Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  Greenlock nodded whitely. His fingers knotted, meshed. Mrs. Murtagh came slowly down the stairs, feeling her way with her cane.

  “Mr. Greenlock said my son tried to shoot him last night?” she said coldly. “He’s lying!”

  Greenlock’s head went up sharply. “Indeed I am not, Mrs. Murtagh,” he said in a strained voice. “I saw him very clearly under the street light on the sidewalk. It was Les. He tried to shoot me.”

  “You’d swear to that?” the old woman demanded harshly.

  “I’d swear to it.”

  “You couldn’t be mistaken?”

  “I couldn’t be mistaken. Who else but Les would try to kill me? Before he went to prison he said he’d do it. He said he’d kill Cook, and he did it. Last night he tried to kill me.”

  The old woman nodded. “All right,” she said. She turned and hobbled toward the cellar door. “Come with me, gentlemen. My son is downstairs in the basement.”

  Evans glanced quickly at the two detectives who slowly reached for their pockets, drew their guns. They stepped quickly and quietly behind the woman. She gave them a thin, mocking smile and labored down the wooden steps. They followed cautiously, and behind them, Murtagh.

  In the cellar, she reached up and switched on the light, standing aside. For a moment there was no sound except her shallow breathing.

  There, lying stiffly on an old leather couch against the wall near the heat of the furnace, was the body of a man with a pinched, hook-nosed face, resembling closely the old woman. His hands were rigid against his chest, but they could not hide the rusty spread of dried blood across his chest.

  One of the detectives bent over him, whistled and looked at the other. “The Chief had better look at this,” he said.

  “Les . . . Les!” Murtagh croaked. He sank to one knee beside the body and cradled the stiff hands in both of his. “Les!”

  The other detective came down with Evans, Greenlock between them. Old Mrs. Murtagh’s eyes glinted.

  “Good grief!” Evans muttered. Greenlock stared, open-mouthed.

  He stammered, “He’s—he’s—”

  “Dead!” Mrs. Murtagh looked almost triumphant. She stood very straight, hungrily watching Greenlock. “He was dead before Mr. Cook was killed. He was dead the evening of the day he came, killed by the bullets of the guards as he escaped from prison. Tell us again, Mr. Greenlock, how a dead man tried to shoot you last night!”

  Automatically the eyes of the four other men turned and pressed on Greenlock, who stared with horror at the dead body.

  “Suppose you tell us about that, Mr. Greenlock,” Evans said quietly. He took a step forward.

  Greenlock’s glance darted from one to the other. “He did, he tried to kill me, I saw him!” he cried wildly. “I saw him standing there, He—” He stopped, aghast.

  “Before he died, my son swore to me that he did not kill his father,” Mrs. Murtagh intoned. He knew he was dying. He would not lie. That night Mr. Cook was killed, and everybody believed Les had done it. Only I knew he had not. I told no one. I waited. I knew then who had killed my husband, and I knew then who had killed Mr. Cook. Mr. Greenlock killed them! He killed them to gain control of the printing business. Look at him! There’s the mark of Cain on his face!” Greenlock shrank before her as she went on savagely:

  “Ask him, Chief Evans, why he made up that fantastic story about Les trying to kill him last night. I’ll tell you why. He told that story because he wanted you to believe Les also killed Mr. Cook. I demand,” she said, “that you have a doctor examine the body of my son. A doctor will be able to tell you how impossible it would have been for Les either to have killed Mr. Cook or attempted Mr. Greenlock’s life. What do you say now, Mr. Greenlock?”

  Greenlock babbled, “He tried to kill me.” He backed away.

  Evans made a small gesture with his hand and the two detectives moved warily, spreading to either side of the gray-faced, retreating man.

  The old woman gloated, “Maybe what Mr. Greenlock saw last night was the ghost of the man he had sent to prison for a crime Les did not commit. What was it you saw, Mr. Greenlock?”

  In a moment of terrible comprehension, Greenlock whispered, “It was you I saw. You!”

  Mrs. Murtagh looked ironically at Evans, who nodded. Greenlock saw the nod, saw the swift movement of the two detectives toward him. He lost his head completely.

