Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 31, No. 4. Whole No. 173, April 1958

Thomas Walsh A Chump to Hold the Bag[1]

What makes a cop? Blue shirt, blue pants, blue coat, some buttons, a shield, and a gun? No, there’s more to a cop than that.

The one sound came from behind him distinct and flat but not very loud, so that at first Mickey Gavegan wasn’t altogether sure whether or not it was a shot. As soon as he heard it, he stopped on the pavement and turned completely about, looking back uneasily along the row of tenements that lined this side of the street to the corner. It came from somewhere in there, Mickey Gavegan thought, the uneasiness stirring stronger in him.

A woman ran out onto the lamplit street through the front door of the house on the corner. Mickey Gavegan heard one word in the frantic shrillness of her screams: “Police! Police! Police!”

He looked back at her uncertainly with a lumpy panic catching at his breath. He took one step toward her and stopped, and then, when a police whistle squealed on the avenue, without thinking, instinctively, he turned and ran up the low stoop behind him. Pounding through a dim hall there, out a rear door to a yard, across a fence to another yard beyond, he stopped breathlessly in the shadow of a building — big and awkward in a well-worn gray suit, with a felt hat turned down in front cutting all light sharply away from his eyes and the pointed, high angles of his cheekbones. Why had he run? He was just coming home from the movies, walking along—

Blocks away a police-car siren whined intolerably against the night. He licked his lips at the sound, turned toward it, hesitated, then froze. A window went up somewhere above him; in the street beyond, the woman’s voice, insane and uncontrolled, screamed on wildly. Another window was raised; one man called to another across the court. Mickey Gavegan ran into the hallway, through a front door, out to the street.

A car racing up from the avenue missed him by a foot as he crossed the road; he was scarcely conscious of it. He ran through an alley, cut west two blocks, north another, slowing to a fast walk that kept him half concealed in the shadows of the buildings, with the siren passing him on the way, whining and close, pouring its incredible rasp over all other sounds like a sea of solid chaos extending about him with the speed of light.

He couldn’t control the panic it roused in him. Even when he had reached his doorway, his fingers trembled clumsily when he grabbed his keys, and perspiration stung his forehead, blurred on the lashes of his small black eyes. Crazy, he thought; what was wrong with him? But only after he had slipped quietly up four flights of stairs to the top-floor front apartment he shared with Luke Daly did the tight band loosen in his chest.

He did not switch on the lights. Stripping off his clothes quickly, getting into bed so that everything would be innocent and quiet when Luke Daly got home, two sullen lines creased into the flesh around, his stubby nose. Cops — this time they couldn’t question him.

Wakeful in the dark, he thought bitterly about that other time, remembering that he’d been dumb then, a kid, telling them the truth over and over, stupid enough to think they were going to believe it. He admitted he was in the car; he admitted he was driving it. But he didn’t know it was stolen, and he didn’t know Jack Bohannon was pulling any holdup.

That night, he said, he was just hanging around the corner when Jack Bohannon pulled up and asked him if he’d like to try the new bus out. So they rode around for a while, Mickey Gavegan driving, and then they stopped on the avenue because Bohannon said he wanted to get some cigarettes. And Bohannon went into the store, and after a while came out again, running, with; a guy after him, yelling, and a cop coming out from somewhere. He just sat there, Mickey Gavegan said; he didn’t know what it was all about. And then Bohannon ducked into a subway entrance because the cop was between him and the car, and Mickey Gavegan got out from behind the wheel kind of nervous, thinking maybe he’d better beat it too. He was just beginning to walk away when somebody pointed at him, and the cop grabbed him. And then he was hooked; then, no matter how many times he told his story, nobody would believe him.

The prosecutor didn’t; the jury didn’t; the judge didn’t — he gave young Michael Gavegan two and a half years.

So he went up the river and served his time. His mother was dead then, and only Luke Daly came up once a month to see him. Bohannon had been smart; Bohannon had skipped out. No one around the neighborhood saw him or heard of him. After a while Mickey Gavegan didn’t even bother to ask Luke Daly about him...

