Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 26, No. 4. Whole No. 143, October 1955

Farewell to Kennedy by William Fay

The question is: Is an hottest cop — even a super-cop, a Galahad-with-a-badge — entitled to one mistake?

After all the waiting and wondering what to do, he telephoned Kennedy at his house and told him calmly and quickly the essential thing. In this way he was not obliged to watch the other man’s face, and it granted them both, as dignified men, opportunity to trim or tuck carefully away any loose emotional strings. He waited at his own end of the line until Kennedy very softly said, “All right; you know all there is to know. Come over, then. We’ll talk.”

“There won’t be much to talk about, George. There’s only one thing I can do,” he said. “Do you hear me, George?”

“I hear you,” Kennedy said, and Joe wondered, hearing the older man, if any event or person or thing could ever rob him of that calm authority.

“I’ll be over,” he said. “I’m two blocks away.”

Outside the drug store he lit a cigarette. He had known of Kennedy’s fall from grace since early afternoon, and, except for Kennedy, he was the only cop who did. Now in the evening, like thin ash from the pyre of a roasted angel, the knowledge seeped through every desperate barricade his conscience could erect. Only one fact was shriekingly simple: Kennedy, the incorruptible captain of detectives, like a pair of socks, had been purchased for cash on the line.

He moved slowly along the street where the Kennedys lived among the dwindling Irish on the west side of the city. It was a narrow stone house that never had been fancy in the Kennedys’ long tenure and was a bit less fancy now. The lingering virtue of the house was spaciousness, for there had always been so many Kennedys. Joe went up the steps and pressed the bell. After a while Kennedy’s wife came to the door, turning a towel in her soft, moist hands, and looking surprised to find him standing there.

“Oh — it’s you?”

“You were expecting Gregory Peck?”

“I mean — the girl’s got her head in the sink, Joe. I was helping her do her hair. You couldn’t have warned us?”

“I didn’t come to see Mary,” he explained. “I came over to talk to the boss.”

“Well, that’s better. By the time you get through, she’ll look human.” Mrs. Kennedy was rather big, and in the fashion of her daughter, handsomely made. She looked as scrupulously honest as her husband, and — in her own case — was honest. “George was on the phone a few minutes ago,” she said, “but I think he’s gone back upstairs. You know where.”

Joe kept climbing. The ancient stairs were narrow and steep but they didn’t creak beneath his weight. The old house was built like a vault, or, you might say, a Kennedy.

“Hello, Joey,” Kennedy said. “Come in and sit.”

Kennedy sat where he always sat, under the hanging light in the littered room at the top of the house, watching him shrewdly. He sat here night after night in a mess of his own creation, making things out of wood, some big and some small, some beautiful, most of it useless. Recent effort had produced a midget wheelbarrow, a totem pole of a pencil’s proportions, and a set of wooden teeth, uppers and lowers, that Kennedy said were modeled after George Washington’s.

“Come in and sit down, Joey.” Kennedy’s tone was light, his eyes still calculating. He had never called him “Joey” before. The vowel sound was an added, deliberate touch. He wore a lopsided smile, as though larceny had already softened the starch of his personality. He’s changed, Joe thought; I swear that already he has changed. “Sit down, Joey,” Kennedy said again.

Joe came in, but for a while he did not sit down. Automatic obedience was not exactly what the moment required. There sat Kennedy, massive and strong, the honored, aging Kennedy of 60 years, still black-haired and youthful-looking, almost certainly unafraid in any panicky sense — and caught like a package thief. It was still hardly possible for Joe to associate the man and the act. He did not expect that he would ever understand it. He had already closed the door. He stood scratching his chest through his shirt and he said to Kennedy very flatly, “Why did you take the money?”

“I just took it,” Kennedy said. “I thought I’d like to have it.”

“That the way you still feel, George?”

“I don’t know. It’s funny, huh?”

It was strange, Joe thought, but it wasn’t funny. It was a whole life. It was a whole man down the drain. It was a wild, unnecessary end, like a man being hit full-tilt by a train for no fairer reward than the recovery of his hat.

“You mean you took it for the family, George?”

