Edge of the Law

by Deming, Richard

  Rising to his feet, Sands took a deep breath. He drew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. Then he moodily examined the two bodies.

  After a few moments of thought he picked up the gun Nick had dropped, using the handkerchief, slightly lifted the plump man’s body and slid the gun back in its shoulder holster. Wiping his prints from Ault’s automatic, he leaned over the dead killer and wrapped the fingers of his right hand around the butt. Carefully he ran the handkerchief over the protruding haft of the knife. Lifting the right hand of the man lying across Ault’s body, he clasped the dead fingers around the knife hilt, then lay the hand at his side again.

  If they ever discovered the bodies in this remote spot, the police would have a ball, he thought, surveying his handiwork sardonically. He didn’t envy the detectives whose job it would be to backtrack on the lives of the dead and try to figure out their motives for murdering each other.

  Fishing his own gun from Nick’s side pocket, he thrust it into its holster. Then he climbed under the wheel of the car.

  He drove back to town with his handkerchief wrapped around the rim of the wheel, so as to preserve Nick’s fingerprints on it. The rear parking lot of the Kit Kat Inn was deserted when he drove onto it, but the light over the back door still brightly illuminated it.

  He left the car there for Sam Durkin to explain.

  He walked three blocks before spotting a cruising cab. Hailing it, he had the cabbie drive him to the Hotel Centner. It felt good to be able to walk in the front door for a change.

  It was four thirty A.M. when he keyed open the door to Bridget’s apartment. As usual, a single lamp burned in the front room.

  Despite the hour and the nerve-draining ordeal he had been through, the night’s events had keyed him beyond any desire for sleep. He looked forward only to the comfort of slipping into Bridget’s arms. Pleasurable anticipation made him start peeling off his coat as he crossed the room to the bedroom door.

  He came to an abrupt halt in the doorway, then slowly pulled his coat back on.

  By the reflected light from the front room he could see that there were two people in Bridget’s bed.

  When he flicked on the overhead light, Bridget and Ginny sat up with simultaneous gasps of surprise. Bridget was decorously clad in a flannel nightgown. Ginny wore red pajamas.

  In unison the two girls bounced from opposite sides of the bed. Both ran toward him, Bridget getting there first.

  Flinging her arms about his neck, she said, “Oh, Jud! You’re safe!”

  Across her shoulder he looked at Ginny, who was gazing at him with brimming eyes.

  “I disobeyed,” Ginny said. “I phoned Bridget as soon as I got home. When she said she expected you here as soon as you—as soon as whatever you had to do was over, I asked if I could come and wait too. Neither of us could stand the idea of waiting for news all alone.”

  Sands gave the bed a rueful glance. Freeing himself from Bridget’s clasp, he walked back into the front room. Trailing after him, the two women found him eyeing the sofa with a scowl.

  A slow blush diffused upward over Bridget’s face. Ginny’s eyes narrowed and she glanced at Bridget with the faintest trace of hostility.

  “I hope I haven’t interfered in anyone’s plans,” she said a little acidly.

  Bridget said diplomatically, “What happened after you sent Ginny off, Jud?”

  “I found out who tossed the bomb. He’s in jail and I’m in the clear.”

  Both women’s faces started to light with joy. Sands dashed the emotion by adding, “It was Jack Carroll.”

  Bridget looked shocked. Ginny turned paper white. She sank into a chair.

  “He wanted you, Ginny,” Sands told her. “He’s in love with you.”

  “I know,” she said in a barely audible whisper. “I—I thought of him one night. The night he told me he was, even before Harry’s funeral. But I didn’t want to believe it, so I refused to think of it again.” She gazed at Sands beseechingly. “You don’t think I led him on, do you? I swear I never meant to. I never acted more than just friendly to him.”

  “He seemed to read something in your look, Ginny. Were you in love with him?”

  “Never!” she said vehemently. “The only man I’ve ever really loved—” She cut herself off and flushed a dull red.

