by Jerry eBooks
By the time we got in, John Lash wasn’t even able to edge by Croy to pick up his gear. We had to get it and pass it up to him where he stood on the dock. John Lash looked down and he looked older in the face. Maybe it was the first time he had seriously thought about his own death. It shrunk him a little.
“Hold him for an hour. I’ll go away,” he said. He didn’t say goodbye. There wasn’t any room in him to think of things like that. He walked away quickly and a bit unsteadily. He went around the corner of the fish house. We’ve never seen him since.
Croy kept watching the place where John Lash had disappeared. Betty kept whispering to him. But in about ten minutes Croy stopped struggling.
“There, baby. There,” I heard Betty whisper.
He gave a big convulsive shudder and looked around, first at her and then at the rest of us, frowning a little as if he had forgotten something.
“Sorry,” he said huskily. “Real sorry.” And that is all he ever said about it. He promised that he was all right. I carried his stuff to their car. Betty bound his ankle with a strip of towel. He leaned heavily on her to the car.
6.
That’s almost all, except the part I don’t understand. The Deep Six is back up to about fifteen again. We have a compressor now, and new spots to go, and we did fine in the inter-club competitions this year. We’re easy with each other, and have some laughs.
But Croy never came back. He and Betty, they go out by themselves in a kicker boat when the weather is right. I don’t see any reason why he didn’t come back. He says hello when we see him around. Maybe he’s ashamed we saw him like that, saw that wildness.
One morning not long ago I went out alone on the Gulf side. I got out there early and mist hung heavy on the water. I tilted my old outboard up and rowed silently. It was kind of eerie there in the mist in the early morning. All of a sudden I began to hear voices. It was hard to tell direction but they kept getting louder. There was a deep voice, a man’s voice, talking and talking and talking, and every so often a woman would say one or two words, soft and soothing.
All of a sudden I recognized the voices as Croy’s and Betty’s. I couldn’t catch any of the words. I rested on the oars. It made me feel strange. I figured I could get closer and find out what in the world Croy could talk about for so long.
But then understanding came to me suddenly, and it wasn’t necessary to listen. I understood suddenly that there was only one subject on which a quiet guy like Croy could talk and talk and talk, and that the situation wasn’t over and maybe would never be over. And I realized that embarrassment was only part of the reason Croy didn’t come skin-diving with us any more; the rest of the reason was that the sight of us reminded him too strongly of John Lash. I turned the dinghy and headed off the other way until their voices faded and were gone.
Later in the morning after the sun had burned the mist off, I was spin casting with a dude and monofilament line over a weed bed when they went by, heading in, their big outboard roaring, the bow wave breaking the glassy look of the morning Gulf.
Croy was at the motor, Betty up in the bow.
Betty waved at me and Croy gave me a sort of little nod as they went by. I waved back. Their swell rocked me and then they were gone in the distance.
She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. You could look at her all day and not find anything wrong.
STAKEOUT
Don De Boe
This time, Case wasn’t going to send me out against a mad-dog killer with a rookie; I demanded that Case come himself. But why was he so pleased about it?
THE PANEL in the door had the name Lieutenant Case scripted across it, and underneath the name two more words said Robbery Detail. I opened the door and stepped into the room.
Lieutenant Case was sitting behind his desk, and I stood silently waiting for him to speak. His small, close-cropped head came up and I saw behind the smile on his face. Case’s smile wasn’t one of enjoyment, but rather a distortion of his facial muscles, revealing his thoughts.
“I’m sending you after Raglan,” he said slowly, in his high, whining voice.
I’ve got my share of guts, but the name Raglan made my body tense momentarily. Raglan was a deliberate, cold-blooded killer, who kept himself high with the jab of a needle. The papers were headlining his last foray against the public; he had held up a bank and gotten away with two hundred grand. It wasn’t the money the papers screamed about, it was the three people Raglan had killed making good his escape.
