Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  Still unobserved; he slumped against a ‘dobe wall only a few feet from where the convertible was parked. The dame in the car was a slick chick, looking at her from the rear. Then suddenly recognition came—the redhead.

  A police car pulled up alongside the convertible, and an officer got out and went up to the door. Johnny could hear him quite plainly.

  “We’ve got men on all the roads, looking for this fellow, Mrs. Stunder. The railroad dicks are on the alert, too. He can’t get away, and we’ll get him in the morning.”

  Johnny heard her mumble something in her handkerchief as the city cop turned away. Right then and there he decided he was going to talk to the redhead if it cost him his life.

  HE CAME OUT of the shadows of the ‘dobe wall and walked up to the convertible. He had his hand on the door handle when he felt something pressing the small of his back—and it didn’t feel like an umbrella.

  “Just keep walking down the street as if nothing happened,” a voice said behind him.

  His captor was a hefty guy, Johnny could see out of the tail of his eye. A big, sunburned fellow, probably Mexican with shoulders on him like a foundry worker’s.

  “Don’t get the idea that you can elude me,” his captor said, and fell into step at his side. His voice and clipped manner of speech definitely weren’t south of the Border, despite his looks.

  He herded Johnny inside a building. Rather abstractedly he noticed it was called the Apollo Club. They sunfished through a noisy crowd of men and women in the bar and went down a corridor at the end of which a door said “Office.”

  The furnishings were ultra-modern, ultraWestern: a big washed maple desk, chairs in green leather, expensive prints on the wall, soft, concealed cathode lighting, air-conditioned and soundproofed. There was a color photo on the desk of a horse-faced man and a pulse-quickening girl. Johnny tried to keep the surprise out of his face. Horse-face, he realized, was the hunk of cold turkey in the car, the late Abel Stunder. The redhead with the honeydew eyes was his nemesis.

  Muscles and his gun motioned Johnny to one of the green leather chairs, and he flopped his hulk in a similar vehicle across the room, and sat glaring at him. He was a character. Even Joe Louis would take a second glance at a pile of sinew like this.

  They didn’t have long to wait. The redhead and the man pointed out to him as Max Crook came into the room. In the white light of the cathode tubes, the redhead looked even better, a svelte package if ever there was one—beauty, brains, and brittle, all stacked on a heavenly chassis.

  Max Crook walked across the room, and sliced his gloves viciously across Johnny’s face, a downsweep that would have torn the skin off a kid’s cheek. Johnny sat poker-faced. He felt hot blood sting his cheeks but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. The big lug’s gun was on him, and to move was simply to commit suicide.

  “After you killed Abel,” Crook said, “what did you do with the briefcase?”

  Johnny didn’t know anything about a briefcase, but surely he wasn’t going to tell them he didn’t. He was pretty certain, too, that Crook wasn’t alluding to the counterfeit bills planted in Johnny’s own battered suitcase.

  It sounded as if that briefcase might be pretty important, too, and if they thought he had it, that fact alone might be the means of prolonging the life of a vagabond by the name of Johnny Chopin, at least for a short time. And right now time was invaluable.

  But what about the redhead? She knew definitely he had no briefcase. What was her angle in keeping mum?

  His conscience didn’t choke him a bit when he met Crook’s hostile eyes and said: “You don’t think I’d carry the case around with me, do you, when I’m hotter than a tamale?”

  “Where is it?” Crook asked. He came forward a step, with his big fists balled into piledrivers.

  “I’ll tell you when you give me a clean bill of health.”

  For an instant he thought Crook was going to drive one of his hammer-like fists down his adenoids. But he didn’t. A cunning look suddenly stole over his big blonde college-boy face, and he seemed so pleased with his sudden brainstorm that he failed to conceal it.

  “Okay, pretty boy,” he said, “you may go. But don’t forget, we’ll be keeping an eye on you, and you won’t get out of town until you produce the briefcase.”

