by Jerry eBooks
He’s dead?”
“Don’t you know it?”
She fell back a step. “Gar!” A thin sound, tinny in her swelling throat. “No, Gar! Don’t!”
“You mean my slip’s showing now?” Hanley asked. “That’s an old one, sister.” He laughed into her affrighted face. “Ha-ha, your husband isn’t within ten miles of here—”
He pivoted. He knew Gar Chanin was in the room, all right. No woman, no matter how fine an actress, could make her face pale at will. Hanley’s words were meant for Chanin, not Chanin’s wife . . .
But Chanin was closer than he’d dreamed. Knuckles welted across Hanley’s mouth, a hard punch with the added impetus of Hanley’s pivoting weight to make it harder. The cop’s knees buckled, one of them hitting the floor.
Hanley came up in a crouch, weaving. He dodged, but the next punch crazed and made his ear sing like a piano wire. He closed with Chanin then. Chanin wasn’t soft, or easy. The banker had come up from farm boy beginnings, as he boasted in his political speeches. He matched Hanley in strength, and he was desperate, savage. Their bodies heaved and crashed into the desk.
Wood splintered loudly.
Hanley turned a hip into Chanin’s viciously resisting bulk. He trapped a hand that was clawing for his throat, dragged it over his shoulder, and pitched Chanin in a flying mare.
Chanin got up, snarling. In the ruin of a desk, a telephone’s dial tone hummed. A weight bounced off Hanley’s skull.
“Paula! You little idiot, come on!” he heard Chanin roar.
Hanley got up from both knees this time. His head was spinning like a roulette wheel from the candlestick Paula Chanin had socked him with. He was perfectly conscious, but so dizzy his legs wanted to follow his head around in circles. The front door slammed. By the time he got it open, the Chanin sedan was racing down the driveway. Hanley stumbled to his motorcycle, and swore bitterly as he discovered the air had been valved from its front tire.
There was nothing to do except use the phone. He went back, flashlight in hand, but as he bent over the ruin of a desk he couldn’t believe his eyes.
The desk was alive. It whined to itself in a low metallic tone, while a section of its veneered front shivered with ague. He touched it, and the hidden spring whirred, the secret drawer shot out into his hand.
Hanley’s eyes widened over the bundle of IOUs. Each was signed by Paula Chanin. Each was payable to Arnold Keet, but Keet had endorsed the lot in John Graham’s favor. The amounts varied from thirty to ninety dollars, and at a rough total the bundle ran over two thousand dollars.
Hanley phoned the nearest filling station on the Boulevard extension. In ten minutes a service truck arrived, and they loaded the motorcycle aboard. Hanley told the attendant to stop on the curve, where a Homicide Detail car was parked alongside the crash car. He examined the splintered fence. As he had expected, the bit of yellow yarn was gone. There was nothing to prove it had ever been there, just his word against the two Chanins. “Drive on,” he grumbled.
However, he ran into a bit of compensatory luck while the attendant was hissing air into the tire. As he paced the filling station driveway, Hanley’s eye fell on a cardboard display in the office window. He jerked his thumb at the highly ornamental gear shift balls.
“You didn’t happen to sell one of these to John Graham, did you?”
“Nope,” came the answer. “We marked ’em down to 69c special, but accessories just won’t move nowadays. Nobody puts any money into a car when they ain’t sure how long its tires will last.”
Hanley stood thought-struck. The price tag on the hunk of glass in the wrecked car had been 69c. Since it was a special price, doubtless the item had come from this very station. But if Graham hadn’t made the purchase, then the complexion of matters changed completely.
“Made a phone call from here,” Hanley muttered under his breath.
“Yeah. A dame did. Swell looker.”
“I meant before that,” Hanley said. “Lotsa customers use the phone.”
“I think you’ll get a chance to pick this one out of a police line-up,” Hanley grunted. He swung his leg over the ‘cycle and chugged away.
Neon lights thickened as he journeyed into the suburb. The cop had patrolled the neighborhood enough to know where he’d find Dr. Wrenn’s office. It was a modernistic fronted layout, just off the main drag. Hanley went in through a glass-bricked foyer, found the entrance door unlocked. An inner office buzzer sounded as he went into the waiting room.
