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 finish my breakfast and go out and hunt for my jaloppy, which I’ve got parked a couple of blocks down the street. I climb in and head for the North Side; 598 Blackhawk Street.

  These foreigners certainly bury them early in the morning. Although it’s only nine-thirty, they’ve already taken the crepe down from the door. There are a couple of kids hanging around and I ask them: “At what church are they having the mass for Mrs. Druhar?”

  “Saint John’s on Cleveland Avenue,” one of the kids replies.

  I miss them at the church, so the only thing I can do is go out to the cemetery, which, according to the paper, is St. Sebastian’s, seven miles outside the city limits. It takes me about an hour to get out there, so when I get to the cemetery, they’re breaking up; going back to the cars that have brought them out. I grab an old envelope out of my pocket and wave it around as if it’s a telegram, or something.

  “Mr. Tony Druhar!” I yell.

  A big fellow, who is just about to climb into a green sedan, says: “Here I am.”

  I run over and see that the license number on the sedan checks with the number on one of my cards. So I pull out the old repossess warrant and stick it into Mr. Druhar’s hand. “Sorry, Mr. Druhar,” I say. “I’m taking your car, on account of you haven’t done right by the Mid-West Finance Company.”

  This Druhar looks stupidly at the piece of paper in his hand for a minute. Then he lets out a roar you could have heard over on Grant Avenue. “Why, you lousy, grave-robbing—! Is this a time to pull something like this, when I have just buried my poor grandmother?”

  “That’s how I found you,” I tell him. “It says in the paper: ‘Mourned by her sons, so-and-so, and grandsons, Tony Druhar, and so-and-so.’ “

  Some people certainly get mad. This Druhar fellow jumps up and down and takes off his hat and throws it on the ground and jumps on it. Then three fellows just as big as Druhar climb out of his sedan and surround me.

  “So you’re a skip-tracer!” one of them says, and lets a handful of knuckles fly in my direction.

  I’m lucky enough to duck them, but I can see that this isn’t the safest place in the world right now for Sam Cragg. I get a lucky break, though. A motorcycle cop who’s escorted the funeral out here is just a little way off, and when Druhar starts all his yelling, he comes over.

  “What’s the trouble?” he asks.

  Druhar starts swearing again, but I grab hold of the cop’s arm. “I’ve got a repossess warrant for this car. This Druhar has missed six payments, and the Mid-West Finance Company wants $188 or the car.”

  The cop gives me a funny look and takes the warrant from Tony Druhar. He looks at it and then he looks at me. “I’ll bet you hate yourself, mister, when you look at your face in the mirror every morning.”

  “Maybe I do,” I tell the cop, “but if I didn’t have this job somebody else would, and I haven’t got a pull, so I can’t get on the WPA, and I have to eat.”

  “Why?” asks the cop.

  I can see he’s all on the other side, so I give him some law. “Officer, this is a regular warrant, good anywhere in this country. As an officer of the law, I’m calling on you to see that it’s properly served. I want this car or $188.”

  There’s some hullabaloo, but after a while Druhar and his pals get together and make me a proposition, which I am sap enough to accept. I’m a softie, and you oughtn’t to be a skip-tracer if you are a softie. They’ve pooled up $32 and they say that Druhar will have the rest of the money for me tomorrow. I’m just cagy enough, though, to make them all give me their names and addresses and prove them by letters and stuff they’ve got with them.

  That’s where I made my big mistake and how I got mixed up with the phoney prince.

  EXT MORNING I drive up to 736 Gardner Street. Gardner Street is a little one-block chopped up street that has been dumped in between Stanton Park and Ogden Avenue. There are only about thirty houses on the street, and every one of them should have been condemned twenty years ago. Druhar is supposed to live on the first floor of one of these dumps.

  I can’t ring the doorbell because there isn’t a doorbell, so I bang the door with my fist. Nothing happens so I bang it again. Then I figure I have been given the runaround and I get sore, and push on the door. It goes open and I walk into the place. Druhar is at home. He’s lying on the floor. He’s dead.

