The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery Megapack

by Fletcher Flora

  I looked at her with the first, faint light of dawn breaking inside my skull. “A bundle? So Wash was more than a phony witness. He was also a blackmailer. That explains a lot. I saw Stark in all this from the beginning, but I couldn’t see why he’d bump his own witness. And there’s still something I can’t see. I can’t see why Stark killed Devore. I know he was after Danny’s public hide, but murder’s something else. It’s too fantastic for belief.”

  Her lips curled. “Politics,” she said, and the word as she said it was incredibly profane. “There was a better reason than politics for Danny’s murder. It’s really sort of funny, the way it happened. Listen. Wash was Stark’s investigator, and Wash was a handy sort of guy. He had a way with gadgets. Things like tape recorders, for in stance. Stark wanted something on Devore that he could use, something concrete. Devore used to make a lot of his crooked deals in his study at home, and Stark figured that if he could set up a hidden mike in the study with a recorder hidden outside, sooner or later he’d get something hot.

  “He put Wash on the job, and Wash set the thing up. How he did it doesn’t matter now. Just take it from me, Wash was a pretty clever guy. He took three spools of tape on three consecutive nights and turned them over to Stark. What Stark didn’t know was that Wash played it all back before he turned it over. He not only played it all back, he made copies. Some of it was pretty good. Enough to nail Devore down. But Stark was greedy. He wanted more, and he got more.”

  She stopped talking and began to laugh. It was deep, soundless laughter that shook her body like a violent spasm. After a minute, she broke it off with a shrill gasp and said hoarsely, “He got something real hot. He got something so hot it blistered the tape and shriveled his own lousy soul. He got Mrs. Austin Stark and handsome Danny Devore in a scene that was strictly unofficial. I guess it was the one thing the arrogant devil never dreamed of.

  She began to laugh again, and inside my skull the dawn broke like thunder. The irony of it all was enough to make anyone hysterical. I reached across the table in the booth. I put my thumb on one side of her face and my four lingers on the other. Then I make like a pair of pincers, cutting off her laughter and forcing it back into her throat.

  “I get it,” I said. “That was something a guy like Stark couldn’t take. He went blind. He killed Danny Devore, not for any political reason, but for the old three-cornered reason that’s always been valid.”

  “That’s it.” She lifted her glass suddenly, draining away the last of its amber contents. “He told Wash to knock off the recordings. But he didn’t know that Wash had copies. He didn’t realize that Wash knew about Mrs. Stark and Danny Devore. Most of all, he didn’t realize that Wash was spinning another spool the night of the murder. He found it out about an hour later. He found it out when Wash showed up at his place all ready to do business.”

  “What about Hal Decker’s gun?”

  “Devore wasn’t killed with Decker’s gun. That was fixed later. Wash remembered Decker’s threats. He knew Decker could be made to look like a logical suspect. Wash swiped the gun the same night and planted it by Devore’s body. He agreed to swear he’d seen Decker leave the scene of the murder. Wash didn’t mind helping with the alibi.

  “The way he looked at it, the alibi was a kind of insurance on the tape. Stark had to be free in order to pay. He was a guy going up, and he could pay and keep paying.” Her fingers tightened around the glass until I thought it would crack. “There was something else he could do too,” she said softly. “He could kill. Wash should’ve remembered that.”

  The front door swung open, and a girl came into the bar. She was, as she would have been the first to tell you, intelligent, beautiful and loaded with charm. Her eyes drifting over me casually; she sat down in a booth up the line and ordered a beer.

  “Has Stark got the tape?” I asked.

  The platinum head nodded. “Not the two big ones—not the love scene, not the murder.”

  “Where are they?”

  Her eyes sharpened, calculating possibilities of salvage, and I laughed. “No dice, sister. I couldn’t rake up more than a fin. It’ll have to be for the satisfaction you get out of it.”

  She shrugged and dug into her purse. On the table between us, she laid a key. The key had the number six hundred and eight stamped on it.

