Rogue Cop

11

Carmody slept that night in his old room. In the morning he discovered that someone had taken care of the things he had left here years ago. His suits hung in plastic bags, and his bureau drawers were full of clean linen. Carmody looked at them for a moment, remembering his father’s finicky concern over his and Eddie’s things. Neatness wasn’t his strong point, but he had worked hard at being father and mother to them, repainting their wagons, trimming their hair, getting after them about muddy shoes and dirty fingernails. “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” he had usually intoned while herding them to the bathroom. I suppose he always expected me to come back, Carmody thought.

He had finished a breakfast of orange juice and coffee when the phone rang. It was Murphy.

“Can I pick you up in about twenty minutes?” he said. “We got some work to do.”

“What did you find out?”

“Something damned interesting. I’ll be out as soon as I can.”

Carmody lit a cigarette and walked into the living room. The early sun slanted through the windows, brightening the somber tones of the furniture and pictures. For some reason the room didn’t depress him this morning. He thought about it as he smoked and looked at his father’s piano. Ever since he had started trying to save Eddie his thoughts had been returning restlessly to the old man. He should have no time for anyone but Ackerman. His thoughts should be on what Murphy had dug up, but instead they swerved irrelevantly into the past. Back to unimportant details. Like his clothes hanging neatly and cleanly in the closet upstairs. And an image of the old man at the piano booming out something for the Offertory. Redemptor Mundi Deus. Even now the somehow frightening Latin words could send a shiver down his spine. But why? They were just words, weren’t they?

A footstep sounded on the porch and Carmody went quickly to the door. Father Ahearn smiled at him through the screen. “I just thought I’d see if you were home,” he said.

Carmody let him in and the old man sat down gratefully.

“It will be hot today.” He sighed and looked up at Carmody. “You asked for understanding from me yesterday but I left you. That wasn’t the way for a priest to behave. I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

“I wish I could help you. You know, Eddie gave me his will the last time I spoke with him. He wanted you to have this house. Did he tell you that?”

“No, he didn’t,” Carmody said slowly.

“You don’t want it, do you?”

“I haven’t thought about it. But I guess not. Why should I?”

“You’re a stubborn man,” Father Ahearn said. “Just like your father. If you understood him, you might understand yourself, Mike. He was a proud man, and very set in his ways. But they were pretty good ways.” The old priest smiled slowly. “Remember how touchy he was about his singing. And the truth was he didn’t have a very good voice.”

“But big,” Carmody said.

“Oh, it was that, I grant you.” Father Ahearn got to his feet with an effort and went to the piano. “Eddie kept all the music, I see.” He picked up one of the sheets and smiled at it. “O, Blame Not the Bard ” His eyes went across the music. “Twas treason to love her, twas death to defend,” he murmured, shaking his head. Then he looked sharply at Carmody. “That’s something to remember about your father, Mike. He wasn’t allowed to love his own country. Like thousands of other Irishmen, that love was a kind of treason. Can’t you understand their bitterness when their sons went wrong over here? Instead of being grateful for a country to love and live in, some of the sons seemed bent only on spoiling the place. That hurt men like your father. It makes them angry and unreasonable, which isn’t the best tone to use on hot-headed young men. Can’t you see that, Mike?”

“Well, it’s all over, anyway,” Carmody said. “He’s dead and I’m still the rotten apple. Talking won’t change it.”

“How did you get so far away from us?” Father Ahearn said, shaking his head slowly.

“I don’t know. It wasn’t one decision.” Carmody shrugged. “Little by little, I guess.”

“Couldn’t you try coming back the same way? Little by little, I mean.”

“Admit I’ve been wrong? Ask for forgiveness.” Carmody turned away from him and pounded a fist into his palm. “It’s no good. If I did that I’d come to a dead-center stop. And I can’t stop while my brother lies dead and his murderers are living like kings.” Turning back, he stared angrily and hopelessly at the priest. “All I’ve got is a certain kind of power and drive. I can do things. The way I am, that is. But I’d be nothing if I turned into a confused sinner, begging for forgiveness.”

“You’ll be nothing until you see that Eddie’s murder was wrong,” Father Ahearn said sharply. “Not because he was your brother, or a police officer, but because he was a human being whose life belonged to God.”

A car door slammed at the curb. Through the windows Carmody saw George Murphy coming up the walk. “I’ve got to be going, Father,” he said, relieved to end this painful and pointless argument.

“Remember this,” the old priest said, and put a hand quickly on his arm. “Don’t get thinking you’re hopeless. St. Francis de Sales said, ‘Be patient with everyone, but above all with yourself.’ Keep that in mind. All sinners flatter themselves that they are hopeless. But no one is, son.”

“Okay, okay,” Carmody said shortly; he wanted to be gone, he wanted no more talk about sin and forgiveness. Turning, he left the house and met Murphy on the front porch.

“We’ve got to take a ride,” Murphy said. “You set to go?”

“Yes.”

When Father Ahearn came down the steps, Murphy’s sedan was moving away from the curb. He watched until it had disappeared at the corner, and then shook his head and started back to the rectory. His expression was weary and troubled.

“Well, what is it?” Carmody asked, as Murphy headed through the bright streets toward the River Drive.

“The Dobbses we found in the clips didn’t add up to anything,” Murphy said. He looked tired and hot; his day-old beard was a black smudge along his jaws, and his eyes were narrowed against the sunlight. “I worked all night on them and didn’t get a lead. But I found another Dobbs, and he could be our man.”

“Who’s that?”

