Richard Deming

Death of a Pusher

Chapter 1

The kid’s name was Herman Joyce. He was twenty-one but could have passed for eighteen. With his lank blond hair cut in a ducktail, his black leather jacket and shapeless slacks, he looked like a typical street-corner punk. It was a good disguise. By the way other cops passing in and out of the squadroom left us strictly alone, it was obvious they assumed we were questioning a suspect.

Actually, Herman Joyce was a rookie cop we had borrowed from Metro for a little undercover work.

“You’re sure he’s not suspicious?” I asked him.

He gave me a youthful grin. “Why should he be? Two different junkies gave me character references.”

Carl Lincoln said, “Don’t get overconfident, Hermie. Benny Polacek is no dunce.”

“He’ll show,” Joyce said. “I’m to be in the alley next to the Adams Furniture Store at nine P.M. That gives you three hours to get a camera set up.”

“That’s down in my old part of town,” I said, frowning. “He picked a fine spot. There’s a warehouse across the street with no windows in front and there’s a blank wall on the opposite side of the alley. What do you mean, he’s not suspicious? He wouldn’t go to all that trouble to make a single sale if he didn’t smell some kind of rat.”

“He’s just careful,” Joyce said. “My junkie pals tell me he always sets it up like that when he makes the first pass. Once he’s thoroughly satisfied with a new customer and the guy has become a regular, he can walk right into Polacek’s apartment and get a pop. But for the initial sale he always picks a spot hard to cover by camera and he checks all along both sides of the street for stakeouts before he’ll move in.”

“That’s because he’s a three-time loser,” Carl said. “He can’t afford another fall. But he has to keep dredging up new clients when the old ones commit suicide, or get shot trying to pull jobs to feed their monkeys, or get committed to the loony bin. Poor guy. My heart bleeds for the sonovabitch.”

“We’ll have to leave the way in wide open,” I said. “We can’t have cops lurking in doorways if he’s going to be watching. And I don’t know where we can set up a camera in that spot.”

“So we’ll use the panel truck,” Carl said.

I gave him a disgusted look. “On a pro like Benny Polacek? He took his first fall as a result of film evidence from a panel truck. With a truck in sight, he wouldn’t sell a pop to his poor old mother.”

Carl said, “Well, suppose we run down that way and case the lay.”

We didn’t take Herman Joyce with us. We sent him back to the South Side poolroom where he had been hanging out for the past two weeks, making friends with junkies and periodically acting as though he too had a monkey on his back. I told him not to try to contact us again but just to show up in the alley at the appointed time. I assured him he didn’t have to worry about us not being there.

The Adams Furniture Store was on Nevins Street in the heart of the Polish section. As I had recalled, the warehouse across the street didn’t have a single window along its front, and the side wall of the building across the alley was equally blank. There were some second-floor windows overlooking the alley from the furniture store, but they were too high up. A camera aimed down at that angle would get only the tops of heads, and if Polacek wore a hat, his face would never appear in camera range.

A number of cardboard cartons piled next to the furniture store in the alley gave us the idea. None were big enough to conceal a man, but we figured the addition of a larger one wouldn’t be likely to attract attention. I knew the store owner, whose name had been Adamski before he shortened it to Adams, and who was a fellow member of the South Side Polish Club. The store had closed at six, so I called him at home from a pay booth. He came down, opened up the store, and let us choose a carton from the supply in his basement. We took one that a refrigerator had been shipped in.

By eight P.M. we were all set. Adamski loaned us some packaging tape to seal the top of the refrigerator carton shut; we cut one side of it down the center and along the top and bottom edges to form a sort of double swinging door. Carl picked out a small but substantial carton strong enough to bear his weight and seated his lanky frame on it inside the bigger carton. He cut a hole at eye level for the camera and another, larger one low down between his feet. The latter was for the battery-powered infrared lamp we used to take night moving pictures when we didn’t want suspects to know they were being filmed.

We unscrewed the bulbs in the green-shaded lamps over the rear doors of both buildings, so that the only light filtering into the alley came from a street lamp in front of the warehouse across the street. Carl had objected to unscrewing the bulbs on the grounds that finding them unlit might make Polacek suspicious. But I figured the pusher had probably cased the place in the daytime and wouldn’t realize later that they were supposed to be on. And, in the event he decided to check the rears of the two buildings, I wanted it to be too dark back there for him to be able to see me.

I took up a position behind the furniture store and waited.

Waiting is a necessary part of police work, but that doesn’t make me like it any better. For most of an hour I shifted from foot to foot, hungering for a cigarette. My only consolation was knowing that Carl was finding the wait even more tedious. It was a fairly warm June night, and that closed carton must have been a sweatbox.

At ten to nine I heard footsteps enter the alley, and there was a low whistle. Peering around the corner, I saw the dim form of rookie Herman Joyce silhouetted at the alley mouth. When I gave an equally low answering whistle, he leaned his back against the brick wall on the opposite side of the alley and waited.

Exactly at nine there was the sound of a car parking in front of the furniture store. A car door slammed, then I heard footsteps going away. For a moment I was puzzled, then I remembered what Joyce had said about Polacek’s precautions about checking for possible police stakeouts before moving in for the contact.

He must have looked into every possible place of concealment on both sides of the street, for several minutes passed before I heard the footsteps enter the alley. There was a low mutter of voices. I waited, not even risking a look, until Joyce’s voice said loudly, “I guess this will hold me until next time, Benny.”

At this prearranged signal I stepped from behind the building and closed in fast. Benny Polacek tried to make a break, stumbled, and fell flat on his face when Herman Joyce thrust out a foot and tripped him. Moments later I had jerked the pusher to his feet and had his hands cuffed behind him.

Polacek yelled, “Cops!” — and the car waiting in front took off like a Polaris missile.

We hadn’t expected Polacek to arrive with a chauffeur, because he usually worked alone. Young Joyce ran to the alley mouth, but I heard the squeal of tires around a corner before Joyce reached the sidewalk, and I knew he hadn’t been able to get even a glimpse of it.

As Joyce returned from one direction and Carl, camera in hand, came over from the other, Benny Polacek peered at me in the dim light.

“Matt Rudd,” he said bitterly. “I walk into it for a lousy three-dollar-and-a-half pop.”

I looked him up and down. Benny Polacek was a chunkily built man of about thirty-five, not unhandsome in a swarthy sort of way.

I said, “Three-fifty tonight, but you figured on draining him of thirty to fifty a week if he became a regular customer, didn’t you, Benny?”

The pusher glowered at Joyce. “What do you get out of this, stoolie?”

If Polacek still didn’t realize he had been dealing with an undercover cop, I saw no point in disillusioning him. We might want to use the rookie again sometime.

“He gets off the hook for another rap,” I said, turning to Joyce. “Take off, punk.”

Carl held out his hand and said, “First, we’ll have that evidence.”

Joyce handed him a small folded paper such as sleeping powders used to come in. After dropping it into a manila envelope and sealing the flap, Carl held the envelope against the brick wall and initialed it. Then he handed his pen to Joyce, who also initialed it.

Meanwhile, I shook down the suspect and removed three one-dollar bills and a half dollar from his side pants pocket. We all moved out to the sidewalk where there was more light, and I had Joyce examine the money. His initials were on the bills in ink, and the half dollar was marked with red fingernail polish.

Carl put the money into another envelope, and he and Joyce initialed it also.

“Now you can take off,” Carl said to the rookie. “Just be around when we need you.”

“Yes, sir,” Joyce said, and hurried off up the street.

Carl said, “Who was your driver tonight, Benny?”

“Baldy Mason,” Polacek snarled at him.

William (Baldy) Mason is our police commissioner.

“You’re hilarious,” I said. “Let’s go downtown so you can regale the booking sergeant.”

At headquarters Polacek was a little surprised when we took him straight to the felony section instead of first questioning him in the squadroom. I thought it might do him good to mull over the reason for this departure from routine procedure.

“We don’t need to ask you anything, Benny. This is your fourth fall, so you’re cooked. This time you get stashed away for life.”

He licked his lips. “I want to call my lawyer.”

“Tomorrow, maybe. Tonight we’d rather have you muse upon your sins without benefit of legal advice.”

“I know my rights, Sergeant. I’m entitled to counsel.”

“We know ours, too,” I informed him. “We can hold you twenty-four hours on suspicion before we lodge a formal charge, and we don’t have to let you phone anybody until the charge is lodged.” I turned to the desk sergeant. “For the moment he’s in on an open charge. Got an isolated cell where he can’t converse with the other prisoners?”

“Sure. O.K., mister. Take off your clothes.”

The men’s felony section is in the basement, and there isn’t any danger of any women wandering in, because you have to be admitted through a barred door even to get to the booking desk. Polacek stripped right in front of the desk. His personal possessions, except for cigarettes and a lighter, were listed on a property sheet, which he signed, then were sealed in a large manila envelope with a copy of the list stapled to it. Then he was led off to the shower, which is mandatory for every newly admitted prisoner even if he is arrested as he steps out of a bathtub. When he got out of the shower his clothing, except for his belt, would be handed back to him.

As he was led off, I called, “We’ll be back to see you tomorrow afternoon, Benny.”

Upstairs in the squadroom we found Herman Joyce waiting for us.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“He’s in the can,” I said. “You did a good job, kid. Tomorrow morning you can get a haircut and report back to Metro. I’ll phone your skipper and suggest you deserve a couple of days off.”

“Gee thanks, Sarge,” he said. “You ever need me again, just yell.”

“Don’t worry, we will,” I told him.

Chapter 2

Next morning I phoned Captain Parker, head of the Metropolitan Division, as I had promised. After commending Herman Joyce for his good work, I suggested he get a couple of days’ leave as a reward.

Parker said he thought he could arrange it.

Carl Lincoln and I weren’t due to report in until five P.M. since the night trick works from five until one in the morning. But when we both checked into the squadroom at one P.M., we found Captain Maurice Spangler in his office.

The head of the Vice, Gambling, and Narcotics Division is a square-bodied, grizzled man in his early sixties, who normally has the affable manner of a traveling salesman. I say normally because on occasion he can be about as affable as a Gila monster.

This afternoon he was in a cordial mood. Smiling at Carl, who had entered the office first, he said, “What are you doing here so early, Corporal?” Then he spotted me behind Carl. “You too, Rudowski? Something must be up.”

Outside of my old neighborhood on the South Side, very few people call me Rudowski. I’m not ashamed of the name and I’m proud of my Polish ancestry. But when you have to give your name over the phone to strangers a dozen times a day, Mateuz Rudowski requires too much repeating and, quite often, spelling out. People understand me instantly when I say Matt Rudd. But for some perverse reason Maurice Spangler insists on using my real name.

When Carl and I were both seated, I said, “We’ve got Benny Polacek in the can, Captain. We nailed him at nine last night.”

Spangler looked gratified. “How good’s your evidence?”

“We haven’t seen the film yet. We left it at the lab last night. We thought maybe the D.A. would want to see it before we make the next move. We got the junk in a marked envelope and the money in another, of course, so I think we can nail him even if the film turns out blank.”

“The junk been analyzed yet?”

“Should have been by now. We left it at the lab.”

Spangler picked up his desk phone and called the Crime Lab. He asked for George Abbot, then after a few moments conversation he hung up again.

“The package was ten grains,” he said. “One grain of heroin and nine grains of powdered milk sugar. They sure gyp the poor suckers, don’t they?”

“Nine to one is about standard,” I said. “The junkies know it’s cut, but what can they do? And one grain is enough to get a conviction.”

The captain picked up the phone again and told the switchboard operator to get him the D.A.’s office. When he got through, he asked to speak to the District Attorney, Norman Dollinger.

After a moment’s wait he said, “Norm? Maury Spangler. My boys caught Benny Polacek with the goods last night.”

There was another pause, then: “Pretty solid. We haven’t seen the film yet. I thought you might want to see it too when it’s run.”

After listening, Spangler said, “O.K. Fine,” and hung up. “He’s coming right over,” he announced. “We’re to meet him in the lab.”

We all three took the stairs to the third floor and walked down the hall to the Crime Lab. Plump George Abbot was inside, peering through a microscope, but he looked up when we entered.

“Afternoon, Captain,” he said. “Hi, Rudd, Lincoln.”

The captain said, “The D.A.’s coming over to look at Rudowski’s and Lincoln’s film, George. Want to set it up in the projector?”

“Sure,” Abbot said.

Rising, he led us into the windowless projection room, which also doubled as the ballistics lab. Selecting a roll of film from a rack, he held it up to the ceiling light to examine a few feet.

“Looks pretty clear,” he said, and began putting it into the projector.

The county courthouse is only across the street from Police Headquarters. By the time Abbot had the film strung into place, the D.A. had arrived.

Norman Dollinger was a tall, slightly stooped man in his mid-fifties with a thin, studious face and horn-rimmed glasses. I suppose he was an efficient enough district attorney, but he was first a machine politician and second a servant of the people. I didn’t hold this against him, because you can’t hold office in either the city or county of St. Cecilia unless you are a machine politician. But I did hold it against him that he made a pretense of being dedicated to equal law enforcement for all, when everybody knew he winked at local rackets which had machine protection. He was up in arms over the narcotics racket solely because the machine wanted it stamped out.

The film was gratifyingly clear for an infrared job, since they don’t always come out perfect. Benny Polacek’s face was easily identifiable as he passed the junk and received payment for it. After the showing was over, Dollinger examined the other evidence and nodded with satisfaction.

“He couldn’t beat it with Clarence Darrow defending him,” he said. “Let’s go downstairs and talk to him.”

The captain returned to his office instead of going downstairs with us. Carl, the D.A., and I descended to the basement together.

The felony section is built for maximum security. You can’t even get into the booking room until the desk sergeant looks you over and presses a buzzer to release the barred entry door. No one but police officers and officers of the court are allowed farther than that, lawyers and other visitors having to wait for prisoners to be brought to the visitors’ grille. And even officers can’t carry any kind of weapon beyond the booking room.

Checking our guns at the desk, we waited for the desk sergeant to buzz open the first door to the cell blocks. Four feet beyond this was a second door which also had an electric lock controlled from the desk. It was impossible for both doors to be open at once: the first had to be closed and locked before the second would open.

Beyond the second door were the cells, three banks of them, walled with two-inch-thick plexiglass so that the patrolling inside guard could see into them at all times. Only the doors to the cells were of barred steel.

We didn’t have to ask the guard which cell Benny Polacek was in, for we could see right through them all, as though the occupants were all in one big room. He was in the far corner of the third bank, isolated from other prisoners by a distance of several cells.

When the three of us stopped in front of his barred door, Polacek looked up sullenly. Then, as he recognized the district attorney, his expression changed to one of surprise.

“Well, well,” he said. “How come the D.A. himself is interested in small potatoes like me? I expected about a twelfth assistant.”

Norman Dollinger looked him over estimatingly, then said to me, “He doesn’t seem to have the shakes.”

“He’s not a user,” I said. “Just a pusher.”

“Yeah,” Carl said. “The slob doesn’t even have the excuse of being hooked himself. He just likes the money. We saw him bareass naked last night, and there isn’t a needle mark on him.”

Dollinger turned his attention back to the prisoner. “We just ran the film of your last night’s transaction, Polacek,” he said crisply. “It came out quite well. An analysis of the product you sold shows it was cut heroin. And of course by now you realize the money you accepted was marked. Looks as though we have an open-and-shut case.”

“So I take the fall,” the pusher said with a shrug. “How come you’re telling me? All your assistants busy?”

“We consider you an important case, Benny. We’ve been laying for you for some time. We can put you away for life with no hope of parole, you know.”

Benny Polacek’s eyes narrowed. In a slow voice he said, “The way you say that, I smell the offer of a deal.”

“You smell correctly. As you say, you’re small potatoes. Ordinarily you’d just be a routine report on my desk, and I wouldn’t even bother to look at the evidence against you. You wouldn’t rate as low as a twelfth assistant, because I only happen to have five, but you’d be handled by the junior member of my staff. How would you like to walk out of here with all charges dropped?”

Benny Polacek’s eyes grew large. “You’re kidding.”

“Not at all. You mean nothing to us. The minute we salt you away, some other vermin will take over your customers. Pushers are a dime a dozen. We want the man who supplies the pushers. The wholesale outlet.”

Polacek’s eyes remained large. “You mean if I give you his name, you’ll let me walk out of here?”

The D.A. shook his head. “It’s not going to be that easy. You’re going to have to set him up, just as you were set up. We want photographic evidence of you making a buy, plus your testimony on the stand. We won’t settle for just a name. You’re off the hook only when we get a conviction.”

The prisoner’s eyes returned to normal size. “I might of known there’d be a gimmick. How long you think I’d live after the trial?”

“A long time, if you fully cooperate. We also want from you the name of every retailer you know. If we smash the entire ring, you’ll be safe enough.”

Polacek emitted a bitter laugh. “For a D.A., you ain’t been around much. A guy squeals and he’s done. Even if you picked up everybody in the business, every gun in town would be after me. They never let a pigeon get away with it, even when they got no ax to grind.”

“The code of the underworld,” I growled. “You’ve been seeing too many B movies. Nobody in any other racket is going to give a hoot in hell if you rat on a horse distributor, Benny. But if it makes you feel better, we’ll furnish you protection after the trial until you get out of town. You’d be better off living somewhere else under a new name than rotting your life away in the joint.”

He thought this over before answering. “I’d have one eye over my shoulder the rest of my life.”

“Better than having the handle of a pickax over your shoulder,” Carl said. “Would you rather make little ones out of big ones the rest of your life?”

Polacek thought some more. Finally he said, “Can I chew this over a while?”

“No,” Dollinger said definitely. “It’s a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. You can decide right now.”

“Umm. Can I talk to a lawyer before I decide?”

“If you wish. But any reputable lawyer will advise you to jump at the chance. What lawyer do you want to talk to?”

Polacek considered for some time. “How about Martin Bonner?”

The D.A. looked surprised. “He’s pretty high class for a pusher. Do you think you can get him to represent you?”

“I don’t know. He won’t know me from a hole in the wall when I call him. I just figure he’s tops, and’ll give me a right steer. Maybe you could ask him to listen to me.”

Dollinger glanced at me, and I moved my head in indication that I wanted to talk to him out of Polacek’s earshot. We walked a few yards away, Carl trailing after us.

“I was going to put in an objection when you said he could talk to a lawyer,” I said. “Chances are any lawyer he deals with regularly would also represent the wholesaler, and that would shoot the whole works. But Bonner’s as honest as they come. He couldn’t possibly have any connection with the dope ring.”

“No, I’m sure he couldn’t,” Dollinger agreed. “He seldom even takes criminal cases. Essentially he’s an estate and corporation man. Why do you suppose Polacek picked him?”

“Maybe for the reason he said,” Carl suggested. “He knows Bonner will give him a right steer.”

“Then suppose we let him phone Bonner,” the D.A. said.

But when we returned to his cell Benny Polacek had a further condition. He insisted that he be allowed to talk to the lawyer with no one eavesdropping. He stipulated that he be allowed to call from a public phone booth, with no cops within hearing range.

“I got a right to private consultation with my attorney,” he said. “It’s that way or nothing.”

The district attorney nodded and I said, “There’s one in the headquarters waiting room, Benny. How’s that?”

Benny Polacek said that would be fine.

Chapter 3

We checked Polacek out and took him upstairs. The public phone booth was in the far corner of the waiting room. We led the prisoner over to it, and Dollinger looked up Martin Bonner’s number in the book. Stepping into the booth, he dropped a dime and dialed.

We all stood outside the open door of the booth as the district attorney asked for Martin Bonner.

After a moment he said, “Marty? This is Norm Dollinger. Do you happen to know a Benjamin Polacek?”

There was a pause, then: “I didn’t think you would. He’s not exactly your type of client. The police picked him up last night for peddling heroin. We’ve offered him a deal, but he insists on legal advice before accepting it and he chose you as the adviser. I’d appreciate it if you’d talk to him. I’m not asking you to accept him as a client. I just want you to talk to him on the phone for a minute.”

After another pause, Dollinger said, “He’s right here. I’ll put him on.”

Stepping from the booth, he handed the phone to Polacek. The pusher moved into the booth, but left the door open.

“You officers mind going over by the desk where I can see you?” he said. “I don’t want you sneaking up alongside the booth to listen in.”

With a shrug, Dollinger moved over to the desk. Carl and I followed. We stood there, about twenty feet away, watching.

Polacek kept one eye on us as he spoke into the phone. We could see his lips move as he spoke at considerable length, but we couldn’t hear a thing he said at that distance. When he finished speaking, he listened for some time, periodically nodding. Once or twice his lips moved as he injected some comment.

All at once his voice came to us clearly. “Hello! Hello!” He reached up to jiggle the hook, repeated it a couple of times more, then stuck his head out from the booth.

“We got cut off,” he called. “One of you officers got another dime?”

We all felt in our pockets, and I came up with one. Dollinger followed me over to the booth.

When I handed Polacek the dime, he said to the D.A., “What’s that number again, Mr. Dollinger?”

“Channel 7-3241,” Dollinger said.

Polacek dropped the coin, then waved us back to the desk. Retreating, we watched as he redialed and again conversed in a tone too low to hear at that distance. The conversation went on for a good five minutes before he finally hung up and stepped from the booth.

When he came over to the desk he said, “You win, Mr. Dollinger. Let’s go somewhere quiet where we can talk.”

“I told you any reputable lawyer would advise you to go along,” the D.A. said.

Polacek grinned at him. “I figured that. I just wanted advice on how to get the best deal. I thought maybe I could get an agreement of immunity in writing from you, but Bonner says not to push my luck. He says he’s sure you wouldn’t sign anything, but your word is good. That’s good enough for me.”

The district attorney stared at him coldly. “You thought I might sign my name to a written agreement with a criminal?”

“No harm in trying, is there? Bonner said the suggestion would probably make you mad. Shall we find that quiet place?”

We took him upstairs to the squadroom. He took his time settling himself in a chair and getting a cigarette going before he spoke. Then he said, “The name of the wholesaler is going to knock your hats off. Better fasten your safety belts.”

“Get on with it,” Dollinger said impatiently.

“It’s Goodie White.”

All three of us stared at him. “Goodie White?” Dollinger repeated incredulously.

“Uh-huh.”

Goodman White was city councilman from the Twelfth Ward. It didn’t surprise me that the councilman was involved in a racket, because many of St. Cecilia’s politicians were. It just surprised me that he was involved in narcotics.

St. Cecilia isn’t a syndicate town, and there are no protected rackets in the sense that anyone gets paid off to leave them alone. But there is a political hierarchy which operates in a somewhat feudal manner. At the top, the city and county administrations, both parts of the same machine, exercise limited dictatorial power over an army of lieutenants whose influence varies according to the number of votes they control.

Some, such as Goodie White, deliver the vote of only a single ward. Others control whole districts, or even several districts. But both the big and the small operate much as did feudal barons, owing allegiance to the princes who run the machine while retaining a degree of independence to run things as they see fit in their own areas. Many are honest men; probably as many more are involved in rackets of different sorts. As long as the rackets stay within tacitly prescribed limits, the powers that be look the other way.

The prescribed limits are pretty strict. A ward leader can get away with operating a discreet gambling house, a string of bookie joints, a lottery, or a call-girl racket so long as he continues to deliver the vote. He pays nothing to protect such rackets, but any cop unwise enough to interfere with them is likely to be called on the carpet by old Baldy Mason, our politically appointed police commissioner, and advised to stop persecuting Baldy’s political colleagues. Persistence can get you transferred to the sticks.

But two things are out: murder and narcotics. This isn’t because of any humanitarianism on the part of the administration. It’s simply that the machine wants to stay entrenched, and is wise enough to know the public will put up with only so much. Activities which might bring on a clamor for reform aren’t tolerated. No one, regardless of political power, can get away with either murder or dope peddling in St. Cecilia.

That’s why I was surprised at hearing the name of Goodie White. If what Polacek said was true, the councilman had been laying himself wide open to being thrown to the wolves.

Norman Dollinger said, “Can you substantiate this charge?”

“I’m gonna set him up for you, ain’t I? That’ll substantiate it.”

I noticed a pleased glitter in the district attorney’s eyes. For a moment I was puzzled, because I thought the news that a fellow member of the administration was involved in narcotics would upset him. Then I remembered that Goodie White had tried to get the party to endorse another candidate for district attorney in the last primary election. Even though they belonged to the same party, the two were political foes.

Dollinger said, “How does White get supplies to you pushers?”

“We pick up the junk at his bowling alley.”

City Councilman wasn’t a full-time job: Goodie White’s primary career was owner and manager of a bowling alley, restaurant, and cocktail lounge.

“Does he personally handle the sales?” Dollinger asked.

“Sure.”

“Exactly what is the procedure?”

“It’s nothing fancy. When I want to make a pickup, I phone in advance. Goodie arranges to be behind the lane-reservation desk when I get there. Next to the desk there’s a showcase with bowling stuff in it. Balls and bags, shoes and gloves, ball cleaners, and stuff like that. I pretend to be buying some small item, usually a can of ball cleaner. Goodie’s got the junk in a prescription envelope, palmed, and when he drops the can in a paper bag, the junk goes in too. I pass him the money in big bills, plus one single dollar. He palms the big ones, rings up the sale for the ball cleaner, and gives me my change from the dollar. Nobody watching sees anything at all out of the way.”

“What’s your usual buy?” I asked.

“An ounce. That’s a couple of weeks’ supply for my size business.”

I did some mental arithmetic. There are four hundred and eighty grains in an ounce, and the way Polacek cut the stuff, his customers had only been getting a single grain of pure heroin in each package. At three-fifty a pop, he had been grossing sixteen hundred and forty dollars every two weeks.

“What’s Goodie charge for an ounce of the pure stuff?” I asked.

“Four hundred bucks.”

That left twelve-forty profit, or a net of six hundred and twenty dollars a week, roughly six times my income.

Carl said, “With the transaction right out in the open like that, we oughtn’t to have any trouble getting a film. Only thing is, Goodie knows both of us.”

“We’ll teach Hermie Joyce to run a camera,” I said. “We can rig a bowling bag with a camera inside, have him wander in and sit down nearby with the bag in his lap. That’s no problem.”

“How soon can you set White up?” Dollinger asked.

Polacek took a final contemplative drag on his cigarette, looked around for an ash tray; when he saw none, he dropped the butt on the floor and carefully stepped it out. “I just made a buy less than a week ago. He’d be suspicious if I hit him for another before next week.”

The district attorney glanced at me, and I said, “We don’t want to boot this by getting impatient. We’d better wait until Benny’s due to make his regular buy. When will that be, Benny?”

“I usually hit him on a Friday afternoon.”

It was now Wednesday, which meant a nine-day wait before he was scheduled to buy again.

Dollinger said, “That’s a devil of a long time to have this thing hang fire.”

“It took us two weeks to get Benny,” Carl said. “Let’s not take the chance of scaring Goodie off.”

“All right, we’ll wait it out,” Dollinger agreed. “We’ll just hold Polacek until we’re ready to move.”

“Goodie would know something was rotten if I’m out of circulation,” Polacek protested.

“That’s right,” I said. “If we want to use him, we’re going to have to turn him loose.”

“Suppose he runs?” Dollinger objected.

“He won’t be that loose,” I assured him. “He’ll be under observation twenty-four hours a day.”

“All right,” the D.A. consented. “Then it’s agreed that you’ll arrange to make a buy the Friday after next, Polacek. Meanwhile, I want you to understand that the charge against you is still hanging over your head. If anything goes wrong, even if it’s not your fault, I’ll get you stashed away for life. Understand?”

Polacek licked his lips. “Yes, sir.”

“Now we’ll move on to another subject. I want a complete list of every pusher you know.”

Benny Polacek said slowly, “Let me get this straight. If you don’t get a conviction against Goodie White, you’re going to cook me anyway, aren’t you?”

“You can bank on it.”

“Then why should I give you anything until I know I’m in the clear? When the jury brings in a verdict of guilty on Goodie, I’ll unload everything I know. Until then, I’ll sit tight.”

“You’re hardly in a position to bargain, Polacek,” Dollinger said coldly.

“Who’s bargaining? I’m just telling you flat out how it’s gonna be. I’m not gonna spill a lot of stuff, then get sent up anyway. If you don’t like that, throw me back in the can, and we’ll forget the whole thing.”

Dollinger looked at me, and I shrugged. “We probably know most of the pushers he could name, anyway. I have a more important question than that. What’s Goodie’s source of the junk, Benny?”

The pusher shook his head. “That I couldn’t tell you. If I knew I’d buy direct, instead of paying Goodie’s price.”

“O.K. Here’s one you can answer. Who was driving you last night?”

