There was nothing but a sharp click. Cougar grinned wolfishly, and as Mac stared blankly down at the empty gun, a soft chuckle came from the side of the room. Mac glanced sidewise just as Claire D’Arcy stepped from the closet, a man-sized .45 automatic clenched in her small hand.
“An interesting show, and just what I expected,” Claire said.
Nan sat up and dazedly felt of her chin.
“Thanks for the demonstration, Nan,” Claire said sardonically. “Did you really think we’d trust you with a loaded gun after planting a cop in our midst?”
Nan worked her lower jaw tentatively and remained both seated and silent.
“When Dude Emory told Thomas over the phone that he had informed you of Larry Mac-Dowell’s cheek scar and blue eyes, there were only two explanations possible for your not branding Mac here a cop right then and there, and taking necessary action,” Claire said. “Either you are awfully stupid, or you’re a cop yourself. I rigged up this little act so I could listen in and learn which.” She smiled, and there was an unpleasant glitter in her eyes. “Now we can have a double funeral.”
The whole picture clicked together in Mac’s mind, and at the same time his mind wildly searched for a way out of the situation. Seemingly of its own accord there popped into his remembrance the Strangler’s craven fear of the “boss,” and Nan’s constant needling of him about the “boss” dislike of his over-ambition. With the remembrance a wild idea occurred to him.
“You mean a triple funeral, don’t you, Claire?” Mac asked insinuatingly.
She looked at him suspiciously. “What do you mean by that crack?”
“Just what I said.” Mac made his voice confident. “Three people in this room are going to die.”
Both Claire and Cougar frowned at him intently, and a faint uncertainly appeared in Cougar’s eyes.
“I suppose you told Cougar I didn’t know you were head of Homicide, Incorporated, and had been completely taken in by Nan acting as your front,” Mac continued blandly. “But you see, Cougar knows you deliberately sent Nan out of town yesterday so you could talk to me alone in order to satisfy yourself I was safe. He also knows I spent six hours in your apartment, because he was having me tailed.”
“So what?” Cougar asked roughly.
“So she never even suspected I was a cop then,” Mac shot at him. “She didn’t suspect it until you told her today. Last night she thought I was just a newly hired gun, and she gave me an assignment.” His next words he spaced slowly and distinctly. “She said you were getting too big for your boots, Cougar. And she told me to kill you. That’s the third funeral. She’ll get you before you get out of this room.”
The uncertainty in the gunman’s eyes had turned to fear and suspicion. Like a trapped animal he swung his eyes from Mac to Claire and back again. Claire’s expression was merely one of indulgent amusement. Apparently she did not realize the profound impression Mac was making on Cougar.
“Nice try anyway, Mac,” she said, and her .45 centered on his stomach.
Cougar’s’ eyes were still on Mac, as Mac shouted; “Look out, Cougar!”
The muzzle of the Strangler’s revolver jerked toward Claire and suddenly spat flame. At the same moment Mac hurled his empty automatic straight at Cougar’s narrow face. It caught the man square in the left eye, Cougar staggered backward.
Mac hit him in a headlong tackle, and the revolver skittered along the floor to a far corner. As they grappled, Cougar’s elbow caught Mac under the chin.
At the moment a regular fusillade of shots came from the next room, but Mac was too busy to concern himself with anything but the Strangler, who had managed to twist on top of him and get his powerful hands on his throat.
Desperately Mac tried to claw the hands loose, but they held with the grip of a vise. The pale, mummy-like face was inches from his, and the man’s teeth were bared in a sadistic smile. With his lungs bursting and waves of darkness pressing against him. Mac’s struggles became weaker and weaker.
His distended eyes were nearly popping from his head when the Strangler’s cruel smile suddenly faded into a vacuous grin. His grip relaxed and he collapsed.
* * * *
For a moment Mac could do nothing but suck great gobs of air into his lungs. Then, as his sight cleared, he was conscious of Nan peering down at him anxiously, Cougar’s revolver held in her hand like a club.
“Drop it, lady,” said a flat voice.
Nan’s gun clattered to the floor and her hands slowly rose at sight of the gun muzzle threatening her from the doorway. Mac pushed Cougar off and sat up.
“I thought that was probably you, giving them fits out there,” he said to George Doud. “Never mind Nan. She’s on our side.” He looked at her wryly. “What are you anyway, Nan? A detective for Argus Mutual?”
She nodded. “I couldn’t warn you today because Thomas and Claire were with me when I phoned. They never let me out of their sight for a minute.”
Mac climbed to his feet and glanced over at what had been Claire D’Arcy. Cougar’s bullet had caught her in the forehead, and she had died instantly.
“How about out there?” Mac asked George, nodding toward the other room.
“Both dead,” George said shortly. “Neither one had their guns out when both decided to take a chance, but only the freckled-faced guy managed to clear his holster. But he didn’t get in a shot.”
“That finishes Homicide, Incorporated, then,” Nan said. “You’re FBI, aren’t you?”
Mac nodded.