  Sands said gently, “He seemed to think you’d turn to him if Harry was out of the way, Ginny. But he couldn’t have been certain of you. or he wouldn’t have tried to eliminate me as a possible rival at the same time. Don’t let your conscience bother you. People who commit crimes like this one have to be a little nuts. He probably imagined love in your eyes every time you smiled at him.”

  Nobody said anything for a few moments. Ginny started to cry quietly. Rising, she disappeared into the bedroom.

  With a glance at the bedroom door, Bridget said in a low voice, “I’m sorry, Jud. I was so worried about you, I never thought of—I really needed her moral support. And she needed mine.”

  “Forget it,” he said.

  “How did you get away from Henny Ault?”

  “He and his partner won’t bother me any more,” Sands said vaguely. “The only problem I have left is Mark Fallon. And I’ve decided how to solve that.”

  “How, Jud?”

  “I’m going back to Miami.”

  Bridget’s eyes widened. “Won’t he have you killed?”

  “He won’t know I’m coming. I’m going to do the stalking for a change.”

  “You mean to kill him?” she asked in a whisper.

  “If I don’t, he’ll keep sending guns after me until one succeeds. It’d be self-defense even if I shot him in his sleep.”

  Bridget stared at him. “Could you kill a man like that?”

  “Probably not,” he admitted. “I’ll probably work out some way to give him an even break. But don’t try to talk me out of it. As long as Mark Fallon is alive, I’ll be hunted everywhere I go. And I never intend to run another step.”

  She said quietly, “I won’t offer any advice, Jud. But when it’s over, will you come back to me?”

  “Sure,” he said. “You’d better go soothe Ginny now. I need some sleep. I want to catch a morning bus.”

  Later, lying fully clothed on the sofa, he had a vagrant thought. Remembering Ginny’s “The only man I’ve ever really loved—” he suspected that before he caught his bus, she would ask if he was coming back to her.

  Just before he fell asleep, he wondered if it wouldn’t simplify matters if he lost his duel with Mark Fallon.

  THE END

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  Death of a Pusher

  CHAPTER 1

  The kid’s name was Herman Joyce. He was twenty-one but could have passed for eighteen. With his lank blond hair cut in a ducktail, his black leather jacket and shapeless slacks, he looked like a typical street-corner punk. It was a good disguise. By the way other cops passing in and out of the squadroom left us strictly alone, it was obvious they assumed we were questioning a suspect.

  Actually, Herman Joyce was a rookie cop we had borrowed from Metro for a little undercover work.

  “You’re sure he’s not suspicious?” I asked him.

  He gave me a youthful grin. “Why should he be? Two different junkies gave me character references.”

  Carl Lincoln said, “Don’t get overconfident, Hermie. Benny Polacek is no dunce.”

  “He’ll show,” Joyce said. “I’m to be in the alley next to the Adams Furniture Store at nine P.M. That gives you three hours to get a camera set up.”

  “That’s down in my old part of town,” I said, frowning. “He picked a fine spot. There’s a warehouse across the street with no windows in front and there’s a blank wall on the opposite side of the alley. What do you mean, he’s not suspicious? He wouldn’t go to all that trouble to make a single sale if he didn’t smell some kind of rat.”

  “He’s just careful,” Joyce said. “My junkie pals tell me he alway
s sets it up like that when he makes the first pass. Once he’s thoroughly satisfied with a new customer and the guy has become a regular, he can walk right into Polacek’s apartment and get a pop. But for the initial sale he always picks a spot hard to cover by camera and he checks all along both sides of the street for stakeouts before he’ll move in.”

  “That’s because he’s a three-time loser,” Carl said. “He can’t afford another fall. But he has to keep dredging up new clients when the old ones commit suicide, or get shot trying to pull jobs to feed their monkeys, or get committed to the loony bin. Poor guy. My heart bleeds for the sonovabitch.”

  “We’ll have to leave the way in wide open,” I said. “We can’t have cops lurking in doorways if he’s going to be watching. And I don’t know where we can set up a camera in that spot.”

