Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  I handed her over to a plain-clothes man. She managed to get her chin up and hand me a weak smile. Then she was gone. I stood looking at the door, feeling uneasy. She’d have plenty of protection, I assured myself, but just the same I ought to be with her.

  Lieutenant Tighe was listening to Powell repeat in a flat, lifeless voice what he had told me.

  “It stinks!” Tighe roared. “You learned that Larsen got wise that you murdered Quigg and that he’d told Mavia Wallace about it. So you decided to rub them both out. Keel kept you from finishing off Miss Wallis, but you had plenty of time to rush here and do the job on Larsen.”

  “No.” Powell was a tired, crushed old man. “Why would I want to kill anybody?”

  “We’ll find out soon enough.” Tighe turned to me with a broad grin. “Well, that closes the case in only a few hours. Even the newspapers ought to be satisfied.”

  I didn’t care for it one bit. “It would have jibed better with Mario Farr’s picture if Powell had left the bayonet in Larsen’s body.”

  “Maybe it’s his and he was afraid it would be identified.” Then he added, scowling: “Anyway, why should I argue with you? You don’t even represent anybody.”

  No, I didn’t. But all the same I was in this up to my ears. So when Tighe set out for the Wallis house to have a look at the razor and have the lab boys go over the place, I tagged along.

  Maria Wallis should have been there ahead of us. She wasn’t, but the plain-clothes man who had been assigned to protect her was.

  We found him just inside the door. He was lying face down and the ugly hilt of a knife stuck out between his shoulder-blades. Blood was still coming from the wound. He couldn’t have been dead more than a few minutes.

  THERE was no sign of the girl. When we stood in the living room, I said: “What does this make Frank Powell?”

  “Powell has an accomplice,” Tighe said irritably. The lieutenant had thought he’d had the case all sewed up, and this new complication got under his skin. “Powell had reason to believe that the girl hadn’t spilled everything she knew, so he had her snatched to keep her quiet.”

  “Why not kill her and run less risk? He seems to have tried it before.”

  “I didn’t say I know all the answers,” he barked. “Not yet, anyway. Powell has been taken to headquarters. By God, I’ll get the truth out of him if I have to—”

  A madman charged into the room. Harold Wallis had just arrived home from the Art Center and had heard from a cop outside that his daughter had been kidnapped. Winston Delattre was with him. Then Tighe handed Wallis a couple of more shocks—the information that Lew Larsen had been murdered and that Frank Powell was being held for the crime.

  “Not Larsen, that brilliant young artist!” Delattre exclaimed. “And Mr. Powell is the murderer! My word!”

  The curator fell back in a chair as if he had been pushed by a giant hand.

  I said: “How can anybody in a position of responsibility at the Art Center steal something valuable and then hide the fact?” Wallis looked dully at me. “I don’t understand what you mean?

  “Say, the Van Eyck painting.”

  “You still harping on that angle?” Tighe growled.

  “Sure I am,” I said. “According to Mavia, Larsen didn’t definitely put the finger on anybody. He just knew that some big shot—perhaps Powell, perhaps somebody else—was involved in some messy business. There’s no doubt that the murders revolve around paintings, and the only one around worth killing for is the Van Eyck.”

  Tighe said: “You’re having bad dreams, Joey. The painting’s still there.”

  “How do we know?” I said.

  That caused Wallis to lift his head. The curator, the art critic and the lieutenant stared at me to see what the gag was. Then Delattre let loose with his patronizing laugh. He didn’t say anything, but the laugh said more than words.

  I went on stubbornly: “How do we know that Dutchman’s painting—”

  “Jan Van Eyck was Flemish.” Delattre corrected me.

  I was careful not to lose my temper. “Maybe that painting is a forgery and these killings are an attempt to keep it from coming out.”

  Tighe liked that. “A motive for Powell. But how does it tie in with the murders?”

  “Quigg found out the picture was a phony and then so did Larsen.”

  Delattre stroked his hatchet-face. “Gentlemen, it is barely possible. I will not be the first expert to be fooled by a superb forgery. There is a simple test, employing the use of chemicals, which I shall be glad to make.”

