Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  The surprise and horror in Handsome’s face were deeper even than Curt’s had been. All the hours he must have spent planning the way it would be . . . and now he, too, was in her way. She’d knocked him out of her life, because I’d stepped into it.

  He looked as though somebody had hit him in the chest and left a dirty brown stain on his shirt. He rocked backward under the impact of the bullet but his knees buckled first and he toppled forward and fell slowly down to the floor.

  I didn’t move. I stared at him, knowing he was dead. I didn’t have to touch him. His gun lay on the ground at my feet. I didn’t touch it either.

  Celia’s voice seemed to be coming at me from across the widest everglades. I could hardly hear her.

  “You’ll say you shot him, Jim. It’ll look better that way. He was prowling and you shot him. He really was prowling, wasn’t he? They won’t even hold you. Then we’ll meet, in Rio—anywhere. But we won’t have to stay, Jim. We can come back, live on the west coast or in the northwest. Anywhere, in fact. Jim, it’ll be like you wanted!”

  Like I wanted. I’d told her I’d do anything to have her and she’d dealt me in. Her hand was double-murder and she was making me her partner. I heard her that first night saying You might be held to that. And soon.

  I was hearing Curt Carmic asking if I thought I’d have her, if I thought I’d be different than all the other men she’d had. Old men and new money . . .

  I was Number One on her hit parade now. I’d won the jackpot—the quarter million dollars and Celia—because I’d owned a ‘copter, and was six-two and rugged and had fallen in love with her. But six months from now, a year? I felt Handsome looking up at me, sightlessly, and was sorry for him.

  Who will be next, Celia? What man will you want tomorrow, next week, next year? How will I get it, Celia, when I’m the one who stands in your way?

  She was staring at me, lips parted, breathing hard, reading my thoughts, the questions in my eyes. “You don’t love me,” she whispered softly. “You’re like the rest of them. Just talk. I killed for you—and you’re afraid of me. You’ll turn me in, won’t you? You’ll tell them. All this money—and you’d tell them.” Her voice rose, was almost a shriek.

  I lunged as the gun came up in her hand. I grabbed her right wrist; the satchel flew out of her left hand. I twisted hard.

  She fought at the trigger, and never fought me at all. Her arm went limp and I heard the gun blast between us, rocking the very earth. For a moment she quivered as though in a spasm and then she relaxed all over. I held her to keep her from falling. But it could do no good. She was falling away from me.

  I let her down gently. She was no good, a killer. Mad, maybe, for all I knew. But all the same, my eyes blurred as I got into my car to go for the sheriff.

  THE PLUNGE

  David Goodis

  Seven out of ten are slobs; he was thinking. There was no malice or disdain in the thought. It was more a mixture of pity and regret. And that made it somewhat sickening, for he was referring specifically to the other men who wore badges, his fellow-policemen. More specifically still, he was thinking of the nine plainclothesmen attached to the Vice Squad. Only yesterday they’d been caught with their palms out, hauled in before the Commissioner, and called all sorts of names before they were suspended.

  But, of course, the suspensions were temporary. They’d soon be back on the job, their palms extended again, accepting the shakedown money with the languid smile that seemed to say, Its all a part of the game.

  He’d never believed in that cynical axiom, had never let it touch him during his seventeen years on the city payroll. From rookie to Police Sergeant and on up to Detective Lieutenant he’d stayed away from the bribe, rakeoff and conniving and doing favors for certain individuals who required official protection to remain in business.

  Of course, at times he’d made mistakes, but they were always clean mistakes. He’d been trying too hard or he was weary from nights without sleep. It was honest blundering and it put no shadows on his record. In City Hall he was listed Grade-A and they had him slated for promotion.

  His name was Roy Childers and he was thirty-eight years old. He stood five-feet-ten and weighed a rock-hard one-ninety. It was really rock-hard because he was a firm believer in physical culture and wholesome living. He kept away from too much starches and sweets, smoked only after meals, had a beer now and then, but nothing more than that, and the only woman he ever slept with was his wife.

