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Culp raised his voice. “Lee! Barry! Get in here.”
They entered quickly. Too quickly.
“Were you listening at the door?”
They exchanged looks. Barry tried to bull through it. “Sure we was listening. You’re alone in here with this guy. We gotta make sure you’re O.K.”
John Butler Culp reached back and took a Colt Bisley .32-20 target pistol from the wall of guns. He fired once at Barry. The heavyweight sagged to the floor with a hole the diameter of a cigarette between his eyes.
Lee gaped in disbelief.
Culp fired again.
Then he said to Branco, “Get rid of the bodies, partner.”
31
Skeletons were scattered like pick-up sticks. The half of the graveyard nearest the
church was still a timeless patch of headstones poking out of green grass, but the explosion had churned the rest into muddy earth and jumbled bones. Above it rose a mountain of bricks and timbers, all that remained of three five-story tenement buildings and Antonio Branco’s grocery warehouse.
Isaac Bell surveyed the destruction from a roof across Prince Street. The Mayor had put the Health Department in charge of removing rubble to search for bodies. Scores of city workers were digging, shifting, and loading their finds into wagons.
“How,” Bell asked, “did the gas penetrate three entire buildings before it exploded?”
The tall detective was flanked by explosives expert Wally Kisley and Gang Squad chief Harry Warren. They hovered at his elbows, braced to grab hold if he fell over. Bell shrugged them off and took a long, hard look.
Branco’s Grocery had occupied two lots, fifty feet of street frontage. Three side-by-side tenements, each twenty-five feet wide, measured another seventy-five feet. The explosion had leveled one hundred twenty-five feet of buildings and fifty feet of graveyard. As Kisley had put it when Bell walked out the hospital’s back door, “One hell of a bang.”
Now, looking down from the rooftop, Kisley did not sound entirely comfortable with his explanation about the scale of destruction. “Thing is, Isaac, they build tenements in rows, several at a time. The walls are made of brick, but they leave man passages so the workmen can move easily between them. When they’re done building, they fill the holes with scrap material and lightly plaster them over. Not much to stop gas from seeping through.”
“How did Branco set it off and escape with his life?”
“Could have left a timing device to spark it off. Could have laid a fuse.”
Bell turned to Harry Warren. “I want you to investigate where and how Branco’s legitimate businesses connected to the underworld.”
“I’ve been looking at that ever since you first brought it up,” said Warren. “I still can’t find a single complaint about fraud or extortion. Branco ran his grocery business clean as a whistle.”
Kisley interrupted. “It’s like he was two entirely different people: a crook, and a choirboy.”
“Then why didn’t the crooked outfits attack him?”
“Only one thing would stop them,” said Warren.
“Fear,” said Bell.
Warren nodded emphatically. “Somehow, lowlifes knew better than to mess about with Branco.”
“But if no one ever saw him with crooks, how did he give orders? He controlled gangs: Black Hand gorillas, drug smugglers, and counterfeiters. For that matter, how does he command them now while he’s on the run?”
“I don’t know, Isaac.”
Another question puzzled Bell.
“Why did he blow up the building?”
“He ambushed us.”
