The Complete Cases of the Marquis of Broadway, Volume 1

by John Lawrence

  “No,” the Marquis said bluntly. “She’s dead. The murder backfired. At least we think she’s dead. She shot herself in the region of the heart. We’ll know presently whether she is or not. Her husband went haywire and ran off with her body.”

  The Spaniard stared. His eyes suddenly went frantic, agonized. He flung out hoarsely: “No! No! You’re saying all this to—to make me do something you want me to do! Dear God—she can’t be—”

  “Where were you at eleven o’clock tonight?”

  “I—oh, I don’t know. At the club. I don’t believe that she—”

  “You’re sure you weren’t in the Buhl Building funneling bullets at me?”

  “I—are you mad? I was at the Club Greco—”

  “Take it easy,” the Marquis said and nodded Derosier toward the phone. The gangling detective stepped quickly over and called the Club Greco.

  Four minutes later he hung up and when he turned back there was an almost affectionate look in his washed-out eyes. “He went on at nine-thirty and did a fifteen minute turn. Then he went on at twelve and did another. Some of the employees have gone home now, but there doesn’t seem to be anybody around that saw his nibs in the joint between those two times.”

  The phone tinkled. It was Johnny Berthold, downstairs in the lobby. The Marquis told him, “I’ll be right with you,” hung up and slid black-gloved fingers into coat pockets. His deep-set bright eyes were somber. “All right, Mr. Hernandez. You mind staying here for a while?”

  The Spaniard did not seem to hear him. Derosier’s face contorted in quick concern. He drew the Marquis aside. “Hey—aren’t you going to jug him?”

  “What for?”

  “My God he’s the missing link! He’s in love with her! He probably planned the whole act—the idea of her putting on the disguise, and trying to worm divorce stuff out of Max Sokolow. When that went sour he rescued her from me. Then he—he talked it up again—hypnotized her—sent her out with a gun! It all fits.”

  “You think a woman of Cynthia Manson’s type could be talked into murder? And if so, why the suicide?”

  “Well, she did it, didn’t she? What other explanation is any better?”

  The Marquis made a disgusted sound, turned to the phone and called headquarters, learned that, as yet, there had been no sign of the missing playboy and his dead wife.

  “Stay here,” he told Derosier and went out.

  Downstairs, in Johnny Berthold’s coupe he turned up the radio. Presently he said: “Well, there’s no sense in doing nothing. Let’s try again to pick up Titanic Johnson.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A Girl Can Go Berserk

  IT WAS nearly four o’clock when they finally located the gambler, and by then two other facts were growing in seriousness. First—the missing playboy seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth with his shot wife. Second—the old man, Cotton Manson, had not been seen or heard from since he’d left the Ritz-Plaza minutes after the shooting on Broadway.

  They eventually located Titanic through Stewart, the crap-game lookout on Broadway and Forty-second. He lipped the information: “No game tonight, but I think Titanic is playing stud up on Seventy-second. He sent me a message he wasn’t going to play in your district for a while.”

  “When did this stud game start?”

  “Around ten—maybe a shade after.”

  “I saw Titanic just before ten. You mean around eleven—or a shade after.”

  “No. He went right from the restaurant where he saw you to this hotel where he is now.”

  “Who’s he playing with?”

  The youth mentioned two names—prominent operators of the Chicago policy racket.

  “That’s a great alibi, if ever I heard one,” the Marquis growled.

  THE Alamo was an old, dark-fronted hotel of the type known as “Commercial.” The night clerk, a mouse-colored man with eight mouse-colored hairs which criss-crossed back and forth across his square bald head, looked at them with uneasy eyes as they came in. He brightened, however, when they inquired for Titanic Johnson.

  “He just went,” he explained. “Just a minute ago.”

  “I bet he did,” Johnny Berthold growled.

  The manager hurried around the desk. “Really—he did! He ought to be—” He pushed through the revolving door and they followed him. The first faint luminosity that warned of dawn’s coming, gave the street a vague grayness. The manager pointed, whispered: “There—there he is—just climbing into his car.”

