Erle Stanley Gardner
It’s the McCoy
Chapter One
Grandstand Play
It was the last half of the seventh inning. The visitors were two runs ahead, and the heavy batting end of the home team was coming up. The crowd was at that emotional pitch when balls are greeted with cheers, strikes bring forth groans, and a foul ball has spectators jumping from their seats, straining their necks.
Paul Pry and Mugs Magoo sat in the grandstand directly behind the catcher.
Paul Pry was drinking a bottle of soda pop, his eyes sparkling with enjoyment. His entire thought processes concentrated upon the progress of the game.
Mugs Magoo, on the other hand, sat heavily on the pads which had been rented for the occasion to soften the hard contours of the grandstand seat. His slightly protruding eyes were masked behind a film which gave them the lack of expression commonly associated with the eyes of a fish. But those eyes missed nothing. Apparently dead, expressionless, inanimate, they were as efficient as the lens of a candid camera.
Mugs Magoo might or might not have been watching the ball game. Certainly he was not absorbed in it, whereas Paul Pry strained every nerve to follow each move in the game which was changing momentarily with such kaleidoscopic swiftness.
Mugs’ right arm was off at the shoulder, and his coat sleeve was neatly folded back and pinned. The breadth of his shoulders, the thickness of his neck, and the easy motions of his left arm, showed that, before the accident which had cost him his arm, he had been a very powerful man.
At one time “camera-eye” man for the metropolitan police force, he had catalogued every crook who had worked in the metropolis or who had been mugged by other police departments. A political shake-up, the accident which had lost him his arm, and a proclivity for drinking huge quantities of whiskey, had cost him his police career. Now, he found solace and remuneration in putting his encyclopedic knowledge of the underworld at the service of Paul Pry.
And Paul Pry’s nimble wits, as swift in their functioning as the flashing of the baseball which was making history as it zipped its way across the diamond, made much capital of the information Mugs Magoo was able to give him.
The batter made a terrific swing. The bat struck the ball with a crack which sounded like the blowout of a huge tire. The ball went sailing high in the air, and the crowd surged to its feet.
Far above the field, the baseball started to curve back toward the third-base line. Spectators watched it with that tense silence which is associated with baited breath, clenched hands, and taut lips.
With swift acceleration the curve of the ball took it back over and across the third-base line.
The third baseman couldn’t reach it.
The fielder couldn’t get to it.
The ball thudded to the ground for the third foul to be called on the batter.
With a long drawn sigh, the crowd relaxed. Some sat down at once. Others remained standing as though loath to believe that the play was over, feeling that perhaps a miracle could recall that which had already happened.
Mugs Magoo said conversationally to Paul Pry: “Big Jim Dolovo is having a hell of a time agreeing on a price for his next job.”
Paul Pry deposited the empty soda-pop bottle between his feet, and said: “Mugs, what the devil are you talking about?”
“Big Jim Dolovo.”
“I heard you, but what the devil has Big Jim Dolovo got to do with this ball game?”
“He’s buying a bunch of gems,” Mugs Magoo said, “and the guy he’s dealing with ain’t as easy as Big Jim likes to have ’em.”
“You mean he’s buying gems here at this ball game?”
“Yes, of course.”
“But how can you tell, in this bedlam of noise?”
“He’s making signs,” Mugs said.
The pitcher caught the catcher’s signal, wound up, and sent a fast ball hopping toward the plate. The batter braced himself then relaxed.
“Ball three,” the umpire called.
Paul Pry said, moodily: “Do we have to talk business now, Mugs?”
Mugs Magoo deftly extracted a cigarette from a package with his left hand, snapped a match into flame, and lit the fragrant cylinder. “You told me to point out anything interesting in the line of crook activities whenever I saw them, and wherever I saw them,” he said.
The pitcher suddenly wound up, shot his arm back and over. But instead of the fast ball hopping through the air to explode into the catcher’s glove, he sent a delivery which seemed barely to dribble through the air. The tense batter tried to control his swing in vain. He swung so hard that he spun himself through a complete turn, and the swing was fully completed before the hall hit the catcher’s glove.
The crowd roared into noise as the crestfallen batter jogged over to the player’s bench.
While the new batter was stepping up to the plate Paul Pry said: “O.K., Mugs, you win. No good having my attention split up half and half. I didn’t get half the kick out of that strike-out on the slowball I should have. Where the hell’s Big Jim Dolovo, who is he, and what’s he doing?”
“The fat guy over there with the blue coat. The one with the big ring on his hand. You’ll see his hand in a minute. There. He took off his hat to wipe his forehead with a handkerchief. See him?”
Paul Pry stared at the man whose thick neck made corrugated washboards of fat over the back of his coat collar.
“You mean the chap who’s just running his handkerchief around the back of his neck now, Mugs?”
“Yeah, that’s the one.”
“And what about him, Mugs?”
“He fences stolen jewelry. Only he doesn’t handle it the way a pawnbroker or someone else would. He knows what he’s going to buy in advance, figures what he’s going to pay for it, and usually has his market ready for resale before he even gets it.”
“Go on, Mugs,” Paul Pry said. “You interest me, and this batter doesn’t seem to be doing very much for himself.”
Mugs Magoo turned his mournful eyes on the batter who had just swung wildly at the second pitched ball to give the pitcher the advantage of two strikes and no balls.
“Big Jim Dolovo,” Mugs said, as the batter stalled for time by dusting his hands, “has about half a dozen big-time crooks working for him. He tells the crooks what to steal, and how much he’s willing to pay for the take after they get it. The crooks go out and lift the swag. Jim Dolovo pays the agreed price, and that’s all there is to it.”
Paul Pry said: “Look here, Mugs. The police would never stand for that.”
“How could they stop it?” Mugs asked.
“They must know about it. If you know about it, they certainly must be able to get some inkling that—”
“They know all about it,” Mugs Magoo said. “That’s all the good it does them.”
“What do you mean?”
“They shadow Big Jim night and day. They’ve got his telephone line tapped. They watch his mail, and they can’t do a damn thing. And don’t think that because I know about things, the police know about them. The cops have changed a lot since I was on the force. In some ways they’re more efficient, and in other ways they ain’t worth a damn. They’re getting soft and lazy because they’ve got machines to do their work.”
“What do you mean machines?” Paul Pry asked.
“Radio, fingerprints, and all that stuff. If they want to know whether a man has a criminal record, they stamp his fingerprints on a piece of paper and telegraph the classification to Washington, and inside a couple of hours they know all about him from the time he was born. But in my time, you were matching wits with crooks all the time. Crooks would change their normal appearance, and you’d have to be on your toes to keep them classified.”