Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  She acted quickly, by instinct alone. Almost before Gil had gotten back there, to flatten the rumble top down again, smother what it had inadvertently revealed before the occupants of the other car came up and saw it, she had opened the door on her side and jumped down. She began to run silently along the edge of the road, in the shadows cast by the overhanging trees. She didn’t know where she was going. She only wanted to get away from this man. This man who had killed. This man who was no longer her husband, who spelled Fear and Horror to her now. She saw now that she had lied to him—and to herself—Monday, when she told him she could stand it even if he’d done this, so long as he only admitted it. If she’d seen Burroughs’ battered corpse at the time, as she had now, the same thing would have happened then: she would have fled away from Gil like one demented. She couldn’t stand cowardly murder.

  He’d gotten the rumble down, and was standing there pressed slightly backward upon it, at bay, arms out at either side to hold it down. He either didn’t see her scurry by along the edge of the trees, or was too preoccupied in facing the two men who were coming solicitously back toward him, to pay any attention. The half-formed idea in her churning mind was to get into that other, momentarily vacated car and get away from him. Anywhere, but get away!

  She was halfway to it now. She could hear their voices, back there where she’d run from:

  “Are you all right, brother? How badly did we hit you?”

  “Gee, we banged up his rumble, Art.”

  And then Gil’s sharp, dangerous: “Get away from it!”

  The two shots came with sickening suddenness. Just bam! and then bam! again, and there were two huddled, loglike forms on the roadway in the moonlight up there by Gil’s car.

  Murder again. Murder trebled now. How far, how far away they’d stopped that other car! She’d never make it. She saw that now. He’d already called her name warningly once, he was already running toward her like a winged messenger of death. She was up to it at last, had one foot on the running board now. But he had a smoking gun in his hand that could reach out from where he was to where she was quicker than any car could get under way. And this one, too, like theirs, had brought up broadside to the road. Before she could back up for clearance, turn, and get away, he’d be upon her. In her frustrated panic, hand on the door catch, she was conscious of the caked dust spewed upon the sides of the car, thrown up by its wheel action. They’d driven it hard.

  Instead of getting in, she ran around it to the opposite side, away from him, as though to take cover. Then she stood there staring at him over it. At last she rounded it once more at the rear and came back toward him, away from it. Met him a few paces before it.

  He seized her relentlessly by the wrist. “So now you know,” he heaved. “So you ran out on me.”

  “I lost my head for a minute; anyone would have.”

  “I watched you. You didn’t go the other way. You started back toward him, the guy you love now.”

  He was dragging her toward their own car, swinging her from side to side like a primordial ape with a living victim.

  “You’re dangerous to me now, I can see that. I’ve just shot two men; I’m fighting for my life. And anything or anyone that might help to trap me, has got to be removed.”

  “Gil, you wouldn’t do such a thing. I’m your wife!”

  “Fugitives have no wives.”

  He half raised the gun toward her, lowered it again. He looked up the road, and down. The moonlight was crafty in his eyes.

  “Get in, I’ll give you one more chance.”

  She knew it was only a postponement. One thing at a time; he had to get to cover first. If he left her lying out here on the open road they’d know instantly who had done it. She could read her death warrant in his eyes, as they started off once more toward the city.

  It was inconceivable that he meant to go through with such a thing. Even the sight of the grimy tenement room, suggestive of crime and violence, failed to make it more plausible. “This isn’t happening,” she thought, “this isn’t real; my husband hasn’t brought me to this unspeakable room in the slums, intending to do away with me. I’m still asleep, at home, and I’m having a bad dream.

  “Yet all these days he’s known, and he hasn’t told me. All these days I’ve been living with a murderer.” She visualized again the way he’d shot those two men down in cold blood, without a qualm, without a moment’s hesitation. Why wouldn’t he be capable of doing the same to her? He was kill-crazy now, at bay. The red tide of murder had swept over him, effacing all love, trust, compassion, wiping away their very marriage itself. And he could kill this woman in the room with him, he could kill anyone on God’s earth tonight.

