Night and Fear

I

Bill Brown, even at fourteen, led the field in everything. He was flashy, brilliant, colorful. Joe Greeley was a plodder, would never be anything but a plodder, an also-ran. He knew it even then, and so did everyone else. He was “Slow Joe” to the fellow’s. Reliable, steady as a block of concrete, but not very exciting. When the cry of “Batter up!” echoed over the ash-dumps, Bill Brown could be counted on for a homer. If Joe Greeley didn’t strike out, the most he could get was a one-bagger.

About the only thing you could say for Joe Greeley was that once he made up his mind about anything, he never changed. A million kids have said they wanted to be policemen, and then dropped the idea when they got a little older. Bill Brown and Joe Greeley said it too, and as far as Joe was concerned, from that moment on his life work was cut out for him. He never veered from his determination. “When I’m on the force—” he’d say, quietly, or “When I’ve got my shield—”

“I can see Slow Joe spending his whole life pounding a beat, ringing in his station house, stopping runaway horses, until they retire him on a pension,” Brown sneered.

“Well, what about you? I thought you were going to join the cops too?”

“Sure, but I’m not going to stay a cop! Any fool can do that. I’m going to be an ace detective before I’m through!”

“More power to you,” Greeley said. He wasn’t jealous.

They’d finished public school together, although Bill Brown had started two full terms after Joe Greeley. Brown got out with a flourish, Greeley just made it by the skin of his teeth. But whatever he’d put down on his final exam papers had come out of his own head, he’d worked hard to hang onto, hadn’t asked anyone’s help. Brown’s answers were a composite; they’d come from the guy in front of him, the guy behind him, and the guys on each side of him. The handwriting, at least, was his own. He got his name up on the school roll-of-honor in the assembly room, in gilt letters. He was selected, because of his rating, to deliver the graduating class’ valediction. He made a fine, thrilling speech. It had been fine and thrilling even five years before when it was delivered, word for word, by some visiting dignitary asked to preside at some other graduation somewhere else.

Through with school, they both took temporary jobs to tide themselves over until they could get appointed to the force. Both doing the same thing for the same concern, driving ice trucks. Mechanical refrigeration was fairly new yet. Now for the first and last times in their lives they were on a basis of absolute equality; there isn’t much chance to show brilliance or originality driving a truck.

They studied for their police exams and sat down at adjoining desks in a big roomful of other prospective limbs of the law. Bill Brown got through in half the time, and with half the sweat, Joe did, but Joe passed — that was all that mattered.

They went to training school together, listening to lectures, having things chalked for them on blackboards, just as if they were kids all over again. They learned fine points of wrestling in the gym, and how to disarm an adversary, and all the rest of it.

They were rookies together, self-conscious in the blue coats and visored caps and brass buttons. Or rather Joe was; but he was proud too. Prouder than anyone would have guessed just by looking at him.

They were given the assignments rookies are given, quiet out-of-the-way beats, where the most that was liable to happen was that some homecoming householder had forgotten his key and couldn’t get in, and had to call on the cop to climb in through a second-story window and open the door from the inside. Which made Joe, at any rate, feel vastly self-important and helpful, and he’d walk down the street again afterward with his chest out even farther than before. Bill, reporting a similar plea for assistance, took a different view of it.

“I told him to climb up himself if he wanted to get in. Wouldn’t I have looked great climbing up over a porch like — like a carpenter or housepainter? What do they think we are anyway, their darky servants?”

“What do the regulations say?” asked Joe doubtfully.

“Aw, you and the regulations! If you’re gonna live by the regulations, you’ll never get anywhere in this racket.”

Racket? thought Joe. That wasn’t the word he would have used for it. Life work, dedication, something like that.

Finally the day came when they weren’t rookies any more; they became full-fledged members of the force. Both on the same day, and both attached to the same precinct-house. They still lived on the same block, a few doors from each other. They walked on-duty and off-duty together whenever their shifts coincided.

Joe was first to get married. He was on the force now, he was set for life, the rest was just a matter of slow advancement up through the ranks, there was no reason to wait any longer. He married a girl that lived on the same block with him, whom he’d known since they were kids. Just a plain girl, but a nice girl, satisfied to be his wife and share a policeman’s lot. Bill Brown had been going with one of the girls on the block too, but he held off getting married. He didn’t say so of course, but he had an air as if to say, “I can do better than around here. I’m going to be somebody. Why should I be in a hurry?”

Officer and Mrs. Joe Greeley moved into a little flat only a couple of blocks away from where they’d always lived. Bill Brown dropped in to see them once or twice, when he and Joe both happened to be off duty simultaneously, but he had an air of good-natured contempt, of — well, almost of looking down on them, feeling sorry for them. Of Joe, for being Joe; and of his wife, for having hitched her wagon to a mud turtle.

Equality ended on a day in October after they’d both been on the force a little over a year. Mr. Kasimir Swoboda, storekeeper, of their precinct, had been held up repeatedly in the past few years and was getting sick of it. Always the same technique: he was driven into a back room at the point of a gun; tied up in there, and sometimes it was an hour before he could attract anyone’s attention, his store was that dark and inconspicuous. Once the robber had had the gall to impersonate the proprietor and wait on a customer who came in while he was in the act of emptying the till, while Swoboda helplessly chewed on a gag a few yards away. To make it even more aggravating, he wasn’t sure but that it had been the same individual each time. Swoboda had been too badly frightened to get a very good look at him.

Swoboda went and beefed long and loudly to the lieutenant about it. “He’s living off me!” he complained indignantly. “I pay my taxes and I want yet protection! Each time you come too late after it’s over, and what good does that? You look for him everywhere but where he was the last time, and he knows that, so back he comes again some more yet! Now idder you do something about it, mishter, or I write a letter to the mayor!”

The lieutenant and he, between them, concocted this little scheme by which to put an end to the marauder’s depredations once and for all. Greeley, because he was already known to be a plodding, patient, dependable sort, was assigned to it. A hole was bored through the store’s partition-wall between front and rear, and for three weeks Joe Greeley sat in the back like a hen, sizing up every customer that came in from the time the store opened in the morning until it closed at six. Swoboda was to give him a signal and duck out of range. Joe got so he knew the prices of every article on the shelves. Even his wife, when he told her about it, thought Joe’s superiors might have worked it on a shift basis, not kept Joe at it all the time, for twenty-one days.

“It’s an assignment,” he said uncomplainingly. “Somebody’s got to do it.”

II

On the twenty-second day, at three in the afternoon, a man came in and asked for sugar. Swoboda picked up a large tin measuring-scoop. “Not that kind of sugar,” said the man quietly.

Swoboda dropped the ladle with a crash, got down on his hands and knees behind the counter, and stayed there with his head tucked under like an ostrich. The door opened and an elderly lady came in with a shopping basket. The counter was short and she moved up directly beside the man, on Greeley’s side of him, where she could watch the scales better.

Greeley, already in the doorway with gun bared, held his fire. He had to — there was too great a risk of hitting her. She was fluctuating, terrified, back and forth in the line of fire, like a chicken with its head cut off.

The hold-up man snapped a shot at Joe that must have singed her hair, and it clunked into one of the cans on the shelf behind Greeley, as he came out, and vegetable soup trickled out. Then the bandit turned tail and broke for the open.

Greeley hit the sidewalk only seconds after him, big as he was and with a panic-stricken woman to detour around. A slice of hindmost heel was all he saw of the man. The store entrance adjoined a corner; that gave the fugitive a few added seconds of shelter, and as Greeley flashed around it in turn, again the breaks were the lawbreaker’s.

There was a school midway up the street toward the next avenue. It was a couple of minutes past three now, and a torrent of young humanity came pouring out of the building by every staircase and exit, flooding the street. In through them the sprinting man plunged, knocking over right and left the ones that didn’t get out of his way quickly enough. If it had been hazardous to take a shot at him in the store, it would have been criminal out here.

The kids parted, screaming in delighted excitement, as Greeley tore through them after the bandit with uptilted gun, but he couldn’t just callously knock them flat like the man before him had. He sidestepped, got out of their way as often as they did his, and he began to fall behind the other, lose ground.

The kids weren’t just on that one street — they had dispersed over the entire vicinity by now, for a radius of a block or more in every direction, in frisky, milling, homeward-bound groups. Through them the quarry zigzagged, pulling slowly but surely away. He kept going in a straight line, because it was to his advantage to do so — the presence of these kids made for greater safety — but he was already far enough in the lead so that when he should finally decide to turn off — the answer was pretty obvious; a taxi or a doorway or a basement. Any of them would do.

And then Brown suddenly horned in. It must have been his beat they’d reached by now. Greeley didn’t know who it was at the time. Brown was just a blue-coated figure in the distance, cutting in between him and his quarry from the mouth of the transverse street up there.

A shot sounded, topping the kid-screeching, and the blue-coated figure went down on one knee, then got up again with the help of a basement railing. That was to be expected from a cornered rat. What did he care how many kids he hit as long as he saved his own skin? In addition, the sound of the shot had made the children dangerously volatile. They were scattering and breaking for cover in a dozen crisscross lines of obstruction. A corner loomed directly ahead and the guy was going to get away sure. Joe tried to put on more speed.

