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

  I climbed out of the car and walked up and down a bit, as the Colonel followed them inside. There was a round shouldered, mustached gent who stood by the door as the stretcher bearers passed. You didn’t need three guesses to tell you that he was a doctor—The Doctor.

  From the sidewalk it was easy to lamp the name across the two buildings. ELROD’S PRIVATE SANITARIUM it read. But I didn’t need that bit of information to wise me up that it was a Quack House.

  I spent my time killing butts and looking the street over, but it was a cinch we hadn’t been followed. Twenty minutes passed, and one of the white coated stretcher bearers came down the steps and asked me to go inside. I did that little thing. Entered the hall, turned left and stepped into a large waiting room, where the Colonel and the lad I had spotted for the boss sawbones were chewing the fat over a bottle which stood on a table. The white coated stretcher bearer closed the door, leaving himself on the outside.

  “Mr. Williams—Doctor Elrod.” The Colonel smiled as the Doctor and I shook hands. Doctor Elrod was a harmless, slightly bent, calm little man, with the professional grin of confidence perpetually stamped on his good natured face. I passed him up and listened to the Colonel.

  “I have told Doctor Elrod a little—just a little of our experience and strain of this evening. The Doctor was in the war with me.” The Colonel emptied his glass, lifted the bottle, poured himself out another hooker, shoved the bottle toward me and indicated a glass with his free hand.

  “What’s this for?” I looked at the liquor. It said “Genuine Bourbon” on the outside of the bottle.

  “It’s been a trying evening,” said the Colonel, “and I’ve been a little severe with you.” He shoved a glass across the table now. “You’ll need something to steady your nerves. I think I have—have further work for you.”

  I shoved the bottle back across the table to him. He was the army man again, I thought. Severe—kindly—patronizing. I didn’t like it. And I’m not a guy to nurse a thing. I gave him what was on my chest.

  “You couldn’t be severe with me,” I told him, and meant it. “You’re not big enough.” And letting him down on that, “Nor is any one else. And I haven’t any nerves. Some day maybe I’ll drink with you. But liquor comes under the head of pleasure with me—not business. It’s not that the stuff would bother me any,” I threw in, for I didn’t like the way he nodded his head. “It’s the psychological effect. I like to feel that when a guy,” and I looked at the Doctor and toned my line down a bit, “falls down, he didn’t collapse through the neck of a bottle I’d been handling.”

  “The Doctor’s as right as they make them.” The Colonel nodded. “We’ve discussed you together, Mr. Williams. Now—well—I wonder about those nerves. I’m sure the Doctor would like to—. Rather—in a professional way, it would be interesting to study your reactions to sudden—sudden danger.”

  And Doctor Elrod had quickly and perhaps nervously stepped forward and clutched at my wrist. I could see the watch in his hand.

  I jerked myself free and stepped back a bit. I didn’t like it. I spoke my piece.

  “The Doctor,” I said sarcastically, “can experiment with rabbits and guinea pigs. I’m not playing either tonight. Science, Colonel, can not play a part in a man’s—well—a man’s guts. The Doctor wasn’t there tonight to hold my hand or feel my pulse.” And suddenly, “If you must have a demonstration—” I snatched up the bottle of liquor, poured the small glass full to the very brim, and sticking it on the back of my outstretched hand, held it so. Never a drop of the “perfect stuff” fell to the floor to eat a hole in the rug.

  “You can laugh that off,” I told him, “if you’re bent on some low scientific relief.”

  And he did. I liked the look in the Colonel’s eyes then. Maybe not admiration exactly— rather, call it good sportsmanship. But he only nodded, winked once at the Doctor, knocked off his drink, and taking me by the arm walked to the outer door.

  “You will guard the patient well, Doc,” he threw over his shoulder. “Your medical skill is not half as important as the secrecy of the man’s whereabouts. I—” and turning suddenly to me, “Good God! Williams—I never thought to tell you—to ask you. We might have been followed.”

  “We were not followed,” I told him flat. “You can kiss the book on that.”

