“Why couldn’t you hold him longer?” the inspector growled. Picking up the other phone, he said sharply, “Did they get a trace on that call?”
After listening a moment, he said, “Okay. We’ll take the rest of it on my car’s two-way. Tell Blake I want constant reports as they come in.”
He hung up the phone instead of laying it down again.
“They had Alberto pinpointed and got his location on the air within forty-five seconds of the time he called. He phoned from a tavern over on the East Side. There was a squad car cruising only six blocks from there, and possibly they. made it in time. We should know before we get there ourselves.”
We passed through the dining room and cocktail lounge so rapidly, customers turned to stare in our wake.
At the front door Mouldy Greene said in a surprised voice, “You still here, Sarge? Thought you’d gone after Fausta long ago.”
We both brushed by without answering, which was a mistake. For when we reached Day’s car at the bottom of El Patio’s front steps, we found Mouldy right behind us. As Day and I crowded into the rear seat, Mouldy opened the front door and plumped himself next to the driver.
Turning sidewise, he scowled at me. “It just registered on me that something’s up,” he said. “What’s happened to Fausta?”
“Corner of Fifth and Martin,” Day snapped at the driver. “Open it up, and keep the two-way on.”
The chauffeur seemed to realize that Day’s mild “Open it up” meant jet speed. He took off like a rocket ship, his siren wide before we even reached the stone pillars at the entrance to the club’s driveway. It was something like eight miles across the heaviest trafficked part of town to Fifth and Martin, but I believe we made it in less than ten minutes.
Halfway across town the radio reported that the police had arrived at the tavern just as Alberto came out and that there had been some shooting. One of the two-man police team had been knocked out of action with a shoulder wound, Sergeant Blake’s voice said from the radio, and the other cap had Alberto cornered in a flat above the tavern. Other police were on the way to the scene, he went on, but since the radio of the original car was now unmanned, there wouldn’t be any additional reports until another squad car got there.
We arrived at Fifth and Martin before any further reports were forthcoming.
The tavern was a corner building, separated from the one next to it by only a four-foot areaway. As we arrived, the police were in the act of shoving back the gathering crowd and roping off the street. Searchlights bathed three sides of the building in bright glare, and a fourth light was directed into the areaway so that any attempt by the cornered man to cross to the next building could be spotted immediately.
A uniformed cop with the gold badge of a lieutenant seemed to be directing the operation. Stepping to his side, Warren Day asked him to report the situation.
“Oh, hello, sir,” the lieutenant said respectfully. “I’m not sure myself what the situation is, except we’ve got somebody trapped in that upstairs flat. All I know is I got a radio report of a shooting, and when I got here I found Officer Healey had been wounded and his partner, Thompkins, had the gunman cornered. I haven’t had a chance to find out what it’s all about.”
“The gunman’s a young punk named Alberto Thomaso,” the inspector growled. “He’s kidnaped a woman and was making the ransom call when we traced it to this tavern. You think maybe he’s got his kidnap victim up there too?”
“I couldn’t say, sir.” Turning to a nearby policeman who stood with a drawn revolver in his hand, the lieutenant said, “Come over here, Thompkins.”
Obediently the cop came over. He was a round-faced, middle-aged cop with the beginnings of a paunch.
“Was anybody with this guy when you jumped him?” the lieutenant asked.
“No, sir. He was all alone and just coming out of the tavern. We pulled up to the curb, jumped out of the car and were just closing in on him when he pulled a gun and plugged Healey through the shoulder. By the time I got my gun out, he’d run back into the tavern. I guess he intended to go out the place’s back door, but there’s three doors back there and he got the wrong one. One leads out to the alley, one downstairs to the rest rooms and one to the flat upstairs. He picked the last door, and by then I was in the tavern and he didn’t have time to change his mind. When I threw a shot at him, he ran up the stairs.”
“You sure he’s still up there?” Day asked.
“There’s nowhere else he could go. The tavern keeper told me he lives in the flat, and that stairway is the only entrance. The tavern keeper had a gun under the bar, so I set him to watching the stair door, shooed all the customers out and made a quick call for help over the car radio. Then, until help arrived, I covered the areaway between the two buildings to make sure he didn’t try to slip across.”
I asked, “Anybody but Alberto up there?”
Thompkins shook his head. “The tavern keeper says no. He lives alone.”
Mouldy Greene said in a calm voice, “Well, what we waiting for, Sarge? Let’s go in and get this punk.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Warren Day gave Mouldy an irritated look. “Listen, Greene, you’re just an innocent bystander here. What makes you think you’re going anywhere?”
Mouldy looked astonished. “Isn’t this the guy who snatched Fausta?”
“Let’s let the cops run things, Mouldy,” I suggested kindly. “This sort of thing is their business.”
Mouldy’s expression turned dubious, but since he had never quite gotten over the army habit of regarding me as his sergeant, he subsided temporarily in order to await developments.
Day turned to Patrolman Thompkins. “You’re certain he didn’t slip across to the next building while you were making your last radio report?”
“He couldn’t have,” the patrolman said positively. “The guy who. owns the tavern says there’s no trap onto the roof. And the only two windows on the areaway side aren’t anywhere near the windows in the next building. He might have reached the roof if he was athletic enough by climbing out a rear window and pulling himself up over the edge of the parapet, but he couldn’t have done it in the time it took me to get the areaway covered. Besides, it would take a Tarzan to make the roof that way, and from what I saw of this guy, he was no Tarzan.”
“Maybe he went down instead of up,” the inspector suggested.
This time the lieutenant answered. “No, sir. I checked both the back of the building and the side Thompkins couldn’t see. It’s a thirty-foot drop from the windows on both sides, and there’s nothing to climb down. The back is a brick courtyard and the side a concrete sidewalk. If he’d jumped, he’d be lying on the ground with a couple of broken legs.”
The inspector scowled across at the windows again. “The same things that make it tough for him to get out make it tough for us to get in. And I want this lad taken alive. He’s an important witness in a homicide case, and also we don’t know where he’s concealed the woman he kidnaped. How do you plan getting him out of there, Lieutenant?”
“I’ve sent for a scaling ladder. I thought I’d get some men on the roof next door and have them put a few tear-gas shells through the windows. That should bring him back down the stairway. Meantime I thought I’d take a crack at talking him down as soon as things out here were organized.”
Things had pretty well organized themselves while we talked to the lieutenant. Ropes were now tautly stretched across the street and across two sides of the corner intersection, and police had managed to get all the curious onlookers beyond the ropes. Men with riot guns kept a steady watch on. the dark windows of the flat.