The Gangster (19 page)

“Out of the frying pan,” thought Alderman Martin, with an awful feeling he was headed for the fire. At first, it all went smooth as silk. Court officers, who were grinning like some swell had stuffed enormous tips in their pockets, let him out of the building by a side entrance. Instead of having to duck his head from a pack of howling newspapermen, he was greeted by a silent escort who whisked him inside a town car before the reporters got wise. But now that his rescuers, whoever they were, had him in the closed and curtained auto, they were not treating him with the respect, much less the deference, expected by a member of the New York City Board of Aldermen, who had jobs, contracts, favors, and introductions to dispense.

They would not tell him where they were taking him. In fact, they never spoke a word. Relieved to dodge the reporters, he hadn’t taken notice of the fact that his broad-shouldered protectors were swarthy Italians. Kidnapped, he thought, with a sudden stab of terror. Snatched by the Black Hand. Abducted for ransom by Italians too stupid to realize that he was in so much trouble already that no one would pay to get him back.

He tried to climb out when the car stopped in traffic. They gripped his arms from either side and sat him back down forcefully. He demanded an explanation. They told him to shut up.

He filled his lungs to bellow for help.

They stuffed a handkerchief into his mouth.

When the auto stopped at last and they opened the door, it was parked inside a storehouse. He could smell the river, or a sewer. They marched him down stone stairs into a cellar lit by a single bulb, glaring from the ceiling. He saw a table in a corner with something spread on it under a sheet. In the shadows of
another corner, a man was standing still as stone. There was a heavy, straight-backed chair under the bulb. They pushed him into it and shackled him to the arms with handcuffs and yanked the handkerchief from his mouth.

The escorts left. The man in the shadows spoke. Alderman Martin could not see his face. He had an Italian accent.

“Alderman Martin, your heeler confess-a you order him to hire assassin.”

His heart nearly stopped beating. He had been right about the fire. This was no kidnapping for ransom. Suddenly, he was thinking clearly and knew that the entire terrible day, starting with the bribe trap, was unimportant. This was a situation he shouldn’t have gotten involved in—would not have gotten into if Brandon Finn’s people hadn’t known he was desperate—and it had gone terribly wrong. He had no hope but to bluster his way out of it.

“He would never say such a thing.”

“He didn’t want to.”

The man lifted the sheet.

James Martin would have given ten years of his life to be sitting in a cell at West 54th Street. The heeler was dead. His face was bloody as a beefsteak. The eye they had left in his head regarded Martin with a dumbfounded stare.

“What did you do to him?” Martin asked when he could draw enough breath to speak.

“We asked him a question. We asked, ‘Who told you hire assassin?’ We now ask you that same question, Alderman Martin. Who told you hire assassin?”

“You know the ‘Chamber of Horrors’?” Captain Coligney asked Isaac Bell on the telephone.

“The one at Union Square?”

“Meet me there.”

Isaac Bell climbed the subway steps at the Union Square Station three at a time. At 16th Street, a leather-lunged barker manned a megaphone:

“Do you want better schools and subways? Do you want green parks and breezy beaches? Want to find out why you don’t have them? Then step right up to the Committee of One Hundred Citizens’ Exhibit against Tammany Hall to see how Tammany gets away with its bunco game.”

The barker seemed superfluous. The line to get in snaked the length and breadth of Union Square and disappeared down side streets. The extras newsboys were hawking claimed that twenty-two thousand people had visited the exhibition in only three days.

In the show window, a papier-mâché cow represented Tammany milking the city. “Don’t cry over spilt milk,” read the placards. “Get a new set of milkmaids.”

A competing Tammany Hall exhibit several doors down boasted a live elephant—representing Republicans eating the city—but it looked to Bell like the anti-Tammany show was outdrawing the pachyderm four-to-one.

Coligney had stationed a cop to escort Bell inside, where he followed signs pointing to the Chamber of Horrors. On the way, he passed “The Municipal Joyride to the Catskill Mountains,” a huge cartoon of “Honest Jim” Fryer running over a small taxpayer in a town car, a depiction of the “Story and Shame of the Queensboro Bridge” that accused Tammany Hall Democrats of wasting $8,000,000 to build “nothing but an automobile highway” that should have been spent on preventing tuberculosis.

