Death of a Pusher

Chapter 14

I drank some of my coffee before asking, “Do you have any idea who might have killed Benny, April?”

She shrugged. “Anybody might shoot a guy in his business.”

“He ever mention any enemies?”

“The subject never came up. He was supposed to be a salesman, not a racketeer, so he would hardly have told me if anybody was gunning for him. I would have asked too many questions he couldn’t answer without letting me know he was involved in something shady.”

“How about friends other than Charlie Kossack?”

“He didn’t seem to have any real friends. I met a lot of his acquaintances.”

“Ever hear him mention Goodman White?”

She looked surprised. “The councilman from the East Side? No, not that I recall. Most of the people he knew seemed to be just barroom acquaintances.”

“Name a few.”

She knitted her brow in thought. “Well, there was a Tom Boyd we used to run into at a place called Rex’s Tavern. He was a bookie. A fellow named Jim Walsh tends bar there, and he seemed to be a friend of Benny’s, too. I don’t think he had any business association with either, though. He had a lot of casual acquaintances like that who aren’t worth mentioning. I only met one man who seemed to have a business relationship with him. We ran into him in a bar one afternoon and Benny introduced him as a salesman for the same firm he worked for. They both laughed when he said it, but I didn’t get the joke at the time. Looking back, I guess the man must have been a pusher, too.”

“What was his name?”

After thinking for a minute, she said, “Gamble. I remember because the bartender kept making puns about his name concerning gambling. Harry Gamble. We met him in Zek’s Tavern down in the Polish section. Benny used to take me to places on the South Side quite a lot. Said he grew up in the district.”

I asked, “Know where this Harry Gamble lives?”

She shook her head. “I never saw him before or since. But you might find him at Zek’s. I got the impression from the way the bartender kidded him that it was his regular hangout.”

Finishing my coffee, I glanced at my watch. It was five after eight.

“I have to scoot,” I said. “Can you think of anything else?”

After musing for a time, she shook her head again.

“You need cab fare to get home?”

“Who’s going home?” she asked. “There’s nothing there but a room. I’ll sleep away the morning and go shopping this afternoon. If I knew when you planned to get home, I might cook you dinner.”

After thinking this over, I decided why not? Nobody would disturb her in the apartment, and it might be nice to walk in to a home-cooked meal for a change.

I said, “I’ll have to phone you after I learn the lieutenant’s plans for me. He may decide to work us right through the night. I’ll try to phone about four.”

Getting up, I rounded the table to kiss her good-by. Winding her arms about my neck, she pulled me down against her.

After a moment I tore myself away. I had to, or miss work.

I logged in at eight-twenty-five. Hank Carter was already there, but neither Lieutenant Wynn nor Carl Lincoln had yet showed.

“Did you get any kind of line on Charlie Kossack?” I asked Carter.

Walking over to a table where some papers lay, he picked up a photostat of a record card and silently handed it to me.

The description on the card fitted what April had said about the man. He was listed as thirty-six years old, six feet two, and a hundred and forty-five pounds. When I looked at the mugg shots at the top of the card, I realized why the description had sounded familiar. About six months before he’d been in the morning show-up on suspicion of armed robbery, but had been released when a witness picked somebody else in the show-up as the person who had robbed him.

Charles Kossack’s record explained why he had been pulled in on routine suspicion on that occasion. He had a total of twenty-six arrests, starting at age sixteen with grand theft, auto, and working up to include everything from assault with a deadly weapon to armed robbery. There was even one arrest on suspicion of homicide.

Out of ten arrests as a juvenile he had taken only one fall, for grand theft, auto, and had drawn eighteen months in industrial school for it. He’d served a year of the eighteen. He’d beaten fourteen of his sixteen raps as an adult, once taking a fall for ADW and once for armed robbery. He had served a year of hard time for the former and five years of a five-to-ten for the latter.

“Nice guy, isn’t he?” Carter said when I handed the card back.

“That’s what makes a cop’s work so rewarding,” I growled. “Juries keep releasing these slobs, and when they do take a fall, the parole board turns them loose. This guy should have drawn life as a habitual years ago.”

“He’s managed to break most of the Ten Commandments,” Carter agreed, examining the card. “Maybe there’s hope, though. He missed one.”

“What’s that?”

“He’s never made a graven image.”

When I failed to smile, Carter said, “I said he never made—”

“I heard you,” I interrupted. “I only laugh at new gags. The first time I heard that one, I was a rookie. Got an address on this guy?”

