Badge of Evil

by Whit Masterson

  “Now, look here,” snapped Quinlan. “I’m not sitting here and listening to a bunch of lies about Mac.” He half rose from the bed, his hand reaching out automatically for his cane.

  “This is the lie,” said Holt evenly, tapping the newspaper. “And you’ve got to face it, Quinlan. You can throw away your paper and you can stay in bed for the rest of your life, but the lie is still there and you know it.”

  “I don’t know any such thing. Now beat it.”

  “How long are you going to keep on playing McCoy’s stooge? Isn’t thirty years long enough?”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to your wife!” Quinlan was nearly shouting.

  “I know you didn’t — just like you didn’t have anything to do with planting the dynamite at Shayon’s apartment and all the other phoney deals McCoy has pulled. You’ve been too dumb to know what was going on, Quinlan, and that’s the truth of it.”

  “Where do you get off, coming in here accusing me?” Quinlan yelled. “If this leg wasn’t bothering me, I’d — ”

  “Is it really your leg that’s bothering you — or something else?” Holt countered, meeting Quinlan’s furious eyes. “Isn’t what’s bothering you that you’ve finally tumbled to what’s been going on all these years?”

  Quinlan’s gaze was the first to waver. He muttered, “You’re out of your head. Why should I believe anything you’ve got to say?”

  “Yeah, why should you? McCoy’s been your little tin god and it’s easier for you to leave it that way. I admire your loyalty. It’s just too bad that McCoy doesn’t feel the same way about you.”

  Quinlan’s head snapped up. “What are you talking about?”

  “Let me ask you something. On the week end that Farnum changed his story about the dynamite, both you and McCoy talked to him. Separately. That seems strange to me, you being such close partners and all.”

  “We were going to see him together, only — ” Quinlan stopped.

  “Only McCoy didn’t show up.”

  “He got delayed, that’s all.”

  “Sure, he did. So you saw Farnum alone and McCoy came in later. That way McCoy could brainwash Farnum without any witnesses — and just in case anything went wrong you were set up to be the patsy.”

  “You can’t prove that.”

  “I can’t prove that Connie was framed, either. But I know she was. And you know she was. Wake up, Quinlan. McCoy’s carried you around for years like a spare tyre in case he needed an out. That’s all you’ve ever been to McCoy.”

  Quinlan’s gaze dropped slowly to his bullet-shattered leg. “I don’t believe it,” he said huskily. “Mac’s my friend.”

  “Where was your friend last night? With you, telling you that there was nothing to worry about?” Holt saw by Quinlan’s expression that he had struck home. “You don’t need to tell me because I know where McCoy was. He was at the Frontier Hotel on Fathom Street, setting up the frame. He didn’t need you for that or anything else now, except maybe to take the bumps if nothing else’ll save his skin.”

  “I called the ranch,” Quinlan murmured, almost to himself. “He wasn’t there. It doesn’t prove anything, though.”

  “You still want proof?” Holt demanded. “All right, I know where the proof is. It’s my gun. You saw it yourself. Connie took it with her last night but it wasn’t among her things when the cops found her. That means McCoy took it. I don’t know what he intends to do with it. He probably figures it as his ace in the hole in case another frame is needed. But it works the other way, too. That gun is also my ace in the hole.”

  “I don’t follow you,” Quinlan said slowly.

  “If McCoy has my gun, it’s concrete proof that he staged last night’s frameup. If he did that, then he’s also guilty of everything else. What are you going to do about it, Quinlan?”

  “Why should I do anything about it?”

  “You’re a cop,” said Holt. “I think you’re an honest cop. You took an oath and you wear a badge. I know you hate my guts but that doesn’t matter — if the badge means anything to you. I challenge you, as a cop, to investigate what I’ve told you.”

  “Don’t give me that crap about duty,” Quinlan sneered “I was doing my job when you were still in diapers. You’re just trying to save your neck, Holt.”

  “And you’re just trying to duck the issue. Why, Quinlan? What are you afraid of — that I might be right?”

  “I’m not afraid of anything,” Quinlan said hoarsely. “I just don’t believe you. You hear me? I just don’t believe you.”

