The Gangster (Isaac Bell 9)

“Give me their names.”

“I don’t know their names.”

“They’re your regular customers.”

“I can tell you who was there. But I can’t tell which ones were talking.” Nick explained that he could make out what they were saying but could not distinguish one voice from another, as sounds were distorted by the shaft.

Coligney said, “You must have recognized his manner of speaking.”

“It’s not like there’s only one blowhard in the club, Captain. They’re Wall Street swells, what do you expect? They’re all blowhards.”

Coligney questioned Nick repeatedly. Nick stuck to his story, and eventually the policeman was convinced he did not know who in the “club” had threatened the President.

Coligney wrote down their names. Seven of the richest men on Wall Street.

“O.K.,” said Coligney. “Here’s the deal. You shut down now, like everyone else. You change the name on your deed. You reopen at the weekend.”

Nick nodded. “That way no one knows about this, and it looks like Tammany stepped in and lent me a hand.”

“But if this ends up blarney, you’ll be selling women to blacksmiths in Joisey. Now get outta here.”

Five minutes later, Mike Coligney headed out, too, wearing a greatcoat over his uniform and a civilian’s fedora low over his eyes.

“Back soon,” he told his desk sergeant. “Just going to clear my head.”

“O’Leary’s or the Normandie?” asked the sergeant.

“O’Leary’s.”

But he walked straight by O’Leary’s Saloon. Continuing up Broadway, Coligney passed the Normandie Bar, too, and cut over to Sixth Avenue, thinking hard on what he had learned. “Satan’s Circus” percolated around him as he strode past brick tenements and frame houses, street muggers and stickup artists, dance halls and saloons. Downtown again in the shadow of the El, pondering possibilities and weighing the complications.

The captain had a gut feeling that the plot was real. But as earthshaking as it was, who in blazes could he trust to help him dismantle it? The department was in an uproar. The new Police Commissioner—a friend, ironically, of President Roosevelt—was turning the force on its ear. Worse, Bingham was a stickler for communicating through “proper channels.” Proper channels in this case would be through a politically connected inspector whom Coligney would not trust to solve a candy store theft.

Besides, who knew how long Commissioner Bingham himself would last? Or what disruption he would perpetrate next? For the moment, Coligney was the only precinct captain Bingham hadn’t transferred, but he had fined Coligney eight days’ pay for a technical violation of department rules. What if, in the midst of pursuing Nick’s allegation, he suddenly found himself banished to a sleepy precinct in the Bronx? The grim fact was that the Commissioner, a by-the-book former military man, was not equipped to investigate a plot against the President, much less muster the speed required to save his life.

Coligney stopped in a saloon on 24th Street and placed a call on the owner’s telephone. Then he walked over to Broadway and, when he was sure no one recognized him, popped down the stairs at 23rd and rode the subway train to 42nd Street, where he slipped quietly into the subway-level lower lobby of the Knickerbocker Hotel.

He entered a small, dark cellar bar off the lobby. At a corner table, backs to the walls, were waiting his old friend Joseph Van Dorn and Van Dorn’s top investigator, Isaac Bell.

13

“Let me get this straight,” said Van Dorn when Coligney had laid out his dilemma. “A New York Police Department captain wants to hire my private detective agency to run down hearsay that an unnamed member of a secret tycoon club is threatening to kill the President of the United States.”

“It may be nothing.”

“But if it is not nothing, it is dynamite.”

“I can’t pay cash. You’ll have to take it out in trade.”

“The life of the President, and the well-being of the nation aside,” Van Dorn said drily, “my agency can’t go wrong in the detective business by helping out a high-ranking cop. Particularly one whose career was boomed by this same President back when Mr. Roosevelt was Police Commissioner.”

Van Dorn turned to Isaac Bell.

“What do you think?”

Bell had listened intently, struck by Coligney’s intelligence and clarity, as well as how inventively he was tackling the Bingham complications. “Are you sure,” he asked Coligney, “that your informant did not recognize the man who made the threats by his voice?”

“I interrogated him severely on that subject. I believe that an echo conveyed by the air vent made it impossible to distinguish voices.”