Vice Cop Page 5

  I glanced that way. Number five stood at ninety-to-one. Number five was Ethyl’s Boy.

  “Everybody figured the way I did,” Carl said. “They just naturally assumed Ethyl’s Boy would be held back his first night out. But if I was his owner, I’d put a bundle on him at those odds and let him go.”

  “Will his owner think that way?” I inquired.

  “I don’t know. I’m going to stand over by the windows until post time. If the odds drop sharply at the last minute, it’ll mean somebody dropped a bundle on his nose. Chances are it will be his owner.”

  “I see,” I said. “Thanks for the tip.”

  “Don’t bet him unless the odds drop,” Carl cautioned. “You’ll be throwing money away.”

  He moved off and I turned to find Sharon at my side. Happily she was stuffing a roll of bills into her handbag.

  “Who was that?” she asked in a preoccupied tone.

  “Fellow who works for the stable that own Ethyl’s Boy,” I said offhandedly. “I knew him in New York.”

  “What did he say?” she asked with quickened interest.

  “He may go tonight. I won’t know until the last minute.” Glancing at the time slot on the board, I noted it was two minutes to post time. “Let’s get over near the windows.”

  Obediently she followed me inside. I stopped alongside the fifty-dollar window, looked up at the indoors tote board. The odds on number five were still ninety-to-one.

  “Is that man going to come give you the word?” Sharon asked.

  “The board will. If the odds suddenly drop, we bet.”

  She looked puzzled, but there wasn’t time to explain it. “You going to bet your usual ten?” I asked.

  When she nodded, I said, “Better go stand by the ten-dollar window. If you see me bet, place your bet, too. If I don’t, save your money. Keep your eye on me, because you won’t have much time to get your bet in. If you’re not fast, the window may shut in your face.”

  Nodding again, she moved toward the ten-dollar window.

  At a minute to post time the odds remained unchanged. A thirty seconds to post time the lighted numbers on the board began to blink on and off to form new numberals. When they stopped blinking, number five had dropped to thirty-to-one.

  I waved to Sharon, twenty feet away at the ten-dollar window, then stepped to the fifty-dollar window and shoved across four fifty dollar bills. “Number five four times,” I said.

  I had my tickets and was making a beeline for the six-dollar combine window when the bell rang. I didn’t have a chance to get a bet down for myself.

  Sharon walked over and said, “I got mine in. How much did you bet?”

  Negligently I spread the four tickets for her to see. Her eyes widened. They probably would have widened more if she had known it was her father’s money.

  My bet forced the final odds down to twenty-to-one. Ethyl’s Boy trotted home without effort by four lengths, paying forty-one-twenty. Sharon collected two hundred and five dollars. The expense fund grew by four thousand one hundred and twenty dollars. I was still two dollars out for the evening.

  My only consolation was that there hadn’t been time to phone Howard Farrell. He was going to hate me for it, but I was glad. It would have been a little too much for everybody but me to make money on my own tip.

  I told Sharon I was through betting for the evening and would just as soon not stay for the rest of the races. She was so happy over her winnings, she failed to notice my glum tone.

  “All right,” she said agreeably. “Let’s drive over to your hotel for another nightcap out of the bottle.”

  CHAPTER VII

  EXCEPT FOR a before-dinner cocktail, the only alcohol Sharon and I had consumed all evening was the single highball we ordered at the racetrack while studying the form sheet. We were both stone sober when we reached the hotel, sober when we reached the hotel, sober enough so that neither of us cared for a straight jolt out of the bottle. But her winnings had so buoyed up Sharon’s spirits, she was a gay as though she had been drinking all night.

  Being sober seemed to have an inhibiting effect on her, though. Tonight she undressed in the bathroom and she wanted the lights off. And while her love-making could hardly be described as reticent, it wasn’t nearly as abandoned as the previous night. She seemed to require the artifical stimulus of alcohol in order fully to let herself go.

