Street would be available. McCarthy had failed to tell Ferry and Eddie about the fertilizer shipment that would be stored in the warehouse over the weekend.
“How stupid can you guys be?” Lovett scolded Needles and Charleston before the meeting got underway. “What are you trying to pull, setting us up in this horsehit place?”
“I swear to you, Bill,” Ferry pleaded. “McCarthy never told us anything about the crap he put in here. It wasn’t in the warehouse when we came here a couple days ago. He only told us that nobody was gonna be here, that we could use the office, and he gave us the key.”
Lovett shook his head disgustedly. He walked to a chair and stood on it.
“Fellas,” he said raspily, “I can’t stand this smell any more than you can. But there’s no choice. So hold your breaths and listen to what I have to say. It won’t take long.”
“I called you here because of what happened to Jimmy O’Toole, to Kevin Donovan, and to Mary Reilly,” he said in a voice choked with emotion. “They were killed by those dirty ginzos who didn’t even have the guts to pull the job themselves. They hired out-of-town hit men to do their dirty work. That’s because their own people don’t have the balls to handle their problems: they’ve got to bring in outsiders when they want to spill our blood.”
Lovett slammed his clenched right fist into the palm of his left hand.
“We aren’t like that, no sir,” he shouted, his face knotting with rage. “At least when we have problems we take care of them ourselves!”
He let a moment pass. As he sensed that his words had sunk in, he went on: “You better believe it that we Irishmen aren’t going to let those lousy wops get away with what they did at Sagaman’s Hall because—”
He was interrupted by a wave of applause, whistles, and shouts. The gathering approved of what he was saying.
“Tell us how we’re going to get those lousy ginzos!” a voice sounded as the tumult died down. That call was echoed a half-dozen times by others in the room.
“Okay,” Lovett said tensely. “I think there’s one man among us who’s got a right to speak his mind and tell us how he’d like to get back at those murdering Black Handers. I’m speaking about Dick Lonergan.”
Wild Bill struck an emotional note which all at once precipitated another outburst. As the applause and cheers subsided, Lonergan limped his way to the chair on which Lovett stood. Wild Bill relinquished it to Pegleg. All eyes were on Lonergan. He was the sympathetic hero; one of those who died in the ambush at Sagaman’s Hall was his girlfriend, Mary Reilly. And there was also what the gang knew about his early suffering wrought by the loss of his left leg.
When he was twelve years old, Lonergan, while playing with friends in the Long Island Rail Road’s yards on Sixty-ninth Street in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, had hitched a ride aboard a freight car. He fell from his perch between an oil tanker and a lumber car and hit the ground alongside the tracks. But his left leg did not clear the rail completely.
The wheels of the lumber car passed over his leg and severed it about six inches above the ankle. His playmates summoned help and young Richard was rushed to Victory Memorial Hospital, where doctors amputated the stub below the knee. It saved his life. But Dick Lonergan was fated to live as a cripple.
In the months following the accident, the youngster was outfitted with a wooden stump which enabled him to walk—and which inevitably inspired the kids in his neighborhood to call him “Pegleg.” The name stuck for the twenty years since that accident, although his friends seldom called him that.
Because of his physical handicap, Lonergan had never made it with the opposite sex. Girls politely turned him down for dates during his teenage years; as he grew into manhood, women rejected his advances. It wasn’t until he met Mary Reilly that Lonergan finally found acceptance by a woman. Their friendship grew into romance and finally into a proposal of marriage—which Mary accepted. They were to have been wed that coming June. Mary’s death left Pegleg shattered beyond description. His only ambition now was to avenge her death by taking as many Black Hand lives as he could. He had already told Lovett that any plan to retaliate against the Italians must include him.
“If you don’t pick me,” Pegleg had said to Wild Bill, “I’ll take things into my own hands. I’m gonna even the score whether you decide to cut me in for the hit or not.”
With Lonergan’s passion for revenge so intense, Lovett knew he’d be a damned fool not to put the man in the lineup of annihilators dispatched against the Black Hand. After all, Lonergan had approached Lovett the previous Wednesday with the scheme of how to strike back at the Italians. He had laid it on the table for Wild Bill after they’d returned from Mary’s funeral. Lovett had been astounded not only by the uniqueness of Lonergan’s plan but by the infinite thought and attention to detail that had gone into it. Lovett decided then and there that Pegleg himself should be granted the privilege of getting up before the gang and giving the rendition of his brilliant blueprint for death.
Pegleg shifted restlessly as he stood on the chair now, his balance seemingly precarious as he tapped his wooden leg around on the seat searching for a comfortable stance. When he finally found a position that pleased him, he glanced at the faces staring up at him. Searching eyes peered from beneath the wide-brimmed hats, pinched lips drew together in anticipation of what he was about to say. Pegleg drew in a long nervous breath.
“I hear,” Lonergan began at last, the words coming softly and slowly, “the wops are going to hold a victory celebration for the score they made on us. It’s gonna be next Saturday night in Stauch’s Dance Hall on Surf Avenue. I say that’s when we should rap them, really lay it into ’em.”
It was a sweet plan. Lonergan proposed that he and three cohorts pose as the four-piece orchestra hired to play the affair. Pegleg and the three other executioners would present themselves at the door as a string ensemble. But instead of Stradivariuses or Cremonas, their violin cases would hold sawed-off shotguns, .45-caliber automatics, and, yes, even a tommy gun or two.
“How are you gonna play music when Frankie Yale’s boys see they got one orchestra there already?” hulking Eddie Lynch, the enforcer for the gang’s loansharking operations, challenged from the back of the room. “They’ll stuff you in your own violin cases before you get past the door.”
Lonergan smiled wryly at his detractor. “That’s where you come in, Eddie,” he quickly responded, pulling a piece of paper from his pocket and handing it to Jimmy the Bug, who was standing directly in front of Pegleg. “Pass it back to Eddie,” Lonergan said. A hand reached out and the paper was relayed to Lynch. As he read the writing, Eddie’s round, nervous face screwed up with frowning suspicion.
“What the hell is this?” he growled.
“That’s the names and addresses of the musicians,” Lonergan said firmly. “What you and some of the other boys are gonna do is stop them from showing up—” Pegleg took another deep breath. “No rough stuff, you understand. Just make sure they stay home awhile. And when me and the other violinists are finished with our numbers, you can let them go to Stauch’s. They’ll be needed then to play a funeral march.”
A sudden shifting of feet accompanied by an undercurrent of murmurs was a signal to Pegleg that the gang was duly impressed with the scenario so far. The smile on Wild Bill Lovett’s face and some others inspired Lonergan to unveil the rest of the plot with even greater enthusiasm.
It was a simple plan, much less complicated
