Reardon

Chapter 9

Wednesday — 3:20 P.M.

The telephone rang sharply. Reardon sighed and put aside a report he had been reading covering a series of muggings in the streets leading from the Panhandle up to Haight in the Park District, which had led to a death the previous evening. Peace and Love! he thought sourly, and raised the instrument. It was a sergeant on the switchboard in Communications.

“Hey, Lieutenant — Captain Tower wants to see you on the double. He says he’s been trying to call your extension all afternoon. Finally got tired and turned the job over to us.”

“Well, it’s one of the things you’re there for,” Reardon said a trifle unkindly. “And anyway, I’ve been off the phone for at least five minutes.”

“Yeah, but you must have been on it for over an hour straight. Anyway, you better get over to his office. He sounded like he had a hair across his butt.” The sergeant added hastily, “That’s just an expression, you understand.”

“I understand.”

Reardon came to his feet, rubbed the back of his neck for luck, picked up his jacket on the way, and left the room. In the corridor he slid into his jacket, brushed his hair back with his fingers, and walked around the corridor bend to the captain’s office. He took a deep breath, tapped on the door, and entered without awaiting an invitation. Captain Tower had his telephone in his hand; the receiver was almost lost in the huge grip. At sight of the young lieutenant he set it down gently in the cradle and studied his subordinate coldly.

“Well, well! Look who’s here.”

“You wanted to see me, Captain?”

“Now, that’s a real bright question,” Tower said sardonically and then dropped the light tone. His fist formed and hovered over the desk, preparatory to pounding it, but then he forced himself to open his hand and lay it down on the blotter. “You know damned well I wanted to see you. But you’ve been glued to that damned telephone for the past hour.”

“It was that Cooke case—”

“I thought I told you to drop that Cooke case; to turn it over to Traffic.”

“I was talking to the purser of his ship, arranging for the body to go back there,” Reardon said quietly. “He’ll be buried at sea.”

“And it took you an hour to arrange it? Well, never mind. Sit down.”

Reardon pulled up a chair and obediently sat down. He had a fair idea of what was coming, but decided to hear it out before making up his mind as to the best defense. Captain Tower swiveled his chair a moment to stare out of the window without appreciation for the lovely distant view of the Oakland hills, and then swiveled back. When he spoke his voice was deceptively plaintive, as if he had been dealt with unfairly and undeservedly, and simply wanted a reasonable explanation.

“Why do you do these things to me, Jim?”

“What things, Captain?”

“As if you didn’t know.” The big man leaned forward, his elbows on his desk, ticking off his points on his thick fingers, his dark eyes fixed on the gray ones facing him.

“One: I told you to drop that traffic accident, but did you? Well, let’s see. To begin with, Captain Clark in Traffic calls me up to say his technical squad started to go over that Buick in the garage — as you asked them to, although I told you not to, and I still don’t see any sense in wasting time going over that car beyond what Wilkins did — and then you call the garage and pull them off the job and tell them to hold off until tomorrow. Now, that gives Clark a chance to squawk that we’re interfering in his business, and he loves to squawk; and it also gives him a chance to say we’re disrupting his schedule and so forth and so on — and it puts me in a position of having to defend one of my men for something I told him not to do. And I’m damned if I know why he’s doing it.”

“Captain—”

“Let me finish.” He pressed down a second finger, warming to his arguments. “Two: Five minutes after Clark hangs up, I get a call from Judge Jorgensen saying that if we’re going to get involved in Traffic, he’d like to be apprised of the fact, and also if I’m under the impression the Municipal Court hasn’t enough cases on its docket without doing each one of them twice — especially idiotic cases — then I ought to drop down to the second floor and see for myself sometimes. He said he went along with Merkel on the continuance for Crocker this time, but if there was any more horsing around on Friday, he was going to raise hell with someone. And he bangs the receiver down. And I don’t even know what in hell he’s talking about, although I’m beginning to get a strong suspicion!”

