The Wabash Factor

by Howard Fast

  “What did you get off?”

  I studied him for a while before I answered this one. Something had happened to Courtny, and it was part of the growing realization that had begun with the hit man’s attempt to kill me. It started very slowly, with just a little blossom of comprehension that was much more doubt than understanding. Until that moment, it made very little sense that they should go to such efforts to kill me. I didn’t have anything like that kind of exalted opinion of myself. I was pretty much the run-of-the-mill cop who distinguishes himself by pushing for promotion because his family can’t get by on what he makes. Not worth great effort to eliminate me. But now I began to realize that they had their own large reason, which I had only begun to smell, and with the smell came this difference in Courtny.

  I was not crazy about Courtny, but no one was. He was crude, nasty, and reeked with the smell of the cigars he smoked, maybe twenty a day. He was never without one. Nevertheless, we had worked together pretty well for the six years he had been captain at the precinct. He had a reputation for being a very good, hard-nosed street cop who in his time had worked in Manhattan South, Fort Apache in the Bronx, and out in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area as well as other Brooklyn spots where with small effort one could get mugged or killed, yet it had been hard for him to make promotion. There was a rumor around for a while that he was being talked about for chief of detectives, but after Koch and the commissioner spent a couple of hours with him, they sent him back to the precinct post haste; but of course that was only a rumor.

  Right now, he had changed. He hated my guts. And when he asked me what did I get off, it meant how many shots had I fired at this gunman, as a brave cop should. I was number one marksman in the precinct—as a matter of fact in the whole zone. Why didn’t you shoot him, Harry?

  “Not a shot, Captain. You see, at the moment he lined up his first shot, the one that got my ear, about two-dozen kids bolted out of a private school on that block and into the street. I don’t toss bullets into a street where there are people or kids.”

  “But he did. I hear he took a second shot.”

  “He shot high, thank God. That cannon of his is an instrument of slaughter.”

  He picked a fat folder up off his desk and said to me, “You see this, Golding? This is your record. Seventeen years on the force and you never fired your gun, never took out one of those bums out there on the street—always with an excuse not to use your gun. What is it with you and a gun? You got shit in your blood?”

  “Yeah,” I said in disgust. “Maybe we share a syndrome, Captain. I’ll tell you something else for that folder—when those kids piled into the street, I ran. If the Olympic Committee could have clocked my speed from there to the corner, I’d be on my way to Los Angeles, in spite of my age. I don’t know whether I would have run if the street had remained clean, but maybe I would have. I’m not Marshal Dillon out there in Dodge City, shooting it out with some lunatic who decided to make killing his profession and who took out a contract on Harry Golding. To hell with that! That’s not what I’m paid for.”

  “Then what are you paid for—being an egghead, taking your wife to Los Angeles? Let’s talk about taking your wife to Los Angeles on police work, after the song and dance you gave me.”

  “Is that what you’re sore at?” I asked, incredulous. “Because I took my wife to Los Angeles? It didn’t cost the department one damn bloody cent, and you damn well know that!” I had raised my voice. Thin partitions and glass panels separated Courtny’s office from the detective room, and every one of the men in there was listening. “I went on police work! Don’t ever forget that! And it might just end with the biggest bust you ever dreamed of.”

  “Get the hell out of here,” Courtny said. “And change your jacket. You look like shit.”

  “All right. I’ll go home and change, but I want Toomey and two other men with me.”

  “Why? Are you picking up a suit of armor? Nothing doing.”

  I turned from leaving to face him and said coldly, “I’m the chief of the squad, Courtny, and I’m carrying out police work according to my best judgment. There’s witness outside”—pointing to the detectives—“to that effect. If my going there alone should result in my death”—I dropped my voice—“you might just whisper good-bye to your pension, maybe to the department too,” I added.

  He faced me out for a moment; then he muttered, “Go ahead. I don’t give a fuck what you do because you won’t be doing it very long. You want to be an asshole, be an asshole.”