“The family, no,” said Kennedy. “There was a time they needed it. But with four of them working?” The wonder and the pain were suddenly fused in what he said next: “I think I took it because I was out of my mind.”

“Or because,” Joe said, “well, maybe because you just didn’t care anymore? Like, for instance, Solly Druze’s money was as good as anyone else’s?”

“A little like that, Joe. You’re kind of close. But it was more like all of a sudden I didn’t believe in God or the United States Marines, when really I do — God especially. I feel very strange, like I should giggle and laugh, but not very loud. Anybody know it but you?”

“Just me,” Joe said. “I’m the only one.”

“And what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to turn you in.”

“That’s what I figured,” Kennedy said.

“You trained me, George. I’m supposed to be your kind of a cop.”

The big man gazed down at his hands. He had not yet sagged, but under the glare of the light his flesh seemed whiter, softer. It was hot in the room. In the dense hair on Kennedy’s arms, and on his brow, the sweat stood shiny, separate, and clear, like beads of cooked tapioca. When he looked up again the lopsided grin was gone from his loose-hanging jaw.

Joe didn’t know what to say. A bare white shade moved slowly at the window, yielding to the press of a breeze no stronger than a breath. In the quiet house a drainpipe accepted a quantity of water, sucking it down with a shrill whine: Mary’s shampoo. Joe could hear her voice, rising to them from below. He looked once again at her father, sitting here in reduced yet terrible strength — watching, waiting, with the look of death two inches deep behind his gaze. This much was real, he believed. Help me, he thought, and almost spoke the words aloud.

“What was Solly to get for the cash, George?”

“Peace and contentment,” Kennedy said. “A weekly card game in his apartment. A small book for a select clientele. That sort of thing. Lots of money and no commotion.” Kennedy breathed deeply, ruefully. “One wrong step and I fell on my face, huh, Joe? One time in thirty years and I had to louse it up. It was as simple as you say?”

“The way I told you on the phone,” Joe said. “One chance in a million. I saw Freddie Gelb give you the money. Why you didn’t hear me walk into the room I still don’t know. I just stood there like a dummy and you never turned around. I got hold of Freddie later and kept hitting his head on the jamb of his kitchen door until he told met the dough was from Solly. I didn’t believe it, yet I had to.”

“Well, you’re a nice young fellow, Joey,” Kennedy said, “and you’re a better cop than me.” The older man brushed wood shavings from his lap. He picked splinters from his shirt. The fingers trembled. “You hear me, Joey? I’m right?”

Joe didn’t reply. He’s working on me now, Joe thought. He isn’t begging, but he’s working, because the hope isn’t dead in him yet. He’s a weaker man than he was yesterday. It’s in his face.

“Where’d you put the money, George?”

Kennedy pointed. “The box,” he said.

The money lay in the carved and beautiful tool chest Kennedy himself had made. The bills were girded at their center like the stacks of cash you see in banks. Joe picked it up and fanned the money like a deck of cards. It was new and crisp in 100s, 50s, 20s. He dropped it back into the box among the heavy shavings and sawdust, jumbled nails, hack-saw blades, sandpaper sheets, and odd things jumbled together. Kennedy, a skilled man, had never been a tidy one. Andrew Jackson looked up at Joe from a miserable twenty. He turned away from the stern face. It was Kennedy who mattered.

“Are you sorry now, George, that you took it?”

“I wish I was dead,” said Kennedy.

Joe walked away as far as the wall and wanted to punch a hole in the plaster there. He could hear Mary and her mother now, talking downstairs in their natural tones, not knowing the axe that hung over them all. A younger Kennedy ran down a flight of stairs, a routine occurrence that always sounded like a horse collapsing on a drum. Joe couldn’t stand much more.

“Give the money back to Solly,” he almost shouted. “Do you hear?” That was the thing, he almost persuaded himself, and Kennedy looked paler. His lips fell open.

“You’ll let me give it back?” he asked.

Kennedy, Joe thought, the super-cop, the Galahad-with-a-badge. He could see the hope leap now beyond those bounds of frigid dignity that Kennedy had worn like a corset all of his adult life.

“You’d do that much for me, Joe?”

