Killer Mine (5 page)

“But they’re here, so it must mean something else.”

The elderly cop leaned back and frowned at the ceiling. “I got an idea that could connect”

“Oh?”

He lowered his eyes and steadied them on mine. “Remember that guy… Gus Wilder, the one who jumped bail in Toledo when he was going to testify against the Gordon-Carbito mob?”

“I saw the flyers and read the news accounts.”

Ralph bobbed his head. “He lived two blocks over for five years. Still got a brother there. The brother’s straight… runs a dry cleaning shop, but I’m thinking they’re watching him to see if Wilder makes a contact”

“Why?”

Callahan grinned at me. “Things you brass cops seem to forget. The Gordon-Carbito mob upstate did the local boys a favor once… a big one. Could be now the locals are returning it by keeping an eye out for Wilder. If he talks the upstate combo will fall.”

“A possibility,” I agreed. I stood up and pushed the chair back. “Keep your ears open… I’ll appreciate it. If you need a contact, try Marta Borlig, only keep it on the q.t that she’s on the force.”

“Will do, Joe.”

“Thanks for your time.”

“Don’t mention it.” I said good night and went downstairs to look for a cruising cab.

My morning reports were finished at nine and I handed them to Mack Brissom. “Want some coffee? I’m meeting Marty at the diner.”

“Can’t do, friend. I’m tied up with that Montreal thing. A cross check on the ballistics came in and the gun used in Montreal was the same used in an attempted bank heist in Windsor a week earlier and to kill a gas station attendant in Utica four days after the Montreal bit”

“That’s not our jurisdiction,” I said.

“Yeah, I know. But the gun was found in a B.M.T. subway train by a passenger and turned in. No prints, unregistered and probably deliberately left there. It could be a red herring dodge to keep the action here while the killer is miles away, but we have to push it all the way.”

“Any of the money showing up yet?”

“Nothing. Lousy thing is, who could tell? Only part of the loot was in bills big enough to have the serial numbers recorded. It’s like the Brinks job… they’ll hold off until things quiet down before dumping the stuff.”

“Well, have fun.”

Mack didn’t seem to hear me. He shook his head, looking out the window. “Screwy deal, that one. The bank heist was a bust because four detectives were on the premises cashing their checks and stopped it. The Montreal job took a lot of planning… more than one single week. That was a top operation.”

“Maybe the guy who used the gun was brought in just to give them cover,” I suggested.

“Ah, I don’t know. It smells. It’s real sour. We got a tipoff from Canada that something had been in the wind a long time. Two mobsters from the States had been spotted up there a couple months earlier and sent back across the line,
persona non grata.
The day after the job an abandoned American automobile was found three miles from the scene that had been stolen in Detroit a week before, so there’s a general tie-in.

“Take the guy with the gun… he grabbed a car in Detroit, ran over to Windsor to pull the bank job, muffed it, then pulled the Montreal deal, dumped the car and took off. A report from a motel in the area where the car was left, that catered to tourists from the States, called in a stolen car with Jersey plates the same day.”

I said, “It looks nice except for that one thing, Mack. You don’t plan that kind of holdup in a week… not on the run, anyway.”

Mack collected his papers from the desk and folded them under his arm as one of the duty officers came in and handed him a sheet. He looked at it, scowled, then glanced at me. “That stolen car from Jersey was found in the Bronx.”

“The boy’s coming home,” I grinned.

“So he takes the subway, leaves the gun there so he can’t get picked up with it and finds a hideout. But where?”

“Why don’t you try the Ritz,” I suggested. “He’d have enough cash along to afford the rates.”

“Drop dead.”

We left together and I went down to meet Marty at the diner. She was already there, tall, fresh and cool looking in a trim suit that couldn’t hide her loveliness no matter how businesslike it was cut. She had coffee and pie ready for me and a notepad open on the table in front of her. I said, “Hi, little Giggie,” and sat down.

“If you weren’t my superior you’d hear something,” she told me.

“Superior in all things, sugar.”

“All?”

“Like I said … all.”

“Maybe you need a lesson, big boy.”

“In what?” I grinned.

“Oh, shut up.” She sipped at her coffee, then pulled the pad toward her. “I had a talk with a few people on the block.”

“And… ?”

“Remember what Fat Mary said about René Mills hinting about coming into some money?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Confirmed. He was seen with a roll, paid off two big bar bills, cleaned up an account overdue by three months at the grocer’s and made a pitch at Helen Gentry who has pretty expensive tastes and only goes with the boys who are loaded. On top, he laid in a case of expensive Scotch whiskey and paid for it in cash.”

“So?”

