“The battle of Shiloh,” she said, tapping a pencil absently against her teeth. Then she jerked erect. “Oh, of all the stupid idiots—”
“What’s the matter?”
“I just remembered where I ran across the name of that machine tool company. It was the other day in the library, when I was going through the back copies of the Express, looking up Purcell’s suicide.”
I whirled. “Did it have anything to do with Purcell?”
“No-o. That wasn’t it,” She bit her lip, concentrating.
I crushed out the cigarette. “Let’s go over to the library and see if we can find it again.”
She started to get up; then she glanced at her watch, and shook her head. “The library’s been closed for nearly an hour.”
“Well, we’ll go in the morning, then.”
“Oh, I could look it up tonight,” she replied, still frowning. “I can always get into the morgue over at the Express building. But what the devil was it? It was only a small item on a back page, and I think it was a followup on some older story.”
Then she snapped her fingers and got to her feet. I’ve got it! It was something about a robbery.” She ran into the bedroom to get her coat.
“But why in God’s name would anybody hold up a tool company?” I asked, helping her on with the coat.
“To steal a lathe?”
“No, no, of course not.” She gestured impatiently. “The payroll was held up. You stay right here. I’ll be back in less than an hour.”
Ten
I paced the floor, smoking one cigarette after another. Just after eleven-thirty I heard her key in the door. She came in and closed it quickly, and I could see intense interest and excitement in her eyes. I took her coat.
“Don’t bother to hang it up,” she said. “Toss it here on a chair. I think we’re onto something.”
She shoved one of the hassocks up to the coffee table and sat down. Opening her purse, she took out two sheets of paper covered with notes. I knelt on the floor across from her and watched eagerly.
“It was held up?” I asked.
She nodded. “But that’s not it alone. There are really two stories, apparently not related at all. But if you struck them together in just the right way you might get a hell of an explosion. Listen—”
She consulted the notes. “On December twentieth of last year—that would be a little over two months ago—the payroll of the Shiloh Machine Tool Company was hijacked just as it was being delivered by the armored car company. It had all the earmarks of a professional job, very thoroughly studied and thought out—cased, I believe the term is. In the first place, it was the last payday before Christmas, and all the employees were getting a cash bonus. The whole thing came to a little over fourteen thousand dollars. The timing, and the exact method of delivery of the money, had apparently been studied for some time. There were two men involved in the actual holdup, and a third was driving the getaway car.
“But something did go wrong. A police car showed up unexpectedly just at the last moment, and one of the two gunmen was killed. They both wore masks, incidentally. The other one, and the driver of the car, got away clean. Along with the money, of course. The case has never been solved. They don’t know to this day who the two men were, and none of the money was ever recovered.”
”What about the one who was killed?” I asked. “Didn’t they identify him?”
She nodded. “Yes. But there was no lead at all to the other two. He was an out-of-town hoodlum, from Oakland, California, I think. As far as the police could find out, he’d never been in Sanport before, and didn’t have any connections here at all. His name was Al Collins and he had a record a mile long, but he might as well have been from the moon as far as identifying the other two was concerned.
“Of course, the police checked out all the Shiloh employees who worked in the accounting and payroll departments as a matter of routine, but found nothing. If the gunmen had got any information from inside, the fact was well hidden. So much for the first story.
“Late the following night—that would be Saturday night December twenty-first—a liquor store was held up in one of the suburban shopping centers. It was a routine sort of thing, one gunman, fifty- or sixty-dollar haul, nobody killed. The case was turned over to Purcell and Stedman, along with several others they were working on.
“The next day, the owner of the liquor store tentatively identified a photograph of Danny Bullard as the gunman who’d held him up. This wasn’t particularly surprising; he’d held up plenty of them and had served time in prison for at least one. Late that afternoon Stedman and Purcell got a tip from a stool pigeon as to where Bullard was living. It was an old apartment house in a run-down section of town on Mayberry Street. They went out to pick him up for questioning. He didn’t answer their knock, but they thought they heard him inside, so they broke down the door. He was trying to get out a window and turned with a gun in his hand, ready to open fire. They shot and killed him. They made out their report, there was the customary hearing, and they were completely exonerated. End of second story.” She glanced up at me. “You can see the possibilities now.”
I nodded. “Did they ever find out if Bullard actually did rob the liquor store?”
“The case was closed that way. After all, he had a record of liquor store robberies, and the owner was pretty sure of his identification.”
”Then if your guess is right,” I said, “there would be one person—and maybe two—who knew Bullard hadn’t held up any liquor store and that he was just hiding out with fourteen-thousand from the Shiloh job; fourteen-thousand that hasn’t showed up to this day.”
“That’s right,” she replied. “And it goes a long way toward establishing the revenge motive. Justifiable killing in line of duty is one thing, but cold-blooded murder by two crooked cops for a pile of money is something else. But I’m inclined to think they might be wrong, about the killing, at least.”
“It’s possible,” I agreed. “Their idea probably is that Purcell and Stedman found out about the Shiloh loot and deliberately fast-talked the liquor store man into an identification, for an excuse.”
“That’s right. But they’d have to be pretty gruesome to do it. It’s more likely they didn’t even know Bullard had anything to do with the Shiloh job until they found the money in the apartment after they’d already killed him for resisting arrest. The temptation was overpowering, it looked safe, so they risked it. They probably thought the third man was also an out-of-town import. And he probably was, except that he was Danny Bullard’s brother.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And a cold-blooded goon who’d already killed two or three men. They picked a lovely spot to turn crooked.”
She lighted a cigarette. “There’s only one trouble with it, of course. And that is there’s still not the slightest connection between Danny Bullard and Frances Celaya, as far as anybody knows. And remember, the police have checked it in both directions. They investigated the Shiloh employees for underworld connections after the holdup, and looked into Bullard’s girl friends after Purcell’s death.”
“But there has to be,” I said. I got up and walked across the room. “Jesus, if I could only have got into her apartment. I might have found a letter or something.”
She looked thoughtful. “You’re absolutely positive there was nothing else in her purse that might have the address?”
“No,” I said. “Just the usual cosmetics and junk, and a pair of stockings she bought at Waldman’s.” I stopped. “Oh, sweet Jesus, how stupid can you get?”