by Otto Penzler
“Good God!” I said to O’Rourke, as we climbed from the car, “I know it’s no use and all that, but it seems like doing something to keep going. At least trying to save her life.”
O’Rourke spoke.
“Here, keep in the protection of those trees. I haven’t trailed Michelle Gorgon all these weeks without knowing his car when I see it. And that Rolls of his was parked in the field back there. Look!”
And I looked through the foliage. Yep, there was the outline of a car all right. But it wasn’t the car I looked at. It was the figure that stood so still beside a tree. A figure that seemed like part of the landscape, or a scarecrow. Then it moved, and I knew that it was human. The figure watched that plane, the plane which had turned now and was coming back over the field. And then I saw the flash. Not for certain, not for sure.
But O’Rourke cried out.
“The plane’s on fire, and some one is jumping.”
A far distant figure, with a great hump on its back, balanced, swayed, seemed to clutch at a wing—then pitched out, swung slowly and came hurtling toward the earth. I waited, breathless, for a sudden jerk of that body and the great silk of a parachute to check the flight, and send the form drifting gently to earth. But no parachute opened. The body began to turn rapidly now; hands gripped frantically at the air; even legs seemed to be attempting to entwine space.
“Good God!” said O’Rourke, “he’s thrown her from the plane, and—”
The falling body struck in some trees, went crashing through them, and I sunk my head in my arms. So, destruction and death! That was the end of The Flame—that was—.
“And he ain’t having such an easy time of it.” O’Rourke gripped me by the shoulder. “The plane’s on fire. Something’s gone wrong. Look! It’s out of control, entirely.”
And it was. Fascinated, I watched that plane. Twisting, turning, diving, ever falling—ever nearer to the ground—ever—. And it swerved suddenly, about a hundred feet from the ground—seemed to straighten, then shoot upward, dip again, and dash straight toward a clump of trees not a hundred yards away from us.
“You can’t do anything for—for her.” And the words choked in O’Rourke’s throat. “But him, the dirty, lousy murderer! We’ve got him red handed this time. In death The Flame gave him to us.”
And we were running across that field. I’m not sure just what happened. But I think the plane paused in its drop, turned its nose up so suddenly that you could hear struts hum—snap, even—and with a crash it dove smack into a tree, twisted slightly, seemed to fall, and hung there.
You could see it blazing now.
“Quick!” shouted O’Rourke, dashing by me. “The damn thing may blow up in a minute. We—”
“Let him burn to death,” I cried out, and the next instant thought better of it. I hurled O’Rourke from me as we reached the now blazing wreck, jumped and caught a branch, and swung myself into the tree beside the plane.
I saw it all, and didn’t care. I saw the jury filing from the room. I knew my story in that second’s flash. I’d say I thought that Michelle Gorgon had a gun in his hand—and I shot him in self-defense. For I was going to kill him—put a bullet right through his head before ever O’Rourke could stop me. Catch Michelle Gorgon for the murder of The Flame? Hang murder on such a notorious racketeer—who could influence judges, keep witnesses silent, intimidate jurors? No—he was going before a jury now that he couldn’t buy, couldn’t intimidate, a Judge he couldn’t fix.
And I saw him crouched there in the cock-pit. He’d know too. The flames flashed back suddenly, whipped by a touch of wind.
“All right, Doctor Michelle Gorgon,” I cried out, almost mad with rage and hate, and something else, something that made me half sob out the words before I killed him. But I wanted him to know. He must know. And he would know. For his body stirred, his head low on his chest beneath the helmet, tried to rise.
My right hand gripped my gun. My left hand stretched in, clutched at the face that was turned from me. I jerked that head around, and—and looked straight into the wide, questioning, frightened eyes of The Flame—Florence Drummond.
CHAPTER XXXII
THE END OF THE RACKET
I don’t know how I got The Flame out of that cock-pit. Maybe O’Rourke and Brophey did most of it. Maybe they didn’t. But, anyway, she was on the grass beside us.
O’Rourke was hollering something about water. Brophey was yapping about a flask in the car, and I held The Flame close in my arms.
“It wasn’t murder, Race,” she said over and over. “It wasn’t that. I ripped the parachute pack on his back with my knife when we got into the plane. But I told him, I did tell him before he jumped. I couldn’t help it. I—but he was gone— on the edge—and he left me there to burn with it—crash with it—for my parachute was useless. He had seen to that.”
