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Robert L. Iles is the author of two previous fiction works about the mythical Cass County Ohio Sheriff's Department, the 1999 novel Dead Wrong and the 2001 short novel The Ten Spot Murders in the Eppie Award winning anthology Blood, Threat and Fears. He is also the author of a short story collection featuring 1950s Manhattan private investigator Peter B. Bruck, The Burning Woman, and a Lake Ozark Theater Guild first-prize winning play, "All's Swell."

Christmas Comes To Criminal Court by Robert L. Iles

I thought everybody knew how these things worked, but apparently not.

It all started one cold, wet morning in December, 1949, when I got a call from a secretary in the Manhattan Criminal Courts building. She wanted to know what my rate was for tracking down a missing person. My inclination was to quote her something outrageous so I could stay put and nurse my hangover, but my bank account was fast sinking below "see" level, so I told her I was sure we could come to some arrangement and I got my bones up and over there.

She turned out to be a sweet old grandmotherly type named Mimi. According to her, a hot dog vendor who had been on the sidewalk in front of the building every day for years was missing. "It's been three days. We just can't imagine where he is. He's always out there through rain and sleet and everything. We thought we should find out if something's happened to him.

He's almost like one of us."

"Us?"

"Me and the gang, nine other girls. We eat together in the basement dining hall. Lots of other courthouse people bought hot dogs there every day, too, but they don't eat them down there, and when we asked them they didn't want to join our search. We're just secretaries, you know." She made a sweet-and-sour smile.

I asked what his name was.

"I don't know. We just called him Hot Dog Man."

"What did he look like?"

She said he was about five-eight, bald, a little fat. Swarthy complexion. Probably in his forties.

Good. That narrowed it down to only a million or so guys in New York.

"Did he have an inspection certificate?"

"I don't know."

"Was there anything printed anywhere that might have had his name on it?"

She smiled, shook her head. "All I ever saw was 'Finest Quality' on his umbrella."

I said I'd like to get the gang together and ask some more questions. She said it was almost time for the coffee break, she'd see how many of the girls she could get.

Five joined us, Jewel, Olive, Flo, Letty, and Birdie. They were eager to help and looked more or less like Mimi—fifty-plus, grey, thick-waisted. Except for Birdie, who was a beanpole and had a popeyed expression I read as one part glad to be there and two parts confusion about just where in the universe there was. As the saying goes, her lights were on but nobody was home.

When I asked what he looked like, these girls described him more or less the way Mimi had. Except Birdie. She said he was over six feet tall, had big muscles, a gorgeous smile, blonde wavy hair, and was in his twenties.

Mimi said, "Birdie, I think you're still in that Sonny Tufts movie we saw last week."

"Oh," Birdie said, blinking.

"What did you and he say when you did business?" I asked.

They looked at each other, shook their heads. Mimi said, "Well, of course we'd tell him what we wanted. He'd say, 'That'll be a quarter,' or 'You want sauerkraut on it?' Sometimes he'd say, 'You're looking very good today.' Always cheerful. Just a nice man. We miss him." The others nodded.

They wanted to know what I would charge. It would have been like dipping into a Salvation Army kettle if I'd quoted anything like my regular rate, so I made up a nice-old-lady rate. They said it sounded fair. Fair? Anything less and I would have been giving them money.

I decided to start in the sub-basement and work my way up. The boiler engineer was a geezer who said he'd worked there since the courthouse opened.

"Then you must know everybody," I said.

"Eh, no. 'Less they come down here, and none of them do that, do they?"

"But maybe you know the guy who used to sell hot dogs on the sidewalk out front?"

"Naup. I come and go by the back entry, don't I?"

In the lobby I talked to a bull sergeant recently assigned to the courthouse after twenty years on the streets. He said the hot dog man reminded him of someone. "I seen him some place I think. Maybe when I was in the six-one precinct." He squinted like a man who should wear glasses but wouldn't. I pointed down the hall and asked if he was about the size of that guy. "Yeah," Sarge said. "Maybe a little shorter." I was pointing to a statue of Lady Justice.

