by Otto Penzler
Even as he said this the front swayed, caved in with a smother of smoke, cinders and flame. Firemen rushed to escape the deluge. The hose lines pounded the place with water.
Detective Cohen appeared, with a bad wrist—his left hand.
“Where you been, Ike?” asked MacBride.
“Looking around. Guy in a cigar store around the corner said he was looking out the window a few minutes before the fireworks. Saw a big blue sedan roll by slow. He noticed because it’s a oneway alley and classy machines don’t often go through it. Runs back of the station-house, you know—Delaney Street.”
“See here, boys.” MacBride’s voice was tense. “You all well heeled? Good. We’re going to take a ride up to 210 Jockey Street, and I smell trouble. There’s something here I don’t understand. We were caught napping. I’ll say I was— I’m the dumb-bell. There I thought I had the case all ready to bake, and we were blown up.”
He found Lieutenant Connolly and gave him brief orders. He gathered together six reserves and Moriarity and Cohen. They used the big touring car in which Hess and the other two gangsters had been brought to the precinct. Gunther drove, and as he was about to slide into gear, Kennedy came up on the run.
“Room there for me, Mac?”
MacBride groaned. Getting rid of Kennedy was like getting rid of a leech. But taking a look at Kennedy, seeing him all banged up but still ready to carry on, the captain experienced a change of heart.
“Hop in,” he clipped.
The big machine lurched ahead. Once in high gear the eight cylinders purred smoothly.
Two left turns and a right, and they were on a wide street that led north. In the distance the reflection of the white light district glowed in the sky. Ten men were in the car. There was no room for comfort.
The white light district grew nearer.
MacBride and his men ignored traffic lights. They struck Jockey Street. Jockey Street is like a cave. At one end it is lit by the glare of the theatrical district. As one penetrates it, it becomes darker, narrower, and the street lamps are pallid. Two and three-story houses rear into the gloom, lights showing here and there, but not in abundance. Most of the doors are blank-faced, foreboding. It is a thickly populated section, but pedestrians are rare. More than one man has been killed in lower Jockey Street. Patrolmen always travel it in pairs.
The machine stopped.
“Two ten’s on the next block,” said MacBride. “We’ll leave the car here. Gunther, you and Barnes go over one block south and come up in the rear. Hang around there in case anybody tries to get out. The rest of us will try the front.”
They all alighted. Gunther and Barnes, their sticks drawn, their pistols loose in their holsters, started off purposefully. MacBride, though he saw no one, had a vague feeling that eyes were watching him from darkened windows. People might have been curious in Jockey Street, like all humanity, but they differed materially in that they rarely came into the open to vent their curiosity.
As the men walked down the street, their footsteps re-echoed hollowly; a nightstick clicked against another. MacBride led the way, a jut to his jaw, his fingers curled up in his palms. Home, in peaceful Grove Manor, his wife was probably mending socks. Maybe his daughter was playing the piano; something about Spring from Mendelssohn or one of those Indian love lyrics. Well, he carried lots of insurance.
How about the men with him? Most of them married, too, with little kids. Moriarity, Cohen, Feltmann, Terchinsky, O’Toole, Pagliano. Gunther and Barnes in the back. Two hundred a month for the privilege of being a target for gunmen. They made far less—and paid double the life insurance premium—than many a man whose most important worry was a cold in the head or the temperature of his morning bath.
“This is it,” said MacBride.
Kennedy said, “Dump.”
“You stay out of it, Kennedy.”
“If you’ve got a pen-knife I’ll sit out here and play mumble-peg on the pavement.”
In front of the house, which was a two-story affair built of red brick, was a depression reached by four stone steps that led down to the basement windows. At a word from MacBride, the men hid in this depression. A single step led to the front and main entrance, where there was a vestibule with glass in the upper half.
Alone, MacBride approached this, tried the door, and finding it locked, pressed a bell button. Somewhere distant he heard the bell ring. He took off his cap of rank and held it under his left arm, partly to hide his identity. His teeth were set, his lips compressed. He rang again.
