“They didn’t,” Don said. “I just beat it, when they weren’t looking.”
“How deceitful of you!” Yates braked for a red light. “You should have learned from what happened to Slenz — it never pays to deceive. If that crud hadn’t tried to hold out on us, he’d be sunning himself in Havana now, instead of lying on an iced slab.”
So that was it! Slenz had gotten away with that briefcase full of bills, but before he met his partners he’d lifted part of the loot. When the amount stolen had been reported in the papers Yates and the girl had gotten sore, killed him.
That would be why Yates and the girl were still around, instead of getting out of town right after the robbery. They’d been trying to find the rest of the dough.
It gave Don an idea. “Say! Suppose I could tell you where the rest of that money is. Would you let me go?”
“Why should we let you go?” Yates speeded up to beat a light at the intersection near the gas works. “We’ll find of a way to make you tell us anything you know before we’re — done with you.”
The Caddy zoomed across as the traffic light changed from amber to red.
“Take it easy,” the girl warned Yates. “There were a couple of Little Boy Blues there on the corner.”
The twelve o’clock shift, Don thought. The night patrols coming out to relieve the boys on beat. If he’d only had foresight enough to disconnect the tail lights on this bus, before he’d gone to that garage office for the keys. Maybe some of the officers would have noticed a thing like that and halted the car!
The girl touched the back of Don’s neck with the muzzle — his heart skipped a couple of beats.
“Might be an idea to pump this well before we get too far out of town,” she said. “Case he does know something, we wouldn’t have so far to drive back.”
Yates put on more speed. “I’ll cut off on a side road here in a minute. Right now,” he glanced up at the rear-view mirror, “I think we ought to keep moving.”
Don caught a gleam of red, reflected from the windshield. Somebody with a blinker signal, following them! Of course it could be an ambulance. An ambulance wasn’t going to do him any good! And hearses didn’t use red flashers!
Ahead loomed the stop light at the intersection of Route 60. The light was green. But there was a red light there, too. And it wasn’t any Bar and Grille sign! Another patrol car!
“Boxing us in,” the girl called. “Watch it, Yatsey!”
“No room to turn.” Yates spoke through his teeth. “I’ll crash him, if he don’t get out of the way!”
The police car swung across the road, a quarter-mile beyond. A siren screamed behind them, kept screaming — closer and closer.
There was a ditch at the right. The railroad embankment at their left.
Don chose the ditch! He stamped, across Yates’ legs, at the foot brake. The effort threw him to the right, against the car window.
A deafening blast filled the interior of the Caddy. A hot wire touched his left ear. The windshield shattered.
Then they were swerving, skidding, toppling over into the ditch...
The Caddy lay on its side, in a ditchful of glass and twisted metal. Don lay on his back on a stretcher.
The starchy interne felt of the bump on Don’s head:
“He’s all right to go home. Nothing but a slight concussion, Lieutenant.”
“He didn’t get that in the smashup, anyway,” Annalou cried. “He was slugged, earlier, by... by one of them.”
She looked toward the ambulance where patrolmen with revolvers in their fists watched two stretchers being loaded into a long, white car. The things on the stretchers were very quiet.
“Are they dead?” Don asked.
“Not yet,” Wiley said bleakly. “You know you’re shot with luck to be alive, yourself?”
“Yeah.” He felt the caked blood on his left ear-lobe. “I still don’t figure how you picked up the Caddy.”
Wiley pointed. “Three minutes after you do that Brodie down the fire escape, there’s a three-state alarm going out for you on every police band. Describin’ you... an’ that repair kit you were lugging.”
“How it ever got on the front of the Cadillac!” Annalou wondered. “Some policeman saw the car at an intersection... and there was Regal Radio Repairs painted on the side of your kit, staring ’em smack in the face!”
Don sat up, groggily. “Hey, Lieutenant! You don’t think I was... was with ’em? Tryin’ to make a getaway?”
Wiley pulled down the corners of his lips. “Give us credit for knowing a little about our business, Dick Tracy. That holdup was a professional mob job. You rattle around too much up here,” the Lieutenant touched his forehead, “to be hooked up with a smart set of crooks. Anyway, we knew there was something off-beat about that phone tip — you’d never have parked your truck right in front of the apartment if you’d meant to go in and murder a man there.”
Don put an arm around Annalou, weakly. “They shot Slenz because he gypped ’em on the split. I tried to get ’em to let me go, in exchange for tellin’ ’em where the rest of the dough is — but they wouldn’t.”
Wiley screwed up his face in a knot. “Mean you know where Slenz hid it?”
“Well, I don’t know for positive,” Don admitted. “But when I heard the fuzzy tone from that loudspeaker in the Garnet’s set — I’d be ready to bet somebody shoved a wad of something inside that speaker cone and it muffles th’ tone. I’ve had sets where mice built their nests in the speaker horns — and it sounds the same way.”
“Mice!” said the Lieutenant, wryly. “Bills hid in radios!” He shook his head. “And they claim this is the day of scientific crime detection.” He touched his foot to the wrecked Caddy. “They’ll be glad to get the rest of that dough back. But I don’t think there’s any reward offered.”
“We don’t want any reward!” Annalou’s arm tightened around Don. “This is all the reward we want.”
“Yeah! Only—” Don looked at her fondly, “these Clark-McGeekin people make blankets, hon. We’re goin’ to have a use for blankets, pretty quick. Maybe we could make a deal — for wholesale.”
A Nice Night for Murder
Popular Detective, September, 1950
Chapter I
Radio Warning
Crisply the voice came over the loud speaker:
“Attention Vigilant: Tug Helen Maginn, towing barges westbound, reports some small craft adrift and awash five hundred yards north northeast City Island Point, seven-fifty P.M. That is all!”
“That is all,” Lieutenant Steve Koski repeated silently, snapping the toggle on the two-way from Listen to Talk. Just “some small craft” adrift in boiling whitecaps on a night so wind-lashed even the cross-bay ferries were taking a terrific beating!
Maybe some late-season eel-fisher-man overturned in the ugly channel chop. Or perhaps only a reckless kid whose leaky scow got swamped in the tide rip. Nothing really important, the dispatcher’s tone had indicated. No hot headline police stuff, like a Broadway theatre stickup or a Third Avenue bar battle!
Koski was burning up at the casual way the radio room at headquarters handled such relay calls. As if it were only the big crimes — and as far as the Harbor Precinct was concerned — only the big seagoing ships that mattered. The particular small craft referred to in the message might not have looked like much to that tugboat captain, high and dry in his pilot house. But it would have been pretty important to anybody who happened to be on the small craft when it went down. In Koski’s book, any boat was as big as the people on board, and human lives were all the same size.