Men Who Walk Alone Page 2

  The cold rain mixed with the tepid air, a strange, ambiguous temperature that pestered me. I tugged my jacket closer to my body as I trudged forward. Better to be too hot than too cold in this weather, I felt.

  As I walked by Elliot Street, I looked reminiscently across the barren railroad track. There, a quarter mile of United Shoe Machinery Corporation factories stood like smooth mountain peaks. Built in the turn of the century, United Shoe Machinery had once been the pride of our city, employed half the town.

  I doubted half of them were operational anymore. The rest were dead. Just like everything else of worth.

  It was an ironic fate for a city that had been at the heart of the Industrial Revolution. Beverly had been at its peak before the economic plunge. With Salem Sound south of it, it had been a suitable geographical location for the once-lucrative sea trade.

  I looked down at my gritty hands, clenched them in frustration. To say I didn’t care for my situation would have been an understatement.

  Before, I had been a member of a proud, effective, upright police force. The system hadn’t been flawless, but it had done its job well. Criminals were caught, put in jail. Cops like myself upheld the law. It was simple to understand. It was black and white, the world I belonged in.

  The last decade had changed all that. Like a disease, bad laws and lucrative, yet illicit businesses had transformed us into a collection of the most degenerate, amoral, treacherous bastards this side of Hell. The economic situation only compounded it.

  A small town like Beverly was a plant; Mafiosos were the weeds that strangled it, the parasites that rode on the back of the sick dog. We were kept alive, but only enough to be fed on. Eager to use the sea ports during Prohibition, organized crime had moved into the city like typhus. At first, they had been a mere nuisance. But when booze sold like gold bullion, they became demigods.

  That’s when the department had lost its way. First, the payoffs had been small, chickenfeed. Then it had grown to the point where bribes were bided on like auction items.

  Men like Hardy helped maintain that path. He was the middleman, made deals with the underbosses so the beat cops wouldn’t touch them. Back when our department had still had good men in it, Hardy had fought to can them, felt they were a risk he couldn’t afford. He promoted those who were loyal to him, rather than men who were capable. The good men had been the old timers; rather than fight, they had retired on their pensions.

  Elroy and Barker, from what I gathered, were either too incompetent or too preoccupied with their own self-importance to know what went on.

  Slowly, everything fell into place. The department protected those who paid the highest; in the early days of the Volstead Act, some cops had supported separate gangs, feuded when things fell through. The results were “friendly fire” accidents.

  As for me, I was lucky to have kept my life, let alone my job. While the rest of the cops around me either gave in or went along, I did neither. In a small town like this, rumors spread like a fire in a pool of gasoline. I had never been the one to comprise, not since my father had been shot on the witness stand during a murder trial. I had been only seventeen at the time. He had been called testify against a known gangster after he had seen him knife a former “friend.”

  Good thing my mother had died from the flu epidemic in 1918, when I had been only fourteen; she didn’t have to deal with the constant death threats we got on the phone, the ominous knocks at the front door. Dad didn’t flinch through the whole thing, even when the gangster offered to pay off all our debt to the city bank. I had the nerve to ask dad once why; he said bribes were for cowards.

  At the trial, one of the gangster’s cronies snuck a Saturday night special in, shot my dad along with the bailiff at point-blank. The bullet punctured a lung, but didn’t killed him instantly. He died two days later, after he had coughed up half the blood in his body. I had been there to watch the whole ordeal; a man of few words, all he had said to me before he had died was made me promise to do the right thing, even if it killed me.

  I meant it when I promised him I would; but what fifteen-year-old boy wouldn’t do the same for their old man?

  Since then, my world had always been black and white. When it was time to pick a career, I had figured no better place to live in such a world than as a cop.

  There was also the different treatment the bailiff received when he died three hours after my father in the same hospital. The reporters had crowded outside his room. My father barely got a glance. When newspapers ran stories on the murders, it was all about the public outrage; not because my father had been murdered on the stand, but because the gangster had dared to kill a cop.

  It wasn’t hard to get the picture of how things worked even then.

  Because of my unique view of the world, my position as lead detective at my precinct station had been unexpected by all parties involved. Too bad it hadn’t been because of my merits. I found little good came without bad along with it.

  After a few years of gun battles between rival gangs, blood flowed down the rickety curbs along with the sewage. General outrage towards us had begun to brew. The last straw had come in the form of a ghastly discovery; a little Irish girl’s body found strangled, brutally ravaged at the feet of the Soldiers' Monument off Abbot Street.

  It didn’t help when the newspapers blamed it on Hardy, a lurid slant ebbed out of their provocative headlines. The Irish newspaper, McKinney’s Press, even had a graphic photo of the corpse splashed across page one. Hardy’s mug right below it sent a very tacit message.

  To help keep the pressure off, calm down the few honest city officials who were ready to have the Grand Jury convene, Hardy had appointed me as lead detective for homicide, figured the promotion would soothe things out.

  It had been a fluke.

  At the time, Hardy hadn’t particularly known me per se. Even for a small-town police department, the level of detachment between the men was big. I had built a reputation for being competent, someone who minded his own business.

