The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original)

by Unknown

  “Give it up, Driscoll,” O’Hara said. “You’re only wasting your time. You won’t coax those three words out of him, not if you worked on it the rest of your life.”

  “Why, what do you mean, Sarge?”

  “I mean that this parrot isn’t Shao—not old Chang’s bird at all! And it’s not the parrot I picked up in Manchu Place, either!”

  Driscoll straightened up, astonishment on his face. “But look, Sarge, how do you figure? Here, you can still smell the samshu on the bird, and here are the ink-stains on its feathers, from the inkwell on your desk.”

  “Yeah, take a good look at those stains,” O’Hara replied crisply. “Those marks were made with black Chinese ink, thick as paint! Since when do I have Chinese ink on my desk?”

  “Then—then there must be two parrots!” Driscoll exclaimed.

  “Exactly! There’s been a switch. This parrot is only a stand-in for the real Shao! But I haven’t finished yet with the Chinese ink. Very interesting, that Chinese ink. It’s going to tell us a lot of things, because the man who painted those marks on the phoney parrot spilled some on his own hand!”

  O’Hara swung around suddenly, seized Tai Gat by the arm and twisted his hand into view, revealing a telltale smudge along the edge of the palm. “Now, Tai Gat, suppose you tell us how you got that stain on your hand!”

  “Not know!” the mafoo declared with hissing breath, trying to jerk his hand away, but O’Hara only tightened his grip, pushing him against the wall.

  “Where’s that other parrot, Tai Gat? Where’s the real Shao? You know! You’re the one who made the switch tonight!”

  The mafoo glared at him, sullen as a cornered animal. “Tai Gat know nothing about Feather Devil,” he insisted.

  O’Hara straightened up, frosty-eyed. “So you spent the evening at the Joss House, burning prayers, eh? Well, we’ll soon check up on that. The bonze will tell us if you were there, and how long you stayed. But I know you’re lying, Tai Gat! You were in Mandarin Lane tonight—in the house where you kept Chang Loo prisoner! You were in Manchu Place, hunting for Shao with a flashlight! You followed me to the precinct to snatch back the parrot—then you came back here, back to this house, and murdered this fake Chang Loo!”

  “Hey, Sarge!” Driscoll exclaimed in protest. “You’re way off the course! This was suicide. Didn’t we chase this guy up the stairs, didn’t he shoot at us?”

  “What we saw was a yellow robe,” O’Hara replied, and leveled his finger at the dead impostor on the floor. “This man was dead before we set foot in Lantern Court. I could tell by the way his blood had soaked through the straw matting.”

  “I still think you’re shootin’ wild, Sarge,” Driscoll said. “If this was murder, how did Tai Gat get out of this room? Look at it—door bolted, windows barred.”

  “I don’t know how Tai Gat got out,” O’Hara replied, “but I know he was inside. I can prove it. Look at this letter of Chang Pao’s about the parrot. Here’s that Chinese ink again—a fresh smudge, right across one corner. Tai Gat handled this letter within the past hour!”

  “Not so!” the mafoo cried out. “It is a Number One lie!”

  “I still don’t see it, Sarge,” Driscoll argued. “If you’re right, why didn’t Tai Gat keep this letter for himself, or else destroy it? It’s the key to the whole thing.”

  “Wrong!” O’Hara corrected sharply. “The parrot is the real key. What’s the letter worth if you haven’t got Shao—the real Shao—to give you the three words?”

  O’Hara eyed the mafoo in cold appraisal. “Your little game is all washed up, Tai Gat. You’ll do no more hunting for Chang Pao’s treasure, because you’re going to jail for a long, long time. So you might as well hand over that other parrot. I know you’ve got it hidden somewhere in this house, and I’ll find it, if I have to take the place apart brick by brick.”

  Tai Gat’s tongue moved uneasily across his lips, his eyes darting here and there as if seeking an avenue of escape. But as O’Hara’s hand gripped him in warning, his momentary panic passed; his slant-eyed face settled into the imperturbable mask of the Oriental.

  “The Lords of Destiny frown upon me. Wah! I strive no more against the tide of evil fortune. Release your hands, Sah-jin, and I will deliver the true Shao into your keeping. He is hidden in the Kwan-Yin room.”