Polacek pursed his lips. After considering, he shook his head again. “The guy’s never been in trouble and he didn’t know what I was doing. He just drove me as a favor because my car was laid up.”

Carl said, “If he’s so pure, why’d he take off like an astronaut when you yelled cops?”

“Oh, he knew I was up to something. He just didn’t know what. I told him to take off if there was any trouble. It wouldn’t do no good to talk to him. He ain’t even in the racket.”

It looked as though we were going to have to settle, at least temporarily, for Goodie White, period. I rose to my feet.

“Let’s go back down to the felony section,” I said. “You can pick up your stuff and go home.”

Chapter 4

I accompanied Polacek down to the basement. Norman Dollinger went back across the street to his office, and Carl stayed in the squadroom.

I knew I didn’t have to give Carl any instructions. While I was getting the prisoner checked out, he would be arranging for a stakeout to tail Polacek from the moment he walked out of headquarters. From then until the day we netted Goodie White, Benny Polacek would be under around-the-clock surveillance.

When Polacek had received and receipted for his personal possessions, I took him back up to the waiting room.

There was a girl standing over at the information desk who drew my attention the moment we entered the room. About twenty-five, she had a lovely but somewhat expressionless heart-shaped face surrounded by honey blonde hair which hung to her shoulders. She wore a tight summer-weight dress which showed off a near-perfect figure, with long tapering legs, a wasp waist, and a firm, outthrust bosom.

She glanced our way as we came in, a smile of relief forming on her face, and she deserted the cop on the information desk to come toward us. She couldn’t have been wearing a brassiere, judging from the motion of her bosom every time her high heels hit the floor. I watched interestedly as she approached.

“I was just asking about you, Benny,” she said, halting in front of us. “I would have been down sooner, but Charlie just phoned me that you were in jail. I brought my checkbook, if you need bail.”

“Charlie who?” I asked.

She gazed at me, distracted by the question, but not really interested in who I was.

“I don’t need bail,” Polacek said. “It was all a mistake, and I’m just leaving. How’d you come down?”

“By taxi.”

“We’ll grab another, and I’ll take you home. Let’s go.”

She made no attempt to move. “Why’d they arrest you?”

“I told you it was a mistake. Let’s get out of here.”

He tried to take her elbow, but she shook him off. “If it was a mistake, you ought to sue for false arrest.” She looked at me. “Are you a policeman?”

“Uh-huh. Sergeant Matt Rudd. Who are you?”

“April French. Why’d you arrest Benny?”

I studied her, deciding that she actually didn’t know. She was such a clean, fresh-looking girl, I couldn’t imagine what her interest could be in a dope pusher. Of course, she seemingly didn’t know he was a pusher, or she would have been aware of why he had been arrested. And Polacek wasn’t a bad-looking guy.

I said, “Didn’t friend Charlie tell you?”

Polacek tried to take her elbow again. “Come on, honey. The sergeant’s a busy man. I’ll tell you all about it.”

“Just hold up, Benny,” I said. “I want to talk to the lady.”

Polacek scowled, but there was nothing he could do about it. Subsiding, he stood uncomfortably shifting from foot to foot.

“Well?” I asked the girl. “Didn’t this Charlie who phoned you say what the rap was?”

“No. He claimed he didn’t know. He just said Benny was in jail.”

“Only one person could have known that,” I said. “What’s Charlie’s last name?”

“Don’t tell him,” Polacek said quickly, which told me what I already suspected. Charlie was the driver Polacek had refused to name.

The girl gave him a startled look, then gazed back at me. “What’s this all about, Sergeant?”

I contemplated her for a moment before asking, “What’s Benny to you?”

“He’s my boy friend.”

“I see. You know what business he’s in?”

“Of course. He’s a salesman.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He sells heroin.”

Her eyes grew enormous. She looked from me to Polacek, then back again. “You can’t be serious.”

“I don’t joke about that subject, April. I can’t see anything funny about horse. What do you do for a living?”

She was a little taken aback by the abrupt change of subject. After staring at me, she said, “I work in a chorus.”

“You’d better stick to your chorus line and give this slob the elbow,” I said. “He’s been up for peddling three times. Once more and he’s in for life.”

She gazed at Benny Polacek as though she had never seen him before. Then she abruptly turned and flounced toward the front door. Polacek watched her receding back ruefully until she disappeared.

“Thanks a bunch, pal,” he said.

“Did you expect a character reference?” I growled. “Just because you’re working with us under pressure doesn’t mean I have to like you. I did her a favor. She has no business running around with a slob like you. You must not have known her long.”

“How you figure that?”

“You’d have had her hooked if you’d been working on her any length of time. She isn’t, or she would have known you were a pusher. Get out of here before I kick your pelvis up between your shoulder blades.”

Giving me a wary look, he headed for the door. I went back upstairs to the squadroom.

During the next couple of days we busied ourselves on other cases, as there was nothing much we could do about Goodie White until the time came for Benny Polacek to set him up. We did have the lab build us a piece of equipment, and we put an outside stakeout on the bowling alley. The stakeout reported a couple of known pushers visiting the place, in each case staying only a few minutes. Neither pusher was bothered, because we were after bigger game.

The stakeouts on Benny Polacek reported him living a quiet life. He had an apartment over on Clarkson and seemed to be spending most of his time there. When he did go out, it was usually only to a restaurant or tavern, and while he had a few casual conversations with people he encountered, his tails got the impression they were accidental meetings. He didn’t come in contact with anyone recognized by the stakeouts as underworld characters.

Rookie Herman Joyce was off on a two-day leave. He was due back on Friday, and I asked Captain Parker to have him drop by the squadroom when he got off duty that day.

Joyce was on the day trick, so it was about a quarter after five when he showed. He was wearing a crew cut and was spick-and-span in a clean blue uniform.

“You look a little different than the last time I saw you,” I said with a grin. “All rested up?”

“Mentally and emotionally. I wore myself out physically following a trout stream for two days. Captain Parker says you want to use me on a special assignment again.”

“Uh-huh. Only this will be a one-day stand, probably for less than an hour. Ever use a movie camera?”

“Sure. I own one.”

“This is a kind of special camera,” I said. “Show him, Carl.”

Lincoln went to his locker and got out the contraption the lab had built for us. It had been an ordinary bowling bag, but the boys in the lab had modified it considerably. Instead of a ball, it contained a movie camera of the type with the view finder on the top, so that the lens was aimed by looking downward.

Carl had the rookie sit in a chair, placed the bag on his lap, and separated the twin handles on top. There was a one-inch-square hole between them, and the view finder was flush with the hole. Carl lifted a small tab at the front of the bag to disclose the camera lens.

“This is the switch,” Carl said, indicating the zipper tab. He flipped it upward, then down again. “There’s no film in it at the moment, so you can try it out. Pretend you’re taking a picture of that file cabinet over there.”

Herman Joyce focused on the file cabinet and lifted the zipper tab. He looked up in surprise. “I can feel the vibration of the spring motor running, but I can’t hear it.”

“You’re not supposed to,” Carl said dryly. “In our work we wouldn’t have much use for a camera that buzzed like an alarm clock.”

“Think you can handle it all right?” I asked.

“Sure. There’s nothing to it.”

“O.K., here’s the setup. Next Friday afternoon Benny Polacek is going to make a wholesale buy at the White Bowl over on the East Side. The transfer will be made at the reservation desk. Do you bowl?”

“Some. I’m not in any league.”

“Ever been to the White Bowl?”

Joyce shook his head. “That’s not in my part of town.”

“Good. That makes it better. Go on home and put on a bowling shirt. Run out there and bowl a couple of games. Don’t attract attention to yourself, but case the area around the lane-reservation desk. Actually, the transfer will be made from behind the showcase next to it, so keep that in mind. Pick a spot where you can sit down and be in camera range.”

“I understand.”

“Once you’ve cased the place, I want you to stay away from it. The next time you walk in, it will be to make a movie. You’ll continue to work your regular job with Metro until we need you, which will probably be next Friday afternoon. O.K.?”

“Got it, Sarge.” He rose and set the concealed camera on a nearby table. “You’ll give me a little notice, will you?”

“I’ll phone Captain Parker as soon as Polacek makes a definite appointment for the buy.”

“Fine,” he said. “See you guys around.”

“There goes a pretty nice kid,” Carl said when Joyce had walked out. “We ought to get him transferred over here.”

“A nice kid like that?” I said. “Why do him that dirty a trick?”

We carefully stayed away from Benny Polacek, not wanting the rumor to start that he was being visited by cops. The stakeouts were keeping sufficient track of him so that personal contact wasn’t necessary.

It was Wednesday evening before I finally phoned him.

“This is Matt Rudd,” I said when he answered the phone. “You alone?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I guess it’s about time you set up an appointment with Goodie.”

“I already have,” he said. “I called him this afternoon and told him I’d be needing my regular supply Friday. It’s all set for seven Friday night.”

“Friday night? I thought you were setting it up for the afternoon.”

“Goodie’s idea,” he said. “I guess he won’t be there in the afternoon. I didn’t ask why the change.”

“O.K. I won’t call you again, so if there’s any switch in plans, contact me. You want us to furnish the marked money, or have you got enough? We’ll reimburse you, of course, because you won’t get back what you pass to Goodie. It’ll be evidence.”

“I’ve got enough bills. And I know how to mark them. I ought to. I’ve been clipped with marked bills four times.”

“Good. Then we’ll see you Friday night.”

When I hung up, I phoned Metro and asked the nightwatch commander to put a note in Herman Joyce’s box telling him to buzz me at five the next day.

“I guess that’s that,” I said to Carl when I hung up the second time. “Now all we have to do is wait until Friday night.”

Chapter 5

Herman Joyce phoned me at the squadroom just as we were logging in at five the following afternoon. I told him everything was set for seven the next evening.

“Better ask Captain Parker if you can get off duty at four P.M.,” I said. “That’ll give you time to change into bowling dress, grab something to eat, and get over here to pick up the camera by five-thirty. I want you out at the White Bowl by six-thirty, in case Polacek shows early. Did you get the place cased the other night?”

“Yeah. There’s a bench along the wall facing the lane-reservation desk. I can catch Benny the moment he walks in the front door and pan him right over to the desk.”

“Fine. You be on the bench at six-thirty, and start shooting as soon as Benny shows. Carl and I will watch from the entrance until the transfer is made, then move in. You keep on grinding right through the arrest and shakedown. O.K.?”

“I’ve got it, Sarge. See you at five-thirty tomorrow.”

Except for my conversation with Joyce, Thursday was a dead night. Ordinarily we would have been out shadowing suspected pushers, but with the big moment approaching, we didn’t want to chance causing the whole ring to run for cover for the sake of routing a few small fry. Carl and I devoted our time to catching up on desk work.

At eleven P.M. the squadroom phone rang. The extension on the table where we were working was closest to me, so I answered.

When I said, “Narcotics, Sergeant Rudd,” a crisp voice said in my ear, “Who? Is that you, Rudowski?”

Aside from Captain Spangler, only one man on the force insists on using my legal name. I recognized the voice as that of Lieutenant Robert Wynn of Homicide.

“Yes, sir, Lieutenant,” I said. I’m on a first-name basis with most police lieutenants, but Robert Wynn is G.I. Nobody of lesser rank calls him anything but Lieutenant or Sir.

“Who’s working the Heroin Detail, Sergeant?”

“Lincoln and I, Lieutenant.”

“Good,” he said in the same crisp tone. “Take this down. Ready?”

Pulling over a scratch pad, I reached for a pencil and said, “Go ahead.”

“Apartment Two-B, 427 Clarkson Boulevard. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll expect you in fifteen minutes,” Wynn said, and hung up.

When I set down the phone, Carl gave me an inquiring look.

“His Lordship, Lieutenant General Wynn,” I said. “He wants us vassals over at an address on Clarkson this instant.”

“For what?”

“He didn’t deign to say,” I said, rising. “Ours not to question why — ours just to rise and fly.”

Carl wrinkled his long nose. “Maybe he wants you for murdering poetry.”

Unfolding his lanky frame, he followed me from the squadroom. Halfway down the stairs, I came to such an abrupt stop that Carl nearly ran over me.

“What the hell?” he said involuntarily.

I looked over my shoulder at him. “He said four twenty-seven Clarkson.”

“Huh?” Carl said. “That’s Benny Polacek’s address.”

“I know. And Wynn said Apartment Two-B. I have a sinking feeling that Benny won’t be setting up Goodie White for us tomorrow night.”

“We’ll never find out, standing here in the middle of a flight of stairs,” Carl said. “Get your big hulk moving.”

We went the rest of the way down the stairs on the double.

Four twenty-seven Clarkson Boulevard was an old but well-kept-up apartment house in a respectable middle-income residential section. It was a three-story, eighteen-unit building of four- and five-room apartments which probably rented at sixty to seventy-five dollars a month. There were similar apartment buildings on either side of it and on the opposite side of the street, one across the avenue rising to six stories.

There were a police car and an ambulance parked in front of the building, and a uniformed cop was stationed at the front entrance. As we pulled up, a couple of ambulance attendants carried an empty stretcher down the front steps, loaded it in the ambulance, and drove away.

“Oh-oh,” Carl said. “Looks like whoever they came after decided to wait for the morgue wagon.”

A crowd of neighbors had gathered on the sidewalk. Among them I recognized Detective First Grade Howard Graves, who had been assigned to stakeout duty that night. Graves moved over to us when he saw us climb from the felony car.

“What’s the story?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. First I knew anything was up was when I heard the sirens. I didn’t think I ought to leave my post and go inside to investigate. There’s enough cops in there to handle whatever it is.”

I grunted and moved on, Carl trailing behind me.

The cop on the front entrance halted us until I showed my badge, then stepped aside.

“What happened in there?” I asked him.

“A shooting, I think. There’s some Homicide cops inside.”

We went on inside. There was a bank of mailboxes in the lobby with name cards beneath them. I glanced at the one beneath box 2-B, hoping I had remembered Benny Polacek’s apartment number wrong.

I hadn’t. The card said: Benjamin Polacek.

“Let’s go upstairs and get the bad news,” I said to Carl.

The door to Apartment 2-B was closed, but directly across the hall from it the door to 2-A stood open. Glancing through it, I saw the stocky figure of Lieutenant Wynn, his back to the door. A dark, handsome young man of about twenty-five sat on a sofa facing the door.

As I paused in the doorway, the young man said, “Bluster all you want to, Lieutenant. As my sister’s doctor I say she’s in no condition to stand questioning right now. You’re not going to see her.”

“Your sister’s doctor, hell,” Wynn said. “You’ve admitted you’re only a probationary intern at City Hospital. Give me the name of your family doctor, and I’ll get him over here.”

The young intern gave him a deliberately infuriating grin. “You know better than that, Lieutenant. Intern or not, I’m a licensed medical practitioner. If you want another physician to examine my sister, you’ll have to have him bring a court order along.”

I cleared my throat, and Wynn spun to glare at me. “You certainly took your time, Rudowski,” he snapped.

I glanced at my watch. It said eleven-fifteen, just when he’d instructed me to get there. I didn’t point this out, though. The young doctor obviously had him in a bad enough mood already.

The lieutenant strode toward me, and I stepped out of the way to let him pass into the hall. Giving Carl Lincoln a curt nod, he crossed to open the door to 2-B. I followed him into the apartment, and Carl trailed after us.

We entered a front room about eighteen feet long furnished with fairly new but cheap pieces. A lab man was dusting flat surfaces for fingerprints.

Wynn paused to ask him, “Anything?”

“Five sets, so far,” the technician said. “This is the last room.”

Wynn continued on through a small dining room, where a uniformed cop stood doing nothing, and on into a kitchen. Carl and I followed.

There were three people in the kitchen, but only two were standing up. Redheaded Hank Carter, Wynn’s partner, leaned his thin frame against the sink. Carter wore a perpetually sad expression, the probable result of working for years with Wynn. A plump, balding man whom I recognized as one of the medical examiners was just snapping his bag closed.

The third occupant of the room lay on his back next to the stove. It didn’t surprise me that it was Benny Polacek, because I had expected it to be, but his condition discouraged me. He was going to be in no shape to carry out his assignment the next evening, because he was quite dead. He was in shirtsleeves, and the left side of his chest was clotted with blood from what appeared to be at least three bullet wounds. Someone had pushed up Benny’s sleeves to expose his bare arms nearly to the shoulders and had pulled his trousers down until they were bunched around his ankles.

I gave Wynn an inquiring look, and he said, “We were looking for needle marks. There aren’t any.”

The M.E. said, “I’d say time of death conforms to the time the shots were heard, Lieutenant. About ten P.M.”

Wynn merely grunted.

“I’ll send over a written report in the morning,” the M.E. said, and nodding to me and Carl, he picked up his bag and left. Wynn gazed moodily down at the body. Hank Carter regarded Carl and me without speaking. He was a good friend of both of us, but he seldom spoke when Wynn was around.

I glanced about the room.

There was no weapon in sight. From the position of the body and the fact that all wounds were on the left side, it seemed apparent that the man had been standing before the stove, half-facing the doorway, when he was shot from the direction of the doorway. An old-fashioned baked enamel coffeepot stood on one of the burners, and a shattered cup and saucer lay on the floor. I guessed that the dead man had been reaching for the pot to pour a cup of coffee when something caused him to turn part way around, just in time to be shot.

Glancing at the table, I saw that another cup and saucer stood before the chair whose back was to the stove, suggesting that a guest had been present when the murder occurred. And — since it was likely the host would pour the guest’s coffee first — the other person must have been seated with his back to the door, for the empty cup still on the table must have been meant for the dead man.

Lieutenant Wynn said, “Guy’s name was Benjamin Polacek. Know him?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “He was a pusher.”

“What we figured,” Wynn said. “That’s why you’re here. When we didn’t find any needle marks on him, we guessed he must be a pusher. Follow me.”

He strode back out into the dining room, where the lounging patrolman straightened up hurriedly and tried to look as though he were doing something.

He turned into a center hall off which there was a bathroom and a bedroom, and Carl and I followed him into the bedroom.

Wynn opened the top drawer of a dresser and handed me a flat tin box.

“We found this during a routine search of the place,” he said.

The box contained nothing but a hypodermic syringe, a spoon, and a small alcohol lamp, the standard rig of horse riders. Then I noticed the residue of fine white powder which coated the bottom of the box.

Wynn said, “Carter says that powder is heroin.”

Getting a little on my finger, I touched it to my tongue. “Uh-huh. Cut with milk sugar. He must have had papers of the stuff measured out in single pops, and some spilled out. He would have gotten rid of his supply, of course.”

The Homicide officer frowned. “Why do you say that?”

“We nailed him for selling last week. He wouldn’t have risked more trouble by keeping a supply around.”

Wynn’s frown deepened. “If he was arrested last week, what was he doing walking around? Out on bail?”

“He made a deal with the D.A. This was Benny’s fourth fall, so he had a life penalty staring him in the face. It was all arranged for him to make a buy from the local wholesaler tomorrow night while we took moving pictures — but now that’s blown sky high.”

“Who’s the wholesaler?” Wynn asked.

“Councilman Goodman White.”

Wynn stared at me as though I had suddenly grown a hole in my head. “You must be nuts, Sergeant.”

I shrugged. “You can check with the D.A. if you don’t believe me.”

After staring at me some more, the lieutenant decided to believe me. “Then Goodie White must be nuts. I never heard of him being tied to any racket, let alone naroctics.”

“Neither did we,” Carl said. “But now it looks as though he’s violated both taboos in this town. Narcotics and murder.”

The lieutenant and I both looked at him. I said, “You think Goodie pulled this kill to avoid being set up?”

“Well, doesn’t it make sense?”

“How would he know Benny was cooperating with us? Nobody but us, Herman Joyce, Captain Spangler, and the D.A. knew the guy had even been knocked over.”

“Who’s Herman Joyce?” Wynn asked.

“A rookie from Metro we used to play the part of a junkie,” I said. “He wouldn’t talk.”

Wynn said thoughtfully, “Maybe Benny confided his troubles to a girl friend and she ran to White with the story. Or maybe there’s a leak in the D.A.’s office.”

“There is a girl friend who knew he was picked up,” I said, suddenly remembering the honey blonde. “Her name’s April French, and she works in a chorus line somewhere.”

“How’d she know about it?”

“She came down to bail him out. But when she found out it was a narcotics rap, she gave him a disgusted look and walked out. Seems she didn’t know he was a pusher and she was through the minute she found out. She might have sounded off to some of her friends, and the story could have gotten back to Goodie via the grapevine.”

“This Charlie guy knew Benny had been arrested, too,” Carl put in.

“Charlie who?” the lieutenant asked.

“We only know the first name,” I said. “Somebody was driving Benny the night we knocked him over, and the driver got away. When the French girl came to headquarters to bail Benny out, she mentioned that somebody named Charlie had phoned her about the arrest. That had to be the driver, because nobody else knew Benny was in jail.”

Wynn said, “Where’s this French woman work?”

I shrugged. “She didn’t say. Just said she danced in a chorus line.”

“You mean you didn’t take down her address?” Wynn exploded.

I could have explained that since the girl hadn’t been charged with anything, I had no right to ask her a lot of personal questions, and felt I had done pretty well to get as much from her as I had. But you don’t make excuses to Lieutenant Robert Wynn.

I merely said, “No, sir, I didn’t.”

Chapter 6

After glowering at me for a time, the lieutenant said grudgingly, “We can probably locate her easily enough. April French isn’t a very common name.” Then his tone turned irritable. “If that damnfool young intern across the hall would let me talk to his sister, we might get a description of the killer.”

“The sister saw him?” I asked.

“According to her brother, she was over here for coffee when it happened. This is secondhand, because I haven’t seen the woman, but he claims she told him she was sitting with her back to the kitchen door and Benny was just getting ready to pour her a cup of coffee when the killer fired from the doorway. He says she was too hysterical to get any more than that out of her, and he doesn’t know whether she recognized the killer, or even saw him. He gave her a sedative and put her to bed. Says she’s in shock and can’t be questioned until morning.”

“Who is she?” I asked.

“Her name’s Beverly Arden and her brother’s name is Norman Arden. He says she’s twenty-two and is a secretary at Whittiker Aluminum. Norman is just out of med school and is interning at City Hospital. But he’s still a licensed M.D., so I can’t force my way past him without getting up to my ears in grief.”

Carl said, “Think he might be covering for her, Lieutenant? Maybe she knocked him off.”

Wynn gave an impatient shrug. “Anything’s possible. Norman claims there was nothing between Benny and his sister. Says they just had a neighborly cup of coffee together now and then. Claims he dropped over occasionally, too, and Benny sometimes dropped in on them. But they were only casually friendly and didn’t move in the same social group.”

“This Norman guy was in his own apartment when it happened?” I asked.

“Yeah. Says he was in the shower when he heard the shots. He says that by the time he got dried off, dressed, and over here to investigate, the killer was long gone and Beverly was having the screaming meemies. He gave her some kind of shot to knock her out, put her to bed, and then called us.”

Carl said, “If the killer came and went by the front entrance, maybe Graves can describe him, Matt.”

Wynn asked, “Who’s Graves?”

“A narcotics cop we had planted out front,” I said. “We’ve had Benny staked out ever since we released him.”

“Well, get him in here,” the lieutenant snapped.

Ordinarily I have Carl run little errands such as that, since I outrank him, but I can stand only so much of Robert Wynn before I need a breath of fresh air. Before Carl could move, I said, “Yes, sir,” and headed for the door.

The door to Apartment 2-A was now closed, I noticed as I stepped into the hall.

Outside the crowd had thinned somewhat, but a few curiosity seekers still stood on the sidewalk. Howard Graves wasn’t among them, but I spotted someone seated in a car across the street and guessed that it was he.

Crossing the street, I peered into the car and saw that it was.

“Hi, Matt,” he said. “The rumor’s circulating among the bystanders that somebody got shot. Was it our boy?”

“Uh-huh. He’s colder than a carp. Has he been home all evening?”

“No, he had dinner out. At an Automat over on Twenty-sixth. Then he had a couple of drinks in a tavern next to the Automat and came home. He walked in the front door about a quarter of ten.”

“Hmm. He was shot only fifteen minutes later. Anybody follow him home?”

“Just me. He didn’t even talk to anybody while he was out.”

“You see anyone walk in or out of the building after he was in?”

Graves didn’t say anything.

“Well?” I asked.

He said slowly, “You’re not going to like this, Matt.”

“What?”

“Well, Benny made a habit of staying home, once he got back from dinner. I’ve been covering him over a week, and never once has he gone out again once he was home. When I saw the light go on in his front room, I figured he was set for the night.”

“For cripes sake!” I growled. “You picked tonight of all nights to goof off!”

“How’d I know somebody was going to take a pot shot at him?” Graves said defensively. “I just walked around the corner to a little place where you can get coffee. I only figured to be gone a few minutes.”

“How long were you gone?”

“About a half-hour, I guess,” he said reluctantly. “I came hightailing back when I heard the sirens.”

“This is great,” I said. “They want you inside to find out if you saw the killer arrive or leave. You know who’s in charge of this case?”

“Who?”

“Bob Wynn.”

“Ouch,” Graves said. “He’ll have me busted down to a beat.”

“I’ll try to cover for you, you damned fool,” I said. “Come on inside and keep your mouth shut.”

Climbing out of the car, he followed me across the street and into the building. I walked down a hallway off the lobby to a door leading out back, Graves a step behind me. The door was unlocked, I was gratified to discover. Out back there was a concrete parking lot for the benefit of the tenants.

“Did Benny park back here or in front?” I asked.

“He keeps his car back here,” Graves said. “But tonight he used the front door. He walked to the Automat. It’s only a couple of blocks.”

If I had been the killer, I would have parked my car in back and would have come in this way, I reflected. Probably Graves wouldn’t have seen anything even if he hadn’t deserted his post.

We went back inside and upstairs to 2-B.

“Wait here in the hall in case Wynn insists on seeing you,” I said. “We’ll hope he doesn’t.”

Carl and Wynn were in the front room when I walked back into the apartment. Wynn frowned when he saw me alone.

“Where’s the stakeout?” he asked.

“Out in the hall. I thought the place was cluttered up enough by cops. He didn’t see anybody come in or out the front way, but there’s an unlocked back door leading to a parking lot.”

“Nobody came in or out the front way all evening?” Wynn inquired.

“Not since Benny Polacek got home. He had dinner at an Automat over on Twenty-sixth and didn’t get back until fifteen minutes before he was shot. Graves said he didn’t talk to anyone while he was out and nobody followed him home. The killer must have come and gone by the rear door. Want to talk to Graves?”

If I hadn’t brought the stakeout inside with me, Wynn would have sent me back out for him. But since I offered to let him talk to the man, he wasn’t interested.

“Not if he doesn’t have any more than that to say,” the lieutenant growled.

Opening the door to the hall, I said, “I guess you can take off, Howie. Benny doesn’t need a tail any more.”

“Thanks, Matt,” he said in a low voice, and hurried toward the stairs.

Closing the door again, I said, “This leaves us out on a limb so far as Goodie White is concerned, Lieutenant. Of course if you manage to tag him for murder, the D.A. won’t quibble about a narcotics rap. You plan to pull him in for questioning?”

Wynn frowned. “Not until I’ve had a chance to question Beverly Arden. He’ll keep until tomorrow.”

I could understand his reluctance to move against a city councilman. In our case we had been prepared to move in on definite information and catch Goodman White redhanded with evidence he couldn’t refute. It was another matter to go after him on mere suspicion for an offense as serious as murder. In St. Cecilia a cop had better be right when he accused an influential politician of a crime.

“You need us any more, sir?” I asked.

Wynn contemplated for a moment, seemed to come to a decision and said, “Not right now, I guess. But since this thing involves both Homicide and Narcotics, I think we’d better have an interdivisional conference on it tomorrow. I’ll set it up through my chief and have him get in touch with Captain Spangler. Better phone in about one P.M. to learn the time and place of the conference.”

“We aren’t due on duty until five P.M.,” I ventured.

“Neither am I, Sergeant,” he snapped. “But a police officer is on call twenty-four hours a day. You phone your captain at one P.M. That’s an order.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, heavily emphasizing the sir and throwing him an exaggeratedly formal salute.

He reddened slightly, but he didn’t say anything. Aside from his tendency to be brass-happy, I didn’t have anything against Robert Wynn, but I could take only so much of his acting as though he were an army colonel and I was a buck private. And from previous experience he knew I was on the verge of telling him to go to hell.

