Dragnet

by Richard Deming

  We took Harry Martel down to the Police Building and ran his name through R & I. There was no record on him. His description did not answer that of any recently reported mashers.

  He was released with an admonition not to attempt to follow any more strange women.

  For the next two nights we continued to dangle the bait without getting a rise from the convertible bandit. Harriet, being an attractive woman, drew the attention of several more mashers, but none went so far as to attempt to approach her. In all cases they merely drove slowly by when she parked, looking her over but apparently not having the courage to make an overt advance.

  Tuesday, August 6th, at 11:42 p.m., we were cruising as usual. I was half dozing on the floor of the car when Harriet suddenly said, “Another taker, Joe.”

  I came awake instantly. “Where are we?”

  “We just passed the stakeout at Third and Alvarado. I won’t have a chance to signal again until we hit Eighth and Hoover.”

  “That’s Marty Wynn and Vance Brasher,” I said. “Keep going straight on Eighth after you signal them, instead of turning right. He might get suspicious if you start circling.”

  “Roger,” she said. Then, after a moment, “Joe, I have a feeling this one is our fish.”

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “I got a glimpse of his face when we turned left at Alvarado. It was too late to signal the stakeout, but he answers the description.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Middle-aged, round face, rimless glasses. He’s driving a Buick sedan.”

  A feeling of elation rose in me, only to be immediately replaced by one of consternation. There was a loud bang, and the convertible swerved to the right. Harriet wrenched it straight again, we bumped along for a few yards and slowed to a stop.

  “A broken bottle in the street,” Harriet whispered. “I saw it just too late. He’s pulled past and is stopping just ahead of us, Joe.”

  We couldn’t have picked a worse spot for a front-tire blowout. We were exactly halfway between two stakeout points. And we had no radio communication.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Harriet said, “He’s getting out of his car, Joe.”

  My palm was sweating against the butt of my gun. If the man was the bandit, and decided to shoot it out, he was almost certain to get in the first shot. He could be the bandit, he could be another masher, or he could be an innocent citizen offering to help a damsel in distress. I couldn’t fire until I was sure, and about the only way to make sure was to give him a chance to shoot first.

  “What’s he look like?” I asked.

  “Forty-five, maybe,” she said in a barely audible tone. “Five nine, a hundred seventy to seventy-five. Pleasant face. Joe, it’s him. He answers the description to a T.”

  I got my left hand braced beneath me.

  “He’s getting close,” Harriet whispered. “He’s reaching into his pocket now.”

  “Drop sidewise in the seat,” I said, and heaved myself upward into a crouch, my gun swinging forward. “Police officer, mister!” I snapped. “Hold it right there!”

  I was conscious that Harriet had obeyed my order and was lying prone across the seat. But only from the edge of my vision, for my attention was centered on the man fifteen feet in front of the car and off to one side. He didn’t look at all dangerous. He had a round, bland face with an amiable expression on it. In the headlights of our car, his rimless glasses glinted like oversized eyes.

  He moved faster than anyone I’ve ever seen. His hand was a blur as it came from his pocket. He fired without aiming, squeezing the trigger as the gun came up. My gun went off a fraction of a second later.

  Either he was a marvelous shot or lucky. His slug caught me high in the left arm, jarring me backward so that I sat heavily on the seat. My shot must have been ten feet over his head.

  He fired again, putting a neat hole in the windshield. The bullet would also have put a neat hole in my head if I hadn’t slid sidewise in the seat in order to shoot around the windshield at him.

  I missed with my second shot, and then he was running back toward his car. I got off a third just as he dived in front of it. I heard my slug whang into his right front fender.

  I was out of the car then and moving away from it in order to draw his fire away from Harriet. A bullet whizzed past me as I found the protection of a tree on the opposite side of the sidewalk.

  “Give it up, mister,” I called. “Throw out your gun.”

