The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

by Penzler, Otto

  Okay, put a bullet in this. I’m done. Turn the page, dammit. Start reading.

  One, Two, Three

  Paul Cain

  ONE OF THE TRUE mystery men of pulp fiction, Paul Cain was discovered to be the pseudonym of the successful screenwriter Peter Ruric. Then, not so many years ago, it was further learned that even that name was a disguise for the author’s actual name, George Carrol Sims (1902-1966).

  His fame as a writer of crime fiction rests with a single novel, Fast One (1933), which Raymond Chandler called “some kind of high point in the ultra hard-boiled manner.”

  The novel had its genesis in a series of short stories published in Black Mask, beginning with “Fast One” in the March 1932 issue, followed by four other adventures of Gerry Kells and his alcoholic girlfriend, S. Granquist. Cain had been writing pulp stories in New York but moved to Los Angeles when Cary Grant began filming Gambling Ship, which was loosely based on these stories. The sale of the film to Hollywood inspired him to pull the stories together as a novel, which was both savaged by the review media at the time while praised by others. It sold few copies and he never wrote another.

  He did write films, however, most famously The Black Cat (1934), about a Satanic cult, that starred Boris Karloff, with whom he became friends, as well as Affairs of a Gentlemen (1934), Grand Central Murders (1942), and Mademoiselle Fifi (1944).

  “One, Two, Three” was first published in Black Mask in May 1933 and collected in his short story collection, Seven Slayers (1946).

  One, Two, Three

  Paul Cain

  A private dick tries to cut into a big roll

  ‘D BEEN IN Los Angeles waiting for this Healey to show for nearly a week. According to my steer, he’d taken a railroad company in Quebec for somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred and fifty grand on a swarm of juggled options or something. That’s a nice neighborhood.

  My information said further that he was headed west and that he dearly loved to play cards. I do, too.

  I’ll take three off the top, please.

  I missed him by about two hours in Chicago and spent the day going around to all the ticket-officers, getting chummy with agents, finally found out Healey had bought a ticket to LA, so I fanned on out there and cooled.

  Pass.

  Sunday afternoon I ran into an op for Eastern Investigators, Inc., named Gard, in the lobby of the Roosevelt. We had a couple drinks and talked about this and that. He was on the Coast looking for a gent named Healey. He was cagey about who the client was, but Eastern handles mostly missing persons, divorces, stuff like that.

  Monday morning Gard called me and said the Salt Lake branch of his outfit had located Healey in Caliente, Nevada. He said he thought I might like to know. I told him I wasn’t interested and thanked him and then I rented a car in a U Drive place and drove up to Caliente.

  I got there about four in the afternoon and spotted Healey in the second joint I went into. He was sitting in a stud game with five of the home boys and if they were a fair sample of local talent I figured I had plenty of time.

  Healey was a big man with a round cheery face, smooth pink skin. His mouth was loose and wet and his eyes were light blue. I think his eyes were the smallest I’ve ever seen. They were set very wide apart.

  He won and lost pretty evenly, but the game wasn’t worth a nickel. The home boys were old-timers and played close to their vests and Healey’s luck was the only thing that kept him even. He finally scared two of them out of a seventy or eighty-dollar pot and that made him feel so good that he got up and came over to the the bar and ordered drinks for the boys at the table. He ordered lemonade for himself.

  I said: “Excuse me, but haven’t I seen you around Lonnie Thompson’s in Detroit?” Lon-nie makes a book and I had most of my dope on Healey from him.

  He smiled and said: “Maybe,” and asked me what I drank.

  I ordered whiskey.

  He asked me if I’d been in town long and I said I’d just driven up from LA to look things over and that things didn’t look so hot and that I would probably drive back to LA that night or the next morning.

  I bought him another lemonade and had another whiskey and we talked about Detroit. In a little while he went back to the table and sat down.

