Gallows in My Garden

by Deming, Richard

  With the wheels in motion, there was nothing to do but wait.

  “We. may as well grab something to eat,” Day suggested. “We got probably a half or three quarters of an hour now, and there’s no telling when we’ll get through questioning this girl.”

  But I had dined with Day in restaurants before, and somehow I always ended up with the check.

  “You go ahead,” I told him. “I want to run over to El Patio and check on my client. I’ll meet you back here in forty-five minutes.”

  We parted in front of police headquarters, Day turning left in the direction of one of the cheapest restaurants in town, and me turning right toward a cab stand on the corner. I went on by the cab stand, however, continued into the next block, and entered a quiet, clean looking restaurant.

  The restaurant had a public phone, and I used it to dial El Patio. I got hold of Fausta and satisfied myself that Grace was all right. I told her I probably would be held up all evening and to have Greene sleep across the doorway again.

  “I’ll be over in the morning,” I said.

  “This makes three days’ rent you owe me,” Fausta said. “When will you come to take me out?”

  “Most any night now,” I said noncommittally. “See you in the morning.”

  I found an empty booth, ordered dinner, and by the time I had finished a second cup of coffee, my forty-five minutes were nearly up.

  As I started to climb the steps at police headquarters, Chief of Police George Chester rushed out, followed by three uniformed cops.

  George Chester was a tremendous man. His shoulders were great slabs of beef, he wore size eighteen collars and size fourteen shoes. Conservatively I would have guessed his weight at three hundred, which was probably about eighty pounds more than he had carried when he made all-America left end in college nearly a quarter century before. Even a few years ago, when he was a major in my outfit during the war, most of his weight had been muscle. But in his late forties it was rapidly turning to fat.

  Since the war George Chester’s normal color had gradually become an unhealthy red, and in the July heat it approached purple. The last time I had seen him, I had noticed his slightly strained breathing and asked if his heart had been checked lately.

  “Don’t believe in doctors,” he had growled.

  Now, as he lumbered down the steps, I held up one hand. “Not in this heat, please, Chief. You’ll bust a blood vessel.”

  When he failed to slow down, I shifted sidewise to avoid being run over, and it was then I noticed that of the three cops with him, two carried riot guns and the third carried a carbine.

  “Can’t stop, Manny!” Chief Chester yelled as he ran across the sidewalk like a charging rhinoceros. When he had squeezed his three hundred pounds into the back seat of a squad car labeled Chief of Police, he called back through the window, “Look me up later.”

  The other three cops threw themselves into the car, the motor roared, and it shot away from the curb with its siren beginning to wail.

  I shrugged and started up the steps again just in time to be knocked down by another cop with a riot gun, who slammed through the door just as I reached it. Half sprawling and half kneeling, I scrambled out of the way as about a half-dozen uniforms rushed by. None of their wearers bothered to stop and inquire if the fall had broken any bones.

  As I climbed to my feet and brushed myself off, six or seven sirens began to scream. From the police-garage entrance a hundred yards away, squad car after squad car rolled, each adding its wail to the others as it reached the street.

  This time I approached the door cautiously, stepped aside as I pulled it open, and peered inside before entering. No one was in sight except Desk Sergeant Danny Blake and Lieutenant Hannegan, who was leaning over Blake and shaking his finger under the sergeant’s nose.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Somebody steal the jail?”

  Neither paid any attention to me. “You find him, and fast!” Hannegan yelled, at which Sergeant Blake, who was old enough to be Hannegan’s father, yelled back, “Yes, sir, Lieutenant! Where the hell am I supposed to look?”

  Hannegan swung to me. “Seen Day?” he snapped.

  “Not in the last half hour. He’s up the street eating.”

  At that moment the front door jerked open and Warren Day shot in like a scared rabbit.

  “Hannegan!” he yelled. “Quit dawdling! Grab a walkie-talkie and let’s go!”