“Who am I?” he demanded fiercely. “I’m to make the final judgment?”

Now Kennedy knew he had won. Even when wrong, he had won. Joe watched him rise from the chair, the planed wood falling from his hands, the light debris of his labor clinging to the top of his pants. The big hands touched him with gratitude. Kennedy’s mouth, no longer firm, tried to do it with words.

“Chuck it,” Joe said. “Get away. I’m wrong, I know. In your life you never gave anyone a break like this.”

“Bless you,” Kennedy said. “I must have been out of my mind.”

Joe looked away. The thick tongue of sentiment had always made him uneasy; coming from Kennedy, it was unendurable. “When will you give the money back, George?”

“Tonight,” said Kennedy, “when you’re gone. When they’re asleep downstairs, I’ll go to Solly, Joe. Let me do it my way.”

He left Kennedy, closing the door, and descending the stairs he was half convinced that he had made a mistake. Charity and mercy were good things in their places. But was this such a place? Or himself the one to know? Yet he didn’t go back. Later on he told himself it had been because Mary was waiting below. He could hear her humming some tune. The light was on in the lower hall.

“You were long enough,” she said. “You manage to straighten out the troubles of the world?”

“We figured it all out, Angel. Me and your smart old man.”

“What’s the matter, Joe?”

“The matter? There’s nothing the matter.”

“For a minute you looked funny.”

“I’m screaming with laughter and I don’t look as funny as you,” he said, “with that towel around your head.”

“You dog, you,” Mary said.

He kissed her on one shiny cheek. She smelled of soap. The turbaned towel became her. She was good to look at any time, but tonight it hurt. “You look like that big Hindu — that what’s-’is-name that protects Orphan Annie,” he said. Actually, she looked beautiful, and standing in her low-heeled mules, she was no taller than himself. She made a face. “You can’t stay, Joe?”

“I’ve got things to do. So many things.”

“Like a dope, I put on the coffee.”

“I can smell it, Angel. It’s a great loss to me.”

“You fraud,” Mary said.

But her eyes were soft, as her nature was soft. She called you the wrong kind of names with the right kind of tenderness. It was a game they had. She was big and beautiful and 26, and, Joe thought sadly, looking at her, wasting on the vine. He should have married her a year ago, he knew. Or perhaps two years ago, before he’d been made a sergeant.

“What’s that?” he said.

“The fellow in the funny papers,” Mary said. “Pay attention, Apple-head. His name is Punjab.” She stood on her toes very straight and statuesque and sizeable, exactly like the mammoth funny-paper man. When she came down off her toes, with her eyes full of him, he held her shoulders and kissed her on the mouth. He held on longer than he believed advisable.

“Good night, Punjab,” he said very softly.

George Kennedy, by the coroner’s estimate, had been murdered at 4:30 a.m. His body was discovered at 6:15. He had been shot and he was found face-down, concealed from passing view, in the sunken entrance to the basement of a brownstone house, not far from where he lived. It was agreed he had stumbled or fallen into this entrance and collapsed there, after he was shot.

Joe learned these details at approximately 9 o’clock when he arrived at the station house. Friends told him later that when he heard the news he had actually staggered and turned the strangest color they had ever seen take possession of a living man’s flesh.

He sat for a while in a plain wooden chair, surrounded by other cops, who were being gentle and clumsy and nice, knowing well how things had been with him and Kennedy and all the dead man’s family. Joe looked up at them. “Why didn’t you phone me when it happened?” he asked.

“Don’t know for sure, Joe; maybe nobody had the heart.”

“I was with him last night,” he heard himself say. There now, he thought, that would begin it; now with their natural questions in reasonable sequence they would draw from him what he didn’t want to tell them, and what, of course, they were entitled to know. He repeated: “I was with Kennedy last night.”

“We know that, Joe. Trouble was you left at half-past 9. We know that much from the kid.”

“What kid?” Joe asked. He followed their glances.

“Marty helped us with details,” someone explained, “up till the time the family went to sleep.”

