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

by Unknown

  The man with the twisted shoulder swung his head slowly about. The corner of his mouth lifted. He spoke gently, unpleasant laughter lurking in his voice. “We think we’ve got a flat tire. We want you to get out and look at it.”

  The chauffeur laughed aloud. Jules looked at him. The feverish eyes were mocking. He looked into the bony, grinning face of the man at his left. Neither of these two had a gun but both were looking at the gun in the hands of the man with the twisted shoulder. Jules looked at it, too.

  “I don’t think the tire’s flat,” he said, in a pleading tone. “I didn’t hear anything like a flat tire.”

  The man leaned towards him slightly, his button eyes flat, and the gun pointed unwaveringly at his stomach.

  “This is a good car,” he said. “You wouldn’t be able to hear anything like a flat tire.”

  Jules looked wide-eyed at the gun and opened his mouth and closed it again. He gulped and said: “All right.”

  He got to his feet, crouching with his head against the low roof. He did not turn his back to the man but kept his eyes on the gun and lifted the guitar so that he held it crossways in his hands, the big end to his left. His left hand slipped the cord loose from its button at the base, then slid to the sound opening again and the first finger inserted itself in a ring there which could not be seen.

  “All right,” he said again

  He struck down with the guitar. Its base bonged on the wrist of the hand that held the gun. It discharged and the bullet tugged at Jules’ left trouser leg. In the same instant he leaped from the car and his right hand seized the inner handle of the door and slammed it shut as he whirled behind it.

  Shouts and hoarse curses burst out in the car, slightly muffled by its heavy doors and the thick glass. Jules was sprinting on his toes at a diagonal from the back of the car, sprinting with his head back and his chest out. As he ran he counted slowly to himself: “Three—four—fi—”

  Wind struck him from behind and hurled him face down on the earth. A twig jabbed his cheek and a muffled ripping concussion burst in his ears. For nearly five minutes Jules lay as he had fallen, the earth cold against his face; then slowly he thrust himself up from the ground, gravel biting his palms, his shoulders humped, his head sagging. He heaved to his knees, then reeled to his feet, steadied himself with one hand on a tree. He breathed deeply a half dozen times, shaking his head sharply; and then he stood erect and moved heavily around towards the car.

  The sedan was not quite where he had left it. It seemed to have been lifted off the ground and dropped about four feet to the right. It listed to that side. The top was blown out and jagged ends of metal thrust spear points up into the air. One door sagged crazily and another was missing. The bullet-proof glass had vanished. Something red dripped on the right running-board, dripped and formed a sluggishly widening puddle. Jules’ lips were pressed together in a thin hard line. Three men had been in that car. That left only O’Reilly to pay for Angela’s death. And there was that score against dear brother Andrew.…

  Jules looked down at his left hand. A steel ring an inch across was on the forefinger and from that ring dangled a steel pin.

  “Well, well,” he said, and threw back his head and laughed with little sound. “That grenade must have ruined my guitar. I’ll have to buy a new one.”

  Smoke in Your Eyes

  Hugh B. Cave

  HUGH B(ARNETT) CAVE (1910–2004) was born in Chester, England, but his family moved to Boston when World War I broke out. He attended Boston University for a short time, taking a job at a vanity publishing house before becoming a full-time writer at the age of twenty. At nineteen, he had sold his first short stories, “Island Ordeal” and “The Pool of Death,” and went on to produce more than a thousand stories, mostly for the pulps (at one point, in the 1930s, his work appeared in more than fifty different magazines in a single year) but also with more than three hundred sales to national “slick” magazines such as Colliers, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, and The Saturday Evening Post. Although he wrote in virtually every genre, he is remembered most for his horror, supernatural, and science fiction. In addition to the numerous stories, he wrote forty novels, juveniles, and several volumes of nonfiction, including an authoritative study of voodoo. His best-selling novel, Long Were the Nights (1943), drew on his extensive reportage of World War II in the Pacific and featured the adventures of PT boats and those who captained them at Guadalcanal. He also wrote several nonfiction books chronicling World War II in the Pacific theater.

