Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  “Or the kind a man might carry if he didn’t want the fit of his dress clothes spoiled by a bulge.”

  “Mebbe. But Lee wasn’t wearin’ dress clothes.”

  Storme acknowledged that to be true. “Nevertheless,” he insisted stubbornly, “this murder—the shot from the dark, the way Susan’s grandmother was framed for it—isn’t the act of a jealous woman or even a frightened one. It’s the work of a cowardly one. It’s the work of a cowardly rat, and that description fits Ashton Lee. With ten times Feet Dorgan’s brains he played second fiddle to him for years. He cooked up all the ingenious rackets for which the Dorgan mob is notorious and was content to take the crumbs Feet handed him. Why? Because he was terrified of Dorgan. He was afraid with every cowardly fibre of his rotten soul of Dorgan’s ways of beating down opposition, his ways of extracting information.”

  He pulled in a breath, gray eyes glowing. “By this time Feet Dorgan’s on a slab in the morgue, Jennie Wrenn is in a cell, and Ashton Lee is at home. I’m going to talk to Lee tonight. And I’ll bet you the thousand dollars I won from you, and a thousand more, that I’ll extract from him the information I’m after.”

  Mimi’s chair fell over as she came up out of it.

  “You’re not—” Her fingers were at her mouth, her face greenish. “You’re not going to bum his feet!”

  “What do you think?” Storme’s nostrils flared, his eyes were gray agate, and his mouth straight-lined, grim. “Do you think I’d stop at that?”

  The girl stared at him horror-stricken, but abruptly Carroll was chuckling.

  “Got yuh, Ted. Calm down, gal. He’s just a-goin’ to run a whangaroo on him. Laughin’ hyenas, son, I shore would admire to watch yuh in a good hot game of no limit poker.”

  “You’ll get the chance to tomorrow night—if I’m still around. Even rats are dangerous when they’re cornered.” Storme came lithely erect. “I’m going to ask you to stay here, Cal, and keep an eye on Susan and her mother. Mimi, I’ll drop you wherever you say.”

  “Hold on.” Carroll lifted to his feet. “Where do yuh think yuh’re a-headin’ ?”

  “To Lee’s apartment up on Fifty-first street. That’s dangerous, I know, but I can’t bring him here, not with the Castle’s here, and there’s no other place I can find at this hour where I can be sure of not being interrupted.”

  “Yes, there is, Mr. Storme.” Mimi was herself again. “I live alone in an old-fashioned flat with thick walls you can’t hear anything through. You’re welcome to use that if you want to.”

  “Sounds like just what the doctor ordered, but I hate to drag you into this.”

  “I’m in it already, ain’t I?” Her pointed little chin seemed suddenly to take on new firmness. “You’re going to use my apartment.”

  “Okay. Where is it?”

  “East Eighth Street. Two-twenty-one.

  The ground floor, on the right as you go in.”

  “Check.”

  Storme strode to the phone on a small desk between two monkscloth-draped windows, and dialed a number. The ringing signal’s burr was cut off by an irritated rasp.

  “Storme calling,” the other two heard him say. “Ted Storme. I know it’s four-thirty in the morning, but you want to see me tonight.”

  The watching two saw a grim smile lick his tight gambler’s mask.

  “I said you want to see me, Judge Lee. That is, you do if you want to beat Feet Dorgan to the seventy-five grand Ben Castle cached five years ago.”

  Mimi was startled. “Dorgan’s dead,” she whispered. “Why does he say that?” Carroll spread his hands. “Dunno, unless he’s got some reason for wantin’ to know has it been on the radio yet.”

  Evidently it had not, for Storme was saying, “I’ll be hanged if I’ll split it with a guy who’s put his hoods on me to burn me down, but I can’t get at it without one of you helping, so you’re in luck.” And after a pause, “Like the devil I’ll come there! You’re coming to me, Lee. Alone . . . Of course, you don’t know where I live, and you’re not finding out now. You’ll meet me at two-twenty-one East Eighth Street in half an hour. The ground floor, right. Walk right in. The door will be unlatched.”

  Storme dropped the instrument into its cradle, turned. “Okay, Mimi. Let’s have the key.”

  She snapped open the rhinestone-studded little envelope strapped to her wrist, fumbled in it, then looked up, eyes widening in dismay. “I—I haven’t got it. I gave it to Jock when we started out and he never gave it back.”

