Death of a Pusher (11 page)

It took me some time to relate the full story of what had happened.

When I had finished, Carl Lincoln glowered down at Kossack. “This guy almost had us snowed. We paged you all over the damn building; we looked for your car on the lot; when we found it we made a room-to-room search of the building. We finally did smell a rat, and Hank and I went over to search that apartment. There was nothing there, so we came back, and we’ve been working him over ever since.”

“What would you have done if I’d never showed up?” I asked curiously.

Maurice Spangler said, “I’d been thinking about that. He was beginning to yell for a lawyer. After twenty-four hours we would have had to let him call one, and that would have been that. We’d have to release him on a writ of habeas corpus, because we certainly didn’t have enough to drag him before a judge for a preliminary hearing. I’m afraid it would have been another Judge Crater mystery.”

If there hadn’t been a tire iron in the truck for me to sit on, the fantastic plan would have worked, I thought. I said, “Ask him any questions about Benny Polacek?”

Carl said, “Yeah. He admits driving Benny the night we picked him up, but claims he didn’t know Benny was pushing. Also he claims he knows nothing about his death.”

Lieutenant Wynn said, “Maybe we can get a little more about his relationship with Polacek from his girl after Robbery is through with her.”

I had an idea that getting anything out of Connie would be equivalent to getting the combination of his vault from Jack Benny, but I had stopped expressing opinions to Wynn.

I said, “Robbery will want this character, too. Maybe they’ll trade us for Connie for a while.” I turned to Kossack. “Now that you’re cooked on the Whittington Steel killing anyway, do you have any more to say about Benny Polacek?”

He merely tightened his lips and shook his head.

We got nothing at all from the man. Eventually we took him over to Robbery Division and swapped him for his blonde girl friend. Under questioning she had finally admitted that her full name was Corinne Quantrail and had given a rooming-house address as her place of residence. Robbery had found a previous record on her for harboring criminals, possession of stolen money, and, once, for acting as a lookout during an armed robbery. She had twice served one-year sentences in the women’s prison.

Corinne Quantrail wasn’t admitting anything aside from her name and address, though. She denied knowing Benny Polacek or ever hearing Kossack speak of him. After a half-hour of nothing we gave up and took her back to Robbery Division.

Meanwhile, I had been brought up to date on the activities of the other members of our joint Homicide-Narcotics team. Carter and Lincoln had been unable to locate Harry Grimaldi, but they had a lead on an ex-girl friend who might know his current address. The girl friend was out of town, but was due back on an eight A.M. train tomorrow. Carter and Lincoln planned to meet her at Union Station when she got off the train.

What Wynn had accomplished was a little hazy to me. I gathered he had revisited Charles Kossack’s ex-landlady, getting no more from her than Hank Carter had the previous night. Otherwise he seemed to have done nothing all day but question Kossack and send people scurrying around the building looking for me.

By now it was five-thirty P.M., a half-hour past normal quitting time. Figuring I had put in a full day, I didn’t bother to ask Lieutenant Wynn if he expected us to work overtime. I just logged out. Ordinarily he liked to tell his minions they could go home, like a colonel dismissing his troops, but this time he made no objection. Maybe, for once, he thought I’d put in a full enough day.

Before leaving the squadroom, I phoned my apartment. April answered instantly.

“Sorry I couldn’t phone you at four,” I said. “I was tied up. I’m leaving for home right now.”

“I’ll have dinner ready when you get here, honey,” she said. “Who’s Beverly?”

“Huh?” I said. “What about her?”

“She phoned ten minutes after you left this morning. I didn’t want to get you in trouble, in case she’s something important in your life, so I told her I was the cleaning maid.”

Now here was an understanding woman, I thought. “Thanks,” I said sincerely. “What did she want?”

“She said she was worried that you might oversleep. Why would she think you’d oversleep, honey? She couldn’t have known how late you were up.”

There was no way I could explain that, for I doubted that April would be
that
understanding. I said, “Don’t worry about it, kitten. See you in about twenty minutes.”

I got home at ten to six. April said dinner would be ready at a quarter after, which gave me time for a quick shower and a cocktail before we sat down.

