Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  “I think you do. You’re scared of the assignment you may draw this evening.”

  “Assignment?” Steve was genuinely puzzled.

  “There must have been a leak,” Blaine growled. “And you know what you might be up against. You’re not man enough to face it.” He sneered. “I guess college took the nerve out of you, eh, Steve? You’re afraid. So you’re quitting.”

  Devlin’s temper flared at the injustice of this, because he hadn’t the slightest idea what Blaine was talking about. Then he remembered the task before him: the rat he had to murder. There wasn’t much time left. Getting into an argument with Sam Blaine would do him no good, and that fly-blown clock on the wall kept ticking away the minutes.

  “All right,” he said quietly. “Have it your way.”

  “So you admit you’re yellow.”

  “I’m resigning. Call it what you like.”

  “Mike will love this,” Blaine said. “He hasn’t had enough bad luck. Oh, no. You have to top It by giving him a coward for a son. Faugh!” He cleared his throat, spat on the floor.

  Steve Devlin put his knuckles on the desk-top and leaned forward, his eyes blazing. “Leave my father out of it. That’s the only favor I’ll ask you.”

  “Favor? You’re entitled to no favors from me, Joe Campus. Now get out of here.” Blaine slammed Steve’s badge into a desk drawer. “Scram, college cop. Go get a job selling ribbons or something. I used to think I could make a good policeman out of you if I worked at it long enough. You seemed like you had the makings, under that hifalutin’ education of yours. But I was wrong. You’re not fit to carry the name Devlin. Get out—and don’t come back!”

  Don’t come back. There was an ironic twist to that, Steve Devlin thought dourly as he walked through the squad-room. Certainly he didn’t want to come back; because if he did, it would be as a prisoner—an arrested murderer. He wondered what Blaine would say then. He wondered what his father would say.

  THINKING of his father made Steve’s eyes a little misty. It was because of Mike Devlin that he, Steve, was going to kill a man. It was to save Mike’s good name, his reputation and his retirement on pension next year that Steve was about to go rat-hunting.

  He passed by the glass door of the police-radio control room; cast a quick glance through the pane and saw his father at the microphone putting out a routine short-wave call to some distant prowl car.

  Mike Devlin was chunky, bald, weatherbeaten—and the empty left sleeve of his blue uniform shirt gave mute testimony to the arm that had been amputated a few months ago, an arm he had given as the price of valor over and beyond the call of duty. A tommy-gun had blasted Mike Devlin when he had walked in on a midnight jewelry store heist. Alone and unsupported, he had cracked down on a quartet of safe blowers—trigger-happy torpedoes hopped to the scalp on cocaine. They had cut him to pieces with a chopper, but he’d stayed conscious long enough to return their fire and to get all four of them with his service .38 Colt.

  So he’d won a medal and lost his left arm, and the department had given him this radio berth when he got out of the hospital. It was a way of letting him stay in harness until he reached official retirement age, and Steve, looking in at him, felt his throat tighten with pride. Nothing, he told himself, must happen to spoil Mike Devlin’s last few months on the force. At the cost of a blackmailer’s life, Mike’s final days as a policeman must be protected.

  But Steve couldn’t tell him that. He didn’t dare tell it to anybody. It was a secret he must keep locked inside him, not to be spoken except from the muzzle of a gun. He slipped out of Headquarters furtively, not letting Mike see him. Then, a block away from the building, he got into his parked coupe and headed toward the city’s main business district. His wrist watch showed ten minutes past four.

  Pretty soon it would be murder time.

  To reach Nick Agricola’s offices in the Harewood Building you took the express elevator to the twentieth floor, walked along a rubber-tiled corridor and then turned to the right. This brought you to a door chastely lettered: Variety Land Developments. As a name it meant nothing—or everything, depending upon how much you knew about the ownership and management.

  Steve Devlin knew plenty. Though Nick Agricola was listed neither on the door nor on the directory in the downstairs lobby, he was head man of this nominal land development concern, which actually was a front for Agricola’s less savory enterprises.

