Jackson was, somehow, one of these initiates. He knew a person here and a person there—a taxi driver, a doorman, a hat-check girl, a waiter, a trim sad-eyed youth who was one of the town’s most successful professional gamblers—and they had been passed on from one of these to another, the trail leading finally to the Club Caravan. Bennie Augustino was new in town and not too well known, and Jackson’s progress had been cautious, but now at last the scent was strong.
“You two wait here,” he advised when they had been escorted to a table. “I’m hoping this is our last stop.”
Maeve sank wearily into the chair he held for her. “It better be,” she sighed. “I’m sick of ginger ale and I’m tired of quarreling with Joey about what another cocktail would do to me.”
“Uh-uh,” said Stern, “you’re not of age.” He had switched to rye and had had six straight, according to Maeve’s count, but he ordered another without batting an eye. Maeve contemplated him with awe. “Well, well, live and learn.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning you, Joey boy. I’d never have guessed. Where do you put them?”
“Oh, that,” said Stern. “It’s one of my weaknesses. I can’t get drunk; I just get tight—inside.”
“I should have such a weakness.” Maeve regarded the loathsome ginger ale bitterly. “I’m being such a good girl. I want to laugh; I want to sing and dance and have another cocktail but I don’t dare. I feel like a martyr.”
Stern’s eyes were slits behind the round lenses. He looked sleepy but he sat as stiffly erect as a drum major. “Official business,” he said solemnly. “We have a job to do, we three. All for one and one for all. Can’t let each other down. Besides, you have to drive.”
“Joey, you’re a faker. You are drunk.”
“Not me.” Stern rose and bowed. “If you’d care to dance I’ll prove it.”
Looking over his shoulder, Maeve saw Jackson weaving in and out of couples along the edge of the dance floor, coming toward them. There was a gleam in his eye that spoke of new developments. She indicated him with a nod, and Stern turned as he came up.
“Come on,” said Jackson. “Let’s get out of here. We’re on the home stretch.”
Back in the car, Maeve, driving according to directions, headed west, then south, and pulled in to the curb in front of a row of dingy brownstones with high stoops and half basements. Stern leaned forward in the rear seat, but Jackson made no move to get out.
“Oh, oh,” he murmured, his eyes on the rearview mirror, “we’ve grown a tail. There’s a car turning in at the end of the block.”
“What’ll I do?” asked Maeve. “Keep going or stay here and let them go by?”
“Better pull out,” said Jackson. “I don’t think they’d try anything in the open street, but you never can tell.”
Stern’s voice was suddenly authoritative. “Stay where you are,” he said. “It’s okay.”
Maeve hesitated between the contradictory orders, and as she did so the other car drew up alongside. A man sprang out of the front seat and came over. Stern rolled down the rear window. “D. A.’s office,” he snapped.
“Yes sir.” The man touched his hat. “We got your call at the precinct and picked you up outside the club.”
“Nice work. Better pull down to the end of the block and then come back one at a time. We don’t want a tip-off.”
“Right.” The man went back to the car, and it pulled ahead. “Well I’ll be damned,” said Jackson. “Of all the dirty copper tricks.”
“Don’t be dumb. I may not know as much as you do about what we’re heading into but I know it’s a police job. Especially with Blackie here. When you said back at the club that we were on the home stretch I went to the men’s room and called the local precinct. I didn’t want to take time to explain. Now give me the dope and let me out. You two stay in the car.”
“Like hell I will,” growled Jackson.
“Like hell you will what?”
“Like hell I’ll give you the dope or anything else. Go do your own dirty work, copper.”
“Suit yourself. It may take us a little longer, but we’ll find whatever’s here.”
“What about me?” asked Maeve. “Do you two grown babies think I came along for the ride?” She kicked open the door on her side and slid deftly from under the wheel onto the curb.
Jackson grabbed for her and missed. “Hey, you can’t go in there. There might be trouble.”
“There’ll be less of it if you tell us what the score is,” said Stern. “All right. You win.” Jackson swore bitterly. “Of all the screwy messes! Why the hell didn’t I go to jail?”