As we sat in the front room sipping martinis, April said, “Tell me something about your work, honey. I don’t suppose it’s anything like the cops on television, is it? I mean, instead of all that excitement, it’s probably pretty dull and routine, isn’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Today, for instance, I cracked a payroll robbery, got taken for a ride in the process, and escaped from my captors by killing one of them.”

She grinned at me. “You certainly have a dry sense of humor.”

“I’m a card,” I admitted, deciding to let her read about it in the newspapers.

It was a more conventional dinner than breakfast had been. April wore her dress. It wasn’t a particularly good dinner, though. I don’t know what I expected. I suppose it was a little unreasonable of me to expect a chorus girl who lived in a furnished room to be an accomplished chef. But I had hoped for more than a couple of warmed-up TV dinners.

That’s what we had. I was gentlemanly about it and complimented her on her cooking. I even offered to repay what she had spent, but she said the treat was on her.

The dessert was nice, though. The dessert was April. And by then I had recovered enough from the previous night to enjoy it.

At eight-thirty I dropped her off in front of the Palace.

“Are you going to pick me up again at two, honey?” she asked.

“Not tonight,” I said. “Every so often I have to sleep. Maybe tomorrow night.”

“All right,” she said agreeably. “I’ll be here whenever you’re ready.”

Again I thought that she was a very understanding woman. Maybe she was a lousy cook, but at least she wasn’t demanding.

When I walked into my apartment at nine o’clock, the phone was ringing. Picking it up, I said, “Hello.”

“I was just about to hang up,” Beverly Arden’s voice said. “I thought maybe you were out for the evening.”

“Not tonight,” I said. “I plan to be in bed in five minutes.”

“Umm,” she said. “If you leave your door unlocked, maybe a little surprise will slip in with you later on.”

“You’d get a surprise, too,” I said. “You wouldn’t be able to wake me up. I plan to sleep straight on through without moving until seven in the morning.”

After a moment of silence, she said, “That sounds like you don’t want me to drop by.”

“Suit yourself,” I told her. “But if you wake me up, I’ll kick you out of bed. I’m falling on my face.”

“What a grumpy old man you are,” she said, and hung up.

I fell into bed and slept for ten hours.

The next day was Sunday, but that doesn’t mean anything to a cop. Ordinarily Sunday is Carl’s and my day off, but when you’re hot on a case, you work straight on through seven days a week. I checked into the squadroom at eight-thirty.

Lieutenant Wynn was already there, and Carter and Lincoln came in together about fifteen minutes later.

As they logged in, Lieutenant Wynn asked Carter, “You meet that woman at the train, Sergeant?”

“Yes, sir,” Carter said. “She says she thinks Harry Grimaldi is living in a rooming house down on Kosciuszko Street.” Taking a notebook from his pocket, he consulted it. “Fourteen twenty-two Kosciuszko. She claims she isn’t his girl friend any more, but says he was living there a couple of weeks ago.”

Carl Lincoln said, “She also says he’s living there under the name of Harry Gamble, not Grimaldi.”

Wynn said, “Rudowski and I will move in on him. I have something else for you and Carter, Corporal.”

“Yes, sir,” Carl said. “What’s that?”

“As I mentioned yesterday, we didn’t hit any of the neighbors along the block where Benny Polacek lived. You and Sergeant Carter can spend the day checking with everyone in the area. It’ll take all day, because the block’s all apartment buildings, both sides of the street, and there must be a hundred or more families in all. Maybe you’ll turn up somebody who saw a green Cadillac driving around the neighborhood that night.”

“A green Cadillac?” Carl asked.

“That’s what Goodie White drives.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t have to confine yourself to that single question, of course. Anything at all out of the way that happened along the block that night might be of value.”

Carl gave him a peculiar look. He wasn’t used to having assignments explained to him as though he were a slightly retarded rookie.

“Yes, sir,” he said dryly. “We’ll ask all the right questions.”

Wynn glanced at him sharply, suspecting a touch of insubordination. But Carl’s face was entirely guileless. Wynn decided to skip it.

