The Big Heat

Chapter 1

It was eight o’clock at night when the phone rang. A detective lifted the receiver and said, “Homicide, Neely speaking.” He listened a moment, frowning slightly through the smoke that curled up from the cigarette in his lips. “All right, we’ll send someone out right away,” he said. He put his cigarette on the edge of the scarred desk and picked up a pencil. “What’s your name and address?” he said. He put the cigarette back in his mouth and began writing on a pad at his elbow.

There were three other detectives in the large, shabby, brightly lighted room. Two of them were playing cards at a desk beside the long bank of green filing cases. The third, a tall, well-groomed man with a long, intelligent face, paced the floor with his hands clasped behind his back. On a bench just inside the wooden counter that ran the length of the room sat a uniformed patrolman and a Negro. The Negro, who was young and solidly built, seemed to be trying to shrink inside his cheap, brown suit.

The card players stopped their game and glanced at Neely, who was frowning at the information he was taking down. One of them, a man named Carmody, with I red, sagging features and thinning hair, glanced at the windows. Ram was rolling down them in slow, level waves. “You might know a job would come along,” he said. His partner, Katz, a big man with the roughed-up features of a preliminary fighter, shrugged. “They always do on nights like this,” he said in a mild voice.

The pacing detective grinned at them. “Unfortunately, I’ve got this matter to handle,” he said, jerking his head at the solidly-built Negro. “Otherwise I’d be glad to accompany you gentlemen on a little trip in the rain.”

“Yeah, Burke, I’ll bet you would,” Carmody said.

The detective on the desk, Neely, a small, red-haired man with a terrier’s face, put the phone down and swung about in the swivel chair. He glanced at the clock hanging above the filing cabinet. “When did Bannion say he’d be back?” he said.

They all looked up at the clock. “About eight,” Burke said. It was then a moment after. “He was at the Nineteenth when he called to say he was coming in.”

Neely drummed his fingers on the desk, frowning.

“Well, what’s up?” Burke said.

“That was Tom Deery’s wife,” Neely said. “He just committed suicide, she says. Shot himself.”

“For God’s sake,” Carmody said.

“He was in the Superintendent’s office, wasn’t he?” Burke asked rhetorically.

“What would he want to do a thing like that for?” Katz said, in his mild voice.

“Maybe he was tired of paying bills,” Carmody said.

“Hell, that’s no reason.”

“Okay, I don’t know,” Carmody said, rubbing his tired face. “He didn’t tell me his plans.”

Neely glanced at the clock. “I’m going to wait a few minutes for Bannion,” he said. “They’ll want a full report on this one.”

“Yeah, they always do when it’s a cop,” Burke said, resuming his pacing. Carmody lit a cigarette and dropped the match on the floor. The silence was disturbed only by the rain drumming against the windows. It was a troubled, uneasy silence.

A cop’s death is one thing; it means black bunting looped over the door of his station house for a week or so, a few paragraphs in the papers, and a note to the family from the Mayor and his Captain. A cop’s suicide is another matter. It can mean that the man was a weakling, a neurotic, a fool — in any case no one to have been safeguarding the lives and properties of other citizens. Or it can mean something even less wholesome, something potentially dangerous to the entire, close-knit fabric of the department.

“He was a nice guy,” Burke said, pacing slowly. “A nice, straight guy”

“That’s what I always heard,” Carmody said. He looked up at the clock. “How come his wife called us, Neely?”

“She knows the police business,” Neely said. “She called Central first and then us. She knows we take a look at most suicides. Central should be giving the call to the district any second now.”

They were all silent again, glancing up at the police speaker on the wall. It had been quiet for a few minutes. Now, as if Neely’s comment were a cue, it coughed metallically, and the police announcer’s flat voice said, “Nine Eighty, Nine Eighty One, report.”

“That’s his district, I think,” Carmody said. “Deery lived in West, in the Ninety Eighth, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Katz said. “On Sycamore Street. They’re sending the wagon and the street sergeant’s car out there.”

