Jericho by George Fetherling Page B

same thing every day: black coffee. Which is probably how come the MacLeods or whoever killed him heard about him. They saw he carried a fat roll of banknotes and wore more fancy jewellery than you’d see in a really good pawnshop window. The cops knew all about Cappy too. The previous August, his suite had been raided. They were looking for betting slips but didn’t find anything because all the paper had been burned. Being so unsuccessful, the cops hadn’t released this event to the press. Which is one reason why hardly any Citizens seemed to have heard of Cappy Smith until he got toe-tagged. The main reason, though, was that he was a big fish only in this one small stretch of pond.
    The papers, which never seemed to get anything right and didn’t seem to care, quoted one of Cappy’s commission men saying that Cappy was killed because he’d refused to pay another twenty-five dollars a week in extortion money to some new muscle. That sounded pretty lame to me, as we knew he was already paying thousands a year in protection.Another source claimed he was exterminated because he’d refused to pay off on a race he thought was fixed. There were also stories, no surprise, tying the murder to characters from Detroit. Theories like that were always being floated.
    But the first pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place only three days after Cappy’s death, though the connection wasn’t obvious at the time. In November 1938 , three men and a woman broke into the Snaketown apartment of one James Senior, respected hoodlum and convicted armed robber, roughed him up a little and stole an awful lot of beer, whisky and gin. The complaint was laid by a character who was identified as the money man in Senior’s operation. Before leaving, the assailants ripped the telephone from the wall, just like the guys who killed Cappy later did. Those charged by the Crown were Joseph Coppalano (an Eyetalian!), John (the Bug) Howard, a prominent holdup artist, Mickey MacLeod (who had been in Kingston Pen as recently as two weeks before) and Mickey’s wife or girlfriend, Margaret MacLeod, known to everybody as Muff. On January 11 , the day before Cappy’s funeral (an event so quiet, the
Globe
said, that it “might have been the funeral of a little-known labouring man”), Coppalano, the Bug and Mickey were found guilty. Muff, who was quite a looker, was found innocent. Only a few days later, Muff was back in court, testifying that Coppalano, the Bug and six others had beaten
her
, and two female roommates, after busting into
their
apartment, which was apparently not a domicile she shared with Mickey. You follow me?
    At this point no one had pinned Cappy’s murder on Mickey, and so the raiding of bookie joints and the dragnet of suspects all over the city went on some more, except thatby now it moved far beyond people suspected of being Eyetalian and became a crackdown on gambling and liquor in general. These were the two greatest evils to the idiot chief constable, who believed, for example, that bookmakers should be given the lash. He had been brought in right around the time Yankee Prohibition ended to straighten out the force, which had gone through a big corruption scandal. He was puffed up in all his glory with news stories about raids on a Snaketown address that netted a bank of twenty phones with their bells removed. Hundreds of people got questioned and a lot of them arrested in various parts of the city—a dozen in one twenty-four-hour period. The Chief called this real progress and asked the politicians for a budget increase. The fact that the grieving witnesses to Cappy’s murder weren’t able to identify any of the dozen in a lineup didn’t seem to matter. Finally, during the last week of February, after about six weeks of putting people in the Box, Mickey and Sandy were charged with Cappy’s murder—Mickey as the trigger man. Both, the public learned, had been free on bail, for different crimes (in Mickey’s case, a