The Bootlegger Read online

  “I suppose your commandant told you the Treasury Department hired my detective agency to recommend how better to combat the illegal liquor traffic. But I bet scuttlebutt says we’re investigating who’s in cahoots with the bootleggers—pocketing bribes to look the other way.”

  “They don’t have to bribe us. They outrun us, and they outnumber us. Or someone—I’m not saying who ’cause I don’t know who—tips them where we’re patrolling. Or they radio false distress calls; we’re supposed to save lives, so we steam to the rescue, leaving our station wide open. If we happen to catch ’em, the courts turn ’em loose and they buy their speedboats back at government auction.”

  Van Dorn took a fresh look at the skipper. Maybe his nose was red from a head cold. Drinking man or not, he sounded genuinely indignant and fed up. Who could blame him?

  In the year since Prohibition—the banning of the sale of alcohol by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution and the Volstead Act—it seemed half the country had agreed to break the law. Millions of people would pay handsomely for a drink. Short of striking oil or gold in your backyard, there was no way to get rich quicker than to sell hooch. All you needed was a boat you could run a few miles offshore to a rum fleet of foreign-registered freighters and schooners anchored beyond the law in international waters. The newspapers had made a hero of Bill McCoy, captain of a schooner registered in the British Bahama Islands. He had come up with the scheme for circumventing the law, which made enforcing Prohibition a mug’s game.

  “Like the song says”—Van Dorn recited a lyric from Irving Berlin’s latest hit—“‘You cannot make your shimmy shake on tea.’ How fast are the taxis?”

  While fishermen and yacht owners sailed out to the rum fleet to buy a few bottles, big business was conducted by “taxis” or “contact boats”—high-powered, shallow-draft vessels in which professional rumrunners smuggled hundreds of cases ashore to bootleggers who paid top dollar.

  “They build ’em faster every day.”

  Van Dorn shook his head, feigning dismay. Isaac Bell had already convinced him to recommend flying-boat patrols, though God knows who would pay for them. Congress banned booze but failed to cough up money for enforcement.

  “Taxi!”

  All eyes shot to the crow’s nest.

  • • •

  JOSEPH VAN DORN whipped a pair of binoculars from his voluminous overcoat and focused in the direction Asa Somers was pointing his telescope. Low in the water and painted as gray as the sea and the sky, the rum boat was barely visible at a thousand yards.

  “Full speed!” ordered the skipper, and bounded up the ladder to the flying bridge atop the wheelhouse. Van Dorn climbed heavily after him.

  The engines ground harder. Valves stormed louder. The subchaser dug her stern in and boiled a white wake. “Fifteen knots,” said the skipper.

  Subchasers had been built to do eighteen, but the oily blue smoke spewing from her exhaust ports told Van Dorn her worn engines were pushing their limits. Their quarry was overloaded, with its gunnels almost submerged, but it was churning along at seventeen or eighteen knots and growing fainter in the distance.

  “Gunner! Put a shot across his bow.”

  The Poole gun barked, shaking the deck. It was not apparent through Van Dorn’s powerful glasses where the cannon shell landed, but it was nowhere near the rum boat’s bow. The gunners landed their second shot closer. He saw it splash, but the boat continued to pull ahead.

  Suddenly, just as it seemed the rummy would disappear in the failing light of evening, they got a break. The taxi slowed. She had hit something in the water, the skipper speculated, or thrown a prop, or blown a cylinder. Whatever had gone wrong on the heavily laden boat, the subchaser caught up slowly.

  “They’ll dump the booze and run for it,” said the skipper.

  Van Dorn adjusted his binoculars. But he saw no frantic figures throwing contraband overboard. The boat just kept running for the night.

  “Gunner! Another across his bow.”

  The Poole gun shook the deck again, and a shell splashed in front of the rumrunner. “They’ll pull up now.”

  The warning shot had no effect and the rumrunner kept going.

  Van Dorn made a quick count of the cases of whisky he saw heaped on deck, estimated the amount she could hold belowdecks, and calculated a minimum cargo of five hundred cases. If the bottles contained the “real McCoy”—authentic Scotch that had not been stretched or doctored with cheap grain alcohol—the boatload was worth thirty thousand dollars. To the crew of a rum boat, who before Prohibition had barely eked out a living catching fish, it was a fortune that might make them more brave than sensible. For thirty thousand dollars, six bootleggers could buy a Cadillac or a Rolls-Royce, a Marmon or a Minerva. For the fishermen’s families it meant snug cottages and steady food on the table.

  The skipper switched on an electric siren. CG-9 screamed like a banshee. Still, the rum boat ran. “They’re crazy. Fire again!” the skipper shouted down to the gun crew. “Get ’em wet!”

  The shell hit the water close enough to spray the crew. The rum boat stopped abruptly and turned one hundred eighty degrees to face the subchaser that was bearing down on them in a cloud of blue smoke.

  “Stand by, Lewis guns!”

  Grinning Coasties hunched over the drum-fed machine guns mounted on pedestals each side of the wheelhouse. Van Dorn reckoned that good sense would prevail at last. The Lewis was a wonderful weapon—fast-firing, rarely jamming, and highly accurate. Rumrunners could be expected to throw their hands in the air before the range got any shorter and let their lawyers spring them. Instead, when the cutter closed to a hundred yards, they started shooting.

  Shouts of surprise rang out on the Coast Guard boat.

