Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  Yet I was right that she knew. When we rose from the table, she stood close to me, her eyes looking up into mine. So softly I could hardly hear, she said: “About four tomorrow—at the Cloisters?”

  I gazed a moment, bewildered. Then I nodded. She smiled, that bewitching little smile, and turned to the others again.

  It was a magic thing, this romance of ours. A thing of trembling, stolen moments. But it was evil, too. Always with us was the nightmare fear of discovery, of smashing the world of this man she pretended to love, this man with whom I worked, whose friendship I claimed.

  Always the guilt, as he and I worked together. Always sickening shame at his praise.

  “Magnificent, Thorne!” His words boomed out as he read some report of mine. “We’ve made progress. We will have the answer soon.”

  Then he was going away. She told me in the afternoon, as we walked together, holding hands like kids, in the park. I thought of the lodge of mine across the river in Jersey. She and I had spent one afternoon there, days before.

  “Come with me,” I urged. “The lodge—there’s no one around, no close neighbors, no gossips. We could have this time together, just the two of us.”

  I looked into her face. I could read desire in those blue eyes. I wanted to take her into my arms and hold her.

  “If I can, dear,” she whispered. “Call me at five—I’ll let you know. He won’t be in until six.”

  When I called, she sounded gay, full of laughter.

  “I may be a little delayed. I think he’s taking a later train. You—you go on out to the lodge. I’ll dine with him, go with him to the train. After that, darling—”

  She would take the car and drive out, she said. She knew the way. It would not be long.

  I was in high spirits as I hung up. I climbed into my own car, drove across the George Washington Bridge, out the main road, turned off the side road to the lodge.

  I wanted to open up the place, to get a fire started. I thought there was plenty of time. I thought it would be about nine before she arrived.

  But it was much earlier when I heard the car coming up the driveway and draw to a stop at the door. Iris must have got away early, I decided. I hurried to meet her.

  But I was wrong. I heard his voice in the car.

  “She’s not coming, Thorne. Not to see you or anyone, ever. You see, I came back without her knowing, and I heard the call. But then I knew about it anyway. I’ve been checking up. Walk backward—toward the porch.”

  We are sitting here now, he and I. He agreed I might make these notes, my last scientific report. My palms are wet with sweat. The gun in his hand points at my heart. I cannot guess at which unthinkable second that final blast will shatter the stillness of the night.

  COWARD’S KILL

  Arthur Leo Zagat

  When gambler Ted Storme meets “Feet” Dorgan, underworld boss, he faces big odds in an impromptu game with death!

  CHAPTER I.

  THE MAN FROM TEXAS.

  IF the man who stood at the long bar on the mezzanine of Tom Goslin’s Biarritz Casino on Long Island was aware that he was marked for death, he gave no evidence of it. Long-limbed, lithe in his impeccable dinner suit, he was young, about twenty-five or -six, but his narrow, bony face was an expressionless mask as he watched a fly that had got itself half-drowned in a spill of cordial and crawled along the blue-mirrored bar top, its wings sticky and useless.

  From some three or four yards away, in the buzzing, convivial crowd along the counter, a girl eyed him owlishly.

  “Why, Jock?” she asked her baldish, rather obese escort. “Why’s he all alone? Why’s everybody not talking to him?”

  “That, Mimi my dove, is Storme.” Jock Haddon, Broadway character about town, seemed to think it was a complete answer. “Ted Storme.”

  Even Mimi Barton recognized that name, though she was more familiar with another variety of “bohemians,” those she knew in Greenwich Village where she was making her home, while playing at learning “art.” It had been on the impulse of the moment that she had come to the Biarritz with Jock Haddon, for she was sure a girl could not learn too much about all kinds of people in New York. And now she was learning plenty.

  As Jock mentioned the name of the gambler, Ted Storme, Mimi’s violet eyes widened.

  “The man they say never loses a bet!” she exclaimed.

  “Darned near,” Haddon agreed. “Too near for the wise mob he’s run ragged since he hit Broadway about six months ago. Those pretzels can’t figure out if he’s so straight they crack up trying to fit their curves to him, or if he’s the slickest operator who ever came to town.”

  “From where, Jock? From where did he come?”