The man who ran the lobby newsstand said he didn't know anything about the guy. Never ate hot dogs, never saw the man.

I caught a court clerk at a water cooler, a little guy in big glasses and dime-store suspenders. "You know the hot dog vendor that used to be out front?"

"Well, I…I…you know…I don't know…is he in trouble or something?"

"Just trying to find him," I said. "You know his name?"

"I don't like hot dogs," he said, and scurried away.

I stopped a judge and asked him if he could help. He wanted to know if the man was accused of something. I said no.

"Then he is of no concern to me," he said and was gone.

The parts of the second and third floors not taken up by courtrooms were occupied by the district attorney and his cub prosecutors. I tried a receptionist first, a bright young thing giving a wad of gum a workout.

"I surely hope you find him," a bright young thing said when I posed my question. "I hate to think anything's happened to him."

Her boss loomed into view and demanded to know who the hell I thought I was. I told him I could figure it out to a near certainty if he'd wait till I checked my driver's license.

"Get out," he said.

I told him it was a public building.

"I'll have you arrested."

"What charge?"

"Get out." Pointing now, the vessels in his forehead bulging. This was fun, but I could see bright young thing wasn't enjoying it, so I gave her a wink and left.

The suite of judges' offices was virtually hidden, accessible by a door in the law library. I walked out into a large carpeted area quiet as a cemetery, off which there were a dozen double doors, each with a stiff-backed secretary looking up from her desk to see who the intruder was. A uniformed guard appeared and asked me if I had an appointment. I told him no and he put a restraining hand on my chest. "Admittance by appointment only."

"How about you let me step over there and ask that lady if she'll give me one?" I said.

"You a lawyer?"

"No."

"Then you got no business here."

I called City Hall from a phone booth in the lobby. The man in charge of licensing sidewalk vendors said he'd check his records and call me back. While I waited, I noticed Beau McGurraugh, a street soldier in Jackie Conn's gambling empire, down the hall trying to blend in and pretend he wasn't watching me. Fat chance he had of blending in. McGurraugh couldn't blend in unless he was in an MGM musical. Today he wore a fitted blue suit with a yellow silk hanky hanging out of his breast pocket, a lilac-hued dress shirt, and a foulard tie that matched the silk hanky. Not the kind of look you expect on a guy who makes his way in the world by criminal acts, but beneath the Technicolor exterior was a hoodlum as vicious as any knuckle-dragging goon. I decided I'd imagined he was watching me. Probably just on his usual courthouse rounds of intimidating witnesses and paying off judges.

When the vendor licensing guy called back he said he could hardly believe it but nobody was licensed for the sidewalk in front of the Criminal Courts building. "Thousands of people around there every day," he said. "Fella could make a mint. Sure is odd."

I agreed.

I called the man at the Health Department in charge of inspecting food stands. I could hear him yell around the office before coming back to me with, "We ain't got nothing on no one selling food there."

"How often do you inspect food vendors?"

"Twice a year. If we know they're there. But if they ain't got no license, then we don't know they're there, do we? See, there's what you call gypsies, guys with no permit, no license. Some stay put, some go all over, but we can't check 'em if we don't know they're there."

I talked with my contacts in Manhattan hospitals and the coroner's office, but it was like looking for a needle in a needle factory. A hundred guys who fit the sketchy description of the hot dog man had died about the time he disappeared.

I gave Mimi the non-news. "The hot dog guy did not leave a trail."

"Oh, goodness. Have you tried everything? How about the people across the street, like that flower shop and the shoe store, the travel agency. Plus there's the law offices. Somebody over there might know something."

It was a long shot, but I was fresh out of short and medium shots, and by now I wanted to know what was going on as much as she did.

The people across the street looked at me like they thought I was pulling their leg. A hot dog vendor in front of the courthouse? Who ever notices someone like that?

