“You saw the killer. I want to know what he looked like. I want every detail you can remember.”
“I’ve told the police everything.”
“Tell me now.”
“Why should I? You’re a friend of the men who killed him. You stood by and let them murder him.” She rose suddenly and turned away from him, her small face beginning to break and crumble with emotion. “You said we were the same kind of dirt, didn’t you? But you let them kill your brother. I’m not in that class.”
Carmody took her frail shoulders in his hands, twisted her around and sat her in the chair. When she attempted to get up, weeping helplessly now, he caught her wrist and forced her back with a turn of his hand. “I don’t want any speeches,” he said coldly. “There’ll be plenty of speeches from everybody else. The Mayor, the newspapers, priests and ministers, they’ll all make speeches. But they won’t do any good. When they’re all through talking, Eddie will be just as dead. So don’t waste my time with a speech.” His voice went low and hard, “Start with the beginning. Eddie was here tonight, wasn’t he? When I called?”
“Give me just a minute,” she whispered.
“Okay, take your time,” Carmody said, releasing her wrist. He lit a cigarette and drew the smoke deeply into his lungs. Then he sat down and stared at a picture on the wall. Finally, he glanced at her. “Okay?”
“Yes. Eddie was here when you called. But he told me he didn’t want to speak to you. He listened to the conversation and broke the connection when you began to yell at me. I begged him to be careful but he said you were more frightened of Ackerman than he was.” She stopped, breathing slowly, and put the palm of her hand against her forehead.
“We watched television until eleven-thirty. When he left I tidied up the room and found his wallet in the chair he’d been sitting in. His badge was clipped inside it and I knew he’d need that on duty. So I went downstairs to see if I could catch him. The street was dark but I saw him walking toward the corner, about fifty yards away. I ran after him. I didn’t call because it was late. Eddie didn’t hear me until I was eight or ten feet from him. I’d changed into slippers and I didn’t make any noise, I suppose. Then he turned around quickly and reached for his gun. When he saw me he laughed and started to say something. But he didn’t get the words out.” She shuddered and rubbed her arms with her hands. “That’s when it happened. A man stepped from behind a tree and into the light of the street lamp. He had a gun and he shot Eddie twice in the back. Then he ran to the corner. I began to scream and he looked around and stopped. He started toward me but a woman came out on the balcony across the street and began to shout for the police. The man stopped again, under the light at the corner, and then he turned and ran into the next block.”
“Okay. You’ve been looking at pictures at Headquarters. Did you find this man in any of them?”
She shook her head slowly.
“Tell me what he looked like. Everything you can remember.”
“He was big. Not fat, but tall and wide. His hair was blond and long. I couldn’t see his eyes, they just looked black, but his face was heavy and brutal.”
“How old?”
“Young, not more than thirty.”
“How about his clothes?”
“He was wearing a sports jacket and a sports shirt. The shirt was open at his neck and the jacket was a light color. Gray tweed or camel’s hair, something like that.”
Carmody frowned. He knew the local hoodlums who might have done this night’s work: Sheen in West, Morgan or Schmidt in Northeast, Youngdahl who ran a bowling alley in Meadowstrip. But Karen’s description fitted none of them. That meant an imported killer. And you couldn’t get a man like that in ten minutes. It required arrangements, discussions, planning. So the double-cross hadn’t been a spur-of-the-moment decision. It had been in the works all the time.
He began to smile slowly. “I’ll get that man, Karen. Don’t worry about it.”
“What good will that do? Eddie’s dead. You can’t bring him back.”
“I’m not doing this for Eddie,” he said, still smiling coldly. “This is for me. They promised me time to work on him, and I believed them. They lied to get me out of the way. And it worked. Then they shot him down like a dog. Do you think I’ll let them get away with that?”
“I might have guessed this,” she said, staring at him with something like wonder in her eyes. “It’s not for Eddie. It’s not because the men who killed him are savage and cruel and evil. It’s because your pride is hurt. Their great crime was to make a fool of Mike Carmody. Even your own brother’s death can’t penetrate your thick-headed arrogance.”