  A bullet plunked into the other side of the tree in answer. Each of us had now spent three rounds. Quickly I reloaded and threw three rapid shots at the Buick, hoping he would think that left my gun empty.

  Apparently he did. Leaving the protection of the Buick, he broke across the street for the areaway between two apartment houses. I took off after him just as two spaced shots sounded from the convertible. Harriet had sat up and was firing with the same methodicalness she would have used on the practice range.

  As I sprinted past the Buick, I saw the man stagger from one of Harriet’s shots. Then he disappeared into the blackness between the two buildings.

  I made the back yard at a dead run. It was backed by an eight-foot board fence, and I could see the silhouette of the suspect straddling the top of it. I took careful aim and fired.

  In the darkness he didn’t make much of a target, but I must have hit him, for he let out a yell. He made it the rest of the way over the fence, though, and dropped to the alley on the other side.

  Ramming my pistol into its holster, I ran at the fence, jumped upward and grasped the top with both hands.

  In the excitement I had forgotten my arm wound. There was no grip at all in my left hand. It slipped free, and my weight tore loose the grip of my other hand. My feet hit the ground with a jar.

  From the other side of the fence I could hear feet pounding away down the alley, the sound fading in volume as the fleeing man put distance between us. I fumbled along the fence until I found a gate in it, but it was padlocked.

  There wasn’t anything to do but return to the street.

  The shots had brought people all along the street to their windows and doors. Harriet had put her gun away and was telling a group of people who had spilled from one of the apartment houses that it was police business, and to go back inside. They just stood there, gaping at her, open-mouthed.

  I said to her, “He made it over a fence. We’ll have to use one of these people’s phones.”

  She looked at me. Her eyes widened at the splotch of blood on my arm, and she said, “You’re hit, Joe!”

  “Scratch,” I said. I wasn’t being heroic. While the wound was beginning to pain, I could tell by the use I still had of my arm that it was only a flesh wound. “We have to get this on the air.”

  I asked the group of civilians generally, “One of you got a phone we can use?”

  They all started to talk at once. An old man in a dressing gown talked the loudest, though. He got across that he lived on the first floor right inside the apartment entrance, and that he had a phone.

  Thirty seconds later I had Communications on the wire. A minute after that sirens began to sound, as every available unit in the area responded to a Code 3. When a policeman reports being shot at, it’s always a Code 3 call. No other report gets as prompt and complete response. Not just because policemen stick together. Few criminals, even hardened ones, will fire at an armed officer. When one does, we know he’s the most dangerous kind of criminal, and is a menace to every person he meets until he is caught. So we go all out to get him.

  The three stakeout cars got there first, arriving almost simultaneously. We didn’t have to brief them on what had happened, because I had given the whole story to Communications and it had been relayed over the air. Every unit in the area knew the details of the gunfight, and scores of police officers were now blocking off the whole district and making a systematic search for the suspect.

  I hadn’t mentioned my wound to Communications, though. When the aged tenant of the a
partment from which I had phoned let Frank and Jack Emlet in, they were surprised to find me shirtless and Harriet putting a temporary dressing on my arm with some bandage material she had borrowed from the old man.

  “You nicked bad, Joe?” Frank asked, with concern.

  “Flesh wound,” I said. “Won’t lay me up any.”

  “Better get over to Central Receiving,” Jack advised.

  I started to draw my bloodied shirt and jacket back on. “Plan to,” I said. “Nothing more we can do here, anyway. The situation’s under control. Probably got a hundred or more officers screening the area.”

  “Yeah,” Frank said. “What happened, anyway, that you tried to take the suspect halfway between stakeout points?”

  “Blowout. We meant to lead him up Eighth past Wynn and Brasher, but we ran over a broken bottle. He decided it was a good opportunity to hit—a lone woman with a flat tire on a deserted street. There wasn’t anything to do but play it out.”

  Frank shook his head gloomily. “Tough break. One of those things you can’t figure.”

