Read Online Crime of Their Life by Frank Kane - Free Book Online

way, and had gotten used to people fawning over her instead of half ignoring her. She flashed an especially warm smile at the young waiter who reached past her to remove her soup plate. Word of Mrs. Phelps’s generosity had already filtered down into the galley and the salon. He returned the smile and Mrs. Phelps made a mental note to ask her room steward to see if “that nice dining room steward” couldn’t arrange for her to have a warm milk and sandwich every night.
    The honeymooners talked to each other in low voices giggling at some secret joke. The conversation at the table lagged, became desultory with each of the diners lost in his own thoughts.

CHAPTER 7
    After dinner, Jack Allen, the ship’s cruise director, sprawled comfortably in a chair on the lower promenade deck, enjoying his first few minutes of solitude for the day. In the west, the sun was getting ready to make its exit in a Technicolor spectacular. Already, the sky was a blaze of red and the billowing water picked up the rosy glow and seemed to catch fire.
    For the past ten years, the winters had all been like this for him. The days hot and the perspiration dried on his skin by the trade winds, the evenings ushered in by pyro-technical displays like this one, the nights cool and black.
    But it hadn’t always been so. His mind went back to the winters of his childhood on the East Side of New York. The cold winds that blew off the East River sent the kids running off the streets to huddle around the oversized stoves in the kitchen of the railroad flats. Hardly a week passed that some old bum was found dead in a hallway along the Bowery, or some family was found asphyxiated when the cold drafts that roamed the ramshackle buildings blew out an oil heater while they slept.
    The kids almost all wore rubbers from right after Thanksgiving until the April showers were finished. The rubbers served a double purpose—kept their feet dry and postponed the need for putting on new half soles. A piece of cardboard cut to fit on the inside and rubbers on the outside doubled the lives of their shoes. Most of the kids took their rubbers off the minute they were called into the house because it was a widely known fact that rubbers worn indoors could ruin a boy’s eyesight.
    Allen watched the slow, leisurely descent of the sun. Back in the old days there was nothing like this. Night came with startling swiftness, the gas jets were lighted in the flats and in the hallways. There was always a faulty one some place in the building that gave the halls a permeating smell of gas.
    On the streets, the hardy old pushcart peddlers stood watch over their wares, which included everything an ordinary household could use—clothing, crockery, food, even furniture. Their faces almost invisible under the stockings pulled down to protect their ears from the cold, old fedoras pulled down over the stockings, they stood sentry over their merchandise, ready and anxious to haggle with any soul hardy enough to make an appearance.
    Sometimes it was not a customer who made the appearance. It might be a band of hoodlums intent on upsetting the pushcart. One would hold the struggling, begging merchant while the others dumped his merchandise into the slush. Other gangs would show up to offer the peddlers insurance against these raids. Sometimes the protectors would be challenged by other gangs wanting a slice of the protection money. This led to gang fights, the most famous of which was between the Monk Eastmans and the Paul Kellys on Allen Street where over a hundred armed men fought a pitched gun battle.
    But this didn’t stop the East Siders from being proud of their neighborhood. In spite of the decaying, unheated hallways and the peeling paint and overcrowded flats, this was the neighborhood of Cherry Street where George Washington once lived; of Mulberry Street where Al Smith started his climb that reached almost into the White House, and of Hester Street where Jacob Epstein first molded a