He paused, his eyes tiny, waiting for another interruption, but Reardon kept quiet. Captain Tower nodded and pressed down a third finger.

“So I call Merkel and he tells me this is the fine Italian hand of my young Lieutenant, James Reardon, not that I don’t already know that. But he doesn’t know why Lieutenant Reardon asked for the continuance.”

Reardon continued to sit silent, watching. Captain Tower released his fingers and stared across the desk at him, glaring.

“Well?”

“Well what, sir?”

Tower’s big fist formed again, this time beyond control, bouncing on the desk. His ash tray jumped.

“Don’t ask stupid questions of me, Lieutenant! I want to know what the hell goes on! I want to know why you disobey orders! You just now spoke about a ‘Cooke case.’ Well, there isn’t any Cooke case! The man stepped off the curb in front of a car and got killed. The poor slob who killed him has enough grief without your persecuting him, because that’s what it amounts to. Why, God knows! I hope not to justify your walking out of that meeting last night, because if that’s the reason, you’re in trouble. I’ve read the Wilkins report, too, you know. And after the reaming I got from the judge, I called Wilkins at home and he repeated the whole thing, practically verbatim. And Merkel told me if Crocker had had the brains to bring a lawyer into court with him, the poor dumb bastard, either he’d have walked out a free man — or driven out in his Buick rather — or his lawyer would have been holding press conferences that would have had the Board of Commissioners seeing purple!”

He frowned across the desk blackly.

“What are you trying to do, Lieutenant? Wreck the police department all by yourself?”

Reardon’s jaw tightened slightly and his gray eyes narrowed, but otherwise he kept his cool. He had decided what his defense was going to be: a good offense, and he knew this was the time to do it, if ever. The captain was plainly in no mood for nonsense. There was only one way to settle it, and that was to do it quickly.

“Captain, you want to know why I’ve done what I’ve done. I’ll tell you in one word. Murder.”

“Murder?”

“Yes, sir. Homicide, and that makes it our business. Ralph Crocker deliberately ran down Bob Cooke and killed him. It was no accident. And I’m going to prove it.”

Captain Tower stared at him a moment. He leaned back in his chair, fumbled a pipe free from his jacket pocket, and sucked on it without lighting it. When he spoke his voice was deceptively quiet.

“What do you know about this case you haven’t reported, Lieutenant?”

“Not a thing, sir. But I’m sure Cooke was killed on purpose.”

“Oh, you do, do you? Do you happen to have any evidence? Any proof?”

“No, sir.”

Tower considered him evenly, almost paternally. “That’s a nice, honest statement. Do you have any indication — I won’t even ask you for proof — that Cooke and Crocker had ever met or even seen each other before in their lives?”

“No, sir.” Reardon faced his superior calmly. “Cooke’s girl friend never heard of Crocker and never saw him before. And says to her knowledge Cooke never mentioned him. And Crocker was strictly a landlubber, as far as we know, and Cooke worked the ships. And lived in Honolulu.”

“I see. But you’re still positive it was homicide. Now,” Captain Tower continued politely, “perhaps you can tell me why a man would go to the trouble of killing a perfect stranger. Do you believe Crocker is a homicidal maniac? Do you think he’s the type who goes running around killing strangers for kicks?”

“No, sir. I think this thing was well planned.”

“But you can’t think why.”

“No, sir, I can’t. Not yet.” He leaned forward a bit, trying to explain something that was difficult to explain to himself. “I have a hunch, I suppose you might call it. Now, I don’t think hunches are anything supernatural, and I also don’t believe they are what people call ESP — extrasensory perception. I think hunches are our subconscious trying to remind us of something we’ve forgotten.”

“And what did you forget?”

The young red-haired lieutenant suddenly grinned. “That’s what I don’t know.”

There were several seconds of silence. Captain Tower put away his pipe.

“Are you all right, Jim?”

“I’m fine, Captain.”

