Headed for a Hearse

by Jonathan Latimer

  Galt retreated a step, then said, “I was just talkin’ to him. I was just tellin’ him how the tough guys folded up when——”

  “Get out!” The gangster shook the bars. “Get out of here or I’ll come out and kill you with my bare hands. Get out!” His voice rose in a hoarse shout.

  Galt retreated along the dim corridor, his face twitching as though from a nervous disease.

  “That son of a bitch!” Connors smiled at Westland. His face was quite handsome now, having lost its former grossness because of the lack of food and the draining tension of waiting. “I’ll get him. See if I don’t.”

  Suddenly, looking at the gangster’s composed face, Westland realized his debt to his courage and sanity, which, by their very sureness, had saved his mind just as he had unintentionally, by kindness, saved the little Jewish peddler from the gulf of stark terror. So, with the awe of a small boy, he asked:

  “How will you get him?”

  “I don’t know—” there were white lines from the bars on the palms of Connors’ hands—“but I’ll get him.”

  In the next cell Isadore Varecha slept, uttering small cries, disjointed phrases, like a fevered child.

  A few minutes after William Crane had finished talking with Westland, the telephone rang janglingly. “Oh my God!” exclaimed Crane. “Hasn’t the telephone company any respect for my nerves?”

  Miss Hogan answered the phone, then said, “It’s for you.”

  It was Doc Williams. He was in the lobby and he wanted to know if it was all right for him to come up. Crane told him to come up and see.

  Miss Hogan was looking out one of the windows when Crane came back into the living room; her face sullen without unpleasantness, her amethyst eyes slumberous, her full vermilion downward-curved lips voluptuous. The yellow rays from the sun made the upper part of her lounging pajamas transparent, outlined her lithe body. She did not have on a brassiere. Crane caught her about the waist, bent her backward like a tango dancer, kissed her on the lips. Immediately he regretted his action: first, because the motion started his head throbbing violently, and second, because she bit a large chunk out of his lower lip.

  She looked at him, neither angry nor flustered. “Be careful, Clark Gable, or I’ll spank.”

  The blood tasted salty and warm in William Crane’s mouth. He patted the lip with a handkerchief. “My judgment doesn’t seem so good this morning,” he said. He admired her composure.

  “Your aim is all right, though,” said Miss Hogan. She moved fluidly to open the door for Williams.

  “Hello, you runnerouter,” said Crane.

  Williams observed him with disgust. “You look like hell.”

  “I feel like hell.” Crane daubed at his mouth with his handkerchief and examined it. The lip was still bleeding. “I wish I was in New York.”

  Williams spoke critically. “What kind of a detective are you, anyway, wishing you were back in New York? You haven’t done anything in this town but ride around in cabs, try to make women, and get drunk. You’d think you were on a vacation.” He took a deep breath. “A good detective would have a Siamese postage stamp, a gold collar button, some peanut shells, and one of Jean Harlow’s garters as evidence by this time.

  “Yes, sir, by God!” Doc Williams added; “a good detective’d not only have those things but he’d say: ‘Doc, this crime is a bafflin’ affair, but I’ve solved it. A dooced strange affair it was, too.’”

  “You practically took the words out of my mouth,” Crane said. “Miss Hogan and I have solved the Westland case, and it’s going to surprise you.”

  “Oh no, it’s not,” said Williams. “Your saying it was anybody that done it wouldn’t surprise me. You could arrest the Governor and it wouldn’t surprise me. The thing that does surprise me is that you think you know who killed the lady. I’ve been with you all the time and I know you haven’t any evidence.”

  Miss Hogan, watching them noncommittally, asked, “Who did kill Mrs. Westland?”

  Crane shook his head. “Tell you later.”

  “He don’t know,” said Williams irascibly. “He’s just talkin’. He hasn’t any evidence.”

  “Evidence?” Crane dabbed at his lip. “Oh, it’s evidence you want? Well, we’ll get some—that is, if there’s life enough left in me.”

  Miss Hogan eyed the place where she had bit his lip. “There’s still plenty of life in you.”

