Manhunt. Volume 9, Number 1, February 1961

The Master Mind by Walter Monaghan

There were two down and one to go. The third was the big man, the master mind. I had to get to him in a hurry because there was a general alarm out on me... for murder.

I knew I was trapped the moment I looked out the window of my room. I recognized Monk’s car across the street, backing into a parking space only a few doors up from the hotel. I watched the car slide back to the curb, rock for a moment, then settled down. The front door opened and Monk stepped out. He looked down to the corner, then flashed a look up at my window. I knew he couldn’t see me behind the drape but I shrank back anyway. He walked across to the hotel entrance.

There was no use running for it now. If Monk would come in the front way like that it meant somebody else would be out back — waiting to gun me down like a scared rabbit if they could flush me from cover. These boys were top professionals, they played rough football, and they played for keeps. Well, so did we.

I swore to myself as I backed away from the window. This wasn’t the way I wanted it but now it couldn’t be helped. It had only taken me twenty minutes to tape the miniature microphone and recorder to my thighs and connect the fine wire to the switch to hide in my clothes, but that was twenty minutes too long. I finished dressing quickly — then slumped into the one stuffed chair in the room and leaned back as if I were dozing. The door was locked, but if Monk had a key he wouldn’t knock.

As I waited I wondered if it would have been better to duck right in and away — grab the transistor recorder and put it on somewhere else, instead of trying to do it here. Then I realized that it didn’t matter. Whoever was watching for me would have turned into a tail and followed me until he could reach Monk or one of the others and tell them where I was. This was quicker, it might even work out better. And I was all set now, or as set as I could be, with the little electronic ear all ready to go right to work. I slid my hand into my jacket pocket and turned the tiny switch on. Outside the door I heard the faint sound of a footstep on the soft carpet. I put my hands on the arms of the chair, in plain sight and palms down.

The doorknob turned silently, then it turned back when he found the door locked. A soft tap sounded.

“Huh? Yeah?” I grunted. “Who is it?”

“Telegram for you, Mr. Young.” The voice was much higher than Monk’s.

I almost laughed. One wrong move for Monk. He didn’t have two cents worth of imagination in his whole body. I was tempted to tell him to slide it under the door, but that would only delay things.

“Okay,” I called. “Right away.”

I shuffled over to the door noisily and turned the lock and pulled the door opened. I kept one hand high on the door and the other out front rubbing my eye.

“I wasn’t expecting a telegram from any...” I stopped talking and put the most surprised look on my face I could. “Monk! Am I glad to see you. Come on in.”

He was standing a little off to the right, his 38 automatic held up high in his left hand. It was aimed right at my heart. His face was set, his mouth grim, his eyes bird-bright.

“Monk, what is this?” I said. I thought my voice sounded surprised too.

“Shut up and get back in the room,” he growled.

I backed up fast, my hands still way out front. Monk followed me in and closed the door. Then he locked it carefully. He leaned against the bureau and motioned me into the chair I had just left.

“Now we can have a nice little talk without being disturbed,” he said. “Just sit there nice and quiet and answer my questions. Make one quick move and you’re a dead one. In fact, if you make a slow move you’re a dead one too. Understand?”

“Sure, Monk, sure,” I said. I tried to put a whine in my voice. “What’s this all about, anyway? Coming up here putting a gun on me — I thought I was supposed to be working for you.”

“Yeah, good buddy. I thought you were working for me too. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe you’re working for yourself, or for somebody besides me, or maybe you’re working against me, who knows? Now tell me just what happened this afternoon, right from the beginning. And the first time I catch you in a lie it’s just like you pull the trigger yourself. You don’t know just how much I know about what happened, so let’s have it, real straight.”

That’s where Monk was wrong. I knew more about every single move he’d made all afternoon than he did himself. In fact I think I knew more about Monk Saunders, past, present, and future, than he could ever know himself.

“Okay, okay, Monk,” I said. “You don’t have to wave that gun under my nose. I didn’t know how to get in touch with you or Larry, so I thought the best thing to do was come back here and wait in my room for you. I thought maybe you’d call and give me a meet. I stashed the stuff away so it’s safe. I don’t want any part of it, I just did what I thought was right, so help me, Monk.”

“What happened this afternoon?” Monk repeated. His voice was grim.

“Jeez, Monk, you were there. You know as much about it as I do. After I met you at the bridge we rode down in the subway to Radio City. The guy Pete who was supposed to show me which jeweler to go to sat across from me all the way down, reading a paper. I never even nodded to him. When he got off at 47th Street I followed him, just about ten feet behind, like you said. You saw us, you and Larry in the same car.”

“Yeah, I saw you all right in the subway, but what happened on the street?”

“I followed Pete up the subway steps to the street. Just as he got to the top two coppers grabbed him and pushed him into a cigar store. I had that bag full of stuff and it sure felt awfully heavy right then. I was sure they’d grab me too. There was nothing I could do but keep on going as fast as I could. I did. I figured you and Larry would be right behind me but when I looked for you at the next corner I couldn’t see either of you. I guess I panicked a little but I knew I had to get out of that neighborhood fast, so I just kept travelling until I came to Grand Central. Then I calmed down a bit and thought the best thing to do was stash that stuff someplace real quick.”

“Where is it?” Monk interrupted.

“I put it in a subway locker in Grand Central Station,” I told him. “It was the nearest and best and safest place I could think of. After all, I’m not used to carrying a load of hot jewelry around. Anything could happen, then you’d blame me.”

“Okay, buddy, let’s have the key.” Monk held out his free hand.

I swallowed hard. “Look, Monk, let me explain. These coppers scared me the way they grabbed Pete. As soon as I put the stuff in the locker I got a heavy brown envelope in a store there and mailed the key to myself here at the hotel. Nobody saw me, I’m sure of that. One night last week my parole officer was sitting right here in this room waiting for me to come in, and when I did he tossed me from head to foot. If he was waiting here tonight he’d do the same thing. I just didn’t want to take a single chance, that’s why I did it. The key will be here in the morning mail, Monk. You can stay right here with me and I’ll go down with you to get the stuff. That’s the truth, so help me.”

“Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t,” Monk said. His mouth was still a thin line, his eyes still shiny-bright.

I could read a little relief there, when he heard the stuff was stashed someplace where he might get his hands on it again — the greed showed through.

I knew he’d never kill me until he had his hands on that haul again and right now I was his only chance of doing just that. If that did happen, and I knew it couldn’t, I’d never need my Blue Cross again, but might be able to use a clear title to a little plot in some graveyard.

“That’s a pretty good story,” Monk said slowly. “Trouble is, I don’t believe it. This whole deal today smells, and the more I figure it, the more I think it’s you that stinks.”

“Look, Monk, I did what I thought was right. I did just what you told me to. You got no right saying that to me.”

“I got right,” Monk said. He raised the .38 a little higher on me. “I got all the right I need. Me and Larry and the Boss talked a lot about you tonight, and none of it was good. We even figure you might be a stoolie.”

I half rose out of my chair, my face angry. “I’m no stoolie, Monk. If you didn’t have that gun on me I’d wrap your nose around your face for calling me that. If I was crossing you I could have grabbed a train in Grand Central and been on my way to Chicago with the stuff by now. But I come back here to wait for you to give you your lousy diamonds and you peg me as a stoolie. You and your friends are the ones who stink.”

“Shut up and sit down,” he growled.

I could see I’d scored heavily by the doubt and confusion in his face. Monk was badly rattled by everything that had happened today. He wasn’t a fast thinker and I wanted to keep him off balance.

“What you don’t know,” he continued, “is that when those cops grabbed Pete two young punks with copper written all over them tried to nail me and Larry at the same time. Only we saw them coming and took off real fast. Larry had to belt one of them to get away, but we made it. Then later we couldn’t figure out how come Pete was grabbed so nice and how they tried to grab me and Larry at just the same time. It looks too much like a finger job, and the only finger we can come up with is you. You walk clear away with our diamonds and nobody even looks at you. How come?”

“Are you blaming me because half the detectives in New York hang around the Jewelry Exchange? You paid me five hundred to cart that stuff around for you, just because you thought you might be picked up. You’re known jewel thieves — those coppers probably have your mugs framed on their desks, you know that — then you call me a stoolie. Drop dead!”

Monk’s head snapped up. I saw the red flush of anger creep up around his neck. His hand tightened on the gun. I knew I had gotten under his skin. My only hope was to make him angry enough to stop thinking.

“Too bad you said that, good buddy,” he rasped. “Something else you don’t know is that I saw one of those young coppers coming down on the train with us, so we’re pretty sure it was a finger job. And even Pete didn’t know where we had to meet you. So that leaves only you. Stand up, boy. Lock your hands behind you. I’ll teach you some manners. You ever been pistol-whipped?”

I hadn’t, but I’d seen some guys who had. Empty hulks with part of an ear gone, or their noses smashed in, or no cheekbone where cheekbones should be — and always something on the inside gone forever — walking dead men. Monk would have to kill me before he pistol-whipped me. I stood up shakily, a tight knot growing in my gut but ready for the coming battle. I backed slowly away from him.

“Get your hands behind your back,” he ordered. He came in at me very slowly, a mean smile playing at his lips.

I wasn’t afraid he’d shoot. I was his golden goose, or maybe diamond goose, and he wouldn’t cook me — yet. But that automatic looked awfully big in his mitt. He waved it from side to side like a knife man, always coming closer. He feinted once, but I saw it in his eyes a second before, then I knew a real one was coming.

He brought around a roundhouse, but I was able to roll with it. It caught me over the ear, stinging more than hurting, but I let out a loud groan to make him think I was hurt bad. I’d have t take two or three like that before I went for him. He telegraphed the next one and I rolled with it again and ducked sideways. That one wasn’t as bad, but I groaned louder.

“Shut up, stoolie,” he snarled.

He swung viciously again, but missed completely when I ducked way down. My hand touched something behind me and I knew I had a weapon. It was one of those big, square, glass ash trays, Woolworth’s best, and it weighed at least a half pound.

I had to get him crazy mad to get the gun away from him. “All right, Monk,” I yelled, “I tipped the cops, but I’ve got the diamonds. You can have them, but don’t hit me again! I can’t stand it!”

His face contorted, his eyes seemed to get red, but his greed won. He brought the gun back for a mighty roundhouse that would have clubbed me through the floor. I ducked down, grabbed the ash tray with my right hand and swung it around as hard as I could, right for his eyes. I let it go like a discus inches from his face, then crouched down, ready to spring for his gun hand.

He didn’t have a chance. It must have looked like a bomb to him. It caught him right under his left eye, a sharp corner gouging upward, then it broke against his face bones, the ragged edges cutting across his flesh like a cleaver. The gun flew out of his hand as he jerked his arm up. I dove for it. He stumbled backwards without a sound, blood spurting from his face. Then he fell back and his head cracked against the edge of the bureau, making an ominous, crunching sound. I thought I knew what that meant.

