Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  When the buzz of comment and the excited babble of exclamations subsided, everyone’s attention was quite suddenly stolen by a loud shout from the washroom door.

  Dibble, his head just protruding through the crack of the door, had indignantly broken the spell.

  “See here, Weber!” he shouted. “You can keep those damned silken atrocities, but get me something decent this instant. After all, no gentleman dons trousers without drawers!”

  THE END

  HOMECOMING IN HELL!

  Ken Lewis

  Instead of his girl and his best friend meeting Nick at the station, he found a hackie who took him for a murder-ride and threw in the cab and the corpse free . . . with no questions answered!

  CHAPTER I

  PLEASANT DREAMS—A MURDER

  EVEN when I woke up in the taxi, throat parched, eyes bleary, and found Sam Richards’ corpse in the seat behind me, I couldn’t believe it was real. It was just a dream—vague, half-remembered, even with all the evidence of my own guilt staring me in the face.

  But the events that led up to that dream I remembered very well. . . .

  The letter from Frank Estes was waiting for me when my ship docked. So naturally I caught the first train for Storm City. But it wasn’t Frank or the letter I thought about mostly on the train j it was Elaine—how she looked when I saw her last—how she’d look when I saw her again, soon now. She was the real reason for this trip, I knew. Of course, I had other reasons. Frank had sent for me, and I was willing to do a lot for Frank, after all he’d done for me during those years while we were growing up together. Then, the letter said Sam Richards needed help. And regardless of what had happened later, I still owed Sam a far greater personal debt than I could ever repay.

  Third, there was that little matter to settle with Blackie Cerno. The matter of ignoring some pretty corny threats Blackie had made the night I left town.

  But above all, this trip meant a chance to see Elaine—to talk to her, maybe hold her in my arms again for the first time in two years.

  •

  IT WAS dark when the train reached Storm City. I stood on the platform a minute, drinking in the smoke-tinged air, grinning idiotically at the remembered sights and sounds and smells. Then a redfaced little man in a cab driver’s cap was standing at my shoulder, talking low in my ear.

  “Sheppard?”

  I looked down, tried to place him, couldn’t. I nodded.

  “Frank sent me. He’ll join us later. He didn’t think it’d be smart for you guys to meet in the open like this.”

  I felt my forehead turn into a washboard. I shook my head. “Nuts,” I said cheerfully.

  The little man laid his head on one side and lifted his shoulders. “Okay, boss. All I know is what Frank told me. But I got a little grapevine on you, bud. You’re the guy Blackie Verno promised to send out in a box, if you ever set foot in Storm City again.”

  If that was supposed to scare me, it didn’t. I knew Cerno had come a long way since the night I fought with Sam about him. Then he’d just been one of the petty, chiseling racketeers I thought Sam tolerated too much. His threats hadn’t had anything to do with my joining the Merchant Marine the next day.

  But the war and its black markets had made Cerno big. If Frank didn’t want him to know we were still pals, he’d have his reasons. I shrugged.

  “Okay, boss,” I mimicked. “Let’s g°”

  I checked my duffle in a locker at the station and followed the little man to his waiting cab.

  We parked in the lot of a fly-specked tavern on lower First and moved through a foggy bar to a private room at the back. The driver motioned to a table and chairs.

  “Frank may be a little late. How about a drink?” A bottle and three glasses stood on the table.

  I nodded absently. My eyes had fastened on the phone against one wall. “Sure,” I said. “In a minute . . .”

  My legs felt rubbery, crossing to the phone. My heart pounded so hard I had trouble breathing. I had to grin at myself. It was just like the first time I’d ever called up a girl for a date. But a guy gets kind of out of practice with such things after two years.

  Elaine herself answered the phone. My heart started pounding all over again when her drawled “Hello” came over. I tried to picture her there at the other end—brown hair swept above her ears the way she liked it, brown eyes, calm and level as her voice.

  She’d never win any beauty contests—none except my own personal one. Her nose was a little too short, her chin a little too tilted for that. And there was always a dust of freckles around her cheekbones that makeup couldn’t quite hide.