  They’d been married eleven years and they had four children. In a few months Louise would be having the fifth. Maybe five was too many, considering his salary and the price of food these days. But, of course, they’d get along. They’d always managed to get along. He had a fine wife and a nicely arranged way of living and there was never anything serious to worry about.

  That is, aside from his job. On the job he worried plenty. It was purely technical worriment because he took the job very seriously and when things didn’t go the way he expected, he’d lose sleep and it would hurt his digestion. When he’d been with the Vice Squad, it hadn’t happened so frequently. But a year ago he’d become fed up with the Vice Squad, with all the shenanigans and departmental throatcutting and, of course, the never-ending shakedown activity he saw all around him.

  He’d requested a transfer to Homicide, and within a few months his dark brown hair showed grey streaks, pouches began to form under his eyes, the unsolved cases put creases at the comers of his mouth. But mostly it was the fact that Homicide also had its slobs and manipulators, its badge-wearing bandits who’d go in for any kind of deal if the price was right.

  On more than one occasion he’d been close to grabbing a wanted man when someone tipped off someone who tipped off someone else, with the fugitive sliding away or building an alibi that caused the District Attorney to shrug and say, “What’s the use? We’ve got no case.”

  So that now, after eleven months of working with Homicide, there was a lot of grey in Childers’ hair, and his mouth was set tighter, showing the strain of work that demanded too much effort and paid too little dividends.

  He was sitting at his desk in Homicide, which was on the ninth floor of City Hall. His desk was near the window and the view it gave him from that angle was the slum area extending from Twelfth and Patton Avenue to the river. Along the riverfront the warehouses looked very big in contrast to the two-story rat-traps and fire-traps where people lived or tried to live or didn’t care whether they lived or not.

  But he wasn’t focusing on the slum-dwellings that breeded filth and degeneracy and violence. His eyes sought out the warehouses, and narrowed in concentration as they came to rest on the curved-roof structure labeled “No. 4” where not so very long ago there’d been a $ 15,000 payroll robbery, with one night-watchman killed and another permanently blinded from a pistol-whipping.

  He’d been assigned to the case three weeks ago, after coming to the Captain and saying it looked like a Dice Nolan job. For one thing, he’d said, Dice Nolan was a specialist at payroll robbery, going in for warehouses along the riverfront and using a boat for the getaway. Nolan had used that method several times before they’d caught up with him some ten years ago.

  They gave him ten-to-twenty, and according to the record he’d been let out on parole this year—in the middle of March. Now it was the middle of April and that just about gave him time enough to get a mob together and plan a campaign and make a grab for loot.

  Another angle was the pistol-whipping. Dice Nolan had a reputation for that sort of thing, always going for the eyes for some weird reason planted deep in his criminal brain. Childers had said to the Captain, “What makes me sure it’s Nolan, I’ve checked with the parole officers and they tell me he hasn’t reported in for the past ten days. He’s on a strict probation and he’s supposed to show them his face every three days.”

  The Captain had frowned. “You figure he’s still in town?”

  “I’m betting on it,” Childers had said. “I know the way he o
perates. He wouldn’t be satisfied with a fifteen-grand haul. He’ll stick around for a while and then go for another warehouse. He knows every inch of that neighborhood.”

  “How come you’re wise to him?”

  “It goes back a good many years,” Childers had said. “We were raised on the same street.”

  The Captain was quiet for some moments. And then, without looking at Childers, he’s said, “All right, go out and find him.”

  So he’d gone out to look for Nolan and the search took him along Patton Avenue going toward the river, past the rows of tenements where now they were strangers who’d been his childhood playmates, past the gutters where he’d sailed the matchbox-boats, unmindful of the slime and filth because it was the only world he’d known in that far-off time of carefree days.