I had his gun in my hand as I went to look at him. His face was a mess, but not bad enough to kill him. But I knew he was dead. I felt the back of his head — it was as soft and pulpy as a rotten melon. I’d heard that same sound in Korea when a rifle butt crashed down on an unprotected skull. Monk had no more worries about his hot diamonds now. Or anything else. I laid his gun on top of the bureau, then felt in my pockets for the recorder switch and shut it off.

In a way I felt sorry for him. His temper had caused his death, just as it had caused most of his troubles in his life. Monk Saunders was probably the best safe man in the country, a sort of real life Jimmy Valentine. I don’t think the safe or vault was ever made that he couldn’t open, given enough time. He could almost make those hunks of steel talk for him. But his temper and the queer idea he had that he was a tough guy were his undoing. If he played it as a loner he could have opened up safes forever and lived like a prince on what he got out of them.

Monk and his two partners gave us a hard time over the years, that was for sure. I work for one of the biggest insurance companies in the business, and have the fancy title of Chief Investigator of Frauds, but I don’t mind that because the salary and extras are pretty fancy too. For the past five years I’ve been trying to nail these three guys — now there were only two of them.

The first time I ever saw Monk was three years ago, when I was stuck in the maximum security cell block in Sing Sing, just before he arrived. He’d been convicted of a felonious assault rap — his temper again. He’d been celebrating the success of a big job and got in a fight with a legitimate john in a bar and almost killed him. The john happened to have a cop friend right there with him, so Monk didn’t have a chance to beat that one. We were cell neighbors for a week then, until Monk moved on to his permanent jail, but we hardly noticed each other. He was up for parole a little sooner than expected, just a few weeks ago, and I’d been pulled off an investigation in Los Angeles and flown back in a jet to sit in the same cell Monk had seen me in three years before. Then we’d struck up a sort of acquaintance, an acquaintance that led to me being hired by Monk and getting into the enemy camp.

Monk never knew it, but all during those three years in the can he’d been like a bug on a slide with guys watching him and studying him. The insurance companies even had psychologists exercising with him in the prison yard to find out what made him tick. I read all the reports, that’s why I felt sorry for him.

His body was partly blocking the door, I tugged his legs out of the way so that I would be able to get out, then searched him quickly. He didn’t have much on him, but I did find a folded paper in his inside jacket pocket which made me whistle in surprise as I read it. It was a list of fifteen jewelry houses in the city — five or six I recognized as active fences — some of them big, respectable businesses, supposedly above suspicion. But I imagine if the stakes were high enough some of these guys would come down off their pedestals to do business with Monk.

I had no time now to stay and explain things to the Homicide boys, that would have to come later, if I got through with the rest of the night. I wasn’t worried about Monk’s friend outside, he would just be a hood to watch the back way out of the hotel — he wouldn’t even see me leave through the front. I unlocked the door and slipped into the hall, then walked down the one flight and through the lobby. My bill was paid a week in advance so I got a big, Good evening, Mr. Young, from the manager at the desk. When the cops came for Monk’s body that guy would hate me forever. The one thing no one could ever do was die in a hotel in New York, even a third-rate joint like this. It was the unforgivable sin.

In the street I decided to walk to a drugstore a block away to call my office. Among other things I had to start the wheels moving for Monk’s funeral, and I was anxious to get the latest reports on his partners.

I hadn’t gone thirty feet when two fellows stopped me. They looked like college kids. Anyone standing more than ten feet away would think they were just that and that they were asking for directions. Only they weren’t college kids, they were two of my best men. I had almost forgotten how closely Monk had been followed.

“Bill, Monk went in that joint twenty minutes ago,” Jim Trevor, the taller one, said to me.

He was holding a card out for me to look at. I took the card, looked at it, and pointed down the street and started making gestures.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “But you can forget about Monk now. He’s dead.”

Jim Trevor whistled.

“Dead, huh?” Bob Moran said. “You know we got four Safe and Loft Squad guys floating around here with us? You want us to tell them?”

I was still gesturing. “Stall them for five or ten minutes. I can’t stay here now. If we don’t break this case tonight, especially after this, we can forget all about it.”

Both of them were looking at me with funny expressions. Then I realized what it was. Leaving the scene of an automobile accident was kindergarten stuff compared to what I was doing — walking away from a stiff who had died at my hand. And I also realized what a very dim view the Police Department and the District Attorney’s Office would take. There are certain things you just can’t do, only now I had to, I had no choice.

“Don’t worry about it, I’ll try to straighten it out later,” I said to them. “Monk tried to gun-whip me, I slugged him and he cracked his head open. He’s in my room. Take those cops in five minutes from now. Ask them to keep it away from the reporters as long as they can.”

“Okay, Bill,” Jim Trevor said. “Only those boys are going to be a little steamed at you for walking out on the party.”

“Yeah, I know, but I can’t help it, Jim. If we can hand them the other two alive and with the right evidence they’ll get over their mad — I think.” I waved to them and hurried down the block, hoping I wouldn’t be stopped by any of the detectives staked out on Monk. It wouldn’t be so easy to get away from one of them.

We have a perfect working arrangement with the police, especially here in New York. The second and third grade detectives are all bucking for promotions, the first grade men just want glory, and the bosses want glory and prestige and politically important friends among the big businessmen in the city. We aren’t selfless wonders, but when we break a big case it means moving up in a league where they pay the same kind of dough the top ballplayers get, and it’s done quickly. So we give the cops all the glory and credit and everything else they want and keep quiet when the reporters flock around them to find out how they broke a case.

I made the corner and then thought I’d better do my telephoning a little further away. There was a bar five blocks down with two booths off in a corner that I could use. I hurried along, my mind racing at what I could possibly do to wrap this case up. I hadn’t been kidding when I told Trevor and Moran it would have to be finished tonight or not at all.

One of the two other men we wanted wasn’t much of a problem, he was really in a box. Monk’s friend Larry was Larry Coster, a two-time loser, both for buglary raps. He’d gone bad after he was discharged from the Navy after the big war — those two convictions represented his first efforts in crime. After that he learned fast and it didn’t take him long to turn in to a real pro, especially after he met Monk. Larry Coster had been a radar and communications man in the Navy, and I think he knew as much or more about electronics as any engineer.

Robbing a safe today isn’t just a mechanical job. The average vault or safe is wired with all kinds of burglar alarms and detection devices. Even a third-rate set up has some kind of wires hooked up to it and if they aren’t handled right by safe men the cops join the party in two or three minutes. Larry’s job was to neutralize the alarm system on a job, and he did it every time perfectly and easily, giving Monk all the time in the world to play with the safe.

A pair like Monk and Larry could cause all kinds of trouble, and they did, but neither of them had the brains to pull off really big jobs. That’s where the guy they called the Boss came in. His name was Leon Schell, and that’s about all we knew about him. I’d read all the European dossiers on him and everything else, but the only real information we had was his name. He’d come out of Europe after the war with a valid American passport issued by the American Military Command in Berlin and had caused us nothing but headaches since. But there was never the slightest shred of evidence to tie him up to any of more than a dozen big jobs he’d pulled, all we knew was that no one but Leon Schell could do them.

I’d only seen photographs of the guy, but I’m convinced that he must have been a general on the German High Command, he had that kind of a mind. No detail ever escaped him, nothing was ever left to chance, the planning on his jobs was fantastic. He’d work for months or even years setting up a job, then clean the place out, and vanish without ever leaving the slightest clue except the absolute perfection of the job.

After we’d been taken four or five times we thought we’d spotted the only weak point in their set-up. Even three guys like that sometimes needed other help on the jobs, either before they hit or during the actual job. We’d caught up with several of them and had learned that Monk always hired them and paid them off for their work, whatever it happened to be. That figured, because Monk was the only one of the three who had a thorough knowledge of the racket guys and thugs who were available. That’s how come I’d been elected Monk’s neighbor in Sing Sing Prison.

That paid off. Monk had been out of touch for three years and Larry Coster and Leon Schell must have been waiting months for him to get out. I got out the same week as Monk and he needed someone in a hurry so I got the job. He’d come to see me at my cover job as a counterman in a cheap restaurant and made a meet with me in my hotel room three days before this last job, paying me in advance and telling me to wait for a phone call to go to work.

From the moment Monk got out of prison we’d had three of the best men in the country tailing him, but after that we doubled the cover — he couldn’t possibly duck away, we thought. Only Leon Schell had that one figured out too. The afternoon before the job Monk took a cab out to Newark Airport, jumped into a waiting helicopter, and vanished into a low fog over the airport. Three days later we found the pilot sobering up in Poughkeepsie. It seemed that a big, luscious blonde met them there when they landed but her boy friend hadn’t come along as she expected and she was so disappointed she let the pilot comfort her in a local motel for three days. Then she took off too.

So we had nothing to do but sit and wait it out. There was a holiday weekend coming up, with Monday the holiday. Most jewelry houses stayed open for business all day Saturday, but even so, figuring a six p.m. closing, that left sixty-three hours for them, until nine a.m. Tuesday morning. And they could be anywhere at all in the United States. We sent out a general alarm bulletin to all members of the jewelers’ associations because that’s all we could do, but we knew most of them wouldn’t even be seen until Tuesday.

On Tuesday morning we didn’t have long to wait though. The call came through at 9:15. It was almost unbelievable. They’d taken one of the biggest firms right here in New York, and oh, brother, how they had taken it. Normally this house kept in the neighborhood of a half million dollars worth of stones in their vault, but a few weeks before they had received a consignment of uncut diamonds from the African mines worth at least a million. The underwriters decided to keep the stuff there until it was cut, for maximum safety, because this house had one of the most modern, burglar-proof, security vaults in the city. Or at least it was until then.

The robbery was a masterpiece, no question about that. The jewelry firm occupied an entire five story stone and brick building on Fifth Avenue. They went in through the brick wall of the adjoining building in the sidestreet on the second floor level. This was more of Leon Schell’s planning. The second floor of the adjoining building was rented out a year before to a rug importing firm, a perfect cover for them. Over weeks and months they had removed the double row of bricks in that building and a single row of bricks in the abutting jewelry building for an almost doorsized opening. The work on their side was concealed from accidental discovery by keeping a bank of metal clothing lockers against that wall. When they were ready to break in all they had to do was wait for a heavy truck to pass by and shove what was left of the wall in on the jewelry house side.

That let them in to a small office on the second floor of the jewelry building. The gaping hole in the wall couldn’t be seen from the street, but to prevent anyone in the building across the street from noticing it they pasted a blue cloth over the opening — the same shade light blue as the walls. And every bit of dirt and debris was cleaned up; we found it all in trash barrels in the adjoining building.

The rest of the second floor, all of the first floor, and the part of the first basement where the vault was located, were protected by burglar-proof, invisible infra-red light beams. Each light source was focused on a light sensitive relay across the room — any interruption of the invisible light would turn in an alarm. The only trouble was that the guy who designed this setup never had basic training in any of the services where he had to crawl on his belly with his back end down to keep under a curtain of live machine gun fire. The light beams were installed in doubles, one at waist height, the other at knee height. I suppose the idea of the doubles was that if one set failed the store still had the protection of the other. But all you had to do to avoid the alarm system was crawl around on the floor under it, which is just what these guys did.

