“What the hell!”
“Accident. I was shooting at one of them rats you’re so concerned about.”
“You calling me a rat?”
“He came running along the bottom of the wall. I missed.” Turning, Burke pointed at a chip in the concrete near the floor. McReary looked from it to the fresh dent in Officer O’Shea’s painted tunic.
McReary let go. The slab of iron hit the floor with a crash and the younger detective tackled Burke, knocking the gun out of his grasp and carrying him down onto a pile of trash. They gouged and bit and rolled.
A shrill whistle ended the wrestling match. They separated and looked at Lieutenant Max Zagreb standing on the stairs. He took his fingers from his mouth and scowled.
“If you girls are through dancing, we got us a situation downtown.”
* * *
“He’s been up there since noon, his boss says.” Zagreb handed Burke his binoculars.
The detective focused on the forty-sixth floor of the Penobscot Building, the highest but one in a skyscraper towering over the rest of the city with the blinking light of a radio tower on top. The man standing on the ledge was in his shirtsleeves, his necktie snapping like a pennant in the wind. He looked to be in his thirties. A square semiautomatic pistol dangled from his right hand. At street level, barricades manned by officers in uniform kept a crowd clear of the block.
Burke passed the binoculars to McReary. “Who’d he shoot?”
“Nobody, yet. Name’s Kenneth Spills, cooks the books for an outfit that makes paper for General Eisenhower to doodle on while he’s chasing Hitler. His wife left him this morning.”
“Who, Eisenhower’s?” McReary offered the binoculars to Sergeant Canal, the fourth member of the Racket Squad and the biggest, Burke included. He shook his enormous head; he’d seen everything already.
“Spills’s, dummy,” Canal said. “When his boss tried to stop him from climbing out the window, he pulled a rod on him. Says he’ll shoot anybody who tries to keep him from jumping.”
Burke said, “I don’t get it. If they don’t want guys threatening to jump off buildings, why do they put ledges on ’em in the first place?”
“What’s our end?” McReary asked. “This should be the uniform division’s baby.”
“Commissioner says us. All us Home Fronters have to pull together.” Zagreb took back his binoculars. “Any ideas?”
Canal shifted his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “We got a deer rifle in the trunk. I can pick him off from here.”
“Any ideas that don’t stick us with a murder rap?”
“Don’t the fire department usually show up with a net for this kind of deal?” Burke asked.
“They’re using it in Redford,” the lieutenant said. “Some punk got turned down for enlistment and set fire to an apartment house to register his disappointment. We could rush him, but that might startle him into a swan dive. I don’t care about that so much, but he might plug one of us before he does. Be nice to talk him inside, though. Make the department look good and get the commish off our backs for a while.”
Canal said, “Hell, if we was any good at that we’d be with the diplomatic corps. Where’s the shrink? Get him to say why he hates his mother and wipe his nose when he steps back in.”
“The one we had’s doing that for the navy. He got Admiral Halsey to admit he wet the bed and that’s how we won at Midway.” Zagreb touched his lighter to a Chesterfield. The wind blew out the flame and he threw the cigarette into the gutter. “We need to come up with something before—”
“—Kenneth spills,” Canal finished.
McReary said, “I just had a thought.”
Burke grinned. “How’d that feel?”
“You want to finish what we started?”
“Say when, rook.”
“One war at a time, boys,” Zagreb said. “What you got, Mac?”
McReary told him.
“We still got that? I thought we gave it to the government.”
“If we did, I wouldn’t be standing here.” The detective third-grade glared at Burke.
“It’s only half an idea. What’s to keep him from taking a brodie?”
“I said it was a thought, not a brainstorm.”
“Oh, looky,” Canal said.
A black Packard squished to a stop at the end of the block. Police Commissioner Witherspoon, a sphincter with eyeglasses, got out on the passenger’s side, stepped around the barricades, glanced up at the man on the ledge, and jerked his chin at the lieutenant.
“What’s the situation?” he demanded when Zagreb joined him.
