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

by Unknown

  He forced himself to eat. He must above all else impress himself upon everyone connected with his alibi as normal. He must show no trace of nervousness or fear.

  “Nice supper,” he complimented the cashier when he had finished. He turned up the collar of his coat and pushed out through the swinging-door repeating: “Yes, sir. A very nice supper indeed.”

  “What the hell!”

  The cashier started out from behind his cage, stopped as the manager of the lunchroom shook his head.

  “But he didn’t pay his check, sir,” the cashier protested.

  The manager shrugged. “Skip it. He’ll pay next Wednesday night. He comes in here twice a week as regular as clock-work. He’s probably worried or something tonight, you know, got something on his mind.”

  The cashier subsided, grumbling.

  Out on the street John Cansdale scowled at his reflection in the window of a hat store. So far, so good. He was following his bi-weekly routine. Only tonight the hours that usually were filled with Evelyn in the snugness of her near north side apartment would rid him of his wife forever.

  He thought of Mazie with disgust as he hurried up the great flat steps of the main library. The little fool was probably even now smearing her face with lotions, listening to the love-lorn programs on the radio, trying, in her common little mind, to figure out some way of winning back his love.

  The thought gave him sadistic pleasure. She didn’t know the meaning of love. They had never been physically, mentally, morally, or spiritually suited to each other. Still, he wondered why she smiled at him, at times, so very strangely.

  The thought gave him pause as he checked through the library file cards for a certain book on the contributions of chemistry to human welfare. Women at times, some women, were very difficult to understand.

  The librarian greeted him cordially. “Good evening, Mr. Cansdale. The book is coming nicely?”

  “Nicely,” he assured her, smiling. “In fact, it’s almost finished.”

  His hat in his hand and the volume under his arm he turned away from the desk to scan the crowded reading-room, ostensibly looking for a place to sit.

  “Crowded, very crowded tonight,” he murmured as he moved away from the desk. There were, he estimated, perhaps five hundred persons in the several reading-rooms that comprised almost the entire top floor of the building. There were constant arrivals and departures. It was small wonder he was never missed. Miss Roby, the thin-lipped, prim, spinster librarian, would swear that he had been there since the time his card was stamped. He turned out into the corridor leading to the other reading-room and to the stairs.

  Behind him, at the desk, Miss Roby adjusted her pince-nez as she stared after him, then turned to an assistant.

  “I suppose,” she said, “I should report him. I would if he wasn’t a school employee. He always chooses a volume that isn’t supposed to leave the library. But he always brings them back.”

  “But where does he go?” her assistant puzzled.

  The librarian shrugged her thin shoulders. “Lord knows. He’s supposed to be writing a book. I wonder. He’s been coming in here at five forty-five, choosing a volume on chemistry, and then disappearing until nine for two years.”

  Her assistant laughed: “Meow.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Miss Roby sniffed, “be at all surprised.”

  In the corridor Cansdale waited until a good-sized group of youngsters had started down the marble stairs, and then joined them. The volume was under his coat. It was an unneeded precaution. The aged attendant in the foyer never even bothered to look up.

  He remembered with a start as he unlocked his car that he hadn’t phoned Evelyn and told her that he wouldn’t call tonight. Perhaps it was just as well. She didn’t need to know until it was all over. She might even try to dissuade him because of the risk he ran. He stroked his thin wisp of a mustache and stepped on the starter button.

  He ran no risk—or did he? His self-confidence oozed slightly as he swung his car down Randolph Street and waited at Michigan Boulevard for the green arrow. He must, above all else, drive carefully. Even a slight accident or a ticket could destroy his well-laid plans. The thought made him even more nervous as he recalled Robert Burns’ immortal lines:

  “The best laid schemes o’ mice and men

  Gang aft a-gley;

  An’ lea’e us nought but grief and pain,

  For promis’d joy.”

  In his nervousness he killed his motor as the light changed and was bumped soundly by the cab behind him. He was glad it was a cab. Cab drivers took little notice of such matters. They were inferior, boisterous persons, always bumping someone. He joined the stream of traffic pouring north.