  “No you don’t!” he cried, and clawed for the inner pocket of his overcoat. A gun roared and he was flung back against the tubular lolly column, spun around and fell to his hands and knees. They were on him before he could recover his balance. Spitting and shrieking, he fought the handcuffs they snapped around his wrists, and when they wrestled him up the stairs, he turned wildly and spat full at the straight-backed figure of the old woman. She disdained to move.

  “I guess that’s all,” Evans mumbled. He shook his head and mounted the stairs.

  Murtagh waited until he heard the outer door close. He looked at his mother. “You tried to kill Greenlock last night. It was you he saw,” he said dully.

  She nodded with satisfaction. “Yes. Les did not kill his father. After Cook was dead, it was between you and Greenlock, but the Murtaghs don’t kill one another. It had to be Greenlock. He wanted the business. He was always a sly, ambitious man. I never trusted him, even before.”

  Murtagh rose. He knew how useless it would be to tell her what he wanted to, the fantastic risk she had run, her lack of proof. She would never understand, for it had worked, hadn’t it?

  Murtagh was not sure he understood it himself. He was a plodding, unimaginative man, and there were practical things to be looked after. He went upstairs to the telephone.

  HOST TO HOMICIDE

  Milton T. Lamb

  The small-town police captain hadn’t been invited to the party until it was all over—and the man who’d thrown the shindig had become a . . .

  I GAVE quite some thought to murdering my brother Alec myself, especially after the visit of the bigwig from Colonial Oil, which I’d managed to keep secret. You’d have thought about killing Alec yourself, had he been your brother.

  Before the accident he had been, perhaps, bearable, a fat, bald, selfish, stuffed shirt-but bearable if, like me, you could take living with him easier than working for a living. But Alec had come out of the auto wreck that night a man who would never again walk. Misfortune and pain might mellow some people, but it had the opposite effect on Alec. He pitied himself; he hated the world; he wanted to torture all who were around him.

  So we lived in the big, depressing house in the Florida everglades that our parents had willed the two of us, Alec chained to his wheel chair, I chained to Alec. The Sloan fortune was gone, the house smothered with taxes. The once beautiful lawn and grounds were being claimed by weeds; our thousand acres were a marshy, reptile-infested mockery. And I was shut up in the lonely hull of rotting house with Alec, forced to live on the pittance we had left.

  From his wheel chair he bellowed constantly for attention. There was barely money for the lone servant we had left; so to make matters worse, I was elected Alec’s male nurse, whether I liked it or not.

  There was Blanche, too, to consider. Blanche Millman, of the family that had taken a fortune out of Florida pine trees in the way of naval stores. Blanche had been with Alec the night of the accident. She hadn’t been seriously injured but her face had been literally sprayed with bits of flying glass—and now there were those tiny scars all over Blanche’s face that almost changed her loveliness into something horrible. She was drinking herself to death. She shouldn’t have gazed in the mirror so much at the scars the accident had left. I think I loved Blanche once.

  And perhaps the house itself bred the thought of murder, the air of decay, the odor of rot. No matter how bright the Florida sun, the house seemed forever to wear the gloom and chill of a tomb. And I had time to think about it. Muggy tropical days; nights that seethed with buzzing insects, the heat thick and unabated, wrapping you like
a cloying shroud.

  At first I toyed with the thought, like a child playing with a flaming match. It was something to take my mind off the stifling heat. But the heat itself seemed to play me tricks, and soon the thought was like little bubbles of heat, rupturing in my brain. Why not? If a man gave attention to all the little things . . . why not?

  BUT I knew as I dressed for Alec’s party that night that I wasn’t the only one who thought of his murder. Everyone he touched, he hurt. He seemed to enjoy it, and that invariably drove the hurt deeper. Consequently, damn near everybody he touched would have killed him.

  I finished knotting my tie, lighted a cigarette, and walked to the window. From my room the flat, dreary Florida everglades stretched into the limitless vastness of the lowering, seething Florida night. It was a grim, dismal scene, moist with the lush stagnation of centuries, dank with the feel of slithering, creeping things out in the night.

