by Unknown
“I don’t know,” Boston said. “I lost my watch in Kansas City. You remember that, don’t you, Ollie?”
Quade winced. Boston had “lost” his watch in Uncle Ben’s Three Gold Ball Shop. Quade’s had gone to Uncle Moe in St. Louis.
“It’s twelve-thirty,” the girl said, looking at her wristwatch.
Quade nodded. “That’s fine. The early afternoon editions of the papers will have accounts of the murder and a lot of morbid folk will flock around here later on. That means I can put on a good pitch and sell some of my books.”
“I wanted to ask you about that,” said Anne Martin. “You answered some really remarkable questions this morning. I don’t for the life of me see how you do it.”
“Forsaking modesty for the moment, I do it because I really know all the answers.”
“All?”
“Uh-huh. You see, I’ve read an entire encyclopedia from cover to cover four times.”
Anne looked at him in astonishment. “An entire encyclopedia?”
“Twenty-four volumes … Well, let’s go back now. Charlie, keep your eyes open.”
“Ah!” Charlie Boston said.
Dr. Bogle’s men were just taking away the body of the murdered man. Sergeant Dickinson, a disgusted look on his face, had rounded up his men and was on the verge of leaving.
“Not going, Captain Dickinson?” Quade asked.
“What good will it do me to hang around?” snorted the sergeant. “Everyone and his brother has some phony alibi.”
“But your clues, man?”
“What clues?”
Quade shook his head in exasperation. “I told you how the murder was committed, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, sure, the guy locked the bloke in the incubator and tossed in the bottle of poison gas, then opened the ventilator and turned on the fans. But there were more than a dozen guys around and almost any one of them could have done it, without any of the others even noticing what he was doing.”
“No, you’re wrong. Only one person could have done it.”
A hush suddenly fell upon the crowd. Charlie Boston, tensed and crouching, was breathing heavily. The police sergeant’s face became bleak. Quade had demonstrated his remarkable deductive ability a while ago and Dickinson was willing to believe anything of him, now.
Quade stepped lazily to a poultry coop, took hold of a wire bar and with a sudden twist tore it off. Then he stepped to the side of the incubator.
“Look at this ventilator,” he said. “Notice that I can reach it easily enough. So could you, Lieutenant. We’re about the same height—five feet ten. But a man only five-two couldn’t reach it even by standing on his toes. Do you follow me?”
“Go on,” said Sergeant Dickinson.
Quade twisted the piece of wire into an elongated question mark. “To move a box or chair up here and climb up on it would be to attract attention,” he went on, “so the killer used a piece of wire to open the ventilator. Like this!” Quade caught the hook in the ventilator and pulled it open easily.
“That’s good enough for me!” said Sergeant Dickinson. “You practically forced that wire on me a while ago and I couldn’t see it. Well—Judge Stone, you’re under arrest!”
“He’s a liar!” roared the bantam poultry judge. “He can’t prove anything like that on me. He just tore that piece of wire from that coop!”
“That’s right,” said Quade. “You saw me pick up the original piece of wire and when I threw it away after trying to give it to the sergeant you got it and disposed of it.”
“You didn’t see me!”
“No, I purposely walked away to give you a chance to get rid of the wire. But I laid a trap for you. While I had that wire I smeared some ink on it to prove you handled it. Look at your hands, Judge Stone!”
Judge Stone raised both palms upward. His right thumb and fingers were smeared with a black stain.
Sergeant Dickinson started toward the little poultry judge. But the bantam uttered a cry of fright and darted away.
“Ha!” cried Charlie Boston, and lunged for him. He wrapped his thick arms around the little man and tried to hold on to him. But the judge was suddenly fighting for his life. He clawed at Boston’s face and kicked his shins furiously. Boston howled and released his grip to defend himself with his fists.
The poultry judge promptly butted Boston in the stomach and darted under his flailing arms.