  About midnight, as we lay quietly side-by-side in the darkness, merely resting, she nestled her head on my bare shoulder and said, “Do you plan to go to the races every night, Matt?”

  “Not if something more interesting comes up. They aren’t likely to turn Ethyl’s Boy loose again for a few nights anyway. After tonight’s performance, he’ll go in at favorite’s odds. Why?”

  “Maybe you’d better take me home early tonight, then. I want you to save your strength.”

  “For what?” I inquired.

  “I thought I’d take you to a party Wednesday evening.”

  I let silence build for a few moments. Then I said, “It’s the kind of party where I’m going to need strength?”

  Sharon giggled in the darkness. “You never know what might happen at one of Isobel’s parties.”

  “Isobel?”

  “A friend of mine. Think you can miss the races one night?”

  “I’d rather miss them than your party. It sounds like fun.”

  “It will be,” she assured me. “You won’t forget it for a long time.”

  Neither would Sharon, if things worked out as we planned, I thought with a mixture of ruefulness and cynicism. I didn’t exactly relish my role in this operation. Not that I had any sympathy for a social group so jaded that it had to get its kicks through dope and aphrodisiacs and mass promiscuity. But it was a kind of sneaky role. I didn’t look forward to what Sharon’s expressed opinion of me would probably be when she learned I was a police spy. Even though she had the morals of an alley cat, I couldn’t help liking the girl. About half the time I felt like turning her over my knee and spanking her round little bottom, but I still liked her.

  I took her home at twelve-thirty.

  Tuesday morning I phoned Carl Lincoln.

  “I’m invited to a party tomorrow night,” I told him. “You all set?”

  “I’ve had the layout cased for days,” he said. “There’s only two entrances: a front door and a back. There’s not much cover in front. Just a couple of pieces of shrubbery, where we can plant possibly two men. That’s enough to keep the people inside from escaping by the front way, though. I’ll have the main force out back. There’s a wooded section back there where you could hide a regiment. How do you plan to signal us?”

  “I’ll carry a pencil flashlight,” I said. “If I blink it twice, that means cancel and get your men out of the area, because there’s someone inside the captain wouldn’t want netted. Four blinks means come on in.”

  “Better flash your signal from the back door,” Carl said. “That’s where I’ll be.”

  “I’ll flash it from whichever door is convenient,” I told him. “I may not be able to get to the back door. You arrange your communications so that you’ll get word relayed to you if I have to signal the men out front.”

  “All right,” he said. “Make it tough for us.”

  “You think you’ve got it tough?” I inquired. “I have to be inside with all those women, most of them probably running around naked.”

  “You always draw the rotten half our assignments,” he said sourly. “I wish I had big brown eyes.”

  “Go to hell,” I instructed him, and hung up.

  In order to keep up the pretense that I had come to town for the races, I had to take Sharon to Everglade again that night. Ethyl’s Boy went in as such an overwhelming favorite, post-time odds were five-to-eight. Neither of us bet him. He was second in the stretch, broke just before the finish line and ran out of the money altogether. It looked to me as though the driver let him break deliberately, because they didn’t want him in the money
at those odds.

  Sharon wasn’t as lucky as the previous night, but she ended up forty-two dollars ahead. I lost twelve dollars of my own money and three hundred of Martin Manners’. It made me feel a little better to lose some of his back.

  Sharon made me take her straight home afterward. She wanted me to stay in shape for the next night.

  Wednesday evening I picked her up at nine o’clock. She had instructed me to dress formally, so I wore my dinner jacket, complete with a white handkerchief in the breast pocket and a pencil flashlight in one of the side pockets. Sharon wore an emerald-green formal gown which clung to her figure like a coat of shellac and was cut so low in front, she probably would have been arrested if I had taken her to some public place.