In the yard, at exercise time, Mickey Gavegan heard a lot of stories about cops — how yellow they were, how crooked, how cruel. Everyone had his own story about them, and Mickey Gavegan never got tired listening to them. Cops! Mickey Gavegan got to spitting out of the corner of his mouth whenever anybody mentioned one.

Then, after he got out and went to live with Luke Daly while he hunted a job, Luke made the list — and became a cop.

In the morning papers the next day, after Luke Daly had gone off to duty, he read that a man named Dingbat Green had been shot dead in a tenement doorway at half-past eleven last night. His wife had heard the shot and found him in the entry; she had heard some people running through the yard but she had not seen them, and she had not seen Mickey Gavegan. He read all the papers, and all said the same thing. No one had seen him; he was safe.

That night, smoking in the armchair with his eyes wrinkled up thoughtfully in his lean homely face, Luke Daly gave him his idea of it.

“It ties in with those four guys who got away with a hundred thousand in that payroll job,” he said. “We found that out. This Dingbat was talking about it in O’Brien’s place last night, an hour before he was killed — saying he’d get his cut out of that or something was going to break. Joe Glennon got a tip on what was going on and went down there to pick Dingbat up, but missed him by five minutes. He was on his way over to the house when Dingbat got it.”

“Dingbat liked his liquor,” Mickey Gavegan said. “I guess it made him talk too much.”

Luke Daly said slowly, “This is how I figure it, Mike. Whoever bossed that payroll job was smart enough to know what anybody like Dingbat Green would do with twenty grand or so in his pocket. He knew he’d tear the town wide open and put the finger right on himself — and on the others too. So I think he didn’t split the money right away — he gave them maybe a couple of hundred each and held back the rest until things got quieter. But Dingbat gets drunk and begins to bellyache, and this other bird hears what he’s saying, or somebody passes him the word. So he rubs out Dingbat right away, to save himself — and maybe to split what’s left just three ways instead of four.”

“I guess that’s it,” Mickey Gavegan agreed, trying not to seem too interested. He looked at a bracelet Luke Daly had bought that day for his girl; and afterward, when Luke Daly, all decked out, had started out to see her, he sat around for a while reading the papers again.

His face looked dull and tired when he raised it at the knock on the door. He said, “Huh? Come in,” and a thin man in a brown topcoat and a soft hat turned down all around opened the door, closed it after him, and leaned against it with his hands in his pockets.

“Hello, Gavegan,” he said, his small mouth smiling in his long, pale face. “How’re tricks?”

Mickey Gavegan looked at him across the room; he knew him right away. “Bohannon,” he said. “Jack Bohannon. What—” His throat got kind of dry; he swallowed to clear it.

“Yeah,” Bohannon said, jerking his head backward. “I seen Daly go out a couple of minutes ago. When’s he due back?”

“Late,” Mickey Gavegan said automatically. Up there where they’d sent him he used to think that he’d meet Jack Bohannon again; and when he did— Something tingled in his fingers, as if a charged wire had touched him, and he got out of his chair slowly.

“Wait a minute,” Bohannon said. He didn’t move; his voice was casual. “Listen to what I got to tell you before you act up. I never knew you took the rap for that holdup until I got back in town last month; I figured you scrammed out of there the way I did. Why in hell didn’t you?”

“Maybe,” Mickey Gavegan said huskily, “because I didn’t know what it was.”

In the pale face across from him the brows arched outward in a shallow V.

“No,” Bohannon said, watching him curiously. “I guess you didn’t. You were always slow on the uptake.” His voice was soft but his dark eyes were cold and serious. “As soon as I heard about it I figured I owed you something. Not that I’m scared of you— Don’t get ideas. I’m no corner punk any more, Gavegan. I been around. I got connections, good connections. In Chi—” He raised his brows again. “That ain’t here or there. I got a grand in my pocket, Gavegan — it don’t square everything but it’ll help.”

“A grand?” Mickey Gavegan repeated. His mind did not take in the words; he spoke only because Bohannon paused.

“That’s it.” Bohannon nodded, watching him directly. “For what I owe you, and for something I want you to do. There’s a guy I want to get in touch with, Gavegan, only he’s ducked out of sight and I don’t know where to find him. He’s got a sister on the west side who could locate him — but she’s never gonna do it for me. Just tonight, when I heard you were living with Daly, I got an idea how maybe you could work it out of her.”

