The Jungle Kids

by Ed McBain

  “Anything I can do to help, Mr. Williams?”

  “Well, it’s a little trouble concerning you,” he said. He blew out a stream of smoke, pinned me with his eyes again.

  “Oh,” I said lamely. “You mean Julie. I—”

  “To hell with Julie,” Mr. Williams said. “He had it coming to him. I’m glad you worked him over.”

  “Well, thanks. I—”

  “Your girl friend,” Mr. Williams said.

  “My … girl?”

  “She was here, Manny. Just a little while ago.”

  “Betty? Here?”

  “She made a lot of threats, Manny. She said she was going to the police. She said she was sick and tired of your taking orders from a big crook.” He paused. “Do you think I’m a big crook, Manny?”

  “No. No, Mr. Williams. You have to excuse Betty. She’s just a kid. Sometimes, she …”

  “No, Manny,” he said coldly. “She doesn’t ‘sometimes’ any more. Things have gone much too far, I’m afraid.”

  “Wh—what do you mean by that, Mr. Williams?”

  “I mean she talks too much. She said she’d give us a week, Manny. After that, she’d go to the police and tell them all about Gallagher and the girl. And a few others.”

  “She … she said that?”

  “I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. Not that she can touch us, Manny. She’d have a hard time proving anything. But I had big plans for you. You’re young, a boy, one of the best boys I’ve got. I hadn’t counted on a hysterical woman, though.”

  “I … I’m sorry, Mr. Williams. I’ll talk to her. I’ll …”

  “Talk!” he said. “Nonsense! Do you think you can talk her out of this?” He was mildly disturbed now. He got up and began pacing the room, back and forth in front of the desk. “Once a woman acquires a loose tongue, she never gets rid of it. She needs more than talk.”

  “But …”

  “If you want to go places in this organization, you’ll know what to do, I won’t have to tell you. You’ll know.”

  “I … I don’t understand.”

  “You’ve got a week, Manny. After that, your girl begins screaming, and we’ll be shaking the police out of our hair for a month after that. Disturbances like that annoy me.”

  “A week,” I repeated dumbly.

  “It’s too bad you’re attached to her, Manny. It’s really too bad. A woman like that can be a millstone around a man’s neck. Unless something is done about it.”

  I nodded and got up. When I reached the door, Mr. Williams smiled and said, “You could be a big man in this organization, Manny. A really big man. Think it over.”

  And I thought it over. I thought it over for four days, then I tried talking to Betty. It didn’t get me very far.

  “I don’t want to listen,” she said. “You either quit your Mr. Williams, or I go to the police. That’s it, Manny. I’ve had enough.”

  “You ain’t had nothing.” I said. “Baby, we’ll be in the chips. I’m moving up. Mr. Williams—”

  “I’ll scream!” she shouted. “If you mention his name once more, I’ll scream.”

  “Baby—”

  “Shut up! Shut up, Manny!” She started crying then, and I’ve never known what to do with a chick that bawls, so I left her alone and walked the streets for a while.

  I found Turk, and I bought a few joints from him. Marijuana was candy to Turk. It never gave him a jolt, but he was willing to sell it so he could get his paws on the needle stuff. I lit up one of the joints, sucking it in with loose lips, mixing it with air for a bigger charge. The street got longer and the buildings seemed to tilt a little, but outside of that, I didn’t feel a thing.

  I lit the other joint and smoked it down to a roach, and then I stuck a toothpick in that and got the last harsh, powerful drags out of it. I flew down the street, then, and I forgot all about Betty and her goddamn loose mouth. I was on a big cloud, and the city was just a toy city down below me, and I felt good. Hell, I felt terrific.

  It didn’t last. You pick up, and the charge is great, but it wears off and you got the same old problem again. Unless you’re Turk, and then your big problem is getting the stuff that makes you forget.

  On the sixth day, I knew what I had to do.

  She went to a movie that night, and I walked the streets thinking it all over in my mind. Around eleven o’clock, I took a post in an alley near her pad. I knew the way she came home. She always came home the same way. The Army .45 was in my pocket. It felt heavy, and my palm sweated against the walnut stock.

