Free Black Hats by Patrick Culhane Page A

collar, polishing off six or seven lobsters. Your pal Mizner, from Nome, used to say Brady liked his oysters sprinkled with clams and his steaks smothered in veal cutlets.”

    “Umm,” Wyatt said, working on another crab.
    “I just squint and I can see them all…. Ziegfeld and Anna Held. Charles Frohman. Victor Herbert. Another Alaska pard of yours, Rex Beach, he liked to hang out here, and O. Henry, the short story writer. What a grand place.”
    “What happened?”
    Bat shook his head. “What happened to every decent lobster palace in this town? Prohibition!
    The men go off to war and the women stay home and push these damned abolitionist laws through, and restaurants like Rector’s and Delmonico’s can’t cook with wine anymore! And a man can’t have a decent meal with a bucket of champagne at his elbow!”
    As if to underscore this travesty, Bat took a swallow of iced water.
    Then he began to rant again: “And now Delmonico’s is closing ! And this joint may change its name to some French nonsense. Can you imagine?”
    “How are the steaks?”
    The steaks were excellent, huge and bloody, the way both men liked them; but Bat wasn’t through.
    “All the great old bars, the fine restaurants, the wonderful cabarets, shutting their doors while these goddamned speakeasies and blind pigs take over.”
    “Speakeasies,” Wyatt said thoughtfully. “Doc’s son—Johnny. That’s what he’s gone into?”
    They were on to coffee now.
    Bat nodded, stirring in sugar. “He used to have an honest trade, like his father.”
    “Denistry, you mean.”
    “Hell, no! Gambling!” Bat leaned forward conspiratorially, though the tables fore and aft were empty. “He’s damned good at it, Wyatt. He can read the cards and he can read the people.”
    “Does sound like Doc’s son.”
    “While back, Johnny got in a high stakes game with a feller at the St. Francis Hotel. Running with a real roller crowd, Wyatt—Rothstein himself was in that game.”
    “Arnold Rothstein?”
    Bat nodded.
    Rothstein, the so-called brain of the New York underworld, was the famed fixer who rigged last year’s World Series. Which struck Wyatt as both un-American and a hell of a feat.

    “Anyway,” Bat continued, “it was a few weeks before this goddamned Volstead Act went into effect. A guy who owned six saloons around town bet all six and his whole stockpile of liquor on aces full over jacks.”
    “Who could blame him?”
    “Guy himself could.” Bat raised an eyebrow. “Johnny had four deuces.”
    Wyatt sipped; his was black. “Saloon guy must’ve been in a reckless frame of mind, with the Prohibition coming.”
    “Drunk, reckless and despondent about his whole general state of affairs. That, and four deuces, was all it took.”
    “What happened?”
    “Paid up. Killed himself, week later.”
    Wyatt shook his head impatiently. “Not the saloon guy—what did Johnny do with six saloons on the eve of Prohibition?”
    “Oh. He held on to the liquor supply and sold the saloons to Rothstein, for a pile…and used the pile to buy an old brownstone on West Forty-fifth.”
    “And that’s the speak?”
    “That’s the speak. Holliday’s. I’ll take you there.”
    “Now?”
    “Hell no!” Bat threw his napkin down and grabbed the check. “We have the fights, first.”
    Madison Square Garden was a palace of yellow brick and white terra cotta with a nude statue of Diana the Huntress on top of its central tower—and to Wyatt, one unlikely venue for a boxing match.
    The block-long affair, bounded by Madison and Fourth Avenues and Twenty-sixth and Twenty-seventh Streets, housed (among other things) a theater, restaurant, concert hall, and a roof garden where ten or fifteen years ago its esteemed architect, Stanford White, was shot by his former mistress’s husband, Harry Thaw, a loony Pittsburgh millionaire. You didn’t have to be a New York native to know about pretty showgirl Evelyn Nesbit and the ruckus she’d caused—just needed