  “No more tricks!” O’Hara warned, alert for a treacherous move as he followed the limping mafoo into the little prayer-room. Tai Gat lifted the gilded statue of Kwan-Yin to the floor, and then pulled away the black cloth which covered its pedestal. And there, under the stand, prisoned in a square wire cage, sat Shao—the real Shao—bound to silence by an ingenious wire gag fastened over its beak!

  Tai Gat took out the bird and perched it on his forefinger. “Shao not talk for me—not tell me the three words of wealth,” the mafoo said softly, then his face contorted with sudden rage and his voice rose to a snarling screech. “Now I fix so he tell no one!”

  And Tai Gat seized the parrot by the neck, twisted its head around with one vicious swirl and hurled the dead Feather Devil at O’Hara’s head.

  “Wang pu tau!” the mafoo snarled, wrenching free from O’Hara’s clutching grasp and springing for the door, no longer the limping mafoo, but a frenzied killer darting toward escape with full-striding vigor, twisting away from Driscoll, hurling Chang Loo aside, slamming the door behind him to delay pursuit.

  “The stairs!” O’Hara shouted, wrenching open the door, gun in hand. But Tai Gat was not racing down the steps. The wily mafoo had darted into the room where the false Chang Loo lay dead and flung up the sash of the far window.

  he two detectives reached the battered doorway in time to see Tai Gat lift one foot to the sill as the seemingly solid web of iron bars swung outward in their wooden frame, like a grilled gate.

  Driscoll fired and missed, but Tai Gat turned at bay, snarling, reaching for a shelf that held an array of bottles and drinking-bowls. With the fury of a madman he hurled stone bottles and porcelain cups and pottery jugs in a crashing barrage that filled the air with flying splinters and the rising fumes of rice wine and white Chinese whiskey.

  O’Hara stumbled backwards as a stone bottle caught him on the shoulder, while Driscoll crumpled and fell under the impact of a blue-glazed samshu jar, his second shot plowing wildly into the ceiling.

  Tai Gat took advantage of the momentary confusion to scramble out over the sill, and by the time O’Hara reached the window, the mafoo had left the narrow outside ledge and was crawling up the steep slant of the shingled roof.

  “Come back here, or I’ll shoot!” O’Hara warned, leveling his .38.

  Tai Gat turned his head, spitting curses as he glared down at the detective. Then his handhold slipped—

  O’Hara leaned far out, snatching at the blue shaam as Tai Gat slid past, but the cloth tore away from his straining fingers. For one sickening moment the mafoo held fast to the rain-spout, then the frail metal sagged and snapped off.

  O’Hara’s ears rang with the mafoo’s last wild cry—he heard the dull thump as the body landed on the hard brick pavement three stories below. He saw Burke come running from the house, his flashlight probing the darkness, but he knew that Tai Gat was dead even before Burke’s terse shout reached up to him.

  By that time Driscoll was stirring again, brushing aside the broken pieces of blue pottery.

  “Are you all right?” O’Hara asked.

  “I’m O.K., Sarge.” Driscoll managed a crooked grin as he tenderly explored the lump on his head. “Hey, what about Tai Gat? Did he get away?”

  “A permanent getaway,” O’Hara replied grimly. “He slipped and fell from the roof. Not a bad little trick, this window with the phoney bars. Now you see how he made that other getaway, earlier tonight.”

  Driscoll shook his head. “White or yellow, Sarge, they don’t come any slicker than Tai Gat. Everything phoney—phoney parrots, phoney nephews, phoney suicides—yes, even a phoney limp. And the guy hooked us at the end, too.
There’s Shao, dead as a doornail. That damn mafoo! Now we’ll never get those three words!”

  O’Hara turned to young Chang with a wide gesture that took in the cash and jades and jewelry spread out on the table. “Well, Chang, there’s what’s left of your inheritance. And of course, you’ll have the house and the furnishings, so you won’t exactly starve.”

  “Kan hsieh, Sah-jin,” young Chang said, with a grateful bow. “What remains is wealth far beyond my simple needs.”

  “That’s the spirit,” O’Hara commended. “With the parrot dead, perhaps we’ll never find the rest of your uncle’s money.”

  “Yes,” Driscoll agreed. “Parrot or no parrot, you can bet Tai Gat and his pal gave this house a Number One going-over—and no dice.” He went over to the table and stood looking at the heaped-up valuables.

