The Last Cop Out Page 4

  “Nobody believed it, but they had to take your word for it.”

  “That’s right, and I never worked again after that, did I? No more night clubs, no more Broadway. Just a receptionist-typist-hostess in a big, impersonal office building.”

  “You know who you work for?”

  “Of course. At least they showed a little gratitude.”

  “Your father was a cop, Helen. Joe Scanlon was a great cop.”

  “My father is a dead cop.”

  “You know how he died?”

  “I know how they say he died,” she told him bitterly. “You know how much gratitude the public showed afterward.”

  “He knew the odds.”

  “But he didn’t have to live with them afterward.”

  “Nobody has it easy.”

  Helen Scanlon shook her head slightly, then looked into his eyes. “And you ... who are you?”

  “Gill Burke.”

  She let the name pass through her mind, then her face tightened. “Aren’t you the one ...”

  Gill didn’t let her finish. “The same.”

  “Then what you did up there was, was ...”

  “All in the line of duty, Helen. It seems like I’m needed again and when the need hits certain people they don’t care what they have to do to fulfill it, even to swallowing their own pride.”

  “You just left them lying there!”

  “They’re lucky I didn’t kill them. I was feeling generous today. Your Mr. Verdun will clean up the mess, give them a few rough lessons on how to bodyguard his precious person and forget all about it. We had a nice long talk, and if he isn’t sore about it, don’t you be.”

  Her face was expressionless, but the tendons in her neck were taut against her flesh. “Thank you for the iced tea,” she said and stood up. Gill went to rise, but she shook her head. “Don’t bother. I’d rather go back alone.” She hesitated a moment, then looked back at him again. “I’m glad I don’t have to know you, Mr. Burke. There’s something indecent about people who don’t care which side of the fence they’re on as long as they can hurt other people. As a policeman, even one disowned by his own kind, you might have had something I could admire, but for a turncoat, you’re as repulsive as a skinless rat.”

  He reached out and grabbed her wrist. “Turncoat?”

  “You heard me.” She drew her hand away, her eyes still hot with anger.”

  Gill Burke let out a quiet, sardonic laugh and picked up his beer. “Hardly likely, baby,” he said.

  On the way back to the office she kept remembering his laugh and the straight line of his teeth. There had been something funny about his eyes, too, something hot behind the icy veil that filmed them and she could still feel the way his fingers had circled her wrist. A shudder ran down her spine and she took a deep breath, idly wondering whether or not somebody would have cleaned up the public relations office annex of Boyer-Reston, Incorporated.

  At the post office in Homestead, Florida, Artie Meeker picked up the single letter addressed to Mr. John Brill, care of general delivery, got in the two-year-old blue Ford sedan and drove back to the small cottage on the south end of Plantation Key. He parked, carried in the carton of groceries, handed Papa Menes the letter and went back to the kitchen to make a lunch for the two of them.

  In the shade of the porch the old man stopped watching the sports fishermen in the gulf pulling in the thrashing dolphin and ran his finger under the flap of the envelope.

  Ordinarily, the Frenchman would take care of details himself, but this one he wanted Papa to know about. That former cop who had raised so much hell had been poking around. Somehow he had come up with a badge and it was a good guess that despite his past record, somebody needed an old time heavy hand and talked him into the job. In a way, it could be a good thing to have the public authorities pushing the hunt for whoever was pulling the raid, but if Papa didn’t like the smell of this particular authority because he was close to breaking them the last time, it could be taken care of on order.

  Papa Menes didn’t like the smell of it at all. Even less, he didn’t like the smell of having to take care of anybody carrying a badge. Cops were funny people, loyal to their own. That crazy man Burke hadn’t been a bad cop. He had been too damn good a cop and had to be squeezed out. Maybe the public thought he was a rotten apple, but all the other cops knew better and even on the outside Burke would be one of their kind. But with a badge again it was different ... he was one of them.

  Maybe the Frenchman was right, he thought. If his assignment was to nail the hit men and whoever was behind the mess, let him do his snooping. Little Richard would know everything that went on and if Burke wound up with something the organization could always beat him to it or take it away before he could use it.

  He looked out at the glassy green water again where they were still boating the dolphin. A warm breeze sifted through the screen and he could smell the salt and sun-drenched air. It should have smelled nice, but it didn’t. The other smell was too powerful and he knew what it was because he had smelled it before, several times, and the strange smell of fear you never forget.

  Silently, he nodded to himself, then wrote out a telegram for Artie Meeker to send to the Frenchman. They’d lay off Gill Burke until he became a threat to the organization again and this time there wouldn’t be any smear campaign ... just a nice, quiet permanent disappearance that would completely eliminate the source of annoyance once and for all.

  He called Artie in, gave him the coded message and instructions, then leaned back in his chair. He should have been satisfied, but he wasn’t, and frowned. That damned smell was still there.

  The stiff drink didn’t do a thing to steady Mark Shelby’s nerves. His stomach was acting up again and his throat was dry no matter how much scotch he poured down it. Helga, the busty Swedish blonde he kept in the apartment on the East Side, sat cross-legged on the sofa, naked under the sun lamp, hoping he wouldn’t get drunk and start to slap her around again.