  For a minute I look down at him and all sorts of cold shivers run up and down my back. This Druhar is a big fellow, but somebody has twisted his neck so that his face is looking over his shoulder.

  There’s a slip of paper sticking out of Druhar’s pants pocket. I don’t like corpses any better than the next fellow, but I reach down and pull out this piece of paper. And then my eyes pop out. The paper reads:

  “For value received, I promise to pay to Tony Druhar, Five Thousand Dollars. “

  W. C. ROBERTS

  A promissory note, good in any man’s court, if this W. C. Roberts has got $5000.

  I look at the thing and finally stick it in my pocket. After all, Tony Druhar, dead or alive, owes the Mid-West Finance Company about $156.00.

  I back out of the house and I’m on the porch when I see the taxicab that is pulled up behind my jaloppy. The prince is coming across the sidewalk.

  Of course I don’t know that he’s a prince then. I find that out later. But he certainly dresses the part. He’s wearing a black, single-breasted coat, which is open, showing a fawn-colored waistcoat. Under it is a pair of striped trousers and below that, believe it or not, white spats. On his head he’s got a pearl-gray Hom-burg. He’s carrying a pair of yellow pigskin gloves and a cane. So help me, he’s coming up to Druhar’s house.

  “Good morning, sir,” he says to me in a voice that drips with some foreign accent. His face is long and very sad and aristocratic. “I’m looking for Mr. Druhar.”

  What I want to do is jump into my jaloppy and get the hell out of there, but I know how cops are, and it’s just my luck that either the prince or the taxicab driver will remember the license number of my car, so I figure I may as well face the thing out.

  “Mr. Druhar,” I say, “is inside the house. He’s dead.”

  The prince’s mouth falls open, but only for a second. Then he reaches into his waistcoat and brings out a monocle and sticks it in his eye. He looks at me and says, “I do not understand.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t either, but he’s dead just the same.”

  He lets out a sigh. “That is too bad. I am Prince Peter Strogovich. This Druhar had applied to me for a position, and I was just about to employ him. It is sad.”

  The prince takes the monocle out of his eye and polishes it with his gloves. “You say he is inside? The police do not yet know?”

  They know soon enough. Some of the neighbors have been attracted by the triple event—my jaloppy, the taxicab and the prince in his fancy outfit. They have gathered and they’ve heard some of our talk, so there’s a lot of chattering and running around.

  In about five minutes, a squad car rolls up. In a few minutes more, there are ten or twelve cops around, an ambulance, and the emergency squad from the Fire Department.

  There’s a lot of excitement and when it all sifts down, the prince and myself are down at Headquarters, and Captain Riordan is swearing and asking a lot of questions.

  Most of the swearing is at me. “I don’t like your story at all,” he tells me. “You were pretty sore at this Druhar. According to the neighbors, and his friends, you cut a pretty scene yesterday at the funeral of his grandmother. My idea is that you went there this morning to collect the money and you got into a fight with him.”

  “Wait a minute, Captain,” I cut in. “Call up Oscar Berger, who’s the Argus Adjustment Agency. Ask him if I’ve killed any of my skips before.”

  “There’s always a time to start, you know.”

  The captain grunts and picks up the telephone. He calls the office and says, “Hello, Mr. Berger? This is Police Headquarters. I’ve got a man here by
the name of Sam Cragg who says he works for you…. What’s the charge? Why, he said he was after a fellow who owed some money and it seems that the fellow got his neck twisted. What?” He listens for a minute, then he turns to me. “He wants to know if you collected the money.”

  I give the captain my opinion of Oscar Berger, which the captain translates into “No.” He listens a minute more and then says, “O.K.,” and hangs up.

  “Berger says he fired you a couple of days ago.”

  I really get sore then. That was about the kind of loyalty you can expect from a man who’d run that kind of a collection agency.

  Prince Peter comes to my assistance.

  “Captain, I do not think this man killed Mr. Druhar. I do not think he is strong enough to do it. Besides, there are no marks on him, and Mr. Druhar would not have submitted without fighting.”