“I told you to skip the sermons,” he said, getting to his feet.
“I know you don’t want to hear sermons,” she said bitterly. “You don’t want to hear a word about right and wrong or good and evil. Those things hurt you. You can’t stand them, Mike.”
“Shut up!” he said thickly. “Damn it, will you shut up?”
“No, you don’t want anyone to tell you what kind of a man you are. You sneer and laugh at the whole world but you’re too damn sensitive to listen to its judgment on you. Well, some day you’ll have to listen, Mike. You helped fire the bullet that killed Eddie, and you’ll never be able to run away from that fact.”
“I did what I could,” Carmody said, catching her thin shoulders in his big powerful hands and lifting her to her feet. “Don’t ever say I killed him. Don’t ever say that to me again.”
“You did nothing but advise him to become a thief like you,” she said, staring into the pain and fury in his eyes. “When that didn’t work you walked away from him. That’s what you did, Mike.”
The words framed the dark thoughts which he had been fighting to drive into the safe hidden depths of his mind. I didn’t kill him, I didn’t kill him, he thought, hurling the words like weapons at his growing sense of guilt. Then he released her arms so abruptly that she staggered to keep her balance. “You don’t know anything about it,” he said hoarsely.
“You’re feeling it now,” she said, watching his face. “It’s something you’ll never get away from. If I’ve done that, I’m glad.”
“I’m tougher than you think,” he said, forcing a smile onto his lips. “Listen to me; Eddie didn’t die because of me. Eddie died because he was a fool.”
She sat down slowly, watching him with a frown, and then shook her head sadly. “If you can say that, you’re tough all right. You’re not a man, you’re just a slab of concrete. But some day you’ll crack up anyway. And the crash will be that much louder.”
“Don’t bet on it,” he said.
It was four in the morning when Carmody entered his own living room. The lights were on and Nancy Drake lay on the sofa, an empty whiskey bottle within inches of her trailing hand. Strands of her fine blonde hair fell across her damp cheek and there was a little smile on her lips. But it was a stiff, unnatural smile, the kind Carmody had seen on the lips of women who needed to scream. The line of her body was rigid and the smooth muscles in the backs of her calves were drawn up into small knots.
He shook her gently. “How do you feel, Nancy?”
“Feel?” The grin grew wider. “Hotsy-totsy.” A spasm shook her body and she pounded her feet up and down on the cushions of the sofa. “Say something nice to me, Mike. Don’t let me start crying.”
“Let’s have a drink. That’s something nice, isn’t it?”
“Real peachy,” she said. “Let’s just do that, Mike.”
The phone rang suddenly, shrill and ominous in the silence. Nancy cried out softly and Carmody patted her shoulder. “Keep quiet while I’m talking,” he said. “Okay?”
“Sure, Mike.”
Carmody crossed the room and picked up the phone. “Hello.”
“Mike, this is Bill Ackerman.”
Carmody stared at the receiver. Then he said softly, “You made a mistake tonight, Bill. I’m going to prove it to you.”
“Now get this!” Ack
erman’s voice was sharp and controlled. “We didn’t kill your brother. I promised you forty-eight hours and I meant it. Whoever shot him was working on his own. We’ll find the killer and when we do he’s all yours. Do you understand me, Mike?”
Carmody smiled coldly. Was this the opening lead in another double-cross? Was he next on the list? “I thought you’d killed him, Bill. I thought you’d crossed me,” he said.
“I don’t work that way. I don’t need to. I gave you forty-eight hours and I stuck to my word. My guess is that some hophead learned that your brother was causing us trouble, and decided to get in good with us by doing the job on him. He’ll be in for a handout one of these days and you can take over from here. Is that clear?”
“That’s your guess, eh?”
“I can’t think of anything else.”
The unpleasant little smile was still on Carmody’s lips. Ackerman’s confidence was almost funny, he thought. But where was this leading? Ackerman hadn’t called to explain himself or apologize. There was no reason for that.
