ONCE PATROLMAN McNAMARA WAS CERTAIN OF THE ADDRESS, he put the call--"shooting in tavern, 12 East Park, man wounded"-on the police shortwave and then dialed Acting Captain Tom Rowe, on night detective detail upstairs.
Rowe bounded out of his cubbyhole office into the squad room, where two of his men, Tim O'Leary and Jimmy Kelly, were discussing the day's report of a quick title defense by James J. Braddock, who had just come off the New Jersey relief rolls to take the world's heavyweight championship away from the hard-hitting but sometimes indifferent Max Baer. Now there was talk of a match between the big Irish boxer and Joe Louis, the stylish puncher from Detroit's Negro slums. The sports pages quoted Joe Gould, the Cinderella Man's manager, as saying that "Jimmy may not be the best fighter in the world but he's the gamest, he'll knock out Louis," and O'Leary wasn't too thrilled by that faint endorsement. "That's a helluva way for a manager to talk about his meal ticket," he was telling his sidekick just as Rowe, his topcoat over his arm, came in and said, "We got a shooting at the Palace Chop House. Let's roll."
Rowe raced his sedan out of Franklin Street into Broad, swung right with the siren screaming and made the seven blocks to Park Place, where it merges with East Park, in less than three minutes. But the Rowe team had been beaten to the scene by Sidney B. White, Chief Inspector of New Jersey's Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission, and a couple of prowl cars.
White had enjoyed what amounted to a bleacher seat for the action outside the tavern. Staying at the Robert Treat that night, he had found it kind of close in his room and gone to the window, facing south to Park Street, to let in some air. He had just noted the time, 10:17 P.M., and as he opened the window he heard what sounded like 15 shots and saw a man in a white chefs uniform (King Lou) and a man in a dark outfit (Birkenfeld) running out of the Palace's side door into an alley. Then he saw a third figure emerge from the tavern itself, duck into the alley next to the Military Park Diner, step out, crouch and wheel with some difficulty, as though he were wounded, and start firing in the direction of Park Place. This was Abe Landau, trying to bring down his fleeing adversary with a gun that might have been empty by then. White, from his safe perch, wasn't the only witness to the grim tableau on suddenly busy Park Street.
Elderly John F. Gaul, alighting from a trolley at the bus terminal on his way from a Knights of Columbus meeting, saw Landau get off at least one shot. Gaul watched in stage-struck horror until he felt a sting on his temple, reached up and found blood on his hand. He had been grazed by a stray shot either of Landau's or of Lulu Rosenkrantz's from inside the Palace, possibly a ricochet off the terminal wall. Marion Seaberg, 23, on the way home from her job in the RCA plant at Harrison, was crossing East Park and Park Place when Landau's quarry came running by, discarded some empty shells into the gutter, and sped on into Military Park across the way. I. Lindon Wilcox, a Public Service driver, saw two men trading shots when he turned into East Park for the terminal. Once inside, he found three bullet nicks in the rear panel of his bus. Wallace C. Wood, the cook in the diner, heard the shooting and went to the side window facing the tavern and saw Abe Landau collapse onto the garbage can. Louis Schwartz, an attendant in the parking lot opposite the terminal, saw the retreating gunman. Birkenfeld, the waiter, viewed the action from the alley and then hastened to the St. Francis Hotel down the block and called the police. King Lou, whose first instinct was to get behind the heavy wooden icebox and stay there when the guns went off, followed Birkenfeld into the areaway and crouched there, rooted in terror, until the first prowl car pulled up. Of all these people, not one could offer a useful description of the retreating gunman.
White, for his part, rushed from the Robert Treat to the tavern and found Landau sitting unsteadily on the garbage can. The wounded gladiator gave the name of Abe Frank (one of his aliases) and a made-up Newark address and said he was just passing by and got shot. Just at that moment, the two radio cars arrived and White asked Patrolman W.P. Duffy, in the first one, to call an ambulance. Then he went into the Palace with Sergeant Percy A. Stanton, encountered the badly mauled Rosenkrantz and Schultz, moved on into the back room, found Berman on the floor, saw the work sheets strewn on the table, picked them up with a handkerchief so he wouldn't obliterate any fingerprints the police might need for identification purposes, and then went back to Schultz.
