The Complete Casebook of Cardigan, Volume 1: 1931-32

by Frederick Nebel

  She said, subdued: “I came here alone, to plead with you.”

  The hushed tranquility of her voice seemed to enrage him. He came around the bed and slapped her face and Cardigan, bitter-lipped, kicked him in the back. Harry spun away from the bed, arching his back, crying out in pain, and Packy came closer with a white, icy look in his face and his gun closer to Cardigan’s stomach.

  But he spoke to Harry— “Lay off, Harry. Keep your head. We’ve got to keep our heads. Lay off now and don’t go meshuga over a dame. It’s the bunk.”

  “He kicked me,” Harry panted.

  Cardigan said: “I’d like to put my foot down your throat,” without emphasis, in a voice hard and brittle.

  It was getting dark. Daylight was fading rapidly beyond the chintz curtains.

  Lily sat up. “I must go home.”

  Harry laughed hysterically. “You’re never going home, Lily!”

  Packy was matter of fact again. “Never, Lily. You brought this dick here and neither you or him are ever going home. Take that and try to like it.”

  “She didn’t bring me here,” Cardigan said, bluntly.

  Her eyes widened as though now for the first time she was becoming aware of her predicament. Her hand moved up to her breast and beyond to her throat. The men in the room were becoming vague blurs because of the thickening twilight, but each was made a distinct personality by his voice.

  Harry whined: “You left me flat, Lily, and now you brought a dick here to my room.”

  Her voice was far away—“I didn’t leave you, as you say, flat. I met you in Africa and I was young and didn’t know men. After a week of it I knew I was all wrong. You changed. Or you didn’t change but were your real self and not the man I met on shipboard. When I met you first you acted the part of a world traveler. But I married you and how quickly you showed your real self. And I loathed you. And myself. And then I felt that love was done with me. You left me for six months, and not a word from you, and then I met you in Algiers and took pity on you and then the very next night you were caught. And then I left you.”

  “Cut this. Cut this,” Packy said coldly. Then his voice hardened with finality. “Harry, we’ve got to lam. We can’t hang around here all night. The car’s gassed and all set and we’ve got to blow while the blowin’s good. Turn on the lights.”

  Harry turned on the lights and these made the room more drab and bare and Harry’s face looked more haggard, more sallow and haunted. Ghosts were in his fevered eyes but Packy remained cold and hard and certain.

  He said: “The gas.”

  “Huhn?” Harry said.

  “The gas—for both of them. Take this guy.”

  Cardigan moved—got his broad back against the wall. “I tell you, she came here alone.”

  Harry yammered: “Being brave, hey? Spare the gal and—”

  “I’m not being brave, louse. I’m trying to tell you something.”

  “Take him, Harry,” came Packy’s crisp, cold voice.

  Lily was off the bed—on her feet. She cried passionately: “If I’ve done anything—anything—my life’s yours to do with as you please. Everything is ruined. This will ruin everything. I’m done for. I tried to begin all over again, but there was no use. But I’ve done nothing wrong—nothing.”

  HARRY struck Cardigan. The blackjack came miraculously from somewhere in his clothes and Cardigan was off guard because his eyes, wondering and curious, were on the woman. The blow sent him sliding along the wall. He reached the washstand and braced an arm against it. He looked stupidly down at the white bowl there. Harry came behind and let him have it again.

  The woman moaned and Packy said: “Shut your trap, sister.”

  Harry, striking Cardigan, cried in a hoarse whisper: “I’ll give you the same as I gave your partner! He got in here too! He found those pearls and he was taking them out but I got him! And you the same—I’ll get you!”

  Cardigan muttered: “So it was you got poor old Fogarty—”

  Rage must have suddenly overcome him. His foot swung and hit Harry and Harry reeled across the room and landed on the bed. Packy jumped and slammed his gun against Cardigan’s stomach.

  “One more crack like that, guy, and you get it quick!”

  Lily sprang to the door and got it open and cried, “Help!”

  Packy choked and spun and Cardigan, drunk with pain and half blind, made a pass at him but only succeeded in getting him off balance.

  “Help! Help!” Lily screamed in the hallway.

