by Brad Latham
In the middle of the block they came upon a darkened number 353. RADIOS AND PHONOGRAPHS, Mr. Louis Bitzel, Owner, the ground-floor window sign read.
Hook motioned three of them to the other side, and he eased forward to look into the darkened store. Blinds had been pulled down, and he saw nothing around their edges. A breeze ran up the back of Hook’s neck, and he felt the sweat that had accumulated there in a thick cold film.
Number 353 was a narrow building, with a store downstairs and three floors of apartments above. Hook eased himself into the narrow lobby and looked at the mailboxes. He recognized no names, and none looked particularly German. Through the glass door that led from the lobby to the stairs he saw that the hallway and stairs were narrow, too narrow to move the bombsight through. If Benny had got the information from the Long Island mobster correctly, it had to be the store, and—
He eased quickly back out to the cool night street. Yes, there on the glass was painted Grundig, The World’s Finest Radio. Grundig and Bitzel—weren’t they both German?
He pointed silently at the store and nodded. All six nodded back. The Hook stepped up to the glass double doors that led into the store.
“What time’s it now, Benny?” The Hook hissed.
Benny gave a low growl, almost inaudible, “You got another minute or two. Wait till Semple starts up, Hook.”
Lockwood stood there, his hand on the doorknob, thinking. He would draw his gun, knock out the glass, and reach in and open the door. He would move over to the left, possibly firing. He remembered clearly what Semple and Halfback and Marbles looked like; he hoped they remembered him and didn’t drill him in mistaken eagerness.
“Thirty seconds,” Benny said. Benny motioned to a couple of the guys, who quickly came up. “He’s going to bust in,” Benny told him in his low voice “When he does, come right in past him. Hook, you go to the left, shooting. Youse guys, go to the right. All of you with your guns out. Don’t shoot them other guys, you hear? In fact, just shoot up in the air. Don’t shoot nothing that ain’t shooting back. Got it?”
The two guys nodded vigorously, their eyes wide with excitement, and pulled out their pistols. They checked them, and Lockwood noticed them checking their safeties, making sure they were off. He checked his too, moving it from off to on. He cursed himself, just the sort of thing that could get you killed.
They heard a noise then from far away.
“That’s Semple,” Benny said.
It all happened so fast, it hardly seemed to happen. As if in a dream Lockwood busted the glass with his gun barrel and unlocked the door. In a second he was inside and crouched to the left of the door, his gun moving from left to right covering the inside. On all sides, he could just make out huge black shapes that loomed over him. To his left he heard scuffling, and assumed these were the other guys coming in behind him and taking positions to his right.
From the back of the store he heard breaking glass and splintering wood. Several thuds. A low curse. The gun in his hand became slippery, but he didn’t dare wipe it dry.
Through the hallway he heard footsteps, and he cocked the hammer of the .38. From that hallway a blaze of light, and there stood Marbles in the hallway door waving his gun in the air wildly.
“Benny! Benny!” Semple shouted. “Ain’t nobody here. The joint’s deserted.”
Hook stood up and made himself breathe deep breaths. Manners and Benny came in the front door, and somebody turned on the lights. It was true. The store looked empty and deserted, even though radios and phonographs still stood on display. Papers were scattered over the floor and dust lay on the floor models.
“You been through the back?” Benny asked. He stood there in the center of the store like a general in a deserted enemy bunker. From the way he looked around in quick little starts, you would have thought he was sniffing the wind to figure out which way his prey had fled.
“They moved out,” Semple said. “Place is a mess. We went through every room quick.”
“Let’s see,” Benny said.
Hook, Manners, and the other guys followed Benny and Semple. Benny let Manners lead the way into the first bedroom so to examine it closely.
“Yeah. In here was two guys,” Manners said. “Crap on each bureau—wouldn’t have left bottles of lotion and cuff links like these if they hadn’t left in a hurry.”
In the other bedroom, they found traces of a man and a woman. The closet was full of a woman’s dresses and high-heel shoes.