Raising his head so that his chin was tilted up, he nodded to the bedroom. “All you have to do is to put on the uniform Luke Daly’s got in there. Then you’re a cop, see? You’re pretty near his size and it would fit you all right; she won’t know any different. You tell her you’re from the D.A.’s office and they want to get in touch with her brother. You say they want to protect him because they heard he’s in trouble and somebody’s plannin’ to knock him off. That’ll scare her all right; she’ll tell you where he is then. Ain’t you a cop? So you pick him up and take him to where I tell you—”

His hands spread wide on the table, his head lowered between his shoulders, Mickey Gavegan stared at him with glittering eyes.

For a moment Bohannon considered him. Then he said in an edged voice, “Or maybe I got to get tough with you. You want that, Gavegan? After that guy was shot last night I saw you running away, scared as hell. Say the cops got that tip phoned in to them tonight. You think they’d want to know why?”

“What?” Mickey Gavegan asked thickly. “You can’t pull that. I never—”

“The cops might believe you,” Bohannon said. He showed his teeth delicately, like a cat smiling. “And maybe they won’t.”

His voice stopped carelessly there. Cold inside, not scared, but upset and uneasy, Mickey Gavegan tried to think this out. But it was confused in his head, offering no place from which to start.

Bohannon gave him no time. Lifting his left arm, he glanced at his wrist watch.

“I got a black coupe parked downstairs with the keys in it. You get into it with Daly’s uniform on in fifteen minutes or that call goes in to headquarters.” Looking up, his eyes narrowed. “Or don’t you think it would?”

Shaking his head, Mickey Gavegan said slowly, “I guess it would go in all right, Bohannon.”

“I guess so too,” the pale man added. He threw a piece of paper to the table. “The first address is where this sister lives; the second is where you bring this Joe Larkin when you get him. If he squawks about not going to headquarters you say the D.A. wants to see him personal; he’s not taking chances on any leak from his office.” He opened the door, nodded, said, “Fifteen minutes,” and left.

Even after Mickey Gavegan was alone, it seemed hard to get it all straight in his head. He thought of those guys in the cell block — how many claimed they had been framed? Say some of them lied; a few had told the truth. They’d done it to the other men and they’d do it to Gavegan. Unless...

He walked into the bedroom, opened the closet door, and looked at Luke Daly’s uniform. Blue shirt, blue pants, blue coat, blue tie — some buttons, a shield, a holster, a gun. Then he looked at the paper Bohannon had left, which he held mechanically now in his hand. Ann Larkin, 441 Court Terrace; and under that 64 Arverne Road, Ransom’s Beach.

He put the paper on the dresser, next to the jeweler’s box that held the bracelet Luke Daly had shown him. Luke had forgotten that, he thought; but he’d be over at his girl’s house probably before he found it out. Too late anyway to come back for it; he wouldn’t be home now till twelve or one. And Mickey Gavegan could be through then, and safe; the suit would be hanging up the way Luke had left it, as if it had never been touched. Only—

Mickey Gavegan forced his mind away from that only. He kept it as empty and thoughtless as he could. He took off his clothes and put on Luke Daly’s. Then he went out to the hall, listened there, and started down quietly, his head lowered.

Nobody met him in the hall; nobody noticed him on the street. He got into the black coupe that was parked where Bohannon had said it would be and drove across town to 441 Court Terrace. The number and the name were very clear in his mind; he did not have to look at Bohannon’s paper. The number and the name, Ann Larkin — they might have been painted on a board before his eyes.

When she came into the front room where the landlady had asked Mickey Gavegan to wait, this Ann Larkin had a tension in her features that showed mostly in the trembling line of her lips.

“Yes?” she said, in a shaky voice, looking at him as he sat on the couch, in Luke Daly’s uniform, with Luke Daly’s cap on his knee. She was a tall girl, with steady, rather serious brown eyes, very slender in a dark blue dress. Her eyes were bright now with anxiety or fright, he could not tell which; but the moment he saw her, Mickey Gavegan knew he wouldn’t have any trouble here,

Bohannon had been right: the uniform was enough. Mickey Gavegan repeated what Bohannon had told him to say, calm now, sure of himself, everything conquered, even the shame; and she listened to him quietly, her eyes meeting his, dropping away from them, all the while he spoke.

