Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 75, No. 4, April 15, 1933
- Автор: Day Stanley, Dunn J. Allan
- Год: 1933
- Язык: английский
- Год: Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 75, No. 4, April 15, 1933». Краткое содержание книги:
Inspector Brame snorted.
“Busy!” he said. “Of course I’ve been busy! My God, all hell broke loose last night. Busy! Say, I’ve been so busy that a fellow who doesn’t do anything more strenuous than clip coupons would think that he’d done a life time of hard work if he’d been with me for the last twenty-four hours!”
Dan Seller raised a mildly supercilious eyebrow.
“Indeed,” he murmured politely, in the tone of one who simulates interest only through courtesy.
“Something about that murder case, wasn’t it?” asked Bill Pope.
“I’ll say it was,” snorted the Inspector. “Do you know what happened? You’ll be getting it in the papers anyway, so I might as well tell you.
“First we got a call from Rodney Field that a couple of muscle men are out there, trying to keep him from giving some testimony about that Lancaster case, and that they’re going to take him for a ride, and that they’ve already taken Lita Monteith out to silence her.
“Naturally we went out there on the run. We knew we were going up against a tough gang, so we sent out a squad car that was equipped with machine guns, tear gas, pineapples, and everything else.”
“Did you need all that stuff?” asked Bill Pope, quizzically.
“I’ll say we needed it,” said Inspector Brame, “but we still can’t figure just what happened. We got out there and there the gangsters were in the house all right. We surrounded the place and had them trapped. When they saw they were cornered they opened fire on us, and we hemmed them in. It was quite a mêlée while it lasted. We had reinforcements come out, and finally the members of the gang who weren’t killed or wounded surrendered, and they kicked through with a story of what had happened. A bootlegger by the name of Kramer had employed a couple of guys to muscle Rodney Field’s hootch, which is underworld parlance for cleaning out his cellar by force. That enabled the bootlegger to sell him more liquor. However, when these hijackers cleaned out the cellar they stole a gun from Field. It was the gun that killed Lancaster. Lancaster was mixed up in dope traffic. These hijackers were just getting a big shipment of dope from Lancaster’s safe when he burst in on them. Naturally they shot him.”
Inspector Brame stared from one to the other, as though he had been a performer on the stage, and was awaiting a hand of applause.
Renfroe, the banker, nodded his head sympathetically. “That was wonderful detective work, Inspector,” he murmured.
Inspector Brame nodded slowly, almost solemnly.
“Yes,” he said, “it was very clever deductive reasoning. We put two and two together and forced an admission from the gangsters, but the funny part of it was that the story, as told by Rodney Field, doesn’t coincide with the facts. He says that the gangsters came out there and took Lita Monteith some ten or fifteen minutes before they returned for the second time, and that the second gangsters were not the same as the first. On the other hand, we have found out that the gangsters only made one trip and that Lita Monteith never was out there. We had shadows on her all the time, and she never was near Rodney Field’s house.”
“I don’t see what difference that makes, Inspector,” said Dan Seller, with a look of cherubic innocence upon his face. “Your men caught the gangsters red-handed, and wiped out the gang, didn’t they?”
Inspector Brame frowned portentously.
“Well,” he admitted, “there is, of course, that aspect of the case. But we still can’t understand the other. You see, one of the men who was in the house, when the police surrounded it, was this bootlegger named Kramer. He was shot through the lungs, but while he was still conscious, on his way to the hospital, he gave information to the effect that they hadn’t gone out there to kidnap Rodney Field and Lita Monteith at all, but to get The Patent Leather Kid. They knew that he was out there.”
“A straight tip?” asked Dan Seller.
“A straight tip,” said Inspector Brame, nodding his head once more, slowly and solemnly.
Abruptly Bill Pope started to laugh.
Inspector Brame whirled on him.
“What are you laughing at?” he demanded.
Bill Pope coughed, choked, caught his breath, and shook his head.
“Nothing in particular,” he said. “I was just wondering how The Patent Leather Kid got into this case.”
“He just muscled in!” savagely exclaimed Inspector Brame.
The left eye of Bill Pope, the explorer, closed for a brief fraction of a second, in a swift, surreptitious wink, as he caught the eye of Dan Seller.
“Yes,” he said, slowly and distinctly, “The Patent Leather Kid muscled in — and saved the life of an innocent man.”
“Not at all,” said Inspector Brame with dignity. “It was simply a matter of time until the police would have uncovered the true facts about that Lancaster murder case.”
Bill Pope said nothing, but his cool smile was far more irritating than words would have been.
But the look of cherubic innocence remained stamped upon the face of Dan Seller.
The White Hander
by Howard McLellan
Once the Sissy of Catharine Street, Wild Bill Lovett Became the Chief of the White Handers and Chased Al Capone to Chicago
Chapter I
The Sissy of Catharine Street
William Joseph Lovett was one of the paradoxical figures in the modern underworld of a great city. He began life as a timid, chicken-hearted lad who could not bear to see a fly swatted. Before he reached manhood he was a reckless killer and gang chieftain.
A weak, pasty-faced man, he brazenly muscled Al Capone out of the underworld of the East into Chicago, and then, after building himself a reputation as the worst bad man of his time, he came at last to rest in a hero’s grave on the lawnswept hillside of a Brooklyn, N. Y., cemetery, a patriot, and yet a lawbeater and killer of the worst type.
He has been dead almost a decade but pistols still crack in the streets he once terrorized and men die trying to impose his ruthless kill upon the gang world where once he was supreme, Wild Bill Lovett.
Life poured strange fluid into Lovett’s veins. He gave the diabolical worst in him to the underworld; the best in him to his country. But, whatever he did, good or bad, was done in a big and reckless way.
For an infant he had an extraordinarily large head and great blue eyes which glared wonderingly at the little circle of relatives and neighbors who trooped into the modest East Side tenement to have their first look at the Lovetts’ newborn.
In striking contrast to his enormous, well-shaped head was the infant’s limbs and body. His legs were short and spindly, his body thin to the point of emaciation, his chest abnormally flat, while his tiny fingers were a dead white, almost as thin as matches and icy cold.
The Lovett tenement looked out upon ancient Catharine Street, overshadowed by a gaunt bookbindery. The district was known as the Deadly Fourth Precinct. It was infested by gangs and included New York’s Chinatown. A few blocks from the tenement, the Brooklyn Bridge, then one of the new wonders of the world, lowered into The Swamp, a damp and desolate hiding-place for river pirates and wharf rats. Yet the neighborhood had been the birthplace of illustrious Americans including Theodore Roosevelt, who, in 1894, the year Lovett was born, was fast rising to fame. The most popular young man in the section was a smiling chap who sported a brown derby. He was Al Smith. Good men and bad first saw the light of day in that section.
The district also sheltered three brothers of whom it did not boast. The Caponi boys — Ralph, sometimes called “Bottles,” and his younger brothers, Alphonse, and Jim, who later changed the final “i” on their name to “e” and made it one of the most sinister names in modern crime. They were members of the notorious Five Points Gang, led by their kinsman, Johnny Torrio. It was a vicious gang, allied to Black Hand killers, blackmailers, counterfeiters and early, types of racketeers who preyed upon Italian residents in the section.