Maccunn raised his head once and looked down at the right side of his chest and it seemed curiously flat, curiously distant; he lowered his head and was still. Angelo moaned.
The wind was like an icy wall.
In the reporters’ room of the Ninth Precinct Police Station, Nick Green was playing cooncan with Blondie Kessler, when the Desk Sergeant yelled from the next room:
“Blondie! Pineapple at Tony Maschio’s Barber Shop on Seventh — nothin’ left but a grease spot!”
Kessler put his cards face down on the table and stood up slowly.
He said very simply: “Dear, sweet Jesus!”
Green looked up at him with elaborately skeptical disdain. “Every time I get a swell hand,” he muttered plaintively, “something happens so you have an excuse to run out on me.”
Kessler, moving towards the door, yipped: “Come on.”
Nicholas, sometimes “St Nick,” Green was thirty-six — with the smooth tanned skin, bright China-blue eyes of twenty, the snowy white hair of sixty. He was tall and slim and angular, and his more or less severe taste in clothes was violently relieved by a predilection for flaming red neckties.
His nickname derived from his rather odd ideas about philanthropy. He had been at one time or another a tent-show actor, a newspaperman, gambler, gun runner, private detective, and a few more ill-assorted whatnots, and that wide experience had given him decidedly revolutionary convictions as to who was deserving and who was not.
A stroke of luck combined with one of his occasional flashes of precise intuition had enabled him to snatch a fortune from a falling stock market and for three years he had used his money and the power it carried to do most of the things young millionaires don’t do. He numbered legmen, Park Avenue debutantes, pickpockets, touts, bank robbers and bank presidents, wardheelers, and international confidence men among his wide and varied circle of friends, and he had played Santa Claus to more than a few of them at one time or another. He found the devious twistings and turnings of politics, the complicated intrigues of the New York underworld exciting, spent more of his time in night courts than in nightclubs and was a great deal prouder of his accuracy with a Colt .45 than he was of his polo.
He got up and followed Blondie Kessler out of the reporters’ room and down the corridor. In his car — a black and shiny and powerful coupé — they careened around the corner and roared north. Green swerved to miss a sleepily meandering cab by inches, asked:
“Now, about this Maschio?”
Blondie was a police reporter on the Star-Telegram. His hair was as black as St Nick’s was white. He was a squat stocky Dutchman almost as broad as he was long and he had a habit of staccato, almost breathless expression, particularly when he was a little excited.
“Tony Maschio is — or was — Gino’s brother. He’s run a barbershop where a lot of the town’s big shots go to have their fringes trimmed for eleven or twelve years, an’ he’s been partners with Gino an’ Lew Costain in a high-powered gambling syndicate on the side. His shop was a little bit of a two-by-four joint, but Tony an’ his hand-picked barbers were artists and it was usually full of names from Wall Street or Park Row.”
Kessler was silent a moment; and Green invited: “And...”
“And — Bruce Maccunn, my Managing Editor, has been dropping in at Tony’s for a mustache trim an’ a mudpack every Friday night for as long as I can remember. I’ve located him there a half dozen times in the last two or three years — late Friday nights.”
Green whistled softly. “And...”
Kessler had no time to answer; the car slid to the curb across the street from the pile of smoking ruins that had been Maschio’s barbershop. In spite of the hour, the glacial wind, the usual gallery of morbidly curious had gathered. Several firemen, policemen, and an ambulance squad from the Emergency Hospital were industriously combing the debris of bricks and steel and charred wood.
Kessler was the first reporter on the scene; he scurried about from one to another after information. Green strolled over to join two men who were standing a little way down the street in earnest conversation. One of them was Doyle, a plainclothesman whom he knew slightly, and the other was a wild-eyed Italian who was explaining with extravagant gestures that if he hadn’t lingered in the corner lunchroom for a second cup of coffee he, too, would have been blown to bits. He, it appeared, was Giuseppe Picelli, Tony’s Number Three Barber, and he’d been on his way back to the shop when the explosion occurred.
Green jerked his head towards the heap of wreckage. “How many have they found?”
“Don’t know.” Doyle chewed his unlighted cigar noisily. “Most of ’em are in pieces — little pieces. We’ve identified Tony an’ one of his barbers, but there’s a lot of pieces left over. This guy” — he nodded at Picelli — “says Bruce Maccunn was there — came in jus’ before he left.”
Picelli bobbed his head up and down, jabbered excitedly: “Sure, Mister Maccunn came in as I went out — an’ there was another fellow — I don’t know him... An’ Tony an’ Angelo an’ Giorgio...”
“That all?” Green was blowing hard in his bare hands to warm them.
“That’s all were there when I left — but Gino an’ Mister Costain were coming over. Tony was expecting them...”
Green and Doyle looked at each other.
Doyle grunted: “If Lew Costain got there for the blow-off it makes my job about eight hundred percent harder. I don’t guess there are more than eight hundred people in New York that’d like to see him in little pieces.”
Kessler galloped over. He was a little green around the mouth and eyes.
“Mac g-got it!” he stuttered. “They just dug him out — or wh-what’s left of him...”
Doyle tried to light his cigar in the screaming wind. “Why did Gino Maschio an’ Costain get it,” he growled. “Maybe there’s not enough left of them to find out, but if Picelli here knows his potatoes they were in the shop or on their way to the shop — an’ if they were on their way they would’ve showed up by now.”
Kessler gurgled: “Where’s a telephone?”
“There’s one in the lunchroom around the corner on Second Avenue.” Picelli waved his arm dramatically.
A police car, its siren moaning shrilly, pulled up and a half dozen assorted detectives piled out.
Kessler grabbed Green’s arm, shouted, “Come on, Nick — I gotta telephone an’ I wanna talk to you.” They hurried towards Second Avenue.
Green grinned down at the tugging, puffing reporter.
“You look like a crazed bloodhound,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’ve got another one of those red-hot Kessler theories.”
“Theory my eye! I’ve got the whole business — the whole bloody shebang!”
“Uh-huh.” Green’s grunt was elaborately incredulous.
Kessler snorted. “Listen, John Sallust was released from Atlanta three days ago!”
“So what?”
Kessler’s mouth made an amazed O. “So what! So Bruce Maccunn was the man who rode Sallust — in the paper — an’ finally stuck him for the Arbor Day Parade bombing nearly five years ago. So Sallust swore by the beards of Marx and Lenin he’d get Maccunn. So, after a half dozen appeals and new trials and whatnot he finally got a commutation and what does he do but make good and plant a pineapple under the man who put him behind the bars!”
They turned the corner.
Green murmured softly: “Blondie, my child — you’re just as dippy as a bedbug — an especially dippy bedbug.”
Kessler stopped suddenly, stood with his arms expressively outstretched and said:
“For the love of God — do you mean to tell me you don’t get it? Maccunn, more than anyone else, or all the rest of ’em put together, hung that rap on Sallust. The Government wanted to drop the case on insufficient evidence, but Maccunn hated radicals like poison an’ wouldn’t let ’em. His editorials yelled about corruption and anarchy and it finally worked. What’s more natural than Sallust wanting to wipe Maccunn as soon as he got out?”