Corruption City

by Horace McCoy

  “Big stuff. The Master Mind,” Igo said.

  Harrigan said, “You know what the trouble with you is, Igo? The trouble with you is that you got a one-track mind. You don’t trust nobody.”

  “The out-of-town boys are locked in this the same as we are,” Roy Ackerman said. “Anything happens to us, it happens to them.”

  “Well, dammit, nothing’s going to happen,” Harrigan said.

  “They don’t know that,” Trickett said.

  “Well, tell ’em.” Harrigan looked at Nemo. “Don’t keep it a secret. Lay it on the line with ’em. Send Paul around to see ’em. That’ll reassure ’em, him with his teeth chattering and his knees knocking together and shaking all over. We couldn’t have a better advertisement.”

  Nemo Crespi smiled. “You know, Eamon, I just been standing here listening to you talk. To all of you talk.” He spread out his hands. “And you know, Eamon, I got a sudden idea.”

  Everybody in the room was quiet. Harrigan watched Nemo smiling at him, and suddenly he felt cold all over. His mouth went dry and he had to swallow before he could speak.

  “What’s that, Nemo?” he said. “What’s that idea you got?”

  “That you got a very big mouth, Eamon, and that you got a very loud voice to go along with that big mouth you got.”

  Out of the corner of his eye Harrigan saw Trickett and Ackerman shift their gaze from Nemo to him. No one else moved. Harrigan tried to lean casually against the wall and keep his hands in his pockets.

  “And, you know, it’s a funny thing because at the same time I got another idea, too,” Nemo went on thoughtfully. “I got another idea while you were talking with your big mouth. You know, Eamon, blood’s thicker than water. Ain’t that right, Pia?”

  “Well, yeah,” his sister said. “I mean, I’d do for you what I wouldn’t for anyone else—”

  “That is very true,” Igo said. He looked at Trickett and Ackerman. “Ain’t it?”

  Trickett said, “Was last night, don’t suppose it’s changed,” and Ackerman guffawed.

  “So this brings me to this point I’m thinking about, which is Michael Conroy,” Nemo went on as if no one had spoken. “He’s an old friend of yours, Eamon.”

  Harrigan tried to laugh. “Sure. I love him like a brother.”

  “It’s a very great thing, brotherly love, Eamon,” Nemo said, “because with this brotherly love you got for him you will watch over Michael Conroy. You will see that Michael Conroy don’t make no mistake, because blood is thicker than water and John Conroy is his son. John Conroy might say do this, do that, and Michael Conroy might do it. So you’ll watch over Michael Conroy with your brotherly love, Eamon, and everything will be all right.” Nemo leaned back and smiled. “Because Trickett and Ackerman, and Igo, too, they’ll watch over you—with their brotherly love.”

  Chapter Three

  THE LEGEND ON THE door at the Hotel Manchester read Suite 4B and directly beneath that, slightly above the center, was stenciled the Great Seal of the State. You opened the door and stepped inside and you were hit in the face by another Great Seal, a big one, four feet by six. It was suspended from the molding of the rear wall and was gold-tasseled on heavy black silk. On each of the four walls, head-high to the average man, were small cards on which were printed the curt warning: NO SMOKING. Against the walls were thirty-six folding wooden chairs, the kind used by funeral chapels.

  Mike Conroy had had Max Ansel and Gene Eimick detached from the Safe and Loft Squad and assigned to him for special duty. Peter Van Pelt, one of John’s ex-students, who had been out of town when he canvassed the list, had read of the appointment and rushed back to town, begging to be included. He had brought with him thirty-year-old Warner Kessel, a divorce lawyer, who was eager for more action and bigger things.

  From District Attorney Fogel’s office had come two steel filing cabinets that contained dossiers and scraps of information about the syndicate and its allies that he hoped would prove useful. And from the Supreme Court had come a large pasteboard carton full of John Doe subpoenas, properly signed and embossed with the Great Seal of the State.

  John Conroy’s Crime Commission was in business.

  There were 304 sources in the city from which the chemicals used in the warehouse fire might have come: 65 chemical plant and equipment companies which manufactured machinery, filters, tanks, mixers, evaporators, agitators and crystallizers for industrial use; 32 sanitary companies which dealt in chemical toilets; and 207 wholesalers and manufacturers. Because these sources seemed to offer the freshest possibilities, John and his staff had decided to move in this direction. If in their first engagement they could hook Nemo’s men into the warehouse fire, they would be off to a running start.

  The list had been divided into areas for efficient covering, and the areas divided among Captain Conroy and Ansel, Eimick and Cicero Smith, Van Pelt and Kessel, and John and Amanda.

  Captain Conroy and Ansel were first to report in with a lead. On the afternoon of the 15th—three days before the warehouse fire—the Superior Chemical Company had sold one hundred pounds of ethyl ether in five-pound drums to a single customer. It was a large sale, but the salesman, a nineteen-year-old part-time employee, who worked after high-school hours, could not remember who had bought it.

