The Laughing Gorilla (6 page)

When Cook gave his wife $1,500 for her needs and another $3,500 to deposit, she turned both sums over to Egan “for safekeeping.” When she served her husband with divorce papers, she confided to him, “I don’t want a divorce, Ed, honey, but Frank Egan insists on it.”

Before Florence died “from the effects of alcohol,” she had deeded her property over to Egan, though witnesses to the signing believed they were witnessing her death certificate. Building residents warned Egan and her attending physician, Nathan S. Housman, that if they didn’t take Florence to a hospital instantly they would summon an ambulance themselves. Dullea knew Dr. Housman—prim, horse-faced, toothbrush mustache, tiny round glasses. He was not only Egan’s personal physician but a gangland doctor.

When one of Housman’s patients, gangster Earl Leter, was shot in a blind pig
³
over at 110 Eddy Street, he died from a gunshot wound without telling who shot him. Dullea was confident that Leter had talked under anesthetic and named the shooter. “What I hope is that the doc will speak that name aloud at some point,” he told Ignatious McCarty, a surveillance expert, “and if we install a powerful microphone we can pick it up.”

The night of July 1, McCarty packed his needle-nose pliers, two coils of telephone wire, a drill, and a knife and broke into Housman’s office on an upper story of the Flood Building, where he concealed a small Dictaphone in a seldom-used corner.

So far, the wire tap had been disappointing. Either Housman didn’t have the information or he wasn’t discussing it. Inspectors Percy Keneally and George “Paddy” Wafer continued to monitor the line, while Dullea attempted to solve the strangling death of Rosetta Baker by a huge-handed killer in her California Street apartment. The wealthy widow had a fondness for younger men.

July plodded by as the detectives hunkered down in their Monadnock Building hideaway at 385 Market Street, read the racing form, chewed the fat, and waited. Paddy studied the peeling paint and cigarette-littered floor with disgust. What a step down! Five years earlier, he and his partner, Detective Sergeant Louis De Mattei, had ended the murderous spree of the Terror Bandits, California’s first drive-by killers. And wasn’t he the one who had brought in a wounded Larry Weeks as bait and stationed then-Lieutenant Dullea by his hospital bed to capture the killers when they came to rescue their partner? In the sweltering room, Paddy scratched his stubble and adjusted his headset. From his earphones fine copper wires swooped up Market Street to Housman’s office.

By July 30, the two sweating, smoking harness bulls were sick of the doctor, sick of his cronies, sick of their endless babble crackling over the insubstantial lines. There was no doubt Housman’s office was a hangout for the underworld. Abruptly they heard hollow laughter. “More lowlifes,” thought Wafer, but reached for his pad and adjusted his earpiece, as did Keneally.

“Sure, Auntie could be killed easily,” said a laughing voice. “You know, she thinks so highly of me she calls me Nephew and Son.” Another laugh—snide, sarcastic, yet familiar—not the doctor’s high-pitched laugh because after all these months the two bulls heard that in their sleep. “If only I had that insurance of Josie Hughes,” the laughing voice continued.

Wafer and Keneally looked at each other and pressed their earphones more tightly against their ears. They’d heard this voice before directed in derision at them as they testified on the witness stand. Yes! It was Frank Egan, who had represented the late, unlamented Pete Farrington at trial.

“How much is involved?” asked Housman.

“Nearly $20,000, a tidy sum,” continued Egan. “It would settle all my debts and leave me a little spare cash.”

“Oh, well. She’ll probably die someday.”

“Not soon enough. Hell, she’s only fifty-seven. Wouldn’t it be funny if she got run over? But she never will. She’s too cautious. I guess I’ll have to kill her myself!”

“And you’d be the first man suspected. The police would find out she has got $20,000 of double indemnity insurance in your favor and they’d clap their hand right on your shoulder. For God’s sake, who else would want to kill her except you?”

“Do you think I’m a dumbbell? I wouldn’t do it myself and I wouldn’t let it look like murder.”

“Then what would you make it look like?”

“A hit-and-run accident.”

Wafer and Keneally drove to the HOJ to repeat what they had overheard. “Oh, come on, boys,” Dullea said with a wide grin. He leaned back in his swivel chair and put his hands behind his head. “Egan had to be joking. Imagine a man in his position planning such a thing. Whether you like him or not, he’s one of the city’s biggest political figures. Heck, he might even be mayor one of these days.”