  Harry, off the bed, made a vicious lunge for Lily, but suddenly there was a new tangle in the doorway and out of it Pat came. There was a small Colt automatic in her hand. Harry stopped against its muzzle.

  She said: “Stop, you!”

  But Harry, wild-eyed, struck at her and she reeled away. He plunged through the door. That scream of Lily’s had turned matters. There seemed in Harry’s actions only a frantic desire to get out of the room.

  Packy, white as death, heard the blast of a police whistle somewhere below. He moved like something shot from a spring. As he reached the hall there was a blinding flash. He ducked. But the flash had nothing to do with him. Lily was falling and Harry was backing away, his gun smoking, his mouth wide open in dumb awe.

  Packy still had nerves. “Scram!”

  Harry whipped toward the stairway but Packy snapped: “We can’t make it that way, dope! Up—the roof!”

  Pat choked in the doorway: “I should have got him, chief. I couldn’t. I couldn’t—kill anybody.”

  “You did enough, little wonderful,” he muttered. “See about Lily Kemmerich—”

  Plunging into the hallway, he saw Lily settling on the floor, her face stricken and her head shaking from side to side as though she were saying: “This didn’t happen—this didn’t happen.”

  His lips tightened and a raw oath ripped from his throat. He slammed his way along the hallway and looking upward saw the heels of Packy disappearing through the door to the roof. The door slammed. In a split minute Cardigan was up at it. He almost carried it from its hinges. Then he was in starlight and the cool summer night, among the chimney pots.

  Red flame split the shadows of the next roof. Lead tore through a rusty ventilator against which Cardigan’s arm brushed. He dropped and then heaved to one side and then shot forward around a chimney and his gun banged. The echoes walloped across the roof, and commingled with them was a short cry. But the two shapes were still running, dodging, scaling the dividing walls between the roofs.

  But one began to lag during the next minute. He half turned and fired but he was wide of the mark and wrecked a skylight. Glass exploded and fell with a harsh, rasping noise. Cardigan’s gun boomed for the second time and the one lagged, stumbled forward, turned all the way around. But he was late. A third shot slammed him down and his gun bounced six feet across the roof.

  It was Packy, panting: “Don’t finish me—”

  “Now where’s your ice-cold nerve?”

  “Don’t! Here—” Out of his pocket came a pearl necklace. “Take it, but don’t—”

  Cardigan snatched it from his hand and thrust it into his pocket. He jumped over Packy and slipped down along the front of the roof. He heard a roof door bang. He plunged past a chimney, reached the door, listened. Heels were clattering down a stairway. Cardigan yanked the door open and a gun belched from the bottom of the stairway. He fired off balance, missed. Harry ducked. Cardigan lunged downward and only when he reached the bottom of the staircase did he realize that his face ached. His cheek had been burned open by the bullet. Blood was flowing.

  A fat woman opened a door, saw his bloody face, screamed and banged the door shut. Harry was down the next flight. Doors were banging all over the house, and women were screaming. Harry went through a door, knocking a woman clear across the room. Cardigan reached the door as Harry crashed into a coal range. The stove pipe broke loose from the wall and coal dust showered downward. Harry fired blindly and his shot smashed crockery on a shelf
above Cardigan’s head.

  Cardigan snapped: “Drop it, Harry!”

  But Harry was too far gone to reason things out. Cardigan had to let him have it. The shot pinned Harry against the wall behind the stove for a brief second, and then he sank, slack-jawed.

  Cardigan walked across the room, reached down and with little effort took the gun from Harry’s hand. The old woman was sitting on the floor, rocking from side to side and moaning. Cardigan lifted her, piloted her to a rocking chair and eased her into it.

  “You’re all right,” he said. “Just be calm.”

  He turned and saw a cop standing in the doorway holding a gun. “Lift ’em, fella,” the cop said.

  “I’m O.K.,” Cardigan said. “I’m Cardigan, of the Cosmos Agency.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “His name’s Harry. There’s a guy named Packy Daskas on the roof.”

  “No he ain’t.”

  “Huhn?”

  “He pitched to the sidewalk. We been looking for him. Him and another guy stuck up a pawnshop on Eighth Avenue this afternoon. We sure been looking for him. The owner was killed.”