  Hannegan disappeared down a corridor at a dead run.

  “Inspector,” Danny Blake said diffidently, “the Malone woman has skipped. I’m having all the stations checked.”

  The inspector glared at him, turned the glare on me, and said, “If you hadn’t held out so long, Moon, we’d have this case cracked.” Then he snapped at Blake, “How much of a start she got?”

  “Over an hour. According to Mrs. Lawson, she called a taxi right after Moon left, packed while it was coming, and took off without even giving notice.”

  “Fine,” Day said disgustedly. “A lot of good checking the stations will do. Probably she had the taxi drop her at the ferry and is across the river into Illinois by now. It will take an extradition order to get her back.” He eyed me glumly. “I suppose you want to tag along on this.”

  “How do I know?” I said. “Depends on where you’re going.”

  He examined me suspiciously, apparently decided I really didn’t know what was going on, and said, “Your two pals, Dude Garrity and Harry Sommerfield are holed up on Front Street. They decided to fight.”

  “I see,” I said, not really seeing at all. “I thought it was at least an atom bomb attack.” I looked at his impatient face puzzledly. “Since when does the chief of police personally go gunning for hoodlums?”

  “When they’re cop killers,” he said grimly. “They got Dinny O’Keefe and Myron Goldstein when they tried to blast their way out.”

  Now I understood perfectly. Cops don’t like killers in the first place, but the cardinal crime in any cop’s book is cop-killing. Once a hoodlum has that tag pinned on him, he might as well give up, for the search for him never dies until the killer dies, and the case is never transferred to the inactive file even though no trace of the cop killer is found for twenty years.

  Hannegan returned with the strap of a walkie-talkie strung over his shoulder. The moment he came into sight, Day ran toward the door. I nudged in ahead of Hannegan and followed.

  A prowl car containing a cop chauffeur idled its motor at the curb. When Day shot into the back seat, I shot in right next to him. Hannegan slipped his walkie-talkie to the floor at my feet and climbed in front next to the chauffeur.

  “Front and Locust,” Day snapped.

  “Too bad it wasn’t a block farther south,” I remarked as our siren opened up. “Why?”

  “Then you could have said, ‘Front and Center.’ “ Day eyed me glumly over his glasses. “Moon,” he said finally, “there’s only one reason I let you come along.” “Yes?”

  “Your gun-happy pals are barricaded on the top floor of a two-story tenement. They got a whole arsenal, including rifles and a Tommy gun.”

  “So?”

  “Somebody else is almost bound to get shot before we take them. Maybe it’ll be you.”

  As we roared across town Chief Chester’s voice on the car radio kept us informed of the situation. By number, prowl cars were being ordered in from all over the city and instructed to report to designated points. By following the directions we were able to figure out he was placing his men in a huge square, four blocks along each edge, around the besieged hide-out.

  Two blocks from Front and Locust we ran into a police barricade.

  “Sorry, sir,” a patrolman told Day. “Chief’s orders that no cars go beyond here.”

  We got out, and Hannegan retrieved his walkie-talkie, this time pushing upward the aerial wand until it waved six feet over his head. We left the driver with the car and proceeded another block on foot.

  Not a civilian was on the street, thoug
h we could see many faces peering at us from windows. There seemed to be no police on the street, either, but every doorway and alcove we passed contained at least one armed cop.

  “Listen,” I said as we neared the corner a block away from Front and Locust. “You sure you got the right address? We’re the only people out in the open.”

  “You heard the chief on the radio,” Day snapped. “It’s still more than a block away.”

  The last building before the corner contained a deep doorway, and in the doorway was another cop.

  “Step in here, sir,” he told Day. “They can see you from there.”

  At that moment a rifle bullet whanged against the cement sidewalk, ricocheted from the side of the building, and whirred off. It was still whirring when Day, Hannegan, and I smashed against our informant.

