by Jerry eBooks
Rainey sprang toward the door, whirled, a gun in his shaking hand. His bullet chipped the lobe of Inspector Schwartz’s ear. He tried to fire again but the inspector’s gun roared. Rainey fell sideways, rolled on his back, was stiffly quiet. A haze of smoke drifted to the ceiling.
The D.A.’s sleuth said shakily: “Hell, that was a close call for you, Inspector.”
“Yeah.” He fingered his bleeding ear and his eyes bored into Sam. “Better explain this, young feller!”
Martin heard his brother’s voice like a white-hot flame burning away all his doubts, his sick despair. Sam hadn’t tried to frame him! Sam was innocent.
“I didn’t realize who the real killer was until last night,” Sam was saying. “Marty showed me the button from my coat, told me he had taken it from Mopsy’s dead hand. Then I remembered—I knew! It happened last week at the settlement house gymnasium. Rainey insisted on wrestling with me. I couldn’t figure out why at the time; he was always so sedate and quiet. What he really wanted was that button! He ripped it off my coat while we were wrestling.
“Go ahead,” the inspector said.
“Yesterday afternoon I got a tip that Mopsy wanted to see me in a hurry. When I got there I found him dead. I didn’t know my coat button had been planted in his hand to frame me for the kill. But I was scared stiff. Mopsy’s wallet was on the floor and I grabbed it, instinctively, I suppose. I decided to visit Rainey last night and play dumb.
“I went to see him, pretended I hated my bossy brother and told him Marty had stolen the wallet. He agreed to come here and identify it. Originally he had intended to frame me; but I suppose he’d figure that Marty was a better fall guy than me, because Marty was an honest dick who was driving the gang out of business. Rainey swallowed my bait and came. I knew if I played dumb and vindictive against Marty, Rainey would explain too much and trip himself up—and he did!”
“This Rainey was trying to get the racket away from Mopsy, eh?”
“Right.”
“Better come down to headquarters, Clyde, and get your shield back,” the inspector said.
Martin didn’t hear him. He was staring at his brother.
“Sam, if I ever lose faith in you again—kick me right square in the jaw, will you?”
THE ANGRY DEAD
Chandler H. Whipple
Madness Stalks a House of Doom, Bringing Its Occupants a Savage Urge to Kill
CHAPTER I
The Room of the Bier
MARCIA didn’t tell me much over the telephone—only that her father was dead, had died suddenly, and that she wanted me to drive her out to their home in Jersey at once. I was astounded. Graham Waite dead! Why, not three weeks before I had seen and talked with him; he was then in the best of health, for all his seventy years, sound in mind and body.
He had told me then—it was the night Marcia and I had received his blessing on our engagement—that he was just beginning to live. Coming from a man who had knocked about a good deal in his time, from Singapore to Suez and back again, and had managed to accumulate a modest fortune through prospecting and trading in those remote places, that sounded rather odd—but I knew he meant it. He had bought a comfortable country place in the rolling New Jersey hills; and there he meant to settle down with his wife to a graceful, quiet life. Now he was dead.
The whole thing, mingled though it was with anxiety and sympathy for Marcia, seemed to form in my mind a faintly sinister pattern. I couldn’t tell why; yet I felt it. Even when, a little later, I was holding Marcia very close, as she wept and I tried vainly to comfort her, I still felt it.
The sun was setting over the hills to the westward, and we were less than an hour’s drive from the Waite home, when at last Marcia spoke. The words came very clearly.
“You see, Jerry,” she said, “father killed himself.”
My hands gripped the wheel of the roadster tightly.
“What!” I burst out. “Killed—but Marcia, he couldn’t have! He was happy—He had everything to live for.”
“Yes,” she said. “I thought so, too. But he shot himself.”
“It isn’t possible!” I protested. “Unless—unless—Could anything have happened—in the past week?”