“Same as when we found it, sir. That’s not a gargoyle up there.”
“Don’t be insubordinate! What’s your plan?”
“I was just discussing it with Detective McReary.”
“Care to let me in on it?”
“Mac?”
McReary joined them. Witherspoon heard him out. His sour look curdled further. “A splendid solution, if it were your job to save your own skins. Meanwhile we’re stuck with a bookkeeper waiting for the DPW to scrape him off Griswold Street.”
A fourth party appeared, wearing a press card in his hatband. He had a broad, humorous face and gin blossoms on his ample nose. “Van Croker, Commissioner: the News.”
“I know damn well who you are, Croker. Those barricades are as much for the press as the citizenry.”
“I’m a citizen too.”
“Excuse me, sir,” Zagreb said. “I’ll handle it.”
“By all means. I’ll send a man up to ask Mr. Spills to stay put while you handle things.”
Zagreb and Croker stepped out of earshot. “How’d you get past Sergeant Dix?”
“I had a little help from Alexander Hamilton.”
“He’s raised his prices. His wife must be expecting another kid.”
“What’s the scuttlebutt, Lieutenant? Stock market crash again?” Croker jerked a thumb at the top of the skyscraper.
“Trouble at home. He’s got a roscoe.”
“Use it on the old lady, did he?”
“Be easier on all of us if he did.” Zagreb started to say something else, then fell silent. “Huh.”
“Can I quote you?” The reporter waited.
“Van, we still jake with your editorial board?”
“Touch-and-go. Right now they’re inclined to let the current administration stay in office for another month or two. Why?”
“You still got that airplane gizmo?”
“Autogyro. We put it in mothballs after FDR declared war on the world. Gasoline’s blood, according to the OPA. So’s shoe leather, but it’s all we have now to scoop the Times and Free Press.”
“Can it be broke out?”
“I’m the one supposed to ask the questions.”
“What if I said I might wangle the News a T sticker?”
“That’s for truckers; unlimited fuel. You dating Eleanor Roosevelt?”
“I can’t promise it. Rockbottom, whatever pops, the Racket Squad calls the News first.”
“Starting now?”
“Starting now. How much does that whirligig hold?”
“One pound past four hundred and it won’t leave the ground.”
“That lets out Canal and Burke, counting the pilot.” Zagreb caught McReary’s eye. He came over.
“Thanks, L.T. Witherspoon’s worse company than usual.”
“He was born three drinks behind. What do you weigh stripped, about one-sixty?”
The detective hesitated. “Why do I think I won’t like where this conversation’s headed?”
* * *
They loaded Officer O’Shea into a paddy wagon, and Burke and Canal rolled him into the Penobscot through the delivery entrance. The elevator operator, one legged and draft exempt, gave the iron effigy a curious glance on the way up.
“He’s fresh from the academy,” Canal explained. “We’re short-handed.”
* * *
“Of all the
harebrained notions,” Witherspoon said. “Zagreb, I wash my hands. When it blows up in your face it won’t be me carrying a duffel up the gangplank of a Liberty ship. Who invited this man?” He glared at Van Croker.
“Some mick,” Zagreb said. “Bill O’Rights.”
“Here comes Buck Rogers.” Croker nudged his photographer, who loaded a plate into his Speed Graphic.
The aircraft swept in low over the skyline, a weird sail-winged craft built of balsa and canvas with rotor blades whirling atop the fuselage, sounding like the love child of an air corps glider and a Waring blender. The crowd outside the barricades made the appropriate noises of spectators at a fireworks exhibition; no one there had seen the contraption since the days of Prohibition and Depression, when Croker and his colleagues had outmaneuvered every other paper in town covering gang shootings, labor strikes, and breadlines around the block. Every head turned when it climbed and made a wide graceful loop into the wind flapping Kenneth Spills’s hair and necktie. The would-be suicide lifted his chin, his weapon, too, following the autogyro with the muzzle.
“Lieutenant, if he shoots down a member of the press—”
Zagreb interrupted the commissioner. “Not to mention one of the Four Horsemen.”
