With my fingers stiffly extended and my palm pointing downward, I swung my hand in a slashing arc. The hard edge of my palm caught him squarely between the eyes with such force, I could feel the bone crunch. In a reflex action he squeezed the trigger and I thought I was dead.
My blow had jarred his head backward, though, causing him involuntarily to swing the muzzle forward. As the reverberations from the shot died away and I realized nothing had slammed into my stomach, relief flowed over me.
It was short-lived. I suddenly realized that the whole top of the driver’s head had disappeared. The car was careening down the street with a dead man at the wheel.
CHAPTER XXI
I HEAVED myself over the top of the front seat, knocking the dead driver sidewise, and grabbed the wheel in time to prevent the car from crashing head-on into a truck parked on the left side of the street. A moment later I was wondering if it might not have been better to allow the crash. We had been traveling at about twenty-five miles an hour. When I knocked the dead man sidewise, he fell prone on the seat with his foot jammed against the accelerator. We began to pick up speed.
Leaning awkwardly over the back of the seat with my feet planted on the rear floor, the only control I had over the car was the steering wheel. I couldn’t reach far enough to turn off the ignition.
I was conscious of my back-seat companion slumping motionless in the right corner, unable to help. From the crunch I had felt when I hit him between the eyes, I guessed that he was as dead as the driver and I was alone in the speeding car with two dead men.
We must have been doing forty when we sped across Third Street. I bore down on the horn and concentrated on trying to avoid sideswiping parked cars. At Second a semi-trailer hissed its air brakes barely in time to let us squeeze past at fifty-five miles an hour. We tooled across First at sixty-five to the accompaniment of my blaring horn and the squeal of the brakes of a taxicab which decided just in time not to argue for the right of way.
The Buick roared onto the dock area at seventy miles an hour. I let up on the horn to concentrate entirely on steering. It was about a hundred and fifty feet to the river edge, and I knew there was a ten-foot drop from the edge of the dock to the water below. I had no desire to hurtle off into twenty feet of water.
The dock area would have been wide enough to swing in a turn even at that speed if its surface had been smooth and it had been banked the right way. Unfortunately the approach was cobblestone and it slanted downward toward the river. When I attempted a wide right turn to keep the car from hurtling off into the river, I felt the right wheels begin to lift.
I tried to straighten out, but it was too late. I closed my eyes, jammed my feet against the rear seat and gripped the wheel hard for support as we started to roll over.
We made two complete rollovers, skidding along in a forward direction on our top for some fifty feet each time we turned upside down, which made a grinding noise on the cobblestones like a hundred washtubs being dragged along a cement alley. When the car finally ran out of steam, we were rightside-up a foot from the dock edge and more than a hundred and fifty feet from where we had entered the dock area.
When I realized that the car was motionless and I was still alive, I released my death grip on the wheel and sank back into the rear seat. I sat on the skinny man, who had been thrown clear over into my corner of the car.
All four doors had popped open and there wasn’t any glass in any of them. I climbed out on the side away from the river and carefully felt my bones. Aside from a considerable shaking up and a small cut on my right hand, I didn’t seem to be injured.
The engine had died, but I reached in the front seat to shut off the ignition. One headlight still burned, illuminating a thick iron mooring post we had missed crashing into by three feet. I noted that the windshield was shattered and that the rear window had popped out in one piece and lay unbroken just behind the car. The rear wheel on this side was broken and the front one was missing.
The top of the car was grooved in the center, having buckled slightly inward for its entire length. It was a miracle that sliding along the cobblestones hadn’t crushed it flat and made hamburger out of me. Only my rigid position across the top of the seat, with both my feet and hands braced to anchor me as firmly in place as though I had worn a safety belt, had saved my life, I decided.
There was the sound of a siren and a car with a blinking red light on its roof drove onto the dock area. When it pulled to a stop alongside the wrecked Buick, a uniformed officer got out either side.
