“There’s always that first time,” Captain Tower said drily. “And as for enemies, they probably include half of San Francisco, or at least those who knew him or did business with him. His family hated his guts. His father died years ago, but his brothers say they never heard of Jerry, and his mother told me that as far as she’s concerned, Jerry died when he went into the rackets.”
“We’ll still have to check out his enemies,” Reardon said. He sounded a bit unhappy at the size of the chore. “Even if we get something, though, it won’t be easy to hang it on anyone. With the outfit that guy was wearing, any identification in the lineup could be thrown out the window in five minutes by a first-year law student.”
Captain Tower looked at him evenly.
“Look, Jim. I think you’re making too much of a thing out of this disguise bit, and the beard and mustache thing. Even if the beard and mustache were real he could have shaved them off five minutes after he left the bar. But the lumber jacket and the cap are something else again. It isn’t as easy to get rid of clothing as some people think.”
“I know it, Captain. I’m having men search the immediate vicinity right now, but I’ll have a special put on the air for the men all over town to be looking for the jacket and cap. And the knife and glasses, too. And I’ll talk to the Department of Sanitation in the morning; have their trucks report any lumber jacket they might get.” He paused, thinking. “And just for the hell of it, I’ll do a check on stores that sell masks and other costume stuff. See if I can come up with anything on that beard. If it was fake, it had to come from someplace.”
Captain Tower nodded. “It’s not a bad idea. And don’t forget the Goodwill Industries and the Salvation Army on that jacket and cap. Dumping the clothes in one of their receptacles on the street wouldn’t be a bad way to duck the stuff. Or to try to.”
“Yes, sir.” Reardon was taking notes. “And I’ll talk to Dutch Smarth on the Examiner. He might get some mileage out of an article about the problems criminals face getting rid of unwanted clothing. He’s doing a crime series; he could use this lumber jacket as an example. He’d be glad to do it, I’m sure, and maybe we can get half of San Francisco looking for it.” He looked up from his pad, smiling briefly. “If the guy isn’t wearing it to work tomorrow …”
“There’s always that.” Captain Tower wiped ash from his cigar. “Well—”
Reardon recognized that the captain was breaking up the conference for the evening. He tucked his notebook into his jacket pocket and got to his feet, reaching for his raincoat. Bed would feel good tonight, even though he knew it would have felt better with Jan there. May she be having fun with Gabriella, he thought with sudden bitterness; may they both be sitting there getting looped on grape juice! The thought was father to another; he hesitated and then spoke.
“Captain—”
“Yes, Jim?”
“I—” He stopped. To report Bennett would probably make him a fink in everyone’s eyes, he thought; probably even his own. And definitely in the eyes of Captain Tower. Still, that was the captain’s privilege; his own responsibility was to the organization as a whole, and not to any particular member of it.
“What is it, Jim?”
Reardon took a deep breath. “Captain, when Dondero and I got to that tavern tonight, Bennett was out in front, moving people along. He’d been drinking. You could smell him a block away. I don’t know if any of the people he was moving along noticed it—down there most of them are pretty well crocked a lot of the time, too—but …” He shrugged unhappily. “I thought it ought to be reported, anyway.”
“Are you saying you think he took a drink at that bar he was investigating a murder in?”
“No, sir. In fact I’d say he didn’t. I think he was probably in that john at that gas station taking it, but where he took the drink or drinks isn’t the point, Captain. He drives a patrol car. If he gets in an accident, or, even worse, tries to make an arrest with noticeable liquor on his breath—” He stopped.
Captain Tower put his cigar in the ashtray and reached for a pencil, beginning to twiddle it idly. For several moments he looked at the pencil and then tossed it aside. He looked up.
“Jim,” he said slowly, “if you tell me Bennett has been drinking, I’ve got to believe you, but I can say he never was a drinker. Tom’s a religious man and he’s been on the force for thirty-two years. We started together when you were probably just a youngster. If he’d have been interested, I expect he could have been sitting where I’m sitting now, or where you’ll probably be sitting long before you’re anywhere near his age. The reason he wasn’t interested was because he put his church and his family ahead of his job, and I’m not sure he was wrong. Still, his record is one I’d be happy to have—four individual citations, wounded in the line of duty twice.”