  “We should net him, anyway,” I said. “He can’t get far with two slugs in him.”

  We went outside then, after thanking the old man for the use of his apartment. While Frank was calling for Latent Prints to come out and go over the Buick the suspect had abandoned, Marty Wynn and Vance Brasher jacked up the convertible and replaced the blown-out tire with the spare. Then Harriet drove me over to Central Receiving, where I had the temporary dressing she had put on replaced by a permanent one.

  It was past 1:30 a.m. when we got back to the Police Building. We checked in long enough to find out whether or not the suspect had been picked up.

  He hadn’t. Somehow or other he had managed to squeeze through the police net with two bullets in him and get clear away.

  CHAPTER IX

  Although I felt perfectly all right and capable of pulling at least restricted duty, the captain insisted I take a week’s sick leave because of my wound. I spent it lying around my apartment catching up on my reading.

  Frank phoned every day to find out how I was and brief me on what was going on at Homicide. Especially on the progress of the convertible-bandit case, as I had a particular interest in that. Most police work is impersonal, but when a suspect puts a bullet in you, you tend to develop a personal interest in his apprehension.

  There hadn’t been any progress. Latent Prints had developed a number of prints from the Buick the suspect had abandoned, but it turned out to be another stolen car, and all the prints checked out as having been made by the owner or members of his family. A pair of ordinary white work gloves were found on the seat of the car. Apparently they had been worn by the suspect when he’d stolen it, and he hadn’t taken them off until he got out of the Buick to approach the convertible. They were of a type purchasable in any dime store, and were untraceable.

  Several spots of blood had been found on the board fence, proving that the suspect had been wounded. The Crime Lab established the blood type as O+, which gave us one more factor of information about him. All physicians within a hundred-mile radius had been alerted to be on the lookout for a man of the suspect’s description requesting medical attention for gunshot wounds.

  The newspapers became interested in the case and gave it page-one publicity. As the suspect’s known record was now two murders plus the injury of three other people, one a police officer, he began to attain the local status of Public Enemy Number One. When one feature writer referred to him as the “Courteous Killer,” the name caught the public fancy, and the suspect became a general topic of conversation.

  All this publicity had the usual effect. Hundreds of people gave us tips about the suspect’s location or identity. Some honestly believed they had seen him; others were merely cranks hoping to share in the publicity. Seven men, none of them even faintly resembling the suspect, walked into the Homicide office and confessed. The suspect was reported as simultaneously having been seen in Santa Monica, Burbank, downtown Los Angeles, and as far away as San Diego.

  All these leads had to be painstakingly checked out, but came to nothing. The bandit had disappeared completely.

  In an all-out effort to locate him, composite pictures and all known data about him were sent to every major city in the country. Meantime, local newspapers and local business groups began posting rewards for information leading to an arrest and conviction. Eventually these rewards grew to five thousand dollars. The reward notices were sent to all major cities as fast as they were announced, so as to insure more than routine treatment of the want.

  I reported back to duty on Tuesday, August 13th, at 4:21 p.m. I stopped by the captain’s office first to check in. When I left there and walked into the squad room, Frank, Jack Emlet, and Tony Ramirez had already logged in for the night watch. All three shook my hand as though I had been away for a year instead of a mere week.

  Of course, after this display of comradeship I had to listen to the usual riding about malingering that any police officer takes on his return from sick leave. Jack Emlet asked, “How was the fishing?” and Tony Ramirez said, “It wasn’t fishing, Jack. It was that blonde over in Intelligence. Didn’t you notice she’s been out all week, too?”

  Amador Ramirez, nicknamed Tony, and Jack Emlet are partners. Ramirez is broad and dark and good-looking, Emlet slim and wiry and wears a blond crewcut. They practice a running end-man act, usually with each other as targets, but today they both concentrated on me. For five minutes I listened to suggestions ranging from one that I had deliberately stepped in front of a bullet in order to get a week off, to one that I had really only cut myself shaving.

