by Otto Penzler
“You said you were seeing him because he’d applied to you for a job of some kind.”
“When I say that I do not know you. It was because of note. I buy note sometimes at bargain.”
He’s lying like hell. Maybe a Serbian’s note is a bargain at five dollars, but it isn’t to an Irishman.
I say, “You send this money to Mr. Roberts; to what address?”
“I send the letter to General Delivery. In two-three days I get back letter, with my commission.”
“Where’s the letter mailed, Chicago?”
“Yes, that is why I know Mr. Roberts still live here.”
“Well, it’s a nice racket for you, Prince. As long as you get your dough, what’re you kicking about? Why do you want to see Roberts?”
He doesn’t like that. He gives me a once-over through his monocle. “Mr. Cragg, I pay you five hundred dollars to find Mr. Roberts. You wish to continue working for me?”
“Why, certainly, Prince!” I tell him. “I was just trying to get a line on Mr. Roberts…. Ah, here’re the girls.”
They look like they’d chewed up the olive branch in the ladies’ room. I get up and say to Betty: “Gosh, I just remembered we’re supposed to be at Bill’s party.”
“I was about to remind you,” Betty says smartly.
I say, “So long, Prince. Be seeing you in a day or two.”
He grabs hold of Betty’s hand and tries to kiss it. She jerks it away. “I just washed it,” she tells him.
“But your telephone number? And your address? I like to send you the flowers.”
“I’ve got hay fever,” Betty says. “I can’t stand flowers. And I haven’t got a telephone. I never learned how to work one. So long, Prince.”
“Good-by!” snaps Mitzi. “It was nice meeting you.”
We exit.
Outside, Betty says, “Nice boy, that Prince. Some woman’s husband is going to shoot him one of these days.”
“You forget Mamie Kelly. She’s got something on him.”
“You going to snitch on him?”
“Not yet. Still a few things to settle with him.”
“You get anything out of him?”
“Uh-huh, the reason he wants me to find this Roberts. He tried holding out one week and discovered Roberts has a checker on him. My hunch is the Prince prefers a hundred per cent to ten.”
The Red Mill is only a couple of blocks from Betty’s apartment hotel. I walk east on Lawrence Avenue with her. I turn her into Winthrop and we are almost to Ainslee before she’s aware of it. Then she says, “You’re taking me home? What a large evening!”
“Be a large one next time. Maybe tomorrow?”
“You’ll probably take me to the Bulgarian or Siberian meeting.”
I leave her outside her apartment hotel. She’s sore when she goes inside. I can’t help it. I’ll see her in the morning. There’s a couple of little things I still have to do and I have to get up early in the morning.
I go to a stationery store on Broadway that is still open and buy a large children’s book, one with stiff covers. I have the clerk wrap it in the reddest paper he has in the store, some glossy Christmas wrapping paper.
Then I get an address label from him and a bunch of postage stamps.
It’s a long ride downtown so I take the elevated. I get off at Quincy and walk over to the post office and mail the red package at the mailing window. Then I go to my cheap hotel on Jackson Street and go to bed.
EVEN-THIRTY I get up and have breakfast at Thompson’s—without the Death Notices, this time. After which I hoof over to the post office to see if my little trick works.
There are a couple of thousand lock boxes in the General Delivery room at the main Chicago post office. To watch them all during the rush hours would take eighteen pairs of eyes. That’s why I mailed the book to Mr. Roberts. The postal clerk would put a card in his box, saying there was a package for him. He’d have to call at one of the windows for it.
So I fool around at a writing stand near the windows. I fill out eighteen or twenty post-office money orders for fancy amounts and tear them up or stick them in my pocket. I make one out every time someone comes from a box and goes to one of the windows to get a package.
It’s nine forty-five when the red package is handed out. I’m almost caught sleeping, because I’d been expecting a man and this is a girl, a young girl probably just out of high school.