In the first basement, across from the vault, was the electronic marvel that made a burglary impossible. A television camera kept its unblinking eye focused on the vault door; any living thing that entered its range would show up on the viewing screen in the control room of the detective agency that provided security for the jewelry house. This closed-circuit television setup was really great, it did away with the necessity of having watchmen on the premises, and would work for you for as many hours as you wanted at a single stretch. A couple of dozen banks, brokerages houses, and jewelers in the city had them installed. I’d seen the rows of viewing screens in the control room, each screen identified with the name and location of the camera installation. If anything showed on the screen all you had to do was call Police Headquarters and the cops would have the building surrounded in minutes. An extra bonus was that you could punch a key to take a tape record of what was going on.

Only it wasn’t foolproof. Leon Schell figured out a way to beat it. They brought in a canvas sheet, probably rolled up to get it under the light beams, then unrolled it and stretched it on a collapsible metal wire frame and snapped it up into position in front of the camera eye. Painted on the side facing the camera was a perfect picture of the vault door and the surrounding part of the basement room. Except for the momentary flick on the viewing screen when they snapped the canvas into position — the kind of flick you’d get on any television screen when an automobile passes — there was nothing to indicate that there were three men in the room in front of the vault. To make certain that no stray light struck the back of the canvas they hung a heavy black cloth on it.

There were four infra-red light beams crisscrossing the area immediately in front of the vault door. Larry Coster took care of them by rigging up new invisible light sources close to the relays so that the light beam was never interrupted; then he neutralized the alarm system on the vault itself. He hooked up relays and induction coils and pulse generators all over the side of the vault and then tied them in to the lead in wires. When he was finished they could have carted the thing off to Central Park if they wanted to without setting off the vault alarm.

All that might have taken them as long as five hours — they still had almost sixty hours to get it open. But Monk didn’t need that long, it might have taken him somewhere between twenty and thirty hours, counting resting and eating time, as nearly as we could figure it. That meant that they were probably finished shortly after midnight Sunday evening leaving them a day and a half to get out and away.

And they cleaned the vault out, but good. They took everything, cut and uncut diamonds, mounted stones and necklaces, rings, bracelets, and even several dozen diamond studded watches. The insured value of the loot was over a million and a half, they could probably get close to a million for it if they could get rid of it in the European market.

When we were reconstructing the job Tuesday morning we got our only lucky break. Somehow, impossibly, Larry Coster had left a full set of fingerprints on the front surface of the vault door. There was no way to understand that kind of stupidity or carelessness after what they had done, but whatever the reason, they were there. It was a blessing for us, and it hung up Larry Coster for this job high and dry. The only possible explanation I could come up with was that he was smoking or eating when Monk swung the big door open. If he was smoking or eating he probably had his glove off his right hand, and in the excitement of seeing what they had he accidentally touched the front of the door. I didn’t care why, I was just mighty grateful that he did.

That simplified things tremendously for us. We knew who pulled the job, and, as important, we knew who didn’t. The Safe and Loft Squad detectives were all for putting out a nation wide alarm for Larry Coster, but I was able to talk them out of it. If we did that, it would tip our hand. The only chance to get the three of them was to let them think we were completely stumped. The newspapers carried a subdued account of it, with no figure mentioned, and only that the police had commenced an investigation.

Knowing how Leon Schell’s mind worked, and how he planned things, the logical thing to expect them to do was to try to run the stuff out of the country. There were several reasons for this, but the most important one was money. If they could get the stuff to the European market they would net twice as much as they could here. But getting it out of the United States and then into Europe wasn’t easy, only someone like Schell would try it. For the amount involved we were almost certain he would.

There are only two ways to move stolen jewelry across borders. One way, of course, is to smuggle it, but it was almost inconceivable that they would try to do that — it’s much too risky and uncertain. If they were caught either leaving here or entering any foreign country they would blow the whole job, netting exactly nothing but trouble for their efforts.

The other way is the way that would appeal to Leon Schell. If they could enlist the services of a man big enough in the jewelry industry to move it for them, get it through customs on both sides as a legitimate shipment by disguising it with false documents to cover its movement, they would be in the clear. It meant an extra cut, but they would not only be a lot safer but still ahead in the final take from the job. And because Monk had hired me to carry for them several days before I was positive that’s what they planned to do.

That Tuesday afternoon I sweated it out at my cover job in the restaurant, watching the minute hands of the wall clock crawl around, hoping desperately that Monk would contact me. He did, just before six o’clock. He didn’t say much over the phone, just told me to meet him Thursday afternoon at one thirty at the Manhattan end of the George Washington Bridge near the Eighth Avenue Subway entrance. That phone call started things rolling.

The Safe and Loft cops wanted to grab Monk and Larry Coster on sight when they appeared Thursday afternoon, but I talked them out of it, after a lot of wrangling. I pointed out that the most important thing was to recover the jewelry, whether they liked it or not, and that after we had the stuff back they could go around locking anybody up they wanted to, but they couldn’t spoil our chances at getting it back. Monk could be trying a dry run, with Corn Flakes or soap powder in a bag instead of jewelry, and I wasn’t taking any chances on that. I also pounded away on the fact that Larry Coster was the only one of the three we had any evidence against, and if they grabbed Monk too early they’d blow the case against him and we’d probably never even see Leon Schell. Finally they agreed to let me be the general, and we set up an elaborate trap.

Relays of my men and city detectives were to pick up the trail when I met Monk. I wasn’t sure that Larry Coster would be with him, but I thought he probably would be. Leon Schell was a big question mark, that much dough might make him come, but his cunning would tend to keep him in the background. There were to be no arrests until they got a definite signal from me; but part of the plan was to have city detectives scare off Monk and whoever was with him if I had possession of the jewels so that I could get away from them with the stuff — again only at a signal from me.

That part of the plan worked perfectly. Monk and Larry Coster pulled up in a cab right on time. They had another man with them, but it wasn’t Leon Schell. Monk was carrying a slightly oversized attache case, of dark brown leather. They hurried down the subway steps and waited for me on the halfway landing, out of sight of the street. Monk handed me the attache case and told me to follow Pete, the third man, wherever he went, and not to talk to any of the three of them for any reason. We separated, and I tagged along after Pete. It was easy to figure out what his part was. He was the steerer for the fence. If anything did go wrong they knew he couldn’t tell the cops anything because he really didn’t know what it was all about; and he would save the fence from any embarrassment of publicly meeting with known jewel thieves. My part was supposed to be the hot seat — if the cops grabbed me they’d just throw me on the griddle and keep turning me over until I was one well done hamburger.

We rode downtown on the subway and I saw three of my men in the same car — it was pretty crowded, even at that time of day. When we got off at Radio City I knew they were heading for the jewelry center in the city, and flashed signals for them to grab Pete and get him out of the way and to scare off Monk and Larry Coster. When I got upstairs and saw I was clear of them I hailed a cab and had him run me over to Grand Central Station. We had only gone a block when a detective cruiser fell in right behind the cab as an escort — the cops must have been using walkie-talkie radios. When I got to the station they piled out of their car and fell in place around me as I headed for the elevator to ride up to the floor our special office was on. Insurance companies maintain special security offices at all railroad stations and airline terminals for the use of jewelry salesmen and carriers. If they ever need to leave any valuables in a safe place overnight or longer the facilities are always available to them. The one in Grand Central is rather large — three big rooms with four armed guards always in attendance. Ten minutes after I get there the place was swarming with people. The president of our insurance company, along with his top brass, more than a dozen detectives, from Assistant Chief Inspector O’Leary down through Inspectors, Captains, and Lieutenants, a couple of Assistant District Attorneys, and some of my own men.

We were naturally anxious to see what we had in the attache case and tried to open it in a hurry, but that didn’t prove easy. Under the brown leather the entire case was made of a high grade steel. The two locks at either end looked ordinary enough but they were far from ordinary. I’m no lock expert, but I’d never seen finer ones in my life. One of the detectives knew a locksmith with a shop nearby, on Third Avenue. He went out and brought him back in fifteen minutes. That guy tried the locks for a half hour before he finally threw down his tools in disgust.

“I never seen nothin’ that tough to open,” he said. “The only thing I can do is use diamond pointed drills on them.”

When he started on the locks an idea started to form in my mind — I thought I might be able to use these locks somehow to help snare Leon Schell. The idea wasn’t clear yet, but I didn’t want the locks damaged.

“No,” I told him. “Is there anyone you know who’s a specialist at something like this. Someone who could get them open without damaging them?”

He did know of a specialist, probably the top man in the whole field. According to him this man could open locked chests and vaults even in sunken ships. His place of business was up in Harlem, so Inspector O’Leary called the Harlem Precinct and told them to pick this man up and run him down to us in a radio car. While we waited you could feel the tension building up in the room.

“I’m an old Navy man myself,” Inspector O’Leary announced. “Just get me a bigger hammer and I’ll open the damn thing up.”

I couldn’t help smiling. Inspector O’Leary is a big, brawny Irishman. I don’t know how old he is, but his hair is jet black, despite the wrinkles in his face. His manner is pleasant, but gruff. His eyes are truly remarkable, they’re sky blue but as hard and penetrating as chipped steel. He could look right through you. He had the reputation of being a good friend but a terrible man to cross, and I think that this reputation was deserved, because I noticed that all his subordinates, even the men only a rank under him, gave him a lot of respect.

He asked me why I insisted on not damaging the locks or the case, so I told him how I thought I could use the case to wrap up Leon Schell — if I could get to him. His eyes got a little twinkle in them, they looked almost human, and he nodded his approval.

“It will be dangerous, I’ll tell you that,” he said. “But you’ve done wonders on this case so far. If the stuff is in that bag I’ll say go ahead if you’re sure you know what you’re doing.”

The master locksmith came in then, and he was really a character. He was over sixty with a shiny bald head fringed with gray tuft, and a happy, absolutely beaming smile. Right then he was the only happy guy in the room. I told him what we wanted and he went to work like a surgeon performing a delicate brain operation. While he worked over the locks he sang almost continually — German lieder, Italian and French arias, American and Argentine cowboy songs, anything and everything. In between he told us about Bach and Mozart and Wagner while we were biting our nails. He got the first one open in about forty minutes, then started on the other one.

“Now it will be quicker,” he said. “I think I know who made this case — there is only one man I know of and he died five years ago. He was a true craftsman, a shopkeeper in Dusseldorf, Germany. Nobody else could make work like this.”

I wondered how I could tie that to Leon Schell, probably with a little digging it wouldn’t be too hard. But it wasn’t enough.

When he finally got the other lock open and threw back the lid of the case I breathed a long sigh of relief. It was almost all there, dazzling in its massed brilliance. By then several officials of the jewelry firm that was robbed were there. They had a check list and started taking an inventory of what we had. Except for a few watches and some smaller stones we had the whole thing.

