The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original)

by Unknown

“How you feel, Tom?”

  MacReady grimaced. “Not so bad. I guess they … fixed me up O.K.”

  “Sure.” Mike grinned cheerfully. What they had fixed Tom up with had been a load of morphine. That was all they could do. “Feel like telling me what happened?”

  The wounded man closed his eyes. “Ain’t much I can tell, Mike. I’m coming along Hester Street. To see if old lady Kruger got her coal from the relief. When I get to the corner opposite Dumont’s jewelry store—” He groaned, tried to put a hand to his belly, fumbled at the bandages for a little, then stiffened and lay still.

  Hansard lit a cigarette, held it to MacReady’s lips. “Take a drag, Tom.”

  The patrolman inhaled greedily, let the smoke dribble slowly from his nostrils. “I see these two punks and a dame huddled in front of Dumont’s window. When they spot me, they move on kind of sudden. So I go over to give a peek.” His voice was weaker, his lips looked like blue steel. “When I get up close, I see this Red Cross poster stuck on the outside of the window.… Ah! It does hurt!”

  “Take it easy, old-timer.”

  “The old gray mare, Mike, ain’t what she used to be.” Sweat glistened on MacReady’s face. He went on, slowly. “Knew that poster was screwy. Stuck over hole in the glass. They’d used a glass cutter and a suction cup. Half the junk was gone out of the window. So I … went after ’em.”

  “You get a look at them, Tom?”

  MacReady licked his lips. “Couldn’t see ’em clear. Light was bad. They went … up the Bowery. Turned in that alley. Middle of the block.” A trickle of pink saliva ran out of the corner of his mouth. “When I hit the corner … they jumped me. Didn’t get a chance …” His voice trailed off into nothing, but his lips continued to work.

  Hansard put his ear close to MacReady’s mouth.

  “Be a while,” the patrolman was gasping, “before I … get back … to roll call.”

  “A little while, Tom. Yeah.”

  “You’ll have to … look after it, Mike.” MacReady’s eyes opened suddenly, very wide. He hoisted himself up convulsively, on one elbow. “They assigned you … to the case … didn’t they, Mike? It’s a hockshop case … ain’t it?”

  “Sure it is. Inspector put me on it personal.”

  “That’s O.K.… then.” The patrolman fell back limply. “Long as … you’re on it, Mike.” His eyes glazed. He fought to focus them on the man bending over him. “When’ll … Mary and Steve … be over … to see me?”

  “Ought to be here any minute, Tom. Any minute, now.”

  There wasn’t any answer. The faded blue eyes stared fixedly up at the ceiling.

  Hansard took out his watch, rubbed the back to mirror brightness on his vest, held it to MacReady’s lips. After a minute he put the watch back in his pocket.

  “You sure got lousy breaks, pal. You sure did. I don’t know if anything can be done to balance the books for you, but I’ll give it a try, Tom.”

  He rang the bell on the wall.

  n the shadow of the El, the street was dark and gloomy, but the opposite side of the Bowery was a blaze of naked electric bulbs over dazzling displays of silverplate and glittering rows of gaudy gems. One jewelry store crowded against another, elbowing for space in this brilliant white light of Little Maiden Lane.

  As Mike stalked toward the sign—DUMONT’S——DIAMONDS—he saw a bulky-shouldered man lounging in the doorway. When Hansard angled toward the Red Cross poster on Dumont’s window, the man stepped out into the light. His eyes were narrow slits in a brick-red face. He had his right hand in his coat pocket and his voice was brusque.

  “Keep movin’, mister … right along, now. Right along.”

  Hansard didn’t even bother to show his badge. “Crysake, don’t you Ames dummies know a cop when you see one?”

  The representative of the Ames Patrol took his hand out of his coat pocket. “I ain’t takin’ no chances. Buddy of mine had the switch snapped on him a little while ago, right up there on the corner.”

  “Yeah. An’ he might be alive now if you stuck to your post, way you’re supposed to, shamus,” Mike said curtly. “What’s your name?”

