Edge nodded. ‘Killed by a single action.’
CHAPTER TWO
THE Captain of Detectives from the local precinct station was named Gilpatrick and he had red hair, green eyes and the kind of demeanor which suggested he would be quick to temper. But there was no hint of an Irish brogue in his voice. He was about fifty with a ruddy complexion. A dead, half-smoked cigar seemed to be a permanent fixture between his thick lips and eyes which viewed everything as if they had seen it all before, countless times.
The half-breed told him what had happened since the Carolina tobacco grower had approached him with the offer of a morning’s work, but made no mention of his guess that the blond haired youngster with crooked teeth had hit the wrong target.
‘That how you saw it, too, Mase?’ Gilpatrick asked when the story was told, acknowledging for the first time that he knew the reporter.
‘Sure was, Captain,’ Dickens confirmed. He glanced around the barroom to indicate the other patrons and the men who tended the bar, many of whom seemed to be trying without success to avoid looking at the corpse which was still sprawled where it had fallen. ‘And I’d say there’s never been a murder in New York with so many eye-witnesses.’
‘There’s never been one here at the hotel,’ Quinn put in anxiously, using a pure white silk handkerchief to mop sweat beads from his forehead. ‘It’s going to be difficult for us to get over...’
Gilpatrick touched the heel of one of Powell’s upturned boots with the toe of his own. ‘This guy isn’t ever going to get over what happened to him, mister.’
It was obvious from the way the detective grimaced and spoke that the publicity sensitive Quinn had already tried to talk Gilpatrick into doing everything possible to play down the killing. Quinn’s own expression and tone of voice indicated that he knew full well that he was indulging in wishful thinking. So, submitting to the police captain’s authority as an officer of the law, Quinn glowered resentfully at Dickens - a representative of the press which would be the instrument for bringing adverse publicity to the Fifth Avenue Hotel.
The men arrived from the city morgue to remove the body, but Gilpatrick made them wait a few moments while he crouched down to look along an imaginary line between the dead man and the door. Then he stood up, nodded his permission for Powell’s remains to be taken away, and ordered the two patrolmen to start taking names, addresses and statements from the rest of the witnesses.
‘You from Texas?’ he asked Edge, out of the blue.
‘Iowa.’
‘How long you been in New York?’
‘Three days.’
‘Staying here at the hotel?’
‘Too rich for my blood and my bank-roll, Captain. Boarding house on Fourth Avenue.’
‘Why’d you come here this evening, Mr. Edge?’
‘A drink is all. Killing some time before my train leaves the Grand Central depot.’
‘You’re a long way from the railroad station, mister.’
The half-breed dropped his cigarette to the floor and stepped on it, which drew a scowl from Quinn. ‘When I got here I had a long while to wait.’
‘What’s the idea, Captain?’ Dickens growled. ‘You’re questioning him like you suspect him of something?’
Edge eyed the reporter coldly, aware that his over-anxious, protective attitude would serve only to strengthen Gilpatrick’s suspicion that Powell had been shot by mistake.
‘Go give a patrolman your statement, Mase,’ the Captain rasped, his green eyes looking almost as hard as the blue ones of the half-breed.
Dickens obviously knew the lawman well enough to recognize the danger signs and he complied without argument, a hangdog expression on his thin face and his skinny shoulders sagging.
Gilpatrick waited until the reporter was out of earshot, then leaned on the counter top and asked for some water. The barman put a few drops in the bottom of a shot glass, knowing from past experience what was required. The detective took a dented silver hip flask from a pocket of his topcoat and poured amber liquid into the glass. It smelled like good brandy.
‘You know what I’m getting at, don’t you, mister?’ he asked, lighting the cigar.
‘Powell and me were standing pretty close together when he got it, feller.’
A nod as he sipped the brandy and water mix. Then he waved the cigar in the direction of Quinn, who stood a few feet away trying too hard to pretend he was not listening. ‘Mr. Quinn there said that when he got into the room you had your gun out and were standing like some picture on the front cover of a dime novel.’