“I’m not so sure.” Tower drummed his thick fingers on his desktop for several moments, considering the man across from him thoughtfully. When at last he spoke he sounded as if he had come to a reluctant decision.

“Jim, I want you to take a week off. You’ve plenty of time coming, and we won’t count it against your vacation time. We’ll tack it onto sick leave. How about it? Take Jan and drive down to Yosemite, or lose some money at Reno or Vegas, or just go down to Carmel and lay around the beach. How about it?”

Reardon smiled at him faintly.

“I’ll tell you what, Captain. I’ll make you a deal. Instead of a week, I’d like just two days — until Municipal Court session on Friday. And instead of sick leave you can call it vacation time or even a holiday without pay if you want; I couldn’t care less. I know I’m right. There’s just one thing; I want a favor. I want Dondero to work with me.” He thought a moment. “And Stan Lundahl, too, if I need him for anything.”

Captain Tower stared at him. He swiveled his chair to take in the view across the bay once again, again not seeing it. He swiveled back, frowning, and then looked up.

“I suppose there’s only one way to cure you, Jim, and that’s to let you cure yourself in your own way. In all fairness to you I’ll say you’ve made damned few mistakes since you’ve been in the department; but I have a feeling this one is a beauty. I’m out of my mind to agree to it, but all right.” His dark eyes studied Reardon without any expression in them. They looked almost opaque. “If your hunch just happens to be wrong — and everything points to it, or at least if there’s anything working for it I can’t see it — then I imagine you know I’m the one who’ll be on the carpet in the chief’s office. Not you. Not after this talk of ours this afternoon. I suppose you’ve thought of that?”

“I’ve thought of it, Captain,” Reardon said evenly. “I’ve thought of it a lot, and frankly, I didn’t like thinking about it. I like to take my own falls for my own mistakes.” His gray eyes firmed. “But I’ve also thought of a girl who lost a boy friend; and even more than that, I’ve thought it’s just too damned easy to kill a man with a car deliberately and get away with it.” He waited a moment in silence and then came to his feet. “If that’s all, Captain, I’d like to get to work.”

“That’s all.” The captain’s tone was expressionless. As the door closed behind his subordinate he swiveled his chair around, staring across the low roofs to the bay and the soft hills of Oakland beyond, with tiny white houses mounting to the rounded peaks, half hidden in the late summer greenery. Jim Reardon was a good man and had been a damned fine addition to the detective force in Homicide and Captain Tower was pleased to have had the man assigned to him. He was smart, intelligent, hard working, fair, well liked, and — the captain shook his head, searching for the elusive word to complete the description.

It was “stubborn,” he finally decided. That matter settled, Captain Tower sighed heavily, swung around, and went back to work.

Wednesday — 3:45 P.M.

The police garage was in the basement of the Hall of Justice; a low-ceilinged room of vast proportions with an exhaust-stained concrete floor and supporting pillars which, Reardon had always felt, had been placed at the exact points to insure maximum damage to doors or fenders by anyone attempting to follow the direction lines painted on the floor. One bent fender had been enough for Lieutenant Reardon; now he parked either in the public lot behind the morgue — without taking a ticket from the machine — or at the curb in front of the Hall on Bryant Street on those rare occasions when the No-parking space was not filled with other interlopers.

The portion of the garage next to the office, adjacent to the ramp leading from the street, had been isolated to serve as a storage space for cars under investigation, and was protected from the balance of the garage by wire fencing and doors which could be — but never had been — closed. Reardon sighed, thinking of the old days when one, or at the most two, cars had been impounded for official reasons. Now the space was crowded with battered wrecks from which dead bodies had been hauled or had to be burned clear with acetylene torches.

He studied the area carefully; the Buick was not there. Perturbed, he walked to the office door, thrust his head inside, and bawled.

“Morrison!”

“Just a second!” The garage attendant poked his head from behind a desk where he had been retrieving a dropped coin. He pocketed it with satisfaction as he rose and slid it into a pocket. “Hi, Lieutenant.”

