by Jerry eBooks
About two and a half hours later, Lucchi returned. There was a patch of adhesive on the side of his lip and he gave Burns a dirty look as he walked into the shipping room. He was alone this time.
“Well?” he said.
Dreer shrugged. “I guess you got us, Lucchi. We can’t call the cops in on this because we haven’t got anything on you.”
“Of course you haven’t,” Lucchi said. “I work smooth, see? And once you start monkeying with the cops, you find out that they are useless to you after you are dead. You get the point?”
“I get the point,” Dreer said. “That’s why I’ve decided to come to terms with you.”
He scratched his chin and Burns moved toward the machine.
“Good,” Lucchi murmured. “Now let’s talk like business men.”
“Sure,” Dreer said.
HE SAT down and motioned Lucchi to a chair.
“Nobody monkeys with the cops,” Lucchi said, “When we started with this association, a few fools called up and tried to bring the law in on this. But I pay protection too, Dreer, You tell me you were in the racket yourself. You know how it works, A handout here; a handout there. I got big police names on my payroll. That’s why it’s foolish to fight me.”
“Sure,” Dreer said, as Burns slipped a half-dollar in the slot.
“I been investigatin’ these machines,” Lucchi went on, “I see a lot of money in them. If Marsh is netting five grand a week now, he’s going to double it and triple it and maybe multiply it by four. There’s millions in this game, Dreer, and that’s why you need protection.”
“Sure,” Dreer said. “By the way, you weren’t kidding me about paying tribute to big shots in the police force, were you?” Lucchi laughed.
“Of course not. Ever hear of Bart Endicott?”
“No,” Dreer said.
“I pay him plenty,” Lucchi muttered, without getting any amusement out of it.
“You’re smarter than I thought you were, Lucchi,” Dreer said. “You got the cops and politicians in on this and you’re set for big things. There doesn’t seem to be any way we can fight you. We’ll have to pay your ten per cent.”
“Now you’re talking the way I like to hear a sensible man talk,” Lucchi said.
“I.”
He stopped and leaped up from the seat as he heard the click and saw a neatly wrapped package come out of the machine. Burns grabbed the package and Lucchi, eyes wide, lips wet, grabbed for his lapel.
Dreer threw a hard left and it caught Lucchi on the nose. The racket man fell back and Burns put a nelson on him while Dreer took the revolver away. Lucchi still wanted to fight, so Burns let him have a slow right that hit him on the point of the jaw and knocked him unconscious.
Marsh opened the door of the office and Dreer held up the package.
“You can call the cops now, Marsh,” he said. “And then you can make out a check for five grand. . . .”
A few days later Dreer was in his office, cleaning out the desk, when Burns walked in.
“What’s this?” Burns said.
Dreer grinned. “I think you’re out of a job.”
Burns shrugged. “Well anyway, you were nice enough to split that five grand with me. What are you gonna do now—invest the dough in something new?”
“No,” Dreer said. “I’m going back on the force.”
Burns’ eyes were blank. “Whaddya mean? What force are you talking about?”
“The police force,” Dreer said.
“You never told me you were a policeman.”
“I wasn’t a policeman,” Dreer said. “I was a detective. It’s been my bitter secret for a few years, Burns, but I’ll give you the lowdown now. I was a detective and I was doing okay until I tried to get something on a few big shot politicians who were disgracing the police force. They framed an inefficiency charge on me and threw me out. I never thought I could get back at them, but the happy day has come.”
“Tell me about it,” Burns said.
Dreer shrugged. “There’s little to tell. The photo-voice machine gave us all we needed to put Lucchi in jail. But it did more, than that—I mean for me, personally. It brought out the fact that Bart Endicott was connected with Lucchi. You see, Burns, this Bart Endicott happens to be the low-life who framed me.”
MURDER TRAIL
Anthony Tompkins
When a kid swipes a gun from Hank Carmel of Homicide, it leads Hank right to the solution of a grim crime mystery!
