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

by Unknown

  Daisy May seemed to want to stick close to us as long as we couldn’t find Johnny, and now that we had her I didn’t know what to do about it, so I shelled out six bits and we all went through the turnstile.

  Inside, the building was divided into two sections by a glass screen that ran down the center. The audience, mostly of men, was on one side of the glass behind a railing, and the Nude Ranch girls were on the other side of the glass under lights in a simulated outdoor setting.

  As you came in, you walked the length of the building along an aisle formed by the glass on your left and the railing on your right. Then you went around and stood behind the railing and could stay as long as you liked. I’d been in there an hour or so before and I’ll swear I recognized some of the same faces lining the rail now, where the lights from the other side of the glass hit them.

  The place was pretty well filled even if it was getting late, and we found a place at the rail near the far end, where McGillicuddy pointed out the girl he thought was the missing Hildegarde Ingraham, whispering hoarsely: “That’s her!”

  She was small and brunette and she was playing Ping-Pong at a table close to the glass screen. Other girls were playing horseshoes and badminton, practicing on an archery range, twirling lariats and taking turns riding a burro. They all wore bandannas knotted loosely around their necks, G-strings, boots, cartridge belts and holsters containing imitation six-shooters. Some wore sombreros and some didn’t. Some were only passable, but most were built very nicely, the brunette with the large mole on her left arm included in the last category.

  But she was different than the others in more ways than one, I had to admit that. In the first place, where all the other girls allowed their bandannas to hang down the back where they would be out of the way, she kept the triangle of the bandanna at the front, an inherent modesty apparently at work on her. She seemed to be acutely conscious of the many watching eyes while pointedly ignoring them.

  She had an air of breeding about her, a way of carrying her head, and her face had a genteel intelligence that was out of place here. Her skin was like smooth ivory. Small-boned, almost dainty, she had a youthful, boyish figure, with slender hips and small budding breasts that the bandanna did not quite hide. It was a fact that she didn’t look more than eighteen—the Ingraham girl’s age.

  “What’d I tell you, boss?” Mac breathed eagerly in my ear.

  “It’s screwy,” I muttered, keeping my gaze on the girl as she and her partner batted the little white ball back and forth. “But could be. Could be.”

  We couldn’t hear the girls on the other side of the glass when they spoke to each other, and they couldn’t hear any of the conversation that went on among the customers. The glass screen was enough to deaden ordinary sounds.

  I swung away at a sudden disturbance in the audience. Someone had grunted explosively above the murmuring voices, as though he’d been hit in the belly with a fist. A rough voice growled, “Hey, quit shoving!”

  When I turned my head to look I realized that Daisy May wasn’t with us any more, and I couldn’t recall when she’d left us. There was a surging scuffle in the thickest part of the crowd up along the rail, but I couldn’t see what it was all about at first because the only lights in the place were on the other side of the glass and they were like footlights, focused on the girls. The only illumination on the audience side was the back-glow and that didn’t amount to much.

  Someone said disgustedly, “Just another drunk.”

  The crowd parted, falling back away from a stocky, middle-sized man so that I could see him. He was almost chubby and he wore a gray fedora. He was staggering, lurching about with his hands pawing for support and his mouth working; but only senseless glugging sounds came from his throat.

  He fell against a little guy with an ugly battered face and the little guy snarled, pushed him away viciously. The man tripped over his own feet, went down, with those in the way scrambling to get out from under.

  “Migawd!” the one who’d shoved him squawked sharply. “The guy’s all bloody!”

  He was holding up the hand that he’d pushed the man with, staring bug-eyed at the glistening red stain across it that looked like a bright splash of fresh scarlet paint.

  “Jeepers!” McGillicuddy croaked at my side, and just then overhead lights flared on.

  The girls behind the glass had stopped their desultory game playing and were staring out at the audience for a change. Two of the barker guys in the Lone Ranger outfits were coming from the door, one shouting above the sudden babble:

  “What’s the matter? What goes on here?”

