Quade stopped. “So?”
“Where does this Demetros fit into the picture?”
“Demetros and Wesley Peters were brothers!”
Christopher Buck gasped. “Say, this Peters fellow was dark complected. I get the picture now. Lanyard killed Peters because he was hanging around his wife, and then Demetros killed Lanyard.”
“Then all you have to do is find Demetros.”
“Yes, but where? Where are you going?”
“To the city. To find Demetros.”
Christopher Buck ran back to his own car. He would burn up the roads to the city, knowing that he could get there an hour before Quade could make it in the dilapidated flivver. Quade wondered what Buck would do if he found Bill Demetros, ex-racketeer and ex-convict.
“First though,” he said to Boston and the latter’s cousin. “I’m going to the hotel and clean up. The facilities in the Westfield jail aren’t as good as those at the hotel.”
Seated in the lobby of the hotel, a big Eskimo dog at her feet, was Jessie Lanyard. She sprang up when she saw Quade. “I slipped out of the house when you were out there, Mr. Quade,” she said. “I want to talk to you.”
The hotel lobby was hardly the place for a private talk. “Come up to my room, Mrs. Lanyard,” Quade said. He introduced her to Charlie’s cousin, then all three of them crowded into the elevator.
Jessie had the husky on a leash, but the dog was skittish and growled ominously. Charlie Boston promptly backed as far away from the dog as he could. Charlie wasn’t afraid of anything in the world except dogs.
In Quade’s room, Jessie said, “It’s about Peters. You asked me yesterday about him. Well, I came to tell you that he was really George Demetros, the brother of Bill Demetros.”
“If you’d told me that yesterday,” said Quade, “it would have been news. But I figured it out for myself last night, in jail.”
She sat up stiffly.
Quade said, without looking at her, “Tell me, Mrs. Lanyard, wasn’t Peters blackmailing you?”
“That was the other thing I came to tell you. Yes, the dirty rat! He blackmailed me. I gave him thousands of dollars and he kept wanting more and more.”
“He threatened to tip off his brother about you. Your new name and your whereabouts. Isn’t that it?”
Her eyes dropped. “Bill will kill me if he finds me. He’s that sort. I was afraid to tell Bob about him. And so I paid all that money to Wes Peters, to keep him from talking. Oh, I know Demetros was in prison all these years, but that didn’t mean I was safe. He had friends on the outside, members of his gang who’d do anything he ordered them to, even though he was in prison.”
“I can believe that,” said Quade. “This morning, here in the local jail, a prisoner got a note from Demetros and inside of a half-hour tried to murder me.”
Jessie cried out. “He—he knows then! Oh, I was afraid he did. I hadn’t even seen him for five years, but I thought I recognized him yesterday at the dog show!”
It was Quade’s turn to be surprised. “Demetros was at the show when Peters was killed?”
“There was a man there I’d have sworn was him. He didn’t talk to me and kept his distance but I’m sure it was him!”
Quade looked at her with clouded eyes. Then he sighed. “Thanks for telling me all this, Mrs. Lanyard.”
She rose. “I’m going away after the funeral. I couldn’t stand it here without Bob—and Demetros loose.”
“Perhaps he won’t be loose very long. He’s known to the police and he’ll have a hard time hiding from them. I don’t think you have to worry about him, right now. Too much excitement around here and too many police and newspapermen.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Quade,” Jessie said. She smiled wanly at Boston who heaved a sigh of relief when the Eskimo dog padded out of the room.
“What do you make of that?” Boston asked when the door was closed.
“All roads lead to Athens—meaning Bill Demetros. So I guess we’ll have to find him.”
“Buck’s got a long headstart,” said Boston. “But somehow I’m not worried about him. From what I hear this Demetros fellow is a very hard customer, indeed.”
Buck was taking the easy way of finding Demetros. When Quade, Boston and the lawyer reached the city, the newspapers already carried screaming headlines: “Police Seek Demetros in Murder Quiz.”
