The Quarry

by Fish, Robert L. ;

  He took another breath and then paused, listening. “Lieutenant?”

  “I’m still here,” Clancy said coldly. “And still freezing. Get on with it.”

  “Yeah. Well, so back I go to New York and this time the old lady’s home when I get there and I give her the old what’s-the-big-idea routine, and she goes all to pieces—the way the Empire State Building goes to pieces when a five-year-old kid kicks it. She looks at me calm as hell and says she’s sorry, she must have made a mistake, and she digs out this old address book and checks real careful, and then she gives me this other address. And she keeps such a straight face that me, like a jerk, instead of calling to check, back to Jersey I go. Only this time, instead of hat shops and beauty parlors, it’s pawnshops and secondhand bookstores and them imitation brownstones they got over in Paterson.…”

  “Let’s speed it up, huh?” Clancy asked politely. “I want to finish a shower and get some sleep tonight.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Well, back I come to town, and by now I’m breathing fire, and this time she tries to give me an address in Passaic—Passaic, by God!—and then to top it off she hands me a completely different name for the guy who’s supposed to own it—so I know right then and there she’s been making the whole thing up.” Stanton sighed heavily. “I’m telling you, Lieutenant, one of these fine days we’re going to have her down at Bellevue for observation, for trying to feed apples to the merry-go-round nags at Coney Island.”

  “Yeah.” Clancy frowned, thinking. He hitched the towel closer, his eyes narrowing. “But, wait a second. If the old lady was kidding you, then she must have been kidding Lenny just as well. And the girl. I saw a letter Lenny wrote to his girl in which he talked about some deal his mother had lined up for him.…”

  “Lieutenant,” Stanton said shrewdly. “That’s one of the reasons I didn’t blow my stack and drag the old lady downtown. If you want my opinion, the one the old lady is basically kidding, is herself. She wanted Lenny to have a job and go straight when he got out, and she wanted it so badly she even invented it. And she believes it herself, by this time.”

  “It’s possible,” Clancy admitted.

  “I’d say it’s certain.”

  “Which only means,” Clancy added thoughtfully, “that wherever he got the car, he didn’t get it in Jersey. Or at least not in this nonexistent used-car lot.”

  “I never did go for that Jersey angle on the car, anyways,” Stanton said slowly. “Even if he could have picked it up there, he would have had to come through one of the tunnels, or over the Washington Bridge, and with every cop in town looking for him, especially at the change booths—It never did sound like too much of a possibility.”

  “Yeah.” Clancy tried to think, but all he could think of was that the bed under him felt so comfortable, and that it would be so easy to just lie back and relax, and forget the whole thing, at least until morning. “Stanton—there’s something I should have checked a long time ago. Did Lenny have a car when he went into the pen?”

  Stanton sighed. “You must be tired, Lieutenant. If Lenny had a car, what would he have swiped one for? The night he took his girl friend for a ride, and then later hit that kid? And his mother never had one, either, or she’d have let Lenny use it, for sure. She would have given him the shirt off her back—and he was the kind would take it.”

  “You’re right, of course,” Clancy said wearily. “I am tired. Well, that’s that. What are you going to do now?”

  “I’m going home and wash dishes. My wife is coming home tomorrow and if she sees the kitchen the mess it’s in now, I’m in real trouble.” Stanton’s voice became almost hopeful. “Unless you got something more important for me to do, Lieutenant.”

  “No,” Clancy said. “Wash them good. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Well, all right, Lieutenant. Good night.”

  Clancy hung up listlessly. Something was nagging him—the thought that he had talked to somebody, somewhere along the line, and had forgotten to ask the right question. Or had talked to many people in many places and had forgotten to ask a lot of the right questions. Or, more likely, had asked the right question and gotten the right answer, but simply didn’t recognize it. He attempted to trace the activities of the day, but gave it up almost at once. He was too tired and he knew it. He got to his feet, heading back to the bathroom and his shower. Kaproski stood in the bedroom doorway.

