The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

by Penzler, Otto

  It was Barnaby who spotted the sedan rolling past at an intersection. He stiffened, nudged Duane and taking the briar from his teeth, pointed with the stem. Sergeant Duane slid to the edge of his seat.

  “Hoods … !”

  The Skipper gave a short brittle laugh. He jammed the pipe into a pocket, leaned over the front seat and gave the driver his instructions:

  “Murray, slam that sedan into a lamp-post; I don’t give a damn if you have to wreck us, don’t let ‘em get away.”

  The police chauffeur nodded without turning his head. He shifted into second, depressed the accelerator and caromed diagonally across the intersection. The siren gave one throaty snarl as he rammed the sedan over to the curb.

  The other driver made no attempt to elude detention. He braked sharply to avoid a crash and thrust his head out the window.

  “Hey, what’s the idea … ?” he began, stopping when he saw Barnaby swing out of the police car, gun in hand.

  Duane followed and threw a beam from his flash into the closed car. There were two men in the rear seat.

  Barnaby yanked open the rear door. “File out,” he ordered curtly, gesturing with his gun.

  The pair in the back seat hesitated, then the larger of the two, a big blond man, grinned insolently, tilted his hat to a rakish angle and climbed to the street. His companion, a stocky fellow, followed scowling.

  “You, too,” Barnaby growled at the driver, and that worthy grudgingly complied.

  The big man yawned. “What is this, Cap, a pinch?”

  Barnaby caught him by the shoulder and spun him around. “Keep your mouth shut, Rit-ter,” he barked. “We’ll start off with a frisk.” He ran practiced hands over the man’s body and found a snub-nosed .38 in a shoulder harness.

  “I gotta license to pack that rod,” Ritter offered, by way of explanation. “Don’t get ideas, copper.”

  Duane searched the other pair. “Clean!” he reported disappointedly.

  Barnaby inclined his head towards the ton-neau. “Frisk the heap,” he growled, keeping his eyes on the big man. “An’ who are these muggs?” he demanded of the latter, indicating the two other hoods.

  Ritter grinned. “I suppose you got a warrant to search our car, Cap?” He ignored the question.

  Barnaby’s eyes glowed. “I don’t need a warrant to frisk a load of rats.”

  Ritter shrugged. “No? Then maybe they changed the Constitution since lunch time. My mouthpiece told me then….”

  Duane came running around the back of the sedan. He had a sawed-off shot-gun in his hands.

  “The car was clean,” he snapped, “but I found this in the gutter. They must have heaved it out when we stopped ‘em.”

  Ritter smiled maliciously. “You’ll have a hell of a time proving….”

  Barnaby hit him alongside the jaw, knocking him over the left-front fender. “You damned … !”

  Duane caught his arm. “Easy, Cap, easy!” Lowering his voice, he added, “We ain’t got a thing on ‘em!”

  The man came up massaging his jaw. “That’ll cost you your job, flatfoot!”

  Barnaby shook his arm free of Duane and started another swing, but Ritter stumbled hastily out of range. The captain flexed his fingers and backed up a stride. “All right,” he rasped. “Pile in!” He waved them into the squad car with his gun.

  The trio climbed into the rear seat. Barnaby ordered the police chauffeur to drive the sedan while Duane piloted the official car. Then he took his place in the front, sitting sidewise so he could cover the cargo of hoods in the rear.

  Ritter made one more prophecy. “You can’t lock us up in this town, flatfoot!”

  He was right. They had barely reached Central Station when a criminal lawyer named Hymie Croker magically appeared armed with writs of habeas corpus. The three guns swaggered from the station, free, and from the shadow of the sergeant’s desk, Captain Barnaby and Sergeant Duane watched in sullen silence.

  When they had gone, Duane commented: “It’s sure a swell system, Skipper. Not much like it was twenty years ago, when my old man was chief.”

  “Mike Duane was a man,” Barnaby snarled through clenched teeth. “He’d have fired us if we’d brought those hoods in without first beatin’ ‘em so they couldn’t walk. We haven’t got a chief no more, we got a puppet. To hell with it, I’m goin’ to bed!” He turned, slapped open the swinging doors and barged out into the night.