This was the second day in a row that Hank Carter had drawn Lincoln as his partner instead of having to work with the lieutenant. He looked nearly happy as he and Carl walked out of the squadroom together.

“Let’s go net this Grimaldi man,” Wynn said to me.

On the way we stopped by Robbery Division to find how they had made out with Charlie Kossack and Connie Quantrail. Charlie had broken and had signed a full confession, admitting his part in the payroll robbery and his shooting of the guard. He had also admitted that his dealing with Benny Polacek had been in an attempt to talk the man into acting as his partner in a series of supermarket holdups. He insisted he knew nothing about Polacek’s death. He claimed that two days after Polacek’s arrest he had accidentally run into Casmir Kuzniki, whom he’d known from years back, and that the bank robber had recruited him for the payroll robbery. Thereafter he had no interest in Polacek, and had neither seen the man nor talked to him on the phone.

Robbery had gotten nothing out of Connie, who seemed to be made of harder stuff than her boy friend. Even after Kossack’s statement was read to her, she refused to admit having any part in the robbery.

Under ordinary circumstances we would have picked up a search warrant before visiting Harry Grimaldi, alias Harry Gamble. But the county courthouse was closed on Sunday, and getting a warrant would have involved routing some judge out of church or off a golf course. Wynn decided to skip it.

The rooming house at 1422 Kosciuszko Street was a gray frame three-story building. A middle-aged fat woman with a sprinkling of fine black hairs across her upper lip came to the door and gazed at us through the screen.

Wynn flashed his badge and said, “Police officers, lady. I’m Lieutenant Wynn, and this is Sergeant Rudowski.”

“Oh, my!” she said. “I knew when he didn’t come home all night, he was in jail again.”

“Beg pardon?”

“He’s not a bad man, officer. He just gets too much to drink and forgets where he lives. I’ll come right down and bail him out.”

“What are you talking about?” Wynn asked.

“My husband. Ain’t he in jail?”

“If he is, we don’t know about it, lady. We’re looking for a man who goes under the name of Harry Gamble.”

Her face started to redden. “He ain’t in jail? Then he’s still drinking in some bar, letting me worry my head off.

I’ll lay a rolling pin right between his horns when he staggers in.”

Wynn said, a trifle loudly, “Do you have a tenant named Harry Gamble?”

“Sure. He’s another spends most of his time in barrooms. I got a houseful of drunks, and my husband’s the biggest drunk of the lot. Come on in.”

She pushed open the screen door and we stepped inside.

“Gamble home?” Wynn asked.

“He’s always home mornings,” she said. “There ain’t a bum in this house gets up before noon. Second floor, end of the hall to the left of the stairs. You’ll see a three on the door.”

“Give me your pass key,” the lieutenant said.

The woman felt in an apron pocket, produced a key, and handed it to him. Without a word he started up the stairs. I followed.

At room number three Wynn quietly tried the knob. The door was locked. Inserting the key, he turned it and smashed the door back against the wall. We were both inside before the man in bed could even sit up.

He was a long, thin man with a hook-nosed face and lank black hair. When he sat erect and the sheet fell to his waist, I saw that he had been sleeping in his underwear.

He said, “Who the hell are you guys?”

I pushed the door shut. Walking over to the bed, Wynn showed his badge. “Police officers, buster. You Harry Grimaldi?”

The man’s eyes narrowed. “My name’s Gamble.”

“Alias Harry the Gambler, real name Harry Grimaldi,” Wynn said. “We can drag you downtown and check your fingerprints if we have to.”

The man in the bed shrugged. “O.K. So I’m Harry Grimaldi. There’s no law against changing your name.”

“On your feet,” Wynn ordered.

Flinging back the sheet, Grimaldi swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood erect. He was even taller than he looked sitting down—at least six feet three. He didn’t act in the least concerned.

Walking over to him, I looked at his arms and realized why he was so unruffled. The insides of his forearms were pocked with needle marks.

“Stick out your right hand, palm up,” I said.

After staring at me for a moment, he indifferently held out his hand. Taking the tip of his middle finger between my thumb and forefinger, I squeezed it hard, then released it. The white mark left by the blood being forced from the tip of the finger didn’t disappear instantly. It took several seconds for normal color to return.

