Wally pulled the door open and stepped past it into the lobby. “Escort the ladies. Manhattan is no place for two girls from Monroe.” He pulled the door shut after himself and headed down the lobby to the business of the day.
############
Smack. “I’m gonna ask you one more time, Mister Oak Park, where in the fuck didge ya learn about Al Capone?”
“Like I said before—”
Smack. “‘Like I said before’ ain’t good enough around here, Mister Bayer.” Another hard slap across the face of the bound victim with a hard hand. “You’re gonna tell me, and you’re gonna tell me right now, what you’re doin’ walking into a Brooklyn brothel parlor asking about somebody you’ve never met before.”
Wally, his face already bruised and bloody, looked away from the finger-ringed fist that threatened to strike once more. “I’m looking for a business partner. I need a distributor. I went down to Little Italy and asked around.”
Now the slap was a punch that left a bloody lip. “Oh, so now it’s the guidos who’ll be doing you’re bootleggin’ for ya, huh? It’s that what you Midwest boys think of us guineas?”
“Not at all, I, I—” Wally allowed his head to loll to one side and lapsed into an exhausted silence.
Out of either exhaustion or compassion, the man who had introduced himself as “Jules” before leading an unsuspecting Wally up a flight of stairs to the interrogation room now began pacing back and forth in front of the chair his subject was tied to. Jules paced slowly, his eyes down in thought and his hands on the back of his hips.
The downward gaze caught the bag that Wally had carried upstairs with him, and Jules reached down to pull it from the chair’s side. The bag was placed on a bed whose well-worn springs creaked slightly with the new weight, and then opened to reveal the six bottles of crystal-clear gin. “What’re these?”
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