Max Collins - The dark city

Ness pulled the sedan up to the gas pumps, got out, stretched, and yawned. The gas-pump jockey was a kid in overalls and a cap with earmuff flaps, and Ness directed him to fill the tank.

"Okay if I use the restroom?" he asked.

The kid nodded and pointed toward the restaurant.

Ness ambled inside. It was a fairly nice little place, a big yellow room with one wall of booths, cloth-covered tables, and a counter with short-order service. A young couple was having a late lunch at a side booth, and a few workingmen were sitting at the counter having coffee. At a table by the front windows was a heavyset guy with cauliflower ears. He wore a plaid shirt and no steam came from the cup of coffee before him.

"Got the time?" Ness asked him.

The guy checked his watch, and Ness grabbed that wrist and flipped him onto the floor with a thump.

"What the hell!" the guy yelled.

Ness grinned down at him. "I guess I got a better eye for faces than you do. The last time I saw you, you were working lookout at Tommy Fink's. I guess there's always a job opening for a specialist, even in hard times."

Ness pointed a finger, gently, toward a pretty, plump middle-aged woman behind the counter. "If there's another buzzer back there, please don't press it. I hate arresting women."

The guy on the floor was scrambling to his feet, looking toward the door. Ness kicked him in the ass and he bumped his head hard against the door and flopped on his belly. A moment later the door opened and hit the ex-pug on the head again, and Savage came in.

"Sorry," Savage said, more to Ness than the unconscious lookout.

Ness was yanking the buzzer out of the wall, ripping it out from along the lower window frame. "Head on back there," he told Savage. "Put Curry in back, in case there's a rear door. I don't think they've been warned, but you never know."

Savage nodded and went out.

Ness dragged the heavy, slumbering lookout over to a steam radiator and dug in his pocket for one of a half dozen pairs of handcuffs he'd brought for the occasion. He cuffed the guy to the radiator, turned to the handful of customers, and said, "Pardon the intrusion," and went outside.

Ness walked through the latticework entryway and joined Savage, Wild, and Vehovic near the door, which was shut and locked. The muffled sound of a loudspeaker came from behind it, filtering through its speakeasy slot, but Ness was not in the mood to give anybody the password.

He raised his foot and let fly. With a satisfying splintering crunch, the door flew open and out rushed the cranked-up sound of a horse race being called out, which was immediately interrupted by Ness' shout: "Police raid! Somebody shut that damn thing off."

Somebody did, and an abrupt silence filled the room.

More than fifty people were packed into the large, unadorned space. Many of them were seated in folding chairs arranged in irregular rows, where they'd been listening to the loudspeaker which hung on one wall, over a large racing' blackboard. Along the wall at left were the betting and payout windows, three of them, with three surprised male faces behind the wire mesh, and at right a bar, its heavyset bartender looking at the raiders as if they were an apparition.

Nothing about the layout was fancy-makeshift was the word. The floor was gritty cement, with torn betting slips scattered like confetti. Empty beer bottles decorated floor and tables randomly. Along the periphery were blackjack tables lit by low-hanging, conical-shaded lamps. The dealers still had their decks of cards in hand, as Ness swung into the room, gun in hand.

The group was largely male, workers from the neighborhood enjoying the mom-and-pop bookie joint. In their white shirts with sleeves rolled up, seated on wooden folding chairs, the group could've been gathered for a revival meeting. There were a few women, in their twenties. They looked scared, whereas most of the men just looked embarrassed.

Ness put the gun away and told the dumbfounded group not to worry. "No one but employees will be arrested," he assured them. "I'd like to ask you to relax, because we're going to be taking statements from all of you. We need to establish that you made, or saw bets made here this afternoon, that you played, or saw blackjack played here."

Savage was rounding up the three cashiers from behind the makeshift betting counter. He sat them down at one of the blackjack tables, just as a door at the left, connecting this building with the restaurant, flew open almost as if Ness had kicked it.

A bear of a man in a white shirt and tie but no coat lumbered in, red-faced and angry. He had sleepy sky-blue eyes and a cupid mouth and a double chin. His eyebrows were upside-down V's and his brown hair was rather long and combed slickly back.

He said to Savage, "What the hell is this?"

"Ask that fella over there," Savage said, smiling faintly, pointing to Ness.

The bearlike man swaggered over and placed himself in front of Ness, saying, "What the fuck's the idea?"

"I take it you're in charge. What's your name?"

The cupid mouth formed a little sneer. "Dick Cooper is my name, and you're goddamn right I'm in charge. My old man's head of the detectives in this burg. Just who the fuck do you think you are?"

"Eliot Ness."

The bear blanched. He swallowed, looking hard at Ness, squinting. "You look different in the papers."

"I guess you never saw me in color before."

The sleepy eyes tried to open wide. He stumbled back and bumped into a blackjack table. He fumbled for a chair, pulled it up, and sat heavily.

He looked at Ness oddly, like he was having trouble focusing his eyes. "Don't you, uh… go with my sister?"

"I used to," Ness said.

Dick Cooper thought about that, as he sat at the table leaning on his elbow, his hand covering his lower face like a mask. Ness went to the bar and used the phone. He called the Central Police Station and ordered up a paddy wagon and some patrolmen to help take the statements of the detained patrons.

"I'll question you myself," Ness said to Cooper, looming over the heavyset young man who sulked at a blackjack table.

"I want to make a telephone call."

"Go ahead," Ness said, and nodded back toward the bar.

"I want to make it in my room."

"Where's that?"

"There's apartments over the restaurant. One of them's mine."

"Are you denying you run this place? You said you were in charge."

The cupid lips smiled nervously. "I meant, I own the building. I don't know nothin' about this activity here."

"I see."

"I rent the place to a guy named Nick for sixty bucks a month."

"You've never been back here before?"

"Can I make that phone call?"

"In your room?"

"Yeah."

"Mind if I come along?"

"I guess not."

"Good," Ness said, and took Cooper by his fleshy arm and guided him across the room to the connecting door. Ness had, after all, made this raid without notification to the local precinct and without obtaining a search war-rant. His excuse for doing neither of those things was that he was merely responding in person to Councilman Vehovic's charges that the Black Swan and other clubs were running wide open in the Fourteenth Precinct. Young Cooper's invitation to look at his apartment was nice to have, in lieu of a search warrant.

Cooper led him through a narrow hall to the stairway. Ness followed the man up. At the top, Cooper said, "You gonna search this whole building?"

"I expect," Ness said, who hadn't been planning any such thing.

Cooper gave Ness a blank, sleepy-eyed look and nodded once and turned to the right and knocked on a door.

"If it's your room," Ness said, getting suspicious, "why are you knocking?"

"I gotta check in with a friend of mine."

"Just use the phone in your room, okay?"