by Otto Penzler
Dizzy gave him the same story she had Mitchell. It was all good hunching, she knew, but not tangible enough evidence on which to make a pinch. She even told Louden that she had positively seen the Ghost the night before, but she carefully refrained from any mention of having trailed him. It was too late to nail him at his hideaway, and even if she had been a squealer.
“And my proposition remains practically the same,” she finished. “Let me fly that striped ransom plane from Roosevelt’s Field at two o’clock this afternoon. Be sure it’s a fast one and have a machine-gun mounted on it—and I’ll get the Ghost for you.”
Suspicion flashed squint-eyed across Louden’s face.
“Say!” he demanded sharply. “How do I know you’re not in on this game too? You were his moll.”
Hot hate flushed Dizzy’s face which changed, gradually, to the amused expression she might have worn when watching the helpless squirming of a newborn puppy.
“Listen, stupid,” she laughed. “I don’t carry any dough. You weigh the ‘chute with a flock of bricks. Everything’s like it should be except for that, and the machine-gun, and Dizzy Malone flying the ship.”
Louden considered.
“No, no, Dizzy,” he burst out petulantly. “It’s impossible. I can’t take upon myself the responsibility of sending you of all people. It’s a job for the police. Your proposition is absurd. I’ve a Boeing pursuit plane out at the field ready and waiting. It’s camouflaged to look like an old crate that’s about ready to fall to pieces, and it’s striped black and white. The parachute is waiting for its load of a million dollars.”
He laughed harshly.
“A million dollars! And I’m sitting here doing nothing. Why, look here! The thing to do is to lay a trap for the boat that’s to pick up all that money.”
“Don’t be dumb!” Dizzy snapped. “I know the way the Ghost’s mind works. He’s a racketeer and a flier. He don’t play with rowboats. I know him like a book and I’m the only one who can get him. Give me a chance!”
The peremptory jangling of the telephone cut in on the voice that had become low and pleading.
Louden picked up the receiver. His face went white as he listened.
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir … I’m doing the best I can … No, nothing definite yet … I’ll give you a ring … Yes.”
His hands trembled violently as he replaced the receiver.
“Come on, Tom.” Dizzy was at him again. “Take a chance. Stall those certain parties off. Tell them someone’s come through with the dough and you’ve sent it out. Call the field about the machine-gun. It’s the Ghost—I know it’s the Ghost and I’ll get him so he won’t bother anyone again. If I don’t get him I won’t come back,” she finished simply.
Louden’s eyes fixed themselves despairingly on hers and slowly a look almost of relief came into them.
He stood up and squared his shoulders with decision.
“I’ll do it!”
Dizzy was across the room. Her arms went around his neck and she pressed a red kiss full on his lips. Before he knew what had happened she was half way through the door. There she turned.
“Plenty gas in the Boeing and two motorcycle cops to shoot me through traffic,” she shouted with a wave of the hand.
Then she tore.
Louden stood there, stunned, his mouth open.
“Gas—cops—” he mumbled, nodding his head dumbly.
But when Dizzy reached her grey roadster, two red motorcycles were coughing impatiently beside it. Their drivers were looking with some disdain at the unpromising hulk, but before they had gone two blocks they were pleasantly disillusioned.
Then, sirens shrieking, they proceeded to do their stuff and, for the first time in her life, Dizzy looked at a copper with favor. The baby in front of her could ride, and he did so.
Through traffic they wailed their way, screamed across crowded Queensborough Bridge and on to Long Island.
There, Dizzy gunned the V-16, worrying the heels of the man in front. In the mirror she could see the man behind grin as he hung on doggedly.
Then all three went raving speed-mad.
It was with fifteen minutes still to spare that they whined through the entrance to Roosevelt Field.
The coppers flung wearily off their busses and kicked them into their rests. But they stood to attention and brought their fingers to their caps with real admiration when Dizzy stepped jauntily to the ground and hurried to where she saw a battered-looking crate, striped black and white, being warmed up on the line.
A field official stepped forward.
