He let me in with a grin and muttered something between the folder of papers he had clamped in his teeth, waved me into the living room and took my coat. His eyes made a casual sweep over my chest and he didn’t have to look a second time to tell I wasn’t wearing a rig under my arm.
Pat said, “Drink?”
“Not now.”
“It’s only ginger ale.”
I shook my head and sat down. He filled his glass, relaxed into a wing chair and shoved all the papers into an envelope. “Glad to see you traveling light.”
“Didn’t you expect me to?”
His mouth crooked up at the corner. “I figured you’d know better than not to. Just don’t blame me for the deal, that’s all.”
“You’re not too sorry about it, are you?”
“As a matter of fact, no.” His fingers tapped the envelope, then his eyes came up to mine. “It puts you on the spot as far as business is concerned, but I don’t imagine you’ll starve.”
“I don’t imagine I will either,” I grinned back at him. “How long am I supposed to be in solitary for?”
He didn’t like the grin at all. He got those wrinkles around his eyes that showed when something was getting under his hide and took a long drag on the drink to muffle what he knew I saw. “When they’re ready to lift it they’ll lift it and not before.”
“They won’t have it that soft,” I told him.
“No?”
I flicked a butt into my mouth and lit it. “Tomorrow you can remind ’em I’m an incorporated business, a taxpayer and a boy with connections. My lawyer has a judge probably getting up a show cause right now and until they settle the case in court they aren’t pulling any bill-of-attainder stuff on me.”
“You got a mouthful of words on that one, Mike.”
“Uh-huh. And you know what I’m talking about. Nobody, not even a Federal agency is going to pull my tail and not get chewed a little bit.”
His hands got too tight around the glass. “Mike ... this isn’t just murder.”
“I know.”
“How much?”
“No more than before. I’ve been thinking around it though.”
“Any conclusions?”
“One.” I looked at him, hard. “Mafia.”
Nothing changed in his face. “So?”
“I can be useful if you’d quit booting me around.” I took a drag on the smoke and let it curl out into the light. “I don’t have to pull my record out. You know it as well as I do. Maybe I have shot up a few guys, but the public doesn’t seem to miss them any. If your buddies think I’m stupid enough to go busting in on something over my head without knowing what I’m doing then it’s time they took a refresher course. They haven’t got one guy in Washington that’s smarter than I am ... not one guy. If they had they’d be making more moolah than I am and don’t fool yourself thinking they’re in there for love of the job. It’s about the limit they can do.”
“You sure think a lot of yourself.”
“I have to, friend. Nobody else does. Besides, I’m still around when a lot of others have taken their last car ride.”
Pat finished off the glass and swirled the last few drops around the bottom. “Mike,” he said, “if I had my way I’d have you and ten thousand more in on this thing. That’s about how many we’d need to fight it. As it is, I’m a city cop and I take orders. What do you want from me?”
“You say it, Pat.”
He laughed this time. It was like the old days when neither one of us gave a damn about anything and if we had to hate it was the same thing. “Okay, you want me for your third arm. You’re going to dive into this thing no matter who says what and as long as you are we’d might as well use your talents instead of tripping over them.”
The grin was real. It was six years ago and not now any longer. The light was back in his eyes again and we were a team riding over anything that stood in our way. “Now I’ll tell you something, Mike,” he said, “I don’t like the way the gold-badge boys do business either. I don’t like political meddling in crime and I’m sick of the stuff that’s been going on for so long. Everybody is afraid to move and it’s about time something jolted them. For so damn long I’ve been listening to people say that this racket is over our heads that I almost began to believe it myself. Okay, I’ll lay my job on the line. Let’s give it a spin and see what happens. Tell me what you want and I’ll feed it to you. Just don’t hash up the play .. at least not for a while yet. If something good comes of it I’ll have a talking point and maybe I can keep my job.”
“I can always use a partner.”
“Thanks. Now let’s hear your angle.”
“Information. Detailed.”
He didn’t have to go far for it. The stuff was right there in his lap. He pulled it all out of the envelope and thumbed the sheets apart. The light behind his head made the sheets translucent enough so the lines of type stood out and there weren’t very many lines.
“Known criminals with Mafia connections,” he drawled. “Case histories of Mafia efficiency and police negligence. Twenty pages of arrests with hardly enough convictions to bother about. Twenty pages of murder, theft, dope pushing, and assorted felonies and all we’re working with are the bottom rungs of the ladder. We can name some of the big ones but don’t fool yourself and think they are the top joes. The boys up high don’t have names we know about.”
“Is Carl Evello there?”
Pat looked at the sheets again and threw them on the floor in disgust. “Evello isn’t anywhere. He’s got one of those investigatable incomes but it looks like he’ll be able to talk his way out of it.”
“Berga Torn?”
“Now we’re back to murder. One of many.”
“We don’t think alike there, Pat.”
“No?”
“Berga was special. She was so special they put a crew of boys on her who knew their business. They don’t do that for everybody. Why did the committee want her?”
