Jackson shook himself and continued his dressing. Too many questions. Too many questions and no answers that made sense. To hell with the whole business, better get down to East Street and see what was happening there.
The brown felt hat with the brim low over his eyes hid the patch of bandage on Jackson’s head. The sleeves of the leather jacket covered the taped wrists. His tall, loose-jointed figure with its swinging stride gave little evidence of the previous day’s adventure.
He found Sangster with Painter, Colletti, and a small group of men on the corner a block away from the dock. Painter’s hawk-beaked face was solemn and uncommunicative, and the little Italian looked bewildered. His eyes shifted when Jackson looked at him. Sangster’s massive head stood out like a beacon over those about him, but though rage and bitterness were evident in the faces of the other men his eyes were gentle and sad.
He greeted Jackson eagerly. “Boy, am I glad you’re here.”
The other men nodded. One of them said, “The men don’t like it. They’d vote strike in a minute probably but they don’t like being told what to do. This is liable to split the union wide open.” Jackson saw what the trouble was, without asking. The sidewalk was crowded with longshoremen in working clothes, most of them with hooks in their belts, but here and there were tight little groups of an entirely different stamp—narrow-eyed men with hard faces, some with flat noses and thick ears—ex-pugs and strong-arm men and petty gangsters—“goons” in the language of the water front. Jackson knew that each of them carried a lead pipe or rubber hose or blackjack under their form-fitting topcoats and that some of them would have guns. The little groups were like fortified islands in the midst of the eddying sea of longshoremen, solid, efficient, and treacherous. The longshoremen cast black scowls in their direction but flowed around them, milling aimlessly without a unified will or leadership. They were bewildered and confused. They reminded Jackson of newsreel pictures of men in prison camps. So many men and so few guards, but the guards had authority and guns.
“It’s one thing to strike,” said Painter, “but bein’ ordered off the job by a gang of thugs is somethin’ else again.”
“What’s the sense in havin’ a union if you ain’t got no say in it?” asked another aggrievedly.
“Weller’s men?” Jackson jerked his head in the direction of the little group.
Sangster lifted his big shoulders. One of the others said, “I don’t know whose men they are and I never seen ‘em before, but they got union cards signed by Melius. I saw ‘em.”
Jackson’s jaw tightened. So that was it. The old labor-faking stunt of padding union rolls with gangsters so as to intimidate the honest men and take control. They wouldn’t get away with it. Not if he could help it. “Where’s Melius?”
A man pointed. “Over there by the dock,” he said, “negotiatin’.” He spat disgustedly. “Anyway, that’s what he calls it.”
Several police cars were pulled up in front of the dock face and a squad of uniformed police was stretched across the broad double doors leading onto the pier. Jackson made out Melius among a small group of men in front of the police. He stepped off the curb and started across the wide traffic-crowded street.
A man detached himself from the nearest of the top-coated groups and started in Jackson’s direction. “Hey, you,” he bawled, “where the hell d’ya think you’re goin’?” The man was squat and had thick lips.
Jackson wanted to wait for him, wanted to swing his fist against those thick lips, but he controlled himself with an effort. One bit of violence now would be the flame that would set off the dynamite stored up in these resentful, frustrated men. That would mean riot, possibly bloodshed with the police charging across the street to take part, slugging the men in work clothes while the topcoats quietly withdrew. And, following that, banner headlines in the papers:
LONGSHOREMEN RIOT. UNION SPLIT IN FIGHT OVER STRIKE.
Jackson had seen it happen too often, so he merely called back to the squat thug, “I’m a union official,” and kept going. The thug hesitated, then, deciding that it was not worthwhile to chase Jackson through the speeding traffic, turned back to his group.
Melius stood with a half-dozen other men among whom were a police officer and a minor official of the Eastcoast Company. The minor official was saying to Melius: “You gentlemen must see our position. Mr. Murdock’s unfortunate death and now a strike on top of it—it’s really too much. There will be a Board of Directors’ meeting this morning, but how they can take up the question of a new contract at this time I don’t know.”