  But she’d been my girl since we were kids. And as far as I was concerned she always would be, no matter what happened between me and her old man. I tried to think of something to say, settled for: “Lainey? . . . Nick!”

  “Nick? . . . Nick Sheppard! Oh Nick!” That made me feel better. There was no mistaking the emotion in those last two words. My own words tumbled out inanely, like a phonograph record, before I could stop them.

  “I’m in town. Just got in. I couldn’t wait to call you—it’s been so long. Why didn’t you write., Lainey? Why’d you send my letters back unopened?”

  Silence. I could almost feel the tension straining back over the wires. That’s a hell of a way to break the ice! I thought sickly. That’s a hell of a thing to say to a girl, the first time you talk to her in two years!

  Her voice was low, sort of dazed, when she answered. “Letters? But I didn’t get any letters, Nick!”

  Silence again. Mine, this time. Silence for the muscles to tighten along my jaw, and my stomach to knot upland red flecks to bother my eyes.

  “Sam,” I said thickly. “Sam saw to that. Sam saw to it my letters came back unopened.”

  “Daddy? Yes—I suppose so. But he’s not bitter any more, Nick. I—I think he’d like to see you. . . .”

  I hardly heard her. I was too mad. “Well, we’ll skip the letters,” I said tightly. “That’s over. What counts now is that I’m back—that nobody can keep us apart any longer. I’ll be out, as soon as I talk to Frank.”

  The silence was longer this time. And the words, when they came, were low, heavy, drained of inflection.

  “No. I don’t think you’d better. Things have changed since you went away. I thought you’d forgotten me, Nick. I tried to forget you, too.”

  My heart stopped beating. “Oh,” I said slowly. “Any luck?”

  “No, Nick. Well, yes. Oh Nick, I’m trying to tell you—I was married two weeks ago. . . .”

  I guess my head jerked a little at that. I know my fingers got white and rigid on the receiver. I didn’t think to ask her who it was she’d forgotten me with. That didn’t matter.

  I just stood there a minute, while the phone dropped hollowly into its cradle, and my world fell apart and then arranged itself again. A strange world now—alien. A world without Elane. . . .

  The little redfaced taxi driver looked up quizzically. “I guess Frank’s been held up,” he said. “We might as well have a drink. You look like maybe you could use one, buddy.”

  I nodded frozenly. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s have a drink. Let’s have a lot of drinks. Let’s drink to Sam Richards.” And some time later, right there in that little back room waiting for Frank, the dream began.

  WHEN I woke the next morning, cold and sick, and found myself slumped over the wheel of the taxi, all I could remember at first was darkness—long stretches of darkness, broken by intermittent shadows, half light—by vague, distorted images like those you see under water at night.

  Then sounds—sounds that came and went. Far-off murmurings at times. Then raucous staccato words. Voices jumbled together, meaningless.

  And lacing the sounds and the darkness—movement. Slow and unreal, like figures in a dream. Quick, convulsive—fists hammering, fingers clutching, clawing, twisting.

  Last of all, a face. A familiar square-jawed face. Gray hair above the temples. Gray eyes staring
in sullen, unblinking horror. A face twisted grotesquely from the stocky body beneath it, with its square jaw pushed curiously to one side, as though it didn’t fit the rest of the face at all.

  That’s all I could remember—even when I turned around and saw the corpse in the seat behind me, the corpse which wore the face of the dream. I knew whose it was—too well.

  That’s Sam Richards—Boss Richards. That’s the man who took me out of the slums when I was a kid, and brought me home and raised me as his own son—then turned around and cut me off forever from the only girl I’ll ever love. . . . But hell, I didn’t kill him! I—I couldn’t have. . . .

  I tried to swallow. My throat had the grating roughness of two files rubbed together. I pulled my eyes too fast to the open cab window beside me, and for a moment the landscape ran together like rain spattering an unfinished watercolor.

  Then I saw the gray pre-dawn light fingering the upper windows of the big house a quarter of a mile away through the trees, and I knew where I was. Just off the highway, in the private drive leading up to Sam’s country place.

