door that led down to some anteroom of hell.
Earlier Joe had noted without surprise that there were a number of small holes in the victim’s shirt and trousers both. Now he discovered that through a number of these holes he could see wounds: small sharp cuts, red and raw but almost bloodless.
Joe sat back on his heels, puffing out his breath. That a man should have been killed in this alley was hardly a surprise. Though most winos were harmless, on streets like this there were always a few people about who would kill for a dime, for an argument, for the last mouthful of muscatel. But this was different. Obviously calculated, somehow arranged. And Charley had said that there were others.
Sighing, Joe got to his feet. He ran a muscular hand, not the same hand that he had used to touch the body, slowly through his unruly sandy hair. “He was killed somewhere else,” he offered at last. “All the blood spilled somewhere else. And then…”
“I figured out that much,” said Charley patiently. “Then—?”
“Then he was… dressed in these clothes, I guess, and dumped here. Holes made in the clothes, to match the holes in him? I dunno. Dumped here, anyway, with the idea that one more stiff in this neighborhood wasn’t going to get a whole lot of attention.”
“This lad’s been living on the street around here for quite a while,” said Charley, anticipating Joe’s next question. “I managed to get a make on him from a couple of the other winos. ‘Dusty’, they called him.” Snider made an economical gesture, which was understood by the two patrolmen. They started hoisting the star of the show out of his spotlit corner and onto a rubber-sheeted stretcher on wheels that waited nearby. The body had stiffened. It was going to make the trip in a comic posture, rump sticking up.
“Why’d you bring me here, though?” Joe asked as the spotlights were turned off, one after the other. “Were there pawn tickets on him?” Joe was already sure that he wasn’t being brought in on the case by reason of his current official specialty. Charley’s summons had come to him over the phone, a personal request very informal and completely outside of channels. And still very much unexplained.
“I just thought I’d let you have a look, man,” said Charley now. He and Joe had each started to wrap up one of the portable spotlights on its own cable, while the working uniforms were busy trundling their loaded stretcher on around the corner of wall, into the stagey glare of the streetlight that shone there from the alley’s mouth.
There sounded a faint burst of demonic laughter, probably from the beer joint that had to be somewhere behind one of these walls.
“Okay,” said Joe. “I’ve had a look. But I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I’ve told you I don’t know him.”
“Never said you might know him, man.” Charley’s face, dark in dark, was hard to see. His cigarette glowed in his moving fingers as he wound cable. “And I’m not sayin’ you have to do nothing. I’m just offering you a look at what my problem is, that’s all.”
“Oh,” said Joe. His suspicions were now confirmed. Charley’s motives were about as he’d thought; but he’d had to make sure.
Now, Charley trudging beside him, Joe carried the spotlight on its folded tripod on around the bend of the alley, where he handed it over to one of the patrolmen. Then he got into Charley’s unmarked car, which was waiting beside the police van, and shut the door. Now he would get a ride home, and maybe Charley would come in for a beer, and possibly somewhere along the line Charley would be more explicit. Quite possibly not, though. Almost certainly the subject they were almost discussing would not be brought up by Charley in front of Kate.
Joe had just been confirmed in a suspicion that had been growing in him for some time. He himself had acquired a reputation, which by now perhaps ran through the whole department, for having at least one super- exotic informant on the string, for being able now and then to come up with information a thousand miles beyond the reach of anyone else. This reputation, he knew, must rest on only two cases that had touched Joe’s professional and personal life during the last few years. Both cases had been weird and spectacular, though on the surface they were unconnected. Neither had been an experience he wanted to repeat. Nor did he want the reputation he seemed to have gained from them. It was quite accurate, as far as it went, but it was hardly even an iceberg-tip of truth.
He wondered now just how much more of the truth Charley Snider might suspect. And then he dismissed the wonder. Charley was street-smart, but he wasn’t imaginative to the point of craziness.
After Charley had come in for his beer, and had talked some about the chances of the Cubs, and had then gone on his way, Joe stood at his living room window which was open to the cool breeze, and looked down at the usual evening processions of headlights crowding their way along. The apartment was a fancier one than you would have expected an honest cop to be able to afford, a two-bedroom condo just off Lake Shore Drive on the reasonably far north side. Kate’s family had money.
“Charley seemed tired tonight,” Kate said. Blond and pretty, she was pacing back and forth in her new housecoat, with the baby over her shoulder, trying to get it to go to sleep. She had regained her slenderness quite nicely after the birth.
“He’s got a tough case. Series of cases. He was talking to me about it earlier.”
“Oh?”
“Hinting around, that I might be able to dig up some information that would help.”
Kate uttered a barely audible shh, and turned gracefully away; the kid was nodding off. She left the room, to return in a few moments unburdened and in utter silence, her eyebrows lifted to ask a question.
Her husband, arms folded, was now leaning with his back to the window. He told her: “I know who they want me to talk to.”
It took Kate only a moment to understand. “I see.”
“They don’t know who they want me to talk to.” Joe made a grim sound, like a poor actor trying to get off a laugh. “Honey, you know what I’m thinking? Maybe I’ll just pack it in. The job, the badge.”
Kate sat down on the sofa, whose rich fabric was blanket-covered now in defense against the baby. She patted the spot beside her where she wanted Joe to settle. “And what,” she asked, “will you do then?” Understanding had left her calm, and made her sympathetic; if she hadn’t actually heard this talk of quitting before, perhaps she had been expecting to one day hear it.
“We wouldn’t starve. There’s your money.”
“Of course we wouldn’t starve. But what would you do?”
Joe put down his empty beer can and sat down beside his wife. “What’s new with Judy?” he asked.
Kate accepted her younger sister’s relevance to the discussion. “She’s still going with that young man from the University of Chicago. I think things may be getting serious. If you’re planning to get in contact with someone, I don’t think asking Judy for help would be the way to go.”
“All her involvement with you-know-who is pretty well over, huh? Well, that’s good, anyway. That’s something. All right, how would I go about getting in contact now?”
“There is a certain emergency procedure,” Kate said doubtfully. “But I doubt we ought to use that unless we’re having a real emergency.”
“If you doubt it, I sure as hell do too.”
Next day, driving through a more or less routine round of pawn shops, helping irate or discouraged robbery victims try to identify their stolen merchandise, Joe had his mind more often than not on Charley Snider’s problem. He heard no more today from Charley, who, Joe suspected was working overtime along with a lot of other people. There was a tip that a mass murderer, a crazed cultist wanted in New Orleans, might have come to Chicago. Anyway Charley had already passed along just about everything that was known or suspected about the Skid Row killings, and now he, Joe, was expected to come up with something helpful if he could. Expected at least to try. Where and how he got his information would be considered his own business if he wanted it that way. All good detectives cultivated informers whenever they had the chance, and the more valuable the source of information the more likely they would try to keep it secret. If Joe preferred to say nothing at all about his source, the whole department would understand.
So there was no reason at all for him not to try to help, except he didn’t want to.
Joe spent a miserable day. He always gave himself a hard time when he did something other than what he thought a good cop should.
When he talked to Kate as usual on the phone in the middle of the afternoon, neither of them mentioned the problem. But when Joe got home that evening his wife greeted him with a faintly knowing smile.