I’m right behind her when she goes out of the post office. She doesn’t even suspect she’s being followed. She walks north up Clark Street to Monroe, then turns east and goes into a building. I ride up in the same elevator with her to the tenth floor.
When she goes in a door I walk over and look at the inscription on it. It reads: “Harker Service Company.”
I wait about five minutes, then go inside. The girl I’d followed from the post office is at a typewriter, but another, a big horsy-faced dame, is behind a desk just inside the door. Beside her, against the wall is a big cabinet with narrow pigeon-holes. There are letters in most of the pigeon-holes and another stack on the desk in front of the girl. The red package is there, too.
I say, “I understand you run a business mail service here.”
“That’s right,” the girl replies. “We also take telephone calls, forward mail and provide you with a business address. No room number is necessary. The charge is only $2.00 per month.”
“That’s fine,” I say. “Now, tell me, does a man named Brown get his mail here?”
She freezes up, right away. “Our service is absolutely confidential!”
“But I got a letter from Brown; he gave this address. I want to see him.”
“In that case, you’d have to leave a message for him. Although,” her face twists, “there’s no Mr. Brown in our service.”
“I must have got the address wrong then,” I say.
I go out. There’s a cigar stand in the lobby on the first floor, with a marble game next to it. I buy a package of cigarettes and shove a nickel in the slot of the marble game. There was a sticker on the glass: “For Amusement Only. No Prizes or Awards.”
It’s a bumper game; the steel marbles make electric contact with springs and light up lights and register a score. I waste three nickels, then get some change from the cigar stand. “You’re playing that just for fun, you know,” the cigar stand man warns me.
“Sure, I’m killing time, that’s all.”
I spend a dollar on the game, then loaf around for a half hour and spend another dollar. It’s about eleven-thirty by then and the man at the cigar stand’s getting nervous about me.
I buy a candy bar and get the change in nickels and shove them into the marble game. “That’s costing you money,” the fellow at the stand says.
“So’s the dame I’m s’posed to meet here!” I snap at him.
He chuckles. “Boy, how you can take it. Two hours!”
I pump two of the steel marbles into the slot and slam them both out with the plunger. Lights go up, a bell rings.
“Jackpot!” the cigar stand man yelps.
“No prizes, huh?” I glare at him. There’s a little knob in the front of the machine. I pushed it and a small door pops open, exposing a box almost filled with nickels. There are about five pounds of nickels. I stow them in my coat pocket while the cigar stand chap looks on, sick. He’s still afraid that I’m a cop.
I quit then. It’s just twelve when I go into the Gregorian Towers on North Michigan and ride up to Prince Peter’s apartment.
He’s just having his breakfast. He’s wearing a purple dressing gown on which is embroidered a big red monogram.
“You have found him, Mr. Cragg?” he asks eagerly.
“Practically,” I say. “But the expenses on this job are very heavy. If you could let me have another hundred….”
He doesn’t like that. “What do you mean, you have found him—practically?”
“Well, I got past the post office, anyway. A girl gets his mail at General Deliver
y and takes it to an address on Monroe Street.”
“How do you know it is Mr. Roberts’ mail?” he cuts in. “Hah! Four days I have waited at General Delivery and cannot spot this girl, his messenger.”
“I can understand that. There’re about five thousand boxes there. I knew I couldn’t watch them all, so last night after I left you I bought a big flat book that I knew was too big to put into a post-office box. I had it wrapped in red paper and mailed it to Mr. Roberts. When the girl got this red package, I followed her.”
“To what number on Monroe Street?”
“The Davis Building. Room 1023. It’s a mail address outfit.”
“Mail address? What is that?”
There was a loud knock on the prince’s door. He says: “The waiter for these dishes…. Come in!”
The door opens and Mamie Kelly, all three hundred pounds of her, comes in. The prince jumps to his feet and turns about four shades whiter.
“Madame!” he exclaims.
She comes all the way into the room. She has something under her arm, a flat red package. The string’s broken on the package and the paper disarranged. I can see the cover of a children’s book.
I say: “Well, Prince, I must be going.”
