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X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries
KIDNAPPED EVIDENCE, by Joseph J. Millard
Originally published in Thrilling Mystery, March 1942.
There was a low hedge along one side of the Mainwaring estate, dividing the landscaped lawn from the graveled driveway. In McGee’s mad dash toward his parked car, he forgot this hedge. But he remembered it when thorny branches clawed at his wet pants legs and tangled with the bottom of his raincoat. He tripped, went over the low hedge in a helpless dive and landed on his face on the wet gravel.
The corpse of Jonathan Mainwaring bounced out of his arms, skidded grotesquely, and brought up against the back wheel of McGee’s coupe.
McGee scrambled up, cursing breathlessly. Behind him, Hilda Mainwaring was still leaning out the window, screaming in high-pitched yelps of anguished terror. Other voices, probably awakened servants, were taking up the clamor. Lights popped on along the storm-swept street and somewhere unpleasantly close, a police whistle bleated shrilly.
With panic clawing at his nerves, McGee scooped up the lifeless body, shoved it into the car and squirmed under the wheel beside it. The motor snarled and the coupe hurled wet gravel at the night and exploded down the drive like a frightened deer.
McGee caught one glimpse of a beat policeman lumbering up from the corner of Maple Street, waving his gun and blasting his whistle. Then he was clawing the coupe’s wheel, skidding wildly to the right and screaming off down the dark suburban street. In the rear view mirror, McGee could see the bluecoat’s gun come down and wink at him redly, but no lead touched the coupe and another screaming turn blotted out even that sight.
The corpse of Jonathan Mainwaring suddenly bobbed forward and slumped against McGee’s shoulder. McGee swore hoarsely and shoved it back with his right hand. When he brought that hand back to the wheel, it was darkly wet and sticky.
McGee made a gagging sound deep in his throat and scrubbed the bloody hand against his wet raincoat. His eyes were muddy, his bony angular face tight and shiny from the rain and the tension of taut nerves and muscles. Rain drummed steadily on the car’s metal roof and the windshield wipers squeaked monotonously, louder and more nerve-wracking than the endless sucking whine of the tires on the wet pavement.
But louder than all these sounds was the mournful, sobbing wail of squad cars ripping through the night, converging on the neighborhood McGee was desperately fleeing.
McGee could easily imagine the radio call that was sending them to the hunt.
“Pick up Samuel McGee, age thirty-one, private detective, believed to have shot and killed the broker, Jonathan Mainwaring, at the latter’s home tonight, afterward fleeing with the corpse of his victim...”
“Here we go again!” McGee growled bitterly, talking aloud to his reflection in the windshield. “Screwball McGee is on the loose. Get your guns, boys. The Mad Irishman has another case.”
Trouble, it seemed, simply hovered around waiting for an opportunity to drop with hobnailed boots onto McGee’s defenseless neck. Every case he got was worse than the ones before and every one put him that much closer to the day when the profane and bitter Inspector Paul Eldritch would make good his threat to see McGee headed either for the chair or life on the rock pile.
It wasn’t that Private Detective Sam McGee sought trouble. He fled from it with a whole-souled craving for peace and quiet. But some devilish fate seemed to doom him to a life of crazy cases and hair-breadth escapes. McGee swore earnestly that if he took the job of discovering who stole the sugar lumps at the Presbyterian Missionary Tea, it would turn into a wholesale massacre the moment he appeared.
That was simply the way his luck ran—and this latest uninvited fracas was a climax that dimmed the insanity of anything he had ever previously encountered. But this one was his own fault.
The louder screech of a siren clawed into McGee’s thoughts. A squad car was headed toward him on the cross street ahead and there was no time to turn around and get out of sight. McGee took the only other alternative.
He slammed on the brakes, went into a looping, skidding slide and straightened in time to dive into a private driveway between two darkened houses. A moment later, sitting with the lights out and the motor idling, McGee saw the squad car flash meteorically past on the street behind.
When sight and sound of the radio car had died away, McGee backed into the street and headed toward the feverish glow of the city lights in the dripping sky ahead. Using side streets and alleys, McGee managed to avoid any more close shaves before he had circled the downtown section and drawn up at the rear of a small, square, dark building.
He got out, leaving the motor running, and hammered on the back door. Presently the door opened, spilling orange light around the silhouette of a small, knotty little man.
“Okay, smart apple!” the little man growled. “Beat it. This ain’t no... Hey, Sam, I didn’t recognize you. Come on in and—”
“Can’t, Jake,” McGee said hoarsely. “Are you all alone?”
The small man grinned wolfishly. “You should ask. You think I do any entertainin’ in a joint like this?”
McGee bent close and began to whisper earnestly. The small man started violently, flapping his hands in negation.
