The Walt Whitman MEGAPACK ™

by Millard, Joseph J.

  The blond Marine never took his cold, washed-out blue eyes off me. He sat there and watched.

  Chipman’s eyes showed his enjoyment. I was a sort of floor show for him while he ate. He put down the chop bone, picked up another crisp juicy chop and sank his teeth into it. My stomach twisted at the sight of it, I was so hungry.

  “I don’t mind telling you why, really,” he said, chewing. “I’m betting against my own nag, because you’re up in the saddle, and you’re yellow!”

  It was like he sneaked up and soused me with a bucket of ice water. It knocked the breath out of me. I took another step forward, the ticking of that fuse beating against my wishbone, now.

  “Chipman...” the word tore my throat.

  “You see,” he grinned. “I only own a fourth of Zalacain, and the other owner will race him come hell or high water. I want to buy the rest of that horse cheap. He’ll sell after you lose tomorrow. A yellowbelly jock can’t win races.”

  “I’ll win! I’ll boot him home!” My mouth was bone dry.

  “Will you? I’m a sort of a connoisseur of cowardice. I think you’ll remember how it feels to be out in front of a big field when something goes wrong and you have to hit the dirt. You’ll hear the rataplan of those hoofs and...”

  I shuddered. The boom of traffic drifted up to the hotel windows from the street below. To me it was like hoofs pounding, thundering at me, and I was down smelling the dirt, tasting it again, knowing what I was going to get.

  “Damn you!” the words stuck in my aching throat and came out in a kind of dry sob. “You dirty, crooked—”

  “Oh, come! I’m not essentially prejudiced against honesty, if it’s convenient,” Chipman chuckled, licking grease off his fingers.

  I picked up his napkin off the table and threw it at him. Then I realized what I had done.

  A blaze of blue-white light lay there where the napkin had been. Diamonds! And what diamonds!

  The smile faded off Chipman’s face in a wink. The lines on his face went the other way—up and down.

  The Marine shoved back his chair. A thin-bladed stiletto came out of his sleeve, but the look on his thin face didn’t change. It had been there all along, and now it fitted.

  I remembered now. At Santa Anita once, somebody’d pointed him out. I didn’t know they took cons in the Marines, I thought. They don’t, the answer came off my own tongue in a mumble.

  “Never mind, Smitty. Don’t dirty up the floor. It’s not necessary,” Chipman purred.

  “Not necessary?” Smitty’s voice was falsetto. He didn’t take those washed-out blue eyes off me, and he didn’t put away the stiletto.

  “He’ll play ball,” Chipman said sharply.

  Will I? I thought. Will I? Just like I’d been asking myself for days, weeks, months, if I was really yellow.

  Inside I can feel that fuse going tick-tick-tick and I wonder.

  “Since you’ve cut yourself in on this deal,” Chipman remarks in suave tones, “take a gander at that chair over by the window.”

  It was a big easy chair and the reason I hadn’t seen the guy in the grey suit before was that he’d been slumped way down, passed out. His face was a pale, dirty yellow.

  I put my hand to his forehead. Not dead. A glass on a side table gives me the idea. I poured a couple of drops into my hands, rubbed them together and sniffed.

  “Mickeyed,” I whispered.

  “Just a little bad ice in his drink,” Chipman said cynically. “We want you to get rid of him for us.”

  I faced them, my lungs working hard for air. I wondered if they could hear that buzzing inside me. It was loud, now.

  Van Chipman was grinning. Smitty stood there with his shiv glittering palely under a rich floor lamp.

  “Just leave him on a bench in the Plaza, Eddy,” Chipman told me. “Take him out the back way.”

  “What if I don’t?” My voice sounded like it belonged to somebody else.

  Chipman closed in, licking his lips. “Pick him up.”

  I found myself reaching over to pick the guy up out of the chair. It was a funny feeling, wondering if I was going to do it and finding myself doing it at the same time.

