The First Family by Mike Dash Read Free Book Online

exceedingly hard, because of the fact that it was blurred, bloody and burned, to decipher the writing,” the newspaper confessed. Only the
Mail and Express
had come up with anything more promising. “An employee of the Street Cleaning Department, named Zido, called at the station and saw the body,” it informed its readers. “He said it looked like a man whom he had seen peddling fish on the East Side.” But among several hundred East Siders sent by the police to shuffle past the cadaver,Zido was the only one who thought he recognized that face. “Twenty hours of zealous searching by three sets of detectives and by many reporters have failed to reveal any clue to the identity of the murdered man,” confirmed the
Evening World
.
    Thus far, Flynn had no reason to suppose that the barrel victim, found on an Irish East Side street, had any connection to his own investigation. It was only when the Chief opened that day’s
New York Journal
that he sat up with a start. Hearst’s daily had secured the only photograph of the dead man lying on the slab. Its picture had been hurriedly composed and poorly shot—it had been snatched from a low angle and showed the corpse’s face only in profile. But there was something deeply familiar about those features.
    Flynn felt certain he had seen the man before. Where, though? The Secret Service man closed his door, lit a cigar, and searched his mental files of suspects. After a while it came to him. The face of the man in the morgue was that of the stranger he had watched the previous night slouching against a streetlamp in Stanton Street. He had the same hair, the same straight nose. Folding up his copy of the
Journal
, the Chief summoned Operative Henry. Get down to the morgue as soon as possible, he said. Call back when you have seen the body.
    Henry left Wall Street flanked by two other agents who had kept the watch on Stanton Street, and it was past 6:30 P.M . when they phoned in. All three, Henry explained, believed they recognized the dead man from Laduca’s store. But there was still at least a little room for doubt. The face of the barrel victim greatly resembled that of the man who had loitered under a streetlamp the previous evening, but his clothes seemed different. The man in Little Italy had been clad in a brown three-piece suit. The barrel victim was wearing blue.
    Henry’s call bothered Flynn. He thought it highly unlikely that the dead man had changed his clothes in the few hours that separated his appearance on Stanton Street from his violent death. After mulling the problem over for a moment, though, it struck him that he and his operatives might have been the victims of some optical illusion. The man they had watched on Stanton Street had been standing almost directly beneath a slanting electric light that had made it almost impossible to make out the details of his clothing.
    The possibility needed to be checked, so Flynn called the East Side precinct house where the body had been taken and arranged to have thedead man’s clothes sent over to his office. While he waited for his package to arrive, the Chief rigged up a light over his desk to simulate the streetlight by Laduca’s store. He carefully adjusted the fitting so that it shone down at the same angle as the lamp in Stanton Street, then turned off the other bulbs in the office. Soon enough there was a knock at the door and another agent entered with a package that contained the bloodstained suit. Flynn tore off the wrapper and thrust the bundle under the slanting light. He stood well back and squinted.
    The cloth looked brown. He reached for the phone on his desk and placed an urgent call to Inspector McClusky.
    MEANWHILE, UP IN LITTLE ITALY , Sergeants Carey and Petrosino had found the Café Pasticceria. Its owner, Pietro Inzerillo, was scrawny, almost illiterate, and much older than the other members of Morello’s gang—he was a graying forty-four years old and sported an unfashionable mustache.