The Long escape

by Dodge, David, 1910-1974

  Then nothing. Nothing at all.

  It had started to rain again. I could feel drops i against a cheek and my hair and on the back of one hand. I Small drops and cool, with an uneven breeze blowing them in [; against me. . . .

  1 I opened my eyes slowly and looked along a stretch of ' shining black asphalt that started somewhere in the neighborhood of my left ear and went on out into infinity. The heavy throbbing I could hear must have been my heart. I wondered fuzzily how it had managed to get shoved up into the back of my head. I decided after a while that the view wasn't really exceptional and that I should get up and go about my business.

  By the time I managed to roll over and get one knee under me, it was time to sleep some more. I hung there like a dog with the colic and swung my head back and forth. Give me a full moon, I thought, and I'll bay at it.

  I pushed hard against the pavement with both palms . . . and came up on my feet.

  Wirtz's wrecked coupe was still half over the curb, right in front of me. And a lucky thing. By grabbing the rear fender I was able to keep the street away from my face.

  After I stood there a while, my fingers chewing the fender md the rain beating against my head, I felt strong enough to ift my arm and look at the strap watch. Two-twelve. An lour and twenty-five minutes since I picked Wirtz up at the parage. Quite a guy—Wirtz. I had certainly scared him. I won-

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  derecl what it was he had hit me with. And then I recalled that flickering shadow from behind the car. Wirtz wasn't the one who had sapped me.

  What had happened to Wirtz ?

  I turned around . . . and the question was answered. The tall slender man in the gray topcoat lay flat on his back in the center of the street, his head only inches from the Plymouth's left front wheel, his arms flung wide in a last gesture of defiance. A hell of a lot of good being defiant had done him. Even with little light and my eyes bleary from shock I could see he was dead.

  But I went over there anyway. It took some doing and my stomach tried twice to pole-vault up behind my sternum. But I made it. I'll always be proud of that.

  Four bullet holes, spaced untidily between his right shoulder and his left thigh. One through the chest and one in the belly. The one in his chest had either pierced his heart or come very close to it, judging from the position of the hole and lack of blood around it.

  Not good shooting, but effective just the same. Panic behind the trigger but the bullets didn't care. End of the trail for Mr. Wirtz. ''Good morning, Mr. Smith. Do you have a book for me to read ?"

  I walked slowly to the corner and looked at the words on a signpost. Comer of Central Avenue and Dakin Street. A long way from where the chase had started. But not too far to discourage the boys who would want to hear about it.

  I went back to my car and set out to find a phone.

  I sat behind the wheel of the Plymouth and watched rain-coated men from three cars go over the street and its parkways with pocket torches while two police photographers set oft" flashbulbs that lit up the night like an electrical storm.

  HALO FOR SATAN 157

  The body still spreadeagled the pavement and the wrecked Chewy sagged against the cottonwood hke an old drunk.

  It was three-forty-five in the morning. The rain had

  stopped again to catch its breath, but there was still a chill

  mist hanging in the air. I slumped deeper in the seat and

  I massaged the back of my head with gentle fingers. Even

  gentle fingers felt like a flame-tipped rake. The second time

  i in less than thirty-six hours. How long could a head last?

  At four-ten a uniform man from an Austin district prowl

  car opened my door, "Time to go, mister," he said in a flat

  unfriendly voice. "I'll ride along to make sure you don't get

  lost."

  "Well, wipe your feet before you put them in here." He gave me a blank glare and climbed in next to me, grunting a little. I started the motor and let out the clutch. Two of the other cars were already out of sight; the third was probably waiting for the meat wagon. As I made the turn, I a tow truck came around the corner, its hoist chains rattling. What with the hour and clear streets all the way, I made very good time. But when I finished parking around the cor-; ner from the Austin station and went in, the boys from Central Homicide were waiting for me. ! We went along a narrow corridor with splotched brown walls and into a fair-sized oblong room where there were !i straight-backed chairs, a flat-topped pine table with cigarette 1 burns around its edges, and chill bare walls the same ugly

  I color as those outside. Hard white light streamed down from ji two inverted bowls of frosted glass, each on three brass chains (from the ceiling.

