Act of Fear: A Dan Fortune Mystery

by Michael Collins

  Act of Fear

  Michael Collins

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media Ebook

  To Hal and Anne

  Chapter 1

  It began with the mugging of the cop.

  Person or persons unknown jumped the patrolman in broad daylight on Water Street near the river, dragged him into an alley, and cleaned him out. No witnesses. This is the lower west side, the Chelsea district, where alley windows are boarded up and people do not see what they’re not sure they should see.

  We all knew the cop: Patrolman Stettin. He’s a young cop, Stettin, not long on the force and still eager. We all heard that he felt so bad about being taken that he offered to quit. That shows how young he is. Sooner or later everyone is taken in this world. This time the mugger took it all: billy club, pistol, cuffs, summons book, watch, billfold, tie clip, shoes, and loose change. The mugger was good. Stettin never even saw a shadow, according to the report I heard.

  ‘What’s a harness bull got worth stealing?’ Joe Harris said.

  ‘The pistol,’ I said.

  Joe Harris is my oldest friend. He never left Chelsea, the way I did over the years, but we always kept in touch. Next to Marty, my woman, Joe is my best friend. Since I’ve been back in Chelsea this time, we see each other a lot. Joe is a bartender by trade. Which is probably why we see each other so much. Now Joe poured me a second free shot of good Irish whiskey while he thought about Stettin’s pistol.

  We were in Packy’s Pub, where Joe was working that day. The boss, Packy Wilson, was too busy talking to his other twilight customers about Officer Stettin to notice the free drink. We had all heard about Stettin, even though they had it under wraps. The police were annoyed. When they are annoyed they go about their work with a grim efficiency. The police did not want publicity for a mugging of one of their men, but everyone in the know had heard.

  In many ways New York is a strange city. One of the ways is that in any given neighbourhood, like Chelsea or Yorkville, there are two kinds of people. There are the people who were born in, say, Chelsea, who have always lived there and most of whom always will unless they are in jail or on the run, who are part of Chelsea the way a Greek villager is part of his isolated village. And there are the people born somewhere else – maybe Queens and maybe Omaha – and who think of themselves as living in New York, not in Chelsea, people who happened to find an apartment in a section most of them don’t even know is called Chelsea. Like a summer resort – the natives and the visitors. When you’re a native you hear the news. I was born in Chelsea, so I rate as a native. I also rate as something else.

  ‘No,’ Joe said at last, ‘there’s easier ways to get a gun, Dan. Even a private snooper oughta know that much.’

  Daniel Fortune, Confidential Investigator: Reliable … Low Rates. The Fortune was once Fortunowski, and there used to be a T in the middle for Tadeusz. That was the name my grandfather carried off the boat: Tadeusz Jan Fortunowski. When I was a boy the old men told me that my grandfather carried that name with pride, even with arrogance. Like most middle and eastern Europeans, his pedigree was a chaos of history. He was born in Lithuania, under a Russian government, of Polish parents who spoke German. But he was proud that he was a Pole, and the name was all he had to prove what he was. My father was born here. Chelsea was a world of Americans and Irish then, and a man needs to belong. My father became Fortune. The old men told me that my grandfather had refused to speak to anyone named Fortune, son or no son. The old man died before I was born. I never knew him. Not that I knew my father. He gave me the name – changed – and not much else. Dan Fortune, who dropped even the T, and who doesn’t really belong anywhere. And, at the moment, a confidential investigator.

  Not that I investigate much that is big or dangerous. Some industrial work and some divorces. Armed-guard jobs, and subpoenas for bread and butter. But mostly the personal problems of small people who want to apply a little pressure on someone but don’t want the police. It’s not work I especially like, but a man must eat, and it’s work I know how to do. (Most men work at what they happened to learn how to do, not at what they wish they had learned how to do.) I’m my own boss, and I don’t have to wear a white shirt or get up early. The work has one big drawback as far as Chelsea is concerned – it makes me a cop. In Chelsea that means something. It means that the only real friends I have are my woman Marty and Joe Harris. And even Joe doesn’t tell me all.

  ‘Who mugs The Man in broad daylight just for a gun?’ Joe said.

  Joe was right, of course. To get a handgun isn’t exactly as easy as picking fruit off a tree in this country, not even in Chelsea, but there are a hundred easier ways than mugging a cop. No, Stettin’s mugging was all wrong.

