Death of a Pusher

Chapter 5

Herman Joyce phoned me at the squadroom just as we were logging in at five the following afternoon. I told him everything was set for seven the next evening.

“Better ask Captain Parker if you can get off duty at four P.M.,” I said. “That’ll give you time to change into bowling dress, grab something to eat, and get over here to pick up the camera by five-thirty. I want you out at the White Bowl by six-thirty, in case Polacek shows early. Did you get the place cased the other night?”

“Yeah. There’s a bench along the wall facing the lane-reservation desk. I can catch Benny the moment he walks in the front door and pan him right over to the desk.”

“Fine. You be on the bench at six-thirty, and start shooting as soon as Benny shows. Carl and I will watch from the entrance until the transfer is made, then move in. You keep on grinding right through the arrest and shakedown. O.K.?”

“I’ve got it, Sarge. See you at five-thirty tomorrow.”

Except for my conversation with Joyce, Thursday was a dead night. Ordinarily we would have been out shadowing suspected pushers, but with the big moment approaching, we didn’t want to chance causing the whole ring to run for cover for the sake of routing a few small fry. Carl and I devoted our time to catching up on desk work.

At eleven P.M. the squadroom phone rang. The extension on the table where we were working was closest to me, so I answered.

When I said, “Narcotics, Sergeant Rudd,” a crisp voice said in my ear, “Who? Is that you, Rudowski?”

Aside from Captain Spangler, only one man on the force insists on using my legal name. I recognized the voice as that of Lieutenant Robert Wynn of Homicide.

“Yes, sir, Lieutenant,” I said. I’m on a first-name basis with most police lieutenants, but Robert Wynn is G.I. Nobody of lesser rank calls him anything but Lieutenant or Sir.

“Who’s working the Heroin Detail, Sergeant?”

“Lincoln and I, Lieutenant.”

“Good,” he said in the same crisp tone. “Take this down. Ready?”

Pulling over a scratch pad, I reached for a pencil and said, “Go ahead.”

“Apartment Two-B, 427 Clarkson Boulevard. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll expect you in fifteen minutes,” Wynn said, and hung up.

When I set down the phone, Carl gave me an inquiring look.

“His Lordship, Lieutenant General Wynn,” I said. “He wants us vassals over at an address on Clarkson this instant.”

“For what?”

“He didn’t deign to say,” I said, rising. “Ours not to question why — ours just to rise and fly.”

Carl wrinkled his long nose. “Maybe he wants you for murdering poetry.”

Unfolding his lanky frame, he followed me from the squadroom. Halfway down the stairs, I came to such an abrupt stop that Carl nearly ran over me.

“What the hell?” he said involuntarily.

I looked over my shoulder at him. “He said four twenty-seven Clarkson.”

“Huh?” Carl said. “That’s Benny Polacek’s address.”

“I know. And Wynn said Apartment Two-B. I have a sinking feeling that Benny won’t be setting up Goodie White for us tomorrow night.”

“We’ll never find out, standing here in the middle of a flight of stairs,” Carl said. “Get your big hulk moving.”

We went the rest of the way down the stairs on the double.

Four twenty-seven Clarkson Boulevard was an old but well-kept-up apartment house in a respectable middle-income residential section. It was a three-story, eighteen-unit building of four- and five-room apartments which probably rented at sixty to seventy-five dollars a month. There were similar apartment buildings on either side of it and on the opposite side of the street, one across the avenue rising to six stories.

There were a police car and an ambulance parked in front of the building, and a uniformed cop was stationed at the front entrance. As we pulled up, a couple of ambulance attendants carried an empty stretcher down the front steps, loaded it in the ambulance, and drove away.

“Oh-oh,” Carl said. “Looks like whoever they came after decided to wait for the morgue wagon.”

A crowd of neighbors had gathered on the sidewalk. Among them I recognized Detective First Grade Howard Graves, who had been assigned to stakeout duty that night. Graves moved over to us when he saw us climb from the felony car.

“What’s the story?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. First I knew anything was up was when I heard the sirens. I didn’t think I ought to leave my post and go inside to investigate. There’s enough cops in there to handle whatever it is.”

