Tight lines appeared at the corners of her eyes and she suddenly looked older than she was. “Honest, Mr. Scanlon…” She paused, bit her lip, then said, “It ain’t nothing, but that other guy… he let out a yell like.”
“What kind of yell?”
“Just a funny yell, then he shot him and walked away. It wasn’t loud, but I heard him. There wasn’t traffic or nothing right then. I heard him yell, that’s all. It didn’t sound right. I was scared. Honest, Mr. Scanlon…”
“Forget it, Paula.” I got up from the chair and slapped on my hat.
“What are you going to… do with me?”
“Not a thing, kid. Vice isn’t my specialty. I’m not here on a case. It’s just that I knew Doug Kitchen when we were all living around here. As far as you’re concerned, I’ll do what I said I’d do. If you’re smart you’ll get your tail off this street too.”
She believed me then and something changed in her eyes. “Gee,” she told me, “it’s hard to believe a cop would… well…” Paula lowered her eyes demurely, then caught mine again. Briefly, she glanced toward the bedroom. “If you’d like… I could show you… like real special things and…”
“Uh-uh,” I said. “I got all I can handle right now,” I lied.
But she didn’t know it and smiled as if she did.
The reports had listed only one other witness who wasn’t sure of what he had seen at all, a drunk coming out of a stupor he had laid on all day, who had seen the kill from the stairway going into the cellar at number 1209. The first shot made him look up and on the next he had seen Doug fall. Then he ducked down below the cement wall and stayed there. He thought he remembered a guy standing in the street but couldn’t be sure and he wasn’t the kind of witness you bothered pressing. If anybody else saw the incident he wasn’t talking. Right now the department had their own stoolies asking around, but in that neighborhood there was a natural, inborn reluctance to even mention anything that would make any more trouble than was already there, so it was doubtful if anything would turn up.
Walking back I reviewed what the sheets had stated. René Mills was found dead behind a building and only one person had mentioned hearing what could have been a gunshot and wasn’t sure of the time. Hymie Shapiro was killed inside his car where it was parked outside his apartment. Noisy Stuccio was shot in the tenement where he lived with the TV turned on full and if the sound hadn’t been up so high that the guy downstairs came up to complain, the body wouldn’t have been found for days.
Somebody was doing it nice and neatly. Very pro.
And there was one thing I was sure of. It wasn’t over yet. Interwoven in the wild hodgepodge of murders there was a peculiar pattern. So far the theme of it hadn’t emerged yet, but it would. It would. It was just too bad that somebody else would have to die before it showed all the way.
When it did I’d be there and a killer would be under the end of my gun with the big choice of dying on the spot or sweating it out in a mahogany and metal chair with electrodes on his legs and one on his head that was the big, permanent nightcap.
There was one more stop I wanted to make before the night was over. I walked one block, turned the corner and went in the vestibule beside Trent’s candy store and struck a match to look at the nameplate over the bells on the wall. A tarnished copper strip read R. CALLAHAN and I nudged the button. A minute later the automatic trip clicked on the door and I pushed it open, went up the stairs to the landing and waited outside the door.
Fifteen years ago Ralph Callahan had been retired from the force, but he had spent his life on the beat in his own neighborhood and you could never take the department out of the man. His eyes would still see, his mind classify events with practiced skill, even though he wasn’t active, but like every other retired police officer, he still had certain privileges extended him by the city including carrying a badge and a gun if he chose to.
When he opened the door he made me with a glance, nodded curtly and said, “Come on in, son.”
“Hello, Ralph.” He was a big guy even yet, filling out his pajamas in a stance that marked thousands of days in a uniform.
He waved me to a kitchen chair after closing the bedroom door softly. “The missus is a light sleeper,” he told me and sat down on the other side of the table. “Now… don’t remember you, but you look familiar.” I started to reach for my badge, but he waved me off. “I know what you are all right, son.”
I grinned at him. “Joe Scanlon. You laid a couple across my behind with that stick of yours when I was a kid.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “Now where are you?”
