A young woman in a nurse’s cap threw open the window next to the one where the night light burned and hissed down: “Will you men please get away from here! This woman’s in a critical condition!”
“Sorry,” Greeley whispered back huskily.
But he lingered there by the locked garage. As he watched the cop shove off down the street he wondered, “Why don’t I get out of here? What am I trying to do — give an imitation of a detective? I’ll never be one.”
He drifted around to the side where the window was, playing his torch around the way Brown had his. He wondered if Brown had found anything. Leave it to him, if there was anything to find he’d find it, Joe assured himself. Bill had been looking for the gun, maybe. No, it couldn’t have been that; even he, Slow Joe, knew no murderer was going to be dumb enough to discard it right there, yards away from the crime. That would have been leaving his name and address with a vengeance. Brown had probably just been killing time until Big Bill was ready to leave his sister-in-law’s house.
All Joe could see, in the little white egg of light he rolled around his feet, was stubble and dried leaves and little stones. He scuffed and prodded around, knowing that if he wasn’t doing any good at least he wasn’t doing any damage either.
He did see something like a beetle nestling there under one of the little stones he dislodged, that was about all. He poked it indifferently with the tip of his shoe. It shop up at an angle against the garage wall, hit with a little click, and dropped again. He looked for it and found it a second time, and it wasn’t a beetle, it was a button.
It was one of those fancy leather-covered ones with a rounded head, not holed through for thread but with a little metal “eye” underneath instead. The kind of button that is sometimes featured on certain extreme types of sports suits. Or uniforms.
Studying it he thought, “Is it possible the great Brown missed this and I got it?” It seemed inconceivable. It could have happened, of course. Brown was only human after all. He might have just missed disturbing the right little stone out of all the dozens strewn around. But it seemed far more likely Brown had lost it himself just now, when he was crouched over exploring around here. Only, on second thought, Greeley remembered he’d had on a dark blue suit, and this button was brown, so that was out too. It was a vest- or cuff-button, judging by its size, rather than a jacket button.
“Maybe it is something after all,” he decided. “I better take it down with me and show it.”
Hackett wasn’t in his office when he got down to the precinct station. Some tip had come in, they told him, on the payroll bandit, and Hackett had chased out again. Brown wasn’t there either, and nobody seemed to know where he was. Probably still consulting Big Bill Nolan on a list of possible enemies.
Joe was going to leave the button on Hackett’s desk, but that looked silly as hell. He could hear the captain growl, “What do you think you’re doing, playing kids’ games?” The more he thought about it the sillier he felt, coming in to say: “I found a button on the ground outside the garage up there.” He realized fully that just such things had turned out to be highly important clues before. In fact whole cases had been hinged on much less than that — a wisp of nap, a single hair, the broken-off tip of a lead-pencil — but perhaps it was that he lacked self-confidence, he was used to playing second fiddle on any case in which he was teamed with Brown; coming from Joe Greeley, a thing like this seemed bound to be disregarded, laughed at. Or so he thought. It might, for all he knew, turn out to have belonged to Jerrold Nolan himself. He hadn’t lost it tonight, for when they found him he too had been in a dark blue suit, but maybe earlier in the week. He decided that before he said anything about it he’d go back tomorrow and check through Nolan’s clothing, just to make sure. For the present he returned the button to his vest pocket, in the little scrap of newspaper in which he’d brought it in.
The ballistics and autopsy reports had come in already, were there on Hackett’s desk under his eyes. Whether Hackett had read them yet, before he was called out on this other thing, Greeley couldn’t tell, of course. He picked them up and glanced through them himself. Being on the case, he was entitled to the information they contained. The bullet that had killed Nolan was from a .45 caliber revolver, and had been fired at very close range, though not quite actual contact. The other typed sheet was less important. The cause of death was a bullet in the brain. Nolan had also received a bad gash at the back of the head from striking against the steel-rimmed running-board of the car, but this was not sufficient to have caused death. Moreover, it had bled only slightly, so the death wound had probably preceded it. Nolan had had a slight amount of alcohol in his system at the time.
Hackett’s desk phone rang while Joe was standing there reading, and he took the call. He recognized Brown’s voice. That pounding like a dynamo was more noticeable in it than ever. He must be on the way to something already.
“Hackett there?”
“No, he was called out on the Wolf Bernstorff thing. This is Joe Greeley.”
“Well, listen, Joe. I’ve just been talking to Big Bill Nolan and we’ve shaped up a list of possibilities in this thing. You know, people who have threatened to get even with him at one time or another, who have held long-standing grievances against him, that kind of thing. Some of them look good and I think we’re going to town. But it’s too big, takes in too much ground, for me to cover single-handed. I want Hackett to get it as soon as he can. He’ll have to apportion it, put some other people on it along with me.”
“All right, let’s have it. I’ll take it down for you.”
“Number one, Anthony Trusso, ward-heeler up in Italian Harlem, frozen out by Nolan and lost his pull. Number two...” When Brown got through he had given six names, with all the requisite information that went with each.
“Which ones are you following up yourself?” Greeley asked unexpectedly.
Brown’s voice had been the staccato rapid-firing of a machine gun until now. It suddenly missed fire, faltered, then recovered again. “Er-Trusso and this Little Benny.”
“No he isn’t,” Greeley told himself. “He wasn’t ready for that and it tripped him. He isn’t going after those two at all. But what’s he bothering to stall me for? What’s he afraid of, my horning in? I’m no competition for him.”
“Okay,” he said, “I’ll underline those two, so he’ll know.”
“Yeah, fine.” Brown’s voice lacked enthusiasm, though. (He’s not really interested in them, Greeley thought.) “See that he gets it right away, will you? And don’t let it get around — it’s dynamite.”
Brown had hung up before Joe could ask him whether he’d seen the ballistics report yet.
VIII
Hackett came in at two that morning with a face sour as green apples. “Got away again,” he commented tersely. “The guy must be an eel. What’s this list?”
Greeley explained.
“I haven’t got a man to spare, Big Bill or no Big Bill,” Hackett told him. “We’ve got to get Bernstorff, dammit! He’s killed a cop and if we let him get away with it, it amounts to waving a white flag of surrender in the face of the entire underworld. Our lives won’t be worth a nickel.” He handed the list back to Greeley. “You and Brown’ll have to cover it between you. Get hold of him and tell him those are my orders.”