Presently he heard a latch click. It was on the inner door. There was a long moment before a face moved dimly in the gloom behind the vestibule window. MacBride made a motion to open the door. The face floated nearer, receded, remained motionless, then came nearer again. Then it disappeared abruptly. The inner door banged. He heard running feet.
“We crash it, boys!” he barked in a low voice.
His revolver came out. One blow shattered the glass in the vestibule. He reached in, snapped back the latch. His men swarmed about him. He leaped into the vestibule, tried the next door. It was locked, built entirely of wood.
“All together, boys,” he clipped.
En masse, they surged against the door. Again they surged. Wood creaked, groaned, then splintered. The door banged up under the impetus, and the law swept in. MacBride had a flashlight. It clicked into life, its beam leaped through the gloom. He turned.
“Holstein and Feltmann! Guard the front!”
“Yup, Cap!”
His flashlight swung up and down, back and forth, showed a stairway against one wall, leading to regions above. In the lower hall, he saw two closed doors.
“Bust these!”
He was the first to leap. The first door opened easily. The room was bare, unfurnished. He dived out and tried the next. It was unlocked. Empty. But it was meagerly furnished; a cot, a table, a rocking-chair, a gas stove.
“Lookout’s room,” he speculated. “Guy who came to the door.”
Sentences, words, were clipped.
The flashlight’s beam picked out the foot of the stairway.
“Up, boys!”
MacBride was off on the run. He led the way up the stairs.
Came two gun reports, muffled.
“Gunther and Barnes,” he said. “These guys are trying for a break.”
They were in the hall above. The first door they tried was locked. MacBride hurled his weight against it.
Bang!
A shot splintered the panel, passed the captain’s cheek. He sprang back.
Moriarity, leaning against the bannister, shot from the hip. He plastered four shots around the doorknob. Pagliano put three more there. Then they waited, silent, all guns drawn. They listened. Men were moving inside the room. There was an undertone of voices.
MacBride turned to Cohen “Ike, go downstairs and get the chair in that room.”
Cohen departed, returned carrying a heavy kitchen chair. MacBride took a chair, hefted it, then swung it over his head and dived with it toward the door. The chair splintered; so did the door. A couple of shots banged from the inside. MacBride felt a sting on his cheek. Blood trickled down his jaw.
Two policemen stood side by side and pumped bullets into the room. There was a hoarse scream, the rush of bodies, the pound of feet. Glass shattered.
Firing, MacBride and Moriarity hurtled into the room. Moriarity saw a dim figure going out through the window. He fired. The figure buckled and was gone.
“They’ve made the roof!” clipped MacBride.
He jumped to the window, out upon the fire-escape, up to the roof. He could see vague blurs skimming over the roof of the adjoining house. For a block these roofs were linked together, trimmed with chimneys, ventilating shafts, radio aerials.
Cohen went past MacBride in leaps and bounds, stopped suddenly, crouched and fired two shots. One knocked a man over. The other whanged through a skylight. Moriarity cut loose, missed fire.
Then the gunmen, near the end of the
row of roofs, stopped and hid behind chimneys and the projections that separated one roof from another. They sprinkled the night generously with gunfire. Officer Terchinsky went down with a groan, came up again.
The policemen advanced warily, darting from chimney to chimney, crouching behind a skylight, wriggling forward. MacBride was mopping the wound on his cheek with a handkerchief. His gun was in the other hand. Moriarity was with him. A slug chipped off the corner of the chimney behind which they crouched.
Moriarity fired.
“Got that bum!” he muttered.
Both sides suddenly opened a furious exchange of shots. Lead ricochetted off the roof, twanged through aerial wires, shattered the glass in skylights. Shouts rose, sharp commands and questions. The policemen rose as one and galloped forward, firing as they ran.
The gunmen loomed up in the darkness— four, five, six of them. Guns bellowed and belched flame at close quarters. Terchinsky, already wounded, went down again, this time to stay. Guns empty, the men clashed, hand to hand, clubbing rifles. Nightsticks became popular.
Below, crowds were gathering, machines coming from other districts. Police whistles were blowing.
