I could see how the rest of it would be; the kid, my kid, must have come limping through that street on her way home, after her spat with her boy friend, and just after losing her own heel in the trolley tracks. But of all the freak coincidences! It nearly made your hair stand up to think of it.
I said, “But doesn’t this punk’s father run the Beechwood? Baron, or whatever his name is?”
“He’s the owner of the whole chain. But he’s a respectable man. It’s this manager we want...”
I said, “Hang back a minute, and get word to the kid in that other car: if he wants to stop off at my place on his way home and say hello to his girl, Endicott’s girl, it’s all right with Endicott.”
Afterword to “Endicott’s Girl”
“Endicott’s Girl” (Detective Fiction Weekly, February 19, 1938) is one of Woolrich’s strongest Noir Cop thrillers and also carries forward the oscillation motif from earlier stories like “The Night Reveals” and “Murder on My Mind.” Captain Endicott destroys the clues that seem to link his daughter to the murder, takes steps to jail another woman innocently involved in the case, sets out to murder the man he believes to be blackmailing his child and is even ready to kill Jenny himself rather than see her reputation (and his?) sullied, but at the fadeout his psychotic malfeasance is covered up by his subordinates, who love him for his compassionate heart. What more perfect specimen of the Woolrich cop? Many years after its publication Woolrich picked this tale as his personal favorite among the hundreds he’d written. So why has it never been collected until now?
Detective William Brown
I
Bill Brown, even at fourteen, led the field in everything. He was flashy, brilliant, colorful. Joe Greeley was a plodder, would never be anything but a plodder, an also-ran. He knew it even then, and so did everyone else. He was “Slow Joe” to the fellow’s. Reliable, steady as a block of concrete, but not very exciting. When the cry of “Batter up!” echoed over the ash-dumps, Bill Brown could be counted on for a homer. If Joe Greeley didn’t strike out, the most he could get was a one-bagger.
About the only thing you could say for Joe Greeley was that once he made up his mind about anything, he never changed. A million kids have said they wanted to be policemen, and then dropped the idea when they got a little older. Bill Brown and Joe Greeley said it too, and as far as Joe was concerned, from that moment on his life work was cut out for him. He never veered from his determination. “When I’m on the force—” he’d say, quietly, or “When I’ve got my shield—”
“I can see Slow Joe spending his whole life pounding a beat, ringing in his station house, stopping runaway horses, until they retire him on a pension,” Brown sneered.
“Well, what about you? I thought you were going to join the cops too?”
“Sure, but I’m not going to stay a cop! Any fool can do that. I’m going to be an ace detective before I’m through!”
“More power to you,” Greeley said. He wasn’t jealous.
They’d finished public school together, although Bill Brown had started two full terms after Joe Greeley. Brown got out with a flourish, Greeley just made it by the skin of his teeth. But whatever he’d put down on his final exam papers had come out of his own head, he’d worked hard to hang onto, hadn’t asked anyone’s help. Brown’s answers were a composite; they’d come from the guy in front of him, the guy behind him, and the guys on each side of him. The handwriting, at least, was his own. He got his name up on the school roll-of-honor in the assembly room, in gilt letters. He was selected, because of his rating, to deliver the graduating class’ valediction. He made a fine, thrilling speech. It had been fine and thrilling even five years before when it was delivered, word for word, by some visiting dignitary asked to preside at some other graduation somewhere else.
Through with school, they both took temporary jobs to tide themselves over until they could get appointed to the force. Both doing the same thing for the same concern, driving ice trucks. Mechanical refrigeration was fairly new yet. Now for the first and last times in their lives they were on a basis of absolute equality; there isn’t much chance to show brilliance or originality driving a truck.
They studied for their police exams and sat down at adjoining desks in a big roomful of other prospective limbs of the law. Bill Brown got through in half the time, and with half the sweat, Joe did, but Joe passed — that was all that mattered.
They went to training school together, listening to lectures, having things chalked for them on blackboards, just as if they were kids all over again. They learned fine points of wrestling in the gym, and how to disarm an adversary, and all the rest of it.
They were rookies together, self-conscious in the blue coats and visored caps and brass buttons. Or rather Joe was; but he was proud too. Prouder than anyone would have guessed just by looking at him.
They were given the assignments rookies are given, quiet out-of-the-way beats, where the most that was liable to happen was that some homecoming householder had forgotten his key and couldn’t get in, and had to call on the cop to climb in through a second-story window and open the door from the inside. Which made Joe, at any rate, feel vastly self-important and helpful, and he’d walk down the street again afterward with his chest out even farther than before. Bill, reporting a similar plea for assistance, took a different view of it.
“I told him to climb up himself if he wanted to get in. Wouldn’t I have looked great climbing up over a porch like — like a carpenter or housepainter? What do they think we are anyway, their darky servants?”
“What do the regulations say?” asked Joe doubtfully.
“Aw, you and the regulations! If you’re gonna live by the regulations, you’ll never get anywhere in this racket.”
Racket? thought Joe. That wasn’t the word he would have used for it. Life work, dedication, something like that.
Finally the day came when they weren’t rookies any more; they became full-fledged members of the force. Both on the same day, and both attached to the same precinct-house. They still lived on the same block, a few doors from each other. They walked on-duty and off-duty together whenever their shifts coincided.
Joe was first to get married. He was on the force now, he was set for life, the rest was just a matter of slow advancement up through the ranks, there was no reason to wait any longer. He married a girl that lived on the same block with him, whom he’d known since they were kids. Just a plain girl, but a nice girl, satisfied to be his wife and share a policeman’s lot. Bill Brown had been going with one of the girls on the block too, but he held off getting married. He didn’t say so of course, but he had an air as if to say, “I can do better than around here. I’m going to be somebody. Why should I be in a hurry?”
Officer and Mrs. Joe Greeley moved into a little flat only a couple of blocks away from where they’d always lived. Bill Brown dropped in to see them once or twice, when he and Joe both happened to be off duty simultaneously, but he had an air of good-natured contempt, of — well, almost of looking down on them, feeling sorry for them. Of Joe, for being Joe; and of his wife, for having hitched her wagon to a mud turtle.
Equality ended on a day in October after they’d both been on the force a little over a year. Mr. Kasimir Swoboda, storekeeper, of their precinct, had been held up repeatedly in the past few years and was getting sick of it. Always the same technique: he was driven into a back room at the point of a gun; tied up in there, and sometimes it was an hour before he could attract anyone’s attention, his store was that dark and inconspicuous. Once the robber had had the gall to impersonate the proprietor and wait on a customer who came in while he was in the act of emptying the till, while Swoboda helplessly chewed on a gag a few yards away. To make it even more aggravating, he wasn’t sure but that it had been the same individual each time. Swoboda had been too badly frightened to get a very good look at him.