  That was enough for a beginning. I had registered myself with him as one of the boys. I went out and drove a couple of blocks to the Pine Hotel and took a room. The Pine was practically the only hotel in town, but I flipped the register back a day or so and found Healey’s name to make sure. Then I went up and washed and lay down to smoke a cigarette and figure out the details.

  According to Lonnie Thompson, Healey was a cash boy—carried his dough in paper and traveler’s cheques. I couldn’t be sure of that but it was enough. The point was to get him to LA and in to one of two or three places where I could work on him.

  I guess I must have slept almost an hour because it was dark when I woke up. Somebody was knocking at the door and I got up and stumbled over and switched on the light and opened the door. I was too sleepy to take Healey big— I mumbled something about coming in and sitting down, and went over to the basin and put some cold water on my face.

  When I turned around he was sitting on the bed looking scared. I offered him a cigarette and he took it and his hand was shaking.

  He said: “Sorry I woke you up like that.”

  I said: “That’s all right,” and then he leaned forward and spoke in a very low voice:

  “I’ve got to get out of here right away. I want to know how much it’s worth to you to take me down to Los Angeles.”

  I almost fell off the chair. My first impulse was to yell, “Sure,” and drag him down to the car; but he was scared of something and when a man’s scared is a swell time to find out what it’s all about.

  I stalled. I said: “Oh, that’s all right,” sort of hesitantly.

  He said: “Listen…. I got here Saturday morning. I was going to stay here long enough to establish residence and then apply for one of those quick divorces, under the Nevada law.

  “My wife has been on my tail six weeks with a blackmail gag,” he went on. “She’s here. When I got back to the hotel a little while ago she came into my room and put on an act.”

  I thought then I knew who Gard’s client was.

  “She came in this afternoon. She’s got the room next to mine.”

  He was silent so long that I laughed a little and said: “So what?”

  “I’ve got to duck, quick,” he went on. “She’s a bad actor. She came into my room and put on an act. She’s got a guy with her that’s supposed to be her brother and he’s a bad actor, too. You said you were going to drive back to LA. I saw your name on the register when I came in and I thought you might take me along. I can’t rent a car here and there isn’t a train till midnight.”

  He pulled the biggest roll I ever saw out of his pocket and skimmed off a couple notes. “If it’s a question of money …”

  I shook my head with what I hoped was a suggestion of dignity. I said: “I’d decided to go back myself tonight. It will be a pleasure to take you, Mister Healey,” and I got up and put on my coat. “How about your stuff?”

  He looked blank until I said: “Luggage,” and then he said: “That’s all right—I’ll leave it.” He smiled again. “I travel light.”

  At the top of the stairs he whispered: “This is sure a big lift.” Then he remembered that he had to sneak up to his room to get something and said he’d meet me at the car. I told him where it was. He said he’d paid his hotel bill.

  I went on downstairs and checked out.

  My car was wedged in between a Ford truck and a light-blue Chrysler roadster. There was plenty of room ahead of the roadster, so I went up and snapped off the hand-brake and pushed it ahead about eight feet. Then I got into my car and leaned back and waited.

  The whole layout looked pretty bad, what with him scared to death of a deal he admitted was blackmail and all. He said he didn’t want his lugga
ge and then right on top of it, he had to go up to his room to get something. That would be taking a chance on running into the wife again. I wondered if she was his wife.

  I couldn’t figure out how a wife could blackmail a husband while she was jumping from state to state with a man who was “supposed” to be her brother; but then almost anything is possible in Nevada.

  After about five minutes I began to get nervous. I opened the door of the car and stepped out on the side-walk, and as I closed the door there were five shots close together some place upstairs in the hotel.

  I can take trouble or leave it alone; only I always take it. Like a sap, I went into the hotel.

  The clerk was a big blond kid with glasses. He came out from behind the counter as I went in the door; we went upstairs together, two or three at a time.

