Rogue Cop

9

Ackerman replaced the phone, checked his watch, and then walked slowly down the sunlit length of Beaumonte’s living room. There was an angry glint in his glassy black eyes, but his hard tanned face was expressionless. He glanced at a man who stood at the windows, and said, “Hymie, leave us alone for a few minutes. Go wash your hands or something.”

“Sure, boss,” Hymie Schmidt said. He was a slender, neatly dressed man with a pale narrow face and thinning brown hair. There was a nervous, charged quality about him, although his body was poised and deliberate in all its movements. The tension was in his dark eyes, which flicked nervously and restlessly from side to side as if constantly on the alert for trouble. “I’ll go wash my hands,” he said.

“And don’t call me boss,” Ackerman said shortly. “I’m Mr. Ackerman. Remember that.”

“Sure, Mr. Ackerman,” Hymie said. His dark eyes flicked angrily from side to side, but avoided Ackerman’s. He didn’t like this, but he kept his mouth shut. There was no percentage in being mad at Bill Ackerman.

“Come back if you hear the doorbell ring,” Ackerman said.

“Right, Mr. Ackerman.”

When he had gone Ackerman’s mouth tightened slowly into a flat ugly line. He looked down at Beaumonte, who was slumped on the sofa in a blue silk dressing gown, and said very quietly, “That was Fanzo on the wire. Carmody just left after slapping him around like a two-bit punk. He’s looking for Nancy.”

Beaumonte rubbed a hand wearily over his forehead. The lack of sleep showed in his face; his eyes were bloodshot and tired, and his flabby cheeks and jowls needed the attentions of his barber and masseur. “I’m sorry,” he said heavily. “I’m sorry, Bill.”

“That doesn’t do one damn bit of good,” Ackerman said coldly. “I thought you had more brains than to spout off to a dame. Can’t you impress them any other way?”

“I don’t ever remember telling her,” Beaumonte said, still rubbing his face wearily. “I must have been drunk.”

Ackerman swore in disgust. “We’ve got enough trouble in town without worrying about where she is and who she’s talking to,” he said.

“We’ll find her,” Beaumonte said. “We got a dozen guys on her trail.”

“And how about Carmody? Anybody watching him?”

Beaumonte nodded. “Sammy Ingersoll. But he hasn’t got on him yet. Right now he’s downstairs in the lobby. There’s a chance Mike will turn up here.”

“She’s our number one job,” Ackerman said. “I know she’s been to Carmody’s hotel. A cleaning woman remembered her. But the elevator men played dumb. Carmody’s trained them not to talk about his business. It’s an example you could damn well follow.”

A touch of color appeared in Beaumonte’s cheeks. He looked at Ackerman and said, “Let’s don’t get so mad that we forget business. You think Carmody believed you? About his brother, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” Ackerman said slowly. “He’s hard and he’s smart. I’ll never underestimate him again. That’s why I told him to look for Nancy. I figured he’d reason it this way: if Ackerman wants me to find her, he isn’t worried about her. So to hell with it.” Ackerman shrugged. “I thought he’d think it was just another job and ignore it. But he didn’t. He put aside looking for his brother’s killer to look for Nancy.”

“We’ll find her first,” Beaumonte said.

“We’d better. Remember that, Dan, we’d better.”

Beaumonte got slowly to his feet and smoothed the wrinkled front of his dressing gown. “Just one thing I want clear,” he said, meeting Ackerman’s eyes directly. “She’s not going to be hurt.”

Ackerman grinned contemptuously at him. “You threw her out, remember,” he said. “You gave her to Fanzo.”

“All right, I did it,” Beaumonte said, in a thick angry voice. “But I’m getting her back, understand? And in one piece.”

“All right,” Ackerman said easily. “That’s the last thing in the world I want to do, as a matter of fact; you and I are friends, Dan. When we find her I’ll send her on a vacation to Paris or Rio or Miami. Anywhere, as long as it is far away and she keeps her mouth shut.”

