Everything we say or do is really about ourselves. I’m telling my story of Jo-Jo Olsen. The real story. The way it happened to Jo-Jo, and to me. It’s not the facts, the simple events, that tell a story. It’s the background, the people and what they have inside, the scenery a man lives with, the shadows all around him he never knew were there. The truth does not come in a nutshell.
Give the facts, Marty would say, but what are the facts that made the story of Jo-Jo Olsen? A fact is everything that makes someone act in such a way as to change events. It does not have to be true or logical or something you can point to and put your finger on. There were already two important facts in Jo-Jo’s story that had no relation to Jo-Jo at all, but without them there would have been no story, or at least a different story.
One fact was that Pete Vitanza had broken the rules of his brief life. By the rules of Chelsea, Vitanza should have minded his own business. He should have been silent until he knew more. But he came to me. And that was the second fact — that Pete came to me. If he had gone to someone else who knows how it would have ended? Maybe better and maybe worse. But he came to me because I had known his father, Tony, before Tony Vitanza died building a bridge so that people could get to the beach faster. And because I had known Tony, I suppose I felt I owed Pete a little. Not much, but enough to work a little harder than I might have otherwise.
The story of a man is what that man is. It is the people he knows and loves and hates. The air he breathes. The strangers he never knew existed. The whole complex of shadows waiting for a spark to set them off. The story is that complex, not the spark that blows it up. And Jo-Jo’s story is my story. Without me it would have been a different story.
It would also have been a different story if one of the cast of characters had been smarter and less nervous.
I had worked for three days and was about to call it fifty dollars’ worth when the spark reached me, and the first blood in the story was mine.
Chapter 5
The man who came out of the alley to maul me was big but slow.
‘Lay off Jo-Jo!’
I’m not big, and I’m not slow. About five-foot-ten, 160 pounds, and a face that is not the dream of even an ugly schoolgirl. (Especially an ugly schoolgirl. The ugly look for beauty. The beautiful don’t have to look for it in others.) But I can catch a fly in mid-air, and when I was a kid I ran the hundred in eleven seconds flat. I’ve run it faster since when there was no one to clock me except a shadow with hot breath behind me. When you have the average number and size of muscles, no fighting skills except cunning, and you’ve picked up a handicap like one arm along the way, you have to develop good legs and quick wits. It’s called compensation or adaptation or just learning to use what you have.
‘Lay off Jo-Jo!’
As I said, he was big but slow. He was also anxious. His first punch got my left shoulder. It was a good punch and would have paralysed my left arm if I had had a left arm. He only got the left shoulder because he had lunged off balance the way a man will who has been waiting too long to throw the punch. He was no trained fighter, but he had muscles. His fist felt like a small bowling ball. I bounced off a wall like a duck pin. His second punch was slow in coming. I had time to roll with it. That was lucky, because it was aimed at my chin and was a lot more accurate.
His trouble was that he had his message on his mind. Any good fighter, ring or street, will claim that to fight well you must have your mind on your work. The fighter who sees the crowd or keeps one eye out for the cops is a loser. His mind was too busy.
‘Layoff!’
I rolled with the second punch, that came too slow. I threw one short jab at his face just to slow him down, kicked his shin as hard as I could, and rolled two garbage cans into his path. He ducked my punch, howled when I got his shin solid, and sprawled over the garbage cans when he tried to get at me again. By the time he picked himself up I was nothing but heels going away fast. I think I was leaning on the bar in Packy’s Pub and halfway through my first whiskey before the big man knew for sure that I was gone. And my brain was at work. Because I had a clear picture in my mind — a picture of the big man’s feet and shoes.
I suppose I saw the shoes when the big man went down over the garbage cans. They were the ancient, pointed, two-toned brown and beige shoes the fashion-plate hoods used to wear in the twenties and thirties. Legs Diamond and oh you kid. And the feet on the big man were like doll’s feet. They were, of course, the shoes and feet of the man I had seen outside the precinct station on Monday. Which meant that the big man had been watching me three days. That figured, because he had known that I frequented Packy’s Pub, or he could not have been in the alley where he had been. He had probably made the silent call, too. All I had out of it was a cut lip that oozed blood, but I wanted to know who the man was.
‘A big guy,’ I said to Joe and Packy Wilson. ‘Blond or going grey. It was dark. A square face, big and flabby, with jowls and small eyes. A good enough suit, and some kind of accent. He wears small shoes for such a big man. The pair he had on were pointed, two-toned brown and beige. He needed spats.’
Joe thought hard. Joe has worked in most of the saloons in Chelsea, and he drinks in most of the others.
‘I don’t place him,’ Joe said. ‘He don’t drink around here.’
‘If he’s who I think,’ Packy Wilson said, ‘he drinks in the good places. The clubs over in the Village and Little Italy. Maybe the Fifth Avenue places and even uptown.’
‘Has he got a name,’ I said, ‘or do I have to guess?’
‘Olsen,’ Packy said. ‘Lars Olsen. They call him Swede.’
I did not need a sworn statement to know that the big man was Jo-Jo Olsen’s father. It made me think. There is a big difference between telling a friend like Pete Vitanza to mind his own business and trying to stop me asking questions about Jo-Jo by using his fists on my skull. It is a matter of degree, of importance. Swede Olsen really didn’t want anyone nosing around after Jo-Jo. Why?
‘Lend me your gun,’ I said to Joe.
I don’t carry a gun. It’s too dangerous. When you carry a gun you get to depend on it too much. Sooner or later you will use it. A man with a gun is a marked man. I’m a fair shot, but I don’t want to prove it and find out the hard way that the other man is better. A gun ruins the brains. But sometimes it can be a needed convincer. Olsen had already jumped me once.
‘Be careful,’ Joe said.
I put the. 38 Police Special in my belt. The night street was as hot as it had been at noon. Pete Vitanza’s list gave Olsen’s address as on Nineteenth Street, not far from Packy’s. I assumed that Swede would have gone home to clean off the garbage. Not that I felt the need for revenge. As far as I was concerned, Swede Olsen could go his way unchastised by me. I would be glad to never run into the Swede, or Norwegian, again. The gun was just for show. If it came to a fight, the odds were still all on his side. But if I was going on I had to talk to Swede sooner or later, and I could not let him think he had scared me, even if he had. That’s bad business and bad living.
It’s not so important to win a fight, but it is important to not let the other man win. I wanted Swede to get the idea that I’d get up each time he knocked me down. The fight wouldn’t end. That’s the best way to make a man stop knocking you down — make him know that it won’t get him what he wants. And I wanted him to know that I knew who had jumped me. I’m supposed to be a detective, and it might worry him to think that I knew my work.
The building was not too bad, and not too good. The usual six-storey old-law tenement with the fire escape in front. There were worse on the block, and there were better. It had been worked on some, but it had not exactly been renovated. In the white-tiled vestibule I studied the doorbells and mailboxes. I got a kind of surprise. The Olsens lived on the top floor, which is the cheap floor in a six-storey walkup. But from the look of the mailboxes they had the whole floor. That made their place the best apartment in the building, or at least the biggest. In this building, unrenovated, there were four to six apartments on each floor. The Olsens had a whole floor. Olsen had his name on all four mailboxes of the top floor. It meant that there was money around somewhere. It made them look like pretty fair-sized fish in a small and shabby pond.
From what Petey Vitanza had told me I’d already figured that the Olsens, except Jo-Jo, were not exactly a
