Manhunt. Volume 14, Number 1, February/March, 1966

His shadower with the.38 revolver was picked up by the first siren screaming cruiser that skidded to a stop as he tried to run across a parking lot. Before the cruiser officers had him leaning on their cruiser, hands on the roof and legs stretched apart for a frisk, other police cars were screaming into the district in answer to the riot call. The addict remained motionless as he was frisked.

“A hot one,” an SFPD sergeant exclaimed, “packing a.38, seven caps of what’s probably H, and, well, well,” he whistled, “look at this!” He handed a wallet to his cruiser partner and flipped up an I.D. card from a hidden compartment. “An N Man. Looks like the Bureau of Narcotics is really on the job. Guess you can stand up now, Padgett,” he called the prisoner by the name he read from the I.D. card. “Let’s have a look at you.” He compared the picture on the card with the face of his prisoner.

“So throw me in the car like it’s for real,” Chris Padgett quipped in a low voice. “You’ll want to check me out at headquarters anyway. Play it like I’m just another junker — all the way. And, if you can, sergeant, make it fast. I think I’ve got something tonight.”

The N Man was run through the SFPD narcotics squad offices and turned out with greater speed than he had been booked in as a suspect. He turned to the lieutenant. “Thanks, Tom. Your boys will have one less to work on now that Bello’s out of the way.”

“There’ll be another one on his corners tomorrow, Chris. They come and go like the fog. Glad to help you. Say hello to your boss when you see him again. Need any transportation?”

“No. Rest is what I need but it’s not for me tonight. Maybe the Bureau’ll plant me on a desk job when this one’s over. If I keep on at this pace, I’ll soon be old — and desk-bound — like you. Night!”

The lieutenant laughed and walked to the door of his office with Chris Padgett. “You boys move too fast to grow old. Be careful, Chris. And good luck.”

Padgett didn’t explain his operation and the lieutenant didn’t ask. His division of the San Francisco Police Department cooperated with the Bureau of Narcotics and that cooperation included all available help but no interference whatever with operations of the Bureau’s undercover men like Chris Padgett. Padgett wanted the late Bello’s source of supply and now he had a handful of leads — the telephone numbers Bello had called from the Chinese pharmacy on Bush Street, the Turk Street bar, and an unknown schooner and its Sausalito anchorage. He had played his undercover role to perfection in San Francisco and was known among local addicts as a user and a rough customer who went armed. He took a cab from headquarters to a modest house on Portola Drive near Twin Peaks, paid it off a block away from the house and walked slowly to the house. It’s living room resembled the signal room of an army command headquarters. Electronic equipment, a teletype and miscellaneous communications equipment took the place of usual household furnishings that passers-by would expect to find inside the Portola Drive house. A rear bedroom was furnished as an office rather than sleeping quarters. Chris Padgett sat across a gray steel desk and talked with a shirt-sleeved Bureau of Narcotics officer.

“If it’s Bello’s connection,” he observed, “it’s probably a kilo man. That means he doesn’t handle the stuff himself. And I don’t think he’s around where the heroin is capped. Someone, between him and Bello, got greedy today. Whoever held out on the heroin and filled those caps with powdered sugar and quinine, made his own killing. The kilo man knows that if Bello didn’t. And whoever did that is on the lam right now — not from the junkies who got Bello but from the kilo man who has that Grant Avenue apartment and the schooner at Sausalito. There’ll be another killing tonight in the tenderloin if that kilo man tracks down whoever swung with the heroin and substituted the sugar and quinine. I’d like to get him before he gets to his capper.”

“Let’s review your position first, Chris. I’ve already got the Coast Guard tracing the schooners over at Sausalito. And the Grant Avenue apartment is staked out. What will the hopheads say when they find out — which they have probably done by now — that Bello got it outside that Turk Street bar and that you disappeared down the street?”

“Nothing. Those two shots I let go in the apartment left the impression that I took off for Bello when he made like he was trying to get away from me.”

“What will this Eddie say when he learns either you or Bello took his car?”

“I’ll tell him Bello got away in it.”

“And what if word gets around that you and Bello were seen buddy-buddy-like, making that phone call on Bush Street, stopping at that Kearny Street cigar store, in the Geary Street bar, and finally at the bar on Turk Street. It’s more than a good bet that you were seen by some junker and that the grapevine has word out that you and Bello have been together all evening. Right, Chris?”