  There was a man in long woolly underwear standing in the corridor on the third floor and he pointed to a door and we went in. Healey was lying flat on his face in the middle of the room, and beyond him, close to the wall, was the body of a woman, also face downward.

  The clerk turned a beautiful shade of green; he stood there staring at Healey. I went over and rolled the woman over on her back. She couldn’t have been much over twenty-two or three; little, gray-eyed blonde. There was a knife in her side, under the arm. There was a .38 automatic near her outstretched hand. She was very dead.

  The man in the woolly underwear peeked in and then hurried across the hall and into another room. I could hear him yelling the news to somebody there.

  I went over and tapped the clerk on the shoulder and pointed at the girl. The clerk swallowed a couple of times, said: “Miss Mackay,” and looked back at Healey. He was hypnotized by the way Healey’s back looked. Hamburger.

  Then about two dozen people came into the room all at once.

  The sheriff had been in a pool-hall across the street. He rolled Healey over and said: “This is Mister Healey,” as if he’d made a great discovery.

  I said: “Uh-huh. He’s been shot.”

  I guess the sheriff didn’t like the way I said it very well. He glanced at the clerk and then asked me who I was. I told him my name and the clerk nodded and the sheriff scratched his head and went over and looked at the girl. I wanted to say that she’d been knifed, but I restrained myself.

  Shaggy underwear was back with his pants on. He said he hadn’t heard anything except somebody swearing and then, suddenly, the shots.

  I asked him how long after the shots it had been when he came into the corridor and he said he wasn’t sure, but it was somewhere around half a minute.

  The first interesting thing that turned up was that it wasn’t Healey’s room—it was Miss Mackay’s room. His was next door. That probably meant that Healey had deliberately gone into her room; that she hadn’t surprised him in his room while he was getting something he’d forgotten.

  Number two was that the knife was Healey’s. Haifa dozen people had seen him with it. It was an oversize jack-knife with a seven-inch blade— one of the kind that snaps open when you press a spring. Somebody said Healey had a habit of playing mumbletypeg with it when he was trying to out-sit a raise or scare somebody into splitting a pot.

  Number three was the topper. The dough was gone. The sheriff and a couple of deputies searched Healey and went through both rooms with a fine-tooth comb. They weren’t looking for big money because they didn’t know about it; they were looking for evidence.

  All they found on Healey were four hundred-dollar bills tucked into his watch pocket, and the usual keys, cigarettes, whatnot. There were no letters or papers of any kind. There was one big suitcase in his room and it was full of dirty clothes. The roll he’d flashed on me was gone.

  In the next half-hour I found out a lot of things. The girl had come to the hotel alone. No one else had checked in that day, except myself. The door to the girl’s room was about twenty feet from the top of the back stairs and there was a side-door to the hotel that they didn’t lock until ten o’clock.

  It looked like a cinch for the man Healey had told me about, the one who was supposed to be Miss Mackay’s brother.

  Healey had probably gone upstairs to take care of the girl. I knew that his being scared of her was on the level because I know bona-fide fear when I see it. She evidently had plenty on him. He’d arranged his getaway with me and then gone up to carve the girl, shut her up forever.

  The alleged brother had come in the side-door and had walked in on the knife act and opened up Healey’s back with the automatic at about six feet.

  Then he’d grabbed the roll and whatever else Healey had in his pocket that was of any value— maybe a book of traveler’s cheques—had tossed the gun on the floor and screwed back down the back stairway and out the side-door. Something like that. It wasn’t entirely plausible, but it was all I could figure right then.

  By the time I’d figured that much out the sheriff had it all settled that Healey had knifed the girl and then she’d plugged him five times, in a ten-inch square in his back. With about three inches of steel in her heart.

  That was what the sheriff said so I let it go. They didn’t know about the brother and I didn’t want to complicate their case for them. And I did want a chance to look for that roll without interference.

  When I got out to the car the blue Chrysler was gone. That wasn’t important except that I wondered who had been going away from the hotel when it looked like everybody in town was there or on the way there.

