted on a stage; every triumph, every disaster, everything in between, on Broadway or off. Josette often had access to house seat tickets provided by those in her growing circle of theatrical acquaintances, but even these had to be paid for. Paul was able to defray the potentially ruinous costs of theater-going through the generosity of various restaurateurs, hoteliers, nightclub owners, producers and actors on his Broadway ‘beat’ who were eager to cultivate Detective Paul Romeo and maintain friendly relations with the New York Police Department. Romeo gratefully accepted their munificence. A pair of orchestra seats in these days of post-War inflation could cost as much as twenty dollars.

Paul willingly and unresistingly provided support for Josette's ambitions in every way he could, viewing this as a kind of compensation for not having given her the life of ease and privilege foretold by their Astor honeymoon. Josette's career, while not yet flourishing, had at least been steady since they'd come to New York. She’d supported a few star turns in a number of plays, most notably a year's run in a frothy comedy featuring a fading movie star whose name attracted a seemingly endless succession of Hadassah ladies to fill the seats. She'd been a semi-regular on a radio soap opera and frequently appeared on television in commercials selling nail polish or detergent.

Paul loved nothing more than to sit in an audience and watch Josette on stage; even if he’d seen the play several times, he was rapt and attentive no matter how long his shift had been or how sleep deprived he was. Going to the theater with Josette to see something she was not appearing in was another matter, however. Never a very devout supplicant at the altar of the arts, Paul silently endured

shows which enthralled Josette but would frequently set his teeth on edge. At least musicals were loud enough that he avoided the embarrassment of slipping into unconsciousness. Many comedies he thoroughly enjoyed; the dramas, with Josette or without her, were often a chore for him. More than once Paul silently vowed that the next time he fell captive to some overwrought rumination on modern angst pegged upon brittle and unrealistic dialog between brittle and unrealistic people he would stand up in his seat, flash his shield and arrest every person onstage for loitering. But he kept his opinions to himself. It was the least he could do, he felt, to make up for leaving Josette alone so many nights, first as a lowly beat cop and now putting in the extra hours required of a Homicide Lieutenant.

Bennie Ferrara, Astor hotel doorman, was pleading, supplicating, begging. Bennie was keening, entreating, whining. As Bennie spoke he gestured with both hands to his chest, cradling a heart that beat beneath his double breasted horse blanket sports jacket. Bennie, off shift for several hours, received permission from Patrolman Feeney to duck into the Astor employee's locker room and change from his doorman's uniform to "civvies." Now he'd reappeared on the sidewalk wearing a jacket of such riotous checks and stripes that it was nearly impossible for Romeo to look at Bennie in the coat without risking woozy disorientation. At least the enormous lapels covered most of Bennie's hand painted necktie depicting horseshoes rampant on a field of four-leafed clover. Bennie evidently aspired to swing the sartorial pendulum as widely as possible away from the gold braid and green livery of the Astor to affect, in mufti, the uniform of a Broadway pimp.

“Lieutenant, I tole you like I tole that beat cop twelve times awready! Guy gets shot inna street, welcome t’Manhattan, what else is new? I don’t know nothin’!”

Romeo suffered Bennie's aria politely but unmoved and when finally it ended he merely shook his head. “Bennie, you shouldn't work at the Astor, you belong at Birdland with Charlie Parker. Know why? Neither one of you guys ever plays a tune the same way twice."

"Lieutenant, whaddya talkin'? I tole you -- "

"Tell it to me again from when you finished your shift. You leave anything out, I make you start over.”
Bennie Ferrara sighed and began to tell it again. He considered himself a conscientious citizen, after all, somebody who controlled the door to the Astor Hotel, for God sake. A cop, especially a cop, ought to realize the importance of that job. From eleven at night when the theaters were shutting down until seven in the morning after the garbage trucks went through Bennie Ferrara ruled the 46th street entrance to the Astor. His sworn mission was to prevent undesirables from entering the Astor lobby, a task which required an innate ability to distinguish between obvious Times Square crackpots and those who might appear just as crazy but could establish their credentials as registered guests by producing a room key on demand.

At dawns first light, when the big yellow sweeper trucks began to roll noisily through the empty streets of the theater district, hotel management saw fit to replace Bennie with not one but two doormen. It was a point of great personal pride to him, that the hotel would recognize the necessity of two guardians of the sanctity of their lobby when he was not there. In his mind this stood as irrefutable proof that Benito Ferrara from Jersey City was a stand up guy, a guy you could depend on.