  “Public locker,” she said. “Union Station. The player is there, too.”

  I covered the key with a hand, and it was just in time. The bar door swung open again, and three guys came in. Two of them I remembered. They came straight back to our booth.

  The guy who’d worked me over said pleasantly, “We thought she’d contact you. She told you where the tape is?”

  “Tape?”

  The guy’s laugh wasn’t quite as pleasant as his voice. “I’ll play along for a minute, counselor. Recordings, I mean.”

  The key was red hot in the palm of my hand, under my thumb. “I don’t know anything about any recordings. Recordings of what?”

  He drew his shoulders forward, his eyes impersonal. “Who knows? Who cares? We’re supposed to get the tape and deliver it, that’s all. You willing to talk now?”

  I looked blank and stayed quiet. After a minute he reached down, and helped me out of the booth. One of the other two did the same for Richert’s widow.

  We all went out together. On the way, I brushed the table of the booth in which Kitty was drinking her beer with a display of serenity that was, under the circumstances, somewhat annoying. My right hand, hanging at my side, extended just below the top of the table. I let the key slip down my palm into my fingers, and flipped it off toward Kitty’s lap.

  Kitty lifted her beer and drank. She looked as if she were enjoying it…

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Fitting the Puzzle Together

  We went up from a narrow alley on rickety stairs into a large room that looked like it used to be a place to lay a bet. There was a flat top desk, with an undisturbed coating of dust. On the wall behind the desk, was an old slate blackboard with some faint chalk marks still on it.

  The young gorilla who looked like a rah-rah boy pushed his hat onto the back of his head and said politely, “Ladies first.”

  The bigger of the other two grinned and smashed the platinum blond across the mouth with the back of his hand. The blow cracked like a rifle shot, and she cringed away with a squeal and a whimper, pressing one hand to her injured mouth.

  “Where’s the tape?” Tan Eyes said. Before she could answer, the big guy backhanded her again, and a wet sob gurgled in her throat. Her eyes flared with hate and fear, and all the other hellish emotions that a woman like her can feel for a guy who belts her in the face.

  “Where’s the tape?” Tan Eyes said.

  The big guy drew his arm up and back again, so that his chin was fitted into the interior angle of his elbow, but before he could slash it out and down, I said, “It’s in a locker at Union Station.”

  Tan Eyes turned to me, smiling. “A gentleman. A real, damned gentleman. Can’t stand to see a dame knocked around. I thought you’d be soft.”

  The big guy came over to me and grabbed me by the lapels with his left hand. He brought the heel of his right hand down in a short chopping motion on my bandage.

  I could fed the cut pull apart, and blood welled out from under the bandage and ran down my face.

  “That’s for not saying it sooner,” he said.

  Tan Eyes held out a hand, palm up.

  “You got a key?”

  “No.”

  The big guy hit me across the eyes with the edge of his hand, it was like getting hit with a tomahawk.

  “Where’s the key?” Tan Eyes said.

  I was blind. I had lost my vision in an intense flare of brilliant light that died instantly to total darkness. Now the darkness was diluted slowly by a gray infiltration, and objects and faces reappeared with a strange effect of coming down a line of perspective from a great distance. The big executioner had his chopper drawn back for a repea
t, and Tan Eyes had his extended, as before, with the palm up.

  I guess I could have taken more, if I’d had to. But I was glad I didn’t have to. Kitty had the key. She’d had at least twenty minutes to function, and Kitty was a smart gal. By this time, she was certainly in possession of the tape and the player.

  “I dropped it in the coin slot in the juke box control,” I said.

  The tan eyes faded to a cold and wary yellow. The lips below them barely moved.

  “Don’t play fancy, counselor. If you say it, it better be true.”

  “It’s true,” I said, and when the big one moved in for another cut, I added quickly, “The number’s six hundred and eight.”

  Tan Eyes swung an arm out gently against the other’s chest. “To hell with the key,” he said. “A public locker’s no problem.”

