The Heat's On (23 page)

“Then he intended to have her killed,” the narcotics lieutenant said.

“Yeah, but she was too square to dig it. Anyway, he told her that he was the boss of the narcotics racket, that he had the shit smuggled into the country and he had used Gus to pick it up sometimes; and that was how Gus got the money to buy this farm in Ghana. That shocked her; she had believed Gus’s hype about his wife leaving him a farm down South. He must have figured it would have that effect because he wanted her to start thinking and remember something she hadn’t thought was important before. He went on to tell her that he had had Gus thoroughly investigated and he was certain Gus was a square, just greedy for some money. She agreed to that but she didn’t know what he was leading to. He told her that Gus had picked up a shipment of heroin at midnight, worth more than a million dollars, and he was supposed to pass it on in the trunk that was picked up at six o’clock.”

“Picked up from who?” the narcotics lieutenant asked.

“He said the heroin was smuggled into the country on a French liner.”

“We know the French liner that docked this week,” the narcotics lieutenant said. “We’ve had it under a tight surveillance.”

“Yeah, but you missed the connection. It was dropped overboard to a small motorboat that passed under the bow without stopping at about eleven o’clock night before last.”

“My men were watching that boat through night glasses and there was nothing dropped overboard,” the T-man said.

“Maybe it was already in the water. I’m just repeating what she said Benny told her. Benny had sent a map to Gus by Jake, the pusher — the one Digger and me got suspended for slugging.”

The city detectives looked embarrassed but the T-men missed the connotation.

“The map showed Gus the exact spot where the shipment would be dropped — only a short walk from here. The boat came up the river and delivered the shipment without ever stopping. Benny said he knew that Gus collected it because the connection told him that Gus was waiting when the boat arrived; and furthermore, when the boat returned to the yacht basin in Hoboken the T-men were waiting for it and searched it and they found it clean.”

“By God, I got a report on that boat!” the T-man said. “It’s owned by a taxicab driver named Skelley. He does night fishing.” He turned to one of his men in the background. “Have Skelley and everyone connected with him picked up.”

The agent went toward the telephone.

“Benny said when his men picked up the trunk the shipment wasn’t in it,” Coffin Ed continued. “She thought maybe Gus had run off with it since it was worth so much. He had gone out before midnight and she hadn’t seen or heard of him since, and that wasn’t like Gus; he didn’t have any friends he could put up with and he didn’t have anywhere else to go. Benny said no, he had probably been robbed. They had found Gus and he was hurt and wasn’t able to talk and he figured someone had hijacked the shipment—”

“But he left the bundle with Gus for six hours before he sent to pick it up. You think he was that stupid?”

“It was as safe with Gus as anywhere — in fact safer. They had him covered. And since he was actually supposed to sail thatday, they figured the trunk dodge would attract less attention than any other. Besides, Benny wasn’t taking any chances; he had a lookout posted outside all night. The lookout saw Gus come into the apartment after he had kept the rendezvous and he didn’t see anyone leave after then who was carrying anything in which the shipment could have been concealed. The lookout saw Digger and me come and go after the false fire alarm; he saw the African go out with the dog and return without it; he saw Sister Heavenly when she came and left. No, Benny was certain that the shipment hadn’t left this house.”

The detectives exchanged glances.

“Then it’s still here,” the homicide lieutenant said. “That’s impossible, the way this place has been searched, unless one of the tenants is in on the deal, and we’ve checked them going and coming and I’d bet my job they’re innocent,” the narcotics lieutenant said. “I personally was with the searching crew when they went through every trunk, every box, every piece of furniture in the storage room; they turned the toolroom inside out, took apart the oil burner, dismantled the washing machines, raked out the incinerator, looked into the sewers, even took two stored automobile tires off the rims; and you saw how the janitor’s flat has been searched. We’d have found a signet ring if we’d been looking for it.”

“That’s the way Benny figured it. It was too big a bundle to hide, and the only way Gus could have got rid of it was to give it to somebody in this house to hold for him.”

“How big a bundle was it, or did he say?” the T-man asked. “He told her there were five kilos of eighty-two percent pure heroin in it.”

