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:
As he grew, young Lovett was untouched by the gang life all about him. He attended parochial school, and displayed an intense interest in religious studies.
His manner was soft and mild; his voice hardly ever arose above a drawling whisper. At home he couldn’t bear to see his mother swat flies and spiders. To save these pests from the annihilating crack of her swatter he caught them and liberated them through an open window.
This tender side of the boy was bound to bring him into harsh conflict with the rough life on the teeming East Side, and physically he was unprepared for the encounters. While attending high school he spent his early evenings on the doorstep of the Lonergan house near his own tenement. There was Anna Lonergan, oldest of the Lonergan brood of fourteen. A brother, Peg Leg, was younger than Bill. The girl was a self-willed, dark-eyed madcap of the Ghetto.
On a hot summer’s evening Bill Lovett and Anna were sitting side-by-side with Peg Leg looking on, when the three Capone brothers came swaggering along the sidewalk and up to Bill.
“Aw, you sissy,” sneered Al Capone. “Why don’t you leave the skirts alone and get out with the boys?”
“You’re not boys, you’re thieves,” Lovett retorted.
Capone pointed at Bill’s white hands. “You ought to put on an apron and take a job as a waitress. You couldn’t possibly do a man’s work with them hands.”
Bill sprang to his feet. He made a lunge at the taunting Capone, but Anna held him back. Capone laughed, flung a final taunt that Bill was hiding behind skirts, and went on with his brothers.
“Why didn’t you let me at him?” Bill demanded of the girl.
“You wouldn’t have a chance against those bullies,” she answered.
Bill’s blue eyes followed the trio as they marched off. “Some day,” he finally reflected, aloud, “I’ll maybe get a chance at them.”
Peg Leg broke in. “And I’ll be right wid youse,” he piped.
The girl looked at Bill, eyed his large head and his thin white hands. “Don’t ever be foolish and go after them, Bill,” she cautioned. “You’re not built to fight.”
Taunted by this advice, the jibes of Capone and the fact that boys along the street were calling him “White Hands,” Bill quit high school in a week and took a man’s job, tooling fine books in the bindery which adjoined his home. In record time he became an ex-pert, and some of the fine books he tooled adorn the private libraries of several fashionable New York families. It was the kind of delicate work which fitted his thin, weak hands.
Then, quite suddenly, the Lonergan family moved across Brooklyn Bridge and settled in Brooklyn. Finally the Capone brothers vanished from Catharine Street and went to Navy Street, Brooklyn, and joined up with a mob of Sicilian cut-throats known as the Death Tavern Gang. They had their headquarters in an eating place known as Death Tavern, which huddled against the great sheds of the coffee docks along the East River north of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Almost at the same moment that Bill heard that the Capones were procuring girls and selling them to the keeper of Death Tavern, who, in turn, sold them into lives of shame, he heard that Al Capone had accosted Anna Lonergan on the street and had invited her to the tavern.
Bill had never crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. When he received this news from Peg Leg he went across and straight to the Lonergan home. There he discovered that Capone had accosted the girl, but that she had taken after Capone with a hat-pin and had driven him away. She had no need of her young cavalier’s protection against Capone or any hoodlum.
However, she did complain that life was getting miserable in her home. Peg Leg had joined a gang which was known as the Roof Birds, and the police were always after him. Moreover, she told Bill, her mother and father were constantly bickering and life was miserable in the same house with them.
She suggested that Bill might make her happy by marrying her and taking her away. She minced no words about it. She was blunt. Though young in years, Anna Lonergan was as old as the hills.
“Why, I couldn’t support a cat on what I make!” Bill exclaimed. “And anyway I’m quitting my job. I’ve been too soft for my own good. A fellow’s got to fight his way in this world. I’m going out to find something hard to do that’ll toughen me up.”
Anna may or may not have loved Bill, but this much is certain, she did not get him for a meal ticket; nor, did he ever return to Catharine Street, the scene of his youth. He started back, but fate met him on the bridge.
Chapter II
“Grab Some Muscle”
Halting on the bridge where it ascends from the Brooklyn side of the East River, Lovett looked down onto the roofs of squalid buildings shadowed by the arched steelwork. On the narrow, damp streets below he saw massive, square-shouldered men lumbering to and from the docks. Over their broad shoulders were slung rolled jumpers. From the hip pockets of their overalls hung gleaming hooks, sharp as marlin spikes. He marveled at their size; at the muscles bulging on their bronzed arms and the coarse hair showing where their blue flannel work shirts were open on broad chests. Some of them staggered as if drunk. All of them seemed to be of one huge size, picked apparently for jobs which required great brawn and gleaming hooks.
They seemed to have a common meeting place within the doors of a green front shack tottering towards the nearest dock at the water end of the narrow street. He saw the number on its door — 25 — and, making his way from the bridge into the street, discovered at a lamp post that he was in Bridge Street. He was in a little dark world of hard, rough men who both mystified and fascinated him. It was a sunless world, for the wide bridge above kept it dark. One thing about the men and the place lured him. In such a world, and among such giants a lad could grow hard and tough. North of him lay the coffee docks and Navy Street, and Death Tavern where the taunting Capones hung out and where murder and traffic in girls were the joint occupations of those who made their headquarters in the inn of murder.
Bill was not aware, of course, that the section he had dropped into was notorious Shantytown, the domain of dock wallopers, great hulks who had fought bloody battles to keep Shantytown for themselves and to insure themselves and their male progeny the exclusive right to labor on the docks. They were not longshoremen or stevedores. They resented being called by either classification, for they could fight harder and do heavier work than longshoremen or stevedores. And the tottering, squalid green front shack with 25 over its door was the Loaders’ Club, their headquarters, and the throne room of their despotic boss.
It was their official hangout and drinking place, and in the years of bloody fighting more than one dock walloper had been shot or clubbed to death in the squalid, dim-lit premises. And many a walloper, in the fury of drunkenness, had been done to death in brawls, clawed atrociously by the sharp, gleaming hooks which were both the badge of their hard calling and their weapons of offense and defense.
For the privilege of hanging about the club and getting work on the docks they gave a large share of their hard-earned, daily pay to a barrel-shaped, grunting czar, Dinny Meehan, who seldom moved from his high-backed chair in the club. As worn men came in from the heavy work on the docks they dropped their tribute into the fat palm of Dinny Meehan and then spent the remainder of their earnings over the long plank where Meehan’s barkeep served them beer and liquor and further enriched the greedy Meehan’s purse.