  The third guy had been standing against the door watching, just as he’d done in my office. It could be that he just went along for kicks, or that he was the coach. The guy who really called the plays and did the thinking when thinking was needed. He was the one who did it now, at any rate, even though it came a little late.

  “The tape’s not in the locker,” he said.

  Tan Eyes turned slowly. “No? You thinking of a better place?”

  Number three, the Thinker, moved lazily against the door, lifting his shoulders slightly. “The tape’s not in the locker,” he said. “The key’s not in the slot. The dame’s got it.”

  “Dame? This one?”

  “No. The blond. The one drinking beer. I just remembered where I’ve seen her before. It’s been bothering me.”

  The tan eyes were very still, fading again, masking the activity of the brain behind. “The secretary, his secretary!”

  The Thinker’s lips curled. He nodded agreement. “Sure. I’m betting he passed the key off when he brushed the booth. One will get you ten if the tape’s not in his office right now, or on the way there.”

  The executioner moved in again. His lips were twisted back off his teeth, and his hand was raised to chop. At the door, the Thinker straightened and said, “Later. We owe him something, but save it for later. Right now we’ve got no time.” He gave the disappointed executioner a placating smile, as one might smile at an unhappy child, promising future pleasure. “You stay here with the dame. She might get lonesome if we left her by herself.”

  Tan Eves took my arm like an old friend, and we went out of the room together and down the rickety stairs to the alley. The Thinker followed along. In the alley we all got into the Caddy that had brought us from The Peanut; Tan Eyes behind the wheel, the Thinker and I in the rear seat.

  “You boys do all of Stark’s strong-arm work?” I asked.

  The Thinker smiled lazily and said, “Button up, counselor.”

  The big Caddy rolled along with a pedigreed purr, taking its time and minding the traffic signals. No one seemed to be in a hurry, which was agreeable to me, and it was probably another twenty minutes before we crawled out onto the sidewalk in front of my shingle. Going up the stairs, like meat in a sandwich between my brace of escorts, I prayed silently that Kitty had been sensible enough to take the tape someplace else. But Kitty, while clever, was given to being sensible only rarely, and this, apparently, wasn’t a rare occasion. She was sitting behind her desk, showing her teeth in a receptive smile.

  “Hi, guys,” she said.

  The Thinker closed the door and leaned against it, as was his habit. Tan Eyes walked over to the desk and took Kitty’s chin between thumb and fingers, tipping her head back. He let his eyes wander over her face and on down the arched stem of her neck. The eyes, she reported later, were tender.

  “You’re a sweet doll,” he said. “You’re a luscious hunk of stuff. Wouldn’t it be a shame if I had to mess you up? Wouldn’t it be a crying shame?”

  She kept on smiling as well as she could with the pressure on her face. Her voice was thin and strained from the tension in her throat.

  “Anything you want to do, you better do quick,” she said. “My friend, Wiley Shivers of homicide, may be slow with a dame, but he can still fire his cannon allegro fortissimo. In your language, that means fast and loud as hell.”

  He was like a guy in slow motion. His hand floated away from, her face, and he turned by degrees from the hips, his arm bent at the elbow and suspended outward at his side. He looked like a kid’s dream of a gunslinger. Only the gun wasn’t on his hip, it was under his arm. The suspended arm flashed up and inward as Wiley Shivers opened my private door. But Wiley’s gun was handier. It was already pointed accurately in the right direction.

  Tan Eyes sat down very quietly on the floor and folded over like a supplicant. Against the hall door, the Thinker was immobile, spread on the wood in a kind of mock and frozen crucifixion. Wiley Shivers, that remarkable, fat, little guy, looked down at his victim, who was obviously dead, and his expression was precisely the same as when he’d looked at his scuffed shoe, or at the visible charms of Kitty.

  “A good gunsel,” he said, after a while. “A dead one.”

  Kitty came out from under her desk, and looked at me across the top. Her voice took off like a wild knuckle ball. “You’re bleeding again. Why the hell don’t you learn to protect yourself?”