  Johnny crawled out of the chair, a lot of questions on his lips, but he swallowed them. He was going to ask, among other things, why they were letting him walk out of the room alive, when he was so nicely framed for Stunder’s death. He was about as popular as a Russian A-bomb, and still he was walking away from the guillotine. It didn’t jell, unless—

  Sure, that had to be it. Crook presumed that he actually had copped a briefcase that contained something of great value. No doubt the case had been carried by Stunder when he was killed. They presumed he had the case cached somewhere and they were going to give him every opportunity to escape, knowing that if an avenue of escape really offered, and he thought he could squeeze by the road blocks, he’d take the case with him. They were merely playing cat and mouse.

  He didn’t give a hoot about the briefcase, or what it contained. He was more interested in who had killed Stunder, and flung his carcass in the car seat with him before notifying the cops.

  The redhead must know some of these answers. But to get to the redhead would be a different matter. He knew he’d be tailed, no matter where he went, or what he did. They wanted a briefcase that contained something so important a man had been killed for it. Crook evidently thought he had filched the case off Stunder after he had killed him. That didn’t make sense, either, for if he was a betting man, Johnny would have named Crook as the man who put the slug through Stunder’s nice green corduroy shirt.

  JOHNNY was being tailed, all right. He worked away from the main stem, finally found a little confectionery and notion store, and went inside to get a cold drink. The big lug who had put the gat in his back came in and sat down at the counter, three stools away. He ordered a chocolate malt with two fresh eggs in it—as if he needed it.

  Johnny had drained his drink before the other assimilated his eggs. On the way out he saw some sportsmen’s specials in an open rack and suddenly got an idea. There were some lead weights in one of the pigeon holes, heavy hunks of babbitt that fishermen use to weight a throw-line. At twenty-nine cents it was a good investment. It fit his broad palm very nicely.

  Outside, he crossed a vacant lot, headed south for the railroad tracks. The mug wasn’t a very good tail. He made too much noise, shuffling through the debris on the lot. Johnny waited for him behind an old crumbling ‘dobe wall, deep in the shadows. He came lumbering up, and Johnny suddenly stepped out of the shadows and let him have a piledriver swing, with all of his one-seventy-eight pounds and the aid of the lead plug in his fist. The muscleman grunted and went down, limp as a sack of potatoes. Johnny rolled him over and clipped him another stinger on the button, but it was unneeded. The coyotes were yodeling nicely for the muscleman.

  He started to round the ‘dobe wall—and stopped. A car had pulled up at the curb, and he saw the moonlight glint on a gun.

  “Let’s take a ride,” a musical voice said. It was the redhead. She was alone—all except the gun.

  Johnny hesitated a moment, then shrugged and slid onto the cool leather seat at her side. She gunned the car down the street, driving with one hand, the other still holding the gun on him. The car had a contented purr, much like a big lazy Persian cat, and he decided she was a Persian, too, with plenty of feline scratch in her nails.

  This was a trap, but he was too angry to be cautious. She gunned the car through the night, heading for the wide-open places.

  “Okay,” he said presently. “Start talking—and it better be good.”

  There was something in the chilly depths of her eyes he couldn’t interpret in the dim light. Possibly it was anger, even fear.

  “Tell me,” he insisted, “why did you let me walk out of the Apollo Club?”

  “The brief
case.”

  “What’s in the briefcase?”

  “Ninety grand—more or less.”

  Johnny whistled through his teeth. But she wasn’t kidding, he could see that.

  They were past the corporate limit signs now, heading for the foothills. She pulled off the slab, onto a narrow trail that wound down the slope. When they were screened from the main road, she stopped and swung around in the seat to face him. The gun was trained on his abdomen.

  “I’ll make a deal,” she said. “Want to play?”

  He was watching her face. “What kind of a deal?”

  “Half the money in the briefcase, if you can get me to San Diego and then aboard a boat.”

  That sounded screwy. Dames don’t offer a guy fifty grand or so for a hundred-mile ride to the Coast, and a boat ticket across the Pacific. There was a catch in it, somewhere. Another thing: she was positive he had the briefcase.

  “If I have the briefcase, as you suppose,” he countered, “why should I split its contents with you?”

