That's Your Conclusion?
A Union member disguised as a coachman carried Roselli on his back and rode the elevator with the night watchman.
"Whew, the smell of booze. Looks like Mr. Roselli hit it hard tonight."
"Don't even start. The whole way over in the carriage he was babbling nonsense. Making money's this hard, huh."
"That's the world for you. Night work ain't easy either."
The elevator doors opened. In front of the office the watchman pulled out his ring of keys and checked them one by one.
Security rooms often kept spare office keys for night emergencies—fire, theft, vandalism, break-ins. This building was no exception, so there was no need to pick the lock; the watchman opened the door for them himself.
The coachman laid Roselli on the waiting-room sofa near the entrance where clients usually sat. Only then did he straighten his back and grumble.
"Damn, he's heavy as hell. This is why you don't take drunks."
"Good work. Come on, I gotta lock up. Let's get out of here."
"You sure it's okay to just leave him like this?"
"He sleeps in the office sometimes. No big deal."
The watchman locked the office door and stepped back into the elevator with the coachman.
As the doors closed and the car began to descend, two shadows appeared in the hallway. Kieran and Corey.
"Shall we get started?"
"Gloves first."
"Right. Keep forgetting."
It was an era when fingerprint investigation was just beginning to take root. Last year I had seen a newspaper piece about the NYPD trying field fingerprint collection for the first time. They were already building a criminal database off prints, and at crime scenes they used powder and brushes to lift prints from doorknobs, desks, safes. Gloves were no longer optional.
Corey, black gloves on, jangled a key ring—the keys he had taken off Roselli's body inside the carriage. After trying three or four nearly identical keys he finally opened the office door.
They ignored Roselli snoring on the waiting-room sofa and got to work. Corey unlocked the inner door to the president's office. On the far wall another door caught their eye—two keyholes.
"Found it. Door to the safe room."
"Then open it."
Corey grinned and fished through the key ring again. After a few tries a solid click sounded. Inside stood nothing but one large, heavy black safe. A lever sat beside the dial; above it, in yellow lettering: Herring Hall Marvin Safe Co. Same company as the safe in my secret room.
"Damn. Latest model, just like I figured."
"Can you do it?"
"We'll find out."
Corey knelt in front of the dial. He peeled off his gloves, pressed an ear close, and turned the dial with delicate fingertips, murmuring,
"Three bolts. Keep turning like this and you start to hear the clicks…"
Every time the dial changed direction Corey's eyebrows twitched. He held his breath. The moment the combination lined up he put pressure on the handle.
The door did not open.
"Ah, these bastards put a secondary lock on it."
Corey felt along the brass seam beneath the dial. He flicked a fingernail lightly.
"There's a little switch hidden inside… oh yeah, got it."
The instant he pressed the switch—click.
The heavy steel door began to swing open.
"See that, Boss? There's not a safe in the world I can't crack."
Looking at the back of Corey's head made me feel as if my own safe had just been cracked. Was the one in my secret room really secure? I decided I would have to install a triple-lock system.
The interior of the safe was divided into compartments. The lower section held bills neatly sorted by denomination—five, ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred, five hundred dollars.
"Whoa. This might be a record haul."
I opened the bag and Corey swept the cash inside. Bonds and bank papers would be useless to us. I took only the ledgers and the cash.
We wiped every one of Corey's prints from the safe as thoroughly as possible, then moved to the next task.
"Boss, you decide?"
"There should be a door that leads outside. Find it."
After enough fatal building fires, America had made iron fire-escape stairs mandatory. Any multi-tenant office building was required to have them, and they had to be reachable from the exterior windows.
While I erased the remaining traces, Corey located the door that led to the fire-escape stairs.
"I think we can go down this way."
"Then you take the bag and go first. Don't forget to take your shoes off."
I hoisted Roselli onto my back. No heartbeat. He was already dead—no question.
Clouds drifted across the moon. The interior sank into deeper darkness.