  “So we’ll use the panel truck,” Carl said.

  I gave him a disgusted look. “On a pro like Benny Polacek? He took his first fall as a result of film evidence from a panel truck. With a truck in sight, he wouldn’t sell a pop to his poor old mother.”

  Carl said, “Well, suppose we run down that way and case the lay.”

  We didn’t take Herman Joyce with us. We sent him back to the South Side poolroom where he had been hanging out for the past two weeks, making friends with junkies and periodically acting as though he too had a monkey on his back. I told him not to try to contact us again but just to show up in the alley at the appointed time. I assured him he didn’t have to worry about us not being there.

  The Adams Furniture Store was on Nevins Street in the heart of the Polish section. As I had recalled, the warehouse across the street didn’t have a single window along its front, and the side wall of the building across the alley was equally blank. There were some second-floor windows overlooking the alley from the furniture store, but they were too high up. A camera aimed down at that angle would get only the tops of heads, and if Polacek wore a hat, his face would never appear in camera range.

  A number of cardboard cartons piled next to the furniture store in the alley gave us the idea. None were big enough to conceal a man, but we figured the addition of a larger one wouldn’t be likely to attract attention. I knew the store owner, whose name had been Adamski before he shortened it to Adams, and who was a fellow member of the South Side Polish Club. The store had closed at six, so I called him at home from a pay booth. He came down, opened up the store, and let us choose a carton from the supply in his basement. We took one that a refrigerator had been shipped in.

  By eight P.M. we were all set. Adamski loaned us some packaging tape to seal the top of the refrigerator carton shut; we cut one side of it down the center and along the top and bottom edges to form a sort of double swinging door. Carl picked out a small but substantial carton strong enough to bear his weight and seated his lanky frame on it inside the bigger carton. He cut a hole at eye level for the camera and another, larger one low down between his feet. The latter was for the battery-powered infrared lamp we used to take night moving pictures when we didn’t want suspects to know they were being filmed.

  We unscrewed the bulbs in the green-shaded lamps over the rear doors of both buildings, so that the only light filtering into the alley came from a street lamp in front of the warehouse across the street. Carl had objected to unscrewing the bulbs on the grounds that finding them unlit might make Polacek suspicious. But I figured the pusher had probably cased the place in the daytime and wouldn’t realize later that they were supposed to be on. And, in the event he decided to check the rears of the two buildings, I wanted it to be too dark back there for him to be able to see me.

  I took up a position behind the furniture store and waited.

  Waiting is a necessary part of police work, but that doesn’t make me like it any better. For most of an hour I shifted from foot to foot, hungering for a cigarette. My only consolation was knowing that Carl was finding the wait even more tedious. It was a fairly warm June night, and that closed carton must have been a sweatbox.

  At ten to nine I heard footsteps enter the alley, and there was a low whistle. Peering around the corner, I saw the dim form of rookie Herman Joyce silhouetted at the alley mouth. When I gave an equally low answering whistle, he leaned his back against the brick wall on the opposite side of the alley and waited.

  Exactly at nine there was the sound of a car parking in front of the furniture store. A car door slammed, then I heard footsteps going away. For a moment I was puzzled, then I remembered what Joyce had said about Polacek’s precautions about checking for possible police stakeouts before moving in for the contact.

  He must have looked into every possible place of concealment on both sides of the street, for several minutes passed before I heard the footsteps enter the alley. There was a low mutter of voices. I waited, not even risking a look, until Joyce’s voice said loudly, “I guess this will hold me until next time, Benny.”

  At this prearranged signal I stepped from behind the building and closed in fast. Benny Polacek tried to make a break, stumbled, and fell flat on his face when Herman Joyce thrust out a foot and tripped him. Moments later I had jerked the pusher to his feet and had his hands cuffed behind him.

  Polacek yelled, “Cops!”—and the car waiting in front took off like a Polaris missile.

