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

  All this in a rush, with deep breathing. His eyes got small and round, and furious. His teeth almost chattered.

  I said: “Why have me tell him? Why not tell him yourself?”

  “Maybe I get mad and kill the——!” he yelled.

  I picked a match out of my pocket and prodded the loose ash in the bowl of my pipe. I looked at him carefully for a moment, getting hold of an idea.

  “Nerts, you’re scared to,” I told him.

  Both big fists came up. He held them shoulder high and shook them, great knots of bone and muscle. He lowered them slowly, heaved a deep honest sigh, and said:

  “Yeah. I’m scared to. I dunno how to handle her. All the time some new guy and all the time a punk. A while back I gave a guy called Joe Marty five grand to lay off her. She’s still mad at me.”

  I stared at the window, watched the rain hit it, flatten out, and slide down in a thick wave, like melted gelatine. It was too early in the fall for that kind of rain.

  “Giving them sugar doesn’t get you anywhere,” I said. “You could be doing that all your life. So you figure you’d like to have me get rough with this one, Steiner.”

  “Tell him I break his neck!”

  “I wouldn’t bother,” I said. “I know Steiner. I’d break his neck for you myself, if it would do any good.”

  He leaned forward and grabbed my hand. His eyes got childish. A grey tear floated in each of them.

  “Listen, M’Gee says you’re a good guy. I tell you something I ain’t told nobody—ever. Carmen—she’s not my kid at all. I just picked her up in Smoky, a little baby in the street. She didn’t have nobody. I guess maybe I steal her, huh?”

  “Sounds like it,” I said, and had to fight to get my hand loose. I rubbed feeling back into it with the other one. The man had a grip that would crack a telephone pole.

  “I go straight then,” he said grimly, and yet tenderly. “I come out here and make good. She grows up. I love her.”

  I said: “Uh-huh. That’s natural.”

  “You don’t get me. I wanta marry her.”

  I stared at him.

  “She gets older, gets some sense. Maybe she marry me, huh?”

  His voice implored me, as if I had the settling of that.

  “Ever ask her?”

  “I’m scared to,” he said humbly.

  “She soft on Steiner, do you think?”

  He nodded. “But that don’t mean nothin’.”

  I could believe that. I got off the bed, threw a window up and let the rain hit my face for a minute.

  “Let’s get this straight,” I said, lowering the window again and going back to the bed. “I can take Steiner off your back. That’s easy. I just don’t see what it buys you.”

  He grabbed for my hand again, but I was a little too quick for him this time.

  “You came in here a little tough, flashing your wad,” I said. “You’re going out soft. Not from anything I’ve said. You knew it already. I’m not Dorothy Dix, and I’m only partly a prune. But I’ll take Steiner off you, if you really want that.”

  He stood up clumsily, swung his hat and stared down at my feet.

  “You take him off my back, like you said. He ain’t her sort, anyway.”

  “It might hurt your back a little.”

  “That’s okay. That’s what it’s for,” he said.

  He buttoned himself up, dumped his hat on his big shaggy head, and rolled on out. He shut the door carefully, as if he was going out of a sick-room.

  I thought he was as crazy as a pair of waltzing mice, but I liked him.

  I put his goldbacks in a safe place, mixed myself a long drink, and sat down in the chair that was still warm from him.

  While I played with the drink I wondered if he had any idea what Steiner’s racket was.

  Steiner had a collection of rare and half-rare smut books which he loaned out as high as ten dollars a day—to the right people.

  II

  It rained all the next day. Late in the afternoon I sat parked in a blue Chrysler roadster, diagonally across the Boulevard from a narrow store front, over which a green neon sign in script letters said: “H. H. Steiner.”

  The rain splashed knee-high off the sidewalks, filled the gutters, and big cops in slickers that shone like gun barrels had a lot of fun carrying little girls in silk stockings and cute little rubber boots across the bad places, with a lot of squeezing.

