Read Online Brass Rainbow by Michael Collins - Free Book Online

who’s always logical.”
    He grinned. “Anyway, baby, I’ve got me an alibi. Soon as I heard, I knew the cops’d be around. They came. I told them what I’m telling you: me and Strega was in the city early Monday, sure, but we was back here by one o’clock. We got proof. Okay?”
    â€œOkay,” I said. “Did you hear about Jonathan being mixed up in anything?”
    â€œNo, but what would I hear about what he did?”
    â€œDo you know a man named Paul Baron?”
    â€œI heard of him, but I never met the man. We work different streets. He’s a con artist, a sharpie. I’m a businessman. Him and his women work badger games; play the ships, the resorts. His kind’ll try to take a casino as fast as any private mark. I’d throw him out.”
    â€œWalter Radford lost $25,000 to Baron at poker.”
    Costa whistled. “Walter can’t play, but Baron probably cold-decked him, too. Only $25,000 is damned high for a loner like Baron to let the tab go.”
    â€œI was thinking that myself,” I agreed. “Maybe Baron sort of knew Walter was going to be rich soon. I notice Walter isn’t shut off here anymore.”
    â€œThe old man’s dead. No worries now,” Costa said. “Walter’s loaded, if the Fallon doesn’t queer the deal when she marries him. Except I don’t give that two years before she wants out, or maybe he does. She’s got too much class for him.”
    â€œYou like her?”
    â€œThere’s something in her, baby. Only you saw she won’t give me the time of day. Not now. Maybe later.”
    â€œKeep hoping,” I said, and stood up.
    â€œI will, baby.”
    I left Costa with a faraway look in his black eyes. Strega still leaned in his corner, a statue. But just as I reached the door, the blond man’s gray eyes turned to look at me. Intense gray eyes, as if Strega wanted to be sure to remember my face.
    Outside the casino in the cold I lighted a cigarette. The stars were clear and hard. It had been a day of the wild goose, and no help to Sammy Weiss. I decided to have one more go at finding Weiss, and maybe Paul Baron. The cops should have given up on Weiss’s room by now. Maybe I could find some lead they had missed.

9
    S T. MARKS PLACE is one of those streets that make New York what it is. It is in what was once called the Ghetto, where the great Yiddish culture flourished. The Jews still live in the area, but now the Poles are there, the Ukrainians, the Italians, and a host of other peoples. The bums are there because the Bowery is near. The artists are there because it is also the East Village, the present cheap Bohemia. The alienated are there, and the grotesque. Old and young; middle-class and far out; bearded hippie and bearded Chassidim; black, white, yellow and brown. All walk in relative peace.
    On any given block between Third Avenue and Avenue A there may be a Polish Hall, a Slovenian Roman Catholic Church, an Italian café, a Bodega-Carniceria, and a Jewish restaurant. There are lower-middle-class tenements, flophouse hotels, apartments with doormen, and some of the lowest rooming houses anywhere. There are spit-and-sawdust workmen’s bars, psychedelic coffee houses, and three places where you can buy marijuana over the counter.
    At the moment, St. Marks Place itself is a hippie heaven, a far-out Coney Island of the flower-children and the LSD-trippers. Every night is Mardi Gras on this year’s St. Marks Place. It will not always be this. It will change again with the city and life itself, and no one can say what it will be tomorrow.
    And underneath the surface carnival of today, the old Ghetto, Bowery, and melting pot still holds firm, offering a home to men like Sammy Weiss, who have never known peace and who love only the dollar made without work.
    Weiss’s room was on the third floor rear, and it was not locked. I went in with caution. The room was empty.