Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  Hocking smiled broadly. “You can steal my car!”

  Bill sighed. “No,” he said. “I don’t want to steal your car. I don’t want to leave town.”

  “But you must,” Hocking said softly. The gun in his fat but strangely nimble fingers was a flat-flanked automatic, and its nose was aimed at Bill’s chest.

  Bill sat very still. He said gloomily: “I should never have let you get the jump on me.”

  “So you knew I did it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was afraid of that.” Hocking wagged his head. “When I left here a little while ago, I drove around the building and saw Charlie’s car. It puzzled me. I came back in and here you were, very busy!”

  Bill said: “I guess you wanted to fix it so that Osa would marry Charlie Flax. It must have been money.”

  “Indeed it was money, my boy. Charlie, of course, is indebted to me. Also I have a little something on him. He got a trifle careless with the accounts.”

  “Sure. You figured that, if Smalley was dead, Osa would come into his property, and if Charlie was her husband—”

  “Precisely. Orange property sells readily these days, and at a high figure. Only the other day Hank turned down an offer of seventy thousand dollars for his grove.”

  Bill nodded grimly. “And you were at the bottom of something that made Osa sore at me, or suspicious of me. There’s a guy in Duluth you do business with. You wrote a letter and put it in a sealed envelope addressed to Osa?”

  “Not to Osa. That would have been too obvious. To Hank Smalley, so he could show it to her.”

  “Okay. And the letter, from my home town, supposed to be from someone who knew me well, dished up some dirty lie about me. Must have been something pretty bad or Osa would have faced me with it.”

  “It was,” agreed Hocking, piously. “It was about another woman—and a baby.”

  Bill groaned. Yes, he thought, a thing like that would alienate Osa. She would not be able to bring herself to charge Bill with it. Sooner or later, however, being fair, she would say something, give him a chance to deny it, but not right away.

  “So you had to get rid of Smalley;” Bill said.

  “It was necessary. He knew about the letter. And anyhow it was safer that way. Then, Hank might have taken a notion to sell the grove for cash, and then spend the cash before Osa could come into it. That wouldn’t have suited me at all.” Hocking peered at Bill earnestly. “You seem to have suspected me almost at once.”

  Bill said: “It was this way—”

  “Oh, not just yet, please.” Without taking his eyes off Bill, Hocking spread a large handkerchief on the desk. “I want to know, of course, but later. Just stand up.”

  Bill stood. Hocking circled him. “Ah, so you brought a gun. Very good.” He removed the gun from Bill’s pocket, placed it tenderly on the handkerchief and wrapped it. “Now we’ll go away in my car. You’ll take the wheel. I’ll sit beside you, my boy.”

  CHAPTER V

  Killer’s Error

  But in Hocking’s car, Bill took the wheel and said wearily: “Where to, you rat?”

  “Turn into that side road up there. We’re not likely to meet anyone that way. Just keep going, slow.”

  Hocking sat, comfortably, turned about, back against the car door, facing Bill, his gun trained along his knee.

  He had dropped Bill’s gun gently on the back seat.

  “You were saying?” prompted Hocking. Bill said: “Before I went on duty at midnight I stopped at the cafe for a drink. I had more than one. You stopped me from getting tight. Why? You’d never been friendly to me before. So I figured maybe it was because you could not afford to have me get drunk, because then I couldn’t have gone on duty, and you would have lost your fall guy.”

  “Quite so.”

  “And when I went up to the office at midnight, you were just leaving. Why were you there? It could be you had just checked with Horton so that you knew I’d start out at twelve-thirty, which would get me to Smalley’s place about one, and all you had to do was break Smalley’s watch with the hands set so as to fix the time of murder.”

  “Precisely,” said Hocking.

  Bill let his hands rest slackly on the ice-cold wheel. Hocking had picked a good road for solitude. Off to the left was a vast stretch of orange groves, smudge pots flickering and smoke idly drifting, but here the road ran through waste land, forlorn, deserted. Their direction was roughly toward Moravia.