The police announcer, connected with the cars he had asked to report, gave his orders: “Hospital case, Fifty Eight Sixty One Sycamore Street.”

“Hospital case,” Neely said with a short laugh. He drummed his fingers on his desk and looked up at the clock.

The double doors of the Homicide Bureau swung open and a young man in a damp trenchcoat came in and walked around the counter. He glanced at the three detectives, noticing their expressions. “What’s up?” he said.

“Tom Deery’s wife just called,” Neely said. “She says Tom killed himself about fifteen or twenty minutes ago. Shot himself.”

Burke said, “You knew him, didn’t you, Bannion?”

“Sure, I knew him,” Dave Bannion said slowly, as he took off his trenchcoat and dropped it over the back of a chair. He was a large, wide-shouldered man in his middle thirties, with tanned, even features and steady gray eyes. Standing alone he didn’t seem particularly big; it was only when Burke, a tall man himself, strolled over beside him, that Bannion’s size became apparent. He stood inches taller than Burke, and his two hundred and thirty pounds were evenly distributed on a huge, rangy frame.

“Did Deery have any kids?” Burke said.

“No, I don’t think so,” Bannion said. He had known Deery in the perfunctory way he knew dozens of men in the police department. Deery had been a slender, graying man, with an intelligent, alert, but unrevealing face. Bannion had passed him in the hall, had said hello to him, had checked clerical matters with him on several occasions, and that was the extent of their relationship.

He glanced at Neely. “I’ll take a ride out there,” he said. “Burke might as well come along, too.”

Burke nodded at the negro, “I’m working on this job, Dave. Want me to drop it?”

“What is it?”

“Well, he might be the character who killed that gas station attendant in the North East last week. The Tenth detectives picked him up and sent him down.”

“I didn’t kill nobody,” the Negro said, standing, his large, bony hands working spasmodically. His head turned, his eyes touched each face in the room, frightened, helpless, defiant.

“Sit down,” the uniformed cop said to him.

Burke smiled pleasantly at Bannion. “I could find out in ten little minutes if you’d just let—” He stopped at the look on Bannion’s face. “Okay, okay, it was just a stray thought,” he said, shrugging elaborately.

“There won’t be any of that stuff on my shift,” Bannion said.

“Okay, okay,” Burke said.

Bannion walked over to the Negro, who seemed to sense that he had got a break of some kind. “We just want the truth from you,” Bannion said. “If you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to worry about. But if you have we’ll find it out. Remember that.”

“I done nothing wrong,” the Negro said excitedly. “I was walking—”

“All right, I’ll talk to you when I get back,” Bannion said. “I don’t have the time now. Burke, you stick at it.” He glanced at Katz and Carmody. “All right, any volunteers?”

Carmody sighed. “Let’s go,” he said. “Katz’s wife would raise hell if he got his feet wet tonight.”

“Ha, ha,” Katz said expressionlessly, and began dealing himself a hand of solitaire.

The Homicide Bureau was on the first floor of City Hall, flanked by the rackets detail and the vice squad. Bannion walked down the long wide dusty hallway, a step ahead of Carmody, nodding occasionally to detectives and patrolmen coming in for duty. He left the building by a side door and went through the Hall’s cold and drafty concourse to the parking area reserved for police cars. As they were crossing the sidewalk, the rain hit both men in a driving shower and they grabbed their hatbrims and ran for it. Bannion slid in behind the wheel of his car and opened the right hand door for Carmody, who climbed in panting and shivering.

“You always get ’em on nights like this, eh Dave?” he said disgustedly.

Thomas Francis Deery had lived in a West side, three-flat apartment building, on a tree-bordered, residential street. When Bannion got there a red car and wagon from the Ninety Eighth were parked in front of the building, and a uniformed cop was standing in the vestibule. It was raining hard, but half a dozen persons were huddled together on the sidewalk watching the police cars and the building.

