Free Brain Guy: A gang killer meets his match in a TNT blonde by Benjamin Appel

long powdered legs moving to the heartbeats of the spectators. She was almost naked, her body dead-whitened with powder. Her black hair loose upon two breasts solid as apples. She did not dance, but swayed to the erotic sighing music. At all the tables the men smoked or sipped wine, their male gestures a chorus.
    As the woman’s body sang of its beauty and desire, the solid apple breasts wavered in Bill’s mind. Her heavy thighs followed the winged naked feet, white and strong, the five toes distinct from one another. His own toes were prisoned one to the other. Summertimes the beaches were ugly with thousands of female feet civilized in tight shoes. He whispered groggily something about the glory that was Greece, not these greaseballs, the ancient Greece with all her glories.
    “You gimme a pain in the behind,” said Madge.
    “I’ll bust you in the jaw.”
    “Sh,” whispered McMann.
    The dance ended, his heart remembering the apple-breasted woman in her stark moment of beauty. The house applauded. He clapped his hands, confused, as if the dance had happened somewhere else, and drank more wine. The lights flashed on like sharp slaps. The place was jammed with anonymous good friends, guzzling, smoking. He sat with the pals of a lifetime, immortal buddies of his. McMann had slipped his arm about Bobbie. Madge squeezed tight against him, her hands teaching him her kind of love, humming a song similar to: “I can’t give you anything but love, baby.”
    They all staggered out finally, up the three stone steps into a cab spinning out of the night. The men flopped on the seat, holding the women on their laps. Bill was insisting he couldn’t let Mac treat, no sir, when the cab seemed to hit a wall, stopping, McMann pushing everybody out. Madge and Bobbie jigged on their heels, it was that cold. They were on Twenty-third Street. Bill said the Greek’s had been warm, and this weather was a blizzard, and he was going to divvy up or know why. The cabbie slipped McMann his change. McMann announced he was glad to put dough in circulation. The cab rolled west under the El. Ninth Avenue was only a half-block away, the station lonely above the street.
    “You’re spending all your dough.”
    “Aw, dry up. It ain’t mine.”
    Bobbie shivered and wanted to go where it was warm. “Whose dough is it?” Madge asked, pressing tight against Bill. He gripped her around the waist and told her to mind her damn business. The crosstown trolley banged down the street and he thought of Wiberg falling down like an empty suit. On this very night. He stared at the street, the quiet rows of brownstone fronts across the way, the tailors and Chink laundries spaced in dark stone, and then they were all trooping upstairs. McMann unlocked the door of his two-room apartment. It smelled male. A pair of silk stockings hung on a chair. McMann hauled off his overcoat. The bedroom faced the street. The second room could be used for sleeping. Bobbie yanked off the cover of the studio couch and made it up as a bed, plumping down the two couch pillows, tucking the blankets in. Not the first time for Bobbie, thought Bill, but was Madge always dame number two? “Hit the hay, kid,” McMann advised, “and don’t fix her more’n fifty times. Boy, I’m tired.” He unbuttoned the shirt on his white chest. He didn’t wear an undershirt. His red hair tousled like a married man’s at bed hour, he walked into the bedroom, trailed by Bobbie, her hips broad and matronly. She shut the French door and began to undress behind the curtains. She might’ve been concealed by a high wall, already out of her dress, yawning from the wine, in a pink brassiere and step-in. A second later he doused the lights. Bill sprawled in one of the chairs. “What a guy! He’s burned cig holes all over the joint.” He was talking big because he felt uneasy, his heart bursting. His body wanted to shake violently. Maybe because he didn’t go about these things in just this way? He