He looked wounded. “One, six months old. He was on parole until six months ago. We checked it last night, but he’d moved the day he got off parole and left no forwarding address. That’s par for the course. They always do. We put out a local and an APB on him.”

I told Carter I had to go up the hall to Records, and if the lieutenant came in before I got back, to tell him I wouldn’t be long.

At Records I asked the girl on the desk to see if there was anything on a Harry Gamble. When there wasn’t, I told her to try the moniker file on the off chance that Gamble was a nickname.

In a few minutes she came back with a card.

“Harry the Gambler, also Harry Gamble,” she said. “Real name Harry Grimaldi. Just a minute and I’ll pull his file.”

She went away again and returned with a thick manila folder.

Harry Grimaldi had a record even longer than Charlie Kossack’s. He was only thirty years old, but had spent eight years behind bars. Like Kossack, he had started with grand theft, auto, as a juvenile, had worked his way up the underworld ladder of success by subsequently being picked up for questioning on simple assault, ADW, possession of lottery tickets, possession of narcotics (three times), armed robbery (four times), and suspicion of homicide. He had taken falls only twice: eighteen months in industrial school as a juvenile, of which, like Kossack, he had served only a year; ten years on two counts of armed robbery as an adult, of which he had served seven and a half years of hard time before being thrust back into society by an indulgent parole board.

According to the file his moniker stemmed from his willingness to bet on anything at all, from horses to how long a housefly would wander over a piece of bread before flying away. Like Kossack, he had been off parole about six months. His last known address was a rooming house on the North Side.

I copied the address down, though I knew it was unlikely he still lived there. As Hank Carter had said, habitual criminals had a habit of moving the minute they got off parole. April French had gotten the impression that he was a regular customer at Zek’s Tavern, which suggested he might now live near it. And Zek’s was clear down in my old neighborhood on the South Side, on Kosciuszko Street.

The thing which interested me most was his three pickups for possession of narcotics. It made it seem likely that this was the same Harry Gamble whom Benny Polacek had introduced to April French as a “salesman” for the firm he worked for.

You can’t take file folders out of Records, but they’ll photostat record cards for you. I carried a fresh print of the card back to the squadroom with me.

Wynn and Lincoln had both logged in by then, but Hank Carter was no longer in the squadroom. Carl Lincoln was studying Charles Kossack’s record card.

The lieutenant seemed in a more amiable mood than usual, this morning. He asked, pleasantly enough, “What were you looking up at Records, Rudowski?”

“An associate of Benny Polacek’s, sir. He’s in the moniker file as Harry Gamble, but his real name’s Harry Grimaldi.” I handed him the photostat. “There’s good reason to believe he’s a pusher who gets his supplies from the same source as Benny did.”

After studying the card, Wynn passed it on to Carl. “You get his name from the French girl?”

“Yes, sir.” I related that April had told me about the man.

When I finished, the lieutenant grunted. “Get anything else out of her?”

“You already know about Kossack. Seems he was trying to get Polacek to go into some kind of deal with him. From Kossack’s record, that probably was something like sticking up supermarkets. The night we picked up Polacek, Kossack drove him to the rendezvous in his own car, but apparently he wasn’t in the narcotics business with Benny. According to April they were discussing this deal at the Palace, and when Benny announced he had to run an errand, Kossack offered to drive him because he wanted to continue talking business.”

“Hmm. She know how to get in touch with Kossack?”

I shook my head. “She has no idea where he lives. And she isn’t holding out. She’s willing to cooperate all down the line.”

“I imagine,” Wynn said dryly. “Where’d you question her? In your bedroom?”

When I simply ignored that, he said, “Get anything else out of her?”

“Nothing of value. The names of a few barroom acquaintances. I thought if we moved in on this Grimaldi character, we might squeeze the name of his supplier out of him. If it turned out to be Goodie White, we’d have a pretty good case, in spite of Goodie’s shenanigans about left-handed bowling gloves.”

Wynn’s good humor evaporated. “You taking over the strategy planning of this case now, Sergeant?”

I merely looked at him.

“Well, are you?”

“No, sir,” I said in a voice as cold as his. Turning to Lincoln to avoid talking to Wynn any more, I asked, “Where’s Hank?”

“The lieutenant sent him up to the lab to hustle Abbot with that comparison test.”

Wynn said, “While we’re waiting, I’ll outline today’s assignments. There’ll be plenty of men in and out of the squadroom on the day trick, so we won’t need to leave a liaison man here. We can give messages to whoever happens to be around.”

Carl nodded as though the lieutenant had said something profound. I felt like kicking him.