Bruno Fischer

by J. Max Gilbert

  The headlights of the other car came through the convertible's rear window. I didn't care who was in it. My hands were light on the wheel, just resting there. Then the car was even with us. I didn't see it. I felt it, sensed.it, and I saw Larry raise his gun in preparation for anything that might happen. It was the moment when his attention was off me as much as it would ever be.

  My hands fell off the wheel. My right hand shoved the gun out of line with my body. My shoulders turned with the motion., I drove a short left uppercut to his jaw. It missed, but landed flush on the broad nose. His head fell away from me. I hit him again. My right hand was frantically groping for his gunwrist as I kept jabbing my left into his face. I couldn't find that wrist. The gun didn't go off. He sat huddled in the corner of the seat, just taking it with his head bobbing loosely every time I hit him.

  I stopped hitting him. He sagged at the angle of door and seat, and his head fell loosely against the window. His eyes were closed. He was breathing raggedly through his mouth and blood ran from its corners and trickled from his nostrils. There was blood on my knuckles. Not all of it his. I rubbed it off with my handkerchief and saw that the knuckles were split. He had known all the tricks, but had overlooked one — that I could hit a man hard enough to make it count.

  I sucked my knuckles and took a cigarette out of my pocket and drew smoke into my lungs. Then, I turned back to him. My fist hadn't improved his appearance. I reached past him and pushed the door open and his head fell out, followed by his torso. His legs remained inside.

  I bent over and saw his gun on the floor beside his ankle. I put it on the seat, bent over again, pushed his legs and feet out, closed the door, straightened up. And looked into headlights facing me.

  The car was parked on the left side of the road, no more than thirty feet away. A man was getting out. He moved rapidly in the brightness of headlights glaring on his crooked nose and doublepointed chin. He held a gun against his hip.

  I jammed in the gears, yanked my foot off the clutch pedal, swung the wheel hard. It leaped by Crooked Nose's car, scraping a fender, and was away. I glanced back and got a picture of Larry lying in the glow of the other car's lights and of Crooked Nose looking after me. Then I let the car have its head.

  The street was wide enough to swing around in a single turn, but I didn't dare go back that way. I drove past Avenue X before I realized what I was doing. I turned left on a murderously rutted side street and then decided that I would have made better time going on to Belt Parkway, and turned right, and when I reached the Parkway I couldn't find an entrance. I blundered around for a couple of minutes until suddenly I saw Ocean Parkway on my left and headed for it. On Ocean Parkway I caught the lights wrong. I stopped at three or four corners until the staggered lights changed and then I laughed crazily and went through two red lights. Let a cop stop me and I'd take him along.

  There was no cop anywhere.

  I was almost home when I remembered the gun. I picked it up from the seat. The safety catch was off. Larry had been ready for action. I dropped it into my pocket. Sweat pasted my underwear to my body.

  There was nothing different about my block. I didn't know why I expected anything to be. There were people walking and cars parked at intervals and cozy lights in windows. I stopped the car with a jolt and started to run down the driveway. At the second living room window I checked myself.

  Esther hadn't moved, or she was back in the precise position I had last seen her, reading in the club chair and at the same time listening to the radio. The same comedian with the strident giggle was telling another joke, or the same joke. Within the space of a half-hour program I had gone and returned. Again all I could see of Esther was her dark hair and a braid and the curve of one cheek. It was as if I hadn't been gone at all, I laughed soundlessly with relief and continued down the driveway. I took the gun out of my pocket. The garage door was closed, the light out. I went around the demonstration coupe and opened the garage door. There was no sound except my own breathing. I snapped on the light. The trunk door of the sedan was raised. The pigskin bag was gone.

  I didn't care. It wasn't mine. It had meant nothing to me but trouble. I went to the rear of the sedan and

  reached up to pull the trunk down; My hand froze. A pair of legs protruded from the side of the right rear tire. Handsome lay on his side. He was no longer handsome. His face looked worse than Larry's after my fist had got through with it, and the top of his head wasn't nice to look at. His pearl-gray hat lay near the wall, its crown bashed in. And near the hat was the tire iron.