“We understand each other then,” Beaumonte said. “She’ll be sensible, I’ll guarantee that.”

Five minutes later the doorbell rang. Beaumonte started to answer it but Ackerman stopped him with a gesture. “Hold it,” he said quietly.

Hymie Schmidt appeared from the study, one hand in the pocket of his coat, his dark excited eyes switching from one side of the room to the other. Ackerman nodded toward the front door and Hymie moved to a position where he could cover anyone who entered. “All right now,” Ackerman said to Beaumonte. “Go ahead.”

Beaumonte walked across the room and opened the door. Mike Carmody stood in the corridor, his big hands at his sides, a faint cold smile twisting his lips.

“Hello, Dan,” he said gently.

Beaumonte took an involuntary step backward. “We were hoping you’d show up,” he said, breathing heavily.

“Sure,” Carmody said. He walked into the room, and nodded to Ackerman and Hymie Schmidt, whom he knew to be fast and dangerous with a gun.

“You can relax, Hymie,” he said, and smiled unpleasantly at him. “We’re all friends here.”

“I never relax,” Hymie said, returning his smile. “The doc says it’s bad for my nerves.”

Beaumonte moved to Carmody’s side, keeping carefully out of the line between the detective and Hymie Schmidt. “I’m sorry as hell about your brother, Mike,” he said. “Ackerman told you that it wasn’t our job, I know. But I want you to know I’m sorry.”

“Sure,” Carmody said, nodding. Nothing showed in his face. He had come here because it was essential to convince them that he was back on the team. Only by re-establishing that relationship could he set himself free to rip them apart from the inside. But it would take a hard, careful control to play this out, he realized. More than he had maybe. A dozen hours ago he had stood here fighting for Eddie’s life. He had sworn that his brother wouldn’t die and Eddie was now laid out in some undertaker’s back room. But nothing else had changed; Beaumonte and Ackerman were still healthy and alive, making plans to perpetuate and enjoy their power and rackets. Only the poor grown-up choirboy was gone from the scene.

This went through Carmody’s mind as he stared into Beaumonte’s anxious eyes. “Well, it’s all over,” he said. “Talking won’t bring the kid back.”

“I told you we’ll find the killer,” Ackerman said. “When we do he’s all yours. That’s settled.” He lit a cigarette and glanced through the smoke at Carmody. “Now, we’ll get on to something that isn’t settled. I had a call from Fanzo. He tells me you beat hell out of him. What’s the story there?”

Carmody smiled slightly. “He called me a name I didn’t like. Also, he wasn’t being helpful. I traced Nancy to his place, and asked him about her. He got lippy so I had to calm him down.”

Beaumonte put a hand on his arm. “What did you find out about her, Mike?”

Carmody turned to him and shrugged. “Nothing at all,” he said. He was slightly surprised at the pain in Beaumonte’s face. He must have loved her, he thought. The imitation lady, the little bottle girl, Beaumonte’s true love. It was almost comical.

“Fanzo had no lead on her?” Beaumonte asked him anxiously.

“He was no help.”

“She shouldn’t have run off, damn it,” Beaumonte said, rubbing his forehead.

“She was at your hotel, Mike,” Ackerman said. His eyes were on Beaumonte, warning him to keep quiet.

“Was she?” Carmody said, turning to Ackerman. “I’m sorry I missed her.”

Ackerman studied him for a few seconds. “One of the cleaning women saw her. But the elevator boys didn’t know anything. Probably she just went through the lobby.”

“That’s odd,” Carmody said, making a mental note to take good care of the elevator boys. Then he shrugged. “What’s all the fuss about? She’s raddled from too much booze, and scared to death after the job Fanzo’s boys did on her. She’ll turn up when she’s had a night’s sleep. Can’t you wait a day or so until she comes to her senses?”