Bannion nodded to the man in the vestibule, who wore a wet, shining, rubber slicker over his uniform. “It’s on the first floor, sarge,” he said, tossing Bannion a salute.

“Thanks,” Bannion said. The door of Deery’s apartment was open, and two big men from the wagon were standing just inside the hallway, chatting together while rainwater dripped from their slickers onto the highly-polished wooden floor. A tall man in a black overcoat came out of a door to the right of the hallway, and said to them, “Okay, you can have him now.”

“Hold it a minute,” Bannion said. He didn’t know the man in the black overcoat, but assumed he was a detective from the Ninety Eighth. “We’re from Homicide.”

“You had a ride for nothing,” the man in the black overcoat said, smiling. “It’s nothing for you boys. I’m Karret, Ninety Eighth Detectives.” Bannion introduced himself and they shook hands. “I heard about you,” Karret said, still smiling. He looked Bannion up and down and from side to side. “I heard you were big, and I heard right.”

Bannion was used to this sort of thing, and it didn’t bother him. He’d always been the out-sized one, in high school and college, even on football teams. He smiled at Karret, and then said, “What’s the deal here?”

“He’s in here,” Karret said, and led the way into the room on the right of the hallway.

The dead man lay on his side, curled up in front of a desk that was placed under a curtained window. Bannion knelt and inspected the wound in his right temple, and the gun in his right hand. The wound was ugly, and the revolver was a nickle-plated thirty-two with black handgrips. After a moment or so, Bannion stood and glanced around the room, automatically noting its contents and arrangement. There was the desk, turned sideways to the window for better light, with a portable typewriter on it, and a wooden correspondence box half-full of papers. A large, comfortable reading chair was in one comer, a floor lamp beside it, and a row of bookcases stood against the opposite wall. Three Audubon prints were hung above the bookcases, and a large, glass ashtray with half a dozen cigarette stubs in it was on the desk beside the typewriter. It was a pleasant room, a luxury that a man without children could provide for himself in a small, city apartment.

“It looks like he was kneeling down when he shot himself,” Karret said, nodding at the body. “The way he’s curled up, I mean.”

Bannion checked the window, found it locked. He turned away from it and glanced about the room. “Where’s Mrs. Deery?” he said.

“She’s in the living room.”

“What did she have to say?”

“Well, she says he came in here after dinner. She stayed in the kitchen cleaning up, and then went into the living room to listen to the radio. About half an hour later she heard a shot. She came in and found him just like he is now.”

“Was there any note?”

“No, not a thing.”

Bannion pushed his hat back on his forehead and sat down at Deery’s desk. He glanced through the papers in the correspondence box. They were bills chiefly, a few sales letters, and one personal note from a friend in Hashville, dated a week previously. The friend, whose name was Mort Chamberlain, apologized for not answering Deery’s letter of four months back; he’d been busy with the office and his family, he explained, and then made a joke about his laziness probably being the real reason. There wasn’t much more in the letter. It seemed to be one of those cheerfully futile attempts to keep something going that had stopped a long, long time ago.

“I told you you had a ride for nothing,” Karret said.

“Yes, this isn’t anything for us,” Bannion said. “Mrs. Deery have any guesses about why he did it?”

“She said he hadn’t been feeling well lately and was worried about it,” Karret said.

“Well, I guess that’s the answer,” Bannion said. He went through the drawers of the desk carefully, not looking for anything in particular, simply following his usual methodical working habits. He found two insurance policies, each in the amount of five thousand dollars, and made out to Mary Ellen Deery, the stubs of two checkbooks, with all entries written in a neat small hand, and an envelope containing a few departmental circulars clarifying policies in regard to police pensions, time off, and so forth. There was also a box of paper clips, several pencils, and a box of stationery. That was all. Bannion closed the drawers, after replacing everything as he had found it, and walked over and glanced at the volumes in the book cases. Most of them were in standard sets, history, biography, the novels of Scott and Dickens, and a selection of book club premiums.

