Black Hats

by Max Allan Collins

  Johnny laughed out loud at that and Wyatt smiled so hard he damned near showed some teeth.

  “Monday night, then?” Tex asked the proprietor, rising. “Back in business?”

  “Back in business,” Johnny said.

  With that, Tex took her leave. Both Wyatt and Johnny watched her go, which was always a worthwhile expenditure of time.

  Alone with Johnny, Wyatt asked, “You’ve got everything you need to re-open your speak with one small exception—liquor.”

  “I know,” Johnny said, and sighed. Shook his head. “With Yale watching our every move, it’s a problem. If he backtracks to my liquor stockpile, I’m finished.”

  “How did you handle it in the past?”

  “I transported it personally. I didn’t even use any of my boys here from the club, not till I got back from the warehouse and needed them to quickly unload.”

  “How did you transport the hootch?”

  “I just loaded up the back seat of my flivver with cartons and threw a blanket over it. Once every week or so has done the trick, fine, so far.”

  “This warehouse, Johnny—nobody knows but you where it is.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I notice you haven’t told me where it is.”

  “Wyatt, if you want me to tell you, I’ll tell you.”

  “It may come to that. Let me ask you something, Johnny—why don’t you use Klingman’s Dairy?”

  A slow smile preceded Johnny shaking his head and laughing, gently. “Boy, you don’t miss much, do you, Wyatt?”

  “More to the point, why do you use Droste when everybody else in the West Fifties uses Klingman?”

  Johnny held up a hand, then got up and closed off the double doors of the dining room. He also checked the push-doors into the kitchen, appeared to be satisfied the room was secure, and returned to his chair at the table next to Wyatt.

  Leaning in close, almost whispering, Johnny said, “Ronald Droste is a good friend and a good customer. Over on Warren Street, in the city’s dairy-wholesaling district, he’s a butter-and-egg wholesaler…”

  “One of Tex’s ‘big butter-and-egg’ men.”

  “Righto. He also has a dairy, and services several parts of Manhattan, but not this neighborhood. The reason he has one of his boys make a long run over here is that Ronald isn’t just delivering milk to the restaurant—he’s also delivering beer.”

  “I thought you had a six-month supply of bottled beer.”

  “I do. That’s what Ronald’s delivering, in dribs and drabs—he’s been good enough to give me space in a modern refrigerator he installed in his dairy’s basement, to keep eggs fresh.”

  “Those wire-and-wood boxes have false bottoms?”

  “That’s right.”

  Wyatt chuckled. “So that’s what that milk kid meant by ‘starting regular deliveries back up’.…Johnny, is the warehouse you’re using, for your treasure trove of liquor, in that same part of town?”

  Johnny reared back. “How the hell did you know that?”

  “I didn’t. Figured you’d be somewhere on the West Side, and maybe this pal of yours, Droste, rents warehouse space to you, too.”

  “Well…actually…yeah, he does. I kind of, well, lied when I told you I’d won the warehouse in that same poker game I got the booze in…sorry. My God, is it that obvious?…What’s on your mind, Wyatt?”

  Wyatt fished a cigar out of his inside coat pocket, a nice quarter’s worth of smoke that he lit with a flourish and a smile.

  After blowing a ring, he said, “Do you think your butter-and-egg buddy could spare me a milk wagon? And a horse?”

  TWELVE

  The horse-drawn milk wagon that made its leisurely journey from Warren Street to West Fifty-third, on this crisp, almost cold spring morning, was unusual in several respects, only one of which might have been noticed, and only then if someone were really paying attention.

  To the casual observer, what the clipping-clopping bay was pulling was just any other delivery wagon, although Droste Dairy had the most modern such in the city, a white metal body with red-and-black lettering and four equal-sized rubber tires. A glance might give the impression that a square squat truck had broken down and was being towed away by a horse; but the intended effect was to make the vehicle blend in better with the modern automobiles with which it mingled, though few were around at so early an hour, dawn having just broken over the concrete cliffs of the city.

