Dick Tracy Read Free Page B

Fletcher enjoyed a limited truce, whereas the Mayor was consistently fawning over his young Chief of Detectives. His Honor was grooming Tracy for the Chief of Police slot—Chief Brandon, who’d hired Tracy, was nearing retirement—but Tracy wasn’t eager for this advancement.
    This morning, plowing through all that deskwork was a reminder to him that even his role as Chief of Detectives was more bureaucratic than he’d like. He hadn’t gotten into this line of work to sit behind a desk. He liked field work; he liked chasing down crooks and clues, just like Sherlock Holmes in the stories he’d read as a kid.
    Funny. Growing up in a little town in the Midwest, his father a local attorney whose speciality was wills and contracts, not criminal cases, Tracy had never even daydreamed of being a detective, despite his interest in Nick Carter dime novels and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of the Great Detective. He’d gone to the big city with a nest egg (provided partly by his father and partly through his own summer-job savings) to attend business college. Which he had, and he’d graduated with honors.
    Being a cop had never been part of the plan.
    But shortly after he graduated, he’d gone to call on Tess, his college sweetheart, hoping to gather courage to propose. Had he done so, and had she said yes, it would have made him the happiest young man in the country, or anyway the city. Of course, he’d gone to the Trueheart home (Tess’s folks had become like second parents to him) on many a night, with proposing in mind; but he’d never quite found the words . . .
    That particular evening, however, had been different. Not because Tracy had finally summoned his courage to pop the question; he hadn’t. But because, while Tracy and Tess were in the upstairs parlor courting, Mr. Trueheart had been robbed in his first-floor delicatessen.
    Two armed thieves demanded Emil Trueheart open his safe—in which he kept his life savings, having lost over five hundred dollars in small bank failures not so long ago—and Mr. Trueheart refused, and fought back.
    The two thieves shot the old man; two slugs in the chest.
    Tracy, hearing the gunfire, had rushed downstairs and got the butt of an automatic on the back of his skull for his trouble.
    In a melodramatic moment that Vitamin Flintheart might well have relished, a tearful Tracy swore vengeance over the corpse of his sweetheart’s father. But even in the colder, more rational light of day, when all the melodrama was drained out of him, Tracy had been determined to find those two thieving murderers.
    He had gone to Chief Brandon, who attached him temporarily to the plainclothes squad; and after he tracked the two thieves down—in fact shot them dead when they were kind enough to draw down on him—he found himself invited by Brandon permanently aboard.
    The two thieves had been low-level hoodlums whose allegiance was to Alphonse Capricio, A.K.A. Al “Big Boy” Caprice, one of the city’s most powerful gangsters. Tracy could hardly leave the force until he’d brought down the Big Boy himself—otherwise, he wouldn’t really have kept the promise he made over Mr. Trueheart’s bullet-racked body.
    That was several years ago, and Big Boy still had not been brought to justice; like so many big-shot gangsters, Caprice was well-insulated, with scores of underlings doing his illicit bidding. In that same short time, however, Tracy had been put in charge of the city’s detective squads, and had formed the select Major Crimes squad, bringing dozens of criminals—mobsters, murderers, outlaws—to meet their just desserts—and sometimes their maker. Now Dick Tracy’s profile was at least as famous as that ham actor’s down on stage—in this burg, anyway.
    The attention embarrassed Tracy—the editorial cartoonists exaggerating his shovel jaw and hooked nose into something absurd, the national newspaper syndicates hounding him to let them assign a “ghost” to write up his