Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  Sometimes Keenan, the magistrate, would drive down Sixteenth Street in his black sedan, and Mike Doolan’s bitter brown eyes would follow the man who had turned Danny Denning loose with a sixty dollar fine for bookmaking. Keenan lived in the suburbs, and sometimes Mike wondered what business brought the magistrate down to this section of the city.

  “Sure an’ it’s graft brings him down here,” Mike told himself. One day he saw the black sedan parked in front of a fire plug. He wrote out a ticket, smiling grimly, and was about to stick it under the windshield wiper when he heard the magistrate cursing at him from a window up above him.

  “Tear that thing up and throw it away, Doolan, if you know what’s good for you.”

  “You’re in front of a plug,” Mike reminded the jurist.

  “All right,” the magistrate grumbled. “I’ll come down and move it—Go peddle your papers.”

  Mike Doolan walked up the street, reflecting that Justice was a fiction, and wondering why he bothered going on being a cop.

  Still, he didn’t quit. He suffered the ridicule that was his daily lot now, and he kept Danny Denning under sharp surveillance.

  One day he followed the insufferable self-confident gangster down Allison Alley to Cumberland Street, saw Denning enter an office building and mount a flight of stairs toward an apartment several stories up.

  Mike Doolan’s lips tightened and he could feel the tempo of his heart beats climb, for as he watched the window of that apartment, he could see a blonde head moving, and then Danny Denning’s black, glistening hair, as he pulled the girl into his arms, up there.

  Mike Doolan stood in the shadow of a building across the street, thinking what he must do now, and the excitement was rising up higher and higher within him. Finally he stepped across the street, entered the building and climbed toward the apartment where Danny Denning was having a rendezvous with his blonde girl friend.

  When he reached the landing in front of the apartment door, his bulk caused noise on the straining wood. Suddenly the door of the apartment swung open and Danny Denning stood holding a gun in his hand.

  HE PUT THE gun away with a grimace of disgust when he saw it was Mike Doo.an. “You again, is it, Doolan? Y’know, I’m gettin’ kinda sick of you taggin’ me around town, sonny.

  “Is that right?” said Mike Doolan.

  Danny Denning’s blonde friend was standing behind the small time racketeer now, looking over his shoulder. The gambler was playing up to her as he sneered at Mike Doolan.

  “Matter of fact,” he said, “I got a good mind to phone a couple pals of mine, down in headquarters, and have you shipped out to some beat in the sticks, Doolan.

  “You’re a fresh guy, Denning. Only you had your innings, see? Now it’s my turn up to bat, and I’m ready to commence batting.”

  He moved close to the man, without warning, and swung his right hand, cuffing Danny Denning on the cheek. The blonde girl squeaked with fright and retreated into the room.

  “Good grief, Dan, watch out. He’s gone berserk!”

  Danny Denning was bouncing off the wall of the apartment, as the girl spoke. He was shaken up, was Danny Denning, and he was muttering vilely through his teeth.

  “Why, you screwy big ox, I’ll learn you to manhandle Danny Denning. I’ll—” He was trying to get that pistol back out of his pocket.

  Mike Doolan’s right leg came up and punted the pistol out of the gangster’s hand. It hit the ceiling, then dropped onto the carpet. Mike grabbed the startled little gambler by the front of his shirt and slapped him on either cheek, then clipped him with a short right.

  Denning was flung headlong to the other side of the room. He would have fallen if the blonde hadn’t caught him.

  Mike said agreeably, “What’sa matter, Danny? You don’t look happy.”

  The little man’s face was twisted with hatred. “Beat it into the other room,” he snapped at the blonde. “Phone the bulls an’ tell ’em Doolan’s up here, off his trolley an’ tryin’ to kill me.”

  “Go ahead,” Mike grinned at the girl. “I’ll have all the time I need, before they get here.”

  The girl retreated from the room, her eyes wide with fright. Mike said to Danny Denning, “Come on and fight, Danny. This ain’t even begun to be fun yet.”

