Francis Nevins - Night and Fear

O’Dare said grimly: “He’ll bounce like a cannon-ball, once I get my two-cents-worth in. The woman up there can identify him, if they’ll only get it out of her. There’s a man and woman on the floor below must have seen something too. She tried to—” Something started coming over the car-set right while they were standing there talking next to it. “Calling Cars 15 and 8, Cars 15 and 8. Go to 50 Diversey Place. 50 Diversey Place. Third floor front. A woman has been reported abducted. A woman has been reported abducted. That is—”

The unintentional irony of it, that: “That is all!”

“Not our party,” Anderson was saying.

O’Dare had hold of the car-door in a funny way, as if he were drunk or had just tripped over something against the curb.

“What’s matter with you?” A peculiar hollow sound came from his chest. “I live there. That’s my wife’s and my — flat.”

“Hang on!” Josephs snapped. They swung off so quick they nearly took him off his feet along with them. He jumped, clung there on the running-board, crouched a little to meet the wind. Just before they skidded around the corner, two of the dicks came out of the house, bringing with them the dead man’s wife and the couple from the floor below, all of whom O’Dare had indicated as possible witnesses. He wouldn’t have known them at the moment if they’d stared him in the face. “Make it a mistake,” he prayed in the teeth of the wind. “Not Molly!”

They screeched to a stop in front of where he’d started out from four hours before, with her waving goodby from the third-floor window. There were too many lights lit for three in the morning. The whole face of the building was blinking with them, like that other house they’d just come away from. He knew then, beyond shadow of a doubt. Something was wrong, something had happened here. It was written all over the place to his cop’s-eye. One of the assigned cars was there already ahead of them.

He jumped down and went at the door like someone stumbling off-balance, shoulders way ahead of his feet. Josephs and Anderson — who’d come out of bounds to bring him here — lit out again around the next corner. Mrs. Kramer, a floor below his, head a mass of curl-papers, was standing in her doorway discussing it with the woman across the hall. Their voices dropped as tragedy in a blue uniform went hurtling by. Not low enough.

“That’s him now. Poor soul, they were going to—”

“Did you see that look in his eye? He’ll kill them if he ever—”

The two men from Car 15 were talking to the super, who had a sweater over his pajamas, just outside O’Dare’s own door. He elbowed the two aside, grabbed the man by the shoulders, began to shake the life out of him. “How’d it happen? What’d they look like?”

The other two pried his hands away tactfully. “He don’t know, he didn’t see them. How can he talk anyway when you’re turning him into an egg-nog?”

“Say that when it happens to you, McKee.” O’Dare said bitterly.

“I happened to be up, reading. I heard her call out in the hall, just once. Your name, ‘Danny!’ Like that. My wife had told me about — and I thought maybe she was sick, needed help. Right down by the street-door, it sounded. Time I got there, I didn’t see anyone, just heard a car driving away outside, that was all.”

O’Dare brushed by them, went in to look. There wasn’t anything to see, but he didn’t want them to see his eyes. They dried right up again, from the slow; fine rage that was beginning to set in. The super sidled up to him, sidestepping the others momentarily.

“And there was this,” he whispered. “On the sill. I thought I better show it to you first, by yourself.”

Your memory played you a bad trick, didn’t it, tonight? maybe this will help it some

the note said. O’Dare turned slowly and showed it to the others. “Benuto did it.” And shaking with a terrible, quiet sort of intensity, “If they bring him in tonight—!”

The inspector who had been over at the other place had shown up. “They just brought him in. I got the flash on my way over here.”

“Where’ve they got him? Where’ve they got him?” O’Dare cried out wildly.

“Holding him over at one of the outlying precincts, without booking him, so his mouth can’t jump right in and haul him out—”

The phone started ringing in the room there with them. The inspector motioned to O’Dare to go ahead.

“Yeah, this is Patrolman O’Dare,” they heard him say.

The voice said, “It’s ten minutes past three, O’Dare. We’ll give you one hour. If the gent you’ve framed isn’t released from wherever it is he’s being held by ten past four, you know the answer, don’t you?”

O’Dare said, “No, I don’t—” Suddenly his face went the color of clay, he jolted there as though the instrument had short-circuited him. Molly’s voice sobbed in his ear: “Dan, what’re they doing this for? What’ve we done to them—?”

A line of beads came out across his eyebrows. “Where are you, quick, where are you?” he said rabidly. But she was gone already. “Not a chance,” the first voice said. “Still claim you don’t know the answer?”

O’Dare said, “I’m only a cop. What can I do? He’s in the hands of the homicide squad—”

“You put him there, you—!” the voice snarled. “You better correct that identification of yours in a hurry. Or maybe you’d like some changes made around the house — a crepe on the door, f’rinstance? One hour.” The connection broke.

The inspector, when he’d told him, said: “We’d better get over there in a hurry, see that he’s turned out. Always can pick him up again later.”

“Not always,” thought O’Dare bitterly. And the next time he’d have a whole battery of legal talent short-stopping him. This wasn’t the way to bring her back, anyway. He’d never be able to look her in the face again if he let himself be blackmailed into— He went running down the stairs after the inspector, sprinted for the running-board; they didn’t say anything. He was a man before he was a cop, after all.

Benuto was in the basement of an out-of-the-way suburban precinct-house, where they rarely handled anything more than traffic violations. If they’d begun sweating him already, he didn’t look it; sat there glowering in the corner on a stool. He was, they admitted to the inspector, a hard nut to crack. They hadn’t gotten anywhere much.

“His crowd are holding this man’s wife, we have reason to believe,” the inspector said. “Afraid we’ll have to pull in our horns for the time being.”

“Lemme talk to him,” O’Dare pleaded. “Lemme talk to him alone! Lemme just find out where they’ve got her! Gimme a break.”

The inspector nodded. One of the dicks took the precaution of slipping O’Dare’s gun out of its holster first, then they let him go in there by himself. He closed the door. The walls were thick down in that basement. That was why they brought suspects down there for questioning. They couldn’t hear a sound for awhile. In about ten minutes O’Dare stuck his disheveled-head out and asked for the loan of a fountain-pen. One of the dicks passed him his.

“You mean you’re getting him to sign?”

“I’m not asking him about the murder,” O’Dare said quietly. “Just my wife, now.” He went in again. When he came out a second time he was wiping off the gold nib of the pen by pinching it between his fingers. He returned it to the lender. Beyond him, in the murky room, Benuto lay on the floor in a dead faint. Ink discolored his fingernails, there was a purple blob of it in underneath each one. It was O’Dare, not he, who was doing the shaking, as though it had been pretty much of a strain.