by Craig Rice
Then O’Mara got his second wind. He began to take the initiative. Slowly he began to back Tony into the concession front. Up the wooden stairs Tony backed, his fists flailing, O’Mara pressing insistently below him, doggedly throwing wild punches, grunting, squealing, crying.
Back, back Tony reeled, O’Mara forcing him with a hail of blows.
Without knowing where he was going, Tony backed into the enormous whirling barrel in the court of the concession. Merry-makers had to stagger through it as the last punishment in the Toonerville fun house.
O’Mara pressed forward with him.
Suddenly, as the barrel turned under his feet, Tony lost his footing and went crashing to its floor. O’Mara lunged for him, lost his balance, and went smashing down on Tony. The barrel continued to turn, churning the struggling men in it like inanimate dummies.
They managed to trip and stumble still farther back, until they had reached the rear opening of the barrel. Tony stepped back, his feet landing on the solid footing of the platform on which the barrel had been built. O’Mara stumbled forward after him.
Tony saw O’Mara loom up in front of him and he relaxed for the briefest fraction of a second. Then, gathering all his remaining strength, he swung his right squarely into the onrushing face. It landed with a smacking thud. O’Mara crashed back into the whirling barrel.
For a split second, Tony stared at the fallen O’Mara. Just long enough to see the knife handle that protruded between his shoulder blades. Then he felt himself falling backward against the flimsy railing of the platform and felt it giving under his weight. He grasped desperately for support, but his energy had been completely sapped by the exertion of his last blow. His knees buckled under him. He heard the sound of splintering wood as he fell into the darkness.
The crowd watched the barrel with fascinated horror, as what looked now like a big rag doll flipped over and over, carried up and down in the whirling motion of the machine.
Then something suddenly went wrong with the Toonerville Wurlitzer, right in the middle of a tune. The mechanical drum rat-a-panned off the beat. The trumpet blared in discordant minors. The piano harped only on two notes. Then, one by one, each instrument became silent.
Shortly, the organ went dead completely.
Chapter Twenty-Two
DRAGNET
Word of the fight filtered all the way down to the Pier entrance, around the Dunk the Girl concession, and traveled up and down the boardwalk.
Someone turned in a riot call to the police.
The New York hoodlum, standing in the hotel lobby, heard mention of the fight from a couple of girls entering the hotel.
“It’s Tony Webb,” he heard one of them say.
The hoodlum shuffled painfully out of the lobby into the street and crossed under the Pier arch.
He made sure his gun was in his coat pocket.
Art Smith arrived at the Pier about 7:15.
Immediately he found himself in a mob of people surging into the Pier, excitedly talking about the gang fight that was supposed to be roaring up ahead.
Smith caught the name of Tony Webb.
He pushed forward, elbowing his way among the throng.
Mamie had also heard of the fight. But she remained in her fortune-telling cubbyhole, reading the cards.
Two rivulets of tears rolled down her cheeks.
When Tony came to, he pulled himself up from the ground and stumbled away, skirting the foundation of the main fun house in the Toonerville concession. Somewhere in the back of his tired brain, he remembered a temporary hide-out. He found it shortly: a small, boxlike hole in the cement foundation housing the electric light and water meters. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled into it, his body filling it almost completely.
Inside, he leaned back and indulged in a moment’s rest. His breath still came from his mouth and nose in heavy, labored gasps; his body ached in every muscle. His right eye was bloodshot and sunk deep in a bed of bruised and purple flesh. He was completely exhausted. Physically he was unconscious, but mentally a small portion of his brain still remained alive as he listened to the hum of distant, excited voices.
Art Smith came puffing up the Pier, pushing his way through the milling crowd. Nobody seemed to know what had happened. A couple of guys had gotten into a terrific fight and had disappeared. That was all. It had been a damn good fight while it had lasted. But it was all over now.
The crowd began to disperse. Smith looked around.
He gasped when he saw Ellen seated on Amby’s stool.
He rushed over to her. She was crying, weeping silently into her cupped hands. Smith smothered an urge to put his arms around her and comfort her. But he remembered O’Mara’s dossier. He remembered McGurn.
When Ellen raised her face from her hands and saw Smith standing before her, she smiled weakly at him.
“It was terrible!” she said. “I thought Tony would kill O’Mara.”
Smith scowled. “Then it was Jack O’Mara he fought?”
Ellen nodded her head. “He came up while Amby was doing my picture again. Then he punched Tony and—”
“I don’t get it,” Smith interrupted. “Why should Amby be doing your picture again?”
She hesitated a moment. “I asked him to. I thought it would be a way to—get acquainted with him.” She frowned, an almost confused frown. “I thought maybe he did know what happened—that night. That maybe he’d tell me.”
This time Smith frowned. “How did you expect to talk with him? You talk dee-dee?”
“A little,” Ellen said. “My aunt was deaf and dumb, and I learned from her.”
Smith sighed. He didn’t believe in the aunt, but he knew that a lot of carnies and con artists learned the talk in order to converse secretly while a crowd was around.
A uniformed cop broke into his thoughts.
“You’re Lieutenant Smith, aren’t you?” he said.
