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    Button Man
    Button Man
    Button Man
    Ebook80 pages1 hour

    Button Man

    By Joseph D'Agnese

    ()

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    About this ebook

    (Note: Button Man is a short story that also appears in the larger collection, Daggyland #1, by the same author.

    *

    New York City is the center of world fashion.

    Funny thing is, the men who manufacture those gorgeous clothes are a cut above thugs.

    When Frank returns from the Korean War, he lands himself a job in the Garment Center, an insular cesspool filled with graft and corruption.

    If you want to keep your job, you keep your mouth shut.

    Then one day, Frank’s buddy Phelan comes to town. He’s as pure as the driven snow. Incorruptible.

    The fashion world is about to get a shake-up.

    In this Runyonesque tale set in New York in the 1950s, innocence clashes against the reality of the gritty marketplace.

    Written by a recent Derringer Award Winner, this short story first appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

    *

    “D’Agnese writes the most unusual and interesting books.”
    —Bookviews

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJoseph D'Agnese
    Release dateSep 22, 2014
    ISBN9781941410127
    Button Man
    Author

    Joseph D'Agnese

    Joseph D’Agnese is a journalist and author who has written for children and adults alike. He’s been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, Discover, and other national publications. In a career spanning more than twenty years, his work has been honored with awards in three vastly different areas—science journalism, children’s literature, and mystery fiction. His science articles have twice appeared in the anthology Best American Science Writing. His children’s book, Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci, was an honoree for the Mathical Book Prize—the first-ever prize for math-themed children’s books. One of his crime stories won the 2015 Derringer Award for short mystery fiction. Another of his stories was selected by mega-bestselling author James Patterson for inclusion in the prestigious annual anthology, Best American Mystery Stories 2015. D’Agnese’s crime fiction has appeared in Shotgun Honey, Plots with Guns, Beat to a Pulp, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Mystery Weekly, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. D’Agnese lives in North Carolina with his wife, the New York Times bestselling author Denise Kiernan (The Girls of Atomic City).

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      Book preview

      Button Man - Joseph D'Agnese

      Button Man

      Button Man

      Tales of the Garment District

      Joseph D’Agnese

      Nutgraf Productions LLC

      BUTTON MAN

      Published by Joseph D’Agnese at Smashwords

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright © 2013 Joseph D’Agnese

      NutGraf Productions LLC

      First digital edition: September 2014

      Cover design by GoOnWrite.com

      Button Man first appeared in the March 2013 issue

      of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

      This e-book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this e-book may be reproduced in whole or in part, scanned, photocopied, recorded, distributed in any printed or electronic form, or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without express written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      josephdagnese.com

      Contents

      In this e-book

      Button Man

      Original Version

      Excerpt

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Please Leave a Review

      Join the VIP Club

      Also by Joseph D’Agnese

      About the Author

      In this e-book

      Button Man by Joseph D’Agnese

      New York City is the center of world fashion.

      Funny thing is, the men who manufacture those gorgeous clothes are a cut above thugs.

      When Frank returns from the Korean War, he lands himself a job in the Garment Center, an insular cesspool filled with graft and corruption.

      If you want to keep your job, you keep your mouth shut.

      Then one day, Frank’s buddy Phelan comes to town.

      He’s as pure as the driven snow. Incorruptible.

      The fashion world is about to get a shake-up.

      In this Runyonesque tale set mostly in New York in the 1950s, innocence clashes against the reality of the gritty marketplace.

      This short story first appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

      JOIN THE VIP CLUB

      Members of The Daggyland VIP Club get a free Starter Library of Joe’s books, not to mention advance news on upcoming books and specials. See the back of the book for details on how to sign up.

      Button Man

      Iwas stationed in Georgia during the war and played my sax to the troops. The men in the officers’ club drank their whiskey fiercely while they dreamed of Poughkeepsie. In the daytime, the military band held practice outside near the reviewing stand; at night a few of us worked the club. After closing time they let me stay just a few hours longer to practice alone. Through the screens I heard bugs humming to the moon.

      A big soldier watched me play on those nights. While I was up there, bleached in the single lamp, belting it out, he’d poke his face through the legs of the overturned chairs. He rested his face in his hands and listened to my Glenn Miller.

      Back then I was looking for buddies and he seemed like the kind of buddy to have. His father ran a prosperous business in the Garment District in New York. The family had money. You could tell by the way people like that talk. Back home he had something other men only dreamed of: a black Caddy sedan with a red leather interior. He was a nice guy to know, for all his bigness. He knew how to make animals out of folded paper, and his name was Happy Phelan.

      The nickname arose from many things. His round baby face. His strawberry nose. Those huge hands. And, no doubt, his colossal innocence. How he got the lieutenant bars I’ll never know.

      He was fascinated with my sax and never missed a chance to hear me play. One of the first times, he watched my fingers sliding up and down, my lips pressed hard against the reed, and with a snap he blew my concentration to hell: Can you play it any slower?

      I stopped. What are you talking about? There’s only one speed.

      He had pulled his stool closer to the stage to peer at the instrument. He touched its rim with one of his square fingers. The moisture from his hand left a ridged salty print on the brass. How do you remember which keys to hit?

      Which is a hell of a question to ask a musician. There’s nothing to remember.

      I rested the sax on my lap and began taking it apart. I plucked the neck off. As spit spattered the floor near my feet, I polished the neck with a baby diaper. There’s nothing softer when it comes to shining brass.

      Phelan used to come see me play off-base, too. One time they loaded up the band in a truck and drove us to a dive in town to win a bet for the general. We weren’t supposed to know it was a bet, of course, but we had a one-day leave and they had us wear our dress uniforms. We played against a civilian band in a place that stank of cheap beer. Girls with garish earrings pouted into their drinks at the bar. It was a fun place to be.

      The general was a man whose eyes we’d never seen, although we’d felt his wrath. From onstage I saw him sitting in a corner of the bar, lit by a flickering candle. He was laughing like hell and guzzling away with one of the other officers.

      That rock and roll crap was getting popular then, and we used to do it just for laughs. We had one drummer, Pops Haskell, who kept everyone sober for about five minutes as he ran through a thumping set. When he finished and slammed his drumsticks to the floor, Phelan hopped from his seat near the stage and doused the sticks with his Coke. The whole crowd broke up laughing.

      When I was

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