Donahue leaned against the car, his face drawn. He hefted the two guns. “Get, Jess—or I’ll empty both these rods in your belly!”
Jess staggered away from the car. Donahue toiled after him, dragging his left leg, hopping on the right. Jess dragged his heels, bent far forward, both hands held to his side. They crossed Second Avenue, crossed Third and started up the hill towards Lexington. Half way up Jess fell to the pavement, groaning.
“Get up, Jess!”
“I can’t. Honest to God, I can’t! Oh-o…. God…. God!”
Donahue started towards where Jess lay, but he never made it. He dropped three feet short, and lay braced on one elbow. Jess was sitting facing him, hands gripping his side, torso rocking from side to side. The street was dark, deserted; not even a house light shone. At the next corner was the hotel.
For fully two minutes they said nothing. They could hear each other’s labored breathing, see each other’s sweat-smeared and pain-twisted face. Then Jess fell quietly side-wise.
Donahue looked at him through glassy eyes. The street began to fade. Jess became a dark blur lying on the sidewalk. Donahue’s braced arm collapsed, and his head struck the sidewalk. He could not move it. Blackness was sweeping down on him.
His hand tightened on the gun he had taken from Jess. He pulled the trigger, kept pulling it until the hammer clicked. The echoes of the shots hammered violently in the narrow street.
Donahue’s fingers relaxed. He sighed, and then there was nothing but blackness. But somewhere a police whistle shrilled.
Chapter VIII
Donahue came to some time later in a white hospital room. He saw two nurses, a doctor, another doctor and he saw sunlight slicing through two windows. Sunlight after darkness. The uppermost thought in his mind, tenacious after hours of riding wild nightmares, had to do with Jess crumpled on the dark pavement in Thirty-seventh Street.
“How are you, lad?”
Donahue saw the fat doctor’s lips moving.
“They get Jess?” Donahue asked.
“Who?”
The other doctor leaned. “He means the gangster.”
“Oh, Jess. Yes. He’s in the ward now.”
“Alive, eh?”
“Quite…. How do you feel?”
“I haven’t felt so rotten in a long time.”
The doctor said, “You were in bad shape, lad. You’ll be on your back for a month… but you’ll get over it.”
“Butt?”
“I wouldn’t—yet, lad.”
“Okey.” He licked dry lips, and the nurse gave him a drink of water. “How’s Ames?”
“Ames?”
“The dick got shot in University Place by the guy I nailed.”
“Oh, yes. Ames is quite all right. Sitting up in fact. He got two wounds, but neither of them was frightfully serious. He said he’d like to see you when you came to.”
“That’s fine.”
The two nurses and the two doctors went out. Five minutes later one of the nurses opened the door, and a white-coated man wheeled in Ames.
Ames was smiling tranquilly. “So you got him, eh, Donny? That was guts, boy. And I got the jane. It was tough. I ducked two of her shots, but when the third got me I couldn’t help cutting loose. I’ve never killed a jane—before. It’s kind of—getting me… you know?”
“Yeah, Billy. Broads. They trick us, cheat us, and try to murder us… and when they get it in the neck, we—get a touch of heart…. How the hell did you ever happen to come over to the hotel? I never thought you’d show up.”
“Well, I breezed down to the place in Waverly, but nobody was in. I hung around a while, and then I thought I’d walk over and get the details from you. I went up in the elevator. When it opened at your floor, I happened to look in the mirror that the operator uses to see if anybody’s coming for the elevator. You know, it’s fixed up on the side near the door.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I saw you and the jane and the guy with the gun. I figured that if I stepped out then I’d have no show… and you’d get rubbed out in the rush. So I told the guy to go down again. Then I saw you hoofing out the side entrance. The papers are having a hell of a gay time about it. One thing that’s got me—”
The door opened and the nurse said, “Mr. Hinkle calling.”
“Sure,” said Donahue.
Asa Hinkle entered with his ambassadorial air, closed the door, turned and stood looking at Donahue. He said nothing. He regarded his aide with mild, curious intensity.
