The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

by Penzler, Otto

  I let the car out another notch, holding the road somehow.

  We went through a town: a scurrying of pedestrians for safety, surprised faces staring at us, street lights glistening on the moisture the wind had whipped from my eyes. I passed blindly by the road I wanted, circled back to it, and we were out in the country again.

  At the foot of a long, shallow hill I applied the brakes and we snapped to motionless.

  I thrust my face close to the girl’s.

  “Furthermore, you are a liar!” I knew I was shouting foolishly, but I was powerless to lower my voice. “Pangburn never put Axford’s name on that check. He never knew anything about it. You got in with him because you knew his brother-in-law was a millionaire. You pumped him, finding out everything he knew about his brother-in-law’s account at the Golden Gate Trust. You stole Pangburn’s bank book—it wasn’t in his room when I searched it—and deposited the forged Axford check to his credit, knowing that under those circumstances the check wouldn’t be questioned. The next day you took Pangburn into the bank, saying you were going to make a deposit. You took him in because with him standing beside you the check to which his signature had been forged wouldn’t be questioned. You knew that, being a gentleman, he’d take pains not to see what you were depositing.

  “Then you framed the Baltimore trip. He told the truth to me—the truth so far as he knew it. Then you met him Sunday night—maybe accidentally, maybe not. Anyway, you took him down to Joplin’s, giving him some wild yarn that he would swallow and that would persuade him to stay there for a few days. That wasn’t hard, since he didn’t know anything about either of the twenty-thousand-dollar checks. You and your pal Kilcourse knew that if Pangburn disappeared nobody would ever know that he hadn’t forged the Axford check, and nobody would ever suspect that the second check was phony. You’d have killed him quietly, but when Porky tipped you off that I was on my way down you had to move quick—so you shot him down. That’s the truth of it!” I yelled.

  All this while she watched me with wide gray eyes that were calm and tender, but now they clouded a little and a pucker of pain drew her brows together.

  I yanked my head away and got the car in motion.

  Just before we swept into Redwood City one of her hands came up to my forearm, rested there for a second, patted the arm twice, and withdrew.

  I didn’t look at her, nor, I think, did she look at me, while she was being booked. She gave her name as Jeanne Delano, and refused to make any statement until she had seen an attorney. It all took a very few minutes.

  As she was being led away, she stopped and asked if she might speak privately with me.

  We went together to a far corner of the room.

  She put her mouth close to my ear so that her breath was warm again on my cheek, as it had been in the car, and whispered the vilest epithet of which the English language is capable.

  Then she walked out to her cell.

  The Jane from Hell’s Kitchen

  Perry Paul

  WHILE THE BETTER pulps offered a pretty good living to those writers who could work fast and produce hundreds of thousands of words a year, there was a definite hierarchy, well known to the top guns of the fiction world—as well as to the least of the hacks, the beginners, and the wannabes.

  Black Mask was the gold standard, but a few other magazines, like Argosy and Dime Detective, as well as such “hero” pulps as The Shadow and Doc Savage, paid equally well. Down at the bargain basement level were such trashy publications as Gun Molls magazine. Literary quality was pretty much nonexistent, though stories usually galloped along at a blazing pace, substituting action and violence for subtlety and characterization.

  Major writers would send them stories only when they had been rejected by the better pulps. Lesser writers never could crack the top publications and generally failed to earn a living at their chosen profession. They vanished as quickly as they appeared, and they are largely unremembered today. Perry Paul is such a figure. A former crime reporter who created two series for Gun Molls, the other being “Madame,” a mystery moll of the underworld, nothing else could be discovered about him.

  “The Jane from Hell’s Kitchen” first appeared in the October 1930 issue of Gun Molls.

  The Jane from Hell’s Kitchen

  Perry Paul

  “Somebody’ll get it in the neck,” said Dizzy, “and don’t forget I told you to keep your eyes off the ground!”

  Things happen quickly to

  Dizzy Ma lone—because Dizzy

  was a real gun moll—a jane

  with a purple paradise and a red

  past—but a sport

  CHAPTER I

  DIZZY MALONE

  The grizzled district attorney stood over a newspaper spread out on his desk, scare heads staring up at him in crude challenge.

