The kid sputtered a moment, but he must have known Dexter meant it. He opened the door and stepped into the dark. Dexter drove away quickly and quietly, glancing just once in the rearview mirror. He barely made out Badger gazing after the car in the cheap suit Dexter had bought him the week before at Crawford’s. It would take him some doing to find his way back to Bensonhurst, if he even knew the address. Those squeaky new brogues would get broken in fast. With a kid like that, you’d no choice but to hit him hard, as many times as it took. Whatever Mr. Q. had saved him from in Chicago could not have been worse than the hellfire that would rain down on Badger here in New York if he failed to observe the chain of command. There was no such thing as immunity. Thinking you had it was suicide.
The good news was that Dexter would likely be free of the kid for a couple of days while Badger licked his wounds. Dexter preferred women, was the truth—they were easier to be around. He would have liked for women to run the whole of his business, if he could find any as tough as the speakeasy owners of his youth: Texas Guinan, Bell Livingstone, dames who’d run over rooftops to escape the dry agents. But modern girls seemed not to like weapons very much, and to be fair, it was hard to carry a gat inside a dress. Even Dexter didn’t wear a shoulder holster; why bother having a suit tailored at F. L. Dunne only to spoil its line? As for keeping a gun in a pocketbook, that only happened in the pictures. A weapon needed to rest against the hide.
The magic hour struck as he approached Manhattan Beach: a swell of promise in the sky that Dexter experienced physically, an expansion inside his chest. He liked to await first light at the eastern end, where the grand hotels used to be. His pop had worked in the kitchen of the Oriental when Dexter was small, and although the hotel had been razed when he was eleven, he could call it to mind precisely—as if its ghost still faced the sea, arms outstretched, awnings, spires, flags snapping in the wind. Inside, miles of red-carpeted hallway were infused with a hum likely generated by the cast of hundreds—his pop included—who toiled just out of sight. Dexter had never been allowed on the Oriental’s beach. Too exclusive.
Last February, just after Pearl Harbor, the Coast Guard had sealed off the eastern end of Manhattan Beach and built a training center amid the vacationers’ cottages. Dexter idled by its gate, looking east as first light appeared. It was gradual, but it never felt like that. One second to the next, and it was day.
His house was on Manhattan Beach’s western end. He kept the front door unlocked. In the kitchen, Milda had left him a pot of coffee, which he warmed on a burner. He poured himself a cup and raised the blackout curtains that covered the windows facing the sea. He only really knew what a day looked like when he’d seen it through these windows. With each quarter turn of dawn, the density of boats was more fully revealed: lighters, barges, tankers, some quarantined at anchor. Wooden-hulled minesweepers moved back and forth across the width of the Ambrose Channel. Tugboats gadflied like circus clowns alongside ships headed into the Upper Bay.
He brought his coffee and binoculars onto the back porch, which overlooked the sea. Tabatha appeared a few minutes later, sleepy-eyed in her frilly lavender robe. Dexter was pleased; normally, his daughter slept late on Saturdays. Her auburn hair—the exact shade of her mother’s—was still indented from the pins she must have yanked from it moments before, to prevent him teasing her. “Tabby cat,” he said, kissing her proffered cheek. “What’s this, you’re drinking my coffee?”
“It’s mostly milk.” She curled into the chair beside his, hugging her knees. Her flimsy chemise was no match for the wind.
“No slumber party last night?”
Lately, it seemed she was always with a girlfriend (often Natalie, whom he didn’t trust), or else two or three girls were over here, making lapel pins out of melted wax or “broomstick skirts,” which involved dipping the skirt in a pot of dye and twisting it around a stick to dry. The result was nothing short of hideous.
“Any picture stars last night?” she asked.
“Well, let’s see. Aline MacMahon was there, Wendy Barrie. Joan Fontaine, she won the Academy Award.” He was teasing her, mentioning only girls.
“No one else?”
“Well, I did catch a glimpse of Gary Cooper. Very late.”
She clapped her hands. “What was he doing?”
“Sitting happily beside his wife and keeping her in martinis.”
“You always say that!”
“It’s always true.” But it was practically never true. Dexter told no one what he saw through the hidden window on the club’s second floor. He left that to Mr. Winchell, his friend and regular, who was a genius at the art of saying something and nothing at the same time.
“Anyone else?” She was hoping for news of Victor Mature. She had gone with Natalie to I Wake Up Screaming last year, and the sight of Mature in a swimming rig had proved a conversion experience. Now his sappy stills decorated her schoolbooks under cellophane.
“No sign of Victor, if that’s who you mean,” he said.
“I didn’t,” she said piously. “He has more important things to do than go to nightclubs. He’s joined the Coast Guard.”
In the old days, when she’d been a regular early riser, Tabby had joined Dexter out here most mornings with her cup of milk. He’d been impressed by her shrewdness, by the grave thought she gave to small topics, and had imagined going into business with her one day—legitimate, of course. But his hopes for Tabby had dimmed over the past year, when she’d begun styling her hair like Veronica Lake and devoting herself to the Ouija board. Yet every couple of weeks she still appeared out here in the morning, as if observing a ritual.
“What’s on tap for today, Tabs?”
“Something with Natalie.”
“Something like what?”
“A picture. Maybe the drugstore.” The studied way she avoided his eyes told him boys would be present. Natalie was boy-crazy, and Tabby had grown prettier than Dexter would have liked. Not that he wished ugliness on his only daughter, but showy beauty was an invitation to dependence. He’d have liked her to have the hidden kind, visible only to those who looked closely. She’d made a lapel pin out of an aspirin box painted over with red nail varnish, and called it a Wish Box. Apparently, there was a secret wish inside, written on a slip of paper. The idea of Tabby maintaining a secret vexed him a little.
“Care for a look?” he asked, offering the binoculars. She shook her head. She’d produced an emery board and was filing her nails into perfect ovals. “English, if you please,” he said.
“No, thank you, Daddy.”
“Lots of ships.”
“I see them.”
“How, when you’re staring at your fingernails?”
“I see them every day.”
He raised the binoculars, scanning the nervous gray water for the conning tower of a submarine. The net across the Narrows protected the Upper Bay, but as far as Dexter knew, there was nothing to stop a U-boat from slipping around the corner of Breezy Point, where Fort Tilden was, and coming right to where sea met rocks below his house. Watching the sea in dread of a submarine felt at times like anticipating one—hoping for it, even.
“Here,” he said, thrusting the binoculars at Tabby to break the spell of her self-absorption. “Make sure no Germans are coming ashore like they did on Amagansett Beach.”
“Why would they, Daddy? There’s nothing important here.”
“To help with your fingernails? Those seem to be very important.”