Dick Tracy

by Max Allan Collins

  Of course, the blonde in the low-cut gown sitting with the congressman was probably not his daughter.

  “Looks like a class reunion,” Tracy said, with a small nasty smile, positioning himself before Big Boy and his table of gruesome cronies. “Maybe we should sing ‘Hail Hail, the Gang’s All Here’?”

  “This is a private club,” Big Boy said, not rising, doing his best to sound bored. “This is a private party.”

  “I decided to crash it.” Tracy shrugged. “This lets me.”

  He tossed a folded document on the table.

  “So you got yourself a search warrant,” Big Boy said, not looking at it. “So search. But consider . . .” He lifted an advisory finger. “You’re gonna make some enemies out of some very important people. Better think twice about how careful you look, Dick.”

  Tracy laughed shortly. “You’re sweating, Big Boy.”

  Big Boy twitched a shrug. “It’s a little warm in here.”

  “Maybe you ought to check the safety gauge on your furnace.”

  Big Boy said nothing.

  Tracy glanced around; the uniformed cops were checking the place out. In front of the bandstand, Breathless stood singing. She wore a black gown, but not the one she’d worn to his apartment earlier. Their eyes locked. For a moment he couldn’t pull away.

  But he did.

  “Tracy,” a uniformed cop said, “no sign of any gambling devices.”

  “You’ve checked thoroughly, Cochran?”

  “Yes. There’s nothing.”

  Tracy sighed. He glanced toward the stairway entrance and saw the gray-haired, gray-mustached waiter slipping back into the room.

  Pruneface, Texie Garcia, Flattop, and the rest were laughing, toasting each other, making cracks about Tracy under their breath. Having a great time at the detective’s expense.

  “That’s it then,” Tracy told the officer. “You and Sergeant Matetsky round up the boys and head out.”

  “Aren’t you gonna join us, Tracy?” Big Boy asked with an ugly grin, gesturing to the table.

  Tracy looked sharply at the gangster. “Not just now. But I’ll be back.”

  “Let us know in advance next time,” Big Boy said with a magnanimous wave of his Havana. “We’ll toss you a great big party.”

  “The next party’s going to be for you, Big Boy,” Tracy said. “We’ll reserve you a seat of honor at the big house—a hot seat.”

  Tracy and the uniformed cops left as quickly as they had come.

  “Some raid,” Flattop said.

  Itchy giggled nasally. “Big Boy scared ’im off—when he saw all the high-hats here, the copper knew he’d get in hot water.”

  “He sure didn’t look around too close,” Big Boy said, suddenly troubled. “I don’t get it . . .”

  Pruneface’s mask of merriment had dropped away; he was watching the door where Tracy went out. “I thought you were going to take care of that bum.”

  “He didn’t really look around,” Big Boy said, puzzled.

  “Relax, Big Boy,” Texie said. She put an arm around him, her generous bosom rubbing up against him. “He was just tryin’ to louse up your grand opening.”

  Breathless continued singing, and Big Boy—and the room—responded to her soothing, sensual sound. The front of the room quieted, even as the casino in back came to loud life, and the party was again underway.

  In his car, Tracy spoke into his two-way. “We’re out, Sam.”

  And in the attic, Catchem prepared to ascend the rope, as Bug Bailey was settled on the floor, sitting Indian-style, attending his listening devices.

  “You’re on your own, Bug,” Catchem said. “Call home if you’re in a jam.”

  “That’s what I invented this for,” Bug said cheerily, holding up his wrist with its two-way.

  As Tracy pulled away, he slowed as he neared the club’s garage. He reached over and swung open the door on the rider’s side.

  The gray-haired, gray-mustached waiter hopped into the car, peeling off the gray hair and mustache as he did.

  “How’d it go?” Tracy asked.

  “The light fixture hides the microphone perfectly,” Pat Patton said. “Bug should hear—and record—plenty from there.”

  “It’s a dangerous assignment.”

  “We’ll have a man posted in the building across the way,” Patton said. “Anything goes wrong, Bug’s got his two-way.”

  “Brave little guy,” Tracy said admiringly. He turned the corner. “Let’s hope we get away with it. You think Big Boy thinks I’m too stupid to look under a false tabletop?”