He would have broken any Homicide sergeant for some of the things I’ve said to him in the past, but because I wasn’t under his command, the worst he could do to me was complain about my discourtesy to his own immediate chief, who in turn could do nothing but relay the complaint to Captain Spangler, who almost certainly would take no action. By the rule book, sergeants are supposed to Sir lieutenants, but hardly anyone aside from Wynn took the rule seriously. Up to a point I was willing to take his nonsense just to avoid trouble, but I had reached the point and he knew it.

He merely gave me a curt nod of dismissal.

On the stairs we met a couple of morgue attendants bringing up one of the wicker baskets they use instead of stretchers for morgue cases.

Outside, Carl said, “You were getting ready to pop off at Wynn again, weren’t you?”

I looked at him with raised eyebrows. “Did it show?”

“It always shows. What are you going to do if they ever transfer you to Homicide and you draw Wynn as a partner?”

“Kill myself,” I said without hesitation.

Chapter 7

The next day, when I phoned Captain Spangler at one P.M., he said Carl and I could come in at three and that the conference would be in his office.

“You can come in a couple of hours late some other time to make up for it,” he said in such a kindly voice that I immediately felt suspicious.

It wasn’t normal for Spangler to offer time off which hadn’t been requested. For example, when we had checked in at one P.M. the day after bagging Benny Polacek, he hadn’t suggested that we could knock four hours off some later trick.

I said, “You’ve got some nasty detail in store for us, haven’t you, Captain?”

“Don’t be an idiot, Rudowski,” he said in a less kindly voice. “Just be here at three.”

I phoned Carl at home to relay the instructions and tell him what the captain had said about letting us have the extra two hours off some other time. His reaction was the same as mine.

“The skipper isn’t that generous,” he said darkly. “I think we’d better resign from the force.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Lincoln,” I mimicked the captain. “Just be there at three.”

When we checked in at three, we found Spangler alone in his office. Today he was in one of his pleasanter moods. Waving a benign hand at a couple of chairs, he said, “Sit down, boys. Sorry I had to bring you in early. The others will be along in a minute.”

Carl and I looked at each other. The symptoms of impending bad news were becoming clearer all the time. The captain never calls us boys unless he has a particularly nasty assignment for us.

Only moments after we had taken seats, Lieutenant Wynn, Hank Carter, and Captain Hugh Ellis of Homicide arrived. This seemed to be everyone who was coming, because Spangler got down to business as soon as they were seated.

“The D.A. is a little upset over last night’s development,” he said. “As you all know, Benny Polacek was supposed to set up his wholesaler this evening, but of course that’s all off now. Dollinger’s first reaction was to have us pull in Councilman White for questioning about the murder, but I suggested we talk to the chief before we went off half-cocked.”

“Did you talk to him?” Captain Ellis asked.

“I talked to both the chief and the commissioner, Hugh. I think the commissioner must have discussed the matter with the mayor, because he had quite definite instructions when he phoned back.”

Hugh Ellis, lean and slightly stooped and near retirement age, looked impressed. “What did he have to say?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute, Hugh.”

Spangler now included all of us. “We’re involved in a rather delicate matter here. We have a city councilman accused by a now-deceased witness of dealing in wholesale narcotics. And he’s also at least tentatively a murder suspect. Of course a suspect’s status makes no difference in a police investigation, but just to avoid possible repercussions, I thought it best — or, rather, Captain Ellis and I thought it best — to clear procedure with the top echelon.”

Status made no difference, hell, I thought. In St. Cecilia a motor cop could get busted to foot patrol for giving a ward heeler a speeding ticket. So long as the evidence against Goodman White had seemed open-and-shut, and the district attorney himself had been directing the investigation, it hadn’t disturbed Spangler to have a couple of his men closing in on the city councilman. But he wasn’t about to start moving against a man with White’s political influence on mere suspicion without advance clearance from above.

“The commissioner has ordered a thorough investigation of both matters,” Spangler went on. “And he wants a definite answer. If Mr. Goodman White is guilty of either or both crimes, he wants it proved. If he isn’t, he wants his innocence definitely established.”

Translated, that meant that the big brass had conferred on Councilman Goodman White and had decided they had to know one way or the other. If he was engaging in activities which might embarrass the administration, they meant to throw him to the wolves. If he wasn’t, they wanted him cleared of all suspicion.

Spangler said, “Since the case involves both my division and Captain Ellis’s, Commissioner Mason wants coordinated effort between us. He’s asked me to supervise the investigation personally and have the Homicide team assigned to the case report directly to me instead of to you, Hugh.”

Captain Ellis shrugged. “Suits me, Maury.”

That figured, I thought. If Goodie White was innocent, the brass didn’t want him riled too much. And there wasn’t a better man on the force to handle delicate situations than Maurice Spangler. He had the knack of never offending anyone who counted, always managing to maneuver between opposing pressures so that in the end every person involved felt he had been on his side, even though they all ended mad at each other.

Spangler cleared his throat. “Now for the strategy of the investigation. The commissioner has suggested that both the Homicide team and the Narcotics team be kept on the case. As a matter of fact, because of the importance of the matter, he’s ordered that the four of you be relieved of all duty except this investigation.”

Wynn asked, “Does that mean Carter and I will be placed on detached duty with you, sir?”

Captain Spangler nodded. “That’s right. And in order to coordinate effort, I feel you should be unified into a single four-man team. You’ll be in charge, of course, Lieutenant Wynn, and Carter, Rudowski, and Lincoln will take orders from you.”

He threw Carl and me bright smiles while we glared back at him speechlessly. The omens of catastrophe had been right, but I had never expected such dire catastrophe.

Robert Wynn glanced at me with the anticipatory smile of a cat regarding a cornered mouse.

“That’s all, I guess,” Spangler said crisply. “Wynn, you may stay a moment for detailed instructions. You stick around to listen in, too, Hugh, if you want, so you’ll know what’s going on.”

Carl, Hank Carter, and I silently filed from the office. When the door closed behind us, Carter’s normally morose face split into the widest grin I ever saw on it.

“Welcome aboard the ‘Bounty,’ boys,” he said. “You’ll love Captain Bligh.”

“Don’t call us boys,” I snapped at him. “It has unpleasant significance.”

Carl Lincoln said solicitously, “You going to do it here, Matt, or wait until you get outside?”

“Do what?” I demanded.

“Kill yourself.”

“Go to hell,” I instructed him. “And that’s an order.”

After a time Captain Ellis and Lieutenant Wynn came out of Spangler’s office. Ellis walked on through the squadroom and out into the hall, presumably to return to Homicide.

Wynn said to me in his crispest army-colonel tone, “Captain Spangler wants to see you, Rudowski. Soon as he’s finished with you, we’ll have our own little conference.”

“Yes, sir,” I said sourly, and re-entered the captain’s office.

When I was seated, Spangler said in an apologetic tone, “I know you don’t get along very well with Bob Wynn, Rudowski, but this was the commissioner’s idea, so I had no choice. It’s only a temporary arrangement, so try not to rub him wrong. O.K.?”

“Did you give him the same advice?” I growled.

The captain waved this aside. “Wynn’s a little G.I., but he’s a pretty good cop.”

“A little, hell,” I said. “He’s a goddamned martinet.”

“Now that’s enough of that,” Spangler said sharply. “I expect you to get along with Wynn.”

“Yes, sir,” I said with a sigh.

“That’s better. There’s one more thing I wanted to talk to you about. I’ve already discussed this with Wynn, but in Homicide they aren’t subject to the same pressures we sometimes are, so they aren’t as used to exercising tact.”

I knew what was coming. What he meant was that Homicide cops seldom had to worry about stepping on influential toes, because the brass made no effort to protect murderers. They made no effort to protect people involved in the narcotics racket, either, but that was only a third of our division’s business. We were also concerned with vice and gambling, and most rackets controlled by local politicians involved one or the other. As a consequence we were walking a tightrope most of the time. In St. Cecilia it was dangerous to arrest, or even investigate, the wrong people for crimes less than dope peddling or murder.

“We have a definite green light to let the chips fall where they may,” Spangler went on. “But there’s no point in uselessly antagonizing a man with Goodman White’s influence.”

This was the sort of thing which had kept Maurice Spangler in office for so many years. Since he was subject to more pressure than any man on the force, by all rights he should have had more enemies than any other division head. But he actually had none with any influence. It was apparent why. Even with a go-ahead from the commissioner himself, he wanted to make sure Goodie White didn’t get mad at him in case the man turned out to be innocent. Spangler always coppered his bets.

I said, “We’ll be tactful, Captain. And I’ll try to keep Wynn in line.”

Spangler looked relieved. “Fine, Rudowski. I knew I could count on you. That’s all.”

Back in the squadroom I found Wynn, Carter, and Lincoln gathered around a corner table. I joined them.

“Our first step is to locate and question Polacek’s girl friend, April French, and this mysterious man named Charlie,” Wynn announced. “If we find the girl, we should be able to get Charlie’s identity from her. There’s no April French listed in either the phone book or the city directory, Rudowski.”

If he expected me to make some comment to this, I didn’t know what he wanted me to say. I merely looked wise.

“Now, here are first assignments,” the lieutenant went on. “Lincoln, get on the phone and start calling theatrical agents to see if anyone knows of April French. If you don’t hit pay dirt that way, you can start making the rounds of theaters and night clubs that use chorus girls. O.K.?”

“Yes, sir,” Carl said. He moved over to another table and started leafing through the yellow section of the phone book.

“Carter, you run over to the coroner’s office and see how far they’ve gotten with the autopsy. Then stop by Fingerprints and the Crime Lab and get whatever they have. Get going.”

“Yes, sir,” Hank Carter said in a relieved voice, glad to get away from his partner.

As Carter hurried from the squadroom, Wynn said to me, “You run over to the Arden apartment and talk to Beverly Arden, Rudowski. Last night I got warrants as material witnesses for both her and her brother, but I didn’t serve them. It was just to keep things under control in case either one tried to get cute. I put two around-the-clock guards on their door armed with the warrants and had a third cover the back. One guard was instructed to accompany Norman to the hospital this morning and stick with him all day. The other was to keep Beverly from leaving for any reason but medical attention. So she should be home.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, standing up.

“I also got a search warrant for both the apartment and persons of Norman and Beverly Arden,” the lieutenant said. “The guard assigned to Beverly has it. I left instructions for Norman to be searched before he was permitted to leave for the hospital this morning, just in case he tried to carry off a gun for disposal. You can search the apartment.”

I had to admit he was thorough. I was beginning to agree with the captain’s opinion that he was a pretty good cop, when he spoiled it.

“It shouldn’t take you more than an hour to search the apartment and get Beverly’s story,” he said. “What you’ll be looking for is the murder weapon, in case I haven’t made that clear. When you’re through, come straight back here. It isn’t necessary to stop for refreshments in some bar en route.”

I stared at him for a moment, then turned my back and marched out of the squadroom.

Chapter 8

At 427 Clarkson Boulevard, a single uniformed cop was seated in a wooden chair in the hallway outside Apartment 2-A. His face was familiar, though I couldn’t attach a name to it, but he knew who I was.

Coming to his feet, he said, “Afternoon, Sergeant Rudd.”

“Hi,” I said. “The other guard off with Dr. Arden?”

He nodded. “Accompanied him to the hospital this morning.”

“He search him?”

“Uh-huh. His person and his medical bag. Nothing.”

“Heard anything from the girl?”

He nodded again. “She looked out once about noon and asked why I was here. I showed her the material-witness warrant and explained I wouldn’t serve it if she stayed inside. She shut the door, and I haven’t seen her since. She’s quite a babe.”

I held out my hand. “Lieutenant Wynn says you have a search warrant too. I’ll take that.”

“Sure,” he said, producing it.

Sticking it in my inside breast pocket, I rang the doorbell.

After a few moments the door opened. As the cop in the hall had said, she was quite a babe. Slim and dark, with a pale, flawless complexion and big, liquid brown eyes, she wore lounging pajamas with gold bottoms and a long-sleeved black top. The pajama pants prevented me from seeing what kind of legs she had, except that they were long and straight. The upper part of her body was lovely, though. I got the impression that she wore no brassiere, and even though she was rather full-bosomed, she was firm fleshed enough so that her symmetry wasn’t in the least marred by the apparent lack of support.

Taking off my hat and showing my badge, I said, “I’m Sergeant Matt Rudd, police, Miss Arden. May I come in?”

She looked me up and down with unsmiling appraisal before nodding briefly and stepping aside.

Walking into the front room, I glanced around. It was furnished much as the place across the hall, with inexpensive but adequate furniture. The layout wasn’t quite the same, though, for there was an open door off the front room which I could see led into a bedroom. In Benny Polacek’s apartment the only bedroom had been off the center hall. This seemed to be a five-room apartment instead of only a four-room.

Pushing the door closed, Beverly Arden moved past me to the sofa, her round little bottom moving back and forth rhythmically as she walked. Seating herself, she indicated the place next to her and said, “Sit down, Sergeant.”

There were two easy chairs and a rocker in the room, but since she preferred me next to her, I obliged. I didn’t sit close, though, and I discreetly set my hat between us. I leaned against the sofa arm, half facing her, and she positioned herself similarly at the other end.

“What did you say your name was?” she asked.

“Matt Rudd.”

“You don’t look like a policeman, Matt. Though I guess you’re big enough. You must go two-twenty or thirty pounds.”

“Only a little over two hundred. I’m hollow.”

She smiled slightly. “You really don’t look like a policeman. I would have taken you for an actor. Not in movies. You’re not that handsome. But perhaps a stage actor.”

“Why?” I inquired with raised brows.

“You have such expressive eyes.”

I winced slightly. My eyes are the cross I have to bear. Sooner or later nearly every new woman I meet makes some crack about my eyes. In the mirror they just look like eyes to me, but women seem to find in them something I can’t see. When the boys in the squadroom want to get under my skin, they call me “Browneyes.” Then they get out of the way fast.

I said, “You have pretty eyes yourself, among other attributes,” and deliberately dropped my gaze to her full bust for a moment before raising it to her face again.

I did it to get even for her crack about my eyes, but it failed to embarrass her. She merely said, “Thank you,” in an amused voice and shifted her position, no doubt deliberately.

I decided it was time to get down to business.

“I guess you know why I’m here,” I said. “Want to tell me about last night?”

The slight smile on her face faded, she drew her feet up under her and hugged herself as though she suddenly felt a cold draft.

“There isn’t much to tell,” she said. “I never saw the man’s face. He was behind me in the kitchen doorway.”

“How do you know it was a man, then?”

She looked at me reproachfully. “You meant that as a trick question. I was just beginning to like you, but if you’re going to be all policeman, we won’t be friends.”

“I want to be friends,” I assured her. “I retract the question. How do you know it wasn’t a woman?”

The faint smile almost, but not quite, touched her face again. “When the shots sounded, I turned in time to catch a glimpse of his back.”

“Why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me the whole story?” I suggested.

“All right,” she said agreeably. “I had been sitting here alone watching television all evening. Norman was reading in his room with the door closed, because he hates television. It was pretty warm last night, so I had the front door open for cross ventilation. About a quarter of ten Mr. Polacek stuck his head in the door and asked if I’d like a cup of coffee.”

“He do that often?” I asked.

“Not very. Usually only when he’d been out somewhere, got home early, and didn’t feel like going to bed. He’d been out last night, because he didn’t come from his apartment. I heard him come up the stairs.”

“Over the television?”

She looked reproachful again. “You’re still asking policeman questions.”

“That’s what I am,” I said reasonably.

“I thought you wanted to be friends.”

“Let’s be policeman-witness now and friends afterward,” I suggested.

“Umm, that sounds interesting. What did you ask me?”

“How you heard Polacek come up the stairs with the television on.”

“Oh, yes. With the hall door open, I naturally had the sound turned very low. In an eighteen-unit apartment building you learn to consider your neighbors, even though the building’s supposed to be soundproof.”

“It is?” I said. That explained something which had been puzzling me since last night. Even though Apartments 2-A and 2-B were isolated at the far end of the second-floor hall, I wondered why no other tenants had come to investigate the shots. With the door of 2-B open, the sound must have reverberated up and down the hallway.

“Yes,” she said. “But with the night so warm, I thought perhaps other people had their doors open, too, and I didn’t want to disturb them.”

“Before Polacek got home, did you hear anyone else moving about in the hall?”

She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t recall hearing anyone.” Then her eyes widened. “You think perhaps the killer was lurking out there waiting for him?”

“I don’t know. Did Polacek act as though anything were on his mind? Did he seem worried?”

She thought again. “Not that I noticed, but I hardly knew him well enough to judge if there were anything different about him last night. He was merely a neighbor who occasionally dropped in for a few moments, and occasionally asked me or Norman, or sometimes both of us, over for a cup of coffee. Never for a drink — just coffee. He didn’t drink.”

Virtuous Benny, I thought. No bad habits except peddling dope to kids.

I said, “So you accepted his invitation.”

She nodded. “I stuck my head in Norman’s door to tell him I was going across the hall. He said he was going to take a shower and go to bed. When we went across the hall, Mr. Polacek left his door open for the same reason I had. That’s how Norman was able to hear the shots.”

“Did you always call him Mr. Polacek?” I asked.

The question startled her. She flushed slightly, then said with an air of honesty, “Actually, no. I suppose I’m trying to disassociate myself from him by giving the impression he was the barest acquaintance simply because he was murdered and I don’t like to be involved. I had never been out with him socially and he was only a neighbor, but we were on rather friendly terms. I called him Benny, he called me Beverly and called my brother Norman.”

“O.K.,” I said. “Go on.”

The girl shifted position again, with the same interesting result as before. But this time it wasn’t deliberate. She was beginning to relive the tragedy of the night before. Hugging her shoulders, she went on in a suddenly low voice.

“I went into the kitchen and sat at the table with my back to the door. Benny went into the bedroom long enough to hang up his suit coat, then came in and put the coffeepot on the stove, and set out cups and saucers. It took about fifteen minutes for the coffee to perk, so we just sat and talked.”

“About what?”

She shrugged, causing her cute breasts to bounce up and down like twin balloons full of water. “Nothing consequential. My job at Whittiker Aluminum — incidentally, I hope I still have it, after not showing for work today. I didn’t even phone in— We talked about our respective vacation plans, Norman’s work at the hospital. Just idle chatter. Finally the coffee was ready, and he got up to pour. He took my cup first. He was just reaching for the pot when he paused and half-turned. I thought he was looking at me, because I hadn’t heard whatever sound came from the doorway that caused him to look around. Then the shots sounded, right over my head. I was so startled, I just sat there frozen as Benny fell to the floor. I swung around just in time to catch a glimpse of a man’s back. Then I started to scream. I don’t remember much after that, because I went into hysterics. I remember Norman being there, attempting to quiet me down and finally giving me a shot. And I remember him putting me to bed, but that’s all.”

I said, “Can you give any description at all of the man? Height and weight, for instance?”

She shook her head. “I only caught a bare glimpse, and I was too dazed to notice anything but that he was male. He wore a dark blue suit, if that helps.”

“It isn’t much of a description,” I said glumly. “Did you know what Benny Polacek did for a living, Beverly?”

She thought for a moment. “He was some kind of salesman, I think. He never talked about his work.”

“Naturally not,” I said dryly. “He was a salesman, all right. He peddled heroin to kids.”

Her dark eyes widened. “You’re fooling.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” I said, raising my right hand. “He was a dope pusher.”

She stared at me with an expression of revulsion on her face. “And I actually liked the man!”

I sat quietly waiting for her to get used to the idea that her nice neighbor hadn’t been quite as nice as she had thought. It had the effect of erasing the horror of the previous evening completely from her mind. Suddenly she grinned.

“All at once I don’t feel nearly so bad about Benny being killed, Matt.”

“He won’t leave a gap in the human race,” I agreed. “Do you remember any visitors he had?”

She thought, then said, “I don’t believe I ever saw a visitor go into his place. He may have had some, but I didn’t happen to see any of them. I seldom keep my door open as I did last night, of course.”

I remembered what Hermie Joyce had said about Benny allowing customers to come to his apartment for pops, once he was satisfied they were safe. It seemed that there should have been a regular stream of visitors to his place. However, they would probably enter and leave surreptitiously, so it was quite possible an across-the-hall neighbor would never see them.

“Did you ever hear him mention a friend named Char-lie?”

After thinking again, she said, “I don’t recall him ever mentioning anyone he knew. He gave the impression of being a rather lonely man.”

“How long have you been neighbors?”

“Benny once mentioned that he’d been here about three years. I’ve been here two. Norman moved in only two months ago, when he finished med school and started interning at City Hospital.”

“I see. Now I have to ask another cop question, Beverly. We’re still playing policeman-witness. Are you going to look reproachful again?”

“Ask it and see.”

“All right. Do you own a gun?”

She stared at me. “You think I killed Benny!” she accused.

“No such thing,” I denied. “I merely have to cover all possibilities. Do you own a gun?”

“No!”

“Does your brother?”

“No!”

“Mind if I look?”

A touch of frost appeared in her eyes. “You mean search the apartment?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I most certainly would!”

“I hoped we could stay friends,” I said with a sigh, producing the search warrant and leaning forward to hold it before her face.

Chapter 9

She studied the document carefully, at first with resentment, then gradually a wicked grin formed on her face.

“It says the premises and persons of Norman and Beverly Arden. Are you going to search my person?”

“Women have to be searched by matrons,” I said. “That was put in so your brother could be searched before he left for the hospital this morning. Just in case he tried to carry out a gun. I can see you haven’t any guns concealed on your person.”

“How do you know? I might have a very small one tucked under the belt to my pajama bottoms.”

“I’ll settle for a search of the apartment,” I told her, rising to my feet. “You can come along to make sure I don’t lift any family heirlooms.”

I started with her bedroom, which was about as feminine as a room can be. Pink and white, it was full of lacy frills, and oversized stuffed animals stared at you from every corner.

Beverly stood in the doorway watching as I rapidly went through the dresser and closet without disturbing a thing. Her eyes widened when I stripped the bed and flipped over the mattress to check the springs, and she looked bemused when I quickly and efficiently remade the bed exactly as it had been.

“You’d make some nice lazy girl a fine husband,” she said. “You could do all the housework. Or are you already married?”

“No,” I said shortly.

I took her brother’s room next, and it was equally free of guns. The bathroom took only about three minutes. I went through a linen closet, glanced into the medicine cabinet, and probed through a clothes hamper. She looked bemused again when I lifted the lid of the water tank.

“You don’t miss a thing, do you, Matt? I never would have thought of that.”

“You’re unusual, then,” I said. “That’s one of the common places amateurs think it’s cute to hide things.”

Within twenty minutes I had completed the search of the whole apartment. After years of experience, I don’t miss a possible hiding place. There was no gun there.

“I guess that’s that,” I said finally.

We had ended in the front room. I went over to pick up my hat.

“Haven’t you forgotten something?” she asked.

I gave her an inquiring look.

“You still haven’t searched my person.”

“It’s a pleasant thought,” I said dryly. “But they board cops who put their hands on female witnesses.”

“I know my constitutional rights,” she said. “That warrant says the premises and persons of Norman and Beverly Arden. Norman had his person searched. I demand the same right.”

I scowled at her. “Are you trying to get me in trouble?”

“I’m trying to keep myself out of it. I know how you policemen operate. If you can’t find the real killer, eventually you’ll arrest me just to silence the clamor of the press. At the trial some smart prosecutor will ask if you searched for a gun. ‘Sure,’ you’ll say. ‘The whole apartment.’ Then he’ll ask, ‘Was the person of the accused searched?’ When you say, ‘No,’ the jury will think, ‘Aha! That’s where she hid it.’ I want complete clearance.”

Except for the wicked glint in her eye, she acted so serious that I couldn’t help grinning.

“O.K.,” I said. “I’ll phone for a policewoman.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said crossly. “Your dumb old rule must mean you can’t search a woman forcibly. When they demand it as a constitutional right, it must be permissible.”

I thought this over, and it seemed to make sense. There was nothing to that effect in the rule book, but I don’t suppose it ever occurred to the rule-makers that the matter might come up. What the hell, I thought. If she did report me, it might be interesting to see what a tizzy the board was thrown into when I presented my defense.

Tossing my hat back on the sofa, I walked over to her and said, “Put your arms straight out from your sides.”

Obediently they shot straight out.

Starting at her wrists, I gently patted her arms clear to the shoulders. Then I ran my hands along her sides from beneath her armpits to her waist. I didn’t find any shoulder or belt holsters, but I found some nice soft curves.

She must have stepped out of the shower just before I arrived, because I could smell the clean scent of perfumed soap on her. I had to resist the impulse to gather her into my arms.

Stooping, I put one palm on the inside of one thigh, the other on the outside, and ran my hands clear to her ankle. Then I checked the other leg. They felt firm and shapely under my hands. She wasn’t wearing any leg holsters, either.

I was perspiring slightly when I rose again. She continued to stand with arms outthrust and her back stiff, staring at me without expression.

“I guess you’re clean,” I said huskily.

“You didn’t do nearly as thorough a job as you did on the apartment.”

A man can take only so much urging, and when it comes to a woman as beautiful as Beverly, I have a low boiling point.

“All right,” I said, and reached out and loosened the top button of her black pajama top.

When she remained rigidly unmoving, I loosened the rest of the buttons and the top fell open. Her face assumed a slightly strained expression, but she still kept the same rigid stance, her arms ridiculously outthrust from her sides. It struck me that we were behaving as a pair of very young children experimenting with sex for the first time, the boy tentatively exploring while the girl stood perfectly still, pretending she didn’t know what was going on.

I attempted to remove the jacket, but with her arms held out that way, it was impossible. As she seemed determined to continue playing statue until I was through searching, I gave up.

Loosening the belt of her gold pajama bottoms, I undid a couple of side buttons. The garment slithered down her legs to bunch around her ankles. Kneeling, I lifted one unresisting foot, then the other, and tossed the bottoms aside. When I stood up again, she still held her statue-like pose, gazing at me with the strained expression on her face.

This was getting silly, I thought. I hadn’t as yet even kissed the girl.

I remedied that by pulling her into my arms. Instantly her rigidity collapsed. Her arms went about my neck, and her mouth was wide open when it reached mine.

After a time I came up for air and tried tugging the pajama top down over her shoulders. She violently shook her head.

“It won’t be in the way,” she said in a strangled voice. “Don’t waste time.” So I didn’t waste time.

It must have been twenty minutes later when I picked up my hat for the second time. Following me over to the door, she cupped my face in both hands and reached up on tiptoe to kiss the end of my nose.

“I don’t suppose I’ll ever see you again, will I?” she asked matter-of-factly.

“Sure,” I said. “You’re a material witness. I’ll probably have to be seeing you often.”

“Umm,” she said. “I hope it takes years to solve the case.”

The cop outside in the hall gave me an inquiring look.

“You can pull the stakeout,” I said. “Tell the guy out back, too. And phone the hospital to tell the man on Doc Arden he can knock it off.”

“O.K., Sarge,” he said in a grateful voice. “This is about as dull a detail as you can catch.”

Chapter 10

It had been three-thirty when I left headquarters. It was five when I got back. Hank Carter had returned and sat with Wynn and Lincoln at the same table where Wynn had given us our instructions.

The lieutenant greeted me with, “I said an hour, Rudowski. You’ve been gone an hour and a half.”

“I stopped to seduce a woman,” I said.

I knew he wouldn’t believe me. His face reddened and he said, “Get it through your head, Sergeant, that I won’t stand for insubordination. That’s the last smart crack I expect to hear from you as long as I remain your superior officer.”

Beverly had left me in too relaxed a mood to let even Wynn upset me. I said mildly, “Yes, sir. I’ll try to remember.”

After glaring at me a moment more, he said stiffly, “Well, what did you find out?”

I gave him a thorough report of everything that had happened, omitting only the cause of my delay. By the time I finished, he had simmered down enough to be civil.

He asked, “What’s your opinion of her story?”

“It sounded on the up-and-up. Of course she may just be a good actress, but I couldn’t detect any discrepancies. Incidentally, I lifted the stakeout.”

The lieutenant’s glare returned. “You took it upon yourself to relieve a detail ordered by a superior officer?”

“Sorry,” I said, starting to rise. “I assumed since their job was done, you’d want them back on regular duty. I’ll put them back on.”

“Sit down, Sergeant,” he said testily. “The stakeout isn’t needed any more. But you could have checked with me by phone.”

Obviously what he wanted was three messenger boys instead of assistant investigators. I suppose if I had worked under him permanently, I would do what Hank Carter did and never make a move without instructions. But I was anxious to get this case over with and get Wynn off my back. I planned to continue taking original action whenever I felt it necessary, and just put up with the hell I caught.

I said equably, “I thought you’d approve the action. Anything happen while I was gone that you think I ought to know?”

