“There’s nerve!” gasped Brill. “What the hell d’you think you’re pulling?”
Gregory rubbed his chin.
“I don’t understand,” he admitted. “If you think you’ve got something to show us, Hawley, let’s see it — in a hurry. We’ll have the reporters here in a couple more minutes.”
“I know,” Hawley said. “But this is something I’ve got to do my own way. Or else it won’t mean anything. You’ve got to leave me alone here.”
“And — us?”
“I want Brill to go over and sit where he was — on the stoop of No. 38. If it’s just the same, inspector, I’d like to have you alongside him. Just sit there — and watch!”
Brill held up his hands.
“Jeez!” he ejaculated. “If that ain’t brass! How long is it, inspector, since you took orders from a rookie patrolman?”
Gregory’s gaze bathed him with a cold light. It was only a straw — but he grasped at it for his sinking friend.
“I haven’t been so long in the department myself, sergeant,” he said, “that I’m sure there isn’t anything left for me to learn. As for Hawley’s proposition, I’m ready to be shown. We’ll stroll across the street together. Brill, if you don’t mind. Where did you say you wanted us, Hawley? On the stoop of No. 38?”
V
Mary Corcoran was over there, watching No. 31 with strained eyes, when Sergeant Bill Brill came back to her. Just as he had gone, he returned — with a swagger. But now it was not a pistol he flourished, but a police inspector.
“This is my boss, kiddo,” he said. “Inspector Gregory, meet Miss Corcoran. She’s my extra special.”
The girl took the inspector’s thin hand, and by her speech betrayed how little she knew of the department. What she said — and warmly, too — was:
“Then I suppose you know Jim Hawley, Mr. Gregory!”
Brill frowned, but the inspector smiled.
“I’ve just had the pleasure of meeting him,” he replied. “An enterprising young man.”
His gaze wandered over the way, and discovered the head of the enterprising young man poking from the brightly-lighted second floor window of No. 31.
“Set?” called Hawley.
“We’re here.”
Mary Corcoran gasped.
“It’s Jim! He’s in that room where the man was killed!”
And then she was on her feet, screaming. What had happened twenty minutes ago was being repeated. A wild, horror-filled shout was echoing along the street.
“Bradley! For God’s sake! Don’t, Bradley, don’t!”
“Help him!” cried Mary Corcoran. “The murderer’s come back, and he’s after Jim! Look, look!”
Black shadows were again on the yellow shade, the swollen shadows of two men struggling behind it.
Brill’s eyes popped. He jumped up, his hand swinging automatically to his hip. But the shadows had vanished then. There was a whir, and a sharp crack.
The crack wasn’t another pistol shot; the yellow shade had been yanked and let go smacking onto its roller. Jim Hawley leaned out the window.
“A one man show!” he called across the street. “How was it, Inspector Gregory?”
Gregory was already on his way over. He pushed into No. 31 and ran up the stairs. Hawley met him at their head. He had the knotted handkerchief in his hand.
“The knots were the giveaway,” said he. “They made the shadows of the two heads. Maybe Bill Brill doesn’t remember being a kid, inspector — but don’t you? Don’t you remember making shadowgraphs between a strong light and a screen? Just with your fingers you could make a lot of things. Horses and dogs and elephants and churches. And if you tied knots in a handkerchief — say, couldn’t you put on a first-class battle?”
A roar escaped Gregory — a roar of appreciation and relief. He went down the stairs with a rush, burst into the parlor where Easier sat among the hostile witnesses.
“Brad!” he shouted. “You’re clear! It was a last dirty trick that Hammett tried to put up on you. He’d got ready finally to bump himself off — and he thought he’d leave you to swing for it. That’s what he’d been scheming these ten years toward, planning a red anniversary!”
He whirled around and caught Jim Hawley’s arm; whispered energetically to him. Then he lashed out at Brill.
“You’re a good man, sergeant,” he wound up. “I’d be the last to say you weren’t. But there’s such a thing as being too anxious to force a collar. You’re inclined to be that way, sometimes. Sometimes your brains are in your feet!”
Hawley didn’t hear that. Already he was sitting on a straw mat on the steps of No. 38, holding hands with Mary.
“Luck!” he exulted. “To-morrow I go into the detective bureau as a second grade sergeant. Pop Gregory says so, and he never breaks his word. Know what it means, Mary? A jump of a thousand a year! Now I can say the word!”
The girl’s eyes were starry.
“Why didn’t you say it a long time ago, Jim?” she wanted to know. “Ain’t I — working?”
Liverpool Jack
by Charles Somerville
When the Two Best Sleuths of the Tenderloin Go to Public School the Underworld Learns a Thing or Two
If there were ever two vexed, irritated, bothered, worried and chagrined man-hunters they were Detectives Ed Burgess and John Fitzpatrick of the New York force on a certain night back in 1912!
These two were, at the time, the star sleuths of the branch bureau of headquarters established at the West Forty-Seventh Street station, in the heart of New York’s new “Tenderloin” district, known also as the Great White Way and the “Roaring Forties.” It draws vast crowds from all over the nation and from all over the world — people with lots of money in their pockets, lots of jewelry on their persons. It becomes, therefore, a Mecca for all the experts of crookdom. A detective in that district has his work cut out for him working his wits against the razor-edged ingenuities of the fastest criminal performers on earth.
Working together, Burgess and Fitzpatrick had achieved an imposing record for difficult cases well handled. They had solved several very knotty mysteries and bagged many dangerous criminals. They had sent the vicious “One-Eye” Lynch, otherwise known as “The Eel,” to the electric chair after long and implacable pursuit. They had taken the million-dollar thief of the American Bank Note Company affair. They successfully laid the mysterious crime of the murder of the West Side philanthropist saloonkeeper, “Paddy the Priest” at the door of “Happy Jack” Halloran, and sent him to the chair for it. They had pursued the youthful thug and plunderer known as “The Crusher,” and closed the bars of prison upon him for a long stretch of years. They had landed “Stutters,” a wizard at burglary, notorious “dinner” and “theater” thief, who pillaged the homes of wealthy New Yorkers of more than a quarter of a million dollars before Burgess and Fitzpatrick got a chance at him. They had raided and routed the thieves’ resort of “Scush” Thomas, fence and gunman, who himself was in the end “taken for a ride” in New Jersey by fellow desperadoes. On the tiny clew offered by the scratch on the side of a stolen gem they had stopped an up-State society woman in the beginning of a career as a jewel thief.
But the Law, in its pursuit of malefactors, frequently gets some hard bumps itself.
Burgess and Fitzpatrick had been long organizing a corps of tipsters, or “stool pigeons,” working underground in the underworld. All detectives must establish such liaisons with the secret lanes, byways and resorts of crime if they are to be successful in their careers. These two detectives had displayed fine tact and ingenuity in playing one crook off on another while maintaining friendly and confidential relations with both. Important as had been many of their captures after the commissions of crimes, even more important had been their ability to nip numerous criminal projects in the bud.