Уильям Макгиверн - Rogue Cop

Footsteps sounded on the porch and Carmody put the music back in place hastily. The front door opened and Father Ahearn came into the living room, fanning himself with a limp Panama hat. He stopped in surprise when he saw Carmody standing in the shadows by the piano. “Well, this would make the devil himself believe in miracles,” he said. “Coming up the street, I said a little prayer I’d find you here. I wanted to talk to you about Eddie.” He sat down slowly and rubbed his eyes with a trembling hand. “The arrangements, you know. I can’t get it through my head that the boy is gone.”

“About the arrangements, you do what you think is right,” Carmody said.

“As a matter of fact, I’ve done just that,” the priest said. “But I thought you’d like to know. The wake will be at Kelly’s, starting tonight at eight. Thursday morning at ten there’ll be a Requiem High Mass at St. Patrick’s. Eddie’s district is supplying fifty honorary pallbearers, and the Superintendent is coming. And the Mayor, too, if he can possibly make it.”

“That’s great,” Carmody said.

“It’s good of them,” Father Ahearn said, nodding slightly, and ignoring Carmody’s sarcasm. “Now about the actual pallbearers. I’ve got five of his good friends from the neighborhood. I’ve left a place open for you, Mike.”

Carmody turned away from him. “You’d better get someone else, Father. I’ll be busy.”

“Too busy to go to your brother’s funeral?” the old priest said softly.

“That’s right.” He was staring at the music on his father’s piano, a bitter look in his eyes. Maybe the old songs had a point. Betrayal and death. They were themes to haunt a man. “I’ll be busy looking for his killer, Father,” he said. “Let the Superintendent and the Mayor make a show at the funeral. They’ve got time, I haven’t.”

“So you’re going to avenge Eddie,” Father Ahearn said thoughtfully. “In that case, you’re a bigger fool than I imagined. You can’t avenge him, Mike. Don’t you understand that much about yourself?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t believe in right and wrong,” Father Ahearn said, shaking his head angrily. “In your heart you believe Eddie was killed because he was stupid. Because he wasn’t like you. According to the rules you’ve made, there’s no such a thing as sin. So how can you hate something that doesn’t exist? By your standards, the men who killed him did no wrong. So how can you hold them to an accounting?” The old priest stood slowly, staring at Carmody with angry, impatient eyes. “Have the guts to be logical at least,” he said. “You made the rules to suit yourself, so stick to them, man. Don’t think you can flop from one side to the other like some sort of moral acrobat. It won’t work, I tell you. You’ve lost the privilege of hating sin. That belongs to us poor fools who believe in right and wrong.”

“All right,” Carmody said slowly. “By my rules, I’ve got to get the men who killed Eddie. Right or wrong, you watch.”

“It will do you no good,” the priest said.

“I’m not trying to save myself. I’m after a killer.”

Father Ahearn looked at him in silence for a few seconds, all the bright anger fading slowly from his face. “Well, I’ll be going on,” he said.

“Look, wait a minute. Won’t you try to understand this?”

“No, I must be going on,” he glanced around the room and shook his head slowly. “There was a lot of goodness and decency here, Mike. Stay a bit. Maybe some of it will soak back into you. Good-by, son.”

Twenty minutes after the priest had gone the telephone rang. Carmody answered it and a man’s voice said, “Is this Mike Carmody, the brother of that cop who got shot?”

Carmody had waited for the call because he knew the value of tipsters; the man with a grudge, the citizen who wanted to assist the law anonymously, even the busybodies — they had helped to break dozens of his cases.

About one in a hundred tips turned out to be helpful. But there was no short cut to find the occasionally reliable informant. The chronic alarmists and crackpots who flooded the police switchboard with calls every day could only be sifted out by patient investigation.

“Yes, this is Mike Carmody,” he said. “Who’s this?”

“The name wouldn’t mean nothing to you. But I’m sorry about your brother.”

“So am I,” Carmody said. Would Father Ahearn take exception to that? he thought bitterly. Could he at least be sorry? “Well, what’s on your mind?”

“Do you remember Longie Tucker?”

“Sure,” Carmody said. The man’s voice told him nothing; it was high and thin, with a tremor of nerves or fear in it. “What about Longie Tucker?” he asked. Tucker was a local hoodlum who’d drifted out to California six or eight years ago, a big and brutal man with black hair and blunt dark features.

“He’s back in town, that’s all. I saw him a couple of months ago. And his hair is gray now. The description of your brother’s killer said blond hair. But at night under a street light gray hair might look blond.”

Carmody nodded slowly. “Where did you see Tucker?”

“In a taproom on Archer Street, right at the corner of Twelfth. I thought of him when I read about your brother.”

“I’ll run this down,” Carmody said. “Thanks.”

“I hope it’s him, Mr. Carmody.”

“What’s your interest in this? Paying off an old score?”

“You might say that,” the man said in an unsteady voice. “Longie Tucker killed my son. I couldn’t prove it, but he did it all right. And my boy never did any harm to anybody. He just got in the way. Well, I won’t bother you with it. But I hope he’s the man you want.”

The phone clicked in Carmody’s ear. He frowned at it a moment, then broke the connection and dialed Police. The record room would know where Tucker was hanging out. He wasn’t wanted for anything here, as far as Carmody could recall, but some stoolie would have tipped off the police that he was back in town. The clerk at Records answered and Carmody asked for the chief, Sergeant Hogan. After a short wait Hogan came on, and Carmody asked him about Longie Tucker.

“We had a tip when he drifted back to the city,” Hogan said. “The detectives in his district watched him for a few weeks, but he seems to be behaving himself. Wouldn’t swear he’ll keep it up though. He’s a stormy one.”

“Where is he living?”

“Just a minute... here it is... 211 Eighteenth Street. A rotten neighborhood, and just where he belongs. Anything else, Mike?”

“No, that’s all.”

Hogan hesitated, then said, “Tough about the kid brother, Mike.”

“Yes, it was,” Carmody said. “But we’ll get the guy who did it.”

“You’re damn right.”

Carmody hesitated a moment after replacing the phone, debating whether to run this down himself, or to pass it on to Wilson. It was now one-thirty. He wanted to see Nancy as soon as possible; now he knew she’d been lying when she said she had nothing on Ackerman. But Longie Tucker was an even stronger lure. When he got into his car he headed for 211 Eighteenth Street.

It was an unpainted wooden building set in the middle of a block of municipal decay. Carmody got hold of the owner, a sullen little Spaniard, and asked him about Longie Tucker.

“There is one man on the third floor,” the Spaniard said, shrugging carelessly. “I don’t care about his name. Maybe you want that one, eh? I go to tell him.”

“You go finish your lunch,” Carmody said.

“You copper?”

“You just finish lunch, understand, amigo?” Carmody said quietly.

“Sure, I don’t care,” the man said and closed his door.