Хал Эллсон - Masters of Noir - Volume 3

Jordan put his whistle in his pocket. “It’s all yours.”

At the station, Sergeant Gillchrist said, “Get down to the inspectors’ bureau. Report to Captain Sline, and hightail it.”

“What for?” Jordan asked, again.

The sergeant put his lips against his teeth and sucked in air. It was a gesture; it meant suction — pull, influence. Gillchrist thought Jordan was finagling a transfer to the bureau. Rookies under a year in the department didn’t get into the bureau, even as clerks. Not without pull. The sergeant thought it was pull, the relief thought Jordan was in trouble over a girl. So neither of them really knew anything.

The inspectors’ bureau was high in the chopped-up warren atop the City Hall building. It was strange territory.

Jordan knew the two men in the captain’s office because they were who they were. He had never seen either up close before. Captain Sline, the broad one, sat behind his desk, his back more rigid than the clerk’s had been. The other one, the little one with the quick, burning, black eyes and the hat on, was Shorty Eglin. Chief Inspector Bernard Eglin of the homicide detail. They said he didn’t like the Shorty and he didn’t like the Bernard; so everybody called him Ben Eglin. He sat slumped and loose as a sleeping child, so very loose that Jordan knew he was doing it because he was even more taut inside than the other man. They were talking when Jordan came in. They looked at him and then at each other, leaving some question suspended in the air between them.

“I’m Jordan. You wanted me?”

“You took your sweet time,” Eglin said.

Jordan looked at him. The pressure was infecting Jordan, too, making him sore at the relief with his puckered mouth, sore at Gillchrist who wasn’t going any higher and so found pull in the promotion of every other cop. Ron was sore at this little man with the raspy voice, the hot eyes and sardonic lips. Jordan said to himself, You’re an ugly runt with a reputation and so you shove rookies around. I ought to call you Shorty to your face. Aloud he said, “I came as soon as I was told to.”

Eglin grunted and looked at the captain. The question was between them again. Jordan wondered if he should have talked hack to the inspector. Eglin had no say-so in traffic and couldn’t touch him. Maybe Captain Sline could, though. Jordan said to himself, Remember your own rules. Keep your nose clean.

Sline turned to the rookie. “So you’re a lady’s man,” he said.

“He don’t look it,” said Eglin. “What’s he got?”

The relief guessed right, then. Jordan was in trouble over some girl. But it didn’t add up. There wasn’t any girl down on him. There wasn’t any girl who had cause to be down on him. He didn’t fool around with the kind that hollered; they were no good for anybody.

Sline said, “Know a girl named Elsa Berkey? Name mean anything?”

“No,” said Jordan quickly. Maybe too quickly, but it was the truth.

“A man named Bart Berkey?”

“No.”

“A man named Joe Crider?”

“If it’s the cigar-store guy, I know who he is. I don’t know him.”

The silence between the two men at the desk started again. Ease worked through Jordan. No one was accusing him. Joe Crider was in jail for investigation of murder. The murder of a cop — Bob Garfield, a young beat patrolman. Joe Crider was the owner of the biggest cigar-store chain in town. Garfield had been found in an alley alongside of one of Crider’s cigar stores not a half-dozen blocks from the City Hall. There’d been a hole in his chest and a .32 slug in his spine.

For two days the papers had been full of it. Station talk centered around it. One drop of blood had put Joe Crider behind bars. One drop of the dead officer’s blood, dripped on the sidewalk an inch beyond the sill of the alley entrance to Crider’s cigar store. Everybody said Garfield must have been killed in the store and carried out that entrance and dumped in the alley.

Now that the captain had brought up Crider’s name, the names of the other two fell in place. Elsa and Bart Berkey, sister and brother, clerked for Crider. They were in jail, too.

The captain said slowly to Eglin. “If it went wrong I’d take the fall, not you.”

“Name another way,” challenged Eglin.

“A little faster footwork out of you and your boys might’ve helped. It might even have uncovered some blood inside that store.”

Eglin’s expression said that didn’t deserve an answer. Jordan wondered about Sline’s statement. No blood in the store? They hadn’t heard about any of this in Traffic.

“Suppose we flub it,” Sline went on. “We flub it and Crider — or somebody — kills young Berkey. We lose our only witness against Crider, unless the girl does know something — and I doubt it.”

“Name another way,” repeated Eglin inexorably. “And if Jordan here is as cute as he thinks he is, he’ll get something out of the dame that’ll be of some value to us. Let the three of them free to roam around. If we’re going to get something on any of them, it’s got to be under cover.”

Jordan didn’t get much of it. But the piece Eglin just recited was plain enough. It didn’t smell good. They needed a cop who was fast with women, and they thought Jordan was their man. They wanted him to con some dame; to be bait for the hook.

It was cheap stuff. Jordan liked women too much for that. It was no go. When they gave him a chance, he’d tell them so.

Eglin looked impatiently at his wrist watch. “Time’s running out,” he said. “Dammit, Frank, we settled this once.”

“I still don’t like it,” the captain said. “Young Berkey knows something and as soon as he walks out of here, his life’s in danger.”

“We gave him his chance to talk. What are we going to do? What do you want us to do, Sline? Tuck him in every night?”

“If there was any other way I wouldn’t touch it. Maybe, if it was anybody but a cop that was killed, I wouldn’t touch it. I don’t know...” His voice trailed off, then came back strong. “Let’s run ’em through. The girl first.”

Eglin shot out of his chair and through a door behind him, yelling somebody’s name as he went. Sline fired up a stubby pipe and looked at the wall, lost in thought. Time was running him to earth; a year, maybe two, and there would be a little retirement ceremony in the chief’s office and Captain Sline would be all done. When it’s that close, big decisions can come hard.

“Somebody’s got me wrong,” Jordan said. “I don’t cuddle tramps.”

“Keep your shirt on,” said the captain.

In a minute Eglin was back. The tension was out of him.

“I still can’t figure what women see in you,” he said to Jordan.

“Maybe he’s the quiet type,” said Sline. “The kind that slips up on their blind side.”

“Maybe he just talks a good game,” said Eglin.

“Maybe,” said Jordan, “you can go to hell.”

The captain looked up thoughtfully. Ben Eglin grinned.

A cop in plain clothes came through the door Eglin had used. He was about ten years older than Jordan; thirty-six, say. Well dressed, round-faced, with that cold expression all the others had.

Eglin spoke to him. “Tague, this is Jordan. He’s the one we picked for the girl.”

Tague seemed to know what was expected of him. He had Jordan follow him into the adjoining room.

Eglin called after Jordan, “Get yourself a good look.”

Tague held the door until Jordan came through, then moved over to its hinged side. He pulled the door toward him until a crack opened between door and jamb on the hinged side.

“This is your box seat,” he said.

He pulled up a chair, motioned Jordan into it and killed the light. Sitting down, Jordan found that by leaning his head to the right he could see through the crack to Sline at his desk, and Eglin beyond.