  “Did Stanton find anything, Lieutenant?”

  “No.” Clancy hitched at his towel. “I’m going to finish my shower and if anybody else calls …” The telephone chose that moment to ring. Clancy stared at it in disgust. “You get it. At least let me put on some pajamas and a bathrobe.…”

  He came out of the bathroom, drawing the cord tightly about his trim body, and took the telephone from Kaproski’s outstretched hand. The large detective was mouthing some words soundlessly. “Captain Wise …”

  Clancy nodded, dropped on the bed, and brought the receiver to his ear. “Hello, Sam.”

  “Hello, Clancy. Look, I just got this call from the office—”

  “Where are you calling from?”

  “Home. But they called me from the office. It’s Blount. He—”

  “Blount?” Clancy felt his weariness drop away; his grip on the receiver tightened. “Did they pick him up?”

  “No. They missed him. But he was seen. He—”

  “Who saw him?” Clancy felt his disappointment return, greater for having had his hopes awakened. “Was he seen for real, or did some wino think he saw him?”

  “No, he was really identified. He—”

  “Where?”

  “Up in Albany. It seems—”

  “When?”

  “It must have happened about forty-five minutes to an hour ago, because the call came first to Centre Street, and then to the 52nd; then they called me. Anyway, he—”

  “Was he alone?”

  Captain Sam Wise, normally the most patient of men, exploded. “Clancy, you big-mouth Irisher, you! Will you for God’s sake let me talk? I’m trying to tell you …”

  “I’m sorry, Sam. Go ahead.”

  “Go ahead, he says! Well, all right.” Captain Wise was far from mollified. “It’s harder to get a word in edgewise with you than it is with Sarah, even!”

  “I said I was sorry, Sam.”

  “Well, all right.” Captain Wise took a deep breath, calming down. “Well, like I’ve been trying to tell you for the last half hour, the Albany cops up there figured the way Blount was so crazy about his wife, he’d get in touch with her one way or another. And they figured they had her covered from A to Z, only it looks like they really only got as far as P, or maybe Q, because he actually met his wife, got some money from her, and then went off, just like that.”

  Clancy couldn’t help himself. “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “With the cops watching?”

  “With the cops watching. Two of them, at the least.”

  Clancy swore fervently. “What are they, in Albany? Blind or something?”

  “No,” Captain Wise said quietly. “Actually, it was sort of cute the way he worked it. The police had a man in a car down the street from the house where he could see the front door. And they had another in back. And they had a tap on the phone, and a man on it constant. Which is about all you can have.” He paused, considering. “As a matter of fact, they had about everything on her that we’ve been putting around trying to spot this Cervera character.…”

  “Don’t remind me,” Clancy said sourly. “So how did he work it?”

  “Well, a couple of hours ago, figuring the time I guess it was, a neighbor lady—a friend—comes over to visit Mrs. Blount, and they go out and sit in the kitchen drinking tea or something, and the man covering the back can see them through the kitchen window. Then after awhile this woman gets up and leaves, and Mrs. Blount sits around drinking tea some more, and then she does the dishes and futzes around generally. And then, about twenty mi
nutes later, Mrs. Blount gets her hat and coat and goes out the front door and walks into the street and hails a passing cab. She takes it about ten blocks down the street and gets out and starts walking down a side street. With the tail in an unmarked car trailing her all the way. Well, she walks around the block, stops a minute, and then walks all the way around the block once again. And then, when she gets back to where she started from, she hikes out into the middle of the street, waves down a cab, and goes home. And that’s all there was to it.…”

  “Don’t try to be cute, Sam. Don’t keep me in suspense,” Clancy said with ill-concealed sarcasm. “You know I’ve got a bad heart.”

  “You don’t have a heart at all, Clancy, the way you don’t even look at that nice Mary Kelly …”

  “Sam!”

