by Horace McCoy
“Oh, God!” Mrs. Conroy said.
“Listen, Dad. I didn’t know about the pension!”
The telephone rang again. “Get out of my way,” Mike Conroy said harshly, shoving his son back against the wall, stamping back into the bedroom again.
“Please, John—do something,” Mrs. Conroy said.
“It’s too late, Ma,” John said.
Mrs. Conroy shoved herself up from the table. She picked up a cup half full of coffee and, holding it under the palm of her hand, slammed it into the saucer. There was a fury in her face that John had never seen before. The cup shattered, the fragments were stained with blood. “It was bad enough for you to do this,” she said tensely, paying no attention to her cut hand, “without dragging us in.”
“Your hand ...” John said, reaching for it.
She slapped at his wrist and drops of blood spattered in his face. “Don’t you touch me!” she said.
“But you’re hurt, Ma.”
Mike came through the door. “That was headquarters. I’ve got to get right down to headquarters,” he said. Then he saw his wife’s hand. He moved quickly to her. “What happened?” he asked. “What goes on here?”
John wiped his face with his handkerchief and saw the bloodstains. “Ma lost her temper,” he said.
Mike bared his teeth. “You better get out of here before I lose mine, too,” he said.
Mike Conroy had said that he was going to headquarters and the natural assumption was that he meant Police Headquarters; and that was precisely what he had meant to be assumed.
After he had tended to his wife’s injured hand, he put on civilian clothes and got in his car and drove into the city. He parked his car in an all-day lot and hailed a cab and went to Main Street and Avenue G in the shopping district. He strolled for two blocks in the mid-morning pedestrian traffic and then got another cab and went downtown to Broad and Caroline Streets. This was the neighborhood where he had once lived—an agglomeration of dingy streets and ugly buildings.
Mike walked down Broad Street and across Caroline, past the corner and the shabby four-story apartment building called the Fleur-de-Lis. Directly behind the Fleur-de-Lis was an alley, and he swung in there fast, moving past the garbage pails and offal and debris to the rear door. He paused, looked around furtively and stepped inside. The corridor was narrow, semidark and stank with an odor that brought back old memories to Michael Conroy.
The elevator was on the first floor and he got in and pushed the top button on which the figure 4 had worn off. The elevator was narrow and badly worn and it stank, too. At the fourth floor he got out and went down the hall toward the front of the building. He stopped before a door on which a small, neat calling-card was thumbtacked. The card read: Eamon Harrigan.
This was the headquarters he had meant, the headquarters of Eamon Harrigan, the ex-flatfoot who had become a political overlord. The apartment building was one of Harrigan’s lesser properties and he chose to live there for political reasons; it proved that all the power he had accumulated and all the luxury he could afford had not changed him from the old days. He was the same old Eamon Harrigan who had pounded a beat thirty years before.
Mike pushed the buzzer and Harrigan himself opened the door. He was a slender man of medium height, with restless eyes and thin lips. “Come in, Mike,” he said.
Mike Conroy had been to Harrigan’s apartment before, many times, but he never was quite prepared for what he saw. It was the neighborhood and the shabby buildings that fooled him. He expected the interior to match the exterior, but this was not so with Harrigan’s place. It was voluptuous, sybaritic, excessive. Three ordinary apartments had been joined to make this one—and it was furnished with leopard-skin rugs, heavy velvet draperies, lush furniture, crystal lamps and wall brackets, a few French Impressionists and primitives on the walls.
“Nemo was just here,” Harrigan said.
“I had to come roundabout,” Mike Conroy said mildly. “It took a little time. I don’t like to come here in the daytime, Eamon. I don’t like to come at night, either, but especially I don’t like to come in the daytime. It’s too dangerous.”
“Especially now that your son’s special prosecutor and out to bust up the syndicate and throw me in the pen,” Harrigan said dryly.
“When did you find that out?” Mike asked.
“He was sworn in at the governor’s office about two o’clock this morning. Nemo was here by three with a couple of the boys. They were going to meet John at the airport. We talked it over.”
Mike’s lips went white.