He clambered reluctantly out of the car, followed by Stern. Halfway down the block a man sauntered leisurely toward them. There was another across the street.
Jackson grunted and held out two fingers close together. “Me and the dicks,” he said disgustedly, “like that. It’s 328,” he told Stern. “The second house down. Augustino and a pal of his share the basement apartment, and unless I got a bum steer Tommy Burke’s there too. If Bennie and his buddy’s home there might be some fun.”
“And you were going to handle this without the cops,” groaned Stern.
“My hero,” said Maeve.
Jackson winced and rubbed a knuckle alongside his jaw. “Okay,” he said. “Maybe I rated that.” He looked at Stern, and his jaw relaxed in a slow grin. “I’m kinda mixed up tonight. Half the time I don’t know which side I’m on.”
No light showed under the close-drawn shades of the basement apartment. They met the precinct dick in front of the house and summoned his companion from across the street. Briefly Stern explained the situation. “One of you stay here,” he said, “and the other come with us. Too bad we can’t cover the rear of the house, but I don’t think they’ll have time enough to blow that way. Jackson, you take care of Blackie and keep her out from under foot.” He led the way up the stairs to the first-floor entrance.
“Shouldn’t you have a warrant or something?” whispered Maeve.
“That’s the law,” replied Stern. His voice was suddenly cold and hard. Maeve looked at him in surprise, but it was too dark in the shadows of the doorway to see his face. Light flashed briefly on an old-fashioned bellpull with a brass plate that said “Janitor” beside the door, and there was a muffled ringing inside the house. The door release clicked, and Stern was inside speaking quickly to a man in shirt sleeves who emerged from a door halfway down the hall. The man gulped and nodded. He indicated a stairway leading down. “Two rooms,” he said in answer to Stern’s question. “There’s only one door though. The other one’s nailed up.”
“Windows?” asked Stern.
“Only the front. The others lead out on a shaft. They’d play hell gettin’ out that way. No, I don’t know how many of ‘em’s home. There won’t be no shoo tin’, will there, Officer?”
“You get back and play doggo,” Stern told him. The man ducked inside, and they heard the key turn in the lock.
The precinct dick led the way down the basement stairs and tiptoed softly along the hall toward a door near the front under which showed a streak of light. Stern halted Jackson and Maeve at the foot of the stairs.
“Keep her here,” he whispered to Jackson. “I don’t think there’ll be fireworks, but we don’t want to take a chance.”
Jackson started to remonstrate, but Stern halted him with a tight-lipped grin. “Remember, you’re a private citizen,” he whispered. “I’m the law.”
Maeve looked down and gasped in open-mouthed astonishment. A short, ugly gun had suddenly appeared in Stern’s hand. His gaze followed hers.
“That’s another weakness of mine,” he whispered. “I like to play cops and robbers.”
The precinct dick was a head taller than Stern and fifty pounds heavier. He held his police special in one hand and twisted the doorknob gingerly with the other. The door was locked. He raised a hand to knock, but Stern arrested it in mid-air and made a gesture with his should
er. The dick looked mildly surprised, then stepped back and drove one of his number twelves against the door just over the lock. The flimsy door flew back with a crash, and the big man followed his foot into the room, almost overturning the floor lamp beside the couch on which Tommy Burke lay. Burke sat up, open-mouthed and goggle-eyed, and the magazine he had been reading fell to the floor beside the base of the lamp. The detective took one look at Burke, said, “Hold the pose, Buddy,” and went through an open door on his left into the rear room.
Burke closed his mouth, swallowed, and opened it again. “Why you lousy, God damn heels,” he said. His voice was high and shrill, without carrying power. He looked and sounded like the end of a week’s drunk. He put one foot on the floor and a hand on the back of the couch. The hand was trembling.
“Relax, Burke,” said Stern from the doorway. “This is a pinch.”
Stern was standing easily with the ugly little gun low at his side and as steady as his voice.
The voice, as much as the gun, stopped Burke in the act of getting up. Terror welled in his bloodshot eyes. “Pinch?” he shrilled. “I ain’t done nothing. What are ya pinching me for?”