  Cave was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Living Legend Award from the International Horror Guild, the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association, and the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award.

  “Smoke in Your Eyes” was published in the December 1938 issue.

  Smoke in Your Eyes

  Hugh B. Cave

  The girl in a red cape pursues trouble and stumbles onto a plot where life means little.

  OHN SMITH GAZED with exaggerated tolerance at his fair companion. Of course it was not difficult to exercise patience with a young lady so scandalously lovely. He was, in fact, used to it.

  “Ever so many men, Angel,” he declared, “smoke long black cigarettes. Even I do at times.”

  “The heat, Mr. Edgerson, has made you lazy. Otherwise you’d jump at a thing like this.”

  Smith’s other name was Philip Edgerson. He hated it because it brought to mind too many memories of birthdays, Christmases and people sick in bed. He was head of a greeting card company. Now he put down his cocktail and leaned back.

  They were dining in Polinoff’s, and it had not been a good idea. Polinoff’s on an August afternoon was far too hot, too stuffy, for the enjoyment of pig knuckles and spiced red cabbage.

  “I’m thinking of abandoning Trouble, Incorporated, Angel.”

  “Said he, lying,” she retorted.

  “No, I mean it. Look, I’ve paid rent on that ninth-floor cell for eleven months now, and not a customer. Not a single client. A man’s hobby, as I see it, should be more productive than that.”

  “It has been,” Angelina said simply.

  “Not financially.”

  “Mr. Philip Edgerson,” she said, “makes quite enough money to support the hobby of John Smith. It’s the heat, that’s all.”

  “I suppose it is.”

  He reached out then and picked up the letter she had read to him. It was a neat little thing, written delicately in green ink on ten-cent-store paper which bore the gilt initials M.A.B. It read:

  “Dear Miss Kaye,

  “This is the third time I have tried to write to you, but on each previous occasion my courage has left me before I could finish. This time, however, I am determined to go through with it. You see, I am really desperate.

  “Please do not be angry with me if this is a long letter. I know that you urge those who write to you to be brief, but I have so much to tell.

  “I am nineteen years old, Miss Kaye, and was married just a little over a year ago to the dearest boy in all the world. Teddy was so loving then and so considerate. We saved money and planned for the future and were just as happy as two birds in a nest. And now all that is changed.

  “I am not really sure when the trouble began. Now that I look back on it, I realize that Teddy acted queerly for days, even weeks, before he actually began staying out nights and leaving me alone. During that period he was awfully quiet and seemed always to be wrapped up in his thoughts. I thought he was worried about his job, and I tried to be tender with him, but he refused to confide in me. He even told me once that it was none of my business.

  “Then, Miss Kaye, he began staying out late at night, sometimes until two or three o’clock in the morning, and I was sick with worry. When I spoke to him about it he told me to leave him alone and stop nagging him, but I wasn’t nagging him; I was just frantic that our love would die and he would drift away from me.

  “It went on this way for almost a month, Miss Kay
e, and then he began bringing these men to the house. Three or four times a week they came, and they were nice enough, I suppose. At least they always said hello to me, but instead of sitting in the parlor like ordinary friends, they and Teddy would go upstairs to Teddy’s den and close the door and stay up there until all hours. Sometimes there would be three of them, sometimes more.

  “Well, Miss Kaye, I do not pretend to be any judge of character, but I am positive in my own heart that these men are not good for Teddy. They are not his kind. They are older, for one thing, and they seem very wise in the ways of the world. One of them, whom the others seem to look upon as a sort of leader, is a foreigner, at least twenty years older than my husband, and he smokes long black cigarettes continually, and the house reeks from it. And furthermore, if these men were proper companions for Teddy, he would introduce me to them, wouldn’t he? But he hasn’t. He just said, ‘Boys, meet the wife.’ Which hurt me terribly.

  “Please, Miss Kaye, tell me what to do to win my husband away from these men. I am worried to desperation for fear I will lose him, and for fear he is getting mixed up in something that will bring trouble to us both.

