The Complete Casebook of Cardigan, Volume 3: 1934-35

by Frederick Nebel

  Cardigan pulled from his overcoat pocket the package of cigarettes he had picked up from Shell’s desk as they left the office. He used the dashboard lighter, pressing the hot coil against the end of the cigarette. The wind blew the smoke into his eyes and he squinted. The wind drummed the upturned collar of his ulster against his ears.

  “Have one?” he asked Shell.

  “Thanks, no. As a rule, I only smoke them before luncheon. Cigars are heavy in the morning.”

  “They’re yours anyhow. I picked them up in your office. I can get some at the airport.”

  “That’s all right. Keep them.”

  Cardigan tightened down his eyelids against the wind. A vague grim smile appeared for a moment on his lips.

  The road took a wide turn and entered a stretch of woodland. Shell frowned, leaned forward, gripped the wheel hard, hauled on it. He shook his head.

  “What’s the matter?” Cardigan said.

  “Feels like a soft tire. Steers that way. I’ll pull up.”

  He drew upon the shoulder of the road, got out and looked at the front tires. Then he walked around to the rear.

  “Rear left,” he called out. “Slow leak, I imagine. It’s almost flat.”

  Cardigan got out and looked at the tire, then at his watch. Shell opened the rumble seat as a couple of cars went past. He hauled out a jack and a tire wrench.

  He said: “Do you mind taking off the spare while I jack the car up? We’ll have to hurry to make that plane.”

  “O.K.”

  The spare wheel-and-tire was held to the rear end by three nuts which Cardigan unscrewed while Shell was jacking up the car. Cardigan laid the nuts on the rear mudguard, jerked the wheel loose and let it bounce on the road.

  “This tire’s flat too,” he said.

  “It can’t be.”

  Cardigan bounced it again.

  “Damn the luck!” said Shell. “We’ll have to catch a ride back to a service station. I haven’t got a pump. There’s a station a mile back. I’ll get a fellow there to lend me a pump.”

  Cardigan looked at his watch. “Looks as if I’ll miss that plane,” he growled. “How far’s the field?”

  “About a mile and a half up the road.” Shell looked at his own watch, frowned. “By George, you’re right! What do you think we’d better do?”

  “If I could get a hitch—”

  “Of course, you’ll have to. Here comes a car now. Flag it.”

  Cardigan stepped out upon the road and held up his hand. A blue sedan with two men in front drew up and the man on the right took a pipe out of his mouth, grinned and said: “Tire trouble, friend?”

  “Yeah,” said Cardigan. “I have to make a plane in fifteen minutes. Will you give me a lift?”

  “Sure. We’re going that way. Climb in.”

  Shell said to Cardigan: “There’s a filling station right this side of the airport. Will you send a man back with a pump?”

  “Sure. Well, so long, Mr. Shell.”

  They shook.

  “Happy landings,” Shell smiled warmly. “I’m damn sorry about this.”

  Cardigan climbed in the rear of the sedan and the man at the wheel put the car in gear and drove off. Sweet smoke from the pipe in the mouth of the man on the right blew back into Cardigan’s face.

  “Going east?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “Yup.”

  “I like to fly.”

  “Well, it gets you there,” Cardigan nodded.

  They made several wide turns and then the man on the right turned around and pointed a gun at Cardigan and said: “Keep your hands far apart, friend. All right, Joe—take the next right.”

  The next right was a narrow lane between two rows of trees. Joe took it, drove about twenty yards and stopped. He pulled a gun out of his pocket, climbed out and opened the rear door.

  “O.K.,” said the man in the front seat. “Let’s have it, friend.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Something a woman wears around her neck. Are you going to act like a smart guy or are we going to have to dirty up my car?”

  Cardigan put his hand into his inside coat pocket. Both guns held steadily on him. He drew out the leather case and Joe took it from him, then backed up a pace.

  “Get out,” said the man in front.

  Cardigan stepped out and as he did so the man in front hit him on the back of the head. As Cardigan pitched into the bushes, Joe hit him twice on the head. Cardigan did not move after he hit the ground.

  Joe walked around to the other side of the car, climbed in behind the wheel and backed the car out into the highway. The other man knocked out his pipe, refilled it and lit up as the car went into forward motion.

