Dick Tracy (25 page)

All of this had gotten to him. At HQ, he’d been uncharacteristically ill-tempered to his staff, barking commands to Patton and Catchem, demanding sketches of the mystery gunman be worked up.

“What exactly is there to draw, Tracy?” Catchem had asked, his hands spread.

“The shape of the head,” Tracy said, “the shape of the ears!”

“We’re circulating photos of Frank Redrum,” Patton said proudly. “Sam and I think he’s your best suspect . . .”

“That’s not good enough!” Tracy said. He took a sip of his coffee and made a face. “And could we get some fresh coffee around here? How can we expect to nail Big Boy if we can’t track down a lousy cup of coffee?”

It had gone on like that for some time. Reflecting on it now, as he drove across the city, Tracy was embarrassed. He’d even handled the Kid dismissively, when the subject of the orphanage came up. He shook his head.

What had snapped him out of his blue funk was the arrival of a long yellow cardboard box tied with an attractive red ribbon.

Inside had been flowers—lilies—and a note in a flowing feminine hand: “Dear Dick—We really should talk this out. Please come over to the greenhouse right away.” There was no signature, but he knew who it was from.

“Not every day a cop gets flowers,” Catchem had said with a friendly smirk, cigarette drooping.

Tracy was relieved Tess had changed her mind, but he was apprehensive. What could he tell her? That he’d quit his job for her? She’d already said she didn’t want that of him. What if she asked him about Breathless? Would she believe him if he told her that the woman’s kiss had been meaningless? Did he believe that himself?

The florist’s shop was dark, but the front door was open, and a few lights were on in the greenhouse. He went in, wandering among the flowers, breathing in their pleasant, heady fragrance.

“Tess?” he called.

She must be here because a radio was on; appropriately enough, “Love in Bloom” was playing, an instrumental version heavy on the violins. Nice.

But the scent of the flowers seemed almost overpowering. His legs felt weak. Had it been that long and hard a day? He found a chair and sat, to wait for Tess.

Then he saw them: the muffins spilled from the brown paper sack onto the cement floor.

And he knew at once Tess had been here, and there had been trouble. A wave of guilt flooded him, nauseating him even more than the overpowering floral scent. It wasn’t bad enough that he’d hurt Tess emotionally; now she was suffering physical peril because she’d had the bad sense to be his girl.

He tried to stand, but his legs were too wobbly, and he tumbled to his knees.

When he looked up, a bright light hit him in the face; a spotlight!

He tried to cover his eyes, but he was too weak to do so, and the light was so all-pervasive he couldn’t block it out. What was this, the third-degree treatment?

He was trying to make his hand reach inside his coat for his gun, but his fingers weren’t responsive; he felt dizzy as a kid on an out-of-control carousel.

And then, abruptly, the dance music on the radio ended in a burst of static, and was replaced by a weirdly filtered voice: “Relax, Tracy.”

“Who . . . what . . . ?”

“Relax,” the voice from the radio speaker said.

“If you’ve hurt Tess, you son of a . . .”

“Relax, I said.” Breathy—distorted. “Do what your girl always wanted you to.”

“What are you . . .”

“Take a little time out to smell the roses . . .”

Only it wasn’t roses.

It was gas.

A sickeningly sweet gas that was already filling the room and Tracy’s lungs. And somebody had turned it up. Jets of the stuff shot out and around the surrounding flowers, the force of it ruffling Tracy’s clothes as he tried to get on his feet. As weak as he was from the effect of the stuff, he might as well have been trying to stand up in a wind tunnel.

The distorted voice was almost soothing as it said, “It won’t hurt. It won’t even kill you. Just relax. Go to sleep.”

“Go to blazes!” Tracy shouted defiantly, and he’d won, he’d made it to his feet! Next stop, the door. “If you’re working for Big Boy, you’re
both
making a big mistake!”

And with that, Dick Tracy fell on his face, unconscious.

