Mink Is for a Minx

by editor Leo Margulies

  “They traced her back to that hospital and no farther,” Shayne said to Lucy. “They never did find out her real name.”

  “No name at all,” Lucy said. “She was a horrible woman, but at least she should have a name.”

  “Just Steiner,” Shayne said. “Colonel Steiner. I think that’s the way she would have wanted it. She thought of herself as a soldier, I suppose. But she was just a killer, Lucy—just a paid killer.”

  Shayne read the letter again and turned back to his quiet, routine cases.

  PARTNERS OF THE DARK

  by Alson J. Smith

  THE PHONE RANG IN THE office of Captain Mike Casey of the Criminal Investigation Detail, Baltimore Police Department. The Detail had been set up a year earlier to answer newspaper criticism that the Department was soft on crime-syndicate hoodlums. The smartest, toughest cops in town had been pulled into it and Captain Mike Casey, 57, a grizzled, hard-boiled ex-pavement pounder had been called downtown from the North Avenue Station to head it up.

  Casey picked up the phone. “Yeah?” he barked. Then, “Oh, hello, Commissioner,” in a more subdued tone.

  For a full three minutes he listened, participating in the conversation only to the extent of a guarded “yes” or “no” now and then. Finally he sighed and said: “Well, we’ll do our best, Commissioner.”

  As he hung up, Casey said, “Damn!” to nobody in particular.

  He paced the floor for a few minutes, rubbing his chin with his big paw, looking broodingly out at the traffic on Fayette Street. Finally he buzzed his secretary on the intercom. “Alice,” he said, “tell Phil Egan to step in, will you?”

  A few seconds later Lieutenant Phil Egan stuck his head in the door. He grinned. “Hi, Mike. What’s the good word?”

  “Come in and close the door,” rumbled Casey. “And the word isn’t good. It just came down from the Commissioner, and it couldn’t be worse!”

  Phil Egan was a thirty-nine-year-old career cop who had graduated from the University of Maryland with an A.B. in Social Science. He had spent a year studying criminal law at Georgetown Law School and was considered a comer in the Department. He stood 5-11, weighed 180, and was a black-belt man in judo. He had a square, highcheekboned, tanned face with clear light blue eyes. His black hair was beginning to gray at the temples. He had been brought into the C.I.D. from the Detective Division because he was considered smart, tough, and resourceful.

  Egan lit a cigarette. “Don’t tell me they want us to bring in Johnny Unitas and Weeb Eubank just because the Colts blew one to the Steelers Sunday.”

  Casey snorted. “It’s no joke, Phil. It’s those goddam jewelry heists. The Commissioner has decided they’re syndicate jobs, so he’s taking them away from Burglary and dropping them in our laps.”

  Egan whistled. “That is the dirty end of the stick. How come?”

  “He figures that nine successful heists in as many months means syndicate. Either that or the heisters are old pros who are cutting The Mob in for a big percentage. Major-league thieves couldn’t work here for nine months without syndicate okay.”

  Egan took a long drag on his cigarette. “That’s for sure. Nine heists? I thought it was eight.”

  Mike Casey picked up a piece of paper from his desk. “Nine. Forty minutes ago a New York jewelry salesman by the name of Norman Feldman was slugged while getting his sample case out of the trunk of his car in front of the Hearn Jewelry Store on West Saratoga Street. The case had fifteen thousand dollars worth of ice in it. Feldman is in Johns Hopkins Hospital with a concussion.”

  “Any clues?”

  Casey shook his head. “Nobody in the store or on the street saw it, or at least we haven’t located anybody yet who will admit he saw it, and the guy is still unconscious.”

  “Sure puts us on the spot. I’ll bet Burglary is throwing a party over losing this one.”

  Casey dead-panned: “The Commissioner put me on the spot, so I’m putting you on it. These jewelry heists are all yours, Phil. Good hunting.”

  2.

  Back in his own office, the first thing Phil Egan did was to stick pins in a map of the city—one red pin for each of the nine jewelry robberies. None of them, he noted with interest, had been in the downtown Howard Street area. All had taken place in neighborhood shopping districts around the city. The pins formed an irregular circle the center of which was, roughly, the area around North Charles and Mount Royal, near the Pennsylvania Railroad Station.