“He said it in all seriousness, Captain!” said Wafer. “Come listen for yourself.” As Dullea monitored the open line, Egan explained how he’d establish an alibi the night of Josie’s “accident.” “I would go to the Friday night fights,” he said. “I would have a ringside seat, and make myself very conspicuous. The whole hit-and-run thing could happen while I was there.” Housman asked who would do the job for him. “Oh, there are several guys that I got out of the pen I could call on. If they didn’t do what I told them I could send them back.”

Dullea put down the earphone feeling morally obligated to warn the intended victim. “I sat back,” said Dullea, “and pondered on what could be done to prevent Egan from carrying out his murderous plan. I could not arrest him. He had committed no crime. And we had no legal proof that it was his voice we had heard over the wires. Besides, the whole plot was so incredible for a man in his position, that even if we could prove that it was he who had done the talking, he would have no difficulty in making it appear that he had been merely joking.”

Dullea spun out Josie’s number on the rotary dial. He had decided that to tell her who he was would do no good and might do some harm. As Egan’s benefactor, she might take it for granted that Dullea, Egan’s political enemy, was trying to do him a personal injury. If she were to tell Egan, he, as an exceedingly clever lawyer, would seize the situation and turn it to his own advantage. “Egan would compel me,” decided Dullea, “through a slander suit, to reveal the source of my information—and thus deprive me of my secret means of learning anything further about his plans or Earl Leter’s murder.”

“This is a friend,” Dullea told Josie. “I want to warn you against Frank Egan. He’s after your money. He wants your insurance. You are in grave danger if you have anything further to do with him.”

“Warn me against Frank Egan?” Josie burst into laughter. “Why he’s the best friend I have.” She slammed down the phone.

Because Josie hadn’t taken his warning seriously, Dullea wrote her an anonymous letter detailing Egan’s plot to carry out her hit-and-run murder. This had one effect. The following day Josie complained to Alexander Keenan, her physician, “Nephew has all my money and I do not even have the scratch of a pen to show for it. Instead of me, you should present your next medical bill to Frank Egan.”

When Dr. Keenan did, Egan told him Josie’s funds had been exhausted. This shocked Josie who began calling Egan’s office every hour or going there and pestering his steno, Marion Lambert.

Over the Dictaphone Dullea heard Egan say, “Aunty’s driving me crazy to return her money. Now she’s threatening to take me before the Bar Association. I can’t stand it any longer. It’s her life or mine.” Dullea doubled the guard around her and penned another warning note, which had no effect. Finally, he dismissed the men stationed outside 41 Lakewood Drive, Josie’s home, and began standing guard himself. He hadn’t been able to save Clara Newman and all the other landladies from the Gorilla Man, but forewarned he could save Josie Hughes.

The next Friday night, Dullea drove to Josie’s home in Ingleside Terraces. He passed Cerritos Avenue and Moncado Way, the site of the old Ingleside Steeplechase Race Track. It was gone now. Nearly twenty years earlier, developers had purchased the land for $2,500 per acre and constructed housing tracts around the site, following its straightaways and turns. Urbano Drive, built over the track, duplicated its lozenge shape, running east to west. Dullea turned onto the road and soon reached Egan’s “charming many-gabled three-story” on the straightaway. He saw Egan in the window. Dullea drove on to the clubhouse turn. Nestled in the vee of Entrada Court was the biggest sundial in the world, where local ladies conducted needlework parties. Five curving roads intersected the track, and just on the other side of Ocean Avenue, they became Fairfield, Lakewood, Manor, and Pinehurst drives. Dullea crossed Ocean to Lakewood, where Josie lived.

Josie’s two-story stucco stood at the end of a line of similar whitewashed Spanish Colonials crawling up and over a steep hill. Most Ingleside Terraces homes had been designed in the Arts and Crafts or Mediterranean style. The developer, Joseph Leonard, had made “crowded conditions impossible” by offering oversize lots, ranging from fifty to eighty feet in width and from one to two hundred feet in depth from four different plans. Josie’s small two-bedroom had cost her $6,000.

Dullea secreted himself uphill where he could see Josie’s front door and peer down on her mission-tiled roof. Her dark-trimmed bay windows overlooked the street. A small garage, virtually soundproof, lay below the master bedroom where a basement ordinarily would be. The garage was locked and empty. Josie did not drive and never allowed anyone the use of her garage.

Around 8:00 P.M. a tall, lean figure came puffing uphill from the direction of Urbano Drive and mounted the ten brick steps to Josie’s door. A quick sharp buzz. When Josie opened the door, Dullea saw Frank Egan framed in the light. As the door closed, Dullea rushed down the drop of the hill but checked himself in mid-street. “Egan wouldn’t act without an ironclad alibi,” he thought. “Mrs. Hughes could not be safer than when Egan is in the house with her.” An hour later Egan came down the steps and Dullea phoned Josie. When she answered, he hung up. Afterward, Josie’s neighbors complained her phone rang far into the late hours.

