by Jerry eBooks
“You rigged up the photo-electric cell that was used to turn on the studio lot lights. It operates by a beam flashing across the circuit. You hooked the relay to the gun, aimed the gun at the spot you directed Edwards to lie on, and then let the searchlight effect of the war scene do the dirty work. When that beam broke the contact, the relay pulled the trigger. You even put soft lead bullets in the gun so they couldn’t be traced to any specific pistol.”
The light held in my face had become a shivering red ball of heat.
“And, you dirty killer,” I yelled, “you thought you had a perfect suspect in Lou Mathis! You knew he was sore at Edwards for making a pass at his sister. You also knew he was crazy about the Jergins dame a couple of years ago and could have been the unknown admirer. So you placed a picture of the dead girl in his office, stole his gun, and planted it near the camera.”
I was getting delirious. I remember snickering at his stupidity. My head was floating toward the ceiling. My arms and legs were no longer a part of me. Words flowed from my mouth like ticker tape.
“You idiot!” I howled. “You made your colossal mistake in not knowing Mathis’ history. At least you should have chosen someone who had been in New York at the time of the murder. Mathis has never been out of California!”
SOMETHING pressed against my temple. It was the nose of a pistol and the cool metal felt good. My head was an inferno. A breeze fanned my face with a gentle swishing. He was wrapping a cloth around his gun to muffle the report.
“You are clever, Jimmy Lee,” he said. “Too clever to stay alive.”
My mind cleared for a moment. It was the subconscious desire to live making a desperate effort to push through. I jerked my head. A muffled roar blasted my ear and a singe of fire creased my scalp. The man cursed and pistol-whipped me across the face. I faded again. . . .
I came to in the midst of a babble of voices. The lights in the sound stage were on like a pre-war Carthay Circle opening. Callahan stood over me with a wet towel. He had been wiping my face with it. He beamed when I opened my eyes.
“Jimmy Lee!” he shouted. “You filled in the missing clue! The motive! I was planted in the building and heard everything you and the murderer said. My taking Mathis out was an excuse to get back to the sound stage. I figured the answer was here. Boy, have we got an airtight case!”
I flexed my arms and legs which had been freed and now only tingled. I pushed to my feet. My head felt a hundred per cent better, I squinted a bleary eye at the lieutenant.
“Listen,” I said groggily. “Did you sit in a cozy corner watching Art Mabry beat my head into a pulp and try to amputate my legs and arms with baling wire?”
Callahan shrugged, smiling broadly.
“Well, of course, we had to get the evidence. After all, we jumped him before he finished you off, though I’ll admit it was close. He’ll fry, don’t worry.” He patted my shoulder.
I glanced to my left where a cop had Mabry handcuffed. His face seemed pushed to one side where something had connected with it.
“What did that to his map?” I asked Callahan.
The lieutenant swelled a bit. “This good old right,” he said, hefting his fist.
“Like this?” I asked.
I swung a haymaker for Callahan’s jaw and landed. His head whipped back and he rode his heels for ten feet before he hit the floor. I shook my tingling hand.
“That,” I said, “was for letting me get the brains beat out of my skull by Mabry. If you get your Beau Brummel self off the floor, I’ll give you another one for letting him put my legs and arms on the bum.”
Callahan got up, shaking his head. He was grinning as he felt his chin tenderly.
“Jimmy,” he said, “we’re square. Maybe I deserved it. But not a second one. There’s nothing wrong with your arms.”
DEATH ON THE METER
Edward Ronns
Detective Dolliver of Homicide Runs a Chase With Doom on the Trail of a Killer—and Learns That the Female of the Gun Racket Species Can Be More Deadly Than the Male!
CHAPTER I
BIG MAN IN THE SHADOWS
DOLLIVER began at ten o’clock that morning. It was a nice morning, with a faint golden haze in the distant hills. It was not a suicide’s morning. So Dolliver chose to believe the telephone message from Sally Burgess, who insisted hysterically over the wire that Lubelle Satterlee would never have committed suicide, that she must have been murdered. It was not Dolliver’s case, but since the telephone message had been for him, he went looking for Sally Burgess.
