by Jerry eBooks
“Yep, I guess it is,” Red agreed. Old Tim Devery, who had pounded a West Side beat for years, had been shot dead while breaking up a heist in an Eighth Avenue bar.
Red let McQuade do the talking—and McQuade did. The cafe proprietor sniffed intolerantly. “Huh!
A manicure she says she is. A manicure!” The way he said it indicated that she might be a combination of a hammer murderess, an incendiary, and the worst woman in Paris. “Dyed the hair av her to the color av that.” He pointed a spatulate finger at the glass of yellow whiskey. “And now she’s changed her name to . . . to Greta de Vere!” McQuade put a hand on his broad hip. “Greta de Vere! She’s turned out a phony all the way through. An’ she from wan av the best families on the West Side. Huh! She’s got a little place around the corner—”
“I wanted to see her a minute,” Red cut in.
He got the address of the apartment house the girl lived in, scrunched out his cigarette, left McQuade to his indignation. The heat was on for Punk Harder, and he might possibly get some unconscious tip-off from the girl friend.
He found the place, smiled a bit oddly at the name plate—Greta de Vere—rang the bell, and waited. There was no response. He rang again, holding the button down for a full half minute. But the buzzer failed, to click. Yet the hour was early for Greta de Vere—nee Katie Devery—to be up.
A peremptory ring on another bell brought the janitor out, and a glance at Carroll’s badge roweled him into action.
The janitor got the apartment door open. “That’s all,” Carroll told him, and with drawn gun swung in the door. After one glance at the inside of the disordered room he slipped into it and closed the door softly behind him. Even the eyes of Carroll reflected horror at the sight of the girl who lay crumpled on the soiled sheets of the studio bed.
The girl’s face was badly disfigured. Her body, from which most of the clothes had been torn, was a mass of livid bruises.
“I’ll say it’s a good thing,” Carroll muttered, “that her old man’s not alive!”
Rather tenderly, he picked up a blackened arm and felt for a pulse. No throb within that body. Dead.
Red Carroll’s eyes quested about the room, noted the cheap overturned furniture, the squalidness that lay beneath a thin and rather smart-Aleck bohemian veneer, and then fastened on something that had been tossed carelessly into one corner of the room. With an almost hawklike speed he swooped down on the remains of a blue suit with white pencil stripes—a suit that had been cut into many pieces.
There was a telephone on a little stand—a taboret that somehow had remained upright during the fury of the battle that had taken place in the room. Carroll pounced on it, got headquarters. He felt almost silly reporting the third death. He was glad Captain Reynolds was not back yet, and finished up with: “Don’t let Adams—the guy with the pencil-stripe suit—get away. We’ll need him. But we’ve just got to get Harter.”
“You’ve got Harter right now, wise guy,” the voice behind him said, as Carroll cradled the phone. “So what? What you doin’ with him? What? Huh?”
Carroll stood still. It was the best thing—the only thing—to do; against the back of his neck he felt the cold muzzle of a gun. Inwardly he cursed himself for ever turning his back to that outside door.
A hand wrenched his Police Positive from his holster. “Turn around, copper, and see what you’re goin’ to get,” Punk Harder ordered. “You’re goin’ to get what any cop gets that tries to take me in.”
Carroll turned around. With a fair simulation of placid concern, he regarded the swarthy little heel who was holding a gun on him.
“Hi ya, Punk,” he said.
Punk Harter laughed acidly. “Yeah. ‘Hi ya, Punk.’ You don’t like me any more’n I like you—which ain’t any. Gettin’ to be friendly, or somethin’ ? Goin’ yella on me?”
“No,” Carroll said. “You had your nerve to come here, Punk. Didn’t you figure that anyone would connect you with the girl?”
Punk Harter seemed to feel pretty good. “Sure I figured it. So what? I didn’t give a damn, anyhow; I was lammin’ it. I came to say good-by to her, if you want to know. I didn’t know she was . . . dead. I beat her up . . . sure. I ain’t makin’ any apologies to you . . . but I didn’t mean to . . . kill her.”
