Broadway's My Beat, from Times Square to Columbus Circle, the gaudiest, the most violent, the lonesomest mile in the world. Broadway's My Beat, with Larry Thor as Detective Danny Clover. Broadway, it's a neon shriek of despair that claws across the face of night, the tears of the black wind that beats against the silent dust. Its struggle and confusion and the dance of shadows, on a spectacular illuminated with 10,000 fragments of light. It screams, it sobs, it whimpers, it laughs. The face of night has not changed. It's Broadway, My Beat. They were waiting, the harbor police, their launch dancing against the shadows of the curious, waiting and bound in the veil of mist rising above the river. They were waiting for me. Hiya, Danny, you got here first. I'm aboard the line. Yeah. Okay, scum, I'll let her go. All right, Danny, you're in. I'll let her go. All right, Florio, fill me in. Well, Danny, it goes something like this. The city engineers were dredging the river for some social purposes. No philosophy, Florio, I'm not up to it. Yeah, okay, Danny. Like I was gonna tell you, they was dredging the river and they come upon a car at the bottom of the St. Huh? They call the derrick department, the mobile department sends out a barge with a derrick. Derrick grabs a chain around the car, gives a mighty heave and a pull and there it is, Danny, hanging there in the floodlights. How did the car get in the river? Well, the engineers figured that the only place it could have come from was off that bridge up there. Where on the bridge? Well, that's what's funny. There ain't a mark on the bridge, not even a blemish. Guardrail ain't touched. If the car crashed through... I want pictures and every foot of the bridge. Now, let's get on the barge, Florio. Tell them to lower the car, Florio. Hey, engineer, lower the boom. Boy and girl in the car, Danny. It's a long time in the river. How long? The engineer says from the amount of rust in the car, two or three days. Yeah, help me open the car door, Florio. Yeah, Danny. It's stuck. Oh, that river water rusted the lock. Well, we should try. For a bad man, you got muscles, Danny. Danny. Why did you have to call me, Florio? Why me? The fish makes it all the more down your alley, Danny. The bullet holes, plugged neatly in the heart region. One inch to each. They weren't not only drowned, were they? No. Florio, come here. Yeah? Yeah, Danny. What do you want? What does this look like to you? It looks like the front end of the car was smashed, like it hit something. Yeah, that's what it looked like to me. You think that's something, Danny? Come around here to the back. Now, you see that, Danny? And you tell me I shouldn't be philosophical. No, no. Yeah. Yeah, Danny. The sign. The sign that says, just married. Ah, good morning, Danny. I give you a greeting, Danny. Good morning. Oh, hi, Sergeant. How are you? Tall in the saddle. You're what? Tall in the saddle, Danny. This is an answer heard all the time, west of the Great Divide. Intelligence, from my youngest boy, Giovanni, who was studying to be a cowboy by box-tops in television. Yahoo, Tartaglio. And what kind of intelligence did you get from upstairs? Give me the rundown. Rundown? To wit. Identity of occupants of car established from respective wallets. Established occupants to be Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kimball, knee Jane Miller. Mm-hmm. Married two days ago at the home of the bride, where the groom had been in erstwhile and former border. Go ahead. Well, that's the intelligence from upstairs, Danny. What may I ask is that envelope? Oh, here. It's the photographs Lou Jacobs took of the bridge off of which the cop plunged down. Yeah. Now I believe it. This morning it was too early. Maybe I wasn't hearing right. But now I believe it. Huh? Look at these pictures. Yeah, let's see. This guardrail on the bridge is four feet high. It's untouched. Uh-huh. Nowhere along the whole length of it is there a sign that the car crashed through it. Well, then how could the car get in the middle of the East River, Danny, under 30 feet of water? That's a tall and a saddle type question, Sergeant. How did the car get there? Tartaglia shrugged, blinked, silently pleaded to be excused from the rule, didn't wait for permission, got out. That left me alone with it. How did the car get there? How did it hurdle a four-foot barrier without a mark, a scratch on said barrier? How? And then the question I'd been touting away from my brain, why? Why the bullet-torn flesh of a boy and girl on a honeymoon, their blood washed away on a river slime? And then I knew no policeman's riddle, no games with the equations of murder, could hold it back any longer. It had to be done. So I did it. I called on the parents of a dead bride. Just a moment. I'll only be a moment. Yes. What is it, please? Mrs. Miller? Yes, I'm Mrs. Miller. Please, if you're selling something, I'm afraid I can't do you any good. You see, we're in a kind of a... Well, everything's different now. I'm from the police, Mrs. Miller. Yes, I know, but I'm sorry. I'd like to help... The police? May I come in? Well, everything's so upset. I don't like for people to see my house this way. It's about your daughter. Oh, but Jane's away on her honeymoon. May I come in, Mrs. Miller? Yes. