Dick Tracy Read online

  Flattop was empty again; gray smoke curled out of the Thompson barrel. He had the empty gun in one hand and was reaching back to his unseen assistant in the sedan for another loaded one, when Brow came screaming out of somewhere, firing his revolver.

  Several bullets stitched the sedan door just behind him, but Flattop merely looked casually Brow’s way, as if the flying slugs were gnats, a nuisance requiring swatting. With a fresh tommy gun in hand, Flattop tore off a volley and the Brow went down, limbs askew, like a dime store paper skeleton doing its dance.

  “That leaves you, Little Face,” Flattop said.

  There was silence.

  “Come on out, Little Face,” Flattop said. His voice was sweet. Melodic. His hooded eyes gave him a lazy look.

  Little Face stepped out from behind a parked truck.

  His tiny features were squinched in irritation.

  “What’s wrong with you, Flattop?” Little Face said. “You coulda killed me!”

  “It’s a dangerous business we’re in,” Flattop said, blandly.

  “I left the side door open for you!” Little Face’s tiny teeth were clenched. “Jeez, what’s the idea of coming in like gangbusters? Every cop in town’ll be here in two minutes.”

  The Kid was edging toward the door; it was so close . . .

  “I don’t think so,” Flattop was saying. “We paid off the beat cops with a sap. And there’s a thunderstorm coming. Also, this neighborhood minds its own business.”

  “That’s your opinion. I must say I don’t much like your style.”

  Flattop shrugged; the tommy gun moved with his shoulders. “No hard feelings. Anyway, I appreciate the tipoff, Little Face. And I appreciate you leaving the side door open. I just like to do things my own way.”

  The Kid was by the door, sitting by that door, but he couldn’t reach the knob unless he stood up.

  “Well, fine,” Little Face said to Flattop, gesturing dismissively, about to turn, “but let’s both take our separate powders. You tell Big Boy he can pay me off later—there’s no time, now.”

  “We’ll make time,” Flattop said, and he fired a burst from the tommy gun.

  Little Face hung in the air for a long moment, enormous surprise taking the tiny features; and then fell flat on his little face.

  “Lezgidoutaher,” a voice from the sedan said.

  “Not yet, Mumbles,” Flattop said. “Not yet. Gimme a hand, Itchy—if you can spare one. Get their wallets.”

  There were two men in the black sedan; the driver was the mush-mouthed one, a sulky hood in an amber-colored cashmere topcoat. The other, who now climbed out of the car, scratching his neck impulsively, was a blond, purse-lipped hoodlum with Coke-bottle glasses.

  The Kid’s hand reached up and touched the cold metal knob.

  Like an angel of death in his dark topcoat, Itchy was going from corpse to corpse, removing wallets and other identification, while Flattop surveyed the scene with a demented-cherub expression, and the boy turned the knob.

  He turned the knob and opened the door and let in the sound of thunder.

  It froze the boy for just a fraction of a second.

  Flattop looked sharply over and brought the tommy gun up and fired.

  But the weapon was empty. There was only a tiny, impotent clicking, and the Kid was out the door, in the alley, in the street, running into a damp, darkening night and a damp, dark world that was his, where the likes of Flattop would never find him.

  Flattop pursued the little brat into the alley, but the boy was gone by the time he got out there.

  “Kidsawya,” Mumbles said, slouching behind the wheel of the black sedan.

  “I know he saw me. That’s why I chased him into the alley, you moron!”

  “Dincatchem,” Mumbles said.

  “No kiddin’.”

  “Gidagulukatim?”

  “No, I didn’t get a good look at him!”

  Itchy was already back in the sedan. “Shake a leg, Flattop! For cryin’ out loud! We gotta get goin’!”

  “Ishysishy,” Mumbles said, with a childish grin.

  “So what if Itchy’s itchy,” Flattop said irritably. “We ain’t quite done, yet. Get me that last tommy.”

  Mumbles handed Flattop the final Thompson submachine gun and the flat-headed gunman beamed beatifically, seeming at once maniacal and relaxed, as cordite singed the air, and the tommy gun echoed and rang in the big room.