The story mentioned Buck’s name in every other line. He had solved, he claimed, “The Westfield Dog Murders” as the papers called them. And he wanted Demetros. The city police knowing that Demetros made his headquarters here, started a search for him.
Quade bought the paper in the Bronx and read it as Boston tooled the car down to Manhattan. “Methinks Mr. Demetros is going to be rather hard to find from now on,” he said.
“That dumb dick!” snorted Boston. “What’ll we do now? Head back for Westfield?”
“No, drive down to Twelfth Street. Everyone seems to have forgotten Felix Renfrew. He was, after all, Peters’ best friend.”
Renfrew lived on the top floor of a five-story brownstone walk-up. He occupied a dingy room containing a studio couch, a couple of chairs, a rickety table and a gas plate. And a typewriter and stacks of paper.
Renfrew was home, but not overjoyed to see Quade and Boston.
“You knew that Peters was Bill Demetros’s brother?” Quade asked.
Renfrew shook his head. “I met Bill a couple of times through Wes several years ago, but Wes never told me Bill was his brother. Said he was just a friend. I knew Wes was a Greek though, but he was touchy about it and I never asked him his real name. After all, my own isn’t Felix Renfrew.”
“What is it?”
Renfrew reddened. “Obediah Kraushaar, but can you imagine a playwright putting that on a play?”
“Renfrew hadn’t brought you any big contracts.”
“No, but playwriting is a tough racket. I may quit it and go back to Hamburg, Wisconsin. With Wes gone the landlady may chuck me out any day.”
“That’s one of the things I wanted to ask you about. Do you suppose Wes got his money from his brother Bill?”
Renfrew shrugged. “I don’t know, but I imagine so, now that you tell me Bill was his brother. Come to think of it, it was right after Bill went to jail that Peters began getting his money.”
Quade looked thoughtfully at Renfrew for a moment. Then he said, almost casually, “Would it surprise you to know that Wesley Peters got his money from Jessie Lanyard by blackmailing her? Threatening to tell Bill Demetros her whereabouts.”
Renfrew’s mouth fell open and his eyes bulged. If he had known those facts about Wes before, he was a good actor, Quade thought. “Lord!” gasped Renfrew. “I never dreamed that about Wes. But come to think of it, that’s why he was always running out to Westfield. He pretended to me he had some pals out there.”
“And that is why you went out there? To learn who his friends were?”
Renfrew’s mouth clamped tightly shut. And his bulging eyes suddenly narrowed to slits. “What are you trying to do? Spring something on me?”
“I’m trying to get information, that’s all.”
“Yeah? Well, get to hell out of here!” snarled Renfrew. “I’ve said the last word to you. Beat it!”
“Don’t get tough, fella!” cut in Charlie Boston. “I used to eat a couple of poets and playwrights for breakfast every morning.”
Renfrew backed away from Boston. But Quade held out a hand toward his pal. “We’ll let him alone, Charlie, for a while. Let’s go.”
Outside Quade said to Boston. “I got Peters’ address. He used to live near here, on Christopher Street. Let’s take a look at his place.”
They didn’t get into Peters’ apartment, however, for the very good reason that a hard-boiled policeman, who was parked in it, wouldn’t listen to reason or financial coercion
. Christopher Buck had sold the New York Police on Bill Demetros.
Quade and Charlie climbed into the flivver, started off. As the traffic light turned red at the corner, a squat, dark-complected man stepped out of a doorway, crossed the sidewalk and stepped on the running-board of the flivver.
“All right, boys,” he said. “Drive around the corner and park the buggy.”
“Ah,” said Quade, “you’re Bill Demetros?”
“Yep. I been following you around since you left Renfrew’s joint. I knew you’d get around there and to my brother’s place sooner or later.”
The lights turned green. Demetros rode around the corner with Quade and Boston. The latter, his nostrils flaring, looked inquiringly at Quade. Quade shook his head.
They climbed out of the car. “You came to town looking for me, didn’t you?” asked Demetros, as they walked together up the street. The gangster kept his right hand in his coat pocket, a fact that Quade had noted from the moment Demetros appeared.