  Somewhere in that big house, Elaine lay sleeping, never dreaming that her father . . . I snapped the thought off savagely, pushed open the cab door and staggered out, rubbing absently at a brown smear on my coat front.

  It wasn’t blood—just grease from the steering wheel where I’d slumped across it. There wasn’t any blood. Sam had been knocked out by a blow that broke his jaw. Then his head had been twisted till the spinal column snapped.

  It was just the kind of murder you’d expect from a strong, drink-crazed man carrying a grudge. I turned away sickly.

  Half a mile to the west, at a crossroads intersection, the lights of an all-night filling station and lunch shack glimmered weakly in the waning darkness. I remembered that it used to be called the “Truck Inn.”

  CHAPTER II

  WHEN A KILLER NEEDS A FRIEND

  IT WAS still called the “Truck Inn.”

  And at 5:30 a.m. it was littered with the tag-ends of yesterday’s sandwiches and cigarettes, stale as yesterday’s beer. I nodded to a dirty-aproned fry cook dozing on a stool beside the grill, ordered a bromo and black coffee, pointed to a rear booth, and slid into a telephone booth beyond it

  The phone rang twice before a sleep-clotted voice said, “What is it?”

  It was the kind of voice you’d expect from a square, chunky guy with tan hair and eyes and a lopsided grin—and as good a head for business as you’ll find at any board of directors meeting in the country; firm, cheerful, reassuring, even when it was irritated.

  Only Frank Estes wasn’t a member of any board of directors. Not officially. He’d grown up to be Sam Richards’ secretary.

  “Frank?” I said thickly. “This is Nick. What—what happened last night? Have you seen that cabby?”

  “Cabby? Where the hell are you, Nick? I thought you’d missed the train when I couldn’t find you at the station—”

  “Then you didn’t send that hacker?” My voice was harsh. Even through the dazed fog I’d been moving in, those words socked home. “Hacker? . . . What the devil is this, Nick? Where are you!”

  “In trouble,” I told him grimly. “The worst kind, Frank—murder trouble. Listen, I’m going to give it to you straight.”

  I did. When I stopped talking, the line was silent for a moment. Then quietly, gravely: “Did you do it, Nick?” I groaned. “That’s what I’ve got to find out. Lord knows I was mad enough—half crazy—after what Elaine told me. I guess I was drunk enough, too, from the way I feel now. I might have ditched that cabby, stolen the cab, made an appointment with Sam somewhere, then broken his neck.

  “If I did, then I’m willing to turn myself in and take the consequences. Lord knows I’d deserve ’em. Only—well—I’d like to find out a little more, first. I’d like to talk to that cabby. He ought to have a few of the answers, even if I have to jar ’em out of him.” The line was quiet again for a minute. I could tell how Frank felt, how anybody would feel under the circumstances. Trying to decide—trying to believe in me, yet not quite being able to, maybe.

  Yet the words, when they came, were firm, positive: “You didn’t do it, Nick. You were framed—probably drugged. I think maybe I know why. If I’m right—if we can prove it—this’ll be the best thing that ever happened to this town, much as I loved Sam Richards. For the third time, where are you?”

  “Truck-Inn. Highway 72. Just west of Sam’s place.”

  “All right Hold tight, Nick. I’ll be right out.”

  THE bromo chased some of the spots away from my eyes, and as I sipped the steaming coffee I let my mind run back, remembering Frank.

  I was sorry our reunion would be. under these conditions. But as long as the conditions existed, I realized I’d rather have him see them through with me than any man I knew. We’d been raised together for one thing, and we made a pretty good team—he with his blunt good nature and shrewd common sense; me with my rangy lankness, blue wool-gathering eyes and tendency to go off half-cocked.

  Frank’s folks had died in the same explosion that killed my own mother and dad. Our families shared second-story apartments in the same North End tenement, and when a bomb blew up the speakeasy below, the floors had caved in, spilling them all to their deaths—

  All except Frank and me. We’d been playing in the street outside, and hadn’t been hurt.

