by Jerry eBooks
“What could I do?” Boswell excused himself. “When Dr. Lowery telephoned me that Galt had been taken to the prison hospital, you were out on the coast, remember, and Bill Haynes was tied up with that big drug theft. I couldn’t pass up a chance to wipe out a five-hundred-thousand-dollar loss for the company, could I?”
“What was the hurry? You could have waited—”
“I thought Galt might be easier to inveigle into talking before he got over the first shock of realizing he was going to die in prison. After Harris was up there, it was inadvisable to replace him with a more experienced operative. But I didn’t get you here at six thirty in the morning to discuss my mistakes. We still have our duty to the company, John. To the stockholders. We’re not licked yet. If we act shrewdly, we may still be able to recover the Ramsdell jewels. Shrewdly and quickly.”
A pulse throbbed in the detective’s temple. “You mean—”
“I mean that it is obvious this Fesden overheard Galt reveal the hiding place to Bert Harris, and killed the latter to silence him, since otherwise the murder would be reasonless. Beside our man, the escaped convict has killed two others and so there is no possibility that we could induce the authorities, were he to be apprehended by the police, to consent to an amelioration of his sentence in exchange for restitution of the Ramsdell loot. But we have certain contacts with the underworld, as you know better than I, that might enable us to beat the police to Fesden, and if we can reach him—” He spread his pudgy hands wide.
“We can make a dicker with him,” Porter filled in the hiatus, his mouth thin and color-drained. “If he’ll turn over the Ramsdell loot, we’ll help him get away. Is that what you’re getting at?”
“Of course not.” Boswell’s fat-drowned little eyes were shocked. “I wouldn’t dream of making the company accessory after the fact to multiple murders. I simply have in mind that we might persuade Fesden that it is to his best interest to cooperate with us. With fifty thousand dollars, say, at his disposal he would be able to retain an outstanding attorney, employ alienists, perhaps, to substantiate an insanity defense. Now do you understand?”
“I understand,” John Porter responded, his voice lower even than before, his tone milder, “that you’re so putrid you stink. That swell lad isn’t cold yet, up there on a slab in the Lornmere morgue, and you’re hot to strike a bargain with the man who caved in his skull. I’ve put over many a lousy deal for you, but this one’s beyond my limit.”
“My dear John,” Boswell protested. “How could you do me such an injustice after all the years we’ve worked so closely together? You are the last man I would have suspected not to comprehend that it is precisely because of my great grief for Bertram Harris that I am so anxious to recover those jewels. He gave his life for them, John, like a soldier on the field of battle. It is incumbent on us, the living, to succeed where he has so nobly failed, to see to it that he has not made the supreme sacrifice in vain. Merely executing Fesden will not atone for Bertram’s death. We—”
“You’re a buzzard,” Porter broke in, “bloated fat on offal a self-respecting rat would stick up his nose at. You don’t mean a word of what you’re saying. But you happen to be right, damn you. Bert knew he might get a knife in his back, any minute, if he gave himself away, but he stuck to his job. He’d want it finished, and I’m going to finish it for him. Not for you or your blasted company, but for Bert Harris. Not your way, Boswell, but mine.”
At about three o’clock that same day, Wolf Fesden was climbing a long green hill, his pulses hammering. A little before noon, he had dropped off the train from Ashley at Millville, had tramped the final seven miles toward Sea City, along back roads, through fields. He was tired, dead beat, and not only because of the long, arduous walk. Even though he had kept telling himself that, disguised as he was and at this distance from Lornmere, no one could possibly suspect him, every yard he had progressed, every inch, had been a matter of taut nerves, of wary watchfulness.
This was the last hill. When he got to the top of it, he would look down on Frog Creek. On the railroad bridge at the base of whose abutment Evar Galt had cached a fortune four years ago.
He wouldn’t be able to dig it up right away, of course. Walking south as he was, the railroad skirted this narrow hill to his left. To his right ran Harding Boulevard, whose bridge, he recalled, crossed Frog Creek less than a hundred feet west of the railroad trestle. Between was flat land, nothing to hide him. He’d have to wait till dark. But he’d at least take a look now. He had to. Hadn’t he gone through four years of hell just to find out where to look?
