Death of a Pusher

Chapter 20

It took me some time to relate the full story of what had happened.

When I had finished, Carl Lincoln glowered down at Kossack. “This guy almost had us snowed. We paged you all over the damn building; we looked for your car on the lot; when we found it we made a room-to-room search of the building. We finally did smell a rat, and Hank and I went over to search that apartment. There was nothing there, so we came back, and we’ve been working him over ever since.”

“What would you have done if I’d never showed up?” I asked curiously.

Maurice Spangler said, “I’d been thinking about that. He was beginning to yell for a lawyer. After twenty-four hours we would have had to let him call one, and that would have been that. We’d have to release him on a writ of habeas corpus, because we certainly didn’t have enough to drag him before a judge for a preliminary hearing. I’m afraid it would have been another Judge Crater mystery.”

If there hadn’t been a tire iron in the truck for me to sit on, the fantastic plan would have worked, I thought. I said, “Ask him any questions about Benny Polacek?”

Carl said, “Yeah. He admits driving Benny the night we picked him up, but claims he didn’t know Benny was pushing. Also he claims he knows nothing about his death.”

Lieutenant Wynn said, “Maybe we can get a little more about his relationship with Polacek from his girl after Robbery is through with her.”

I had an idea that getting anything out of Connie would be equivalent to getting the combination of his vault from Jack Benny, but I had stopped expressing opinions to Wynn.

I said, “Robbery will want this character, too. Maybe they’ll trade us for Connie for a while.” I turned to Kossack. “Now that you’re cooked on the Whittington Steel killing anyway, do you have any more to say about Benny Polacek?”

He merely tightened his lips and shook his head.

We got nothing at all from the man. Eventually we took him over to Robbery Division and swapped him for his blonde girl friend. Under questioning she had finally admitted that her full name was Corinne Quantrail and had given a rooming-house address as her place of residence. Robbery had found a previous record on her for harboring criminals, possession of stolen money, and, once, for acting as a lookout during an armed robbery. She had twice served one-year sentences in the women’s prison.

Corinne Quantrail wasn’t admitting anything aside from her name and address, though. She denied knowing Benny Polacek or ever hearing Kossack speak of him. After a half-hour of nothing we gave up and took her back to Robbery Division.

Meanwhile, I had been brought up to date on the activities of the other members of our joint Homicide-Narcotics team. Carter and Lincoln had been unable to locate Harry Grimaldi, but they had a lead on an ex-girl friend who might know his current address. The girl friend was out of town, but was due back on an eight A.M. train tomorrow. Carter and Lincoln planned to meet her at Union Station when she got off the train.

What Wynn had accomplished was a little hazy to me. I gathered he had revisited Charles Kossack’s ex-landlady, getting no more from her than Hank Carter had the previous night. Otherwise he seemed to have done nothing all day but question Kossack and send people scurrying around the building looking for me.

By now it was five-thirty P.M., a half-hour past normal quitting time. Figuring I had put in a full day, I didn’t bother to ask Lieutenant Wynn if he expected us to work overtime. I just logged out. Ordinarily he liked to tell his minions they could go home, like a colonel dismissing his troops, but this time he made no objection. Maybe, for once, he thought I’d put in a full enough day.

Before leaving the squadroom, I phoned my apartment. April answered instantly.

“Sorry I couldn’t phone you at four,” I said. “I was tied up. I’m leaving for home right now.”

“I’ll have dinner ready when you get here, honey,” she said. “Who’s Beverly?”

“Huh?” I said. “What about her?”

“She phoned ten minutes after you left this morning. I didn’t want to get you in trouble, in case she’s something important in your life, so I told her I was the cleaning maid.”

Now here was an understanding woman, I thought. “Thanks,” I said sincerely. “What did she want?”

“She said she was worried that you might oversleep. Why would she think you’d oversleep, honey? She couldn’t have known how late you were up.”

There was no way I could explain that, for I doubted that April would be that understanding. I said, “Don’t worry about it, kitten. See you in about twenty minutes.”

I got home at ten to six. April said dinner would be ready at a quarter after, which gave me time for a quick shower and a cocktail before we sat down.

As we sat in the front room sipping martinis, April said, “Tell me something about your work, honey. I don’t suppose it’s anything like the cops on television, is it? I mean, instead of all that excitement, it’s probably pretty dull and routine, isn’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Today, for instance, I cracked a payroll robbery, got taken for a ride in the process, and escaped from my captors by killing one of them.”

She grinned at me. “You certainly have a dry sense of humor.”

“I’m a card,” I admitted, deciding to let her read about it in the newspapers.