The boy, who was Kennedy’s youngest, was sixteen. He looked like his father and he could grow even bigger. He wore a gym shirt with the name of his high school on its chest. His eyes met Joe and his firm mouth trembled. Trying to fight the tears, he had no place to turn, nowhere to run. He fell against Joe to hide his shame, grasping him and bawling aloud, holding tighter and tighter. It was awful. They sent the boy home. Inspector Needham came into the room. He had come up from downtown in fifteen minutes, they said, and been on the job since 7 o’clock. He was watching Joe, who wondered why.

Then Needham said kindly, “I think you’re too close to this case, Sergeant. I think where you belong for the next few days is with Kennedy’s family. Stay close to them and let me know if there’s anything the department can do.”

Joe said, “Yes, sir,” aware while he spoke that it was not the right thing to say. Speak now, he told himself — now! But his tongue was thick and silent in his mouth. While he was fighting it, Needham walked back into the other room.

Joe put a cigarette in his mouth. A cop named Lew Farber, of Homicide, held a match for him. Farber said, “It was a great night all around.” But Joe didn’t comment. He was thinking. “It was the first double-header we ever had in Kennedy’s precinct, far as I can remember,” Farber said.

Joe looked at him. “I don’t understand you, Lew.”

“You must know the guy, Joe. Freddie Gelb, a cheap thief. Used to run errands for Solly Druze an’ people like that. Well, years ago, when Solly was active, that is. You know ’im?”

Joe didn’t move. He couldn’t move. But the words came out: “I know him.”

“He got shot in bed in a boardin’ house, maybe an hour after Kennedy got it in the street.”

Joe tightened his hands to the point of pain. He succeeded in asking, “You figure maybe it was Solly, Lew?”

“Hell, no,” said Farber. “There’ll be a routine check, but Solly’s been sweet an’ orderly for seven years. Like a reformed dancer, Solly don’t even twitch.”

Joe stood up. “I want to see Needham.”

“We don’t see any connection between the two killings,” Farber continued. “Freddie was vicious, but small-time.”

“Excuse me,” Joe said. He went into the room where Needham had gone. “The Inspector here?”

“Gone, Joe. Hermie Shultz just drove him back downtown. There anything I can do?”

“Not exactly, Lieutenant. Not just now, anyhow.”

“You look weird, kid. You should do what Needham said. Bow out of this an’ do everyone a favor. Hear what I say?”

Joe nodded absently, then realized: they were inviting him out, without knowing it; they were cushioning the way.

At least let the family bury Kennedy, he began to petition himself. Don’t kick the ghost while the air is full of pain. The agony would fill New York. Later, or in a few days, go to Needham. Maybe, after all, it wasn’t Solly. And if it wasn’t Solly, who would have to know of the money that was sticking to Kennedy’s hands. Even if I’m kidding myself (and I know that I am), why must the family take the grimmest punishment?

“Something else, Joe?”

“Nothing else, Lieutenant,” he said.

He did the wrong thing then for what he hoped was a proper reason. He walked out of the station house.

Kennedy’s wake was in his own house, in the old tradition, with the furniture cleared from the big square parlor at the front of the house. There he lay, with his shield on his chest, in the uniform he had not worn for twenty years, except on those dress occasions of department ritual. His gold buttons gleamed and he looked very well, having been shot at a time when his health was high. His widow sat near. She was tearless, accepting the hands of hundreds who passed by. Sometimes she smiled a little foolishly, her gaze far gone. A relative, who had been watching her from the first bad hour, told Joe he was convinced that shock and grief had nudged her two-thirds off her trolley, poor woman. “But I think she will come around all right,” this relative said. It was the evening of the second day.

Joe said nothing. The flowers were sweet as arsenic and in their ceiling-high abundance they had sucked the life from the indoor air. Mary came over and stood next to him, their hands touching at their sides, unseen in the press of the parlor traffic.

“You all right?” Joe said.

“Warm, Joe. That’s all.”

There was sweat on her nose and a few loose hairs had gone astray. Absently, he blew at them, and she smiled. Then he touched the loose hairs with his hand and they were in place again. “Don’t ever leave me, Joe.” She whispered it, but with a fierceness that was not like Mary.