  “All right,” Captain Wise said philosophically. “If you don’t want any advice, you don’t want any advice. Anyway, about Blount—he apparently got the word to his wife through this neighbor woman, and set a definite time, to the minute. Because he was in that cruising cab she picked up, the first one in front of the house, crouching in the back, down low, with a gun in the driver’s neck. As soon as he got loose from Blount, of course, the driver called in, yelling bloody murder. Anyway, the driver says that when Mrs. Blount got in the cab she gave Blount some dough, but he hands most of it back and says he’ll only need a little and she ought to hang on to the rest. And then they spend the next couple of blocks holding on to each other, and then she drops off and he has the cab keep going. Blount makes the driver hand over what dough he has—which only comes to a couple of bucks—and then he has the driver drop him off on a dark deserted street alongside of the railroad yards.…”

  “Which yards?”

  “New York Central, but that doesn’t mean anything. Those are marshaling yards up there, and from there trains go everywhere except straight up.”

  “And Blount didn’t say anything to his wife about what his plans were?”

  “Not in the cab, apparently.”

  “I see. Did they pick up the wife and the neighbor?”

  “No,” Captain Wise said. “They figure maybe he’ll try to contact them again. But they’ve got a tap on the neighbor’s phone, now.”

  “For whatever good that will do.” Clancy sat and stared at the phone. Some little germ of an idea was tickling his brain but he couldn’t pin it down and identify it. He shook his head despairingly; what was he trying to say to himself?

  “Sam, when Blount was picked up for that bank job in Glens Falls, did they recover all the money?”

  “Every nickel. Why?”

  “I don’t know.” Clancy had that old familiar tingling; similar feelings in the past had always been revealing. “That question sort of popped out by itself. There’s something itching at me.…”

  “Good,” Captain Wise said heartily. “That’s what I like to hear from you, Clancy. Keep scratching at it all night and tell me what you’ve come up with in the morning.”

  “I’ll try, Sam. Thanks for the information.”

  “Thanks for letting me finally give it to you,” Captain Wise said with heavy sarcasm. “Good night, Clancy.”

  “Good night.”

  Clancy hung up. He stared at the telephone a minute in deep concentration and then gave up, got to his feet, and walked into the living room. Kaproski had his jacket off; his shoulder holster bulked under his big arm. He was leafing through a magazine; he laid it down as Clancy entered.

  “Anything new, Lieutenant?”

  “They saw Blount in Albany, but he got away.”

  “Oh. Tough.” Kaproski shook his head. “You know, Lieutenant, if that phone’s going to keep ringing like this all night, maybe you ought to keep the bed and I’ll stay out here on the couch.”

  “Why?” Clancy asked curiously. “Why should I be the only one to be disturbed?”

  “Or I got an even better idea,” Kaproski said brightly. “Why don’t we go over to my house? My brother’s in the Army, and you could have his room. My mother wouldn’t mind. And you could get some rest; nobody would disturb you.”

  “What rest? With your mother feeding me that rich Polish food all night—who could sleep?”

  “You’ll pardon me, Lieutenant,” Kaproski said, slightly offended. “But if you’d have been raised on good solid Polack food, you wouldn’t be—well, so skinny like.”

  “In the neighborhood where I was raised,” Clancy said dryly, “there were a lot of skinny Polacks, too.” He reached over to the end table, fished in a cigarette box, withdrew one and lit it. He found an easy chair and fell into it.

  “Kap …”

  “Yeah, Lieutenant?”

  “What do you know about Cholly Williams and Phil Marcus?”

  “Williams was before my time,” Kaproski said, remembering. “But I remember Marcus. Or at least I remember when they were trying to get to the bottom of them loft fires. That was a real scary deal, believe me—never knew when a fire would break out or how many might be caught in it. I even seen this Marcus once—I was down at Centre Street the day they brought him in. A real creepy-looking character.” He looked over at Clancy with a puzzled frown. “Hell, Lieutenant, you ought to remember both of them. Better than me.”