  “Because I know how to get out of town, only it will take two to do the trick. I can’t do it myself.”

  “Look,” Johnny said, getting mad again, “before we start making deals, let’s back up and straighten out a few things. I’m hotter than Death Valley because of you. The dead man in the front seat with me, when I woke up, was your husband. You killed him to frame me. Why?”

  “I didn’t kill him,” she said slowly. “Keep your shirt on and I’ll put my cards on the table, the whole deck.”

  “Keep it clean.”

  SHE FISHED a cigarette out of her purse with one hand, sat tapping it on her knee. “Let’s say, first, I’m in a racket.”

  “What kind of racket?”

  “Let’s just call it a racket. We had some—some merchandise coming in via this freight train. You were supposed to be bringing it in, in an old battered bag, to go with your hobo front.”

  Johnny was staring now, trying to keep pokerfaced.

  “You were supposed to jump when you saw the red car parked on the side of the road. That was me—the patsy. We didn’t know that the railroad would suddenly decide to hook two Diesels on this particular freight. Generally freights are barely crawling when they reach the top of the grade. Jumping would have been easy—”

  Instinctively Johnny felt the back of his head, with memories of that whistle post in the cinders. “Stunder—my husband—was playing it safe.

  He was waiting for the freight to pull into the Millburg depot before he came out to contact you. Then he’d drive up in his own car and wait for my all-clear signal, to make the deal with you.”

  She stopped, listening to a coyote wail off in the distance. “But you were hurt, and you weren’t carrying a bag. You passed out right after you got in my car. I didn’t know what to do, so I hailed a passing tourist for a ride into town. I couldn’t find Abel or Crook, and I presumed they were contacting you. I waited for an hour or more at the Apollo Club. Then I heard it on the radio. Tourists had found Abel dead in the car.”

  Her story sounded good, but evidently it was as full of holes as a plasterer’s sieve. For one thing, if her story was legitimate, if she and Stunder were happily married and working together, she’d have shown a natural animosity toward Johnny, her husband’s possible murderer. The missing briefcase also figured in the picture—not to mention this guy, Crook.

  Possibly she and Crook were doublecrossing Stunder. It could be plausible, for Stunder was a horse-faced man much older than the redhead, while Crook was a handsome, masculine devil of her own age.

  She handed him a smoke, and pointed to the dash lighter. Johnny took the cigarette and reached to put the lighter knob for contact. The gun was still on him, and she was edged over in the wide seat, too far away to risk a sudden lunge. Her bullet would be faster than his leap. But the lighter button gave him a sudden idea.

  When the gadget flipped out, he carefully lifted its glowing coil to her cigarette. Then, lightninglike, he swooped downward with it, and heard the sizzle of tender flesh as the hot steel caught her arm. She screamed, and in the split second it caught her off guard, he had the gun, and pushed her rudely back into the seat.

  He yanked off his tie, wrapped a burly arm around her and pinioned her arms before her pained surprise changed into rage. With the tie knotted about her wrists, he pulled her to his side of the seat, then got out, walked around the car and slid under the wheel.

  “You big dumb cluck!” she wailed. “Don’t you know they’ll kill you the moment you get back to town!”

  “We won’t go back to town. We’ll go to your place.”

  “That’s even worse. Crook might be there.”

  “He’s the guy I want to see. To see how he takes it when I tell him you doublecrossed him.”

  He was hoping for a bull’s eye, but the accusation didn’t change the expression on her face. “You big dumb cluck!” she said again.

  IT WAS the only ranch house in the vicinity, and it wasn’t hard to find. Johnny drove slowly, watching the road. He pulled off to the side presently and got out of the car, raising the trunk lid. There wasn’t anything in the trunk compartment that he could use as a rope—or was there? A single parcel was inside, wrapped in hemp. He ripped off the string and tested it. It was not too strong, but it might do the trick. He went around to the front seat.

  “You’ll love this,” he said. “Just imagine you’re in the dentist’s chair.”