The locksmith was beaming more than ever and all ready to break into a song, so I told him what I wanted him to do in a hurry, and he went back to work. I had sent out for some fake jewelry to a firm which specialized in stuff like that and they had sent quite a bit of it down to us. When the attache case was ready I started packing it with the false glassware. This stuff wasn’t junk though, it was so good only an expert would be able to spot it as phoney — an expert like Leon Schell. To make it look as good as I could I asked for and got the diamond studded watches back from the jewelry firm officials and put them back in the case the way they were. Then the locksmith carefully closed the case and locked both of the locks again. I was all ready to start what I had to do. I told my men to get back to our office and wait there, then started out with the attache case in my right hand. Hardly anyone noticed me, but I did see Inspector O’Leary watching me with those cold blue eyes. He only nodded to me.

I went down in the elevator to the main floor, walked through the terminal until I came to a row of public lockers, slid a dime in the slot and put the attache case in and closed and locked the door, just as I told Monk a few hours later. Only I didn’t mail myself the key, that was still in my pocket. I only needed one more thing. I cabbed down to Radio Row on Cortland Street to see a friend of mine who ran an electronics parts store and asked him if he could rig up one of the new miniature recording machines with the tape in a cartridge so that I could conceal it on my body. He thought he could and promised to have it ready in a couple of hours.

While I waited I kept in close touch with my office and got the reports of the men who were still trailing Monk and Larry Coster around. They’d separated when they’d been scared off in the subway at Radio City, each of them taking off alone and riding around in the subways for more than an hour, but then they both started making telephone calls. I suppose when nothing else happened to them and they calmed down a little they thought they were in the clear. They must have contacted Leon Schell, because about two hours later they met in a downtown bar, then went for a long walk together, occasionally stopping off at drug stores to make phone calls. Once they made a long call in a street booth outside a filling station on the west side, each of them taking turns going in to the booth. It could only be Leon Schell they were talking to then — I would have given anything to see his face when he heard what happened.

I wanted to get them alone, first pick up Larry Coster and put him on ice, and then go to work on Monk, and I hoped, through Monk, to find out where Leon Schell was. We still had no idea where he could be.

When the transistor recorder was ready for me I cabbed up to my room in the hotel, and that’s where Monk upset my plans. I never dreamed he’d have anyone watching the joint for me, but he did and he had, and I couldn’t get too mad at the guy for it because he’d paid for it with his life.

Now as I turned into the bar to make my call to the office I felt a terrible urgency, because if I couldn’t get to Coster alone I might just as well forget about Leon Schell. I wanted to bag him as much as the jewelry firm wanted their stuff back. The office phone answered before the first ring was finished. It was Jack Finch — he’d been glued to that phone for the last ten hours. I told him briefly about what happened with Monk.

“Yeah, Bill, I heard,” he said. “A Captain Carrara of the Safe and Loft Squad called a couple of minutes ago. He’s in your hotel room now and he’s plenty mad. He wants you to call him right away — he said that when Inspector O’Leary finds out what you did he’ll chew him out until there’s nothing left of him and he’ll probably tear you apart personally when he catches up to you. Maybe you’d better call him fast, Bill.”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll call him right away. First give me a run-down on Larry Coster.”

“He and Monk were together in a bar on West Eighth Street until a little over a half hour ago. Monk got a phone call and took off real fast — that’s when he went over to your hotel room. Coster stayed there a few minutes then went out and made a phone call from a drug store on the corner. Then he took a cab up to an apartment hotel on West Sixty-Second Street. He went in there about ten minutes ago. We found out he’s in Apartment 4E under his own name — Coster. That must be his voting address.”

“Very funny. Give me the number on Sixty-Second Street,” I told him. He did and I jotted it down.

“Look Jack,” I said, “I’m going up there now to make the pinch. Before I do, though, I have to find out something from him, so I don’t want you to let anyone know I called or where I’m going. You got that straight?”

There was a long pause before he answered. “You mean you’re not going to telephone the cops, Bill? Those guys are really awfully mad at you for leaving Monk alone.”

“I’ll call as soon as I make the pinch,” I said. “Just forget I called you now, understand?”

“Okay, Bill,” he said. “I can follow an order. Good luck.”

I hung up and went out and found a cab right away and told him to run me up to Sixty-First Street and Central Park West. I wanted to have the attache case with me when I went in to Larry Coster but there wasn’t time for that now — I’d have to figure out another angle. I knew I wouldn’t be the general of this operation much longer. Maybe by now Inspector O’Leary had me down to buck private or worse. If my office knew where Coster was it was for sure the Safe and Loft Squad did too, and the same five minutes that Inspector O’Leary decided to grab Coster they’d go in and bag him and that would be the end of what I was trying to do. I was still determined to get Leon Schell no matter what chances I had to take to do it.

The cab pulled up to the corner of Sixty-First Street. I paid the driver and got out. My gun was at the office and I needed one now so I walked up towards Sixty-Second Street looking for one of my men. I saw him sitting at the wheel of a cab we used for tail jobs right on the corner of Sixty-Second Street. It was Harry Sloan and he was alone in the cab. He saw me coming through his mirror and slid open the cab door when he saw me head for the cab. I stepped into the back and sat hunched forward on the seat.

“He still in there?” I asked.

“Yeah, Bill. I followed him uptown and saw him go in the building. Then a couple of minutes later the light went on in that fourth floor room on the corner. He came to the window and I saw him good when he closed the blind.” He pointed to the window he meant. There was still a light in the room.

“I haven’t got time to fill you in on everything that’s happened,” I said. “I’m going in now and make the pinch, but first I have to see him alone and try to find out something. You got your gun on you?”

He nodded.

“Let me have it,” I said.

He took it out of his shoulder holster and handed it back to me. I slid it under my belt, around on the left side.

“How many city detectives are there around here now?” I asked.

“Three or four that I know of. A couple of them are out behind an alley that leads into the back yards there. Why, Bill?”

“I’m in a mess with them, and I want to steer clear of them if I can,” I said. “I’ll make this as fast as I can, but if I get in any serious trouble, Harry, I’ll try to smash that window. Come in fast then, but come in with a gun, and bring those cops with you. I’m not sure what this guy might try, he’s certainly pretty upset and mad after what happened today. If I can bag him quietly, though, I’ll call the office and have them contact you over your radio — keep it on. Then you can come in alone or with our guys, but leave the cops out of it until I can duck out. I don’t want to see them if I can help it. You got that straight?”

“Whatever you say, Bill.”

I got out of the cab and started for the entrance of the apartment building. I could feel that knot growing in my gut again. I walked in and went right to the elevator and rode to the fourth floor. Apartment 4E was off to the right. I reached into my jacket pocket and turned on the switch of the transistor recorder. I didn’t need any more evidence against Larry Coster, but you could never tell — it might come in useful. Then I pressed the doorbell button twice, two short ones.

In a couple of seconds a low voice came through the door. “Who is it?”

“Me, Bill. Bill Young,” I said. “Monk just sent me up.”

The door opened a little and he peered out at me. I could see the blue glint of an automatic at his waist. When he saw I was alone he opened the door wide enough for me to walk in. He stood off to the side of the door and then I didn’t have any trouble seeing the gun.

He waved me into the room with it and shut and locked the door behind me. He kept the automatic right on my middle.

“Where’s Monk?” he asked.

“Downstairs in his car,” I told him. “He came to my hotel room and I gave him the suitcase with the stuff in it. He brought me out to his car and we rode up here. He couldn’t find a place to park so he told me to come up here and get you. He said you should call the Boss to let him know he had the stuff and find out what he wants you to do.”

I threw the whole can of bait at him — there was no time for stalling. I just hoped he took it. From here on I’d have to play it by ear.

“How come Monk didn’t call me?” he asked. “He was supposed to call me here.”

“How do I know? Maybe because he has no telephone in his car. Go down and ask him,” I said.

Larry Coster was a bundle of nerves. His face was haggard and strained and he looked as if he had a few too many belts of liquor to keep himself under control. He searched my face with a hard, vicious look in his eyes.

“If I thought you were trying anything funny I’d let you have it right now,” he said. He inched the gun a little higher. Now it was aimed at my heart.

“You guys make me sick,” I said. I wanted to quiet him down, I didn’t like that look in his eye, and he had the gun.

“You’re the friendliest bunch I ever worked with. Every time I see one of you, you throw a gun on me. Monk even accused me of being a finger man.”

“Are you?” he asked. His voice was deadly.

“Would I be here if I was? I try to work with you guys — duck cops all afternoon and worry about getting your stuff back to you — then go back to my hotel room where I figure Monk will be able to reach me and all I get are guns thrown at me. This is the last time I have anything to do with a bunch like you. If I was a finger man I wouldn’t be here, but there’d be cops swarming all over the place. Now if you want to shoot me go ahead, enjoy it. If not put that thing away. I’m getting out of here.”

It worked. I breathed out nice and slow and felt the knot in my middle loosen as he shoved the gun in his hip pocket. He shook his head as if to clear it and rubbed his hands over his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Mac,” he said. “It’s just I can’t take any chances. I’m nervous as a cat. You know what we have in that bag?”

“Yeah. Monk told me hot jewels,” I said.

“Yeah, man, hot jewels. But you know how much? You know how much jewels is in there?”

“Must be a big deal to make you guys so jumpy,” I said.

“It’s big, man, so big I can’t believe it almost. I never thought I’d be so lucky. That’s why I went to pieces when those cops moved in on us today. At first we were sure you fingered us. Monk and I got separated, but then I met him later and we were plenty sore at you, but we talked to the Boss and he thought it over and a little later when we called him he said he wasn’t so sure you were a pointer. The job we pulled was so big he thought the cops might just have a bad case of the heebie-jeebies and were going around grabbing everybody they even saw near the diamond center. We shouldn’t have gone down there. Someplace out of New York would be better. That’s what we’ll do now. Maybe Philly or Miami.”

That Leon Schell told them I wasn’t a finger man was the best piece of news I’d had in hours — maybe he meant it and maybe he didn’t — but it tipped the scales for me when I needed it most. Larry Coster lost some of the tense expression on his face, he was walking back and forth rubbing his hands together. His lips were parted in something that might be a smile, only it made him look like a hungry shark.

“Man, that is good news, we got away from those cops after all. I still can’t believe I’m so lucky. When this is over I’ll send you five big ones for your trouble today. How about a quick drink before we see Monk?”

“No thanks,” I said.

“Maybe I had enough, too,” he said. “Let’s go meet Monk.”

He reached for his topcoat on a chair. My heart started to beat faster. I spoke as casually as I could. My face was frozen.

“Oh, Monk wanted you to call the Boss. You want to call from here or someplace else?”

Everything hinged on this. He had to call from this room. If he went out the door now I’d never learn what I had to and I could kiss Leon Schell goodbye for keeps. But I couldn’t let Coster even suspect how important this was. I stood up and started for the door.

“Oh, yeah. I almost forgot. Maybe I better call him now. Wait a minute.” He walked over to the telephone.