A figure in a yellow trench coat and matching fedora burst through the front doors into the dingy, shabby lobby of the Midway Hotel. The hotel was a fleabag on the corner of Conway Avenue and Byrd Boulevard, in a seedy section that was just a step up from skid row—and not much of a step. Half a century ago it had been the lavish Marschall Arms—now, it was the Midway, a graveyard for dying potted plants and threadbare armchairs and sofas that were losing their stuffing.

The clerk behind the check-in desk looked up crankily from the crime pulp magazine he was reading; he had several strands of white hair combed haphazardly across a sickly pink skull, his thin white shirt spotted with tobacco juice about the same color brown as his suspenders.

“Shut the door!” the clerk yelled at the figure in the yellow topcoat.

An old guy in a derby and a red plaid coat, who lived at the Midway, was sitting in the lobby reading a racing form; he felt the cold night come in the open door and looked up irritably as the figure in the yellow topcoat moved quickly by, ignoring the clerk’s request, going up the garishly blue-painted stairs against the side wall, two steps at a time.

Muttering, the clerk got out from behind his counter to close the door; the old man in the derby returned to his racing form.

The figure in the yellow trench coat went to the fourth floor, where numbers on the door were tarnished brass nailed on: 429. The figure unlocked the door and went in.

Inside the room, the city’s District Attorney was waiting, none too patiently.

“Tracy,” Fletcher said tightly, standing as the figure in the yellow coat entered, “what’s the meaning of this? If you think I can be blackmailed . . .”

The figure in the yellow topcoat, having shut the door, turned so that the District Attorney could see the face under the fedora.

Only there was no face.

“Who are you?” the D.A. demanded indignantly, but the fear came through. His cigarette in its holder, held tight in his teeth, wobbled as he spoke. “What’s the meaning of—”

The cross-examination, however, had already ended. Two silenced shots sent the D.A. over backward, dead when he hit the wooden floor.

Tracy heard a voice. The voice was shouting. It was faint, as if in another room, or another world; yet faint as it was, groggy as he was, he somehow knew the voice was shouting.

“Are you insane, trying to blackmail me?” the voice shouted. “If I go to jail, you’ll go to jail! I’ll have you run off the police force! You won’t get a dime out of me, Tracy . . .”

Tracy?

The detective tried to force himself awake.

The voice was still shouting: “Put that gun away, Tracy! Put that gun away . . .”

As groggy as a drunk coming home New Year’s Eve, Tracy opened his eyes as best he could; the room was black. Did he remember someone carrying him, did he remember being hauled over someone’s shoulder like a sack of grain and deposited here? Carried up a hill, or was it up endless flights of stairs? Or had he dreamt it?

The shouting had stopped. His night vision began to take hold and he could see a bed, a figure on the floor alongside it, on its back; a male figure, in a coat and tie and dark pants. A man on his back with a cigarette in a holder still in his lips.

And two other figures moved in the room. Indistinct figures. Was the room this dark, or was it him?

Someone whispered in his ear; the voice was a hoarse, muffled, somehow theatrical voice, not the speaker’s natural one.

“You were right about the D.A.,” the voice said. “He
was
dirty . . .”

The figure passed a bottle of ammonia under Tracy’s nose and the detective sat up sharply.

He didn’t see the Blank slipping out the window behind him, past the ghostlike flutter of the sheer curtain, joining accomplice 88 Keys on the fire escape.

He saw only himself, sitting in a chair in a shabby hotel room, with his topcoat and hat on. All dressed up, no place to go.

Except down.

Because he could now see that the prone male figure was District Attorney Fletcher. And soon he was not alone in seeing this: the night clerk and two uniformed cops rushed into the room to see the same tableau.

And all of them, Tracy included, saw the gun in Tracy’s hand.

All of them saw it, that is, except the District Attorney, who—like Blind Justice—was seeing nothing at all.

T
he County Orphanage was in the city.