  “That’s nice. That’s just fine.”

  “Oh, it isn’t so bad. There’s a way of opening my door without a key. But I’ll have to go along and show you.”

  “I don’t like that. You—” Storme caught himself. “It’s only ten minutes from here. Can you drive a car?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Then this is what we’ll do. Cal will come along and drive you back here after you’ve let me in. We’ll have to take a chance on leaving those two alone here for twenty minutes. Let’s go . . .”

  At the turn of the century, the four-story, brownstone house where Mimi lived had been the home of some wealthy family. Now it had been cut up into small, furnished suites, but it still preserved some of its ancient dignity. The entrance hall was wide and high-ceilinged, the dark mahogany staircase was baronial in its proportions.

  Mimi led the men to a door deeply embrasured in a marble niche.

  “A boy I used to know found out how to do this one time when we had a scrap and I locked him out. You push in on this loose part of the jamb, see, and down hard on the knob.”

  The door swung open silently, let them into a narrow, dark hall.

  “Just a second,” the girl whispered, “and I’ll light up for you.”

  As she moved away, Ted Storme pressed the latch-button to hold the bolt back, pulled the door shut. There was a moment of tar-barrel blackness, a click. Yellow luminance struck from beyond the wall-corner that concealed Mimi. A low, startled scream came from within the unseen room.

  “You’ve kept me waiting a long time.” It was a man’s voice, blurred with drowsiness. “I fell asleep.”

  Storme relaxed as he heard Mimi’s voice, not frightened but indignant.

  “You’ve got a nerve, Jock Haddon, using my key to get in!”

  “I had to, kid. I couldn’t go home till I’d told you how sorry I am I acted like such a heel, back on Long Island.”

  “Get out of here, Jock. Get right out!”

  “Give me a chance, honey. Please give me a chance to tell you. You can’t blame me for going off my trolley with the rep Feet Dorgan has, and when I saw he’d nabbed you—gosh, Mimi! I clean lost my head. All I could think of was to pour a couple drinks down and then beat it out of there, but soon’s I hit the sidewalk I got thinking how you’ve been so sweet to me and all, and what do I do the first sign of trouble? I ditch you.”

  “Listen, Jock—”

  “You listen to me,” the fellow pleaded. “Let me finish. I was still too scared to go back in there, but I remembered I had your key so I grabbed a cab and come straight here.”

  “Straight here, Haddon?” Storme asked, stalking into the stuffy room. “Are you sure of that?”

  CHAPTER VIII.

  TEAMWORK.

  BLOOD draining from his sensuous lips, the fellow in Mimi’s apartment goggled at the sudden apparition.

  “Storme!” he squeezed from his dew-lapped throat. “Wh-hat are you doing here?”

  “I’m asking the questions, Haddon.” Storme was past Mimi, standing rigid in the center of the room. “I asked you if you came straight here from the Biarritz bar, without making a detour.”

  “I don’t know what you’re driving at,” Haddon said surlily.

  “You he.” Storme advanced on him slowly, menacingly, and behind Storme Cal Carroll entered, slipped an arm around the girl’s waist. “You know exactly what I’m driving at. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.”

  Jock Haddon backed fro
m the slowly advancing, ominous figure. “Not after hearing what Dorgan said as he passed you with Mimi,” Storme accused. The wall stopped Haddon and he flattened against it, yellowed cheeks quivering. “What was it again, Mimi?” Storme asked, not turning his head. “The exact words?”

  The girl licked her lips.

  “Tell him, sweetheart,” Carroll rumbled. “Tell him.”

  “He—he said, ‘That phony’s going to find out he’s made one wrong play too many.’ ”

  “That’s it,” Storme sighed. “You heard him say that, Haddon. It meant to you that you were fingered for a rubout because you’d let your girl try to save me from his torpedoes, and you were terrified. But you’re not terrified any longer or you wouldn’t have come here to whine your way back into Mimi’s good graces. No. You’d be putting as much distance as you could between yourself and Feet Dorgan’s torpedoes. Right?”

  There wasn’t any answer. There was no sound at all save Jock Haddon’s hoarse, heavy breathing.