He came to the brow of the hill, pushed aside a bush that obscured his view. Then his breath caught in his throat! A vein swelled in his temple, swelled till it was about to burst.
The yellow of freshly dug earth gashed the green banks below him. A steam shovel hissed and swung its crane like some gargantuan, prehistoric monster. Men, laborers, swarmed on the banks of Frog Creek just below him, their backs rising and falling, their spades and pick-axes flashing in the sun!
Digging! A hundred men were digging, down there! They couldn’t possibly miss—
Abruptly, Wolf Fesden breathed again. They weren’t digging anywhere near the north abutment of the railroad trestle. The nearest of them with a full seventy feet away from it.
He saw, now, a little to the right of where they worked, a temporary wooden structure over which the stream of motor traffic surged. What was being built there was a new bridge for the highway. The excavation was close, too damned close, to Galt’s cache, but it was far enough away for safety.
Wolf Fesden’s lean jaws opened in his silent laugh. This was a break, a real break. He started moving again, climbing down to that beehive of activity. He didn’t have to skulk around in the bushes now till night. He could go down there, sit calmly on the creek bank overlooking the excavation. The laborers would think him some poor fellow out of work, watching and envying them. The cops patrolling the highway, scanning every car and truck for the prisoner escaped from Lornmere, would figure him, if they noticed him at all, as a subengineer or city inspector overseeing the construction.
Dusk lay gray against the big windows of J. Latham Boswell’s office, on the nineteenth floor of the Seaview Building in downtown Sea City. John Porter, bluish pouches under his eyes, his face deeply lined with weariness, dropped the telephone instrument into its cradle, said: “That’s that. The police haven’t a trace of Fesden.”
Boswell spread his pudgy hands wide. “We’re through, then. The fellow is five hundred miles away from here and getting farther all the time.”
“No.” Porter’s lips hardly moved as he spoke. “He’s somewhere in Sea City, or close by.”
“How do you arrive at that conclusion?”
“Very simply.” The puckered scar on the detective’s brow seemed, to pulse with a life of its own. “Galt didn’t have time to get very far with the jewels before his arrest, so Fesden had to come back here to get them. Even if he had nerve to come right into town by train, he couldn’t have reached here before noon. Say they were in some spot he could get at without waiting for dark, we still have to allow him another hour to collect them. By that time I’d flown up to Lornmere, spotted the dug-in footmarks around that stone in the woods where the keeper was killed, unearthed the tin box under the boulder and discovered the brown wig hairs stuck in the mold on the under side of the box lid.”
“And instructions had gone out,” Boswell broke in, “over the police teletypes, for the searchers to stop every man of approximately Fesden’s height, in cars or truck or on trains within reaching distance of Lornmere, and make certain he isn’t wearing a wig. I see what you mean, John. If Fesden is on the move, he would have been picked up by now. He is hiding somewhere in Sea City till the hue and cry dies down.”
“And I’m going to find him before the night is over.” John Porter wheeled away from his superior’s desk, pounded stiff-legged toward the office door. “I’m going to find and bring the R
amsdell jewels back here and cram them down your fat throat, and that’s going to cost you fifty thousand dollars, but Fesden doesn’t get a cent of it. What Wolf Fesden gets,” he flung over his shoulder from the doorway, “my dear boss, is the hot squat.”
Dusk settled down into the excavation above which Wolf Fesden sat. The steam shovel emitted a long blast from its whistle and the laborers started to stack their shovels. A muscle twitched in Fesden’s cheek, but he didn’t stir from the position he’d assumed three hours ago.