  With one corner of my mind I noticed a funny thing about the set-up. The guy’s shirt wasn’t buttoned and he looked like his clothes were thrown at him.

  Instead of picking the guy up I pulled open the unbuttoned shirt. His belly was a dirty yellow color!

  It did something to me. That yellow belly!

  The fuse inside me stopped ticking and there was a long pause.

  One step I took toward Chipman. Two, three, and it blasted, welling up out of me like a depth charge of T.N.T.

  “You dirty pair of heels!” I yelled. “I’ll see you in hell first!”

  Smitty came gliding across the floor with his stiletto balanced like a toy.

  “You hooked those diamonds from the movie queen throwing the party down the hall!” I snarled. “You’ve got a record a mile long. Jewel thief and killer!”

  The traffic below sounded like a twelve-horse field coming up behind me all right, but I loved it!

  A breath of air hit my lungs and went all the way to my toes. It’s the first in a long time!

  With one hand I tipped the dinner table over in front of Smitty as he closed. With the other I grabbed a wine bottle and swung on Chipman.

  It caught him a glancing blow. He went down. I gave my undivided attention to Smitty, who was weaving around the corner of the messed-up table like a blond weasel, with the cold-looking shiv in his grip.

  “You’re no Marine!” I sneered at him. “Come on, mix it!”

  Smitty shook himself, blinked his pale eyes, and dived at me.

  With one hand I clamped down on his knife wrist and with the other I crossed hard to the mouth. Blood spattered. Smitty whimpered. Yeah. Whimpered.

  This cold-blooded little killer didn’t like being pushed around by a jock ten pounds under his own weight.

  I slammed home a couple of hard rights. The stiletto clinked on the floor. A left straightened him up. Another right put him away for keeps.

  I sucked in a breath of that swell new air I seemed to be breathing, and turned.

  Chipman was up and snarling like a mad dog while he fumbled in a desk drawer. He swung around with a little black automatic.

  I saw his face twisted with the thoughts that were in him and I knew I was going to get it, but I rushed.

  One, two, three—I charged across that room at him feeling like a giant inside.

  A gun shot crashed against the walls, stunned my ears, but I didn’t feel hurt. I kept going, wondering if it didn’t hurt to be shot like this.

  Then I saw. Chipman dropped his gun and crumpled into a chair.

  The house dick stood in the doorway, a whiff of cordite spilling from the business end of his gun.

  I pulled up short. “These guys swiped some diamonds,” I began.

  “Yeh, yeh,” he cut in. “I heard the whole thing. I followed you to the door and listened outside.”

  So I sat down in a chair and what do you think? Right beside me was all that food messed around on the floor. Lamb chops, and potatoes with cheese melted all over them and everything.

  I’d had a hard time making the weight. The smell of it hit me and I passed out.

  When I came to, the house dick was pouring brandy into me. “Get away from me with those calories,” I said, shoving him. “I got a race to ride tomorrow!”

  The old zip and zest was back in life. I knew the thundering hoofs of a twelve-horse field was going to sound like music to me.

  The dick is talking. “Huh?” I said.

  “I said—how’d ya know the guy had mickeyed the Marine and swapped clothes so’s he could get i
nto the movie dame’s suite?”

  I walked past Chipman, who sat groaning in a chair, and pulled back the mickeyed man’s shirt and pointed at his belly.

  “Whew!” whewed the house dick. “Yellow as gold!”

  “It’s the atabrin they take for malaria in the tropics,” I explained. “I work at Naval Hospital. You see a lot of Marines like that when they first come back.”

  “It was the yellow belly that upset the deal then,” the house dick chuckled.

  “Yeah,” I grinned. “The yellowbelly!”

  My eyes met Van Chipman’s, and Chipman’s dropped first.

  SUICIDE SOUVENIR, by Dennis Layton

  Originally published in 10-Story Detective, Jan. 1943.

  Detective Perry’s eyes rested expectantly on the frosted-glass panel in the door to his office. A grotesque shadow was plastered there, cast on the glass like a picture by a motion picture projector. It moved around in indecision and groped for the knob of the door.