  “You ask him that, or anything else personal, and he’ll freeze you so hard they’ll wrap you in wax paper and label you Birdseye.”

  “Not me, he won’t.” Mimi tossed her honey-hued clipped curls. “Watch me go to work on him.” She started away, was dragged back by a sudden, fierce grip on her arm. “Keep clear of that bird,” Haddon said huskily, black lights flickering in his too-small eyes. “Stay away from him unless you’re looking for trouble.”

  “Trouble?” The girl wrenched free and faced him, her body taut in the shimmering white sheath of her strapless frock. “From you?”

  “No not from me. I’m on to your little tricks. I mean bullet-trouble.” He glanced fearfully at their neighbors dropped his voice to a murmur. “Storme took ten thousand from Feet Dorgan in the floating crap game last night and Dorgan got the notion he did it with a pair of educated ivories. That bird’s blazing hot, what I mean, and anybody near him’s liable to get burned with him. Look, honey, the lights are dimming. Let’s get to our table before Jennie Wrenn comes on.”

  “Hang Jennie Wren. I like your Ted Storme and I’m going . . . Oh-h-h!” Mimi stopped short. “Someone’s starting to talk to him. Is he one of Dorgan’s—”

  “Torpedoes?” Haddon stole a quick look, shrugged. “I never saw him before, but that don’t mean anything. Could be he’s some out-of-town gunsel Feet’s imported to iron Storme out.”

  “No-o!” Mimi moaned. “Oh, no, Jock. He’s too nice.”

  Then the rush to get to the tables carried them down the short flight of carpeted steps from the mezzanine.

  With the crowd gone, one could see the innumerable tiny silver bees—B for Biarritz—that studded the bar front, blue mirror-glass like its top, and the dozen larger, golden ones that were poised along its inner edge to conceal plebian beer taps. But it was the living fly at which the man who had ranged himself beside Ted Storme jabbed a gnarled forefinger.

  “Pertinacious little cuss, ain’t he?”

  “Very.”

  Storme’s eyes, the color and seeming hardness of chilled steel, flicked to the speaker and flicked instantaneously away. The glance had photographed every detail of the gaunt, leather-textured countenance, including the healed bullet-trough that angled down from beneath grizzled hair. A big man, taller than Storme and solidly built, the stranger obviously was ill at ease in a tuxedo as obviously newly bought.

  “Hades nor high water,” he drawled, “ain’t a-goin’ to keep that jigger from gettin’ to the back edge of this shelf.”

  “Not the back,” Storme corrected. “I’ve been watching that fly for five minutes. If and when it leaves the top of this bar it will be over the front edge.”

  The big man’s face hardened. “I think he’ll go over the back, and down in Brazos County we back our opinions with our cash. What do yuh say, stranger?”

  “Suits me.” Storme produced a well-stuffed wallet. “For how much?”

  The Texan looked at the fly again. It was still crawling toward the back of the bar. “For one thousand,” the challenger said. He brought out of his trouser pocket a roll of bills almost as thick as his fist, started counting fifties down onto the blue mirror. A bartender moved nearer, started polishing the bee-hidden draught arm opposite them. In the shadows at the far end of the counte
r a thin, ferret-faced chap stiffened, black eyes glittering.

  “Nine-fifty,” the big man finished his count. “One thousand. There yuh are, stranger.” The roll he thrust back into his pocket but little reduced in diameter. “Cal Carroll don’t back water for nobody.” Storme covered the money with ten hundreds. Applause splattered from the big room behind him and he turned to look.

  Far across the now dimmed room blue satin curtains swirled apart to unveil a stage high-banked with men in yellow satin monkey-jackets, their instruments glinting as they blared an entreaty to Richard to open the door.

  A spotlight noosed a microphone staff that grew upwards at the stage’s front, center, with brilliance. A roly-poly little man trotted into the bright disk, brown derby canted back on plastered-down hair, loudly checked coat and pants ludicrously too tight.

  From somewhere in the dark a whisky-slurred voice called, “Hi, Sam Slats!” Others shushed it.

  Behind Ted Storme’s back the fly suddenly stopped short, inches from the bar’s rear edge and flattened itself down on the glass.

  “Come on!” the barkeep whispered. “Come on, baby. There’s two grand ridin’ on your back.”

