There is the car now, just like Delaney says, jacked up with the new tires off of it and some recaps ready to go back on. You never see a more open swindle. I guess there is some money to be made in trading off special motor parts like this, all right, though it is a racket that never occurs to me before.
The attendant is a shifty-eyed little gezabo that Delaney’s got handcuffed to the front bumper, where there are a bundle of motor parts laying all over the floor.
But I don’t pay much attention to the garage guy or anything else, for that matter, except the very slick doll wrapped in a mink coat who is standing there beside the green convertible, tapping one dainty little foot like she ain’t got all night to hang around.
“Well,” she says to us, real put out, “are you going to make this fellow put my automobile together?”
“Wow!” says Ed Clancy, looking her over like she is a two grades promotion and a month off with pay. “Now this is the kind of customer I like to get, Sarge!”
Me, I don’t feel the same way, at all, at all. Big Bobo’s wife, Susie, always is a good-looking dish, especially when her green eyes light up because she got a mad on. And she has got a good mad on right now.
“Officer,” she says, turning the big smile on Ed Clancy, “I do not have all night to spend in idle chatter. Would you be good enough to help me get my automobile out of here?”
Well, Clancy falls all over himself, trying to give the good-looking Susie the impression that he knows what he is doing.
I tell Delaney to uncouple the garage character, who is a fellow by the name of Hankering Harry Hannover, which is a name he gets for hankering after other people’s property. I remember him from some police line-ups in the past. This is a lad who has been jugged before on a number of occasions; he is a very glue-fingered gent that people are always giving their stuff to, if you hear him right.
“Honest, Sarge,” he tells me, “I’m just doin’ a tune-up on the car, which is what I think the boss tells me to do. You can’t clamp a guy for trying to do a service for one of the customers, now, can you?”
He is looking around like he might try out for the track team any minute, but I do not think he is so foolish as to try to go with the leg.
“How long will it take to put this heap back the way you find it?”
“Ten, fifteen minutes.”
“And for you to blow but good — like to another state?”
“Er... right afterward. Immediate, I would say.”
“You’re not going to let him go, Sarge?” Delaney chimes in.
I ignore him and ask Mrs. Big Bobo Barsted if she will be satisfied to get her automobile back in one satisfactory-working piece and no fuss in the police courts. Clancy is frowning like I am asking her to poison somebody’s dish of tea, but Susie, having been wed up with Big Bobo for some time now, has adopted some of his feeling about never tangling with the law, can she help it.
“Why... why, I guess that would be all right, Sergeant. Just so long as the car is in good condition.”
“It will be in the pink. If it ain’t, this light-fingered cookie here will go down into the hole we save for special characters and nobody ever hears of him again because we lose the key. Y’understand, Harry?”
“I getcha, Sarge. I getcha. You folks don’t worry about this little old car, now. I’ll have it tickin’ like a clock in a couple minutes.”
So he gets to work on it right away, and I tell Delaney everything will be okay and he can run on back to his beat, and that’s the good fellow. I keep my eye on Hankering Harry and Ed Clancy takes his cap off and settles down to some real jawing with Mrs. Big Bobo and as soon as Delaney leaves I begin to feel a little better about the whole thing, because it looks for sure like we can forget about reporting this car deal once the car is fixed.
By my watch, it’s only thirty minutes to midnight and there is not much more that can happen before we put the police car away and call it a day.
Well, that is what I am thinking then, at about half-past eleven. But it ain’t five minutes more before the whole thing blows up higher than an atom bomb, right in my kisser.
And the way it all happens is like this. Hankering Harry is banging away on the motor there and Mrs. Big Bobo is chewing the fat with Clancy when all of a sudden Clancy nods at her and goes over to the green convertible.
“No trouble at all,” Clancy says, walking around Hankering Harry, looking for something.
“What’re you after, G-man?” I ask.
“A clean cloth, Sarge. Mrs. Barsted got some oil and dirt on her shoes.” He cheeks around some more and then he gets an idea. “Maybe there’s some clean rags in the trunk.”
So he wants to make some time with the dish, that’s his own lookout. But I am remembering how Big Bobo is a jealous man and what he recommends that I do to Larry Melody for making a play for this here Susie and I chuckle to myself thinking that maybe my wise-boy Ed Clancy is asking for a mouthful of fist, as well, if anything comes of this. Not that I will be able to do the job myself, a brother officer and all that, but—
“Holy cow, Sarge!”
This is Ed Clancy, his mouth wide open and his eyes popping out like hard-boiled eggs.
“Look at this, Sarge!”
He’s holding up the trunk door of the green convertible with one hand and pointing inside with the other. Susie and me get over there just about the same time, and she lets out a scream that will tear the ears off a brass monkey. Then she goes all rubbery, sprawling in a bundle of mink on the floor.
Me, I don’t feel much good either. Because in the trunk compartment of Big Bobo Barsted’s brand new green convertible is the young man who goes by the name of Larry Melody. Who went by the name of Larry Melody, that is. All curled up in there, snug as a bug in a rug.
“Dead!” says Clancy. “He’s dead!”
Well, wouldn’t you know Clancy would come up with something like this?
It is several weeks later when I see Big Bobo Barsted for what, it turns out, is the last time. I am taking a drag on a butt outside of Headquarters, before I go in this day to start my shift on the radio.
To me, this Bobo Barsted is five hundred fish down the drain, or over the dam by now, and though I got no love for Ed Clancy, I do not have no sympathy for Big Bobo Barsted, either. Bobo had the chance to get the job done right for him, but could he wait like a smart man shoulda? No, he had to go louse it all up, himself.
And louse me up, too, not only with the five hundred I don’t get. You see, after that night when Ed Clancy finds Larry in the back of Bobo’s car, the Chief takes me off of car patrol with the bust hand and puts me here in Headquarters, on the mike calls. Which is a job I can do fine, but there ain’t the extra dough I could always pick up on the outside work.
This day that I am talking about, when I see Bobo for the last time, is the day that they are taking Big Bobo Barsted over to the court for his trial. I think the judge will lay it into him for the full count, what with they’ve been trying to tie into Bobo for a long time now, and it will be the big chop. We use the noose in this state for murderers in the first degree, and that is the rap they get Bobo for, on the Larry Melody kill.
Of course, he don’t even have the long odds going for him. He is in tighter than a plumber’s joint on a leaky pipe, and all the money he got ain’t going to do him any good. No sir, not one little bit. It is a fact that Big Bobo Barsted puts the lump on Larry Melody’s head that is the fatal clout.
He does this right after I call and tell him Ed Clancy busts my working hand in the car door; in fact, the person at Big Bobo’s door, that day I call him, is not the little woman as he thinks but it is Larry Melody himself in person, and he comes to put the whole thing up to Big Bobo — how he loves Susie and Susie loves him and what the hell is Big Bobo gonna do about giving her a divorce, you can’t stand in the way of true love and so forth.