Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  “Yes,” Wulfing said hoarsely.

  Barney stared at him. The way Wulfing said that, the look he was giving from his gray eyes, you could tell he thought Barney was lying. Well, Barney wasn’t lying.

  He said, “Let’s go downtown and spring Betty, Fritz.”

  Barney Ghent had intended this to be a murder without solution. If he had more of a flare for dramatics he might have written a letter to be read after his death in which he confessed to the crime and explained why he had killed Harry Pomeroy. He had fully intended to dispose of the murder weapon the following day, lest the gun be traced back to Fritz Wulfing, the original owner. Now he was glad he had put that off.

  On the way downtown in Dr. Wulfing’s car, he explained why he had killed Pomeroy. This town didn’t belong to the people. It was Pomeroy’s town. Pomeroy ran the elections through a powerful machine of his own building. And because there was scarcely a public office from the courts to the council that had not felt the weight of Pomeroy’s iron heel, the city had become honeycombed with vice and rackets. And every crime that flourished paid for its protection, so that when another election rolled around Pomeroy’s machine never lacked the funds to bring victory to its party. The rackets Pomeroy had fostered got away with larceny in the open. Graft in high office pilfered the public funds, heaped tax upon tax. And murder—nobody knew how many honest people had died because they had refused to play ball Pomeroy’s way.

  “Look at me,” Barney said. “I’m a small cell of yeast, but I’m an example.” He tapped his chest. “My ticker wouldn’t be due to run down right now if it hadn’t been for Pomeroy’s machine. I expose a numbers game that has been running wide open in the Negro quarter. I can’t put my finger directly on Pomeroy without running the paper into libel, but I do name a few names that have taken their share of protection money.

  “And I’m small potatoes, Fritz. There have been cop killings nobody has explained to my satisfaction. Murder goes hand in hand with Pomeroy’s business. And I thought if he died the teeth would be stripped from the central cog in the machine. But there was another reason.”

  Barney stopped speaking, stared straight ahead through the windshield at the deserted street. “Well?” Wulfing prodded.

  “I don’t know why I should tell you this, Fritz. Maybe you’ll understand. It wasn’t jealousy. Neither revenge for what Pomeroy has done indirectly to me nor jealousy enter into the picture at all. But ever since I’ve known your kid Betty, I’ve loved her. She never looked my way. That was all right. I’m ten years older than she, and what’s a newspaperman got to offer anyway? But you’ll remember that she announced her engagement to Harry Pomeroy just before I got this slug in the chest. That hurt worse than the slug, because I knew Pomeroy would be poison to her.” Wulfing choked, a dry, hacking sound. “Barney,” he said, “that’s how I always wanted it—you and Betty. Maybe I talked you up too much. Maybe that’s why she insisted on going around with Pomeroy. If I hadn’t been so obvious—”

  Barney laughed harshly. “Does there have to be an ‘if’ at this late hour, Fritz?”

  He was glad that the blue lights of the police building were visible just ahead. There would be no long silence, no chance to think about what might have been.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Not Enough Motive

  THEY found Mat Hopson standing in the corridor of the building, talking to Lieutenant Macallum. He left the Homicide man and came forward to meet Barney and Dr. Wulfing, derby in his hand, his Chesterfield open. Macallum kept apart, a somewhat resentful look on his flat, blond face, as though he figured that the other three were hatching some plot against him.

  Mat Hopson’s dark eyes were grave, but his smile attempted to be reassuring. He pumped Wulfing’s arm.

  “Got your message, Doctor, and came right over,” he said. “I want you to know I will do everything in my power to get Betty out of this difficulty. We can’t, of course, offer bail on a murder charge.”

  “Just how bad is it, Mat?” Barney asked. “Well, the big difficulty is that Betty refuses to answer questions,” Mat said. “That’s what I gathered from Macallum. You know and I know that Betty couldn’t have done this thing. Down in his heart, I don’t think Macallum thinks she did it. But you know how it is. Pomeroy was a friend of the Chief of Police. Macallum’s being pressured, undoubtedly.”