  Most milk wagons included one man and one horse, but here a second (apparent) dairy employee rode behind the man at the reins. That it was doubly manned was one of the unusual aspects of this particular milk wagon; another was that it wasn’t making any deliveries.…

  Of course, the vehicle might be on its way to a specific route, which was the case, although the “route” in question included but a single stop.

  And the driver was older by decades than the typical milkman, though few would look past the black cap and white jacket and black trousers. No one would guess the slumping figure, guiding the reins with casual authority, was Wyatt Earp.

  This was not a buckboard affair, as the driver sat on a padded bench within the largely enclosed wagon; but, modern automobile-style wheels or not, the ride was old-fashioned rough, often over bouncy brick. What few autos were out this time of morning often pulled around with a honk of their horns, drivers frowning and sometimes cursing—nothing better told the tale, Wyatt thought, that the day of horse-drawn wagons in this automotive age was drawing to a close.

  Wyatt had been a teamster at age sixteen, driving freight wagons between California and Arizona. In those days, he and his brother Virge had had their share of scrapes with Indian raiders and highway bandits. And hauling this liquor-laden milk wagon through an early-morning ghost town of a big city brought back old feelings, including that tingle of anxious excitement he’d learned to control, back then…and, oddly, relish.

  Moving down main thoroughfares and side streets alike, guiding the bay—he’d asked for a young, strong steed and this one fit the bill—Wyatt was taken back to not just freight-hauling days, but to the years when he and his brothers would ride with shotguns up top of Wells Fargo stagecoaches, rattle-clattering through canyons, wondering who was watching from above, and did they wear feathers or a black hat with mask, and was an ambush in the offing…?

  The long-barreled Colt .45 rode on the bench beside him; and squeezed in back with the crates of liquor was Bat, also wearing a dairy delivery uniform of black cap and white jacket and black trousers. Bartholomew was crouched back there, actually sitting on a crate, the small revolver tight in his fist, held alongside his leg, his chin set in its bulldog way. Part of the back was open, so Bat’s eyes were at the rear while Wyatt’s were everywhere else.

  The nub of the plan had come to Wyatt all at once; the execution took some thinking, even some ciphering. But everything revolved around the simple fact that though the brownstone was being watched, its residents could come and go at will, never picking up a tail.

  As they sat alone in Holliday’s dining room, Wyatt had explained to Johnny.

  “Yale’s boys are staking out the building,” Wyatt said, “because they want your booze supply. You’ll get one load of liquor, unimpeded…but then they’ll trail your delivery man back to the warehouse, and heist it all.”

  “And if they pull that off,” Johnny said, arching an eyebrow, “I’ll be out of business…and Capone will be free to get even.”

  “Oh, Capone doesn’t want to get even.” Wyatt gestured with his lighted cigar, making a smoky trail in the air. “You won’t just get your face cut up, though it might start that way. He’ll kill you. You know that don’t you, son? You need to know that.”

  Johnny said nothing. After a moment, he merely nodded.

  “But right now,” Wyatt said, “you are not on top of their list—your booze trove is. Now, you know I’ve ventured out any number of times, as have others, since these dark clouds rolled in. And I believe that I…and e
ven you…can come and go as we please, and not pick up a shadow.”

  Johnny’s eyes narrowed. “How is that helpful?”

  Wyatt explained what he had in mind, then said, “But first I need to see the lay of the land—the warehouse with the liquor, the dairy where you store the beer.”

  Wyatt and Johnny had gone separately, over an hour apart, each man finding a street corner and picking up a taxi, but only after exiting the brownstone to walk in opposite directions.

  They met at a small corner restaurant three blocks from Droste’s Dairy, and sat in a hard-wooden booth and consumed corned beef and cabbage and near beer, while Wyatt determined to his satisfaction that no one was watching them. In their suits—Wyatt’s dark brown with white shirt and darker brown tie, Johnny’s pinstriped gray with an eggshell-blue tie against a pale gray shirt—they might have been two businessmen ending their day with talk of work, and a meal.

