Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  “I have,” replied Castle, shedding his overcoat. He sat down and looked into the library fireplace while Standish watched him shrewdly. “Remember Gregory—ten years ago?”

  Standish nodded.

  “A man named Jim Gregory, in a place where a city dick named Lee Castle was looking for a crook. I shot him. Then I went to his home and ‘explained’ to his wife and kid.” Castle laughed bitterly. “Explained to a white-faced woman and a shivering little boy that I’d shot Gregory by accident. That was a big help to the widow and orphan!”

  Standish’s hand touched Castle’s knee. “You’ve paid for that, Lee. It was an accident. But you paid for it. You resigned from the force and were well on your way to hell. Then I got hold of you and helped you a little. I loaned you a few dollars to start a private detective agency . . . . But why is this so fresh in your mind tonight?”

  Castle’s somberly burning eyes went to Standish’s face.

  “Because I just saw Jim Gregory, driving a car, outside.”

  Standish started, then shook his head. “Don’t be fantastic! You killed him ten years ago. Beyond doubt. The coroner pronounced him dead, of a bullet in the brain, and you saw him buried.”

  Castle drew a great breath and wiped his forehead.

  “Of course you’re right! I saw some one that looked as Gregory looked ten years ago. That’s all. Saw him in a sedan that . . . He stopped. He had suddenly remembered why that car looked familiar. It was one of several cars belonging to Gabby Lewis. And Tress had entered it . . . .

  “The Regent!” he exclaimed.

  Standish looked at him sharply. “What about the Regent?”

  Castle bit his lip. He didn’t want the unpleasant task of telling Standish that he had just seen Tressa—Standish’s daughter step into a car which, no matter who drove it was owned by the proprietor of the most deadly, the most notorious gambling club in New York.

  “Funny you should mention the Regent,” Standish said. “It ties in with what I called you about tonight.”

  He lit a cigar, his thin hand shaking a little.

  “I wanted to talk to you about Tress, Lee.”

  Castle refused the proffered cigar. He watched Standish.

  “Tress has always been a problem beyond me to solve. She’s so . . . independent . . . . full of spirit. Rather than break that spirit, I’ve indulged her. Spoiled her, I’m afraid. Lately I’ve wished I could curb her, but now it’s too late. She’s over twenty-one and could tell me to go to hell if she liked,” He smiled wryly. “I think she would, if I tried the heavy father on her.”

  Castle ached inside him. He knew, now, what was coming.

  “Lately she’s been playing with fire. She has been going around with a young fellow named George—who works at the Regent. She has even talked of joining the floor show there!”

  Castle moistened his lips. Standish stared at him almost reproachfully.

  “She likes you, Lee. In fact I’ve sometimes thought it was more than liking. And I’ve wished . . . . It’s too bad you couldn’t . . . fall in love with her.”

  CASTLE’S hands clenched hard. Too bad he couldn’t fall in love with her! When he trembled all over every time she was near! But he only said: “Where do I fit on this. Carson?”

  Standish looked fixedly at his cigar.

  “I was wondering if you’d have a talk with her. You know a lot of dirt about the Club Regent and the scum that owns it, Lewis. Perhaps if you told her some of it . . .”

  The cigar broke in his hands.

  “She went there tonight!” he said harshly. “My daughter! Into that stinking hole! With one of the thugs who works for Lewis!” He waited a moment, then went on in a more normal tone: “Will you go there and hunt her up, Lee—try to make her see reason, try to bring her home?”

  With the request, Castle had gone very still. He stared into the fireplace, eyes unblinking. Go to the Regent and get Tress Standish away from there! Swell! With Gabby Lewis gunning for him on the Breen case as he’d never gunned for anyone before in all his deadly life!

  Castle’s lips opened to tell Standish about that. But the older man spoke first.