He seemed to imagine I had apologized for doing some original thinking, for his tone became mollified. “A little. Corporal Lincoln wasn’t able to locate April French through theatrical agents, but Carter brought back a little information. Bring Rudowski up to date, Sergeant.”

After five years as a team, Wynn still never called Hank Carter anything but Sergeant or Carter, and Hank always addressed him as Lieutenant or Sir. It was no wonder the redhead seldom smiled.

Carter said sadly, “He had three thirty-two-caliber slugs in him, which doesn’t seem likely for a gang kill. Usually the pros go in for heavier artillery. Two of the slugs are good enough for comparison purposes, if we ever turn up the weapon. The other hit a bone. Fingerprints lifted six sets of prints from the apartment, but none of them were Goodie White’s. His are on file because he’s got a gun registered with the department. A thirty-two revolver.”

I raised my eyebrows. “That’s interesting.”

“I checked the gun register for Norman and Beverly Arden too. Neither one of them have any guns registered.”

Wynn said, “I think I’ll go see Mr. White this evening. I’ll take Lincoln along. Rudowski, you can start hitting night clubs to see if you can locate April French, since you seem to have a way with women. Carter, you’ll stand by here as liaison.”

Captain Spangler had come from his office as the lieutenant started to speak. Overhearing him, he walked over to our table.

“You’re going to see Goodman White tonight, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir,” Wynn said. He gave the captain a brief rundown of developments. “Under the circumstances I think we’re justified in asking him to account for his movements last night and to turn over his thirty-two for comparison purposes.”

Spangler frowned. “I think you’d better take Rudowski instead of Lincoln with you, Lieutenant. And I’d suggest you let him do most of the talking.”

Wynn looked surprised. But he was consistent in his philosophy. Just as he expected subordinates to accept his orders without question, he wouldn’t have dreamed of questioning the order of a superior.

Without the least sign of resentment he said, “Yes, sir, if you want it that way.”

The captain told us all good night, logged out, and went home. Wynn rose to his feet.

“Let’s catch some dinner,” he said. “Then get back to work.”

We all had dinner together in the headquarters cafeteria. Afterward Hank Carter returned to the squadroom to stand by for any calls in the rest of us might make. Carl Lincoln went off in search of the deceased Benny Polacek’s honey blonde girl friend. Wynn and I checked out an F car and headed for the Twelfth Ward, with me driving.

The White Bowl was pretty fancy for the East Side, which is largely populated by dock wallopers and warehouse workers. If an outsider had opened the place, probably the glitter of the cocktail lounge and dining room would have scared the local working men away. But Goodie was a local boy, not only known to everyone in the ward, but looked up to as a leader. The White Bowl was the Twelfth Ward’s center of social activity.

One reason for this, aside from Goodie’s popularity, was the prices, which were all out of line with the glittering atmosphere. Bar whiskey in the richly furnished cocktail lounge was thirty cents, draft beer a dime. In the dining room you could get half a fried chicken, spaghetti and meat balls, or a roast beef plate for sixty cents, a passable steak for a dollar and a quarter. Goodie probably broke about even on food and drink, banking on the income from fifty bowling lanes for his profit.

During bowling season all fifty lanes were packed with league bowlers seven nights a week. Once when I had nothing else to do I figured out that the gross take from this operation amounted to twenty-one hundred dollars a week, and that didn’t include the take from afternoon open bowling. Why this wasn’t enough to get by on without seeking additional income from wholesaling narcotics was a little beyond me.

In midsummer, of course, there was no league bowling. Only about a half dozen lanes were in use when we walked in.

Jack Carr, Goodie White’s immediate assistant in everything from running the White Bowl to running ward politics, was behind the lane-reservation desk. He was a squat, powerfully built man with hairy arms and, as disclosed by an open-necked sport shirt, an equally hairy chest. He seemed to have thick hair everywhere except on top of his head, which was nearly bald.

We stopped in front of the desk and I said, “Hi, Jack. Goodie around?”

“Evening, Sarge,” he said. “I think he’s having dinner in the dining room.”

Then he recognized Wynn and pretended to do a double take. “Hey, Lieutenant, I hope you’re not here on official business.”

“Why?” Wynn inquired.

Carr grinned. “Vice cops don’t bother me because we run a clean place. Homicide cops scare me.”

“You got a guilty conscience?” Wynn asked unsmilingly.

Carr gave me a pained look. “This guy’s got no sense of humor, has he?”

“He only laughs at funny jokes,” I said. “Shall we try the dining room, Lieutenant?”

As we walked together toward the dining room, Wynn said, “Why do you think Captain Spangler wants you to do the talking to White, Sergeant?”

“I don’t know, sir,” I said. “I never question a superior officer’s orders.”

He gave me a suspicious look, but he didn’t say anything. He couldn’t, without disagreeing with his own philosophy.

Councilman Goodman White was a plump, hearty man with a full head of gray-flecked hair. He was seated alone at a table drinking coffee.

He glanced up as we neared his table, threw us a vote-catching smile, and rose with outstretched hand. “How are you, Matt? Evening, Lieutenant.”

Even civilians didn’t call Robert Wynn by his first name, I noted. There was something about the man which prevented any sort of familiarity.

“Hello, Goodie,” I said, shaking the proffered hand. “Keep your seat. We don’t want to disturb your meal.”

“I’ve finished, Matt. I’m just having coffee.” He waved us to chairs. “Join me?”

I took a chair across from him, and Wynn sat between us. White, ever the gracious host, waited until we were both seated before reseating himself.

“Have you gentlemen had dinner?” he inquired.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Like some coffee? Or an after-dinner drink?”

I shook my head. “We can’t have a drink, Goodie. We’re on duty.”

“Oh? Is this an official visit?”

“Let’s say semiofficial. Captain Spangler asked us to stop by.”

The plump councilman smiled. “Well. How is my old friend Spangler?”

“Chipper as ever. This is kind of embarrassing, Goodie, because the captain regards you as a personal friend. And he hates to involve personal friends in criminal investigations. That’s why he sent us over to have a quiet talk with you instead of dragging you down to headquarters like a common criminal.”

Goodie White looked amazed. “Dragging me down to headquarters! What the hell for?”

“Spangler said he was sure the lieutenant and I could straighten the matter out by having a personal talk with you, and that way the newspapers wouldn’t have to know a thing about it.”

Glancing at Wynn, I saw his face was dark red. He couldn’t understand this coddling of a murder suspect. But he was a good soldier. Captain Spangler had told him to let me do the talking, and the lieutenant was incapable of violating instructions.

White looked both puzzled and gratified. “I appreciate the captain’s thoughtfulness, but what’s it all about?”

“Know a fellow named Benjamin Polacek?”

“Sure. Somebody shot him last night. I heard it on the air. Kind of shook me up, because he was due here tonight to make a buy.”

He said it so casually, I was momentarily speechless. The last thing I expected was an admission from White that he was Benny’s wholesale supplier. Particularly without us even asking.

It jolted Wynn too, enough to make him insert a spontaneous question. In a squeaky voice he said, “What do you mean, a buy?”

“The guy phoned me a week ago wanting five extra-large, left-handed bowling gloves. We sell bowling supplies, you know. I didn’t know the guy, but Jack Carr said he bowled with one of the leagues and was a regular customer. So I had them ordered special. They came in the day before yesterday and I phoned him they were here. He said he couldn’t come after them until tonight at seven o’clock. Now he’s dead. What in the devil am I going to do with five extra-large-size, left-handed bowling gloves? They sell for four bucks apiece.”

Wynn and I stared at the man in fascination. Was he trying to be cute, I wondered? Did he know of Benny’s deal with the Narcotics Squad, and was he hoping this outlandish story would cloud the issue?

“What did he want with five left-handed bowling gloves?” I finally asked.

“Said he was getting up a new team of all left-handers. It seemed unlikely, because not one bowler in fifty wears a glove, and it struck me as odd that everybody on one team would want one. Odder yet that they all had extra-large hands. But it wasn’t any of my business why he wanted them.”

“You say these gloves came in?” I inquired.

He nodded. “Couple of days ago.”

“Mind letting us see them?”

He shrugged. “If you want to. But what’s this about me being involved in an investigation?”

“It’ll keep until we see the gloves.”

Shrugging again, White took a last sip of his coffee and rose to his feet.

“They’re over at the lane-reservation desk,” he said. “Follow me.”

Chapter 11

We followed him into the bowling alley section of the building and over to the desk behind which Jack Carr stood. To the left of the desk was a long showcase displaying bowling balls, bags, and shoes. Atop it were assorted bowling accessories, such as laces and ball-cleaning fluid. Among them was a wire rack containing fingerless bowling gloves in small cellophane bags.

Goodie White said to Carr, “Give me that box of gloves Benny Polacek ordered.”

Jack Carr looked at his employer blankly. “Huh?”

“Those left-handed gloves,” White said. “You told me two days ago they were in.”

Carr said with an air of puzzlement, “Our regular stock order of gloves came in the day before yesterday. I told you that.” He indicated the wire rack atop the showcase. “They’re right there. There’s a couple of left-handed ones.”

Goodie White frowned. “Didn’t you say Polacek’s order was in?”

His assistant gave his head a definite shake. “You must of misunderstood me.”

White’s frown deepened. “Well, then get Polacek’s order out of the file.”

“What order?”

In an exasperated tone White said, “Don’t tell me you never ordered those gloves. You sounded awake when I told you to.”

An expression of comprehension grew in Jack Carr’s eyes. He gave the impression that he suddenly realized his employer wanted him to go along with the act for our benefit.

“I remember now, Goodie,” he said. “I guess I goofed. I forgot all about it until just now.”

After staring at him for a moment, White abruptly turned his back and strolled toward the cocktail lounge. We trailed after him. When he seated himself in a corner booth, Wynn and I sat across from him. A waitress instantly came over.

“Martell with water behind it,” White told her. “Sure you gentlemen won’t have anything?”

When we both shook our heads, the waitress moved away.

“You’ll have to excuse my dumb assistant,” White said. “He made me look like an idiot, didn’t he?”

I shrugged. Wynn didn’t even do that. He merely regarded the plump councilman contemplatively.

“It was Jack who said we ought to take the order,” White said. “I’d never even heard of this Polacek before he phoned. Jack called me out to the bar, said Polacek was on the phone, and explained he was a league bowler and a regular customer. He said the guy wanted us to order him some special gear, and he thought we ought to go along. Then he forgot to put in the order when I told him to.”

“Maybe he’s got a weak memory,” I said.

White made an impatient gesture. “It’s hardly important, except it makes me sound like a psychopathic liar. But why would I make up a screwy story like that?”

“Hard to figure,” I agreed.

The waitress brought White’s drink and went away again.

The councilman said, “Now what’s all this about a criminal investigation? I assume it involves this Polacek man’s murder.”

“Uh-huh. Know what Benny Polacek’s business was?”

White shook his head. “I told you I didn’t know the man. I don’t even know what he looked like. Our two phone conversations were the only contacts I ever had with him.”

“Well, he was a pusher.”

“A pusher?” White repeated puzzledly.

“Horse. He retailed heroin.”

The councilman elevated his eyebrows. “No fooling?” He took a sip of his brandy.

He was a pretty good actor, I thought. He would have convinced me if I hadn’t heard Benny Polacek accuse him of being his wholesale supplier of heroin.

I said, “About a week back we knocked Benny over when he made the mistake of selling a pop to an undercover cop. The D.A. offered him a deal if he’d turn in his wholesale supplier. Benny was a three-time loser, so he went along. He agreed to make a buy from his wholesaler tonight while we took movies of the transaction.”

“I see. But how am I involved?”

“Benny claimed you were his supplier.”

Goodie White stared at me with his mouth open.

I said rapidly, “The D.A. himself was directing the matter, so we couldn’t just forget it. The captain figured you’d be able to explain things to me and Lieutenant Wynn, so here we are.”

White continued to stare at me for a long time. Presently he said, “I appreciate the captain’s faith, but he’s wrong. I can’t explain a damned thing.”

“I have to ask you this,” I said. “Were you his supplier?”

“I was his supplier of left-handed bowling gloves. Period. If you had turned a camera on us tonight, you would have caught me redhanded passing him a box of gloves. The guy must have been trying to make you people look like damn fools.”

I said, “We’ll never know now what might have happened tonight, because somebody pumped three thirty-two-caliber slugs into him. Some officious Homicide cop suggested it might have been you, in revenge for trying to set you up. The thing was in the record, so again we couldn’t just forget it. Captain Spangler managed to get the homicide investigation lumped together with the narcotics investigation and have the whole case assigned to him. He figured he could handle it more discreetly than Homicide. So if you could explain where you were last night about nine-thirty to ten-thirty, we could put that in the record too, and make it look better for you.”

Lieutenant Wynn’s face had started to redden again, but he made no comment. He obviously was bursting to take over the interrogation with Homicide Division technique, but he couldn’t bring himself to violate Captain Spangler’s instructions.

Goodie White’s face had reddened slightly too, but for a different reason. Looking at Wynn, he said, “Who was this officious Homicide cop?”

“The captain thought you’d ask that,” I said quickly. “So he wouldn’t tell us.”

White glowered at me for a few moments, then took a sip of his brandy. It seemed to cool him off, because his voice became merely sardonic instead of angry. “You’re sure the suggestion came from a Homicide cop, and not from our distinguished district attorney?”

I didn’t care if Goodie White got sore at Norm Dollinger. It wouldn’t hurt the district attorney, because the two were political enemies anyway. I said, “That could be. Anyway, Captain Spangler wants this cleared up as quickly and quietly as possible, with nobody getting mad. So if you’ll just give us your alibi, everything will be fine.”

White considered for a moment, then seemed to decide to cooperate. “Between nine-thirty and ten-thirty, did you say?”

“Uh-huh. The murder took place about ten.”

“I was en route to the country club at ten. I belong to Riverside. I left here about nine-forty-five and met my wife at the bar about a quarter after ten. The club is clear at the opposite edge of town, so it takes a full half-hour.”

Wynn, unable to contain himself any longer, said, “It can’t be more than twenty minutes, even if you creep.”

White frowned at the lieutenant. “For the actual drive, maybe. I had to get my car off the lot here, then park it on the country club lot and walk a good hundred feet to the clubhouse. If you’re suggesting I might have stopped en route to commit a murder, the place would have had to be directly on the way. Where did this Polacek man five?”

“Clarkson Boulevard near Talcott,” I said. “Unfortunately it is directly on the way. I assume you’d take Talcott from here clear to Riverside Drive.”

White gave a rueful nod. “Afraid I did.”

I said, “This same officious cop checked the gun-registration file and learned you had a thirty-two-caliber revolver registered. Captain Spangler suggested it would be a point in your favor if we took that in for a ballistics test and proved it wasn’t the murder weapon.”

White gazed at me steadily for a time. Finally he said in a dry tone, “It’s nice to have a friend on the force as concerned about my interests as the captain. I carry it in the glove compartment of my car.”

Draining the rest of his brandy and following it with a gulp of water, he rose. “Come on out to the lot and I’ll give it to you.”

We rose also, and followed him outdoors.

On the parking lot a green Cadillac was parked in a slot near the main entrance to the building. A stake in front of it bore a sign lettered: Reserved. Goodie White unlocked the Cadillac, then unlocked the glove compartment and drew out a snub-nosed thirty-two revolver. He handed it to me.

“I’ll see that you get it back when we’re finished with it,” I said.

He smiled without humor. “I’m sure you will, Matt. Now that the interrogation is over, what’s your opinion of my guilt or innocence?”

“I just collect facts,” I said. “I’ll let the captain form an opinion.”

“I see,” he said quietly. “In other words, I’m the prime suspect.”

“I wouldn’t say that, Goodie. We’re questioning a number of other people. We’ll be in touch with you again.”

“I don’t doubt that,” he said dryly.

He didn’t offer a good-by handshake. He stood watching as we walked on to the lane where I had parked the felony car. When we drove off, he was still standing there gazing after us.

As we pulled off the lot onto Talcott, Wynn said, “You certainly bent over backward not to hurt the man’s feelings, Sergeant. Are you always that gutless in grilling suspects?”

“In our division we call it tact, sir. The captain wants it that way.”

That shut him up. He wasn’t going to object to a superior officer’s methods.

It was only eight P.M. when we got back to headquarters. The Crime Lab closed at five P.M., SO we left the gun on George Abbot’s desk with a note attached to it asking him to fire it the next day and run a comparison of the slug against those dug out of Benny Polacek.

Then we stopped by Records, where Wynn pulled the file on Benny Polacek. He merely glanced at the face sheet, then returned it to the clerk.

“What was that for, Lieutenant?” I asked as we walked up the hall toward the squadroom.

“Just checking something, Sergeant. Benny Polacek was right-handed.”

Hank Carter was on the phone when we entered the squadroom.

He said, “Just a minute. Here’s the lieutenant now.” Turning to Wynn, he proffered the phone and said, “Corporal Lincoln.”

Wynn said into the phone, “Yes, Corporal.”

He listened for a moment, said, “Well, wait until she gets there. I’ll send Rudowski along to join you. We’ve finished our mission.”

Hanging up, he said, “The French girl works in a floor show at the Palace. Know where that is?”

“Yes, sir. Up on the north side.”

“Lincoln’s there now, but she hasn’t shown for work yet. The first show’s at nine, so she should be along soon. Run on over there and join him.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“There isn’t anything else we can do on the case until you’ve talked to the girl, so Carter and I will be over at Homicide writing up a couple of other cases. Phone me there as soon as you’ve talked to her.”

“Yes, sir,” I said again.

Hank Carter gave me an envious look because I was being sent off on an errand while he had to remain with his partner.

Chapter 12

The Palace was a supper and dance club in the uptown night club and theater district. It consisted of one enormous room with a U-shaped bar in its center. Along the side walls were railed platforms containing tables and chairs. Low steps led down to the bar area at intervals. A stage at the front, elevated to the same level as the platforms, served for the floor show and doubled as a dance floor between shows.

The tables were pretty well filled with dinner customers, but there was no one on the dance floor because the orchestra hadn’t as yet started to play. When I walked in, at eight-thirty, they were just tuning up their instruments.

I found Carl seated at the bar sipping a lemon soda.

“She just came in,” he said. “The bartender says she’d be in dressing room three behind the stage. I thought I’d better wait for you.”

“O.K.,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Backstage the dressing rooms numbered one and two had stars on their doors, one presumably for the M.C. and the other for the feature act. Number three turned out to be the chorus girls’ dressing room.

The door was wide open. Glancing in, I saw a row of eight girls, all blonde, seated before a long dressing table which ran the length of the room. They all wore frilly pink skirts, pink dancing shoes and pink, rhinestone-studded halters. That is, all but two wore them. A couple hadn’t yet gotten around to putting on their halters.

The girl who had come down to headquarters to bail out Benny Polacek, and then had walked out on him when she learned he was a pusher, was second from the door. When I said, “Hi, April,” all eight girls glanced at my reflection in the long mirror above the table. The two halterless girls went right on making up without paying me any more attention than that casual glance.

April French, in the act of applying eye shadow, paused to examine my reflection. There was a mixture of recognition and puzzlement on her face, which led me to believe she recalled seeing me, but couldn’t remember where.

She said, “Be with you in a minute, honey. I’m almost done.”

Withdrawing into the hallway, I leaned against the wall. Carl remained standing in front of the door, but a little back so as to be inconspicuous, staring into the room.

“Tuck your eyeballs back in your head,” I told him.

Ignoring me, he continued to stare.

After a few moments April French came out into the hall. Nearly unclothed she had an even nicer figure than when she wore a dress. Carl seemed to admire it too.

She glanced at Carl, then flashed small white teeth at me and asked, “What is it, honey?”

I said, “Can you spare a few minutes?”

She carefully looked me up and down. “What time is it, honey?”

Glancing at my wrist watch, I said, “Twenty-two minutes until nine.”

“Then I’ve got twelve minutes, Browneyes. It’s all yours.”

Carl gave me an amused look, and I stared back at him coldly.

I said to the girl, “Apparently you don’t remember me. We met at police headquarters about a week and a half ago.”

“Oh,” she said, her smile fading. “I remember you now. I thought you were a stage-door John.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll come back some night when I’m off duty, but tonight it has to be business.”

“What was your name again?” she asked.

“Matt Rudd. My partner here is Carl Lincoln.”

She nodded to Carl, then turned back to me. “I suppose it’s about Benny, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“I figured somebody would be around asking about him. I saw in the paper where somebody pushed a few holes in him. But I haven’t seen or heard from him since the day I walked out on him at police headquarters.”

“He never tried to get in touch with you?” I asked in surprise. I had gotten the impression that Polacek had something of a crush on her, and it seemed unlikely that he wouldn’t have at least tried to talk himself back into her favor.

She lifted her bare shoulders in a shrug. “He may have phoned my rooming house. The landlady never remembers messages. I didn’t bother to check with her, because I couldn’t care less. We were finished the minute I found out what he was. I wouldn’t even bother to spit on anybody in that business.”

Carl was still casting glances through the open door of the dressing room whenever he could tear his gaze away from April. But he seemed to have at least part of his mind on the dialogue between us, because he said in a preoccupied voice, “Who’s Charlie?”

The girl looked at him without understanding.

“He means the guy who phoned you that Benny was in jail,” I said.

“Oh, Charlie Kossack. He’s just a friend of Benny’s.”

“Cossack, like in the Russian cavalry?” I asked.

“No, with a K.”

A man in a tuxedo came from dressing room number one, stuck his head in the door of the chorus girls’ dressing room and called, “Ten minutes, girls. Everybody in the wings.”

“That means me too,” April said. “Why don’t you come back after the last show? We can go somewhere and talk over a drink.”

“All right,” I said. “Meanwhile, how do we get in touch with Charlie Kossack?”

“I don’t know his address. I’ll tell you everything I know about him when you pick me up.”

“What time’s the last show?”

“It’s over at two A.M. Give me ten minutes to take off my paint.”

“O.K.,” I agreed.

The girls were streaming out of the dressing room and heading toward the wings. April fell in at the end of the line.

“See you later, honey,” she said, throwing me a kiss. “Come back alone.” Then she called to Carl, “No offense, honey, but three’s a crowd. Glad I met you.”

“Yeah, but don’t come back,” Carl muttered dourly.

As the girls disappeared into the wings, Carl looked me up and down in imitation of the girl’s examination. “Shall we phone a report to Lieutenant Wynn, honey? My, you have big brown eyes.”

“I have big bony knuckles, too,” I told him. “And they’re about to close your beady little eyes.”

“I tremble in my boots,” Carl said. “Let’s find a phone.”

There was a booth at the front of the club next to the cloak room. I dialed headquarters and asked for Homicide. Lieutenant Wynn answered.

“This is Matt Rudd, Lieutenant,” I said. “We talked to the French girl long enough to learn she’s willing to unload anything she knows about Polacek. She broke up with him when she discovered he was pushing horse, you know, so she isn’t in a mood to hold anything back. They called her away to get ready for the first show before we could get much out of her. I have a date to pick her up after the last show and get the story.”

“When’s that?” he asked.

“Two-ten A.M.”

“Hmm. Did you get anything at all from her yet?”

“The name of the guy who phoned her that Benny was in jail, who presumably is also the guy who was driving him the night we set him up. It’s Charlie Kossack, spelled with a K. She doesn’t know his address.”

“You check the phone book?”

“No, sir.”

He grunted in a tone suggesting that he was burdened with an assortment of idiots as assistants. “You might have done that at least, Rudowski. But never mind. I’ll have Carter check both the phone book and the city directory and also run the name through records. You say you’re going back to see the girl at two A.M.?”

“Two-ten.”

“Well, I guess you can knock off until then,” he said generously. “Tell Lincoln he can go home from there, and I’ll have Carter log you both out. We pulled a short trick today, so I want you both to log in at eight-thirty in the morning.”

“I’m going back to work at two A.M.,” I objected.

“Work, hell. You could wait until the first show ends and talk to the woman between shows. You ought to be able to get everything she knows in twenty minutes. I know how you operate, Rudowski. You like to combine business with pleasure. You want to interview this woman at your apartment. You have my permission to play it any way you like, so long as you get results, but you’re not tomcatting on force time.”

I didn’t say anything, and after a minute he said, “You still there, Sergeant?”

“Yes, sir,” I said wearily. “See you at eight-thirty A.M.”

When I stepped from the booth, I said to Carl, “You can go home. Carter will log us out.”

His pleased expression evaporated when I added, “We log in at eight-thirty in the morning.”

“Eight-thirty! We going to work day and night?”

“Who cares?” I asked. “The quicker we wrap this up, the quicker Wynn returns to Homicide. I’m willing to work around the clock.”

After considering this, Carl nodded. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. See you tomorrow, Matt.”

He went out the front door. I lingered a few minutes until the first show started. April was second in line when the chorus danced out. I watched long enough to decide she was as talented as the other girls, which wasn’t very talented, then I went home, too.

I set the clock for one-fifteen, and got to bed at nine-thirty. I had a feeling that before the night was over I might need my strength.

A ringing sound woke me from sound sleep. I started to grope for the alarm clock when the ringing stopped. Lying half awake, I was puzzling this over when another ring sounded. Sitting up, I lifted the bedside phone and listened to the dial tone.

Then I came a little more awake and realized it had been the doorbell.

I sleep raw. Switching on a lamp, I found my robe and padded barefoot into the front room, switching on another lamp in there. Glancing at my watch, I saw it was five of ten. My late caller had allowed me exactly twenty-five minutes of sleep. I opened the front door.

Beverly Arden threw me a dazzling smile. I still wasn’t entirely awake, but I saw that tonight she was wearing a red nylon blouse with wrist-length sleeves, a matching red cotton skirt and red pumps. Her dark hair was tied by a red ribbon into a pony tail.

“Did I get you out of bed?” she asked.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I wasn’t doing anything but sleeping.” I let her in and shut the door behind her.

She glanced around the room with feminine interest, crossed to peep in the bedroom, then recrossed the room to the kitchenette. She found and turned on the light in there.

Walking to the kitchenette door, I asked, “Thinking of renting the place?”

“I was just curious to see how you live. It’s a very nice little apartment.”

With a grunt, I turned and padded into the bedroom and on into the bathroom. Following, she stood in the bathroom doorway and watched me throw water in my face and brush my teeth. In the mirror I saw my hair was rumpled from sleep. I drew a comb through it.

“I was bored,” she said. “Norman went to bed early and left me sitting all alone. I looked up your address in the phone book and decided to drive over. Do you mind?”

“Would it do me any good?” I asked. “Like a drink?”

“Not particularly.”

I moved toward the door and she remained where she was, in the center of the doorway. I stopped six inches away. She looked up at me with a glint of challenge in her eyes.

By now I was totally awake. “Like another searching party?” I inquired.

Immediately she raised her arms to grip the door jamb on either side and simply waited. It seemed to me a little silly to go through that routine again, but if she got a kick out of acting the part of a passive young girl being investigated by some curious young boy, I was willing to go along.

She stood perfectly still, staring at me with her lips slightly parted as I unbuttoned her blouse. Finding a button at the side of her skirt, I loosened it, and slid down the side zipper.

As before, I knelt and lifted one unresisting foot at a time, this time pulling off her shoes as she stepped out of the skirt. But when I stood and attempted to push the blouse off her shoulders, she again blocked my efforts by refusing to lower her arms.

Some women have strange quirks. If it was essential to Beverly’s sense of modesty to retain one garment, even though it covered nothing but her arms and back, I wasn’t going to make an issue of it.

Chapter 13

At midnight I began to wonder if Beverly planned to spend the night. By twelve-thirty I was trying to think up some excuse to send her home before it was time to leave for my late date.

I hadn’t thought of anything which seemed plausible when, at one A.M., she finally resolved the problem herself.

“Norman will be calling the police to report me missing,” she said. “I’d better go.”

“I thought he was in bed before you left,” I said.

“I tell little white lies like that,” she said cheerfully. “I needed some excuse for showing here so late. He knows I’m out.”

She climbed from bed and slipped on her skirt and shoes. “Don’t get up,” she said. “I can let myself out.”

She leaned over the bed to give me a peck on the forehead, then considerately turned out the light. I waited until I heard the front door close, then got up and turned it back on. There was no point in trying to grab fifteen minutes of sleep, so I took a leisurely shower and shave and dressed for my date with April.

Before Beverly’s arrival at the apartment, I had anticipated that something interesting might develop with April French, but now I was inclined to hope it wouldn’t. Beverly had left me wanting no more strenuous relations than holding hands with any woman during the immediate future.

I walked into the Palace at five minutes after two. The floor show was already over and couples were dancing on the stage. When I got backstage, the eight chorus girls were again lined up in front of the dressing table, this time removing their stage make-up with cold cream.