“That name is not sanctioned by this department! A Racket Squad with a fancy nom de guerre is still a bevy of thugs with shields.”
Croker asked if he could quote him.
Witherspoon’s face took on a deeper shade of apoplexy. “It’s off the record! I warn you, First Amendment or not—”
“Tom, get a shot of the commissioner. I’m going to ask the chief to run it in color. I think it’s what Sylvia’s got in mind to paint the kitchen.”
The photographer lifted his bulky camera and exploded the flash in Witherspoon’s face.
That official blinked, tore off his spectacles, rubbed his eyes. “If you run that, I’ll yank your credentials!”
“Put it on the wire, Tom. There’s a credit line in it for you in Time.”
Grinning, the man stashed the exposed plate in one of his voluminous pockets, replaced it, and plugged in a fresh bulb. “Not the Pulitzer, though. That’s coming.” He aimed the lens at the aircraft, which was circling perilously close to the radio tower.
“Keep your shirt on,” Zagreb said. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
The sound of a shot reached them, warped by wind and distance. The man on the ledge had fired at the autogyro.
“Not to worry,” said Croker. “Jack Dance emptied a clip at it back in thirty-one, escorting a load of hooch across the bridge from Windsor. That fabric’s dosed with creosote; bullets just skid around it.”
“I’m calling an end to this immediately! Get Spills’s wife here. We’ll put her on a bullhorn and talk him down.”
“Too late,” Zagreb told the commissioner. “Unless you’re politician enough to explain to these good people what that’s about.” He pointed.
A fresh whoop from the crowd accompanied the sight of the man emerging from the open door of the flying machine. McReary, the junior member of the Racket Squad, wearing a one-piece flight suit and a leather helmet, perched on the floor of the craft the better part of a minute while it hovered, then stepped out into empty air. The rope attached to his chest harness uncoiled, jerked him up several feet when it came to an end, and dropped him the same distance while he hung on to the harness with both hands.
Zagreb cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted at the top of his lungs. “Hang on, Mac! I’m bumping you up to first-grade!”
“. . . you, L.T.!” Half the response was torn away by the wind.
“I didn’t catch that,” Witherspoon said.
Zagreb grinned. “I’ll fill in the blank back at Thirteen Hundred.”
Tom, the photographer, steadied his camera, took a deep breath, and pressed the shutter button. Next day, the picture made every front page in the country, bumping Monte Cassino below the fold.
* * *
“Police! Freeze!”
Canal and Burke had gone rock-paper-scissors for who’d get to say it; Burke won.
They’d used a passkey, and opened the door slowly to avoid distracting the man standing outside the window with a sudden movement. At Burke’s shout, Kenneth Spills wheeled, nearly lost his footing on the ledge, steadied himself, and fired. The slug struck Officer Rick O’Shea square between the eyes, which was too close for Canal’s comfort, having drawn the duty of peering through the rectangular holes beneath the tin cop’s comical brows. But both men showed remarkable restraint, aiming their weapons around its edges without pulling the triggers.
Spills opened his hand, letting his .45 drop forty-six stories, appeared to brace himself, and fell away from the building.
Square into the arms of Detective Third-Grade McReary, dangling like a baited hook from an aircraft that hadn’t had a shakedown flight since before Pearl Harbor.
“Kenneth,” he said, “If you had anything heavier than a poached egg for breakfast, I’m going to extradite you from hell in the next life.”
Spills struggled, but McReary’s grip, increased by fear, was as strong as Patton’s Third Army. He succumbed. “No problem, mister,” he said. “I haven’t seen an egg since Guadalcanal.”
* * *
Kenneth Spills accepted commitment to the Ypsilanti State Mental Hospital, which allowed him to plead guilty to a reduced charge of creating a public disturbance. His impassioned testimony convinced the judge that he never intended to shoot anyone.
“Not counting the crate I was riding,” McReary said, when the decision was announced. “What was to stop him from taking a potshot at me when I was hanging there like the tail on a kite?”