Over the next week Dullea monitored the Dictograph. “From time to time,” he said, “we heard Egan refer again to the project of murdering Mrs. Hughes, and almost as frequently I phoned and attempted to convince her that she should have nothing more to do with him.”

Dullea overheard Egan planning to become “the Czar of San Francisco” by murdering any political foes in his path to the mayor’s seat. He even targeted his ineffectual assistant, Gerald Kenny, a man who could absorb a martini at fifty paces. But there was no more talk of killing Josie. Dullea concluded he was aware his plan was blown. As Egan’s ranting grew more incoherent, Dullea decided he was either drunk or using dope or his mind was failing. If he was not in his right mind, there was no reason to take his threats more seriously than those of any hophead.

More months passed. Dullea disconnected the bug, but consulted with his lawyer, Vince Hallinan, who assured him there was no longer any danger. On March 7, the bank, as forecast, filed a foreclosure suit on Egan’s house. Whatever the desperate public defender was going to do he was going to do it soon.

Anguished by indecision, Dullea decided to see Chief Quinn. Two years before, Quinn, a favorite of the mayor and police commissioners, had rocketed from sergeant to chief of police. His first official act as chief had been to lock Mrs. Frances Orlando in the Bush Street Jail for the crime of dressing in men’s clothes. Quinn’s promise of a clean department had been welcome words to Dullea. During the Rum Bribery Investigations in April 1922, police officers, deputy sheriffs, and their higher-ups had been arrested in every district. Police Commissioner Theodore Roche had begun cleaning house with the arrest of knife-wielding ex-cop Tom Joyce, the proprietor of a blind pig at 47 Sixth Street. “Cops accepting bribes from saloon keepers in return for immunity from arrest,” Roche said, “will be prosecuted on charges of conspiracy to violate the Volstead Act [which outlawed alcohol]. Policemen accepting money from bootleggers will be weeded out. I have no use for a crook inside or outside the department.”

Had corruption returned to levels equaling those wild and wooly days when every cop was on the take? Dullea’s flaw was that, like most honest men, it was difficult for him to perceive dishonesty in others. But with the example of Egan, his faith was shaken. He had learned how far a respected man of the public trust could fall. Unable to endure another sleepless night, he walked down the marble corridor to the chief’s office at the northwest corner of the HOJ.

The Old Girl (as they called the fortresslike HOJ) was a boxy, serviceable stone edifice with semicircular bays and tall fan windows with radiating sash bars, each like half a lemon slice. The elaborate fretwork, stone mullions, grillwork, parapets, and a long rooftop battlement failed to add a grain of cheer to the oppressive tomb. Chief Quinn’s office was something else entirely.

The big front room was opulent—fine rugs, parqueted hardwood floors, and long polished tables. A photo of the chief hung alongside Mayor “Sunny Jim” Rolph Jr. next to pictures of two early civilian-appointees, DA White of the Mooney bomb plot days and affable Dan O’Brien who tried to be “a good fellow” by day and an officer-administrator by night and failed miserably at both. Quinn’s latest photo showed him in action on the running board of his new armored police vehicle and Captain Mike Riordan aiming a machine gun through a gun port. In Dullea’s own office was exhibited only a single photo and that of his wife and three sons.

Against one wall the chief proudly displayed shining rows of police trophy cups. In his office, Dullea had a single battered trophy he hadn’t won for anything. Someone once brought him flowers in it, and he’d kept the empty cup. Next to an early lowboy radio, the chief prominently displayed the ensign of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which he hoped to someday head. Across the room the stolid Irishman, a study in military severity, sat rigidly behind a huge mahogany desk. He was well-buffed, well-starched perfection, his superbly cut dark blue serge studded with golden epaulettes and full gold braid. A gold star, two gold stripes, and three gold buttons gleamed on each sleeve. Quinn’s gilded elegance contrasted against a triangle of colorful flags unfurled on both sides of him. “Assured, resplendent in blue and gold, almost Napoleonic in his posture,” Kevin Starr wrote of Quinn’s appearance at a Civic Center rally, “the Chief embodied the power of established authority as it struggled to contain the increasing restiveness of the populace.” That day, Quinn stood not against a background of flags but against a white sea of union placards. He was not only antiunion but antireform, especially with his own department. He routinely stifled any opposition or attempts for reform by discrediting or transferring any critic into the hinterlands.