are you guys gonna do after you shoot up the place, walk through the crowd of ginzos saying, ‘Excuse me, please.’ and go out the front door?” Joe “The Boozer” Bean yelled derisively.
“No, no, no!” Lonergan shouted.
“You got it all wrong, Joe,” Lovett interrupted Pegleg’s response to Bean, the brother of Petey and Danny. “Dick didn’t say they’d shoot from the stage, although maybe he left that impression. The way it’s really gonna be, Dick and whoever goes on this one will jump out of the car on Surf Avenue, walk into Stauch’s right through the main doors, and start blasting.”
“Hey, that’s real great,” rasped Ernie “Skinny” Shea, one of the White Hands’ waterfront extortion collectors. “Our guys’ll be in and outta the joint before them Sicilian scum know what hit em!
But the plan didn’t sit right with Shea’s sidekick in shakedowns, Wally “The Squint” Walsh.
“Why don’t you just go in with the rods showing?” he asked in his gravelly voice, his eyelids shuttered. “What the hell for do you need to get fancy with violin cases and all that shit?”
“Because,” Lovett said slowly, his patience running out fast at the thickheads who apparently hadn’t listened closely when Pegleg was covering that ground. “You see, Wally, there are gonna be maybe one or two wops at the door who’ll be watching who goes in. So if our guys hop out of the car with their artillery showing, they’ll bo wiped out before they even put their feet on the sidewalk.”
Charleston Eddie then raised a very good point when he asked how Lonergan expected even to reach the door of the dance hall without being recognized.
“I know what you’re saying,” Pegleg grinned in spite of the oblique reference to his wooden leg. But he was prepared with an answer. “That’s all gonna be taken care of,” he assured them. “Bill’s gonna buy me one of them new artificial legs. You can wear a shoe with it and it looks like the real thing. I was measured this morning for one, and it’ll be ready for me first thing Tuesday.”
The boys began clapping for Lonergan. And buoyed by the seeming acceptance of his plan, Pegleg began doing a jig on the chair.
With no further questions, Lonergan asked for three volunteers to accompany him on his mission. Nearly every hand in the warehouse office was flung in the air.
“No good,” Lovett said. “We gotta make this fair.” He took off his gray fedora and placed the crown in the palm of his left hand. Then, urging Lonergan off the chair, Wild Bill stepped up so everyone could see what he was doing. He stuffed his hand into his coat pocket and pulled out a fistful of white marbles, which he began dropping into the hat. “One, two, three…”
The count went to fourteen and his hand was empty. Lovett then pulled another handful of white marbles and continued dropping them, one at a time, into his chapeau… twenty, twenty-one.” He stopped and returned the remaining marbles to his pocket. Then he went to his jacket pocket and pulled out three black marbles. “One, two, three,” he counted as he let them fall into the hat.
Then, holding the fedora above everyone’s head, Lovett ordered, “Everybody come up and take a marble. The ones who pick the blacks go with Dick on this job…”
The luck of the draw went to Irish Eyes Duggan, Danny Bean, and Charleston Eddie McFarland, who were cheered lustily and pounded on their backs by their less fortunate brethren.
“Don’t worry you guys who lost out,” Lovett consoled his boys. “There is still gonna be action for a lot of you men. I’m sending at least another six of you as a backup, just in case Dick and his, orchestra’ don’t read their music too good.”
The concerto for murder was scheduled to be played at Stauch’s one week hence. Curtain time was eight o’clock on Saturday, February 26th, by which point some fifty-five members of the Black Hand gang would have been seated at the tables around the dance floor with their wives or dates, and when some of the crowd might very well indeed begin wondering why the orchestra had not yet taken the stage and struck up the strains of “Santa Lucia,” Frankie Yale’s favorite number. The gang’s “entertainment committee” had planned it that way because they wanted Frankie and his missus to lead the dancing. It was their way of paying homage to Yale for his brilliant direction of the Sagaman’s Hall ambush.
Not in his wildest dreams did Pegleg Lonergan imagine that things would go the way they did when he and his sidekicks in slaughter went to Stauch’s Dance Hall. As confident as he’d been in presenting his plan, first to Wild Bill Lovett, then to the White Hand’s rank and file, all sorts of anxieties burned inside him.
Pegleg’s overriding concern was the very apprehension advanced by Charleston Eddie. Since Tuesday morning, when the artificial leg was strapped on, Lonergan had spent hour after hour trying to master a walk that would look natural. But as Saturday night approached, he hadn’t mastered that miserable artificial limb. While for the first time since the accident he wore trousers with both legs down to his ankles and two shoes, he still hadn’t managed to walk without a limp. Yet the improvement was so dramatic that Lovett assured Pegleg no Black Hand lookout could ever recognize him.
At six o’clock on Saturday night the men appointed for the hit rallied in the White Hand’s garage on Baltic Street. Wild Bill Lovett personally checked each of the weapons packed into the violin cases to be toted to the Coney Island dance hall by Pegleg Lonergan, Irish Eyes Duggan, Danny Bean, and Charleston Eddie.
Lovett also checked each of the revolvers, automatics, and shotguns the backup team was taking to the scene. Picked for that assignment were Joey Bean, Ernie Shea, Wally Walsh, Eddie Lynch and Jack “Squareface” Finnegan. Their driver was Ernie “The Scarecrow” Monaghan. Danny Bean’s brother, Petey, had been singled out for the honor of driving the black 1920 Chevrolet sedan that would carry the second team of hit men to the hall.
“All right, you guys,” Lovett said after he had satisfied himself that his executioners were prepared to move out. “Go get ’em!”
A whoop and cry exploded from the gathering, but Lovett quickly muffled it.
“Nobody’s celebrating yet!” he scolded his boys. “You do the job first and then we’ll have something to cheer. Now get the hell out and get it done!”
Lonergan led the way out, followed by Charleston Eddie and Danny and Petey Bean, with Duggan trailing behind them. The backup team then left the garage and got into the second car, a black 1919 Packard sedan. The two cars roared off toward Coney Island.
A powdery snow began falling just as the White Handers started toward their destination.
“Shit!” Petey Bean shouted as he spotted the small white flakes buffeting the windshield. “I hope this goddam snow doesn’t screw us up.”
“Take it easy, Petey,” Lonergan pampered the hot-headed wheelman. “It’s all gonna be over and done with before the streets even get slippery.”
Had it been the middle of July, a half-million persons or more would have been wandering around Coney Island’s beaches, boardwalks, and amusement grounds. But on that windswept, snowy night of February 26th, the only visible activity in America’s famed bathing and amusement resort was in Stauch’s Dance Hall, where fifty-five celebrants had gathered for their revelry. Elsewhere, the streets were deserted.
As Petey Bean cruised along Surf Avenue he kept a sharp eye out
