Unhappy Hooligan
A Howie Rook Mystery
Stuart Palmer
To FELIX ADLER, dean of the happy clowns, and to Amelia, Jr., queen of the happy piglets, in memory of a wonderful week with The Big One.
1
On the bloody floor of the bedroom
I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair,
I note where the pistol has fallen.
—Walt Whitman
T
HE MIXED FOURSOME IN
gala eevervning dress came to the party late, and found that there wasn’t any party. No light showed over the transom, and nobody answered the bell. They hammered on the door and called “Mac?” several times and then got tired of it all and went away to have their nightcaps somewhere else. The silence surged softly back again.
Inside the big, comfortably furnished apartment, a large black tomcat came in through the one open window and stretched himself luxuriously. His name was supposed to be Satanas, but he answered neither to that nor to anything else except the sound of the refrigerator door opening, or the smell of food. He now padded confidently through the Stygian darkness of the living room, made a wide detour around the dead man who lay akimbo in the center of the rug, and paused to hiss silently at a strange bit of foreign dirt on the floor. He went on to take off in an effortless leap to the top of the portable cocktail bar that somebody had readied for the party that was never to take place. There, without a single qualm of conscience, he tasted the forbidden fruits of two sausages and the filling of a sandwich—spitting out the latter because it turned out to be too-salty anchovies—and then he deftly knocked a stuffed olive out of its bowl and played polo with it up and down the floor. Finally he batted it through the dining room and into the kitchen, where he curled up easily under the stove with the battered olive still held firmly in his paws, and went calmly to sleep. He was strictly a cat who walked by himself, and the devil take the hindmost.
On the next morning but one, on the other side of the great sprawling collection of assorted suburbs which calls itself Los Santelos, Mr. Howard Rook was rudely disturbed from his slumbers at nine o’clock by a firm knocking on his door. He yawned, put on a worn woolen bathrobe, and wearily went to answer it, trying to think of some new excuse with which to stall his landlady. But for once it wasn’t the landlady; it was a brisk, pale-haired young man in sober tweeds. He had a badge cupped in the palm of his hand.
“My name is Jason, sergeant, Detective Bureau,” he said, in what was no doubt his best imitation of the heroic fictional cop on a certain well-known television program.
“Come in, come in,” said Howie Rook resignedly, since it was obvious that the young man was coming in anyway. “Jason, is it? Well, I haven’t got your Golden Fleece.”
“Huh? Mr. Rook, you’re coming downtown with me,” said Jason.
“I am, am I?” Rook countered, not very brilliantly—and not un-cheerfully for a man who suspects that he is being arrested, and not for the first time either. But he did firmly insist on dressing and shaving and being allowed to have his breakfast; said breakfast consisting of crackers and liverwurst washed down with copious drafts of dark beer. Meanwhile, characteristically, he talked. The earnest young police detective, who waited patiently by the door of the rooming-house bed-sitting-room, soon felt as if he had been trapped into a wrestling match with a trained bear.
Across the room, the older man—brick red, fiftyish, shaggy—was holding forth, and obviously enjoying having a captive audience. He was waving a fistful of yellowed newspaper clippings; more clippings were around his feet, like dead leaves around a gnarled oak, and still more were spilling every which way from the shoebox files that covered all of one wall of the room. “You take fingerprints now,” said Howie Rook argumentatively. “No doubt when you were going through the police academy they filled you full of the so-called science of dactyloscopy, no two fingerprints in the world alike, and all that?”
“But that’s basic…” protested Jason.
“Then you listen to this, from the Minneapolis
Star,
November 18th, 1943: ‘Twin Sisters, Enlisting in Waves, Found to Have Identical Fingerprints.’!”
Detective-sergeant Jason flushed slightly, and started to say that he remembered that newspaper story and that it had been disproved later.
“Sure, sure,” Rook interrupted. “Something about minute differences in the sweat pores, or something, under magnification. The story had to be disproved, because it ran contrary to the sacred mumbo jumbo that has come to take the place of common sense and shoe leather in investigative work. And all you young squirts with your new shiny badges swallow the dogma without question, just as your elders used to accept Lombroso’s goofy theories about criminals having a special type of ear lobe or a funny nose or something! Mark my words, criminology in the past two decades has gone all to pot, snake-bit by the obvious fallacy of trying to attack the problem of human misbehavior as if it were something mathematical and predictable instead of just natural hellishness. You can’t solve crimes in a lab. Now, you take ballistics—”
“Mister
Rook,” interrupted the young detective almost desperately, “this is all very interesting, and I bet you don’t really believe half of it yourself. But I’m here on duty; they want you downtown and I got orders to bring you in.”
Rook sighed. “So here we go again, hah?” His pale, slightly faded blue eyes were wary but amused. “Well, sonny, what’s the gag this time? Am I supposed to be growing marijuana plants in a flower pot, or shooting out the street lights with a BB-gun, or what?”