  ‘Maybe just a fast buck?’ I said.

  ‘Come on, Pirate,’ Joe said. ‘Not even the new breed of punk strong-arms a cop for his loose change.’

  ‘Pirate’ Joe still calls me sometimes. The old nicknames stick even when a man has been away from his past as much as I have. I must know ten girls who are now six feet tall, fat, or forty, but who are still called ‘Bunny’ or ‘Puppy’. Danny the Pirate. That was the name I got a long time ago when I lost my arm. I tell a lot of stories about how I lost the arm. Exciting stories if you buy me a beer. It’s the left arm. I’m right-handed. There is some good in everything if you look at it right.

  The truth is that I lost the arm when Joe and I were looting a ship. We were seventeen then. It was a dark night, and I fell into a hold. The arm broke in so many places they had to take it off just below the shoulder. Maybe if I had been rich I’d still have two arms. The city hospital didn’t have the doctors or the time to take a chance on my life. That doesn’t make me bitter. They saved my life. Fifty years earlier there wouldn’t have been a hospital for me to be saved in. Everything is relative.

  I got the loot out a porthole, and Joe dragged me off the pier and got help. The only charge the company could have made was trespassing. They made no charge. You see, my father was once a New York cop. I had friends on the force. Or, to be accurate, my mother had friends on the force. She had a lot of friends.

  The cops forgot the robbery. I’ve got no record. The natives did not forget. It wasn’t our only robbery in those days, just the one we were almost caught at. The neighbourhood knew it all. I lost my arm. The rest was inevitable: Danny the Pirate. They remember that in Chelsea. That’s fine with me. It takes off some of the cop-taint. It makes the natives sometimes overlook the fact that I’ve lived away so much, that I say things that show I’ve read books. It gets me friends I need on occasion. The natives remember the seventeen-year-old pirate, and the police forget. I like it both ways.

  ‘A cop gets killed, that figures,’ Packy Wilson said to the bar in general. ‘It’s the robbin’ and not killin’ that’s wrong.’

  ‘A junkie maybe,’ Joe suggested. ‘He could sell the gun for a fix. Maybe use it for a show of power.’

  ‘Could be,’ Packy said. ‘For a fix a junkie tries anything.’

  ‘A junkie trembles when he sees a cop on a movie screen,’ I said. ‘Never a junkie.’

  I could not see an addict attacking a policeman in uniform on his own beat in broad daylight. But then I did not see anyone attacking a cop under those conditions.

  About then the night regulars began to come into the bar, and Packy had a cash register to mother. Joe had to begin to work in earnest. First things come first in Chelsea, as they do in the rest of the world for that matter, and there was money to be made.

  Packy ended the discussion with a pronouncement. ‘A cop hater. Some alley-crawler psycho with a grudge on cops.’

  After that t
he regular customers kicked it around for a time. They did not really care about Stettin, any more than the millions who would read about Stettin in the newspapers would care, but a man has to talk about something while he drinks himself peaceful.

  For a few more days it was good for a lot of talk around Chelsea and the Village. Then the talk faded. People are strange. Cops are killed in the world somewhere almost every day. A cop does not get mugged in broad daylight very often. Yet a cop killing is headlines for months, and a mugging, hot news at first, fades fast. People are more interested in death.

  I might have forgotten Stettin myself in a week. I had my own troubles. Marty was getting a big play from a well-heeled customer at her club; three subpoena victims were playing a hard hide-and-seek with me; and it was too hot in the city. There was no reason to connect the second robbery and the two killings to Stettin. We get forty burglaries a day on the West Side and as many assorted crimes of violence. After a time you hardly notice the small crimes. No, a man worries about the troubles he has on hand; anything else is insanity.

  So Patrolman Stettin was no more to me than good gossip.

  Until the kid walked into my office.

  Chapter 2

  ‘He’s in trouble, Mr Fortune. I know it,’ the kid said.

  It was a Monday five days after Stettin was mugged. My office is one room on Twenty-Eighth Street. I have one window with a view of a brick wall that has turned black with the grime of the city. The window itself is dirty, so I don’t have to look at the wall outside unless it is too hot. It was too hot, so I had been studying the shades of black on that wall while I waited until it was safe to call Marty and suggest a drink in a cool tavern. Since it was only eleven o’clock in the morning, Marty would not be up for breakfast for at least an hour. Marty snarls when you wake her up early. So I let the boy sit down.

