Dick Tracy (9 page)

“Gee,” the boy said, pretending to ponder. “I can’t make up my mind. Maybe I oughta try a scoop of each one of them.”

Tracy smiled and nodded to Mike, who fixed the boy up.

Tracy was just starting a piece of apple pie when the Kid was scraping his spoon on the bottom of what had been a humongous bowl of ice cream. Despite this manful effort to get every last melted drop of his dessert, the boy finally looked full. Tess was sipping coffee.

“Are you guys married?” the Kid asked them.

“No,” Tess said, and looked down at her own piece of pie.

Tracy cleared his throat and looked at the boy sharply.

“What’s the matter, Tracy?” the Kid asked. “Did I touch a sore spot or somethin’?”

“First of all, it’s Mr. Tracy, or Detective Tracy—got that?”

“Yeah, yeah. Mr. Tracy. Detective Tracy.”

“Second of all, mind your own business,” Tracy advised, shifting in his seat.

Tess smiled faintly.

So did the Kid. His face wore memories of the food he’d just eaten—various shades of ice cream mingling with brown gravy smudges. His face looked like an abstract painting.

Tracy was about to introduce him to the world of napkins when Sam Catchem’s voice jumped out of the two-way.

“Tracy, something’s up down at the Southside Warehouse, on the riverfront. Better get down there.”

“What’s going on?”

“To tell you the truth, Tracy, we don’t exactly know. Pat called in and asked us to send some backup, ’cause he saw some suspicious lookin’ cops take Lips Manlis inside that warehouse . . .”

“I know all about that. I told him to call it in.”

“Well that’s fine, and he did, and we’re on our way over now—but when I try to check back in with Pat, I can’t raise him.”

“He may not be able to respond without giving away his surveillance position.”

“Yeah, sure, but then we had a call from a uniform cop patrolling the area, who also saw suspicious vehicles heading into that warehouse, and now we can’t raise
him,
either.”

“I’m on my way,” Tracy said hurriedly, and slid out of the booth, tossing some dollar bills and coins on the table; both the Kid and Tess were looking at him widened.

“Got to go,” Tracy said.

“What about the eating machine?” Tess asked, nodding pointedly toward the boy.

“Next stop,” the boy said with glum sarcasm, “Juvenile Hall.”

“It’s awfully late for that,” Tess said. Her eyes beseeched Tracy to give the boy a reprieve.

“Take him to my place, then,” Tracy said impatiently. He put a key on the table. “I’ll arrange something with the orphanage tomorrow.” He was half out the door. “I’ll radio for a squad car to pick you two up.”

Tess blew him a kiss and Tracy blew her one back. The Kid made a face at such mush, even as he eyed the money Tracy left.

“Touch that,” Tess said without looking at the boy, “and I’ll break your arm.”

The boy made a disgusted face, but withdrew his hand.

“I don’t like dames,” he said.

“Good,” Tess said. “Neither do I.”

But Tracy was already out the door, where he walked quickly to his car, which he’d left at Mike’s earlier that day in anticipation of his dinner date with Tess. He wasn’t wearing a gun—normally, even off-duty he wore his shoulder holster—but it hadn’t seemed necessary for a trip to the Civic Opera House earlier this evening, a century ago.

He drove with one hand and reached over to pop the glove box with the other, grabbing the spare .38 within and slipping the gun into his topcoat pocket. Something at the back of his neck was tingling. Had Pat stumbled onto something big? If so, Tracy only hoped his zealous little partner would have sense enough to wait for the cavalry.

The industrial area along the riverfront was a maze of narrow streets, with the occasional pools of street-lamp light mere drops in a dark ocean. But Pat’s directions had been good, and Tracy saw the squad car parked in the alleyway where Pat said it would be, and pulled over himself, and walked toward the Front Street warehouses, one of which would bear the number Pat had given him. He had the gun in his hand in his topcoat pocket. The rain had never come tonight, but yesterday’s wetness remained.