  Williams asked, “When do you expect to begin this great search for evidence.… Sometime next week?”

  “No, we can begin right away. Where’s Fink?”

  “He’s going over Westland’s books—and over the firm’s too.”

  “Then I got a job for you. There’s some things I want to get right away.”

  “Some bottles of whiskey?” inquired Miss Hogan with elaborate sarcasm.

  “At that, I wouldn’t mind a little——”

  Williams interrupted him. “What do you want me to get?”

  “First I’d like a cab—” Crane folded the handkerchief into a neat square and put it into his hip pocket—“and a stop watch——”

  “A stop watch!”

  “Yes, a stop watch and … a deep-sea diver.”

  CHAPTER XV

  Thursday Noon

  The cab driver was a hook-nosed Greek with a cap pulled down over his left eye. His name, according to the smudged identification card, was Nick Papos, and his age was twenty-six. He slouched in the left corner of the front seat, elbow out the open window, and his lips seemed to snarl at the inmates of each car he passed.

  Doc Williams handed Crane the stop watch. “I rented it for a ten spot,” he said. “I suppose you’ll want an elephant next.”

  Crane pulled the watch out of its green felt case. “How about the diver?” The nickel surface was cool in his hand.

  “He’ll be ready any time we want him this afternoon. The price for him and a boat is five hundred bucks.”

  Crane said, “We’re putting more men to work than Roosevelt’s recovery program.”

  Pedestrians swirled about them as the cab, halting for a red light at Oak Street and Michigan Boulevard, neatly blocked off the cross walk. An elderly man with a white mustache and a red face circled cautiously around the engine, shook his cane angrily at them.

  “I’ll bet he’s tryin’ to tell us he’s a taxpayer,” said the driver scornfully. Yellow appeared on the traffic light; he started the cab with a jerk and sent four women into flight like a covey of startled quail.

  “Didn’t get a one,” observed Williams sympathetically.

  “Naw,” said the driver; “they got a closed season on jaywalkers this year.”

  The cab just caught the light at Division Street, swung to the left off the drive, then to the right on Astor Street and pulled up in front of Westland’s apartment.

  “Leave the meter down,” Crane said.

  Doc Williams started to get out of the cab.

  “Stay in. We’re not stopping here.” Crane set the stop watch at zero. “What time is it?”

  Williams looked at his wrist watch. “Eleven-thirty.”

  “That’s swell. That’s just swell.”

  Williams regarded him with suspicion. “What’s swell?”

  “That it’s eleven-thirty.”

  “All I can say is, one of us is wrong.”

  Crane addressed the driver. “Nick, I want to go to the corner of La Salle and Adams in the Loop. How long have you been a driver in Chicago?”

  “Five-six years, boss.”

  “Good. I want you to take us there the very quickest way you can. I don’t care what kind of roads you take, just go the quickest way.”

  “But we just come from that way.” The driver rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. “If you want to get there so quick why didn’t——”

  “Don’t worry about that. Pretend we just picked you up right here on Astor Street and told you to take us to La Salle and Adams as quick as you could.” He spoke slowly to let the words sink
in. “You don’t need to break the speed laws, just go as fast as you can without getting arrested.”

  “You want me to start right now?”

  “Sure.”

  Nick Papos put her in low and let out the clutch. He thought, What I care if the guy is daffy? William Crane pushed the head on the stop watch, listened with gratification to its regular ticking.

  They went directly over to La Salle Street, four blocks to the west, and then turned south. At Chicago Avenue they were held up by a stop light, and on the sunlit La Salle Street bridge they got caught behind a gas truck for a minute. Williams looked out at the smoke-gray water in the Chicago river and shuddered.

  “I’d hate to have to swim in that,” he said. “The water looks as though it was ready to freeze.”

  When the cab swerved in toward the curb at La Salle and Adams, Crane jumped out. “Drive around the block a couple of times,” he told Williams. “I’ll pick you up in a minute.”

