“How come you’re on it, Fitz? Big time?”
“Big enough. From what Killan says, this guy Ritter—and maybe Fink—have been running that million-dollar numbers business up in Harlem.”
“Uh-huh. … You’re not kidding a little columnist, are you?”
Fitz’ blue eyes glared wrathfully.
“Would I pick you up to pass the time of day, nut? I tell you that numbers mystery has had me stewing for the last year. Huge profits—wholesale killings. A murder a week for the last six months. No leads, no clues. I tell you, Jerry, the whole set-up has had me worried as hell. Killan say that this dead Sam Ritter is the answer—and I hope to God that he’s right! If I’d been sure about it yesterday, I’d have knifed Ritter myself! Boy, I’ve suffered lately and I’m not fooling.”
Again that peculiar searching glint came into Fitzgerald’s blue eyes.
“Cards on the table, Jerry! You know what I mean. Have you got one of those special tips of yours—on Sam Ritter?”
Tracy coughed, looked somewhat embarrassed. He laid a friendly hand on the inspector’s gray trouser knee.
“If I had, Fitz, you’d get it—right off the bat, without any ‘ifs’ or ‘buts,’ Trouble is—” He sighed faintly, “Maybe I’d better tell you the whole truth about those tips. I mean, those special red-hots I’ve been running in the column lately. Every one of them as ac-curate as hell. Every one of ’em based obviously on some underworld source as trustworthy as a supreme court judge. I give you my word of honor, Fitz, that I don’t know any more than you what the source is, who the mysterious tipster is—what it’s all about. All I know is that I get ’em, I use ’em—and they’ve never been wrong once.”
The inspector nodded.
“Okey, Jerry. I merely thought you might have some kind of dope that we could use.”
“Sorry. If I did—wait a second! Whoa, baby!”
“S’matter?”
“It’s just barely possible. … I’ve been away over the weekend—just got in town this minute. It’s barely possible that one of those tips—maybe if I hopped into a booth somewhere and gave Butch a quick call at the office—”
“Do that, will you, Jerry?” Fitzgerald howled suddenly at the back of his chauffeur’s head, “Hey, Barney! Pull up first telephone sign you see. There’s one up at the next corner! Whoa. … ” Tracy was off the running-board before the police sedan stopped. He banged into the drug-store and was gone forty-seven seconds. Fitzgerald timed him.
“Well?”
“No dice. Nothing doing. Sorry.”
Barney Callahan took the inspector’s disappointed nod and broad-jumped the sedan into motion.
“How do those tips come to you, Jerry?” Fitz asked with a slow persistence. “Through the mail?”
“All ways. Through the mail. Delivered by bums who can’t tell you a thing. Stuck under the office door. No way of tracing ’em. Don’t you think I’ve tried?”
“You mean the stuff is anonymous?” the inspector asked stubbornly. “A free gift? You don’t put out dough for those tips?”
“Not a nickel.”
“Man or woman?”
“No way of telling. I’ve often wondered.”
“Fingerprints?”
“Pull-eze,” Jerry said softly. “You think I’m that kind of a heel?” His soft smile made the inspector flush.
“Well, of course … I didn’t mean—I thought that maybe from the handwriting—”
“Typed,” Jerry said. “Plain cream note paper. Plain cream envelopes. The stuff you buy in any five-and-dime. Always the same. And I never save ’em for police inspectors. And I never, never look for fingerprints.” His soft smile deepened. “Maybe it’s the signature that makes me funny that way. Always the same on every message. ‘God bless you, Jerry. You’re a good guy.’ ”
“Might be a woman,” Fitz suggested.
“Yeah?” Jerry’s bright eyes mocked him.
Ahead of them, at St. Nicholas Avenue laid a gaunt, dusty diagonal across upper Harlem towards the dizzy spider-work of the Eighth Avenue Elevated. Barney braked expertly and pulled in alongside the curb. A crowd of loiterers, delivery boys, housewives were spilling aimlessly back and forth on the sidewalk, attracted like flies by the police uniforms. Bluebottles, Tracy thought, buzzing morbidly in the clear sunshine.