And then he saw this second cop, who had already been hit once and therefore must be suffering from nervous shock and impaired muscular control if nothing else, deliberately draw and take a sight on him. The man must be insane.

Greeley bellowed “Hold it! Don’t, you fool!” although he was still a good half block behind.

Brown didn’t even jockey for a clear line of fire, just squeezed with cold-blooded obliviousness. Bang! and the kids squealed wildly, and the fugitive went over like a log and pinned one of them under him.

For a minute Greeley couldn’t even tell which one had been hit and which one had stumbled. Then the kid squirmed free and hopped to his feet and lit out for home with the fright of his young life. That didn’t alter the facts of the case any.

Greeley came up swearing. The other cop was there ahead of him, holding his own shoulder where he’d been hit, rolling the corpse vindictively over on its back with his foot, and he saw that it was Bill Brown.

“You oughta known better than to try a thing like that!”

Bill Brown just looked at him. All he said was, “I got him, didn’t I? And you didn’t.”

And that, it seemed, was what counted when the reports came in. Bill Brown got a citation and was promoted to detective, third grade. Joe Greeley stayed right where he was, and got a calling down from his lieutenant in the bargain. Or at least, a displeased cross-questioning.

“How is it when you were planted there right on the spot, and had been for three weeks past, you let him get away from right under your nose, Joe? You didn’t doze off back there by any chance, did you?”

Greeley’s self-respect wouldn’t let him answer this last. “An old lady got in between us and I couldn’t take a chance on hitting her.”

“That’s all right, but she didn’t follow the two of you for three solid blocks, did she? How is it he got that far from the store before he was dropped?”

“There were kids ganged up on the sidewalk the whole three blocks. Any man would’ve had to be a dead shot. And even then, I couldn’t take the responsibility—”

“Brown’s no better marksman than you,” his superior said pointedly. “He got his practice on the same target range than you did.”

Joe Greeley lowered his head. But not in retraction, in stubborn refusal to admit he’d been wrong. “I did the best I could Lieutenant,” he said quietly.

The lieutenant relented a little. “I know you did, Joe; I can see your point,” he admitted. “But it’s the results in this business that count.”

Bill Brown came around to the flat to show them the clothes he wore to work now. He was on Safes and Lofts now, he mentioned.

Mrs. Joe didn’t act dissatisfied or envious, though. “Thirty-two dollars at the best store in town wasn’t all that homespun tweed might’ve cost,” she said after he’d gone. “The price might’ve included a kid with a bullet in his spine. I like you better in blue, Joe.”

III

They met again over a dead man several years later. Their paths hadn’t crossed again until then.

Bill Brown looked him slowly up and down across the corpse. “So you finally got out of blues, Joe?” He said it as though he hadn’t really ever expected him to.

Greeley just grinned a little for an answer.

“Third-grader now, eh?” Brown went on.

“Yeah, just now. This is my first case.”

“Like I told you ’way back in the beginning,” Brown said patronizingly, “You’ve got to make your own chances in this game. Otherwise you just gather cobwebs off in some corner.”

So now it was a game, was it? It had been a racket to him once, Greeley remembered. Well, to him it still was what it had always been — his life’s work.

“I suppose you heard what I did to that Ingram business?”

“You tied it up in knots,” agreed Joe.

“But you’re only as good as your last case in this chain-gang.” Brown pointed downward to the floor, to what they were talking back and forth across. “I been praying for something like this to come along. It’s just what I need. It’s been over a year now. I’ll get another boost out of it sure as you live.” He actually rubbed his hands together above the corpse. Joe Greeley just looked at him inscrutably.

“I’m working with Bill Brown again,” he told Mrs. Joe that evening.

“You may as well save your energy,” she remarked mockingly. “The case is practically over already.”

But it wasn’t, by a long sight. It was a cast-iron, unbreakable witch of a thing.

The man’s name was Thomas Allroyd. He was an installment collector, and he had been found bludgeoned to death in the upper hallway of a seemingly respectable and even fairly high-class apartment house on the West Side.

The linings of his pockets told them a good deal of it before they’d done more than search the body. Namely: that he represented a firm marketing sun-lamps called the Sol-Ray Company, that he had visited all but one of the customers on his list (they could tell this by pencil checks next to the names), that he had already collected nearly three hundred dollars up to the time he was set upon and killed (they could tell this because monthly installments on the lamps averaged twenty-five dollars, and he had been to see about a dozen people), and that the money had been taken from him — therefore robbery motive — because he hadn’t turned it in at his home office, and his billfold was gone.

The rest should have been fairly simple, but as so often happens in these “fairly simple” cases, appearances were deceptive. The building was not the “walk-in” type, open to the first passerby who chose to enter; there was a doorman posted at the entrance. Which should have meant that anyone who had followed Allroyd in from the street would have had to pass the doorman’s scrutiny, state his business, and be remembered later. And that would have been an enormous help. Unfortunately it wasn’t anything of the kind, because the doorman insisted no outsider had entered at or around that time.

Allroyd had entered the premises at about four-thirty in the afternoon and his body had been found by one of the tenants about half an hour later. The doorman had not during that time left his post; this was substantiated by a woman tenant who had used him to air her dog at that hour, and at the same time had kept a watchful eye on her pet from the window.

The elevator was self-operative. There was a delivery entrance, but this too had been commanded by the doorman, and he was equally positive no deliveries had been made at or around that time. An exhaustive compilation was made of every grocery, laundry, dry cleaner, and whatnot patronized by every tenant in the building, and each and every employee of them, running into the dozens, was tracked down, questioned and cross-questioned. All were able to furnish satisfactory proof of their movements and whereabouts.

This narrowed it down to somebody who had been living in the house itself, and therefore had never entered or left the premises around that time. It was not, fortunately, an unduly large building. Again an exhaustive series of interrogations, from floor to floor and flat to flat, brought the police nowhere. Almost all the men in the various families, the wage earners, had been still at work. The doormen and their various places of employment, when checked, quickly eliminated them. Of those who hadn’t been out, one (a customer of Allroyd’s) was a doctor on the ground floor who used one of the firm’s lamps for his patients; he not only had his nurse to vouch for him, but also a patient whom he had been treating at the time. The second (again on the installment-man’s list) was a semi-invalid confined to a wheel-chair, and he too had an attendant. The party whom Allroyd had still to call on when he was slain, had been conveniently “out” all afternoon — possibly the collector was expected — but in any case the party had certainly been far from home until long past the hour when there was any danger of encountering the collector.

A fourth lamp was discovered in the house, belonging to a Mrs. Ruth Crosby. She was not down on Allroyd’s list because she had bought it outright. She kept late hours, she explained rather nervously, did a lot of entertaining, and needed it to pep herself up the following day. Her apartment was luxuriously furnished and, they discovered, she paid an exorbitant rent for it, nearly twice that of anyone else. Their scrutiny and interrogation seemed to make her strangely ill at ease; she was almost abject in her willingness to placate them, offered them drinks and fawned on them. Be that as it might, she had had two young women friends staying in the place with her the day of the murder, as well as a Negro maid, and all four had been fast asleep at the time it happened; they seemed to be late risers.

So they had gotten exactly nowhere, and fast. Everyone living in the house was exonerated, and no one had been seen to enter it from outside, and yet the man had certainly been slain and robbed in that upper hallway, while he was lingering there waiting for the customers who were “out” to return.

While all this was going on Greeley, being the lowest ranking man on the case and a newcomer to Homicide, had been given all the dirty work to do. The tedious drudgery of reconstructing Allroyd’s movements, step by step, from the time he’d first opened his eyes that last day of his on earth. This meant days on end of monotonous, repetitious interviews, asking the same things over and over. “What time did he come here that day? How long did he stay here?” And then counter-checking someone else’s statement against that, to see if it would hold up. In other words he built up a laborious time-table for the others to make use of, and it wasn’t a very thankful task.

“It’s somebody,” Brown kept insisting dogmatically, “who is down on that collection list of his. Somebody who knew what his job was, and therefore knew that in all probability he’d have a considerable amount of money on him by the time he neared the end of his rounds. Maybe they’d already gotten a glimpse of his receipts when he called on them themselves, and that worked up their appetite for a little lettuce. If we can’t figure out how they got into the building after him, then we can’t. Let’s skip that altogether, instead of letting it hold us up, and work it the other way around. Go back to it later, after we’ve already got our possibilities lined up, and fill it in. It may fall into place by itself. Now here’s what we want: somebody who owns one of those damn lamps, who Allroyd had already been to see that day, who’s plenty hard up for cash, and who can’t supply an airtight account of themselves from four to five that afternoon.”

They sifted through the customer list exhaustively, with the help of additional data supplied them by the company’s records. There wasn’t anyone down on it who couldn’t have used three hundred dollars. The mere fact that they had bought the appliances on time instead of outright was evidence enough of that. The majority, after a preliminary floundering brought about by nervousness, were able to pass muster on their movements.