  I didn’t answer. I watched Wiley Shivers walk over slowly to the body of the rah-rah gorilla and nudge it with a toe. The folded body, in delicate balance, stirred and slipped over, straightening on the floor. The face under the light brown crew-cut had acquired a new softness of line. It looked rather sophomoric. Shivers’ sour gaze lifted, roamed around the wall, and down across the Thinker against the door. It came to rest on me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Sorry? For what? This guy?”

  “No. For what I thought about you. I thought you were a crook. I thought you were hand-picked by Austin Stark to pin a rap on me.”

  “I don’t give a damn what you thought.”

  “Thanks, anyhow.”

  His mouth twisted. His eyes looked like a couple of smeary marbles. When I was a kid, we used to call them snotties.

  “That’s the trouble with you smart guys,” he said. “You think in generalities. We got crooks at headquarters, so you jump to the opinion that everyone’s a crook at headquarters. See what I mean? Under all the smartness, no brains at all. I’ll tell you something to remember, counselor. Wherever you go, you’ll always find a few honest guys.”

  He moved over to the door and casually flipped an automatic from under the arm of the Thinker. Without turning, he said, “I’ll take this punk in. You two stay here and sit on those tapes. I’ll send back for them. And don’t worry about the cops I send, they’ll be honest. When I send them, they’re always honest. Wagon’ll be here for the guy on the floor.”

  He was moving again, when I thought of the platinum blond. “They’re holding Richert’s widow,” I said. “I just happened to remember. The Thinker there can tell you where.”

  Looking back for a second over his shoulder, he struck an attitude of ludicrous, flabby coyness. He was the only guy I’ve ever known you could love and hate at once.

  “Much obliged. That’s real thoughtful of you. She’ll probably be very glad you just happened to remember. Incidentally, Stark’s in custody by now. I sent a couple men after him just as soon as I’d heard the tape. We’ll be springing Decker to make room for him.” His lips moved again into that sour twist that seemed to signify hatred, for all the world and everything in it. “See you around, counselor.”

  He went on out with the Thinker, and I said, “Not if I can help it. Never again.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Kitty picked her way around the body in front of her desk. “Wiley isn’t a bad guy. I knew right away he was honest. That’s why I called him to meet me here.”

  “Yes? What made you so sure he was honest?”

  She grinned. “That remark he made. About being too old for me. No one but an honest man could have said that! Let’s go in your office and play t
he tape with Mrs. Stark and Danny Devore on it. I’ve already listened to part of it. He’s quite the romantic type. You can learn a lot from Danny, even though he’s dead.”

  THE CLOSING TRAP

  Originally published in Detective Story Magazine, May 1953.

  CHAPTER 1

  It was quiet in the big room. The full wall of windows at the west end caught the pale, slanting light of the sun in descent, and the light splashed in across deep carpeting and rich furniture to give the ivory painted concert grand at the east end a delicate old-world coloring. Behind the grand, Terence Pope fingered from memory a few old tunes, looking into the warm wash of light and feeling within himself a kind of frail peace that took its substance from the hour and, like the hour, wouldn’t last.

  He didn’t see the girl called Liza Gray who stood in the arched entrance to the room looking at him, but he was thinking about her. And when she crossed the room silently and leaned against the piano, it seemed like something that ought to happen about that time and was no surprise whatever.

  “Hello, Terry. I didn’t know you could play.”

  He looked up at her with a smile restricted to careful friendliness, and he broke out of the tune he was playing into the soft ascension of a scale. The light gathered in her pale gold hair, dispersing along the clean lines of her face and throat, and in his heart the transient peace succumbed to pain that was almost adolescent in its intensity. Underlying the change, adult and reasoned, was the grim foreknowledge of everything coming to a bad end.

  “I can pick out a tune, baby, if you call that playing.”

  “You’re a strange guy. Full of little things no one would suspect.”

  “We’re all like that. Full of surprises, I mean. If you keep looking long enough, you begin to find them.”