Rogue Cop

7

She was crying so hard that it took Carmody several minutes to get any details. When he learned where it had happened he stood up, his breathing loud and harsh in the silence. “You stay here,” he said in a soft, thick voice. He picked up his coat and left the room.

The shooting had occurred a block from Karen’s hotel. Carmody got there in twenty minutes by pushing his car at seventy through the quiet streets. The scene was one he knew by heart; squad cars with red beacon lights swinging in the darkness, groups of excited people on the sidewalks whispering to each other and women and children peering out from lighted windows on either side of the street. He parked and walked toward the place his brother had died, a cold frozen expression on his face. A cop in the police line recognized him and stepped quickly out of his way, giving him a small jerky salute.

Lieutenant Wilson was standing in a group of lab men and detectives from Klipperman’s shift. One of them saw Carmody coming and tapped his arm. Wilson turned, his tough, belligerent features shadowed by the flashing red lights. He said quietly, “We’ve been trying to get you for a couple of hours, Mike. I’m sorry about this, sorry as hell.”

Carmody stopped and nodded slowly. “Where’s Eddie?” he said.

“They’ve taken him away.”

“He’s dead then,” Carmody said. Nothing showed on his face. “I was hoping I’d got a bum tip. What happened?”

“He was shot twice in the back. Right here.”

Carmody stared at the sidewalk beyond the group of detectives and saw bloodstains shining blackly in the uncertain light. In the back, he thought.

“We’ll break this one fast, don’t worry,” Wilson said. “We’ve got a witness who saw the shooting. She was a friend of Eddie’s. Karen Stephanson. You know her?”

“She saw it, heh? Where is she now?”

“At Headquarters, looking at pictures.”

Carmody turned and walked away, his heels making a sharp, ringing sound. Wilson called after him but Carmody kept going, shouldering people aside as he headed for his car.

It took him twenty minutes to get back to center-city. He parked at Oak and Sixteenth, a few doors from the morgue, and walked into the rubber-tiled foyer. The elderly cop on duty got to his feet, a solemn, awkward expression on his face. “He’s down the hall. In B,” he said. “You know the way, I guess, Sarge.”

Carmody pushed through swinging doors and turned into the second room off the wide, brick-walled corridor. Three men were present, a pathologist from Memorial Hospital, a uniformed cop and an attendant in blue denim overalls. The square clean room was powerfully illuminated by overhead lights and water trickled in a trough around the edge of the concrete floor. The air smelled suspiciously clean, as if soap and brushes had been used with tireless efficiency to smother something else in the room.

Eddie lay on a metal table with a sheet covering the lower half of his body. The brilliant white light struck his bare chest and glinted sharply on the smears and streaks of blood. His shirt, which had been cut away from him, lay beside the table on the floor.

Carmody stared at his brother’s body for a few moments, his features cold and expressionless. A lock of hair was curled down on Eddie’s ivory-pale forehead and his face was white and empty and still. The choirboy who stole the show at St. Pat’s, Carmody thought. Who wanted to play it straight, get married and have kids. That was all over, as dead as any other dream. One of the men said something to him hesitantly and awkwardly. “Damn shame, sorry...” Carmody couldn’t speak; a pain was pressing against his throat like a knife blade. He nodded slowly, avoiding their eyes.

Someone came into the room behind him, and Carmody turned and saw old Father Ahearn standing in the doorway.

“I came as quickly as I could, Mike,” he said.

Carmody turned and looked down at his brother. “We were all too late,” he said, holding his voice even and cold. “Too late, Father.” He put out a big hand and pushed the lock of hair back from Eddie’s forehead. For another moment he stood there, staring at the pale quiet face, and then, moving deliberately and powerfully, he walked past the priest and out to the sidewalk. The night was cool and soft; a faint wind moved over the city and a diffused light was spreading thinly along the horizon.

The door behind him opened and Father Ahearn came to his side. “Why can’t you face me, Mike?” he cried softly. “Who did this thing to your brother?”

“I warned him,” Carmody said, swallowing hard against the pain in his throat. “I warned him, but he wouldn’t listen to me.”

“You warned him!” Father Ahearn took Carmody’s big hard arm and tried to pull him around; but the detective’s body was like a post set in stone. “What do you mean by that, Mike?”

“He wouldn’t listen to me,” Carmody said again. “They meant business but he wouldn’t believe it.”

“You knew this was going to happen?” the old priest said in a soft, horrified voice. “Is that what you are saying?”

“Sure, I knew it would happen...” Carmody said.

