Dick Tracy by Max Allan Collins Page B

opinion.”
    “Hey, well that’s nice.”
    “I respect it so much, I want you and Pat to bring those three in. Flattop, Itchy, and Mumbles.”
    “Flattop, Itchy, and Mumbles?”
    Tracy nodded. “Flattop, Itchy, and Mumbles.”
    Catchem rolled his eyes. “Sounds like the law firm for the circus, don’t it?”
    “You know where to find ’em?”
    “Sure,” Patton said. “We got addresses on all of ’em.”
    Catchem laughed humorlessly. “Fancy Gold Coast apartments the likes of which we’ll never see. They’ll be snug in their king-size beds about now.”
    “Wake ’em up. I want to talk to ’em.”
    “When?”
    “Now. Tonight. A tour of the HQ holding cells will give ’em a taste of their future.”
    Catchem’s eyes were narrow and doubtful. “On what charge, Tracy? We ain’t got any warrants on ’em!”
    Tracy smirked. “Bring ’em in on suspicion of being ugly.”
    Catchem’s eyes widened and the doubt disappeared. He nodded and shrugged at Patton who nodded and shrugged back.
    “I can live with that,” Catchem said seriously, and he and Patton set out to do it.

A t Central Police Headquarters downtown, with midnight approaching, Tracy strode up the limestone steps, yellow topcoat flashing, past the white globes labeled POLICE and inside. Once up the stairs, he cut through a sprawling squad room where plainclothes detectives moved in and out among a dozen scuffed-up desks; overstuffed file cabinets lined the walls like so many suspects in a lineup. Cathedral windows threw the shadows of their panes on the green-painted walls and bare wood floors. His own office was a smoked-glass-and-wood affair at the end of a hall of similar offices; on the door it said, simply, DICK TRACY.
    He went to the closet to hang up his coat; as for his hat, it was ventilated beyond further use. Tracy’s assistant Pat Patton continually kidded him about going through “so gosh-darn many hats.” On one wall of Patton’s office down the hall, tacked like trophies, were half a dozen of Tracy’s old hats, each of them riddled with at least one bullet hole, and tagged with a date and description, i.e., “Boris Arson shoot-out, March 3, 1933.” Smiling at the thought of this Patton-ed whimsy, he placed the latest of the drilled fedoras on a shelf in the closet, saving it for his friend. It was the least he could do for the man, whose own derby had seen hazardous duty tonight.
    In the meantime, he put on another of the yellow snap-brims; he’d feel naked without one.
    Tracy took his place at his desk, which faced the door. Right now that desk was relatively clean, due to the long morning he’d spent handling paperwork; still, it was cluttered with files, mug shots, half-written reports, and law books, overseen by a heavy black phone and a green-shaded banker’s lamp. A framed picture of Tess was the sole personal touch.
    The crime-scene photos from the garage massacre were waiting for him on his desk; they were still damp. He silently thanked Casey for staying through the evening, getting these done; but he saw nothing in the photos that his eyes hadn’t told him on the scene.
    He got up and went to a file cabinet and removed a can of chili from a lower drawer (it was not filed under “C,” which he realized was careless of him) and opened the small can and placed it on the hot plate by the window. It didn’t compare to Mike’s chili, but it would suffice.
    He was stirring it, bleakly pondering what Officer Moriarty’s family must going through right now, when Sam Catchem came in, smiling, saying, “I got three ugly, mad-as-hades hoodlums who’d like a word with you. They’re having a long, hard, frustrating night.”
    “Well, we all have that much in common, don’t we?”
    “Don’t we though. After I rousted ’em outta their digs, they started asking for their phone calls, and I explained that ‘departmental policy’ didn’t allow ’em a phone call till after they’d been booked.”
    “And of