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Oh, but Jane's away on her honeymoon. May I come in, Mrs. Miller? Well, she won't be back for another 10 days. Please come in. This way, Mr.... Clover, Danny Clover. Mr. Clover, I'm sure you'll want to talk to my husband, too. We've been rearranging the furniture. You see, two of our rooms are unoccupied now, and Ben... Well, what do you want? Well, don't move the chair now, Ben. It's the policeman. Mr. Clover. Couldn't you have stated your business at the door, Mr. Clover? You see, I'm quite occupied at the moment. It's something about Jane, Ben, about Jane. Well, what do you have to do with her, Mr. Clover? Do you have a picture of your daughter? Oh, yes, we have a whole album. A recent picture? One of the wedding of her and Charles and of Ben and me. May I see it, please? One minute. What right have you to come into my house to... Oh, please, Ben. Mr. Clover just asked to look at Jane's picture. Well, there it is on the mantle, Mr. Clover. And that's Charles, her husband. Yes, Charles Kimball. Isn't he a fine-looking boy? There's no other way to say this. If there were another way, I'd give... They're dead. They're both dead, murdered. Get out of my house. Go on. Go on, get out. Get him out of here. I'll kill him. What kind of a filthy joke is he trying to play on us? Go on, get him out. Ben, Ben, don't, don't. Who would want to kill our boy and girl, Mr. Clover? We don't know, Mrs. Miller. That's why I came here, because we don't know. Charles lived here with us. He and Jane fell in love. They got married two days ago. They went on honeymoon to Niagara Falls. We were waiting for a letter, a postcard. Why should they be killed, Mr. Clover? Charles, where are his family, Mrs. Miller? He had none. He came here after the war, rented a room from us, worked hard. Charles and Jane, they were two people, Mr. Clover, nothing more. Tell him to ask someone else, Anne, what he wants from someone else, not from us. Tell him that, Anne. Ben, Ben, what do you think you're doing to me? They were found in a car. A car? The one we gave them for their wedding present. Ben and I knew all along, so we saved for it. Anne. Yes, Ben, what do you want? Ask him to help us, Anne. I'm sorry. Ask him to help us. Yes, Ben. Will you help us, Mr. Clover? It was a basic question. It had a background of a few thousand years to it. A man's child had been killed. A man's child needed avenging. As simple as that. There's a cult that comes with civilization. Men who put on white jackets buttoned at the throat and measure violent death with slide rules, who stare at murder in the cross section through microscopes, who dissolve it and shake it up in test tubes until death has a color to it. One of the men in the white jackets was named John Gordon. He was a technician for the police department technical division. I called on him. Something I can do for you, Lieutenant? Yeah, the report on the automobile dredged out of the river early this morning. Just a minute. Well, wait till I finish reading this article, Lieutenant. You don't expect me to put it down now, do you? Yeah, I expect that. Have you read it? No. No, I don't expect you have. The isometric measurement of hydrogen ion concentration versus colorimetric measurements. Imagine you reading that. What do you read, Lieutenant? A bitcheries, Gordon. Where's the report? I had it ready an hour ago. I waited for you. Now I'm here. Get it. I'll tell you about it. It's chock full of charts and graphs and chemical reagents. You'd be distressed. What's your great sorrow, Gordon? Who did what to you? The report, Lieutenant. It says the passenger car in the truck. What truck? Please. All right. The size, the shape of the crumped front end of the passenger car, together with the molecular displacement of the metal, indicates that the car, assuming a normal rate of speed, indicates that the car hit a truck. What kind of truck? I was getting to that. I don't know. Scrapings indicate that the paint of the truck was new and not its original code, a widely used paint. From information available, the make of the truck