Ryan looked up at the girls. One had flowing coppery hair. Nuts to that! She’d never pose that way.
“Derby,” said Nichols. “November seven. Sure. Here it is. Yeah, he had a helper. Dom. Dom the Tailor.”
“Who?”
Nichols grinned a fat-lipped grin.
“Dominic D’Tela, his real name is,” he said. “Dom the Tailor, they call him. He’s a little dago who part-times for me.”
“You sure that’s who it was? Is it possible someone else might have substituted for this Dom? Say Derby’s brother Harry, who’s a—well, a sort of—”
“I know Harry.” The heavy lids narrowed calculatingly. “But Dom’s the man I paid. I remember now—and I remember Harry was around that night, too. They left together. Maybe he was waiting for Ken to come in. Anyway, I can tell from this, that Dom went out in the morning with Henderson—he’s my downtown man. And with Derby in the afternoon.”
But Ryan’s heart had suffered a sinking spell. Harry had been around that night, all right. Nichols remembered it.
Nichols was saying, “Derby is usually my uptown east guy. And according to this, he drew a full day’s check, fourteen fifty.”
“Can you tell me where Dom lives?”
“Sure. It’s just off Houston Street.” Like all downtowners Nichols pronounced it Howse-ton.
“Think he’d be home now?”
“That’s hard to say. He jobs around. He’s a good strong man.”
“Big? Tall?”
“Oh, no. He’s a little fellow. Big shoulders, though. Good-natured. And very reliable.”
“Yeah. Thanks, Mr. Nichols.”
Once again outside in the bright cold street he paused. He was tired. But he was also tired of uncertainty.
Better finish it up. Then he’d know.
* * * *
Dominic D’Tela’s midday meal, lasagna, bread and coffee, lay spread before him on an oil-clothed table in the tenement parlor.
“Have some coffee?” he asked cordially.
“No, thanks.” But the cheese-laden steam from the lasagna made Ryan hungry.
D’Tela turned a strong face to him and said, “What’s on your mind?” then returned to his food.
“Do you remember last November seventh? It was a Friday.”
“I’ll say it was a Friday.”
“You remember it?”
“I’ll say I remember it. That’s the day Cannon Cracker came in at Jamaica and paid twenty-eight bucks—twenty-eight eighty, to be exact.”
“And you were on him?”
“Was I on him!” The memory made D’Tela stop eating. “Ten bucks on the nose. I come home with over a hundred and fifty bucks that night. I worked that day too.”
“What was the job?”
The thick cup came down, revealing a suspicious frown. “You checking on me or something?”
“Not on you. On someone else. And it doesn’t have anything to do with horse bets. All I want to know is what you did on the job that day.”
“Well, let’s see.” He reverted to the lasagna and chewed thoughtfully. “I was working for old man Nichols that day. Yeah, I remember. In the morning I went out with Henderson and in the afternoon with Derby. Kenny Derby.”
“You were with Derby all afternoon?”
“Sure.”
“Doing what?”
“Well, let’s see. Yeah, that was an easy afternoon—lucky day all round.” He grinned. “There were only two big pieces he needed help with. Of course I jumped off with lots of the little ones, too, when we got to a neighborhood where there were quite a few deliveries. I always do my share on a job. Besides, Derby was feeling a little tough.”
“What was his trouble?”
“You know how it is. He said something about needing some dough for a friend of his, and he’d had a few drinks at lunch—tell you the truth, I figured he had a broad in trouble. Of course, now I figure he wanted the dough for his brother. But it’s odd, sort of.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, he needed money and I told him about this horse I was going to bet, see? He was interested, too. But when I called in to get down on the horse just before post time—around five, if was—he said the hell with it. I just wonder what it might have done for him if he’d given me a ten to bet for him. Maybe his brother wouldn’t have bumped the old lady, huh?”
“By that time she was dead,” said Ryan shortly. “Let’s get back to what you did that day. You said there were two big pieces. Where’d you deliver them?”
“Well, the reefer went to an address in Harlem. The gas range went to a new house up in the Bronx.”