“No, we can’t,” Ackerman said. “Beaumonte wants her back right away because he thinks she’s a cute kid. I want her back for another reason. She walked out of here with a bundle of bills, Mike, sixty-two thousand bucks to be exact. I want it back, and fast.”

“Now that makes sense,” Carmody said. He tried to keep the excitement from showing in his face. When they started lying they were scared. “How’d she get her hands on that kind of money?”

“Dan left the numbers pay-off for Northeast laying around,” Ackerman said, shaking his head disgustedly. “So we’ve got to find her.”

“Sure,” Carmody said. “I’ll let you know if I hear anything. By the way, Myerdahl’s set to clamp down hard. I guess you know that.”

“Let me worry about it, Mike,” Ackerman said. “This is the seasonal slump in our racket. There’ll be raids, arrests, public displays by all the reform groups. Our boys will have it rough for a while. But these things blow over.”

“I wouldn’t mind a fight,” Beaumonte said. “We’ve made some of the biggest men in this town. If they try to unload us I’d like the chance to ruin the bastards.”

“There isn’t going to be any fight,” Ackerman told him coldly. “I’m not tossing this city up for grabs. Remember that.”

Carmody couldn’t help marveling at their cool arrogance. The city was their private hunting ground, created and maintained for their express pleasure. They fed on it. Like protected vultures. How did they do it? he wondered. Just how in God’s name did they do it? He remembered a phrase of his father’s; in weakness there is strength. The old man had used it to spur them on in school. If you were weak at something, but worked like the devil on it, you would become strong through the weakness. Ackerman used a variation of the principle; the city’s weakness was his strength. The average citizen’s indifference, cynicism and willingness to compromise, was the weakness that Ackerman used as the foundation of his power.

“You’ll keep in touch?” Ackerman asked him as he picked up his hat. “Remember, nothing’s changed.”

“Sure, nothing’s changed,” Carmody said. Just Eddie, he thought, forcing a small smile to his lips. Yesterday he’d been alive, today he was dead. That was the only change. “I’ll keep in touch,” he said to Ackerman. “Don’t worry.”

Downstairs in the lobby Carmody put through a call to Lieutenant Wilson. “I’m just checking,” he said, when Wilson answered. “Any progress yet?”

“No. We’ve got seventy men in the street and they haven’t turned up a lead. But I’m glad you called. A guy has phoned here three times wanting to talk to you. He says he’s got some information you can use. He wouldn’t tell me anything else, except that he was phoning from a drug store and not to bother tracing the call. I gave him your hotel number, and the number of your brother’s home. He said he’d try both places till he got you.”

“Okay,” Carmody said. “He’s probably a gravestone salesman. Now look; I suggest you start digging into Ackerman’s background immediately. There’s a loose end in his past that can trip him up, I think.”

“The D.A. has covered that ground before, Mike. Ackerman always kept in the clear. You know that.”

“I don’t run the department, it’s just a suggestion,” Carmody said. “But take it to heart, Jim. I know what I’m talking about.”

Wilson hesitated. Then he said, “I’ll pass that upstairs. You got anything specific in mind?”

“No, that’s the trouble. It could be anything, any time.”

“I’ll pass it on. Keep in touch.”

“Of course, Jim,” he said.

Half an hour later Carmody parked his car before Eddie’s home in the Northeast. It was almost noon then. Sunlight filtered through the chestnut trees along the block, and faded to a softer tone as it struck the pavements and lawns. The kids playing ball in the street stopped their game to watch Carmody with round solemn eyes. They all know Eddie’s dead, I guess, Carmody thought. He was probably a big favorite with them.