  Cardigan’s left hand was tight on the pearls in his pocket. He headed for the door and the cop stepped aside and Cardigan went down into the street. He walked to the red brick house. The riot squad was there. He recognized Flamm, a precinct dick. Then an ambulance pulled up.

  “Did you get Packy?” Flamm said.

  “I guess so.”

  “Some guys get all the breaks.”

  “Oh, you think so?”

  Pat came down out of the hall door. She held a handkerchief to her face and Cardigan pushed through the crowd and took hold of her arm.

  “Hurt, kid?” he said.

  “No. Just”—she grimaced—“sick. She died. They won’t need the ambulance. Poor thing—poor thing.”

  “Chin up, Pat.”

  “I know, I know.”

  Cardigan turned to Flamm. “This is Miss Seaward, one of our operatives. I’ll get her out of this and then come back.”

  “Sure—sure thing,” Flamm said.

  More cops were arriving. Windows were open and hall doors were jammed with wide-eyed people. Traffic was being diverted from this block. Cardigan walked Pat to the next corner and found a cab. They got in.

  “Still sick, kid?”

  “It was terrible, chief. She was so beautiful.”

  The taxi gathered speed.

  Cardigan said: “She say anything?”

  “Yes. She said Harry Pritchard was her husband, once. She got a divorce and only two months ago he turned up, after nine years. He used to be a gambler. He was down and out and he threatened to tell of her former marriage if she didn’t help him. She pawned that necklace, got a paste one to match it and wore that and her husband never knew. He was proud of the necklace. There’d been bits in the paper about it.

  “Then this jewel expert Van Damm was coming. She got panicky. She hadn’t the money to get the real one out of hock and she knew Van Damm would know the one she wore was a fake. She went to Harry and told him. She was desperate. She had to lose that necklace, have it stolen. All that was arranged. But she wouldn’t tell him where she had pawned the real one.

  “He was hooked up with Packy. She let Packy steal the fake. Then Packy and her former husband decided to get the real one. How? Well, she had the pawn ticket. Packy crashed the apartment and got it and that’s why she said nothing had been stolen. The pawn ticket showed them where she’d pawned the necklace. They destroyed the fake one.”

  Cardigan said: “And they had to bump Feitelberg off to get the real one.”

  She lay back in the cab, closed her eyes. “She was a good girl, chief. You’ve got to believe that. She did her best. She could never have stood it if Van Damm had seen the necklace she wore was paste.”

  He drew the pearls from his pocket.

  They were stained crimson. They had got that way from Packy’s hand.

  The Dead Don’t Die

  Chapter One

  Curtain Column

  THE hotel grapevine vibrated with the news. The telephone operator going off duty at 8:00 A.M. gave it to the red-head coming on. The page-boy, on his way through overheard it and, scooting out of the little office, he passed the word on to the bell captain. The bell captain slipped it sotto voce to his favorite hop, and the hop, headed downstairs to get a pressed suit for 900, gave it to the valet, the head porter and the engineer. The head porter passed it on to the housekeeper, but she’d already heard. The red-head who had relieved the night operator plugged in a surreptitious call to a newshawk friend on the daily tab.

  Her voice was a dramatic whisper. “Listen, Hank. Get this on the nose and don’t ever tell me I’m not your pal. Giles Jacland is dead in his apartment here…. Go on now, ask me a lot of dumb questions! Ain’t I told you enough?” She plugged out, plugged in, lilting, “Good-morning-sir-Hotel-Saxony!”

  M. Broéue, the Swiss managing director, got it from the fourth assistant manager at breakfast and dropped his half-eaten croissant into the coffee. “But no!” he exclaimed.

  “The police,” said the fourth assistant manager, “are here.”

  “And Strout, the house officer?”

  “He is there representing the management.”

  “The press?”

  “No one knows of this but you, the housekeeper, Strout, myself, and the police.”

  Downstairs, at that moment, the second porter was giving it to the head car washer in the hotel garage.

  SO Giles Jacland, the dramatic critic, aged fifty-two, was dead in a welter of blood that was darker than the red blocks of the Bokhara upon which he lay in the great living room of Suite 904. There was a moment of inactivity while the police photographer set his lenses.