“Where’s that Buick?”

“Parked out in the main garage. Second row down, back up against the wall. All the way at the end.”

Reardon studied the man coldly. “Isn’t your normal practice to keep a car in the cage until the technical squad has a chance to go over it?”

Morrison looked unhappy. He wiped his hands, dusty from his search of the floor, on his buttocks.

“Sure, Lieutenant,” he said unhappily. “Only they went over it.” He raised a hand, denying culpability. “I told them what you said, but the gang came down about one o’clock and went over her then. They said it was Captain Clark’s instructions. Said they had other wrecks to go in.” He shrugged apologetically. “There wasn’t nothing I could do. Me, I’m just a guy here, runs the office.”

“I see.”

So Captain Clark had screamed about the disruption of his crew’s schedule after he had already ordered his men to check out the car! It was certainly nice to see co-operation between departments and to know one had friends in high places, Reardon thought, and put the thought of Captain Clark out of his mind.”

“What did they find?”

“Nothing that I could see, or at least they didn’t say anything,” Morrison said. “I know they dusted her for prints and went over her from top to bottom. They had the seats out, picked up the hard stuff like hairpins and coins and then they vacuumed under them and the rug too; and they had the hub caps off and all that stuff. They had the trunk open and they looked at the spare tire and took that out too. They gave it the works; a lot more than they usually do with an accident car.” He paused and then shrugged apologetically. “But it ain’t for me to say. I’m just a desk jockey down here.”

“And a damned fine mechanic,” Reardon reminded him.

“Yeah. Well, maybe I was once upon a time, but I’m flying a file cabinet now.” Morrison changed the subject. “You ought to be getting a report, Lieutenant.”

“I suppose I will, eventually,” Reardon said evenly.

Captain Clark, he thought, in addition to having a personality problem also had a technical squad that functioned under his direction and operated both efficiently and well. Oh yes — Reardon was sure he’d get a report, and so would his superior Captain Tower, and undoubtedly Assistant Chief Boynton. And the report would be as detailed as an instructed laboratory could make it, embellished by the Traffic chief, with developed fingerprints and dust analyses and eighteen type-written pages — all designed to prove what a complete waste of time Lieutenant Reardon, meddling with a department not his own, had put the long-suffering technical squad to. Not to mention the trouble Captain Clark had been forced to endure. To hell with it, Reardon thought sourly, and went on with his questioning of Morrison.

“How about the engines?”

Morrison became enthusiastic for the first time.

“I checked her under the hood myself, Lieutenant. What a lovely job!” He shook his head in admiration. “Tuned to a dime. And the body? A real old-timer. You could hit an elephant with that one. They really built cars in those days. I should be in as good shape when I’m that old!”

“You are that old,” Reardon pointed out. “Older in fact.”

“Yeah. Well, you know what I mean. Them 1940s were a dream, probably the best they made before the war. After the war, of course—” He waved a hand, putting the cars produced after the war in their proper place. “A beauty!”

“What about the radiator?”

“Not a scratch. I tell you, Lieutenant, she’s practically perfect. Leaks a little transmission oil, but what the hell! I should be in as good a shape—” He realized he was repeating himself. “I mean it ain’t bad for a car thirty years old. Even the bumper where it hit the guy, it ain’t hardly dented. Beautiful!”

“If that’s the proper word for a lethal weapon that killed a man,” Reardon commented dryly.

“That ain’t what I meant, Lieutenant,” Morrison said, his sensibilities wounded. “I just meant I wished they built them patrol cars we got like they built that Buick back about thirty years ago. Maybe then they wouldn’t be in the shop every second day.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Reardon conceded. He looked up. “Let me have a flashlight, will you? I want to take a look at her myself.”

“Sure,” Morrison said. “I’ll show you where I put it.”

He picked a flashlight from his desk, checked it to see if the batteries were alive, flicked it off and led the way down the long rows of cars fitted into the garage space like bits of a jigsaw puzzle.

