Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  Jak was a very average-looking man, tall, lean, quiet, wearing steel-rimmed glasses. A Florida cracker. But something about the way he moved and spoke . . . something in the cold depths of his eyes, the, uncompromising set of his thin lips . . . those certain little somethings combined and caused you to know that here was a dogged man who would see anything through to any end.

  He was digging skeletons out of closets with the finesse of military intelligence and the determination of a desert prospector finding gold.

  He’d asked us the preliminary questions, and at the moment was concentrating on Anthony Hughes.

  “You say you didn’t want to come here, Mr. Hughes?”

  “No.” Anthony looked pained, his face white, as if he were about to faint and couldn’t decide whether or not he wanted to.

  “Then you came here tonight because of some ulterior motive?”

  Anthony mopped his face. “See here, my man, I came because I—because—” He stopped speaking, but he darted an unconscious glance at Marline, and Jak had his answer.

  Jak turned to Marline. She twisted her hands and blurted, “I had Anthony bring me here, but I—”

  “Yes, Miss Smythe?”

  She didn’t speak, and Jak said, “Weren’t you about to marry Alec Sloan at one time, Miss Smythe? And didn’t he leave you waiting at the altar while he went on a drunken party with another woman—a party that ended in a terrible auto crash?”

  Blanche’s face tightened. Marline Smythe’s face was white; her gaze dropped. “Yes—I—he jilted me once.”

  “And you wanted to kill him?” Her childish blonde head jerked up.

  “No, I loved him! I still loved him—I wanted him back!”

  JAK’S gaze turned inexorably back to Anthony. “She wanted Alec Sloan—you wanted her. You couldn’t get her while she wanted Sloan, so you—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, my man.”

  “I am not your man,” Jak said quietly.

  “Well, I—I wouldn’t kill a man for any woman! As far as that goes, Blanche Millman might have thought a lot of him, too—despite the fact that she was with him in that crash that scarred her face!”

  Blanche closed her eyes. She was sober now, stone sober. Her voice came from down deep in her lungs, a soft, fierce whisper. “You’re wrong, Anthony. I hated Alec. I wanted to see him dead. Drinking wouldn’t make me forget—nothing would! Unless you’re a woman, you can’t understand. He was careless that night. I begged him to drive slow. He just laughed and stepped on the gas. And look at me now!” She sobbed, her voice rising almost to a scream. “Look at my face—my scarred ugly face!”

  I slipped my arm about Blanche to steady her. I’d loved her once—before she had given me the toss in favor of Alec. Then I’d learned to hate her, I guess, for weakening to that fatal, savage sod of charm Alec once had seemed to have for women.

  Jak looked at her, at all of us grouped there in the corner, without expression. As if musing to himself, he said, “Murder, you know, consists of little things. The accumulation of little things leads to it. And the act of murder in itself is not the one single action a lot of people would think. The act of murder is a lot of little actions again accumulated. A few seconds of time here, a movement there, a word, a look, a dark thought flashing in a twisted mind.

  “But murder being what it is, no one person is ever big enough to handle all those little things, because each little thing that is being accumulated is like a pebble dropping into a still pool. Each pebble sends out its ring after ring of ripples, until they’re all running into each other, overlapping each other, until the pool is churning. And no one person, no matter how smart, is capable of covering himself completely, of bringing calm back to the pool! Do any of you want to say anything?”

  No one spoke.

  “We’re going to work on the little things,” Jak said simply. “I’ll want to talk to all of you again tomorrow.”

  “You mean that’s all,” I said.

  “For now. I wouldn’t advise any of you to leave Palm City, and if any of you happen to see a strange man hanging around the place where you live, don’t be alarmed. It’ll only be a shadow, assigned by me. We don’t want anyone else getting killed, do we?”

  I reached in my pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Something fell from my pocket to the floor—an envelope. That note that had been under Alec’s door when I’d gone in his room after the shoelace.

  The way I pounced on it interested Jak. He snapped his fingers, reached, and jerked the envelope from my hand. He read it, his eyes going hard. “Where did this come from, Colin?”

