The Complete Cases of the Marquis of Broadway, Volume 1

by John Lawrence

  “Huh? Hey—is that ri—”

  “It’s right enough for you to tell anybody that gets there before I do.”

  THE building was a block of stores on a corner, evidently being prepared for wrecking. All the stores stood empty. The lodgings on the floor above were, however, still in use. A doored stairway connected them to the street and when the Marquis ran up, the sweating patrolman was standing in the dingy hall outside a closed door—alone.

  “All right,” the Marquis flung at him. “Go ahead and report. You heard a shot. You ran up here. I was here, with a gun in my hand and I told you the guy resisted arrest.”

  The patrolman gulped. “O.K., Lieutenant, if you say so, but—but the guy was in bed.”

  “You can resist arrest in bed.”

  There were two beds in the room. One was smooth, unrumpled. The other contained a man that the Marquis recognized instantly, from the girl’s description, as the rock-faced killer who had strangled Tommy Buell. His pillow was stained, but not soaked, in fresh red blood, and blood matted his black hair. He was breathing quickly through his mouth, though gently, as if afraid to overdo it. His eyes were closed and he was unconscious. There was no gun near him.

  As the patrolman whipped up the phone, the Marquis snapped: “Call the ambulance first.”

  A chair with the man’s clothes was at the foot of the bed and the Marquis jumped for it, sent fingers flying through the pockets. A heaviness in the side-coat pocket proved to be a .38 automatic pistol.

  The Marquis swung the chair quickly up to be beside the dying man.

  “He reached for a gun in here,” the Marquis explained when the patrolman had finished phoning and had joined him at the bedside. When the uniformed man’s eyes showed unease, the Marquis added: “There’s a grand that says so.”

  “All right, Lieutenant. I say so. Only the holes are in the back of his head.”

  The ambulance had sirened to a stop by the time the Marquis had assured himself that the dead criminal’s pockets contained nothing of value, except, oddly, a photograph that could be nobody else but the other murderer—the one who had imprisoned and slugged the girl while his partner killed Buell. He pocketed this as the stretcher crew came in.

  The interne took one look at the unconscious man’s head and said wearily: “Why didn’t you wait a while and we could of taken him direct to the morgue.”

  “He’s done for?”

  “Yep.”

  “Any chance of his regaining consciousness?”

  The interne looked squarely into the Marquis’ eyes. “You shot him. The hole’s in the back of his head. And now you’re worried about whether he’s going to come to. Well, well, Marty, I’m surprised.”

  “Never mind being surprised. Answer my question.”

  “He could come to, but I don’t think he’d be rational.”

  “Get him to your factory and see.”

  Sitting in the swaying, racing ambulance, the Marquis was utterly silent, his small, gloved hands flat in his Chesterfield pockets. He was aware of the straight stare of the brown-eyed young interne beside the stretcher, but he was not worried about the thoughts the other was thinking. He kept his eyes on the unconscious man’s face, all through the screaming ride, the rush into the emergency room, the hastily called consultation.

  To the hospital’s head physician, he said: “If he’s done for, hopelessly, can’t you try and revive him—even if for a few minutes?”

  The other’s eyes had the same look as the interne’s. He gave orders to rush the patient upstairs.

  The patient died on the way up.

  The Marquis came down again—to face a platoon of reporters. He stood on the top step of the exit stairs and told them: “I had a tip that he was holed up there and went after him. When I came in, he reached for a gun, so I gave it to him.”

  They asked him about the hole in the back of the head. The Marquis shrugged and said nastily, “I told you what happened,” turned and stalked back into the building to escape further questions, went downstairs, intending to pass out the door used for the emergency-room entrance.

  The ambulance interne was smoking a cigarette in the hall.

  “Why couldn’t a person have two hundred pounds of ephedrine?” the Marquis asked him.

  “Because it comes from China,” the other said after a minute, “and the supply has quit on account of the war. Why?”

  “I was just wondering,” the Marquis said, and passed on.