Harrigan grinned. “Relax, Mike. I’m your friend. But Nemo’s got a point of view about this, too. We’ve got a five-hundred-million-dollar-gross business here. Every year. It took a long time to build that up. You can’t expect him to sit up and clap his hands when some punk tries to tear down the playhouse. But Nemo knows now he was wrong in thinking that murder’ll stop this thing. No. Murder might have stopped it yesterday, but it won’t stop it today.” He opened a big mahogany humidor and held it out. “Cigar?”
“No.”
Harrigan put the humidor down and took one. He took a gold sheath off a gold toothpick and punched several holes in the round end of the cigar. He held the cigar in his hand and with a gold lighter he burned the open end, rolling it around in his fingers to blacken it evenly. Then he put it in his mouth and lighted it. He said, “You see, that’s where you come in, Mike. You’re Nemo’s ace in the hole.”
Mike stood up. “You’ve no cause to expect favors from me, Eamon, the lot of you.”
“Sit down, Mike,” Harrigan said quietly. “I hate to see a crooked cop try to put on an act.”
“That was a long time ago ...”
“Unfortunately the statute of limitations on a crooked cop never runs out. You were on our payroll for six years at ten thousand dollars a year—and that makes you a crooked cop in anybody’s language. I won’t mention the lieutenancy I swung for you ...”
“I’m square with you,” Mike said. “I been square with you for years.”
“Mike, look. I don’t want to have to dump the evidence you’re a crook in John’s lap. I don’t want to have to give it to the public. I know what that would do to John’s life and your life and my life. And I’m your friend. Everybody gets hurt and for what?” He looked at Mike for a moment, not saying anything. “We’ll play this close to our stomachs and everything’ll be fine.”
“I’ve already had a talk with him. I begged him to call it off.”
Harrigan’s face clouded. “You shouldn’t. You’ll tip your hand if you play it too strong.”
“With me eligible for pension in ten months? That was the angle I used. That he’d screw up my pension. Which is true. But his mind’s made up, Eamon, and he’s going through with this. There’s no way to stop him.”
“Nemo doesn’t want him stopped. Nemo decided he wants him to go through with it.”
Mike shouted, “What in hell are you talking about?”
“It’s pretty simple,” Harrigan said, grinning. “The governor’s committed himself to the investigation. He’s got to go through with it now. So we knock John off, so what? So the governor appoints another special prosecutor. Nemo don’t want that to happen. He wants John Conroy to go ahead and investigate until he’s red, white and blue like the Star Spangled Banner. Because you know why? Because Mike Conroy is already appointed Chief Investigator. And so Mike Conroy is going to know every move John Conroy makes before he ever makes it. And Mike Conroy is then going to tell Nemo Crespi. And Nemo Crespi is then going to take appropriate action. That spell it out for you, Mike?”
Mike swallowed, and then he smiled thinly. “It’s the prettiest double-cross I’ve ever seen set up, Eamon. And foolproof. Absolutely foolproof. Very neat, Eamon. Very neat.”
“I’m glad you approve, Michael,” Harrigan said, rolling the thick cigar between his thin lips. “But not that it would have made any difference to Nemo, you know. Approve, disapprov
e. You play ball, or you don’t. It’s all the same, Michael. You took your money, and you took your chance.”
Chapter Two
JOHN CONROY CHECKED INTO the Manchester, a big downtown hotel, and then, as a matter of protocol, he called on District Attorney Fogel. Fogel said that he had no wish to interfere, but he thought that John should assemble a staff he trusted at once.
John said that he intended to collect his staff from former students of his who were in private practice in the city. He had with him a list of twenty names of men with whom his contacts at the university had been more than professorial, men whose attitudes when they were students sympathized with his own. He would pick four of these to serve as assistant prosecutors.
On John’s list of twenty names there were two that were first choices. They were brothers, Alan and Evan Reeves, with whom he had, during their university days, sat up many a midnight discussing his lectures, as he himself had once sat up with Dean Roughead. The Reeves boys had been brilliant students; now they were junior partners in their father’s law firm, with impressive and dignified offices that they could not, as yet, have earned.
