The Mystery & Suspense Novella

by Fletcher Flora

  CHAPTER I

  There was a sign in the subway advertising: Dignified Funerals—$150 Up! For some reason that slogan kept doing a ring-around-the-rosy in my brain as I faced Flo, my secretary, across the beers in the Cedar Tavern.

  “You sweet, simple fool?” Flo shook her beautiful blonde head despairingly. “You won’t listen to reason.” Her hand grasped mine across the booth table. Her dark-lashed grey eyes looked as if they might be ready to sputter tears. “Darling, I tell you it’s too dangerous a business. You may be next!”

  I patted her hand, and did my best to grin reassurance. Then I took my paw away quickly just in case she might feel its jitter, and discover I was getting the whips-and-jingles myself.

  “I drop out,” I said, “and the program really will fold. I can’t let the others down, Flo. Besides”—I tapped my chest—“how would it look if the brain-poppa of the toughest detective characters in fiction ran like a gazelle the first time somebody said boo?”

  The program I was referring to was the Murder Clinic radio quiz. Because I, Perry Sherwood, was a writer of mystery thrillers, they had me on the quiz board as one of the experts. Flo wanted me off the show, because Skinny Sam Simms, the ace criminologist who really made the show, had just been murdered.

  Flo thrust her suds-ringed beer glass out of the way. “If you call getting blown to bits just boo—then stick with it!” Her angry grey eyes suddenly softened. “Oh, darling, the things you stir up on this Murder Clinic aren’t rose petals. That bomb blew poor Skinny into so many pieces, they haven’t even found his shoelaces.”

  I laughed, but my throat was a clogged drain. “You’re scared, Flo. We don’t even know for sure Skinny was killed. They haven’t found any trace of him, most probably because he’s gone into hiding after this murder attempt and will come up with the villains.”

  I put down a frogskin in payment for the beers. Flo looked at me sidewise. “Sometimes I think you write too many of those stories!”

  But she really wasn’t mad. I sauntered her out of the Tavern.

  “I don’t think you ought to walk me home.” She stopped me as we reached the sidewalk, bright with evening lights. “I’d feel much happier if you let me walk you home this time.”

  “Now wait a minute,” I said. “Just because one person on the Murder Clinic might have been killed is no sign any of the rest of us will be. Besides there are two others on the program more dangerous than me. How about Les Warren? He’s a detective. Or Victor Right?”

  I didn’t like the way Flo was stirring up doubts in my brain-pan. I was already worried enough. This Murder Clinic had started off as a straight quiz program, with questions exclusively on crime. But we had branched off onto discussions of cases the police hadn’t been able to solve. When we had actually cracked a couple wide-open right there on the air, our radio rating had jumped like mercury on a summer day.

  This Skinny Sam Simms was really the wonder boy of the show. He had no official legal capacity—being a professor at a local college—but the FBI and Military Intelligence both frequently consulted the prematurely silver-haired expert.

  Personally, I didn’t think his work on the program had resulted in his death. He’d been working on a case involving an escaped war prisoner—a German rocket-warfare expert. And his death, apparently, had been from a bomb so devastating it left no trace of its victim.

  * * * *

  I took Flo to her Washington Place apartment and said good night. She regarded me woebegonely for a moment. “Darling, I don’t like to think of you walking home alone in the dark. Promise me you’ll be careful? That you’ll go straight home?”

  What could I do? Her eyes had me. I kissed the tip of her up-tilted nose, nodded.

  But down the street I realized how empty my promise to go straight home was. I’d done some snooping since Skinny had been blasted two nights before. I’d do more snooping. I had to. Skinny had been my friend. If I had my way, I’d name his murderer on our next Murder Clinic.

  I stepped into a storefront doorway, debating what I could do. It was a small Eighth Street dress shop, with a long panel mirror. I looked at the reflection of my puss.

  It was not a particularly engaging image. Due to sitting at the typewriter all day, I had a tendency toward pouchiness. And I had a Satanic mustache and clipped Van Dyke which I’d nurtured so that my readers would be suitably impressed when I lectured on crime at their club luncheons, or autographed their copy of my latest thriller.