“Like when I was over at Repairs,” he said. “Southern twelve. I must have put new cotter pins in the steering linkage on that bastard eight times in six months. Guy could go blind. That’s what I meant, Lieutenant.” He paused, flashing on the light, pointing with the beam. When he spoke he sounded proud. “There she is, Lieutenant.”

Reardon took the lighted flashlight and opened the rear door, sweeping the beam around the empty space, bringing it back to the floorboards and up to the roof. And what do you think you’re looking for in the first place? he asked himself sarcastically, and closed the door. It closed with a solid, satisfactory chunk. He moved to the front, opening the door, flashing the light about.

“Glove compartment’s empty,” Morrison offered. “Technical squad looked.”

“Did they, now!” Out of sheer perversity Reardon opened it and flashed the light about the bare space, and then snapped the small panel shut. He noted the mileage and frowned. Only eighteen thousand miles on a 1940 Buick? Second time around, probably, though it didn’t look that, either. He shrugged. The keys were in the switch; he turned them and watched the needles on the gauges come to life. The gas gauge moved to a quarter; he wondered idly what mileage the big car gave per gallon and turned the switch off, not knowing why he had even switched it on. He bent down, noting the registration on the steering column. He glanced over his shoulder at Morrison.

“They take a look at this?”

“Sure, Lieutenant, but they put it back. They put everything back, like the spare tire, and everything.”

Reardon bent in the car again, reading the registration information through the plastic window of the folder. Unsatisfied, he snapped the holder from the steering column, bringing it closer to the flashlight to study it. As he had already known, the car was registered to Ralph Crocker, hair etc., eyes etc., address etc. He turned the clear plastic envelope over, glancing at the back. He was about to return the folder to the steering column when he suddenly paused, looking at the back of the registration a second time. His eyes came up to Morrison’s face. The ex-mechanic, cum-garage-attendant was surprised at the expression.

“What’s the matter, Lieutenant?”

“The registration was transferred to Crocker only last week.” Reardon was frowning.

“So?”

“So he only bought this car last week!”

Morrison shrugged, unimpressed. “So he just happened to be lucky. You run into one of these jobs — in this good a shape — maybe once in a lifetime. A guy would be crazy not to grab it. Any guy who knows anything about cars, that is.”

“If he knew anything about cars...”

“Well, he had to,” Morrison said reasonably. “He grabbed it, didn’t he?”

“That’s true, he did,” Reardon said enigmatically, his brain racing. He looked at Morrison, a cold smile on his face. “Rather a coincidence, though, don’t you think? Getting it just in time to kill somebody with it?”

“Well,” Morrison said, “That’s how it goes.”

“Yes.” Reardon slipped the car registration into his pocket. He flashed the light about the interior once more and then shut the door. He crouched down, staring at the undercarriage of the high car. As Morrison had said, there was a slight leak from the transmission, but otherwise the underside looked clean; the springs looked in good shape and the muffler hadn’t rusted out. He straightened up, flicking off the flashlight, handing it to Morrison. “I guess that’s it.”

“Right. Say, Lieutenant—” Suddenly Morrison seemed diffident, hesitant.

“Yes?”

“Well—” Morrison seemed embarrassed, but then he overcame it, speaking out. “Well, sometimes, you know lots of guys don’t want to keep a car that killed somebody. Especially if they were driving. This guy Crocker, maybe hell feel that way too. You’ll be seeing him. Could you ask him for me? I’d give him a decent price,” Morrison added hastily. “I ain’t trying to gyp him, or take advantage of his tough luck. It’s just — well, I can replace them leaky seals in a matter of four, five hours — on my own time, that is — and have me a real winner. How about it, Lieutenant? Will you ask him?”

Reardon stared at the eager face before him and sighed.

“If I get a chance I’ll ask him,” he said quietly and turned away, walking toward the elevator back to the fourth floor.