  ‘He’s run out,’ the boy said. ‘I mean, I ain’t seen him.’

  ‘Start with the name,’ I said. The boy was nervous.

  ‘Jo-Jo Olsen,’ the kid said. ‘Joseph Olsen, only we always calls him Jo-Jo. I looked all week-end. No one seen him.’

  ‘I know you,’ I said. ‘Pete Vitanza, right? Tony’s boy?’

  ‘Yeh,’ Pete Vitanza said. ‘Jo-Jo, he’s my friend, Mr Fortune.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘He’s missing how long?’

  ‘Four days.’

  I said, ‘For God’s sake, kid, four days isn’t …’

  ‘The whole week-end,’ Vitanza said. ‘Since maybe early Friday. We had plans like for the whole week-end. Big plans.’

  ‘Go to the police,’I said.

  Missing persons are for the police. They have the tools. Rabbits are people who have found the world too heavy. One way or another they have been pounded too hard for too long. To be a rabbit is to want to run away more than anything else on earth, and I don’t like the role of the hound. That’s for the police.

  ‘Jo-Jo wouldn’t never stay away right now on his own,’ Pete insisted. ‘He just got a new bike, a beauty. We been workin’ on the motor for months. We was gonna race it Sunday. I mean, yesterday we was to race it out by East Hampton.’

  ‘He never showed?’

  ‘Not since Friday. He … was worried like. Some trouble.’

  ‘Is he married?’ Ninety-nine out of a hundred rabbits are married. Male or female rabbits. It makes you wonder.

  ‘Hell, no. I mean, he got girls, sure. No real steady, not even the Driscoll piece. Jo-Jo and me we got motors, see? Jo-Jo he studies hard by Automotive Institute. We’re gonna go over’n work for Ferrari someday.’

  ‘He lives with his family?’

  ‘They told me he went on a trip. I know that ain’t true. He didn’t take his bike. Not on his own he don’t go nowhere!’

  ‘What did he do, Pete?’ I said. ‘What did he pull?’

  ‘Nothin’! I swear.’

  He was nervous. He had something more on his mind.

  ‘Come on,’ I said.

  He was a thin kid, tall, and he had the hard muscles all the kids have around the docks. But he was lean and scrawny. I guessed he had never eaten too well or had much of anything. His Adam’s apple did a dance in his throat.

  ‘That cop,’ he said. He looked at me. ‘The fuzz got beat? He got it the day before Jo-Jo faded.’

  ‘Stettin?’ I said. ‘So what?’

  ‘The bull got it right down the block from Schmidt’s.’

  ‘The garage on Water Street?’

  ‘Yeh.’

  He seemed to think he had painted a picture of great clarity. Maybe he had.

  ‘You mean that you and Jo-Jo were doing your work on the motorbike at Schmidt’s Garage?’

  ‘Yeh. Jo-Jo he works by Schmidt’s. I mean, he works there regular, ‘n the last couple months we been workin’ on the new bike there.’

  What Pete Vitanza was trying to tell me, in the inarticulate manner of Chelsea, was this: Jo-Jo Olsen was missing when he had no reason to be missing that Pete knew, and every reason to not be missing; Patrolman Stettin had been mugged near where Jo-Jo Olsen worked; and Jo-Jo did his fade-out the morning after Stettin had been attacked. It could be something. It could be nothing.

  ‘Did Jo-Jo need money? The cycle must have cost,’ I said.

  ‘Jo-Jo stashed his loot. He’s a good mechanic. Schmidt pays him good, ‘n he don’t got to give money home.’

  ‘Did he need a pistol? Maybe he was going into business.’

  ‘Hell, no!’ Petey said quickly. ‘Anyway, his old man got guns. He could of got a gun.’

  ‘Did he ever have any trouble upstairs? Psycho? Any time on the funny farm?’

  ‘No,’ Pete said.