  The doorway was an entrance to an upstairs flat, and was deep enough to accommodate us all comfortably. When we had untangled ourselves, I took the position closest to the street.

  “Where are they?” I asked.

  The cop said, “Second building from the corner on the other side of the street.”

  Dropping full length, I peered out cautiously at ground level. By stretching the imagination, the second building could be construed as being at Front and Locust, for there were no other buildings between it and that intersection. Once there had been, as attested by three gaping foundations of buildings which had either been torn down or burned, but actually the gunmen’s hide-out was in the middle of the block. This side of it, between it and the corner building, stretched a long vacant lot. The hide-out itself seemed to be a four-family tenement and it was ideal for standing off a siege, for clear ground lay on all sides of it.

  “They’re on the roof now,” the policeman volunteered. “We got some tear gas up there, but they have masks. That hide-out was prepared for everything.”

  Directly across the street another cop crouched in an areaway listening to a walkie-talkie, and diagonally across two more policemen knelt on the sidewalk this side of the building. One of them was also equipped with a walkie-talkie.

  I pulled my head back and asked, “Anyone been in contact with them?”

  “The chief talked to them over a loud-speaker,” the cop whose doorway we shared said. “But all the answer he got was a submachine-gun volley. Guess they intend to go down shooting.”

  “There goes the Lawson case, then,” I told Day. “Unless you get someone in that building and take at least one of them alive.”

  “Want to volunteer?” Day asked sourly.

  “Not particularly.”

  The inspector switched on Hannegan’s instrument and said, “Chief Chester, sir?”

  I stood close to Day in time to hear a voice rasp back, “Yes?”

  “Inspector Day, sir. Any orders?”

  “Not at the moment. You know the situation?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Any suggestions?”

  Day hesitated a moment, glanced at me, then said, “These men are key witnesses in the Lawson case. Any chance of taking them alive?”

  “They don’t want to be alive,” Chester said. “They want to die like big shots, and they’re going to get their wish. I’m not risking any more lives on them.”

  “If we could get someone in the building—” the inspector suggested tentatively.

  “Want to volunteer?” the police chief barked.

  “Not particularly, sir.”

  George Chester’s voice rasped. “You wouldn’t suggest your men do anything you wouldn’t, would you?”

  Day took the receiver from his ear, glared at it ferociously, replaced it again, and said in a choked voice, “I’m ready any time you are, sir.” Then he stared at me over his glasses and added, “The suggestion came from Manny Moon. He’s here with me.”

  “He is? Let me talk to Manny.”

  I took the handset and said, “How are you, Chief?”

  “Terrible. What you think, Manny?”

  “I think you’re missing a bet if you bump these guys off. The inspector didn’t get a chance to finish, but we think we got the Lawson case figured out. But there’s no evidence, and damn little chance of finding any. At the moment it looks like our only chance of a conviction is to make one of these gunnies talk. I think you ought to try to get someone into the building.”

  “They’re cop killers,” the chief grumbled. “They don’t deserve a chance.”

  “You’re running the show,” I told him. “But three people have died in this Lawson affair, and another is hiding out to avoid becoming the fourth. Four people ought to get at least as much consideration as two cops.”

  For a moment there was silence. “All right, Manny,” he said suddenly. “How do you suggest we get inside?”

  I didn’t like the emphasis he put on the word “we.”

  “I’m just a civilian,” I said cautiously. “I’m not supposed to tell cops how to run their business.”

  “You used to be in the infantry. Look at it as a tactical problem. The building’s a strong point—“

  “You used to be in the infantry, too,” I interrupted. “And you were a major when I was a sergeant. Look at it as a tactical problem yourself.”

  “I am,” he said. “They’re both on the roof, we think. Now if we could get inside, we could come up on them from underneath. I figure a heavy covering fire would pin them down until we—“

  “Who is this ‘we’ you’re talking about?” I broke in.

  “You and me.”

  “I’m not a cop!” I hollered.

