Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  “Not a bad idea,” I drawled. “Some time I can slip in a nice write-up about your establishment. Perhaps I can even tuck in one of those photos you had taken twenty years ago—when you were young and less repulsive.”

  Ziggy raised a brow. Unlike morphine he was nobody’s dope. But like most of the Broadway sporting gallery he had a craving for seeing his name in print.

  “No kidding, Johnny.”

  “Come on,” I said. “What bends?”

  Ziggy studied the fistic action of the two sluggers in the ring before he put on a cagy look and lowered his voice.

  “Poor Kenny Stangl,” he said, from the left side of his mouth. “Picked up in an alley at six this morning—with more holes in him than a twenty-dollar suit hung in a closet full of moths! Tough, huh?”

  I went back to the Orbit office, thoughtfully reflective. What Ziggy revealed was interesting. Kenny Stangl, one of the Rialto wolf pack, was a big shot along the lane. That is, as an ex-gunsel and a large drinker. Stangl had tangled with the police on several memorable occasions. That he always came out first best was due to a smart mouthpiece and a distressing lack of evidence. In fact, folks who had seen Kenny use a hot rod had become vague and forgetful in a witness chair.

  So now he had been picked up in an alley, looking like a sieve.

  I said a polite good afternoon to Beth Wheaton, prima donna of the plugs, as I braked at her switchboard.

  “Any calls, darling—for me?”

  Beth flicked a blue eye uninterestedly over the top of the board.

  “One from somebody named Hart—a dame. She wants you to call her immediately, if not sooner. I wrote the number down somewhere. I’ll look it up and see if I’ve misplaced it.”

  “Do that,” I said, and wandered into Bill Jamison’s domain.

  Jamison was a star leg man for the Orbit. Bill’s department was crime in all its vicissitudes, murder a specialty. Once he had dreamed of being a college professor, teaching English. Now he wrote a reasonable facsimile of the same language, with vernacular embellishments, and made Times Square his campus.

  “Hi, Johnny,” was his greeting. “Pull up a chair.”

  “Remember Kenny Stangl?” I led off with. “Sure do,” he said. “Bad news in blue serge. What’s he been up to now?”

  “Not up—down. In the gutter. Blasted. Rubbed. Perforated. Haven’t you heard?”

  Jamison looked at me with a frown. “Is this straight? Because I haven’t had a nudge on it from anybody. Not even Mullin the Great, and he’s kept all his promises lately to give me ground floor space. Where’d you hear it?”

  I explained. Bill looked serious. He thanked me and I went back to my desk where the phone was jingling.

  “About that number, Mr. Castle,” Beth Wheaton cooed. “I can’t find it anywhere.”

  “You can draw your pay Saturday and don’t come back Monday,” I told her.

  “But I’ll keep trying and maybe some day it will show up.” She broke off and came back with, “What a coincidence. The lady’s on another wire now. Do you want to talk to her?”

  A round of seconds and then the One and Only’s fascinating tonal qualities drifted into the receiver:

  “Johnny? Why didn’t you call me?”

  “Because a stupid, inefficient operator named Beth Wheaton—”

  “Well, I like that!” Beth cut in indignantly. She clicked off before I could fire another shot.

  “Date still on for five at Austin’s?” I said to Libby.

  “Yes, but couldn’t you make it a little earlier? Something funny’s happened and I want to ask your advice.”

  I told her I’d try to be on tap about half-past four and she rang off. Jamison came in looking troubled.

  “I just called the good captain, Johnny,” he said. “He says I’m crazy. That as far as he knows Stangl’s in perfect health. How do you like it?”

  I whistled. “Then it’s front page stuff, sure!”

  “My idea exactly.” Jamison pulled on his hat. “Kenny always hangs out at the Jockey Club on Forty-eighth. I think I’ll roll around. Want to come?”

  “Date,” I said, and he blew.

  CHAPTER II

  Tail

  Billy Austin’s mouserie was a hole-in-the-wall where the Scotch had an accent and you could meet anyone from an exiled king to a reigning pickpocket. All I wanted to meet was Libby and for once I made a rendezvous before she did.