“Yes,” replied Quade. “And I guess we had better luck than the cops.”
Demetros raised his eyebrows. “Luck? All right, in here.” He pointed to a short flight of stairs which led to a saloon just below the level of the sidewalk.
There were two customers and a bartender in the saloon. The three looked at Demetros and his “guests” and went on with their conversation.
Demetros and Boston sat down. The gangster scowled at Quade. “Look, fella,” he said, “none of this business had really concerned you, so why do you have to butt in on it?”
“What about the lad in the Westfield jail who tried to stick a shiv into me?”
“You got out of that, so why don’t you take the hint and stay out of it today? You know, I never liked buttinskys. I know of a few out in the ocean with concrete on their feet.”
Quade grimaced. “As a purely hypothetical question, what’s your own interest in this thing?”
“I just finished a five-year stretch in Atlanta,” Demetros said. “I didn’t like it there and I don’t want to go back. Or worse.”
Quade considered that. It sounded reasonable enough, but still, just how much did Bill Demetros know? Quade cautiously ventured to find out. “You know that Wesley Peters was your brother?”
“Of course,” snapped Demetros. “The louse! How the hell do you suppose I got into this?”
“I see,” said Quade. “Well, I think I’ll be going now.”
Demetros slammed to his feet. “You ain’t going nowhere.”
It was a swell fight while it lasted. Charlie Boston was a howling terror. And Quade was no slouch himself. But the addition of the bartender and the two customers, who turned out to be pals of Bill Demetros, was too much. They and the weapons they brought into the fight, to wit: a couple of blackjacks, a bungstarter and a chair or two.
Regaining consciousness with a splitting headache, Quade groaned and sat up. For a moment he thought he was blinded but then he realized that he was in a dark room. He groped in his pockets and found matches. Striking one, he saw that he was in a dingy room, littered with old furniture, junk and kitchenware. From the rough beams overhead he guessed that it was the basement of the saloon in which they’d met their Waterloo.
Charlie Boston lay supine upon the floor near Quade. He was twitching and mumbling, although still unconscious.
Quade saw a cord dangling from an electric light bulb and pulled on it. To his satisfaction it sprang into light. He rose and stood for a moment, shaking his head to clear away the cobwebs. He ached in almost every muscle of his body. And his blue suit was now ripped in a dozen places.
There was a dirty sink at one side of the room, beside an old coal range. Quade went to it and ran water. He laved his hands and face, then caught a peek of himself in a cracked mirror over the sink. He grimaced when he saw the mouse under his right eye.
Charlie Boston was mumbling louder and Quade sloshed water on Boston’s face. The big fellow shuddered and sat up.
“What the hell!” he gasped as he looked around.
Quade grinned through split lips. “I thought you were a good fighter, Charlie.”
Boston swore. “Fists against fists I’d have licked all four of ’em by myself. But those blackjacks and that chair the bartender conked me with!”
“Pipe down,” Quade warned.
The thugs had neglected to search them, probably figuring on doing that later. Quade still had his wrist-watch. It showed one fifteen. “We’ve been out over an hour,” he said.
“And we’ll probably be ‘in’ here until tonight,” replied Boston. “Then we’ll go on a one-way ride.”
Quade looked around the room. There was a trapdoor overhead and he guessed that recalcitrant customers had on occasion been unceremoniously dropped through the floor. There was another door at one side of the room, which no doubt led to an outer corridor and upstairs. There were no windows in the cellar. The only ventilation in it came from a narrow vent which led into another part of the cellar. The air was dank and laden with a thousand old smells.
“Looks like they used to do the free lunch cooking here in the old days,” Quade observed. “And there’s an awful lot of trash.”
“You mean we could start a fire?”
“We’d probably be roasted by the time the fire department got here. Because I don’t think our friends upstairs would dash to our rescue in the event we fired the joint. No, it’s got to be something better than that.”