“No pinball machine,” Benny complained.
They were following Benny back into the store up front when a roar surprised them, and there stood a small white-haired man in a robe holding a long-barreled huge-gauged shotgun on them.
“Don’t move!” the old man shouted. His eyes were wide with anger and steady with determination. “You, pretty boy,” the old man said to Lockwood, waving the shotgun. “Ease over to that phone and call the cops. And a one of you reach inside for even a toothpick, you’re going to be fastening the safety pin on your white robe as you beg St. Pete to take you in.”
Behind them, Lockwood heard Benny’s guys coming in to see what the noise was about.
“Who’re you, pops?” Benny asked. Benny’s eyes were slits. Hook knew this look. Benny was pissed as hell. Pissed at Manners, pissed at Vince Salerno, pissed at these Nazis keeping ahead of them, pissed at the old man, and pissed at the guy who worked for him who had allowed a simple old guy to get the drop on him.
“I’m the guy owns this joint,” the old man said. Hook felt himself jump as the old man waved the shotgun in his direction again. “You ain’t telephoning. Move, son. Who the fuck are you guys?” he asked Benny.
“I’m from the U.S. government,” Manners said smoothly. “May I reach in my jacket pocket and get my wallet, show you my badge?”
“Real slow, buster,” the old man said, and the black hole at the end of the gun followed Manners’ hand as it gently eased in and out of his jacket. He flicked open his wallet to display the gold badge.
“Treasury Department,” Manners said. “Special Agent Manners. Now, who are you?”
The old man frowned and faltered, and then pointed the shotgun a couple feet over their heads.
“You’re federal cops?”
“Yes.”
“Then what are you doing breaking into my house?”
The old man owned the building and lived upstairs. He had rented the store to Louis Bitzel a year ago, and the middle-aged man had moved in with his wife and a couple of employees and opened a radio store.
“Isn’t that what it looks like?” the old man asked.
“Last week, Wednesday morning,” Manners asked. “Did you see anything unusual around here?”
“Last week?” the old man said. “He had a big delivery. I threw my back out helping him with it.”
Louis Bitzel had bought a refrigerator from the Northstar Refrigerator Company, and it had been delivered in a panel truck at eight in the morning.
“I was putting out the garbage cans when it drove up,” he said. “Seemed early for anybody to make deliveries. A big crate. It was too heavy for the four of them, so I give them a hand. Had a hard time getting it through the double doors, but we did.”
“Did he open up the rest of the week?” Lockwood asked.
“How’d you know he didn’t?”
“Because they didn’t want anybody to know a crate from Northstar was sitting in the showroom,” Lockwood answered. “It couldn’t be moved into the back because it was so big.”
“I want to call in a crime team,” Manners said. “I want them to go over this place inch by inch.”
“Mind if I look around?” The Hook asked.
“No, just don’t mess up any evidence,” Manners replied. “Don’t touch anything. We’ve got to nail down who they are and where they’ve gone.”
“Suits me,” Hook said.
Chapter 13
By noon the next day, Manners admitted to Lockwood he was stumped. They had
been sitting around the small midtown Treasury office for the past several hours feeling more and more frustrated. Not only had the crime team failed to come up with a clue as to where Louis Bitzel and the woman and the two men were, they couldn’t even say much about them, except that Mr. Bitzel had left his initials on fine luggage and half a dozen well-crafted wallets.
Lockwood had phoned his chief twice this morning, and each time Mr. Gray had asked him if he knew that this was costing Transatlantic $1000 a day in penalties.
“I’m going to take the penalty out of your pay, Lockwood!” Mr. Gray shouted on the second call. “You’ve been on this case for days!”
“In that case I owe you six months’ work, Chief,” Lockwood said. He made sure he kept the phone a safe distance from his ear, as every minute or so Mr. Gray shouted into it.
Finally, Lockwood just hung up on him.
