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mine.
     
    T HEY CALLED New York “the city that never sleeps” for a reason. Sure, the Depression had made it drowsier than normal, but never sleepy. I knew the best place for gossip at five in the morning was The Stage Left Bar, commonly known as Lefty’s. It was a small speakeasy tucked away in an alley on Forty-Sixth Street and Broadway. Even back when times had been good, Lefty’s always drew a hard-luck crowd. Stage hands, press agents, bit players and acting types; all on the down-swing looking for work, just like everyone else.
    Nobody ever went to Lefty’s for the ambiance or the floor show. The place had neither. People went there to swill bad booze and run their mouths about their troubles. If misery loved company, it was never lonely at Lefty’s. My kind of place.
    When I got to Forty-Sixth and Broadway, I stepped over two drunks at the mouth of the alley bickering over a bottle. They stopped fighting long enough to think about jumping me. But when they saw the holster under my arm, they went back to fighting over the bottle. There wasn’t much light in the narrow alley, but I knew where I was going. I found the steel door leading to the place and pushed it in. There’d been a time not too long ago when even a place like Lefty’s could afford to have a doorman, but those days were long gone. For Lefty’s. For everyone.
    Lefty’s was nicer than The Chauncey Arms, but not by much. It was a dank, humid little joint with low ceilings and sticky floors. The bar itself was just some two-by-fours nailed together for posts and some wooden planks to cover the front. Even on its best day, it reeked of watered-down gin and desperation, but on a humid August morning, it smelled even worse.
    The lack of décor didn’t faze the stagehands and other drunks who’d ambled in from the playhouses along Broadway. Most of the poor bastards were out of work and hoping for their luck to change, like everyone else in this town. But it never ceased to amaze me how they somehow managed to scrape enough dough together to go in there and drink every night. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
    The regulars usually eyeballed me when I walked in the place. They knew who I was, and what I used to be. The looks they gave me were always far from admiring. But on that particular morning, the regulars were distracted by a fairer sight in the back of the place. And when I saw who they were looking at, I couldn’t blame them. She happened to be talking to the man I’d come to see. Sometimes my luck wasn’t all bad.
    Wendell Bixby was perched in his usual spot: back table near the phone booth. He had his head down, scribbling in a notebook, while a tall blonde whispered to him from across the table. Bixby was the only one in the place not looking at the girl.
    Her name was Alice Mulgrew and I’d known her for a long, long time. Even sitting down, it was easy to tell Alice was something to look at: tall and trim with a hell of a figure. She was Harlow-blond and wore a black, off-the-shoulder number that showed plenty of skin. Even in the dingy light of the bar, she glowed. Or maybe she glowed because of it. I never could figure out which.
    Too bad Bixby was more interested in the dirt she was spilling than how she looked spilling it. You see, ‘Bixby’s Box’ was one of the most popular gossip columns in the country, thanks to the Hearst newspaper syndicate. One mention in his column either made you or broke you, depending on who you were and how Bixby decided to write it on that particular day. Socialites, businessmen, politicians, philanthropists, philanderers, actors and actresses were all fair game. No one was beyond the influence of Bixby’s pen.
    Of course, he could always be inspired to write — or not write — whatever he uncovered for the right amount of cash. Money had always been Bixby’s muse. Some people paid him off, most didn’t. Just about the only thing worse than being mentioned in ‘Bixby’s Box’ was