“I’m glad you weren’t involved in it,” Carmody said. “I’m going after the guy who did the job.”
“We’ll help you, Mike. Is there anything you need right now?”
“I’m okay. I don’t need help.”
“If you need it, it’s here. Now here’s why I called. Did you see Nancy Drake last night or this morning?”
Carmody frowned. What was Ackerman’s interest in Nancy? “No, I haven’t,” he said, glancing at the slim figure on the sofa.
“That’s funny. She was out with some of Beaumonte’s friends last night. The last thing she told them was that she was going to your place.”
“My place? She must have been drunker than usual.”
“I imagine so. Anyway, Beaumonte wants to find her.”
Now it’s Beaumonte, Carmody thought. Why should Ackerman give a damn about Beaumonte’s troubles? There had to be an answer to that one. Ackerman operated solely in the light of self-interest; nothing mattered to him unless it directly concerned his safety and money. “Did Beaumonte and Nancy have a row?” he asked casually.
“Yeah. He didn’t like that baptismal job she did on him.”
“Well, I’ll check the elevator men here at the hotel,” Carmody said. “You want me to go any farther?”
“Sure. Find her if she’s still in town.”
“Okay.” Carmody hesitated, then: “I’ll give Beaumonte a call if I get a line on her.”
“No, let me know first,” Ackerman said. Normally he never explained or discussed his orders, but now he said, “I’ll hand her over to Dan as a little surprise.”
“Sure.”
“And, Mike, I’m sorry about your brother.”
Carmody couldn’t say thanks to that, the words would have stuck in his throat. “It was a rough deal,” he said slowly.
When he put the phone down he walked over and sat down beside Nancy on the sofa. There was a pale morning light coming in the windows now and it glinted on her tumbled blonde hair and the backs of her slim silken legs.
“Can you talk to me a minute?” he asked her quietly.
She twisted around until she was lying on her back. “I’ll get out,” she said. “I shouldn’t have bothered you.”
“Don’t worry about that,” he said, taking one of her hands and rubbing it slowly.
“Why did Beaumonte do it to me?” she asked him in a small, weary voice. Then her eyes began to fill with tears. “I was as good to him as I knew how. I tried my best to do everything he wanted. Really, I did. And he must have liked me a little, Mike. In all the time he never had another girl. He used to laugh about that. Said he was growing old. But that wasn’t it. He must have liked me. But he must have hated me, too. That’s what I can’t understand. Unless he hated me he wouldn’t have done this, would he, Mike?”
“He doesn’t hate you. He wants you back.”
“I don’t want to go back,” she said, and her hand tightened in his like a frightened child’s. “Can he make me?”
“No, of course not.”
She sighed. “This is my chance, Mike. I don’t want to wind up in some alcoholic ward. I’ll lay off the booze, and try to get back into show business. I can do that, I know it.”
“That was Ackerman who just called,” Carmody said. “He wants you back, too. Does that make any sense to you?”
She shivered and rubbed her bare arms. “It just scares me.”
“Is there any reason for him to be afraid of you? Have you got anything on him?”
She shook her head quickly, her eyes bright with fear. “I haven’t got anything on anybody, Mike. Tell them that, please, Mike. Even if I could, I wouldn’t bother them.”
“I’m after them,” he said gently. “Because they killed my brother. If you help me they’ll never find out about it.”
“I was sorry about your brother,” she said, beginning to cry. “That was terrible, Mike.” She was slipping away from him, he saw, retreating into irrational, nonspecific grief. “They shouldn’t have done that.”
“You’re sure they did it?” He tightened his grip on her hand. “You know they did it?”
“They talked about it after your fight with Johnny Stark. After you’d gone.” She stared pitifully at him, transfixed by his cold eyes. “Dan said there was a man tailing your brother, and Ackerman said to tell him to get to work.”
Was this what Ackerman was worried about? Carmody wondered. Possibly. But there had to be something else. What Nancy had overheard wasn’t evidence. And Ackerman would know that.
“They’ll be looking for you,” he said. “You told someone you were coming here.”