“The ship is ready,” he said, waving his hand.
“Gas?” Dizzy snapped.
“Full tanks.”
“Cruising radius?”
“A thousand miles.”
“Good!”
Dizzy stepped into the flying suit he held toward her and adjusted helmet and goggles.
She waved aside the parachute straps he started to buckle about her with a grim: “That won’t do me any good!”
It was to be a battle to the death.
Dizzy climbed aboard and the man explained the manipulation of the machine-gun that had been hastily geared to the motor and camouflaged and showed her where the auxiliary belts of ammunition were nested in the cockpit.
“This is a regulation army pursuit ship,” he said, “with complete equipment Very pistol and lights, earth inductor compass—”
“Okay, okay!”
The girl checked the details as he pointed them out and shot a glance at her wrist watch.
Two o’clock!
She revved the motor, thrilling to the smooth precision of its whining roar as the man snapped the buckles of the safety-belt.
“Money ‘chute!” she cried.
The man brought it and stowed it away within easy reach.
“Bricks!” he shouted with a grin.
Dizzy nodded.
“Let’s go!”
The chocks were pulled from the wheels. She gave it the gun and the crate rolled into the runway, hurtled forward. A slight pull on the stick and it catapulted into the air.
Climbing in a tight spiral she watched the altimeter—a thousand feet, two, three, four, five. Then she leveled off and threw the ship into a series of intricate maneuvers. She had been taught by a master—the Ghost—and had proved a more than apt pupil. The Boeing responded to the slightest touch on rudder and stick. Never had she flown such a ship.
She leveled off again and, putting the blazing disc of the sun at her back, set her course by the compass dead into the east. Full gun she watched the speed indicator climb to its maximum, then throttled down to an easy hundred miles an hour. No need to figure drift—not a breath of air stirred.
Long Island slid out from under her and the Boeing nosed out over the Atlantic.
Dizzy dipped her left wing and scanned the smooth blue expanse of water. No yacht with striped deck met her eager gaze; in fact, there was no boat of any sort to be seen, no smudge of black smoke, even, on the horizon ahead. She wormed round in the cockpit as far as the safety-straps would permit and scanned the air.
Nothing.
The scorching sun beat blindingly into her eyes.
A sense of utter loneliness settled depressingly about her.
She shot the moon to warm her guns, quivering with a throb of power at their chattering death-talk.
An hour spun round on the dial of her watch.
The sea below her was a round blue waste circled by a shimmering heat haze.
Another hour—
She dispelled a growing uneasiness with a screaming burst of the guns.
The sun settled slowly behind her. The Boeing roared on into the east.
Another hour—
The ship, perceptibly lightened of its load of gas, floated easily in the air. She flew left-wing low, now, searching the water for a striped-deck yacht.
Still nothing. The sea was as barren as a deserted mill-pond. She searched the sky above and behi
nd. Nothing but the red round of the sun, slowly sinking.
The vague restlessness of fear shuddered along her nerves that the staccato of the guns failed to dispel. The gas was almost half gone and still the bare, tenantless reach of water stretched below her.
Where was the yacht?
The suspicion born in the D.A.’s office that it was only a stall grew into a certainty. Real fear gripped her. What was this all about? Should she turn back?
No! She remembered her boast and screamed it into the surrounding void.
“Damn the Ghost! I’ll get him or I won’t come back!”
As if in answer to her screamed challenge a black shadow seemed to sweep out of the sun.
Her eyes jerked to the side, her body went rigid.
Beside her floated a low-winged black Lockheed Sirius monoplane.
Her gaze probed through the pilot’s goggles, locked with the pale smoldering eyes of—the Ghost!
He waggled his wings and motioned over the side with a long-armed gesture.
Dizzy held up the readied ‘chute.
The Ghost nodded and she flung it clear.
A cold dash of warning from some seventh sense sent her up in a steep zoom and she fell off on one wing.
And none too soon for a spatter of holes ripped through the doped linen of one wing. The Ghost was heeled too.