  She sat slumped on the edge of the creaky iron bedstead, fingers pressed to her temples. He’d locked the room door after they came in, pulled down the patched blue shade on the window. He stood listening for a moment by the door, to see if anyone had followed them up, then he turned to her. “I’ve got to get rid of that car first,” he muttered to himself. Suddenly he’d come over, thrust her aside, was disheveling the bed, pulling out the sheets from under the threadbare cotton blankets. They squealed like pigs as he tore long strips down their lengths.

  She guessed what they were for. “No, Gil, don’t!” she whimpered smotheredly. She ran for the door, pulled uselessly at the knob. He swung her around back behind him.

  “Don’t do this to me!”

  “I can’t just leave you locked in here. You’d scream or break a window. You sold out to him, and you’re my enemy now.”

  He flung her face-down on the bed, caught her hands behind her back, deftly tied them together with strips of sheeting. Then her ankles in the same way. He sat her up, lashed her already once-secured hands to the iron bed frame. Then he wound a final length around her face, snuffing out her mouth. Her eyes were wide with horror. It wasn’t so much what was being done to her, as whom it was being done by.

  “Can you breathe?” He plucked it down a little from the tip of her nose. “Breathe while you can.” His eyes, flicking over to the length of tubing connecting a wall jet with a one-burner gas ring, then back again to her, betrayed his intended method when the time came. He’d stun her first with a blow from his gun butt, probably, then remove her bonds to make it look like a suicide, disconnect the tube and let the gas take its course. That happened so often in these cheap rooming houses; that was the way out so many took.

  He listened carefully at the door. Then he unlocked it, and as he turned to go glanced back and said to her:

  “Keep your eyes on this doorknob. And when you see it start to turn, begin saying your prayers.”

  She heard him lock the door again on the other side, and the faint creak of his step descending the warped stairs.

  He would come back—in forty minutes, in an hour—and kill her. But therein didn’t lie the full horror of it. It was that this man and she had danced by moonlight not so long ago, had exchanged kisses and vows under the stars. It was that he had brought her candy, and orchids to wear on her coat. It was that they had stood up together and sworn to cherish and cling to one another for the rest of their lives.

  Yet she saw that it must have been in him from the beginning, this fatal flaw of character that had finally led him to murder. People didn’t change that abruptly; they couldn’t. There were some who could never be capable of murder, no matter what the circumstances. And others, like Gil, needed only a slight push in that direction to fall into it almost of their own accords. He’d been a potential murderer all along. He hadn’t known it and she hadn’t, so who was to blame?

  She couldn’t free her hands. She only succeeded in tightening the knots in the sheeting more inextricably when she strained against them; it was that kind of material. The bed had no casters, and one foot, caught in a crack in the floor, held it fast against her attempts to drag it after her.

  He’d been gone a long time. Against her will she found herself eying the china knob on the inside of the doo
r. When it started to turn, he’d said—

  And suddenly the light, given back by its glossy surface, seemed to flash, to waver. It was moving, it was going slowly around! Without his having made a sound on the stairs outside. She could feel her temples begin to pound. But the key rattle didn’t come. Instead the knob relapsed again to where it had been. With a slight rustling sound, so she knew she hadn’t been mistaken, she had actually seen it move. She stared toward it till her eyes threatened to start from their sockets, but it didn’t move again. Why didn’t he come in and get it over with? Why this exquisite additional torture? Maybe he’d heard someone coming on the stairs.

  There was another agonizing wait, during which she screamed silently against the gag. There, he was coming back again. This time she could hear the furtive tread on the oil-cloth covered stairs. He must have gone down to the street again for a minute to make doubly sure no one was about.

  The key hardly scraped at all, so deftly did he fit it in. And once again the china knob wheeled and sent out wavers of light. And this time the door opened—and let Death in. Death was a face she’d kissed a thousand times. Death was a hand that had stroked her hair. Death was a man whose name she had taken in place of her own.