  Cardigan still lay in the bushes, motionless, his legs sprawled wide, his overcoat halfway up his back. There was not a quiver in his body.

  Chapter Four

  Ice Delivery

  AT four o’clock Shell was briskly signing correspondence in his large sumptuous office. He wrote his signature with bold, firm strokes. His clerk, a youngish man in eyeglasses, was going through a tall, lean filing-cabinet at the back of the office. His secretary was standing alongside the desk, waiting with calm, well-bred patience.

  Cardigan came through the outer doorway, through the connecting doorway, with his hands in his coat pockets. He looked like something that had been left out overnight in a bad windstorm. He looked very big and very rough and there was a dark, sullen scowl between his eyes.

  Shell showed genuine amazement. “I thought you’d left on that plane!”

  There was the sound of the outer door opening and Cardigan stepped back, out of range.

  “Oh, Mr. Shell,” said a hard, male voice. “We been doing so much running around that we forgot to tell you about the escape of Shane. The lieutenant sent me over to—”

  Britten came in through the connecting doorway.

  Cardigan drew his gun.

  The secretary gasped.

  “Up, Britten,” Cardigan said dully. “You cops got under my feet once today and you’re not going to do it again.” He snarled at Shell: “Keep your hand away from that drawer!”

  A paleness seemed to grow around Britten’s mouth.

  “Shell,” Cardigan said, “get up and put your hat and coat on. Get up, I said!”

  The lawyer rose, moved stiffly to the costumer, put on his hat, his overcoat.

  Cardigan addressed the others: “I’m going to take Shell out with me, and I want you three to pay attention to what I’m telling you. I’m telling you that if there’s one peep out of anybody during the next hour—if you try to phone headquarters or in any way leave this office, I’ll blow Shell apart. Shell, do you think they ought to pay attention to that?”

  Shell moistened his lips, looked at them. “I think,” he said, “that under the circumstances you’d better remain quiet.”

  Britten was livid with rage. “I’ll get this bird yet if—”

  “Will you?” said Cardigan; then he spoke to the girl: “On Mr. Britten’s belt you’ll find a pair of handcuffs. Take them off. Take them off! Don’t stand there like a dummy!”

  She took the handcuffs from Britten’s belt.

  Cardigan said: “Pass it around the leg of the radiator—O.K. Snap one cuff on your own wrist. You’ll have to kneel. Britten, you kneel and snap the other cuff on your wrist and do it now. I see the radiator’s screwed to the floor. Try to get out of that. You,” he said to the clerk, “squeeze in that locker in the other office.” There was a key in the locker door. The clerk had to remove his own and the girl’s hat and coat in order to get in. Cardigan locked the door, left the key in the lock.

  “Let’s go,” he said to Shell, putting his gun in his overcoat pocket and keeping his hand clamped on it. “You’ll use your head and abide, dear brother, by what I say. Do you know where we’re going?”

  Shell said stiffly, levelly: “I haven’t any idea.”

  “Get going. I’ll show you.”
>
  THEY went down and out to the street and into a taxicab. Cardigan said to the driver: “Go to Twenty-two hundred Windsor Boulevard.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Shell sat stiffly, his nape straight, his face hard and grim. Cardigan said to him, chiding him: “You don’t by any chance think I’m this guy Homer Shane, do you?”

  Shell, rigid, made no reply. He stared straight ahead as the taxi banged down the main drag.

  Cardigan chuckled without humor. “Of course. You know I’m not Homer Shane. I got a ride in on a truck from where I was knocked out. I did some thinking, Shell, and I think I’ve thought things out pretty well.”

  Still Shell made no reply. When the cab drew up in front of the gray stone apartment house, Cardigan paid the driver before they got out. He made Shell get out first and was right behind him. Shell stood on the sidewalk as the cab drove off.

  “Well?” he grunted.

  “Now you lead the way,” Cardigan said in a low, dull voice.

  “Lead the way where?”

  “Into this building and up to the apartment you visited earlier today, when you were supposed to be at the bank. I tailed you from your office and then beat you back to your office.”

  Shell, while remaining rigid, seemed nonetheless to crumple. It was doubtless the expression on his face, as though somewhere deeper in his eyes something shattered. Color ebbed from his face.

  “In,” said Cardigan.