“You just meant to rebuke her gently. That it, Punk?” Red Carroll said. “You always did have nice ways with women.”
“She had it cornin’—plenty,” Harter rasped. “You’ve always thought I was just a heel, Carroll, but you don’t know that I—”
“I still think you’re a heel,” Carroll cut it. “If you weren’t a cheap little screwball, you’d know damned well you couldn’t get away with—” The doorbell rang. Carroll had been ready to make his bid anyhow. The unexpected summons gave him a slight break. Harter tensed. In that brittle instant, Carroll dived—low. Somewhere above him a gun thundered.
Carroll rolled sideways, tossed Harter away from him, put the small-time gangster on his back. Harter’s gun came up again. Carroll’s hand reached for a vase; in one single, follow-through movement he had brought it down on Harter. There was a roar in the little room, and Carroll felt himself violently spun around. He lashed out with his foot, got Harter in the chin. The next shot missed him, for the gun was loose in Harter’s hand when the shoe caught him in the face.
Harter groped for the gun, almost had it when Red Carroll brought a chair down on his head. Harter went cold, collapsed in a motionless heap.
The doorbell rang again, but before Carroll looked for the buzzer, he snapped handcuffs on Harter. Then he picked up Harter’s gun and his own, pocketed both of them. He felt a wound throbbing in his shoulder, but since it wasn’t throwing him, he walked over to the buzzer and pressed it.
Light footsteps pattered up the stairs, and just outside the door a girlish voice called:
“Still sleeping, Greta? I thought I heard—”
Carroll opened the door, saw the janitor and several tenants on landings. But he let the girl in and closed the door.
The girl was not much more than a child. Maybe sixteen. Possibly seventeen or a young-looking eighteen. The girl’s eyes widened as she saw the handcuffed form of Punk Harter; then her right hand flew to her mouth as she looked toward the bed.
“Now, listen,” Carroll said. He showed his badge. “Don’t get too excited. You can go in a minute or so. All I want to know is this: You seem to have been a friend of Greta’s.” He picked up the remnants of the suit and showed them to the girl. “Did you ever see this suit before?”
The girl was still scary-eyed. She seemed afraid of the thing on the bed, but was also afraid of the law. “Why, yes. It was, I think, one of Punk Harter’s . . . that he kept here . . . with Greta,” she said unevenly. “But Greta . . . she wanted some money . . . for gin . . . yesterday morning . . . Punk hadn’t been here for days . . . and she took it out and sold it—”
“To Old Sam?” Carroll helped out.
“Yes, that secondhand store over on Seventh—”
“That’s all I want to know, sister,” Carroll cut in softly. “Now, I don’t even want to know your name, but I want to advise you to go and keep away from things . . . like this. Go ahead, and—”
A uniformed policeman shoved his way in. Red Carroll felt wobbly.
“Hello, Mike,” he said, swaying. “Call up Captain Reynolds—phone’s right over there—and tell him to hold that fellow Adams. Then take this little heel, Punk Harter, in and book him for murder. Then call a doctor for me—”
It was about an hour and twenty minutes before Red Carroll, his shoulder wound properly dressed, was back at headquarters with Captain Reynolds and had Adams brought up to him.
Adams was defiant now. “You have no reason to hold me,” he said heatedly. “I had nothing to do with Valdez’s death. I have no money for a lawyer, but I tell you I bought this pencil-stripe blue suit at Old Sam’s, and paid eight bucks for it; and—”
“And you bought a bargain, too,
boy,” Red Carroll told him. “But you didn’t even know it.”
He got up, slipped Adams out of his coat. With a razor blade he made a slit in the lining, near the cuff. He was following the pattern of the slashes made in the pencil-stripe blue suit be had seen at Greta de Vere’s. From the sleeve he pulled a carefully folded thousand-dollar bill. From the other sleeve he pulled another.
“Well, that starts it, captain,” he said to Reynolds. “The coat’ll be loaded with these little keepsakes. So will the vest be, and probably the waistband and the cuffs of the trousers. You know, captain—the West Side Traders’ dough. We never figured on a cheap little heel like Punk Harder heading in on a job like that, did we? But here’s the answer.”
