The Bootlegger

“Mr. Van Dorn built a top-notch outfit that spans the continent. We have offices in every city linked by private telegraph and long-distance telephone. We have hundreds of crack detectives — valuable men who know their business — and thousands of Protective Services boys guarding banks and jewelry shops, escorting bullion shipments, and standing watch in the finest hotels. But the outfit isn’t worth a plugged nickel if clients can’t trust our good name. Van Dorns do not accept graft. You did. You sullied our good name. That is what ‘sullied’ means, and that is why you are fired.”

“Listen here, Mr. Bell, it’s human nature to share the wealth. The bootleggers are hauling it in.”

Ellis chimed in. “The bellhops get their cut delivering bottles to the guests and it’s only fair we get our cut for allowing the booze in the door.”

“Not every bellhop.”

Clayton and Ellis traded a cagy glance. They knew what had happened.

“The bootlegger you took bribes from tried to throw a boy off the roof last night. That boy’s employer, Hotel Gotham, pays us to protect their property, their guests, and their workers. You two let that boy down. Don’t let me see you near this hotel ever again.”

“Are you threatening us?”

“Spot on, mister. Get lost.”

Clayton and Ellis stepped closer, light on their feet for big men. The honest house dicks exchanged looks, wondering if they should come to the chief investigator’s defense. Bell stayed them with a quick gesture. A barely perceptible hunch of his shoulder telegraphed a roundhouse right to end the scrap before it started.

Clayton saw it coming. He stepped lithely to his right. The by-the-book evasive move had the unexpected effect of driving his chin straight into Bell’s left, which rose from his knee like a wrecking ball and tossed the house dick backwards.

Ellis was already piling on, swinging a quicksilver left too powerful to block. Bell slipped it over his shoulder and returned a right cross to the side of Ellis’s head, which slammed him across the alley into Clayton, who was clinging to the wall.

Containing his anger, Isaac Bell said, “If I ever see you on the streets of New York, I’ll throw you in the Hudson River.”

“Mr. Bell! Mr. Bell!”

A Van Dorn apprentice — a fresh-faced kid of eighteen — burst from the kitchen door. “Mr. Bell. Mr. Van Dorn was shot!”

“What?”

Isaac Bell turned in horror toward the piping voice, so stricken that he failed to register the boy’s eyes tracking sudden motion.

Ellis had launched a powerful right hook. Bell succeeded in rolling with part of it, but enough glancing drive landed to knock him off his feet. He sprawled on the greasy concrete. Clayton bounded at him like a placekicker, reared back for maximum power, and launched a boot at his head. Bell tried to block it with his hand, but the boot brushed it aside and came straight at his face. Bell caught Clayton’s ankle in his other hand, held tight with all his strength, and surged to his feet in a double explosion of fury and despair.

He hoisted Clayton’s leg high above his shoulder, dumped him backwards to the concrete, and whirled to meet Ellis’s next punch, a pile-driver left aimed straight at his jaw. Bell ducked under it. Ellis’s balled knuckles burned across his scalp. He ducked lower, seized Ellis, and used the heavier man’s momentum to drive him at Clayton, who was rising to his feet. The house dicks’ faces met nose to nose, mashing cartilage and cracking bone. Bell dropped Ellis in a moaning heap and gripped the apprentice’s shoulder with an iron hand.

“Where is he?”

“Bellevue.”

Bell took a deep breath and braced himself. “Hospital? Or morgue?”

“Hospital.”

“Let’s go! The rest of you, back to work. Tell Hancock he’s in charge.”

The boy had the wit to have a cab waiting.

Bell questioned him closely as it raced across Midtown. But all anyone knew so far was that sometime after Isaac Bell put Joseph Van Dorn aboard the Coast Guard cutter, the Boss had been wounded in a gun battle with rumru

“How did they get him ashore so quickly?”

What Joe would call the luck of the Irish had come to his rescue. An alert shore operator had relayed the Coast Guard radio report to the New York Police Department, and the Harbor Squad had dispatched a fast launch, which was already patrolling for rummies off Sandy Hook. It rendezvoused with the much slower cutter and raced Van Dorn up the East River to Bellevue Hospital. Bell would have preferred a hospital with more renowned surgeons than practiced at the overworked, understaffed municipal hospital, but the cops had chosen the one closest to the river.

“Soon as you drop me, take the cab straight back to the office. Tell Detective McKi

“Tell him I said to call in markers from every bootlegger in the city; one of them will hear who did it. Tell him to look for a shot-up rum boat. And tell him to look for wounded in the hospitals.”

The cab screeched to a stop on smoking tires.

“Off you go! On the jump!”

Bell stormed into the hospital lobby.

At the desk, they told him that Joseph Van Dorn was in the operating room.

“How bad is he?”

“Three of our top surgeons are attending him.”

Bell steadied himself on the desk. Three? What grievous wounds would require three? “Has anyone called his wife?”

“Mrs. Van Dorn is in a waiting room. Would you like to see her?”

“Of course.”

A grim-faced receptionist led Bell to a private waiting room.

Dorothy Van Dorn fell into his arms. “Oh, Isaac. It can’t be.”

She was considerably younger than Joe, a brilliantly educated raven-haired beauty, the daughter of the Washington Navy Yard’s legendary dreadnaught gun builder Arthur Langner, the widow of naval architect Farley Kent. Dorothy had been at Smith College with Joe’s first wife, who died of pneumonia. Bell had watched with joy when what had seemed a commonsensical coupling of widowed parents with young children blossomed into a marriage that brought unexpected passion to the prim Van Dorn and a longed-for steadiness to the tempestuous Dorothy.

“Isaac, what was a man his age doing in a gunfight?”

There were several answers, none of which would help. There was no point in assuring his terrified wife that Joe Van Dorn was the steadiest of men in a gunfight, ever cool, alert, and deadly. Nor did Bell see any purpose in relating that his only fear when he put him aboard a United States Coast Guard cutter armed with two machine guns and a ca

“I don’t know yet what happened.”

“Who shot him?”

“We’re already investigating. I’ll know soon.”

He hugged her close, then let go to shake hands with Joe’s oldest friend who had accompanied Dorothy to the hospital. Captain Dave Novicki, broad and sturdy as a mooring bollard, was a retired ocean mariner. He had taken Joe under his wing years ago when he was a junior officer on the immigrant boat that brought the teenage Van Dorn to America. Bell had met Novicki often at Thanksgiving di

“Thanks for coming,” he said to Bell.

Bell motioned Novicki aside to ask in a low voice, “How bad is he?”