There was a shelf of travel books he noticed, all of them well-worn. He picked out a couple of them, and flipped through the pages, wondering idly at this bent of Deery’s. There were penciled notes in Deery’s handwriting in the margins, and Bannion immediately became more interested. There was nothing more potentially revealing, he felt, than a man’s honest, impulsive reactions to a book. However, Deery’s comments were fairly routine. Of a description of bullfighting, he had observed, “Not for me!!” and of vulgar statues at Pompeii, he had written, “Just like a Peep Show.”

“He read a lot,” Karret said, nodding.

“Apparently.” The books struck Bannion as curious. He glanced through a few more of them, turning them to the light to read Deery’s marginal comments, before returning them to their shelf. They weren’t the books one might expect to find in a police clerk’s library. In fact, a library of any kind in a police clerk’s home was rather unusual.

“Are you going to talk to his wife?” Karret said.

“I think I’d better,” Bannion said. “How’s she taking it?”

“She’s fine, no trouble at all. A real sensible woman.” He nodded toward a closed door on the opposite side of the hallway. “She’s in there, in the living room, quiet as you please.”

“I’ll go in and see her,” Bannion said, and walked out of Deery’s study. He tapped on the living room door and a light, controlled voice said, “Come in, please.”

Bannion turned the knob and entered a very clean, very neat room, furnished with fragile elegance, and lighted softly by two floor lamps. Mrs. Deery was seated on a brocaded sofa, her hands folded quietly in her lap. The legs and back of the sofa were bright with gilt, and the brocaded upholstery was a gleaming canary yellow; it made a cheerful, gracious frame for the woman. She turned her small head to him, and smiled slightly.

“Please come in,” she said. “You mustn’t apologize. I know this is necessary.”

“Thank you,” Bannion said. He sat down in an armless chair that made him uncomfortably aware of his size, and faced her across the low, mirrored coffee table. “I won’t stay more than a few minutes, I promise you. My name is Bannion, Dave Bannion, and I knew your husband downtown.”

Mrs. Deery listened attentively, her small head tilted to one side. She gave the impression of not wanting to miss one word he said. “I know Tom had many friends,” she said quietly.

“Would you mind telling me what happened tonight, please?”

“No, of course not. I’m a policeman’s wife, Mr. Bannion. I know this is necessary. Well, Tom came home at a quarter of six as usual. If you knew him you’ll remember how punctual he always was. We had dinner, just the two of us, and then he went into his study. That’s our extra bedroom. I did the dishes, and then came in here to sew and listen to the radio.”

While her voice, low and pleasing, fell into the silent, softly lighted room, Bannion tried to sort out his impressions of her, and of this clean, orderly little world in which Thomas Francis Deery had lived and died. He would like her as a witness on his side, Bannion thought. She was intelligent and controlled — if those words didn’t mean about the same thing. Anyway she was clever enough to control herself, strong enough, too, and cleverness and strength are a reasonable facsimile of intelligence. Physically, she was small, slim, and well-cared for, with ash-blonde hair, streaked with silver at the temples, and clear, fresh skin and eyes. She wore a black suit with a rhinestone clip on the right lapel, and a thin diamond wedding ring.

Everything about her was meticulously arranged and ordered; her small black patent leather pumps shone glossily, her sheer nylons lacked even the suggestion of a wrinkle, and her nail polish and makeup looked as if it had been applied, and with great care, within the last fifteen or twenty minutes. And possibly it had, Bannion thought, with an odd quirk of annoyance.

“I heard the shot, of course, and for a moment, really only a few seconds, I suppose, I sat here, too surprised to move.” Mrs. Deery moistened her lips and looked down at the backs of her slim white hands. “I called to Tom then but got no answer. When I went into the study I found him on the floor. He was dead. I called the police right away,” Mrs. Deery said, looking up into Bannion’s eyes.