  As for the M.O., the last heist—the slugging of the jewelry salesman—was the only one involving violence. In all of the others, entrance—to seven jewelry stores and one hotel room—had been gained by simply unlocking doors, walking in at two or three A.M. and either opening safes by clever manipulation of the tumblers or cutting out the locks with a blowtorch and acetylene gas. Two of the former, five of the latter.

  In the hotel room job, the thieves had let themselves into the room of a Broadway and Hollywood starlet who was playing a tryout week in Baltimore and had made off with $20,000 worth of gems with which she had been gifted—as she was able to prove—by various gentlemen.

  Whatever else they were, one of the gang had to be an expert locksmith, and another a first rate boxman. And, Phil Egan would bet his last shamrock, they were holed up in the slightly run-down, semi-bohemian area around North Charles and Mount Royal. There were plenty of third rate hotels there—and a couple of good ones—plus rooming houses, bars, jazz joints. And there were several coffee houses where folk singers twanged guitars or bearded poets read their latest effusions to short-haired girls in toreador pants and dark glasses.

  His first stop, obviously, was the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He phoned. Yes, Mr. Feldman had regained consciousness. Could he talk? Yes, but only for a minute or so.

  It was late October, warm, hazy Indian summer, and Egan left his topcoat in the office. Hell of a day to be tracking down jewel thieves in town. He’d much rather be picking up Muriel after she got out of work at three and driving out towards Westminster to look at the foliage. He thought gloomily: that old line from Gilbert and Sullivan is right. A policeman’s lot is not a happy one.

  He picked up the unmarked black Chevrolet sedan that he usually used from the police garage on Gay Street and headed north for the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Well, he thought philosophically, he would see Muriel that night, and damn the iridescent foliage. They’d make their own colors in their own fashion.

  A policeman was seated outside Feldman’s room. He recognized Egan and said: “Hello, Lieutenant. Our boy is awake, but he’s got a flying saucer for a head.”

  Egan laughed shortly and went on in. A middle-aged nurse was sitting beside the bed, reading a magazine. The jewelry salesman’s head was swathed in bandages. He had his eyes closed and the whiteness of his pallor emphasized the dark lines of his eyebrows. He was a rather thin man of about thirty-five, and his horn-rimmed glasses with one cracked lense were on the bedside table.

  “Lieutenant Egan, Police Department,” he told the nurse crisply. Feldman heard him and slowly opened his eyes, which were brown and bloodshot.

  “Sorry about this, Mr. Feldman. Feel like talking?” The man smiled wanly and shook his head.

  “Well, I understand,” Egan said soothingly. “Just a couple of routine questions for now. Did you see the men who sapped you?”

  Feldman whispered: “Not very well. Happened too fast. One was kind of fat.”

  “How many were there?”

  “Three or four—I’m not sure.”

  “Did they have a car?” Phil Egan asked.

  “Yes, it was parked right behind me.”

  “What make?”

  “I think a Plymouth, about a fifty-six.”

  “What color?”

  “Black.”

  “Did you notice the license number?”

  Feldman shook his head. “Maryland plates,” he whispered. He closed his eyes wearily.

  The nurse looked reprovingly at Egan. He said: “Well, that’
s all for now. Thanks, Mr. Feldman.”

  The man didn’t open his eyes.

  A week later Feldman was out of the hospital and able to look through the mug books at Headquarters. He had seen his assailants briefly, but not well enough to make positive identification. The fat man he thought he might be able to identify.

  He picked out four photos that might possibly be those of the men who had slugged him, including that of a fat-faced, heavy-set local thug named George “Binky” Byers, 28, who had fallen several times for petty larceny and simple assault. A very unlikely jewel thief, but Phil Egan sent Detective Sergeant Gus Anderson out to pick him up for questioning.

  Byers’ last known address was a rooming house on Franklin Street. Anderson came back without him. He wasn’t there, had left no forwarding address, and nobody in that transient neighborhood knew where he had gone. He hadn’t been seen around the bars in over a year.

