by Jerry eBooks
Myrt paled and started to cry. Nick advanced to the bed.
“Cut that out,” he said. “What was it for?”
She stopped crying and flushed angrily.
“You can’t take that attitude with me, Nick. I won’t tell.”
“That’s what you think,” Nick said. But he knew just how hard it would be to make her talk if she didn’t want to.
“I’ll tell you,” Helen broke in. “She got some sort of crazy formula from an old woman who lives down the street. It was a lotion for her skin. She was supposed to soak fly paper and drain the liquid off. Of course it has a lot of arsenic in it and that’s supposed to be good for the skin. Mike and I told her she shouldn’t try it.”
“Mike and you told me!” Myrt cried, her voice husky with rage. “Always Mike and you. Why don’t you tell Nick you were in love with Mike? Don’t say you weren’t. I’ve watched you two together!”
“Shut up,” Nick snapped. “Mike’s death doesn’t mean anything to you, but it does to me. Where’s this beauty preparation made out of soaked fly paper?”
Myrt glared at Helen. “Ask her,” she accused. “She came in here yesterday evening. I was all alone and feeling miserable. She said the stuff was hurting me—the stuff with the arsenic from the fly paper in it. She went into the bathroom and said she threw it down the drain. But that isn’t any reason to feel the way I do. I’m sick, really sick.”
“Yeah,” Nick said, “I guess you are.” He left, taking the medicine bottle with him. He drove over to the city hospital and left the bottle with the laboratory technician there.
When he went out to get Art Scanlon and Benny Mack, he went alone.
At ten o’clock he climbed the steps of Art Scanlon’s apartment. Scanlon knew he was coming, just as he always knew when the cops were going to raid his gambling joints. Scanlon was alone, apparently, and that was sufficient novelty to excite suspicion.
Scanlon looked tall in his brocaded lounging robe. Also, his face looked long because his black sideburns were trimmed like the tapering blades of butcher knives. He smiled only on one side of his face because he’d had a fifth nerve operation that had left the other side dead.
“Hello, Captain,” he said. “This is a surprise.”
“Like hell,” Kalkas retorted. He walked into the small but expensively furnished living room. “Where’s Benny Mack?”
“Benny Mack?” Scanlon repeated. “Oh, yes, Benny Mack. I haven’t seen him for some time. He got to running around with a pretty fast crowd.”
Kalkas clicked his tongue reflectively. Looking around the room, he caught the glint of something on the floor near Scanlon’s slippered feet. He stepped over to it and picked it up. It was what he had thought—a miniature safe dial no larger than a quarter. There was no doubt that it had come off the toy bank Mike Hanley had told Kalkas to get.
“I guess you haven’t seen Benny for ten minutes,” Nick said. “Mind if I look around?”
Scanlon rested the tips of his fingers on the pipe-legged end-table beside a modernistic chair.
“Not at all, Captain. Got a warrant?” Kalkas unholstered his revolver. “This is it,” he said.
Nick walked to a closed door and put his hand on the knob. Benny Mack’s metallic voice shrilled out.
“Come in and get me, copper, if I don’t get you first.”
Nick Kalkas pushed the door open and stepped back. Nothing happened in front of him. Behind him, though, Art Scanlon had produced a gun from somewhere. He shoved it into Nick’s back.
“Go on in, Captain,” he grated. “And drop the gun right there.”
The gambler’s gun gouged into Nick’s spine. So he dropped the gun at his feet and raised his hands a little way. He walked into the bedroom.
Benny Mack lay on the bed. Scanlon’s silk sheets had been ripped up to make bandages for him. He was wounded in the chest or shoulder, you couldn’t tell which because the blood had spread around so. His face was white and his black eyes squinted through the smoke of a cigarette clamped between pain-tightened lips. He was holding a gun in his left hand, but the weight of it had his hand shaking. He must have lost a lot of blood.
“Well, you will play with coppers, Benny,” Nick said.
“You should have seen the other guy,” Benny jeered.
“I did. That’s why I’m here.”
Benny laughed again and winked at Scanlon. Scanlon kicked the bedroom door shut behind him.
