Night and Fear

He was on late duty that week, which was why his face was so long as he came down the steps of the precinct house in the middle of all his shift-mates a quarter of an hour before midnight. He hated that late racket — couldn’t get used to it. Midnight to 8:00 A.M. The dregs of time. You had to sleep in broad daylight — try to, you mean, around where he lived. Loaf around all afternoon when other people worked. Didn’t know whether to call it breakfast he ate before he reported in at 11:30 P.M. or midnight-lunch or what.

And such a totally-forsaken beat: Lincoln to Main, Halsted to Spring. Trying store-fronts to make sure they were locked up. Picking them up and putting them down. Ringing the House twice an hour. Then you came off, went home to bed when the rest of the world was waking up. Got up at noon and the whole thing started over once more.

“Cheer up,” Dinty Falvey said at his elbow, “think of all the nice fresh air you get.”

“Every dog has his day,” O’Dare answered. “I’ll be having mine — one of these fine nights!”

They formed a double column on the sidewalk, tramping along two by two. Not in drill-formation by any means, just roughly symmetrical, to avoid ganging up. The two green lamps dwindled to the size of peas behind them, lost themselves in the night-murk. They started thinning out, dropping off one by one to relieve the men going off duty. O’Dare’s beat was the farthest out of them all. “S’long, Danny, see you tomorrow!”

“Right,” said Danny O’Dare, and went on alone. Just a cop. Just a cog in a machine. He reached his beat, opened the call-box, phoned in:

“O’Dare taking over, corner of Lincoln and Rogers.”

Keefer, the man he was relieving, had a drunk on his hands. A drunk and a taxi-driver and an accusing meter. One of the pesty kind of drunks that persecute cops. It’s that way more often than not, public belief to the contrary. A cop loathes running in a drunk, will lean over backward if he can possibly avoid it. For one thing, they’re rarely held the next day, unless they’ve done something particularly overt. For another, it takes up the cop’s time, he’s got to appear to press the charge. It’s a nuisance.

Keefer had a disgusted air, as though this had been going on a good ten minutes or more. “C’mon now,” he said weariedly, “which pocket did you put it in? It must be in there somewhere! Give the man his money.”

The drunk, legs splayed, hat teetering on the back of his head, was digging a thumb into a vest-pocket with somnambulistic slowness. Three or four others had their linings turned inside out. The taxi-driver sat by at his wheel, mum as a clam, aware that the gentry in dark-blue have no great love for his kind.

The drunk pulled the exploring thumb out, smote himself a devastating blow on the chest, bellowed indignantly: “I been robbed!” The dramatic emphasis was too great, he went off balance, sat down abruptly from the effect of his own Tarzan-wallop.

“I got a better idea,” said O’Dare quietly. He picked him up by the feet instead of the collar, held his legs straight up in the air. “Catch his head so it don’t bump,” he warned his brother-officer. “Now, shake!” The drunk began to vibrate like someone with the palsy. Something chinked musically to the sidewalk under him, something else followed; there was a succession of pleasant tinkling metallic sounds.

“Holding out, huh?” Keefer said with feigned ferocity as they stood him up. “I oughta run you in!”

The drunk heaved with exaggerated dignity. “Never wash so insulted in my life!” he glowered.

“Now pay the man and get outa here, before I haul you in!” Keefer took a threatening step forward. The drunk scurried around the corner as though he were worked on pulleys. When Keefer turned to the cab-driver, however, his truculence was no longer assumed, it was the real thing. “Now y’ got paid, get out o’ here, gyp-artist! Y’oughta know better than take on a drunk for a fare in the first place! Don’t lemme see y’ around here no more, chiseler!”

The driver, meek as a lamb, took off his brake, glided away without a word.

“What’s new?” O’Dare asked when they were alone.

Keefer jerked his head despondently after the disappearing taillight. “That’s all I ever get. And I hadda get somebody’s pet cat out of a flue for them around at 40 Spring awhile ago. I’d almost be willing to trade places with either of those guys.” Which wasn’t exactly true, and wasn’t meant to be taken as such. O’Dare understood. Blowing off steam, they called it.

“Well, be good, Danny — see you t’morra.”

“Yep.” The footfalls died away. The night-silence descended, unbroken blocks of it, an occasional machine in the distance, a trolley taking a curve in High-C, only adding emphasis to it. The quiet of a sleeping city, that for complete suspension beats any country-quiet hollow.

Danny O’Dare was on duty.

He started down Lincoln, in and out of the store-entryways, testing the locks, peering through the glass fronts. He got to the other end of his beat, turned right, followed that street. A window was thrown up high above him, a window that showed black directly over one that showed orange. A lady of uncertain years thrust her head out, exclaimed with shattering audibility: “There’s one now! Officer, officer — will you come up here please?”

He knew right away it wasn’t going to be important; a cop can tell about those things — sometimes. She wasn’t frightened, just sore. “What’s the trouble, lady?”

“I want those people under me arrested! They keep playing their radio until all hours of the night. It’s an outrage!”

“Sh, quiet, lady!” O’Dare reminded her. “You’re making more noise than any radio yourself right this minute.”

