Manhunt. Volume 3, Number 7, July, 1955

Everybody was sure the boy was a killer. Nobody even wanted to prove him innocent — except Manville Moon.

1

I was having breakfast at my usual hour, noon, when Ed Brighton dropped by to see me. When I opened the door I was a little startled, not only because he hadn’t visited my flat for some years now, but because it’s always a little startling to be confronted unexpectedly by a man as big as Ed. He goes six feet six and weighs approximately two hundred and seventy-five pounds, most of it muscle except for a slightly rounded stomach.

When I had recovered from my surprise, I said, “Hi, Ed,” and held out my hand.

He shook it jerkily, at the same time giving me a rather uncertain smile, and I got another surprise. He was stone cold sober.

But he had the jitters so bad he was nearly shaking apart. Which wasn’t surprising. You can expect them if you suddenly sober up after keeping yourself at a certain alcoholic level for five straight years.

At forty Ed Brighton was still in pretty good physical shape in spite of his heavy drinking, largely because his job involved heavy labor and daily he sweated out a good deal of the whiskey he’d consumed the night before. But his eyes were always a little puffy and he always smelled faintly of alcohol. At least before today. Today his eyes were perfectly clear and he smelled only of clean shaving lotion.

As I stepped aside to let him come in and he moved past me into my front room, I said, “I’m just having breakfast. Like a cup of coffee? Or maybe a coffee royale?”

He shook his head. “No whiskey, thanks. Maybe some coffee, if you don’t have to make it extra.”

I led him out to the kitchen, poured him the last cup from the pot and sat down across from him to resume my meal of sausage and eggs.

“You off the stuff temporarily?” I asked curiously.

“Permanently,” he said.

I grinned at him. “Sure. I swear off permanently myself every time I get a hangover.”

“I’ve got a reason to stop.” He raised his coffee cup, spilling a little even though he held it with both hands.

“You thought you had a reason to start five years ago too,” I said around a mouthful of sausage.

When he remained silent, I went on, “Maggie was a wonderful gal, and maybe losing her was an excuse to hit the bottle. But five years seems like a long time to need an anaesthetic. I’ve never preached to you before, because I believe in letting people live their own lives. But trading everything you had for the bottle wasn’t very kind to young Joe.”

He took another sip of coffee and managed to get the cup back on the saucer with only a faint rattle. “Joe’s my reason for swearing off, Manny,” he said huskily. “If it isn’t too late. It took a sledgehammer over the head to make me see what I’ve done to him, but it’s a permanent cure. I’ll never take another drink as long as I live.”

“You finally woke up to what a slum environment was doing to him, eh? I could have told you that three years ago.”

“I wish to God you had.” Then he added moodily, “Not that I’d have listened. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself to see what bringing a kid up in a neighborhood that breeds nothing but criminals would do to him.”

I took a bite of egg. “Now, he isn’t that bad, Ed. Joe’s a little too big for his pants, but he’s a long way from a criminal.”

“That’s what you think,” he said with a mixture of savageness and despair. “He’s in jail right now on a murder charge.”

I laid down my fork and blinked at him. “Young Joe?” I asked incredulously.

“Young Joe,” he affirmed. “Or, more accurately, Knuckles Brighton, as he’s known by his fellow members of the Purple Pelicans.”

“The Purple Pelicans? What in the devil’s that?”

“A so-called club,” Ed said wearily. “Bunch of teen-agers. They all wear purple jackets and hats with purple bands. It’s supposed to be just a social group, but in reality it’s a juvenile gang. I think they must pull petty crimes like stealing hub caps and so on, because they seem to have a lot of spending money. I never stopped to wonder where Joe got his until this happened. I was too busy trying to make the distillers work overtime. But now I realize he’s had a devil of a lot more to spend for the last couple of years than I ever gave him.”

“A teen-age gang, eh?” I said thoughtfully. “One of those bunches that carry switch blades and zip guns?”

Ed nodded. “When they arrested Joe, they found a switch knife on him, and both a knife and a zip gun on the dead kid.”

“What happened?” I asked. “The Purple Pelicans have a rumble with some other gang, and Joe accidentally killed somebody?”

Ed shook his head. “Worse. On something like that, they’d probably only stick him with manslaughter. He’s clipped for premeditated murder, for knifing the leader of his own gang. The cops think it was a fight over leadership. They caught me when I was drunk last night, and before I knew what had happened, and got out of me that Joe was vice-president of the damned club. I also kindly identified the murder weapon for them before I learned it had been found sticking in young Bart Meyers’ chest.”

He brooded a minute, then added almost as an afterthought, “Joe says he didn’t kill the kid.”

Ed explained that the knifing had taken place in the basement club room of the Purple Pelicans, and Joe had been caught practically red-handed. The police had raided the place on an anonymous tip that a marijuana party was in progress, and found nobody on the premises but Joe and the dead boy. Joe insisted he had walked in only a few moments previously for a prearranged meeting with the juvenile gang leader, and found him dead when he arrived.

But the murder weapon, still sticking in the boy’s chest, was a hunting knife which had belonged to Ed Brighton for years. Ed hadn’t had occasion to use it for years, and as a matter of fact had even forgotten he owned it, but he recognized it immediately because a small cross was burned into the plastic haft. It had been so long since he’d thought about the knife, he couldn’t even tell the police where it had been kept, but he assumed it must have been in a small trunk at the rear of his closet, which he used as a storage place for similar little-used items. The police assumed Joe had found it while rummaging through the trunk and had been carrying it around stuck in his belt with the jacket buttoned over it, as the knife didn’t possess a sheath.

“What’s Joe say?” I asked.

“That he never saw the knife before. He asked the cops with some logic why he’d carry a hunting knife when he already had a switch knife, but they just brushed that off.”

“When all this happen?”

“Last night about ten. I was drunk, as usual, so I didn’t really get into action until this morning, when I went down to headquarters to talk to both Joe and the cops. What I came to see you about, Manny, is... well, I don’t know the ropes about stuff like this. I thought maybe you could talk to the boy, arrange for a lawyer and so on. And, if you think Joe’s innocent after talking to him, poke around and see if you can uncover anything to clear him.”

“Sure, Ed. Be glad to.”

“About your fee,” he said hesitantly. “I’m not very well fixed right now, but I make pretty good wages down on the dock when I work, and when I’ve been off the liquor awhile...”

He let it die off when he saw my face redden.

“Well, you do this kind of work for a living,” he said defensively.

“Just mention it again and I’ll flatten out your pointed head for you,” I informed him.

“That’ll be the day,” he said in automatic retaliation, but I could see the relief in his eyes.

I’d known Ed Brighton for fourteen years, ever since I walked out of St. Vincent’s Orphan Asylum to conquer the world armed with nothing but a high school diploma and the blessings of tough old Father Eugene. Ed had been foreman of a dock-walloper gang I worked for down on the river front, and also a part-time fight trainer.

It was he who introduced me to the fight game and acted as my trainer for my three pro fights. When that career blew up in my face because the boxing commission discovered the manager I’d picked was crooked before either Ed or I discovered it, and I went to work as a private cop, the two of us still remained friends.

After his wife Maggie was killed in an auto accident, he started drinking heavily, drifting towards his new barroom pals. I lost contact with him after that but I still regarded Ed as a close friend. Ed never visited me, so the only place we could get together was in his own social environment.

And I didn’t feel impelled to take up heavy drinking just to prove he was still my friend.

As he was leaving I told him I’d drop down to Police Headquarters that afternoon to see what I could find out, and let him know what I learned either that night or the next day. I added that there was no sense going to the expense of a lawyer until we were sure we needed one.

2

The relationship between me and Inspector Warren Day is a little hard to define. I suppose you could call it a competitive friendship. There’s little either of us wouldn’t do for the other, but a casual observer who didn’t understand our peculiar relationship would probably think we hate each other’s guts.

In the eight years I’ve known the chief of Homicide, I doubt that we’ve spoken a dozen courteous words to each other. But beneath the surface wrangling is a solid liking based on mutual respect, which neither of us would admit under oath.

When I walked into my irascible friend’s office shortly after one p.m., he raised his skinny bald head to peer at me over his glasses, looked pained and automatically moved his cigar humidor out of reaching distance.

I said, “I brought my own today, Inspector,” took a seat, produced a couple of cigars and offered him one.

He accepted it dubiously, sniffed it before sticking it in his mouth, then shook his head when I offered a light, preferring to chew. I don’t know why Day is so particular about cigar brands, since he rarely lights any of the half dozen a day he consumes, usually just chewing them down until they disappear.

As I lit my own cigar, he said, “If this is a bribe, Moon, it’ll take more than a cigar to fix any murder raps.”

“I didn’t happen to kill anybody this week,” I told him. “I’m just after information. Understand you’ve got a kid named Joe Brighton down here on some trumped-up charge.”

The inspector’s eyebrows raised. “Trumped-up? The young punk’s a killer.”

“Mind telling me what you’ve got on him?”

“Mind telling me why you want to know?”

“His father’s an old friend,” I said. “And I’ve known the kid since he was three. I’m sort of a foster uncle to him. His dad asked me to look into it and do what I could for the boy.”

“Oh.” The inspector was silent for a few moments while he adjusted his mental attitude. He’d been prepared to resist any request I made just to keep in practice, but my personal interest changed things. He isn’t exactly unreasonable, even though he is approximately unreasonable.

Finally he said, “You can’t do anything for him, Moon. His old man should have done something for him years ago. With a razor strop. It’s a little too late to start now. Sorry the kid means something to you, because he’s as tough a nut as I’ve seen in a long time. He’s a cinch for life at least.”

“How about giving me the details,” I suggested.

Usually I have to dig out bit by bit any information I get from Warren Day, even when it’s something he intends to release to the newspapers as soon as I leave. This isn’t because he likes me less than newsmen, but solely because he seems to derive some kind of fiendish satisfaction from making me work. But today he recognized I wasn’t much in the mood for games and gave it to me straight.

“The switchboard got an anonymous call from some female about a quarter of ten last night,” he said. “Claimed she was the girl friend of one of the Purple Pelicans, which probably makes her a teen-ager. The switchboard operator says she sounded young. She also sounded mad, as though she were getting even with her boy friend for something. She reported the gang was holding a reefer party in their basement club room. The place is at 620 Vernon, just south of Sixth. Fifteen minutes later the narcotics boys raided the joint and nabbed young Brighton just as he was running up the steps. When they shook him down, they found a switchblade knife over the maximum legal length in his pocket. Then they went on down to the club room and found the dead boy. Another seventeen-year-old named Bart Meyers. He was still warm and the cops figured he hadn’t been dead more than a few minutes when they walked in. There was no sign of a struggle and no evidence that anyone at all aside from the dead kid and Joe Brighton had been in the place that evening. The theory is that young Brighton stuck the knife in him unexpectedly before the Meyers kid could start to defend himself, because the dead boy had both a clasp knife and a zip gun in his pockets.”

“What’s Joe say?” I asked.

The inspector shrugged. “That he didn’t kill the kid. Nothing more. Wouldn’t give a reason for being at the club room, except that he was supposed to meet Bart Meyers there. Wouldn’t say for what purpose. For that matter, he wouldn’t even admit belonging to the Purple Pelicans, though the police know all about the gang and Joe was wearing the uniform. That’s a purple jacket and purple hat band. Besides, his father let it out and gave us the added information that Joe was vice-president. He killed the kid all right. We traced the knife to his old man, who admitted he hadn’t seen it around for some time.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean Joe swiped it,” I commented.

Day snorted. “He’s the only person aside from his dad living in their flat. And his dad didn’t kill Meyers because a dozen witnesses testified he was leaning against the bar in a tavern near his place from the time he got off work at five until we located him there at eleven.”

“Any fingerprints on the knife?” I asked.

“It had been wiped clean. By young Brighton, we think.”

I puffed my cigar silently for a time. Finally I asked, “The police find any evidence of the reefer party?”

“Not exactly. They found a few home-made reefers in the dead boy’s pocket. Also a heroin kit hidden behind a picture in a hole made by removing a brick from the basement wall. The whole works: syringe, needles, spoon and alcohol lamp, all in a little tin box. But no dope.”

The heroin kit depressed me. Youngsters Joe Brighton’s age fooling with dynamite for kicks. Flirting with a habit which ninety-nine times out of a hundred eventually leads users to one of three places: a penitentiary, a mental hospital or a morgue.

“Joe have any needle marks on him?” I asked.

Warren Day shook his head. “Or the dead boy either. But some of the club members must ride the stuff, or they wouldn’t keep a rig right in the club room.”

I said, “Did it occur to you this anonymous call may have been timed deliberately?”

“It occurred to us,” he admitted.

“Yet presumably it came about the time of the murder.”

“We’re aware of it, Moon. We’re not exactly dunces down here.”

“Doesn’t that smell faintly like a possible frame?” I suggested.

“Not necessarily. Maybe the girl knew the two boys planned to meet at the club room and have it out, and wanted the police to break it up because she was afraid whichever one was her boy friend would get hurt.”

“Have what out?”

“Didn’t I mention the motive we figure?” he asked. “This Bart Meyers was president of the club and Joe was vice-president. We think Joe was pushing for president, which is the polite title these juvenile gangs give their leaders.”

I snorted. “You think a seventeen-year-old kid would kill somebody just to become president of a club?”

“It isn’t a club,” Day said. “They just call it a club. It’s an organized gang modeled after adult criminal gangs. Adult gang leaders get bumped off by ambitious underlings all the time. Why shouldn’t a juvenile gang leader get bumped occasionally?”

“Is this just a wild guess, or do you have some evidence of conflict between the two boys?”