It was Anne Martin who stopped him. As the judge scrambled around Boston she stepped forward and thrust out her right foot. The little man tripped over it and plunged headlong to the concrete floor of the auditorium. Before he could get up Charlie Boston was on him. Sergeant Dickinson swooped down, a Police Positive in one hand and a pair of handcuffs in the other. The killer was secured.
Stone quit then. “Yes, I killed him, the damned lousy blackmailer. For years I judged his chickens at the shows and always gave him the edge. Then he double-crossed me, got me fired.”
“What job?” asked Dickinson.
“My job as district manager for the Sibley Feed Company,” replied Stone.
“Why’d he have you fired?” asked Quade. “Because you were short-weighing him on his feed? Is that it?”
“I gave him prizes his lousy chickens should never have had,” snapped the killer. “What if I did short-weigh him twenty or thirty percent? I more than made up for it.”
“Twenty or thirty percent,” said Quade, “would amount to quite a bit of money in the course of a year. In his advertising in the poultry papers Tupper claimed he raised over eight thousand chickens a year.”
“I don’t need any more,” said Sergeant Dickinson. “Well, Mr. Quade, you certainly delivered the goods.”
“Not me, I only told you who the murderer was. If it hadn’t been for Miss Martin he’d have got away.”
Quade turned away. “Anne,” he said, “Charlie and I are flat broke. But this afternoon a flock of rubbernecks are going to storm this place and I’m going to take quite a chunk of money from them. But in the meantime … That hot dog wasn’t very filling and I wonder if you’d stake us to a lunch?”
Anne Martin’s eyes twinkled. “Listen, Mr. Quade, if you asked me for every cent I’ve got I’d give it to you right away—because you’d get it from me anyway, if you really wanted it. You’re the world’s greatest salesman. You even sold Judge Stone into confessing.”
Quade grinned. “Yes? How?”
She pointed at Quade’s hands. “You handled that first wire hook with your bare hands. How come your hands didn’t get black?”
Quade chuckled. “Smart girl. Even the sergeant didn’t notice that. Well, I’ll confess. I saw the smudge on Judge Stone’s hands away back when I was putting on my pitch. He must have used a leaky fountain pen or something.”
“Then you didn’t put anything on it?”
“No. But I knew he was the murderer and he knew it … only he didn’t know his hands were dirty. So …”
The girl drew a deep breath. “Oliver Quade, the lunches are on me.”
“And the dinner and show tonight are on me,” grinned Oliver Quade.
Dirty Work
Horace McCoy
HORACE MCCOY (1897–1955) was born in Pegram, Tennessee, and went to school in Nashville, dropping out at sixteen to get a job. After serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War I, he became the sports editor of the Dallas Journal, a job he held from 1919 to 1930. He moved to Hollywood in 1931 to become an actor and to write motion picture screenplays. McCoy had been selling stories, mostly mysteries, to various pulps, the majority to Black Mask, between 1928 and 1932, after which he devoted himself full-time to film scripts and novels, most of which were filmed. His first book, a noir Depression-era existential novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935), was inspired by his job as a bouncer at the Santa Monica Pier, where dance marathons were held; it was filmed by Sydney Pollack, with Gig Young, Jane Fonda, and Michael Sarrazin fourteen years after McCoy died of a heart attack. No Pockets in
a Shroud (1937), about a corrupt American city and a crusading journalist, was published in England more than a decade before its U.S. appearance; it was filmed in France. The noir screenplay for I Should Have Stayed Home (1938) was never produced. Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948) was filmed in 1950 with James Cagney as a near-psychotic criminal. Scalpel (1952) was mostly a medical story filmed as Bad for Each Other (1953), with Charlton Heston and Lizabeth Scott. Corruption City (1959) was a novelization of The Turning Point (1952), which starred William Holden and Edmond O’Brien.
“Dirty Work,” the first Frost of the Texas Air Rangers story, was published in September 1929.
Dirty Work
Horace McCoy
APTAIN JERRY FROST walked through the rotunda of the Texas State capitol, past the oils of Crockett and Houston and Hogg, and into the deep-toned offices of the Adjutant-General.