Patrolmen kept a channel open through the eddying crowd. The channel led straight towards crumbling stone steps, a vestibule door with a latch that didn’t work, ragged stair carpet that made Tracy’s throat tickle with dust.
A respectful voice said: “Fourth floor, Inspector. Rear apartment.”
A voice utterly lacking in respect said: “Hi, Jerry! What are you doing way up in Harlem, you big old prima donna, you? Another red-hot tip?”
Tracy shoved the fresh Globe man back on his heels with a deftly applied palm.
“This concludes the morning broadcast,” he said dryly. “For further details, read your favorite small-size newspaper, the Daily Planet.”
The chubby little medical examiner was putting on his hat and coat when Tracy inched into the fourth-floor apartment behind Fitzgerald.
“Straight homicide,” Goldfarb told Fitz in his pleasant, enthusiastic voice. “Single knife-wound, inflicted at a slight downward angle. Smacko into the heart. Fellow that did it knew his business. Probably a bit taller and heavier than the deceased. Quick job. Dead since—oh, about one o’clock this morning. … ”
The body was in the dinette, a small boxlike cubicle that opened off a long, gangling kitchen. Tracy gazed down with mild curiosity as Inspector Fitzgerald twitched back the soiled sheet. Moon-faced, well-fed, swarthy—the type you’re never quite certain is either Jewish or Italian. A well-built, husky-looking corpse. Eyes wide open and faintly surprised.
Sergeant Killan bustled into the dinette, said, “Hi, Jerry!” with a friendly smile, whispered respectfully to the frowning inspector.
“I’d like to show you something pretty interesting in the front living-room, sir.”
Their feet slopped on the kitchen floor. The linoleum was wet and oozy with spilled water.
“Where’d all this water come from?” Fitzgerald growled.
Tracy’s eye lifted to the wall beside the electric refrigerator, noted the empty socket, the dangling electric cord further along.
“Somebody’s pulled out the plug,” Jerry murmured. “Probably last night. That icebox has been defrosting all night. … Can’t be any tray under the freezing unit—or am I wrong?”
Sergeant Killan grinned. “Not a bad guess. Unit tray is missing, all right. Not a speck of food in that icebox, Inspector. Every shelf was loaded with bottles—rye, bourbon and a whole slew of club soda.”
Fitzgerald frowned. “You opened that refrigerator?”
“Yes, sir. Er—that is, the door was ajar when we got here. That’s how all that water dripped out, I guess.”
“Prints?” Fitzgerald snapped.
“No, sir. No prints anywhere. Gibson and Kominsky left a coupla minutes ago. Everything clean—or wiped. Knife as clean as a whistle. Murderer must have used those rubber gloves over there in the sink.”
“Yeah?” Fitzgerald’s frown got deeper. “Suppose you let me do all the guessing about this. What’s in the front room?”
He clumped solidly away, behind the nimbler feet of Killan.
Tracy lingered in the kitchen for a while, staring aimlessly here and there. The soaked linoleum of the kitchen floor seemed to fascinate him. He kept staring alternately at the floor and the empty electric outlet in the wall; rubbing his nose gently with the tip of his long forefinger, a favorite habit of his when he found something simmering faintly inside his inquisitive skull.
Fitzgerald had let the swinging kitchen door bang shut behind him. For the moment, Tracy was alone. The body of Sam Ritter lay, sheeted and quiet, in the tiny dinette; but Tracy didn’t bother with the corpse. With a mildly stealthy expression on his lean countenance, the Daily Planet’s columnist
poked quietly about the empty kitchen.
He stared into dish-closets, looked over a small array of canned goods and packaged cheese; opened the cupboard doors down below. His lips remained pursed in a steady, soundless tune. He pried among pots and pans, examined carefully an electric iron, a toaster, an electric fan. An idea seemed to strike him and he walked slowly up and down the narrow length of the kitchen, sniffing the air with quiet deliberation. The result of his sniffing was a disappointed frown and a low, “Nuts!” to the refrigerator.
Finally, he walked out, padded along the dim hallway to the front of the apartment.
Inspector Fitzgerald was in the living-room, seated at a battered oak desk, talking in a low voice to Sergeant Killan, The Globe man had beat it, apparently. So had the rest of the legmen, including the guy from Tracy’s own rag.