“Homicide. Special detail right now. Marta Borlig’s working it with me.”
“Damn, ain’t the department getting tricky?” He studied me a few seconds, then leaned forward on the table, his hands folded together. “Those four kills?”
“Uh-huh. Smell anything?”
“If I did I would have reported it. Nobody knows a thing.”
His eyes watched me shrewdly, and I said, “There’s another interesting angle.”
“That’s what I was waiting for you to say. Loefert and the others showing up?”
“That’s right,” I agreed. “What does it look like to you?”
“They’re out of place around here, that’s what it looks like. The only rackets going on are small stuff. Numbers, a few books, that sort of thing. A few hustlers work around, but it’s all normal procedure, and not big enough to crack down on. Hell, nobody’s got enough money in this neighborhood to lay on hard.”
“But they’re here, so it must mean something else.”
The elderly cop leaned back and frowned at the ceiling. “I got an idea that could connect”
“Oh?”
He lowered his eyes and steadied them on mine. “Remember that guy… Gus Wilder, the one who jumped bail in Toledo when he was going to testify against the Gordon-Carbito mob?”
“I saw the flyers and read the news accounts.”
Ralph bobbed his head. “He lived two blocks over for five years. Still got a brother there. The brother’s straight… runs a dry cleaning shop, but I’m thinking they’re watching him to see if Wilder makes a contact”
“Why?”
Callahan grinned at me. “Things you brass cops seem to forget. The Gordon-Carbito mob upstate did the local boys a favor once… a big one. Could be now the locals are returning it by keeping an eye out for Wilder. If he talks the upstate combo will fall.”
“A possibility,” I agreed. I stood up and pushed the chair back. “Keep your ears open… I’ll appreciate it. If you need a contact, try Marta Borlig, only keep it on the q.t that she’s on the force.”
“Will do, Joe.”
“Thanks for your time.”
“Don’t mention it.” I said good night and went downstairs to look for a cruising cab.
My morning reports were finished at nine and I handed them to Mack Brissom. “Want some coffee? I’m meeting Marty at the diner.”
“Can’t do, friend. I’m tied up with that Montreal thing. A cross check on the ballistics came in and the gun used in Montreal was the same used in an attempted bank heist in Windsor a week earlier and to kill a gas station attendant in Utica four days after the Montreal bit”
“That’s not our jurisdiction,” I said.
“Yeah, I know. But the gun was found in a B.M.T. subway train by a passenger and turned in. No prints, unregistered and probably deliberately left there. It could be a red herring dodge to keep the action here while the killer is miles away, but we have to push it all the way.”
“Any of the money showing up yet?”
“Nothing. Lousy thing is, who could tell? Only part of the loot was in bills big enough to have the serial numbers recorded. It’s like the Brinks job… they’ll hold off until things quiet down before dumping the stuff.”
“Well, have fun.”
Mack didn’t seem to hear me. He shook his head, looking out the window. “Screwy deal,
that one. The bank heist was a bust because four detectives were on the premises cashing their checks and stopped it. The Montreal job took a lot of planning… more than one single week. That was a top operation.”
“Maybe the guy who used the gun was brought in just to give them cover,” I suggested.
“Ah, I don’t know. It smells. It’s real sour. We got a tipoff from Canada that something had been in the wind a long time. Two mobsters from the States had been spotted up there a couple months earlier and sent back across the line, persona non grata. The day after the job an abandoned American automobile was found three miles from the scene that had been stolen in Detroit a week before, so there’s a general tie-in.
“Take the guy with the gun… he grabbed a car in Detroit, ran over to Windsor to pull the bank job, muffed it, then pulled the Montreal deal, dumped the car and took off. A report from a motel in the area where the car was left, that catered to tourists from the States, called in a stolen car with Jersey plates the same day.”
I said, “It looks nice except for that one thing, Mack. You don’t plan that kind of holdup in a week… not on the run, anyway.”