“I think you killed Butch Wagner, too,” Nick said. “He was payroll man for Art’s joints. Art didn’t keep his books so well that Butch couldn’t hold out some extra change for himself. Art found out he was laying a nest egg for himself, so he put the finger on him. You did the rubbing out, Benny.
“You overheard the conversation between Mike Hanley and me, so you beat it over to Hanley’s house. You had to get the evidence on the Butch Wagner killing that Mike had gathered. He had that evidence tucked into a little toy bank which you swiped out of his basement.”
“Show it to him, Art,” Benny said. “Before we knock him off, I’d like to make some sense out of that stuff Hanley wrote.”
Art Scanlon came from behind Nick. His left hand went into the pocket of his lounging robe and came out with a folded piece of paper. It was creased down small enough to be squeezed through the slot of a toy bank. Art and his gun watched while Nick took the paper and unfolded it.
The note was written in Mike Hanley’s hand, which was never very easy to read.
“Monday morning—”
This, Nick suddenly remembered was Monday, though it seemed like a week since morning.
“If you get this,” the note went on, “I will be sort of dead—”
“Mean something to you?” Art Scanlon asked.
Nick’s eyes ran down through the note. “Yes, it will mean something.”
“Code or something, ain’t it?” Benny Mack asked.
“Something,” Nick said. Holding the note in one hand, he groped in his vest pocket.
“What are you looking for?” Scanlon asked suspiciously.
“A match,” Nick said. “I want to read between the lines.”
It was funny that Scanlon didn’t notice how cramped the writing was. Nothing could have been written between the lines in invisible ink.
Scanlon laughed. “So you guys use that kid stuff, do you?” He handed Nick a cigarette lighter.
“Well, the kid stuff fooled you, didn’t it?”
Kalkas flipped the lighter into a healthy flame and brought it up under the paper. Scanlon bent over close. Even Benny’s curiosity was excited. He tried to crawl to the foot of the bed, but pain flattened him.
Nick held the paper at the tips of his fingers, but he was watching Scanlon’s eyes and gun. As though by accident, he dropped the paper. It skidded in the air, barely missed the flame of the lighter.
Scanlon tried to grab the paper in midair. That was when Nick drove the tall, hot flame into Scanlon’s right eye. At the same time, his left hand grabbed at the automatic.
Scanlon’s cry of pain, the noise of the speedy footwork on the floor, brought Benny Mack upright. His shaky hand found his gat at the same time Nick Kalkas got Scanlon’s gun.
He started shooting as soon as Scanlon broke away from Nick. The gambler dived for the captain’s gun lying in the doorway of the bedroom. The bullets went crazy. Nick shot once. That finished what Benny had started.
Nick twisted on his toes. Scanlon fired up from the floor the minute he snatched the cop’s gun. Scanlon got Nick through the thigh. Before the captain’s legs went out from under him, he managed to pump a couple of slugs. Suddenly the room looked like a morgue.
Nick Kalkas came out of the hospital a week later. Art Scanlon never got nearer the hospital than the morgue in back of it. Benny Mack had a chance to recover. What with the high cost of electrocution, though, it might have been better if he hadn’t had a chance.
Nick limped out of the hospital, one arm around his daughter, Ma
y. But he hurried back to the old routine, anxious to see what would crop up in place of the Scanlon gambling joints.
After a couple of days around the office, he went out to see Helen Ives one evening. He had called her up so she would have a chance to decide whether she would be at home or not. She was at home.
She wasn’t looking her usual attractive self. Her dark eyes had veiled, making her face a mask for something behind it. She was thinner, too. Nick asked her what the trouble was, though he thought he knew.
“I got my walking papers from the Globe-Telegram.”
Nick Kalkas sat down, his hat in his hand. “What’ll you do now?”
“Go over to the Star,” she said without enthusiasm. Something had gone out of her since Mike Hanley’s death.
Nick Kalkas put his hat on the floor. He rested a hand on each knee and leaned forward. His dark brows drew close together above his eyes.
“I know, Helen,” he said. “What?” she asked after a moment, without looking at him.
“Just how much you loved Mike, and just how much he loved you. He left proof of what he thought of you. I know how Mike died, so I get all the irony of it.
