Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  WHEN HE and Sally were settled in a quiet corner of one of those expensive French restaurants where the food costs more than the overhead, Oliver’s eager digestive juices were promptly thwarted.

  “Let’s just have an omelet,” suggested Sally. “They’re very good here, and we don’t have much time.”

  “Hey,” he protested, “What gives? A doll like you comes in here and demurely orders nothing but a cheap little omelet, you know what’ll happen? They’ll call the cops and have us run in on suspicion.”

  “Quit stalling around,” she ordered. “You know that Nocturne business is a phoney; we’ve got work to do.”

  “Aw, Sally,” he complained, perusing the listed varieties of omelet on the menu, “there’s nothing in that business. Nothing you can put your finger on.”

  “What you mean is there’s nothing you can put your fist on. The man who has a desk like that one doesn’t put his feet on it . . . nor does he eat his lunch off it.”

  “And too many people have good reasons for not liking his guts,” agreed Oliver. “I intercepted two more out in the hall and sidetracked ’em into their own offices.”

  “Come on, Buster,” coaxed the girl, “let’s give it a go, old boy.”

  The elderly waiter, coming up to the table, raised his eyebrows in Gallic surprise.

  “I’ve got better things to do with my time off,” grumbled Oliver. Then in French he’d picked up in the Rue Pigalle during the war, he ordered two cheese omelets. The waiter’s eyebrows stayed up all the way back to the kitchen.

  While the fact of a crime may be detected by a flash of intuition, it isn’t often solved by anything except long, dreary routine questioning. So Sally Ryan and Sgt. Ralph Oliver drew up a schedule and divided it between them.

  By the time they returned to precinct headquarters that night for briefing on a minor raid on a “tea parlor”, Sally had determined that Gunther Wade, distinguished publisher of The Gasp Group Inc., loved Nick Nocturne like a brother . . . like Cain did his brother Abel. Nick, it seemed, had an irritating habit of picking off and using up the most delicious of the new gift employees as fast as Wade hired them. Snatched them right out from under Wade himself, so to speak.

  With equal subtlety, and even more flattery, Sally had wormed her way into the confidences of sleek, energetic Barton Trask, an associate editor of The Gasp Group, Inc.

  “Sure Nick committed suicide,” he assured Sally. “Know why? He was dejected, that’s why. Everybody around here’s heard him crying for years that you can’t buy a good lead novel for twenty-five bucks nowadays.”

  But the heavy irony told Sally what she wanted to know about Barton Trask—that and his caustic analysis of Nick Nocturne’s editorial mistakes and blunders. Trask, it seemed, knew just how to put Murder Monthly into the bigtime slick-paper field inside of six months . . . if only he had a free hand. It looked as if he had just that now.

  Summing it up for her father, Sally pointed out: “It’s just too much to believe that, with so many people running around with motives for pushing Nocturne out a window, a guy like this Nick Nocturne would accommodate them by jumping out of his own accord.”

  “Grant you that, Sally,” admitted Captain Patrick A. Ryan, disgustedly poking at a heap of the paper-work he detested. “Guys like that want to live just for spite. Never heard of a first-class heel killing himself for any reason.”

  “Then why not give Ralph . . . Sgt. Oliver, I mean . . . a rain check on this narcotic deal?” she pursued. “It’s just a headquarters draft, anyhow. Strictly for the newspapers.”

  “Two good reasons right there,” he said wryly. “Headquarters and the newspapers. Furthermore, this Nocturne business has a clean bill from both headquarters and Corcoran. I can’t order an investigation over their heads on nothing but a shrewd guess. Sorry, Honey.”

  “Dismissed!” he ordered sharply, as an afterthought.

  DR. CARSON UPDIKE, Deputy Medical Examiner, fiddled with a letter-opener. Squinting across his desk at Sgt. Oliver he absent-mindedly performed an autopsy on his desk blotter which apparently had succumbed to some suspicious coronary affliction.

  “But in terms of the layman,” Oliver pressed, “what does all that mean, Doc?”

  Updike obligingly translated his medical description of Nick Nocturne’s remains. “Boy, was that guy a mess!”