  It was one of my many deceptions. I did my best to appear to keep my nose out of my colleagues’ less-than honorable matters, but I was no sideliner when it came to the justice. Justice still came about, but by other means than the official method. Every time I saw an innocent dead man or woman’s face, I saw my father.

  A scream abruptly shot out of some indistinct street, hidden by the darkened sky.

  I paused, hung my head for a moment, then resumed my walk after a long shrug.

  It wasn’t apathy on my part. It was reality.

  I could have tried to help. But what could be done? I was armed; it didn’t mean a thing. Nobody in Beverly had a gun; they had two, at least. By then, I knew better than to try to be the hero. I wouldn’t have lasted a day if I had. Violence was everywhere, the venom in Beverly’s blood vessels that pumped weakly, but surely. Heroes who tried to change that ended up dead. I had investigated their murders so many times it got repetitive fast.

  Except for this vigilante, apparently.

  Another abandoned textile factory appeared on my left in the fog. It stood high in the sky like a dead Sequoia. Like the city, which slowly rotted from within, it faced an inevitable demise. Next to it a large line of destitute people filed around a bread and soup kitchen. It was a rare sight to see the nonprofit organization that ran it. As of late, the new government welfare programs took it upon themselves to perform on the task.

  I didn’t pay any attention to politics. Economic theories, social programs, all that other nonsense was worthless garble to me. I had worked long enough for the city to realize politicians were all the same, whether they were an elephant or a donkey.

  No matter who was elected, I had the same attitude; trust no one.

  A brief smile appeared on my face when I finally reached my small home at the intersection of Cabot and Kittredge. It was a tiny speck compared to the other houses that occupied the small street.

  I didn’t complain. The rent was cheap, a wo
rd I appreciated well.

  When I reached the door, I pulled out my key, opened it, my revolver held out warily. Too many enemies for me to let my guard down.

  It was clear. Nine times out of ten it was safe. I wouldn’t be caught off guard that one time.

  I walked into my home, shut the door with a yawn. It was a demure setup: a small kitchen, a central living room, one bedroom for myself. The carpet, walls, ceiling were all a pale brown. I didn’t mind the diminutive space; I had few possessions, no sentiment for material things. The only thing I valued was my life, my integrity, my reputation.

  And my Smith and Wesson Model 10 revolver. Come to think of it, a good pack of Lucky Strikes never hurt me, either.

  I threw a large pile of files I had retrieved from police archives on the table. I then went into the kitchen, fixed myself some homemade soup. After I had finished my meager dinner, I walked into the living room; only a tiny couch, golden brown radio set with a lamp stand next to it. But since my wife had left me five years ago, I had lived alone. By then I had grown accustomed to the sound of my own voice.

  I placed a stack of the day’s newspapers on the couch, glanced at the front-page articles, the large pictures. Every story involved the Vigilante, illustrations on the front cover of what people thought the Vigilante looked like based on the description given to them by “eye witnesses.”

  Everyone had their own theory, personal visualization. Most looked idiotic, belonged more in dime novels than in newspapers.

  I dropped a pack of cigarettes on the lamp stand, smoked on the first of many as I carried out the process step by step. I examined the man’s behavior, the crime scenes, then looked for pertinent facts. I picked up one of the files, read through it quickly, then jotted down important information in a small notebook. I moved onto the next file, repeated the same.

  An hour expired quickly.

  I was finally done. I looked into my notebook for patterns. I shook my head as I laughed humorlessly.

  The son of a bitch Hardy had been right; the killer had no originality, no creativity.

  Every case had the same basic storyline: A criminal attempts to murder someone, is killed by a single bullet from a .455 Webley cartridge before he can carry out his actions.

  The weird part: Two of the Vigilante’s victims had been done in within ten minutes of each other, five blocks away. No one could have covered that distance unnoticed.

  I scratched my head as I mulled over the motives.

  A tenable theory, the oldest one: It was personal. A hard theory to prove. But it stuck somehow. Something connected all the cases together. Personal issues were the invisible glue, held seemingly unrelated events together.

  I pulled out a map of the city, grabbed a pencil from my desk as I looked at the location of each crime scene. I circled the place of where it had occurred, then peered at the map when I was done. A few seconds later, I pushed myself away from it in disbelief.

  The pack of Lucky Strikes that sat on the lamp stand proved to be a solace. I rapidly consumed them, filled the apartment with transparent clouds.

  It was a game: connected the dots, create the picture.

  Dozens of circles next to each other, all overlapped. Rantoul Street was the most marked.

  Fact: Every incident occurred west of Cabot Street, half of them in the Shingleville area. Not one had occurred east of Cabot.

  Shingleville was a story of pure tragedy, originally meant to be the crown jewel of city planning. The neighborhoods had been intended to house the thousands of immigrants arriving to work at the factories. They were supposed to live the American Dream; a neat house, a bit of front lawn for their white picket fence. Their dream had turned into a nightmare when the jobs had disappeared. No jobs, no money, no home purchases.