  Captain Mike and Ansel had had too much experience not to recognize a nervous lie when they heard it. They slapped a subpoena on the boy and took him in. His name was Kinney and he was badly frightened. He admitted, after a little questioning, that he did know who had bought the ethyl ether. It was a guy named Rader who worked for the Eubanks Novelty Company. The boy said that the reason he had denied this at first was because he had got a kickback on an overcharge and that he was afraid he would lose his job if this became known. He had done this before on occasions when he had sold solvent to Rader, but he had never before sold him such a large order. Rader had told him, he said, that Mr. Eubanks had sent him out to buy one hundred pounds of the stuff and had specifically ordered him not to buy the hundred pounds all at the same place.

  “This the Eubanks who owns the company?” John asked.

  “Why, sure,” Kinney said.

  “And Rader told you that Eubanks personally had told him to buy the stuff?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Go on,” John said.

  Well, Kinney went on, Rader thought this was silly, to have to make twenty stops when one would do. Besides, in five-pound drums the price was sixty-seven cents a pound and in 100-pound lots the price was twenty-one cents a pound. There was a difference of $46.00 and the ten-cent per pound overcharge, which came to $10.00. He had split $56.00 with Rader.

  “Bring in Rader and Eubanks,” John said to Mike and Max Ansel.

  The elevator stopped at the first floor of the hotel, and Mike got out there instead of going down to the garage in the basement. “Meet you in front, Max,” he said to Ansel. “I’ll get a cigar. Want a cigar?”

  “No, thanks, Mike,” Ansel said.

  Then things happened fast. Mike walked straight into a telephone booth and closed the door and dialed a number; then he quickly unscrewed the bulb so that he would be in the dark.

  A man’s voice answered at the other end.

  “This is Mike Conroy, Eamon,” he said. “Listen good. I only got a minute. Does the Eubanks Novelty Company mean anything to you? It’s mixed up in the warehouse fire. I’m on my way there now to pick up Eubanks and a punk named Rader. Check with Nemo.”

  Eamon Harrigan broke the connection of the private phone and dialed a number.

  “I want Nemo, Pia,” he said. “Step on it.”

  “Hold on,” Pia said. She got up from behind the massive desk on which there were four telephones and walked across the thick carpet and went into her private lavatory. She locked the door and pushed a concealed button and a panel in the wall opened, revealing a multiple telephone box. She plugged in a jack and jabbed at the bell button with her finger.

  In Nemo Crespi’s off
ice upstairs over the produce company a telephone bell rang. Nemo picked up one of the two phones on the littered coffee table.

  He said, “Yes?” His eyes narrowed. “Of course it means something to me!” He nodded his head. “I got a few interests you don’t know about, Ramon.” He wet his lips and stiffened. “When?” He distended his nostrils and exhaled heavily. “Stop bragging,” he said.

  He hung up the phone and dialed a number on the other one.

  “Telephone, Mr. Eubanks” the girl clerk said. She was sitting in a small office at the rear of a small, narrow store. There was only one aisle in the store, and the counters and shelves on either side were full of mechanical toys and cheap novelty items.

  Mr. Eubanks, two desks away from the girl clerk, picked up the telephone and when he heard the voice of Nemo Crespi at the other end his eyes flickered and he swung around in his chair, casually putting his back to the girl. He said in a low voice, “When?” He rolled a pencil between his fingers as if he were taking an order from a customer. “No, he knows nothing about it,” he said, and tapped lightly on the desk with the erasing end of the pencil. “It wasn’t set up that way. I told him—” Then he stopped, realizing that it was no time to try to pass the buck. He started rubbing, with the eraser on the desk. “Are you sure about that?” The muscles in his jaws tightened. “Right,” he said and hung up.

  He rose and put on his coat. “I’m going to have a cup of coffee,” he said to the girl.

  He picked up his hat and went out.

  There was no indication that anything was wrong.

  He went down the street and got in a cab. “Union Terminal,” he said to the driver.

  Nine minutes later Mike Conroy and Max Ansel walked into the Eubanks Novelty Company and asked for Eubanks. One of the two salesmen, after checking with the girl in the office, said he had gone out for coffee.

  “We’ll wait,” Mike said.

  Mike and Ansel were still waiting two hours later at closing time, and it was plainly evident to the girl and the two salesmen that something was wrong. There had been other instances when Eubanks was absent at closing time, but he had always telephoned to say that he would not be back.

  Mike and Ansel took this as proof that he had blown for good, and they admitted that they were cops.

  “You should’ve told us,” the first clerk said.

  “Which one of you is Rader?” Mike said.

  Neither of the clerks said anything. But the second clerk’s eyes unconsciously drifted to the first clerk standing beside him. That was enough identification for Mike. “You?” he asked the first clerk.

  The first clerk finally admitted it.

  “That’s why we didn’t tell you,” Mike said. “We didn’t want you going for a cup of coffee, too. Get his hat,” he said to the second clerk.

  John Conroy needed only one look at Rader to know what kind of a character he had to deal with. “Sit down,” he said.

  “What’s this all about?” Rader asked arrogantly.

  “Sit down,” John said firmly.

  Rader bit his lip and sat down.

  “What’s your first name?”

  “Alexander.”

  “How long have you been working for the Eubanks Novelty Company?”

  “Two years.”