She banked to see the man pull his ship out of a zoom that had been intended to rake her bus from prop to tail assembly, and dive for the opened ‘chute. He caught it deftly on a hook suspended from the undercarriage and hauled it rapidly aboard.
Dizzy rammed forward on the stick, the wind droned through the wires as she dropped down and threw a burst of steel into the Sirius. It dropped off clumsily on one wing and pulled itself up heavily.
With that maneuver the insane daring of the Ghost’s final gesture came clear. The Sirius with its cruising radius of 4,300 miles was fueled to capacity. The Ghost gambled to blast the ransom plane out of the sky with a single burst, pick up the money ‘chute and head for Europe.
Dizzy thrilled in spite of herself at the very audacity of the thing, its colossal bluff.
Then the red mantle of hate dropped over her.
She dropped the Boeing down out of the sky and swept alongside the black ship. This would be a fair fight and to the death. She would get him, if she could, and on the level.
Dizzy tore off goggles and helmet, noting with satisfaction the cringe of recognition that swept across the Ghost’s face.
She shook her fist at him and motioned him to dump his gas.
He accepted the challenge and a sheet of spray gushed downward. The black ship, lightened of its load, leaped upward.
They were on even terms now.
Dizzy tripped her guns and the man answered the salute—the salute of death, for one of them at least and perhaps both.
They flung their ships at each other, guns flaming.
Steel seared Dizzy’s cockpit, rocking the Boeing. She dove, zoomed up in a loop and stood on her head pumping chattering hail into the Sirius.
The Ghost wing-slipped out of the way and they clawed down the sky to get at each other’s bellies, then roared upward, guns raving.
Dizzy’s instrument-board went to pieces. Stunned, the Boeing slipped into a spin, the Ghost on its heels waiting to rip in the coup de grace.
The girl threw the stick into neutral and, when her crate steadied, sat on her tail and clawed for altitude.
Sirius steel tore into the Boeing. Dizzy pulled into a reversement and for an instant the black crate was glued to her ring-sights. She pressed the trips. Steel gutted the black ship.
It wabbled. She was under it, ripping, tearing.
The Sirius nosed over into a spin, flame streaming behind.
The Boeing nosed in for the kill, wires screaming, guns raving.
A black wing collapsed and the Sirius spun faster, down, down.
Dizzy leveled off, banked and leaned over the side.
Below her a flaming ball cometed down through the dusk to be extinguished, suddenly, in a mighty geyser of spray—
Dizzy was limp and trembling when she pulled back on the stick and gunned the Boeing into a staggering climb. The motor missed, caught again and roared on as she leveled off and stuck its nose into the faint afterglow that streaked upward into the gathering darkness.
She rode the air alone, sky-victor in a riddled ship. Ominous metallic growlings broke the smooth beat of the motor from time to time. The instrument-board was shot away, but she realized that her gas must be running low.
The compass needle wabbled perilously on its luminous dial.
She nursed the game crate on—on.
The motor began to miss badly. Her eyes strained into the blackness below, but she remembered the deserted sea and gave up hope of distinguishing a light. A thin, complaining whine from the iron guts of the motor.
Bullet through the oil tanks, she thought. This can’t last much longer.
But she kept on, content to take death as it should come, but still fighting. The score was even—victory hers even though she would never enjoy its spoils.
The whine of the motor was rising in a screaming crescendo—she felt the Boeing settle.
Her hands unloosed the buckles of the safety-belt, grazed the butt of a Very pistol. Her fingers closed about it and tore it out of its holster.
Pointing the Very gun over her head a rocket of light shot upward, burst in a shower of colored stars.
With a final shrill of protest the motor clanked into silence.
She nosed the ship down in a long easy glide.
The face of Spanish Lil sneered up out of her mind. Dizzy gritted her teeth. That score would have to go unsettled.
The Very pistol spurted another streamer of light that rocketed into twinkling stars.
The ship nosed down, a darker blackness rising to meet it. Wave crests slapped at the undercarriage, a spurt of spray dashed upward from the dead prop and the Boeing settled gently in the arms of the sea.