For a moment after he stopped she was silent; then she looked up at him again and said what, of all things, Mickey Gavegan had not expected her to say. She said in a soft breath, as if she weren’t frightened any more: “I’m glad you came. It’s — Joe will be glad too. He wanted to go to the police before — I told him to. But always, at the end, he was afraid to. Afraid of what that man would do. Joe wouldn’t even tell me where he was living. All I have is a phone number.”

When Mickey Gavegan asked her what that was, she shook her head at him.

“No. He wouldn’t be there now — he never is before eleven. I think it’s a restaurant where he goes to eat. They always have to see if he’s there. But I’ll go with you now, wherever you want; I’ll call you for him at eleven. You see—” she looked at him with a timid, painful smile — “it may help him if I’m there. Please take me, too.”

“I can’t do that,” Mickey Gavegan said. Bohannon wouldn’t like this at all. “Sorry, lady.”

“But I’m going,” she told him, in an unsteady voice. “Why not? He hasn’t done anything wrong. If they just want to talk to him I can be there. I can help.”

It struck Mickey Gavegan that if he protested too much she might get obstinate; she might insist on calling the DA.’s office herself.

The fall night, damp and rainy, seemed to seclude them very close together in the little coupe. As soon as they started off, she began to talk about her brother and that man he’d met. After a while Mickey Gavegan realized who she meant: Bohannon.

Moving around in his seat, grunting answers, he began to wish savagely that she’d shut up; he wasn’t asking her life’s history. How she’d left the small town upstate when her mother died, how she came here, got a job, and sent for Joe. Maybe, she said, it was all her fault, because if she hadn’t sent for him he’d still be back home; he’d never have met that man. Did he — her face turned dimly to him — did he think this would be very serious?

Maybe not, he said shortly. He thought they could fix this up all right. Yes — her voice lifted there. They could, couldn’t they? It wasn’t as if Joe had done anything terrible; he’d just taken the bag Bohannon had given him and put it in a safe-deposit box downtown. He didn’t know what was in it; and when he suspected, from what Bohannon let slip one night, he was afraid to go to the police, he slipped out of sight because he didn’t want to have anything to do with it. That was all he’d done, and they couldn’t punish him for it, when they understood how it was. The bag? The one with the money — the money Bohannon and his friends had stolen last month in the payroll holdup.

Mickey Gavegan remembered then what Luke Daly had said about the holdup, and Dingbat Green and the leader who must be Bohannon; and he remembered the car that had passed him last night. That’s where Bohannon had seen him, from the car, after he’d killed the other man. And he’d hooked in Joe Larkin the way he’d hooked in Mickey Gavegan years ago — a chump to hold the bag, a sucker who didn’t know what was going on.

Mickey Gavegan’s lips were strangely colorless in his set face went they came to the little village of Ransom’s Beach, and he stepped under a light to look at the address on Bohannon’s paper again.

Around them all the store fronts were dark, the streets deserted; rows of cottages sloped desolately away under the indifferent pale pools of street lights. He looked through his pockets for Bohannon’s paper once, twice, a third time; he didn’t find it. In his other suit maybe, left there when he changed. But Arverne Road anyway, and a low number; he remembered that much. The coupé went on more slowly then, until on a corner signpost he saw the letters he was watching for.

There was only one bungalow lit up, far down near the beach; he pulled in to the curb before it and told her to stay in the car, for he knew he had to see Bohannon alone, and tell him she was there too. Because she had said she knew Bohannon; and if she saw him first she’d never call her brother. She’d know then that Gavegan—

“I’ll be back,” he said harshly. “I’m not sure this is it.”

After he rang, Bohannon opened the door, but his thin body was sheltered from the car by Mickey Gavegan’s bulkier one. In the hall, with the door closed, Mickey Gavegan told him how it was; he listened, fretting at his lower lip.

“She knows me all right,” he said when Mickey Gavegan was done. “You’ll have to get her to put in the call. Tell her you’re a little early, and the D.A. won’t be here for a while. After she calls him I’ll run things. That call is all we want out of her.”

