Manhunt. Volume 9, Number 1, February 1961

We have a perfect working arrangement with the police, especially here in New York. The second and third grade detectives are all bucking for promotions, the first grade men just want glory, and the bosses want glory and prestige and politically important friends among the big businessmen in the city. We aren’t selfless wonders, but when we break a big case it means moving up in a league where they pay the same kind of dough the top ballplayers get, and it’s done quickly. So we give the cops all the glory and credit and everything else they want and keep quiet when the reporters flock around them to find out how they broke a case.

I made the corner and then thought I’d better do my telephoning a little further away. There was a bar five blocks down with two booths off in a corner that I could use. I hurried along, my mind racing at what I could possibly do to wrap this case up. I hadn’t been kidding when I told Trevor and Moran it would have to be finished tonight or not at all.

One of the two other men we wanted wasn’t much of a problem, he was really in a box. Monk’s friend Larry was Larry Coster, a two-time loser, both for buglary raps. He’d gone bad after he was discharged from the Navy after the big war — those two convictions represented his first efforts in crime. After that he learned fast and it didn’t take him long to turn in to a real pro, especially after he met Monk. Larry Coster had been a radar and communications man in the Navy, and I think he knew as much or more about electronics as any engineer.

Robbing a safe today isn’t just a mechanical job. The average vault or safe is wired with all kinds of burglar alarms and detection devices. Even a third-rate set up has some kind of wires hooked up to it and if they aren’t handled right by safe men the cops join the party in two or three minutes. Larry’s job was to neutralize the alarm system on a job, and he did it every time perfectly and easily, giving Monk all the time in the world to play with the safe.

A pair like Monk and Larry could cause all kinds of trouble, and they did, but neither of them had the brains to pull off really big jobs. That’s where the guy they called the Boss came in. His name was Leon Schell, and that’s about all we knew about him. I’d read all the European dossiers on him and everything else, but the only real information we had was his name. He’d come out of Europe after the war with a valid American passport issued by the American Military Command in Berlin and had caused us nothing but headaches since. But there was never the slightest shred of evidence to tie him up to any of more than a dozen big jobs he’d pulled, all we knew was that no one but Leon Schell could do them.

I’d only seen photographs of the guy, but I’m convinced that he must have been a general on the German High Command, he had that kind of a mind. No detail ever escaped him, nothing was ever left to chance, the planning on his jobs was fantastic. He’d work for months or even years setting up a job, then clean the place out, and vanish without ever leaving the slightest clue except the absolute perfection of the job.

After we’d been taken four or five times we thought we’d spotted the only weak point in their set-up. Even three guys like that sometimes needed other help on the jobs, either before they hit or during the actual job. We’d caught up with several of them and had learned that Monk always hired them and paid them off for their work, whatever it happened to be. That figured, because Monk was the only one of the three who had a thorough knowledge of the racket guys and thugs who were available. That’s how come I’d been elected Monk’s neighbor in Sing Sing Prison.

That paid off. Monk had been out of touch for three years and Larry Coster and Leon Schell must have been waiting months for him to get out. I got out the same week as Monk and he needed someone in a hurry so I got the job. He’d come to see me at my cover job as a counterman in a cheap restaurant and made a meet with me in my hotel room three days before this last job, paying me in advance and telling me to wait for a phone call to go to work.

From the moment Monk got out of prison we’d had three of the best men in the country tailing him, but after that we doubled the cover — he couldn’t possibly duck away, we thought. Only Leon Schell had that one figured out too. The afternoon before the job Monk took a cab out to Newark Airport, jumped into a waiting helicopter, and vanished into a low fog over the airport. Three days later we found the pilot sobering up in Poughkeepsie. It seemed that a big, luscious blonde met them there when they landed but her boy friend hadn’t come along as she expected and she was so disappointed she let the pilot comfort her in a local motel for three days. Then she took off too.