I walked to the iron stairs and, without hesitation, threw the body I was carrying over the edge.
"Everyone who gets mixed up with you ends up dead, senior."
Another one had gone down.
A cleaner mopped the thick blood from the alley—Roselli's blood. Until recently he had been the man digging for information.
"Gives me the creeps."
"Who commissioned the job on Roselli?"
The junior asked seriously. Raymond Kane's mouth twitched; he sighed and shook his head.
"Nothing to do with this case."
In the short time available they had pieced the outline together.
The night before, Roselli had gotten drunk and fallen asleep in his office. The night watchman's statement to the police backed that up. From there it was easy to reconstruct:
Sometime before dawn Roselli woke, still half-drunk, and opened the iron fire-escape door. Whether by accident or on purpose no one could say. Maybe he wanted fresh air. Maybe he suddenly decided he wanted to die. Either way, the official police version was that he had lost his footing and fallen down the fire stairs.
"They're going to call it suicide by jumping."
"Most likely."
Raymond thought for a moment, then asked,
"Any word yet on the Union boss?"
"I told you. NYPD, Pinkerton, every gang in the city—they're all looking and it's still radio silence."
"Weird as hell."
Some of the gangs operating in the LES even claimed they were part of the Union. But the moment you tried to climb the chain of command, nobody knew anything. Digging into the Union had put Raymond in personal danger more than once. Conversely, some people approached him with open arms—Irish and Italian gangs, mostly.
Find us the Union headquarters and we'll pay a thousand dollars. Condition is we share the intel.
Naples side? Or Sicily?
Doesn't matter.
Either way, the Union was priority number one for elimination. Both the Irish and the Italians had given Raymond Kane their contact numbers. All of it had happened in the handful of days he had been investigating the Union.
The more I think about it, the more it pisses me off.
Had a week been too short? No—even a month would probably have ended the same. Helplessness sagged his shoulders. Then the problem figure started circling in his head again.
"Edwin. You remember the anarchists who tried to assassinate Tammany Hall big shot Foley and got themselves killed?"
"Of course."
"You know who killed them? Name?"
"Well… he was a minor, so the NYPD deliberately kept the story small in case the anarchists went after him. I think the name was only half-mentioned."
"Kieran? Was that it?"
"Yeah, that sounds right."
The boy who had stopped an anarchist assassination and even finished them off. Calm beyond his years, a crack shot—enough that Pinkerton executives had taken notice.
The way he talks, the easy attitude, those eyes… I started this whole thing wrong.
Raymond Kane abandoned further canvassing. He grabbed a coffee with the not-particularly-helpful Edwin and moved on.
Second-floor office of the Allen Street twin buildings.
I had slipped into the secret room and only opened my eyes around two in the afternoon.
"Where did I leave off?"
Falling asleep counting money. Apparently I was living a pretty happy life.
I picked up the memory at a hundred thousand dollars and kept going. By the time I finished, the cash taken from Roselli came to a full hundred and ninety thousand.
I stacked the bills neatly and the safe was suddenly full. It was too small to hold four hundred thousand in cash. I left only the twenties and higher denominations inside and piled the rest on the desk.
Once everything was more or less sorted I closed the safe, left the secret room, pulled the lever hidden behind the bookcase, and moved into the public office.
"You're up, Boss?"
"What's the situation with Roselli?"
"Pedestrian found the body at six this morning."
NYPD coroners and officers had swarmed the scene, examined everything, and started tracing his movements from the day before.
"Rosenthal's going to get called in."
"Cops already went to SCL. Roselli's men are being questioned too. Looks like they're tracking the coachman as well."
Rosenthal's alibi was airtight. So was the coachman's—he had been accompanied by the watchman the whole time. No real problems there.
"By the way, I spotted an interesting face at the scene this morning."
"Who?"
"Raymond Kane."
Right—the promised week was up today. Rumors had been floating around for days that Raymond was tearing through the LES hunting the Union.