  I left his office and asked Toomey who would be available for a half hour, and he grabbed two detectives to go with us. I asked Toomey whether my car was still outside.

  “Double-parked. You been cussed out by everyone in the place, including me.”

  “Why you?”

  “I got to move it four times a day.”

  “Why don’t you curb-park it?”

  “There ain’t been curb-parking around this precinct for years. You know that.” He handed me my keys. “You drive.”

  “I’m going to my apartment to pick up a fresh suit, but I don’t think it would make any sense to any of you that I need four men to pick up a clean suit.”

  “That’s all right, Lieutenant,” Bolansky said, sitting next to Keene in the backseat. “You don’t have to explain. It’s a beautiful day. I’m happy to get out of the pisspot station.”

  “The point is, I don’t want you to think I’m crazy. This is goddamn serious.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Toomey said. “Don’t go on like that, Harry. We don’t think you’re crazy. You been acting mighty peculiar, but nobody thinks you’re crazy, not after all that wiretapping stuff in the basement. Of course, why they tap you—that’s another matter.”

  “Shut up,” I told Toomey.

  “Sure.”

  “I said I’m dead serious, and I am. Two things: First, my apartment is bugged, every inch of it.”

  “So why don’t you send Tony Cabreni over there?” Cabreni was the best man we had on bugs, in or out.

  “They’d only bug it again. I’d rather leave it alone and use the bugs. Bolansky,” I said remembering, “get out before we take off and check under the car for trail bugs.” And then, when Bolansky came back to report that there were no trail bugs under the car, I told them, “The second thing is that over at my apartment there will be two or maybe three men waiting to kill me, and one of them uses something like a World War Two Luger, one of those big things that can stop a tank.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Like hell I am!” I snapped.

  There was silence for a long moment as they stared at me, and then Toomey said, “I’m going inside to get a couple of shotguns. You say there’re armed men in there—I don’t go busting in with a pistol in my hand, like some dumb hot-dog kid who’s watched too much TV and wants to be a hero.”

  The reference was to Keene, who was sitting in the backseat with Bolansky. He had done it once, with two armed men in the room, kicking down the door and all the rest. He took it nicely. “I’ll take one of the shotguns,” he said.

  “You know, it’s my apartment,” I said, “full of things Fran and I cherish. So if we take shotguns—ah, the hell with it,” I finished. “Get three, Toomey. I don’t want one. What do I say to Fran if I bust up her whatnot chest?”

  “What’s a whatnot chest, Lieutenant?” Bolansky asked.

  Toomey came back with the guns, and he said that he wouldn’t be surprised if Courtny had a stroke, the way he was letting go of everything around him.

  “Ah, well, poor man,” I said, “he carries a heavy burden.”

  “We carry the burden,” Toomey said.

  We double-parked, and then we moved into the house quickly, our guns out and ready, and a couple of people who noticed us almost fainted. “Police,” I said. “Please move on.” A silly thing to say, but on the other hand, I felt very silly.

  In the elevator, I told them shortly that I would turn the bolt with my key. I could
do that almost silently. I would fling open the door and dive in, flat on the floor, and Toomey and Keene would cover me, one each side, and Bolansky in the doorway. The elevator stopped and we stepped into the hall.

  “You let me take that dive,” Toomey whispered. “I’m younger than you, and I used to play football.”

  “You can’t take a dive with a shotgun.” I felt that I was spelling out a pattern of lunacy, and I was still amazed that these nice old friends didn’t flip me into a straightjacket and run me right down to Bellevue. It was indeed a tribute to their trust in Harry Golding who had given them this incredible song and dance about men in his bugged apartment waiting to shoot him. Also, ever since television took over the human race cops have become increasingly self-conscious, hooked on the cop shows on TV and always wondering whether there isn’t a camera right over their shoulders.