The superintendent said Miss Burgess wasn’t in. His name was Horace Purvis, and he had a faint lisp.
“I hardly ever see her anyway,” he announced. “She drives a taxi, you know. Women do everything nowadays.” Mr. Purvis snickered. “Almost everything.”
“What does she look like?”
“Sally’s all right. About twenty-five, dark hair, slender, medium height. Nice blue eyes. A quiet and industrious person.” Mr. Purvis paused. “I thought you knew her.”
“Maybe I do,” Dolliver said. “I guess I’ve used her taxi a couple of times. Anyway, she remembers me. She wanted to see me. I’m surprised she’s not in. What about her friends? Does she have many?”
“Hardly none at all. Never seen a man come for her, but maybe she discourages them. She lives alone, anyway.”
Dolliver was annoyed that he couldn’t remember Sally Burgess’ appearance. He asked for the superintendent’s pass-key and discouraged Mr. Purvis’ efforts to follow him into the cottage.
A yellow, varnished sign announced the bungalow court as Terrace Gardens. Little stone gargoyles squatted like frogs along the barren concrete walk. Dolliver walked slowly between them until he came to Number 8, which was Sally Burgess’ address. The blinds were drawn against the high morning sun. There was a semi-circle of red brick steps, a sunken doorway, and a yellow mailbox. There was nothing in the mail-box except a throwaway circular from the neighborhood food market.
It was cool and shadowed inside. The scent in the air was not unpleasant. Dolliver shrugged a little, heeled the door shut, and listened. He was a solid man in his middle thirties, with thick, sleek hair, a square dark face, and a tendency toward fat unless he exercised. He was known at Homicide headquarters to be meticulous, plodding and sober. He was a bachelor. His first name happened to be Enoch.
THE rooms were neat, yet not so neat that a man couldn’t be comfortable in them. He was tempted to take an apple from a bowl that stood in the kitchen, but his sense of law and property was too deeply ingrained to permit it. The Hollywood bed in the bedroom was smooth and unruffled, obviously unslept in last night. He felt a little nagging ache of worry as he searched the place. The vacant atmosphere depressed him.
There were no pictures of Sally Burgess—none of any kind. The bungalow looked like a dead end until he found the scratch pad beside the telephone. There were just two names in neat, typographical script, and two telephone numbers. One of them was the name of the woman who had been reported as a suicide at two o’clock that morning—Lubelle Satterlee. The other was that of a woman named Vera Poole. Dolliver carefully copied both names in his dog-eared black note-book and turned to go.
He was startled to find Mr. Purvis at the doorway, watching him through newly donned thick spectacles. For an instant he caught an intent, worried expression on the super’s small, pinched face. Then light shattered and splintered on the glasses as Mr. Purvis raised his head and smiled. His eyes looked goggly, like those of goldfish in a bowl.
“For heaven’s sake,” Mr. Purvis demanded, “what has she done?”
“Nothing,” Dolliver said. “I’m just looking for her. She said she had some information for me.”
“Well, I thought, after that other man asked for her—”
“What other man?” Dolliver snapped.
“The man early this morning. He broke in here. I thought he was a sneak-thief.” Mr. Purvis was distressed. “ ‘He ran away when I started in th
rough the front door. That was about three o’clock this morning.”
“What did he want?”
Mr. Purvis snickered. “He didn’t wait to say.”
“What did he look like?”
“Big,” Mr. Purvis said promptly. “He was enormous. A regular gorilla type. But it was too dark to identify him properly.”
“Had you ever seen him around before?”
“Oh, no. As I said, Miss Burgess never had any men callers.”
Dolliver frowned. Shrugging off Mr. Purvis’ morbid curiosity, he left the Terrace Gardens in drowsy sunshine and climbed into his car.
At the nearest pay phone he called Headquarters and got Willie O’Brien.
Willie was sarcastic. “You run down that secret passion of yours, Pop? She have some good news for you?”
“She didn’t come home last night,” Dolliver said. “And don’t call me Pop. Look up her background, if you can. I don’t guess she has a record, but Red Streak Cabs always checks their drivers’ histories through us. See where she came from and what-all”
“Sure thing. Haven’t you viewed the original corpse yet?”