Gunther and Barnes came up from the rear, joined the fight. From then on it was short-lived. Every one of the six gunmen, rough customers to the last man, were beaten down, and most of them were unconscious.
The policemen were not unscathed, either. Terchinsky, of course, was dead. Cohen was on the point of collapse. MacBride was a bit dazed. They handcuffed the gangsters. MacBride looked them over, one by one, with his flashlight, and then went off to examine the ones who had been shot down. Moriarity was with him.
“Recognize anybody, Cap?”
“One or two, but can’t place ‘em. I’d hoped to find Duveen.”
“Didn’t you pot a guy going through the window? Maybe he fell down the fire-escape.”
“That’s right, Jake. Let’s look.”
MacBride gave brief orders to his men, told them to carry the prisoners down to the ground floor. Then he went off with Moriarity, descended the fire-escape, followed it down to the bottom.
Lying on the ground, face down, was a man dressed in a tuxedo. MacBride turned him over.
“Alive,” he muttered, “but unconscious.” “Who is he?” asked Moriarity. MacBride snapped on his flash, leaned over, his eyes dilating.
“Bonelio!” he muttered.
Kennedy was coming down the fire-escape.
VII
A day later MacBride stood in a large room in Police Headquarters. He was a little pale. His cheek was covered with cotton and adhesive tape. Moriarity was there, strips of tape over his right eye. And Cohen’s left arm was in a sling.
Against one wall was a bench. On this bench sat Trixie Meloy, Adolph Shanz, and Beroni, manager of the Palmetto Club. All three were manacled, one to the other. Shanz was despair personified. Beroni was haggard. Trixie wore a look of contempt for everybody in the room.
Kennedy came in, sat down at a desk and played with a pencil.
MacBride said, “I have a letter here that I’m going to read. It will interest you, Miss Meloy.”
He spread a sheet before him, said, “It was dictated to a stenographer at the hospital by a man named Louis Martinez.”
Trixie bit her lip.
MacBride read, “ ‘To Captain Stephen MacBride: The man you want is Tony Bonelio. I worked in his club. I was Miss Meloy’s dancing partner. We’d danced before, all over the country. I loved her. I thought she loved me. Maybe she did until Bonelio won her with money. It drove me crazy. I wanted to kill him. But I didn’t. But I learned a lot. He killed Bedell. I heard the plans being made. Bedell was getting hard to handle. State’s Attorney Krug and Shanz and Bonelio got together. Shanz was to get Bedell on the speaker’s platform, so Bonelio could shoot him from the roof. Shanz and Krug staged the block-party just for that. When Bonelio read that you had a man prisoner who was in the know, I heard him phone Krug. Krug promised to go down and get the man from you. Whoever he was, they were going to pay him a lot of money to take the rap. But when you wouldn’t give him up, Bonelio told Krug there was only one way—blow the station up.
“ ‘I tipped you about all this because I wanted to see Bonelio get his. I wanted to win back Trixie’s love. But I knew if she knew I’d done all that, she’d never look at me again. I was crazy about her. I was, but that’s over. I was lying here, dying, and I called her up to come over. She told me to go to hell and croak. I’ve been a fool. I see what she is now. But go easy with her, Captain, anyhow. The only thing she did was to go to the block-party and say she saw a man in a gray suit walking away. She didn’t see anybody. It was just a stall. That’s all she did, except what she did to me. I don’t know, maybe I still love her.’ “
MacBride concluded, and you could have heard a pin drop. Then he said, “That was Martinez’s death-bed confession.”
“The damn sap!” snapped Trixie, her face coloring.
“What a fool he was to waste his time on a hunk of peroxide like you,” observed Kennedy. “And what a dirty write-up I’m going to give you, sister.”
“Rats for you, buddy,” she gave him.
“Here’s hoping you become a guest of the state. Don’t forget to primp up and look pretty when the tabloid photographers get around. I don’t even see what the hell Bonelio saw in you.”
“Damn you, shut up!” she cried fiercely.
“Now, now,” cut in MacBride, “that’ll be enough. You, Shanz, are under arrest, and your trial won’t come up till the new administration’s in.”