A cacophony of whistling sounded spontaneously. “That’s one hell of a load,” the homicide lieutenant said. Calculating rapidly, the T-man said, “He pays about fifteen thousand dollars per kilo for the junk. Say around seventy-five thousand for the shipment. And after he cuts it down with lactose to about two percent pure, he can retail it for around a half a million dollars a kilo. Say, give or take a little, it’s worth two and a half million dollars on the retail market.”

“Now we’ve got the motive for this massacre,” the homicide lietuenant said.

“But where did the junk disappear to?” the narcotics lieutenant echoed.

“That’s the question Benny asked. But she couldn’t help him. She said Gus wasn’t on good terms with any of the tenants; in fact his relations were on the bad side.”

“No wonder,” the narcotics lieutenant said. “He didn’t need this job.”

“Then Benny asked her about Pinky. She told him all she knew but he wasn’t interested in Pinky’s life. He wanted to know if Pinky could have got the stuff from Gus and hidden it somewhere in the house. She said he’d have to wait until Gus could talk and ask him, she hadn’t seen either him or Pinky since before midnight. Then he confessed that when they didn’t find the shipment in the trunk they had killed Gus and thrown his body in the river.”

“That sounds to me like he was lying,” the T-man said, and turned to the narcotics lieutenant. “Do you believe that?”

“Hell no! They wouldn’t kill Gus, even by accident, as long as the five-kilo bundle of H was missing.”

“That’s the way I see it.”

“But where is Gus?”

“Who knows?”

“Maybe he’s still somewhere in the house,” the homicide lieutenant ventured.

“No, he’s not,” the narcotics lieutenant stated flatly.

“Then maybe Benny was leveling with her.”

“No, he was probably trying to scare her,” the homicide lieutenant said.

“He scared her all right,” Coffin Ed said. “But right away he offered her five thousand dollars if she would help them find him— Pinky that is.”

“Generous bastard,” the T-man said.

“That’s when she got on their side,” Coffin Ed said. “With Gus dead and five G’s in her apron, and now the farm was hers too, she could marry the African. She didn’t know he was dead. So she put her mind to it, and then she remembered noticing the night before that the trunk had been moved from the storage room into the hail. And as a rule Pinky did all the heavy moving. So she said maybe Pinky had it with him.

“But Benny discarded that too. He had investigated Pinky along with Gus, and he had him cased as a pure halfwit, incapable of handling that much H; he wouldn’t know what to do with it. She argued that Pinky had the habit and maybe he took it for personal use. But Benny’s lookout had seen Pinky leave here when he went to put in the false fire alarm, and he couldn’t have concealed a handkerchief in ragged clothes he was wearing. And he hasn’t been back here since.

“Then she remembered Sister Heavenly’s visit. She told him that Sister Heavenly was Pinky’s aunt, and that she sold decks of heroin under the guise of a faith healing racket. Then Benny remembered his lookout reporting that Sister Heavenly had left here shortly after the trunk was picked up. He conceded that maybe she was right, maybe Sister Heavenly was the connection, and maybe Pinky had hijacked the bundle. That would be just like a halfwit.

“They took her down to the car and all of them drove up to the Bronx to look for Sister Heavenly. But by the time they got there the house had been blown up and Sister Heavenly had disappeared. But they found out about Uncle Saint and they saw the Lincoln. It was one of Benny’s guards whom Uncle Saint had shot over by the French Line dock and they began putting two and two together.”

“We made a line on that,” the homicide lieutenant said. “We tied it all together after Sister Heavenly’s body was identified by the boy, Wop. And we already had a report on the car from an officer stationed at the Lincoln Tunnel.”

“Yeah. Well, they figured Sister Heavenly had already gotten the bundle and had blown up the house to kill Uncle Saint and destroy her tracks—”

“It was just the old joker trying to crack her safe,” the homicide lieutenant said drily. “The experts made it.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t long before they dug that too. Benny had kept lookouts on this house all day, and one of them remembered Sister Heavenly nosing around here after Digger was shot. So Benny figured by that she hadn’t made the connection. After then they concentrated on finding Pinky.”

“We kept a line on all of you after that,” the homicide lieutenant said. “No need of going into detail now.”