Outside on the street she was standing by the car, looking around. It was dark here, she said — scary. And her hand clung to his arm all the way up the stoop — a small hand he could crush in his, a hand that weighed nothing at all.

Mickey Gavegan seemed to feel it there even after they got inside, and he looked at his watch and said maybe she could call now; it was almost eleven. The touch of her hand seemed still on the coat. From the hall he heard her dial.

He went out to the kitchen and nodded silently at Bohannon, and then, when the other man went inside, he lit a cigarette. After a moment, when he heard her voice muted through the walls, he went out to the corridor that ran into the living-room arch.

He didn’t know what he was going to do. Why had he left the kitchen? There was a small room on his right that he looked into absently, his head aching — a tiny, bare pantry with one window high up in it not wide enough for a man. It was odd why he examined the room so very carefully, why he stood there motionless in the hall, listening to Ann Larkin’s voice, panicky and breathless, in the room beside him. You aren’t — this isn’t — her chair pushed back. Where was the policeman?

“Who?” Bohannon said. Mickey Gavegan heard him chuckle — low, not too amused. “I guess the suit fits him pretty good at that, baby; only it ain’t his. He’s no more a cop than I am. Gavegan!”

When he stopped in the archway her eyes watched him with a kind of incredulous horror.

Mickey Gavegan did not look at her at all; he stood there rigidly, in Luke Daly’s uniform, like a statue.

“I guess there ain’t a cop within a mile of here,” Bohannon said, “but at that I guess you could take a gander around from upstairs, Gavegan. See if anybody’s getting nosy about the lights.”

The girl never said a word; she just kept watching him as if she had lost the power to move her eyes. They seemed to stay on him when he went out to the stairs, and her hand, too, remained tangible on his arm. Upstairs, in a dark bedroom, he stood by a window.

A car came down the street, slowing as it passed the house. A cheap black sedan, like the one Luke Daly had, it reached the end of the block, turned around in a driveway there, and passed the house once more. On the boulevard it stopped a moment and then turned left, out of sight. Somebody looking for a number, he thought; there were a million models like Luke Daly’s around. Still his heart began to beat unsteadily, and the quiet around him became an oppressive thing whose weight he could not endure.

So down the stairs again, into the living room, where Jack Bohannon sat on a corner of the table, and the girl, her eyes shaded darkly, moved her head aside as he came in so that she did not have to look at him. “All quiet?” Bohannon asked. Gavegan nodded. It wasn’t Luke Daly; it couldn’t be. For how could Luke Daly know where he was?

But while they sat there, waiting for Joe Larkin, things began to come together in Mickey Gavegan’s mind. There was the paper Bohannon had given him, which he had lost; and there was the bracelet Luke Daly had bought for his girl, Had Gavegan put the paper on the dresser, forgetting it completely after he changed, so that Luke Daly, missing the bracelet before he reached his girl’s house, came back for it and found the paper by its side?

If it was there, Luke Daly would have found it, and he’d have seen Mickey Gavegan’s gray suit rumpled on the bed. He’d have looked in the closet and found the uniform gone, and then puzzled, worried, he’d have driven over to the first address, the landlady’s. And she’d have told him Miss Larkin had gone out some time ago. Yes. With a policeman. Was there any trouble?

He could see Luke Daly, cursing him, perplexed, not wanting to get him into any mess, coming down here to see what it was all about. Impersonating an officer — they could send Mickey Gavegan up for that—

In the house, in the dark kitchen, there was something that might have been the creak of a floorboard, the rasp of a door. Mickey Gavegan coughed and made the chair creak under him to cover it; when Bohannon looked at him he said to smother it entirely:

“I been thinking, Bohannon. A car passed me last night, maybe a minute after the shot; you could have seen me from inside it. Say you did — then you’re the guy who killed the Dingbat.”

“I am?” Bohannon said, in a lazy voice, as if he was just repeating the statement. But his eyes grew watchful — flat and depthless.

“You always used your head,” Mickey Gavegan went on, trying to make himself believe that he only imagined the sound, he was imagining another, fainter, almost indistinguishable, that could have been the scuffle of a shoe on oilcloth. “You always had a sucker — me for that cigar store holdup, and Joe Larkin for this. That’s the way you work, isn’t it?”