“This fell into my lap, from an old guy named Sweeney who’s been a rewrite man on our paper since the year One. I got talking to him this morning, and he told me about a Billy Dobbs who worked on the Intelligencer years back. Not a reporter, but a photographer. The only memorable thing about Dobbs, Sweeney told me, was that he once stumbled accidentally into a bank stick-up. This was in ’38. Dobbs was coming in from a routine assignment, driving south on Market Street, when three guys ran out of the old Farmer’s Bank with satchels of dough and guns in their hands. They killed two cops right in the street, and a bullet hit the windshield of Dobbs’ car. He stopped and scrambled into a gutter to get out of the fire. All he thought about was taking cover instead of taking pictures. He could have been a hero by photographing the gunmen, but he’d probably have been a dead one. That’s what he said, at any rate. Two years later Dobbs quit the paper and that’s all Sweeney could tell me about him.” Murphy glanced at Carmody. “You see where this might be leading?”

“I’ve got an idea.”

“Right now we’re going to where Dobbs used to live. A guy in the Intelligencer’s personnel section gave me his old address. It’s in Avondale, in a pretty average neighborhood. Dobbs lived there with his mother and father. But they’ve all been gone for a long time.”

“We’ll have to ring a lot of doorbells to find someone who knew them,” Carmody said.

“I can’t think of any short cut,” Murphy said, and rubbed a hand wearily over his face. “I wish there was. I could use some sleep.”

They parked in front of the two-story wooden house in which the Dobbs family had lived, and got out of the car. The street was shady and quiet, in a neighborhood that was deteriorating steadily but gradually.

“You want the odd or even addresses?” Murphy said dryly.

“I’ll take the other side. Let’s go.”

It was in the middle of the afternoon and two blocks from the Dobbs home that Carmody got his hands on a lead. She was a pleasant little woman, starched and clean in a blue house dress, and she had known the Dobbses very well. “Funny you should ask,” she said, tilting her gray head at Carmody. “I was just thinking of Ed and Martha the other day. Something brought them back to mind, what I just can’t remember. But come in, won’t you? No sense baking there in the sun.”

In the dim old-fashioned parlor, Carmody said, “Do you remember when they moved away?”

“Yes, it was just before the war. The Second World War, I mean. About ’40 or ’41. Ed quit his job on the cars, and off they went. To California.”

“Did you know their son? Billy Dobbs?”

“Indeed I did. He was a quiet, steady youngster, and got himself a fine job on the paper. Took pictures for them. We used to see his name on them sometimes. Fires, accidents, all sorts of things you’d never expect little Billy Dobbs to be mixed up in.”

“But he quit his job, didn’t he?”

“That’s right. Moved off to another paper. It worried his mother, I can tell you, but it turned out pretty well, I guess.”

“Do you know what paper he went to?”

“His mother told me but I forgot,” the woman said, with a little sigh.

“Anybody around here ever hear from the Dobbses?”

“No, not for years anyway. Old Mr. Johnson, he’s dead now, looked them up when he was in California. He was out seeing his son who was in camp there, you see. And the Dobbses had come into good luck. Some relative of theirs in Australia had died, they told Mr. Johnson, and left them a nice little bit of money. They were living in style, he said. Flower garden, nice home, a maid even.” She smiled and shook her head. “A far cry from the days when they were on the cars.”

“Was their son around?”

She frowned. “Mr. Johnson never said anything about Billy...”

Carmody went quickly down the stairs to the sidewalk and looked along the street for Murphy. He saw him in the next block and yelled at him to get his attention. When Murphy turned, Carmody shouted, “Let’s go. I’ve got it...”

“Everything fits,” Carmody said, as they headed back toward his home. “Dobbs did take pictures of the stick-up. He waited two years, probably protected himself from every angle and then parlayed them into a pension plan.”

“Nice guy, Dobbs,” Murphy said, nodding. “Didn’t forget the old folks either. The thing is, I guess, to find Dobbs.”

“We won’t find him,” Carmody said. “Ackerman has sent him on the road by now. Dobbs is on his way to South America or Newfoundland, I’d bet.”

“Then we got to find the pictures,” Murphy said.

“I want to think about that angle a little,” Carmody said.

“We got something good here, Mike. This is what Delaney had on Ackerman. He must know about Dobbs. And that pressure was strong enough to make Ackerman take the big risk of killing your brother. So if we get Dobbs’ pictures we get Bill Ackerman. On a rap he can’t beat.”

“That’s it.” Carmody glanced at Murphy’s tired profile. “You’d have made a good cop, George.”

“So would you, Mike,” Murphy said. Then he rubbed his lips with the back of his hand. “Forget that; okay? It’s no time for cracks.”

“Nobody’s mad,” Carmody said bitterly.

They said good-by in front of the house and Carmody went inside and tossed his hat on the piano. He was on his way to the kitchen for a beer when the phone began to ring. Picking it up, he said, “Yes?”

“Mike, this is Karen. The police took me downtown this morning to look at more pictures. There was no guard here while I was away.” Her voice began to tremble. “Nancy’s gone, Mike.”

“Who picked you up?” he said sharply.

“A Captain Green. From the records station.”

Green was on Ackerman’s leash, Carmody knew. Technically, he had the right to bring a witness downtown... And someone else could have pulled off the police guard... Carmody swore furiously.

“Stay right there,” he said. “I’m coming over.”

Nancy might have walked out by herself, he thought, as he ran down to his car. But in his heart he knew he was kidding himself. This was Ackerman’s work. He wanted her and he had taken her.