  The tuckaway was full up. Aristocratic trap-shooters rubbed elbows with not so aristocratic craps shooters. Wall Street mingled with the underworld. That delightful camaraderie that came from cracked ice, soda and fire-water glossed the dive with the shellac of equality.

  I got a beer, a handful of pretzels and a table. I was down to the last crippled cracker when I saw Libby come in. She lit the place up like a four-alarm blaze. There was music in the way she walked, Saks Fifth Avenue in her smart little dress, and a whole garden of dewy flowers in the perfume that haloed her shining dark hair.

  But Mrs. Hart’s daughter had a troubled look. The minute I saw the starry eyes and the expression in them, I realized that while she was serene on the surface there was agitation under her cake make-up.

  “You’re on time, Johnny,” she said. “How wonderful!”

  I pulled out a chair for her and bowed her into it. She looked back over her shoulder as she sat down. Her cherry-red lips featured a smile, but it was fixed and a little mechanical.

  “What’s the trouble, hon?” I asked her. “Why the backward glance and the shadows under your lashes? Lovely lashes, too. They sort of sweep your chin when you close your eyes.”

  “I’ve been followed!” Libby said, a trifle breathlessly. “By a man!”

  “I can’t blame him. If I saw you, didn’t know you, I’d try to correct that.”

  “Be serious, Johnny! This is what I want to talk to you about. Something very strange is going on. Do you know Dance Bowen?”

  Everybody knew who “Dance” Bowen was even if they weren’t lucky enough to be on speaking terms with her. The star of a brand new musical smash entitled, “Lady in Love,” Dance had hit Rainbow Road with all the scintillation of a bursting meteor. The critics loved her, the public adored her and so did Howard Gail, a retired barge owner who, through the medium of cards, horses and roulette wheels, had amassed himself a fortune.

  Those in the know had the word that Gail had backed the new show, exclusively for Dance’s benefit. For weeks she had been seen at all the better bistros with Gail in ardent attendance. Twice, in the past few evenings, I had lamped the lovely at a couple of spots where, if you didn’t buy champagne, you were a very low and unimportant character.

  All that went through my mind while I gave Lib a puzzled look.

  “Enunciate,” I requested. “I’ve known Dance for the past month,” Libby said. “She stopped in my office at Flowerland several times. I think she likes me.”

  “I’ll lay bets on that. Go on.”

  “Night before last she asked me if I’d do her a favor. If I’d put a little package in the safe and keep it for her. Naturally I said I would.”

  “What’s strange about that?”

  “Nothing, except that from that moment on this man I mentioned is bobbing up all over the place. Every time I go out I see him. I sit down to have a sandwich and there he is. I get on the bus to go home and I see him.”

  “He’s the conductor?”

  The starry eyes crackled. “There he is sitting up front or in the rear.” Libby leaned quickly forward. “And there he is now—the one in the brown suit who just came in, at the end of the bar!”

  I looked. What I saw I didn’t like. The party in the brown suit was a gaunt-faced youth with slanted eyes, a hooked, beaky nose and a mouth half normal size. His skin looked as if you could make a wallet or a belt out of it and while his brown suit was well-tailored and expensive, on him it wasn’t becoming. I pegged the lad, in a second glance, as “Cracky” Morgan, a hard number around Sugar Square.


  Morgan, I knew, had turned in a number of years helping the Government make auto license plates in a prison machine shop. And Morgan was one of those careless, casual lads who always wore a gun and used it as often as necessary, without a qualm. And he had been following my dream girl!

  “I’m scared, Johnny!” Libby said, in a half-whisper.

  “I’ll second the emotion.”

  I finished the rest of my foam, told the waiter to bring Libby a dry Martini and did a little prodding.

  “You think that whatever the Bowen fluff gave you is responsible for the tail?” I asked.

  “What else?” Libby said. “What did Dance Bowen say? I mean, did she give you any hint at all as to what was in the package?”

  Libby shook her dark head. “No. All she said when I took it was that now Kenny Stangl would be out of luck—whatever that meant.”

  Something high explosive went off inside me. Stangl again! Murder in an alley and my honey chile tangled in it! Libby Hart in the picture and Cracky Morgan at the end of the bar, watching our table with slanting eyes under the brim of a low-pulled hat!