Donahue reached out, lifted Ames’ cigarette from the latter’s fingers and took a long drag. He gushed smoke through his nostrils, said, “Pardon me if I don’t seem to get up, Asa.”
Hinkle chuckled, came forward smiling and laid his soft, fat hand on Donahue’s lean brown one.
“You’re a wonder, Donny!”
Donahue chuckled. “Now come the bouquets.”
“Not,” said Hinkle, sitting down, “exactly.” He leaned forward. “We thought Jess had the ice, but he said you said you’d left it with the precinct skipper in Harlem. Skipper says you’re a liar.”
“I am. Jess told the truth.”
Hinkle wagged his head, drew in his upper lip. “The skipper says—”
“Now don’t worry about that,” Donahue broke in whimsically. “The ice is safe. Go over to my hotel and tell the clerk to give you the letter I had him put away just before I went up to my room—and met the broad and her playmate.”
Hinkle’s eyes widened. “So that’s it!” He placed his hand on Donahue’s again. “Donny, you are a wonder! Take a long rest, boy. The reward is big. I’ll cable our client immediately, deposit your share in the bank for you. It’s been a long road, Donny. And a brutal one. Frankly, I’m surprised to see you alive.
“This last play was a bad one. We’ve got it straight now that Poore sent Tubba Klem after the ice. Poore figured that Friedman had switched it. And we’ve got it straight that Irene Saffarrans had a long talk with her sister and Irene figured that you’d switched the ice.”
Donahue sighed. “Okey, boss… okey. Get the ice and get rid of it. It’s the unluckiest hunk of ice I ever tailed. I’m on my back for a month, and I don’t want to hear about it, don’t want to talk about it. I’m sick of guns and gun-toting frails. When I can walk I’m going to go to the country. I know a guy up in the mountains. He’s got a cabin there. And it’s quiet as hell. God, Asa, it’ll be good to smell the woods and forget all about business!”
Asa sat back with a reflective smile. “You know, Donny, I’d like to go with you.”
Donahue glared. “Nix. You couldn’t get enough newspapers, and you couldn’t go an hour without talking about your life’s work. Nix, boss. Just nix.”
Hinkle chuckled. “I guess you’re right, son.”
Spare the Rod
Tough dick Donahue is taken for a buggy ride.
Chapter I
When Donahue came into the office Asa Hinkle, the pontifical-looking head of the Interstate Agency, looked up from the stock quotations he was frowning over.
“I thought you’d be at Tony’s,” he said.
“I was learning some card tricks.”
“Well, I don’t suppose that could be any worse than playing the market.”
“I told the boys I’d be right back.”
Asa Hinkle sat back and pulled a memorandum from the drawer. “You have a reservation,” he said, “on the Pennsy tonight—for St. Louis. You’d better take plenty of clean shirts.”
Donahue stopped a lighted match half-way to the cigarette that hung from his lips. Then he grunted, put flame to tobacco, and snapped the match into a cuspidor.
“Who the hell wants to go to St. Louis?” he said.
“Boy, the way my finances stand now, St. Louis is as good as any place. You’d better take along some Scotch, too. I hear they’re having a cold snap out there and you can only buy gin and thrice-cut bourbon.”
“Listen, Asa, the last time I went to that burg I
almost got fogged out. Not only that, but there was a shyster there named Stein who double-crossed us.”
“This is simple,” said Hinkle. “It looks to me like nothing more serious than being a bodyguard. The client’s name is William Herron. He’s at the Apollo Hotel, in Locust Street—room 804. I think your train gets in at five tomorrow evening.”
“What’s the matter, haven’t they got any private dicks in St. Louis?”
“That is neither here nor there. Herron called us on long distance just before noon today. I told him that it seemed a little irregular and that I didn’t think we could send a man out there unless we had a retainer. He said that would be given as soon as you arrived. I said that it was possible to send money over the Western Union. Half an hour ago I collected three hundred dollars that he sent by telegraph. I just wired him that Mr. Donahue would arrive about five tomorrow evening.”
Donahue tipped back his Homburg. “Providing you supply the Scotch.”
“I have two bottles here in the desk.”
“Suppose I get in Dutch out there?”
