Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  Mudd looked at me. “Sit down there in the corner,” he said to me, “and let me be the detective.” And so I did.

  He went out then, but in a minute he came back, with Junky Rothfuss.

  Mudd sat down at the desk and beckoned Rothfuss to the chair by the window. “Well, Junky,” Mudd said, and though his voice was soft, it gave me a shivery feeling, “it’s nice to see you here. You’re heeled, I guess?”

  “I got a permit, copper, from the sheriff’s office,” Junky Rothfuss growled.

  “Okay, Junky. Just routine. Let me see the rod,” Mudd said.

  Junky Rothfuss looked at Mudd a minute. “Sure,” he said. He reached under his coat and handed Mudd a gun. Mudd took it, holding it by the barrel with his handkerchief.

  “I don’t want my prints on any gun of yours, Junky,” he said good-humoredly.

  I noticed then, suddenly, that the gun on the desk was gone.

  “Yeah,” Mudd said, sitting down behind the desk. “Thirty-eight automatic. Nice gun.” He laid it in his lap. “Now let me see the permit, Junky.”

  Rothfuss dug in his billfold and handed Mudd a card. Mudd looked at it carelessly, picked up the gun with his handkerchief and handed it back with the card. “All shipshape, Junky!”

  Junky Rothfuss replaced the gun and card. “Talk fast, copper,” he said. “I got other things to do besides listenin’ to you gab. I gotta get home.”

  “All right, Junky,” Mudd said evenly. “You’ll get home—home through the green door! Home to the old easy-chair. You’ve been away too long.”

  Junky Rothfuss grinned, and his grin was mirthless too. “Make ’em up as you go along, flatfoot?” he asked.

  And Mudd grinned back. “Carlotta was your girl, wasn’t she, Junky? Carlotta was your girl, and you had shot off your kisser about rubbin’ out Ike Stein if he didn’t stay away. That was dangerous talk, Junky. I thought you were smarter than that. Lots of people heard you. It even got around so bad that the dumb coppers heard about it.”

  Junky Rothfuss made his voice weary. “You got nothin’ on me. And I’m gettin’ sleepy. Speak your piece.”

  “Well,” Mudd said, “you’re the best suspect we got. We’ll have to run you in, Junky.”

  “You won’t make that hold, copper,” Junky Rothfuss said. “I’ll be out in an hour. I seen the guy that let Ike have it. It was the Fenston punk, and the kid with him grabbed the gun and run.”

  “Yes,” Mudd said. “We’ll make it stick. We’re gonna burn you, Junky. We’ll make it stick.” He paused a moment, and lit a cigarette. “Who’ll believe a member of one of the town’s finest families would kill a rat like Stein for no reason, when they know that you’d threatened to kill him yourself for a damned good one?”

  Rothfuss didn’t change expression except a hair’s breadth, but it converted his face into a sneer. “You got nothing on me,” he repeated.

  “Yes,” Mudd went on as if he hadn’t heard him. “They shave your head, and they hook the plates on tight to your legs, and then they pull the volts through you. The scientists say it doesn’t hurt, but they don’t know. It looks to me like it hurts when the smoke comes up, and you smell the old burning flesh, and you sort of jerk and twitch—”

  I sat tense, listening to Mudd’s droning voice, dripping conviction and grim assurance, and I wondered.

  “It looks like it hurts plenty—and nobody has ever come back to say it didn’t.”

  “You’ve jumped your trolley,” said Rothfuss. But his smile was mirthless.

  Mudd said evenly: “We’ve frisked everybody in the joint. The gun ain’t there. The gun in your holster has been fired once. The ballistics boys will check the slug with the one in Ike Stein’s head, and they’ll prove it came out of your gun. The one in your holster.”

  Junky Rothfuss jerked his gun, and he sniffed the barrel. He whipped the clip open and looked. He sat there tense, the gun in his hand.

  Mudd had his service revolver out, and he was leveling on Junky Rothfuss.

  Junky put the gun back under his coat. Mudd said slowly, putting his own gun up too: “I’ve been after you for two years, Junky. And now I’ve got you framed. Framed cold!”

  “Switched guns, eh?” Junky Rothfuss whispered.