  “I could figure that out myself,” snaps the captain. “He could have come on Druhar from the back and caught him by surprise.”

  The prince shrugs. “At any rate, you are not going to hold me? I have important matters….”

  “You can go,” says the captain. He scowls at me. “I still don’t like your story, but I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt. If I find out anything more, I can pick you up easily enough.”

  That’s enough for me. I get out of Headquarters as quickly as I can. Outside, Prince Peter is just climbing into a taxicab.

  I get a street car and ride back to Gardner Street where the jaloppy is still parked. It’s there all right, only it hasn’t got any tires or headlights now. The damn crooks in the neighborhood have stripped them off.

  When I start swearing even the kids on the street duck into the houses. I’ve got a good mind just to leave the rest of the junk right there, but when I get to Division Street I go into a saloon and telephone a garage.

  By the time I get down to the rattle-trap building on Wells Street where AAA has its lousy offices, I’m in a swell mood—for murder.

  I slam into the office and Betty Marshall, who practically runs the business from the inside, gives me the ha-ha. “So you finally landed in jail!”

  “And it’s no thanks to our boss that I’m not still there. Is he inside?”

  He’s trying to lock his office door, when I push it open and knock him halfway across the room. “Listen, Berger,” I says to him, “what kind of a double-crosser are you?”

  He ducks behind the desk. “Now take it easy, Cragg. I was just going to call Goldfarb, my lawyer, and have him spring you.”

  “I’ll bet you were! Every day of the week I do things for you that keep me awake nights, and that’s the kind of loyalty you give me.”

  “Now, now, Sam,” he soft-soaps me. “I got a nice bunch of easy skips for you. To make it up, I’ll pay you the regular five buck rate on them, although these are so easy you oughtn’t to get more than three on them. It’s the new account I landed, the O. W. Sugar Jewelry Company.”

  “You call those easy skips? Hell, three-fourths of the people that buy jewelry on the installment plan pawn it before they finish paying for it!”

  “Yeah, but they’re all working people in the lower brackets. You’ve just got to find out where they work and threaten to garnishee their wages and they’ll kick in.”

  I take the cards he gives me. Like I said before, I hadn’t any pull and couldn’t get on the WPA.

  These Sugar Jewelry skips are no better or worse than others I’ve handled. I find the first one, a middle-age Italian woman, cracking pecans in a little dump near Oak and Milton—the Death Corner. She gets eight cents a pound for shelling the pecans and if she works hard she can shell two pounds an hour. Why a woman like that ever bought a wrist watch I don’t know, but she did— and I make her promise to pay a dollar a week on the watch.

  AM working on the second skip on Sedgwick near Division, when I get the surprise of my life. Prince Pete Strogovich, cane and white spats and all, comes out of a little confectionery store. I step into a doorway and watch him saunter across the street and go into a saloon. Then I walk into the confectionery store. It’s a dump; dirty showcases, stationery, candy boxes and empty soft drink bottles standing all around. There’s a magazine rack on one side.

  Next to it sits the biggest woman I’ve ever seen in my life. She’s six feet one or two inches tall and big all around. She weighs two-ninety or three hundred and none of it is flabby fat.

  “What can I do for you?” she asks, her voice a hoarse bass.

  I pretend not to hear her and started pawing over the magazines.

  “Can I help you?” she goes on. “What magazines are you looking for?”

  I make up the name of a dick mag.

  “I don’t carry that one, but there’s plenty of detective magazines, just as good.”

  “They’re not just as good,” I retort. “That’s the trouble with you storekeepers. You’re always trying to sell something just as good.”

  She starts panting like she has the asthma and I give her a look. Her eyes are slits in her fat cheeks, but they’re glittering slits. She’s good and sore.

  “Get the hell out of here!” she snaps at me. She starts getting up from the big reinforced chair and I beat it to the door.

  When I get outside Prince Peter’s coming out of the saloon, dabbing a handkerchief to his aristocratic mouth. I walk across the street and meet him on the corner.

