The sweep hand of my wrist watch told me the barrage had been underway fifteen seconds. Instead of waiting for the full thirty to pass, I turned and raced to the rear of the building. As I rounded the edge, I glanced back out of the corner of my eye just long enough to catch a glimpse of the cop with the walkie-talkie. He was shouting something impossible to hear over the roar of submachine guns, carbines, and riot guns, and pointing in the direction Chief Chester had told me to go.
I didn’t bother to zigzag, hoping that since the besieged killers expected us both from the front thirty seconds after the barrage started, my early start and shift of direction might catch them off guard. The fifty yards from the rear of my building to the rear of the other seemed like fifty leagues. But even though handicapped by a false leg and with knee-high weeds clutching at my trousers and holding me back as though I were wading through water, I am sure I broke world records for the fifty-yard dash with that sprint.
The first-floor window sills were about shoulder-high from the ground, and the corner window facing me was raised from the bottom. As I neared it, I leaped into the air with both my legs and arms stretched out straight toward the side of the building.
The soles of my feet smacked the side of the building three feet off the ground, my knees bent, and my fingers clamped over the sill. I snapped my knees straight again, simultaneously pulled on the sill with all my strength, and literally hurtled into the room. I slid on my stomach across linoleum clear to the far wall.
I was in a kitchen, a fact I discovered by banging my head on a sink as I scrambled erect. At the same time I jerked Mouldy Greene’s .45 from under my arm and swung it at something cowering beneath the kitchen table.
The something proved to be a dumpy and very scared middle-aged woman in a dirty house dress. There was no point in trying to say anything to her, for inside the building the noise was nearly as deafening as outside. And to it was added the crack of bullets smashing into the upper story and the screaming whine of ricochets.
Assuming that Dude Garrity and Harry the Horse had occupied only one of the four flats before converting the whole building into a fortress, the thought flashed through my mind that perhaps a number of innocent persons might be caught in the other flats. But I had enough to think about without worrying about the safety of innocent bystanders.
On tiptoe I slipped out into the hallway. Why on tiptoe, I don’t know, for no one could have heard me above the racket even had I danced out wearing cymbals and castanets. I sidled along the hall with the .45 thrust searchingly in front of me.
The muzzle flashes I had seen placed the Tommy gun in the front room of the apartment I was in now. The hallway ran clear from the front room to a glass-paned door beyond the kitchen, and through the glass I could see this door led to a communal inside hallway, with stairs going both up to the second floor and down to the basement. Aside from the front room and kitchen, the flat seemed to contain only two more rooms and a bath, all situated on the right side of the hallway.
I slipped past the open dining-room door after a quick glance within, past the bath and bedroom, then flattened myself against the wall outside the front-room door, which was shut.
I was not waiting for anything in particular—certainly not for a noise of some kind in the front room, for I couldn’t have heard the Philharmonic playing the Anvil Chorus. I think I must have been waiting for my mind to crack and leave me crazy enough to push open the door and face a spitting machine gun.
A rhyme I had used as a kid when screwing up courage to dive into cold water popped into my mind. Aloud I said, “One-two-three, the bumblebee. The rooster crows, and away she goes!”
As I hit the last word, there was an instantaneous pause in the firing, and before it resumed at full blast, I boomed out, “—goes!” into dead silence.
At the same instant I twisted the doorknob and slammed open the door.
If it had not been for my little courage-gaining rhyme, I would have caught my quarry with his back turned to me. He was just starting to spin away from facing the front door as I swung my gun up.
My intention had been to use my gun as a club, or else place a bullet in a nonvital spot in order to take my quarry alive, but when his weapon began to chatter, I forgot everything but self-defense.
The Tommy gun was cradled against his left hip, and apparently he had been firing it with one hand, for his right was in a sling.
It seemed to take me forever to center my pistol and press the trigger, for I remember thinking the process through step by step, as though practicing on a pistol range: Wait till your gun steadies—A miss is worse than no shot—Inhale—Hold it—Squeeze, don’t pull!
Actually it must have been one of the fastest snap shots I ever got off, for Harry the Horse began to trigger his Tommy gun the same moment he began to spin. At eight-foot range, you don’t have to bother much about aiming a Tommy gun.
I fired after his burst started, and the burst continued for an instant or two after I fired. But the slugs he got off while I was squeezing (not pulling) the trigger, hit the wall three feet to one side. The remainder climbed the wall and squirted across the ceiling as he toppled over on his back with a hole in his forehead.
I didn’t see the hole. I didn’t have to. I was so sure of that shot, I started racing for the rear stairs as soon as the gun kicked in my hand.
At the second floor I reduced my speed to a cautious wriggling on my stomach, since lead was screaming through every window at this level. The stairhead brought me into another communal hall, except this one was shared by the two second-floor flats. At its far end I could see another set of stairs for the use of the second upstairs flat.
Directly in front of me was another glass-windowed door, but only slivers of glass remained in the shattered French panes. I wondered fleetingly if this had been the apartment rented by the two gunmen, and hoped that if it had not been, the tenants had been smart enough to run for the basement before the shooting started.
