Authors: Mickey Spillane

Tags: #Hard/Boiled/Crime

The Last Cop Out (12 page)

“Sure. Just wanted to tell you that we couldn’t open up that new account. It looked good, and if there was anything to buy, we would’ve got it.”

“What happened?”

“The account decided to cancel out himself.”

“Okay, dump it,” he said, then hung up and went back to sleep.

The previous night’s mist had been the overture for a cold front overrunning the East Coast. A driving rain drenched the city, whose towering buildings had their tops clipped off at the twentieth-story level by a lead-gray cloud layer. Cars drove with their lights on and pedestrians fought to hug the sides of the buildings. As usual at times like that, no empty cruising cabs and if one did stop to disgorge a passenger, the city syndrome of bad manners was at its best in the concerted rush to commandeer the taxi. Women might have thought they were equal, but a guy was always bigger and faster in getting to the door and could snarl back the insults as fast as their luckless sisters could give them.

Going downtown, Gill had a half-empty subway car to himself. He got off, fought the rain to Captain Long’s office, tossed his wet raincoat and hat on a bench and went in where the Captain and Robert Lederer were waiting for him.

“Lousy day, but good morning anyway,” he said.

Lederer looked up from the folder he was studying and nodded curtly. Bill Long said, “Coffee?”

“Just had some.” He pulled a chair over and sat down. When the assistant district attorney finished his reading he closed the folder and looked up. Gill tossed the photo on his desk. “Take a look,” he said.

Lederer only glanced at it a moment. The annoyance showed on his face and in the tone of his voice. “You know we’ve issued these to all our investigative personnel. If you called me all the way down here . . .”

The captain said, “Let me see that,” and took it out of Lederer’s hands. He spotted it right away and handed it back.

“It’s a copy of one of ours.”

It took a few seconds for the implication to sink in. Lederer ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, his lips pursed.

“Who had it?”

“The other side’s got them handed out,” Gill answered.

“They’re looking for the same guy, so it means you have a big leak in your own wall, buddy. What else do they know?”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“Oh, crap!” Gill spat out. “What the fuck do you use for brains?”

“Now, listen, Burke . . .”

“If you take that attitude, go screw yourself. You got an organization with an active hand inside of every big city government in the country who can call the shots in a political election or into somebody’s head and you find it hard to believe. There’s a gang war going on, narcotics turning citizens into corpses, businesses going bust because they can’t keep up with the planned thievery and I have to listen to that shit.”

Bill Long held up his hand. “Okay, tiger. I know the score. We’ve only put these out on a limited basis and it shouldn’t be too hard to run down. Why the sweat?”

“This is an old hand showing,” Gill told him. “It’s not going to be that easy.”

“So?”

“I want to know how old that hand is.”

Lederer didn’t like what he was getting at and frowned.

“Like a couple of years, maybe?”

“At least,” Gill agreed.

“I hope you’re not wasting a lot of time,” the captain said.

“No time’s being wasted. You always have to start at the beginning.”

“Mr. Burke . . .”

Gill looked over at Lederer. “What?”

“Our office has very efficiently and very systematically compiled a great deal of information on the syndicate operation in the past few weeks. It has done so without any help from you at all, in view of the fact that you were specifically recruited to add your supposed store of knowledge to our own. So far you have contributed nothing except this.” He tapped the picture with a forefinger, his face grim and accusing.

Burke’s face held no expression at all. It was the kind of face too many people had wondered about when they lay there hurting, and a lot of others were forced to talk to whether it was safe or not because they couldn’t read what was behind it. After a moment, Gill said, “Let me know when all that efficiency turns into evidence and convictions, Mr. Lederer. When you get that leak plugged up maybe I’ll add to your information. Meanwhile I’ll just work my end of the deal we made.”

Lederer didn’t feel capable of arguing against the face that stared at him. He never did feel comfortable inside a police building. There was something about the cold colors, the odd smell and indescribable mien of men who chose to work in an area of crime that reminded him of when he was a college freshman. But he was fortunate then that he had had a rich and influential family. He got up and took his coat off the rack, shook hands with the captain, barely nodded at Gill Burke and left.

“You sure like to rub that guy,” Long said.

“If he’s lucky, in ten years he’ll get some sense. What about that picture?”

“That isn’t the only incident.”

“Any leads?”

“No, but a few ideas.”

“How about the guy in the photo?”

“Our expert in the lab is willing to bet the whole thing was a disguise. There’s even a chance he knew the camera was there and let the picture get taken to throw us off.”

“Clever,” Gill said.

“Not really,” Long told him. “It was pretty sophisticated equipment and the next shot in the sequence took an automatic magnified shot that brought out some detail we might be able to focus on. Scientific advancement is getting to be pretty damn incredible.”

“Legwork is a lot better.”

“Only when you have the time, buddy. Right now we haven’t much of it. This morning we found a body in the middle of Prospect Park that had been worked over until it was a disgusting mess, but originally it could have fit the description of that man in the photo.”

