VI
A gray frame house in Fillmore Street was our destination. A lot of people stood in the street looking at the house. A police-wagon stood in front of it, and police uniforms were indoors and out.
A red-mustached corporal saluted Duff and led us into the house, explaining as we went, “ ’Twas the neighbors give us the rumble, complaining of the fighting, and when we got here, faith, there weren’t no fight left in nobody.”
All the house held was fourteen dead men.
Eleven of them had been poisoned—overdoses of knockout drops in their booze, the doctors said. The other three had been shot, at intervals along the hall. From the looks of the remains, they had drunk a toast—a loaded one—and those who hadn’t drunk, whether because of temperance or suspicious natures, had been gunned as they tried to get away.
The identity of the bodies gave us an idea of what their toast had been. They were all thieves—they had drunk their poison to the day’s looting.
We didn’t know all the dead men then, but all of us knew some of them, and the records told us who the others were later. The completed list read like Who’s Who in Crookdom.
There was the Dis-and-Dat Kid, who had crushed out of Leavenworth only two months before; Sheeny Holmes; Snohomish Whitey, supposed to have died a hero in France in 1919; L. A. Slim, from Denver, sockless and underwearless as usual, with a thousand-dollar bill sewed in each shoulder of his coat; Spider Girrucci wearing a steel-mesh vest under his shirt and a scar from crown to chin where his brother had carved him years ago; Old Pete Best, once a congressman; Nigger Vojan, who once won $175,000 in a Chicago crap-game—“Abacadbra” tattooed on him in three places; Alphabet Shorty McCoy; Tom Brooks, Alphabet Shorty’s brother-in-law, who invented the Richmond razzle-dazzle, and bought three hotels with the profits; Red Cudahy, who stuck up a Union Pacific train in 1924; Denny Burke; Bull McGonickle, still pale from fifteen years in Joliet; Toby the Lugs, Bull’s running-mate, who used to brag about picking President Wilson’s pocket in a Washington vaudeville theater; and Paddy the Mex.
Duff looked them over and whistled.
“A few more tricks like this,” he said, “and we’ll all be out of jobs. There won’t be any grifters left to protect the taxpayers from.”
“I’m glad you like it,” I told him. “Me—I’d hate like hell to be a San Francisco copper the next few days.”
“Why especially?”
“Look at this—one grand piece of double-crossing. This village of ours is full of mean lads who are waiting right now for these stiffs to bring ’em their cut of the stickup. What do you think’s going to happen when the word gets out that there’s not going to be any gravy for the mob? There are going to be a hundred and more stranded thugs busy raising getaway dough. There’ll be three burglaries to a block and a stickup to every corner until the carfare’s raised. God bless you, my son, you’re going to sweat for your wages!”
Duff shrugged his thick shoulders and stepped over bodies to get to the telephone. When he was through I called the agency.
“Jack Counihan called a couple of minutes ago,” Fiske told me, and gave me an Army Street address. “He says he put his man in there, with company.”
I phoned for a taxi, and then told Duff, “I’m going to run out for a while. I’ll give you a ring here if there’s anything to the angle, or if there isn’t. You’ll wait?”
“If you’re not too long.”
I got rid of my taxicab two blocks from the address Fiske had given me, and walked down Army Street to find Jack Counihan planted on a dark corner.
“I got a bad break,” was what he welcomed me with. “While I was phoning from the lunchroom up the street some of my people ran out on me.”
“Yeah? What’s the dope?”
“Well, after that apey chap left the Green Street house he trolleyed to a house in Fillmore Street, and—”
“What number?”
The number Jack gave was that of the death-house I had just left.
“In the next ten or fifteen minutes just about that many other chaps went into the same house. Most of them came afoot, singly or in pairs. Then two cars came up together, with nine men in them—I counted them. They went into the house, leaving their machines in front. A taxi came past a little later, and I stopped it, in case my chap should motor away.
