His eyes went up to Penny’s face. She shook her head dismally.
“She never saw the character before,” Dondero said. He sounded a bit angry, as if just seeing the man who killed Bob Cooke was an ordeal Penny should have been spared. “And I’m taking her home now. She looks beat.”
“All right,” Reardon said calmly. “Just don’t forget to come back.”
“He was awfully upset,” Penny said softly. She made it sound like a complete non sequitur.
“Don? He’s always awfully upset. It’s his—”
“Not me,” Dondero said disdainfully. “She means Crocker. He says he needs his car and he wants it. He says it was an accident. He says—”
“He says the man stepped off the curb in front of him and he couldn’t stop in time.” Reardon finished it for him. “I know what he says. He’ll get his car after we get a chance to go over it and not before.” He looked up. “We did get our continuance, didn’t we?”
“We got it—or rather, you got it—but old Judge Jorgensen wasn’t very happy about it.”
“What did Crocker’s lawyer say?”
“He didn’t have a lawyer,” Dondero said flatly. “He said he was innocent and what did an innocent man need a lawyer for? Jorgensen had read Frank Wilkins’ report and he was in agreement with Crocker. Personally,” he added, “so am I. But Jorgensen went along with the two-day continuance as a favor to Merkel.” He stared at Reardon. “Jim, I know you were mad at this guy for lousing up your evening last night, and I know you’d love to see it as something for us, instead of Traffic, but right now I think you’re just being stubborn.”
“That’s me—stubborn,” Reardon said equably and looked at Penny. “I’m sorry I dragged you down here for nothing, Penny. Don will see that you get home okay.”
“All right,” she said emotionlessly.
“By the way,” Reardon added, “that chief purser of yours—Thompson—called. He saw an article in the paper. He said they’ll take the body and bury it at sea on their next trip.”
She looked at him a moment, her eyes wide, and then suddenly collapsed in a chair beside his desk, trying to control herself but finally succumbing to tears. She forced herself to stop, looking at the two embarrassed men almost defiantly.
“I don’t cry.” She dabbed at her eyes viciously with a wisp of handkerchief to prove it. “I’m not going on that trip. I don’t want to see Bob—” She bit her trembling lip and changed the subject. “I’ll ask to stay off a trip. I have the time coming anyway. I’m sure they’ll understand.”
She came to her feet and put her handkerchief away with a gesture that also put aside any possible future need for it. She looked at Reardon as if searching for some way to end the conversation and get away from his office and the entire Hall of Justice. He understood and nodded to Dondero.
“Let’s go, Penny,” Dondero said and took her arm almost tenderly. He looked over at Reardon. “I’ll be right back.”
“There’s no rush,” Reardon said softly and waited until the two had left the office. Then he reached for In-basket for the third time that day, together with its constantly increasing mountain of reports. As Mr. Harry Thompson of the S.S. Mandarin had put it so succinctly, it wouldn’t be a bad world if it weren’t for people.
CHAPTER 9
Wednesday—3:20 P.M.
The telephone rang sharply. Reardon sighed and put aside a report he had been reading covering a series of muggings in the streets leading from the Panhandle up to Haight in the Park District, which had led to a death the previous evening. Peace and Love! he thought sourly, and raised the instrument. It was a sergeant on the switchboard in Communications.
“Hey, Lieutenant—Captain Tower wants to see you on the double. He says he’s been trying to call your extension all afternoon. Finally got tired and turned the job over to us.”
“Well, it’s one of the things you’re there for,” Reardon said a trifle unkindly. “And anyway, I’ve been off the phone for at least five minutes.”
“Yeah, but you must have been on it for over an hour straight. Anyway, you better get over to his office. He sounded like he had a hair across his butt.” The sergeant added hastily, “That’s just an expression, you understand.”
“I understand.”
Reardon came to his feet, rubbed the back of his neck for luck, picked up his jacket on the way, and left the room. In the corridor he slid into his jacket, brushed his hair back with his fingers, and walked around the corridor bend to the captain’s office. He took a deep breath, tapped on the door, and entered without awaiting an invitation. Captain Tower had his telephone in his hand; the receiver was almost lost in the huge grip. At sight of the young lieutenant he set it down gently in the cradle and studied his subordinate coldly.
