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:
Martin’s big fist went up in the darkness and came down like a sledge on Bill’s shoulder. The blow sent Bill to his knees on the tin roof. He didn’t come up at once. But, what he lacked in brawn he possessed in gray matter. He dived between Martin’s knees, and fastening both arms about the giant’s legs, he arose and lifted Martin off his feet. The big body fell over Lovett’s back like a bag of flour. In the fall Martin’s head struck the roof, slightly dazing him. The spindly-legged Bill hauled him across the roof. When he reached the coping around the edge of the roof Martin had a gorilla-like grip on the calves of his puny legs. Lovett fell across the coping, Martin still on his back.
The weight of the big load pressed Bill’s stomach against the stone ledge and squeezed the breath out of him. The two figures were locked together, both half over the coping, dangling four stories above the street.
The four other roof gypsies looked on, open-mouthed, amazed. At any instant both youths might go hurtling down into the street. Bill was choking under the pressure of Martin’s big body, but he held grimly on and wriggled forward a foot or two. Both bodies were slipping. Finally Martin let go Bill’s shanks and caught hold of the coping but, as he did so, Lovett raised himself on the ledge and pried his adversary’s hands loose.
“Do you say quits?” Lovett asked.
“You bloody fool,” cried Martin, “we’ll both go down.”
“That’ll be all right with me,” said Bill. “Quick. Say what it is, or, down we go.”
“Lemme up and I’ll—”
“Say quit or—” The two bodies slipped further over the coping.
“Quit!” bawled Martin. Lovett let go of his legs and caught his white hands on the cross piece of a window frame. Martin clambered back onto the roof. Presently Bill raised himself to a sitting position on the coping and caught his breath. He watched Martin slouch away in the darkness.
Still perched on the coping Lovett took steps to make absolute his dominion over the Roof Birds. He had vanquished the one man who openly challenged him. He had not done it with brawn, but by strategy. Perhaps it was this cunning which cowed the four men into subjection. Lovett took pains to warn Fiddler Byrnes that if he ever raised his voice or hand to question his leadership he would be battered out of the gang. Then, to clinch his rule, he ordered all four to raise their hands and vow to take orders only from him; to follow him wherever he went, and if anything should happen to him, to carry on as though he were still around and in command. Byrnes was the only one who faltered, but when Peg Leg and Raycroft nudged him, up went his hand.
This sudden, speedy ascension to power instantly transformed Bill Lovett. His mild manner and soft speech were gone. The desperate encounter with Martin had hardened him. The taunts flung at him by the Capones, the rough treatment accorded him by Dinny Meehan had embittered him. As he sat nibbling his browned pork chops under the star-lit sky he was sullenly silent. Finally he gave voice to the thoughts that were churning in the brain within his enormous head.
“There ain’t nothing to this life except when fellows stick together,” he announced. “They say a good guy goes to heaven with wings on his shoulders, but until I see them going up through the sky with my own eyes I’ll figure it’s a lot of bunk. A guy’s heaven or hell is what he makes it right here.”
He had not only put Catharine Street out of his life but he had turned his back on his religion. In a single night he had demonstrated that he could best men of superior fighting powers by outwitting them. In his first attempt to “grab himself some muscle” he had succeeded without brawn, and the triumph had fired him with a lust to rule men by the might of a new kind, of “muscle.” He had the four Roof Birds under his thumb though any one of them could have toppled him with a slap.
He might go far with this kind of muscle. He might extend his power over many men, and thus extend his dominion, and, incidentally, pay his respects to Al Capone and Dinny Meehan, for whom he had a hate equal in its ferocity to his lust for power.
He had been taunted so often about his white hands that he decided to turn this sign of weakness into a symbol of power, too.
“No more of this Roof Birds stuff,” he announced. “And no more of this stealing pork chops and little stuff like that. From now on we’re the White Hands. We’ll go after big stuff. We’ll make everybody sit up and take notice, so, when they hear the White Hands are coming, they’ll shake in their shoes.”
Peg Leg passed around a demijohn of whiskey. All drank to the White Hands. It was the first liquor to pass Bill Lovett’s lips, but he downed his drink as if he was an old timer at swigging the strong stuff. Peg Leg wondered aloud if Bill had a gun and knew how to use it. Peg Leg and his pals had long carried gats.
“Naw,” Bill replied. “I don’t want to pack a gun. I hate to think of a bullet cutting into a guy. You fellows can pack guns, but I won’t. I don’t need one, but that don’t mean I couldn’t use one if I had to. I’ll show you.”
Peg Leg handed him a .45. Bill raised it and shot a clothes-pin from a wire wash line, and handed the gun back to Lonergan. He had never shot a gun before.
“I guess I was made to do anything in a pinch,” he explained.
His four vassals eyed him in amazement. He was cocksure of himself and he could do anything he said he could. Doubtless this quality drew at least three of the men closer to him. Byrnes was the only one to show a lack of interest in the self-appointed leader.
Lovett lost no time in looking up a job for them to do. He had a score to settle with the Capones and the next night he led his men in a flying attack on the Capone dive in Coney Island. They swept into the resort in wedgelike formation, tipped over tables, wrecked the bar, drove out patrons, barkeeps and bouncers, and turned the place upside down. The Capones were not in evidence. When the damage had been done to their joint Bill took a piece of soap from under the bar and with it printed upon the back bar mirror, in the fine lettering he had often used on books in the old Catharine Street bindery, this message for the Capones:
WRECKED BY ORDER OF WHITE HANDS
Al Capone, viewing next day the skillfully printed defi, and looking over the wreckage, was unaware that it was the handiwork of the puny Catharine Street boy he had insulted and taunted on the Lonergan steps. In Coney Island shady resort keepers wondered fearfully about the White Hands without knowing who they were or from what motive they had attacked the Capones.
The worried keepers suspected that the White Hands were an off-shoot of the secret, white-capped raiders who called themselves Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. They were frightened.
Lovett, meanwhile, had high hopes that Dinny Meehan had caught an earful of the damage done to the Capone dive in Coney Island.
Chapter IV
The Dock Raiders
Dinny Meehan’s control of the docks of Shantytown was not wholly based on his ability to supply labor to load and unload ships. For years before his rule there had been systematic looting of both docks and ships. Meehan had promised ship owners and dock operators that the pillage would end with his rule if the owners would permit him to run the dock laborers and collect his tribute from them. He put an end to pillage and the ship and dock masters gave him the run of the docks.
Suddenly one morning, a few weeks after the attack upon the Capone dive, Meehan was amazed by the news that one of the largest docks under his control had been robbed of nearly every article on it that could be carried away and the watchman either clubbed into insensibility or thrown into the river. The thieves had tacked a message, expertly lettered, on the dock gate. It read: