Slow Burn

by Terrence McCauley

  “But that doesn’t have to happen,” I said, “Max Lennon, Joe. Tell us everything, and don’t lie, and all of this stops right now.”

  Joe looked around at the wreckage all around him, at his broken blackjack and poker tables. “Lousy bastard ain’t worth all this fuss. Lennon came back to town a couple of months ago. Started managing the place again for Stiles. That’s all I know.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just kept staring at him, waiting for the rest of it to come out. Joe said: “It’s the truth, honest. I ran the bar, Lennon ran the take and the tables in the back. Lennon ain’t the type who makes friends. Ask Hauser, he’ll tell you.”

  But all Hauser had was questions. “He have anybody who came in here to see him lately?”

  I watched Joe really think it over. “A couple of guys, I guess. I never saw them before they started coming around here a month or so ago. They didn’t talk to me much. Mostly they’d come in later and play cards in the back, sometimes all night. Some of them were real mean-looking bastards, too. Some of them were high-talking types. Well-dressed fellas that Lennon seemed to know. I always got the impression they were swells looking to slum around and…”

  “Recognize any of them?” Loomis asked.

  “One of them, maybe—” Joe said, then stopped himself.

  I knew there was more, and I knew it was probably important. “Go on. Whatever it is, you’re already in it up to your neck, so spill.”

  Joe squirmed and stomped his foot. I even thought he might start crying. O’Hara signaled one of his men to hit him again and Joe jumped. “The Van Dorn punk, okay? The Van Dorn punk who’s missing.”

  Now we were getting somewhere. “What about him?”

  “He used to come in here all the time, talking loud, spouting off about politics and such. Swell-head shit I didn’t understand, but Lennon seemed to like it well enough. They got along fine. Van Dorn also liked to gamble big and lose big, which made Lennon like him even more.”

  Loomis, Hauser, O’Hara and I looked at each other. All of a sudden, we liked Lennon too, but for a much different reason.

  “Where is Lennon now?” Loomis asked.

  Joe nodded toward a door behind O’Hara. “I don’t know, but he bunks down in the store room mostly. Other than that, I couldn’t tell you, and that’s God’s honest truth.”

  Hauser was already on his feet. “Which room?”

  “Downstairs,” Joe said. “It’s where he used to have his private poker games for the high rollers. Least high rollers this place gets. Pimps mostly, and other...”

  But I didn’t care about any of that. “How do I get down there?”

  “Back stairs over there, next to the shitter,” Joe said. “I’ve got the key in my pocket if you need it.”

  The uniforms stayed with Joe while Loomis and I jogged down the hall. I found the door, but it was locked. Loomis and I put our shoulders into it, but it wouldn’t budge. Over Joe’s shouts that he had the key, O’Hara and Hauser came up with a crowbar and dug it into the wood. For an old door, it took more effort than it should’ve, but the lock eventually snapped.

  I pulled my .38 as the door swung open. Thick, stale air drifted up from below. The four of us stood there quiet. Listening. I didn’t hear anything — no sudden movement — so I flicked on the light switch by the door. An old yellow bulb showed the plank wooden staircase that led downstairs to a dirt floor. I saw more light below.

  There was no telling what was down there, so I motioned for the others to stay put while I trotted down the stairs. I wasn’t a heavy guy, but the planks creaked and bowed under my weight. So much for the element of surprise.

  The basement ran the full length and width of The Chantilly Club. A few thin poles kept the ceiling propped up. A thick layer of cobwebs and dust lined the bare ceiling beneath the floorboards of the club above. The stone walls were lined with crates of booze stacked just above my head. I crept further into the room, watching and listening. Waiting for any sudden sounds or movement. My .38 was ready.

  A couple of old beer barrels had been set up with a wooden board on top. Some chairs were scattered around it, so I figured that’s where the poker games Joe had mentioned took place. Behind another wall of crates, I found where Lennon lived, if you could call it living. A cot was set up in the corner with a dirty pillow mashed flat from sleep. Off to the side, an old wardrobe with a door missing. A chest of drawers with clothes sticking out was on the opposite wall. The rest of the store room was clear, so I called up to the others to come down.

  I put my .38 back in my holster and started tossing the living area. The wardrobe had a couple of dark suits and some shirts in it — cheap and poorly tailored. I patted down the pockets, but didn’t find anything but a couple of neckties in the inside pockets. I hit the dresser next, just as Loomis and the others got downstairs. Half a bottle of booze was on top. I opened the cork and smelled it: Rot-gut whiskey. I tossed it on the Lennon’s cot without putting the cork back in it. Clumsy me.

  I opened the top drawer of the dresser first. It was filled with the usual things: handkerchiefs, tie clasps, calling cards, spare change.

  And matchbooks. One in particular that caught my attention.

  It was a brown matchbook with a golden VL on the cover—the same kind I’d found in Jack Van Dorn’s apartment. There were plenty more in Max Lennon’s drawer. Coincidence? Maybe, but I’d been a cop too long to believe in coincidences. O’Hara flipped the cot while Hauser looked at the wardrobe.

  Loomis asked me, “Find anything?” I tossed him one of the matchbooks. “Maybe. I found one of these in the dresser here. I found the kinds of matchbooks in Jack Van Dorn’s place, too.”

  Loomis looked it over. “VL. No address on it. No phone number, either. Where’s it from? What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know, but it links Van Dorn to Lennon somehow. It’s not much, but it’s more than we walked in here with. I’d better find a phone and call it in to Carmichael.”

  “Tell him Lennon’s looking better all the time.” I found a wall phone opposite the stairs and had the operator connect me to the Van Dorn house. After two rings, a cop picked up and I told him to get me the Chief. There was plenty of commotion in the background while the cop put the phone down to find him, but I couldn’t hear anything clearly, just a lot of men shouting, more to be heard than out of anger. As the yelling eased up, I knew Carmichael was about to come to the phone. He had that effect on people.

  “Doherty?” the Chief asked. “That you?”

  “We just tracked down Max Lennon’s last known address and where he works. I think he’s—”

  “Skip it. Just get your ass in a car and get up here as soon as you can.”

  I didn’t have time for another trek up to the mansion just to kiss Carmichael’s ring. “With all due respect, Chief, I’d like to question some of the men we’ve rounded up here about where Lennon might be.”

  “I already know where he is,” Carmichael said. “The A.P.B. worked, because the son of a bitch just turned himself in. He’s sitting in Van Dorn’s front parlor right now. And he didn’t come alone.”

  MR. WONDERFUL

  THE FOUR of us piled back into the car. I drove. It was only half-past one and it had already been a full day. Twenty-four hours ago, I was doing what I did best in those days: sleeping. When I woke up, I began counting down the minutes until I could go back to sleep again. I remember figuring out how I could stretch out my shift and do as little as possible. I’d almost gotten away with it, too, until the phone rang. Some girl had gotten herself killed at The Chauncey Arms. And now I was caught smack in the middle of a murder/kidnapping case involving one of the richest families in the city.

  Sure, I’d pushed my way into this mess and fought like hell to stay in it. But that’s when I thought I might walk out of this thing with a couple of bucks in my pocket.

  Maybe get the Van Dorn clan to owe me a favor or two for keeping my mouth shut. I hadn’t counted on this being tied to
the Van Dorns directly. And I hadn’t expected Mr. Van Dorn to stick up to Carmichael for me like he did. Now I owed Mr. Van Dorn a debt I could only pay one way — by bringing his son back to him. I guess the old saying is true. Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.

  I’d just driven past Twenty-Third Street and Park Avenue when Loomis asked Hauser, “Do you think Lennon, or Chamberlain, or whatever he’s calling himself, took Jack out of ideology or greed?”

  Hauser shrugged in my rear-view mirror as he looked out the window. “What difference does it make? It’s up to us to get him back. Doesn’t matter who took him or why.”

  I liked Hauser’s way of thinking. But Loomis was in one of his rare chatty moods. “Sure it matters. We should know if we’re up against one guy, or a larger movement. Knowing that could help us figure out the best way to get him back.”