He sighed, went into the building, climbed two flights of stairs, knocked on a door. You could hardly hear it, she probably had a grudge. He liked the people at a glance, screwed up the side of his face good-naturedly. “Just tone it down a little,” he advised. They offered him a drink. “I’ll hold you to that when I’m off duty,” he grinned, went down to the street again. A clock chimed the half-hour and he rang in from the call-box at the next intersection. “O’Dare, 25th and Main, nothing to report.”

And then right away, as though just to give him the lie, there was.

It didn’t seem like anything at first glance, anything at all. Just a car parked half-way down one of the side-streets, lights out. For all the life it showed, it might have been there all night. No violation in that. It wasn’t on the main thoroughfare, wasn’t near a hydrant or anything. If its owner lived in that building, he had a perfect right to leave it out all night instead of bedding it at a garage.

But, somehow, it didn’t blend with its surroundings, with the building it was standing in front of, with the neighborhood as a whole. Even in the dimness, it was too high-class, too expensive a job, to look right hanging around here any length of time. It would have been more in keeping with Heinie Muller’s beat, over around Rivercrest Heights.

I’m not trying to make a swami out of Danny O’Dare, but it’s a fact that a cop has a definite instinct about that sort of thing, maybe even without realizing it. Just as he had known that that lady-crank had had nothing worth hearing to say to him out of the window just now, something about this car struck him as not being quite as guileless as it let on to be.

He had been in full sight of it when he rang the House just now from the corner. Had only spotted it as he finished closing the callbox. Some sort of a tension got to him from it, as he looked down toward it from where he was. As though somebody, either in it or nearby, were holding their breath, metaphorically speaking, waiting to see what his next move would be.

He continued on the way he’d been heading, crossed the mouth of the side-street and passed from view behind the opposite corner. Then he stopped, got up close to it, and stuck about half of one eye out beyond the building-line. He could have been dead wrong. It could have belonged to a swell who had a wren tucked away in this part of town. Its presence could have been explained by any one of a half-a-dozen things that were none of Danny O’Dare’s business. Then, while he hinged like that, a portion of a doorway-shadow detached itself and came further out into the open, became the outline of a man who had been watching O’Dare, himself, from there — and now wanted to make sure he had gone! O’Dare drew that tiny sliver of his head back, paying him out a little more rope as it were.

The silhouette went over to the car; a brief, almost unnoticeable blat of its horn sounded. Pip! like that. Not just a signal of impatience, too short and quick for that — a warning signal, for somebody unseen within that building.

It was O’Dare’s meat now. He had been the cause of that warning, and anyone that’s afraid of a cop must have some reason for being afraid of a cop.

The set-up was a particularly bad one; he realized that as he breasted the corner, came into full sight, and headed down on that car and its look-out. An ordinary man would have thought twice about bucking it, and then not bucked it. Which is why cops wear blue uniforms to distinguish them from ordinary men. He and the car and the street-light across the way formed a triangle. As he advanced, the street-light fell behind him. He had half a block to cover as a looming silhouette, silver radiance behind him, a target that a blind-man could hit. They — the car and its watchers — stayed safely shrouded in gloom. They could stop him long before he got there and he couldn’t do a thing about it, wasn’t even entitled to fire first until he was given the provocation. Tension had switched over to him now, had hold of every nerve. He thought of Molly, waiting at home, alone, helpless, going to present him with a Danny O’Dare Junior one of these fine days real soon now. Thought, but that was all. He didn’t even try to protect himself by feigning casualness as he bore down. He wasn’t using his beat-gait, was coming on at the quick pace of aroused suspicions.

Half-way to it now. The look-out had gotten in the car long ago, when he first revealed himself around the corner. But the door stayed invitingly open — like an invitation to sudden death. Metal glinted momentarily behind the glass above the dash, highlighted by the rays of the street-light far behind O’Dare. You couldn’t even see the guy’s face, just that warning glint of deadly weapon.

O’Dare had partially unlimbered himself, though the act was begging for the death-flash that was to come, closed in with his hand to his hip-bone. The odds, climbing as high against him as they could possibly have gone, now suddenly began to drop down again in his favor. He was in close now where he could do some damage himself; the guy had waited too long to drop him.

The car’s gleaming bumper flashed past behind him, he was up to the door. The guy’s face came into focus — and a little round knob pierced by a hole sighted over the top of that door into the middle of O’Dare’s stomach. He was going to take him the hard way.

“Can it, Detroit!” a commanding voice cried warningly from the doorway, “I’ll handle it, you jerk!”

The round knob with the black hole vanished, the door-top was just a straight line as though it had never been there. The glimmer of white face under the car-ceiling went “S-s-s!” through puckered lips and pinched nostrils like something letting off steam through a safety-valve. That’s very bad for a killer’s nerves, to be at firing-point and then be checked abruptly. Fiction-writers like to say they haven’t any. It’s really just the other way around; they’re all nerves. O’Dare whirled, careless of whether he got it in the back or not.

Two men were hurrying out of the doorway, across the sidewalk to the pulsing car. O’Dare drew first, looked second to see if there was menace coming from that direction. There wasn’t, at least not on the surface. The one in advance was stocky, short, matched the car. Sleek like it, glossy, important-looking. Fleecy vicuna coat with big headlight pearl-buttons flapping open as he strove to get there before anything regrettable happened. Furious, apparently, that it so very nearly had. Or maybe for other reasons that O’Dare hadn’t divined as yet, having to do with his own happening along just when he had. At any rate — this sleek pudge — had his brakes off for a moment, spoke without thinking — as though O’Dare weren’t present.