  “Ah—yes, yes.” And as we went down the steps and climbed into the car, “I was upset, Williams. Very much upset. You could not have acted differently, of course. Indeed, if you had, I—”

  “Would have been as stiff as a mackerel.” I finished for him. There was no use to let him minimize the part I had played.

  “Yes—exactly.” He was thoughtful now. “I have a family back in Washington; a responsibility which makes me think that perhaps—” and straightening as he climbed in behind the wheel and I shoved in along side of him, “But I’ll see the thing through to the end—and I apologize for my rudeness. My—. There!” He stretched out a hand and gripped mine. “You saved my life tonight, and there are no two ways about that.”

  “Okay—” I told him. “Forget it. Let the dead rest. You paid for it. It was part of the job.” Funny. When you get credit you don’t want it, and when you don’t get it you’re sore as a boil.

  We drove for several blocks without a word. Then:

  “I think I’ll drive you home with me. I have a job that it’s almost suicide to give a man.”

  I smiled at him, and chirped:

  “The suicide clause has run out on all my insurance policies. Besides which, I’m considered a bad risk, anyway, now. So—”

  “Williams,” he said very slowly, “in some respects you are a very remarkable man.”

  Well—he wasn’t the first one who had given me that line. But somehow I liked it. He didn’t strike me as a guy who went in much for the old oil.

  CHAPTER VI

  A THOUSAND DOLLAR MESSAGE

  His house proved the regulation brown stone front—just a copy of the private hospital affair, a shade closer to the center of things in the city.

  He let us in with a key, carefully closed the heavy front door and pushed me quickly before him up the stairs to the floor above.

  “I have taken this house for my stay in the city,” he said, as we climbed to the first landing. “Just a man and his wife to look after me. An elderly, not over bright couple, who are long since in bed.”

  A pause as we passed along a narrow hall, and he stood with his hand upon a door knob—a key turning the lock with his other hand.

  “I think I shall take you quite a bit into my confidence, Williams. Yes—quite a bit. But come in.”

  He threw open the door and we entered a comfortable living room facing on the street.

  “You’ll excuse me just a moment.” He walked to a door in the rear of that room, inserted a key in the lock and went on talking before unlocking it. “Make yourself quite comfortable there. I have a—. Well—a man is waiting for me behind this door. One who might grow alarmed—greatly alarmed—if he heard us talking here. I must ease his mind.”

  He spun the key, pushed the door open just far enough to admit his body, and slid himself through the narrow aperture, disappeared and—.

  The door opened wide this time, and the Colonel was back in the living room again looking quickly around. He opened a closet, the key of which was in the lock; then without a word ducked quickly back into the bedroom again. For it was a bedroom. I could see the bed plainly now—an open window, too, across the room from it.

  “What’s the matter?” I spoke close to the door, my gun half drawn. Even the most particular movie director would have been satisfied with the perplexed, excited emotion his face was registering.

  “Nothing—nothing. It’s just my nerves, I guess.” The Colonel blocked my way for a moment, then with a jerk to his shoulders stood aside and pointed into the bedroom. “He’s gone,” he said. “I’ve searched the room. There’s—. And he used the lamp cord—the wiring—to lower himself to the alley.�
�� He pointed excitedly to the length of wire that was twisted around the bed post and hung over the window-sill.

  “Yes.” I saw that. The house was old—there was only one electric floor plug and that was across the room, so there was a generous length of wire needed to reach the lamp. The wire was made of heavy rubber. I leaned out the window and pulled it in. Offhand, I’d say that it reached within—well—ten feet of the ground. Not much of a drop for a man of average height. But my flash, cutting a ray of light into the blackness below, disclosed the fact that whoever had left that room was certainly not lying on the flagging below. I ran the light along the alley a bit, and found it as empty as a country constable’s helmet.

  “It’s your show.” I turned to the Colonel. “It wasn’t much of a place to lock a guy up in anyway, unless he was hog tied—which—”

  “There was no man a prisoner in this room.” He had a way of pushing his chin forward and his neck back when he hit his dignity. “That is, an involuntary prisoner.” He amended his last statement slightly. “Poor—poor, unfortunate creature.”

