Dan Marlowe - Doom Service

Johnny sat in silence. It seemed like such a long way back to the towheaded, crew-cut fighter, but the whole thing had springboarded from that fixed fight. Whoever had fixed the fight originally had probably had Charlie Roketenetz killed. On the other hand, regardless of who had fixed it in the first place, when Rick Manfredi had refixed it he could easily have decided that it was the best part of wisdom to do the same thing. And, if he had used Jake Gidlow as his intermediary, that would account for what had happened to Jake.

The second telephone call from Gidlow's room was the key to the whole thing. The police had the answer, but they were surely taking their time about doing anything about it. There had to be something funny about that telephone call, the deep, dark silence that persisted about it. The police…

Johnny sighed without realizing it, and Sally's head lifted again. “I forgot, Ma. I got to run over to the precinct station house.”

“For what?” she asked in alarm.

“Just to look at a few pictures,” he said lightly. He smiled a little unwillingly as a thought occurred to him. “'Course, there could be stereophonic sound to go with 'em if Cuneo's there.”

“You won't be long?”

“I shouldn't be. Throw a few eggs at the fryin' pan in about an hour, okay?” He picked her up and sat her back down on the arm of the chair. “You be good till I get back.”

Her indignant sniff followed him out to the hall closet, from which he retrieved his coat.

He ran lightly up the worn white steps of the weather-beaten red brick building and turned left inside after nodding to the incurious uniformed patrolman at the inner door. He walked briskly on oil-darkened wooden floors to a head-high desk presided over by a burr-headed man whose red hair was laced with gray.

“The name's Killain,” John told him. “I'm supposed to look at pictures in your file.”

“Pictures we've got,” the man behind the desk agreed. “What classification? Breaking and entering? Armed robbery? Safe cracking? Using the mails to defraud? Shoplifting? Bank robbery? Arson? Pickpocketing? The confidence game?” He ticked them off rapidly on his fingers. “If the offense was sexual, that's a different department.”

“Assault,” Johnny informed him. “A piece of pipe.”

A pencil poised over a notebook. “Time and location of assault? Investigating officer?”

“This mornin', in back of the Cortez Apartments. Cuneo investigated it.”

The pencil pointed back down the corridor through which Johnny had just come. “Gilligan's your man. Second door back that way.” His hand was groping for the phone as Johnny turned away from the desk.

Behind the second door Johnny found a room cluttered with small desks, large filing cabinets and a cheerful, blue-eyed extrovert in a pin-stripe suit. “Sit down, sit down,” the extrovert invited hospitably, eying Johnny and pointing to the largest desk. “I'm Gilligan.” He attacked the files energetically, dumped a big double handful of file cards on the desk before Johnny and returned to the cabinets for more. “The desk said you wanted the heavy characters.” He looked over at Johnny fleetingly. “You must have a hard head if you're still walking around after tying into a piece of pipe.”

“I got just the back of his hand when he flew. A friend of mine got the load.” Johnny looked dubiously at the pile of cards and lifted off the top one. He studied the picture in the upper left corner and the neatly typed information beneath — name, known aliases, last address, arrests, convictions, known associates and technique. “How the hell do they stay outside when you've got them under the gun like this?” he asked in surprise.

“Not all of them are out,” the bustling Gilligan informed him, returning with another stack of cards. “Once they're in there, they stay in until the undertaker seals up the casket.” He pulled up a chair opposite Johnny, put his feet up on the next desk and slid down onto the final eighth of his spine. “If you've any questions, fire away.”

Johnny turned cards silently. For the first few he glanced through the typewritten information on each one, but after a dozen or so he turned cards and just looked at faces. A man would be hard put to imagine this many lowering countenances in the city, he reflected, with a single common denominator-menace.

He looked up suddenly from one card to find the shrewd blue eyes across the desk steadily upon him; while appearing to be in a soporific trance, Gilligan had not missed an expression upon Johnny's face during the card-turning. Johnny grinned at him and flipped a card into his lap. “Thought you said you retired 'em when the undertaker got them. Jigger Whelan's not around any more.”

“That right?” Gilligan squinted at the card. “Whelan. I don't remember. What happened?”

“He lost a right-of-way argument with a hit-and-run artist a month or so ago. Jigger was on foot.”

Gilligan nodded and made a pencil notation on the card. “It takes us a little longer to catch up with that kind of exit. We don't expect it of our clients.” He smiled faintly, and Johnny returned to the diminishing stack.

A door at the side of the room opened, and Detective James Rogers entered. He looked tired, and his suit was in need of pressing. He nodded to Gilligan and addressed Johnny. “I heard you were here. Step across the hall before you leave and see the man.”

“He wants his shoes shined, maybe?” Johnny inquired.

“Don't go giving me a harder time than I'm having where I just came from,” the sandy-haired detective warned him. “I could always lose my temper.”

“Maybe you don't lose it in the right places,” Johnny suggested. “Sympathy's in the dictionary. Right next-”

“I know what it's right next to,” Detective Rogers replied wearily. “Just walk across the hall like a good little boy when you're finished here.” The hazel eyes considered Johnny bale-fully. “Remind me to talk to you sometime, too, about using my name to get a private eye off your back, will you?”

“You'd be surprised the influence you have, Jimmy.”

“Over some people, maybe.” The slender man's tone was ironic. “We'll be expecting you.”

Gilligan looked at Johnny curiously when Detective Rogers had departed. “I wouldn't think there was much of a future butting heads with Rogers,” he said mildly.

“He discounts the source,” Johnny replied briefly, and resumed turning over cards. When he finally reached the bottom of the stack, he stretched lengthily and looked up to find the blue eyes questioning him. He shook his head negatively. “He's not in there.”

Gilligan looked disappointed. “You sure you'd know the man?”

“That man I'd know,” Johnny answered softly.

Gilligan's glance at him was sharp, but he picked up the cards without comment. “They're probably waiting for you,” he said from the file. “You'd better get on over there.”

“Isn't it funny that everyone's in a hurry but me?” Johnny remarked, but rose reluctantly from his chair and moved to the door. After the day he'd had he didn't particularly look forward to locking horns with Joe Dameron. In Johnny's present razor-edged near-depletion, he knew his own temper well enough to know that the infighting could get out of hand quickly.

He knocked on the door across the hall and, when he heard nothing, knocked again. He tried the door when there was still no sound from inside. It was locked, so Johnny turned and walked back to the squad rooms where a plump detective with round eyes known on the Broadway perimeter as Owly sat by the phones.

“I was supposed to see Dameron,” Johnny said to him.

“They just went out, him and Rogers,” Owly replied.