“Doc,” Hanley said. “Doc!”
He hesitated, and then opened the inner door.
The little doctor was more grim than ever. He sprawled on his own examining table, with one of his own scalpels plunged deep in his throat.
There was blood on the floor. There was green fluid—the green, liquid soap that doctors use—spilt from a bottle that was smashed on the floor.
Hanley’s pulse got thick in his throat. He stared at the little doctor a moment, and then lurched to the phone. He barked out two brief messages, one to the filling station he’d just left, and the other to police headquarters.
All the time he kept peering at the little puddle of green on the floor, not at the blood at all.
He swung outside, hunched low in the saddle as he skid-turned onto the main drag. He opened the siren, split the street up dead-center. The address was stamped hard into his memory, because cops always take addresses in accident cases. He found it an apartment building, a nice location overlooking a park.
The desk clerk breathed out a number. “307, but—”
Hanley barged into the self-operated elevator. He barged out, and pounded on 307.
Arnold Keet opened the door. “You’re okay?” Hanley grunted.
“I was lucky,” Keet said. “The doctor turned me loose. Told me I should take it easy for a day or so.”
“Wrenn?”
“Naturally. I’m not a charity case to be taken to an Emergency Station and a police surgeon.”
“I thought you weren’t,” Hanley said, “after I found these.”
Keet looked at the IOUs. His large face was collected, calm. “Oh, yes. Mrs. Chanin. But I didn’t get face value for those.”
“What’s the story?”
“It’s an old one,” Keet said. “Chanin’s one of those sobersides, bluestocking, model husbands. Paula is—she’s different. She craves excitement. It takes the form of gambling, playing bridge for high stakes.”
“With you?”
“There’s a crowd,” Keet said. “The Country Club crowd at Farhaven. Graham used to play. Dr. Wrenn took a hand occasionally. Paula Chanin was a regular. Only she played for excitement, which isn’t the way to play bridge.”
“It’s evident she lost money!” muttered Hanley.
“She ran into a streak of bad cards,” Keet said. “That’s when she started handing out IOUs. I knew, of course, that I could collect any time I wanted to go to Gar. If I wanted to kick up a filthy stink.”
“Gar didn’t know?”
“What do you think?”
“I guess he didn’t,” Hanley said. “Where does Graham fit into this?”
Keet said, “He made me a cash offer for her IOUs. I gave her twenty-four hours to raise the money, and when she didn’t, I turned them over to him.”
“What’d he want with them?”
“Politics. A gambling wife is no asset to a reforming politician. Photostats of those IOUs could do Chanin a hell of a lot of harm, if they got broadcast over the state when he runs for Governor. It’d hurt him where he’s strongest, in the rural districts, and with the ladies. The average housewife wouldn’t sympathize much with Paula’s gambling away more money than most families earn in a year.”
Knuckles were drumming on the door. Keet opened it, and then lurched back, open-mouthed.
“Get your hands up,” Gar Chanin ordered. “Both of you.”
Chanin was white-faced. He was desperate. The shine in his burning eyes looked downright crazy.
; “You blackmailing rat,” he said to Keet. “You’re not going to drag my name through the muck. You’ll give me those IOUs, or I’ll kill you.”
“Graham—” began Keet weakly.
“I know all about Graham!” declared Gar Chanin, verging on hysteria. “Wrenn, too! You’re all a pack of scoundrels, luring my wife on to destroy me!”
Paula Chanin tiptoed into the apartment, her face as scarlet as that of a ten-year-old caught in a jam pot.
“How do you mean, they lured her on?” Hanley asked.
“Just what I say. They let her win small amounts at first, encouraged her until the foul, damnable disease of gambling was in her blood!”
“Where’d you find all this out?”
Chanin perspired. “Today. She asked me for two thousand dollars, on the pretext her mother needed an operation. I put through a long-distance call, and discovered the lie. But I gave her the money anyway. I hid myself in the tonneau of the car to see where she went with it.” He faced Keet. “She came here first. The clerk told her you’d left with Graham. She drove to his home. He wasn’t there, either. You didn’t want her money! You were determined to ruin me!”