Halfway down the communal hall was a steep stairway leading to an open trap door in the roof. It was little more than a permanently fixed stepladder.
Slowly I began to wriggle toward it, but just as I reached it, something smashed a hole in the third rung over my head, splashing splinters in my face. I spread flat again and tried to dig a dent in the floor with my chin.
All at once the firing began to diminish, then trickled off to a few scattered final shots. The silence became so complete, I was conscious of the noise made by my breathing.
Jumping erect, I scurried up the ladderlike stairs to the roof without bothering to recite rhymes first. I shot through the trap door like a jack-in-the-box, landed spraddle-legged on graveled tar paper and made two complete spins before I would believe I had the roof all to myself.
In the center of the roof stood the portable short-wave radio whose aerial I had seen from the street. It was on, but emitting only static. Brick chimneys thrust upward about five feet in from the edge of the roof on either side of the house. I circled these warily, but Dude Garrity was nowhere in evidence.
Just as I started back toward the trap door, I heard someone climbing the ladder and I faded behind one of the chimneys.
My gun centered on the section of atmosphere where I judged the climber’s head would appear, but I let the muzzle droop when a little girl about ten years old stumbled out on the roof. She was a cute little blonde in a sunsuit and bare feet, and tears of fright were streaming from her eyes. One side of her face was the flaming red that only comes from a solid slap, and both her upper arms showed finger bruises.
Pushing her from behind came Dude Garrity, a rifle at trail position in his right hand. His straw hat was missing, but he still wore his white suit and it was filthy with tar from the roof.
The girl blocked my aim until Garrity got clear of the stairs, and then he immediately grabbed her by the upper arm and jerked her spine against his stomach. At ten-foot range I undoubtedly could have placed a slug through Dude’s sh
oulder without endangering his companion. But I would have hated to make a mistake and add a ten-year-old kid to the small list of corpses St. Peter is some day going to make me explain, and I was afraid to take the chance. Instead I drew back my head and tried to make myself look like part of the chimney.
Garrity’s rifle butt scraped the other side of the chimney as he went by. I shifted around to the side nearest the trap door and watched as he forced the little girl toward the roof edge overlooking the street. As he neared it, he went into a crouch, and six feet away he dropped to his knees, forcing the girl to hers also.
“The gravel is hot,” the kid said in a shaky voice, and began to sob.
“Shut up!” he snarled.
His arm was across her back, and his fingers dug savagely into her shoulder, holding her rigidly against his side.
“Hey, cops!” he yelled.
After a few moments a loud-speaker boomed, “Who is speaking?”
“Garrity!” shouted the gunman. “You got my pal with a stray shot.”
Apparently he had found Harry and assumed the bullet in his head had come through the window. I was just beginning to crawl toward his back, with the intention of bringing my gun down on his head, when he spoke again.
“I got a ten-year-old kid with me! You hear me, cops?”
“We hear you,” boomed the loud-speaker. “Better give up, Garrity.”
The gunman laid down his rifle, rose to a crouch, and pushed the girl ahead of him to the roof edge. Her head just showed above it.
“Take a good look at this kid, cops!” Dude yelled. “I’m walking out of here, and the kid with me. My gun will be in her side, and the first wrong move anyone makes—she gets it!”
Now I was halfway to the rifle lying behind Garrity on the graveled tar paper.
“Better give up, Garrity,” said the loud-speaker. “You’ll never make it out of this trap.”
At that moment the short-wave radio on the roof sounded off. “Stall him along,” came Warren Day’s voice. “Moon’s in there somewhere.”
Dude Garrity whirled, and at the same moment I stopped creeping and started charging. Without releasing his grip on the girl, he shot his right hand under his arm.
I reached him just as his hammerless revolver appeared. Before he could swing the muzzle to bear on me, the barrel of my automatic cracked the back of his hand, and his gun skittered across the roof.
Dude swept his left arm forward, flinging the little girl head first into my stomach. We went down in a tangle, and by the time I pushed her out of my lap and rolled clear, Dude had the rifle and was swinging the muzzle toward me.
Possibly there are pistol shots who can place a bullet exactly where they want it while performing gymnastics, but I don’t happen to be one of them. In the back of my mind was the intention to shoot Garrity through the arm and make him drop his rifle, but as I rolled away from the child, his form was nothing to me but a large blur.
I pressed the trigger of my automatic before I stopped rolling, firing blindly at the blur. A fraction of a second later the rifle cracked, and a small hole appeared in the tar paper between me and the child.
Dude Garrity bent over slowly, then just as slowly began to straighten again. A red stain appeared in the center of his dirty white coat. His long, horsy face set in concentration as he forced the drooping rifle barrel up. Now I was seated, and could choose my target with more discrimination. I put a second slug through his right shoulder, and he spun completely around, dropped the rifle, and sat down with a thump.
He stared at me from eyes vacant with shock. His mouth drooped open, and red froth bubbled from one corner. Getting to my feet, I stood over him.
“Who hired you to bump Vance Logan, Dude?”
One hand supported him in his seated position, while the other lay limply in his lap. His voice was one wheeze ahead of a death rattle when he spoke.
“You’re a bright boy, chum. Figure it out.”