  “You guessed it,” Mudd told him. “Here’s your gun.” He laid another thirty-eight automatic on the desk.

  And Junky Rothfuss moved, a fraction of an inch only, it seemed to me. And suddenly there was the gun in his hand again, and he fired once as Mudd slid down behind the desk.

  I half jumped up as Junky snaked over the window-sill. I couldn’t help it. I figured that it was suicide, but I liked Joe Mudd. I was on my feet and starting to move as Junky saw me and turned, one arm crooked over the window-ledge, his gun in the other.

  But I started to move forward even as Junky began bringing his gun into careful alignment. Then I heard Mudd’s voice as he crawled around the desk.

  “Here’s one for Red Armstrong, Junky!” the voice said. And there was a shot. I saw Rothfuss’ thin-lipped snarling mouth go suddenly, horribly, red and round. And his arm relaxed, and there was the empty window.

  I grabbed the gun off the desk and I stuffed it into my pocket as Jaffre broke into the door then, a sawed-off shotgun in his hands.

  “Junky Rothfuss,” Mudd said, standing up. “Killed while attempting to escape, He’s out the window there. His gun has been fired twice, and the ballistics men will find the slug in Ike’s head was the first one. You can tell the people to go home.” He walked over to me and hit me on the shoulder, and then started awkwardly peeling off his coat, and I noticed one hand dripping blood.

  “Damn,” he said to me. “You scared me when you jumped up. What were you gonna do—bite him?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted shakily, feeling foolish; but I looked up and saw Mudd looking at me with a funny light in his eyes, and I quit feeling foolish because his look was one of respect. And I was suddenly proud. Joe Mudd didn’t respect or admire many things.

  “Send the sawbones in here, Chief,” Mudd said, turning, and unbuttoning his shirt with one hand, clumsily. “I gave him too much head start. He got lucky and nicked me. I must be gettin’ slow.”

  He turned to me and added, bending so no one could hear: “Go out and tell the kids how it is—all three of ’em.” Straightening up, he concluded; in a normal voice: “And come up to the hotel pretty soon, and I’ll tell you the end of that story.”

  “Okay,” I told him, but as I made my way to Marshalt’s table, it occurred to me that I knew the end of the story now.

  So I told it to Bud Fenston, and Marshalt, and Marshalt’s sister, while they drove me home; and they stopped on the bridge over the river, and I threw the gun a mile.

  SHE WAITS IN HELL

  Paul Ernst

  It was a bitter assignment for Private Detective Lee Castle; not because it would take him into a nest of killers who had long sought his life—but because he must face the son of a man he had killed unjustly, and take from him the one thing that man claimed would send him back to the ranks of honest men.

  LEE Castle looked at his watch. Quarter past eight. He got up from his desk and went to the anteroom, the hall door of which was lettered, Lee Norris Castle, Private Detective.

  Miss Barnes was at the anteroom desk, middle-aged, prim, with a capable chin and firm grey eyes under polished glasses. “You can go home, Miss Barnes.”

  Though she had had no dinner, Castle’s secretary hesitated. She stared up at her boss—at all six feet of him, with his solid muscle, narrow hips, and broad shoulders.

  “I’ll stay a while longer,” she said.

  The hint of a smile crept under Castle’s hard-bitten, grimly good-looking face.

  “There’s no need, Flora. I’m to see a man at eight-thirty. Then I’ll shut up shop and go to Standish’s home. I’m to meet him at nine.”

  “It’s the man you’re to see here that I’m interested in,” Flora Barnes said bluntly.
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  “Don’t think I ought to be alone, eh?”

  “No, I don’t. Gabby Lewis knows you’re about to tie him up in the Breen murder. Lewis is the most powerful crook in town—has the most pull. He’ll kill you if he can.”

  “But it isn’t a Lewis man who’s coming here. It’s a former cook at the Club Regent, Lewis’s night club. He says he has more information, proving that Harold Breen was killed in the club and then driven to the Bronx roadway where the police picked him up.”

  “You don’t know it isn’t a Lewis man. It may be a trap. I’ll stay. They won’t shoot you before a witness.”