  I heard her heels, and I knew it was her when she was still a block away. She crossed the street under the lamppost, and the light danced in her hair, threw little sparkles across the street. She walked like a queen, Betty, with her shoulders back, and her fine, high breasts firm under her coat. Her heels tapped on the pavement and she came closer and I took the automatic out of my pocket.

  When she reached the alley, I said, “Betty,” soft, in a whisper.

  She recognized my voice, and she turned, her eyebrows lifting, her mouth parted slightly. I fired twice, only twice.

  The gun bucked in my hand and I saw the holes go right through her forehead, and she fell without screaming, without making a sound. I didn’t look back. I cut down the alley and over toward Eighth Avenue. I dropped the gun down a sewer, then, and I walked around for the rest of the night. It was a long, long night.

  The party was a big one. I stayed close to Mr. Williams all night, and he called me his boy, and all the punks came around and looked up to me and I could see they were thinking, “That Cole is a tough cat, and a big man.”

  I was wearing a tailor-made suit. I’d laid down two hundred skins for it. My pinky-badge was white and clear even if I’d got it at a hock shop. It was a big party, all right, and all the big wheels were there, and Manny Cole was one of them. They were afraid of me, and they respected me. Even Julie. Julie maybe respected me more than all the rest.

  The usual punks were there, too, eager, falling all over Mr. Williams, waiting for the big kill, the one that would put them up there on top of the heap. Mr. Williams introduced me to a young squirt named Davis, Georgie Davis or something. He said the kid was worth watching, that he’d done nicely on a few gigs so far. I watched the kid, and a few times I caught him watching me back, and there was a hungry, glittering look in his eyes.

  I didn’t get home until five in the morning. The dawn was creeping over the edge of the night in a gray, lazy way.

  I stood in the kitchen in the quiet apartment. I had the money to move out of there now, but I hadn’t made the break yet. I pulled back the curtain, and I looked down over the roof tops, the way I used to long ago when Betty would come up to see me, when we were both a little younger—when Betty was alive.

  It got chilly in the apartment. The chill reached through my skin and settled in my bones. I tossed the curtain aside and walked over to the phone, flipping open the pad. I’d written the number down when it was an important number to know, when I’d been a punk like Georgie Davis and when this number belonged to a guy on the top.

  “Hello?” The voice was tired, not a big shot’s voice.

  “Hello, Turk,” I said. “This is Manny Cole.”

  “Oh, hello, Mr. Cole, how are you. What can I do for you?”

  I smiled a little. “Turk, bring a girl over. I feel lonely, Turk.”

  “A girl?” Turk said. “Why sure, Mr. Cole. Any particular kind?”

  Mister Cole again. The smile got bigger on my face. “Use your own judgment, Turk. You know what I like.”

  “Sure, Mr. Cole. Right away.”

  “Incidentally, Turk …” I heard the click on the other end of the line, and I knew he’d hung up. I really didn’t have anything more to tell him, but I had felt like talking a little more. Slowly, I put the phone back into the waiting cradle.

  The apartment was quiet, very quiet. I walked into the bedroom and stood before the dresser, looking down at the framed pic
ture of Betty. I looked at it for a long time.

  Then I went to the phone and sat down near it, wondering who I could call, wondering who I could talk to. I lit a cigarette, studied the burning end.

  I knew who I wanted to talk to.

  I put her out of my mind. I thought of other things. I thought of Georgie Davis, the young punk who’d eyed me at the party. And I thought of all the other punks who’d stare at me with the bright gleam in their eyes and the hungry look on their faces. The young punks eager for a kill, eager for a lot of things.

  I thought about them for a long time.

  When the doorbell rang, I knew it was the girl.

  I knew it couldn’t have been anyone else, but it took me a long time to open that door. And when I did open it, I had one hand on the slippery .45 in my pocket, and I was sweating. I wasn’t scared, but I was sweating.

