“A year, just about.” Greeley turned his head aside a little, as though he didn’t like to be reminded of it.
“See, that’s what I mean. I had to wait a year between the Ingram case and that. Now it’s been another year since that one again. It’s all right for you, Joe. You’re a different type from me. You don’t seem to mind staying in a rut. ‘Slow Joe.’ But me, I could go nuts just thinking about it. It gets me down.”
Joe Greeley gave him a look. “You’ve gone up pretty fast.”
“Not fast enough to suit me,” Brown insisted. And he got that same hard, calculating glint in his eyes, and seemed to be looking past the other man, into the future. His own future.
A cop stuck his head in. “Brown. Greeley. Report to Captain Hackett’s office right away.”
“Maybe,” said Joe, as they crowded through the doorway together, “this is it now.”
They met the captain coming out of his office. He’d snatched his hat up without waiting for them to get there, was making a bee-line for the hallway and the street. “Homicide at Two-ninety-five Russell Street just reported,” he snapped over his shoulder at them.
Riding out to it, Greeley wondered: “Where do I fit in? Why me, teamed up with the great Brown, and not one of the other guys?” But he knew the answer without having to be told. Brow n for the fireworks; himself for the dirty work, the thousand and one petty details that didn’t need much imagination or originality, just a mole-like patience, but were essential just the same. He was as good in his way as Brown was in his. He made a very good cog in the machine. Brown supplied the electric current. They were short-handed just then anyway. The division as a whole was up to its ears in work trying to track down a payroll bandit who was responsible for the deaths of two armed guards and a policeman.
The Russell Street address was a substantial private home, set back from the street on its own plot of ground, with a garage adjoining. It belonged to a middle-aged couple, a retired saloonkeeper named Jerrold Nolan and his wife.
When they got out of the car and went up to the entrance, one of the prowl car men who had reported it in came forward to meet them. “It’s not in the house, Captain Hackett — it’s over in the garage,” he explained. They turned and cut across the lawn to the concrete driveway that led to the garage. The garage doors were wide open now and the lights on behind them. A year-old sedan was backed into place, and in the lane between it and the side wall of the garage a man’s leg was thrust grotesquely upward from the floor.
They could only see the rest of the crumpled body by getting over close to the wall and peering in. There was a window in the wall directly above it, the only one in the garage, fairly high and narrow, its glass protected by wire mesh. The sash was up as far as it could go. A lean narrow-hipped man could possibly have wriggled out through it; the body, from what could be seen of it, was that of a somewhat stocky, rotund man. Me had evidently tried to climb through just the same. There were innumerable evidences of this, even before the car had been jockeyed out of the way. The toes of his shoes were badly scuffed, and yet the heels and uppers had been shined only recently. There was a pad of dust on each knee of his otherwise immaculately pressed and cleaned suit, where he had braced his legs against the wall under the window to try to hoist himself up to the ledge. And lastly there were a number of blackish toe-marks down the wall, where the shoe polish had streaked off on it.
At first sight it almost looked like an accidental death. He had fallen backward into the lane between car and wall in his effort to climb out through the window, and struck the back of his head either on the cement garage-floor or against the steel-rimmed running-board of the car. But Greeley knew they wouldn’t have been there if that was all there was to it. When the car had been exhaustively powdered for prints and shunted out of the way and they could get in closer, and Joe knelt down over the man in his turn, after Hackett and Brown, he could see that the ugly wound in the front of his head (and he had fallen backward) had a black core to it that no cement flooring in the world could have caused. Bullet hole.
Greeley straightened up and got out of the light so that the photographers could take the scene.
“Who found him?” asked the captain.
One of the prowl car men answered, “We did, sir. We were cruising past and noticed a woman leaning out of one of the upper-story windows of the house, hollering something. We braked to see if anything was the matter, but she was only calling to her husband to find out why he was taking so long to come in. So I got out and went to take a look in the garage, where she said he was. The doors were jammed fast and the keys were still sticking in them on the outside. I had to call my partner over before we could get them open. We found one of them warped.” He led them over and showed them. “See, it hangs unevenly on its hinges, and the wind must have blew them shut after him and got them stuck. When we finally pried them open, all the lights were on and there he was, with one leg sticking up against the wall like that.”
“What tipped you off it was a homicide?”
“Well, he landed backward, so I knew the floor couldn’t have given him that ugly looking hole in front. I could see it even from out past the car’s bumper. I’ve seen bullet holes before.”
“Good work,” said the captain crisply, “because that’s what you saw this time too. Now just one more question. About those doors: are you sure they were just jammed fast, and not locked on the outside?”
“Yessir. One side hung unevenly, like I said. For half of the distance it slanted in a little further than the other, and for the other half it leaned out a little more than the other. You could see the light coming through up at the top and down near the bottom. All he could do on his side, I guess, was just shove in one direction. That’s why he couldn’t free them. The way we had to do it, I pulled out at the top and my partner pushed in at the bottom, we evened it with the other wing and that got it loose.”
“Take those keys anyway,” the captain ordered the print men, “if they’re not spoiled already. And all around that window, every square inch of it. I’d like to know if he opened it to try to get out or somebody else opened it to shoot in at him. How long ago do you figure?” This last to the examiner.
“A good hour, maybe even more.”
“How do you figure it?” He turned almost instinctively to Brown when he put the question.
“Just roughly, with what we’ve gotten so far, something like this: the wind blew the doors shut on him and trapped him in here after he drove his car in to put it to bed. He couldn’t get them open from the inside, like the radio cops suggest, so he tried to climb out through the window. He either inadvertently attracted someone’s attention doing so and they approached him, or he got stuck and called out to someone to give him a hand. Whoever this person was, they almost certainly fired a bullet at him and killed him instead of helping him out.”
“I think that’s close enough for a starter,” the captain agreed. “We’ll build on it, anyway, until and unless we find evidence to the contrary. It doesn’t give us any motive yet, but we haven’t gone far enough to reasonably expect one.” He indicated the fat wallet and silver cigarette-case that had been taken from the body. “Whatever it was, it wasn’t robbery. Let’s go in and talk to her if we’re able to.”
As they moved up to the house he added, “This thing’s going to make a big splash. The sooner we can get a strangle hold on it, the better for us. You know who they are, don’t you?”
Greeley saw Brown nod, but he hadn’t any idea, for his part.