“Well, well! Look who’s here.”
“You wanted to see me, Captain?”
“Now, that’s a real bright question,” Tower said sardonically and then dropped the light tone. His fist formed and hovered over the desk, preparatory to pounding it, but then he forced himself to open his hand and lay it down on the blotter. “You know damned well I wanted to see you. But you’ve been glued to that damned telephone for the past hour.”
“It was that Cooke case—”
“I thought I told you to drop that Cooke case; to turn it over to Traffic.”
“I was talking to the purser of his ship, arranging for the body to go back there,” Reardon said quietly. “He’ll be buried at sea.”
“And it took you an hour to arrange it? Well, never mind. Sit down.”
Reardon pulled up a chair and obediently sat down. He had a fair idea of what was coming, but decided to hear it out before making up his mind as to the best defense. Captain Tower swiveled his chair a moment to stare out of the window without appreciation for the lovely distant view of the Oakland hills, and then swiveled back. When he spoke his voice was deceptively plaintive, as if he had been dealt with unfairly and undeservedly, and simply wanted a reasonable explanation.
“Why do you do these things to me, Jim?”
“What things, Captain?”
“As if you didn’t know.” The big man leaned forward, his elbows on his desk, ticking off his points on his thick fingers, his dark eyes fixed on the gray ones facing him.
“One: I told you to drop that traffic accident, but did you? Well, let’s see. To begin with, Captain Clark in Traffic calls me up to say his technical squad started to go over that Buick in the garage—as you asked them to, although I told you not to, and I still don’t see any sense in wasting time going over that car beyond what Wilkins did—and then you call the garage and pull them off the job and tell them to hold off until tomorrow. Now, that gives Clark a chance to squawk that we’re interfering in his business, and he loves to squawk; and it also gives him a chance to say we’re disrupting his schedule and so forth and so on—and it puts me in a position of having to defend one of my men for something I told him not to do. And I’m damned if I know why he’s doing it.”
“Captain—”
“Let me finish.” He pressed down a second finger, warming to his arguments. “Two: Five minutes after Clark hangs up, I get a call from Judge Jorgensen saying that if we’re going to get involved in Traffic, he’d like to be apprised of the fact, and also if I’m under the impression the Municipal Court hasn’t enough cases on its docket without doing each one of them twice—especially idiotic cases—then I ought to drop down to the second floor and see for myself sometimes. He said he went along with Merkel on the continuance for Crocker this time, but if there was any more horsing around on Friday, he was going to raise hell with someone. And he bangs the receiver down. And I don’t even know what in hell he’s talking about, although I’m beginning to get a strong suspicion!”
He paused, his eyes tiny, waiting for another interruption, but Reardon kept quiet. Captain Tower nodded and pressed down a third finger.
“So I call Merkel and he tells me this is the fine Italian
hand of my young Lieutenant, James Reardon, not that I don’t already know that. But he doesn’t know why Lieutenant Reardon asked for the continuance.”
Reardon continued to sit silent, watching. Captain Tower released his fingers and stared across the desk at him, glaring.
“Well?”
“Well what, sir?”
Tower’s big fist formed again, this time beyond control, bouncing on the desk. His ash tray jumped.
“Don’t ask stupid questions of me, Lieutenant! I want to know what the hell goes on! I want to know why you disobey orders! You just now spoke about a ‘Cooke case.’ Well, there isn’t any Cooke case! The man stepped off the curb in front of a car and got killed. The poor slob who killed him has enough grief without your persecuting him, because that’s what it amounts to. Why, God knows! I hope not to justify your walking out of that meeting last night, because if that’s the reason, you’re in trouble. I’ve read the Wilkins report, too, you know. And after the reaming I got from the judge, I called Wilkins at home and he repeated the whole thing, practically verbatim. And Merkel told me if Crocker had had the brains to bring a lawyer into court with him, the poor dumb bastard, either he’d have walked out a free man—or driven out in his Buick rather—or his lawyer would have been holding press conferences that would have had the Board of Commissioners seeing purple!”