  A few days later Egan, getting nowhere in his investigation of the jewelry heists, had dinner with Muriel Evans, in her three-room apartment on Mount Vernon Place. Muriel was Goucher ’54, which made her about twenty-nine. She was a blue-eyed, honey-haired blonde, about 5-6 in height, and with other and even more impressive statistics.

  She was Travel Editor of the Baltimore Sun, and she had marriage in the back—and sometimes in the front—of her mind. She’d been Phil’s girl for three years, ever since they’d met at a posh party thrown by another Goucher girl whom Egan had known ever since his Georgetown Law School days.

  Muriel was something to look at, in a clinging blue housecoat and not much else. “How’s my favorite cop?” she murmured, pressing against him and turning her face up for his kiss. It lasted a long time.

  “Yum,” he said finally, still holding her in his arms. “What’s cooking?”

  “Me,” she said. “Also shrimp chop suey with water chestnuts, imported all the way from Doo Far’s carry-out around the corner on Charles Street.”

  “Sounds great,” he said, letting her go.

  She pointed to a tea tray with bottles, a jar of olives, a bucket of ice cubes, and cocktail glasses on it. “Be a good little Hawkshaw and mix us some martinis while I check the food,” she called out as she went into the tiny kitchen.

  It was a cozy apartment. Wall-to-wall deep green carpeting, three Van Gogh reproductions on the walls, glass-topped coffee table in front of the fireplace, shiny black log scuttle, low bookcases, a handsome combination television, FM radio, and hi-fi, a recordholder, his picture and one of her mother and father on the mantle. The furniture was gray, chic, comfortable. He mixed the martinis, slumped into an easy chair, and turned on the television to catch the six o’clock news.

  The news was tiresome. Khrushchev might come to the UN. Cuba was complaining about U.S. violation of her air space around Guantanamo. There was a new revolution in Costa Rica. Richard Burton had been seen with his wife in Switzerland. The Colts were in good condition for their game with the Packers at Green Bay Sunday. And the police were still baffled by the series of sensational jewel robberies that had netted the thieves a quarter of a million dollars.

  He grimaced at that and turned off the set.

  Muriel came back into the living room. “Be a few minutes yet,” she said. She sipped her martini, sitting on the floor in front of him, putting one hand comfortingly—if a bit excitingly—on his knee. He ran his fingers through her honey-colored hair.

  “How are you doing with your jewel robbers?” she asked.

  “Not so good,” he replied glumly. “They’re ruining my disposition. Also my love life.”

  She looked at him. “I think that involves me. Please elucidate, Charlie Chan.”

  He drained his martini and held out the olive to her. “I can’t stay long after we eat. Got to check The Block on this damned jewelry thing.”

  She pouted. “Can’t it wait? I thought we’d eat, catch the new Italian movie at the Art, and then come back here for an orgy.”

  Egan shook his head. “Can’t wait, even though I could use a good orgy. But give me a rain check.”

  She sighed. “Sure. All I do these days is hand out rain checks. If this keeps up I’ll take out after those jewelry heisters myself.”

  He laughed shortly. “You’re a cinch to do better than we’re doing.”

  3.

  “The Block,” as it was known all up and down the east coast, was really three blocks on East Baltimore Street, and it was a garish tenderloin replete with bars, B-girls, burlesque shows, night clubs, tattoo parlors, third-rate hotels, all-night movies, and gospel missions. You could get any thing there—a girl, dirty pictures, a beer, a crabcake, a broken head, a heroin fix. It was the last of its kind—an organized-to-the-hilt, syndicate-controlled, Barbary Coast.

  But its raffish people—strippers, bartenders, doormen, tattoo artists, men’s room attendants, masters of ceremonies, bookies, B-girls, bouncers—knew everything that went on in the underworld. They were privy to all the action in town. The Baltimore Police Department leaned heavily on its “informants” in The Block.

  The unmarked black Chevie sedan prowled slowly east on Baltimore Street towards this tawdry playground. Phil Egan, full of chop suey, slumped behind the wheel, wishing to hell he was back at Muriel’s apartment, with Muriel in his arms, listening to Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall on the hi-fi.

  He parked the Chevie in front of Biggy’s Bar on Commerce Street, just off The Block. Biggy’s was near the Gayety Burlesque stagedoor, and, although it advertised itself as a stag bar, strippers from the theatre hung out there along with musicians, stagehands, and comedians.