The people kept coming. The priest was there. The various societies arrived — a church sodality, his club. They entered and proceeded in single file. They paused a brief prayer’s length and then moved slowly past the window, past the standing members of the family. If you were a stranger, you could still identify the Kennedys, for they were bigger than the rest. The priest called Mary. “Excuse me,” she said to Joe.

In the kitchen you could get a cup of coffee or a spot of whiskey, depending on your need. Most of the cops and male relatives were there. One of Kennedy’s cousins stopped telling a joke when Joe came in. The deference was unmistakable. He was Kennedy’s boy, the adopted and chosen one. The role made him uncomfortable. The men stood around, smiling, but uneasy. Joe drew himself a cup of coffee from a big jug with a spigot that some fireman had provided. Joe knew how it was at a big man’s wake. After all, he had been to enough of them.

“Finish your joke,” he said to Kennedy’s cousin.

He walked out into the small yard. It was cool and the moon lit up the other small yards and the fire escapes of structures to the south. “Is that you, Joe?” somebody said. He turned around. It was Lew Farber, of Homicide.

“They were prayin’ inside,” Lew said. “I was a hundred per cent in tune with them but I didn’t know the words.”

They talked a while about nothing much. They had a smoke. Then Joe said, hoping it sounded casual, “When they found Kennedy, Lew, was there anything on him? Money, for instance?”

“A dollar forty cents, I think. George was a family man. You ought to know that. He never had any money.”

Joe took a last drag on his cigarette. “Anything else on him? After all, nobody talks to me. You’d think I was his mother and you were trying to spare me.”

“There was nothing on him, Joe. Just junk. You know the way he was. Busted pencils, paper clips, wood shavings.”

“Wood shavings?”

“From all that doodlin’ with wood at home. He had the sloppiest pockets I ever saw on a sane man. Didn’t he?”

“I won’t argue, Lew. Get any breaks at all?”

“Frankly, no. Lots of guys picked up, Joe. Lots of tries, but no cigar.”

“What about Solly Druze?”

Farber looked at him closely. “I remember you mentioned him the other day. Why Solly?”

“Just a notion. Kennedy gave him a bad time once.”

“Kennedy gave many a crook a bad time, then an’ now, till the day he died. Matter of fact, Solly did get called downtown for the usual shave an’ a haircut, like every hoodlum, plain or fancy, in the town. But Solly hasn’t been active. He don’t as much as spit on the subway any more.”

They went inside.

Yes, it can all dissolve and die, he thought, as far as I’m concerned. They will get Solly, if they’re able, but what happens to him is less important than a quiet grave for Kennedy and honor in his house.

It was morning now. The summer dawn had taken the city. The skinny birds in wretched backyards were awake. The family were all upstairs, the widow resting under sedatives. Only a sleepy-eyed mortician and Joe maintained the quiet vigil. Just a few more hours, and then, when it was 9 o’clock, they’d carry Kennedy into the church. Maybe then it would be over?

You lie very well to yourself, his conscience said. His conscience was the most persistent, articulate companion ever to sit beside him, or to walk, and if required, to race beside him when he sought to get away. It was a contest he could not expect to win. Any fair analysis informed him he had been wrong from the beginning when he accepted Needham’s kindness, not as an earned indulgence, but for a shield. He got up and walked into the kitchen. He ran cold water in the sink. He raised it in cupped hands to his face. The one thing he knew that should not prove difficult would be locating the unsuspected Solly Druze.

Solly was not in his bed or his apartment at 6 o’clock. This much the night clerk grudgingly conceded. Solly lived in Kennedy’s precinct, in a Broadway hotel, in the 70s. He was a twilight creature most of the time, and unless he went to the races, slept all day.

“You haven’t seen him?” Joe asked.

“I didn’t say I hadn’t seen him.”

“Then don’t be cute with me,” Joe cautioned. “When was he here?”

“Ten minutes ago, maybe fifteen minutes,” the night clerk said. “He came in, bought a paper, then went out.” The clerk nodded towards the stacked editions on the desk.

“He went out to eat?”

“That’s right. Next door he went.”

“Many dear thanks,” Joe said.