  In the room Sam Slats took hold of the mike rod, his round, goggle-eyed face bisected by a clown’s grin.

  “Thanks for the greeting, customers, but you ain’t fooling me. I know you didn’t come here tonight to listen to my gags. You came to be present at a great event in the history of the American stage—the return from retirement of that tiny songstress, that diminutive interpretess of musical classics who won the hearts of your fathers and your grandfathers with her own inimitable voice.”

  He turned to the left, held out both arms in a gesture of welcome.

  “Ladies and gentlemen. I give you the one, the only Jennie Wrenn!”

  And was butted out of the spotlight by the spangled pink buttocks of an enormous female who had galloped from the stage’s darkened right wing.

  Applause thundered as she loomed above it, blonde-wigged, flabby-jowled, and threw kisses, using both bare, bulging arms. On the mezzanine the barkeep swore softly as the fly started moving again, slantwise across the bar toward its front.

  Storme came around, smiled without humor.

  “You lose, my friend.”

  “Not yet,” Carroll grunted. “It can still turn back.”

  “It can, but I don’t think it will.”

  “Okay, Mr. Storme. I’ve got another thousand says different.”

  “No.”

  “No?” The Texan stared unbelievingly. “It’s a fifty-fifty bet, ain’t it?”

  “Precisely. That is why I won’t make it.”

  The bartender snorted disgustedly. Below the balcony the applause faded and from the stage Jennie Wrenn said, “Hello, suckers!” She laughed girlishly. “Your warm greetings bring tears to my eyes, and that reminds me of the fellow who came back from a month in Florida all tanned but with his eyes red and puffy. When his partner asked him how he got that way, he told him about the blonde he’d met on the beach—”

  She went on with the smoking-room yarn, but on the mezzanine the fly reached the bar’s front edge, went over it and dropped to the floor. Storme picked up the sheaf of bills.

  “The drinks are on me,” he said, expressionless as before. “I’ll have mine as usual, Jim.”

  The barkeep looked at Carroll.

  “Give me the same,” the Texan growled, and then to Storme, “Yuh win, but yuh’d a won twice as much if yuh was a real sport.”

  “I’m not a sport.” Storme stowed his winnings in his wallet, dropped two singles on the bar. “I’m a professional gambler. I don’t risk any money on any proposition that doesn’t give me a percentage in my favor.” Oddly enough, now that the issue was decided he seemed gripped by a tenseness that had not been in evidence before. “I told you I’d been watching that fly for five minutes. In that time it approached the rear of the bar three times and turned back each time because it was frightened by the reflection of the big golden bee in the mirror.”

  Carroll’s jaw dropped. “I’ll be everlastingly hornswoggled.” He reached for the tall glass the bartender had set in front of him, gulped a swallow, choked on it, and stared at the white liquid left in the tumbler, on his raw-boned features a mixtures of disgust and amazement. “C-cow juice,” he sputtered. “Milk!”

  A faint smile touched Ted Storme’s thin lips but did not ease their grimness.

  “In my business, Carroll, I can’t afford to drink anything stronger. If I’d been doing so tonight, for instance, I might not have noticed the single time you forgot to call me ‘stranger’ and used my name instead.”

  The audience whooped as Jennie Wrenn and Sam Slats engaged in Weberfieldian slapstick.

  “Yeah,” the still-faced Texan acknowledged. “Yuh was pointed out to me.” His right hand dropped into the side pocket of his coat and made a bulge there. “I got some business with yuh ought to be done where it’s more private.” He looked down along the room’s side wall to a small door over which a red light burned. “I reckon that gives out on the car-parkin’ corral. S’pose we go thataway.”

  “Very smart,” Ted Storme murmured. “If we left the front way, the coatroom girls and the doorman would see us together and they might remember afterward. Down there everybody’s looking at the stage.” He finished his drink, turned down the empty glass. “Let’s go,” he sighed. “Let’s get it over with.”

  CHAPTER II.

  A CHILD’S PLEA.

  SAM SLATS ducked a buffet from Jennie Wrenn’s big hand.

  “Hey, Jennie!” he panted. “Maybe the customers’d like to hear you sing the ‘Gay Caballero’.”