Down the basement stairs was the chief attraction, the Chamber of Tammany Horrors, and it was stronger stuff. Silhouettes of men, women, and children encircled the room like the rings of Hell, dramatizing the price of graft: the thirteen thousand New Yorkers who had died this year of preventable diseases; the children condemned to the streets by the shortage of schools.

Captain Coligney was waiting next to an exhibit illustrated by a floor-to-ceiling billboard: “How Tammany Hands Catskill Aqueduct Plums to its Favored Contractors.”

“A DA dick told me you dropped my name on him,” he greeted Bell.

“Only your name. I was trying to get a handle on Adlerman Martin.”

“I reckoned as much,” said Coligney. He jerked a thumb at the billboard. “Thought you’d like to see Part Two of this exhibit.”

Alderman James Martin was behind the billboard, barely out of the regular visitors’ sight. He was hanging by the neck. His face was blue, his tongue as thick and gray as a parrot’s, his body stiff.

Coligney said, “He wasn’t here when they closed last night. They found him this morning.”

“What time do they close?”

“Closed at eleven. Opened this morning at nine.”

“Are we supposed to believe he committed suicide from guilt?”

“Martin didn’t have a guilty bone in his body. But, at any rate, he’s been dead a lot longer than twelve hours. Which means he didn’t hang himself here.”

“Not likely he hanged himself elsewhere, either,” Bell noted. He inspected the body closely. “But it doesn’t look like he put up a struggle.”

Coligney agreed. “On the other hand, his pockets were empty, except for one thing.” He held up a business card, balancing the edges between his big fingers. Bell read it.

“Who is Davidson?”

“Onetime reformer. Saw where the money was made and woke up thoroughly Tammanized. Big wheel in the Contractors’ Protective Association.”

“What’s his card doing in Martin’s pocket?”

“I’d guess same reason Alderman Martin is hanging here: To make Tammany look even worse than the Chamber of Horrors.”

“So Davidson locked horns with whoever hanged Martin.”

Coligney nodded. “And they’ve just sent him a threat.”

Bell asked, “How much time would I have to interview Davidson before you make it official?”

Coligney found sudden interest in the ceiling. “My cops are busy. I’d imagine you have a day.”

“I’ll need two,” said Bell. Time for Research to scrutinize Davidson before he braced him.

The side-wheel river steamer
Rose C. Stambaugh
struggled to land at Storm King sixty miles up the Hudson from New York. Smoke fountained from the stack behind her wheelhouse, and her vertical beam engine, which stood like an oil derrick between her paddle wheels, belched steam that turned white in the cold air.

The pilot cussed a blue streak, under his breath, when a bitter gust—straight from the North Pole—stiffened the American flag flying from the stern and threatened to hammer his boat against the wharf. Winter could not shut down the river too soon for him.

Isaac Bell stood at the head of the gangway, poised to disembark. He wore a blue greatcoat and a derby and carried an overnight satchel. Red and green Branco’s Grocery wagons were lined up on the freight deck, stacked full of barrels and crates destined for the aqueduct crews at the heart of the great enterprise. The siphon that would shunt the Catskills water under the Hudson River would connect the Ashokan Dam with New York City.

The mules were already in their traces. The instant the gangway hit the wharf, Bell strode down it and pulled ahead of the long-eared animals clumping after him. Officials scattered when they saw him coming.

If his coat and hat made him look like a New York City police
detective, or a high-ranking Water Supply Board cop, Isaac Bell was not about to say he wasn’t. Two birds with one stone on this trip included a second visit with J. B. Culp. This time, it would be on his home turf, Raven’s Eyrie, which Bell could see gleaming halfway up the mountain in the noonday sun. In his bag were evening clothes. First he would look like a police detective
under
the mountain.

He found the site where they were sinking a new access shaft to the siphon tunnel. The original shaft had been started too close to the mountain edge, where the granite proved too weak to withstand the aqueduct’s water pressure.

“Can I help you, sir?” the gate man asked warily.

“Where’s Davidson?”

“I’ll send somebody for him.”

“Just point me the way.”

The gate man pointed up the hill.

Bell stepped close, cop close. “Precisely where?”

“There’s a contractor’s shed about a hundred feet from the new shaft.”

Bell moved closer, his shoulder half an inch from the man’s cheek. “If you use that telephone to warn him, I will come back for you when I’m done with him.”

