The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age--The '20s, '30s & '40s

by Otto Penzler

  MacBride looked dispassionately at the watch on his wrist. Kennedy seemed interested in his hands. Morarity’s eyes were hidden behind shuttered lids, but he was staring at Al.

  MacBride shoved his hand back into his pocket. “Minute’s up, Al.”

  Kennedy looked up from his hands.

  Al strained harder in his chair, his white face ghastly in the light that poured down upon it.

  “Well, Al? …” MacBride drew his lips flat back against his teeth.

  Al choked. “No-no!”

  MacBride walked to the door and opened it and called, “Hey, Mike!”

  He came back into the room and after a while a patrolman came in buttoning his coat.

  “Mike,” said MacBride, “take this guy upstairs and put him over the hurdles. You, too, Mory.”

  The policeman and Moriarity heaved Al out of the chair and dragged him out of the room. Al was blubbering and breaking at the knees.

  MacBride closed the door and sat down in the swivel-chair. Kennedy lit a cigarette and shot smoke through his nostrils.

  “Bunny sure got hell, didn’t she, Cap?”

  “Yeah. It’s like that song about what you get for making whoopee.”

  “I wonder what’s behind this. I wonder why Chibby tried to bump off the broad. Maybe he killed Barjo.”

  “Maybe.”

  They didn’t talk much. MacBride started a cigar and sat back in his chair, and after a while Kennedy got down from the desk and wandered about the room.

  Half an hour later the door opened and Moriarity stood there. He carried his coat under his arm.

  “Okey, Cap.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Chibby’s hiding out at 95 Hector Street with about six other guns.”

  “All right, Mory. Put your coat on.”

  XI

  It was a big, powerful touring car that left Headquarters and droned through the dark streets. Hogan was at the wheel. Beside him sat Moriarity and MacBride. In the rear were five policemen and Kennedy. It was half-past two in the morning. The dark streets were empty, and the big car plunged from one into another, and the men in the back swayed from side to side as the car bent sharply around corners.

  “This is Hector,” said Hogan.

  “What’s the number?” asked MacBride.

  “The numbers begin here,” said Kennedy. “That 95 should be about three blocks down.”

  MacBride said, “Pull up about a block this side, Hogan.”

  “Okey.”

  The car slowed down and rolled along leisurely, and presently Hogan swung into the curb and applied the brake.

  MacBride got out first and looked up and down the street. The policemen got out and stood around him, and their badges, fastened to the breasts of their heavy blue overcoats, flashed intermittently.

  “It must be on the other side of the street,” said MacBride. “Come on.”

  They crossed the street and walked along close to the houses. The houses were set back from the sidewalk and fronted by iron fences, and just behind the fences were depressions and short flights of stone steps that led down to the basement floors. The street lights were few and far between, and the windows of the houses were darkened.

  MacBride was saying, “We’ll try to get in through the cellar.”

  They reached number 95 and went in through the gate and crowded noiselessly down the stone steps until their heads were level with the sidewalk. There were two windows, without shades, and the windows were dirty.

  “They’re supposed to be on the top story,” whispered Moriarity.

  “And it’s four stories,” muttered MacBride. “Let’s try the windows.”

  They tried them, but the windows were locked. MacBride stood for a moment thinking. Then— ”There’s no fire-escapes in front. They must be in the rear. Let’s find a way to the rear. The next block.”

  They came back to the sidewalk and walked on, took the next left turn and then turned left again into the street that paralleled Hector. Mac-Bride counted the houses.

  “You might have noticed,” said Kennedy, “that 95 was the only four-storied house. The others were three.”

  “It should be about here,” said MacBride.

  He mounted the steps and rang the bell. After a few minutes the door opened and an old woman wearing a nightcap looked out.

  “Madam,” said MacBride, “we’re from Police Headquarters. We’d like to pass through your house so that we can get to the one behind it in Hector Street.”

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “We’re looking for someone.”

  “Well—well—all right. But waking an old woman up on these cold nights …”

  “I’m very sorry, madam.”