  CHICAGO PROSECUTOR VANISHES IN NEW YORK

  MYSTERIOUS KIDNAPER DEMANDS HUGE RANSOM

  LOCAL DISTRICT ATTORNEY SCOUTS

  GANGSTER VENGEANCE MOTIVE

  The district attorney, scourge of New York’s underworld, glanced nervously from the headlines to the watch on his wrist and showed his teeth in a smile of cynical satisfaction.

  Behind him the door opened noiselessly— a flash of chiffon and silk—the door closed and a girl backed her quivering body against it, her mouth open, panting.

  Her high, pointed heels ground into the heavy rug as she struggled for self-control. Her lithe, supple body tautened. Her lips hardened into a thin scarlet line. The grey eyes, shadowed by a tight-fitting crimson bit of a hat, tempered to the glitter of new steel.

  Sensing an alien presence, the district attorney’s head came up sharply.

  “ ‘Local D.A. scouts gangster vengeance motive!’ “ the scarlet lips jeered.

  The man sprang round to face the door with the agility of a jungle beast of prey.

  “Dizzy Malone,” he gasped, “the same, gorgeous body and all!”

  The girl swung her slender hips across the room until she faced the man.

  James Mitchell, veteran district attorney of New York, looked down at her lovely blonde bravado with the expression of a man charmed against his will by some exotic yet poisonous serpent.

  Dizzy Malone was like that. She went to men’s heads. Her moniker was a stall. They called her Dizzy because she most decidedly wasn’t any way you looked at it.

  “Well, when did you get back to your purple paradise in Hell’s Kitchen?” the district attorney demanded. He was a tough baby. He knew all the dodges. He talked gangster talk and every crook in New York feared him. “I thought you lammed it to Europe with the Ghost when he finished his rap up the river.”

  The girl’s sensitive nostrils quivered.

  “Yeah? You thought so!” she sneered. “Well, I didn’t. The Ghost saw to it that I missed the boat. He’d decided to change his luck, I guess. Anyway, Spanish Lil went with him. Her hair is black, mine’s blonde. And that’s why—”

  “Say, wait a minute!” Mitchell interrupted. “I’m not running any lovelorn bureau. What’s the idea? How did you get in here, anyway?”

  “That’s my business!” she flared. “Now collapse, stuffed-shirt, while I put on the loud speaker!”

  The D.A. opened his mouth—and closed it again. When Dizzy made up her mind to talk, she talked, and everyone else listened.

  “Now, get a load of this,” Dizzy snapped. “It’s about that guy Burke, the D.A. from Chicago, that’s disappeared. I gotta hunch who lifted him.”

  It was Mitchell’s turn to sneer.

  “So you want to squeal, huh, Dizzy?”

  “Squeal?” Dizzy panted. “You—you—!”

  She crouched like a feline killer ready to spring. Coral-tipped fingers that could tear a man’s face to ribbons, tensed. Her lips curled back from her teeth in a fighting snarl of defiance.

  “Now calm down, Dizzy. Calm down.”

  The girl’s rage did a quick fade-out, leaving in its place a cold, calculating grimness th
at was a sure danger signal.

  “No more cracks like that then, big boy.” Her voice grated slightly on a note of savage restraint. “Get this through your smart legal mind—I came here to make you a proposition, not to turn anyone up. Get that straight!”

  “All right, Dizzy,” the D.A. growled, glancing hastily at his watch. “Shoot.”

  “You gotta job to do, Mitchell. I gotta job to do. You help me. I help you. See?”

  The district attorney waited.

  “Now about this D.A. from Chicago. His disappearing act puts you in a tough spot, doesn’t it? Looks like a smart game to me. He gets a phoney wire to come see you. He hops the Century and walks into this office the next morning. You don’t know what it’s all about. You didn’t send any wire. Burke walks outa here and disappears. You get a letter demanding a big ransom for his return. Your job is to get Burke back and turn up the guy that pulled the job. Right?”

  “Right, Dizzy.”