He swiveled his chair, staring out of the window toward the bay, invisible in the darkness and the fog.
“But Tom’s had his share of grief lately. We’ve had his youngest boy in here three times in the past year, everything from car-stealing to the latest, which was armed robbery. He goes up for that next week. Tom believes it killed his wife. So from a close-knit family he was proud of—with reason; after all, he put three kids through college on a cop’s pay without being on the take once—to a dead wife and a criminal kid, all in a year—” He sighed. “Well, if he drinks …”
Reardon remained silent, bitter with himself for having reported the man. Captain Tower swiveled back, read the younger man’s thoughts in his face and shook his head.
“Jim, you were right, and don’t forget it. It would be no favor to Tom Bennett if he got into an accident, or had to use muscle making an arrest, and he smelled of booze. If it came out in court it would not only kill the case, but it could ruin him, too.” He leaned forward, picking up his cigar again. He glanced at his watch. “I’ll speak to him. He should be checking out around now.”
“Yes, sir.”
Captain Tower dragged his phone closer and dialed an internal number. “Hello, garage? Is Sergeant Bennett there? He’s changing? Good. Tell him I’d like to see him before he leaves, will you? Thank you. What? Right.” He cupped the receiver, looking at Reardon. “Another call; Communications cut into the line. Stick around …” He leaned back in the chair, puffing on his cigar, and then sat more erect. “Hello? Yes, this is Captain Tower. What? What!”
He shot up in his chair, his large pockmarked jaw hardening as he listened to the voice at the other end of the line; the receiver was almost lost in his huge paw of a hand. The cigar was forgotten. Reardon frowned as he saw the captain’s knuckles whiten as he squeezed the instrument. The big man set the cigar aside in an ashtray and hastily dragged over a pad; he picked up his pencil again and started to scribble hurriedly, his eyes narrowed in concentration.
“Yes, I’m listening. I’ve got it—the Cranston. Where the hell is that? What? Oh, I know. Yes. When did it happen?” There was the sound of a voice audible as an excited buzzing coming from the receiver to Reardon. Captain Tower paused in his writing. “Right. Right. Yes. I don’t suppose you can tell yet if there are any signs of violence? I suppose not. Yes. Right. I’ll get someone over there right away; you boys stick around until he gets there and then go back into service. Yes. What? Ten minutes at the most. Yes.” He hung up and stared at Reardon blankly, his big hand still resting on the telephone.
Reardon looked at him. “What is it, Captain?”
The captain came out of his reverie, looking at the lieutenant as if seeing him for the first time that evening.
“Jim, what’s your general opinion of coincidence?”
“Coincidence?” Reardon didn’t treat the question lightly; Captain Tower, in one of his moods, rarely asked idle questions. “Well, Captain, a little of it goes a long way with me.”
“With me, too,” Captain Tower said, as if satisfied with the answer. “Still, they also say never look a gift horse in the mouth.”
He made no attempt to explain thi
s cryptic remark; instead, he began clearing his desk again, placing the items there on the table behind him. This chore finished, he moved his chair back and raised the pane of glass once again. Reardon, alert and sleepiness completely forgotten, watched wordlessly as the captain fished out his list a second time and reached for his pencil. A second heavy line joined the first, crossing out another name on the list. The paper was replaced; the glass straightened neatly. The captain’s eyes came up, flat and cold.
“That’s right, Lieutenant. It looks like a long night for you.”
He swung around to replace the accouterments on his desk, and then paused, as if aware that time did not permit.
“About three minutes ago, according to the patrol car that was just passing at the time,” he went on somberly, and took a deep breath.
“What, sir?” Reardon had a good idea.