Pulling out my wallet, I showed my badge and said, “Rudd of Vice, Gambling and Narcotics. This isn’t just an automobile accident. Put in a call for Homicide. You’ll need the coroner’s wagon, too. You can call an ambulance if you want to, but I think they’re both dead.”
One of the cops stepped back into the police car to use the radio. The other looked in the front seat, then climbed in back and shined a flashlight in the skinny man’s face.
Climbing out again, he called to his partner, “Never mind the ambulance. Just the coroner’s wagon.”
There isn’t any third watch in Homicide. When something concerning Homicide Division comes up after one in the morning, the call is taken in the Detective Bureau, which routes a homicide team out of bed. It was a half-hour before the team got there, and it turned out to be Bob Wynn and Hank Carter. Meantime a couple of more squad cars had arrived to hold back the crowd which inevitably gathers at an accident scene even in the middle of the night, the coroner’s wagon was standing by and the nearest physician had been called from bed to examine the bodies and make it official that they were dead. When he finished looking at the bodies, the doctor insisted on putting a handaid on my hand.
When I finished explaining to Wynn and Carter what had happened, Lieutenant Wynn asked, “You have any idea who sikked them on you?”
I did have, but I couldn’t tell him without admitting I had been dabbling in his case. I merely shrugged.
“Well, maybe Chicago can give us a lead,” the lieutenant said. “We’ll have some mugg shots taken at the morgue and get them and their fingerprints off to Chicago this morning. You were damn lucky, Rudd.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Lieutenant, one of them mentioned a skiff with some chains in it. Seemed they planned to take me for a boat ride.”
Wynn detailed four of the policemen at the scene to hunt for the skiff. They located it within minutes. It was tied to a piling beneath the dock just opposite the end of Vermont Avenue. The officer who found it signalled the find to the others with his flashlight. We all went over to lie on the end of the dock and peer underneath at it while the policeman held his light on it. It was a ten-foot wooden skiff with a set of oars in it. Several lengths of heavy chain and a spool of wire lay on its bottom. The sight made me feel a little queasy. I’m a good swimmer, but even Esther Williams couldn’t have stayed afloat with all that iron wired to her.
Wynn said, “That must be the one they mentioned. If they just flew in tonight, whoever hired them must have arranged for the boat. The damnfool didn’t even paint out the boat number, so it ought to be registered with the River Patrol. Maybe it will turn out to belong to whoever brought them to town.”
I thought this hardly likely. Pros such as the skinny man and the grinner would have specified that the boat be untraceable, even if that hadn’t occurred to their hirer. I stood up.
“You going to need me any more, Lieutenant?” I asked.
Climbing to his feet also, Wynn looked at his watch. “It’s almost four-thirty. No sense keeping you up the rest of the night. You can dictate a statement when you come on duty.”
One of the squad cars drove me home. I fished the shells out of the wastebasket, reloaded my gun, bolted the door and went back to bed.
When the alarm went off at seven-fifteen, I was so stiff I had trouble getting out of bed. A few bending exercises followed by a boiling-hot shower loosened me up some, but I still ached dully in every muscle. Even when you’
re lucky, rolling over in a car jars your body about like tumbling down a flight of stairs in a barrel.
Neither Captain Spangler nor Carl Lincoln had yet arrived when I checked into the squadroom at eight-fifteen. There was nothing in the message book for me. I logged out to the Homicide Division and went up to the third floor to make my statement concerning last night’s events.
A formal statement is always taken from a police officer involved in a killing, just as one is taken from a private citizen involved in a killing not his fault. Sometimes even an inquest is held, but in this situation, since the dead men undoubtedly would prove to have criminal records in Chicago and the circumstances were fairly clear-cut, the coroner would probably merely issue a certificate of “death by police officer in line of duty” in the case of the skinny man, and “death by accidental shooting” in the case of the driver of the car. These, along with my statement, would be retained permanently on file in case there was ever a kickback.