My heart kept on beating faster and faster. I could almost hear it in the stillness of the room. He picked up the instrument and started to dial. I held my breath — half closed my eyes. The tiny clicks came through clear and as loud as drumbeats to my ears. I burned them into my memory. 6-4-4-2-1.

Then I caught the last two digits and almost shouted for joy. I had it. I knew where Schell was now. I repeated the numbers to myself. I could never forget them.

I made a quarter turn and closed my hand around the gun in my belt and brought it down to my right side, out of Larry Coster’s line of vision in case he should turn around to face me. My heart kept right on hammering hard. I wanted to end it quickly now — I just hoped the conversation wouldn’t be long.

They didn’t talk much. I heard Coster tell him briefly that Monk had found me and had the stuff back and was waiting for him downstairs. That news must have overjoyed Leon Schell, because then about all Larry Coster said was that they’d be over and bring me along — that he’d see him in twenty minutes or a half hour. He hung up without saying goodbye.

It was ridiculously easy then. He reached for his topcoat again and I levelled the gun at him.

“You won’t need it right away, Coster,” I said. “You’re under arrest.”

His face blanched, his eyes seemed to roll back in his head. His right arm made a slight motion for his back pocket where his gun was but stopped when I cocked my revolver.

“Your friend Monk Saunders is dead,” I told him. “He wanted to play rough with me, and now he’s dead. You try anything and you’re dead too.”

I saw fear come into his eyes.

“Put up both hands, real high, and turn around,” I said.

He turned around slowly and I walked over to him and took the gun out of his back pocket and slipped it into my coat.

“Now lie down on the floor and keep your hands out in front of you, face down.”

He got down on his hands and knees and then straightened out. He turned his head to look at me, his face an ugly mask of fear and hatred.

“Put your nose in the rug or I’ll kick it off,” I said.

He did, a wracking sob of anger and frustration shaking his body.

I backed up two steps to the telephone and picked it up with my left hand and dialed the operator and told her to get my office number. She told me in a syrupy voice that I could obtain that number by dialing it. I said I had my dial finger on the trigger of a 38 Detective Special with the hammer cocked and it was aimed right at the head of a jewel thief and that I had killed one of his buddies less than an hour ago and didn’t want to kill him unless I had to and would she please get the number. All the syrup left her voice and she stuttered all over the place but finally rang the office.

Jack Finch was still answering and he snapped it up.

“Jack, this is Bill Young,” I said. “I’ve got Larry Coster on ice. Now listen carefully. Harry Sloan is parked in a cab on the corner — he’s got his radio on waiting for a call from you. Call him on the air and tell him to get right up here. Coster is stretched out on the floor chewing the rug, he won’t give me any trouble. Tell Harry to come up alone — he’ll understand. Then wait five minutes or so and call the Safe and Loft Squad Office and tell them that Harry has Coster here and that they can pick him up and book him. I need that five minutes to get out of the building — I have a little errand to do. You got that clear?”

“Yeah, Bill, I got it clear. But wait a minute...”

I cut him short. “I can’t wait, Jack. Every second counts for me now. I’ve got to hang up.”

He yelled through the phone. “Don’t hang up, Bill. It’s an emergency. Inspector O’Leary called a couple of minutes ago and the air is still blue around here. He’s down in his office in Police Headquarters and he said if he didn’t hear from you in fifteen minutes he’d send out a general alarm for you on a murder charge. He was so mad he could hardly get the words out. You better call him right away, Bill, he’s not fooling. And you know what the brass in this company would do if a thing like that hit the papers about one of their men.”

“Okay, okay, Jack, I’ll call him.” I hung up and frowned.

I hadn’t expected that strong a reaction from O’Leary — pinning me down to fifteen minutes ruined any chance I had of getting to Leon Schell. But Jack Finch was right. If a general alarm went out for me it would queer me but permanently with the brass in my company and every other company in the business. It wouldn’t matter one bit whether I handed them Leon Schell wrapped in cellophane or a big red bow. I’d be out of work a long, long time.

I tried to think of something that would quiet O’Leary down, something that would keep him pacified for the little bit more time I needed. I knew I’d have to call him in the next ten minutes — that I couldn’t avoid. The first thing he’d want to know was where I was so he could have a radio car pick me up — that I had to avoid. I got a very small idea.

I walked around Coster and stood in front of him so that he could see me by lifting his head a little.

“Coster, I want you to tell me where Leon Schell is now,” I said. “You can help me a lot if you tell me where he is so I can pick him up. If you do maybe I can make things easier for you with the District Attorney or the Judge at your trial. How about it?”

If I knew anything at all about criminal psychology this was the worst possible way in the world to get information out of a guy like Larry Coster. There was only one answer I could get and I got it and it was just what I wanted.

“Don’t make me laugh. You insurance dicks are the creepiest cops in the world. I wouldn’t spit at you if you was in the middle of the ocean. You’re so smart, go find him.”

He glared at me, his shark teeth showing in a wicked grin.

“Okay, shove your face back in the floor,” I said.

The doorbell sounded and I backed over to the entrance door. It was Harry Sloan and he had two of our men with him. He came in first with a big 38 Police Positive revolver in his hand.

“Spare I keep in the cab,” he said when he saw me looking at it.

I took Larry Coster’s automatic out of my pocket and handed it to him.

“The Safe and Loft guys will be up in five or ten minutes,” I said. “Coster had this on him — they can add that to the charge. Hold him here and whatever you do don’t let him near a phone and don’t let him talk to anyone, anyone at all. Tomorrow he can get fifty lawyers if he wants to, but I don’t want a peep out of him tonight. That’s important, Harry.”

“No talk. Okay, Bill,” Harry said.

“You better put handcuffs on him,” I said. “Oh, and one more thing, Bill. Give me the keys of the cab.”

He handed them to me without saying anything, but gave me an odd look. Minutes were valuable to me now, and I needed the cab to get out of the neighborhood. I put the gun I had borrowed from Harry Slaon back under my belt and watched as one of the other men bent over Larry Coster and snapped the cuffs on him. My hand felt in my jacket pocket for the recorder switch and I turned it off. Coster had really tied up the case against himself by everything he had said — all he could possibly do now would be to plead guilty. I went out the door and downstairs.

Across the street from the entrance to the building there were two men standing under the street light. They stared hard at me as I came out and headed for the cab. Both of them had on gray hats and coats and so help me they looked like real grayhounds to me and for a crazy moment I thought I was a rabbit and when someone pressed a button I’d have to start running around a track until one of them caught me. Well, O’Leary had the button in his hand and it was up to me to stop him from pressing it.

I drove the cab up a few blocks and turned west to Broadway and when I saw a big drugstore I parked it and went in to a phone booth. Now I had to get the information I needed. I got a lucky break. The Night Wire Chief at the telephone company office was a guy I knew — he didn’t hesitate when I told him what I wanted. I gave him the number Larry Coster had dialed from his apartment.

“Call me back in about five minutes, Bill, and I should have the dope for you then,” he said.

That only left Inspector O’Leary. I took a deep breath and called Police Headquarters and asked for his office. When I told the cop who answered who was calling I didn’t have to wait for O’Leary. He almost came through the phone at me.

He had no trouble getting the words out now. He was icily sarcastic, his words hit me and stung me like a high-pressure needle shower. He went on for over a minute until I started to wonder if he were trying to trace the call, then I remembered it was practically impossible to trace a call over a dial system in a city.

“...and now the Commissioner knows about it and if you think I’m going to cover you five minutes more you’re out of your mind. I wouldn’t care if you got back ten million dollars worth of jewelry today you had no right to leave that room when that man died. It’s a felony and I personally will throw the book at you if you don’t get right down here...”

When he slowed down a little I tried to tell him about Coster. That made it worse.

“Ah, yes. I just learned how truly heroic you were. You went right up there alone and placed him under arrest. I’m going to call the Mayor right away and have him proclaim a whole week’s celebration for everyone in the city for such a great thing. But we have over twenty thousand men in the Police Department in New York and the dumbest cluck on the force could have done the same thing and probably better.”

“Look, Inspector,” I said. “You know why I went up there. I had to try to find out where Leon Schell is so we could get to him before he finds out about Monk. If he takes off we’ll never find him. I thought...”

“Did you find out?”

“I asked him where Schell was,” I told him truthfully. “He laughed at me, told me to find him myself.”

“Do you know where Schell is?”

“No, Inspector, I honestly don’t.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about it. After your fine day’s work you should rest up a little. I’ll put a couple of hundred of those twenty thousand men on the case and maybe they can do almost as good a job as you could do. Mind you, I only said maybe.”

He was getting under my skin but I tried to reason with him.

“Inspector, you know that even if you do grab Schell it won’t do any good. We only have a circumstantial case against him and he’d have a high-powered lawyer get it thrown out before we even went to trial. We have to get something on him to tie him directly to this job, and you know I’m the only one who can possibly get close enough to him to do it. You’ve got to let me try.”

“No! Absolutely not, Young. Murder is still a more serious crime than robbing a safe. I don’t care if we ever convict Leon Schell. I want you in so we can clear up this Saunders death.”

“He tried to gun-whip me,” I said. “When I fought back and hit him with an ash tray I cut his face open and he fell back and cracked his skull. It was self defense. I certainly didn’t murder him.”

His voice became even more sarcastic. “I know that, Young. Believe it or not I did get a report from the men up there. But I’m only a dumb cop, remember? To me any death by violence is murder, until a Grand Jury decides otherwise. So all you have to do is make a sworn statement to a District Attorney and then tell your story to a Grand Jury — if they believe it then it’s self defense. But you’re not supposed to tell me about it over a telephone. That’s why I want you in — now!”

I still wanted a chance at Leon Schell. I was willing to plead.

“Please, Inspector. All I need is an hour, maybe two. I have an idea that I think might work. I want to...”

“Where are you now?” he interrupted.

I gave him a location fifteen blocks away.

“Wait there,” he said. “I’ll send a radio car right over to pick you up. Don’t leave there, you understand?”

“I’m sorry, Inspector, but I want Leon Schell convicted. I have to leave.”

He had a lot of trouble getting the words out then, but when they came they were five times as loud as before.

“...and so help me, Young, if you leave there, I’ll ruin you. I’ll indict you for everything I can find. I’ll put a general alarm out for you for murder...”

I’d have to take my chances on that. I put the receiver back on the hook gently. The booth wasn’t hot but my face and neck were wet from perspiration. I took out my handkerchief and dried off and lit a cigarette.

Inspector O’Leary wasn’t bluffing when he said he could ruin me. I knew it and he knew I knew it. I’d been called in before the Board of Directors of my company a couple of times on cases and knew just what I could expect from them. I don’t think one of them ever had to work for a living. The only thing they did was get enough education so the family fortunes would never shrink during their lifetimes. Maybe their fathers or grandfathers or great-grandfathers piled up the family fortunes in the beginning by running dope or smuggling or maybe a little white slavery here and there but of course that was all forgotten now and they were oh so eminently respectable and super honest it was disgusting. And heaven help any dumb employee like me who ever got himself in trouble by cutting a legal corner now and then or who got himself featured on the wrong side of a front page newspaper story. It would shock them silly — so silly they’d fire you in five minutes and see to it that you never went back to work with any of their cousins who ran other companies the same way. Okay, so I’m dumb and stubborn, but I was still going after Leon Schell.