“They’ll take it up, all right,” blustered Melius. “This’d be a bad time for the company to have trouble.”
“Trouble?” said the company man. Both he and Melius looked at the police officer.
The officer echoed the word. “There won’t be no trouble. We’ll see to that.”
“Of course we don’t want trouble, but—you know what I mean,” said Melius. “The boys are ugly and pretty hard to hold.”
Jackson stepped into the circle. “I want to see you, Melius,” he said.
Melius flushed and hesitated but a flat-faced man standing beside him, whom Jackson knew as a longshoreman only by sight, bristled like a badmannered pup, “We don’t want to see you, stool pigeon.” Jackson held himself in check with an effort. No matter what the provocation, he must keep his temper. Everything depended on that.
“I’ll see you later,” he said. “Right now I want to talk to Jim.” Melius took courage from the other’s belligerence. “I’ve nothing to say to you, Jackson. You’re a troublemaker and you’re under suspicion as a union spy.”
“All right, if that’s the way you want it.” Jackson turned to the company official. “You know me, Goodwyn, and you know I speak for the men. No strike has been voted by the membership of the union, and this action is therefore without authorization.
It is the result of intimidation by hired thugs posing as union workers. I’ll give you and the police the benefit of the doubt when I say you were not aware of the facts but I warn you that any agreement you make with Mr. Melius or anyone else that hasn’t been authorized to act for the union will not be recognized.”
He turned back to Melius. “I don’t know what you are up to exactly but whatever it is I know it stinks. Now I’m going back across the street and call the men to a union meeting and I advise you to come along and call off your phonies so they won’t get hurt.”
He turned on his heels and walked away without looking back. Would they call his bluff? If they stood pat he would not dare address the men and risk a riot that might be the end of the union for some time to come. But if he could get the men away from the water front into an organized meeting in their own hall there was a possibility that they might wrest the initiative away from Melius and his crew of thugs and decide for themselves what they wanted to do.
He reached the curb and stood still for a moment. Then he breathed a sigh of relief as Melius appeared beside him. The bluff had worked.
“Jim,” he said, trying to keep his voice level, “as president, you’d better make the announcement.”
Melius cleared his throat and shouted, “All union members to the hall. Special emergency meeting.”
The flat-faced man began unostentatiously rounding up the topcoats. Jackson caught the arm of a passing longshoreman whom he knew.
“Slick,” he said hurriedly, keeping his voice low. “The hall won’t hold half of us, and the phonies will try to pack it. Pass the word to Bullethead and the boys to get up there as fast as they can.”
When Jackson got to the hall it was already packed, and men stood on the stairs and in a swelling crowd outside. As he elbowed his way in the men made way for him, asking anxious questions, shouting opinions and advice, trusting him, looking to him for honest leadership in a struggle that meant their bread and butter. It made him feel warm and confident, but when he got inside the hall his heart sank. Almost all the thugs had managed to shoulder their way
into the hall and now sat, a compact mass in the front rows, noisy and insolent with their boos and catcalls, while the longshoremen who sat in the rear seats or stood along the walls were sullen and silent. Under such conditions it would be impossible to hold an orderly meeting, and the gathering would probably break up in a fight that would wreck the hall and leave the union confused and split, an easy prey for Melius and his sellout mob.
And for the first fifteen minutes it seemed as though his worst fears were about to be realized. Everything was turmoil and confusion, the thugs dominating the meeting, booing down all opposition, himself included. Had Melius been clever he could have settled the thing then and there with a motion of confidence and a quick adjournment, but he was riding high, and they were greedy. He wanted to break Jackson while he had the chance.