“Then maybe it’s a good way,” Bohannon answered softly, regarding him with watchfulness, but no alarm. “I never got picked up, Gavegan. I roped you into that holdup — hell, it’s over and done with now; you didn’t know any more about what was going on than a baby. But you want to remember that they hooked you for it all the way, the way they’d hook you for killing the Dingbat if I talk. Unless—”

He turned his head sharply, as if he heard something now that Mickey Gavegan had not caught. Getting up suddenly and silently from the table, he was past the archway in two strides, peering down the hall. Then he snarled something and the hand in his coat pocket jerked up; sound and smoke rebounded from the wall in a roll of clamorous enormity.

The girl was on her feet. Had she screamed? Mickey Gavegan, not conscious of moving, was in the archway behind Bohannon’s crouching form. “In the pantry,” Bohannon said breathlessly. “A guy.”

Straightening clear of the arch, with his body pressed flat to the wall and the gun extended before him in his right hand, Bohannon moved forward carefully on his toes. Behind him, Mickey Gavegan moved too, one step into the passage, with Luke Daly’s gun in his hand, and Luke Daly’s uniform on his back.

“Bohannon,” Mickey Gavegan said. The band at his temple snapped with the word; his body lost its pain and its shame; it became in an instant supple and careful.

The pale man turned, and they looked at each other, and Luke Daly’s gun was solid and sure in Mickey Gavegan’s hand. For a moment Bohannon just watched him; then in a quiet and persuasive tone he said, “If you’ll use your head, Gavegan, if you’ll let me handle this the safe way—”

His voice was so quiet, his eyes so steady and sensible, that Mickey Gavegan did not watch his gun. The reports came, one, two, three, rapid and wild, even while Bohannon spoke.

The hall was quiet then. Smoke whirled and eddied in it like lazy fog. And Jack Bohannon lay very still, clumsily sprawled out, on the floor...

In the living room Luke Daly made him tell it all — how he got scared and ran at the shot last night because he didn’t want to get mixed up in anything, how Bohannon came to see him, how he thought that if he didn’t do what Bohannon wanted him to...

“You couldn’t tell me,” Luke Daly said bitterly. “You couldn’t do anything as brilliant as that. This mess now—” He went to the window and looked out; coming back he said, “I don’t think anybody heard us; I didn’t see a light for blocks around. Give me the gun, Gavegan. I killed him. I heard him call the girl from a saloon and I followed him here and shot him when he fired at me.”

“What?” Mike Gavegan asked huskily. “You can’t do that. I won’t let you.”

“Who shot Bohannon?” Luke Daly asked the girl. His voice was tight and savage. “You know, sister. You’re the only one who does. They sent him up once for something he never did — you heard Bohannon say that. And now this goes the way you tell it. Who shot Bohannon?”

“You shot him,” she said. But she had turned to Luke Daly then. “I saw you. You came in and—”

“Sister,” Luke Daly said, with his eyes gleaming, “we’ll cook something up. Get into the coupe and scram out of here. Mike, take off the cap and the shield and no one will spot you. I’ll give you five minutes before I call the precinct.”

Half pulling Mickey Gavegan out across the porch, he said something else — that maybe they could clear the other business up. The holdup three years ago. And if they did, if the commission believed what Luke Daly and the girl would have to tell them about what Bohannon had admitted back there, that he didn’t have anything to do with that holdup at all, that he hadn’t known anything more about it than a baby—

“Maybe,” Luke Daly said, shoving him into the car, “maybe you’re not too dumb to make a pretty good cop.”

He bounced back up the stairs. Mickey Gavegan stared after him and then got the coupe in gear. Driving off through the rain, he thought of unbelievable things.

Gavegan the cop — and the girl—

He drove on faster, once touching the cap beside him. There was a curious lightness in him, a prickling like bubbles in all his veins. Say he made the list — say, one day, he got in touch with her again. He remembered her fingers on his arm. Would they ever be there again?

Maybe they would, he thought. Just once — that was all he wanted. For even now, sure in his mind, was the knowledge that he would never let them go.