  “I . . . I’m afraid it’s terribly urgent, Lee,” he said, with his voice shaking. The cigar dropped from his fingers to burn unheeded on the rug. “Tress—infatuated with this Lewis mobster—going everywhere he wants her to—doing anything he likes—” His hands closed on Castle’s arm. “Every time she goes to the Regent may be the last time! It may be the last time tonight! You know what could happen to her there. Lee, you’ve got to get her out!”

  Staring into the fireplace with wide, unseeing eyes, Castle nodded. It was Standish’s girl—daughter of a man to whom he owed everything—against a mere personal risk of death on his own part. There was no decision to make here; it was made for him.

  He got up.

  “Right, Carson. I’ll give it a try.”

  “Thank God . . . . Lee, why don’t you think over what I said . . . . about trying to . . . . care for Tress? She still idolizes you, I believe.”

  Castle actually managed a smile. Standish would never know how hard that smile came.

  “She’s twenty-one, Carson. I’m thirty-six. I’m really a lot older than that—a humorless, chilly kind of a guy. I’ve had a knock or two, and it hasn’t made me any younger for my age . . . No, it woudn’t do. We wouldn’t be compatible.”

  “You don’t know that,” began Standish. He stopped with a sigh as he saw the look on Castle’s face. “You’ll try to get her away from the Regent?”

  “I will get her away,” said Castle grimly. “If I have to bring her out under my arm like a bundle of laundry!”

  Unless Lewis saw him first, he added to himself. Going to the very headquarters of the city’s smoothest and most dangerous gangster—a man whom he was almost ready to send to the electric chair, and who was well aware of that fact! Going among the mob of that man who would rather kill him than make an extra million dollars of! his rackets!

  CHAPTER THREE

  Killer’s Club

  IT was about half-past ten when Castle’s cab drew near the doors of the Club Regent over the winter slush. He had the man stop at the corner, and looked at the Regent doorman.

  He knew that man. He wasn’t an ordinary doorman. He was one of Lewis’s best men, posted at the door to report to the boss on every person who entered the place. If Lee Castle were reported on his way in . . . he’d be stopped almost before he had started. And stopped permanently!

  He gave the driver a five-dollar bill.

  “I’m getting out here,” he said. “You go on to the entrance and get the doorman to come over to your cab for a minute.

  Ask him directions on some phony address near here. Anything, just so you keep him busy for a minute.”

  “I get you,” said the man, grinning.

  Castle got out. He saw the cab drive up before the entrance, saw the driver beckon the doorman. The doorman arrogantly walked to the curb. Castle went along the sidewalk, near the building. He got to the entrance with the doorman’s back still turned, and went in.

  At the check counter he gave the dark coat and derby to the girl, and walked toward the stairway beside the big cabaret room which took up the first floor of the old building and was the blind for the gambling rooms upstairs.

  He looked over the cabaret room from there. Tress and the young fellow whose face had seemed so terribly familiar, were not in it. He climbed the stairs.

  In spite of his trying to move and act like anyone else, he found himself instinctively walking on the balls of his feet, and felt sweat moisten the palms of his hands. There would be at least twenty of Gabby’s men scattered through this three-story place which was his headquarters. If any one of them saw Castle, his life wouldn’t be worth a lead cent.

  He got to the top of the stairs. He knew the layout: cabaret room on the first floor, two big gambling rooms on the second; on the third floor, most secretive and sinister of all, a score of
small private dining rooms where half the criminal activities of New York were said to be planned.

  The two doors opening off the second floor corridor were shut, of course. In each was a peep-panel. Any one desiring to enter had to be inspected first. And Castle couldn’t afford that inspection.

  His legs wanted to take him back down those stairs and out of the place. But Standish’s words rang in his mind. “Every time Tress goes to the Regent may be the last time! It may be the last time tonight!

  You know what could happen to her there. Lee, you’ve got to get her out!”

  The urgent words kept him standing there when every impulse was to get away as quickly as possible. Mixed with that thought was another: Why had Lewis lent his big sedan to the youngster with the sandy eyebrows? Gabby wasn’t in the habit of turning over his cars to his men in which to take girls joy-riding.

