Detective Alvin Penn sat in his office at Park Police headquarters reading the newspaper and talking to the boys on duty.
It had been a long night with nothing much happening.
It had been raining for hours, leaving the streets, parks and waterfronts
quiet.
Penn figured that St. Anthony would not stay this
way for long.
There had been some action earlier in the
evening in the Red-Light district on Lake Street; a bar-boy who worked at the
Round-up had been struck by lightning and died.
Lake Street was not under the authority of the
Commissioner of Parks, not officially, so the city police had been tasked with
handling the investigation, which had not been ruled a homicide, but the
incident did involve Karl Thorrson whose criminal enterprise was a protected racket,
so a couple of rangers had been dispatched to make sure that Thorrson didn’t
get harassed by anyone who might have the wrong idea about what was happening
on the streets.
Thorrson and his crew had taken over St.
Anthony, it had been a long bloody summer and the Park Commissioner was behind
it. Through Karl Thorrson the Commissioner now owned all the gambling,
prostitution and other vice on the west side of the river, all the way down
Lake Street from Pig’s Eys to Excelsior, and the Big Island with it’s amusement
park and casino.
There wasn’t any trouble regarding the dead-boy,
a Kid by the name of Tom Kaplan; there were plenty of eyewitnesses who saw it
happen and there was nothing to cover-up.
What Penn was having trouble understanding, was
why Thorrson had been on the street by himself, and for some inexplicable
reason had gotten into a physical altercation with a group of ROTC candidates
from the University of St. Thomas at the bar.
Penn had been surprised to learn that the
young men had managed to push the giant out of the door, they even knocked him
off his feet…a feat Penn thought would be impossible.
The dead-boy was struck down as he was bringing
the gigantic Thorrson his hat, and his bill. Then, for yet another inexplicable
reason, Thorrson ran from the scene, causing a foot chase with some Fifth
Precinct beat police to ensue.
The beat cops did not know, or hadn’t taken
the time to figure out who Thorrson was, as far as they were concerned they were
just chasing a man who had run from the scene of a killing, but one of them had
a heart attack, and the rangers who had been tasked to monitor the scene did
not stop to render aid; the older cop, a veteran, died on the street.
Now the tension between the rangers and the
city police, which had already been fraught, was becoming more volatile by the
hour. It felt like there were battle lines forming and something ugly was about
to happen.
Penn wondered if the Commissioner hadn’t
overplayed his hand by backing the one-eyed Swedish gangster against the old
power, Colonel Forrester, whose grip on St. Anthony had always felt as if it would
never break.
Penn had learned that there was another
incident with Thorrson following the chase, but the bosses had not made him
privy to it; he heard about it anyway; there were whispers that a starlet had
been killed at a property that Thorrson owned, the place to which he ran when
he fled the Round-Up.
The woman, whose name was Ingrid Magnusson, was
a popular singer and socialite, and she happened to be the gangster’s
sister-in-law.
There was a cover-up there for sure...and it
was well under way.
Detective Penn concluded that it didn’t matter
whether the Commissioner had or had not overplayed his hand; the Colonel
probably had all the bets covered, and if Thorrson ended up running the streets
of St. Anthony, it was probably because the Colonel wanted it that way.
Penn might have come up through the Park
Police, but he was from St. Anthony and for his entire life Colonel Forrester had
been the boss.
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