SERGEANT HANK CARMEL, Homicide Squad, tilted his hat to the back of his head, placed both feet comfortably on the edge of his desk and leaned back to study the State Police reports on the hijack murder which had taken place upstate. But like many of those things, the crime had its roots in New York. Here it had been plotted, here the loot of nylon stockings would be disposed of. So, the job was draped across the sturdy shoulders of Homicide.
Someone opened the office door. Carmel didn’t turn around.
“Yes?” he said. “What is it?”
The answering voice seemed to come from the region of the floor, and was shrill.
“Please, mister, is your name Sergeant Carmel?”
Carmel swung around, brought his feet to the floor with a crash, and while in this sitting position found himself eye to eye with the scrawniest boy he had seen in a long time.
The boy weighed no more than sixty pounds. Still, he looked healthy enough, and he was scrubbed as if on his way to Sunday School. A cap adorned his head but red curls popped out all around it. His eyes were azure blue and a bit frightened. He prodded the unyielding floor with one shoe, scuffing the toe of it more and more with each prod.
“Well”—Carmel grinned—“don’t tell me you’re wanted for something?”
“No, mister,” The boy shook his red head. “I ain’t wanted. The man in front—the one back of the big desk, he said I should come and see you. He said I wasn’t to be scared, and that cops ain’t all bad.”
Carmel pursed his lips. “Such a statement, coming from just another cop, can’t be seriously taken, son. We’ve some bad ones among us.”
“You ain’t,” the boy said promptly.
“Well, thanks.” Carmel feinted a punch at the boy’s chin. “Now suppose you tell me what’s on your mind? My job is to serve men like you. You’re a taxpayer—or will be some day. Let’s have it, kid.”
“I want to see my pop.”
“Ah-ha!” Carmel said. “Now who is your pop?”
“Jack Kirby!”
The boy’s face grew pinkish for a moment. Then it turned as stern as a twelve-year-old boy’s face can be stern.
Carmel whistled softly. “So you’re Jack Kirby’s son. We sent a man to hunt you up, to make sure you were taken care of. Now look, son, maybe your pop doesn’t want to see you.”
“Maybe he does too. I know I want to see him. He ain’t bad, even if you do say he killed Andy Graham.”
CARMEL sighed, put an arm around the boy’s shoulders and pulled him a bit closer.
“Now see here, Al—yes, I know your name—we don’t say your father killed Graham. He says so himself. I guess maybe he did, too, but we don’t regard him as a criminal. You know what he went through, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir. He was torpedoed and lived for nineteen days on a raft and everybody else with him died and Pop got home safe.”
“That’s right. But not entirely safe, Al. You see, I—”
Carmel stopped talking and wondered how to tell a twelve-year-old boy that his father was a homicidal maniac.
“You gonna let me see him?” young Al asked. “Or do I have to see somebody bigger’n you?”
Carmel laughed. “Oh, no. No, I can take care of it. But first I’ve got to ask your father if he wants to see you. That’s the rule. Stay right here. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”
He drew in a sharp breath as he walked slowly down the long corridor to the cell room. The turnkey opened the main gate.
“Bring Kirby into the visi
ting room,” Carmel said.
Kirby soon appeared. He was a burly man with a thick neck and big arms. His face was wholesomely tanned and his eyes were deep-set and harrowed. He wore a pair of work pants, work shoes and the leather jacket he always wore when he drove trucks. He sat down without saying a word, without changing the anguished expression on his face one whit.
“Your kid is here,” Carmel said. “He wants to see you.”
Kirby’s eyes changed then. They seemed to acquire life in them. He half arose, groaned, and sat back again wearily.
“No use, Sarge. I don’t want the kid to see me in here. I don’t want him to ever know that his old man is crazy. A crazy killer.”
Carmel nodded. “I guess I can’t blame you much. Did the psychiatrists show up yet?”
“No. Why should they hurry? I can’t harm anyone else. And why should I go all through that again anyway? I know what the war did to me. It’s happened to a lot of us guys. Better guys than me—only they never got to the stage where they killed a man.”
Carmel took out a pack of cigarettes, extracted one and handed the rest of the pack to Kirby.