Meanwhile the days were adding up to weeks, and suddenly it was a couple of months and still the thing was unsolved.

The captain of detectives under whom they were working gave them all a light talk one night. Probably his own superiors had been riding him. Moreover, the Sol-Ray Company, Allroyd’s firm, had pointedly offered a reward on its own account for the capture of their agent’s murder, which looked suspiciously like a dig at the police.

“Now get out after it or there’s going to be a shaking-up around here that’s gonna change the color of some of you people’s clothes before you know it!” He pounded the top of his desk mercilessly. “I want whoever killed that man Allroyd! I want him brought in here, d’ye hear me? If you can’t work together, then work separately, but dammit, work! The man that brings him in here first stands a good chance of promotion. I’ll recommend him for it myself!”

They drifted out of his office grousing in low voices, “You’d think we done nothing but sit and twiddle our thumbs, the way the old man talks. You’d think we were holding out on him purposely. What does he expect us to do — pull the guy out of our hats?”

Bill Brown, for once, had nothing to say, Greeley noticed. He looked glum, like when you see something desirable slipping through your fingers. He had a hard, remorseless glint in his eyes, and a little later he was missing. No one knew where he’d gone.

Greeley, on his part, went and took another shot at the Ruth Crosby apartment. He had, of course, absolutely no illusions as to just what kind of a place it was, but that had nothing to do with this.

Mrs. Crosby, summoned by the colored girl, greeted him with a mixture of sulky annoyance and patient resignation. He asked her a few routine questions, but there was nothing he could really get his teeth into.

“I’ve told you men already,” she sighed, “I bought the lamp outright, for spot cash. This collector of theirs never had occasion to call here, I never set eyes on the fellow from first to last. Wait a minute — I’ll get you the receipted bill.”

She’d already shown them that long ago, so he tried to dissuade her, but she seemed to want him to see it again, for some reason that he couldn’t fathom. “That’s all right, I understand,” she said drily as she went out.

She came back again a minute later and handed him the receipt. It was folded around the outside of a small bulky envelope, and there was money in the latter. How much, he didn’t trouble to find out.

He said, “You’ve made a mistake, haven’t you?”

“That’s for you to say.”

“Well, I say you have. Watch yourself or you’ll get in trouble. Real trouble!”

She saw that she actually had tipped her hand, and became a little frightened, he could see. Both the bill and the money envelope vanished as if by sleight-of-hand. “I... I thought somebody’d been talking to you,” she faltered.

“Who, for instance?” he asked, dangerously intent.

“Oh... er... I don’t know, one of your teammates, maybe,” she floundered.

He couldn’t resist saying, “So you already made another of those little ‘mistakes.’ Only that time it wasn’t.”

“It pays to stay in with people,” was all he could get out of her.

IV

He got back to the precinct house in time for the bombshell. It burst at the captain’s telephone and spread in a widening circle of excitement from mouth to mouth, from room to room.

“Brown’s got the Allroyd murderer! Single-handed. He just phoned in! He’s on his way over with him now.”

“Who is he?” Greeley asked. No one seemed to know.

The captain came hustling through just then with another man, spotted Greeley in the anteroom, jerked his head at him to follow them. They got in a car and streaked off.

“Who is it, Cap?” Greeley asked again.

The captain either didn’t know yet himself or was too excited to answer. “If I had a few more like him working under me—” he muttered.

“We’d be too good for just one squad,” the other man finished for him.

“Well, no danger of that happening!” the captain squelched him.

They started to taper off in their headlong rush as they neared their destination. It seemed to be a small one-family house occupying just one corner of a big empty plot. It was sparsely built-up out here, and the street lighting was poor. But before they reached it a man suddenly stepped out of the darkness ahead into the path of their lights, flagged them to stop. It was Bill Brown. He was alone.

The police car skidded to a violently broadside to him, braked. The three of them spilled out around him.

“Where is he?” the captain almost screamed. “I thought you said you were bringing him in. Did he get away?”

“No, he didn’t get away.” Brown spoke with difficulty in a low, panting voice as though he still couldn’t get his breath back. He had a dazed or rather a blankly disappointed look, in his eyes. He was holding his gun in one hand, his new hat in the other. It had a bullet hole through the crown.

“He’s over there in the lot.” Brown said. “He broke out a gun.” He held the hat up, looked at it. “It was him or me.”

The captain swore. He said, “Well, we got him anyway, and that’s something.” Then he added hastily, “Are you sure he was our dish, Brown?”

Bill Brown met their eyes unwaveringly in the brightness of the head-beams. “He confessed,” he said, “and I found the Allroyd money on the premises.”

He turned and struck out into the darkness, across the sidewalk and into the hollows of a weed-grown lot, that had a footpath running through it diagonally, from near the house to the opposite corner. They followed him single file. Greeley thought, as he stumbled over a loose stone, “What’d he bring him through here for? This was asking for something to happen.”

The sound of low weeping, of a woman moaning in distress, reached them from the darkness ahead. There was somebody huddled on the ground there, two somebodies. Bill Brown’s torch flicked on, and the other man with them raised a distracted woman to her feet. Greeley had never seen her before. There was still somebody on the ground, motionless among the weeds. The torch pointed downward, and it was the doorman from the building where Allroyd had been murdered, with a black thread of blood bisecting his forehead.

Brown spoke, in the unassuming voice of one who expects to be complimented. “I had my eye on him for quite some time. Someone had to go in there after Allroyd, and no one had. We proved that. I think we all developed a blind spot in the case of this man, sort of overlooked him from the beginning. Just because a tenant insisted he’d been in sight the whole time, airing her dog below. Well, he had. She was telling the truth of it. Only, the other day I happened to ask her, ‘Who returned your dog to you when the airing was over? Did you go down and get it or did he bring it up to you?’ ‘Why, he brought it up to the door, of course,’ she said. Don’t you see, that’s when he did it — right while the dog was still with him, on his way to return it to its owner. How long would it take? We musta missed that because it was so obvious, and kept looking for something unusual.” He reached into his inside coat-pocket. “And here’s the money, to cinch it. Where would a doorman get this much, and why would it be hidden where I found it?”

“And he admitted it, you say?”

“Yeah. I’m only sorry there wasn’t time to get it down on paper.”

“No, no,” the woman sobbed.

“Not in front of you, no,” Brown said gently. “He didn’t want you to know. But he admitted it as soon as I got him out of the house, away from you.” He turned back to the captain with modest remorse. “I’m sorry, Cap.”

“Sorry?” the captain roared. “If everyone else on this squad had as much to be sorry for as you, my worries would be over! Look after this woman, Greeley,” he added. “Take her back to her house. Call in one of the neighbors to stay with her.”

Greeley left Bill Brown being symbolically, if not actually, hoisted high on their shoulders in triumph. He guided the newly made widow back along the footpath. He got her back to the house somehow. She was in pitiable condition. She caught at his sleeve with both hands, clung to him pleadingly, as if he could bring the dead back to life. “No, no,” she kept moaning, “he murdered him. He murdered my husband, out there in the darkness. He never resisted. Dick went with him willingly. Oh mister, you’ve got to listen to me! I was there when he took him! He purposely wanted to get him outside the house, where I couldn’t see what happened. Dick said, ‘Sure I’ll go with you. Take me there right now. I’m ready to answer any questions they want to ask me. I know I can clear myself.’ Those were his very words! He went like a lamb.”

Joe Greeley’s face was whiter than it had ever been before. “Did he have a gun? Did he own a gun?” He said it so low she could hardly hear him. Afraid to speak his thoughts too loudly, even to himself.

“Yes, yes.” She nodded readily. “Oh, it was an old leftover from his army days. But he didn’t take it. This man of yours took it. He put it in his pocket before he took Dick out of the house with him. I saw him do it!”

“Which pocket?”

She patted her hip. “Here.”

That was a careless place to put it, on the side nearest the prisoner. And he hadn’t used a manacle. Why, Greeley wondered, hadn’t he used his manacle? That was something they’d forgotten to ask him. Did he want the prisoner to break and run for it? Was he looking for an excuse to shoot the man down, to distinguish himself even further than he had already? Or had something even worse happened out there on that dark empty lot, with no one watching the two of them but the weeds and stars?

Joe got her a glass of water, but he needed one himself. “How many shots did you hear?” he whispered.

“Two.”

“One right after the other, close together, right on top of each other?”

“Not awfully close together. One, and then the other pretty soon after, but not right away.”

Maybe... maybe just long enough for a man to change guns. That is, throw down the first, unlimber a second, doff his own hat — and deliberately fire through it, his “assailant” already dead on the ground.

“And the money?” he asked after a long hideous time. “Where did he find the money?”

“Behind the radio, between it and the wall. He stuck his hand down, and it came up holding it.” She rocked back and forth, hands pressed to her eyes. “I cleaned there right this morning, and it wasn’t there!” Then she said the most horrible of all things she’d had said yet. “He seemed to know right where to look for it.” Greeley flinched as though he’d been cut. “Dick didn’t hide it there. I could tell by his face. He didn’t know it was there any more than I did! He murdered my husband. He’s not a policeman, he’s the murderer!”