  “Brundage.” The Ames man was surly. “Don’t be telling me my business. I know what I’m supposed to do and what I ain’t. I been assigned to this corner for two years. Me an’ Tom MacReady always got along jake. He never made no complaint. An’ none of our subscribers got any squawk—”

  “MacReady ain’t exactly in a position to complain. Far as your customers are concerned, why should they holler? They’re covered by insurance, aren’t they?” Hansard went over to the window, ripped off the poster, looked at the six-inch hole the glass-cutter had made. “But that isn’t saying there aren’t going to be plenty of beefs about this. There’ve been too many of these glass-cutter jobs in the last two-three weeks. It’ll be the same mob back of all of ’em. Now they’ve gone up against a chair job, everybody’ll get put on the pan about it. Where was you when the fireworks went off?”

  Brundage jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Down on Hester. Kid came up and told me somebody’d heaved a brick at Thomasini’s window. That We Buy Old Gold joint. So I beat it down there. It was a false alarm. So then I hear the shooting and hike back.” He shifted uneasily under Hansard’s cold stare. “I called an ambulance for MacReady.”

  “Yeah?” Hansard morosely studied the vacant spaces in Dumont’s display. The robbers had been smart. They hadn’t taken any watches or any of the cheap “slum” that’s used to catch the eye of the passerby. The stuff that was missing was mostly rings, he decided.

  “Got a key, Brundage?”

  The Ames man produced a ring attached to his belt with a steel chain. “I ain’t s’posed—”

  “Suppose my eye!” growled the plainclothesman. “Open up!”

  Brundage used a key. Hansard went in first, inspected the alarm box on the wall, saw it hadn’t been tampered with. Then he found a phone, got through to headquarters.

  “Extension four-oh-two … Ed Schmidt … Ed? I’m down at Dumont’s. Put through a thirty-one, will you? All cars. Rush. Have ’em contact every hockshop in the city. Notify us of anyone trying to pawn any solitaires worth over—say, fifty bucks. Or any unset stones more than a quarter carat. They’ll probably pry the stones out of the settings.… I know, I know. It’s a hundred-to-one shot. Still and all, it’s one of those things we gotta cover, Ed.” He hung up.

  Brundage shook his head dubiously. “You ain’t gonna lay the finger on the lads who did this job just by puttin’ the peep on the hockshops. This mob was from out of town.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  “I seen their car.”

  “Where?”

  “Couple of blocks down. Green sedan with Jersey pads.”

  Hansard swore and reached for the phone again. “Why the hell didn’t you say so when I was talking to headquarters! How did you know it was their car?”

  “Well, I don’t—for sure. But it was there when I beat it down on Hester, and it wasn’t there when I got back. Then that old hag selling pretzels down on the corner claims there was two guys and a frill came running over to the sedan and drove away like a bat outa—”

  “Hello, Ed? Something to add to that alarm. All cars to notify all men on post. Pick up a green sedan.… What make, Brundage?”

  “Buick, near as I noticed.”

  “… a Buick, maybe, Ed. Or any other green sedan with Jersey plates. Two men and a girl in it … Nah, this Ames dope I’m talking to never heard about getting a license number. So long.”

  The headquarters man reached out, caught the private guard’s necktie, yanked him close. “How many times you been told to take the plate numbers of any car parks near the Diamond Exchange after closing hours?”

  “Leggo,” snarled Brundage, “you’re chokin’ me! I don’t know when that sedan parked there. They’s a lot of Jersey hockers come over to do business before closing hours an’ leave their cars around here while they grab a bite
. Anyhow, I told you I was in a hurry to check up on that rock throwin’. If it hadn’t been for that—”

  “Yah!” Hansard sent him reeling back against one of the glass cases. “You don’t stay on your post. You don’t check on parked cars. You’d ought to have your watchman’s license revoked. You had sense enough to notify the proprietor, here?”

  “I tried to get Dumont on the phone. He wasn’t home.”

  “Where’s he live?”

  “Over in Brooklyn.”

  “Well, try him again. Send him a wire—collect. Ask the phone company to give him a bell every five minutes until they get him. But get him over here.”

  “I’ll do the best I can.”

  “And soon as you see him, get me a complete checklist of all the ice that was glommed. I want the number of stones in each ring, the carat weights, settings—”

  “Sure, I know.”