  Days of not knowing what poisonous roots were in the squalor of the neighborhood. Until the time when ignorance was ended and he saw them going bad, one by one, Georgie Mancuso and Hal Berkowski and Freddie Antonucci and Bill Weiss and Dice Nolan.

  He’d pulled away from it with a teeth-clenched frenzy, like someone struggling out of a messy pit. He’d promised himself that he’d never breathe that rotten air again, never come near that dismal area where the roaches thrived and a switchblade nestled in almost every pocket. He’d gone away from it, telling himself the exit was permanent, feeling clean. And that was the important thing, to be clean, always to be clean.

  He’d been acutely conscious of his own cleanliness as he’d questioned the men in the taprooms and poolrooms along Patton. They looked at him with hostile eyes but were careful to keep the hostility from their voices when they told him, “I don’t know” and “I don’t know” and “I don’t know.”

  And some of them went so far as to state they were unacquainted with anyone named Dice Nolan. They’d never even heard of such a person. Of course he knew their lying and evasive answers were founded more on their fear of Nolan than on their instinctive dislike of the Police Department.

  It told him his theory was correct. Nolan had engineered the payroll heist, and certainly Nolan was still in town.

  But that was as far as he’d got with it. There were no further leads, and nothing that could come to a lead. Night after night he’d come home with a tired face to hear his wife saying, “Anything new?” And he’d try to give her a smile as he shook his head.

  But it was getting more and more difficult to smile. He knew if he didn’t come in with something soon, the Captain would take him off the case. He hated the thought of being taken off the case, he was so very sure about his man, so acutely sure the man was hiding somewhere near. Very near—

  The ringing phone sliced into his thoughts. He lifted it from the hook and said hello and the switchboard girl downstairs said to hold on for just a moment. Then a man’s voice said, “This Childers?”

  Instantly he had a feeling it was something. He could almost smell it. He said, “Yes,” and waited, and heard the man saying, “I’m gonna make it fast before you trace the call. Is that all right with you?”

  He didn’t say anything. For a moment he felt awfully weary, thinking: It’s just some crank who wants to call me some dirty names—

  But then the man was saying, “It’s gonna be good if you wanna use it. I got some personal reasons for not liking Dice Nolan. Thing is, I can get you to his girl friend.”

  Childers reached automatically for a pencil and a pad. The man gave him a name and an address, and the pencil moved very rapidly. Then the call hung up, and Childers leaped from the desk, ran out of the office and down the hall to the elevator.

  It was a seventeen-story apartment house on the edge of Lakeside Park. He went up to the ninth floor and down the corridor to room 907. It was early afternoon and he doubted she’d be there. But his finger was positive and persistent on the doorbell-button.

  The door opened and he saw a woman in her middle-twenties, and his first thought was, a bum steer. This can’t be Dice Nolan’s girl.

  He was certain she couldn’t be connected with Nolan because there was nothing in her make-up that indicated moll or floosie or hardmouthed slut. She wore very little paint and her hair-do was on the quiet side. There was no jewelry except for a wrist-watch. Her blouse was pale grey, the skirt a darker shade, and he noticed that her shoes didn’t have high heels. Again he thought, Sure, it’s a bum steer. But anyway, he said, “Are you Wilma Burnett?”

  She nodded.

  “Police,” he said, turning his lapel to show her the badge.

  She blinked a few times, but that was all. Then she stepped aside to let him enter the apartment. As he walked in, the quiet neatness of the place was impressed upon him. It was simply furnished. The color motif was subdued, and there wasn’t the slightest sign of fast or loose living.

  He frowned slightly, then got rid of it and put the official tone in his voice as he said, “All right, Miss Burnett. Let’s have it.”

  She blinked again. “Let’s have what?”

  “Information,” he said. “Where is he?”

  “Who?” She spoke quietly; her expression was calm and polite. “Who are you talking about?”

  “Dice.” He said it softly.

  It seemed she didn’t get that. She said, “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  “Dice Nolan,” he said.