  “I opened Alec’s bedroom door, just before the party. It was on the floor.”

  He looked from face to face. “Which of you has been here today?”

  I said, “Any of us could have put the note under his door, Jak. Blanche, Marline, and Anthony were by—trying to make excuses to stay away from Alec’s party, I guess, only he wouldn’t hear of it, of course. But the note is probably of no consequence. It—”

  “Colin, you wouldn’t have some idea who really wrote the note? You wouldn’t be trying to cover somebody?”

  The flesh of my face was tight. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  He smiled faintly. “We’ll see. Those little things, you know. But if I catch you holding out any information, I jail you, Colin, and throw the key away!”

  The house that night was more like a tomb than ever. Now and then a creature screamed out in the swamps. It kept me bathed in cold sweat. It was like having Alec’s soul out there in the dark marshes.

  THE next morning Jak arrested Blanche for murder.

  I didn’t know it, though, until I got to his office. When he phoned me, he just said, “Colin, come down. I want to have a powwow.”

  “Some of those little things?” I cracked.

  Jak was alone in his office when I got there. He looked up from the onion-skin reports he was studying and said, “Sit down, Colin.”

  He looked at me steadily and said, “You were pretty sweet on Blanche Millman once, weren’t you?”

  “I might have been.”

  “And that’s why you held out on me. Why you didn’t show me that note of your own accord. You knew Blanche had written it, slipped it under Alec’s door in an hysterical moment.”

  I splayed my palms on his desk. “I didn’t know any such thing! You’re crazy if you think Blanche wrote that note!”

  He leaned back in his chair. “Let me bring you up to date, Colin. We work while others sleep. The autopsy showed that your brother was killed with a hell of a strong dose of cyanide. Analysis of what was left of Alec’s bourbon and soda showed the drink was loaded with the poison. Blanche served those drinks, Colin.”

  “And I mixed them, damn it!”

  “Don’t try to go noble on me, Colin! It’s old-fashioned, and this is neither the time nor the place. If you had poisoned Alec’s drink, you’d have served it to him yourself. Blanche slipped the poison in his drink between the time she took the drinks from you and served them. Item two: Somebody had tried to wipe that sheet of note paper clean of fingerprints before putting it under Alec’s door—because only your prints were scattered over the note, Colin. You’d handled it. If that note hadn’t been wiped of prints, there’d have been yours and someone else’s! But she missed, Colin. One of Blanche’s fingerprints was in the upper corner of the note. The third little thing: The note was written on paper that matches stationery we found in Blanche’s apartment. And it was also written on a portable typewriter on her desk.”

  I stood up. “Can I see her?”

  Jak shook his head. “She’s being questioned upstairs.” As I started out, he asked, “Where are you going, Colin?”

  “To get a lawyer.”

  “You’d better get a good one. We got an airtight case. Strictly airtight!”

  The lawyer seemed to think so, too. I talked with him all morning, then I went home.

  The next day was Frid
ay. We buried Alec. The sky was very blue, and the sun was very hot. That night creatures screamed in the marshes.

  The next day, about noon, I was in the living room where Alec had died, walking the floor. I heard a movement behind me and started to turn and tell Mrs. Lynch for the fifth time that I didn’t want any lunch. But it wasn’t Mrs. Lynch. It was Jak.

  I hadn’t seen him now for two days. He looked gaunt, hollow-eyed, as if the heat were getting him.

  “I came in without knocking, Colin.”

  “That’s okay.”

  JAK watched me pace for a moment, then said, “How does it feel, Colin, to walk over the spot where your brother’s body has lain in death?”

  “Not so good.” I kept my back to him. “I guess not,” Jak sighed heavily. “You keep thinking of the way you killed him, don’t you, Colin?”

  I whirled on Jak, hot words boiling up in my throat. But the words became cold curdles somewhere behind my tonsils. Jak had a gun in his hand, pointed at my stomach.