  The area had crumbled into a living graveyard of ruined dreams; thousands of immigrants had arrived in a new country, thought it was the land of opportunity. Instead, they found themselves in homeless shelters, at the mercy of government bureaucrats who threw them out for any reason they deemed sufficient. The factories meant to fill the buildings had dissipated, a large vacuum left for the mob to fill up. Rantoul Street alone housed a thousand Italians in a handful of apartments like a small sliver of Italy.

  A jolt of recollection rushed through me as I recalled the crime report, the press’ ‘field day.’ I went over to the radio, turned it on, curious as to how they would spin it. After several seconds of static, incoherent speaking, the reporter from KAFA station became clear.

  “And now the Vigilante’s quest to rid of the city of crime has appeared to have been taking a toll on the underworld, as Shingleville alone has seen a dramatic drop in crime, with just half the number of reported crimes compared to last month. Men of vice and depravity are now beginning to wonder if they are the next to join their fellow villains in the private cemetery of hoodlums. The questions are now on everyone’s lips; who is this mysterious Vigilante? What inspires him to stand alone against impossible odds? When will his thirst for justice finally be quenched? Are the police complicit in these acts that are terrorizing the underworld?”

  I rolled my eyes, scoffed as I turned the radio to some jazz before I went back to my notes. I checked the files again, tried come up with a personality for the suspect. I put my head back against the couch, closed my eyes slowly. I tried to envision the face that would go with the name, the kind of personality needed for a killer.

  The automatic revolver bounded around in my mind most prominently. It was something to consider. The man was a good shot; a military veteran, perhaps from the Great War. Maybe it was the only gun he had. Hard to tell.

  I couldn’t ignore the psychological aspect, the fact that he was a vigilante to begin with. The origins, the motive. The most important question.

  Why did he do it?

  Though my theories were limited, this much I knew: it wasn’t because he had woken up one day with the decision to go shoot hoodlums. Such a decision would have been too arbitrary. People didn’t just snap. They had to be pulled apart first.

  More conclusions rolled through my mind like tumbleweed; it couldn’t be completely personal. Vigilantism wasn’t exactly a rarity in Beverly. Hundreds of cases like this popped up every year, except there were two common variables; the perpetrators had only killed those connected to him, then the vigilante had been done in themselves in return.

  A life for a life for a life.

  It wasn’t a simple case of revenge, either; he would have committed one act of vengeance, not pursued every criminal that he encountered. He was too dedicated.

  It had to be a man. Not because women weren’t capable of it. I had seen it before. Women didn’t go on prolonged acts of rage. They were emotional beings. They lashed out like a wounded animal in a corner, then pulled themselves back.

  Men were different. They were stubborn, stoic, a lethal combination. They continued down a path like a deaf and dumb brute, even after the emotions that had incited it were dead.

  I had a preliminary profile: male, unknown age but most likely younger than fifty, probable military experience, the victim or related to the victim of some brutal crime, lived in the downtown district.

  Those were the bare facts. I had to narrow down the precinct, then go from there.

  I put the files down on the couch, yawned, then entered my bedroom to sleep on top of my screechy bed. My revolver sat on the nightstand next to me, didn’t stray far from my reach.

  I couldn’t sleep, my mind too busy. I just stared at the low ceiling, wondered just how far it would go. I wanted to be optimistic, hope nobody would get blown away.

  But I harbored no delusion.

  This was Beverly.

  Nobody got that lucky.

  ***

  A family walked out of the Cabot Street Cinema Theatre late at night. They headed down the sidewalk. The street was quiet, save for the occasional automobile horn, police siren, or trains on the tracks off Elliot Street. They were equally familia
r sounds.

  The little boy and girl ran ahead of the mother and father, chased each other playfully. They seemed calm, but slightly tense. They should have been home by now.

  The picture they had seen had been It Happened One Night. It had turned out to be a little longer than they had expected with the cartoon, a short subject that had played prior to it.

  As they neared a liquor store at the corner of Pond Street, a man in a tight, black coat walked up to them. He pulled a small pistol out of his jacket, aimed it towards the family.

  The father immediately grabbed his two kids, begged the man not to shoot. The man yelled very loudly, demanded their wallet and purse. The couple obeyed, threw their possessions at the man’s feet, continued their pleas to be left alone. The man stalled, waited before grabbing the money, like he expected something to happen.

  A dark, dim figure came out from the shadows of the buildings behind the thief. He jumped into the air, landed on man’s back, knocked him to the ground with a loud smack. The dark figure then picked up the couples’ wallet and purse, threw it back to them, told them to leave. They obeyed quickly without dissent.

  When they had fled, the mysterious figure turned around deliberately to see his prey. The would-be thief had gotten up, faced him.

  The thief peered deeply at his attacker, as if he tried to confirm his identity. His visitor gave him no assistance. He stood behind the street light, cloaked from the man’s vision. All he discerned was his faint outline. The illumination of the lamppost formed a murky silhouette.

  He stood roughly six feet tall, wore a dark brown trench coat, oil black boots on his feet, brown trousers tugged his legs.

  The dark figure stepped closer, reached into his coat, produced a gun. Rays of light from the lamppost reflected off it. It was a Webley-Fosbery Automatic Revolver.

  The Vigilante.