“Ssh.” I warned her. “O’Rourke will hear.” Maybe he did hear, and maybe he didn’t. But, anyway, he was running across the fields, running to where the body of Michelle Gorgon had dropped through the trees. I could barely make out the unshapely mass on the ground.
And The Flame talked.
“I had to know about my sister. I had to know if he really planned it so that she was crippled like that. That’s why I went to meet him when he telephoned me. You see, the plane was in my name. Michelle brought it to the airport only a few days ago. He registered it at the field under my name because he was afraid, then, that the truth could come out about Rose Marie. He was afraid—deadly afraid—of that voice on the wire, and was ready for a get-away. He told me everything, once we were in the air. Gloated over the way he had broken my sister. Told me, too, that he had killed her—made her kill herself.
“It was a horrible crime, that murder of my sister. He played upon both her mental and physical weakness. Told her that in the secret flap of her bag was a bottle of poison, and a mirror. And told her that if she were alive in two hours’ time he would bring to see her the man she loved—the man who had loved her.”
She stopped a minute and rubbed at her dry eyes. The Flame didn’t know how to cry, I guess. Then she went on.
“I couldn’t protect myself, Race. I had not expected him to act so quickly. Before we were off the ground he had taken my gun—and the mechanic who turned our propeller struck me a blow on the head. I was stunned, didn’t fully recover until we were up in the air, high up.
“He was clever, Race. The mechanic was one of his men. That mechanic would swear that I had gone up alone. Michelle was to set fire to the plane, leap with a parachute, be picked up by a man waiting with his car and driven back to the city.
“ ‘This was to be our bridal chariot,’ he said. ‘Now—it’s your coffin, Florence. Like your sister, you crossed me. I loved you; I could have made you very happy. But you proved yourself a rat and a stool-pigeon. I give you death. I fight my own battles, I do not need the police.’ “
“ ‘And I too can fight my own battles,’ I cried out, as he tossed something on the hot engine and did something to the controls. ‘Don’t jump, Michelle Gorgon! You’ve planned for me to be burnt to death in this blazing plane. I—’ as I saw him on the edge of the cock-pit, his gun covering me, his index finger cocked through the loop of his parachute chord, ‘I ripped the pack on your back with a knife as soon as you climbed into the plane. I cut your parachute. You’ll—you’ll have to burn with me.’
“He seemed to hesitate for a moment—then he smiled and stretched his hand back over his shoulder. The plane lurched. He cried out once, slipped, tottered—and fell. It seemed like hours that I heard his terrible screech of horror. Then the earth coming up, the trees and the crash—and you. But I swear I warned him that I cut—”
I put my hand across her mouth. O’Rourke was coming back.
“I’ll telephone at the first town and have them pick up that Rolls and that mechanic at the field—and then have a look at Rudolph Myer,” O’Rourke said, as we climbed into the police car. “And to ease your m
ind, Race. That lad was as dead as old King Tut, and it was our mutual friend, Michelle Gorgon.”
“Yes, and anything The Flame had to do with it was self-defense, and—”
“You talk too much.” O’Rourke looked at me as he lit a big black cigar, and I gathered The Flame close to me in the back of the machine. “You know, the body of Gorgon still hung in the trees when I reached it.” And when I looked at him, surprised—for I had seen plainly that the body was on the ground, “I say it still hung in the trees. Get that! I know it, for I had to cut that parachute pack to ribbons with my knife to get him loose. Cut it to ribbons, understand!” And after a pause, while he glared at me, “It’s funny it didn’t open right, but then, they very often don’t, and there’s no explaining—no explaining it.”
After all, O’Rourke wasn’t a bad scout. But Michelle Gorgon was dead, and Michelle Gorgon had held The Flame in his arms. And—oh, I wasn’t superstitious or anything like that. That thought had nothing to do with my moving over in a corner of the back seat and sticking a cigarette in my mouth. I—I just needed a smoke, I guess.
Any more to it? Well—hardly. The body of Eddie Gorgon turned up in the river three days later. We could only guess that Michelle Gorgon had some of his crowd put it there. Why? Well— maybe because he didn’t want it discovered in the underworld, just then, that some one—particularly a lad known as Race Williams—had the guts to shoot his brother, Eddie—or the lad every one thought was his brother, Eddie.