He got out of there fast. But the talk followed him along the quiet sidewalk outside, ringing in his ears. He could still hear it all the way down at the next corner — or thought he could: “He murdered my husband! He shot him down in cold blood!”

Joe didn’t go back to the precinct house to share in Bill Brown’s Roman holiday. Instead he shut himself up in a booth and called the Crosby woman again. His voice was harsh and relentless. “This is Greeley of the detective division. I want to know just one thing out of you. (Jive me a straight answer, and you’ve got nothing to worry about — it won’t go any further. Try to cover up, and you’ll be on your way to the lockup before the night’s out!”

She drew in her breath in sudden fright for an answer.

“Who was the guy, the man before me, you made a ‘mistake’ with, like you tried to with me tonight?”

“I don’t know his name, honest I’m not kidding you I don’t!”

“Tall, good-looking guy, snappy dresser?”

“Yeah,” she said reluctantly.

There was only one man on the squad that applied to.

“How much?”

She lowered her voice uneasily. “Three hundred.”

He banged up, but he forgot to leave the booth right away. He seemed to see things in it, vermin on the wall. Three hundred dollars wouldn’t buy Bill Brown a promotion. But properly invested — pinned on a badly wanted murderer pulled out of his sleeve — it could get him one. And he’d still be seven hundred ahead on the Sol-Ray Company’s thousand dollar reward.

No, he told himself — and it was as much in desperation as conviction — Bill Brown took a bribe from a source that had nothing to do with the work he was assigned to. All right. That’s not my speed, but it’s not my business either. Other men have done it before him and other men’ll do it after him. But beyond that — that’s all I know. That’s all I want to know. That’s all there is to know.

V

His name was Danny Halpern, he’d been wanted for a killing in a poolroom, and after about three weeks they caught up with him and brought him in.

No, of course he hadn’t done it. He hadn’t been near the poolroom in question that night. If they said he had they were lying. He hadn’t been near it any other night either. He’d never been near it in his life. He’d never killed anyone, he was as innocent as a newborn babe, he was being unjustly accused, he was being framed, he had an alibi a yard long. And so on.

So they went to work on him. Greeley was allowed to participate in the questioning of suspects by this time. They needed everyone available in this one particular case, anyway; they worked shifts, sent in by relays as the suspect wore them out.

They called Greeley in to take a hand, at about midnight. It had been going on since noon the day before. He passed Brown on the basement stairs, coming up all wilted, with his coat off and looking sore as a pup. “Take him apart and find out what keeps him going,” he muttered. “My knuckles are all swollen.” Brown wasn’t so good at this protracted grilling stuff. He didn’t have the patience. It was more in Greeley’s line. Tricky questions, in Halpern’s case, did no good; he had been born tricky. Knocking him against the walls didn’t get them anywhere either; he’d been taking hard knocks all his life. But his vitality was flickering now, and that was all that had been keeping him going.

It was a pretty brutal scene, but he had taken a human life and that had been a pretty brutal scene too. Whether he confessed or not, he couldn’t bring that life back again. Moreover, he was no novice. He was suspected of a long string of other crimes. He’d never shown mercy, given a break; he wasn’t getting one now.

They kicked the chair out from under him again and again, they tortured him by holding glasses of water before his swollen, bleeding lips, then slowly emptying them out on the floor as he strained forward to drink.

“Water!” he wept. “Water! Oh, if you ever had mothers, just a drop of water — and I’ll tell you everything you want.”

He’d broken. As unexpectedly as that.

Another glass was brought, poised within his sight, but withheld.

“Say it!”

“Yes, I shot Tomasso. I was on dope and I had to have money. I waited until he’d closed up the poolroom that night. I’d purposely left my hat behind in there. I went back pretending I’d forgotten it, and he let me in, and I—

“I’ll get the chair for it anyway, and they can’t fry you more than once. That Frankie Reynolds thing you were asking me about — yes, I done that too. And Allroyd, the bill collector, that was me too.”

There were only two of them left in there with him by this time — Greeley and another man. The captain had already hurried out with the confession that the culprit just finished dictating and signing.

There was an electric pause. The two dicks looked at each other across the prisoner’s bowed head. Then Greeley jumped for him, grabbed him by the shoulder, dragged him to his feet. “What’d you just say? Allroyd? How’d you get in the building?”

“I was in it the whole time, from noon on. I must have gone in while the doorman was on relief, having his lunch. I was in the doctor’s office. He was treating me for the junk habit. A patient came in that had to have immediate attention, an emergency case, and they told me I’d have to wait. I was getting a sun bath under that lamp of his, in a little cabinet off the waiting room. I was already wanted for something and I was afraid to go back on the street again, so I stayed where I was. They were both too busy inside there, him and the nurse, to keep an eye on me. I saw Allroyd stop by to collect for the lamp, I got a glimpse of his receipts, and that gave me the idea. I slipped my shirt on, eased out and followed him upstairs. Then as soon as I — done it — I came back down, peeled my shirt off, and lay down on the cot under the lamp again. They never even missed me.”

His eyes rolled around in his head. He sagged across Greeley’s arm, and fainted away on his feet. “Did you hear that? We better get the old man in here again in a hurry!”

But the other dick swept his arm contemptuously, “Don’t pay any attention to him. These snowbirds’ll confess to anything once you get ’em started. He’s having a pipe-dream. We’ve worn him down till he don’t know what he’s saying any more.” He took the inert prisoner over, started to shake him like a terrier and slap him backhand across the mouth and cheeks to wake him up. “Watch him retract that and the whole string of them, even the Tomasso thing, as soon as he’s rested up a little and gotten hold of a mouth. You’re new at it, Greeley. That’s why you’re ready to believe anything they say.”

Greeley went out without waiting to argue, and up the basement stairs, looking for the captain. “New at it? Maybe I am,” he said to himself. “But people don’t confess to things they haven’t done. Not things they’re not being grilled about at the time.”

Brown was in the locker room as Joe passed through it. He was shrugging into his coat, getting ready to go home; he’d presumably taken a shower after the ardors of the grilling. He had a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

Greeley stopped, turned and came back to him. “This’ll tell me,” he thought. “This is one way of finding out.” He fixed his eyes on Brown dead-center, locked and held Brown’s with them.

“He just said he killed Allroyd,” he said quietly.

The cigarette fell out of Brown’s mouth, and he took his face down out of range to fumble for the cigarette and pick it up. Then he threw it away anyway. His face was all right again when it came up level with Greeley’s once more, but it had had that minute to itself, to straighten out free of observation.

He said with unshakable calmness, “Boy, that’s a hot one! He did, did he? He sure must be high.” But he wasn’t, and they both knew it. He’d been in custody for nearly twenty-four hours now, and no drug lasts that long. Their eyes held magnetically, unbreakably. Brown’s refused to waver, to give an inch. (“Swell facial control,” thought Greeley.) And then Brown said, “Who was down there with him at the time?” Carefully casual. Too carefully casual.

That did it. “Now I know,” thought Greeley, and his stomach caved in.

He turned on his heel, went on his way to look up the captain. Behind him, Brown seemed to have changed his mind about going home after all. He was standing there perfectly motionless, looking for something in his locker. Or at least looking into it, lost in thought.

Greeley got the captain down to the basement with him again, but this Halpern was in a state of collapse. They had to let him alone for awhile. They didn’t believe it anyway, Greeley could tell that. Not even the captain.

“Take him out. He’s in bad shape,” the captain said, and the prisoner was removed to a detention cell in the adjoining building and locked up for the night.

Greeley went home. But Bill Brown was still there when he left — killing time, for there was nothing to keep him there any more.

When Greeley reported back the next day he found them in a welter of excitement. The prisoner had taken his own life in his cell sometime during the night. When they’d come to get him out to take him before the line-up, they’d found him with his wrists and throat slashed. He’d gotten hold of a razor blade in some way. They found it in there by him. It was old and rusted. It was a Jewel, single-edged. His shoelaces, his belt, and everything else by which he could possibly have harmed himself had been taken away from him, and yet he’d gotten hold of a thing like that.

Bill Brown was the last one who had seen him alive. He’d escorted him to the cell, supervised his incarceration. The prisoner had begged for cigarettes after the bars were locked, and Brown had taken pity on him, gotten him a pack, and thrown them in through the bars in the presence of the turnkey. They were found there at his feet, with just one taken out and partly smoked.

The captain had the turnkey in and raked him mercilessly over the coals. “You were responsible for his safekeeping once we turned him over to you! Now he was thoroughly searched, and he didn’t have as much as a pin on him! It musta been lying in there on the floor of the cell and he found it! I’m gonna report you for your carelessness, fella.”

“I know my job! He didn’t get that off no cell floor! That cell was thoroughly swept out before you brung him over.”

“Don’t give me no buts! He was on stuff, and they’re tricky!” the captain roared. “He should have been watched more closely.”