Hanley’s straining ears caught footsteps. His lean body gathered itself inside his uniform. There was a tap at the door.
Chanin’s head turned involuntarily toward the sound. Hanley stepped swiftly and lashed his fist against Chanin’s jaw. The banker fell.
“Come in,” Hanley said.
It was the filling station attendant.
“One of these guys?” Hanley murmured. A coverall sleeve came up, pointing.
“Yeah. Sure. Him.”
Keet squatted swiftly; snatched the gun from Chanin’s limp hand. Hanley went for the heavy gun in his holster. Click! That was Keet triggering. Click! Click! But Chanin had been bluffing, and the weapon was empty. Chanin wasn’t a killer.
“Hah!” grunted Hanley, belting Keet a lick with his Service Positive. The big man crumpled, twitched on the floor. Hanley rolled him over, and there was a wet spot on Keet’s coat front.
Hanley opened the coat, but he had to hunt awhile in the coat’s lining before he found the pocket at all.
“Holdout,” he muttered then. To the amazed-eyed Paula Chanin he explained, “The guy’s a card shark, a crook. No wonder he took you to the cleaners. He generally won in those bridge games, didn’t he?”
The filling station chap said: “I thought the sharks just played poker.”
Hanley said, “Hell, no. Poker’s one of the toughest games to rig. Bridge is one of the easiest, especially around a country club where the stakes are high but women play. He could slip in a cold deck from the holdout, just leaning over to right a lady’s cigarette.”
“Doubled and redoubled,” gasped Chanin’s wife.
Hanley helped the groaning Chanin sit up. “Redoubled?” the banker asked. “What’s that?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” said Hanley, “but Keet could win forty, fifty dollars on one trick hand. But I guess Graham got wise to him. I guess he made Mr. Keet turn over those IOUs by threatening to expose the guy. Keet must have had some strong motive to kill him.”
“Kill—? But he was in the wreck, too!” Hanley said no. “It goes back to the gear shift accessory Keet stole from the filling station today. What really happened is that he slugged Graham, and jumped out of the car before it went through the fence. Then he ran to the wreck, and used the broken half of the gear shift doodad to open the artery in the wrist. After that, he wedged himself in and pretended to have been there all along.
“It was neat enough, except that I got there before Graham had time to bleed to death. That’s why he had to go over and loosen the tourniquet when I ran up to the road to stop your car, Mrs. Chanin. I didn’t suspect it at the time, because he showed all the symptoms of concussion and shock—dilated pupils, pallor, and feeble pulse.”
Chanin was incredulous. “How could he possibly fake those symptoms?”
“Belladonna would do those things,” Hanley said, “and maybe there are other drugs. It fooled me, because I’m only a first aider. But it didn’t fool Doc Wrenn, not when the Doc got a good look at him. So he had to kill Wrenn, to cover up his first murder. And to cover up his second—”
Hanley fumbled in the holdout pocket, extricated slivers of glass. “He poured off a vial of liquid soap from a bottle in the office, and smashed the bottle. That was to sprinkle a clue on somebody’s else’s clothes, in case the chase got too hot for him.
“I knew that,” Hanley went on, “all along. Because there was just a pool of soap on the floor. It wasn’t tracked around, as it would have been if the bottle got smashed in a fight.” He broke off, listened. The others heard it, too. The sound of a siren. “Homicide squad,” Hanley said.
Paula Chanin gulped, “But how could they—so soon—nobody sent for them—?”
“I did,” said Hanley. “A while ago.”
“You knew he was the guilty one?” demanded Chanin.
“It pointed that way. First, the piece of glass that Graham didn’t buy. And then Wrenn being dead. It added up, because in my own mind I was sure I tied that tourniquet right all the time.”
MAIL ME MY TOMBSTONE
Charles Larson
When that detective story writer was called out to solve a locked-room murder, all he could think of was an invisible man who could crawl through keyholes. Only the keyholes were plugged. But the unseen slayer got through just the same to sling a deadly missive at the writer.