  “My job’s a little different. A guy—yes, it was the Ghost—put the double-x on me. I was his moll. We worked a good racket. We piled up a stake, a big one. We were all set to beat it for the sticks, get married and settle down respectable, and forget about rackets. My man was clever, he never let the coppers get anything on us. Then some fly dick framed a rap on him.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “ Yeah! I said framed. My man went stir-bugs up there in the Big House, and no wonder. Baldy Ross, his partner, and a straight-shooting guy, gets lit out in Chi with a cokie that’s a rat. A copper gets bumped off and the rat turns state’s evidence to save his stinking hide. Baldy swings because my man’s in stir and can’t spring him.”

  Her pink fists clenched.

  “The cokie that shot the copper’s dead now— they put him on the spot for the rat he was.”

  The girl’s grey eyes narrowed.

  “Then what happens? Well, if there’s one guy the Ghost’s crazy about, it’s his kid brother. The Kid’s a wild one but my man can hold him. He keeps him outa the racket, sends him to college. While the Ghost’s in the ‘Can’ some wise yegg gets the Kid coked up and they pull a job. A watchman gets knocked off. You got nothing on the Kid but circumstantial evidence, but you send him up the river and he fries, across the court from where the Ghost is raving in a strait-jacket.

  “The Ghost’s already a little nuts from the bullets he gets in his head when that German ace shoots him down in France—but he’s a genius just the same. He comes outa the Big House completely bugs. What they did to Baldy and the Kid turns him into a mad killer.

  “I been waiting for him, not touching our stake. I figure if I can get him to Europe I can nurse that killer streak outa him.

  “Then what happens? That black-haired flossie, Spanish Lil gets her hooks into him and he takes the stake I’d helped him make, and lams it with her. She takes him for the wad and the Ghost is flat, and more bugs than ever.”

  “Well, what of it, Dizzy?” the D.A. cut in impatiently, shooting a hurried look at his watch.

  “Just this, big boy. The Ghost taught me all he knows. He taught me how to fly, among other things, and how to work rackets the flatties never heard of. And I can spot the Ghost’s technique through a flock of stone walls. Just about now he’s got two things on his mind—dough and revenge.

  “Listen! Someone will pay handsome to get this D.A. from Chi back. And don’t forget—he prosecuted Baldey Ross—he’s the guy that swung Baldy!”

  She paused a moment to let her words sink in.

  “This is the Ghost’s work all right. You’ll never find him but I think I can. And I can spring this bozo Burke for you, and get the guy that double-crossed me. But I want to do it legal. All I ask is a plane, a fast one, with a machine-gun on it, and your say-so to go ahead.”

  The district attorney’s laugh grated through the silence of the room.

  “For once I think you’re really dizzy,” he said.

  His sarcasm cut the girl like the flick of a whip. Her face went white.

  “Then you won’t—”

  “Take it easy for a minute, Dizzy, and let me talk,” the big man interrupted not unkindly. The beaten look in the girl’s eyes touched him in spite of himself. “In the first place the Ghost is still in Europe. I’d have been tipped off the moment he stepped off a boat.”

  “I think you’re wrong there, big boy, but— go on.”

  The man took another surreptitious glance at his watch.

  “It won’t be long now, Dizzy, so I don’t mind telling you a few things,” he went on. “We’ve got this Burke business on ice.”

  He took an envelope from his pocket and drew out a soiled sheet of paper.

  “Here is the ransom letter. For once we outsmarted the newspaper boys. They know it exists but they don’t know what it says. Listen!”

  He read:

  “UNLESS HALF A MILLION DOLLARS IS FORTHCOMING BURKE WILL NEVER BE SEEN ALIVE AGAIN. FOLLOW THESE DIRECTIONS. THE MONEY, IN GRAND NOTES, IS TO BE TIED SECURELY IN A MARKET BASKET PAINTED WHITE. PLACE MONEY AND BASKET IN THE EXACT CENTER OF VAN CORTLANDT PARK PARADE GROUND AT 7:30 P.M. TODAY AND CLEAR A SPACE FOR A QUARTER OF A MILE AROUND IT. IF THERE IS A PERSON WITHIN THAT AREA B URKE WILL BE PUT ON THE SPOT AT ONCE. THE MONEY WILL BE CALLED FOR AT 7:55 AND BURKE WILL BE DELIVERED A T THE CITY HALL ALIVE AT 8:00 IF DIRECTIONS ARE FOLLOWED IMPLICITLY. ONE FALSE MOVE QUEERS THE GAME.”