  If a man wanted a fight fixed, or a horse race tampered with, or an enemy slugged, or a house burned down for its insurance with no evidence of arson left behind, he saw Nick Agricola about it. Agricola had an organization geared for any kind of lawlessness you could plan. In the old days it would have been called a “mob.” But gangsters had gone out of fashion, and the old-style underworld czars were supplanted by men like Nick Agricola who paid income taxes and donated to charities and presented to be legitimate.

  In Agricola’s case the pretense was pretty substantial. Though many had tried, nobody had ever been able to pin anything on him. He lived sedately, kept his nose clean and laughed at the occasional attempt to investigate him. He was the police department’s sore spot, and while he lived, crime would thrive. You couldn’t prove this, of course, but it was true. Steve Devlin knew it was true, and he wasn’t going to worry about proof. He was no longer a cop; he had turned in his badge. But he’d kept his gun. He felt for it in his coat pocket, made sure it wouldn’t snag on the lining.

  Then he opened the door.

  It was typical of Agricola that he disdained the use of bodyguards. Unlike gang leaders of an earlier era, he surrounded himself with no beetle-browed gunsels to protect him from possible enemies. Frankly and without bravado, he refused to admit the existence of enemies, for he was too powerful for rivals to survive in the territory he controlled. Moreover, bodyguards would attract attention to him and spoil his pose as an allegedly respectable businessman. So he made a point of being accessible to all visitors—a break which Steve Devlin had been counting on. Without it, Devlin’s murder plan would be worthless.

  A RECEPTION desk stood behind a streamlined counter, and a tall, freckled man sat smiling there. “Something I can do for you?” he asked affably.

  Devlin didn’t bother to return the smile. “I want to see Nick Agricola.”

  “If it’s about our real estate tract out in Lakewood, maybe I can help you. I’m the salesman on duty. O’Conner is the name, Larry O’Conner.”

  “I’ve got to see Agricola personally.”

  “Okay. Wait while I get him on the horn.” The freckled man depressed an interoffice communicator key spoke into a fretted box. “Gent to see you, boss. His name is—”

  “Devlin,” Steve said.

  “—Devlin. He says it’s personal.”

  The box spoke back, metallically. “Send him in.” It clicked off.

  O’Conner waved an indolent thumb. “Second office to your left, pal.” He touched an electric switch that unlocked a swinging half-gate in the partitioning counter, and Devlin strode through, made for the office of the man he intended to kill.

  Entering that office, he closed the door behind him; then, unhurriedly, he drew his gun. “Don’t bother to get up, Agricola. It’ll be easier for you to die sitting down.”

  Startled, Nick Agricola raised his black eyebrows. He was a suave, swarthy man whose curly, coal-black hair and blue, shaven cheeks were somehow out of keeping with his pale gray eyes. He had a lobe missing from his right ear, and his nose was like a crow’s beak—pointed, curving, predatory.

  “What is this?” he demanded. If fear was in him, he concealed it well.

  “I just told you,” Devlin answered. “You’re about to die.”

  “For any particular reason, or are you just a guy that likes to go around shooting people?”

  “I’m just a guy named Devlin. Mike Devlin is my father.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

  “We can do without the sparring around,” Steve s
aid. “You had a talk with my father last night. I eavesdropped, so don’t bother to deny it. You’ve unearthed something in his past that even I didn’t know about, something he did when he was a punk that landed him behind bars. He escaped, came here, got on the police force. He’s been going straight for more than forty years, but you dug this stuff up and you’re threatening to make it public unless he does what you tell him to do. You could wreck him, get him fired without a pension, maybe even have him extradited back to where he crushed out of prison.”

  “You heard a lot, didn’t you?” Agricola interrupted.

  Devlin’s eyes were as steady as his gun. “I heard you giving him orders to put out a phony radio call at five o’clock this evening—an all-equipment alarm that will send every patrol car and every motorcycle cop and beat-pounder in the city into the harbor sector to cover a fake riot. That means the downtown business district will be unprotected, and you’ve got a mob of heist artists ready to loot all the stores along Jewelry Row on Hespera Avenue. It would be quite a raid, if you pulled it off. But you won’t be around to give the order for, without you, your mob won’t function. The scheme is dead, Agricola—as dead as you’re going to be! And when you’re dead, you won’t be able to spill what you know about my oldman.”

