“They say,” Hop Wang translated, “that the three Hammond men entered a warehouse on one of the wharves.”
“All right,” said Grant, “have it surrounded. Then we will break in.”
Wang spoke to the two highbinders. One of them went back toward Market Street to convey the command to the approaching forces of the Hop Sing and of Murray and Dorni. The other hatchet man led the way on to the warehouse.
It was a two-story affair, and looked deserted. Very few persons were passing in the street. Grant tried the door, and it opened readily, disclosing a dark flight of stairs leading upward.
“That’s a break!” he exclaimed. “Any blasting that Mike has to do now, will not be out in the open, where it would attract too much attention.”
“It looks too easy,” warned Torchy. “Keep away from dem stairs, Jim.”
A big coal truck appeared down the street. Grant found the coal-hole which belonged to the warehouse, and directed the truck driver to place his chute there, and then to stand by for orders, long men and mobsters began arriving in ones and twos, and tided into the shadows of surrounding wharves and buildings.
“All set,” said Grant. He stuck his head cautiously around the corner of the door, and peered up the dark stairs. Then he snatched out his pocket machine gun, and pressed the button on its front handle, sending a tiny beam of light up the stairs. His ray fell on what looked like a gun muzzle protruding through a hole in the door at the top. So Grant waved one hand at Torchy, and squeezed his trigger. His weapon roared, and there came the echoing patter of bullets on steel. Then the gun muzzle at the top of the stairs spurted flame and a hail of slugs.
Out in the street, the truck began delivering coal, to drown the noise of the battle.
Grant stepped back from the doorway just in time to dodge the down-coming bullets; and Mike Novak, with a gleeful bellow, heaved two pineapples up the stairs in rapid succession. They landed with a roar.
The enemy gunfire ceased. Grant peered around the corner of the stairs. The steel door at the top was sagging open.
“Come on, boys!” he shouted. Gripping his weapon in both hands, he charged up the flight of steps. From behind him, Mike Novak heaved a bomb through the opening above. It exploded. Then Grant reached the top.
He was met with the roar of a tommy gun. He dropped flat and peered over the top step. His searching beam found the gunner in the dusk of the warehouse, and Grant sent a burst of slugs true to their mark.
Rising cautiously, he swept his beam around, but found no other Hammond men.
“Come on!” he shouted. “It’s clear.”
His forces surged up the stairs, and in after him. All through the top story they searched, but found no one. Then a bunch of them took the freight elevator to the ground floor. But as they moved slowly downward, they were raked by gunfire from all sides from below, blasting them down.
Mike Novak, who was still on the floor above, leaped through the opening, with suitcase in hand, and landed in the midst of his dead and dying comrades. Calmly he opened up his case, and began heaving pineapples in all directions.
Grant leaped down to join him, and others followed. Soon their comrades were avenged, and there was not a living Hammond mobster left.
Rapidly they searched that story too, but found no further sign of the enemy. However, they did find a small locked room. Mike Novak was about to heave a pineapple at it, when Grant stopped him. So together, they crashed their shoulders against it, and burst through.
The room was a small office. And there, gagged, blindfolded, and tied to a chair was Mary Smith. Grant and Torchy quickly released her.
As the blindfold was snatched off, she stared at them in dazed surprise. Then she colored slightly, and her chin stiffened.
“I know all about you, Jim Grant!” she snapped.
But Grant cut her short with, “That’s a hell of a way to greet a rescuer! But I haven’t time to argue with you. Torchy, get her out of here quick, and take her to our headquarters. I’ve got to locate Slim Hammond and the Man from Long Island, before I attend to anything else.”
“But, Jim—,” Mary began.
“Skip it!” said he peremptorily, then turned and joined the searchers. Torchy dragged Mary, protesting, away.
Grant and his remaining men found a stairway leading to the basement, and proceeded carefully down. Here were beds, bedding and food supplies; evidently the San Francisco quarters of the Hammond gang. But no signs of any of the gangsters.
Coal was still pouring down into a huge coal bin.