“Never one of them!” he barked hoarsely. “Don’t you know any better than that? Never one of them!” He reached the running-board, swung a short right hook in under the low-slung roof of the car. The impact sounded as it hit the dim face lurking below. Whock! “There’s never anything that can’t be straightened out if you use your head!” he raged on. A dark line was bisecting the chin of the face he had hit.

It was now O’Dare’s turn. He saw no one else was coining out of the doorway. Neither of the two new arrivals made the slightest threat toward him. The second man, less conspicuously-dressed than the shorter one, stayed in the background, lighting a cigarette with four hands — the way they shook he seemed to have at least that many. But O’Dare wasn’t forgetting that surreptitious gleam of metal behind the windshield, that bored knob atop the door. “Put up your hands!” he rasped into the car. “Step out here where I can get a look at you, and identify yourself! What was that you had sighted on me just now when I was coming up? Where is it?” His own gun was in the open now; not exactly pointed, but just there, ready.

The man in the vicuna coat spoke, as though that were a short-cut out of an unpleasant misunderstanding. “He’s my driver, brother, that’s all,” he explained blandly. “His name is Emmons, we call him Detroit because he comes from—”

O’Dare cut him short like a knife with: “I didn’t ask you, I asked him!” The man had stepped out, palms up like somebody carrying a cafeteria-tray. The blood down the cleft of his chin had widened but was drying. He glanced at Vicuna-Coat quizzically, as though asking: “Why don’t you stop this cop’s foolishness?”

Vicuna-Coat seemed to think it was about time to. “I’m Benny Benuto,” he said softly, and waited for that to get its work in.

It didn’t seem to. O’Dare didn’t even flick his eyes over at him, kept them on the driver. “Where is it?” he growled. He missed seeing the brief pantomime. The second man gave Benuto a brief, inquiring look, hand idly fingering the lapel of his coat within grabbing distance of his own left shoulder. The look might have meant: “Want me to give it to him? He’s holding us up.” Benuto answered with a negative shake of the head, a contemptuous curl of the lip, as though: “What, this harness cop? Leave him to me!”

He said aloud to O’Dare, “You don’t seem to understand, brother. I said I’m Benny Benuto.”

Again O’Dare didn’t hear, apparently. The driver had handed over the gun, a brutal-looking thing all steel and a yard wide. O’Dare pocketed it. “License?” he snapped.

Benuto cut in reassuringly, “He’s got one, brother. I wouldn’t let him carry it if he—”

“He better have!”

He did. O’Dare scanned it by the light of the dash, which he had ordered cut on. All Jake, nothing phony about it. He jabbed it back to him reluctantly.

Benuto was soaping him, “You see, he’s a sort of bodyguard of mine as well as driver; a little fidgety like all such guys are. Must have mistook you for some kind of footpad in the dark and—”

O’Dare at long last gave him his undivided attention. If he’d placed him by now, you wouldn’t have known it by any change in his voice or manner, any creeping-in of deference. “The corner-light was on me the whole way up,” he said tersely. “He saw me at the call-box even before that! I take it you don’t live here, Mr. Benuto? You can explain your presence in this building at this hour, can you?”

Benuto seemed to be trying hard to control himself. “Would you mind giving me your name, officer?”

“Answer my question!” O’Dare yelled loudly in his face. “I don’t care who you are, if you’re the biggest big-shot in town!”

“Oh, then you do know who I am.” Benuto smiled a little dangerously. “That should make it much simpler. Sure, glad to answer your question, Officer 4432.” He repeated the numerals on O’Dare’s shield aloud. The other man in the background was scribbling them down. “I just dropped in to visit an old friend. Well, I found out he doesn’t live here any more—”

O’Dare’s eyes involuntarily went up the face of the house. It was changing right while he looked. A whole half-floor went suddenly orange, or rather the windows did. A minute later the other half followed suit. Then the one below. It was waking up from top to bottom. One of the sashes went up and a frightened-looking young woman peered down at the group by the car. She seemed to be about to say something, when abruptly a man standing behind her in the room clasped his hand to her mouth, pulled her in again. His voice carried down to the sidewalk just before he slapped the sash down again: “Stay out of it! What’s matter wit’ yuh? Wanna get in trouble?”

A woman suddenly appeared in the street-doorway, distracted, dazed, staggering, clad only in her night-dress, blood down the front of it. “Johnny!” she was groaning, hands pressed to her forehead. “Johnny! What’ve they done to you?”

O’Dare took a step toward her. A steely-grip suddenly shot out, held him fast by the upper arm. “I wanna talk to you!” All the suavity was gone from Benuto. He meant business.

The woman had sat down on the top doorstep just as she was, huddled there clasping her knees, rocking back and forth like some lost soul. “Johnny! I knew this would happen to you! You wouldn’t listen to me! Johnny!”

Benuto’s voice was a harsh whisper in his ear. “Now, before you get any ideas in your head, listen to me, brother! Use the old bean. We heard some trouble going on in one of the flats up there — somebody getting his from somebody. That’s why we got out in a hurry. We didn’t want to get mixed up in it. I still don’t — do you get me? And here’s how much I don’t — step down this way.” He led O’Dare a step or two to the rear of the car, just out of the line of vision of his two henchmen. “Tact” is what Benny Benuto would have called that if asked for a definition.