“Your boss sounds like as much of a sweetheart as mine,” Manners said. “I might get replaced on this case at any hour, to hear him tell it. I might, too.”
“I got an idea,” Lockwood said. He pursed his lips and grinned. “This guy Bitzel loved his initials, right?”
“He loved to put them all over the place,” Manners said. “But I’m not so sure a Louis Bitzel even exists. We can’t find a trace of him before he signed the lease at 353, and the FBI doesn’t have him in its files.”
“How about Army Intelligence?”
“I’m way ahead of you, Lockwood. They don’t even have a Bitzel in German intelligence.”
“Good!”
“Good? How are we going to find him without a name?” Manners exclaimed. “He could be in any one of a million houses here in the city, with the damn crate—if he’s using the same one, which I doubt—he’s not that dumb.”
“He liked his initials, right? We look for people with the same initials.”
Manners just looked at him, then tapped his pencil reflectively on his teeth.
“You’re saying he didn’t buy those suitcases and wallets after he took that lease last spring.”
“Hell, no,” Lockwood said. “Weren’t some of those wallets worn?”
“Well worn. He’d traveled with them—that’s right, Lockwood! He was ‘L.B.’ before he was Louis Bitzel!”
“And might be still. Might be in a house that’s in his real name.”
Manners reached for the Manhattan phone directory and flipped through its pages excitedly. Lockwood moved around the desk to lean over Manners’ shoulder.
“Oh Jesus,” Manners said. “This is going to be impossible. Look at all these.”
There looked to be hundreds of L.B.s in the directory.
“And we haven’t even opened the directories for Staten Island or Queens,” Manners said.
“Not to speak of Westchester or Suffolk County.”
They looked at each other and shook their heads in a dispirited way.
“Well, look,” Lockwood said. “It’ll probably be a German name.”
“That much I’d bet on.”
“Suppose we collect all the phone books of the area, get clerks to go over them, and come up with lists of people.”
“What then? Phone them?” Manners asked.
“Some, maybe. How many will we come up with?”
“I don’t know. Dozens, hundreds—maybe thousands.”
“Let’s get cracking,” Lockwood said.
“This is a big job,” Manners said. “Who’s going to do it? You got people in your office?”
“No, don’t you?”
“No, we don’t keep an office in New York, not really.”
“Some other federal agency?”
Manners looked down, a sour expression on his face. “Well, the FBI has a huge office here, but I don’t like to ask them.”
“Why not?”
“This is my case.”
“Have they got maybe ten girls who could go over these books in a few hours?”
Manners squirmed. “Yeah, but they’d want to know what we were after, and before I knew it, they would take over the case.”
“What’s the difference—as long as we catch Mr. L.B.?”
“My boss would throw my ass into a sling, Lockwood. You don’t understand these things.”
Lockwood shook his head and breathed a long sigh of exasperation. “You’ve been preaching about my lack of cooperation—how unpatriotic I am—and now all you can think of is who’s going to get credit for the collar.”
Manners made a sour face and a small pout. “These things are important.”
“Sure. Well, if you don’t call the FBI, I will.”
Manners sat up in alarm. “Aw, come on, Hook!”
“Don’t call me Hook, you bastard. You weren’t in the 69th.”
Manners held his hand up, and Lockwood watched a triumphant grin spread over the T-man’s face. “We’re working together, Bill. You wouldn’t do something like that.”
“Like hell I wouldn’t. My boss is threatening to take this out of my hide. I can’t stand many $1000-a-day days.”
They stared at each other for a long half a minute, and then Manners said, okay, he would phone, and the FBI’s special agent in charge said the Bureau would be delighted to help, provided Manners understood that the Bureau got proper credit.
“See there,” Manners growled to Lockwood on the way over in the cab. “I know those bastards. This is my case, and they’re going to horn in. And all you care about is not paying a lousy per-diem penalty.”
Lockwood grinned at him, unable to summon up much sympathy. “Relax, Manners.”