  I was sweating because I knew I’d have to open a lot of doors in the days and nights to come—

  And one of them would not open on a smiling girl.

  SMALL HOMICIDE

  Her face was small and chubby, the eyes blue and innocently rounded, but seeing nothing. Her body rested on the seat of the wooden bench, one arm twisted awkwardly beneath her.

  The candles near the altar flickered and cast their dancing shadows on her face. There was a faded-pink blanket wrapped around her, and against the whiteness of her throat were the purple bruises that told us she’d been strangled.

  Her mouth was open, exposing two small teeth and the beginnings of a third.

  She was no more than eight months old.

  The church was quiet and immense, with early-morning sunlight lighting the stained-glass windows. Dust motes filtered down the long, slanting columns of sunlight, and Father Barron stood tall and darkly somber at the end of the pew, the sun touching his hair like an angel’s kiss.

  “This is the way you found her, Father?” I asked.

  “Yes. Just that way.” The priest’s eyes were a deep brown against the chalky whiteness of his face. “I didn’t touch her.”

  Pat Travers scratched his jaw and stood up, reaching for the pad in his back pocket. His mouth was set in a tight, angry line. Pat had three children of his own. “What time was this, Father?”

  “At about five-thirty. We have a six o’clock mass, and I came out to see that the altar was prepared. Our altar boys go to school, you understand, and they usually arrive at the last moment. I generally attend to the altar myself.”

  “No sexton?” Pat asked.

  “Yes, we have a sexton, but he doesn’t arrive until about eight every morning. He comes earlier on Sundays.”

  I nodded while Pat jotted the information in his pad. “How did you happen to see her, Father?”

  “I was walking to the back of the church to open the doors. I saw something in the pew, and I … well, at first I thought it was just a package someone had forgotten. When I came closer, I saw it was … was a baby.” He sighed deeply and shook his head.

  “The doors were locked, Father?”

  “No. No, they’re never locked. This is God’s house, you know. They were simply closed. I was walking back to open them. I usually open them before the first mass in the morning.”

  “They were unlocked all night?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I see.” I looked down at the baby again. “You—you wouldn’t know who she is, would you, Father?”

  Father Barron shook his head again. “I’m afraid not. She may have been baptized here, but infants all look alike; you know. It would be different if I saw her every Sunday. But …” He spread his hands wide in a helpless gesture.

  Pat nodded, and kept looking at the dead child. “We’ll have to send some of the boys to take pictures and prints, Father. I hope you don’t mind. And we’ll have to chalk up the pew. It shouldn’t take too long, and we’ll have the body out as soon as possible.”

  Father Barron looked down at the dead baby. He crossed himself then and said, “God have mercy on her soul.”

  We filed a report back at the squad, and then sent out for some coffee. Pat had already detailed the powder and flashbulb boys, and there wasn’t much we could do until they were through and the body had been autopsied.

  I was sipping at my hot coffee when the buzzer on my desk sounded. I pushed down the toggle and said, “Levine, here.”

  “Dave, want to come into my office a minute? This is the lieutenant.”

  “Sure thing,” I told him. I put down the cup, said “Be right back” to Pat, and headed for the Skipper’s office.

  He was sitting behind his desk with our report in his hands. He glanced up when I came in and said, “Sit down, Dave. Hell of a thing, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’m holding it back from the papers, Dave. If this breaks, we’ll have every mother in the city telephoning us. You know what that means?”

  “You want it fast.”

  “I want it damned fast. I’m pulling six men from other jobs to help you and Pat. I don’t want to go to another precinct for help because the bigger this gets, the better its chances of breaking print are. I want it quiet and small, and I want it fast.” He stopped and shook his head, and then muttered, “Goddamn thing.”

  “We’re waiting for the body to come in now,” I said. “As soon as we get some reports, we may be able to—”

  “What did it look like to you?”

  “Strangulation. It’s there in the report.”

  The lieutenant glanced at the typewritten sheet in his hands, mumbled, “Uhm,” and then said, “While you’re waiting, you’d better start checking the missing persons calls.”