ELLEN said softly: “Hey.”
“Um?” I raised my eyes.
“Could that be the telephone?”
For a solemn moment we listened to the mad jangling from the kitchen.
“Damned if I know,” I murmured. “I can’t hear a thing for the ringing.”
“It’s probably just me,” Ellen admitted. Gently she kissed me.
But the phone kept on. Eight times. Nine. Ten. Eleven. And finally Ellen sighed and said: “No use. Maybe if I kicked it . . .”
She slid off my lap, moved toward the back of the house, and I smiled after her pretty figure and reflected on the blessings of marriage. A year and a day. At first it had raised merry hell with my writing, but the novelty of having her around wore off after a while, and the writing was easier and better because I had someone to write for.
In the kitchen the phone stopped when she answered it. I leaned back in the chair and wondered idly who it was. My agent had said he’d call—but it was too early in the morning, not yet nine-thirty. Probably for Ellen. Bridge. Shopping. A shower for a new bride.
“Jim . . .”
I turned my head, startled. She’d come back so quietly I hadn’t heard her at all. Slowly I blew my breath up over my face. “You walk like a cat, my pretty,” I said. “Right now I feel like a cat.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
I twisted around in the chair, looked up at her. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing.” Her voice was sharp. She picked at an imaginary bit of dust on her blouse. “Go answer the phone.”
Puzzled, I stood up. “Who is it? My agent?”
“Not unless his voice is changing.”
I walked warily toward the kitchen. Already I felt guilty and a little ashamed, as though I’d been caught sneaking a solitary drink.
I squeezed into the narrow space between the refrigerator and the breakfast table and picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“Jim? Oh, Jimmy darling . . . I’m so glad you’re home.” The voice was very feminine, very frightened—still, very relieved.
I said: “Oh?” It was asinine, but as far as I knew, I’d never heard the voice before. I glanced over the mouthpiece at Ellen who’d wandered into the doorway behind me, and shrugged.
There was a long awkward pause while the voice thought it over, then: “Jim . . .”
“Yes.”
“You don’t remember me?”
“I’m sorr
y, really . . .”
“Rita Manning.”
ONCE I fell off a barn onto my head.
Nothing like this. Rita Manning. Rita Manning. A thousand years ago 1’d loved her—not the way I love Ellen, but sharper, quicker. In the seconds before I answered, I remembered a hundred emotions I thought I’d forgotten. Aching happiness, childish despair. Long lazy college evenings, hot Sunday afternoons, and the sad trail of rain down a paneled sorority window.
“Rita,” I murmured.
“Jimmy, listen. I’m in terrible trouble and we have to talk quickly. They think I’m calling my lawyer.”
I shook my head. “What?”
“They think—”
“Who does?”
“The police. Will you please just listen?” The voice was tired.
“Yes. All right. Go ahead. I’m listening.”
“Everything happened so quickly. Do you know Steven Loring?”
I’d heard of him. A big-time gambler. Too big to touch. I said: “I think so.”
“He’s dead.”
“So?”
“Don’t say it like that! I loved him.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I’m sorry. I thought—wasn’t there a doctor?”
“Doctor? You mean John. No. We were divorced two years ago. And he wasn’t a doctor, he’s with the government. He keeps after me, but—I loved Steve. And now they’re holding me for it.”
“Holding you for what?”
“The murder of Steven Loring! Don’t you ever listen? My heavens, Jimmy . . .” She was crying softly.
“Oh,” I said again. “Oh, I see.”
I’d heard, but I hadn’t heard. Murder? It happened only in my stories, not in real life. And if it did happen in real life, it happened to men like Dillinger and Nelson, not to people I knew.
I said: “Where are you? I’ll come over.”
“I’m at Steve’s house. Thirty-ninth and Klickitat.”
“Steve’s house!”
“Don’t make me explain now. We haven’t time. But believe me, Jimmy, I didn’t do it. I have three men who’ll swear they heard shots from inside the house while I was with my mother.”
“What men?” I asked.