  He hit Danny Denning and knocked him into a big sofa. The gambler put a frightened hand to his bruised chin and half-threatened, half-whined, “You ain’t getting away with this, pal. You’re way out of line. I got some friends at Headquarters. They’ll strip that uniform off you so fast you’ll think you been hit by a cyclone.”

  “Why,” grinned Mike, not worried, “that bein’ the case, I may as well make the most of my time. Stand up, Danny. There must be some scrap in a loud-mouth monkey like you.”

  There was. Danny tried to knee him. Mike caught the gambler’s leg, shoved him across the room, and tucked him neatly into the fireplace. It was a tight fit. His head seemed to get bumped against the bricks, on the way in, and Danny Denning became very unconscious.

  HE WAS STILL half out when the riot squad, came. They took both combatants into custody, took Mike’s gun away and rode him off to Headquarters like any criminal.

  “Kid,” said a fellow policeman, “you must be off your nut. Whatever made you think you could beat up on Danny Denning and get away with it? He’s got the fix in on Magistrate Keenan. They’re goin’ to boil you in oil, kid.”

  “Maybe,” grinned Mike.

  In court, the magistrate mounted the bench and listened gravely to the charges and counter charges. He listened with special attention to the description of the scene of battle. “You say this disturbance occurred in the apartment of a Miss Dolly Graham, at 8713 South Cumberland Street?”

  “That’s right, Your Honor,” said Danny Denning’s high-priced lawyer.

  “What was the nature of Denning’s business with Miss Graham?” asked the man on the bench.

  “Personal, Your Honor,” cut in Danny, and leered, despite the misshapen condition of his face.

  “I see,” said the magistrate. “You’ve been a frequent visitor in this court, Denning. Too frequent. I find you guilty of carrying concealed weapons, striking an officer, resisting arrest, and disturbing the peace. Two years.”

  “Two years!” raged Denning. “You can’t—”

  “Get him out of here,” said the magistrate, inspecting a hangnail. “You, Doolan, return to your duty.”

  Mike Doolan returned to his duty via Captain Regan’s office. “Son,” said that worthy, “I take me hat off to you. I’m givin’ you another stripe for your sleeve, as of today. How in the name of sin did you do it?”

  “Once,” smiled Mike, “I started to give Magistrate Keenan a parking ticket. He bawled me out from Miss Dolly Graham’s apartment.”

  He went out of there, his ears still ringing with the captain’s guffaws. He walked down toward Sixteenth Street, and for the first time in weeks his head was high, his shoulders squared, and his step showed no reluctance.

  POINTS SOUTH

  Flora Fletcher

  I drew an ace, and I needed it. With the pair that I already had, it established something substantial. Luck was going my way. I lifted my eyes from the cards to the face of Leo Gall, and I thought to myself again that it was like a fat olive with features. His eyes were screwed back into little puffs of skin as he examined his hand, and his pimento-red lips were pursed into the shape of a wet kiss. It was a face I didn’t like, though I pretended to like it for my health’s sake, so I slanted my line of vision off over his shoulder to the face of Hilda Hearn.

  Hilda was tired. About midnight she’d gone into the bedroom for a nap, but when she’d returned a couple of hours later, it was obvious that the nap had been too late and too short to do her much good. The muscles of her face had a tight, drawn look, her eyes were smudged, and her mouth was a soft scarlet smear. She slept too little and smoked too much, ate too little and drank too much, did too much of everything bad for her and too
little of anything good, but tousled and smeared and worn to the bone, she was still a lovely assembly of female parts. Sprawled on the sofa with a highball in her hand, she combed free fingers through copper curls and sent me a smoke signal from smoldering eyes.

  “One grand,” Leo Gall said.

  Beside me, between me and Leo as the betting went, Hugh Lawson cursed softly and bitterly, slapping his hand into the discard. His mouth and eyes were pinched at the corners by the long strain of losing, and his fingers shook as they fumbled a cigarette out of a limp pack and carried it to his lips. I did some quick calculation and figured he must have dropped at least twenty grand. Just about what I’d contributed myself to the fat welfare of our host. I also figured Hugh could afford it about as much as I could, which was not at all. He was a slim guy with a lean, hungry face and blond hair cut very short and square on top the way a lot of college boys wear it. He’d got most of his education in pool rooms and clip joints, but he looked a hell of a lot like a college boy.