“The kid must have known about those dreams of yours,” he said.
“No—no, I made sure of that. I made him sleep in a room at the end of the flat, and I locked myself into my room every night. So when those dreams came, he wouldn’t hear me yelling. They were letting up—some—before this happened.”
Carmel puffed on his cigarette for a full two minutes. He looked at Kirby through the haze of smoke.
“It’s tough,” he murmured. “Even tougher when you have a kid like Al. You should have let the Maritime Commission hospitalize you and keep you there.”
Kirby jerked his head up and down nervously. “Sure—and leave my kid with his mother’s folks to be raised any way at all. To be worked to death, be half starved. Don’t you think I know all about them? My wife died three years ago because of an illness she contracted when she was a kid about Al’s age. No, I couldn’t see it. I was willing to take my chances so long as I could be with him.”
“It might have worked too,” Carmel said, “if you had laid off the booze and stopped hating Andy Graham. From the reports we have, you were always okay until you drank, and then something hit you. Turned you into a killer. Like night before last when you knifed Graham. You hated him so much. Why?”
Kirby closed his eyes slowly.
“We’ve been all over that, Sarge,” he said bitterly. “When the war came, I had a nice little trucking business with Graham as a partner. He agreed to carry on while I went into the Maritime. And he promised to take care of the kid. So what happens? I find he sold out the business, made a lot of dough, and kept every dime. He licked the kid two or three times when he asked for money—because I told him when he needed anything to see Graham.”
“Tell me about what happened to make you blow your top night before last,” Carmel said.
“Sure, why not? I haven’t a thing to hide. I got a job when they let me out of the hospital. Working for McKinney, driving one of his eight-wheelers. It paid well. I was doing okay and saving a little so I could buy my own truck again. Then Graham put his oar in. Somebody swiped two cases of goods off my truck. Graham said they never were swiped at all. I just took them. He also said I was going into business for myself and give McKinney competition.”
“And McKinney fired you,” Carmel said. “I know the rest of it. You got drunk. Graham came into the cafe with a friend and took a booth. You worked up a good rage, went into the booth and stabbed him with a swivel knife.”
KIRBY pressed a hand hard against his forehead. “I don’t remember,” he said. “I don’t remember a thing except that I wanted to beat Graham up. Everything he’d ever done to me came back in one big lump. I hated him. Sure, I killed him. I must have. With his own knife. He was using it to defend himself with. So his pal said. I took it away and shoved it into his heart. But I don’t remember doing it. I was in one of those mental blackouts.”
“I understand,” Carmel said. “I’ll send the kid away. And, Jack, don’t worry about him. I’ll see he’s okay. I know a nice boy when I see one.”
“They don’t come any better,” Kirby said, and his eyes glittered for a second in pride. “Thanks, Sarge. I feel a lot better.” Carmel went back to the office, pushed open the door and looked around. The boy was gone. Automatically his eyes darted to the shoulder harness which he had hung on the clothes tree in the corner. The harness was there but its holster was empty. Carmel let out a yell and stormed to the front of Headquarters.
“The kid?” Sergeant Mahoney, on desk duty, pointed at the door. “He went through there about five minutes ago like he was shot out of a gun.”
“Out of a gun, my eye. With a gun! My thirty-eight. I’m taking a car. Be back as soon as I can.”
Carmel raced around to the garage, took out a coupe and sent it rolling toward the slum area where Jack Kirby had made his home. He didn’t know what the kid wanted with that gun, but if he was like his father there might be no telling what would happen.
Kirby lived on the top floor of a four-story, eight-family tenement block. Carmel ran up the steps, thinking a bit abstractly that he puffed more than usual, and that he might be getting old. He pounded on Kirby’s door, stepped back, and smashed in the flimsy door.
The apartment was not badly fitted out. The living room furniture was standard mohair, old but scrupulously clean. The worn kitchen linoleum glistened like the deck of a battleship equipped with a grouchy skipper. There were two bedrooms, one with two stout locks. When Kirby Senior, locked himself in for the night he made sure that when those bad dreams came he would stay inside the room. Or have a difficult time getting out.