  “I remember them,” Clancy said. “But that’s not what I meant.…”

  The itch was growing, aggravatingly. He leaned forward, dragging deeply on his cigarette, staring at his bare toes, trying to pierce the web of the idea that was beginning to form so nebulously on the fringes of his mind. “What I mean—”

  Once again the telephone rang.

  “You see?” Kaproski said disgustedly, spreading his hands. “You ain’t going to get any sleep at all tonight with that thing.” He sighed. “Neither one of us,” he added morosely.

  Clancy walked into the bedroom, his mind nibbling tenaciously at the thought that was so persistently evading him. He shook his head, picking up the phone to speak into it absently.

  “Yes?”

  The voice that answered him was so high-pitched in nervousness that for a moment he did not recognize it; then the name slowly filtered through. “Clancy, this is Roy Kirkwood. I—” There was a long pause.

  “What’s the trouble, Roy?”

  “Clancy—I want to ask a favor of you.”

  “Sure, Roy. What is it?”

  There was another long pause; when the words finally came they came with a rush, tense, nervous, almost incoherent. “Clancy, about five minutes ago I got a telephone call. A man’s voice, one I never heard before. All muffled up and hard to understand; he apparently had the mouthpiece covered with something.…”

  Clancy was listening intently now. “Do you remember what he said, Roy? I mean, word for word?”

  Kirkwood gave a bitter laugh. “I’ll never forget it. He said: ‘Kirkwood? I bet you think you’re smart, covered with cops that way, don’t you? I bet you think you’re safe, don’t you? Well, this is to tell you that one of your kids will do just as well …!’ Then he gave a sort of laugh and hung up.”

  “Did he wait after he said, ‘Kirkwood?’ For you to answer? To identify yourself?”

  There was a pause as if the other were remembering. “No.…”

  “Was one of my men with you when the call came?”

  “Yes. Quinleven was here.”

  “Let me talk to him.”

  “Wait, Clancy. Listen to me first. I want that favor—I want to send my wife and my kids to my mother-in-law’s house. She lives in Camden. And I want your men to go with them.”

  “Roy, we’ll cover your kids, don’t worry.…”

  “Clancy, I don’t want them covered. I want them out of town until you pick this maniac up.” The voice went higher. “I don’t want them going to school with a cop on each arm, and I don’t want them to wear bullet-proof vests when they go down to the corner or go to the movies. They’re kids, that’s all. Don’t you understand?”

  “Now, Roy …”

  The voice f
irmed. “Don’t ‘Now, Roy’ me, Clancy! You know as well as I do that this protection deal is a lot of crap! If I wanted to knock off the President of the United States I could do it if I really wanted to, if you had him covered eighteen ways! And you know it! Just answer me one thing, Clancy—are you going to let me send my kids and my wife down to my in-laws, and will you send some of your men with them? To see that they get there safely?”

  “Sure, Roy. Take it easy. We won’t stop you from sending your kids and your wife anywhere you want. And we’ll send men with them, too.” Clancy paused, considering. “The only thing is, I’d feel a lot better if you went with them.”

  “Me? To hell with that!” The voice was steady now, low and bitter. “I’ve got a campaign to run, but even forgetting that, I still have a gun and a license to carry it, and I just hope that crazy son of a bitch tries to take a crack at me, that’s all! I hope the maniac bastard shows up in front of me—that’s all I hope! Threatening my kids that way!”

  Clancy sighed. “Look, Roy, calm down. Let me talk to Quinleven.”

  “Calm down, my ass! Clancy—”

  “Damn it, Roy! Relax!” Clancy brought his temper under control. “Now let me talk to Quinleven.”

  There was a pause and then a new voice came to the line, a bit cautious for the dramatics it had witnessed. “Hello? Lieutenant? This here is Quinleven.”

  “Quinleven—” The question that popped into Clancy’s mind was not at all the one he had originally intended to ask. “Where were you when that phone call came in just now?”

  “Me? I was in the john, Lieutenant. But when I come out he was on the phone, and he held up his hand for me not to make any noise. He just sat there listening and then when he hung up he called you right away.…”