William P. McGivern
The Big Heat
TO EARL SELBY
of The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin
with thanks
Chapter 1
It was eight o’clock at night when the phone rang. A detective lifted the receiver and said, “Homicide, Neely speaking.” He listened a moment, frowning slightly through the smoke that curled up from the cigarette in his lips. “All right, we’ll send someone out right away,” he said. He put his cigarette on the edge of the scarred desk and picked up a pencil. “What’s your name and address?” he said. He put the cigarette back in his mouth and began writing on a pad at his elbow.
There were three other detectives in the large, shabby, brightly lighted room. Two of them were playing cards at a desk beside the long bank of green filing cases. The third, a tall, well-groomed man with a long, intelligent face, paced the floor with his hands clasped behind his back. On a bench just inside the wooden counter that ran the length of the room sat a uniformed patrolman and a Negro. The Negro, who was young and solidly built, seemed to be trying to shrink inside his cheap, brown suit.
The card players stopped their game and glanced at Neely, who was frowning at the information he was taking down. One of them, a man named Carmody, with I red, sagging features and thinning hair, glanced at the windows. Ram was rolling down them in slow, level waves. “You might know a job would come along,” he said. His partner, Katz, a big man with the roughed-up features of a preliminary fighter, shrugged. “They always do on nights like this,” he said in a mild voice.
The pacing detective grinned at them. “Unfortunately, I’ve got this matter to handle,” he said, jerking his head at the solidly-built Negro. “Otherwise I’d be glad to accompany you gentlemen on a little trip in the rain.”
“Yeah, Burke, I’ll bet you would,” Carmody said.
The detective on the desk, Neely, a small, red-haired man with a terrier’s face, put the phone down and swung about in the swivel chair. He glanced at the clock hanging above the filing cabinet. “When did Bannion say he’d be back?” he said.
They all looked up at the clock. “About eight,” Burke said. It was then a moment after. “He was at the Nineteenth when he called to say he was coming in.”
Neely drummed his fingers on the desk, frowning.
“Well, what’s up?” Burke said.
“That was Tom Deery’s wife,” Neely said. “He just committed suicide, she says. Shot himself.”
“For God’s sake,” Carmody said.
“He was in the Superintendent’s office, wasn’t he?” Burke asked rhetorically.
“What would he want to do a thing like that for?” Katz said, in his mild voice.
“Maybe he was tired of paying bills,” Carmody said.
“Hell, that’s no reason.”
“Okay, I don’t know,” Carmody said, rubbing his tired face. “He didn’t tell me his plans.”
Neely glanced at the clock. “I’m going to wait a few minutes for Bannion,” he said. “They’ll want a full report on this one.”
“Yeah, they always do when it’s a cop,” Burke said, resuming his pacing. Carmody lit a cigarette and dropped the match on the floor. The silence was disturbed only by the rain drumming against the windows. It was a troubled, uneasy silence.
A cop’s death is one thing; it means black bunting looped over the door of his station house for a week or so, a few paragraphs in the papers, and a note to the family from the Mayor and his Captain. A cop’s suicide is another matter. It can mean that the man was a weakling, a neurotic, a fool — in any case no one to have been safeguarding the lives and properties of other citizens. Or it can mean something even less wholesome, something potentially dangerous to the entire, close-knit fabric of the department.
“He was a nice guy,” Burke said, pacing slowly. “A nice, straight guy”
“That’s what I always heard,” Carmody said. He looked up at the clock. “How come his wife called us, Neely?”
“She knows the police business,” Neely said. “She called Central first and then us. She knows we take a look at most suicides. Central should be giving the call to the district any second now.”
They were all silent again, glancing up at the police speaker on the wall. It had been quiet for a few minutes. Now, as if Neely’s comment were a cue, it coughed metallically, and the police announcer’s flat voice said, “Nine Eighty, Nine Eighty One, report.”
“That’s his district, I think,” Carmody said. “Deery lived in West, in the Ninety Eighth, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Katz said. “On Sycamore Street. They’re sending the wagon and the street sergeant’s car out there.”
The police announcer, connected with the cars he had asked to report, gave his orders: “Hospital case, Fifty Eight Sixty One Sycamore Street.”
“Hospital case,” Neely said with a short laugh. He drummed his fingers on his desk and looked up at the clock.
The double doors of the Homicide Bureau swung open and a young man in a damp trenchcoat came in and walked around the counter. He glanced at the three detectives, noticing their expressions. “What’s up?” he said.
“Tom Deery’s wife just called,” Neely said. “She says Tom killed himself about fifteen or twenty minutes ago. Shot himself.”
Burke said, “You knew him, didn’t you, Bannion?”
“Sure, I knew him,” Dave Bannion said slowly, as he took off his trenchcoat and dropped it over the back of a chair. He was a large, wide-shouldered man in his middle thirties, with tanned, even features and steady gray eyes. Standing alone he didn’t seem particularly big; it was only when Burke, a tall man himself, strolled over beside him, that Bannion’s size became apparent. He stood inches taller than Burke, and his two hundred and thirty pounds were evenly distributed on a huge, rangy frame.
“Did Deery have any kids?” Burke said.
“No, I don’t think so,” Bannion said. He had known Deery in the perfunctory way he knew dozens of men in the police department. Deery had been a slender, graying man, with an intelligent, alert, but unrevealing face. Bannion had passed him in the hall, had said hello to him, had checked clerical matters with him on several occasions, and that was the extent of their relationship.
He glanced at Neely. “I’ll take a ride out there,” he said. “Burke might as well come along, too.”
Burke nodded at the negro, “I’m working on this job, Dave. Want me to drop it?”
“What is it?”
“Well, he might be the character who killed that gas station attendant in the North East last week. The Tenth detectives picked him up and sent him down.”
“I didn’t kill nobody,” the Negro said, standing, his large, bony hands working spasmodically. His head turned, his eyes touched each face in the room, frightened, helpless, defiant.
“Sit down,” the uniformed cop said to him.
Burke smiled pleasantly at Bannion. “I could find out in ten little minutes if you’d just let—” He stopped at the look on Bannion’s face. “Okay, okay, it was just a stray thought,” he said, shrugging elaborately.
“There won’t be any of that stuff on my shift,” Bannion said.
“Okay, okay,” Burke said.
Bannion walked over to the Negro, who seemed to sense that he had got a break of some kind. “We just want the truth from you,” Bannion said. “If you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to worry about. But if you have we’ll find it out. Remember that.”
“I done nothing wrong,” the Negro said excitedly. “I was walking—”
“All right, I’ll talk to you when I get back,” Bannion said. “I don’t have the time now. Burke, you stick at it.” He glanced at Katz and Carmody. “All right, any volunteers?”