The Big Heat

Chapter 4

As Bannion entered the Homicide Bureau Neely winked at him and nodded toward the door of Lieutenant Wilks’ anteroom. “You’ve been paged on the quarter hour,” he said.

“Damn, that’s too bad,” Bannion said, returning the wink. He tossed his hat and coat on a desk and walked into the Lieutenant’s reception room, where a uniformed cop, assigned to duty as Wilks’ secretary, was busy at a typewriter.

The cop said, “The Lieutenant’s expecting you, Sarge, go right in.”

“Thanks.”

Wilks was seated behind his desk, a tall, sparely built man in his early fifties, looking very trim and fit in the tailored uniform he wore in preference to street clothes. The room was unpleasantly cold; Wilks believed in the austere, vigorous life and except on the worst days of winter his windows were always flung open. He was also a cold-bath and long-hike type. “Sit down, Dave,” he said, nodding at the chair beside his desk. “You’ve got me in trouble, so let’s get it straightened out.” Wilks affected the manner of a martinet; he talked forcefully and briefly, although not always with point, and had cultivated a stem, uncompromising glare. He was a driver, fairly smart about police work, but more valuable to the department as a distinguished, confidence-evoking figurehead. Wilks was excellent at banquets, Rotary luncheons, and women’s clubs; his ascetic, cold-nipped face, and his trim body, the result of diet, exercise and a good tailor, were enough to diminish any doubts about the efficiency of the police department. The role had more or less been wished on him; whether he enjoyed it, Bannion didn’t know.

“Drekker’s been raising cain with me, so I’m going to pass it on, Dave,” he said. “What the hell were you bothering Tom Deery’s wife about?”

Bannion was undisturbed by Wilks’ hard face, the stern, accusing glare. He was interested that Mrs. Deery had made some sort of complaint, and more interested that the Department was taking it so gravely. “It was just a routine matter, Lieutenant,” he said.

“Well, it struck me as a pointless piece of work,” Wilks said, snapping the words out sharply. “Where the hell’s your judgement, Dave?”

Bannion shifted slightly in his chair. “You’d better listen a bit now,” he said. He felt anger surging up in him, pounding for release. This had always been his cross, a violent, hair-trigger temper that tore the control away from his judgement and reason. He fought it down now, as he had fought it for years. Bannion permitted himself no excesses of anger; he refused to pander to his buried need for violence, for unmotivated destruction. Bannion was known as a kind man, a gentle man, but only he knew the effort it cost him to play that role.

Wilks frowned at his tone. He reacted in one of two ways to insubordination; either he blew his top, toweringly, majestically, or else he accepted the challenge as directed against the Department instead of himself, and adopted a winning, they’re-all-a-bunch-of-asses manner. He chose the latter course now.

“Hell, you know how Drekker is, Dave,” he said, relaxing slightly and smiling. “Fine House Sergeant material wasted as an Assistant Superintendent, I’ve always thought. Anyway, he’s in a stew about this matter, so let’s calm him down. Peace in the family, eh Dave? Now, what’s the story?”

Bannion told him about Lucy Carroway, of her story on Tom Deery, and the fact that she had quit her job at the Triangle. When he finished, Wilks shrugged and raised his eyebrows. “Well, I’ll be damned if I can see what the fuss is about,” he said. “You checked this Carroway girl’s story with Mrs. Deery, which was certainly your job. Now the girl has packed up and gone, and that would seem to end the matter. Right?”

“It seems that way,” Bannion said. “I do think it’s strange that she cleared out, though.”

“Why? These B-girls are a migratory crop, you know. Another thing, she might have got scared after talking to you, and lit out. Maybe she thought of causing trouble and then lost her nerve. As for her story about Deery’s health, it’s her word against the wife’s. And I’d take the wife’s word on it, particularly since there was no funny angle about the suicide.”

“Mrs. Deery must have squawked pretty loudly,” Bannion said. “What was her pitch, by the way? When I talked to her, she was very cooperative, very willing to help. I wonder what changed her mind?”

“No, Drekker said she was pleasant enough,” Wilks said. “Don’t blame her for this. It’s Drekker, that’s my guess. She was just curious about it, and called him. Well, you know how he is. Thinks all cop’s widows should be beatified on the notification of their husband’s death. And it annoyed him to think we were bothering her.” Wilks paused, and then smiled. “I’ll calm him down, don’t worry. But don’t bother her any more.”