Danny O’Dare had never seen a thousand-dollar bill before. He saw five of them now, as they went into his uniform-pocket one by one. Benuto took good care that he should, let each one focus without blurring, yet without being too blatant about it. “Just a token of good-will,” he said. “You know where you can find me, drop around tomorrow or next day, and I’ll match them for you. All you gotta do is just forget I happened to drop around here at the same time this was happening. Everybody else is getting theirs. Get yours, brother. Be up-to-date. Your looey is a pretty good pal of mine. Maybe I can do you some good, 4432.”

He thought of Molly and the kid they were expecting, for the second time that night. What a lot of difference ten-grand can make in this world! Get his, everybody else was— Through the blur of his thoughts he heard himself saying: “There’s blood on your shirtfront, Benuto. There’s blood on that other guy’s hand too, I saw it when he lit a butt—”

“That’s from hitting my driver in the nose,” Benuto said softly, “You saw me do it.” He flicked the back of his hand familiarly against the pocket that held the five-thousand. “You saw me do it,” he repeated slowly. “Ask the jane. Call her over here and ask her — and then let me get out of this mess.”

O’Dare had to drag her forward bodily. She kept trying to dig her naked feet into the sidewalk intersection-lines, resisting, holding back in mortal terror. “What happened upstairs? Who got hurt?”

She was almost incoherent with grief — and something else besides. “My Johnny! They came after him! He went to the door, I stayed in bed. They locked me in there. I heard them, I heard them doing it! Right in my arms he—” She spread out her nightdress like a pitiful child showing a mud-stain. “Look.”

“Who?” O’Dare said.

“Somebody. I don’t know.”

“Look at these two men. Was it either of these two men?” Benuto and the other one just stood there, smiling slightly.

She went nearly wild with fear, began to thresh about trying to free herself, swung all the way around O’Dare backwards until she faced the other way, straining away from him like something on a leash. “Lemme go! Lemme go, oh please! No, I never saw them before! I don’t know who it was! I tell you I don’t know!”

Benuto said “See?” You could hardly hear the word, just a lisp on his tongue. He turned, took an abrupt step; the other man went with him. The car-door cracked smartly. The tuned-up engine bellowed out. Benuto’s voice topped it. “Be seeing you, brother!” The Isotta-Fraschini telescoped itself into a swirling red tail-light that seemed to spin concentrically as it receded.

O’Dare half-raised his gun at it; held it that way at a forty-five-degree angle from the ground. One foot stamped forward a pace. The other wouldn’t follow. $10,000. Three and a third weary years of pounding pavements, trying door-latches, that represented. Forty solid months of it, twelve-hundred days. In rain and snow and slush; in below-zero numbness and blistering dog-days. And the accrued earnings of all that plodding drudgery were his in the space of five minutes, without lifting a finger. Just by forgetting a name. A name that it wouldn’t do him any good to remember, a name that counted for more than the numerals 4432 in high places. A name that could send him to a worse beat than this one even, out by the river shore where the ash heaps were. A wife home that he didn’t want to watch grow ugly and old, wrestling with pots all her life. A kid coming that he wanted to be someone, to send to college some day. Who gave a rap about them, but him? Who gave a rap about him, but himself? Others were getting theirs, why shouldn’t he get his? The modern way, the up-to-date way.

He ground the heel of his left hand in, above his eyes, letting go of the woman. She slumped down like a clawing, groveling animal, around the leg that hadn’t moved forward. The red tail elongated into a comet, turned the corner. A prowl car passed it, going slowly the other way, ebbed from sight.

O’Dare yanked out his whistle, gave it a blast. He put his gun away and picked the woman up with both arms. “You do know who did it, don’t you?” he asked without looking down into her face. “You’re afraid to tell!”

“Johnny!” she moaned. “Johnny!” Her head was hanging downwards over his elbow. “What’s the difference who did it? He’s gone now! You can’t bring him back, you guy with the badge!”

The prowl-car backed up, turned in, shot down toward them, stopped on a dime. The one on O’Hare’s side leaned out. “There’s a guy just been beaten to death in that building,” O’Dare said with a jerk of his head. He carried her in without waiting, up the stairs. “Which door is it?” he panted.

The house was unnaturally still from top to bottom; light threading from under every door, floor-boards creaking under tiptoed footsteps, but not a face showing outside. Self-preservation working overtime.

He set her down on her feet and she groped along the wall, wavering toward the right door. It was open, anyway.

“Those guys did it, didn’t they?” he said a second time.

“Why should I tell you?” she shuddered. “Who can help me? Who? Everyone in the house must have heard him groaning, must have heard me pleading for him through that locked door. Nobody would come near us to help us. What a world this is!”

“Why didn’t you scream for help?”

“I was afraid that would kill him even quicker.”

He turned and went in. The lights were on, from when the dead man had answered the door. It was pretty fierce. The assistant medical examiner’s full report, later, was to be something unique in the municipal records: there was not an unfractured bone or group of bones in the man’s entire body! All the legs were off four otherwise undamaged chairs, and all sixteen of those, in turn, were broken — some of them three or four times. They must have stayed in there quite some time.

The woman kept trying to come in and he wouldn’t let her, kept her out in the hall. Finally one of the neighbors got up enough courage to show up outside, took her in with them, gave her some whiskey or something. Her sobs, when she finally thawed, came thinly through the door — a little bit like that cat must have sounded Keefer said he’d rescued from a flue. O’Dare thought: “I got someone loves me like that too.” He touched his pocket; paper crackled.