  Anyway, we went through all the motions. I flung the door open, dove in from a crouch to flat on my belly and lost my grip on my gun, which sailed across the room. Toomey and Keene charged after me, just like in the movies, and Bolansky crouched in the doorway, his shotgun at ready, and of course the place was empty. The only plus for the good guys was that we had not kicked down the door. We advanced from room to room, a careful and brave selection of New York’s finest, and they were all empty. Then we returned to the living room and they all looked at me, and perhaps because cops do have compassion, no one said anything.

  I was saved from being hustled to the nearest shrink by a cigarette. It had been crumpled into an ashtray, but it was still smoldering, a thin line of smoke rising from it, and I pointed to it before they had a chance to say anything, and then I pointed to other things, a brown bag on the coffee table with half of a corned beef sandwich sitting next to it, a container of coffee that was still warm when I poked my finger into it. Toomey picked up the cigarette, put it back, and then went to the coffee table and put his finger into the container of coffee.

  “They could have been on the stairs when we were in the elevator,” Keene said.

  “Maybe not quite that close.” Toomey started to speak again when I put my finger across my lips. He understood and nodded.

  “You want any of this stuff for evidence?” he asked.

  “Evidence of what? The hell with it! I’ll go into the bedroom and pick up a few things. I won’t be more than five minutes. You fellers make yourselves comfortable.” I touched my lips to remind them of the bugs. “Talk about literature. It’s enlightening.”

  In my bedroom, I stripped down, got rid of the dried blood on my neck and shoulder, substituted a small flesh-colored Band-Aid for the large one that Toomey had applied, and put on fresh clothes. I packed a small suitcase with some extra shirts and a robe and slippers, simply to make life in a hotel suite a bit more comfortable and then paused at the open closet to stare at my uniform, something that I wore only for parades and funerals. I can’t define the run of thought that impelled me to pack the uniform. It’s possible that, as I folded it carefully into the suitcase, I had some vague notion of what I intended for it—but the notion, if there, was very vague indeed.

  I finished packing, joined the others in the living room and led them silently out of the apartment. Even in the car, I couldn’t get over the feeling of someone listening, and I turned on the radio, finding some music to blur our speech. I parked on Third Avenue.

  “We can talk here,” I said.

  “Oh, Lord,” Keene said. He was a good-looking black man, and it was only after being shaken that he lapsed into broad southern. “I sure enough don’t want to break into any junkie or some other bum’s apartment ever again. I do hate that. It just gives me a bad stomach for days.”

  I said to Toomey, “When I was having my ass burned by Courtny for telling him that I wanted three more men to come to my apartment, who was in the detective room?”

  “Us.”

  “You and Keene and Bolansky?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I thought I saw Hennesy there.”

  “He was there. But then he went downstairs to bum a butt. We don’t smoke.”

  “That’s right,” Keene said.

  “Could you hear what we were saying in Courtny’s office?”

  “Come on,” Toomey said. “You know you can.”

  “You know what I’m driving at?”

  “What am I?” Toomey, demanded. “Some kind of moron? Of course I know.” And pointing toward the backseat, “And they know too. It might be a hell of a lot better if we had some idea of what’s going down here.”

  “What else is new?” I said. “Look, you heard Courtny make that smartass crack about a suit of armor. Was Hennesy in the room then?”

  “How about it?” Toomey asked Keene.

  “No.”

  “Bolansky?” I asked. “Do you recall?”

  “No, because, you know, Lieutenant, he made some crack about being sick of hearing Courtny’s crap, and then he got up and said he was going downstairs to bum a butt off someone.”

  “I’m pushing because it’s important,” I said. “We got to know whether Hennesy was there or not, because if he wasn’t ...” I let it go.

  “He wasn’t,” Toomey said, “but it still could have been some kind of coincidence, Lieutenant.”