  He entered the marble-and-gold lobby of the building in which Westland had his office, crowded into an elevator, and was skyrocketed to the thirty-fifth floor. He walked up to the door of the Westland suite, examined the inscription; Westland, Bolston & Woodbury, for about thirty seconds, and then halted the stop watch. It registered 17 minutes, 14 and 3/5 seconds. He wrote this figure on the back of an envelope and returned to the street.

  Climbing into the cab beside Williams, he said, “Nick, it took you about eighteen minutes to come here from Astor Street. Now I want you to take me every other possible way between the two places that you can make in twenty-five minutes. I want you to cross the river at a different place each time, but you can’t take more than twenty-five minutes for the trip.”

  The driver said, “How about Michigan Boulevard, boss?”

  “All right. Michigan Boulevard.” Crane started the stop watch.

  They went north to Wacker Drive and east to Michigan and then north again across the big bridge. Crowds of people hurried in either direction along the pedestrian walks; stenographers and clerks out for an early lunch; salesmen, window gazers, shoppers: the usual line of loafers peered raptly at the empty river.

  “I almost forgot,” Williams said suddenly. “I checked with the phone company about the service calls at Miss Martin’s place. There was a call for a repair man on the day Mrs. Westland was found, but the company has no record of a man being sent out there on the day of the murder.”

  “No?”

  “No. The guy Miss Martin saw must have been a phoney.”

  “That’s what we thought, wasn’t it?”

  The cab, making good time with the progressive traffic lights on the Avenue, passed Walton Place. Two blocks away they could see the building in which Miss Hogan was living, the red bricks bright in the sunshine.

  Crane, looking up from the stop watch, said, “I wish that Hogan dame would commit a murder. I could enjoy tracking her down.” He felt his swollen lip reminiscently.

  “That would be one case you’d work hard at,” said Williams.

  Crane said, “Aw, now.”

  Presently the driver said, “Here you are boss, back at Astor Street.”

  The watch showed that 20 minutes, 31 seconds had elapsed since they left downtown. Crane sat the hands at zero, said, “All right, back to Adams and La Salle again.”

  This time they crossed the river over the new, wide Wabash Avenue bridge, then swung west on Wacker to La Salle. Not bothering to get out, Crane stopped the watch when they reached Westland’s office building. The time was 17 minutes, 2 and 3/5 seconds. The next trip was on State Street, and the watch showed 21 minutes flat when they reached Astor Street. The driver said they were lucky not to meet a streetcar on the busy bridge. Returning to the Loop, they took the Dearborn Street bridge and made the trip in 19 minutes, 37 and 1/5 seconds.

  It was about one-thirty and Doc Williams gazed longingly at the Loop restaurants. “My God, I’m hungry,” he said.

  Crane spoke to the driver. “Stop at a lunch place on the way back,” he said. “I’ll deduct the time we stop from the running time.”

  They went back over the Clark Street bridge behind a streetcar. They followed the car clear to Chicago Avenue, making frequent stops while passengers got on and off, and halted in front of the Elite Restaurant and Lunch Counter, Ladies Invited, on the corner.

  “This ain’t a bad joint,” said the driver.

  “All right. Doc, you get some sandwiches and coffee,” Crane said. “We’ll eat them while we ride. Get Nick something too.”

  “Don’t get me nothing with onions in it,” said Nick. “I go with a Swedish broad, and she don’t like onions.”

  Crane leaned back on the upholstered seat with his eyes closed until Williams came back with three hamburger and three American cheese sandwiches on white bread and a paper container of muddy coffee. He refused the sandwiches but drank some of the coffee from a paper cup. It didn’t taste good.

  The driver, holding his coffee in one hand and taking the other hand off the wheel to bite into his sandwiches, reached Astor Street safely. After deducting 8 minutes for the stop, Crane found the trip had still taken 26 minutes, 47 seconds.

  “I never seen a street I’m so sick of as this one,” Williams said, wiping his mouth with a silk handkerchief. “How long do we have to keep comin’ back here?”

  Crane set the watch at zero again. “It’s up to Nick.”