  “Why did you have the courage to come here?” Storme’s relentless inquisition was resumed. “Why are you no longer afraid of Feet Dorgan? I’ll tell you. You know Dorgan is dead. That hasn’t been put on the radio yet, so you couldn’t know it if you’d come straight here from the Biarritz bar. I’ll tell you how you know. Before you left the bar you saw him go backstage and when you left it you went around in back of the casino. Standing there in the dark, you saw him come into a lighted dressing room and you shot him through the window and threw your gun into that room to frame Jennie Wrenn with the killing.”

  “You devil!” Jock Haddon squealed. “You were watching me.”

  Cal Carrol swore softly and Mimi whimpered, but Ted Storme’s expression was as granitic as before.

  “No, Haddon, I wasn’t watching you. But that was a rat’s crime and you’re a cowardly rat, and cornered rats can be vicious. I realized that Dorgan’s threat might have terrified you beyond terror, might have given you enough of the courage of desperation to grab the opportunity to strike back at him. But that kind of courage doesn’t last, so I gambled that if I accused you of the crime you wouldn’t have nerve enough to deny it.”

  “Great stuff, Ted!” Carroll applauded, coming up beside him. “Yuh had the kind of animal that beefed Dorgan figgered out correct, only yuh picked on the wrong rat. He ain’t squeezin’ out of it either. Tracin’ that pearl-handled gun to him ought to be easy, and the wax test on his paw’ll show he fired it recent. Yuh’ll have Susan’s grandma out of the calaboose by momin’.” A choking sound from Mimi jerked Ted Storme’s head around to her, and past her to the doorway from the hall, to the slender, ferret-featured individual who had stepped in, stub-nosed automatic snouting from his hand.

  Another man came through, a man wearing a blue topcoat and blue Homburg hat, light glittering on thick lenses, a gun in his gloved fist also.

  “You will not move,” Ashton Lee said tonelessly, “unless you want lead to shatter the young lady’s spine. Gull! Will you please make sure that they are not armed?”

  “Pleasure, Judge.” Gull Foster’s nose was strapped with adhesive plaster, the area around it blue with bruises, and his lips puffy. “Only I’d sure like the chance to work the big gozebo over.”

  “Patience, my dear fellow. You may have the opportunity.”

  Foster moved to Storme, patted him from head to foot, looking for a gun, while Haddon, his back to the wall, watched out of hopeless eyes.

  “It was most considerate of you to leave the door unlatched, Mr. Storme,” Lee continued. “I scented some sort of trap, thought it wise to reconnoiter before letting you know I’d arrived, and what I heard, listening from that passage, was most interesting.”

  “Okay, Judge,” Foster interrupted. “They’re all clean.”

  “Thank you, Gull. Step back here where you can keep the girl covered, and shoot her down at the first untoward movement anyone makes. You may turn around slowly, gentlemen.”

  They complied. “Look here, Lee,” Ted Storme said. “I suspected you of murdering Feet Dorgan and got you down here hoping to wring a confession from you. Now it’s developed that Haddon’s the killer, there’s nothing between us.”

  Lee’s fingers seemed to writhe on the butt of his gun. “Wrong. You wish to clear Jennie Wrenn of the charge against her and I prefer it to stand.”

  “So that you can use it to bring pressure on her daughter? Sorry, Lee. I made sure to put Viola Castle and Susan where you can’t find them, before I did anything else.” Lee shook his head. “No go. They’re in your flat or you would have had me meet you there.”

  “Okay. They’re in my flat.” It might be a game of cards these two were engaged in, so quietly was each verbal trick played and topped. “You don’t know where that is.”

  “Wrong again. Your telephone is unlisted, but I have a conection that enabled me to have your call traced.”

  Ted Storme’s hand made a little gesture of defeat that Lee acknowledged with a wholly evil smile.

  “So you see,” he continued, “all I have to do now is arrange matters so that you and your two friends—and Haddon, of course—shall not upset a situation which is much to my liking. Much as I abhor violence, the only certain way in which I can do this is to silence you.”

  “In plain English,” Cal Carrol growled, “yuh’re goin’ to gun us.”