“The morning of the day he was going to die, he wrote me a note and put it in that toy bank he had down the basement. He wanted me to get that note, told me about it a little while before he died Monday night.
“Benny Mack overheard him talking about it, and both Benny and I misunderstood. We thought he was talking about some evidence he had got concerning the murder of Butch Wagner.
“That’s part of the irony. It brought things to a head so I could shoot it out with Benny Mack and Art Scanlon. But the note Mike left me didn’t have anything to do with Scanlon. It was something personal.”
Kalkas took a piece of paper out of his pocket. “Go ahead, Nick,” Helen said huskily.
“ ‘Monday morning,’ he read from Mike’s note. ‘If you get this I’ll be sort of dead. Those damned shrimp I ate yesterday. I love shrimp and they’re death to me. Sunday night about eleven I started to have terrific pains. I hit the bicarbonate at a drugstore, but that didn’t help the shrimp. So I went home.
“ ‘Myrt was in bed and didn’t disturb her. I didn’t even turn on a light, except in the bathroom. There was some indigestion medicine there—some stuff Myrt swears by. I took a gulp of it and then went and curled up on the davenport.
“ ‘Early this morning, I was feeling worse. And then I remembered that Myrt had been making some nutty skin lotion out of soaked fly paper. I also remembered seeing her put that fly paper skin tonic in an old medicine bottle. Knowing Myrt as I do, I knew she hadn’t bothered to change labels, even though the skin tonic would contain enough arsenic to kill a horse.
“ ‘I have taken every antidote in the book, but the poison has gone too far, I’m afraid. I’m going to see you tonight about this note and then go around to a doctor, though that won’t do much good. If I come out okay, you won’t see this note. If I don’t, this note will show it wasn’t murder or suicide, or anything for a cop to argue about. Do you get me? Just an accident.—Mike Hanley’.”
Nick looked at Helen. Head down, a she was crying a little, but not making any fuss about doing it.
“So that proves what Mike thought of you,” Nick said.
She quieted down quickly, made a hard little newspaper dame out of herself. “Yes? How do you figure it?”
“Well,” Kalkas said slowly, “the night Mike died, Myrt told us you had thrown all that arsenic beauty stuff down the bathroom drain. Remember? If you had really done that, Mike couldn’t have got hold of the poison by mistake. What you really did was pour the arsenic stuff into that bottle labeled indigestion remedy. That’s what the bottle had in it—arsenic. It was Myrt who was supposed to take the poison.
“After he knew he was poisoned, Mike realized what you had done. I guess maybe the two of you sometimes discussed what you would do if anything happened to Myrt. Myrt being what she was, and you and Mike being in love, that’s natural.”
Helen lifted her head. The set of her mouth and chin was defiant. “Well?” she demanded. “Mike beat me to the draw,” Nick said. “If I try to tie a rap on you, this note defends you. If I throw the note away, I’ve got a better case against Myrt than I have against you.”
“What are you going to do, Nick?”
He got up and walked to the door. “I’m a cop, not a judge or jury. And I’m certainly not God. You’ve already passed your own sentence. It’s life, isn’t it?”
That shook her badly. “I don’t know,” she choked out. But Nick saw she did know.
“It’ll be life,” he said. “And it’ll be a tough punishment, especially when you see this evening’s Star. Too bad you couldn’t have waited.”
He went out. The Star was on the front porch of Helen’s cottage. The item Kalkas had referred to stared up at him.
HANLEY WIDOW DIES DURING OPERATION
Myrt Hanley’s ailments hadn’t all been imaginary. She had been taken to the hospital to be operated on for stomach ulcers. She hadn’t lived to come out of the anesthetic.
EYES OF THE MAGNATE
William L. Hopson
When a Dynamic Press Agent Discovers a Pair of Human Optics in His Pocket a Grisly Murder Ring Is Doomed to Destruction!
THE traffic light turned to red. With an exclamation of impatience I halted and fumbled for a cigarette. Over my cupped hands I noticed the green eyes of the girl dressed in yellow. She was staring at something to my left. I looked in that direction, but saw no reason for the fear mirrored in her eyes. Just the usual noon-day scene of any busy street corner.