  “We’ve chemists of our own,” Tighe told him.

  The session broke up. I was right behind Delattre; he flagged a hack. Luckily a crowd had gathered and there were other hacks around, so I could keep up. I slipped my driver a five-spot to keep the other car in sight, but he didn’t earn his money. There was only a mile to go and Delattre didn’t seem to be in a hurry.

  But I was pretty sure I wasn’t wasting my time. A visiting New York art critic has no business in that part of the city. It was a slum section so old that few people lived there any longer.

  His cab stopped in front of the worst of the tenements. I leaned forward in my seat, watching him through the windshield. He paid off his driver, looked around, then went up the stoop of the house and disappeared.

  I wasn’t far behind him. Every window of the house was boarded up. I pushed in the door and found myself in a dark vestibule. My gun was in one hand, a pencil flashlight in the other. The place was so still that I would have heard somebody take a deep breath, let alone the creaking of Delattre’s feet going up the ramshackled staircase.

  Fine, I thought. There was sure not to be any way out from the second story down. Carefully I removed my shoes and started up the staircase. It was pretty tough going because those ancient boards groaned whenever they felt part of my weight. But by keeping close against the wall I managed to cut down sound to a minimum. Fortunately Delattre’s feet still sounded on the floor above, so his steps drowned out whatever noise I made.

  When I reached the stairhead, I heard the voices on my right. Naturally I didn’t dare snap on my pencil flash. I groped forward until I came to an open doorway. The voices seemed to come from there. I poked my head around the doorjamb and saw the glow of a cigaret. And Delattre was saying to somebody unseen: “It was really very simple. I made it extremely easy for Keel to follow me. And now here he is, right in the room with us.”

  I TOOK two steps into the room and pressed my back against the wall and centered my gun at a spot twelve inches below the cigaret in Delattre’s mouth. I said: “Don’t move, Delattre or whatever your name is. If I see that cigaret budge, I shoot. There’s not a chance I’ll miss and your pal can’t see me at all.”

  There was a brittle silence. Beyond the glow of the cigaret I could see the ghostly outline of Delattre’s lips. Delattre spoke without taking the cigaret from his mouth.

  “Get him, Mario,” he said lazily.

  I was set for a shot snapping out at me from the darkness or maybe they’d be foolish enough to send out a light. I was confident enough of my speed with a gun not to be too worried over that. I wasn’t a target at all, and the flash of a light or a gun would give me somebody in addition to Delattre to shoot at. But I hardly expected the attack to come from overhead—by a thing that flew in the air and could apparently see in the darkness.

  I heard it swishing through the air above me. “Keep back or I plug Delattre!” I yelled a warning. Then it smacked me and the weight of its body sent my head against the wall.

  CHAPTER IV

  The Legless Thing

  HORROR numbed me as much as the blow. It’s a bird, I thought wildly. An incredibly gigantic bird.

  Then fingers closed about my gunwrist, and I knew they were the fingers of a human hand.

  The entire weight of the thing was dragging me down. I braced myself against it and tried to turn my gun into its body. But those fingers were steel, crushing the small bones of
my wrist, and anybody will tell you that Joey Keel is far from a weakling.

  The thing was too close to me to get a blow in with my left. So I whipped my free arm around it, and it was a human body all right. Or rather half of one. My arm dropped down over the hips and then abruptly closed over nothing. He had no legs.

  My right arm numbed from the pressure of those powerful fingers. I felt his other hand tug at the gun, and I knew that I couldn’t swing the bore against him and that he’d get the gun. So I dropped it.

  With the clatter of the gun on the floor, the legless man flew away from me. Or he seemed to be flying.

  “What happened, Mario?” Delattre’s voice came from the darkness.

  He had crushed out his cigaret.

  “He dropped his gun,” the voice came from overhead. “He’s probably groping for it.”

  That was right. I was down on my knees, frantically running my palms over the floor. I’d lost my flashlight also.

