He did not move from his hunkers after he dropped, for long minutes. His eyes gradually became accustomed to the darkness. Most of the windows were gone from the sagging, two-story house before him. There was no sign that anyone lived here—or had ever lived here. The Marquis eased across the yard.
He found the kitchen door. It was locked, and a cautious testing revealed the key still in the door.
He hesitated, stung by the knowledge that he was in a dangerous position. If Joey Blossom—or anyone inimical—were inside the house, he was setting himself up for them. Common sense said to send for a raiding-squad, break in—
Yet his vanity was at stake. The Marquis of Broadway could not afford to be made ridiculous—if the tip were a fake. Neither could the Marquis of Broadway afford to be topped by the Homicide Squad or any other squad. Sending for help—save to his own men—was something the Broadway Squad had never found necessary. And there was no time for that now. He was driven on by the tormenting thought of Voss and possibly Blaisdell—maybe a half-dozen other newspapermen, already on their way uptown. If this was really the pay-off and they blundered in before he had scored they might disrupt everything.
The moon came out from behind racing scud for a moment, bathed the house and ugly dark yard in cold blue light. The Marquis’ teeth set and he stooped quickly. Metal flashed in his hand. He slid key-pincers carefully into the keyhole, gripped the key inside.
There was not a sound as he turned with infinite patience, removed the pincers, pocketed them. He did not move till the moon again plunged into smothering clouds—and then he was swiftly, silently inside.
His flash, muffled by black-gloved fingers, glowed for a split second, was dark again. He was on a grimy wood floor, in a half-dismantled kitchen. The stove was gone but there was a strip of dirt-encrusted linoleum where it had stood. There were a few rusty knives and forks on a bare, dirty table. There was a kerosene lantern at his very feet.
He listened tensely—to utter silence.
Painfully, slowly, he moved forward, sliding the safety catch off his gun. He went through the ground-floor rooms. All four were in the same state as the kitchen—small, musty, dank, with a scant bit of mouldy furniture in each. Evidently the former tenants had abandoned unwanted items in a hurried departure.
It was in the last room—the one that had been the living-room—that he felt his hair rise. It was a smell—faint, almost imperceptible—yet in the close confines of the room, unmistakable. He risked a spurt of light.
There was nothing in the room, save a few life-size, heavy-gilt-framed pictures, stacked against one corner. The one on top—the only canvas that he could see completely—was of a woman at a well, pouring a bucket of water to the ground. The water was a little rivulet snaking along the bottom of the picture. Then his eyes widened. The rivulet did not cease at the edge of the frame. It had run out in a twisting little stream—and blackened on the bare wood of the floor.
The Marquis caught his breath, was across the floor in three long strides, jerking the picture out from the wall. It screeched heavily. Aghast, he heaved at it in impatient fury, sent it crashing forward. He had found Joey Blossom.
THE body of the slight, shabby newspaperman tumbled out stiffly from where it had been stuffed behind the heavy pictures, crashed down and lay on its side. The back of his head had been beaten to a frightful mess. From crown to nape, the skull had been smashed like an eggshell. Matted hair and brains were a solid plane—the contour of the head was gone. He had been dead many hours.
Horror at the sickening sight caught the Marquis momentarily off guard—and the whole macabre mess made its final deadly eruption.
There was a soft intake of breath behind him. A whispering, wondering voice said, “Good Lord! You!” and the Marquis flung around. As he whirled one foot hit against the dead man’s outstretched hand. It was stiff as wood and the Marquis tripped, pitched forward.
Twin funnels of flame thundered from the doorway and glass from the framed pictures behind him exploded in shattering outburst.
He had just one glimpse, in the lashing beam of his falling torch, of the powerful-framed, immense, smiling Paddy Harrigan in the doorway, twin guns in his huge hands. Then the light shattered on the floor and Paddy’s guns thundered again.
By now the Marquis was whirling over and over, was six feet away—and his own gun pounded out fire and lead—twice. He heard the grunted curse from the fat man—and fired again.
This time he got a broken cry—and the door was suddenly slammed shut.