***

It turned out I was indeed on McGurraugh's errand list that day. When I left the Zanzi Bar after a lunch of Bloody Marys, oysters, and a Rueben sandwich, he was waiting on the sidewalk, holding something in his coat pocket pointed at me. Possibly a nail file, knowing him, but that was not the way to bet.

He motioned me into an alley and got right to the point. "Why you looking for the hot dog man?"

When I said it was my business, he corrected me. "My business." In support of this contention he drew a snubnose .32 Special from the pocket.

I said, "Look, why don't you put that away? You can't shoot me here, a hundred people would hear it, and a dead source of information is no source of information at all. Let's discuss this like a couple of gentle—"

He swacked me across the head with the gun. I felt lightning all the way down my spine, crumpled to my knees, looked forward to blacking out. But this was not my day. He bent over to grab my necktie, waggled me back and forth. "I ast you a question."

I couldn't form a thought, let alone words.

"You hear me?" When I still didn't answer, he said, "Nod yer head."

I did my best and almost passed out. My stomach churned.

"Why you looking for the hot dog man?" He got me up on tiptoe, face to face, his chypre aftershave making my stomach churn worse. "Say something."

I puked all over him.

"You, you…look what you done!"

While he moaned about the mess, I kicked him in the nuts. He bent over. I gave him a rabbit punch that put him face-down in a puddle of my puke. I took his gun, leaned down close, said, "You ever get near me again, I'll take your head off." To drive the point home, I gave him a swack like the one he'd given me. He moaned in a lower key, then went quiet. I staggered up Broadway to my office.

Ella, my secretary, seemed to think it was just a case of me drinking my lunch again until she saw the blood, then she was all Mother Hen. "Oh, Mr. Bruck, what happened? Were you run over?"

While she went for a towel and a basin of water, I got a bottle out of my desk and downed a dose of first aid.

When she came back to tend my wound, I told her I'd gotten crossways with the infamous McGurraugh.

"Why would he do such a thing to you?" she said.

I'd been trying to figure that out myself. Although I knew he was interested in the hot dog man, what he had done to me didn't make a lot of sense. One of the things he did for Jackie Conn was collect on bets, so I supposed the hot dog man could have owed a gambling debt. But why had McGurraugh asked me why I was looking for the hot dog man instead of asking me if I knew where he was?

I told Ella, "Because he's weird. Ow!"

"Hold still. Some detective. You get conked and don't know why."

"Some nurse, making fun of your patient."

"I am not a nurse. I am a secretary, and a secretary who has to dodge your landlord to get to work because the rent's overdue. Which reminds me," she waved a handful of envelopes at me. "I am not a magician, either. I can't make these disappear."

I needed another dose of first aid and told her to go get a fresh basin of water.

When she came back, she wrinkled her nose up at me and made a sour face. "I am not going to fix up someone who keeps poisoning himself."

I said I didn't know what she was talking about but hiccupped in the middle of the sentence. She handed me the towel.

"For your information," I said, "my meeting with McGurraugh had to do with a client I got this morning. In fact, several clients."

When will I learn? Now she had to have all the details, including what I was charging. I stalled. "Well, like I say, they're a bunch of sweet old things in low-paying jobs—"

"In other words, nothing."

"No. They're all chipping in."

"Wow, I bet I can get that new pencil."

"This isn't the movies, you know," I said. "Heiresses and millionaires aren't lining up in the hall for my services."

She rolled her eyes. "Oh, my goodness, an illusion up in smoke."

I wanted to turn her over my knee.

"Look," she said, "you're being paid next to nothing by people who probably can't even afford that very long, to find someone who could be in far Bombay by now. And in the meantime you get Mr. Weird rearranging your brain cells. Why do you bother?"

Let me count the whys, I thought. Why did a vendor at one of the hottest spots in Manhattan not have a license or an inspection record? Why had he disappeared? Why did people who had seen him every day know little or nothing about him? Why were Mimi and the girls going to any trouble at all to find him? And why had McGurraugh asked why I was looking for the guy instead of where he was?

