“Didn’t you ever hear of Big Bill Nolan, the politician? This is his brother.”
Greeley knew vaguely that he pulled a lot of weight, a sort of district boss of some kind.
“Yeah,” Brown added, “we better get it under control fast.” But he sounded fairly confident.
Mrs. Nolan was in pretty bad shape, as was to be expected, but managed to give them an outline of her own and her husband’s movements just preceding the event.
“Jerry and I had dinner at Big Bill’s house tonight,” she wept. “He’s my brother-in-law, you know. He was giving some kind of a smoker or party for his club-members afterwards, and wanted Jerry to stay — oh. I only wish he had. But he serves such elaborate meals, we’d both had wine at dinner, we weren’t used to it, and it made us both sleepy. Jerry wasn’t much of a drinker any more than I am, in spite of the fact that he used to be in that business. We got back a little after nine, and I came right into the house and he went to put the car away. I must have dozed off upstairs. The next time I opened my eyes over an hour had gone by and he hadn’t come in yet. I wasn’t worried about his being overcome or anything like that, because he’d had that window put into the garage especially on that account, only about a year ago. The two officers in the radio car came by while I was calling to him.”
“You didn’t hear anything like a shot, Mrs. Nolan?”
“I can’t tell if I did or not. You see the car had backfired all the way home, its exhaust-pipe needed cleaning badly and Jerry had put off attending to it. It was still going on after he got it into the garage, but I had the windows closed in the bedroom and it wasn’t enough to keep me from dozing off.”
“Do you know of anyone who had a grudge against your husband, Mrs. Nolan?”
“No one did. Everyone liked him,” she said tearfully. “He was very easy-going. Big Bill is the one who has enemies.”
“Well, we won’t distress you any more tonight,” the captain said sympathetically. “We know how you must feel.” He motioned his two men out with him.
In the hallway they met Big Bill Nolan as he came storming in answer to the bad news he had just received. He was still in dinner jacket and lapel flower, a big florid silver-haired man, chewing viciously on a cigar.
“You get that man for me, Captain!” he thundered, pointing his cigar menacingly at Hackett. “You get the man that did this, d’ye hear me? Give me a chance to get my hands on him!”
“We’ll get him, Mr. Nolan,” the captain answered evenly. “We’ll give it everything we’ve got. I’ll put my best men on it. Here’s one of them here.” He rested a hand on Brown’s shoulder. “This is Bill Brown, one of the best men on the squad. D’you remember the Ingram case? D’you remember the Allroyd case? That’s this boy.”
Nolan studied him a moment, with the swift appraisal of a man used to judging character at sight. Then he swept up Brown’s hand, pumped it with ferocious intensity.
“Brown,” he grated, “the sky’s the limit! I’ll shoot you up to the top. I can do it! If you’re as good as they say, you get me the dirty sneaking so-and-so that done this to my brother and you’re made for life! You can count on Big Bill Nolan!”
Then he barged on past them, to go in and console his sister-in-law, without so much as a glance at Greeley.
“Well, you men heard,” Hackett said succinctly as they returned to the garage. “It means our scalps.”
Brown said, “The angle, of course, is that it’s some enemy of Big Bill’s, who couldn’t get at him himself and therefore struck at him through his brother.”
“That’s logical,” Hackett conceded. “Big Bill never married, so his brother was his nearest of kin, and he always had a peculiar affection for him anyway. He gave him all this.” He waved his hand at the house behind them. “Took him out of the saloon business and pensioned him for life.”
They had taken Nolan out of the garage by now. “I don’t think this place can tell us much more, for the present,” Hackett remarked after a final look around. “I want to get down and find out what Ballistics can tell us about that slug. That’s going to be important. Get hold of Big Bill as soon as he cools off a little, Brown, and see if you can get a line on anyone who in his opinion might possibly nurse a grievance against him. He’s made enough enemies in his time. Case the vicinity, Greeley, and try to find out if anyone was seen loitering around the premises earlier in the evening, if any parked car was noticed that didn’t belong in the neighborhood. Stuff like that. Sometimes little things, that don’t seem like anything, pack more weight than the biggest leads you can get.”
The dirty work again. He went at it without a murmur. Hackett drove off back to headquarters to await the autopsy and ballistics reports. Brown remained puttering around the garage, measuring the window dimensions with a pocket tape, examining the warped doors microscopically. All this was highly pertinent, but it wasn’t much in character for him to bother with it. It was more the sort of thing he usually delegated to Greeley. He was hanging around waiting for Big Bill to come out, Joe supposed. The last Joe saw of him he was going over the ground on the outside of the garage window inch by inch, crouched down on his heels with a torch.
Greeley worked his way down the street dwelling by dwelling, on the side nearest the Nolan garage. He got practically nothing. It had been, and still was, an unusually windy night. No one had heard anything like a shot, or if they had they hadn’t been able to differentiate it from the incessant banging of loose shutters and rattling of window frames that had gone on. One family, in the house nearest the Nolans’, but which was separated from it by one empty building-lot, remembered hearing the backfiring of the car when it arrived home, but this had been going on for days now, so they didn’t think anything of it. “I guess he kept forgetting to have the carbon scraped off. He was a lovely man, but he was very absent-minded at times.” The woman sighed reminiscently. “Poor soul. Only about a week ago he locked himself out of the house one night — his wife was away or something — and a man in a car stopped and caught him in the act of trying to climb in through the window. It turned out he was a plainclothesman too.” She laughed a little, ruefully. “Poor Mr. Nolan had to identify himself, tell who he was, that he was Big Bill’s brother and all that, before the policeman would let him go. Then Nolan wanted him to climb up for him and open the door on the inside. He was too stout himself to be very good at it, you know. The man said, ‘What do I look like, a sign painter or a monkey in the zoo?’ And he drove off and left Nolan there on the sidewalk at two in the morning. I had to send my husband out and have him do it for him, otherwise he’d have stood out there all night.” Her smile faded and she sighed again. “And now he’s gone. I can’t believe it.”
The incident reminded Greeley of when he and Brown had been rookies, in uniform, and that was almost the sum total of their duties. Brown had been just like that too in those days, with an exaggerated sense of his own dignity.
VII
When he got back Brown had gone. Big Bill presumably had too, for the two retainers and the battleship of a limousine were missing. A single dim light behind a lowered shade on the upper floor of the death house marked where Mrs. Nolan was under medical supervision. A cop was preparing to lock up the garage.
Greeley came up to him in the dark, his shoddy topcoat ballooning about him, hanging onto his hat with one hand. “Open ’em all the way again,” he suggested. “Let’s see if the wind’ll do the same thing this time.”
They swung the two halves back to the full width necessary to admit a car, took their hands off, and watched and waited. Nothing happened for a few minutes; then just when Greeley was starting to get doubtful a sudden gust came along that shot the doors closed with a noise like a giant firecracker. It took the men a good five minutes to pry them apart again.