Running from Legs
by Ed McBain
Mahogany and brass.
Burnished and polished and gleaming under the green-shaded lights over the bar where men and women alike sat on padded stools and drank. Women, yes. In a saloon, yes. Sitting at the bar, and sitting in the black leather booths that lined the dimly lighted room. Women. Drinking alcohol. Discreetly, to be sure, for booze and speakeasies were against the law. Before Prohibition, you rarely saw a woman drinking in a saloon. Now you saw them in speakeasies all over the city. Where once there had been fifteen thousand bars, there were now thirty-two thousand speakeasies. The Prohibitionists hadn’t expected these side effects of the Eighteenth Amendment.
The speakeasy was called the Brothers Three, named after Bruno Tataglia and his brothers Angelo and Mickey. It was located just off Third Avenue on 87th Street, in a part of the city named Yorkville after the Duke of York. We were here celebrating. My grandmother owned a chain of lingerie shops she called “Scanties,” and today had been the grand opening of the third one. Her boyfriend Vinnie was with us, and so was Dominique Lefevre, who worked for her in the second of her shops, the one on Lexington Avenue. My parents would have been here, too, but they’d been killed in an automobile accident while I was overseas.
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