CHAPTER IX
Jerry Hoffman's death created a sensation and for days the city was rife with conjectures as to who could have carried out such a daring murder plot. But the police and gangland both had a good idea as to who was responsible. The dicks took Johnny Lovo down to headquarters and questioned him for half a day but he told them nothing beyond proving an alibi for himself. Nor did he give the impression of defiantly holding back something. On the contrary, he blandly and smilingly convinced them that he actually knew nothing. But the North Side gang was far from convinced and some day they meant to have vengeance for the death of their chief.
Neither Tony nor Jane was ever mentioned in connection with the affair. Lovo gave them a thousand dollars each and thanked them profusely, promising to let them handle any other little jobs he might have in the future. In the meantime he sent an enormous and elaborate floral piece bearing his card to Jerry Hoffman's garish and expensive funeral and gave Tony various assignments in connection with the gang's activities. But he didn't send Tony back to the interesting but perilous task of proselyting saloonkeepers—he considered the boy too valuable an aid now to risk in such reckless fashion. No, Tony had become a staff officer now. His work consisted mainly in relaying Lovo's orders to the powerful leader's henchmen and in receiving reports that Lovo himself was too busy to hear. There was no detail of the gang's operation that Tony did not come to know.
He spent all his spare time in pursuing Jane Conley. And the more he saw of her, the more fascinated he became with her. Yet there was something elusive about her. He could never feel that he had a definite grasp upon her. Yet he finally got his courage up to the point of proposing that they take a flat together.
"I'm not interested in marriage," she answered with a shake of her shapely head.
"Neither am I," agreed Tony quickly. "But who said anything about marriage? I said I thought it would be nice for us to have a flat together."
Again she shook her head.
"I've never lived with a man."
"Well, you might find it a pleasant experience."
"Yes," she admitted frankly, looking him straight in the eye. "And then again I might not. I'm afraid it would be too—intimate; that people, even if they were very much in love when they started, would surely tire each other finally."
"Is there—somebody else?"
"Not particularly."
"But there is somebody?" he persisted jealously.
She laughed lightly. "There is always somebody else. Any girl knows more than one man and often likes more than one very much."
"Then you do like me a little?" He was at her side, with her hand caught in both of his.
She nodded.
"And you will think about what I proposed?"
"Yes, I'll think about it."
And with that he had to be content. This Jane Conley was a very strange woman, he reflected. He often wondered who she was, where she came from. As much as he had been with her, he really didn't know her at all. And he knew enough about women to realize that that very mystery and elusiveness was one of the main reasons why she fascinated him so intensely.
But he had enough on his mind without troublesome love affairs. Contrary to expectations, the North Side gang had found a new leader and apparently an able one, a wily little Italian rightly named Schemer Bruno. Rumor had it that he was reorganizing things in every direction and preparing to set out on a campaign of reprisals and business-getting that would set the city by the ears. That he was utterly ruthless and intended carrying on with gusto the feuds begun by his predecessor was proven by the fact that another of Johnny Lovo's best men was "taken for a ride," his body discovered out in the country with a scrawled note: "In Memory of Hoffman," tacked to his chest with the blade of a pocketknife.
"I tell you, Tony, I don't like this," said Lovo after the man's body bearing its gruesome message was brought in.
"Not gettin' scared, are you?" demanded Tony. He talked to Lovo now with the freedom of a privileged counselor.
"Hell, no!" snapped the gang leader, but he talked like a man who is assuming a falsely ferocious air to maintain his own courage. "But just the same I don't like it. It may be you next—or me. I don't want to spend the rest of my life having somebody shot and trying to keep somebody else from shooting me or my employees."
"Forget it!" advised Tony. "It's all in the game. We'll fight 'em to a finish and get this Schemer guy too if necessary."
"No, not yet. Maybe he'll quit now. I don't want to spend all my time in a war; it takes too much time away from making money."
