The Bootlegger (Isaac Bell 7)

Bell looked at Dorothy. “We shouldn’t tax him. He should rest.”

“Listen!” she shot back. “He won’t rest until he talks to you.”

Isaac Bell spoke in normal tones. “I’m here, Joe. What do you want me to do?”

“Protect the outfit,” Van Dorn whispered.

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s in worse shape than I am.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“Stop lying. I’m touch and go. So’s the outfit . . . I lost Justice.”

Bell knew he meant his longtime contract to help the Department of Justice pursue bank robbers, motorcar thieves, and white slavers across state lines. He was not surprised. The Bureau of Investigation had greatly increased its force of special agents during the war and consequently was no longer willing to pay for nationwide investigations by a transcontinental detective agency.

Bell said, “We knew that was coming.”

Van Dorn whispered, “Treasury threw me a bone.”

He meant, of course, the Coast Guard contract that had gotten him shot. A favor from one of Joe’s many Washington friends, it would be canceled tomorrow morning when officials demanded to know why a civilian detective was in a gunfight on a Coast Guard vessel. No matter that investigating who in the Guard took bribes from bootleggers was for the good of the Service, the contract was lost.

But that was the least of the agency’s troubles.

Bell leaned closer.

“How’d you make out with Ellis and Clayton?”

“They’re leaving town.”

“Iceberg,” Van Dorn whispered.

The nurse jumped up. “That’s enough. He’s hallucinating.”

“No he’s not,” said Bell. He nodded sharply at Novicki to get the nurse out of his way. Van Dorn was saying that his life’s work was threatened by the corrupting effect of Prohibition. Two house dicks taking bribes were only the tip of the iceberg. The new men replacing detectives lost to the war and the flu pandemic were susceptible to corruption. And when the word about him firing Ellis and Clayton got around, how many Protective Services boys would quit to sign on with less scrupulous agencies with lower standards?

“Isaac.”

“Right here.”

“I’m counting on you . . . Protect the agency.”

“Rest easy,” said Bell. But he had his work cut out for him. It was less a matter of protecting the agency than saving it.

5

HAIG & HAIG SCOTCH WHISKY, twenty thousand cases in a freighter from Glasgow, landed in British colonial territory at the Bahaman port of Nassau. Import duty was paid and the whisky was locked in bonded warehouses. Six thousand of the cases were sold to the captain of the Bahamas-registered staysail schooner Ling Ling. He paid the export duty and cast off immediately for Long Island’s Rum Row.

During the warm and pleasant Gulf Stream sail north, Ling Ling’s crew worked on deck. The contents of twelve thousand bottles were stretched—doubled to twenty-four thousand—by mixing the authentic Haig & Haig with grain alcohol and distilled water and adding tea for color. They pasted counterfeit labels that guaranteed the contents on the extra bottles and sealed them with corks boiled in tea to make them look old. Then they repackaged the bottles in ham-shaped burlap bags holding six each, padded with straw, for ease of handling.

Ling Ling arrived off Fire Island on a dark night when the Coast Guard cutter CG-9 was picketing the schooner Aresthusa, steaming circles around it to keep taxis from picking up booze. A few miles away, flat-bottom boats slipped alongside Ling Ling. They loaded a thousand “hams” and sped to Fire Island, keeping a sharp eye peeled for “Prohibition Navy” patrols and for hijackers. Approaching the beach, they waited for the lights of a foot patrol to pass by. Then they landed in the surf, several miles east of the Blue Point Coast Guard Station.

The hams of Haig & Haig were loaded into carts that men trundled across the narrow island on a boardwalk laid in the soft sand. Fishing boats with oversize engines raced them five miles across Great South Bay and up an unlit channel and into a narrow creek. Cars and trucks were waiting at a dock just beyond the bright lights of a rambling wood-frame hotel. Music and laughter drifted across the marsh from which the creek had been dredged.

The Haig & Haig was quickly moved off the boats into the cars and trucks. The hotel’s handyman and dishwasher helped with the loading and were rewarded with a bottle each. Farm trucks, laundry trucks, and milk and grocery vans hurried off in various directions. Some small cars followed, Fords and Chevrolets with hidden compartments for their owners to smuggle a dozen bottles.

Last to leave were the big cars driven by professional bootleggers. Buicks, Packards, and Cadillacs—with seats removed to make more room for the Haig & Haig and with heavy-duty springs added to carry and conceal the extra weight—formed a convoy on the Montauk Highway and headed west toward New York City, seventy miles away.