Alan and Evan were glad to see their former professor, and there was much old-school-tie spirit until he told them why he had come. Then it got chilly. The junior partners were not sympathetic, their beliefs as students were one thing and their beliefs as men of the world were another. They had changed, naturally. They said it was very noble of him to go out and slay the dragon and more power to him, but that they simply didn’t have the time to be included. Who cared about the dragon, really?
Restraining the impulse to knock their heads together, John left.
There was a Star-Journal extra on the street. The entire front page above the fold had been given over to heavy headlines and a two-column cut of John Conroy.
GOVERNOR ORDERS THE CITY CLEANED UP!
Special Prosecutor Is Named to Investigate Rackets Here
EXTRAORDINARY POWERS ARE GIVEN TO JOHN CONROY
John bought a paper. In the story itself there was a long review of the syndicate’s accomplishments and considerable mention of the warehouse fire.
There was no doubt about it. The Star-Journal had personally declared war on Nemo Crespi.
That edition of the newspaper was seen by more than a million persons and for all of them it had interest in varying degrees. But for two persons that edition had more than interest—it was a shaft of bright sunlight: for an old man leaning against a lamppost on skid row, and for a young girl sitting on a stool in an uptown drugstore having lunch.
The girl was Amanda Waycross, twenty-seven years old, well-dressed, attractive, with a delicate yet resolute face. She never read the noon editions of the newspapers, but she saw the headlines over the shoulder of the man on the stool next to her, and her stomach tingled. With her sandwich only half eaten, she paid the check and went out into the street and bought a copy of the paper herself.
She read the story in its entirety and slow, warm excitement rose inside her.
She went back into the drugstore and entered a phone booth.
The old man’s name was Cicero Smith. He was sixty-one years old and skinny, almost cadaverous. His clothes were grimy and spotted. He wore no socks and his dilapidated shoes were laced with pieces of wrapping twine. He was a watery-eyed bum and skid row was his habitat.
Leaning against the lamppost, he read the John Conroy story line by line, his interest mounting. There was a warmth coming into his stomach, too.
He went into a wine shop and asked if he could use the telephone and he was promptly thrown out.
By 3:40 that afternoon, John Conroy had called on nine of the twenty names he had on his list. Not one of the nine was in the slightest interested in helping him. They all felt that it would be a regrettable waste of time, that the syndicate was too firmly entrenched to be dislodged and that if, by a miracle, it could be dislodged, something else, probably even worse, would replace it. And who but a dreamy-eyed idealist, a do-gooder, a reformer, would concern himself with it in the first place?
John was not disappointed. He had been disappointed when the Reeves brothers had turned him down, but he was not disappointed any longer.
He was angry.
Shortly before four o’clock he entered the side door of the Manchester Hotel, walking across the lobby toward the desk.
Two inconspicuous-looking men, sitting so that each covered one of the two main entrances to the lobby, saw him over the tops of the newspapers they pretended to be reading. They looked at each other simultaneously. They had been staring for hours at Conroy’s picture in the newspapers they were holding. Their names were Max Ansel and Gene Eimick and they were sergeants of the Safe and Loft Squad under Lieutenant Michael Conroy. They stood up.
“You keep him pinned down,” Gene Eimick said. “I’ll buzz the skipper.”
Max Ansel nodded. “I’d sure like to know what this is all about,” he said, and sauntered toward the desk where John stood talking with another man.
The managing director of the hotel, Daggett, with the traditional carnation in his lapel, was assuring John that the complete facilities of the hotel were at his disposal. He said that he hoped Mr. Conroy would have no objection to having been transferred from his small bedroom to Suite 4B which could be rearranged in no time to serve as offices and living quarters. A wall or two might have to be knocked out, he said, but no matter. Could he please have some idea of how many desks and chairs and telephones would be needed? What would be the size of the staff? How many beds?
“One bed in one small bedroom,” John said. “I’m the staff. There’s nobody else. I’m the works.”
“But, sir, that’s only for the time being,” Daggett protested.