  A court appearance in the morning and a lengthy conference with a deputy prosecutor after that kept Captain Barnaby away from Headquarters until late the following afternoon. When he finally strode into the station, the desk sergeant flagged him.

  “Chief Grogan wants to see you, Captain. He left orders to shoot you right up the moment you came in.”

  Barnaby bobbed his rugged head, turned and tramped up the stairs to Grogan’s office on the second floor. He was admitted at once.

  Chief of Police Grogan squatted behind a desk, his broad back to the windows. His full, moon-shaped face was an apoplectic purple and his heavy jowls welled over the tight collar band of his tunic as though it strangled him. He had a small, querulous mouth that was permanently puckered as though he was just about to whistle. What hair he had left was gray and he wore it plastered sidewise across his pate in a vain attempt at deception. His thick hands toyed with an onyx lighter.

  “You wanted to see me?” Barnaby asked.

  Grogan nodded sourly. “Sit down,” he commanded; and as Barnaby complied, he rose to his feet and began to pace the stuffy office. He made two complete circuits, then jerked to a stop and glared down at the Captain.

  “What in hell kind of a cop are you?” he roared. “I understand you stopped a carload of citizens last night without a damn’ bit of evidence, beat up one of the men for no good reason and then didn’t have enough facts even to lock them up!”

  Barnaby’s eyes narrowed.

  “You understand wrong,” he retorted dryly. “I stopped a sedan of professional hoods for a frisk. A rat named Ritter, an ace gunman of Coxy Swarm’s, got tough, so I slapped him. Ritter had a gun….”

  “… for which he has a permit,” cut in Gro-gan. “By what authority did you search that machine?”

  What little warmth remained in Barnaby’s eyes faded abruptly. “By what right, you ask? D’you know what happened down there last evenin’? A child was cut down by a mob of killers! They was tryin’ to knock off another hood an’ this kid of three took it instead.”

  Grogan made a disgusted motion with his big hand. “A wop kid!”

  “He lived an’ breathed,” Barnaby said slowly. “He died because we coppers tolerate a lot of rats in this town.”

  The Chiefs mouth shrank. “Captain Barnaby,” he rasped, “you’re relieved of your command immediately. You are suspended for ten days, after which you will report in uniform to night patrol duty in a suburban precinct.”

  Barnaby ran his tongue around the inside of his cheek. “I see. I rate this demotion because …”

  “Because of conduct unbecoming an officer of the law; because you violated the laws you are sworn to uphold; because you have a vicious temper and beat up citizens; because …”

  Barnaby stood up, lifted a restraining hand. There was fire glowing in the caverns under his shaggy brows.

  “Grogan, you’re a blustering dummy. You mouth a lot of words but you’re tryin’ this act because Coxy Swarm ordered to you to get rid of me. Ritter told me this was comin’.”

  The Chief swelled his chest. “Wait a minute, Captain Barn …”

  The older copper interrupted him. “Shut up! You can take your crooked graft-eaten force an’ go straight to hell with it.” With an explosive oath, he swiveled and stalked out of the room.

  He went down to the street and began to walk. Sweat stood out on his corrugated forehead; sweat of rage. Then as time passed and his temper cooled, he began to realize the cold truth.

  He had quit!

  Quit! That meant he wasn’t a copper anymor
e! Or did it? Twenty years—no, it was longer than that; it was twenty-six years next June that he came to the Department. Hell, he’d headed the Homicide Squad for nearly a decade. He spread his big hands before him—with battered knuckles, calloused palms. His quizzical eyes stole to his heavy feet. Not a copper … ? That was a laugh!

  He had quit!

  What was wrong? It hadn’t been like that in the old days! Sure, there was graft—you can’t change human nature entirely—but small stuff that meant little, not this wholesale business. But murder was murder and the old laws of war or peace always offered safety to women and babies. Was it the laws, the tricks the crooks’ shysters were skilled in under the guise of legality? Was it the way they were enforced, or the present administration?

  Grogan had accused him of unbecoming conduct. What in hell had he done to rate that? Slap a baby killer? Was that unbecoming of an officer? The Old Man had called him a law violator! Huh! What was he paid a salary for?

  Unable to find the answers to his muttered queries, Barnaby shrugged and raised his chin. Darkness had settled over the city; street lights sputtered into being. He glanced at a corner post and found himself in the district where Sam Duane lived….