  Shell walked into the lobby and Cardigan was at his elbow. They entered an elevator and were taken to the ninth floor and when they got out, the elevator door closed with a jar. Shell licked lips that had become very dry. Cardigan nudged him. Shell, in a kind of stiff, frozen stupor, moved down the corridor. He stopped before a door and stared glassily at it. Cardigan reached past him and knocked. In a minute the door was opened by the hearty man who had smoked the pipe in the dark-blue sedan. He was smoking a pipe now and streams of fragrant smoke flowed against Cardigan’s face.

  Cardigan’s gun was trained on his top vest button and Cardigan said: “Put your hands up and step back. Get in, Shell.”

  The hearty man stopped puffing and his teeth tightened on his pipestem as he stepped back, raising his hands. Shell walked in, his legs moving stiffly, a frightful grimace on his face. Cardigan followed, closed the door. He was ready for the man Joe, the man who had been at the wheel of the car, but Joe did not appear.

  “Into the living room,” Cardigan muttered.

  Shell’s head drooped and he moved leaden-footed into the living room. The other backed in, his heavy, ruddy face no longer hearty. There was a steady, polished look in his eyes. Then he abruptly turned his back on Cardigan and said to Shell in a hard, blunt voice: “What the hell is the idea of this?”

  Shell turned to look fixedly at him but it seemed that the lawyer was unable to open his mouth. There was a strange, twisted look on his face, a shriveled dry look about his eyes.

  Cardigan looked at the thick ruddy neck of the big man and said: “I want that necklace.”

  But the man was still concerned with Shell. “What the hell is the idea of this?” he repeated furiously.

  Shells eyes slid away from the man’s face and he moved his lips and then his feet and sat down. The man started toward him furiously. Cardigan took a step and struck him on the head. The man grunted, hunched his shoulders and put both hands to his head, moving it slowly from side to side. Cardigan shoved him into a divan, then snapped at Shell:

  “I don’t look like I had a lot of brains and I’m not so bright that I sparkle, but I get a laugh when a lawyer like you, who’s supposed to be very bright, tries to pull a stunt like this. I figured it out riding in on the truck. I knew there was something cockeyed when I tailed you here but when you turned up at the office with the necklace, I wasn’t sure. Your driving me out to the airport was all right. Even the flat tire looked on the level, though it figures you fixed the valve for a slow leak when you went around to the garage to get the car. And you let the air out of your spare. It was all swell acting. You even maneuvered me into suggesting that I’d better hitch a ride to the airport. This guy and his pal were wise not to tail too close. They only came in sight after we were stalled. The whole thing looked genuine as hell but it was crooked nevertheless.”

  HE took from his pocket the package of cigarettes which he had taken from Shell’s desk. “You were in Cleveland this morning, Shell. There’s a little sticker on this package. It reads Public Service Drug Company, Euclid Avenue, Cleveland. You were in Cleveland and were the ‘informer’ who phoned the cops there just after the train left—about Shane. Then you drove back here. On these roads and in that car of yours you could beat the train. That’s the way I figure it out. It’s the only sensible way. The rest I don’t know—except that the necklace wasn’t in the bank. It was here in this apartment. It’s here again. I want it.”

  Shell, staring bleakly at the floor, said in a voice with no lift in it: “Tanner, give it to him.”

  “What!” exploded Tanner from the divan.

  “Give it to him. It’s not my fault, Tanner. Circumstances did it.”

  Tanner’s face looked red and bloated with anger. He heaved up, his lips breaking in a snarl. Cardigan said flatly: “Calm yourself, mister, or I’ll let you have it!”

  Lieutenant Noonan stepped in quietly through the corridor door and leveled his gun at Cardigan’s back. “Reach up, Shane,” he hit off.

  Cardigan started to spin.

  “Reach!” Noonan lashed out.

  Behmeister came in, made a cautious half circle of the room, holding his gun almost at arm’s length. “We got you this t-time Shane,” he stammered.

  Noonan barked in his hoarse voice: “Just by accident we seen you riding down Water Street in the cab. We told by the look on Mr. Shell’s face that you were holding a rod on him. By Geez, Shane, we’ll kick you all over headquarters for pulling that fast one on us!”

  “Now wait!” roared Cardigan, his eyes blazing.

  “Don’t yell at me!”