  They let me sit down on one of the chairs, probably because

  II looked as bad as I felt. The man in charge was Lieutenant {Overmire, just as it had been exactly twenty-four hours before. A different station house, a different room, a different

  body to talk about. But I was still catching for the losing team.

  Overmire was still lean, still soft-spoken, I thought his dark hair seemed a little grayer at the temples, but that couldn't have been true. He had on the same suit and maybe the same shirt, but this time the bow tie was a dark green.

  One other change: where yesterday his eyes had been chill, today they were colder than the ice cubes in Connie Ben-brook's Scotch.

  He swung a leg over one corner of the table and bent forward far enough to let me see his eyes, while the three men with him found chairs somewhere behind me. "Tell me about it, Pine."

  "It goes along with yesterday's story. Lieutenant. Only this time I found Wirtz. I tailed him, hoping to locate his cave. He made me and tried to throw me off with some fancy driving. He tried too hard and smashed a wheel. I hate to tell you the finish because you're not going to believe it."

  "Try me."

  "I was going to bring him in. To Headquarters."

  "What detained you?"

  ^T was hit on the head."

  ^'By Wirtz?"

  "No. By whoever shot him. The shooting came after I was hit."

  "Who pulled the trigger ?"

  "I don't know. I was hit from behind."

  ^'Any idea who could have done it?"

  "Not enough of an idea to talk out loud about."

  "Still dealing them from your hip pocket, is that it ?"

  "No, Lieutenant." I was sweating now. "I haven't a thing that's solid enough to build a dream castle on."

  "Let me be the judge of that."

  I didn't say anything.

  Overmire clasped his hands over a bent knee and rocked himself gently, still cold in the eyes. "Three deaths, Pine. By violence. Murders, my friend. And w^ith you right in the middle of every one of the three."

  I didn't say anything—again.

  "I'm going to lock you up. Pine. I'm going to hold you until I get out of you the name that goes with this idea of yours. Now, tell me I can't get away with it."

  More silence. Abruptly he got off the desk corner, went over to the door and out. I yawned, getting a thrust of pain through my battered head. One of the men behind me cleared his throat with a harsh sound and I jumped, adding to the pain.

  The door opened and Lieutenant Overmire was with us

  again, carrying a bunched white cloth which sagged in the

  middle. He put it down on the table and turned back its cor-

  : ners, revealing a thin gold-filled cigarette case and lighter to

  ■ match, an open-faced watch in what appeared to be platinum,

  keys on a chain, a brown leather wallet, a handkerchief with

  a few smears of blood on it, three business-size envelopes with

  neatly slit edges, and the ball-point pen I had come across

  while frisking Wirtz for a gun.

  ' Overmire dragged a chair around behind the table, facing me, and began to finger through the collection, his face expressionless. None of the stu
ff held him for long until he came to the envelopes and wallet. He took his time about going through them.

  Finally he shoved everything aside and leaned his elbows on the table and looked at me over locked fingers. "Tonight was the first time you met Wirtz?"

  "Yeah."

  "Where did you first pick him up?"

  In a few words I told him about remembering Wirtz's car and how I had gone about locating it. He nodded thoughtfully a time or two when I finished.

  "Another thing you didn't tell us. I'm surprised at you, Pine. I really am."

  "Well, don't be," I said, beginning to get angry. "My job was to find Wirtz and I was working at it. You suspected him of being a killer but that doesn't mean he was one. I'm not working for you boys; I wasn't then and I'm not now. I have to do things the way I think they should be done. I don't break any laws, but I'm not a Department pigeon, either."

  I sounded a little scared, even to my own ears.

  He sighed. The detective business was a hard job for him, even though he was good at it. He said, "Why did he try to run away from you?"

  "Because he had something hidden away that other people wanted. He thought I was one of them."

  "After he piled up his car, you talked with him?",

  "Only a few words."

