Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

Linda returned, carrying a short fur jacket over her arm. “All ready?” she said.

  Neelan nodded and got to his feet. His change was spread out in the inevitable silver tray, and he saw a fleeting smile on the bartender’s lips.

  “Keep it,” he said dryly.

  He took Linda’s arm, and turned toward the doorway, but Brewster said: “Say, Neelan, excuse me for bothering you, but the boss asked me one question about that Fiest story I couldn’t answer.”

  Neelan stopped and regarded him with cold hard eyes. “Well?”

  Mark glanced at Linda, smiled an apology at her, and then said to Neelan: “It’s just this: what was the description of the fellow that Fiest was taking a bet from?”

  “You’re still worrying about that story, eh?”

  Mark smiled disarmingly. “It’s not my idea, believe me.”

  “Okay. He was about five ten, stocky-built, and wore a dark suit and a gray hat. I didn’t see his face.”

  “Thanks a lot.” Mark included Linda in his smile. “Sorry to trouble you with a detail like that.”

  “Let’s go,” Neelan said to Linda.

  Mark Brewster sat down and toyed with his drink.

  The bartender picked up Neelan’s change and dropped it in his pocket. Turning to a porter who was refilling the ice bins, he said: “I clipped Sourpuss tonight, but good.”

  The porter grunted. “Why she bothers with him beats me.”

  “Yeah, she’s a good kid.”

  Chapter Four

  THEY drove for a few blocks in silence. Then Neelan said, “Linda, I’m sorry. I acted like a fool.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Barny. It’s late, and we’re probably both tired.”

  “How about something to eat? Or a drink?” he said.

  “Not tonight, thanks. I’m really tired.”

  “Well, how about a drive? We’ll go out along the river a ways. Okay?”

  She knew he was unhappy, and so she smiled at him and said: “All right, Barny. That sounds pleasant. But don’t be annoyed if I fall asleep.”

  “Don’t worry about that. Go to sleep if you want to.” Neelan drove out the Parkway, past the Art Museum, and turned onto the West River drive where it flowed along by the darkly shining Schuylkill River. There was little traffic. They had the trees and the river and the darkness to themselves. Linda lit. a cigarette and hummed softly under her breath. Finally she said: “Who was that fellow at the Simba—the one who asked you a question about something?”

  “That’s Mark Brewster, a reporter. He’s a nosey punk.”

  “Oh? He looked nice. What did he want with you?”

  “Something about a case of mine.” He stared ahead, his eyes fixed on the flashing white line in the middle of the drive. “I had to shoot a man tonight. A guy named Dave Fiest. Brewster’s acting like it’s the biggest story he’s ever had.”

  “Did—did you kill the man, Barny?”

  “Yes, I had to.” He cursed himself for bringing up the subject. “I arrested him, see, and he made a break. I fired at his legs, but the shot went a little too high.”

  “It’s horrible,” she said. She rolled down the window and threw her cigarette out; and the cool night wind made her shiver. After a moment, she said: “Was he married, do you know?”

  “Who?”

  “The man you had to kill.”

  “Fiest? I don’t think so.”

  “Did he have any family?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How old was he?”

  “About forty.” He glanced at her oddly. “You ought to team up with Brewster, kid.”

  “I know it’s none of my business, Barny,” she said. “Now don’t be like that. I didn’t mean that it’s none of your business.”

  They were silent for a mile or two, and Neelan was overcome with confusion and anger. He had wanted to talk to her tonight, to tell her how he felt about her, but instead he’d got involved with the story of Dave Fiest. Finally he said, harshly: “Why do you like me, Linda?” The question obviously startled her. “How do you know I do?” she said.

  “Don’t kid about it,” he said. “You must like me, or you wouldn’t see me.”

  She glanced at him, and saw the strong sullen lines of his face in the light from the dashboard. “We’ve been friends, Barny,” she said, choosing words carefully. “There’s no reason why we shouldn’t, is there?”