“No thanks at all,” the night clerk said. “Thank City Hall what gave you the badge.”

Solly Druze sat in the big and nearly empty cafeteria eating pineapple-cheesecake, which is not a breakfast item. On Solly’s inverted calendar it was a go-to-bed goodie. He pushed the last bit on his fork with his little finger. He seemed pleased with the pineapple-cheesecake and not tired at all, for he blew his nose with great force in his paper napkin. He shoved his newspaper aside and got up, replacing his reading glasses with his ordinary ones. At the fountain against the wall he drank some water, swishing it in his mouth, decisively. He was a decisive fellow, Solly. He paid his check and walked outside. He went through the lobby of the adjacent hotel and into the waiting elevator there. And this was where Joe chose to join him.

“Good morning, Solly.”

The elevator began to climb. It was not a rapid one, but grilled and fancy and old, rocking leisurely in its ascent. The car was lined with mirrors which at certain angles displayed more Solly Druzes than you would need to stuff a jail. Retired from sinful habit, and ostentatiously reformed (if you could believe it), Solly had once been a thief of staggering consequence. Not yet 50, he was stylish and healthy, and by reputation, brave. Carefully now he appeared to examine his beard in one of the mirrors. It had prospered through the night.

“And good morning to you, young man,” said Solly finally.

The tone was forced, Joe knew. The elevator stopped and they got out together. Together they walked along the figured carpet of the long, long corridor.

“This is a pinch,” Joe said. “I’m the man with the lock and key.”

Solly laughed. “You’d better go home an’ squeeze some of the custard out of your head. Stop botherin’ me.” He began to open the door of his apartment.

Joe shoved Solly and the door with calculated violence. Solly fell down on a rich throw-rug with force enough to make it slide on the polished floor. His glasses fell off. Joe walked ahead of him with a large I-am-the-boss-of-this-thing stride through all the rooms of the apartment. It was very beautiful.

“This is your office, huh?”

The office faced on Broadway and the morning light came into it big. It was all glass brick, like in a dentist’s. It was as nice as you’d want.

“I wish I could live this fancy,” Joe said.

Solly called him a blistering number of obscene things. The puffed and dry saliva appeared like cotton pellets in the corners of his mouth. Solly had hot been forcibly kicked loose from his dignity in many years. He wore his hatred like a bright flag. Yes, Solly could kill a man, Joe thought; with hate this high it would hurt him no more than to swallow an orange pit.

“Did Kennedy bounce you around, too, Solly?” Joe asked quietly. “After he gave you the money back, that is.”

The words hit Solly like a flat plank in the face. There was no mistaking the shock. In Joe’s own head the notion cracked like a knuckle: Freddie Gelb never told him I knew. Freddie didn’t dare tell Solly, and in due time, as insurance, Freddie would have attempted to get me,

“Freddie Gelb never told you I saw him give Kennedy the money? Don’t stare at me, Solly. These things get complicated and require attention. There’s always another patch of dust that you have to sweep under the rug. Like, for instance, here.”

Joe knelt on the deep pile of the broadloom carpeting. It was the color known in decorating shops as “greige.” Solly watched him, blinking, but, evidently, could see nothing.

“Put on your reading glasses, Solly.”

“What is that?”

“It sure isn’t dandruff, Solly,” Joe said. “Never mind what it is. You should have told the lady to vacuum the rug a couple of times, at least.”

“You’re talkin’ mumbo-jumbo,” Solly said. “You’re makin’ it up.” The cotton puffs were bigger in the corners of his mouth.

“Relax, Solly,” Joe said. “I’ve known since Tuesday, and yet the cops gave you no more than a routine check. You’d be clear as Kennedy’s own wife — except for me.”

Solly stepped back, his tongue rinning over dry lips. “Tell me more.”

“Well, that’s as far as I go with the things I know about. I figure Kennedy not only gave you back the dough, but let you know he was turning you in, and maybe himself as well. My guess is that Freddie killed Kennedy for you, because it was neat, out-of-doors, and it required better eyesight than you’ve got yourself. Shooting Freddie in his own bed was closer to your talents. You figured you wrapped up the package tight. You just didn’t know about me.”