But there were no signs of the kid. Carmel cursed softly. If the boy had decided to avenge his father and went after old McKinney, there would be repercussions that were bound to put Carmel on the longest and lonesomest beat they could invent.
There was a light footstep behind him and he turned quickly, but he saw only a girl about Al Kirby’s age. She had pigtails and a mischievous smile.
“I know where Al is if you gimme a dime,” she said in one breath.
“You bandit,” Carmel grunted. “Okay, a dime it is.”
She regarded him somberly for a moment. “Maybe I better ask for a quarter, mister, on account of Al has got a gun and you’re awful worried.”
“Where do you live?”
Carmel approached her slowly, not wanting to frighten the child. Not until he had a good firm grip on her arm.
“Downstairs with my grandma. She drinks.”
“She must have fed you a pint of bourbon,” Carmel said.
He lunged at her. She didn’t move at all.
“Why did you do that?” she asked. “I wasn’t going to run away.”
Carmel held her tightly. “That’s the truth, anyway. Not now you won’t run. Okay, where is he?”
“Give me the quarter, mister. I won’t say a word until you do.”
Carmel dug a hand into his pocket, fished out a coin and put it into the palm of her hand.
“There—now talk.”
“He went over to where Mr. Graham lived before he was killed.”
Carmel tried to figure it out. Graham lived in a cheap apartment hotel. He had lived alone, so the kid wouldn’t find anyone there to serve as a target. Perhaps, Carmel thought, the kid meant to vent his spleen by pumping bullets into Graham’s furniture. Kids had done crazier things than that.
Carmel pushed the girl into the hallway, closed the battered door and gave up trying to fasten it shut. He had demolished the lock. The girl walked toward the steps. Carmel thought there was something odd about her. She was wearing stockings. Sheer, beautiful nylons which were sizes too big and fell wrinkled and haphazardly around her skinny legs. And nylons in this neighborhood were about as common as polar bears in Bermuda.
“Hey—you!” Carmel shouted.
THE girl gave one fri
ghtened look over her shoulder and ran. She went down those steps faster than a deer runs from a mountain lion. She was at the bottom when Carmel reached the third-floor landing.
He steadied himself, wished again that he didn’t puff so much and decided to take one thing at a time. Just one at a time. Find the kid first, get the gun away from him, and then try to discover where that girl had got herself a pair of three-fifty nylons.
His car was still at the curb, which fact he construed as some minor miracle the way things were happening to him so far. He used the siren this time and swung corners on wheels that skimmed the pavement. He pulled up in front of Graham’s apartment house with a jerk that knocked the wind out of him.
He ran into the lobby and found a bored super swabbing the floor. Carmel seized him by one shoulder.
“I’m the law. Did you see a kid, kind of skinny, wearing a cap?”
“He went up about ten minutes ago. What’s he done? Murdered somebody?”
“Maybe,” Carmel answered, and hoped he wasn’t telling the truth.
He had to wait while the self-service lift crawled down. It crawled back up, too—as far as the ninth floor. Carmel pushed the door back, stepped into the illy illuminated hallway and started hunting apartment numbers tacked to the various doors.
He found Graham’s. The door was not locked. He opened it slowly, noiselessly and held his breath. Perhaps this would be the end of the chase. He didn’t know how much longer he could take it. Chasing an armed crook was simple compared to catching up with a twelve-year-old kid.
He closed the door behind him, took the precaution of locking it and putting the key into his pocket. Then he began a room-to-room search. There wasn’t a sign of the boy. In the bedroom Carmel found a locked closet door. There was no key in it. He smiled wryly.
“Okay, kid, come on out,” he called. “You can’t get away.”
That drew no answer. He banged on the door as hard as he could and still there wasn’t even a whimper. Carmel drew back, muttered savagely under his breath and attacked the door with a shoulder. He bounced back, tried again, and finally splintered one panel. He ripped out sections of wood, fumbled for the key which should be on the other side of the lock and found none.