He scrambled up, dived for it, wrenched it open and plunged out into the hall, immediately dropping to the floor. He heard the stumbling, half-falling footsteps of the big man—and then suddenly a torch-beam centered him from the darkness immediately ahead.
He fired at the same instant that Harrigan did. The big man grunted, the torch fell from his hand, rolled across the floor. The Marquis, by reflected light, sent two bullets slamming into the wood of the kitchen door, just as the stricken big man managed to get through it, get it closed.
It was not till he tried to leap up again in pursuit that the Marquis realized his leg had been hit. It was paralyzed, a dead lump of flesh and bone.
He cursed, dragged himself to the big man’s still burning torch, snatched it up and was able to crawl to the door. He managed to clutch the knob, turn it, send the door slamming open, then he dropped flat. Outside in front the street was suddenly full of screaming sirens.
There was a black shadow in the open back door as the Marquis jerked his gun up, but it was gone before he could fire. Then, surprisingly, there was a sudden vicious rattle of shots from outside the house, in the back yard.
Big Paddy Harrigan suddenly walked backwards through the door, on his heels, his knees collapsed abruptly and he pitched down with a crash, rolled over on his back and lay still.
There was not much blood veining down his jowly face from the two holes in his forehead, but enough.
The Marquis centered the flashlight and his gun-muzzle on the back door, blinking—and then let them sink down as the red-headed Voss, holding a nickeled pistol in both hands, suddenly appeared, his spectacles twinkling madly.
“Oh, you,” the Marquis said, as the front door burst open and a flood of bluecoats and blazing torches burst in.
“Yeah! Yeah! Is—is that you, Marty? Who—who—” He stepped forward to examine the dead man. Then he cried shrilly, in ecstasy of excitement: “Hey! Look! Paddy Harrigan! I shot Paddy Harrigan!”
CHAPTER FIVE
Witness! Witness!
DEROSIER, half-leaning, half dragging the redheaded girl, burst through the bluecoats. “Marty! Hey Marty!”
“I’m here, stupid,” the Marquis said, almost at his feet. “You and Hope stand away from here. Did you bring this squad?”
The lean, greenish-eyed Lebaron suddenly was standing over him. “No, I did, wise-guy. I got an anonymous tip that Joey Blossom was here with a girl.”
“He’s in there,” the Marquis said and nodded at the living-room door.
“Hey—are you hit?” Derosier asked anxiously, as the others crowded in toward the dead reporter. “There’s an ambulance on the way.”
“I’m all right. Just wait a minute,” the Marquis said.
When the others came out of the living-room, looking grim, Lebaron snarled: “So you cleaned it up, big shot, did you? Knocked off Paddy Harrigan and everything.”
“Not me,” the Marquis said wearily. “The young gunman here did that.” He nodded up at the beaming Voss. “Not that I didn’t try.”
“So,” Lebaron said with sneering relish. “When you do run up against the killer, a newshawk—and an amateur at that—has to pull you out. Very funny.”
THE Marquis said nothing. His eyes were on Hope Dale, motionless with her hands behind her beside Harry Derosier. Her green eyes were staring, fascinated, beyond the Marquis, at the dead body of Harrigan.
Lebaron shrugged his carefully tailored overcoat hi
gher on his painfully thin shoulders. “Ha! Well, to hell with it. Paddy Harrigan got his—even if not at the hands of the great Marquis. The case is cleaned up.”
“Is it?” the Marquis asked curiously. “What about the missing witness?”
“Still trying to find something to hang onto, eh? Something to make good your bluff on. Boloney. We got Paddy—which is all we wanted to do—and the Broadway Squad didn’t do a damned bit of it.”
“What did the Homicide Squad do?”
Lebaron grunted. “We didn’t shoot our faces off. We’re here when we’re needed—at the pay-off.”
“And you don’t want the witness, eh?”
“The hell with the witness. How can you do any more to Paddy than has been done? Who the hell wants the witness?”
“I do,” the Marquis said.
“Bah! What for? How can you hang an accessory rap on him now, with the principal dead?”
“I don’t want him for an accessory rap,” the Marquis confided. “I want him for murder with his own two hands. Wake up, Lebaron! Paddy Harrigan shot Leroy Mills and the babe—and that’s all he did do! But there’s more killing and trying to kill to be accounted for.”