  “I’ll yell at you! I’ll yell my head off! These guys—”

  “Shut up!” bellowed Noonan, quivering with anger. “You’re not going to talk yourself out of this! What did he do, Mr. Shell, kidnap you?”

  “More than that!” Tanner broke in. “He kidnaped my dear friend Shell and brought him here! Not only that! He threatened to kill both of us! He’s a dangerous man!”

  Cardigan, spitting out a violent oath, whirled on Tanner.

  “Stop it!” yelled Noonan.

  Cardigan whirled back to Noonan. “You thick ape, these two fellows are—”

  “Shut up!” bellowed Noonan. “I told you you ain’t going to talk yourself out of this! When I get you over to headquarters I’m going to make you say uncle if I have to hit you with a couple of desks! Keep your hands up! No talking! Not a word out of you! You’ll talk when you get to headquarters and not before! I’m taking no chance with you!”

  Behmeister stepped up behind Cardigan, reached and took the gun out of Cardigan’s hand. Noonan stepped up to Cardigan and said in a low, bitter voice: “Just one more word out of you—just one—and I’ll break this rod across your puss.”

  Joe, the man who had driven the dark blue sedan, breezed in through the doorway. He stopped short. He didn’t see Cardigan because Noonan was in the way. But he saw Behmeister. Joe’s face blanched, his mouth shot over to one side, his eyes popped, and he turned to run.

  “Hey!” shouted Behmeister, diving after him.

  JOE was halfway down the corridor by the time Behmeister reached it. Joe looked over his shoulder, slammed against the wall and went for his gun. Behmeister’s gun boomed in the corridor and Joe’s gun, already drawn, fell to the floor. Joe left it and started to run again, broken-kneed. Behmeister pounded after him, caught up with him, grabbed him by the back of the collar and spun him around off his feet.

  “Listen, copper!” Joe panted. “I didn’t do a thing. They got me into it. I w
as dead broke and they offered me three hundred bucks and being I was dead broke—”

  Behmeister lugged him up the corridor.

  “Honest to God, sir!” Joe whined. “It was Tanner and Shell got me to do it against my will.”

  Behmeister hauled him into the apartment and Joe babbled on: “I knew it was wrong but I needed the dough and they said we wasn’t going to kill Cardigan, only knock him out—”

  “Cardigan!” boomed Noonan.

  “Y-yeah,” choked Joe. He pointed to Cardigan. “Cardigan there. Shell said not to kill him, just to—Tanner hit Cardigan once and I only hit him—”

  Noonan whirled on Shell. “What’s this!”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you,” Cardigan said to Noonan, “that Shell was the guy gave that phony information to the Cleveland bureau about this guy Shane.”

  Tanner dropped to the divan, his mouth hanging open.

  Shell looked at his palms, said in a constricted voice: “Yes, Lieutenant. This man’s Cardigan.”

  “Good grief!” choked Noonan.

  “I did it,” Shell said, “because I had to. I needed forty thousand dollars immediately and I had no security to get it through the usual channels. Tanner lends money on hot jewelry. I knew that. Three days ago I took the liberty of taking Mr. Sondergaard’s necklace from the safety-deposit box. I took it to Tanner and said I wanted forty thousand dollars for a period of two weeks. I offered him the necklace as security and promised to pay back the forty thousand, at eight percent interest for two weeks. He lent me the money. He knew it was Sondergaard’s necklace.

  “Then last night I got Sondergaard’s wire. I tried to get Tanner to give me back the necklace and take my word that I’d pay him back as I promised. He refused. I drove to Cleveland early this morning and made that phone call to the police. I had to fix it so that Cardigan could not get to me. I needed time—time to get the necklace back.

  “But when he did get to me at noon, I knew that I had to do something desperate. So I told him I was going around to the bank to get the necklace. Instead, I came out here and put a proposition before Tanner. I showed him a way to realize a fortune on the necklace. I wanted no part of the cut. I just wanted to get in the clear. I told him that we could arrange to have the necklace stolen by him and then he could sell it under cover for about seventy thousand. He took me up. I got the necklace and gave it to Cardigan and drove him out toward the airport. I’d fixed one of my tires for a slow leak and I’d let air out of the spare. We were stuck and Cardigan had to make the plane. Tanner and Joe came along in time to give him a lift—and that was how they got the necklace back and that was how—”