“I began to suspect it when all your references were so conveniently unavailable. That’s why I took the last phone call myself. After Dude’s description, I was almost sure, and was trying to work up to telling you who I was when Claire walked in and caught us—ah—talking.”
“Was it Claire who killed Bart Sprague?” Mac asked.
“Who?”
“The FBI man who was shot a month ago. He was my kid brother.”
“Oh,” Nan said. “I’m sorry. I was too late to stop that. I didn’t even realize he was an FBI man until it was all over. Yes, Claire handled that personally, just as she intended to handle you.”
Mac glanced over at the dead woman once more and smiled a dead smile lacking the bitter satisfaction he had expected to find with revenge. Then he looked down at Nan’s white face.
“You’ve got a lot of guts for a woman,” he said. “With all those bullets and all this blood, most women would faint.”
“You have to be tough to work for Argus Mutual,” Nan said.
Then she fainted.
FOR VALUE RECEIVED
Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, August 1952.
“The oddest thing happened this morning,” Chalmers said. “I can’t make up my mind whether to take it to the police or forget about it. I’d really have nothing but suspicion to report in any event, and probably would only get a horse laugh for my pains.”
I was a little surprised at his obviously upset manner, for even under stress Lloyd Chalmers ordinarily exhibits the ponderous kind of aplomb you might expect of a man who has practiced criminal law for two decades.
“I did go so far as phoning a ballistics expert I know over at Columbia University, though,” Chalmers said. “He told me it would be quite possible to fire a rifle like an artillery piece with considerable accuracy up to a range of several miles, providing you used a fixed mount, were good at mathematics, and had an observer to adjust your fire.”
Rising to mix fresh drinks. I said, “If you’ll pardon the comment, you’re dithering. I haven’t the foggiest notion what you’re talking about.”
“About the death of Thomas Mathewson III a few weeks back,” Chalmers said testily. “You must have seen it in the papers. He was struck by a spent rifle bullet while seated in
a duck blind in the center of a small lake up in the Catskills. The coroner called it accidental death from a stray bullet fired by some unknown hunter, but it occurred to me that the lake would have made artillery observation easy. The blind was a sunken barrel camouflaged by weeds, you see, and was surrounded by water for a hundred yards in all directions. An observer could have adjusted fire by the splashes.”
Handing him a new drink. I reseated myself by the fire and leaned back in my chair.
“Thomas Mathewson III,” I repeated thoughtfully. “The multi-wived playboy who spent so much of his time in jams, wasn’t he? I vaguely recall reading something about his death. Was he a client of yours?”
“One of my better ones from the standpoint of fees,” Chalmers said glumly, “but absolutely the worst from the standpoint of my ulcers.”
“You think he may have been murdered?”
“See what you think after I tell you what came in the mail this morning.” He paused to eye his drink thoughtfully. “But it wouldn’t make sense to you without knowing the background. Let me organize my thoughts a moment and I’ll tell you the whole story…”
Thomas Mathewson III (Chalmers said) was the most horrible example I have ever encountered of what too much inherited money can do to an individual. It was not just that he lived a life of idleness and squandered too much, for compared to the average so-called playboy he was rather niggardly with his money…no, niggardly isn’t the right word either, for on occasion he made gestures which by popular standards could only be regarded as generous. But always with what to him was a logical motive. He possessed a sort of calculated shrewdness which, from his own perverted standpoint, got him what he considered value received.
His eight wives, for example, cost him in excess of a million before he was through with the last of them. A normal person might regard this as an expensive proposition, but Tom Mathewson considered it a good buy. At the time of the last settlement he told me quite candidly each of his wives had cost him about what he had estimated in advance of proposing marriage—the implication being, of course, that he had bought the women like so many cattle and was well satisfied with his bargains.
He firmly believed that money could buy anything, and insofar as he was concerned, apparently it could. It certainly managed to get him out of many a jam which would have landed a poorer man in jail.
But before you anticipate me by assuming I am working up to the old moral wheeze that gold is not all, that Tom Mathewson finally discovered money could not buy the one thing he wanted most, let me assure you I have no such intention. So far as I know, he went to his death never having failed to get exactly what he wanted, and at what he considered a fair price.
What I suspect upended his apple cart was another person adopting his same philosophy.
The circumstances leading up to the incident which upset me this morning go back to early 1945. We were still at war then, and the gasoline and tire shortages kept most people at home. But for Mathewson the war never existed. He somehow managed to escape the draft in spite of being only thirty-five, unmarried at the time, and in perfect physical condition. The dash compartment of his long-nosed convertible was always full of gasoline coupons which he obtained the Lord only knows where, and whenever he felt the urge to take a trip, he simply went.
This particular morning he had driven up from New York with the intention of spending the weekend at the hunting lodge he owned a few miles the other side of Catskill—the same place, incidentally, where he was killed last month. He had with him the blonde young lady who later became his seventh wife.
He was about hall-drunk as usual, and he roared onto the Rip Van Winkle Bridge at a speed witnesses later estimated at eight-five miles an hour. Unfortunately, a six-year-old boy on a bicycle was crossing the bridge from the-other direction.