  “I heard him land myself,” said Oliver slowly. “And I called on a flock of witnesses a policewoman on the scene had noted down. No question of his not having come from a long way up. But it struck me that there was hardly any blood. What I want to know is, why wasn’t there a lot smeared around?”

  “Could be because there were only minor lesions of the skin,” sighed the bored and weary Medical Examiner.

  “But I saw a couple of places where the skin was broken,” protested the detective. “Deep gashes.”

  “I know,” conceded the doctor wearily, “Hide was pretty well torn up around the head.”

  “Well?”’ said Oliver provocatively. There was a long silence.

  “I’m not a detective,” replied the doctor, defensively. “But I’d like to have the address of the correspondence school that taught you.”

  “Then the lack of blood could mean he was dead long before he hit the sidewalk?” queried Oliver eagerly.

  “Otherwise he must have taken off from Mars and died of old age on the way down,” said the doctor. “Funny how great the power of suggestion is,” he mused. “There was another obvious point I overlooked . . . or, rather, chose to misinterpret under the strong suggestion of suicide.”

  “You mean there was definite evidence of a cause of death other than the fall?” the detective pressed him.

  “Not exactly,” demurred the Medical Examiner. “But there was this distinct groove in the skull . . . about an inch wide and three-quarters of an inch deep. Ran almost the full length of the skull from forehead to base. I just chalked it up to his having landed head first on one of the expansion joints between the blocks of the sidewalk, but . . .”

  “But the tar joints have long since shrunk down below the level of the blocks!” Sgt. Oliver finished for him.

  “Exactly,” agreed the medico. “When I first noticed that groove crushed into the skull, I could see those expansion joints sticking up fresh and new . . . just about right to make that impress.”

  “I’m going over to check that sidewalk right now,” declared the sergeant.

  “Don’t waste your time,” advised Updike, tossing a half dozen large, glossy photographs into the detective’s lap. “Here are the photos of the body in situ, and they show the sidewalk joints clearly.”

  “I’ll take these with me, if you can spare ’em, Doc,” said Oliver briskly. “And give me a break on this, will you? Stall sending up a new report until morning, huh?”

  “Young man,” said the Deputy M.E., “Do you think I’m in such a tearing rush to inform my superiors of what a bumbling nincompoop I am? I’ll spend the whole night confirming suspicions, if you like.”

  Sergeant Ralph Oliver had just time for one more stop in downtown headquarters before reporting out at the precinct station. He almost ran up the dingy, echoing staircase to Fingerprint Identification Division.

  “Look, Ralph,” he pleaded with one of the print experts, “I’m just a precinct bum and I can’t get an order for an overtime job, but I need a process on the prints on that lunch tray in the Nocturne office. You’ll be able to match ’em with a record, I think. Also check ’em against the prints you picked up elsewhere in Nocturne’s office. Bet you a twenty you find them on the back of one of those steel-pipe chairs.”

  “Humh,” pondered the fingerprint man, studying a chart. “Chairs marked D, E, F, and G, that’d be. Okay. It’ll take about four hours of my time; but that figures out at five bucks an hour. You got a deal, brother.”

  THE “TEA PARTY” the precinct narcotics detail broke up that night proved to be almost as memorable as the one once staged in Boston Harbor
.

  The punks were pretty far gone by the time the stakeout men signalled for the raid, and three of them had guns. In the wake of artillery cover provided by uniformed men, Sgt. Oliver conducted a lively infantry skirmish with bare fists through two bedrooms and the kitchen of the sleazy flat.

  And in the squad car on the way back to the station, Sally had a brisk and decisive cat-fight in the rear seat of the police sedan with one of the two girls who had been in the flat.

  Wearily, but contentedly, Oliver checked the car in at the garage where the bits of feminine apparel, tufts of long hair, and isolated buttons and dislodged snap-fasteners would be swept out of the back seat and the car would be prepared to go back on the prowl with the morning shift.

  “Turned out pretty good at that,” he told Sally with satisfaction, when she emerged from the police matron’s office neatly and cleverly pinned, patched and painted back into presentable condition.