I fished up another dime and called the Night Wire Chief back. He had the information for me and I jotted it down. The telephone that Larry Coster had dialed was listed to a Sandra LaCoeur in Apartment 21 in a fancy Sutton Place apartment building. With an improbable name like that she’d have to live in a fancy joint. I didn’t much care where she lived. That’s where Schell was and that’s where I was going.

There was only one more thing I had to do. Now I needed the attache case with the junk jewelry in it, so I went out and got a cab on the corner and gave the driver a ten dollar bill and told him to get me to Grand Central Station as fast as he could. The guy was a real jockey and for once I got my money’s worth.

I half ran through the main waiting room to the bank of lockers where the case was, thankful I hadn’t told O’Leary I’d left it there. If he knew that he’d have about ten guys waiting for me. I got the case out of the locker and half ran for the exit on the east side of the building. The clock over the information desk showed me it was almost a half hour since Coster had made his call. It would take me at least another ten minutes to get up to Sutton place. That wasn’t good, but it couldn’t be helped.

The second cab driver was better than the first guy. He got me to the front of the building in nine minutes flat, but I had him roll past and leave me out at the corner. I walked back slowly, looking the place over. It was a fancy place, alright. The entrance doors were all glass and chrome. The lobby walls were all white marble that gleamed softly under the indirect fighting. The rugs inside were ankle deep. There was no doorman — either the management was saving money or he was off for a beer. A big directory board with a house phone hanging next to it was back near the elevators. S. LaCoeur, Apartment 21, was printed in gold letters under where it said Second Floor. The elevators were self service jobs. I stepped in and punched 2, then felt in my jacket pocket for the recorder switch and turned it on again — this was where I really needed this gadget.

Apartment 21 was almost right across from the elevator. I stepped across and pressed the button twice and wondered what kind of a gun Leon Schell would have on me when he opened the door.

He opened it almost immediately, without even looking through the interviewer and he had nothing in his hands. His eyes flickered momentarily in surprise when he saw me standing there alone, then narrowed as they swept over the attache case in my right hand.

“Are you Leon Schell?” I asked him.

“Yes.” There was no expression on his face but his eyes were as sleepily alive as a lion’s.

“I’m Bill Young,” I said. “Monk Saunders and Larry Coster sent me up here. They told me to give you this bag.”

“Oh. Won’t you come in?” He held the door open a little wider and moved to the side for me.

“Sure,” I said.

I went in and heard him close the door behind me. I placed the attache case on a small upholstered chair near the door and looked around. It was a beautiful apartment — obviously a woman’s — with everything in good taste and very, very expensive. Just ahead of the small entrance foyer we were in was a dropped living room. Several lamps were on and a large console radio, a deluxe Hi Fi job, was turned on, playing classical music very softly. There was a little hallway at the far left end of the living room, but all I could see was a closed door — probably the bedroom. A kitchen and dinette were off the foyer to the right. I didn’t see any sign of the woman.

“I expected Monk and Larry along with you,” Schell said in a mild voice.

I shrugged my shoulders and put a dumb look on my face.

“They drove me over here,” I said. “All they told me to do was bring the bag up to you and tell you they’d be up in a little while.”

“Strange,” he muttered.

I could almost see the wheels spinning furiously behind those bland eyes. He was a big man, much bigger than I expected from his passport photograph and description. He had twenty or thirty pounds on me and was an inch or two taller, and I’m not exactly small. I wasn’t expecting exactly a bald professor type, but somehow, maybe because of his reputation as a brain, I was surprised at his physical appearance. He might be near forty, but he looked ten years younger and as if he’d be right at home enjoying himself in any kind of a barroom brawl.

“Well, I guess I’m through for the day,” I said. “I sure earned my dough on this deal — ducking cops all afternoon...”

I took a couple of steps towards the door and reached for the knob. No matter how calm this guy looked on the outside, he had to be upset about letting a million and a half get kicked around on him, even if he did think he had it back now. I had to stay there, but I thought he might bite on a double in reverse. If I seemed anxious to go, he’d want me to stay.

“No rush,” he said. “Why not stick around until Monk and Larry get up? I can fix you a drink while we’re waiting.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Maybe I could use one.”

He picked up the attache case from the chair and walked down the two steps into the living room to a large portable bar next to the radio, set the case down, and pulled open the front of the bar. I could see the glistening porcelain front of a small refrigerator tucked under the bar.

“Anything special?” he asked.

“Make it Scotch on the rocks,” I said.

He fixed two drinks with his back to me, and I watched him closely. Maybe I could have taken him then and maybe I couldn’t. With all the little crystal mirrored surfaces on the bar he was probably studying me closer than I was studying him. He was fully dressed except for his suit jacket — instead he was wearing something I think is called a smoking jacket, but I’d never seen one before except on an old TV movie. This one was dark maroon in color, with a black velvet collar. It came down a little further than a suit jacket and had two big pockets in the front. I thought he had something in the right one but it looked too small to be a gun. He turned and handed me my drink.

“Monk tell you what was in that bag?” he asked.

I noticed that he kept his drink in his left hand. His right hand went into the right pocket of the jacket and closed around something and stayed there. So it was a gun.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s hot jewelry, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “We thought you took off with it in all the excitement today. It was mighty nice of you to go back to your hotel and wait for Monk. Most guys would just disappear if they had a chance like that.”

I was on mighty dangerous ground and I knew it. This was something I had to explain satisfactorily to Leon Schell or forget about getting any direct evidence on him, and maybe forget about living. But I had thought a lot about it and was ready for him.

“Maybe,” I said. “Only hot jewelry isn’t my line. It’s too hard to handle and too hard to get rid of unless you have the right contacts. And I didn’t want you guys gunning for me.”

Schell was far from a dummy, I couldn’t tell from his eyes if he bought it or not, but I thought I could sense a slight relaxation in his body.

“Speaking of guns,” he said, “what do you think of this?”

He took his right hand out of the pocket and I saw his fist closed around one of those small calibre European models. He didn’t aim it at me exactly, it was just pointed in my general direction. I didn’t say anything.

“Marvelous piece of workmanship,” he said. “I don’t like your clumsy American arms at all. I can almost hide this in the palm of my hand but it’s deadly under fifty feet. You know I practise a great deal with it in my spare time — I lay empty beer or soda bottles on their sides and try to shoot through the necks of the bottles and knock the bottoms off from forty or fifty feet. I can do that seven out of ten times.”

“So you’re a good shot,” I said. I was trying to figure out what he was up to.

“Do you have a weapon on you now?” he asked.

Now I knew. He was a pro, all right. I didn’t want him frisking me — if he ran his hands over my legs he couldn’t miss the recorder parts taped to my thighs.

“Yeah. I got a little nervous today so I borrowed this one from a friend of mine.” I pushed my jacket aside and showed him the butt of Harry Sloan’s .38 stuck in my belt.

“May I see it?” he said.

“Sure.”

I pulled it out, being careful to keep it pointed to the floor, and handed it to him. His gun was two feet away from my nose, and it was aimed directly at it. He put his drink down on the bar.

“This is typically American,” he said as he took it. “It’s just like your cars and your houses and everything else — much too big. It’s clumsy and inefficient and not nearly as accurate as my gun. Don’t you agree?”

I shrugged. I didn’t know what to say. I was beginning to think Schell was a bit of a weirdie — this was really going the long way round to lift a gun off a guy. He backed away from me, then half turned around and walked to the far side of the room, where the little hallway was, and laid my gun on top of an end table. He put his own gun back in his jacket pocket but kept his hand on it. Then he motioned to me to sit in a chair near the bar, picked up his drink, and sat in another chair across from me.

“May as well relax and enjoy your drink,” he said. “If you don’t mind I’ll leave your gun over there. I don’t like people I don’t know too well to be armed around me, it makes me uncomfortable. Now tell me what happened today — everything.”

This wasn’t going the way I wanted it to, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I didn’t care about the gun, but I wanted his voice on the tape, not mine, and I didn’t want his opinions about the size of American guns, automobiles, or houses.

I told him almost the same thing I told Monk, only I didn’t say anything about leaving the attache case in a public locker — instead I told him I went into a movie house until it got dark so it would be safer to go back to my hotel to wait for Monk. And I told him the time Monk arrived there was a half hour earlier than the time he had really come.

I had a simple plan to trap Schell, something that was based on a very simple fact. The one single thing all thieves have in common is their fear of being double crossed. No matter how long a thief has known or worked with another thief, he always has that fear in the back of his mind, and sometimes it’s not so far back. My job now was to plant a big fat seed of mistrust in Schell’s mind about Monk Saunders and Larry Coster and force it to grow fast until it became a certainty. I wasn’t too worried about him suspecting me; the biggest thing in my favor there was that Monk saw me in a prison cell next to his three years ago — Schell would know about that. And now here I was in front of him, playing it dumb, but I had carried the attache case in to him.

I slanted my story carefully, working slowly towards the big pitch. Schell just sat there listening attentively, watching me through half-closed eyes. It began to look to me that it would have to be the big pitch, or nothing, because he didn’t interrupt me once.

“...so he said I should wait right there in my hotel room for him. Then he went out, he took the bag with him, and came back about forty minutes later. He told me to come on, we had to...”

Leon Schell’s eyes narrowed to slits. “I was wondering why you took so long to get up here,” he said. “Monk got to your hotel room almost two hours ago. You mean he left you there, took that bag out, and then came back?”

“Yeah, that’s right. He said something about the locks being pretty good, but not good enough. Then when he came back he said we had to meet Larry...”

“Shut up,” Schell barked.

There was a thin white line around his nostrils, his forehead was furrowed with lines. I could almost see him thinking of Monk working over those locks. If Monk could open burglar-proof vaults, those locks on the attache case wouldn’t be too tough for him, no matter how good they were.

“Monk wasn’t supposed to open that bag,” Schell said. He was thinking out loud now. “It was going out of the country. If he and that other crumb pulled anything on me...”

He was on his feet, the gun in his pocket forgotten as his right hand searched in the trouser pocket and came out with a long, slender key. He walked over and picked up the attache case and laid it on the radio, then slid the key into the first lock — it snapped open in a moment. Then he unlocked the other one and lifted open the top. He stood there for long seconds, his face draining of color the white line around his nose and mouth deepening. He picked up a handful of the stones, held them under the light, and for more long seconds studied them closely.

Leon Schell knew diamonds, he didn’t need a loupe. And he knew glass stones, even good glass stones. He let out something that sounded like a groan and flung the whole handful against the far wall.

He stood still for almost a minute, not saying anything, his face working spasmodically. Then he started swearing in a low, deadly voice. He called Monk Saunders and Larry Coster every vile name I ever heard, and some I never heard before. His hands shook in his rage.