  She led them through the hall and opened a door in the rear that led into a small yard. Beyond the yard was a low board fence. Beyond the fence was the back of the four-storied house.

  “Thank you, madam,” said MacBride.

  “It’s all right, but with my sciatica …”

  MacBride and the cops and Kennedy passed out into the yard. MacBride scaled the fence and dropped down into the other yard, and the others were close behind.

  “There’s the fire-escape,” he said, and walked towards it.

  He was the first to go up. Whatever may be said of him, good or bad, he never hung back in the face of impending danger. If he planned a dangerous maneuver, he likewise led the way, remarking, with ironic humor, that he carried heavy insurance.

  He climbed quite noiselessly, and the men were like an endless chain behind him, a dark chain of life moving up the metal ladders. The windows they moved past were black as black slabs of slate. The skirts of their long blue coats swung about their knees as the knees rose and fell with each upward step.

  MacBride went slower as he neared the top landing. He stopped and looked back down over the line of men, and right behind him was Patrolman Haviland, and behind Haviland was Patrolman Kreischer, who was getting on in years. And looking at them, MacBride felt a little proud of them.

  He looked upward and climbed slowly, and Haviland came up to crowd on one side of him and Kreischer came up to crowd on the other side. They all had their guns out. MacBride had his out, too, but he reached over and took Havi-land’s nightstick.

  He looked at the window, and then he raised the heavy stick and smashed the glass. He struck four times, and then plunged in through the yawning aperture.

  Somewhere in the darkness there was a shout. A split-second later a gun boomed and a flash of fire stabbed the darkness and a bullet slammed into the window frame. MacBride fired around the room and lunged across the floor. He heard a man scream. If he could find a door, then he could find a light-switch, he reasoned.

  Someone cannoned into him, and MacBride crashed against the wall. A gun exploded so close to his face that the smoke made him choke. He ducked and sprang away and banged into another twisting body, and ducked away again. He brought up suddenly against a door and then he groped around for the light-switch. He could not find it. A body hurtled against him with such force that the captain went down.

  Somebody pulled the door open, and the dim light from the hall filtered in. Two or three forms dived out through the door. MacBride leaped up and lunged towards the door and collided with another man who was trying to get out. Both went down under a rush of four policeman who had not time to recognize MacBride. MacBride disentangled himself in a hurry and heaved up as Haviland was on the point of swinging his nightstick.

  “Hey!” shouted MacBride.

  “Oh … you, Cap!”

  Another man came barging out of the door behind a flaming gun, and one of the bullets put a hole through MacBride’s new hat but did not budge it the fraction of an inch. Kreischer fired three times, and the man threw up his hands and screamed, and the momentum of his dive carried him over the banister and crashing down to the hall below.

  And in the hall below the cops who had run down were fighting with the men who had opened t
he door and sought to escape. Somebody in the room had found the light-switch—it turned out to be Kennedy—and the light revealed two gangsters lying dead on the floor and Kennedy mildly scratching his nose, as though he were trying to figure out why the men did not get up.

  MacBride ran to the head of the stairs and saw the spurts of gunfire below. He forked the banister backward and slid down with lightninglike speed. He flew off the end and did a backward somersault, and as he was getting up Patrolman Mendelwitz toppled over him groaning and then slid to the floor like a bag of wet meal.

  The fighting moved down the next stairway, and MacBride went after it, and Kreischer and Haviland came pounding down behind him. MacBride, going down the staircase, stumbled over a body, but caught hold of the banister and steadied himself. It was the body of a gangster.

  MacBride looked over the banister and saw three gangsters backing towards the next landing below. He climbed over the banister, hung out a bit and then dropped. It was a fall of about fifteen feet, and MacBride landed on somebody’s shoulders and created a new panic. He saw one of the other gangsters swing towards him, and he recognized Sam Chibbarro, and Chibarro recognized him. The gunman swung his rod towards MacBride’s head, but another body sailed down from above and crashed Chibbarro to the floor. It was Kennedy, unarmed, but effective, nevertheless. The third gangster turned and ran for the head of the next staircase, and Haviland fired along the banister and got him in the side and the gangster fell against the wall and then slid down to the floor.