  A car moved into my mirror’s reflection. The car stopped. My heart began to trip. I remembered Skinny’s fate. The sort of pulverizing bomb that had blown him into nothingness could be tossed from a taxi like this one.

  The hulking figure of a man stepped from the taxi. I whirled, hands held tensely wide.

  The man leapt toward me. “Perry!” He grabbed my arm.

  The breath gusted from me as I recognized him. “Pull-lease!” I held a hand to my chest. “You’ll gimme a weak heart, Vic.”

  Victor Right was tall, handsome, in the shadowed nightlights. You couldn’t tell his hair was flax-blond under his Homburg.

  “I was just at the brauhaus.” He looked worriedly over his shoulder. “They told me you’d just left, so I cruised around looking for you.”

  I suddenly became aware that Victor Right’s sharp-featured face was paler, more strained than I’d ever seen it. His usually placid eyes were humorless.

  I tried to be cheerful. “You look like you swallowed a porcupine.”

  His face went bleaker yet. “Will you get in this cab with me? I’ve got a lead that’s going to take us right to Skinny Simms’ killer.”

  My heart was going biddy-bump, biddy-bumpy but I got in the taxi with Vic. Victor Right mentioned meeting Skinny’s killer as if it were going to be a cinch. But, then, Vic was six foot two and weighed over two hundred. I made a mental note to use him as the hero of my next thriller.

  We started up. Vic looked back over his shoulder out of the cab’s rear window. I looked back, too. A block away was another taxi, but there was no way for me to tell if it were following us.

  “What is this tip-off, this lead you mentioned?” I said.

  Victor drew his lips back tautly to show an even row of teeth. His eyes went positively maniacal.

  “There is no tip-off.” He laughed a little crazily. “I said that just to get you to come with me.” He lifted a thumb to the rear window. “That’s the killer back there. He’s been trailing me all evening.”

  I shot another hurried look back at the following cab.

  “You intend meeting up with him”—I snapped cold fingers—“just like that?”

  Vic Right held out a rolled up newspaper. “I’ve got this for protection. Since Simms was killed I’ve carried a lead-weighted rubber hose inside this paper.”

  Our cabby ground around a corner. The other taxi followed. My scalp grew all tight and prickly. I touched Vic Right’s sleeve. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to find out for sure who’s in that cab. There’s an off-chance it may be only a plainclothes police detail watching me. But if it’s—if it’s not, I don’t want to face him alone. That’s why I asked you along.”

  Before I could stop him, Vic tapped on the window cutting off the cabby’s compartment. “Pull up here, Jack. We’re getting out.”

  Vic tossed some money up front in payment. The taxi stopped with a quick jolt.

  Vic right thrust out. I followed, wondering how a poor, innocent writer ever got mixed in a business like this. A mass of heavily foliaged trees and shrub-studded walks loomed ahead of us. City Hall park. This was a section busier than picnic ants during the day, but it was certainly sleepy now. Over toward Park Row a couple of Bowery citizens were taking beauty naps. A lone cop strolled under the distant shadows of the El.

  Vic darted toward concealing shrubbery. I didn�
��t need any urging to do the same. I remembered that subway ad about the funeral for $150, with all the trimmings. I was almost praying there’d be enough of me left for a funeral.

  I peeked back. Our own taxi was just pulling away, it having taken a moment for the driver to enter the fare on his tally sheet. Now the cab Vic Right had said was following went by. If it were following, why hadn’t it stopped now when it saw we did?

  The clock in the City Hall tower clunked midnight. Clutching the hose wrapped in newspaper, Vic Right started cautiously down the park path. He might be heading directly for grief, but I couldn’t stay behind in the dark. I followed.

  “In those bushes!” He turned back with a quick jump that made me trip over my own feet.

  Something was stirring in the shrubbery! A sea breeze? Or was it—?

  “Look out!” The flat of Vic Right’s hand thrust against my shoulder.

  I stumbled again. I saw Vic raise his left arm, as if to fend against an assailant. He swung his rubber hose in a powerful downward arc at whoever was concealed in that shrub!

  Then it happened.

  Boom!