“Good tripe, Sam, you know what they’d do to me if I did. No! Not even for a friend like you, Sam, would I—”
It took McGee ten solid minutes of impassioned oratory before he won his point. Finally the small man sighed, swore bitterly, and tagged behi
nd McGee out to the waiting coupe.
Between them they got the body of Jonathan Mainwaring out and hauled it into the building. McGee came out a few moments later, alone, and got back into the coupe. He was breathing more easily, now, and color was coming back into his face. Before driving off, he reached down and snapped on the radio. The voice of a rapid-fire news commentator faded in as the tubes warmed.
“—Mrs. Mainwaring was alone in her room when she heard the sounds of gunshots from her husband’s den downstairs. Running down the stairway, she saw her husband lying on the rug before his desk, the front of his dressing gown smeared with blood. Bending over him, gun in hand, was Samuel McGee, a private detective who has frequently been under police fire over his methods of operation. Mrs. Mainwaring positively identified McGee, whom she says has visited her husband several times recently on some mysterious business.
“At the sight of Mrs. Mainwaring, McGee snatched up the broker’s body and fled with it, racing out through an open French window onto the terrace and getting away in his car. Neither Mrs. Mainwaring nor the police can offer any explanation of the mystery or the reason for the shooting. It is not even known for certain that Jonathan Mainwaring is dead, although his wife is sure that what she glimpsed so briefly was his lifeless corpse. McGee is still at large, but the object of an intensive police man-hunt. Stay tuned to this station for further developments in the myst—”
McGee swore harshly and snapped off the radio. He backed the coupe, swung around and headed south, following dark, twisting streets deep into the maze of warehouses and factories that hovered close to the railroad switch yards. Angling through this district, he came at last to a short, quiet street lined with modest bungalows.
Driving down this street, McGee swung off and parked the coupe in the dark driveway of a warehouse a block away. Then he returned on foot, and swung in at the third bungalow from the corner.
The place was small and neat and dark. No lights showed anywhere in the little house nor in the houses on either side. McGee went around the bungalow to the garage in the rear and squinted in through the dark window. Enough light filtered in from the distant street light to show that there was no car inside. McGee grunted in satisfaction, backed into the shrubbery close by and made himself as comfortable as possible on the wet ground.
An aching hour dragged by and McGee was slowly crazy with the inactivity and the endless dropping of rain when the headlights of a car bounced down the street and turned into the drive. McGee tensed, shrinking deeper into the concealing shrubbery. He got a heavy .45 caliber automatic out of its holster under his left arm and tucked it into the pocket of his raincoat, keeping his right hand tight on the butt.
The car growled slowly up to the garage and stopped. A big, beefy man got out, hunched against the rain, and stood briefly in the beams of the headlights, fumbling with a padlock on the garage doors. The garage doors swung back, cutting off McGee’s view, and the car snarled its way inside. McGee slipped out of concealment, went around the doors in a running crouch and into the garage.
When the big man shut off lights and motor and started to get out of his car, he backed right into the solid menace of McGee’s gun. He stiffened, standing frozen with one foot on the concrete floor and the other still on the running board.
McGee could see the white blob of the man’s big face swimming around slowly, trying to identify the man behind him. The private detective could feel an almost imperceptible quiver run up the gun to his own taut nerves, a telegraphed warning of big muscles setting themselves for explosive action.
“Don’t do it, Paul,” McGee said flatly, through his teeth. “I’m messed up so badly now that a little more can’t matter. Come out the rest of the way slow and easy.”
“You!” Homicide Inspector Paul Eldritch’s voice sounded thick and strangled. “You won’t get away with this!”
“I am getting away with it.” McGee snapped as his fumbling left hand found and snatched the big detective’s gun. “You can relax, now. All I want is to talk a few minutes while you listen. I knew you’d be home about midnight, even with your family away on a visit, so I came here and waited for you.”
“You murdering rat!” Eldritch spat furiously. “This is one trick you won’t wiggle out of. This time you’ll fit the chair and there won’t be any ifs or ands about it. We’ve got the town sewed up so tight you’ll be nabbed the minute you—”
“I haven’t been so far,” McGee interrupted dryly. “And for the record, I didn’t kill Jonathan Mainwaring.”
“Then he is dead?”
“You’ll get the answer to that one when I’m ready to give it. Nobody’s tried to—to make any trouble for Mrs. Mainwaring yet, have they?”
“Trouble?” Eldritch bellowed. ‘Nobody but you, you—you snake. Seeing you shoot down her poor, defenseless husband and then snatch his body—”
“I didn’t shoot him!” McGee raged. “And she didn’t even see him shot. All she saw was a poor, dumb Irishman sticking his neck out, to save her life.”