The old priest took a step backward, quickly and involuntarily, as if the face of evil had appeared before him without warning. “God have mercy on your soul,” he said, breathing the words softly.

“Save the mercy for the men who killed him, Father.” Without looking at the old priest, Carmody turned quickly and strode toward his car.

Half an hour later he pulled up before Karen’s hotel. The street was quiet now, the squad cars had gone back to their regular duty. Only a few groups of people remained on the sidewalk, smoking a last cigarette and exchanging their final words on the shooting. Everyone prefaced his recapitulation with an “I was just—” “Just getting into bed.” “Just locking up.” “Just opening the ice-box — when it happened.” For some reason, Carmody thought, listening to the eddies of talk in the silent street, they all felt these commonplace activities had assumed a shape and significance through their temporal relationship to tragedy. And maybe they did. I was just getting drunk, he remembered. Just passing out after accepting Beaumonte’s word that Eddie would be spared for two more days.

A middle-aged patrolman was posted in the small foyer of Karen’s hotel.

“Is the witness back yet?” Carmody asked him.

“Got in about fifteen minutes ago, Sarge.”

“You’ll be here all night?”

“That’s right. And there’s a man in back and one just outside her room. You going up?”

“Yes.” The cop unlocked the inner door and Carmody walked by him and took the elevator up to her floor. He nodded to the alert-looking young cop who was on guard there and then rapped on her door.

“You’d better start asking everybody for identification,” he said.

The young man flushed slightly. “I’ve seen your pictures in the paper lots of times, Sarge.”

“Okay. But be on your toes when anyone gets off that elevator. If the guy she spotted comes up here he won’t give you a chance. Remember that.”

“I’m ready for him,” the cop said, putting a hand on the butt of his revolver.

Carmody glanced at his youthful, clean-cut face, and swallowed hard against a sudden constriction in his throat. Another Eddie, confident and hard, willing to take on all the trouble in the city. How did they get guys like this for sixty bucks a week? Where did they find these brave dumb kids?

The door opened and Karen looked up at him. She had been crying but her face was now pale and composed. For a moment they stared at each other in silence. Then she said, “What do you want here?”

“The whole story, everything,” he said, moving into the room and closing the door. She sat down slowly and locked her hands together in her lap. “Eddie was killed, that’s what happened,” she said, struggling to control her voice. “Just the way you said it would.”

“You saw the killer. I want to know what he looked like. I want every detail you can remember.”

“I’ve told the police everything.”

“Tell me now.”

“Why should I? You’re a friend of the men who killed him. You stood by and let them murder him.” She rose suddenly and turned away from him, her small face beginning to break and crumble with emotion. “You said we were the same kind of dirt, didn’t you? But you let them kill your brother. I’m not in that class.”

Carmody took her frail shoulders in his hands, twisted her around and sat her in the chair. When she attempted to get up, weeping helplessly now, he caught her wrist and forced her back with a turn of his hand. “I don’t want any speeches,” he said coldly. “There’ll be plenty of speeches from everybody else. The Mayor, the newspapers, priests and ministers, they’ll all make speeches. But they won’t do any good. When they’re all through talking, Eddie will be just as dead. So don’t waste my time with a speech.” His voice went low and hard, “Start with the beginning. Eddie was here tonight, wasn’t he? When I called?”

“Give me just a minute,” she whispered.

“Okay, take your time,” Carmody said, releasing her wrist. He lit a cigarette and drew the smoke deeply into his lungs. Then he sat down and stared at a picture on the wall. Finally, he glanced at her. “Okay?”

“Yes. Eddie was here when you called. But he told me he didn’t want to speak to you. He listened to the conversation and broke the connection when you began to yell at me. I begged him to be careful but he said you were more frightened of Ackerman than he was.” She stopped, breathing slowly, and put the palm of her hand against her forehead.

“We watched television until eleven-thirty. When he left I tidied up the room and found his wallet in the chair he’d been sitting in. His badge was clipped inside it and I knew he’d need that on duty. So I went downstairs to see if I could catch him. The street was dark but I saw him walking toward the corner, about fifty yards away. I ran after him. I didn’t call because it was late. Eddie didn’t hear me until I was eight or ten feet from him. I’d changed into slippers and I didn’t make any noise, I suppose. Then he turned around quickly and reached for his gun. When he saw me he laughed and started to say something. But he didn’t get the words out.” She shuddered and rubbed her arms with her hands. “That’s when it happened. A man stepped from behind a tree and into the light of the street lamp. He had a gun and he shot Eddie twice in the back. Then he ran to the corner. I began to scream and he looked around and stopped. He started toward me but a woman came out on the balcony across the street and began to shout for the police. The man stopped again, under the light at the corner, and then he turned and ran into the next block.”