I went to plan B, called my old pal Barry Morrissey of the New York Journal-Sentinel. "You know everything that goes on at the justice factory, right?"

"Why?"

"So you know if someone there colors outside the lines, right?"

"Why?"

I told him I was looking for the hot dog man.

"Why?"

"What is this?" I said. "First thing out of everybody's mouth is why am I looking for him."

"Why should I be different?"

"Sorry. Thought this was a newspaper. You know, a place that disseminates news?"

"Gathers and disseminates."

"Okay, you give me some, I'll give you some."

"Good. You first. Why are you looking for him?"

"Because," I said, "someone hired me to find him."

"Sorry, doesn't qualify. Who, when, why, where, how."

I told him about Mimi and the bunch. He laughed at me. "And they didn't tell you why they're looking for him?"

"All right," I said. "What's going on here?"

He told me.

***

I caught Mimi at her desk and told her to get the girls to the basement lunch room. She said their afternoon coffee break wasn't until—

"Now," I said.

We had the place to ourselves. I had them sit facing me on the other side of a table. When I had their attention, I said, "Six oh nine."

They were stunned. No one moved. Then some shuffling of feet and some cautious, embarrassed smiles.

I said, "You girls weren't square with me, were you?"

Mimi said, "Did you get our money?"

I said, "No. How much was it?"

They dithered, each apparently hoping someone else would answer. Finally Mimi said ten thousand dollars. I almost fell backward off the bench. Most people who played the numbers risked a dime, maybe twenty-five cents. To hit for ten thousand bucks, they would have had to put twenty dollars down.

I asked, "Did you always bet that big?"

"No," Mimi said, "We've all been betting our own dime on our own number every day for years, and never won a cent. We decided it was useless, time to quit. But I said let's go out in style, pool our money on one number and win big or lose big. If we're lucky, we'll make a bundle for Christmas. So we all chipped in two bucks and bet the courthouse street address, six oh nine. And would you believe it, we won, but…no payoff. Did you find the hot dog man?"

"He's gone forever."

"How do you know?" Letty asked.

I didn't want to tell them about my sidewalk encounter with McGurraugh, because if he ever returned to his errands around the courthouse, they would be terrified. But it was McGurraugh's interest in knowing why I was looking for the hot dog man, and what Morrissey had told me, that convinced me the hot dog man was never coming back. I sanitized the truth for them. "He'd be crazy to get anywhere near here after stiffing someone on a big bet like yours. His would be the fate worse than the fate worse than death."

"Afraid of a bunch of old ladies?" Mimi said.

"You don't know the big picture," I said. "The hot dog man didn't just cheat you, he put his boss, Jackie Conn, in trouble with the Mob bosses. They let Jackie run gambling in this part of town in return for a split of the take. If word gets around that a numbers operator didn't pay off, pretty soon people all over town will stop betting, and there would go not just Jackie's business but one of the Mob's sweetest rackets. Jackie has to show the Mob and the bettors that no operator gets away with stiffing the customers."

Letty gasped. "You mean his own boss would have the hot dog man…killed?"

"If he's lucky," I said. "More likely he'd suffer…well, you fill in the blank. Yeah, when they find him, he'll die eventually. It's what the Mob calls good business. Can't let feelings interfere with business."

Birdie wanted to know just who Jackie Conn was. The other girls looked at her in disbelief. Didn't she read the papers, they wanted to know, or listen to the radio? They told her he was in Earl Wilson's column and Walter Winchell's mouth every week.

"You mean everybody knows he's a crook?" Birdie said. "Well, why don't we just go to the police and tell them to put Mr. Conn and everybody else involved in jail?"

A long silence. The other girls tried to suppress their groans and snickers. I told Birdie, "'Everybody else involved' includes you and your friends. It's illegal to buy a number. In the eyes of the law, you are part of the racket."

"Oh," she said.

Mimi wanted to know why the hot dog man hadn't just come back and paid them their winnings. After all, she said, it would have been coming out of Jackie Conn's pocket, not his.