‘Habit, feller. I’ve been shot at lots of times.’
Another nod. ‘Figured you had. One of them western gunfighters, are you? Lots of that kind of trouble in Iowa?’
‘I was born and bred in Iowa, feller. Haven’t been back there in a long time. There’s trouble all over.’
‘So I hear, Mr. Edge. We get more than our fair share right here in New York. But we got us the municipal police set up to deal with it. Works real well most of the time. From the commissioners right down to the patrolmen. Not one man on the force wouldn’t like for the carrying of guns by private citizens to be outlawed. But if that ever comes, it won’t be for a long time. Best we can do now is enforce the laws we got on the books. And there’s a whole bunch of them laws against the kind of shoot out that almost happened here.’
‘You saying that here in New York a man doesn’t have the right to protect himself, Captain?’ the half-breed asked.
Gilpatrick finished his drink and ceased to draw against his cigar. He straightened up. ‘You know what I’m saying, mister,’ he replied sternly. ‘You strike me as a man with a brain as sharp as his reflexes so I don’t intend to draw you any pictures. The frontier and its ways moved west from here a lot of years ago. And me and every other man in this city who carries a shield are here to make sure those ways don’t come back.’
Mason Dickens had used his acquaintanceship with the police captain to jump the line and give his statement to a patrolman. Now he returned to stand on the bloodstain which was all that was left to show a man had been killed in the hotel barroom. His pale face continued to express anxiety.
‘You through with me?’ Edge asked.
Gilpatrick pursed his thick lips around the again dead cigar. ‘Unless you got any hard information you want to volunteer, mister? That has a bearing on the shooting?’
The half-breed said nothing and could not be sure whether or not his silence was an implied lie.
‘All right, Mase, get your notebook out.’ The detective waited until the reporter was ready. The nervous Quinn moved a pace closer. Gilpatrick stared into space as he said: ‘The municipal police of this district ask members of the public to be on the look-out for the man who shot and killed Vincent G. Powell in the bar of the Fifth Avenue Hotel.’ He paused to direct his gaze into the impassive face of Edge. ‘Anyone who thinks he knows or sees the gunman is urged to report the fact to the police and to make no attempt to approach him.’
‘Is that all, Captain?’ Dickens asked as Gilpatrick made to turn around and go to check with the patrolmen.
‘What else?’ the detective growled. ‘You were here and you saw what happened. So you’ve got the killer’s description. The victim was a big wheel in the tobacco business so you shouldn’t have any trouble digging up some background on him. Hell, Mase, you want me to do your job for you?’
‘Captain, couldn’t you tell him not to print the name of the hotel?’ Quinn put in hurriedly. ‘He could just call it a mid-town hotel, couldn’t he?’
Gilpatrick wore an expression as if he were sucking on a sour lemon. ‘I could say a whole lot to him, mister. But he’s a newspaper scribbler who happened to be at the right place at the right time for a change. So anything I told him wouldn’t turn out to be anything like he prints.’
Now he did leave the small group at the bar counter and the hotel manager seemed on the point of addressing his plea directly to the reporter. But Dickens s
poke first.
‘Forget it, Quinn. The Globe’s only one paper that’ll carry the story. And even if all of them held back on the hotel name, it’d be all over the city by word of mouth. Hell, there wouldn’t have been many more people to witness what happened if the killer had rented Madison Square Garden to shoot down Powell,’
The manager blinked, gasped and became disconsolate as he realized the truth behind the reporter’s exaggeration.
‘Shall we get out of here, Edge?’ Dickens asked. ‘I need to file my story with the office. Unless you’ve got something to tell me that’ll give me a head start on what the other sheets will carry tomorrow?’
‘Not a thing, feller.’
Dickens led the way through the scattering of tables to the doorway.
‘Mase going to show you how to get to Grand Central?’ Gilpatrick called from where he was seated at a table, leafing through a sheaf of pages torn from the patrolmen’s notebooks.