I knew Case’s hate for me was a definite reality. I tried to catch his beady eyes, but he constantly shifted around, avoiding my gaze. I saw his fat lips pull back over his tobacco-stained teeth in a tight smile. He shoved a paper across the desk toward me.
“Here’s where Raglan’s hiding,” he said. “Take Joe Moore and go get him.” The reason for Case’s smile was evident to me now. Moore was a rookie and not worth a damn against a killer such as Raglan. My lips compressed to a thin line as I glared at Case. His plan was a real cutie; he was trying to put me in the middle. I could refuse the assignment but only by having the accusation of being yellow hurled at me.
I felt the urge to reach out and slam my fist in Case’s face, but I didn’t. This vindictive attitude of Case’s had been the same for years. All the chance-taking jobs he had assigned to me in the past flashed before my eyes; my lips curled as I stared down at him. “You’re a gutless wonder, Case,” I said slowly, “But I didn’t think you’d try a thing like this.”
His beady eyes searched my face. “Meaning what?” he demanded testily.
“I’m not going for your phony tricks any more, Case,” I replied; “this time I’m asking you to come along.”
Case pushed his fat body back in the chair. A cold, malevolent smile crept across his face. I could almost feel he had anticipated my asking him to come along. I should have been wise right then, but I wasn’t.
He came to his feet. “Check us out, Darby,” he smirked. “I’ve been waiting for something like this.”
A WALL OF mutual silence separated us as we drove to Raglan’s hideout. I had no respect for Case as a man, and little more for the way he ran his office.
We set up our stakeout in a small clump of trees, not too far from the house where Raglan was hiding. The door to the house was closed, but there was a car parked in the driveway. I knew Raglan for a killer, who had nothing to lose and everything to gain; I knew he was merely waiting for the cover of darkness to make good his escape.
The darkness was closing in around us as I glanced sideways at Case and caught the expression on his face. A faint smile wrinkled his fat cheeks and he seemed almost happy with the way things were going. I didn’t like it; he had agreed to come with me far too easily.
I fingered the badge in my coat pocket. It was worn smooth with my years of service on the Force. A badge is a funny thing; it effects different men in different ways. For most of us, our badges were something to be proud of, something we had earned the hard way. But for a very few a badge was a shield of authority to hide behind; Case was that kind.
He didn’t rate the badge he wore. It was his kind the reporters took savage delight in exposing when they did something crooked; it was his kind that destroyed all the heroic things that good cops had done in the past.
The compassion in me began to come to the surface, and I felt sorry for Case as a coward who was trying to fill a man’s shoes. Then the pity in me turned to cold anger as I remembered how he had tried to frame me on this assignment.
My thoughts wandered back into the past while we waited silently for Raglan’ to emerge from the house. Being a cop wasn’t an easy job at its best; it was a thankless one in many respects.
I saw Case’s weak chin begin to tremble as our deadline on Raglan grew closer. I was engrossed in my thoughts and when Case nudged me I hardly noticed it.
“He’s coming out, Darby!” he whispered. “You circle around and get him, I’ll cover you from the rear.”
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nbsp; I STARTED toward Raglan, contemptuous of the cowardice Case was displaying. I edged in close to the killer, until we were less than thirty feet apart. Case’s whereabouts didn’t bother me now; my job was to capture or kill Raglan—not to worry about a coward who was cringing in my footsteps.
Raglan was moving slowly in the darker shadows near the house. He was wary, with the alertness of a hunted animal. The briefcase full of money was under his arm, and he held a gun in his fist.
Suddenly a shot shattered the stillness of the night and a bullet passed by my head. The shot had come from behind me. What was Case trying to do? Had his fear turned him into a crazed, irresponsible fool?
I turned slightly and heard Case’s gun bark again and I felt the burning fire of the slug as it chewed its way into the muscles of my shoulder. The impact of the slug forced me to my knees, and as I went down I heard Raglan’s gun pouring shot after shot in Case’s direction. I raised my gun until I had a perfect bead on Raglan’s head; then I squeezed the trigger and watched his body stiffen momentarily before he slumped to the ground.
