Enough Rope

by Lawrence Block

  “A solid citizen.”

  “The best.”

  “A civic leader.”

  “None other.”

  “It was sure one peach of a professional touch,” Finney said. “Six shots fired point-blank. Revenge, huh?”

  “Something like that.”

  “No bad blood coming up between Beyer and Archie Moscow?”

  “Haven’t heard a word. They’ve been all peace and quiet for years. Two mobs carve up the city instead of each other. No bad blood spilled in the streets of our fair city. Instead of killing each other they cool it, and rob the public.”

  “True public spirit,” said Finney. “The reign of law and order. It makes one proud to serve the cause of law and order in this monument to American civic pride.”

  “Shut up,” Mattera said.

  Approximately two days and three hours later, three men walked out the front door at 815 Cameron Street. The establishment they left didn’t have an official name, but every cabdriver in town knew it. Good taste precludes a precise description of the principal business activity conducted therein; suffice it to say that seven attractive young ladies lived there, and that it was neither a nurses’ residence nor a college dormitory.

  The three men headed for their car. They had parked it next to a fire hydrant, supremely confident that no police officer who noted its license number would have the temerity to hang a parking ticket on the windshield. The three men were trusted employees of Mr. Archer Moscow. They had come to collect the week’s receipts, and, incidentally, to act as a sort of quality-control inspection team.

  As they reached the street, a battered ten-year-old convertible drew up slowly alongside them. The driver, alone in the car, leaned across the front seat and shot the center man in the chest with a sawed-off shotgun. Then he quickly scooped an automatic pistol from the seat and used it to shoot the other two men, three times each. He did all of this very quickly, and all three men were very dead before they hit the sidewalk.

  The man stomped on the accelerator pedal and the car leaped forward as if startled. The convertible took the corner on two wheels and as suddenly slowed its speed to twenty-five miles an hour. The little man drove four blocks, parked the car, and raised the convertible top. He disassembled the sawed-off shotgun and packed it away in his thin black attaché case with the automatic, removed the jumper wire from the ignition switch, and left the car. Once outside the car he removed his white gloves and put them, too, inside the attaché case. His own car was parked right around the corner. He put the attaché case into his trunk, got into his car, and went home.

  Finney and Mattera got the squeal again, only this time it was a pain in the neck, good weather notwithstanding. This time there were eyewitnesses, and sometimes eyewitnesses can be a pain in the neck, and this was one of those times. One of the eyewitnesses reported that the killer had been on foot, but this was a minority opinion. All of the other witnesses agreed there had been a murder car. One said that it was a convertible, another that it was a sedan, and a third that it was a panel truck. There were two other minority opinions as well. One witness said there had been three killers. Another said one. The rest agreed on two, and Finney and Mattera figured three sounded reasonable, since two guns had been used, and someone had to drive the car, whatever kind of car it was. Then they asked the witnesses if they would be able to identify the killer or killers, and all of the witnesses suddenly remembered that this was a gangster murder, and what was apt to happen to eyewitnesses who remembered what killers looked like, and they all agreed, strange as it may seem, that they had not gotten a good look at the killers at all.

  Finney had to ask the stupid questions, and Mattera had to write down the stupid answers, and it was an hour before they got over to the White Tower.

  “Eyewitnesses,” said Finney, “are notoriously unreliable.”

  “Eyewitnesses are a pain in the neck.”

  “True. Three more solid citizens—”

  “Three of Archie Moscow’s solid citizens this time—Joe Dant and Third-Time Charlie Weiss and Big Nose Murchison. How would you like to have a name like Big Nose Murchison?”

  “He doesn’t even have a nose now,” said Finney. “And couldn’t smell much if he did.”

  “How do you figure it?”

  “Well, as they said on Pearl Harbor Day—”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “This do look like war, sir.”

  “Mmmmm,” said Mattera. “Doesn’t make sense, does it? You would think we would have heard something. That’s usually the nice thing about being a cop. You get to hear things, things the average citizen may not know about. You don’t always get to do anything about what you hear, but you hear about it. We’re only in this business because it gives us the feeling of being on the inside.”