“No actual evidence, but it’s a little more than a wild guess. Call it an informed guess. We rounded up most of the Purple Pelicans last night and grilled them. About fifteen altogether. But we couldn’t even get them to admit they’d ever heard of the gang, let alone that they belonged to it. We’ve had enough experience with these teenage gangs to know how they operate, though. They don’t elect officers; the toughest kid in the gang is president, the second toughest vice-president, and so on down the line. The president is expected to be able to whip everybody else in the gang. Any time another member thinks he’s a better man, he can challenge the president. Then they have a fight, and, if the challenger wins, he’s the new president. We think young Brighton challenged the Meyers kid and they met by prearrangement to have it out.”

I said, “You couldn’t even get that theory before a jury without substantiation.”

Day shrugged. “We’ve got the knife as evidence, plus virtually catching the kid in the act. We don’t need a motive.”

I said, “The murder weapon strikes me as a little peculiar too. Why would the kid carry a hunting knife when he already had a switch blade?”

“You should see how some of the other Purple Pelicans were armed when we rounded them up,” Day said sourly. “Half a dozen carried both sheath knives and pocket knives.”

“But I understand this hunting knife didn’t have a sheath. Kind of awkward to carry a thing like that just stuck under your belt.”

“Maybe he only carried it when he expected trouble,” the inspector said. “Look, Moon, we thought of all these objections you’re making. We’ve had nearly as much experience in evaluating evidence as most private eyes. Believe me, the kid is guilty.”

“All right,” I said wearily. “Mind if I talk to him?”

“I mind, but I don’t see what harm you can do,” Day growled.

Picking up his phone, he spoke into it and a moment later his chief assistant, Lieutenant Hannegan, stuck his head in the door. The lieutenant didn’t say anything, because he rarely does, merely raising his eyebrows inquiringly.

“Moon wants to see young Brighton,” Day said curtly. “Give him ten minutes.”

Hannegan just nodded.

3

Joe Brighton was stretched out on the drop-down canvas bunk of his single cell, but he couldn’t have been very comfortable. The detention cell bunks are only six feet long, so four inches of him hung over.

When Hannegan unlocked the door, Joe pushed himself to a seated position, swung his oversized feet to the floor and self-consciously smoothed back his theatrically long hair. Hannegan locked the door behind me and moved away down the hall.

Joe had outgrown the habit of calling me Uncle Manny, but after knowing me most of his life, apparently he couldn’t quite bring himself to call me Mr. Moon. At the same time he seemed to feel I was too adult for the logical compromise of plain Manny, with the result that he hadn’t called me anything for more than a year.

Now he simply said, “Hi.”’

“How are you, Joe? Your dad asked me to look in and steer you through this. Arrange for a lawyer and so on.”

“Yeah?” he asked.

He didn’t smile, but his attitude wasn’t particularly unfriendly either. His long, big-featured face was merely warily morose. He rested gangling arms on his bony knees and let his hands dangle downward limply. They were big hands, knobby and powerful. I could see how his gang might nickname him Knuckles.

“What’s the pitch?” I asked. “You actually knife this kid?”

He looked disdainful. “The blueshirts are way out in left field. Why would I use a knife on Bart Meyers? I could whip him with one hand.”

“Who did knife him then?”

Joe merely shrugged.

“Better tell me the whole story,” I suggested.

While he considered me estimatingly, I said a little sharply, “Stop looking at me like I was a cop. I’m here to help you, and I’m only allowed ten minutes. You want to take this rap sitting down, or you want to give me something to work on so I’ll have at least an outside chance to prove your innocence? If you are innocent.”

“I’m not looking at you like you’re a cop,” he said defensively.

“You’re sure as the devil not looking at me like I’m your foster uncle. You want my help, or don’t you?”

“What can you do?” he asked. “The blueshirts have got this rigged.”

“The police don’t rig murders,” I said. “If it was rigged, the real killer rigged it. Probably one of your Purple Pelicans.”

“Them? Nobody in the club would do a thing like that.” When he gave me that estimating look again, I said in an exasperated tone, “For God’s sake, kid, you’re on your way to at least a life sentence, and maybe the gas chamber, for a crime you claim you didn’t commit. You don’t owe any fake loyalty to anybody. Anyway, I’m not a cop and I’m not going to blab your club secrets to anybody. My sole interest is to do what I can for you because your father’s a friend of mine. Now open up. How many members in the Purple Pelicans?”

He brushed his hand over his hair again, hesitated a moment, then said reluctantly, “Around sixty.”

The figure surprised me. Warren Day had said the police had managed to round up fifteen members for questioning, and had implied that was most of the gang. Apparently the police had underestimated its size considerably.

“Sixty,” I said. “All of them such staunch friends they wouldn’t dream of framing you?”

Joe reddened a little. “We don’t pull stunts like that on each other,” he muttered.

“Then what’s your theory?”

“The Gravediggers, probably. A club down the other side of Lucas. The boys will take care of it.”

“You mean go down and knock off their president in revenge? And frame the Gravediggers’ vice-president? That’ll be cozy. The two of you can hold hands in the gas chamber.”

He popped his knuckles nervously. “Well, cripes, what can I do, Uncle Manny?”

His calling me Uncle Manny for the first time in over a year told me what his real mental state was beneath his surface indifference.

In a little softer voice I said, “Just spill everything you know or suspect, Joe. Start with how you happened to be alone with Meyers at the club room last night.”

“That’ll only make it sound worse,” he said miserably.

“Spill anyway.”

He looked at me a long time before responding. Then he shrugged hopelessly. “I gave Bart a challenge. A lot of the guys thought I should be president. It’s been building up all year. We were supposed to meet at the club room at ten o’clock and go somewhere to have it out. That’s why none of the other guys was around. They knew it was coming off and stayed clear. But when I got there Bart was dead.”

“You say you were going somewhere to have it out? You weren’t going to fight at the club room?”

“No. We don’t allow fights there. Bart and me just fixed to meet there.”

“Where were you going?” I asked.

His bony shoulders lifted in a shrug. “Behind the car barns, maybe. Or some vacant lot. We’d have decided that after we met.”

“When a fight for the presidency takes place, are there certain rules?”

“Sure,” Joe said. “You can’t use nothing but your hands. That’s how the guys would know this was a bum rap. They know I wouldn’t use a knife and they know we wouldn’t fight in the club room. Besides, Bart had on his jacket.”

When I only looked puzzled at this, he explained. “Our jackets cost fourteen bucks apiece. We don’t even wear them on a rumble. Nobody in the club would fight without taking his jacket off first.”

I asked, “If the Gravediggers framed you, how’d they know you planned to meet Bart last night?”

“Everybody knew. The Purple Pelicans wouldn’t spread it around, but the auxiliary knew all about it too, and some of them pal around a little with members of the Gravediggers’ auxiliary.”

“What are these auxiliaries?” I asked. “The members’ girls?”

“Yeah. Only they have to be taken in.”

I took this to mean the girl friend of a member didn’t automatically become an auxiliary member, but had to be approved by either the club or the other auxiliary members, or perhaps both.

“So you’re reasonably certain the Gravediggers knew of your planned meeting with Bart, then?”

“Sure. That stuff gets around fast.”

“How would they get at that knife your dad owned?”

He laughed a little sardonically. “Our flat hasn’t been locked in years. What’s there to steal except a lot of empty whisky bottles?”

“The police say some girl phoned in anonymously at a quarter of ten to report a reefer party was going on at the club room. Which is why the cops happened to arrive just when they did. Any idea who the girl would be?”

His face darkened angrily. “First I heard that,” he said. “Probably some gal in the Gravediggers’ auxiliary.”

“The cops think maybe it was either your girl friend or Bart Meyers’, trying to prevent the fight because she was afraid one of you’d get hurt.”

“How’d the cops find out about the fight?” he asked in astonishment.

“They didn’t. They’re only guessing. You think it could have been either your girl or Bart’s?”

He shook his head decisively.

“Give me their names anyway.”

“Bart’s girl friend was Stella Quint over on Sixth. I don’t know the exact address.”

“How about yours?”

After the slightest hesitation he said, “I haven’t got one.”

I suspected he was being gallant about involving his girl, but before I could follow up, Hannegan appeared outside the cell and attracted my attention by banging his keys against the bars. When I looked at him, he pointed at his watch.

“Don’t be so G.I.,” I said. “Give me another minute.”

“Kid’s got another visitor,” the lieutenant said stolidly.

“All right. Just one more question then. Joe, who do I see in the club to steer me around down in that neighborhood?”

He looked thoughtful, glanced at Hannegan, then asked, “Got a pencil and paper?”

I gave him my pocket notebook and a mechanical pencil. I stood beside him, watching as he laid the notebook on his knee and wrote: Stub Carlson, 722 Vernon.

Below this he wrote:

He contemplated what he had written, scratched through the no and substituted any above it. I put the notebook and pencil back in my pocket and waited in silence for Hannegan to come over and unlock the door.

4

When the lieutenant and I arrived in the lobby together, I discovered the other person waiting to see Joe Brighton was his Aunt Sara. Sara Chesterton looked too young to be anybody’s aunt, and as a matter of fact was still short of thirty, but she was a full-fledged aunt nevertheless. She was the sister of Joe’s dead mother.

She was also a strikingly pretty woman in a businesslike sort of way. Years back Maggie Brighton, who was something of a matchmaker, had tried to brew a match between Sara and me. But it didn’t take. While the girl always seemed to like me well enough, she showed no indication of swooning in my presence. And she was a bit too briskly self-sufficient for my taste.

Sara Chesterton was a caseworker for the Division of Public Welfare, and years of dealing with relief clients had given her an impersonal and businesslike manner which carried over to her social contacts. She was a rather small woman, brunette, with attractive gray eyes and a well-rounded but not too plump figure.

When she saw me, she rose from the bench where she had been waiting, came over and thrust out her hand like a man. “How are you, Manny? Haven’t seen you for ages. What have you been doing?”

“Hello, Sara,” I said. “Working, sleeping, eating. Drinking a little occasionally.”

“I’ll bet a little. Married to that Fausta girl yet?”

She meant Fausta Moreni, blonde proprietress of El Patio night club, with whom I’ve carried on a sporadic and volatile romance for some years.

“Hardly,” I said. “We’re just friends.”

“You ought to get married, Manny. You’re past thirty now, aren’t you?”

I grinned at her. “This is me, your old boy friend Manny Moon, Sara. Not one of your relief clients.”

When she had the grace to look a little guilty, I said, “I gave up all thoughts of marriage when you tossed me over a career.”

“Phooey. Maggie practically threw me at your head, and you never even noticed me.” Then her responsive grin faded. “You been in to see Joe?”

“Yeah.”

“How’s he taking it?”

“Pretty well.”

“What’ll they do to him, Manny?”

“Prison, probably, if he’s convicted. He’s a little young for the gas chamber. He claims he didn’t kill that kid.”

“Oh?” She looked dubious. “I understood he was practically caught in the act.”

“He thinks he was framed by some teen-age club his club has rumbles with. I’m going to poke around down there and see what I can turn up.”

Again she emitted an inquiring, “Oh?” Then her expression turned reflective. “Want a guide, Manny? That’s my relief district, you know, and I know the area pretty intimately.”

“I hate to bother you,” I said.

“Bother? Joe’s my real nephew, not just a foster nephew. And I’ll bet you’re doing this poking around on the house. My saturated brother-in-law certainly hasn’t paid you any retainer, has he?”

The bitterness of her tone surprised me. I knew she hadn’t been very thick with Ed since he took up drinking as a hobby, but I’d never before heard her speak of him with anything but liking tempered by faint impatience. But apparently now her attitude toward him was about the same as his attitude toward himself. She was blaming Joe’s situation on Ed’s drinking.

I said mildly, “Ed’s a friend of mine and I like Joe. Ed’s done me enough favors in the past.”

“Name one in the last five years,” she challenged.

When I merely shrugged, she said, “You haven’t said whether or not you want a guide.”

“If you can spare the time,” I said. “I may spend a couple of days down there.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said doubtfully. “I was thinking of volunteering some evenings, but of course you’d want to work in the daytime.”

Then she brightened. “At least I can give you a briefing on the neighborhood before you go down. I’m only going to drop in on Joe for a minute, because my lunch period is practically over. Why don’t you wait and I’ll give you a travelogue as you drive me back to my office.”

I hadn’t contemplated going anywhere near the welfare office, but she put it in such a way I couldn’t very well refuse without being blunt. I said I’d wait a few minutes.

After a wait of about five minutes, Sara Chesterton took me to her office in the building housing Public Welfare. She chatted all the way about various technical aspects of her work as a relief investigator. As we passed a long counter in a large waiting room, Sara gestured toward it and said, “Intake. I get stuck for a week there every summer when the regular Intake girls go on vacation. Not that I mind too much. It’s kind of dull, but it’s a change from my usual routine.”

We stopped before the elevator and Sara pushed the signal button.

I asked. “What’s Intake?”

“Where they accept original relief applications. After Intake takes down the basic data, applications are sent upstairs to Records, where the information is carded.” She went on to tell me about the way Records sorted the cards into geographical districts and so forth, finally assigning them to caseworkers for investigation.

The elevator doors opened, we stepped in and Sara punched the button marked “Two.” The ancient cab started with a shake and crept upward.

I said, “Then you’re the one who decides whether an applicant is eligible for relief or not, eh?” I didn’t particularly care, but thought I ought to show at least polite interest in what she had been saying.

“I make an investigation, write it up and recommend either approval or denial. My casework supervisor, Mrs. Forshay, makes the actual decision based on my report, but almost never does a supervisor reverse a worker’s recommendation.”

The slow-moving elevator came to a stop and the doors opened. We stepped out into a huge room containing dozens of desks, about half of which were occupied. Sara hurried toward a desk situated in the center of the room.

As she seated herself and pointed to a chair next to her desk for me, she said, “But what you really want to know is about Joe’s neighborhood, isn’t it?”