  He crowded the query into the back of his mind and concentrated on getting a look into the two gaming rooms without himself being seen. And then he had it.

  If you could open a peep-hole to look out, why couldn’t one be opened to look in?

  Castle looked down the stairs. No one was coming. He got out a small gold knife and put the point of the blade against the small sliding panel which was recessed in the door. He tried it cautiously. It wasn’t fastened; the man on guard slid it open and shut too many times to bother with that. He slowly slid the panel open an inch.

  If the man at the door was watching that slow movement, if he looked at his boss’s worst enemy through the little opening. . . .

  But the man wasn’t watching. Castle looked through the crack, at the back of his head. In a moment the man shifted a bit so that Castle could see the whole room. Tress Standish wasn’t in it.

  HE stepped down the hall and repeated the ticklish panel process on the second room. Tress wasn’t in there, either. He chewed his lip. That meant that she must be up on the third floor, in one of the private rooms. Jaw taut, he marched up the stairs.

  Just one floor higher from the ground—and escape if he were discovered. Just one flight deeper into the heart of Gabby Lewis’s small kingdom.

  The third floor corridor echoed to steps. Castle retreated down three stairs and watched while a waiter with a tray full of drinks went to one of the private rooms, and then came out and went back down the rear service stairs. Then Castle went down the corridor himself.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Between the Devil and—

  OUT of the question to look through all these twenty or more small rooms, containing God knew what cliques of big-shot crooks, or parties of sweaty politicians with their show-girls. He went from door to door, listening for Tress’s voice, taking his life in his hands as he well knew, balanced for flight to front or rear stairs if someone came.

  And then he heard the voice he was listening for. It came from behind the door through which the waiter had just gone with the tray of drinks. Tress’s voice, a little shrill, a little unsteady, more than a little reckless.

  Castle straightened and faced the closed door. All right. He’d located Tress. Now all he had to do was get her down three flights of stairs and out of the building, perhaps against her will.

  Choking down the agony of hearing that bright voice in such a place with such a man, he grasped the knob, turned it, and wrenched open the door.

  Tress Standish was sitting at a small table with a glass in her hand. Across from her sat the blond young fellow, trying to hold her other hand on the table top. She was laughing, eluding his fingers.

  Both turned with a jerk at the opening door. Then the man’s face went dark with anger, and his hand twitched.

  “Don’t,” said Castle, shutting the door behind him and advancing with his own gun in his hand.

  It was all he could do to get the word out. Meanwhile, he was staring, shaken to the soul, at the face of Tress’s partner.

  “Lee—” the girl said, in a funny, squeaky voice.

  He didn’t look at her. He stared at the face of—the man he had killed ten years ago. But it couldn’t be that face! The man he had shot had been thirty, then, would be forty now. This pleasant-faced youngster was certainly under twenty-two.

  “Lee—what do you mean by coming here?” Tress’s voice was firmer, harder.

  “I came here to get you,” said Castle, voice almost normal. “You’ve got to get out of here, kid.”

  “Kid!” repeated Tress. Her hands tightened on the table. Her eyes, which had looked with a sort of wistful searching at Castle, grew chilly.

  “You’ve got to come home with me.”

  “Kid!” she said again. “Still treating me like a child in arms . . . Get out of here, Lee Castle.”

  “Not without you.”

  “Wait a minute!” The blond youngster’s voice was as hard as flint. “Are you Lee Castle, detective?”

  Castle nodded, gun steady in his hand. The young fellow took a step forward.

  “Lee Castle, eh? I’ve been wanting a look at you for a long time! Since I was eleven years old! You shot my dad, James Gregory.”

  CASTLE reeled with that one, and the gun sagged a trifle in his hand. His face became grey and old. Tress stared first at him and then at her companion, bewilderedly.

  Castle’s breath made a hissing sound as his eyes went over the youngster. No wonder his face looked like the face of the man he had killed by accident years ago! This chap, this blond husky with the bleak eyes, was the shivering little boy to whom Castle had tried to make faltering apology, along with his widowed mother, ten years ago. Son of the man he had drilled through the head!

