“Are . . . are you hurt, Mike?”
“Hell, no. Got a bullet burn across the ribs but it never broke the skin.” I pulled up my shirt to confirm it, then got dressed. The phone rang just then and she took it.
She frowned once or twice, said, “Are you sure? All right, I’ll look into it.” When she hung up I asked her what the matter was. “A client. Responded to treatment, then lapsed into his former state. I think I’ll prescribe a sedative and see him in the morning.” She went to her desk.
“I’ll run along then. Maybe I’ll see you later. Right now I want to get a haircut before I do anything else.”
“Okay, darling.” She came over and put her arms around me. “There’s a place on the corner.”
“That’ll do as well as any,” I told her between kisses.
“Hurry back, Mike.”
“You bet, darling.”
Luckily, the place was empty. A guy was just getting out of the chair when I went in. I hung my coat on a hook and plunked into the seat. “Trim,” I told the barber. After he ogled my rod a bit, he draped me with the sheet and the clippers buzzed. Fifteen minutes later he dusted me off and I walked out of there slicked down like an uptown sharpie. I got the boiler rolling and turned across town to get on Broadway.
I heard the sirens wailing, but I didn’t know it was Pat until the squad car shot past me and I saw him leaning out of the side window. He was too busy to notice me, but cut across the intersection while the cop on the corner held traffic back. Further down the avenue another siren was blasting a path northward.
It was more a hunch than anything else, the same kind of a hunch that put me on the trail of George Kalecki. And this one paid off, too, but in a way I didn’t recognize at first. As soon as the cop on the corner waved us on, I followed the howl of police cars and turned left on Lexington Avenue. Up ahead I saw the white top of Pat’s car weaving in and out of the lanes. It slowed down momentarily and turned into a side street.
This time I had to park a block away. Two police cars had the street barred to traffic at either end. I flashed my badge and my card to the patrolman on the corner. He let me pass and I hurried down to the little knot of people gathered outside a drugstore. Pat was there with what looked like the whole homicide bureau. I pushed my way through the crowd and nodded to Pat. I followed his eyes down to the crumpled figure on the sidewalk. Blood had spilled out of the single hole in the back, staining the shabby coat a deep maroon. Pat told me to go ahead and I turned the face around to see who it was.
I whistled. Bobo Hopper would keep bees no longer.
Pat indicated the body. “Know him?”
I nodded, “Yeah. Know him well. His name is Hopper, Bobo Hopper. A hell of a nice guy even if he was a moron. Never hurt anything in his life. He used to be one of Kalecki’s runners.”
“He was shot with a .45, Mike.”
“What!” I exploded.
“There’s something else now. Dope. Come over here.” Pat took me inside the drugstore. The fat little clerk was facing a battery of detectives led by a heavy-set guy in a blue serge suit. I knew him all too well. He never liked me much since I blew a case wide open under his very nose. He was Inspector Daly of the narcotics squad.
Daly turned to me. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“Same thing you are, I think.”
“Well, you can start walking as of now. I don’t want any private noses snooping around. Go on, beat it.”
“One moment, Inspector.” When Pat talked in that tone of voice he could command attention. Daly respected Pat. They were different kinds of cop. Daly had come up the hard way, with more time between promotions, while Pat had achieved his position through the scientific approach to crime. Even though they didn’t see eye to eye in their methods, Daly was man enough to give Pat credit where credit was due and listen to him.
“Mike has an unusual interest in this case,” he continued. “It was through him we got as far as we have. If you don’t mind, I would like him to keep in close touch with this.”
Daly glared at me and shrugged his beefy shoulders. “Okay. Let him stay. Only be sure you don’t withhold any evidence,” he spat at me.
The last time I was involved in a case he was working on I had to play my cards close to my vest, but hanging on to the evidence I had led me to a big-time drug dealer we never would have nailed otherwise. Daly never forgot that.
The head of the narcotics bureau was blasting away at the druggist and I picked up every word. “Once more now. Give me the whole thing and see what else you can remember.”
Harried to the breaking point, the druggist wrung his pudgy hands and looked at the sea of faces glaring at him. Pat must have had the most sympathetic expression, so he spoke to him.
“I was doing nothing. Sweeping out under the counter, maybe. That is all. This man, he walks in and says fill a prescription. Very worried he was. He hands me a broken box that has nothing written on the cover. He says to me he will lose his job and nobody will trust him if I can’t do it. He drops the box he was delivering and somebody steps on it and his prescription is all over the sidewalk.
“This powder was coming out of the sides. I take it in the back and taste it yet, then test it. Pretty sure I was that I knew what was in it, and when I test it I was positive. Heroin. This should not be, so like a good citizen I phone the police and tell them what I have. They tell me to keep him here, but how do I know that he is not a gangster and will shoot me?” Here the little guy stopped and shuddered.
“I have a family yet. I take my time, but he tells me to hurry up and puts his hand in a pocket. Maybe he has a gun. What can I do? I fill another box with boric acid, charge him a dollar and he walks out. I leave my counter to go see where he goes, but before I get to the door he falls to the sidewalk. He is shot. All the way dead. I call police again, then you come.”
“See anyone running off?” Pat asked.
He shook his head. “Nobody. At this time it is slow. Nobody on the street.”
“Did you hear a shot?”
“No. That I could not understand. I was too scared. I see the blood from the hole and I run back inside.”
Pat stroked his chin. “How about a car. Did any go by at that time?”
The little guy squinted his eyes and thought back. Once he started to speak, stopped, then reassured, said, “Y-yes. Now that you remind me, I think one goes by just before. Yes. I am sure of it. Very slow it goes and it was turning.” He continued hurriedly from here. “Like it was coming from the curb maybe. It goes past, then when I am outside it is gone. I don’t even look for it after that, so scared I am.”
Daly had one of his men taking the whole thing down in shorthand. Pat and I had heard enough. We went outside to the body and checked the bullet angle. From the position of where it lay, the killer had been going toward Lexington when the shot was fired. The packet of boric acid, now a blood red, lay underneath Bobo’s hand. We patted the pockets. Empty. His wallet held eight dollars and a library card. Inside the coat was a booklet on the raising of bees.
“Silencer,” Pat said. “I’ll give ten to one it’s the same gun.”
“I wouldn’t take that bet,” I agreed.
“What do you make of it, Mike?”
“I don’t know. If Kalecki were alive it would involve him even deeper. First prostitution, now dope. That is, if Bobo was still working for Kalecki. He said not, and I believed him. I thought Bobo was too simple to try to deceive anybody. I’m not so sure now.”
We both stared at the body a bit, then walked down the street a way by ourselves. I happened to think of something.
“Pat.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Remember when Kalecki was shot at in his home? When he tried to put the finger on me?”
“Yeah. What of it?”
“It was the killer’s gun. The killer we want fired that shot. Why? Can you make anything out of it? Even then Kalecki was on
“That’s going to take some doing, Mike. The only ones that can tell us are dead.”
I gave him a grin. “No. There’s still someone. The killer. He knows why. Have you anything to do right
