Contents
DEAD SURE, by Herbert Brean
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
ALSO BY HERBERT BREAN
PART ONE: THE C-NOTE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
PART TWO: THE BIG NEWS
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
PART THREE: THE BLOW-OFF
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
DEAD SURE, by Herbert Brean
Also published as A MATTER OF FACT
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1956 by Herbert Brean.
ALSO BY HERBERT BREAN
Wilders Walk Away
The Darker the Night
Hardly a Man is Now Alive
The Clock Strikes Thirteen
Dead Sure (also published as A Matter of Fact)
The Traces of Brillhart
The Traces of Merrilee56DEDICATION
For Dorothy—all by herself.
PART ONE: THE C-NOTE
CHAPTER 1
The Double Tail
Shadowy darkness and cold filled the street, the sudden bone-penetrating cold of early November that sends a man indoors and holds him there. Darkness was appropriate to this street as a black garment to a nocturnal thief, for it was a mean, shabby thoroughfare, walled in on either side by rows of high brownstone houses that frowned down on passers-by by day and menaced them by night, obscurely but perceptibly. Before the houses stood unbroken rows of automobiles, illegally parked as though their owners had left them there only long enough to snatch a few hours’ sleep before driving away forever from this glowering neighborhood.
Meanwhile the night-black windows of houses and cars reflected back the street lamps’ murky light at either end of the block. Only an occasional rectangle of orange showed where someone still sat up, mesmerized by television or solitaire, or absorbed in the evening paper or a wrangle with the old woman. On the sidewalk dusty cans of ashes awaited next morning’s sanitation truck, and in the middle of the block a small bulb burned over the Night Bell sign beside a garage’s door.
A tall man swung into the street from the Third Avenue end, moving with the long, confident strides of the hard-muscled. As he passed under the street light it showed him lean and high-shouldered, wearing a peaked cap like a hunter’s and a heavy jacket of checkered wool. In his right hand he carried a brown paper sack that clunked in heavy rhythm to the crunch of his shoes. The street light spread a lengthening, writhing shadow of himself before him that merged with the other darkness and, as he progressed, finally vanished.
When this man was midway down the block a second man appeared at the Third Avenue end. He snapped a quick glance after the first that was like a silent pistol shot and, having seen what he wanted, continued on across the lighted intersection, looking straight ahead without turning into the dark side street. When he reached the opposite curb, he turned quickly on silent feet and began paralleling the first man from the opposite sidewalk.
He walked rapidly and carefully, putting his weight on rubber heels so that he would not be heard above the faint, endless grinding that is the sound of Manhattan an hour before midnight. As he did he strained his eyes after the first man, for he knew there was a good chance that he was being ambushed. You were taught to guard against things like that in the police academy, and the second man, whose name was O’Neill Ryan and who was a probationary-detective, had completed his course there only two weeks before.
But if the man in the wool jacket knew that he was being followed, he disguised it very convincingly. Three quarters of the way down the block he turned unhurriedly, a flicker of black in the larger darkness, into one of the brownstones and took the tall steps two at a time. He whistled a snatch of jukebox song, opened the door into an ill-lit hall, and Ryan, moving almost soundlessly along the opposite sidewalk, caught the diminuendo of boots on a rugless stair before the door swung shut.
Then the street was silent again. Ryan paused behind a parked station wagon.
He was uncertain and scared. He looked back along the way he had come for his partner, who was the senior member of the detective team. For the last fifteen minutes they had been double-tailing the man who had gone into the house. In double-tailing a detective follows a suspect while a second detective follows the first detective, out of sight of the quarry. After an agreed-on number of blocks or minutes the second moves up into the lead position while the first detective drops back and follows the second. It is complicated, requiring quick and cooperative intelligences, but a subject who is on guard against being followed is much less likely to notice this kind of tail.
What bothered Ryan was that he wanted to let his partner, who was not yet in sight, know where their quarry had gone, which meant staying where he was. But he also knew that if the quarry had observed the tail he might have entered the house only to walk through it quickly and escape out the back. Logic indicated he should go to the rear, but that meant missing Jablonski, his partner. A rookie’s agony of eagerness and uncertainty seized Ryan.
A wedge-shaped silhouette appeared at the end of the street. Ryan relaxed. That was Jablonski—thick, routine-minded, unimaginative, but solid and knowing. And in command.
Jablonski did just what Ryan had done. He crossed the intersection and then turned into the dark street, coming along softly, watchfully. Ryan whistled from the station wagon’s shadow.
“Where is he?” Jablonski whispered back.
“There. Where the light is in the hall.”
“Did he make us?”
“I didn’t see him look back. But what can you see in this damned street?”
“It don’t figure,” said Jablonski. His mouth made chewing movements as though he were rolling a cigar between his lips.
“Maybe it’s a hideout.”
“Hideout nothing! It don’t figure. He’s shakin’ us. I’ll hit the back.”