The front door was unlocked and he went inside. For a moment he stared about at the familiar furniture and pictures, frowning slightly. Then he walked upstairs to Eddie’s room, which was at the rear of the house, overlooking the back yard. He had come here for two reasons: to look through Eddie’s things and to wait for a call from the man who had been trying to reach him at Headquarters. Carmody went through Eddie’s closet, drawers, desk, looking for nothing and anything. Eddie might have made notes of his identification of Delaney, or he might have noticed that he was being tailed and kept a record of that. Working with trained speed, Carmody opened insurance policies, police department circulars and a bunch of old letters, most of them yellowing notes he had scribbled to Eddie when he was away at school. In the bottom drawer of the bureau were athletic programs, news clippings, class pictures, English compositions with inevitable titles: My First Vacation, When I Grow Up, The Pleasures of Daily Mass. And there were pictures of Mike Carmody, dozens of them; running with a football, getting set to pitch, smiling in his rookie’s uniform. There’s nothing here, he thought bitterly, unless someone wanted details of the great Mike Carmody’s career.

Downstairs again, he stopped with his hands on his hips and looked around the cool dim living room. He frowned at his father’s big upright piano, and wondered why Eddie had never got rid of it. It was a space waster and dust trap. But the room played its usual trick on him; the gentle eyes of the Madonna stared at him reproachfully; the silent piano and empty chairs made him guiltily aware of the old rupture between him and his father. Exasperated with himself, he picked up a stack of music from the piano and looked at some of the titles. It was the old Irish stuff. Kevin Barry; Let Erin Remember the Days of Old; O, Blame Not the Bard; Molly Brannigan. Carmody had heard his father sing them all a hundred times. What had he got out of these songs? Each one told the same poignant story of betrayal and death, of vanished glories, of forsaken people dying grandly in fruitless battles for betrayed causes. Why did he cherish these bitter memories? They belonged a thousand years in the past; why were they important to him in America?

Footsteps sounded on the porch and Carmody put the music back in place hastily. The front door opened and Father Ahearn came into the living room, fanning himself with a limp Panama hat. He stopped in surprise when he saw Carmody standing in the shadows by the piano. “Well, this would make the devil himself believe in miracles,” he said. “Coming up the street, I said a little prayer I’d find you here. I wanted to talk to you about Eddie.” He sat down slowly and rubbed his eyes with a trembling hand. “The arrangements, you know. I can’t get it through my head that the boy is gone.”

“About the arrangements, you do what you think is right,” Carmody said.

“As a matter of fact, I’ve done just that,” the priest said. “But I thought you’d like to know. The wake will be at Kelly’s, starting tonight at eight. Thursday morning at ten there’ll be a Requiem High Mass at St. Patrick’s. Eddie’s district is supplying fifty honorary pallbearers, and the Superintendent is coming. And the Mayor, too, if he can possibly make it.”

“That’s great,” Carmody said.

“It’s good of them,” Father Ahearn said, nodding slightly, and ignoring Carmody’s sarcasm. “Now about the actual pallbearers. I’ve got five of his good friends from the neighborhood. I’ve left a place open for you, Mike.”

Carmody turned away from him. “You’d better get someone else, Father. I’ll be busy.”

“Too busy to go to your brother’s funeral?” the old priest said softly.

“That’s right.” He was staring at the music on his father’s piano, a bitter look in his eyes. Maybe the old songs had a point. Betrayal and death. They were themes to haunt a man. “I’ll be busy looking for his killer, Father,” he said. “Let the Superintendent and the Mayor make a show at the funeral. They’ve got time, I haven’t.”

“So you’re going to avenge Eddie,” Father Ahearn said thoughtfully. “In that case, you’re a bigger fool than I imagined. You can’t avenge him, Mike. Don’t you understand that much about yourself?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t believe in right and wrong,” Father Ahearn said, shaking his head angrily. “In your heart you believe Eddie was killed because he was stupid. Because he wasn’t like you. According to the rules you’ve made, there’s no such a thing as sin. So how can you hate something that doesn’t exist? By your standards, the men who killed him did no wrong. So how can you hold them to an accounting?” The old priest stood slowly, staring at Carmody with angry, impatient eyes. “Have the guts to be logical at least,” he said. “You made the rules to suit yourself, so stick to them, man. Don’t think you can flop from one side to the other like some sort of moral acrobat. It won’t work, I tell you. You’ve lost the privilege of hating sin. That belongs to us poor fools who believe in right and wrong.”