  “Anxiously yours,

  “Margaret Arnold Burdick.

  “P.S. If you print this letter in your column, please sign it ‘Worried Wife,’ because if you used my real name Teddy would be angry, I’m sure.

  “M.A.B.”

  John Smith, president of Trouble, Inc., carefully folded the letter and passed it back. “Do you get many like that, Miss Kaye?”

  She frowned at him. Her name was not Katherine Kaye any more than his was John Smith. Her name, when she was not opening letters from love-sick wives at her desk in the Star office, was Angelina Copeland. Angel to her friends.

  “You think it’s a rib, Philip?”

  “As phony, Angel, as some of the sentiments I’m guilty of perpetrating.”

  “I don’t. I think it’s on the level. I’m going out there. After all, Philip, you’ve bored me to death for months about that fool professor who smoked black cigarettes and here we have a guy who—”

  “You know the address?”

  She took from her purse an envelope which matched the letter. “Spencer Street, 154. You could drive me out there,” she said. “Otherwise I’ll have to go by trolley.”

  Edgerson heaved an elaborate sigh. It was a hot, sticky afternoon. From nine to twelve he had faithfully perspired through his duties as president of the Edgerson Greeting Card Company, watching the clock and looking forward to a long, cool drive into the country with Angel, a dip in some shady lake, dinner and dancing at some quiet roadhouse far from the city’s heat.

  Now he was to be John Smith again. It was inevitable.

  He disliked this silly Margaret Arnold Burdick intensely. He resented the fact that she had found it necessary to mention a large foreign person who incessantly smoked long black cigarettes. Because, after all, the thing was ridiculous. Dubitsky was dead. Dubitsky had been dead for at least four months. The Dubitsky whose strange death had intrigued him was gone forever. Margaret Burdick’s foreigner would turn out to be a wrestler or a man selling carpets. Or a myth.

  “I’ll drive you,” he said sourly, “but you’ll regret it. Mark my words, Angel, you’ll regret it.”

  t least half a dozen times since the birth of Trouble, Inc., Edgerson had been on the verge of closing the tiny office in the Mason Building and chucking the whole thing to the dogs. On each and every one of those occasions, Angelina had popped up with something “hot.” It was she, not he, who kept his hobby, Trouble, Inc., going. He half suspected that the Trouble idea had been hers in the first place anyway.

  When they reached Spencer Street on the outskirts of town, and found the house, he was relentlessly gleeful. He pointed to the sign in the window and said: “You see? I told you so.”

  The sign said, “For Rent.”

  Angel frowned at it. The frown was most becoming to her beauty. Edgerson gently patted her shoulders. “We still have time for the ride into the country, the swim, the—”

  “Apply at 27 Brook Street,” Angel said.

  “What?”

  “That’s what it says. ‘For rent. Apply 27 Brook.’ That’s the next street over, Philip.”

  He said nothing, merely groaned and put the car in gear. Angel was silent, too, until he stopped the machine in front of a small brown cottage on Brook Street. “The trouble with you, Mr. Smith,” she said then, sweetly, “is that you give up too easily.”

  He followed her up the walk, between beds of marigolds. She rang the bell. In a moment the door was opened by a plump female in a flowered apron.

  “How do you do?” Angel said in her nicest Sunday voice. “I’m Mrs. Smith. This is my husband.”

  The woman said, “How do you do?” wonderingly, and glanced at Edgerson and stared at Angel. Women usually stared at Angel. And envied her her slimness, her remarkable blond hair and her more than pretty face.

  “We noticed a house over on Spencer Street, for rent,” Angel said.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Is it occupied at present?”

  “No.” The woman shook her head. “We had a nice young couple living there, but they’ve moved out.”

  Edgerson, recovering from his shock at so casually being called “my husband,” smiled slyly. He was John Smith now, and John Smith was at times a pretty fair detective. Angel, fishing for information about the nice young couple on Spencer Street, was going to encounter difficulties. The plump lady in the flowered apron was obviously not a talker.