  I squatted and touched the nearest hand. Work it smart and careful, he had said — and he was dead.

  I twisted on the balls of my feet and looked at the tire iron. There was blood on half its length and bits of hair. Probably it was my tire iron, the one that had been in the trunk. I didn't care to look at it closely. I stood up and skirted around the dead man and put out the light and went into the house through the back door.

  Esther heard me come up the hall. “Is that you, darling?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  Sucking my split knuckles, I dialed the operator and asked for the police.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Detective-Lieutenant Woodfinch didn’t rise from behind his desk when I came in. He didn’t shake hands or say hello or smile. He waved his pipe in a vague arc ending in the general direction of the ceiling and said: “Sit down, Mr.' Breen.”

  There were five or six desks in the office and plain wooden chairs scattered about. I pulled a chair up to the other side of his desk and sat. I tried not to feel like a schoolboy who had been sent for by the principal.

  Nothing happened for a while. Lieutenant Woodfinch believed in doing one thing at a time, and at the moment he was loading his curved, pipe from an oilskin tobacco pouch which unfolded to the length of a small apron. Not a grain of tobacco spilled. I would have been startled if it had. An unhurried, methodical man, and he looked it. His clothes were without. dash; they were precisely cut and carefully subdued. His face, so close-shaven at three in the afternoon that it looked as if it never needed a razor, appeared in repose. His thinning hair was calculatedly combed at the exact angle to cover most of the scalp. Last night at my house I had decided that it would be tough selling him a car, or anything, even if he needed it.

  There were two other detectives in the office, and they also had been at my house last night. The beefy man with the stub of cigar in the corner of his mouth and the black hat glued to his head was named Scavuzzo. The third man was just somebody in a blue suit who sat at a desk with a notebook and pencil. Last night he had sat at my living room table with a notebook and a pencil.

  Lieutenant Woodfinch drew on his pipe, critically studied the glowing bowl, then at last looked at me, “So you’d never seen Jasper Vital before last night or heard of him?” he said as if taking up a conversation that had been interrupted a moment before.

  “Who?” After I replied, I realized that I had been supposed to say yes or no and give myself away.

  “Jasper Vital, the man who was murdered in your garage. He had his name in his wallet, along with around seventeen hundred dollars in cash. It’s his own name. Has a police record in Brooklyn. Six years ago he was picked up for running a phoney numbers racket. Didn’t like to pay off even the small percentage the winners were entitled to. Not even an honest crook. He got a ten-month rap. After he got out of jail, there was no trace of him in Brooklyn till his cadaver turned up last night.”

  “He was down south,” I said. Woodfinch cupped his pipe between his palms. “How do you know if you didn’t know him?”

  “I told you last night that during the ride Larry mentioned that they’d come from the south, and his car had a Florida license plate. Unless it’s a stolen car.”

  “We spoke to Dade County, Florida, by phone,” Woodfinch said. “The car was Jasper Vital’s all right. In his name. Registration, motor number, everything checks. Lived in Miami. Picked up twice there for being in the s
lot machine racket. They don’t like slot machines interfering with more profitable gambling.” He sucked his pipe. “Why do you say it’s a stolen car?”

  “I only suggested it. That cash in Vital’s wallet might have been every cent he owned, and it requires wealth to have a car like that. And he was a crook. It made sense that way.”

  “Uh-huh. And now what about Raymond Teacher?”

  “What about him?” I said. “Another crook, I suppose. I’m not up on crooks. That’s your job.”

  “A fresh guy,” the beefy detective named Scavuzzo grunted. He was sitting on one of the desks and swinging his legs and watching my profile.

  Briefly Lieutenant Woodfinch looked at him over the bowl of his pipe and then shuffled paper on his desk. “Raymond Teacher is the name he was born with, but he had others. Will Raymond, Wilson Ray, Ted Wishingdale. Wonder how he thought up that Wishingdale. A mug. In the last ten years was in jail more than out. Assault and battery, stolen cars, stick-up of a beer joint. You’d think he’d die with a bullet in him. Instead he was knocked over by a car like any respectable citizen. Anything to add, Mr. Breen?”