  The gambler’s plump figure was recognizable under a street light, a block and a quarter away as he entered a big sedan. Johnny started off. “I’ll get him!”

  “Wait,” the Marquis checked him. “Never mind.”

  He led the way to Berthold’s car, threw a “Thanks” over his shoulder at the clerk.

  “Catch him,” he told the shaggy blond detective, “but there’s no point in cutting baldy back there in on it.”

  “Oh—I get it.”

  Ahead, they saw the sedan swing out, head straight across for Fifth Avenue. Berthold sent the coupe at a moderate pace in the gambler’s wake.

  It was not till they had both turned south on Fifth that the big sedan started to do convolutions. Berthold stared with wrinkled forehead. “Say—what the hell? He didn’t see me.” He cursed, accelerated quickly, as the gambler swung out of sight. “I’ll jam that monkey up against a lamp po—”

  “Relax,” the Marquis said. “Maybe he’s going somewhere. He seems anxious to make sure he isn’t followed. Keep on his tail.”

  Titanic started circling blocks, doubling back, swinging around corners unexpectedly. Berthold growled, held him in sight with the ease of long practise. The sedan curveted across town and back, up and down. It was not till it straightened out, in the Twenties, on Lexington, that it was apparent the gambler had been slowly working southward.

  At Gramercy Park he swung west. Johnny Berthold took a chance and paralleled him on Twenty-third, cut in again behind him at Fifth and then they started angling over and down, over and down.

  The last angle left them on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, unable to turn because the gambler’s car was easing into a parking-space on Eighth, a block below them.

  “Leave it here,” the Marquis said abruptly.

  They slid from the car as the gambler did likewise. He vanished down Horatio Street and when they, in turn, reached that corner, his plump figure was visible three quarters of a block down, standing peering up at a small apartment house.

  They hugged the shadows, stalked silently and slowly towards him, so that when, finally, he walked across the street, they were almost at once in an areaway a foot from where he had been standing. They were there when the momentary flare came in a window on the third-floor front. It was extinguished almost immediately.

  They stood watching, Johnny Berthold’s big, scarred face wrinkled in curiosity, the Marquis’ deep-sunk eyes somber, steady.

  IT WAS not till a good half or three quarters of an hour had gone by—not till the sky was almost fully light—that the Marquis stirred. He said quickly: “Run back and see if his car is still there.”

  The big man lumbered off at a trot. He was back in three minutes, his face savage. “He back-door’d us.”

  He walked grimly along till he stood opposite a delivery alley at the side of the apartment house, waved his hand in grim display. Behind the apartment house was a small, paved yard, ending in a board fence. Beyond the board fence was the weed-grown back yard of a closed and boarded-up residence.

  In silence they went in the open door of the apartment house, climbed stairs to the third floor and located the door of the apartment in which they had seen the match flare, presumably lighted by the gambler. The Marquis stared at the knob, finally tried it gently with one black-gloved hand. It was open.

  They walked into a one-room apartment containing only the barest necessities of living, a little dust and faint pungent odor—too faint to wake recollec
tion in either of them.

  “A furnished joint,” Berthold growled. “Hired for something else besides living in.”

  The Marquis nodded absently.

  They went downstairs, went slowly out. The sun was out now, laying broad beams on the sidewalk. Somewhere in the distance, milk-bottles clanked. The clop-clop of a horse’s hooves was loud. They wandered back to the alley at the side of the building.

  There was now a queer humming sound somewhere nearby. It was a moment before the Marquis managed to locate it, identify it. A swarm of wasps, so tremendous as to be unusual in a city district, was whirling and buzzing, just beyond the board fence at the back of the property. The Marquis reached down into an ash barrel as he walked towards it, picked up a folded newspaper. By the time he reached the fence, he had twisted it into two thick wads. Looking across, the high grass and weeds concealed what the wasps were hovering above, but with two paper smudges, lighted and smoking the wasps buzzed angrily away and the Marquis went over, Berthold scrambling after.

