Fenwick Green said he was willing to admit he’d run the movie school to case robberies but he never killed anybody.
Bill Kurtz isn’t so dumb. I knew he knew that Fenwick Green hadn’t bumped Studsy. And I knew he knew he’d have a hell of a job pinning it on Mary without the gun or the bullet that did the job. And he knew no jury in America would convict a brave kid for killing a rat to keep her father straight. Maybe some day I’ll tell him about the picture I got while he was looking at his selenium camera. The picture of a scared girl dragging an old army rifle out of a trunk. A rifle like her dad had lugged around France while she was hanging onto her mother’s skirts. Bill Kurtz wouldn’t have known about the rifle. It was probably in the mud at the bottom of the Schuylkill River, not far from a bullet-riddled frame that really fit Fenwick Green. No. Bill wouldn’t have known about that. Or would he?
Rats Breed Rats
by G. T. Fleming-Roberts
In which a tough cop and a sentimental newshound gamble against death with the soul of a killer’s kid for table-stakes.
Nobody knew better than Detective Sergeant Bill Teed himself how he got all the breaks in the capture of Benny Hango. In the first place he just happened to be watching a group of boys pitch pennies in front of the Alpha Café that night. He was interested in the sport because down in the detectives’ room at headquarters he was no mean penny-pitcher himself. He was watching these kids when Pop Walker appeared at the screen door of the Alpha and said to Bill Teed: “You are pretty smart, aren’t you?”
Teed couldn’t answer that question himself, so he followed Pop Walker back into the café. Pop had a big Alpha Café napkin tucked under the latest acquisition in his collection of chins, and the creases at the corners of his mouth held evidence of dinner. It was said that Pop Walker was digging his grave with his teeth, which was not strictly true because the teeth he used were false. Pop Walker asked Bill to have a cup of coffee with him.
This Pop Walker had been police reporter on the Courier for twenty-odd years and he sometimes scooped the police as well as his rivals. Also, he was no one to hand out undeserved orchids. He had implied that Teed was smart at a time when Teed was feeling anything else but. Teed had been looking for and not finding this Benny Hango who was wanted for the murder of a teller in a bank stick-up that had occurred two days before. That Pop Walker had said Bill was smart when Bill didn’t know what he had done that was smart, was no better than being utterly dumb.
“Why,” Pop said, adding sugar to his coffee until heaven help the dishwasher who had to clean out his cup, “you’re smart to be watching Benny Hango’s son.”
The fact that Benny Hango had a son had either escaped the police record or was considered of no importance to detectives. Teed had never heard of Benny Hango’s son. All he had to go on was that the D. A. had a witness who would identify Benny Hango as one of the stick-up men and the murderer of the bank teller. But Pop Walker knew about Hango’s kid. In fact, he said, the kid was out in front now pitching pennies.
Looking out the café window, anybody who had ever seen Benny Hango could pick out his kid from the others. The kid was maybe fifteen years old, but looked older in the face and younger in the body. He was slope-shouldered, skinny, undersize. He had his dad’s thin, angular nose, his dad’s glossy black hair, his dad’s close-set dark eyes. His mouth, though, was a finer thing than his dad’s.
Teed turned from the window thoughtfully pulling his chin, which was a good deal longer than all of Pop’s facial terrace. “Pop, why in the deep dark hell have you been keeping this under your toupee?” He thought, damn it, if this was anybody else but Pop you could call it withholding material evidence.
Pop’s short brow got worried with wrinkles. “Well,” he said slowly, “I like kids. I been watching this kid of Benny Hango’s for several hours, What I intended to do was see if he’d lead me to Benny’s hangout, and then I could report the hangout to the police and just leave the kid out of it. You know how I’ve always wished I had a son.”
“Yeah,” Bill admitted. He got up to go to the door, but Pop got hold of his coat-tail. “You wait,” Pop said. His face was wrinkled up as though he had been eating green apples. “There’s no use pulling up a weed if another grows right up in its place. Isn’t that true?”
“Yeah, but—”
“There’s good in that kid, Bill. But if he gets in dutch with the cops right about now, he’ll grow up hating cops. And that’s a good way to get off on the wrong foot — hating cops.”
“I’ll buy the kid a lolly-pop,” Bill said.
Pop said: “You just think of Hango’s kid as though he were your own. You give him a break and keep him out of it entirely. That kid ought to have his chance. You’re going to fry his old man for murder, don’t forget, and if you approach the kid with your usual nightstick diplomacy the kid will get the impression that his dad is a martyr.”
Bill Teed spread his hands. “O.K. I said I’ll go easy on the kid. I’ll even hand him over to you and you can cuddle him to your bosom if you want to. Only I got to get Benny Hango or my own kids will be provided for by a relief ticket.”
He jerked out of Pop’s grasp and went out to look the kids over. The more he saw of Benny Hango’s kid the more he saw of Benny Hango. The kid was just a miniature of his old man. At the penny-pitching, Hango’s kid had been winning steadily, so there was no complaint from the other boys when he pulled out of the game.
Teed followed the kid, watched him visit a serve-self grocery where he bought bread and milk with pennies he had won and stole some cookies. From there, the kid went to the basement entrance of a deserted building that walled in one end of a parking-lot. Teed followed along and eventually located the kid and Benny Hango in the furnace-room of the building, and through the door of the fuel cellar, where Teed was hiding, he could hear the two talking.
Teed approached the door. What he heard gave him the idea that Hango was wounded. And that was his second break.
“Lemme take your rod and get a doc for you,” the kid was saying. His voice was just like his dad’s except that it was an octave higher.
“I’m O.K,” Hango said. “You help me outta here tonight and I’ll get some of the dough and blow. You been a damn good kid, Joey.”
“But the bulls—”
“The hell with them,” Hango said. “What did I do in the Peoria job? It’s a sweet set-up, in Peoria. The joint is cased. We go in, clean out the cages. Coming out, what happens? Right in front of me is a cop. I give it to him in the belly.”
At this point, Bill Teed pulled his revolver and shoved open the door. Benny Hango, dark, dried-up little stick of dynamite that he was, lay on a bed made of burlap sacks. His right trouser leg was slit and his leg was bandaged above the knee with rags. His gun was on an up-ended orange crate about three feet from him. Joey was on the other side of the orange crate and a little to the left. A candle was stuck in the regulator chain of the furnace, and that was the only light there was. The open bottle of milk was beside Benny, and he had a chunk of the bread in his hand.
Bill Teed couldn’t be seen easily because he was at the edge of the circle of candle-light. If it hadn’t been for the kid, it would have been a cinch. “Put up your hands, Benny,” he said. “Try anything and you’ll get what the Peoria cop got. You’re under arrest.” He advanced to the edge of the circle of light and a little beyond.
Hango’s kid said: “A dirty copper!” He looked from Teed to his dad as though he expected Hango to make a super-move. Benny looked at his gun and evidently couldn’t decide on a super-move. Hango’s kid couldn’t quite understand this. He repeated, tossing in a few more adjectives, that here was a dirty copper.