  “You’re not really . . .

  “No?” said the youngster. “You know I am. I can see it in your face. I must look as much like my dad as folks say I do. Lee Castle, eh? Up to your regular stunts. You killed my father—now you crush down on me.”

  “I have nothing against you . . .” Castle said hoarsely.

  “No? You came to take this girl away, didn’t you? Do you call that nothing? I’m crazy about her, see? And she is about me. If you’d let me alone, we could be married and I could get out of all this. Her father could get me a decent job—”

  “What would you do with a decent job?” said Castle.

  “Plenty. I’ve got a good education. I could be worth any salary Mr. Standish paid me. And I could get away from the Regent and the bunch, and go straight, with a fine wife by my side.”

  Tress’s lip was caught between her teeth. She bit harder, at that, but said nothing even though Castle gazed imploringly at her.

  “Not that I’ve ever done anything so bad, at that,” the young fellow went on. “I haven’t been with Lewis long. And here’s my chance—” he nodded toward the white-faced girl. “A decent home with a grand little wife, and a job with a future. If you don’t upset the apple-cart.” Castle wiped sweat from his forehead with his left hand. He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t speak at the moment This man had a terrible weapon to use against him; and that weapon was struggling with Castle’s shrewdness, won by bitter experience, in judging human nature.

  The youngster’s face hardened. “You are going to upset the apple-cart, huh? You killed the father. Now you’re going to smash the son’s chances to get out of a crook’s life. Is that it?”

  “You . . . . expect me to just walk out of here and leave a girl like that—with you?” demanded Castle thickly.

  The young fellow nodded eagerly. “Sure! That’s it. Leave Tress to me—I’ll take care of her.”

  Hell was in Castle’s eyes.

  “Sure, you’ll take care of her,” he grated. “You start by bringing her to a joint like this, where they roll drunks with small wads and ransom drunks with big ones. A headquarters of gangsters and gunmen, run by the rottenest louse of all—Gabby Lewis.”

  “It’s the only place I could bring her to. All the money I get comes from Gabby. This’ll be the last time, if you’ll only beat it and leave me alone.”

  Castle felt physically ill
. Carson Standish meant the world to him, and he had promised to bring his daughter home. To go and leave her here with this smooth young fellow. . . .

  But there was a slight chance that young Gregory might be as sincere as he sounded. If so—then this was his big chance to leave gangdom and go straight with a girl who had not protested the statement that she loved him. Had Castle a right to deny even a slight chance to the son of the man he had robbed of life ten years ago?

  “Well?” said young Gregory.

  Tress stared at Castle with great, luminous eyes.

  And Castle had the answer. To hell with his own personal rights and wrongs. It was Tress who mattered. And he wouldn’t leave her here with this glib young husky if he’d only felt a tenth of the doubts about his character that he did feel. . . .

  THE SLIGHTEST of sounds whirled him toward the door. Then he crouched and sprang sideways with his gun roaring like thunder in the little room.

  Tress screamed. A sound like a laugh came from young Gregory’s lips. And in the doorway a man sagged slowly to the floor with Castle’s phenomonally quick bullet in his heart. The man was Scully, sprung already from the charges Castle had earlier lodged against him.

  Young Gregory had double-crossed the detective. Even as he pleaded with him, his fingers had touched an alarm button somewhere, and one of Lewis’s chief guns had come, to be beaten to a killing only by a fraction of a second.

  But these thoughts took only an instant of time in Castle’s brain. What counted was that he had to get out of here—and the girl too!

  “Come on—we’re beating it!” he snapped to Tress.

  She only stared at him, face drained of blood, too shocked to move.

  Castle grabbed her wrist and lifted her from the chair. The blond youngster tried to get in his way. Castle rapped him on the head with the barrel of his gun.

  “Sorry,” he said. “But that shot’ll bring everybody in the place up here and there’s a dead man—The cops—Can’t have Tress here—”