  “There’s fifty reasons. I’m too old for you; you said that yourself tonight. You’re educated; you come from a good family; you’re making big money. And I’m a cop, meatball cop from South Philly. There’s a couple of reasons, I guess.”

  They were both silent again; and then she patted his hand and said with an attempt at lightness; “Don’t worry about it, Barny. We’ve been friends so far, in spite of all those silly-reasons.” She glanced at his brutally strong profile, moody and bitter now, and realized that for all his toughness, he could be as easily hurt as a child.

  The touch of her fingers on his hand made Neelan feel better. “I’ve been acting like a damnfool tonight,” he said, with a slow smile. “Forget it all, will you?”

  “Of course.”

  “You know, Linda, things are getting a little better for me financially, and I thought—” He stopped. He wanted to tell her he had money, that he could take her anywhere; but his cop-bred instincts told him nothing could be more foolish.

  Linda was looking at him with interest. “Don’t tell me a long-lost uncle has died and left you his fortune!”

  “No, nothing like that,” he said. “But things have kind of eased up for me. Maybe we could drive over to the shore Sunday for dinner. You’ve never been to Atlantic City, have you?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Well, it’s great. The hotels on the Boardwalk are better than anything in New York. I’d like to take you over there sometime. You see—” He stopped, suddenly infuriated at his awkwardness. Everything he said led him to a maddening dead-end. She must like him though, he thought with a swift change of mood.

  “What are you smiling about?” Linda said, in an amused voice. “One minute you’re frowning like thunder, and now you’re grinning like a boy with a new red wagon.”

  Neelan glanced at her and laughed. “I’m just feeling good, that’s all.” He realized that he would eventually need an explanation for his new affluence, and it was easy to devise one that would also account for his high spirits. “I’m through paying alimony,” he said. “My ex-wife is getting married again, so I bow out as Uncle Sucker. That’s good news, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” Linda said. Then: “What sort of woman was she, Barny?”

  “My wife? She was a—” He checked the word on his lips. “She was a bum,” he said.

  “How did you happen to marry her?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows?” he said, honestly bewildered. He had met his wife a few months after he was appointed to the Police Department. She was a waitress at a neighborhood diner, a buxom chattery blonde, who knew all the patrolmen at the station, and as Barny learned eventually, knew a number of them too well.

  They had remained together four years, and then she had gone off to California with their car and three hundred and seventy dollars from a joint savings account. Neelan heard from her later through a lawyer; and eventually she had divorced him, and he was ordered to pay her fifteen dollars a week alimony. Neelan knew that she was living with a musician of sorts on the Coast, but he actually wasn’t interested enough to do anything about it. He paid the fifteen dollars a week, and felt happy to be rid of her.

  “I don’t know why I married her,” he said to Linda. “I was twenty-three and healthy and had a job. I guess I figured I should get married.”

  “You’re thirty-nine now, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right. A real old man.” He smiled at her tentatively.

  “That’s an interesting age. Look at Pinza.”

  “Pinza?”

  “He’s a very great singe
r, and he’s at least in his middle fifties. My father took me to hear him in Chicago years ago. He sang Mephistopheles—the devil, you know, and darned near scared me out of my seat.” Linda sat up straighter and glanced at her watch. “I think we’d better start back now, Barny. I’m really very tired.”

  “Okay, kid, anything you say.” He slowed the car and began watching for a place to turn around.

  Half an hour later he stopped before her apartment house on Walnut Street. She was curled up beside him sound asleep, her head resting against his arm. He looked at her a moment, studying the fineness of her skin and the faint blue shadows under her eyes; and then he put a hand on her shoulder and shook her gently.

  “We’re home,” he said. His voice was husky; and he cleared his throat. “Wake up, kid. End of the line.” She woke, drowsy and apologetic. “I’m not very good company, I’m afraid. Thanks so much, Barny.”

  “I’ll drop by tomorrow night, okay? At the Simba?” He had never been in her apartment. She had never asked him in, and it hadn’t occurred to him to suggest it. “All right, Barny. Don’t bother getting out, please.” She slipped out of the car, waved to him and ran lightly up the steps to her doorway. Barny waited until she turned and waved to him again, and then let out the clutch and drove off down the street.