I grunted and moved on, Carl trailing behind me.

The cop on the front entrance halted us until I showed my badge, then stepped aside.

“What happened in there?” I asked him.

“A shooting, I think. There’s some Homicide cops inside.”

We went on inside. There was a bank of mailboxes in the lobby with name cards beneath them. I glanced at the one beneath box 2-B, hoping I had remembered Benny Polacek’s apartment number wrong.

I hadn’t. The card said: Benjamin Polacek.

“Let’s go upstairs and get the bad news,” I said to Carl.

The door to Apartment 2-B was closed, but directly across the hall from it the door to 2-A stood open. Glancing through it, I saw the stocky figure of Lieutenant Wynn, his back to the door. A dark, handsome young man of about twenty-five sat on a sofa facing the door.

As I paused in the doorway, the young man said, “Bluster all you want to, Lieutenant. As my sister’s doctor I say she’s in no condition to stand questioning right now. You’re not going to see her.”

“Your sister’s doctor, hell,” Wynn said. “You’ve admitted you’re only a probationary intern at City Hospital. Give me the name of your family doctor, and I’ll get him over here.”

The young intern gave him a deliberately infuriating grin. “You know better than that, Lieutenant. Intern or not, I’m a licensed medical practitioner. If you want another physician to examine my sister, you’ll have to have him bring a court order along.”

I cleared my throat, and Wynn spun to glare at me. “You certainly took your time, Rudowski,” he snapped.

I glanced at my watch. It said eleven-fifteen, just when he’d instructed me to get there. I didn’t point this out, though. The young doctor obviously had him in a bad enough mood already.

The lieutenant strode toward me, and I stepped out of the way to let him pass into the hall. Giving Carl Lincoln a curt nod, he crossed to open the door to 2-B. I followed him into the apartment, and Carl trailed after us.

We entered a front room about eighteen feet long furnished with fairly new but cheap pieces. A lab man was dusting flat surfaces for fingerprints.

Wynn paused to ask him, “Anything?”

“Five sets, so far,” the technician said. “This is the last room.”

Wynn continued on through a small dining room, where a uniformed cop stood doing nothing, and on into a kitchen. Carl and I followed.

There were three people in the kitchen, but only two were standing up. Redheaded Hank Carter, Wynn’s partner, leaned his thin frame against the sink. Carter wore a perpetually sad expression, the probable result of working for years with Wynn. A plump, balding man whom I recognized as one of the medical examiners was just snapping his bag closed.

The third occupant of the room lay on his back next to the stove. It didn’t surprise me that it was Benny Polacek, because I had expected it to be, but his condition discouraged me. He was going to be in no shape to carry out his assignment the next evening, because he was quite dead. He was in shirtsleeves, and the left side of his chest was clotted with blood from what appeared to be at least three bullet wounds. Someone had pushed up Benny’s sleeves to expose his bare arms nearly to the shoulders and had pulled his trousers down until they were bunched around his ankles.

I gave Wynn an inquiring look, and he said, “We were looking for needle marks. There aren’t any.”

The M.E. said, “I’d say time of death conforms to the time the shots were heard, Lieutenant. About ten P.M.”

Wynn merely grunted.

“I’ll send over a written report in the morning,” the M.E. said, and nodding to me and Carl, he picked up his bag and left. Wynn gazed moodily down at the body. Hank Carter regarded Carl and me without speaking. He was a good friend of both of us, but he seldom spoke when Wynn was around.

I glanced about the room.

There was no weapon in sight. From the position of the body and the fact that all wounds were on the left side, it seemed apparent that the man had been standing before the stove, half-facing the doorway, when he was shot from the direction of the doorway. An old-fashioned baked enamel coffeepot stood on one of the burners, and a shattered cup and saucer lay on the floor. I guessed that the dead man had been reaching for the pot to pour a cup of coffee when something caused him to turn part way around, just in time to be shot.