“We don’t know.” Her voice was very low now. “I guess we never will. You see, he was alone. Jim had been away for the past two weeks on a fishing trip. And mother had gone to visit friends in Connecticut. Dad had urged her to go. It—it was almost as if the whole thing had been planned—”
“The servants?” I said. “Did they notice any change in him?”
“They—mother said that they—”
Abruptly, Marcia screamed. I didn’t find out what the servants had said.
At the same time she screamed, I saw what she had seen—a big blue car swinging around the curve at a vicious speed and coming straight for us!
The sun-glare blinded me. I tried to swerve our roadster off the paving. Then something struck me in the face with stunning force, and I was breathing in choked gasps. We had gotten off the road and had come to a stop in the shallow ditch. The other car had raced on.
“Are you hurt, Jerry?” came Marcia’s frightened voice.
“Not at all,” I said. I turned, saw that she was unharmed.
“The—the other car,” she said. “It looked like father’s—the big sedan. And I’m sure it was Franklin, the butler, driving. I wonder if—”
She broke off short, gasped.
“Darling!” she cried. “You are hurt. You’re bleeding—”
I felt my face. She was right. When the car stopped, my head had gone forward into the sunshade, and I had some rather nasty cuts about the nose and mouth.
I wasn’t thinking of them, though, as I started the car. I was thinking of the strange feeling I’d had as the other car came upon us.
You see, I’d been positive that we couldn’t avoid a crash; yet we had done it. And it seemed as if suddenly we had been picked up from the road and set in the ditch. Somehow, in that sharp moment, I had seemed to see Death smiling indulgently at us as he set us to one side of the onrushing car—as if, with grisly humor, he had saved us for something else he had in mind . . .
WE were the last to arrive at the Waite home.
We had stopped at a doctor’s office on the way and he bandaged my nose and upper lip thoroughly—so thoroughly that for hours afterward I could smell only the odor of antiseptic. I cursed those bandages at the time. I couldn’t know that they alone, for a while, saved me from what followed.
Howard, Marcia’s oldest brother, met us at the door—he and Winfield had driven out from New York, too—and the others were just behind him.
“Mother!” Marcia said, and then she was in Mrs. Waite’s arms. Marcia’s own mother had died at her birth—but the understanding between these two was perfect. In fact, though Graham Waite’s second wife was truly mother only to eighteen-year-old Jim, all the Waite children loved her as much as they could have loved their own mother.
The men questioned me about the accident. As always, when seeing them together, I could not help thinking how distinctly different each was from the other. Howard, hard-muscled and tall—you could tell him for a man who built roads and spanned rivers. Winfield, Howard’s opposite—the sensitive, artistic type. You’d know before you’d been told that he was a painter. And blond, blueeyed Jim, eager, intelligent, though too young yet for one to know just what he would make of himself. And last of all, their cousin, Sidney Horton. Sidney lived nearby, and—his parents being dead—was at the Waites’ so often that I counted him one of them. Dark and slender, yet tall and strongly built, he was like none of them, yet there seemed to be a great deal of Waite blood in his veins. It was said that a strain of Polynesian was in him, too. His father had knocked about the earth a good deal with Graham Waite, and later had married Graham Waite’s sister. Ordinarily quiet and reserved, Sidney showed genuine alarm now as I finished telling of the accident.
“Then it was Franklin,” he said.
“Marcia was sure of it,” I told him. “But where was he heading, going like that?”
Young Jim answered.
“We—we don’t know,” he said. “We think last night must have unnerved him. Just after mother and I got here, we heard a crash in the hall. We rushed in and it was Franklin; he was white as a ghost and he had dropped the tea things.
“He blurted out that he’d just seen—seen father in the dining room. Then suddenly, he flew into a rage. He cursed the place, said he’d be damned if he’d work here another minute. He stamped out and took the big car and drove away.
“We—there was no chance of stopping him.
And mother and I were sure he’d come back.”
I couldn’t help saying:
“If he keeps on driving that way, he won’t ever come back—alive.”
I don’t think there is any custom among civilized people more redolent of barbarism than that of viewing the corpse.