“Nothing happened for at least half an hour after the nine chaps went in. Then everybody in the house seemed to become demonstrative—there was a quantity of yelling and shooting. It lasted long enough to awaken the whole neighborhood. When it stopped, ten men—I counted them—ran out of the house, got into the two cars, and drove away. My man was one of them.
“My faithful taxi and I cried Yoicks after them, and they brought us here, going into that house down the street in front of which one of their motors still stands. After half an hour or so I thought I’d better report, so, leaving my taxi around the corner—where it’s still running up expenses—I went up to yon all-night caravansary and phoned Fiske. And when I came back, one of the cars was gone—and I, woe is me!—don’t know who went with it. Am I rotten?”
“Sure! You should have taken their cars along to the phone with you. Watch the one that’s left while I collect a strong-arm squad.”
I went up to the lunchroom and phoned Duff, telling him where I was, and:
“If you bring your gang along maybe there’ll be profit in it. A couple of carloads of folks who were in Fillmore Street and didn’t stay there came here, and part of ’em may still be here, if you make it sudden.”
Duff brought his four detectives and a dozen uniformed men with him. We hit the house front and back. No time was wasted ringing the bell. We simply tore down the doors and went in. Everything inside was black until flashlights lit it up. There was no resistance. Ordinarily the six men we found in there would have damned near ruined us in spite of our outnumbering them. But they were too dead for that.
We looked at one another sort of open-mouthed.
“This is getting monotonous,” Duff complained, biting off a hunk of tobacco. “Everybody’s work is pretty much the same thing over and over, but I’m tired of walking into roomfuls of butchered crooks.”
The catalog here had fewer names than the other, but they were bigger names. The Shivering Kid was here—nobody would collect all the reward money piled up on him now; Darby M’Laughlin, his horn-rimmed glasses crooked on his nose, ten thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds on fingers and tie; Happy Jim Hacker; Donkey Marr, the last of the bowlegged Marrs, killers all, father and five sons; Toots Salda, the strongest man in crookdom, who had once picked up and run away with two Savannah coppers to whom he was handcuffed; and Rumdum Smith, who killed Lefty Read in Chi in 1916—a rosary wrapped around his left wrist.
No gentlemanly poisoning here—these boys had been mowed down with a .30‒30 rifle fitted with a clumsy but effective homemade silencer. The rifle lay on the kitchen table. A door connected the kitchen with the dining-room. Directly opposite that door, double doors—wide open—opened into the room in which the dead thieves lay. They were all close to the front wall, lying as if they had been lined up against the wall to be knocked off.
The gray-papered wall was spattered with blood, punctured with holes where a couple of bullets had gone all the way through. Jack Counihan’s young eyes picked out a stain on the paper that wasn’t accidental. It was close to the floor, beside the Shivering Kid, and the Kid’s right hand was stained with blood. He had written on the wall before he died—with fingers dipped in his own and Toots Salda’s blood. The letters in the words showed breaks and gaps where his fingers had run dry, and the letters were crooked and straggly, because he must have written them in the dark.
By filling in the gaps, allowing for the kinks, and guessing where there weren’t any indications to guide us, we got two words: “Big Flora.”
“They don’t mean anything to me,” Duff said, “but it’s a name and most of the names we have belong to dead men now, so it’s time we were adding to our list.”
“What do you make of it?” asked bullet-headed O’Gar, detective-sergeant in the Homicide Detail, looking at the bodies. “Their pals got the drop on them, lined them against the wall, and the sharpshooter in the kitchen shot ’em down—bing-bing-bing-bing-bing-bing?”
“It reads that way,” the rest of us agreed.
“Ten of ’em came here from Fillmore Street,” I said. “Six stayed here. Four went to another house—where part of ’em are now cutting down the other part. All that’s necessary is to trail the corpses from house to house until there’s only one man left—and he’s bound to play it through by croaking himself, leaving the loot to be recovered in the original packages. I hope you folks don’t have to stay up all night to find the remains of that last thug. Come on, Jack, let’s go home for some sleep.”