I could see him hesitate a moment, shrug and make up his mind. “There wasn’t much to the Torn dame. She was a good-looking head with a respectable mind but engaged in a mucky racket, if you get what I mean.”
“I know.”
“There was a rumor that Evello was keeping her for a while. It was during the time he was raking in a pile. The same rumor had he gave her the boot and the committee figured she’d be mad enough to spill what she knew about him.”
“Evello wouldn’t be that dumb,” I said.
“When it comes to dames, guys can be awfully dumb,” he grinned at me knowingly.
“Finish it.”
“The feds approached her. She was scared stiff, but she indicated that there was something she could give out, but she wanted time to collect her information and protection after she let it out.”
“Great.” I snuffed the butt out and leaned back in the chair. “I can see Washington assigning her a permanent bodyguard.”
“She was going to appear before the committee masked.”
“No good. Evello could still spot her from the info she handed them.”
Pat confirmed the thought with a nod. “In the meantime,” he went on, “she got the jitters. Twice she got away from the men assigned to cover her. Before the month was out she was practically hysterical and went to a doctor. He had her committed to a sanitarium and she was supposed to stay there for three weeks. The investigation was held up, there were agents assigned to guard the sanitarium, she got away and was killed.”
“Just like that.”
“Just like that only you were there when it happened.”
“Nice of me.”
“That’s what those Washington boys thought.”
“Coincidence is out,” I said.
“Naturally.” His mouth twitched again. “They don’t know that you’re the guy things happen to. Some people are accident prone. You’re coincidence prone.”
“I’ve thought of it that way,” I told him. “Now what about the details of her
escape?”
He shrugged and shook his head slightly. “Utter simplicity. The kind of thing you can’t beat. Precautions were taken for every inconceivable thing and she does the conceivable. She picked up a raincoat and shoes from the nurses’ quarters and walked out the main entrance with two female attendants. It was raining at the time and one of them had an umbrella and they stayed together under it the way women will who try to keep their hair dry or something. They went as far as the comer together, the other two got in a bus while she kept on walking.”
“Wasn’t a pass required at the gate?”
He nodded deeply, a motion touched with sarcasm. “Sure, there was a pass all right, each of the two had a pass and showed it. Maybe the guy thought he saw the third one. At least he said he thought so.”
“I suppose somebody was outside the gate too?”
“That’s right. Two men, one on foot and one in a car. Neither had seen the Torn girl and were there to stop anyone making an unauthorized exit.”
I let out a short grunt.
Pat said, “They thought it was authorized, Mike.”
I laughed again. “That’s what I mean. They thought. Those guys are supposed to think right or not at all. Those are the guys who had my ticket lifted. Those are the guys who want no interference. Nuts.”
“Anyway, she got away. That’s it.”
“Okay, we’ll leave it there. What attitude are the cops taking?”
“It’s murder so they’re working it from that end.”
“And getting nowhere,” I added.
“So far,” Pat said belligerently. I grinned at him and the scowl that creased his forehead disappeared. “Lay off. How do you plan to work it?”
“Where’s Evello?”
“Right here in the city.”
“And the known Mafia connections?”
Pat looked thoughtful a moment. “Other big cities, but their operational center is here too.” He bared his teeth in a tight grimace. His eyes went hard and nasty as he said, “Which brings us to the end of our informative little discussion about the Mafia. We know who some of them are and how they operate, but that’s as far as it goes.”
“Washington doesn’t have anything?”
“Sure, but what good does it do. Nobody fingers the Mafia. There’s that small but important little item known as evidence.”
“We’ll get it,” I told him, “... one way or another. It’s still a big organization. They need capital to operate.”
Pat stared at me like he would a kid. “Sure, just like that. You know how they raise that capital? They squeeze it out of the little guy. It’s an extra tax he has to pay. They put the bite on guys who are afraid to talk or who can’t talk. They run an import business that drives the Narcotics Division nuts. They got their hand in every racket that exists with a political cover so heavy you can’t bust through it with a sledge hammer.”
He didn’t have to remind me. I knew how they operated. I said, “Maybe, chum, maybe. Could be that nobody’s really tried hard enough yet.”
He grunted something under his breath, then, “You still didn’t say how you were going to work it.”
I pushed myself out of the chair, wiping my hand across my face. “First Berga Torn. I want to find out more about her.”
Pat reached down and picked the top sheet off the pile he had dropped on the floor beside him. “You might as well have this then. It’s as much as anyone has to start with.”
I folded it up and stuck it in my pocket without looking at it. “You’ll let me know if anything comes up?”
“I’ll let you know.” I picked up my coat and started for the door.
“And Mike ...”
“Yeah?”
“This is a two-way deal, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
Downstairs, I stood in front of the building a minute. I took the time to stick a Lucky in my mouth and even more time lighting it. I let the flare of the match bounce off my face for a good ten seconds, then dragged in deeply on the smoke and whipped it back into the night air. The guy in the doorway of the apartment across the street stirred and made a hesitant motion of having come out of the door and not knowing which way to walk. I turned east and he made up his mind. He turned east too.