  Not that she minded. He always used his open hand and it was a small price to pay for what he had given her. Most of the money was safe in the bank or tied up in securities, her charge accounts were paid promptly, the clothes and furs in the closet were all new, all expensive and all hers. Once or twice a week Mark Shelby would come up for a couple of hours of sex, be teased into arousal with the erotic love games she was so practiced in, then with five minutes of oralistic activity he would be reduced to limp impotency until the next time. He always called before he arrived, giving Nils a chance to leave and get a little stoned at having his own sex life interrupted.

  Mark stood at the bar, stripped to his shorts and poured himself another drink. Helga looked at the clock, then switched off the sun lamp. She was good and tan, with no strap marks showing. She ran her fingers through the natural blond silk of her hair, then softly stroked her pubic area that was almost the same color.

  “Mark dear,” she said.

  “Shut up.”

  She didn’t know if he was mad at himself because even the love games couldn’t get him erect, or if it was his business again. The past two weeks he had been unusually irritable and she wondered why anybody in the wholesale grocery business should be so upset. The way prices were, one would think he’d be overjoyed. Men were funny, she thought, even a solid citizen from Trenton, New Jersey, who had a frigid wife who liked to play bridge every day rather than take care of husbandly needs. She smiled inwardly. When she and Nils were married it wouldn’t be like that at all. He would never need another woman. Before he left for work she would weaken him with an orgasm, and when he walked in the door at night she would be standing there naked so that he would throw her on the couch right in front of the cleaning woman who would gasp with embarrassment and run off, only to peek at them from behind the curtains. At night they would make wild sounds and laugh at the creaking and wrenching of the bed boards and one day have the whole thing collapse on the floor as a result of their outlandish exertions.

 
It was either the way she was sitting, a little glistening of wet reflecting the shaft of sunlight, or the scotch that was getting to him, but Mark Shelby felt the fingers of arousal touching his groin. He put the glass down, took one moment to study the ornate candle in the jade holder that was the centerpiece ornament arranged on the back bar, then he slipped his shorts down, let them fall to his feet and walked across the room to where she was sitting. He stood in front of her and she looked up at him and smiled, knowing what he wanted.

  When her mouth touched him he groaned and shuddered. Gill Burke, the incessant funerals, the awesome thing he had accomplished, the terror of Papa Menes’ almost unlimited power ... they all swept away in pounding hardness and the sudden gush of manhood, leaving him soft and vulnerable once more. Before he sank to his knees in fatigue, his head resting on her bare, warm thigh, all he could think of was a small, flickering flame that could scorch whether it was lit or burned out.

  The photo of Mark Shelby that Gill Burke studied was twenty-eight months old and showed him coming out of a fashionable midtown bistro, smiling at someone cropped out of the picture. It had been taken privately with a telephoto lens from the building opposite the restaurant. Since Mark Shelby had no record, there was no official police front and profile shot of him and Shelby was notoriously camera shy.

  Bill Long said, “The case is closed, Gill.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Burke told him. “You got the gun, the motive and the man all at one time, except the man was a corpse.”

  “A police officer shot him during the course of a holdup. He was wearing Berkowitz’s gold watch and when we checked his room out we found Manute’s wallet along with a lot of other stolen items.”

  “How often do chintzy holdup men keep souvenirs. They aren’t that stupid.”

  “They are if they’re stupid enough to pull a robbery.” Burke glanced over another of the sheets, reading it to the end. “No track record at all on this guy. He even held down a job.”

  “Part time,” the captain said.

  “That’s more time than any crooks work.”

  “Not always. It makes a good cover. The guy was a loner, had a drinking problem and wasn’t too bright. Check his income. He couldn’t support a drinking problem on that and eat too. He had to supplement his income. Hell, Gill, you know it’s an old story.”

  “Berkowitz and Manute were processing film they had shot. There wasn’t any dough in the joint and none of their equipment could be fenced very easily. It wasn’t the kind of place a holdup artist would hit.”

  “Gill ... they were in a partially deserted area, alone, and that guy ... what’s his name ... Ted Proctor just saw an easy target. As far as we could determine, Berkowitz had over a hundred bucks on him and Manute was probably good for fifty. Enough to justify a holdup, anyway.”

  “And Mark Shelby was in the area about the same time.”

  “The supposed witness retracted his statement. He was parking lot attendant and had only seen Shelby once before when he dropped off his car.”

  “Balls.”

  “That’s what he swore to.”

  “A parking lot beside a mob-owned restaurant. He had seen plenty of Shelby.”

  “You’re pushing, Gill.”

  “Mavbe, but it was the pushing I did before that got me laid out like a squashed bug.”

  “You were after Papa Menes, friend.”

  “A rung at a time and you reach the top man, Bill. Somehow I was just about to shake the apples out of the tree when they cut the branch out from under me.”

  “Forget it, will you?”

  The side of Burke’s mouth curled in a smile. “Would you?”

  “No.”

  Burke laid the papers down on the desk and stretched in his chair. For a minute or so he stared at the ceiling, then leaned forward and stared at his friend. “How’d they work it on me, Bill?”