  Sam Richards was just getting well seated in the saddle of Storm City politics at the time. He read in the papers about the two orphaned kids, came down and adopted us both.

  That was Sam all over. He hadn’t done anything about the mob who blew up the speak. They kicked through too much for protection. But he did his best, personally, to take care of the innocent victims—those who weren’t dead.

  Everybody in the North End knew Sam as a personal friend. That’s how the machine’d stayed in power all these years. Hadn’t he bailed their kids out of jail, got them jobs when they needed it most, sent out more Christmas baskets than the Salvation Army? Why shouldn’t they vote for anybody Sam endorsed? I made a wry face and ordered more coffee.

  Then the front door opened and Frank was coming toward me, sandy hair half-combed, round face flat and drawn, stubby paw outstretched.

  He wasted no time in preliminaries. That wasn’t Frank’s way. He just let me see by the glow in his light brown eyes that he was glad to see me, but his voice was urgent, almost abrupt when he spoke.

  “To understand this, Nick,” he said, “you’ll have to let me give you a fill-in. And you’re going to say, ‘I told you so’, when you hear it. But to make a long story short, Sam finally woke up to the danger in Blackie Cerno and his kind. He was going to swing the machine behind the Good Government League this time, as you tried to make him do two years ago.

  “My guess is, Blackie found out about it. I’ve suspected he had some kind of line into Sam’s office, for a long time. Some of my personal mail’s been opened, in fact. That’s probably how he found out what train you were coming in on, so he could send that cab—”

  My eyes began to burn. Sure, that made sense! If Blackie’d reached the point where he wanted to throw the town wide open, and Sam stood in his way, he’d want to get rid of the old man all right. Only—

  I shook my head. “Blackie wouldn’t kill Sam now,” I said. “Not the week before election. Sam’s murder would be a political bombshell, blowing the machine in a dozen pieces. Nobody’d have a chance of getting anywhere then.”

  Frank’s eyes turned bleak. “You don’t know how Blackie’s filled out his britches since you left,” he said bitterly. “He figures he can step in and take Sam’s place himself, keep the machine in line. He’s just cocky enough to think that by sewing up an airtight case against you—one the public as well as the cops will believe—he can get away with Sam’s murder and still swing the election—”

  THAT was when I stopped listening.

  I was too busy staring at the counter up front. Four men had pushed through
the door. And the first was a small, redfaced man with a taxi driver’s cap and grease on his coat front.

  I watched long enough to see that the man who followed him was heavyset, sour-lipped, in a sagging, pinstripe suit; that the other two wore prowl-car uniforms. Then I pushed to the booth’s far-corner, as much out of sight as possible, and held a finger to my lips.

  “What’s this all about?” The little man’s voice held just the right note of amiable curiosity.

  The heavy man grunted, ordered coffee and doughnuts for four.

  “Nothing,” he said. “We got a tip that hack you reported stolen last night was out here some place. So we brought you along.”

  “Yeah? Who tipped you?”

  “Nobody. Some screwball. Wouldn’t leave no name. Said a cab with the number you gave was parked in the entrance to Sam Richards’ place—with a body in the back seat.”

  The taxi driver tried to whistle with his mouth full. “Whooee!” he said.

  “Yeah,” the plainclothesman chuckled, dunking a doughnut. “Anything for a gag. Someday I’m gonna catch one of them funny boys and knock his teeth in. How’d you happen to lose this hack, anyhow?”

  The taxi driver gulped coffee. “Jeez that’s hot,” he said. “Some sailor I picked up down at the station. Wanted to go to a bar. Seemed like a nice guy—just lonely. He asked me in for a drink, so I figured what the hell. Business was bad, anyway. What’d I have to lose?”

  The dick laughed. “I know,” he said. “Your hack.”

  “Yeah. Well, we went in and had a few drinks. He made a phone call. I noticed him actin’ kinda funny after that, but I let it go. Pretty soon he wanted to leave. Then, when we reached the cab he went crazy. Grabbed the keys out of my hand, give me a shove, jumped in and beat it. That’s the last I seen of him.”