  “Maybe he thinks you were afraid of getting in trouble with those judges and the other high-hats in attendance.”

  “Yeah,” Tracy said. “He did mention that himself.”

  “Kind of embarrassing, isn’t it?” Patton admitted. “Letting Big Boy think we’re that stupid, or that scared.”

  “Yeah,” Tracy said. “It’s embarrassing.” He grinned at his assistant, who looked more than a little silly in the red waiter’s jacket. “But no more embarrassing than you in that outfit.”

  Patton looked at himself and laughed, and said, “I’ll get over it.”

  “So will I,” Tracy said, pointing. “There’s Sam . . . let’s give the man a lift . . .”

  Big Boy slammed his fist down on the front page that stared up at him, taunting him, from the blood-red conference-room table; the table shook, the very room seemed to shake, and the newspaper below the fist tore and crinkled. Big Boy’s fist had landed directly on a smiling photograph of Detective Dick Tracy, seen hauling away a sullen, handcuffed Ribs Mocca.

  “Everywhere I turn,” Big Boy raved, “it’s Tracy, Tracy, Tracy!”

  The newspaper headline, in print of a size and boldness usually reserved for the outbreak of war (and in fact that was, in a way, what the Tribune was reporting), said: TRACY ATTACKS GANGLAND, with a secondary head stating: BIG BOY FEELS THE SQUEEZE. Several other papers were scattered about the table; the headline on the Chronicle said: TRACY’S WRECKING CREW BRINGS GAMBLERS BAD LUCK, accompanied by photographs of axe-wielding plainclothesmen smashing slot machines, overturning gambling tables, and escorting hoodlums into paddy wagons.

  The News had focused on the arrest of Texie Garcia and the shuttering of various of her brothels. That headline read: TRACY CRACKS DOWN ON WHITE SLAVERY RING. Smaller headlines referred to the various judges, aldermen, city council members, and socially prominent citizens among the patrons of the various illicit establishments raided, gambling and prostitution alike. Tracy had graciously chosen not to arrest any of these luminaries, but did leak their names to the press.

  “He invited the newshounds along!” Big Boy said. “Publicity-seeking son of a . . .”

  And the room rang with invectives as obscene as they were heartfelt.

  Seated at the shining red table, making a very disgruntled audience for this symphony of rage, were Pruneface and his chief bodyguard, Influence, whose mashed-looking skeletal face rivaled his boss’s in sheer hideousness. Seated across from them, watching them with hooded-eyed care, were Flattop and Itchy, their coats unbuttoned, their shoulder holsters showing.

  “Consolidate, you say,” Pruneface growled. “You’re the future, you tell us. And the day after we start all this mutual planning, this ‘coordinating’ like a ‘big-time corporation’—with you our ‘chairman of the board’—we suffer our worst setbacks, the most damaging raids, in history!”

  “It’s like that lousy dick’s readin’ my mind!” Big Boy said, and he wadded up the newspaper with Tracy’s face on it and hurled the ball into the fireplace across the room, where the paper crackled and burned.

  Pruneface seemed unimpressed by Big Boy’s display of temper. “Tracy threw Ramm in the slam; he nailed Texie, too. Mocca’s in the jug, so’s DeSanto and Clipper Brown. They’ll all be out on bond by noon, but still, it’s real inconvenient. Worse, nearly every gambling joint in the city is in pieces.”

  “Don’t you th
ink I know that?” Big Boy snarled. He slammed his fist on the table. Again and again.

  “All this show of emotion,” Pruneface said coldly, “doesn’t hide one fact.”

  “Oh, yeah? Which is what?”

  “You didn’t get raided last night.”

  “I got raided the night before! You was there!”

  “Yeah. Compared to the rest of us, your club got a free pass. You’ll be the only game in town tonight. The only casino up and running. The question being asked in certain nasty circles is, Did Big Boy sell out his competition to the cops?”

  Big Boy waved his arms. “That’s crazy! Tracy’ll probably hit me tonight, which means maybe I don’t even dare open the casino—I probably oughta put the wheels and slots and such in storage.”

  “Is that what’re you gonna do?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m gonna do.” Big Boy shook his head. “Tracy. This one lousy cop, Tracy . . .”