  Slapping a quick look over the audience, which was pressing back in a ring away from the man on the floor, I still didn’t see Daisy May. There were only a few women in the audience, and one of these screamed:

  “He’s been stabbed! Look!” Then she keeled over too and the guy with her caught her.

  “Where’s the girl that was with us?” I asked Mac, and he shook his head, his mouth hanging open loosely.

  “I dunno. I ain’t seen her since we came in here. Cripes, what’s happened to that guy? Let’s broom outa here!”

  “Nix,” I said and shoved forward, fighting my way through to the front part of the ring. The stocky man was on his back on the floor, one of the cowboys kneeling beside him. The other one was bellowing:

  “Get back! Get back! Give this guy air.”

  “He needs a doctor more than anything else,” I yelled, grabbing his arm. “Get one and some cops in here.”

  He looked at me, then nodded and shoved off. The man on the floor had the long bone handle of a clasp knife protruding downward from just under his wishbone. At its base, his vest was sodden with a slowly spreading stain of blood. The blade, at least six inches long judging from the handle, was slanted inward and up toward the heart, had been driven in that way by an underhand blow that had at first knocked the wind out of the man.

  Now he lay with his head supported on the arm of the attendant, his chubby face beaded with sweat and convulsed with pain as he gasped for breath. He was a middle-aged, nondescript man with hair beginning to gray. He opened his eyes and stared upward, looking around almost desperately. His jaws opened and closed. He gasped something that sounded to me like, “Hilda-glug Ing—” and then the blood came, thick and frothy, pouring from his mouth.

  It ended in a liquid rattling in his throat as he relaxed and died.

  My insides turned over and I retched, swung away to keep from being sick. The hush that had fallen over the crowd was broken by one of the women with a shrill, hysterical scream. And there was a sudden stampede for the door, that was met and stopped by a couple of special cops in their fancy Fair uniforms.

  But I was staring at the girls behind the glass then, wondering if the man had been trying to say, “Hildegarde Ingraham” as he died.

  The girls were huddled together just opposite me, staring out. All but one—the brunette with the mole on her left upper arm. She stood aloof and alone, at one end of the Ping-Pong table, half leaning on it for support with one arm. Her patrician face was unnaturally white and strained, and her knees were bent a little as if they were about to give way and she might collapse.

  The cops were forcing the audience back into the room, gradually restoring some semblance of order out of the chaos. Uneasy and murmuring, some frankly sick, the customers were being lined up between the railing and the glass. And all backs were turned to the glass now; the almost nude girls behind it had ceased to be the main attraction. I made sure again that little Daisy May wasn’t among those present, worked my way to the side of the cowboy who had been on duty at the door.

  “Did anyone go out of here,” I asked him, “just before this happened?”

  He was tall and pale and thin, all the sap knocked out of him by what he’d seen. He shook his head in a half-dazed way. “Judas Priest, I don’t know. I came in here to see what was wrong, and anybody could have slipped out behind me then.”

  “
That makes it just swell,” I muttered, “for the killer.”

  doctor came first and shook his head over the corpse, pronounced it dead. Then more Fair cops, and plainclothes men stationed on the grounds. Finally the coroner and homicide squad from San Francisco.

  From papers and identification in his pockets, the corpse was found to be one Rufus Moore, a Swinnerton operative from Chicago. Swinnerton Investigation Service has offices in every large city, is one of the largest private dick agencies in the world. But Rufus Moore had come all the way here from Chi, and I thought I knew why: The Swinnerton agency had been hired to trace Hildegarde Ingraham by her father in Chicago, and Moore had come here on her trail.

  I didn’t tell the cops that, though. For some reason I kept it to myself when we were all herded into a back room and taken aside singly for questioning. I knew white-haired Chauncey O’Toole, the inspector in charge, from my old days on the Trib, and so I got off pretty easy, furnishing McGillicuddy with a straight alibi.