“What are you doing?” Wynn asked.

“Making some tests,” I said.

Taking my pencil flashlight from my pocket, I shone it into Grimaldi’s eyes. When he started to turn his head away, I backhanded him across the mouth.

“Hold still or you’ll find your head rolling under the bed,” I told him.

He glared at me, but he didn’t try to avoid the light again. His pupils didn’t react to it. They should have contracted to pinpoints with the beam directly on them. Instead, they stayed exactly as they were.

Dropping the flashlight back in my pocket, I said to Wynn, “When you see enough junkies, you get so you can diagnose their condition better than a doctor can.

This one had a pop about four hours ago, probably just before he fell in bed. He must have been out all night, because that would make it about six A.M.”

“You’re nuts,” Grimaldi said. “I never use the stuff.”

“You want to make it easy and tell us where it is?” Wynn asked. “Or do we have to tear the room apart?”

“You better have a warrant before you start tearing anything apart,” Grimaldi said belligerently.

“We have the landlady’s permission,” Wynn said, not exactly truthfully. “She owns the premises. Come up with an answer. Where is it?”

“Earn your money, copper,” the man said in a sullen tone.

So we tore the room apart. We didn’t bother to use the finesse I had used on the Arden apartment. When we finished, you could tell this room had been searched, because we upended all the bureau drawers on the floor.

We didn’t have any trouble finding the rig. The tin box containing a hypodermic syringe, spoon, and alcohol lamp was in the top drawer of his dresser. His horse supply was tougher.

I was the one who finally found it. It was taped to the inside of the front lip of the washbowl in a corner of the room. It was an ordinary legal-size envelope containing forty-eight folded papers such as sleeping powders used to come in. Each one contained a single pop of cut heroin which would have retailed at the going price of three dollars and fifty cents a pop.

Grimaldi didn’t even look very concerned when we found the cache. It wasn’t cut horse he was riding on, but a full-strength pop. Apparently he treated himself better than he did his clients. He was still riding high enough not to care about much of anything at the moment.

But that would change when he had been sitting cold in a cell for a while.

“Get your clothes on,” Lieutenant Wynn ordered him. “We’re taking a ride.”

Back at headquarters we booked Grimaldi at the felony desk and had him stuck in a cell. There wasn’t any point in trying to question him at the moment, because he was too high. By the next morning, when he’d gone twenty-four hours without a pop and the withdrawal pains started, he’d be in a more cooperative mood.

It was noon before we finished booking the man, marking the evidence, and bringing the case record up to date. We broke for lunch in the headquarters cafeteria.

After lunch Wynn decided we might as well help Carter and Lincoln complete their chore. Neither had phoned in, so we drove over to Clarkson Boulevard, parked, and waited. After a time we saw Carl Lincoln come from an apartment building up the street and start for the next house.

We both got out of the car, and I waved him over.

“Anything, Corporal?” Wynn asked as Carl neared us.

“Not yet, sir. Carter hadn’t turned up anything either, at the time we broke for lunch. I haven’t talked to him since. He’s working the other side of the street. I’d judge we’ve covered about half the people.”

“Which end of the block did you start from?”

Carl pointed to the north end.

“Then Rudowski and I will start at the south end and work toward you and Carter. Let’s go, Rudowski.”

The lieutenant took the west side of the street and I took the east, which was the side opposite from where Benny Polacek had lived. It was dull work. The whole block was apartment houses, all at least three stories high and some towering to six. You simply walked along hallways, from one door to another, punching bells, showing your badge, and asking questions.

I learned about a lot of things that had happened along the street the night Benny Polacek died. The tough O’Leary kid, whom I gathered was eight years old, had dropped a paper bag full of water from his parents’ fifth-floor apartment and just missed an old lady. Izzy Swartz, who lived on the second floor of the house directly across the street from Benny’s, had come home at eight smelling of whisky and was locked out of the house by his mother. The Callagees, just above the Swartzes, had a fight at nine P.M. Nearly everywhere I asked, something of similar interest had happened.