April jumped up when I stuck my head in the door and said, “Only be a minute, honey.”

A row of lockers lined the wall opposite the dressing table. Moving over to one, she casually slipped off her halter and hung it in the locker. A couple of other girls simultaneously walked over to lockers and started to un-snap their halters.

When April reached for a zipper at the side of her skimpy pink skirt, I decided it was time to withdraw. I knew that in show-business circles it was sometimes customary to be remarkably casual about exposure of female anatomy backstage, but in quantity it embarrassed me. I was afraid I might draw frowns of disapproval for staring too hard, and I knew if I continued to stand in the doorway, I couldn’t avoid staring in eight different directions. I leaned my back against the wall next to the doorway and waited.

In a few minutes April came out wearing a light summer print dress with a high neck, no sleeves and very little back.

“The bars close in twenty minutes,” she said. “Think we can make one in time?”

“We can make the bar here in about thirty seconds,” I said.

She made a face. “That’s too much like a busman’s holiday. I don’t want to see any more of this place tonight.”

When we got out to my car, she said, “What I need more than a drink is a shower. The Palace only has them in the private dressing rooms, though we girls work up more of a sweat than either the M.C. or the feature stripper. After three shows we’re pretty hot and sweaty. What kind of a place do you live in?”

“A three-room apartment.”

“Are you married or anything?”

I shook my head. “Not even anything. I live alone.”

“You have a shower or a tub?”

“Combination.”

“Any liquor in the place?”

“Uh-huh,” I said reluctantly.

“Then let’s go there,” she said. “I can have a shower and we’ll have our drink afterward.”

I doubt that April was the sort of girl who fell in bed with any man who suggested it, because she was good-looking enough to be able to pick and choose. But obviously she regarded sex as casually as the average girl regards a good-night kiss. If she liked a man’s looks, she saw no point in the usual preliminaries. She certainly wasn’t naïve enough to think she could invite herself to a strange man’s apartment to take a shower in the middle of the night and have things end there. It seemed likely she meant to spend the rest of the night.

If it hadn’t been for Beverly’s visit, I would have been enthusiastic about the plan. Now it only depressed me. But when you have a cooperative witness, it’s bad tactics to do anything which might give offense.

Bracing myself for sacrifice in line of duty, I headed for my apartment.

En route I attempted to pump her a little in the hope that if I got what information she had before we arrived, I could afford to keep our relationship on a platonic basis.

I said, “Tell me about this Charlie Kossack, April.”

But April wasn’t having any. “I just want to relax now,” she said. “Three shows is hard work. Save it until we’re cuddled up with a couple of drinks.”

At the apartment she looked around with the same air of interest that Beverly had shown. She glanced into the bathroom last, examining the tub and shower with approval, then walked back into the bedroom and zipped down the back of her dress.

As I stood disconsolately watching from the bedroom doorway, she pulled the dress off over her head and tossed it across a chair. There was nothing but April beneath it.

Her figure was as nice as Beverly’s, though she was considerably plumper through the chest. Under ordinary circumstances it would have started my heart pounding. But at the moment it didn’t do a thing.

Kicking off her shoes, she ran into the bathroom and closed the door. Instantly it reopened a crack to disclose one blue eye.

“I’ll yell when I’m ready for you to wash my back,” she said.

The door closed again.

Five minutes later her voice trilled in a carrying soprano, “All ready, honey!”

I winced, certain that my neighbors on all sides must have heard the female yell coming from my apartment at two-thirty in the morning. With a sigh of self-pity, I hung my suit coat in my closet, opened the bathroom door and went in.

It was one of the nicest backs I ever washed. Despite my reduced stamina, I found myself getting so interested in the chore, I decided not to stop with her back. Stripping to the waist, I turned her around and lathered her front, too. Presumably she had already washed that once, but she seemed not to mind.

By the time I had soaped her to the waist, I was even more interested. Taking off the rest of my clothes, I climbed into the tub and did a complete job.

When she decided to reciprocate the favor, I had my second bath within two hours. By then I had completely forgotten that Beverly had been an earlier visitor.

Neither of us got quite dry, because we were in too much of a hurry. We let the sheets absorb the moisture our towels had missed.

Though I had managed to forget my earlier session with Beverly, my system didn’t. April never did get her drink, and I didn’t get my information until morning. I fell asleep on her shoulder and slept right through.

Sunlight slanting through the Venetian blinds and falling on my face awakened me. Thinking I had overslept, I jumped out of bed and hurriedly glanced at my watch. I breathed a sigh of relief. The sun must have just come up, for it was only seven A.M.

April opened one blue eye to look at me, then closed it again. Leaning over her, I shook her shoulder.

“Go away,” she said, eyes tightly squeezed shut. “Wanna sleep.”

Peeling back the sheet, I rolled her over on her stomach and gave her plump little bottom a resounding smack. With a gasp she swung herself around to a seated position and glared at me.

“Sorry, kitten,” I said. “But I have to make a report to a very G.I. lieutenant in an hour and a half, and he’s going to want to know what I learned from you. After I leave, you can go back to bed and sleep all day if you want. But on your feet right now. You can brew some coffee while I shave and dress. We’ll talk about Benny over coffee.”

Pouting, she rose and tenderly felt her posterior. Placing her back to the dresser, she peered over her shoulder into the mirror.

“That’s a dirty way to wake a girl up,” she complained. “I can see your handprint.”

“If you don’t rustle up some coffee fast, you’ll see one on the other cheek,” I threatened.

She made a face at me. “Woman beater. Don’t I even get kissed good morning?”

Walking over to her, I tilted up her chin, planted a firm but quick kiss on her lips, then took her by the shoulders and faced her toward the door. Lightly I slapped the cheek which wasn’t already red and she scurried out of the room.

Fifteen minutes later, when I entered the kitchenette fully dressed, she was seated at the table, still without a stitch on. Cups, sugar, and cream were already laid out, and the coffee pot was merrily perking.

“The only food in your refrigerator is butter and jam,” she said. “But I found a loaf of kind of dry bread in your cupboard. Want some toast?”

“All right,” I said.

I’d never had breakfast served by a naked woman before. It was pleasant but distracting. April burst out laughing when I stuck a piece of toast in my eye.

“Want me to dress?” she asked. “I didn’t because I plan to take your offer and go back to bed as soon as you leave.”

“Don’t bother,” I said, wiping jam from my eyebrows with a paper napkin. “Time’s running short and we have to talk.”

She took a sip of her coffee. “I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you. I really don’t know a thing about Charlie Kossack.”

“You said he was a friend of Benny’s. You must know something about him if Benny was your boy friend.”

“Benny and I were pretty torrid for a time,” she admitted. “But I realize now I hardly knew a thing about him, let alone about his friends. All I know about Charlie was that he and Benny had some kind of business deal pending.”

“Oh?” I said. “With the business Benny was in, that must have concerned dope.”

She shook her head. “It was something new he wanted Benny to go in with him. The first time I met Charlie Kossack was about three weeks ago, at the club. Benny always caught the first show, and Charlie was at his table when I came over to sit with Benny between shows.

I just caught the tail end of their conversation as I walked up to the table. Charlie said something about Benny being in a sucker business, and they could both make a fortune if Benny would get out of it and throw in with him. Then Benny cut him off to introduce me, and they didn’t talk business any more. But a couple of times after that Charlie came in the club while Benny was waiting for me, and asked when Benny would be ready to start operations. The night you arrested Benny they were talking about it, as a matter of fact.”

“You saw Benny earlier that night?” I asked.

“I used to see him every night. He drove me to work. We got to the club about twenty after eight and found Charlie having dinner there. Charlie said he wanted to get things settled one way or the other that night, because if Benny didn’t make up his mind, he was going to look for another partner. Benny said he had an errand to run, but Charlie could come along and they’d discuss it on the way. I think they took Charlie’s car and Benny left his on the lot.”

“That figures,” I said. “Benny had a driver that night. The errand was to meet a new customer in an alley and sell him a pop of heroin.”

She made a face. “And to think I worried about the slob when he didn’t come back. He was supposed to pick me up when I got off at two. Next day Charlie phoned to tell me he was in jail. How he got my number I don’t know, because the phone is listed in my landlady’s name. Maybe Benny gave it to him.”

“Just what did he say when he called?”

“Only that Benny was in jail. Claimed he didn’t know why, but he thought Benny might appreciate me bailing him out. So I grabbed my checkbook and headed for headquarters like Lady Bountiful. You know the rest.”

I asked her what Charlie Kossack looked like.

“He’s a tall, lean guy. About six-two, I’d say, but I doubt if he weighs over one-fifty. About thirty-five with dark, slick hair and a thin face. Dresses pretty well.”

The description touched a vague chord of memory, but I couldn’t quite pin it down.

Chapter 14

I drank some of my coffee before asking, “Do you have any idea who might have killed Benny, April?”

She shrugged. “Anybody might shoot a guy in his business.”

“He ever mention any enemies?”

“The subject never came up. He was supposed to be a salesman, not a racketeer, so he would hardly have told me if anybody was gunning for him. I would have asked too many questions he couldn’t answer without letting me know he was involved in something shady.”

“How about friends other than Charlie Kossack?”

“He didn’t seem to have any real friends. I met a lot of his acquaintances.”

“Ever hear him mention Goodman White?”

She looked surprised. “The councilman from the East Side? No, not that I recall. Most of the people he knew seemed to be just barroom acquaintances.”

“Name a few.”

She knitted her brow in thought. “Well, there was a Tom Boyd we used to run into at a place called Rex’s Tavern. He was a bookie. A fellow named Jim Walsh tends bar there, and he seemed to be a friend of Benny’s, too. I don’t think he had any business association with either, though. He had a lot of casual acquaintances like that who aren’t worth mentioning. I only met one man who seemed to have a business relationship with him. We ran into him in a bar one afternoon and Benny introduced him as a salesman for the same firm he worked for. They both laughed when he said it, but I didn’t get the joke at the time. Looking back, I guess the man must have been a pusher, too.”

“What was his name?”

After thinking for a minute, she said, “Gamble. I remember because the bartender kept making puns about his name concerning gambling. Harry Gamble. We met him in Zek’s Tavern down in the Polish section. Benny used to take me to places on the South Side quite a lot. Said he grew up in the district.”

I asked, “Know where this Harry Gamble lives?”

She shook her head. “I never saw him before or since. But you might find him at Zek’s. I got the impression from the way the bartender kidded him that it was his regular hangout.”

Finishing my coffee, I glanced at my watch. It was five after eight.

“I have to scoot,” I said. “Can you think of anything else?”

After musing for a time, she shook her head again.

“You need cab fare to get home?”

“Who’s going home?” she asked. “There’s nothing there but a room. I’ll sleep away the morning and go shopping this afternoon. If I knew when you planned to get home, I might cook you dinner.”

After thinking this over, I decided why not? Nobody would disturb her in the apartment, and it might be nice to walk in to a home-cooked meal for a change.

I said, “I’ll have to phone you after I learn the lieutenant’s plans for me. He may decide to work us right through the night. I’ll try to phone about four.”

Getting up, I rounded the table to kiss her good-by. Winding her arms about my neck, she pulled me down against her.

After a moment I tore myself away. I had to, or miss work.

I logged in at eight-twenty-five. Hank Carter was already there, but neither Lieutenant Wynn nor Carl Lincoln had yet showed.

“Did you get any kind of line on Charlie Kossack?” I asked Carter.

Walking over to a table where some papers lay, he picked up a photostat of a record card and silently handed it to me.

The description on the card fitted what April had said about the man. He was listed as thirty-six years old, six feet two, and a hundred and forty-five pounds. When I looked at the mugg shots at the top of the card, I realized why the description had sounded familiar. About six months before he’d been in the morning show-up on suspicion of armed robbery, but had been released when a witness picked somebody else in the show-up as the person who had robbed him.

Charles Kossack’s record explained why he had been pulled in on routine suspicion on that occasion. He had a total of twenty-six arrests, starting at age sixteen with grand theft, auto, and working up to include everything from assault with a deadly weapon to armed robbery. There was even one arrest on suspicion of homicide.

Out of ten arrests as a juvenile he had taken only one fall, for grand theft, auto, and had drawn eighteen months in industrial school for it. He’d served a year of the eighteen. He’d beaten fourteen of his sixteen raps as an adult, once taking a fall for ADW and once for armed robbery. He had served a year of hard time for the former and five years of a five-to-ten for the latter.

“Nice guy, isn’t he?” Carter said when I handed the card back.

“That’s what makes a cop’s work so rewarding,” I growled. “Juries keep releasing these slobs, and when they do take a fall, the parole board turns them loose. This guy should have drawn life as a habitual years ago.”

“He’s managed to break most of the Ten Commandments,” Carter agreed, examining the card. “Maybe there’s hope, though. He missed one.”

“What’s that?”

“He’s never made a graven image.”

When I failed to smile, Carter said, “I said he never made—”

“I heard you,” I interrupted. “I only laugh at new gags. The first time I heard that one, I was a rookie. Got an address on this guy?”

He looked wounded. “One, six months old. He was on parole until six months ago. We checked it last night, but he’d moved the day he got off parole and left no forwarding address. That’s par for the course. They always do. We put out a local and an APB on him.”

I told Carter I had to go up the hall to Records, and if the lieutenant came in before I got back, to tell him I wouldn’t be long.

At Records I asked the girl on the desk to see if there was anything on a Harry Gamble. When there wasn’t, I told her to try the moniker file on the off chance that Gamble was a nickname.

In a few minutes she came back with a card.

“Harry the Gambler, also Harry Gamble,” she said. “Real name Harry Grimaldi. Just a minute and I’ll pull his file.”

She went away again and returned with a thick manila folder.

Harry Grimaldi had a record even longer than Charlie Kossack’s. He was only thirty years old, but had spent eight years behind bars. Like Kossack, he had started with grand theft, auto, as a juvenile, had worked his way up the underworld ladder of success by subsequently being picked up for questioning on simple assault, ADW, possession of lottery tickets, possession of narcotics (three times), armed robbery (four times), and suspicion of homicide. He had taken falls only twice: eighteen months in industrial school as a juvenile, of which, like Kossack, he had served only a year; ten years on two counts of armed robbery as an adult, of which he had served seven and a half years of hard time before being thrust back into society by an indulgent parole board.

According to the file his moniker stemmed from his willingness to bet on anything at all, from horses to how long a housefly would wander over a piece of bread before flying away. Like Kossack, he had been off parole about six months. His last known address was a rooming house on the North Side.

I copied the address down, though I knew it was unlikely he still lived there. As Hank Carter had said, habitual criminals had a habit of moving the minute they got off parole. April French had gotten the impression that he was a regular customer at Zek’s Tavern, which suggested he might now live near it. And Zek’s was clear down in my old neighborhood on the South Side, on Kosciuszko Street.

The thing which interested me most was his three pickups for possession of narcotics. It made it seem likely that this was the same Harry Gamble whom Benny Polacek had introduced to April French as a “salesman” for the firm he worked for.

You can’t take file folders out of Records, but they’ll photostat record cards for you. I carried a fresh print of the card back to the squadroom with me.

Wynn and Lincoln had both logged in by then, but Hank Carter was no longer in the squadroom. Carl Lincoln was studying Charles Kossack’s record card.

The lieutenant seemed in a more amiable mood than usual, this morning. He asked, pleasantly enough, “What were you looking up at Records, Rudowski?”

“An associate of Benny Polacek’s, sir. He’s in the moniker file as Harry Gamble, but his real name’s Harry Grimaldi.” I handed him the photostat. “There’s good reason to believe he’s a pusher who gets his supplies from the same source as Benny did.”

After studying the card, Wynn passed it on to Carl. “You get his name from the French girl?”

“Yes, sir.” I related that April had told me about the man.

When I finished, the lieutenant grunted. “Get anything else out of her?”

“You already know about Kossack. Seems he was trying to get Polacek to go into some kind of deal with him. From Kossack’s record, that probably was something like sticking up supermarkets. The night we picked up Polacek, Kossack drove him to the rendezvous in his own car, but apparently he wasn’t in the narcotics business with Benny. According to April they were discussing this deal at the Palace, and when Benny announced he had to run an errand, Kossack offered to drive him because he wanted to continue talking business.”

“Hmm. She know how to get in touch with Kossack?”

I shook my head. “She has no idea where he lives. And she isn’t holding out. She’s willing to cooperate all down the line.”

“I imagine,” Wynn said dryly. “Where’d you question her? In your bedroom?”

When I simply ignored that, he said, “Get anything else out of her?”

“Nothing of value. The names of a few barroom acquaintances. I thought if we moved in on this Grimaldi character, we might squeeze the name of his supplier out of him. If it turned out to be Goodie White, we’d have a pretty good case, in spite of Goodie’s shenanigans about left-handed bowling gloves.”

Wynn’s good humor evaporated. “You taking over the strategy planning of this case now, Sergeant?”

I merely looked at him.

“Well, are you?”

“No, sir,” I said in a voice as cold as his. Turning to Lincoln to avoid talking to Wynn any more, I asked, “Where’s Hank?”

“The lieutenant sent him up to the lab to hustle Abbot with that comparison test.”

Wynn said, “While we’re waiting, I’ll outline today’s assignments. There’ll be plenty of men in and out of the squadroom on the day trick, so we won’t need to leave a liaison man here. We can give messages to whoever happens to be around.”

Carl nodded as though the lieutenant had said something profound. I felt like kicking him.

Chapter 15

Wynn went on, “I had planned to have Lincoln and Carter cover the block where Polacek lived, today. We questioned all the tenants at Benny’s apartment house the night of the murder, and no one aside from the Ardens saw a thing, though several heard the shots and took them for backfires. We didn’t hit any of the neighbors along the block, though. Eventually we should, but in view of these names you’ve turned up, I think it’s more important to locate these two men first. Lincoln, you take Carter with you and hunt down this Harry Grimaldi. Rudowski and I will try to get a line on Charles Kossack.”

“Yes, sir,” Carl said.

At that moment Captain Spangler walked in. The lieutenant retired with the captain to the latter’s office to explain our progress so far. They were closeted together twenty minutes. Wynn finally emerged just as Hank Carter returned.

“Well, Sergeant?” Wynn asked.

“No make, sir,” Carter said briefly.

Wynn shrugged. “I hardly expected one. He surrendered the gun too easily. If Goodie White did burn Polacek, the gun’s probably in the river. Corporal Lincoln has your assignment for today, Sergeant. You’ll be working with him.”

Carter’s expression brightened at the news that he was to spend the day with Carl Lincoln instead of with the lieutenant.

Wynn said to Carl, “If you locate Grimaldi, just stake him out and report in. I don’t want the arrest loused up, because I’m hoping to squeeze the name of his wholesaler out of him.”

That was exactly what I had suggested and had been slapped down for. Apparently it wasn’t the merit of the idea Wynn objected to, but my effrontery in having an original thought.

Lincoln said, “Yes, sir. We understand.”

I handed Carl the slip of paper on which I had written Grimaldi’s last known address. “You can start here, but I’ll bet a beer you draw a blank. This is where he lived six months ago, before he went off parole.”

“No bet,” Carl said gloomily.

He and Hank Carter walked out of the squadroom.

Wynn said to me, “Last night Sergeant Carter talked to the landlady where Charles Kossack formerly lived. He didn’t get anything. I don’t suppose there’s much point in hitting her again.”

If he were asking for an opinion, he wasn’t going to get one. I was beginning to develop the same defense Hank Carter used.

“I suppose the quickest way to locate Kossack would be stoolies. You have any underworld contacts, Sergeant?”

“A few,” I said.

“Then let’s go visit them.”

I looked at him. “Together?”

“Of course. Why not?”

I doubt that Robert Wynn had any personal stoolies, for a cop as unbending as he was couldn’t get the time of day from anybody linked to the underworld. Wynn would treat anyone with a record like dirt.

I said, “It would be a waste of time, Lieutenant. My contacts would clam up if I brought along another cop.”

He looked surprised. After a moment, he asked, “Are your contacts any good?”

“I think so. I have one who knows practically everything that goes on in the underworld.”

“Who’s that?”

I shook my head. “Part of the deal is that nobody knows we’re even acquainted.”

“You can’t withhold information from a superior officer,” Wynn said testily.

“Captain Spangler says I can, sir. Even he doesn’t know who my contacts are.”

This wasn’t quite true, because Spangler did know some of my underworld contacts, at least by name. But the captain understood that a cop has to guard his private sources of information if he doesn’t want them to dry up, and I knew he’d back me if Lieutenant Wynn decided to make an issue of it.

Wynn decided not to. A trifle irritably he said, “All right, Rudowski. Go see what you can dig up. I’ll visit the landlady again and see if Carter missed anything. Check in here by phone at noon.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, and walked out of the squadroom.

People become police informers for a variety of reasons. Some hope for a break in case they themselves eventually land in a police net. Some squeal for pay, which has to come out of the cop’s own pocket because there isn’t any fund to cover such expenditures. Some inform through jealousy or because of grudges. None of these are very reliable, though I’ve used all on occasion with some degree of success.

The most reliable type of informer is an old lag who feels indebted to you for once giving him a break.

Dan (Boxer) Wilshire was such a man. He didn’t get his nickname from any pugilistic ability. “Box” is underworld jargon for “safe,” and in his prime Wilshire had been king of the safecrackers. He was credited with over a million dollars in scores when the state had salted him away on a life sentence as a habitual criminal when he was forty-five. Fifteen years later he was released on parole, a prematurely old man at sixty. He was now seventy-two.

I knew Boxer well because he’d lived on my beat along the riverfront ten years back when I was a rookie. He had decided to go straight after his release from prison, partly because a news syndicate paid him a pretty good sum for the story of his life, but mostly, I think, because arthritis had ruined the sensitivity of his fingers. He was greatly admired by unreformed crooks for his past exploits, though, and occupied a sort of professor emeritus position in the underworld. When he was released from prison, he was reputed to still have hidden somewhere a set of the finest box tools in existence. There were also the usual rumors of a hidden hoard of money, but Boxer insisted he had always spent it as fast as he stole it, and because of later events, I was inclined to believe him.

Eventually the money paid him by the news syndicate ran out, and Boxer found himself reduced to living on a remittance sent him by a married daughter. This was enough to get him by, but apparently it hurt his pride. Two years after his release, at the age of sixty-two, he made one last try for a score.

I was a rookie, only six weeks on a beat, when I caught him redhanded with his kit of safecracking tools trying to jimmy a rear window at the Meiner Department Store warehouse. Possession of the tools alone would have sent him back to prison with no hope of another parole.

Boxer turned white as a sheet when I flashed my light on him. Dropping the jimmy to the ground, he stood with slumped shoulders, looking utterly defeated.

I turned my light on the window. There was a small dent in the wooden sill where he had forced in the jimmy, but apparently I had come along before he could exert any leverage, for the lock wasn’t broken.

I said, “Let’s sit down and have a little talk, Boxer.”

We sat on a couple of wooden crates behind the warehouse and conversed for some time. After the talk we walked down to the dock, and I watched him fling his expensive tools one at a time as far out into the river as he could. When the satchel followed the last of the tools, he straightened his shoulders and breathed a sigh of relief.

“I’ll never forget this, kid,” he said. “And rest easy if you think maybe you made a mistake. I’ll never even look at another box, so help me.”

So far as I know, he had kept his word. When I moved up to plainclothes, I started collecting for the favor. Actually, though I had always liked the old man, it hadn’t been entirely youthful idealism which made me give him a break. It had occurred to me weeks before he made his slip that he would make a wonderful source of underworld information if some cop could gain his confidence. So, when I caught him, I was calculating possible future benefits at the same time as I was being compassionate.

I didn’t rub it into the ground, because he was no ordinary informer. As a matter of fact he didn’t consider himself an informer at all. I only tapped him when I needed specific information, never for a general picture of what was going on in the underworld, and he never voluntarily came to me with information. What information I got from him was given because he liked me, not through a sense of obligation. If Boxer announced that some hood I was inquiring about was a friend of his, that was that. I knew the hood would never hear from him that I had inquired about him, but I also knew that further questions would only offend the old man’s dignity.

Boxer Wilshire now lived in a basement flat on the East Side only a couple of blocks from the river. You went down some concrete steps into a cellarway and turned the handle of an old-fashioned bell on a barred iron gate.

The door immediately behind the gate opened and Boxer peered through the bars. When he recognized me, he smiled broadly and unlocked the gate. After I passed through, he carefully locked it behind me again, closed the door and led me across the front room into the kitchen.

“Have a seat, kid,” he said, pointing to a round table covered with oil cloth. “Coffee?”

“Sure,” I said.

A pot was already simmering on the stove. It always was. He poured two cups and sat across from me. His lined face looked ten years older than his seventy-two years, and his shoulders were somewhat more bent than when I had seen him last, but his eyes were still clear and bright and his body still sturdy.

The coffee was as strong and bitter as it always was. After sampling it, I said, “How you been, Boxer?”

“Good, except for this damned arthritis.” He held up both clawlike hands. “I couldn’t open a piggy bank with these things. What’s on your mind?”

“You know a Charlie Kossack?”

“That knothead?” he said contemptuously. “All he knows how to do is use a gun.”

“He been using one recently?”

Boxer pursed his lips. “Not that I know. But the word is that he’s trying to line up a partner to knock over a couple of big jobs.”

“I already know that,” I said. “You haven’t heard of him using a gun on somebody recently, have you?”

The old man’s eyes widened. “You mean a hit? He’s no hired gun, far as I ever heard. He’s just a heist artist.”

“I wasn’t thinking of him knocking anybody over for hire. But sometimes partners fall out. He’d been working on Benny Polacek to throw in with him on these jobs he had planned.”

“Oh, that. Afraid I can’t help you there. I hadn’t even heard he was dealing with Benny.”

“Have you heard any rumors as to who might have hit Benny?”

A withdrawn look appeared in his eyes. “Nothing definite enough to repeat.”

So there were rumors as to why Benny had died and who had pulled the trigger, I thought. But maybe they implicated someone Boxer regarded as a friend.

I took a stab. “How well do you know Goodie White, Boxer?”

Boxer Wilshire stared at me for a long time, then took a sip of his coffee. “You can’t live in the Twelfth Ward without knowing Goodie. Guess I know him as well as anybody in this part of town. He’s done me favors. I’d vote for him if they hadn’t taken my voting privilege away.”

That was that. If the underworld rumor was that Goodie White had taken care of Benny Polacek, I wasn’t going to hear about it from Boxer Wilshire.

I sipped my coffee before asking, “Hear any rumors about what kind of jobs this Charlie Kossack plans to pull?”

Boxer shook his head. “Just that he considers them big. Big in his book probably means a supermarket, where the take might be one or two grand. It wouldn’t be anything like the Brinks robbery. He’s pretty small time.”

I said, “Know where Kossack lives?”

The old man considered. “I think I heard he’s got a flat at the Axton.”

The Axton Apartment Hotel was on Clarkson Boulevard, only about three blocks from Benny Polacek’s apartment.

I said, “Ever hear of a Harry Grimaldi? Also known as Harry Gamble.”

Boxer thought for a moment. “Rings a vague bell. Another small-time punk, isn’t he? A pusher or something?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t know much about him, or where he lives. He’s hardly important enough to keep track of.”

That seemed to be all the information I was going to get this trip. I finished my coffee and left.

Chapter 16

I was driving my own car, not a police undercover car, so I couldn’t get police calls. I happened to have my car radio on, though, so I heard the special bulletin.

The announcer broke into the middle of a recorded tune to say, “We interrupt this program to bring you a news flash. One hour ago, at nine-thirty A.M., two masked men held up and robbed a payroll truck which was transmitting the weekly payroll of the Whittington Steel Company from the Merchants’ and Traders’ Bank to the steel plant. Payroll guard Arthur Prentiss, thirty-three, was shot and killed by one of the bandits.

“The well-planned robbery took place in midblock on Twenty-first Street between Dover and Spence Streets. According to the driver of the payroll truck, John Kendall, a heavy truck roared out of the alley as he started to pass it, and it struck him broadside, driving the armored car up on the sidewalk and into a brick wall. The force of the collision caused the rear door of the armored car to open. As the truck driver, wearing a stocking mask over his head, leaped from the cab and covered Kendall with a sawed-off shotgun, a similarly masked bandit came up from the alley on the opposite side of the street. As guard Arthur Prentiss, probably dazed by the accident, started to emerge from the rear door, the second bandit shot him down with a revolver.

“As the truck driver covered Kendall and several pedestrian witnesses with his shotgun, the second bandit carried two large payroll bags from the armored car to a car parked in the alley. Both bandits then leaped in their car and drove away.

