Read Online Black Hats by Patrick Culhane - Free Book Online

marble everywhere and afternoon sunlight slanting in like swords in a magician’s box through windows taller than most buildings. Grand Central Terminal had been built only six or seven years ago, on the site of the old one; but this grandiose gateway to New York already felt like it had been here just a little longer than Egypt’s pyramids.
    The crowd was considerable, a mix of travelers coming and businesspeople going, with the red hats of colored porters bobbing in the bustle. How odd to be in a station with no smell of smoke, no carbon fumes, the trains themselves hidden away like poor relations. The vast vaulted ceiling was nighttime blue with the expected stars, though slowing to squint up at these indoor constellations, he thought they weren’t quite right. Were they backwards?
    Shrugging, he skirted the central circular information booth past ticket booths and up the gentle slope toward the street, past the glass of restaurants, bars, barbershop, drugstores, and more. On his way, he was jostled without apology perhaps half a dozen times, but no one had tried to pick his pocket, which was politeness of a sort.
    Frontier reputation aside, Wyatt was no stranger to a big town—he’d lived a good ten years in the City of Angels, and Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis and even Chicago had been his gambler’s stamping grounds. But hitting the sidewalk at the corner of Forty-second Street and Vanderbilt Avenue on a cool spring afternoon, he was not fully prepared for this big a town.
    With its shifting sea of pedestrians and its bedlam of motor and streetcar traffic—horseless carriages outnumbering horse-drawn by a wide margin—Midtown Manhattan stopped Wyatt Earp in his tracks. He stood as motionless as the Greek statues that surrounded the massive clock surmounting the imposing terminal, frozen heroes who towered over him even as the buff skyscrapers towered over them, like tombstones in the graveyard of God’s sky…not that he could make out much sky.
    The taxi driver who took Wyatt to the Morning Telegraph at Fiftieth Street and Eighth Avenue provided plenty of local color along the way, including that the newspaper was quartered in what had been an old streetcar stable, back before the cars had been electrified.
    “You wouldn’t expect to find a paper this far uptown,” the hackie said, a little hook-nosed feller in a blue plaid cap, about two blocks from their destination. “You heard of Park Row?”
    “No.”
    “Well, that’s Newspaper Central in this burg. Most of the other dailies are down there. Of course, the Telegraph is not your typical rag.”
    “That so.”

    “Well, you’re going there. You must know.”
    And he did know: the paper his old friend Bat worked for specialized in theatrical, financial and sports news, with horse racing edging out boxing by a nose.
    He did not reward the chatty cabby with anything more than the nickel tip he’d intended, and soon he and his valise were threading through a second-floor city room adrift with blue tobacco haze and alive with typewriter clatter and littered with small cluttered desks at which shirtsleeved scribes toiled and smoked, except for a poker game on the periphery, where copy was being proofed between pots. Passage was made difficult by a variety of humans in the aisles, loud guys with louder clothes sporting derbies or boaters and sucking ciggies or chewing stogies and who belonged either to the gambling or show-business worlds, while bobbed-haired chorus girls sat perched on desks displaying plenty of calf and patiently filing their nails, waiting for reporters banging away at the keys in a hurry to rush through work before coming out to play.
    Wyatt didn’t ask directions of anybody, since few of these people worked here. Besides, he could see Bat through the glass in one of a quartet of window-and-woodframe offices at the far end of the city-room chaos. Bat’s back was to him, but the oval skull was unmistakable, as were the broad