  FOR the rest of the day, he was on Broadway. After the afternoon papers appeared, he was a marked man; every newshawk had belabored the circumstances of the shooting of the heister, had made much of the fact that the holes were in the back of the man’s head. It took no great intellect to read in their stories the belief that the Marquis had shot a defenseless man in cold blood from behind.

  When, at dusk, he went to Kastner’s apartment, even the stringy old man was white-faced and involuntarily shrank a little from the Marquis’ neat figure.

  The Marquis saw the spread-open papers on the table and his lip lifted in a ghost of a smile. “There’s only one to worry about now.”

  The old man’s throat worked, and he blurted: “Did you—is it true you—shoot him while he was asleep?”

  The Marquis looked at him quizzically, shrugged. “Don’t put too much faith in newspapers. They don’t always get things straight. For instance: They say this Sebastian—that was his name, Sebastian Enz—died without talking. That isn’t entirely true.”

  The old man’s eyes were luminous.

  “He didn’t become rational,” the Marquis explained, “but he jabbered. I may be wrong, but I’m almost certain that the other one is coming for you tonight.”

  “Tonight!” the old man gasped.

  “You won’t be here,” the Marquis assured him. “I’ll take your place.”

  “But—but my God—where’ll I go? They’ll see me—”

  “No they won’t—because we’re going to exchange identities right here. Up till now, you’ve been safe inside here. But things have started to happen. Willie—yeah, that’s the other brother’s name—either has to quit or do his trick fast—even if it means taking wild chances. One of my men is coming up soon with a suitcase full of stuff. Fortunately, you’re about my height and we can pad you up here and there so you could pass for me in the dark, going out of here.”

  It was specious enough, but the dazed old man seemed beyond objecting.

  Johnny Berthold arrived with a suitcase. There were no arrangements for food in the old man’s apartment, so they went out to a nearby restaurant for food. After that, it took nearly two hours to prepare the old man for the masquerade. They made a creditable effort. In darkness—or semi-darkness—Kastner could pass for the Marquis if unseen eyes were watching for the Marquis. Certainly, no one could identify him as Kastner.

  It was nine o’clock, then ten. They sat around, talking about anything but the climax immediately ahead. At ten-thirty, the Marquis—he had not done anything about fixing himself up, up to that point—said: “Now you two listen carefully. I don’t want any slip-ups. You’re to take a taxi from here over to Ninth Avenue and walk down Ninth. You’ve got to be seen somewhere in the district and Ninth is dark enough so that, if you keep that hat down over your eyes, you can be mistaken for me. I don’t imagine many people will speak to you—I’m kind of unpopular just at the moment. Fool around, being seen, yet not being seen, if you follow me, till twelve o’clock.

  “At twelve o’clock, Johnny, take him over to Central Park West and walk down. Start a few blocks above my apartment house. If anyone is watching—me, as they think—I want any possible doubts laid that I am not safely at home. When you get to the corner above my place, you, Johnny, stop and say good-night, then cut back up. I guess you can walk twenty yards alone without being nervous, Mr. Kastner. That’s all you’ll have to do alone. Eh?”

  “I—yes, yes.”

  “Fine. Here’s the key to my apartment. The doorm
an goes off duty at midnight, so there’ll be nobody inside the building to see you in the light, except the elevator boy. You can hang around outside till he’s making a trip or something, then walk up. One of my men will be in my apartment to take charge of you. By the way, have you got a gun?”

  “Eh? No. Or—yes, I think I have.”

  “You don’t need it, but you might tote it, if it will make you feel better.”

  The old man’s fright had returned as he looked sick-eyed from one of them to the other. He croaked: “All—all right. I think it’s in my trunk. I’ll get it.”

  His courage almost failed when it was time to open the door and step into the hall. He hung back, blurted desperately: “Lieutenant—Marty—why couldn’t I stay here, too. I—I don’t want to go out on the street.”

  “Don’t be silly,” the Marquis told him. “If killers are going to get in here, we want you to be far away. You do as you’re told.”

  THE Marquis made no attempt to don the white wig or any of the clothes laid out for him. He sat stolidly, watching the clock, looked at a couple of drug catalogues.