“Eyewitness descriptions of the bandits varied. Estimates of the truck driver’s height range from five feet six to five feet ten, estimates of his weight from one hundred seventy-five pounds to over two hundred. The second bandit is described as from five ten to six feet and weighing from one-fifty to one-seventy-five. All witnesses agree that the truck driver was heavy-set and the other man slimly built, however. Both men wore tan coveralls, painter’s caps, and white cotton work gloves.

“Police believe the truck was probably stolen and are checking its registration. No figure on the amount stolen is yet available. Further details will be reported by this station as they come in.”

More work for Robbery Division, I thought. It sounded as though it would be a tough one. It had all the earmarks of a highly professional job, which probably meant out-of-towners, because there weren’t any local guns slick enough to pull such a smooth job.

Because I had just been discussing him with Boxer Wilshire, it fleetingly crossed my mind that it would be coincidental if Charles Kossack had been one of the bandits. I dismissed the idea, though, because according to his past record, and also according to Boxer’s estimate of the man, a big-time job such as this was out of his class. He was more the type to knock over filling stations and liquor stores. It hardly seemed likely that a joker stupid enough to get himself arrested twenty-six times would suddenly develop enough organizing ability to plan this professional a score.

I’d once had a few dates with a girl who lived at the Axton Apartment Hotel, so I knew the place fairly well. It was a somewhat run-down building of three stories. Once it had been an exclusive address, but as the residential section moved west, newer and more modern apartments had lured away the Axton’s monied tenants, and its management had been forced to adjust the rents downward to attract a less social-register class of tenants. Rent for a three-room furnished apartment with maid service now ran only sixty a month. Of course the furnishings were thirty years old, the management no longer ever redecorated, and the maid service was rather hit-or-miss. In short it had become something of a dump.

There was a different man on the desk than there had been when I used to call there. He was a fat man of about fifty wearing a dirty sport shirt.

I said, “What apartment is Charles Kossack in?”

“Two-eleven,” he said. “But he’s not home. He went out about eight this morning.”

“Any idea when he’ll be back?”

The fat man shrugged. “He didn’t say. He usually stops at the desk for his mail about noon, but that’s usually on his way out. I’ve never seen him up this early before. Want to leave a message in his box?”

“No thanks,” I said. “He live alone?”

He gave me a suspicious look. “If you don’t know, you must not be very well acquainted with him.”

“I’m not.” I took out my wallet and showed him my badge. “My name is Sergeant Matt Rudd. Who are you?”

After staring at the badge for a time, he said, “Marvin Johnson. I’m just the day desk clerk, Sergeant. You want I should phone the manager?”

“That won’t be necessary, Mr. Johnson. I’m not planning to raid the hotel. I just want to see one of your tenants.”

“I hope Mr. Kossack isn’t in any trouble.”

I said patiently, “I just want to talk to him. Does he live alone?”

He looked a little uncomfortable. “He’s the only registered tenant in two-eleven. But a friend stays with him off and on.”

“Who’s the friend?”

“He’s never introduced her.”

“A woman, eh?” I said. “She there now?”

“I really don’t know. If she is, she came in last night when I was off duty. She wasn’t with him when he left this morning.”

“I’ll go ring the bell,” I said. “If he comes in while I’m upstairs, don’t mention that he has a visitor.”

“All right,” he agreed. “We have orders to cooperate with the law.”

There was an elevator, but I took the stairs to the second floor. No one answered the door at apartment 211.

Downstairs again I used the desk phone to call the squadroom. Captain Spangler answered the phone.

“Matt Rudd, Captain,” I said. “Any messages for me from Lieutenant Wynn?”

“Nope. Haven’t heard from him.”

“I’m at the Axton Apartment Hotel,” I said. “Charlie Kossack lives here. He’s not home, so I plan to stick around until he shows. Want to take down this phone number, in case Wynn wants to reach me?”

“Go ahead.”

I read the number from the dial. “Tell the lieutenant if Kossack doesn’t show by noon, I’ll check back in by phone.”

“O.K., Rudowski. I’ll give him the message.”

I had been sitting in the lobby about a half-hour when an attractive but hard-faced blonde of about thirty came in, carrying a suitcase. She was overdressed and over-painted, but she had a nice figure.

She set down the suitcase at the desk and said, “Mr. Kossack will be along soon. He asked me to get his key from the desk and wait for him in his apartment.”

The desk clerk’s glance flicked in my direction, but fortunately the woman’s attention was distracted at that moment by a male tenant stepping from the elevator, crossing the lobby and going out the street door. The clerk handed her the key, and we both watched as she lugged the suitcase to the elevator. It wasn’t large, but it seemed to be heavy, for she bent over to one side carrying it.

When the cage door closed and the indicator showed the car was moving upward, I went over to the desk.

“Do me a favor, Mr. Johnson,” I said. “When Kossack shows, don’t look my way. You almost tipped off that woman that the place is staked out.”

“Sorry,” he said apologetically. “I’ll watch myself.”

“Was that his usual visitor?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Looks as though she plans to stay a while.”

“She never brought a suitcase before. Usually just an overnight bag.”

I went back to my seat.

Fifteen minutes before noon, Charlie Kossack finally appeared. I recognized his long, thin frame and slicked-back hair the moment he entered through the street door, but of course he didn’t know me. The only time I had ever seen him was at the morning show-up the time he was picked up as a robbery suspect, and from the stage the suspects can’t see the cops who are observing them because the audience section is dark.

He gave me only a casual glance as he passed me on the way to the desk.

Fat Marvin Johnson made a point of not looking my way this time. He said, “No mail today, Mr. Kossack. Your lady friend is upstairs. She said you told her to get the key and wait in your apartment.”

“That’s right,” Kossack said. “Another friend of mine will be along soon. Send him up too.”

I was on the verge of rising and putting the arm on him, but his words made me pause. I decided I might as well wait to see who the expected friend was. With Kossack’s record, there was a good chance any friends of his might be on the Wanted list.

Kossack got into the elevator and went upstairs. I continued to sit and wait.

At noon the desk phone rang. After answering it, the clerk called, “For you, Sergeant.”

Going over to the desk, I took the phone from his hand. It was Lieutenant Wynn.

He said, “Captain Spangler gave me your message, Rudowski. Kossack showed yet?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “He’s up in his apartment now. I haven’t moved in yet because he told the desk clerk he’s expecting a friend. I thought I’d wait to see who the friend is.”

There was a short period of silence. I suppose he was deciding whether or not to disapprove of my waiting for the friend. Apparently he decided it wasn’t a major bit of original thinking, for all he said was, “Think you’ll need any help?”

“What for? I’m only bringing him in for questioning. He’s not likely to put up a fight.”

“O.K.,” Wynn said. “I’m going to lunch now. If I’m not back in the squadroom when you bring in the suspect, have me paged in the headquarters cafeteria.”

“Yes, sir,” I said and hung up.

With my back to the door, I hadn’t been aware that someone had entered the lobby. I didn’t realize it until I started to turn and from the corner of my vision glimpsed the bulky figure only a couple of feet behind me.

The man recognized me before I did him. His hand darted to his armpit and swept out a thirty-eight automatic while I was still reaching for my hip gun. I froze in position, then slowly raised my hands. The automatic centered on a point between me and the desk clerk.

I hadn’t seen Casmir Kuzniki since we were both eighteen, and he had changed a lot. He’d been heavy-set even as a kid, but now he was almost as broad as he was tall. He must have weighed two-fifty, and not much of it was fat. He had a round stomach, but it looked as rock-hard as the rest of him. His face hadn’t changed much, though. He still had the same moon-shaped face, flat nose, and little pig eyes.

“You must be slowing down, Matt,” he said. “First time I’ve been able to take you.”

Kuzniki had been a member of a gang of juvenile delinquents called the Green Penguins when we were kids together on the South Side. A couple of times when we were both in our early teens he had jumped me for daring to walk through his gang’s territory, and both times I had knocked him silly. I assumed his reference was to those long-ago episodes.

I said, “I didn’t know you were in town, Cas. Our word was that you were somewhere on the West Coast.”

We got regular bulletins on Cas from the FBI, because he had recently gained the distinction of making their Ten Most Wanted list. Along with a varying number of partners, all of whom were now behind bars, he was credited with knocking over some ten banks during the past couple of years. The jobs had all been done on the West Coast, though, so the St. Cecilia force hadn’t been actively looking for him.

The bank robber, deciding that the lobby was no place to chat over old times, after a quick glance around, ordered Johnson from behind the desk and herded us both into the public rest room off one side of the lobby. Inside, he made me lean against the wall while he removed my gun and dropped it into his coat pocket. After shaking down Marvin Johnson and finding no weapons on him, he told us both we could lower our hands.

Then he said, “I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation on the phone, Matt. Who were you planning to bring in for questioning?”

“Nobody you’d know, Cas.”

“Who was he getting ready to move in on?” Kuzniki asked the desk clerk.

Marvin Johnson was so scared his body was shaking. When he didn’t immediately answer, Kuzniki centered the gun on Mm. The man turned paper white.

“Mr. Kossack,” he squeaked.

Kuzniki frowned in my direction. “You must have just been making a routine check, cop. You couldn’t know, or you wouldn’t have walked in here alone.”

This went over Marvin Johnson’s head, but I knew instantly what he was talking about. As a matter of fact, the moment I had recognized him in the lobby, I knew who had pulled the Whittington Steel payroll job. By sheerest accident I had walked alone right into the bandits’ hideout.

I felt like kicking myself. I had even thought of Charles Kossack as a possibility for one of the bandits, then had dismissed the idea as absurd. It hadn’t occurred to me that perhaps the other bandit, one big-time enough to plan that sort of score, might have recruited Kossack as an assistant.

Kuzniki said, “Long as you want to see him so bad, I guess I’ll let you. You too, Fatty. Let’s the three of us go quietly up to Charlie’s apartment.”

Chapter 17

Kuzniki made us turn our backs while he eased open the rest-room door and checked the lobby to make sure it was still empty. Then, holding the door open and covering us with his automatic, he ordered us to move ahead of him.

“Never mind the elevator,” he said. “Make for the stairs. And move fast. If anyone shows before we hit Charlie’s apartment, I start blasting.”

Marvin Johnson waddled toward the stairs at a near trot. I had to take long-legged strides to keep up with him. We met no one on the stairs or in the second-floor hallway. In front of Apartment 211 Kuzniki motioned with his gun for us to stand to one side of the door while he rapped on it. He used a code knock: two quick raps, a pause, a single rap, then three more in rapid order.

The door cracked open about an inch. From where Johnson and I stood, we couldn’t see who was peering out.

Kuzniki said, “Don’t strip your gears, Charlie, but I’ve got two pigeons under the gun out here. Open up fast before anyone comes along.”

The door was pulled wide open. Kuzniki motioned us through it. Charles Kossack had backed halfway across the room and was holding a revolver in his hand. Kuzniki entered last, pushed the door closed, and threw home the bolt.

“The big guy’s a cop,” he said to Kossack. “I recognized him because we were kids together down on the South Side. His name’s Mateuz Rudowski.”

Kossack’s face was pale. He said, “He was in the lobby when I came in.”

From the bedroom doorway the blonde said in a harsh voice, “He was there when I came in, too.”

Kuzniki said, “Don’t get excited. The joint ain’t surrounded. He was just making a routine check, I guess. I just happened to walk up behind him as he was talking to headquarters on the phone, and got the drop on him. He was telling his boss he’d bring you in for questioning. At least I guess it was his boss, because he called him sir.”

Kossack said, “How’d you get on to this so fast, cop?”

“I didn’t,” I said. “Your idiot partner blew it. If he’d turned and walked out before I saw his face, I would never have tumbled. All I wanted you for was routine questioning about Benny Polacek.”

Kossack looked blank. “Benny? I didn’t have no part of that.”

I shrugged. “It hardly matters now. You’ll squat in the gas chamber for this morning’s kill. I suppose you know the guard you shot is dead.”

Kuzniki said in an impatient voice, “Let’s can the chatter and decide what to do. All the plans will have to be changed now, because this place is gonna be too hot for a hideout. When Matt doesn’t show up at headquarters with you, cops will be swarming all over this joint.”

Kossack turned even paler. “What are we going to do?”

“We’re gonna have to think fast.” The burly bandit pointed to a sofa and said, “You two guys sit there and keep quiet.”

Marvin Johnson scurried over to the sofa and collapsed on it. His cheeks were twitching, and his hands shook uncontrollably. I went over and sat next to him.

Casmir Kuzniki began pacing up and down, obviously thinking furiously. About a minute passed before a slow grin began to form on his face.

Coming to a halt, he said to Kossack, “What’s this rap my childhood playmate was picking you up for?”

“A friend of mine got hit.”

Kuzniki raised his eyebrows. “You hit him?”

“Not me. I’m clean on that one.”

“Then you can stand a grill about it?”

Kossack’s eyes narrowed. “Sure. What’re you getting at?”

“I’m trying to rig you an alibi so when the cops start swarming in here, it won’t mean a thing. Rudowski’s the only cop who knows you were in on this morning’s score. Maybe we can keep it that way.”

I didn’t like the sound of this. The only way they could keep it that way was to place me permanently out of communication with headquarters.

Kuzniki turned to me. “Give me your car keys, Matt.”

Reaching into my coat pocket, I pulled them out and tossed them to him. He in turn tossed them to Kossack.

“Where’s your car parked?” he asked.

When I merely cocked a quizzical eyebrow, Kuzniki said matter-of-factly, “I haven’t got time to fool around, Matt. Either tell me or take a slug in the stomach.”

It didn’t seem worth a slug in the stomach. I said, “Out front, about four spaces south. It’s a gray Olds.”

“What division you working out of these days?”

I couldn’t see what harm giving him that information would do. “Vice, Gambling, and Narcotics.”

“What’s the squadroom number?”

I frowned at him. “Two-twenty-four,” I said puzzledly.

He turned back to Kossack. “Drive his car down to headquarters and leave it on the lot. If any cops are wandering around the lot, drive on by and circle the block until you’re sure there won’t be any witnesses when you park. I don’t want anyone to see you alone in the car.”

His slick-haired partner looked as puzzled as I was.

“As I remember from the days when they used to pull me in at Juvenile Division, there’s a door from the lot into the rear of the building,” Kuzniki went on. “It takes you into a basement hall, and there’s a fire stair just inside it. You should be able to make the second floor without anybody seeing you.”

“What the hell for?” Kossack asked in bewilderment.

“Your alibi. Find room two-twenty-four, then walk in and tell the first cop you see that Rudowski told you to wait there.”

“Are you nuts?” Kossack said on a high note.

“He told his boss over the phone that he was bringing you in,” Kuzniki said patiently. “So you show up in the squadroom. Your story is that he drove you to headquarters, the two of you walked together as far as the squadroom door, Rudowski told you to go in and wait while he went off somewhere. He didn’t tell you where. Maybe he went to the Records Division to pull your card.

When he never shows up, you’re going to be asked a lot of questions. But not nearly as many as if you don’t do it my way. Just stick to your story, and let them try to figure out how a cop disappeared in the middle of police headquarters.”

“They’ll never believe me in a million years!” Kossack said, sounding appalled at the whole idea.

“They’ll have to. They won’t think you have the brains or the guts to burn a cop, then walk into headquarters for an alibi. If you get there fast, they’ll figure you wouldn’t have had time to burn him and dispose of the body. It isn’t fifteen minutes since he hung up the phone.”

“But... but—” Kossack stammered.

“But, hell. The alternative is to burn them both and run. Which means a six-state alarm will be out for you in an hour. Because that’s about how long it will take the cops to start checking here to find out why Rudowski never showed up with you. This way they’ll start looking for him at headquarters first. They’ll get here eventually, of course, but they won’t find anything. You stick to your story, and they’ll never be able to pin you down, no matter what they suspect.”

It was a fantastic plan, but it just might work. I began to understand why Cas Kuzniki was such a successful bank robber and how he had managed to stay at large when every one of his former partners was in prison. He could think on his feet and he had all the audacity of a master strategist. As he suggested, cops would probably be checking Kossack’s apartment within an hour if I failed to show at headquarters. And even if the bandits took us somewhere else to kill us, so that there was no evidence of the crime in the apartment, Kossack could hardly return here to brazen it out. They’d all have to run. But the plan he outlined could conceivably throw the police such a curve that they would never be able to figure out exactly what had happened, no matter what they might suspect.

The blonde came in from the bedroom and said to Kossack, “He’s right, honey. I told you he was smart. You can face them down.”

Kossack ran a distracted hand through his oily hair.

Kuzniki said to him, “If you don’t get moving, you may as well forget about it. The whole thing depends on you getting there fast.”

“How about you and Connie?”

“We’ll take care of these two and hole up at her place. When the cops release you, call there from a pay phone.”

“What about the loot?”

“Want your cut now?” Kuzniki inquired. “So the cops can find it when they search the joint?”

“I’ll be with him, honey,” the blonde, Connie, said. “I’ll watch out for your interests.”

“Sure,” I put in. “You’re being set up as a fall guy, Charlie.”

Kossack looked at me.

“There won’t be any answer when you phone Connie. They’ll be halfway across the country with that suitcase full of swag.”

Kossack said, “That isn’t even a good try. Cas has a reputation for playing square, and Connie won’t run out on me.” Sliding his gun beneath his arm, he headed for the door.

“Hey!” Kuzniki said.

Pausing with his hand on the knob, Kossack turned to look at his partner.

“You plan to walk into police headquarters with that heater under your arm?” Kuzniki demanded.

Flushing, Kossack drew out the gun and tossed it at Connie, who expertly plucked it from the air.

“How about the harness, genius?” Kuzniki asked sarcastically.

Kossack’s flush deepened. Slipping off his coat, he removed his shoulder harness and tossed it to the blonde. He put his coat back on, unbolted the door, and let himself out without saying anything.

I said, “It won’t work, Cas. He’s too dumb. He’ll spill his guts the minute the boys turn on the heat. He’ll tell all about you and Connie and where you’re hiding out.”

“Maybe. But we won’t be at Connie’s if the cops look there.”

“Huh?” the blonde said suspiciously.

“Don’t worry. I’m not planning to beat your boy friend out of his cut. But we’re not going to be where he can finger us in case he does break. We’ll contact him when the heat dies.”

“But you said—”

“I wanted him to get started,” Kuzniki interrupted. “I didn’t have time for a long discussion. I don’t have time to argue with you either. Where’d you park the panel truck?”

“Around back.”

“Bring it around front. Then come back up here. I’ll want you to run interference when I take these jokers out, so we don’t meet any witnesses. Get moving.”

She walked into the bedroom. Through the open door I could see the suitcase she had carried in lying on the bed. Opening it, she dropped in the gun and harness and closed it again. For a moment she disappeared from view, then reappeared carrying a handbag from which she took a set of car keys. She paused at the door. “I shouldn’t be more than five minutes,” she announced, and went out, closing the door behind her.

Chapter 18

Because there wasn’t anything else to do while we waited, I tried to figure out how the getaway after the payroll robbery had been worked. The suitcase, I was reasonably sure, contained the loot, probably also the costumes the bandits had worn and the shotgun handled by Kuzniki. Since Connie had brought in the suitcase, it had presumably been transferred to her somewhere along the getaway route. And since the two men had showed up here separately, they had probably split up after the transfer.

Another example of Cas Kuzniki’s detailed planning, I thought. Within minutes of the robbery the bandits had separated and were merely two lone men in ordinary business suits with nothing on them to connect them with the robbery. Then, unobtrusively, they rejoined at Kossack’s apartment.

I could imagine how it must have happened. As one drove the car away from the holdup scene, the other crouched in the rear seat, transferring the money from the payroll bags to the suitcase, stripping off his painter’s cap, stocking mask, gloves, and coveralls and packing them into the suitcase as well.

Finished, he probably called to the one driving who screeched to a momentary stop in some alley long enough for them to change places. By the time the second man had crammed his costume into the suitcase, most likely hiding the shotgun inside it, too, they would be near the rendezvous point.

Kuzniki had mentioned a panel truck, so presumably that was what Connie had been waiting in. By now the getaway car would have reduced its speed to the legal limit, since the farther it got from the robbery scene, the less safety there was in speed and the more there was in becoming inconspicuous. Probably the panel truck had been parked in some alley, where observation was unlikely. There would have been a momentary halt alongside it as the man in the back of the getaway car stepped out, swung the suitcase into the back of the truck, and climbed back into the car. Both vehicles would then instantly move on, but at the alley mouth the getaway car would turn one way, the panel truck the other.

Blocks away from the transfer point, the getaway car would stop again to let the man in the rear get out, probably near a streetcar or bus line. A few blocks farther on, the driver would pull into a parking place, get out, and walk away. The getaway car, of course, would be a stolen one.

I imagined that within ten minutes of the holdup the two bandits had become inconspicuous bus or streetcar passengers, many blocks apart from each other, and with nothing on their persons to connect them with the robbery.

The code knock came at the door, and Kuzniki let Connie back in.

Closing the door behind her, he said, “Bring the suitcase out here.”

As the blonde went into the bedroom, I said, “I think you’re making a mistake, Cas. Why don’t you just tie us up and leave us here? With the cops looking for me at headquarters, it’ll be hours before they get around to looking here. You could be clear out of the state.”

“I like this state,” he said.

Connie carried the suitcase into the front room and set it down.

“You can carry it, Matt,” Kuzniki said. “It’ll keep your hands occupied, in case you get any ideas.”

Marvin Johnson said in a trembling voice, “Why don’t you let me go, mister? I swear I won’t call the cops or anything. Honest.”

“Get on your feet,” Kuzniki told him.

Johnson reluctantly rose from the sofa. I stood up, too.

I said, “The cops won’t buy this, Cas. They might if I was the only one to disappear. But with the hotel desk clerk also mysteriously missing, they’ll never turn Charlie loose. Your best bet is to tie us up and run.”

The blonde said worriedly, “He’s got a point, Cas. Aren’t the cops going to figure Fatty’s disappearance is tied in with this guy’s?”

Kuzniki looked thoughtful. After a moment he said, “Thanks for the suggestion, Matt. Take off your necktie.”

I was a little surprised, but mostly I was relieved. Obediently I stripped off my necktie and handed it to him.

“Turn around and cross your wrists behind you,” he ordered.

When I obeyed, he said to the blonde, “Tie his hands.”

She did a thorough job of it, though it wasn’t as thorough as she thought. I tensed my muscles to make my wrists swell as much as possible. When she finished and I relaxed them, there wasn’t enough slack to free my hands, but at least the necktie was loose enough not to interfere with the circulation.

Kuzniki told me to sit back down on the sofa. Then he drew my gun from his coat pocket and handed it to Connie.

“Keep him covered,” he said. “If he tries anything, shoot. You got the guts to?”

“Sure,” she said, staring at me coldly. “He’ll stay put.”

Expertly she broke the gun to check the load, then snapped the cylinder home again. She trained the gun on me.

“I’ll be back,” Kuzniki said. He motioned the desk clerk toward the door. “You live here, Fatty?”

“Yes, sir,” the man said. “I have an apartment on the first floor.”

“You got a wife?”

“No, sir. I live alone.”

“That makes it easier,” Kuzniki said. “I was afraid I was going to have to use that rest room again. Lead on to your apartment.”

“Hey,” I said. “What you planning to do?”

In an easy tone Kuzniki said, “Did you think I’d leave you jokers tied up in the same apartment, where you could pick at each other’s knots?”

His tone struck me as too easy. The fat man started to look relieved, but I didn’t have his faith in the word of bank robbers. And I didn’t like the subdued glitter in Kuzniki’s eyes.

I began to suspect my suggestion had been a mistake. But since the only way to undo it would have been to talk Kuzniki back into his original plan of taking both of us off and killing us, I decided not to compound the error by opening my mouth again.

Kuzniki opened the door a crack to check the hall, then pulled the door wide and motioned the fat man through. The door closed behind them.

I said to the girl, “What’s he have in mind?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Cas? He’s gonna tie Fatty up in his own apartment. You heard him.”

“I heard what he said. He was thinking something else.”

“Could be,” she said indifferently. “He’s a smart one.”

“Too smart for Charlie,” I said. “You know he’s going to ditch you and run off with the whole loot, don’t you?”

She smiled disdainfully. “You tried that on Charlie. It won’t work on me either.”

If I had been certain that when Kuzniki returned he would merely bind me a little more thoroughly, put a gag in my mouth, and walk off and leave me, I might have been content just to sit and wait for him. But the more I thought about that glitter in his eyes, the less I liked it.

I said, “I don’t think you’d really shoot me if I made a break. I think I’ll just get up and walk out, tied hands and all.”

I started to get up from the couch. The hammer of the pistol clicked back. Looking at her, I saw her finger begin to whiten on the trigger.

I sank back into position. Carefully she lowered the hammer again.

“Now that that’s settled, what would you like to talk about?” she asked sardonically.

“Nothing. I think I’d rather talk to Cas.”

The burly bank robber was gone about fifteen minutes. When the code knock finally sounded and the blonde opened the door, he was alone.

Without bothering to close the door behind him, he said rapidly, “Stow that gun in your bag and go on ahead, Connie. O.K., Matt, on your feet.”

“So I’m going with you after all?” I said without moving.

He took out his automatic. “Yeah. It would be simpler for you to walk, but I’ll carry you over my shoulder dead if you insist.”

I guessed he was big enough to do it. Rising, I said, “I can’t carry the suitcase with my hands tied.”

“Never mind the suitcase. I’ll handle it. Just stay ahead of me.”

I walked out into the hall. Kuzniki followed with the suitcase in his left hand and the automatic still in his right. He set the suitcase down in the hall long enough to click the door shut behind him.

Connie was at the head of the stairs, looking down. Motioning us forward, she moved down the stairs. By the time we reached the top step, she was on the landing, peering down into the lobby. She motioned us down again.

The lobby was deserted. I had the bitter thought that the Axton must be a dull place to live. Cas Kuzniki had been herding people all over the place at gunpoint without running into a single tenant. Then I realized there was nothing very remarkable about this. The apartments at the Axton were so small that most were occupied by single people, who at this time of day would all be at work.

Apparently everybody in the neighborhood was at work. Or rather, I corrected myself, at lunch near wherever they worked, for it was about a quarter of one. If there had been any restaurants in the block, the street probably would have been crowded, but there was nothing but apartment houses. We waited inside the door as Connie opened the back of the panel truck. When she motioned us out, there was one lone pedestrian a half-block away with his back to us.

As we started across the sidewalk, Kuzniki thrust his gun in his pocket, but kept me covered through the cloth. I climbed into the truck, which was empty except for a jack and some tire tools lying on the floor. Heaving in the suitcase, he climbed in after me and drew his gun again. Connie closed the rear door and went around to the cab.

“Make yourself comfortable,” Kuzniki said, turning the suitcase flat and seating himself on it with his back against the rear door.

That left me with the floor to sit on. I settled myself against the back of the cab seat on a flat tire iron.

Starting the engine, Connie said over her shoulder, “Where to?”

“Head east to the river road, then south,” Kuzniki said. “We can’t do anything until after dark, so take your time.”

By “do anything,” I assumed he meant kill me and dispose of my body.

Maybe there was a description out on the panel truck and we would be stopped by cops, I thought hopefully. Then I decided there wouldn’t be, because the truck probably wasn’t stolen. Kuzniki wouldn’t risk having the transfer car on a job stopped on routine suspicion, so undoubtedly either he, Kossack, or Connie had a legal right of possession. Possibly it was rented.

I strained at my bonds, but couldn’t feel any give. The tie was wool, which inclines to stretch, but it was wound around my wrists several times. It was knotted at the top of my wrists, where I couldn’t reach the knot.

Connie called back to Kuzniki, “What about the desk clerk?”

“He hung himself in his apartment,” Kuzniki said casually.

I felt my stomach lurch. If I had kept my mouth shut, the man might still have been alive. Not that he’d have anything but death to look forward to, but at least he wouldn’t be dead yet.

Connie said dubiously, “Think the cops will swallow it as suicide?”

“He left a note. Not much of one, because I didn’t want him to know what he was writing. All it said was, ‘Sorry it has to be this way.’ But it’s in his own hand. I think they’ll buy it as a coincidence having nothing to do with Matt’s disappearance.”

The poor scared fat man, I thought. I could imagine him trembling under the bank robber’s gun, writing what he was told and hoping its purpose wasn’t what he suspected. For despite Kuzniki’s comment about not wanting the man to know what he was writing, he must have suspected. I suppose that in his hopelessness he obeyed the order to write simply to stretch out his life a final few seconds.

I was sitting squarely on the tire tool, its end protruding from behind me like a short tail. I worked a piece of the necktie under it and strained upward. The cloth seemed to stretch, but when I relaxed, the tie didn’t seem any looser. I tried again.