  “Hurry, Mario!” Delattre said.

  The gun must be right at my feet—yet it wasn’t. Sweat poured down me. Above me something swished toward me and I felt a hand brush the top of my head. I jumped up and flapped my hands above my head like somebody trying to chase an angry bee. Nothing was there.

  I stood perfectly still, holding my breath, waiting for the next attack. If I could land my left flush to his jaw, it might do the trick. I kept my fist at my side, like a fighter wading in for the finishing blow, except that I didn’t move.

  He dropped down from the ceiling on my back. I hadn’t a chance. One of his arms hooked around my neck and the weight of him carried me over backward. I clawed at the arm, tried to get my hands around to his face. The pressure tightened. I bucked, then fought myself up to my feet. He stayed on my back like the Old Man of the Sea.

  I was through and I knew it. Blood pounded in my temples. My lungs caught fire. My legs folded under me.

  “Put the lights on,” a voice said in my ear. “And have your gun ready. I don’t want to kill him.”

  “Why not?” Delattre asked.

  “Do as I say! Robbery is bad enough. We can at least stop at murder.”

  LIGHT pressed against my closed eyelids.

  The strangling arm relaxed. I lay back, feeling breath cool my burning lungs. Then I opened my eyes.

  Delattre stood over me with my .45 automatic in his left hand and a snub-nosed .38 revolver in his right. His thin lips were smiling, but it was no longer the supercilious smile which had made me itch to smash his teeth in. It was as deadly as his weapons.

  Then I saw Mario Farr. Like a hideous bird, he was perched on the two stumps which extended only an inch or so below his hips. He had thick black hair and sensitive black eyes, but below his eyes his face was a thing of horror. It had been so scarred and battered by the auto accident that you had to look hard to distinguish where the nose ended and the mouth started.

  I sat up. A couple of flood lights hung from the ceiling, run by batteries, no doubt, for there was no current in that house. The room contained an artist’s easel with a blank canvas on it and a rack of paints and brushes and a bed. And at intervals from the ceiling stout ropes dangled almost to the floor. That was how Mario Farr got around—by swinging from the ropes like a monkey.

  “You were a bit too smart for your own good,” Delattre grinned down at me.

  “Who are you?” I said. “You’re no art critic.”

  He shrugged. “It won’t matter to you in a little while. You’re too smart to live long.”

  “If I was too smart you weren’t smart enough,” I said. “If the attendant Quigg and then Lew Larsen recognized that Van Eyck painting as a phony, then certainly the great art critic Winston Delattre would have. That was why I tailed you, even though I wasn’t sure. I had nothing to lose.”

  “Nothing?” Delattre showed his teeth. “You think you have nothing to lose now?”

  “Don’t you think the others will get wise?” I said.

  “So what? The whole idea is that the forgery will be found out. Then in a few months, perhaps a year, the original will turn up somewhere in Europe, through a dummy art dealer. A hundred and twenty-five grand, shamus, in my pocket; and there’ll be nobody to prove that the person who originally donated the painting to the Art Center hadn’t been in possession of a forgery all along.”

  I turned to Mario Farr. “I assume you made the forgery.”

  Farr’s disfigured face twisted. “Why not? Why shouldn’t I deserve some luxury? I am forced to live here hidden away from the eyes of men, and live in squalor. Listen! With my share of the money I shall build a home for myself on a mountaintop and there I shall paint powerful pictures.”

  I said: “And was it worth all those corpses and the ones to come?”

  “Shut up!” Delattre rapped.

  I knew then what my play would have to be. There wasn’t much chance of it working out, but it was the only chance. I took a deep breath and said: “Delattre is going to shoot me, Mario, to keep me from telling you about the murdered men.”

  Mario turned his black eyes on the phony critic. “No, he won’t,” he said quietly. “What about them?”

  Delattre was watching both of us at the same time. He chewed his underlip in indecision, so I knew that I could at least get started.

  “You didn’t think, Mario, that this would mean murder,” I said. “You’d stop at that. When you could have choked me to death, you said you didn’t want to kill me. The real Winston Delattre is dead; this imposter had to kill him to keep him from showing up so he could take his place.”