Captain Reynolds—quite as flabbergasted as young Adams—swore eloquently. “But I still can’t see just how—”
“Listen, captain,” Carroll said. “It’s simple as hell. Punk Harter and some other heels had a big idea and they got up their nerve and cracked the West Side Traders’. Who the other guys are—well, well know as soon as we sweat Harter. He’d squawk against his own brother. So the West Side Traders’ case is cracked.
“Small-timers like those guys wouldn’t know what to do with a take of big hot bills like these,” he went on. “But Punk, being a wise guy, gets some crooked tailor to sew most of his in a lining of an old suit, figuring that’d be the last place anybody’d look for it. He was right, too. He kept his suit in his dame’s closet—without telling her what was in it, of course. He changed to another suit—always was a neat little rat—and went away three or four days, probably with some hot bill to pass in a night spot in Philly, or maybe even Chi’ or discount for smaller bills with some mob he knew out of town. The dame runs short of money and gin at the same time. So what does she do? Why, she picks out an old suit of Punk’s—this blue pencil-stripe—and takes it over to Old Sam’s and sells it.
“Punk gets home that evening—last night—and finds out about it and raises hell and goes over to Old Sam’s to get it back. This Adams guy has bought it and taken it home in the meantime. Old Sam knows where Adams lives—you recall Adams saying he’d bought suits there before—and describes Adams as a well-set-up young fellow, probably tells Punk he don’t know why an old suit should be so important, and suggests Punk go and get it for himself if he wants it that bad. Punk does just that, hangs around and sees another pencil-stripe blue suit going in the rooming-house door late that night, slugs the wearer, steals the suit, knifes Valdez to shut his mouth, and lams it.
“He gets home early in the morning, cuts it open expecting to see the grands roll out, but there’s no grands there, for it’s another pencil-stripe blue suit. First thing he does is beat up that poor dame. Then he figures that Old Sam double-crossed him somehow—maybe took the dough and sewed up the seams again—or anyhow, that Sam, since he knows the set-up now, has to be silenced for good. So he goes to see Sam first thing Sam opens up, and kills him. Then, not knowing the dame died from the beating, he—”
“He walks into your arms, and you were man enough to take him, Red!” Reynolds said jubilantly. “It means we’ve cracked every angle of this—” The switchboard operator came running in. It meant someone special on the phone for Reynolds. Usually when Reynolds answered a phone, he never even said, “Hello.” He always knew who was calling, it seemed, and started out with “You pick up that guy, Carroll?” or something like that. But now his attitude was different. So different. Carroll had heard that breathless whisper as to who was on the wire: “The Old Man.”
“The Old Man!”
Down at 240 Centre Street, in the city of New York, is a personage called “The Old Man.” The Old Man may really be old, or he may not be so old at all, but he is always.
The Old Man. He may not have the most important job in the United States and its island possessions, but try to tell that to any one of New York City’s eighteen thousand five hundred and fourteen cops.
Reynolds was eager, a little fidgety. “Yes, commissioner . . . Yes, sir. Captain Reynolds . . . Yes, sir, I realize things happened pretty fast, commissioner. But we’ve cracked the whole business, I’m glad to report. We have the murderer of Valdez, and of the secondhand-clothes man, and that Devery—that De Vere—girl. And we’ve cracked the West Side Traders’ case, too. Have some of the money now, and we’ll have the rest within hours . . . Sir? . . . Why, investigation by Detective William Carroll . . . Well, third-class, sir . . . What’s that, commissioner? . . . Yes, sir. Two thirty, sir.”
Captain Reynolds replaced the receiver and wiped a little trickle of perspiration from his forehead. He didn’t slam up the receiver as he usually did, he hung it up.
“He wants the pair of us down at 240, Red!” he gasped. “Half past two this afternoon. Now, get out of here and get a shave. You look like hell. Scram! Want to be a third-class dick all your life? I don’t know what I’ll do with you, Red!”
“You might sue me, skipper,” Red Carroll told him. He grinned.
And this time Reynolds grinned back.