I told her I wasn’t sure, since there were so many possibilities, but that a thumb-nail picture of the area would probably be the best starting point.

“Well, it’s a typical slum, area,” Sara said with a reflective look on her face. “Cramped housing, low incomes, low educational level. A large foreign-born element. Very little parental control over the children of high school age. Not that the parents aren’t strict. Most of them are quick to use a strap and the children jump when their parents speak. But homes are too crowded for much family life, and most parents down there are just as glad to have their offspring out from underfoot. That puts them out on the streets, and roaming the streets without much to do, the kids tend to get out of control.”

Then she went off into a long involved discussion of the psychological reasons behind mass juvenile delinquency. But I was after information about the two specific juvenile gangs, interesting as were the things she was saying.

I said, “What do you know about the organization of the Purple Pelicans and the Gravediggers?”

“Not too much about the Gravediggers, I’m afraid. That’s out of my welfare district. But a number of my clients have children who belong to the Purple Pelicans. I’ve seen them with their purple jackets. The girls wear similar jackets, and wear their hair in pony tails tied with a purple ribbon.”

“Know anything about their criminal activities?”

“Only suspicions. There are frequent muggings and also frequent shop burglaries, the loot usually easily disposable stuff like candy, portable radios and so on. It’s a safe assumption no outside gang would pull them in Purple Pelican territory — the gang wouldn’t tolerate it for long.”

“Ever pick up any rumors about narcotics traffic?”

“Vague ones. Several of my clients reported their teen-age children were using narcotics, and wanted me to do something about it. But there wasn’t much I could do, except authorize them to take the children to a doctor at agency expense.”

“Did you know this Bart Meyers kid personally?” I asked.

“Oh yes. His mother was a client of mine once. I closed her case a couple of years ago, though, so I haven’t seen much of Bart since.”

“You wouldn’t know of any enemies he had, then?”

Sara shook her head.

I got up out of my chair. “Thanks a lot. I don’t know wether anything you’ve told me will help, but at least it gives me a picture of the environment.”

“If you think of anything else you want to know, ring me up. Or better yet, drop by my apartment. I can serve you a drink there.”

“Sure,” I said. “I may take you up.”

It was well after two p.m. when I got out of the place. I didn’t know whether the boy whose name Joe Brighton had given me was a high school student or not, but I knew high school let out at two-thirty. By the time I could get down to Seventh and Vernon, there was a good chance I’d find him home.

He was just putting his books away when I stopped at his apartment on seven-twenty-two Vernon, a so-called railroad apartment house, like the rest on the block. That is, they were three or four rooms lined up in a straight row from the front of the building to the alley, much like railroad cars.

Stub Carlson was a stocky youth of about eighteen, wide-shouldered and well muscled. He had a square, not unpleasant face, a firm mouth and steady eyes. He wore his hair long, this apparently being a club trademark.

After he looked up from the note I handed him which Joe had written, there was faint interest in his eyes. “Manny Moon, eh? Joe’s told me about you. Private dick, aren’t you?”

I admitted I was.

His eyes strayed to my foot with a touch of curiosity. I’ve seen the same look in too many other eyes not to recognize what caused it. Joe had told him one of my legs is false from the knee down.

“It’s the right one,” I said dryly.

Guiltily his eyes jumped back to my face. He looked at me, though, with a natural and direct assurance. “Okay, Mr. Moon. What’s the deal?”

We went out to my car on my invitation, and I told him. At first he hesitated giving me any direct information, but, since Joe was his “number one pal” and because my note, I emphasized, gave me Joe’s guarantee, he agreed to cooperate with me. I impressed on him that I had no personal interest in him, or the Purple Pelicans, or the Gravediggers. “I don’t approve much of these clubs you kids form, because they get out of hand and grow into nothing but bands of hoodlums,” I said. “But you’ve got my word and Joe’s that nothing I hear will go any further.”

He told me of the club’s organization. It had four officers: president, vice president, secretary and treasurer. “The bylaws say they’re elected at an annual meeting by voice vote, but it isn’t quite that simple,” he explained. “When a guy stands up for president, you either have to vote for him or fight him. Because if you vote against him, it’s a challenge and means you think you can whip him. The same thing for the other officers. Usually there’s no challenges because they’ve all been settled on a vacant lot somewhere in advance of the meeting.”

“Like Joe and Bart were going to settle things?” I asked.

He gave me a startled look.

“Joe told me why he was meeting Bart at the club room,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to spread it. The police already suspect it anyway, though they haven’t any proof. What’s your office, Stub?”

“Secretary right now. Plus acting president until next week’s election. I’m in line now, with Bart dead and Joe in jail. But I don’t care much about it. I could probably whip any of the guys, but it seems a hell of a lot of trouble.”

Apparently Stub didn’t know it, but he was on the verge of graduating from membership in the teenage gang altogether. He seemed to be gaining adult perspective enough to be vaguely dissatisfied with the group, and only habit, I guessed, was keeping him in the group now. I also sensed he wouldn’t graduate into an adult criminal gang as would others of the Purple Pelicans. He would be one of the lucky few who could rise above his slum environment.

He wasn’t hooked with heroin like twenty percent of the gang, having learned his lesson after one unpleasant session when he was fourteen. The most important thing I learned from Stub, besides a closer picture of the gang itself, was that Bart Meyers was “getting religion” and had been influenced by a YMCA worker. He had been against the use of narcotics in the gang, and that’s why some of the guys wanted Joe to challenge him. Like most of the others, Joe thought little of Bart’s reform plan. Gradually Stub warmed to his subject, and for the next fifteen minutes I listened to an amazing story of how an organized adult gang was deliberately exploiting a bunch of teen-agers. The Purple Pelicans’ contact with this adult group was a hoodlum named Buzz Thurmond. But the Gravediggers were organized similarly by a different hood named Limpy Alfred, so there was evidently a big boss above them. Who this boss was, Stub had no idea. But it was generally accepted by both juvenile clubs that they were under the protection of a powerful adult gang which would furnish them with bail and legal service if they ever got in trouble. This had been going on for four years, and now this adult gang had ruled a cessation to hostilities between the Purple Pelicans and the Gravediggers. The boys got their narcotics from pushers introduced by Buzz Thurmond, who also supplied them with a fence. The pushers were a barber named Sam Polito, and a pool room habitué named Art Cooney. The fence’s name was Harry Krebb. I noted these names but I was primarily interested in Buzz Thurmond and Limpy Alfred, and their boss, whoever he turned out to be.

“Did Buzz Thurmond know of Bart’s reform campaign?” I asked.

Stub looked startled. Glancing at me sidewise, he said in a suddenly thoughtful voice, “Yeah. I guess he wouldn’t like it much, would he?”

“I shouldn’t think so,” I said dryly. “Might put a crimp in his business. One more thing, Stub. Did you know the reason the cops showed up so conveniently to catch Joe on the spot was that fifteen minutes previously they got an anonymous phone call from some girl telling them a reefer party was in progress at the club room?”

“No,” he said with surprise.

“Any idea who the girl might be?”

He shook his head. I told him the police thought it was either Bart’s girl or Joe’s wanting to break up the fight because she was afraid her boy friend would get hurt. Stub didn’t think much of this idea, though, since Bart’s girl didn’t like fighting but she wouldn’t dare “pull a stunt like that, while Joe’s girl would figure he’d win, she wouldn’t call.”

I tried to get the name of Joe’s girl from him, but he told me if Joe hadn’t told me her name, Joe mustn’t want to get her mixed in, so I didn’t press the point.

Before I left, he told me that any time I needed him, to either drop at his home or look for a purple jacket. “I’ll pass the word that you’re okay,” he assured me, and added, “And I’m going to get a few of my closest friends to work with me, in helping you.”

“I can use help,” I said. As I started to drive away, he stood on the sidewalk and waved me a friendly goodbye.

5

The rest of the day, I spent visiting. First, I saw Stella Quint, the dead boy’s girl. She was an attractive blonde of about sixteen, whose eyes were deeply shadowed and flecked with red.

She spoke to me without enthusiasm when her mother left us alone in the small, crowded room, furnished with cheap sofas and ancient easy chairs, and tables and lamps, and a brand new television set. Her tone indicated she never expected to get over the shock of Bart Meyers’ death, and I couldn’t get much from her. After telling her who I was and why I came, I asked bluntly, “Stella, did you phone the police at nine forty-five last night?”

Surprise formed on her face, but no alarm. “Me? No. Phone them for what?”

“Do you know of any girl who did?”

She shook her head, in a disinterested way.

“What’s Joe Brighton’s girl’s name?” I asked.

“Ruth Zimmerman,” she said dully.

“Live around here?”

“Around the corner on Tamm. Six forty-six.”

I left her feeling that Bart Meyers had probably been the girl’s first love, and that the tragic effects on the girl could be more permanent than if both of them had been adults.

Ruth Zimmerman was something else again. She was about sixteen, too, but self-possessed. I asked her to take a walk with me since her house was such a bedlam of television sets going full blast, from her own parlor and those of her neighbors, with her mother trying to quiet a howling baby.

She walked in a sinuous way that was calculated to give a sensual effect, but instead gave her a curiously defenseless air. Her development of coordination hadn’t kept pace with her bountiful physical development. Ruth’s general attitude was that of a woman who has lost a man, but isn’t going to cry about it because another would be along soon.

I spoke bluntly to her, when we reached the sidewalk. “You think Joe’s going to take this rap, don’t you?”

She moved her shoulders slightly. “I hope not. From what the kids say, though, the cops have got too good a case. Even if he’s innocent, he’s cooked.”

I asked her the question I’d asked Stella. “Why’d you make that call to the police last night, Ruth?”

Her eyes opened wide. “What?”

“Some girl phoned and said she was Joe’s girl friend,” I said, distorting the truth a little. “Naturally, I thought it was you.”

“Some other girl? Well, that’s a nerve. What’d she want? Permission to see Joe?”

Apparently she thought I meant the call had come after Joe’s arrest. Since I doubted that she would have the ability to make such a perfect parry on the spur of the moment, I decided she couldn’t know anything about the call.

“I suppose,” I said, wanting to kill the subject. “When the police wouldn’t give out any information, she hung up.”

My next stop was to visit Bart Meyers’ mother. She lived in a two-room walkup of a building which looked as if it should have been condemned years ago. She was alone.

The woman was only about thirty-five, thin, but not unattractive in an undernourished sort of way. She had little to say that could help me, although I got a picture of Bart himself that was at considerable variance with the previous picture I had had of a tough juvenile gang leader. Granted that it was a mother’s-eye view, and further sugar-coated by the fresh grief which makes people recall virtues and forget vices of loved ones, it was still rather surprising. Even after discounting a good portion of the panegyric, Bart Meyers took shape in my mind as a basically nice kid.

He had always been an organizer, his mother told me, and if he got into fights and at one time or another whipped every kid in the area, she blamed this on the tough neighborhood, where children either fight or are labeled sissies.

He was a loving son, too, she told me with some pride. She said that many of Bart’s friends were openly contemptuous of their parents, but he constantly showed his affection for her with kisses every time he left the house, or upon his return.

She knew he had been president of the Purple Pelicans, and I didn’t try to disillusion her about the nature of that group, since she thought of it merely as a teen-age social club. She couldn’t tell me what the odd jobs were which enabled him to have a regular supply of money. It seemed never to have occurred to her that Bart might have been raising money illegally.

After I left her, I visited the club room of the Purple Pelicans. It was staked out by a detective I knew, a guy named Hogan. It was just a basement room about twenty feet wide and fifty feet long, with brick walls, and unfinished ceiling. It was decorated with bright green drapes over the four windows, and pictures of nudes cut from magazines or calendars were placed in dime-store frames. There was a homemade bar painted and trimmed in the same combination as the cement floor and base — battleship grey with a decorative border of red. The place was furnished with second or third hand benches all around the walls, a number of cheap card tables and about twenty folding chairs.

The spot where the body had been found was marked in a chalk outline in front of the bar. When I looked closely, I could see a couple of small spots of dried blood in the center of the outline.

“Where’s that hole where they found the heroin rig?” I asked Hogan.

Hogan went over to the wall and pushed aside a framed drawing of a Petty girl who was, as usual, phoning somebody, in the standard garb of nothing. Behind it one brick had been removed from the wall, leaving a small oblong cavity. It didn’t tell me anything.

“I guess that’s all,” I said to Hogan. “Thanks.”

“See anything the boys missed?” he asked with a touch of indulgence.

“Naturally,” I said. “The killer couldn’t have been Joe Brighton, because he was a short, redheaded man who wore elevator shoes, a checked jacket and an Alpine hat with a feather in it. He’s ambidextrous, has just arrived from Australia on a cattle boat and snores when he sleeps on the left side.”

“Amazing,” Hogan said in simulated awe. “How do you do it?”

“Elementary,” I said negligently.

6

It was getting late, and I had decided to call it a day and get started in the morning until I neared Grand Avenue and realized I was passing within only two blocks of Sara Chesterton’s apartment. Since it was still early in the evening, on the spur of the moment I decided to stop by and see her.

Sara lived in a modern, tan-brick apartment house in a neighborhood which was nice without being exclusive. She had a comfortable, four-room apartment on the second floor.

She came to the door wearing a white terry-cloth housecoat.

“Why, Manny!” she said. “This is a pleasant surprise.”

“I was going through the neighborhood and suddenly thought of something I wanted to ask you,” I said. “Got a few minutes?”

“Of course. Come on in.”

As she led me into the front room, I saw that it had been redecorated since the last time I was there, which wasn’t surprising since I hadn’t been in the apartment for over five years. She also had some new furniture: a handsome gray living-room suite, a fragile blond cocktail table with a glass top and a twenty-four-inch-screen television set.

“You’ve fixed the joint up,” I said. “Compared to my trap this is luxury.”