“What’s on your mind, General?” he said, dropping himself into a chair and stretching his long legs.
“This Jamestown business.” The Adjutant-General drummed on the desk with his incredibly long fingers. “It’s quite a mess.” Plainly he was just a little irritated.
Frost grinned. “Yes, sir. It’s quite a mess.” But the Adjutant-General didn’t think it was so funny. He was quite serious.
“Jerry, for the life of me I can’t understand why all police act so stupidly. This purely is a local case, but they can’t handle it. They bump their heads against the wall and cry for the Rangers. I’m sometimes sorry we’ve got such a thing. Now the bigwigs are kicking.” He held up a small packet. “Know what these are? Got any idea what they mean?”
Captain Frost confessed he hadn’t.
“They’re clippings from newspaper editorials in which the people who sit in the offices of the daily gazettes tell us how to run our great commonwealth. The robbery is up to us. I’m sorry, of course, you had to be ordered off leave. You know what that means, don’t you?”
Jerry nodded. Did he know what that meant? Indeed! And since when had the Adjutant-General become so obtuse? He was tempted to laugh. Did he know what that meant? Hell, of course he knew. What did trips to this office usually mean? Dirty work—that’s what. Dirty work.
He was not offended; he was too much of a soldier for that. It was that he just didn’t have any illusions about the romance of criminal work. That was a lot of applesauce that looked good in print and nowhere else. He had spent two months in the Border Patrol on some tough work and had been promised a week’s leave. He had got but two days of it. Two days on the Galveston beach, and when the messenger boy found him with that fatal telegram from the Adjutant-General he was waiting on a fair young person who would be due in ten minutes.
That annoyed him no end. He had earned a rest, why couldn’t he get it? Now there was more dirty work to be done. That’s all he had ever done, it seemed. God knows, there had been plenty of it in the old Lafayette Escadrille, where he won his wings, and that crazy hitch with the Kosciusko Squadron over in Poland hadn’t been any pink tea. And those four years down in the Guatemalan banana country hadn’t made a dilettante out of him.
Go into any Latin-American country and mention Captain Jerry Frost and nobody would have the slightest idea of whom you spoke. But mention El Beneficio to any soldado and he was all attention. In those countries where men still die for illusions and assume musical names, they tell you that El Beneficio was a bold, roistering Americano who could handle women and a machine-gun like nobody’s business.
No, he was no stranger to dirty work.
“Well,” the Adjutant-General interrupted his reveries, “you can take the pick of the staff. You can do anything you want to. Forty years ago a train robbery in Texas might have been ordinary, but this is 1929. This infernal publicity is bothering me. It’s up to you and the men you name.”
“I’d rather look around a bit first,” Frost said, as he rose to go. “If I need anybody, I’ll let you know.”
“Good luck to you.”
He accepted the hope with a nod of his head and walked out.
Captain Frost expected little information from the chief of police of Jamestown, and he was not disappointed. The chief pointed out that he and his men were after all merely humans, and that they were doing everything humans could do. That this had availed nothing was not his fault. Captain Frost could see that?
Very frankly, Captain Frost said he couldn’t. “It beats me,” he said. “Here it is, the high-powered twentieth century—a scientific age. And a gang of bandits sticks up a passenger train in orthodox Wild West manner and gets away clean with a fortune. Every copper in North Texas is caught flat-footed. I’d like to have the opportunity sometime to get in on top of a case instead of waiting two or three weeks. I sure would.”
“Well,” the chief observed pointedly, “maybe we can arrange that just for you. It’s a funny thing, but criminals never invite us to their parties. However, they might make an exception for the Rangers.”
“Never mind the wisecracks! Didn’t anybody in North Texas make any reports or anything after the robbery? It looks to me like a correspondence school sleuth could have done that.”
“Ain’t I been telling you they didn’t? There wasn’t nothing to report! My God, don’t say that any more to me! It makes me sore all over. Every newspaper in this town has been plastering stories all over their front pages about it. It’s got me goofy!
