O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [149]
“No, sir, no, sir.”
“You’re a liar, Henry.”
“I ain’t lying to you.”
Paddy O’Hara shrieked as fearsome pain, like a bullet, ripped into his stomach and he wobbled and doubled over, made cries like a woman giving birth. He looked up at Henry through maddened eyes.
Paddy’s hand wrapped in natural movement about the bar blackjack, a sap of lead pellets covered in leather. No man in Hell’s Kitchen was so accurate and devastating in its use.
Gagging in pain, Paddy’s left hand grabbed Henry and lifted him off the bar stool and pulled him over the bar, and the right hand lashed out, bashing the sap into Henry’s head, shattering the edges of Henry’s temple with a single blow. Henry puked. His eyes nearly popped out as Paddy lined up a second blow.
“No, Da, no!” Zachary’s voice shouted from the opened storeroom door.
Old Henry did not require a second blow.
Paddy O’Hara, renowned for his lightning thinking under fire, let Henry fall to the floor and turned his back to Zachary.
Within a minute, Paddy ditched the blackjack, snatched a bottle of rum from the bar, smashed its bottom, and pulled the jagged edge over his own face, ripping his skin, and he punched himself hard in the nose, turning his face gory.
He knelt alongside Henry’s body and wrapped Henry’s fist around the broken bottleneck, then looked up to Zachary standing above them.
“The son of a bitch tried to kill me!” Paddy cried.
God be thanked that Commissioner Andy Burke was in a card game at the Hibernian Club a few blocks away. Andy Burke was familiar with and on top of these circumstances. It was very late and the street was quiet.
The commissioner shut the saloon down tight against curiosity seekers and, God forbid, a wayward reporter.
The ambulance and a doctor arrived with no bells. It backed into the side alley and whisked off quickly with the dead man’s body.
Paddy was cleaned up, his cut taped closed.
“Not too bad, you’ll need a few stitches,” the doctor, a stitch master, told him; otherwise he was fine and lucky.
Paddy was helped to a table.
“What happened?” Burke asked.
“He come in very late and must have been drinking up a storm, probably had a shot at every bar he delivered. I fixed him something to eat, but he was raging, cracked off a bottle, reached over the bar and cut my face, and bashed my nose as well. I pushed him off me. He was so drunk he fell off the stool, cracked his head on the corner of the bar, then hit it again on the foot rail, wedging in his face.”
Paddy stopped, aware that his son was standing close by, listening.
“Did you see it, Zach?” Andy Burke asked.
“No, he didn’t,” Paddy answered quickly.
“Zachary,” the commissioner said, “you wait now over in the ladies’ parlor. I’ll be with you later.”
Burke ordered a cop to help Paddy up to his flat, where the doctor would stitch him up.
It was half four and dawn peeking through when the commissioner was satisfied with the cleanup and found his way into the ladies’ drinking parlor, where Zach sat in a booth in a stupor.
Burke was a steadying sight, great muttonchop sideburns, top-of-the-line bowler, a diamond stickpin in his cravat, a man as dandy as his reputation.
He set a bottle of Paddy’s best Scotch whiskey on the table and invited himself to a glass and ran through his notes.
“Can we have a little talk now, Zachary?”
Zach mumbled.
“Here, take a couple of sips, won’t hurt you any.”
Indeed, it helped.
“I realize this has been a traumatic experience for you, but as you know, it is not an uncommon occurrence. We like to close the report quickly on these barroom incidents. Not that anyone gets too upset when Irish brawl with Irish, but when you start mixing the races, particularly the niggers, it can be like lightning on a short fuse, if you get my meaning.”
Zach nodded.
“You often rode with old Henry?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We don’t have a complicated case. In that you are the only possible witness, your statement will close the matter and spare us a coroner’s inquest. So, you came out of the storeroom to see what the ruckus was all about and you