  When they kicked the smoking wads away, they had the body of Eve Scudder, or Cynthia Manson. She lay on her back, her eyes staring, her little face paste-colored. One hand was clenched at her breast, the other outflung. The clenched hand was stained with long-dried blood as was the left bosom of her white sequin dress. She had been dead long enough for rigor to be starting.

  There was nothing in her clenched fist, but in kneeling down to unclench it, they caught a sharp, pungent odor—the same odor that had been so hazy in the apartment they had just visited, but strong enough now to give a name to it.

  Berthold jerked up his big head. “Smell it?”

  The Marquis nodded.

  “Marihuana,” Berthold breathed. “That explains how a nice girl could go berserk.”

  The Marquis nodded again, absently. “Let’s find the superintendent of the building in front,” he said.

  The ancient, whiskery janitor told them: “Yeah. I had rented that apartment to a girl—a little, dark-eyed girl—last night, around eight—nine o’clock.” When he saw the Marquis’ watch-back picture he nodded. “Yeah. That’s her.”

  They called Homicide from a restaurant at the corner, and from the same phone the Marquis checked once more to see if the missing playboy had been found—or his millionaire father.

  There was no trace of them.

  FOR one full hour they sat in Johnny Berthold’s car, listening to the radio calls. The Marquis sat hunched, staring straight through the windshield. When Johnny Berthold started to speak he said: “Shut up.”

  Later Berthold tried again, humbly. “Excuse me, chief, but is there still a mystery about it?”

  “You think there isn’t?”

  The big man’s face knotted and he counted off on the thick broken-knuckled fingers of his hand. “Well, the girl is sore on Tommy Manson. She comes in to get evidence for a divorce—even though she’s a good Mick and he is too. Well, that flivs and she gets to smoking loco-weed, goes out and rubs him out—that is, tries to. She winds up giving it to herself. The kid, in a panic, starts to take them to the hospital and they die on him. He loses his head, dumps them out and crawls into a hole, calls his pappy and he goes into the hole too.”

  “And who tried to murder me?”

  “Well, maybe Titantic. You say he got a mad on when you—”

  “It was the girl’s own voice on the phone that trapped me. If he’s the one after my skin, then he’s also the one who snatched the girl from Harry Derosier in the hotel. And that makes him the one who brought the girl down here and had her rent the apartment, then fed her the muggles.”

  “Hey! Speaking of muggles, how about that Spick? Them guys all use them!”

  “Well, make up your mind. Are you electing Titanic or the Spaniard?”

  Berthold brightened. “Hey—maybe they’re in it together. ’Member? That little dip said they was two guys….”

  “Sure.” The Marquis suddenly came to the end of a long chain of thought—thought which the big man’s talk had not interrupted in the least. He stirred in his seat. “Sure. Now go in that restaurant and look up the number of Dorothy Vernor, on Charles Street. What time is it?”

  “Eight o’clock.”

  “That’s late enough. Go and phone her place and ask for the old man—his name is Cotton Manson. Remember—don’t ask for Tommy.”

  The big man’s eyes bulged. “You mean the old man’s spending the night with the babe Tommy was—”

  “Go on and phone,” the Marquis said.

  When Berthold came back presently, his eyes were punch-drunk. “How the hell did you know he was there?”

  “You got him?”

  “Yeah. He tried to give me a stall about having just dropped in to make an early morning call and all that.”

  “Drive over there.”

  It wasn’t far. A typical Village house—a tall, five-story ex-residence, so heavily converted that it now looked more like an apartment building than what it was originally. The girl’s apartment was a duplex—one immense room, two stories high with a balcony circling it halfway up. There were three closed doors opening from the balcony. There were large blue zodiacal signs here and there on the walls, and a crystal ball wrapped in flannel on a tripod in the center of the immense floor.

  The girl stood by the tripod—a tall girl with raven-black hair pulled over her ears to a knot behind. She had long, greenish eyes set in a face that had no more color than tallow. She wore no make-up, save a vivid smear on her thin lips. Her black peasant dress, puckered at the neck and with large, hanging sleeves, failed to conceal her beautifully proportioned body. With earrings, she would have looked slinky and theatrical but she did not wear earrings.