Shortly, he found the massive redbrick warehouse; a few lights were on inside, but he could hear nothing, even when he pressed his ear to the cloudy glass windows along the Front Street side of the building. He went around back and found a window ajar.

And found Pat.

The pudgy detective was sprawled amidst some garbage cans, and next to him, with a dent significantly reminiscent of Patton’s head, was the garbage-can lid he’d been smacked with.

Tracy cradled his partner in his arms like a big baby, and the man began to groan, and come slowly awake.

“Tracy . . . oh!” Patton touched his head. He wasn’t bleeding, but he had a bump on his head like a doorknob.

“Are you okay, Pat?

Tracy helped him slowly, tentatively, to his feet.

“The best you can say is I’m alive.”

Tracy was still steadying him. “I don’t suppose you know who hit you.”

Patton shook his head; the motion hurt him and he winced.

Tracy let go of his partner and then watched him, to see if he’d fall again; but Patton seemed steady on his feet. Steady enough, anyway.

“Did they take your gun?”

Patton checked. “No,” he said.

“Okay. Stay put. And really stay put this time. Sam and some boys should show any minute.”

Tracy climbed in the window and moved through a dim—but not pitch-dark—warehouse where wooden crates and boxes were stacked high, like fortress battlements. He tripped on something, caught himself without making any noise. A train track embedded in the cement floor had caught his toe. Railroad tracks, in fact, seemed to wind here and there, throughout the warehouse.

That made a sort of sense. There was probably a freight elevator in back, with tracks on its bed, that lowered to an underground railway tunnel. The system of underground railway tunnels—fifty miles of them, on which diminutive battery-driven trains carried freight, coal, and cinders beneath the central city—had been a boon for bootleggers. Due to corrupt city officials, some of those tunnels, not long ago, had been used to ship hooch from the riverfront to warehouses like these to speakeasies like Lips Manlis’s joint.

Taking care not to trip over the rails, Tracy wound his way through the towering crates, the .38 out of his topcoat pocket and tightly in hand now; he was listening quietly, hearing nothing.

Then he heard it: the echo of voices.

Tracy froze.

He moved closer to the sound, and the blurred words became distinct enough to make out.

“I didn’t come to this burg to be a lousy janitor,” somebody said.

“Just finish up so we can get out,” another voice said.

Tracy moved toward the voices. Quickly but carefully, quietly.

“The boss sure does mean business,” a third voice said, “don’t he?”

The voices were louder now; cavernous though the warehouse was, Tracy was closing the distance.

“Personally,” the first voice said, “I think the boss has got a screw loose.”

The voices were just around the corner now.

“That’s it,” one of them said. “Let’s get out of here before the cops show.”

“Raise ’em!”

Tracy yelled the words as he stepped out into the open where three men dressed as cops were standing in a loose circle near some stacked crates and boxes, not doing anything apparently. But nearby were several mops in buckets, the sight of which deflected Tracy’s attention just long enough for the phony cops to go for their guns, which were hipholstered in true cop fashion.

A bullet whizzed through Tracy’s hat and sent it flying and he moved right toward the fake cops instead of taking cover, he charged right at them, firing his .38. Bullets zinged and sang around him, but the bad guys were unnerved—they could shoot, but they couldn’t aim, back-pedaling, as he bore down on them.

There were six bullets in Tracy’s .38, and Tracy parceled out two per hood, bullets going in straight as arrows but spiraling out the back.

And all three of the “cops” were as lifeless as the cement floor by the time they hit it—two face down, one face up.

Tracy stood over them, his eyes wide and burning from the cordite, his breathing heavy, near panting, his gun trailing smoke.

Then he began looking around. The buckets of soapy water interested him.

But not as much as the walnut shells.

T
racy was just finishing up a quick, expert diagram of the crime scene when he heard the sirens of arriving squad cars. Something blue winked up at him from the floor, and he knelt, found a sapphire earring, which he studied briefly, then dropped in his pocket.

A phalanx of uniformed men descended, with Sam Catchem leading the way.

Catchem stood with his hands in his topcoat pockets and stared down at the three corpses in cop uniforms. He wore a red fedora and a loud tie and his perpetual smirk.