The Dutchman, slumped in his blood-stained chair just below a poster extolling the virtues of something called Burnett's White Satin Gin, not one of the bathtub brands he had peddled, gave the ABC inspector the name of Flegenheimer and said he didn't know what had happened. White sensed that this was the only survivor who might be well enough to talk but couldn't get anything out of him. All Schultz mumbled was that he was in the toilet when someone came in and shot him.
Now Rowe was on the scene with his men and he took over the questioning. He recognized the man in the chair.
"You're Dutch Schultz, aren't you?" "Yes," came the weak answer.
"Your real name's Arthur Flegenheimer, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"You're shot, aren't you?"
"Yes, and it's damn painful. I think they got me in the liver."
"No," the Captain said. "The wound's high. You got it through the chest."
"Well, get me off to a hospital."
"The ambulance is on the way. Who shot you?"
The answer came in the time-honored underworld phrase, faintly:
"I don't know who shot me."
Rowe detailed Timmy O'Leary to stand by the Dutchman and went on into the dining room, where Berman reached up a hand and murmured, "Help me, help me." Rowe told the fallen magic-maker of the numbers game that help was coming. Then he tried to find out who might have been responsible for all that mayhem. He got about as much from the crafty Abbadabba as O'Leary was getting from policy's overlord at that moment.
"You got a serious wound," the detective said to the Dutchman. "Why don't you tell us who did it?"
"I don't know," Schultz replied. "I know I got bad cramps.
Do something."
"The chunky O'Leary turned to Jack Friedman, whom he had known going back to the speakeasy days, and asked him for a brandy. With his right hand holding a towel to his wound, Schultz took the jigger in his left hand and downed the drink. "Thanks," he said to the cop. "That feels good."
By now Landau had been sped off in the first arriving police emergency wagon and City Hospital's three ambulances--the total fleet of the creaking 49-year-old institution--were on the scene. Rosenkrantz was carried into the first one on a litter. Schultz, just five-feet-seven and a squat 175 pounds, was loaded into the second ambulance in the arm chair he had been in all that time and O'Leary went with him. The Dutchman's eyes kept closing on the speedy one-mile trip to the hilltop hospital on Fairmount Avenue but he wasn't out by any means. As the meat wagon roared into the driveway, he reached into his right-hand pants pocket, fished out a roll of bills and handed it to Bernard Alberg, the interne on the bus. "Here," he said, "you might as well have this as the state. Take care of me, buddy." The startled Alberg, holding a huge wad of absorbent cotton to the gangster's gaping side, said he would have to turn the money--it would add up to $725--over to his superiors. Schultz's other possessions-an expensive yellow-gold wristwatch and an oversized sapphire ring he wore on the little finger of his right hand, not to mention that little switchblade knife--were impounded by the police. The cash, ring and watch would be claimed in time not by one but by two women identifying themselves as the lawful-wedded wives of Arthur Flegenheimer.
Otto Berman was deposited in the receiving room alongside the Dutchman and Sergeant Arthur Jollimore, another member of Rowe's squad, tried to question him even as the doctors started their emergency treatment.
"Don't waste your time," Schultz called over to Jollimore. "He won't talk."
And Abbadabba didn't.
Indeed, Rosenkrantz, Landau and Berman would not so much as admit that they were helpmates of Schultz's until the cops were able to satisfy them that the Dutchman had confirmed that they were all his "boys."
Once Schultz was stripped and given a dose of morphine to kill the pain, Police Chief John Harris and his deputy, John HaIler, undertook to question him again.
"What happened, Dutch?" Haller asked.
"All I know," said Schultz, "is that I saw fire and sort of lost track of everything. Now I've told you the truth."
"You haven't told us who shot you."
"I've told you everything I know. I don't know nothin'. I was in the tavern and some fellows came in shooting."
That "some fellows" was a cautious reference indeed. The man who shot the Dutchman used to boast that he had once been on the Beer Baron's payroll; even if he hadn't been, Schultz might well have known him, for he was one of the more celebrated killers of the time.