“It must have been a terrible shock. Had your husband seemed worried or upset lately?”

“No, I wouldn’t say that. I explained to the other detective about his health,” she said. “That’s the only thing I can think of. We have no other problems. There was enough money and we got along very well. Tom didn’t make a great deal but his income was steady, even during the depression when we were just getting started, and we were able to save a little money. It must have been his health that worried him, Mr. Bannion. Three or four times in the last few months he complained of pains along his left side. He said it was probably indigestion when I suggested he see the police surgeon.”

“Then he didn’t go to a doctor?”

“Not that I know of, Mr. Bannion.”

“Did he usually read every night?”

“Not every night, but he did enjoy reading a great deal.”

“He was interested in travel books, I noticed.”

Mrs. Deery smiled, a little girl’s smile. “I really don’t know, Mr. Bannion. I was never much for reading myself. You see, Tom was the brains of the family.”

Bannion took out his cigarettes, but seeing no ashtrays about put them back in his pocket. Mrs. Deery noticed the gesture but said nothing. There was an ashtray in the study, and Tom Deery had apparently done his smoking there, Bannion decided. “Thanks for being so helpful,” he said, standing. “If there’s anything you need, anything at all, please get in touch with us, Mrs. Deery.”

“Thank you Mr. Bannion. I appreciate your offer. It... it makes me feel less alone.”

Bannion said goodbye to her and left her behind in the clean, graciously furnished room, still sitting on the brocaded sofa, hands folded quietly in her lap. He closed the door of the room and caught Carmody’s eye. “Okay, let’s go,” he said. They said goodbye to Karret, and went down the stairs and out to Bannion’s car.

The rain was still falling. Bannion lit a cigarette and then stepped on the starter.

“Well, it’s nothing for us,” Carmody said, settling down comfortably.

“Yes, he shot himself, all right,” Bannion said...

Downtown he typed out a detailed but informal report on Deery’s death, and put it in an envelope for the Superintendent. The official report would come from Karret, since it was a district job with no homicide angle. A reporter from the Express, Jerry Furnham, came in and sat on the corner of his desk. Furnham was a veteran of the Hall, a bulky man in his early forties, with thinning black hair and a tough but amiable face. In his work he played ball most of the time, but no one pushed him around. “What’s the story on Deery, Dave?” he said, taking out his cigarettes. “All Kosher?”

Bannion nodded, and took one of Furnham’s cigarettes. “He’s been worried about his health, his wife said.”

“Too bad. What was it? Heart? Cancer?”

“Heart, probably.” Bannion tapped the envelope marked for the Superintendent. “There’s my report on it, if you want to look it over.”

Furnham shook his head. “Our district man in West got the details from Karret. It’s not my story, of course. But the office wanted me to check it. Our man there is a live one from an Alabama school of journalism. The desk just wanted to be sure he hadn’t missed anything — such as Deery’s name and address.”

Bannion smiled, wondering slightly at Furnham’s interest. “Tell them not to worry,” he said.

“Sure. Was there a note, by the way?”

“No, not a thing ”

Furnham borrowed Bannion’s phone to call his desk. After that he sauntered out. Bannion got through some paper work that had accumulated, and then went along to the cell block to talk to Burke’s Negro. The man was frightened, but his story sounded reasonable to Bannion. Burke’s case was a long way from airtight. He told Burke they needed more on it and went back to the office.

Neely and Katz were arguing about the coming elections. Carmody was asleep with his hands folded over his small paunch.

It was almost twelve; time to quit.

When his relief, Sergeant Heineman, lumbered in, Bannion told him everything was quiet, and got into his coat and went out to his car.

It had been a run-of-the-mill night, like a thousand he had known in the past. He felt comfortably tired as he followed the curving, shining Schuylkill out to Germantown, listening with only mild interest to a news program on the radio. It was good to be on his way home, he thought. Home to dinner, to Katie.