  “You suggested the operation,” he said. “If you want these guys alive, you’ll get in on it. I’m willing to take a chance along with you, but I’m certainly not going to order any of my men in there.” I could almost sense a shrug in his voice. “Of course, I can’t order you in, either. ‘I’ll try it alone. Let me talk to Day again.”

  I could feel my ears redden. “Damn you, Chester! Where are you?”

  “Southeast corner of Front and Locust. Behind the corner house. Where are you?”

  “A block from you, at the intersection north of them. Northwest corner.”

  “Let me talk to Day.”

  “Cut it out,” I said irritably. “I’ll go in with you. Let me work across the street to the house just north of theirs first, will you?”

  “Check. Good boy. Like old times, isn’t it?”

  I grunted.

  “Let us lay it down for half a minute, then make your run.”

  I said, “Check,” and handed the receiver to Hannegan.

  Stretched flat, I again poked out my head and viewed the situation. The besieged building had seemed about seventy-five yards away the first time I looked, but now there seemed to be about seventy-five miles between me and it. The roof was flat and ringed by a high edge which formed a protective wall for the gunmen. As I watched I saw a long slim wand of metal which pointed straight up sway gently in the breeze.

  Suddenly gunfire crashed from all directions at once, and the side of the building I was watching puffed tiny clouds of brick dust all along its face.

  I shouted to Day, “They’ve got a receiving set of some kind up there! They’ve been listening in!”

  I saw his lips form “What?” but the roar of battle was too deafening to hear above.

  “Never mind,” I yelled at him, rose to a crouch, took a deep breath, and started to run.

  For ten yards I ran straight at my goal, then started to zigzag. At the second zag something began to chip holes in the asphalt where my feet had been before I zigged. Above the roar of gunfire I couldn’t hear the weapon firing, but I could see flashes from a ground-floor window, and too many holes were appearing in the street for it to be anything but a Tommy gun.

  Fortunately Thompson submachine guns are not very accurate beyond fifty yards. I had started out at what I thought was full speed, but during the second half of the trip I am sure I doubled my rate.

  Diving between the two cops stationed beh
ind the corner building, I collapsed with my back to the wall and waited for the barrage to stop. It stopped almost at once, leaving a silence so profound, it almost hurt the ears.

  One of the cops had a handset to his ear. “Yes, sir,” he said. Then to me, “They’re starting again in one minute, and they’ll hold their fire to the roof and second floor so as not to hit you and the chief. The chief says both of you will take off for the front door a half-minute after the barrage starts.”

  “Tell him,” I said, “they got a receiver up there and are listening in on his instructions. Also at least one of them isn’t on the roof. He’s on the ground floor with a Tommy gun.”

  “Huh?” the cop said, and stared at me blankly.

  “Tell him to hold the barrage,” I yelled at him.

  “Huh? Listen—”

  Jumping to my feet, I grabbed the handset from him. “Chief—” I got out, but the rest was drowned by an ear-shattering burst of fire.

  I slammed the handset into the cop’s stomach and he said, “Oof!”

  I felt like following it with my fist, for in thirty seconds big George Chester would be heading for the front entrance of the besieged building. And inside, waiting for him to come through the door, sat a killer with a submachine gun.

  XXIII

  FOR A MOMENT I HESITATED between three possible courses of action. I could head for the hide-out’s front door as planned, I could reverse direction, cut around the back of the building now shielding me and hope to find some way of entering the rear of the hide-out, or I could forget the whole thing and simply stand by while George Chester got himself killed.

  The first alternative meant a fifty-yard dash through machine-gun fire. The second meant a slightly longer dash over broken, weed-grown ground which would make for much slower traveling than the smooth sidewalk in front. It also meant running directly under the nose of the rifleman on the roof, since I assumed he would be stationed at the rear of the building as long as his partner covered the front. The third alternative meant I might live longer, but I still had to live with myself.