Murder Makes Me Mad by Ferguson Findley

Author:Ferguson Findley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2022-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

The telephone was ringing when I got to my apartment. It was Eddie Zimmer from the Seventeenth Precinct.

“What you been doing all day, Chief?” he asked, kind of off-handedly. I smelled a rat.

“Walking around,” I said. “Talking to people.”

“Maybe you’ve been talking too much, Rex. Everybody in this town knows that a big tow-headed guy with a red face and blue eyes is looking for Coggy. What are you going to do if you find him?”

“Strangle him. What else do you know?”

“A little bird told me that a fellow by the name of Smiley Street went into the john in a restaurant and a big tow-headed guy with a red face and blue eyes went in after him. In about ten minutes the tow-headed guy with the red face and blue eyes came out without a scratch on him. Not even breathing hard. This fellow Smiley Street is still in the john, with a busted nose, a dislocated jaw, five broken ribs, numerous cuts and contusions. What do you know about that?”

“What did he do?” I asked. “Fall? It was a good thing the tow-headed guy was there to keep him from getting hurt worse, wasn’t it?”

“You could look at it that way, I guess. Look, Rex, take it easy or you’re going to get killed. You’re messing around with something that’s too hot for you to handle.”

“I’ll take a chance,” I said. “Anything else on your mind?”

“They’re after you, Chief. Watch your whites, because the hot stuff is going to start coming through!”

“What did you find at Wertz’s warehouse?” I asked.

“Say, I’m glad you mentioned that. Darned near forgot to tell you. We found five more cases of Tooley’s Irish. They had their original distiller’s numbers on them, and we started tracing them back.”

“Find anything?”

“Yeah. They were part of a hundred-case truckload that was hijacked last winter. We haven’t been able to find out how Wertz got them into his warehouse without them showing up in his books, but he did it.”

“Any of them poisoned?”

“Three bottles out of five cases. That isn’t bad, is it?”

“No,” I said. “Won’t kill more than three people, probably. A thing like that is enough to drive a man out of business. Say,” I ventured, “maybe somebody was trying to drive Wertz out of business.”

“Now you’re beginning to use your head, Chief. You’re starting to think like a cop. Keep it up and maybe we’ll be able to use you one of these days.”

When he’d gone, I put some iodine on the little cut across my belly, shaved and changed my clothes, and went out. I left the cut jacket at a tailor’s to be rewoven, and then I walked uptown to a restaurant owned by a retired admiral and his wife. The guy who used to cook for the admiral when he had his own flagship runs the galley in this restaurant, and I guess he doesn’t drag down any more on the side than he used to. I was coxswain of the gig when the admiral was a cruiser skipper, and we’ve always gotten along pretty well.

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