One of the prowl-car men’s name was Anderson, the other was Josephs. O’Dare knew them both. “Some job,” Anderson remarked. O’Dare kept looking down at what was left of the guy. Maybe it was that. The woman’s mewing kept coming in. Maybe it was that. Or maybe it was that he hadn’t thought quickly, clearly enough down below on the street when that red tail spurted for the corner. Just before the detecks got there he blurted out: “Benny Benuto and one of his hoods were leaving just as I got to the door.”

They both looked at him, looked away, again. Anderson said warningly out of the corner of his mouth: “Pipe down! Are you crazy, O’Dare?” They glanced at each other understandingly. “Who are you, to buck — things? D’ya want your beat shoved so far out y’ gotta commute to get to it? D’ya want just empty pin-marks left on your coat? You’re no rookie, kid. Take a tip from us, shut your yap. Don’t tackle—”

Two dicks came hustling up the stairs into the room. “Whew! Hamburger!” one let out. An inspector arrived, minutes later. O’Dare said in answer to his questioning: “I didn’t hear anything, but there was a suspicious-looking car standing out front, numbered 6M58-4O. A man who identified himself as Benny Benuto came running out of the house with another man just as I got up to it. There was blood on his shirt-front.”

“Then why did you let him get away?” asked the inspector.

O’Dare looked unflinchingly at him. He said slowly, “He gave me five thousand dollars to forget I’d seen him here, jumped in the car. Here it is.” He opened his hand. It held ten pieces of paper, five bills torn in half. They all fell down on the floor as he dropped his hand to his side.

The inspector said, “Send out an alarm for Benny Benuto. He’s to be picked up for questioning, on suspicion of murder, along with two other men, Detroit Emmons and Wally Furst.” He pointed to the torn bills. “Pick that up and seal it in an envelope, to be presented as evidence at the arraignment — if there is one.”

“If,” somebody unidentifiable in the room piped very low.

One of the dicks murmured dryly as he brushed by O’Dare: “I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, cop!”

Josephs, going down the stairs with O’Dare, said: “You’ll find out. He’ll meet himself coming out, he’ll spring so fast! He bounces like a tennis-ball off a racket.” When they got to the prowl, he picked a newspaper out of the door pocket; handed it to him. “Better start getting familiar with the Help-Wanted ads.”

O’Dare said grimly: “He’ll bounce like a cannon-ball, once I get my two-cents-worth in. The woman up there can identify him, if they’ll only get it out of her. There’s a man and woman on the floor below must have seen something too. She tried to—” Something started coming over the car-set right while they were standing there talking next to it. “Calling Cars 15 and 8, Cars 15 and 8. Go to 50 Diversey Place. 50 Diversey Place. Third floor front. A woman has been reported abducted. A woman has been reported abducted. That is—”

The unintentional irony of it, that: “That is all!”

“Not our party,” Anderson was saying.

O’Dare had hold of the car-door in a funny way, as if he were drunk or had just tripped over something against the curb.

“What’s matter with you?” A peculiar hollow sound came from his chest. “I live there. That’s my wife’s and my — flat.”

“Hang on!” Josephs snapped. They swung off so quick they nearly took him off his feet along with them. He jumped, clung there on the running-board, crouched a little to meet the wind. Just before they skidded around the corner, two of the dicks came out of the house, bringing with them the dead man’s wife and the couple from the floor below, all of whom O’Dare had indicated as possible witnesses. He wouldn’t have known them at the moment if they’d stared him in the face. “Make it a mistake,” he prayed in the teeth of the wind. “Not Molly!”

They screeched to a stop in front of where he’d started out from four hours before, with her waving goodby from the third-floor window. There were too many lights lit for three in the morning. The whole face of the building was blinking with them, like that other house they’d just come away from. He knew then, beyond shadow of a doubt. Something was wrong, something had happened here. It was written all over the place to his cop’s-eye. One of the assigned cars was there already ahead of them.

He jumped down and went at the door like someone stumbling off-balance, shoulders way ahead of his feet. Josephs and Anderson — who’d come out of bounds to bring him here — lit out again around the next corner. Mrs. Kramer, a floor below his, head a mass of curl-papers, was standing in her doorway discussing it with the woman across the hall. Their voices dropped as tragedy in a blue uniform went hurtling by. Not low enough.

“That’s him now. Poor soul, they were going to—”

“Did you see that look in his eye? He’ll kill them if he ever—”

The two men from Car 15 were talking to the super, who had a sweater over his pajamas, just outside O’Dare’s own door. He elbowed the two aside, grabbed the man by the shoulders, began to shake the life out of him. “How’d it happen? What’d they look like?”

The other two pried his hands away tactfully. “He don’t know, he didn’t see them. How can he talk anyway when you’re turning him into an egg-nog?”

“Say that when it happens to you, McKee.” O’Dare said bitterly.

“I happened to be up, reading. I heard her call out in the hall, just once. Your name, ‘Danny!’ Like that. My wife had told me about — and I thought maybe she was sick, needed help. Right down by the street-door, it sounded. Time I got there, I didn’t see anyone, just heard a car driving away outside, that was all.”