  Linda stood with her hand on the doorknob and watched the red tail-light of his car disappear in the night. She sighed then, and wondered, as she had so many times recently, why she was allowing this essentially false situation to continue. There was something about Barny Neelan that appealed to her. He was a roughneck, of course, and sullen at times, and uncultivated, and crude; but there was a sense of power and strength in him that was fascinating. Also, he needed her desperately, and that was flattering. He didn’t need her in a conventional physical way, obviously, but he desperately needed her company, her friendship, and most of all, her approval.

  Linda sighed again, annoyed with herself. She was usually forthright and honest in her relationships and this present indecision struck her as unwise and foolish.

  Neelan drove back to West Philadelphia slowly, enjoying his fresh cigar and the empty silent streets. It was about five, and light would be breaking in another hour. He wasn’t due in at the Division until four in the afternoon, unless Ramussen wanted to see him earlier about his report. But that wasn’t likely. Dave Fiest’s death would be wrapped up in official records and forgotten by tomorrow, he thought with satisfaction.

  Chapter Five

  MARK BREWSTER WOKE UP THAT FORENOON AT about eleven. Sun slanted through the Venetian blinds of his apartment and broke on the green rugs and flat gray walls. He drifted tor a moment in a hiatus between sleep and consciousness, aware only of a disquieting sense of oppression—then remembered: A cop named Neelan had shot and killed a gambler named Dave Fiest. Mark swung his legs oft the couch and picked up a cigarette. Why should that bother him? Why did he care what Neelan did?

  Standing, he realized he couldn’t answer those questions. He was depressed, and that was that. He walked into his tiny kitchenette and put the coffee on and opened a can of orange juice; then he slipped into slacks and a sports shirt and went down to the corner for the papers. Murchison had said he would try to do a rundown on Neelan’s line-of-duty killings; but it turned out that he hadn’t.

  The story was on Page Three, with a one-column cut of Neelan, and had nothing in it but the bare facts. “An escaping prisoner was shot fatally early this morning by Detective Bernard Neelan of the Thirteenth Division—”

  Mark read the story and walked back to his apartment. He drank his coffee and orange juice and thought about Neelan and the girl who’d been with him last night. He hadn’t noticed her particularly, but his impression had been that she wasn’t Neelan’s sort. What would be Neelan’s sort, he wondered. What was Neelan? That seemed to be the important question in Mark’s mind. There was a terrible fascination in any man who could coolly and deliberately shoot another person in the back, he decided, finishing his second cup of coffee.

  He gave up Neelan, and shaved and showered, with the idea of getting down to work. But once at his desk, he found his thoughts straying back to the detective. Frowning, he dug a wedge of typewritten manuscript from the drawer and began rereading the last few pages he’d done. It was all going to add up to a novel, one of those days, he hoped. Mark knew only too well that it was traditional for newspapermen to have a novel, or a play, tucked away in a trunk somewhere. But he hoped he’d be different; he hoped to finish the book.

  However, it seemed pretty flat this morning. Even the Captain, the character he liked best, failed to hold his interest. He made an effort to get started by slipping a clean sheet of paper into his typewriter; but after staring at its discouragingly blank expanse for several minutes he lit a fresh cigarette and walked out to get another cup of coffee.

  That didn’t help much, and he finally realized that he wasn’t going to get any work done until he settled some of the questions about Neelan that were picking at his mind.

  He dressed quickly and walked outside to his car. It was a bright sunny day, and the air was cool and fresh—a fine day for a ball game, he thought. He drove over to the East River Drive and headed out to Germantown, simply because he had to start digging into Neelan at some point. And his old division was probably as good a place to start as any other.

  The Forty-first District was located in the middle of a pleasant residential street, and was sparkling with fresh paint. Window boxes of flowers jutted out from the first-floor windows. Downtown a cop lived and worked in another world; but here there was very little activity besides school-crossing duty, dog-bite cases, and the sort of constabulary functions that would be required in a peaceful village.