  Bill went on: “Hank Smalley had been pestering you for one of those small fruit thermometers. You got a half dozen in yesterday. You took one out, unknown to Charlie Flax. You saw Smalley in the cafe. You probably had that thermometer in your pocket at the time, but you didn’t tell him. You just told him that you’d get one for him and give it to him if he met you at the edge of the grove a few minutes after midnight.

  “So Smalley was waiting for you there. You stopped your car, got out and gave Smalley the thermometer. He went back in, two or three rows, and punched an orange with it. You sneaked up behind him with a crowbar. Just as he pulled the thermometer out of the orange, you let him have it!”

  “You know that?”

  “Yes. Because there are tiny splinters of glass in Smalley’s thumb and forefinger, and also more in the soil under the tree. In the act of dying, he crushed the thermometer.”

  “Yes, that’s a source of danger,” Hocking said thoughtfully. “I’ll have to do something about it.”

  “It’ll be your word against Flax’s,” Bill said. “And the chances are he’ll have an alibi.”

  Hocking shrugged.

  Bill said: “At first you had planned to leave Smalley there under the tree, for me to find on my rounds. But you were up in the office just before midnight, talking to Horton. You learned that Horton expected to go home for medicine very soon. His place is just back of Smalley’s. It was possible that he would run into Smalley’s body—and that wouldn’t do because it would be before I could get there.”

  “Yes, indeed,” agreed Hocking, in a pleased tone.

  “So you did the next best thing. You lugged the body to your car, drove around to the house and put it in the kitchen. You knew I’d find it later.”

  “It was a nuisance,” Hocking said regretfully.

  “And there was something else. Felix Dominquez, the crew foreman, happened to drive out there. You heard him, saw him as he passed by, and figured you’d have to hurry in case he stuck around. In your panic, you overlooked Smalley’s flashlight.”

  “The flashlight,” Hocking said, “came in handy later.”

  “You mean when you conked me with it. Yes. But it was the flashlight that tipped me off that Smalley was killed outside, not in the house. He was lying in the kitchen, dressed for going out, but there was no flashlight with him. And he certainly wouldn’t go out without a flashlight.”

  Hocking beamed at him. “Your calculations are excellent, my boy.”

  “Well, you had to go back for that flashlight. You were there, in the grove, when I went to take a look. You bashed me with it. Why?”

  Hocking said: “A mistake. A moment of recklessness, of savagery. The sight of you, checking up on me, drove me mad. I crept up on you intent on smashing your head in. Just as I struck, I remembered that I still needed you as a murder suspect. The thought broke the force of the blow and saved your life—for the moment.”

  The car was still moving slowly. Bill peered ahead. Hocking, unmoved, watched Bill ceaselessly, his trigger finger alert.

  The lights of the town were ahead, and a little south. “Don’t you still need me as a murder suspect?” Bill said huskily.

  “No,” Hocking said gently. “Not now. As things are, with you already under suspicion, you’ll be more useful dead. And please stop just this side of the railroad tracks.”

  Bill stopped the car as directed, some twenty yards from the tracks, its nose pointed at them head-on. It was a dark and neglected spot, Bill reflected. The nearest building was a quarter of a mil
e away.

  Hocking said: “I live a few blocks up the street. I’ll say that I had just reached the tracks here, on my way home, and had stopped to let a train go by before crossing. Then—”

  “What train?”

  “There’s one due to go through soon now. To make it look right, we’ll wait for it. And I’ll say I was sitting here, waiting, when you appeared and tried to force me out of my car at the point of a gun.”

  Bill sighed through his teeth. He could see the set-up, all right, but he didn’t dare move, didn’t dare make one small threatening gesture. That gun in Hocking’s hand, just two feet away, held him helpless.

  He said bitterly: “So I tried to swipe your car for a get-away, and you had to let me have it! Is that the story?”

  “Yes.” Hocking chuckled. “It’s wonderful, how nicely things work out. The train is due at two forty-seven. And at three o’clock Osa will be at my house.”

  “Osa?” Bill said huskily. “We’re to continue our talk as to how best to help you. However, by then the problem will have been solved.”