INTRODUCTION BY HARLAN ELLISON
I, FELON
NOT THAT IT’S any of your damned business, but the first time I went to jail was in 1945.1 was eleven years old. In 1958 I wrote a story about it. The title was “Free With This Box!” I was twenty-four. Now shuddup and leave me alone.
There are three sections in this group of homages to the pulp writers of a dear and departed era in popular literature. One of them, I’m told, is The Crimefighters, the third will be The Dames, and this one, dealing with the villains. As I am not a woman, it is manifest why I was not solicited by the eminence grise of this project, the esteemed editor Mr. Otto (we calls him “Slow Hand Poppa”) Penzler, to pen the introductory exegesis for the book about the broads; and as you will understand in mere moments, selecting me to front a book extolling the virtues of cops, pseudo-cops, hemi/semi/demi cops, and P.I. cops is about as apropos as a pinata at a paraplegics’ picnic.
I was importuned by Penzler to write a foreword for a book of stories about crooks. We’re talkin’ here thieves, thugs, knaves, poltroons, bilkers, milkers, murderers, arsonists, liars, blackmailers, footpads, cat burglars, shakedown artists, pigeon-drop and 3-card monte swindlers, bloodthirsters, and backstabbers … in short, criminals.
Now, you may ask, what is this delicate flower of advanced age, this pinnacle of society, this world-famous and multiple-award-winning credit to his species, getting at? Is he, heaven for-fend, suggesting that it is right and proper, even condign that this Penzler fellah thinks Ellison is as one with this fictional cadre of creeps and culprits, similar in spirit or outlook or past experience? Is that what we are to believe?
What is it witchu? Didn’t I tell you to shuddup and leave me alone?
First of all, I grew up reading the pulps. I was born in ‘34 and, unlike most of the Jessica Simpson-admiring twerps of contemporary upbringing, for whom nostalgia is what they had for breakfast, I actually remember what a hoot it was to plonk myself into the Ouroboros root-nest of the ancient oak tree in the front yard of our little house at 89 Harmon Drive, Painesville, Ohio, with the latest issue of Black Book Detective Magazine or The Shadow. Ah me, those wood-chip-scented, cream-colored pulp pages dropping their dandruff onto the lap of my knickers …
(Those were corduroy boys’ pants, here in America. In England, as I later discovered to my priapic delight, the same word is used to designate female panties—ah yes, in the aphorism of G. B. Shaw: “The United States and England are two countries divided by a common language.”)
… and while Jack Wheeldon and his cronies yelled “kike” as they rode their Schwinns past my eyrie, I went away from that place and that time with the adventures of masked riders, square-jawed crimefighters, mightily-thewed barbarian warriors, spacemen accompanied by gorgeous women in brass brassieres, and culprits too smooth and sagacious to be nobbled by some cigar-masticating flatfoot from the Central Office. There was something called “escapism” in the pop lit of those days. It’s too bad that word has fallen on such hard times. Escapism now, I’m told, is Not A Good Thing. Yet in its place we have “entertainment” that deifies the idle, the infamous, the egregious, and the shallow. In place of Raffles and Flambeau and Jimmy Valentine we have rapper thugs for whom human speech is not their natural tongue, a morbid fascination with those missing and presumed buried or drowned in the Bahamas, the need for a daily fix of tabloid ink infusion anent the presumed grotesqueries of child molesters, serial killers, televangelist alarmists, racists and ratfinks and raucous riffraff. We have been led down the societal garden path to a place where an honest crook who carries no firearm and would not stoop to such ignominious behavior as a carjacking or ballbatting of an ATM is no-price, and we are surfeited with “entertainment” that cheapens us, distances us, turns us into an unworthy people who accept no responsibility for our bad actions, and fills us with a sense of American Idol entitlement that has no substance in reality.