He moved hurriedly out from between parked cars.
“What about help?” Ryan whispered hoarsely into the darkness after him.
Jablonski only waved a hand in irritation behind him and went on across the street, a bulky, grizzled, worried man of fifty-three. Jablonski really did not want help. It would have been absurd for anyone to consider him brave for feeling that way, and Jablonski would have been the first to laugh at such an idea. He did not greatly venerate courage, regarding it as a quality usually reserved for rookies and saps. But Jablonski had personal, hardheaded reasons for not wanting, for very much not wanting, any help on this arrest.
That is why he walked quickly up to the door of a passageway between the two houses across the street, pushed it open and stepped into the dark passage which, he knew after years of working neighborhoods like this, would take him into whatever backyard or court lay behind the houses. He was lucky it was there—but it would be a hell of a place to meet Derby.
After a minute he flashed his light down the black passage. He saw only twin walls of eroded old brick, chalked with children’s scribbling. He clicked out the flashlight and w
alked down the passage in cold darkness. Doing that he comforted himself with the somewhat specious reasoning that if Derby, a cop-hater, three-time loser and now a killer—if Derby had spotted them, he was already out the back of this building and was gone. If not, then they had him. And at that Jablonski sucked in his breath, audibly, hopefully.
He reached the end of the passage. It opened into a small yard, faintly starlit and surrounded by the high old garden wall of another era. Above him a window suddenly rasped open, and his hand dove under his overcoat’s left lapel. There came a harsh, strangling sound; someone spat out the window, and did not close it.
Presently Jablonski moved across the yard to the wall. On top of it his exploring hands encountered pieces of broken glass, a futile deterrent to juvenile marauders. He picked the glass off, placing the pieces carefully on the ground, then took out his gun and, holding it, drew himself up and over the wall. He eased down into the yard of the house where Derby was. No light showed from the windows. Jablonski waited a few minutes to let his arms recover their strength so his hands would be steady if he needed them to be. As he did this his eyes adjusted to the yard’s darkness, and he thought he saw a back porch with a door, and below the porch another door leading into the cellar.
Jablonski stole across the yard, went almost silently down some steps and tried the cellar door. He revolved the knob several times while he leaned his weight against it to see if the door was locked. Doing that he knew he was an unmissable target for anyone standing with a gun on the other side of the door. Nothing happened. Jablonski cautiously climbed the steps and tried the porch door in the same way with the same result. Then his thick, pursed lips relaxed in a complacent smile.
They had him.
For if Derby had spotted the tail and simply walked through the house to escape them he would have been in a hurry. He would not have bothered to lock any doors behind him. He was inside then and didn’t know they were there at all. It was perfect!
Ryan and Jablonski had picked up Derby only twenty minutes before on Third Avenue, just as he had gone into a delicatessen to buy some beer, and Jablonski surmised that Derby planned to sit up for a while, drinking it. That was perfect, too. It’s eleven-thirty now. Give him until one o’clock. The beer will make him sleepy.
Jablonski returned to the wall, wrapped his overcoat around himself and sat down in the shadow. He could assume Ryan would interpret no news as good news and would continue to watch the front. All they had to do now was to wait, and the only thing that could go wrong would be for Ryan somehow to manage to send back for help. Good strategy demanded that they call in for reinforcements, but Jablonski for urgent personal reasons wanted to make this arrest himself. He settled himself in his overcoat and wished for one of the cigars he had been about to buy when they had spotted Derby.
Time passed. No lights appeared in the house’s rear windows. An ambulance whined down Second Avenue. Jablonski waited. He rolled an imaginary cigar in his mouth and thought of Derby, sipping beer out of a can, getting heavy-eyed, sleepy, dull of wit…
That’s what Jablonski was waiting for. He was good at waiting.
Time passed.
* * * *
Ryan stood beside the station wagon where Jablonski had left him, hunched over for warmth and concealment, eyes never leaving the front door across the street for more than a fleeting second. A feeling of imminent triumph filled him; Jablonski’s silence was the best news in the world.
Yet Ryan was jittery. He was not afraid of Derby, even though Derby was the hottest guy in town tonight, a three-time loser who would get life at best but who far more likely was going to the chair. Ryan would never have become a cop and stayed a cop if he did not believe innately that he was smarter, faster and tougher than anyone he would ever go up against.
What worried him was that through his own inexperience or overeagerness he would wreck the delicate, dangerous strategy that he and Jablonski had decided on earlier that night, casually and almost jokingly.
For as the evening wore on they had felt the mounting pressure—on them and on the department of which they were but a unit. It wasn’t merely the big type on the tabloids’ early editions, nor the thick, indignant anger in the lieutenant’s voice when they checked in at the precinct. Nor the unwonted quiet there or the knowledge that the commissioner had ordered direct reports to be telephoned to his home throughout the night. No, it was some deeper, policeman’s instinct, born of experience and a feeling for the rhythm of the city’s emotions, that told them both the Connors murder would be a heavy one. That was what had been in Jablonski’s mind as their plain black sedan idled up one East Side street and down another. That was why he had casually remarked that if they happened to stumble on any trace of Derby, it sure wouldn’t do them any harm to work it out on their own.