AGENT FOR MURDER
William Campbell Gault
Ex-pug Mickey Dolan set out to collect a debt. But he found he’d rung up murder’s number on crime’s cash register.
“MAYBE,” Judy said acidly, “you would rather be back in the ring?”
“Maybe I would,” I said. “It wasn’t any worse than hounding people for overdue bills. Now—if you’d have let me open a detective agency, like I wanted to—”
She sniffed. “Detective agency! What difference does it make what we call it? All our cases start out as collections and end up in murder. It’s just your perverse nature. You’re—”
I held up a hand in surrender. “Okay. What’s on the list for today?”
She started to riffle through the file. Then she glanced up. “Mickey, we don’t want to fight, do we? I mean, it’s your money, after all. If you want—”
I said: “Just to show you I think you’re right, I want you to pick out the tamest account in there. Anything. You be the judge.”
She smiled smugly. She had a card in her hand. “It’s a Mr. Enos Cragg of Milton Grove. Mr. Cragg is an old meanie who won’t pay for some pipe.”
“What kind of pipe? And where is Milton Grove?”
“Six-inch pipe. And Milton Grove is only about twenty miles out of town, due west.”
The prospect of a twenty mile drive in the flivver wasn’t too pleasant. But Judy was pleading with her eyes. I took the card, kissed her lightly, and went out.
As the flivver rattled westward, I thought back to our argument. At Judy’s insistence, I had quit the ring when I was about two months from the welterweight crown. That had been disappointing. But then she’d picked this collection business. I’d wanted a detective agency, being a natural detective, more or less. I was now a collector.
You may think I’m a little soft in the head to let a girl dictate to me, but you’d understand if you could see Judy. She never won any beauty contests—but only because she never entered any. And when you understand that I’m only five feet eight and not too handsome, you’ll realize I’m a very lucky guy to land such a knockout.
By the time I’d pulled into this wide place in the road called Milton Grove, my natural good nature had returned. I stopped at a filling station and asked the red-haired attendant if he knew the whereabouts of a Mr. Enos Cragg.
He pointed up a gravel side road. “It’s about a half mile from here, on the right side. You’ll see his mailbox.”
“He buy gas here?” I asked.
The fellow nodded. “Sometimes.”
“How’s his credit?”
The attendant hesitated, then shook his flaming head. “He pays cash. The boss won’t give him credit.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Not that he hasn’t got plenty,” the fellow went on, “but he hates to dish it out. He’s the slowest pay in the county.”
Which didn’t make my job any easier. I thanked the redhead and
pointed the flivver up the road.
I didn’t need to look for any mailbox. I saw the house a long way off. The way I knew, the back yard was piled high with pipe. By the back yard I mean the two or more acres directly behind the house. I turned in.
There was an ancient sedan parked on one side of the white frame house. The old man would be home then.
THERE was a handle in the middle of the front door. I gave it a whirl and the bell inside set up a clamor. No answer. I worked it again. With the same result.
There was just a chance he might be in the back, so I went around. There was a shed attached to the rear of the house. It looked like what they call a “summer kitchen” and it was about three steps lower than the rest of the house. I knocked on the door—and it swung open.
I stood there and stared and I was sure some one had put a piece of ice at the base of my neck. My knees shook a little.
A lean, gray-haired man was sprawled at the bottom of the steps leading from the regular kitchen. His head was up against the leg of the summer kitchen stove, and there was blood at the base of that leg.
I put out a hand to turn him over, but he was stiff as the pipe in his yard. He must have been dead quite a while. The way it looked, he had stumbled, coming down the steps, and landed up against the stove leg. He was over sixty, and a blow like that could do it.
I went out in the yard again. It’s funny, but I was thinking of Judy. I was thinking of how she’d accused me of looking for trouble, and I got the queerest feeling. Not that I’m superstitious. I just felt queer.
I could see no telephone wires leading to the house and I had no desire to go back in there anyway. I sent the flivver scurrying back to the filling station.
The redhead looked up in surprise as I steamed into the drive. I said: “Call the police—and the coroner.”
“What’s happened?” the kid asked. He was pop-eyed.