Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  “That’s fantastic,” he replied. “I couldn’t harm a hair of her poor old head. Why, I’m the one who’s kept her alive as long as this. But I’m a doctor and I know she’s dying, and since she’s dying I might as well see the undertaker gets her out before the relief investigator arrives.”

  He looked me full in the face. “That’s only common sense,” he said. “And I’ll give her a nice funeral on the insurance money, too.”

  I was still talking against my own best interests, my best interests being for him to keep hanging around and buying me blockbusters. But I was getting tight and I said, “If you think she’s dying why aren’t you up there with her?”

  He said, very serious, “You’ve got a point. A telling point. Fact is, I don’t want to be alone with her when she dies, Jack. I’m a drunk. I might get the horrors. You could do me a favor, Jack.”

  Uh-uh, I thought, here it comes. I’m old enough to know guys don’t buy you three blockbusters in a row without expecting something. Usually with guys like me who are big and young and kind of rough, it’s the fags slumming on Skid Row who make the propositions. Sometimes they only want you to come up to their fancy Park Avenue apartments and beat the holy hell out of them. That’s a funny kind of kick, you ask me. But this guy wasn’t gay and he wasn’t any slummer. He was a wino who belonged right where he was—on the Bowery.

  He was saying, “I’d appreciate it a lot if you’d come up with me, Jack. We can pick up some bottles of wine on the way. Enough to last all day. I’d like you to be there when she dies, just so I could have a little company. A man needs a friend at a time like that.”

  It’s funny the things an alky will do to get the stuff. I knew damned well he was framing me somehow and I thought he might be planning murder, but all I was thinking about was those bottles of wine he was going to buy.

  I said, “Well, maybe if I could have another blockbuster first. It’s quite a walk.”

  “Sure,” said the doc. “Put two ryes in my friend’s sherry this time, bartender.”

  The Bowery is used to sights, but the procession we made on our way to Hester Street was one that attracted attention. The blind old dog could hardly walk at all and he moved along in his zombie fashion putting one stiff leg out in front of the other, his nose scraping the sidewalk like a bloodhound on the scent. The hangover and four blockbusters, including a double, had made my own legs wobbly. And the doc was glaze-eyed drunk and stared straight ahead like he was hypnotized. We stopped at a liquor store and bought half a gallon jug of wine plus an extra fifth, just in case the old lady didn’t die right away and we might need it. There were several flights of steps to climb in doc’s tenement, but we didn’t mind ’em too much because we stopped on each landing and had ourselves a snort. I carried the jugs and the doc carried the blind and crippled old dog upstairs.

  The doc’s flat was a railroad, three tiny rooms in a row. The first one was the kitchen with an oil stove and a sink and an old fashioned ice box and a table and some chairs in it. The second was the doc’s bedroom. The door to the third was closed. The place was pretty bare and was furnished with stuff from junk shops, but the doc had kept it neat and clean. I guess it was his hospital training. Most drunks like doc are pretty messy.

  The doc told me to sit down in the kitchen. He left the jug and the dog with me. Then he tiptoed to the old lady’s room, the closed one, and opened the door. He came back in a minute or two. He put a finger to his mouth and said, “She’s asleep now.” But he didn’t close her door.

  We sat in the kitchen drinking wine and talking about this and that and once or twice I nodded off and put my arms on the kitchen table and slept maybe an hour or more. Every time I woke up the doc was there. He was one of those winos that seems to drink himself sober. Each time he’d tell me the old doll was still sleeping. The old dog would be sleeping, too, snoring loud.

  Once I woke up and saw there was hardly a drink left in the half-gallon jug and that we’d have to start on the fifth if the old lady didn’t die pretty soon. I figured the vino wasn’t lasting as long as the doc had thought it would till I looked out the window and saw it was dark. We’d got to the flat before noon. Now it was night already. A drunk sure loses track of time, sleeping and waking up like I’d been doing.

  The doc looked worried. He said, “It’s getting late and the investigator comes tomorrow. I’ve got to get old Marge out of here.”