  The driver tossed his empty cup and the oiled paper from the sandwiches into a carefully groomed front yard. A fat nursemaid, leading a brown-and-white wire-haired terrier and two small children with saucer-blue eyes, glared at him. He ignored her, said, “I guess there’s a couple of ways we could go yet.”

  “Well, go ’em,” said Crane.

  They went farther west this time, over to slovenly Wells Street near the edge of Little Italy, and crossed the river with the elevated roaring over their heads. It was dark on the bridge, and William Crane said, “This is something like it,” but when they reached the corner of La Salle and Adams he discovered more than 28 minues had elapsed. They returned by an even more out of the way route, and the time was again more than 28 minutes.

  Parked again in front of the apartment on Astor Street, Crane shook his head sadly. “That all, Nick?”

  “All!” said Doc Williams. “It’s a wonder the nursemaids don’t yell rubberneck at us as we go by.”

  The driver said, “That’s all unless you want to go by the lower level of the Michigan Boulevard bridge.”

  “Sure, let’s go that way,” Crane said. He pushed the watch, closed his eyes.

  Doc Williams groaned.

  The pavement, when they got near the bridge, was much rougher. The cab shook and rattled, and the driver was forced to slow down to avoid several large holes. A block to the east, Michigan Avenue’s sleek pavement soared upward in a gentle hill between the Tribune Tower and the white Wrigley Building, but they continued to parallel it until they were within a block of the river. Then they turned to the left and cut under the elevated highway amid a forest of cement and steel braces. They swerved around a wagon drawn by two fat horses and entered the gloomy, steel-surfaced lower passage through the bridge. Their side, going south toward the Loop, was wide enough for two cars, and a similar one-way passage, for northbound traffic, was on their left behind a curtain of steel cross braces. On their right, through widely separated steel beams, could be seen the slow river current. Although sunlight dappled the water, it was gloomy in the passage.

  “This is a good way to go,” said the driver, “because most people only use it when they have to. It ain’t crowded, and you miss the stop lights, too.”

  Once across they turned to the right and ran up an incline and came out on familiar Wacker Drive. The stop watch read 19 minutes, 30 and 1/5 seconds when they arrived at La Salle and Adams.

  “Any more ways you can think of, Nick?” Crane asked.

  “No, that’s all, boss.”

  “Good. Let’s go back under t
hat bridge the way we did before, heading for the Loop.”

  “Headin’ for the last round-up,” said Doc Williams wearily.

  They went around and came through the underpassage again. In the middle, Crane told the driver to pull up to the right-hand side by a particularly wide opening in the steel braces.

  “Have you got a good-sized monkey wrench?” he asked the driver.

  “Sure, boss. Why?”

  “How much will you sell it for?”

  Williams asked, “What in hell do you want a monkey wrench for?”

  “How much will you sell it for?” Crane repeated.

  “It’s a ver’ good one,” said the driver. “I wouldn’t think of sellin’ her for less’n five bucks.”

  “Five bucks!” Williams looked at Crane in astonishment. “I can get the best monkey wrench in the world for half that.”

  “Maybe Nick’s attached to that monkey wrench.” Crane handed the driver a five-dollar bill. “Monkey wrenches are funny. At first you don’t give a damn about them, but they grow on you. Yes, sir, Doc, you can get mighty fond of a monkey wrench after a time. I can see Nick is that sort of a fellow, too.”

  “You’re feeling better,” said Williams.

  The driver fished a battered wrench from under the seat and endeavored to hand it to Crane, but he wouldn’t take it.

  “I want you to sit here in the driver’s seat,” he said, “and when I wave to you from the bank over there I want you to toss it through the window and into the river.”

  Amazement made the driver’s face moronic. “You’re givin’ me five bucks to toss this in the river?”

  “Yes, just sit in the driver’s seat and toss it in the river. Be sure it goes in, though.”

  Williams’ face was suspicious. “You haven’t got hold of any more liquor, have you?”

  “Who ever heard of such a thing!” Crane stepped out of the cab with dignity. “Come on.” He glanced over the railing at the gray-black water. “You give it a toss when I wave my handkerchief, Nick. D’you understand?”