Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  And that was what he did not want. The desire to redeem himself was too strong, and he felt he could be vindicated by nothing less than the single-handed capture of the killer. For that reason, he remained silent, stubbornly fighting off his weariness—he had not slept—when he returned, again in civilian clothes, to the rented room that night.

  Once more, he set himself before the thin slit of the partly open door. Again, he set his eyes vigilantly upon the door across the hall. When Lippy came, he would undoubtedly come at night and that was why Dan dared not sleep; he wanted to be there to greet him.

  Nor would the capture be difficult; Dan had it all planned out. When Lippy rapped for admission, Dan would simply step out, gun in hand, and the killer would have to surrender. Yes, it would be done just as simply as that.

  Already, he thought, he could see the smile on the inspector’s face when that official heard of Lippy’s arrest. It seemed to Dan that he could even hear the happiness in the inspector’s voice when he complimented—

  With a start, Dan woke up! He realized instantly that he had been dreaming and he saw by his watch that it was midnight, and four precious hours had passed. Even while he was wondering if Lippy had already come, Dan was condemning himself for his weakness, for his inexcusable betrayal of the trust he had put in himself.

  He tiptoed across the hall and listened at the door. He heard a small voice—Eve Porter’s. Then he heard a heavier voice—a consciously subdued voice—and instinctively he knew that was Lippy’s.

  Dan returned to his room. Because of his lapse, the capture, which should have been so simple, had been made difficult. With a gun in his hand, and a chance to shoot from behind a locked door, Lippy wouldn’t surrender at a command. He would fight as long as his bullets lasted—and that might mean death to one or more of his would-be captors.

  Dan could only blame himself. Because of his egotistical selfishness, one, or more, of his fellow officers might have to die. And it was for that reason that he now dared not notify headquarters of Lippy’s whereabouts. Come what might, this was a situation he had to handle himself.

  It would be difficult, perhaps impossible. Nevertheless, he had to try. At worst, he would stop some of Lippy’s bullets and, Dan berated himself, that was just about what he deserved.

  He tensed, reached for his gun, as Eve Porter’s door opened cautiously. He watched, as she closed it carefully; heard Lippy turn the key in the lock from inside as she scurried, in a kimono and slippers and with a towel over her shoulder, along the corridor to the bath.

  Lippy Layden, his dark face haggard and unshaven, sat behind drawn blinds and glowered at the locked door like a hunted animal. He hated this shabby room, he hated the dingy hotel, he hated the cops, he hated everyone!

  While he hated the world, Lippy felt sorry for himself. He felt sorry for himself because he was a hunted thing—because he knew, sooner or later, he would have to die. He told himself in resentful self-pity that he had no friends left at all, no friends but his guns—the two .45s which lay, ready for use, upon the table before him.

  His irately brooding eyes softened as he thought of Eve Porter. She was everything to him now; in the blackness of his despair, he realized that she was the one thing in the world of which he could think without snapping his long-strained last thread of sanity.

  What was keeping her so long? She had gone to the bath more than half an hour before, promising to make a quick return. In that time, he told himself, he could have taken a dozen baths.

  Impatiently he prowled about the room. Like a caged creature, he strode furiously up and down. There was something wrong. Where was she?—he demanded with insane anxiety.

  He picked up a gun. He listened at the door. He turned the key—softly, he hoped. He would take a quick look along the corridor. The bathroom door would be locked, and that would reassure him; he would know that she was still in there.

  He looked, then shut the door swiftly. The bathroom door had been wide open—but Eve had not been in sight. She had left the bathroom—she had not returned—she had gone somewhere!

  Where had she gone?

  He had to know. He had to find her. He had to call her, do anything, to bring her to his side. He couldn’t stand it! He had to—to do something! Again, swiftly, he opened the door. He listened.

  Something was happening—something was happening so very quietly that it was suspicious. Something was going on—somewhere! Something was going on that he was not supposed to hear.

  A giggle! A girl’s soft laugh! A familiar tone! And it was coming through that partly open door on the other side of the hall.

