Black Mask Detective (Vol. 35, No. 2 — November, 1950)

Mayhem Patrol by John Bender

Five hundred smackers flew out of Sergeant Fagan’s prowl-car window — all because an eager rookie tagged along on the...

The day they put Ed Clancy in the patrol car with me is the day I should of took my sick leave. He is a nice-looking, fresh-faced sort of cookie, but right from the start I can see that he is a wrongo for yours truly, Sergeant Tim Fagan, and it is the most uncomfortable week of my life I spend with this brand-new cop Ed Clancy.

Most of the time I am thinking how I can get rid of him and team up with one of the old-timers like myself, who is not above looking in on a bar or two for a quick one or dogging it a bit now and then. But this Clancy is fresh out of the patrolmen school and eager as a hound dog on a hot smell, and there is no relaxing with him, not even one little bit.

We are cruising down Pennoyer Street, me and Clancy, the last night of our tour together, when I get the horn on my left and the big green convertible cuts in front of our police car. It is Big Bobo, the bookie, at the wheel and I wonder what is up, since he is not that kind of reckless driver for nothing. He is at all times a very careful citizen, and I have even known him to swallow instead of spit should there be a bluecoat in the neighborhood.

“Of all the nerve!” says Officer Clancy, as I pull in to the curb in front of the parked convertible. “You see that, Sarge. You get a load of that? You see the way he cuts right in front of us, no hand signal? I ought to give him a ticket.”

“Just to prove you know how to write?” I ask. This kid Clancy is just itching to use his charge book, all right, a one-man FBI. I tell him to sit still and put his ticket book away. Part of the reason Chief Monaghan assigns him to my car is to wise him up, to show him the ropes, but I got a feeling that this is impossible.

“You just sit here, Eager Beaver,” I tell him, “and make sure nobody steals the buggy. I’ll talk to the guy.”

I go over to the convertible, wondering what is on Big Bobo’s mind besides the fifty-dollar panama. I steer quite a bundle of trade his direction the past ten, twelve years since he got me appointed to the force, but I cannot recall that I owe his book anything much these days. I been a little lucky lately; the nags run good for me. Maybe I’m into him a half a yard, but nothing substantial to speak about, you understand. He’s not a guy to put the pressure on for that much, the dough he turns over.

“Well, Fagan,” he says, “good to see you. Hop in.”

This boat is six grands’ worth of solid comfort, big, smooth — just like Bobo. He’s wearing a hand-tailored piece of cloth my month’s pay couldn’t touch. His pudgy, smooth-shaven face comes out the top of his silk shirt like he’s pulled his belt too tight and squeezed himself up into the panama.

“New car, ain’t it, Bobo?”

“Thirteen miles on her, is all.” He nods his cigar at the speedometer. “Present for Susie.”

“She catch you kissin’ the maid?”

He is pained. “Tim, you know I don’t look at no dame but Susie.”

This is true. He got a dozen dolls running around half-naked in his Chromos Club six nights a week and he could take his pick, any time he wants. But he treats them all like sisters, what I understand.

Susie Schlemmer is the one he picks, two years ago, right out of the hat check, and she takes him for the big fall. City Hall wedding, by the mayor, no less, who makes a nice, simple speech about marriage — no reform talk tacked on, either. Then Bobo takes his bride to Europe, all over France and Switzerland, real cultural — though I hear he stops in at Monte Carlo and picks up a little bundle, several times more than what the trip costs him.

“Tim,” Bobo says, “this convertible is for Susie, the way I said. We are in a little strain, you see. I think the car will make some points for me.” He grunts. We cruise around the block. “Right now, to make everything copasetic, I got the need of a little favor and you are the fellow can do it for me.”

I sit quiet, my hat off, letting the breeze dust my overheated bald spot.

“It’s worth five C’s to me,” Big Bobo says. “Plus we clean up the rest of the tab you’re into me.”

Now Big Bobo Barsted is not the kind of guy who goes around separating himself from the folding coin, can he help it. Even for his ever-loving Susie.

“Legal?” I say.

He laughs. “Getting dainty, Tim? I seen the day half a grand gets you real busy, no questions asked.”

“I’m a sergeant now.”

“So this is legal, Tim.”

I settle back on the cushions. “What’s the pitch?”

“Very simple. There is this scumbo, name of Larry Melody. You know him?”

“The guy who dances in your club?”