“Who’d you see at the new house?”
“No one, especially. There were some painters or carpenters working inside. We just set the range down on the porch and left.”
“I see. Now look. This is the important part—this is why I’m here. Was there anyone else along on this trip? In other words was there another man on the truck that afternoon besides you and Derby?”
“Of course not.” D’Tela looked surprised.
“At no time did another man ride with you?”
“That’s right.”
“And you were with the truck all the time?”
“Sure—except when I left it to run packages in. Oh, yes, and…uh…we made a stop so I could pick up that dough I won.” He looked uneasily at Ryan.
But Ryan was not interested in handbooks at the moment. He said, “Then you didn’t see anything of Derby’s brother Harry that day? On the truck or anywhere?”
Surprise opened D’Tela’s eyes. “Sure I did. Now that you mention it. He was around the office when we got back, after six. Surly and tough-looking as usual, too. Waiting for Ken. I guess.”
“But at no time was he on the truck. You’d swear to that?”
“Sure, for God’s sake.”
Ryan got up. He knew the truth when he heard it. “Thanks, Mr. D’Tela. You’ll probably never hear any more of this, and I’d appreciate it—if you don’t mention what you told me to anyone. Especially anyone around the Triple-A Delivery Company.”
“Sure. Sure thing, you bet,” said D’Tela good-humoredly.
The flights of tenement stairs were dark and noisome, but as Ryan went down them they looked as good as a red-carpeted movie set. That lousy lying Ken Derby! Jabby had been right, all right. They had just been trying to shake his nerve and his testimony. They knew what he and Jabby had done with the dust, of course, and they hoped to make a scared and uncertain witness out of him—the rookie! And they had almost succeeded.
When he thought of what a fool he had made of himself talking to Jablonski in the car Ryan felt his cheeks redden. But it was all right now. He could go home and sleep, and forget the whole thing. Tonight was the party. Everything was okay.
CHAPTER 10
The Y-Shape
Mickey McGonigle was a slim, wiry man who at the age of fifty-four had somehow shrunk an inch under the five feet eight prescribed by the City of New York for its policemen. He had very curly red hair parted on one side over a hatchet face corded with belligerent muscularity. He also had an intuitive, wonderfully penetrative sense for truth, which was infinitely more effective than the popular conception of the “third degree” in questioning suspects or witnesses. Leaning against Manny’s bar now, he said, “A beefsteak! A beefsteak for that squarehead Jablonski. I gotta have a drink on that.”
He pushed his glass across the broad mahogany. “What are you having, Ryan?”
Ryan was not sure. He did not know what you did on an occasion like this, surrounded by superiors and having to work in a few hours. He said, “A beer.”
McGonigle said, “Give him the Würzburger, Charlie.” Then he looked down the bar to make sure the subject was out of earshot and said, “You were sure lu
ck for Jablonski.”
“Why? He was just as much luck for me.”
The thin, conflicting planes of McGonigle’s face wrinkled skeptically. “The way I got it, you spotted him, walked him into the house and, when Jablonski let Derby jump him, you pulled him off him.”
“That’s not exactly right.”
“It’s not exactly wrong,” said McGonigle.
Ryan raised his seidel. “In a pinch like that how do you decide who’s responsible for what?” He added quickly, “This is good beer.”
Lieutenant Bauer came in, dark-hatted, dark-coated, quick-eyed. “Hi, Mick. Hi, Neill. A Manhattan, Charlie.”
Bauer took off his coat, leaned cold hands across the bar, rubbed them and said, “Neill, do me a favor.”
“Sure,” said Ryan. He knew Bauer too well to call him lieutenant, but not well enough to call him Paul.
“The Fifteenth Squad is getting some enlargements of a print the picture bureau got in a drugstore job a couple weeks back. I have a hunch it may be one of that Little Turk gang we had in. Will you and Lambert pick them up during the night and leave them for me?”
“Sure thing.”
“Thanks.” Bauer picked the cherry out of his drink and nibbled it by the stem. “How’re things going? I haven’t seen much of you.”
