by Jerry eBooks
Monty groaned.
“Come along and point them out to me,” he exclaimed as the car stopped at the first floor. He sent the door flying open and half dragged Dad, as excited now as Monty himself, to the doorway.
“There they be!” cried Dad, pointing. “See that there big black closed car? That’s them! Look, the man’s just jumping in—Hurry, Mr. Dellert, hurry!”
The black car shot away, but not alone. Monty was already in his car, and after them, leaving Dad shouting excited encouragement to him from the curb.
MONTY’S first impulse was to race alongside the other car and settle things then and there. His better judgment told him, however, that there were probably several of them, and they would have every advantage. Besides, Betty was undoubtedly prisoner in the car, and there would be the risk of hitting her. Monty was sure the driver of the other car was not alarmed, from the way he drove, and Monty trailed him at a safe distance.
Rather to his surprise, the car he was following went but a few blocks and drew up in front of a ramshackle old building, with which Monty was quite familiar. It was a disreputable rooming-house, directly across the street from the county jail, and Monty had often gone there to consult with his clients.
As soon as he saw the other car stop, Monty turned into a side street and drew his own car to the curb. Quickly he slipped off his coat, transferring the gun from the coat pocket to the hip pocket of his trousers. He rolled up his sleeves, loosened his belt a notch, and threw his straw hat on the seat. Leaping out of the car, and making sure that no one was watching, he ran his hands over the dusty tires and rubbed the dirt on to his shirt and his bared arms. At the last moment he tore off his tie and opened the top button of his shirt. Then, shaking his shock of stubborn black hair low over his eyes, he hurried around the corner and up to the building before which the big black car had stopped.
In front of the shiny powerful sedan he paused idly and lit a cigarette, letting the thin white tube droop dispiritedly from the corner of his mouth. The car was empty. Casually, he turned and strolled up to the door that led upstairs.
There was a dim light burning inside, and through the grimy, torn shred of lace curtain that was hung across the glass panel of the door, Monty could see a flight of worn, uncarpeted steps leading upward. He flung open the door carelessly and entered.
Just as he set foot on the first step, somebody started coming down. Monty’s heart skipped a beat, but he steeled himself to look up casually, insolently.
It was a woman that met Monty’s gaze; a large, round woman, with no visible waist nor neck. She peered down at Monty curiously and then came ponderously down the steps, while Monty waited at the bottom. Huge as she was, it would have been hard for them to pass on the narrow stairs.
“You lookin’ fer a room?” she wheezed as she reached the landing. “ ‘Cause if you are I only got one and you got to take it sight unseen. I ain’t climbin’ up there agin’ to show nobody any rooms.
I live right next door and run both places. It’s the first room to your right as you go up and it’s four-fifty the week. Want it?”
Monty stared at the woman coolly, through slitted eyes, and exhaled a cloud of smoke through his nostrils.
“Now, who the hell said anything about rentin’ rooms?” he growled. “I got friends here, see? Just come in. I hadda fix the bus for a getaway.”
The woman looked at him with something like respect in her rheumy eyes; respect not unmixed with fear.
“Gord!” she muttered. “Pick and his mob? They’ll be in the front room raisin’ hell. Tell ’em not to let that soused jane that they dragged in go to yellin’—I got two warnin’s already I got to be more quiet.” And with another sharp glance at Monty, she moved heavily out of the door.
Monty heard low voices coming from the front room as he gained the head of the stairs, but they were silenced at the sound of his feet in the hall. For on instant he had a desire to march up to the green door of that room, kick it open, and start emptying his automatic. A more logical plan won out, however, and he entered, without hesitation, the “first room to your right as you go up,” and slammed the door behind him.
Without bothering to turn on the light, he slipped off his shoes, and then, very cautiously and very silently, opened the door into the hall again.
There was no one in sight, and from several rooms he could hear the sound of sonorous breathing that told of deep sleep. Of course, someone might come in. The occupants of the front room might decide to leave. Almost anything might happen. But Monty did not hesitate.