“Okay. You’ve been looking at pictures at Headquarters. Did you find this man in any of them?”

She shook her head slowly.

“Tell me what he looked like. Everything you can remember.”

“He was big. Not fat, but tall and wide. His hair was blond and long. I couldn’t see his eyes, they just looked black, but his face was heavy and brutal.”

“How old?”

“Young, not more than thirty.”

“How about his clothes?”

“He was wearing a sports jacket and a sports shirt. The shirt was open at his neck and the jacket was a light color. Gray tweed or camel’s hair, something like that.”

Carmody frowned. He knew the local hoodlums who might have done this night’s work: Sheen in West, Morgan or Schmidt in Northeast, Youngdahl who ran a bowling alley in Meadowstrip. But Karen’s description fitted none of them. That meant an imported killer. And you couldn’t get a man like that in ten minutes. It required arrangements, discussions, planning. So the double-cross hadn’t been a spur-of-the-moment decision. It had been in the works all the time.

He began to smile slowly. “I’ll get that man, Karen. Don’t worry about it.”

“What good will that do? Eddie’s dead. You can’t bring him back.”

“I’m not doing this for Eddie,” he said, still smiling coldly. “This is for me. They promised me time to work on him, and I believed them. They lied to get me out of the way. And it worked. Then they shot him down like a dog. Do you think I’ll let them get away with that?”

“I might have guessed this,” she said, staring at him with something like wonder in her eyes. “It’s not for Eddie. It’s not because the men who killed him are savage and cruel and evil. It’s because your pride is hurt. Their great crime was to make a fool of Mike Carmody. Even your own brother’s death can’t penetrate your thick-headed arrogance.”

“I told you to skip the sermons,” he said, getting to his feet.

“I know you don’t want to hear sermons,” she said bitterly. “You don’t want to hear a word about right and wrong or good and evil. Those things hurt you. You can’t stand them, Mike.”

“Shut up!” he said thickly. “Damn it, will you shut up?”

“No, you don’t want anyone to tell you what kind of a man you are. You sneer and laugh at the whole world but you’re too damn sensitive to listen to its judgment on you. Well, some day you’ll have to listen, Mike. You helped fire the bullet that killed Eddie, and you’ll never be able to run away from that fact.”

“I did what I could,” Carmody said, catching her thin shoulders in his big powerful hands and lifting her to her feet. “Don’t ever say I killed him. Don’t ever say that to me again.”

“You did nothing but advise him to become a thief like you,” she said, staring into the pain and fury in his eyes. “When that didn’t work you walked away from him. That’s what you did, Mike.”

The words framed the dark thoughts which he had been fighting to drive into the safe hidden depths of his mind. I didn’t kill him, I didn’t kill him, he thought, hurling the words like weapons at his growing sense of guilt. Then he released her arms so abruptly that she staggered to keep her balance. “You don’t know anything about it,” he said hoarsely.

“You’re feeling it now,” she said, watching his face. “It’s something you’ll never get away from. If I’ve done that, I’m glad.”

“I’m tougher than you think,” he said, forcing a smile onto his lips. “Listen to me; Eddie didn’t die because of me. Eddie died because he was a fool.”

She sat down slowly, watching him with a frown, and then shook her head sadly. “If you can say that, you’re tough all right. You’re not a man, you’re just a slab of concrete. But some day you’ll crack up anyway. And the crash will be that much louder.”

“Don’t bet on it,” he said.

It was four in the morning when Carmody entered his own living room. The lights were on and Nancy Drake lay on the sofa, an empty whiskey bottle within inches of her trailing hand. Strands of her fine blonde hair fell across her damp cheek and there was a little smile on her lips. But it was a stiff, unnatural smile, the kind Carmody had seen on the lips of women who needed to scream. The line of her body was rigid and the smooth muscles in the backs of her calves were drawn up into small knots.

He shook her gently. “How do you feel, Nancy?”

“Feel?” The grin grew wider. “Hotsy-totsy.” A spasm shook her body and she pounded her feet up and down on the cushions of the sofa. “Say something nice to me, Mike. Don’t let me start crying.”

“Let’s have a drink. That’s something nice, isn’t it?”

“Real peachy,” she said. “Let’s just do that, Mike.”