“Don’t make me go,” she whispered.
“This isn’t safe,” he said. “Let me think.” He had to hide her somewhere. Hotels and boardinghouses were out. If Ackerman were serious he could put a hundred men on her trail. Finally, Karen occurred to him; she was guarded by a detail of police and Nancy would be safe in her apartment. “Come on, let’s go,” he said. “Fix your hair and get into your coat.”
“All right,” she said. She seemed to have lost the power to act or think independently; she moved like a small battered puppet at the touch of his voice.
There was the problem of getting her past the police guard and Carmody put his mind to it on the trip across the dark city. Karen was an important witness, the only lead to Eddie’s killer, and the police wouldn’t stand for any casual boarders in her apartment. When he parked the car, a half-block from the Empire, he said to Nancy, “Now listen closely. We’re going to the Empire Hotel. You can see the entrance from here. You go into the foyer alone and tell the cop that you live in the hotel but don’t have your key. That’s all, understand? I’ll be right behind you and take it from there. Okay?”
Carmody walked into the foyer ten seconds after her and listened as she told her story to the patrolman. Then he said, “It’s okay, officer. I’ve seen her around before. She lives here.”
It worked smoothly, not because the cop was careless but because Carmody’s endorsement had the stamp of rank and authority on it. In the elevator he punched a button that took them to the floor above Karen’s. He led her along the warm silent corridor to the stairway and down one flight to the landing. “Wait right here,” he whispered. Then he opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. The young cop stationed at Karen’s apartment straightened alertly, but smiled as he recognized him.
“Everything quiet?” Carmody asked him.
“No one’s been here since you left.”
“Good. I’m going to be here half an hour going through some pictures with her. Why don’t you go down and get some coffee?”
“Well, I’m supposed to stick right here.”
“I’ll take over. And coffee will keep you sharp the rest of the night.”
It was that argument that sold the young cop. “I’ll make it on the double,” he said.
When the elevator doors closed on him Carmody
went down the corridor to the stairway landing and brought Nancy back to Karen’s apartment. He rapped sharply on the door and checked his watch. Five o’clock. He wanted to settle this and get to work.
There would be a restless ferment in the city today, precipitated by Eddie’s death, and by fear of the cops’ reactions to this defiant challenge from the big boys. This was the time to strike, Carmody knew, when people were ready to flinch.
The latch clicked and Karen opened the door. She wore a robe and slippers but he saw that she hadn’t been asleep.
“I’ve got to ask you a favor,” Carmody said.
“All right,” she said, looking at Nancy.
“She’s in trouble with the same guys who killed Eddie,” he said. “She needs a safe place to stay.”
Karen hesitated, still watching Nancy. Then she put a hand on her arm, and said, “Come on in. There’s plenty of room.”
“That’s mighty hospitable of you,” Nancy said, with a pitiful attempt at humor.
“She’s had a rough time and is pretty loaded right now,” Carmody said. “The cops won’t let her stay if they find out she’s here, so do your talking with the radio on. And if any detectives come up, put her in the bathroom or kitchen.”
“I can manage it,” Karen said.
The elevator cables hummed warningly and Carmody closed the door. He was standing with his back to it when the young cop came out of the elevator, carrying two cardboard containers of coffee.
“I brought one for you,” he said.
“Fine,” Carmody sipped the black coffee slowly, his thoughts ranging restlessly toward the city. The cop was silent until Carmody was ready to leave, then he wet his lips and told him awkwardly and hesitantly how sorry he was about his brother being killed.
“I worked with him and he was all cop,” he said.
“I think you’re right,” Carmody said soberly. Then he left.
8
Carmody walked through the double doors leading to Headquarters at five-thirty that morning. Abrams and Dirksen were there, along with a couple of men from Klipperman’s shift. It was their day-off but they had come in when they’d heard the news. The same thing would happen in every station and district in the city, Carmody knew. Off-duty detectives and patrolmen would check in with their sergeants, grimly eager to join the hunt for a cop’s killer.
Rogue Cop Page 10