  The fat lady was singing, but the opera wasn’t nearly over.

  Dick Tracy slumped in his plush, padded seat, unable to resist the urge to doze. A gently reproving look from the slender beauty beside him—one Tess Trueheart—made him straighten temporarily, but a long morning at headquarters, catching up with weeks of paperwork he’d put off, conspired with the boredom of culture with a capital C, to make the plainclothes detective’s eyelids grow heavy.

  Among all these tuxedos and gowns, his severe black suit with red and black tie stood out; but on his salary, Tracy couldn’t really spare the tuxedo rental. The public, and Tess, would have to accept him as he was: a working cop on a budget.

  After all, Tracy was not here to please himself. He was here to make three people happy. First and most important was Tess herself; attending this charity matinee performance of something called Die Schlumpf at the Civic Opera House, amidst assorted faces straight off the society page, was a rare treat for a working girl. How could he deny his sweetheart the thrill of viewing the city s cultural event of the moment?

  These seats, incidentally, had been provided them by another of the persons he wanted to make happy with his presence: Diet Smith.

  Smith was a wealthy industrialist who had taken a big interest in the local police after Tracy cleared the millionaire of a murder frame-up. Since then Smith had set his regiments of researchers and inventors to work on various gadgets, the latest and potentially most applicable of which was a two-way wrist radio—a portable police-band radio no bigger than a wristwatch. In fact, it was a wristwatch, keeping perfect time in addition to its sending/receiving capacities.

  Tracy was wearing one of the handful of experimental models right now. As Chief of Detectives, he had distributed the wristwatchlike devices to the half-dozen members of the Major Crimes squad he personally headed up. Nobody was quite used to them yet, and there was some grousing, but Tracy saw the two-ways as heralding a future where policework would be more scientific, more technologically advanced.

  Diet Smith was a true ally in the war on crime, and Tracy meant to keep the rotund multimillionaire happy. And when Smith made a gift of his seats to the premiere performance of an opera directed by actor Vitamin Flintheart, there was no way Tracy could graciously decline.

  Beyond that, there was Flintheart himself, who had been helpful to Tracy in several cases that had veered into the theatrical world. The pompous old ham had a big heart, and Tracy had come to be very fond of him; Flintheart had organized a group of actors who regularly made the rounds of hospitals, orphanages, and soup kitchens, giving free shows.

  Tall, dignified, and utterly self-absorbed, actor Vitamin Flintheart (the nickname came from a propensity toward chugging health tonics and popping vitamin pills in pursuit of a youth long since fled) was not merely directing the opera. He had taken on one of the leading roles. Even now he was joining in with the heavyset soprano whose steel breastplates and Norse horn helmet matched Vitamin’s own, though admittedly each cut his or her own distinct figure. With his flowing silver-white hair and mustache darkened for the stage, Flintheart—famed for his striking profile, drinking problem, and squandered talent—made a less than convincingly youthful Viking.

  But the actor had a melodious, soothing voice, which lulled the detective to sleep—until the formidable soprano would reach for an earsplitting high C, her voice all but shaking the paint off the Opera House walls, and jarring Tracy awake.

  “Dick,” Tess whispered. “Please try to stay awake.”

  She wasn’t at all cross about it; but at lea
st a little embarrassed.

  “I was resting my eyes, dear,” he whispered back.

  “You were snoring,” she said, and smiled in her crinkly, endearing way, cornflower blue eyes sparkling. She wore a handsome dark green dress and matching hat—modest but stylish, and definitely attractive.

  “Sorry,” he said, smiling back at her.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Vitamin certainly has knobby knees, for a Viking.”

  “Vitamin has knobby knees anyway you look at it,” Tracy said.

  Boredom soon settled in again. Tracy’s eyes moved above and to the right, where the Mayor and his wife, and the District Attorney and a bejeweled society-girl date, shared box seats. The Mayor was a heavyset, balding West Side politico who wheeled-and-dealed his way into office, building ethnic coalitions around the city; he and his matronly wife were dressed to the teeth, but going the cultural route was obviously purely a political move on their part. The Mayor had his eye on the statehouse.