  I was rumdumb and stary-eyed and the nasty part of sitting there and drinking and waiting for a sick old woman to die didn’t mean a thing to me. I was only worried if the wine would last. I said, “You mean she’s already dead and the undertaker hasn’t come to get her?”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “She hasn’t died. Not yet, she hasn’t.”

  Then he went over and shook the old blind dog named Pasteur and woke him up. He said sharply, “Come on, Pasteur. We’re going to show old Marge the new trick that you’ve learned.”

  Like I say, I was rumdumb and stary-eyed and my brain was numb from the blockbusters and the Pete and I just sat there grinning like a halfwit, not realizing what the hell he was up to.

  “Play dead, Pasteur! Play dead!” he said.

  The poor old dog got down on his side and after a few painful tries he rolled over on his back and lay there with his stiff legs stuck up in the air and the milky cataracts over his eyes glowing in the ceiling light. The doc had told me all about the old doll identifying herself with the dog, but I was so drunk, I’d forgotten.

  The doc had an old-fashioned battery radio in the kitchen in one of those dome-shaped stained-wood cabinets. He turned a dial. For a minute nothing happened. Then there was the most God-awful blast of shrieking sound I ever heard in all my life. I jumped half-way to the ceiling. He grinned at me, turned off the radio, said, “You’re nervous, Jack. You need a drink. The radio always does that when you first turn it on. I wanted to show you how well-trained the dog is. He hasn’t even twitched. You can’t even see him breathing. An atom bomb could go off and he wouldn’t move until I snap my fingers.”

  The old dog hadn’t moved. He still looked about as dead as any dead thing I ever saw. But the sudden blast of noise had awakened the old woman. She was calling to him in a croaking voice. The doc said, “Come out here, Marge, and take a look at poor old Pasteur.”

  To my drunken eyes, Marge was a shapeless bundle in an old gray wrapper with a pale face and toothless mouth and clouded eyes and wild white hair. She looked like she must be about a hundred. She hobbled slowly toward the kitchen. She walked as stiff as the old dog.

  Finally she saw the dog lying there and she let out a bloodcurdling scream, the most awful sound I ever heard. “He’s dead!” she shrieked. “He’s dead!”

  The doc said nothing. He just sat there looking kind of interested, like one of those scientists who do things to white mice.

  I couldn’t say anything, either. I was too stupefied.

  Marge’s scream changed to a kind of gurgling in her throat. Her face started turning black, right there in front of my eyes, like she was choking to death. Then she crumpled to the floor, real slow, like one of those trick motion pictures you’ve seen.

  I’ve lived rough and I’ve seen some things but that was the most horrible thing I ever saw. Between the booze and the shock I couldn’t move. Not for several minutes. I just sat there with my mouth open, kind of gasping.

  The doc kneeled down beside the old woman and felt her pulse. Then he went into his room and got a stethoscope and listened to her chest. Finally he got up, cool as you please, and said, “She’s dead. The shock was too much, seeing the dog like that. I’ll have to call a doctor to issue a death certificate. And then the undertaker.”

  He noticed the old dog, still stiff there on his back, and grinned. He snapped his fingers, said, “It’s all right now, Pasteur. You did the trick just fine.”

  He said to me, “You’re sober enough to know what you just saw. A perfectly natural death. An old woman with a h
eart ailment. She came out here and keeled over with a stroke, a heart attack.”

  The old dog finally scrambled to his feet. And I came to life, too. I swung one at the doc. I was so drunk and weak I couldn’t have hurt a healthy fly, but it was a fluke punch and it landed right on the point of doc’s chin, the button. He went down and his head banged hard. He lay there with his eyes staring up at me and they looked as sightless as the old dog’s eyes.

  It’s hard to say why I swung at him. It wasn’t feeling sorry for the old woman made me do it. In a way, her dying was what they call euthanasia, mercy killing. But when I was a kid back in Ohio I had a dog. It was a little fox terrier named Spot. I guess Spot was the only living thing I ever cared much about. I cried my eyes out when he died. I remember that, all right.

