The Battered Badge

by Robert Goldsborough

  Saul is equally loyal to Wolfe and has been known to drop whatever else he is working on if he’s needed on a case at West Thirty-Fifth Street.

  We did not have a case at the moment, of course, but I like to anticipate the possibilities, which was why I was calling Saul, who answered “Yeah?” on the first ring.

  “What can I do for you, Archie?” he said in that unmistakable Brooklyn accent of his. This despite his having resided on the Manhattan side of the East River for most of his adult life.

  “That remains to be seen,” I told him. “I have always been impressed by your wide-ranging network of contacts.”

  “Why do I feel that I am being buttered up?”

  “I’m serious, old friend. You know all sorts of people, some of whom live, shall we say, on the fringes of society.”

  “Pretty fancy talk. I sense what you are trying to say in your quaint way is that I have crossed paths with some individuals who tend to shy away from the limelight, right?”

  “I suppose that’s one way of putting it.”

  “Okay, now that we’ve established where this discussion is heading, what is it that you—or is it Mr. Wolfe—need to know?”

  “In this case it’s me. Have you read about the Capelli killing?”

  “Yes, just what the newspapers carried, which wasn’t much.”

  “Do you know any more about it than what you have read?”

  “I don’t, Archie, but it sounds like a case of the mob getting rid of one of its own, hardly an unusual occurrence. It happens all the time.”

  “Do you think by utilizing some of those people of yours who avoid the limelight, you might be able to learn more about the demise of poor Mr. Capelli?”

  “Have you asked our mutual friend and fellow poker player, the esteemed Mr. Cohen?”

  “In all fairness to Lon, you have better sources than he does.”

  “I guess I should be flattered,” Saul said. “May I be so bold as to inquire about your interest in this? Is it connected in some way to the gunning down of Lester Pierce?”

  “It might be.”

  “Aha. And Mr. Pierce’s killing has cast a pall over the long career of one Inspector Cramer of the Homicide Squad. Do I begin to see a pattern forming here?”

  “Let me lay my cards on the table for you,” I said, “which won’t be anything new, as you always seem to know exactly what I’m holding in our weekly games. First off, we have not been hired to investigate the Pierce murder or anything connected with it. At the moment, we are clientless, and possibly clueless as well. Whatever you think, Wolfe seems to have little or no interest in Cramer’s difficulties, saying that the inspector can take care of himself, which may very well be true. The man has survived attacks from inside and outside the department before.”

  “I agree. So you are really on your own here, is that it, playing some sort of hunch?”

  “I suppose so. You and I and Wolfe all have this in common: sometimes, we each get an itch that needs to be scratched.”

  “And your itch is that you need to know why this character Capelli got gunned down mob-style, because it might have something to do with what happened to Mr. Pierce, and what happened to Mr. Pierce has made life extremely uncomfortable for Cramer.”

  “You have seen right through me.”

  “Of course I have. All right, I can’t guarantee that I’ll learn anything, but I will shake a few trees and see what kind of fruit falls out of them,” Saul said.

  “I’m not looking for a gratis job on your part,” I told him. “I will of course pay your standard rates.”

  “I could be insulted by that, Archie, although knowing you, I realize that you meant well. Your boss, and by extension, you, have thrown so much business my way over the years that I can never repay that.”

  “I confess to being chagrined.”

  “That was not my intent. I assume that either Mr. Wolfe already knows about your appeal to me or that you will tell him.”

  “You have my word that he will be fully informed.”

  “Good. Before I go out to shake some trees and see what—or who—falls out, I have to finish a job I’m working on with Durkin. But we’ve just about got that one wrapped up.” The burly Fred Durkin is another freelance operative we often use, and while he is by no means Saul’s equal in smarts or in stealth, he is tough, brave, and dogged. And by the way, he once saved my life.

  “I will wait to hear from you,” I told Saul, and we ended the call.

  When Wolfe came down from the plant rooms that morning, got settled in his chair, and rang for beer, I swiveled to face him. “I just got off the phone with Saul,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  I proceeded to relate our conversation. When I had finished, he threw a scowl my way.

  “You have taken advantage of Saul’s loyalty and his agreeable nature,” he said, “by sending him on what may very well be a fool’s errand. He could be otherwise engaged in a profitable endeavor. You know very well that his services are in demand, which is hardly surprising.”

  “As I said, I offered to pay him.”

  “Pah!” Wolfe snorted, waving my comment away. “He was understandably insulted. You know him well enough to realize that.”

  “Okay, you’ve made your point. I’ll call him off.”

  “That would be to no avail. Once his ship is launched, Saul will not steer it back to port without making a discovery.”

  “Very poetic,” I remarked. “Well, I for one look forward to that discovery.”

  Wolfe did not reply. His nose was in his latest book, Inside Africa by John Gunther.

  Chapter 7

  Three days passed and I had heard nothing from Saul, but I was hardly concerned; I figured he and Fred Durkin took longer than expected to wrap up whatever they were working on. When I finally got a call, it was from Fred.

  “Archie, something … you and Mr. Wolfe should know,” he said, coughing. “It’s Saul … he’s in the hospital … Greenpoint in Brooklyn.”