  We hadn’t expected Polacek to arrive with a chauffeur, because he usually worked alone. Young Joyce ran to the alley mouth, but I heard the squeal of tires around a corner before Joyce reached the sidewalk, and I knew he hadn’t been able to get even a glimpse of it.

  As Joyce returned from one direction and Carl, camera in hand, came over from the other, Benny Polacek peered at me in the dim light.

  “Matt Rudd,” he said bitterly. “I walk into it for a lousy three-dollar-and-a-half pop.”

  I looked him up and down. Benny Polacek was a chunkily built man of about thirty-five, not unhandsome in a swarthy sort of way.

  I said, “Three-fifty tonight, but you figured on draining him of thirty to fifty a week if he became a regular customer, didn’t you, Benny?”

  The pusher glowered at Joyce. “What do you get out of this, stoolie?”

  If Polacek still didn’t realize he had been dealing with an undercover cop, I saw no point in disillusioning him. We might want to use the rookie again sometime.

  “He gets off the hook for another rap,” I said, turning to Joyce. “Take off, punk.”

  Carl held out his hand and said, “First, we’ll have that evidence.”

  Joyce handed him a small folded paper such as sleeping powders used to come in. After dropping it into a manila envelope and sealing the flap, Carl held the envelope against the brick wall and initialed it. Then he handed his pen to Joyce, who also initialed it.

  Meanwhile, I shook down the suspect and removed three one-dollar bills and a half dollar from his side pants pocket. We all moved out to the sidewalk where there was more light, and I had Joyce examine the money. His initials were on the bills in ink, and the half dollar was marked with red fingernail polish.

  Carl put the money into another envelope, and he and Joyce initialed it also.

  “Now you can take off,” Carl said to the rookie. “Just be around when we need you.”

  “Yes, sir,” Joyce said, and hurried off up the street.

  Carl said, “Who was your driver tonight, Benny?”

  “Baldy Mason,” Polacek snarled at him.

  William (Baldy) Mason is our police commissioner.

  “You’re hilarious,” I said. “Let’s go downtown so you can regale the booking sergeant.”

  At headquarters Polacek was a little surprised when we took him straight to the felony section instead of first questioning him in the squadroom. I thought it might do him good to mull over the reason for this departure from routine procedure.

  “We don’t need to ask you anything, Benny. This is your fourth fall, so you’re cooked. This time you get stashed away for life.”

  He licked his lips. “I want to call my lawyer
.”

  “Tomorrow, maybe. Tonight we’d rather have you muse upon your sins without benefit of legal advice.”

  “I know my rights, Sergeant. I’m entitled to counsel.”

  “We know ours, too,” I informed him. “We can hold you twenty-four hours on suspicion before we lodge a formal charge, and we don’t have to let you phone anybody until the charge is lodged.” I turned to the desk sergeant. “For the moment he’s in on an open charge. Got an isolated cell where he can’t converse with the other prisoners?”

  “Sure. O.K., mister. Take off your clothes.”

  The men’s felony section is in the basement, and there isn’t any danger of any women wandering in, because you have to be admitted through a barred door even to get to the booking desk. Polacek stripped right in front of the desk. His personal possessions, except for cigarettes and a lighter, were listed on a property sheet, which he signed, then were sealed in a large manila envelope with a copy of the list stapled to it. Then he was led off to the shower, which is mandatory for every newly admitted prisoner even if he is arrested as he steps out of a bathtub. When he got out of the shower his clothing, except for his belt, would be handed back to him.

  As he was led off, I called, “We’ll be back to see you tomorrow afternoon, Benny.”

  Upstairs in the squadroom we found Herman Joyce waiting for us.

  “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “He’s in the can,” I said. “You did a good job, kid. Tomorrow morning you can get a haircut and report back to Metro. I’ll phone your skipper and suggest you deserve a couple of days off.”

  “Gee thanks, Sarge,” he said. “You ever need me again, just yell.”

  “Don’t worry, we will,” I told him.

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