Whatever else they were, one of the gang had to be an expert locksmith, and another a first rate boxman. And, Phil Egan would bet his last shamrock, they were holed up in the slightly run-down, semi-bohemian area around North Charles and Mount Royal. There were plenty of third rate hotels there — and a couple of good ones — plus rooming houses, bars, jazz joints. And there were several coffee houses where folk singers twanged guitars or bearded poets read their latest effusions to short-haired girls in toreador pants and dark glasses.
His first stop, obviously, was the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He phoned. Yes, Mr. Feldman had regained consciousness. Could he talk? Yes, but only for a minute or so.
It was late October, warm, hazy Indian summer, and Egan left his topcoat in the office. Hell of a day to be tracking down jewel thieves in town. He’d much rather be picking up Muriel after she got out of work at three and driving out towards Westminster to look at the foliage. He thought gloomily: that old line from Gilbert and Sullivan is right. A policeman’s lot is not a happy one.
He picked up the unmarked black Chevrolet sedan that he usually used from the police garage on Gay Street and headed north for the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Well, he thought philosophically, he would see Muriel that night, and damn the foliage. They’d make their own colors in their own fashion.
A policeman was seated out-man’s room. He recognized Egan and said: “Hello, Lieutenant. Our boy is awake, but he’s got a flying saucer for a head.”
Egan laughed shortly and went on in. A middle-aged nurse was sitting beside the bed, reading a magazine. The jewelry salesman’s head was swathed in bandages. He had his eyes closed and the whiteness of his palor emphasized the dark lines of his eyebrows. He was a rather thin man of about thirty-five, and his horn-rimmed glasses with one cracked lense were on the bedside table.
“Lieutenant Egan, Police Department,” he told the nurse crisply. Feldman heard him and slowly opened his eyes, which were brown and bloodshot.
“Sorry about this, Mr. Feldman. Feel like talking?”
The man smiled wanly and shook his head.
“Well, I understand,” Egan said soothingly. “Just a couple of routine questions for now. Did you see the men who sapped you?”
Feldman whispered: “Not very well. Happened too fast. One was kind of fat.”
“How many were there?”
“Three or four — I’m not sure.”
“Did they have a car?” Phil Egan asked.
“Yes, it was parked right behind me.”
“What make?”
“I think a Plymouth, about a fifty-six.”
“What color?”
“Black.”
“Did you notice the license number?”
Feldman shook his head. “Maryland plates,” he whispered. He closed his eyes wearily.
The nurse looked reprovingly at Egan. He said: “Well, that’s all for now. Thanks, Mr. Feldman.”
The man didn’t open his eyes.
A week later Feldman was out of the hospital and able to look through the mug books at Headquarters. He had seen his assailants briefly, but not well enough to make positive identification. The fat man he thought he might be able to identify.
He picked out four photos that might possibly be those of the men who had slugged him, including that of a fat-faced, heavy-set local thug named George “Binky” Byers, 28, who had fallen several times for petty larceny and simple assault. A very unlikely jewel thief, but Phil Egan sent Detective Sergeant Gus Anderson out to pick him up for questioning.
Byers last known address was a rooming house on Franklin Street. Anderson came back without him. He wasn’t there, had left no forwarding address, and nobody in that transient neighborhood knew where he had gone. He hadn’t been seen around the bars in over a year.
A few days later Egan, getting nowhere in his investigation of the jewelry heists, had dinner with Muriel Evans, in her three-room apartment on Mount Vernon Place. Muriel was Goucher ’54, which made her about twenty-nine. She was a blue-eyed, honey-haired blonde, about 5–6 in height, and with other and even more impressive statistics.
She was Travel Editor of the Baltimore Sun, and she had marriage in the back — and sometimes in the front — of her mind. She’d been Phil’s girl for three years, ever since they’d met at a posh party thrown by another Goucher girl whom Egan had known ever since his Georgetown Law School days.
Muriel was something to look at, in a clinging blue housecoat and not much else. “How’s my favorite cop?” she murmurred, pressing against him and turning her face up for his kiss. It lasted a long time.
“Yum,” he said finally, still holding her in his arms. “What’s cooking?”
“Me,” she said. “Also shrimp chop suey with water chestnuts, imported all the way from Doo Far’s carry-out around the corner on Charles Street.”
“Sounds great,” he said, letting her go.
She pointed to a tea tray with bottles, a jar of olives, a bucket of ice cubes, and cocktail glasses on it. “Be a good little Hawkshaw and mix us some martinis while I check the food,” she called out as she went into the tiny kitchen.
It was a cozy apartment. Wall-to-wall deep green carpeting, three Van Gogh reproductions on the walls, glass-topped coffee table in front of the fireplace, shiny black log scuttle, low bookcases, a handsome combination television, FM radio, and hi-fi, a record-holder, his picture and one of her mother and father on the mantle. The furniture was gray, chic, comfortable. He mixed the martinis, slumped into an easy chair, and turned on the television to catch the six o’clock news.
The news was tiresome. Khrushchev might come to the UN. Cuba was complaining about U.S. violation of her air space around Guantanamo. There was a new revolution in Costa Rica. Richard Burton had been seen with his wife in Switzerland. The Colts were in good condition for their game with the Packers at Green Bay Sunday. And the police were still baffled by the series of sensational jewel robberies that had netted the thieves a quarter of a million dollars.
He grimaced at that and turned off the set.
Muriel came back into the living room. “Be a few minutes yet,” she said. She sipped her martini, sitting on the floor in front of him, putting one hand comfortingly — if a bit excitingly — on his knee. He ran his fingers through her honey-colored hair.
“How are you doing with your jewel robbers?” she asked.
“Not so good,” he replied glumly. “They’re ruining my disposition. Also my love life.”
She looked at him. “I think that involves me. Please elucidate, Charlie Chan.”
He drained his martini and held out the olive to her. “I can’t stay long after we eat. Got to check The Block on this damned jewelry thing.”
She pouted. “Can’t it wait? I thought we’d eat, catch the new Italian movie at the Art, and then come back here for an orgy.”
Egan shook his head. “Can’t wait, even though I could use a good orgy. But give me a rain check.”
She sighed. “Sure. All I do these days is hand out rainchecks. If this keeps up I’ll take out after those jewelry heisters myself.”
He laughed shortly. “You’re a cinch to do better than we’re doing.”
III
“The block,” as it was known all up and down the east coast, was really three blocks on East Baltimore Street, and it was a garish tenderloin replete with bars, B-girls, burlesque shows, night clubs, tattoo parlors, third-rate hotels, all-night movies, and gospel missions. You could get anything there — a girl, dirty pictures, a beer, a crabcake, a broken head, a heroin fix. It was the last of its kind — an organized-to-the-hilt, syndicate-controlled, Barbary Coast.