  Hauser shrugged again. “Who knows anything anymore? Whole damned world seems to have fallen on its head. Riots. Marches. Labor unions striking. Take those vets who marched on Washington a couple of months back, forinstance. The Bonus Army. Forty-thousand vets and their families, marching across the country. Just to demand back pay from Congress for a war that’s been over for more than ten years.”

  I’d read about it, but I didn’t know what Hauser was getting at. “What’s that got to do with Jack Van Dorn?”

  “I don’t know if it’s got anything to do with him,” Hauser admitted. “All I know is that there’s lots of angry, desperate people running around these days. People do crazy things for all sorts of reasons, even when times are good — and more so when times are tough. Lucky for me, I don’t get paid to figure out why people do what they do. I get paid to figure out what happened, who did it, and to put them away for it. That’s complicated enough for me.”

  The others kept talking while I drove uptown. I didn’t say much, because my mind was elsewhere. I was worried about time. About not having enough of it left to find Jack Van Dorn. I blew through traffic lights just as they went from yellow to red. Drivers leaned on car horns and pedestrians darted out of the street. They didn’t run all the way to the sidewalk. They jogged just far enough out of my path so they didn’t get hit. I didn’t blame them; it was too hot for running. Besides, most of them had nowhere to run to, anyway. No job. No appointments. Nowhere they had to be in a hurry.

  Sure, most of them had families and kids, but there was no rush to get back. Their families would be just as hungry tonight as they’d been last night and the night before, with more of the same on the menu tomorrow, and the next night, with no end in sight.

  And that’s what got me wondering if Loomis wasn’t on to something. What if there was a Red angle in this kidnapping business after all? Lennon/Chamberlain having Red tendencies meant it wasn’t out of the question. I’d seen it happen before, back in ’18, when I’d gotten back from the war and rejoined the force. You couldn’t walk down the street without tripping over an anarchist back then.

  Communism had swept through Russia and gave all the stateside lefties hope that the same thing could happen here.

  Unions sprang up like weeds: bus drivers, construction workers and carpenters all organized. Hell, even the cops up in Boston struck. Workers struck. Cities burned, and a lot of people died. We had our troubles here, but nothing the department couldn’t handle. But times had changed since then. The Commie philosophy was a fad — a phase — like ragtime or the foxtrot. It died out in time, but the problem with fads was that they eventually came back.

  If Communism could ever come back, now was the time. Jobs were scarce and money was scarcer, with no let-up in sight. Leftie trouble wasn’t just possible. It was damned likely. Marches and rallies were already happening all over town damned near every day. If the Van Dorn kidnapping was part of some kind of growing Red conspiracy, I didn’t know if the city could handle it. At least back in ’18, we had consistency. We had a stable government — city, state and even federal people — focused on preventing revolution. Now, all the city had was a crooked mayor being driven from office, an ambitious governor running for the White House, and a police department that was already stretched pretty thin.

  If things broke as bad now as they had back in ’18, I didn’t know if we could handle it. Maybe it was just my lack of sleep, but I began to worry about a lot of questions I didn’t have answers to. And suddenly, the reason for getting Jack Van Dorn home alive became a lot of reasons. I floored the gas pedal and watched the city blur.

  WHEN I’D driven away from the Van Dorn mansion that morning, the street had been full of cops milling around, killing time and waiting for orders. Now, those same cops were on crowd control. The crowd in front of the mansion had since grown ten deep, clustered around the corner of Sixty-Sixth and Fifth.

  They were on the sidewalk and spilled out on to Fifth Avenue, all the way back to the wall at Central Park. Some were standing on benches, peering over each other’s heads. Ragged, thin people with blank stares and sunken eyes. They weren’t protesting or holding signs or shouting slogans. They were stone dead quiet, just standing there, facing the Van Dorn mansion.

  It was ninety-five degrees and humid as hell, but the street was snowfall still. Big events like murders and court cases always drew people, but these weren’t rubberneckers. They were men and women and kids in all shapes and sizes. And they all had that same tattered, desperate look people got when the best of life turned away from them. They had nowhere else to be — no jobs, no food and no homes to go to. They’d had it like that for a long time and it would likely stay that way. Since they had nowhere else to go, they might as well be here. In front of the Van Dorn mansion on Fifth Avenue.