“Maybe murder, maybe not. If you want my guess it’s blackmail.” Stern watched Burke’s eyes for a moment.
“Uh-huh,” he nodded. “Blackmail. But it won’t be so bad at that if you talk.”
The dick came back from the rear room and shook his head at Stern. “Nobody here but him,” he said.
“Fine.” Stern put the gun in his pocket and moved away from the door into the room. “You and your buddy wait outside. If we have company bring them in here.”
“Yes sir.” The man went out. Jackson and Maeve appeared in the doorway.
Jackson said: “Hello, Tommy. You got yourself in one sweet mess this time.”
Burke’s lip curled. “Well, if it ain’t my stinkin’ pal,” he sneered. “Who’s the twist, Jack, a lady cop?”
The moment’s respite, coupled with the sight of Jackson running with the hounds, had restored some of Burke’s self-possession. Perhaps Maeve had something to do with it, too, for his hands fumbled ineptly with his tie and pushed back the tangles of his curly black hair. He had youth and Irish tenacity on his side and although terror still lurked in the depths of his eyes and his tenacity verged on sheer stupidity as it often does he did not crack as readily as Stern thought he would.
Stern began with a direct question. “Burke, did you kill John Murdock?”
“I’m not talking,” said Burke. “You think I’m a sap?”
“You’ll talk.” Stern arranged three chairs in a semicircle before the couch. He sat down and looked at Burke, his eyes appearing deceptively wide and owlish because of the thick-lensed glasses. “You’ll talk now to us if you’re smart. But if you’re not you’ll talk sooner or later—either down at headquarters or on the stand or up in the death house. You’ve bought your ticket and you’re on a one-way trip to the frying pan unless you talk. You know that, Burke, don’t you?”
“Don’t give me that stuff.” Burke’s loose mouth tightened defiantly. “I may talk and I may not but I won’t talk to you, copper.”
“You better talk to me,” said Stern softly. “You know I’m not a cop.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know you, you four-eyed little shyster.” Burke sneered contemptuously. “The racket buster. That’s a laugh. They better take that popgun away from you before you hurt yourself with it.”
“You had a chance to take it, Tommy. Why didn’t you try?”
“And get myself plugged by that big flatfoot? Fat chance.”
Stern smiled, and his voice was still soft. “If I thought you were a killer, you thickheaded Irish mug,” he said, “I’d give you another chance. It’d save the state some money.”
Jackson intervened. “You’re not doing yourself any good, Tommy. I don’t know whether you killed Murdock or not but somehow I can’t peg you for a fink, and a dirty rotten fink killed old Riorden. For Christsake, kid, speak up.”
“Fink, yourself,” flared Burke bitterly. “I thought the papers had you rigged for this. How’d you get clear? Turn cop lover?” Jackson choked, and his face purpled. He leaped out of his chair and swung a right that would have kept Burke from talking for some time if it had landed. Luckily, it missed by inches, and Stern was between them, white with rage, before either could make another move. The sheer fury of the little attorney’s attack pushed Jackson back into his chair.
“One more move like that, and I’ll call in those dicks outside and have them take you both to the precinct,” stormed Stern. “And you”—he adjusted his glasses and turned abruptly on Burke—“you listen, and I’ll talk for a minute and, by God, if you’re still stubborn when I get through I’ll know you killed Murdock and I’ll turn you over to Nicholson on a silver platter and wash my hands of you. And if I do that you’ll fry. I’ll make book on it.”
Stern stabbed viciously at his glasses again and sat down. Under other circumstances the gesture with the glasses, the round moon-face, and stubby figure might have been funny, but it wasn’t funny now. The sudden, unexpected violence of the little man had left his audience dumbfounded. Jackson and Burke stared, and Maeve’s lips were parted, and her eyes were round and bright. Joey Stern. Little Joey Stern, of all people. Seven shots of rye and a gun and now this. What kind of liquor did they serve in the Club Caravan anyway?