“Whoever owns this place is getting a lot of free coal,” Grant remarked drily.
Every door was then broken open, every room searched. Finally one door gave on the dark space beneath the wharf. As Grant and his pals crashed this door open, the chug of a motor exhaust came to their ears, echoing hollowly amid the lapping of the water against the piles.
Steering out below the end of the wharf into the sunlit harbor was a trim speedboat, carrying five men. Grant sent a burst of slugs after it, and a tommy gun belched back at him; but neither volley took effect.
“There goes Slim Hammond and his boss,” Grant sighed.
The battle of the warehouse was ended. Grant gave orders to stop the delivery of coal; then to leave by ones and twos, and scatter rapidly. He himself reloaded his gun, slipped it back into its shoulder holster, and left the building.
As he stood in the alley between this warehouse and the next, Tin Yuk, in American clothes, entered it from the street.
“Oh, Jim,” she cried, as she saw him, “I was scared!” She ran toward him.
He grinned. “The war’s over,” he announced. “And now what are we going to do with you?”
She smiled up at him coquettishly. Then suddenly her expression changed. “Look out!” She cried.
Across the alley from them stood a Chinaman with a knife held poised by the tip over one shoulder: Grant grabbed for his gun. The knife hurtled through the air. Tin Yuk flung her arms around Grant’s neck.
Grant thrust her to one side and blasted down the highbinder:
Tin Yuk lay in a little crumpled heap on the cobblestones the carved ivory handle of a Chinese dagger protruding from her back. Grant snatched it out, scooped her up in his arms, and ran toward the street A cruising taxi was passing. He hailed it, piled in with his precious burden, and gave the address of Dr. Wu. The pitiful little bundle in his arms shivered and clung to him.
“There, there!” he soothed. “You are going to be all right, Little Jewel, I’m taking you to a doctor. He’ll fix you up.”
She coughed, opened her almond eyes, and stared appealingly up into his face.
“Jim,” she whispered, “I—love—you. I’m glad—it was me—instead of you.”
She shuddered, and went limp in his arms, her eyes still staring—wide open. Gently he closed the lids, and held her tenderly until they reached the house.
Dr. Wu came running and took the body from Grant’s arms. Grant paid the taxi driver, then sadly entered the house.
“It is all over,” said Hop Wu solemnly. “She has gone to join her ancestors.”
“Yes,” Grant replied with a catch in his voice “I know.”
Slowly he went up to his own quarters. And there, in the living room, sat Mary Smith.
Her blue eyes narrowed, as she saw him. She jumped to her feet, her yellow curls shaking with indignation.
“Jim Grant,” she cried, “you have a nerve bringing me to this bawdy house, after all you’ve done here—I know all about your Chinese girl!”
“Shut up!” Grant’s nerves were raw, and his voice was like a rasp. “Why, you little, narrow-minded, corn-fed dumbbell, you’re not half the woman that little Tin Yuk was.”
Mary Smith was startled, chilled. “Was—was?” she echoed.
Grant spoke softly. �
��Yes,” he said. “Was. She died ten minutes ago to save my life.” He paused, steadying himself. “And if it hadn’t been for her, you’d have been a Chinaman’s slave yourself by now!”
“Oh, God, Jimmy,” Mary cried, “I didn’t know, Jimmy. I didn’t know! Won’t you forgive me?”
“Forgive you?” Jim Grant looked at her queerly, somberly. “I’ve a damn good notion to wallop hell out of you!”
“Oh, Jim!” Mary took a step backward, aghast “You—you haven’t the right,” she hesitated, “yet.”
Slowly, the entanglements of the past few days faded from Jim Grant’s mind, at least temporarily. Sanity began to return. He saw that Mary Smith, after all, was a sincere, honest, clean little country girl groping her way through unfamiliar waters. And he saw in her eyes the evidence of a girl’s adoration for the man of her choice.
He opened his arms, slowly. Mary Smith came toward him, as one who, walking in a grotesque nightmare, comes suddenly out into a lovely dream-garden.
WHO KILLED GILBERT FOSTER?