Harris and Haller tried a name on the Dutchman after awhile, just to see if it would play. The name was Amberg. Actually, there were two Ambergs, Joe and Louis, called Pretty because he was so ugly, and they happened to be a pair of fairly fresh corpses on the hands of the New York police at the time. Pretty Louis had expired, indeed, on the very morning of the Palace shootout. All chopped up with a blunt instrument, either a hatchet or a hammer, he had been wrapped in a kerosene-soaked blanket and deposited in an old car set afire on a deserted street on the Brooklyn end of the Manhattan Bridge. Joe, 43, had preceded his 36-year-old brother to the grave just three weeks earlier. All dressed up for a golf date, he was lined up against a garage wall in Brooklyn's Brownsville section, spawning ground of Murder Inc., and shot to death. The unfriendly trio performing this mission also turned its artillery on the Amberg chauffeur, Morris Kessler, so he died just for being there.
The Newark cops mentioned the late Ambergs because there was a suspicion abroad that the hungry Dutchman had recently moved into the loan-shark racket and run afoul of the fearsome brothers. It made for an interesting piece of speculation in the wake of the Newark bloodletting but there was no substantiation for it. It is just as likely that an Amberg sideline, the narcotics trade, had got them in trouble with some of the other mobs.
In any case, the Dutchman didn't bite when the dirty name was tried on him.
"Let me alone," he said to Chief Harris. "You're killing me. I'm getting weak."
Lulu Rosenkrantz was even less helpful, if that was possible.
"Get the hell away from me," he said when Haller threw the usual question at him. "Go out and get me an ice cream soda."
It was hardly a moment for that kind of repast, of course--not for a man with seven bullet holes in him.
Now Schultz was moved to a vacant four-bed ward on the second floor of the hospital's North Wing, once again with Tim O'Leary to keep him company.
O'Leary, who retired from the force in 1964 and went to work as a guard for the First National Bank of New Jersey, recalled 34 years after the Battle of the Palace that once he got upstairs he drew back with a start when he found himself standing by a window fronting on a row of old rooming houses. It had occurred to him that the word would be out by now that the Dutchman was still alive and that some fresh sharpshooters might be taking up temporary residence across the street.
O'Leary phoned this alert to his superiors downstairs, but it was hardly necessary, because the brass had remembered a night in Newark General, just five years earlier, when a trio of gunmen dropped in on a gentleman recovering from a bungled gangland ride. The patient, Dominick (The Ape) Paselli, 52, and in and out of police hands for a good many of those years, was suffering from nothing more than
superficial wounds of the scalp and cheek when his guests arrived; he did not recover from the fresh leaden posies they were delivering. It wasn't a rap the cops had to take, because The Ape's presence in the private institution had not been reported to them, but they had it in mind nonetheless and now they had taken all the necessary precautions, inside Newark City Hospital and out.
Once O'Leary settled down on the side of the Dutchman's bed away from the window, he noticed for the first time that
the gangster's black hair had touches of gray in it. He thought this was strange for a guy in his early thirties who had led such a high life up to that night but he didn't dwell on it. Schultz, waiting his turn in surgery, seemed fairly alert and wasn't complaining, so the cop started talking to him again.
"Anything you want me to get for you?"
"I want a priest," said the Dutchman, who was the son of a German-Jewish immigrant couple and had listed his faith as Hebrew on his hospital pedigree.
"You asked for Father McInerney when you were down in the emergency ward," O'Leary said, referring to the Reverend Cornelius McInerney, a chaplain at Essex and Hudson County prisons, "and it's been taken care of. The Father is probably on the way. You know him?"
"Yes. He's my friend."
"Why don't you tell me who shot you now?"
"I don't know."
"You got a family you want me to call?"
"Yes, a wife."
"Where?"
The Dutchman gave the detective a vague address in North Jersey, either out of approaching delirium or guile. O'Leary knew there was no such address and tried the familiar question once more.
"Tell us who did it. We'll go get the guy. Don't you want us to do that?"
"I don't know who shot me," the wounded man murmured. "It was somebody that didn't like me, I guess."
Well, that was the heart of it.
Even at that moment, as the clock moved toward midnight, the "somebody" who didn't like Dutch Schultz--and of course it was more than one somebody--had a second shift of torpedoes going to work across the river in Manhattan. This time the guns would be pointed at the heart or the head of the pint-sized tough guy who had been delegated to keep an eye on the New York end while the Dutchman was trying to stand off both the law and his business enemies from what he had mistakenly considered a safe distance.