In this dreary institution in the shadow of the El tracks, an overcast sky adding to the gloom, the Kid had to himself a cold, vast dormitory, with paint-peeling pale green walls and wooden floors and facing rows of metal beds with wafer-thin mattresses and one horsehair blanket each. He stood looking out the window at the courtyard of the orphanage, and its pitiful scattering of ill-maintained playground equipment, wishing he were anywhere else.

This was his third day here—actually, his second full day. The people had been nice enough—the lady in charge, Mrs. Plett, was kind and spent a lot of time talking to him. Or anyway, trying to talk to him. He didn’t mean to be mean, or even disobedient, but he had no intention of fitting in here.

The other kids seemed all right, though they were mostly keeping their distance from him, and he was doing the same with them. The tow-headed kid who had the next bed was ten years old and a tough little character who’d ridden the rails himself for a couple years. He cornered the Kid and made a big speech about how he was the boss of the dorm, and anybody who didn’t like it could lump it. The Kid let him get away with that noise, only ’cause the Kid didn’t figure to be around here long enough to make a scrap worthwhile.

Today was Saturday, and day after tomorrow they would expect him to start school classes. But he’d be out of here and have found himself a freight to hop by that time. Mrs. Plett had figured out he could read after he asked if he could see a newspaper (to check up on how Tracy was doing), and the class he was supposed to go into would be for second- and third-graders.

“You’re a bright young man,” she’d said as he sat in her office yesterday morning. “Despite the fact that you’ve never attended school proper, I think you’ll fit in best with children your own age.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he’d said. He was polite to Mrs. Plett, even though he didn’t say much or answer her questions very good. She was nice, and he didn’t want to hurt her feelings; besides, he wanted her guard down, so he could bust out of the joint. It ought to be a cinch.

“Now, we’ll need a name for you,” she said, a big record book spread open in front of her on her desk. “We have no records on you, whatsoever. And the caseworker informs me that you claim not to have a name.”

“I don’t have, ’xactly,” he admitted. “People just call me ‘Kid,’ ” He shrugged. “It’s a name, far as I’m concerned.”

“Well, it’s not enough for our purposes. Why don’t you select a more proper name?”

“Okay,” he said. “Put my name down as ‘Dick Tracy, Junior’ ”

The headmistress winced. “ ‘Dick Tracy’ is a well-known name, in these parts. Do you really think it prudent to select the name of a policeman? We have some boys here that don’t like policemen much.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“And Detective Tracy is in a good deal of trouble right now.”

“I know that, ma’am. I saw it in those newspapers you give me.”

“Gave me,” she corrected gently. Her kind face was creased with doubt, with worry. “You put yourself at risk of being teased, being an object of ridicule . . .”

“I didn’t pick the name ’cause he’s a cop, or ’cause he’s famous.”

“Why did you then?”

“Because, ’cept for Steve the tramp, he’s the closest thing to a pop I ever had. And I don’t fancy bein’ called Steve the Tramp, Junior.”

Now, a day later, as the Kid stared out the window—through the crosshatch of wire that reminded him he was, for all of Mrs. Plett’s kindness, nothing more than a prisoner here—he thought about Tracy. He knew he should help Tracy, but he wasn’t sure he could.

The night Tracy got in all that trouble, the Kid had sat with Sam Catchem in Tracy’s office. While the caseworker waited impatiently to haul the Kid off to the orphanage, the freckled, rumpled-face detective leveled with the boy.

“Tracy’s in a real jam, son,” Catchem said. “Me and Pat Patton are gonna do everything we can to get him out of it, but it ain’t gonna be easy.”

“What happened, anyway?”

“It’s a frame-up,” Catchem said, lips tight over his teeth. “Some people who want Tracy out of the way bumped off the District Attorney and made it look like Tracy pulled the trigger.”

“That’s crazy!”

“You know it, and I know it. But the evidence, so far, is stacked against him. I gotta give my all to this, kid. I’d like to take you under my wing, like Dick did—but I just can’t do it. I gotta turn you over to that welfare worker out there.”

“Yeah,” he’d said fatalistically. “I figured as much. What can I do to help Tracy?”