  The day was too hot. It was a thousand-to-one that there was no connection between a kid missing a lousy four days, and the mugging of Stettin. But a thousand-to-one is still only odds. It is far from an impossibility. Jo-Jo did not sound like a bad kid, but, then, Pete Vitanza was his friend. Jo-Jo did not sound like a boy with any reason to do a rabbit act. He sounded like a hardworking, ambitious kid. He even sounded a little too good for Chelsea right then and there.

  ‘On the day Stettin was hit, last Thursday,’ I said, ‘were you and Jo-Jo at the garage all the time?’

  ‘Up to maybe six o’clock.’

  I did not know the exact time of Stettin’s mugging, but from the rumours it figured to be between 5.30 and 7.30 p.m.

  ‘You were together the whole time?’

  Pete Vitanza’s Adam’s apple worked again. ‘We took turns riding the bike. I mean, we was testing it, working it. Maybe we’d be gone ten, fifteen minutes sometimes.’

  ‘Out of sight?’

  ‘Yeh.’

  ‘You think he saw something he shouldn’t have?’

  His Adam’s apple did a dance. ‘I don’ know, Mr Fortune. Only I know he wouldn’t of faded this week-end for nothin’ except some bad trouble. When I seen him Friday mornin’ he was scared, you know? I mean, he said he couldn’t work none, he had some business.’ And the scrawny kid looked at me out of those dark eyes. ‘Maybe he needs some help, Mr Fortune. I mean, you got to help him, find him. I can pay.’

  I like to think I had decided to help Petey before he said that. Like most men who despise money, I always need some. But I know I wasn’t considering the money angle at that point. How much could a slum kid have anyway? No, I had already decided to help, I know I had. I had nothing better to do, and I was pretty sure then that it was all nothing. Jo-Jo was on a binge. Maybe away in the hay with some juvenile Jezebel. Boys don’t tell each other everything. But it was important to Pete; he was sweating in his chair. As my cases go it was no worse than usual. A boy wanted to help his friend. It was better than most of my cases, and I could always use money.

  ‘I’ll check it out,’ I said. ‘How much can you pay?’

  ‘Would fifty bucks be okay? I mean, for a start?’

  I get five dollars for a summons and two dollars an hour for guard work. Industrial snooping pay
s better, plus expenses. For just about anything else I get what the traffic will bear up to maybe twenty-five dollars a day. Chelsea is not a haven of the rich. The kid surprised me by having fifty dollars. I didn’t think that there would be more.

  ‘Tell me more about Jo-Jo. Other friends?’

  ‘We ain’t got a lot of friends. Jo-Jo he’s kind of a loner, you know? We works mostly on motors. I asked around some.’

  ‘I’ll start from scratch,’ I said. ‘Girls?’

  ‘Nothin’ special. Maybe some I don’ know about.’

  ‘You mentioned a Driscoll?’

  ‘Nancy Driscoll. She’s older like. Only she ain’t a real girl friend. I mean, she chased him, you know?’

  ‘Where do I find her?’

  ‘I don’ know. I ain’t seen her in a while. I figure Jo-Jo been keepin’ her under wraps from me, you know?’

  ‘Where did he play cards, shoot dice, drink, have his fun?’

  ‘Jo-Jo don’t gamble. He likes movies. He drinks a lot o’ places. Maybe by Fugazy. He goes to dances by Polish Hall. He goes to the Y. He goes by the Y alone; I don’ swim.’

  ‘Give me a list; anyone and anywhere. His home address. You got a picture?’

  ‘I figured you’d want that,’ Pete said.

  He handed me a small snapshot. It was poor, but it showed Pete with a motorbike and a tall, blond, good-looking boy of the same age. It would have to do. After Pete gave me the list of names and places, I sent him home.

  I called Marty. I had fifty dollars and first things first, right? She was friendly but busy.

  ‘New girls at the club, baby, I have to rehearse,’ Marty said, ‘I’ll see you at five, okay? Don’t spend the fifty.’

  It left me with a free afternoon. There was nothing to do but go to work. I was not anxious. A boy missing for four days was hardly a hot case. But I was on my way out when the phone rang.

  ‘Fortune,’ I said. I waited. ‘This is Dan Fortune.’

  Silence.

  But not quite silence. There was something like heavy breathing. I waited. Nothing but the breathing. I hung up. I suppose I should have sensed something then and there. I did stare at that telephone. But that kind of call happens to someone every day in New York. We’ve got a lot of cranks.