“The same,” says Bobo. “Well, he and my wife Susie — they been seeing too much of each other lately. I don’t like it. Now I got the fix in at Headquarters to have Melody’s entertainer’s license revoked, but I want you to personally escort him out of town for me. Tonight. Right to the Nevada state line.”

“That’s all? For five notes, this is not a very great deal of work, Bobo.”

He coughs, very polite. “I want you should make sure he gets the point to stay over the state line, Tim. Now, I don’t say you got to break his neck or anything, but if you was to rearrange his nose a little...”

“Unpretty him some, you mean.”

“Y’understand, I could just hire a muscle, but I want to get a good job done, and this is right down your street. Besides, you got the police car. It is very important that you got the police car because you can give him a little trip in it and nobody takes a second look.”

A real thinker, this Bobo. “No trouble at all, Bobo.”

We make a turn and there is my police car parked where we left it. Clancy is out at the curb, walking up and down, waiting for me. I get out and Bobo takes the green convertible away from there and I go over to the patrol car.

“What’s up?” Clancy says.

“Nothin’. Absolutely nothing’. Just talkin’ to an old friend. D’you mind?”

“What did he want? Did you tell him he is not supposed to cut in like that?” Clancy shoots the questions like he is studying to be the next D.A.

I climb in behind the wheel and do my best not to pay any attention to him. But he’s as jumpy as a brand-new father at the christening and he comes around to my side of the car and stands there, his hands on his hips, his jaw sticking out like a shovel.

“Is it... is it trouble, Sarge?”

“The guy wanted to know if the dew is goin’ to hurt the tomato patch. C’mon, Sherlock, get in the car.”

So he shrugs. “Okay,” he says, “you know what you’re doing,” and he slams the car door.

That is when the stars fall down and the drum and bugle corps goes off inside my skull. For a minute there it is like all the hangovers I’ve ever had, all put together — only it is not my skull that hurts; it is my arm, my working arm, my left one. It is just like somebody chops with an axe across my fingers.

“Sarge! I’m sorry!”

It is Clancy telling how terrible he feels, catching my hand in the car door like this. He feels terrible! My left hand is puffing balloon-size already, a big red crease throbbing across the back of it.

“You dumb baboon!” I manage. “You—”

He slides me over on the seat. “I’ll take you to Doc Spensil, Sarge. Gosh, you don’t know how sorry I am.”

Well, it is a break for me, all right. Not a compound fracture of the dingus whatchamacallis, says Doc Spensil, the department surgeon, but it is a bone bust just the same, and I gotta stay off any hands, he tells me.

Of all the times to get a bust hand! I wonder if I can beat the rap if I put a couple of .38 slugs in that bird-brain Ed Clancy.

Doc is not too much put out when Clancy rings his door bell this time of night and he shoots me right into his front parlor office and tells Clancy to go back and wait in the patrol car.

After he looks the mitt over he says, “We’ll just slap her in a little old cast, Tim, and I’ll send the report in to Monaghan. He’ll take you off the car patrol for a while.” He hunts through the pile of Racing Forms on his desk until he pulls out a medical report sheet. “Want me to write you up for limited duty?”

“Hell, no!”

With my good flipper I grab the sheet. I am thinking of them five hundred iron men of Bobo’s and how I can sure make them go to work for yours truly. But I can’t do no beat-up job for him, my hand in a cast and all, not if I want to make it a good piece of work. A one-hand deal means I got to handcuff this Larry Melody to a tree or something to give him his clumps, which is not the way I like to do it. A good beating is a two-hand proposition, way I see it, and I know Big Bobo has faith in my work, else he doesn’t hand out this job to me in the first place. Ed Clancy, I think, you dog, you!

“Look, Doc, suppose you just forget all about this here little accident. Suppose you don’t tell the Chief nothin’. If anybody — especially Monaghan — should happen to ask you did you treat Jim Fagan the other night, why you don’t know a blasted thing about it.”

“But Tim—”

“I got my reasons, Doc, y’understand. Ain’t no skin off you, now, is it?”

“Well,” he says, pulling at his lip. “But what about that playmate of yours, that Clancy?”

“I’ll take care of that jerk. He won’t peep.” I hold out my hand. “Can’t you just sorta slap some plaster of pans on the mitt and let it go at that?”

