“We did kill him, right, Mickey?”
“Of course we killed him, Bernie,” Mickey Hannan said. “We smashed his skull with a baseball bat and dumped him in a creek with a tire rim tied to his neck. So yes, we killed him.” Mickey thought what people said about Bernie McDonough was true, that he was strong as an ox and smart as one too.
“I mean, did we kill him before we dumped him in the creek?” Bernie wheezed.
“Who cares? Now shut up and let me drive. You can’t breathe through your busted nose, and I can hardly see through my left eye.”
They drove in silence until they passed a diner they’d seen on their way into town. “I thought we were stopping for pancakes,” Bernie said.
“We’re covered in blood, Bernie.”
Mickey would have liked pancakes and coffee just now. The diner’s large electric sign said World Famous Pancakes. He doubted a diner in Bay Shore, on Long Island, New York, made pancakes known throughout the civilized world. But Mickey liked pancakes, and he would have liked some before the half-hour, late-night drive back to Patchogue. Of course, since he and Bernie were covered in blood, a stop for pancakes, world-famous or not, was out of the question. Now all Mickey wanted to do was get to Dutch’s, tell the boss the job was done, go to his boarding house, and collapse into bed.
“Hey, Mickey, you think Dutch will be sore?” Bernie asked as they turned north toward the highway.
“I told you not to talk, Bernie. But why would Dutch be sore? We did the job, right? And it’s my eye and your nose hurting, not his, right? So shut up and relax, okay?”
Mickey wasn’t so confident about their boss not being sore. And Dutch Schultz wasn’t a man to be on the outs with. Dutch liked his operation to run smoothly, and Mickey’s eye and Bernie’s nose were strong evidence that the job had not gone smoothly at all. Dutch Schultz did not get to be one of Prohibition’s most-feared gangsters by tolerating screw-ups. Indeed, his proclivity for broken-bone justice helped him achieve that status, which Mickey knew because he was usually the one breaking bones.
Tonight’s business began a week ago when the blockhead clamdigger snuck into the abandoned naval air station in Bay Shore that Dutch used as a secret smuggling base for his bootlegging enterprise. The clammer retrieved a case of whiskey he squirreled away while working last month’s shipment and then tried to peddle the booze to some of the local speaks and restaurants. The idiot didn’t realize there wasn’t a speakeasy manager or restaurant owner from Montauk to Poughkeepsie who would buy booze from anyone but a recognized Dutch Schultz man. Word got back to Dutch, who ordered Mickey and Bernie, two of his trusted soldiers from the old neighborhood in Yonkers, to kill the clammer.
The plan was simple. Get word to the clammer through one of the speakeasy managers that a buyer would meet him at the old air station dock at nine tonight. Mickey would meet his boat and help offload the liquor. Bernie would sneak up from behind and smash his skull with a baseball bat. Then they would weigh him down and roll him off the dock. Easy as pie, with time for world-famous pancakes afterward.
Mickey and Bernie would have been cutting into those pancakes now, instead of driving through the rain, injured and blood-soaked, were it not for the clamdigger’s damn dog. As Bernie raised his bat to whack its master, the hound started howling. Startled, Bernie delivered a blow nowhere near lethal. The clammer, more angered than injured, landed several heavyweight-worthy punches, including one to Bernie’s nose and the other to Mickey’s eye, before Bernie managed to deck him with a final deadly skull-cracker. The two gangsters deposited the clammer at the bottom of the creek, weighted with a rusted tire rim they found at the old air station.
When Mickey’s big Nash sedan rumbled over the Long Island Rail Road crossing, he knew if they continued north for a mile they’d hit Sunrise Highway, and then it was a straight shot east to Patchogue.
“I feel a little bad for the dog,” Bernie said.
At that moment, just up the road, Louise Melton pulled her Cadillac coupe out of a friend’s driveway after dinner and some bathtub gin.
If Mickey hadn’t been in such a rush to get back to Patchogue, maybe he wouldn’t have been speeding on that dark, narrow lane. And if it weren’t raining, he would have seen better despite his left eye being swollen shut. But as Mickey told Bernie not to worry about the damn dog, Mrs. Melton turned left from a side street, crossing directly in front of his Nash. Swerving across the slippery road to avoid a head-on, Mickey sideswiped the Caddy and plowed into one of the majestic maple trees that lined the street.
The force of the impact catapulted Mickey and Bernie through the Nash’s windshield. When Police Officers Adam Stark and Philip Cahill arrived at the scene, they promptly arrested Mrs. Melton for drunken driving. Upon inspecting the two men’s corpses, they had no reason to conclude that Mickey’s bruised eye and Bernie’s mangled nose were anything other than injuries sustained in another of Bay Shore’s ongoing series of alcohol-related fatal car crashes.