The Bootlegger

your office, you can offer us a drink,” and handed him from Marat Zolner’s satchel a bottle of Haig & Haig.
•   •   •
ISAAC BELL paced the Van Dorn bull pen like a caged lion, flowing across the room in long strides, turning abruptly, flowing smoothly back, wheeling again. His gaze was active, and every detective in the room felt the chief investigator’s hard eyes aimed at him.
“It’s four days since Mr. Van Dorn was shot. Who did it?”
The squad of picked men Bell had drafted to track down the rumrunners who shot Van Dorn had nicknamed themselves the “Boss Boys.” They ran the gamut of Van Dorn operator types from deadly knife fighters who looked like accountants, to cerebral investigators who looked like dock wallopers, to every size and shape in between. Few appeared to have slept recently. There was a collective wince around the room when Isaac Bell repeated, “Four days. This is your city, gents. What is going on?”
The wince dissolved into shamefaced shrugs and sidelong glances in search of someone with something useful to say. Finally, the bravest of the Boss Boys, grizzled Harry Warren, who had headed the New York Gang Squad since the heyday of the Gophers, ventured into the lion’s den.
“Sorry, Isaac. West Side, East Side, Brooklyn, none of the gangs know who these guys are. I spoke with Peg Leg Lonergan and even he doesn’t know.”
Detectives stared at Harry in amazement and admiration, wondering how he had wangled a conversation with the closemouthed Lonergan and managed to return from Brooklyn alive.
Harry acknowledged their esteem with a modest nod. “If the leader of the White Hands doesn’t know about these guys, none of the Irish know these guys.”
“What about the Italians?” asked Bell.
Harry, who had changed his name, was known and respected in Little Italy. “Same thing with the Black Handers. Masseria, Cirillo, Yale, Altieri—none of them know.”
“What about Fats Vetere?”
“Him neither.”
“What makes you think they’re telling you the truth?”
“The bootlegging business is heating up. Gangsters and criminals are pushing out the amateurs. There’s so much money to be made. So if the White Hand or the Black Hand knew about these guys, they’d be wanting to get in touch either to buy from them or hijack them. But when I fished, they never fished back. The fact they didn’t try to pump me says the guys who shot the Boss are strangers to the gangs.”
Bell kept pacing. “What about the bootleggers?”
Several men cleared their throats and answered, briefly, one after another.
“The bootleggers I know don’t know, Isaac.”
“I went around the warehouses. They swear they don’t know.”
“Same thing on the piers, Isaac.”
“And the speakeasies. They’ve got no reason to lie to us, Isaac. It’s not like we’re arresting them.”
“It’s not like anyone’s arresting them.”
Bell paced harder, boot heels ringing. “What about the black boat?”
“Yeah, well, the Coasties say they saw this black boat. No one else did.”
“Except maybe Mr. Van Dorn. Is he talking yet, Isaac?”
“Not as much as the first day,” Bell answered, adding, quietly, “In fact, not at all, for the moment.” His surgeons feared an infection had settled into his chest. Dorothy was beside herself, and even Captain Novicki was losing faith.
“Watermen,” said Bell. He turned to the barrel-chested, broad-bellied Ed Tobin. A brutal beating by the Gopher gang when Tobin was a Van Dorn apprentice had maimed his face with a crushed cheekbone and a drooping eyelid. “Ed, have none of the watermen seen it?”
“None that will talk to me.”
“Have you asked Uncle Darbee?” Donald Darbee, Tobin’s great-uncle, was a Staten Island coal pirate with sidelines in salvaging cargo that fell off the docks and ferrying fugitives from New York to New Jersey.
“I asked him first off. Uncle Donny’s never seen the black boat, never heard of it. Though he did like the idea, and he asked me could I find out whether it’s got Liberty motors and, if so, how many, and are they installed in-line or side by side.”
Knowing laughter rumbled about the bull pen, and when even Bell cracked a faint smile, Tobin said, “Can I ask you, Mr. Bell, how are you making out with the Coast Guard?”
Bell’s smile vanished like a shuttered signal lamp. “I will continue trying to interview the cutter crew.” He had had no luck so far. The Coast Guard was keeping CG-9 at sea. When Bell offered to fly out in his plane to interview the crew, his offer was refused.
“McKinney!” Bell turned to the new chief of the New York field office. Darren McKinney was built short, wiry, and supple as chain mail. “You reported that the cops caught a lighter in the East River that had off-loaded the sinking rummy. What sort of booze were they carrying?”
“Dewar’s blended Scotch whisky. The real McCoy.”
“From Arethusa?” Arethusa was the famous McCoy’s schooner that cruised international waters off the coast of Fire Island.
“McCoy just sailed up a shipload from Nassau. But the guys the cops arrested in the East River swear that they got the stuff from somewhere other than the shot-up rummy—understandable, considering the circumstances.”
“Did they or didn’t they?” Bell demanded.
“Harbor Squad claims they followed them from the sinking rummy. These guys saying otherwise are understandably reluctant to be linked to a shooting that might have ki—”
A flicker of violence in Isaac Bell’s eyes silenced the detective mid-word.
“—That is to say, led to the wounding of the proprietor of the Van Dorn Detective Agency.”
Bell said, “I want that reluctance felt by every bootlegger in this city. Find out if they knew the guys on the shot-up rummy.”
“The rummy guys are in jail.”
“No they’re not,” said a gang unit detective hurrying into the bull pen. “Someone bailed ’em out.”
“Now’s our chance to find out. Run them down.”
“Sorry, Isaac, that won’t be possible.”
“Why not?”
“They just got fished out of the river . . . That’s why I’m late.”
The Van Dorns met the news of slaughtered witnesses with stunned silence. Criminals fearing the electric chair killed accomplices, not ordinary rumrunners and bootleggers.
Bell turned to Detective Tobin. “Ed, get on