  At eleven-thirty, there was a series of soft taps on the door. The Marquis took his service gun from his hip and opened up. The dapper little Frenchman, Henri, came in, his eyes questioning the Marquis. “All set?”

  The Marquis nodded and without closing the door, followed Henri into the hall. Then he closed it.

  They made their way down the back stairs—the fire-stairs—and into an alley behind the building, where the little Frenchman’s coupe purred. They drove slowly over to Central Park West, down it, parked the car a block and a quarter above the Marquis’ apartment.

  They had to keep walking down Central Park West, till three or four pedestrians had passed from sight, leaving the wide stretch of dimly lit street deserted. Then, with one accord, they swung over the low stone wall and were in the bushes lining the park’s edge.

  Presently, they were sitting on the cold ground, behind the low stone wall, directly opposite the Marquis’ apartment house.

  The entrance to the building was on the side street, not on the park proper. They had fifteen minutes to wait.

  Once, the Frenchman whispered plaintively: “I suppose it wouldn’t fit in with your plans to tell me what the hell goes on here?”

  “No,” the Marquis said, “but you might carry your gun in your lap. We may need some of your fancy sharpshoot—”

  He went abruptly silent, as, two blocks down, two figures suddenly rounded the corner. There was no mistaking the big, lumbering figure of Johnny Berthold, with his too-small hat perched atop his shaggy blond head. And the man beside him was giving a moderately good imitation of the Marquis.

  They came on. They came down one block, then another. Then they were at the corner, not forty yards from where the Marquis and the Frenchman knelt. There big Johnny tentatively put out a paw and shook hands vigorously with the pseudo Marquis. “Well, good-night, Marty,” he said loudly.

  The other nodded jerkily. The big man turned and went back up Central Park. Kastner stood only a second on the sidewalk, then almost trotted across toward the dimly lit apartment-house entrance.

  Beside the Marquis, the Frenchman gasped, whispered swiftly: “Look—in the door right across the street from yours.” His gun whipped up above the wall.

  In the same split second, the Marquis had seen the crouched figure leap from concealment, had seen the flash of the metal in his hand. The suddenly revealed skulker roared hoarsely: “Hey, you!”

  Henri fired—but as he did so, the Marquis’ black-gloved hand slashed the Frenchman’s gun-muzzle suddenly skyward.

  Henri cried, “Hey what the—”

  “Wait!” the Marquis snapped.

  The figure of Kastner had suddenly whirled. The stringy old man uttered a strangled cry, flung himself wildly onward for the apartment house.

  The thick, crouched figure opposite squealed: “Taka thees, you…!” and fire and flame spat from his hand. The first shot sent the flying Kastner stumbling, wrenched a scream from him. The second knocked him sideways, his leg crossing, and he dived headfirst into the gutter. The third and fourth flamed as he lay there, kicking.

  Not till then did the killer swing toward the two behind the stone wall of the park—and the Marquis’ gun and the Frenchman’s blazed together, riddled him. Johnny Berthold burst out of the entranceway of the apartment house in which the killer had lurked—too late.

  As they raced toward the two fallen men, Henri gasped in wild unbelief: “I could have saved Kastner, Marty. I could have got the killer before he fired!”

  “What for?” the Marquis wanted to know. “This Kastner killed his partner—or hired it done. Then he back-doored you and tried to mop up his hirees—getting a bad break because only one of them was at home. But it would be a hell of a job to prove. Now we don’t have to prove anything.”

  “But—but—” stammered the Frenchman. “Why? Why did he—”

  “Because, you chump, he wanted the business for himself. He had picked up a big consignment of stolen ephedrine. Apparently he didn’t tell his partner about it. It was worth two dollars and something an ounce up until recently. He probably paid less than that. This war in China has cut off the supply. It’s suddenly skyrocketed—ten, twenty times that—it’s now worth a fortune. He had to own the whole business in order to sell it—without splitting.”