Tony departed from that interview much disgusted with Johnny Lovo. He did not realize the essential differences between them; that Lovo was merely a shrewd and unscrupulous man willing to do anything for money; that he was much more a business man than a fighter; and that he had had none of Tony's war experience which had taught the younger man such a supreme contempt for human life.
Then for the first time Tony actually saw the close contact which exists between crime and the law. Lovo was summoned to the District Attorney's office and he took Tony along as a sort of bodyguard and aide-de-camp. The District Attorney was a little man with a flat nose, an undershot belligerent jaw and mean little eyes.
"This shooting has got to be stopped," he barked at Lovo. "It's—"
"But I'm paying—"
"Of course you are. And you'll keep on paying if you want to keep on doing business. It isn't your business that I'm objecting to; it's this damned shooting that's going on among you. It's getting the city a bad name and what's more important, the newspapers are beginning to ride me and my administration. I don't want to interfere with you boys any more than is absolutely necessary, but this killing has got to be stopped."
"I'm willing. It's that North Side outfit."
"And they say it's you. I had this Schemer Bruno in here for an hour this morning and he promised his mob would do no more killing if yours didn't. So that's settled, then. Now I don't want to hear of any more gang wars."
For six months there was peace, that is, on the surface. There were no killings but fist-fighting and stabbings occurred with too great frequency to be accidental. The rivalry for business was becoming keener and more bitter daily, and all sides knew that it was merely a question of time until somebody blew the lid off and started the old feuds all over again. The two South Side factions also were beginning to meddle in districts which belonged to other gangs and on the near west side a crowd of five brothers had suddenly set up in the bootlegging and allied rackets with a strong gang of their own.
Tony was growing restive from inaction. And he was deeply resentful of many things, of the fact that the last murder of a Lovo man was still unavenged, of the fact that other gangs were beginning to encroach upon the Lovo territory and that they were not being challenged by the bullets that should be poured into them. He had just about decided to begin a lone war of reprisal when the lid was blown off.
He and Johnny Lovo were dining at a table in the ground floor restaurant of the hotel where Lovo had his headquarters and which he owned. Suddenly there was a rapid staccato rattle of shots from outside somewhere, the tinkling crash of shattered plate glass windows and the spiteful whizzing of bullets. With one sweep of his arm, Tony overturned the table and dragged Lovo down behind it. He had recognized that peculiar stuttering of those guns outside. Machine guns! Why hadn't somebody used them before? Why hadn't he, an expert machine gunner, thought of them and brought them into play in this other war that was for money only? Well, if that was the way they were going to play now, he'd give them a nasty dose of their own medicine.
That shooting had been a direct attempt to get Johnny Lovo himself. It was the most daring move of the enemy so far. And it had been partly successful. Lovo had been hit in the shoulder. It wasn't a serious wound but the fact remained that he had been hit for the first time and it brought a hunted look into his eyes that remained there for ever after. Johnny wasn't a warrior when his own person was involved; his nerves weren't constructed to stand the strain.
That attempt to kill Lovo made Tony furious. He felt that it was a gesture of contempt which must not be allowed to remain unanswered if the Lovo organization was to continue and to endure. Without saying a word to anybody, he managed to purchase a machine gum himself. Then one night he set out on a little war of his own.
The headquarters of the North Side gang was upstairs over a florist's shop which had been the property and hobby of the gang's first and greatest leader, the famous Dean Martin, who had been shot down among his own flowers—the first post-war gang leader to die from the bullets of an enemy. The shop, which was directly across the street from a large cathedral, was located on a thoroughfare which was dark and quiet at night.
Sitting in the tonneau of the car with his machine gun on his lap, Tony ordered his chauffeur to drive slowly past the shop. As the car moved deliberately along, Tony lifted the machine gun to his shoulder—it was one of the new type that are operated much as a rifle—and riddled the front of the shop, both upstairs and down. There had been a light on the second floor which went off the moment he started firing and he had no means of knowing if he hit anybody. But he had certainly done plenty of damage, he reflected happily as the car raced away from the scene. He'd given them as good as they sent, and with their own weapon. Since machine guns had been introduced into the war, the score was even.