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The Ambulance Made Two Trips
by
Now, next day, there were eighteen cases of smashed beer bottles. The crime had been committed in the small hours. There were no clues. The restaurant proprietor unconvincingly declared that he had no idea who’d caused it. But he’d only notified the police so he could collect insurance–not from Big Jake.
With a sort of morbid, frustrated gloom, Detective Sergeant Fitzgerald made the necessary notes. He put his notebook in his pocket and backed his car out of the alley. Oddly enough, he thought of a beautifully carved meerschaum pipe he’d found with the milk that morning. He’d presented it to an orphanage mainly because, irrationally, he’d have liked to keep it. There had been other expensive gifts he’d have liked to keep. Bourbon. A set of expensive dry-flies. An eight-millimeter movie camera. Scotch. Shiny, smooth silk socks that would have soothed his weary feet. He’d denied himself these gifts because he believed–he knew–that they came from Big Jake, who tactfully won friends and influenced people by making presents and denying it. In business matters he was stern, because that was the way to collect protection-money. But he was subtle with cops. He had their wives on his side.
Sergeant Fitzgerald growled in his throat. He’d always wanted a really fine meerschaum pipe. He’d had one this morning, and he’d had to get rid of it because it came from Big Jake. He felt that Big Jake had robbed him of it.
He turned the police car and drove back toward the Elite Cleaners and Dyers establishment. As he drove, he growled. His eyelid had twitched twice, and each time he’d been heading into danger or trouble. The fact was dauntingly coincidental with Brink’s comment after giving him a scrap of plastic from the bottom of that crazy machine. These things were on his mind. He couldn’t bring himself to plan to mention them, but he needed to talk to Brink again. Brink could testify to threats. He could justify arrests. Sergeant Fitzgerald had a fine conviction that with a chance to apply pressure, he could make some of Big Jake’s hoods and collectors talk, and so bust things wide open. He only needed Brink’s co-operation. He drove toward the Elite Cleaners and Dyers to put pressure on Brink toward that happy end. But he brooded over his own eyebrow-twitchings.
When the cleaning establishment came into view, there was a car parked before it. Two men from that car were in the act of entering the Elite plant through the same door the detective had used earlier. He parked his car behind the other. Fuming, he crossed the sidewalk and entered the building. As he entered, he heard a scream from the back. He heard a crashing sound and more screams.
He bolted ahead, through the outer office and into the working area he had not visited before. He burst through swinging doors into a two-story, machinery-filled cleaning-and-dyeing plant. Tables and garment racks and five separate people appeared as proper occupants of the place. But something had happened. There was a flood of liquid–detergent solution–flowing toward the open back doors of the big room. It obviously came from a large carboy which had been smashed as if to draw attention to some urgent matter.
The people in the room seemed to have frozen at their work, except that Brink had apparently been interrupted in some supervisory task. He was not working at any machine to clean, dye, dry, or press clothing. He looked at the two individuals whom Fitzgerald had seen enter only fractions of a minute earlier. His jaw clenched, and Fitzgerald was close enough behind the bottle-breakers to see him take an angry, purposeful step toward them. Then he checked himself very deliberately, and put his hands in his pockets, and watched. After an instant he even grinned at the two figures who had preceded the detective.
They were an impressive pair. They were dressed in well-pressed garments of extravagantly fashionable cut. They wore expensive soft hats, tilted to jaunty angles. Even from the rear, Fitzgerald knew that handkerchiefs would show tastefully in the breast pockets of their coats. Their shoes had been polished until they not only shone, but glittered. But by professional instinct Fitzgerald noted one cauliflower ear, and the barest fraction of a second later he saw a squat revolver being waved negligently at the screaming women.