by Jerry eBooks
The detective wiped his lips. “There’s our dead body,” he said. “He picked Sam’s driveway to sleep it off in, woke up before we got here and drove off again. Sailor, you say?”
“Yeah. Some kind of officer, I think.”
The detective called for the bill. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Your hack’ll turn up, all right, out of gas somewhere. They always do.”
“I hope so,” the driver said. “I sure hope so. Just had her overhauled. Grease job and everything. She run like a dream. I sure hope you find her.”
“We will,” the plainclothesman said as the door slammed behind them. “We will.”
I stared at Frank, my mind whirling like a pinwheel. The round oval of his face was as pale as I’d ever seen it.
“As soon as the cops turn him loose, I’m gonna look me up a taxi driver,” I breathed. “I wonder how the devil they missed seeing that cab. . . .”
Then it hit me—like a delayed action bomb. They hadn’t found that cab there in the drive entrance, in plain sight of the highway, because it wasn’t there any more! Some one had driven it away!
My mouth dropped open and I looked strickenly at Frank. But the tan eyes didn’t answer. They were vague, preoccupied.
“This is the screwiest of all the screwy things that’ve happened since I hit town last night,” I murmured. “Who’d steal a cab with a corpse in it?”
His eyes probed mine. “Whoever did it gave us a little more time, anyway,” he said oddly.
The morning sun was hot and bright when we left the “Truck Inn” and started for Frank’s roadster, parked in the lot. Black spots danced before my eyes again as I swung into the sudden light.
Then Frank pulled open the car door and waited for me to climb in, and I saw that at least one of the spots was permanent. A dull brown smudge above the second button of his light sport coat. Somewhere this morning I’d seen a spot like that before—two, in fact.
Suddenly I knew what had become of the taxi!
I put a hand on his shoulder. “I wish you hadn’t done that, Chum,” I said, my eyes fogging a little. “It took plenty of guts and plenty, of faith in me. Don’t think I don’t appreciate that. But I doubt if I’m worth it. You know, don’t you, that you’ve left yourself wide open now, too. Accessory after the fact, if they ever find out. . . .”
The tan eyes narrowed. “What the hell are you babbling about, Nick?” he asked harshly.
I nodded. “Okay. We won’t talk about it. But I know about that fork in Sam’s drive, a few hundred feet from the entrance. I know the right branch leads to Sam’s private picnic grounds down by the river; and that the water’s deep enough at the bank to cover a car.”
He sighed. “If you stop to think, you’ll know something else, too,” he said softly. “Somebody tipped off the cops about that cab. Somebody who wanted you found with the corpse—who’s probably all set to testify at your trial.
“Only there won’t be any trial, without a corpus delicti. They can’t even hold you for car theft, till they find the cab. Nothing like a little insurance, in case we can’t break that frame.”
I shook my head. “If we can’t break the frame,” I said, “ditching the cab won’t help. I couldn’t go on, knowing Sam’s body was down there in the river some place—thinking I killed him . . .”
CHAPTER III
STRICTLY FROM HUNGER
FRANK’S apartment was still cool, despite the gathering heat outside. I sat on a sofa in the living room, scanning the morning Star-Journal and trying to hold myself still till Frank got back. The ham and eggs he’d fixed made my stomach feel better, and the good healthy hate I’d worked up for that hacker and whoever sent him made my mind feel a little better, too.
I’d wanted to go after him right away, but Frank pointed out that he probably wouldn’t be back from the cops yet, anyhow, and somebody ought to drive out and see Elaine. So I tried to content myself with memorizing the cabby’s name and address, which I’d found in a paragraph story at the bottom of Page 13, about his cab having been stolen by “an unidentified sailor.”
I was just sitting there, mumbling “Albert F. Fetts, 1372 South Twenty-First” over and over under my breath when the doorbell rang.
I didn’t answer. Whoever it was didn’t want me. Or did they?
Then a key clicked in the lock, and I figured Frank must’ve returned for something or other he’d forgotten. He couldn’t be back from Sam’s place already.
But k wasn’t Frank who stepped into the square of sunlight made by the opened door. It was a tall lithe girl with soft brown hair and troubled brown eyes and a face that was tight with anxiety.
