But Paxton Boulevard is mainly a residential street, and in the shuttling stream of cars — in the absence of more cops — the runaway car had vanished. School kids: some said one thing and some said another. You couldn’t be sure. It seemed fairly certain that the gunmen had gone north into the new additions between Paxton Boulevard and the railroad; at least they hadn’t passed Five Mile Corner.
Eight police cars went cruising through the new prairies, the flat subdivisions. Marble-eyed men examined every alley and driveway and private garage. The human manacles around the main highways were drawn tighter and tighter... the teletype clicked and buzzed, phones were a screaming chorus.
First-class Patrolman Nick Glennan came slowly down the steps from police headquarters. “No,” he told the clustering reporters, “they’ve got my story, inside. Go in and talk to the Inspector. You don’t want to talk to a damn fool who missed because he was a poor shot.”
“Listen, Glennan,” said McCail of the News-Detail and Luff of the Tribune, “nobody’s blaming you. You did everything you could—”
Nick shrugged. “That’s all right, but I should’ve got them.” He adjusted his peaked cap.
In a gray Packard parked beside the curb were Sergeant Dave Glennan and Detectives Kerry and Horn. “Nick,” called Dave.
Nick went over to the car. His corpulent brother was hunched deep in the rear seat with a feather pillow between his shoulders. Dave Glennan’s back was still sore, after a famous shooting scrape in March. “All washed up?” he asked kindly.
“Yes. I’ve just been talking to Inspector Bourse.”
“You’re off duty now?”
Nick blinked at him. “Yes.”
“Want to take a ride?”
Promptly enough Nick climbed into the Packard beside his brother. “Let’s go,” said Dave. They went, swiftly and silently, up the Avenue.
The young patrolman turned his sad eyes to the huge sergeant. “Where you rolling?”
“I’ve got an At Will assignment, but I keep in touch with the Bureau. If they need me they’ll shoot it to us on the radio.” He shoved the pillow higher between his shoulders. “Did you show the Inspector what you found?”
“Yes. He said it was nothing.”
“That’s what I say, me boy. Nothing.”
Kerry asked: “What did you be finding, Nick?”
The patrolman fished a small object out of his pocket and passed it across to Kerry and Horn. “A bottle opener,” grunted Horn.
“Yes, it is that.”
It was three or four inches long — a flat oval of silvered metal with a sharp tongue at one side, and a long handle. HOFFBRAU LIGHT OR DARK. Drink the best was stamped into the handle.
“You get ’em with a case of Hoffbrau beer,” explained Horn. “Whenever you buy a case, they give you a free bottle opener.”
Dave Glennan nodded. “That’s the trouble; that’s the reason it ain’t no clue. There’s too many of them around.”
“Where’d he find it?”
Nick said: “Out on the plaza. It was about where the car was when the big guy slipped out through the door.”
“You thought he might have dropped it?... Dave, how many cars go by that station in a day.”
“One a minute, perhaps. Lots more in rush hours. I don’t know; your guess is as good as mine... The Inspector said to forget it, eh, Sparrow Cop?”
Nick turned his bitter eyes on him. “I’m a sparrow cop no longer,” he said softly. “Though I was on the park police last March, when I grabbed those hoods who shot you — out there on Acola Street.”
There was silence in the car for a moment. Dave flushed; awkwardly, he patted his kid brother’s knee. “Suppose Inspector Bourse had told you to regard this bottle opener as a clue, Nick. How would you work it?”
Nick took a long breath. “The city flusher,” he said, “cleans off that plaza at the Union Terminal every morning. It was there this morning, a bit late — five o’clock, it was. It shoots a powerful stream of water; it would wash that bottle opener up to the curb, like chaff. So the bottle opener was dropped since five o’clock—”
“We’re listening,” said Dave.
“If a man dropped it from a moving car — or if it got jolted out of the side pocket of a moving car — it wouldn’t roll far. It ain’t the right shape. I picked it up ten feet from the curb, but to the north of the safety island. And the brown sedan crossed there, headed southeast, cutting across the wrong side of the plaza... You see? It was in a kind of no-traffic zone. If it fell from any other car it came from one traveling between the stanchion and the curb, because all traffic is supposed to move outside the stanchion.”
Kerry said: “And those cars are few and far between. Maybe the big guy did drop it, Nick—”
“Shut up,” Dave said. “Would you call up the Hoffbrau Brewing Company by long distance and arrest them all, Nick?”
The radio began to crackle; Nick Glennan didn’t answer. The grating voice said: “Squads Eight, Nine, and Sixteen. Suspicious car reported on Pearl Street south of railroad tracks. Abandoned brown sedan. Signal Twenty-four B. Squads Eight, Nine, and—”
“Here’s Dorchester Avenue,” Dave directed the driver. “Down Dorchester to the Paxton cut-off, then left.” The balloon tires howled as the car swung quickly into Dorchester Avenue... forty, forty-five, fifty, fifty-five... the speedometer ribbon blurred. The siren sang in an endless alto.
Kerry, not the liveliest-witted man in the squad, was mumbling to himself, “Signal Twenty-four B. Signal—”
“You dope,” said Horn wearily, “that’s ‘As you approach the designated point, watch for criminals fleeing from the scene.’ ”
“As if they hadn’t fled from the scene an hour ago,” grunted Sergeant Glennan. “I always did say that if you didn’t have a license number, you didn’t have much to go on.”
Nick grinned his tired grin. “When the day comes that they make it jail for the man who drives with muddy license plates, we’ll have a better break. There was dirt an inch thick on those plates. Nobody got a smell of them. You can’t put teeth in an ordinance that carries a two-dollar penalty.”
Vacant lots began to flicker past them.
“Pearl Street,” meditated Dave. “That’s a block or two past Washington. It’s nothing but a big mud hole there — no houses or nothing... Turn right at the second corner, Frank.”
Horn asked: “And no rise out of anybody at the Gallery?”
“No,” said Nick. “We all looked and looked. The taxi driver and the nuns and all of us. It wasn’t anybody ever mugged in this town.”
“I say they were trying to spring him,” grunted Dave.
“And him handcuffed to Cohen?”
“I know the Chief and most of the others think it was a push-off. But it wasn’t worth it: if anybody’d wanted to rub out Rainy, they could have managed it easy with stabbing, after he went to the pen. They never needed to risk all this. No, they were primed to spring him. Maybe they didn’t realize he was tied to Cohen. They got rattled, maybe. Remember what the taxi driver said about it? ‘Hell, you got him!’ That was no push-off.”
They shouted and argued back and forth, above the wailing siren. The Packard skidded into the miserable pavement of Pearl Street. No houses here; the wasteland and marshes spread out, block after block. Rubbish piles, tilted signboards... Far ahead near the railroad viaduct, a dark group of men milled around a huddle of cars. Dave leaned out and squinted his narrow eyes. “That’s Rhineheimer’s squad. Eight. They got here ahead of us.”
Anna Watelowitz and Irene Krzanowski were the best witnesses who had yet figured in the case. They had been playing games — playing house, mostly — since seven-thirty o’clock in the vacant lot which bordered Pearl Street,