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 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.”
Buzz said, “Hell in a bucket maybe,” saw Mickey going into his patented low simmer–nostrils flaring, jaw grinding, eyes trawling for something to smash–and handed him the half-full Bloody Mary Johnny Stompanato left behind. Cohen took a gulp and licked lemon pulp off his lips. “Spill it. Now.”
Buzz said, “Lucy’s shack job’s been squeezing Solly with some dirty pictures. I broke it up, strong-armed the boy a little. Lucy needs a safe place to flop, and I know for a fact that the Greek’s got pals on the West Hollywood Sheriff’s–your pals. I also know he used to push reefer in Dragna territory–which made old Jack D. real mad. Two damn good reasons for you to leave him alone.”