The phone rang suddenly, shrill and ominous in the silence. Nancy cried out softly and Carmody patted her shoulder. “Keep quiet while I’m talking,” he said. “Okay?”

“Sure, Mike.”

Carmody crossed the room and picked up the phone. “Hello.”

“Mike, this is Bill Ackerman.”

Carmody stared at the receiver. Then he said softly, “You made a mistake tonight, Bill. I’m going to prove it to you.”

“Now get this!” Ackerman’s voice was sharp and controlled. “We didn’t kill your brother. I promised you forty-eight hours and I meant it. Whoever shot him was working on his own. We’ll find the killer and when we do he’s all yours. Do you understand me, Mike?”

Carmody smiled coldly. Was this the opening lead in another double-cross? Was he next on the list? “I thought you’d killed him, Bill. I thought you’d crossed me,” he said.

“I don’t work that way. I don’t need to. I gave you forty-eight hours and I stuck to my word. My guess is that some hophead learned that your brother was causing us trouble, and decided to get in good with us by doing the job on him. He’ll be in for a handout one of these days and you can take over from here. Is that clear?”

“That’s your guess, eh?”

“I can’t think of anything else.”

The unpleasant little smile was still on Carmody’s lips. Ackerman’s confidence was almost funny, he thought. But where was this leading? Ackerman hadn’t called to explain himself or apologize. There was no reason for that.

“I’m glad you weren’t involved in it,” Carmody said. “I’m going after the guy who did the job.”

“We’ll help you, Mike. Is there anything you need right now?”

“I’m okay. I don’t need help.”

“If you need it, it’s here. Now here’s why I called. Did you see Nancy Drake last night or this morning?”

Carmody frowned. What was Ackerman’s interest in Nancy? “No, I haven’t,” he said, glancing at the slim figure on the sofa.

“That’s funny. She was out with some of Beaumonte’s friends last night. The last thing she told them was that she was going to your place.”

“My place? She must have been drunker than usual.”

“I imagine so. Anyway, Beaumonte wants to find her.”

Now it’s Beaumonte, Carmody thought. Why should Ackerman give a damn about Beaumonte’s troubles? There had to be an answer to that one. Ackerman operated solely in the light of self-interest; nothing mattered to him unless it directly concerned his safety and money. “Did Beaumonte and Nancy have a row?” he asked casually.

“Yeah. He didn’t like that baptismal job she did on him.”

“Well, I’ll check the elevator men here at the hotel,” Carmody said. “You want me to go any farther?”

“Sure. Find her if she’s still in town.”

“Okay.” Carmody hesitated, then: “I’ll give Beaumonte a call if I get a line on her.”

“No, let me know first,” Ackerman said. Normally he never explained or discussed his orders, but now he said, “I’ll hand her over to Dan as a little surprise.”

“Sure.”

“And, Mike, I’m sorry about your brother.”

Carmody couldn’t say thanks to that, the words would have stuck in his throat. “It was a rough deal,” he said slowly.

When he put the phone down he walked over and sat down beside Nancy on the sofa. There was a pale morning light coming in the windows now and it glinted on her tumbled blonde hair and the backs of her slim silken legs.

“Can you talk to me a minute?” he asked her quietly.

She twisted around until she was lying on her back. “I’ll get out,” she said. “I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

“Don’t worry about that,” he said, taking one of her hands and rubbing it slowly.

“Why did Beaumonte do it to me?” she asked him in a small, weary voice. Then her eyes began to fill with tears. “I was as good to him as I knew how. I tried my best to do everything he wanted. Really, I did. And he must have liked me a little, Mike. In all the time he never had another girl. He used to laugh about that. Said he was growing old. But that wasn’t it. He must have liked me. But he must have hated me, too. That’s what I can’t understand. Unless he hated me he wouldn’t have done this, would he, Mike?”

“He doesn’t hate you. He wants you back.”

“I don’t want to go back,” she said, and her hand tightened in his like a frightened child’s. “Can he make me?”

“No, of course not.”

She sighed. “This is my chance, Mike. I don’t want to wind up in some alcoholic ward. I’ll lay off the booze, and try to get back into show business. I can do that, I know it.”

“That was Ackerman who just called,” Carmody said. “He wants you back, too. Does that make any sense to you?”

She shivered and rubbed her bare arms. “It just scares me.”

“Is there any reason for him to be afraid of you? Have you got anything on him?”

She shook her head quickly, her eyes bright with fear. “I haven’t got anything on anybody, Mike. Tell them that, please, Mike. Even if I could, I wouldn’t bother them.”