  "What about?" k

  "I told him who I was, that the Bishop wanted to know why he had failed to keep his original appointment. I asked where he'd been hiding out and where was the manuscript. I didn't get any answers."

  "What else?"

  "Nothing else. I pointed my gun at him and said to get in my car. We started over there and the roof fell in. Did you find my gun?"

  "There was an unfired .38 under his body." He stood up and came around the desk and bent down until his face was 1 close to mine, his gray eyes colder than ever. "You're lying to me, Pine. Not only lying but being clumsy about it. Did you honestly think it would stay covered up or are you just

  playing for time, hoping to get out of here long enough to finish the job you were hired to do?"

  I sat there and looked back at him and said nothing at all.

  He said heavily, "Are you going to insist that you didn't know the dead man's name was Myles Benbrook?"

  The complete astonishment in my expression was his answer. Some of the frostiness left his eyes and he said, "You really didn't know that, did you?" in an almost gentle voice. He straightened and leaned back against the table.

  "No," I said. "I didn't know it. I'm not sure I know it now."

  "When you talked to him, did he tell you his name was Wirtz?"

  "Not in so many words, no. He was driving Wirtz's car, his description fitted the very weak and very general one I had of Wirtz, and our conversation was along lines only Wirtz could have understood. I called him Wirtz; not to have called him that would have been like a man asking his wife if she was married."

  Overmire reached around and picked up the leather wallet. "This came out of the'dead man's pocket. Pine. Filled i|i with all kinds of identification in the name of Myles Ben-brook, including a driver's license complete with picture."

  He flopped the wallet up and down on the back of his left hand. "I called his home out on Sheridan Road and talked to his wife. She said Benbrook has been missing for the last four days. I sent a car out to pick her up."

  I said, "Then you must have known he was Benbrook before going through that business of looking through his papers just now."

  The phone on the table rang once. He put down the wallet and took up the receiver. "Overmire."

  He listened, said, "Yes," listened some more and said,

  "Bring her in here." He hung up slowly and raised his eyebrows at me. "The wife identified him. Let's hear what she has to say."

  A harness cop opened the door and Constance Benbrook, in lusterless black silk, a w-hite spring coat over one arm, came in. There was grief in her face, but not a great deal of grief. Her face seemed whiter than I last remembered it, and in tlic harsh glare of light from overhead I saw a wrinkle or two that were new to me but not to her.

  Overmire had introduced himself with the gravity the situation called for and she was seated before she saw me as something more than just another pair of pants. Surprise widened her brown eyes and she said, "You!" almost shrilly.

  Overmire's neck was stiff as a pointer's. "So you two know each other." His tone said he was going to make-something of it.

  I said, "Mrs. Benbrook hired me to find her husband."

  In the sudden brittle silence I took out my cigarettes and lighted one. Lieutenant Overmire waited until I blew out the match and dropped it on the floor. A lot of thoughts were milling around behind those cold eyes.

  "And you found him, I see," he said at last. "I must really be slipping. I believed your little act when I threw Ben-brook's name at you. Never again. Pine."

  I said, "Stop sounding like I deflowered you, for Chrisakes. Mrs. Benbrook called on me later the same day I went to work for Bishop McManus. She'd seen my name in the paper as the one who found Post's body in Wirtz's room, Benbrook was an old friend of Wirtz's and he disappeared the same day. The answer to why is simple: he found Wirtz a hideout until an opportunity came to get the manuscript to the Bishop. Hotels or rooming houses wouldn't do, so he hid him out in a private home.

  "I'll go a ways further, while I'm at it. Up until you showed me Benbrook was the latest corpse, instead of Wirtz, I had me a theory. I would have given six, two and even that Myles Benbrook was the killer of Willie Post and Sergeant Frank Tinney."

  "You filthy, filthy liar!" Constance Benbrook was out of her chair, all the loveliness gone from her face, her hands red-tipped claws. "I'll—I'll "

  Overmire waved her back to her chair, "Finish it up, Pine."