Zagreb said, “I put a sniper on top of the Dime Building, if Spills drew a bead. He invalided home after picking off thirty-six of Tojo’s monkeys on Guam.”
“Been nice if I’d known that when I was up there.”
“Quit your bellyaching. You know how hard it is to swing a stateside promotion in wartime? You’re getting an extra twenty bucks a month. You can afford to move your dear old ma out of that rat-trap apartment and into one of them houses Henry Ford built for Joe Lunchpail.”
“I offered. She turned me down. She named all the rats. They’re her pets now.”
Burke said, “In that case, I’m glad I missed that one in the basement.”
They were sitting in the squad room, occupying chairs belonging to men subsisting on K-rations in Europe and the Pacific. Canal blew the exhaust from one of his worn-out tractor tires out an open window. “What’s the commish up to?”
“Tanning his hide in the spotlight,” Zagreb said. “He held off a half hour before calling a press conference. I was impressed.”
Burke said, “What about Officer O’Shea? He took five slugs in the line of duty. I make that five Purple Hearts, a Distinguished Service Cross, and a by-god Congressional Medal of Honor.”
“Close,” said Zagreb. “He went to the smelters. This time next week, he’ll be on his way to Italy in the prow of a destroyer.”
“God help Mussolini.” Burke lifted his flask.
— KILL —
Fee
“Just don’t throw any pineapples in Detroit, that’s all we ask.”
Kill Fee
Zagreb snatched up the receiver on the first ring. The Four Horsemen were expecting a search warrant from Judge Springer.
“For you.” He held it out to Burke. “Grady from downstairs.”
“What’s up, Mel? I was catching up on my knuckle-cracking.” As the big detective listened, his face grew dark. “Who says he’s a friend? Well, let ’im rot. Jesus.” He banged down the receiver.
Sergeant Canal, who was bigger yet, skinned the cellophane off a cigar. “Been reading Dale Carnegie?”
“They tanked Asa Organdy for d-and-d. He wants me to bail him out.”
“Makes sense.” Dan McReary licked and sealed a V-mail envelope. He had a cousin in boot camp at Fort Dix. “Za
g and Canal sold him a U-boat sighting in Lake St. Clair, and he never remembers my name. You’re the only one hasn’t done him a bad turn lately that he knows.”
“Drunk-and-disorderly’s baby stuff,” Lieutenant Zagreb said. “Let’s chip in. We can use a friend on the Herald.”
“That’s fifty bucks wasted. His editor hates the mayor worse than Yamamoto. Organdy’s been trying to pin something on us since Dunkirk.”
“See what he wants. It’ll give us something to do while we’re waiting for Judge ‘Spring ’em’ to make up his mind. Pony up, boys. Yesterday was payday and we pulled a double shift, so I know you’re still flush. Who can you bank on these days if not the press?”
* * *
Organdy had written a regular column for the Detroit Herald until too many bum steers from Zagreb’s Racket Squad busted him down to obituaries. He’d spent eighteen months building himself up to man-on-the-street reporter; although truth be told he conducted most of his interviews in bars and brothels. His drinking history had left lesions on a face that was mostly nose under a hat that was beyond brushing and blocking. He scribbled his name on a receipt for his personal effects, distributed them among his various pockets, and Burke accompanied him from the jail to nearby Greektown, where the journalist ordered a bourbon and branch from the big Macedonian behind the Pegasus bar.
“What about you, Officer?” asked the bartender.
“Draw me a beer. I’m on duty. Put it on my friend’s tab.”
Organdy scowled, then shrugged. The bartender served their drinks. “You know, we settle up first of every month. That’s tomorrow.”
“I ever stiff you, Connie?”
“Depends on what you call stiff. Every time a new month comes around, I don’t see you till it’s half gone.”
“Well, the first don’t always come on payday.” The reporter searched all his pockets, came up with a couple of crumpled bills, a handful of change, half a roll of Tums, and a streetcar token. “Take out what looks like currency and leave the rest.”
Detroit Is Our Beat Page 19