  Barney snorted. “I’m going to talk to Macallum. I’ll get him to let you see Betty, Fritz.” He started across the corridor toward the lieutenant, stopped, looked over his shoulder to the doctor. “But, Fritz, not a word to anybody about what I told you, understand?”

  There was a dazed expression in Wulfing’s gray eyes, but he nodded.

  Barney went over to Macallum, a big, shapeless man whose body might have been made out of a sack of grain with stovepipes attached for arms and legs.

  “Mac,” Barney said, “Wulfing can see his daughter, can’t he?”

  “Sure, Barney.” Macallum crooked his finger to a plainclothes cop who was leaning up against the wall not far from the door of the Homicide office. When the detective came up, Macallum said, “Take Dr. Wulfing and Mr. Hopson to Miss Wulfing.”

  “And I want to talk to you alone, Mac,” Barney said.

  “Sure,” Macallum agreed. He stepped to the door marked Homicide, opened it for Barney. They crossed to Macallum’s private office and Barney slumped down into a chair. Macallum sat down slowly and carefully behind his desk, as though his stuffed waistline didn’t bend easily.

  “What’s on your mind, Barney?” he asked. “Plenty.” He smiled. “Look here, Macallum, Betty Wulfing didn’t kill Harry Pomeroy. I saw her leave the Pomeroy house. She may have discovered the body, but that’s all. All she really did that was open to question was fail to report the murder, and you can’t blame her for that, considering the state of mind she must have been in. What ever led you to her in the first place?” Macallum’s flat, fishy eyes were fixed on Barney’s face; they were expressionless with a certain hypnotic quality about them.

  “Letters Pomeroy had. A tear-stained handkerchief with the girl’s initials in the corner. The fact that a neighbor in the apartment next to the Pomeroy house saw a girl answering to Miss Wulfing’s description enter the Pomeroy house during that interval of time in which the murder was committed.”

  “That’s merely circumstantial,” Barney said. “She didn’t have any motive. She was going to marry Pomeroy.”

  “She had a motive,” Macallum said. “That’s it. She was going to marry Pomeroy. Her engagement had been announced. But Pomeroy wasn’t legally divorced from his first wife. That’s motive enough for a girl like Betty Wulfing.”

  Barney scowled. “Where’d you dig up that dirt about Pomeroy not being divorced?”

  “We didn’t. Dr. Wulfing did. Pomeroy had claimed a Reno divorce. Dr. Wulfing, who never wanted Betty to marry Pomeroy in the first place, checked with Reno. There’s no record of the divorce proceedings. That’s what’s got Mat Hopson standing on his ear right now. It means he’s not legally married to his present wife.”

  Barney plucked his lower lip thoughtfully. To a proud, high-minded girl like Betty this could be made to look like sufficient motive for murder. Barney dismissed all that with a flathanded gesture.

  “Forget it, Macallum. You’re making it hard for yourself. I killed Harry Pomeroy. I’ve always hated him and everything he stands for. I’d been told I had about six days to live, at the outside. Pomeroy was indirectly responsible for that little piece of bad news. So I killed him. He was dead before Betty Wulfing ever entered the house. The only reason she was able to get in without knocking and arousing the housekeeper was that, when I went out after the job, I didn’t close the door tight.”

  “Miss Wulfing had a latchkey to the back door,” Macallum said flatly.

  Barney came forward in his chair, bared his teeth. Then he forced himself to a calm. He couldn’t risk kicking off here In Macallum’s office, with the homicide man still unconvinced of the tr
uth. Barney had to live—had to live long enough to see this thing through.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said quietly. “Betty Wulfing wouldn’t have the key to any man’s house, whether she was engaged to him or not.” Macallum shrugged. He knew what he knew. “How did you get in, Barney?”

  “Through the front door. Remember, Mrs. Taylor testified that a man selling magazine subscriptions called at the door? That was me. If her glasses hadn’t been broken, Mrs. Taylor could identify me as that man. I’ve used that gag before to get in where I wasn’t wanted. I guess a lot of newspapermen have. I stood in the open door, handing Mrs. Taylor a sales talk, my back to the side of the door frame that has the socket plate for the lock bolt. I had a rubber plug, cut from a hard eraser, in the hand behind my back. I wedged that into the socket where the bolt of the snap latch would ordinarily go. I was irritating to Mrs. Taylor. She slammed the door as soon as I stepped back, and the snap-lock bolt went home because of the plug.”