"Two possibilities," I said. "One, maybe the hot dog man couldn't resist keeping the payoff for himself when it came down. It would have been the biggest he'd ever seen or hoped to see. Or two, more likely, maybe your twenty never went up the line to Jackie in the first place. The hot dog man kept it. Small-time numbers guys like him seldom see even a single, so a twenty-dollar bill would have stood out like a moose in a mousetrap. What could be simpler than just stuffing it in his pocket? Who would know? You girls weren't going to win. But you did, and he didn't get the ten thousand to pay you."

Mimi said, "We bought from him all these years. We were pals, we thought. Why couldn't he have just, oh, I don't know…well, girls, our number came up, but Santa isn't coming down the chimney. Let's forget the whole thing." They sighed in agreement.

Except Birdie. She asked, "Do you think if we all went to see Mr. Conn and told him what happened he'd pay us our ten thousand dollars?"

***

I picked up the evening paper on my way back to the office and saw that the hot dog man's number had also come up. A one-paragraph story on page six carried a headline, "Body Impaled on Umbrella on Garbage Scow." The captain of the scow had made the discovery in the early morning hours as he prepared to head out to the harbor dumping grounds. Police found no identification on the body but said the umbrella was the type used on a hot dog stand and had "Finest Quality" printed on it. Coins had been stuffed down the man's throat and a crudely lettered sign saying "Bad dog" hung around his neck.

Jackie Conn had got his message out to everybody in New York: Mess with my money and you get a harbor cruise with exclusive accommodations.

***

Ella wanted to know how I knew that the gambling grannies' number was six oh nine.

I told her, "The winning number in the numbers racket every day is the last three digits of the amount bet at the Gulfstream Park race track in Florida the previous day. It's published on the sports pages. I checked the papers for the number the day before the hot dog man disappeared. It was $4,211,609."

She let out a "Woo" and made a production of fanning herself with a handful of bills from the afternoon mail. "The race track took in over four million in one day? Maybe you're in the wrong business."

"Yeah. Call Gulfstream, see if they want to sell."

"Why did McGurraugh ask you why you were looking for the hot dog man instead of if you knew where he was?"

I told her my guess. "I figure Conn already knew how to track the hot dog man down and told McGurraugh to find out the why of anyone searching for him. If McGurraugh found someone simply trying to collect from the hot dog man, no big deal. But if he found a cop or a reporter or someone like me looking for him, Conn wanted him shut up. To keep the bad news from spreading."

She nodded. "And everybody in Criminal Courts clammed up when you asked them questions because they were betting too?"

"Yeah," I said, "judges and prosecutors are a little touchy about making the front page as lawbreakers. But the fact is everybody except you, Miss Innocent, buys a number now and then. There's hardly a barber shop, candy store or beauty shop in the city that doesn't sell numbers. For the courthouse people, the hot dog stand was the perfect place to buy. Outside on a busy sidewalk, nobody hears what you say or notices anything odd when you buy lunch. You just say, 'Gimme two dogs with kraut, and number bing-bing-bing.' The guy charges you an extra dime, writes the number on a little piece of paper he gives you with your food, and you've got your bet down."

"Then how did Morrissey know people at the courthouse were doing it?"

"He's been around the courthouse so long he probably knows when they change their socks. People who would never rat to a cop enjoy telling a reporter about things. Gives them a sense of power. And it's not too hard for someone placing bets to spot others doing the same thing."

"All right, Mental Marvel, what did the ladies pay you for a day of detecting and getting your head bashed in? And did you get extra for that?"

"Ella, have you no heart, no soul? Christmas is right around the corner, those women have kids and grandkids to buy presents for, plus they just learned they had been cheated out of ten thou—"

"Uh-huh. I thought so. You didn't charge them anything, did you? All right, you go ahead and play Santa, but just remember, ho-ho-ho doesn't pay the bills."

"Wow," I said. "Another illusion up in smoke."

THE END