  “I thought it was for the free coffee,” said the counterman. They drank, pretending not to hear him.

  “We’re going to look real bad, you know,” Finney said. “If Moscow and Beyer have a big hate going, they’re going to spill a lot of blood, and the chance of solving any of those jobs isn’t worth pondering.” He broke off suddenly, pleased with himself. He was fairly certain he had never used “pondering” in conversation before.

  “And,” he went on, “with various killers flying in and out of town and leaving us with a file of unsolved homicides, the newspapers may start hinting that we are not the best police force in the world.”

  “Everybody knows we’re the best money can buy,” said Mattera.

  “Isn’t it the truth,” said Finney.

  “And what bothers me most,” said Mattera, “is the innocent men who will die in a war like this. Men like Big Nose, for example.”

  “Pillars of the community.”

  “We’ll miss them,” said Mattera.

  The following afternoon, Mr. Archer Moscow used his untapped private line to call the untapped private line of Mr. Barry Beyer. “You had no call to do that,” he said.

  “To do what?”

  “Dant and Third-Time and Big Nose,” said Moscow. “You know I didn’t have a thing to do with Lucky Tom. You got no call for revenge.”

  “Who was it hit Lucky Tom?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Well,” said Beyer, reasonably, “then how should I know who hit Dant and Third-Time and Big Nose?”

  There was a long silent moment. “We’ve been friends a long time,” Moscow said. “We have kept things cool, and we have all done very nicely that way—with no guns, and no blasting a bunch of guys out of revenge for something which we never did to Lucky Tom in the first place.”

  “If I thought you hit Lucky Tom—”

  “The bum,” said Moscow, “was not worth killing.”

  “If I thought you did it,” Beyer went on, “I wouldn’t go and shoot up a batch of punks like Dant and Third-Time and Big Nose. You know what I’d do?”

  “What?”

  “I’d go straight to the top,” said Beyer. “I’d kill you, you bum!”

  “That’s no way to talk, Barry.”

  “You had no call to kill Lucky Tom. So maybe he was holding out a little in Ward Three, it don’t make no difference.”

  “You had no call to kill those three boys.”

  “You don’t know what killing is, bum.”

  “Yeah?” Moscow challenged.

  “Yeah!”

  That night, a gentleman named Mr. Roswell “Greasy” Spune turned his key in his ignition and was immediately blown from this world into the next. The little man with the small hands and the white gloves watched from a tavern across the street. Mr. Spune was a bagman for Barry Beyer’s organization. Less than two hours after Mr. Spune’s abrupt demise, six of Barry Beyer’s boys hijacked an ambulance from the hospital garage. Five sat in back, and the sixth, garbed in white, drove the sporty vehicle through town with the pedal on the floor and the siren wide open. “This takes me back,” one of them was heard to say. “This is the way it used to be before the wor
ld went soft in the belly. This is what you would call doing things with a little class.”

  The ambulance pulled up in front of a West Side tavern where the Moscow gang hung out. The ambulance tailgate burst open, and the five brave men and true emerged with submachine guns and commenced blasting away. Eight of Archie Moscow’s staunchest associates died in the fray, and only one of the boys from the ambulance crew was killed in return.

  Moscow retaliated the next day, shooting up two Beyer-operated card games, knocking off two small-time dope peddlers, and gunning down a Beyer lieutenant as he emerged from his bank at two-thirty in the afternoon. The gunman who accomplished this last feat then raced down an alleyway into the waiting arms of a rookie patrolman, who promptly shot him dead. The kid had been on the force only three months and was sure he would be up on departmental charges for forgetting to fire two warning shots into the air. Instead he got an on-the-spot promotion to detective junior grade.

  By the second week of the war, the pace began to slow down. Pillars of both mobs were beginning to realize that a state of war demanded wartime security measures. One could not wander about without a second thought as in times of peace. One could not visit a meeting or a nightclub or a gaming house or a girlfriend without posting a guard, or even several guards. In short, one had to be very careful.