“I’m beginning to accumulate a few nice things, more than I can afford, really. But I keep buying things on time, and somehow eventually they get paid off.” She looked around with satisfaction, then turned to me. “What do you drink? Still rye and water?”

“If you’ve got it.”

“I’ve got it. You can get ice cubes out for me while I’m mixing drinks.”

I followed her to the kitchen and by the time I had emptied the ice tray and dumped the cubes into a bowl, she had our drinks all measured out.

“I take soda,” she said, “and I know there isn’t any in the refrigerator. Be a doll and get a bottle from the clutter room, will you?”

What Sara called the “clutter room” was merely a small back hall which was recessed both sides of the door. She used it for storage and it got its name from the fact that it was as cluttered with odds and ends as the average attic.

I found the soda without difficulty, and was preparing to return to the kitchen when I noticed a bamboo spinning rod standing in a corner of the alcove. On the floor next to it was a dust-laden bait box.

No fishing enthusiast can resist peeking into a strange bait box, and fishing has been my favorite sport since I was a kid. I lifted the lid and looked admiringly at an. expensive and complete collection of spinning lures worth at least a hundred dollars. When I didn’t see any with which I was unfamiliar, I closed the lid again.

When I had returned to the kitchen and opened the soda for her, I asked, “You like fishing, Sara?”

She glanced at me in surprise. “A little. I haven’t been for several years. Why?”

“Some Sunday I’ll pick you up and we’ll try the river for a few jack salmon.”

“I’d like that,” she said agreeably.

She suggested we take our drinks into the front room. When we were settled there, Sara on the couch and me in an easy chair, I said, “What I stopped by for was to find out if you knew anything about either a man named Buzz Thurmond or one named Limpy Alfred.”

She looked at me in amused surprise. “You mean there’s actually a real person with a name like Limpy Alfred?”

“Apparently.”

She shook her head. “I’ve certainly never heard of him before. Nor of anyone named Buzz Thurmond. Why do you think I would have?”

“I didn’t have much hope about Limpy, because I don’t know his last name. But I thought Buzz Thurmond might possibly ring a bell. I understand he originally came from the neighborhood, and I thought possibly the family had been on welfare at some time or other.”

“Buzz Thurmond,” Sara repeated thoughtfully. “Thurmond sounds familiar, but the first name doesn’t mean anything to me. It must be a nickname, isn’t it?”

“I imagine,” I said dryly. “I don’t think many parents would be likely to christen a child Buzz.”

“I think I had an Aid to Dependent Children case named Mrs. Thurmond about six years ago,” Sara said. “Tomorrow I’ll have Records look it up for me. Possibly your Buzz Thurmond was one of the children. How old is he?”

I shook my head. “I haven’t the faintest idea, except that he’s been connected with an adult criminal gang for at least four years. Doesn’t seem likely he’d have been a child six years ago.”

“No. He would have had to be under sixteen at the time. He may have been an older son not living at home, though. If I can find anything on him in the welfare files, what is it you want to know?”

“Anything you’re able to dig up. I don’t know a thing about him except his name and that he’s a hood.”

“You think he may have had something to do with Bart Meyers’ death?”

I said, “I can’t tell you why I’m interested without violating the confidence of my source. I’m afraid you’ll have to work in the dark.”

“All right,” Sara said agreeably. “I’ll do my best to control my curiosity. Why don’t you phone me at work between one-thirty and two tomorrow? I’ll either have something by then, or the news that I can’t find anything.”

We left it at that. We had one more drink together before I went home and let Sara get back to her case records.

7

As Sara Chesterton worked in the field mornings and didn’t arrive at her office until one-thirty p.m., and since Stub Carlson was in school until two-thirty, there wasn’t much I could do the next morning except take care of a couple of routine matters. I started by checking with Warren Day to see if there had been any new developments.

There hadn’t been.

When I left the inspector’s office, I went down the hall to the record room and asked the cop on duty if he had anything on Buzz Thurmond or Limpy Alfred.

He didn’t have any trouble locating the card on Thurmond, but Limpy Alfred took him a little longer. I studied Thurmond’s record while he continued the search.

Buzz Thurmond’s given name was Leroy, I noted, and he was a two-time loser. His first conviction was for assault and battery at the age of nineteen, and had gotten him a six-month term. The second, for extortion, had occurred when he was twenty-two and had cost him two years. The front and profile pictures on his record card had been taken at the time of his second conviction, which made them eight years old, since the man’s age was listed as thirty. They showed a thick-featured man with a strong jaw and a sullen cast to his mouth. He was a big man, I noticed, his height being listed as six feet two and his weight as two hundred and six.

By the time I had finished reading over Leroy Thurmond’s record, the cop had located Limpy Alfred’s card by checking the nickname file.

His full name, according to the record, was Alfred Lloyd Leventhal, and he was forty-two years old. He’d only been in circulation thirty years, however, because he’d spent twelve years behind bars. His time had been served in two separate sentences, with several years intervening: the first a five-year term for armed robbery, of which he had earned four years, and the second a fifteen-year term for second-degree murder. Two years previously he’d been paroled after doing eight of the fifteen.

The front and profile views on the card dated from the time of his parole. They showed a thin, sharp-featured man with a receding chin and a slit for a mouth. His height was given as five-eight and his weight as only one-thirty-five. He had earned his nickname because, according to the description, he had a pronounced limp as a result of an old gunshot wound in the left knee.

Both men, from these records, had been picked up for questioning a number of times since their respective releases from the penitentiary, but had never been charged. Two of Buzz Thurmond’s had been on suspicion of homicide, one for receiving stolen goods and one for attempted extortion. The crimes for which Limpy had drawn the suspicious attention of the police included everything from assault to homicide, even, in one case, arson.

I gave the record room cop a cigar for his trouble.

Instead of phoning Sara Chesterton, as she had suggested, I decided to drop by the welfare office. She was busy at work, but put it aside and told me what she’d learned. “I phoned Records from home this morning before I started out in the field and asked them to pull my old Thurmond case, Manny. I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet, but it should be in my box.”

She rummaged through a pile of case records, and correspondence in her in-box and gave a grunt of satisfaction when she found a manila folder labelled Thurmond, ADC-6251.

As she opened it and started to look through it, I said, “I’ve learned Buzz’s real name is Leroy.”

“Leroy,” she repeated, studying the face sheet. “According to this Mrs. Thurmond had only two minor children named Thomas and Grace. Wait a minute. Here he is, under ‘Relatives Not Living in the Home.’ Leroy Thurmond, eldest son of client, age twenty-four.” She glanced at the date of the record. “That would make him thirty now, as this is six years old. His address is listed as the Bremmer Hotel, where he worked as a night clerk.”

She thumbed through several pages of the record. “According to this, his mother phoned she wouldn’t need ADC anymore because her eldest son was now giving her support. That’s when we closed the case.”

“He fell into money, eh?” I said thoughtfully.

“Apparently.” Again she thumbed through the case record. “There isn’t a thing more on him.”

“I’ve learned Limpy Alfred’s name is Alfred Lloyd Leventhal,” I said. “Could you check your old records for him?”

For answer she picked up the phone and called Records. Then she excused herself, and returned in about three minutes with a manila folder similar to the other. Sitting down at her desk again, she opened it and studied the face sheet.

It turned out Limpy was from another district, and his common-law wife had applied for relief when he was in the state penitentiary. “Leventhal was paroled two years ago,” she said. “Here’s a notation that the worker visited him to ask if he was willing to support his common-law wife. And guess where he was living?”

“The Bremmer Hotel,” I said.

Sara looked at me in surprise. “How’d you know?”

“Intuition,” I said.

It was to some degree, but I knew the reputation of the Bremmer Hotel, as did everybody in town who had dealings with crime. A second-rate place at the edge of the slum area, it was respectable on the surface, but those in the know, including the police, were aware the respectability was only a veneer. The place was the on-and-off residence of numerous known criminals, including a good number of freshly-released convicts who made it their first stop after getting out of the can.

The police raided the Bremmer Hotel with monotonous regularity, they’d never been able to make any charge stick, as a matter of fact, because, while the proprietor wasn’t very particular about his guests, he carefully avoided harboring criminals who were wanted at the moment.

A reputed racketeer named Sherman Bremmer owned the place, which made me wonder if I hadn’t stumbled onto the leader of the gang which maneuvered the Purple Pelicans and the Gravediggers into criminal activity. It seemed too much of a coincidence for both gang lieutenants to have a connection with the Bremmer Hotel unless they also had a connection with the owner.

Sara broke into my thoughts by saying, “Any of this helpful?”

“It’s given me another lead,” I said, rising. “Thanks a lot.”

Before I closed the door behind me, she called, “Don’t forget that fishing date we have some Sunday. You won’t forget?”

“I won’t forget,” I said.

It was pretty close to two-thirty when I left the welfare office, but I made it to the flat where Stub Carlson lived by twenty of three. I found no one home.

As I waited downstairs, a boy in a purple jacket turned to come into the building. “Stub isn’t home,” I said.

He looked startled, and then smiled. “You must be the guy Stub told us to be on the lookout for, Manny Moon. I’m Dave O’Brien.”

He explained to me that the club members were being rounded up for a special meeting. “I guess it’s about Stub and you,” he said. “Some of the guys don’t like it you’re a private cop. I think Stub’ll change their minds.”

I decided I’d see Stub later, after the meeting, when he could tell me what had been decided, and I’d know how much I could depend upon the Purple Pelicans for help.

To kill a couple of hours, I visited the downtown YMCA, and had a talk with an affable man in his fifties, the YMCA secretary, named Gardner.

He sent me to see a vital, well-muscled young man named Wilfred Reed, as the one most likely to know about the Y’s program of converting juvenile gangs into law-abiding clubs.

He knew Bart, and felt bad when I suggested Bart might have been killed because of his plan to reform the club.

“You shouldn’t blame yourself,” I said. “Your program seems a fine one to me. If you dropped it more kids would get killed in rumbles than could possibly get hurt in fighting for reform.”

“I know that,” he said ruefully. “But that doesn’t make me feel any better about it. As a matter of fact, I tried to slow Bart down.”

“How was that?” I asked.

“He wanted to convert the Purple Pelicans into a straight club at one fell swoop. I knew it wouldn’t work, since the gang, like the Gravediggers, was too highly organized for criminal activity. Also both have a high percentage of narcotic addicts.”

I talked a while longer with him, but basically he knew little that could help me. He hadn’t heard of Buzz Thurmond or Limpy Alfred, either. As there didn’t seem to be anything else he could tell me, I thanked the man and left.

8

I planned a visit to the Bremmer Hotel to see if I could turn up a connection between racketeer Sherman Bremmer and the two hoods who acted as advisors to the Purple Pelicans and the Gravediggers. But I decided to hold off on this until I knew how much I could make use of the friends Stub was working on to help me. One thing I didn’t want. I didn’t want to make Buzz Thurmond suspicious that the kids were plotting against him. Most of the club members just thought I was digging up general information to help Joe, but Stub’s close friends would know the truth, and I had to hope none of these close friends were hooked, and would try to protect their source of supply.

When I reached the corner of Sixth and Vernon and started to run right, a purple-jacketed youngster stepped from the curb and waved me down.

It was Dave O’Brien, the kid I’d met a couple of hours before.

In an excited voice, he said, “Stub told me to head you off. Everything’s blown up.”

When I’d parked the car, I got out and joined him. “What’s blown up?”

“The whole deal. They’re holding a kangaroo court for Stub. For telling you club secrets.” The kid’s face was pale and his speech was so hurried the words ran over each other.

I mulled this over a minute, then asked, “If this kangaroo court finds Stub guilty, what are they likely to do to him?”

The kid looked worried. “Maybe kick him out of the club.”

“Any danger of physical punishment?”

“I don’t think so,” he said in an uncertain voice. “They brought along the cat-o-nine-tails, of course, but that’s just to sort of scare guys. Only thing is, a lot of the guys seemed to be riding pretty high.”

I thought this over. It seemed reasonable to assume that if Buzz Thurmond was behind the kangaroo court, he would have seen to it that the addicts in the group were all doped to their eyebrows.

“I think I’d better look in on this meeting,” I decided.

“Stub said no,” the redhead insisted. “He wants you to get clear out of the neighborhood. He didn’t like the way some of the guys were talking about you.”

“I don’t like it either,” I informed him. “I think I’ll do some talking back.”

“There’s sixty guys down there,” Dave O’Brien said doubtfully as he followed me hesitantly to the brownstone entrance.

“Sixty kids,” I corrected. “I think I can handle kids, even if they’re doped up.”

None of the Purple Pelicans saw me enter the room, for they were all crowded to the far end with their backs to me. The green drapes were not only drawn, the windows were shut so no sound could emerge.

As I started to move forward slowly, from beyond the crowd there came a whistling sound followed by a dull spat and a groan. What I had heard sent me charging through the mass of youngsters, scattering boys in all directions.

Directly before me in an open area at the far end of the room Stub Carlson was spread-eagled on the floor, a purple-jacketed boy holding each of his arms and legs. He was stripped to the waist and his back was a mass of bloody welts.

Over Stub stood a muscular youth of about eighteen, also stripped to the waist and glistening with sweat. His back was to me and he was just raising a vicious-looking cat-o-nine-tails.

My right hand grasped the whip just as it reached the top of its upsweep and my left gripped the boy’s shoulder. Swinging him around, I slashed the knotted leather thongs across his bare stomach and chest with such force that he let out a howl of pain and stumbled backward until he crashed into the rear wall. I slashed at the four boys holding Stub, too, and they screamed and rolled on the floor to get out of my range.

No one had moved during my attack, being stunned by its suddenness. Turning to face them, I got them to move by taking a step forward and swinging the cat in a vicious circle at head height. It would have ripped to pieces any face it caught, but though I was boiling with rage, I wasn’t berserk enough to want to mar any of the kids personally. I only swung close enough to make the boys jerk back in terror. The ring widened appreciably.