  Eleven-thirty-two Crystal Drive was in a section of huge homes with lots of space between them. It was already too dark to see much of the grounds when we arrived, but I could make out that there was a good hundred feet between Isobel Whittier’s home and the houses either side of her. The place was set back about fifty feet from the street, and a few tall elm trees threw their shadows over the front lawn. Although there was a bright moon, the tree shadows were too dark for me to pick out the shrubbery Carl had indicated he planned to use as cover for the two men out front.

  The house itself was a broad, two-story brick building, and every light on both floors was on. Both the driveway and the street in front were jammed with cars.

  A tall, willowy brunette of about thirty met us at the front door. My first impression was that she was breathtakingly beautiful, then I looked again and realized with some surprise that her features were all wrong according to the usual standards of feminine beauty. Her cheek bones were too high, her eyes too wide apart and too big, her nose and her mouth too large. It was her look of aliveness, coupled with the almost overpowering feminine charm which emanated from her which made her seem beautiful. A pale, flawless complexion and even white teeth added to the illusion. Probably most people never realized she wasn’t truly beautiful even after learning to know her well. My policeman’s habit of automatically cataloguing people feature by feature in order to file descriptions in my mind let me see through the fraud.

  There was nothing fraudulant about the beauty of her body, however. Although a trifle on the slim side for my taste, she was perfectly proportioned. She wore a flaming-red gown as low-cut as Sharon’s, exposing the full upper half of a firm bosom nearly though not quite so ample as the redheaded girl’s.

  When Sharon introduced her as Isobel Whittier, she threw me a dazzling smile and said she was delighted I could come.

  Things looked promising, I thought. In this section everyone had servants, and the phenomenon of a hostess answering the door herself suggested that whatever servants Isobel Whittier employed had been dismissed for the night. It seemed likely that the reason for this was that she didn’t care to have her servants know what went on at her parties.

  When she led us into a front room large enough to serve as the lobby of a small hotel and began to introduce me around, however, it seemed an innocuous enough social gathering. There were only fifteen people aside from Sharon and myself, the men all impeccably clad in dinner jackets, the women in formal gowns. About half the group, gathered about a small bar in one corner of the room, held highball glasses. The rest were merely standing around talking. There was no sign of either marijuana or aphrodisiacs.

  There were four married couples present, all seemingly somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five years old. Two of the pairs I recalled having met at the country club on Sunday afternoon. There were also two girls of about Sharon’s age, or perhaps a year or two older, and two young men of about twenty-five who apparently had brought the young women. Since the young men were paying more attention to a couple of the married women than they were to the young girls, it was hard to tell which had brought which girl.

  Our hostess was the thirteenth person present, and the other two were Howard Farrell and a tall, heavy-set man of about fifty with a bullet head and close-cropped gray hair which made him look like a Prussian colonel. The latter was introduced to me as Mr. Grace, which touched a dim chord in my memory, but before I could grope for it, Farrell distracted my attention.

  “I thought you were going to tip me off when Ethyl’s Boy was ready to go,” he said resentfully.

  “I didn’t know until thirty seconds before post time,” I apologized. “I barely got in a bet myself. Nobody expected him to try the first night out.”

  Sharon put me higher on his black list by saying brightly, “Matt won over four thousand dollars on him.”

  When Farrell scowled, Isobel averted any further discussion of the unpleasant subject by inserting a hostesslike suggestion. “This is a help-yourself party, Mr. Rudd. There isn’t any bartender. But you’ll find ice and mix behind the bar. Just fix whatever you want.”

  I rounded the bar to make Sharon and myself highballs. As I mixed them I kept musing over the man introduced to me as Mr. Grace. Both the name and his face had something familiar about them.

  Then it registered. He was Big Joe Greco, councilman-at-large and political boss of the Third District. Down in his own part of town, where there was a large foreign element, he wouldn’t have dared use any name but his original one. It would have been tantamount to resigning from politics. But I had heard rumors that he Anglicized his surname to Grace when he mingled with the upper echelons of St. Cecilia’s society. I had never met the man, but his picture had been in the paper a few times, which is why I knew the face.