  Even so, not everyone was careful enough. Muggsy Lopez turned up in the trunk of his car wearing a necktie of piano wire. Look-See Logan was found in his own kidney-shaped swimming pool with his hands and feet tied together and a few quarts of chlorinated water in his lungs. Benny Benedetto looked under the hood of his brand-new car, found a bomb wired to the ignition, removed it gingerly and dismantled it efficiently, and climbed behind the steering wheel clucking his tongue at the perfidy of his fellow man. But he completely missed the bomb wired to the gas pedal. It didn’t miss him; they picked him up with a mop.

  The newspapers screamed. The city fathers screamed. The police commissioner screamed. Finney and Mattera worked double-duty and tried to explain to their wives that this was war. Their wives screamed.

  It was war for three solid months. It blew hot and cold, and there would be rumors of high-level conferences, of face-to-face meets between Archer Moscow and Barry Beyer, cautious summit meetings held on neutral ground. Then, for a week, the killings would cease, and the word would go out that a truce had been called. Then someone would be gunned down or stabbed or blown to bits, and the war would start all over again.

  At the end of the third month there was supposed to be another truce in progress, but by now no one was taking truce talk too seriously. There had not been a known homicide in five days. The count now stood at eighty-three dead, several more wounded, five in jail, and two missing in action. The casualties were almost perfectly balanced between the two mobs. Forty of Beyer’s men were dead, forty-three Moscow men were in their graves, and each gang had one man missing.

  That night, as usual, Finney and Mattera prowled the uneasy streets in an unmarked squad car. Only this particular night was different. This night they caught the little man.

  Mattera was the one who spotted him. He noticed someone sitting in a car on Pickering Road, with the lights out and the motor running. His first thought was that it was high school kids necking, but there was only one person there, and the person seemed to be doing something, so Mattera slowed to a stop and killed the lights.

  The little man straightened up finally. He opened the car door, stepped out, and saw Finney and Mattera standing in front of him with drawn revolvers.

  “Oh, my,” said the little man.

  Finney moved past him, checked the car. “Cute job,” he said. “He’s got this little gun lashed to the steering column, and there’s a wire hooked around the trigger and connected to the gas pedal. You step on the gas and the gun goes off and gets you right in the chest. I read about a bit like that down in Texas. Very professional.”

  Mattera looked at the little man and shook his head. “Professional,” he said. “A little old guy with glasses. Who belongs to the car, friend?”

  “Ears Carradine,” said the little man.

  “One of Moscow’s boys,” Finney said. “You work for Barry Beyer, friend?”

  The little man’s jaw dropped. “Oh, goodness, no,” he said. His voice was high-pitched, reedy. “Oh, certainly not.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “Aberdeen Pharmaceutical Supply,” the little man said. “I’m a research chemist.”

  “You’re a what?”

  The little man took off his gloves and wrung them sadly in his hands. “Oh, this won’t do at all,” he said unhappily. “I suppose I’ll have to tell you everything now, won’t I?”

  Finney allowed that this sounded like a good idea. The little man suggested they sit in the squad car. They did, one on either side of him.

  “My name is Edward Fitch,” the little man said. “Of course, there’s no reason on earth why you should have heard of me, but you may recall my son. His name was Richard Fitch. I called him Dick, of course, because Rich Fitch would not have done at all. I’m sure you can appreciate that readily enough.”

  “Get to the point,” Mattera said.

  “Well,” said Mr. Fitch, “is his name familiar?”

  It wasn’t.

  “He killed himself in August,” Mr. Fitch said. “Hanged himself, you may recall, with the cord from his electric razor. I gave him that razor, actually. A birthday present, oh, several years ago.”

  “Now I remember,” Finney said.