Smith nodded. “Homicide,” he said.
“We’ve got something for you,” the officer said. He started off for the Toonerville concession across the street. Smith took Ellen’s arm and followed.
“You’d better stay with me,” Smith told her. “Tony may still be around.”
They followed the man to the bottom of the platform which supported the barrel in front of Toonerville. A group of uniformed policemen was standing around a crumpled-up figure.
For a fleeting second Smith thought it was Tony. He saw a pool of blood around the body.
Then, in the beam of a pocket flashlight that one of the coppers was playing over the body, Smith recognized O’Mara.
He was dead, all right.
A kitchen knife still protruded from his back. No doubt about it. It was the same sort of knife that had killed McGurn.
A glow of pleasure went through him. He knew he was a heel for feeling that way. But the knife meant one thing. Tony had killed O’Mara and used the same kind of knife with which McGurn had been killed. Tony had killed them both.
Ellen stood at his side, looking down at the body of the dead cop. Smith patted her arm. She was innocent, he thought. She really had been nothing but an innocent bystander.
He deliberately chose to forget about her association with McGurn.
Then he went into action. “The killer’s still loose somewhere on the Pier,” he told the coppers. “I want a couple of you to run back to the entrance. One of you get on the phone for more men. The other keep guard at the entrance. Don’t let anyone get out without a check-up. I’ll be down there soon to help.”
Two of the cops started off. Smith bent over the body to examine it more closely. He felt someone tug at his elbow. He turned and straightened up. It was little Amby.
“What do you want?” Smith said.
Amby started to talk to him with his fingers.
“I’m sorry,” Smith said, “but I’m too busy now to see you.”
An expression of anguish spread over Amby’s face.
He tried desperately to tal
k. But only a series of pitiful squeaks came from his drooling lips. He tugged at Smith’s arm as though to drag him away. But Smith pulled his arm out of the little artist’s grasp.
“I’m sorry,” he said curtly. He gestured to him to get going, then turned to one of the cops.
“Will you take this guy out of my hair? He’s bothering me!”
The burly cop grabbed hold of Amby and shoved him away from Smith in the direction of the street. Amby tried to hold back, kicking and struggling and spitting out squeaky whimpers. The copper dumped him out on the street some distance away from the Toonerville concession.
“Lay off!” the copper warned him.
Amby’s eyes smoldered. Then he slunk away.
About five hundred men, women, and children milled around at the entrance of the Pier.
Standing with a couple of other plain-clothes men, Smith patiently examined each person and nodded his approval for them to be permitted to leave.
He had already dispatched two police motorboats with orders to circle the waters surrounding the Pier continuously, in case Tony tried to escape by swimming to the beach. A cordon of cops had been thrown around the entire Pier. Now, with the process of thorough sifting, followed afterward by a detailed search of every inch of the Pier, he would flush his quarry. He was sure of that. Just as sure as he was that somewhere on the Pier Tony was hiding, waiting for his chance to escape.
One thing bothered him. He was enough of a copper to realize that he was being impelled not so much by his desire to nab a murderer, especially the killer of a fellow member of the Force. No, he knew what his real motive was. To absolve Ellen completely.
Absent-mindedly, as he scrutinized the faces of the people filing through the line of cops, Smith’s fingers went down to the buttons of his coat. One of them was missing. A jagged tear in the cloth showed where it had been pulled off. Smith smiled to himself when he looked down at the tear.
There would be another button on it soon, he knew.
Tony’s flesh was young. In spite of the beating he had taken and the exhaustion that had set in, his body had recovered its strength a short while after he had crawled into the meter hole. But he remained in his hide-out a little longer, listening intently to the sounds that filtered in from the outside.
First he heard the gradual subsiding of the roar of the crowds. They’re shagging them out of the Pier, he thought. When the roar was gone completely and the loudspeakers of the various concessions closed down, he knew that the Pier was deserted of all customers. What were the police doing? They must have found O’Mara’s body by this time. Were they going to make a search of the Pier, or did they think he had already escaped?
The ocean? He could jump off the Pier and swim for the beach. But he could hear the sounds of those motor-boats circling constantly around the Pier. A police patrol, that indicated. He strained his ears and heard the motor chug-chug approaching again from the distance. That meant they still thought he was hiding out on the Pier. They’d soon be around poking into every possible hole for him. If only the hole was covered. That wouldn’t be so bad. But all a cop had to do was see the hole, flash his light, and there he was.
No, he wouldn’t be there.
The hole was too small for him to turn around in, so he began slowly to push himself out of it feet first. The action made his stiffened muscles ache and twinge with pain. But he continued to push out, listening intently all the while. When he had edged himself completely out, he stood up and groaned as his muscles protested the violent twinges.
Mamie or any of the other carnies would help him. But maybe they, too, had been shagged out by the cops. He decided to chance it and take a gander around the corner of the Toonerville concession foundation. Slowly, hugging the cement wall, he edged along until he came to the corner of the building. He looked around the corner where the big barrel rolled. It had been stopped. Nobody was there. Even O’Mara’s body had been taken away.