He began poking around things in a corner. Thoughtfully he prodded a sack of cement, then a smaller sack containing a white substance. “Lime and cement,” he commented. “The boys mix a bit of concrete now and then.”
“I got a hunch they don’t mix the concrete for no building work,” scowled Boston. “You heard what Demetros said about pouring it on guys’ feet.”
“I remember it well. But lime has many uses. You haven’t forgotten, Charlie, that I’ve read my encyclopedia from cover to cover. There are some mighty interesting things in it…. Ah!”
He brought up a sheet of tough fiber board. He broke off a corner, tested it with his tongue. “Sulphur it is, Charlie. They soak this fiber with it to make it tough and waterproof. Lot of these advertising signs that have to hang out in all sorts of weather are first soaked in it. There’s just one more thing I’d like to find. Look through those bottles around here and see if you can find a bit of ammonia.”
A fifteen-minute search failed to produce any ammonia. Quade sighed. “I’ll have to try it without the ammonia. Build a fire in the stove, Charlie, and hope the damn chimney still works.”
There were plenty of old boxes and other fire material in the room. Charlie Boston soon had a nice fire going in the old coal range.
Quade then broke up the fiber board into small pieces and put them in a big, old cooking pot.
“With better tools I could do a better job, but this will do,” he said to Boston. “If I’d only found some ammonia or naphtha we’d have had some real fun.”
The pot on the stove began giving off a strong, biting odor after a while. Boston sniffed it. “Damn me if it don’t smell like sulphur, Ollie.”
“It is. I tasted it. Sulphur melts at 113 degrees Centigrade and boils at 444. But I don’t think we can get up a hot enough fire here to boil it. But maybe that won’t be necessary.”
Inside of twenty minutes the pot on the stove was half-filled with a brownish-green liquid in which floated pieces of fiber. Quade fished out the fiber as well as he could, then drained the hot mixture through a handkerchief into another pan that Boston had washed in the sink.
He let the stuff cool for a while, then stirred lime into it. The mixture began bubbling but Quade worked cautiously and kept it from bursting into flames. Finally when the mixture was completed and cooling, he poured it out on a sheet of newspaper in thin strips.
“Now, C
harlie,” he said, “don’t spit on those strips or there’ll be trouble.”
Quade carried a sliver of the stuff to the sink and tossed it in. There was water in the sink and the instant the sliver touched it, it exploded into a bright yellow flame.
“I’ll be damned,” said Boston.
“If we’d had naphtha,” said Quade, “I could have made Greek fire, the stuff the old-timers used in their wars. Thinking of Demetros gave me the idea. But this will suit our purpose.” He looked at his watch. “It’s after three. Time we got out of here. Tear yourself a leg from that old table there. You may have use for it.”
Taking the thin brittle strips of lime and sulphur, Quade stuffed them in the cracks of the door leading to the outer corridor. Boston helped him and soon the wide crack was stuffed completely around.
“This isn’t going to be a cinch, Charlie,” Quade said. “When that stuff starts burning it’s going to be just about hot enough to melt the hinges off. We’re going to have to smash down the door then and jump through a regular furnace. If there isn’t a staircase or a quick outlet on the other side of the door we’re going to get roasted alive.”
Charlie Boston scowled. “And if we stay here and wait for Demetros to get back it’s a tubful of cement on our feet. I’ll take a chance on the fire, Ollie.”
“All right then, get ready.”
Quade took a deep breath, then, with a pan of water in each hand, suddenly doused the sulphur-stuffed cracks of the door.
The result was astonishing. The sulphur and lime exploded into a roaring thread of bright yellow flame. The fire was so hot that it almost seared Quade’s face even though he sprang back quickly. The flame, he knew, was only a few hundred degrees cooler than an oxy-acetylene torch.
Quade and Boston waited at the far end of the room, shielding their faces with their arms. Now and then Quade peered over his arm. Finally, after about a minute, he said, “The hinges are gone now, Charlie. A good stiff wallop or two and the door’ll go down. Then we’ve got to make it. And keep your fingers crossed.”
Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia Page 16