  “Them pajamas are the nuts,” he remarked.

  “Get that picture,” Lieutenant Bone said.

  “No kidding. If I busted out in a rash of nightdress like that the wife’d leave me flat.”

  Bone said, toneless, “Get done and scram.” He had a dour, slab-cheeked face with high cheekbones and a chin like a doorknob. He stood paring his fingernails with a penknife.

  Sergeant Raush was stocky and still worrying about the fifty bucks he’d lost on Schmelling. Strout, the house dick, stood near the windows, short and fat and white in dark clothes. The photographer got his picture, hummed, said, “O.K., Abe,” to Bone and strode light-heartedly out of the apartment.

  Strout said, “Did he begin life in a slaughter house?”

  “No,” Raush said seriously. “He used to be a barber upstate. He had political pull in the county and he used to get all the jobs shaving dead men.”

  Bone suddenly went across to the telephone and made a call to headquarters. “I think maybe I ought to have a fingerprint man up here…. This is Abe Bone, on the Jacland kill, at the Saxony.”

  When he hung up, Raush said, “It must have been somebody Jacland knew.”

  “Maybe Cardigan’ll know.”

  In Jacland’s checkbook there was a stub showing that a check for $300 had been made out to the Cosmos Agency on the day before.

  Bone said, sourly, “How about this guy’s women, Strout?”

  “Well, you know Jacland.”

  “If I knew him, I wouldn’t be asking.”

  Strout shrugged. “He had the pick, I guess. He was a gay old bird and his women were usually young. No woman carved that throat, though.”

  “No. Some woman’s boy friend, maybe.”

  The door opened and Cardigan loomed through, his battered felt in hand and his mop of black hair shaggier than ever.

  Bone said, “Hello, Cardigan.” He jerked his doorknob chin toward the body and added, “Get a load of it.”

  Cardigan looked. He came in, closed the door and leaned back against it. After a moment he looked back at Bone.

  “That’s tough,” he said.

  “What’s the dope, Cardigan?”

  “Dope on what?”
/>
  “This.”

  “Search me, Abe.”

  Bone sighed, strolled across the room and picked up the checkbook. “This guy was a client of yours. It began yesterday. Why was he a client?”

  “It was his idea, not ours. He walked into our office yesterday morning, sat down and drew out his checkbook. He wrote a check for three hundred berries and said, ‘There’s a retainer. I may telephone at any time for a bodyguard, or for advice.’ Like that—see?”

  “Yeah. Now go on.”

  Cardigan shrugged, said, “That’s all there was, Abe,” and went across to the body.

  “You mean to tell me,” Bone dug in, “that this guy just planked down three hundred bucks and didn’t give any details?”

  Cardigan took his time in examining the body, then rose and said, absently, “Yes. We knew of him. A perfectly respectable citizen.”

  Bone chopped off, “I don’t believe it!”

  “Me, neither,” agreed Raush.

  “It does,” Strout said, “sound crappy.”

  MEANWHILE Cardigan rolled across the room, disappeared into regions beyond—the bedroom, the bathroom, the dinette, the pantry. He reappeared in the living room plucking grapes from a bunch in his left hand and eating them. He blew the seeds into his right palm and deposited them in a tray on the desk. There were two newspapers on the desk. One was folded; the other lay flat. They were, otherwise, identical issues of the same newspaper—The Press-Call. On the desk, also, there were half a dozen pictures of as many beautiful women.

  Cardigan pointed. “He was a good picker.”

  “Listen, you!” Bone snapped. “Why did Jacland hire you guys down at the agency?”

  Cardigan disappeared again but returned in a moment with another bunch of grapes. “I told you, Abe,” he said, unruffled. “I don’t know. In times like these, when a guy walks in and signs his name to three hundred berries’ worth of negotiable paper, what are we supposed to do, call him a dirty name?”

  “You’re lying, Cardigan!”

  Cardigan indicated the body. “I’m lying, huh, when our client’s been knifed to death? I’d give you a waltz-me-around, huh? Why, Abe? Why the hell should I? That looks like a head on your shoulders, boy—use it.”