  They sat silent then. Soon the distant night gave out a faint whirring sound. The sound gathered power, became a clatter, and then a roar.

  The headlights of the train, rounding the bend not far away, glared bright. And still Hocking sat motionless, his eyes on Bill, giving him no chance.

  The engine roared up, past. The garish lights of the train flickered fast.

  His lips pressed tensely against his teeth, Bill suddenly jammed his foot down. The car shuddered, then leaped forward, at the racing train.

  It was just an instant or two. Then Bill’s foot weighed frantically on the brake.

  The car seemed to rear into the air, and then settled down, as if exhausted. It was within inches of the train. Bill gasped, his breath shattered by sharp contact with the steering wheel. Presently he turned to look at Silas Hocking. He frowned at the smashed windshield, at the blood from Hocking’s head. Hocking, totally unprepared, had turned his head in terror toward the train, and it had crashed face-first into the windshield.

  “I guess you’ll stay put for awhile,” Bill muttered.

  The doctor and the police, Bill thought. He was still half stunned. He got out of the car, started swaying down the street toward the nearest lights. But a car, coming toward him, stopped.

  “Bill!” said a voice. “Oh, Bill!”

  Osa’s face was white and strained and humble. Bill said nothing.

  “Bill,” pleaded Osa. “I want to tell you something—before you go away.”

  Bill wasn’t going, but he didn’t say so. “I—I don’t believe you killed father,” Osa said. “And there was something else I was told about you, something I don’t like to talk about. I don’t believe that either! Not now.” She waited for Bill to say something, but he was silent. She turned her head and said: “Well, good-by, Bill. I—I’ve got to go see someone now.”

  Bill opened the door and slipped in beside her. He smiled grimly. “You won’t be seeing anybody from now on, baby—except with me.”

  NO LEASE ON LIFE

  Allan K. Echols

  Maybe Jay Carleton was a lug in love—but he showed up keen and dangerous as a dagger when grim murder stalked!

  IT COULDN’T have been an accident! It had to be murder! The accident, if it were an accident, had happened six weeks ago, while Jay Carleton was still in the Army hospital, according to the date on the clipping he held in his hand. He sat at his desk in the law offices of Carleton and Rowley on the first day of his return, and reread the first clipping. In spite of all the horrors of death he had seen in the last thirty-one months, his mind kept rejecting the facts as set forth in the news story.

  Tragedy descended upon the Lake Club Settlement yesterday evening when Dale Vaughan of this city was killed as the result of an explosion of bottled gas which destroyed his summer cottage on the lake. The resulting fire which destroyed the building left his body burned beyond recognition. Mr. Vaughan, a brilliant young oil geologist, leaves a sister, Miss Beatrice Vaughan, his father having been killed in the disaster at the Electra Coal Mine five years ago.

  The Herald has not yet learned the details of the tragedy, which will be forthcoming at the sitting of the Coroner’s Jury this afternoon.

  Stunned, still unable to accept the facts, Jay looked up at his late father’s law partner, Sam Rowley, and then at Bea Vaughan, who had been secretary in the office for more than five years. “Why didn’t you let me know?”

  Sam Rowley was a small and mild-mannered man of middle age with the manner of a family doctor. “Bea and I thought it best. You had enough to worry you, trying to recover your own health. After all, two years in a prison camp—”

  “Never mind me,” he answered. “Bea, you could have told me.”

  Bea’s face was pained, and she bit her lip. “Please, Jay, it wouldn’t have helped. And it would just have hurt you.”

  Jay knew the story didn’t warrant his suspicion, but he couldn’t help it. “I don’t like this. There’s something left out of this story.”

  Jay and Bea and her brother had been inseparable since kindergarten days, and he knew her as he would a sister, but he had never seen her like this before. She was nervous, ill at ease.

  Bea looked at Rowley uncomfortably, and then down at her scarlet fingernails. Rowley looked out of the window. “You might hear things,” he said vaguely. “But don’t believe them. There’s been a hint he took it too hard when the Army turned him down on account of the importance of his work.”

  “That’s a lie,” Bea said throatily. “It did hurt him, but he wouldn’t have—done anything like that.”