Bannion wasn’t sure about Wilks. Most cops were honest, of course; Wilks probably was, on a form bet. The big boys didn’t have to buy up every cop in the city. A half dozen crooked cops, strategically placed, could nullify the work of a thousand honest ones. Maybe Wilks was in that unholy little group. Bannion wasn’t sure; but he disliked men who had to give certain orders obliquely, and with a smile. Wilks was still smiling at him now, and his words hung in the air. “Don’t bother her, Dave!” This was an order, of course. Was it just Drekker’s tender sensibilities at work? An insignificant little man had shot himself, but because he was a cop, his wife mustn’t be bothered by the normalities of a police investigation. That hardly made sense. To a schoolboy it might, but it didn’t to Bannion. “Don’t bother her, Dave!” That was pressure. Where was it coming from? The big boys. You heard their names, you nodded to them on the street, and they had a police department, a whole city, in their hands. When they tightened the grip you could feel it.

“Okay, I won’t bother her,” Bannion said, at last.

“Fine,” Wilks said, still smiling.

Outside he sat at his desk, ignoring the chatter in the room, staring out the dark window at the winking glare of Market Street. Finally he rolled a sheet of paper into his typewriter and wrote out a detailed description of Lucy Carroway. He read it over twice, frowning. It was okay, but he hesitated. At last he shrugged, walked over and handed it to Katz. “Take this up to Radio and tell him to put out a three-state alarm for her,” he said.

“Okay,” Katz said.

Bannion watched him leave the room, and then he sat down at his desk and stared out the window. He was sticking his neck out, of course; but so had Lucy Carroway...

He took time off the next day to make inquiries about a man with a big nose, dark complexion, black or brown hair, who might wear a camel’s hair coat. The record room was no help; the description was too general. No one in the rackets detail knew the man, and he drew a blank at the detective districts scattered about the city. A numbers writer at Broad and Market looked startled and told him it sounded like his brother, who, he seemed relieved to add, was in Korea with the army. The only lead came from a plainclothes cop on the vice squad. “Could be a guy named Burrows, Biggie Burrows,” the cop said. “Sounds like him, but your description is pretty vague. Anyway, Burrows is a Detroiter, came to work here for Stone just a few weeks ago. That’s the talk. I don’t know Burrows, just heard a few things.”

“Burrows, eh? Well, thanks,” Bannion said. He went back to the office, found things quiet, and went upstairs again to the record room. There was nothing on Biggie Burrows. Bannion told the sergeant to wire Detroit for their file on the man.

He checked Radio and drew another blank.

The three-state alarm on Lucy Carroway hadn’t turned up a thing...

It was a quiet night. Bannion smoked and let his thoughts turn slowly, idly, in any direction they chose.

Biggie Burrows, in town for Stone. Stone was one of the big boys. The biggest in West. He could put on pressure. When Stone closed his hand, you felt it.

Carmody and Burke were arguing about politics.

“You got two parties, call ’em the Ins and the Outs,” Burke was saying as he paced the floor, an unusually serious expression on his long face. “The Ins have been in ever since we can remember. Everything is going their way. They account to nobody. That’s how you get lousy government, bad schools, and hoodlums into a city. The politicians forget the city belongs to the people, and treat it like their own little cupcake.”

“You think them Outs would do any better?” Carmody said.

“You damn right I do,” Burke said. “Not that they’re better men in themselves, but a new broom does you know what. They’d come in, sweep out the drones, and chase the hoodlums under cover. In time they’d relax, of course, get just as bad as the old Ins. Then it’s time to throw them out. That way you avoid these cosy, long-term contracts between the politicians and the hoodlums.”

Bannion listened to them in spite of himself, in spite of Lucy Carroway and Biggie Burrows.

“Well, we’ll see,” Carmody said. “Elections are next month. We’ll see what the people say about those Outs of yours.”

“The people deserve their rulers,” Katz said from behind his paper.

“What’s that?” Carmody said.

“I read it in a book so don’t ask me what it means,” Katz said.

The night stayed quiet, and Bannion smoked and looked out the window, thinking again of Lucy Carroway and what, if any, connection there could be between her and Max Stone. Tomorrow the shifts rotated and he would start on days for a week, working from eight till four. That meant a short night’s sleep and he was glad that nothing came up to keep them overtime. Sergeant Heineman came in at eleven, an hour early, to give them that much of a break, and Bannion headed home, wondering when and if the three-state alarm would turn up Lucy Carroway. If there was no news of her in the morning he’d have to forget about it, or send out an eight-state flyer — and he didn’t have enough to justify that trouble and expense.

