But no one knew about it except Ryan. No one could. For no one would ever think of comparing an odd thumb and forefinger print from a cheap smash-and-grab with the known prints of a tough, big time stevedore-hoodlum like Harry Derby. Not even in the Known Criminal File.
* * * *
Ryan was very quiet during the rest of the tour, but Lambert did not comment on it for he himself was a self-contained man. After they checked in at the precinct Ryan took both prints into the lavatory where he could be undisturbed and compared them, using a flashlight and a magnifying glass in the toilet’s dimness.
After that there was no doubt. Derby was innocent. He had an unassailable alibi.
Ryan put Derby’s records back in his own desk drawer and the new print from the Fifteenth Squad on Bauer’s desk.
Then he went home and tried to get to sleep.
CHAPTER 11
A Million Things Can Happen
Sunday afternoon was desolate. He wanted yearningly to talk to someone; the subject was forever at his tongue’s tip, and instead, eating a late brunch, he had to listen to his mother’s chatter about the church decorations and Eleanor’s talk of the drama appreciation class she was taking one evening a week at Columbia. Eleanor had gone to Katherine Gibbs’ and become a secretary after graduating from high school instead of going to college. Now she was working with dilettante interest toward an A.B. degree. She asked Ryan to pick up some volumes of Ibsen she needed the next time he was near the Columbia University library. Twice that day he had to ask her to repeat the name of the dramatist although it was not unfamiliar to him; the second time he wrote it down.
* * * *
Around four he went for a walk, stopping at the first drugstore to call Jablonski. Someone he took to be the bartender at the Green Lantern said Mr. Jablonski had gone to Jersey for the day with his wife to visit her folks. He’d be around tomorrow, the bartender said. Ryan left his name and said he was coming out tomorrow.
He walked thoughtfully toward Fifth Avenue. It was a sunny late afternoon; there were still many leisurely strollers. In Central Park he bought peanuts and fed ragged squirrels and watched a few hardy kids sail boats in the boat basin. The last dull orange gleams of the sun were dying in a striped violet sky and the lights had come on, circling the park, when he turned homeward. The onset of night’s gloom depressed him, renewing the anxiety he had partly shaken off.
Tomorrow would be better. Jablonski would have advice to offer, and ideas—just talking to him about it would help. And then tomorrow night, a bare twenty-four hours from now, after they had settled on something, there’d be Gee Gee to see.
Ryan began walking faster. It wasn’t just the cold. He wanted to get everything over with as soon as possible—supper and sleep and the trip to New Rochelle.
* * * *
It originally had been a store building, and the first floor front still consisted chiefly of a kind of bayed-out show window that contained a big glass vessel filled with green liquid, the kind that old-fashioned druggists used to display. But across the window glass Green Lantern Inn was printed in gold letters and in one corner there appeared “Walter Nowak.” Under it in bright, newly applied gold leaf was “Edmund A. Jablonski.” That was Jablonski all right—he wouldn’t waste any time getting his name up!
But when Ryan pushed the door open and walked in there was no Jablonski. A portly bartender, bland-faced and immaculate in a fresh apron, was behind the bar, and from the end of the room an Oriental face under a chef’s tall cap looked expectantly up over a gleaming grill. There were tables, neat with green checkered tablecloths and shiny bottles of catsup.
“Mr. Jablonski around?”
“He’s not in right now. He should be back about six. Any message?”
“My name’s Ryan. I’d phoned him that—”
“Oh sure, Mr. Ryan. He said to tell you to come on out to the house.”
“The house?”
“They’re renting a house over on Devens Place and I guess the missus has got him doing some work.” The bartender, distinguished-looking, smiled a bland, man-to-man smile. “You know how it is.”
“Oh, sure. How do I get out there?”
“It isn’t far. You take your first right up at the corner…”
He found Jablonski in the unfurnished living room of an old-fashioned double house. He was on his knees in a corner touching up the varnish with a brush and a can of lacquer. From some unseen kitchen came clinking sounds and the rush of water as Mrs. Jablonski washed the glass globes from the lighting fixtures. Jablonski got up painfully but gratefully. “Jeez, I’m glad you’re here. My knees couldn’t take much more. How you been?”
“Good. And you?”
“Great. Except we’re moving in Friday and Sarah figures I can completely redecorate the joint before then. Say, I hear the brass still hasn’t gotten over our collaring Derby. You’re hotter’n a two dollar pistol, Neill. That’s great.” Jablonski sounded a little envious.
“You’re pretty hot yourself with that bar and grill. That’s a nice layout, Jabby. I’ll bet you do a heck of a business.”
“We’re doin’ all right. We’ll drop by and have a drink there after a bit. Mind if I go on working while you tell me what you wanted to talk about?”
“Go right ahead.”
Jablonski picked up the brush, sank to his knees, groaned and went on dabbing.
“It’s about Derby.”
“Oh?”
“Yah. To give it to you straight…in a few words…he’s innocent.” Only the brush’s steady pat-pat against the floor made any sound. Its rhythm did not vary.
“Yeah?” Jablonski sounded surprised but nothing else. He went on brushing.