Then I threw the lash half the width of the room at the boy I’d taken it from. He let out another yell when the handle caught him in the stomach.

Ignoring him, I let my eyes move around the circle of faces slowly, and the boys shifted uneasily under the contempt they could see in my expression.

Stub had managed to come erect, but he was weaving on his feet and staring around him with glazed eyes. A shirt, jacket and snap-brim hat lay on the floor near where he had been spread-eagled. Stooping I picked them up, set the hat on his head, draped the jacket over his lacerated shoulders and handed him the shirt to hold. When I took hold of his arm he let me start to steer him through the now silent crowd, as though he were a punch-drunk fighter being led from the ring.

A path silently opened before us, but we had gone no more than a few steps when a sharp click behind us made me release Stub’s arm and spin around.

The youngster from whom I had taken the cat-o-nine-tails stood spraddle-legged not two paces away, a switch knife with a seven-inch blade thrust out before him. His voice broke the silence, “That’s the private cop Stub’s been ratting to,” he said loudly. “The guy who’s trying to break up the club.”

9

Despite his youth the boy was an impressive-looking opponent. Naked to the waist and with his well-muscled body shiny with sweat, he looked like a pirate getting ready to board ship. A half dozen livid welts had raised across his chest and stomach from the single lash I had given him. His face was white with rage, and as I examined him warily, I saw that his eye pupils were mere pin points.

I also noticed for the first time that both forearms were dotted with needle punctures.

There’s no point in trying to talk down a guy full of heroin, because the stuff makes him feel big enough to whip the whole world. But his words, which couldn’t have been news, brought an angry muttering from the rest of the group, and I knew I had to move fast.

The only way to keep a mob under control is to step on the first person who tries to arouse it and step on him hard.

Swiftly I moved toward him. He didn’t need any further invitation. He moved with the smoothness of an expert, the knife thrust forward at waist level with the blade pointing upward. As the light glittered on it I could see that it was honed to razor sharpness and tapered to a needle point.

As the blade suddenly slashed up at my stomach, I crossed my forearms, the right on top of the left, and grabbed with both hands. My left hand clamped about his wrist and my right about his forearm. I pushed downward with my left, pulled forward with my right and simultaneously pivoted to swing my hip into his.

Before you could say, “Judo,” he was flat on his face on the floor and the knife was in my hand.

Hefting the weapon casually I looked around at the group, then snapped the knife shut and dropped it in my pocket.

As I started to push the still-dazed Stub on toward the stairs, the boy twisted on the floor and screamed, “Don’t let that cop out of here! Kill them both!”

Up to that moment I’d had the rest of the mob pretty well cowed, none of them wanting to make the first move against me. But the muscular boy’s enraged scream acted as a trigger.

Abruptly the crowd stopped opening a reluctant lane before us and we were suddenly walled in. A dozen clicks sounded as switch knives appeared.

I told myself that probably a third of the crowd was full of heroin, and even though they were a bunch of kids, some as young as fourteen and none of them over eighteen, it was time for shock tactics if either Stub or I expected to get out alive.

Keeping my hold on Stub’s arm, I said with a weariness I was far from feeling, “You kids are beginning to bore the hell out of me.”

Then I dipped my hand under my arm, flicked the safety off my P-38 and smashed a bullet into the light bulb immediately over our heads.

Instinctively every kid around us recoiled. Somebody yelled unnecessarily, “He’s got a gun!”

I took careful aim and shot out the other light twenty feet away.

Pandemonium set in as the room plunged into pitch darkness. I reholstered my gun before some kid could bump into me in the dark and accidentally set it off again.

All around us there were shouts, curses and the noise of people stumbling over each other. I made directly for the stairs, moving ahead of Stub and dragging him along behind me. Whenever we ran into anyone in the dark, I put my right hand under his chin, if I could find it, or against his chest if I couldn’t, and pushed, a maneuver which was invariably followed by the sound of several boys falling and thrashing around on the floor in an attempt to untangle themselves from each other.

We had made the foot of the stairs before anyone thought to flick on a lighter.

At the first flash of light every boy in the room got the idea, however. Within seconds matches and lighter flames sprang to life all over the club room.

I pushed Stub up the first two steps and said, “Move!”

In the flickering light I could see the entire horde surge toward us.

At the top of the stairs, I unlatched the door, put my hand in the middle of Stub’s back and shoved. Not waiting to see if he retained his feet, I turned my back on him, gripped either side of the door jamb and raised my right knee to my chest.

When the first boy reached the top of the stairs, I planted my aluminum foot in the center of his chest and shoved. His mouth popped open and he spread his arms wide in a sort of backward swan dive.

The flickering lights on the stairway winked out as milling bodies rolled down the stairs amid thumps and roars of anger and yells of pain.

When I slammed the door shut, I found Stub dazedly resting on his hands and knees where he had fallen after my shove. Jerking him erect, I hustled him out to the street.

Outside Dave O’Brien peered at us frightenedly.

“What were those shots?”

“Ask me later,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

I started to trot toward my car at the corner, dragging Stub Carlson along. Recognizing that something was wrong with Stub, the redheaded O’Brien grabbed his other arm. Between us we managed to work him up to a fair burst of speed.

When we reached the car, I left Stub for Dave to manage and raced around to the driver’s side. While I was getting the engine started, Dave helped Stub into the front seat and slid in next to him.

Since Stub’s home was only a block from the basement club room, I decided that wouldn’t be the safest place in the world to take him with sixty out-of-control youngsters after our hides. While I doubted that even with a third of them hopped up they’d go so far as trying to beat down his door, I saw no point in taking the chance. Anyway, in their present mood, they’d almost certainly strip my car and possibly wreck it completely, if they found it parked in front of Stub’s place.

I drove right on past and headed for the El Patio, Fausta Moreni’s place.

When we had traveled a couple of blocks Stub groaned and inched his back away from the seat.

Dave O’Brien asked, “What’s the matter with him?”

I gave him a brief rundown of what had happened in the club room.

“My God!” the redhead said in an awed voice. “Have the guys gone crazy?”

“Just temporarily,” I said. “They’re full of H and they’ve been whipped into a mob. And I’d guess on Buzz Thurmond’s orders.”

After a moment I added reflectively, “I think I’m going to enjoy meeting the Purple Pelicans’ friend and advisor.”

10

I took Stub to El Patio for two reasons. The first was that, except for jail, I couldn’t think of a safer place in town to take him, both because of its structure and because of its personnel. The second reason was that I knew he’d be welcome.

It was typical of its proprietress, Fausta Moreni, that she didn’t question the advisability of harboring a kid who was sought by gangsters. She helped put Stub on a cot and made him comfortable while I called a doctor to see him. The doctor was Tom Mason, a tall and skinny man in his early forties, who told me that Stub was in mild shock and would have to rest for a few days. When I let him know that Inspector Warren Day was interested in the whole incident which caused Stub’s beating, since it concerned a murder he was interested in, and that I’d tell Warren about the beating, he let it go at that and didn’t report it to the police. I told him I thought an adult put the kids up to the beating, and if a lot of cops descended on the neighborhood where it took place, he’d probably take to cover. I wanted him out in the open where I could get at him.

Once Stub was taken care of, I put Dave O’Brien in a taxi and sent him home. When I went home myself I knew Stub was in good hands. Prior to being taken over by its present owner, Fausta Moreni, the El Patio had been a gambling casino, and it had been constructed with the idea of making it invulnerable to both hijackers and raiding cops. It was like a medium-sized gray prison, even to ornamental but burglar-proof bars on the lower windows, and it was isolated in the center of a three-acre patch of ground at the extreme south edge of town.

On the off-chance that Buzz Thurmond or one of his pals managed to break into the building anyway, or the more likely chance that an attack might be made during the time the club was open for business, I talked to my old friend Mouldy Greene, Fausta’s bouncer and formerly a basic in the company where I was first sergeant during my army days. He still called me “Sarge,” and I’d given up trying to break him of the habit for fear he’d coin me an even more picturesque nickname.

Mouldy, a nickname he’d acquired from army buddies because of a mild case of acne, wasn’t long on brains, but he could follow orders to the letter. I told him to refuse to allow Stub to leave El Patio under any circumstances until I countermanded the order.

“Sure, Sarge,” he said. “Want me to lock him in my room daytime?”

“Of course not. He’s not a prisoner. He’s just here for his own protection.”

“He’ll get it,” Mouldy promised.

He would, too, I knew. Since I’d given Mouldy such strict orders, there was the risk that if I dropped dead Stub would remain a prisoner for life. But at least I was reasonably certain he’d be safe. I was tempted to give Mouldy contingent instructions in case I did drop dead, but decided cluttering his mind with anything more would only confuse him. With Mouldy it’s best to keep things as simple as possible. “I don’t think there’s a chance in a hundred any of the Purple Pelicans would make a try for him here,” I told him, “even when they’re full of heroin. But keep on the lookout for purple jackets anyway.”

As usual when I saw Fausta I found that, despite my resolve not to feel any reaction toward her, the familiar lump formed in my throat. Fausta Moreni was born in Rome, but her coloring isn’t olive like most Italo-American beauties, it is the color of coffee with cream, and her hair is a vivid natural blonde. Nevertheless you would never mistake her for anything but a Latin. If her expressively liquid eyes didn’t give it away, her emotional explosiveness would.

When I left Stub with Mouldy, and started to walk with her to my car, she threw her arms around my neck and made me agree now that she was taking care of Stub that I’d take her out one evening for each day she furnished him room and board. The dates would start tomorrow night at 9 p.m. Before the war when Fausta was only nineteen and I was twenty-four, we had a violent romance which we both expected to eventuate in marriage. But when I returned to civilian life, I found a sophisticated woman who had parlayed her culinary genius into a fortune, until she now owned half the money in town.

I have an old-fashioned notion that the man should be the breadwinner in the family, and the richer Fausta became, the further I backed. Both of us long ago accepted the fact that we aren’t going to marry, but Fausta seems to enjoy seeing me try to struggle off the hook. It’s my own feelings I have to struggle against rather than Fausta, a fact she understands perfectly.

Once she’d won her bargain with me, she asked, “Are these gangsters after you, too, Manny?”

“Not the juvenile ones,” I said. “The adults don’t like me much.”

“Maybe you had better hide out here too,” she suggested. “There is a day bed in my upstairs apartment.”

She cocked an inquiring eye at me and I said, “I’ve got work to do.”

“Let the police do it. If the gangsters are after you, just call them up and report it. I would not like it if you got all shot up and perhaps were made even uglier than you are.”

I left before I gave in to her on that, too.

11

The next morning, just before noon, Dave O’Brien called me. “You sure Stub’s safe?” he asked.

“Couldn’t be safer. Why?” I asked.

“The guys are out to get him. Or some of them, anyway. They say Stub has to be shut up before his squealing wrecks all the club’s rackets.”

“Bump him off, you mean?” I asked.

“The whole gang’s gone kind of nuts.” Dave’s voice was high-pitched. “I went back to the club room after I left you last night, and they had a party till nearly morning. Buzz Thurmond dropped in with a whole flock of H and passed it out to anybody that wanted it. I don’t think a guy in the club made school today.”

“Buzz suggest that the gang get Stub?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” Dave said. “The guys were all talking about Stub squealing to a private cop, and Buzz just said if it was his gang, they’d know how to handle it. The next I knew half the guys were saying squealers ought to be rubbed out.”

Almost as an afterthought he added, “Buzz let it drop that his gang was going to take care of you, Mr. Moon.”

“I was having similar thoughts about Buzz and his gang,” I said dryly.

When Dave had hung up, I called Stub at the El Patio, and got him to release me from my promise and let me bring the cops into the case, giving them everything I knew.

When he sounded stubborn, even after hearing about the gang’s threat, I said with mild exasperation, “For cripes sake, kid! These people intend to kill you! What in the name of jumping Jehosaphat do you think you owe them?”

There was a moment of silence, and I knew he struggled between self-preservation and loyalty to an underworld code that had been bred into him. A code which regarded squealing to the police as the lowest crime in the book, no matter what the pressures were.

Finally he said with a peculiar mixture of apology and belligerence, “I’m not just going to sit still and wait for a bullet. You tell the cops anything you want, Mr. Moon.”

Inspector Warren Day was dubious at first.

“Maybe Buzz Thurmond is just concerned because he’s afraid your digging around will mess up his racket,” he said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean he had anything to do with Bart Meyers’ death.”

But after I filled him in on all the details, he began to look pleased with me. “You’ve given me enough dope to keep Narcotics, Vice and Burglary busy for a long time just checking up. We’ll go over Thurmond when the other boys are through with him. But I can’t offer you much hope about tying him to the murder. Without evidence, what do you expect me to accomplish? He doesn’t sound like he’d confess because of a bad conscience.”

I hadn’t expected him to do much more than give my theory about Buzz being connected with the murder careful consideration, so I was satisfied with this answer. Grouchy as Warren Day is, he’s not the type of cop who closes his eyes to any lead which points away from his prime suspect. I doubted that I had lessened his belief in Joe Brighton’s guilt in the slightest, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t follow up the theory I had dumped in his lap. And he’d do just as thorough a job of investigation as if he believed Thurmond guilty.

For once we parted mutually satisfied with each other.

I knew that as soon as Warren Day passed along the dope I had given him to the proper departments, whole squads of cops would begin a co-ordinated effort to smash the gang of which Buzz Thurmond was a member. Before that evening Thurmond, Limpy Alfred, Sam Polito, Art Cooney, Harry Krebb and Sherman Bremmer would be under twenty-four hour surveillance. None of them could make a move which wouldn’t be eventually relayed to headquarters and entered in a co-ordinated intelligence record on the whole gang. If Bremmer was the leader of the gang, as I suspected, the police would establish the fact beyond any doubt through the record of his contacts. From here on out every bit of stolen merchandise received by the fence, Harry Krebb, or the two dope pushers would be recorded, and each boy who brought stolen merchandise in to them would immediately acquire a shadow.