  But Wyatt was not attempting to hide, and had even worn the black Stetson Bat had provided; and Johnny, too, sported a Stetson, a gray one with a black band, worthy of his late father. The point was not to slip a shadow but to spot one.

  And no shadow was there to be spotted.

  “My intention,” Wyatt said, over a slice of apple pie, “is to go out for a walk the evening before…”

  He meant before the day of delivery, but was keeping his conversation elliptical.

  “…and to bunk in with Bartholomew. Around four a.m., he and I will catch a cab over to Warren Street, pick up our conveyance and our apparel and load up the goods, make our delivery and head back to Warren Street.”

  Johnny, smoking a Camel (having passed on the pie), was indeed following this. But he asked: “What about our regular weekly delivery?”

  He meant the beer the dairy was clandestinely bringing around with the milk.

  Wyatt swallowed a nice tart bite of pie. “That can and should go on as before. What Bartholomew and I deliver will be the hard stuff.”

  Johnny sighed smoke. “It’s risky, Wyatt.”

  “That’s why Bartholomew and I are worth the ten percent of your weekly gross we agreed to.”

  The younger man sat forward in the booth. “That’s more than fair, but why don’t I come along and back you up?”

  Wyatt pushed his empty plate aside and tossed his fork on it with a clatter that emphasized his response: “No. Me leaving in the evening and not showing back up till the next day, that just means the old man got drunk or maybe lucky. You are the proprietor of Holliday’s, the owner of the house. You staying out all night raises questions.”

  “I don’t know that I agree. Young men can get drunk or lucky, too, you know. Happens frequently in this town.”

  Wyatt shook his head. “Johnny, this will be a weekly procedure, for the foreseeable future. You start disappearing one night a week, and even the thickest of Yale’s thugs would begin adding two and two and coming up with something damned near four. No.”

  But Johnny was frowning in concern. “Jesus, Wyatt, I would feel like hell if anything—”

  “Something happens to me, son,” he said with a shrug, “I’ve had a life. You are just getting a jump on yours.”

  His forehead tensed. “Well, damnit all…at least let’s make your cut fifteen percent of the gross.”

  Wyatt bestowed the boy a rare grin. “That one I’ll let you win.”

  The dairy wholesaling district was part of a fruit and produce center called Washington Market, close to the river and harbor. The Droste Dairy housed itself in half a dozen boxy, unremarkable-looking buildings amid warehouses and five-and six-story brick structures with oversize windows and stone and marble facades that not so long ago had been considered skyscrapers.

  The buildings may have dated back to the middle of the last century, but the interior of Droste’s was clean and modern. A tour (conducted by Johnny’s friend Ronald Droste himself) was quick if impressive; this seemed more a plant than a dairy by Wyatt’s estimation—no cows on the premises, the raw milk arriving in ten-gallon cans from over a thousand farms in five counties, an army of white-clad workers weighing, testing and pumping the stuff through sanitary lines to refrigerated tanks. A pasteurizing room followed, and machines washed glass bottles, filled them with milk and capped them, rollers conveying bottles to a loading dock.

  Odd to go from this modernization to the stables, and its familiar dung aroma, where, with the stable master’s help, Wyatt picked out the young bay.

  The warehouse Johnny rented was in the next block, nicely away from the hubbub of the dairy. Two big inwardly swinging steel doors would, when the time came, allow the milk wagon to be ridden within; but for now Johnny used a key on a side door, constructed of the same heavy steel.

  The interior seemed small—no, not small: it was after all a warehouse, and an empty, cavernous one at that. But the exterior of the brick building had appeared much larger. This Wyatt made out thanks to a single yellow security light glowing over the door of a small, empty office visible thanks to its glass-and-woodframe walls; the warehouse had scant windows, and these were high and boarded over from within, keeping any other illumination out.

  Over by the door, Johnny clicked-on some high overhead lights, bright bulbs in conical shades that threw pools of light, and Wyatt understood the size disparity between inside and out.