  “Yell as loud as you like,” Holt told him, his voice equally intense. “It doesn’t convince me because it doesn’t convince you. That’s why you’re hiding here in bed. You’d rather pretend to yourself that it’s your leg that’s crippled when all the time it’s your guts instead.”

  Quinlan made an inarticulate growling sound, but whether it signified despair or only rage Holt couldn’t be sure. They stared at each other across the rumpled blankets and each of them was panting slightly, as if they had been engaged in violent physical exertion. Finally, Quinlan whispered, “Shut up,” although it had been several moments since Holt had spoken. “I got to think.”

  Holt turned and went into the tiny living room. He sat down in an easy chair and didn’t look at Quinlan. He felt drained of emotion, his mind entertaining neither hope nor hopelessness. He had said it all, everything he had come to say, and now there was nothing more he could do. The decision was no longer his. It belonged to Quinlan.

  He sat there a long time, hardly thinking of anything except how tired he was. On the boulevard outside, buses rumbled past and somewhere close by a power lawn mower whirred. But inside the bungalow there was only silence. Once he thought he heard Quinlan mutter, “Thirty years,” like a requiem, but that was all.

  Perhaps he dozed because he didn’t hear Quinlan leave his bed. But he suddenly became aware that the sergeant was standing beside his chair. Quinlan had put aside his pyjamas; he wore his working clothes. Quinlan wasn’t looking at him. Instead, he was staring out the window where the afternoon shadows were lengthening across the grass.

  “Getting late,” Quinlan murmured. “But maybe not too late. What do you want me to do, Holt?”

  Holt rose slowly to face him. “I think you know.”

  “Yeah.” Quinlan sighed. “I guess I do.”

  “You’ve got to ask McCoy for the truth. You’re the only man in the world he might tell it to.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “I FEEL like Dick Tracy,” grumbled Quinlan. “Never had a bit of use for all this crummy machinery, anyhow.”

  “You can put down your arms now,” Holt told him. Despite the sergeant’s complaints, the short-range broadcasting equipment he carried was surprisingly compact. There was a microphone the size of a half-dollar pinned behind his necktie, and tiny wires under his shirt that were connected to a pair of batteries in his hip pocket. Nothing more, but he was a walking transmitter. Holt surveyed him critically. “Well, the batteries bulge a little but your coat-tail should hide that. Be sure to keep your coat buttoned and don’t fold your arms or you’ll deaden the mike.”

  Quinlan grunted agreement and got back into his car. Holt got in, too, but into the rear seat where the bulkier receiving set and tape recorder were set up. He doubled his long legs under him and tried to find a comfortable sitting position on the car floor while Quinlan started the engine. They had halted less than a mile from McCoy’s turkey ranch to make final preparations. It had been a long drive from the city to Whiteside, neither man talking very much, conscious that tonight marked some sort of a turning point in each of their lives, for better or for worse.

  Night had fallen, a dark moonless night that in the country achieved a blackness that was unknown in the city. Holt, sitting in the small cavern between the two car seats, thought it fittingly funereal. Someone’s aspirations, reputation and career were going to be buried tonight. A strange kind of funeral, he
thought, when you don’t know whether you’re going to be the corpse or the mortician.

  The car stopped again and with it his macabre train of thought. He peeped over the window ledge and saw that they had reached the big wooden gate which barred the road to McCoy’s ranch house. The gate was bathed in the radiance of two floodlamps, making the darkness beyond that much more forbidding.

  Quinlan got out, opened the gate, drove the automobile through and stopped again to close the gate behind them. “Mac would think it was funny if I didn’t,” he explained. “He can see the gate from his front window.”

  “Is he home?” Holt asked, keeping out of sight.

  “There’s a light on at the house. He’s home.”

  They drove forward again, along the winding lane that Holt remembered from his previous visit, and then came to a final halt. “How close are we to the house?” he questioned, not daring to look for himself. “I’m not sure about this gadget but I don’t imagine the range is much over a hundred yards.”