Mack collected his papers from the desk and folded them under his arm as one of the duty officers came in and handed him a sheet. He looked at it, scowled, then glanced at me. “That stolen car from Jersey was found in the Bronx.”
“The boy’s coming home,” I grinned.
“So he takes the subway, leaves the gun there so he can’t get picked up with it and finds a hideout. But where?”
“Why don’t you try the Ritz,” I suggested. “He’d have enough cash along to afford the rates.”
“Drop dead.”
We left together and I went down to meet Marty at the diner. She was already there, tall, fresh and cool looking in a trim suit that couldn’t hide her loveliness no matter how businesslike it was cut. She had coffee and pie ready for me and a notepad open on the table in front of her. I said, “Hi, little Giggie,” and sat down.
“If you weren’t my superior you’d hear something,” she told me.
“Superior in all things, sugar.”
“All?”
“Like I said … all.”
“Maybe you need a lesson, big boy.”
“In what?” I grinned.
“Oh, shut up.” She sipped at her coffee, then pulled the pad toward her. “I had a talk with a few people on the block.”
“And… ?”
“Remember what Fat Mary said about René Mills hinting about coming into some money?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Confirmed. He was seen with a roll, paid off two big bar bills, cleaned up an account overdue by three months at the grocer’s and made a pitch at Helen Gentry who has pretty expensive tastes and only goes with the boys who are loaded. On top, he laid in a case of expensive Scotch whiskey and paid for it in cash.”
“So?”
Marty closed the pad and said, “He’d been pimping for those two girls who live over Papa Jones’ store for three years now. Cheap trade, and the take couldn’t have been big, but it was all he had, then suddenly he tells them both to take off… that he’s going out of business.”
“Not much cash was found on the body,” I said. “None of that Scotch was found in the apartment, either.”
“Screwy,” she mused.
I told her about my conversation with Ralph Callahan the night before and she nodded, thinking the same thing I was. I said, “He could have been hiding out Gus Wilder for a price.”
“We could check and see if they ever had a previous contact.”
“Not now we can’t, kid. You’re supposed to be a working girl. Until tonight we’ll go at it from a different angle. If the local mob is looking for Wilder they’ll have their own sources. Let’s see if they really are. Think you can run a check?”
“Sure. Regulation procedure accelerated by native ingenuity. I’ll see those who are assigned to that detail.”
I finished my coffee and dropped a bill on the table. “Good enough. I’ll pick you up at the apartment tonight.” I started to leave, then stopped and turned around. “Don’t get involved personally. Let somebody else do the legwork.”
“I can handle it myself, Joe.”
“Perhaps, but I don’t want you to lose your cover. Probe too far and some newshawk will get curious and your picture will be in the paper. That would wipe out your effectiveness in the neighborhood.”
“All right, Joe,” she smiled, “I’ll be careful.” But all that time she knew what I really meant I was getting a damn funny feeling about that woman, one I had never experienced before. Something that was like a fist tightening in my belly and sending a warm, crawly sensation across my back.
CHAPTER SIX
HENRY WILDER’S dry cleaning place was a hole-in-the-wall operation that catered to the local trade. Enough business kept him from poverty, but he was never going to get rich there. He lived upstairs over his store, a prematurely balding bachelor about fifty with tired lines around his eyes and a nervous flutter to his hands. I caught him on his lunch hour, flashed my badge and got invited in to a shabby room cluttered with junk and three racks of clothes customers had either forgotten about or didn’t have the money to redeem.
When I sat down he fidgeted on the edge of his chair waiting for me to speak. Finally I said, “Ever hear from your brother Gus?”
“That bum!”
“I didn’t ask that.”
“Sometimes I get a letter. He was up on charges in Toledo.”
“Hear from him since?”
Henry Wilder was going to say no, but knew he couldn’t make the lie stick. “Sure… a phone call. After he jumped bail.”
“Where was he?”