Written with Ralph Milne Farley.
Originally published in Five-Novels Monthly, January 1936.
CHAPTER 1
The Missing Manuscript
Raymond Landon drove Eloise Foster’s tan roadster down the dimly lit New Orleans street and stopped in front of her uncle’s palm-shrouded mansion. As he eased his rangy, broad-shouldered frame out of the little car. Landon somewhat bitterly reflected that it was quite a come-down for a soldier of fortune, late of the army of Ibn Saud, to be translating Arabic manuscripts and running errands for a crack-brained old professor.
Of course the job had its compensations—for example, Eloise. But now that Landon had finally gotten her to the point of attending a Vieux Carré party with him, damned if old Foster didn’t have to send a telephone message over from the Hotel Roosevelt, where he was to address a gathering of archeologists, asking Landon to run out to the house and fetch the manuscript, which the professor had absent-mindedly left behind.
Why hadn’t Bert Collins, the professor’s secretary, reminded his employer of the manuscript? That was his job, not Landon’s. And why hadn’t the old buzzard sent Collins after it, instead of him?
Meanwhile, the sappy blond Collins was probably at that moment hanging around Eloise. He might, in fact, have engineered the whole performance, just so as to break Landon’s monopoly. Not such a sap, Collins, after all!
Landon shrugged and glanced up at the unlit house, bulking large in the shadows. The street was deserted. It might have been midnight or early morning, rather than slightly past ten.
Landon shuddered. He had not been in New Orleans long enough to accustom himself to the musty, somber old residential quarters of the city. Then he swung open the creaking cast-iron gate, wound his way along the stone-paved path between swaying broad-leaved plantains and clusters of rustling bamboos flanked by tall palms and white-blossomed magnolias, and mounted the steps to the broad piazza. He applied Eloise’s key to the massive door.
The door swung, noiselessly back, almost as though aided by some unseen hand. Landon groped a moment, found and snapped the switch. The ancient Napoleonic chandelier, with its scores of glass prisms, blazed to life.
The mahogany newel post and balusters gleamed dully as he soundlessly ascended the richly carpeted stairs. The thick, velvety silence made him unconsciously tiptoe.
At the top of the stairs he stumbled. The baluster creaked as he caught it for support, but the sound was swallowed by the stillness of the house.
He crossed the hall, opened the door to the library and jabbed the switch.
Instinctively his gray eyes swept around the room. The three desks—his and Collins’ and the professor’s—littered with papers as they had left them when they had knocked off work that afternoon; but the chromium plated circular door of the little wall safe stood ajar! Landon, sidestepping the central desk, bounded toward the safe. But he halted abruptly, in mid-stride.
Professor Foster, in full evening dress, lay sprawled grotesquely on his back, his eyes staring sightlessly upward, his mouth open and distorted, his arms outflung, his fingers clawed, and the carved hands of an Oriental dagger protruding from a red splotch in the middle of the left side of his starched shirt front.
Robbery and murder!
Landon’s first reaction was sheer horror. His next was pity for Eloise. Then he began to attempt to reconstruct the crime.
For several weeks, Professor Foster had been bargaining with Alcide Dumaine, a local dealer in antiques, for the purchase of Shah Ismail’s prayer rug from one of Dumaine’s unnamed clients. Finally the price of twenty-five thousand dollars had almost been agreed upon, and the professor that very day had sent Collins, his secretary, down to his safe-deposit box at the Hibemia Bank to get and sell Liberty bonds to that amount. The proceeds had been put in the wall safe. Professor Foster alone knew the combination.
Someone who knew that the purchase price of the rug was in the wall safe had either tricked or forced the old professor into opening the safe. That the dagger was one of those which formed a collection of antique weapons on the tapestried wall of the room indicated that the murder had been unpremeditated.
Suddenly Landon thought of his own situation. Lord, what a jam!
He was a stranger in New Orleans. Foster had picked him up on one of his archeological expeditions to the Arabian desert. Who would vouch for him? Who would believe that he hadn’t robbed and murdered his employer?
