He dressed quickly and walked outside to his car. It was a bright sunny day, and the air was cool and fresh. A fine day for a ball game, he thought.
Mark drove over to the East River Drive and headed out to Germantown, simply because he had to start digging into Nolan at some point. And his old division was probably as good a place to start as any other.
The Forty-first District was located in the middle of a pleasant residential street and was sparkling with fresh paint. Window boxes of flowers jutted out from the first floor windows. Downtown a cop lived and worked in another world, but here, there was very little activity besides school-crossing duty, dog-bite cases, and in general, the sort of constabulary functions that would be required in a peaceful village.
Mark went upstairs to the clean spacious Detective Headquarters where half a dozen men were sitting about talking and reading the papers. He’d met most of them around the city on various jobs, and they gave him a general welcome.
“Come in and sit down,” Sergeant Ellerton said, beaming at him from behind horn-rimmed spectacles. “Long time no see, Mark. What brings you out this way?”
Mark sat on the edge of a desk and lit a cigarette. “I had to see a dentist on Greene Street, so I thought I’d stop in and say hello. How’re things?”
“So-so, just so-so,” Sergeant Ellerton said. “You look thinner, boy. They must be working you downtown.”
“It’s not too bad.” Mark glanced at the detectives, who were watching him with good-humored interest. “We had a little excitement last night, though.”
“Yeah, we were reading about that,” Sergeant Ellerton said. “What was the story?”
“Fiest made a break and Nolan tried to bring him down, and the shot went a little high. That’s all there was to it,” Mark said.
“You know, I always said Nolan had too hot a temper,” a detective named Grunhov said.
“He don’t take nothing from anybody,” another said.
The other men began discussing Nolan and the shooting, repeating in essence what had already been said but making their points as if they were pioneer contributions to the conversation. Mark smoked his cigarette and listened with what appeared to be casual interest.
The detectives at the Forty-first were chiefly middle-aged men on the downgrade. They had been passed over many times for jobs that required better-than-average alertness and ability. Some, of course, had been shanghaied here by politicians or superiors who were afraid of them; and men to whom that happened usually went down hill very rapidly. However, an occasional detective in that spot would go on stubbornly doing his best work and hoping against slim hope to get back to where there was something to do besides listen to a housewife’s complaints about the theft of a shirt from her clothesline.
Jerry Spiegel was that sort. He was a thickly built man of about forty with coarse black hair and strangely gentle eyes. He had made the mistake of knocking off too many protected handbooks in the downtown area, and had been sent to Germantown to reflect on his sins. Now he was seated in a tilted chair, listening to the talk about Nolan with a faint smile on his lips.
Finally he stood up and said in a flat voice, “Nolan’s a bum. I worked with him here and in the Northeast, and I never saw him do anything that took any brains. Sure he’s fine at gunning some colored kids or a gambler, like he did last night, but he never made a smart pinch in his life.”
Spiegel spat expressively. “I got no use for a cop that can’t use anything but a gun. Hell, if that’s police work, we should bring in the National Guard and have ’em machine-gun the hell out of anything they see moving after ten o’clock at night.”
“That Guard would do it, too,” a white-haired man named Senesky said, ruminatively, convinced obviously that this was Spiegel’s chief point.
“There isn’t another cop in Philly would have shot Dave Fiest last night,” Spiegel said, with a disgusted glance at Senesky.
“Hell, you weren’t there,” Sergeant Ellerton said. “You don’t know, Spiegel.”
“You can say what you want but the guy’s got guts,” Grunhov said. He was a middle-aged man with washed-out, blue eyes, and a habit of wetting his lips between sentences. “Remember that time in forty-two when he got those guys who stuck up that Super Market at Tenth and Spring Garden? You remember, don’t you, Sarge?” he said, turning to Ellerton. “It was raining like the devil, and Nolan and me and old Jerry Thomphson were coming down Spring Garden when we got the call. Nolan was driving and we took off like a big fat goose, and don’t ever think that guy can’t wheel a car. We got to the Market in time to see the thieves running down the street and waving guns like they was in a cowboy picture. They ducked into that warehouse at the corner of Tenth and Greene and started potting at us from the second floor. We were in a mess then, because we couldn’t get across the street without getting our heads blown off. So we stayed out of sight in a doorway, wondering what the hell to do. About then one of them guys leans out of the window and yells, ‘Come and get us, you bastards!’ ”
Grunhov wet his lips, obviously excited by his reconstruction of the scene.
“Well, Nolan let out a shout like a wild man,” he continued, grinning around at his audience. “He tore across the street paying about as much attention to the bullets as he did to the rain drops. Thomphson and I took out after him, but he beat us up the stairs, and when we got there he’d already shot and killed one of them punks, and was beating the devil out of the other with his fists. He was like a madman. If we hadn’t pulled him off that fellow, he’d have killed him, too.” Grunhov shook his head emphatically. “Yes sir, he’s got guts. If I had a real tough job, he’d be the boy I’d want alongside me.”
Spiegel sat on the edge of a desk, his arms folded, and his eyes were tired and thoughtful. “Yes, I suppose he’s got guts all right,” he said, in a bitter voice. “He came from a neighborhood where guts were essential to staying alive. I should know, I guess. I grew up two blocks from where he lived. But Nolan never learned anything else, don’t you see?” He stared about the room, his face anxious and troubled. “You can’t go along slamming hell out of everything in your way just because you had a rough time as a kid. You got to help people out a little bit. Don’t you see that? How the hell else will things ever get any better?”
Several men looked away uncomfortably. They weren’t disturbed by what Spiegel was saying, Mark judged; but they were embarrassed by the nakedness of his feelings.
“Well, that’s just the way he is,” Ellerton said, with a portentous shake of his head. “People don’t change, you know.”
“Did you ever hear how he came to be made a detective?” Spiegel asked the room in general. His mood had changed, and he spat out the words derisively.
There was a negative murmur.
“Well, it’s a hot one. Nolan’s working the last-out shift, twelve-to-eight, and about seven-thirty he’s drifting along toward the District so he can get out fast when the eight-to-four shift reports. Well, at Allegheny and Thirteenth, I think it was, a car rips through a red light and comes to a stop on the sidewalk. The driver is drunker than hell, but Nolan knows if he makes a pinch he’ll be tied up all morning making out reports, and the next morning at the hearing. So Nolan gives the guy a brush, and sends him on his way.”
“Hell, that’s no way to make detective,” Senesky said.