He put his flash on it and his nostrils flared in repugnance. This was where Tom had taken it. He swung the circle of light up and down the cobblestones. Besides MacReady’s blood, there was nothing to see except a couple of those small, white, slotted cards in which rings are displayed. Each card bore the caption — Absolutely Perfect Blue-White — 22-Carat Setting — Latest Style.
A couple of chunks of limestone had been chipped from the building wall by flying lead but there was nothing else.
Chapter Two
The Girl in the Hock Shop
Mike strode grimly through the alley, over to Centre Street, up to the block-long white stone building at Number 240.
He went down a freshly scrubbed corridor smelling of antiseptic, turned in at a door marked — DETECTIVE BUREAU LOST PROPERTY DIVISION.
There was a long counter running across the front of the room, behind it half a dozen small oak desks. There was only one man in the office, a thin, sharp-featured individual with glossy black hair, shaggy eyebrows and an expression of perpetual surprise on his face. He sat in a swivel chair, with his feet up on the lower drawer of his desk. This was Ed Schmidt, Hansard’s working-partner. He was drawling into a telephone.
“Yeah, that’s what I said. Report by phone and pronto. That don’t mean you shouldn’t send in the regular descriptive cards on everything that’s been hocked in your shop today. If I don’t get a brown envelope with a bunch of those cards from you in the morning I’ll know you’ve either gone out of business or you’re trying to give us the runaround, Abe. But about those solitaires — it’s important. They’re hot as the electric chair.”
Hansard sat at his desk and gloomily fingered the day’s list of property, lost and stolen. There were wallets reported from the midtown section. Their only chance of recovery lay across the hall in the offices of the pickpocket squad. Another epidemic of lost dogs in the Washington Heights area probably meant that the old “dog racket” was being worked again. And there was the usual assortment of missing handbags, wrist-watches and briefcases — mostly testimonials to their owner’s forgetfulness.
None of these held any interest for Mike. He would let the other boys on the squad look after them. By that tacit understanding which goes without expression in the police department, it was accepted that Hansard was after the mob that had shot down his friend, and that he would let nothing interfere with that job until it was done.
He knew that the likelihood of his finding the killers was remote, unless he had a streak of luck. For there would be little doubt that this was the work of the same crowd that had bedeviled the pawnshop squad for nearly three weeks, with window-hole robberies from one end of Manhattan to the other.
“Mike,” called the other man, hanging up the phone, “I got that file of lugs who’ve been involved in window robberies, from the Bureau of Identification. Covers twelve years. About sixty guys. But more than half of ’em are doing their home-work up at Stone College.”
“Let me have a look-see, Eddie.” Mike shuffled over the identification cards, with full-face and profile photos. “None of these answer the descriptions given by any of the bystanders at the other robberies, huh, Ed?”
“Not as near as I can make out. But we might as well go through the routine.”
“Let Homicide do it, Eddie. They can put more men on it than we can. And anyhow, I got an idea it’s a waste of time. I think this is a new mob, just organized.”
“The way they’re going at it, Mike” — Schmidt came over and put a police flyer from San Francisco headquarters on Hansard’s desk — “it looks to me as if they’re old hands. Seven jobs, they’ve pulled. Nobody’s caught ’em. Nobody’s even got a cast-iron description. That takes some experience.”
“Yeah. I guess so, Eddie.” Mike studied the flyer.
It was an old one. It stated that all police departments should be on the lookout for William Sexton, recently a resident of San Francisco. Sexton was an expert at window work, had cleaned out five jewelry stores in one night and departed for places unknown. His method had been to use a couple of stooges to stand on either side of him, apparently inspecting the contents of a show-window, while he used a window-glass cutter, calmly inserted a cane with a wad of chewing gum on it and picked up such items as his fancy dictated. After the desired merchandise had been abstracted, the busy Mr. Sexton would calmly paste a poster of some sort over the small hole and depart.
“This looks good,” Mike grunted. “Only there’s no photo.”
“Good reason why,” Schmidt pointed out. “They never caught him. They picked up that dope from stoolies. Wouldn’t you say this Sexton might be our man?”
“It’s a thought. All we got to go on is — five feet six or seven, hundred and sixty pounds or thereabouts, brown hair, brown eyes. I can’t walk from here to Broome Street without bumping into half a dozen guys would answer that description. Tell you what, Ed. Wire Frisco. Ask ’em if they’ve got any later dope on this punk.”
“O.K.”
“And send out a teletype to all states we got working agreements with, giving his description. Include the green sedan in the Jersey notice. And warn all of ’em to be on the lookout for anybody trying to hock or sell unset ice.”
“Anything else, Mike?”
“Yeah. Check over the lists of arrests MacReady made, the last four-five years. See if any of those bums had any jewelry-store robberies in their records. I have a hunch maybe this slob who shot him, did it because Mike knew him and put the pinch on him at some previous time.”
The phone rang. Schmidt answered. “Yeah? Hold the line a second, Elias.” He put his hand over the receiver. “Litzman calling. Up on Sixth Avenue. Says there’s a floozie trying to put the bite on him for two hundred bucks on a rock worth six or seven C’s anyway. Wants to know what to do with her.”
“Tell him to stall her. Kid her along. Haggle with her. Tell him if he lets her go before I get up there, I’ll dig that old receiver charge up and slap him in the jug for sure.” Mike grabbed his overcoat, got to the door. “And Ed—”
“Yuh?”
“Tell him to work it so he gets her prints. On his showcase. Or maybe a fountain pen.”
He got into the corridor before Schmidt yelled: “Want I should notify the radio Rollos?”
“No,” Mike called back. “I’ll do that. If I need ’em.”
Hansard’s coupe hit nothing but the high spots on the way uptown. This might be a wrong lead, of course. No telling whether the skirt at Litzman’s was the same one Tom MacReady had spotted down on Little Maiden Lane. But if she wasn’t, it was a damn queer coincidence. Women didn’t do much legitimate pawning late at night. That was a male trick, for booze money. Women usually did their hocking in the daytime, when they could buy something they needed with the money they got. But if this was the same dame, seconds might count. Litzman might not be able to stall her off, for long. She’d be sure to get suspicious.
Still, there was something screwy about the set-up. That window-job had certainly been done by a professional mob of heisters. Yet no gem thief would be dumb enough to suppose he could get away with pawning a piece of glitter within a couple of hours after the stuff had been lifted.
It was ten minutes past nine when Mike got out, a block below Litzman’s. He forced himself to stroll leisurely toward the hockshop — past a couple of employment agencies.
It wouldn’t do to come tearing into the shop. There might be a lookout waiting outside, or across the street. That was why he hadn’t wanted the radio cars notified. A lookout would have spotted police cars before they could have closed in and given the alarm.