It was now five minutes to ten, too late to catch Byrnes at home.
While he waited for the lieutenant to arrive, Meyer doodled a picture of a man in a fedora shooting a Colt .45 automatic. The man looked very much like Meyer, except that he possessed a full head of hair. Meyer had once possessed a full head of hair. He tried to remember when. It was probably when he was ten years old. He was smiling painfully over his own joke when Byrnes came into the squadroom. The lieutenant looked dyspeptic this morning. Meyer surmised that he missed the painters. Everyone on the squad missed the painters. They had added humanity to the joint, and richness, a spirit of gregarious joy, a certain je ne sais quoi.
“We got trouble,” Meyer said, but before he could relate the trouble to the lieutenant, the phone rang again. Meyer lifted the receiver, identified himself, and then looked at Byrnes.
“It’s the Chief of Detectives” he said, and Byrnes sighed and went into his office to take the call privately.
Thrity-three telephone calls were exchanged that morning as police and city government officials kept the wires hot between their own offices and Lieutenant Byrnes,’ trying to decide what to do about this latest revolting development. The one thing they did not need on this case was publicity that would make them all appear foolish. And yet, if there really had been a leak about the extortion attempts, it seemed likely that the full story might come to light at any moment, in which case it might be best to level with the papers before they broke the news. At the same time, the anonymous caller might only have been speculating, without any real evidence to back up his claim of extortion, in which case a premature release to the newspapers would only serve to breach a danger that was not truly threatening. What to do, oh, what to do?
The telephones rang, and the possibilities multiplied. Heads swam and tempers flared. The mayor, James Martin Vale himself, postponed a walking trip from City Hall to Grover Park and personally called Lieutenant Byrnes to ask his opinion on “the peril of the situation.” Lieutenant Byrnes passed the buck to the Chief of Detectives who in turn passed it back to Captain Frick of the 87th, who referred JMV’s secretary to the police commissioner, who for reasons unknown said he must first consult with the traffic commissioner, who in turn referred the police commissioner to the Bridge Authority who somehow got on to the city comptroller, who in turn called JMV himself to ask what this was all about.
At the end of two hours of dodging and wrangling, it was decided to take the bull by the horns and release transcripts of the telephone conversations, as well as photocopies of the three notes, to all four city newspapers. The city’s liberal blue-headline newspaper (which was that week running an expose on the growth of the numbers racket as evidenced by the prevalence of nickel and dime betters in kindergarten classes) was the first paper to break the story, running photos of the three notes side by side on its front page. The city’s other afternoon newspaper, recently renamed the Pierce-Arrow-Universal-International-Bugle-Chronicle-Clarion or something, was next to feature the notes on its front page, together with transcripts of the calls in 24-point Cheltenham Bold.
That night, the early editions of the two morning newspapers carried the story as well. This meant that a combined total of four million readers now knew all about the extortion threats.
The next move was anybody’s.
Anthony La Bresca and his pool hall buddy, Peter Vincent Calucci (alias Calooch, Cooch, or Kook) met in a burlesque house on a side street off The Stem at seven o’clock that Monday night.
La Bresca had been tailed from his place of employment, a demolition site in the city’s downtown financial district, by three detectives using the ABC method of surveillance. Mindful of the earlier unsuccessful attempts to keep track of him, nobody was taking chances anymore — the ABC method was surefire and foolproof.
Detective Bob O’Brien was “A,” following La Bresca while Detective Andy Parker, who was “B,” walked behind O’Brien and kept him constantly in view. Detective Carl Kapek was “C,” and he moved parallel with La Bresca, on the opposite side of the street. This meant that if La Bresca suddenly went into a coffee shop or ducked around the corner, Kapek could instantly swap places with O’Brien, taking the lead “A” position while O’Brien caught up, crossed the street, and maneuvered into the “C” position. It also meant that the men could use camouflaging tactics at their own discretion, changing positions so that the combination became BCA or CBA or CAB or whatever they chose, a scheme that guaranteed La Bresca would not recognize any one man following him over an extended period of time.
Wherever he went, La Bresca was effectively contained. Even in parts of the city where the crowds were unusually thick, there was no danger of losing him. Kapek would merely cross over onto La Bresca’s side of the street and begin walking some fifteen feet ahead of him, so that the pattern read C, La Bresca, A, and B. In police jargon, they were “sticking like a dirty shirt,” and they did their job well and unobtrusively, despite the cold weather and despite the fact that La Bresca seemed to be a serendipitous type who led them on a jolly excursion halfway across the city, apparently trying to kill time before his seven-o’clock meeting with Calucci.
The two men took seats in the tenth row of the theater. The show was in progress, two baggy-pants comics relating a traffic accident one of them had had with a car driven by a voluptuous blonde.
“You mean she crashed right into your tail pipe?” one of the comics asked.
“Hit me with her headlights,” the second one said.
“Hit your tail pipe with her headlights?” the first one asked.
“Almost broke it off for me,” the second one said.
Kapek, taking a seat across the aisle from Calucci and La Bresca, was suddenly reminded of the squadroom painters and realized how sorely he missed their presence. O’Brien had moved into the row behind the pair, and was sitting directly back of them now. Andy Parker was in the same row, two seats to the left of Calucci.
“Any trouble getting here?” Calucci whispered.
“No,” La Bresca whispered back.
“What’s with Dom?”
“He wants in.”
“I thought he just wanted a couple of bills.”
“That was last week.”
“What’s he want now?”
“A three-way split.”
“Tell him to go screw,” Calucci said.
“No. He’s hip to the whole thing.”
“How’d he find out?”
“I don’t know. But he’s hip, that’s for sure.”
There was a blast from the trumpet section of the four-piece band in the pit. The overhead leikos came up purple, and a brilliant follow spot hit the curtain stage left. The reed section followed the heraldic trumpet with a saxophone obbligato designed to evoke memory or desire or both. A gloved hand snaked its way around the curtain. “And now,” a voice said over the loudspeaker system while one-half of the rhythm section started a snare drum roll, “and now, for the first time in America, direct from Brest, which is where the little lady comes from … exhibiting her titillating terpsichoreal skills for your pleasure, we are happy to present Miss … Freida Panzer!”
A leg appeared from behind the curtain.