  D.A. Fletcher was His Honor’s heir apparent. Handsome, mustached, graying at the temples, Fletcher was smooth with the public and the press, and one of the best courtroom prosecutors Tracy had ever seen. But the detective was uncomfortable with the D.A.’s social climbing and political aspirations. Fletcher was the kind of D.A. who would bounce any case he didn’t feel he had a lock on winning and who would not prosecute anybody if the wrong toes were getting stepped on.

  Tracy and Fletcher enjoyed a limited truce, whereas the Mayor was consistently fawning over his young Chief of Detectives. His Honor was grooming Tracy for the Chief of Police slot—Chief Brandon, who’d hired Tracy, was nearing retirement—but Tracy wasn’t eager for this advancement.

  This morning, plowing through all that deskwork was a reminder to him that even his role as Chief of Detectives was more bureaucratic than he’d like. He hadn’t gotten into this line of work to sit behind a desk. He liked field work; he liked chasing down crooks and clues, just like Sherlock Holmes in the stories he’d read as a kid.

  Funny. Growing up in a little town in the Midwest, his father a local attorney whose speciality was wills and contracts, not criminal cases, Tracy had never even daydreamed of being a detective, despite his interest in Nick Carter dime novels and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of the Great Detective. He’d gone to the big city with a nest egg (provided partly by his father and partly through his own summer-job savings) to attend business college. Which he had, and he’d graduated with honors.

  Being a cop had never been part of the plan.

  But shortly after he graduated, he’d gone to call on Tess, his college sweetheart, hoping to gather courage to propose. Had he done so, and had she said yes, it would have made him the happiest young man in the country, or anyway the city. Of course, he’d gone to the Trueheart home (Tess’s folks had become like second parents to him) on many a night, with proposing in mind; but he’d never quite found the words . . .

  That particular evening, however, had been different. Not because Tracy had finally summoned his courage to pop the question; he hadn’t. But because, while Tracy and Tess were in the upstairs parlor courting, Mr. Trueheart had been robbed in his first-floor delicatessen.

  Two armed thieves demanded Emil Trueheart open his safe—in which he kept his life savings, having lost over five hundred dollars in small bank failures not so long ago—and Mr. Trueheart refused, and fought back.

  The two thieves shot the old man; two slugs in the chest.

  Tracy, hearing the gunfire, had rushed downstairs and got the butt of an automatic on the back of his skull for his trouble.

  In a melodramatic moment that Vitamin Flintheart might well have relished, a tearful Tracy swore vengeance over the corpse of his sweetheart’s father. But even in the colder, more rational light of day, when all the melodrama was drained out of him, Tracy had been determined to find those two thieving murderers.

  He had gone to Chief Brandon, who attached him temporarily to the plainclothes squad; and after he tracked the two thieves down—in fact shot them dead when they were kind enough to draw down on him—he found himself invited by Brandon permanently aboard.

  The two thieves had been low-level hoodlums whose allegiance was to Alphonse Capricio, A.K.A. Al “Big Boy” Caprice, one of the city’s most powerful gangsters. Tracy could hardly leave the force until he’d brought down the Big Boy himself—otherwise, he wouldn’t really have kept the promise he made over Mr. Trueheart’s bullet-racked body.

  That was several years ago, and Big Boy still had not been brought to justice; like so many big-shot gangsters, Caprice was well-insulated, with scores of underlings doing his illicit bidding. In that same short time, however, Tracy had been put in charge of the city’s detective squads, and had formed the select Major Crimes squad, bringing dozens of criminals—mobsters, murderers, outlaws—to meet their just desserts—and sometimes their maker. Now Dick Tracy’s profile was at least as famous as that ham actor’s down on stage—in this burg, anyway.

  The attention embarrassed Tracy—the editorial cartoonists exaggerating his shovel jaw and hooked nose into something absurd, the national newspaper syndicates hounding him to let them assign a “ghost” to write up his “casebook,” Hollywood making noises about doing a movie biography—and it had, to a degree, hampered his effectiveness on the job. The time when Dick Tracy could go undercover, for example, was long since past.