Mamie Kelly blocks the way to the door. She says, “Stick around, young fellow. Something I want to ask you.”
“Yeah, sure,” I say. “I’ll run over to your store after a while. I’ve got to report at my office.”
She shakes her big head. “No.” She takes the book from under her arm and says, “Look, Pete!” and slams it over the prince’s head. He goes down to the floor and stays there.
“Get up, you dirty rat!” Mamie Kelly yells.
The prince begins to whine. He sounds like a dog that has been whipped. Big Mamie reaches down and twists one of her meat hooks in the back of his purple dressing gown. She picks him up and tosses him into an easy chair. Man Mountain Dean couldn’t have done it easier.
All of a sudden I think of something. Tony Druhar, the Serbian I’d found dead—with his face turned around to his spine….
Maybe you think I don’t feel funny. A three-hundred-pound woman, all muscle and bone. My skin gets hot and cold and begins to crawl. What the hell, a man—you could belt him in the jaw, butt him in the stomach or kick him where it’ll do the most good. But a woman—can you do those things to a woman?
The prince is as big as me, if not bigger. Yet Mamie Kelly handles him as if he was a baby. She turns to me and says, “So you think you’re smart, sending me this book?”
“Me?” I say.
“None of that, now! Delia Harker’s a cousin of mine. I never got a package before. When you came in there with your phoney stuff she got me on the telephone. I saw you from across the street fooling around with that damn pin game.”
“Mamie!” yelps the Prince suddenly. “ You— you are W. C. Roberts?”
“Of course I am. How the hell you suppose I got all the money to set you up in this swell hotel? You think I made it in that lousy store I run on Sedgwick for a blind?”
The prince is about ready to faint. I’m not far from it, myself. I’m concentrating on the door, wondering if I can get to it and out, before she can head me off.
Mamie Kelly says, “I give you all that dough, buy you the fancy clothes and what do you do in return? You spend the money on blond floozies, and try to muscle in on my racket. You think I don’t know about Druhar?”
“Druhar?” the prince gasps.
“Yes, Druhar, the punk. He was starving, and I gave him a job at the store. He had to nose around, and then try to sell me out to you. Well, he got what he deserved.”
“You killed him?”
“Like that!” she makes a motion with her two hands like wringing out a wet dishrag.
I take a deep breath and make a dash for the door.
I don’t get to it. Mamie takes a quick step to one side and falls against me. She knocks me spinning and before I can get up, she swoops down on me and grabs my left arm. She twists it behind my back in a hammerlock.
I yell and heave up, trying to turn a forward somersault. A bunch of nickels fall on the floor. And then—
I yelled to high heaven. She breaks my arm. The big, fat murderess! The bones grate in my elbow and I yell bloody murder.
I guess that saves my life. After all, it’s a hotel and she doesn’t want a flock of cops busting in. She lets go of my arm to grab my neck. I have just enough strength left to roll away.
She comes after me again, her big face twisted in a snarl. I can’t see her eyes at all, they’re buried in the fat of her cheeks. I’m so scared of her that I go a little crazy. I kick a chair in her way and she knocks it aside with one punch of her fist.
I try for the door again. She heads me off. I back away and step on some of the nickels that’ve spilled from my pocket.
And then I know what to do. It’s my only chance. Two minutes more in this room with the amazon—and I’d wind up like Tony Druhar. Only more broken bones.
My left arm is hanging limp at my side and I’m dizzy with the pain of it. But there’s nothing wrong with my right arm. I rip open my coat with my right hand, shrug out of the right side of it and reach over to slide it down my left shoulder.
Mamie makes a noise like a female gorilla and starts for me. I jump back and find myself against the wall. But I’ve got the coat in my hand now, the coat with about five pounds of nickels in the pockets. A half-pound of them in the toe of a sock would have made a dandy black-jack.
She comes at me and I swing the coat with all that’s left in me. The noise she makes when she hits the floor reminds me of the time I got drunk at a dance and fell into the bass drum.
