It was well past midnight when he was showing her the fine points in the difference between real currency and the kind that he made. He bragged, “Not even that little dago Sarotto could tell the difference. It was easy fooling that mutt. Why, I stuffed a whole wad down his throat and they was phoney — phoney as hell!”
To Mike Morgan it seemed that he had just got into bed when his telephone jangled. Mike hurled several hot suggestions at it and rolled over with his pillow wrapped around his ears. But the instrument rang loud and stubbornly. Finally the Irishman slid his feet into bedroom slippers and knuckled the sleep out of his eyes. Reaching for the telephone he bawled:
“Who is it?” When the voice at the other end identified itself, Mike cooled down. “Oh, it’s you, Joe. Get the rye all right? Fine; but why the hell get me outa bed at this hour to tell me? — WHAT? — Them barrels was watered! — The old can trick, eh? — Huh? You’re gonna stop payment on that check? — It’s my tough luck, is it? — You dirty low-down—”
A click on the wire told Mike that his brother-in-law had hung up. The racketeer sat fuming and spluttering for the best part of a half hour. “Hell!” he growled. “I expected to make a neat little haul on this job — because that check I gave to Big Sam was a rubber. Now I’m sunk!” He leaped to his feet with clenched fists. “And it’s that damn little dago’s fault. I’ll fix him! He double-crossed me. Hell, you can’t trust nobody any more.”
The new Police Commissioner selected a fragrant Havana from his humidor and glanced at the dainty clock on his glass-topped desk. It registered fifteen minutes past ten. He looked out of his window at the serene fall morning.
“There’s only one way to handle gangsters and racketeers,” he told himself, “and I know—”
At that moment the grizzled old detective captain burst into the private office with a handful of precinct reports. He tossed them under the commissioner’s nose. “I know what’s on ’em,” he snapped, “so I’ll tell you and save time.”
The dollar cigar dropped from the commissioner’s gaping mouth. That flinty gleam in the captain’s eyes told him that something — everything was wrong.
With a grim smile, the detective chief started off. “Sarotto’s warehouse has just been bombed. Two of the wop’s death cars are smashed up in front of Big Sam Stevens’ printing plant. A dozen pineapples were tossed at the plant and it looked like the Frisco ’quake had parked there all night. Five of the Swede’s best rods are stiff in the street in front of Mike Morgan’s hangout which looks like all the bullets in the world had struck it. And a couple of Morgan’s high-speed armored cars are decorating lamp-posts in the wop district.”
The commissioner slumped in his chair and groaned.
“Yep,” said the captain as he moved toward the door, “the only way to handle them mutts is to kill ’em off. And I’m taking out a dozen riot squads right now to do just that little thing.” With his hand on the door knob, the veteran detective flung over his shoulder, “When I get back we’re going out and buy me that new hat!”
Kid Dropper Plays It Alone
By Clement Wood
Racketeer Stories, February 1930
The job seemed as sure as The Dropper was safe from bullets that he could play it alone — but he forgot one thing — he was butter in the hand of a skirt!
It was safe to visit the place in the daytime, that he knew. But, safe or not. Kid Dropper would have gone ahead.
Nothing had ever stopped him yet: nothing ever would, the whole Suffolk Street gang knew. If he was safe at black midnight in the thick of East Side gunmen and cops, what should he fear when bright noon sparkled over these April Westchester woodlands?
The car rattled across the bridge over the tracks just above Garrison, and took the uphill road. For a mile, the way was flanked by the evergreened borders of two great estates. Then they turned up a steeper, wilder road to the right, and were at once in the midst of the untouched forest.
The car groaned in zig-zag fashion up the narrow rocky road, high above a noisy torrent in the hill pocket, just below them; so they made for the top.
Here the Dropper had the car parked in an unkempt grassy opening. “Come on, Abe,” he called to the chauffeur. The two of them set out on foot for their goal — the lofty outside of the house called Aiken’s Folly.
You must have seen the place, if you ever rode down the Hudson past Garrison, or stopped at West Point or Highland Falls to stare across the swirling river. Aiken’s Folly is the tall shell of a house, four stories high, smack on the top of a great cliff. It has always been a shell. Some say that a Wall Street plunger gave his wife exactly a million to build it; and, when this sum was sunk in the concrete base and the cavernous structural steel framework, refused her another cent to complete it.
Native guides point to the deep concrete pits in front, and tell of interrupted German plans to place guns here, during the World War, that would have blown West Point to bits. All these may be only myths: but there the high hollow shell of a house stands, in the eyes of the curious tourist world good for nothing, and used for nothing.
Kid Dropper knew otherwise. He had stumbled by accident upon the secret; he was quick to make use of it. That was why he was closing quietly in on the place, an early April morning, at an hour when he knew it should be empty. But he took no foolhardy risks; empty or not, all the way his hand was on his gun.
Eyes peering intently, he reached hemlock. Nothing stirring yet...
“Keep yer iron handy,” he cautioned Abe Beck, the close-mouthed chauffeur.
Like two velvet-footed shadows, the two men sped across the open space to the shelter of the building. Like human flies, the Dropper in the lead, they scuttled noiselessly along the concrete wall, to the first opening.
The Kid swung himself recklessly up to the floor level, disdaining the exposed plank trodden by most of the few curious visitors. Beck was at his side at once. The two men, dwarfed into insignificance by the immensity of the high-ceiIinged shell on whose rim they stood, stared suspiciously into the interior.
“It’s clear,” said the Dropper casually. “Come on.”
The flooring was of iron, and clanged hollowly at their softest step.
“Speed it,” the Kid ordered sharply, and hurried ahead across great vaultlike rooms, till he came to the only enclosed space in the building. He knelt here on the floor, pointing to a huge padlocked trap-door to the basement.
“That’s where they keep the stuff, when any’s here,” he muttered cryptically. “I dunno — other way’s sure, anyhow. Yeah, it’s gotter be the other way. Come on — hurry; if them guys turned up—”
Back to the main hall he hurried, leaving Abe Beck to wonder who the “other guys” might be. But he said not a word: in good time he would know. When they reached this place, the interior of the house rose, without intervening doors, four stories high.
Up the center zig-zagged an iron stairway; for this the leader made. They went clear to the top landing, and so out upon the highest balcony leaning on the sky.
The view of river and hill from here was magnificent. But not to the Dropper: his eyes measured only the hill road they had come, and the far ribbon of brown below that was the Post Road back to New York. Suddenly his eyes grew tense: there was a city taxi coming, where no city taxi should be.
“Speed it,” he hissed suddenly, taking the way down in great dying leaps, that set the echoes leaping and shrieking metallically all around them. Disdaining cover this time, they made for the red and black taxi that had brought them, and piled in. “Give her everything,” he ordered fiercely.