  No one, I reflected, but my parents would have chosen to build this onetime mansion seven miles from the village of Palm City. But that had been in the twenties, the period when, all over Florida, dream cities were being erected on paper, when manmade islands were being pumped up out of the stomach of the Gulf, when swank apartment houses and hotels were being built in the middle of stretches of tropical desolation to be first to do business when the new cities came. You can still drive over Florida and see the gaunt, bedraggled ruins of a lot of these swank buildings, monuments to a hysteria that never became a civilization.

  That was our house. Our mansion. It was to have been in one of the finest sections of a vast city of pleasure. But the crash had come. Palm City had never mushroomed. We were still stuck seven miles out in the ‘glades, and standing there with the sodden decay of the house enveloping me, a bitter laugh escaped my lips. Murder? If only a man paid attention to the little things, all the details . . .

  I crushed out my cigarette, left my room, and went downstairs. I could hear Alec’s voice in the library, which contained once proud volumes slowly gathering mildew. Alec was blaspheming at old lady Lynch, our one servant.

  I listened to him berate her for the way the crab had been prepared last night. Then I shrugged and walked down the hall to his bedroom to borrow a shoelace.

  I opened Alec’s door and almost kicked the plain, white envelope that lay on the carpet. It looked as though the envelope had been slipped under the crack of the door, and I bent to pick it up.

  It was unsealed, the flap tucked under. I pulled the flap out; the square of note paper was as bare of identifying marks as the envelope. The message was typewritten and unsigned, reading tersely: You’ll do as I say, or the party tonight will be your last!

  I smiled faintly as I pushed the note in my pocket. An almost childish, desperate, hysterical outburst, the note showed to what lengths Alec was capable of driving people. Any one of several persons could have pushed that note under his door today.

  I removed a lace from one of Alec’s shoes, put it in my own, and went back to the kitchen, where I found some cold roast duck. I was nibbling at it and thinking of the note, when Mrs. Lynch came in. She looked as if she were about to cry. She slammed a pan on the stove.

  “Honestly, Mr. Colin, if he weren’t your brother—I—I could almost—” Her mouth tightened over the words.

  I said, “Don’t mind me. Go ahead and say it. A lot of people could cut his throat.” Then after a moment, I asked, “Who has been in the house today?”

  “Oh, several people. Miss Blanche, Miss Marline Smythe and that gentleman—” it seemed a note of sarcasm crept into Mrs. Lynch’s voice when she said gentleman—“that gentleman of Miss Smythe’s, Mr. Anthony Hughes. Maybe one or two more. Mr. Alec is always pestering them to drive out.”

  “Maybe he gets lonely and tired in the wheel chair, Mrs. Lynch.”

  She made no comment, and I added: “I suppose everything is ready for the party tonight?”

  “There’s plenty of liquor, if that’s what you mean,” Mrs. Lynch said. “There’s always that, even if Mr. Alec hasn’t the money to pay his cook. I guess I’d better check the refrigerator and see about the ice for tonight.”

  “I’ve already seen to it, Mrs. Lynch. You needn’t bother.”

  “Well, it’s a shame you don’t handle the financial affairs around here, Mr. Colin.”

  “He’s the older brother and all that stuff, Mrs. Lynch. It was in the will. But cheer up, maybe I’ll kill him—or somebody will do it for us.” She looked shocked, but she laughed, the way I felt, the way that note had read. She laughed like the maddening weather, with heat, tightly, hysterically. I left the kitchen.

  BLANCHE MILLMAN was the first guest to arrive. I opened the front door for her at nine. Her eyes were too bright; her breath was like a gust of wind from a bourbon bottle. She swayed a little. The drinks she’d had had seemed to tighten the skin of her face, causing the multitude of tiny scars from the auto accident to seem to glow.

  “Welcome to Sloan Manor,” I said, “and another of Alec’s shindigs.”

  “Oh, damn him and his shindigs!” Blanche stepped into the hall. “Colin, I don’t mind telling you that no one would ever come around this house because of Alec except that he—”

  “That you’re all afraid of him,” I said. “You know he’d make himself a nuisance, phoning you at all hours for weeks, if you didn’t show up for one of his parties. Well, you’d rather endure him an hour or two once a month than to take his devilish consequences.”

  “Something like that,” she agreed. “Let’s let him have his sadistic wake and get it over! Where is he?”

  “In the living room.” I glanced out the front door. “Sorry I can’t announce you in the best butler fashion, but I spy headlights.”

