The wheels of the lumber car passed over his leg and severed it about six inches above the ankle. His playmates summoned help and young Richard was rushed to Victory Memorial Hospital, where doctors amputated the stub below the knee. It saved his life. But Dick Lonergan was fated to live as a cripple.
In the months following the accident, the youngster was outfitted with a wooden stump which enabled him to walk—and which inevitably inspired the kids in his neighborhood to call him “Pegleg.” The name stuck for the twenty years since that accident, although his friends seldom called him that.
Because of his physical handicap, Lonergan had never made it with the opposite sex. Girls politely turned him down for dates during his teenage years; as he grew into manhood, women rejected his advances. It wasn’t until he met Mary Reilly that Lonergan finally found acceptance by a woman. Their friendship grew into romance and finally into a proposal of marriage—which Mary accepted. They were to have been wed that coming June. Mary’s death left Pegleg shattered beyond description. His only ambition now was to avenge her death by taking as many Black Hand lives as he could. He had already told Lovett that any plan to retaliate against the Italians must include him.
“If you don’t pick me,” Pegleg had said to Wild Bill, “I’ll take things into my own hands. I’m gonna even the score whether you decide to cut me in for the hit or not.”
With Lonergan’s passion for revenge so intense, Lovett knew he’d be a damned fool not to put the man in the lineup of annihilators dispatched against the Black Hand. After all, Lonergan had approached Lovett the previous Wednesday with the scheme of how to strike back at the Italians. He had laid it on the table for Wild Bill after they’d returned from Mary’s funeral. Lovett had been astounded not only by the uniqueness of Lonergan’s plan but by the infinite thought and attention to detail that had gone into it. Lovett decided then and there that Pegleg himself should be granted the privilege of getting up before the gang and giving the rendition of his brilliant blueprint for death.
Pegleg shifted restlessly as he stood on the chair now, his balance seemingly precarious as he tapped his wooden leg around on the seat searching for a comfortable stance. When he finally found a position that pleased him, he glanced at the faces staring up at him. Searching eyes peered from beneath the wide-brimmed hats, pinched lips drew together in anticipation of what he was about to say. Pegleg drew in a long nervous breath.
“I hear,” Lonergan began at last, the words coming softly and slowly, “the wops are going to hold a victory celebration for the score they made on us. It’s gonna be next Saturday night in Stauch’s Dance Hall on Surf Avenue. I say that’s when we should rap them, really lay it into ’em.”
It was a sweet plan. Lonergan proposed that he and three cohorts pose as the four-piece orchestra hired to play the affair. Pegleg and the three other executioners would present themselves at the door as a string ensemble. But instead of Stradivariuses or Cremonas, their violin cases would hold sawed-off shotguns, .45-caliber automatics, and, yes, even a tommy gun or two.
“How are you gonna play music when Frankie Yale’s boys see they got one orchestra there already?” hulking Eddie Lynch, the enforcer for the gang’s loansharking operations, challenged from the back of the room. “They’ll stuff you in your own violin cases before you get past the door.”
Lonergan smiled wryly at his detractor. “That’s where you come in, Eddie,” he quickly responded, pulling a piece of paper from his pocket and handing it to Jimmy the Bug, who was standing directly in front of Pegleg. “Pass it back to Eddie,” Lonergan said. A hand reached out and the paper was relayed to Lynch. As he read the writing, Eddie’s round, nervous face screwed up with frowning suspicion.
“What the hell is this?” he growled.
“That’s the names and addresses of the musicians,” Lonergan said firmly. “What you and some of the other boys are gonna do is stop them from showing up—” Pegleg took another deep breath. “No rough stuff, you understand. Just make sure they stay home awhile. And when me and the other violinists are finished with our numbers, you can let them go to Stauch’s. They’ll be needed then to play a funeral march.”
A sudden shifting of feet accompanied by an undercurrent of murmurs was a signal to Pegleg that the gang was duly impressed with the scenario so far. The smile on Wild Bill Lovett’s face and some others inspired Lonergan to unveil the rest of the plot with even greater enthusiasm.
It was a simple plan, much less complicated than Pegleg had led the gang to believe at the outset. Their initial impression was that the “orchestra” would mount the stage before breaking out its “pieces” and begin playing the cadenza of hot lead.
“What are you guys gonna do after you shoot up the place, walk through the crowd of ginzos saying, ‘Excuse me, please.’ and go out the front door?” Joe “The Boozer” Bean yelled derisively.
“No, no, no!” Lonergan shouted.
“You got it all wrong, Joe,” Lovett interrupted Pegleg’s response to Bean, the brother of Petey and Danny. “Dick didn’t say they’d shoot from the stage, although maybe he left that impression. The way it’s really gonna be, Dick and whoever goes on this one will jump out of the car on Surf Avenue, walk into Stauch’s right through the main doors, and start blasting.”
“Hey, that’s real great,” rasped Ernie “Skinny” Shea, one of the White Hands’ waterfront extortion collectors. “Our guys’ll be in and outta the joint before them Sicilian scum know what hit em!
But the plan didn’t sit right with Shea’s sidekick in shakedowns, Wally “The Squint” Walsh.
“Why don’t you just go in with the rods showing?” he asked in his gravelly voice, his eyelids shuttered. “What the hell for do you need to get fancy with violin cases and all that shit?”
“Because,” Lovett said slowly, his patience running out fast at the thickheads who apparently hadn’t listened closely when Pegleg was covering that ground. “You see, Wally, there are gonna be maybe one or two wops at the door who’ll be watching who goes in. So if our guys hop out of the car with their artillery showing, they’ll bo wiped out before they even put their feet on the sidewalk.”
Charleston Eddie then raised a very good point when he asked how Lonergan expected even to reach the door of the dance hall without being recognized.
“I know what you’re saying,” Pegleg grinned in spite of the oblique reference to his wooden leg. But he was prepared with an answer. “That’s all gonna be taken care of,” he assured them. “Bill’s gonna buy me one of them new artificial legs. You can wear a shoe with it and it looks like the real thing. I was measured this morning for one, and it’ll be ready for me first thing Tuesday.”
The boys began clapping for Lonergan. And buoyed by the seeming acceptance of his plan, Pegleg began doing a jig on the chair.
With no further questions, Lonergan asked for three volunteers to accompany him on his mission. Nearly every hand in the warehouse office was flung in the air.
“No good,” Lovett said. “We gotta make this fair.” He took off his gray fedora and placed the crown in the palm of his left hand. Then, urging Lonergan off the chair, Wild Bill stepped up so everyone could see what he was doing. He stuffed his hand into his coat pocket and pulled out a fistful of white marbles, which he began dropping into the hat. “One, two, three…”
The count went to fourteen and his hand was empty. Lovett then pulled another handful of white marbles and continued dropping them, one at a time, into his chapeau… twenty, twenty-one.” He stopped and returned the remaining marbles to his pocket. Then he went to his jacket pocket and pulled out three black marbles. “One, two, three,” he counted as he let them fall into the