Young Jason looked a little baffled. “I don’t get the drift. But if you’ll just put on your hat and coat—”
There was a snort. “It’s only a gag, sonny, a running gag. Like sending a machine-shop apprentice out to borrow a left-handed monkey wrench, or showing a cub reporter the type lice in a pail of water so that he gets himself well squirted. Rookie cops assigned to this part of town always get sent out to arrest me on some pretext or other; it’s been going on for years. This is the way the fatheads who spend most of their time playing pinochle down at Headquarters get even with me for calling the public’s attention to their mistakes in my open letters to the newspapers. Maybe you’ve even read some of my diatribes? And it’s also a way of hazing the greenhorns into the bargain; I am known to have ways of destroying some of their fond illusions, and proving my points with my clippings. But you run along now, and tell those jokers that it didn’t work this time.”
Detective-sergeant Jason shook his head stubbornly. “Sorry, Mr. Rook. I don’t just know what it’s all about, but I’ve got to take you in right now.”
“But
why,
sonny?”
“I guess you’ll find out just what makes when you get down to Well Street. You’re not being arrested, you’re just coming along voluntarily, see?”
“Voluntarily! I see.” Grumbling sulfurously, Rook finished his beer, then raised himself from his Morris chair, wrapped a shabby topcoat around his ursine bulk and jammed a disreputable fedora on his head. He lumbered out and down the stairs, the young detective close upon his heels. Outside in the driveway there was a black-and-white Ford sedan with the familiar LSPD insignia on the side, a uniformed man at the wheel.
“Back to Well Street,” ordered Jason as they got in.
“And as I was saying,” Howie Rook continued blithely, “you take ballistics. Every schoolchild today knows that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent of killing that paymaster up in the Boston suburbs. But the ballistics evidence that wrongfully convicted them is proudly presented in photographs in such official reference works as Hatcher’s
Firearms Investigation…”
“Kick it along a little faster,” said Jason to the driver, who did.
“And how about the polygraph, the so-called lie detector? Its results have been thrown out of court a dozen times, because the thing is inconclusive and easy to trick and also edges into self-incrimination and a violation of the Bill of Rights. Same thing with the truth drugs, such as sodium pentothal is supposed to be and isn’t. Why, I can show you literally dozens of clippings to prove—”
“Hit the siren!” ordered Sergeant Jason in pure desperation. And they raced on downtown drowned in their own noise, like three thousand pigs caught under a fence.
“—or this recent increasing dependence of the police on hidden microphones and wire tapping and Dick Tracy pocket-size wire recorders and all the rest of that stuff?” Howie Rook was happily continuing as they got out of the police car and went up the stone steps shadowed by one of the largest and most hideous modernistic statues in history; it was supposed to represent The Policeman Guarding the American Family, but to Rook it looked like a mammoth Tin Woodman of Oz. On the way down the second-floor hallway he nodded pleasantly to several young detectives whom he had put into their places in the past and who obviously had no illusions about the future; they gave him a wide berth.
For Rook was, as our English cousins say, a man with a maggot. He was always riding his hobby, and while sometimes he went to ridiculous extremes with it, there had been times when subsequent events had proved him right.
Jason led him all the way down the hall to the anteroom of Chief of Police Parkman’s office, where he deposited him with ill-concealed relief. The room at the moment was occupied by a bored veteran in uniform at the desk, and by two visitors, both female. One was a rich-bitch type, Rook decided, a strikingly lovely moonlight blonde in a coat of blue mutation mink. She was tinglingly beautiful and had been working on it; not too young but making the best of her thirties. She sat nervously tapping her long fingernails on the arm of the divan. The other one, sitting well across the room, was a plumply pretty teen-ager with a sulky lower lip; she might be beautiful someday, Rook decided idly, if she got rid of that baby fat. A confirmed widower of years’ standing, he still had a keen eye for the opposite sex—but like the little boy in the toy shop, he didn’t want to touch, he just came in to look.
Resigning himself to a long wait, he gathered up some old magazines and sank into a chair. But the uniformed man at the desk suddenly beckoned to him. “If your name is Rook, you’re to go right in.”
So Howie Rook cast aside the magazines and went into the office of the Chief of Los Santelos Police, wondering just what the hell this was all about. He and the boys in the Detective Bureau had for years enjoyed a sort of running feud, but this was something else again. Chief Parkman, Rook knew full well, was a competent police executive and far above wasting his time on practical jokes.
The Chief was a bespectacled Hibernian type, and a horse-player would have said that he was carrying extra weight-forage. But now the great man rose briskly from behind his massive mahogany desk and leaned over to shake hands. He indicated a big leather chair, and offered his cigar humidor.