Quickly he made his way down the hall to the green door of the front room. There was a quiet murmur of men’s voices coming from within, but not until he laid his ear to the thin panel could Monty understand a word.
“—come to the winder agin any time, now,” said a surly voice. “When he does, he gits it. I got a dead rest, and this .30-’06’ll tear a hole in him big enough to stick a cabbage in. God, ain’t I seen ’em fair bust a Heinie in two, though!”
“Let him have it—but be sure you don’t miss,” replied a cold, hard voice. “If you do—”
“I won’t, Pick!” The surly voice was whining, fawning now. “Just you wait!”
“I’m waiting,” came the cold voice of the man called Pick—the man the landlady had mentioned with such fear and respect.
“What I wanta know,” broke in a third voice, “is what we do with the frail. Leave her here, bump her off, or take her with us? She ain’t so bad lookin’, now; if she was wise, this here skirt, I wouldn’t mind—”
“That’s all out,” cut in the icy voice of the man called Pick. “You know damned well, Ramsey, that Harrison never lets any skirts trail with this mob. We leave her here when we go.”
“She’ll talk,” objected Ramsey sullenly. “She knows too much. Here we got all this stuff Vanetti blabbed, and we bump him off—and leave her here to spill her guts to the first dick—”
“I said we’d leave her here,” interrupted Pick coldly. “I—didn’t say how we’d leave her. She won’t talk,” he added significantly.
“More like it,” growled Ramsey. “I don’t want to be turned up on account of no damned frail. Ike, why the hell don’t you bump off that bird and be done with it. God! I don’t like this waitin’ around.”
“Loosin’ your nerve, Ramsey?” asked Pick in a sneering voice. “Ike, you take your time, and do a clean job of it.”
“Damn right I will,” said the man who had spoken first. “He’s standing there, talking with somebody. I can see him fine through these here glasses. But he’ll come over to the window again, to git a breath of fresh air, and when he does, with the light right to his back; it’ll be duck soup. Then we beat it in the bus. That right?”
“That’s right,” agreed Pick. “We—Look!” his voice was low and sibilant, but it crackled with sudden excitement; the first real emotion he had allowed to show in his voice. “Vanetti! He’s coming to the window. Watch him! See? Just a second, Ike—then get him!”
Monty drew back from the door, crouching low, and jerked the heavy black automatic from his pocket. Quietly he pressed down with his right thumb, and the safety catch clicked down with a little snick of well-oiled, polished steel.
Then, gathering his body under him, he suddenly catapulted himself against the green door.
THE flimsy door splintered, cracked, and flew open. A rifle roared like a clap of sudden thunder in the confines of the little room. There was a chorus of shouts, roared cursing, stamping feet, the crash of overturned furniture.
A gun in the hands of a tall, thin man started barking. Monty’s gun answered, and the tall man, the man known as Pick, stumbled back against the wall and slid slowly to the floor. Ike, a little man with a heavy rifle, threw the weapon at Monty and tried to dodge out through the wreckage of the door. Monty’s gun spat fire and Ike stumbled and shrieked, locking his grimy, clawlike fingers around his leg. Thick blood oozed out between the fingers as he rocked back
and forth, screaming and cursing.
It was all very strange to Monty. There was another man in the room; an ugly man with feverish eyes and a white, deeply-lined face. A “snow bird.” That must be Ramsey. He was muttering and whining, his face twitching, his fingers tearing at the slide of a wicked-looking automatic in his hands.
“Jammed! My damned luck! Jammed just when—Hell!” Ramsey flung the useless weapon crashing into a comer and stood staring at Monty, his hands raised shoulder high, his eyes beady as a rat’s, his gray face twitching nervously.
Excited shouts came from the rooms to the rear. There was a sudden rush of feet, and a crowd of sullen, curious faces at the battered door. Several of the half-dressed men had guns, and from the looks in their eyes they were ready to use them. If the dicks—
Monty forestalled them.