  The cops had found a blood-stained, plain linen handkerchief on the floor under Moore, and figured it had been used to hold the knife when the killer used it. So I was pretty sure there weren’t any fingerprints on the knife handle, though they didn’t say, and an expert was working on it. But a funny thing about the handkerchief—it was the small size used and carried by girls and women of all ages, and not by any of the kind of men I know.

  No one of the audience could name the killer. It had been too dark for them to notice, and practically everyone had come in to get his money’s worth, so was concentrating his attention on the Nude Ranch gals. The cops held the little guy with the ugly battered face who had pushed Moore and got blood on his hand, and three other known petty crooks who were in the audience, took names and addresses and let the rest of us go, one by one.

  It was almost two a.m. when Mac and I got out of the place. The Nude Ranch had closed down, of course, but there was a mob hanging around out front, being kept back by a squad of the Exposition cops. None of the other attractions on the Gayway was getting any kind of a play. Word had got around about the killing, and practically everyone left on the Fair grounds had gathered here.

  We were collared by a bunch of newshounds, my old pals of the fourth estate, who wanted to know who, what, where, why and how. I told them we didn’t know from nothing but not to quote me and, fickle characters that they are, they left us to swoop down upon the next guy the dicks had let out of the place. I lit a cigarette and we were moving out of the limelight to become part of the crowd, when a voice said in my ear:

  “I beg your pardon, but do you know if the police are keeping a girl inside—a blond girl?”

  “Who!” I said, twisting my head to look at the man at my side.

  His face was young and clean-cut and worried. He smiled apologetically. “I’ve been looking all over for her. We became separated earlier in the crowd and I can’t find her anywhere. She isn’t outside here now, so she must be inside. I saw you coming out and I thought maybe you could tell me if she’s in there.”

  I lifted my brows at him, took the cigarette from my mouth and said slowly: “You mean as a customer, and not as one of the—uh, attractions?”

  “Of course.” He wasn’t quite as tall as I was, but he was well built and you could tell he was wearing quality clothes. He looked like money, but there was nothing flashy about him. He had a good jaw, a cleft chin, crisp dark hair. “She’s small and blond,” he said, “and is wearing a dark suit, a hat with a feather in it.” He used a gesture to illustrate the length of the feather.

  “Her name wouldn’t be Daisy May Huggins, would it?” I said.

  He hesitated a moment before nodding his head and answering yes. There was an odd questioning gleam in his eyes.

  “She isn’t in there,” I told him. “She was, but she’s not there now.” Then I explained how I happened to know her name and told him about Vogelsang and his fat stooge trying to take her with them.

  Mixed thoughts and emotions were chasing themselves all over the kid’s good-looking face. “My God,” he breathed. “Maybe they’ve got her again!”

  “They could have come back,” I admitted, realizing that one of them might have followed us into the Nude Ranch, and slipped out with the girl in the confusion just after Moore had been stabbed. I added, “You’re Johnny Foster, aren’t you?”

  He looked at me in a blank, startled way; then his face got very expressionless. “No,” he said shortly, turned on his heel and walked off, shouldering through the crowd.

  He hadn’t even bothered to thank me. He was too worried for that, and I was beginning to get an idea about Daisy May. On impulse, I fished out my car keys, shoved them at Mac, who had been standing silently beside me.

  “Tail that guy, keed,” I told him. “He’s heading for the parking grounds, so that means he has a car. I’ll ride a cab into town. Phone me at Ricopetti’s as soon as he lights.”

  Mac looked puzzled when he grabbed the keys, but he didn’t ask any questions. He said, “Right, boss. But you keep an eye out for that girl, huh?” Then he was gone, after the kid who had denied being Johnny Foster.

  was becoming more and more interested in the missing Hildegarde Ingraham and the possibility of knocking off a hunk of that five-grand reward. The Swinnerton dick getting knifed out and gasping what sounded to me like her name couldn’t be just coincidence. And any part of the reward would come in very handy indeed in keeping the wolf from my door, as I did not have any particular prospects of a job and did not particularly relish the idea of work anyway since I’d got used to a life of ease and trailer tramping. Five thousand clackers was something worth gambling for, and what could I lose?

