by Jerry eBooks
Burney’s eyes shuttered, and his head fell forward as his ambition faded into a nightmare. He woke up with a start as the pick-up struck the choppy spots in the road near Railway Gulch. Then he dozed off again. When the car rolled by the airport just outside of Rock City he started living once more.
“Before we see this Crane person,” he said, “we’ll stop at the office.”
With a shattering drone of dry brake bands, Sue sent the vehicle against the curb. Burney went into the tiny office on State Highway, and proceeded to beat an uneven rhythm on the typewriter. In a few minutes he was back on the seat beside her.
“To the Rock City Hotel,” he told her. “Then, for you, bed.”
Sue’s sleepy but widening eyes showed alarm and jealousy. “You think I’m going to leave you alone with Coral Crane?” she demanded. “Besides, I want to help clear up this ghastly business. It frightens me.”
“You win.”
The car vibrated loudly to a halt. They both went inside. Burney asked the clerk to ring Miss Crane’s room and announce him, and half a minute later they were pounding up the stairs of the three-story colonial hotel.
Coral Crane met them at the door of her suite.
“Come in,” she said, her face smiling, Burney noticed, but her eyes cold. “I always see the press. There’s nothing worse for a woman in my position than to get the newspapers down on her.”
“That’s right,” Burney agreed, and introduced himself and Sue. He decided, from Coral Crane’s manner, that she could turn her charm on and off like a faucet. She sat on the divan. He watched her take a cigarette from a package on the coffee table in front of her while, at the same time, she introduced her son, Bobby, a blond, blueeyed boy of about three. Burney noticed her jerky movements. She had trouble getting cigarette and match together.
He proffered her his lighter, and she lit the cylinder.
He looked at Sue. She was sniffing. She nodded her head emphatically. Burney got it.
She was telling him about the perfume on the glasses. It was the same odor she now smelled.
“I suppose you know why I’m here,” he said to Coral Crane.
“Of course. It’s about my divorce.”
“I thought that you and Greg Gallery were Hollywood’s ideally married couple.”
“Don’t believe everything you read. He was cruel—mentally cruel.”
“That’s what I figured. The usual grounds.”
Burney pulled the typewritten sheet from his pocket, handed it to her.
“Here’s a nice, dignified statement,” he told her. “You can read and sign it.”
She opened it, held it close to her eyes.
She squinted, finally admitted:
“I guess you’ll have to read it to me. I’ve lost my glasses.”
“That won’t be necessary. Try these,” he said. He pulled the harlequins from his pocket, held them out to her, saw her start.
“Why—I can’t read with anybody’s glasses!” she protested.
“You don’t have to,” Sue told her. “They’re yours.”
Coral Crane’s face paled under her blanket of tan.
“I’m sorry—but—you’re very much mistaken—I—”
“There’s really no doubt about it,” Sue persisted. “We found out you had your lenses put into these new harlequin rhinestone frames at the Las Verdes Jewelry Company. The clerk who waited on you recognized you.”
CORAL CRANE shed her genial, be-nice-to-the-press attitude with the agility of a snake ridding herself of last season’s skin.
Her eyes blazed at Sue. Then she glared at Burney. “Where’d you find them?” she demanded.
“Where you left them,” said Burney. “On Homer Hansel’s desk—”
Coral Crane’s hand went to her throat. “Why did you go to Hansel’s office?” Nick asked persistently.
“He—well, I wanted to see him, that’s all. He used to be my press agent in Hollywood. I saw his by-line and—”
Burney’s smile was grim. “You’re lying, Miss Crane. A big shot star doesn’t come up to a desert city to see an ex-press agent—” Coral Crane’s anger brought her to her feet. “I told you I came up here for a divorce, not to see Hansel. Six weeks is a long time when you have nothing to do. Last night I went to the editorial offices of the paper after I’d seen Hansel’s column. I pounded on the door. He came to it and let me in. We killed an hour talking about old times. Now, get out of here!”