Tracy knew why as he listened to the dry, satisfied murmur of the burly inspector at the desk. The newspaper lads were all hopping for phones and rewrite men. Headline stuff in that shabbily furnished living-room! Fitz was grinning like a hyena; so was Killan. Both of them had the air of sleek tabby-cats brought unexpectedly face to face with a saucer of fresh cream.
Sam Ritter’s murder had unexpectedly removed the covering from a discreet and well-padded rathole. The battered oaken desk, the drawers of a rickety old bureau were crammed with indisputable evidence that here in a shabby St. Nicholas Avenue tenement, was the prize rathole whose existence had long bothered Fitzgerald. Expense slips, account books, tickets, memoranda. … The stuff spilled out of every drawer in the desk. Another pile—currency and silver—was scattered on the floor in front of a small dark recess in the wall where Killan’s stubby fingers had pried out a panel whose fitting had looked slightly phoney to the sergeant’s experienced eye.
Tracy fingered some of the documents, listened to Fitzgerald’s dryly jubilant murmur.
“The numbers racket, Jerry. Biggest and most profitable gold mine in the city for years. I’ll bet that at least twenty murders have stemmed from this private little counting-house. And figure how much hush-hush money has been spread among the occasional crooked cops or plain-clothesmen—and how many small-fry politicians, and big ones too, must have had a finger underneath the piecrust! This is one murder, Jerry, that positively makes me gloat with pleasure. It’s going to end my biggest headache—along with Harlem’s biggest racket.”
“You figure that the broad-shouldered gent with the knife in his heart is the head gink in this thing?”
“He has to be or there’s no sense to it.”
“What do you mean he has to be?” Tracy’s arm gestured towards the littered floor. “Aren’t you sure? Doesn’t this stuff here pin it on him?”
“Not so you’d notice it,” Fitz admitted. “The whole layout seems to have been run on a code basis. Agents, district managers, collectors, go-betweens—all represented by alphabetical or numerical designations. No check books, no bank deposit slips. I’m hoping we’ll run across the code book before we get through with all this heap of junk. If we do, the patrol wagons are going to be very busy. And even if we don’t, this charming industry is in for a bad time of it. Customers will start squawking, dirty hints of double-cross and fraud will start dropping all over Lenox Avenue. … Oh, we’ll get evidence, all right!” Fitzgerald chuckled.
“Take it from me, Jerry, the old man is happy.”
“What do you know about this bird, Ritter? Ever had him under surveillance?”
“Never. Not once. Wouldn’t know him from Adam if it weren’t for the card in his pocket. He had a very pretty front down on Seventh Avenue among the cloak-and-suiters. Sam Ritter and Morris Fink, wholesale clothiers. Morris Fink is the partner. I’ve sent Delehanty to pick up Fink. I want to hear what he has to say on the subject of partnership and—alibi.”
The inspector conferred briefly again with the sergeant. Together they began poking systematically among the disordered papers. There was a mild hubbub out in the hallway and Sergeant Killan popped to his feet and went outside. In a moment his head poked back again.
“Delehanty is here with Ritter’s partner,” he said tersely. “Wanna see this Fink guy right away?”
“Yeah.”
Morris Fink sidled into the room in the grasp of the massive Delehanty like a reluctant small dog on a leash. His round, greasy face was gray with poorly concealed apprehension. Fat and jowly he was, like the dead Ritter; but smaller, flabbier, gelatinous-looking. His eyes bobbed timorously about. When he spoke he didn’t talk to anyone in particular.
“Gentlemen, I swear I had nothing to do with—this. I don’t know what it’s all about. This police gentleman will tell you that I came willingly, gladly. I’m a respectable business man.”
“That’s swell,” Fitzgerald said. “What’s your name?”
“Morris Fink.”
“Where do you live?”
“5724 Central P-Park West. Apartment 12-B.”
“Has he looked at the body, Delehanty?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know that guy in the dinette, Fink?”
“Sure, sure. Yessir.”
“Who is he?”
“Mein—my partner. Sam Ritter.”
Fitzgerald nodded and made a note on the pad in front of him. Tracy lit a cigarette and the little cloak-and-suiter jumped spasmodically as the match sputtered.
