Death of a Pusher

Chapter 1

The kid’s name was Herman Joyce. He was twenty-one but could have passed for eighteen. With his lank blond hair cut in a ducktail, his black leather jacket and shapeless slacks, he looked like a typical street-corner punk. It was a good disguise. By the way other cops passing in and out of the squadroom left us strictly alone, it was obvious they assumed we were questioning a suspect.

Actually, Herman Joyce was a rookie cop we had borrowed from Metro for a little undercover work.

“You’re sure he’s not suspicious?” I asked him.

He gave me a youthful grin. “Why should he be? Two different junkies gave me character references.”

Carl Lincoln said, “Don’t get overconfident, Hermie. Benny Polacek is no dunce.”

“He’ll show,” Joyce said. “I’m to be in the alley next to the Adams Furniture Store at nine P.M. That gives you three hours to get a camera set up.”

“That’s down in my old part of town,” I said, frowning. “He picked a fine spot. There’s a warehouse across the street with no windows in front and there’s a blank wall on the opposite side of the alley. What do you mean, he’s not suspicious? He wouldn’t go to all that trouble to make a single sale if he didn’t smell some kind of rat.”

“He’s just careful,” Joyce said. “My junkie pals tell me he always sets it up like that when he makes the first pass. Once he’s thoroughly satisfied with a new customer and the guy has become a regular, he can walk right into Polacek’s apartment and get a pop. But for the initial sale he always picks a spot hard to cover by camera and he checks all along both sides of the street for stakeouts before he’ll move in.”

“That’s because he’s a three-time loser,” Carl said. “He can’t afford another fall. But he has to keep dredging up new clients when the old ones commit suicide, or get shot trying to pull jobs to feed their monkeys, or get committed to the loony bin. Poor guy. My heart bleeds for the sonovabitch.”

“We’ll have to leave the way in wide open,” I said. “We can’t have cops lurking in doorways if he’s going to be watching. And I don’t know where we can set up a camera in that spot.”

“So we’ll use the panel truck,” Carl said.

I gave him a disgusted look. “On a pro like Benny Polacek? He took his first fall as a result of film evidence from a panel truck. With a truck in sight, he wouldn’t sell a pop to his poor old mother.”

Carl said, “Well, suppose we run down that way and case the lay.”

We didn’t take Herman Joyce with us. We sent him back to the South Side poolroom where he had been hanging out for the past two weeks, making friends with junkies and periodically acting as though he too had a monkey on his back. I told him not to try to contact us again but just to show up in the alley at the appointed time. I assured him he didn’t have to worry about us not being there.

The Adams Furniture Store was on Nevins Street in the heart of the Polish section. As I had recalled, the warehouse across the street didn’t have a single window along its front, and the side wall of the building across the alley was equally blank. There were some second-floor windows overlooking the alley from the furniture store, but they were too high up. A camera aimed down at that angle would get only the tops of heads, and if Polacek wore a hat, his face would never appear in camera range.

A number of cardboard cartons piled next to the furniture store in the alley gave us the idea. None were big enough to conceal a man, but we figured the addition of a larger one wouldn’t be likely to attract attention. I knew the store owner, whose name had been Adamski before he shortened it to Adams, and who was a fellow member of the South Side Polish Club. The store had closed at six, so I called him at home from a pay booth. He came down, opened up the store, and let us choose a carton from the supply in his basement. We took one that a refrigerator had been shipped in.

By eight P.M. we were all set. Adamski loaned us some packaging tape to seal the top of the refrigerator carton shut; we cut one side of it down the center and along the top and bottom edges to form a sort of double swinging door. Carl picked out a small but substantial carton strong enough to bear his weight and seated his lanky frame on it inside the bigger carton. He cut a hole at eye level for the camera and another, larger one low down between his feet. The latter was for the battery-powered infrared lamp we used to take night moving pictures when we didn’t want suspects to know they were being filmed.

We unscrewed the bulbs in the green-shaded lamps over the rear doors of both buildings, so that the only light filtering into the alley came from a street lamp in front of the warehouse across the street. Carl had objected to unscrewing the bulbs on the grounds that finding them unlit might make Polacek suspicious. But I figured the pusher had probably cased the place in the daytime and wouldn’t realize later that they were supposed to be on. And, in the event he decided to check the rears of the two buildings, I wanted it to be too dark back there for him to be able to see me.

I took up a position behind the furniture store and waited.

Waiting is a necessary part of police work, but that doesn’t make me like it any better. For most of an hour I shifted from foot to foot, hungering for a cigarette. My only consolation was knowing that Carl was finding the wait even more tedious. It was a fairly warm June night, and that closed carton must have been a sweatbox.

At ten to nine I heard footsteps enter the alley, and there was a low whistle. Peering around the corner, I saw the dim form of rookie Herman Joyce silhouetted at the alley mouth. When I gave an equally low answering whistle, he leaned his back against the brick wall on the opposite side of the alley and waited.