“There’s just one question I’d like to ask,” the T-man said. “How was it they didn’t spot you, Ed, when you planted your bag on top the elevator?”

“They saw me all right, but they didn’t make me. You see, I didn’t come in here. I went to the second house from here and went up to the roof and crossed over. I dropped the bag from the top access to the elevator shaft. Besides which I was wearing painter’s coveralls and carrying the small bag inside of a large paint-smeared bag the last painters had left in my house. And when I went back outside the same house I’d entered, I was carrying the same big bag.”

“All that is well and good and you deserve credit for it,” the narcotics lieutenant said. “But where in the hell is the junk?”

The T-man said to Coffin Ed, “You’re the only one here who knew Pinky. Do you think he’s capable of that?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Coffin Ed said. “I figure him for a halfwit too. But so was Al Capone.”

“All that this proves is one thing,” the narcotics lieutenant said. “That this case is not finished; not by a damn sight. Not with a fortune in heroin floating around.”

“For us it’s just begun,” the T-man said.

“I’ve got a hunch we’ll find it,” Coffin Ed said.

“A hunch? What hunch?” the homicide lieutenant asked.

“If I told you, you’d laugh.”

“Laugh!” the homicide lieutenant exploded angrily. “Laugh! With eleven people whom we know of already dead from this one caper, and five kilos of pure poison loose in New York City, and we haven’t even scratched the bottom of it. Laugh? What the hell’s the matter with you? What’s your hunch? Let’s hear it.”

“I’ve got a hunch that Gus is coming back and then we’ll find out where it’s at.”

In the dead silence which followed, the detectives could feel their hackles rise. They stared at him win blank, deadpan expressions.

Finally the T-man said, “Well, at least no one is laughing.”

The dick stationed on the front door came in and said, “A Railway Express truck just pulled up out front. I think they’re delivering something here.”

“Get back and keep out of sight,” the homicide lieutenant said quickly.

“If it’s what I think, we ought to clean up here,” Coffin Ed said.

The detectives looked at him curiously, but they did as he suggested. Quickly they moved the table and chairs back into the janitor’s flat and then split into two groups. Some remained there and the others rushed to the other end of the corridor and stationed themselves in the laundry.

Ears were pressed to the closed doors, listening for footsteps. But after the faint sounds made by the opening and closing of the front door, the silence was prolonged.

Then they heard a faint rap on the basement floor, followed by a slight scraping sound as though some small object had been place there stealthily.

Doors were flung open and detectives rushed into the corridor with drawn pistols. They stopped in their tracks as though they had all run into an invisible wall.

A black giant, so black he looked dark purple in the bright light, the blackest man any of them had ever seen, crouched over a large green steamer trunk that hadn’t been there before.

It was the giant who inspired their first amazement. He was dressed in the kind of uniform the Railway Expressmen wear, but it was so small on him the coat wouldn’t button, the sleeves ended halfway down the forearms and the pants halfway up the legs. His purple-black feet were encased in blue canvas sneakers, and a uniform cap sat atop kinky hair that was decidedly purple.

Pink eyes darted this way and that from the black-purple face. And then the giant started to run.

“Halt!” several voices cried in unison.

But it was Coffin Ed who stopped him by shouting, “Give up, Pinky. We got you.”

“Pinky!” the homicide lieutenant exclaimed. “My God, is this Pinky?”

“He’s dyed himself,” Coffin Ed said. “He’s really an albino.”

“Now I’ve seen everything,” the T-man said.

“Not yet,” Coffin Ed said.

The detectives surrounded Pinky and the homicide lieutenant snapped on the handcuffs.

“Now we’ll get to the bottom of this,” he said.

“Let’s open the trunk first,” Coffin Ed said. “Give us the key, Pinky.”

“I ain’t got it,” Pinky whined. “The African’s got it.”

“All right, let’s break it open.”

A dick got a crowbar from the toolroom and pried open the lock.

When they lifted the lid only a jumble of soiled laundry was at first visible. But after pulling it aside, a corpse was revealed. It was the corpse of a small gray-haired man with a small wrinkled black intelligent-looking face. He wore a suit of spotless clean blue denim coveralls and black hip boots.

Everyone began talking at once.

“It’s Gus,” Coffin Ed said.