“Well, Tim—”

I know the tone of voice. So I promise him twenty-five bucks come payday if he’ll just do the necessary repairs and keep his official trap shut. I also tip him to a hot one that is running tomorrow and he does the business on my hand so it don’t look like I’m carrying nothing bigger than a grapefruit when the fist is all wrapped up.

Outside, I tell Clancy to keep the seat warm for a little while longer and I go down the block a little way to a little ginmill that I know where I grab a quick medicinal bracer, and then I use the phone booth and a couple of numbers I got in a special inside pocket.

I try Eddie the Carrot’s horse parlor first, because that is where Big Bobo sometimes opens his satchel at this time of the night, but I draw a blank; Eddie ain’t seen my boy. It is the same with Mother Mary’s novelty shop and with old Preacher Kelley’s Super-Salvation Shelter; neither joint has got a line on him today, though the Preacher tells me, between pulls at his bottle of musky, that he expects the big boy one time or another, maybe tonight. These are honest hand-book havens that Bobo has right in his pocket and they are on my own list, too, for a touch now and again when I give them the word that the raids are heading in their direction so they should put the chalk boards away and imitate the business they are supposed to be in.

It occurs to me that maybe Bobo will be at his own place, so I try his apartment and sure enough there is the voice I’m looking for.

“What’s up, Tim?”

“Well, it’s about tonight, Bobo. There’s a little hitch.”

And I tell him all about the accident to my hand, doing a little more swearing than I thought I would when it comes to mentioning that no-good Ed Clancy’s name.

Finally, Bobo says, “Tim, you disappoint me. I been counting on this job.”

“Yeah, Bobo, sure. There’s a chance I can get it done for you tomorrow night. I finish my penance with this Clancy character tonight and Vincente and me are working together for the next couple days. Vince is one of the old-timers, one of my boys. If I cut him in for a bunch of iron men, he’ll be glad to play punching bag with Larry Melody.”

“Well, Tim, I don’t know—”

“Results guaranteed, Bobo,” I say, talking fast. I don’t want that five hundred going into some cheap hood’s pocket. “This Vincente does a job I’d be proud of myself. And, remember, all official — with the police car and everything, no trouble for anybody.” I laugh. “Except maybe Larry.”

“Well,” Bobo says again. Then: “Oh-oh. Got to hang up, Tim. That’s probably Susie at the door.”

“What about our deal?”

“Okay, okay. But no later than tomorrow night.”

I tell him check, and I am feeling a little better when I go out to the patrol car and Ed Clancy. But not so much better that I am looking forward to the rest of the shift with this baboon, especially when I begin to realize that with an automobile in his hands this Clancy character is armed with a dangerous weapon. I’m running a sweat by the time we go no more than three, four blocks, the way he lead-foots it along, cutting in and out of traffic like these trucks and trolley cars are made out of cardboard.

I kill the big contented smile on his kisser by telling him to turn down a side street and park it by the curb.

“Wassamatter, Sarge?”

“Wassamatter? When you bring me down to the Doc’s, I am so blind with pain I don’t see how bad you drive. Now I got my senses back, it comes to me you don’t know what for about handlin’ this buggy, or any other buggy! You ever drive before?”

“Well, a little, back in the Army.”

“Cars?”

“Er — tanks. And some half-tracks.”

“You got a license?”

“No, but I like to drive.”

“Well, ain’t that dandy! Just dandy!”

He shrugs and starts to let out the clutch but I reach down and turn off the ignition. “Hold it, Junior. We can listen to the radio just as well without risking my neck with your drivin’. We got to midnight — so let’s just park.”

“But—”

“That’s an order!”

It is possible that Monaghan just might give me a qualified driver, if I report in with the bust hand and a partner who can’t drive legal. For a few minutes I get hot with the prospects of getting Vincente or maybe Callahan to finish out the shift with me, and being able to do the job for Big Bobo tonight after all. But on second thought I realize that Monaghan is probably gonna get nosey about the busted flipper and maybe suspicious if I don’t synchronize the thing right with Doc Spensil, who’s liable to get all mixed up about the deal if the Chief checks with him.

There’s nothing much I can do but sweat the shift out here with Clancy, and hope that I can duck the Chief long enough for assignments tomorrow. Clancy is as fidgety, sitting there beside me, as a hen on a hot griddle. Finally, about an hour later, when our call letters come in over the set, he almost leaves the seat.

“Sarge — that’s us!”