  “You don’t know your rump from a hole in the ground. If you get hold of anything phone it in to headquarters, extension four-oh-two. And don’t be leaving Dumont’s here to run around and see if you can locate somebody who can give you a description of those three. We’ll take care of that without any amateur kibitzing.”

  Hansard got out of the store, up to the corner of the alley. He half expected some of the Homicide boys to be down there, but maybe the word hadn’t gotten through that MacReady had died. Or perhaps they’d come and snapped their photographs and were now combing the district for eyewitnesses.…

  The sharp contrast between the blinding brilliance of the row of windows at the Diamond Exchange and the utter pitch-blackness of the alley made it difficult for him to adjust his eyes quickly. He slipped on something greasy underfoot.

  He put his flash on it and his nostrils flared in repugnance. This was where Tom had taken it. He swung the circle of light up and down the cobblestones. Besides MacReady’s blood, there was nothing to see except a couple of those small, white, slotted cards in which rings are displayed. Each card bore the caption—Absolutely Perfect Blue-White——22-Carat Setting—Latest Style.

  A couple of chunks of limestone had been chipped from the building wall by flying lead but there was nothing else.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE GIRL IN THE HOCKSHOP

  ike strode grimly through the alley, over to Centre Street, up to the block-long white stone building at Number 240.

  He went down a freshly scrubbed corridor smelling of antiseptic, turned in at a door marked—DETECTIVE BUREAU——LOST PROPERTY DIVISION.

  There was a long counter running across the front of the room, behind it half a dozen small oak desks. There was only one man in the office, a thin, sharp-featured individual with glossy black hair, shaggy eyebrows and an expression of perpetual surprise on his face. He sat in a swivel chair, with his feet up on the lower drawer of his desk. This was Ed Schmidt, Hansard’s working partner. He was drawling into a telephone.

  “Yeah, that’s what I said. Report by phone and pronto. That don’t mean you shouldn’t send in the regular descriptive cards on everything that’s been hocked in your shop today. If I don’t get a brown envelope with a bunch of those cards from you in the morning I’ll know you’ve either gone out of business or you’re trying to give us the runaround, Abe. But about those solitaires—it’s important. They’re hot as the electric chair.”

  Hansard sat at his desk and gloomily fingered the day’s list of property, lost and stolen. There were wallets reported from the midtown section. Their only chance of recovery lay across the hall in the offices of the pickpocket squad. Another epidemic of lost dogs in the Washington Heights area probably meant that the old “dog racket” was being worked again. And there was the usual assortment of missing handbags, wrist-watches and briefcases—mostly testimonials to their owner’s forgetfulness.

  None of these held any interest for Mike. He would let the other boys on the squad look after them. By that tacit understanding which goes without expression in the police department, it was accepted that Hansard was after the mob that had shot down his friend, and that he would let nothing interfere with that job until it was done.

  He knew that the likelihood of his finding the killers was remote, unless he had a streak of luck. For there would be little doubt that this was the work of the same crowd that had bedeviled the pawnshop squad for nearly three weeks, with window-hole robberies from one end of Manhattan to the other.

  “Mike,” called the other man, hanging up the phone, “I got that file of lugs who’ve been involved in window robberies, from the Bureau of Identification. Covers twelve years. About sixty guys. But more than half of ’em are doing their homework up at Stone College.”

  “Let me have a look-see, Eddie.” Mike shuffled over the identification cards, with full-face and profile photos. “None of these answer the descriptions given by any of the bystanders at the other robberies, huh, Ed?”

  “Not as near as I can make out. But we might as well go through the routine.”

  “Let Homicide do it, Eddie. They can put more men on it than we can. And anyhow, I got an idea it’s a waste of time. I think this is a new mob, just organized.”

  “The way they’re going at it, Mike”—Schmidt came over and put a police flyer from San Francisco headquarters on Hansard’s desk—“it looks to me as if they’re old hands. Seven jobs, they’ve pulled. Nobody’s caught ’em. Nobody’s even got a cast-iron description. That takes some experience.”

  “Yeah. I guess so, Eddie.” Mike studied the flyer.

