by Unknown
“Have someone type it up in the form of a statement for Mrs. Swope to sign. And while it’s being typed, bring in Marden Swope. Get Longstreet from his cell too.”
He said: “Check,” rose from his chair and escorted Mrs. Swope from the room.
As the door closed behind them, Warren Day burst out: “What in hell’s going on? All that nonsense about truth serum!”
I grinned at him. “Worked, didn’t it?”
“Is Marden Swope the killer?” he demanded.
“I doubt it,” I said, enjoying myself. “Can’t tell yet.”
He peered at me sourly over his glasses. “Damn grandstander,” he muttered.
A knock sounded and Day said: “Come in.”
It was Marden Swope, followed by Hannegan.
I said to Swope: “You’ve met Inspector Day, haven’t you?”
“Yes. Yesterday.”
Day grunted something unintelligible, then said begrudgingly: “Have a chair.”
Another knock sounded and Day said: “Come in.”
It was Willard Longstreet, flanked by two bluecoats. He looked the group over without speaking, then moved over and took a chair next to me. Apparently he had gotten some sleep, for he looked rested. But his clothes were in terrible shape and he needed a shave.
In a self-conscious voice Marden Swope said: “Hello, Willard.”
Longstreet nodded at his partner gravely, no sign of humor in his eyes.
“Swope suggested you might be an impostor,” I told Longstreet. “We brought him down to identify you.”
A mischievous twinkle replaced the serious expression in Longstreet’s eyes. “What made you think that, Marden?”
Marden Swope said embarrassedly: “It’s Willard, all right, Mr. Moon.”
“What made you think I wasn’t?” Longstreet asked.
Swope remained silent, so I said: “He couldn’t understand how you got in jail. Weren’t you supposed to be up at your camp yesterday?”
“Planned to be. Changed my mind.”
“Why?”
Longstreet eyed me quizzically. “No law against it, is there?”
“None I know of. Especially since you had a good idea of what awaited you at the camp.”
Swope asked: “You through with me now?”
“Not quite,” I said. I turned back to Longstreet. “I have the case solved.”
There was a sharp click as Longstreet’s upper plate dropped and was snapped back in place by his tongue. Swope licked his lips and watched me curiously.
“Funny thing about this case,” I said to Warren Day. “Longstreet hired me to find out something he already knew. That probably sounds silly, and it was in a way. But Longstreet couldn’t figure any other way to handle the impossible situation he found himself in.”
I paused to let tension build up in the room. The only reason I occasionally grandstand is because Day hates me for it. He was glaring at me now.
“Another peculiar thing about the case,” I went on, “was that all of the evidence was false. So to solve the case, you had to ignore the evidence and depend on pure reason. That’s why the police fell down.”
Glancing sidewise at Day, I noted his nose now shone pure white against the inflamed background of his face.
I said: “The first premise I worked on was that Longstreet here couldn’t possibly have committed the murder. The police should have decided that at once also, but they preferred to play around with weird theories about his pulling a Houdini jail break and then breaking back in again. My second premise was that Longstreet deliberately got himself jailed.
“Combining these two facts, you immediately get some inevitable conclusions. First, Longstreet knew someone was after him, and the forces involved were too much for him to fight. So he chose jail as the only safe place to be. Second, he had been framed for Carmichael’s murder. Luckily for Longstreet, his being in jail not only made him temporarily safe, but gave him an iron-clad alibi and upset the framer’s applecart.
“The third inescapable conclusion is that the testimony of Marie Kincaid was a lie from beginning to end. There never were any phone calls. Her story was prepared in advance of the crime. If I hadn’t, out of pure cussedness, pointed out a gunman named Anton Strowlski to a cop, which prevented him from phoning Marie and telling her the plot had gone sour, she never would have told the story she did. And after finally learning too late that Longstreet had been safely in jail all the time, she tried to wriggle out of her sworn statement by inventing another story which never happened.
“And the last obvious conclusion is that from the moment Longstreet learned Carmichael had been murdered, he was able to figure out exactly what had happened.”
Marden Swope was gazing at me in wide-eyed amazement. Longstreet’s face, directed at his partner, contained an expression of unholy glee. Warren Day had half risen, and glared at Longstreet.