If I seem to be extolling the chimerical “virtues” of felons and crooks, one might assume in much the same way as the naive and gullible praised Dillinger, Capone, Ma Barker and her boys, back in the day, well, I live in the real world and I do truly really understand that Billy the Kid and Murder, Inc. and even Bonnie & Clyde were way less than icons to hold up to one’s children … but… nonetheless …
I would rather spend time reading about Boston Blackie and Fantomas and Harry Lime than have to put up with one more pelvic twitch of Christina Aguilera or pelvic piercing of Pink. What used to be a necessary and even enriching, innervating, if not ennobling retreat to the made-up worlds of high crimes and low misdemeanors in the pulps, has been relentlessly, ceaselessly, tirelessly bastardized by corporate and advertising thugs (far worse than the Bad Guys you’ll find in this volume), into a pounding, remorseless assault of empty trivial crap that fills the air, saturates our perceptions of the received world, and turns us away from ourselves and our true values and our important pursuits. Distractions that make the tomfoolery and toughtalk of the pulps seem as rich and golden as the Analects of Confucius or a paraphrasing of Lao Tzu. In the stories in this book, taken from the heart and core of that popular entertainment engine of the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, you will experience an escapism that steals nothing from you, reduces you not one scintilla, pleasures and distracts you the way a tall champagne flute of good, tart lemonade does on a blistering August afternoon.
The fictions may creak a bit in the joints, some of the writing may be too prolix for modern tastes (don’t forget, they were writing for % to a penny-a-word in those halcyon days of post-Depression America), and we have been exposed to an electronically-linked world for so long now, that some of the attitudes and expressions in these fables may seem giggle-worthy, but this is a muscular writing that sustained us through some very tough times, and their preserved quality of sheer entertainment value is considerable. So be kind.
As for me, well, I come to this book with credentials that are not trumpeted in the “official biographies” or in a Who’s Who or the Encyclopedia of American Authors. But mine is exactly the proper vita for a book’a’crooks.
As I said, I grew up in situ with the pulp detective magazines. And in my earliest days as a professional I wrote for the metamorphosed hard-boiled pulps in digest-size (which stick-in-the-mud Penzler has trouble perceiving as equally valid cred for “pulp” as the larger-sized magazines). I wrote for Manhunt, Mantrap, Mayhem, Guilty, Sure-Fire Detective, Trapped, The Saint Mystery Magazine (both U.S. and U.K editions), Mike Shayne’s, Tight
rope, Crime and Justice Detective Story, and Terror Detective Story Magazine, just to glaze your eyes and bore yo ass with a select few of the rags for which I toiled. So that’s a second good reason for me being the one who stands here at the prow of the ship, urging you aboard.
But the cred that stands, the one that beats the bulldog, is that I was a felon. I mentioned my first incarceration at age eleven, a spree of petty theft involving comic character pinback buttons concealed in boxes of Wheaties; but that was just the first. Age thirteen, ran off and wound up in a huge free-standing cell in the old (now-razed) Kansas City slam, all alone save for a carny geek who went nuts without his bottle of gin a day, and impressed me forever with the stench of rotgut sweated out via armpits. Booted out of Ohio State University in 1954, in part, for shoplifting. Saw the inside of the Columbus jail on that one.
U.S. Army brigs of various venues, 1957-59, mostly for insubordination. 1960: I’m in New York, living down in the Village, guy I had a beef with phones in bullshit charges of “possession of firearms” to the cops, they bust me, toss me in The Tombs (see my book Memos from Purgatory), and finally the Grand Jury looks at it, the D.A. knows it’s bullshit so he urges them to return No True Bill, and that was that.
Civil Rights days. I was in jails in Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama with Martin, and on and on. In Louisiana, a couple of redneck cops grabbed me on a back road in Plaquemine Parish, hauled me in, stripped me to the waist, cuffed me behind my back, lifted me up between them, hung the cuffs over a meat hook turned into the top-half of a Dutch door, and took turns walloping me across the belly with a plastic kiddie ballbat, careful to leave barely a mark on the outside. Did that till the Boss of Plaquemine, the infamous Lean-der Peres showed up, thumbed through my wallet full of I.D. and credit cards, discovered I was from Hollywood, knew there’d be ngeshry (as we say in Yiddish) if I vanished, had his boys take me down, and redeposited me: in a ditch somewhere out on a dark back road, with this admonition, which I recall with telephonic accuracy more than four decades later: “Nex’ tahm you show yo ass in Plack-uh-mun, jew-boy, we gonna jus’ kill you.”