Glancing at the table, I saw that another cup and saucer stood before the chair whose back was to the stove, suggesting that a guest had been present when the murder occurred. And — since it was likely the host would pour the guest’s coffee first — the other person must have been seated with his back to the door, for the empty cup still on the table must have been meant for the dead man.

Lieutenant Wynn said, “Guy’s name was Benjamin Polacek. Know him?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “He was a pusher.”

“What we figured,” Wynn said. “That’s why you’re here. When we didn’t find any needle marks on him, we guessed he must be a pusher. Follow me.”

He strode back out into the dining room, where the lounging patrolman straightened up hurriedly and tried to look as though he were doing something.

He turned into a center hall off which there was a bathroom and a bedroom, and Carl and I followed him into the bedroom.

Wynn opened the top drawer of a dresser and handed me a flat tin box.

“We found this during a routine search of the place,” he said.

The box contained nothing but a hypodermic syringe, a spoon, and a small alcohol lamp, the standard rig of horse riders. Then I noticed the residue of fine white powder which coated the bottom of the box.

Wynn said, “Carter says that powder is heroin.”

Getting a little on my finger, I touched it to my tongue. “Uh-huh. Cut with milk sugar. He must have had papers of the stuff measured out in single pops, and some spilled out. He would have gotten rid of his supply, of course.”

The Homicide officer frowned. “Why do you say that?”

“We nailed him for selling last week. He wouldn’t have risked more trouble by keeping a supply around.”

Wynn’s frown deepened. “If he was arrested last week, what was he doing walking around? Out on bail?”

“He made a deal with the D.A. This was Benny’s fourth fall, so he had a life penalty staring him in the face. It was all arranged for him to make a buy from the local wholesaler tomorrow night while we took moving pictures — but now that’s blown sky high.”

“Who’s the wholesaler?” Wynn asked.

“Councilman Goodman White.”

Wynn stared at me as though I had suddenly grown a hole in my head. “You must be nuts, Sergeant.”

I shrugged. “You can check with the D.A. if you don’t believe me.”

After staring at me some more, the lieutenant decided to believe me. “Then Goodie White must be nuts. I never heard of him being tied to any racket, let alone naroctics.”

“Neither did we,” Carl said. “But now it looks as though he’s violated both taboos in this town. Narcotics and murder.”

The lieutenant and I both looked at him. I said, “You think Goodie pulled this kill to avoid being set up?”

“Well, doesn’t it make sense?”

“How would he know Benny was cooperating with us? Nobody but us, Herman Joyce, Captain Spangler, and the D.A. knew the guy had even been knocked over.”

“Who’s Herman Joyce?” Wynn asked.

“A rookie from Metro we used to play the part of a junkie,” I said. “He wouldn’t talk.”

Wynn said thoughtfully, “Maybe Benny confided his troubles to a girl friend and she ran to White with the story. Or maybe there’s a leak in the D.A.’s office.”

“There is a girl friend who knew he was picked up,” I said, suddenly remembering the honey blonde. “Her name’s April French, and she works in a chorus line somewhere.”

“How’d she know about it?”

“She came down to bail him out. But when she found out it was a narcotics rap, she gave him a disgusted look and walked out. Seems she didn’t know he was a pusher and she was through the minute she found out. She might have sounded off to some of her friends, and the story could have gotten back to Goodie via the grapevine.”

“This Charlie guy knew Benny had been arrested, too,” Carl put in.

“Charlie who?” the lieutenant asked.

“We only know the first name,” I said. “Somebody was driving Benny the night we knocked him over, and the driver got away. When the French girl came to headquarters to bail Benny out, she mentioned that somebody named Charlie had phoned her about the arrest. That had to be the driver, because nobody else knew Benny was in jail.”

Wynn said, “Where’s this French woman work?”

I shrugged. “She didn’t say. Just said she danced in a chorus line.”

“You mean you didn’t take down her address?” Wynn exploded.

I could have explained that since the girl hadn’t been charged with anything, I had no right to ask her a lot of personal questions, and felt I had done pretty well to get as much from her as I had. But you don’t make excuses to Lieutenant Robert Wynn.

I merely said, “No, sir, I didn’t.”