Three interminable hours. Fesden laughed silently, thinking how the whole State had been looking for him and here he’d been all the time, hiding safely right out in the open. Suddenly his jaws closed with a click. What was this? A big bus had stopped on the road, just where the new cut branched off, and was disgorging men in overalls, in flannel shirts and corduroy trousers like his, dozen of men carrying lunch boxes. They were pouring down into the cut, were meeting the stream of laborers coming up out of it. Lights came on, blazing big lights. Strung on poles that he had not noticed before, they laid their brilliance on Frog Creek’s greasy surface, sent their brightness all the way to the abutment of the railroad bridge!
What was going on here? He had to know. He had to know right away. He leaped erect, angled across the grass, grabbed the arm of a swarthy, unshaven Italian.
“What’s the idea?” Fesden demanded hoarsely. “What are those lights for?”
“Wachyoo t’ink? Dissa breedge, she gotta be feenish’ quick before get col’, concrete freeze. We worka t’ree shift, alia day, alia night.”
All night! “How long?” All night it would be bright as day around that abutment. “How long before it’s finished?” How long before he could dig up the jewels?
The laborer shrugged. “Maybe wan week, maybe two. I don’ch know.” He wrenched away from Fesden.
One week. Maybe two. Not long, after four years. But too long, terribly too long, when you’re wanted by the cops of a whole State, of a whole country!
When you’re wanted for murder!
The Italian threw a frightened glance over his shoulder at the tall man standing on top of the cut bank, standing motionless and staring after him. “I t’ink,” he muttered, “I t’ink dat feller, he got the evil eye.”
IV.
Wolf Fesden sat on a rickety chair, powerful hands fisted on knees, and stared at a sagging, dirty-sheeted bed, stared at broken-plastered walls that were so close together they choked him.
The room was no bigger than a cell at Lornmere and the smell of it was worse. A black shade was down over the window, day and night. The unshaded bulb that hung from the ceiling on a cord crusted with flyspecks was never out. The door was so thin it didn’t stop sounds from the hall, whenever there were any, and its paint was raddled with cracks. It was kept locked always. All color except that of dirt had long ago faded out of the carpet and it was full of holes. It was strewn with newspapers that Fesden had crumpled angrily into balls, and smoothed out, and crumpled again angrily when even a second reading and a third had failed to reward him with the item he had to find.
The item that would tell him the new highway bridge over Frog Creek was finished at last. That the lights were out and the laborers gone.
His name was in a couple of those papers, his rogues’-gallery picture, under it a caption beginning, “Five Thousand Dollars Reward.” Fesden’s upper lip snarled away from his teeth, thinking of that. If Gimpy Morgan—But no. Gimpy wouldn’t turn him in for five grand, or for a hell of a lot more than that. The underworld has its own ways of handling a hide-out keeper who double-crossed one of his customers even if there wasn’t altogether too much money in this business for him to kill it for the sake of any thinkable reward.
Look at what Fesden was paying Gimpy. Twenty-five dollars a day. Just for this lousy room, and the crummy grub the Dummy brought three times a day. He couldn’t even get a bottle of liquor. A soused lamster might get noisy, and this house was a place of silence. Of whispers.
“Here’s the rules,” the one-legged hide-out keeper had told Fesden that first night, “and if you don’t do what they say, you get thrown out of here, pronto. You check any heater or shiv you got with me. You stick in your room except when you got to go to the bathroom. When you got to do that, you first knock twice on your door, to make sure there ain’t nobody else in the hall, and you knock once when you get back, and you don’t go out in the hall if you hear anyone else give the two knocks till you hear the one knock that says all’s clear. You don’t want nobody to see you and nobody wants you to see them.
“You don’t drink and you don’t start no rumpus. When you get ready to go, you let me know and I’ll get you out a way no cop can pick you up. Meantime, you hand me twenty-five bucks every morning, when I bring your breakfast.” He’d only brought Fesden breakfast the first morning, after that the Dummy had started coming. “Anything else,” Gimpy Morgan had finished laying down the law of the hide-out, “is extra.”
Extra was right. Fifty cents for the Morning Chronicle. Fifty cents for the Evening Star. Twenty-six dollars a day Fesden had been paying out for eight days now. Good thing he’d put a big enough wad in the tin box he’d buried under the boulder in the thicket outside Lornmere, four years ago. He had enough to stay here a month, if he had to.