On this particular day, as Bennie related the events to Detective Romeo, he had lingered in Times Square well past the end of his shift. Any other day he would retrieve his pre-war Chevy coupe from the hotel garage and make for the Holland Tunnel to Jersey City and home. But Bennie's wife, Fran, had driven the coupe to Nyack yesterday to visit her sister for a few days. Bennie, therefore, as he carefully explained to Romeo, had neither reason nor desire to rush home to an empty house. Instead he ate an enormous breakfast in the hotel kitchen while he read the Mirror and the Racing Form. He claimed he’d then gone to the Pathe to view the latest combat newsreels from Korea. "What else am I gonna do, eight o'clock in the morning in Times Square?"

"If you were off shift, why didn't you change into your...into what you're wearing?

Bennie shrugged. "The green coat lets me walk by the ticket booth at the Pathe. Professional courtesy."

"That works for you pretty much at all the joints in the neighborhood? You wear the doorman coat, you go clean?"

Bennie was suddenly wary. "Yeah...pretty much."

Paul Romeo had a fair idea what Bennie was leaving out about his activities once his shift had been completed. With his wife out of town, Bennie had most probably spent a good part of the morning not at the Pathe Newsreel Theater but at a whore house over on Ninth Avenue. Paul let his suspicions go unvoiced for the moment. Right now Bennie's movements once he'd returned to Times Square were more crucial to matters at hand and the detective might need to question the doorman again in order to mine every detail of what he had seen. Experience dictated that it was a wise tactic for Romeo to keep his Ace face down just in case he would need to stimulate Bennie's memory later.

“So what time were you back out on the street, Bennie?”

“I tole you, ‘bout noon. I remember lookin' up at the clock on the big electric sign when I was getting a pretzel and a orange drink.”

“Okay. Then what?”

“Then, like I tole you, a cab pulls up. Guy gets out, pays the hack.”

“Something unusual about him maybe? Something catch your attention?”

“I’m a professional, know what I’m sayin’? Me being on the door at the hotel every night, I get paid to check out out who walks by. That’s how come I pin the guy in the first place. Nice suit...nice topcoat...no hick. He looks legit, y'know? Kinda guy I would'a let him walk in my lobby, no questions, even though he --” Bennie fell silent, clamping his lips tightly together as if to prevent any more words from escaping. Romeo waited.

“Even though he what, Bennie?"

"The guy was a, you know..."

"No, Bennie, I don't know. You tell me."

"...A finnochio. You're Italian, you know that word."

"It means queer."

Bennie nodded. "I pegged the guy for a homo."

"You good at that, Bennie, pegging homos?"

Bennie's eyes narrowed as he tried to gauge the depth of the insult, if indeed that's what it was, while struggling to keep in mind that he was talking to the police. He finally shrugged and looked away rather than engage Romeo as he would the maker of such an inference in one of the Hoboken taverns he frequented on the other side of the Hudson River. "I got no problem with fairies. They come in the hotel, they tip like anybody else. Lot of 'em better even." Bennie rocked on his heels and shrugged elaborately, elbows tucked, in the studied manner of one of his heroes, Jimmy Cagney. "So, what? I can go now? I tole it all t'yiz."

Paul slowly shook his head. "See, that's my problem, Bennie. You say 'I tole it all' but it's always different. For instance, this is the first time you ‘tole’ me he had a topcoat. The guy.”

Bennie blinked. "I never said so before? I never?"

"You never. And he doesn't have one now. Not that he'll

ever need one again. So what'd it look like, the topcoat?"

“Expensive Limey kind. All buckles and lapels. I see ‘em all'a time at the hotel.”

"He was wearing it?"

"Sort of. You know, over his shoulders without his arms in the sleeves?"

“So where is this expensive topcoat?” Bennie shrugged again, Cagney style. “You grab it, Bennie?”

“Uh-uh. I never saw it again after the guy got shot. ...Did I mention that's where he had his wallet? I noticed when he paid the hack.”

“You’re skipping ahead, Bennie. What’d I tell you -- ?“

“Awright, awright... So I eyeball the guy like I said, and as soon as I turn back to put some mustard on my pretzel...Pop! Pop! Pop! Three shots. I look around again and the guy's down.

“And you didn’t see the shooter? C’mon, Bennie!”

“Lotta people on the street. It’s Times Square, awright? Everybody’s ducking, jumping out of the way ‘cause who knows? Maybe the shooting ain’t over.”