The outburst had left Stern a little breathless. He filled his lungs and exhaled audibly through his nostrils before he continued. “You met Bennie Augustino in a bar on the water front last night,” he told Burke. “Bennie had something on you. Maybe he caught you in a crap game and took your pants off. I don’t know what it was and I don’t care—the point is, he was putting the heat on. You had thought up some kind of a scheme—or Bennie had suggested it—to get money out of Murdock. That’s got to be so, because it’s the only way you fit into this thing and the only way some of the facts make sense. What the scheme was I don’t know but I’ll even make a guess on that. It had something to do with your sister.”
Burke winced. “Leave my sister out of this,” he growled.
“Shut up,” snapped Stern. “If you’ve left her out she’s out. Bennie told you to meet him at Big Edna’s last night because he didn’t want any other punks horning in on the play. The two of you stayed there last night, and it’s possible that that gives you an alibi for the Riorden killing, although Jackson didn’t think to check it when he was down there. There’s one thing I checked, though, and that is that you made a phone call from the lunchroom downstairs where you had breakfast. As near as I could verify it, the time fits with the second call over Murdock’s private wire this morning, and I’ll bet my shirt it was you that made that call. Not very many people knew the number of that private line, but you could get it from your sister. Now the next thing after that, you turn up in Murdock’s library with Murdock dead in his chair. You socked the butler, and the butler gave a perfect description of you, even to the brown topcoat and hat that are in that closet back of the couch there.”
Burke turned his head involuntarily to look at the closet door, and Stern laughed. “Oh, the door is closed,” he said, “but the coat and hat are there just the same, aren’t they, Burke? You didn’t know how good a look the butler got at you. You didn’t know he has a camera eye. But he saw you, Burke, and he’ll identify you on the stand, and his testimony will cook your goose and cook it brown. Now, damn you, go on from there.”
Burke’s hands had commenced trembling again, and when he spoke his voice was unsteady, but he was still defiant.
“You think you’re smart, don’t you, shyster?” he sneered. “Sure I got a brown coat and hat. So have fifty thousand other guys. And that butler’ll never identify me or anybody else. He never saw the guy’s face.”
Stern pounced. “How do you know that?”
“Why”—Burke hesitated and looked at Stern, his brows drawn together in a tiny frown—“why, it was in the papers. The
guy was masked.”
“Have you got the paper, Burke?” Stern’s voice was silky. “Have you got the paper that says the man was masked?”
“Why, yeah. Yeah, I guess so. It’s somewhere around here.” Burke’s eyes shifted about the room.
“Never mind looking for it, Burke. It’s no good. You stick to that story, and I’m through—and so are you. The man was masked, Burke, but not one news story carried it. We kept it out.” He paused to let the significance of his last statement sink in. “You didn’t read it,” he continued. “But you knew it, Burke—you knew it because you were the masked man.”
7. Drive Home
Later, when the three were squeezed into the front seat of Stern’s car, with Maeve in the middle and Stern driving, Maeve asked: “Do you think Burke really told the truth?”
Stern nodded. “I think so. What Nicholson and McArthur will think when they hear that crazy tale is a horse from another stable. Nicholson thinks I’m normally cracked; now he’ll think I’m feeble-minded.”
“But if it’s true——”
“Uh-huh. It leaves us right where we started. That’s what Nicholson will like about it. He hasn’t my appreciation for herrings, red or otherwise. That’s why I sent Burke over to the precinct and told them to hold him till morning. The captain will be able to take it better after a good night’s sleep.”
Jackson snapped his cigarette through the open window into the gutter. “Of all the damn-fool stunts...” he said thoughtfully.
“Particularly slugging the butler.” Maeve had meant to say “hitting” and changed it to “slugging” the last minute. After the night she had spent the word “hitting” hardly seemed sufficiently expressive.
“He couldn’t help that,” said Stern. “He walked in through that window, and the high back of the chair hid Murdock’s body at first. When he did get a glimpse of it, it must have frozen him in his tracks. I know it did me when I first saw it. And then, while he’s standing there, Powers knocks. Burke just had time to get behind the door and tie that handkerchief over his face when Powers walks in. Then, when Powers starts to turn, there’s nothing left to do but slug him. I suppose the fact that Augustino gave him that sap when he left the car sort of subconsciously influenced the whole action.”
Death on the Waterfront Page 18