“Just fine, thanks.”
“Lambert’s a good operator. Quiet but smart. Smarter than Jabby.”
Ryan had already discovered that about his new partner, but he was surprised and flattered by Bauer’s candor. “Could be,” he said. McGonigle was talking Dodger talk with two others who had come in.
Bauer said, “From what I hear they’re going to push that Derby case into court as soon as possible. So if you have any special preparations to make or need extra time or anything, just let me know.”
“Thanks. I don’t think there’s anything special, but I appreciate the offer.”
Bauer waved that off and sipped his drink. “By the way,” he said, and Ryan recognized that the rest had been preliminary and that this was what Bauer really wanted to say.
“Jack Sandalwood called me today,” said Bauer, and Ryan’s nerves began to jangle.
He said, “I see.” Then, “What’d he want?” He took a deep draught of beer.
“Oh, he asked if we’d found that hundred dollar bill in the Derby case,” said Bauer very unconcernedly, “and he said something about having talked to Farragut. He—he talked kind of odd.” He looked idly down the bar. “I don’t know what he was driving at exactly,” he finally went on. “He was sort of vague, and that’s not like Sandalwood. You have any ideas?”
“No.” And then, on a sudden gambler’s impulse, he said, “Of course, that night we brought in Derby he was asking a lot of questions, too. He was mainly interested in the C-note then. I think he figured Jabby and I had latched on to it.”
Bauer sniffed skeptically and finished his drink. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I can’t believe Jack’d bother with something like that. I think he’s after something bigger. But I’m damned if I know what.”
“Another, Lieutenant?” asked the bartender.
“No, thanks, Charlie. Well, whatever it is I suppose we’ll see it on the front page of his newspaper one of these days. Wonder how the beefsteaks are coming?”
“I think they’re about ready, Lieutenant,” said Charlie.
* * * *
They ate thick, juice-streaming slices of steak laid on juice-pink bread, and afterward deep-dish apple pie and coffee, and talked shop and kidded Jablonski about his bar and grill. Jablonski sat at the head of the table, wonderfully crisp in a starched white shirt and fresh haircut and shave, flushed with whisky and happiness at being the center of importance. Paul Bauer sat at the other end of the table, and when they had pushed the coffee cups aside and lighted tobacco he said a few words about how swell it had been working with Ed Jablonski and what a good cop he was and how he would be missed. Then he gave Jablonski a big package containing a bar apron as a joke, and a smaller package containing a toilet kit including a gold-plated razor; and everyone clapped and Ed Furtig yelled, “Speech!”
No one expected Jablonski to make a speech. But after accepting with unusual solemnity the toilet kit that was passed down the table to him he rose and stood looking at it for a moment. Then he said, “Well, fellas, all I can say is…” and stopped, and for the first time really, they understood that Jablonski was leaving and how it must feel to be going away from something you’ve lived with for twenty-eight years, and each of them got a quick, clairvoyant glimpse of what was coming to him some day.
Suddenly Jablonski sat down, his eyes watery, his speech unsaid, but everyone at the table applauded, with a curious sense that he had said it anyway.
Those who were not working that night had a farewell drink with him at the bar and Ryan, going out, punched his arm as he passed. But Jablonski was busy trying to buy that round of drinks and he did not feel it.
It was only ten-thirty. Ryan stopped in a lunch counter restaurant where he knew there was a phone booth, ordered coffee and dialed the number of the club where Gee Gee worked. He had called it only twice before but he did not have to look up the number. The phone was answered with a blast of music and he said to please tell Miss Hawes that Mr. Ryan was calling.
There was an interval during which the music stopped, and then a low, warm voice said, “Hello, Mr. Ryan,” and he heard the rush of her breath into the phone, soft and intimate as she held her mouth close to it, and he remembered the scent of her hair and how it had been dancing with her. For a second he did not have any words.
He said, “My name’s Neill,” and grinned awkwardly in the phone booth’s dimness. He heard her chuckle. “I start a forty-eight tomorrow morning,” he said, “and I was thinking maybe we could work out a date.”
