The car slid and slithered down the rocky hill road. At the bottom, the leader ordered Beck to slow up, to turn right instead of left, to drive across the shallow ditch at the right of the road, and to hide the car behind glossy-leaved rhododendron and mountain laurel clustered conveniently at the corner.
Not a moment too soon — the city taxi groaned up the easier hill, and turned up the way they had gone, hardly three minutes afterwards. Abe Beck’s eyes widened in amazement as he saw who was in the car. He could not keep silent this time: “It’s Little Goldie,” he marvelled, “an’ ‘Get ’Em’ Engel — most of Allen Street, Kid!”
“Yeah. An’ Suffolk Street don’t love any of ’em too much.”
Beck chuckled grimly. The rivalry between the two gangs had cost more than a dozen lives in the last six months.
“What’s the game, Kid?”
The Dropper explained to Beck as much as it was good for him to know. “It’s rum-runnin’, Abe. Them wise guys horned in on the swell boot-leggin’ game. The border runners bring the stuff this far down from Canada, an’ hide it under that old tin loft. Then Little Goldie’s gang picks it up, in milk trucks — whaddya know about that! Big money, boy. So tomorrer night — that’s when they run it in, Choosdays an’ Fridays — that’s when we come in.”
“The gang?”
“I’m playin’ this all alone — me an’ you, Abe. I got my own little debt to pay. It’s all worked out. To make it look nice, you see, for the cops, they ain’t even got a guard ridin’ in — only that Mike Spadoni chauffin’ the ‘Meadow Dairy’ truck. Then I hi-jack ’em, see? It’s stewed rhubarb, this job is.”
“Tomorrer night, eh?”
“We’ll beat it out of Noo Yawk about midnight, an’ get to Peekskill before three. The truck leaves up here just at three. Come on, we can get started now.”
Abe backed the car savagely back to the road. “That lob ain’t got a chanct in the worl’!”
Moe Korn, known all over lower Manhattan as Kid Dropper, was, in the eyes of the police department, the toughest gunman on the East Side. Not a gang murder for four years, the knowing ones said, but he had had his hand in it some way. Yet, before any living witnesses arrived, like a shadow he had dissolved away.
Barring one jail sentence for being seen throwing away a gun, his record was clear; even that case, he claimed, had been framed up against him. Nobody knew a thing against his record: just as nobody was fooled as to what he really was. In the eyes of reformers, he was an utterly vicious killer, with not a good word to be said for him.
In the eyes of the Suffolk Street gang, that he ruled with a grip of steel, he was the ideal man, with only one fault. That fault was women. If it wasn’t Bessie Laut, it was Mamie Kaplan; if it wasn’t Mamie, it was Yetta Wolff; if it wasn’t Yetta, it was that uptown blonde of Saul Cohen’s, or some other soft-eyed skirt.
Heretofore, the Dropper had changed his girls as easily as he changed his necktie or his name. But Yetta Wolff was different.
There was something hard about her eyes much of the time — something hard and fine. She saw the Kid’s easy smile answer the open invitation on the admiring face of Saul Cohen’s uptown girl, and her eyes grew hard and beautiful.
“Look yere, Kid,” she crooned to him, voice still gentle, “lay off that uptown cheese. She’s nothin’ to you — an’ you’ve got me — ain’t it honey?”
“You got a nerve,” he said. “You ain’t got no mortgage on me.”
Her eyes flashed hard and dangerous fire. “I’m straight with you, Kid; you play straight with me.”
“Aw, I wouldn’t lift my little finger to save that skirt’s life, if she was drownin’ in apple sauce,” he assured her easily.
“Don’t let me catch you playin’ around with her, just the same.”
“Whaddya think I am, anyhow? Aw, be reasonable, baby. My mind ain’t on no uptown jizzies. I got a big job on, Yetta — real pile for me an’ you, an’ no dividin’!”
“Come on, tell me!”
“Aw, I couldn’t yet—”
But no fly in the web of a spider was more hopeless than Kid Dropper in the hands of a woman. Yetta kept at it, and out it all came — the whole plan to get hold of the priceless week’s truck-load of contraband rum from the Allen Street gang.
“You’ll be spendin’ every cent of that wad, baby. Think I’d bother about another dame?”
“Don’t let me catch you doin’ it, that’s all.”
She had to be content with this; but she kept her eyes open. This had been several days before; and she knew the Kid, and his weakness for ladies. It wasn’t hard to pump Meyer Korn, the Dropper’s brother who was studying law in his vacations from gunplay. Meyer never guessed what she was driving at: his mind was whirling with torts and arsons and law quizzes. But he leaked enough to send her flying, the very night that the Kid returned from his jaunt into Westchester, over to the dance at the Labor Temple.
She didn’t see him at first; she almost hoped Meyer had been wrong. No, there he was, he and that uptown blonde, clinched as tight as a large family in the subway at rush hour, while the band jazzed out some seductive Blues. This was enough.
Yetta started to slip away, eyes blinded by a sudden sting. The Kid saw her just at this moment, and waved a worried hand at her.
When he came across to see her, as the dance ended, she was gone.
He threw it off lightly; a synthetic pearl choker, a little soft talk, would make it right. He forgot entirely that Sollie Fein, who was right in the heart of the Allen Street gang, was Yetta’s cousin. And, before her anger had time to cool, she had found Sollie, and had poured out the story of her abandonment in his receptive ears.
Sollie kept on his pinochle face. “Yeah, he’s a bad egg, the Dropper is. Ain’t much of a real man—”
“Little you know!”
“Ahhh! he always skips when his gang’s in trouble — wouldn’t dare do a thing by himself—”
Her breast rose furiously. “Why, right now, Sollie, he’s goin’ to stick up a bootleg truck tomorrer night, an’ hi-jack the whole load, all by himself!”
A sudden suspicion formed in the gangster’s agile mind. “He wouldn’t dare fool around our truck—”
“Oh, wouldn’t he!” She had already said more than she intended; she ended by saying more still.
“He’s lyin’ to you, Yetta,” Fein taunted. “He’ll be playin’ around with that blondie again.”
Out it all came now; the very thought of that other woman drove all caution out of her mind.
Sollie’s face threw off its mask. “I’ll fix him!” with gritting teeth.
“Don’t hurt the boy,” suddenly contrite. “He’s my man, if he’d only play straight—”
“We’ll just scare him off,” he lied easily.
Within half an hour, the willing ear of Little Goldie itself had the whole thing. The brains of the Allen Street mob were gotten together. Kid Dropper — and alone! This was the chance they had always waited for.
They argued long and hard over the plans, and at last worked out what ought to settle the Dropper’s hash completely.
At three a.m. the next morning the milk truck started, loaded to its roof, except down the center, from Aiken’s Folly. But it was not Mike Spadoni who drove down alone. Hunched beside him on the driver’s seat sat Max Engel, “Get ’Em” Engel, the crack shot of the whole gang; inside the truck crouched Sollie Fein and Morris, his brother; and, starting out three minutes behind, Little Goldie himself followed with a carload of his mate’s, all with guns out. There would be no slipup on this trick!