  In the yellow cab in back of him an earnest youth, his first night behind the wheel, jotted the numbers 905—754 down carefully on the margin of his report sheet. The car ahead hadn’t stopped. He doubted if there was any damage done, but when a man had been out of work for months, he couldn’t be too careful. It might be just as well to report the incident when he checked in.

  The Bridge, Chicago Avenue, Oak Street, and the juncture of the Outer and the Inner Drive. Cansdale chose the Inner Drive, his self-confidence returning. In another fifteen minutes, a half-hour at the most, it would be over and he would be returning to the Loop. Lincoln Park was dark and bleakly naked except for her necklaces of yellow gems strung in rows around her ample body.

  The lights reminded him of Mazie’s yellow diamonds. They would look well on Evelyn. But he must manage to show grief, perhaps even offer a reward for the killer. He would be safe enough in that. The thought amused him and he laughed, only to find the hoarse burst from his throat had frightened him. He realized that his hands and his body were shaking as with some inner palsy. The night was no longer cool. His collar had become too tight, his overcoat too heavy. Despite the cool wind blowing in the open window of the car he was perspiring freely.

  “I’m acting the fool,” he said aloud. “There’s nothing at all to fear. I’ve been too circumspect. I’ve planned too well.”

  Cansdale wondered suddenly if he had planned well. He wished he had read a few of the trashy detective magazines that Mazie was always buying. There might, perhaps, have been a plot in one of them that would have suited his purpose better. But he couldn’t imagine what it would be. The plot he had conceived was simplicity itself. No one would ever suspect a middle-aged, respectable high-school instructor of bludgeoning his wife to death.

  He began to lash himself into a fury against Mazie to prepare himself for the actual deed. She stood in his way of complete happiness. She was stupid, insipid. But his mind could find no other flaws. She was as young, if not younger, than Evelyn. In her dark, southern way she was pretty. She had never denied him herself. Until he had met Evelyn they had been mildly happy. Even during the last two years she had been unsuspicious, undemanding. Her only other flaw, if it could be called a flaw, was the phobia she couldn’t help, her dislike of being alone.

  She would be, Cansdale thought, as he turned off of Sheridan Road onto the side street on which he lived, alone for a long time. He parked his car a full three blocks from his house and, turning up the collar of his coat so that it almost touched his hat-brim, slunk through the shadows of the alley paralleling the street on which he lived.

  Only four persons saw him. One was the delicatessen owner’s wife who caught a glimpse of his face in a lamp light as he crossed a street intersection. Another was the newsboy who happened to be late. A third was a neighbor emptying garbage who had chanced to pause a moment for a breath of air in the blackness by the alley gate. The fourth was a man named Kelly who was unlocking the side-door of his garage. Of the four he was the only one who wondered at the time why Cansdale was walking down the alley.

  “He shouldn’t ought to short-cut through the alley,” Kelly thought ungrammatically. “What with all the stickups now-a-days he’s likely to get robbed.”

  ansdale saw none of them. His mind was inte
nt on his business. He wanted it over with. The pounding of his heart was choking him. The actual act of murder was not as simple as it seemed. He paused at his own alley gate, almost tempted to go back.

  “Well, of course, if you don’t love me enough to give me the things that a man who loves a woman usually gives her—”

  Evelyn’s words hung suspended in the air just as she had left them.

  “I can’t. I won’t give her up,” the little teacher thought in panic. “I’ve a right to happiness.”

  He stared at the back windows of his apartment. Both the kitchen and the dining-room were dark. A light burned in the bedroom briefly, then it too winked out, leaving only a faint glow streaming out of the living-room into the hall.

  Cansdale opened the gate and went in, groping in the darkness near the garbage can for the weapon he had decided he would use. The half brick was where he had thought that he had seen it. The inspiration had come to him during his last class. A half brick was the killer’s favorite weapon.

  The garbage can, balanced precariously upon three bricks instead of four, toppled over slowly and the tin lid clattered on the walk forcing open a basement window in the janitor’s apartment.

