The boss said, “Yes, quite true.” Then he helped me to my feet. “It’s only a flesh wound, Willie.” Then the boss turned to Hannrihan. He wised the big dick up to all that had happened.
“I talked myself blue in the face,” the boss finished, “and had just run out when you got here. I knew as long as the light stayed on there was a chance it would attract you or one of your boys.”
Hannrihan kept the live ones covered. “The light attracted me, all right. I passed and saw it. I’ve been combing the town for you all night, Smith.”
The boss tossed the bloody pillow to Hannrihan. “Watch the rent in the cloth,” Smith said. “There’s fifty-seven grand in that pillow!”
Hannrihan whistled.
“You may use my phone to get the meat wagon and reinforcements,” Smith told him. “Willie and I are leaving now.”
The boss helped me downstairs. Hannrihan’s car was at the curb. We got a cab. “Central hospital,” Smith told the driver. He turned to me. “We’ll get that leg dressed, Willie. Then we eat.”
I leaned back. The morning air tasted sort of good. The sun came up. I hadn’t ever noticed before how good it looked, all red and everything.
I looked at the boss. He was looking at me. I don’t know why, but the first thing I knew we were grinning at each other and shaking hands to beat hell.
YOUR CRIME IS MY CRIME
Originally published in New Detective Magazine, May 1946.
The city of Baltimore lay sweltering in the sluggish heat of the autumn night. A searing, fitful breeze off the bay lay its hot tongue on the dinginess of Pratt Street, bringing tired, stringy-haired women to doorways, causing babies to whimper in their grotesque sleep. On Redwood Street, a few offices in concrete and steel buildings blazed with light as brokers figured clients’ margins, or tried to guess how many points above 103 Acme Steel would be four weeks from today. Lower East Baltimore Street teemed with sweat-boiled, jostling bodies. A newsboy hawked his wares, rearranging newspapers and magazines laid along the grimy curb and held prisoner from the faint breeze by paperweights.
A burlesque barker added his voice to the din and the air-conditioned penny arcades were jammed, offering refuge from the heat for the price of a pinball game and hot dog smeared with sweet relish. Shooting galleries reminded passing veterans of things they wanted to forget, and bartenders worked like machines, pouring streams of cool liquid over damp bars, while the laughter of men was joined by the tinkling laughter of women and juke boxes and sweating four-piece orchestras pounded a never-ending rhythm. Street cars clanged and horns blared as taxis snaked toward curbs for fares and into the stream of traffic again.
In John Hopkins, a quartet of specialists studied a case of leukemia and wagged their heads over it, knowing it to be incurable. In surgery a famed obstetrician finished a Caesarian and the new life was rushed to an incubator.
It was people. It was sound and silence, life and death. It was kinship, for no matter what a man was doing that hot night in Baltimore, there was another doing or thinking a similar act—even to murder.
Save for the man in the small apartment on Mount Royal Avenue. He was quite alone in his decision, his act—for there was, after all, only one John Brennan.
He stood looking at the slim steady girl with the brunette hair and the rotund, bald man who sat on the couch beside her. They looked back at him and the silence was heavy, broken only by the angry hum of traffic on the street below and the laboring whir of an exhaust fan somewhere in the building.
The rotund, bald, red-nosed man stood up his bulldog jaw quivering on the black cigar clamped between his teeth. “But you can’t mean this, John! Now that you’re back, you’re staying right here—in Baltimore. We need you. Jean,” he glanced at the girl who looked at John Brennan so steadily, “and me. The force needs you. And the city, John. We’ve been waiting for you to come back—me and Jean and the force and the city. We’ve waited a long time. When V-J day came—”
Brennan turned from the window. He’d been a big, strapping, lean-bellied man once. Now he wasn’t. He felt only the ghost of himself.
He broke in, “V-J day was just another day in a hospital for me, MacLaren—and for a lot of other guys.” His voice was almost savage, bringing the heavy silence back again. Then he added, “Sorry.” He waited a moment and said, “Thanks for coming by, Inspector MacLaren. Tell the boys on the force—”
The ash on MacLaren’s cigar glowed. “I’ll tell them you’re coming back, John.” He moved over beside the younger man, the man who looked and felt old. He took Brennan’s elbows in his hands and gripped until the tall, gaunt man winced. “You remember Donnavan, don’t you, John? Donnavan is dead.”
Brennan closed his eyes. “Sure,” he said, “I remember Donnavan. A pug-nosed, red-a headed kid in school—the flivver we used to chase around together in.”
“That was Donnavan,” Inspector MacLaren said. “And you remember him as a red-headed rookie, too, John. The way he kept his shield shined and gun oiled. He worshipped you Brennan—and he was right.”
“No,” Brennan husked. “Donnavan was wrong.”
“But you remember, don’t you?” MacLaren released Brennan’s elbows and sat down again, slowly, stiffly. “Now he’s dead, Donnavan is. He never had a chance to tell us what crook killed him. He only had time to say one thing, Brennan. He said, ‘I was trying to do it up like Brennan—but I guess I just ain’t man enough.’”
MacLaren stopped and that brought the heavy silence again. Once more the bald man got up, paced back and forth. He wheeled on Brennan abruptly. “Then let’s forget Donnavan—let’s just think of all the decent people and the rats who are going to hurt some of them