Him, and I wonder who else? Greeley thought dismally.

Two weeks after, he came in a little later than usual one day, with an overnight growth of beard, as though he hadn’t had time to shave at home, and they all kidded him about it.

Bill Brown — a recommendation for his promotion had gone in and he was feeling good-natured these days — offered to lend him a kit he kept in his locker. Several of the others kept spares on hand like that too.

Mrs. Joe, at about that same time, was replacing the shaving things she’d laid out for him at home and which he hadn’t used. “I wonder why not?” she thought.

He was in the precinct house washroom just then, making use of Brown’s. It was a Jewel, made to hold single-edged blades.

VI

“Yeah,” Brown was saying one night, “promotion’s one thing, but it’s these long waits in between that give you ants in the pants. How long is it, now, since that Allroyd case?”

“A year, just about.” Greeley turned his head aside a little, as though he didn’t like to be reminded of it.

“See, that’s what I mean. I had to wait a year between the Ingram case and that. Now it’s been another year since that one again. It’s all right for you, Joe. You’re a different type from me. You don’t seem to mind staying in a rut. ‘Slow Joe.’ But me, I could go nuts just thinking about it. It gets me down.”

Joe Greeley gave him a look. “You’ve gone up pretty fast.”

“Not fast enough to suit me,” Brown insisted. And he got that same hard, calculating glint in his eyes, and seemed to be looking past the other man, into the future. His own future.

A cop stuck his head in. “Brown. Greeley. Report to Captain Hackett’s office right away.”

“Maybe,” said Joe, as they crowded through the doorway together, “this is it now.”

They met the captain coming out of his office. He’d snatched his hat up without waiting for them to get there, was making a bee-line for the hallway and the street. “Homicide at Two-ninety-five Russell Street just reported,” he snapped over his shoulder at them.

Riding out to it, Greeley wondered: “Where do I fit in? Why me, teamed up with the great Brown, and not one of the other guys?” But he knew the answer without having to be told. Brow n for the fireworks; himself for the dirty work, the thousand and one petty details that didn’t need much imagination or originality, just a mole-like patience, but were essential just the same. He was as good in his way as Brown was in his. He made a very good cog in the machine. Brown supplied the electric current. They were short-handed just then anyway. The division as a whole was up to its ears in work trying to track down a payroll bandit who was responsible for the deaths of two armed guards and a policeman.

The Russell Street address was a substantial private home, set back from the street on its own plot of ground, with a garage adjoining. It belonged to a middle-aged couple, a retired saloonkeeper named Jerrold Nolan and his wife.

When they got out of the car and went up to the entrance, one of the prowl car men who had reported it in came forward to meet them. “It’s not in the house, Captain Hackett — it’s over in the garage,” he explained. They turned and cut across the lawn to the concrete driveway that led to the garage. The garage doors were wide open now and the lights on behind them. A year-old sedan was backed into place, and in the lane between it and the side wall of the garage a man’s leg was thrust grotesquely upward from the floor.

They could only see the rest of the crumpled body by getting over close to the wall and peering in. There was a window in the wall directly above it, the only one in the garage, fairly high and narrow, its glass protected by wire mesh. The sash was up as far as it could go. A lean narrow-hipped man could possibly have wriggled out through it; the body, from what could be seen of it, was that of a somewhat stocky, rotund man. Me had evidently tried to climb through just the same. There were innumerable evidences of this, even before the car had been jockeyed out of the way. The toes of his shoes were badly scuffed, and yet the heels and uppers had been shined only recently. There was a pad of dust on each knee of his otherwise immaculately pressed and cleaned suit, where he had braced his legs against the wall under the window to try to hoist himself up to the ledge. And lastly there were a number of blackish toe-marks down the wall, where the shoe polish had streaked off on it.

At first sight it almost looked like an accidental death. He had fallen backward into the lane between car and wall in his effort to climb out through the window, and struck the back of his head either on the cement garage-floor or against the steel-rimmed running-board of the car. But Greeley knew they wouldn’t have been there if that was all there was to it. When the car had been exhaustively powdered for prints and shunted out of the way and they could get in closer, and Joe knelt down over the man in his turn, after Hackett and Brown, he could see that the ugly wound in the front of his head (and he had fallen backward) had a black core to it that no cement flooring in the world could have caused. Bullet hole.

Greeley straightened up and got out of the light so that the photographers could take the scene.

“Who found him?” asked the captain.

One of the prowl car men answered, “We did, sir. We were cruising past and noticed a woman leaning out of one of the upper-story windows of the house, hollering something. We braked to see if anything was the matter, but she was only calling to her husband to find out why he was taking so long to come in. So I got out and went to take a look in the garage, where she said he was. The doors were jammed fast and the keys were still sticking in them on the outside. I had to call my partner over before we could get them open. We found one of them warped.” He led them over and showed them. “See, it hangs unevenly on its hinges, and the wind must have blew them shut after him and got them stuck. When we finally pried them open, all the lights were on and there he was, with one leg sticking up against the wall like that.”

“What tipped you off it was a homicide?”

“Well, he landed backward, so I knew the floor couldn’t have given him that ugly looking hole in front. I could see it even from out past the car’s bumper. I’ve seen bullet holes before.”

“Good work,” said the captain crisply, “because that’s what you saw this time too. Now just one more question. About those doors: are you sure they were just jammed fast, and not locked on the outside?”

“Yessir. One side hung unevenly, like I said. For half of the distance it slanted in a little further than the other, and for the other half it leaned out a little more than the other. You could see the light coming through up at the top and down near the bottom. All he could do on his side, I guess, was just shove in one direction. That’s why he couldn’t free them. The way we had to do it, I pulled out at the top and my partner pushed in at the bottom, we evened it with the other wing and that got it loose.”

“Take those keys anyway,” the captain ordered the print men, “if they’re not spoiled already. And all around that window, every square inch of it. I’d like to know if he opened it to try to get out or somebody else opened it to shoot in at him. How long ago do you figure?” This last to the examiner.

“A good hour, maybe even more.”

“How do you figure it?” He turned almost instinctively to Brown when he put the question.

“Just roughly, with what we’ve gotten so far, something like this: the wind blew the doors shut on him and trapped him in here after he drove his car in to put it to bed. He couldn’t get them open from the inside, like the radio cops suggest, so he tried to climb out through the window. He either inadvertently attracted someone’s attention doing so and they approached him, or he got stuck and called out to someone to give him a hand. Whoever this person was, they almost certainly fired a bullet at him and killed him instead of helping him out.”

“I think that’s close enough for a starter,” the captain agreed. “We’ll build on it, anyway, until and unless we find evidence to the contrary. It doesn’t give us any motive yet, but we haven’t gone far enough to reasonably expect one.” He indicated the fat wallet and silver cigarette-case that had been taken from the body. “Whatever it was, it wasn’t robbery. Let’s go in and talk to her if we’re able to.”

As they moved up to the house he added, “This thing’s going to make a big splash. The sooner we can get a strangle hold on it, the better for us. You know who they are, don’t you?”

Greeley saw Brown nod, but he hadn’t any idea, for his part.

“Didn’t you ever hear of Big Bill Nolan, the politician? This is his brother.”

Greeley knew vaguely that he pulled a lot of weight, a sort of district boss of some kind.

“Yeah,” Brown added, “we better get it under control fast.” But he sounded fairly confident.

Mrs. Nolan was in pretty bad shape, as was to be expected, but managed to give them an outline of her own and her husband’s movements just preceding the event.

“Jerry and I had dinner at Big Bill’s house tonight,” she wept. “He’s my brother-in-law, you know. He was giving some kind of a smoker or party for his club-members afterwards, and wanted Jerry to stay — oh. I only wish he had. But he serves such elaborate meals, we’d both had wine at dinner, we weren’t used to it, and it made us both sleepy. Jerry wasn’t much of a drinker any more than I am, in spite of the fact that he used to be in that business. We got back a little after nine, and I came right into the house and he went to put the car away. I must have dozed off upstairs. The next time I opened my eyes over an hour had gone by and he hadn’t come in yet. I wasn’t worried about his being overcome or anything like that, because he’d had that window put into the garage especially on that account, only about a year ago. The two officers in the radio car came by while I was calling to him.”

“You didn’t hear anything like a shot, Mrs. Nolan?”

“I can’t tell if I did or not. You see the car had backfired all the way home, its exhaust-pipe needed cleaning badly and Jerry had put off attending to it. It was still going on after he got it into the garage, but I had the windows closed in the bedroom and it wasn’t enough to keep me from dozing off.”

“Do you know of anyone who had a grudge against your husband, Mrs. Nolan?”

“No one did. Everyone liked him,” she said tearfully. “He was very easy-going. Big Bill is the one who has enemies.”

“Well, we won’t distress you any more tonight,” the captain said sympathetically. “We know how you must feel.” He motioned his two men out with him.

In the hallway they met Big Bill Nolan as he came storming in answer to the bad news he had just received. He was still in dinner jacket and lapel flower, a big florid silver-haired man, chewing viciously on a cigar.

