Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 51, No. 2, June 28, 1930

“That’s right, egg,” answered Kerrigan, who was truthful to the point of painfulness.

“Well, lookit! I got twenty-five grand for you if you lay off, see?”

“Listen, bozo,” he snapped. “Who ever told you I went in for petty larceny?”

Kerrigan’s icy stare was famous. His eyes would start at your shoes and wander upward, in a despising, withering manner, to your face. Then he would stare hard, looking right through you. That stare was most irritating and disconcerting. Therefore, it produced results.

At noons the Wolf, when in New York, frequented a cheap eating house patronized by characters of the underworld. When entering the place he was in the habit of giving every one in the joint the once over. One day he let his glance fall on a man and a woman. He didn’t know them; he hadn’t, in fact, ever laid eyes on them before. But they apparently knew him, for when his gaze roved from their shoes to their heads they nudged one another, left their meals unfinished, paid their bill and hurried into the street.

“Oh, boy,” said Kerrigan to Agent Kelley, “they’ve done something. Notice how fast they blew when I looked ’em over?”

So the Wolf bounded through the door and shadowed the couple — for two weeks.

They wound up in jail, having been underlings connected with a big dope ring. Before taking the rap they spilled information to Kerrigan which resulted in the demolition of the ring in question.

For more than a year preceding his death the Wolf concentrated on an international narcotic network which had for years mystified the best minds of the Government. Kerrigan loved big jobs — and he knew that to get to the core of that ring was a big job. He had an idea that Arnold Rothstein was in back of the organization, but he couldn’t get the goods on him.

The Wolf’s labors, however, began to bear fruit just after Rothstein’s death. It seems that the police had gone to the offices of the Rothmere Realty Company, one of the slain gambler’s many “smoke screens,” in an effort to unearth a clew which would lead them to Rothstein’s murderer. But the police came to the conclusion that there was nothing of value in the offices.

The Wolf, however, had a hunch that a search of the “realty” company’s premises might reveal something of moment. So the place was gone over with a fine tooth comb, and certain data — the Government won’t reveal the details — was obtained. The upshot of the whole thing was this:

One fine day, a few weeks after Rothstein’s murder, Joseph Ungar, a suave and dapper crony of the slain man, strolled into the Grand Central Terminal in New York. He was leaving for Chicago on the crack Twentieth Century Limited, the first section of which pulls out every day at two forty-five. It was then two thirty, and Ungar occupied himself with the task of seeing that his two expensive-looking trunks were properly placed in one of the baggage cars.

Meanwhile, the Wolf sat in the office of Assistant United States Attorney John M. Blake, in the Federal Building, his long, nervous fingers beating a tattoo on the desk. He was waiting for the word from Grand Central Terminal.

Shortly after three o’clock Ungar’s two trunks, which had been removed from the train without the knowledge of their owner, were brought in to Kerrigan.

“Now we’ll see if I’ve worked a year for nothing,” said the Wolf to Blake. With that Kerrigan took an oversized hatchet and began to smash one of the trunks open. When his task had been completed he was confronted with a sight he had long anticipated — narcotics valued in excess of a million dollars.

The wires began to buzz, with the result that the Twentieth Century was flagged outside of Buffalo that night. Ungar was unceremoniously hustled from his berth, forced to complete his toilet in the railroad yards, brought back to New York and sent up for a long stretch.

But I’m a trifle ahead of my story. When Kerrigan was smashing open the second trunk, which also contained more than a million dollars’ worth of “hop,” his hatchet slipped and he struck himself in the stomach.

“Dammit,” he said, a sly smile playing about his lips, “I’ve killed myself.”

And the Wolf had killed himself. He was taken to Misericordia Hospital, where he succumbed to an operation for a twisted intestine, brought on by the blow from the hatchet. He didn’t have a chance. His constitution had been undermined by seventy-two consecutive hours of work preceding Ungar’s arrest and the Wolf died a martyr to his country, the same as a soldier on the battlefield.