“...those slobs couldn’t get in that building even when they were open for business. I never should have cut them in. It was all my work, my work and planning, two whole years it took, and then I get this from pigs like them...”

I still hadn’t figured out why Leon Schell had his two buddies and me carry the stuff for him today, why he hadn’t been along, but I didn’t think this was the time to ask. I wanted him to talk, and brother, he sure was. It was just beautiful. I sat there and listened and wondered how it would sound when it was played back in Court.

He went on and on, it was unbelievable. He had no restraint or caution. He seemed to be unaware that I was even in the room, even though he was looking right at me and talking right to me. He told me how he had set up the job, everything he did, how he had timed it, and how little Monk and Larry Coster had to do with the whole thing. I had come up here hoping he’d open the attache case with his key and that he would make a damning statement or two against himself, and here I had something far better than any confession. It was all over, all wrapped up now for keeps. I could hand him over to O’Leary now as one very dead duck. All I needed was five minutes or less to get to a phone and Leon Schell was through. I only had to figure out a way to get away from him gracefully and that shouldn’t be too hard.

He kept on talking, telling me how he had seen the infra-red ray light beams diagrammed and described in a trade electronics magazine, and how he had read about the television eye to protect the vault in a national industrial security magazine, and then how he planned to outwit these measures. He just wouldn’t stop talking.

I began to feel like the farmer who prayed for rain and then had all his crops washed out in a cloudburst. I just wanted to get out and away from him now to call O’Leary, but there was no way I could think of to shut him up and make my break. He kept going for minutes more, but finally ran out of breath.

It gave me the break I wanted. I stood up and moved a couple of steps towards the foyer. He eyed me sharply and seemed to realize that I was in the room with him for the first time since he started his ranting.

“Guess I’m no use here, Leon,” I said. “May as well mosey off. I’m real sorry for your trouble, though.” I turned and headed for the door.

“Wait a minute.” His voice was sharp and commanding.

I turned around and looked questioningly at him. He apparently didn’t suspect anything yet, his hands were clenched together, not exactly wringing them, but almost. At least they weren’t near his gun pocket.

“Wait a minute. I may need you for something. I’ve got to think of something.”

He paced up and down on the rug in quick hurried strides, his face a mask of concentration. This was a fine note. Here I had the guy signed, sealed, and almost delivered, on my way out of the dump to call the cops, and he tells me to wait while he thinks of something. But I couldn’t run out on him, now I really had to play it cool, very cool.

I shifted my weight and half faced him. I dug into my jacket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one and blew the smoke at the ceiling and watched it curl upward. My mind was racing. If he sent me out on some kind of an errand it would still be all right. All I had to do was get out of his sight and to a phone booth — in five minutes the building would be crawling with cops.

He kept pacing up and down, making sharp turns at the end of each little trip he made on the rug, his back never to me. The room was very quiet, the music coming from the hi-fi radio seemed louder and louder. I cursed myself for getting hog-tied like this, every minute was precious, but there wasn’t a single thing I could do about it.

The music stopped on the radio, an annoying fifteen second commercial came on, so annoying it made Leon Schell head for the set to snap it off, but a news announcer came on before he got there. The announcer’s words smashed into the room like live devils, loud and clear as rifle shots. My blood froze, my insides felt as if an icy hand was ripping them out.

“...police have identified the dead man as Martin Saunders, better known in the underworld as Monk Saunders. He is believed to be one of the suspects involved in an enormous jewel robbery last weekend which...”

Leon Schell’s right hand darted into his pocket and came out with the little gun as soon as he heard Monk’s name mentioned. Now it was aimed right at my head. His eyes glared into mine, beady marbles of hate. My heart felt like lead, slowly sinking into my legs, and for a crazy second I thought my eyes had changed into Coca Cola bottles.

“...high police officials refused all comment, but reporters on the scene learned that the occupant of the hotel room was an operative for an insurance concern and that he was seen in the vicinity shortly before the body was found...”

The announcer kept talking, but I couldn’t hear the words, the blood was pounding in my head too loudly. Schell was slightly bent over the set, still glaring at me, not missing a word. Finally the announcer shut up and he snapped off the set.

“So you’re an insurance copper, and you killed Monk,” he snarled.

He was too far away from me to try anything, and he held that gun like it was on a tripod. I just swallowed hard and didn’t say anything.

He threw his head back and gave an insane laugh, it was the weirdest thing I ever heard in my life. I could feel the cold sweat beading on my forehead, a chill raced down my back.

“That’s real funny,” he said. “An insurance cop slob like you almost fooling Leon Schell, imagine that. But that was the last laugh, you’ll be very dead in a minute or two, after you tell me why you came up here with that junk. Now talk, while you’re still alive.”

My mind was a chaos, I tried desperately to think of something, anything, to stall for time. For sure I didn’t want to die, but if I lived, I didn’t want him to get away.

“Sure, Leon, sure,” I said. “Only if I were you I’d put that gun away and forget all about shooting people, especially me. You’re hung up on the jewelry job, you’ve had it on that. There’s no percentage in making it worse and signing your own death warrant by killing me and that’s just what you’d be doing.”

He was icy calm again, his face a hard mask of hatred.

“Why would I sign my death warrant?” he asked. “Seems to me I remember saying a few indiscreet things to you a while back, things I never should have said. You don’t think I’ll let you walk out of here so you can tell people what I said, do you? You might even try to convict me for that jewel robbery. And I hate witnesses. A bullet in your head now and I never have to worry about you.”

The way he looked, the hate in his eyes, I knew he meant it. It had never looked worse for me. I decided on a desperate gamble — it was all I could do.

“Look, Schell,” I said, “I didn’t come up here for a social call, you realize that. And I didn’t come up here to hand you a suitcase full of glass. I came up here to get you to talk, and brother, you sure did, with bells. Only I have a microphone and a transmitter strapped to me, and every word you said was broadcast to a truck my boys have downstairs. And they have earphones on so they know what’s going on up here and by now they’ve probably called Police Headquarters to send a few squad cars around. So now if you want to shoot, go ahead.”

I knew from the flicker of doubt and confusion in his eyes I had scored heavily. Nobody commits a murder when the cops might walk in a couple of minutes later.

“Where’s the mike and transmitter?” he asked. His gun still hadn’t moved a fraction of an inch.

I half bent over and pulled the material of my trousers tautly over the bulge of the recorder strapped to my thigh. “Right here,” I said.

“I don’t mean like that. I want to see this great invention. Take your clothes off. Strip.”

“What!” I was incredulous. I couldn’t believe it.

“You hear me boy, get your clothes off fast, otherwise I take them off you, after I put a slug in you. Now!”

There was nothing I could do but obey. I started to unknot my tie.

“Just be very slow and easy with your hands, copper,” he said. “If they move too fast I’ll put a slug in your head. Now strip, right down to your skin.”

I undressed slowly, careful not to make any abrupt moves with my hands.

“Fact is,” he said, “I just don’t believe anything you say. If you are telling the truth, it seems to me your cop friends should be here by now, and I don’t hear anything. But if they are outside, I’d be foolish to try to make a break for it, if that’s what you want me to do. If you’re lying then you don’t have a transmitter there and that’s what I want to see, just what it is.”

Leon Schell was no dummy. He almost had it figured out. I had slipped the control switch out of my jacket pocket and it was hanging down over my belt. I unhitched my belt and slipped out of my trousers. The recorder and the microphone were clearly visible now, held to my legs with adhesive tape, the wire to the control hanging to the floor. I felt like a damn fool standing there in my underwear, socks, and shoes.

“Okay, boy, that’s enough. Now just turn around and get your hands up high over your head,” Schell ordered.

He came up behind me and I felt his hand on my left leg at the microphone, but didn’t feel the gun in my back. He was a pro, all right. I couldn’t move a muscle. He ripped the microphone off, then the recorder, tearing savagely at the tape. It felt like two fistsful of flesh came with them. I almost screamed with the pain. Then he backed away from me.

I turned around to look at him and lowered my hands without him telling me. He had dropped the microphone on the floor but had the recorder in his left hand and the gun still in his right. The recorder was half covered with adhesive tape, I knew he’d never get it off with one hand, and that meant he’d have to lay the gun down. An idea started ballooning in my mind.

My cigarette was still burning in an ash tray on a little end table next to a chair where I had placed it before I got undressed.

“Okay to smoke?” I asked him.

“Sure, relax,” he said meanly. “It may be your last one.”

He was eight or ten feet away from me, then moved a couple of feet further away to the bar and laid the gun on top of it. He didn’t have to be an electronic wizard to figure out that the recorder wasn’t a transmitter, and when he did tag it for what it was, I was dead six ways and up. This would be the only chance I’d have.

I reached toward the ash tray to flick my cigarette. It was made of heavy copper, just about the size of a baseball. This looked like my day for ash trays, but if that was all I could come up with, it would have to do. Now my life depended on it.

He was just starting to tear the adhesive tape off the recorder. I dropped my cigarette into the tray, seized it, and in one sweeping motion snapped it off right at his head.

He saw my first motion. His head came up, he hesitated for a split second, then his arm shot out for the gun. But his reflexes took over. The tray was whistling at his face like a meteor. He raised both arms to ward it off and tried to duck. It caught him on the side of his face and almost tore his ear off. He let out a shriek of pain.

I didn’t wait. There was an overstuffed pillow on the chair and I scaled that at him, then took two jumps toward him and dove at him in a vicious tackle. His arm shot out frantically for the gun, but I smashed into him just as his fingers were inches from it and we both crashed to the floor. I dropped my head just as I hit him and rammed him full in the belly. It knocked the wind out of him, but only for a second.

He twisted and turned under me and brought his knee up at my groin and I was just able to roll out of the way. I slammed my elbow into his gut and heard him grunt horribly as the air went out of him again. I rolled away and tried to scramble to my feet, but he came with me, his fingers groping for my eyes.

I smashed my right into his nose and the blood poured out but that didn’t slow him up a bit. I tried to knee him but didn’t get him right and he kept coming at me like an octupus, all arms and legs flailing. I reached a nerve center in his bull neck and squeezed hard. He screamed in pain and rolled away from me. I got to my knees and sprang up.

He didn’t wait. He climbed up and jumped at me in one motion. His right slammed into my chest and it felt like a truck hit me. Then his left smashed into my face just under my right eye and for a second I thought I was going. I backed away from his deadly punches. With that thirty pounds he had on me I had to keep away from him. I kept peppering him with my left to slow him up, but he wouldn’t slow. I threw a right at his chin that would have stopped any normal man — it landed perfectly but he just shook his head and kept coming. He landed another crusher over my heart, then another, and out of nowhere a fist slammed against my jaw. My head was spinning, I fought against passing out. All I could see was his bloodsoaked face and ear and an evil grin on his face.

Then he made the mistake he couldn’t afford to make. A couple more shots like that and he’d have me on the floor, unconscious. But he was a gun man. The gun was still on top of the bar, four or five feet to his right. He stopped coming at me and took a step sideways towards the bar.