  A rifle slug crackled past the mast, a foot from Van Dorn’s head. Another clanged off a ventilator cowling and ricocheted against the cannon on the foredeck, scattering the gun crew, who dived for cover. Van Dorn whipped his Colt .45 automatic from his coat, rammed his shoulder against the mast to counter the cutter’s roll, and took careful aim for a very long pistol shot. Just as he found the distant rifleman in his sights, a third rifle slug struck the Coastie manning the starboard Lewis gun and tumbled him off the back of the wing to the main deck.

  The big detective climbed down the ladder as fast as he could and squeezed into the wing. He jerked back the machine gun’s slide with his left hand and triggered a three-shot burst with his right. Wood flew from the taxi’s cabin, inches from the rifleman. Three more and the rifle flew from his hands.

  “Another taxi!” came Asa Somers’s high-pitched yell from the crow’s nest. “Another taxi, astern.”

  Van Dorn concentrated on clearing the rumrunner’s cockpit. He directed a stream of .30-06 slugs that made a believer of the helmsman, who let go the wheel and flung himself flat.

  Somers yelled again, “Taxi coming up behind us!”

  Fear in the boy’s voice made Van Dorn look back.

  A long, low black boat was closing fast. Van Dorn had never seen a boat so fast. Forty knots at least. Fifty miles per hour. Thunder chorused from multiple exhaust manifolds. Three dozen straight pipes lanced orange flame into the sky. Triple Liberty motors, massed in a row, each one as powerful as the turbo-supercharged L-12 on Isaac’s flying boat, spewed the fiery blast.

  The gun crew on the foredeck couldn’t see it.

  Charging from behind, slicing the seas like a knife, the black boat turned as the subchaser turned, holding the angle that screened it from the cannon. The port machine gunner couldn’t see it either, blocked by the wheelhouse. But Joseph Van Dorn could. He pivoted the Lewis gun and opened fire.

  The vessel began weaving, jinking sharply left and right, agile as a dragonfly.

  A cold smile darkened Van Dorn’s face.

  “O.K., boys. That’s how you want it?” He pointed the Lewis gun straight down the middle of the weaving path and fired in bursts, peppering the black boat with a hundred rounds in ten secon
ds. Nearly half his shots hit. But to Van Dorn’s amazement, they bounced off, and he realized, too late, that she was armored with steel sheathing.

  He raked the glass windshield behind which the helmsman crouched. The glass starred but did not shatter. Bulletproof. These boys had come prepared. Then the black boat fired back.

  It, too, had a Lewis gun. Hidden below the deck, it pivoted up on a hinged mount, and Van Dorn saw in an instant that the fellow firing it knew his business. Scores of bullets drilled through the subchaser’s wooden hull right under where he manned his gun and riddled the chest-high canvas that protected the bridge wing from wind and spray. Van Dorn fired long bursts back. A cool, detached side of his mind marveled that he had not been hit by the withering fire.

  Something smacked his chest hard as a thrown cobblestone.

  Suddenly, he was falling over the rim of the bridge wing and plummeting toward the deck. The analytical side of his brain noted that the taxi they were chasing was speeding away, covered by machine-gun fire from the black boat, and that, as he fell, the Coast Guard cutter was wheeling to bring the Poole gun to bear. In turning her flank to the seas, she took a wave broadside and heeled steeply to starboard, so that when he finally landed it was not on the narrow deck but on the safety railing that surrounded it. The taut wire cable broke his fall and bounced him overboard into bitter cold water. The last thing he heard was Asa Somers’s shrill, “Mr. Van Dorn!”

  2

  “POWWOW IN THE ALLEY. Hancock, you cover.”

  Isaac Bell appeared to wander casually through the Hotel Gotham’s sumptuous lobby. Four well-dressed house detectives drifted quietly after him, a smooth exodus unnoticed by the paying guests. When all four had assembled in the dark and narrow kitchen alley out back, Bell addressed two by name.

  “Clayton. Ellis.”

  Tom Clayton and Ed Ellis were typical Van Dorn Protective Services house dicks—tall, broad-shouldered heavyweights, not as sharp as full-fledged detectives but handsome as the Arrow Collar Man. Tricked out in a decent suit, clean white shirt, polished shoes, and four-in-hand necktie, neither of the former Southern Pacific Railroad detectives appeared out of place in an expensive hotel. But pickpockets, sneak thieves, and confidence men recognized bruisers to steer clear of.

  “What’s up, Mr. Bell?”

  “You’re fired.”

  “What for?” Clayton demanded.

  “You sullied the name of the Van Dorn Agency.”

  “‘Sullied’?” Clayton smirked at his sidekick. “‘Sullied’?”

  Ellis said, “I’m with you, pal. ‘Sullied’?”

  Bell stifled his impulse to floor them both. The others in their squad had resisted taking bribes. For the good of the agency, he seized the opportunity to remind the honest ones what was at stake and to give them courage to resist temptation. So he answered the mocking question, calmly.

  “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 rumrunners. Bell thought, fleetingly, that he was probably tying up his Loening at the 31st Street Air Service Terminal when it happened.

  “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 McKinney that I said that all hands are to hunt the criminals who attacked Mr. Van Dorn.” Darren McKinney was a young firecracker Van Dorn had brought up from Washington to run the New York field office.

  “Tell him I said to call in markers from every bootlegger in the city; one of them will hear who di
d 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 cannon was an accidental dunking. Now, of course, he wished he had insisted that Joe take a man with him. There was plenty of room in the Loening’s four-passenger cabin. He could have assigned a couple of men to look out for him.

  “I don’t know yet what happened.”

  “Who shot him?”

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