Then he died sitting up.
I turned to the little girl, who had stood up and was lifting first one bare foot and then the other from the hot roof. She was sobbing steadily.
“Take it easy, honey,” I said. “He can’t hurt you any more.” Then I raised my voice and yelled, “Hey, cops!”
“Better give up!” boomed back the loud-speaker.
“It’s Moon!” I yelled. “Come on in and sort out the bodies.”
XXIV
INSTEAD OF ASKING if I was all right, the first words the inspector spoke to me were, “The idea was to take at least one of them alive! I ought to book you for destroying evidence.”
“I would have taken Garrity alive if you hadn’t shot off your face into that walkie-talkie,” I snapped back at him.
The little girl turned out to be named Janet Mueller, and she was the daughter of the woman I had seen hiding under the kitchen table downstairs. The other tenants, two married couples and a total of seven children, we eventually found cowering in the coalbin.
The upper right-hand flat proved to be the gunmen’s hide-out. I went through it with Warren Day, and I have never seen so much armament outside of a government arsenal. Including the guns they had been using, the pair had possessed twelve pistols, two rifles, three carbines, a submachine gun, and a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. It took three cops just to carry out the ammunition. We also found gas masks and another short-wave radio.
It was at this point I remembered George Chester.
“He’s at the hospital,” Day said. “Had a slight heart attack just before the last barrage started.”
Hannegan stuck his head in the door, and the inspector asked, “You phone the hospital?”
“Yes, sir,” Hannegan said. “He’s okay, but he’s staying overnight.”
Then I started to get mad. “The only reason I came in this hole was to keep the chief out of trouble,” I yelled. “And all the time he was enjoying himself a heart attack!”
“Take it easy,” Day told me. “There are some rewards on these guys, and I’ll see that you get half.”
“And I,” I informed him, “will see that I get the other half.”
We were getting ready to leave when the morgue wagon arrived. As attendants were hauling two long wicker baskets from its rear door, I walked into the lower front room for a final look at Harry Sommerfield.
He no longer looked tough. He seemed smaller, somehow, curiously shrunken, as though even in death he was cowering from his hunters. The barrel of the Tommy gun lay across his left leg, and his bandaged right arm had slipped from its sling and thrust out from his body in a stiff right angle. I noted the tightly wound gauze ran from his shoulder to a point midway between his elbow and wrist, and seemed to cover a splint which held the arm at a rigid right angle, an observation which led me to the conclusion my shot during our previous gun fight had broken the bone.
Then two men came into the room and casually dumped his body into a wicker basket.
It was nearly nine and the sun was beginning to set when we got back to headquarters. Warren Day collapsed behind his desk, looked at Hannegan as though surprised to see him still with us, and said, “Go on home, Lieutenant.”
But as Hannegan turned to leave, Day changed his mind. “Find out what developments there are on the Malone woman first.”
In a few minutes Hannegan was back with a report that Kate’s taxi had been traced, and as the inspector had guessed, she had taken the ferry. Illinois police had been asked to pick her up, but so far had reported nothing.
“All right, Lieutenant,” Day said tiredly. “Now you can go home.”
He sat looking at me glumly for a few moments after Hannegan departed. “Looks like all we got left is the suicide note,” he said finally. “Give the professor a ring.”
In the phone book I found Professor Quisby’s number and dialed it. A woman answered.
“Professor Quisby, please,” I said.
“I’m sorry, but he’s out for the evening. Is this Mr. Moon?”
“I’m Professor Quisby’s sister,” she said. “He expected you to call earlier. He had a faculty meeting at eight-thirty. He asked you to leave a number and he’ll phone in the morning.”
I gave her my apartment phone number.
After I hung up, the inspector and I employed a few minutes examining each other discouragedly.
“I don’t understand you,” he said suddenly. “You know how to shoot. Why’d you have to knock both those guys off?”
“It happened too fast,” I said shortly.
“But you managed to put a bullet in Garrity’s arm. Couldn’t you leave it at that?”
“That was the second one,” I said. “The first one did the damage.”
“You should have put the first one there,” he said insistently. “Apparently you know how, because Sommerfield had a bullet in his arm, too, from your first encounter.”
“Next time there’s a building full of killers, you can go in,” I said irritably. “As a matter of fact during our original clash, I didn’t aim at Harry’s arm. I meant to puncture his head, not just give him a flesh wound.”
“It was more than a flesh wound by the looks of the bandage,” Day said.
I nodded. “That kind of surprised me. I was almost sure at the time it was a minor wound, because he managed to drive the car away.” Then a thought struck me, and I sat up straight. “Listen, I just had a wild idea.”
“What?”
“It’s too wild to repeat. Let me use your phone some more.”
After using the phone book again, I dialed another number.
“City Hospital,” a male voice answered.
I told the man who I was and that I wanted to get in touch with Dr. Thomas Halleran.
“He’s off duty till seven a.m.,” the voice said.
I got the phone number of intern quarters from him and eventually got Halleran to the phone.
“Manny Moon,” I told him. “I sent you two shot-up hoodlums a little while ago. Seen them yet?”
Gallows in My Garden Page 19