  I grinned it off and logged myself in.

  “Anything going?” I asked Frank.

  “Nothing in the message book,” he said. “Some mail in your box.”

  Frank had been forwarding my mail to my home address while I was out, so only the day’s accumulation was there. I dropped a couple of ads in the wastebasket and examined the lone envelope that remained. It was a legal-size post-office envelope, addressed by pencil in block letters to Sergeant JOE FRIDAY, HOMICIDE DIVISION, POLICE BUILDING, 150 LOS ANGELES STREET, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA. It was postmarked from Los Angeles at 6:30 p.m. the previous day, and there was no return address.

  Ripping it open, I drew out a news clipping and a single sheet of paper. The clipping was from a week previous, and described the gunfight between the convertible bandit and Harriet and me. This was before the newspapers had begun giving the case page-one treatment, so it was a bare account of the fracas. Both Harriet Shaffer’s and my full names and ranks were given, however.

  The message, like the address on the envelope, was printed by pencil in block letters. There was no salutation and no signature. It read:

  you think your a smart badge, nobody BURNS ME AND LIVES, COP. START SWETTING.

  In the process of unfolding the sheet, I had already left my fingerprints on it, and possibly had obscured those made by the sender, if any. I dropped the message, the clipping, and the envelope onto a table before any more damage could be done.

  “Look at this,” I said.

  Frank, Emlet, and Ramirez gathered around as I spread the anonymous note flat with a pair of pencils. The three of them read it in silence.

  Then Jack Emlet said, “Didn’t go far in school, did he?”

  “How would you know?” Ramirez inquired. “If it wasn’t printed, you couldn’t even read it.”

  Emlet only grinned at him.

  Frank said seriously, “This guy must be a psycho, Joe. Nobody with all his marbles would mail a thing like that.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe it’s a break, though. We’ll shoot it down to Latent Prints.”

  With one of the pencils, I pushed the three items into an empty file folder. Then Frank and I took it downstairs to Room 208. Sergeant McLaughlin and Bill Tucker were on duty. It took them only a few minutes to determine that the only prints on the message and clipping were mine. There were
a few smudged prints on the envelope, probably from post-office handling, but none of them was good enough for comparison purposes.

  “Must have worn gloves,” McLaughlin said. “Doubt that any of the prints on the envelope would be his, even if we could bring them out. He wouldn’t be likely to make a mistake with the envelope after being so careful with the inside contents.”

  “Let’s, see what Pinker can do with it,” I said to Frank.

  We took the elevator up to the fourth floor and went to the Crime Lab. After examining the items, Ray Pinker shook his head.

  “Common-type bond paper that’s sold through thousands of outlets,” he said. “Post-office envelope. We might establish the brand of pencil by running a spectogram of the graphite, but what would it prove? Pencils are sold through thousands of outlets, too. Best bet would be Larry Sloan.”

  Larry Sloan is the department’s handwriting expert. We took the material to him. After studying the message and the envelope through a magnifying glass, he, too, shook his head.

  “Best I can do is make a suggestion,” he said. “Possibly the two spelling errors—‘your’ for ‘you’re’ and ‘swetting’ for ‘sweating’—were deliberate. The attempt of a literate person to make you think he was uneducated.”

  “How do you figure that?” I asked.

  “I don’t figure it,” Sloan said. “I only suggest it as a possibility. But look here.” He pointed to the printed message. “The printing is pretty regular. It’s no draftsman’s job, but it’s even and legible. There are no hesitation marks, and no inverted letters. Semiliterate people sometimes make N’s and S’s backward. This was done by someone who at least is used to holding a pencil. Furthermore, while there’s a little idiom used, there are no grammatical errors. Note the comma before the word cop. Most people uneducated enough to misspell as common a word as sweating wouldn’t use that comma. The line would read, ‘Nobody burns me and lives cop.’”

  “So he might actually be a college graduate?”