The Death Instinct

At the bar, men hunched over their drinks, speaking in low voices. Even the bartender was taciturn. A solitary woman wearing a boa nursed a cocktail at one end of the counter; no one approached her. Near the door, the man keeping watch handled a pack of cards by himself at a table — not playing, just shuffling and reshuffling.

'It's the same all over town,' said Littlemore. 'Everybody's still spooked from the bombing. Only place they're not spooked is the Bankers and Brokers Club. They were having a ball when I went there a couple nights ago. I think it was relief — that they weren't the ones who got hit. Guess what: a doctor came to Bellevue today for Two-Heads. He heard about the shooting in the church and recognized her description. Her name's Quinta McDonald. I found out what's wrong with her. The doctor said it was confidential, but I got it out of him. She has syphilis. Apparently syphilis can cause a growth on your body?'

'Tertiary syphilis can,' agreed Younger. He thought about it. 'It could have made her demented as well.'

'That's what her doctor said. It got into her brain. Gave her delusions.'

'I did some work on syphilitic dementia a few years ago. If that's what she has, there's no reversing it and no cure for it.'

'So here's what I'm thinking,' said Littlemore. 'There may not be anything left for the Miss to worry about.'

'How's that?'

'Well, let's start with Amelia, the girl who left the tooth at your hotel. Amelia's in some kind of trouble, and she needs to leave a tooth with somebody she knows to get them to help her. But the clerk delivers the tooth to Colette by mistake. Meanwhile, Drobac's following Amelia. He's hunting whoever she's trying to leave the tooth with. When the tooth gets delivered to Colette, Drobac thinks Colette is his target. So he and his two pals kidnap her. After that, Amelia gets killed by the bomb, Drobac's two pals get killed when we rescue Colette, and Drobac himself is behind bars. That leaves only Two-Heads, the McDonald girl. We don't know why she came after Colette — probably she's just crazy from her syphilis — but it doesn't matter because now she's in a coma. So everybody's either dead, jailed, or otherwise out of commission. Case closed.'

'What about the other redhead?' asked Younger. 'There were two of them outside the police station.'

'Friend of the McDonald girl. Maybe her sister. Nothing to worry about.'

'I thought you didn't make assumptions,' said Younger.

'I don't. I was just trying it out to see how it sounded.'

'How did it sound?'

'Didn't make any kind of sense at all,' said Littlemore.

The two men drank for a long while. Younger could feel the cheap alcohol beginning to work on him.

'So the Miss is going back to Europe?' asked Littlemore.

'You can't tell me,' answered Younger, 'that marriage makes men happy. Do you know one married man who's actually happy?'

'I'm happy.'

'Apart from you.'

Littlemore thought about it. 'No. Do you know any unmarried guys who are happy?'

'No.'

'There you go, then,' said Littlemore.

The men drank.

At another table, a man tried to stand, failed, and fell to the floor, knocking his chair over with him. For a moment Younger thought the sound had been a gunshot. Then he heard more gunfire, but he knew it was inside his head. The recurring image that, ever since the bombing, he could neither forget nor interpret sprang into his mind again, this time with greater clarity. 'I know what I saw on the sixteenth,' he said. 'It wasn't a blackboard. It was someone shooting. When everyone else was running around in a panic, in the middle of all the smoke and dust, someone was firing a machine gun.'

'At what?'

'At a wall. Leaving marks on it.'

'Firing a machine gun at a wall?' said Littlemore. 'In the middle of the bombing?'

'Did I mention that I also saw the shrapnel flying through the air so slowly I could make out the individual pieces?'

'No, you didn't tell me that, and don't mention it again. They'll lock you up with Eddie Fischer.'

Detective Littlemore was restive as he paced the cramped offices shared by Homicide and Special Crimes. Overcrowded desks vied for space with overstuffed filing cabinets. Typewriters clacked. Men yelled at one another, their complaints mostly jocular. The joking irritated Littlemore. A week had passed since the Wall Street bombing, and they had made no progress. Loose threads dangled everywhere.

There was Fischer, now confined in a sanitarium, whose prescient warnings remained unaccounted for. There was Big Bill Flynn, determined to hang the crime on Italian anarchists even though each piece of evidence Flynn came up with was thin as cheap typing paper. Then there was Attorney General Palmer — or rather, where was Palmer? Everything Littlemore knew about the Attorney General would have predicted Palmer's seizing control of the case, giving press conferences, taking the spotlight. Instead Palmer had passed through town for a night on his way to a family holiday — why? Finally, there was the fact that the attack seemed wholly unmotivated. If there was a target, it appeared to have been the Morgan Bank, yet Littlemore had identified no individual or organization with the right means and motives for attacking Morgan in so blunderbuss a fashion.

'Hey, Spanky,' Littlemore called out.

'Sir?' replied Roederheusen.

'Go over to the Mexican consulate,' said Littlemore, 'and get ahold of a guy named Pesky something or other. Pesky-air-uh, I think. I want to talk to him.'

'Say, Cap,' called out Stankiewicz from his desk, 'I found the cards.'

'What cards?'

'The filing cards we made on Wall Street.' Stankiewicz was holding a stack of handwritten note cards made at the scene of the bombing — one card for each of the dead. 'You remember, you thought there was somebody who was killed who should've been on the casualty list, but he wasn't on the list, so you asked me to find the cards.'

'Give me those,' said Littlemore irritably. He flipped through the note cards. 'The guy was a Treasury guard. Name began with R.'

Littlemore found what he was looking for. 'Here he is: "Riggs, United States Treasury." Now where's that casualty list?'

Stankiewicz fished through the papers piled haphazardly on his desk. 'I had it a second ago.'

'Tell me you didn't lose the casualty list,' said Littlemore.

Stankiewicz handed the detective the stapled, typed, many-paged document.

Littlemore went through it, checking both the alphabetical listing and the page specifically naming government officers killed in the blast. 'No Riggs,' said the detective. 'What happened to "Riggs, United States Treasury"?'

'Guess they missed him.'

'They?' asked Littlemore. 'Who's they? Didn't you type this list?'

'Not exactly.'

'Who did?'

'Um, the Feds did. A couple of agents came over the day after the bombing and asked if we had a list of the dead and wounded. I said sure and let them have a look — you know, at the handwritten list, which we made from the cards. They volunteered to have it typed up for us over the weekend. They said they had typists who would do a nice job. So I-'

'You gave the Feds our list?' asked Littlemore, incredulous.

'I'm not too good with a typewriter, sir. I figured it would come out better this way.'

'You figured you were too lazy,' said Littlemore. 'What kind of Feds? Flynn's boys?'

'No, sir. They were T-men,' said Stankiewicz, using the shorthand name for Treasury agents.

A second letter from Colette arrived on Thursday, but it turned out she must have sent it before receiving Younger's reply. The letter lay open on Younger's hotel room bed:

21-9-1920

Dearest Stratham,

I am finished with your Professor Boltwood. He is going to prevent Yale University from awarding Madame Curie an honorary degree when she comes. He says she is both academically and morally unfit. He is unfit to tie her shoelaces. My one consolation for running his laboratory is that I am disproving his theories. I can't stay on here, no matter what.