I gave the Purple Pelicans, the Gravediggers and the adult gang exploiting them another week before the police moved in for mass arrests and smashed the entire setup.

That didn’t necessarily mean they’d uncover any evidence concerning Bart Meyers’ murder, however. I was reasonably certain that if Buzz Thurmond actually had killed the boy and framed Joe Brighton for it, none of the Purple Pelicans knew anything about it. And unless one of the adults broke under questioning, there didn’t seem much likelihood of freeing young Joe without turning up actual evidence.

Instead of seeking the safety of El Patio, I decided to stick my neck out a little more. The Bremmer Hotel seemed to me to be the logical place to stick it.

The Bremmer Hotel was a three-story brick building on Ninth, at the very edge of the slum area. It was old, but it wasn’t a particularly disreputable-looking place. As a matter of fact it looked cleaner than most of the second-class buildings and stores in the same neighborhood.

The hotel lobby was a bare but relatively clean room with only the faintest odor of antiseptic about it. As I was asking the skinny old man in his seventies at the desk if Buzz Thurmond was in, and getting no satisfaction, a smooth voice behind me said, “Can I help you?”

Swinging around, I looked down at the moon-shaped face of Sherman Bremmer, the hotel’s proprietor.

12

I had to look down a full eight inches, because Bremmer was only about five feet four. He was built like a snowman: round pillars for legs, a round ball for a body, fat arms, and a round head with tiny black eyes. A complexion resembling sooty snow helped the illusion.

His body grew momentarily rigid when he saw whom he had addressed, but he didn’t change expression.

“Afternoon, Mr. Moon,” he said, relaxed again. “May I do something for you?”

“Possibly,” I said. “Got an office somewhere?”

He led me into a small office containing a plain desk, two extra chairs and a safe. There was one window with frosted glass in the panes.

I told him I wanted to see Buzz Thurmond, when we were seated.

“What do you want with Buzz?”

“Nothing,” I said. “He wants it with me. I heard he was looking for me, and thought I’d save him the trouble.”

“Looking for you? Why?”

“Tell me where to find him and I’ll ask him.”

“Don’t you know?”

“Don’t you?”

“I haven’t the faintest...” He broke off and a look of enlightenment suddenly grew in his small eyes, almost instantly to be suppressed again.

“I really couldn’t say,” he said calmly.

I grinned at him. “It just registered, eh? What happened? Buzz just refer to me as a private cop, and forget to mention my name?”

He managed to get the puzzled expression on his face again, but this time it was obviously forced. “I haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re talking about, Mr. Moon.”

“I’ll bet,” I said, rising. “Thanks for the information, Bremmer.”

I meant it. I knew for sure Sherman Bremmer had given the order to get rid of me, without even knowing it was me. Either his Purple Pelican informant had forgotten my name when he initially passed along to Buzz the information that a private detective knew all about his connection with the Purple Pelicans and hoped to pin a murder rap on him, or Buzz had simply neglected to mention my name when he relayed the news to his boss.

As I started to leave, Sherman Bremmer said, “Don’t go yet. If you want to see Buzz, I’ll get him for you. Meanwhile, have a drink.” He picked up the desk phone. “Scotch or rye?”

He was so glaringly obvious, it was almost funny. Now that he knew who I really was, he was as anxious for me to meet Buzz Thurmond as I had been. Since I was still interested in meeting Buzz, I said, “I’ll take rye.”

In a few minutes the door opened and the old man who had been at the desk carried in a tray containing a bowl of ice cubes, a bottle of soda and a half-full quart of Mount Vernon.

I felt by the way the old man kept looking at me as he put down the tray before he left that something more than a request for whiskey had gone over the phone when Bremmer called him. A signal of some sort? I watched Bremmer warily as he poured the drinks, or I might not have given any significance to the way the hotel proprietor first handed me my drink, and then let his disappear for a moment beneath the desk. I switched my drink to my left hand, dipped my hand under my coat to produce my P-38 and pointed it at Bremmer. “I prefer my rye without chloral hydrate,” I told him and clicked off the safety.

His small eyes grew big at the sight of the gun and his mouth popped open.

“When Buzz Thurmond gets here, does he expect to pick up my drugged body, ready for disposal?”

“I... don’t know what you mean.”

Centering my gun on his stomach, I let my face grow expressionless and slowly increased the trigger pressure. It was a ticklish thing to do, because the safety wasn’t on. But though I have an aversion to shooting unarmed men in cold blood, even accidentally, I suspected Bremmer was too familiar with guns for me to work a bluff with the safety on, and that he knew even an expert can’t always control trigger pressure.

“Don’t!” he squeaked. “For God’s sake, don’t!”

“Where’s Thurmond?” I asked.

“Outside, waiting,” he managed to whisper. “But it’s not what you think. I swear...”

“Shut up,” I cut him off.

Relaxing my trigger pressure, I thrust the glass I was holding in my left hand under his nose.

“You’ve got a choice,” I informed him. “Gulp this down in two swallows, or take a bullet in the guts. Don’t strain my patience by stretching it to three swallows.”

He stared at me fascinatedly until I let my expression become a little resigned and at the same time steadied the gun on his stomach again. Then he quickly reached out, grabbed the glass from my hand and drained the contents in two shuddering gulps.

By my watch it was only four and a half minutes until the hotel proprietor dropped off to slumber still sitting in the chair.

13

I didn’t have long to wait. In a few minutes, there was a light tap on the door, and then it opened, and Buzz Thurmond came in. He froze as his eyes took in the room and the gun I held pointed at him.

Buzz Thurmond had changed considerably during the eight years since the photographs on his police record card had been taken, but he was still recognizable as the same man. His description at age twenty-two had listed his weight at two hundred and six; I guessed it now as two-fifty. His thick-featured face was also much heavier than it had been in the photographs, but it had the same strong jaw and the same sullen expression.

“What do you want?” he asked huskily.

I motioned him into the room. “Just a little conversation. First about why you felt you had to stir up the Purple Pelicans against Stub Carlson. Then about the announcement you made to the club that you’d take care of me. If you’re still conscious when we finish those subjects, we’ll talk about Bart Meyers’ murder.”

His eyes narrowed. “What you mean, still conscious?”

“I wouldn’t expect a crumb who steers kids into dope addiction and crime to talk freely without a little persuasion,” I explained. “Matter of fact, I’d be disappointed if you did.”

I reached behind me to push the door shut, but instead my hand encountered rough cloth. This startled me, but not enough to make any sudden moves. Cautiously, I pressed against the cloth and discovered a thin leg beneath it.

After that I wasn’t terribly surprised to feel a gun muzzle press into my back.

“Put your hands on top of your head,” a thin voice said in my ear.

I put my hands on top of my head.

“You got here just in time, Limpy,” Buzz Thurmond said. “This is that Moon character I was telling you and Bremmer about.”

Moving forward, he relieved me of my P-38 and patted my pockets for other weapons.

“He’s clean,” he finally decided.

Aside from his slight build and receding chin there was little resemblance between the two-year-old photographs in his file and Limpy Alfred Leventhal himself. The features were the same, of course, but the police pictures had shown a sinister-looking man with a gash for a mouth and the expression of a habitual criminal. This must have been a trick of photography, for he actually resembled Caspar Milquetoast without a mustache. Nor could his halting gait properly be described as a limp. It was more of a stiff manner of walking, as though he had general arthritis instead of a game leg.

On top of everything else he looked fifty-five instead of the forty-two he was. In the pictures his hair hadn’t even been grey.

“What’s the deal?” Limpy Alfred asked Thurmond.

The big man shrugged. “Bremmer was supposed to have the guy Mickey Finned. With Bremmer out, what are we supposed to do now? Bremmer didn’t tell me what he wanted done with this guy.”

“I thought he wanted him bumped.”

“Not here, he didn’t,” Thurmond said. “He had it figured where he wanted us to take him, but he didn’t get around to telling me. He said he’d outline it to both of us when we got the guy.”

I said, “He can’t tell you now. Guess we’d better call the whole thing off.”

Ignoring me, Limpy Alfred said, “Why not just take him out somewhere and dump him?”

Thurmond shook his head. “I think Bremmer had some kind of plan to frame it like an accident. Or maybe frame somebody he didn’t like for it.”

“Like you framed Joe Brighton for the Bart Meyers kill?” I asked.

Both of them looked at me.

“Why don’t you just shut up?” Thurmond inquired in an irritated voice.

Limpy Alfred said, “I guess all we can do is wait for him to sleep it off. How long you think he’ll be out?”

Thurmond shrugged, and looked at a gold wrist watch. “It’s three-thirty now. The way he’s sleeping, I don’t guess he’ll stir before dark anyway.”

“I have a dinner engagement,” I said. “Maybe I’d better leave and come back later on.”

Again I was ignored. Stiffly Limpy Alfred walked over to the table and examined the bottle of rye. Approximately a half pint remained in the bottle.

“This the stuff?” he asked Thurmond.

“I don’t know.” He looked at me. “Is it?”

“Naw,” I said. “The knockout drops are in the soda. That’s pretty good whiskey. Let’s all have a couple of snorts for old times’ sake.”

“That’s the stuff,” Thurmond told Limpy Alfred.

Still keeping his gun on me, the gray-haired man uncorked the bottle with his left hand, sniffed at it and then poured about four ounces in a tumbler.

“You’re going to take a little nap,” he informed me. “You can take it this way, or get a gun barrel bent over your head. Take your pick.”

I considered the two alternatives with equal lack of enthusiasm. “Why can’t we just all play pinochle until Bremmer wakes up?”

Thurmond said, “Just belt the guy and shut him up, Limpy.”

When Limpy Alfred’s expression indicated he was about to do just that, I said hurriedly, “I’ll take the Mickey Finn.”

When I awoke the room light was on, and I could see from the frosted glass window that it was evening. I was lying on the couch. When I tried to move, I discovered my hands were lashed behind my back. They felt as they were asleep.

Only one other person was in the room. Buzz Thurmond sat in the chair where Sherman Bremmer had previously slept, an automatic lying in his lap and his eyes studying me broodingly.

“Decided to join the party, eh?” he said.

“What time is it?”

“Eleven o’clock. You been sleeping seven and a half hours.”

“Where’s Bremmer and Limpy Alfred?” I asked.

“The boss is lying down with an icebag on his head. Limpy’s on an errand.”

A few minutes later the door opened and Sherman Bremmer came in. His normally sooty white complexion was even sootier than usual and his eyes possessed the slightly glazed look of a man with a terrific hangover. Apparently he still had a headache, because when the sight of me distorted his face into a snarl, he winced and smoothed out his facial muscles again.

Behind him, Limpy Alfred moved stiffly into the room and handed Bremmer a leather key case I recognized as my own.

“He wasn’t there,” the gray-haired man said. “What now?”

Bremmer frowned, and then glared down at me. “Where’d you hide that kid, Moon?”

When I merely looked at him silently, he started to bend forward with the apparent intention of slapping me, but the instant his head lowered he winced and straightened.

“Get out of him where he put the kid,” he ordered Thurmond.

Rising, Buzz Thurmond walked over to me and grabbed my shirt front and jerked me to a seated position. I swung my legs over the side of the couch, closed my eyes until my head adjusted to its new position and the ache subsided, then looked up at him.

“Where’d you put him?” Buzz asked.

“He’s in jail,” I said. “He was describing you to the cops, and they arrested him for indecent language.”

Buzz growled deep in his throat. Leaning over me, he grasped my shoulders and dug a thumb into the joint on each side. When he found the nerves he wanted, he pressed until I had to bite my lips to keep from screaming.

Eventually he let up and asked, “Where’s the kid?”

I had to wait a minute for the pain to subside before I could speak. Then I asked thickly. “Have you tried his home?”

With an exasperated expression, Buzz started to dig in his thumbs again.

This time, I did scream. I’m not an expert screamer, but it was enough to make Bremmer say, “We can’t have screams like that in the hotel.” He paused a moment and then his face brightened. “Sam Polito’s the one could make him talk. We’ll take him to Harry Krebb’s house, and work in his soundproof basement. I’ll pick up Sam Polito and meet you there.”

Harry Krebb was the fence the juvenile gangs dealt with, and I remembered Sam Polito as being one of the narcotics pushers.

Limpy went out into the lobby a minute, and then came back in. “There’s a kind of stupid looking cluck sitting in the lobby,” he said.

Bremmer considered. Then he ordered my wrists untied, and as we went into the hotel lobby, Bremmer went over to talk to the man Limpy had mentioned, to block off the view.

Just before we went outdoors, with Buzz Thurmond’s pocketed gun pressing into my back, I risked a quick glance back. This got me a scowl from Buzz, but didn’t prevent me from getting a profile view of the man Bremmer was talking to.

To my complete amazement I saw it was Mouldy Greene.

14

It was only about twelve blocks to Krebb’s place, near a darkened repair garage. I was hustled downstairs after the door had been opened by someone I guessed to be Harry Krebb himself, and into a newly decorated game room at the rear of a furnace and laundry room. It was about fifteen by twenty feet, with a pool table, a fireplace, and a bar. The ceiling was white acoustic board, and the walls were of light blue painted plaster. A wicker sofa was in front of the fireplace and two small round cocktail tables were near the bar.

In a few minutes footsteps sounded in the laundry room and Bremmer entered with a swarthy man I took to be Sam Polito. He was about fifty with short gray hair which lay close to his head in tight ringlets. He had an insensitive, almost sullen face, thick lips and dull black eyes which contained none of the Sicilian spark common among his countrymen.

