by Jerry eBooks
He half lifted her over the dead gangster in the doorway and started toward the back of the place. He stopped. Coming from the rear stairs were three men, guns out.
He turned. From the front stairs poured half a dozen of Lewis’s guns; and after a moment a door opened, and Lewis himself joined them to stare, first in amazement and then with dawning murderous joy, at Private Detective Castle.
They couldn’t shoot, Castle realized, without killing the girl, or at least risking it. So he was preserved for a time from instant death. But, trapped in front and behind, he had no more chance of shooting his way out than of flying.
WITH four men training guns on him, Castle sat in the small private room in which he had found Tress and young Gregory. Tress cowered on a leather divan ranged along one wall. Gregory was grinning at Castle, having recovered from the tap on die head.
The door opened. Gabby Lewis came in with an evil smile on his face. Castle couldn’t see the body of Scully at the doorway; evidently it had been moved. Lewis crossed to Castle.
“I’ve just sent out for the corner cop, Castle,” he said, in his coarse, hard voice. He laughed. “Jeez, what a perfect setup! Instead of working on you myself, I get you out of the way by sending you to the chair for murder. Also the rap will make a jury disbelieve any Breen evidence you may leave behind you. And on top of all that, I get out of a jam that looked a little while ago like it might be serious. Luck’s with old Gabby tonight.”
He smirked, a big, oily man with a spare chin and a roll of fat over his collar in the back. Castle wondered what the crack about Gabby’s getting out of a jam meant, but he forgot that an instant later. It didn’t seem important.
“So you called the cops,” he shrugged. “What a dope you are! I’ve got a pretty good rep in New York, Gabby. Your gun, Scully, was a rat all his life, and the whole force knows it. I can plead self-defence and any court in the land would let me off.”
“You’ll see,” Gabby smirked. There was a rustling, scraping noise just outside the door, the sound of something being eased to the floor. “I’m telling you, this murder rap will stick. My God, what a fool you were to come in here! You might have got me on the Breen thing—and then you walk in here and offer yourself on a silver plate. Thanks, mug.” Tress’s head jerked toward Castle at that. She opened her lips. But then there was an exclamation in the hall, and a knock at the door.
“Come in,” said Gabby smoothly.
A uniformed patrolman came in, eyes alert. His hand went for his gun as he saw the automatics in the hands of Gabby’s men. Then it stopped.
“What’s the lay here?” he said, looking at Gabby. “You pulled me here on a murder. Okay, there was a murder. There’s Bill Reed’s body in the hall. Which one of you did it?”
Castle exclaimed aloud. Whose body in the hall? It was Scully he had shot! Scully. . . .
He jumped for the door. The patrolman yelled, and swung his gun. But Castle wasn’t trying to commit suicide by getting away. He only ducked the gun barrel and stared at the body on the threshold.
It was not the body of Scully—it was the corpse of a fat man of city-wide notoriety as a politician; a man named William Reed. He had been shot in the head.
“This guy, Castle, shot Reed,” Gabby grinned. “There are eye-witnesses. Besides we have the gun he did it with. We took it away from him.”
He handed a .45 that Castle had never seen before, to the cop. Castle stared at it, utterly speechless.
He saw it now—that crack of Gabby’s about how lucky he was. Sometime this evening, before Castle had come here, Gabby or one of his men had had a quarrel with politician Reed and had shot him. Rashly! It would be a job to cover a killing like that. Then Castle had appeared and Gabby’s animal cunning had dictated a way out.
Take away the body of Scully, who could be perfunctorily taken to a far ditch with nobody to care, and substitute the dangerous corpse of the politician. Then swear that it was this man Castle had killed. That was a murder rap he couldn’t beat!
“Look,” he said to the cop. “This is a frame!”
Gabby guffawed and the patrolman sneered a little.
“I killed a man here a few minutes ago. I admit it. It was in self defense. But it wasn’t this man! I killed Scully—you know him—just before he could kill me! Reed must have been drilled by somebody else here and they’re trying to palm it off on me—”
“Nuts,” said the cop. “Come along.”
