The humorous aspects of premeditated murder are almost identical with those of custard-pie comedy: connoisseurs of both can enjoy the victim's splendid initial innocence, his growing disbelief and alarm, and, finally, his absurd response to the inexorable offices of fate. It takes a trained mind to really appreciate the drolleries of the rubout, however; when the gaudiest murder of the year was staged one morning last week in the barber shop of Manhattan's Park Sheraton Hotel, nobody in the U.S. was as well qualified to enjoy its subtleties as bulky, greying Albert Anastasia—onetime Lord High Executioner of Brooklyn's Murder Inc. But this time Al was straight man rather than critic.
Al managed to be pretty funny in his new role, although doubtless not as comical as the fellow his practical jokers once threw into a lake, alive, weighted down with slot machines. At 55, Al was ripe for the part; he had grown rich, fleshy, imperious and sentimental on the rewards of death. He wore the big tipper's air of assurance as he walked into the bright, mirrored, roomy barber shop and ordered a haircut; he closed his eyes contentedly as he felt the clippers on his thick neck. He was completely oblivious of two dark, sallow men who entered with their hats on, after him. Each of the pair wore the sort of dark, metal-rimmed glasses affected by highway cops. Each wore a scarf over his mouth. Each wore a black glove on his right hand, and each black hand gripped a pistol. They pushed the barber aside and stood on either side of the chair.
Also Bay Rum. Al's eyes were still closed when the first bullet made a hole in his pudgy left hand. Both gunmen fired at him. Another slug went through Al's clothes, made him jump as though he had been hit with a baseball bat, and bloodied the soft, warm, white, middle-aged flesh of his right side. Al just had time to realize he was being killed. He kicked out in such convulsive fright that he broke the chair's metal footrest. Then he lurched up in adenoidal agony and knocked over a bottle of bay rum. The two men who were killing him went placidly on with their work, and when Al crashed to the floor he was a pleasantly scented cadaver—a five holer, as it were, and badly in need of a new head.
The killers inspected the remains with professional care. Then they joined the horrified barbers, customers and shoeshine boys who went bursting into a hall off the hotel lobby. They left Al as evidence that history repeats itself—he had gotten it in the same hotel in which Gambler Arnold Rothstein was shot back in 1928.
Also Ice Picks. Al had earned the honor. A murderous, grasping and illiterate slob, he had thwarted the law for 40 years, twisted the politics, and opened the economic veins, of the greatest city in the world. He had done it, at bottom, simply by killing people, personally and by proxy, with ice picks, knives, pistols, the garrote and the bludgeon.