  At the left from where they’d entered, one “wall” was wooden, not brick, and painted a flat black. Johnny strode across the cement floor, cutting through circles of light with his long shadow trailing, his footsteps echoing like gunshots. Confidently he found an inset rope loop, a handle that he yanked, hard, as he stepped back using his full weight and swung open one of two massive doors that comprised the false wall, the bottom edge scraping the cement and complaining about it.

  “Shit,” Wyatt said.

  Crude though it might be, the word Wyatt uttered was infused with awe; because no pirate ever saw a cave so brimming with bounty, no bank robber a vault so piled with loot.…

  Stacked halfway to the ceiling, taking up what must have been a third of the warehouse’s space—and damn near all of the concealed space behind the false wall—were wooden crates. Hundreds, no—thousands of them. Stamped on these crates were legendary names from that ancient time, months ago, when liquor was legal.…

  booth’s.

  jim beam.

  seagram’s.

  old forester.

  dewar’s.

  old grand-dad.

  old crow.

  Other words of great yet simple poetry were similarly stamped here and there on rough pine sides: gin; bourbon; scotch; rum; rye; whiskey; and (best of all) pure rye whiskey. Even where wood was emblazoned black with the names of distilleries—hayner, brown-forman—the stark words resonated, familiar yet foreign, like hieroglyphics in the just-unearthed tomb of a pharaoh.

  This section of the warehouse lay in darkness, the conical lights above minus their bulbs, a precaution against illumination leaching under the false wall when the outer light switch was thrown. An unintended result was to shroud the cache of liquid gold in a near darkness that made a mirage of it.

  Johnny, hands on his hips, was grinning. “It does take the breath away.” His voice echoed a little.

  “Does at that,” Wyatt said.

  Gesturing to the towering crates like an impresario presenting a star attraction, the younger man said, “I’ve worked it out on paper, done the figures: at my present rate of business, this represents almost six-years’ product.”

  “I believe you.”

  Johnny motioned for Wyatt to follow him past the slant of the door and inside the cloister of crates, and Wyatt did so in the quiet, respectful manner of the devout, right down to taking off his hat.

  Wyatt, like most gamblers, had a mind for math, but he couldn’t work out just how much this trove would be worth to the right buyer.

  He strolled around the squared-off area of stacked cartons, surveying the brain-boggling hoard of liquor. The wooden b
oxes were not stacked in a massive block, rather in rows two crates deep, aisles—Wyatt counted six—providing access. Two sets of metal portable steps were available to aid in plucking boxes from the top.

  Coming around from behind, he returned to the younger man’s side.

  “How many?” Wyatt asked, his voice so church-hushed it didn’t echo.

  “Give or take? Four thousand.”

  Four thousand crates of top-level pre-Volstead liquor.

  “…Johnny, we may be going about this wrong.”

  Johnny eyed him with curiosity and surprise. “Why? A different plan spring to mind?”

  “No. The plan is sound. But seeing this stockpile in all its glory.…How well do you know this Rothstein character?”

  Johnny shrugged. “Nobody really knows him. He’s the sort who seems friendly, but has a coldness about him. I’ve played cards with him, many times—he was there the night I won all this.”

  “I bet he hated losing it.”

  Johnny grinned. “My take is, Rothstein hates losing, period. But he’s a sort of silent partner in Holliday’s.”

  “To what extent?”

  “A modest monthly pay-off. He mediates problems, and fixes Tammany Hall when need be. I think he’s the single reason no shooting wars have started in Manhattan—he’s got ties to every hoodlum faction and works at making sure nobody gets too greedy.”

  Wyatt nodded toward the towering crates. “Wouldn’t he be interested in this?”

  “Sure. And he could probably afford a hell of a price. He carries a big fat bankroll on him; to him a hundred grand is pocket change.”

  Wyatt nodded. He stared at the boxes of booze. No small wonder that Frankie Yale coveted this stockpile.

  Then he said, “Here’s a thought. Why don’t you sell this boodle to Rothstein, grab that little brunette by the hand, and go set up shop pulling teeth somewhere?”

  Johnny grinned and shook his head. “You can’t be serious…”