“You been a busy boy, Tracy,” Catchem said. “These the first cops you ever shot?”

“Recognize them?” Tracy said, joining him.

Catchem was a veteran of several police forces; he’d never lit in one spot longer than a year or two, with the Boston Police Department his most recent stop. Tracy had recently interviewed and hired Catchem for the Major Crimes squad, taking a chance on him, because the man had racked up citations for bravery and cracked major cases from L.A. to Brooklyn.

“Philly talent,” Catchem said. “Brothers. The Crouch boys.”

“I didn’t know you were ever on the Philly force.”

“Wasn’t. That was when I was in the delicatessen business.” He fished some smokes out of his pocket.

Tracy grabbed his arm. “No,” he said. “No smoking in here till we deal with the evidence properly.”

“There was a crime committed here?” Catchem asked curiously. “Killing the Crouch boys is a public service.”

Chief Brandon arrived with a second wave of men. He was turning in a slow circle, looking around at the warehouse’s mostly empty floor, with the expression of a tenant who had come home to find his apartment burgled. “What happened in here?”

“Lips Manlis came in,” Tracy said, “but he didn’t come out. Isn’t that right, Pat?”

Patton was bringing up the rear, working on his derby, trying to restore its shape. “Far as I know,” Patton admitted. “I slept through part of it.”

“Officer Lefty Moriarty was patrolling the area,” Catchem said, “and called in about the unmarked car, but that’s the last we heard of him.”

“Have a couple men check the periphery,” Tracy said to Patton, “outside the building.”

Patton nodded and did.

Moriarty was a reliable veteran cop whose beat included this waterfront area. Tracy knew him only slightly, but the man’s reputation was solid.

“As for the unmarked car both Pat and Officer Moriarty saw,” Tracy said, “you’ll find it parked behind that wall of crates. I already checked it—no plates, no registration. You can be sure it’s hot.”

“Who all was
in
here?” Brandon demanded. “Besides these phony cops you drilled? What
happened
here?”

“There’s a recently-in-use cement truck parked up top of that platform over there,” Tracy said, pointing. Brandon and Catchem took that in, but obviously didn’t grasp the significance.

Tracy walked and gestured toward the mops in buckets of water, off around the corner of the stacked crates. “We’ll have the lab check that dirty water—but from the smell and texture of it, I’d say the remains of Lips Manlis were recently encased in quick-drying cement.”

Now Catchem, Patton and Brandon got it, and exchanged nods and knowing looks.

“Lips always did want to be a pillar of the community,” Catchem said. “So the Crouch boys were cleaning up, while somebody else dumped Lips in the drink?”

“Most likely,” Tracy said. “Plenty of access to the dock from this warehouse. Neither Pat nor Moriarty would have seen that.” Tracy shook his head. “It’s too bad those phony cops all went down.”

Catchem snorted. “Why?”

“Because,” Tracy said, quietly arch, “corpses don’t respond all that well to interrogation. And because I want the one who hired them—the one who ordered the rub-out.”

“You don’t
know
for sure Manlis is dead,” Brandon pointed out.

“Then,” Tracy said, “we better
find
Lips Manlis, fast.”

“We’ll put an A.P.B. out on him,” Patton said.

“Write that A.P.B. on a slip of paper,” Catchem said wryly, “tie it to a rock and throw it in the river, why don’t ya, and let Lips know we’re lookin’ for him.”

“But
who
was responsible?” Brandon asked, frustration tingeing his voice. “It could be any one of the major gang figures.” Brandon counted them off on his fingers. “Pruneface, Johnny Ramm, Mocca, Spaldoni, even Texie Garcia . . . with this gang war brewing . . .”

“I
know
who was responsible,” Tracy said.

Brandon looked at his ace detective with a wide-eyed, frozen expression.

“Well, c’mon, Tracy—spill!” Catchem said.

Tracy curled his finger at Catchem, Patton, and Brandon, and they followed as Tracy walked a few paces and knelt. He pointed to the walnut shells. “See those?”