The truck turned right. Shortly afterward, it began to pick up speed, and I realized we must be beyond the city line.

Connie called, “You know, we never had any lunch, Cas. Think I could risk stopping somewhere for sandwiches?”

“No,” he said in a definite tone. “We’ll eat late tonight.”

“I haven’t had any lunch either,” I offered.

He merely gave me a brittle smile.

Again I pulled my arms upward away from the tire tool. This time when I relaxed, the tie had definitely stretched. Not quite enough, though. I still couldn’t slip it over my hands.

Chapter 19

After a time Connie said, “How far you want me to drive?”

“How much gas you got?” Kuzniki countered.

“Full tank.”

“Then just keep going until dark. After our friend leaves us, we’ll gas up and keep going south to a hideout I know.”

At this time of year it wouldn’t be dark for another seven hours, which would put us in the next state even if we only averaged forty miles an hour. Apparently Kuzniki meant to plant me somewhere far enough from home so that I’d never be found.

It was hot in the back of the truck. I could feel sweat running down my arms. Periodically I kept tugging my bound wrists upward and away from the tire iron. The necktie grew damp from my sweat and stretched a little more. It still wasn’t quite enough. Kuzniki was directly facing me, so I couldn’t put my full effort into it. If my face had started to redden with strain, he would have made me turn around so that he could check my bonds.

We had been riding about a half-hour before I managed to stretch the necktie enough to free my hands.

I gripped the tire iron, shifted position slightly, and drew it from beneath me. The movement caused Kuzniki to raise the gun from his lap and center it on me. When I remained still, he seemed to decide I had just been trying to get more comfortable, and the gun dropped to his lap again.

There was a small window in the rear door, too high for me to see anything through except a stretch of sky. Kuzniki’s head was even with it, however, as he was elevated by the suitcase he sat on. I sat a little more upright and stared curiously at a cloud passing by the window.

When Kuzniki gave me a sharp glance, I immediately shifted my gaze downward to my lap. A moment later I glanced at the window again and let an interested expression form on my face.

“What are you looking at?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said quickly, and turned my gaze aside.

He didn’t bite. Instead of turning to glance out through the window, he called, “You watching your rear-view mirror, Connie?”

“Sure. Why?”

“What’s behind us?”

“A car about a quarter of a mile back with a guy and a girl in it. We just passed them.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing I can see.”

Smiling faintly, I flicked my gaze at the window again, then immediately away. This time I didn’t even see the cloud. There was only clear sky.

Centering his gun on me, Kuzniki quickly turned his head to glance back through the window. I doubt that he considered the maneuver particularly risky. Presumably my hands were tied behind my back and I was seated, with my legs awkwardly spread out before me, several feet away from him.

I whipped the tire tool from behind me and threw it pry edge first, as you would hurl a knife. He started to turn his head back just in time to catch it squarely in the left eye.

His body recoiled backward, and his full two hundred and fifty pounds hit the rear door, snapping the catch. The door flew open, and he went out head over heels, his arms outflung and blood gushing from the ragged hole where his left eye had been.

I grabbed the handle of the suitcase just in time to keep it from following him.

Possibly Connie wouldn’t have known anything was wrong behind her if the door hadn’t banged shut again, then sprung open a second time. This time it stayed open, and through it I could see Kuzniki rolling over on the concrete road in what was probably his second backward somersault. I really didn’t have my attention on him, though. I was clawing at the suitcase snaps.

I felt the truck slow, and Connie called over her shoulder, “What happened?”

When there was no answer, she braked and began to pull off the road. I had both snaps of the suitcase open now, but the thing was locked. Miraculously, the tire iron hadn’t followed Kuzniki out the back door. Grabbing it up, I shoved the pry edge under the hasp of the lock and jerked. The lock snapped open just as the truck came to a full stop and the blonde twisted around to peer in the back.

Then it was a contest of speed. Connie clawed open her handbag for the revolver in it while I threw up the suitcase lid. Charlie Kossack’s gun and shoulder holster lay on top of a folded pair of tan coveralls. Inside there was also a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun.

The shoulder harness lay on top of the pistol, and I wasn’t sure I had time to fling it aside. I grabbed for the shotgun.

The blonde’s hand was coming out of her bag when I rested the twin barrels on the top of the seat, the muzzles inches from her head and said, “Uh-uh.”

She froze in position. The gun dropped back into the handbag, and the handbag fell to the seat. Shifting the shotgun to my left hand, I reached down with my right, plucked the gun from the bag, and thrust it into my hip holster. Then I tossed the shotgun back into the suitcase and slammed the lid. Connie was reaching for the door handle when I grabbed her under both arms and dragged her over the back of the seat. She came over face up, making a three-point landing on the metal floor of the truck.

I don’t think the jar hurt her feet, but the third point she landed on brought an indignant “Ouch!” from her.

“You shouldn’t have tried to run,” I said, pulling her to her feet. “You would hurt a lot more if I’d had to shoot you there.”

Pushing her to the rear door, I jumped down and dragged her after me.

Two hundred yards back, a car had stopped on the shoulder alongside the sprawled figure of Casmir Kuzniki, and a man was just getting out from behind the wheel. I figured that was too far for us to walk.

The truck door’s rear lock was broken so that the door wouldn’t latch. Letting it hang open, I marched Connie to the cab’s left door, pushed her under the wheel to the far side and slid into the driver’s seat.

“You don’t have to be so rough,” she complained.

“I lose my chivalry with gun molls,” I said. “Give me any trouble and I’ll backhand your head off your shoulders.”

She understood that kind of talk. She probably was used to hearing it from the kind of men she went with. She sat quietly with her hands in her lap as I made a U-turn and drove back to where Kuzniki lay.

I parked on the right-hand shoulder and dragged the woman along by the arm when I crossed the road, feeling no desire to have to chase her down across country. Kuzniki had completed his final somersault by landing on his face, and the back of his head was a flattened and bloody pulp. He must have hit head down when he fell from the truck, killing himself instantly.

The face of the driver who had stopped was a pale green. He was only about twenty years old, and a girl of about the same age still sat in the car. He wasn’t doing anything about the dead man. He was just standing there staring down sickly.

I said, “Don’t grieve about him. He would have ended up in the gas chamber anyway.”

He looked at me without understanding.

Glancing at Connie, I saw she was as green as the young man. I knew she wouldn’t try to run, for the moment, at least no farther than to bend over the ditch edging the shoulder. Releasing her arm, I stooped to pick up and pocket the automatic lying in the road, then dragged the body by the feet over to the shoulder.

A state patrol car drove by at that moment, made a U-turn, and came back to see what the trouble was.

It was three-thirty P.M. when I turned Connie and the suitcase over to Robbery Division. She had clammed up so completely during the drive back to town that I still didn’t know her last name. She had no identification on her and she wouldn’t tell me. I left the problem of finding out who she was to the Robbery Division cops.

From Robbery I went to Homicide to report the rigged suicide of Marvin Johnson. This held me up some more, so it was nearly four when I finally walked into Vice, Gambling, and Narcotics.

Captain Spangler, Lieutenant Wynn, Hank Carter, and Carl Lincoln were standing in a circle around someone seated at a corner table. When I pushed into the group, I saw it was Charles Kossack. He glanced up at me, and his was the third face I had seen turn green that afternoon.

I said, “Hello, Charlie. How’d your story go over?”

Before he could answer, Lieutenant Wynn exploded, “Where have you been, Sergeant? What do you mean leaving a suspect unattended in the squadroom and wandering off for hours?”

“I guess it went over,” I said to Kossack.

“I’m speaking to you, Sergeant!” Wynn yelled. “And where’s your necktie?”

I guess it was the last question that did it. Suddenly I was fed to the eyebrows with Robert Wynn. I turned to face him and I felt my nostrils flare. But before I could open my mouth, the captain said, “Rudowski!”

When I glanced at him, he shook his head. “Don’t say it. What happened?”

I looked back at Wynn and saw his face had smoothed. Now that Spangler had taken over the inquisition, he wouldn’t dream of intruding with any more questions of his own.

My anger died. “I accidentally walked into the hideout of the pair that pulled the Whittington payroll robbery,” I said. “Kossack here and our old friend Cas Kuzniki. They decided to take me for a ride, but first they had to rig an alibi for Kossack because Lieutenant Wynn knew I was moving in to pick Kossack up. So they thought up the bright idea of having him drive my car down here and letting a squadroom full of dumb cops be his alibi.”

Everyone stared down at Kossack. If he had been a turtle, his head would have disappeared.

Chapter 20

It took me some time to relate the full story of what had happened.

When I had finished, Carl Lincoln glowered down at Kossack. “This guy almost had us snowed. We paged you all over the damn building; we looked for your car on the lot; when we found it we made a room-to-room search of the building. We finally did smell a rat, and Hank and I went over to search that apartment. There was nothing there, so we came back, and we’ve been working him over ever since.”

“What would you have done if I’d never showed up?” I asked curiously.

Maurice Spangler said, “I’d been thinking about that. He was beginning to yell for a lawyer. After twenty-four hours we would have had to let him call one, and that would have been that. We’d have to release him on a writ of habeas corpus, because we certainly didn’t have enough to drag him before a judge for a preliminary hearing. I’m afraid it would have been another Judge Crater mystery.”

If there hadn’t been a tire iron in the truck for me to sit on, the fantastic plan would have worked, I thought. I said, “Ask him any questions about Benny Polacek?”

Carl said, “Yeah. He admits driving Benny the night we picked him up, but claims he didn’t know Benny was pushing. Also he claims he knows nothing about his death.”

Lieutenant Wynn said, “Maybe we can get a little more about his relationship with Polacek from his girl after Robbery is through with her.”

I had an idea that getting anything out of Connie would be equivalent to getting the combination of his vault from Jack Benny, but I had stopped expressing opinions to Wynn.

I said, “Robbery will want this character, too. Maybe they’ll trade us for Connie for a while.” I turned to Kossack. “Now that you’re cooked on the Whittington Steel killing anyway, do you have any more to say about Benny Polacek?”

He merely tightened his lips and shook his head.

We got nothing at all from the man. Eventually we took him over to Robbery Division and swapped him for his blonde girl friend. Under questioning she had finally admitted that her full name was Corinne Quantrail and had given a rooming-house address as her place of residence. Robbery had found a previous record on her for harboring criminals, possession of stolen money, and, once, for acting as a lookout during an armed robbery. She had twice served one-year sentences in the women’s prison.

Corinne Quantrail wasn’t admitting anything aside from her name and address, though. She denied knowing Benny Polacek or ever hearing Kossack speak of him. After a half-hour of nothing we gave up and took her back to Robbery Division.

Meanwhile, I had been brought up to date on the activities of the other members of our joint Homicide-Narcotics team. Carter and Lincoln had been unable to locate Harry Grimaldi, but they had a lead on an ex-girl friend who might know his current address. The girl friend was out of town, but was due back on an eight A.M. train tomorrow. Carter and Lincoln planned to meet her at Union Station when she got off the train.

What Wynn had accomplished was a little hazy to me. I gathered he had revisited Charles Kossack’s ex-landlady, getting no more from her than Hank Carter had the previous night. Otherwise he seemed to have done nothing all day but question Kossack and send people scurrying around the building looking for me.

By now it was five-thirty P.M., a half-hour past normal quitting time. Figuring I had put in a full day, I didn’t bother to ask Lieutenant Wynn if he expected us to work overtime. I just logged out. Ordinarily he liked to tell his minions they could go home, like a colonel dismissing his troops, but this time he made no objection. Maybe, for once, he thought I’d put in a full enough day.

Before leaving the squadroom, I phoned my apartment. April answered instantly.

“Sorry I couldn’t phone you at four,” I said. “I was tied up. I’m leaving for home right now.”

“I’ll have dinner ready when you get here, honey,” she said. “Who’s Beverly?”

“Huh?” I said. “What about her?”

“She phoned ten minutes after you left this morning. I didn’t want to get you in trouble, in case she’s something important in your life, so I told her I was the cleaning maid.”

Now here was an understanding woman, I thought. “Thanks,” I said sincerely. “What did she want?”

“She said she was worried that you might oversleep. Why would she think you’d oversleep, honey? She couldn’t have known how late you were up.”

There was no way I could explain that, for I doubted that April would be that understanding. I said, “Don’t worry about it, kitten. See you in about twenty minutes.”

I got home at ten to six. April said dinner would be ready at a quarter after, which gave me time for a quick shower and a cocktail before we sat down.

As we sat in the front room sipping martinis, April said, “Tell me something about your work, honey. I don’t suppose it’s anything like the cops on television, is it? I mean, instead of all that excitement, it’s probably pretty dull and routine, isn’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Today, for instance, I cracked a payroll robbery, got taken for a ride in the process, and escaped from my captors by killing one of them.”

She grinned at me. “You certainly have a dry sense of humor.”

“I’m a card,” I admitted, deciding to let her read about it in the newspapers.

It was a more conventional dinner than breakfast had been. April wore her dress. It wasn’t a particularly good dinner, though. I don’t know what I expected. I suppose it was a little unreasonable of me to expect a chorus girl who lived in a furnished room to be an accomplished chef. But I had hoped for more than a couple of warmed-up TV dinners.

That’s what we had. I was gentlemanly about it and complimented her on her cooking. I even offered to repay what she had spent, but she said the treat was on her.

The dessert was nice, though. The dessert was April. And by then I had recovered enough from the previous night to enjoy it.

At eight-thirty I dropped her off in front of the Palace.

“Are you going to pick me up again at two, honey?” she asked.

“Not tonight,” I said. “Every so often I have to sleep. Maybe tomorrow night.”

“All right,” she said agreeably. “I’ll be here whenever you’re ready.”

Again I thought that she was a very understanding woman. Maybe she was a lousy cook, but at least she wasn’t demanding.

When I walked into my apartment at nine o’clock, the phone was ringing. Picking it up, I said, “Hello.”

“I was just about to hang up,” Beverly Arden’s voice said. “I thought maybe you were out for the evening.”

“Not tonight,” I said. “I plan to be in bed in five minutes.”

“Umm,” she said. “If you leave your door unlocked, maybe a little surprise will slip in with you later on.”

“You’d get a surprise, too,” I said. “You wouldn’t be able to wake me up. I plan to sleep straight on through without moving until seven in the morning.”

After a moment of silence, she said, “That sounds like you don’t want me to drop by.”

“Suit yourself,” I told her. “But if you wake me up, I’ll kick you out of bed. I’m falling on my face.”

“What a grumpy old man you are,” she said, and hung up.

I fell into bed and slept for ten hours.

The next day was Sunday, but that doesn’t mean anything to a cop. Ordinarily Sunday is Carl’s and my day off, but when you’re hot on a case, you work straight on through seven days a week. I checked into the squadroom at eight-thirty.

Lieutenant Wynn was already there, and Carter and Lincoln came in together about fifteen minutes later.

As they logged in, Lieutenant Wynn asked Carter, “You meet that woman at the train, Sergeant?”

“Yes, sir,” Carter said. “She says she thinks Harry Grimaldi is living in a rooming house down on Kosciuszko Street.” Taking a notebook from his pocket, he consulted it. “Fourteen twenty-two Kosciuszko. She claims she isn’t his girl friend any more, but says he was living there a couple of weeks ago.”

Carl Lincoln said, “She also says he’s living there under the name of Harry Gamble, not Grimaldi.”

Wynn said, “Rudowski and I will move in on him. I have something else for you and Carter, Corporal.”

“Yes, sir,” Carl said. “What’s that?”

“As I mentioned yesterday, we didn’t hit any of the neighbors along the block where Benny Polacek lived. You and Sergeant Carter can spend the day checking with everyone in the area. It’ll take all day, because the block’s all apartment buildings, both sides of the street, and there must be a hundred or more families in all. Maybe you’ll turn up somebody who saw a green Cadillac driving around the neighborhood that night.”

“A green Cadillac?” Carl asked.

“That’s what Goodie White drives.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t have to confine yourself to that single question, of course. Anything at all out of the way that happened along the block that night might be of value.”

Carl gave him a peculiar look. He wasn’t used to having assignments explained to him as though he were a slightly retarded rookie.

“Yes, sir,” he said dryly. “We’ll ask all the right questions.”

Wynn glanced at him sharply, suspecting a touch of insubordination. But Carl’s face was entirely guileless. Wynn decided to skip it.

This was the second day in a row that Hank Carter had drawn Lincoln as his partner instead of having to work with the lieutenant. He looked nearly happy as he and Carl walked out of the squadroom together.

“Let’s go net this Grimaldi man,” Wynn said to me.

On the way we stopped by Robbery Division to find how they had made out with Charlie Kossack and Connie Quantrail. Charlie had broken and had signed a full confession, admitting his part in the payroll robbery and his shooting of the guard. He had also admitted that his dealing with Benny Polacek had been in an attempt to talk the man into acting as his partner in a series of supermarket holdups. He insisted he knew nothing about Polacek’s death. He claimed that two days after Polacek’s arrest he had accidentally run into Casmir Kuzniki, whom he’d known from years back, and that the bank robber had recruited him for the payroll robbery. Thereafter he had no interest in Polacek, and had neither seen the man nor talked to him on the phone.

Robbery had gotten nothing out of Connie, who seemed to be made of harder stuff than her boy friend. Even after Kossack’s statement was read to her, she refused to admit having any part in the robbery.

Chapter 21

Under ordinary circumstances we would have picked up a search warrant before visiting Harry Grimaldi, alias Harry Gamble. But the county courthouse was closed on Sunday, and getting a warrant would have involved routing some judge out of church or off a golf course. Wynn decided to skip it.

The rooming house at 1422 Kosciuszko Street was a gray frame three-story building. A middle-aged fat woman with a sprinkling of fine black hairs across her upper lip came to the door and gazed at us through the screen.

Wynn flashed his badge and said, “Police officers, lady. I’m Lieutenant Wynn, and this is Sergeant Rudowski.”

“Oh, my!” she said. “I knew when he didn’t come home all night, he was in jail again.”

“Beg pardon?”

“He’s not a bad man, officer. He just gets too much to drink and forgets where he lives. I’ll come right down and bail him out.”

“What are you talking about?” Wynn asked.

“My husband. Ain’t he in jail?”

“If he is, we don’t know about it, lady. We’re looking for a man who goes under the name of Harry Gamble.”

Her face started to redden. “He ain’t in jail? Then he’s still drinking in some bar, letting me worry my head off.

I’ll lay a rolling pin right between his horns when he staggers in.”

Wynn said, a trifle loudly, “Do you have a tenant named Harry Gamble?”

“Sure. He’s another spends most of his time in barrooms. I got a houseful of drunks, and my husband’s the biggest drunk of the lot. Come on in.”

She pushed open the screen door and we stepped inside.

“Gamble home?” Wynn asked.

“He’s always home mornings,” she said. “There ain’t a bum in this house gets up before noon. Second floor, end of the hall to the left of the stairs. You’ll see a three on the door.”

“Give me your pass key,” the lieutenant said.

The woman felt in an apron pocket, produced a key, and handed it to him. Without a word he started up the stairs. I followed.

At room number three Wynn quietly tried the knob. The door was locked. Inserting the key, he turned it and smashed the door back against the wall. We were both inside before the man in bed could even sit up.

He was a long, thin man with a hook-nosed face and lank black hair. When he sat erect and the sheet fell to his waist, I saw that he had been sleeping in his underwear.

He said, “Who the hell are you guys?”

I pushed the door shut. Walking over to the bed, Wynn showed his badge. “Police officers, buster. You Harry Grimaldi?”

The man’s eyes narrowed. “My name’s Gamble.”

“Alias Harry the Gambler, real name Harry Grimaldi,” Wynn said. “We can drag you downtown and check your fingerprints if we have to.”

The man in the bed shrugged. “O.K. So I’m Harry Grimaldi. There’s no law against changing your name.”

“On your feet,” Wynn ordered.

Flinging back the sheet, Grimaldi swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood erect. He was even taller than he looked sitting down — at least six feet three. He didn’t act in the least concerned.

Walking over to him, I looked at his arms and realized why he was so unruffled. The insides of his forearms were pocked with needle marks.

“Stick out your right hand, palm up,” I said.

After staring at me for a moment, he indifferently held out his hand. Taking the tip of his middle finger between my thumb and forefinger, I squeezed it hard, then released it. The white mark left by the blood being forced from the tip of the finger didn’t disappear instantly. It took several seconds for normal color to return.

“What are you doing?” Wynn asked.

“Making some tests,” I said.

Taking my pencil flashlight from my pocket, I shone it into Grimaldi’s eyes. When he started to turn his head away, I backhanded him across the mouth.

“Hold still or you’ll find your head rolling under the bed,” I told him.

He glared at me, but he didn’t try to avoid the light again. His pupils didn’t react to it. They should have contracted to pinpoints with the beam directly on them. Instead, they stayed exactly as they were.

Dropping the flashlight back in my pocket, I said to Wynn, “When you see enough junkies, you get so you can diagnose their condition better than a doctor can.

This one had a pop about four hours ago, probably just before he fell in bed. He must have been out all night, because that would make it about six A.M.”

“You’re nuts,” Grimaldi said. “I never use the stuff.”

“You want to make it easy and tell us where it is?” Wynn asked. “Or do we have to tear the room apart?”

“You better have a warrant before you start tearing anything apart,” Grimaldi said belligerently.

“We have the landlady’s permission,” Wynn said, not exactly truthfully. “She owns the premises. Come up with an answer. Where is it?”

“Earn your money, copper,” the man said in a sullen tone.

So we tore the room apart. We didn’t bother to use the finesse I had used on the Arden apartment. When we finished, you could tell this room had been searched, because we upended all the bureau drawers on the floor.

We didn’t have any trouble finding the rig. The tin box containing a hypodermic syringe, spoon, and alcohol lamp was in the top drawer of his dresser. His horse supply was tougher.

I was the one who finally found it. It was taped to the inside of the front lip of the washbowl in a corner of the room. It was an ordinary legal-size envelope containing forty-eight folded papers such as sleeping powders used to come in. Each one contained a single pop of cut heroin which would have retailed at the going price of three dollars and fifty cents a pop.

Grimaldi didn’t even look very concerned when we found the cache. It wasn’t cut horse he was riding on, but a full-strength pop. Apparently he treated himself better than he did his clients. He was still riding high enough not to care about much of anything at the moment.

But that would change when he had been sitting cold in a cell for a while.

“Get your clothes on,” Lieutenant Wynn ordered him. “We’re taking a ride.”

Back at headquarters we booked Grimaldi at the felony desk and had him stuck in a cell. There wasn’t any point in trying to question him at the moment, because he was too high. By the next morning, when he’d gone twenty-four hours without a pop and the withdrawal pains started, he’d be in a more cooperative mood.

It was noon before we finished booking the man, marking the evidence, and bringing the case record up to date. We broke for lunch in the headquarters cafeteria.

After lunch Wynn decided we might as well help Carter and Lincoln complete their chore. Neither had phoned in, so we drove over to Clarkson Boulevard, parked, and waited. After a time we saw Carl Lincoln come from an apartment building up the street and start for the next house.

We both got out of the car, and I waved him over.

“Anything, Corporal?” Wynn asked as Carl neared us.

“Not yet, sir. Carter hadn’t turned up anything either, at the time we broke for lunch. I haven’t talked to him since. He’s working the other side of the street. I’d judge we’ve covered about half the people.”

“Which end of the block did you start from?”

Carl pointed to the north end.

“Then Rudowski and I will start at the south end and work toward you and Carter. Let’s go, Rudowski.”

The lieutenant took the west side of the street and I took the east, which was the side opposite from where Benny Polacek had lived. It was dull work. The whole block was apartment houses, all at least three stories high and some towering to six. You simply walked along hallways, from one door to another, punching bells, showing your badge, and asking questions.

I learned about a lot of things that had happened along the street the night Benny Polacek died. The tough O’Leary kid, whom I gathered was eight years old, had dropped a paper bag full of water from his parents’ fifth-floor apartment and just missed an old lady. Izzy Swartz, who lived on the second floor of the house directly across the street from Benny’s, had come home at eight smelling of whisky and was locked out of the house by his mother. The Callagees, just above the Swartzes, had a fight at nine P.M. Nearly everywhere I asked, something of similar interest had happened.

But no one had seen any strangers enter the building at 427 Clarkson Boulevard that evening, and no one had noticed a green Cadillac driving around the neighborhood.

I finally did run into someone with a small item of information. An old maid on the fourth floor of the building across from Benny’s said that some time around ten or ten-thirty — she wasn’t sure of the time, except she thought it must have been at least ten — she had glanced out the window to see a young man come from 427 Clarkson, walk to the curb, and glance up and down the street. There was a street light in front of the building, so she had seen him clearly. From her description, it could have been Dr. Norman Arden.

It didn’t strike me as a very important clue. If it had been Arden, I guessed it probably had been after he phoned the police, and that probably he had merely gone out to see if they were in sight yet.

“How long did he stand there?” I asked the woman.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just looked out for a minute, then went about my business. He was still there when I left the window.”

Hank Carter and I finished our side of the street at a quarter of five. Wynn and Lincoln had already finished their side and were waiting for us under the shade of a tree near the center of the block.

When we crossed to them, Wynn said, “We both drew total blanks. Either of you get anything?”

Hank Carter said, “I didn’t, sir.”

“I got something that doesn’t seem very important,” I said. “A woman on the fourth floor across the street glanced out around ten or ten-thirty that night. She saw somebody answering Doc Arden’s description come out of the building, go down to the curb, and look up and down the street. If it was Arden, he had probably already called the cops and was looking for them.”

Wynn frowned. “You had a man posted out front that night. How come he didn’t mention this?”

I had forgotten Howard Graves, the stakeout who left his post at just the wrong time.

I said, “I don’t know, sir. If it was Doc Arden, and he was just waiting for the police to arrive, Graves probably figured it wasn’t important.”

“It probably isn’t, but he should have mentioned it to you. We may as well ask Arden about it. And since we’re right here, we may as well do it now. Carter, you and Lincoln can return to headquarters and log out. Rudowski and I can handle this.”

As Lincoln and Carter moved toward the car they had brought, Wynn and I started toward the building where Beverly and Norman Arden lived. We didn’t have to go in, because Norman Arden pulled up in a car just as we got there. Beverly was with him.

Both got out of the car. Beverly gave me a bright smile and said, “Hello, Matt. You haven’t met my brother, have you?”

“I saw him the night of the murder,” I said. “We weren’t introduced.” I held out my hand. “How are you, Doctor?”

Shaking my hand, he said cordially, “So you’re the Matt Rudd Beverly keeps talking about. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, because I hardly hear of anything else.”

“Be quiet, Norman,” Beverly said with a frown. “I didn’t want him to know I’m after him.”

Then she looked curiously at Robert Wynn, and I realized she had never met the lieutenant. The night of the murder her brother hadn’t allowed Wynn to see her, and I had done the subsequent interviewing.

“This is Lieutenant Wynn, Beverly,” I said. “Miss Beverly Arden, Lieutenant.”

They exchanged polite greetings, then the lieutenant said, “We’ve been checking the neighbors along the street, Doctor. One says that about ten or ten-thirty the night of the shooting, you came outside and looked up and down the street. Is that right?”

“Yes, it is,” Arden admitted easily. “It must have been about twenty after ten. I had called the police about ten minutes before, and I thought they ought to be arriving. I went out front to wait and direct them to the proper apartment. I was still there when the patrol car arrived. You could have learned that from your own men.”

Wynn flushed slightly. “O.K., Doctor. Just checking it out. Let’s go, Sergeant.”

Beverly said, “How late do you work today, Matt?”

“We’re going in to log out now.”

“Oh. Do you have any plans for this evening?”

I shook my head. “Not a single plan.”

“Then why don’t you come find out what a nice cook I am?” She turned to Wynn. “You’re welcome to come too, Lieutenant.”

“Thanks,” he said politely. “But my wife’s expecting me home.”

“What time?” I asked.

“Can you make it by six-thirty?”

“I’ll be here,” I said.

I drove the F car back to headquarters, and we logged out at five-ten. I was home by five-thirty. I took a shower, changed clothes, and made it back to the Ardens’ by six-thirty on the nose.

Chapter 22

Apparently it was only when she received men at home alone, or when she visited their apartments in the middle of the night, that Beverly dispensed with underclothing. Tonight, probably because her brother was present, she was wearing a brassiere. It was obvious. She was dressed very simply in a long-sleeved tan blouse and a cotton skirt of the same color.

When she opened the door to my ring she said breathlessly, “Matt, why didn’t you mention that you’d captured those payroll robbers?”