  Matt Perry half rose from his chair, pulling open the top drawer of his desk and exposing an ugly Mauser pistol which rested there, primed, loaded and ready for trouble.

  The door burst open without warning. A girl plunged into the office wildly. Astonished, Perry stared at her.

  Her blonde hair was blowing around crazily without a hat covering it. She was small and chic. She ran right up to the desk. “What can I—” Perry began.

  “Can’t explain!” she interrupted rudely. She thrust her right hand forward and deposited something on the desk. “Hold it until you hear from me,” she said swiftly. “And don’t let it get out of your hands.”

  “Hey,” Perry exclaimed. “What in hell is this? Just a second, lady, I want to—”

  He was talking to air. She turned around and was out of the office like a wraith. Perry bit his lip. But stunned as he was by the sudden procession of events, he made up his mind in a split second. His hand dove into the desk, came up with the Mauser which he jammed deep in his coat pocket.

  Then he lanced away from behind his desk and went out after her. He scuttled to the elevator bank. But he was too late.

  Just as he got there, the sliding door of the shaft slammed shut. Through the small glass window in the door, he could see the cage close and the car zoom down towards the street.

  “Damn!” Perry muttered.

  It would be senseless to try and beat the girl down by taking the stairway. It was seven flights to the street floor of the Lanin Building. She would beat him easily.

  He pressed the down button. Luckily, another car was just on its way to the main floor. It opened up. He rushed in, watched the gates close and felt his stomach rise queerly as the car sped down like a plummet.

  “Hey, Joe,” Perry called to the elevator starter on the main floor as he leaped out. “Didja see a blonde? Small, no hat?”

  “Yeah, Mr. Perry,” said the starter. “She went out the Fifth Avenue way. I remember her. She was a stunner.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Half a minute or so.”

  Perry tore along the main floor to the Fifth Avenue exit. Out in the street, he searched frantically for some sign of that brilliant yellow hair. But he could find nothing like it. A line of taxicabs caught his gaze. He snapped his fingers knowingly. The girl had lammed in a cab. She wouldn’t take any chances on his catching up with her.

  Disappointed, Matt Perry returned to the elevator bank. He stepped into one of the elevators and was whisked up to the seventh floor where his office was. He got out, feeling sorry for himself because he hadn’t caught the girl. As he walked down the marble-like corridor of the floor, he noticed that the door at the end of his quarters was open. He had left it closed.

  The Mauser appeared in his hand like magic. He stole agilely down the remainder of the hall to his office. Silently, he peered in. There was a dead man on the floor.

  “What the hell!” Perry whistled. He entered, closing the door behind him and putting the big pistol away. Then he stooped down over the man.

  “Toby Beck!” Perry breathed, recognizing the dead man as one of the most elusive professionals of the city. It didn’t jell at all. First the girl who had left something on his desk. And now Toby Beck, gunman and chiseler, a cooling corpse on his floor.

  Beck was dead. But he wasn’t stiff. Rigor mortis had not begun to set in. And the flesh was warm. Perry realized that Beck had died here in the few minutes that Perry had spent below, in pursuit of the blonde. But how had he died?

  Perry examined Beck, frankly baffled. There wasn’t a bullet wound anywhere on Beck’s body. Nor a sign of blood either. Perry turned over Beck’s right hand.

  In the center of the dead man’s thumb there was a tiny, almost invisible drop of blood. Just that. Nothing else.

  Perry got to his feet and lifted his telephone from its pedestal. He called the elevator starter in the hall below.

  “Listen, Joe,” he said, “did anyone come down from the seventh while I was out?”

  There was a long pause while the starter made inquiries. “No, Mr. Perry,” Joe replied finally. “You weren’t out long enough. No one came down.”

  “Okay, thanks,” said Perry. He hung up.

  For the first time, he noticed the thing that the frantic blonde had left on his desk. It was a bronze casket, beautifully hammered. It was about four inches long and two inches wide. The sort of thing a rich girl would put her jewels in.