“I’m not so sure about that,” John said, and he went tiredly up to the fourth floor.
He was putting the key in the lock of his door when he heard voices and the sounds of scuffling. He looked around. The noises were coming from the end of the corridor, from somewhere behind the swinging doors that enclosed the storage space and the freight elevators. It sounded like a fight. He turned back, opening his door, and a voice said, “Mr. Conroy! Mr. Conroy!”
Three men were standing in the swinging door, holding it open with their bodies. One was husky and wore a blue suit and a tight felt hat—the hotel detective—and the other was small and compact and wore a hotel porter’s uniform. They had between them a tall, skinny man who was struggling to get loose. The skinny man was Cicero Smith.
Frowning, John came back to them.
“You Mr. Conroy?” the hotel detective asked.
“Of course, he’s Mr. Conroy,” Cicero Smith said. “Special Prosecutor appointed by Governor Duncan.” He wrenched loose and jerked a newspaper out of his pocket and shoved it under the detective’s chin. “Does that look like him?” His voice was resonant and strong, surprisingly so from one who looked so frail.
“Shut up, you bum,” the porter said.
The detective glanced from the photograph in the paper to John and said, “I guess you’re Mr. Conroy, all right. You know this man?”
“Certainly he knows me, you imbecile!”
“We’ve thrown this wino out of here twice already,” the detective said. “He keeps sneaking back.”
Cicero Smith looked at John, a pleading look in his watery eyes.
“It’s all right,” John said. “I know him.”
The hotel detective and the porter grimaced, backing away toward the freight elevator, still watching, still not satisfied.
John and Cicero Smith went out into the corridor. The old man didn’t say anything until the doors had stopped swinging. Then he said, “Thank you, sir. You’re very kind.”
“You mind telling me what goes on here?” John asked.
“May we speak in private, sir?”
John shrugged. “Down here,” he said. They went into John’s room and he closed the door. In cold and dispassionate terms, as if he were talking to
a complete stranger, Cicero Smith told his story. Not all of it, by any means; just the high spots, the climaxes. It was a story that followed a conventional pattern, as such stories always do. Cicero Smith had once been a celebrated trial lawyer, the Clarence Darrow of his time, with an astonishing number of successive victories. And then, after a doubtful case, he had been accused of bribing two jurors. He had been tried, convicted, sentenced to jail and automatically disbarred. That had been twenty years before. For ten years afterward he had time and time again applied for reinstatement, but always his appeals had been denied. He had finally decided that it was hopeless, and for the next ten years he had gone down and down and down ...
“... Then today I saw this newspaper, sir. And I tell you that the inside of my stomach grew hot as if I’d been drinking whisky and the hope that I long thought was dead was born again. Understand me. You are no stranger to me. I remember the uproar you caused a few years ago with your heretical teachings—I remember well, because that was in one of my lesser alcoholic periods. How far you will get with this crusade ...”
John looked at Smith angrily. He had heard that word a lot that day. “Look, you say crusade, do-gooder, reformer, once more and I’ll throw you out of here on your ear. I’ve heard that enough today.” He walked across the room. “You’re no stranger to me, either. I’ve heard Dean Roughead speak of you. Okay, you were brilliant.” He turned suddenly. “Why’d you bribe those jurors?”
“But, I didn’t. Nemo Crespi—”
“Nemo Crespi,” John said tiredly, and he sat down on the edge of the bed. “He set you up for a mark, too, Cicero? That your story?”
Cicero Smith smiled. “Don’t be so hard and cynical, my young friend. Whether you like it or not you are engaged in a crusade—you are a do-gooder, a reformer. How far you will get with it I do not know. I don’t know what I have to offer you—probably nothing. But what you have to offer me is immeasurable. I am not altruistic. I want back my self-respect and a chance to regain some sort of standing. I would like—” He stopped and stood up. He pushed back his coat and reached inside his shirt and snapped something with his fingers and took out a long and badly worn money belt. From one of the pockets of the belt he took out a paper folded lengthwise and handed it to John, saying, “I would like the right to have this re-framed.”