“Two four Fagan,” comes the voice from Headquarters, “Fourteenth and Sammis... an all-night parking garage... a rumpus... PB there...”

I listen for the repeat while Clancy puts the address down in his book, then I take the mike:

“Two four Fagan... check and out.”

“I know the place they mean,” Clancy says, putting some life under the hood of the police buggy. “That’s Delaney’s beat.”

The PB is code for “check with the patrolman on beat,” and this we got to do, no two ways about it, now that the call is on the records official. Well, I have been in worse trouble than I am in tonight, but I cannot recall same off hand.

“Take it away, G-Man,” I tell Clancy and we bang away from the curb like we been hitched to a rocket. Somehow I do not mind this jerk’s driving so much any more. In fact, I am hoping that maybe we will run into something nice and solid on the way, like a brick fence, say, that will give me a good solid explanation for this hand of mine. Because, sure as my name is Tim Fagan, if this is a legitimate beef and I got to make a report of same, I am going to be in one hell of a fix for not reporting this busted handle of mine earlier. And I do not see any way I can learn to write right-handed in the next twenty minutes or so, to sign the report. So there is just the hope that Clancy runs this bus into something or that we draw a blank at the garage. Way I see it, it is much better if there is not enough wrong at the garage for us to have to write up a report.

But it doesn’t look like I’m going to have any luck at all, first look I get at the crowd around the Acme Garage when we pull up. Clancy puts his foot on the siren and takes us right through the mob into the building before he pulls up.

“Where’s the policeman?” I ask one of the faces there, and some gee jerks a thumb toward the ramp that winds around and leads upstairs.

I guess Clancy figures he is back in that there tank warfare of his — the way he almost knocks over the guy and goes lickety-split up that ramp like it was a cross-country highway.

Zoom! Zoom!

We’re just missing the walls, going around the narrow corners, and Clancy gets the siren going again, blowing it for all it’s worth, and we are the horse marines coming to the rescue, that’s for sure.

Finally, up on the sixth-floor level, there is Delaney standing in the middle of the ramp, waving us to a stop. He is almost getting his uniform pressed right on him, as Clancy has a little trouble with the brake.

When the boat stops rocking, I get out and Delaney hauls himself up out of the puddle of oil and dirt that he’s thrown himself into.

He gives Clancy a dirty look and says like this: “What the hell are you trying to do — kill me?”

“We heard you had trouble,” Clancy says, hopping out with his gun in one hand and his notebook in the other, brave and ready as they come.

Well, it would be nice to see Ed Clancy get a good bust in the mouth that cannot be traced directly back to myself, but I don’t do nothing to promote a fight, as much as I would like to. I just tell Delaney that we got the tingle from Headquarters and what the hell is up?

He brushes off his cap and points with it down toward the back of the garage. “Dame’s screaming her head off downstairs, little while ago. Says these jerkimers here won’t give her the car that her husband parked in the joint a little earlier.”

We are walking down toward the back of the place with him and he gives us some more:

“She says her hubby put the car in here — a brand new convertible — and she’s got the parking receipt for it, but the attendant claims the car ain’t in the place. So they get into quite a hassle and pretty soon it is a very noisy bit of business, yakety-yak, when I am walking by outside.”

“Okay, okay. D’you find the car?”

“Sure,” Delaney says. “They got it up here all the time. Me and the dame come up and find it. This joker got the car all jacked up and he’s pulling the guts out of the new motor and putting back a lot of spare nuts and bolts he’s got hanging around since Henry Ford is a small boy.”

There is the car now, just like Delaney says, jacked up with the new tires off of it and some recaps ready to go back on. You never see a more open swindle. I guess there is some money to be made in trading off special motor parts like this, all right, though it is a racket that never occurs to me before.

The attendant is a shifty-eyed little gezabo that Delaney’s got handcuffed to the front bumper, where there are a bundle of motor parts laying all over the floor.

But I don’t pay much attention to the garage guy or anything else, for that matter, except the very slick doll wrapped in a mink coat who is standing there beside the green convertible, tapping one dainty little foot like she ain’t got all night to hang around.

“Well,” she says to us, real put out, “are you going to make this fellow put my automobile together?”

“Wow!” says Ed Clancy, looking her over like she is a two grades promotion and a month off with pay. “Now this is the kind of customer I like to get, Sarge!”