  Cold sweat dampened his collar. Had Sam got it, too? Sam had a wife and family … ! Barnaby fished out a handkerchief and daubed his face. He’d better have a talk with Sam. It was one thing for Barnaby to throw up his job, he had no one to worry about. Somehow he’d just never found the time to get married. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to—he had. He wanted a real home, loved kids, but a copper doesn’t get much time for courting women—not the kind he’d want to mother his kids.

  It took him ten minutes to reach the shabby little duplex that Sam Duane called home. A woman admitted him. Her wan features were wrinkled and worn, her body shapeless, and her head wore a crown of pale silver, but to Barnaby, Molly Duane was still the golden-locked colleen she had been the day she married Sam. One look at her patient face warned him.

  She smiled and inclined her head to a curtained opening.

  “Sam’s in the parlor. Go right in, Clyde.”

  Barnaby squared his shoulders, swung on his heel and pushed into the room.

  Sam Duane was sitting in a decrepit rocker, his stockinged feet on the windowsill, his chin resting on his chest, clamping his briar between his teeth. He spoke without turning his head.

  “H’lo, Skipper. I hoped you’d drop in.”

  Barnaby pulled up a chair without invitation and straddled it. He probed through his pockets for his own pipe, found it and rapped it against the heel of his palm.

  “Grogan haul you up?” he asked with studied casualness.

  Duane bobbed his bald head. “Yep. Back to the goats with a log of wood.” Which is a copper’s descriptive phrase to explain that he was transferred to the suburbs to swing a club as he patrolled a foot beat.

  “You quit, eh?” Duane added.

  Barnaby thumbed tobacco into his pipe. “Yeah, I …” He stopped as the front door-bell whirred. He heard Molly pad down the corridor, heard the door creak open, then the booming voice of Dennis Hallahan flooded the small home.

  Sam lifted his chin. “Come on in, Denny,” he invited. Simultaneously the curtains were brushed aside and Hallahan and another dick named Louis Forsythe came in. The parlor seemed crowded.

  Hallahan and Forsythe belonged to the same breed as Duane and Barnaby; born coppers, disillusioned, bitter, but patriotic to a losing cause—-justice. To describe them would be to describe any typical old harness bull. Big men, with wide hunched shoulders, powerful biceps and cold, neutral eyes. They hold their heads a certain way after some twenty years of forced aggressiveness, a sort of cross between a Seville bull and an English bull dog. Their mouths grow straight and thin from cynicism, faces furrow and seam from the sight of constant tragedy. They grow to look alike, to think alike, to act alike…. A grand breed—a vanishing race.

  That was Barnaby, that was Duane, and Hallahan, and Forsythe!

  “You gave Grogan some good advice, Clyde,” Hallahan commented. Hallahan had retired a year ago; Forsythe was due to take his pension in another eight months.

  Barnaby nodded. “I couldn’t help myself,” he explained slowly. “The sight of him sittin’ there, a beefy, blusterin’ figurehead … well, some-thin’ snapped inside of me and … I quit!”

  Hallahan sighed. “It’s too damn’ bad you threw away your pension. This town needs men like you! The city’s in a hell of a shape; the criminal element are in power. What this town needs is a new department. Why a half-dozen old timers could clean this rat’s nest up in forty-eight hours! Why, I remember when Old Mike Duane was chief we …”

  He droned on, but ex-Captain Barnaby was not listening.

  “… old timers could clean this rat’s nest up in forty-eight hours!”

  Old timers? He raised smoldering eyes and looked into the dim-lit faces around him. Forty-eight hours? Two days! And why not?

  Forsythe was talking when Barnaby held up a commanding hand for silence. Forsythe paused….

  Barnaby’s voice knifed the sudden hush. “Dennis, could you an’ me raise a few old timers for a clean-up?”

  No one spoke for nearly five minutes. These were not impulsive youngsters; these were veterans. They knew the seriousness of the suggestive question; knew the potential dynamite packed into the simple phrase.

  Hallahan spoke first, almost defensively, for he remembered it was his own words that prompted the query.

  “You mean, Clyde, to gun out these hoods?”

