Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  FEW friends of District Attorney Yarrow who had known him well in life could have identified him in death. Only his single gold tooth stood out where yellow lips had shrunk back. His eyes were closed and deeply sunken. A man of a hundred and eighty or ninety pounds, his body seemed to have shriveled grotesquely to half of that.

  To get away quickly was Sudden’s impulse. This was red hot. That came first. In the darkness the body might still lie there for several hours undiscovered-. The Star-News would be on the street with the incredible story before its competitors could learn the crime, if it was a crime, had been committed. It wouldn’t be the first time Sudden Cassidy had cracked a story before even the police had arrived at its source.

  And, though Sudden was hard-boiled enough in his way, he wasn’t enjoying the brief minute he passed beside the body. Overcoming a reluctance to touch the terribly dead flesh, he had ascertained that there was no visible wound. Though the street was deserted, his spotlight might attract attention of a patrolman or a late passerby, so Sudden worked fast.

  Half a dozen letters in the coat pocket were routine. He returned them. He retained only the glazed square of cardboard after a hasty glance at its cryptic wording.

  The words were typed.

  So others may know. Would you pay for the antidote or would you die this horribly? Yarrow had no chance to pay. You have.

  The dead man’s twisted yellow-right hand held his gold-rimmed eyeglasses so tightly that one lens had been crunched. In the left hand, too, gleaned a bit of glass. Sudden shivered, but he forced the fingers free. They had been clutching a slender, silvered hypodermic syringe, with the plunger high as though it had been prepared for an injection that had not been made.

  No one appeared along the street. Sudden wrapped the syringe carefully in his handkerchief and slipped it into his pocket. He glanced toward the Yarrow residence. Except for the dim light over the entrance door, the house was in darkness.

  Back in his car, Sudden clicked off the spotlight. Later the police would yell about that cardboard and the syringe. Perhaps he would get a few days for this contempt of procedure. It wouldn’t be the first time the police had racketed him into court for being a few jumps ahead. The Star-News bonus would more than make up for it.

  Sudden intended to know first what that slender tube of silver contained. Something told him the syringe had not been in the dead man’s hand by design of his killers, if there had been killers.

  As he started the car he recalled that Gyp Martin had said he would meet him in half an hour at the Cabin Club. He’d better streak over there and get hold of Gyp. He’d take him over to the Star-News and sew him up where he couldn’t talk while he was writing the break on the story for the Daylight Edition.

  THE Cabin Club was in the Cosmopolis whirlpool. Indeed, Juniper Avenue pulsed more quickly after midnight than at midday. So the crowd near the alley in the Cabin Club block wouldn’t have attracted Sudden if he hadn’t seen the two police cars and the ambulance at the curb. He swung in.

  “Nothin’ much,” growled Detective Connell, as Sudden shouldered in. “Cheap bump-off. One of them Mexican snow eaters. Sure, you know him. You fronted for him on that penthouse job, Sudden. An’ see what you done for him. Right now he’d a been all safe in stir instead of havin’ the back of his head almost knocked out from between his ears.”

  Sudden watched them roll the limp figure of Gyp Martin onto a stretcher and slide him into the death car.

  “Know who?” said Sudden.

  “Nor what,” replied Connell. “Mighta had a mary-hannah fit and butted himself to death against the wall, only he got conked from behind.”

  Cold, damp flakes of snow seemed to fall thickly on the back of Sudden’s neck and slide clammily down his spine, only it wasn’t snowing. He wouldn’t have to sew up Gyp Martin to keep him from talking.

  And whoever had accomplished the same thing so efficiently and finally had been inspired by extraordinary purpose. Sudden linked the crime instantly with the huddled, horrible body that had been District Attorney Yarrow. He was edging out of the morbidly curious crowd as he thought of it. It was a temptation to jolt the unruffled Detective Connell and his scorn of a “cheap bump-off” with that other thing that would assuredly set Cosmopolis by the ears.

  But the Star-News paid him for that sort of exclusive ear setting, so it would have to keep.