  “Listen, Jak—”

  “You listen. Those little things, remember, Colin? Surprising how much oil they’ve been drilling for in Florida recently. A bigwig from Colonial Oil came to Palm City, came out to see you. How do I know? From a desk clerk, Colin, a quiet, nameless little man who is a desk clerk at the hotel where the bigwig from Colonial registered. The oil man asked the clerk how to find your place, and the clerk remembered and came to headquarters to tell us, thinking it might have some bearing on the case, when he heard that Alec had been murdered.

  “Just a little thing, a man asking directions. A quiet clerk you’ve never even seen, with a sense of duty. Just a pebble dropping in the black pool of murder, sending out its never-ending ripples! That started me, Colin.”

  I sank into a chair.

  Jak said, “Let’s say that you saw the oil man, Colin, before Alec did. You knew that you’d never see a dime of any oil rights money if Alec got it, so you stalled the oil man to give you time to get your brother out of the way. Then I began to wonder how you managed it. In my questioning I, ran across a quaint little thing, the fact that Alec always hogged a well-iced drink. From Mrs. Lynch I gathered a little remark that you had made to the effect that, on the night of the murder, you had already seen to the ice. So I knew the poison was not merely in the drink—but in the ice!

  “You knew Blanche would serve the wheel chair invalid first—and you knew which drink Alec would automatically take. If he had by any remote chance taken the wrong drink, you could have reached quickly for the ice-poisoned drink yourself and pretended to spill it or taken it out to the kitchen and dumped it, to await a later time when Alec’s murder would have again been opportune. But he took the right drink, as you had known he would, and your plan was set. All the details cared for? Oh, yes, Colin, all that you could foresee!”

  “But Blanche—”

  “A dupe in your hands, Colin! You were so very smart, weren’t you? You knew you’d be suspected of Alec’s death unless the police solved the murder quickly. In addition, you picked Blanche as your sacrifice to your own safety because you hated her for throwing you over once. How your mind must have savored that sort of thing—setting the stage, toying with human beings, exacting a warped revenge! It was daring. It was smooth. It was the most subtle frame-up I’ve ever heard of, Colin, if that’s any satisfaction.”

  I licked my lips. “But the note—”

  “You wrote the note, slipping into Blanche’s apartment a day or two before the murder. Then you pretended to let the note fall into my hands unintentionally. You see, we found some of your fingerprints in Blanche’s apartment. We found one on a vase on her desk, where you’d moved the vase when you sat down at her portable to write that note.”

  Somehow I mustered a laugh. “You fool! Of course my prints are in Blanche’s apartment. I’ve been there often!”

  “But not within a week prior to the murder?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “Blanche says you hadn’t.”

  “Well, I hadn’t! So what about it?”

  “So you’ve just condemned yourself, Colin! You say you hadn’t visited her for a week prior to the murder. Your fingerprints were on that vase on her desk. Yet she swears she did not buy that vase until the day before the murder!”

  “She’s lying!” I screamed.

  “No, Colin. Another little thing. Another little series of ripples drowning you, Colin! We checked with the old dealer who sold Blanche that vase. He identified the vase, showed us the sales slip!”

  I wiped my face on my coat sleeve. “You’ll never prove it! You—”

  “You’ll talk,” he said. He hit me as I jumped up, as if he liked it. He knocked me down on the floor and said quietly, “There’ll be other little things, Colin. So many others that we’ll dig up! Little things like the tiny strands in a rope—a rope strong enough to hang you! You’ll talk, Colin!”

  I lay there sobbing. It had been so perfect; I had felt so secure. Yet at the first puff of wind my murder house had toppled like a deck of limp cards.

  Jak hauled me to my feet. “Too many little things, Colin. Just too many little things!”

  Sure, if there was a guy like this Jak to put them together.

  FLATFOOT

  Hal K. Wells

  Patrolman Matt Foley was just a good-natured beat-pounder, but when Slug Partlo started cutting capers, Foley knew what to do!

  IT WAS a nice evening, if you cared for evenings. Patrolman Matt Foley didn’t. As far as Matt was concerned, the world of an evening was a bleak gray oyster with a very sour taste.