  It was Eve—in that room across the hallway! She was laughing, giggling, protesting. There was no mistake about it for he remembered how she had laughed and giggled and protested in the days when he had first made love to her.

  She was laughing and giggling that way now, he thought, as he moved stealthily across the hallway; she was laughing, giggling, and protesting girlishly—subduedly—at the love-making of some other man. She had lost no time! He had not yet been captured, he had not yet stopped cop lead—and already she had picked another lover. Upon the pretext of taking a bath, she had hurried to another’s arms.

  Lippy glared his hatred through the thin crack. It was dark inside—pitch black—but his eyes were not needed, his ears told enough. And it was the subdued, tightly restrained tone of the girl’s voice which revealed the most. She was trying to smother the giggles, not wanting them overheard.

  Lippy kicked the door wide and leaped inside. As he entered, there was a scream—and he whirled toward that sound. And then his swiftly moving legs struck something, and he fell headlong!

  The lights snapped on.

  On the bed lay Eve—bound, with torn bedsheets, hand and foot. Almost upon him, high above him, weapon in hand, stood a heavy, broad-shouldered giant who had “cop” written all over him. And, on the floor, where he had landed after tripping over a deliberately-placed chair, Lippy Layden found himself, helplessly, at least six feet from the weapon which his fall had driven from his hands.

  The cop picked up the dropped gun, then snapped handcuffs on Lippy’s wrists.

  From the bed, Eve sobbed: “Lippy, I tried not to let you hear—I was afraid you would come—but he tickled me so much, I couldn’t help it.”

  Inspector Corbett chuckled.

  “That must have been a ticklish situation,” he quipped, “but I can’t understand why, after you had put your hand over her mouth and dragged her into the room, she didn’t yell to warn him when you left her mouth free after tying her up.”

  “Ironically,” Dan explained, “she tried to keep him from doing the same foolish thing she made me do when her screams brought me running to her help just before that raid. She knew I was armed and knew I would be ready for him if he came rushing through the door. I would have had the advantage; that’s why she tried to keep quiet.”

  “And that probably fooled Lippy most.” The inspector nodded understandingly. “He must have thought she was trying to restrain herself because she was two-timing.”

  “Not knowing what the set-up was,” Dan guessed, “she wanted him to stay where he was—behind a locked door; she did know he’d be so worried about her that he would just have to come out.”

  “Yes,” said the inspector, “he was worried about her so he had to come out. Just as in your case, it was the human thing for him to do.”

  THE SECONDHAND MURDERS

  Ben Conlon

  Red Carroll climbed in beside Dan Garrity, who was at the wheel of the police car.

  “O.K., Dan. Hit it,” Carroll said.

  Garrity threw the car in gear, shot it up the street, turned into Seventh Avenue. At Fourteenth Street he was doing sixty. There was a skim of ice on the pavement, and it would be just like Garrity, the dumb cluck, to pile them up, Carroll decided. Garrity had nothing to worry about, probably would always be in harness, always slipping by the easy way. A game guy, though, a square guy
; maybe a lucky guy, at that.

  For Red Carroll was almost wishing that he were back in harness himself. And he might be, he thought with a sour little grin, if he didn’t break this new one. He had made no progress on the homicide end of the West Side Traders’ case; none at all. He had been prowling the Chelsea and Greenwich Village sections for weeks, trying to turn up some clue to the identity of the mob that had stuck up the West Side Traders’ Bank, bumped a guard, and vanished with forty thousand dollars—mostly in new thousand-dollar bills.

  The serial numbers of the currency were known, and the detectives working on the case occasionally got hold of one of the smaller bills that popped up somewhere in the five boroughs, or in Jersey, but so far there was absolutely no tie-up. Must have been a well-organized, well-led mob to have tackled as big a job as that and—

  Carroll’s hat blew off as Garrity turned west and hurtled the car into the face of a razor-blade wind tearing in from the North River. Only a quick left-hand stab kept the hat from going into the street. Carroll’s peculiar-colored hair, between apricot and butterscotch, writhed like a wind-blown torch.