  I felt a chill, although the office was warm, per Wolfe’s specifications. “What’s happened?” I said, or may have barked, because Fritz appeared at the office doorway within seconds, looking concerned.

  “He called me, Archie. He said that he’s all right, but he didn’t sound very good on the telephone,” Fred continued. “He wanted me to know he had gotten the payment for the job we did for that pawnbroker whose employee was cheating him blind.”

  “Have you got any idea how Saul ended up in a hospital bed?”

  “No, but he did say he was glad we wrapped up the pawnbroker business so fast because he had another job he wanted to get started on. I asked him if there was anything he needed in the hospital, and he told me no and said not to tell anyone he was laid up.”

  “I’m glad you told me, Fred,” I said as we ended the call. I went to the kitchen, where Fritz was preparing lunch. “Is everything all right, Archie?” he asked, the concern still evident on his mug.

  “I’m not sure. I’ve got to leave for a while. It’s still three hours until we eat, and I may or may not be back. If Mr. Wolfe asks, tell him I had to run an errand.”

  I went to Curran’s Motors over on Tenth Avenue, where we have garaged our cars for years, and I took the Heron sedan. I much prefer the convertible for city driving, but only when I can have the top down, and this blustery morning argued against that. Traffic was light, so I made it to the Greenpoint Hospital in Brooklyn in just over twenty minutes.

  Greenpoint had been a New York City fixture far longer than I’d been around town, and as I looked up at its somber six-story brick façade, I felt the old building was starting to show its age. Inside, however, warmth seemed to permeate the place. A smiling—and very attractive—young woman at the front desk gave me Saul’s room number on the third floor, and as I walked down the hall and then rode
the elevator, I received smiles and hellos from nurses and orderlies of every shape, size, and age. The hospital must require all its employees to take a charm course.

  I got to Saul’s room and found the door ajar. He was in the bed nearest the window, his face buried in a book. The bed nearest the door was empty.

  “Is that holding your interest?” I asked as I stepped into the room.

  Saul turned and looked at me, frowning. “I had a feeling you might show up,” he said in a tone that was neither welcoming nor angry. He had a broad bandage around his head, and the bruised right side of his face was the color of an eggplant. “Fred told you, didn’t he?”

  I nodded. “I would trust that man with my life, but probably not with a secret.”

  “Yeah, I agree. I wouldn’t have called him but I wanted to let him know I got our money from the pawnbroker. He’s always short of cash, as you are aware, and I wanted to assure him that some greenbacks would soon be coming his way.”

  “Enough with Fred. Now what is all this about?” I asked, gesturing at our surroundings.

  He shifted in the bed, wincing as he did so. “It’s a long story, but first the good news: I finally have this room to myself. The occupant of the other bed, who went home first thing this morning, was an old Irishman who spent the days here humming ‘My Wild Irish Rose’ and ‘Oh, Danny Boy,’ and ‘Galway Bay.’ He’s a decent guy, but now I’ll never get those damned tunes out of my head.”

  “Glad to hear he’s gone out of your life; now what about your long story?”

  Saul took a deep breath, wincing again. “I was doing a little investigating for you, and I got careless.”

  I cursed. “I was afraid it had something to do with our last phone call.”

  “Now don’t go blaming yourself, Archie. I let my guard down, and now I’m paying for it, although my sawbones says I’ll be out of here in two, maybe three days, and by next week, I should be close to normal.”

  “Are you up to telling me what happened?”

  “Why not, even if it makes me look stupid? I’ve got this source, had him for several years, a sawed-off little bird named Whitey, even shorter than me, who has drifted through life as a racetrack tout, a carnival barker, and a roller-coaster operator at Coney Island, among God knows how many other things.”

  “A man of many parts,” I observed.

  “Yeah, but none of these parts have been very successful, at least not in a financial sense. Anyway, Whitey has always seemed to know a lot about the goings-on of the mob, I believe because he had a brother who had been in on some robberies in Brooklyn and Long Island City some years back.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous to talk about the outfit’s activities?”

  “Of course it is, but Whitey has always been short of cash—our own Fred Durkin is a fat-cat capitalist by comparison. When I called Whitey and told him what I was interested in, he seemed eager to talk, which should have been a red flag. Anyway, at his suggestion I met him at a bar in Williamsburg. A second red flag should have been the sudden vagueness of his conversation. He was evasive when I pressed him about Pierce’s shooting, and he told me that we needed to meet with another man, who he said was named Miller. Whitey said he could tell us exactly what had happened to Pierce and why. So the two of us hopped into a taxi and went off to see this Miller over in Bushwick.”

  “It sounds like a strange—”

  “I know, I know,” Saul interrupted me. “I had taken leave of my senses, don’t remind me. Whitey directed the cabbie to a block of Myrtle Avenue under the elevated tracks, where, he said, Miller would meet us. We got out of the taxi and went halfway along a dark block where most of the shops were closed.

  “Miller—if that really is his name—stepped out of a gangway between two buildings, and Whitey introduced us. Miller was a tall skinny character who seemed nervous. ‘I’m positive I wasn’t followed,’ he said, ‘but let’s keep out of sight just to be safe.’ He motioned us back into the gangway, and that’s when I got it from behind at least twice with a sap. I went down and I think I hit my head.