  What I did next was pure instinct. I stuck the fifth of wine in my pocket. I figured I was going to need it. I’d seen the doc had bills left from his relief check when he paid for the liquor. He’d had them in an old wallet in the inside pocket of his coat. I bent down and got the wallet.

  I guess the doc had a weak heart, too. Anyway, when I leaned down to get the wallet my hand was up against his chest. And his heart wasn’t beating. I wonder who’s going to get the old doll’s insurance money. You can buy all the Sneaky Pete on the Bowery with two grand in your jeans.

  I picked the old dog up in my arms. He was heavy, but I ran down four flights of steps with him. I brought the old dog here. He’s right alongside me now. The dog and the bottle. I had to give the clerk downstairs $5.75 of the doc’s money for this cubbyhole I’m in. Six bits for the room rent and five bucks bribe for letting me bring the dog up. I guess you could get a big room in the Waldorf-Astoria for that kind of money, but maybe they don’t take dogs and winos.

  I don’t know what I’m going to do about the dog. Maybe I can give him to some home for dogs like the SPCA runs. I don’t understand at all why I took the dog in the first place, any more than I understand why I hit the doc. Maybe it was because I remembered my own dog, Spot. Maybe it was because I was afraid the blind and helpless dog would starve to death if I left him up there in the room with two people who couldn’t feed him.

  Mostly, though, I think it’s just that I want to try to make it up to the poor old dog for what the doc did to him. People like the doc and the old doll, Marge, and me don’t count. We stumbled over something a long time ago and we took the wrong turn and landed on a street called Skid Row. The doc and the old doll are dead anyway. I’m still young and if it was only the booze with me, maybe I could join Alcoholics Anonymous or something and start all over again. But a city croaker told me some time back that this thing I got in my throat that keeps me from taking big swallows is going to kill me pretty soon, booze or no booze.

  But the dog, he’s different. All he ever wanted to do was please the doc and this old doll. He’s old and crippled and blind and he’s got sores on him and he hurts all over, but he kept right on trying to please the doc and the old doll by sitting up on his rump and doing tricks for them.

  So I say it’s not right what the doc did to the old dog.

  He made the dog a murderer, that’s what he did.

  IDENTITY UNKNOWN

  Jonathan Craig

  The cheap furnished room in the brownstone where the girl had been murdered was so cramped that it was hard for Walt and the assistant M.E. and me to keep out of each other’s way. The photographer and the other techs had finished half an hour ago and gone back to the station house. I’d put a patrolman at either end of the third-floor corridor to keep the crowd back. From the noise that came up both the front and back stairs, it seemed that half of New York’s west side must be down there.

  The building super was talking to the two ambulance attendants in the hallway just outside the door. He was beginning to rub on my nerves. The M.E. had stripped the girl, of course, and the super was trying his damnedest to get a clear gander at her.

  “Relax, Jacobson,” I told him. “You’ve seen young girls before. Wait for us down the hall.”

  He gave me a hard look, but he moved away.

  The M.E. pulled the sheet up over the girl’s body. “That’s it,” he said.

  I motioned for the ambulance attendants to take her away. When the body was gone, and I’d shut the door, the M.E. sat down on the side of the bed and lit a cigar.

  “She had a lot of living left to her,” he said. “She was about eighteen, I’d say. No older.” He shook his head. “Damn shame.”

  “You find anything besides those lumps on her jaw?” I asked.

  “Not a thing, Dave. I won’t know for sure till I post her, of course, but right now I’d say the cause of death was a fractured skull.”

  “Those bumps didn’t look so bad though,” Walt said dubiously.

  “That doesn’t mean much,” the M.E. said. “When a person’s hit hard enough on the chin, the force of the blow is transmitted to the point where the jaw hinges on the skull. That causes a fracture, and a lot of times it’s fatal. The brain’s a semi-solid, Walt, and it doesn’t take much to damage it, or even tear it away from the skull altogether.”