I stood there and let my eyes drink in the tilt of her chin, and the freckles dusting her nose, and the way the brown hair swept above her ears. I saw the way the red print dress molded the long graceful lines of her body—fuller now, more mature. And I thought: This is the moment I’ve been waiting for, living for, for two years. And now that it’s come I’d give every dream I ever had or hope to have to be back on a stinking-tanker somewhere in the South Pacific.
She stared at me and a spark lit up, somewhere behind those brown eyes. Then she willed it to sleep again.
“Nick! I—I was looking for Frank. But maybe you can help me even more. What does it mean, Nick? Where’s Daddy?”
I hope I never again have a question like that to answer. My eyes dropped sickly and my palms began to sweat. “I—I’m not sure, Elaine.”
“But he was with you last night. Wasn’t he? The phone rang about midnight, and I heard him repeat your name . . .”
I shook my head miserably. “You’ve got to believe me, Elaine. I don’t remember. I don’t remember any phone call, except the one to you.”
She stared at me bewilderedly, her eyes clouding. “Oh—well, I just supposed it was you. A taxi pulled into the drive a few minutes later and he rode off in it. He didn’t come back all night—then this morning I got this queer telegram . . .”
My fingers were like wax, unfolding the yellow slip she handed me:
ELAINE, HONEY. CALLED OUT OF TOWN UNEXPECTEDLY ON BUSINESS. MAY BE GONE SEVERAL DAYS. DON’T WORRY. LOVE AND KISSES.
SAM.
I glanced at the time it was sent—6:30 a.m.—and pulled her shakily to the sofa beside me. “I’m afraid Sam never sent that wire, Elaine,” I said.
I told her the whole thing then, adding nothing, leaving out nothing. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, but I couldn’t stand putting it off any longer.
When I finished, her eyes were dry and bleak. She sat there a minute just staring dully across the room. Then she turned to me.
“You think you killed him, don’t you, Nick?”
“Don’t you?”
For answer I felt her arms slip around my neck—her breath warm and sweet against my face, her lips pulsant against my mouth.
I wanted to put my arms around her, crush her to me, keep her there forever. But I knew it wasn’t that kind of kiss. This was just her way of showing that she believed in me. After all, we’d grown up together. It was only natural that she should express herself that way, even if someone else had taken my place in a deeper sense.
I wanted to hold her—to comfort her as I would have two years ago. But I let her go.
“Nick,” she said unsteadily. “You couldn’t have I know that—even if you don’t. Aren’t you going to do anything about it?”
I looked at the clock across the room. Frank had been gone long enough. Anyway, this was my job, not his. I made my voice as light as I could.
“All I need’s a chauffeur,” I told her.
THE 1300 block of South Twenty-First Street centered a square half-mile of cheap rooming houses and walk-up apartments on the other side of town. As Elaine weaved her convertible through mid-morning traffic, I couldn’t help noticing that she wore no rings.
“This husband of yours must be quite a boy.” I tried to make it sound casual. “Anybody I know?”
The con
vertible swerved, threatened to climb the curb. She kept her eyes straight ahead, but I noticed that the fingers on the wheel were quivering.
“I—I can’t tell you, now, Nick. He—we decided to keep it a secret for awhile. Even Daddy—” The words broke off abruptly.
I whistled. “You must be in love, to do that for him. That doesn’t sound like you, Lainey.”
Her face was rigid, fingers tense. “Love him? Yes. Yes—I suppose so. I thought I did, when I married him. And that was only two weeks ago.”
She tried to grin it off. I tried to keep my thoughts out of my eyes and concentrate on the cab driver, as she swung the car to a rubbish-littered curb and braked. I looked at the glazed-brick apartment house numbered 1372.
“You stay down here,” I said. “I might have to do and say some things not fittin’ for female eyes and ears.”
She nodded absently. “I’ll wait. Nick—be careful, won’t you?”
A block of glass-paneled mail boxes lining the front foyer showed that Albert F. Fetts lived in apartment 3-B. No one stopped me as I legged through the darkened hall beyond, climbed three tiers of shabbily-carpeted stairs.
