Anything But Saintly

Chapter 20

I finally got to bed at four A.M. I set the clock for a quarter of eight, was up, had showered, shaved and dressed by five after eight. I caught coffee and a doughnut on the way to headquarters and logged in at eight-thirty.

Captain Spangler arrived just as I finished logging in.

He looked at me in surprise. “What are you doing here, Rudowski? You working two tricks?”

I said, “I think our night duty is over, Captain. I’ll let Lincoln sleep until twelve and call him back to duty this afternoon.”

Spangler frowned. “What do you mean your night duty is over? Have you decided to make up your own schedules now?”

“No, sir,” I said. “Something happened last night that takes us off the hook with Bartkowiak. Got a minute?”

He nodded. “Come into my office.”

Following him into his office, I took a seat and waited until he was situated behind his desk.

“All right,” he said. “What happened last night that’s so important?”

“A couple of things. First, I discovered that Nick Bartkowiak led us up the garden path when he explained his reason for wanting us to go after Little Artie Nowak’s girls. He’s trying to unload Artie, and he wants to discredit him among his constituents in order to make the unloading easier. Artie’s too strong in the district to kick out without substantial reason.”

“How do you know this?” the captain asked.

I relayed a portion of my conversation with Little Artie and Jake Stark. I left out the part concerning the attempt on my life, wanting to save that until I disposed of this first subject. I merely told him how Nick Bartkowiak had hired Jake to undermine the call-girl operation so that it would seem that Little Artie was deliberately disobeying orders.

When I finished, the captain was frowning deeply. “I’m going to speak to the chief about this, and ask him to speak to the commissioner. I suspect Mr. Mason will take a dim view of Bartkowiak maneuvering the police department to carry out political stratagems.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And he’ll probably take a dimmer view of Nick ordering one of his cops killed.”

“Huh?”

“That was the other thing which happened. Bartkowiak sicked a couple of guns on me last night.” I explained in detail just what had happened.

I had seen the captain mad before, but usually his anger was directed at some underling — sometimes at me. I had never seen him get angry at an influential politician, regardless of what the politician did. He always had a ready excuse for the behavior of anyone who had the commissioner’s ear. But apparently passing at one of his men was more than even such a wily back-rubber as Maurice Spangler was willing to tolerate. His face turned beet red.

“Is this cheap hood under arrest?” he rasped.

“He’s going to be. Lieutenant Wynn didn’t want to get a lot of people out of bed to draw up a warrant. I’m going along with the homicide boys to help serve it.”

“He should have been dragged out of bed and thrown in the clink without a warrant!”

“How long do you think he would have stayed there?” I asked reasonably. “We’ll probably have trouble sticking him even with all the proper legal machinery awake and functioning. The guns he hired are too dead to testify, so the only actual evidence we have that Nick ordered the kill is Jake Stark. And all his evidence amounts to is that Nick told him to phone me and make an appointment to meet him. Can you imagine what Nick’s attorney could do with that?”

This seemed only to infuriate the captain more. “Is there any doubt in your mind that Bartkowiak ordered you killed?” he demanded.

I shook my head. “I’m sure of it.”

“So am I,” he said grimly. “If the commissioner and the D.A. don’t go all out for a conviction on this, I intend to raise so much hell, they’ll hear the squawk all the way to the state capitol.”

It was nice to have the captain fighting on our side for a change, instead of admonishing us for stepping on the toes of vested interest. I very nearly felt proud of him.

I said, “The commissioner will probably feel the same way you do, Chief. You can say one thing for old Baldy...” At the captain’s glare, I quickly changed it to, “I mean Mr. Mason. He may give us hell for arresting privileged citizens on charges less than murder, but he doesn’t like even the most privileged to gun for his cops. Even if we don’t get a conviction, I suspect Nick’s influence with the department will be zero from here on out.”

“His influence with this division will certainly be zero,” Spangler growled. “And I’ll back that up with my job.”

I got to my feet. “I’m going over to Homicide to see if they’ve got a warrant yet. Lincoln and I will log in for regular duty at one P.M.”