  A burly Negro bumped into him as he cleared the edge of the throng. The black man scowled, but muttered a swift apology and faded back into the crowd. But when another Negro, tall and cadaverous, removed his lanky figure from the fender of his coupe, where he had been sitting, Sudden again had the feeling of icy snowflakes impinging on the back of his neck.

  He shook off the feeling. It was impossible that anyone could have connected him with the swift, mysterious demise of Gyp Martin. None in that crowd could have known where he had been within the past half hour. Yet the insides of his hands were slippery with cold sweat when he gripped the steering wheel and pushed off.

  Someone must have seen Gyp when he stumbled upon Yarrow’s body. Had that someone followed him, been nearby when he telephoned the Star-News? Or had Gyp come by his death at the hands of some other person unconnected with the incident of that gruesome body on the Yarrow lawn?

  No time now to follow up that line of inquiry. Sudden swung his car into the Star-News parking space. But when he was upstairs calling Morrison, the city editor, to get a couple of early copy readers down for the Daybreak Extra, his eyes kept swinging to the door at the head of the stairway.

  For a third Negro had been leaning casually against the wall, at the foot of the stairs when he had come up. Though the Negro had apparently paid no attention to his entrance, Sudden had been grateful for the presence of the night janitor and two scrubwomen in the hallway. And the little classifying camera in the back of his mind had clicked for the third time that night on an oddity.

  None of the three Negroes had seemed to be of the ordinarily type of the Cosmopolis black belt. What had been the difference? Their dress had been commonplace. Yet there was something outstanding. Yes, that was it. All of the trio were of the distinctively pure African type. That rarity in the States, a native Negro of unmixed blood strain.

  All this slipped away in the following hour.

  “God!” exclaimed Morrison, getting his first slant at Sudden’s lead. “Won’t this split open the works! You don’t mean it’s sewed up?”

  “Sewed up an’ we’ll break it. Keep in touch with Pete on police. You know it, or Pete would’ve been burnin’ in by this time.”

  And the plates were being locked in the presses with Sudden’s story before Pete did call in. Then it wasn’t the Yarrow death he had.

  “There’s been a funny stickup out at Arthur T. Marsden’s on the Gold Coast,” Pete told Morrison. “If you can rout Sudden Cassidy out at this infernal hour, thought maybe you’d like to have him get on it. Burke of the crime detail’s out there, but I can’t get a lead on it at Headquarters. For some reason or other, they’ve all buttoned up.”

  “Okay,” said Morrison. “We’ll shoot a man along.”

  “You don’t have to go,” he told Sudden. “I’d figured you good for a week off and out of the way after the cops begin yapping on this Yarrow beat, but—”

  “Hell!” said Sudden. “Marsden’s a big shot, an’ I’ll run along.”

  He didn’t tell Morrison, but the events of the night were too vivid to contribute to sleep and he wanted to be somewhere and enjoy the comments of a few Headquarters dicks he knew when the Star-News extra hit the street.

  ARTHUR T. MARSDEN, president of the Transvale Corporation, largest maker of automobile parts in the state, and reputed to be many times a millionaire, was the center of a little group in the living room of his home when Sudden Cassidy barged in.

  Marsden’s rotund, usually good-natured face, appeared strangely stricken. He recognized Sudden and he whispered.

  “For God’s sake, keep the
newspapers off of this!”

  There were no other newspapermen there. Lieutenant Detective Burke stepped in front of Sudden.

  “You heard what he said. You’ll have to get out.”

  “That’ll be swell,” said Sudden easily. “We know just enough now to make it a peach of a mystery. Marsden held up and won’t talk. An’ say, he’s pretty sick, isn’t he?” The man in the big reclining chair groaned. One of Burke’s men took Sudden by the arm. The reporter twisted with an apparently accidental flick of his right toe behind the man’s ankle and the dick unaccountably performed half of a back somersault, alighting on one ear.

  “First chance I had to try that one, Burke,” said Sudden. “Now what’s the dope?”

  A calm, slow voice with only a hint of foreign origin spoke.

  “I would advise, Mr. Marsden, it might be best to inform the newspaperman of what has occurred. In my own practice, I’ve discovered it is best to confide in the gentlemen of the press.”