  “Scatt! Gott damn dogs! There should ought to be a law!”

  Cansdale stood frozen where he was, half up the back steps to his porch until the clatter and profanity had ceased. Then the basement window closed and he began to breathe again. He wanted to retreat but didn’t dare. The janitor might hear him. He continued to the porch.

  He had never known the night to be so full of sounds and smells. The detective’s mother in the next apartment was frying steak and onions against her son’s return. The couple in the flat above were fighting. Through the closed windows of his own apartment he could hear their radio blaring out the news. Mazie always kept it tuned so high it was a wonder the neighbors didn’t complain.

  He remembered, tardily, that he had forgotten to put on his gloves. He laid the half brick on the window sill and did so, meanwhile listening to the news.

  The foreign situation covered, the newscaster turned to the local pages, beginning with: “… While the police as yet have failed to apprehend the moronic killer who has preyed upon the housewives of Chicago for these last several months, the department is expending every effort to bring about his capture. Meanwhile housewives are warned not to open their doors to any suspicious strangers and to make certain that all first-floor windows, and windows leading off of fire escapes are locked.…”

  Cansdale cautiously tried the window with the broken lock that led from the porch to the kitchen. It slid up easily. Now that the actual moment had arrived his self-confidence was oozing back and he sniffed contemptuously. Mazie was a fool. She had no right to be so stupid and live. She was afraid to be alone. A moronic killer was at large. Yet she lay on a sofa in the living room listening to a newscast with a perfect entrance open to the killer.

  He straddled the open window cautiously, the half brick in his hand. In the faint light streaming down the hall he could see that the back door was locked and bolted. He stepped into the kitchen making no noise, leaving the window open behind him.

  The newscaster had finished by now and there was a blare of transcribed music from the front room. And, as usual, Mazie had two stations on at once. Back of the hi-de-hi-de-hi, ho-de-ho-de-ho of a boogie-woogie program, some woman heroine of one of the soap-chip operas to which Mazie was addicted was telling someone she called “honey” in no uncertain terms how much she loved him.

  The man’s voice was gruff but eager and insistent. Sudden suspicion gleaming in his eyes, the little teacher paused in the center of the kitchen floor and listened closely. But either the program had signed off or the brass of the transcribed band had drowned it out. He smiled painfully with a guilty conscience.

  “She hasn’t fire, or soul, or brains enough,” he thought. “I wish she had. I wouldn’t have to kill her then.”

  The smile faded from his twisted lips as he thought of her insurance. He had to have the money. With the double indemnity clause, on which she herself had insisted, Mazie’s death would pay him twenty thousand dollars. He and Evelyn could take sabbaticals on that. They could spend the year in travel, live in the best hotels. In California, perhaps, they would be married. Or perhaps in romantic Old Mexico or Hawaii. The police would never suspect the insurance money as a motive. He carried even more insurance in her name.

  The half brick clutched tightly in his hand, he stole quietly past the open doors of the dining-room and the bedroom to the front of the apartment.

  “She’ll cry ‘John’ when she sees me,” he thought, “and run to me. Then I’ll hit her with the sharp edge of the brick and drag her into the bedroom just like the killer would do.”

  His gloved hand clutching the brick felt hot and sweaty. He must remember to leave the brick behind for the police to find. He stepped into the lighted front room. The radio was blaring cheerfully. The shades on the windows were drawn. A box of chocolates lay opened on a coffee table convenient to the sofa. Mazie’s outrageously tight dressing-gown lay crumpled in a silken pool upon the floor. But Mazie wasn’t there. The living-room was empty. From where he stood, Cansdale could see that the front door was locked and bolted.

  He felt slightly cheated but relieved as he turned back towards the bedroom. This would make it even simpler. He could kill her while she slept. She would never even know that he had been there. She would die believing in him and loving him. On the several occasions he had returned to find her sleeping, and the doors bolted had resisted his key, he had had to pound on the door like a mad man to arouse her. Only Mazie could sleep with a radio blasting in her ear. Still, he supposed, she did get tired of reading trash and had to pass her time some way.

