The three men headed for their car. They had parked it next to a fire hydrant, supremely confident that no police officer who noted its license number would have the temerity to hang a parking ticket on the windshield. The three men were trusted employees of Mr. Archer Moscow. They had come to collect the week’s receipts, and, incidentally, to act as a sort of quality-control inspection team.
As they reached the street, a battered ten-year-old convertible drew up slowly alongside them. The driver, alone in the car, leaned across the front seat and shot the center man in the chest with a sawed-off shotgun. Then he quickly scooped an automatic pistol from the seat and used it to shoot the other two men, three times each. He did all of this very quickly, and all three men were very dead before they hit the sidewalk.
The man stomped on the accelerator pedal and the car leaped forward as if startled. The convertible took the corner on two wheels and as suddenly slowed its speed to twenty-five miles an hour. The little man drove four blocks, parked the car, and raised the convertible top. He disassembled the sawed-off shotgun and packed it away in his thin black attaché case with the automatic, removed the jumper wire from the ignition switch, and left the car. Once outside the car he removed his white gloves and put them, too, inside the attaché case. His own car was parked right around the corner. He put the attaché case into his trunk, got into his car, and went home.
Finney and Mattera got the squeal again, only this time it was a pain in the neck, good weather notwithstanding. This time there were eyewitnesses, and sometimes eyewitnesses can be a pain in the neck, and this was one of those times. One of the eyewitnesses reported that the killer had been on foot, but this was a minority opinion. All of the other witnesses agreed there had been a murder car. One said that it was a convertible, another that it was a sedan, and a third that it was a panel truck. There were two other minority opinions as well. One witness said there had been three killers. Another said one. The rest agreed on two, and Finney and Mattera figured three sounded reasonable, since two guns had been used, and someone had to drive the car, whatever kind of car it was. Then they asked the witnesses if they would be able to identify the killer or killers, and all of the witnesses suddenly remembered that this was a gangster murder, and what was apt to happen to eyewitnesses who remembered what killers looked like, and they all agreed, strange as it may seem, that they had not gotten a good look at the killers at all.
Finney had to ask the stupid questions, and Mattera had to write down the stupid answers, and it was an hour before they got over to the White Tower.
“Eyewitnesses,” said Finney, “are notoriously unreliable.”
“Eyewitnesses are a pain in the neck.”
“True. Three more solid citizens—”
“Three of Archie Moscow’s solid citizens this time — Joe Dant and Third-Time Charlie Weiss and Big Nose Murchison. How would you like to have a name like Big Nose Murchison?”
“He doesn’t even have a nose now,” said Finney. “And couldn’t smell much if he did.”
“How do you figure it?”
“Well, as they said on Pearl Harbor Day—”
“Uh-huh.”
“This do look like war, sir.”
“Mmmmm,” said Mattera. “Doesn’t make sense, does it? You would think we would have heard something. That’s usually the nice thing about being a cop. You get to hear things, things the average citizen may not know about. You don’t always get to do anything about what you hear, but you hear about it. We’re only in this business because it gives us the feeling of being on the inside.”
“I thought it was for the free coffee,” said the counterman. They drank, pretending not to hear him.
“We’re going to look real bad, you know,” Finney said. “If Moscow and Beyer have a big hate going, they’re going to spill a lot of blood, and the chance of solving any of those jobs isn’t worth pondering.” He broke off suddenly, pleased with himself. He was fairly certain he had never used “pondering” in conversation before.
“And,” he went on, “with various killers flying in and out of town and leaving us with a file of unsolved homicides, the newspapers may start hinting that we are not the best police force in the world.”
“Everybody knows we’re the best money can buy,” said Mattera.
“Isn’t it the truth,” said Finney.
“And what bothers me most,” said Mattera, “is the innocent men who will die in a war like this. Men like Big Nose, for example.”
“Pillars of the community.”
“We’ll miss them,” said Mattera.
The following afternoon, Mr. Archer Moscow used his untapped private line to call the untapped private line of Mr. Barry Beyer. “You had no call to do that,” he said.
“To do what?”
“Dant and Third-Time and Big Nose,” said Moscow. “You know I didn’t have a thing to do with Lucky Tom. You got no call for revenge.”
“Who was it hit Lucky Tom?”
“How should I know?”
“Well,” said Beyer, reasonably, “then how should I know who hit Dant and Third-Time and Big Nose?”
There was a long silent moment. “We’ve been friends a long time,” Moscow said. “We have kept things cool, and we have all done very nicely that way — with no guns, and no blasting a bunch of guys out of revenge for something which we never did to Lucky Tom in the first place.”
“If I thought you hit Lucky Tom—”
“The bum,” said Moscow, “was not worth killing.”
“If I thought you did it,” Beyer went on, “I wouldn’t go and shoot up a batch of punks like Dant and Third-Time and Big Nose. You know what I’d do?”
“What?”
“I’d go straight to the top,” said Beyer. “I’d kill you, you bum!”
“That’s no way to talk, Barry.”
“You had no call to kill Lucky Tom. So maybe he was holding out a little in Ward Three, it don’t make no difference.”
“You had no call to kill those three boys.”
“You don’t know what killing is, bum.”
“Yeah?” Moscow challenged.
“Yeah!”
That night, a gentleman named Mr. Roswell “Greasy” Spune turned his key in his ignition and was immediately blown from this world into the next. The little man with the small hands and the white gloves watched from a tavern across the street. Mr. Spune was a bagman for Barry Beyer’s organization. Less than two hours after Mr. Spune’s abrupt demise, six of Barry Beyer’s boys hijacked an ambulance from the hospital garage. Five sat in back, and the sixth, garbed in white, drove the sporty vehicle through town with the pedal on the floor and the siren wide open. “This takes me back,” one of them was heard to say. “This is the way it used to be before the world went soft in the belly. This is what you would call doing things with a little class.”
The ambulance pulled up in front of a West Side tavern where the Moscow gang hung out. The ambulance tailgate burst open, and the five brave men and true emerged with submachine guns and commenced blasting away. Eight of Archie Moscow’s staunchest associates died in the fray, and only one of the boys from the ambulance crew was killed in return.
Moscow retaliated the next day, shooting up two Beyer-operated card games, knocking off two small-time dope peddlers, and gunning down a Beyer lieutenant as he emerged from his bank at two-thirty in the afternoon. The gunman who accomplished this last feat then raced down an alleyway into the waiting arms of a rookie patrolman, who promptly shot him dead. The kid had been on the force only three months and was sure he would be up on departmental charges for forgetting to fire two warning shots into the air. Instead he got an on-the-spot promotion to detective junior grade.