“I’m after them,” he said gently. “Because they killed my brother. If you help me they’ll never find out about it.”

“I was sorry about your brother,” she said, beginning to cry. “That was terrible, Mike.” She was slipping away from him, he saw, retreating into irrational, nonspecific grief. “They shouldn’t have done that.”

“You’re sure they did it?” He tightened his grip on her hand. “You know they did it?”

“They talked about it after your fight with Johnny Stark. After you’d gone.” She stared pitifully at him, transfixed by his cold eyes. “Dan said there was a man tailing your brother, and Ackerman said to tell him to get to work.”

Was this what Ackerman was worried about? Carmody wondered. Possibly. But there had to be something else. What Nancy had overheard wasn’t evidence. And Ackerman would know that.

“They’ll be looking for you,” he said. “You told someone you were coming here.”

“Don’t make me go,” she whispered.

“This isn’t safe,” he said. “Let me think.” He had to hide her somewhere. Hotels and boardinghouses were out. If Ackerman were serious he could put a hundred men on her trail. Finally, Karen occurred to him; she was guarded by a detail of police and Nancy would be safe in her apartment. “Come on, let’s go,” he said. “Fix your hair and get into your coat.”

“All right,” she said. She seemed to have lost the power to act or think independently; she moved like a small battered puppet at the touch of his voice.

There was the problem of getting her past the police guard and Carmody put his mind to it on the trip across the dark city. Karen was an important witness, the only lead to Eddie’s killer, and the police wouldn’t stand for any casual boarders in her apartment. When he parked the car, a half-block from the Empire, he said to Nancy, “Now listen closely. We’re going to the Empire Hotel. You can see the entrance from here. You go into the foyer alone and tell the cop that you live in the hotel but don’t have your key. That’s all, understand? I’ll be right behind you and take it from there. Okay?”

Carmody walked into the foyer ten seconds after her and listened as she told her story to the patrolman. Then he said, “It’s okay, officer. I’ve seen her around before. She lives here.”

It worked smoothly, not because the cop was careless but because Carmody’s endorsement had the stamp of rank and authority on it. In the elevator he punched a button that took them to the floor above Karen’s. He led her along the warm silent corridor to the stairway and down one flight to the landing. “Wait right here,” he whispered. Then he opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. The young cop stationed at Karen’s apartment straightened alertly, but smiled as he recognized him.

“Everything quiet?” Carmody asked him.

“No one’s been here since you left.”

“Good. I’m going to be here half an hour going through some pictures with her. Why don’t you go down and get some coffee?”

“Well, I’m supposed to stick right here.”

“I’ll take over. And coffee will keep you sharp the rest of the night.”

It was that argument that sold the young cop. “I’ll make it on the double,” he said.

When the elevator doors closed on him Carmody went down the corridor to the stairway landing and brought Nancy back to Karen’s apartment. He rapped sharply on the door and checked his watch. Five o’clock. He wanted to settle this and get to work.

There would be a restless ferment in the city today, precipitated by Eddie’s death, and by fear of the cops’ reactions to this defiant challenge from the big boys. This was the time to strike, Carmody knew, when people were ready to flinch.

The latch clicked and Karen opened the door. She wore a robe and slippers but he saw that she hadn’t been asleep.

“I’ve got to ask you a favor,” Carmody said.

“All right,” she said, looking at Nancy.

“She’s in trouble with the same guys who killed Eddie,” he said. “She needs a safe place to stay.”

Karen hesitated, still watching Nancy. Then she put a hand on her arm, and said, “Come on in. There’s plenty of room.”

“That’s mighty hospitable of you,” Nancy said, with a pitiful attempt at humor.

“She’s had a rough time and is pretty loaded right now,” Carmody said. “The cops won’t let her stay if they find out she’s here, so do your talking with the radio on. And if any detectives come up, put her in the bathroom or kitchen.”

“I can manage it,” Karen said.

The elevator cables hummed warningly and Carmody closed the door. He was standing with his back to it when the young cop came out of the elevator, carrying two cardboard containers of coffee.

“I brought one for you,” he said.

“Fine,” Carmody sipped the black coffee slowly, his thoughts ranging restlessly toward the city. The cop was silent until Carmody was ready to leave, then he wet his lips and told him awkwardly and hesitantly how sorry he was about his brother being killed.

“I worked with him and he was all cop,” he said.

“I think you’re right,” Carmody said soberly. Then he left.