News of Lucy Carroway was waiting for him the next morning. Neely, who’d come in before him, handed him a report. “You were interested in this, weren’t you, Dave?” he said.

Bannion put the carton of coffee he was carrying on the counter and took the form from Neely. He read it quickly.

The State Police at Radnor, Pennsylvania, had picked up a woman answering the description sent out the day before by the Philadelphia Homicide Bureau. Found on the Lancaster Pike at two o’clock in the morning by a passing truck driver, body of the deceased was presently at Saint Francis’ Hospital.

Bannion rubbed his forehead slowly. Deceased at Saint Francis. He was aware of the smell of coffee beside him, of Neely’s fragrant pipe, of the sunlight on the dusty floor, of all the sounds and impressions of the living world.

“I’m going out on this,” he said to Neely. “I’ll probably be back around noon. Keep an eye on things.”

“Okay, Sarge,” Neely said.

Bannion drove out along the Schuylkill, through Ardmore and Bryn Mawr, clean, pleasant Main Line villages with Packards and Buicks lining the street and housemaids doing the shopping in the business centers. The air was clear and fresh, and pale yellow sun brought the countryside to life, glinting in the river, gilding the gray Gothic heap of Villanova College, and making even the black winter woods seem warm and hospitable. It was vastly different from Philadelphia, Bannion thought. Here were first-rate schools, big homes, nice people.

What the hell had Lucy Carroway been doing out here?

Bannion turned off Lancaster Pike in Radnor and drove down an elm lined avenue to Saint Francis’ Hospital. He walked into the tile-floored accident ward and told the nurse who he was and what he wanted.

“Yes, come with me, please,” she said. She led him along a quiet, rubber-tiled corridor and stopped at a closed door. “Go right in,” she said.

Bannion opened the door and entered a small carpeted room, furnished with wicker chairs. There were flowers on a table and three hunting prints on the wall. A tall, gray-haired man stood up and put out his hand.

“I’m Parnell, County Detectives,” he said. “You’re Dave Bannion, I guess.”

“That’s right.”

“I saw your picture in the paper or something, I think,” Parnell said. He had a thin, tanned face, and a high forehead.

There was a quality of lean, whip-cord toughness about him. His hand was powerful in Bannion’s, and his eyes were those of a man who spent much of his time outdoors. “You’re interested in this girl we have here, eh?” he said.

“Yes, what happened to her?”

“She was pushed out of a car on the Pike sometime last night or early this morning. Her neck was broken and her skull fractured. She’s in the next room now, the place we use as a county morgue. I called for a Post and the doctor’s ready to go ahead. Let’s go in.”

“All right,” Bannion said, removing his hat.

The unclothed body of Lucy Carroway lay on a long, zinc-lined table, a table equipped with running water and built-up sides. There was a powerful lamp above her, about two feet from her body now, that could be raised or lowered from the ceiling by a foot pedal. She looked very small, Bannion thought, not much bigger than a child. The black bangs were still neatly in place on her forehead. There was no expression on her face; it was crumpled up like a piece of soiled white cloth. He noticed details; the grotesque angle of her head in relation to the shoulders, the smooth, cold look of her skin, the tininess of her breasts, the rough abrasions on her hips, legs and arms.

The coroner, a tired, earnest-looking man with a slight tic in his left cheek, moved his foot and brought the lamp down closer to her body. “See here,” he said, glancing at Bannion and the county Detective. He pointed to spots on her slim legs, a half-dozen of them between her ankles and knees. “Burns, cigarette burns, I’d say,” he said.

Parnell swore softly.

“Looks like it could be one of those upside-down sex crimes,” the doctor said, shaking his head. “There are rope burns on her wrists and thighs. Maybe the fellow had his fun with her and then pushed her out of the ear. You want her for something in Philly?”

“No, she was just — part of something else,” Bannion said. “Was she dead when she was pushed out of the car?”

“Can’t tell yet,” the doctor said. He tapped his scalpel on the metal edge of the table. “I’ll know in fifteen, twenty minutes.”

“Was she raped?” Bannion said.

“No, but as you know, you don’t usually find that in cases like this. Well, I’ll get started now.”

Bannion walked into the next room with Parnell. He was damning himself bitterly, thinking, if I’d worked harder, moved faster, been smarter, maybe...

“What was your interest in her?” Parnell said, beginning to fill a short, black pipe. “This is my job now, and anything may help.”