When they arrived at the downtown FBI offices, the conference room had been filled with eight women clerks of varying ages and sizes and a stack of telephone books two-feet high. Manners looked dispirited and indicated with a wave of his hand that he would as soon that Lockwood talk to them. Lockwood went to the head of the conference table.
The women stopped chattering and looked at Lockwood. Three of the eight looked pretty, and each of them made little gestures that told Lockwood they found him attractive. The one in front blinked at him, the second leaned back to make her breasts more prominent, and the third, a milk-skinned raven-haired beauty, ran a graceful hand back through her hair in the age-old gesture of preening. Bill Lockwood paused before speaking and looked each of them in the eye, plain as well as pretty, making contact. He smiled, and they smiled back.
“Ladies, I can’t tell you a lot about this case, except to say that a part of the future of our country is in the hands of a man who’s stolen something of large military importance. You have a chance here to serve your country and other Americans. Last night a man with the initials L.B. escaped a careful raid on his premises, and we have reason to think he’s hiding under his real name that has the initials L.B. somewhere in the metropolitan area. What we’re hoping is that you’ll help us locate all the L.B.s.”
The cocky-looking blond in the first row said, “This is a pretty tall order. There must be thousands of L.B.s.”
“German,” Lockwood said. “It has to be a German name.”
A dumpy-looking woman in the back row asked, “But how will we know if it’s German or not?”
“Good point. Do any of you know if there are any rolls of long paper in the building? We’ll make lists of German names with B’s, and hang them on the walls.”
Within minutes they were all hard at work, and after a half-hour Lockwood had filled up sheet after sheet with Barths, Bergens, Bornas, Burzows, Buxtehudes, Brunswicks, Bendorfs, and Backnangs. Manners, who had sat on the sidelines with a sour expression on his face during Lockwood’s opening speech and had smirked and shaken his head over the opening stages of the clerks’ search, got interested in spite of himself as a debate rose between Lockwood and the ladies whether “Berouthe” was German. He didn’t show it, but Lockwood figured that Manners was a bit jealous over the flirting that flipped back and forth between Lockwood and the ladies.
After three hours, it looked as if they wou
ld finish up in another hour. Lockwood went down the hall and asked the agent in charge if he could use an office with a phone. He called Myra at her office at Northstar.
“Oh Bill,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d have any time for me.”
“I don’t,” Lockwood answered. “I’m making time. It’s all in Manners’ hands now. He’s got over two hundred names and addresses to follow up, and his manpower can do that job best. Have dinner with me.”
“Aw,” she said, and sounded disappointed. “Is that all you have to offer?”
His heart leapt. “Dancing? A stroll in the moonlight?”
Her laugh sent a thrill through him. “I was looking for even more,” she said. “Oh, well, I guess I’ll have to look elsewhere.…”
“Don’t bet on it. It’s three. I’ll leave now and pick you up as soon as I get out there.”
“I’ll be waiting,” she said, and he heard a promise in her voice that excited him.
“Can I bring you something from the city?”
She laughed. “Don’t stop for anything. I’d rather have the extra time with you. Oh Bill—hurry, hurry, hurry. Leave now.”
Delighted, he laughed. “I’m leaving now.”
Lockwood phoned Hank and had him get the Cord ready. He was on the road in fifteen minutes, yet the trip out wasn’t the fun he’d assumed it would be.
This afternoon all the traffic seemed too slow. He had an urge to run his car through the other slowpokes, and had to restrain these impulses half a dozen times. He hardly understood his ragged feelings—after all, a drive on an April afternoon out into the country to take one of the prettiest and most delightful girls he had ever known out to dinner and dancing and then very likely into the sack—what was wrong with him? How come he felt so crabby?
Was it because he was leaving the case? Manners would put a dozen men to run down Mr. L.B. and Lockwood would be of relatively little help. Sure, Mr. Gray would say he should work under Manners’ direction, adding one more person to the T-man’s manpower, but screw it—Lockwood had been up all last night, and he wanted something more tonight than ringing doorbells.
