“I did — and it was neffer turned in! I cannot find the man again. I know if I make too much trouble about it, I get in trouble myself. This Nolan, he would like nothing better than to send me to jail, like he did my oldest boy.” He breathed stormily through dilated nostrils. “Wait. Wait. My time comes.”
“Well this isn’t it. Nolan’s brother was killed last night — with your gun. You better get out of here fast! Don’t stop to argue or ask questions.”
Schreiber’s Teutonic stubbornness came to the fore. “I don’t move! I was at the club last night. I can proof it!”
“Where? Where you going to prove it?” was all Greeley asked.
“At the police station! Where you think?”
“You’ll never get there alive. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You won’t show up there any more than your gun did. Come here a minute, to the front window with me. Don’t touch the curtains now. See that cab there? There’s a man waiting in it to arrest you. He’s the same man that impounded your gun. You’ll get it back. It’ll be found in your pocket, or in your hand, when they come across you in some vacant lot.”
Schreiber just stood there staring in hypnotized horror, as though he could see the scene before him. He felt for his own throat, held onto it as though he could feel a noose tightening around it.
“The only thing that saves you is he’s alone on it. Take off your bib and follow me. You can get out through the back, the way I came in. Get out of town for the next couple of days and stay there. After that it’ll be all right. You can come back again.”
He ran down the back stairs, stopped halfway to the bottom to make sure Schreiber was coming after him, then went on down the rest of the way. Schreiber suddenly balked at the yard door. “How I know it ain’t you instead of him who does it to me? How I know who you are?”
Greeley, astride the fence already, answered, “Stay here then. I’ve done my part. I don’t much care what you do. I never saw you before in my life.”
A doorbell rang somewhere at the front of the house, and it could be heard all the way out here.
Schreiber came out the rest of the way, his arms extended. “Give me a hand up. I ain’t so athletic no more.”
IX
Greeley didn’t go back to headquarters after he left Schreiber at the 125th Street Station. He went out to Brown’s house instead. It had to be up there, not at headquarters.
He waited patiently through the long hours, a huddled figure in the outer doorway, hands deep-pocketed, coat collar turned up against the slanting silvery rain. Head down the whole time, never once raised; not lowered in an attempt to avoid recognition, but with the weight of the responsibility upon him.
The shiny sidewalk darkened from pewter to black, and it was night at last. He never moved. He was stiff all over. It seemed like half the night had gone by before tires came whispering up at last and stopped out at the curb before him. He didn’t look up. A car door cracked and a man’s thick-soled tread came across the sidewalk. A pair of shoes stopped there within the radius of his lowered gaze.
His head came up slowly then, and it was Brown.
“For pete’s sake!” was Brown’s wry recognition. “Haven’t you got sense enough to come in out of the rain?”
He, Greeley, was a coward up to the very last. He couldn’t do it down here in the open street either. He said, “Let’s go upstairs. I want to talk to you.”
Going up. Brown growled, “I was thrown for a terrible loss just now.” Greeley didn’t ask him what he meant. Didn’t have to.
Brown’s wife was asleep. Greeley went over and closed the door so she wouldn’t hear them. He sat down and took out his gun.
Brown looked at him and smiled. “What’re you pointing it at me for? Rehearsing what you’re going to do to—”
“Finish it,” Greeley said. “What I’m going to do to the man that killed Jerry Nolan. This isn’t the rehearsal. This is it. Hand over that forty-five you impounded from Gus Schreiber last week. Hand it over. It’s on you right now. Your own too. Come out with it. Now don’t move. I’ll shoot you if you want it that way. I’m in hell already.”
“How did you know I—?” Then he tried to say something about having unearthed it just now at Schreiber’s house.
“How do I know — the whole thing?” Greeley grimaced in revulsion. “Do we have to talk about it? We’ve known each other half our lives. Let’s shut up, let’s shut up.”
Brown sat down at long last. “What are you doing this to me for?”
Greeley pitched the leather-covered button at him. “Are you man enough to bring the vest this goes with out here and show it to me? Don’t keep looking at me trying to find out how much I know. I know the whole thing. It’s been progressive. The Ingram case was on the level. You got a boost. In the Allroyd case, the murder was on the level but you couldn’t break it, so you framed a suspect and shot him down in cold blood. You got a boost. Things didn’t happen fast enough after that to suit you. You caught the hotheaded Dutchman Schreiber shooting off his mouth what he’d like to do to Big Bill Nolan. You took his gun away. That part of it was in good faith. That was the only part that was. That same night you came through Russell Street and came across Jerry Nolan locked out of his house. It was a devastating coincidence, and it was too much for you. The whole set-up must have come to you then and there. You couldn’t do anything right then, because the people in the next house were at their window. You drove through that street again and again, I suppose. And finally it jelled just right. You caught him accidentally imprisoned in his garage, trying to climb out the window, and with a high wind blowing that was making enough racket to muffle any shot.
“You dropped a button. You didn’t know just where, but you were worried. I saw you looking for it later that night. I would never have looked myself if you hadn’t. Now give me those guns — butts first. Careful.”
Brown complied. Joe Greeley pocketed the .45, and started to empty the Police Positive’s chambers. “I’m going to get out of here now. I’m going to leave you here — with your wife in there. Say goodby to her or not, whichever you like. I’m going to leave your own gun here with you. It’s got one bullet in it.”
“I can’t, Joe! I can’t! I haven’t got the nerve. I’ve got some kinds of courage, but I haven’t got that kind.”
“Then I’m going in to report,” Joe said. “I’m not going to force you with me at the point of a gun — but you better come. What else is there to do? You’d only be a renegade for the rest of your life, hunted and tracked down like the rats you’ve always hunted yourself until now. It’s going to blow the roof off the whole division, tear us wide open, this way. There’s nothing worse than when a sheep-dog turns wolf.”
The door opened and Brown’s wife looked in on them. “Would you and your friend like some coffee or beer, Bill?” she smiled.
“No, we’re going right away,” Brown said. “He’s... he’s got a report to make. Don’t wait up for me. I don’t know when I’ll be back.” And he turned his back to her and hunted for his hat where it wasn’t.
They went on foot, walking side by side as though nothing were the matter. “How many hundreds of guys have been walked in like this,” Brown said once. “Now I know what it feels like.”
“Quit it!” exploded from Greeley’s tight lips. He eyed a car that had recklessly shaved a corner short ahead of them just then. “You don’t have to. A step in the wrong direction, without looking behind—”
Brown shook his head. Greeley knew whom he was thinking of.
A block or so beyond, somebody dropped an electric-light bulb in the dim recesses of one of the decrepit rookeries they were passing at the moment, and they both jolted spasmodically, then grinned sheepishly at each other, as if to say, “What a fine pair we turned out to be!”