The caller was from one of the two afternoon papers. He repeated essentially what Meyer had already heard from his two previous callers, and then asked if Meyer knew anything about it. Meyer, loath to lie lest the story eventually broke and tangentially mentioned that there had been a police credibility gap, suggested that the man try the lieutenant later on in the day. When he hung up, he looked at the clock and decided to wait for the next call before trying to contact the lieutenant. Fortunately, there were now only four daily newspapers in the city, the leaders of the various newspaper guilds and unions having decided that the best way to ensure higher wages and lifetime employment was to make demands that would kill off the newspapers one by one, leaving behind only scattered goose feathers and broken golden egg shells. Meyer did not have to wait long. The representative of the fourth newspaper called within five minutes. He had a bright chirpy voice and an ingratiating style. He got nothing from Meyer, and he finally hung up in cheerful rage.
It was now five minutes to ten, too late to catch Byrnes at home.
While he waited for the lieutenant to arrive, Meyer doodled a picture of a man in a fedora shooting a Colt .45 automatic. The man looked very much like Meyer, except that he possessed a full head of hair. Meyer had once possessed a full head of hair. He tried to remember when. It was probably when he was ten years old. He was smiling painfully over his own joke when Byrnes came into the squadroom. The lieutenant looked dyspeptic this morning. Meyer surmised that he missed the painters. Everyone on the squad missed the painters. They had added humanity to the joint, and richness, a spirit of gregarious joy, a certain
"We got trouble," Meyer said, but before he could relate the trouble to the lieutenant, the phone rang again. Meyer lifted the receiver, identified himself, and then looked at Byrnes.
"It's the Chief of Detectives" he said, and Byrnes sighed and went into his office to take the call privately.
Thrity-three telephone calls were exchanged that morning as police and city government officials kept the wires hot between their own offices and Lieutenant Byrnes,' trying to decide what to do about this latest revolting development. The one thing they did not need on this case was publicity that would make them all appear foolish. And yet, if there really
The telephones rang, and the possibilities multiplied. Heads swam and tempers flared. The mayor, James Martin Vale himself, postponed a walking trip from City Hall to Grover Park and personally called Lieutenant Byrnes to ask his opinion on "the peril of the situation." Lieutenant Byrnes passed the buck to the Chief of Detectives who in turn passed it back to Captain Frick of the 87th, who referred JMV's secretary to the police commissioner, who for reasons unknown said he must first consult with the traffic commissioner, who in turn referred the police commissioner to the Bridge Authority who somehow got on to the city comptroller, who in turn called JMV himself to ask what this was all about.
At the end of two hours of dodging and wrangling, it was decided to take the bull by the horns and release transcripts of the telephone conversations, as well as photocopies of the three notes, to all four city newspapers. The city's liberal blue-headline newspaper (which was that week running an expose on the growth of the numbers racket as evidenced by the prevalence of nickel and dime betters in kindergarten classes) was the first paper to break the story, running photos of the three notes side by side on its front page. The city's other afternoon newspaper, recently renamed the
That night, the early editions of the two morning newspapers carried the story as well. This meant that a combined total of four million readers now knew all about the extortion threats.
The next move was anybody's.
Anthony La Bresca and his pool hall buddy, Peter Vincent Calucci (alias Calooch, Cooch, or Kook) met in a burlesque house on a side street off The Stem at seven o'clock that Monday night.