  It was an old one. It stated that all police departments should be on the lookout for William Sexton, recently a resident of San Francisco. Sexton was an expert at window work, had cleaned out five jewelry stores in one night and departed for places unknown. His method had been to use a couple of stooges to stand on either side of him, apparently inspecting the contents of a show-window, while he used a window-glass cutter, calmly inserted a cane with a wad of chewing gum on it and picked up such items as his fancy dictated. After the desired merchandise had been abstracted, the busy Mr. Sexton would calmly paste a poster of some sort over the small hole and depart.

  “This looks good,” Mike grunted. “Only there’s no photo.”

  “Good reason why,” Schmidt pointed out. “They never caught him. They picked up that dope from stoolies. Wouldn’t you say this Sexton might be our man?”

  “It’s a thought. All we got to go on is—five-feet-six or -seven, hundred and sixty pounds or thereabouts, brown hair, brown eyes. I can’t walk from here to Broome Street without bumping into half a dozen guys would answer that description. Tell you what, Ed. Wire Frisco. Ask ’em if they’ve got any later dope on this punk.”

  “O.K.”

  “And send out a teletype to all states we got working agreements with, giving his description. Include the green sedan in the Jersey notice. And warn all of ’em to be on the lookout for anybody trying to hock or sell unset ice.”

  “Anything else, Mike?”

  “Yeah. Check over the lists of arrests MacReady made, the last four-five years. See if any of those bums had any jewelry-store robberies in their records. I have a hunch maybe this slob who shot him did it because Mike knew him and put the pinch on him at some previous time.”

  The phone rang. Schmidt answered. “Yeah? Hold the line a second, Elias.” He put his hand over the receiver. “Litzman calling. Up on Sixth Avenue. Says there’s a floozie trying to put the bite on him for two hundred bucks on a rock worth six or seven C’s anyway. Wants to know what to do with her.”

  “Tell him to stall her. Kid her along. Haggle with her. Tell him if he lets her go before I get up there, I’ll dig that old receiver charge up and slap him in the jug for sure.” Mike grabbed his overcoat, got to the door. “And, Ed—”

  “Yuh?”

  “Tell him to work it so he gets her prints. On his showcase. Or maybe a fountain pen.”

  He got into the corridor before Schmidt yelled: “Want me to notify the radio Rollos?”

&n
bsp; “No,” Mike called back. “I’ll do that. If I need ’em.”

  ansard’s coupe hit nothing but the high spots on the way uptown. This might be a wrong lead, of course. No telling whether the skirt at Litzman’s was the same one Tom MacReady had spotted down on Little Maiden Lane. But if she wasn’t, it was a damn queer coincidence. Women didn’t do much legitimate pawning late at night. That was a male trick, for booze money. Women usually did their hocking in the daytime, when they could buy something they needed with the money they got. But if this was the same dame, seconds might count. Litzman might not be able to stall her off for long. She’d be sure to get suspicious.

  Still, there was something screwy about the set-up. That window-job had certainly been done by a professional mob of heisters. Yet no gem thief would be dumb enough to suppose he could get away with pawning a piece of glitter within a couple of hours after the stuff had been lifted.

  It was ten minutes past nine when Mike got out, a block below Litzman’s. He forced himself to stroll leisurely toward the hockshop—past a couple of employment agencies.

  It wouldn’t do to come tearing into the shop. There might be a lookout waiting outside, or across the street. That was why he hadn’t wanted the radio cars notified. A lookout would have spotted police cars before they could have closed in and given the alarm.

  He turned in, hesitantly, under a dingy sign from which hung three tarnished gilt balls. The window was plastered, inside, with a miscellaneous network of watches, binoculars, shotguns, revolvers, banjoes, carpenter’s levels, flutes, fishing rods. Phony “flash wares” bought at auction, Hansard knew, for sale to overwise suckers.

  The girl was still there. She was talking earnestly to Elias down at the far end of the counter. A bleached-out aluminum blonde with plenty of curves where they counted, and a pinched, sharp little face with too much rouge and lipstick on it. She wore a short seal jacket over a thin blue silk dress, and if Mike Hansard was any judge, she was scared silly about something.

  “Won’t you please hurry,” she was saying, shrilly, to the two men behind the counter. “I tell you I’ve got to catch a train.”