He frowned across the desk blackly.
“What are you trying to do, Lieutenant? Wreck the police department all by yourself?”
Reardon’s jaw tightened slightly and his gray eyes narrowed, but otherwise he kept his cool. He had decided what his defense was going to be: a good offense, and he knew this was the time to do it, if ever. The captain was plainly in no mood for nonsense. There was only one way to settle it, and that was to do it quickly.
“Captain, you want to know why I’ve done what I’ve done. I’ll tell you in one word. Murder.”
“Murder?”
“Yes, sir. Homicide, and that makes it our business. Ralph Crocker deliberately ran down Bob Cooke and killed him. It was no accident. And I’m going to prove it.”
Captain Tower stared at him a moment. He leaned back in his chair, fumbled a pipe free from his jacket pocket, and sucked on it without lighting it. When he spoke his voice was deceptively quiet.
“What do you know about this case you haven’t reported, Lieutenant?”
“Not a thing, sir. But I’m sure Cooke was killed on purpose.”
“Oh, you do, do you? Do you happen to have any evidence? Any proof?”
“No, sir.”
Tower considered him evenly, almost paternally. “That’s a nice, honest statement. Do you have any indication—I won’t even ask you for proof—that Cooke and Crocker had ever met or even seen each other before in their lives?”
“No, sir.” Reardon faced his superior calmly. “Cooke’s girl friend never heard of Crocker and never saw him before. And says to her knowledge Cooke never mentioned him. And Crocker was strictly a landlubber, as far as we know, and Cooke worked the ships. And lived in Honolulu.”
“I see. But you’re still positive it was homicide. Now,” Captain Tower continued politely, “perhaps you can tell me why a man would go to the trouble of killing a perfect stranger. Do you believe Crocker is a homicidal maniac? Do you think he’s the type who goes running around killing strangers for kicks?”
“No, sir. I think this thing was well planned.”
“But you can’t think why.”
“No, sir, I can’t. Not yet.” He leaned forward a bit, trying to explain something that was difficult to explain to himself. “I have a hunch, I suppose you might call it. Now, I don’t think hunches are anything supernatural, and I also don’t believe they are what people call ESP—extrasensory perception. I think hunches are our subconscious trying to remind us of something we’ve forgotten.”
“And what did you forget?”
The young red-haired lieutenant suddenly grinned. “That’s what I don’t know.”
There were several seconds of silence. Captain Tower put away his pipe.
“Are you all right, Jim?”
“I’m fine, Captain.”
“I’m not so sure.” Tower drummed his thick fingers on his desktop for several moments, considering the man across from him thoughtfully. When at last he spoke he sounded as if he had come to a reluctant decision.
“Jim, I want you to take a week off. You’ve plenty of time coming, and we won’t count it against your vacation time. We’ll tack it onto sick leave. How about it? Take Jan and drive down to Yosemite, or lose some money at Reno or Vegas, or just go down to Carmel and lay around the beach. How about it?”
Reardon smiled at him faintly.
“I’ll tell you what, Captain. I’ll make you a deal. Instead of a week, I’d like just two days—until Municipal Court session on Friday. And instead of sick leave you can call it vacation time or even a holiday without pay if you want; I couldn’t care less. I know I’m right. There’s just one thing; I want a favor. I want Dondero to work with me.” He thought a moment. “And Stan Lundahl, too, if I need him for anything.”
Captain Tower stared at him. He swiveled his chair to take in the view across the bay once again, again not seeing it. He swiveled back, frowning, and then looked up.
“I suppose there’s only one way to cure you, Jim, and that’s to let you cure yourself in your own way. In all fairness to you I’ll say you’ve made damned few mistakes since you’ve been in the department; but I have a feeling this one is a beauty. I’m out of my mind to agree to it, but all right.” His dark eyes studied Reardon without any expression in them. They looked almost opaque. “If your hunch just happens to be wrong—and everything points to it, or at least if there’s anything working for it I can’t see it—then I imagine you know I’m the one who’ll be on the carpet in the chief’s office. Not you. Not after this talk of ours this afternoon. I suppose you’ve thought of that?”