“I’m going there now, in case you want me.”
He hung up, irritated and worried, and drove on into town. . . .
A neighbor had found Lubelle Satterlee’s body. At two o’clock in the morning Mrs. Brennan had smelled the gas that crept insidiously through the corridors, and had sounded an alarm. The police broke down the door ten minutes later. The gas had come from a little heater set in the ornamental fireplace, and was hissing from all jets. The girl was sprawled on the floor, quite dead. The respirator men worked on her for three hours, giving up just before dawn. It was obviously suicide, motive unknown.
Dolliver listened to Kipps, the harness cop left on guard at the place, tell all this with unchanged expression.
“She was a blonde,” Kipps finished. “Pretty nifty, too. The M.E. said she was loaded with rye when she passed out.”
Dolliver surveyed the disheveled little flat with bleak eyes. The rooms lacked the neat, prim cleanliness of Sally Burgess’ cottage. There were tasseled satin pillows in overabundance on the mohair furniture. Here, too, the bed hadn’t been slept in.
“Was she a taxi driver, too?” Dolliver asked.
“Yep. Red Streak Cabs. She worked at night, came home about midnight, and didn’t make a sound after that until the lady next door sniffed the gas. She was too far gone by then for anything at all to be done for her.”
“Then nobody knows whether she had any visitors or not?”
Kipps grinned.
“You trying to make something out of this, Enoch?”
“I don’t know,” Dolliver said, brushing his thick black hair in place. “This Sally Burgess was evidently Lubelle’s pal. She seems to know me, but I can’t place her. Maybe I used her cab a couple times. Anyway, she called Headquarters an hour ago and asked for me. Said she could prove this blonde here was murdered.”
“Well, where is this Sally Burgess now?”
“That’s what I’d like to know.” Dolliver studied the chalk outline of a body on the floor, left when the medical examiner ordered Lubelle’s body removed. He had no desire to see the dead girl. “Where is Ankers now?” Ankers was the lieutenant who had been given the case. “Has he dropped it?”
KIPPS spread his meaty hands and shrugged.
He looked bored.
“Ankers called it a suicide and went back home to sleep.”
Dolliver twirled his neat felt hat on a long, slender forefinger.
“Was the place this messy when you first came in?”
“Oh, sure. This Lubelle was kinda flashy—the silk tassel type.”
“Yeah,” Dolliver nodded. “But the bed is nicely made.” He eyed the open bureau drawers, the limp stocking trailing to the floor, the twisted rugs. “Some cops have no sense of neatness. Maybe the place was searched.” Kipps stared out the window and still looked bored. Dolliver eyed the pathetic rooms and looked in the kitchen. There was the same disorder here. A can of sugar was overturned on the table and the white crystals glistened in the stray sunlight. A small saucepan filled with dark brown liquid stood cold on the stove, and he dipped a finger into it for a tentative taste. It was coffee. He could make out the dark grounds on the bottom of the pan. There was also an empty rye bottle and one glass tumbler beside a dirtied coffee cup.
Dolliver returned to Kipps, in the living room.
“Who were her friends?”
“They were mostly men—but plenty of them. That was Lubelle.”
“But no callers last night?”
“I only know what I heard Ankers saying,” Kipps said. “Some big guy is supposed to have asked the super if Lubelle Satterlee lived here. He showed about three, so it musta been after the suicide.”
“A big guy?” Dolliver asked. His eyes were suddenly shiny. “What did he look like?”
“You got me there. The guy kept in the shadows out in the hall. Just big, that’s all we got. Nothing there.”
“All he wanted to know was if Lubelle lived here?”
“That’s all, Lieutenant.”
DOLLIVER nodded his thanks and went out. He heard Kipps striking a match for a cigarette as he closed the door. . . .
Taxi Number 83, assigned to Sally Burgess, was missing from the Red Streak Cab garage. Cummings, the manager, was indignant:
“She’s had it out all night now,” he told Dolliver. “She was due in at midnight, like the other women drivers, but she never showed up. I’m giving her until noon, and then you fellows got to search for it. After all, a cab costs dough.”