  The earth opened up in a preview of hell. I was blinded by light. A flaming convulsion paralyzed my brain. Dazedly, I fought back through darkness. I was flat on the walk. My body felt stepped-on.

  I remembered then, and staggered up.

  I looked about. “Vic!”

  That had been one of those bombs. A bomb like the one that had made small peanuts out of Skinny Simms!

  Shrubbery shook in a quick threshing movement.

  “Vic?”

  A dark figure lurched out at me. I grabbed the man with murderous fury. “You killer!”

  A blow behind the ear spun me. My attacker was a cop! Other police erupted from behind every tree and building. Viselike hands grabbed me. “Here’s our bomb-tosser!”

  A cop wrenched an arm behind me. He thrust a finger at my goatee. “An anarchist! Maybe tryin’ to blow up the City Hall, huh?”

  Whistles shrilled. A siren spiraled up through the night sky. Footsteps beat toward me in a closing trap. City Hall, this heart-center of New York, was one of the most heavily guarded zones in town!

  “I wasn’t here by myself.” I had to make them understand. “My friend, he—”

  “A confederate, huh?” One cop holding me looked around.

  I glanced at the walk where surely a yawning crater must have been blown by the blast. I did a double-take. There was no mark of an explosion! There was no mark of anything!

  “Leggo!” In some mysterious fashion Skinny Simms had been blasted into nothingness. And now—Vic Right! My throat hurt with the words. “The man you’re after is getting away!”

  But to tell cops to let go of a suspect once they have their mitts on him, is like trying to tell a bull-terrier to quit playing with a rat once he’s caught it!

  “Nuts!” was all I could say, realizing the hopelessness of it. “Nuts!” But I was almost crying.

  CHAPTER II

  Lieutenant Sol O’Malley waved his chunk of fist under my pudgy proboscis in the windowless basement room in police headquarters.

  “We should have hauled you in long ago!” he blatted like a tired vulture. “You been threatenin’ to do this for too long!”

  Sol O’Malley didn’t love me. My being a writer somehow cooled his passion. Even my having a Van Dyke annoyed him. And my being a member of the crime-exposing, police-belittling Murder Clinic positively gave him ulcers.

  He’d been out to get me anyway ever since the time I’d given a talk on how I’d commit the perfect crime. I had laid down as the cardinal principle for would-be perfect-crimers, to kill somebody they had absolutely no reason to kill—preferably some stranger they didn’t even know.

  Sol O’Malley carried all the law he needed in his two bumpy fists. Significantly, every knuckle of those fists had been broken in line of duty. He’d been rawhiding me all the preceding night and most of that day since Vic Right had exploded plunk into nowhere.

  Now O’Malley was really getting tiffed, because his fun was about at an end. He knew that without a corpus delicti there was no crime. No trace having been found of Right, he couldn’t hold me much longer. The cops hadn’t even been able to find evidence that any bomb had exploded!

  If I’d been in the mood, I could have heckled O’Malley. But I kept thinking about Skinny Simms, and now Vic Right. How they’d been such lively guys one moment, and then dried-up soup the next.

  “It’s that perfect crime stuff of yours!” O’Malley was a big, two-pawed, red-faced bear in front of me. His repeated complaint was beginning to sound like the broken record. “Blowin’ people up so there ain’t no body to pin a case on.”

  “It’s not possible,” I breathed. “A man can’t be blown into just nothing.”

  “Oh, no?” O’Malley wagged his cropped, brown head up and down. “Sure, and maybe you didn’t read about the ammunition ships that blowed up out there in California? Three hundred and fifty men aboard. Only four of ’em was ever found at all!”

  The shiver that traced up my spine was hardly delicious. But there had been no trace of a bomb either.

  I thought of a fantastic way in which a murder like this might be rigged in a mystery story. “Maybe it’s something that’s put in their food,” I said, thinking aloud. “Like dynamite in a keratin capsule. Stomach fluids have no effect on keratin. The capsule wouldn’t be dissolved until it reached the intestinal tract. Then—” I made an explosive gesture with my two hands. “But why?”

  O’Malley looked at his watch. “Bah!” He stalked away, turned back. “You done it all right!” he growled wearily. “But if I was to clap you in a cell now, newspapers would probably grab it as sure proof that the Police Department was just slappin’ at your Murder Clinic bunch for rubbin’ em raw.