Halfway down the block I crossed over to make it a little easier on him. Washington didn’t discount shoe leather as expenses so there was no sense giving the boy a hard time. I went three more blocks closer to the subway station and pulled a few gimmicks that had him practically climbing up my back.
This time I had a good look at him and was going to say hello to add insult to injury when I caught the end of a gun muzzle in my ribs and knew he wasn’t Washington at all.
He was young and good-looking until he smiled, then the crooked march of short, stained teeth across his mouth made him an expensively dressed punk on a high-class job. There was no hop behind his pupils so he was a classy workman being paid by an employer who knew what the score was. The teeth smiled bigger and he started to tell me something when I ripped his coat open and the gun in the pocket wasn’t pointing at me any more. He was half spun around fighting to get the rod loose as the side of my hand caught him across the neck and he sat down on the sidewalk with his feet out in front of him, plenty alive, plenty awake, but not even a little bit active.
I picked the Banker’s Special out of his hand, broke it, dumped the shells into the gutter and tossed the rod back into his lap. His eyes were hurting. They were all watered up like he was ashamed of himself.
“Tell your boss to send a man out on the job the next time,” I said.
I walked on down the street and turned into the subway kiosk wondering what the deuce had happened to Washington. Little boy blue back on the sidewalk would have a good story to take home to papa this time. Most likely he wouldn’t get his allowance. At least they’d know a pro was in the game for a change.
I shoved a dime in the turnstile, went through, pulled the sheet out of my pocket, glanced at it once and walked over to the downtown platform.
Chapter Six
SOMETHING HAPPENS to Brooklyn at night. It isn’t a sister borough any more. She withdraws to herself and pulls the shades down, then begins a life that might seem foreign to an outsider. She’s strange, exciting, tinted with bright lights, yet elusive somehow.
I got off the Brighton Line at De Kalb and went up to the street. A guy on the comer pointed the way to the address I wanted and I walked the few blocks to it.
What I was looking for was an old-fashioned brownstone, a hangover from a half-century past that had the number painted on the door and looked at the street with dull, blank eyes. I went up the four sandstone steps, held a match to the mailboxes and found what I wanted.
The names CARVER and TORN were there, but somebody had drawn a pencil through the two of them and had written in BERNSTEIN underneath. All I could do was mutter a little under my breath and punch the end button on the line, the one labeled SUPER. I leaned on it until the door started clicking then I opened it and went in.
He came to the door and I could almost see his face. Part of it stuck out behind the fleshy shoulder of a woman who towered all around him and glared at me as if I had crawled up out of a hole. Her hair was a gray mop gathered into tiny knots and clamped in place with metal curlers. She bulged through the bathrobe, trying to slow down her breathing enough so she could say something. Her hands were big and red, the knuckles showing as they bit into her hips.
Dames. The guy behind her looked scared to death. She said, “What the hell do you want! You know what time it is? You think ...”
“Shut up.” Her mouth stopped. I leaned against the door jamb. “I’m looking for the super.”
“I’m the ...”
“You’re not anything to me, lady. Tell your boy to come out.” I thought her face would fall apart. “Tell him,” I repeated.
When men learn to be men maybe they can handle dames. There was something simpering in the way s
he forced a smile and stepped aside.
The boy didn’t want to come out, but he did. He made himself as big as he could without it helping much. “Yes?”
I showed him the badge I still had. It didn’t mean a thing any more, but it still shined in the light and wasn’t something everybody carried. “Get your keys.”
“Yessir, yessir.” He reached up beside the door, unhooked a ring and stepped back into the hall.
The dame said. “You wait a minute, I’ll be right ...”
He seemed to stand on his toes. “You wait right there until I come back,” he told her. “I’m the super.” He turned and grinned at me. Behind him his wife’s face puffed out and the door slammed.
“Yessir?” he said.
“Berga Torn’s place. I want to go through it.”
“But the police have already been through there.”
“I know.”
“Today I rented it already.”
“Anybody there now?”
“Not yet. Tomorrow they’re supposed to come.”
“Then let’s go.”
First he hesitated, then he shrugged and started up the stairs. Two flights up he fitted a key into the lock of a door and threw it open. He felt around for the light switch, flipped it and stood aside for me.
I don’t know what I expected to find. Maybe it was more curiosity than anything that dragged me up there. The place had been gone over by experts and if anything had been worth taking it was gone by now. It was what you might call a functional apartment and nothing more. The kitchen and living room were combined with a bathroom sandwiched between two bedrooms that jutted off the one wall. There was enough furniture to be comfortable, nothing gaudy and nothing out of place.
“Whose stuff is this?”
“We rent furnished. What you see belongs to the land-lord.”
I walked into the bedroom and opened the door of the closet. A half dozen dresses and a suit hung there. The floor was lined with shoes. The dresser was the same way, filled to the brim. The clothes were good, fairly new, but not the type that came out of exclusive shops.
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