  Agricola’s voice was impassive. “So you’re going to shoot me like a dog.”

  “Like a rat.” Steve cocked his gun.

  The swarthy man tugged at his lobeless right ear, smiled past Devlin at the tall, freckled Larry O’Conner, who had come into the office behind Devlin.

  “Take him, Larry!” Agricola said.

  Devlin fired, then whirled. As he pivoted, O’Conner maced him across the skull with the barrel of a .38, brutally and efficiently. Streamers of pain scalded through Steve Devlin’s head, poured down through his body. Then, suddenly, there was no pain, no feeling of any kind. He crumpled, and the world went black. . . .

  STEVE Devlin was a long time climbing back out of that blackness, an interminable time. With the first returning glimmer of consciousness came throbbing agony, a savage pulsating agony almost beyond endurance. It hammered at his brain with the steady beat of a metronome and the impact of a sledge hammer, then spread into every part of his senses. Suddenly he was sick with a wretched, retching nausea that shook him violently and left him exhausted.

  He stirred feebly, and movement brought back the memory of what had happened. He was on the floor of Agricola’s private office, in front of Agricola’s massive desk. His gun lay close to his limp right hand, and there was a pungent odor at its muzzle, the smell of powder recently burned. The acrid smell was new, fresh, telling him that not too many minutes had gone by since he’d squeezed the weapon’s trigger.

  Slowly and with infinite patience, he started pushing himself up off the floor, pressing his palms against the carpet. It took all his strength, and twice he sagged down in collapse. The third time, though, he succeeded in getting to his knees. Then, by clutching at the curiously splintered edge of the desk, he hauled himself fully erect.

  Nick Agricola leered at him, redly.

  The swarthy man was still in his chair, but his smile was not mirthful. It was the sardonic grin of a corpse. A thin trickle of crimson had streaked from above his deformed right ear, where the bullet had gone in; then, because of the head’s macabre tilt, the trickle had wormed across to leering lips and stopped there, like a paint smear. Death, of course, had been instantaneous.

  “So I nailed you after all,” Steve Devlin’s whisper was harsh, squeezed dry of all inflection. “Because you were the kind of rat you were, God help me, I’m a murderer.”

  He felt no triumph now, no victorious satisfaction. He had shot a man in cold blood, and the knowledge was a damning weight inside him.

  And yet, standing there in front of the desk, sick with awareness of his guilt, he sensed something wrong—an off-key note, as elusive as a wisp of fog curling through his pain-blurred mind. He extended his wrist and looked at his strap watch. At first it was dim and out of focus. Then, gradually, his vision cleared.

  Ten minutes of five.

  And at five sharp, his father was to broadcast that fake riot alarm which would despatch practically every cop in town to the harbor area, leaving the business district unprotected. Not that it would need protection now that Agricola was dead. Dead men couldn’t direct looting campaigns any more than they could carry out blackmail threats to ruin a veteran policeman’s career.

  But there was no use taking chances. If Devlin’s father made that phony broadcast, repercussions would follow, even though there was no mobster raid on Jewelry Row. The Police Board would investigate, just on general principles. Mike Devlin would have a hard time explaining why he’d put the bogus alarm on the short wave and, meanwhile, he was probably sitting there at his microphone in headquarters, eating his heart out with worry because Agricola had unearthed something that could undo forty years of going straight.

  Mike had to be informed that Agricola was dead, had to be told that he need no longer fear exposure of his past. Steve Devlin reached past the splintered place on Agricola’s desk and pulled the telephone toward him, dully wondering how he should go about giving his father the news without actually confessing to murder. It would take evasion, double talk, ambiguity, but it had to be done somehow. And the way Steve’s head was hurting, he didn’t feel too capable of glibness.

  Gripping himself, he lifted the phone from its cradle, started to dial, then froze.

  The line was in use. Somebody was talking over the front office extension. It was the voice of the freckled, lanky Larry O’Conner whose gun had smashed Devlin unconscious a while ago and obviously it was Devlin he was discussing.