“Any idea what Sam Ritter was doing way up here in Harlem in a cheap tenement?” Fitzgerald asked softly.
“No, sir.”
“Or why he was killed?”
“Well—” Fink hesitated, licked his thick lips, leered suddenly in an indecently confidential manner. “I couldn’t exactly be knowing. Maybe—”
“Maybe, what?”
“Sam was a funny guy about—about goils, see? Always went kinda heavy for Cubans and—and brown goils. I figure that in this neighborhood—well, maybe some dame lured poor Sam up here and some boy friend of the goil was waiting with a knife, hah?”
“Did you kill him, Fink?” Fitzgerald asked curtly.
The pudgy little man turned white as chalk.
“No! Mein Gott, no! For why I should do such a—”
“Ever been in this apartment yourself, Fink?” Fitzgerald asked him.
“Not never. Positively, no. Never even knew such a place existed even!”
The inspector’s hand waved languidly towards the litter of records on the floor.
“Any idea, Fink, what this stuff might be?”
“Absolutely, I couldn’t say.” He scanned with a lackluster eye the numbers slip that Fitzgerald thrust at him. “It might be a business maybe,” he conceded cautiously.
“Yeah. It might. … Where were you around midnight last night?”
“I was home,” Fink cried eagerly. “I can prove it, yet. A alibi, I got. You can ask my wife, you can ask—”
“What kind of an alibi?” Jerry Tracy inquired curtly. It was the first question he had asked.
“Mit cards, I play; mein wife und I. From nine o’clock, maybe nine-thirty, We play rummy. Till eleven. Then I go to bed. The whole evening yet, I am at home. I never leave the building even. You can ask mein wife; you can ask the elevator man; you can ask the night hallman. Positively, I demand you should ask them!”
“I’d rather ask you something,” Tracy murmured.
“You should go right ahead.” Morris Fink beamed shakily at the famous little columnist of the Daily Planet.
“Did you, by any chance,” Jerry inquired, “get up after you went to bed? Get dressed? Walk softly down the staircase that houses your service elevator? Pass quietly through the basement and out by the delivery entrance? Return the same way—perhaps around one-thirty or two o’clock this morning?”
“No. I didn’t. I’m telling you before already what I—”
“Do you have a service elevator, such as I have described, in your apartment building?” Jerry persisted.
“I—I think so. Maybe. I would have to look, y’understand.
”
“One more question, Mr. Fink, if you don’t mind?” Tracy eyed the clothier with the air of a man pumping rifle shots at a distant target. “Are you interested in electric irons? Toasters? Or maybe electric fans?”
Fink’s eyes looked first blank, then cunning.
“Suits and dresses, I sell,” he said warily. “Hardware is merchandise I positively don’t touch.”
“Okey,” Jerry said. “Skip it.”
Inspector Fitzgerald’s blue eyes were boring into Tracy. “Something, Jerry?”
“Nope. Just horsing around. … What are you going to do with Monsieur Fink here—if anything?”
“Lock him up,” the inspector snapped. “Material witness, till I have a look at his service stairs and talk to the people at his apartment house and go through some more of these papers here.”
“Don’t,” Tracy murmured.
“Huh?”
“Don’t lock him up. I’d keep an eye on him, if I were you, Fitz—but I wouldn’t lock him up. That is, not yet.”
“You think he’s a fall guy in this thing?”
“Yes and no,” Tracy said. His smile was dubious and peculiar. “This whole set-up hath a peculiar stink, milord. It will bear looking into and much pondering. In the meantime I don’t think that jail for Monsieur Fink would help us any. At least, not yet.”
“I wish to God,” Fitzgerald growled, “that tipster of yours would come through for you with the real McCoy on this!”
“You and me both,” Jerry sighed. He squirmed suddenly into his featherweight topcoat, made his face suddenly good-looking with a careless snap of his hat-brim.
Morris Fink backed up against Delehanty’s long legs as Tracy gave him a granite-eyed once-over.
“I think you’re a rat, Morris, my lad,” the columnist said at last. “I think you could double-cross with ease and agility. I think you know a lot. Maybe you might even know something about electrical appliances. Or a knife in an annoying partner’s gizzard. … S’long, Fitz!”
Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter Page 31