“I know about you now,” Solly said. He spoke very softly. His breathing, deep in his chest, seemed louder than his speech. “How much do you want?”

“I’ll be expensive, Solly, but I won’t be like Kennedy. I won’t come marching back with it. Ten won’t buy me. But it could be a nice down payment.”

“Don’t boss me,” Solly shouted. “Don’t be so big. You’ll take what you get. If you’ve kept your mouth shut this long, you can’t afford to talk much now.”

Joe reached for him and caught the lapels of his coat. He lifted Solly and pulled him over the top of the desk, turning him like a sack of grain. “Talk to me like that and I’ll jump on your face.” He held him very close. “Get the money now,” he directed, then let Solly go.

It was that way. It took time, while they appraised one another. There was no more to be said. After a while Solly shrugged. He opened a bottom drawer in his desk, turning the key. He tried to smile for the sake of prestige, but the smile was sick and flat on his face. He tossed a packet of money disdainfully on the desk.

“Here’s the ten,” he said. “Go buy a cigar.”

20s, 50s, 100s. Joe picked it up, as he had a few nights before at Kennedy’s. He fanned through the crisp green notes.

“Look, Solly, look. This isn’t dandruff, either. These are wood fragments you didn’t see or didn’t bother to get rid of. They’ll check in the lab with shavings and grindings they found in Kennedy’s pockets.”

“You’ve got the dough,” Solly said. “So what?”

“I don’t want it the way you thought I wanted it. Now’s the hard part, Solly, for you, for me, and the Kennedys. George was at least a part-time crook, you’re a full-time one, and me? I don’t know what I am.” But he was certainly not happy. “Let’s go peacefully,” he said.

Solly Druze did not go peacefully. In a foaming rage he threw a punch that missed. He crippled his hand against the desk. Joe punched him competently in the mouth and knocked him over the swivel chair. Joe walked around after him and Solly screamed like a woman. Solly reached for the drawer where the money had been but was inept and fumbling with frantic haste. Joe saw the revolver in Solly’s hand and shot him twice. It was the first time he had killed a man. The powder smell hung heavy. The silence was deep. Joe turned away from the body. He picked up the telephone.

They gave Kennedy an “Inspector’s funeral” in the big church east of Broadway. They cut off traffic on the one-way street and you could see the cops in dress parade, their white gloves swinging in the sunlight, pretty as a squad of scrubbed cadets.

Joe was late getting there because you can’t drop a body like a shoe. The business downtown had taken time, and when he reached the church’s vestibule, they were carrying Kennedy out. The widow walked with her oldest boy. Even the professional morticians wore a veil of pallid gloom. Mary came next, alone, her eyes meeting his and asking him, “Why couldn’t you have been here?” Joe chewed his lip. She didn’t know where he had been. He moved closer to Lew Farber, who was standing to one side. The money, flat and tidy and concealed within his coat, felt bulky as a phone book when he breathed.

“We got the word from down below,” Lew said. “Needham says you’re a Kennedy kind of a cop. You were right, huh? It was Solly all along?”

“Call it a hunch, Lew. Call it anything. He admitted it before he went for the gun.”

“What could have been between them?” Farber said.

Joe answered slowly. “I don’t pretend to know.” The big church emptied fast. Out in the bright street where the cops stood grandly at attention, the rented limousines pulled slowly from the curb. “Well, it’s done,” Joe said, then looked at his friend. “Ever occur to you, Lew, that maybe Kennedy was on Solly’s payroll?”

“If I didn’t know you were kiddin’,” Lew said, “I would punch you in the mouth.”

Joe walked alone in the vast and quiet church. Far ahead, on the high front altar, the sexton was killing the candlelight. The bright flames just surrendered and went out, like murdered memories. It will be safe now, Joe thought carefully; I think the story will hold.

He paused at one side of the darkened church and he had the money in his hand. The mouth of the poor box was capacious as the inside of a hat. The money fell and thudded mildly against the quarters, the nickels, the dimes. God make it right, Joe prayed, then quickly walked away. Outside the last of Kennedy’s cortege had passed from view, and the cops, in exquisite order, marched away.