  “I must have been almost out, but I heard them talking. Miller said to Whitey, or maybe it was the other way around, ‘That poor schlub really thought one of the families was behind it.’”

  “I suppose he meant one of the Mafia families,” I said.

  “You suppose right. They thought I was out cold, of course. What really hurt, maybe even more than my head, was the use of that word.”

  “Schlub?”

  “Do you know any Yiddish, Archie?”

  “Very little, and I don’t know schlub, although I can hazard a guess that it’s not exactly a compliment.”

  “Most dictionaries would describe it as a yokel, a boor, or a worthless person. I am cut to the quick.”

  “But you are on the mend, which is the most important thing right now. Anything you need that I can get?”

  “Just a return of my pride.”

  “You’ll find that soon enough, probably the next time we play poker and you lighten my wallet, as is invariably the case.”

  “That’s something to look forward to. I suppose you will have to report my opacity to your boss.”

  “Opacity? The two of you speak the same language, and it’s one that I have never learned.”

  That got a chuckle out of Saul, but it was followed by a groan. “Lovin’ babe, I’ve got to take it easy.”

  “I suppose it is hopeless trying to track down this Whitey, let alone Miller,” I said.

  “Yeah, I don’t even know Whitey’s given name, and it’s a sure thing Miller is an alias. Well, so much for my source, who turned out to be a snake. I can’t imagine I’ll ever see him again, not that I particularly want to. You’re going to have to tell Mr. Wolfe that I failed him.”

  “This was my idea, not his, and he wasn’t wild about it. I can only imagine what he’s going to say to me when I get home. But I know he’ll be happy that you’re going to get out of here in a few days.”

  “I’ll be happy, too. They have been good to me in here, but everyone is so blasted cheerful all the time. It’s like they’re all taking happy pills.”

  “Well, I will leave you to their ministrations. See, I know a fancy word or two myself.”

  “Mark me down as impressed,” the patient said as I rose to leave. On my way out into the hallway, I passed a perky and grinning nurse who was coming into the room with a lunch tray. “And how are we this lovely fall day, Mr. Panzer?” she asked. The last I saw of Saul, he was rolling his eyes.

  Chapter 8

  I got back to the brownstone just as Fritz was serving lunch. Wolfe gave me a questioning look as I came to the table, where he already was seated, knife and fork at the ready, about to tackle the spareribs. “I will report later; let’s eat!” I said, knowing his iron-fast rule about not discussing business during meals, and I considered what had happened to Saul to be business.

  Wolfe held forth on the reasons for the downfall of the Roman Empire as we cleaned our plates and then polished off a dessert of papaya custard. As we settled in the office with coffee, I got another look from Wolfe.

  “I saw Saul earlier,” I said. “He’s in the hospital.”

  “Indeed?” No one can put more meaning into a single spoken word than Nero Wolfe. In this case, the word he mouthed could be described as indicating curiosity, of course, but also incredulity, frustration, vexation, and anger. I plunged ahead.

  “He got worked over on a Brooklyn street a couple of nights ago. He’ll be okay and should be released this week.”

  “Go on,” he said icily.

  “He was … looking into the Pierce killing, as I mentioned to you. He said he had a source who knew a lot about the goings-on of the syndicate.” I then gave Wolfe a verbatim account of my conversation with Saul.

  He sat without speaking for more than a minute
, his face set in a glare. After drawing in a bushel of air and releasing it slowly, he said, “Confound it, can he receive telephone calls?”

  “I think so.”

  “Get him, now!”

  After finding the hospital’s number in the directory, I dialed and got transferred to Saul’s room. I nodded to Wolfe, who picked up his receiver just as the patient answered.

  “Saul, this is Nero Wolfe. Is it fatuous of me to ask how you are?”

  “Fatuous—no, not at all. Each day is better than the last, and the pain continues to recede. Nice of you to call.”

  “Archie tells me you will be out of the hospital soon.”

  “I’m hoping maybe the day after tomorrow or maybe the day after that, if the doc gives the okay. I’m letting him call all the shots.”

  “Excellent. I would like you to be our dinner guest the day you get released. That is, if you are able to take nourishment.”

  “Hah! I sure can. The food here isn’t all that great, but on the other hand, I am in no position to complain. It’s edible, and probably healthy as well. But it would be a fine idea if the kitchen at this place brought in Fritz to teach them a few tricks.”

  “I do not loan him out,” Wolfe said, the folds in his cheeks deepening, which for him is a smile, or so he thinks.

  Three nights later, our front doorbell rang and I played doorman, as is usually the case. “Come in out of the ozone,” I told Saul, who looked better than when I had last seen him. The bandage was off his head, the swelling in his face had gone down, and his skin was almost back to its normal sallow tone.

  “I understand there’s food to be had here,” Saul said, flipping his battered flat cap onto one of the hooks in the hall. He’s been making that toss for years and he almost never misses.

  Five minutes later, we were seated at the table in the dining room, where Fritz served the first course of onion soup with strong beef stock and dry white vermouth.