  “I don’t want to stick my nose into your affairs,” I said, “But I don’t go in for riddles either. Wise me up or drop the subject. I don’t care which.”

  “The man in this room,” the Colonel broke in, “was the man who brought me the information about Giovoni—the old man in the hospital. It was worth his life if certain parties discovered it.”

  “Oh. A squealer—a rat. A—”

  “No.” The Colonel shook his head. “Not in that sense, for I paid him nothing. I would trust you with his name, but that would be breaking a confidence. I promised him secrecy. He came here of his own accord, a withered, sickly, drug addict. He had no money, no friends, and he would not tell me who sent him. At one time he was useful to a certain—a certain trio of criminals. And then the drug. Once a relief from the nightmare of his life; now, to still the craving of his body—and the fear of his mind. He had been useful before; now he feared that he was to be killed. Not because he had ever betrayed these murderers, but because he knew something. Something that he was afraid they might read in his eyes, or that he might let slip in a drug-crazed moment. Yes, he feared death—murder.”

  “Sure. Some one was going to put him on the spot.” I nodded. It may have been a rather new and unique procedure to the Colonel, but to me it was an old racket—a natural one. A member of a gang no longer able to hold up his end. Body and mind weakened, and the gang afraid that if he was dragged over the coals at police headquarters—denied his drug—he would talk.

  But the Colonel was talking again.

  “Yes—on the spot. That’s why he told me what he did. He wanted protection; protection I could have given him. Tomorrow I would have put him where they could not find him. In fear that they would get him, he came to me. Now— in fear that he was not safe here, he has lost himself in a great city.”

  “It all depends on who THEY are,” I suggested. This running up and down an alley after another guy’s hat was beginning to lose its interest.

  “Ah!” The Colonel stroked his chin, pushed me into the living room, indicated a chair and sat down across from me. I took the cigar he offered me, shoved it into my pocket, and lit a cigarette.

  “Mr. Williams,” the Colonel said very slowly, as he drummed on the arm of his chair, “would you like to see the city purged of vice and crime—racketeers, and most of all, corrupt officials—crooked magistrates. Yes, and even members of the higher courts perhaps? For the hand of graft can find its way into the pockets of the mighty. It is bad indeed when greed and ambition enter the same brain.”

  He was so serious that I tried not to smile as he went on.

  “You are a good citizen—a staunch citizen. Wouldn’t you like to feel that you played an important part in cleansing New York’s cesspool—wouldn’t you?”

  “At the right price?” I looked straight at him.

  His dignity hit him again. The outward chin—the backward neck. I killed his words.

  “Before you go on with your altruistic oration, let me spill a bit of chatter.” I leaned forward and gave him what was on my chest. “I daresay there isn’t a big shoe manufacturer who wouldn’t want to see every child in the country wear a pair of his shoes—but he don’t give them away. Henry Ford would like to see every man, woman and child sporting a Ford coupe—but he don’t give them away. It’s business with them. When these men are called upon to give to charity, they make out a check. You never saw John D. Rockefeller alleviate the suffering of the unemployed by giving each one of them ten gallons of gas. But he has given away more money for charitable purposes than any man in the country.

  “Now—if you want a man hunter, I’m open for such work. And I expect to get paid for it. If a contractor builds a small house he gets a small sum. If he builds an apartment—. Well—that’s me. I’ll take small pay for a small job and big pay for a big job. If you’re raising a fund to help clean up the city and want me, as a good citizen, to contribute to it—all right. I’ll give you a check, and expect to see ninety per cent of the money go back into that cesspool you were speaking so elegantly about.

  “I’m no amateur detective. I’m a hard working, private investigator. I won’t take a job that isn’t straight and don’t interest me. I may be just a common gunman in your estimation, but I’m a big shot in my own—my own line. At least, others think enough of me to pay me well. I don’t know your racket, but I know mine. There. That’s a chestful for me, but it’s gospel. At least I’ve made myself clear—that I’m not doubling for a Saint Patrick and driving the snakes out of New York.”