  The sight of them gave me a pit in my stomach, because I knew they hadn’t just showed up out of the blue. They were a mob waiting for something to happen. Someone had brought them there. Someone like Max Lennon/Peter Chamberlain. Two cops parted the crowd to let us drive up to the mansion. The crowd peered into the car as they moved back further than the cops asked them to, like they were allowing us to enter. Like they wanted us to enter.

  “Jesus,” Loomis said. “Look at them all.”

  I looked at Hauser in the rearview. “Recognize any of them?”

  He was already looking over the crowd. “A few. A whole lot of Reds and other malcontents, too.”

  O’Hara and I had lived through the Red riots back in the Teens. “We’ll be needin’ more men, Charlie.”

  I pulled up in front of the mansion and we all got out at the same time. I started making with the orders before Hauser or Loomis beat me to it. “O’Hara, get a handle on the situation. Carmichael’s probably got more men on the way, but check anyway. Hauser, you stay out here and keep an eye on the crowd. Point out all the troublemakers you know to whoever’s in charge out here. Loomis, you’re with me.”

  Shutterbugs still lined the entrance to the mansion. They took pictures of me and Loomis as we walked up the steps. But this time, they didn’t shout questions at us. All we heard was the soft popping of bulbs; like the reporters were afraid to talk too loud. Like the slightest sound might start an avalanche.

  One of the uniforms opened the door and another one directed us to the library, not the parlor. In fact, the parlor doors were closed. We found Carmichael and some of his men in the library with Mr. Van Dorn and Arthur Gottheim. Pinky Flynn was nowhere in sight.

  “Hell of a crowd you’ve got out there, Chief.”

  “Bastards started showing up just after this Chamberlain bastard rang the doorbell,” Carmichael told me.

  “Came up one by one, like goddamned crows, until the street was full of them. Quiet, too. Word has it they were told to come here for some kind of a protest. To get attention for all the unemployed in the city.”

  “Vultures,” Mr. Van Dorn said. “Using this tragedy for their own purposes.”

  I knew Carmichael too well to ask if he’d ordered backup. I figured he already had. “How far out are the reinforcements?”

 
“Mounted units are mustering in Central Park as we speak. I’ve got the riot squad down by Fifty-Ninth and Fifth. Far enough away not to spark trouble, but close enough to get here quick if something starts.”

  Like I said, Carmichael was a lot of things, but a fool wasn’t one of them.

  Gottheim cleared his throat. “Now that the tactical situation seems to be in hand, please share with us what you learned from the girl, Detective.”

  I didn’t know how much Carmichael had told them, so I filled them in on the kidnapping plot, and Rachel’s list of suspects. I left out the part about her pregnancy. This wasn’t the best time to tell Mr. Van Dorn he was going to be a grandfather. I’d do that later in private, if I got the chance.

  When I finished laying it all out for them, Mr. Van Dorn balled his fists and turned away. “Damn you, Jack! Damn you for associating with people like this!”

  Gottheim said, “It’s awfully convenient that Mr. Chamberlain turns himself in just as the crowd is amassing outside.”

  “It’s no coincidence,” Carmichael said. “He rang the doorbell and turned himself in. Said he heard we were looking for him, and that he had information on where Jack was and who murdered Jessica. He insisted on speaking to Mr. Van Dorn directly, but that’s not going to happen.” He shoved a folder at me and I took it. “I had the bastard’s jacket sent up here once we issued the A.P.B. on him. It makes for interesting reading.”

  Loomis asked, “What have you gotten out of him so far, chief?”

  Carmichael’s jaw clenched and his face reddened. “Nothing. I wanted one of my men to work on him, but Mr. Van Dorn and Mr. Gottheim here wanted you two gentlemen to have a run at him first.”

  Mr. Van Dorn surprised me by snapping at Carmichael. “I don’t appreciate the sarcasm, Chief. I made it abundantly clear that I will not have this investigation turn into a convoluted mess like the Lindbergh investigation. I want one clear thread of communication to keep everything orderly. Detective Doherty is that thread.”