Being on the night watch, neither Wynn nor Hank Carter were in. But the day-watch boys told me that both the Buick and the skiff had been checked out. As I had suspected, both had been stolen, so they were dead ends. The Crime Lab had the sections of chain and the spool of wire to see if their origins could be traced.
When I got back to the squadroom, the captain was talking to Carl Lincoln. Both had heard of last night’s incident, and I had to explain all about it in detail. For the captain’s benefit I repeated that I had no idea who could have hired the killers.
I breathed a sigh of relief when Captain Spangler finally left us and went into his office. Since he didn’t order me to come along with him, I assumed that Joe Greco hadn’t complained to the commissioner that I was horning in on Homicide’s work.
Of course it was possible that the complaint simply hadn’t yet had time to be relayed down through channels.
I said to Carl, “What were you and the skipper talking about?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I was just telling him we were set to tag this pusher at one P.M. I wasn’t expounding my theory as to why these Chicago boys come so far and so fast to see you.”
I gave him the fishy eye.
“You can’t fool your Uncle Carl,” Lincoln said. “You know as well as I do that somebody’s pushing the panic button because you’re sticking your nose into the Whittier kill. I just got convinced that your little redhead is innocent. Suppose you move in with me and Joyce for a while, so I can keep an eye on you?”
“Thanks,” I growled at him. “But I won’t be caught flat-footed a second time.”
A stoolie Carl had been working with oozed into the squadroom at that moment. I left him talking to the man and went downstairs to see Sharon. She hadn’t heard from Max Fuller and knew nothing of any arrangements the lawyer might have made with Lieutenant Wynn and Dr. Quigley.
Upstairs again I found Carl alone.
“What’d your stoolie want?” I inquired.
“Some Puerto Rican is growing hemp in his back yard over in the Fifth Ward. We might as well let him harvest it and see where he markets it, huh?”
“Uh-huh. Got the address?”
“Of course. Shall we go take a look and see how close it is to harvest time?”
Over in the Fifth Ward we walked down an alley to where a back yard was enclosed by a high board fence. Through a knothole we examined a neat garden of weeds whose dried leaves would eventually become marijuana. We judged it would be ready for harvest in about a week.
“We can forget it for at least five days,” I decided. “Then put the place under around-the-clock surveillance.”
We seldom move in on hemp growers the moment we locate them. The weed will grow almost anywhere, so it’s almost impossible to keep people from growing it. We don’t try. When we locate a garden, we put the gardener under surveillance until he leads us to the wholesaler he sells to. Then we let the wholesaler lead us to his pushers. When we have the complete picture, we pounce all at once, but still leave the grower alone. Sometimes he leads us to several wholesalers before he wises up and decides to plow his garden under.
We try to be on hand when he starts plowing. His use-fullness to us over, we pull him in, too.
The rest of the morning we spent checking a few places which had formerly been reefer pads, just to see if they had tried to resume operations. About eleven-thirty we checked back in at headquarters to prepare for our close-in on pusher Amos Wood.
There was no note in the message book for me to report to Captain Spangler. Apparently no complaint from Joe Greco was going to filter down through channels.
CHAPTER XXII
OUR PREPARATIONS for our visit to Amos Wood’s restaurant weren’t very complicated. Carl made no advance preparations at all; I merely equipped myself with a pocket tape recorder.
The tape recorder we use is about the size of a package of cigarettes, yet will record a full half-hour of tape. The recorder itself goes in your lefthand pants pocket, the wire leads up under your shirt to a microphone strapped to your chest. The mike is flatter, but nearly as long and wide as the recorder. It’s sensitive enough to pick up a whisper across the room which can’t even be heard by human ears.