Exactly at nine there was the sound of a car parking in front of the furniture store. A car door slammed, then I heard footsteps going away. For a moment I was puzzled, then I remembered what Joyce had said about Polacek’s precautions about checking for possible police stakeouts before moving in for the contact.

He must have looked into every possible place of concealment on both sides of the street, for several minutes passed before I heard the footsteps enter the alley. There was a low mutter of voices. I waited, not even risking a look, until Joyce’s voice said loudly, “I guess this will hold me until next time, Benny.”

At this prearranged signal I stepped from behind the building and closed in fast. Benny Polacek tried to make a break, stumbled, and fell flat on his face when Herman Joyce thrust out a foot and tripped him. Moments later I had jerked the pusher to his feet and had his hands cuffed behind him.

Polacek yelled, “Cops!” — and the car waiting in front took off like a Polaris missile.

We hadn’t expected Polacek to arrive with a chauffeur, because he usually worked alone. Young Joyce ran to the alley mouth, but I heard the squeal of tires around a corner before Joyce reached the sidewalk, and I knew he hadn’t been able to get even a glimpse of it.

As Joyce returned from one direction and Carl, camera in hand, came over from the other, Benny Polacek peered at me in the dim light.

“Matt Rudd,” he said bitterly. “I walk into it for a lousy three-dollar-and-a-half pop.”

I looked him up and down. Benny Polacek was a chunkily built man of about thirty-five, not unhandsome in a swarthy sort of way.

I said, “Three-fifty tonight, but you figured on draining him of thirty to fifty a week if he became a regular customer, didn’t you, Benny?”

The pusher glowered at Joyce. “What do you get out of this, stoolie?”

If Polacek still didn’t realize he had been dealing with an undercover cop, I saw no point in disillusioning him. We might want to use the rookie again sometime.

“He gets off the hook for another rap,” I said, turning to Joyce. “Take off, punk.”

Carl held out his hand and said, “First, we’ll have that evidence.”

Joyce handed him a small folded paper such as sleeping powders used to come in. After dropping it into a manila envelope and sealing the flap, Carl held the envelope against the brick wall and initialed it. Then he handed his pen to Joyce, who also initialed it.

Meanwhile, I shook down the suspect and removed three one-dollar bills and a half dollar from his side pants pocket. We all moved out to the sidewalk where there was more light, and I had Joyce examine the money. His initials were on the bills in ink, and the half dollar was marked with red fingernail polish.

Carl put the money into another envelope, and he and Joyce initialed it also.

“Now you can take off,” Carl said to the rookie. “Just be around when we need you.”

“Yes, sir,” Joyce said, and hurried off up the street.

Carl said, “Who was your driver tonight, Benny?”

“Baldy Mason,” Polacek snarled at him.

William (Baldy) Mason is our police commissioner.

“You’re hilarious,” I said. “Let’s go downtown so you can regale the booking sergeant.”

At headquarters Polacek was a little surprised when we took him straight to the felony section instead of first questioning him in the squadroom. I thought it might do him good to mull over the reason for this departure from routine procedure.

“We don’t need to ask you anything, Benny. This is your fourth fall, so you’re cooked. This time you get stashed away for life.”

He licked his lips. “I want to call my lawyer.”

“Tomorrow, maybe. Tonight we’d rather have you muse upon your sins without benefit of legal advice.”

“I know my rights, Sergeant. I’m entitled to counsel.”

“We know ours, too,” I informed him. “We can hold you twenty-four hours on suspicion before we lodge a formal charge, and we don’t have to let you phone anybody until the charge is lodged.” I turned to the desk sergeant. “For the moment he’s in on an open charge. Got an isolated cell where he can’t converse with the other prisoners?”

“Sure. O.K., mister. Take off your clothes.”

The men’s felony section is in the basement, and there isn’t any danger of any women wandering in, because you have to be admitted through a barred door even to get to the booking desk. Polacek stripped right in front of the desk. His personal possessions, except for cigarettes and a lighter, were listed on a property sheet, which he signed, then were sealed in a large manila envelope with a copy of the list stapled to it. Then he was led off to the shower, which is mandatory for every newly admitted prisoner even if he is arrested as he steps out of a bathtub. When he got out of the shower his clothing, except for his belt, would be handed back to him.

As he was led off, I called, “We’ll be back to see you tomorrow afternoon, Benny.”

Upstairs in the squadroom we found Herman Joyce waiting for us.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“He’s in the can,” I said. “You did a good job, kid. Tomorrow morning you can get a haircut and report back to Metro. I’ll phone your skipper and suggest you deserve a couple of days off.”

“Gee thanks, Sarge,” he said. “You ever need me again, just yell.”

“Don’t worry, we will,” I told him.