“Ever have any trouble with the women drivers before?”
“No, can’t say I did. They’re a pretty good bunch, mostly. Their men go in the service and they take their place.”
“Got a picture of this Sally Burgess?”
“Sure, we keep file cards on all our hackies. Come on.”
Dolliver followed Cummings’ coveralls into the office. The picture was not very informative. He still couldn’t remember Sally Burgess. Her face was pleasant, her hair dark and cut boyishly close. Her eyes were pale, her lips thin and strong. She could have been attractive, but the passport-type photo was too harsh for him to tell. He returned the card.
“How long has she been working for you?”
“Three months. Always been strictly business so far.” Cummings filed the card. “She buddied with that Satterlee girl—the one that did a Dutch this morning. That was a funny one, too.”
“How come?”
“This Satterlee girl was a good-time babe. Always happy, always having dates. Seems funny to think she’s dead now. And did it herself, too.” Cummings looked shrewd. “Come to think of it, Lubelle was Sally Burgess’ best friend. You aren’t looking for Sally on account of the suicide, are you?”
“Let’s see Lubelle’s taxi log, will you?” Dolliver said thinly.
“Sure thing.”
CHAPTER II
LETTERS AND PEARLS
THE scribbled pad Cummings showed Dolliver carried the activities of Lubelle Satterlee’s cab up to 11: 00 P.M. and ended there. The last fare was to a good address, 18 Park Towers, Woodham Park. Dolliver meticulously jotted down the addresses in his worn little note-book.
“Did Lubelle bring the taxi back herself?” he asked.
“I didn’t see her myself,” Cummings told him. “In fact, nobody saw her bring it in, as it happened. But it was parked okay, and her cash and log were on my desk, where they leave it when I’m not around.”
“But you’ve no idea where Sally Burgess would be?” Dolliver said.
“Nope. If I get hold of her, I’ll fire her. That’s what I told her boy friend just before you came in.”
Dolliver felt a queer thrill chase up his back. He paused half-way through the doorway and slowly returned.
“What boy friend?”
“This big fellow came around about an hour ago,” Cummings said.<
br />
“He asked for Sally, said he wanted to use her cab. I told him she was out and he said he’d wait a while, but I guess he’s gone now.”
“What did he look like?”
“About middle twenties, I’d say—a husky blond brute. Sorta Scandinavian or Russian. He had a queer accent. His clothes didn’t fit so well—plain black serge and plain black tie. He seemed nervous, kept cracking his knuckles. His hands were the biggest hands I’ve ever seen.”
“You didn’t get his name?”
“No, I wasn’t that interested.”
Dolliver thanked him and left. Headquarters was only three blocks down and across the square, and he walked through the warm spring sunshine with measured, thoughtful strides. O’Brien, in Records, had some information for him when he came in. The little sergeant had covered a lot of ground. Dolliver listened attentively, smoothing the crease in his felt hat as O’Brien talked.
“This Sally Burgess is clean. No P.D. records anywhere yet. She came here a year ago from Arkansas City, Kansas, worked in a defense plant, and quit to drive a hack for Red Streak in February. No accident record, no customer complaints.”
“Any family?”
“Well, that’s a funny one. The address she gave in Kansas was a boarding house, and she lived there a couple of years, working as a waitress and taking some correspondence courses in domestic science. But that’s all. It’s a dead-end there. Nobody knows what-all before that.”
“No boy friends?”
“Nothing at all on that.”
Dolliver sent down for sandwiches and coffee and sat in his own dingy little office using the telephone. It was a tedious task, checking Lubelle Satterlee’s taxi log. There seemed to be nothing in it. The last address, 18 Park Towers, Woodham Park, was occupied by a Mr. W.F.K. Lemming. Dolliver vaguely associated the name with a bond investment company, and checked to make sure. A call to the Tribune verified the respectability of the Lemmings. He scratched the name off the list and was sipping his coffee when the telephone rang.
It was Cummings again, from the Red Streak garage.