  Chibbarro flung off Kennedy and bolted, but MacBride, having knocked his own man out, dived for Chibbarro and caught him by the tail of the coat. Chibbarro cursed and tried to get out of his coat, and then he pivoted and his gun swung close. MacBride let go of the coat-tail and caught Chibbarro’s gun hand as the gun went off. The shot walloped the floor, and then MacBride swung Chibbarro’s arm up and backward and clouted him over the head with the barrel of his own gun. Chibbarro went down like a felled tree.

  Kreischer came up on the run, big-footed, and then stopped and watched Chibbarro fall. Then he looked at MacBride and grinned with his beet-red face.

  “Himmel!” he said.

  “I guess that’s that, Fritz,” said MacBride. “Hey, Haviland, how is Mandelwitz?”

  “He’s laying back here and cursing like hell.”

  “Okey. Then he’s all right. Harrigan, find a telephone and call the hospital and then call the wagon. Hey, Sokalov, for God’s sake, don’t keep pointing that gun this way! It’s all over. Put it away.”

  “All right…. I forgot, Cap.”

  MacBride looked around and saw Kennedy leaning against the wall and lighting a cigarette. Kennedy’s hat was twisted sidewise on his head, and two buttons were gone from his coat, and his face was dirty. He looked comical. MacBride chuckled bluntly.

  “How come you’re alive, Kennedy?”

  “There is a Providence,” said Kennedy with mock gravity, “that watches over fools, drunks and bum reporters.”

  “I always said you were a bum reporter,” put in Moriarity.

  Kennedy spun away his match. “Imagine a guy like that!”

  XII

  Dawn was breaking, but the light in the office still streamed down over the flat, shiny desk.

  Chibbarro sat in a chair within the radius of the light, his hair plastered down over his ears and forehead and a streak of dried blood on his cheek. His brows were bent, and he scowled at the top of the flat shiny desk.

  Moriarity stood with his back to the radiator, and Kennedy had reversed a chair and now straddled it with his arms crossed on the back and his chin on his crossed arms.

  MacBride sat in the swivel-chair and looked at Chibbarro.

  “You did wrong, Chibby,” he said, “to come to Richmond City. It’s a tough town.”

  “Tough hell!”

  “Tougher than you are, Chibby. I always wondered why you came here. I’m wondering now why you tried to kill Bunny Dahl.”

  “She was a chicken-hearted broad!”

  “Bad … doing what you did, Chibby.”

  Chibbarro took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. “I been framed all around. That boy scout Dominick—”

  “Didn’t spring a thing.”

  “Bah!”

  “It was Al.”

  “The lousy pup!”

  MacBride leaned back and put his hands behind his head. “So you didn’t kill Barjo.”

  “No, of course I didn’t kill him! D’ you think I’m a fool, to put a knife in a guy at a souse party?”

  “I didn’t think you were so much of a fool. But why did you try to put Bunny out of the way?”

  Chibbarro turned his back on MacBride. “You can ask my lawyer all them things.”

  “That’s all right by me, Chibby. But it won’t help your case.”

  The door opened and Ike Cohen walked in. “Hello, Cap—Mory—Kennedy.” He looked at Chibbarro. “Hello, Chibby, you small-time greaseball!”

  “Go to hell!” said Chibbarro.

  “Funny, you are!”

  MacBride said, “What news, Ike?”

  “The frail just died.”

  Chibbarro looked up with a start, and his dark eyes widened and horror bulged from the pupils. Then he pulled his face together and crouched sullenly in the chair.

  Cohen drew a folded piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to MacBride.

  “She regained consciousness long enough to spring this, Cap. It’s signed by her and witnessed by the doctor and me.”

  MacBride unfolded the paper and spread it on the desk. He read it over carefully, then settled back in his chair holding it in one hand.