Me, I don’t feel the same way, at all, at all. Big Bobo’s wife, Susie, always is a good-looking dish, especially when her green eyes light up because she got a mad on. And she has got a good mad on right now.

“Officer,” she says, turning the big smile on Ed Clancy, “I do not have all night to spend in idle chatter. Would you be good enough to help me get my automobile out of here?”

Well, Clancy falls all over himself, trying to give the good-looking Susie the impression that he knows what he is doing.

I tell Delaney to uncouple the garage character, who is a fellow by the name of Hankering Harry Hannover, which is a name he gets for hankering after other people’s property. I remember him from some police line-ups in the past. This is a lad who has been jugged before on a number of occasions; he is a very glue-fingered gent that people are always giving their stuff to, if you hear him right.

“Honest, Sarge,” he tells me, “I’m just doin’ a tune-up on the car, which is what I think the boss tells me to do. You can’t clamp a guy for trying to do a service for one of the customers, now, can you?”

He is looking around like he might try out for the track team any minute, but I do not think he is so foolish as to try to go with the leg.

“How long will it take to put this heap back the way you find it?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes.”

“And for you to blow but good — like to another state?”

“Er... right afterward. Immediate, I would say.”

“You’re not going to let him go, Sarge?” Delaney chimes in.

I ignore him and ask Mrs. Big Bobo Barsted if she will be satisfied to get her automobile back in one satisfactory-working piece and no fuss in the police courts. Clancy is frowning like I am asking her to poison somebody’s dish of tea, but Susie, having been wed up with Big Bobo for some time now, has adopted some of his feeling about never tangling with the law, can she help it.

“Why... why, I guess that would be all right, Sergeant. Just so long as the car is in good condition.”

“It will be in the pink. If it ain’t, this light-fingered cookie here will go down into the hole we save for special characters and nobody ever hears of him again because we lose the key. Y’understand, Harry?”

“I getcha, Sarge. I getcha. You folks don’t worry about this little old car, now. I’ll have it tickin’ like a clock in a couple minutes.”

So he gets to work on it right away, and I tell Delaney everything will be okay and he can run on back to his beat, and that’s the good fellow. I keep my eye on Hankering Harry and Ed Clancy takes his cap off and settles down to some real jawing with Mrs. Big Bobo and as soon as Delaney leaves I begin to feel a little better about the whole thing, because it looks for sure like we can forget about reporting this car deal once the car is fixed.

By my watch, it’s only thirty minutes to midnight and there is not much more that can happen before we put the police car away and call it a day.

Well, that is what I am thinking then, at about half-past eleven. But it ain’t five minutes more before the whole thing blows up higher than an atom bomb, right in my kisser.

And the way it all happens is like this. Hankering Harry is banging away on the motor there and Mrs. Big Bobo is chewing the fat with Clancy when all of a sudden Clancy nods at her and goes over to the green convertible.

“No trouble at all,” Clancy says, walking around Hankering Harry, looking for something.

“What’re you after, G-man?” I ask.

“A clean cloth, Sarge. Mrs. Barsted got some oil and dirt on her shoes.” He cheeks around some more and then he gets an idea. “Maybe there’s some clean rags in the trunk.”

So he wants to make some time with the dish, that’s his own lookout. But I am remembering how Big Bobo is a jealous man and what he recommends that I do to Larry Melody for making a play for this here Susie and I chuckle to myself thinking that maybe my wise-boy Ed Clancy is asking for a mouthful of fist, as well, if anything comes of this. Not that I will be able to do the job myself, a brother officer and all that, but—

“Holy cow, Sarge!”

This is Ed Clancy, his mouth wide open and his eyes popping out like hard-boiled eggs.

“Look at this, Sarge!”

He’s holding up the trunk door of the green convertible with one hand and pointing inside with the other. Susie and me get over there just about the same time, and she lets out a scream that will tear the ears off a brass monkey. Then she goes all rubbery, sprawling in a bundle of mink on the floor.

Me, I don’t feel much good either. Because in the trunk compartment of Big Bobo Barsted’s brand new green convertible is the young man who goes by the name of Larry Melody. Who went by the name of Larry Melody, that is. All curled up in there, snug as a bug in a rug.

“Dead!” says Clancy. “He’s dead!”

Well, wouldn’t you know Clancy would come up with something like this?