It was a more conventional dinner than breakfast had been. April wore her dress. It wasn’t a particularly good dinner, though. I don’t know what I expected. I suppose it was a little unreasonable of me to expect a chorus girl who lived in a furnished room to be an accomplished chef. But I had hoped for more than a couple of warmed-up TV dinners.

That’s what we had. I was gentlemanly about it and complimented her on her cooking. I even offered to repay what she had spent, but she said the treat was on her.

The dessert was nice, though. The dessert was April. And by then I had recovered enough from the previous night to enjoy it.

At eight-thirty I dropped her off in front of the Palace.

“Are you going to pick me up again at two, honey?” she asked.

“Not tonight,” I said. “Every so often I have to sleep. Maybe tomorrow night.”

“All right,” she said agreeably. “I’ll be here whenever you’re ready.”

Again I thought that she was a very understanding woman. Maybe she was a lousy cook, but at least she wasn’t demanding.

When I walked into my apartment at nine o’clock, the phone was ringing. Picking it up, I said, “Hello.”

“I was just about to hang up,” Beverly Arden’s voice said. “I thought maybe you were out for the evening.”

“Not tonight,” I said. “I plan to be in bed in five minutes.”

“Umm,” she said. “If you leave your door unlocked, maybe a little surprise will slip in with you later on.”

“You’d get a surprise, too,” I said. “You wouldn’t be able to wake me up. I plan to sleep straight on through without moving until seven in the morning.”

After a moment of silence, she said, “That sounds like you don’t want me to drop by.”

“Suit yourself,” I told her. “But if you wake me up, I’ll kick you out of bed. I’m falling on my face.”

“What a grumpy old man you are,” she said, and hung up.

I fell into bed and slept for ten hours.

The next day was Sunday, but that doesn’t mean anything to a cop. Ordinarily Sunday is Carl’s and my day off, but when you’re hot on a case, you work straight on through seven days a week. I checked into the squadroom at eight-thirty.

Lieutenant Wynn was already there, and Carter and Lincoln came in together about fifteen minutes later.

As they logged in, Lieutenant Wynn asked Carter, “You meet that woman at the train, Sergeant?”

“Yes, sir,” Carter said. “She says she thinks Harry Grimaldi is living in a rooming house down on Kosciuszko Street.” Taking a notebook from his pocket, he consulted it. “Fourteen twenty-two Kosciuszko. She claims she isn’t his girl friend any more, but says he was living there a couple of weeks ago.”

Carl Lincoln said, “She also says he’s living there under the name of Harry Gamble, not Grimaldi.”

Wynn said, “Rudowski and I will move in on him. I have something else for you and Carter, Corporal.”

“Yes, sir,” Carl said. “What’s that?”

“As I mentioned yesterday, we didn’t hit any of the neighbors along the block where Benny Polacek lived. You and Sergeant Carter can spend the day checking with everyone in the area. It’ll take all day, because the block’s all apartment buildings, both sides of the street, and there must be a hundred or more families in all. Maybe you’ll turn up somebody who saw a green Cadillac driving around the neighborhood that night.”

“A green Cadillac?” Carl asked.

“That’s what Goodie White drives.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t have to confine yourself to that single question, of course. Anything at all out of the way that happened along the block that night might be of value.”

Carl gave him a peculiar look. He wasn’t used to having assignments explained to him as though he were a slightly retarded rookie.

“Yes, sir,” he said dryly. “We’ll ask all the right questions.”

Wynn glanced at him sharply, suspecting a touch of insubordination. But Carl’s face was entirely guileless. Wynn decided to skip it.

This was the second day in a row that Hank Carter had drawn Lincoln as his partner instead of having to work with the lieutenant. He looked nearly happy as he and Carl walked out of the squadroom together.

“Let’s go net this Grimaldi man,” Wynn said to me.

On the way we stopped by Robbery Division to find how they had made out with Charlie Kossack and Connie Quantrail. Charlie had broken and had signed a full confession, admitting his part in the payroll robbery and his shooting of the guard. He had also admitted that his dealing with Benny Polacek had been in an attempt to talk the man into acting as his partner in a series of supermarket holdups. He insisted he knew nothing about Polacek’s death. He claimed that two days after Polacek’s arrest he had accidentally run into Casmir Kuzniki, whom he’d known from years back, and that the bank robber had recruited him for the payroll robbery. Thereafter he had no interest in Polacek, and had neither seen the man nor talked to him on the phone.

Robbery had gotten nothing out of Connie, who seemed to be made of harder stuff than her boy friend. Even after Kossack’s statement was read to her, she refused to admit having any part in the robbery.