“I’ve thought of it, Captain,” Reardon said evenly. “I’ve thought of it a lot, and frankly, I didn’t like thinking about it. I like to take my own falls for my own mistakes.” His gray eyes firmed. “But I’ve also thought of a girl who lost a boy friend; and even more than that, I’ve thought it’s just too damned easy to kill a man with a car deliberately and get away with it.” He waited a moment in silence and then came to his feet. “If that’s all, Captain, I’d like to get to work.”
“That’s all.” The captain’s tone was expressionless. As the door closed behind his subordinate he swiveled his chair around, staring across the low roofs to the bay and the soft hills of Oakland beyond, with tiny white houses mounting to the rounded peaks, half hidden in the late summer greenery. Jim Reardon was a good man and had been a damned fine addition to the detective force in Homicide and Captain Tower was pleased to have had the man assigned to him. He was smart, intelligent, hard working, fair, well liked, and—the captain shook his head, searching for the elusive word to complete the description.
It was “stubborn,” he finally decided. That matter settled, Captain Tower sighed heavily, swung around, and went back to work.
Wednesday—3:45 P.M.
The police garage was in the basement of the Hall of Justice; a low-ceilinged room of vast proportions with an exhaust-stained concrete floor and supporting pillars which, Reardon had always felt, had been placed at the exact points to insure maximum damage to doors or fenders by anyone attempting to follow the direction lines painted on the floor. One bent fender had been enough for Lieutenant Reardon; now he parked either in the public lot behind the morgue—without taking a ticket from the machine—or at the curb in front of the Hall on Bryant Street on those rare occasions when the No-parking space was not filled with other interlopers.
The portion of the garage next to the office, adjacent to the ramp leading from the street, had been isolated to serve as a storage space for cars under investigation, and was protected from the balance of the garage by wire fencing and doors wh
ich could be—but never had been—closed. Reardon sighed, thinking of the old days when one, or at the most two, cars had been impounded for official reasons. Now the space was crowded with battered wrecks from which dead bodies had been hauled or had to be burned clear with acetylene torches.
He studied the area carefully; the Buick was not there. Perturbed, he walked to the office door, thrust his head inside, and bawled.
“Morrison!”
“Just a second!” The garage attendant poked his head from behind a desk where he had been retrieving a dropped coin. He pocketed it with satisfaction as he rose and slid it into a pocket. “Hi, Lieutenant.”
“Where’s that Buick?”
“Parked out in the main garage. Second row down, back up against the wall. All the way at the end.”
Reardon studied the man coldly. “Isn’t your normal practice to keep a car in the cage until the technical squad has a chance to go over it?”
Morrison looked unhappy. He wiped his hands, dusty from his search of the floor, on his buttocks.
“Sure, Lieutenant,” he said unhappily. “Only they went over it.” He raised a hand, denying culpability. “I told them what you said, but the gang came down about one o’clock and went over her then. They said it was Captain Clark’s instructions. Said they had other wrecks to go in.” He shrugged apologetically. “There wasn’t nothing I could do. Me, I’m just a guy here, runs the office.”
“I see.”
So Captain Clark had screamed about the disruption of his crew’s schedule after he had already ordered his men to check out the car! It was certainly nice to see co-operation between departments and to know one had friends in high places, Reardon thought, and put the thought of Captain Clark out of his mind.”
“What did they find?”
“Nothing that I could see, or at least they didn’t say anything,” Morrison said. “I know they dusted her for prints and went over her from top to bottom. They had the seats out, picked up the hard stuff like hairpins and coins and then they vacuumed under them and the rug too; and they had the hub caps off and all that stuff. They had the trunk open and they looked at the spare tire and took that out too. They gave it the works; a lot more than they usually do with an accident car.” He paused and then shrugged apologetically. “But it ain’t for me to say. I’m just a desk jockey down here.”
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