No one in apartment 3-B answered my knock. I tried it again, then my fingers dropped to the glass knob, twisted. The door swung in and I stepped forward.
Then I stopped. Clad in blue and green striped pajamas, Albert F. Fetts was asleep on the bed—sprawled crosswise on top of the covers. His jaw lolled strangely to one side, and his stumpy neck twisted at an incredible angle from the body to which it was fastened.
I didn’t try to rouse him. I knew that Albert F. Fetts could answer only one of my questions now. His was the sleep that knows no waking.
Nevertheless a great weight of despair and hopelessness and fear drained out of me as I stared at his curiously twisted corpse. I felt almost buoyant. Because now, for the first time since I woke up in his cab that morning, I was absolutely certain that I hadn’t murdered Sam Richards!
I swallowed twice, crossed to the bed, fingered a pulseless wrist. I glanced around the tiny bachelor apartment, noticing that a window opening on outside service steps was thrown wide.
A small table stood beside the window. I pawed absently through the papers and writing paraphernalia littering it, poked into the lone closet, examined the pigmysized bathroom.
Then I crossed again to the hall door, set the night latch with a handkerchief-swathed finger, stepped out and pulled the door to behind me. There was nothing in there that would help.
As I turned toward the stairwell again, someone stepped through the glass door opening from a second set of service stairs at the rear of the hall. I didn’t stop to chin. The morning sun was behind whoever it was, making a meaningless silhouette of the figure, and I realized that if I didn’t want my own face seen here I couldn’t very well wait to memorize his.
ELAINE was behind the wheel of the convertible as I came out the front door. “You didn’t stay long,” she said, her eyes full of question marks.
“And I didn’t find out much,” I said wryly. Before she pressed the starter, I told her about Albert F. Fetts.
I guess what happened next is the inevitable result of lingering too long in the vicinity of a fresh corpse. Because just before Elaine threw the car into gear, a gaunt, musical-comedy type character in a modified green zoot-suit whipped around the firebrick corner of 1372, darted behind the convertible, and came up at Elaine’s elbow with a foot on the abbreviated running board.
“Hiya, kids,” he grinned, and his mouth made a wide gold-studded V beneath his sharp hooked nose, “I’m gonna give ya a chance to be patriotic and share the ride.”
As he spoke, the muzzle of a flat little automatic in his right hand crept up and made a chrome-rimmed O above the open window opposite Elaine and a skinny left hand reached in and closed over the keys in the ignition.
His faded blue eyes seemed to hold a friendly enough twinkle, but I could see that behind them was something that didn’t twinkle at all—something opaque and cold as dry ice.
“ ’Course I could herd you around the corner to my jalop,” he rattled on. “But why should I waste my gas? First, though, let’s work out a little better seatin’ arrangement . . . You git out, sis. Bud, you take the wheel. Miss Richards and me’ll go around and git in the other side.”
The skinny fingers came away with the keys in them, and he moved far enough to one side to let the driver’s door swing out. But the angle of the gun remained the same, steady as a gyroscope.
Elaine’s eyes were blank. Slowly, like an automaton, she put out a hand, pushed at the door, stepped woodenly to the pavement. The green zoot suit swung behind her.
I sat there a moment, trying to keep my fists unclenched and the red film out of my eyes. Sure, I could refuse to co-operate, jump the gun—at the cost of Elaine. Something told me this old coot was just stagey enough to shoot her down on the street if we didn’t play ball.
I slid stiffly under the wheel. The character with the reet pleats prodded Elaine in beside me, followed her, slammed the door. He rested the automatic on one bony knee and tossed me the keys.
“Okay, kids,” he said cheerfully. “Let ’er flicker!”
“Where to—headquarters?”
He chuckled. “Mebbe, later. If you live that long . . . Sis, you ain’t interduced me to our friend here.” He sounded upset about it.
Elaine stared leadenly at the dashboard. “This is Zeke Selfridge, one of Blackie Cerno’s friends, Nick,” she said tonelessly.