Want me to grab the bastard? He even showed up at the Pumpkin Dance Hall asking questions.
Leave him alone.
I was the one who had hired him to find the Union boss. I was genuinely curious how far he had gotten.
"We'll know by the end of today."
"You think he'll even show? Guy takes a ten-dollar advance and then vanishes, that's my bet."
"Then we never see him again. Fine by me."
I opened the file folder and flipped through the documents inside—debt contracts taken from Roselli's office. Not all of them; only the ones belonging to George Walcott and a few others.
"Leo. Tonight at nine. Tell Walcott to meet me at the same place as last time."
If I had solved the job, I was entitled to the reward.
Leo left. A good while later a visitor arrived.
Raymond Kane.
"Did you find him?"
Instead of answering, Raymond stared hard at me.
Had he actually uncovered the identity of the Union boss?
My fist tightened without my noticing.
Then:
"A week was too short. Give me another two weeks."
"Will more time change anything?"
"No matter how I look at it, I started wrong. If I start over I think I can get it."
"How?"
Raymond locked eyes with me, lips twitching.
"Kieran Graves. I should have started with the client—you."
"…"
"You're the one who gunned down those two anarchists without hesitation, right? If I'd known you were the same person I could've saved myself a lot of wasted effort."
His gaze grew even more intense.
"Under the Pumpkin Dance Hall there's a gambling den, upstairs is a lingerie shop. That's strange enough, and you've been mixed up in more than a few incidents. More than anything, you can't fool my eyes. The easy attitude, the look in your eyes, the shooting skill. You're definitely—"
"…?"
"—a member of a rival gang to the Union. Five Points? Or some new outfit?"
He had gotten that far… and that was the conclusion.
I swallowed a laugh and kept my face straight.
"I asked you to find the Union boss. Why are you investigating me?"
"Because you seem like the one who would know the Union best. That's why I—"
"That's enough."
Raymond had failed to find the Union boss. But the implications were not small. Plenty of people still suspected a connection between the Pumpkin Dance Hall and the Union. If someone who knew me better than Raymond started digging, it could get dangerous.
I had money now. Maybe it was time to expand and relocate the dance hall completely, sever the link for good.
I set that problem aside for later.
"You've got the wrong end of the stick."
"But you are the Kieran who killed those anarchists, right?"
"That's correct. The precinct cops around here all know it."
"That so?"
Raymond clicked his tongue, wrestled with something for a moment, then asked,
"You hear Archie Roselli's dead?"
"Yes. Surprised the hell out of me. Suicide by jumping out of nowhere?"
"Gave me the creeps too. Anyway, I shouldn't even be asking this, but… why did you need information on Roselli?"
He looked more genuinely curious than suspicious.
"You still have any connections over at Pinkerton?"
"I hate bragging, but let's just say there's no detective I don't know."
"Then why'd you quit?"
"…Had my reasons. Anyway, why? You interested in Pinkerton?"
"No. I'm interested in you, Raymond."
Ever since I had founded the flea market I had been turning over an idea: a magazine that would handle business intelligence not just for the LES but for all of Manhattan.
"The goal is to dig up company information and build a network that lets us know about stock plays and mergers before anyone else."
One of Pinkerton's core businesses was corporate espionage. Raymond understood better than most how valuable early information could be—how it turned into money and power.
"On the surface it's a business magazine. Real purpose is intelligence gathering. That is money and power."
"Yeah… while I was running around looking for the Union boss, the flies started swarming."
"Flies? Gangs?"
Raymond nodded.
"Irish crews, Italian crews—they all had their eyes open looking for the Union."
As if it were nothing, he held out a couple of business cards. The Irish name was unfamiliar; the Italian one I knew well.
Salvatore Lucania
Personal motive? Or orders from Frankie Yale, head of the Sicilian alliance?
Either way, the number of people hunting the Union was only growing.