“Lissen,” he snarled thrusting out his chin truculently. “Any you birds figurin’ on hornin’ in? These monkeys kipped the wrong jane, see? The bulls’ll be here in a minute; beat it before we all get caught in a jam, you damn fools!”
That was different. This bird was one of them. Just so the cops weren’t putting over a fast one—The little crowd melted away like magic.
“Fer God’s sake!” exclaimed Ramsey. “There’s the bulls now! Let’s get clear!”
“Stay where you are!” snapped Monty. “You and your boy friend, here—” he nodded towards the writhing, groaning little rifleman they had called Ike—”are going to the Big House for a stretch. A nice, long, juicy stretch. Get used to the idea.”
“But—”
“Keep quiet!” Monty poked his gun against the snow bird’s ribs suggestively. “I’ll ask the questions; all you do is the answering. Where’s the girl?”
“Go to hell!” growled Ramsey.
“She’s in the next room!” piped up Ike suddenly. “Right through that door. And remember who told you. God, I’m glad I missed Vanetti! That’d be the chair, Lissen, you, I’ll give you the real low-down—”
There was a heavy rumble of feet on the rickety stairs. Monty thrust his head through the splintered door and hailed the squad of policemen who, with drawn revolvers, were coming into view at the head of the stairs.
“Right in here!” he called to them, and then, to his unwounded prisoner, “Hold everything, Ramsey; it’ll all be over in a minute or two!”
Ramsey glared at the threatening muzzle of the big .45 automatic, and said nothing.
There was nothing, really, for him to say.
BETTY—unbound but still excited and disheveled—seated herself in Monty’s car.
“I’m afraid I’ve made you a lot of trouble,” she remarked demurely as Monty sent the car rolling down the quiet street.
“Don’t be absurd,” said Monty. “Tell me: how did they manage to get hold of you?”
“The big car; they drove up to the curb in a big car as I was walking home. One of the men got out, lifted his hat and asked me if I could direct them to the Mercy Hospital. I came out to the curb to point out the turn, and quick as a flash he bundled me into the car and we were gone. His hand was over my mouth, so I couldn’t make any sound; the street is a quiet one, and nobody seemed to notice what had happened.
“Of course, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was happening, nor why, until they started asking about the Vanetti confession. I told them it was in the safe, where they couldn’t get it, but they had found out, somehow, that I knew the combination. While they were trying to get it out of me, there in the back room, I was wriggling free of the ropes around my hands. Somebody drove up in another car, and they all went out to talk with this newcomer. I scribbled that note and ran to the ‘phone.
“They were angry, of course, because I tried to get away, and said they were through fooling. Either I would open the safe for them, or they would get you here by a trick and make you open it to save me. They thought. . . .
“Well, anyway, I gave in to them. Somehow, I knew you’d get the best of them. But I can’t for the life of me—even yet—understand how you found the house and the paper I left there, as you did. They jerked me away before I had time to name the street—and there must be a hundred or so houses in the city numbered twelve thirty-one.”
“I imagine so,” nodded Monty, “but you see, Betty—”
The girl looked up at him as he paused, and smiled. “You may call me Betty, if you wish,” she said softly.
“I do wish,” said Monty emphatically. “But locating the street wasn’t so hard. You see, just as you were speaking, I heard a fire engine siren go shrieking by. Couldn’t figure out what it was that made that unearthly sound for a minute or two; then it popped into my head. A moment later, I saw a chance of finding the house from which you had ‘phoned. An accurate record of all fire calls is kept. I found out what company had rolled at that particular moment, and then where it had gone. Only one street it had passed down had a number twelve thirty-one. So—”
“It’s been a terrible night,” said the girl soberly, as Monty paused.
Monty glanced down at the tender, upturned face, and for the first time in several hours his tense features relaxed.