O’Dare brushed by them, went in to look. There wasn’t anything to see, but he didn’t want them to see his eyes. They dried right up again, from the slow; fine rage that was beginning to set in. The super sidled up to him, sidestepping the others momentarily.

“And there was this,” he whispered. “On the sill. I thought I better show it to you first, by yourself.”

the note said. O’Dare turned slowly and showed it to the others. “Benuto did it.” And shaking with a terrible, quiet sort of intensity, “If they bring him in tonight—!”

The inspector who had been over at the other place had shown up. “They just brought him in. I got the flash on my way over here.”

“Where’ve they got him? Where’ve they got him?” O’Dare cried out wildly.

“Holding him over at one of the outlying precincts, without booking him, so his mouth can’t jump right in and haul him out—”

The phone started ringing in the room there with them. The inspector motioned to O’Dare to go ahead.

“Yeah, this is Patrolman O’Dare,” they heard him say.

The voice said, “It’s ten minutes past three, O’Dare. We’ll give you one hour. If the gent you’ve framed isn’t released from wherever it is he’s being held by ten past four, you know the answer, don’t you?”

O’Dare said, “No, I don’t—” Suddenly his face went the color of clay, he jolted there as though the instrument had short-circuited him. Molly’s voice sobbed in his ear: “Dan, what’re they doing this for? What’ve we done to them—?”

A line of beads came out across his eyebrows. “Where are you, quick, where are you?” he said rabidly. But she was gone already. “Not a chance,” the first voice said. “Still claim you don’t know the answer?”

O’Dare said, “I’m only a cop. What can I do? He’s in the hands of the homicide squad—”

“You put him there, you—!” the voice snarled. “You better correct that identification of yours in a hurry. Or maybe you’d like some changes made around the house — a crepe on the door, f’rinstance? One hour.” The connection broke.

The inspector, when he’d told him, said: “We’d better get over there in a hurry, see that he’s turned out. Always can pick him up again later.”

“Not always,” thought O’Dare bitterly. And the next time he’d have a whole battery of legal talent short-stopping him. This wasn’t the way to bring her back, anyway. He’d never be able to look her in the face again if he let himself be blackmailed into— He went running down the stairs after the inspector, sprinted for the running-board; they didn’t say anything. He was a man before he was a cop, after all.

Benuto was in the basement of an out-of-the-way suburban precinct-house, where they rarely handled anything more than traffic violations. If they’d begun sweating him already, he didn’t look it; sat there glowering in the corner on a stool. He was, they admitted to the inspector, a hard nut to crack. They hadn’t gotten anywhere much.

“His crowd are holding this man’s wife, we have reason to believe,” the inspector said. “Afraid we’ll have to pull in our horns for the time being.”

“Lemme talk to him,” O’Dare pleaded. “Lemme talk to him alone! Lemme just find out where they’ve got her! Gimme a break.”

The inspector nodded. One of the dicks took the precaution of slipping O’Dare’s gun out of its holster first, then they let him go in there by himself. He closed the door. The walls were thick down in that basement. That was why they brought suspects down there for questioning. They couldn’t hear a sound for awhile. In about ten minutes O’Dare stuck his disheveled-head out and asked for the loan of a fountain-pen. One of the dicks passed him his.

“You mean you’re getting him to sign?”

“I’m not asking him about the murder,” O’Dare said quietly. “Just my wife, now.” He went in again. When he came out a second time he was wiping off the gold nib of the pen by pinching it between his fingers. He returned it to the lender. Beyond him, in the murky room, Benuto lay on the floor in a dead faint. Ink discolored his fingernails, there was a purple blob of it in underneath each one. It was O’Dare, not he, who was doing the shaking, as though it had been pretty much of a strain.

Three pairs of eyes sought his questioningly.

“He told me,” he said very low, and wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. “They’ve got her in a refrigerating-plant out at Brierfield. He told them to take her there, in case he was picked up.”

“How d’ya know he told you the truth?” one of them said, which was just the dick in him being superior to a mere cop in matters of this kind.

“I let him tell me three times before I paid any attention,” O’Dare explained simply. “Three times running it must be the truth; his brain was too busy blowing out fuses to think up a stall, anyway. I read about some Japs doing that, only yesterday in the paper. Gimme back my gun,” he wound up somberly, “I’m going over there and get her back.”

“We’ll get her back for you,” one of the dicks promised, “now that we know where—”

“I’ll do my own getting back.” O’Dare’s voice rose. “Gimme back my gun. I’m facing suspension anyway, for going off my beat while on duty. Don’t try to stop me, any of you; I’m going, with my gun or without it—!”

“We’re not trying to stop you,” the inspector said. “Give him his gun. Go with him, McKee. The rest of us’ll follow. Wait there out of sight for further orders, you two. Don’t make a move until we size the place up. This woman’s life is at stake.”

“And we’ve got thirty-five minutes,” O’Dare said bitterly.

Brierfield lay across the river — which made it an interstate death-penalty kidnaping and put her in just that much more jeopardy of her life. Since they got top prices whether they killed her or not, there was every inducement for them to do away with her rather than be caught with the goods. O’Dare was cursing the day they were born.