  “Pat’s doing that now, sir.”

  “Good, good. You know what to do, Dave. Just get me an answer to it fast.”

  “We’ll do our best, sir.”

  He leaned back in his leather chair. “A little girl, huh?” He shook his head. “Damn shame. Damn shame.” He kept shaking his head and looking at the report, and then he dropped the report on his desk and said, “Here’re the boys you’ve got to work with.” He handed me a typewritten list of names. “All good, Dave. Get me results.”

  “I’ll try, sir.”

  Pat had a list of calls on his desk when I went outside again. I picked it up and glanced through it rapidly. A few older kids were lost, and there had been the usual frantic pleas from frantic mothers who should have watched their kids more carefully in the first place.

  “What’s this?” I asked. I put my forefinger alongside a call clocked in at eight-fifteen. A Mrs. Wilkes had phoned to say she’d left her baby outside in the carriage, and the carriage was gone.

  “They found the kid,” Pat said. “Her older daughter had simply taken the kid for a walk. There’s nothing there, Dave.”

  “The Skipper wants action, Pat. The photos come in yet?”

  “Over there.” He indicated a pile of glossy photographs on his desk. I picked up the stack and thumbed through it. They’d shot the baby from every conceivable angle, and there were two good close-ups of her face. I fanned the pictures out on my desk top and buzzed the lab. I recognized Caputo’s voice at once.

  “Any luck, Cappy?”

  “That you, Dave?”

  “Yep.”

  “You mean on the baby?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The boys brought in a whole slew of stuff. A pew collects a lot of prints, Dave.”

  “Anything we can use?”

  “I’m running them through now. If we get anything, I’ll let you know.”

  “Fine. I want the baby’s footprints taken and a stat sent to every hospital in the state.”

  “Okay. It’s going to be tough if the baby was born outside, though.”

  “Maybe we’ll be lucky. Put the stat on the machine, will you? And tell them we want immediate replies.”

  “I’ll have it taken care of, Dave.”

  “Good. Cappy, we’re going to need all the help we can get on this one.
So …”

  “I’ll do all I can.”

  “Thanks. Let me know if you get anything.”

  “I will. So long, Dave. I’ve got work.”

  He clicked off, and I leaned back and lighted a cigarette. Pat picked up one of the baby’s photos and glumly studied it.

  “When they get him, they should cut off his …”

  “He’ll get the chair,” I said. “That’s for sure.”

  “I’ll pull the switch. Personally. Just ask me. Just ask me and I’ll do it.”

  I nodded. “Except one thing, Pat.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We got to catch him first.”

  The baby was stretched out on the long white table when I went down to see Doc Edwards. A sheet covered the corpse, and Doc was busy filling out a report. I looked over his shoulder:

  Doc Edwards looked up from the typewriter.

  “Not nice, Dave.”

  “No, not nice at all.” I saw that he was ready to type in the Result of chemical analysis space. “Anything else on her?”

  “Not much. Dried tears on her face. Urine on her abdomen, buttocks, and genitals. Traces of Desitin and petroleum jelly there, too. That’s about it.”

  “Time of death?”

  “I’d put it at about three A.M. last night.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You want a guess?”

  “Sure.”

  “Somebody doesn’t like his sleep to be disturbed by a crying kid. That’s my guess.”

  I nodded. “Nobody likes their sleep disturbed, Doc. What’s the Desitin and petroleum jelly for? That normal?”

  “Yeah, sure. Lots of mothers use it. Mostly for minor irritations. Urine burn, diaper rash, that sort of thing.”

  “I see.”

  “This shouldn’t be too tough, Dave. You know who the kid is yet?”

  “We’re working on that now.”

  “Well, good luck.”

  “Thanks.”

  I turned to go, and Doc Edwards began pecking at the typewriter again, completing the autopsy report on a dead girl.

  There was good news waiting for me back at the squad Pat rushed over with a smile on his face and a thick sheet of paper in his hands.

  “Here’s the ticket,” he said.