  “That was strictly for the birds,” she said. “Or maybe for the birdbrains. Speaking about brains, what did you get on the Nocturne Case?” He told her. Then she briefly outlined what she’d learned in the offices of The Gasp Group, Inc., including the fact that no witness could be found who had seen Nocturne leave his office by any exit save the window. Also that no one had seen anyone enter Nocturne’s office, including the man with the lunch tray.

  “But that doesn’t mean a thing,” she concluded. “Obviously someone did bring that tray in. Oh, and one more thing. That Gretchen Slarr, who was getting the brushoff from Nocturne since her novelty wore down, admits that she didn’t see Nocturne after ten o’clock in the morning. She got the order to cancel Mort Gage’s appointment by telephone.”

  “Telephone?” cut in Oliver. “Why telephone? I’d swear there was one of those interoffice squawk-boxes on his desk.”

  “That’s Momma’s little boy!” she encouraged him. “There was and is; what’s more, the glamorous Gretchen was too flustered by her emotions to be sure whether the call came from an inside or outside line. The girl at the switchboard doesn’t remember the call, either.”

  “Well, well,” said Oliver with satisfaction. “That seems to clear up one point. Too bad the Medical Examiner can’t be sure now as to just how long before he hit the pavement Nocturne was killed. That morgue cooler bollixed up the possibility of checking back by means of body temperature and degree of rigor. But it’s a cinch he wasn’t alive when that call was made.”

  They checked out with the desk sergeant to go across the street to an all-night diner to sweat out the last two hours of their shift over coffee.

  “But the pattern doesn’t add up to anything,” complained Oliver, moodily stirring his coffee and absently checking over the customers at the counter.

  “Sure it does, Buster,” Sally pointed out. “It spells alibi. Somebody went to a tot of trouble to spell it out good and clear.”

  “I get it,” said Oliver: “And naturally you’ve already checked his desk calendar to see who needed an alibi, because he was in Nocturne’s office—or had access to it—plus a more or less good reason for knocking him off.”

  “Well, yes,” said Sally hesitantly, “but it was no good. It was Nocturne’s morning for laying out the dummy on Murder Monthly. The lead novel is usually tied in with current news interests as closely as possible. You know, with whatever is the crime sensation of the month. So they don’t make up the magazine as far in advance as most magazines of the type are. So that means two days a month when he can’t break the day with appointments, except maybe one or two very important ones.”

  “Sure. Okay,” put in Oliver impatiently, “but none of the people with motives . . . at least none of those we’ve run across so far . . . could hope to build an alibi for the whole morning. And not one of them actually did have an ironclad out-for-lunch sign up at noon when the fake suicide was staged.”

  “That’s right,” agreed Sally. “But there was an appointment for eleven o’clock pencilled on his calendar in his own handwriting, Gretchen claims. All it said was ‘Crkpt . . . there’.”

  “Who’s this Mr. Crkpt? Sound like a Russian. Or a Balkan character of some sort.”

  “Don’t let your imagination run away from you, Buster,” she chided. “This is a police examination . . . not a Congressional probe. Gretchen Slarr translated it. Says it refers to a very well known mechanical engineering consultant named Cyrus P. Ward. He thinks he can write detective stories. Turns out some very weird stuff, according to Gretchen; and Nick Nocturne always called him CrackPot. Claimed that’s what the initials C. P. stood for.”

  “And that ‘there’ business,” cut in Oliver with a flash of inspiration, “obviously means in Ward’s office, instead of ‘here’, meaning Nocturne’s.”

  “You’re cutting ice with a buzzsaw now, Buster,” the blonde assured him. “By the frozen acre, too.”

  “Where’s this guy Ward’s office?” he demanded.

  “No office, Darling. A laboratory, if you please,” she told him. “And brace yourself . . . it’s on the 17th floor of the building across the street from Nocturne’s office.”

  “Oh, no!” he begged, in mock agony. “Not a mad scientist! Better even a bearded Balkan spy.

  JUST THEN, one of the countermen caught Oliver’s attention. He was waving a telephone handset. “For you,” he called. “Take it in the booth.”

  “Collect your gear,” he ordered when he returned from the telephone booth. “That was the desk. Said my boy, Ralph, downtown in Identification called up and said for me to come down and collect my double sawbuck.”