  I didn’t get much information at the station. The agent said he’d just come on duty; the telegraph operator had been there all afternoon but he was out to supper. I found him in a lunchroom across the street and he said there’d been a half-dozen or so people get off the afternoon train from Salt Lake; but the girl had been alone and he wasn’t sure who the other people had been except three or four hometowners. That was no good.

  I tried to find somebody else who had been in the station when the train came in but didn’t have any luck. They couldn’t remember.

  I went back to the car and that made me think about the blue Chrysler again. It was just possible that the Mackay girl had come down from Salt Lake by rail, and the boyfriend or brother or whatever he was had driven down. It didn’t look particularly sensible but it was an idea. Maybe they didn’t want to appear to be traveling together or something.

  I stopped at all the garages and gas-stations I could find but I couldn’t get a line on the Chrysler. I went back to the hotel and looked at the register and found out that Miss Mackay had put down Chicago as her home, and I finagled around for a half hour and talked to the sheriff and the clerk and everybody who looked like they wanted to talk but I didn’t get any more angles.

  The sheriff said he’d wired Chicago because it looked like Healey and Miss Mackay were both from Chicago, and that he’d found a letter in one of Healey’s old coats from a Chicago attorney. The letter was about a divorce, and the sheriff had a hunch that Miss Mackay was Mrs. Healey.

  I had a sandwich and a piece of pie in the hotel restaurant and bundled up and went out and got in the car and started for LA.

  I didn’t get up till around eleven o’clock Tuesday morning. I had breakfast in my room and wired a connection in Chi to send me all he could get on Miss Mackay and her brother. I called the desk and got the number of Gard’s room and on the way down stopped in to see him.

  He was sitting in his nightshirt by the window, reading the morning papers. I sat down and asked him how he was enjoying his vacation and he said swell, and then he said: “I see by the papers that our friend Healey had an accident.”

  I nodded.

  Gard clucked: “Teh, tch, tch. His wife will sure be cut up.”

  I smiled a little and said, “Uh-huh,” and Gard looked up and said: “What the hell are you grinning about and what do you mean: Uh-huh?”

  I told him that according to my paper Mrs. Healey was the lady who had rubbed Healey— the lady who was on her way back East in a box.

  Ga
rd shook his head intelligently and said: “Wrong. That one was an extra. Mrs. Healey is alive and kicking and one of the sweetest dishes God ever made.”

  I could see that he was going to get romantic so I waited and he told me that Mrs. Healey had been the agency’s client in the East and that she’d come in from Chicago Monday morning by plane and that he’d met her in the agency office, and then he went on for five or ten minutes about the color of her eyes and the way she wore her hair, and everything.

  Gard was pretty much of a ladies’ man. He told it with gestures.

  Along with the poetry he worked in the information that Mrs. Healey, as he figured it, had had some trouble with Healey and that they’d split up and that she wanted to straighten it all out. That was the reason she’d wired the Salt Lake office of his agency to locate Healey. And almost as soon as they’d found Healey he’d shoved off for LA and the agency had wired her in Chicago to that effect. She’d arrived the morning Healey had been spotted in Caliente and had decided to wait in LA for him.

  Gard said he had helped her find an apartment. He supposed the agency had called her up and told her that bad news about Healey. He acted like he was thinking a little while and then asked me if I didn’t think he ought to go over and see if he could help her in any way. “Comfort her in her bereavement,” was the way he put it.

  I said: “Sure—we’ll both go.”

  Gard didn’t go for that very big, but I told him that my having been such a pal of Healey’s made it all right.

  We went.

  Mrs. Healey turned out a great deal better than I had expected from Gard’s glowing description. As a matter of fact she was swell. She was very dark, with dark blue eyes and blue-black hair; her clothes were very well done and her voice was cultivated, deep. When she acknowledged Gard’s half-stammered introduction, inclined her head towards me and asked us to sit down, I saw that she had been crying.