  For a moment she said nothing. Then, very quietly, “I know a Philip Nolan, if that’s who you mean.”

  “Yes, that’s him.” And he thought, Let’s see if we can rattle her. His voice became a jabbing blade, “I figured you’d know him. He pays your rent here, doesn’t he?”

  It didn’t do a thing. There was no anger, not even annoyance. All she did was shake her head.

  He told himself it wasn’t going the way he wanted it to go. The thing to do was to hit her with something that would throw her off balance, and while he groped for an idea he heard her saying, “Won’t you sit down?”

  “No thanks,” he said automatically. He folded his arms, looked at her directly and spoke a trifle louder. “You’re doing very nicely, Miss Burnett. But it isn’t good, it just can’t work.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Yes you do.” And he put the hard smile of law-enforcement on his lips. “You know exactly what I mean. You know he’s wanted for robbery and murder and you’re trying to cover for him.”

  That’ll do it, he thought. That’ll sure enough break the ice. But it didn’t work that way, it didn’t come anywhere near that. For a few moments she just stood there looking at him. Then she turned slowly and walked across the room. She settled herself in a chair near the window, folded her hands in her lap, and waited for his next remark. Her calm silence seemed to say, You’re getting nowhere fast.

  He said to himself, Easy now, don’tpush it too hard. Yet his voice was somehow gruff and impatient, more demand than query. “Where can I find him? Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Not much you don’t.” He took a step toward her, his mouth tightening. “Come on, now. Let’s quit playing checkers. Where’s he hiding out?”

  “Hiding?” Her eyebrows went up just a little. “I didn’t know he was hiding.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  She gazed past him. She said, “Tell me something. Is this the only way you can gather information? I mean, does your job require that you go around insulting people?”

  He winced. He knew she had him there, and if this was really checkers, she’d scored a triple-jump. But then he thought, It’s only the beginning of the game, we can get her to talk if we take our time and play it careful—

  Again he smiled at her. This time it was an easy pleasant smile, and his voice was soft. “I’m sorry, Miss Burnett. I shouldn’t have said that. I apologize.”

  “That’s quite all right, Mister—” she hesitated.

  “Childers,” he said. “Lieutenant Childers—Homicide.” He pulled a chair toward hers, sat down and went on smiling at her. “It’ll help both
of us if you tell me the truth. I’m looking for a crook and a killer, and you’re looking to stay out of prison.”

  “Prison?” Her eyebrows went up again. “But I haven’t done anything—”

  “I want to be sure about that. I’m hoping you can prove you’re not an accessory.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning if you’re helping him to hide, you’re an accessory after the fact. That’s a very serious charge and I’ve known cases when they’ve been sent up for anywhere from three to five years.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  He leaned forward slightly and said, “Of course you understand that anything you say can be held against you.”

  “I’m not worried about that, Lieutenant. I haven’t broken any laws.”

  “Well, let’s check on it, just to be sure.” His smile remained pleasant, his voice soft and almost friendly. “Tell me about yourself.”

  She told him she was a free-lance commercial artist. She said her age was twenty-seven and for the past several years she’d been a widow. Her husband and two children had died in an auto accident. There was no emotion in her voice as she talked about it, but he saw something in her eyes that told him this was genuine and she’d been through plenty of hell. He thought, She’s really been hit hard.

  Then all at once it occurred to him that she was something out of the ordinary. It wasn’t connected with her looks, although her looks summed up as extremely attractive. It was more on the order of a feeling she radiated, a feeling that came from deep inside and hit him going in deep, causing him to frown because he had no idea what it was and it made him uncomfortable.

  He heard himself saying, “I owe you another apology. That crack I made about Nolan paying the rent. I guess that wasn’t a nice thing to say.”

  “No, it wasn’t.” She said it forgivingly. “But I know you didn’t mean to be personal. You were only trying to find out—”

  “I’m still trying,” he reminded her. His manner became official again. “I want to know all about you and Nolan.”