  “I didn’t know at the time just why he had killed himself,” Mr. Fitch went on. “It seemed an odd thing to do. And then I learned that he had lost an inordinate amount of money gambling—”

  “Inordinate,” Finney said, choked with admiration.

  “Indeed,” said Mr. Fitch. “As much as five thousand dollars, if I’m not mistaken. He didn’t have the money. He was trying to raise it, but evidently the sum increased day by day. Interest, so to speak.”

  “So to speak,” echoed Finney.

  “He felt the situation was hopeless, which was inaccurate, but understandable in one so young, so he took his own life.” Mr. Fitch paused significantly. “The man to whom he owed the money,” he said, “and who was charging him appalling interest, and who had won the money in an unfair gambling match, was Thomas M. Carroll.”

  Finney’s jaw dropped. Mattera said, “You mean Lucky Tom—”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Fitch. For a moment he did not say anything more. Then, sheepishly, he raised his head and managed a tiny smile. “The more I learned about the man, the more I saw there were no legal means of bringing him to justice, and it became quite clear to me that I had to kill him. So I—”

  “You killed Lucky Tom Carroll.”

  “Yes, I—”

  “Six times. In the back of the head.”

  “I wanted to make it look like a professional killing,” Mr. Fitch said. “I felt it wouldn’t do to get caught.”

  “And then Beyer hit back the next night,” Finney said, “and from there on it was war.”

  “Well, not exactly. There are some things a man must do,” Mr. Fitch said. “They don’t seem to fit into the law, I know. But—but they do seem right, you see. After I’d killed Mr. Carroll I realized everyone would assume it had been a revenge killing. A gangland slaying, the papers called it. I thought how very nice it would be if the two gangs really grew mad at one another. I couldn’t kill them all myself, of course, but once things were set properly in motion—”

  “You just went on killing,” Mattera said.

  “Like a one-man army,” Finney said.

  “Not exactly,” said Mr. Fitch. “Of course I killed those three men on Cameron Street, and bombed that Mr. Spune’s car, but then I just permitted nature to take its course. Now and then things would quiet down and I had to take an active hand, yet I didn’t really do all that much of the killing.”

  “How much?”

  Mr. Fitch si
ghed.

  “How many did you kill, Mr. Fitch?”

  “Fifteen. I don’t really like killing, you know.”

  “If you liked it, you’d be pretty dangerous, Mr. Fitch. Fifteen?”

  “Tonight would have been the sixteenth,” Mr. Fitch said.

  For a while no one said anything. Finney lit a cigarette, gave one to Mattera, and offered one to Mr. Fitch. Mr. Fitch explained that he didn’t smoke. Finney started to say something and changed his mind.

  Mattera said, “Not to be nasty, Mr. Fitch, but just what were you looking to accomplish?”

  “I should think that’s patently obvious,” Mr. Fitch said gently. “I wanted to wipe out these criminal gangs, these mobs.”

  “Wipe them out,” Finney said.

  “You know, let them kill each other off.”

  “Kill each other off.” He nodded.

  “That’s correct.”

  “And you thought that would work, Mr. Fitch?”

  Mr. Fitch looked surprised. “But it is working, isn’t it?”

  “Uh—”

  “I’m reminded of the anarchists around the turn of the century,” said Mr. Fitch. “Of course, they were an unpleasant sort of men, but they had an interesting theory. They felt that if enough kings were assassinated, sooner or later no one would care to be king.”

  “That’s an interesting theory,” Finney said.

  “So they went about killing kings. There aren’t many kings these days,” Mr. Fitch said quietly. “When you think about it, there are rather few of them about. Oh, I’m certain there are other explanations, but still—”

  “I guess it’s something to think about,” Mattera said.

  “It is,” said Finney. “Mr. Fitch, what happens when you run through all the gangsters in town?”

  “I suppose I would go on to another town.”

  “Another town?”

  “I seem to have a calling for this sort of work,” Mr. Fitch said. “But that’s all over now, isn’t it? You’ve arrested me, and there will have to be a trial, of course. What do you suppose they’ll do to me?”