  “Newspapermen don’t have any patent on that,” Macallum said without enthusiasm. “All you’ve got to know is what kind of lock the door has.”

  “I knew that,” Barney said. “I’d visited Pomeroy’s house before on interviews, election forecasts, and the like.”

  He reached into his pocket and took out an oblong of rubber. A thin piece of brass, a little larger than the end of the plug, was cemented to the rubber to prevent the plug from going too deep into the snap-bolt socket. He tossed the plug onto Macallum’s desk. Macallum had seen such things before. He didn’t take his eyes off Barney.

  “You had plenty of time to fix that up after you learned we had picked up Miss Wulfing.”

  Barney shook his head. “When I returned to my flat tonight from covering the murder I had committed, I carelessly left my door open. Some prowler caught me off guard, knocked me out, and robbed me. I spent the rest of the evening on my living-room floor until Dr. Wulfing brought me around.”

  Macallum shrugged stiffly. “Go on. After you had plugged the lock and after Mrs. Taylor had retired to her rooms at the rear of the house, I suppose you pushed open the door and walked in.”

  Barney nodded. “I wonder if you noticed the makeshift electric wiring in Pomeroy’s den? That house was built before electric lights, and some things that the insurance underwriters wouldn’t approve of have been done. For instance, the wire from the lighting fixture in the den is stapled across the ceiling, through the door, and tapped off the fixture in the hall. The den light turns off and on with a pull cord, but it can be turned off from the bottom of the stairway by means of the switch controlling the hall fixture. I had noticed that on previous visits to the house, also.

  “I turned off the switch at the bottom of the steps and went up to hunt Pomeroy in the dark. He was sitting in his chair, in a direct line between the door of the den and the window of the same room. I stepped just inside the door and shot him. I didn’t know whether Mrs. Taylor could hear the shots or not, what with her radio going. Apparently she didn’t.

  “I wanted to be certain I’d killed Pomeroy before I lammed out of there. I came closer to his chair, but not so close I’d risk getting any blood on me. I lit a match and held it up. Blood was sopping the front of his shirt. He was dead, all right, and I don’t think he knew what hit him.”

  “I’ll substantiate that,” Macallum said. “Medical testimony suggested that he was in a drunken stupor when he was killed. He hadn’t moved from the chair. You’re pretty convincing, but I don’t think you’ve got much motive. Not for murder!”

  Barney got out of his chair. He planted big fists on the top of Macallum’s desk. He was trembling a little and he could feel the jarring beat of his heart throughout his body.

  “No motive? Listen, Mac. Suppose you’re a Russian. You hate like hell the things the Soviet machine has done to your country, but you’ve played up to Stalin because you’ve had to stay alive. Some accident or something happens to you, and a doctor tells you that you’ve got six days to live. Would you hang onto what was left of your life, or would you risk throwing it away in an attempt to kill the man who had ruined your country?”

  Macallum sighed. “Sure, I’d gun Stalin. But not Harry Pomeroy.”

  “It’s the same thing on a small scale,” Barney said. “Pomeroy made this town what it is. You ought to know what it is. You’ve been as close to the vice rackets here as I have, and I’ve seen kids from high school on the skids and coasting to hell because of the protected vice in this town. You cops haven’t done anything about it because you haven’t been allowed.

  “Pomeroy’s machine has taxed and spent—spent to buy the votes to perpetuate control. When the honest, thinking people got up on their hind legs to fight, what happened? You’ll find names from the cemeteries on the registration list. Pomeroy’s men vote early and often from dawn to dusk on election day, going from one precinct to the next, voting under different names. The machine has seen to it that aliens have registered. The machine has intimidated the ignorant.”

  “Sure, sure,” Macallum admitted impatiently. “That’s a motive, Barney. But there’s a better, stronger motive for a guy they call Gentleman Ghent coming in here and trying to lie himself into the chair.”

  “It’s the gospel truth, Mac,” Barney said through clenched teeth.