When I got down to Catskill in response to Tom’s urgent phone call from the jail, I found the local authorities determined to send him up for life, providing they could deter the townspeople from taking the law into their own hands.
The dead boy was from a farm just outside of Catskill and about five miles from Tom’s own place. And of all the children around the village of Catskill whom he could have picked to kill, he had the bad luck to run down the only son of the town’s outstanding hero. Staff Sergeant Jud Peters, the boy’s father, was a battalion communications sergeant with the field artillery supporting General Patton, and only the day before, Catskill had received news of his winning the Distinguished Service Cross.
It was undoubtedly the worst jam I ever had to get him out of. And the worst of it was, his money was a disadvantage in this case—at least, in the beginning. In the end, as usual, it was money that saved his hide.
His tremendous wealth was held against him by the natives, who were in no mood to tolerate special prerogatives for the rich. Had he been penniless, I doubt that public reaction would have been nearly so strong. But his reputation for profligate spending, combined with the suspicion that he was a draft dodger, set them after his blood.
His first thought was to start greasing palms, but fortunately he always waited for my advice before making any move at all when he was in a jam. Not that he always followed my advice; to some extent it depended on whether my arguments were based on moral or practical grounds. Frequently they were the former, for he was constantly ready to bribe anyone who could render him service, and professional ethics demanded I do everything possible to dissuade him from this amoral practice. If the best I could do was read him a moral lecture, he blithely went ahead with his corruption, though he always made a pretense of following my advice and did everything possible to conceal his bribe-giving from me. This, I am convinced, was solely to avoid hearing further moral lectures, and not because he cared a mil for my opinion of him.
But he had considerable respect for my practical judgment, and if I were able to advance any objection to bribery other than an ethical one, he usually complied without question.
I remember him as he looked that day: still firm-bodied in spite of his excessive drinking, for he had professional masseurs work him over daily; entirely at ease and his expression indicating his sole emotion was irritation that the dead child had interrupted his hunting trip.
The first thing he said to me was, “Think it would speed things up if I slipped the Chief a couple of thousand to spread in the proper places?”
Having already talked to the Catskill Chief of Police and noted his grim expression, I knew any mention of money would be the worst tactical error Tom could make.
I said bluntly, “If you offer anyone in this town so much as a dime, I suspect the Chief will order you hanged without trial.”
His shoulders moved in a graceful shrug. “Then I guess it’s your baby. Counselor, just get me out of this town fast.”
But for once there was no last way to get what he wanted. Nor was there any possibility either of hushing the matter up or avoiding trial. So I threw the local authorities off balance by attempting to do neither.
On a writ of habeas corpus I got Mathewson before a J.P. who set bond with the provision the defendant remain in the county. That got him out of jail, but he still couldn’t leave Catskill. Then I quietly pulled a few strings to get the case moved up on the Grand jury’s calendar, and as soon as he was properly indicted. I played my trump. I asked for change of venue on the grounds that public opinion prohibited a fair trial in the county where the offense took place, and since the plea was obviously truthful, I got the case transferred to a neutral county without difficulty.
Then I stalled for a year by getting a series of continuances, and when everyone but the people of Catskill had entirely forgotten the matter, finally let him come to trial. The charges were reckless driving, driving while intoxicated, and manslaughter.
Since it was Tom’s third arrest for drunken driving and the second person he had killed
, naturally he was found guilty. Clarence Darrow could have hoped for no other verdict. But he was found guilty with a recommendation of leniency, which I consider a courtroom triumph. All he suffered was a $500 fine, a suspended sentence, and loss of his driver’s license for a year—a mild sentence when you consider his previous record.
In the meantime I had managed an out-of-court settlement with the child’s parents—or rather with his mother, for Sergeant Jud Peters was still overseas. She was a pathetic little woman in her late twenties, so crushed by the loss of her son that she hardly knew what she was doing and automatically signed anything her Catskill lawyer told her to sign. The latter, not being the sharpest legal opponent I had ever encountered, would have settled the matter for as little as $10,000 but Mathewson arbitrarily set $50,000 as the amount which would salve his conscience, and insisted that I offer that amount. Naturally Mrs. Peters’ lawyer told her to sign.
The total cost to Mathewson was terrific, for in addition to substantial legal fees over a period of a year, I am almost certain it involved a large bribe, or possibly bribes. Whether he managed to buy one of the jury, or made a secret campaign contribution to the judge who later pronounced the lenient sentence, or both, I don’t know. I am only guessing, for I would have countenanced no such action on the part of my client had I been able to find concrete proof of it; but it is a partly substantiated guess. Not only was it entirely in keeping with Mathewson’s normal procedure, but since I handled all his financial matters, I was aware he had withdrawn a huge sum from his main bank account. And when he refused to explain the withdrawal, I simply added two and two.
A thinner-skinned person than Tom Mathewson would have disposed of the hunting lodge and never again gone near Catskill, for his squeezing out of the jam with a suspended sentence left him universally hated by the natives. But he seemed to feel that the financial cost to him had balanced his responsibility for the child’s death, and he resumed use of the lodge with an entirely clear conscience.
The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK® Page 4