  Blanche navigated a swaying course toward the living room, and I hurried across the veranda to move her car, which she’d left in the middle of the rutted sandy drive.

  I pulled Blanche’s car out of the way as the other car drew to a stop before the front door. I ran up the sagging steps to the veranda that still retained a ghost of its columned magnificence, and the two new guests turned.

  “Oh, hello, Colin. We were just ringing.” It was Marline Smythe, a slight blonde, who bore on her small face a martyrlike expression, always, that made you think she was searching soulfully and desperately for heart-rending disappointment in love. Beside her, tall, sleek, straight as a bogus duke, stood Anthony Hughes.

  “I was moving Blanche’s car,” I said. “Come in.”

  “Reluctantly.” Anthony Hughes’ voice could have crooned, but now as he spoke, his one word was cold, hard. He added, “I might inform you, Colin, that I wouldn’t be here, except for Marline. I think as much of your brother Alec as I do of—”

  “A salamander. Thank you, Mr. Hughes. I think you’ve voiced those sentiments before.” I didn’t like him. He had no dough, but he spent plenty, and most of it came from Marline.

  She hadn’t been born to wealth. She’d been plain Mary Smith, secretary to a writer once and had picked up enough story technique so that she made an income writing for the confession magazines that a congressman would envy. With that tortured, martyr psychology of hers she had a natural knack for it. She kept two secretaries busy pouring out her sweet, lush stories of the agony that can come through love.

  She and Anthony Hughes disappeared into the living room. I heard Alec greet them. “Marline, little dove! Ah, and an odor—could it be a rodent you have leaning on your pretty arm, Marline?”

  I knew that Anthony Hughes’s lips tightened considerably at Alec’s remark. I heard Marline say with a soulful sigh: “Oh, Alec, must you envy me the company of a kind, understanding man?”

  I thought: She’s writing the dialogue for her next story. Had it not been for her, Anthony Hughes would never have come here. But since Marline came, Anthony couldn’t bear the thought of letting his meal ticket get away from him even for a moment. I speculated that even a gigolo had to work at unpleasant tasks now and then for hi
s livelihood, and turned into the living room.

  Alec was already demanding a drink, and the others looked as if they needed it. I sighed and excused myself and went out to the kitchen.

  WITH some trouble, I broke a tray loose in the refrigerator, dumped ice directly into the glasses. I was very careful about it, making sure I filled one glass well with ice, even at the expense of the others. Alec demanded that his drinks be cool even if somebody else had to drink tepid highballs. I put the glasses on a tray, went back to the living room. I poured bourbon, added soda. Marline Smythe was sitting at the piano; but the piano was out of tune and the middle C ivory had peeled, giving the grand a ridiculous, snagged-tooth look. Marline seemed to be projecting her soul to Alec with her gaze, and Anthony, leaning on the piano, didn’t like it.

  Blanche came over to me. “I’ll serve the drinks, Colin,” she said with a faint hiccough. “I’ve got to do something at this wake!”

  I handed her the tray, and since Alec was the wheel chair invalid, she went first to him, then the others. The sight of alcohol—and I’d made the drinks strong—lifted the gathering for a moment. We drank.

  Marline was trying to get a minuet out of the piano. Blanche giggled. The grand was more out of tune than I’d thought. The music was a crazy, clashing conglomeration of discords.

  Like tinkly, weird, murder music!

  The thought had no sooner crackled in my mind when into the music came another sound, a horrible, choking sound, guttural and dark, like the roiling of water in the swamps outside.

  The music stopped with a crashing dissonance. All of us spun to look at Alec. He seemed to be trying to claw his way out of his wheel chair. His face was twisted. A spasm shook him. He stared at us, eyes jutting, sweat oiling his face, trying to speak. He pitched to the floor; a great convulsion seemed to shake him. Then he was still.

  Marline Smythe screamed. A confession story heroine couldn’t have done it better.

  I think the whole Palm City police department came. They were everywhere, prowling, measuring, taking our fingerprints. Alec lay in the middle of the carpet where he’d fallen, a bulk that sent shivers up my spine. We were herded over into a corner by a man who introduced himself as Captain Jak, head of the Palm City detective department.