  “A pretty girl like Betty Wulfing kills a guy who ought to be killed anyway. Betty’s the daughter of a friend of yours. You’re going to die before you could face trial anyway. You’re in love with the girl.”

  “I am like hell!” Barney lied savagely.

  “All right. So you don’t have to love her. But I think enough of you to believe you’d try a thing just like this. And I wouldn’t believe this confession of yours if you swore on a stack of Bibles a mile high.”

  Barney took so deep a breath that the wound in his chest pained him.

  “I’ve cracked a few cases for you, Mac, and I’ll crack this one. If you’ll come to my flat I’ll prove I killed Pomeroy.”

  “Okay.” Macallum got out of his chair as though he was trying to keep his stuffed body from splitting somewhere.

  “Why, Mac,” Barney said, “I’ll prove it if it takes me the rest of my life!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Four-O’Clock Caller

  IN THE company of Macallum, Mat Hopson, and Dr. Wulfing, Barney saw Betty before she was handed over to the custody of a policewoman. There was no use telling Betty to keep her chin up; she did that without being told. She even managed a courageous smile as she said good night to her father. Barney went over to her, looked down into her sweet face, into her sober brown eyes. He patted her arm a couple of times.

  “Hello, Barney,” she said.

  The only time Barney liked the sound of his name was when she spoke it. Maybe it wasn’t so much the sound as it was the kick he got out of watching her soft lips say it.

  Barney took off his hat. He swallowed. He wanted to tell her then that whatever he had done that night he had done for her. He wanted to say that killing Harry Pomeroy had been a double pleasure because it had kept Pomeroy away from her. But he didn’t say anything like that. What good would it have done? When she did find out he had killed Pomeroy, she’d hate him. And even that wouldn’t make any difference to him, where he was going.

  “Kid,” he said, “I’ll have you out of here by dawn.”

  “I’ll count on that,” she told him, “Ever since I was a high-school punk I’ve been counting on whatever Gentleman Ghent says. It’s the truth because you read it in the papers.”

  “ ‘Night,” he said, and turned away.

  He rode back to his flat with Dr. Wulfing in the physician’s car. Right behind them were Macallum and Hopson in the lieutenant’s roadster.

  “You’re feeling all right?” Wulfing asked.

  “Fine, Fritz. I worked up quite a sweat in Mac’s office. The air feels good.” Barney thought it was funny that Wulfing closed the window after Barney had said that. “You afraid I’ll catch pne
umonia?” he laughed.

  Wulfing coughed dryly. “I wouldn’t want you to pull another fainting fit like the one you had in your flat. There’s too much depending on you now.”

  “I didn’t faint,” Barney said. “Somebody bopped me on the head. You’re a swell doctor!”

  Wulfing looked at him sharply. “I thought you collapsed and hit your head on the floor. Who hit you?”

  “I don’t know. I’d left the door open. Somebody swiped my wallet.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You didn’t ask and there wasn’t time. You told me the cops had pinched Betty for the Pomeroy killing. That seemed to be the only thing that mattered, right then.”

  Now, though, the attack on him by that prowler seemed to attain new importance. What if something else had been taken? He discarded the idea immediately. Why would anybody steal the murder weapon? No motive. It was crazy.

  Crazy or not, the fear nagged him all the way to the flat. As soon as Wulfing stopped the car, Barney sprang out and hurried into the apartment building. He all but ran up the steps and lost all the time he had gained fumbling with the keys. Wulfing caught up with him and so did Mat Hopson and Macallum from the other car.

  “Say! You better take it a little easier, Barney!” Mat said.

  Barney got the door open, strode through the living-room and the hall and into the bedroom. He switched on the light and went immediately to the drawer in which he had put the gun. He opened it, dug into the pile of socks and handkerchiefs it contained. The gun wasn’t there. He wheeled, went back into the living-room.

  Macallum and Wulfing were standing on either side of the door. Mat Hopson was beside the table, reaching into Barney’s cigar humidor. Barney lunged across the room and seized Hopson’s wrist before he could withdraw his hand from the box. Hopson turned, his mouth open, a blank expression in his fine dark eyes. Barney looked down at the lawyer’s fingers. They were clutching a cellophaned cigar.