The Big Book of Female Detectives

by The Big Book of Female Detectives (retail) (epub)

  For an instant silence hung over the little group. Watching Ortega, Wylie could almost read the conflicting emotions that raced through his brain. He knew that Ortega did not have the secret of the treasure and he could see that the Cuban was torn between the desire to admit the fact and a desire to bluff it out until he had obtained the secret from Vivian at eight o’clock that night.

  The eyes of the Chinese youth had flitted back to the statues again. They seemed to fascinate him. His head was slightly tilted as he moved a step or two toward one of them to examine it more closely.

  And so intent was Ortega upon the problem confronting him that he did not notice the interest of the young Chinese, did not see the stealthy sidewise movement that brought him in front of Wylie. Nor did he catch the movement that sent a revolver slipping from its hiding place up the loose sleeve of the Chinese and the hand that extended it to Wylie.

  * * *

  —

  Ortega got to his feet and paced up and down. And, as his back was turned, the revolver disappeared into Wylie’s pocket, along with the folded paper that accompanied it.

  It was the piece of paper the Lady from Hell had received from Gonzales, on which she had added a few terse instructions. Instructions so brief that to most men they would have seemed fantastic, but to Wylie, who knew from long experience the shrewd crystal-like clearness of Vivian’s brain, they were simple enough.

  We’re on top of treasure now. Be ready to help. Sunlight developed secret ink. Let Ortega find loot hidden in headless statue. Chink will take it from him and then be ready.

  And, in the voice of the Lady from Hell, there came to Wylie’s ears a few whispered sentences:

  “Don’t try getaway. Read note. I’ll return tonight. Just before Chang Kai arrives tell Ortega that the loot is in the statue of Sebastian!”

  Her low-voiced instructions left him with gleaming eyes. He had recognized Vivian immediately upon her arrival. That disguise and make-up of a Chinese youth was one that he himself had taught her.

  He found himself perplexed as to the exact meaning of her orders. There had been so little time while Ortega’s back was turned. Yet he knew the Lady from Hell well enough; hers were never idle instructions. Whatever plans she was now revolving, things she expected him to do were an integral part of them.

  Besides, there was the note safe in his pocket. Her whispered, urgent words must have been rather an afterthought. Otherwise she would have written them out for him in advance, adding them to the folded paper and the welcome revolver. Obviously she was concerned about something which she could not have understood clearly before entering this very room.

  Vivian’s face had settled again into its smooth yellow mask and her hands were folded as Ortega turned back to her suddenly.

  “You may tell Chang Kai,” he said, “that I agree.”

  “All right,” she answered. “Then I am to tell you that Chang Kai will arrive here tonight at eight thirty. He will join his knowledge with yours and together you will secure the treasure.”

  “Agreed,” Ortega said, and with a bow the young Chinese turned away.

  CHAPTER V

  The She-Devil’s Gems

  That night the Lady from Hell slowed the car she had hired two-thirds of the way up the hill on which the ruined monastery stood and ran it behind a clump of young mango trees. A few branches snapped off and tucked here and there about the body of the car broke its outlines, gave effective camouflage. She would have need of that car in a short time, and need it badly, if her plans went according to schedule.

  The pile of ruined masonry loomed on the crest of the hill above her in charred tracery against the golden globe of the rising moon, looking like some fantastic monster crouched there ready to spring. A light gleamed through one of the narrow slitted windows as she made her way up the hill, keeping carefully in the shadow of the underbrush that lined the roadway. Only the faintest of rustlings betrayed her presence. But even that, to her strained ears in the quiet of the night, was magnified to enormous proportions.

  Thirty feet from her stood the black wall of the ruined monastery, and halfway between where she stood and the door a man stood sentinel by the tall undergrowth at the edge of the road. To attempt to approach the door by the road would be madness, serve only to invite a bullet from the man on guard. To even attempt a dash up the road in the moonlight, now stronger, would betray her presence. And along the side of the road it was equally dangerous.

  Her only chance was to slip through the undergrowth, and she knew that her chance of getting past the man unobserved was slight. To jump him, and then make for the door, gave her only the scantiest of chances, for there was the possibility that there were others on guard that she could not see. But it was a chance that must be taken.

  She might have stolen by at that, reach the door in safety, if she had not stepped on a dried twig. It snapped with an explosion of a rifle there in the stillness.

  Silence…strung…pulsating…a gruelling hiatus. Minutes were eons…From the crest of a nearby palm came a querulous rasp of a parakeet, the only sound in a vast and dark silence.

  Then cautious footsteps.

  Vivian tensed. She was armed, but she dare not shoot, except as a last desperate expedient. The sound would bring the pack to her heels in half a minute.

  And then near disaster swept upon her with sinister swiftness.

  An intuition, a sudden leaping of her nerves from no visible warning, saved Vivian. She leaped sidewise under this intuitive impulse as a man behind her aimed a blow at her head with a revolver.

  And then he broke into a high-pitched, choking noise as he stumbled back, clawing frantically at his eyes, writhing like a man suddenly bereft of all reason.

