The Last Cop Out (2 page)
Leon Bray ran the computer section that serviced the organization’s long list of activities. At fifty, he looked a decade older, his face seamed from years of intense detail work, eyes owlishly large behind thick-lensed glasses. He tapped the table top with his pencil and waited for the soft murmuring to cease.
“None of our people showed any unbalanced books,” he said. “I’ve triple-checked everything and the accounts were right, down to the last penny. Joe Morse and Baggert had upped their figures over twenty percent from last year and both Rose and Vic were doing great with their new territories. No complaints anywhere.”
Shelby digested the information and nodded, then looked to his right. “Kevin?”
Arthur “Slick” Kevin rolled his unlit cigar in his fingers and looked back at the chairman. He was nervous, and he didn’t like to be nervous, but what was happening had all the earmarks of something just beginning and promising to get bigger and bigger. His eyes narrowed and he shook his head.
“I checked with all the other offices and nobody’s trying to move in or take over. Chicago and St. Louis want to lend us some of their men who might be able to spot any new faces around in case it’s a push by some of those wise punks from Miami or Philly, or even K.C. They ran into some trouble like that last year, but cleared it up in a hurry. I told them we’d wait awhile to see how things developed.”
“How about Al Harris? He’s been out of Atlanta a year now.”
Kevin waved the suggestion off. “That was all big talk and his day is past. Al’s got that place in Baja California and hasn’t left it since he got there. The Mex authorities keep an eye on him all the time and let him blow his loot in that little town where he lives and the old boy seems happy about it. On top of everything, he’s got T.B. So even if Big Al Harris has the contacts and the loot to finance a return he’s got too much sense to try it.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“How about you, Remy?” Shelby asked.
All the little guy did was shrug, but that single gesture implied an intense investigation utilizing some two hundred trained men whose reports were analyzed down to the last detail. Finally he said, “Vic and Baggert both handled narcotics, but their territories didn’t overlap. Morse had the books and Rose was handling the shylocking. Nothing connects at all. None of them even had the same friends. I cross-checked them in every possible direction and couldn’t come up with a single connection except that Rose’s and Vic’s kids went to the same elementary school together.”
Almost a minute passed before Shelby let his eyes come up from the papers again. He studied each face in turn, then seemed to take them all in at once. At that moment he looked more like one of those stern faces of past jurists whose portraits in oils hang in the courtroom than the chairman of the underworld’s most affluent board of directors. “No one,” he told them softly, “kills four of our head people without having a reason.”
At the far end of the table the one they called Little Richard because of his huge bulk said, “We can’t be sure there’s just one.” Richard Case was the organization’s liaison man to the political spiderweb of the city. Ostensibly, he headed a mammoth real estate concern, was public-spirited and politically active, but like everything else, it was only a front, a cover for his true business.
“Go on, Richard.”
Three hundred pounds shifted in the chair, making it squeak under his weight. “No two guns were alike. Vic and Morse got it with thirty-eights, Baggart with a forty-five and Rose with a nine-millimeter job. The only thing the same was that each was a one-shot deal expertly placed.”
“We have hit men like that,” Shelby reminded him.
“No,” Case disagreed. “They would have made sure and placed a couple more in there. Besides, our guys wouldn’t have picked the time and places like that. These were all top ambush jobs and it looks like they were done with silenced rods. So far the cops can’t find anybody who heard a damn thing and whoever pulled off the hits must be either an expert at disguise or different guys altogether. The pattern’s the same, all right, but what witnesses were around can’t remember seeing anybody on one kill who matches up with anybody on another. If it is one guy he’s a damn top pro and there’s got to be heavy money behind him. That kind of talent costs.”
Case scraped his chair back, his face still thoughtful. “But one thing with a pro like that... he’ll know we’re alerted now and he won’t feel like exposing himself any further. He’ll take his money and go cool off somewhere and let them shop for another gun somewhere else. He sure as hell is good and although he knows the territory he can’t be local and my bet is that right now he’s long gone from here.”
“Let’s suppose it’s more than one guy,” Shelby offered.
“In that case it’ll be all the easier to find out what the hell is going on. Somebody’s going to make a bad move or a wrong one and we’ll know where it’s coming from. All we need to know is why and we can take it from there.”
“It’s a raid,” Kevin stated flatly.
Across the table Leon Bray squinted at him through the thick glasses. “I’m not so sure. None of the properties have been touched. There hasn’t been a squeal any place. There’s still a chance that this can be a personal vendetta.”
“Vendettas went out with the old regime,” Kevin told him.
“Perhaps,” Bray agreed, “but with girls and greed, they can always be reinstituted.”
Remy looked a little annoyed at both of them and slammed the table top with his palm. “I’ve already told you that there wasn’t any connection between them. That was the first angle we looked into and there’s absolutely no match at all. The only thing they had in common was this group right here and I don’t think I have to go any further than that.”
“Relax, Remy,” Shelby said. His mind had been sorting out the information and the possibilities and when he was satisfied he sat back and reached for a cigar. Everybody else except the three who didn’t smoke did the same. “There’s only one conclusion,” he said. “It’s a raid, all right.”
“So what do we do?” Slick Kevin asked him.
“Simple,” Shelby answered. “We wait. They eliminated our people to shake up our control. Now they try to move into the loose areas and try to take hold. All we do is wait and see who is stupid enough to match their manpower against ours. Meanwhile, we restructure our table of organization and the operations will continue as usual. I don’t think our opponent will be trying any further hits.”