Castle didn’t blame him. The story sounded thin as hell. But the cop had to believe him, that was all.
“There are two people here who saw the man I shot,” he said crisply. “They saw me shoot him—and saw the man through the doorway. They’ll tell you it was Scully, not Reed.”
He turned to young Gregory.
“Tell him,” he urged the blond youngster. “Who was it I shot? Reed, or Scully?”
Gregory smiled. “It was Reed. I saw it all.”
CASTLE cursed, then shrugged. Gregory had crossed him once; it was to be expected he’d do it again. He turned to the girl. Her word would be enough to put the affair at least in the doubtful class.
“This is Tressa Standish,” he said to the patrolman. “You know of her father, Carson Standish. He’s a big man in New York. His word is good. So is his daughter’s. She saw the shooting. She’ll tell you if the man I shot was a murdering rat about to shoot me—or this man, Reed.”
The cop turned to the girl. His face was still granite hard, but in his eyes was a worm of doubt. Castle saw that doubt with grim satisfaction. Thank God for Tress’s presence!
But Tress wasn’t saying anything. With Castle and the patrolman staring at her, she only sat on the divan with wide, luminous eyes, and avoided their gazes.
“Tell him Tress,” said Castle urgently.
Still she said nothing. For a moment an incredible doubt chilled him. But he threw it off. Impossible. . . .
Tress’s eyes went to Gregory’s sardonic face and then to the cop’s.
“Yes,” she said, voice flat and dead, “I saw it all. I saw him shoot the man. And—it was the one who lies in the hall now.”
Castle’s nostrils went white. He glared at the girl, stared like a caged animal around the room. Four guns lifted again to cover him while the cop put on the handcuffs.
The cop took him to the door. There, he turned and looked at Standish’s daughter, who stared at him with blank eyes.
“Thanks, Tress,” he said evenly.
At the curb outside, with a ring of curious faces around the cop and his prisoner, the cop phoned from the corner box. Send the prowl car to take in a murderer—Lee Castle, charged with killing the politician, James Reed.
It was the end of everything. Lewis would never be tripped up by his Breen evidence—not with himself on trial for murder. He would go to the chair—the cunning switch in corpses ensured that. And Tress Standish would be sucked into the rotten hole whose opening was the Regent. Castle knew that, now. The actions of young Gregory, the look on his face, had confirmed his hunch that the young blood was a gangster born.
A gangster’s moll. Alienated more and more from all that was decent as the law pursued her as well as the rats she consorted with. Going lower and lower in the crook scale as young Gregory tired of her and she was picked up by a lesser rat. At the end—sag-fleshed and blowzy—picked up with body bullet-riddled when somebody thought she had become dangerous!
Castle’s jaw hardened. Tress, infatuated with Lewis’s man, had sworn his life away. But he wouldn’t tolerate that end for her! His own secret love for her had been torn from his heart. But he wouldn’t let that fate descend on the daughter of Carson Standish!
The cop had the box phone receiver in one hand. His other hand was chained to Castle’s right wrist by the cuffs.
“Box at the corner of Eighth and Thirty-Sixth,” he was concluding. “I’ll be waiting.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Break!
HE HUNG up—and Castle struck. His left
fist got the cop under the ear with a sound like that of a cleaver hitting meat. The cop dropped, eyes astonished.
A woman in the little encircling crowd screamed. Two men exclaimed and sprang forward to attack Castle.
Castle dipped and got the cop’s gun from its holster.
“Back everybody!” he rasped. “Keep ten feet clear around me. Any one coming closer gets shot!”
The two men stopped. The screaming woman fainted in the snow. White-faced, with eyes blazing and the patrolman’s gun taut in his hand, Castle was a deadly figure. His flaming eyes rested on the weasel-faced countenance of a youngster who had been jeering him a moment ago.
“You! Come here! Get the handcuff key out of his pocket and unlock this cuff on my wrist.”
The patrolman was moaning and jerking with returning consciousness.
“Quick!” roared Castle. “Or by God—”
The weasel-faced fellow jumped. He put the key in the lock with trembling fingers.