At the policeman’s whistle I stepped from the curb. The girl lurched against me. I got a whiff of orange blossoms and a quavering, “Pardon, please.”
I turned to her, smiling. But she had wheeled about and was fighting her way back to the sidewalk. I shrugged indifferently, inhaled deeply, and shoved my hand into the pocket of my light topcoat. My fingers closed around an object that had not been there thirty seconds before. My steps lengthened then, a usual after dinner stroll became almost a run.
As the door of my office clicked behind me, I drew from my pocket a handkerchief through which I could feel the two soft globular items wrapped in it. I unfoldled the red stained linen. In the palm of my hand I held—two glassy human eyes!
For a moment I was frozen into immobility. With a shudder I placed the handkerchief on the desk and sank into a chair. Shaking, I drew a bottle of Scotch from the top drawer. I didn’t bother with a glass. The bottle gurgled and some of the chill left me.
With a trembling finger I touched my grisly presents. They were human eyes all right—dull black, bloodshot. Icy fingers seemed to flutter up my spine. I tilted the bottle to my lips again. There was no doubt in my mind that those spare parts had been shoved into my pocket when the girl in yellow had jostled me at the corner. But why?
I was lighting a cigarette when the door was thrown open. I looked up and into the maw of a .45 Colt held steadily in the fist of a huge pockmarked individual.
“All right, chump,” he growled. “Where’s them glims? Ah, here—”
He stepped forward, scooped up the handkerchief with the eyes and thrust the gruesome objects into his pocket. Keeping the gun leveled at my head he backed to the door.
“You ain’t seen nothin’, see?” he said, as he fumbled for the doorknob behind him with his left hand. “No callin’ the Law.”
“I’ve been asleep all day, Pal,” I assured him.
He grinned. The door closed behind him as he went out. I reached for the phone, dialed 6226, Police Headquarters. Before my ring was answered I had an idea. The receiver fell back on the hook. It was on a spot. I couldn’t call the police!
The Law would be certain this was a publicity gag. That phony jewel theft of my client, Colla Colano, the actress, while giving us plenty of newsprint space had left me in that state approaching “bad standing” with the local finest. What was it
the detective-sergeant had said?”
“So help me, one more phony caper from you, and as sure as your name’s Jerry Jerome I’ll put you away.”
I TRIED hard to get this situation out of my mind. But why would a keen-looking girl present a stranger with two human eyes? I shivered a bit and tried to lose myself in the work piled on my desk.
When I left the office it was dark enough for the work of two characters who were loafing near the street door. One on each side of me they closed in, shoved their guns into my ribs. The one on my left was the chap who had snatched the peepers from my desk.
“Walk straight out to that car. Buddy,” he ordered.
At the car my pock-marked escort got into the back seat with me. The other lug, a little round-shouldered hood, slid under the wheel. Pockmark jammed a cigarette into the corner of his mouth, shoved the pack to me. Keeping to the quieter streets we traveled at a moderate speed out of town.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Guess?” cracked Pock-Mark.
The driver laughed.
“Wait,” I pleaded. “Am I being taken—Is this a ride?”
“Take it easy, Buddy,” said Pock-Mark. “It ain’t gonna hurt you. But you know too much for the Chief. It’ll soon be over.”
“Now, look—” I began.
“Shut up!” barked the hood.
Shrugging, I settled back on the cushions, and with the back of a trembling hand smeared away the cold sweat on my forehead. Pock-Mark now drew his hand from his pocket, grasping a .45. The car slowed, turned off the main road into a narrow tree-lined lane. Pock-Mark lurched against me; then put both hands on the seat to straighten himself. I decided it was time to act. I acted.
My left fist crashed against Pock-Mark’s jaw. He reeled away, bringing up his gun hand. I knocked aside the gun, smashed my right into his mouth. The gun roared, sending up a geyser of flame. The car swerved suddenly. We crashed. Glass splintered and showered over us. I was thrown heavily into Pock-Mark. Whirling darkness, star-shot, closed around me. . . .
When I opened my eyes it was very quiet. Except for the lonely croaking of a frog far off on the right there was no sound.