  “If it was a trap,” said Castle, “they’d simply shoot you too. And you’re too good a secretary to be shot. Go home.”

  “But—”

  “Go on. Go on,” said Castle. But his voice was gentle. Loyalty is a rare and beautiful thing.

  Flora sighed and got up. She shrugged into her heavy cloth overcoat, pulled the fur collar up till only the glasses over her eyes could be seen.

  “Good night, then.”

  “Good night, Flora.”

  CASTLE went back to the inner office. There, he eased the gun in his shoulder holster, and slid the drawer of his desk out to make sure another automatic was in its place there. . . .

  Eight months ago Harold Breen had been killed. The spoiled son of a millionaire father, he had expressed his intention of going to the Club Regent for an evening.

  Next morning he had been found in a lonely spot in the Bronx, shot in the heart.

  The police had investigated and turned in a report: killed by persons unknown. But that wasn’t good enough for Harold’s bitter father. He had retained Lee Castle to fasten the crime on the Club Regent. For eight months Castle had worked with grim tirelessness. . . .

  Now he had Gabby Lewis, himself, almost sewed up for that murder. And Gabby knew it. Hence four attempts on Castle’s life in the last three weeks.

  There was a tap at the door. “Come in,” Castle called. His hand went to his shoulder.

  It came away as the man who had knocked entered his office. He was an undersized, stoop-shouldered man with bitter dark eyes. And he was a former Regent chef. Castle remembered seeing him there.

  “You said over the phone you had information on the Breen case?” he said brusquely.

  “Yes . . . sir,” whined the man. “It ain’t exactly information, though. It’s a gun.”

  “A gun?” Castle’s hands tightened on the desk edge. “The gun that killed Harold Breen?”

  “I think so,” said the man. “But I wouldn’t swear . . . You c’n match the slug from it and see for yourself.”

  “Yes, by God, I can!” Castle’s hard eyes flamed with cold exultation. “If it is the murder gun, and if it can be traced to Gabby Lewis . . . Give it to me.”

  “Okay.”

  THE man’s hand went leisurely to his pocket and came out with a .45 automatic.

  But the automatic was pointed straight at Castle’s chest.

  “Stick ’em up, you!” the man snarled. Gone was his frightened rabbit look. His eyes were deadly slits. “Don’t make a move. Your number’s up. Scully—Johnson!”

  The office door opened to admit two more men. Members of Gabby Lewis’s mob, advancing toward the seated man with guns in their hands.

  “So it was a trap,” murmured Castle. “Gabby must be getting plenty scared to send you rats to gun me right in my office.”

  “Why shouldn’t we gun you in your office?” sneered Scully, a big man with a twisted nose.

  “There are safer places.”

  Castle smiled a little, though he was icily furious with himself for having been trapped by the ex-cook. “It might be hard to get me out of here afterwards.”

  “Why get you out?” snarled Scully. “We’ll just scram and let you lay.”

  The three had walked slowly forward till now they were at the opposite side of the desk from Castle, with their guns within a yard of his chest. A firing squad, doing execution to order. The order of Gabby Lewis.

  “Hey! Watch that hand,” said Scully.

  Castle’s hand, on its way to his breast pocket, stopped.

  “I was just going to get out my handkerchief and wipe my forehead,” he said. “It’s close in here.”

  “It ain’t close. You’re scared till you’re sweatin’, that’s all.” Scully’s eyes had gloating glints. The glints deepened . . . .

  And then simultaneously he and the other two gasped and clawed at their throats, and Castle went straight over backwards in his chair with his hand jerking his handkerchief from his pocket.

  The three men all shot, blindly, furiously, with the bullets missing Castle by a foot. Then they were too busy sobbing for breath and rubbing at their blinded eyes to do anything else.

  Castle laughed. He got up, holding to his nose the chemically saturated hand kerchief from his breast pocket. He went to the door. The three mobsters writhed on the floor, wheezing and moaning.

  “Next time,” Castle said, “shoot first and gloat afterwards. Then you won’t get a gas treatment from four tubes under the outer edge of your victim’s desk, worked by a knee trigger!”