  Rowley looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go down to the law library,” he said as though eager to leave them to their private sorrow. “It closes at noon on Saturdays. But get hold of yourself, Jay. There was nothing we could do.”

  There was a disquieting silence in the office after Rowley had left, then Jay stuffed the clippings into the envelope and shoved it into his pocket. He looked at Bea, staring out the window.

  “You don’t like Rowley, do you?”

  “He’s all right, I suppose,” Bea answered, turning. “Dale was always embarrassed about not being in uniform, but I don’t believe anybody ever hinted that he killed himself. I think Mr. Rowley made that up.”

  “Why?” Jay asked sharply.

  The girl looked down at the green rug. Finally she said, “I don’t know. May I have those clippings? I’ve got a lunch appointment.”

  Jay took the envelope out of his pocket and started to hand them to her. The girl reached for them with an eagerness that suddenly caused Jay to withhold them.

  “Wait a minute, Bea,” he said thoughtfully. “What’s behind this, anyway?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “You’re imagining things.” He was sure he caught a fleeting look of fear in her eyes.

  “Yeah, I am. Just let me keep these a while, will you? I believe I’ll drive out to the lake. Want to come along?”

  “No. I’ll see you there this afternoon some time. And Jay, please don’t go getting any ideas. It’s bad enough as it is.”

  “I’ve only got one idea. And that is that it smells like murder to me.”

  JAY went down to the bank and had a talk with Dick Little, the Vice President, and then drove out to Club Lake. Something in the back of his head kept telling him that his friend had been murdered! It didn’t make sense to him, but he couldn’t get it out of his mind.

  Dale Vaughan was not a man to brood over things. It could not have been suicide. And Jay could not accept the story that it was an accident, either. Dale was a scientist and a careful man. And besides, there was the fact that his father had been killed by a gas explosion in a mine some years before. This bottled gas that they used for cooking and heating outside cities was a great thing, but everybody knew that it was practically odorless, and that it was dangerous. Particularly, Dale knew it, for he had worked on its commercial development.<
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  The Saturday afternoon crowd was already trickling into the clubhouse, a stained pine and fieldstone structure on a bluff overlooking the boat-dotted lake. Men in sports clothes, girls in a rainbow assortment of shorts, white sails on the green water.

  He parked on the gravel lot and made his way down to the boat landing without stopping at the club house. He was just in time to catch Benny Postoak, the lake custodian.

  “Would you drop me off at the Vaughan cottage?” he asked.

  Benny Postoak was quarter Indian, a wiry little old-young wilding who was more at home in the woods and on the water than he was in town. Benny grinned at Jay. “Howdy, Mr. Carleton,” he said, shaking hands. “Glad to see you back, but the bass won’t be.”

  “I’m not fishing today, Benny. I’d like to look at what’s left of Vaughan’s cottage, if you could take me over.”

  Benny spun the rope on his outboard, and the motor sputtered to life. The boat cut a white wake as it threaded through the anchored boats and hit the open water with Benny at the helm.

  Jay asked suddenly; “Benny, what do you think about that business? You think Vaughan was accidentally killed?”

  Benny shot him a sharp, suspicious glance, then looked off across the lake. His free hand went down into the bottom of the boat and came out with a .22 rifle. He lifted it to his shoulder and fired.

  “Those damned turtles,” he said, laying the rifle down. “They eat more fingerling bass in a year than we plant. But now that I can get plenty of hollow point shells again, I’m cleaning ’em out.”

  “Yeah,” Jay answered. “Where were you when the fire started?”

  “I was checking the licenses of a fishing party down by Vaughan’s neck.”

  Jay did not comment for a moment. He was rereading the second of the clippings on the accident.

  The coroner’s jury this morning returned a verdict of death due to accidental causes in the case of the tragedy late yesterday which took the life of Dale Vaughan. According to witnesses, Vaughan had just returned from a business trip, and had stopped off at the club house to get the keys to his cottage. There he met and talked with Martin Chamberlin, manager of the club, and with Sam Rowley, local attorney.