When Teed had finished, Pop got up slowly and went over to where the kid was sitting. He put both hands on the kid’s shoulders and asked him if all this was true. Pop’s eyes were shiny.
Joey Hango knocked Pop’s hands down. His mouth sneered, and then it was very much like his dad’s mouth. “Listen, fats, I been sitting around here playing you for a sucker because I like what you hand out. I like having a bed an’ a place to eat. Easy pickings on the money, too, and I could help some friends a mine. You and that damn dirty copper sent my old man up. And if my old man fries—”
Teed said to Pop: “What this kid needs he’s got waiting for him. I mean a paid-up tuition in the reform school.”
“Shut up, Bill,” Pop said. He went over to the kid, got him by the shoulders, shoved him across to the bedroom. He pushed the kid through the door, pulled the door shut, and locked it. He turned, looking deflated.
Bill said: “I’m sorry, Pop. But I think one reason the kid has been hanging around is that he’s got some nutty idea he can get square with you and me for what we did to his dad.”
“The kid has guts enough to try it,” Pop said. “That’s what makes it tough. There’s stuff in the kid, good stuff.”
“It’s nothing more than you can expect, for him to turn out like this,” Bill said. “Rats breed rats. You’d save a lot of grief for yourself if you’d just let me take him down to headquarters on the charge of trying to break into that grocery. That will at least get him away from the Jigger Cullem outfit. He’ll learn fast from Jigger. The Cullem mob must have been the gang that Benny Hango was working with, but we can’t prove it. We might be saving the kid from a murder rap later on.”
Pop pounded one fat fist into the palm of its mate. “If I only knew, Bill. If we could only see into the future and see how Benny Hango is going to face the chair. I guess you know that Benny has been asking to see his son.”
Bill Teed nodded. “And maybe that hasn’t had me on a spot down at headquarters. I knew you wouldn’t want the kid to see his dad, so I’ve been pretending I didn’t know anything about Joey. You know, Pop, this personal stuff between you and me is O.K., but I think it’s gone far enough. I better take the kid down to headquarters before something turns up that makes me get it in the neck from the chief. I got a family, you know.”
Bill started for the bedroom door, but Pop caught his arm. Pop’s face was pale, his eyes moist. “Don’t do that, Bill.” His voice was flat. All the appeal was in his eyes. “It’s the last impression the kid gets of his old man that’s going to count. If Benny Hango gets hold of that kid long enough to talk to him, he’ll ruin the kid. And if Benny turns up a hero in the electric chair, that’ll finish the kid, too. But the reason Benny wants to talk to the kid is — well, there’s a certain tragic sense of life in all men, an aching desire to be sure of some sort of immortality. And Benny hates cops and always has. It’s almost a creed with him. His last desperate effort to grasp that immortality will be an attempt to drive that same creed home to the kid. That way, Benny will live again in his kid, see? We can’t have that.”
Bill said: “I’m not thinking of the kid. I’m thinking you’re making an ass of yourself. Rats breed rats.” He jerked away from Pop and went to the bedroom door. When he got the door open he found the room empty, the window open, the curtains breezing out over the fire-escape. He turned to Pop, his thin face screwed into a knot. “I’m a hell of a cop,” he said. “The kid blew while we were talking all that stuff about immortality.”
A week later Bill Teed and Pop Walker were compelled to witness the death of Benny Hango in the electric chair. Teed was among the official witnesses and Walker represented the local press. Benny lived up to all his promises, and the only reason he didn’t spit in the warden’s eye was that his spitting was not accurate enough. He did not die yellow.
The following morning, Bill and Pop returned from the up-state pen. Pop had no comments to make. He simply went off to his news office.
About noon, Teed was bending over the cigar counter at Rudy’s poolroom, talking to Rudy, when somebody who was buying cigarettes shoved up against him. Teed looked around and saw that it was Joey Hango. Joey’s lips sneered at the dick and that made his face a sort of living death mask of Benny Hango’s face. It startled Teed more than a little.
Joey bought cigarettes and shoved a hundred-dollar bill across the counter to Rudy. Rudy ran a dice game somewhere in his establishment, it was rumored, so Teed was not surprised when Rudy changed the C-note. Bill made no effort to stall Joey as the little punk swaggered out of the place. But he did insist on looking at the bill the kid had passed. One look at the numbers and he knew the bill was hot. It was part of the loot from the bank stick-up. Teed took the C-note and gave Rudy a receipt for it.
Bill noticed, when he put the note in his pocket, that there were gray grease stains on it and he meant to have a man in the police lab look at these stains before he went much further. But from Rudy’s he drove to a drug store which was across the street from the ratty three-story walk-up where the Cullem mob hung out. He got there in time to see Joey Hango enter the Cullem place.
Teed used the phone booth at the drug store and called headquarters. He asked for a man to be sent around to the drug store at once. Then he called Pop Walker at the Courier and told him that he had found the Hango kid passing hot money and that he thought now was the time for a showdown. He hung up without telling Pop where he was. Teed didn’t know but what this was a trick on the kid’s part to get him into some sort of trap in which the Cullem mob was to serve as jaws. If that was what it was, he didn’t want Pop or anybody else walking into the trap with him.
When the man came from headquarters, Teed gave him the C-note and told him to get a report on the grease spots on the bill and call him at the drug store. When the man started back to headquarters, Teed stood around in the drug store, watching the place across the street. He was there long enough to see Jigger Cullem go in about forty minutes later. Jigger was a crazy-looking hood, what with his broken nose on which sat large horn-rimmed glasses, and the blond baby fuzz that grew on his head. He didn’t look tough, but then neither does a black widow spider.
The report Teed got from headquarters was that the grease stains were a mixture of certain animal and vegetable fatty substances mixed with salts of magnesium and calcium. Teed knew that a mixture like that comes from the contact of soap and hard water. It gave him an idea.
As soon as he had that report, Teed went out of the drug store and there he met Pop Walker. Pop said: “You thought you’d put over a fast one, did you? I simply went over to headquarters and found out you were here waiting for a call. Where’s Joey?”
Teed nodded at the building across the street. “Over there with his cute little pal, Jigger Cullem and maybe Spig Morrava and Mike Brandon. I’m going over there alone.”
“If Joey’s up there, I’m going with you,” Pop insisted.
Teed shrugged. “I’m not going to mess up this sidewalk with you all over it. Let’s go across the street.”
The Cullem flat was on the top floor of the walk-up, and Teed’s long legs took him up the first flight of steps quickly. He waited for Pop to join him. He said: “Pop, you’re not barging into a mess like this with me.”
“Like hell I’m not,” Pop said.
“I’m sorry,” Teed apologized, and then hit Pop on the point of his most prominent chin. Pop was out on his feet and collapsed into Teed’s arms. Teed let him down easy and then went on up to Cullem’s place.