Marty closed the pad and said, “He’d been pimping for those two girls who live over Papa Jones’ store for three years now. Cheap trade, and the take couldn’t have been big, but it was all he had, then suddenly he tells them both to take off… that he’s going out of business.”

“Not much cash was found on the body,” I said. “None of that Scotch was found in the apartment, either.”

“Screwy,” she mused.

I told her about my conversation with Ralph Callahan the night before and she nodded, thinking the same thing I was. I said, “He could have been hiding out Gus Wilder for a price.”

“We could check and see if they ever had a previous contact.”

“Not now we can’t, kid. You’re supposed to be a working girl. Until tonight we’ll go at it from a different angle. If the local mob is looking for Wilder they’ll have their own sources. Let’s see if they really are. Think you can run a check?”

“Sure. Regulation procedure accelerated by native ingenuity. I’ll see those who are assigned to that detail.”

I finished my coffee and dropped a bill on the table. “Good enough. I’ll pick you up at the apartment tonight.” I started to leave, then stopped and turned around. “Don’t get involved personally. Let somebody else do the legwork.”

“I can handle it myself, Joe.”

“Perhaps, but I don’t want you to lose your cover. Probe too far and some newshawk will get curious and your picture will be in the paper. That would wipe out your effectiveness in the neighborhood.”

“All right, Joe,” she smiled, “I’ll be careful.” But all that time she knew what I really meant I was getting a damn funny feeling about that woman, one I had never experienced before. Something that was like a fist tightening in my belly and sending a warm, crawly sensation across my back.

CHAPTER SIX

HENRY WILDER’S dry cleaning place was a hole-in-the-wall operation that catered to the local trade. Enough business kept him from poverty, but he was never going to get rich there. He lived upstairs over his store, a prematurely balding bachelor about fifty with tired lines around his eyes and a nervous flutter to his hands. I caught him on his lunch hour, flashed my badge and got invited in to a shabby room cluttered with junk and three racks of clothes customers had either forgotten about or didn’t have the money to redeem.

When I sat down he fidgeted on the edge of his chair waiting for me to speak. Finally I said, “Ever hear from your brother Gus?”

“That bum!”

“I didn’t ask that.”

“Sometimes I get a letter. He was up on charges in Toledo.”

“Hear from him since?”

Henry Wilder was going to say no, but knew he couldn’t make the lie stick. “Sure… a phone call. After he jumped bail.”

“Where was he?”

He licked his mouth nervously and toyed with the food on his plate. “He ain’t that simple. He called direct”

“Why?”

His eyebrows went up then. “Money. What else? He wants me to send him five hundred bucks. Now where the hell am I supposed to get five hundred bucks? He didn’t even ask. He just told me to get it ready and he’d tell me where to send it”

“Going to?”

Once again, his tongue snaked out. “I… don’t know.” He took a sip of coffee to wet his mouth and added, “I’m scared of him. I always was.”

“He’s your brother, isn’t he?”

Wilder shook his head. “Stepbrother. Hell, I’d sooner turn him in, only it might not work and he’d come after me.” His eyes held a pleading expression. “What am I supposed to do?”

“The cops aren’t the only ones looking for Gus, buddy.”

“I know. That’s what I figured. So I’m caught in the middle either way,” he said.

“Then take a chance and play it right. If he calls you, call us. We have ways of keeping things quiet”

“Can… I think about it?”

“Sure. One way or another he’ll turn up, but like you said, why get caught in the middle? He asked for anything he gets.”

I went to get up, then changed my mind and asked, “You know the girls René Mills had working for him?”

For a second his face took on a startled look, then he nodded. “Rose Shaw and Kitty Muntz. They come in all the time. Rose should be in soon to pick up her stuff. That Mills, he gave ’em the boot before he kicked off.”

“So supposing we go downstairs and wait for her, Henry.”

“In the shop?” He swallowed hard, knowing what they thought of cops around here.

“Don’t worry, I’ll even help out behind the counter.” Rose Shaw didn’t show until ten after three, a flagrant little whore with a hard, tight body encased in a too-small sweater and blouse combination, her eyes showing the cynicism of her profession, the caustic twist to her mouth accentuating it. She threw her ticket down on the counter top with a crumpled ten-dollar bill from a plastic purse and stood there with a hurry-up look on her face.

I got up from the stool where I was sitting while Henry Wilder was collecting her clothes. She made me as fast as Ralph Callahan did, but in a different way. The lids half closed over her pupils and the mouth went into a semi-sneer that spat
copper,
and she was ready to tell me to stuff it because she wasn’t working a pad at the moment and there was nothing I could lay on her. She was too wise to get trapped by a phoney approach, and wasn’t about to get stuck with a pay off if I was a bad one.