  “All right,” the false Delattre said. “When you start in on a big haul like this, you can’t stop at anything. How could I steal the original Van Eyck without killing the watchman? But simply killing him wouldn’t have done any good. The cops would have thought of the Van Eyck right away. I had to rig up the murder so they would get the idea a madman had done it.”

  “But something went wrong,” I put in. “Wallis called me in on the case and I started asking the right questions at once. You decided to get rid of me. What did one more murder mean to you?”

  DELATTRE said: “One always expects hitches. Lew Larsen discovered the forgery too soon. I was anxious to get out of town before it was discovered. I might have been suspected for the very reason that you suspected me—why would an expert like me be fooled easier than Larsen? So I had to kill Larsen also.” Mario wet his lips and said nothing. I could see those black eyes of his go sick.

  “Mario,” I said, “you hid yourself away here because you love Mavia Wallis. You love her so much that you couldn’t endure to have her look at your deformity.”

  “Mind your own business!” Mario screamed at me:

  But it was Delattre I was watching. His hands holding the guns twitched, but he didn’t shoot. He no longer cared how much I said.

  “Delattre also tried to murder Mavia,” I told Mario. “I arrived at her house in time to save her.”

  Mario’s body jerked. His eyes were livid coals.

  “How was I to know she was your girl?” Delattre said hastily. “I thought she was Larsen’s and that he had spilled everything to her.”

  “And you set out to murder them both so horribly that the same madman would be blamed.” I looked up at Mario. “He’ll never split the money with you. Remember how he said a few minutes ago, ‘One hundred and twenty-five grand in my pocket?” My words were tumbling out now. “He’s letting me spill all this to you because it no longer matters. He kidnapped Mavia. She’s probably somewhere in this building right now. He’s going to kill her and you, too, and when your bodies are found, you, Mario, will be blamed for it all. They’ll say your accident had driven you insane; the case will be closed and Delattre will be clear to clean up on the picture!”

  Delattre laughed and backed a few steps away from me so that his guns faced both Mario and myself. Mario just looked at him with his chest heaving. I made a noise drawing my stockinged feet under me, and impulsively De
lattre gave me all his attention for a moment.

  “Get him, Mario!” I yelled.

  Delattre’s eyes jerked back to the legless artist. And Mario rose in the air on the rope dangling in front of him. Momentum sent him across the room.

  First one, then the other of Delattre’s guns blasted. Mario’s body shuddered in midair against the impact of lead, but he came on. He hit Delattre’s chest at the same time that my dive sent me crashing against Delattre’s legs. The three of us piled up, with Mario squatting on the phony critic’s chest and myself clinging to his legs.

  A hand clutching a gun stuck out of that tangle. It belched flame which seared my pants over the kneecap. I dug my teeth into the gunwrist and the gun was mine. While Mario held him down, I got the second gun the same way.

  When I rose to my feet, I saw that Mario had both of his powerful hands clamped about Delattre’s throat. I bent and tried to loosen his fingers, but I couldn’t do it short of hacking them off.

  Then Mario slumped forward and they both formed a single motionless, bloody heap. Death had ended the struggle for both of them. Mario’s fingers remained clamped about the other’s throat. Possibly, I thought dully, Delattre’s last breath had been choked out by the hands of a dead man.

  In a corner of a room I found a small roll of canvas. One look at it told me that it was the Van Eyck. I tucked the painting under my arm and searched the building.

  Mavia Wallis was in the cellar, lying tied and gagged on a cracked, damp cement floor amid the stench of long decayed things.

  As we went up the broken staircase to the street, she threw questions at me in a thick, hysterical voice. I avoided answering by telling her that there would be plenty of time for talk later.

  She would find out soon enough that Mario Farr was dead, but when she did I’d tell her that the man she loved had died as bravely as a man could. And I was glad now that I hadn’t tried as hard as I might have to have saved Delattre from Mario’s hands. Every man has the right to a final chance at atonement.