Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 8, No. 11, November 1963

Out of order by Carl Henry Rathjen

Long have we been subjected to the archetypical image of the “dumb cop.” Unlike the mass of mythologically based truisms, it is surprisingly difficult to substantiate these claims, my though we may.

The kid got it in the back at seven-thirty that evening.

He’d answered the service station’s inside phone, listened, then covered the mouthpiece and said to Jim Daly, “Duck! It’s The Sniper. I’m going to call his bluff.”

“Don’t,” Jim had warned, feeling exposed with glass on four sides of the office.

But the kid ran out to call the police from the phone booth near the driveway. A customer, driving in, made him swerve, slipping on a glob of grease. So there was no telling whether the slug got him before or after he began twisting down. No telling from which direction it cause. And no sound of a shot either.

Jim Daly, with hair as black as the grease on big knuckles he kept rubbing into a palm, told all that to Whitehead, the squat, blond detective who came in the second police car while the ambulance guys were covering the kid with a canvas.

“So that’s an out for you, I suppose,” Daly added.

This was the seventh such robbery of a service station. Somebody phoned and said, “You’re covered with a gun, every move. Put a clip or rubber band on the bills from the till. Drop them over the wall behind the air hose, then go on with your work. Don’t get nosey or call the police. You’ll be covered every moment.” Seven of them, and the police, as usual, said they were working on it. Now the kid was dead. The first killing.

Whitehead’s square face got a little white, then he spoke quietly. “Seeing anybody killed is hard to take, but was he something special to you?”

Jim Daly looked toward the canvas, a hub for a ring of morbid stares being held out of the station by uniformed police.

“He tried to hold me up once,” said Daly. “I talked him out of it and gave him a job.”

Whitehead stared. “Instead of calling us.”

“All he needed was a break,” snapped Daly.

“That’s all we need too,” Whitehead murmured. His partner, a thin man with razor-sharp gaze, said nothing.

“In other words,” Daly charged, “you haven’t done a damn thing. Now a good kid’s dead, murdered. He never had a chance.”

Whitehead seemed to sort words before he spoke. “You’d know better than I would how many service stations there are in the metropolitan area. Close to a couple thousand, isn’t it?”

“All right,” said Daly. “You can’t stake out every one of them. But you guys are supposed to know how to run down these killers.”

“It takes time,” Whitehead began.

“I can’t get away with that in my business,” Daly declared. “I’m expected to trouble-shoot a customer’s car in five minutes.”

Whitehead nodded, staring around at apartments across the avenue, store windows facing the sidestreet with a slice of night sky showing in the alley.

“And the customer,” he said with a slight smile, “expects it because he thinks it’s easy, doesn’t know the problems of your job. That works two ways, Daly. If you were a policeman, you’d know.”

“I tried to know once.” Daly pressed his lips.

Whitehead faced him curiously. “Why’d they turn you down?”

Daly answered defiantly, staring at a fist making his thumbnail white as the blood squeezed back. “I did time once when I was a kid.”

Whitehead studied him. “That’s why you gave this one a break.”

Daly nodded. “That’s why I’m sore, damn sore. A guy sees he’s made a mistake and more than makes up for it. Then someone louses it up for him, and you hand me the usual hogwash alibi. Save it for somebody else. I’ll find who got him.”

“Take it easy,” Whitehead began.

“That’s the trouble. I have, waiting for you to do something.”

Daly pulled off his coveralls.

But he was still in the station at midnight, though not open for business, when Whitehead drove in with his partner.

“Got it solved, Daly?” he asked, neither sarcastic nor hopeful as he leaned against the desk, hands in the pockets of his topcoat.

Daly poked a thick finger in a cigarette pack that looked as though it had been sat on. “It’s like tracking down a miss in a car. I’ve found out where it can’t be from.”

“I know what you mean,” said Whitehead. He waited. Daly carefully straightened out a bent cigarette, then thumbnailed a wooden match. He waited too. Whitehead sighed, and smiled. “All right, I’ll tel] you. We know where it couldn’t have come from too but, being police, we had to cheek it out anyway. The shot couldn’t have come from the apartments or stores. They’ve all been occupied a long time. No stick-up artist is going to have friends living in the vicinity of every place he plans to knock over. He wouldn’t be on a roof either. Couldn’t watch his victim at the phone. We know that from other jobs that have been pulled where he mentioned what the victim was doing while being warned.”

Daly blew smoke toward the door. “You don’t have to be a cop to figure that out.”

Whitehead looked at the No Smoking sign, glanced at the locked gasoline pumps, then got out his own cigarettes.

“And it doesn’t take a police officer to figure it took two of them to pull these jobs. One to make the phone call, the other to watch from a dark parked car.”

Daly took a long drag, then gestured with his thumb toward the side street. “My guess is the car was parked up there.”

Whitehead’s partner shifted to peer in that direction, then turned to look where the kid’s body had been. Whitehead just leaned against the desk.

“Police officers have one advantage over citizens who think we’re not doing our job. Take the chip off your shoulder and listen, Daly. We looked up records. When the kid tried to hold you up, it wasn’t the first job he’d pulled, nor the last.”

Daly closed his eyes and took another long drag. “I wish you hadn’t told me.” He looked up suddenly. “You think he was in on these sniper jobs?”

Whitehead nodded. “And he wanted a larger split. That’s why he was shot.”

Daly frowned “But they tried to hold me up.”

“That’s what doesn’t fit,” said Whitehead. “They hit only stations doing a good business. We’ve checked on gasoline purchases with the wholesaler. You haven’t been doing so well here since the freeway pulled traffic away. A lot of nights it’s not even been worth staying open.”

“It was a phony stick-up then,” Daly growled. “Just to get the kid.”

“A phony, sure,” Whitehead agreed, “because we figure the kid was shot in the back, dying out there while he staggered, running to get away from you!”

Daly straightened. Whitehead’s partner suddenly had a gun in his hand. Whitehead took his hands out of his pockets. One of them held handcuffs.

“You overplayed it, Daly. Too positive we were going to be dumb cops. Too dumb to wonder what happened to the supposed customer who made the kid swerve so you couldn’t tell where the shot came from. Too dumb to thoroughly check everything out, records of all kinds, the possible and the impossible. We were even so dumb we tried the phone company, even though we figured the call couldn’t be traced. It couldn’t, because the kid forgot to tell you — or didn’t have time to — that he’d reported earlier this evening the phone was out of order.”

Daly expelled smoke. “What does that prove? I might have been confused by the shock of his being killed. I guess he took the call on the outside phone.”

“The same as you were so confused,” Whitehead suggested, “you forgot to rub grease on your thumbnails when we arrived. So confused you told us yourself that we had killers, not just one man, to run down on these hold-ups. You also thought we were too dumb to have men watching you while you pretended to begin tracking down the kid’s killer. There’s a crew opening the sewer now to retrieve your silenced gun.”

He put the cuffs on Daly and guided him toward the car.

“You know,” he said, “it doesn’t bother us that people think we’re dumb. It takes time, but we find in the long run that we meet plenty who are dumber. You’ll have a lot in common with them, Daly... in prison.”