“Cap, what are you doing here?”
“I caught the squeal, Pete, thought maybe I could help out — direct traffic or something. You boys seem to be having a busy night.”
Lorgos was embarrassed. “I thought you had taken off for California.”
“I leave tomorrow. If I don’t change my mind. I haven’t seen my sister for seventeen years, another week or month won’t make that much difference.”
“Well, Cap, we have things pretty well in hand...”
The retired captain understood his feelings, knew before he came that he would be in the way. Besides, he hadn’t worked the street end of an investigation for almost twenty years, and even when he was chief of detectives — up until six weeks ago — he always had the feeling that Pete and a few of his contemporaries were only tolerating him, would rather not have to put up with him. Now that the captain was out of the way some of the other old-timers would be clearing out soon, and then Pete and the others would have their chance at running things.
Not that the retirement was the captain’s idea at all — it was the regulations: sixty-five and out. The pension was generous enough, and he had put some money aside the last twenty-five years. It was just that he wasn’t ready to quit.
A patrolman came up to Pete, one of the new kids out of the last class. For a minute the captain couldn’t think of his name. Then it came to him — Minetti.
“Sergeant, they’ve just located a vehicle, abandoned behind the high school about six blocks from here. The headlight is smashed, and it looks like it’s the car that hit Pelk. But it’s black — it’s definitely not the car involved in the Huegens crash.”
“Scenting conspiracy, Pete?” the captain asked.
He shrugged. “You never know, Cap. Wouldn’t you check out all angles when four of the city’s biggest hoods get it on the same night?”
“Pelk has been out of the rackets and clean for over twenty years,” the captain said mildly.
“Maybe someone has a long memory. He and Dolan started out together on the streets, and for a long time Huegens did his legal dirty work...”
His voice trailed off; he seemed to feel awkward to be lecturing the older man on the history of the power structure of the city. He was glad suddenly to have the opportunity to shout orders at a too pushy television cameraman. The captain stood there for another two or three minutes, watching from the sidelines, then finally walked back to his own car.
He heard the low murmur of the police radio — he should have turned it in the day he retired, but somehow he forgot. Maybe it was because the day before the sergeant in charge of the supply office had told him that for some strange reason he couldn’t find the paperwork charging the captain for the thing.
He sat in his car for perhaps another ten minutes, until the meat wagon came to claim Pelk. After that the television crew left, and then most of the gawkers as well. He watched Pete moving around for another couple of minutes, and then he started the car and pulled away from the curb, cutting around the barricades blocking off the scene of the accident.
Midnight: Chelton broke the record. He was number five.
They found him with a gun in his hand, the smell of scorched flesh coming from the hole under his chin where the bullet had entered. There was another hole the size of a fist in the top of his head and a half-kilo of uncut heroin under the front seat of his car.
It didn’t figure: Chelton wasn’t under pressure, apart from the usual surveillance by the federal, state, and city narcotics boys. Everyone knew that he was the number one man in the city drugstore, but he was too smart to be caught with so much as an aspirin in his machine-turned gold cigarette case — unless there was a doctor’s prescription folded around the tablet. There were plenty of others to take the risks, to do the holding. Chelton himself was on top of his world, respected among his fellow syndicate associates, living in a fantastic riverfront mansion, built during the Thirties by a famous movie queen for three hundred thousand dollars. Chelton enjoyed a happy family life; his kids were educated in the most exclusive private schools, where never was heard a discouraging word or intimation as to the source of Papa’s wealth and the nature of his business.
Why should Chelton stick a gun under his face and pull the trigger?
But the gun was in his hand.
And the only other prints on or in the car belonged to members of his family.
About then somebody in the department came up with the bright idea that since all of the deaths except Dolan’s were connected with cars, maybe there was something worth looking into. The genius blabbed to a television newsman, and he got to make his first public appearance on the one o’clock news roundup, just a few minutes after Sellinger walked off the balcony of his penthouse on the twenty-third floor.
12:53 A.M.: Sellinger was number six. He landed on the hood of a car pulling out of the building garage, almost adding the car’s four passengers to the death list. They would have been the first extraneous victims since the death of Dolan’s wife and girl friend.
By now there were a great many nervous people in town, almost everyone who was still awake. The ones with criminal connections were perhaps justified in their worries, but the police switchboard was besieged with distraught callers of the little-old-lady variety, who were certain that a mad killer was lurking in the hydrangea bushes below their bedroom. There was no way such calls could be checked out, for every available man had been called in to duty and the city was being saturated with patrols — but someone got the bright idea of bringing in some of the volunteers from the drug and suicide centers, and letting them talk to the nervous grandmas. They did a pretty good job of calming the old ladies.
After that the pace seemed to pick up:
1:21 A.M.: someone poured a glass of household lye solution down Bergen’s throat. It was possible the man was unconscious at the moment of assault, as there was no sign of struggle. But it made no difference, for he would have been just as dead if he had struggled.
2:02 A.M.: Wentworth’s north-side house went up in a shower of flames that reminded one late-pacing neighbor of a giant Roman candle. The cause was later determined to be an exploding gas line.
2:43 A.M.: someone entered Korman’s bedroom without waking his wife. He was strangled with one of her stockings, also without waking his wife. His body was not discovered until morning, at which time his servants also found the dead bodies of three guard dogs, struck down by poisoned tranquilizer darts.
At 3:50 the captain arrived home to find Pete Lorgos’ city sedan in his driveway. Pete was sitting in the porch swing that the captain had never gotten around to taking down, with Ellie no longer there to nag him about such matters. He knew there was a three-inch rip in the window screen behind Lorgos as well, although this new nylon screening didn’t rust like the old stuff did. The storm windows were still stacked in the garage behind the house.
“Pete,” the captain said, speaking to the spark of the other’s cigarette as he got out of his car. He walked up to the porch. “Come on in and I’ll fix coffee, if you can stand instant.”
“That’ll be fine, Cap.”
Lorgos said nothing as he followed him through the clutter of the living room, even when he saw the dust coating the tables and the pile of unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink. The captain found two mugs in the cupboard and set the teakettle on the gas range to boil, then pulled out a chair at the kitchen table.