“Listen, Sam.” Eldritch’s tone grew wheedling. “What’s this all about anyhow? Why’d you go there in the first place? What have you done with that man’s body? You got some screwball idea in your noggin, I suppose, but it’s the kind of an idea’ll get you burned, sure as guns!”
“It might, at that,” McGee agreed soberly. “Listen, Paul, while I tell you what happened. You won’t believe it, but listen anyhow. Ten days ago, Jonathan Mainwaring hired me to guard him from attempted murder—”
“Who’d he think was gonna knock him off?” Eldritch barked.
“Hilda Mainwaring—his wife.”
“Wh-a-at? Why you low-down... Trying to throw the blame on that poor, grieving—”
“Shut up!” McGee snarled harshly. “I’m only telling you what he told me. His wife talked him into taking out a half-million-dollar paid-up life insurance policy two weeks ago. She argued that it was the only safe investment with conditions the way they are today and Mainwaring did it. The half-million was and is payable to his wife. Mainwaring didn’t think anything of that until, a few days later, he accidentally opened some of his wife’s mail and found it was all answers to her inquiries about steamship tickets and chinchilla coats and Pierce Arrow cars and the like. When he handed the letters to her, she denied knowing anything about them or ever making the inquiries.”
Eldritch growled something unintelligible. “Go on, scum,” he spat then.
“Mainwaring was a rabbity little Homer Feep kind of guy, outside of business hours, but he loved his wife. He tried to shut out his suspicions, but they wouldn’t shut. Then, to top it, a man calls him at his office and says to tell Mrs. Mainwaring she can get a special bargain on some jewelry she was pricing. Mainwaring carried the word home and again his wife denied ever hearing of the firm or the jewelry.”
“You mean,” Eldritch said heavily, “she got him to take out insurance for half a million slugs and then started getting set to spend it before she whittled him off?”
“That’s how it looked. Mainwaring was scared and sick, but he wouldn’t go to the police. Instead, he came to me, begging not for protection for himself but for me to figure some way to break up the scheme before his wife got into trouble. He still was thinking only of her.”
“So what did you do?”
“Investigated a little,” McGee shrugged. “It sounded crazy and after I saw Hilda Mainwaring, I was sure it was a sour pie. You’ve seen her. She’s one of the sweetest, finest little ladies on earth. Nobody could imagine her as a killer. At least I couldn’t and I told Mainwaring so. I tried to quit and he raised the ante to keep me on. I stuck a few more days, with no signs of trouble, and went out there tonight to tell him I was all washed up.”
“So,” Eldritch broke in, “you got to arguing and he called you some names and maybe made a pass at you
so you grabbed out your rod—”
“Don’t be an ass,” McGee snarled. “I got there and followed him into his den to talk. He stepped in first and some guy outside opened up through the window. At least two shots got Mainwaring and knocked him back into me. Before I could untangle and snatch my own gun, the guy had vanished. Then Mrs. Mainwaring appeared and like a flash, I saw the whole dirty frame-up. So I snatched—”
“Like a flash,” Eldritch growled sarcastically. “You and your flashes. Of all the phony gags I ever heard—”
“All right,” McGee rapped suddenly. “The devil with you. I didn’t figure you’d hear me out. I’m going to play it my own way and let you eat dirt when it’s over. So long, sucker.”
“Wait, Sam!” Eldritch caught at McGee’s arm, swinging him back. “Look, I’m sorry I butted in. Go on and spill the rest.”
“Okay. Here’s the way the whole thing came to me. Somebody on the outside put a bug in Mrs. Mainwaring’s ear about the insurance. They sold her such a bill of goods that she sold her husband, figuring it was the right thing. When he took out the insurance, that set the stage. After that, this outsider went ahead with phony inquiries to big firms, using Mrs. Mainwaring’s name and fixing it so the answers would get to her husband, apparently by accident.”
“But, why? Why? It don’t make a bit of sense, Sam.”
“Why? You ape, to make Mainwaring suspect his wife and go to the police, that’s why. He’d go to you and you’d do just what I did—snoop around, tell him he was crazy and forget the whole thing. Then he’d really get killed and you’d say ‘Ah-ha’ and pull her in.”
Eldritch sank onto the running board, holding his head.
“So we pull her in and who collects any insurance?” he groaned. “You know darn well insurance companies won’t pay off if the beneficiary’s supposed to have bumped the policy holder, you dope.”
“Sure. But it wouldn’t take you more than a few days at the most to run into a stone wall on your investigation. You couldn’t pin anything on her because there’d be nothing to pin. You’d let her go and she’d collect the insurance.”
The Walt Whitman MEGAPACK ™ Page 2