  Mark went upstairs to the clean spacious Detective Headquarters, where half a dozen men were sitting about talking and reading the papers. He’d met most of them around the city on various jobs, and they gave him a general welcome.

  “Come in and sit down,” Sergeant Ellerton said, beaming at him from behind horn-rimmed spectacles. “Long time no see, Mark. What brings you out this way?”

  Mark sat on the edge of a desk and lit a cigarette. “I had to see a dentist over on Greene Street, so I thought I’d stop in and say hello. How’re things?”

  “So-so, just so-so,” Sergeant Ellerton said. “You look thinner, boy. They must be working you downtown.”

  “It’s not too bad.” Mark glanced at the detectives, who were watching him with good-humored interest. “We had a little excitement last night, though.”

  “Yeah, we were reading about that,” Sergeant Ellerton said. “What was the story?”

  “Fiest made a break and Neelan tried to bring him down and the shot went a little high. That’s all there was to it,” Mark said.

  “You know, I always said Neelan had too hot a temper,” said a detective named Grunhov.

  “He don’t take nothing from anybody,” another said. The other men began discussing Neelan and the shooting. Mark smoked his cigarette and listened with what appeared to be casual interest.

  The detectives at the Forty-first were chiefly middle-aged men on the downgrade. They had been passed over many times for jobs that required better-than-average alertness and ability. Some of course had been shanghaied here by politicians or superiors who were afraid of them. However, an occasional detective in that spot would go on stubbornly doing his best work and hoping against slim hope to get back to where there was something to do besides listen to housewives’ complaints about the theft of a shirt from the clothesline.

  Jerry Spiegel was that sort. He was a thickly built man of about forty, with coarse black hair and strangely gentle eyes. He had made the mistake of knocking off too many protected handbooks in the downtown area, and had been sent to Germantown to reflect on his sins. Now he was seated in a tilted chair listening to the talk about Neelan with a faint smile on his lips.

  FINALLY he stood up and said in a quiet voice: “Neelan’s a b
um. I worked with him here and in the Northeast, and I never saw him do anything that took brains or guts. Sure, he’s fine at gunning some colored kids, or a gambler, like he did last night; but he never made a decent pinch in his life.”

  Spiegel spat expressively. “I got no use for a cop that can’t use anything but a gun. If that’s police work, we should bring in the National Guard and have ’em machine-gun anything they see moving after ten o’clock at night.”

  “Well, Neelan’s got guts,” Grunhov said. “I never liked him, understand, but he’s got guts.”

  “Nuts!” Spiegel said. “There ain’t another cop in Philly would have shot Dave Fiest last night.”

  “You weren’t there,” Sergeant Ellerton said. “You don’t know, Spiegel.”

  “You know how he got to be a detective?” Spiegel asked the room in general. “Ever hear that story?” There was a negative murmur.

  “Well, it’s a hot one. Neelan’s working the last-out shift, twelve-to-eight, and above seven-thirty he’s drifting along toward the district so he can get out fast when the eight-to-four shift reports. Well, at Allegheny and Thirteenth, I think it was, a car rips through a red light and comes to a stop on the sidewalk. The driver is drunk, but Neelan knows if he makes a pinch he’ll be tied up all morning making out reports, and the next morning at the hearing. So Neelan gives the guy a brush, and sends him on his way.”

  “That’s no way to make a detective,” someone said.

  “Well, wait a minute: The drunk got a look at Neelan’s shield and remembered the number. And you know who he was? Well, he was Tim O’Neill, brother of old Mike O’Neill, the ward leader. Mike hears about the thing from his brother, and so he calls Neelan in and tells him he’s a fine police officer, a credit to the force, a man who can temper justice with mercy, and common sense with the letter of the law. You know how old Mike could spin it out. Well, the payoff is that Mike put the word in, and about eight months later Neelan is made detective.”

  “WELL, that doesn’t prove much,” Sergeant Ellerton said, after a slight pause. “Everybody needs a little boost now and then.”