“Got a make on him?”

“No trouble at all. He was a former con who had gone straight. For six years he had been making furniture, then switched over to selling upholstery fabrics.” Long picked up the photo and looked at it again. “This makes a little sense now.”

“How?”

“The odd thing about the corpse was its right hand. There was ink smeared on the fingertips. Apparently somebody took his prints and checked out his I.D. The same person could have lifted this picture and used our files.”

“You releasing the picture to the papers?”

“Might as well now,” Long said. The phone rang and he picked it up, listened and growled, “Send him up.” When he cradled the receiver he told Gill, “Corrigan’s on his way in. He’s a detective with the Fourth now. Don’t waste too much of his time. If you need me I’ll be down the hall.”

Burke nodded so-long, lit a cigarette and had taken his second drag on it when the cop in the civvies walked in. Gill said, “Hi, have a seat.”

Jimmie Corrigan tossed his hat on the desk and sat down.

“What’s up, Mr. Burke?”

“How’s your memory?”

“Good enough.”

“Remember Ted Proctor?”

The cop’s head snapped around. “No way to forget that, is there? He was the first, and I hope the last. Killing somebody doesn’t leave a nice taste.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Corrigan flushed and turned his eyes away. Gill Burke’s history was very clear in his mind.

“Tell me about that night,” Gill asked him.

“It’s all in the report, Mr. Burke.”

“I know. I read them. Now I want to hear you tell me about it.”

“Well, I was an hour from coming off duty. I had called in from the box, crossed over to the south side of the street and continued west.”

“On schedule?”

“A few minutes early, I suppose. It was cold as hell that night and I was figuring on a hot cup of coffee in Gracie’s Diner at the end of the beat. The Chinaman’s laundry and the pawnshop were open and ...”

“Any incidents?”

Corrigan thought back and shrugged. “I checked an alley out when I heard a garbage can go over. It was a dog. Right after that some half-lit broad stopped to tell me what a son of a bitch her boy friend was because he had another woman in his apartment when she had helped him buy the furniture.”

“Many people on the street?”

“Too cold. I saw a couple, that’s all.”

“Where were you when you were talking to the dame?”

“By the doorway of the grocery store.”

“Lights on?”

“Nope. The place was dark.”

“Then if Proctor entered the pawnshop then he couldn’t have seen you.”

“Guess so. I didn’t see him go in, either.”

“Okay, go on.”

“So I told the woman to forget about it and she left. I went on up the street. When I got to the pawnshop I looked in and saw the owner standing there with his hands up and Proctor facing him. I pulled my own gun out and went in right then and told the guy to drop his weapon, but instead he swung around with the gun in his hand and I thought sure as hell he was going to start shooting and I shot him.”

“He say anything?”

“No, but he sure had a crazy look on his face.”

“Describe it?”

Corrigan squinted and shrugged, “Been a couple of years, Mr. Burke. I can still see that expression but the only way I can describe it is crazy. Believe me, it was all so damn fast you really can’t tell what’s happening. You just react and hope you did the right thing.”

“You did.”

“I wish I could be sure.”

“What makes you doubt it?”

The cop rubbed his hands together, his eyes trying to peer at a dim, indistinguishable picture in his mind. “You know,” he said, “I try not to, but I keep seeing that whole damn thing over and over again. I even dream about it. There was something there that just wasn’t right and I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it was.”

“Don’t you think the follow-up would have spotted it?”

“I keep telling myself so,” Corrigan said. “Anything else?”

“No, I guess that’s all.”

“I thought that was a closed case, Mr. Burke.”

“That’s what the sign says,” Gill told him, “but sometimes closed cases just make room for new ones.”

Corrigan said, “That’s life,” shook hands and left.

Over in records, Sergeant Schneider took Burke back to the files and found the packet he requested. He spread the contents out on the table and said, “There it is. Not much, but we didn’t need much.” He pulled out photos of three bullets that had taken a life and pointed out the configurations on the enlargements that showed they all came from the same gun, then moved over another verifying the groove marks from the murder weapon. “I wish they were all that easy,” he said.

Burke picked up the composite showing the prints lifted from the murder weapon. They clearly matched those taken from the body of Proctor. Schneider pointed out the similarities with expert ease.

“We were lucky here,” he said. “The usual crosshatched walnut stock had been replaced with a clear plastic that picked up those three beautiful prints. The rest were smudged, but even then it didn’t matter. The gun was lying right under him where he fell.”

Burke jammed his cigarette out in an ash tray, his finger flicking against the photo. “What’s wrong with this, Al?”

Schneider took it out of his fingers, studied it and gave it back to him. “Nothing. It’s beautiful.”

“There’s something wrong.”

“Like hell.”

“Maybe we’re just stupid.”

“You don’t make sergeant being stupid,” Schneider told him. “What more do you want?”