Uncomprehendingly, at first, Dizzy Malone’s eyes took in the little white room, the stiffly-uniformed nurse, the white iron bed; came to rest on the face of the man bending over her—Tom Louden.
Realization filtered gradually into her mind.
Tom grinned.
“Feeling better?”
Dizzy nodded feebly.
“I may get myself into a jam for—ah— commandeering that sea sled but—it was worth the chance. And I was just in time.”
“Thanks,” she whispered. “You took a chance for me, huh? Well, I’m just dizzy enough to take one myself—now. I’ll chance the straight and narrow, if you—think—”
Tom Louden’s face bent closer—closer—.
The Duchess Pulls a Fast One
Whitman Chambers
THE AUTHOR OF MORE THAN twenty crime and mystery novels, as well as an active screenwriter, Whitman Chambers (1898-1968) is surprisingly neglected today. He created several private eye characters for the pulps and novels; perhaps the failure to produce an especially engaging series character has militated against his continuing popularity.
Among his most successful works are The Come-On (1953), which was filmed in 1955; he was the co writer of the screenplay with Warren Douglas. A good and complex film noir, it starred Anne Baxter and Sterling Hay den; Russell Birdwell was the director. Hayden also starred in Manhandled, filmed in 1949, which also featured Dan Duryea as the quintessential small-time hood and Dorothy Lamour; Lewis R. Foster directed the Paramount feature. In 1960, Chambers wrote a novelization based on his own screenplay.
Among the many pulp stories Chambers wrote in the 1930s, he created Katie Blayne, known as “the Duchess,” for Detective Fiction Weekly. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Katie was no one’s assistant, wife, secretary, or partner. A reporter for The Sun who dated a man on a rival newspaper, she investigated crimes while digging out facts for her articles. She is good-looking and aggressive but often relies on intui
tion to solve a mystery; it was said that she could “produce hunches faster than a cigarette machine turns out coffin nails.”
“The Duchess Pulls a Fast One” first appeared in the September 19, 1936, issue of DFW.
The Duchess Pulls a Fast One
Whitman Chambers
Bergstrom directed them toward the closet
Katie Blay tie’s Bluff Forces
a Mysterious Insurance
Murderer into the Open
THE THREE OF US, Spike and Katie Blayne and I, were alone in the City Hall press room. It was six thirty of a dark and rainy evening. I’d just taken over the beat from Spike, for the Telegram, and Katie was waiting for the Sun’s night police reporter to come on the job.
“Duchess,” Spike Kaylor beefed, “why don’t you scram out of here and go home?”
“Spike, why don’t you give yourself up?” the Duchess retorted, smiling.
“Pinky, doesn’t she get in your hair the way she hangs around and hangs around, all the time?” Spike persisted.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to be drawn into their quarrel which, for seven months, had kept the press room on pins and needles. In the first place, Spike Kaylor is my best friend. And in the second place, Katie Blayne—well, never mind about Katie Blayne.
The fire alarm gong tapped out 236. Spike strode over to the card tacked on the bulletin board. “Fifth and Chesnut.” He looked more cheerful. “Our City Hall apparatus will roll on the deuce.”
“And you, dear little boys, I suppose, will take a ride on the big old fire engine,” Katie jeered. “Won’t that be just ducky!”
“Well,” I said, “it’s some consolation to be able to do something that you can’t do.”
Katie’s blue eyes twinkled. “Maybe you think I can’t.”
“Skip it,” I said. “You’re not going kiting around on any fire truck. Not the way these lunatics drive.”
At that instant the second alarm clanged in. “There’s the deuce!” Spike shouted, and leaped toward the door.
I was on his heels and I realized, unhappily, that Katie was on mine. We tore down the corridor and into the fire house. The big pumper was just starting to roll. The three of us caught the hand rail and swung onto the running board. Two firemen up beside the driver looked back and yelled at Katie. The roar of the powerful engines drowned their words and the Duchess looked the other way.