  COTTON MANSON was a little, red-faced, white-haired monkeyish man, dapper. He actually sported sideburns. His eyes were bright blue but they were red-rimmed now and his face was yellow. The minute they were inside, he began an incoherent rapid-fire monologue intended to explain where he had spent the night—a matter of forgetting the name of his hotel, finding himself exhausted and near another—an utterly pitiful effort. The Marquis listened to only a few words of it.

  “We don’t care about that, Mr. Manson. All I would like to know is exactly where you were at eleven o’clock last night.”

  “Why—why—” The old man’s eyes were confused, concentrated on the floor. “I—I—why, that must have been about the time I—why, I was in my hotel.”

  The Marquis’ somber, respectful eyes turned to the girl. “And where were you, Miss Vernor?”

  Her green eyes were coldly superior. Her clear, slightly husky voice said without the slightest inflection: “I broadcasted from ten to ten fifteen. I would probably have been on my way home at eleven.”

  The old man blurted: “Have you found my son?”

  The Marquis’ blue eyes were vaguely reproachful. He looked up at the closed doors on the balcony, then back at the old man, at the girl. “Yes. That is to say, I know where he is.”

  The old man seemed to shrink, but the girl might not have heard, or understood, for all the sign that her long green eyes gave.

  “Tommy has no reason to hide,” the Marquis said. “It was a dumb trick in the first place—getting frightened when those people died. The police do not want him—that is, they do not want to arrest him.

  “Too many people are losing their heads, doing rash things. Certainly, if you were in your right mind, you’d realize that Tommy’s coming here to hide and calling you down here, too, was a dead giveaway. And also, you’d know that no blame attaches to Tommy whatever for the death of those people. The thing to do is take him downtown and have him dictate a statement to the district attorney and that’s probably the last he’ll hear of it.”

  The center door on the balcony suddenly came open and the shaking, feverish-eyed playboy stumbled out onto the threshold. He called hoarsely, “I swear I didn’t shoot her. I didn’t even have my hands on the—”

  “We know,” the Marquis said
. “You’d better quit being a fool and go downtown with your father.”

  A bell jangled suddenly in the apartment and simultaneously, a postman’s whistle shrilled outside. The girl said, “Excuse me,” and went down the hall.

  The Marquis looked up at Tommy Manson and said: “I want one straight answer from you, Tommy—and then I’ll be through with you. What was the deal that Max Sokolow was handling for you?”

  “Why—why—it was nothing. A little two-story building I owned—in Canarsie. It was in Cynthia’s name and mine jointly. If—if we hadn’t been on the outs I could have gotten her signature myself.”

  “Did Max Sokolow ever meet your wife?”

  “Not—not that I know of. No, I know he didn’t.”

  “Is there any detail of that deal that might make you an enemy?”

  “What? My God, no!”

  THE tall girl in the black dress came back in from the hall, her cold green eyes on an envelope in her hand. She was tearing it open as she came in. The Marquis got a glimpse of the special-delivery stamp—and then light jumped into his eyes. The envelope was addressed with letters clipped from newspapers and pasted on. Now the girl was unfolding a sheet of white paper.

  She read it and her green eyes seemed to swell, then contract. She looked quickly up at the Marquis, questioningly. “Why—why—” She held out the letter. He took it from her quickly. It, too, was put together of newspaper cuttings and read—

  I killed your lover. That is to say—my intelligence killed him. I used a human instrument but mine was the thought that planned it. I shall kill you, within twelve hours of the time you receive this, if the article I want is not delivered to me before that time. You, of course, know only too well what article I refer to.

  Charles.

  The Marquis’ eyes were hot. “You know who this is from?”

  She was not quite so poised. Her breasts were rising and falling more quickly. “No. No, I do not.”

  “You don’t know anyone named Charles?”

  She hesitated, just a second. Then, in a voice so husky as to be almost inaudible: “I have—a control—named Charles.”