  The rain drummed on the hood of the Chrysler, beat and tore at the taut material of the top, leaked in at the buttoned places, and made a pool on the floorboards for me to keep my feet in.

  I had a big flask of Scotch with me. I used it often enough to keep interested.

  Steiner did business, even in that weather; perhaps especially in that weather. Very nice cars stopped in front of his store, and very nice people dodged in, then dodged out again with wrapped parcels under their arms. Of course they could have been buying rare books and de luxe editions.

  At five-thirty a pimply-faced kid in a leather windbreaker came out of the store and sloped up the side street at a fast trot. He came back with a neat cream-and-grey coupe. Steiner came out and got into the coupe. He wore a dark green leather raincoat, a cigarette in an amber holder, no hat. I couldn’t see his glass eye at that distance but I knew he had one. The kid in the wind-breaker held an umbrella over him across the sidewalk, then shut it up and handed it into the coupe.

  Steiner drove west on the Boulevard. I drove west on the Boulevard. Past the business district, at Pepper Canyon, he turned north, and I tailed him easily from a block back. I was pretty sure he was going home, which was natural.

  He left Pepper Drive and took a curving ribbon of wet cement called La Verne Terrace, climbed up it almost to the top. It was a narrow road with a high bank on one side and a few well-spaced cabin-like houses built down the steep slope on the other side. Their roofs were not much above road level. The fronts of them were masked by shrubs. Sodden trees dripped all over the landscape.

  Steiner’s hideaway had a square box hedge in front of it, more than window-high. The entrance was a sort of maze, and the house door was not visible from the road. Steiner put his grey-and-cream coupe in a small garage, locked up, went through the maze with his umbrella up, and light went on in the house.

  While he was doing this I had passed him and gone to the top of the hill. I turned around there and went back and parked in front of the next house above his. It seemed to be closed up or empty, but had no signs on it. I went into a conference with my flask of Scotch, and then just sat.

  At six-fifteen lights bobbed up the hill. It was quite dark by then. A car stopped in front of Steiner’s hedge. A slim, tall girl in a slicker got out of it. Enough light filtered out through the hedge for me to see that she was dark-haired and possibly pretty.

  Voices drifted on the rain and a door shut. I got out of the Chrysler and strolled down the hill, put a pencil flash into the car. It was a dark maroon or brown Packard convertible. Its license read to Carmen Dravec, 3596 Lucerene Avenue. I went back to my heap.

  A solid, slow-moving hour crawled by. No more cars came up or down the hill. It seemed to be a very quiet neighborhood.

  Then a single flash of hard white light leaked out of Steiner’s house, like a flash of summer lightning. As the darkness fell again a thin tinkling scream trickled down the darkness and echoed faintly among the wet trees. I was out of the Chrysler and on my way before the last echo of it died.

  There was no fear in the scream. It held the note of a half-pleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness, and a touch of pure idiocy.

  The Steiner mansion was perfectly silent when I hit the gap in the hedge, dodged around the elbow that masked the front door, and put my hand up to bang on the door.

  At that exact moment, as if somebody had been waiting for it, three shots racketed close together behind the door. After that there was a long, harsh sigh, a soft thump, rapid steps, going away into the back of the house.

  I wast
ed time hitting the door with my shoulder, without enough start. It threw me back like a kick from an army mule.

  The door fronted on a narrow runway, like a small bridge, that led from the banked road. There was no side porch, no way to get at the windows in a hurry. There was no way around to the back except through the house or up a long flight of wooden steps that went up to the back door from the alley-like street below. On these steps I now heard a clatter of feet.

  That gave me the impulse and I hit the door again, from the feet up. It gave at the lock and I pitched down two steps into a big, dim, cluttered room. I didn’t see much of what was in the room then. I wandered through to the back of the house.

  I was pretty sure there was death in it.

  A car throbbed in the street below as I reached the back porch. The car went away fast, without lights. That was that. I went back to the living-room.