“You get that man for me, Captain!” he thundered, pointing his cigar menacingly at Hackett. “You get the man that did this, d’ye hear me? Give me a chance to get my hands on him!”

“We’ll get him, Mr. Nolan,” the captain answered evenly. “We’ll give it everything we’ve got. I’ll put my best men on it. Here’s one of them here.” He rested a hand on Brown’s shoulder. “This is Bill Brown, one of the best men on the squad. D’you remember the Ingram case? D’you remember the Allroyd case? That’s this boy.”

Nolan studied him a moment, with the swift appraisal of a man used to judging character at sight. Then he swept up Brown’s hand, pumped it with ferocious intensity.

“Brown,” he grated, “the sky’s the limit! I’ll shoot you up to the top. I can do it! If you’re as good as they say, you get me the dirty sneaking so-and-so that done this to my brother and you’re made for life! You can count on Big Bill Nolan!”

Then he barged on past them, to go in and console his sister-in-law, without so much as a glance at Greeley.

“Well, you men heard,” Hackett said succinctly as they returned to the garage. “It means our scalps.”

Brown said, “The angle, of course, is that it’s some enemy of Big Bill’s, who couldn’t get at him himself and therefore struck at him through his brother.”

“That’s logical,” Hackett conceded. “Big Bill never married, so his brother was his nearest of kin, and he always had a peculiar affection for him anyway. He gave him all this.” He waved his hand at the house behind them. “Took him out of the saloon business and pensioned him for life.”

They had taken Nolan out of the garage by now. “I don’t think this place can tell us much more, for the present,” Hackett remarked after a final look around. “I want to get down and find out what Ballistics can tell us about that slug. That’s going to be important. Get hold of Big Bill as soon as he cools off a little, Brown, and see if you can get a line on anyone who in his opinion might possibly nurse a grievance against him. He’s made enough enemies in his time. Case the vicinity, Greeley, and try to find out if anyone was seen loitering around the premises earlier in the evening, if any parked car was noticed that didn’t belong in the neighborhood. Stuff like that. Sometimes little things, that don’t seem like anything, pack more weight than the biggest leads you can get.”

The dirty work again. He went at it without a murmur. Hackett drove off back to headquarters to await the autopsy and ballistics reports. Brown remained puttering around the garage, measuring the window dimensions with a pocket tape, examining the warped doors microscopically. All this was highly pertinent, but it wasn’t much in character for him to bother with it. It was more the sort of thing he usually delegated to Greeley. He was hanging around waiting for Big Bill to come out, Joe supposed. The last Joe saw of him he was going over the ground on the outside of the garage window inch by inch, crouched down on his heels with a torch.

Greeley worked his way down the street dwelling by dwelling, on the side nearest the Nolan garage. He got practically nothing. It had been, and still was, an unusually windy night. No one had heard anything like a shot, or if they had they hadn’t been able to differentiate it from the incessant banging of loose shutters and rattling of window frames that had gone on. One family, in the house nearest the Nolans’, but which was separated from it by one empty building-lot, remembered hearing the backfiring of the car when it arrived home, but this had been going on for days now, so they didn’t think anything of it. “I guess he kept forgetting to have the carbon scraped off. He was a lovely man, but he was very absent-minded at times.” The woman sighed reminiscently. “Poor soul. Only about a week ago he locked himself out of the house one night — his wife was away or something — and a man in a car stopped and caught him in the act of trying to climb in through the window. It turned out he was a plainclothesman too.” She laughed a little, ruefully. “Poor Mr. Nolan had to identify himself, tell who he was, that he was Big Bill’s brother and all that, before the policeman would let him go. Then Nolan wanted him to climb up for him and open the door on the inside. He was too stout himself to be very good at it, you know. The man said, ‘What do I look like, a sign painter or a monkey in the zoo?’ And he drove off and left Nolan there on the sidewalk at two in the morning. I had to send my husband out and have him do it for him, otherwise he’d have stood out there all night.” Her smile faded and she sighed again. “And now he’s gone. I can’t believe it.”

The incident reminded Greeley of when he and Brown had been rookies, in uniform, and that was almost the sum total of their duties. Brown had been just like that too in those days, with an exaggerated sense of his own dignity.

VII

When he got back Brown had gone. Big Bill presumably had too, for the two retainers and the battleship of a limousine were missing. A single dim light behind a lowered shade on the upper floor of the death house marked where Mrs. Nolan was under medical supervision. A cop was preparing to lock up the garage.

Greeley came up to him in the dark, his shoddy topcoat ballooning about him, hanging onto his hat with one hand. “Open ’em all the way again,” he suggested. “Let’s see if the wind’ll do the same thing this time.”

They swung the two halves back to the full width necessary to admit a car, took their hands off, and watched and waited. Nothing happened for a few minutes; then just when Greeley was starting to get doubtful a sudden gust came along that shot the doors closed with a noise like a giant firecracker. It took the men a good five minutes to pry them apart again.

A young woman in a nurse’s cap threw open the window next to the one where the night light burned and hissed down: “Will you men please get away from here! This woman’s in a critical condition!”

“Sorry,” Greeley whispered back huskily.

But he lingered there by the locked garage. As he watched the cop shove off down the street he wondered, “Why don’t I get out of here? What am I trying to do — give an imitation of a detective? I’ll never be one.”

He drifted around to the side where the window was, playing his torch around the way Brown had his. He wondered if Brown had found anything. Leave it to him, if there was anything to find he’d find it, Joe assured himself. Bill had been looking for the gun, maybe. No, it couldn’t have been that; even he, Slow Joe, knew no murderer was going to be dumb enough to discard it right there, yards away from the crime. That would have been leaving his name and address with a vengeance. Brown had probably just been killing time until Big Bill was ready to leave his sister-in-law’s house.

All Joe could see, in the little white egg of light he rolled around his feet, was stubble and dried leaves and little stones. He scuffed and prodded around, knowing that if he wasn’t doing any good at least he wasn’t doing any damage either.

He did see something like a beetle nestling there under one of the little stones he dislodged, that was about all. He poked it indifferently with the tip of his shoe. It shop up at an angle against the garage wall, hit with a little click, and dropped again. He looked for it and found it a second time, and it wasn’t a beetle, it was a button.

It was one of those fancy leather-covered ones with a rounded head, not holed through for thread but with a little metal “eye” underneath instead. The kind of button that is sometimes featured on certain extreme types of sports suits. Or uniforms.

Studying it he thought, “Is it possible the great Brown missed this and I got it?” It seemed inconceivable. It could have happened, of course. Brown was only human after all. He might have just missed disturbing the right little stone out of all the dozens strewn around. But it seemed far more likely Brown had lost it himself just now, when he was crouched over exploring around here. Only, on second thought, Greeley remembered he’d had on a dark blue suit, and this button was brown, so that was out too. It was a vest- or cuff-button, judging by its size, rather than a jacket button.

“Maybe it is something after all,” he decided. “I better take it down with me and show it.”

Hackett wasn’t in his office when he got down to the precinct station. Some tip had come in, they told him, on the payroll bandit, and Hackett had chased out again. Brown wasn’t there either, and nobody seemed to know where he was. Probably still consulting Big Bill Nolan on a list of possible enemies.

Joe was going to leave the button on Hackett’s desk, but that looked silly as hell. He could hear the captain growl, “What do you think you’re doing, playing kids’ games?” The more he thought about it the sillier he felt, coming in to say: “I found a button on the ground outside the garage up there.” He realized fully that just such things had turned out to be highly important clues before. In fact whole cases had been hinged on much less than that — a wisp of nap, a single hair, the broken-off tip of a lead-pencil — but perhaps it was that he lacked self-confidence, he was used to playing second fiddle on any case in which he was teamed with Brown; coming from Joe Greeley, a thing like this seemed bound to be disregarded, laughed at. Or so he thought. It might, for all he knew, turn out to have belonged to Jerrold Nolan himself. He hadn’t lost it tonight, for when they found him he too had been in a dark blue suit, but maybe earlier in the week. He decided that before he said anything about it he’d go back tomorrow and check through Nolan’s clothing, just to make sure. For the present he returned the button to his vest pocket, in the little scrap of newspaper in which he’d brought it in.

The ballistics and autopsy reports had come in already, were there on Hackett’s desk under his eyes. Whether Hackett had read them yet, before he was called out on this other thing, Greeley couldn’t tell, of course. He picked them up and glanced through them himself. Being on the case, he was entitled to the information they contained. The bullet that had killed Nolan was from a .45 caliber revolver, and had been fired at very close range, though not quite actual contact. The other typed sheet was less important. The cause of death was a bullet in the brain. Nolan had also received a bad gash at the back of the head from striking against the steel-rimmed running-board of the car, but this was not sufficient to have caused death. Moreover, it had bled only slightly, so the death wound had probably preceded it. Nolan had had a slight amount of alcohol in his system at the time.

Hackett’s desk phone rang while Joe was standing there reading, and he took the call. He recognized Brown’s voice. That pounding like a dynamo was more noticeable in it than ever. He must be on the way to something already.