  Pruneface’s dark eyes were crazed and glittery in the rough-creased mask of his features. “I’ll hand you your head, if you’re playing me for a patsy. And if you got a canary singin’ in your organization, tipping Tracy off, then you better find that bird, and find yourself a big cat to feed him to. Or your grand and glorious scheme about all of us ‘businessmen’ throwing in together and goin’ national is going to blow up in your face. And it’ll make Spaldoni’s demise look like a firecracker goin’ off.”

  Big Boy’s lip curled. “Don’t threaten me, old man . . .”

  “You said you had a way of taking care of Tracy,” Pruneface said in his hoarse, hollow voice. “You told me you’d either buy him, or take him out and make it look like an accident. But instead you screwed up royal.”

  Big Boy glared at Flattop and Itchy; Flattop remained impassive, but Itchy began scratching over his ear, like he was digging out a tick.

  Pruneface sneered with disgust. “I wanted to just bump him off, plain and simple—but no. You had to outsmart yourself.”

  “I am gonna take care of Tracy,” Big Boy said, almost pleading. “But you gotta leave it to me.”

  “No,” Pruneface said, standing suddenly. “I’m takin’ this bum out of the headlines myself.”

  Flattop and Itchy rose a fraction of a second thereafter, as did Pruneface’s bodyguard Influence. The men glowered at each other like the Earps and Clantons trying to decide who was going to draw first.

  “Not so fast,” Big Boy said, holding up a fat palm in a stop motion. “You rub Tracy out, the finger’s gonna point at me.”

  “My finger’s pointing at you now,” Pruneface said, and it was. It was as gnarled as the branch of a tree; an old, ugly tree. “I’m rubbin’ him out! And you can’t stop me.”

  “Pruneface,” Big Boy said, “we got to keep our heads . . .”

  And as he extended his hand in a gesture of reasonableness, Big Boy felt something damp.

  A drop of something.

  Something brown and warm.

  He looked up, saw nothing. Pruneface was looking at him like he was crazy; Flattop, Itchy, and Influence were similarly transfixed by Big Boy’s sudden distraction.

  Then Big Boy glanced down, where one of the newspapers on the table was getting damp. A picture of Tracy, in fact, was pearled with brown moisture.

  Bug Bailey was, as Tracy had described, a brave little man. Little in life fazed him, and he had pulled hazardous surveillance duty more times than the rest of the department put together. But he had one, ironic phobia.

  He was afraid of bugs.

  Not the electronic kind, obviously. Ever since he was a little kid, whose bug-eyed physiognomy had earned him his nickname, he’d been good with all things mechanical and electrical. He had an affinity for science that had led to his involvement in helping Chief Brandon initiate a city-wide system of radio patrol cars, well ahead of much of the country; and with the encouragement of Tracy, Bug had connected with billionaire Diet Smith and, together with Smith’s inventor son Brilliant, they had come up with the two-way wrist radio.

  But if science was his friend, biology was not. At least not entomology.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that a four-eyed, goofy kid nicknamed Bug would have some bully put insects down his shirt. One nightmare after-school encounter with a sadistic lout and his rat pack of equally brutish chums had moved Bug’s aversion to things creepy and crawly into a full-blown phobia. A spider had been put down his shirt, and a cockroach dropped into his mouth.

  A cockroach not unlike the one that was, at this moment, moving inexorably toward his ham-and-cheese sandwich.

  Bug spotted it, and, though gripped with horror, looked for something to swat it with. His fingers found his notebook and he tried to flick the cockroach away from his sandwich, but to his dismay and terror, Bug determined the bug was only millimeters from slithering between the white slices, apparently planning to nestle between the ham and the cheese.

  This was not the first meal the Bug had taken here. On both days at this listening post, he’d brought sandwiches and a full thermos of coffee to help him through the night. His surveillance stint was a long haul, albeit not a twenty-four hour one. Big Boy’s business was, after all, primarily conducted in the evenings—it had been Tracy’s primary intent to track and interrupt Big Boy’s various bagmen as they made their payoffs and collections. So Catchem would return before dawn each day, collect the Bug, and bring him back again, to be lowered into the attic via the skylight, well after dark.