But no one had seen any strangers enter the building at 427 Clarkson Boulevard that evening, and no one had noticed a green Cadillac driving around the neighborhood.

I finally did run into someone with a small item of information. An old maid on the fourth floor of the building across from Benny’s said that some time around ten or ten-thirty—she wasn’t sure of the time, except she thought it must have been at least ten—she had glanced out the window to see a young man come from 427 Clarkson, walk to the curb, and glance up and down the street. There was a street light in front of the building, so she had seen him clearly. From her description, it could have been Dr. Norman Arden.

It didn’t strike me as a very important clue. If it had been Arden, I guessed it probably had been after he phoned the police, and that probably he had merely gone out to see if they were in sight yet.

“How long did he stand there?” I asked the woman.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just looked out for a minute, then went about my business. He was still there when I left the window.”

Hank Carter and I finished our side of the street at a quarter of five. Wynn and Lincoln had already finished their side and were waiting for us under the shade of a tree near the center of the block.

When we crossed to them, Wynn said, “We both drew total blanks. Either of you get anything?”

Hank Carter said, “I didn’t, sir.”

“I got something that doesn’t seem very important,” I said. “A woman on the fourth floor across the street glanced out around ten or ten-thirty that night. She saw somebody answering Doc Arden’s description come out of the building, go down to the curb, and look up and down the street. If it was Arden, he had probably already called the cops and was looking for them.”

Wynn frowned. “You had a man posted out front that night. How come he didn’t mention this?”

I had forgotten Howard Graves, the stakeout who left his post at just the wrong time.

I said, “I don’t know, sir. If it was Doc Arden, and he was just waiting for the police to arrive, Graves probably figured it wasn’t important.”

“It probably isn’t, but he should have mentioned it to you. We may as well ask Arden about it. And since we’re right here, we may as well do it now. Carter, you and Lincoln can return to headquarters and log out. Rudowski and I can handle this.”

As Lincoln and Carter moved toward the car they had brought, Wynn and I started toward the building where Beverly and Norman Arden lived. We didn’t have to go in, because Norman Arden pulled up in a car just as we got there. Beverly was with him.

Both got out of the car. Beverly gave me a bright smile and said, “Hello, Matt. You haven’t met my brother, have you?”

“I saw him the night of the murder,” I said. “We weren’t introduced.” I held out my hand. “How are you, Doctor?”

Shaking my hand, he said cordially, “So you’re the Matt Rudd Beverly keeps talking about. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, because I hardly hear of anything else.”

“Be quiet, Norman,” Beverly said with a frown. “I didn’t want him to know I’m after him.”

Then she looked curiously at Robert Wynn, and I realized she had never met the lieutenant. The night of the murder her brother hadn’t allowed Wynn to see her, and I had done the subsequent interviewing.

“This is Lieutenant Wynn, Beverly,” I said. “Miss Beverly Arden, Lieutenant.”

They exchanged polite greetings, then the lieutenant said, “We’ve been checking the neighbors along the street, Doctor. One says that about ten or ten-thirty the night of the shooting, you came outside and looked up and down the street. Is that right?”

“Yes, it is,” Arden admitted easily. “It must have been about twenty after ten. I had called the police about ten minutes before, and I thought they ought to be arriving. I went out front to wait and direct them to the proper apartment. I was still there when the patrol car arrived. You could have learned that from your own men.”

Wynn flushed slightly. “O.K., Doctor. Just checking it out. Let’s go, Sergeant.”

Beverly said, “How late do you work today, Matt?”

“We’re going in to log out now.”

“Oh. Do you have any plans for this evening?”

I shook my head. “Not a single plan.”

“Then why don’t you come find out what a nice cook I am?” She turned to Wynn. “You’re welcome to come too, Lieutenant.”

“Thanks,” he said politely. “But my wife’s expecting me home.”

“What time?” I asked.

“Can you make it by six-thirty?”

“I’ll be here,” I said.

I drove the F car back to headquarters, and we logged out at five-ten. I was home by five-thirty. I took a shower, changed clothes, and made it back to the Ardens’ by six-thirty on the nose.