  Mitchell looked up and grinned.

  “We followed the directions all right, but there’s a cordon of police around the park that a midget louse couldn’t get through. They wait for a flash from us and make the pinch, exactly at the moment Burke is being returned to City Hall. Furthermore, the money in the basket is phoney and there’s a ring of plainclothesmen for five blocks each way around City Hall. Whoever made way with Burke won’t stand a show. We’ll nab them for sure.”

  “Clever, all right,” Dizzy admitted, “but you can’t outsmart the Ghost. He’s a genius, I tell you, a crazy genius. And there’s only one person can put the skids under him, and I’m that baby.”

  “Okay, okay, Dizzy,” the man replied genially, “but whoever pulled this Burke coup is going to get it in the neck in a few minutes.”

  The girl hunched her shoulders.

  “Somebody’ll get it in the neck, all right,” she said cryptically. “And don’t forget I told you to keep your eyes off the ground.”

  Her remark went unheeded, however, for a rap sounded on the door and the next instant it was flung open admitting the slick, dark head of Tom Louden, the D.A.’s shrewd young assistant.

  “Seven forty-five, Chief,” he reminded Mitchell. “ ‘Most time for the show to start.”

  “All right, Tom. Is the car ready?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Come on, Dizzy. You offered to help us so we’ll let you in on the pay-off.”

  The girl followed them to a low, black police car that waited at the curb in front of the Tombs. She took her place in the back seat between Mitchell and the assistant D.A. without a word.

  A sign from the district attorney and the car purred down Centre Street.

  Mitchell rubbed his hands with keen anticipation. A suspicion of doubt drew Louden’s lips down in a faint frown. Dizzy’s face was a blank.

  The car swung into Chambers Street and stopped opposite the rear entrance to City Hall. They were out and hurrying around the grimy, outmoded building.

  The plaza in front wore a peculiarly deserted appearance. Walks and benches were empty. The statue of Civic Virtue thrust its marble chest upward, unwatched by newsboy or tattered bench-warmer.

  Broadway and Park Row were still literally sprinkled with homeward-bound workers, but they shunned the plaza as though it bore a curse. An atmosphere of tense expectancy hung over it, brooding, sinister, almost palpable in the gathering summer dusk.

  Dizzy found herself on the broad steps before City Hall in the midst of a group of grim, tight-lipped men.

  The district attorney held his w
atch in his hand.

  “Seven fifty-five,” he muttered. “Five minutes to go.”

  The familiar sounds of traffic came to them in a muted murmur as though muffled by the wall of silence that ringed them in.

  “Fifty-seven.”

  Bodies tautened.

  “Fifty-nine.”

  Keen eyes swept the approaches to the plaza— right hands flicked furtively to bulging pockets.

  Dizzy’s shoulders slumped forward in a nonchalant slouch, her eyes rose in slow boredom toward the darkening heavens.

  A low rumble impinged upon the silence, like the growl of distant thunder. Into it burst the first booming note of the clock in the tower.

  The rumble increased to a roar, filled the air with a howl of sound, snuffed out the metallic clang of the clock’s second note. The screaming drone of wind through wires.

  Eyes snapped upward.

  Then it came.

  Sweeping in low over the Municipal building hurtled a black shadow—a low wing, streamline racing monoplane. It banked sharply as though to give its pilot a view of the square below him, then disappeared behind the Woolworth building.

  The watchers stood petrified.

  Once more the black ship swung into their range of vision, lower this time, banked, and circled the cramped area like a hovering eagle.

  No one moved.

  Suddenly the pilot pulled his somber-hued bus into a steep zoom above the Municipal Building, fluttered up into a graceful reverse-ment and hurled his crate across the plaza again directly at the grey Woolworth tower. Swooping down he pulled the screaming ship up into a sharp inside loop that almost scraped the walls and reached its apex directly above the huddled group on the steps.

  As it hung there for an instant, upside down, a black shape dropped like a plummet from the auxiliary cockpit. The pilot brought his plane out of the loop and scudded out of sight toward the south.

  The black object fell writhing. A flutter of black sprang from it, mushroomed out, breaking the swift descent with a jerk.