  III

  That room reached all the way across the front of the house and had a low, beamed ceiling, walls painted brown. Strips of tapestry hung all around the walls. Books filled low shelves. There was a thick, pinkish rug on which some light fell from two standing lamps with pale green shades. In the middle of the rug there was a big, low desk and a black chair with a yellow satin cushion at it. There were books all over the desk.

  On a sort of dais near one end wall there was a teakwood chair with arms and a high back. A dark-haired girl was sitting in the chair, on a fringed red shawl.

  She sat very straight, with her hands on the arms of the chair, her knees close together, her body stiffly erect, her chin level. Her eyes were wide open and mad and had no pupils.

  She looked unconscious of what was going on, but she didn’t have the pose of unconsciousness. She had a pose as if she was doing something very important and making a lot of it.

  Out of her mouth came a tinny chuckling noise, which didn’t change her expression or move her lips. She didn’t seem to see me at all.

  She was wearing a pair of long jade ear-rings, and apart from those she was stark naked.

  I looked away from her to the other end of the room.

  Steiner was on his back on the floor, just beyond the edge of the pink rug, and in front of a thing that looked like a small totem pole. It had a round open mouth in which the lens of a camera showed. The lens seemed to be aimed at the girl in the teakwood chair.

  There was a flash-bulb apparatus on the floor beside Steiner’s out-flung hand in a loose silk sleeve. The cord of the flash-bulb went behind the totem pole thing.

  Steiner was wearing Chinese slippers with thick white felt soles. His legs were in black satin pyjamas and the upper part of him in an embroidered Chinese coat. The front of it was mostly blood. His glass eye shone brightly and was the most lifelike thing about him. At a glance none of the three shots had missed.

  The flash-bulb was the sheet lightning I had seen leak out of the house and the half-giggling scream was the doped and naked girl’s reaction to that. The three shots had been somebody else’s idea of how the proceedings ought to be punctuated. Presumably the idea of the lad who had gone very fast down the back steps.

  I could see something in his point of view. At that stage I thought it was a good idea to shut the front door and fasten it with the short chain that was on it. The lock had been spoiled by my violent entrance.

  A couple of thin purple glasses stood on a red lacquer tray on one end of the desk. Also a potbellied flagon of something brown. The glasses smelled of ether and laudanum, a mixture I had never tried, but it seemed to fit the scene pretty well.

  I found the girl’s clothes on a divan in the corner, picked up a brown, sleeved dress to begin with, and went over to her. She smelled of ether also, at a distance of several feet.

  The tinny chuckling was still going on and a little froth was oozing down her chin. I slapped her face, not very hard. I didn’t want to bring her out of whatever kind of trance she was in, into a screaming fit.

  “Come on,” I said brightly. “Let’s be nice. Let’s get dressed.”

  She said: “G-g-go—ter—ell,” without any emotion that I could notice.

  I slapped her a little more. She didn’t mind the slaps, so I went to work getting the dress on her.

  She didn’t mind the dress either. She let me hold her arms up but she spread her fingers wide, as if that was very cute. It made me do a lot of finagling with the sleeves. I finally got the dress on. I got her stockings on, and her shoes, and then got her up on her feet.

  “Let’s take a little walk,” I said. “Let’s take a nice little walk.”

  We walked. Part of the time her ear-rings banged against my chest and part of the time we looked like a couple of adagio dancers doing the splits. We walked over to Steiner’s body and back. She didn’t pay any attention to Steiner and his bright glass eye.

  She found it amusing that she couldn’t walk and tried to tell me about it, but only bubbled. I put her on the divan while I wadded her underclothes up and shoved them into a deep pocket of my raincoat, put her handbag in my other deep pocket. I went through Steiner’s desk and found a little blue notebook written in code that looked interesting. I put that in my pocket, too.

  Then I tried to get at the back of the camera in the totem pole, to get the plate, but couldn’t find the catch right away. I was getting nervous, and I figured I could build up a better excuse if I ran into the law when I came back later to look for it than any reason I could give if caught there now.