He licked his mouth nervously and toyed with the food on his plate. “He ain’t that simple. He called direct”
“Why?”
His eyebrows went up then. “Money. What else? He wants me to send him five hundred bucks. Now where the hell am I supposed to get five hundred bucks? He didn’t even ask. He just told me to get it ready and he’d tell me where to send it”
“Going to?”
Once again, his tongue snaked out. “I… don’t know.” He took a sip of coffee to wet his mouth and added, “I’m scared of him. I always was.”
“He’s your brother, isn’t he?”
Wilder shook his head. “Stepbrother. Hell, I’d sooner turn him in, only it might not work and he’d come after me.” His eyes held a pleading expression. “What am I supposed to do?”
“The cops aren’t the only ones looking for Gus, buddy.”
“I know. That’s what I figured. So I’m caught in the middle either way,” he said.
“Then take a chance and play it right. If he calls you, call us. We have ways of keeping things quiet”
“Can… I think about it?”
“Sure. One way or another he’ll turn up, but like you said, why get caught in the middle? He asked for anything he gets.”
I went to get up, then changed my mind and asked, “You know the girls René Mills had working for him?”
For a second his face took on a startled look, then he nodded. “Rose Shaw and Kitty Muntz. They come in all the time. Rose should be in soon to pick up her stuff. That Mills, he gave ’em the boot before he kicked off.”
“So supposing we go downstairs and wait for her, Henry.”
“In the shop?” He swallowed hard, knowing what they thought of cops around here.
“Don’t worry, I’ll even help out behind the counter.” Rose Shaw didn’t show until ten after three, a flagrant little whore with a hard, tight body encased in a too-small sweater and blouse combination, her eyes showing the cynicism of her profession, the caustic twist to her mouth accentuating it. She threw her ticket down on the counter top with a crumpled ten-dollar bill from a plastic purse and stood there with a hurry-up look on her face.
I got up from the stool where I was sitting while Henry Wilder was collecting her clot
hes. She made me as fast as Ralph Callahan did, but in a different way. The lids half closed over her pupils and the mouth went into a semi-sneer that spat copper, and she was ready to tell me to stuff it because she wasn’t working a pad at the moment and there was nothing I could lay on her. She was too wise to get trapped by a phoney approach, and wasn’t about to get stuck with a pay off if I was a bad one.
One by one the possibilities ran through her mind, eliminating the wrong ones, and when I still didn’t make a move her face clouded because she couldn’t tap the right answer. Then she got jumpy. There is something peculiar about those on the stiffer sides of the fence, the law and the punks. In some ways they seem to look alike sometimes. They work in the same areas in the same profession with the same people, and it gets to them so they adopt common mannerisms and expressions and deep in the back of their eyes is buried a mutual hatred for each other.
But we had the advantage. We could read them. They could never quite read us. They were the ones who were mixed up, not us.
I said, “Talk or walk, Rose.”
“Look, mister…”
The badge lay in my hand, nicely palmed. “Talk here, walk downtown. Take your pick.”
She said something under her breath and glanced around her. “Screw you, copper. Not in public.”
“You name it then.”
“I got a room at 4430. It’s where I live, not work.”
“Go ahead. I’ll give you ten minutes.”
“Second floor in the back.” She swore under her breath, draped her clothes over her arm, picked up her change and walked out, her face still full of disgust.
I gave her the ten minutes and picked my way down to her brownstone, cut in quickly and shoved the door open. The odor of burned grease and cabbage was heavy on the air, cutting through the mustiness of dirt and decay. The steps were hollowed by the tread of thousands of feet traversing them, creaky with age and littered with odds and ends of callous living. I found her door, knocked once and turned the knob without being asked to come in.
Rose Shaw sat with her feet up on a table, a beer in her hand, deliberately posed so I could see up her dress past the muscular smoothness of her thighs. I said, “Forget the peep show, Rose,” and swung a chair around and sat down with my arms lying across its back.
Killer Mine Page 5