‘I know how to get there, feller,’ the half-breed answered.
‘Don’t miss your train.’
‘You telling me?’
‘Just trying to cut down on my work, Mr. Edge. We got enough eastern style trouble here in the city. We can well do without the imported kind. Now beat it, or you’ll be late.’
‘Like Powell’s late?’
‘Don’t think it couldn’t happen.’
Dickens pulled open one of the double doors and they went out into the crowded lobby. Another patrolman was on duty there, barring entrance to a group of noisy men who immediately began to fire questions at Dickens and Edge. They used the reporter’s first name and called the half-breed ‘cowboy’ were obviously staffmen from competing newspapers.
‘No deal, no deal,’ Dickens repeated as he forced a way through the press of journalists. ‘Gilpatrick’ll give you a statement.’
‘He wouldn’t give you the pickings of his Goddamn nose!’ somebody snarled.
‘That5s because he rolls his stinking cigars out of them,’ another countered.
They exited through the Broadway doorway of the hotel and both of them relished the fresh, warm night air, pleasant in contrast with the perfumed and smoke-filled atmosphere of the barroom and lobby. The wide street and its flanking sidewalks were crowded with traffic, and strollers, impervious to what had happened behind the white marble facade of the large hotel.
‘The Globe office is over on Seventh at 29th, Edge,’ Dickens announced. Taster to walk than to try to get a cab this time of night.’
‘Lead the way, feller,’ the half-breed allowed, not interrupting his apparently nonchalant survey of the street and its buildings.
The reporter started to walk north on Broadway, looking for a break in the traffic to cross to the other side of the street. ‘I really appreciate your co-operation, Edge. Hope you don’t mind, but I’d like for you to wait for me outside the Globe building.’
‘If you’ve got carpets down, I won’t spit on them.’
Dickens shook his head, as pre-occupied with private thoughts of the future as was Edge with reflections on the past and staying alert to the present. ‘It’s not that,’ the reporter muttered. ‘I’m just a couple of steps up from the kid who makes coffee for the city room. I get all the crumby no-account assignments like the Elks dinner I was supposed to cover tonight. If I let them know in the office the kind of deal I’ve got with you, they’ll take me off the story and give it to somebody else.’
‘Somebody likely to have better contacts than a man who reports Elks dinners, feller?’
‘Hell no!’ Dickens came back fast. ‘I’ve been around this town a long time, Edge. Bad luck is all that’s kept me low down on the totem pole.’
‘A man makes his own luck,’ the half-breed answered, having to increase his easy walking pace to keep up with the reporter as Dickens ducked out on to the street and began to weave between stalled cabs, carriages, wagons and streetcars.
‘What I’m trying to do now, isn’t it?’
Edge did not believe any more in what he had told the tall, thin man striding along at his side. Not in every instance, anyway. Luck - or fate, or destiny, which was how he elected to think of this most variable of indefinable occurrences in life - could often be changed by a man’s reactions or responses to a particular event. But just as often it could not be, influences outside his control either ruled the decisions he made, or overruled them.
Luck, fate or destiny had caused Vincent G. Powell to step around Edge tonight and thus stop a bullet which was probably intended to kill the half-breed.
How many other times had the man now called Edge escaped violent death because of the predetermined or involuntary action of the others? The same for the man he once had been - Josiah C. Hedges?
That had been his given and family name during the mostly halcyon days on the Iowa farmstead where he was born and grew up to adulthood. Throughout his youth violence and the threat of death had made its presence felt on occasions: but raids by marauding Plains Indians had been relatively few and easily beaten off by his parents and then by himself and his younger brother, Jamie. Less frequently, passing strangers had brought danger to the farm. But the closest any member of the Hedges family came to death was when the two boys were playing with what they thought was an empty Starr rifle which exploded a shot when Josiah squeezed the trigger - the bullet shattering Jamie’s right leg and making him a cripple for the remainder of his short life.