“Where’s Krug?” he grumbled.
“Still looking for him,” said MacBride. “He slipped out at three this morning. Moriarity was over to his house and saw signs of a hasty departure. Krug got cold feet when he heard we had Bonelio. He knew he couldn’t help Bonelio, because the wop staged a gunfight with us. And he knew that if Bonelio knew Krug couldn’t help him, then Bonelio would squeal. As a matter of fact, Bonelio has squealed. You’ll go on trial in connection with the killing of Bedell. The net is out for Krug.”
Even as he said this, the telephone rang. He picked it up.
“Hello,” drawled a voice. “I want MacBride.”
“You’ve got him.”
“Well, MacBride, this is Duveen. I was sore as hell because you picked up Hess and the other two boys. They were on the way to blow up one of Bonelio’s warehouses. Say, I hear you’re looking for Krug.”
“Yes, I am. He’s wanted—bad.”
“I’ve got him. I’m calling from up-State. He ran into me a little while ago with his car. I nabbed him. I’m sending him in with a State trooper. That’s all, MacBride.”
“Thanks. Drop in for a drink some time.”
“I might, at that.”
That was all.
MacBride rubbed his hands together. “And now we’ve got Krug,” he said. “Krug, Shanz, Bonelio. And thank God, they’ll go on trial when Anderson is State’s Attorney.”
Shanz groaned. A little man, a tool of others, he had tried to barter honor for power.
The three of them, including Trixie Meloy, were marched out and locked in separate cells.
The commissioner came in, a large, benign man, mellow-voiced, steady-eyed.
“Congratulations, MacBride,” he said, and shook warmly. “It was great work. You’ve broken up an insidious crowd in Richmond City, and there’s every possibility you’ll be made inspector and attached to my personal staff.”
“The breaks helped me,” said MacBride. “I got a lot of good breaks toward the end.”
“That may be your way of putting it. Personally, I attribute your success to nerve, courage and tenacity.”
With that he left.
MacBride sighed, sat down, and felt his head. It hurt, there was a dull pain throbbing inside. He would carry a three-inch scar on his cheek for life. He felt his pockets.
“Thought I had a smoke….”
Kennedy looked up, g
rinned, pulled a cigar from his pocket. “Have one on me, Mac.”
MacBride eyed him for a moment in silent awe. Then he chuckled. “Thanks, Kennedy. I see where I have to buy you a box of Montereys.”
“See they’re good and moist, Mac,” said Kennedy.
Law Without Law
Frederick Nebel
I
ENNEDY CHUCKLED. “So you’re back in the Second, Mac.”
“See me here, don’t you?”
“Ay, verily!”
The old station-house blown up during the last election had been rebuilt, and the office in which Captain Stephen MacBride sat and Kennedy, the insatiable news-hound, stood, smelled of new paint and plaster. Something of the old atmosphere was lost—that atmosphere which it had taken long years to create: dust, age-colored walls decorated with news clippings, “wanted” bulletins, likenesses of known criminals.
Two days ago MacBride had been suddenly and inexplicably shifted from the suburban Fifth to the hectic Second. He was surprised, more than a little incredulous; and he suspected some ulterior motive behind the new Police Commissioner’s leniency.
So did Kennedy. And Kennedy said, “This is funny, Mac.”
“As a crutch.”
“Now, if you’d asked me a week ago, I’d have said you were stuck in the Fifth for the rest of your term—or shoved farther out in the sticks. What did Commissioner Stroble say?”
“Said we ought to get on well.”
“Was he nice?”
“Gave me a drink and asked about the health of my family.”
“Hot damn!” Kennedy clasped his hands and with a serio-comic expression stared at the ceiling. “O, Lord what hath come over the powers that be in this vale of iniquity, Richmond City?”
“You jackass!”
“Mac, poor old slob—”
“Don’t call me a slob!”
“Mac, my dear, what’s up now? Why did the Commissioner suddenly put you in the precinct nearest your heart’s desire?”
“Out of the pure and simple goodness of his heart.”
“Amen!”
Kennedy sagged limply and supported himself with one extended arm against the wall.