“Go to Moss Garrity, in Olive Street. And remember, tip no more than ten per cent. And don’t include any money lost in those East St. Louis gambling joints.”
“I’ll be good.”
“I seem to have heard that before. But anyhow, start packing.”
The sound of wheels rattling over switches, the slow lurching of the Pullman, the muted jangling of bells, woke Donahue up. He looked out of the window and saw railroad yards: red lights, green lights, many steel rails shining in the gloom.
He picked up a book that had fallen to the floor, stowed it in the Gladstone, took a flat black automatic from beneath a suit of pajamas and shoved it into his pocket.
The train crawled into the shed. Donahue put on raglan and Homburg, submitted to the porter’s ministrations, tipped him, grabbed up the Gladstone and got off. He defied porters on the way up the platform, went through the barn-like station and came out in Market Street. He took a taxi and it rushed him to Twelfth, north on Twelfth, east on Locust. He got off at the Apollo Hotel.
He had wired ahead for a room on the eighth floor. They gave him number 812, and a black boy took the key and the bag and piloted Donahue aloft; opened a window in the room, opened the closet door, grinned with white horse teeth in a sooty black face.
“Anything else, suh?”
“I brought my own.”
“Thank you, suh.”
The boy left and Donahue stood for a moment staring down into Locust street, where a pall of smoke and fog dimmed the lights. Then he took off hat and topcoat and sat down at the small metal desk. He took up the telephone receiver.
“Give me room 804,” he said. Presently he heard a man’s voice, and said: “Mr. Herron?… This is Donahue, the Interstate man from New York. Should I come right over?… I’m down the hall from you in 812…. All right, I’ll be right over.”
He hung up and sat staring blankly at the instrument for a full minute. Then he rose, wagged his head dubiously, frowned with his lean-cheeked brown face. He looked like a man reacting visibly to a vague inner instinct; to an intangible warning against which his better judgment was as nothing compared with the force of circumstance. With a hoarse sigh, begrudgingly philosophical, he went to the door, opened it and locked it from the outside; went down the corridor with a shadowy forehead and slow deliberate footsteps.
Herron let him in after a moment’s scrutiny through big horn-rimmed glasses.
“Well—well, so you got here; so you did get here!”
There was no handshaking. Donahue, hands thrust into jacket pockets, strolled in as though the room and Herron were a familiar ensemble. Herron locked the door behind him, quickly. Donahue walked the length of the room and turned finally when he reached the windows. The shades were drawn. The room, larger and more pretentious than Donahue’s, was close, stuffy, as though no air had permeated it in a long while.
Herron, beaming with a fat florid face, chafed fat white hands and stood watching Donahue with eyes that laughed without losing their scrutiny. Donahue returned the look with candid brown eyes and immobile brown features.
“Well—well, now that you are, Mr. Donahue—now that you are here—well, sit down. Of course, sit down—anywhere.”
“I’ve been sitting all the way from New York.”
Donahue continued to stand, feet a little apart, broad shoulders slouching, hands in pockets. Herron lumbered across the room and turned on another light. He was well-dressed, a vigorous fat man whose fat was not particularly doughy. Solid white fat. Crinkly gray hair. Big eyes with a bright blue baffling look. His age might have been forty or fifty. He sat down in a mohair armchair, lit a dark cigar, began to smile reflectively.
“I suppose you think it odd, don’t you?”
Donahue shrugged. “I haven’t got the details yet.”
“Oh, I mean—I mean my sending to New York for a private detective. Eh? Don’t you?”
“I’m never surprised, Mr. Herron.”
“Well, I am glad to hear that, Mr. Donahue. I am certainly glad to hear that. Yes, sir—indeed. I think you will find that it was worth your while to leave New York and come here. I have to have a man I can depend on implicitly. Eh? Implicitly! You understand that, of course.”
“Yes.”
“Splendid! And I am a man you can depend on too, Mr. Donahue. Depend on me to compensate your Agency for anything you do. And I might add—I will add, in fact, that a little premium for yourself will not be entirely out of order. Eh?”
“Go on, Mr. Herron.”