  “We’ve looked so long for a house,” Angel said, “that I really don’t know what I want. You know how it is, I’m sure. You go from one place to another and simply get all worn out.”

  The woman nodded sympathetically. There were chairs on the porch and she moved toward them. “Won’t you sit down, Mrs. Smith?”

  “Thank you,” Angel breathed. “Thank you so much!”

  “It’s really a very nice house,” the woman said. “My husband and I built it ourselves and lived in it four years. Then last year Mr. and Mrs. Burdick, the nice young couple I mentioned to you, moved in.”

  Angel looked thoughtfully at the tips of her fingers. “They didn’t stay very long, did they?”

  “No, they didn’t. It wasn’t because of the house, though. Mr. Burdick worked for the Glickman Company and lost his job. He had to go to another city to find work.”

  “Oh,” Angel said. “That’s too bad. And they’d only been married a year?”

  “Only a year.”

  Angel widened her large brown eyes and looked soulfully at Edgerson. “You know, dear,” she said, sadly shaking her head, “when you hear of the misfortunes that beset other married people, it makes you realize how terribly fortunate we’ve been.” She turned the soulful eyes on the woman again. “Married only a year, and so in love with each other! I just know they were!”

  “Well,” the woman said dubiously, “well, yes, I guess they were.”

  “And are they coming back some day? To visit you?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Theodore, that’s Mr. Burdick, said they were moving to some place near Boston. Margaret went last Wednesday to put things in order, and he went Saturday, with the furniture truck. They may come back, but of course I couldn’t hold the house for them. Now if you’d like to look at it, Mrs. Smith …”

  But Angel was looking at her “husband” again. “You know, darling, perhaps Mrs.—er—”

  She glanced helplessly at the woman who said, “My name is Crandall.”

  “Perhaps Mrs. Crandall could recommend someone to move our furniture. Those last people we had were simply unbearable. I’ll just never forgive them for ruining our twin beds.”

  Edgerson gulped.

  “Could you recommend someone, Mrs. Crandall?” Angel cooed.

  “Well, we like the Hartley people ourselves. If you’re just moving a short distance, that is. The Burdicks used the McCullen Warehouse people.�
�

  “You saved her a lot of trouble,” Edgerson thought. “She was going to ask you that in a minute. Twin beds! Of all things, twin beds!”

  Angel stood up. “Would you like to look at the house now, dear, or come back tomorrow? It’s quite late, and we did promise to meet the Burrs.”

  “Tomorrow,” Edgerson said.

  “Will that be all right with you, Mrs. Crandall?”

  “Well, yes,” Mrs. Crandall agreed.

  “Then we’ll see you tomorrow.… Come, darling. I really think we’ve accomplished something!”

  In the car, Edgerson drew a slow deep breath and said, “You little hellion!”

  She grinned. “It worked, didn’t it?”

  “It worked, but I’ve a mind to put you across those mythical twin beds and spank you.”

  Gnomes and pixies would have danced to her laughter. But then she was suddenly sober.

  “This thing sounds ugly to me, Philip.”

  “Why?”

  “First, that letter. I received it Wednesday, the day she left. She must have written and mailed it Tuesday. Then, more important, why the sudden departure? If she’d known that they were leaving the city, she wouldn’t have written the letter at all. I never answer letters personally. When people write to my lovelorn column they expect to see the replies in print.”

  Edgerson, silent for a moment, said, “Would it be all right with you, Angel, if I did a little detecting myself for a change? After all, I’m president of Trouble, Inc.”

  “You’re not a very ambitious president.”

  “I might surprise you.” He turned the car onto a main street. “The McCullen Warehouse is on Canal Street, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “We’re going there. Between your nutty curiosity and my interest in any guy who smokes black cigs like Dubitsky did … I’ll never believe that guy’s really dead.”

  It was a huge red-brick building growing out of the damp, sticky smells of the waterfront. Smith went in alone and was gone a half-hour. Returning, he had a triumphant smirk on his angular face.