Микки Спиллейн - The Last Cop Out

Trouble was, it exploded when Ted Proctor comes in. Gill frowned and went over it again. If Proctor somehow knew about Berkowitz coming into dough and thought he had it, he could have tried a robbery that turned into a murder, and when there was no money, he held up the pawnshop instead. Logical, but somehow it didn’t fit Proctor’s nature at all. He wasn’t the type who could hold together for two jobs... or kills.

One thing for certain... Jimmie Corrigan was as square a cop as lived and there was no denying the accuracy of his report when he walked in on Proctor holding a gun on the pawnbroker. Corrigan’s service record was impeccable, he had had plenty of experience and wouldn’t have acted with undue haste unless he thought his life was threatened.

Enter the next squirrely point... Corrigan knew the facts as well as he did, but he felt something was wrong too. Some crazy little thing was all out of focus because it was either too complicated or too oversimplified for anybody to see it.

But it was sure as hell there.

Henry Campbell had seen Mark Shelby in the area there even though he’d deny it publicly. Mark Shelby was there and denied it completely. Ergo... if Shelby wasn’t implicated, why all the fuss?

More rain splattered against Burke’s face and he shrugged into his raincoat. A taxi slowed for him, but he waved it on. Right now he had to think.

The landlady of Proctor’s rooming house had never seen any evidence of stolen goods, nor a gun, yet the investigating team had uncovered wallets hidden away, half of which had been reported stolen, apparently by a pickpocket.

For a second Burke stopped, a sudden thought in his mind. The rain was coming down harder and a slow grin came to his face. A couple passing by saw it and edged to one side, a nervous look in their eyes.

Burke said something very softly under his breath and went out in the street to whistle, down a cruising cab. He gave the driver the number downtown and settled back into the seat.

Sergeant Schneider was just getting ready to leave when Gill Burke walked in. He took one look at Gill’s face and said, “Aw no, not you again.”

“Won’t take long, buddy.”

“Look, I’m an hour late for supper already. Can’t it wait?”

“What’s the matter, don’t you want to be a hero?”

“Who can be a hero in the records section, you kidding?”

Burke just stood there until Schneider threw up his hands. “Get the files on the stuff they found in Ted Proctor’s room,” he said. “I want to see the complaint sheets and the names and addresses of the owners of the junk that was hoisted.”

“For Pete’s sake, Gill!”

“Come on, it won’t take all that long.”

With another resigned look, Schneider pushed himself out of his chair and nodded for Gill to follow him. Thirty minutes later he had everything Burke had requested and watched while Gill went through them one by one. Seven persons had reported their pockets picked with a total loss of four hundred and eighty-six dollars. The notation made said that the wallets and remaining contents had been returned to their rightful owners. Gill jotted down their names and addresses in his pad and closed the folders.

Schneider gave him an annoyed look and asked, “That’s all?”

There was something bright in Burke’s eyes. “We all missed something there, buddy.”

“Like what?” The sergeant didn’t get it.

“Those complaints were all filed within two days.”

“So what? You get a guy hoisting wallets on a good day and he isn’t about to quit.”

“Proctor was a two-bit drunk. He didn’t need over four hundred bucks to satisfy his kind of thirst.”

“Then you’ve forgotten your drunks,” Schneider told him.

“He’d get rolled himself before he could spend it and with the kind of a need he’d have he’d go try for another score.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe hell. You’ve gone ape over this crap, Gill. I don’t know why you bother.”

“Because this kind of crap got me booted off the force.” Schneider just looked at him.

“And it is crap, friend. The whole damn thing is a phony.”

“You can prove that, I guess?”

Gill nodded. “Yeah, if I’m right, I think I can.”

It was simpler to bypass the government bureau and get what he wanted from the newspaper office. The guy at the city desk was having a slow hour and was glad to escort him to the right department and open up the files. He looked up the dates, handed Gill the two detailed sheets and let him read them over. When Gill handed them back he said, “Find anything?”

“Beautiful,” he said and thanked him.

He went back outside, walking toward the corner in the rain that came slashing down from the roiling sky that churned about the towering spires of the city. He was alone on the street and he was smiling again in spite of the downpour, because the two nights all those pockets were reported picked it had been raining the same way as this one and not the kind of night a pickpocket would be working at all.

The explosion in Miami came within two hours of the arms shipment to Vigaro’s Outboard Motor Outlet. Neither Vig nor Herman the German bothered checking the source of their bounty, fully believing that Moe Piel had somehow arranged it all. They didn’t even bother to consider that the value of the arms they received was far greater than the cash Moe had carried. The mere sight of grenades, Army issue submachine guns still packed in cosmoline and cases of ammunition was so exhilarating that all they could think of was the power it brought and Herman the German had a sudden vision of a new order with himself in the seat of power being instituted in the peninsular state with an even more satisfying picture of at last having the means to wipe out a certain old Don named Papa Menes whose guts he hated so badly it made his bones ache.

Unfortunately for the two out-of-town soldiers the Big Board had sent in, they had figured anything outside their own city was Hicksville and, after making a hit on one of Herman’s men, didn’t cover their getaway trail well enough, never suspecting that a fifteen-year-old girl on a motor scooter was the one tracking them to their hideout. A grenade through the living room window of the cottage they occupied kept them from having any regrets.

Another group making a pass at a drive-in hamburger stand where one of Herman’s top lieutenants had been reported to be having lunch was chopped up in a crossfire of rapid bursts from three tommy guns and only the driver escaped alive, the other two in the car being cut to bloody pieces.

The shock wave that went through the organization that considered itself invincible took hours to subside, then they realized that the enemy they considered such an upstart was far more formidable than they had supposed. He was operating in his own territory, an area of absolute necessity to syndicate operations, he had all the equipment for defense and offense he would need, the manpower to handle it, and with the flush of success he’d be getting new recruits all the time. But more important than anything, he had the temerity to hit hard and the intelligence to remain obscure while he did it. Already he had decimated the brains of the organization with bold strikes across the country in a manner so unpredictable as to make a defense impossible.

What the Big Board could not quite understand was how they could have underestimated or overlooked a person like Herman the German. Anybody with any sense at all should have picked up his potential long ago and either alerted them or had him knocked off.

It was Florio Prince who remembered the incident of Papa Menes having him beaten up and kicked out of New York, and after a short consideration they determined that it was that indiscretion on the part of Menes that had terminated in the near-destruction of everything they had so carefully built up. So, even though Papa Menes was the head of the structure, the mental reservations were there on the part of the members and unless he fully redeemed himself, he would be invited to step down.