  “Out,” he said.

  I put my faith in three bullets and met the thousand. I couldn’t bump it, because I didn’t have a good bump left. A couple of hundred in chips, that was all.

  “One raise, I’m a dead duck,” I said.

  Leo laughed softly and wetly behind a red, white and blue mountain. “Credit’s good, boy. With me, it’s always good.”

  Around the circle 90 degrees, Kal Magnus sighed and rolled his soaked cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other. His hand struck the discard and flew apart, but his expression was genial, signifying his indifference to luck that always ran one way or the other and would be good next time, or the next or the next, if it happened to be bad tonight. Being able to carry your luck comfortably from bad to good makes a hell of a difference in your attitude. Kal’s was bad tonight, all right, ten grand bad, but you’d have thought he was playing for matches.

  He said, “If you’re worried about me, you’re wasting it. I’m out.”

  Leo smiled. It was a very small smile, slightly sad. It was the one he’d been using all night. The one he used when he was looking down your throat.

  “No raise? That’s too bad. Well, you paid to see them, Andy, so have a good look.”

  He spread them slowly in ascending order, five little cards worth my last grand, and whichever end you read them from, going up or down, they came out straight. Better any time than three lousy aces.

  I added my junk to the discard and said, “Take it away.”

  He took it. On the ring finger of his right hand was a diamond worth more than the pot. In the thick nest of black hair growing above the second joint of the finger, it looked like a glittering egg. And it was then, watching his fat hands rake in my dough, that I got one of those crazy ideas a guy sometimes gets when it’s late, too late, and the world’s gone sour. It was then that I began to think what fun it would be to clobber him. We began to settle the score, and all the time we were settling it, I kept seeing those fat white fingers with the black hair growing out of them. I saw them over and over in a dozen repellent engagements—dealing cards that brought me no luck, dragging in the fat pots, creeping like slugs over the soft flesh of Hilda Hearn.

  I closed my eyes and kept them closed for half a minute, but the fingers were there behind the lids, so I opened them again, and the first thing I saw was his red, wet mouth. The lips were so soft and thick and full of blood. They looked as if they’d smash on his big white teeth like a glutted leech.

  I went sort of blind, I guess. Blind to everything and everyone but Leo Gall. And I functioned for a few seconds in the terrible urgency of a single grim compulsion.

  I stood up and leaned across the table and clobbered him.

  He got a glimpse of knuckles coming at him, and his face had, for a split second, a ludicrous expression of surprise. His chair rocked back on its rear legs, hung for a moment in balance, and then crashed over. He hit the floor on his shoulders and skidded like a clown on ice, but there wasn’t really anything funny about it. His head smacked the sharp edge of the frame of the sofa Hilda was sprawled on, and there was a dull, sodden sound like the bursting of a rotten melon, and he lay very still on his back with his fat gut rising like a strange and ugly growth from the floor, and it was not funny at all.

  Hilda stood up very slowly, the movements of her arms and legs possessing the unreal quality of action in slow-motion. She stood looking down at Leo. “Jesus,” she said. “Oh, Jesus.”

  Hugh Lawson’s breath whistled shrilly through his nostrils, and Kal Magnus heaved his ponderous bulk erect. He turned his eyes from Leo’s prone carcass to me, and his broad face was flat and still and hard as stone.

  He said tonelessly, “You tired of living, Andy?”

  I didn’t bother to answer. I went over and knelt beside Leo. I felt for his pulse and found it. Then I passed my hands swiftly over the obvious places for a gun, but there was no gun on him. I knew he would come out of it soon, and I didn’t want him coming with death in his hand. My death, I mean. Chances were it’d come soon enough. Soon and sudden, if I was lucky. Soon and not so sudden, if I wasn’t.

  Standing, I looked across the body at Hilda. Her lips were slightly parted, and the tip of her tongue appeared between them to slip slowly around the red circumference. Her eyes were hot and cloudy behind lids descending to veil an intense inner excitement.

