The afternoon papers carried more of it. A boiler explosion in a residence hotel off Eighth Avenue, in the middle of Whore Row. A liquor-store owner shot to death in what the papers called a hold-up attempt, though the “bandit” had stolen nothing—it was suggested that he had been scared off after firing the four shots that had killed the owner. Another fatal automobile accident, this one in Jackson Heights, in which the driver, who had been alone in his year-old Bonneville Pontiac, was listed in the paper as “unemployed.”
The coup was less than twenty-four hours old. I had seven clippings. Each separate item was explainable in some manner less dramatic than the truth. No outsider, reading these separate and minor reports from the front, would guess that a revolution was taking place.
Most of the action wouldn’t be hitting the papers at all. There were surely men who had disappeared in the last twenty-four hours, and who would never be heard from again, but no one would be calling the police to find them. Other men, insisting that they had fallen downstairs, would be entering hospitals with no more public fanfare than is given any obscure accident victim. Store owners would be gazing gloomily at wrecked showcases and merchandise, about which they would not be calling the police or the insurance company.
Thursday night I walked around Manhattan steadily for five hours. I avoided midtown and Central Park, so most of my time was spent between 50th and 100th Streets, on and near Broadway. I had no goal. I simply had to burn the energy off. I saw no signs of the struggle.
Friday morning, I added three more clippings. Friday afternoon, I added another five. Among them was a resident of the Riverdale section of the Bronx, who broke his neck when he fell down a flight of stairs in his house. I recognized the name. He was one of the men who’d been at the meeting in Lake George. So the incumbents were fighting back.
The police must know what was going on. But they wouldn’t be anxious to advertise it. Like Irving Baumheiler, they would want it all very quiet. No sense upsetting the citizenry.
Saturday morning the papers reported, without knowing it, the results of a major battle the night before. The News, the Mirror and the Herald Tribune all reported the Athletic Club blaze in Brooklyn. The Herald Tribune and the Times reported the boiler explosion in the East Side night club half an hour after closing. Two more of the Lake George insurgents had run into fatal accidents, one in his home and one in his car. All in all, I had clippings on eleven incidents in the battle, no one of them found sufficiently newsworthy to be mentioned by all four of the morning papers.
When I called Johnson at three, he sounded nervous. “What the hell were you setting me up for, Kelly?”
“Why? What happened?”
“Nothing. I stuck my nose in and pulled it right back out again. Something’s going on.”
“I know.”
“You could’ve warned me.”
“I did. I told you to be careful.”
“Listen, just do me one favor. Don’t call me any more, okay?”
“All right.”
“Whatever the hell it is, I don’t want any part of it. I don’t even want to know about it.”
“All right, Johnson, I understand you. I won’t bother you again.”
“I’d like to help you out,” he said, and now he sounded apologetic. “But this just isn’t my league.”
“You said that before.”
“It’s still true. I’m great on divorce.”
“In other words, you don’t know where Ganolese is.”
“I got both his addresses. An apartment in town here, and a house out on the Island. But he isn’t at either one of them. And whatever’s going on, this doesn’t look like a good time to ask where else he might be.”
“All right.”
“I’m sorry. I did my best.”
“I know. Don’t worry about it. This shouldn’t be anybody’s league.”
We hung up, and I lit a cigarette and decided I’d have to do it the other way around. I looked in the phone book and found William Cheever’s law office listed, but no home phone. He wouldn’t be there on Saturday afternoon.
It was a long weekend.