  “Yeah, drilled the boss through the brain. I came up behind him just as he fired, and I caved in his skull. I killed him, but I was too late to save Nick.”

  Oh yes? Devlin thought grimly. I’m a long way from being killed, Mister, as you’ll soon find out!

  He kept listening.

  ANOTHER voice on the wire, deeper and thicker than O’Conner’s, said doubtfully: “But with Nick croaked, what about this caper we got lined up, Larry?”

  “That’s why I called you,” O’Conner answered. “We’ll go ahead with it as though nothing had happened. The boys are all set, aren’t they?”

  “Well sure, but—”

  A shiver coursed through Steve Devlin’s flesh. In spite of all his efforts, he hadn’t stopped that jewelry raid. It was going to go through as planned, unless he somehow managed to get a message to his father, telling him not to make the broadcast. And he had less than five minutes remaining!

  “So okay,” O’Conner was saying. “Keep tuned to the short wave. When that phony hot call goes on the air, get started. If we’re lucky we ought to grab off anywhere from two hundred grand up to half a million in ice. And there won’t be any lion’s share going to Agricola—which means a bigger split for the rest of us. We’ll need it, too, because we’ll have to scatter for a while until the heat dies. Later maybe I’ll pick up where Nick left off and take over the organization myself.”

  “That might be kinda risky, after this trick today,” the heavier voice said.

  O’Conner chuckled. “Maybe. And then again maybe not. Nick never kept any incriminating records that would finger any of us. It was all in his head. Naturally when we pull the caper, the cops’ll come hotfooting here to ask him a lot of questions like they always do. Only they’ll find him dead, along with the guy that killed him. As far as the rest of us are concerned, it’ll be a blind alley for the flatties. They’ll never get near us. Nick can’t talk, and it’s a cinch we won’t. Now hang up and wait for that broadcast. Tonight we’ll meet at the regular place for splitting the haul.”

  There was the click of disconnection, and the line hummed with dial tone. An urgent decision confronted Steve Devlin, then. It was just two minutes to five o’clock, barely time for him to get a call through to his father at headquarters. But there was Lar
ry O’Conner in the front office; O’Conner, who might overhear. That would mean trouble—bad trouble.

  Panting, desperate with the need for haste, Devlin scooped up his gun from the floor. Then, knowing that the seconds were running out on him, he lunged to the door and smashed it open, took quick aim at the lanky, freckled man.

  “Up!” he rasped. “Get your hands in the air. Fast!”

  “Hey, what the devil?” O’Conner pivoted away from a small table-model radio whose switch he had just snapped on. Then, foolishly, he reached toward his armpit holster.

  Steve Devlin shot him through the shoulder. The slug spun the red-haired man halfway around and dumped him in a chair. Devlin catapulted at him, pistol-whipped him across the face.

  “When I say get ’em up, I mean get ’em up!” Then he reached for his hand-cuffs—and suddenly remembered that he didn’t have them. He wasn’t in uniform.

  But there was a green-shaded lamp on the reception desk, with a long rubberized cord. Devlin yanked the plug from its base-board socket, ripped the other end from its connection in the lamp itself, and swiftly tied O’Conner’s wrists behind him. He wrapped the remaining wire around the chair rungs.

  “That will hold you for a while!” he said.

  He reached for the reception desk telephone.

  Before his fingers could close around the instrument, a warm-up hum came from the table-model radio which O’Conner had switched on. Then the hum became a voice; a voice Steve Devlin recognized. It was his father at the police microphone.

  “Calling all cars. All cars. G.A. All cars, general alarm! A riot in the harbor district! All cars and motorcycles proceed to the harbor precinct at once and with all possible speed! General alarm! All cars—”

  Devlin snapped the switch. “Too late!” he breathed.

  But at least he still had time to get to Hespera Street—time to cover the few short blocks to Jewelry Row! Once there, he’d be able to take a lone stand against the organized raiders. He would be one against dozens, he realized. He would face impossible odds. It would be even worse than the night his father had gone up against four hoods with a tommy-gun and had lost his left arm.