  “How much money have you stolen from the company in that time?”

  “What do you mean, stolen?”

  “Stop stalling. Kinney’s told us the whole story. You know that kid at the Superior Chemical place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Let’s go on from there. Early this week you bought a hundred pounds of ethyl ether from Kinney.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you use it for?”

  “Solvent. We paint toys. Novelties.”

  “You’d bought ethyl ether before?”

  “Sure.”

  “But never in hundred-pound lots.”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t it strike you as unusual that Eubanks would tell you to buy a hundred pounds all at once?”

  Rader shook his head.

  “You were so busy figuring out the size of the knockdown that you didn’t pay much attention. Was that it?”

  Rader didn’t say anything.

  John leaned toward him. “I’m not interested in the fifty-six dollars you knocked down. I want to know what you thought when Eubanks told you not to buy that hundred pounds of ethyl ether all at the same place. What did you think about that?”

  “I just didn’t think about it.”

  “What’d you do with the stuff?” John asked.

  “Put it in the back of the shop.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “I don’t know. The next morning it was gone.” His face lighted up. “Hey, I did think it was funny—”

  “Very funny. That was part of the chemicals used to set fire to that warehouse the other night.”

  Rader’s eyes widened and he sat up straight. “Hey! That what this is all about?”

  “You know anything about Eubanks? Who he goes with—who his friends are?”

  “No.”

  “You know Nemo Crespi?”

  “I know who he is. Sure.”

  “Ever see him?”

  “No.”

  “Ever see Eubanks talking to anybody you figured wasn’t legitimate?”

  “No.”

  “Ever hear anything about him—privately?”

  “No. I wasn’t looking for nothing like that. I figgered he was on the up and up. Well, whaddya know,” Rader said, and he seemed more surprised than ever.

  “Think. Think hard now. In all the time you’ve been here, did anything strike you as funny?”

  Rader thought hard. “Nothing. I wasn’t looking for nothing. If I’d figgered the guy was playing angles, I mighta seen something.”

  John looked at Amanda and the others. They believed Rader. The first haul had been so small they had to throw him back.

  “You know I can hold you for grand theft. Theft over fifty dollars ...”

  “Aw, now, look ...”

  “Then keep your lip buttoned about this. And get out.”

  Rader went.

  John glanced wearily at the newspapers on the desk, black with headlines and crowded with page-one photographs of himself in various poses.

  “Well,” he said bitterly, “I’m a hell of a success in the newspapers.”

  John was dancing with Amanda at the Golden Cock, and he was out of step. No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t catch the beat of the music. “My talent on the dance floor is just about equal to my talent for catching Crespi,” he said.

  “Would you like to go back to the table?” she asked.

  “I never wanted to leave it.”

  They went back to the table. He helped her into her chair. The waiter put a plate before each of them and took off the aluminum covers, revealing club sandwiches.

  “Take that away and bring me a cognac,” John said.

  Amanda said, “Don’t you think you should eat something?”

  “No,” John said, nodding to the waiter to do as he had been told.

  “You’re taking this much too seriously,” she said.

  “My dancing—or Crespi?”

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “I’m disappointed, too—but not depressed. You didn’t expect to get Crespi the first time out, did you?”

  “I’m afraid that I haven’t got a hero complex, and eat your sandwich so I can take you home. We’ve got a staff meeting at eight o’clock.”

  Cicero Smith came up to the table. “I thought I’d find you here,” he said. “I’ve been browsing.” He got an empty chair from one of the other tables and sat down. “Did you go through that stuff from Fogel’s office?”

  “Some. Why?” John asked.

  “Did you happen to notice the file on the produce dealers?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I did. There’s an angle there.”

  “
What kind of angle?” Amanda asked.

  “A very interesting one.” Cicero said to John, “I think you ought to take a look at it.”

  The waiter came with the cognac. “Have something?” John asked Cicero.

  Cicero shook his head.

  John took the pencil from the waiter and signed the check, putting a tip on it, and handed the check back. “I’ll take Amanda home,” he said to Cicero. “Wait up for me.” He tossed off his cognac.

  Amanda unfolded her napkin and wrapped it around her sandwich to take it with her. “I’m a member of this team, too,” she said. “And where the team goes, I go.”

  What Cicero had found in the files was a report dated March 12th, 1932, from an assistant district attorney that declared on that day there had come to his office a man named Stefan Manizates, a truck farmer of 30 Tollgate Road, who complained that because he would not, at what he regarded an exorbitant fee, join the Fruit and Produce Distributors, he was being terrorized by groups of men, his stalls wrecked and his produce ruined. No formal complaint was filed because Manizates could not identify his assailants, but he was so insistent something be done that Special Investigator Roy Ackerman had been assigned to look into the matter.

  Investigator Ackerman’s report was appended. He stated that Manizates was but one of eleven merchants, all comparatively recent additions to the produce center, whose businesses had been wrecked because they wanted to remain independent and conduct open competition. Manizates, however, was the only one who wanted to take official action. The others were so thoroughly intimidated that they refused to make any effort to identify the strong-arm men. It was common knowledge that these strong-arm men were Nemo Crespi’s flying squadron.