Davidson’s official job was to provide expert advice on the labor situation. That was window dressing. His real job was collecting contract fees from the Contractors’ Protective Society—or, as former newspaperman Detective Scudder Smith put it, “Tammany’s on-site fleecer of contractors and taxpayers.” Originally a Municipal Ownership League proponent of public utilities, Davidson had switched sides after the city’s Ramapo Water
Grab victory and become, as Captain Coligney had noted, thoroughly Tammanized.

Across the Hudson—where the Catskills water tunneled under and emerged from the uptake—a stretch of aqueduct was being bored by a company that had paid Davidson an “honorarium” of five percent of the contract fee for his expert advice. Or so reliable rumor unearthed by Van Dorn operators had it. Vaguer rumors had Davidson shaking down Antonio Branco for $20,000 for a provisioning contract. Trouble was, hearsay was not evidence, and graft charges would never make it to court before the statute of limitations expired.

But despite his apparent immunity, Davidson was scared. Rattled, it seemed to Bell, at least too rattled to question Bell’s masquerade as a cop. “I got the telegraph” were the first words out of the heeler’s mouth.

“What telegraph?” asked Bell.

“The message. They left him hanging there for me. Warning me off.”

“From what?”

“None of your business.”

Bell said, “If you want me to run you in, the boat’s heading back to New York. Or we can take the train if you prefer trains.”

“Go right ahead.”

“What?”

“Arrest me. I’ll be safer in your custody than I am standing here.”

“Fine with me,” Bell bluffed, “if you think you’ll be safer in a city jail.”

Davidson wet his lips. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Go see Finn. He’ll set you straight.”

“Which Finn?”

Davidson looked at him sharply. “There is only one Finn, and if you don’t know him, you’re not who you say you are.”

Bell tried to bull through it. “I’m asking politely one more time. Which Finn?”

Davidson turned on his heel and walked again, leaving the tall detective with a strong feeling he had egg on his face. He hurried into the village, found a telephone building next to the post office, and phoned Captain Coligney. It took a while to connect to the long-distance wire, and he assumed that the local operator was listening in.

“Do you know a ‘Finn’ in connection with our hanging?”

“I’m afraid you’re talking about Brandon Finn. Not beholden to the powers in the usual way. Informal, if you know what I mean.”

“You mean he operates off the usual tracks?”

“And covers his tracks.”

“Who does Brandon Finn report to?”

“The Boss. But only on a strictly informal basis. Why do you ask?”

“It might be smart to keep an eye on him.”

“Too late,” said Coligney. “He died.”

“Of what?”

“They don’t know yet.”

Bell composed a telegram in Van Dorn cipher.

PROTECT CLAYPOOL HOME AND OFFICE

If Brandon Finn was linked directly to Boss Fryer, then whoever was killing the Tammany men was nearing the top of the heap. If Claypool was the fixer who started the ball rolling, then he could be next.

Archie Abbott took for granted that he delighted women the way catnip fired up cats. So when an attractive brunette taking tea in the Knickerbocker Hotel lobby not only failed to notice him but looked straight through him as if he didn’t exist, Abbott took it as a radical challenge to the proper order of things.

“Good afternoon.”

She had arresting blue eyes. They roved over Abbott’s square chin, his aquiline nose, his piercing eyes, his high brow, his rich red hair, and his dazzling smile. She said, “I’m afraid we’ve not been introduced, sir,” and returned her gaze to her magazine.

“Allow me to remedy that,” said Abbott. “I am Archibald Angell Abbott IV. It would be an honor to make your acquaintance.”

She did not invite him to sit beside her. At this point, were he not known to the Knickerbocker’s house detectives as a fellow Van Dorn, two well-dressed burly men would have quietly materialized at his elbows and escorted him to the sidewalk while explaining that mashers were not permitted to molest ladies in their hotel—and don’t come back!

“My friends call me Archie.”

“What does your wife call you?”

“I hope she will call me whatever pleases her when we finally meet. May I ask your name?”

“Francesca.”

“What a beautiful name.”

“Thank you, Archibald.”

“Just Archie is fine.”

“It pleases me to call you Archibald.”

Abbott’s sharp eye had already fixed on her left hand, where a wedding ring made a slight bulge in her glove. “Are you married, Francesca?”

“I am a widow.”

“I am terribly sorry,” he lied.

“Thank you. It has been two years.”