  He locked the door behind him, Death did. He said, tightlipped: “I sent it into the river. It was misty and there was no one around to see. At last I’m rid of him, that damned old man! And by the time they fish him out again, if they ever do, I’ll be far away. There’s a tanker leaves for Venezuela at midday.”

  The rubber extension tube went whup! as he pulled off the nozzle of the jet. The key didn’t make any sound as he turned it, and the gas didn’t either, as it started coming in.

  He dropped his eyes before hers. “Don’t look at me like that; it’s no use. I’m going through with it.”

  He drew his gun and gripped it down near the bore, and then he shifted his cuff back out of the way, as a man does when he doesn’t want anything to hamper the swing of his arm. The last thing he said was “You won’t feel anything, Jackie.” That was Gil Blaine, dying inside the murderer.

  Then he raised the gun butt high over his head, with a terrible intensity, so that his whole arm shook. Or maybe it was just the way she was looking at him, so that he had to use twice as much will power, to get it done.

  It had gone up as high as it could; now it started to come down again. Her head seemed to be made of glass. It shattered, she could hear it shatter with the blow, and her skull seemed to rain all around her on the floor, and the blow itself exploded deafeningly in her own ears, like a shot. But without causing any pain.

  Then as her eyes started spasmodically open again, it was he that was falling, his whole body, and not just his arm any more. She turned her head dazedly. The window shade was being held aside by an arm, and there was broken glass all over the floor, and Ward was out there looking into the room through a sort of saw-toothed halo where the windowpane had been, lazy smoke soft-focusing him. He reached up and did something to the catch, raised the frame, climbed through across the sill.

  When he’d turned off the gas jet and freed her, she hid her face against him, still sitting there on the bedstead, and clung like that for a long time. It was a funny thing to do, with a mere detective, but still—who else had she?

  “You weren’t in line with the keyhole when I squinted through it, or I would have shot the lock off then. I wasn’t sure that this was the right room, so I went through to the back yard and climbed the fire escape from there. All I had to go by was what you’d traced in the dust on the side of that car left standing out there on the road: just my name and this address. And, gee, Jackie, if you knew how close I came to never noticing it at all!”

  “I didn’t think it would be seen, but it was all I had time to do. Anything could have happened. Someone’s sleeve could have brushed against it and erased it.

  “He killed Burroughs early Monday morning. And he’s had him in our locked rumble seat ever since! That explains so many things in his behavior the past few days I couldn’t understand. But, oh, you’re so blind when you trust anyone! He finally dumped him, car and all, into the river just now, before he came back.”

  “We’ll get it up. I was sure of him from the first, but without a body or any trace of one, our hands were tied. And then you, you pulled so much weight in his favor just by being in the picture at all, so honest and so-We all knew you couldn’t be a party to a murder.”

  She lifted her head, but without trying to see past him into the room. He seemed to understand what she was trying to ask, and told her:

  “He’s dead. I wasn’t very careful, I guess.”

  She wondered if he’d meant to do it that way. It was better that way. Better even for Gil himself.

  Ward stood her up and walked her out through the door, leaning her against him so she wouldn’t have to look at Gil lying on the floor. Outside the night seemed clean and fresh again, all evil gone from it, and the stars looked as new as though they’d never been used before. She drew a deep breath, of infinite pity but no regret.

  “So this is how it ends.”

  FIVE-STAR FURY

  Tom B. Stone

  Into the mouths of the hungry newspaper presses Chris Carter fed dynamite copy.

  CHRIS CARTER had passed the corner newsstand with its mounted papers, the heavy black Ledger headlines screaming about the election the next day, when he noticed the little man stepping from the sedan.

  It was because of the little man’s ears. They were really tremendous. Huge, flapping appendages that threw the rest of his body and head completely out of proportion. Yet, as large as they were, his eyes were the opposite. Small and colorless behind low hung lids, they were mere patches of lightness against his sallow skin. His dark grey sharkskin suit and silk shirt and crocheted black tie held neatly with a gold pin were expensive, and good-looking. He wasn’t.