Bremmer told him, “What we want, Polito, is to find out where Moon here hid out Stub Carlson. The kid’s not at home and he’s not at Moon’s flat. It’s your baby.”

The swarthy barber merely nodded.

“Lay him out on the pool table,” Bremmer ordered the others. “Strip him to the waist first.”

When I was lying on the table, stripped, Sam Polito reached in his pocket, brought something out, there was a sharp click and a thin blade with a razor edge jumped from his fist. At a signal from Bremmer, Buzz Thurmond grabbed both my arms and Limpy Alfred clasped his arms around my legs.

“Sam doesn’t like to talk much, so I’ll explain things for him,” Bremmer said. “Sam’s so expert with that thing, he can peel off skin a square inch at a time without even cutting the tissue underneath. According to Sam, a man can live until two-thirds of his skin has been cut away. But I imagine he’d stop wanting to long before that. Now I don’t enjoy this sort of thing, Mr. Moon, and I’d just as soon dispense with it. Why don’t you tell us where the kid is, and save both us and yourself trouble?”

I examined Sam Polito. There was nothing sadistic in his sullen face. His expression was simply unfeeling. He had a job to do and he’d do it efficiently, but he didn’t really care one way or the other whether he had to do it or not.

This unnerved me more than if he had done a little gloating. The man impressed me as little more than an animal, standing there holding his knife and patiently waiting for an order to begin. I felt sweat pop out on my forehead and roll off the side of my face.

I clamped my mouth shut and looked at Polito’s knife.

Bremmer gave a resigned nod and the point dipped toward my chest.

I brought my legs up, shot them forward again and hurled Limpy Alfred halfway across the room. The knife retreated and the barber said unemotionally, “Such a little man cannot hold his legs alone.”

“You can say that again,” Limpy Alfred said as he returned to the table and dusted himself off. “Why not bring Krebb down from upstairs?”

Bremmer nodded and went to the door.

He opened it just as a figure reached for the knob on the other side. But it wasn’t Krebb or one of the Bremmer’s gang. When the doorknob receded from his seeking grasp, Mouldy Greene changed the direction of his grab and instead gathered a handful of Bremmer’s shirt front.

Pushing the hotel man before him, Mouldy came all the way into the room, gave me a friendly wave with his free hand and said, “Hi, Sarge.”

Both my arms were released as Thurmond decided to straighten up and draw his gun. Mouldy picked all two hundred pounds of Sherman Bremmer off the floor and tossed him at Buzz Thurmond like a medicine ball.

I didn’t see what else happened, because I was rolling on my side and clamping one hand across the cylinder of Limpy Alfred’s revolver as it appeared. I clamped down tight, preventing the cylinder from rotating and consequently making it impossible to fire. At the same time I swung my left leg around, got my foot under his armpit and pushed.

Limpy let loose the gun and staggered across the room to crash into the bar.

When I turned my attention back to the rest of the room, Mouldy was nimbly leaping aside to let Sam Polito’s knife whistle past him and sink into the door jamb. As I scrambled off the pool table Mouldy stepped forward and landed a six-inch jab on the barber’s chin. Polito made a complete spin and collapsed on his face.

Catching the fat hotel proprietor in his stomach had knocked Buzz Thurmond down and jarred the gun from his hand. I scooped it up and turned to cover the room with both guns. “What brought you rolling in like the Marines?” I askedy Mouldy.

He gestured toward Limpy Alfred. “I spotted him coming out of your flat and followed him.”

I thought about Harry Krebb, upstairs. “There’s another one,” I told Mouldy.

“You mean the guy upstairs? He’s hung up in the laundry room. That’s what took me time in getting to you.”

“What do you mean, hung up?”

“By the seat of his pants on a spike in the wall,” Mouldy said. “I checked upstairs before I tackled this room. I hogtied him with his necktie first, so he couldn’t reach up and turn himself loose.”

It occurred to me that it must have taken incredible bad luck for Mouldy Greene’s former employer, the owner of Fausta Moreni’s club when it was a gambling house, to get himself killed while Mouldy was acting as a bodyguard for him.

I said, “Let me get this sorted out a little. You followed Limpy Alfred from my apartment. What were you doing at my apartment?”

Mouldy’s brow furrowed in an effort to remember. Then an expression of enlightenment crossed his flat face. “Oh yeah. Fausta sent me. When you was nearly an hour late for your date with her and didn’t answer your phone, she sent me to check up. I got there just as the little guy came out. Boy, if you think you had trouble with these guys, wait until Fausta catches up with you.”

“I think I had a fair excuse,” I said dryly.

Handing the two guns to Mouldy so that he could supervise our captives, I put on my shirt, tie and coat. Then I retrieved my P-38 from Buzz Thurmond’s pocket and thrust it under my arm.

I was just rising when a voice from the door said, “Freeze, buddy. And put those guns down real slow.”

My gaze jumped to the door. A tall, lean man in a light gray suit stood there covering the room with a short-barrelled pistol. “This one’s a stranger,” I said to Mouldy as we slowly lowered our guns to the floor. “I thought I’d gotten to know the whole gang.”

The tall man advanced into the room. His left hand dipped into his breast pocket and came out with a small leather folder which he flashed open to exhibit a badge and an identification card.

“Sergeant Hudson of Burglary,” he announced. “You’re all under arrest.”

It took me some time to convince the sergeant that Mouldy and I weren’t criminals. But after he had examined my license and listened to my story, he finally decided to believe me.

It developed the place was practically surrounded by police. On the basis of the information I had given Warren Day, and he in turn had passed along, the Vice Squad, Burglary Squad and Narcotics Squad had all gotten together and detailed men to cover each of the suspects starting at five that afternoon. Sergeant Hudson was in charge of the combined detail.

When Limpy Alfred had been seen leaving the Hotel Bremmer that evening by the man assigned to tail Sherman Bremmer, the word was passed along to Limpy’s assigned shadow, who had been patiently waiting in a doorway across the street from Limpy’s living quarters. The gray-haired man’s shadow joined Bremmer’s shadow at the hotel in time to see Limpy return from his trip to my flat and also to spot Mouldy Greene tailing him.

On a hunch that Buzz Thurmond might be at the Bremmer Hotel too, as he hadn’t showed at the place he lived, Buzz’s shadow was also ordered to the Bremmer Hotel. Consequently the car in which I rode to Krebb’s was followed by two cops in addition to Mouldy, and when Bremmer drove over to pick up Sam Polito, he was followed by one.

At the barber’s place Sam Polito’s shadow joined the caravan. Krebb’s tail was watching the garageman’s home. When the other four cops arrived on the scene, they all got together, decided something important was up and phoned Hudson.

15

The next morning I got back on ray normal schedule by sleeping until noon. Probably I would have slept even later, since it was two-thirty A.M. before I fell into bed, but the phone woke me up.

It was Ed Brighton.

“Sorry to bother you, Manny,” he said. “But I wondered if you’ve turned anything up.”

“I’ve been at least partly responsible for getting some hoodlums thrown in the can,” I told him. “The gang I mentioned to you which may have been responsible for killing the Meyers kid and framing it on Joe. There isn’t material evidence tying the mob to the murder, and they’re being held at present because of narcotics and stolen goods found on their property last night. So all we can hope for is that somebody breaks down and talks. Homicide’s got a pretty good staff of interrogators. It’ll probably be tomorrow before they’re even turned over to Homicide, so we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Actually I was a little more hopeful than I sounded, since there was a good chance Joe Brighton would be released even if Homicide couldn’t prove a case against the Bremmer gang. All that was necessary was for Warren Day to become convinced the gang had engineered the kill. Even if he couldn’t prove it, he’d recommend to the D.A. that charges against young Joe be dropped.

I didn’t mention this to Ed, though, as there was no point in building what very well might be false hopes.

At one-thirty I dropped by Warren Day’s office.

“You certainly loused things up good, Moon,” were his first words to me. “Burglary, Vice and Narcotics wanted to check that gang’s contacts for a few days before they moved in. Now we can’t nail any of the kids they were dealing with.”

“You’re too big to pick on kids anyway,” I said. “Heard how Burglary et al are making out with their catch?”

“Pretty good, I guess,” Day said sourly. “They found Krebb’s house loaded with stolen stuff and got a confession from him on receiving stolen property. Claims he didn’t know it was stolen, of course, and can’t remember the names of the boys who brought it in. Not because he’s trying to protect them. He’s just afraid the kids will break down and implicate him even worse.”

The pushers’ apartments also yielded a good supply of reefers and heroin, Warren Day told me. Buzz Thurmond gave the inspector the impression he was telling the truth, and didn’t have anything to do with Bart Meyers’ killing.

“I got the feeling Thurmond was lying about everything else but the murder,” Day said. Then, he added grudgingly, “If it makes you feel any better, I’ve requested the D.A. to hold off asking for an indictment against young Brighton until we’ve gone over the Bremmer gang.”

That was some consolation anyway, I thought as I left the inspector’s office. But not much. I wouldn’ have admitted it to Warren Day, but I had a healthy respect for his ability to judge the veracity of suspects.

16

After leaving the Inspector’s office, I had a few words with Joe Brighton in the detention cells. He looked listless and dispirited. When he saw me, he swung his feet to the floor and gripped his knees with his large-knuckled hands.

“Get me out of here, Uncle Manny,” he said in a low voice. “For God’s sake, get me out of here!”

I told him I was doing my best and let him know about the gang’s capture. Briefly I told him what had happened since I last saw him, and that there was an outside chance Homicide might pin Bart Meyers’ murder on the gang.

“It would help if we could establish opportunity for Thurmond or some other member of the gang to have gotten hold of that hunting knife,” I said. “You ever mention it to him or to any members of the Purple Pelicans?”

“I never even knew Dad owned it. Honest, Uncle Manny. I never saw it in my life until the night I found it sticking out of Bart’s chest.”

I only stayed a few minutes, having stopped by just to see how he was getting on, and not because I wanted anything in particular. When I left I told him to hang on to hope a couple of more days, as by then Warren Day should have made up his mind definitely as to whether or not Bremmer’s gang was responsible for Bart Meyers’ death.

It was shortly after two-thirty when I got back to my flat. I had hardly entered when the phone rang. Dave O’Brien was on the other end. He told me the whole neighborhood knew that Buzz Thurmond and his gang were in jail, and were worried about being pulled in themselves. With the gang in this mood, it seemed to me a good time to talk to them, and Dave O’Brien arranged the meeting.

The Purple Pelicans were strangely subdued when I arrived in the club room. The boy who had tried to knife me sat as quietly as the rest, and it looked as though most of the members were present, either seated on folding chairs or on the benches around the walls.

I let them know that I’d consider my experience with them past history, and start fresh. “I think by now most of you boys must realize you were suckered into making that play. Is there anyone here who doesn’t by now know that Buzz Thurmond deliberately worked you up into a mob in order to block my investigation into Bart Meyers’ murder?”

There were a few mutters, but no one said anything aloud.

I explained that Bremmer’s gang had been arrested for offenses ranging from possession of stolen property to pushing narcotics. “The police seized plenty of narcotics as evidence, but what really concerns you is the stolen property since you all know, and I know, and the police suspect, that most of it came from members of this club.”

I paused and the group shifted uneasily.

“However, I doubt that the police will be able to break down the fences and implicate you boys,” I said.

There was a murmur of mingled surprise and relief.

“But not because any of them give a hoot in Hades what happens to you,” I said brutally. “They won’t give your names only because you’re just a bunch of kids, and they know you’ll squeal back. Right now they’re only hooked for possession. They know that once the cops got hold of you, they’d be hooked for everything from conspiracy to commit burglary to contributing to the delinquency of minors. So if you’re tempted to admire your adult pals for not breaking, forget it.”

I stressed that they’d been suckers for a gang which made one-third of their members dope addicts, to widen the market for their pushers, and were advised on burglaries in order to drum up business for the gang’s fences. I finished up by telling them that Stub Carlson would be home in a day or so, and that I’d beat the living hell out of the instigator if there was any ganging up on him such as happened before. If they were sore with him for telling me club secrets, they could take him on one at a time. Stub was a big boy and could take care of himself that way.

I asked them if they had any questions. No one had. I made the trip across the room in dead silence until I was within feet of the stairs, then somebody gave a tentative clap.

That set it off, and the kids began to applaud as though I had sung like Mario Lanza instead of bawling the hell out of them.

I grinned, gave them a wave and started up the stairs.

17

The next day I stopped by headquarters in the afternoon to check how Homicide was making out with its interrogations. The results were depressing.

Back in the inspector’s office, I asked, “Think there’s any hope?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think he’s guilty. Or anybody else in the gang. They were after you because you threatened their rackets, not because you were digging into the murder.”

“So what’s the situation on Joe Brighton now?”

“What do you think?” he growled. “The D.A.’s going ahead and ask for an indictment.”

When I left headquarters I was more irked than I was discouraged. I was personally convinced of Joe Brighton’s innocence, which meant there had to be evidence of it somewhere. The only thing to do was continue digging.

One phase of the thing I hadn’t looked into was young Joe’s theory that he had been framed by the Gravediggers. I’d skipped it because it seemed such an unlikely possibility it hardly seemed worth checking. But with the probability of pinning the killing on Buzz Thurmond growing more remote by the minute, it was time to look into even unlikely possibilities.

Another point I hadn’t managed to make any progress on was the identity of the girl who had phoned the police at about the time Bart was killed and reported a reefer party in progress at the club room. Turning her up might answer a lot of questions.

I checked with Stella Quint and Ruth Zimmerman again, but got nowhere. Stella was no longer listless and her thoughts seemed to have stopped turning inward at least enough for her to be aware of her surroundings. When I asked if she had ever heard any rumors about who the girl who had phoned the police might be, she said she had heard some speculation about it, but nobody seemed to know.