“You get what I said. The guy’s innocent.”
Jablonski said, “Why do you say that?”
“Because I know—I know what his alibi is.”
“Neill, you’re nuts. You must be. Why, he even admitted killing her himself, after he burned the bill. You know that.”
“He was boasting,” said Ryan patiently. “He was just trying to make us feel worse. You ought to know he’d do that.”
“Oh, for God’s sake—”
“You can’t talk this down, Jabby. I know what I’m saying.”
The brush’s lacquer-slaps had finally stopped. “I don’t believe it.” Then, “How sure are you?”
“Dead sure. He didn’t kill the old lady. He couldn’t have. He was doing a smash-and-run on a drugstore at the time, and he left a clear print there. It’s only by a crazy coincidence that I happened to see it and recognize what it was. No one in the department knows, or can know. There’s nothing to classify.”
“Uh huh.” Jablonski, supported by knees and one hand, was bent away from Ryan. He resumed stroking.
Ryan said, “Well, what do you think?”
Jablonski finished touching up the spot he was working on with great care. Then he turned over, to sit and look up at Ryan inquisitively. “What am I supposed to think?”
“Well, you know how you—how we planted that dust on his jacket.”
“I know Derby’s a hood and a killer.”
“Maybe. But now you also know he didn’t kill the old lady.”
“No, I don’t. All I know, and all you know, is that a fingerprint looked just like another fingerprint—to you. You’re no fingerprint man. And someone says the time was the same. Maybe yes. Maybe no. I haven’t seen any proof.”
“As far as the time is concerned, I checked that myself this morning. A radio car got there less than two minutes after the drugstore was hit. And there’s a million neighbors who heard the old man yell when he ran out into the street. That job was done just when the report said it was done. As for the prints, okay, I’m no fingerprint man. But I’ve looked at a few and so have you. Want to argue with these?” The envelope he tossed
struck Jablonski’s shiny-serge knee.
But Jablonski did not pick it up. He was looking up at Ryan. Ryan had noticed before that his face was fresher looking and less lined. But now it became dark and vigorous with thought.
“The department,” Ryan explained patiently; he did not like this or Jablonski’s expression—“the department actually has Derby’s alibi on record and doesn’t know it. Nobody knows about it except me—and now you.”
Jablonski said coldly, “Okay. So what?”
Ryan knew what that meant. He had known it by Jablonski’s face before Jablonski said it. But he had to go on, to carry the argument through until it arrived at whatever deadlock it would reach.
“So Derby’s going to the chair,” he said. “And we’re sending him there. And he’s innocent.”
Jablonski, throwing back his head, croaked brief laughter. “For Christ’s sake!”
Ryan felt like an undressed child. It made him mad.
“Well, damn it, even a lousy hood is entitled to a square shake!”
Jablonski put a finger to his lips. “Not so loud. Sarah.”
“To hell with Sarah!”
“Look, Neill. You’re young and you’re inexperienced in the department, even though you’ve done great recently. And I don’t want to see you hurt yourself now.”
“Hurt who?” Ryan had lived with it too long to be patient any longer. The time had come for anger and indignation and he unleashed them, unconsciously seeking to force the decision that would end it one way or another.
But Jablonski had spent his life handling anger and indignation. “Neill, now listen a minute—just a minute. Harry Derby’s a hoodlum. He’s crooked; it’s what’s inside him. You ought to know what I mean—you were on the street long enough. He ain’t like normal people, that believe in square shakes and giving other guys breaks and so on. He’s got a record that—well, he’s done almost everything to anyone you can think of. And you know as well as I do that for every time he was arrested doing it, he had done the same thing twenty times more when he wasn’t caught. He’s an animal, Neill—do you want to turn that loose?”
“No, for God’s sake.” Ryan responded to emotion with emotion. “For heisting the drugstore he should go up for life.”
“He had that choice, Neill. He has it now. As you say, he has a perfect, tailor-made alibi. All he’s gotta do any time he wants is to say that he was in the drugstore then. Right away he is out of the chair. Well, he made the choice. He’s sayin’ nothing about the drugstore. And why?”
“’Cause he figures to beat the murder rap.”
“Sure. He ain’t crazy.”
“But—”
“But nothing! Look, Neill. What do you really think you’re going to do about it? Let down all our witnesses? Ruin the case against a guy that should have gone up years ago? Give the newspapers another shot at making the department look silly? And what will something like this do to your career?”
“I’m not thinking about my career,” snapped Ryan. “And God knows I’m no friend of Derby’s or the newspapers. But I can’t stand around and see a guy burn, no matter how much of a heel he is, when he doesn’t have it coming to him.”
“Well, what do you think it’ll do to my career?” Jablonski asked quietly. “I’m on pension, Neill, and I need every nickel right now to swing that grill. That’s why we’re takin’ this old house. But what’s going to happen if the department finds out about our case against Derby? What happens to my pension, and my reputation and business? I’m in this as much as you. You ought to remember that. And I’m not as young as you.”