“Hackett there?”

“No, he was called out on the Wolf Bernstorff thing. This is Joe Greeley.”

“Well, listen, Joe. I’ve just been talking to Big Bill Nolan and we’ve shaped up a list of possibilities in this thing. You know, people who have threatened to get even with him at one time or another, who have held long-standing grievances against him, that kind of thing. Some of them look good and I think we’re going to town. But it’s too big, takes in too much ground, for me to cover single-handed. I want Hackett to get it as soon as he can. He’ll have to apportion it, put some other people on it along with me.”

“All right, let’s have it. I’ll take it down for you.”

“Number one, Anthony Trusso, ward-heeler up in Italian Harlem, frozen out by Nolan and lost his pull. Number two...” When Brown got through he had given six names, with all the requisite information that went with each.

“Which ones are you following up yourself?” Greeley asked unexpectedly.

Brown’s voice had been the staccato rapid-firing of a machine gun until now. It suddenly missed fire, faltered, then recovered again. “Er-Trusso and this Little Benny.”

“No he isn’t,” Greeley told himself. “He wasn’t ready for that and it tripped him. He isn’t going after those two at all. But what’s he bothering to stall me for? What’s he afraid of, my horning in? I’m no competition for him.”

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll underline those two, so he’ll know.”

“Yeah, fine.” Brown’s voice lacked enthusiasm, though. (He’s not really interested in them, Greeley thought.) “See that he gets it right away, will you? And don’t let it get around — it’s dynamite.”

Brown had hung up before Joe could ask him whether he’d seen the ballistics report yet.

VIII

Hackett came in at two that morning with a face sour as green apples. “Got away again,” he commented tersely. “The guy must be an eel. What’s this list?”

Greeley explained.

“I haven’t got a man to spare, Big Bill or no Big Bill,” Hackett told him. “We’ve got to get Bernstorff, dammit! He’s killed a cop and if we let him get away with it, it amounts to waving a white flag of surrender in the face of the entire underworld. Our lives won’t be worth a nickel.” He handed the list back to Greeley. “You and Brown’ll have to cover it between you. Get hold of him and tell him those are my orders.”

Greeley couldn’t locate Brown any more that night. Brown must have started already. Joe went after two of them on his own hook, and had the satisfaction of eliminating two of the six names pretty conclusively. For the present anyway, unless a dead-heat developed later on. Both had firearms but neither was a .45. Both were willing to admit they hated Big Bill — too willing to admit it, for present purposes — but they were able to lay it on the line and show they hadn’t been anywhere near Russell Street that night.

It was the milkman’s hour by this time, and still no Brown. Joe was ready to cave in by now himself, so he went home and got a couple of hours sleep before he went ahead. He stretched out fully dressed on the sofa in the living room with an alarm clock under the pillow, in order not to disturb his wife, who had been asleep for hours. By six he was up again.

He thought he might be able to catch Brown on the fly by stopping off at his house on the way down to headquarters, but he’d missed him again. Brown’s wife was up already and came to the door instead. She was a tall, stately red-haired girl with an air of breeding. Brown had done himself up right in that direction too.

“He hasn’t been home all night,” she said. “Phoned about one this morning not to expect him. He’s working on a case and” — she shrugged charmingly — “I’m practically a grass widow.” She was holding a vest folded under her arm. “I’m amusing myself sewing buttons on his clothes.” He could tell she was nutty about the guy, though. “It’s great fun until you come up against one that’s missing and can’t be matched.”

“Is there one you can’t match?”

“On this. Funny little leather-covered things. What’s the matter? You look sick.”

His shoulder slumped wearily lower against the door frame. “I am sick, Mrs. Brown. Sicker than I’ve ever been in my life before.”

“Can I get you something?”

He mumbled something that sounded like “Sorry I disturbed you,” and suddenly the doorway was empty.

He was standing on a corner, then, somewhere near there, thinking, “I’ve got to save somebody’s life! Somebody whose name isn’t down on that list. He wouldn’t have turned it in if it was. Somebody who’s going to be arrested, who’s going to try to bolt at some dark place along the way, and who’s going to be shot dead in ‘self-defense.’ Who, though? How am I to know who?”

Then he was at an open directory, tracing a rubbery finger that wouldn’t hold steady across William Francis Xavier Nolan, who’d paid to have all four names listed in full.

It was still only a little after seven when Joe got out of a cab in front of the house. It was a four-story limestone dwelling, and the shades were still down on all the windows. He kept his finger on the doorbell until a half-dressed secretary of some sort opened the door.

“I’m from police headquarters and I’ve got to see Mr. Nolan.”

“You can’t at this time of the morning. He’s been up half the night. He’s just lost his brother, and—”

“Don’t try to keep me out of here. I’ll take the full responsibility. It can’t wait, I tell you.” Joe’s face was too white and strained not to be convincing.

The secretary gave in. “Have you caught the man yet? Is that what it is?”

He was led up to the second floor, motioned to wait outside a big pair of double doors. He kept pacing back and forth wondering, “What am I going to say to him? How am I going to put it?”

He still didn’t know, when the doors slid back once more and the secretary gestured with a thumb. Big Bill’s bedroom was fantastic, but Greeley didn’t give it half an eye. He got a blurred impression of a canopied bed, a grand piano, a tiger-skin rug, a nightstand with a pearl-handled revolver and a memorial light flickering dimly before a picture of Jerrold Nolan.

Big Bill was sitting up under the canopy in candy-striped pajamas, shading his eyes as remembered grief came flooding back on him from the night before. Greeley just stood there in considerate silence.

“Well, what is it?” Nolan roared finally. “Did you get hold of Schreiber like I suggested?”

That name wasn’t down on Brown’s list. So that was who it was.

Greeley spoke with difficulty — after that. “I’m assigned to the case with Brown. If you’d mind giving me a few details—”

Big Bill’s face got purple with fury. “I gave Brown all the details! Get them from him! Don’t you even know your own job? Do they have to send every piddling dick in the division into my bedroom in the middle of the night? You ought to be demoted, whoever you are! What’s that?” He scanned the list. “Where’s Schreiber? Why isn’t his name down here? He’s the most important one of the lot. None of these others count! We eliminated them one by one! He’s the one was heard to say publicly that he’d get even with me. There’s been bad blood between us for years! I told Brown all that. I gave him all the details and documents in the case the last thing last night.”

Greeley said in a peculiarly muffled voice, “Yes sir. Brown’s — after him right now.”

“Then what do you want here?” Then, noticing that his caller was already easing the doors shut after him, he boomed, “In my day a detective used to have brains!”

“He used to be straight too,” said Greeley inaudibly.

It took him an hour, in the Yorkville sector, to locate Gus Schreiber’s whereabouts. An earlybird bartender, opening up his tavern, finally admitted knowledge of where Schreiber lived. Greeley went over on foot. Then as he rounded the corner, he stopped dead, a few doors down from the address the barman had given him. Something about it suggested it had been there for some time past, and was going to stay there for a long time to come.

He was too late. The cat-and-mouse play was already in full swing.

He turned and went back the way he’d come. He went midway up the next block over, to a point roughly approximating the location of Schreiber’s house. He went into a flat there, and out into the back yard, and climbed the fence over into Schreiber’s back yard. He knocked on the rear door until a typical German hausfrau came to open it.

“Lemme in,” he said. “I’ve got to talk to Schreiber. Don’t be afraid. I’m a detective.”

He thrust his way in without waiting and went up the basement stairs, beating the rain off his hat. The woman was crying now and jabbering behind him. In a back room on the main floor he found a corpulent man with a napkin tucked around his throat drinking coffee with a number of assorted kids.

“Are you Gus Schreiber? Headquarters. I’ve got to talk to you. Get your family out of here.”

The former district-leader stood up, eyes bulging with wrath. “You got a warrant to come in here? Then scram! This persecution stops or I kill somebody!”

“Now wait a minute. I had to do this. If I waited until I caught up with you outside the house, it would have been too late. You own a gun?”

Schreiber nodded belligerently.

“What caliber is it?”

“Forty-fife.”

“I was afraid of that,” murmured Greeley. “Where is it?”

The question seemed to infuriate Big Bill’s enemy. “You ask me where is it? Nein, I ask you where is it! I ask you why it was taken away from me!”

“Who took it?”

“Von of your people! I drink a little too much beer von night. He is in there with me, he sees it on me, he says, ‘You better let me have that before you get into any trouble with it.’ They have told him who I am, how I have said I will kill that Nolan the day I see him, for what he has done to me.”

“Why didn’t you go around to claim it?”

“I did — and it was neffer turned in! I cannot find the man again. I know if I make too much trouble about it, I get in trouble myself. This Nolan, he would like nothing better than to send me to jail, like he did my oldest boy.” He breathed stormily through dilated nostrils. “Wait. Wait. My time comes.”

“Well this isn’t it. Nolan’s brother was killed last night — with your gun. You better get out of here fast! Don’t stop to argue or ask questions.”