  The show was on in the Gayety so there was only one customer in the bar. The bartender was a fairly attractive girl of about twenty-seven who sat moodily smoking a cigarette behind the polished mahogany. The lone customer was studying the autographed photos of the strippers above the bar mirror.

  The bar-doll—that’s what they call lady bartenders in Baltimore—looked up. “Egan,” she said. “What you-all doin’ down heah tonight?” She had all of the Blue Ridge Mountains in her voice. She was one of his people.

  “Hello, Marge,” he said. “How’s business?”

  She flicked the ashes from her cigarette. “Reckon it’ll pick up when the show breaks. At least, it usually does.”

  In a low voice Egan said: “You get anything on that last jewelry heist?”

  “The one abaht a week ago? Wheah that salesman got hisself slugged?”

  He nodded.

  “Uh-uh.”

  He took four photos from his pocket and a ten dollar bill from his wallet and held them out to the girl. “You make any of these?”

  She studied the four mug shots that the salesman had picked out as possibles. “Naw,” she said finally. “Ah kain’t make a one of ’em.” She looked wistfully at the bill folded between his fingers.

  He sighed and put the pictures back in his pocket and the bill in his wallet. “Get anything, call me quick.”

  “Ah’ll do that, Egan.”

  That was the way it went all night. The people hadn’t gotten a single rumble on the jewelry heists. Snaps O’Toole, who sold girlie magazines and dirty pictures, Loretta, the plump B-girl at the Tampico Club, Ferdy, the bookie at the newsstand on the corner of East Baltimore and Gay Streets, Big Joe, the bouncer at the Troc Sho-Bar—all looked longingly at the ten-spot and regretfully admitted that they hadn’t gotten a thing on the jewelry capers and couldn’t make a mother’s son of the mug shots. It was one A.M. and the last shows were going on in all The Block clubs. He decided to try one more informant—Charmaine, a stripper at the Three O’Clock Club. Her real name was Haydee Melendez and she was a Cuban refugee.

  Egan really liked Haydee, who supported her mother and three younger sisters by taking off her clothes for a bunch of drunks twice a night, wheedling drinks for a percentage, acting as a police stoolie, and doing whatever else was necessary to pay the rent for three buggy tenement rooms on Paca Street and some groceries from the s
upermarket.

  The Three O’Clock Club was the usual Baltimore show spot. There was a horseshoe-shaped bar enclosing a stage and runway, and a five-piece band played behind a curtain at the open end of the horseshoe.

  There were maybe fifteen men scattered about the bar, most of them carefully nursing a single bottle of beer. Three bartenders, a girl and two men, slouched with their backs to the stage, indifferent to the feigned ecstasies of the undulating peelers.

  Phil Egan found a place at the bar. He didn’t see Haydee anywhere. He said to the girl bartender: “Bourbon and water. Charmaine working tonight?”

  “Yeah,” the bar-doll said languidly. “She’s back stage gettin’ dressed. She’s on next.”

  The girl who was working bumped a final sinuous bump, pulled the pasties from her breasts and threw them to the beer-drinkers, yanked down her transparent panties to give the crowd a completely untrammeled look at her curvacious posterior, and exited to scattered applause.

  Then Charmaine came on. She was twenty, blackhaired, brown-eyed, full-figured, with a coffee and cream complexion. She worked strong—she had to; the strong workers were always in demand, and she couldn’t afford long layoffs. In no time at all she was out of her sequin-studded silver dress, and working in a blue strobolite to bring out the full effect of the man’s hands outlined in orange on her buttocks.

  She saw Phil Egan and nodded in recognition, but otherwise ignored him as she stripped her brassiere and panties and writhed on the stage in simulated passion. She got a big hand from the beer-drinkers.

  She came from backstage wearing the same sequin-studded silver dress she had worn at the beginning of her act.

  “’Allo Eegan,” she said, smiling a gold-toothed smile. “’Ow you like me tonight?”

  “You’re hotter than three feet inside a furnace,” he said, taking her light brown hand in his. Then in a lower voice: “Let’s talk for a minute.”