He walked to Paget, unfastened his shirt, examined the wound, grunted. “Not so good. Better put through a call to Conningsby, Dan. We want him alive, if possible.” He looked at Irene, crouching sullen and silent in the shadows by the table. Quickly he drew cuffs from his pocket, snapped them securely around her slim, beautiful wrists.
“She’ll get a neat stretch,” he muttered. “Kessler and these two pulled the Vanderfelt job unaided. I got the story tonight.”
He looked last at Ellen Conway, looked long and with his face in shadow, then he walked over and stood before her.
“And now,” he asked slowly, “just who are you?”
Her heavy head lifted. She met his sharp, disturbing glance without flinching. “I am Ellen Conway,” she said clearly, “employed by the—”
He laughed. “Department of Education,” he began, but she stopped him.
“No, the Mid-West Life Insurance Company, of New York. We wrote the policy on the Vanderfelt jewels.”
She glanced down at her manacled hands. “And you?”
His lips twitched in that unforgetable smile. “John Hayes Armour,” he told her. “Chief of the Homicide Squad of the Chicago Police Department.”
They looked at each other for a long time, then he drew a key from his pocket, unlocking the cuffs. “You gave a swell imitation of a tough little moll working a hot lay alone,” he confided.
Her white lips smiled. “And you a lone wolf, chiseling in on a closed corporation.”
“Lone wolf’s right — but I felt coming undercover as Tavelli was my best gamble in getting the goods on the. Kessler pair and this man Paget; nosed ’em out here through a tapped wire in Tavelli’s office. Smart as they were they should have figured we’d have the bee on the biggest fence in the business.”
“—and Susan,” spoke Ellen, “working for your department, got the job—”
“As housekeeper here,” he finished. “We pulled wires at the employment agency and did she learn plenty?” He glanced at Dan, lowering his voice. “His mother,” he said sadly. “Her husband was a copper and her father before her — she worked with us sometimes.”
Ellen’s eyes misted. “Breaks of the game,” she spoke low. “I... I would have liked knowing Susan Dilke.”
He nodded wordlessly.
“And the Vanderfelt gems?” she asked.
“Were merely a means to an end with us. We wanted someone to fry for the murder of as grand an old man as ever drew breath.”
Ellen nodded understandingly. “Of course. Well, I was after the stones and I got them.” From the pocket of the big raincoat she wore she dragged the brown leather bag, held it out to him.
“The Mid-West followed a hunch on shadowing Tavelli too,” she smiled.
“After our ’Frisco agent wired he was negotiating with an Oriental fence for passing a carload of ‘ice’ — the Vanderfelt haul was the biggest Chi’ take in years, and — well — that’s why I was dogging the green sedan along that beastly detour.”
“I thought you’d just acted natural in copping them,” he said, as he took them. “Just figured you were outsmarting one of your own kind.”
“I figured I was outsmarting a pretty smart crook,” she said gravely. “I’m too soft for this job, though. When I got to the gate, with the road clear for a get-away, I couldn’t leave you all alone without sending Dan in to help you.”
Under his grave regard, soft color burned her cheeks. He said slowly, “You know, Ellen Conway, I somehow figured you as that kind of a girl. I said to myself, ‘Here’s too nice a kid to be in the racket.’ ”
She laughed suddenly. “And it hurt me somehow to think that you—” Confusion stopped her. They kept on looking at each other.
Dan was talking excitedly over the telephone. Captain Armour held his bemused gaze on the girl’s tired face, that was flushing beautifully. He remembered her as he had first seen her, in peach blow taffeta, sprayed over with wild roses. His hand went out.
“Stout fellow, Ellen Conway,” he said softly, and she slipped her hand into his, eyes suddenly starry through the gray mists of weariness which clouded them.
A Hand of Pinochle
by Theodore Tinsley
“This goes for all of you,” Captain Daley snapped. “Don’t think that because you’ve been assigned to duty in a rural precinct in Queens that you have nothing to do but chuck old ladies under the chin. The commissioner sent me out here to pep up this precinct, and I intend to get results or there’ll be men up on charges.”
His eyes focussed meaningly on Patrolman Kirker. Kirker shuffled his big feet nervously and wished old Captain O’Brien were still alive. O’Brien had been easy-going, not like this new skipper with the youthful frown and the crisp snap to his voice. “If only I could get him to play pinochle!” Kirker thought sadly.
Eleven years on the force hadn’t made much change in Patrolman Adolph Kirker. His feet were a little flatter, his uniform a bit tighter across the stomach, his sun-wrinkled smile deeper. He had served in three boroughs and had made exactly three arrests. The first was an under-sized Sicilian junk peddler whom Adolph had caught viciously; larruping a bloated white horse from a rental stable in lower Manhattan. The second was a Bronx janitor who had celebrated an alcoholic birthday by blacking his wife’s eye. The third, a taxi driver in Queens, had tinkered unlawfully with his meter and had tried to collect the surcharge with his fists.
Adolph Kirker had drifted to Queens on the border of the city line, because there was no further spot to which a mild and inoffensive cop could be transferred to make room for the stronger jawed, more ambitious rookies who poured out of the police school every year.
Each time a new commissioner stepped up, Kirker stepped down. He was not at all bitter about it; quite the reverse. In Queens there were shady trees, friendly folk in neat frame houses who called him Mr. Kirker and were like as not to bring out a bottle of cold beer when he passed and asked about the health of his wife. In Manhattan Kirker had lived in a dark, dismal flat. Here he owned his own grassplot and home, or would as soon as he finished making the payments. And every Sunday afternoon, while his wife attended the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Lutheran church, Kirker and his friend Otto Muller played pinochle.
Pinochle! That was the one thing that gave meaning and pleasure to the easy-going existence of Kirker. Even in Queens the virus of bridge had bitten deeply, so that it was hard to find a good steady pinochle player. But Otto Muller, an ex-cop who had taken a lighter job after being wounded and partly crippled, knew the finer points of pinochle and was fond of beer and Liederkranz. Kirker walked his beat, not from block to block but from Sunday to Sunday. In two years he was two dollars ahead of Muller and hopeful of increasing his lead. He smiled dimly at the prospect, the irate face of young Captain Daley a meaningless blur. Daley’s curt question cut ruthlessly through his daydream.
“Anything particularly exciting happen on your beat?”
“Some kids were playing baseball in a vacant lot on Division Avenue,” Kirker mumbled. “One of ’em broke a window, so I... I—”
“Ahh. A broken window. Did you make your annual arrest?”
Kirker’s ears were bright red. “I walked the kid a coupla blocks and talked to him like a... a Dutch uncle. He was scared stiff, a big overgrown kid. So I gave him a half dollar and told him to get the window fixed,”
“And reconstructed a potential criminal, eh?”