  “Listen to this, gang,” he said, and read aloud:

  “ ‘I killed Salvatore Barjo. He was drunk. He followed me into a room in the Club Naples and tried to attack me. I picked up a paper cutter that was laying on the table and stabbed him. Then Dominick came in. Then Chibby came in. Chibby cursed hell out of me, and Dominick yelled at him and said I had to be got out of the jam. Chibby said like hell. Then I said he’d get me out of it or I’d tell what I knew about him. That’s why he got me out of it. So we hid out. Then Dominick and Chibby got in a fight and Dominick skinned out. He was a good guy, Dominick. He didn’t know what Chibby had up his sleeve. He thought Chibby was just a bootlegger.

  “ ‘Then Chibby got his gang together and they hunted for Dominick to bump him off before the cops got him. Chibby thought Dominick knew more than he did. Chibby came here from Chicago. He was one of the Rizzio gang, and he came here to work up a white slave trade. He got me to work with him, and in the month here I helped him get twelve girls for houses in Dayton and Columbus. That was his real racket, but he wanted to try booze on the side, and he wanted to be friends with Dominick because his old man was alderman, and that might help.

  “ ‘When we heard the cops had Dominick I wanted to go to Headquarters and get him out. I was sick of the whole rotten business. Chibby swore he’d kill me, and I dared him. I said I was going, and that I’d say nothing about him. But he didn’t believe me. He got me tight and then he shoved my head down by the gas-heater. I guess he always was a bum.’ “

  “Hell’s bells!” said Kennedy.

  MacBride dropped the letter to the desk and got up and walked around the room.

  “So that was it, Chibby,” he said. “White slaving, eh?”

  Chibbarro stared darkly at the shiny top of the desk.

  MacBride said, “And you only protected the girl because you knew it was the only way of protecting yourself. God, but you’re a louse!”

  “Imagine this guy wanting a lawyer!” said Moriarity.

  “Yeah,” said Cohen. “Ain’t he the optimistic slob?”

  MacBride picked up the telephone and called a number. After a moment he said, “Hello, Tony. This is MacBride…. Now hold your horses. We’ve got the kid here…. Yeah, yeah, he’s all right, and he’ll get out after a while…. What’s that? … No, I’m not going t
o comfort him. I’ll leave that to you. If he was my kid I’d fan him…. All right, come around when you feel like it.”

  He put down the telephone and sighed and stared at it for a long moment.

  Kennedy pulled a photograph out of his pocket and stared at it.

  “She wasn’t such a bad-looking frail.”

  MacBride looked at him. “Where’d you get that?”

  “In her bedroom. We’ll smear it on the front page of the noon editions.”

  MacBride went to the window and looked out and saw the red sun coming up over the rooftops. And it occurred to him, without any blur of sentimentality, that Chibby and Dominick and Al were small-timers, and that the girl—this Bunny Dahl—had been stronger than all of them put together.

  Kennedy was saying, “It’s tough the way sometimes a broad has to die to get her picture in the paper.”

  Murder Picture

  George Harmon Coxe

  IT CAN BE NO surprise that George Harmon Coxe (1901-1984) began his career as a newspaperman, since his two major literary creations, Jack “Flashgun” Casey (mostly known as “Flash” Casey) and Kent Murdock were both photo-journalists.

  Casey came first, created for Black Mask in 1934. A secondary character here to young reporter Tom Wade, he quickly moves to the fore, accompanied by his young sidekick on a regular basis. There were more than twenty “Flash” Casey stories and five novels.

  Murdock, very much like Casey but not as tough or violent, made his debut the following year in the novel Murder with Pictures (1935). Although Casey is the better-known character, Murdock appeared in many more novels (twenty-one in all), the first of which was filmed in 1936 with Lew Ayres playing the hero.

  One unusual aspect of both series is that most of the adventures feature private detectives but, unlike virtually all other fiction in Black Mask and the other pulps, they are bad guys, frequently hired by villains to protect their evil interests.

  While the earliest stories are much in the Carroll John Daly school of “shoot first, ask questions later,” they soon became more cerebral, especially the Murdock tales, as murders and their solutions tended to involve technological devices rather than merely a bullet in the skull.