“Now, listen while I go over it again. Then you’ll know as much as we do—or anybody else does. That train carried $300,000 in torn money that was going back to Washington. It left Jamestown, going east, at 8:45 and when it got to Reddy, about eight miles out, it was flagged down by a man on the track with a lantern. A moment later the engineer and fireman looked into the muzzle of a sub-machine-gun held by a masked robber.
“While this one kept the engineer and fireman covered, another went in the express car, blowed open the safe and got the coin. They slipped in on the messenger, tied him up, but when Cummings, the brakeman, ran through the door, they dropped him with a slug of lead in the forehead. Before anybody else knew what it was all about, the train started. It stopped a little farther on, but the bandits had disappeared.
“It happened right beside the highway but they had put red lights half a mile apart to stop the traffic. It’s the general opinion that they are hiding out somewhere, but we’ve got the numbers of some of the bills and sooner or later we’ll nab the men. Nobody can beat the law!”
It was the sort of a preachment Frost could expect from the chief. He was a man who had been in the chair for twenty years, and was slightly antiquated. One of the old school, as the newspaper boys liked to say.
“Now you know as much as we do.”
“So that’s all, eh?”
“All? Ain’t it enough? It’s been plenty to keep these newspapers in copy. It ought to be enough for you.”
“Are you worried about what they think?”
The chief glared. “Ain’t you?”
“Not particularly.”
“Well, I am; you’re damn well right I am. We got an election coming off here next month and unless the right guy gets in, I go back to pounding a beat. Damn if these crooks can’t pick fine moments to pull big jobs! So, you see how much I’m for you. Personally, I’ll let you have my moral support and hope you have a lot of luck. But I don’t think you will!”
omebody once wrote that clever crime detection is one-third luck, one-third hard work and one-third intuition. Great detectives rate luck and intuition as a stand-off, which is to say they reckon one as important as the other.
Jerry Frost was not a scientist, he was not a criminologist, he was not, in the technical sense of the word, a detective at all. But he had had a fair amount of luck thus far, he was perfectly willing to work hard, and he knew his intuition had stood him in good stead before.
And he was going to be able to use it this time. He realized that an hour after he had left the Jamestown chief of police.
He saw something that c
licked in his mind—and would not be shaken. The very incredibility of the thing was what sold him.
He had dropped into the Secret Service offices of the government in the Federal Building, for, after all, it was their case. His conversation with the inspector had not been especially productive. But his eye caught a picture on the desk. It was a wrecked airplane, and he naturally was interested.
“This was a sweet one,” he said. “Where’d it happen?”
“That,” replied the inspector, “is an old one. It happened about a year ago. I was rummaging around my desk the other day and found it.”
“Nasty spill.”
“Yea, Charlie Cox got killed in it. You ought to remember that. The air-mail pilot. He crashed up in the Red River country. We lost a registered pouch in it.”
“Oh,” said Frost. “I do remember now. Never got anything on that case, did you?”
“Nope, never did. None of the bonds ever showed up.”
“Ever have any ideas about it?”
“Well, not exactly. Charlie just crashed, that was all. Somebody came along and took the pouch. Anybody’d know the difference between registered mail and ordinary mail. We figured some farmer had got it, but we watched that country for a long time. None of the bonds ever showed up. Just another one of those mysteries.”
It was at that moment that Jerry got his idea. But then it was too ridiculous. His intuition kept trying to tell him something, but he wouldn’t listen. The voice was too faint. A little later the idea came bounding back again. And he couldn’t lose it. The air-mail job. What made him think it was connected with the train robbery?
He wondered. Still, there had been innumerable baffling crimes solved by leads much more absurd than this. The air-mail job. Well, the idea was there to stay. He couldn’t get rid of it.
He slept on it all night. Or tried to. Writing people and artists know how that is. You can’t tear those things out of you. They weigh you down like an anvil. Sometimes you can’t breathe comfortably. You think of it for hours and then very suddenly it comes, clear and clean, like big handwriting. All you have to do then is sit down and copy it.