  “We’re right by the front door,” Quinlan said. He shut off the engine but made no move to get out. Holt finally asked him what was the matter. “I feel like the lowest kind of snake, coming here like this. That’s what’s the matter.”

  “I don’t like it any better than you do.”

  “That’s easy said. But Mac has been like one of my own family.” Quinlan’s voice quickened. “Oh-oh, there he is now. I’d better move.” And at the same time, Holt heard McCoy’s cheerful hail from the direction of the house, “Hey, Hank, is that you? Come on in.”

  Quinlan opened the door and got out. In an undertone, he told Holt, “If you’re wrong about him, I promise you I’m going to kick your teeth in. Even if you’re right, I may still do it.”

  Holt hastily put on the ear phones and groped for the switch of the tape recorder, ready to start the spools in motion at the proper moment. Quinlan’s microphone was working; Holt could plainly hear the crunch of the sergeant’s footsteps across the gravel and then the hollow sound of his mounting the wooden steps to the porch.

  McCoy’s voice came into the ear phones, faintly at first but increasing in volume as the two men approached each other. “Well, how are you, stranger? Glad to see you. Why didn’t you phone you were coming?”

  Quinlan made some excuse. He was no actor.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said McCoy jovially. “I’ve got plenty of beer in the icebox and I’m ready, willing and able to give you another pinochle lesson. Come on in, Hank.”

  Holt heard a door open and shut. Cautiously, he looked out. McCoy and Quinlan had disappeared. Holt turned on the tape recorder.

  “Well, don’t just stand there,” said McCoy from somewhere in the ranch-house living room. “Sit down, Hank, take the load off your feet. How’s the leg doing tonight?”

  “Not so good,” muttered Quinlan.

  “That’s a darn shame,” sympathized McCoy. “Personally, I feel good, best I have in days. In fact, I feel like celebrating and I’m glad you came out. Sit tight while I get the beer.”

  “Never mind, Mac,” said Quinlan. “I’m not thirsty.”

  “Who said anything about being thirsty? This is a celebration.” McCoy paused and his voice grew more serious. “What’s eating you, Hank? I know that expression.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Yeah? Well, all right, if you say so. But relax, take your coat off — ”

  “No, I don’t want to,” said Quinlan, so hastily that Holt winced. “I just want to talk to you, Mac.”

  “Okay,” said McCoy slowly. “I’m listening.”

  Holt, listening, also tensed. It was coming now, he knew, and he wondered how Quinlan intended to lead up to the subject. Holt himself would have chosen a devious route but Quinlan knew only one way. He was as subtle as a bulldozer attacking a hillside; he drove into the subject head-on. “I want to know what’s been going on.”

  “Going on when?” asked McCoy cautiously.

  “Now. And in the past. The whole thirty years.”

  There was a pause during which Holt could hear Quinlan breathing heavily. Finally, McCoy said, “That’s a pretty big subject. Hank. Sounds to me like you’ve been reading too many newspapers.”

  “They started me thinking, that’s all.”

  “So you’ve come to the astounding conclusion that where there’s smoke there must be fire.” McCoy chuckled. “This is a pretty strange thing for you to be asking me, Hank.”

  “I didn’t hear any answer.”

  “I thought this was a friendly visit,” McCoy said, so softly that Holt had to strain to hear him. “But maybe I was wrong. You figuring on pushing me around?”

  “I came out here to ask you a question. Is what Holt’s been yelling about the truth?”

  “The truth?” echoed McCoy. “Every time I’ve ever appeared in court, I’ve sworn to tell the truth. Now am I supposed to take another oath in front of you?”

  “If you’d like.”

  “Well, I don’t like. I don’t like the way we’re talking to each other.”

  “Mac,” said Quinlan. “The question’s easy, too easy to duck any more. Did you ever frame anybody?”

  There was another pause. Then McCoy said simply, “Nobody who wasn’t guilty.”

  The admission was given so matter-of-factly that Holt, straining every nerve, scarcely believed that he had heard it. Quinlan apparently had the same reaction because McCoy laughed. “Well, Hank? You asked for the answer and I gave it to you. Satisfied?”

  “You’re kidding me,” said Quinlan, in almost a whisper. “You can’t mean it.”