  Barnaby leaned forward and his voice took on a saw-edge. “I mean to form a real department, to investigate, to convict, to execute.” The idea assumed shape as he spoke. “To clean up; to deal out, not shyster’s law, but justice. Every one of you boys knows the problem—it isn’t enough to find out who commits crime, it’s to make a jury believe it. We know the guilty ones, the thieves, the killers, and the grafters, but we can’t do anything about it. Hallahan, you’re a widower, independent—what do you think?”

  Hallahan leaned back in his chair, his eyes watching the blue spiral of smoke that eddied ceilingward from his corncob.

  “To deal out justice, not law,” he mused absently. Then a laugh rang from his throat and he sat very straight.

  “Think?” he roared. “I think it’s a hell of a good idea! You an’ me….”

  “Count me in,” Forsythe interrupted.

  Hallahan shook his head. “No, Louis, not you. There’s your pension to think about. You’d lose that. An’ of course Sam is out, too. We can’t use married men with families that might suffer.”

  Barnaby nodded in accord. “That’s right,” he growled. “We’ll get no thanks if we succeed. If we fail….” He made an eloquent gesture with his big hands.

  Duane never moved his head, but his voice roared out.

  “Molly … !”

  Steps sounded in the hallway and a moment later, Molly Duane’s head appeared in the opening.

  “Yes, Sam?”

  Sam turned his face towards her. “Molly,” he said quietly, “the boys are going to form an unofficial police department. They’re goin’ to clean up this town, gun out baby killers an’ the like. They may get themselves killed, Molly. What do you think about it?”

  She hesitated just an instant, then: “And you want to go with them, Sam?” she whispered.

  Barnaby cut in. “That’s out! Sam ain’t gonna do no such a damn’ fool thing. Why it’s practically suicide an’ …”

  In the wan light, they saw her smile. “If Sam wants to go, he can,” she told them firmly. “Our babies are all grown and have families of their own; they don’t need us now. It sounds like a mighty good thing. I’ve confidence in Sam and I can go to the children if anything should … well, happen.”

  “Thanks, Molly,” Duane said huskily.

  She went away.

  “Four of us should be enough,” Sam Duane went on quietly. “An’ since we’ll nee
d a Chief, I suggest Clyde.”

  Hallahan stared for a minute at the drapes, still swaying from Molly Duane’s passing. Then a deep sigh escaped him. “What a woman,” he whispered, then added with a deeper growl: “I think that’s another damn’ swell idea. What do you say, Louis?”

  Forsythe got up and walked over to the telephone. “Just a minute,” he begged. “I got just one job to do before I take orders from our new Chief.” He dialed a number, waited until the receiver made a metallic noise, then began:

  “Hello, Grogan? This is Lieutenant Forsythe. Well, get this straight the first time, you thick-headed— —”

  Hallahan’s explosive laughter drowned Forsythe’s words.

  “Louis,” Hallahan boomed, “is resigning!”

  At exactly eleven thirty, “Big Dutch” Ritter was comfortably ensconced at a ring-side table in La Parisienne Cafe in company with his swart body-protector, Whisper Rieg, affectionately known as “The Scourge,” and a pair of blonde entertainers. The redoubtable Ritter paused in the middle of a humorous tale when his alert eyes glimpsed the bulky figure of Barnaby and Duane bearing across the polished dance-floor towards his table. He had just time to remark out of the corner of his mouth that, “this ought to be good,” when Barnaby reached his side.

  “All right, Ritter, you’re comin’ with us!”

  “The Scourge” slid to his feet, but made no overt move when he caught the imperceptible shake of his boss’ head. Ritter grinned, tilted back in his chair and eyed the two veterans.

  “Don’t clown, Cap. Sit down an’ have a drink. I heard you got canned.”

  One of the girls tittered nervously; perhaps she thought Skipper Barnaby didn’t look like a man to fool with. She started up from her chair.

  Barnaby glanced sidewise at Duane; their eyes met. “Okey, Sam!” he rasped: and made a dive for Ritter.

  Rieg tried to earn his salary; he went for his gun. But big Sam Duane’s persuader thudded behind his left ear and he immediately lost all interest in the encounter. Before he hit the polished floor, Duane caught him, slung him over his shoulder.