is impossible to identify. What else? My, my job is done. Now it's in your, well, your very capable hands, I'm sure. Pardon me. John Gordon, police department, technical laboratory speaking. Huh? Yeah. Yeah, he's here. For you, Luke. Thanks. Hello? They switched me to you, Danny. I kind of asked. It almost took too long. Who is this? Floyd Carpa, Danny. Come get me, kid. I got news for you. Well, tell me now, Carpa. What kind? Charles and Jane Kimber, the couple who took a honeymoon in the river. Come get me, kid. Yeah, where? Bowery, 320 Front Street. Walk back, hurry, kid. Carpa. Come get me, Danny. Please, listen. I never said it to a cop before. Listen, come get me. Please. It was a name to launch a minor nightmare. Floyd Carpa, a man who dressed too well, perhaps despite the memory of the years of wearing cast-off clothes. A little man with hate perched on his shoulder like a sharp beak creature. Vocation, poodleum, majoring in bank holdups. Three of them, two convictions. Floyd Carpa in the Bowery. He didn't belong there. Carpa saying he knew about the Kimbell murders. It didn't fit. Carpa saying please to the police. It didn't make sense. 320 Front Street, he said. I went there. Walked back, he said. I did that. Danny, come over here. Carpa. Carpa. Hey, what? I'm coming in. Come on in. You almost made it with that. That was Carpa, right? I had to look close to make sure, but it was he. No hate now. Something lent its own special expression to his face. Something the bullet wound in his stomach. The time of pain. The final hugging close of the darkness. Floyd Carpa was dead. You are listening to Broadway's My Beat, written by Morton Fine and David Friedkin and starring Larry Thor as Detective Danny Clover. Broadway demands quality to its crime, else Broadway pays no attention. But when a boy and a girl are murdered on their honeymoon, when a boy and a girl are dredged from the East River, when a grade A hoodlum named Floyd Carpa is found shot to death in the Bowery, Broadway gives pause. And there was a connection. The boy, the girl, the hoodlum. Broadway chortled and nudged its neighbor and just had to know all about it. So did I. The police records told me about a place I could go. To a housing development out in Flushing. The records said a man named Bruce Monroe lived there. And Bruce Monroe had once been caught splitting the proceeds from a bank robbery with Floyd Carpa. So I went there. After all, I was a policeman. I had to ask questions of somebody. Danny! Danny, how are you? You don't have to tell me. You look wonderful. Wonderful. You checking up on me, Danny? No, no, you're not checking up on social call, huh? Sure is social call. How are you, Danny? Wonderful. Wonderful. How about me, huh? How about me? All settled down. Settled down a two-story house in Flushing. Me and my family. Respectable. Family, huh? I'd like to meet them. Sure, Danny. They're upstairs. I keep them in a cage. That way you can keep your eye on them. They're problem children. Children with problems, Danny. Come on up. Take a look. I'd like to. What have you been doing for the last couple of years, Bruce, since jail? It's feeding time, Danny. They like company when they eat. Yeah. What have you been... Out here, Danny. I keep my family in a glass cage on the roof. Look at them. Fady beauties. Makes a man proud. I'm proud, Danny. Pigeons. Sure. What did you think? Quite a cage, huh? Isn't it? You bet it is. Let's go in. Come on. Feeding time. I had jasper. Oh, Mildred. Oh, George. Who plucked out your tail feathers? What have you been doing since jail, Bruce? I'll bet you didn't come here as a social caller after all. Your buddy Floyd Carper was found shot to death. They all wind up that way. You? I'm not a function. I retired. I'm respectable. I raised a family. Here, fellas. Eat. Come on and eat. Look at those pigeons eat. Did you kill Carper? Nonsense, Danny. You know that's nonsense. Haven't seen him for ages and ages. Tell me something, Bruce. How can you afford all this? Nice house, large family. It's a drain, isn't it? Business is good. What business? I'm a licensed used car dealer. I drive used cars into Canada, have an outlet there. Oh, come on, Elliot. Eat your corn. Well, you won't eat, Danny. No more bank heisting, huh? Danny, you know that's nonsense, too. Look, Danny. Danny, frankly, Danny, you're upsetting all of us. I'm being voted in tonight. I gotta make a speech. Flushing homing pitch in society is voting me in tonight. Questions like yours could ruin my acceptance speech. Bruce Monroe placed a kernel of corn on his lips, puckered them and then extended a finger. Lucille fluttered to the finger, was lifted to Monroe's mouth and daintily