Richard Deming - Gallows in My Garden

“Inspector,” Danny Blake said diffidently, “the Malone woman has skipped. I’m having all the stations checked.”

The inspector glared at him, turned the glare on me, and said, “If you hadn’t held out so long, Moon, we’d have this case cracked.” Then he snapped at Blake, “How much of a start she got?”

“Over an hour. According to Mrs. Lawson, she called a taxi right after Moon left, packed while it was coming, and took off without even giving notice.”

“Fine,” Day said disgustedly. “A lot of good checking the stations will do. Probably she had the taxi drop her at the ferry and is across the river into Illinois by now. It will take an extradition order to get her back.” He eyed me glumly. “I suppose you want to tag along on this.”

“How do I know?” I said. “Depends on where you’re going.”

He examined me suspiciously, apparently decided I really didn’t know what was going on, and said, “Your two pals, Dude Garrity and Harry Sommerfield are holed up on Front Street. They decided to fight.”

“I see,” I said, not really seeing at all. “I thought it was at least an atom bomb attack.” I looked at his impatient face puzzledly. “Since when does the chief of police personally go gunning for hoodlums?”

“When they’re cop killers,” he said grimly. “They got Dinny O’Keefe and Myron Goldstein when they tried to blast their way out.”

Now I understood perfectly. Cops don’t like killers in the first place, but the cardinal crime in any cop’s book is cop-killing. Once a hoodlum has that tag pinned on him, he might as well give up, for the search for him never dies until the killer dies, and the case is never transferred to the inactive file even though no trace of the cop killer is found for twenty years.

Hannegan returned with the strap of a walkie-talkie strung over his shoulder. The moment he came into sight, Day ran toward the door. I nudged in ahead of Hannegan and followed.

A prowl car containing a cop chauffeur idled its motor at the curb. When Day shot into the back seat, I shot in right next to him. Hannegan slipped his walkie-talkie to the floor at my feet and climbed in front next to the chauffeur.

“Front and Locust,” Day snapped.

“Too bad it wasn’t a block farther south,” I remarked as our siren opened up. “Why?”

“Then you could have said, ‘Front and Center.’ ” Day eyed me glumly over his glasses. “Moon,” he said finally, “there’s only one reason I let you come along.”

“Yes?”

“Your gun-happy pals are barricaded on the top floor of a two-story tenement. They got a whole arsenal, including rifles and a Tommy gun.”

“So?”

“Somebody else is almost bound to get shot before we take them. Maybe it’ll be you.”

As we roared across town Chief Chester’s voice on the car radio kept us informed of the situation. By number, prowl cars were being ordered in from all over the city and instructed to report to designated points. By following the directions we were able to figure out he was placing his men in a huge square, four blocks along each edge, around the besieged hide-out.

Two blocks from Front and Locust we ran into a police barricade.

“Sorry, sir,” a patrolman told Day. “Chief’s orders that no cars go beyond here.”

We got out, and Hannegan retrieved his walkie-talkie, this time pushing upward the aerial wand until it waved six feet over his head. We left the driver with the car and proceeded another block on foot.

Not a civilian was on the street, though we could see many faces peering at us from windows. There seemed to be no police on the street, either, but every doorway and alcove we passed contained at least one armed cop.

“Listen,” I said as we neared the corner a block away from Front and Locust. “You sure you got the right address? We’re the only people out in the open.”

“You heard the chief on the radio,” Day snapped. “It’s still more than a block away.”

The last building before the corner contained a deep doorway, and in the doorway was another cop.

“Step in here, sir,” he told Day. “They can see you from there.”

At that moment a rifle bullet whanged against the cement sidewalk, ricocheted from the side of the building, and whirred off. It was still whirring when Day, Hannegan, and I smashed against our informant.

The doorway was an entrance to an upstairs flat, and was deep enough to accommodate us all comfortably. When we had untangled ourselves, I took the position closest to the street.

“Where are they?” I asked.

The cop said, “Second building from the corner on the other side of the street.”

Dropping full length, I peered out cautiously at ground level. By stretching the imagination, the second building could be construed as being at Front and Locust, for there were no other buildings between it and that intersection. Once there had been, as attested by three gaping foundations of buildings which had either been torn down or burned, but actually the gunmen’s hide-out was in the middle of the block. This side of it, between it and the corner building, stretched a long vacant lot. The hide-out itself seemed to be a four-family tenement and it was ideal for standing off a siege, for clear ground lay on all sides of it.

“They’re on the roof now,” the policeman volunteered. “We got some tear gas up there, but they have masks. That hide-out was prepared for everything.”

Directly across the street another cop crouched in an areaway listening to a walkie-talkie, and diagonally across two more policemen knelt on the sidewalk this side of the building. One of them was also equipped with a walkie-talkie.

I pulled my head back and asked, “Anyone been in contact with them?”

“The chief talked to them over a loud-speaker,” the cop whose doorway we shared said. “But all the answer he got was a submachine-gun volley. Guess they intend to go down shooting.”

“There goes the Lawson case, then,” I told Day. “Unless you get someone in that building and take at least one of them alive.”

“Want to volunteer?” Day asked sourly.

“Not particularly.”

The inspector switched on Hannegan’s instrument and said, “Chief Chester, sir?”

I stood close to Day in time to hear a voice rasp back, “Yes?”

“Inspector Day, sir. Any orders?”

“Not at the moment. You know the situation?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any suggestions?”

Day hesitated a moment, glanced at me, then said, “These men are key witnesses in the Lawson case. Any chance of taking them alive?”

“They don’t want to be alive,” Chester said. “They want to die like big shots, and they’re going to get their wish. I’m not risking any more lives on them.”

“If we could get someone in the building—” the inspector suggested tentatively.

“Want to volunteer?” the police chief barked.

“Not particularly, sir.”

George Chester’s voice rasped. “You wouldn’t suggest your men do anything you wouldn’t, would you?”

Day took the receiver from his ear, glared at it ferociously, replaced it again, and said in a choked voice, “I’m ready any time you are, sir.” Then he stared at me over his glasses and added, “The suggestion came from Manny Moon. He’s here with me.”

“He is? Let me talk to Manny.”

I took the handset and said, “How are you, Chief?”

“Terrible. What you think, Manny?”

“I think you’re missing a bet if you bump these guys off. The inspector didn’t get a chance to finish, but we think we got the Lawson case figured out. But there’s no evidence, and damn little chance of finding any. At the moment it looks like our only chance of a conviction is to make one of these gunnies talk. I think you ought to try to get someone into the building.”