A frame-up from the start! Landon understood now the phone call from the bell captain at the Roosevelt, telling Landon that his employer wanted him to rush out to the house and fetch the missing lecture manuscript!
Wrath wiped the dismay from his features. His lips straightened into a thin grim line, and his eyes became cold as sword-points. The only way to clear himself was to stay and cut the web of treachery which, centering about Shah-Ismail’s prayer rug, had brought death to Gilbert Foster.
Landon glanced about the spacious library.
He saw a hundred-dollar note lying near Foster’s desk, and stooped to pick up the loot the murderer had dropped. It was new, and must have come from the packets that had been in the safe. Landon’s move was an instinctive impulse to salvage the property of his employer; but he restrained it, remembering that nothing must be touched.
His senses sharpened, now that the shock of discovery had subsided, he distinctly felt a menacing living presence in the room, and heard a faint rustle, as of the stirring of the window drapes or wall hangings. He wheeled around, but before he could complete the turn, a vase crashed against his head with a devastating impact that drove him flat to the floor. His fingers dug into the nap of the Feraghan carpet, as he sought by sheer force of will to recover and grapple with the enemy. Blinded and dizzy, he rose to a crouch and lashed out. But as his hands closed on his adversary’s wrists, a second blow drove home. Landon pitched forward, his brain a globe of roaring fire. Despite his lingering vestige of consciousness, he could not force his nerveless limbs to act.
As he lay inert, Landon felt the trickle of blood from his scalp. He heard, as from a great distance, the distinct note of a doorbell—someone ringing for admittance. Landon tried to cry out, but only a gasp resulted. Again the insistent jangle of the doorbell.
“Hell!” exclaimed a frantic voice nearby. Footsteps rushing across the room—the click of a window latch—the sound of the window being hurriedly raised.
Then the painfully distinct tick-tick-tick of the electric clock as it marked off the seconds during which the murderer was making his escape through the window, down the tree outside and across the lawn.
Through the window, from far away, the shrill cry of a police siren tore into his consciousness. The piercing note was repeated, came nearer. That whipped him to desperation. He regained his feet. He tottered dizzily, snatched a decanter of brandy from a tabour
et, and took a deep draught. That helped. He shook himself and squared his shoulders.
“Knocked me cold, then turned in the alarm to make sure I’d take the rap!” he muttered. He gingerly felt of his blood-matted hair. “With these wounds on my scalp and the signs of struggle about the library, it’s a clear case against me. I’ll get ’em all right—but I can’t do any detective work from a police cell!”
The gritting of brakes, the tramp of feet, and the sharp commands, as the police patrol drew up, told him that his chance of escape was slender. Retreat by way of the lower floor was impossible. Concealment in some corner of the mansion would be equally futile. The police were already pounding at the door.
CHAPTER 2
When in Doubt, Attack!
The trap, however, was not complete. The open window and the limbs of a magnolia promised at least a momentary refuge.
Landon leaped from the sill and plunged into the shelter of the dark, waxen leaves.
“Give ’er hell!” commanded a voice in the shadows of the garden below. There was a grunt of men moving in unison, a crash of splintering wood, and the tinkle of glass. Landon judged, from the prompt forcing of the door, that whoever had turned in the alarm had rendered a lurid report of what a dangerous character he was.
The entire police squad, however, did not pour into the house. Landon heard the order to surround the building. A second squad car disgorged its quota. He saw dark forms in plain clothes, caught the gleam of badges on uniforms.
“Horse, foot, and artillery!” he muttered bitterly. “Lucky I wasn’t knocked out completely!”
For a moment he hoped that the police would overlook his place of concealment; and then he remembered the betraying window. He wondered why his assailant had elected it as an exit, instead of the front door; then he remembered the insistent ringing of the doorbell, which he had heard just before the murderer had departed.
Landon peered into the darkness, seeking to estimate the distance to the low roof of the garage. If he could reach it undetected, he could clear the high, spike-tipped cast-iron fence and perhaps elude pursuit.
E. Hoffmann Price's Two-Fisted Detectives Page 42