Prince Pete thinks this is a good time to make his getaway, but I beat him to the door and swing the weighted coat in his face.
“Wait a minute, pal,” I say to him. “You made a bargain with me—four hundred bucks more if I found W. C. Roberts for you. There’s Roberts. Now kick in. I need the dough, on account of I figure on quitting my skip tracing job and maybe getting married!”
He pays. Then I pick up the telephone and call police headquarters.
Finger Man
Raymond Chandler
ARGUABLY THE GREATEST mystery writer of the twentieth century, Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) brought a literary sensibility to that least likely of places—pulp magazines. Pulps were very clearly and specifically designed to be fast, cheap, action-filled entertainment for the masses. No literary aspirations or pretensions were welcomed by the hard-working editors of even the best of them, notably Black Mask and Dime Detective. Still, Dashiell Hammett brought important realism to his pulp stories, and Chandler elevated the form even further.
Philip Marlowe, the hero of all seven of Chandler’s novels, appears in this printing of “Finger Man,” a novella filled with bad guys and corruption. When the story was first published in the October 1934 issue of Black Mask, the first-person narrator was unnamed. For its first book appearance, the anonymous shamus in “Finger Man” was given the Marlowe name, as Chandler had become the “hottest” mystery writer in America because of his Marlowe novels. The majority of Chandler’s short fiction was collected in three paperback originals published by Avon in its “Murder Mystery Monthly” series, 5 Murderers (1944), Five Sinister Characters (1945), and Finger Man (1946), and his detectives, whether named Carmody, Dalmas, Malvern, Mallory, or unnamed, were transformed into Marlowe. As the detectives evolved from the earliest experiments to the more complex and nuanced hero he envisioned and later compared to a modern-day knight, the adventures became classics of the American crime story.
Finger Man
Raymond Chandler
Putting the finger on a murder victim is rarely a safe bet
ONE
GOT AWAY from the Grand Jury a little after four, and then sneaked up the backstairs to Fenweather’s office. Fen weather, the D.A., was a man with severe, chiseled features and the gray temples women love. He
played with a pen on his desk and said: “I think they believed you. They might even indict Manny Tinnen for the Shannon kill this afternoon. If they do, then is the time you begin to watch your step.”
I rolled a cigarette around in my fingers and finally put it in my mouth. “Don’t put any men on me, Mr. Fen weather. I know the alleys in this town pretty well, and your men couldn’t stay close enough to do me any good.”
He looked towards one of the windows. “How well do you know Frank Dorr?” he asked, with his eyes away from me.
“I know he’s a big politico, a fixer you have to see if you want to open a gambling hell or a bawdy house—or if you want to sell honest merchandise to the city.”
“Right.” Fenweather spoke sharply, and brought his head around towards me. Then he lowered his voice. “Having the goods on Tinnen was a surprise to a lot of people. If Frank Dorr had an interest in getting rid of Shannon who was the head of the Board where Dorr’s supposed to get his contracts, it’s close enough to make him take chances. And I’m told he and Manny Tinnen had dealings. I’d sort of keep an eye on him, if I were you.”
I grinned. “I’m just one guy,” I said. “Frank Dorr covers a lot of territory. But I’ll do what I can.”
Fenweather stood up and held his hand across the desk. He said: “I’ll be out of town for a couple of days, I’m leaving tonight, if this indictment comes through. Be careful—and if anything should happen to go wrong, see Bernie Ohls, my chief investigator.”
I said: “Sure.”
We shook hands and I went out past a tired-looking girl who gave me a tired smile and wound one of her lax curls up on the back of her neck as she looked at me. I got back to my office soon after four-thirty. I stopped outside the door of the little reception room for a moment, looking at it. Then I opened it and went in, and of course there wasn’t anybody there.
There was nothing there but an old red davenport, two odd chairs, a bit of carpet, and a library table with a few old magazines on it. The reception room was left open for visitors to come in and sit down and wait—if I had any visitors and they felt like waiting.