Their parents died peacefully, struck down by disease, and the two sons developed a fine working partnership until the first shots were fired in the War Between the States. Too lame to fight for the Union, Jamie was able to run the farmstead single handed while his elder brother rode as a lieutenant, then a captain, in the US Cavalry.
Josiah Hedges was little more than a raw kid when he went to the war, but like so many others who survived, he emerged a hardened and embittered man. Was perhaps affected more than most by his experiences of war. Because under his command had been six troopers who were probably the most vicious and amoral men who ever donned cavalry uniform - men who were often more of a threat to their captain than were the Rebel enemy.
But when the bloody war eventually gave way to an uneasy peace, the mustered-out cavalry captain rode home to Iowa with every intention of forgetting the grim past and making a bright future for himself and Jamie. Until he saw that Jamie had no future - that his kid brother was now just a corpse sprawled in the yard of the burned out farm, the marks of torture on his body in process of being eradicated by the talons and beaks of rapacious buzzards.
Perhaps if the six men who committed the outrage had all ridden away from the farm, the man called Edge would not have been created. But only five had gone, leaving one of their number as dead as Jamie. One ex-trooper who in death revealed the names of the other five who had been inseparable companions throughout the war.
In hunting down the murderers of Jamie and avenging his brother’s death, the former cavalry captain had used every brutally learned lesson of the war, but he no longer wore a uniform to justify his actions. And he killed a man in Kansas who perhaps did not deserve to die. So the law issued wanted posters on him and because of the mispronunciation of his family name by a Mexican, Josiah C. Hedges became Edge. He also became a drifter, at first searching for the opportunity and a place to put down roots, then acknowledging that this was not to be - surrendering to the dictates of his ruling fate which ordained that his destiny lay in survival for its own sake.
Since that day in the June of sixty-five when he rode up to the burnt out farmstead on the Iowa prairie, this man had never won anything that he was allowed to keep. Women, money, a place to rest his mind and body in comfort and safety, friendship.... He had been allowed to enjoy such minor luxuries and reassuring relationships for only cruelly short periods before violence and death intervened to rob him of all that he had except his life. Until eventually he ceased to look for that which other men took for granted.
Violence and death con
tinued to shadow his backtrail or lay ahead in ambush and sometimes he had to endure physical pain. But his decision to forsake the normal human desires at least protected him from the greater agonies of mental anguish and grief. He ate, drank, slept, earned money, had a woman and accepted the help of others whenever or wherever the opportunity presented itself. Coldly. Paying for what he had or returning the favor for favor. So that he could be totally devoid of emotion when what he had was taken from him.
Such a drastic decision to alter the course of his life and the way he lived it owed nothing to luck. But what of all those events which caused him to become hard and embittered enough to make the choice? Jamie’s death. The even more harrowing way in which his wife had met her end. The taking of jobs which earned him big money he always lost. The strange circumstances which had brought him to New York. No man could see into the future, so when he was faced with alternatives and committed himself to one or other of the courses open to him, surely he was trusting to luck that he had chosen wisely?
Unless he was a man called Edge who did not give a damn which way the spinning coin came down.
‘We’ll go down the alley,’ Mason Dickens said. ‘Short cut to the Globe building. There’s a bar in the basement where you can wait for me.’
The half-breed nodded his acceptance of the reporter’s suggestion and glanced quickly in both directions along the length of West 28th Street before he stepped into the alley behind Dickens. As far as he was able to tell, nobody had followed them from the hotel. But he could not be so sure as he would have been out on the plains or deserts or in the mountain country of the west. In the city there were too many people and too much cover among the buildings. Too much noise and too much cement. And he was prepared to admit that fifty men could be trailing him without him being aware of their intention.
The alley was broad enough to allow a wagon to pass through, enclosed on one side by a towering building and on the other by a high wall broken at intervals by closed gates. The glow from the street gaslights filtered a short way into the darkness at either end. The sounds of the city were muted by the walls. The clack of their footfalls were amplified, by these same confining walls.
EDGE: WAITING FOR A TRAIN (Edge series Book 30) Page 2