  “Hi, Pete!” I say to him.

  He knows me all right. But he isn’t overjoyed to meet me. “What are you doing here?” he asks.

  “Nothin’ much, Pete, just trying to locate a skip.”

  “Skip?” he asks. “What is a skip?”

  “Well, suppose you buy a suit of clothes on the installment plan, or a diamond ring or a car. You try to beat the firm out of the money and move without leaving a forwarding address. A skip tracer runs you down and hands you a summons. That’s me.”

  “Then you are a detective, no?”

  “Well, I do detective work, all right, but I’m not exactly a detective.”

  “So!” The prince gets out his monocle and begins polishing it on his gloves. He’s sizing me up. After a minute, he decides I’m O.K. “My friend, would you do a job for me? For two weeks I have been looking for a man and I can not find him. He—he owes me some money, just like your skips. You think, perhaps, you can find him?”

  “Probably, but you see, I work for a collection agency and I only look for people they want.”

  “But I would pay you well. Here!” He whips out a leather wallet and pulls out a couple of bills. Fifties. I take them from his hand and rub them. “You’re paying me a hundred dollars to find this man for you?”

  “One hundred dollars now. When you find him I give you four hundred dollars more. You work for me, huh?”

  I fold the bills four ways and put them into my pocket. Argus Adjustment Agency pays me five dollars for finding a skip. Sometimes I find two in one day. Sometimes I don’t find two in a week.

  “What’s this fellow’s name?”

  “Roberts,” the prince says, “W. C. Roberts.”

  I don’t tumble right away, not until the prince says: “He owes me five thousand dollars. He has give me the note and promise to pay….”

  And then I know. W. C. Roberts is the name on Tony Druhar’s note, the one I’d slipped out of his pocket and had in my own right now. I say: “What was the last address you had of this Roberts, and what does he look like?”

  “I do not know what he looks like,” the prince says. “But his last address is—was,” he pulls a tiny notebook from his pocket, “518 Rookery Building.”

  I write the address down on a card.

  “He isn’t there any more, I take it.”

  “No, he have moved and not give the new address. But you find him?”

  “For five hundred bucks I’d find John Wilkes Booth,” I tell him.

  “Booth? I do not know him.”

  “Never mind. And where’ll I find you?”

&n
bsp; He thinks that over before giving me the answer. “At the Gregorian Towers on Michigan Boulevard.”

  I write that down, too, then I ask him the question that’s been bothering me for a long time. “Say, Prince, would you mind telling me what nationality you are?”

  He likes that. He pulls himself up straight and sticks the monocle in his eye. “I am Serbian,” he says proudly. “My cousin was the king of Serbia. King Peter Karageorgovich.”

  Me, I don’t even know where Serbia is. The name’s vaguely familiar, but that’s about all. I make up my mind to look it up sometime.

  I leave the prince and get on a south-bound Sedgwick Street car, but at Chicago Avenue it moves too slow and I get off and grab a cab. I have a hundred bucks and I want to see what it’s like to spend money.

  HE ROOKERY BUILDING is one of those old office buildings that was built right after the war—the Civil War. One of these days they’re going to tear it down and use the ground as a parking lot.

  I go straight to the superintendent’s office. “I’m looking for a Mr. W. C. Roberts, who used to have an office in this building,” I say to him. “Is that so?” The supe comes back at me. “Some other people are looking for him, too— including the cops.”

  “Ha, the cops! And why’re they looking for him?”

  “You ain’t never heard of W. C. Roberts, mister?”

  “What’d he do, kill someone?”

  “Uh-uh.” He gives me a funny look, then reaches into his pocket and brings out a slip of paper. He hands it to me and I look at it. It has some writing on it:

  “For value received I promise to pay to William Kilduff, five thousand dollars. “

  W. C. ROBERTS.

  I pull out my own note—the one made out to Tony Druhar. I show it to the superintendent. “Hello, sucker,” says the superintendent. “How much you pay for yours?”

  I stall. “The usual amount, I guess.”