Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

Finney and Matteracaught the squeal. The scene was packed with onlookers, but Finney and Mattera didn’t share their overwhelming interest in the spectacle. They came, they looked, they confirmed there were no eyewitnesses to question, and they went over to the White Tower for coffee. Let the lab boys sweat it out all night, searching through a coal mine for a black cat that wasn’t there. Fingerprints? Evidence? Clues? A waste of time.

“Figure the touch man is on a plane by now,” Finney said. “Be on the West Coast before the body’s cold.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So Lucky Tom finally bought it. Nice of him to pick a decent night for it. You hate to leave the station house when it’s raining. But a night like this, I don’t mind it at all.”

“It’s a pleasure to get out.”

“It is at that,” said Finney. He stirred his coffee thoughtfully, wondering as he did so if there were a way of stirring your coffee without seeming thoughtful about it. “I wonder,” he said, “why anyone would want to kill him.”

“Good question. After all, what did he ever do? Strong-arm robbery, assault, aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon, extortion, three murders we knew of and none we could prove—”

“Just trivial things,” said Finney.

“Undercover owner of Cleo’s Club, operator of three illegal gambling establishments—”

“Four.”

“Four? I only knew three.” Mattera finished his coffee. “Loan-shark setup, number-two man in Barry Beyer’s organization, not too much else. We did have a rape complaint maybe eight years ago—”

“A solid citizen.”

“The best.”

“A civic leader.”

“None other.”

“It was sure one peach of a professional touch,” Finney said. “Six shots fired point-blank. Revenge, huh?”

“Something like that.”

“No bad blood coming up between Beyer and Archie Moscow?”

“Haven’t heard a word. They’ve been all peace and quiet for years. Two mobs carve up the city instead of each other. No bad blood spilled in the streets of our fair city. Instead of killing each other they cool it, and rob the public.”

“True public spirit,” said Finney. “The reign of law and order. It makes one proud to serve the cause of law and order in this monument to American civic pride.”

“Shut up,” Mattera said.

Approximately two daysand three hours later, three men walked out the front door at 815 Cameron Street. The establishment they left didn’t have an official name, but every cabdriver in town knew it. Good taste precludes a precise description of the principal business activity conducted therein; suffice it to say that seven attractive young ladies lived there, and that it was neither a nurses’ residence nor a college dormitory.

The three men headed for their car. They had parked it next to a fire hydrant, supremely confident that no police officer who noted its license number would have the temerity to hang a parking ticket on the windshield. The three men were trusted employees of Mr. Archer Moscow. They had come to collect the week’s receipts, and, incidentally, to act as a sort of quality-control inspection team.

As they reached the street, a battered ten-year-old convertible drew up slowly alongside them. The driver, alone in the car, leaned across the front seat and shot the center man in the chest with a sawed-off shotgun. Then he quickly scooped an automatic pistol from the seat and used it to shoot the other two men, three times each. He did all of this very quickly, and all three men were very dead before they hit the sidewalk.

The man stomped on the accelerator pedal and the car leaped forward as if startled. The convertible took the corner on two wheels and as suddenly slowed its speed to twenty-five miles an hour. The little man drove four blocks, parked the car, and raised the convertible top. He disassembled the sawed-off shotgun and packed it away in his thin black attaché case with the automatic, removed the jumper wire from the ignition switch, and left the car. Once outside the car he removed his white gloves and put them, too, inside the attaché case. His own car was parked right around the corner. He put the attaché case into his trunk, got into his car, and went home.

Finney and Mattera got the squeal again, only this time it was a pain in the neck, good weather notwithstanding. This time there were eyewitnesses, and sometimes eyewitnesses can be a pain in the neck, and this was one of those times. One of the eyewitnesses reported that the killer had been on foot, but this was a minority opinion. All of the other witnesses agreed there had been a murder car. One said that it was a convertible, another that it was a sedan, and a third that it was a panel truck. There were two other minority opinions as well. One witness said there had been three killers. Another said one. The rest agreed on two, and Finney and Mattera figured three sounded reasonable, since two guns had been used, and someone had to drive the car, whatever kind of car it was. Then they asked the witnesses if they would be able to identify the killer or killers, and all of the witnesses suddenly remembered that this was a gangster murder, and what was apt to happen to eyewitnesses who remembered what killers looked like, and they all agreed, strange as it may seem, that they had not gotten a good look at the killers at all.

Finney had to ask the stupid questions, and Mattera had to write down the stupid answers, and it was an hour before they got over to the White Tower.

“Eyewitnesses,” said Finney, “are notoriously unreliable.”

“Eyewitnesses are a pain in the neck.”

“True. Three more solid citizens—”

“Three of Archie Moscow’s solid citizens this time — Joe Dant and Third-Time Charlie Weiss and Big Nose Murchison. How would you like to have a name like Big Nose Murchison?”

“He doesn’t even have a nose now,” said Finney. “And couldn’t smell much if he did.”

“How do you figure it?”

“Well, as they said on Pearl Harbor Day—”

“Uh-huh.”

“This do look like war, sir.”

“Mmmmm,” said Mattera. “Doesn’t make sense, does it? You would think we would have heard something. That’s usually the nice thing about being a cop. You get to hear things, things the average citizen may not know about. You don’t always get to do anything about what you hear, but you hear about it. We’re only in this business because it gives us the feeling of being on the inside.”

“I thought it was for the free coffee,” said the counterman. They drank, pretending not to hear him.

“We’re going to look real bad, you know,” Finney said. “If Moscow and Beyer have a big hate going, they’re going to spill a lot of blood, and the chance of solving any of those jobs isn’t worth pondering.” He broke off suddenly, pleased with himself. He was fairly certain he had never used “pondering” in conversation before.

“And,” he went on, “with various killers flying in and out of town and leaving us with a file of unsolved homicides, the newspapers may start hinting that we are not the best police force in the world.”

“Everybody knows we’re the best money can buy,” said Mattera.

“Isn’t it the truth,” said Finney.

“And what bothers me most,” said Mattera, “is the innocent men who will die in a war like this. Men like Big Nose, for example.”

“Pillars of the community.”

“We’ll miss them,” said Mattera.

The following afternoon, Mr. Archer Moscow used his untapped private line to call the untapped private line of Mr. Barry Beyer. “You had no call to do that,” he said.

“To do what?”

“Dant and Third-Time and Big Nose,” said Moscow. “You know I didn’t have a thing to do with Lucky Tom. You got no call for revenge.”