pecked away at the lunch so lovingly served. All that billing and cooing did something to me, so I got out. The ride back to Hedgman's house was a long one. The ride back to headquarters didn't clear up a thing. The same nagging questions rolled alongside me. Why was the hoodlum Floyd Carpah dead? What had the hoodlum Floyd Carpah to do with the life and death of a boy and a girl whose lives have been ordinary, whose death spectacular and grotesque? Sergeant Tautaglia couldn't make sense out of it either, or as he put it, I can't make no sense out of it, Danny, either. I have been mulling over this sad affair with the Mrs. Mrs. Tautaglia. She can't make no sense out of it either. No? No, Danny. The scene of our mulling it over, I remember like it was a picture on a calendar. Mrs. Tautaglia was hovering over her mix-master, hustling up some pizza dough. I was reading to her from the paper in my stocking feet. We was very domestic last night, Mrs. Tautaglia and I. Tautaglia, have you... What have you found out about Charles Kimball, the dead boy? Oh, oh, sure, Danny, sure. I got it right here. What we have found out about Charles Kimball is that he was a good boy with an honorable war record, with decent law-abiding friends, with a decent law-abiding job in a paper factory. He was a good boy, Danny. That's what I thought. Anything else? Yeah, a couple items. Tautaglia, what do I have to do to get you to tell him to me? Oh, nothing, Danny, just ask me. Don't look that way, Danny, I'll tell you. Tracing down the truck with which the Kimball car collided is still in the process of being traced down. This means they haven't found it. Tell him to find it. Yeah, I'll do that, Danny. Now, here is the Beastie Resistant, a teletypewriter from the Poughkeepsie Police Department. What makes it so resistant? It wants Floyd Copper. Huh? Yeah, Floyd Copper. They want him on suspicion of a bank robbery that took place recently in Poughkeepsie. They want to know do we got him, this Floyd Copper, so the bank telecom can identify him. Do we got him, Tautaglia? Yeah, yeah, in a manner of speaking. So tell him that, Tautaglia, put it on the teletype. We don't want to keep Poughkeepsie in suspense, do we? So you're Danny Clover, huh? I've been reading about you in the papers up in Poughkeepsie. Still trying to solve that honeymoon couple murder, I read. Which one of you is from the Poughkeepsie Police? Me, who'd you think? This little guy's the bank teller. This little guy's Oliver Hilliard. How are you, Mr. Hilliard? Oh, don't blush, Oliver. Just ask him, hello, that's all. Answer, Mr. Clover. No? What are you going to do with a guy like that, Danny? He shoots and wounds a heister? Who could be Floyd Copper? Now, he blushes. This way. I want you to look at Floyd Copper, then Mr. Hilliard will know for sure. Down this corridor. Oh, you got him on ice, huh? Say, what do you think of our work up in Poughkeepsie, Danny? I haven't heard. About matching a three-day bank robbery with a known bank robber. Clever, huh? Real magnificent. I know you'd say that. Nothing spiteful about you, big city police. We're going into the morgue now, Mr. Hilliard. Don't worry, it'll only take a second. You'll be all right. Sure, sure, Oliver'll be all right. He helped as Oliver did. Described the bank robber. Picked out his picture from our files. That's the type of citizen we have up in Poughkeepsie, Danny. Cooperative. Right over here. Hey, this is quite a production you got here. Only at Poughkeepsie, we got a morgue with something to write home about. You feel all right, Mr. Hilliard? Oliver feels fine, don't you, Oliver? Bet you can't wait till you get home and tell your wife about this, huh? All you have to do is take one look, Mr. Hilliard. Flip back the shroud, Danny. Well? That him, Oliver? This bloke copper, the one who held you up? Yeah. Oliver nods his head yeah, Danny. Positively, huh? What do you like a cooperative citizen like that, Danny? The kind we grow in Poughkeepsie. Poughkeepsie's policeman, the bank teller, and I had nothing else to say to each other after that. When it finally registered on the Poughkeepsie policeman, he shook my hand heartily, thanked me from the heart, wrapped a hearty armor on the bank teller's shoulders, and led him back to Poughkeepsie. I started back to my office. On the way to Taglia, shoved a phone message in my hand. It was from Detective Muggervin. Muggervin had something, the message said. Something may be hot, may be cold. Anyway, the something was in a garage uptown. Come right away, it said. So I changed course and went to the garage. This is called Maldon's Garage, Danny. Caterers to the desires and ailments of trucks, moving