He listened again for footsteps. None came. He stepped away from the protection of the wall and ducked into the clear and then under the barrel platform. A pool of clotted blood still remained to show where the body had lain.
If he could get to that tool shed behind the Diving-Bell, he thought. Where he had hid out little Amby. Thoughts of Amby brought back conjectures as to what the little artist had tried to tell him. About Ellen. Amby had seen something.
Maybe Amby was still in the shed? It was big enough to hide both. No one could ever find it. Especially those dumb cops.
A pistol shot broke into his thoughts.
Startled, he looked down the street. A couple of coppers had spotted him.
“There he is!” one of them shouted.
Tony ducked and ran back to the passageway behind the concession. There was a back window he could open.
A grin lit up his face.
He thought of a perfect place to hide.
They’d never find him.
Chapter Twenty-Three
SHARK FOOD
Starting from the Pier arch, Smith and his men combed every inch of the Pier. He had given orders that the Pier was to be cleared of all people except the owners of the concessions.
The Race Track concession was their first stop. It revealed nothing, not even in a little cubbyhole behind the track board where Smith suspected the races were fixed when necessary. He had to glower disapprovingly at one of the cops who became overly interested in the pin-game devices that regulated the mechanical horses.
The High-Boy ride was next. Smith sent a detail over the route of the ride to make sure Tony wasn’t hiding in the towering trestles. He even poked into the big metal box that housed the machinery. But no sign of Tony.
Doggedly the procession continued up the street, going through every inch of each concession. The Screenland girl-show; the Fun House with its laughing papier-mâché woman overhead, where a couple of his men got ludicrously lost in the mirror maze; the Bumpmobile where Smith and his men poked around in every car; the hot-dog stands and the French-fries stands; Mamie’s fortune-telling cubicle, where Mamie still was hunched over her table reading the cards and weeping at the same time.
Smith was very thorough in her place, knocking at the walls and floor for false-front soundings, remembering that she had been Tony’s alibi for McGurn’s murder.
“Where’s Tony?” he demanded of her.
Mamie looked up at him and shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “Go away. Don’t bother me.”
“You knew where he was the last time he killed a man.”
“Who’s he supposed to have killed now?” she asked wearily.
“One of my men.” He told her of the knife that had been found on O’Mara’s body. “Don’t leave your place,” he warned her as he started to go. “I want to ask you a little more about that alibi you came up with for Tony.”
He left Mamie still crying and reading her cards.
Smith and his men continued up the street. On past the Penny Arcade, where Smith sent a detail of men in to search each machine, under and around each miniature bowling-alley. As he waited for them to return, Smith looked idly into the darkened Gorilla’s Bride exhibit. It was a big glass-fronted box about ten feet square. In it was an enormous stuffed gorilla holding a model of a woman in one arm and grabbing for another naked woman with his other arm. Behind the gorilla, in lush tropical vegetation, were the heads of various natives peering out at the scene. A printed card at the side told the story of an African tribal legend in which a gorilla had to be given two virgins of the tribe each year to appease his lust. If you put a nickel in the slot, you could see the gorilla raise his free arm slowly and grab off the other virgin.
Smith looked at the exhibit almost unseeingly, wondering who would be sucker enough to waste a nickel on it and, at the same time, stifling a desire to take a nickel out of his pocket to see how the damn-fool thing actually worked.
He had his virgin, he thought. Virgin? Well, no! But that was all in the past. This
was all in the past. This was a modern age. What the hell!
He reflected suddenly that, in spite of O’Mara’s dossier on her, he knew damned little about Ellen.
At that moment he felt a hand on his arm. He wheeled around.
“Ellen!”
“I lost you in the crowd. And I didn’t know where to look for you.”
He patted her hand. “Stay close to me. Don’t get lost again.”
The detail came out of the Arcade, shaking their heads despairingly. Smith started off for the Merry-Go-Round, next on the list. The coppers followed after him. Ellen trailed a short distance behind.
Through the fly-specked window of the Gorilla’s Bride exhibit, through which Smith had just been peering, Tony stared after Ellen and itched to pull out his gun. She would have made a perfect target. Tony had stationed himself in the center of the wax-model natives in the tangled, jungle foliage background. When Smith had looked into the box, Tony was certain he was a goner. He was sure Smith could hear his heart pounding outside the box.
When Ellen and the cops passed out of view, Tony decided to remain in the box for a while. No telling how many coppers were still around or waiting for him to show up at the entrance.
He waited for a while holding himself as stiff as possible, breathing as lightly as he could.
Finally he backed away and opened the rear door. He slid out of the box and cut back to the rear of the Penny Arcade to the unlocked window through which he had previously crawled.
By the time Smith reached the Diving-Bell concession, he had become a little bored with the search. But he remembered his Police Manual. The routine search, it said, should never be dismissed summarily. The art of being a good policeman is the art of taking infinite pains.
Smith walked up the wooden stairs leading to the yellow steel cylinder. There was the entire Chute-the-Chutes ride still to go over, he thought dejectedly. It was a big layout with a lot of space in which a guy could hide. That long, dark tunnel, for instance, through which the boats bumped before going up on the elevator.