  On the floor between us, Leo stirred and shuddered and came up jerkily from the hips, leaning back for support against braced arms. He shook his head from side to side and brought one hand forward and up across his split lips. He sat there on the floor and looked in a stupefied way at the smear of blood on his hand. At last, moving like an old, old man, he got one knee under him and rose slowly to his feet. His eyes were as dull and lifeless as dirty metal disks. They slid from face to face until they reached and remained on mine, and his voice was a gassy whisper escaping through loose teeth and blood and swollen flesh.

  “You dirty bastard! You scummy little louse! Get out of here! Get the hell out of here fast! And right now you better start living it up. Right now you better start to live up all your God-damn life in the next twenty-four hours, because maybe you’ll have that long and maybe you won’t.”

  Hilda took a step toward him, lifting one arm with a jerk, as if she were breaking ice in the joints. “Look, Leo. It was just one of those crazy things. Andy just went nuts for a second, that’s all.”

  He turned to face her. His mangled lips were working, and a trickle of saliva leaked out of one corner of his mouth and down across his chin. “The hell you say! So we just forget all about it, is that it? So we kiss and make up? Well, it’s nice to know you’re so damn concerned about the lousy punk. If that’s the way it is, maybe you better get the hell out, too.”

  “It’s not that way, Leo. You know it’s not that way.”

  His voice broke controls, skidding up to a high, feminine scream. “Get out! Get the hell out, you Goddamn tramp!”

  She stood very still for a moment, her breasts held high against her dress, and then she turned without speaking and went into the bedroom. She returned immediately in mink and went over to the hall door and out, still without speaking and without looking at any one of us. When she was gone, I helped myself to my hat and followed. Behind me, Leo’s shrill voice said, “Don’t try to run, punk. Wherever you go, wherever you try to hide . . .”

  There was more, but I never heard it, because I cut it off with the door and went down the hall to the elevator. Hilda had left the car in the lobby, and when I’d brought it up, Kal and Hugh still hadn’t come out of the apartment. Taking time to clear themselves, I thought. Making certain that none of Leo’s trigger men came looking for them in whatever good time was convenient for killing. On the same trip, probably, when he came looking for me. God knows I couldn’t blame them. I could blame them in no way for not wanting to share Andy Corkin’s suicide. Descending alone in the elevator, I cursed myself in the bleak and passionless futility of irrepa
rable idiocy, but it only came to the same result that most things had come to in the life of Andy Corkin. To nothing, that is.

  Outside by the curb, the taxi was waiting with its engine running. The back door opened as I came out, and I scooted across the sidewalk and inside. The taxi lurched forward, swerving out into the traffic lane, and Hilda came over against me with a kind of restrained violence, her body twisting around to a frontal approach, her soft mouth hungry and aggressive. I snarled fingers in her short copper hair and pulled her face down so hard that I could feel her lips flatten and spread and her teeth click sharply against mine. Her breath was hot and labored, and after a long time she twisted away and fell back in the seat, her breasts rising and falling in slow cadence with deep, ragged gasps.

  “Andy,” she said. “Andy . . .”

  “I just thought we’d better be making hay, honey.”

  “Don’t say it that way. Don’t ever say it that way.”

  “You heard Leo. Live it up, he said. Twenty-four hours, he said.”

  “Why, Andy? For God’s sake, why’d you do it?”

  “I went blind, honey. I saw his fat fingers, and I thought of you, and I thought of the fingers and you together, and so I smashed his ugly mouth. Besides, maybe it was just getting too late. Maybe I’m just a sour loser who should’ve stuck to penny ante. Who really knows what makes a guy do something crazy? He does it, that’s all. First thing he knows, it’s done.”

  “Now what, Andy? What’re you going to do now?”

  “Something pleasant, I hope. It’s up to you.”

  “You’ve got to get away, Andy. Just till I’ve had time to try to fix things.”

  “Run?”

  “Call it what you like. If I can’t get it fixed, I’ll run after you.”