The Gangster

“He would never say such a thing.”

“He didn’t want to.”

The man lifted the sheet.

James Martin would have given ten years of his life to be sitting in a cell at West 54th Street. The heeler was dead. His face was bloody as a beefsteak. The eye they had left in his head regarded Martin with a dumbfounded stare.

“What did you do to him?” Martin asked when he could draw enough breath to speak.

“We asked him a question. We asked, ‘Who told you hire assassin?’ We now ask you that same question, Alderman Martin. Who told you hire assassin?”

* * *

“You know the ‘Chamber of Horrors’?” Captain Coligney asked Isaac Bell on the telephone.

“The one at Union Square?”

“Meet me there.”

22

Isaac Bell climbed the subway steps at the Union Square Station three at a time. At 16th Street, a leather-lunged barker manned a megaphone:

“Do you want better schools and subways? Do you want green parks and breezy beaches? Want to find out why you don’t have them? Then step right up to the Committee of One Hundred Citizens’ Exhibit against Tammany Hall to see how Tammany gets away with its bunco game.”

The barker seemed superfluous. The line to get in snaked the length and breadth of Union Square and disappeared down side streets. The extras newsboys were hawking claimed that twenty-two thousand people had visited the exhibition in only three days.

In the show window, a papier-mâché cow represented Tammany milking the city. “Don’t cry over spilt milk,” read the placards. “Get a new set of milkmaids.”

A competing Tammany Hall exhibit several doors down boasted a live elephant — representing Republicans eating the city — but it looked to Bell like the anti-Tammany show was outdrawing the pachyderm four-to-one.

Coligney had stationed a cop to escort Bell inside, where he followed signs pointing to the Chamber of Horrors. On the way, he passed “The Municipal Joyride to the Catskill Mountains,” a huge cartoon of “Honest Jim” Fryer running over a small taxpayer in a town car, a depiction of the “Story and Shame of the Queensboro Bridge” that accused Tammany Hall Democrats of wasting $8,000,000 to build “nothing but an automobile highway” that should have been spent on preventing tuberculosis.

Down the basement stairs was the chief attraction, the Chamber of Tammany Horrors, and it was stronger stuff. Silhouettes of men, women, and children encircled the room like the rings of Hell, dramatizing the price of graft: the thirteen thousand New Yorkers who had died this year of preventable diseases; the children condemned to the streets by the shortage of schools.

Captain Coligney was waiting next to an exhibit illustrated by a floor-to-ceiling billboard: “How Tammany Hands Catskill Aqueduct Plums to its Favored Contractors.”

“A DA dick told me you dropped my name on him,” he greeted Bell.

“Only your name. I was trying to get a handle on Adlerman Martin.”

“I reckoned as much,” said Coligney. He jerked a thumb at the billboard. “Thought you’d like to see Part Two of this exhibit.”

Alderman James Martin was behind the billboard, barely out of the regular visitors’ sight. He was hanging by the neck. His face was blue, his tongue as thick and gray as a parrot’s, his body stiff.

Coligney said, “He wasn’t here when they closed last night. They found him this morning.”

“What time do they close?”

“Closed at eleven. Opened this morning at nine.”

“Are we supposed to believe he committed suicide from guilt?”

“Martin didn’t have a guilty bone in his body. But, at any rate, he’s been dead a lot longer than twelve hours. Which means he didn’t hang himself here.”

“Not likely he hanged himself elsewhere, either,” Bell noted. He inspected the body closely. “But it doesn’t look like he put up a struggle.”

Coligney agreed. “On the other hand, his pockets were empty, except for one thing.” He held up a business card, balancing the edges between his big fingers. Bell read it.

“Who is Davidson?”

“Onetime reformer. Saw where the money was made and woke up thoroughly Tammanized. Big wheel in the Contractors’ Protective Association.”

“What’s his card doing in Martin’s pocket?”

“I’d guess same reason Alderman Martin is hanging here: To make Tammany look even worse than the Chamber of Horrors.”

“So Davidson locked horns with whoever hanged Martin.”

Coligney nodded. “And they’ve just sent him a threat.”

Bell asked, “How much time would I have to interview Davidson before you make it official?”

Coligney found sudden interest in the ceiling. “My cops are busy. I’d imagine you have a day.”

“I’ll need two,” said Bell. Time for Research to scrutinize Davidson before he braced him.

* * *

The side-wheel river steamer Rose C. Stambaugh struggled to land at Storm King sixty miles up the Hudson from New York. Smoke fountained from the stack behind her wheelhouse, and her vertical beam engine, which stood like an oil derrick between her paddle wheels, belched steam that turned white in the cold air.