  Bug had enjoyed himself; he didn’t mind the dark, and there was plenty of entertainment. He sat crosslegged, looking very buglike, heavy headphones over his ears, in his black-and-yellow striped sportcoat with black-and-yellow tie. Listening to Big Boy blusteringly ordering people around was like listening to a radio melodrama. Though he was only one floor above, Bug felt detached, removed, entirely safe.

  He sat like a mischievous elf, eavesdropping, then tattling, via two-way. He’d been especially amused, a few moments ago, when Big Boy began raving about “Tracy, Tracy, Tracy,” and that it was as if Tracy could “read his mind.” That made Bug smile. It had been fun duty, and the danger hadn’t bothered him a bit. Hadn’t even occurred to him.

  He didn’t like the sound of Pruneface wanting to “rub Tracy out,” but Big Boy, oddly, seemed to have talked the older gangster out of it.

  But now, as he frantically swatted the dreaded cockroach, he lost composure. He didn’t notice that his thermos-cap cup of coffee had spilled.

  The bug banished, Bug returned to his listening post, scribbling notes as he monitored Big Boy’s fulminations.

  He was shivering, the thought of that insect crawling into his sandwich a frightening image that he couldn’t dispel. Intent on his work, shaken by his phobia, Bug did not notice the coffee silently dripping info the microphone hole, and down.

  The white light fixture, with its deco concentric circles, had hidden the microphone and its hole well. So Big Boy observed, having climbed up on the red table to get a peek. He could see from whence the brown rain had fallen. He began to reach for his gun, but something, somebody, tugged his pantleg. Flattop.

  “Boss,” Flattop said, and made a shushing gesture with the forefinger of a black-gloved hand. Then the gunman curled the finger and nodded to the door.

  Big Boy’s eyes narrowed, then he nodded back, and climbed down off the table.

  “What . . . ?” Pruneface began.

  But Big Boy raised a hand. He pointed upward, and Pruneface nodded, too.

  “Be with you in a second,” Big Boy told him. “Gotta sign for some meat.”

  In the hall, Big Boy said, “Tracy’s got somebody up there listening!”

  Flattop, ever composed, nodded sagely. “That’s right, boss.”

  “The attic, right over us! The nerve of the bum! Let’s get up there and smash the son of a . . .”

  “No, boss!” Flattop touched Big Boy’s arm, gently. “The cops don’t know we’re onto ’em. We should use it against ’em, b
efore we put a stop to it. Feed ’em some wrong info or something.”

  Big Boy’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. Then he said, “Go get that wrinkled lunatic for me.”

  “Sure, boss.”

  In a moment, Pruneface had joined the hallway confab.

  “You want to rub Tracy out?” Big Boy asked the older gangster. “With my blessing?”

  “I’d like nothing better.” He shook his head. “But finding him’s going to be the trick. He’s moving so fast, we’re getting hit everyplace in town . . .”

  “So why don’t we send him an invitation?”

  Big Boy walked Pruneface back into the office. Flattop, pulling his black gloves tight, smiled smugly, following them in, as Big Boy went to the phone. Pruneface stood and smiled up at the light fixture. Influence gazed upward, as well, though his was a face that never smiled.

  “Okay, Freddie,” Big Boy said into the receiver, his thumb holding the cradle button down, keeping the line dead. “Get down to the Southside warehouse. Time for the big pay off . . .”

  “We have to talk,” Tess said.

  “I know,” Tracy said, and dipped his spoon into a bowl of Mike’s chili.

  Outside the night was a dark hand gripping the city; not a good night to wish upon a star, because there wasn’t a star in the sky. Within the electric radiance of the diner—its chrome trim glistening, enamel countertop and tables gleaming, booths and stools covered in ersatz leather as red as a circus clown’s nose—the world seemed brighter. But it was an illusion.

  The Kid was curled up in one of the booths while Tracy and Tess sat at the counter, having moved there not to disturb the boy after he dropped off to sleep.

  “The Welfare Department called about you-know-who,” Tracy said glumly.

  “He is a swell kid.” Tess sighed. She wasn’t eating her food.

  “Not hungry?” he asked.