vans, trailaways, all kinds of heavy vehicles. Interesting. Yeah, like you say, interesting. This one over here, for example. Fascinating piece of machinery. Why does it fascinate you, Muggervin? Two reasons, Danny. First, because it's exactly like one of my kid's toys. A trailerway, they call it, that picks up and delivers automobiles, carries them on the highways and the byways. Somehow it gives me a romantical feeling, these automobile carriers. The second reason, Muggervin? The second reason, also fascinating. This trailerway is the truck you've had the whole department looking for, including me, Danny. What? Yeah, the one into which the honeymoon car crashed or vice versa before going over the bridge into the river. Are you sure? Danny, in something so fascinatingly routine as this, I wouldn't be sure. I've been scraping hunks of paint off of it, trotting down a technical, trotting back, examining the stent and the grill work, trotting down a technical, trotting, trotting, trotting. Muggervin, would it be asking too much of you to shut your big mouth? Oh, not too much. Something, Danny? All this routine adds up to something? Danny? Danny, come back to me, Danny. You're so far away. That's how they did it, Muggervin. Carpa makes us get away from a bank job upstate in a car, drives it up on this trailerway. He and his buddy-buddy drive off. Who looks for a runaway car on one of these things? It's your party, Danny. On the road somewhere, they crash into the honeymoon couple or vice versa. The kids see Carpa's hurt from a bullet wound. They're murdered for seeing that. The murderers drive the kids' car up on the trailerway, stop at the 59th Street bridge, dump it. That explains the no scars on the bridge's guardrail, huh? Yeah. You sounded like you were tired of routine. Is that right, Muggervin? Yeah, that's right. I'll change it for you. Ever been to Flushing? Let's go, Muggervin. This house. Such a serene and peaceful habitat, Danny. Now, look. Yellow shutters and chintz drapes. Tasteful. Ring the bell. Welcome back, Danny. All right. I'm going to get you some food. I'll be right back. I'll be right back. I'll be right back. I'll be right back. Welcome back, Danny. Oh, you brought a friend, a friend of Danny Clovis. I'm glad. Come in. Social, Danny, or business? Business, Bruce. Oh. Oh, pigeons. That's it. You want to buy some pigeons. You're going to start raising pigeons. Muggervin, take a look at the serene and peaceful habitat of a man who dumped Floyd Carver when he was wounded, who killed those two kids. Surely, Danny. Surely this is nonsense. The cops, Muggervin. Yeah. Remember your feet, Danny. Come on, Muggervin. Danny. Muggervin. Muggervin. It hurt much, kid? Yeah. Yeah, it hurt. Go get him, Danny. I'll be OK. My shoulder. Yeah. You won't get away, Bruce. Oh, no, Danny. On the roof, Danny. It's a good place to die. Come up on the roof and die right through this door and die, Danny. Yeah. It's me, Danny. Shoot at me. One of my pigeons just hurt. Throw away your gun, Bruce. Throw it away. That's me nice, then. That's me real nice. I got loads for you, Danny. No more bullets in my gun. Throw it here. Yeah. See how I do when you tell me when you ask me nice? Put your hands behind your head and walk toward me. Yeah. Don't look like you hurt any of my pigeons, Danny. That makes me glad for you. That makes me glad for you. Still got bullets in your gun, Danny? Yeah, Bruce. What are you going to do, kill me in cold blood? You could, real easy. I'm so close to you now, face to face, very easy target. Put your hands out, Bruce. Long time since there were handcuffs on them, huh, Bruce? Not long enough, you... You know, I'm glad, Bruce. I'm glad you did that. All right, that's enough. Enough? Come quiet, Rob. No, Bruce. Those were for me. This is for Muggum. And for two. Kids. Two decent kids. Two decent kids. Kids. What tried to stop me was something gentle. A gentle, easy Irish voice telling me I didn't have to hit him anymore. That I might as well be hitting a rag doll. That's enough, Danny, it said. Enough. Then they pulled me away. That was good because I would have killed him. Then I asked a question. And the same gentle Irish voice told me Muggum was all right. Three, four days maybe, and he'd be all right. And that was good, too. Broadway's quiet now. It's the hour without color. The six o'clock hour. The hour of going home. But in a while, night will dip down and touch the street. And there'll be fury again and rag and roar and crowd. The restless wandering down a phosphorescent alley. The puppet dance into a screaming furnace of light. It's Broadway. The gaudiest. The most violent. The lonesomest mile in the world. Broadway. My beat.
