Only Brian Rome’s dark eyes were alive as he listened to Bernie Dumont’s story. Bernie seemed agitated. Rome picked up his phone and called Central Hospital. He talked to Emergency and found that Elser was D.O.A. He told them to hold the body until either the family or the police contacted them.
“Dead,” Rome said superfluously to Dumont. “Have a car sent out to his house. No phone?”
“None listed.”
“Then come back in here and we’ll talk this out.”
While Brian Rome waited for Dumont to return to his small office, he felt a prickle of apprehension at the nape of his neck. He rubbed his neck vigorously.
Dumont came back in and sat down.
“Okay,” Brian said. “I guess we’ll both go along on the assumption that the package contains a bomb. But it sounds small.”
“Anything else is too fancy. And it wouldn’t have to be big. Where he was going to put it, it would have been six inches from Wylie’s belly.”
“Okay, if it’s small for a bomb, it certainly is small to include a timing device, too. Let’s get George Pell up here.”
Pell, the part-time demolitions expert, was a stocky, bald, crumpled, fearless little man.
“George, assume a bomb this big,” Rome outlined the dimensions with thin, strong fingers. “Can you get much of a bang out of it?”
“It won’t knock down any buildings, Brian. But it could kill five or six people if they were standing in a group.”
“Could it include a timing device?”
“Not mechanical. Chemical. During the war OSS had incendiary pencils with a timing device accurate to within a half hour, and you could set ’em twelve hours ahead. You won’t get the accuracy a mechanical timer will give you, but you get enough for all practical purposes. I’ve seen...”
The phone rang and Rome answered it. He listened carefully, murmured a few words, and hung up. “George, you’re back on duty. Better get Lew to help. Take what you need out to 1881 Bernice. Tell Lew to meet you there. I’ll be along later. A patrolman named Holmar just got blown to bits out there. It sounds like the place was booby-trapped. George, I think he made his bomb out there. See if you can find out what we can expect of it, how it was made, and so on.”
George asked. “Where is the bomb itself, the one you were asking about?”
“In some woman’s purse, somewhere in the city.”
George opened his mouth, then closed it, swallowed, and left.
“Holmar,” Dumont said softly. “Good man.”
“And Rice took some metal in the leg. He got back to the car and called in.”
Chief of Police Paul Pepper was a massive, white-haired man who rode a white horse in all parades. He looked hard, confident, competent. In his job he was soft, vacillating, timorous. Price Heard, the hard-driving Deputy Chief, ran the department and preserved the illusion of Paul Pepper’s authority.
Price Heard and Brian Rome held their conference with Pepper on the wide porch of Pepper’s old-fashioned house.
Pepper listened and said, dubiously, “Now I’m afraid a thing like that’ll cause a panic.”
Price Heard gave Brian Rome a meaningful look. Rome said patiently, “Chief, people panic when they’ve got something to run from, or run out of. Here’s the situation. We’ve got some woman walking around with a bomb in her purse. It’s due to go off around midnight. Maybe if she finds it and tries to open it, it will go off. If we don’t do anything, it’s going to kill some people, I’d like your permission to go ahead with my plan.”
Pepper looked at Price Heard. Price nodded. “Well then, I guess you got to.”
It was twelve minutes after seven.
Price Heard turned his larger office over to Brian Rome. The communications were better, and it was in a more central location.
Brian Rome had Charles Walker Wylie on the phone.
“Frankly, Mr. Wylie, I don’t give a damn about your commitments. The other television and radio stations have all agreed to play ball. After all, that bomb was intended for you. It’s going to look damn funny if everybody cooperates with the police but you. I want your people to break into the program and make an announcement. A bomb wrapped in gray paper in a flat package three or four inches square was slipped into the purse of a woman who rode down in an elevator in the Shannon Building at five o’clock. All women who left the building at that time should examine their pocketbooks and, if such a package is found, call the police immediately. Don’t touch the package. Put the purse out in the yard in some open space and keep people away from it until the police arrive. Got that? Good. And I want it repeated every half hour. We’ll let you know when we locate it. Thank you, sir.”
Rome hung up and made a face of disgust and annoyance at Sergeant Dumont. “Catch any of the announcements?”
“Heard WELP. They made a production out of it. The newspaper guys want to see you.”
“Keep them off me until I get this thing set. You got enough men?”
“Forty-two. That’s about all I got phones for. They’re waiting in 312. I told them the pitch. Here’s the list. It’s off the main floor directory, so I guess it’s up to date. We got one break. Transit Mutual is going to take care of their own gals. I talked to the personnel manager.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
They walked down to 312. The men were standing around, smoking, talking. They quieted down when Rome and Dumont came in. Rome said, “We had an officer killed today, blown up. We want to make sure nobody else gets blown up. Bernie here has a list of all the business offices in the. Shannon Building. He’s going to divide them up among you. You’ll each have a phone, a phone book, and some brains. Get hold of the guy in each office who can give you a list of the girls who work there and their home addresses. Find out if their girls leave at five or five-thirty. You can skip the girls who leave at five-thirty, unless some got off earlier. As you get lists of the girls that left at five, start contacting them. Where there are no phones, feed the names and addresses to Bernie and he’ll give them to the cars. We’re still trying to contact that elevator operator. He may remember the woman being knocked down and remember what stops he made to fill the car up. Until we get hold of him, we try to contact everybody. That’s a hell of a big building.” Rome looked at his watch. “It’s seven minutes after eight. At the most we have four hours. Okay, Bernie.”
Rome walked back to Heard’s office. George Pell was waiting for him.
“You didn’t get out to the house.”
“Too jammed up. What have you got?”
Pell looked tired and more rumpled than usual. He put a canvas zipper bag on the desk and opened it. “I got some components. Here’s the casing. An empty one. Hell of a nice machining job. Good tough steel. It’ll give the explosion a lot of compression. It ought to give pretty good fragmentation, too.”
Rome picked up the metal box. It was not very heavy. There was a threaded hole an inch in diameter in one end.
George said, “He loaded it through that hole. Here’s the timing device and detonator. Ingenious damn thing. The fulminate of mercury cap goes here. This is soft iron wire. It holds the firing pin up against the tension of this spring. It screws into the hole like this. Now here’s the cap that goes over this other hole in the timing device. You pour acid in here and put this cap on. He had run tests on the wire, using acid and holding it under the same tension. I saw his records. He had got it down so it was twelve hours, plus or minus fifteen minutes. At the end of twelve hours the acid has deteriorated the iron wire enough so it snaps. Boom. It’s a little intricate, but damn effective. I think he had a long list of people, too. There are enough components for about fifteen more of these little Christmas packages.”