“I assumed you knew about it,” I said. “It was in the morning paper.”

“We just got around to reading the paper. We’ve been driving in the country all day.”

By then I was inside, and she had closed the door. Norman Arden came from the direction of the kitchen with a tray containing three martinis.

“The modest hero,” he said. “Now Bev has really flipped.” He handed me a martini and another to his sister.

Beverly wanted me to repeat the whole story, though it had all been in the paper. I explained that there was nothing to add to the news account. This wasn’t wholly because of modesty. The paper had made it sound like a brilliant piece of police work, and I hated to disillusion her by letting it be known that I had merely accidentally blundered into the bandits’ hideout.

She accepted it as modesty, though. She gazed at me starry-eyed over the top of her martini glass.

Beverly proved to be a much better cook than April. We had broiled lamb chops, and the meal was excellent. Afterward Norman and I sipped brandy in the front room while Beverly did the dishes.

“Making any progress on our neighbor’s shooting?” Arden asked.

“Not much,” I said. “It’s still pretty much up in the air.”

“I suppose, with a man such as that, the suspects are practically limitless. Do you think it was an underworld killing?”

I shrugged. “The percentages are that it was. It would help if we could locate someone who saw the killer enter or leave the building. We’ve talked to everyone along the street, but the only person who saw anything at all was the woman who happened to glance out her window when you were waiting for the police.”

“The killer probably used the back door,” Arden said. “There’s a parking lot back there, you know.”

“Yeah,” I said glumly. “I looked at it. Beyond the parking lot is an alley, and beyond that the backs of a row of stores, all closed at that time of night. There aren’t any neighbors to question in that direction.”

“Well, here’s luck in your investigation,” he said, raising his glass. Then he made a wry face and said, “Cancel that. I’m not sure I care about your catching the man. My opinion of our ex-neighbor has dropped since I learned he was a dope peddler. It bothers me a little that I used to actually like the man.”

“Your sister made a similar remark,” I said. “We didn’t like him much either, but you can’t let people take the law into their own hands. We’ll continue to go after the killer as hot and heavy as though he had killed some respectable gray-haired old lady.”

The young doctor nodded. “One of our democratic principles is equal protection for all. I suppose if you started to make exceptions, you would end up with anarchy.”

It was about seven-thirty when Beverly rejoined us. When her brother asked if she would like a little brandy, she said, “It’s too nice a night to sit around here. I thought maybe I could talk Matt into taking me for a ride.”

I could hardly refuse. Politely I asked if Norman would like to come along, and he as politely declined. Three minutes later I was helping Beverly into my car.

As I slid under the wheel, I asked, “Where would you like to go?”

“Why, to your place,” she said in a voice indicating surprise at the question.

So we went to my place.

When I pushed the key into the lock of my apartment door, the door opened without my turning it.

Beverly raised her eyebrows. “Do you often leave your door unlocked?”

“The spring lock doesn’t always catch,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to get it fixed for a couple of years. I guess I’ll have to soon, because it’s getting worse. The door’s unlocked half the time.”

As I closed the door behind us, the phone began to ring. I walked into the bedroom to answer, Beverly following me as far as the bedroom door.

When I said, “Hello,” April French’s voice said, “Hi, honey. Just get home?”

I wasn’t pleased to hear from her, because I don’t like phoning women. Beverly had a habit of phoning at odd hours, and even of showing up unexpectedly. If I was going to have two women phoning, eventually I was going to find myself in the middle of a cat fight.

“Yeah,” I said a trifle shortly.

Apparently she was not only an understanding woman, but a perceptive one, for she instantly got the point from that one short word.

“I don’t make a habit of phoning men,” she said quickly. “I just called because of that story in the paper. I thought you were kidding last night.”

Her tone of near apology made me a little ashamed of my shortness. I said in a friendlier tone, “I never kid. I’m a very serious fellow.”

My change of tone seemed to encourage her. “I’m just getting ready to go to work. Were you planning to pick me up at closing time?”

I glanced at Beverly in the doorway. It seemed unlikely that I would be in the mood for another woman at two A.M.

“I don’t think so, tonight,” I said.

“All right, honey,” she said cheerfully. “Whenever you’re ready, I’ll be there. Except tomorrow night, of course. There’s no show on Mondays, so you’ll find me at home.”

“O.K.,” I said. “Maybe I’ll drop by.”

When I hung up, Beverly asked, “The cleaning maid?”

I merely looked at her. With a little smile she moved across to the bathroom, disappeared inside, and pulled the door closed.

By now I was enough used to her to know what to expect. I undressed and lay on the bed.

I had expected correctly. When the bathroom door reopened five minutes later, she wore nothing but the tan blouse, and that hung wide open. She stood looking at me with a curious glitter in her eyes for a few moments, her body erect and her back arched to make her firm breasts jut outward. Then she glided across to the bed and threw herself into my arms.

I took her home at midnight, which was earlier than she had left last time. But then we had gotten an earlier start than last time.

Monday morning it seemed apparent that Lieutenant Wynn had run out of ideas. The area that could be covered in this particular investigation was too limited to keep four officers busy, at least until we were able to get some information out of Harry Grimaldi which might give us something to work on. But Wynn was the type of officer who couldn’t stand to see subordinates sitting around idle, even when there was nothing for them to do. He could have given Lincoln and Carter the day off, inasmuch as they had both worked Sunday and had a day coming. Instead, he dreamed up a useless task for them.

He ordered them to shadow Goodie White.

Since the city council was meeting that morning, this struck me as pretty silly. You could almost bank on it that White would spend the morning in the council room, and probably spend the rest of the day at his bowling alley. But, as an underling, I had learned my lesson about trying to give the lieutenant advice. I kept my mouth shut.

Carter and Lincoln trooped off to waste the day.

While the lieutenant was reporting our progress to Captain Spangler, I went down to the basement to the felony section to see if our prisoner was ripe to talk yet.

Checking my gun and penknife at the desk, I waited for the desk sergeant to buzz open the first door to the cell blocks, then waited again until he buzzed open the second. Through the plexiglass walls of the first row of cells, I could see Grimaldi in the second bank.

“I see the guy I want,” I said to the inside guard as he approached me. “I won’t need you.”

Stopping in front of Harry Grimaldi’s cell, I looked in at him. He gazed back at me sullenly. He was seated on the drop-down bunk, his bony shoulders hunched and his hands working together between his knees. His eyes were red and watery, and his shoulders occasionally twitched.

“How you feeling?” I asked.

“I’m sick,” he said. “I need medical attention. I want a transfer to the prison ward.” He meant the prison ward at the City Hospital.

“Sure,” I said. “We’re going to move you over there, where the doctors can ease the withdrawal pains by giving you a little morphine now and then.”

He looked up hopefully. “Now?”

“As soon as you tell us who your supplier is.”

He tried to look puzzled. “Supplier of what?”

“I guess you’re not ready to talk yet,” I said. “See you again about noon.”

“Wait!” he called as I started to walk away. “You got to transfer me to the prison ward. I’m real sick.”

“You’ll get sicker,” I informed him cheerfully, and continued on my way.

He suddenly went into a fit of sneezing.

I stopped to talk to the inside guard.

“Grimaldi may get noisy after a while,” I said. “As a matter of fact, he may fracture your eardrums screaming. Don’t pay any attention to him, and above all, don’t bring in a doctor. I’ll be back about noon.”

“Sure, Sarge,” he said. “I’ve seen junkies before. I won’t get excited.”

When I got back upstairs, Wynn testily asked where I’d been.

“I looked in at Grimaldi for a minute, sir. He’s not quite ripe yet. By noon he’ll be begging to tell us everything we want to know.”

For once he didn’t object to my expression of an opinion, seeming to realize that in this particular field I was the expert and he the novice.

“I suppose you know more about dealing with addicts than I do,” he said begrudgingly. “You deal with them all the time.”

The lieutenant decided to spend the rest of the morning having me go over the entire case with him to see if we had missed any angles. We both knew he was only killing time until noon, but I was too discreet to mention it, and he was too G.I. to admit it. At a quarter of twelve he decided it was time for lunch. We went down to the basement together at a quarter after.

We could hear Grimaldi the moment we approached the door to the booking room. An eerie, long-drawn-out scream of pain rose to crescendo, then gradually faded off.

The booking sergeant was glad to see us. “You better get what you want out of that guy fast and let us ship him over to City Hospital,” he said in a fervent tone. “He’s been sounding off like that every five minutes for the last half-hour. Much more, and we’ll all be as nuts as he is.”

Checking our weapons, we went inside to see the prisoner. The other prisoners gazed at us silently as we walked along the corridor, their expressions subdued. A screamer does that. You never hear another sound from any other cell while he’s putting on his performance.

The inside guard also looked relieved when we passed him.

“See how fast you can make it, huh, Sarge?” he suggested.

Chapter 23

Harry Grimaldi lay flat on his back, his hands gripping the edges of the bunk on either side. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut, and his chest was heaving. Every muscle in his body seemed to be twitching, and he was drenched with sweat.

“Hello, Harry,” I said.

His eyes popped open. He had difficulty focusing them because they were swimming with water.

“Get me out of here,” he gasped. “You got to get me to the prison ward.”

“Sure,” I said soothingly. “Ready to talk now?”

He went into a fit of sneezing which broke off abruptly as his whole body tensed. His hands gripped the edges of the bunk until the knuckles showed white, and his face contorted with agony.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God!” he moaned.

Because we were watching, he managed by a superhuman effort to hold back the scream. Finally the spasm passed.

“What do you want to know?” he whispered.

“You’ve been pushing horse, haven’t you, Harry?”

“Sure, I’ve been pushing!” he almost yelled. “How the hell else can you feed a habit this big? The sonovabitch got me hooked.”

“Who’s that, Harry?”

“Benny Polacek!” he yelled. “What a smooth talker that guy was. Just for kicks, he said. It can’t hurt you if you keep it under control. But you notice the sonovabitch never touched it himself. I’m glad the bastard’s dead.”

“Who made him that way, Harry?”

“How do I know? I wasn’t there.” He started to sob. “Oh God, oh God, oh God! Please get me out of here.”

“In a minute,” I said. “Where’d you get your supply, Harry? From Benny himself?”

His head moved back and forth jerkily. “He introduced me to his supplier. He got a bonus for that.”

“Who’s the supplier?”

He looked up at me beseechingly. “You want me killed?”

“I guess he’s not ready yet, Lieutenant,” I said to Wynn. “We’ll give him another hour.” I started to walk away.

“Wait!” Grimaldi yelled.

I turned back to look at him. His body was shaking again.

“Will you transfer me to the prison ward right away if I tell you?” he asked in a strained voice.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a promise.”

Taking a deep breath, he whispered, “Carr.”

“Carr?” I repeated in surprise.

“Jack Carr, out at the White Bowl. He’s got a corner on the wholesale end. He deals direct with the syndicate.”

Wynn and I looked at each other. The lieutenant looked puzzled. “He trying to cover for Goodie White?” he asked me.

I gave my head a slow shake. “In his condition, he’s interested in only one thing: getting transferred to the prison ward at City Hospital. He’s telling the truth.”

Wynn stared through the bars at the man, then back at me. He was puzzled enough to ask my opinion. “How do you figure it, Sergeant?”

I was thinking back to the day the district attorney made his deal with Benny Polacek. I said, “Something just fell into place.”

“What?”

“Before Benny Polacek would agree to his deal with Dollinger, he insisted on getting a legal opinion from some reputable lawyer. He picked Martin Bonner, which surprised us all, because he’s about as reputable as they come. I can see now that he just picked a lawyer’s name out of the air.”

Wynn merely gave me an inquiring look.

I said, “Dollinger let him to talk to Bonner from a pay phone. As a matter of fact, the D.A. dialed the number and introduced Benny to Bonner over the phone. Then we all backed off so that Benny could converse with his lawyer privately. In the middle of the conversation they were cut off. Or at least Benny pretended they were cut off. Actually he’d finished his conversation with Bonner. Like gullible little marks, we gave him another dime to call Bonner back. Only he called Jack Carr instead, and got instructions on what to say.”

It took a moment for it to sink in. Then Wynn said slowly, “I’ll be damned. Carr sure must be able to think fast on his feet. I guess Goodie White was telling the truth after all. His loyal assistant tried to frame him.”

I looked back at the prisoner. “Where do you pick the stuff up, Harry? Right at the bowling alley?”

His head gave a jerky nod. “He keeps it somewhere under the showcase where the bowling balls are. Nobody notices. They just think we’re buying some kind of bowling equipment.”

His body tensed again, and suddenly he started to scream.

Turning away from the cell, we walked over to where the guard stood.

“You can call an ambulance now and get him over to City Hospital,” I said.

The guard shuddered a little. “I’ve seen the third degree before,” he said. “But this is rougher than a rubber hose ever was. How do you sleep nights, Sarge?”

The guard was only a patrolman, and it was indicative of the way Harry Grimaldi had affected Wynn that the lieutenant didn’t blast him for speaking like that to a sergeant. Wynn wanted nothing but to get out of there. He walked on without a word, and I followed.

Upstairs we checked out an F car and headed for the White Bowl. En route Wynn said, “I don’t think Captain Spangler’s instructions about letting you do the talking to Goodie White apply any more, Sergeant. The time for tact is over. I’ll handle things when we get there.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

When we parked on the lot at the bowling alley, we spotted Lincoln and Carter seated in another F car a few slots away. We walked over to them.

“He’s inside, Lieutenant,” Carl said. “There’s no point going in there, because he knows both of us by sight.”

“Stand by,” Wynn ordered.

The lieutenant and I walked on to the main entrance and inside. Jack Carr was again behind the lane-reservation desk.

“Back again, gentlemen?” he said with a grin.

Wynn asked coldly, “Where’s Mr. White?”

“In the bar, Lieutenant.”

“Go get him,” Wynn said to me.

Walking over to the entrance to the cocktail lounge, I glanced in and saw Goodman White seated at the bar. When he looked my way, I crooked a finger at him. Coming over, he gave me an inquiring look.

“Lieutenant Wynn wants to see you,” I said.

Shrugging, White accompanied me over to the desk. “Afternoon, Lieutenant,” he said pleasantly.

Wynn merely nodded. Turning to Carr, he said, “We’ve had Harry Grimaldi, alias Harry Gamble, in a cell in the felony section since yesterday morning, Carr. He went thirty hours without a pop before he finally broke. In your business you must have seen lots of guys carrying monkeys. They’ll do anything for a pop. They’ll confess their most intimate secrets.”

A wary expression grew in Jack Carr’s eyes. Goodie White asked, “Who’s Harry Grimaldi?”

“One of your trusted employee’s pushers,” Wynn said frigidly, without taking his eyes from Carr’s face. “Your assistant is the wholesale distributor of heroin in this town, Mr. White. He operates right from behind this desk. He’s been passing the stuff to pushers right under your nose.”

Carr said in a high voice, “You must be nuts, Lieutenant.”

Wynn said, “You were pretty cute. When the district attorney started to squeeze Benny Polacek, Benny figured a way to phone you for instructions without Dollinger knowing who he was talking to. And you threw a real curve. You told him to confess that his supplier was Goodman White and agree to set him up. Then, after Polacek was released from jail, you had him phone White and give him that nonsense about needing five left-handed bowling gloves. Probably White would have told him to dunk his head if you hadn’t advised him that Benny was a good customer and suggested White should do him the favor. The gloves were never ordered, of course. When your boss told you to put in the order, you merely waited a few days, then told him they had come in. He phoned Polacek, and Polacek told him he’d be in for them at seven o’clock in the evening two days later. If he had showed, White would have handed over the package you furnished him, thinking it contained the gloves. After the pictures were taken and the cops closed in, it would have turned out to be horse instead of bowling gloves.”

Goodie White said in a voice as high as Carr’s, “Jack tried to frame me? Why?”

Wynn shrugged. “Probably for a mixture of reasons. Benny had been offered immunity for turning in his supplier. Carr was probably afraid that if he didn’t throw the cops somebody, Benny would turn him in. Then, too, he’s the second most powerful political figure in the ward. With you out of business, I suppose he figured he could step in as councilman. You would fire him from the bowling alley as soon as you realized what he had done to you, of course, but with the money he must have salted away from wholesaling dope, he could probably buy the place.”

White was staring at Carr, who merely stared back at him belligerently.

Wynn said, “You wouldn’t have had a chance of beating the rap, Mr. White. All your story about the left-handed bowling gloves would have gotten you would be a horse laugh. Carr and Benny would of course deny knowing anything about such an order, and there wouldn’t be any record of the order in your files. You could scream frame until you were blue, but you would have taken the rap.”

Jack Carr said tightly, “You’ve got a lot of proving to do, Lieutenant. So far I haven’t heard a thing but guesswork based on some junkie’s delirious babblings.”

I put in my bit. “Maybe a search beneath the display counter will turn up the evidence we need.”

“Got a search warrant?” Carr flared at me.

“I don’t think we need one.” I glanced at White. “This is your place, Goodie. You have any objection to us searching it?”

“I’ll even help you,” the plump councilman said.

Jack Carr attempted to bar our way when we started behind the counter. When Wynn irritably shoved him aside, he swung a haymaker which would have floored the lieutenant if it had connected. Fortunately Wynn jerked his head back so that it only grazed his jaw.

I was past the lieutenant then. Carr tried for me, too, but I caught the blow on my left palm and laid a hook on his chops that didn’t travel more than a foot. It set him on the seat of his pants clear beyond the other end of the counter.

His eyes were still crossed when I jerked him to his feet and snapped on the cuffs behind his back.

Beneath the showcase was a shelved cabinet in which score sheets were kept. We might have missed the hiding place if Harry Grimaldi hadn’t told us where to look. But when we found nothing but blank score sheets, we examined the cabinet carefully, finally measuring the depth of the shelves. They were six inches narrower than the top of the showcase.

It still required some probing before we discovered the sliding panel at the rear of the bottom shelf. The stuff was neatly packaged in small envelopes of about fifty grains of pure heroin each. There were twelve dozen envelopes, with a total retail value, after the stuff had been cut, of over twenty-five thousand dollars.

Chapter 24

When we uncovered the cache, Goodie White looked at his ex-assistant with an expression of revulsion on his face.

“You louse,” he said. “How many kids do you figure you’ve put on the skids?”

Jack Carr sullenly looked at his feet.

White turned to me. “I don’t understand all of this, Matt. Did he kill Benny Polacek too?”

“We’ll get the answer to that when we get him down to headquarters,” I said.

“If he did, why? Seems to me it loused up his original plan.”

I shrugged. “Maybe Benny backed out and was going to turn him in. Don’t worry, we’ll find out. I’ll let you know.”

When we led Carr outside, we told Lincoln and Carter to follow us back to headquarters.

Contrary to popular conception, more crimes are solved through police interrogation than through scientific methods or brilliant deduction. Once we get hold of a suspect whom we’re reasonably certain is guilty, it’s only a question of time before he breaks down under interrogation and admits everything. We don’t use rubber hoses. In fact, we don’t lay a hand on him. It isn’t necessary if you know the techniques of interrogation.

It was only two-thirty P.M. when we got back to headquarters. The four of us threw questions at Jack Carr until six o’clock without getting him to admit a thing. Wynn sent Carter and Lincoln to eat at six, while the two of us continued to pound at the man. At six-thirty Carter and Lincoln came back, and Wynn and I went to eat.

After that we took him in relays. By eight he was beginning to contradict himself and make a few minor admissions. By nine he had admitted being the local wholesale supplier of heroin. By ten we had the names of twelve pushers he had been supplying. At ten-thirty he gave us the name of the syndicate contact who brought him the stuff from out of town and told us where and when he was supposed to make the next contact with the man to receive a shipment.

But he steadfastly refused to admit that he knew a thing about Benny Polacek’s death. By eleven we began to believe him.

At eleven-thirty we had him sign a statement admitting all his misdeeds except murder. Then we took him down to the felony section, had him thrown in a cell, and quit for the night.

Since we had put in a fifteen-hour day, Lieutenant Wynn generously told us we didn’t have to report for duty until ten the next morning. I got home shortly after midnight.

The spring lock on my apartment door hadn’t caught again, as I discovered when I shoved in the key and the door opened from the pressure. Resolving to call my landlord about it the very next day, I closed the door from inside and pressed hard against it until I heard the bolt click home.

A lamp was burning in the front room, which surprised me, for I certainly hadn’t left it on that morning. Walking into the bedroom, I switched on the overhead light and discovered I had a visitor.

Beverly Arden lay sound asleep on the bed in her favorite bedtime wear: nothing but a long-sleeved blouse. This time it was a black one, unbuttoned and hanging open.

My first reaction was to be irked. It would be a fine situation if I had walked in with another woman. Then, gazing at the rhythmic rise and fall of her bare breasts, I began to forgive her. Despite a fifteen-hour day, I wasn’t particularly tired, for I had gotten in seven hours’ sleep the night before and ten hours the night before that. I decided it was kind of pleasant to find such a nice surprise waiting.

Hanging my suit coat in the closet, I went over to the bed and ran my eyes up and down her softly curved body. She was certainly well built, I thought. It was a shame she always insisted on retaining that one garment. I had the desire just once to see her completely nude.

On impulse I rolled her over on her stomach and, before she was awake enough to know what was going on, jerked the blouse down over her shoulders. Another quick jerk and it came off with the sleeves turned inside out.

Beverly swung around to a seated position, stared up at me in confusion, then realized she was stark naked and an expression of consternation crossed her face. Her arms went across her bosom to hug herself.

But not in time. I had already seen the tiny scars from countless needles on the insides of her forearms.

For a long time I gazed at her, and she stared back at me whitely. Finally I let out a long breath.

“No wonder you’re so impulsive,” I said heavily. “I should have known when you practically threw yourself at me the first time we met. Junkies don’t have any inhibitions.”

Jumping from the bed, she snatched up her blouse and tugged the sleeves right-side out. Slipping it on, she rapidly buttoned it to the throat, grabbed her skirt from the back of a chair, and stepped into it. Momentarily she sat on the bed to slip on high-heeled shoes. Then she jumped up again and headed for the door. All the time she hadn’t looked at me once.

Beating her to the door, I put my back against it.

“Not so fast, Beverly,” I said. “How long have you been on the stuff?”

“Is that any of your business?” she asked frigidly.

“I think so,” I said. “I’m investigating the murder of a pusher who was killed while you were present. It seems kind of significant that you turned out to be a junkie. You were one of Benny’s customers, weren’t you?”

“Suppose I was?” she flared. “I didn’t kill him. You think I’d cut off my own source of supply?”

I studied her consideringly. “That’s another thing. You don’t exhibit any of the symptoms of withdrawal. Where are you getting it since Benny died?”

“I’m not. I kicked the habit.”

I gave my head a slow shake. “Nobody kicks it that easy. Your brother’s been easing you over the hump, hasn’t he? He has access to all the narcotics he needs. Except heroin, of course. That’s illegal even in hospitals. What’s he been substituting to keep you from shaking apart? Morphine?”

For several minutes she stared at me without answering. Then she lowered her face to her hands and began to cry. Leading her over to a chair, I let her sit and cry herself out. Eventually, when she started to sniff, I handed her a handkerchief.

Wiping her eyes, she said in a small voice, “I don’t want to get Norman in trouble. He’s been wonderful. He just gives me enough to quiet my nerves, cutting it down all the time. He’s going to cure me.”

“Sure,” I said. “The mental hospitals are full of voluntary cures.”

It was true. There are cases of voluntary cure of drug addiction, I suppose, but the only former addicts I knew had kicked it by being locked up long enough to dry out completely. And often even they got right back on the dream wagon the minute they were pushed back into society.

“He is curing me,” she said with a touch of spirit. “I’ve already cut down a quarter of a grain a day in this short time.”

A quarter of a grain, and she thought she was making progress.

While she was crying, I had been thinking. And I was beginning to suspect what might have happened that night. Picking up the bedside phone, I dialed headquarters, asked for Communications, and issued some instructions to be relayed to the radio car cruising closest to 427 Clarkson Boulevard.

When I hung up, I said to Beverly, “Come on. I’m going to drive you home.”

“I have my own car,” she said.

“It’ll keep. I’ll have it brought to your apartment later.”

A squad car was parked in front of the building when we arrived. There was a storm drain right in front of the building, and its manhole cover was off. A uniformed policeman stood over the hole, directing a flashlight downward.

As we climbed from the car, the patrolman looked up. “You Sergeant Rudd?” he inquired.

“Uh-huh. Any luck?”

“I think my partner just found it. He’s coming up.”

A man’s head emerged from the hole, and a second policeman climbed out. He was shirtless, barefoot, and his trousers were rolled above his knees. He had a small, nickel-plated revolver in his hand.

While the man who had been down in the storm sewer went over to the squad car to dry his hands and feet on a handkerchief and get back into uniform, I examined the gun. It was a five-shot, hammerless Smith and Wesson thirty-two, probably at least fifty years old.

“This must have been in the family for some time,” I said to Beverly. “No wonder it wasn’t registered.”

“It belonged to my father,” she said dully.

I said, “Give me your car keys.”

Obediently she probed in her purse and brought them out. Handing them to the policeman, I described her car, told him where it was, and asked him to drive it to the lot behind the apartment building and leave the keys in the glove compartment.

Then I took Beverly inside. Norman was in bed. When I flicked on his bedroom light, he sat up and stared at us. Seeing Beverly’s expression, he gradually paled.

I said, “We just found the gun in the storm sewer out front, Doctor. You were almost lucky. If that woman across the street had kept looking out her window a few more seconds, she would have seen you ditch it.”

“You told?” he asked Beverly.

She shook her head miserably. “He guessed. He found out I was an addict.”

Norman Arden got up and started to dress, pulling his clothes on over his pajamas.

“Want to tell me about it?” I asked.

“Why not?” he said in a colorless voice. “I still don’t regret it. I’d kill him again. You would have too, if you had watched your sister on her knees begging for a hypo.”

“You walked in on them?”

“Sure. I knew what was the matter with Bev. I’d been watching her all evening. She had the hall door open, waiting for that creep to come home, jumping out of her skin — I thought she’d shake apart. When he finally stuck his key in his door, she shot across the hall so fast, she was just a blurred streak. At first I only meant to turn the man over to the police. I deliberately waited fifteen minutes, hoping to walk in and catch him in the act of giving her a shot. Then I meant to hold him at gunpoint and call the police. But it didn’t work out that way, because he didn’t have any heroin to give her.”

“Then why’d you shoot him?” I asked.

Momentarily he closed his eyes. “They were in the kitchen and he was making her coffee, trying to quiet her down. She was down on her knees begging for a shot and he was saying he didn’t have any because he was in trouble with the police and had gotten rid of it. Just as I reached the kitchen door, my sister made her last plea. She said if he would give her just one fix, she would not only pay him double, but he could have her.”

He opened his eyes again and said calmly, “So I shot him.”

No one said anything for a time. Finally I said heavily, “Suck to that defense, Doc. If any jury gives you more than manslaughter, I’ll serve part of your time. Ready to go?”

“I’m ready,” he said quietly.

It was nearly two A.M. by the time I had booked Dr. Norman Arden and had checked Beverly into the narcotics ward at City Hospital. When I headed for home, I was in no mood for sleep. I kept thinking of the wreckage that men such as Benny Polacek left in their wake. How many vital young women similar to Beverly Arden had he hooked into abject slavery to a drug? Even in death he had wrought havoc, ruining the career of a young doctor whose only real crime was devotion to his sister.

They ought to give him a medal, I thought. But I knew they wouldn’t. As the young doctor himself had said, you can’t condone the murder of even lice such as Benny Polacek without risking anarchy.

I felt the need of diversion to take my mind from its depressing thoughts. Heading north, I was nearly to the Palace when I remembered that this was April’s night off.

Two A.M. was a devil of a time to go calling on a young lady, but I continued on to her rooming house anyway. The front door was locked, but I knew which room on the second floor was hers, and there was a light on inside. An instant after I tossed a pebble against the screen, the curtains parted, and she peered down at me.

She smiled delightedly when she saw who it was, then forced her expression into stern lines. “You just wait right there,” she called down in a low voice.

Less than a minute later she let herself out the front door. “I’ve been sitting at home all evening because you said you might drop by,” she said. “I ought to be mad at you.”

“I’m here,” I said reasonably. “I just got off work.”

“Oh,” she said. “In that case I won’t be mad.”

I helped her into the car, went around it and slid under the wheel.

“What time do you have to check in tomorrow morning?” she asked.

“I’m supposed to be in at ten, but I have some time coming. I’m going to phone in and take the day off.”

“Umm,” she said. “In that case we can have a long breakfast.”

Content

Richard Deming
Death of a Pusher

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24