Ryan had braked the car gently to a stop for a red light at Madison Avenue and looked through the windshield. He had a boyish face and dark, round, long-lashed eyes that held a thoughtfully mischievous expression which women found attractive. It sure wouldn’t do them any harm, Ryan had agreed.
He did not look at Jablonski; he did not have to. In that instant the pact was made, and they both understood it.
Edmund Aloysius Jablonski was retiring in less than two weeks after a career of twenty-eight years in the police department. As his rank of Detective Third Grade suggested, Jablonski’s had been a quiet, lackluster career. He was an uninspired man who had begun to realize as retirement neared that somewhere along the trail he must have missed opportunities. That was bitter, helpless knowledge.
And now Harry Derby represented the greatest opportunity of them all.
Derby was a bright chance for Ryan also. For four years Ryan had walked a beat to get this tryout as a detective. He had been paired with the older man, in accordance with departmental custom, to gain experience and also to be observed. He had been disappointed in the man he was paired with, recognizing Jablonski as plodding, tired and inept. But tonight Jabby was acting and sounding like an eager kid. It made Ryan feel hopeful, because to arrest someone like Derby would do him more good…
And then—it had seemed incredible, for Ryan was new at this end of the business—then he had seen something.
Swinging down Third, walking fast but not furtively, bathed briefly in the colors of the neon signs that he passed, a lean, hard-muscled man with a cold eye and a curt sneer—that was Derby.
Since their car was not a Radio Motor Patrol car and had no two-way radio, departmental routine dictated that they split up, one telephoning in for help while the other tailed Derby to wherever he was going and whomever he was meeting, for there had been an indication this afternoon that he had had an accomplice.
But Ryan and Jablonski had already made their decision. They would bring him in themselves. That dangerous decision was what was in Ryan’s mind now as he stood minute after minute, feeling the cold creep up through the soles of his shoes and an ache grow in the small of his back. If it came to shooting and he shot recklessly or held his fire when—Stop that! The hall light across the way blinked out.
Was he coming out?
Ryan’s right hand dove under overcoat and suit coat and gripped the warm, snub-nosed .38 holstered under his left arm. But no one came out of the house. Ryan concluded it was just the janitor turning out the lights.
A car turned into the street. Ryan hoped it was not an RMP car for then he could have no reason for not asking for help. It was not an RMP car and he felt relieved, and was pleased at his own relief.
But why the hell didn’t Jablonski—!
Ryan arched his back and reminded himself that Jablonski was doing the same thing. His watch showed five minutes of one. They had him trapped.
All they had to do was take him cleanly.
CHAPTER 2
The China Chip
Some ten hours earlier a thin sixty-three-year-old woman nam
ed Thelma Connors had left the small gloomy apartment she shared with her daughter Elaine on East Sixty-first Street and walked to a branch bank on Lexington Avenue a few blocks away. There she drew out one hundred and twenty dollars from their joint savings account, leaving only twelve dollars to keep the account alive. A white-haired, pathetically proper woman with a slight limp that expensive surgery could have repaired, she confided to the teller that she and Elaine were leaving by interstate bus that night for Chicago and a visit with her son, and she specifically asked for a hundred dollar bill to pin to her clothing for safekeeping.
Later, under the deluge of probing questions by detectives, the teller recalled that a tall man whom he did not remember ever seeing in the bank before, a man in some kind of wool jacket or shirt, had stood in the line with several others waiting for Mrs. Connors to complete her garrulous transaction. The teller could not recall definitely whether or not the man had come up to the window. If he had it had been only to get a bill changed.
Mrs. Connors stopped at a nearby grocery for some sandwich meat and then walked home in crystal November sunshine, a happily excited wisp of woman in a decent black cloth coat. A neighbor, one Mrs. Anders, who was sitting on the steps of a dingy apartment building, spoke to Mrs. Connors. A moment later Mrs. Anders saw a man walk up the steps and go into the vestibule. He seemed to study the mailboxes, and when she asked who he was looking for, he did not reply or look at her but went into the building. It was his incivility more than anything else that made her remember him later: a tall, thin man with a bitter face and wearing a checkered woolen jacket.
The wife of the building janitor, a Mrs. Lombardi, also glimpsed him. She was coming down from the fourth floor when she saw him standing before Mrs. Connors’ apartment on the second. She heard him say something like, “I’m from the office, ma’am,” when the door opened and she saw him step quickly in.
She went on downstairs, noticed Mrs. Anders outside and paused to smoke a cigarette with her. They were tête-à-tête over a match when the first outcry came. They looked at each other over the burning match.
Dead Sure Page 1