Melius recognized the flat-faced man, whose name was Mead. Mead made a long, rambling speech denouncing Jackson as a stool pigeon, to which Jackson could not answer since he could not make himself heard. Throughout this period tension had been growing in the hall, and Jackson knew that only his presence on the platform and that of Sangster and a few others in the hall kept it from breaking out into violence. He began to resign himself and picked out Melius as his own special property when the fun started. The union might be in Melius’ hands when this was over, but he would be in no condition to profit by it.
And then a change began. Even before he saw it Jackson felt what was happening. The union longshoremen were ceasing to be a disorganized, futile mass and were becoming a disciplined army. Burly dock workers began to move up along the walls and appear at the edge of the platform. Others edged into seats beside the top-coated phonies. Hooks displayed suggestively in fronts of belts, they began to hem in the thugs. A murmur ran through the room: someone had started a story—an eyewitness story of what a longshoreman’s hook did to a man’s throat.
It was the story, more than the sight of the hooks themselves, and the determined faces that did the trick. The thugs grew quiet and shifted nervously. A longshoreman made a motion that all members who had not previously been employed on the Eastcoast dock be excluded from the meeting, and when Melius called the motion out of order such a storm of protest arose that he hastily reversed himself. The motion was passed, and a hush fell. For a minute no one moved, then one or two of the thugs got up and began making their way, heads down, toward the door. Others followed under the accusing eyes of the men along the wall until it became a general exodus. Melius and his phonies were licked.
Not till then did Jackson realize what actually had happened. Then a small, stocky man who had been going quietly from man to man in the back of the hall turned and faced the platform. He pushed back his hat displaying a shock of blond hair and part of a soiled bandage. It was Whitey Gordon.
The rest of the meeting was clear sailing. The strike was legalized by a roar that shook the hall, picket lines were voted, and a strike committee elected. When Jackson heard himself nominated as chairman of the strike committee he rose to speak.
“On Wednesday night two things of great significance occurred: evidence of the fact that a stool pigeon was working in this union was presented to your Negotiating Committee and a member of that committee was murdered. As a result, several members of this union, including myself, have been accused of being stool pigeons and murderers.”
An angry murmur ran through the hall, and there were shouts of, “Not you, Jack. We know you’re not a rat.”
Jackson raised his hand to quiet the tumult. “This is not the time to answer these charges,” he continued, “and I am not going to defend myself. I’ll simply say for the record that I am not a rat or a murderer. But somebody is, and, until we find out who, we’ve got to be careful. I’d like to make a motion if the Chair will entertain it at this time.” He paused and turned to Melius who sat slumped, chin on chest, behind the rostrum.
There were cries from the hall, “Never mind the Chair. Make your motion, Jack. We’re listening.”
Melius raised his head and nodded wearily. He was a thoroughly beaten man. Jackson turned back to the audience.
“This is the motion,” he said. “I move that no member of the present executive committee serve on the strike committee.”
The motion caused another commotion in the hall. A voice bellowed, “We can’t do it. We’ll be sold out. You saw what happened this morning.”
Jackson ignored parliamentary procedure to answer. “That’s baloney. You’ve got Roberts, Padacini, George, Pig Eye”—he indicated various men—“and a dozen others. Select any one of them, and you can’t go wrong. You’ve got to do that or take a chance of having a stool pigeon on your committee and you all know what that means.”
Painter’s voice boomed out over the confusion. “I second the motion.”
Jackson smiled. “Thanks, Painter,” he said and sat down. The motion was carried unanimously.
Despite the rank-and-file victory in the union and his confidence that Melius and Weller’s crew of thugs were decisively and finally beaten, Jackson was low and dispirited. The union and its work was a passionate cause to him, and now, when he was most needed in that work, he had to exclude himself from it because of a murdering stool pigeon who had tried to frame him. The fact that he was himself suspected of being the murderer did not bother him, and though the accusation of stool pigeon hurt, he was almost egotistically secure from the charge in his knowledge of the purity of his own motives and the trust which the rank-and-file members of the union had displayed for him. But to be on the side lines when a strike was on—that hurt.