“Out of my way!”
Like a whip, Castle’s voice cracked out as he jumped toward a segment of the awed, frightened, staring ring of people. They fell over each other to get back. Dizzily the cop reached for Castle’s legs, and missed.
Castle fled into the night, down Thirty-Sixth Street. Behind him he heard the cop’s pounding feet, gaining momentum as the man gamely struggled out of the daze of that blow. Other running steps told that men from the crowd were fleeing after him too.
Where could the hare go? Castle’s lips tightened.
The hare was going right back to the spot where the chase had started. He was damn well going to get Tress Standish out of the Regent! Besides, even from a personal-risk attitude, which he wasn’t thinking much about, the move was sound. The last place the police, after him relentlessly from now on, would expect to find him, would be at the Regent.
He was coming close to sprinting each hundred yards in ten seconds as he fled down the street. The men behind were rapidly falling back. He rounded the near corner. There was a restaurant a little ahead. He jerked off his overcoat as he ran toward it. Every overcoat he had was reversible, with an inside entirely different from its outside. Of frequent use in trailing people, those coats were. Thank God this was that way—and that the cop had let him stop at the checkroom on the way out to retrieve it and his hat.
He had a violently checked overcoat over his dinner clothes now. He stopped running at the restaurant door, and walked in, forcing his breathing to evenness.
He sat at the lunch counter, derby on the stool away from the front window, hidden by his body.
“Cup of coffee,” he said. “Hey—wonder what’s the matter outside?”
The shouts of the men following the cop in his supposed wake, streamed past the window. Through that window could be seen a hatless man, face turned away, covered by a plaid overcoat. The man the crowd was chasing had an oxford gray coat and a derby. The last man had gone when the lunch counter proprietor got to the door.
He came back, wiping his hands on his white apron.
“Guess they’re chasing a pick-pocket,” he said, shrugging. “Cup of coffee?”
Castle finished the coffee as quickly as possible without risking notice, and walked out to the street again.
There was a narrow areaway between Gabby Lewis’s dub Regent building and a stinking warehouse building just behind it. A pitch-dark alley led back to the warehouse.
Four minutes later, having walked casually past several people who had seen him hit the cop, but who paid no attention to the checked overcoat, Castle entered that alley.
“OKAY, Gregory, I’ll leave you to your unfinished business.”
The words were followed by a coarse laugh—Gabby Lewis’s laugh—and then steps faded down the third floor corridor to the front stairs.
With their cessation down the stairs, there was a faint rasping noise and the window at the back end of the hall, over the top of the service stairs, opened up. Three feet from that window, across the cracklike areaway, was a window in the warehouse, customarily boarded up, now opened. On the first floor of the warehouse lay an unconscious watchman who had been trustful enough to open the warehouse door a crack when Castle tapped at it and said he was Patrolman Smith, looking around.
Castle crossed from warehouse to Club Regent. He poised an instant on the window-sill, then dropped soundlessly to the stairs four feet below. He went to the door of the room he’d been taken from a few minutes before. . . .
As before, he heard Tress’ voice, a little shrill, a little harsh. And he heard something else. A reckless, sleepy laugh and her words:
“I’m still laughing at the look on his face when I said he’d shot Reed, too. I don’t think he was expecting that, darling.”
“It’s your word that cinched him,” came young Gregory’s reply. “And it’ll be your word that burns him for sure in court, if you’ve got nerve enough to go through with it.”
“Of course I’ll go through with it.” Tress’s voice grew more languorous. “I’d do anything you asked me, if you asked me nice. Was it really you, who—”
Castle’s face was so white it had a greenish tinge. But he put out his hand for the door-knob. He had said he was going to get Tress Standish out of here. He had risked much to get back to this room. Now he was going through with it. He was going to deliver her to Carson Standish if he had to give her a sock on the jaw.
His fist tingled, in fact, to give her the sock.
He burst into the room as he had before. But this time the man and the girl were not at the table. They sat on the leather divan, with Tress in the man’s arms.