  Brakes squealed as Garrity skidded up to the curb in front of a shabby four-story house.

  “This must be the jernt,” Garrity said. “One the crowd’s in front of, I guess.”

  Carroll’s nimble blue-gray eyes gleamed cynically. “Just probably, Garrity,” he conceded. “Just probably.”

  He got out of the car. His quick glance raked the dingy structure—fire escapes in front, some windows closed, some open. It was an old railroad-flat tenement converted into a litter of cheap furnished rooms and apartments occupied by a strange and ever-shifting array of tenants. No references, moral or financial, demanded in there; prompt payment of rent was the sole requisite.

  Reynolds, homicide chief, had told Carroll that the dead man had been slugged and knifed—probably, Carroll thought, had bought into a drunken fight and been socked by some transient thug who had lammed it at once, some thug who didn’t even have a police record here. Just the kind of case Reynolds would expect you to clear up in no time; and just the kind that would be hard to crack. No shooting. No ballistics to help out. No pattern to it. Like playing checkers with Garrity in the station house—you used your brains and maneuvered Garrity into moves he ought to make, then Garrity would pull a dumb, entirely illogical move that threw out your whole game.

  Red walked up the crumbling steps, nodded to the officer there. The officer was busy keeping a good-sized crowd away, though the hour was 7 a.m. and the air was decidedly, chilly. Red saw Jim Kelsey standing halfway down the ground-floor hallway. At Kelsey’s feet was a body. Carroll looked down at it.

  The dead man was young, probably in his late twenties. Carroll had seen things like this many times. And yet not like this. For the dead man had no suit on. He had underwear, socks, shoes, a shirt and collar and tie—and a hat; a light-colored fedora snap-brim with a cocky little feather in the band. But no coat; no vest; no trousers.

  Kelsey had little to tell. Like Garrity, he was a good-looking young cop who would never get out of harness and, like Garrity, he would miss a great many headaches as he moped peacefully through life.

  “I was on my post about a block away,” Kelsey said, “when the old babe that runs this place comes screamin’ down the street and tells me she just stumbled over a dead man in the hallway. I came here on the double, found him like she said. He was dead. So I phoned the skipper. The old babe’s in that room now”—he pointed—“with the folks that room here. She can give you the dope, I guess.”

  Kelsey seemed to shift the whole weight over with that information.

  “Stay here and guard the body,” Carroll ordered. “The skipper and the M.E. and the fingerprint men’ll be along right away.”

  He walked into the room that Kelsey had indicated—a sort of sitting room.

  A woman, scrawny, wrinkle-necked, with scraggly gray hair, was sitting on a sofa with two girls, one of them fairly good-looking. A pair of men sat facing them on the bench of an old-fashioned upright piano. Five other men lounged around in chairs. They had been talking, obviously, but they closed up as Carroll entered.

  There was no need for telling who he was; folks in this section knew a detective when they saw one.

  The gray-haired landlady—a Mrs. Hanely—told the story she had told Kelsey. She occupied a bedroom on the west side of the ground-floor hallway. Her kitchen was on the east side of the hallway. It was just after she had gotten up and put on kimono, dressing gown, and slippers that she started across the hall, tripped over the dead man.

  “Who was he?” Carroll asked.

  “His name was Valdez,” Mrs. Hanely answered. “He’d lived here for some time past—almost seven months.”

  Carroll nodded. Seven months was quite a period for anybody to live in a semitransient dump like this.

  “And are all the folks who live here assembled in this room now?”

  “Well, all but one—a Mr. Adams, that stays out all night once in a while. The policeman wanted me to round everybody up, he said. So I did, except for this Mr. Adams, of course.”

  Carroll was starting another question when the door opened and Captain Reynolds, homicide chief, came in with Lieutenant Roberts. Reynolds was a thin man, sharp, irritable, seemingly made out of whipcord and rawhide and shrapnel and steel scrapings. He had a clipped, speckled mustache that made his hard mouth look harder, eyes the color of gun metal.

  “Well, who killed him, Carroll?” Reynolds snapped.