  “Buster!” she cried. “You mean you’ve got him taped already?”

  “Sure,” he said with an effort at modesty, “I had it figured as a hired killing. Just as soon, that is, as I had it figured as a killing. Characters like these editorial big-bugs don’t do their own killings.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, slowly and doubtfully. “Seems to me I’d prefer even the mad scientist angle.”

  “Come on, Honeybunny,” he urged, in expansive good humor. “Let’s go get this guy. Obviously it’s one of the regular hacks in the pay of some wise guy in that office. It was a pushover; all he does is go up to Nocturne’s office wearing a waiter’s white jacket and carrying a lunch tray. Nobody’s going to notice him. He cuts into the private office when the Slarr babe ducks down the hall for a minute. Then he conks Nocturne with one of those modern chairs made out of chrome-plated gaspipe. Then he stalls off Gage with the phone call, not knowing about the interoffice gadget. Promptly on cue at the stroke of noon he gives the body the old heave-ho through the window.”

  “Well done, Buster,” she gave in. “We’ll let it go at that . . . for now.”

  AT DOWNTOWN headquarters they found a weary, hollow-eyed identification expert awaiting them with the file on a certain Algernon William Wright.

  “He’s a petty hoodlum,” explained the print expert. “Works around cafes and bars, when working. Too dumb to wear gloves; too dumb for real dirty work.”

  “Just the kind of punk an amateur crime-buyer would pick out,” said Oliver defensively.

  “You’ll see for yourself,” said Ralph wearily. “Took it upon myself to put out a pick-up order for him. You can push these punks around about all you want; he’ll be here any time now. Here’s your twenty.”

  “G’wan,” growled Oliver, thrusting back the proffered bill, “You trying to make me ashamed of myself? I’m cutting you in on the credit for this one, too.”

  “I don’t buy this punk for big stuff,” affirmed the fingerprint man.”

  “Those big shots might not know a killer when they see one . . . but little Algy knows he’s a punk.”

  As if to illustrate the point, two huge policemen came in with a dried-up little man who had the furtive, terrified look of a rabbit who’d just ducked into a bear’s den to escape a dog.

  With Sally watching him, Ralph Oliver couldn’t lay a fatherly hand of good counsel on the little hoodlum. But i
t wouldn’t have done any good, and it wasn’t necessary; the little guy ran off at the mouth both literally and figuratively.

  “Honest,” he pleaded. “I didn’t know what the caper was till I read the papers. It ain’t clear even now; I jus’ know what I tol’ yuh.”

  What he told them, over and over again, was that a distinguished-looking man . . . “a real gennulmun” . . . had approached him in the cafeteria where he worked.

  The gentleman’s proposition was simple and involved only the simple and boyish crime of breaking a window. It was all a part of a joke he was playing on a friend. And, of course, these country club characters were always playing elaborate and expensive pranks on one another. All he had to do was bring up the lunch as an excuse to get up the service elevator and into the inner office corridors without being noticed.

  He was to allow plenty of time to get into Nocturne’s office unseen. He was to leave the tray on the desk and smash out one of the windows at exactly noon, or as close to it as possible. Then get out unseen. It was a lead-pipe cinch and very clean, for the money.

  “Okay,” conceded Sgt. Oliver finally, tiredly dragging on his coat again. He gave Sally a long speculative glance.

  “Come on, Snow White,” he said. “Here we go to the mad scientist’s den.”

  SALLY CALLED the precinct desk to check them out for the day’s duty and they took a cab uptown through the slowly awakening city streets. In the building opposite the shining modern structure which housed GASP! and its’ little brethren, Oliver easily found a janitor who was impressed by police badges.

  The 17th Floor suite which accommodated the activities of Cyrus P. Wade Associates, Consulting Engineers, had a slightly old-fashioned and spartan air.

  There was a barren, drafty waiting room furnished in heavy, practical golden oak, surrounded by a range of little private offices and drafting rooms, like monastery cells. Beyond that insulating partition of offices lay a large and lofty room fitted out with huge and heavy tables and ranged with a fantastic jungle of mechanical equipment. There were models of farm machinery and construction machinery. There were full-scale machines of doubtful purpose, in all stages of assembly.