“Last week a Philadelphia cop committed suicide. Bad health, his wife said. Lucy Carroway said otherwise. She said he was in fine shape.” Bannion shrugged and got out his cigarettes. “It wasn’t much, you see, just a routine little funny business. Then Lucy disappeared. Now she’s dead.”

“That could be a coincidence,” Parnell said. “My guess is she was killed by someone she met for the first time, someone who bought her a few drinks and took her for a ride.”

“That could be,” Bannion said.

The coroner joined them fifteen minutes later, wearing a tweed jacket and adjusting a dark red, wool-knit tie. “She was alive when she was thrown from the car, I’m quite sure,” he said. “Death was caused, I’d say, by a splintered rib that went right through her heart. Of course, the broken neck, the skull fracture, either of those would have done it, too. But the rib went into her heart when she slammed onto the pavement. That’s why I say she was alive when she went out of the car.”

It seemed a moot point to Bannion.

He and Parnell went out to his car, turning up their coat collars against the wind. “Well, good luck,” Bannion said.

“I’ll need it,” Parnell said. “There’s a chance that one of our regulars can help us out. We know quite a few people who use the Pike at night. Newspapermen, some doctors, engineers for the power plants — they work nights and drive home late. We’ll check all of them, see if any of them noticed a car parked on the road or anything else funny. Outside of that, we’ll just have to pray.”

“That’s the way it is on some jobs.”

“If you run into anything in Philadelphia give me a ring,” Parnell said. “Wasn’t anything funny about that cop’s suicide, was there?”

“No, it was on the level,” Bannion said. Parnell, he realized, was no dummy.

They shook hands and Bannion slipped behind the wheel of his ear. Parnell sent his regards to some detectives he knew in Philadelphia. Then he said, again, “Let me know if you come across anything I can use.”

“Certainly,” Bannion said.

He drove back to the city, through the bright shining Main Line villages, disgusted with himself, and bitterly, savagely angry.

Bannion let the Bureau’s work slide for a few days and dug into what he had on Lucy Carroway. The Detroit file on Biggie Burrows had come in, plus three pictures of the man. Burrows was a dark-haired, heavy-set hoodlum, who had averaged about an arrest a year, from Homicide to Assault and Battery, since emigrating to America from his native Sardinia twenty years ago. Real name: Antonio Burfarino. Bannion took the pictures to the clerk at the Reale Hotel, but the man couldn’t make a positive identification.

“You see, he was wearing a hat, and never looked me full in the face,” he said, studying the pictures of Biggie Burrows. In the police pictures, taken eight years ago, Burrows was hatless. “I... I just can’t be sure.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Bannion began looking for Biggie Burrows then, through stoolies, bookmakers, numbers writers and prostitutes. He learned that Burrows had definitely been in the city, had been working for Stone, and had lived in a good, commercial hotel on Chestnut Street. But Burrows was gone now. Bannion went to the hotel he had been staying at and showed the desk clerks Burrows’ pictures. They identified him positively. He had been with them for ten days, but had checked out without leaving a forwarding address. Burrows had checked out the same day that Lucy Carroway had dropped out of sight. There was a twenty-four-hour lag between the time she’d left the Triangle and the time of her death — in that interim she had been hidden away and tortured before being murdered. The set-up smacked of organization. No one can be kept for twenty-four hours against his will unless there are arrangements for a hide-out, money, food and transportation.

Bannion questioned everyone at the Triangle Bar, all the girls, the cooks, musicians, bartenders, and steady customers — but none of them had seen Lucy with a person matching Biggie Burrows’ description. He wasn’t discouraged, only impatient. He knew the break would come. One night he combed through the apartment houses near the Reale Hotel, checking one question with everybody: Had they seen a car parked before the Reale around twelve-thirty in the morning earlier in the week? Most of the people he talked to said they were in bed by that time, but a woman who happened to have been waiting up for a partying teen-age daughter remembered seeing a car in front of the Reale. She didn’t know what kind it was, but it was long and shiny, and had a canvas top. Yes, a convertible, a big one.

That was pretty good, Bannion thought. Big convertibles weren’t too common. Maybe Parnell, the county detective, might pin such a car down on the Pike. One of his “regulars” might have seen it.

He was working on the assumption that Biggie Burrows had murdered Lucy Carroway. It was an assumption he was ready to toss aside if anything else came along, but it was his best and only bet now. For one thing, if Lucy had been kidnapped, if Burrows had a gun on her while she was checking out of the Reale, then that afforded an explanation, a hypothesis at any rate, for her telephone call to him, and the mention of the twenty dollars.