He nodded. “Keep me posted on developments concerning Bartkowiak. And take all the time you want to assist Homicide. Under the circumstances I consider Mr. Bartkowiak as much our concern as theirs.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll keep you posted.”

Lieutenant Harry Anderson and Sergeant Max Cole, who had taken the original squeal on the Desmond case, were both in the homicide squadroom. Anderson is a plump, good-natured man in his forties and Cole is a thin, gloomy hypochondriac of about the same age who chronically suffers the symptoms of a dozen imaginary diseases.

Harry Anderson, unlike Lieutenant Robert Wynn, doesn’t care a hoot in Hades about rank. I said, “Morning, Harry. How are you, Max?”

The last was a mistake, because Max Cole is the type of person who takes such questions literally. “Got a touch of my old back trouble again, Matt. And my gall bladder’s been acting up again. I’ve been going to a new doc who...”

“You sure had some excitement last night,” Harry Anderson interrupted. The only way to stop Cole, once he starts to enumerate his symptoms, is to interrupt him.

“Yeah,” I said. “Did Wynn leave a note about my request?”

“Uh-huh. You’re welcome to come along. We’re waiting for a warrant to arrive from the D.A.’s office now. Two warrants, as a matter of fact. We’re also picking up Artie Nowak as a material witness in the Desmond case.”

“It’ll be a pleasure to help you serve that too,” I said. “But why a warrant? He didn’t show any disinclination to cooperate last night.”

“Bob Wynn’s idea,” Anderson said. “According to his notes in the case record, he and Carter questioned Stark half the night, and weren’t able to shake his story of the girl being dead when he arrived at her apartment. They finally quit, convinced he was telling a straight story. Wynn thinks Little Artie must have killed the girl. That business of instructing Stark to run several other errands before he went to Kitty Desmond’s apartment has all the earmarks of deliberately setting up an alibi. Wynn wants him pulled in on some charge strong enough to hold him for a while, so we can do a thorough job of questioning.”

“How the mighty have fallen,” I said. “Earlier last night Wynn was all upset from just having to ask Artie a few polite questions in his own tavern. Now he wants him dragged down to headquarters like a common criminal.”

Anderson grinned. “Thanks to you getting yourself shot at. Little Artie’s protection was Nick Bartkowiak, and today Nick couldn’t get a parking ticket fixed. Not that he’d try to get Artie off the hook anyway, since he seems to be trying to shaft the guy completely out of the organization.”

Max Cole said gloomily, “We’ll never stick Little Artie for the Desmond job unless we can establish he left the tavern while Stark was gone.”

“I think we can establish pretty definitely whether or not he did,” I said.

“Yeah?” Anderson asked with raised brows.

“I’ve got a witness who spent all day in the tavern. I didn’t mention it to Wynn, but that’s how I learned Stark was gone for an hour. After we serve the warrants, I’ll look him up.”

“Who’s the guy?”

“An old fellow who hangs around there.”

Anderson said, “Give us his name and you won’t have to bother with it.”

“No bother,” I said. “Spangler gave me permission to work along with you guys as long as I want.”

Anderson looked surprised. “What’s gotten into him? Usually it’s like prying gold from a miser to get one of his cops assigned to special duty with another division.”

“He’s sore about me being fingered,” I said. “He put on quite an impressive show. He even threatened to speak nastily to Baldy Mason and the D.A. if they don’t go all out to convict Bartkowiak for conspiracy.”

“Spangler?” Anderson asked in disbelief. “He wouldn’t raise his voice to the big brass if he caught one of them picking his pocket.”

Within the division we make jokes about the captain’s tactful handling of higher-ups, but we don’t much like similar comments from outsiders.

“The old man’s as good a cop as anybody you have over here,” I said in a nettled voice.

I think Anderson was prepared to give me an argument, but we were both sidetracked by the entry into the squadroom of a young man in civilian clothes.

“Here comes the messenger from the D.A.’s office,” Max Cole announced. “I guess we’ve got our warrants.”