The others went in with us to the flower-banked library where the coffin lay. I don’t know what I expected to see, but tiny shivers of fear crawled up and down my spine, and because of that, I kept a tight hold on Marcia’s arm. Otherwise, I think she’d have fallen when she saw her father’s body. As it was, she gasped—and I started, took half a step back.
I could hardly believe that it was the body of Graham Waite which lay there. Only the white hair and beard seemed natural. The bullet hole in the side of his head was carefully hidden; but that did not help much. The face was contorted. The smiling, generous mouth that I had known was twisted with hate.
I had a feeling that behind the closed lids even the eyes must be shining with that awful fury. I don’t know how much the undertaker had changed the look in that face; but those things must have been beyond his power to change.
I knew then that when Graham Waite had shot himself, he had been insane—stark, raving mad.
WAS there a strain of insanity in the Waite family? I didn’t say anything; I couldn’t, for I was certain that others in that room knew what I was thinking. Marcia must have guessed my thoughts; she tore away from me, ran again to Mrs. Waite. The brothers, even Jim, stood stiffly silent.
I found myself beside Sidney Horton. At that moment, friendly as the Waites had been to me, I felt like an intruder in this room of death. For an instant Sidney seemed to feel that way, too.
“It may seem a sacrilegious thing to say,” he said, “but I can’t help thinking—looking at the old chap’s face, you find it not hard to credit those old beliefs—”
“Beliefs?” I said.
“In Polynesia,” he said, “they have a strange feeling toward the newly dead. They fear them. No matter how kindly the dead one, how much he loved his family, they believe that for a time after death his ghost is a hateful, hideous thing—that he comes battering at the doors, striving to get in to attack and destroy. In Polynesia, after a death, the women bar the doors and sit the night through in terror.”
I looked at the corpse again, and shuddered. I felt suddenly cold.
“An odd belief,” I said.
“A stupid belief.” He smiled. “But looking at the old chap reminded me of it. You don’t wonder that Franklin got to seeing things.”
He spoke lightly, evidently striving to break the tight feeling in both of us. With me, though, it didn’t succeed. I couldn’t forget what he had said and what Franklin thought he had seen; it seemed to tie up with the growing certainty in my mind that here in this room something ominous and fearful hovered—something apart from the aura of death occasioned by the body of Graham Waite.
I looked about me now, trying to place the vague thing that troubled my brain. The room seemed choked with flowers, almost tropical in abundance. Where they were grouped thickest, the Waites stood, talking quietly.
On the instant, the sound of a blow cut sharply through the thick quiet of that funereal room. Winfield—the quiet, self-effacing Winfield—had struck Howard across the mouth!
“I’m damned if I’m taking orders from you!” he snarled. “I say the flowers are going! They’re barbarous—heathen!”
He started toward a cluster of flowers as if he meant to fling them out the window. Howard followed after, seized him roughly by the arm.
“You and your bloody artistic sense,” he sneered. “You seem to forget that they have a meaning. Leave them there, confound you!”
“I don’t care what they mean!” shrilled Winfield. “Their odor is foul—I can’t stand them!”
He brought back his free arm; Howard stepped back to avoid the blow, his own fists coming up. At that moment Mrs. Waite came between them.
Oddly, she wasn’t shocked; she seemed, instead, furious! All her poise was gone.
“I want to hear no more of this!” she snapped. “The flowers shall stay.”
Then I glimpsed Marcia’s face. She saw that I was looking at her and did not speak—but her lips were parted and her face was flushed with anger. Had it not been for me, she would have entered the quarrel, too.
Over the dead body of their father, I thought, the well-bred Waites are quarreling like fishwives!
CHAPTER II
The Suicide Room
SHOCKED as I was, I yet had the feeling that it was not the Waites who were quarreling, that it was something arising from the corpse in that room. I wanted to get them out of there.
Sidney seemed to be thinking the same thoughts. He stepped quietly over to the little group, took Mrs. Waite’s arm.
