Chapter 6

Suddenly, I was the man to call for any sort of difficulty faced by the rich. Of course, I gave preference to kidnapping cases, but there were others that generated clients. Yeah, and I did some pro bono work, but not much of that because how much profit can there be in stealing from a poor person?

I even became known among the Jewish community as a goy who could be trusted. Not only that, I spoke Yiddish: what greater recommendation could there be? I got a call for help when the synagogs were being trashed. There did not seem to be a clear reason for the desecration. The best anybody could come up with was that it was a pure hate crime. The most obvious suspects were the local Catholics or the local Baptists. Even at that, nobody could think of someone or some clique to accuse.

Anyway, seven synagogs had been trashed by the time I was called in. The community offered to pay me $1,000 if I could find who was doing the damage and bring it to a halt. All I had to work with was that the damage was being done on Friday night so that the first anyone saw of the desecration was on Saturday morning when they showed up for worship.

So far, there seemed to be no pattern to the attacks: they were scattered all over the Jewish community. There were a total of 53 untouched synagogs, and there was no way at this point to know which one would be hit next. All we knew for sure was that a synagog was trashed every week, so the perpetrator had a long-term schedule ahead of him/them.

The only solution that I could think of was to revitalize my Baker Street Irregulars. I went by the Blumberg restaurant for lunch and snagged Ruth when she walked by. I asked her to tell Aaron that I needed to see him, and I would be waiting for him at the same place that we had met during the kidnapping case. Ruth promised to pass the message along, and I had to wait for less than an hour for Aaron to show up.

I told him what I had in mind, and he was all in favor of reactivating the troops, but this time we would need more kids. I made the same offer of two-bits per week to the troops and four-bits per week for Aaron. Furthermore, I would pay $1 to anyone who could provide a description or other helpful information on the perpetrators and $10 to the one who made the catch possible. That meant 53 kids to be recruited, though the first few from the previous case would be easy to recruit.

I had Aaron find a place where each kid could watch a synagog. In all cases so far, entry has been through the front door, so that was where a watcher was placed to observe things. It did not seem reasonable that the modus operandi would change. If it did, we would have both the front and rear doors watched.

Unfortunately, though we scored sort of a hit on our first night of watching, we did not get enough of a description to do us any good. We knew that three men were involved in the vandalism, but it was too dark to get a description of any of them. Again, the attack was in a totally unexpected place. I wondered if the vandals were using a random number generator to pick a target, but I knew that was virtually impossible. Well, all we could do was keep on with the present plan until it worked or until somebody thought up a better plan.

The next Friday, we were a little luckier. The hit on the synagog was done by three men, but we did get a description of one of the men. The problem was that in the dim light, little could be seen of the men except that they were all three White males of average build. They were not wearing masks, but they were wearing caps so that we had no way of knowing the hair color.

Some luck at last: the next synagog to be hit was in a neighborhood with better lighting. The watcher got a good look at one of the faces, and a different vandal lost his cap, so it was possible to see that he was a blond. At last! We were getting somewhere. I had the sketch artist who had made up the picture of Eve Van Steel to try to work out something with the description we had.

I paid for three different sessions between the artist and the observer to try to work out a composite drawing from the three separate sessions. The boy insisted that the finished picture was an excellent likeness, so I had a large number of handbills printed up with the picture and an offer of $10 for information on where this person could be found.

We plastered these handbills all over the city, and some even leaked into the Barbary Coast district. That was when we had our second break. Of course, we had a lot of false positives, but the search finally narrowed down to Winnie the Weasel of the Top Hat gang. He was the spitting image of the drawing, and his alibi kept changing.

Well, this was enough pussy-footing around. After a lot of work and a lot of coins spread around, I found out where Winnie the Weasel was hiding. Very simply put, I kidnapped him and took him to an empty building in the Jewish ghetto (a redundancy, I know).

It didn't take long to get Winnie to admit that he was one of the vandals, but he was relying on the protection of the Top Hat gang to keep me from hurting him seriously. It took a couple of hours to convince him that I was not afraid of the Top Hat gang, and he was going to hurt even more if he did not start talking. A candle flame applied to his balls did wonders to loosen his tongue.

The full story came out, as far as he knew it. The Top Hat gang had been hired to harass the Jews. Winnie knew none of the details of that side of the deal. All he knew was that he, Toby the Toad, and Harry the Hare were assigned the vandalism job. Somebody higher up in the gang had decided that destroying synagogs would do the job the contract called for. As a bit of revenge for the desecration, I broke both of Winnie's arms and dumped him naked in the middle of the territory claimed by the Rabbit gang. I don't know what happened to Winnie after that. Toby and Harry were hunted down and treated the same way.

Okay, a lot of people felt better at that point, but it did not prevent more attacks, so I kept up the watch on the remaining synagogs for four more weeks. Nothing was done to vandalize synagogs in that time, so we figured that the attacks would shift to something else.

That something else was a damned dirty trick: an upper class Jewish wife was kidnapped, raped multiple times, and thrown naked onto the main street of the ghetto. This was an especially heinous crime as far as the Jews were concerned, so I realized that I had to go after the top level of the Top Hat gang.

It was not too difficult to find out where the headquarters of the gang was located. What was difficult was getting in and getting back out alive. The main thing left to find out was the identity of the man who had originated the harassment contract. Until I got him, this problem could go on indefinitely.

The leader of the Top Hat gang was James Hopwell, known as Jimmy the Joker. I tracked him down to the third floor over a whore house in the heart of Top Hat territory. Jimmy the Joker lived and worked in the same set of rooms which encompassed the entire uppermost floor of the building. His bodyguards lived in apartments on the same floor, and there were always four of them on duty. The rest could usually be found somewhere in the whore house making use of the women. Jimmy also made use of the whores in the lower levels of the building, but they came to him. He was one of those rare men who was more interested in power and money than he was in sex.

Jimmy the Joker usually reserved Wednesday night as his night of sexual relief, so that was the night I planned to strike. The bodyguards would be nearby, but they would probably not be in the same room with Jimmy and his whore for the night. I assumed that fact would make it easier for me to get to him without armed interference.