  “Yes,” he said slowly, “you’ve made yourself clear. But I expect to pay you. You’re a very conceited man, Race Williams.” And more slowly even, “Undoubtedly a very courageous one also. The man I will want you to face—the man I will want you to deliver a message to is a man who has crushed every one who has stood in his way, politically or financially—and though I can not prove it, I believe that behind him is the greatest villain—the greatest murderer—the—. Here!” He took a folded bit of paper and threw it into my lap.

  “Just what price does a big shot like you want, to deliver that message to Joe Gorgon? Stop!” His hand went up as I read the single line on the paper. “The message means nothing to you. But, as God is my judge, I believe that Joe Gorgon would murder, without a moment’s hesitation, the man who delivered that message to him—if he believed, as he must believe, that that man was familiar with its significance.”

  “Just hand this to Joe Gorgon—nothing more?”

  “No. Repeat the message to him tonight. Say it as if you were giving him some information. Say it loud enough for his friends to hear. Oh— they won’t understand it. Then report to me his reactions to the message.”

  “Don’t you think I’ll be blasted right then and there?” I couldn’t help but be sarcastic.

  “No, not then and there. Not you—after what I saw tonight.” And his face paled slightly, in memory of the dead gunman, I thought.

  “And that’s all you want me to do? When is the message to be delivered?”

  “At once—at the Golden Dog. Mr. Myer is keeping the table for your return.”

  I looked down at the message again. It seemed simple enough. Cryptic, perhaps. I was thinking of my knocking Eddie Gorgon about, just for amusement. Now—well—this little bit of byplay would only accentuate the animosity of the Gorgons. Besides which, I’d be paid for a hatred that I had already acquired under the head of pleasure.

  “And that ends my job?” I asked.

  “I hope not. If things are as I believe, I will be able to employ you in the biggest case of your career. The anger of the Gorgons won’t matter to you then. It will already be established after you deliver—. But here. It is not fair—it is not right. You are a man whose business brings him into queer places; the blackness of dismal, deserted city streets in the late hours. Come! Give me back the message. I forget that you saved my life tonigh
t.”

  But I closed my fist about that bit of paper as I came to my feet.

  “Friend,” I told him, “I’ll hurl this message into the teeth of the devil himself for one thousand dollars.”

  “Yes, yes—I believe that you would.” And suddenly, “Done! For after all it is a great step toward a glorious accomplishment. Here.” He took my hand, pressed it a moment and then dragged open a drawer.

  I counted the money and pushed it into my pocket. He went on.

  “There will be five hundred more if you do it knowingly! As if the message means as much to you as I hope it will to Joe Gorgon—or the man behind Joe Gorgon. The Third Gorgon. Doctor Michelle Gorgon.”

  “And that’s the whole show?” I asked him, as we left the room and descended the stairs together.

  “No. I would like, if possible, to know where Joe Gorgon goes after you deliver that message.”

  “I can arrange that.” I was thinking of my assistant, Jerry. A product of the underworld—a boy I could always count on.

  “Good!” said the Colonel. “Telephone me here, then.” And he gave me his phone number. “And, Mr. Williams—would you be willing to,” and he smiled, “at a price, of course, work for me? Work for the overthrow of the Gorgon brothers? Work silently and secretly, to get evidence against them—rid the city of their presence? A big job, a hard job, and a job that must be accomplished before the opposing political forces appeal to the governor for another investigation of the racketeering. One man is responsible for it all—you know that.”

  “You mean Joe Gorgon?” I nodded. Yes, I thought I knew that.

  “No—” he said. “I mean Doctor Michelle Gorgon. Neither Joe Gorgon nor his racketeers take a step that is an important step without its having been ordered by his brother, Doctor Michelle Gorgon. And Doctor Michelle Gorgon buys judgeships, has crooked officials appointed, and fixes juries. Yes, he is the brains that directs the hands of murderers.”