  The big copper planted a finger of his fist under my nose. “All right, Sherwood. Clear out. But hand out more advice about perfect crimes, and you’ll find yourself pratin’ through a coffin lid!”

  A guard handed me my coat and hat. Another turned a key in a door lock to let me out. They weren’t letting me go. I knew better than that. They were letting me out, just so I might make the misstep that would sew me up for keeps.

  I started up the corridor. The bowed figure of a young woman was in the waiting room. I couldn’t see her face because she was blowing her nose.

  I stopped, stroking my chin beard thoughtfully. “I beg your pardon.”

  The young woman raised her face out of the hanky. Her grey eyes went wide. “Perry!”

  “Flo!” I caught her between my hands. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”

  “They’re my widow’s weeds.” She indicated her black getup, sniffed, and the tears were perilously close again. “I thought at first you’d been blown to bits, too! Oh, Perry!”

  “But you see I’m perfectly okey-doke.” I took her arm masterfully.

  She pulled away. “If you think you’re taking me home—no! I’ll take you home this time. First it was Skinny. Now Victor Right. Perry, can’t you realize this isn’t a gin-rummy game?”

  Weary as I was, I couldn’t argue. For some reason, apparently, someone did have it in for the Murder Clinic. Just being on it marked you for death by that someone. But who was it? Maybe it was some unknown pal of a criminal who was sent up because of our investigators. My underpinnings were ready to wobble at any moment.

  “Lead forth,” I said.

  “Perry Sherwood,” a voice spoke behind us.

  I turned cautiously. Les Warren, the private detective who, besides myself, was the only remaining member of the Murder Clinic, stood near the exit.

  “You sure look like your whiskers have been through a wringer, Perry.” He clapped my shoulder encouragingly. He had fish eyes, a mustache, and ears like water-wings. “You still game?�
��

  I felt Flo’s grip tighten on my arm. I had once done a takeoff on Detective Warren in a mystery yarn. The villainous character hadn’t exactly won his heart.

  “Game for what?” I asked.

  “The radio broadcast tomorrow night. The studio’s goin’ ahead with it, even after what happened to poor Vic Right.” He shook his head unhappily and rubbed a flappy ear. “I got no ambitions to join Vic and Skinny up at St. Peter’s pearly, but I sure can’t crawl out now if the studio’s goin’ ahead.”

  “You mean,” I gasped, “just the two of us are gonna carry on with the Murder Clinic?”

  For some reason I no longer had the slightest desire to be on the Murder Clinic.

  “They’re ringing in a couple kid actors in the vacant spots.” Les Warren reached into his inside pocket and brought out a folded script. “So the kids won’t appear dumb, we’re all goin’ to use scripts, the questions and answers all written out for us. Here’s yours.”

  When I died, I wanted a coffin, and to be all in one hunk. But before I could say anything, Flo sighed, took the script and put it in her patent leather bag.

  “Very fine,” she said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, Mr. Warren, I’m taking the little one home and putting him to bed.”

  Flo hadn’t even given me a chance to crawl out. She was beginning to think I really was a hero!

  I was so tired I hit the hay just as soon as Flo got me home. Flo was a sweet one to look after me this way. Someday I’d marry little grey-eyes, I knew, when I could convince myself I could make her happy as a writer’s wife—if I survived that long.

  I couldn’t sleep. Lying in the dark, I kept seeing Skinny Simms and Vic Right.

  Imagine any ordinary college prof being called “Skinny!” It showed the affection in which all held Simms. Who wanted him pulverized? I scoured my skull for an answer. Before Vic Right had been blasted, I’d felt fairly sure it had been Skinny’s investigating that escaped war prisoner—that rocket bomb expert—that had brought his end. Now it could be only some enemy of the Murder Clinic that wanted him dead.

  Relief from the heat had been promised for tomorrow—in the form of rain. But that wasn’t helping me sleep now. Ever since I had moved up from the floor below, to get more space and light, I had been bothered by the top floor’s heat. Besides, the radio in my old apartment was turned up blaringly loud.