Raglan’s death caused big headlines in the papers. Most of the reporters wrote the story just the way I thought they would. Lieutenant Case was a hero to the public. He was played up big, as an unselfish cop who had sacrificed his life in the line of duty. Even his burial was a big event, according him the full honors of a hero.
Everybody thought it was Raglan’s slug that had nailed me, and I didn’t tell them any different. The one-way ticket to Mexico I found in Case’s pocket after he was killed was never brought to light; I tore it up. Two hundred grand in Mexico would have been a lot of dough, even to Case.
But as I say, there’s a badge to think about and most of us try to live up to it. Especially me, since the door to my office now says “Lieutenant Darby” on it.
DOUBLE HOMICIDE
Robert Standish
Edward Langley’s first crime was a petty one, but it led him to
THIS is the story of a perfect murder. It was committed by Edward Langley and not even the fact that Edward Langley is sitting in the condemned cell of Wandsworth Prison, waiting for two more Sundays to pass before the end comes, can detract from the perfection of the crime he committed. It is a disquieting story, for it sets one to speculating about murder, particularly about undetected murder, because the fact is that if his name had been John Smith, or Bill Jones, or any one of a thousand other commonplace names, his would in all human probability have remained upon the list of unsolved crimes. But it is because his name is Edward Langley—and for no other reason—that he has an appointment with the hangman.
The genesis of the story is in June, 1944, at which time Edward Langley was living in a shabby block of one-room flats off Blomfield Road, Maida Vale, a frowsy part of West London where the sun of respectability was setting. He was twenty-four years of age, an accountant by profession. A poor physique had kept him out of the armed services.
We meet Edward Langley one evening as he eat drinking insipid wartime beer in the saloon bar of the Rose of Normandy, some three hundred yards from where he lived. His drinking companion, who lived in the same block, was a young Scottish electrical engineer, employed by the British Broadcasting Corporation, His name was Stewart McWatt. These two, living under the same roof and being much of an age, were on friendly terms. McWatt, as had often emerged in conversation, was a lonely young man. He had no other friends in London and, except for a married Bister living in South Africa, no close relatives.
When the pub closed, these two began to walk home together. Hardly had the pub door closed behind them when there came the terrifying roar of a flying bomb as the flame from its exhaust came into view. Its line of flight would send it directly over their heads. McWatt sprinted For a nearby air-raid shelter, which was quite empty. Langley, who was mildly a claustropbobe, leaped over a low wall and lay flat, face downward, on the lawn of a private house. As he did so, the flying bomb became silent and went into a steep dive, which ended on the roof of the air-raid shelter where McWatt had taken refuge.
When Edward Langley found him he was quite dead, without a mark of any kind on him. He had been killed instantly by the tremendous concussion. Some forty-odd people living in adjacent houses were also killed.
Until the moment when he found McWatt’s body, Langley had never done anything criminal. But when, by the Light of his electric torch, he saw his friend’s wallet protruding from a breast pocket, he yielded to the temptation or stealing it. Perhaps “temptation” is the wrong word, for he knew that the wallet contained nothing worth stealing. Only that same evening McWatt had borrowed a couple of pounds until payday. It was a whim, an uncontrolled impulse, not a temptation in the ordinary sense of the word. But it was destined to have far-reaching effects upon the life of Edward Langley.
In those hideous days there were too many unidentified bodies in London for one more to make any difference. When McWatt’s had lain unclaimed in the mortuary for the recognized period of time, it was buried as just one more nameless victim of indiscriminate bombing.
In McWatt’s wallet were all his identity papers, the ration cards, one pound in money and two or three private letters of no consequence. As yet, Langley had no purpose in mind, but he locked the wallet away with his own private papers. When he did not report the circumstances at once, it became out of the question to do so later without laying himself open to grave suspicions. So it was that Stewart McWatt vanished from the earth, leaving no trace. Perfunctory inquiries were set on foot by his employers, and that was that.