  I went back to the girl and got her slicker on her, nosed around to see if anything else of hers was there, wiped away a lot of fingerprints I probably hadn’t made, and at least some of those Miss Dravec must have made. I opened the door and put out both the lamps.

  I got my left arm around her again and we struggled out into the rain and piled into her Packard. I didn’t like leaving my own bus there very well, but that had to be. Her keys were in her car. We drifted off down the hill.

  Nothing happened on the way to Lucerne Avenue except that Carmen stopped bubbling and giggling and went to snoring. I couldn’t keep her head off my shoulder. It was all I could do to keep it out of my lap. I had to drive rather slowly and it was a long way anyhow, clear over to the west edge of the city.

  The Dravec home was a large old-fashioned brick house in large grounds with a wall around them. A grey composition driveway went through iron gates and up a slope past flower-beds and lawns to a big front door with narrow leaded panels on each side of it. There was dim light behind the panels as if nobody much was home.

  I pushed Carmen’s head into the corner and shed her belongings in the seat, and got out.

  A maid opened the door. She said Mister Dravec wasn’t in and she didn’t know where he was. Downtown somewhere. She had a long, yellowish, gentle face, a long nose, no chin and large wet eyes. She looked like a nice old horse that had been turned out to pasture after long service, and as if she would do the right thing by Carmen.

  I pointed into the Packard and growled: “Better get her to bed. She’s lucky we don’t throw her in the can—drivin’ around with a tool like that on her.”

  She smiled sadly and I went away.

  I had to walk five blocks in the rain before a narrow apartment house let me into its lobby to use a phone. Then I had to wait another twenty-five minutes for a taxi. While I waited I began to worry about what I hadn’t completed.

  I had yet to get the used plate out of Steiner’s camera.

  IV

  I paid the taxi off on Pepper Drive, in front of a house where there was company, and walked back up the curving hill of La Verne Terrace to Steiner’s house behind its shrubbery.

  Nothing looked any different. I went in through the gap in the hedge, pushed the door open gently, and smelled cigarette smoke.

  It hadn’t been there before. There had been a complicated set of smells, including the sharp memory of smokeless powder. But cigarette smoke hadn’t stood out from the mixture.

  I closed the door and slipped dow
n on one knee and listened, holding my breath. I didn’t hear anything but the sound of the rain on the roof. I tried throwing the beam of my pencil flash along the floor. Nobody shot at me.

  I straightened up, found the dangling tassel of one of the lamps and made light in the room.

  The first thing I noticed was that a couple of strips of tapestry were gone from the wall. I hadn’t counted them, but the spaces where they had hung caught my eye.

  Then I saw Steiner’s body was gone from in front of the totem pole thing with the camera eye in its mouth. On the floor below, beyond the margin of the pink rug, somebody had spread down a rug over the place where Steiner’s body had been. I didn’t have to lift the rug to know why it had been put there.

  I lit a cigarette and stood there in the middle of the dimly lighted room and thought about it. After a while I went to the camera in the totem pole. I found the catch this time. There wasn’t any plate-holder in the camera.

  My hand went towards the mulberry-colored phone on Steiner’s low desk, but didn’t take hold of it.

  I crossed into the little hallway beyond the living-room and poked into a fussy-looking bedroom that looked like a woman’s room more than a man’s. The bed had a long cover with a flounced edge. I lifted that and shot my flash under the bed.

  Steiner wasn’t under the bed. He wasn’t anywhere in the house. Somebody had taken him away. He couldn’t very well have gone by himself.

  It wasn’t the law, or somebody would have been there still. It was only an hour and a half since Carmen and I left the place. And there was none of the mess police photographers and fingerprint men would have made.

  I went back to the living-room, pushed the flash-bulb apparatus around the back of the totem pole with my foot, switched off the lamp, left the house, got into my rain-soaked car and choked it to life.

  It was all right with me if somebody wanted to keep the Steiner kill hush-hush for a while. It gave me a chance to find out whether I could tell it leaving Carmen Dravec and the nude photo angle out.