Burney ignored a finger which gestured imperiously at the door. He said, “Woman prowls at night. Goes to see former press agent on a whim, knowing he’s at the office when he shouldn’t be. How’d you know he was working late? Miss Crane, he told you to come there at a certain hour.”
“You’re crazy!” the actress screamed. “Get out of here!”
Burney advanced on her. “Cut out the hysterics and tell the truth,” he commanded. “He was blackmailing you, wasn’t he?”
“This is absurd. I’ll call the manager.” Burney beat her to the telephone, and clamped his hand over it.
“Homer Hansel’s dead,” he told the actress. “He was shot between the eyes. Your glasses were on his desk. He had something on you, didn’t he?”
“I don’t believe he’s dead. Prove it.”
“You’ll take my word for it.”
Coral Crane took strength from a deep breath. “If you have to go on with this,” she said, her voice suddenly hard and rasping, “see my lawyer. I think you’d better get out of here before I start screaming and throwing things. If you’re insinuating that I had anything to do with a supposed murder I don’t believe ever happened and don’t know anything about, you’re insane. Now, get out!”
She pushed by Burney and opened the door.
“Let’s go, Nick,” said Sue. “We’ve gone as far as we’re going here.”
Burney got up and headed for the door. “One of your better scenes, Miss Crane,” he said, bitterly. He escorted Sue through the open door. “I’ll be seeing you.”
“Try it!” Coral Crane retorted.
Sue and Burney walked down the stairs into the lobby. Just as their feet hit the main floor, Burney grabbed his wife’s arm, nodded his head toward the desk.
“Isn’t that Farmer Jones, the guy that runs the Estrella Club?”
“Definitely, Nick. Nobody could mistake him.”
As her voice died away, Jones’ words floated toward them. “I’d like to see Miss Coral Crane,” he said. “It’s very important.”
“And he looks angry about something,” Sue muttered.
CHAPTER III
Third Story Work
THAT evening after being confined all day to what she and her husband called “The Manse,” a three-room shack in Rock City, Sue Burney was ready to chew her fingernails. She paced up and down while Burney went through the contents of the blackmail envelope groping for clues.
Suddenly she stopped pacing and studied her husband. “Why did you keep insisting to Coral Crane that she was being blackmailed, Nick?” she demanded. “There wasn’t anything about that in those papers.”
“Because the dust showed that an envelope had been taken from the files. It could have contained evidence of something illegal she’s done. After all, Hansel had known her a long time. He might have got hold of it and made her pay through the nose. Now, don’t bother me—”
“I will, too, bother you, Nick. What you’re thinking is this: she came up here for a divorce; Hansel found out about it; he called her, told her to come see him so he could bleed her. Because of the hold he had on her she was forced to go. She went.
“They had a fight and she shot and killed him. She had an accomplice. They stole the evidence against her, tapped you on the skull and took the body away.”
“Something like that,” Burney answered. “For heaven’s sake, let me—”
“How big was the envelope?”
“Standard size, about four by nine. Now, go away.”
Sue busied herself abo
ut the room. Her husband noticed this new activity.
“What’re you doing?” he asked.
“I’m going away. You’ve been smoking like a garbage dump. We need a carton of cigarettes.”
“Okay,” he said absently.
Sue picked up her heavy purse, kissed him on the back of his preoccupied head, went outside and drove to the Rock City Hotel. She slipped by the clerk, went to Coral Crane’s room. When her knock wasn’t answered, she tried the door. It was locked. She went downstairs, out of the building and looked up. The rooms of the suite were dark.
The fire escape was not hard to get onto, once Sue had thrown a piece of clothesline from the pick-up truck over it and pulled it down. It was dark now, and making the third floor was easy. The window catch was locked, but Sue remedied that problem with her husband’s pocketknife.
Once inside, she turned on a light, went to work fast. She started with Coral Crane’s dresser drawers, thinking that a woman would have been likely to tuck it under a pair of scanties or a couple of piles of handkerchiefs.
