by Jerry eBooks
“Didn’t I tell you I’d get it?” She looked down at him, cold face as impassive as ever. “Here.” She passed him a small folded slip which he pocketed quickly.
Mentally he remembered that when the job was done and they were out of it and away together, he must get some of that new brand of elevator shoes. The kind that were said to raise your height without anybody detecting the means. He didn’t like having to point his sharp chin up to look at a woman.
Marta suddenly turned. She was halfway up the flight of stairs from the hall when the library door opened and the burly Hoskins stuck out his iron-gray head and barked, “All right, Cheek!”
“DON’T know what you waste your time driving all the way up here from the city for, Cheek,” Lambert Hoskins snorted, lounging on the corner of his desk as Cheek walked in. “Close the door!”
Cheek slammed it. “Don’t order me around like a damn servant, Hoskins!” Cheek flared back. “I’m just the guy who’s got your big red neck between my hands. Don’t forget—”
Hoskins chuckled derisively as he selected a Havana cigar from a hammered metal case. He was a large thick-chested man, impressive with his leonine head and mane of wavy hair. He was the personification of the tycoon type the more expensive business journals liked to feature on their covers. Muscular power radiated from every inch of his body garbed in the carefully-tailored loose tweeds.
“Forget that the day you try to choke that neck you are putting your own in a noose, Cheek?” he came back, raking the smaller man with his bulbous blue eyes.
“There’s such a thing as turning State’s evidence.”
“Oh, bosh! You’re rep is too smelly to begin with. Try that one and I’ll swear you helped me do the job. That’ll put you away for life, Cheek, and—”
Cheek smiled sleekly. “Life is one hell of a lot better than the hot squat. I mean, the chair, Hoskins.”
Hoskins picked up a desk lighter and put it to the tip of his cigar, “You couldn’t take a life term, a little rat like you, Cheek! You’d crack. You’ve got to have the flash of the bright lights and a smooth dame on your arm so you can impress people. Y’know it.”
Cheek strode to the other side of the big desk by the side wall of the library. He made a sharp sweeping motion with the side of his hand, knife-fashion. “Let’s cut the hot jive, Hoskins. I want money. Plenty.”
“I paid you off once. That’s all you get.” He let the bulbous eyes drift down Cheek’s deliberately unpressed suit, down to the unshined none-too-new shoes. Then he turned to glance through the window at the second-hand sedan in the drive. “Say, you’re broke, aren’t you, Cheek? Probably in a financial jam, too. . . . Did that detective agency give you the bounce?” He smiled at the thought. “You look down at the heels, positively down at the heels.”
Mike Cheek’s pale hand went up to message the lapel of his coat, just inside from the heater in the shoulder rig. But now wasn’t the time. He said calmly though his lips had a vulpine curl, “Look, Hoskins. I can spill. I get twenty five grand—or I do spill. And when I do—”
Plucking the cigar from his mouth,
Hoskins looked for a moment as if he would spit in Cheek’s small face. Instead he said, “You—haven’t—got—the—nerve!”
“This is your last chance, Hoskins.” And Cheek alone knew how he meant that.
THE BIG man had started to walk down the room. He whirled at that, heavy shoulders hunching. “Get the hell outa here, Cheek! And if I break every damn bone in your body! You—” He broke off as the door at the other end of the room opened to admit the aged housekeeper with a bottle of brandy and a seltzer siphon on a tray.
For that moment alone Mike Cheek wished that housekeeper wasn’t deaf. It would have been a clinching piece of evidence for this case, this background for murder, he was building. He turned on his heel and went out, slamming his car down the drive just in case a passer-by might remember seeing him afterward. A few yards down from the gate at the road, he drew up again. With a grimace of distaste, he pulled on the wig of gray and redonned the seedy-looking topcoat. Then, after carefully checking the straight stretch of road in each direction, he tapped the horn button twice. Counted to five and gave it another double tap. Marta stepped from behind a boulder up among the trees and slipped down to the side of the car.
“What did he say, Mike?”
“Same as ever: not another cent.
