Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 26, No. 4. Whole No. 143, October 1955

After all the waiting and wondering what to do, he telephoned Kennedy at his house and told him calmly and quickly the essential thing. In this way he was not obliged to watch the other man’s face, and it granted them both, as dignified men, opportunity to trim or tuck carefully away any loose emotional strings. He waited at his own end of the line until Kennedy very softly said, “All right; you know all there is to know. Come over, then. We’ll talk.”

“There won’t be much to talk about, George. There’s only one thing I can do,” he said. “Do you hear me, George?”

“I hear you,” Kennedy said, and Joe wondered, hearing the older man, if any event or person or thing could ever rob him of that calm authority.

“I’ll be over,” he said. “I’m two blocks away.”

Outside the drug store he lit a cigarette. He had known of Kennedy’s fall from grace since early afternoon, and, except for Kennedy, he was the only cop who did. Now in the evening, like thin ash from the pyre of a roasted angel, the knowledge seeped through every desperate barricade his conscience could erect. Only one fact was shriekingly simple: Kennedy, the incorruptible captain of detectives, like a pair of socks, had been purchased for cash on the line.

He moved slowly along the street where the Kennedys lived among the dwindling Irish on the west side of the city. It was a narrow stone house that never had been fancy in the Kennedys’ long tenure and was a bit less fancy now. The lingering virtue of the house was spaciousness, for there had always been so many Kennedys. Joe went up the steps and pressed the bell. After a while Kennedy’s wife came to the door, turning a towel in her soft, moist hands, and looking surprised to find him standing there.

“Oh — it’s you?”

“You were expecting Gregory Peck?”

“I mean — the girl’s got her head in the sink, Joe. I was helping her do her hair. You couldn’t have warned us?”

“I didn’t come to see Mary,” he explained. “I came over to talk to the boss.”

“Well, that’s better. By the time you get through, she’ll look human.” Mrs. Kennedy was rather big, and in the fashion of her daughter, handsomely made. She looked as scrupulously honest as her husband, and — in her own case — was honest. “George was on the phone a few minutes ago,” she said, “but I think he’s gone back upstairs. You know where.”

Joe kept climbing. The ancient stairs were narrow and steep but they didn’t creak beneath his weight. The old house was built like a vault, or, you might say, a Kennedy.

“Hello, Joey,” Kennedy said. “Come in and sit.”

Kennedy sat where he always sat, under the hanging light in the littered room at the top of the house, watching him shrewdly. He sat here night after night in a mess of his own creation, making things out of wood, some big and some small, some beautiful, most of it useless. Recent effort had produced a midget wheelbarrow, a totem pole of a pencil’s proportions, and a set of wooden teeth, uppers and lowers, that Kennedy said were modeled after George Washington’s.

“Come in and sit down, Joey.” Kennedy’s tone was light, his eyes still calculating. He had never called him “Joey” before. The vowel sound was an added, deliberate touch. He wore a lopsided smile, as though larceny had already softened the starch of his personality. He’s changed, Joe thought; I swear that already he has changed. “Sit down, Joey,” Kennedy said again.

Joe came in, but for a while he did not sit down. Automatic obedience was not exactly what the moment required. There sat Kennedy, massive and strong, the honored, aging Kennedy of 60 years, still black-haired and youthful-looking, almost certainly unafraid in any panicky sense — and caught like a package thief. It was still hardly possible for Joe to associate the man and the act. He did not expect that he would ever understand it. He had already closed the door. He stood scratching his chest through his shirt and he said to Kennedy very flatly, “Why did you take the money?”

“I just took it,” Kennedy said. “I thought I’d like to have it.”

“That the way you still feel, George?”

“I don’t know. It’s funny, huh?”

It was strange, Joe thought, but it wasn’t funny. It was a whole life. It was a whole man down the drain. It was a wild, unnecessary end, like a man being hit full-tilt by a train for no fairer reward than the recovery of his hat.

“You mean you took it for the family, George?”

“The family, no,” said Kennedy. “There was a time they needed it. But with four of them working?” The wonder and the pain were suddenly fused in what he said next: “I think I took it because I was out of my mind.”

“Or because,” Joe said, “well, maybe because you just didn’t care anymore? Like, for instance, Solly Druze’s money was as good as anyone else’s?”

“A little like that, Joe. You’re kind of close. But it was more like all of a sudden I didn’t believe in God or the United States Marines, when really I do — God especially. I feel very strange, like I should giggle and laugh, but not very loud. Anybody know it but you?”