“Mr. Porfirio Falcone, alias Peter Gabriel, Alias Paul Garbonne—also called Pete the Pimp, a name not selected by him, needless to say …” His eyes came up, expressionless. “He took himself a dive. From his fancy apartment on the fifteenth floor of the Cranston Hotel, over on the other side of town …”
CHAPTER 5
Wednesday—11:10 p.m.
The Syndicate does not exist; it is a figment of the imagination. And, even if it had existed, it never had made the slightest foothold in the San Francisco Bay area. Still, there were people like Porfirio Falcone to explain …
Porfirio—Pete—Falcone had controlled all the organized prostitution in the San Francisco Bay area for the nonexistent Syndicate for many years. He had had a well-methodized system of recruitment that dovetailed and co-operated with similar non-existent organizations throughout the western part of the country from St. Louis to the Coast, as well as the northern states of Mexico, and which was sufficiently well regulated to both satisfy the custom—if not the Customs—and to avoid undue paid competition. Porfirio—Pete—had had his informants and paid representatives in the Homes for the Unmarried; he had received valuable tips from friends and co-workers such as Jerry Capp, who knew when women of all sizes, shapes and colors were in dire need of funds; he had heard from Ray Martin when a girl was foolish enough to go over her head at one of the gambling clubs. While he remained good friends with John Sekara, however, he had consistently refused to use any of the girls Johnny managed to hook on drugs, or to whom Sekara acted as supplier. It was not that conscience ever bothered Pete; it was simply that girls on the habit had a tendency to hold out money such as tips from the organization, and in addition they were usually selfish in bed.
Still, with all these efficient and effective means of arranging talent, Pete Falcone was not beyond personally inducting a new girl into the profession if the opportunity arose. It was one of the many reasons he preferred the Hotel Cranston as his residence, for the bar there seemed to attract an unusually large number of single girls not unwilling to accept a drink or visit a gentleman’s apartment—or to be impressed both by the decor and the view. Not all of these encounters resulted in a new employee, of course—in fact, few of them did—but even the failures furnished an interesting evening’s entertainment.
This particular evening, Pete Falcone had been sure he had struck gold. The girl seated a few stools down from him, alone in the dim, intimate bar, was, to his experienced eye, the perfect candidate. She was obviously not a hooker. First of all, Pete could spot a professional a block away with his eyes blindfolded, and that went for the expensive call girls as well; in addition, the management of the Cranston was very strict about things of that nature, and more than one bartender had lost a lucrative job because he had tried to make it even better paying by introducing girls into the cocktail lounge.
Pete had studied her a moment and then moved in. She had the kind of beauty that he, personally, favored: long, dark brown hair that half covered her face; a bit too much make-up, but not so much as to distract; a lovely full figure, a bit large in the bust, but nothing nine tenths of all women wouldn’t trade a padded bra for. She seemed to him to be fairly tall, although it was difficult to discern this fact when she was sitting; nor could he tell the color of her eyes since she was wearing dark glasses, a not uncommon scene at the Cranston bar, although how anyone could tell what they were drinking under those conditions remained a mystery to Pete Falcone. She was dressed in an ankle-length evening gown, tight about the neck, with a string of pearls draping her full bosom, and long white gloves coming nearly to her elbows, and she had poise—a most important characteristic in one of Pete’s girls—because she neither accepted his first offer of a drink, nor did she immediately give him the cold shoulder. Rather, she allowed him to move over and sit next to her, and she listened to his tale of loneliness as if it actually merited listening to. It must be admitted, however, that Porfirio Falcone had used the tale enough times to polish it to perfection, nor was his delivery amateurish in the least.
To make a long story short, he had been pleased to see she did not bolt her drink, which indicated to him she could hold her liquor—a vital point, since in the Falcone pleasure palaces there was no cold tea served in the guise of Chivas Regal—she was intelligent, with a sense of humor, and a deep, husky, almost mannish voice that made little icy fingers run up and down Pete’s spine. Nor was she at all unwilling to see the marvelous view from the heights of Pete’s fifteenth-floor bachelor apartment, even though the fog, unfortunately, was bound to be somewhat of a deterrent. Pete had signed the bar check with a slight flourish, winked at the bartender (and later at the elevator boy) and taken the young lady toward his apartment, while visions of sugarplums danced in his head.