  “The way I figure it, Sarge, they got the jitters when the parrot escaped with Chang’s message and started packing up to take it on the lam. Then Tai Gat got the bright idea of bumping off his pal and letting the dead man take the rap.”

  “I think it goes even deeper than that,” O’Hara put in. “I believe that this false nephew was only a stooge for Tai Gat’s scheming. I doubt if he knew anything about the parrot, or the hidden treasure.”

  “But Chang Pao’s letter!” Driscoll exclaimed. “We found it in his pocket!”

  “Yes, but don’t forget the smudge of China ink from Tai Gat’s fingers,” O’Hara replied. “I’ll never be able to prove it now, but I’d bet Tai Gat planted that letter after the murder, to make the job look even more complete. He’d still have the inside track, so long as he had the real Shao under cover.”

  O’Hara opened out Chang Pao’s fateful letter, and stood staring at it for a moment. “I’m convinced that Tai Gat engineered this whole job, from start to finish. Very likely he got hold of this letter when Chang Pao had his second stroke, and started the ball rolling by stealing Yun Chee’s parrot as a stand-in for Shao.

  “But the parrot wouldn’t talk, and old Chang was obviously on his deathbed, so he cooked up his scheme to install a false heir while he went on searching for the hidden treasure. However, his stooge got out of control—drinking and gambling and quarreling—throwing away the money too fast to suit Tai Gat, so when the parrot got away from Mandarin Lane with the message, he saw a chance to eliminate his partner.

  “His first job was to get Shao back in his possession. With that done, he scurried back to Lantern Court, fixed up the phoney parrot with China ink and samshu, and then disposed of his pal—by treachery, no doubt. He put on the yellow robe to fool us, fired a volley, then dashed in here, bolted the door, put the yellow robe back on the dead man, and made his getaway over the roofs. That’s my line on what happened.”

  “It sounds O.K. to me, Sarge,” Driscoll agreed. “That joss house alibi will turn out to be as phoney as Tai Gat’s limp.… Phew! Smell the samshu, Sarge? I’m splashed all over from that damn jar. If I don’t get these clothes off quick I’ll get a drunk on just smellin’ the stuff.”

  O’Hara pointed to the dripping stain on the wall where the blue jar had smashed. “You’re lucky Tai Gat didn’t aim a couple of inches lower, Driscoll, or you’d have been a gone goose.… Hey, what’s this?”

  O’Hara bent down and picked up a lustrous pink globule from the debris on the floor, and as he held it between thumb and forefinger his eyes lit with excitement.

  “A pearl!” he exclaimed. “A big one—a beauty! And look, here’s another one, and another!”

  By that time Driscoll and young Chang had joined the hunt, eagerly turning over the jagged fragments of the samshu jar. They found more pearls, many more, some rolling free, others imbedded in a kind of waxy tallow which still clung to the broken jar.

  “Pearls! A fortune in pearls!” O’Hara exclaimed, when they had finished their searching and young Chang Loo’s hands held the gleaming heap of lustrous sea-gems. “Old Chang Pao dropped them into this samshu jar, then poured wax over them to seal them to the bottom. It’s his hidden treasure.”

  “I’ll say it was hidden!” Driscoll put in. “Why, even if you poured out the liquor and looked inside the jar, you wouldn’t notice anything. Unless you smashed the jar, you’d never find ’em!”

  And suddenly the solution to the strange riddle of the old silversmith’s parrot flashed into O’Hara’s mind. He turned excitedly to Chang Loo.

  “Listen, Chang, the parrot’s name was Shao, wasn’t it? And Shao is the Chinese word for fire. But the parrot always squawked out its name three times—Shao! Shao! Shao! Get it? The three-word key to your uncle’s hidden treasure wasn’t three different words, as Tai Gat thought, but only one word, repeated three times—fire, fire, fire! Follow your uncle’s directions, make one word of the three, and what do you have? Three times fire—triple fire.”

  “Hai!” young Chang exclaimed. “Triple fire—it is the name for samshu!”

  “Exactly!” O’Hara said. “Samshu is a powerful liquor, distilled three times. It’s as clear as crystal, once you get on the right track. Perhaps the parrot always squawked its name three times, and that’s what gave your uncle the idea for hiding the pearls in a samshu bottle.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” Driscoll exploded. “Think of that! Tai Gat prodding the parrot for its secret, and the bird screaming the answer at him all the time! And maybe the samshu he gave it was poured from this very jar!”