  THE scene was swarming with police, ambulances, white-coated internes, and the Marquis and his men were riding up in the elevator toward his apartment, before Henri got untangled enough to blurt: “But—but I don’t get it. These Enzes—their sister—the drug—”

  “All phony. A wild dream. The Enzes were simply hired killers. Kastner put on a big act—merely to divert suspicion and get himself an alibi with us. Buell was a sap—did what Kastner told him—knocked off at noon today without telling anybody, hung around and made his girl go to Leland’s to slip that envelope in Kastner’s pocket. Kastner knew the Inspector would be there at that time and he took good care to be right under his eyes when the trick was pulled, then dropped the picture where the Inspector would see it.

  “He knew that would pull me in and he guessed exactly what we would do—get him on the carpet. He had Buell instructed to go to that drug store and phone him at my place. He had his hired killers planted there to wipe out Buell. If he’d managed to drop both the Enz brothers when he went to their hideout this morning, he would have been almost clear.”

  “But—but if you knew he was it, why didn’t you jug—”

  “Jug him hell. Proving it would be too tough—we’d be in the papers for weeks, attracting attention. This way—what have we got? One day’s story. We’ll tell it without all the trimmings—a simple hired killing with a double cross—and me in the role of crafty hero. A one-day sensation that makes us look good.”

  Henri was still dubious. “I still don’t see why all the masquerade stuff. Why you had Kastner impersonate—”

  “Your head’s a little thick. Kastner would be alive now, spouting fairy tales that might get us all a flock of publicity, if it weren’t for that.”

  “But how d’you know the gunman would be waiting—”

  “I didn’t, sap. But the Enzes were strangers in town. They knew nobody—except Kastner. When Sebastian was killed, it was a safe bet that either his brother killed him or Kastner did.

  “If Willie did it—then my taking the blame on my shoulders—pretending I’d butchered him in cold blood—would puzzle him but it wouldn’t send him out fretting for my hide. By the same token, if Willie did it, Kastner didn’t do it.

  “But if Willie didn’t, and thought I had, he’d go crazy to get me. Similarly, if Willie hadn’t, then Kastner had.

  “I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t have to be sure. I simply set Kastner up, in my clothes, where he’d get the dose if he were guilty and get nothing if he were innocent. So what happened? The case closes itself.

  “The meanest paper in t
own won’t find enough now to have a field day at my expense. Just a nice neat little package—all folded up and put away. What can they make of that?”

  Body About Town

  It started with a whispered conversation overheard by a cheap dip, wound through the blind alleys of New York’s Tenderloin, and ended with a seven-grand profit for a corn-fed farm gal. But the Marquis of Broadway had his finger on the pulse of the murder sequence from the first till the final blastoff.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Counterfeit Cleric

  BY THE time Leo Mallon darted through the door in the delivery alley of the Club Caleb, he had ditched the incriminating wallet. Only the thick wad of currency it had contained was still clutched in his warped, undersized fist. The toothy man in dinner jacket and smoky glasses, who closed and locked the door quickly behind Mallon, solemnly and without hesitation plucked the entire wad from his hand and said in a bored voice: “Well?”

  “Precinct copper. Must have been sitting on my damned shoulder when I made the touch.”

  Heavy pounding shook the door and the toothy man said: “Go lose yourself on the third floor. All the private dining-rooms are dark up there, but there’s still a full house in the Peacock Room and some of the second-floor rooms.”

  THE little dip had been sitting in the darkness of one of the long row of closed third-floor cubicles for three or four minutes before he became conscious of soft whispering near him. It was another few seconds before he oriented it as coming from the adjoining private dining-room, which was also in darkness, as he could see by staring up to where he knew the little ventilating-grill between the two rooms was. Curious, he moved across the thick carpet, found a spot where he could hear to best advantage and cocked his head.

  In two minutes, he would have given a year’s income never to have entered the place. Yet he could not move. He listened, fascinated, a queer crawling feeling in his stomach.

  There were two tense, whispering voices. One of them was exact, driving almost vicious; the other jerky, hoarse. In the very first moment he listened, the pickpocket saw his own danger—the ugly spot he would be in if his eavesdropping were disclosed to the two in the next room. But he was trapped. It was too late to run away now. It would never be believed that he had heard nothing of significance.