“I think that would be lovely. What’s a forty-eight?”
“We work six tours—six days, then get forty-eight hours off. It’s really fifty-six hours, but anyway. I thought if you—if the club was closed tomorrow, being Sunday, or on Monday, maybe we could get together in the evening or something.”
“Monday evenings I’m free.”
“Dinner maybe?”
“I’d love it.”
Ryan left the phone booth in a happy glow. He threw a quarter on the counter but left the coffee untouched. He did not want to spoil the way he felt with that coffee.
Lambert had not yet reported when Ryan got to the squad room; so he belatedly crushed his hat into its conventional version, lit a cigarette, propped his feet up on a desk and thought about Gee Gee and where they would go for dinner. Some theatrical sort of place probably. Lindy’s or Dinty Moore’s.
After a time, mindful of what Bauer had said, he got out the file on Derby that Jablonski had left and began leafing through its slender contents. Notebook pages of names and dates, a couple of typed sheets, a photostat of Derby’s police record, a copy of his fingerprints… Ryan stared at them for a long time out of sheer lassitude and a feeling of well-being. Then Lambert arrived.
They had a busy night. Saturday nights usually were busy, but in addition there were two fires, within blocks and minutes of each other, that the fire marshal concluded had been set by an arsonist. Ryan and Lambert spent most of the night on foot patrol, and it was not until after six a.m. that they could drive down to the Fifteenth Squad on East Thirty-fifth Street and pick up the envelope Bauer had asked for. They stopped for breakfast on the way back, each sitting in the car and listening to the radio while the other ate. Ryan idly examined the contents of the envelope over his sandwich. It consisted of big enlargements of some fingerprints and blurred carbon copy of a theft report.
Ryan read it. Several weeks before a man had walked into a small neighborhood drugstore just off First Avenue, handed the proprietor a bottle and asked that it be filled with castor oil
. That took the proprietor to the prescription counter at the rear and while he was out of sight the customer dodged around a showcase to the cash register, grabbed its contents and ran out. The proprietor, who was seventy years old, had not noticed the thief especially, except that he wore a dark suit and had no overcoat, although the day was brisk. But the bottle had been oily when he brought it in and so the fingerprint men had found prints of a right thumb and forefinger perfectly delineated on the rim of the cash register drawer.
Things like that were rare, despite what the public, educated by seeing and reading a hundred fictional criminal investigations, was led to believe. Still, they happened, and this was one. Ryan studied the fingerprint photographs while he sipped coffee. He saw something odd in the thumb print—a little Y-shaped scar on the print’s right perimeter. That was odd because he had recently seen the same thing somewhere else.
And he knew where. There had been a scar like that in Derby’s prints, which he had studied earlier waiting for Lambert. A thumb? What of it? It was coincidence, of course. But it was odd. Could Derby have done this one too? He looked again at the date on the smudged report.
And when he did, Ryan felt a crushing weight sag his shoulders and a pervading chill enter his heart. The drugstore robbery had occurred on November 7, at 3:25 p.m., twenty blocks south of the apartment where at the very same time Thelma Connors was being murdered, presumably by Harry Derby.
But the thumb print of the drugstore thief remarkably resembled Derby’s.
It must be coincidence. When he got back to the precinct he could compare them.
But the overpowering sureness, the growing conviction that is born of subconscious observation, began invading his mind. Ryan had a precognitive sense of what he would find when he got back to the precinct. The prints were going to be the same.
He knew it because of the way everything—all the incongruous little things that had struck him as odd from the beginning—fell into place with dreadful logic.
Derby had been engaged in a comparatively harmless bit of sneak thievery at the very time Mrs. Connors was being mortally assaulted. That is why he had not told the truth about where he really was at the time. Derby was a three-time loser whom even the drugstore theft would send up for life—but insofar as the murder was concerned he was innocent. He had the strongest possible sort of alibi, proved unwittingly by a police investigation, and now safeguarded unknowingly in the records of the department.
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