  “Why should I kid you?” asked McCoy. “You already knew, anyway, didn’t you? Otherwise, you wouldn’t have had to ask. I know you.”

  “I thought I knew you. I believed in you, I stood up for you — and all the time, all these years …” Quinlan’s voice was a croak of anguish. “Mac, why did you do it? What got into you?”

  “Nothing got into me. I was just doing my job, that’s all, making sure that the bastards couldn’t commit murder and get away with it. Sure, sometimes I had to dress it up a bit but you’ve got to fight fire with fire. There was nothing wrong about it.”

  “But faking evidence, lying — ” Quinlan mumbled.

  “It wasn’t lying,” snapped McCoy. “It was aiding justice. You remember the Burger case back in ‘34 or ‘35? We had him dead to rights but he’d have gotten away with it, sure as shooting, if we hadn’t come up with the pipe he used to beat his wife’s brains in.”

  “You found it in his backyard where he’d buried it,” said Quinlan slowly. “Or was it you that buried it there?”

  “It worked, didn’t it? Burger confessed. So what difference does it make who buried it?”

  “What difference does it make?” Quinlan cried. “You didn’t have any right!”

  “Burger didn’t have any right to kill his wife, either. I just made sure he paid for it.”

  “What about all the others — the ones where they didn’t confess — what about them?”

  “Well, what about them? They were guilty, every damn one of them.”

  “But how could you be sure?”

  “I’m a detective,” said McCoy. “I got an intuition for these things. You know that I didn’t play around with the case unless I was sure. Most of the time I didn’t have to, anyway.”

  “Most of the time,” Quinlan echoed. “How often, Mac? How many times?”

  “I don’t know,” said McCoy, and Holt could almost see him shrug. “Maybe a dozen, maybe less. I don’t remember exactly. What does it matter, anyway?”

  “It matters to me,” Quinlan said hoarsely. “Don’t you see what you’ve done to yourself? And to me?”

  “Oh, knock off the moralizing,” said McCoy impatiently. “It’s out of place coming from you. You’ve got nothing to kick about. You’ve had a nice ride all these years, thanks to me.”

  “Thanks to you!”

  “Yeah, to me. You’d still be po
unding a beat if I hadn’t carried you along. But I made a sergeant out of you, made your name known all over the state. Hell, I made you practically a legend. And you enjoyed it. So don’t come crying around now about how it was done.”

  “I didn’t know,” Quinlan murmured. “God help me, I didn’t.”

  “That’s not my fault.” McCoy paused and then his voice softened. “What are we fighting about, anyway? We’ve been partners too long to be yelling at each other like this. It’s all ancient history, Hank, water under the bridge. I’m retired now and what’s past is past.”

  “It isn’t ancient history,” said Quinlan. “It’s still going on.”

  “You mean the mix-up with the dynamite? All right, I stumbled there but I’m an old man, Hank, and I guess I was pressing too hard. Anyway, it all came out all right, didn’t it?”

  “I’m talkin about last night, when you framed Holt’s wife. That was a dirty thing to do. If it’s all over, like you say, why did you take Holt’s pistol?”

  There was a short silence. McCoy asked softly, “And just how did you happen to know about the pistol?”

  There was a concealed deadliness in his tone that Holt recognized even through the earphones. But apparently Quinlan didn’t. He blurted out the truth. “Holt told me.”

  “Oh, did he? Perhaps that explains a lot, why you’re here, and that halo you’re wearing. You’re working for Holt now. You’ve got yourself a new partner.”

  “I’m not working for Holt,” Quinlan said. “I’m working for the department.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that. What are you after, Hank?”

  “Holt’s pistol first. The game’s over, Mac. I’m going to have to take you in.”

  “So that’s it, is it?” McCoy said thinly. “That’s the loyalty I get, huh?”

  “I took a bullet for you once.” Quinlan’s voice was bitter. “I figure that makes us square. I’m not going to take this one for you. I’m taking you in, Mac. Don’t make me rough you up. I might enjoy it too much.”

  “You’d better think it over,” McCoy warned. “You’re in this thing just as much as I am.”