“Terrible—this evening? Betty—I think it’s been wonderful!”
THE CORPSE ON THE GRATING
Hugh B. Cave
It was ten o’clock on the morning of December 5 when M.S. and I left the study of Professor Daimler. You are perhaps acquainted with M.S. His name appears constantly in the pages of the Illustrated News, in conjunction with some very technical article on psycho-analysis or with some extensive study of the human brain and its functions. He is a psycho-fanatic, more or less, and has spent an entire lifetime of some seventy-odd years in pulling apart human skulls for the purpose of investigation. Lovely pursuit!
For some twenty years I have mocked him, in a friendly, half-hearted fashion. I am a medical man, and my own profession is one that does notsympathize with radicals.
As for Professor Daimler, the third member of our triangle—perhaps, if I take a moment to outline the events of that evening, the Professor’s part in what follows will be less obscure. We had called on him, M.S. and I, at his urgent request. His rooms were in a narrow, unlighted street just off the square, and Daimler himself opened the door to us. A tall, loosely built chap he was, standing in the doorway like a motionless ape, arms half extended.
“I’ve summoned you, gentlemen,” he said quietly, “because you two, of all London, are the only persons who know the nature of my recent experiments. I should like to acquaint you with the results!”
He led the way to his study, then kicked the door shut with his foot, seizing my arm as he did so. Quietly he dragged me to the table that stood against the farther wall. In the same even, unemotional tone of a man completely sure of himself, he commanded me to inspect it.
For a moment, in the semi-gloom of the room, I saw nothing. At length, however, the contents of the table revealed themselves, and I distinguished a motley collection of test tubes, each filled with some fluid. The tubes were attached to each other by some ingenious arrangement of thistles, and at the end of the table, where a chance blow could not brush it aside, lay a tiny phial of the resulting serum. From the appearance of the table, Daimler had evidently drawn a certain amount of gas from each of the smaller tubes, distilling them through acid into the minute phial at the end. Yet even now, as I stared down at the fantastic paraphernalia before me, I could sense no conclusive reason for its existence.
I turned to the Professor with a quiet stare of bewilderment. He smiled.
“The experiment is over,” he said. “As to its conclusion, you, Dale, as a medical man, will be sceptical. And you”—turning to M.S.—”as a scientist you will be amazed. I, being neither physician nor scientist, am merely filled with wonder!”
He stepped to a long, square table-like structure in the center of the room. Standing over it, he glanced quizzically at M.S., then at me.
“For a period of two weeks,” he wen
t on, “I have kept, on the table here, the body of a man who has been dead more than a month. I have tried, gentlemen, with acid combinations of my own origination, to bring that body back to life. And . . . I have—failed!
“But,” he added quickly, noting the smile that crept across my face, “that failure was in itself worth more than the average scientist’s greatest achievement! You know, Dale, that heat, if a man is not truly dead, will sometimes resurrect him. In a case of epilepsy, for instance, victims have been pronounced dead only to return to life—sometimes in the grave.
“I say ‘if a man be not truly dead.’ But what if that man is truly dead? Does the cure alter itself in any manner? The motor of your car dies—do you bury it? You do not; you locate the faulty part, correct it, and infuse new life. And so, gentlemen, after remedying the ruptured heart of this dead man, by operation, I proceeded to bring him back to life.
“I used heat. Terrific heat will sometimes originate a spark of new life in something long dead. Gentlemen, on the fourth day of my tests, following a continued application of electric and acid heat, the patient—”
Daimler leaned over the table and took up a cigarette. Lighting it, he dropped the match and resumed his monologue.
“The patient turned suddenly over and drew his arm weakly across his eyes. I rushed to his side. When I reached him, the body was once again stiff and lifeless. And—it has remained so.”
The Professor stared at us quietly, waiting for comment. I answered him, as carelessly as I could, with a shrug of my shoulders.
“Professor, have you ever played with the dead body of a frog?” I said softly.