  Deepset gray eyes looked straight into Sudden’s. The reporter identified the man instantly as Dr. Von Kruppen. He was a pleasant, almost unctuous man who wore a physician’s one-time traditional Van Dyke beard and small blond mustache. He was rubbing a thoughtful forefinger over a forehead that sloped so suddenly his hair seemed to have skidded halfway off his skull.

  Sudden had encountered him a couple of times on hospital cases. Dr. Von Kruppen, in the four or five years he had practised in Cosmopolis, had built a reputation as a brain specialist. Some of his lectures before the state medical society had made good copy.

  “If you think so,” whispered Marsden, suddenly seeming too sick to care much. “I’d hoped—what in hell is it, anyway, doctor.”

  “I only wish I could give you the right answer, but I’m afraid it’s too soon,” said Dr. Von Kruppen, taking Marsden’s pulse. “I would say, Officer, you might as well let the representative of the press see that note and then we’ll ask him as a special favor to keep it in confidence for awhile.”

  “What a chance!” growled Detective Burke.

  The sick man was muttering in a low tone. “Things are getting blurred.”

  Von Kruppen tried to soothe him. “Hold yourself together, Mr. Marsden. Perhaps the power of suggestion is working. Try to forget for a minute that anything happened. I’ll fix you a sedative.”

  “No! No! I tell you it isn’t imagination!” The whisper was frantic. “Everything’s fading out!”

  “Nonsense,” said Dr. Von Kruppen cheerily, but Sudden saw there was a worried crease in his long forehead.

  “Well,” said Burke, “someone held Marsden up when he got out of his car in the garage under the house. “He’d just switched off the lights when they grabbed him, he says. That’s all, except it was damn’ funny. He had several hundred dollars in his pockets and that diamond on his finger, but they didn’t take anything. Just put him out with ether and walked out on the job. All, except this.”

  Once again big, damp, icy snowflakes fell from nowhere on the back of Sudden’s neck. Burke was extending a small square of glazed cardboard. On it was written in typed letters:

  Soon you will be very sick. You will grow worse until you die horribly. But you have one chance to live. One chance only. That will cost you one million dollars cash. Don’t think anyone can help you. Only one man has the antidote and only that can save you. Get together one million cash at once and wait for instructions.”

  THE words photographed themselves on Sudden’s brain even while he was swiftly revolving the facts and what to do. In less than an hour the Star-News Daybreak Extra would be on the streets. He didn’t want to get in a jam with Burke and the Police Department, not just yet. They would find the District Attorney’s body quickly enough after the story broke.

  Sudden had thought of one place to go where he might get a part of the answer to the sinister, terrible thing that had struck down Yarrow. Now he saw the clear intent of Yarrow’s killers, so incredibly horrible as to be fantastic. Important as the District Attorney had been, the cunning mind behind this plot to extort a cool million from Marsden, perhaps more millions from others, had considered Yarrow merely a pawn in the bigger game.

  And what a terrific proof of the killers’ power and their confidence in the scheme they had evolved.

  Sudden thought of the bomb he could burst among this little group. Burke and his men, who would be incredulous until they had confirmed his story. The skilful, cool-headed doctor, maintaining his calm and going about his business of ascertaining what source of human ill was even now coursing through the millionaire’s bloodstream.

  Marsden himself. God! If he could have seen what Sudden had come upon in Trent Street! The shock alone would be sufficient to twist his already apprehensive brain.

  The women Sudden had seen hovering about in a nearby room.

  No. This wasn’t the time to talk. Not to Burke. Later he could get the more collected Dr. Von Kruppen to one side. Perhaps what he had to tell might give the doctor a lead. If he could only get the doctor out and drive him over right now to Trent Street. That fearfully shrunken, horribly warped body on the lawn might tell him something.

  As he looked, Dr. Von Kruppen pulled back Marsden’s sleeve and was feeling a tiny red spot on his upper arm. The mark of the hypodermic was plain. Sudden unconsciously touched the silver tube in his coat pocket.