We always use a recorder when a volunteer is blowing the whistle on a pusher. It isn’t so much for evidence as for psychological use on the volunteer. Sometimes a volunteer has a change of heart after setting up a pusher, and decides not to testify in court. Letting him listen to a tape recording of the arrest, and threatening to put him on the stand anyway as a hostile witness, usually brings him around. If he cooperates, we don’t even use the tape in court, because it isn’t necessary. If he won’t cooperate, we do call him as a hostile witness, play the recording and ask him under oath to identify his own voice.
We don’t like to use a tape in court, though. The state courts have held phone-tap evidence inadmissable as a violation of the Fifth Amendment. We’ve been holding our breaths waiting for some smart lawyer to make a similar plea about the use of tape recordings, and have it upheld by the court.
It was about twenty after noon when we parked on North Seventh a few yards beyond Wood’s Restaurant. As Carl cut the ignition of our F car, I lifted the radio mike off its dash bracket and called in a code seven, which meant we would be out of service for lunch until we called in again.
The restaurant was a long, narrow place with a lunch counter running its full length and a single row of booths along the wall. Right across the street from Holden High School, it was jammed with students on their lunch hour. The management must have had a rule that the booths were reserved for adults, however, for only about half of them were full although all the counter stools were taken and kids were standing at the counter between the stools. No one but adults was in any of the booths.
A juke box was blaring so loud, I knew it would be impossible to use the tape recorder unless we managed to get it turned down. When we had seated ourselves in a booth near the rear and a waitress came over, I asked if she could tone it down.
“One of the kids would only go over and turn it up again,” she said. “They’ll start clearing out of here before long. Soon as they’re all gone, I’ll shut the blamed thing off entirely.”
We ordered a couple of plate lunches and decided to endure the din.
In addition to the waitress working the booths, there were two more working the counter and two male cooks on the grill and steam table. We could see an open door to a kitchen, but nobody seemed to be in it, for all the orders were coming from the grill and steam table. Presumably it was used only for food preparation and all serving was done out front.
As one of the cooks was only about twenty, I guessed that the other was Amos Wood. He was a big fat, bald-headed man of about fifty wearing a T-shirt, white ducks and a dirty apron.
We lingered over our lunch. By ten of one all the teen-agers had departed back to school, the counter was deserted and only a few people sat in booths. The juke box was still blaring. I motioned over our waitress.<
br />
“Couple more cups of coffee, please,” I said. “And can you tone down that noise box now?”
“I’ll do better than that, mister,” she said. “It’s beginning to scramble my brains, too.”
She went over and pulled the plug before going after our coffee.
Exactly at one Carl, who was facing the door, said quietly, “Here she comes.”
I didn’t turn around to check. I merely reached in my pocket, switched on the tape recorder and pushed the volume up high.
Penny Doyle’s slim figure moved past our booth to the rearmost counter stool, which put her only about eight feet away from us. She gave us a casual glance as she went by, but but there was no sign of recognition on her face.
When one of the counter waitresses approached her, I heard the girl say in a low voice, “Coffee, please And tell Amos I want to see him.”
The waitress set coffee before her, then walked down to the center of the counter where the grill was and said something to the bald fat man. He glanced toward Penny, smiled and waddled up the way to her.
As he leaned across the counter, Penny said distinctly, “Can I get ten weeds, Amos?”
The man frowned and threw a quick glance at our booth. I was raising a coffee cup to my lips and Carl was lighting a cigarette. Reassured, he said something in a voice I couldn’t hear and disappeared into the kitchen.
He was gone only about thirty seconds, then reappeared with a small brown paper bag such as candy is sold in. Penny laid a bill on the counter, picked up the bag and started toward the door. She hadn’t even touched her coffee. Amos Wood pocketed the bill.
Carl crushed out his cigarette and stood up. I stood up, too. Carl walked over to Penny, who had stopped to wait for him, and took the bag from her hand. I approached the counter and showed Wood my badge.
“What’s this?” he asked in a flustered voice.
“The end of the line for a few months at least,” I told him. “You’re under arrest for the illegal possession and illegal sale of marijuana cigarettes.”
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