  "He wanted that manuscript," I said. "These two men weren't such great friends that Benbrook would be willing to risk an accessory rap on friendship alone. Take that motivation away from him and greed is the only one left. Wirtz had told him when he, Wirtz, intended to make his first call on the Bishop. In Wirtz's absence from the room on Erie Street, Benbrook went there to hunt for the manuscript. Post walked in on him and got himself knifed."

  "Why did Post walk in there in the first place?"

  "To get the manuscript himself. It must be clear to you by now that that hunk of paper, or whatever it is, is very valuable. Crooks can smell out valuables like that further than a cop can smell free drinks."

  Overmire flushed, started to yell at me, coughed instead and said, "How do you tie Tinney's murder to Benbrook?"

  "Both men died with a toothpick through the heart, Con--sidering everything else, it means the same killer did both jobs. When Wirtz called the Bishop, he said, during the conversation, there was only one man in Chicago he trusted and he was beginning to have his doubts about that one. He must have meant Benbrook; there's no other way to figure it.

  "Wirtz-arranges to meet me at a certain street corner. To Benbrook, delivery of the manuscript to me means his chance

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  of getting: it himself is gone. Wirtz, we'll say—and there are excellent reasons for saying it—Wirtz doesn't have the script with him when he goes out to meet me. Benbrook follows him, expecting to see Wirtz take me to where it is hidden. But instead of me showing up, a policeman—Tinney—steps out of the shadows and tells Wirtz he's under arrest. Actually, I suppose, Tinney had located Wirtz's hide-out, wasn't sure Wirtz was inside and waited until the guy came out to nab him. When Tinney saw his man sneak out of the house to keep an appointment with me, he tailed Wirtz to the selected corner before attempting an arrest.

  "Benbrook, watching from the shadows, realizes Wirtz's arrest will ruin his own hope of getting the manuscript, and so he kills Tinney. Then he and Wirtz run back to their hide-out."

  I stopped there, waiting for comments. Overmire was chewing a thumbnail and looking vaguely at the floor. Constance Benbrook was red in the face and hating me to pieces. One of the plain-clothes men behind me somewhe
re shuffled his feet on the linoleum and cleared his throat.

  Lieutenant Overmire said, "That's your theory, Pine?"

  "Uh-hunh. Or rather it was my theory. But now that Benbrook himself has been knocked off, it isn't so good any more. The new theory now is that Wirtz killed all three men: first, Post when he found him in his apartment; second, Tinney for trying to arrest him; third, Benbrook because he was afraid I was going to take him, Benbrook, to the police and the guy might tell where the killer was hiding out."

  Overmire rubbed the sides of his forehead between the thumb and fingers of his left hand, a gesture of infinite weariness. He looked up and around to where Connie Benbrook sat fuming. "Have you anything to say that may throw some light on this matter, Mrs. Benbrook?"

  "You bet I have!" she snarled. "Of all the insane, insulting, vile lies I ever heard ! He's just trying to throw blame on a wonderful man wno is dead now and can't defend "

  "I mean," Overmire said smoothly, "anything we can use, Mrs. Benbrook. Something, for instance, that might tell us where Raymond Wirtz is hiding out."

  Her teeth came together like the jaws of a bear trap. "I have nothing to say to you," she said coldly.

  The lieutenant thought about her answer. At least he appeared to be thinking about it. "The man will take you home now, Mrs. Benbrook. Thanks for allowing me to intrude on your grief even this much. I'll notify you about the inquest and whatever else you will have to be bothered about."

  Without a word she stood up and stalked over to the door. There she turned back to say, "My—my husband's body. What will—?"

  "The coroner's office will call you, Mrs. Benbrook."

  I got myself skewered on those brown eyes, then she was gone. I had had my last drink of Connie Benbrook's Scotch and my last taste of her lipstick. Twin blows that I would manage to survive.

  "Well, Pine?" Overmire was watching me without expression.

  I said, "I'm tired and my head hurts and I'm through talking. I'm going to bed, either in my own apartment or in one of your cells. I don't give a good goddam which."