  “Madre de Dios!” he cried in terror. “My eyes—they are burned out! I am blind—”

  Concentrated ammonia does that to a man. It burns his eyes. Renders him immediately helpless.

  Vivian’s weapon had been a small rubber syringe filled with the stuff, and she had squirted a fine spray of it into the man’s face. Then the butt of her gun fell on the head of the moaning man again and again with all the power of her strong arm—and the thing was done. The man slipped to the ground unconscious.

  Without stopping to see how badly hurt the man was, Vivian slipped on quietly toward the great door of the building.

  Her chief fear was that it might be locked. But it was not.

  A touch, and it moved slightly on well-oiled hinges. Another touch and Vivian could peer through into the long, spacious room.

  Hurricane lanterns, placed on the rude table in the center of the room, cast an irregular circle of light that barely washed the walls with a dim glow and bathed the statues in their niches in faint luminescence. Another lantern, placed on the floor, but tilted back so that its tin reflector directed a concentrated beam of light, illuminated one of the statues…a headless, battered piece of polychrome.

  She caught her breath in astonishment. Here was something that she had not planned, something that startled her, made her think for a moment that her carefully-laid plans had gone wrong. Then a partial solution dawned upon her, and her tense lips parted in a slight smile as she saw how she could turn it to her own advantage.

  * * *

  —

  Ortega, standing on one of the steps a little below the headless statue, swung a heavy hammer against it with shattering force—another and another blow. An oval portion in the statue’s midsection cracked loose and fell to the floor. Behind it was a sparkle, a glitter.

  Ortega shouted his triumph, and the Lady from Hell caught her breath in excitement. This was the hiding place of Cordoza’s loot—a battered statue, hollow inside, standing in the ruined hall of a ruined monastery.

  Ortega rained blow after blow. The statue cracked into fragments and the upper part c
rashed to the floor. And, like grains of corn from a ripped sack, the hoarded treasure spilled to the floor—pearls, rubies, amethysts, opals, emeralds in a glittering cascade in which the red-gold of minted coins formed dancing highlights of flame.

  Dropping his hammer, Ortega leaped to the floor and scooped up a handful of the glittering gems, let them trickle through his fingers in a shining stream.

  It was his last act of life. A shriek of terror burst from his lips as he glanced up from the floor just in time to see Chang Kai, standing ten feet away, raising a gun. It spat flame. A red splash appeared on his forehead. He fell over on his side, twitched once or twice, and then lay still.

  “Do not stir,” the Chinese snapped sharply at Ortega’s astounded followers, huddled in a little knot a dozen or so feet away. The Lady from Hell could see that Chang Kai’s Chinese had them covered. The Cubans saw it also. They did not move. They dared not.

  Every eye in the room was fixed on Chang Kai. Softly Vivian pushed the door open a little more, slipped into the room, and closed the door behind her. None of those inside heard a sound, caught her furtive movement.

  “This man,” Chang Kai said with a contemptuous smile, indicating the huddled form on the floor, “was foolish enough to think that I would share Cordoza’s treasure with him. He knows better now. It belongs to me.”

  “I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” Vivian said quietly from her position beside the doorway. “It belongs to me.”

  Chang Kai whirled, amazement upon his face, his gun held high. Then he smiled slowly as he saw that the intruder was only a woman, even though she was armed. His eyes swept her from flaming red hair beneath the trim white Panama, raked down the white silk suit and ended at the white buck-skin shoes.

  “What makes you believe that it belongs to you?” he said silkily. But there was deadly menace beneath the silk.

  “Because I planned that it should,” the Lady from Hell told him coolly. “I knew that the treasure was here, but Ortega’s presence prevented my searching for it. I knew that you knew the hiding place, but did not know the house in which it was hid. So I told you the address, and arranged for you to come here.”

  “You!” There was amazement in Chang Kai’s eyes. “But—”

  “Yes,” Vivian cut him short. “I was Señorita Dolores Cordoza. You did exactly as I planned for you to do. You found the jewels. You removed Ortega. And now I have come for the treasure.”

  Chang Kai laughed. A lone woman, even though armed with a gun, to wrest a fortune from the hands of two dozen armed and desperate men. Ortega’s men, he realized, had nothing to lose and everything to gain by fighting on his side, should a fight be necessary.

  There was a stillness in the poise of the man opposite Vivian Legrand that told her his purpose as clearly as though the words had been spoken. Her nerves coiled like springs.

  “Do not make the mistake of thinking me alone,” she warned. “I would not be that foolish. You are covered by a dozen men—good shots all of them.”

  Chang Kai’s eyes flashed about the room. It was empty save for Vivian, his own and Ortega’s men. He laughed and gave a swift order in Chinese to his men.

  “I warn you,” Vivian said urgently, switching into staccato Cantonese, so that his men might not mistake her meaning. “Attack me and the souls of your men will leap the Dragon Gate this night, to join their ancestors!”

