The Bootlegger

“Hooks, what is that you dropped?”

Hooks bent his head and looked down at his feet. “What?”

Yuri Antipov pressed his revolver to the nape of the boxer’s neck and pulled the trigger. Hooks collapsed in a heap.

Zolner asked, “What did you do that for?”

“You were going to kill him, were you not?”

“You should have waited. He could have helped us carry the guns.”

12

“I blame the Irish.”

“For which, the guns or the booze?”

“Both. The booze was a Si

“Some smoke screen. Seventy-five thousand bucks of twenty-year-old Canadian Club. Si

So went the conversation among detectives hurrying in and out of the Van Dorn bull pen while Isaac Bell, who had set up a desk prominently in the middle of the room to keep everyone on his toes, combed through empty report after empty report on the Van Dorn shooting.

It was the morning after a daring and brilliantly executed late-night raid on the Appraisers’ Stores. The newspapers, which had printed less than half the story the private detectives had pieced together, were having a ball castigating Prohibition, Prohibition officials, Dry agents, U.S. Customs, the Treasury Department, and the New York City police.

“Just wait,” said Darren McKi

Harry Warren burst in at a dead run. “Isaac! Wait ’til you hear the latest. I was just talking to a customs agent, and he—”

“If it doesn’t have to do with Joe Van Dorn, I don’t want to hear it—” But even as he spoke, Bell thought better of it and changed his mind. Any clues to the raid that were snagged in the Van Dorn net could stand them in good stead with the federal government. “Hold on, I take that back. What’s up?”

Harry leaned in close and spoke in a low voice. “Something’s fishy. They found a dead guy in the machine-gun room. A kid named Newdell. Ricky ‘Hooks’ Newdell. Small-potatoes thug dreaming of prizefights.”

“What’s fishy?”

“He hung out in a lunchroom on 18th. Customs guy didn’t know it, but that’s a Gopher joint. Hooks was a Gopher.”

“You’re kidding. What was a Gopher doing in that operation?”

“My question, too. The Gophers have been washed-up since before the war. The bunch that moved to Chelsea couldn’t pour water out of a hat with directions stamped on the crown.”

“Could they have been hired by Si

“Si

“How did he die?”

“Shot.”

“First I’ve heard there was gunplay.”

“No, no, no, not by customs agents. No, it sounds like one of his pals nailed him.”

Isaac Bell said, “That makes no sense. By all accounts we’ve heard, it was a smooth operation. Guys on that smooth an operation don’t usually kill each other on the job.”

“I agree, but a Gopher where a Gopher shouldn’t be is dead. Something’s up.”

Bell and Harry Warren were interrupted by Ed Tobin. The head of the Boss Boys squad looked like he’d slept under a pier. His suit was rumpled, his hat battered, his complexion sallow. But his eyes glowed with triumph.

“Found a friend of your Joh

Isaac Bell surged to his feet. “Where?”

“Oysterman I was buying drinks for — Staten Island fellow named Tom Kemp — said a bootlegger he knew disappeared just when he was hoping the guy was going to hire his boat to taxi booze. The bootlegger looked like your description of Joh

“Was his name Joh

“We didn’t get that far. Kemp’s pal came into the blind pig and recognized my mug. Soon as he spilled I was a detective, Kemp clammed up.”

“I’ll get it out of him,” said Bell.

“He won’t talk to a detective. He thinks we’re the same as cops. Can’t blame him, if he’s hoping to make a living ru

“Tell the garage to send over a Stutz Bearcat.”

The tall detective strode to the costume room, stripped off his clothes, and put on a one-hundred-thirty-dollar pin-striped navy suit that he had waiting in a closet. Its coat had a pinched waist and was cut to accentuate his broad shoulders. He knotted a silk necktie, folded a matching handkerchief and inserted it in the breast pocket, and transferred the contents of his pockets. From a rack of hats, he chose one carefully, a dark Borsalino, then studied his reflection in a full-length mirror. He laced spats over his boots and looked again.

Something else was missing.

He unbuttoned his coat and rearranged his belongings. He closed it, pulled the Borsalino low over his eyes, and returned to the bull pen. “Let’s go.”

Tobin said, “That’s why you want a Stutz. It’ll make you look like a high-class bootlegger.”

“That, and the fact that it has a three-hundred-sixty-cubic-inch engine that puts out eighty horsepower,” said Bell. “The image ought to convince your man I intend to hire his boat.”

“I like the gun bulge.”

“Don’t tell my tailor.”

Bell opened his coat to show Tobin the notebook he had shoved behind his shoulder holster, deliberately puckering the cloth that his tailor had so skillfully crafted to conceal the Browning.

They drove the Stutz to the Battery and took it across to Staten Island on the ferry. From the St. George landing, they drove past the mansions and resort hotels of Richmond Terrace and along the Kill Van Kull, a narrow, winding strait of water that separated Staten Island from New Jersey and led to New York Harbor in either direction. Tobin got out of the car at Bridge Creek and pointed Bell in the direction of Tom Kemp’s oyster boat.

Bell drove within sight of the boat and parked the car on the side of the road where Kemp would see it when he looked up from the motor he was working on. Then he swaggered down the gangway onto a rickety floating dock. Kemp’s vessel was typical of the workboats that New York oystermen had been converting from sail to motor power since long before the war. It was broad and flat and thirty feet long. The motor sat in a hole in the deck, and Bell saw immediately that it was anything but typical. He recognized an eight-hundred-twenty-five-cubic-inch, six-cylinder Pierce-Arrow that Tom must have pulled out of a wrecked touring car. A maze of tubing indicated that he had added on an oversize oil pump to keep it lubricated when the boat angled its bow up at speed.

“How fast does this thing go?” he asked the figure crouched over it with tools scattered beside him.

“Who wants to know?” Kemp said without bothering to look up.

Bell stepped onto the boat without being invited — a sin, Ed Tobin had told him, that a waterman would equate with burning an American flag or insulting his mother. Kemp jumped to his feet. He was a big man with arms and shoulders that bulged from lifting oyster tongs since boyhood. Bell moved closer, two feet from the man, close enough for him to smell his cologne and have to crane his neck to meet his cold gaze.

“I want to know. How fast does your boat go?”

Tom Kemp took note of Bell’s expression. His eyes fixed on the bulge under his coat. “Thirty knots.”

“What’s that in miles per hour?”

“Jeez, mister, I don’t know. Thirty-five?”

“How fast when it’s loaded?”

“Depends with what.”

“Booze.”

“Mister, booze is—”

“Profitable,” said Bell, and before Tom could say anything else, “I hear two different stories about you, Mr. Kemp. One says you’re available to run rum. The other says you’ve already been hired. Which is it? Are you available or not?”