  I nodded. “The skin wasn’t broken, so the murder weapon was probably somebody’s fist. And besides, if the killer had used a club or something, say, he’d have hit her almost anyplace else but on the jaw.”

  The M.E. took a deep drag on his cigar. “How’d you boys make out?”

  “No good,” I said.

  “No identification at all?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “Yeah,” Walt said. “The only clothes in the room were the ones she had on. Nothing in the closet, not even a suitcase. And nothing in the dresser. No letters. No anything. She must have used this room for something else besides living in it. We did find a purse, but there wasn’t any identification in it. If she had any identification at all, then it must have been in a wallet, and somebody took it along with him.”

  “You’re sure she wasn’t attacked, Doc?” I asked.

  “I can’t be positive until I get her downtown, Dave. But I’d say no. There’s no evidence of that at all. Her lipstick was a little smeared, you noticed, so she’d probably been kissing somebody. But I don’t think there was anything more than that.”

  “I’ve got a hunch this is going to be one of the tough ones,” Walt said. “It just smells tough, if you know what I mean.”

  The M.E. got up and walked to the door. “Well, the sooner I get started on the autopsy, the sooner I’ll know whether I can give you any more help.”

  Walt went over to the open window and sat down on the sill. “You got any ideas, Dave?” he asked.

  “Just the shoes,” I said.

  “The shoes? What about them?”

  “The rest of her clothes are going to be hard to trace,” I said. “They’re nice enough, but they’re just like a million other garments. They aren’t expensive, and all they’ve got in the way of labels is the manufacturer’s name. They could have been bought in any of a thousand places, all over the country. But the shoes are something else again. They’re Jules Courtney shoes, and that makes them just about the most expensive shoes she could buy.”

  “So?”

  “They can be traced. The Jules Courtney outfit stamps all their shoes, not only with their trade name but with the name and address of the retailer to whom they’re shipped. This girl’s shoes were bought at a store in Atlanta, Georgia, Walt.”

  “Fine. Nothing like an out-of-town corpse on your hands.”

  I moved toward the door. “Let’s take another crack at that super.”

  We left a patrolman in the murder room and took the super down to his living quarters in the basement.

  He was middle-aged, surly, and about half drunk. “I told you guys I don’t know nothing about the girl,” he said. “She come in looking for a room last Friday. She paid me a week in advance, and that’s all I see of her.”

  “You told us before that you didn�
�t know her name,” I said. “How come? You had to sign a receipt for the rent, didn’t you, Jacobson?”

  “Receipt? Hell no, I don’t sign no receipts. It’s too much trouble. If people don’t like the way I run this house, then they can go live someplace else.”

  “She didn’t even tell you her name?”

  “I told you once. No. She asked me for a receipt, and I said no dice—so what’d I care what her name was?”

  The wall behind Jacobson’s bed was covered with photographs torn from magazines and newspapers. Nothing but girls. Some in bathing suits and some nude. Walt walked over to look at them.

  “Kind of like the ladies, eh, Jacobson?” Walt said.

  “All right, so I like girls. Who doesn’t, for God’s sake?”

  “We’ve talked with the other people on the third floor,” I said. “Nobody knew the girl at all. Nobody had seen her. They’d never even heard her in there. She have any company, so far as you know?”

  He shook his head. “As long as the tenants don’t bust up the furniture, I don’t ask no questions. I don’t spy on them. I just plain don’t give a damn what they do. Maybe she had company, maybe she didn’t; I don’t know.”

  “You mean to say you had a girl living in your house almost a week, but you never saw her but once, and never heard any of the other tenants say anything about her?”

  “That’s right. How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “How about when you took towels and linen up there?”

  “Towels and linen ain’t due till tomorrow.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  He moistened his lips, staring at me. “You got nothing on me, copper.”

  “Answer the question,” I said.

  “You going to take me down?”

  “I’ll damn well take you down if you don’t open up.”

  “I ain’t saying till I have to.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The people I was with—well, I don’t want to cause no trouble.”