Ruth Zimmerman had apparently thrust out of her mind everything connected with the murder just as she had thrust Joe Brighton out of it, for she had to concentrate a moment before she figured out what I was talking about. “Oh, you mean the girl who said she was Joe’s girl friend,” she said. “She had some nerve. I asked everybody in the auxiliary. Not a one of the girls even knew what. I was talking about. I bet there never was such a girl.”

That seemed to put the damper on my bright idea of tracing the girl down.

After leaving Ruth, I decided to call at Mrs. Meyers’ flat again. I had an idea that she would probably be at work, but I tried anyway. I timed it just right, because I caught her just coming in. She was in the lower hall collecting her mail.

“Hi, Mrs. Meyers,” I said. “I thought probably you’d be at work, but I took a chance on catching you.”

“Oh hello, Mr. Moon. I just got off work at three-thirty. I go into the restaurant at seven A.M. Come on up.”

She led me up the worn stairs to her kitchen and motioned me to a chair. Like Stella Quint’s her grief had now settled into a quiet hopelessness, but she seemed to have adjusted to the necessity of going on with her everyday life. I waited without saying anything while she checked over what the mailman had brought that morning.

A card which looked like a gas bill and an envelope I recognized as the kind the electric company uses, she placed in a tray on top of the ice box. An envelope addressed in a flourishing feminine hand she put aside on the kitchen table without opening. A slim brown envelope with a typed address she tore open, drawing from it a small printed form of some kind. She examined the form puzzledly.

Reading half aloud and half to herself, she muttered, “Due to your new employment, you are no longer eligible... If you are not satisfied with the decision of this office, procedure for request for review of your case is...”

She looked up at me and emitted a humorless chuckle. “This is good. The welfare finally got around to letting me know I’m off relief, when I been off two years.”

Crumpling the form into a ball, she dropped it into a waste basket under the sink and took a chair across from me. “Now what can I do for you, Mr. Moon?”

“Probably nothing,” I said. “I’m still convinced Joe Brighton is innocent of your son’s death, but I’ve come to a dead end, so I’m starting the investigation over.”

I explained to her about the girl I was trying to locate. “Would you have any idea who made that call?” I asked.

Wonderingly she shook her head. “How would I know, Mr. Moon?”

“I didn’t think you would,” I said, rising. “But none of the Purple Pelicans’ auxiliary seems to know either, and I thought it was worth the chance to ask you.”

After I had thanked the woman and left, I sat in my car out in front of her place and brooded for a time. There didn’t seem to be any logical next move to make except to tackle the Gravediggers, and I was so unenthusiastic about that possibility, it hardly seemed worthwhile checking. Nevertheless this seemed to be the only remaining field of research, so I unenthusiastically decided to tackle it. But to put it off, I decided to drop by and see Ed Brighton first.

It was near the close of Ed’s work day, and he’d already done his piecework quota for the day, evidently, because he was sitting on a piece of crated machinery with other workers when I found him. When Ed saw me, he jumped up, took my arm and led me to one side.

“I’d rather not talk about this thing in front of the guys,” he said. “They know Joe’s in jail, of course, but you know how it is working with guys. They’re embarrassed about it and so am I, so we just skip it. Anything new?”

I gave him the bad news about the D.A.’s going ahead with asking for an indictment on Joe, and Ed looked as though I had kicked him in the stomach. “I’m sure the kid’s innocent,” I assured him. “There’s bound to be proof of it somewhere.”

“Where?”

“That’s the question,” I said.

I told him of my unsuccessful attempt to run down the girl who had phoned the police, and also of Joe’s theory about the Gravediggers.

“Planning a slick frame-up like this seems to me beyond what you’d expect of a kid gang. Then too, whoever swiped that knife must have been familiar with where Joe lived, which would seem to narrow it to a resident of this section.”

When Ed merely silently brooded over what I had told him, I said, “Can’t you remember where you kept that blamed knife? Joe insists he never in his life saw it before he found it sticking in Bart Meyers.”

He shook his head. “I hadn’t used the thing in years, Manny.”

“What in the devil did you ever buy the thing for?” I growled at him. “You never did any hunting, did you?”

“I used it to clean fish.”

We both lapsed into moody silence. For some reason Ed’s last remark lingered in my mind and wouldn’t go away. “You used it to clean fish,” I repeated. “That why it didn’t have a sheath?”

“Yeah. I just used to pitch it in my bait box.”

I felt a peculiar tingle race along my spine. “Say that again.”

“What?” he asked, surprised. “I just said I used to pitch the knife in my bait box. When I was getting ready to go fishing, I mean.”

It was as simple as that. For more than a full week I’d been pounding my legs off, talking myself hoarse and ducking knives and guns without making an inch of progress. Then Ed Brighton made a casual remark and I knew who had killed Bart Meyers.

I wasn’t sure of the motive, but I even had an inkling about that. And now that I knew where to look, it wasn’t going to be much trouble to check.

18

It was nearly ten after five when I pulled up in front of the building where Public Welfare was officed, after fighting traffic across the most congested part of town.

The first thing I did was check with Sara’s plump supervisor, Mrs. Forshay, catching her just as she was about to leave for the day.

“Welfare cases are confidential, Mr. Moon,” she told me, when I explained what I wanted. “I’m afraid I’d need a pretty good explanation before I could accede to a request like that.”

So I gave her a pretty good explanation. When I finished, she stopped looking astonished and started looking upset. Without any more argument she led me to the Record Room.

When I found what I wanted, she agreed not to take any action until she heard from me, but she wasn’t ready to let me go. First she wanted to know how the swindle had been worked.

I wasn’t sure, but I had some ideas. With my ideas and her knowledge of agency procedure, we worked out most of the answers between us.

When I left the welfare office, I worked straight on through until eight o’clock in the evening without even stopping for dinner. I made five calls, and the answers I got in each case were the same.

Each of the women I called on was either a widow, divorced or separated. Each worked, so was not at home in the daytime when the mail was delivered. Each had at least one son who belonged to the Purple Pelicans.

And while all of them had been on relief at some time or other, none had been on the rolls for over two years or more.

I didn’t call on Mrs. Meyers again, because I knew her situation. And I skipped the last three names because I knew I’d find the same answers there and I already had enough evidence.

19

When I rang the buzzer, Sara came to the door dressed in a neat gray suit which must have cost a hundred dollars. She looked at me in surprise.

“It’s nice to see you, Manny!” she exclaimed.

She led me into the well-furnished parlor and I looked it over again, as I had the evening I stopped by while she was doing case records. But this time I was doing more than just admiring it. I was adding up the cost of the obviously expensive furnishings and trying to reconcile it with the kind of salaries received in the underpaid profession of social work.

“Drink?” Sara asked.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m afraid I’ve come on business, Sara. About that fishing rig in your clutter room.”

“You want to borrow it?” she asked.

“It really isn’t yours to lend, is it? Doesn’t it belong to Ed?”

Her eyebrows raised. “Why yes, as a matter of fact. But he certainly wouldn’t mind.”

“I should have guessed it the first time I saw it,” I said. “I knew that when Ed lost his house and moved into that two-room flat, he couldn’t move everything with him. Most of the extra furniture he sold, of course. But there’s always a certain amount of stuff you hang onto no matter where you live. Like camping equipment and cameras and fishing gear. But Ed didn’t have any storage space at all in that tiny place he moved to. So naturally he had to get someone to store his stuff for him. And who else would he ask but a relative?”

“What are you talking about?” she asked uneasily.

“The knife that killed Bart Meyers. It never was in the trunk in the back of Ed’s closet. It was in his bait box back in your clutter room.”

Sara’s face suddenly paled. “What... what do you mean, Manny?”

“Just what you’re thinking,” I quietly informed her. “I know the whole story, Sara. I happened to be at Mrs. Meyers’s flat this afternoon when she took in the mail. She got a notice from Public Welfare that she’d been cut off relief. But she hadn’t been on relief for two years. How’d you happen to make a mistake like letting that notice go out?”

Weakly she sank into a chair. It seemed to take an effort for her to speak, but finally she managed to say in a dull voice, “I couldn’t stop it. They’re mailed out of the state office, just like the checks. I hoped she’d just throw it away instead of making an inquiry as to why she got it.”

“She did,” I admitted. “And I suppose you figured the boys in the other nine homes would have sense enough to destroy the notices when they came in.”

When she made no reply at all, merely sitting with hunched shoulders and looking down into her lap hopelessly, I said, “It was a kind of clever racket. Mrs. Forshay and I had quite a little discussion before we figured out just how you worked it.”

Her head came up. “Mrs. Forshay knows?”

When I nodded, she let her head droop again.

“I remember you told me you worked at Intake for a week each summer when the regular Intake workers were on vacation. That’s when you put through the applications. You picked all old cases, ones you’d had before and whose present circumstances you knew well enough so that you were reasonably sure the families were now on their feet economically and wouldn’t louse you up by coming in to apply for relief when they were already on the rolls. Since they were all in your district, naturally the applications all ended up on your desk for investigation. Normally a caseworker couldn’t work such a deal, because at least two agency people have to come in personal contact with a client: the Intake worker and the investigator. But in this case you were both people. And since the records of investigation were all in order, your supervisor automatically approved them. How’d you line the boys up for the racket?”

“Bart did it,” she said dully. “I knew he was leader of his dreadful little gang and would do almost anything dishonest for money. Before he turned religious and decided to reform the world, anyway. He gave me a list of the members and I checked it against my list of closed cases. There were over twenty families who had children in the Purple Pelicans, but Bart eliminated all but those he was sure he could trust. That left ten.”

“And the kids collected the checks,” I said. “With their mothers all at work when the mail came, that was a cinch. And even if a mother happened to be home sick, the kid could make a point of getting to the mail box first once a month, since the checks always arrived on the first. What’d they do then? Turn them over to you and collect a commission?”

“To Bart,” she said in a lifeless voice. “Bart had a contact with a tavern keeper who’d cash them without question for a twenty-five per cent commission. The kids each got another twenty-five per cent and Bart and I split the rest twenty-eighty.”

I did some quick arithmetic. “Mrs. Forshay figured the checks averaged sixty dollars a month. Which would leave three hundred a month for you and Bart to split. Sixty for him, maybe seventy or seventy-five including his split on his own mother’s check. Enough for spending money and for him to turn in a bit at home without arousing suspicion. You’d get two-forty. It’s a nice tax-free bit of additional income, but it hardly seems enough to kill for.”

“He was going to report it to Welfare,” she said. “He wouldn’t let me just close the cases and not do it any more. He had to get religious. I’d have been ruined, Manny. I’d not only have lost my job, I’d have gone to jail.”

“The state’s probably a little stuffy about people embezzling its money,” I conceded. “But if you were going to kill the kid, why’d you frame your own nephew?”

She looked up at me again and her eyes were completely empty. “I didn’t mean to do that. I didn’t even mean to kill Bart. I took that old knife along because it was the only weapon in the house and I wanted to scare him. When he wouldn’t listen to reason and insisted he was going to report the whole thing to Welfare even if he went to jail for it, because he wanted to start out living straight, I lost my head. I struck at him with the knife and he went down. I didn’t know he had a date to meet foe in the club room a few minutes later, and it never occurred to me anybody would be able to identify that silly knife.”

“It was you who phoned the police right after the killing and reported a reefer party, wasn’t it?” I asked.

“I just wanted them to find the body so he wouldn’t have to lie there alone,” she said. “I didn’t mean to get Joe in trouble.”

“But after he was in it, you’d have let him burn for your crime, wouldn’t you, Sara?”

Tears formed at her eye corners and began to edge across her cheeks. “I don’t know,” she said brokenly. “I was hoping you’d prove that gang committed the murder. I’ve been going crazy. You know I always loved Joe.”

“Sure,” I said. “You even visited him in jail.”

As I crossed over to the phone, she mumbled through her tears, “All I wanted was nice things.”

I dialled Homicide and waited while the phone rang several times.

“They never paid us enough,” Sara said, now crying freely. “You don’t know what it’s like, skimping and saving and not even being able to afford a television set when even most of your relief clients had them. All I wanted was a few nice things.”

“They have television at the state penitentiary now,” I told her.

“What?” a voice asked in my ear.

20

About two weeks later I got a phone call from Wilfred Reed.

“Mr. Moon? Just called to tell you how things are going in the Purple Pelicans. Stub Carlson was elected the first president under their new by-laws.”

“You mean he managed to whip Joe Brighton?” I asked in astonishment.

“Oh, they don’t elect officers that way any more. They have straight elections now. Matter of fact, Joe Brighton put his name in nomination.”

“Oh. Well, I’m glad to hear it.”

“I thought you might be interested in our organizational setup,” he said. “After we’ve brought a club into the program, we usually invite one or more of the parents to act as adult supervisors, you know. On a volunteer basis, of course. They act as liaison between the club and the Y in organizing baseball and basketball games, do a little referee work and chaperone teen-age dances. That sort of thing.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” I said.

“Oh, it is. A good deal of our success depends on parent cooperation. And that of other adults.”

He paused and I waited for him to say good-by.

“Ah... Mr. Moon, we generally ask the boys who they’d like for an adult supervisor before we approach any of the adults.”

“That sounds like a good idea too.”

“Ah... when we asked the Purple Pelicans, they requested you.”

While I just sat there in astonishment, he went on hurriedly, “I know you’re probably a busy man, but before you say no, will you drop by and let me explain what duties are involved. It’s certainly a worthy cause, and it won’t tie you up more than an evening or two a week.”

I thought of sixty kids who only a couple of weeks ago had been on a one-way street leading to the penitentiary, the morgue or mental hospitals. Then I grinned into the phone.

“I’ll drop down for a briefing, Mr. Reed. But you can forget the sales talk. I’ll take it.”