  He locked the door of his inner office and called headquarters. “Brady? Three Sunday school pupils here for you. Assault with intent to kill, concealed weapons, more charges when I can think of them. Gabby Lewis’s men.”

  He watched the three gunmen being half dragged and half led out a few minutes later. Then he called the man he hated most on earth, the man he had been after for years, the man he hoped to put in the chair a little later on the Breen case—Gabby Lewis.

  “Gabby? Lee Castle talking.”

  There was a silence. Then Gabby’s cold, coarse voice:

  “Well?”

  “I just wanted you to know I’m still alive. I know you’re wondering about it.”

  “Trying to get me to talk over a tapped wire, Castle?” snarled Gabby.

  “No—just making a few announcements.” Castle’s voice got as hard as tool-steel. “I’m going to get you in a few days on the Breen business, you gold-plated louse. You killed him yourself, because he got drunk and messed around with your girl friend of the moment. Then you had his body dragged to the Bronx. I’m about ready to clamp down on you—and you can’t kill me quick enough to save yourself. Get that?”

  “I don’t know what you’re blabbing about,” retorted Gabby, smoothly now. “Whatever it is, I want you to know it’s all right by me. Why don’t you come down to the Regent some night and we’ll talk this out?”

  Castle laughed with real amusement.

  “Wouldn’t you love that? I should go to the Regent! What’s the odds on my getting out alive if I were ever such a fool?”

  He hung up on the protesting voice. And the laugh died on his hard lips.

  It was a little after nine. He got in his car to go to the home of Carson Standish. He was up to his ears in the Breen stuff; but no business was too important to detain him when Standish called.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Death Commission

  THE DOOR of Standish’s grey stone house opened before Castle could get his hand to the bell. It was opened by a girl, coming out just as Castle prepared to go in. She was very young looking, small, with alive brown eyes and a heart-shaped face over her squirrel coat.

  “Lee!” she said. He hands went to his. In her eyes came a warm light, and her smiling lips were half parted.

  “Hello, young ’un,” Castle said soberly.

  The warmth in the girl’s eyes was slowly replaced by chilly anger. She jerked her hands from his.

  “Still treating me like a kid!” she flared. “As if I were a baby!”

  “You are, compared to me.”

  “I know. “You’re a thousand years old.”

  “I’m thirty-six, fifteen years older than you are. There’s grey in the old hair at the sides.”

  Castle spoke a little harshly. He was really speaking to himself—lashing at the
wistful desire for this beautiful small girl which kept springing up within him. The self discipline was what made his voice hard, cold; but the girl didn’t know that.

  She turned on her heels and went down the porch steps. She couldn’t unfortunately, see the look in Castle’s eyes . . . .

  He’d always been crazy about her, since she was a kid of ten, going to the circus with him. But always he had realized as a matter of course that his only possible role with her was that of big brother. It had been hard to treat Carson Standish’s daughter like that.

  A car swept up the drive. It stopped beside Tressa Standish. Castle frowned. There was something familiar about that car. He had seen it before.

  The door opened. Tress got in.

  “God!” whispered Castle suddenly, glaring at the man behind the wheel.

  The car drove off, leaving Castle standing at the door shaking like a leaf and with sweat pouring down his face. The man at the wheel was young, with a smooth, pinkish face and sandy eyebrows and eyelashes. It was a face that had haunted Lee Castle for ten years. How many times in nightmares had he seen that face, or its duplicate, smile at him and then go grey as a bullet hole suddenly appeared in the center of the forehead! A face from the past—from the one thing in life that had left a scar he’d never lose . . . .

  “I didn’t see him closely,” he whispered. “He couldn’t have looked as much like . . . Gregory . . . as I thought . . . just a chance resemblance . . . .”

  HE went into the house. Standish met him in the hall. He was a gaunt man of fifty, with shrewd though tired eyes and with thinning hair. He had made a fortune and lost his resiliency and bounce in doing so. But he had not lost a certain reserved warmth that made friends of all who met him.

  The warmth was in his handclasp, and Castle pressed back hard. Carson Standish was like a father to him. More than a father—a saviour! He had rescued Castle from the human junk pile after that soul-scarring experience ten years ago.

  “What’s up?” Standish asked, leading the private detective into his library. “You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”