  I reached over to crush out my cigarette in the lieutenant’s ashtray. All three men watched me impassively.

  “Last night I told you everything I know,” I said.

  “Let’s see.” Woodfinch leaned back. “We’ll start with Jasper Vital offering you five hundred dollars for the bag. Had the cash right in his wallet. Why didn’t you take it?”

  “Because the bag wasn’t mine.”

  “You sure you didn’t look in the bag?”

  “It was locked.”

  “Five hundred dollars is a lot of money. To me, anyway. I suppose to a car salesman too.”

  I took out another cigarette. I was afraid my hands would shake with anger. “I can understand where those two crooks, Jasper Vital and Larry, couldn’t get it into their heads that a man can be honest. Maybe, being a cop, you can’t either.”

  “When a story stinks, it stinks,” Scavuzzo commented from 'his perch on the desk.

  “Shut up,” Woodfinch told him mildly. “All right, Mr. Breen, you didn’t know what was in the bag, but when Vital offered you five hundred dollars you knew it was worth a lot more. So you decided to hold onto it.”

  “Because the bag wasn’t mine to sell.”

  “Then they put a gun on you, and you still held out on them. What is it — you say you’re so honest you’d let them kill you?”

  “I’d thrown the key away,” I said. “I would have had to search in the grass for it with them and Esther would have seen us and come out. And, of course, I didn’t want them to go into the house to get the other key from Esther.”

  “Why didn’t they think of getting the key from your wife?”

  “I told you. Jasper Vital insisted that she be kept out of it.”

  Scavuzzo snorted.

  Woodfinch said: “Why would Vital worry about a strange woman?”

  “How the hell do I know? Maybe he was, a gentleman. Besides, he’d made up his mind that he could get information out of me. If he showed himself to Esther to force her to give up the key, he’d have to take her along too. It wasn’t necessary.”

  The pipe had gone out. Lieutenant Woodfinch tamped the ashes down with a finger and ran a light around the bowl until he was satisfied with the draw. He took his time. Everybody waited for him.

  “What did you know that they wanted to know?” he asked, leaning back again.

  “They made a mistake. They only thought I knew something.”

  “Why did they think that?”

  “Because, like you, they couldn’t believe a man would refuse five hundred dollars for a bag just because it didn’t belong to him.”

  Woodfinch shook his head. “There’s more. They were getting the bag anyway, they thought. They wanted information about something else or about somebody. They were sure you could give it to them. Why?”

  I set fire to the cigarette I had been holding between my fingers. I dropped the match into his ashtray. “I think they got the idea when I told them I was .working for Redfern Motors. I can’t tell you why; I don’t know. It might have been something else. Maybe because Howard Pine, the man whose car killed Teacher, had told Vital that, he thought he had seen Esther — “ I stopped. I could have bitten my tongue off.

  Woodfinch’s lips twitched. For him it was a broad smile. “Get it into your head that you can’t hide anything from the police.” He shuffled papers on his desk, selected a typewritten sheet. “This morning Howard Pine identified the body of Jasper Vital as that of the man who called at his house at a few minutes after six p.m. Vital told him that his name was Webster and that he was a friend of Teacher’s and was trying to locate Teacher’s bag.

  “I quote Howard Pine: ‘Webster — or Vital — told me that he had inquired at the hospital for Teacher’s bag and they knew nothing about it. He asked me if I knew what happened to it. I said that I had seen the police put it into Mrs. Breen’s car. He asked me why did Teacher go straight to Mrs. Breen’s car when he rose to his feet instead of to one of the other cars which had stopped on both sides of the street. I said I didn’t know. He asked if Teacher seemed to know Mrs. Breen. I said all I knew was that they were talking together before he got into her car. For all I knew, I said, it was even possible that Teacher had got out of Mrs. Breen's car. I remember seeing Teacher cross in front of her car, and he might have got out of it when it stopped for the red light and then he crossed in front of it to get across the street before the light'

  changed. Vital asked if I was sure of that. I said no, I couldn't be sure. Then Vital left.”

