Buzz walked over; the gunman’s hand slid under his morning _Herald_.
Mickey stood up, smiling; Johnny Stomp and the other guy pasted identical grins on their faces and slid over to let him into the booth. Buzz stuck out his hand; Cohen ignored it, grabbed the back of his head and kissed him on both cheeks, scraping him with razor stubble. “Big fellow, it has been too long!”
Buzz recoiled from a blast of cologne. “Much too long, big fellow. How’s business?”
Cohen laughed. “The haberdashery? I got a florist’s shop and an ice cream parlor now, too.”
Buzz saw that Mickey was giving him a shrewd once-over; that he’d caught his frayed shirt cuffs and home manicure. “No. _Business_.”
Cohen nudged the man on his left, a bony guy with wide blue eyes and a jailhouse pallor. “Davey, business he wants. Tell him.”
Davey said, “Men got to gamble and borrow money and schtup women. The shvartzes got to fly to cloud nine on white powder airlines. Business is good.”
Mickey howled with laughter. Buzz chuckled, faked a coughing attack, turned to Johnny Stompanato and whispered, “Sifakis and Lucy Whitehall. _Keep your fucking mouth shut_.”
Mickey pounded his back and held up a glass of water; Buzz kept coughing, enjoying the look on Stompanato’s face–a guinea Adonis turned into a busted schoolboy, his perfectly oiled pompadour about to wilt from fright.
Cohen’s back slaps got harder; Buzz took a gulp of water and pretended to catch his breath. “Davey, you’re a funny man.”
Davey half smiled. “Best in the West. I write all Mr. Cohen’s routines for the smokers at the Friar’s Club. Ask him, ‘How’s the wife?'”
Buzz saluted Davey with his glass. “Mickey, how’s the wife?”
Mickey Cohen smoothed his lapels and sniffed the carnation in the buttonhole. “Some women you want to see, my wife you want to flee. These two Dragna humps were staking out my house after the Sherry’s job, my wife brought them milk and cookies, told them to shoot low, she ain’t had it from me since Lucky Lindy crossed the Atlantic, she don’t want nobody else getting it either.
My wife is so cold that the maid calls our bedroom the polar icecap. People come up to me and ask, ‘Mickey, are you getting any?,’ and I pull a thermometer out of my jockey shorts, it says twenty-five below. People say, ‘Mickey, you’re popular with the ladies, you must get reamed, steamed and dry-cleaned regularly.’ I say, ‘You don’t know my wife–hog-tied, fried and swept to the side is more like it.’ Some women you _got_ to see, some you _got_ to flee.
Oops–here she comes now!”
Mickey ended his schtick with a broad grab for his hat. Davey the gagster collapsed on the table, convulsed with laughter. Buzz tried to drum up chortles and couldn’t; he was thinking that Meyer Harris Cohen had killed eleven men that he knew of and had to rake in at _least_ ten million a year tax free.
Shaking his head, he said, “Mickey, you’re a pisser.”
A group of squarejohns at the next table was giving the routine a round Side 15
Ellroy, James – Big Nowhere, The of applause; Mickey tipped his hat to them. “Yeah? Then why ain’t you laughing?
Davey, Johnny, go sit someplace.”
Stompanato and the gagster slid silently out of the booth. Cohen said,
“You need work or a touch, am I right?”
“Nix.”
“Howard treating you right?”
“He treats me fine.”
Cohen toyed with his glass, tapping it with the six-carat rock on his pinky. “I know you’re in hock to some handbooks. You should be with me, boychik.
Good terms, no sweat on the payback.”
“I like the risk the other way. It gets my juices goin’.”
“You’re a crazy fuck. What do you want? Name it.”
Buzz looked around the room, saw Stompanato at the bar belting a stiff one for guts and solid citizen types giving Mickey surreptitious glances, like he was a zoo gorilla who might bolt his cage. “I want you not to lean on a guy who’s about to make you real mad.”
“What?”
“You know Audrey’s friend Lucy Whitehall?”
Mickey traced an hourglass figure in the air. “Sure. Solly Gelfman’s gonna use her in his next picture. He thinks she’s going places.”