“Bah! A child could see through that. Paddy had it done because the witness forced him to—either directly or indirectly. So what? What can you make of it now? How can you prove anything—with Paddy dead? For that matter, how can you identify this witness?”
“I’ll identify him, in a few minutes. In fact I’ll go get him for you. Would it be a surprise to you, ghost-face, to have it proven that, apart from the original killing at the Shanghai, Paddy knew nothing about the rest of this?”
“You’re plain nuts.”
“No. Paddy Harrigan is the little fish in this deal—and he’s finished and done with. The big fish, ironically enough, is the witness. Because the witness murdered Joey Blossom. Because the witness tried to kill me and did injure Big Johnny Berthold. Because the witness—through using one of my stool-pigeons—trapped me here tonight—and trapped Paddy, too. He trapped us because we were the only ones who might know his identity.”
“Bah! You’re trying to make us think this witness was a madman. Anybody else would have had the sense to go to Paddy—and have it done for him.”
“The witness was a madman—in a way,” the Marquis assured. “A madman to this extent: he is yellow from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. He hasn’t got the guts of a worm. He’s been in a frantic fever of wallowing fear—ever since the night of the Mills killing—and that fear has been like a red-hot knife in his back—driving him on to all this.”
DESPITE his own wishes, the Marquis’ eyes strayed again to the glazed green eyes of the girl.
Lebanon blurted exasperatedly: “And I suppose you know exactly who the witness is?”
The Marquis looked at him speculatively. “Yeah. In a way. I know he weighs a hundred and twenty-three pounds.” He hesitated, then said coolly: “Lebaron—of all the men who were in your office when the weight card was dropped—and picked up by Joey Blossom—do you know one who didn’t have an alibi—an alibi for the night of the Shanghai killings?”
“No. They all had.”
“Yeah? And you checked them up yourself, personally, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“Who checked your alibi, Lebaron?”
For a minute, Lebaron could not speak. Red flooded his skeleton-like face. “Why, you—”
The Marquis looked over at the red-headed girl. “Hope—I’m sorry I dragged you here. It was a mistake. The pipe dream by which I was trapped here included a girl. You were the only one in sight so I thought it might be you. I don’t think so now. I’ll make it up to you if you’ll tell me how. Lebaron—there’s a weighing machine within a block of here. Are you willing to step over and weigh yourself, with all of us present?”
Lebaron’s teeth were set. The cords stood out on his thin face. After a long minute, he said: “Yes, smart guy.”
The Marquis said, “Good. Give me a hand up, somebody,” and reached up to the excited Voss. As the reporter pulled him upright, he continued, so dreamily that for a moment no one realized the import of his words: “Well, I wish I could hang it on you, you loud-mouthed chiseler, but I’m afraid I can’t. It won’t be necessary for you to weigh your skinny carcass, because—”
There was a sudden flurry of motion as the Marquis’ free hand came from his hip pocket like a flash. There was a snap, the glint of steel, a cry as Voss’ gun went sailing from his hand, then a short, flailing struggle as the Marquis pulled the reporter down on top of him, securely handcuffed. Voss screamed, drove at the Marquis’ eyes with his free hand. The Marquis warded him off, called: “Harry! The sap!”
Derosier rose from his trance, leaped forward. The blackjack rose and fell.
“Good God,” Derosier said as the Marquis unshackled himself and was hoisted upright. “Voss! How—my God—why?”
The Marquis’ face was like granite as he looked at the sprawled redhead. “Because he was yellow.”
Derosier gasped. “Yellow? What are you talking about? If he was yellow, he wouldn’t be knocking off Joey—and trying to trap us—”
“You don’t get it,” the Marquis said. “He was so damned yellow that he went mad with it. He was a rat—a triple-plated, one-hundred-percent craven rat, yellow down to the ends of his toes—and he’s been in a brainstorm of fear ever since the shooting.”
“But—but that would only make it more likely that he’d run to Paddy—and you said he didn’t—”
“You still don’t get it. He didn’t run to Paddy because he couldn’t find the courage to—till he was forced to it. I know there’s no sense to it, but it’s apparent enough.