  Chris Carter did the poultry filler on the Ledger, Cleeport’s lone paper, so it wasn’t strange that his mind should pursue those channels. Unashamedly staring, he compared the little man’s fleshy ears with a turkey’s wattles, and was mildly surprised at their similarity.

  The little man turned, small hand on the car door.

  “Don’t you worry, Ben,” he said in a high, reedy voice. “I’ll handle him. He knows what’s good. Taking your dough was sticking his neck in a rat-trap. He’s gotta play ball.”

  Chris glanced at the occupant of the tonneau, a heavy-set individual with merry, curved lips and rubicund cheeks. His eyes were set in pleasant laughter crinkles, and his head cocked to one side like a cheerfully inquisitive sparrow. Momentarily, Chris expected him to explode into flesh-quaking laughter. He received an unpleasant shock with the fat man’s voice.

  “We don’t leave anything to chance,” the man said in a flat, dead voice, utterly devoid of emotion. “Sam Travers does what’s expected—or there’s no more Sam Travers!”

  Chris Carter blinked, unpleasantly disturbed as if he had quaffed aged brandy and swallowed, instead, acid vinegar. Travers! Sam Travers! Why, that was the name of his city editor! Of course, these two were talking about some other Travers, still.

  Surging pedestrian traffic swept Chris Carter on past the car, and he shrugged off the feeling of agitation.

  The city room was a cacophonous clamor. Chris felt the staccato beat of life throbbing, the never subdued imminence of excitement with something of a thrill. For sixteen years he had gloried in the keen electric tension it awakened within his lean, gaunt frame, as sharply today as that first cub reporting day.

  The mantle of his weariness was doffed as quickly as he might discard his mismatched tweed suit or battered felt hat. Latent blue fire glowed deep in his eyes.

  “Carter! Got your chicken filler?” Travers, the bull-necked city editor, roared across the clattering room.

  “Right away, chief,” Chris waved, shoulders slumping defeatedly.

  He had wanted to talk about the Greeley story, to relax in the
flow of words concerning the state’s live-wire special prosecutor. The story was page one stuff. Prosecutor Greeley had secured indictments against Paul Thiele’s mighty political machine; then, mysteriously, the incriminating documentary proof had disappeared!

  Greeley’s hands were tied. The Thiele juggernaut chuckled. Cleeport’s long-suffering public were mystified, numbed to the accusations sensing political intrigue. Yet they could be depended upon to throw their votes against the corrupt incumbents—if the missing records could be found, and exposed!

  Johnny Brady was covering the story for the Ledger. His crackling up-to-the-minute column sent pride glowing in Chris Carter’s eyes, for he liked to feel that in some small manner his coaching and sage advice had aided Johnny up the ladder. A long time had passed since Johnny, an eager-eyed cub, had joined the staff.

  Chris surveyed the office, searching for Johnny’s lean, brown face. He then dismissed the idea as he stared at the stranger, seated at the city desk, who was watching Sam Travers with sharp, unfriendly eyes.

  “The little man with the big ears,” Chris murmured, bewildered. He knew now that the mention of Sam Travers’ name had not been a reference to some other Travers. Because Sam was hunched over his desk, penciling copy at a great rate, and his square cheeks were gray, tight, and his lips compressed to thin, straight lines.

  Thinking back, Chris remembered the fat man with the merry lips, and he scowled bitterly.

  “A fine newspaperman, I am. That was Paul Thiele’s county leader, Braddock. Ben Braddock. That little guy is Vane Qualey, Braddock’s hound dog. They got Travers tied up in some crooked work, and Qualey’s here to make sure Travers toes the line. What a line?”

  He knew, with lightning-like clarity, as a copy boy dumped yellow pages before Travers, and Vane Qualey leaned over the desk, reading every word, pointing to several pages and shaking his head.