  Perry picked it up and looked at it. There was a little catch on the front of it where you opened the thing. Perry ran his fingers along it to open it.

  Simultaneously, the telephone rang. “Hello,” said Perry, putting the casket down for a second. “Matt Perry speaking.”

  “Mr. Perry,” came a breathless feminine voice at the other end of the wire, “whatever you do—don’t open that bronze casket. I forgot to tell you when I left it— but don’t open it. It’ll kill you in a second if you do!”

  “Say, what is all this?” Perry asked sharply.

  “I can’t explain now,” the girl replied. “I haven’t time. They’re following me. Just hang onto that casket and don’t try to open it. And if a man named Toby Beck comes looking for it or—”

  “Beck’s dead,” said Perry. “Right here in my office.”

  “Oh!” he heard her cry. “He tried to cross them, the fool!” She was silent for a second. “Lock it up,” she said then. “Lock it up, Perry. Hide it!”

  “Okay,” Perry replied. “But who in hell are you?”

  “Call me Lois,” she answered. “Lois Ward. That’ll do until I get in touch with you.”

  “But—” Perry began.

  He heard a sharp click and he knew that the connection had been severed. She was gone again. And there was no use tracing the call. If she were in flight as she had said, then the call had come from a public booth. He had the bronze casket. She said she would come for it. He had to be satisfied with that.

  Perry put the casket in the top drawer of his desk and locked the drawer, placing the key in his pocket.

  The corpse of Beck loomed up again. Perry realized that he’d have to report this to the homicide bureau. Otherwise, Inspector Lowery would raise the roof.

  There was a knock at the door of the office.

  It startled Perry only because he had not expected it. He glanced warily at the frosted glass. He could see it was a man.

  “Come in,” he said, patting the bulk of the pistol in his pocket.

  He was right. It was a man—a huge giant of a man, uncouth and bestial. He wore a slouchy topcoat, a faded gray fedora and dirty brown shoes. A ragged cigar perched in the corner of his mouth as he eyed the corpse of Toby Beck on the floor and grunted.

  “You saved me the trouble,” he said gruffly. “I was after Beck. How’d you
put him away?”

  “I tied him to a buzz saw,” replied Terry sarcastically. “Who in hell are you?”

  The man flashed a golden badge with a spread eagle on it. “Twenty-two,” he said. “Name’s Rick McKenzie.”

  “Let me see that badge,” Perry said suspiciously.

  McKenzie shrugged, smiling, and handed his badge to Perry, who examined it carefully. It was the original all right. No fake. The number twenty-two was emblazoned on the shield.

  “Federal operative, eh?” Perry said, handing the badge back to McKenzie. “Well, what’s in your craw?”

  McKenzie pointed to the corpse. “How’d you get Beck?”

  “I didn’t get him,” said Perry. “He—”

  There was a pause. Perry remembered the secret the girl had left with him.

  “I get it, I get it,” remarked the Federal man. “He tried to open the casket, eh?”

  “What casket?” asked Perry innocently.

  McKenzie laughed. “Stop stalling, shamus,” he said. “You’re a good dick and a steady worker. Don’t pick no quarrel with me. I know the dame left the bronze casket here.”

  Perry eyed McKenzie silently.

  “Sure,” the Federal man continued. “I’ve been on the trail of this gang for the last two months. Today, that dame tried to shake me off. She had the bronze casket. She was making a delivery. I followed her—chased her. She came here and when she left—the bronze casket wasn’t with her.”

  There was a fishy look in the Federal man’s eyes which Perry didn’t like much. Perry leaned forward and said politely:

  “You don’t tell me.”

  “I do tell you!” snarled McKenzie, exasperated. “Listen, Perry. I’ve been pretty nice with you so far. If you get tough, I’ll crack down. You’ve got that casket here. The dame left it here—a blonde with taking ways. Are you an accessory after the fact? Or do you hand the casket over and report this stiff to the cops?”