  “Aw, no.” Pink-spangles wriggled in embarrassment. “Not that!” Lavish grease paint could not hide the crowsfeet under mascaraed eyes, nor the unlovely loose skin at an aged throat. “I couldn’t. Ruhlly I couldn’t.”

  “How about it, folks?” Slats appealed across the footlights, and affirmatives roared back at him out of a clatter of silverware on Tom Goslin’s bee-sprinkled chinaware.

  Jennie nodded to the orchestra leader. The strains of the bawdy tune blared out.

  The scent of expensive perfume was heavy in the big room that was lit only by shaded electric candles topping the porcelain beehives on each table.

  “Jock,” Mimi whispered to her companion. “Isn’t that Dorgan over there?”

  Haddon let his look slide to the table, next but one to theirs, toward which she jerked her dimpled chin.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, that’s Dorgan all right.”

  “I don’t see why everybody’s so scared of him,” Mimi said. He was a little man all sleek tailored curves, his face round and apple-cheeked under a mane of snow-white hair gleaming silkily in the dimness. “He looks like Santa Claus”

  “Some Santa Claus,” Haddon muttered. He took the girl’s dimpled chin in the V of his thumb and forefinger. “If you’re getting ideas about Dorgan, skip it. He’s a wolf that eats up honey-sweet little gals like you for dessert.”

  “Jock!” Mimi gasped. “Look over there, by the wall.”

  He turned, saw the lean figure that moved smoothly along blue silk drapes, and the taller form that kept close alongside.

  “Ted Storme and that other man, Jock,” Mimi said. “That. . . . What was it you called him? That gun—”

  “Gunsel.” Haddon was a little pale around the gills. “Taking Storme out.”

  “There’s another one, Jock!” whispered the girl. “Sneaking along behind them.”

  A spray of light from a canted candle shade fell across the weasel face of the thin-bodied individual who’d lurked in the shadows at the end of the bar.

  “Him I know, Mimi,” said Jock Haddon. “That’s Gull Foster, of the Dorgan mob. Guess Feet’s taking no chances on his imported killer slipping up.”

  “Killer!” The girl’s pupils dilated. “Jock Haddon, how can you sit there so calmly when. . . . We’ve got to do something
, Jock! We’ve got to save. . . . Ohhh! They’re going out that side door to the parking lot and that Foster’s hurrying to catch up, Jock!”

  “Keep still, you little fool! Do you want. . . . Oh, Christopher!”

  Mimi had pushed up out of her chair. Haddon grabbed at her, but she evaded him, was running toward the steps leading from the mezzanine.

  Ted Storme went through the side door just ahead of Carroll, stepped to one side as the Texan came through. Storme’s rock-hard fist flailed to the big man’s midriff, another to the jaw which the first blow had brought down within reach. Carrol sagged, folded down on the threshold, but before he had stopped falling Storme already was feet away along the building’s wall.

  Glare from a naked three-hundred-watt bulb over the attendant’s booth at the entrance glinted on car windows but toward the casino’s rear a small shed made a patch of Stygian black. He reached this cover, glanced back as a sudden burst of sound came from within the larger building.

  The door out of which he had come was slitted open again. “Gull” Foster squeezed through, shut it softly, stared down at the limp, sprawling Carroll. Traffic sound seething past the high black hedge that divided the lot from the highway was threaded by the thrilling of a traffic cop’s whistle. A woman’s voice cried out thinly.

  Foster peered through the rows of parked cars, started toward them, hesitated, then turned back and bent over the stunned Texan. But a thud of running feet from the gate leading to the lot jerked the black-polled little thug erect again.

  His gesture of his hand toward his lapel was paralyed by a hoarse bellow.

  “Reach, you! Grab air or I’ll let some into you!”

  A burly cop pounded toward him, revolver out. Foster’s arms lifted.

  “It’s okay. Officer,” he said suavely. “My friend here had a snootful and I brought him out here and he passed out. I was just lookin’ after him.”

  “Lookin’ after his jack, you mean.”

  The policeman glared at Cal Carroll’s plethoric bill roll which was clutched in the little thug’s raised left hand, jabbed his gun muzzle into Gull Foster’s midriff, slid his own free hand under the tuxedo jacket’s flap and brought out a flat, lustreless automatic.