McKee ran the car out along the river-drive, with its siren cut off; past the stony cliff-dwellings where Benuto himself lived and had been picked up, past the desolate ash-dumps further on that were the rewards of demotion on the force. They crossed the interstate bridge, slithered through four o’clock, dead-to-the-world, downtown Brierfield, which was just a little annex to the Big Town, and came out beyond in a barren region of scattered breweries, warehouses, and packing-plants. The side-streets quit but the main highway ran on. McKee slowed a little, doused the lights. They skimmed along like a little mechanical metal beetle over the macadam. “They coming?” he asked.

O’Dare wasn’t interested, didn’t even bother looking to see. “Acme Refrigerating Plant it’s called,” he said. “Keep watching. He owns it — one of his lousy rackets.”

McKee slowed to a crawl as the outline of a sprawling concrete structure up ahead began topping a rise of the road. A single dreary arc-light shining down on the highway, bleached one side of it; the rest was just a black cut-out against the equally-black night-sky. Stenciled lettering ran the length of the side that faced the highroad, but too foreshortened by the angle at which they were looking to be decipherable. McKee went over to the side with a neat little loop of the wheel, stopped dead — and soundlessly. O’Dare gestured to him, got out, went up ahead to look. “Keep out of that arc-light,” McKee whispered.

The cop came back again in a minute. “Sure,” he said. “I can make out the first two letters, A and C, and that’s enough.” He looked back the other way, for the first time. “What’d they do, lose their way?”

McKee got out, eased the car-door closed after him. O’Dare couldn’t stand still, took his gun out, put it away, took it out, put it away. “What time y’got?” he almost whimpered. Not a moving thing showed on the long arc-lit ribbon of road they had come over.

McKee hadn’t been there when the phone-call was made to O’Dare. “Five after four,” he answered incautiously.

“Damn them! They’ll kill her!” the agonized cop rasped out. He meant the strangely-delayed follow-up party. He lurched away from the car, struck out alone toward the ominously-quiet building up ahead.

“Hey! Wait!” McKee hissed after him desperately, “Don’t do that, you fool—!” He took a quick step after him, grabbed him, tried to haul him back to the car. They had a brief, wordless struggle there by the roadside, gravel spitting out from under their scuffling shoes. O’Dare, crazed, swung out with all his might at the dick. The blow caught him on the under-side of the jaw. McKee went down, sprawling on his back. O’Dare’s gun was out again, he stood there crouched over him for an instant. “I’m going in there — now, d’ya hear me? I’ll put a bullet in you if you try to stop me again!” He turned and went toward the concrete hulk, bent double, moving along the roadside with surprising swiftness for a man his weight and height. Like an Indian runner.

Caution, concealment, was a thing of the past. His stumbling footfalls echoed in the stillness of that place like drumbeats. Behind him the road, which he could no longer see, stretched empty all the way back into Brierfield. What was that to him, whether they came now or didn’t? In, that was all he wanted, in! He came up to the cold, rough walls, padded against them with one bare hand outstretched to guide himself as he ran along beside them.

The entrance was around on the side, a darker patch in the dark wall that turned solid as he got up to it. Vast and huge, to admit and disgorge trucks, impregnably barred, the lidded bulb over it screwed off so that it was dark. He was like a tormented pygmy dancing up and down there, raging helpless in front of its huge dimensions. Even McKee didn’t come up to help him. Maybe he’d knocked him out.

There weren’t any openings at all within reach of the ground. Higher up, at about third-story level, there was a row of embrasures paned with corrugated glass. He ran down the rest of its length, turned the corner to the back, looking desperately for an outside ammonia-pipe, drain-pipe, anything that would offer a way up. Nothing broke the cream-smooth surface of the concrete, for a length of half a city-block. But there was something else there, a black shape standing out from it. The car in which they’d brought her here, left outside ready for their quick get-away once Benuto was turned loose and they’d gotten rid of their encumbering hostage. O’Dare recognized it. The same hefty Isotta Benuto had gone out to do murder in earlier that night! They must have dropped him off at his own place, then gone straight to O’Dare’s flat to get her, then come direct out here.

He got up on the convexed roof, balanced there erect, saw that even that way he couldn’t reach the height of those embrasures. He jumped down again, got in. They’d left the key in it, so ready were they to start at hair-trigger timing — maybe pick up Benuto at some prearranged place along the way to save time.

He turned it up, roared out away from the walls in a big semicircle, careless whether they heard or not. Over grass and sliding sand and stones, that rocked but didn’t impede it. You only had to handle it to understand why some cars are made in Turin too. Not all are made in Detroit. He wheeled in toward the plant again, straightened out, came at that door diagonally from away off there in the open, fifty yards away, in high. He slid down the seat onto his kidneys, braced his feet. There was a jar that went up his back, exploding in his brain like a blue flash, a boom like a cannon; glass went flying up like powdered sugar from the headlights or something, came down again on the read-end of the roof with a sound like rain — but the car ducked in away from it before it was even finished falling. There was electric light inside, rows of dim spaced bulbs that showed an inner wall rushing at him. He was still stunned, but managed to kick his foot down. The car bucked, went into the wall anyway, but with a less severe jolt than the first time. Behind him, the big doorway looked somewhat like those beaded string-curtains used in the tropics.

