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It was a grey, desolate afternoon in late November and my partner Bruce B. and I headed down to Buffalo on business. The broad Niagara seemed as dismal as the day itself until we crossed the bridge into the barren lodge pole timber stands of Grand Island.
Bruce was driving. Fantasy Island was closed, the stalled Ferris Wheel silhouetted against the gunmetal sky like a scene out of Carnival of Souls.
We listened to the radio and talked about the paper and puffed on Smokin Joes filter kings an associate had brought down from the Rez earlier in the week. The farther south we traveled, the worse the weather became.
By the time we reached the shores of Lake Erie--called the "Graveyard of the Great Lakes" by sailors and by scuba divers on the Discovery Channel--the radio was playing some sad Charlie Parker. The sleet pelted the windshield and the wind howled and, if you'd have given it two seconds thought, you would have been glad you weren't out on the water in a craft of any size.
That day, though, Bruce and I were thinking about other things.
Our business took us to McKinley Square. Named out of guilt, I guess, in the wake of President William McKinley's 1901 assassination right under the noses of Buffalo's Finest.
The assassin, 28-year-old Leon Czolgosz, had one of the most unpronounceable names in the annals of American crime.
"I done my duty!" the lone gunman screamed after pumping two shots into McKinley's chest at close range.
"Be easy with him, boys," the mortally wounded President reportedly told lawmen as they wrestled Czolgosz to the ground.
McKinley lingered eight days before dying of gangrenous poisoning, the result of inept medical care. An unrepentant Czolgosz died about a month later in the electric chair at Auburn State Prison.
Bruce and I arrived about 90 minutes early for our meeting. There's a small cafe just off the square, Marotto's, and we decided to get some lunch.
The icy wind made walking difficult. While we both own overcoats, neither of us had worn one because the weather in the Falls had been temperate by comparison.
By the time we'd walked two blocks and entered the cafe's friendly confines, we were wet and windblown. The weather, not bad by Buffalo standards, was brutal. And the municipal anti-smoking laws, brutal as the Buffalo weather, relegated us to a couple of stools at the bar. Marotto's is a cozy place. Cops and defense attorneys and defendants and prosecutors mingle at the bar and the dozen or so tables in an easy manner they could never display at, say, the Erie County Courthouse Coffee Shop, located just across the square.
"Where's Tommy?" one guy asked a new arrival.
"He's gone to get fingerprinted."
"They'll never let him out this time," the guy said. "And what's our favorite hoodlum done now?"
"No, it's for a job," came the reply. "He'll never get it, though."
The barman came and we ordered a couple of cordials. I was still wiping the sleet out of my hair with my fingers.
"It's got to be 20 degrees colder out there than it was in Niagara Falls," I told him.
"You guys in court?" he asked when he came back with the drinks.
I wasn't sure I'd heard him correctly.
"Pardon?" I said.
He asked again and I laughed. "Not today," I said.
The barman got a beer for one of the waitresses and came back a minute later. "It's just that, usually, when someone from Niagara Falls comes in here, they just got out of court," he explained.
We ordered soup and sandwiches, hearty fare and reasonably priced. After lunch, we took our meeting. It ran a little long, but seemed to go well. I learned years ago in the newspaper business that, sometimes, you just have to play it as it lays.
It was 4:30 in the afternoon and nearly dark when we pulled out of the parking ramp and headed home to Niagara Falls. The skies began to clear as we crossed the Grand Island Bridge.
"It always seems faster going back," Bruce said, and I nodded in agreement.