Which is all right with me. He—” Cheek’s eyes hardened, contracting as they ran slowly over her mouton beaver swagger cost. “That’s new.”
“Nice of you to notice. . . . Mr. Hoskins is a very appreciative employer.” But her bland mask dropped and she reached through the car window to grasp Cheek’s arm as anger jerked his suddenly paled lips. “Don’t be a stupid ass, Mike. If the old fool wants to shell out, let him. It’s just one you won’t have to buy!”
“I still don’t like it. You—” His voice was ugly.
“Keep your head! Now, when do we do it? Tonight?”
He plucked the cigaret from her hand, sucking on it hard, and shook his head. “I want to build up the picture a little more. Not tonight.
. . . Maybe tomorrow night, I think. I’ll phone tomorrow afternoon. What’s the best time to figure on him being out?”
Her eyes lidded. She shrugged. “It’ll be all right. Call any time. . . . Yes, any time.” She seemed to have lost interest.
Cheek’s nostrils darted cigaret smoke impatiently and he shook her forearm. “Come outa the daze, honey! This is the last lap. We don’t wanta get careless now. Tell me what time to—”
SHE PULLED her arm back through the window, seeming to withdraw behind the shell of her glacial poise. “Any time in the afternoon. I’ll take care of it. He—Oh, here comes a car!” She was looking down past the rear of the sedan. The next moment she had turned and run back into the woods.
Cheek rolled the sedan away unhurriedly. Before he hit the State highway intersection, he drew up again. He balled a hand into a fist, studied his face carefully in the rear view mirror. A thin trickle of blood wormed from the lower lip. Satisfied, he moved on. It wasn’t till after he had made the crossing that he realized no car had come up from the rear to pass him back there despite the fact he had driven slowly. It made him frown baffledly.
At eight-thirty that evening, he shuffled into Joe’s bar with a beaten sullen look on his face. He avoided Joe’s eyes as he ordered a shot.
“Well, Mr. Mainz, did ya tell Hoskins off?” Joe asked.
Cheek growled some oaths, looking sheepish. He threw down the whisky, then pointed to his swollen lips. “Looka that! See? The dirty son—All right, Joe. But that dirty thief threw me off the place! Imagine that? Threw me out himself like I was a—a tramp!”
He glared around at the guffaw from the loafers in the back. “But, I’ll fix him good—next time. You’ll see. . . . I’ll get even!”
CHAPTER III
HOSKINS’ last night alive. It amused Mike Cheek to put it that way as he sipped rye in the musty little cottage back from the lane, because he had already decided. Tomorrow night would be the night. He had completed the background for his murder today; tomorrow there would be just a few routine moves, then the big strike. And when the heat cooled, it would be a sizable chunk of fortune and Marta for him—without a chance of ever being apprehended either. The coppers couldn’t grab a murderer who didn’t exist, and after tomorrow night, there would be no more “Mr. Mainz.”
“A masterpiece,” Cheek said softly, almost purring with self-satisfaction. He leaned back on the ancient sofa with the stuffing bulging in worn spots. Outside, barrages of wind-lashed rain flung themselves at the window panes; storm-tossed trees rocked and groaned with a gnashing of limbs. The house itself creaked under the impact of the gale. It was a good night to be inside, especially with the pleasant thoughts Mike Cheek entertained.
He went back to the very beginning of the thing, some nine months ago, when Lambert Hoskins was still and officer of Chemical
Research Institute, Inc. An unimportant member of the laboratory staff, a Polish refugee recently employed by the firm, had been slain in his modest two-room apartment. Police had put it down to a prowler who had choked the victim to death when interrupted in his looting. The fact that a couple of hundred dollars, kept in a locked desk, had been gone made it seem logical enough. The FBI was said to have made a routine check on the circumstances and pronounced themselves satisfied. But the firm itself had some doubts, and they had hired the Paragon Investigation Agency to make a check, sub rosa.
That was where he, Mike Cheek, entered the picture. He was the operative Paragon had sent out to the Institute. At first it had seemed like a routine job, just an assignment on which he had to go through the motions. And then, grabbing a cup of java at a lunchroom near the plant, he had heard an employee remark that Hoskins was the man who had brought Waslinski, the murdered man, into the company.