“All right,” Carmody said slowly. “By my rules, I’ve got to get the men who killed Eddie. Right or wrong, you watch.”

“It will do you no good,” the priest said.

“I’m not trying to save myself. I’m after a killer.”

Father Ahearn looked at him in silence for a few seconds, all the bright anger fading slowly from his face. “Well, I’ll be going on,” he said.

“Look, wait a minute. Won’t you try to understand this?”

“No, I must be going on,” he glanced around the room and shook his head slowly. “There was a lot of goodness and decency here, Mike. Stay a bit. Maybe some of it will soak back into you. Good-by, son.”

Twenty minutes after the priest had gone the telephone rang. Carmody answered it and a man’s voice said, “Is this Mike Carmody, the brother of that cop who got shot?”

Carmody had waited for the call because he knew the value of tipsters; the man with a grudge, the citizen who wanted to assist the law anonymously, even the busybodies — they had helped to break dozens of his cases.

About one in a hundred tips turned out to be helpful. But there was no short cut to find the occasionally reliable informant. The chronic alarmists and crackpots who flooded the police switchboard with calls every day could only be sifted out by patient investigation.

“Yes, this is Mike Carmody,” he said. “Who’s this?”

“The name wouldn’t mean nothing to you. But I’m sorry about your brother.”

“So am I,” Carmody said. Would Father Ahearn take exception to that? he thought bitterly. Could he at least be sorry? “Well, what’s on your mind?”

“Do you remember Longie Tucker?”

“Sure,” Carmody said. The man’s voice told him nothing; it was high and thin, with a tremor of nerves or fear in it. “What about Longie Tucker?” he asked. Tucker was a local hoodlum who’d drifted out to California six or eight years ago, a big and brutal man with black hair and blunt dark features.

“He’s back in town, that’s all. I saw him a couple of months ago. And his hair is gray now. The description of your brother’s killer said blond hair. But at night under a street light gray hair might look blond.”

Carmody nodded slowly. “Where did you see Tucker?”

“In a taproom on Archer Street, right at the corner of Twelfth. I thought of him when I read about your brother.”

“I’ll run this down,” Carmody said. “Thanks.”

“I hope it’s him, Mr. Carmody.”

“What’s your interest in this? Paying off an old score?”

“You might say that,” the man said in an unsteady voice. “Longie Tucker killed my son. I couldn’t prove it, but he did it all right. And my boy never did any harm to anybody. He just got in the way. Well, I won’t bother you with it. But I hope he’s the man you want.”

The phone clicked in Carmody’s ear. He frowned at it a moment, then broke the connection and dialed Police. The record room would know where Tucker was hanging out. He wasn’t wanted for anything here, as far as Carmody could recall, but some stoolie would have tipped off the police that he was back in town. The clerk at Records answered and Carmody asked for the chief, Sergeant Hogan. After a short wait Hogan came on, and Carmody asked him about Longie Tucker.

“We had a tip when he drifted back to the city,” Hogan said. “The detectives in his district watched him for a few weeks, but he seems to be behaving himself. Wouldn’t swear he’ll keep it up though. He’s a stormy one.”

“Where is he living?”

“Just a minute... here it is... 211 Eighteenth Street. A rotten neighborhood, and just where he belongs. Anything else, Mike?”

“No, that’s all.”

Hogan hesitated, then said, “Tough about the kid brother, Mike.”

“Yes, it was,” Carmody said. “But we’ll get the guy who did it.”

“You’re damn right.”

Carmody hesitated a moment after replacing the phone, debating whether to run this down himself, or to pass it on to Wilson. It was now one-thirty. He wanted to see Nancy as soon as possible; now he knew she’d been lying when she said she had nothing on Ackerman. But Longie Tucker was an even stronger lure. When he got into his car he headed for 211 Eighteenth Street.