  The newspaper reporter came uppermost. What a story, if that to which his mind had leaped might be true. No. This wasn’t the place to tell it. Not now. He’d go to Dr. Von Kruppen later, very soon, but not until he had gone to the one man he had intended to see.

  If there was anyone in Cosmopolis could tell him the secret of that silver tube he had taken from Yarrow’s yellowed fingers, that man could do it. It was evident from the warning that Marsden would not be fatally stricken at once. He recalled now that Yarrow had been away from his office for more than two weeks. Had left word that he was going up country.

  “And that’s all then?” said Sudden, as if he had expected more. “You wouldn’t think it was just a clever trick, one of them extortion scares? How about it, Dr. Von Kruppen?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell Mr. Marsden,” said the doctor. “Possibly there was nothing at all except perhaps an opiate or something that might nauseate him for a few hours in that hypo.”

  “I can hardly see,” mumbled Marsden. “For God’s sake, Doctor, can’t you do something to make sure?”

  Dr. Von Kruppen smiled through his blond beard and looked at Sudden.

  “I trust you’ll treat this in confidence, young man, until I can be sure of something,” he said. “Publicity is probably just what the scoundrels would want.”

  Sudden considered swiftly. He ought to be able to be back within an hour.

  “I’ll not let go of anything I’ve heard until I see you first, Doctor,” he promised. “In the meantime, something may turn up.”

  He was in no doubt that something would turn up. And he slipped through the door, for far up the street newsboys were crying the Daybreak Extra.

  SUDDEN drove with such reckless disregard to the hilltop section of town that his mind was only on his driving and the possibilities ahead.

  Half an hour later he emerged from a gray stone house on a side street. His pulse was jumping with elation. Professor Ralston’s analyses never went wrong. When Ralston was doubtful, he refused to commit himself.

  A serum, he had said, after he had passed two tiny drops from the syringe through a complicated test.

  “Taken from the blood of an animal,” he stated. “It’s intended as a relief from or the cure of some blood disease. That I can’t identify, to be sure. But I would say positively that it is an antidote in a serum concocted from animal blood.”

  It made Sudden dizzy. Newspapermen get that way when a big break on a great story is imminent. He had this one sewed up, as completely as the murder of the District Attorney. Now he was sure it had been murder.

  He parked his ca
r in the Star-News space and broke for upstairs. First, break the Marsden case as it lay, then get out to Dr. Von Kruppen’s, if he had left Marsden’s, and pledge the doctor to secrecy in return for giving the doctor his big chance to help solve the mystery of the ghastly plot for a million.

  He barely took notice of knots of people along the street, of the newsboys selling extras, of the note of horrified excitement. Only vaguely he did see two huge Negroes lounging near the Star-News entrance, but in the heat of this new break on the story his mind passed that up.

  THEN Morrison was thundering across the room toward him.

  “You damn’ fool!” the city editor was frothing. “Where in hell’s that Yarrow body? What did you do with it? The commissioner himself has been on the wire! Answer me! What did you do with it?”

  Sudden stared with unbelief. Morrison must be crazy.

  “The body; Yarrow’s, you mean? Why, in front of his house—right—”

  “The police have combed every inch of the place!” shouted Morrison. “It ain’t there I’m tellin’ yuh! Where in hell is it? This puts us in a helluva spot!”

  Sudden was dazed as he got back downstairs. He’d get to Marsden’s place and catch Dr. Von Kruppen there. Then he’d get out to Trent Street.

  His car was parked in the shadowed corner under the Star-News Building. As he walked into the gloom he was aware that two Negroes had also stepped from the pavement, were following him. The import of it flashed on him now.

  He acted almost on instinct. That was it. He might have realized it sooner. They were after that silver tube. Then it had been a Negro who had got Gyp Martin.

  He thought swiftly, took the syringe from his coat pocket and pulled up his trouser leg. When he straightened, the silver tube was firmly held close to his leg by his hose supporter.

  But the Negroes had stopped when he had. And they didn’t move as he went on toward his car. He was watching them over his shoulder as he reached mechanically for the handle of the coupe door. Something brought his eyes around.