I shook my head desperately and jumped him. I landed two hard lefts on his face and a powerhouse right in his ribs. He gasped but tried to shift his weight and start in on me again, but I had all of that I wanted. He was just off balance enough to make himself awkward. I shot another right at his nose and more blood spurted, then smashed my open hand on his right shoulder in a Judo chop. It landed perfectly, his right arm fell dead like a tree. For the first time the evil grin disappeared and a look of alarm came on his face.

This was better, it evened up his thirty pound advantage. He was game, though, he wouldn’t give up. He kept lashing out at me with his left, and kicking viciously at me whenever he thought he could reach me. Only now he couldn’t.

From then on it wasn’t really fair. I kept slamming his body with hard rights and jabbing his face with my left. His useless arm kept him off balance — it was like slugging a punching bag. Only he wouldn’t quit and he wouldn’t go down.

I knew he’d go for the gun again if he got a chance. I circled him around so that his left side was against the side of the room where the bar was and backed away from him for a second. He thought he could make it and tried. It was just what I wanted. I stepped in and threw a roundhouse right against his jaw with everything I had. His body sagged, then fell backward and this time it sounded like a tree when he hit the floor. He was out, but good.

I sucked air into my lungs, they felt as if they were on fire. I felt dizzy and wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t pass out. I moved groggily over to the bar and pushed the little gun back until it dropped behind it. I didn’t want Schell jumping for that thing any more if he came to.

The recorder with its precious cartridge was lying on the rug in front of the bar, I bent down and picked it up and hugged it to me.

“That must be very valuable to you.” It was a woman’s voice.

I turned and saw her at the other end of the room. The bedroom door was open and she was standing just this side of it, with my gun in her hand, and it was pointed right at me. Oh, no, I thought wildly, I can’t lose this guy now, after everything that’s happened today.

She was big, and beautiful; a big, gorgeous blonde. Her voice sounded like the Gabor sisters with a sort of mittel Europe accent, but there was enough of her to make three Gabors. She had on a silk dressing gown which did nothing but show off what she had. Somehow she looked familiar, then I remembered. This must be the blonde who shanghied the helicopter pilot last weekend, the babe with the improbable name of Sandra LaCoeur. In a way I didn’t blame that pilot.

She was looking at me with a smile playing around her lips, and I suddenly remembered I was in my underwear. Then I noticed with dismay quite a bit of it had come off in my go with Leon Schell.

“How do you do, Miss LaCoeur.” I said dismally. “Sorry I had to mess your apartment up. You mind if I get dressed?”

“Please do,” she said. “But don’t try any of your tricks. You might not be as lucky with me. I grew up in Alsace during the war, and I killed three German soldiers before I was nine years old.”

I knew from her eyes she was telling the truth. Besides, there were no more ash trays around and anyway I don’t think I could throw a spitball across the room the way I felt. I walked over to my clothes and shoved the recorder cartridge into my jacket pocket, pulled on my trousers and tugged on my shirt. That cartridge had me crazy, if I lost that now it would ruin me for life, if I lived.

“Just who are you, and what are you doing here?” she asked me.

That started a lot of wheels going around in my head. She was no dumb blonde, whatever else she was.

“Your boy friend and I had a little fight,” I said. I was trying to get the pitch, to fit her into the picture.

“He’s not my boy friend,” she said. “Leon is just a friend, more a business associate I guess you would say.”

That didn’t figure, but the wheels started turning faster. Leon Schell never worked with a woman, that I was sure of. But he would hire one for a specific job, such as grounding that pilot for a weekend, and it was easy to see he wouldn’t mind mixing a little pleasure with business, and with this Amazon that kind of mixing would be a real pleasure. I wanted to get that gun away from her in a hurry, so I gave her a fast pitch. With a dame like this there was one thing in the world that interested her more than anything else, dough.

“Look, honey,” I said, “I’m working with the police. I don’t know if you know it or not but your friend Schell here is one of the most wanted jewel thieves in the country. He’s wanted so bad by just my company that they have a twenty-five thousand dollar reward out for him. You have a pretty fancy layout here, with that kind of dough you could pay some of the expenses for quite a while.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

Leon Schell moved his legs and let out a groan. This had to be fast. I put the pressure on.

“I want you to give me that gun right now, and I want you to testify about how Schell hired you for that job in Poughkeepsie last week. In a little while this place will have a couple dozen cops swarming over it, and somehow I can’t imagine you having a gun fight with the police over any man, especially a guy who is just a business associate. If you work with me I know I can talk my company into giving you all or a good chunk of that reward money. But it has to be right now, before this guy wakes up. If you stick with him there’ll be a mess when the cops get here, but no matter what happens, he’s finished, and you won’t get a smell of that dough.”

She was a Frenchwoman with French logic, she could see a chance at some heavy money, and heaven be praised, she was a woman who could make up her mind quickly.

“Okay, handsome, I work for you,” she said.

She lowered the gun and walked, no strutted, no I mean sidled toward me. Everything shook, but it shook just right. So help me, in a spot like that I was distracted. When she handed me the gun I just kept looking.

“I wasn’t really going to shoot you,” she smiled at me. “You’re really much too handsome. I thought maybe you were a burglar or something like that. I was asleep in my bedroom when I heard all that racket and...”

“It’s okay, baby,” I smiled back at her.

Leon Schell moaned again, but now I didn’t care if he sang the St. Louis Blues.

“Where’s your phone?” I asked her.

She went over to the sofa and pulled open the door of the end table at the far end. I found myself getting distracted again, but forced my mind back to business. For a big gal she sure had perfect control of her musculature. I sat down to face Schell. He was still out and now I hoped he’d stay that way for another ten minutes. Just to be sure, I kept my gun at the ready on him. Sandra LaCoeur sat on the couch a foot or so from me, looking at him. She even smelled nice.

I dialed the operator and asked her to get me Police Headquarters. This time I didn’t get any jazz about dialing it myself, I heard a bunch of clicks and noises over the wire and then the cop operator at Headquarters came on.

“Drop the gun, Young. Fast.”

I half turned my head towards the foyer and saw them — two, no three men, stepping quickly out of the kitchen into the foyer, spreading out. Each had a gun in his mitt. My heart leaped, then I recognized one of them, I think his name was Cosgrove, one of the Homicide Squad boys. I dropped the gun silently on the rug. The cop at Headquarters kept saying hello but I couldn’t say anything. I looked at Sandra LaCoeur and she had a stricken look on her face.

“It’s okay, baby,” I said. “These guys are the cops I was telling you about.” I had no idea how they got there that fast.

“Put the phone down, Young,” one of them said. “You won’t have to make any calls for a long, long time.”

I put it down on the cop who was still saying hello. One of the detectives walked to the front door and opened it, then I got another surprise. Men poured through it, but the first one in was Inspector O’Leary himself. His face looked like red granite, his eyes were flashing fire and brimstone if I ever saw it. He looked mad enough to eat me alive if I so much as sneezed. He didn’t say anything at first, his eyes swept over every detail in the room — at Leon Schell still out on the floor, the open attache case, the junk jewelry on the far side of the room where Schell threw it, the mess of the bar where Schell and I had crashed into it, over Sandra LaCoeur, and finally over me. They fastened on me like two gimlets. I realized I had my coat and tie off and Sandra LaCoeur was only a foot away from me on the couch — my face got very red.

“Little hootchie-cootchie on company time?” he finally asked.

One of the detectives let out a wolf whistle behind him.

Inspector O’Leary whirled around. “Shut up!” he bellowed.

He turned back to me. “Now will you mind telling me just what the hell is going on here?” he yelled at me.

“Sure, Inspector, sure,” I told him.

“Shut up, wait a minute,” he barked. “Perrozzi, get your pad out and take down every word he says.”

“Yes sir,” Perrozzi answered.

I told him the whole thing, from the time I left him earlier that afternoon right up to the end. I embroidered the end a little, exaggerating what Sandra LaCoeur had done to help me. Hell, I was willing to give her the whole insurance company for the way she bailed me out of that mess. Inspector O’Leary’s face gradually relaxed as he listened. When I was finished he almost looked human again.

“Where’s the recorder cartridge?” he asked me.

I got up and got it out of my coat. “It’s all on that,” I told him as I handed it to him. “Everything, from the time Monk came in to my room right up to the time Schell made me strip.”

Sandra LaCoeur smiled and a couple of the detectives snickered. Inspector O’Leary took it in his giant paw and slipped it into his pocket. He was almost beaming at me.

“I hate to admit it lad,” he said, “but you did a fine job, sure enough you did. I admit I was a little mad at you for a while, but you were lucky and it worked out just fine.”

“Well, Inspector,” I said, “I promised you I’d get the three of them for you, and that’s what I tried to do, even if I had to cut a few corners. You know, like the old song goes, ‘One, Two, Three, O’Leary’.”

Inspector O’Leary threw back his head and roared with laughter. I didn’t get it, I didn’t think it was that funny, in fact now I couldn’t see anything funny about it at all. But he was having the time of his life. Even the detectives looked puzzled.

When he was able to talk he called Perrozzi again. “Get handcuffs on Schell and get an ambulance up here for him — we don’t want anything to happen to the lug now, and get a Matron up here so Miss what-ever-her-name-is can get dressed. Bring her in for questioning, we’ll need her as a material witness. I’ll take care of Young myself.”

“Gee, thanks, Inspector,” I said.

He swooped up my coat with one hand and me with the other. He put his right arm around my shoulder and I thought I was dancing with a bear. He headed me across to the foyer, up the little stairs, and out into the hall, then rang for the elevator.

“What’s so funny about ‘One, Two, Three, O’Leary’?” I asked him when I could breathe again.

His eyes twinkled. “You wouldn’t understand, lad,” he said. “But it brings back the old days to me. When I was a rookie in Hell’s Kitchen I never locked anybody up unless I had three charges against them, and I always made them stick. I got the nickname ‘One, Two, Three, O’Leary’ those many long years ago. It just struck me funny coming from you.”

That didn’t clear it up at all. “Why was it so funny coming from me?” I asked him.

“Well, lad, it’s like this. When my men brought that other punk, Larry Coster in, I told him I’d personally unscrew his head from his shoulders unless he told me where this Schell guy was hiding. I figured you’d be up there with him. He came across fast enough, and on my way up here I guess I was pretty peeved at you. As a matter of fact when I got you I was going to book you on no less than sixteen different charges. But you did such a good job I’m going to forget all that now, I’ll let bygones be bygones.”

“You mean you won’t book me?” I asked hopefully.

“Oh, I have to book you, lad, you know that. But I’ll cut it down to three. Homicide, leaving the scene of a homicide, and failing to report a homicide.” He roared with laughter again.

The elevator came and we stepped in. This guy had the lousiest sense of humor I had ever seen in my life. All I could say was “Um.”

“Cheer up, lad,” he guffawed. “I’ll buy you a beer or two before I book you. No, I’ll make it three. Three for ‘One, Two, Three, O’Leary’.”

I wondered if I could talk him into five or six so I could get to sleep and maybe dream of Sandra LaCoeur.