  “Yes, it’s strange the way things work out sometimes,” O’Hara said thoughtfully. “You know, Driscoll, sometimes I almost believe those invisible Lords of Destiny the Chinks are always talking about do take a hand in things!”

  Let the Dead Alone

  Merle Constiner

  (FRANCIS) MERLE CONSTINER (1902–1979) was born in Ohio and graduated from Vanderbilt University, then returned to Ohio, where he lived for the rest of his life. He wrote prolifically for the detective pulps, creating several series characters that were somewhat unusual for their venues because they were less hard-boiled than humorous.

  Perhaps his best-known series features Wardlow Rock, known as “the Dean,” an eccentric genius in the mold of Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe. His “Watson” or “Archie Goodwin” is Benton (Ben) Matthews, who serves as both an assistant as well as the chronicler of the tales. There is even a Mrs. Hudson–like landlady, Mrs. Duffy, who runs the rooming house in which the detectives live. Not surprisingly, just as Inspector Lestrade calls on Holmes for help and Inspector Cramer visits Wolfe, Lieutenant Mallory consults the Dean when a case seems too complex or outré to be solved by the police department. There were nineteen stories published in Dime Detective between 1940 and 1945, collected in book form by editor Robert Weinberg in The Compleat Adventures of the Dean (2004). For Black Mask, he wrote a series of eleven humorous tales about Luther McGavock, a private detective who works for Atherton Browne, who runs a Memphis-based agency; most have rural settings. Constiner’s only mystery novel was Hearse of a Different Color (1952), though he had numerous Western novels and pulp stories published.

  “Let the Dead Alone,” the first McGavock tale, was published in the July 1942 issue.

  Let the Dead Alone

  Merle Constiner

  “I don’t know a snowshoe rabbit from a horned owl,” Luther McGavock admitted when asked if he was a hunting man. What he neglected to add was that he knew two-footed killers very well indeed—and had come to murder-ridden Bartonville for the express purpose of potting one on the wing or any other way that seemed handy, using the help of native beaters, if necessary.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE ROOFING NAIL

  HE FIRST THING McGavock noticed when he entered the chief’s office was that the old man was wearing a clean collar. “I see you’ve freshened up your neckwear,” McGavock said. “Are you anticipating early burial?”

  The old man glared at him with salty, inflamed eyes. “I’ve got on my traveling clothes. For the first time in twenty years I’m going to leave my desk and go out on
a case. This thing is too important to me to sublet to any slipshod hired help. I’m handling it myself and I’m taking you along with me. We’re leaving immediately. You can buy a toothbrush at a drugstore.”

  McGavock was small, sinewy, tough. His coarse black hair was cut in a short pompadour and there was a dusting of tweedy gray at his temples. He had a selfish, taunting quality about him that aroused instant animal antagonism in total strangers. He’d worked for every major agency in the country. A genius at getting results, he was a hard man to take.

  McGavock flushed. “I work alone and you know it. I came here to Memphis and you gave me a berth. You like what I bring in but you don’t want to know about my methods. I work on a roving license, one that you cooked up yourself, a contract that you can repudiate if things get too hot. What is this big-time job?”

  The chief corrected him. “It’s not big-time, it’s just personal. A cousin of mine, a second cousin, had a little trouble with a friend of his—he wouldn’t stay alive. Cousin Malcom lives at a place called Bartonville, a hill-town back by the Tennessee-Mississippi line. He just telephoned me. He’s in some sort of a hole. He says that blood is thicker than water and that he thinks I can handle the affair with greater delicacy than the local law enforcement. It seems to be an emergency. I thought we’d run over—”

  McGavock snarled. “No soap! If I take it on, I’ll do it alone.” He rubbed a knuckle thoughtfully behind his ear. “When can I catch a train?”

  “Trains don’t stop there, Luther,” the old man said mildly. He produced an envelope. “Here’s a bus ticket. Good luck.”

  When the door swung shut behind McGavock, the chief turned to his secretary. A pleased cat-and-canary look came into the old man’s watery eyes. He ripped off the new collar, tossed it in the wastebasket. “Ah!” He breathed happily. “That’s better.… You know, Miss Ollinger, I was afraid for a minute that he was going to call my bluff. Luther McGavock is the best man that ever drew my pay. But he’s dangerous, touchy. You have to handle him like a black panther—with an electric prod.”