  “I was just getting started on the questions, captain,” Red said.

  Reynolds shook his head in a mock gesture of hopelessness. A good sign when Reynolds did that. It was a form of flippancy—a sign that he was in fairly good humor, a sign that he regarded this case as just a work-out.

  “Don’t quite know what I’ll do with you, Red,” he said.

  “You might sue me, captain,” Red risked.

  Reynolds came near to a smile; then he proceeded to take over the questioning—browbeating, cross-examining like a district attorney. At the end of five minutes, Mrs. Hanely was in tears.

  “All I know is what I’ve told you already,” she repeated in a hysterical undertone.

  Reynolds swung to a dark-haired young fellow who sat on the piano bench. “You’re a Spaniard, too, ain’t you? Just like the man who was murdered?”

  “Cuban. Valdez, he also Cuban,” the man answered.

  Reynolds glared at him. “Well, same thing.”

  “Eet ees not thee same theeng,” the young man insisted. “Spaniard born een Spain. Cuban born een Cuba.”

  The remark did not endear him to Reynolds. “You knew him, didn’t you?” the captain asked accusingly. “Had a fight over a girl with him, didn’t you?”

  “Why you say that?” the Cuban wanted to know. “Valdez like thee girls, si. Me, I like thee girls, too. But we ‘ave thee deeferent girls. We nevair fight. We nevair even—”

  “There’s Mr. Adams now!” Mrs. Hanely broke in. She pointed out the window. Her voice was excited, strident. “And he’s got the same—”

  She put her hand to her mouth.

  Reynolds glowered at her. “He’s got—what?”

  The woman did not answer, but the Cuban who had been in a verbal tussle with Reynolds jumped up and ran to the window.

  “That suit he wear!” the Cuban exclaimed. “That suit belong to my friend Valdez! Eet ees thee same one—thee blue suit with thee stripe!”

  One of the other men in the room nodded emphatically. “No doubt about it!” he agreed. “I seen Valdez goin’ out wearin’ that suit about nine last night! And by the way,” he added, “I never seen this guy Adams in a suit like this before. I’ve run into him lots o’ times in the halls, and he always wore brown. I remember that definitely, and:—”

  Reynolds was out through the doorway like a college athlete and as the newcomer entered the hallway had him by the arm. He yanked him into the sitting room.
/>   “Wh-what’s this?” Adams demanded.

  “You know what it is!” Reynolds shot back. “You just liked the suit Valdez had, so you bumped him and took it, huh?”

  “Killed Valdez?” the young fellow gasped. “I heard those folks outside saying someone’s been killed, but—”

  “But you wouldn’t know who it was, huh?” Reynolds cut in. “Just an honest lad that wouldn’t harm a soul, that it?”

  Adams smiled, a little hopelessly. “Well, as a matter of fact, that’s just about it.”

  While Reynolds browbeat and frisked him, Red Carroll studied the newcomer. Slender, reasonably tall, well groomed, wore clothes well. Might be a good dancer. Crispy, light hair, mild eyes. Didn’t look like a killer, which was no sign, these days. They used to look like thugs, now they had slicked-back hair and maybe got mud packs and manicures.

  “If I’d killed Valdez, if I’d taken his suit,” Adams spoke up, “would I come back here now, and in his suit, too?”

  “You might,” Reynolds snapped-. “Where you been all night?”

  “Been in Yonkers,” was the reply, “My wife has a job in a bank there, has a little apartment there. I don’t want her to live in a . . . a place like this and face that trip every day. But I got a cheap room here, because it’s close to my work. I left her place early this morning, wanted to get back here to shave and brush up some before going to the store. I tell you I have an air-tight alibi.”

  “Have, huh?” Reynolds taunted.

  “Couldn’t fix an alibi with the wife, sneak: back here and kill Valdez, then do a Houdini and come back here now, innocent-looking, could you? What work you talking about? What store?”

  “The Grand Outlet Store, over on Sixth Avenue. I sell furniture. And, boss, I wish you’d let me brush up and get to work.”