Ed McBain - Ax

His real name was Danny Nelson, but no one ever called him that. Even mail addressed to Danny Gimp was delivered to him by his faithful mailman, who thought Danny was a World War I veteran who had been wounded in the Ardennes, rather than a stool pigeon. As a matter of fact, there were very few people who knew that Danny Gimp was a stool pigeon, it being a necessity in the profession to keep one’s activities quiet, lest one discover one night that several hired guns were after one, objective, homicide. Being chased by gangland torpedoes, very old-hat terminology for guns, is not entertaining even if you do not limp slightly. When you do limp, it is difficult to run very fast, so Danny decided it was best to avoid any friction between himself and either oldhat torpedoes or fashionable guns, thereby eliminating foot races through the city streets.

Danny told everybody he was a burglar.

This made him socially acceptable, and it also encouraged other assorted thieves to open their hearts to him. Every time they opened their hearts, Danny opened the voluminous filing cabinets inside his skull and began collecting information, dropping bits and pieces into place here and there, making no attempt to evaluate, sorting and filing as he went along, hoping all of it would make better sense later.

A twenty-two-year-old hood might tell Danny that he needed a new right rear tire for a late-model Oldsmobile, does Danny know a good fence? Danny does indeed know a fence—not a good one, actually; actually he has done time in at least three state prisons, so how good can he be?—and while he is asking the man about a tire for his young friend, the fence casually mentions that a fur warehouse on Tenth Street was knocked over on Tuesday night, with the night watchman taking a slug in the forehead, unfortunately killing the old man. Danny clucks sympathetically, and the next day he sees his young friend’s wife—who used to be a hooker but who has graduated to the big time since she now has a husband who can keep her in heroin—and lo and behold, the wife is swathed in what appears to be 400 yards of natural let-out ranch mink. Danny has never known the precise meaning of “let-out mink,” but he suspects that this particular mink was let out of that warehouse on Tenth Street by none other than his young friend who now needs a new right rear tire for his latemodel Oldsmobile. He reads in the newspaper the next day that the night watchman must have got off a few shots at a retreating person or thing before his untimely demise, his service revolver having been found with only two bullets in it. When Danny sees his young friend he asks him how come he needs a new right rear tire. His friend says, “I picked up a nail on the parkway.” Danny looks at his friend and wonders why he doesn’t simply go to a garage and have them repair the tire, if all he picked up in it was a nail? There is the possibility, however, that the nail has really done big damage to the wheel, making it necessary to replace it. Danny is willing to give his friend the benefit of the doubt; after all, if replacement really is necessary, he knows his friend would automatically go to a fence for the merchandise.

Fences are the best discount houses in the city. They sell anything you might need, from Westinghouse portable television sets to Smith & Wesson portable .38 revolvers, and at very good prices indeed. Even square citizens in bad neighborhoods utilize the services of a fence, so why shouldn’t a cheap hood like Danny’s young friend, in dire need of a new tire, go to a fence—even if there isn’t anything suspicious about why he happens to need a new tire?

A good stoolie never jumps to conclusions.

He collects, he sifts, he collates, he waits.

A week later Danny runs across a fellow who has just come in from Chicago where he has been for several days. The fellow is carrying a very big bundle. That night Danny sees the Chicago fellow and also his young hood friend riding around in the Oldsmobile together, the right rear tire replaced by now. The next day Danny’s young hood friend is sporting a very big bundle, and the hood’s wife is on a heroin-buying jag that will keep her stocked until China runs out of poppy flowers.

What Danny reports to the police is that he believes his young hood friend broke into the warehouse with his Chicago pal, was shot at by the night watchman, who put a hole in their right rear tire and who received a hole in his forehead in return. He further tells the police that he believes the furs were dumped in Chicago and that the two thieves only recently split the cash received for the loot.

For his services Danny gets ten bucks from the detective to whom he divulges this. The ten bucks comes out of a fund loosely described as “Petty Cash.” Neither the detective nor Danny report this exchange on their income tax.

It was not at all surprising that very few people knew Danny was a stool pigeon since he could very easily have passed for a burglar or a mugger or a check passer, or any one of a number of criminal types, all of whom looked exactly the way Danny looked, which is to say they all looked like normal everyday human beings who were honest citizens. Except they happened to be crooks.

Danny didn’t happen to be a crook. He was as honest as the day is long. He only said he was a crook.

He had, in fact, spent five years in a prison in California when he got convicted in a criminal case out there back in 1938. It was this prison stay which convinced everyone that Danny Gimp was indeed a practicing burglar, especially since he told everyone he’d been serving a five and dime on a Burglary One conviction out there. This happened to be true. But actually he’d only gone to Los Angeles for his health.

He had been bothered with a persistent cold and an accompanying low fever for perhaps two months when his family physician suggested that he go out to California to get some sun and some rest, away from his normal city pursuits. Danny had just helped the bulls of the 71st to crack a particularly difficult whorehouse setup, and the bulls (in tandem with some Vice Squad cops) were grateful to the tune of 500 bucks for his assistance, mainly because five of them received promotions out of the crackdown. Danny, flush with his $500, running this low fever and coughing all the time, went out to Los Angeles.

Ah, land of glamour and mystery. Ah, city of sun and stars. Ah, cultural citadel!

He got arrested four days after he arrived.

The way he got arrested was very peculiar, since he had no idea he was committing a crime at the time. He met a fellow in a bar on La Brea and they began drinking and telling jokes, and the man asked Danny what line of work he was in and Danny said, “Communications.” The man thought this very interesting because he himself was in a line of work he described as “Redistribution,” and they had a few more drinks and it was then that the man asked Danny to accompany him to his house where he wanted to pick up some more money so they could continue their fun and revelry, drinking and talking shop and laughing it up in good old LA.

They drove up the Strip past La Cienega and then the man turned his car up into the hills and they pulled up in front of a good-looking Spanish-type hacienda house, all stuccoed and tiled, and Danny and the man got out of the car and went up to the back door which the man opened. They didn’t put on any lights because the man didn’t want to wake his brother, he said, who was a manic-depressive and lived in the back room.

The very polite Los Angeles police, all of whom had studied under Joe Friday, picked up Danny and his friend as they were leaving the house. Danny’s friend had not only taken several hundred dollars in cash from the bedroom of the house which (surprise!) was not his house at all, but he had also managed to pick up a diamond and ruby necklace which the police valued at $47,500.