  * * *

  —

  Chang Kai peered at her appraisingly, striving to pierce the veil of shadows that filled the room, and read the expression on her face. It seemed incredible this woman should have come here single-handed in an attempt to wrest the treasure from them.

  And yet there was no evidence that she was not alone.

  He flung an order at his men:

  “Disarm her.”

  As if to put a period to his words a shot rang out from somewhere behind him. Cursing shrilly, Chang Kai dropped his revolver and spun about as a bullet shattered his arm above the elbow.

  “I warned you,” Vivian said, her voice cutting through the sudden hub-bub of chattering that had arisen from the Chinese. “Look!”

  Every eye in the room followed her pointing hand.

  From behind one of the statues, where he had been hidden, Wylie stepped forth, automatic in hand. And for the first time the two opposing parties, Chang Kai’s Chinese and the dead Ortega’s Cubans, noticed that from behind each of the statues lining the wall behind them a slender black muzzle peered menacingly down at them.

  “My men are armed with automatic rifles,” Vivian said. “One movement and they can rake this place with a cross fire that will leave not one of you alive.”

  After a second’s pause she went on, and, had Chang Kai not been too busily occupied with the pain of his wound, he might have caught the palpable note of relief in her voice. “Drop your weapons on the floor and kick them toward me—all of you.”

  She raised her revolver menacingly, and again her eyes flickered toward the line of statues.

  “Quick, or I fire! And the first shot will be the signal for my men to shoot.”

  A revolver dropped onto the stone flagging and skidded across the pavement toward her under the impetus of a hasty kick. Another—another—until the floor between Vivian and her opponents was littered with revolvers and knives.

  Wylie stepped down from the niche in which he stood.

  “Back, all of you,” he said sternly. “Go through that doorway in the rear.” He indicated the door to the room in which he had been placed.

  Fear in their eyes, treading on one another’s toes in their eagerness to get out of range of those deadly rifles peering menacingly down upon them, the two groups went backward and through the doorway Wylie had indicated. With a quick movement he slammed the door.

  “There is no other exit?” Vivian queried.

  “None,” Wylie said.

  “Good,” Vivian said. “Now we’ve got work to do. I’ve a car hidden below and we can place this stuff in it,” and she indicated the glittering heap of jewels and gold coins on the floor. Then she halted.

  “But how in the world did you manage that?” and she indicated the slender, deadly muzzles that leered down at them in the half gloom.

  “Oh, that!” Wylie said with a smile. “That was an inspiration. There was a pile of short lengths of pipe in my room. I thought I might as well make use of them.”

  BAD GIRL: THE MADAME

  THE MADAME GOES DRAMATIC

  Perry Paul

  RELENTLESS SEARCHING for information about Perry Paul, which may be a pseudonym, has been fruitless. He was identified in passing as a former crime reporter, but there the trail of facts ends.

  What is known is that he wrote for the lowest level of pulps, cracking one of the better magazines, Detective Fiction Weekly, just once in his career. It was tough enough to earn a living at the rates the best magazines paid: two cents a word, or maybe three if one was a big enough name. But to make it at a half cent a word was impossible, no matter how fertile the imagination or how fast one could type.

  That was Perry Paul’s world. He wrote for Airplane Stories, Ghost Stories, Complete Sky Novel, and Gun Molls (which lasted for only nineteen issues between October 1930 and April 1932), producing twelve stories about the Madame. All of his work appeared in the brief period from 1930 to 1932, after which he undoubtedly gave up—or starved to death (pure speculation on the latter).

  While no one will confuse Paul’s work with Hammett’s or Chandler’s, his stories gallop along briskly, and the Madame was a good enough creation to develop a bit of a following. Like many female characters in fiction, especially pulp fiction, she is jaw-droppingly gorgeous. Although she is a fairly hardened criminal, she also helps others whenever she can. To publishers and readers, Robin Hood–type crooks were acceptable as heroes and heroi
nes. The Madame is well regarded, even by her adversaries, described as “a straight shooter in a town where even the calendar was suspected of being fixed.”

  “The Madame Goes Dramatic” was originally published in the April 1931 issue of Gun Molls.

  The Madame Goes Dramatic

  PERRY PAUL

  “I’LL FIX YOU SO YOU’LL NEVER TELL!”

  A dull black automatic menaced a sinister, leering face.

  The hand that held the gun shook.

  The audience sat forward in its seats, tense.

  Dorothy Devine, glorious Dorothy, had the center of the stage. The moment was hers.

  For two acts and part of the third she had caused her audience alternately to roll in the aisles and flood their handkerchiefs. The play was a clever combination of pathos, melodrama, and comedy, with the latter element prevailing. It was the first time the sensational dramatic actress had attempted an essentially comic role, but in it she wowed her public limp.

  In the first act she had portrayed a schoolgirl, in the second a glamorous woman of the world, but now she was a little frail old lady. At the moment she had put off her pose of a grande dame and in tattered garments had gained access to the office of a night club, whose proprietor was in possession of a secret that could compromise her granddaughter.