Some fifteen minutes later the desk clerk at the Cranston Hotel had been rudely shocked by an angry passerby who came in and brusquely announced that some bloody fool—and he did mean bloody—had either jumped or fallen from one of the upper floors and had damned near brained him. The room clerk, forced against all his instincts to investigate, had pronounced the body to be that of Mr. Porfirio Falcone, after which he became violently sick to his stomach, and had to be escorted home.
Of the lovely girl both the bartender and the elevator operator had seen accompanying Mr. Falcone toward his room, there was no sign.
Wednesday—11:45 p.m.
Lieutenant Reardon stood in the middle of the large, beautifully appointed living room and studied the luxury about him, consciously comparing it with his own poor flat. Maybe Jan was right, he thought, studying the pictures, the sculpture, feeling the ankle-deep pile of the oyster-white rug beneath his feet; maybe the other half lives better and maybe police work not only is dangerous, but also it may not be the best profession through which to reach these heights. But would Jan agree to my doing what Pete Falcone did for a living? Highly dubious, he thought, and wiped away his smile, walking toward the large open window.
The view from the casement was, indeed, a lovely one, fog and all; in fact, the fog seemed to enhance it. The Golden Gate Bridge seemed to rise from the mist of the bay like a phantom structure, its cables shimmering mysteriously in the dim lights from the towers, all of the bridge independent of land, seemingly floating in the fog; below, the spaced street-lamps of the Presidio marked the winding tree-lined avenues with faintly glowing curves. It occurred to Reardon that the fog was clearing; from the height of the apartment the sky could be seen through the wispy haze, the moon brushing aside the mist, the stars picking holes through it. He sighed and turned to the man bent over the windowsill, dusting it for fingerprints.
“Anything yet, Charley?”
“Nothing yet, Lieutenant.”
The lab man was cheerful, but then, Reardon thought, he’s only been on duty several hours and not eighteen, like me. He wasn’t even sure why he had asked for this check; the girl, according to the elevator operator, had been wearing gloves, and in any event she hadn’t been the one to go through the window—Falcone had. And it would scarcely prove very much to find his own fingerprints in his own apartment. Still, there was always the
possibility that Pete Falcone had not particularly wished to go through the window, and may have attempted to hold back, and the marks of desperate fingers scrabbling for purchase on the window’s edge could well support a charge of murder. On the other hand, Pete Falcone, while no giant, still was large enough to prevent a girl from tossing him to his death—or at least he should have been. Reardon watched the technician for a few more moments and then wandered through the rest of the apartment.
There had obviously been no time for Pete Falcone to put his vaunted skills into practice, and the bedroom quite logically remained pristine, its huge circular bed neatly made, the pillows puffed up beneath a brocaded spread. Reardon noted the inviting nudes that made up the pictorial presentation on the paneled walls, as well as the profuse use of reflective surfaces, and then walked on through to the bathroom. Again he found an unsullied room, the towels in the rack all neatly folded and hanging in place, even as the room maid had deposited them. The only conclusion Reardon could draw from this was that either (a) Falcone hadn’t washed his hands before dinner, which made him out to be a slob; or (b) the maid had cleaned up since, although in that case one would have thought she would also have turned down the bed; or (c) Falcone hadn’t been in his apartment before meeting the girl in the bar. Since none of the three made the slightest difference to the case that Reardon could see, he promptly put them out of his mind, returned to the hallway, and thence to the kitchen.
The only apparent use this room was ever put to was to furnish ice cubes, and an empty tray stood in a small puddle of water on the counter. Otherwise the tiny pullman-type room was clueless, or at least to Reardon at the moment. Maybe the answers are all here and I’m just too tired to see them, he said to himself, and yawned as if to excuse himself. A kitchen in a hotel apartment! Ah, well, who said crime doesn’t pay, or that the wages of sin were death? The sudden memory of the body on the sidewalk returned and he shook his head at his own obtuseness and went back to the living room.
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