  “You’ve been a maverick a long time, Gill. That citizen’s committee instituted the probe.”

  “Their two lawyers had mob connections.”

  “No way of proving that.”

  “Why didn’t somebody try to cover for me?”

  “Because we all have ourselves to protect, Gill, you know that. They gave only what facts that were drawn out the hard way. Nobody volunteered a damn thing.”

  “The papers had a field day. The TV boys pulled me apart.”

  “You always made sensational news. When you shot those three guys in that subway it gave them something to chew on.”

  “Bill, those guys all had guns. Some of those bastards in the crowd grabbed them and ran when I dropped them.”

  “You almost started a race riot.”

  “Don’t believe it. There were plenty of cool heads there.”

  “Why didn’t they speak up then?”

  “And get labled Uncle Tom? Get the boot by their own people? Maybe if my life was on the line they would have, but I was just another cop getting the squeeze and squeezes aren’t new to them. Those guys were all carrying the loot they lifted from the heist and the shooting would have been justified even if I thought they had a gun.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Begin where I left off.”

  “Here we go again,” Long said resignedly. “Just keep in mind what they wanted you back for. There’s one hell of a gang war brewing and they’re hoping you might be able to add that one touch that could stop it.” The Captain paused, watching Gill’s face. It was the kind of face you couldn’t read at all. “Do you think you can, Gill?”

  “It’s a possibility,” he said, “but I don’t suppose they’d mind a few fringe benefits on the side.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like putting a crimp in the whole fucking syndicate.”

  “You’ve been away too long, Gill. They’re too big. It can’t be done.”

  “In the pig’s ass it can’t,” Gill told him. “Somebody’s doing it to them now.”

  When the eleven o’clock news was over, Gill Burke switched off the TV and poured the rest of his beer into his glass. It had been a long day and tomorrow would be even longer and he was looking forward to getting to bed early.

  The sudden rasp of the door buzzer made him snap his head around wondering who the hell it could be at that hour. Any friends he had would have called first and anybody else he didn’t want to see. He put the glass down and picked up the .45 from the table, then stood to one side of the door and yanked it open.

  She was in a short sweater and skirt combination with a white raincoat thrown loosely over her shoulders, and her hair was a dark frame for startled, wide brown eyes and a rich, full ruby mouth.

  Helen Scanlon said, “Are you going to shoot me, Mr. Burke?”

  Burke smiled with his lips, but his eyes remained impassive. With a casual movement he put the gun inside his waistband. “Not tonight.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me in?”

  “These are hardly visiting hours.”

  “Make an exception.”

  “Come on in then.” He made a deprecating motion with his head toward the apartment. “Don’t mind the mess. I wasn’t expecting company.”

  “Apparently not since you’ve lived here. You aren’t very ,neat, Mr. Burke.”

  “Who gives a shit,” he told her. “Can I make you a drink?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Then get to it.”

  “Don’t be so abrupt. May I sit down?”

  Gill waved toward a chair and eased himself down in the worn recliner. Something, he thought, was very, very screwy.

  “I’ve come to apologize,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “My remark about you being a turncoat.”

  “How about being as repulsive as a skinless rat?”

  “Did that really get to you?”

  Burke shrugged and sipped his beer. “That’s nothing compared to some of the things I’ve been called.”

  “But it got to you.”

&
nbsp; “Just the repulsive part.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. The sincerity in her tone was real.

  “Why?”

  “Because I overheard Mr. Verdun making a phone call. He said you were a policeman again and poking around. Apparently you are some sort of a threat to his ... business.”

  “You’re damn well told I am.”

  “Mr. Burke ... things get very confusing sometimes.”

  “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers. How old are you?”

  “Thirty.”

  “You don’t look it at all.”

  “How old are you?”

  “A hundred and ten.”

  She smiled gently. “You don’t look it either.”

  “It’s all mental, kid.”

  “Why are you a threat to them?”

  “Because I made a career out of trying to break them.”

  “You know it isn’t possible, don’t you?”

  “That’s what everybody seems to think, but they’re wrong. What goes up can come down.”

  “My father thought that too.”

  “Joe Scanlon had just obtained the murder weapon used to gun down a key witness who could have testified against Papa Menes and six other top men in the syndicate. The fingerprints of the killer were on that gun and it would have brought the walls tumbling down around some important political figure. The mob had him run down by a stolen auto and they retrieved the gun. It was classified as a hit-and-run accident.”

  “There has never been any proof otherwise,” she stated flatly.

  “If a little old lady were still alive ... the one who heard the last words he ever spoke, she’d tell you differently.”

  “What little old lady?”

  “She died of a stroke two days later. Seeing that incident probably triggered it. She gave the information to Hanson, who was the local beat cop then. All he could do was report it, but as courtroom evidence it was out.”

  Helen Scanlon nibbled on the tip of her thumb and tried to blink away the wetness that clouded her vision. She had come only to apologize, not resurrect the past. It was something she neither wished to discuss or even think about, but sitting opposite Gill Burke, seeing all the hardness reflected in his face and the way he carried himself and sensing the controlled violence that was an integral part of himself, the past kept forcing itself into the present.