  Evenings meant eight hours of pounding a beat. It was only ten o’clock now. The stretch of four solid hours still facing Matt loomed just a trifle longer than the first thousand years in Purgatory.

  He clumped glumly past Gus Krauss’ beer parlor and approached Tony Aretta’s vegetable stand. Tony looked up from his fond labor of turning his apples and oranges so that they presented their best faces to the late evening customers.

  “Hello, Mist’ Foley. And how’s-a my frien’, the flatfoot, this-a fine evening?”

  Tony was proud of his long friendship with Officer Foley and equally proud of his mastery of American slang.

  The twin pride illumined his widely smiling olive face. The light went abruptly out before the crimson thunder of Matt Foley’s scowling visage.

  “Arr-rrgh!”

  Matt spat the answer out as though he were using a handful of rusty nails for chewing-gum, and barged on up the street. Tony stared after the generous width of Matt’s retreating figure in open-mouthed amazement.

  Jimmy Murphy was the next recipient of the Foley wrath. Jimmy came blithely down the street, his lips puckered in the cheerful whistle of a twelve-year-old business man who has just done a very satisfactory day’s work selling papers.

  “Hiya, flattie!” he greeted Matt exuberantly.

  The impudent grin upon Jimmy’s freckled face should have brought a response from any heart not pickled in pure vinegar, but Matt didn’t respond. His beefy body blocked Jimmy’s progress. A thick forefinger was vigorously waggled under Jimmy’s snub nose to give emphasis to a short and pungent lecture upon the respect that young sprouts should pay their elders, particularly when those elders happened to be uniformed minions of the law.

  The exuberance in Jimmy’s eyes faded to the injured bewilderment of an unexpectedly spanked puppy. Matt felt those eyes drilling into the back of his head as he stalked indignantly on up the street, and his choler vanished in a belated surge of shame.

  “Keep it up, Matthew, me boy!” he muttered disgustedly to himself. “Just keep it up, and pretty soon you won’t be having a friend left on the beat!”

  “But why did they have to call him flatfoot!

  JOHN LAW, or copper or cop, or bull, even harness bull he could take—but he had reached the point where the mere mention of flatfoot was like a sudden bite with a long-aching tooth. Worse, for that matter. A dentist could take c
are of a troublesome tooth, but you couldn’t very well pull a pair of aching feet.

  That was the trouble. Matt Foley had flat feet. Twenty-five years of pounding a beat on a 210-pound frame had brought their inevitable toll. Matt’s arches were flatter than the griddle side of a pancake. What had once been a sturdy and serviceable pair of No. 12 pedal extremities were now two large and yowling bundles of throbbing misery.

  The evening wore on. At eleven o’clock, old Walt Barley came rolling spraddle-legged out of Krauss’ beer parlor and gave a belligerent whoop as he spotted the telephone pole at the corner of the alley. He joyously squared away for his usual four-round bout with the towering timber.

  Ordinarily, Matt would simply have collared the bellicose little bantam and taken him home to his wife. But tonight, Barley made a grave error when Matt approached him.

  “Can’t a man be having a bit of a private fight with an old enemy,” he protested bitterly, “without a dumb flatfoot butting in and spoiling all his fun?”

  Matt grimly dragged old Walt to the call-box, and four minutes later Mr. Barley was in the back seat of a squad car, pokey bound. Tomorrow morning’s fine of five dollars and costs would be a jolt that the meager Barley family budget could ill afford, but Matt was past the place where he even felt shame.

  His morale was lower than a frog in a well as he plodded painfully on up the street. Old Walt’s parting gibe of “Yah! Dumb flatfoot!” still rang in his ears. Flattie! Flatfoot! Dumb, flat-footed pavement-pounder! It seemed to Matt’s misery-numbed brain that the world was all feet, and that every inch of every foot ached as only broken arches can ache.

  It wasn’t just tonight. Tonight was only the climax of something that had been building up for weeks and months. What had been merely an annoyance had finally become a monstrous thing that made Matt hate the world in general and his job in particular. But most of all he hated himself.