She bit her lips on a scream. Gregory struggled upright. Castle wasted no words. He leaped, and Gregory went down with a fractured skull.
“Come here, damn you,” Castle grated to Tress.
Like one hypnotized, her eyes wide, the girl got up and came toward him. “We’re getting out of here. Are you going of your own accord, or—” His fist drew back.
“How can we get out?”
“Open window at the rear of the hall. Warehouse across from it. Down through warehouse—”
But then there was a harsh shout from outside the room.
“What’s that window doing open? Who—Hey! Everybody—up here!”
Cursing through his teeth, Castle stuck his head out the door. He ducked back as four slugs from an automatic slammed within an inch of the portal, then leaped out again with the cop’s gun blazing.
The man who had shot fell at the head of the back stairs with a bullet in his abdomen. Castle tugged at Tress.
“For God’s sake, get out of that window! Quick! I’ll hold ’em off here.”
He turned his back to her as racing steps pounded on the front stairs. Then, as he heard no sound behind him, he jerked over his shoulder: “Run, damn it! There won’t be much time—”
A head appeared over the front steps. It popped down as Castle blazed at it. A hand with a gun in it replaced the head, fired blindly. There was a scream as Castle shattered that hand. But there weren’t too many shots in the patrolman’s gun, and the bullets in Castle’s pocket wouldn’t fit it.
Still there was no sound of high heels clicking from behind him. Castle whirled.
Tress stared at him, desperate but calm.
“For the love of God—”
“I’m not going. I’m going to stay.”
Castle stared with open mouth, then gasped as something like an enormous hot needle pierced the biceps of his left arm. They’d got him from the front stairs. He pivoted, sent two slugs at the man who had raised above the steps, saw a red spot appear like an instantaneous rash in the man’s forehead.
“Will you get out of here?” he yelled.
But now there were steps on the back stairs too. And groaning with impotent rage, he did the only thing he could do: jumped back into the room where Gregory lay, dragging the girl with him.
He slammed and locked the door.
“God, Tress!
Why didn’t you—”
“I told you.” Tress was still calm, with the calmness of an intelligent person who has given up hope. “I’m staying with you. If you die, I want to die too.”
CASTLE blinked. Even in face of galloping death, this arrested him.
“I’m pretty dumb, I guess,” he said bitterly. “I only heard you laugh when you spoke of swearing my life away, and heard you say you’d repeat it in court. I only saw you in the arms of that—that rat on the floor. It doesn’t match your idea of sticking with me now.”
“Sure I said that,” Tress retorted. “And I was in his arms.”
“Well—”
“When you asked me to tell the cop I saw you shoot another man—Lewis’s men behind you had their guns on both you and the policeman. You couldn’t see that, not having eyes in the back of your head. But I could. And their faces told me they’d shoot if. I said the wrong word. So I said what they wanted, and saved two lives. Afterward—well, I acted a part with George Gregory to try to find out who really did kill Reed. I wanted to save you, after being forced to betray you. . . .”
Castle stared, ignoring the shouts in the corridor and the banging at the door.
“Boloney!”
Tress nodded at the door, still composed with a desperate calm.
“We’re going to die in here, Lee. I wouldn’t lie—nobody would—at a time like this.”
“You won’t die,” rasped Castle. “I will, but not you. Not with Gregory to talk for you.”
“Yes, I’m going to die too. I’d rather . . . . than go through what this gang will hold me for after . . . . all this. Oh, I know! I was silly and reckless when I started going around with George Gregory because I thought it might make you jealous. But I’m not so silly any more. “I’ve . . . had a peep at some grim facts.”
There were three shots through the door. Lee Castle hurled himself and Tress aside, out of the line. The shots had been directed at the lock, which was half out. He sent two shots roaring in return.
“Something else to tell you, Lee,” came Tress’s voice, in the lull. “I’ve been ready to murder you for three years—because I’ve been so crazy about you and you insisted on treating me like a child. But I wouldn’t have gone through with . . . anything . . . ever, with another man. It was you, really, or nobody.”