If he had to stay here a month, he’d go nuts. Cripes! A month in here was worse than a year in Lornmere. You had guys to talk to, up there at Lornmere. You had things to do. You didn’t just sit alone in a smelly little room. You didn’t hear footfalls outside your door and go to the door and listen to them, listen to the sounds of men you wanted to talk to and didn’t dare, knowing that even if you took a chance on it they wouldn’t dare talk to you.
Up at Lornmere you scoffed in a big mess hall with two thousand other guys. You didn’t eat greasy chow off a rusty tray. You weren’t alone all day and all night. You didn’t wait all day for the Dummy to bring you your tray, not because you wanted the food on it, but because you would see a human face for a few minutes, even if it was a face with a mouth that hung open, drooling, a dirty face with no sense in it at all, an idiot face with empty gray eyes and dirt-crusted, never-combed black hair that didn’t quite hide the puckered scar on its forehead.
Up at Lornmere you didn’t snatch the morning paper out of hands with black-edged fingernails and search furiously through it and not find what you’re looking for, and then start waiting endlessly for the Dummy to come back with the evening paper. You didn’t pace up and down, up and down your cell at Lornmere, your heels catching in the holes in the carpet, or sit like this on a rickety chair and stare at walls so close they choke you. You didn’t listen, hour after hour, for the Dummy’s shamble along the hall—
There it was!
Fesden jumped up and got to the door in a single long stride. He unlocked it and pulled it open, and the Dummy shuffled in, bent and dirty-skinned and vacuous-eyed, his idiot smile wet with saliva. Fesden slammed the door shut and grabbed the Star, his hands trembling as he spread it on the bed and leafed it over, page by page, his eyes burning as they read a headline and jumped to the next one.
The Dummy shambled on across the room, and put the tray on the paintless table against the wall next to the black-shaded window. He made little clucking noises with his useless tongue while he pawed paper napkins off the thick dishes.
Wolf Fesden’s mouth was dry, suddenly. He snatched the rustling sheet up so the light would be better on it, and read the item over again, the two short paragraphs at the top of Page 11:
BRIDGE FINISHED IN RECORD TIME
Stone & Lambert, contractors for the new bridge that will carry Harding Boulevard over Frog Creek, announced today that the job had been completed six days before the deadline set by the highway commission. All that remains is the installation of the lighting system by the municipal electric department.
Formal opening of the new facility will be delayed till this is completed, but by tonight all of the contractor’s equ
ipment will have been removed and the site cleared—
A dish rattled and Fesden looked over the top of the newspaper sheet.
The Dummy was looking at the back of the newspaper and in the instant their eyes met, the gray ones weren’t empty!
The veil of vacuity dropped over them at once and they slid away. The Dummy started scuttling toward the door. He seemed to be moving quicker than he ever did before. He seemed to be in an awful hurry.
Of course he was! He’d seen what page of the paper Fesden had been reading. He’d seen where the item was that had got him so excited. He was in a hurry to go point it out, in another paper just like this, to Gimpy Morgan. Gimpy Morgan had figured out why Fesden paid a buck day for newspapers!
“Here you,” Fesden yelled, and started after the Dummy, his long arm reaching for him. The Dummy’s toe caught in a hole in the rug and it-tripped him, and he squealed like a stepped-on pup as he went down.
He hit the floor and rolled, and Wolf Fesden was atop him, knee in his chest pinning him down.
“What’s the hurry?” Fesden demanded, through tight lips. “What’s your blasted hurry?” The Dummy made little mewling noises, his dirtingrained hands scrabbling to reach Fesden’s knee and to push it away. “What—”
The word caught in Fesden’s throat. The Dummy’s scraping fingers had torn his shirt and through the rent there was gleam of metal, gleam of a silvery badge pinned to the Dummy’s undershirt. “Private Detective,” Fesden read, embossed on the metal. And the end of a half circle of embossed letters, “—ance Co.”