The ration books revealed that McWatt had been a registered customer at a big food shop in Willesden, where he worked. Langley yielded to the temptation of using these and thus availing himself of double rations. So, as Langley, he continued to buy his food in Kilbura, while, as McWatt, he shopped in Willesden. Dealing with a big organization, the impersonation was absurdly easy. Everyone was too busy to question his identity. Already the original crime had led to another. It would lead to still more before the talc was told.
In the latter part of 1945, when London lights had been turned on after a lapse of six years, Langley went to see a play at a theater in the Strand. During the first act the fur wrap of a woman sitting immediately in front of him slipped off her shoulders. Almost simultaneously there was a cascade of green fire as a collar of square-cut emeralds fell at Langley’s feet. Allowing his own raincoat to rail, it gave him an excuse to retrieve it and at the same time steal the emerald collar.
Ostensibly going out for a smoke in the interval, Langley left the theater with the gems in his pocket. At home, a brief examination convinced him that he had stolen an extremely valuable piece of jewelry. This was confirmed three days later, when the insurance underwriters advertised that they would pay a reward of two thousand pounds for its return and “no questions asked.”
Now, it so happened that the firm of accountants for which Langley worked had once recovered some valuable property for a client by employing an unsavory character named Henry Ansell, ostensibly a pawnbroker, but suspected of being a receiver of stolen property. Langley knew Ansell by sight and knew that he lived in a small detached villa in Willesden, not far from the shop where McWatt had been a registered customer.
Ansell opened the door to Langley and recognized him from having seen him in the office. Not much escaped Henry Ansell’s beady little eyes. After some verbal sparring and circumlocution, Langley produced the emerald collar. Every fence in London and the gem dealers in Amsterdam, Antwerp and elsewhere on the Continent, knew all about the loss of this valuable piece of jewelry. Ansell recognized it at once by the description. It was his business to know such things.
“I’ll give you three ’undred quid for it,” he said with well-simulated indifference.
“And then, I s’pose, you go off an’ claim the two thousand quid and no questions asked. Is that it? Like hell! I can collect the two thousand from the insurance underwriters, and without any risk.”
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p; “All right, all right!” said Ansell with a grin. “Hold your shirt on. There’s no harm in trying, is there. What d’you want for it?”
“Now you’re talking,” said Langley. “The way I figure it is that if the insurance underwriters are willing to pay two thousand pounds, it ought to be worth ten thousand at least. I’ll take three thousand pounds.”
“Give you twenty-five ’undred!”
“All right, it’s a deal,” replied Langley, who realized the risks attached to the “no-questions-asked” offer, which, under the law of the land, could be construed as compounding a felony and was not therefore binding. He left Ansell’s house with twenty-five hundred in one-pound notes concealed in a brown paper bag.
Now that he was a capitalist in a small way, Langley’s horizon began to widen. In the office he learned of several “good things” before the public got wind of them. Accountants are well placed for that kind of thing. It was not long before the twenty-five hundred had been turned, by judicious speculation, into eight thousand pounds.
Langley still had no definite purpose in mind, but with every day that passed he saw new and advantageous possibilities in the possession of two widely disparate identities. Vaguely nefarious plans were forming slowly. The train of thought set up persuaded Langley that another banking account in the name of McWatt might be useful, so he opened one at a busy branch bank in the East End. In a mean street some four hundred yards distant from the bank, he rented two cheap rooms, accounting for his frequent absences by saying that he was a commercial traveler. Four or five days weekly he slept, in Maida Vale and on the others in the East End under the name of Stewart McWatt. There was the thought, too, that if the income-tax people ever became too curious about the affairs of Edward Langley, it would be simple enough to transfer all liquid assets to Stewart McWatt. The converse, if the need arose, would be equally simple, and there was nothing to connect the two.