  “Look, babe.” I said it fast in a private voice. “Whatever you have that belongs to Miss Bowen goes back to her, and quick! Come on, we’re leaving. Maybe you don’t know it, but the scythe of the well known Grim Reaper is about to take a cut at us, if we don’t dodge!”

  “But my Martini?”

  “Dump it in your shoe,” I said, “but take out the olive. It might hurt when you start running!”

  “Where are you taking me?” Libby cried softly, when I got her out of Billy Austin’s and into a taxi. .

  “Stuyvesant Theater, hackie,” I told the driver, answering Libby’s question at the same time.

  The ark rolled off. I looked through the rear window, in time to see Morgan nose dive out of the wall-hole and toss his big frame into the next cab in line.

  It didn’t look good from where I sat.

  Something screwy was breaking and I didn’t have an angle to go on. Ziggy’s confidential tipoff after Detective Hartley’s visit to the gym. Jamison’s phone call to my old friend and enemy, Captain Fred Mullin of the Homicide Department, and what Mullin had told him. And now Libby, with Morgan pounding along in our wake.

  I didn’t like that last word, either!

  While I was still thinking about it our taxi slid up to the marquee of the playhouse where “Lady in Love” was strictly S.R.O. at every performance.

  This was mid-week matinee day and, according to my watch, just about time for the finale and the last curtain.

  I oiled the hackie and steered Libby for the stage door. Cracky’s cab passed, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. We went down a length of bricked-in cement and up to an open fire-proof door out of which issued voices lifted in song.

  A party in suspenders, blue shirt and faded pants stopped us on the threshold.

  “Miss Bowen.” I gave him a glimpse of my newspaper-police pass card. “She ought to be off in a few minutes.”

  “She ain’t working today.” He said it defiantly. “Understudy. Goldielocks don’t believe in no afternoon shows. Too much wear and tear on the nervous system.”

  “Do you know where she lives?” I asked Libby.

  “I have the address she gave me, in my handbag.”

  “Swell. Thanks, bud,” I said to the Suspenders.

  There was no sign of Cracky Morgan out on the street. Still his absence didn’t improve my mental agitation to any marked degree. Taxis were as plentiful at that hour as ants at a picnic. We hopped another and I let Libby speak her piece.

  “The Armitage Arms,” she directed. “I think it’s on Fifty-sixth.”

  “Correct, lady,” the driver said over his shoulder.

  The address was that of one of those super-exclusive apartment houses. A tall sliver of a building set between sedate private houses. The kind of a dump that had a waiting list for its duplexes as long as a bartender’s arm. It was hardly the type of place a Broadway star would be at home in. Still, with the housing problem—and Howard Gail rolling in dough like a baker’s elbow—nothing was too good for the Bowen frail, the Armitage Arms, least of all.

  “I don’t want to be announced,” I said to Libby, covering the street we’d just left with a glance that didn’t find Cracky Morgan in its focus.

  “What’s the apartment number?”

  “Twelve D.”

  “Then right into the elevator just as if we lived here,” I directed.

  We made it without being stopped for questioning by any of the gold-braided staff officers prowling around the lobby.

  “Twelve,” I told the operator, and the cage went away like Hoop Jr. with a Derby to win.

  Beautiful black-and-white tiles echoed to our steps as we hunted for 12 D along a corridor where a parade could have been held. Libby, close beside me, began to ask questions.

  “I don’t get this, Johnny. What am I to tell her? What’s the reason for all this rush? You know, maybe it’s only imagination. I mean, that man following me ever since Dance gave me the package to keep for her.”

  “Tell her to put her shoes on and go down to the office at Flowerland and get her little bundle. You don’t know it, but I have an idea it’s loaded with dynamite. The kind that goes off by remote control.”

  “I don’t understand,” Libby said, wrinkling that smooth brow.

  “Neither do I—exactly,” I confessed. “But I do know this much. The Stangl she mentioned to you was swept up this morning in a public byway, all full of great big holes!”

  Libby’s eyes widened. She was about to say something else but checked it as I pressed the pearl circle of the bell of a door numbered 12 D.