Schreiber’s Teutonic stubbornness came to the fore. “I don’t move! I was at the club last night. I can proof it!”

“Where? Where you going to prove it?” was all Greeley asked.

“At the police station! Where you think?”

“You’ll never get there alive. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You won’t show up there any more than your gun did. Come here a minute, to the front window with me. Don’t touch the curtains now. See that cab there? There’s a man waiting in it to arrest you. He’s the same man that impounded your gun. You’ll get it back. It’ll be found in your pocket, or in your hand, when they come across you in some vacant lot.”

Schreiber just stood there staring in hypnotized horror, as though he could see the scene before him. He felt for his own throat, held onto it as though he could feel a noose tightening around it.

“The only thing that saves you is he’s alone on it. Take off your bib and follow me. You can get out through the back, the way I came in. Get out of town for the next couple of days and stay there. After that it’ll be all right. You can come back again.”

He ran down the back stairs, stopped halfway to the bottom to make sure Schreiber was coming after him, then went on down the rest of the way. Schreiber suddenly balked at the yard door. “How I know it ain’t you instead of him who does it to me? How I know who you are?”

Greeley, astride the fence already, answered, “Stay here then. I’ve done my part. I don’t much care what you do. I never saw you before in my life.”

A doorbell rang somewhere at the front of the house, and it could be heard all the way out here.

Schreiber came out the rest of the way, his arms extended. “Give me a hand up. I ain’t so athletic no more.”

IX

Greeley didn’t go back to headquarters after he left Schreiber at the 125th Street Station. He went out to Brown’s house instead. It had to be up there, not at headquarters.

He waited patiently through the long hours, a huddled figure in the outer doorway, hands deep-pocketed, coat collar turned up against the slanting silvery rain. Head down the whole time, never once raised; not lowered in an attempt to avoid recognition, but with the weight of the responsibility upon him.

The shiny sidewalk darkened from pewter to black, and it was night at last. He never moved. He was stiff all over. It seemed like half the night had gone by before tires came whispering up at last and stopped out at the curb before him. He didn’t look up. A car door cracked and a man’s thick-soled tread came across the sidewalk. A pair of shoes stopped there within the radius of his lowered gaze.

His head came up slowly then, and it was Brown.

“For pete’s sake!” was Brown’s wry recognition. “Haven’t you got sense enough to come in out of the rain?”

He, Greeley, was a coward up to the very last. He couldn’t do it down here in the open street either. He said, “Let’s go upstairs. I want to talk to you.”

Going up. Brown growled, “I was thrown for a terrible loss just now.” Greeley didn’t ask him what he meant. Didn’t have to.

Brown’s wife was asleep. Greeley went over and closed the door so she wouldn’t hear them. He sat down and took out his gun.

Brown looked at him and smiled. “What’re you pointing it at me for? Rehearsing what you’re going to do to—”

“Finish it,” Greeley said. “What I’m going to do to the man that killed Jerry Nolan. This isn’t the rehearsal. This is it. Hand over that forty-five you impounded from Gus Schreiber last week. Hand it over. It’s on you right now. Your own too. Come out with it. Now don’t move. I’ll shoot you if you want it that way. I’m in hell already.”

“How did you know I—?” Then he tried to say something about having unearthed it just now at Schreiber’s house.

“How do I know — the whole thing?” Greeley grimaced in revulsion. “Do we have to talk about it? We’ve known each other half our lives. Let’s shut up, let’s shut up.”

Brown sat down at long last. “What are you doing this to me for?”

Greeley pitched the leather-covered button at him. “Are you man enough to bring the vest this goes with out here and show it to me? Don’t keep looking at me trying to find out how much I know. I know the whole thing. It’s been progressive. The Ingram case was on the level. You got a boost. In the Allroyd case, the murder was on the level but you couldn’t break it, so you framed a suspect and shot him down in cold blood. You got a boost. Things didn’t happen fast enough after that to suit you. You caught the hotheaded Dutchman Schreiber shooting off his mouth what he’d like to do to Big Bill Nolan. You took his gun away. That part of it was in good faith. That was the only part that was. That same night you came through Russell Street and came across Jerry Nolan locked out of his house. It was a devastating coincidence, and it was too much for you. The whole set-up must have come to you then and there. You couldn’t do anything right then, because the people in the next house were at their window. You drove through that street again and again, I suppose. And finally it jelled just right. You caught him accidentally imprisoned in his garage, trying to climb out the window, and with a high wind blowing that was making enough racket to muffle any shot.

“You dropped a button. You didn’t know just where, but you were worried. I saw you looking for it later that night. I would never have looked myself if you hadn’t. Now give me those guns — butts first. Careful.”

Brown complied. Joe Greeley pocketed the .45, and started to empty the Police Positive’s chambers. “I’m going to get out of here now. I’m going to leave you here — with your wife in there. Say goodby to her or not, whichever you like. I’m going to leave your own gun here with you. It’s got one bullet in it.”

“I can’t, Joe! I can’t! I haven’t got the nerve. I’ve got some kinds of courage, but I haven’t got that kind.”

“Then I’m going in to report,” Joe said. “I’m not going to force you with me at the point of a gun — but you better come. What else is there to do? You’d only be a renegade for the rest of your life, hunted and tracked down like the rats you’ve always hunted yourself until now. It’s going to blow the roof off the whole division, tear us wide open, this way. There’s nothing worse than when a sheep-dog turns wolf.”

The door opened and Brown’s wife looked in on them. “Would you and your friend like some coffee or beer, Bill?” she smiled.

“No, we’re going right away,” Brown said. “He’s... he’s got a report to make. Don’t wait up for me. I don’t know when I’ll be back.” And he turned his back to her and hunted for his hat where it wasn’t.

They went on foot, walking side by side as though nothing were the matter. “How many hundreds of guys have been walked in like this,” Brown said once. “Now I know what it feels like.”

“Quit it!” exploded from Greeley’s tight lips. He eyed a car that had recklessly shaved a corner short ahead of them just then. “You don’t have to. A step in the wrong direction, without looking behind—”

Brown shook his head. Greeley knew whom he was thinking of.

A block or so beyond, somebody dropped an electric-light bulb in the dim recesses of one of the decrepit rookeries they were passing at the moment, and they both jolted spasmodically, then grinned sheepishly at each other, as if to say, “What a fine pair we turned out to be!”

They went on a few steps farther, and someone coughed behind them. Greeley turned to look and there was a uniformed cop standing there in the entrance they’d just passed, and the cop suddenly keeled over and flattened out and lay there face down across the doorstep.

Lifting a gun, Greeley wheeled, jumped back, Brown a step behind him. Joe crouched down over the man and tilted his head, and a thread of blood came down beside the bluecoat’s ear.

“Bernstorff,” he whispered. “The one we’ve been so long—”

The gun was grabbed from Joe Greeley’s hand and someone was pounding up the rickety stairs with no attempt at caution or concealment, and Joe stood up. He was alone in the doorway.

“Bill!” he bellowed. “Hold it! That’s your gun, and there’s only one bullet in it!” But somehow he knew that Brown had thought of that before he sprinted in there.

Joe plunged in after him, but they came before he’d even reached the foot of the stairs. Six slashing, vindictive shots, so fast you couldn’t count between them. And then a pause, and then a single shot as if in contemptuous answer, somehow sounding steady, sure, unhurried. Fired by the kind of wrist that could take aim above a dock of school kids and never falter.

Detective William Brown was lying there at the head of the stairs, up on the fourth floor, when Greeley got to him. There was a motionless huddled figure at the other end of the dim hall.

Brown’s eyes were still open and they saw Greeley when Joe’s face came close in stooping to pass an arm under Brown so the fallen detective’s last few breaths could come easier.

“How am I doing?” he panted. “Does that square it?”

Brown lowered his head just once, kept it down.

“You won’t tell them?”

“I don’t know anything to tell — except you got Bernstorff. Good luck, Bill Brown.”

The last thing Brown said, his eyes already lidding closed, was, “I wasn’t so smart after all.”

Yes, he was smart all right, Joe Greeley thought, turning away, and he meant it in sincerest admiration. Smarter than I’ll ever be. That was the whole trouble. Just a little bit dumber, a little bit slower, and he would have been all right. Just a little less speed, just a little more control...

Afterword to “Detective William Brown”

The title character of “Detective William Brown” (Detective Fiction Weekly, September 10, 1938) strikes me as the ultimate Noir Cop in the Woolrich canon, a conscienceless opportunist who rises through the ranks of the force thanks to a combination of brutality and raw courage. The story’s viewpoint character however is not Brown but his plodding, dedicated and relatively humane boyhood friend Greeley, and the plot takes us through yet another of Woolrich’s oscillations as Greeley slowly, by fits and starts but inexorably comes to learn the truth behind Brown’s meteoric rise to the top — the truth which, as in “Endicott’s Girl,” is covered up at the climax. Such, Woolrich tells us, are the men who are licensed to kill us at their whim, and even those who enter the life as decent people are corrupted by the system they serve.