One by one the possibilities ran through her mind, eliminating the wrong ones, and when I still didn’t make a move her face clouded because she couldn’t tap the right answer. Then she got jumpy. There is something peculiar about those on the stiffer sides of the fence, the law and the punks. In some ways they seem to look alike sometimes. They work in the same areas in the same profession with the same people, and it gets to them so they adopt common mannerisms and expressions and deep in the back of their eyes is buried a mutual hatred for each other.

But we had the advantage. We could read them. They could never quite read us. They were the ones who were mixed up, not us.

I said, “Talk or walk, Rose.”

“Look, mister…”

The badge lay in my hand, nicely palmed. “Talk here, walk downtown. Take your pick.”

She said something under her breath and glanced around her. “Screw you, copper. Not in public.”

“You name it then.”

“I got a room at 4430. It’s where I live, not work.”

“Go ahead. I’ll give you ten minutes.”

“Second floor in the back.” She swore under her breath, draped her clothes over her arm, picked up her change and walked out, her face still full of disgust.

I gave her the ten minutes and picked my way down to her brownstone, cut in quickly and shoved the door open. The odor of burned grease and cabbage was heavy on the air, cutting through the mustiness of dirt and decay. The steps were hollowed by the tread of thousands of feet traversing them, creaky with age and littered with odds and ends of callous living. I found her door, knocked once and turned the knob without being asked to come in.

Rose Shaw sat with her feet up on a table, a beer in her hand, deliberately posed so I could see up her dress past the muscular smoothness of her thighs. I said, “Forget the peep show, Rose,” and swung a chair around and sat down with my arms lying across its back.

“Swing me, copper. I’m waiting to hear the pitch.”

“Let’s start with René Mills.”

She shrugged elaborately and took a pull from the can of beer. “He’s dead. What else?”

“Why, Rose?”

“I can think of a hundred reasons. Somebody beat me to it. Kitty too. Hell, she pulled out before René was knocked off. I thought she was dumber’n me, but she saw the signs, she did. She knew what was coming and cut out before she was told to.”

“Where is she?”

“Jersey City. She left yesterday. Her old man let her go back to work for him in a factory. She won’t like it.”

“And how about you?”

“What the hell do you care?”

“I don’t”

“So why the action?” she asked.

“René Mills,” I repeated.

“You seem to know the score. Where do I come in? So I’m puttin’ out for cash, man. It ain’t the best, but it’ll do until something better shows.” She lost her hate for a second and stared at the ceiling. “Would you believe it, I used to be big time. Miami, then, and that was only four years ago. I was seventeen and rolling in the long green. Man, what days.”

“What happened?”

“I got clapped up and handed it out, and like that I was out. Two trips to the medic and I was okay, but the curse was there, man. So what’s new?”

“Get back to René Mills.”

She made a face and finished the beer. “He took me on. Me and Kitty. We was broke, willing and able. The trade was lousy compared to the other, but that’s the breaks. He set up the scene, we split fifty-fifty only we paid all the bills.” She gave another of those resigned shrugs and said, “We made out”

“Why’d he drop you then?”

“Went big time… like ha ha. He always had ideas and they got him dead. So this time he tells us to get lost, lays on a hundred bucks apiece when he’s all grins and new shoes with that watch back on his wrist he stole from some guy in a bar and hocked… got eighty bucks for it from Norman at the hockshop, so it was worth plenty.”

“How, Rose?”

“Who knows, copper? You think he’d spill? Hell, he booted Noisy Stuccio out of his pad a week before, and you know how close they were. Sure, old René had somethin’ going for him all the way.”

“And what would you say it was?”

She reached back over her shoulder, opened the small refrigerator and took out another bottle of beer. She didn’t offer me one. When she jacked the top off she said, “It was fresh money he didn’t expect. It came sudden like, but I’ll tell you this… he couldn’t get his hands on all of it. What he had was plenty, but not the large stuff. He liked to talk big, and kept hinting at what he was going to come into, but I knew that slob too damn well. He was thinking and working on something he didn’t have but sure damn well expected to get one way or another. That bastard wouldn’t let a penny get past him if he could help it”

“Who supplied it?”

“What’s it get me, copper?” She eyed me curiously, waiting for my answer.

“Ask,” I said.

She started to speak, stopped and gave me one more of those shrugs and went back to her beer.

“I can give you advice,” I said.

“Screw your advice,” she told me coldly. “No advice from a cop.”