  Woodfinch looked up from the paper and blew smoke at me.

  “That means nothing, of course,” I said, “It was just an idea Vital put into Pine's head.”

  “By itself it doesn't,” Woodfinch agreed. “Certainly not enough to convince Vital that you were connected with Teacher. But something else did. Something more important than the fact that you turned down his five hundred dollars. What was it?”

  “I wish I knew.” I sat hunched over, holding my cigarette between my knees.

  Woodfinch said: “Let’s go on. Vital tells Larry to take you to Coney Island. Why not have Larry stay with him till he gets the trunk open? Safer for the two of them to drive you. Why the rush?”

  “That’s another thing I explained to you last night. Vital wanted me out of there in a hurry before my wife came out to see what was keeping me or to get in on the conversation. He must have seen something in my face when Esther called out and guessed that I’d start throwing my fists if she was in a position where they might have to, harm her. If there was shooting, they’d have to run for it without the bag. Besides, they wanted me alive to learn whatever they thought I knew. Vital was using his head.”

  “He used it, all right. He got it caved in by a tire iron.”

  “Which was in the open trunk and only had to be reached for.”

  Woodfinch gently knocked out his pipe, ran his pinky inside the bowl, unfolded his pouch. “Now we come to where you're a hero. You were overseas, you said?”

  “Seventeen months.”

  “See action?”

  “A little strafing and bombing and shelling. I was in supply.”

  “Didn’t you want to get into combat?”

  “I did what I was told. I knew cars, so they put me on jeeps. You can check that easily enough, though I can’t see what that has to do with anything.”

  “Brother,” Scavuzzo said, swinging one leg against the desk, “there’s nothing we don’t know about you. We’ve been checking you all morning.”

  “So why these questions?”

  “I was thinking,” Woodfinch said, polishing his hot pipe against his cheek, “that maybe I could understand a man, who was hardened to combat fighting, tackling an armed man in the close quarters of a, car.”

  “But I’m not the type, is that it?” I twisted my mouth. “Listen. What did I have to lose
? I was being taken to torture and death.”

  Scavuzzo took out his cigar and snorted and put it back.

  I turned to him. “I suppose no murdered bodies are found in Brooklyn? I suppose nobody’s ever been tortured by gangsters in Coney Island or Flatbush or Bay Ridge or anywhere else in Brooklyn? I suppose Murder, Inc., was just newspaper propaganda?”

  Scavuzzo said: “We cleaned .that up.”

  This time it was my turn to snort.

  “All right,” Woodfinch said mildly. “So you were sure you were going on a one-way ride. So you turned and socked him in the close confines of a car seat and knocked him out cold before he could shoot you.”

  “His attention was on the other car passing us, the one driven by the man with the crooked nose.”

  “We’ll get to him. You must be pretty good if you could K.O. him with one short jab.”

  “I am,” I said.

  Scavuzzo slid off the desk and came around for a front view of me. “Yeah, you’re good,” he said. “Especially the way you think up stories.”

  I ignored him. “I was division boxing champion in France,” I told Woodfinch.

  “A prizefighter?” Woodfinch sounded almost interested.

  “Only an amateur. Your investigation of me wasn’t so good if you didn’t learn that I reached the Golden Glove finals when I was a kid. I was too tall for my weight and hadn’t much science, and in, the finals I was cut to pieces and lost on points. But I could always hit, and last night I gave Larry my Sunday punch. A lot of them.” I smiled up at Scavuzzo, “Would you like a practical demonstration?”

  Scavuzzo said: “Why, you mug!”

  Lieutenant Woodfinch was laughing. We all looked at him in surprise. He broke off, looked embarrassed, and his face resumed its normal attitude of repose.

  “Sit down, Scavuzzo,” he said placidly. “All right, you have a wonderful sock, Mr. Breen, and you knocked Larry out. He was a criminal. Why dump, him out of the car? Why not take him to the nearest police station?”