  The glittering lenses moved to him. “Precisely. These walls are thick enough to muffle our shots. Neither Foster’s weapon nor mine is registered with the police and when they’re found here in the apartment of a—shall I say bachelor girl?—beside your bodies, the natural conclusion—”

  A half-shout, half-squeal from Haddon jerked Foster’s automatic toward him, and in the next instant Carroll dived under the orange-red streak from the thug’s gun, slammed him down in a bone-jarring smash as Storme’s flying tackle, only a breath later, crashed Ashton Lee to the floor.

  The thud of fists on fleshed bone ended almost as quickly as it began. Jock Haddon darted past the tumbled sprawl of bodies, but reeled down, his ankle clamped by the Texan’s knarled fingers. Carroll raised himself, turned his leather-seamed countenance to Mimi.

  “I told yuh this Gull Foster was goin’ to get hurt if he kept on pesterin’ me,” he drawled. His taut smile drifted to Storme. “How yuh doin’, Ted?”

  “Not so good, Cal.” Coming up to his knees, Storme looked sick. “Lee’s head hit this chair as he went down and I’m afraid his rotten skull’s smashed.”

  “ ‘Afraid,’ he says. Shucks, boy, that means you can live a normal life again. The kind of hombres him and Dorgan was, yuh can lay yore whole bankroll they’re the only ones in the gang know what they was doggin’ her ma an’ grandma about. But yuh’re like yore old man, all right. He never gunned out a blackhearted owlhooter that he wasn’t sick over it for weeks.” The tall Texan chuckled. “Another thing reminded me of old Rod was the way yuh took off for Lee the second I jumped for this weasel. Shore took me back to the time we worked the same trick once when we was in a mite of trouble in a gully on the Brazos.”

  “Trick?” Ted Storme gasped. “What gave us our chance was Haddon’s howl of terror!”

  “Terror nothin’,” Carrol grinned. “That was a yelp of pain, son, when I kicked my heel back into his shinbone. An’ if yuh think yuh’re the only one can figure how a galoot’ll act in a particular set of circumstances, the reason I went for Foster is the same motion was because I knew from the way Lee handled his gun he wouldn’t get a shot off till yuh’d sized up what was happenin’ and got to him.”

  THE END

  DON’T WAKE THE DEAD

  Frank Morris

  It looked too easy to Detective Luggan when the scared little man paid him five hundred to deliver a package!

  LUGGAN tossed off his drink, took his feet off the desk and yawned hugely. The clock in the Hall of Records tower across dark Spring Avenue said it was ten and time for little private eyes to be in bed. He picked up his coat from the back
of the swivel chair, shrugged into it, gathered up the Grant reports and crossed to the office safe. Then the doorknob rattled.

  He swung around, frowning. A shadowy figure loomed on the frosted glass door leading to the hall, and the doorknob rattled again, imperatively. Luggan stuffed the Grant reports into his pocket, stepped over, turned the key and flung the door open in one deft motion.

  The man who staggered into the office was small and skinny, with a sallow face, pale like the underside of a halibut. He clutched a round newspaper-wrapped package to his heaving chest and hastily closed the door behind him. He wore a camel’s-hair coat over the tan suit that clung to his skinny shoulders. He had a bulging egg-shaped head fringed with coarse dark hair. He sucked in his breath and licked thick red lips fearfully.

  “Thank you. Thank you,” he said hoarsely. “Are you Mister Rick Luggan, the private investigator?”

  Luggan nodded and inspected his caller curiously. Queer bird, this. The guy was hopping around like a Mexican jumping bean, and the end of his nose seemed to tremble.

  “Turn out the light,” the frightened man said, walking to the window and still clutching the package as if his very life were wrapped up within it. “My name’s Horace Squidy. My father died this afternoon, and I’m being followed.”

  “Quiet down,” Rick ordered, switching out the light. “Nobody’s going to follow you in here. Why are they after you? How many of them are there?”

  A LATE trolley rattled by, and Horace Squidy turned from the window.

  “Two of them,” he mumbled. “Brutish looking fellows. They’ve been after me since eight o’clock, when I left father’s house.”

  Horace Squidy placed the round package on Rick’s desk and looked at the private detective appealingly.

  “I want to hire you for a couple of hours.” He yanked out his wallet, extracting a sheaf of bills. “Will five hundred dollars be all right?”

  “Five hundred dollars is always all right,” Rick clipped, rubbing his square chin thoughtfully, “But it depends on what you’re hiring me for. I don’t like deals with shyster tricks included. Comprenez?”