“I got a friend who makes pictures. We were in the war together. He might be able to use your type if you have the guts to try. Maybe it won’t work, but I can always ask.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

I was starting to feel like a damn dogooder and didn’t like it. Thirty days in the can would probably make more of an impression, but she was from the place I grew up and couldn’t get out and I knew what she felt like.

Rose looked at me, the beer motionless in her hand. “You mean it, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“What’s this world coming to?” she said. “So I’ve tried everything, why not advice from a cop?” The hardness washed out of her eyes and the expression turned serious. “René had somebody stashed in his apartment. Somebody he knew.”

“How did
you
know that?”

“Because he was buying groceries for two, that’s why. I saw him at the deli, old Pops mentioned it and once I saw the laundry he brought into the laundromat. He bought booze he’d never buy for himself and he had those allover smiles he never had when times was hard.”

“Who, Rose?”

“I never inquired. If I did it would mean a belt in the mouth and I had enough of that, and in my business that would be…”

“Disastrous,” I supplied. “Yeah.”

I got up and pushed the chair back where it was. “I’ll make that call for you. Take it.”

“Okay, copper,” she said. She lifted the bottle to her lips, sipped at it without taking her eyes from mine, then put it down and smiled. “And you know what? I’ll make it, too.” When I agreed with a little grin she said, “Watch out for that Al Reese. He had the bull on René and was pushing him. You’re the copper I’ve been hearing about, aren’t you?”

“Probably.”

“Then watch him. He knew René had dough coming. I saw them arguing one day and it was all on Al’s side. He had René pinned because of something he knew René did, like he does with everybody else, and held it over his head. When René started flashing that cabbage, Al was there, so he put things together and put the squeeze on him. Don’t play that fat boy down, copper. He’s just a precinct captain around here, but dig his place on the Sound and that boat he has and the broads he pays for and you’ll see more. The tax people ought to do him like they did Capone. Where he lives here is only for show to get the votes for the party like he’s one of the boys, but he’s a power, man, a big power.”

“I’ll watch him,” I said.

“He’s smart.”

“So am I.”

“He’s tough.”

“I’m a helluva lot tougher, sugar.”

“But he knows more about René and that’s what you’re interested in, isn’t it?”

“You’re on the ball.”

“I like you, copper. You’re welcome to stay a while if you want.”

For fun I winked like maybe I’d be back, but we both knew what it meant. Twice now I’d been invited to a bed party free by a couple of pros who could make it interesting and twice I kissed off the deal.
Too much training, I thought. Too many Army VD films.

Hell, that wasn’t the reason. It was that damn Marty. I kept thinking about her.

The late-afternoon shift was just beginning to drift into Donavan’s place when I got there. This was the straight bunch, the guys still in work clothes carrying lunch pails, having a drink before they had to breech the fortresses of their own homes. The bartender caught my entry and tried to pass the word, but I stopped him with a single look and went back to where Donavan was sitting behind a paper and pulled it away from his face.

“Al Reese,” I said. “Where is he?”

His tone was bland, but forced. “He ain’t been in.”

All I had to do was start that damn vicious grin again.

“Try Bunny’s,” he said in a hurry. He covered his fright by looking at his watch. “He don’t generally come over here until six.”

I said, “You make a call, Donavan, you put the word out and I’ll smear you all over your own joint. You got that?”

“Listen, Scanlon…”

Tough guys I didn’t like. I just grinned again, and he got the message. Whatever he saw in my face scared the crap out of him. “Look… I got my own business…”

I didn’t bother to hear him out.

Bunny’s was a fag joint around the bend. Hell, you’ve probably read about it a dozen times if you keep up with the columns. At night a cop is stationed outside and a cruiser goes by every ten minutes looking for trouble. It was an old place and back when Prohibition was still in effect and the stage door Johnnies were still escorting the chorus babes around as status symbols and it was a genuine saloon, Larry and I were making bucks for eating money holding open car doors for the tux crowd and sometimes steering the lonelies to spots where exciting company could be found in a hurry.

Now it was changed, the exterior was gaudy, the canopy and doorman expensive, the line of taxis unusually long for this area at this time, but the reason plain… it was the convention season, and the out-of-towners wanted a peek at New York in the rough.

I could still feel Larry at my side, laughing at the suckers, knowing what marks they’d be when a forlorn lad was out for a favor and a broad watching to see how expansive her date would be. Hell, that was how he got his loot to go watch all the Tom Mix shows.

Chief Crazy Horse, I kept thinking. Miss you, boy. Of all that big family we had, I miss you the most. One lousy war and a
missing in action
notification telegram busts us up.

You didn’t miss a thing, Larry. The world went wild after you left. Most of the bunch are dead. Some died with you… some the hard way. Some are still waiting to die. The rest just waiting.