Эд Макбейн - Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here

Genero blinked.

Willis was stooping over the fallen Hamling now, a gun in his right hand, his handcuffs open in the other hand. He slapped one onto Hamling’s wrist, squeezed it closed. The sawtooth edges clicked shut into the retaining metal of the receiver. Willis pulled hard on the cuffs and yanked Hamling to his feet. He whirled him around, pulled his other arm behind his back, and snapped the second cuff shut.

Genero was out of breath.

Danny Gimp was a stool pigeon who told everybody he was a burglar. This was understandable. In a profession where access to underworld gossip was absolutely essential, it was a decided advantage to be considered one of the boys.

Actually, Danny was not a burglar, even though he had been arrested and convicted for burglary in the city of Los Angeles, California, back in the year 1938. He had always been a sickly person, and had gone out West to cure himself of a persistent cold. He had met a drinking companion in a bar on La Brea, and the guy had asked Danny to stop by his house while he picked up some more money so that they could continue their all-night revel. They had driven up the Strip past La Cienega and had both entered the guy’s house through the back door. The guy had gone into the bedroom and come back a little while later to where Danny was waiting for him in the kitchen. He had picked up several hundred dollars in cash, not to mention a diamond and ruby necklace valued at forty-seven thousand five hundred dollars. But it seemed that Danny was not the only person waiting for his drinking companion to come out of the bedroom. The Los Angeles police were also waiting. In fact, the way Danny found out about the value of the necklace was that the police happened to tell him. Danny tried to explain all this to the judge. He also mentioned to the judge that he had suffered polio as a child, and was a virtual cripple, and that jail would not be very good for his health or his disposition. The judge had kindly considered everything Danny had to say and then had sentenced Danny and his drinking companion to a minimum of five and a maximum of ten. Danny never spoke to his drinking companion again after that night, even though the men were in the same cell block. The guy was killed by a black homosexual prisoner a year later, stabbed in the throat with a table knife honed to razor sharpness in the sheet metal shop. The black homosexual stood trial for murder, was convicted, and was executed. Danny served his time thinking about the vagaries of justice, and left prison with the single qualification he would need to pursue a profitable career as a snitch. He was an ex-con. If you can’t trust an ex-con, who can you trust? Such was the underworld belief, and it accounted for the regularity with which Danny Gimp received choice bits of information, which he then passed on to the police at a price. It was a living, and not a bad one.

Carl Kapek had put in a call to Danny that afternoon. The two men met in Grover Park at seven minutes before five. The afternoon was beginning to wane. They sat together on a park bench and watched governesses wheeling their charges home in baby buggies, watched touch football games beginning to break up, watched a little girl walking slowly by on the winding path, trailing a skip rope behind her and studying the ground the way only little girls can, with an intense concentration that indicated she was pondering all the female secrets of the universe.

“Belinda, huh?” Danny said.

“Yeah. Belinda.”

Danny sniffed. He always seemed to have a cold lately, Kapek noticed. Maybe he was getting old.

“And you don’t know Belinda what, huh?” Danny said.

“That’s why I called you,” Kapek said.

“She’s a spade, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t read her right off,” Danny said. He sniffed again. “It’s getting to be winter already, you realize that?”

“It’s not so bad,” Kapek said.

“It stinks,” Danny answered. “Why do you want this broad?”

“She mugged a Marine.”

“You’re putting me on,” Danny said, and laughed.

“She didn’t do it alone.”

“A guy was in it with her?”

“Yeah. She played up to the Marine in a bar on Seventeenth, indicated she wanted him to follow her. When he did, she led him to her partner, and they put him out of action.”

“Is the guy a spade, too?”

“No, he’s white.”

“Belinda,” Danny said. “That’s a pretty name. I knew a girl named Belinda once. Only girl I ever knew who didn’t mind the leg. This was in Chicago one time. I was in Chicago one time. I got people in Chicago. Belinda Kolaczkowska. A Pole. Pretty as a picture, blonde hair, blue eyes, big tits.” Danny demonstrated with his hands, and then immediately put them back in his pockets. “I asked her one time how come she was going out with a guy like me. I was talking about the limp, you know? She said, ‘What do you mean, a guy like you?’ So I looked her in the eye, and I said, ‘You know what I mean, Belinda.’ And she said, ‘No, I don’t know what you mean, Danny.’ So I said, ‘Belinda, the fact is that I limp.’ So she smiled and said, ‘You do?’ I’ll never forget that smile. I swear to God, if I live to be a hundred and ten, I’ll never forget the way Belinda smiled at me that day in Chicago. I felt I could run a mile that day. I felt I could win the goddamn Olympics.” He shook his head and then sniffed again. A flock of pigeons suddenly took wing not six feet from where the men were sitting, filling the air with the sound of their flight. They soared up against the sky, wheeled, and alighted again near a bench further on, where an old man in a threadbare brown coat was throwing bread crumbs into the air.

“Anyway, that ain’t the Belinda you’re looking for,” Danny said. He thought a moment longer, and then seemed to suppress the memory completely, pulling his head into his overcoat, thrusting his hands deeper into his pockets. “Can you give me a description of her?” he asked.

“All I know is she’s black, and well built, and she was wearing a red dress.”

“That could mean two thousand girls in this city,” Danny said. “What about the guy?”

“Nothing.”

“Great.”

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re very good for a chuckle on a Sunday when winter’s coming, that’s what I think.”

“Can you help or not?”

“Let me listen a little, who knows? Will you be around?”

“I’ll be around.”

“I’ll get back.”

There are times in the city when night refuses to come.

The afternoon lingers, the light changes only slowly and imperceptibly, there is a sense of sweet suspension.

This was just such a day.

There was a briskness to the air, you could never confuse this with a spring day. And yet the afternoon possessed that same luminous quality, the sky so intensely blue that it seemed to vibrate indignantly against encroachment, flatly resisting passage through the color spectrum to darkness. When the streetlights came on at 5:30, they did so in vain. There was nothing to illuminate, the day was still bright. The sun hung stubbornly over the buildings to the west in downtown Majesta and Calm’s Point, defying the earth’s rotation, balking at extinction behind roof copings and chimney pots. The citizens of the city lingered in the streets bemused, reluctant to go indoors, as though witnessing some vast astronomical disorder, some realized Nostradamus prediction — it would be daytime forever, the night would never come; there would be dancing in the streets. The sky to the west yielded at last.

In Herbert Gross’s apartment, the light was beginning to fade.

Carella and Brown had been in there for close to three hours now, and whereas they had searched the place from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, timber to toilet tank, they had not found a single clue that told them where Gross had been heading when he hopped that uptown bus.