  “No! I am sick to death of trying to explain this thing with coincidence. Coincidence doesn’t follow you around trying to kill you. They had a shot at it this afternoon, and they were waiting there in the apartment. You know that. You saw the cigarette, the food, and when we left the station house, our own sweet Captain Courtny picked up the telephone and called my apartment and told them that four cops with a lot of nasty firepower were on their way over and they were to get the hell out of there before we arrived. Now if any of you see it any other way, tell me!”

  “Trouble is,” Keene said, “that none of us seems to know what’s going on here, maybe not even you, Lieutenant. How about that?”

  “If what you say is true, Lieutenant, then Courtny’s in this neck-deep. So what do we do?”

  “I’ll be damned if I know.”

  “What do you want us to do?” Keene asked.

  It was getting dark now. Fran would be back at the hotel. A sudden wave of fear shook me. What if something had happened to her?

  “Nothing. Play it cool. Let’s see what happens tomorrow.”

  “You shouldn’t be alone,” Toomey said.

  “I’m not. Fran is with me.”

  “You won’t go back to the apartment?”

  “No.”

  “The station house?”

  “I’ll be there in the morning.”

  “How can we get in touch?”

  “You can’t. I’ll call in first thing in the morning.”

  I picked up a cab there on Third Avenue. I was fairly sure that we weren’t being followed, and I had him drop me at Lexington and 34th Street. All my years in the police department, I had been at the other end of the stick. I had tailed people, instructed others to tail people, and had on two occasions led seminars in my squad on the art of tailing. And it is an art, believe me. But now, for the first time, I was being tailed. That had never happened to me before, and it called for a whole new set of reflexes and observations that would lead to a decision as to whether I was being followed or not. This time, no tail.

  I walked to the hotel, nighttime now, about seven o’clock in the evening, and when I entered our suite, I was almost certain that Fran would be there.

  She wasn’t. I felt a rush of fear, a sense of something clenching my heart and with it a feeling of total despair.

  Then the door opened and Fran walked in. I didn’t say anything; I simply held her in my arms.

  Chapter 12

  WE HAD DINNER that night in the small dining room of the Primrose Hotel. It was a great relief not to have to go out into the street, but to be able to hole up here where at least for the moment we were safe. I asked the waiter to put us in a corner, where we could talk softly and not be ove
rheard. It was very pleasant indeed, almost like a dinner date of long, long ago, and at least for the moment, with the children secure in Dublin, we could relax and even smile a bit. I had asked Fran what her day was like, but she only said that she had spent ten hours in the New York Public Library and had returned with a bundle.

  “You first,” she said. “Your day and then my day. Anyway, I have notes. You don’t have notes.”

  “No notes, but one hell of a day. I look back and I can’t believe it. It’s eight-thirty now, so that was less than twelve hours ago—when we said good-bye this morning.”

  “Poor dear,” Fran said. “Let’s order first.”

  A good woman is always practical. We ordered our food, and then I told Fran what had happened since we parted in the morning. She listened intensely, her lips parted. The food came, quite good, yet I had to remind her, “You’re not eating, Fran.”

  “Heavens to betsy, you want me to eat and listen to this?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, I’ll eat,” she said meekly.

  I went through the day, blow by blow. When we came to the coffee, she had it all. “Harry,” she said hopelessly, “I don’t understand.”

  “Join the club. But does it match up with your day, even around the edges?”

  “I think so, around the edges perhaps. But where does Courtny fit in?”

  “I’ve been working with that. First I thought Courtny was just a miserable old bastard getting more miserable as he aged. No. I am convinced that he’s in this, neck-deep. I told you how I kept after the guys to establish that Hennesy was not there, and then walking over to the hotel tonight, I was able to get it into focus, and I remembered seeing Hennesy leave. So it was Courtny who called the apartment and got them out.”

  “You look nice. I always felt that a man can’t dress better than to wear a blue blazer over gray trousers. But you took another suit?”

  “The brown one.”

  “Yes. That’s nice. But didn’t I see your uniform?”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Why? Having a parade?”