“Of course, to be sure. These little preliminaries I think are necessary. I am a man who believes in certain preliminaries, Mr. Donahue; one might even call them courtesies, or delicacies. You appear to me to be a man of intelligence and tact and also a man of courage and tenacity. Said as much to myself the moment I laid eyes on you. And I believe in giving credit where credit is due.
“Now, Mr. Donahue—now.” Herron took three quick puffs on his cigar. “My real name is not Herron. You may as well know that now, though I implore you to keep it a secret. You must at all times call me Herron. My real name is Stanley Edgecomb. As Stanley Edgecomb I was supposed to have left for Hot Springs three days ago. I didn’t. I am here, in this hotel, incognito. I have not been out of this room since the night I walked in as William Herron. I want to be frank with you, Mr. Donahue.”
For the first time since he had entered the room a glimmer of interest appeared in Donahue’s eyes.
“Surprised—eh?”
“No,” said Donahue.
“By Godfrey, you are an uncommon fellow! A man of parts you are, Mr. Donahue! ’Pon my word!” He swayed in the chair in what seemed like a paroxysm of sheer delight.
Donahue began to speak frankly, bluntly—“Mr. Herron, suppose we get down to cases. It’s kind of you to spread a lot of bouquets around, to tell me I’m pretty damn’ good. I know I’m pretty good, Mr. Herron. What are you driving at? In short, what is your particular kind of racket?”
“Racket, Mr. Donahue, is an ugly word. I wish you would not use it again. Stanley Edgecomb is well known in this city. He is a lawyer. I, Stanley Edgecomb, am a lawyer. A price is on my head, that price set by the head of a notorious gang. I was warned to leave this city within twenty-four hours. To all appearances, I left, deciding that discretion was the better part of valor—outwardly, at least.
“Understand, I dare not show my face on the streets. Not even my friends know that I am here. My house is closed, but I believe it is being watched. And this is where you come in. In my haste to get away from the house, I left behind some valuable papers, in my safe. I want you to get those papers.”
“Anybody in the house?”
“One servant, old Jansen, who sleeps on the top floor. But you will not disturb Jansen. I will give you my keys and the combination to my safe. In the safe is a black metal box. In that box are these papers. You will bring me the box. Eh?”
“Until the police have rounded up the gang. It was on the advice of a policeman that I left town. He doesn’t know I did not leave. He thought I would be safer while the process of rounding up was going on. I have been worried, thinking that someone might break into my house and get these papers. I think they would be safer with me. Now—here are my keys. This one opens the rear door. I will give you this one. And here is a diagram of the interior of the house, showing the room where the safe is located. Midnight or after would be the best time.”
“And you got me all the way from New York—for this?”
“Of course, Mr. Donahue. The papers are valuable to me. They contain much evidence against the gang I started out to crush.”
“Why didn’t you hire a private cop right in town?”
“Because I am too well known here. Come, come, Mr. Donahue. If you are incredulous, inquire anywhere as to the reputation of mine. Ask anyone who Stanley Edgecomb is.”
Donahue shrugged. “Well, I take the key. And let us go over the plans.”
“To be sure, Mr. Donahue!”
Chapter II
At eleven-thirty that night Donahue walked out of the Apollo Hotel and climbed into a taxi. He gave an address and the taxi turned left into Seventh Street, west on Olive. It was cold, and Donahue slouched in one corner of the tonneau, his collar up around his ears, his hat yanked down over his eyes.
Fifteen minutes later the taxi drew up at the corner of Lindell Boulevard and Kingshighway. Donahue got out, paid up, took a look at the Hotel Chase and then dodged traffic on the way across the monumental plaza. He walked west on Lindell, with pretentious homes on his right, Forest Park on his left, a cold wind at his back. His well-shod feet smacked the pavement with dogged deliberation, his dark eyes, hawkish beneath his hat brim, cruised the street and kept watching the houses. Finally his eyes settled on an imposing rough stone house with a tower on its left. Broad lawns lay before it. The windows were darkened.
Tough as Nails: The Complete Cases of Donahue From the Pages of Black Mask Page 18