Уильям Макгиверн: The Big Heat

Carmody sighed. “Let’s go,” he said. “Katz’s wife would raise hell if he got his feet wet tonight.”

“Ha, ha,” Katz said expressionlessly, and began dealing himself a hand of solitaire.

The Homicide Bureau was on the first floor of City Hall, flanked by the rackets detail and the vice squad. Bannion walked down the long wide dusty hallway, a step ahead of Carmody, nodding occasionally to detectives and patrolmen coming in for duty. He left the building by a side door and went through the Hall’s cold and drafty concourse to the parking area reserved for police cars. As they were crossing the sidewalk, the rain hit both men in a driving shower and they grabbed their hatbrims and ran for it. Bannion slid in behind the wheel of his car and opened the right hand door for Carmody, who climbed in panting and shivering.

“You always get ’em on nights like this, eh Dave?” he said disgustedly.

Thomas Francis Deery had lived in a West side, three-flat apartment building, on a tree-bordered, residential street. When Bannion got there a red car and wagon from the Ninety Eighth were parked in front of the building, and a uniformed cop was standing in the vestibule. It was raining hard, but half a dozen persons were huddled together on the sidewalk watching the police cars and the building.

Bannion nodded to the man in the vestibule, who wore a wet, shining, rubber slicker over his uniform. “It’s on the first floor, sarge,” he said, tossing Bannion a salute.

“Thanks,” Bannion said. The door of Deery’s apartment was open, and two big men from the wagon were standing just inside the hallway, chatting together while rainwater dripped from their slickers onto the highly-polished wooden floor. A tall man in a black overcoat came out of a door to the right of the hallway, and said to them, “Okay, you can have him now.”

“Hold it a minute,” Bannion said. He didn’t know the man in the black overcoat, but assumed he was a detective from the Ninety Eighth. “We’re from Homicide.”

“You had a ride for nothing,” the man in the black overcoat said, smiling. “It’s nothing for you boys. I’m Karret, Ninety Eighth Detectives.” Bannion introduced himself and they shook hands. “I heard about you,” Karret said, still smiling. He looked Bannion up and down and from side to side. “I heard you were big, and I heard right.”

Bannion was used to this sort of thing, and it didn’t bother him. He’d always been the out-sized one, in high school and college, even on football teams. He smiled at Karret, and then said, “What’s the deal here?”

“He’s in here,” Karret said, and led the way into the room on the right of the hallway.

The dead man lay on his side, curled up in front of a desk that was placed under a curtained window. Bannion knelt and inspected the wound in his right temple, and the gun in his right hand. The wound was ugly, and the revolver was a nickle-plated thirty-two with black handgrips. After a moment or so, Bannion stood and glanced around the room, automatically noting its contents and arrangement. There was the desk, turned sideways to the window for better light, with a portable typewriter on it, and a wooden correspondence box half-full of papers. A large, comfortable reading chair was in one comer, a floor lamp beside it, and a row of bookcases stood against the opposite wall. Three Audubon prints were hung above the bookcases, and a large, glass ashtray with half a dozen cigarette stubs in it was on the desk beside the typewriter. It was a pleasant room, a luxury that a man without children could provide for himself in a small, city apartment.

“It looks like he was kneeling down when he shot himself,” Karret said, nodding at the body. “The way he’s curled up, I mean.”

Bannion checked the window, found it locked. He turned away from it and glanced about the room. “Where’s Mrs. Deery?” he said.

“She’s in the living room.”

“What did she have to say?”

“Well, she says he came in here after dinner. She stayed in the kitchen cleaning up, and then went into the living room to listen to the radio. About half an hour later she heard a shot. She came in and found him just like he is now.”

“Was there any note?”

“No, not a thing.”

Bannion pushed his hat back on his forehead and sat down at Deery’s desk. He glanced through the papers in the correspondence box. They were bills chiefly, a few sales letters, and one personal note from a friend in Hashville, dated a week previously. The friend, whose name was Mort Chamberlain, apologized for not answering Deery’s letter of four months back; he’d been busy with the office and his family, he explained, and then made a joke about his laziness probably being the real reason. There wasn’t much more in the letter. It seemed to be one of those cheerfully futile attempts to keep something going that had stopped a long, long time ago.

“I told you you had a ride for nothing,” Karret said.

“Yes, this isn’t anything for us,” Bannion said. “Mrs. Deery have any guesses about why he did it?”

“She said he hadn’t been feeling well lately and was worried about it,” Karret said.

“Well, I guess that’s the answer,” Bannion said. He went through the drawers of the desk carefully, not looking for anything in particular, simply following his usual methodical working habits. He found two insurance policies, each in the amount of five thousand dollars, and made out to Mary Ellen Deery, the stubs of two checkbooks, with all entries written in a neat small hand, and an envelope containing a few departmental circulars clarifying policies in regard to police pensions, time off, and so forth. There was also a box of paper clips, several pencils, and a box of stationery. That was all. Bannion closed the drawers, after replacing everything as he had found it, and walked over and glanced at the volumes in the book cases. Most of them were in standard sets, history, biography, the novels of Scott and Dickens, and a selection of book club premiums.

There was a shelf of travel books he noticed, all of them well-worn. He picked out a couple of them, and flipped through the pages, wondering idly at this bent of Deery’s. There were penciled notes in Deery’s handwriting in the margins, and Bannion immediately became more interested. There was nothing more potentially revealing, he felt, than a man’s honest, impulsive reactions to a book. However, Deery’s comments were fairly routine. Of a description of bullfighting, he had observed, “Not for me!!” and of vulgar statues at Pompeii, he had written, “Just like a Peep Show.”

“He read a lot,” Karret said, nodding.

“Apparently.” The books struck Bannion as curious. He glanced through a few more of them, turning them to the light to read Deery’s marginal comments, before returning them to their shelf. They weren’t the books one might expect to find in a police clerk’s library. In fact, a library of any kind in a police clerk’s home was rather unusual.

“Are you going to talk to his wife?” Karret said.

“I think I’d better,” Bannion said. “How’s she taking it?”

“She’s fine, no trouble at all. A real sensible woman.” He nodded toward a closed door on the opposite side of the hallway. “She’s in there, in the living room, quiet as you please.”

“I’ll go in and see her,” Bannion said, and walked out of Deery’s study. He tapped on the living room door and a light, controlled voice said, “Come in, please.”

Bannion turned the knob and entered a very clean, very neat room, furnished with fragile elegance, and lighted softly by two floor lamps. Mrs. Deery was seated on a brocaded sofa, her hands folded quietly in her lap. The legs and back of the sofa were bright with gilt, and the brocaded upholstery was a gleaming canary yellow; it made a cheerful, gracious frame for the woman. She turned her small head to him, and smiled slightly.