When the meeting was over he wanted only to get away, but Whitey collared him and insisted that they have breakfast together before they both joined the picket line.
Over ham and eggs in the Silver Dollar Diner they brought each other up to date on the events of the past forty-eight hours. Whitey was effervescent, insisted that he felt like a million dollars, and gave Jackson an ecstatic description of a redheaded nurse who had entered into a conspiracy to help him escape from the hospital.
“Boy, was she a pip? Was she a honey?” he raved. “If it hadn’t been for the lousy dick they had planted outside my door and all these murders and stuff——”
Jackson cut him short. “How did you get by the dick?”
“Like I’m telling you—the redhead. Men and dicks are putty in her hands. She just crooked a finger like that”—he held up a finger and bent it twice—“and the poor dope followed her with his tongue hanging out. I got her phone number and everything. What d’ya know about nurses, Jack?”
“Are you hot?”
“Who, me? Nope. I thought any minute they’d throw a pinch on me, but they didn’t. When I woke up in the hospital they questioned me some and after that they just let me alone—except they wouldn’t give me my clothes.” He bit into a piece of toast. “What d’ya know about that phony grease ball, Melius, trying to pull a fast one? D’ya think he killed Riorden, Jack?”
Jackson looked into the grinning face before him for a long minute. Then he shook his head slowly. “I don’t know,” he said. “Do you?”
“Naw.” Whitey’s brows drew together in a frown. “He’s too yellow. Say what you want to, that job took guts of a kind. Tell you who I do think might fill the bill though. Doc Painter. Old Eagle Beak. I never did trust him as far as I could throw him. Melius is a stuffed shirt, but Old Eagle Beak’s got what it takes when it comes to dirty work.”
“You could be right,” Jackson sighed. “I wish to Christ we knew. This thing’s getting me down.”
Their conversation was interrupted by the waitress bringing their coffee. Whitey looked up at her.
“Hello, babe, can you be union-made?”
“I am,” the girl said tartly. She thumbed the Hotel and Restaurant Union button on her white apron. “Anything else for you, gentlemen?”
“Okay, you win,” said Whitey.
A teamster sitting at the counter turned his head. “What is that crack, a joke?�
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Whitey leaned back and looked at him. “Pipe down, you big ape,” he growled. “Who asked you?”
The man was four inches taller than Whitey and many pounds heavier. He swung around from the counter and slid off his stool. “Who’s an ape?”
“Easy, pal,” said Jackson, “this little guy just got out of the hospital. He’s a little slap-happy.”
“Just got outta the hospital, eh?” said the teamster. “He’s not careful, he’ll go back there.”
Whitey reddened and half rose, but Jackson reached out a long arm and shoved him back in his chair.
“Quiet, runt,” he ordered. “Behave. We got work to do.”
Whitey subsided, and the teamster, after a contemptuous glance, turned back to his meal.
Halfway through a piece of French apple pie, Whitey asked, “What are we going to do about Weller and the rat who killed Riorden?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? You mean we’re going to let ‘em get away with it?”
“Look,” said Jackson, “we’re longshoremen, not cops. I’ve already got us in a mess, running around playing tag. From now on I’ll have my fun on the picket line, and you’ll be right along with me.”
“But they got you pegged for it,” said Whitey. “You’ll have to square yourself if only because the old doc fronted for you. And besides,” he added, “nobody’s goin’ to try to knock me off and get away with it.”
“It’s no use.” Jackson shook his head ruefully. “The best thing we can do is stick to things we know something about.”
“I can’t make you out. Ain’t you even goin’ to try to find out who the stool pigeon is?”
“I think I know.”
“What!”
Jackson nodded. “But it’s only a hunch. And if my hunch is right the stool pigeon is also the murderer. So it’s a job for the cops after all.” He stood up and picked up his check. “Come on, let’s get down on that picket line.”
Death on the Waterfront Page 20