She wound up with Coral’s suitcases, two of which were not entirely unpacked. At last she began exploring shoes; and found the envelope crushed into one of a pair of hiking boots. She took it out, glanced hastily at its contents and shoved it into her shirtwaist, a plain little number with a candy stripe. She made a last survey of the room and headed for the desk lamp with which she had illuminated the place for her search.
She didn’t get there. She heard the key turning in the lock of the door to the hallway. Fascinated, she stared at the knob, saw it starting to turn. At the same time, she was backing toward the window, her only means of escape.
The door swung open, and she found herself looking at a man with a gun in his unsteady hand. The fellow’s face was very hard, his jaw stiffly set, the lines of his face were very sharp. His graying hair was mussed, and he had murder in his eyes.
Sue kept moving backward to the window.
“Hold it!” the man snapped.
By this time she knew that she was facing Greg Gallery—she had seen his face often enough in film magazines and newspapers as the producer-husband of Coral Crane—and that this might be her last look at anyone’s face if she didn’t move quickly.
She rolled sidewise through the window, and heard the blast of the gun as she went, but felt no thud.
She went down the fire escape with such speed that by the time Gallery had reached the window she was protected from any further shots by the iron grillwork above her. She darted to the pickup, leaped in, started the engine and raced toward home.
WHEN she barged breathlessly into the tiny place she found her husband still intently studying the contents of the envelope he had taken from Hansel’s pocket. “How’re you doing?” Sue asked.
“Can’t make head or tail of it. Any one of the victims could have killed him. Get the cigarettes?” Burney didn’t look up.
“No—I got detoured.”
“Detoured?”
“Right. Did you know that Coral Crane’s present husband, Greg Gallery, is in town and probably living at the Rock City Hotel? Nice kind of a divorce, that is. He even has a key to her rooms.”
“How do you know that?” asked Burney, jarring himself away from his welter of evidence, and even looking up.
“I know because he took a shot at me in Coral Crane’s room on the third floor of the Rock City Hotel.
Burney leaped to his feet, put his hands against his wife’s arms.
“What are you talking about? Are you hurt?”
“I’m healthy. And I got the envelope.”
“What envelope?”
“The one you wanted.”
She pulled it out of her blouse, handed it to him.
“How’d you get it?”
“The hard way. Up the fire escape. You always say that a good newspaperman gets what he goes after.”
“And I’m getting gray years ahead of time.”
He took the envelope, looked at the contents, his eyes growing wider and wider as he read.
“Great guns!” he exclaimed. “Coral Crane’s a bigamist! She has two husbands—Greg Gallery and none other than our old pal, Farmer Jones! That means that the boy, Bobby, isn’t—”
“So it does,” agreed Sue.
“There are photostatic copies of both marriage certificates, an affidavit from Farmer Jones saying he’s never divorced the gal. What a spot she’s in! If this ever got out, her career’d be ruined in nothing flat and she’d go to jail.
“Hansel was shaking her down, just as we thought.”
“Makes sense.”
He put the papers back into the envelope and shoved them into his pocket.
“Is Farmer Jones shaking her down, too?”
“Could be. We’d better see him at the Estrella Club.” He reached into the top desk drawer, pulled his hand out. “Where’s the thirty-eight?” he asked.
Sue pointed to her purse. He picked it up, guided her out of the door.
“Got the copy for tomorrow’s sheet?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Come on.”
Sue covered the twenty-five miles to Las Verdes in just that many minutes in spite of the wheezing, over-heating engine.
“We’ve got three direct suspects now, and more than a dozen indirect. Those silly harlequin glasses I found on Hansel’s desk tie in Coral Crane. Either Farmer, her first husband, or Gallery, her second, might have been with her, or she might have called them in to help her get hold of the evidence against her and help her move the body. There’s one thing pretty certain—she was there,” Burney mused.
When the lights of the Estrella Club came into view, Sue braked. She shot the truck into the parking lot.