“What about you, Bennie? You duck?”

Bennie grinned. “I ain't stupid. I hit the deck behind the pretzel wagon and grabbed some sidewalk.”

Romeo handed Bennie a white card embossed with the NYPD emblem and bearing his name and the switchboard number at the 16th. “Call me if you remember anything else. I mean anything. And don’t leave town, understand?”

“Hey, Lieutenant, I live in Jersey, fa’ Chrissake!”

“So don’t go any further than Jersey.”

“So where would I go? Philly?” The question, both detective and doorman knew, was New York rhetorical and required no answer.

As Paul walked back to the crime scene he noticed a black limousine double-parked with its engine running. Presumably someone in the passenger compartment had instructed the driver to pull over in order to observe the activity around the body on the sidewalk. The back window which had been rolled down now began to slide upward and Romeo instinctively bent to get a glimpse of whoever was inside. He saw a moonfaced man with a wispy mustache and beard wearing tortoise shell glasses with green tinted lenses. It wasn't until the limousine disappeared in Sixth Avenue traffic that Romeo realized the man in the back seat was the playwright, Tennessee Williams. Paul Romeo was long since inured to the sight of celebrities in the theater district and he maintained casual relationships with many of them. He did not know Williams, had seen him only once before, six years ago on a night he and Josette sat in the first row of the balcony for opening night of a play called "The Glass Menagerie." They had driven into Manhattan that afternoon from Hartford, in defiance of the wartime admonition against unnecessary travel. It was a long trip and they used up most of their gas ration points but what they had witnessed in those three hours in the Playhouse Theater remained a treasured memory he and Josette shared to this day.

Paul Romeo stepped inside the area cordoned off by the wooden traffic barriers and approached the body. The coroner’s man, Steiss, was packing his equipment back into the Gladstone satchel. The driver of the meat wagon, Jensen, flipped his cigarette into the gutter and made an elaborate entreating gesture.

“C’mon, Romeo, this guy’s cold and so is the fuckin’ weather. Can we scrape the poor bastard up off the sidewalk? This city picks up dog shit faster.”

Paul glanced at Steiss and got a curt nod from the fat man. “Go ahead," Steiss spat, "I got all I need.” With a rheumy cough he laboriously got to his feet, spread a blank death certificate on the roof of a parked police car and began filling it out.

Jensen now took over at the body, unrolling a long black rubberized bag with a zipper along one edge. Body bags always reminded Paul of the sleeping bag he’d used at Boy Scout camp on West Hill Pond near Torrington. Jensen was joined by a uniformed member of his ambulance crew, a young Negro woman Paul didn’t recognize. Together they worked the zippered sheath around the corpse. Then, as Jensen rolled the body expertly by the shoulders into the bag, he exclaimed in surprise. Paul stepped closer.

“Got something?”

“Didn’t any of you Sherlocks think to feel around underneath the guys ass?” said Jensen. “I bet you would if this was a broad.” The Negro ambulance crew woman made an exclamation of disgust and stared across 45th street. Jensen ignored her and handed Paul a gold mechanical pencil and a jagged piece of newsprint about ten inches square. It was a New York Times theater listing. The torn page was stained with blood though not enough to obscure penciled circles and check marks on some of the boxed show titles.

Jensen peered over Paul's shoulder as the detective examined it. “Might just be some junk he landed on after he was shot. You fall down anyplace in this city, you land on garbage.” Romeo didn't answer. He took an envelope from his pocket and carefully placed the pencil and the scrap of newsprint inside. Now he looked around for the young patrolman.

“Feeney! Was that hack a radio cab?”

Feeney hurried to him. “Right, Detective. A Checker.”

Paul looked at his watch. “Get on the call box to the Precinct and talk to my partner, Detective Andy Mazak. Tell him I said to g

et the company dispatcher to pull that hack off the street. I want the back seat gone over good before he hauls any more fares.” Feeney nodded, leafing frantically through his small notebook for the pertinent page. “We’re looking for a newspaper. The Times. Got it?” Feeney nodded emphatically as he took off toward the call box at a trot.

Jensen and the Negro woman lifted the gurney bearing the body and slid it into the back of the meat wagon. Jensen slammed the double doors and waved to the detective.

“Need a ride, Romeo?”

“Not to the morgue.”

As the Coroner’s wagon pulled away and the crowd began to disperse, Paul Romeo took a deep breath and looked around Times Square. It was Wednesday afternoon, matinee day. The theater marquees were just beginning to light up.