  And now his success was threatening to take him out of the action and put him in bureaucratic mothballs altogether. It was a dilemma, all right; the increased money—to a man who hoped one day to get married, buy a house, fill it with kids—was a serious consideration.

  It could also be argued that, from the command-post position of Police Chief, he might be able to direct an all-out war on crime, and in the bigger picture accomplish much more than he was able to out in the streets. Maybe that would be what it would take to bring down the Big Boys of organized crime.

  Still, the successes of a commanding general could never compare to the foot-soldier thrills of engaging in individual skirmishes.

  “Calling Dick Tracy,” a scratchy, loud voice said. “Calling Dick Tracy!”

  The voice was coming from his wrist.

  It startled Tracy momentarily, and then he bent over in his seat, as if tying his shoes, but cocking the side of his head to his raised wrist, even as he adjusted the volume lower on the two-way gizmo, from which the rather high-pitched voice of his partner, Detective Pat Patton, had crackled.

  “What is it, Pat?” he whispered.

  Tess was sinking into her seat. The eyes of the packed Opera House were on them—on the main floor, and in the balconies alike, the theater was a sea of faces turned their way. Not a patron was paying any heed, at this moment, to Vitamin Flintheart’s Wagnerian excesses.

  “We’ve got five dead hoods over at the Seventh Street garage,” Pat’s voice said breathlessly over the staticky two-way. “I never saw anything so vicious, Tracy.”

  “Have you I.D.’d the stiffs?”

  “That’s just it—we can’t even tell who they are, or were. They’ve been shot to pieces.”

  The Opera House, seeing only an apparently vacant seat where Tracy had ducked down, had returned their attention, perhaps reluctantly, to Vitamin’s musicale. Both the D.A. and the Mayor were hanging over their box seat, however, straining to listen to this little drama, as it came over Tracy’s wrist; Tess, too. Any thought of embarrassment had flown from her mind—her eyes reflected only concern.

  “Don’t let anybody touch a thing, Pat. I’m on my way.”

  Sitting up straight, he gave Tess’s hand a quick squeeze and said, “I’m sorry.”

  She smiled just a little. “No, you’re not. Don’t you get shot to pieces.”

  “I think the shooting’s over for tonight. Anyway, I’ll try to make it back for Vitamin’s big death scene.”

  “Take your time,” she told him wryly, as he rose. “Vitamin will no doubt take his.”

  The cor
pses littering the cement floor of the garage on Seventh Street hadn’t taken their time dying. It had been sudden and it had been brutal.

  The gawkers had found their way here; uniformed men had roped off the area where the garage door had been, prior to the killers’ car bursting through it. Chief Brandon, on the sidelines, was explaining to the forensic team that he wanted Tracy’s opinion before letting them take over. The rain had not yet come, but the thunder continued to provide its occasional punctuation. Dusk was settling on the city like fog.

  Tracy, his yellow camel’s hair topcoat hanging open, his yellow snapbrim fedora pushed back on his head, stood with hands on hips as he stared grimly down at a bullet-torn body. He nodded and Pat Patton covered the corpse back up.

  Patton stood, sighed, tucked his hands in the pockets of his emerald topcoat, his Kelly-green derby pulled down almost to the eyebrows of his round, open face, which was as white as the underbelly of a fish. Of a dead fish.

  “I thought we’d seen it all by now, Dick,” Pat said. He shook his head. “This takes the cake. These babies are obliterated.”

  “Somebody used a tommy gun like a buzz saw,” Tracy said. He gestured. “Look at all the spent shells. They’re everywhere.”

  Shell casings were scattered about the vast cement floor like golden confetti.

  “ ’Cept for the crime-scene shutterbug and the M.E., we haven’t let any of the boys in,” Patton said, nodding toward the Chief, “ ’cause of your standing orders to diagram the crime scene, and mark the location of every scrap of evidence and every spent shell, ’fore anything’s touched or moved. But Tracy, these babies are gonna get ripe before we get that done.”