“It is a shattering experience, Aunt Anne,” he said. “Don’t you think it would be best if we retired to the living room?”
Mrs. Waite started at the sound of his quiet voice. She drew her hand across her eyes.
“Yes,” she said dazedly. “Yes, you are quite right, Sidney.”
She led the way from the library into the living room. The rest, even Winfield and Howard, followed.
We sat down there. That room, too, was heavily banked with flowers. I realized now that many of them had come from the Waites’ own garden—out there, I supposed, by the faithful Franklin before his strange defection. Oddly, they oppressed me. It wasn’t the odor, for I could still smell nothing but antiseptic; but nevertheless they gave me the feeling of wanting to escape—to run screaming from the room, into the fresh country air outside.
I think I might have done just that, if Wong, the Chinese cook, had not brought the brandy at that moment.
The Waites seemed to have forgotten their strange actions, the harsh words they had spoken. Marcia came over and sat beside me, slipped her hand through my arm. But I could feel her body trembling a little.
Then, as we were talking quietly, Winfield rose from his chair. He set his brandy down sharply.
“If you’ll pardon me,” he said, “I shall go to my room.”
He walked out, and I couldn’t help staring at him. What had I seen in his eyes? Was it anger—or madness?
“Now what the devil is he up to?” Howard demanded irritably.
I held my breath. Was it going to break out again, this sinister battle? I thought Marcia trembled more visibly. Grimly, I held to her hand. I couldn’t let her speak—she couldn’t do as the others had done.
Jim got to his feet. I was afraid for the moment that he meant to follow Winfield, but instead he went to the casement windows and flung them open.
“Stuffy as the dickens,” he said.
That commonplace act broke the tension. I felt Marcia quieting. The others sat back, relaxed.
I couldn’t relax, though. I kept thinking of what I had seen in Winfield’s eyes, and I wondered what he was up to.
Then I heard something upstairs. It sounded like a crash or like something falling. Though the noise puzzled me, I breathed easier, just knowing he was really upstairs.
The sound I heard next, there was no mistaking. Everyone in the room heard it, and we started to our feet. Muffled by the intervening walls, it yet came sharply. It sounded from Winfield’s room.
It was the death cry of a man in mortal agony.
We men ran out of the room and up the stairs almost together. No one spoke, but horror showed on every face. I entered Winfield’s room first—and at what I saw I stopped short.
Winfield lay on the floor in a pool of blood. His throat had been slashed from ear to ear, and the knife which had done it was still clutched in his hand.
That wasn’t all, though. His face was contorted, twisted with madness. And in the room there were signs of a struggle. A chair had been smashed to splinters and a vase of flowers overturned; and more significant than that, two of Winfield’s paintings on the wall—two that he had especially liked and refused to sell—had been slashed to ribbons. Plainly, they had been slashed by the same knife which Winfield clutched in his hand.
It was quite evident that Winfield Waite had killed himself, and that he also had done these other things; yet it nevertheless seemed as if he had been struggling against something in this room—something invisible, perhaps, but nonetheless hideous and horrible. And whatever this thing was, I felt then that it was that which had caused the strange actions of the Waites. Perhaps it had caused Graham Waite’s death, too. I remembered Sidney’s strange tale of the fierce ghosts of the newly dead, and wondered. Was this the way they struck? Was an epidemic of madness to sweep through this family because of Graham Waite’s death?
Marcia—Good Lord, would it strike her, too?
Down there in the library she had—
I shuddered.
AFTER Mrs. Waite learned what had happened, we had to take her upstairs and to bed. She was more than hysterical; it was plain that if she weren’t quieted, she’d go the way Winfield had gone.
When we were back in the living room again, Howard asked:
“Did anyone phone for the doctor?”
Jim looked up from the couch, his face frightened.
“I tried to,” he said. “The—the phone wouldn’t work. It was dead.”
“That’s odd,” Howard said. “It was working this afternoon. We can’t help Win now, but someone should go for the doctor—”