Ryan lit a cigarette. He hadn’t thought of it quite that way. But he said, “Sure you’re not as young. That’s why I thought you might have the answer. You always said you’d been around a long time.”
“Gimme one of them things—my cigars are in my coat. Sure I got the answer. If you’ll take it.”
“So? What do we do?”
“Nothing.”
“But I tell you—”
“Nothing,” Jablonski repeated firmly, and put the cigarette to his lips. “Until after the trial. Neill, you’re forgetting he isn’t convicted yet. And he’s going to be defended by one of the best criminal lawyers in the business. If he gets off—and he’s got a fair chance of that; they always have, what with hung juries and so on—if he gets off, we can forget the whole thing, and nobody’s hurt.”
“Yeah, but…”
“Look, kid. You got excited about this before—remember? When that wild-haired brother of his came to see you? Then you found out for yourself what I told you all along—that he was lying. Take my advice again, won’t you? For my sake as well as your own? Wait and see, Neill. You won’t gain anything by rushing this thing. And you may lose—we both can lose—a great deal.”
Jablonski’s tone was low and confidential, and it was convincing because Ryan half-wanted to believe it. He had outlined a solution that Ryan had hardly given a thought to.
“Well…yeah.” Ryan knocked cigarette ashes into his trouser cuff. “But supposing he’s convicted?”
“We cross that bridge when we come to it. Jeez, Neill, a million things can happen. You know that.” Jablonski got to his feet. “There’s nothing you can do now that you can’t do later. Hell with this floor. I want you to meet my wife. Let’s drive down to the joint and have a beer.”
The three of them drove to the Green Lantern in the bartender’s car, which Jabby had borrowed. Sarah Jablonski, tall and black-haired, was a surprisingly youthful-looking woman with fierce bright eyes and quick good humor that made Ryan wonder why Jabby had ever bothered with Inez. He also wondered how much Sarah knew about Inez. Probably everything, he decided.
Once back at the restaurant he protested that he had to get back to Manhattan right away, insisted on walking to the station, and caught an express soon after.
He sat in the smoker and smoked all the way back to Grand Central. He felt relieved of most of the weight of responsibility that he had carried out to New Rochelle; the decision and the need to act had been postponed for a time at least by Jablonski’s eloquence.
But not merely by his eloquence, Ryan told himself. After all, he did owe Jablonski something—certainly he owed him the chance to let things straighten themselves out, without his own intervention. Jabby’s twenty-eight years of plodding still deserved consideration; it was typical of himself to react hotheadedly to any injustice and try to right it. That was what he had done now. But actually that was often the way greater injustices were compounded.
It was a comforting thought and Ryan extinguished the last flickering anxiety by turning his thoughts deliberately to Gee Gee and the next six hours. What would she be like this time, alone with him? And what would he be like?
Ryan had always found girls fairly easy to get along with, except for those he fell in love with. Of those in his twenty-eight years of life there had not been too many, because he did not easily form attachments, although once they were formed they lasted. But Ryan had been almost old enough to vote before he came to realize that while there were some girls you wanted very much to sleep with and others that you fell respectfully in love with, the two were not incompatible but were indeed closely and rightfully associated. Even so, when he met a girl whom he really liked, tensions developed and he felt himself grow shy and awkward. When it was a girl he didn’t deeply like, then things went very easily and surely. He felt he was going to be awkward with Gee Gee.
For not since he was sixteen had he met one like this, a girl whose name even was a honeyed fragrance in his mind. He must be crazy, he thought. He’d only met her once—but she had sounded glad he called, hadn’t she? And even dames like that don’t want to kick around in nightclubs forever. If they have any sense at all, they want to settle down like everyone else, and have a little apartment and kids after a while…and she had sense all right.
That was what he liked about her. Pretty girls were a dime a dozen in this town. But the kind that were also level-headed and could see farther than a mink coat and that somehow you knew were square shooters…
Ryan gazed out the window, looking into the tenements mounting above the train as it rushed down to the level of Park Avenue and the tunnel entrance. But those tenements and the dark, dangerously underprivileged hearts that lived there in the Twenty-fifth Precinct, one of the city’s toughest, brought back Derby.
And that brought back something that had occurred to him before but only tangentially, without real meaning. Now, as the train burst into the tunnel with a gasping roar, he thought of what he should have thought of in arguing with Jablonski. If Derby had committed the drugstore theft, then certainly he deserved to go up for life. But Derby was at least in custody and therefore still at the disposal of the law.
But the real Connors’ murderer was at large and was not even being sought. He had gotten away with it.
Everything in Ryan’s policeman’s soul shuddered at that. But what was he, the only working cop who knew this, doing about it?
CHAPTER 12
The Puerto Rican
Ryan chose critically from the shirts his mother had ironed that day, and knotted his tie with precision. It was good to concentrate on unimportant things, and to have a reason for concentrating on them. Putting on his suit he tried not to disturb the creases pressed into it. Then, having arranged a breast-pocket handkerchief, he went into Eleanor’s room (after first making sure she and his mother were in the kitchen) to survey the total effect in her long vanity mirror. Ryan decided he looked as good as he could and reminded himself that it was not the world’s record.
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