  Without ceremony he flipped a handkerchief gag into her mouth and carried her to the trunk compartment. He tied her feet the best he could, stretched her out on the floor and closed the lid, first inserting a stick between the lid edge and tire lock, to keep it open enough to give her air.

  He got back into the car, turned on the lights and drove slowly up the driveway to the ranch house. He stopped at the car port.

  The wheels hadn’t stopped rolling before Crook lunged up from the shadows, a gun in his paw and rage on his face.

  “So it’s you!” he bellowed, “in Cherry’s car. Where’s the girl?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Johnny said.

  “I’ve got a way to find out,” Crook said, and the gun came up menacingly.

  “Not that way, Crook.” Johnny crawled out of the car. “Let me tell you a little bedtime story. I jumped off a train and came near bashing in my head. When I woke up on that comfortable cushion of Stunder’s car, old horse-face was beside me with a nice little bullet hole in his fine new shirt.”

  Johnny worked forward a step, to get away from the car, just in case. “Stunder was carrying a briefcase stuffed with greenbacks—about ninety grand worth, so I hear. There’s still a blank place in the story—what was Stunder doing with the briefcase, and who was to get it?”

  The rage in Crook’s face was uncontrollable. “You were—you cheap chiseler. You know all about the deal. You were bringing in the phony bills, four hundred grand in nice new twenties and fifties, and you were taking Stunder’s ninety grand in return. But you blew your top and killed him!”

  Johnny suddenly visualized the stack of counterfeit money in his battered suitcase, up in his hotel room. It still didn’t make sense. The briefcase containing the real currency was still missing. He was pretty certain that neither Cherry Stunder nor Crook had it, for if they did, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to put the finger on him.

  It looked as if Crook and Cherry had been trying to doublecross old horse-face. Mrs. Stunder had mentioned the fact that Crook was a flyer. Possibly they had their escape all arranged, but in some mysterious way the briefcase with the real McCoy was missing, holding up their escape.

  “You shot Stunder,” Crook was saying. “You’ve had plenty of time to pick up the briefcase. Let’s have it!”

  “You’re crazy—” Johnny began, and stopped. There was a movement in the shadows behind Crook. Johnny stood there, facing Crook’s gun, listening.

  The movement suddenly evolved into the figure of a man—a man with
a slight limp, and a pasty-white face that loomed up ghostly in the moonlight.

  “Johnny hasn’t got it,” a voice said. “He’s never even seen the briefcase, Crook. All Johnny’s got is the fake coin in his bag. Maybe he doesn’t even know about that. I’ve got the briefcase. This gat in my fist belonged to Stunder, and it’s got six bullets in it—all for you!”

  The kid! The hitchhiking kid on the freight train. The kid with a bum leg, and a pasty-white face. That explained everything—in one exploding flash.

  The kid, the pale-faced cripple he had mistaken for an outcast beating his way to the Coast via a freight train, was in reality a carrier for a counterfeit ring. Bring in the phony bills from the East, via a bum’s route, and pick up the real coin from Stunder—pretty clever. Crook and his airplane represented a quick way of distribution.

  Something had gone wrong, and he had been used as a fall guy.

  “You dirty doublecrossing cheat!” the kid was saying. “I risk my neck to bring in the phony bills. I have to wait until this egg jumps off to get off that rattler, rolling faster each minute. I have to hide until the girl gets him in her car, and leaves with a tourist. Then Stunder drives up and we make the switch. He’s supposed to get me on a northbound bus. But he’s worried when he sees his wife’s car, with you in it, slumped in the front seat. He hands me the bag, grabs my coin and says he has to beat it. Something’s gone wrong—I’m on my own.”

  The kid was like a wound-up watch spring releasing some of its tension.

  “Stunder starts to leave, and then I get a bright idea. There’s something phony about the whole setup. I’m getting the rush act too fast. I throw a gat on him and open the briefcase. Just like I thought—a lot of paper and a few big bills on the outside. He goes for his gun, and I beat him to it. He didn’t die right away, and the last word he says is that he’s been on the level. Somebody else took the big money out of the bag. You, Crook!”

  “Where’s Stunder’s car?” Crook asked.