  Halfway down the long hall to the bedroom, the program he had heard before began again. Only this time the man was speaking.

  “Why don’t you leave him?” he demanded. “I make enough to support you and my mother, too. Just one good break and I’ll be a lieutenant and—”

  The woman stopped him with a kiss, murmured with an unaffected passion. “It’s not the money, honey. It’s jes’ I don’t want to worry him now. He’s so little an’ funny-lookin’, an’ all he’s got is me. But once his book is finished an’ he’s famous like he says he’s goin’ to be—”

  Cansdale turned slowly towards the front room. The band was still playing, muted now. But the voices came from the bedroom.

  An unreasoning fury should have seized him, but it didn’t. The only emotion that he knew was fear, sudden and terrible. He had been so wrong. Perhaps he had been wrong in thinking that he could get away with murder. His eyes were suddenly open. The past two years rushed through his mind like the life of a drowning man. He remembered sly looks and glances that had failed to register at the time; smirks on the faces of his fellow teachers and his students. Even Miss Roby had looked strangely at him. He had forgotten to pay his supper check. There had been the matter of the cab. Perhaps someone had seen him enter. He hadn’t been intelligent, he had been dumb. Step by step, rung by rung, he had allowed his blind infatuation to be the nails in the ladder he had built—a ladder leading to the chair.

  No woman, not even Evelyn, was worth that. He wanted to be out in the night with the cold of the wind against his burning cheeks. Mazie was suddenly lovely. He wanted her as he had never wanted any woman. Perhaps it wasn’t too late. She had loved him once. Perhaps she might again. She wasn’t guilty. He was. If he hadn’t neglected her, left her alone—

  He tiptoed meekly down the hall towards the still open kitchen window. He would return at nine. He would never leave Mazie alone again. He would break with Evelyn in the morning. He would—

  As he passed the opened door of the darkened bedroom a board squeaked beneath his feet. He tried to step more lightly, lost his balance, and the half brick scraped along the wall.

  There was an answering scrape of springs from the bedroom as a man got sudd
enly to his feet. The little teacher turned instinctively. With his hat brim and his coat collar almost touching he formed a grotesque silhouette in the half light. The half brick raised above his head, in the hand flung out to keep his balance, looked like the squat barrel of an automatic.

  “The killer! The moron!” Mazie’s scream from the blackness of the bedroom was pure terror.

  “No,” Cansdale croaked, protesting from a throat so dry the single word rasped like a file. “I—”

  He failed to finish the sentence. A blast of gun-fire lighted the room and the first of six soft-nosed .45 slugs pinned him to the far wall of the hallway. He hung there a moment pinned to the wall like a spitted butterfly, then crumpled slowly to the floor.

  There had been not one but many flaws in his perfect murder. The worst of these, as Lieutenant Mack summed up the situation to his wife some twelve months later, had been: “So what can we do but keep our mouths shut? So what if he wasn’t the killer. He was trading on his name. He intended to kill you. If I hadn’t just ‘happened’ to be passing by, he’d a done it. The coroner’s inquest proved that. No. I tell you, Mazie, all we can do is keep our mouths shut. This was just one of them there cases where—”

  The newly promoted lieutenant paused to wipe the perspiration from his forehead and make a mental vow.

  Still the same eager smile on half-parted, too-full lips. “One of those cases where what, honey?”

  “Well,” the former sergeant summed up the situation, “one of those cases where what was sauce for the goose turned out to be apple sauce for the gander.”

  A Little Different

  W. T. Ballard

  W(ILLIS) T(ODHUNTER) BALLARD (1903–1980) was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and, after college, briefly worked for his father’s electronics magazine, then for a newspaper, followed by less than a year each at two movie studios. He had written sporadically for several pulps before creating Bill Lennox, a motion picture troubleshooter, for Black Mask, successfully using his work background at First National and Columbia to lend authenticity to his stories, which soon rivaled Dashiell Hammett, Carroll John Daly, and Erle Stanley Gardner in popularity.