“When he saw Paddy shoot Mills, he was absolutely torpedoed. He ran and skulked. He didn’t have the guts to come forward—to get up in a courtroom and swear Paddy into the chair. He just couldn’t find the guts. Or is that psychology too involved for you?”
“No, but if he was so yellow, how did he get the nerve—”
“He didn’t have the nerve to do anything—except hide and shiver. But he got caught between two fires. After he’d kept his mouth shut a couple of days, he knew he was an accessory—if he were ever exposed. That stabbed him from one side—the fear of being publicly exposed. From the other—the fear of being uncovered to a deadly rat like Paddy.
“Then Joey Blossom stumbled on the weight card—and he saw disaster coming—both ways—if Joey ran him down. He had already got himself temporarily put on the case—ironically enough, through pleading with Joey—so he knew when Joey found the weight card. And he also knew he was in immediate danger—for there were no cops in that room who weighed as little as one-twenty-three.
“He went into another frenzy of fear, followed Joey—and killed him at the first opportunity, hid his body in the first place he thought of—a house where he’d covered a fire a little while back.
“Then he got himself appointed somehow on the committee that came to me, after Blaisdell and the rest had cooked up this scheme to force me into it. Evidently Voss feared me, too—and evidently his panicky questioning me in my place gave him the idea I had a line to him. He tried to blow me up.
“When that failed, he lost track of me, temporarily, but he was still sitting on needles. The minute I called him and let him know that I’d caught up to the weight-card business, he sprang to try and eliminate me.
“It took him a few minutes before he could get a plan figured. He had a stroke of genius there—to get Paddy on the phone, convince him that he was the witness and arrange to meet. He knew Paddy would come on the kill—and when he trapped me to the same place, he knew I wouldn’t be looking for a tea-party. One of us seemed sure to go down if not both. Then he planned to arrive in time to finish off the survivor—but miscalculated. And if you dumbheads can’t see that he has never had a really sane minute since that first killing sent him into a trance of terror, then you’re craz
y—but I’m damned if I think he’ll get off on any insanity plea.
“As for you, Lebanon, don’t overlook in your report that the Broadway Squad cleaned up the real mystery in this job—after the Homicide Squad had given up. It will make nice reading for Johnny in the hospital.”
THERE was a second’s silence. The baron blurted through clenched teeth. “Tricky, aren’t you? Well, he wouldn’t have trapped me into a bullet, anyhow.”
“He would have if you’d forgotten that you left the name of your favorite stool-pigeon lying around on your desk and he got a slant at it. No, chump, there’s only one place where I was as stupid as a Homicide dick. That was when I didn’t stop to realize that the only people who have use for, and plenty of opportunity to steal, one of those police rosters, and reporters.
“Though I daresay you knew that—probably sold yours to some newshawk for a few bucks.”
The clanging bell of an ambulance hammered into the street outside. The Marquis heaved erect, on Derosier’s hastily proffered arm. Reporters were arriving.
At the door, the Marquis said seriously, “Try and do a little better, won’t you, Lebaron? After all, the Broadway Squad is only supposed to handle jobs in the Broadway district. We can’t be expected to police the whole town.”
Twelve Morticians Named Green
It began when Elmer Rentz got kicked to death by a horse on an upstate farm—and didn’t end till his brother Purley got what the horse gave Elmer in a N.Y. murder-marathon. But from first to last Marty Marquis, czar of Manhattan’s Mazda Lane, followed the grisly blood trail from one Undertaker Green to another, until he found the lock his little bronze key would fit—and broke the riddle with a bullet-blast.
CHAPTER ONE
The Girl from Avenue A
—undertakers’ parlors. Only they are not parlors any more, it seems, but little white stone chapels, with dim night-lights outside. I am getting the creeps from looking at them.
He makes no attempt to go in, or attract attention. There doesn’t seem to be any sign of life inside the joints. He simply stands out front, shaking like a leaf, with this letter in his hand, or under his coat.
The Complete Cases of the Marquis of Broadway, Volume 1 Page 24