It is several weeks later when I see Big Bobo Barsted for what, it turns out, is the last time. I am taking a drag on a butt outside of Headquarters, before I go in this day to start my shift on the radio.

To me, this Bobo Barsted is five hundred fish down the drain, or over the dam by now, and though I got no love for Ed Clancy, I do not have no sympathy for Big Bobo Barsted, either. Bobo had the chance to get the job done right for him, but could he wait like a smart man shoulda? No, he had to go louse it all up, himself.

And louse me up, too, not only with the five hundred I don’t get. You see, after that night when Ed Clancy finds Larry in the back of Bobo’s car, the Chief takes me off of car patrol with the bust hand and puts me here in Headquarters, on the mike calls. Which is a job I can do fine, but there ain’t the extra dough I could always pick up on the outside work.

This day that I am talking about, when I see Bobo for the last time, is the day that they are taking Big Bobo Barsted over to the court for his trial. I think the judge will lay it into him for the full count, what with they’ve been trying to tie into Bobo for a long time now, and it will be the big chop. We use the noose in this state for murderers in the first degree, and that is the rap they get Bobo for, on the Larry Melody kill.

Of course, he don’t even have the long odds going for him. He is in tighter than a plumber’s joint on a leaky pipe, and all the money he got ain’t going to do him any good. No sir, not one little bit. It is a fact that Big Bobo Barsted puts the lump on Larry Melody’s head that is the fatal clout.

He does this right after I call and tell him Ed Clancy busts my working hand in the car door; in fact, the person at Big Bobo’s door, that day I call him, is not the little woman as he thinks but it is Larry Melody himself in person, and he comes to put the whole thing up to Big Bobo — how he loves Susie and Susie loves him and what the hell is Big Bobo gonna do about giving her a divorce, you can’t stand in the way of true love and so forth.

So what Bobo does is see a couple shades of red and reach for the nearest object, which happens to be one half of a pair of naked lady bookends which Susie gives him for a wedding present, and this he lays alongside Larry Melody’s right ear, where it makes quite a mess, and leaves Big Bobo with a fresh corpse on his hands.

After a while, Bobo carts the body downstairs and puts it in the trunk of his car, because by now he has a hot idea. He takes the car over to the Acme Garage and leaves it and Larry there, and then he has a talk with Susie and tells her yes, he thought it over, she can have the divorce and marry that Larry fellow after all; he’s not the one to stand in their way. It is Susie’s plan to go to Reno, which Bobo says is quite the right idea, why don’t she just take the car, and no hard feelings, and drive to Nevada that very night.

What Bobo figures is that somewhere in Nevada, in a couple of days, say, that convertible is gonna smell real ripe and Susie is gonna have one hell of a surprise when she opens the trunk — plus one hell of a lot of trouble explaining said corpse to the cops in Nevada. Only he never figures on a gezabo in the Acme Garage who is got a private racket of making old cars out of brand new ones.

And, just like me, he certainly never figures on a guy named Ed Clancy, who is a jinx of a cop if there ever is one. Why, if Clancy doesn’t try to find a shoe rag for Susie, this whole thing might go any number of ways...

Well, like I say, this day I see Big Bobo for the last time I am having a smoke out in back of Headquarters. And on the way inside who do I run into — no one but my dear old friend Ed Clancy.

Now, I do not see much of Clancy lately, which is strictly all right with me because after this Larry Melody case, Chief Monaghan thinks that Clancy is the real white-haired wonder boy of the force — don’t ask me why — and he puts Clancy in for plainclothes duty and gives him the eight-to-four shift, days, which is nice work if and when you can get it.

“Hiya, Sarge,” he says to me. “How’s it going?”

So I give him the time of day. A guy with his kind of luck, you can’t be too careful how you treat him. He is liable to end up as the Chief of Police any day now.

“Nice-looking suit you got there,” I tell him. “You’re all spiffed up like you got a heavy date.”

He grins. “Well it is pretty heavy, Sarge. You remember that Mrs. Barsted? She decides not to go to Reno after all, for that divorce. Looks like the State is going to make her a widow pretty soon now, hey?” He polishes his nails on the lapel. “She don’t have a lot of friends in town, you know, and she’s got that nice new car. So she’s going to give me some driving lessons.”

Well, now that is the way it turns out. And I’ll bet you Big Bobo the bookie is one surprised gent if he ever hears about this big, dumb cop Clancy riding around in that fine present he gives to Susie Barsted.