He wanted to stay there, sit there under the front wheel, and just ache. He had a headache and a sprained back and the pit of his stomach felt like a mule had kicked him, and his mouth was gritty with tooth-enamel. A disembodied thought, “Molly!” came to him from far away. He didn’t know what it meant just then, but did what it seemed to want him to. Got one of the buckled doors open and crawled out hands-first. Just as his chin got to the ground and his feet came clear, a gorgeous sunburst of yellow beamed out from the car-engine, and an instant later a towering pillar of flame was shooting sky-high from it. It stung him and he jerked away from it side-wise along the floor, but the pain brought him to, he got up on his knees.

Feet came pounding, but not from the busted front door, from another direction, going toward it. On the opposite side of the curtain of flame. A voice cried shrilly about its hum: “I don’t know who was in it, don’t bother looking! Get out quick — give it to ’em with the tommy if they try to stop us outside!”

A figure flashed by from behind the furnace-glow heading for the open door, carrying something in front of it. A second one was right behind it. O’Dare snatched his gun out, did his best to steady his wrist but couldn’t wait to make sure. “Hold it!” he yelled. Both figures whirled. The second one, with a bared revolver, slightly telescoping the first, with a sub-machine! He saw then that the warning had just been a medieval anachronism on his part, instantly fired first before they had, from where he was, on his knees. It was the second one went down, not the one with the tommy. He’d cleared the way for it, that was all. He dropped flat on his face in a nosedive, as though there were water under him, not cement-flooring.

It was popping, and something that sounded like horizontal rain was hissing by above him. Then it broke off again after about two rounds, and he raised his face from the little pool of blood the nosebleed he’d given himself had formed under it. The guy was on top of the weapon, shaped like a tent, bending too far forward over it, blocking it with his own body from O’Dare. Then he straightened out in a flat line along the floor, and McKee came in from outside holding a feather of smoke in his fist. He spread his legs and stepped over him.

“Got him, didn’t I?” he said almost absent-mindedly. “First time I ever shot a man in the back!” Then taking in O’Dare’s blood-filmed face, “Great guns! you’re a goner! Shot your puss off—”

“I hit it on the floor ducking!” snapped the cop impatiently. “What was you doing, picking daisies out there the last two hours?”

McKee held the side of his jaw. “I took a nap on the road. Next time don’t be so—”

The blaze from the car was collapsing into itself, turning red. O’Dare ran around it, past the dick and in toward where they had come from just now. An arctic blast hit him in the face. There was a long corridor, it seemed to stretch for miles, lined on both sides with gleaming white refrigerator-doors. Dazzling, like a snow-scene, each door big enough to take whole beeves in at a time. He ran down to the far end of it, turned, came back along a second one. “Molly!” he yelled, “Molly!” and then a sudden premonition freezing him, screamed it like an inmate of a madhouse. “Molly!” The sound of his own voice rang mockingly back in the vast, cold, empty place. “They’ve done away with her! She’s in one of these things, I know it!”

There was a sudden scampering of fugitive footsteps somewhere nearby. He heard McKee, in the next aisle over, stop short, call out, and dart back the other way, as though chasing someone. O’Dare’s yells changed as he too raced toward the sound, hidden from him by the towering row of refrigerators. “McKee! Don’t shoot him — whoever he is! He’s the only one can tell us where she—! Don’t shoot!”

And then, in despairing finality, a gun cracked out there where the car was. Just once.

There was a third prostrate figure this side of the other two when he got there, head toward the door in arrested flight. McKee was standing stock-still, looking down. The inspector and the rest, who had just gotten there, were coming in from outside.

O’Dare Hung himself down on the still form like a long-lost brother, tried to sit it up.

“He’s dead,” a voice said, “Whaddya wanta do that for?”

“I didn’t do it,” McKee said, white, “they got him from outside, like I did the first one.”

“She’s in one of them ice-boxes, I tell ya!” O’Dare screeched, “Now we’ll never find out which one—!”

The inspector barked, “Get in there quick, you men! Open ’em up—” A sudden mass-panic gripped them, horror was on their faces as they rushed forward in a body.

It was O’Dare who sighted the thing, with seconds that were centuries pounding at his maddened brain. Didn’t know how he had for the rest of his life. A little fleck of color down the long dazzling-white of that vista, a tiny thing, a mote, a dot. Green. Smaller than the smallest new leaf in May. The edge of a dress caught in the airtight crevice between ponderous refrigerator-door and refrigerator. A thing that in another age they would have called a miracle; that still was a miracle in this 1937, call it what they might.

They got it open and she slumped into their arms, lips blue, fingernails broken, in the bright-green dress he’d kidded her so for buying only a week before. (She still has it; he won’t let her wear it, but he won’t let her give it away either. He touches it to bring him luck, keep them from misfortune, every time he goes out on duty — as a detective, third grade.)

She opened her eyes in the car, going back, and smiled up at the blood-caked face bending over her. “It was so cold in there and dark, and I couldn’t breathe any more. It was just a dream, wasn’t it, Danny? Just a dream and I’m awake now?”

“It was just a dream,” Officer 4432 said, holding his wife close in his arms.

Afterword to “Blue Is for Bravery”

“Blue Is for Bravery” (Detective Fiction Weekly, February 27, 1937), which had been submitted as “The Police Are Always With Us,” is rather short and almost plotless but full of action and desperate urgency and with a viewpoint rare indeed for Woolrich. As Danny goes berserk and careens across the nightscape in a race against time and death, for once our reaction to a Noir Cop is undivided and we are completely and uncritically behind torture, mayhem and whatever else is done by a protagonist with a badge.