Lucy, scared and in trouble, might have asked Burrows to let her make a casual phone call. She had tried to tip Bannion off, tried to point a finger at herself, by mentioning the Triangle Bar. It had been a desperate wave for help, but he hadn’t seen it in time.

Bannion checked into Homicide on the third afternoon of his hunt, feeling stale and tired. He signed the reports on his desk, said good-night to Neely, and walked over to the Y on Arch Street. There, in sweat clothes, he spent an hour working with weights — the only exercise that seemed to give his big body the physical release it needed. Three or four high school boys stopped to watch him. He stood solidly, feet well spread, and pressed a hundred-and-seventy-five-pound barbell above the head ten times in succession, and then, using two-minute rest periods, repeated the sequence five straight times. Bannion’s body was like an engine; he could hook it to a job and it would run all day. He was no body-lover, no beach athlete. He felt an impersonal regard for his strength, as if he were merely a steward whose job was to keep it functioning at par. Bannion had learned that the more able a man is to stop trouble, the less of it he is likely to meet. And he didn’t want trouble, he didn’t want to use his hands on people. When circumstances forced him to, or when his temper jerked him out of control, he inevitably felt disgusted with himself and degraded. He knew the wild streak inside him and had tamed it, or frustrated it rather, by being strong enough to stop trouble before it started. It wasn’t a unique problem, he knew; it was the problem of all the gentle giants in the world.

He put a towel around his damp neck and grinned at the boys. “That’s the price I pay for liking potatoes too well,” he said. He talked with them for a while, answered questions, showed them how to lift a barbell without risking a broken wrist, and then went down for his shower, feeling comfortably relaxed, the staleness gone from his body. He drove home thinking about dinner.

He was an hour late getting to the Bureau the next morning; he had stopped at a bar where some of Stone’s men hung out to see if he could pick up anything on Burrows. It was a wasted trip. When he walked around the counter Neely pointed to Wilks’ door. “Urgent,” he said. “Very, very urgent.”

“Well, well. Excited?”

Neely nodded.

Bannion walked into Wilks’ office without bothering to take off his topcoat. Wilks looked up at him, then down at a report he was reading. “Take a chair, Dave,” he said. He read for a moment or so, and then pushed the report away and looked directly at Bannion. “What are you working on, Dave?”

“Some angles on that Carroway girl’s murder,” Bannion said.

“That’s a county job, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, drop it, and get back to our business,” Wilks said. There was flat finality in his voice. “You’re not paid to do their work. I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise to you, Bannion.”

Bannion held his temper down. “Lucy Carroway, I think, was kidnapped and tortured in Philadelphia, then murdered in the county. I’m working on the first two ends of the job.”

“That’s not what you’re paid for either,” Wilks said, slapping his open hand sharply on the desk. “You’re paid to run a shift, keep reports current and in order. Any man in the Bureau can handle the Carroway job. Do you think we made you a sergeant of Detectives so you can waste your time interviewing B-girls and hotel clerks?”

Bannion kept his mouth shut. The fact that Wilks had checked on him, or had been informed on him, was the most interesting thing he’d learned so far. He shrugged and let a smile touch his lips. “Okay, I’ll pass it on to one of the boys,” he said. “But I don’t understand all the fuss. I just took a little time off to check some leads on this girl’s murder. I was doing pretty well, too.”

Wilks smiled, too. “That doesn’t surprise me, Dave. I don’t think there’s any doubt that you can make a thorough investigation. The thing is, I want you doing the more important work, supervising your shift. Understand?”

“Sure, sure,” Bannion said. “By the way, you remember who this Carroway girl is, don’t you? She’s the one who knew Tom Deery, who said his wife was lying about his bad health.”

“Yes, I remember her,” Wilks said. He looked at Bannion, then at his desk top. “I don’t see any connection between that and her death, however. She was killed by a damn, misbegotten sex maniac.”

“Yes, that’s what the county man thinks,” Bannion said.

“It’s their job, remember that,” Wilks said, returning to his executive manner.

“Who should I turn the Carroway job over to?” Bannion said. “Burke?”

Wilks hesitated for a few seconds. Then he said, in a casual voice, “Write a full report on it, and let me have it, Dave. I’ll give it to someone on Heineman’s shift. Your boys are busy enough, I think.”

Bannion looked at Wilks steadily for a moment. “All right,” he said, and walked out of the office.