CHEEK had smelled smoke. A little more nosing around, particularly in a neighborhood barroom where the laboratory staff was wont to drop in for a quick one, and he learned that Waslinski had been experimenting with a new explosive ingredient. Cheek could put two and two together. A little shadowing of Hoskins showed that the man was a skirt-chaser; Cheek had had Marta, whom he had used in such capacities before, put on the office staff. The regular secretary had been given an unexpected vacation, and Don Juan Hoskins had fallen quickly for Marta with her smooth s. a.
And, during outside-the-office rendezvous, he had let a few things drop. There was nothing exactly incriminating: just that, Hoskins once admitted, he had been up to the late Waslinski’s place several times. And that the experiments Waslinski had been conducting—which he was not supposed to have completed—had to do with a new type of explosive far superior to anything then in use in the war effort. Though only usable in small projectiles or grenades, the new element followed its own detonation with a liquid fire that would reduce anything in the immediate area to cinders in the space of a few minutes.
There was nothing to prove a crime on Hoskins’ part, but Mike Cheek always boasted he could smell the sweet aroma of homicide at a distance of two miles, wind or no wind. For one thing, the eminently respectable Lambert Hoskins, whose position was purely business administrative, was too familiar with the details of the late Waslinski’s formula. Cheek had little real evidence to go on, but he knew how to play his cards. On the excuse that he had unearthed some new evidence about Waslinski’s death, he made a dinner engagement with Hoskins. After hinting around that perhaps Hoskins’ alibi for his whereabouts the night of the killing wasn’t exactly air-tight, Cheek claimed to know that the dead man had completed his experiments on the new explosive ingredient successfully.
“And his formula, according to some of his laboratory associates, is missing, Mr. Hoskins,” Cheek had casually uncorked his payoff punch. It was the last time he had ever called Hoskins “mister.”
“Of course,” he had added, “I’d hate to present this evidence to the D.A.’s office and involve somebody who might only appear guilty,” he had added.
Hoskins had been outbluffed. Sooner than “appear” involved, Hoskins had paid off to the tune of a cool ten grand. Mike Cheek had reported to his office that there was nothing on the case that the police hadn’t uncovered.
Then, approximately six months later he had stumbled over a little item in the paper concerning the manufacture of a new explosive for war purposes by the famous Dumont Corporation. In the press story it was stated that the new product had been patented by Lamber Hoskins, retired officer of Chemical Research Institute. Mike Cheek could scent murder and money. He had done some private probing and learned that the retired Hoskins’ royalties on his patent were due to run into several hundred thousand dollars.
THAT had been enough for Mike Cheek. He had taken the trail like a bloodhound on the spoor. On the basis of a doctor’s certificate, he had obtained a prolonged leave of absence from the agency, after having looked up Hoskins in his new rural residence. Then he had used Marta again. She had contacted Hoskins on the excuse of needing a personal reference for a new position. Mike had not under-rated Marta nor over-rated Hoskins’ weakness for the female of the species. Hoskins had employed her as a private secretary, and it had only been a matter of weeks before Marta had learned that Lambert Hoskins, in order to offset any suspicion, was converting his royalty checks into cash immediately and keeping the cash in the house.
Mike had laughed long and loud when he heard that. Lambert, never knowing when the finger might be put on him, was prepared for a quick getaway. “A lead pipe cinch,” was the way Cheek had described the game after that.
HE HAD moved into Elwort, establishing him as “Mr. Mainz” as he went through the gestures of a routine blackmailing attempt on the tough Hoskins. Of course, Hoskins didn’t know he was “Mainz” and living in the town. Cheek had paid regular and repeated visits to his own bungalow in the suburbs back in the city to maintain the appearance of residing there. He was leading a double life, creating the fiction of “Old Mainz,” the man who had a grudge against Hoskins, in Elwort. He had never expected Hoskins to pay off; the man was too hard-headed to be that kind of a fool, knowing that if he once came through, the bleeding game would never stop. Mike Cheek hadn’t wanted him to pay off. What the hell was a picayune twenty-five grand compared to the better than a hundred thousand in cash Hoskins kept in his house safe?