I whistled softly. “Now I’ve seen everything,” I managed. “A cornfed gunsel, strictly from vaudeville!” Zeke nodded. “Vaudeville’s dead, bud,” he said conversationally. “Don’t you go hankerin’ to join it.”
I sniffed. “How’d you happen to be Johnny-on-the-spot just at the wrong time?” I asked suspiciously.
“Why, I dropped around t’ call on my old friend, Al Fetts. And who should I find goin’ outa his room but you. And what should I find when I git inside but that Al’s gone out, too—for good.”
My eyes narrowed. “You still haven’t told me where you want us to drop you off,” I reminded him dryly.
He slapped his knee. Not the one with the gun on it. “Bud, you’re a card!” he chortled. “You must be Nick Sheppard. Blackie was tellin’ me just this mornin’ that he ain’t had a chanct to welcome you home yet. ‘If you see Shep,’ he says, ‘bring him around. For him I’ll dig up the keys to the city morgue’ !”
Very funny, I thought. Ver-ry funny!
CHAPTER IV
THE three-story brick warehouse was windowless on three sides. Cerno Enterprises, Inc.—Importers, stood out in weathered gilt above the absurdly small front door. The sign should have said “Importers of Black Market Commodities, Needled Liquor, Dope, and Murder.”
Zeke had me swing the convertible up a deserted loading ramp at the rear. We got out—me first, then Elaine with the gun at her back—and started up narrow concrete stairs.
As we climbed I heard a second car pull onto the ramp. But Zeke herded us through a narrow door at the top before I had a chance to see if it held anybody I knew.
We stopped before another door half way down the shadowy second floor corridor while Zeke knuckled the panel, shoved it back, and pushed us into a luxurious skylighted office.
A dapper little man, half handsome, with dark wavy hair, bunchy shoulders, and the barest suggestions of dimples in his olive cheeks, sat behind a big desk centering the room. A radio droned police calls at his elbow.
He looked at us, let the comers of his mouth and eyes turn up, and switched the radio to long wave. A dance band began to sob as he arose.
“Well, Zeke,” he said speculatively. He had a black velvet voice with just that touch of accent a lot of women go for. But before he got any further the door opened again and three men came in.
One was short and heavy, with ring-battered features. One was graceful and wispy in a lavender suit and polka dot Sinatra tie. Between them
they held Frank Estes.
He was stripped to a pair of blue swimming trunks and he’d been pretty well worked over. Assorted lumps that didn’t belong there sprouted from the oval face, his sandy hair was sticky, and there were marks about his head and shoulders that might have been made by an indelible pencil with inch-thick lead. The one tan eye that was still open seemed dazed.
“Found this monkey takin’ a morning plunge in the river behind Sam’s Place, Blackie,” the ex-pug rasped. “He’s quite a diver. We thought you might wanna sign him up for the water carnival next week.”
I sighed and wondered who wrote the script for Blackie Cerno’s hoods. Zeke, I decided, had certainly had a bad influence on them.
Cerno motioned Elaine to a divan along one wall, and had Pretty Boy and Gargantua stand Frank up beside me. “You boys keep an eye on things outside,” he told them. “Zeke’ll look after everything here.”
They left and Zeke found a chair in the opposite corner, where his automatic could cover everybody. Frank finally recognized me and tried a grin. It was even more lopsided than usual.
“Maybe we shoulda stood in bed this morning, Nick,” he mumbled through swollen lips.
Blackie looked us over like a schoolmaster surveying a couple of recalcitrant eraser throwers. He shook his head.
“I don’t know what to do with you boys,” he sighed. “You have certainly been trying to play horse with my election. I can’t leave you loose to get into more mischief. But I can’t turn you over to the police yet, either. That would spoil everything.”
Zeke chuckled. “Mebbe we can jug one of ’em without tippin’ our mitt at that, Blackie,” he said. “I fergot to tell ya Shep here killed that hacker this mornin’, the same way he done Sam.”
Blackie let his eyes widen. “So?” he said. “That makes things ever so much simpler, doesn’t it? The police can hold Sheppard for this Fetts thing. Then, when we “permit” them to find Sam’s body after the election, they will discover that Sheppard killed the old man, too. You might as well turn him over to them now, Zeke.”