  Right then I was really more worried about what had happened to Daisy May, but while on the spot I thought I ought to find out what I could about the dark-haired gal in the Nude Ranch that McGillicuddy had pointed out to me. The gals were still inside. The cops were questioning them too, to see if any of them had noticed anything in the audience at the time of the killing that might help them to tab the killer. They weren’t off duty till two anyway, so I planned to hang around until they came out.

  There was a back door and chances were they’d use that. I had to go up to the corner and around the building that held the Incubator Babies, and cut back along behind the row of buildings. It was darker back here and there wasn’t as much of a crowd, only a scatter of the curious who were watching the building from the rear. I took up a position against the wall near the rear door, got another cigarette going and settled down to wait.

  It wasn’t long before the door opened and the gals started to drift out, mostly in pairs or groups chattering about the murder. There was a single bulb burning above the door, so when the one I was waiting for came out under it I spotted her without any trouble. She was alone and she was hatless and she was wearing a coat of dark sleek fur that matched her hair. That was something—a thirty-five-dollar-a-week nudist wearing a fur coat in mid-summer, a coat that looked like kolinsky, and you can’t get kolinsky for peanuts.

  She sent a quick searching glance from side to side as she passed under the light, then started to walk past me. I stepped up even with her and touched her arm.

  “Pardon me, miss. May I speak with you a minute?”

  She shied away from me like a frightened filly, her delicate face white and strained.

  “Don’t be afraid,” I told her easily. “I’m harmless. I’m not going to hurt you. All I want is to ask you a couple of questions.”

  She was pressed against the wall of the building, staring at me. “What—who are you?”

  She spoke in a whisper and I kept my voice down too. “I’m curious,” I said. “I saw you inside and you don’t belong in a place like this. What are you doing here?”

  “That,” she said tensely, “happens to be my business.”

  “Maybe I can get you a better job,” I lied. “Would you mind telling me your name?”

  The fear had gone suddenly
out of her and she straightened up away from the wall, tilting her chin. “I most certainly would.”

  Behind me a rough voice said, “Who is dis slug?”

  I turned and looked at a hard-faced mug with a barrel chest who was fully six-feet-four and built like Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom. The red knot of his necktie was on a level with my eyes and I had to look up to see his face, and even then his chin was in the way so I couldn’t see most of it. His jaw stuck out like the prow of a battleship, and he had big black shaggy eyebrows that seemed to hang down over his eyes. He had been one of the customers in the Nude Ranch before and after the killing.

  “I don’t know,” the girl told him. “I’ve never seen him before. I didn’t see you when I came out and he stopped me and started talking to me, tried to find out my name.”

  “One of them kind of guys, huh,” the gorilla growled. “What’s da idea, slug, annoying a lady? I oughta hang one on you. Beat it, before I pop you one. On your way, on your way!”

  He was pointing a thumb like a sausage over one shoulder, jiggling it. He was one of those the cops had questioned and let go, and I wasn’t sure they hadn’t made a mistake in letting him go, seeing as how he knew this girl. If she were actually Hildegarde Ingraham … I remembered he’d been standing close to the spot where Rufus Moore had fallen with the knife in him, and he’d been the one who’d told Moore to stop shoving, before the man had dropped.

  “Don’t scare me like that,” I told him, getting ready to jump—the other way. “Who are you to order me around?”

  I thought that might make him tell me who he was, but it didn’t. And when he put his slab of jaw down on his big chest and started for me with his long arms swinging, I knew I’d met my Waterloo. I retreated and got out of his way. He didn’t follow, just stopped and snorted, sneering at me. Then he swung back to the girl, said, “Come on, babe. Let’s go.”