But Mark Shelby was wrong. That night a hollow-tipped .22 went into the left earhole of Dennis Ravenal and the sub-chieftain of East Side prostitution died on silken sheets in a high rise apartment building whose door he thought was absolutely pick-proof.
Nobody heard a shot. Nobody saw an intruder.
At the offices of Manhattan’s Homicide Assault Squad Captain William Long sipped from a paper coffee cup and grinned at the commissioner. “Why break up a nice war like that?” he asked.
“Because it looks like the police department is pretty damned inept,” the commissioner glared.
“Oh, we’re ept, all right,” the captain told him. “It’s just that you can be more useful being useless sometimes. So far there aren’t any innocent bystanders.”
“That won’t last long. The other side hasn’t turned on their hoses yet.”
“Seems to me they don’t know where to look,” Long said.
“I suppose you have a few ideas?”
Long nodded, still smiling. It was nice to get under the commissioner’s skin. In two weeks he was retiring out and he couldn’t think of a better situation to mark the end of his career. “A few,” he admitted. “Nothing concrete, but after twenty-five years you sort of get an instinct for these sort of things.”
“I don’t suppose you’d care to explain them,” the commissioner said caustically.
Long finished his coffee, crumpled the cup and tossed it into the waste basket. “There’s only two possibilities, business or personal. Frankly, I can’t picture anybody dumb enough to go after the organization’s top men from a personal sense of vengeance. Ergo... it has to be business. Somebody wants in and they have to move somebody else out first. They have to be tremendously big since this is a move—not against a part—but against the entire network of the syndicate. They wouldn’t dare allow a chunk like that being bitten off without jeopardizing their entire situation. This new force moving in is playing the old cute game of removing the top men to rattle the rest enough to let them get a toehold in the game or an attempt to soften the operation so they can leech in themselves.”
“That’s a pretty dangerous play.”
“Nevertheless,” Long told him, “it’s been tried before and it’s worked before. Sometimes the big guys see the value of assimilating the new ones instead of fighting them. They’re absorbed, making their overall power even greater. There’s always new blood coming along.”
“And that, captain, makes it even worse. For a while there we’ve been able to push them back and with another year or two might even break them wide open, but if they start working from strength again everything we’ve done will be shot to hell.”
“Not if this war keeps on the way it’s going.”
“You know better than that.”
“Yeah. It’s just too good to last. They’re five down and I think the lesson is about over. By now they ought to be ready to expose their hand and call their shots.”
But Captain William Long was wrong too. At two-fifteen the next afternoon a taxicab was stolen from in front of a diner on Eighth Avenue. At two forty-eight the same cab was spotted, seemingly abandoned on a Greenwich Village side street, by a driver from the same fleet company. In the back seat Anthony Broderick, the former dockworker who was the enforcer for the organization’s shylocking racket, was slumped in the corner, a bullet from a .357 Magnum in his heart.
Gillian Burke sat in the balcony section of the Automat forking up beans and meat pie, washing it down with milk. In all the years he had been on the force nobody had ever referred to him by his first name. Always, it had been Gill, and even The Gill. Now here was another quarter-page editorial bringing up the past, the departmental trial, his suspension from the force because he was too much cop for the politicians to live with and spelling his name correctly and in three places. The writer reviewed his career in brief, commenting much too late that more men like him were needed, not fewer, even if a few official ears were scorched and perhaps innocent if unsavory hides were scratched.
Gill looked up when he saw Bill Long come over with his tray and pushed his paper aside to make room at the table. There was no doubt about the profession of either of them. The marks were there, inbred and refined to such a point that any aware citizen could recognize them after a minute’s scrutiny, and anyone outside the law could spot them immediately and at a hundred paces. Years of law enforcement, crime prevention-detection and association with the raw nerves and open hostility that fought against the normal society was a mold whose grain was indelible, even to the penetrating depth of a casual glance from eyes that saw more than other eyes could see.
There was one uneasy dissimilarity though. Bill Long was still there and it showed. Gill was outside the periphery of it all now and there was something in his demeanor like the ebbing of the tide on a low, sandy beach, a sadness, growing deeper with each receding wave. Yet the high-tide mark was still there and you knew that the water would be back again, and sometimes even higher when the storms come.
“Why didn’t you wait?” the captain asked.
“I was hungry, buddy.” He pushed the chair out with his foot. “Besides, I’m ready for seconds.”
Long sat down, took the dishes from his tray and arranged them in their usual order, putting the tray on an empty chair. Gill left, was back in five minutes with another meat pie and a wedge of cake balanced on top of a fresh glass of milk. The captain grinned and cut into his meat loaf. “I would have taken you up on going to 21, but I don’t want to get exposed to any of that rich living.”
“Balls.”
“How’s the new job going?”
“Profitably, pal. Not everybody bought that crap about me.”
Long spooned sugar into his coffee and stirred it with a clatter. “Forget it, Gill. You lucked right in. So you dumped a pension because you were disgusted with the system and wouldn’t fight it, but a fifty grand a year job beats it all to hell. Besides, it’s the same kind of work.”
“Not really.”
“You know how many retired inspectors would like to be head security officer at Compat?”
“Tell me.”
“All of ’em.” “And you were just a sergeant. I just hope something like that turns up for me.”
Gill looked up from his cake and smiled. It wasn’t a smile that had humor in it. It was simply one that had to be understood. “Not you, Bill. You always were the idealist. That’s why you bought that farm eight years ago. You’re all cop and a good one, but it’s something you can turn off and stop being when the time comes.”
“But not you?”
“No, not me, Bill. It’s one of those things I hid from the psycho team all these years.”
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