“You grab a beer and a sandwich while I talk to Jones, darling,” Nick said, as they went inside the combination casino, cafe and night club.
Old Tom Green was at the twenty-one table, as usual. Merle Lewis was handling the dice, and there was an excited mob around the table. Burney saw the reason for it, shriveled little Skeeter Simms, Homer Hansel’s leg man.
Skeeter said, “Shoot three hundred.”
BURNEY hurried to the table. Simms tossed the dice and they came to rest with one up on one cube and two up on the other.
“Easy come, easy go,” Simms said. “Shoot the last two hundred.”
Sue told her husband, “That guy doesn’t make over seventy-five a week—and he’s acting like a millionaire.”
Burney shot a questioning look at Merle Lewis and got the answer from four fingers. Simms hadn’t seen the Burneys yet.
“He’s lost four grand,” Burney whispered to his wife. “He’s getting it from some place beside the Sentinel payroll.” Burney turned to Green. “Jones in?” he asked.
The old gambler thumbed over his shoulder. His finger indicated an office with a door of frosted glass.
“When I come out,” Burney told Sue, “I’m going to talk to Skeeter Simms. Go eat.”
Burney barged in, his hand on the gun in his pocket. Farmer Jones looked up from the contemplation of currency on his desk.
“Simms is doing pretty well for you,” Burney said.
“That’s right.”
“You’ve been getting money from other sources than gambling, Jones,” Burney said. “I want you to lay it on the line.”
“How so?”
“You pulled a pretty rotten trick. You told your ex-wife, Coral Crane, that you’d got a divorce—and you hadn’t. You let her get married a second time, and then you put the heat on her.”
Jones leaned back in his chair. “You newspapermen get around,” he said.
“That’s right. And a lot of people have been getting around a lot faster than Sue and I. I’m just beginning to catch up.”
“I suppose you’ve got plenty of evidence to back up what you just said?”
“That’s correct, Farmer.”
Burney produced the envelope, displayed the contents—but held onto them.
“You’re playing with dynamite, Burney.”
“I know it. Start talking.”
Jones clasped his hands behind his head. “You might as well have it. We separated several years ago. I told Coral I’d got a divorce. I hadn’t. I figured she was going to go two ways. She had a picture contract before we parted. I guessed she was going to go places in pictures-and she was going to get married again. A long chance, but right on both counts. You know how gambling is, up and down. I thought she’d be right for a touch any time I needed it. So I got it!”
“You’re a swell guy, Farmer. I’m proud to know you.”
“Anyway, that’s the score, and I’m worried.”
“Why?”
“I thought I had it exclusive, but somebody else is throwing a pitch.”
“I know. How come you gave that affidavit to Hansel?”
“The rat caught up with me—that’s all. He has the goods on me. I had to sign.”
“I get it—blackmailing a blackmailer.”
“Call it that. Now, scram.”
“Where did Skeeter Simms get four grand to throw off on your tables?” Burney persisted.
“I wouldn’t have any idea. You’re wasting your time. You might go out in the mountains and get the rocks to talk.”
“Okay. I’m going out and find where Skeeter Simms got four grand. He’s leg man for Hansel.”
“I wouldn’t try. It wouldn’t be healthy.”
Burney started for the door. “And I wouldn’t try shaking me down either, for the same reason,” Jones warned.
“Thanks for the kindly advice.”
Burney went outside, found Simms turning his pockets wrong side out. He went to him.
“Hi, Burney,” Simms said. “It happened. I got clipped.”
Burney grinned at him, held his hand on his gun.
“You’ve been around Las Verdes long enough to know that casinos have to pay help, buy drinks on the house and pay a state tax. That’s why they need suckers like you with four thousand dollars and no will power.”
BURNEY lifted the gun high enough so Simms could see it. “I want to talk to you about that four grand,” he added. “You didn’t get that working for the Sentinel.” Simms sidled toward the door. “I’m not saying anything.”