  My first reaction was chargin that the raid would have to be called off, for Big Joe Greco was exactly the type of political figure Captain Spangler had warned me to be on the lookout for. Then it occurred to me that there wasn’t a way in the world anyone could ever prove that I had recognized him. The man’s involvement in a raid would cause political repercussions which might shake the police department from top to bottom, and probably would get me called on the carpet. But I wouldn’t suffer anything more than a halfhearted bawling out, because I’d have the alibi that he was going under a false name and I had never before personally met him. I was reasonably certain my superiors would write it off as an unavoidable accident.

  Usually I don’t buck City Hall. You can’t and stay on the force. But it’s only to stay out of trouble, and not because I approve of all the political pressure on our police department. When a rare opportunity comes along to throw monkey wrenches into the machinery of vested authority without getting caught, I have a pixie tendency to throw them.

  I decided that if the party developed into anything worth raiding, I’d flash the signal to break in despite Big Joe Greco’s presence.

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE RUG in the big front room, which must have been eighteen by thirty feet, had been rolled against one wall. I noticed that there was a record changer in one corner of the room. Apparently there was going to be dancing.

  There was one more man than woman at the party. From the proprietory attitude he displayed toward Isobel Whittier, it seemed evident that Big Joe Greco regarded himself as his hostess’s partner for the evening, which left Howard Farrell as the odd man. Farrell wasn’t content with this status, however. The manner in which he smoothly moved in to monopolize Isobel’s attention suggested that he intended to end the evening with her as his partner and with Greco as the odd man.

  Isobel was enjoying the competition between the two men. When someone turned on the record player, she added fuel to the fire by instantly moving into Farrell’s arms without invitation, before Greco had a chance to ask her to dance with him. The politician leaned against the bar scowling as they floated across the floor to the strains to a slow waltz.

  Sharon didn’t like the attention Farrell was paying Isobel any better than Greco did. Watching her expression, I suddenly realized that Isobel was the rival who had usurped her place wth Farrell. Her eyes were glittering with jealousy for the willowy brunette.

  Isobel and Farrell were t
he first couple on the floor, and for the moment no one followed their example. Then Sharon abruptly swung herself into my arms and we became the second dancing couple. Pressing her body close to mine, she gazed up into my face with such a patently false expression of adoration, I felt like batting her.

  One of the younger men, with one of the married women as his partner, started to move onto the floor, then halted in favor of watching Sharon’s performance. It seemed to me that the eyes of everyone else present were on us, too. Sharon was so obviously throwing herself at me for Farrell’s benefit, the entire group was amused.

  When the piece ended and another began, Greco moved from the bar, grasped Isobel’s arm and almost forcibly swung her against him, Isobel looked surprised, but she didn’t resist. As she floated away in the arms of her new partner, she pursed her lips as though throwing Farrell a little kiss of goodby.

  Sharon and I had moved apart as the waltz ended. She stood there looking at Farrell, obviously hoping for him to move toward us and take her over from me. Glancing at her without expression, he walked over to the bar and picked up the drink he had left there.

  Flushing, Sharon threw herself back into my arms so hard, she nearly knocked me off balance.

  In a low voice I said, “The hell with it. When you decide you want to dance with me because you enjoy it, we’ll give it another whirl. But I’m not going to spend the evening being used to make your boy friend jealous.”

  Taking her elbow, I steered her over to the section of the bar where we had left our drinks, which was the opposite end from where Farrell stood. Angrily I drained my glass.

  In a small voice Sharon said, “What’s the matter, Matt? What did I do?”

  Other couples began to move onto the floor now, leaving the bar deserted except for us and Farrell at the far end. My momentary anger faded and I said in a quiet tone only Sharon could hear, “Quit acting like a teen-ager. If he doesn’t want you, throwing yourself at me isn’t going to get him back. You’re only amusing the others by your performance.”