Now, the background for murder was completed; the stage was set. Tomorrow night, late, he would call on Hoskins for a showdown. When he left the house on the hill, Lambert Hoskins would be dead, apparently killed by a marauder. And “Old Mainz,” whose threats of vengeance had been heard all around town, would disappear from the face of the earth. Michael Cheek would be in his suburban home, as usual; and within a few months, after things had cooled off, he and Marta would meet somewhere out on the West Coast. . . .
Cheek laughed out at the simplicity of the thing and adjusted his body more comfortably on the sofa. There was a sudden lull in the wind outside, and he caught a thin singing sound. As he slid a hand to the Police positive under his coat, he galvanized. Then he realized what it was, the bulb in the lamp on the side table at the head of the sofa. The bulb was burning out, due to go dead shortly. He’d have to replace it and—
But after tomorrow night, he, “Old Mainz,” wouldn’t be there any more. No need to worry about a new bulb. Again he chuckled as he swigged off the last of the rye highball. With a sigh of contentment he went back to contemplation of the life he would live after he had gotten hold of Hoskins’ dough. . . .
CHAPTER IV
HE MUST have dozed off.
Without stirring, Cheek came alertly awake, every sense on guard. Then he caught the sound that had galvanized him into consciousness. It was the creak of stairs under the weight of somebody ascending them furtively. Somebody was in his house!
Slipping the heater from the shoulder holster, he levered his body off the sofa cautiously. All other sound for the moment was swallowed in a great earth-shaking clap of thunder. Then he was moving through the archway into the little dining room of the cottage. From there he stepped into the kitchen and inched open the door leading to the back stairway. He could feel the hair like hackles rising on the back of his neck. Some animal-like instinct told him that somebody had come to kill him, and knowledge made him mad in a cold hard way. The idea of somebody intending to kill him!
He got to the top of the stairs, breathing guardedly. The wind was howling again so that it was impossible to hear any other sound. Lightning sliced the night outside, quivering lividly on the blackness for the space of a breath. And in that instant, Cheek saw that his bedroom door was open. Saw too, silhouetted against the white flash outside the window, the burly crouched figure in the doorway, facing inward.
Cheek sprang even as the other, seeing he wasn’t in the bed, started to turn. At the last instant, the private detective decided to beat his man down with a blow of the barrel over the
skull instead of shooting. After all, he was the last man who wanted to have the county police snooping around. The decision was his undoing.
He had to get close to bring down the revolver barrel. And just as he was chopping down with it, an unseen figure struck from the left, from over by the head of the front stairs. Sensing the blow at the last moment, Cheek thrust up a forearm. The second person’s gun barrel deflected from his arm and caught him a glancing blow over the side of the skull. It sent him spilling sideward, crashing down over a small stand in the upper hall—and saved his life.
For the man just inside the bedroom had wheeled swiftly. His gun spat, the muzzle flash seeming to erupt almost in the toppling Cheek’s face. But the bullet whipped by, fanning his cheek, passing where his head had just been. Head ringing, he went on over and let himself hit the floor, rolling behind a chair, but he still gripped his gun and waited, trying to get his senses cleared.
He was dimly aware of some whispering, then the stairs began to creak again. They were going down them. He inched up his head to see a pencil torch flash its beam across the downstairs hall. Cheek got his hands and feet under him, swearing beneath his breath. His head pulsed like a thin-skinned tortured rubber balloon, but though his legs were rubbery, he was able to navigate all right. Working his way down the back stairs, he made sure the safety was off his gun, then pulled open the kitchen door and stepped out into the storm-rent night. The wind tore at him, jamming his breath back in his throat. He got around the back corner of the house and into the drive.
There was another lightning flash, prolonged in a quivering night-knifing aftermath. In it Cheek saw the pair fleeing up the driveway toward the lane, the long gray-trousered legs of the slimmer one flying. But the burly man, happening to glance backward, spotted Cheek too. As the darkness closed in again, the latter opened fire once more.