  No answer.

  I rang again, and again. We could hear the bell giving out with a melodious tinkle somewhere inside, but nothing happened. Nothing, that is, until I happened to drop a hand to the large brass knob. Through force of habit I gave it a turn and the door obligingly opened.

  “Well,” I said, “this is hospitality. The latch string’s always out and come right in!”

  “You’re not going in there, Johnny!”

  “Try and stop me.”

  An arm around Libby’s slender waist forced her unwillingly into a mirror-lined foyer where the waning afternoon shadows backed up in all four corners. I let the front door swing shut and stood there for a minute, listening.

  There wasn’t a sound except faraway-street noises and Libby’s quick breathing. I couldn’t explain it, but I felt a funny tingle. Like a piece of ice sliding down my spine and sending out small shivers during its journey.

  “We might as well look around.” I tried to make it sound cheerful. “Maybe some day we’ll be renting a hive like this for ourselves. Smart idea to get a view of what kind of furniture to buy.”

  “I’m staying right here,” Libby interrupted decidedly. “You look at the furniture. I want to be ready to leave when the police come to arrest us for housebreaking!”

  I was glad she stayed in the foyer.

  Because, when I went through one gorgeously appointed room and into another that connected with it, it wasn’t the furniture that caught my eye. It was what was lying full length on the floor, and that wasn’t any Oriental rug.

  I was in a living room. One of those Hollywood movie set places. The carpet was as soft as moss and the same color. The appointments mingled periods with question marks in a decorator’s nightmare.

  But all that sank in later.

  What started to lift my hair, and put a dryness in the back of my throat, was the grotesque appearance of the room’s occupant. He was a gent with pepper-and-salt hair, not small and not large—just an average sized fellow in a better than average set of rugged tweeds. Somebody had shot him neatly in the throat and it wasn’t beef gravy running down his vest in a thin, coagulated trickle!

  I stood there looking. My feet seemed frozen to the floor. After a while my hair got back in place and the slight nausea left
the pit of my crawling stomach.

  I took another look and recognized the man’s rather blunt features. Glazed eyes with pouches under them, a nose that should have been bigger for the amount of face that went with it, and lobeless ears that grew close to his head.

  Howard Gail!

  CHAPTER III

  Libby Opens the Safe

  While the dead man’s identity penetrated, I saw something else. That was the gun that had done the trick. It lay on the other side of the room, bright and glinting against the mossy carpet. A funny kind of a gun—a Colt Woodsman, the type that used .22s for target practise.

  It had taken some smart shooting to send Gail away with a single shot pumped into a principal artery in the larynx department. Whoever had triggered the lead knew just where to address it. Gail had probably folded up without a squawk.

  My thoughts were all scrambled like a dozen eggs in a sizzling pan. Gail in his girl friend’s apartment, cold as a handful of snow. From the looks of him he had been dead for hours. And Dance hadn’t played a matinee that afternoon.

  And Cracky Morgan had been tailing Libby while Homicide had been withholding the sudden demise of Kenny Stangl who, according to what Libby had transferred to me, cut some sort of a figure in the package my dream cake was keeping for the Bowen beauty in the safe at Flowerland. That was the hooferie where Libby smoked up publicity for all the dailies.

  “Johnny!” I heard her call. “What are you doing? Where are you?”

  “Don’t come in here!” I said it with authority and, of course, it brought her right to the door. Before I could block the late Mr. Gail from her view, Libby had seen, and started to make odd noises in her throat. Even the cake make-up couldn’t hide the pallor spreading in her smooth cheeks. As if fascinated, her big, dark eyes, wide and horrified, riveted on what occupied the floor.

  I got an arm around her and edged her toward the other room.

  Just as we reached it the foyer door banged open and in walked no less than Captain Fred Mullin with what seemed to be the entire Metropolitan Police Force at his rubber heels!

  Queerly enough, Mullin, the bulldog of the department, in appearance and manner, didn’t seem unduly surprised because of my presence in Dance Bowen’s suite. Or the presence of the young lady my arm was around. In fact Mullin’s cast-iron countenance mirrored an expression that might have been one of knowing satisfaction.