“If you knew the answer all along,” he rapped, “why’d you keep quiet?”
“That’s the silly part of the whole affair,” I answered for Longstreet. “He has a sacred locket he takes oaths on. Before Mrs. Swope warned him he was on the spot, she made him swear on the locket that he’d never repeat a word. That left him in the peculiar position of being framed for a murder and unable to say anything in his own defense. He was literally between the devil and the deep blue sea. So he hired me to expose what he already knew.”
Day said: “He chose the devil,” guffawed ferociously and suddenly stopped when no one else smiled.
Ignoring the inspector, I went on: “In a desperate effort to keep his oath, he gave me twenty-four hours to solve the case. If I hadn’t made it, I suspect he would have talked anyway. Keeping the oath was worth ten thousand dollars to him, but I doubt that he wanted to gamble his life on it.” I looked at Longstreet. “Right?”
He merely grinned without answering.
Swope, suddenly coming to life, rose from his chair. “What was that about my wife?” he demanded.
I said: “Shut up and sit down.”
He looked at me whitely, his eyes narrowed to slits. Hannegan crossed the room, put his hand on Swope’s chest and pushed him back in his chair.
Warren Day snarled at me: “If you’re through grandstanding now, spill the works. Is this guy the killer?”
I took him out of his misery. “No. It was a good old-fashioned gang killing. Swope ordered it and Marie Kincaid was an accessory. If Longstreet had received the warning earlier, he’d probably have skipped town. But when he got it, Anton Strowlski was already on his tail. And when he couldn’t shake Anton, he got himself arrested.
“What gave me the first steer was that even after his alibi was established, Longstreet insisted on staying in jail until the case was solved. The only reason I could see for that was that he was afraid of something, and I learned what he was afraid of by a visit to the Rex Amusement Corporation and a conversation with a bartender. The corporation’s salesmen are the finest bunch of professional extortionists and killers you ever saw. They’ve spread coin machines all over town by delivering them and telling proprietors to keep them. You can pass that to the rackets squad.
“So it was all of them Longstreet was afraid of. He’d been put on the spot in typical gangster fashion. Swope here was tired of splitting three ways, so he had Carmichael killed and framed Longstreet. Howard Tattersall, who had access to Longstreet’s room, obtained the gun, probably on Swope’s promise that he’d be made a partner. But Swope wasn’t splitting with anyone. After Tattersall served his purpose, he conveniently committed suicide.
“Swope picked a time he knew Longstreet would be at his river camp alone and without an alibi. Undoubtedly one of Swope’s killers was waiting at the camp to arrange Longstreet’s suicide in remorse for having slain his partner.
“Marie was merely a tool. She’s probably Swope’s mistress.”
Swope said: “I want a lawyer.”
Paying no attention to him, Warren Day said: “So after all this c
ircus, we still don’t know the name of the actual killer. I’m going to find out right now!”
It turned out to be Tiny Sartt. The state rewarded him with a free trip to another world. Swope got life, Marie five years, Longstreet my apology and permission to call me “Moon,” and I got ten thousand dollars for eleven hours’ work, which is nine thousand, nine hundred and seventy-five more than my standard day rate.
Beer-Bottle Polka
C. M. Kornbluth
C(YRIL) M(ICHAEL) KORNBLUTH (1923–1958) was born in New York City and attended the University of Chicago, graduating after his service in World War II, where he received a Bronze Star for his action at the Battle of the Bulge. Although not known as a writer of mystery fiction, he is regarded as a giant in the world of science fiction in spite of his death of a heart attack at the age of only thirty-four. He was a member of the Futurians, an organization of left-wing, occasionally communist, activist figures of the SF fan community, many of whom went on to become successful writers and editors, including Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, Frederik Pohl, and Donald A. Wollheim.
Kornbluth began writing science fiction at the age of fifteen, selling his first work before his eighteenth birthday. His most famous short story, “The Little Black Bag,” in which a doctor who has become an alcoholic derelict finds a bag containing advanced medical technology from the future which he uses to benefit mankind, was filmed by the BBC for its Out of the Unknown television series in 1969, and in the following year by Rod Serling for Night Gallery. Kornbluth used numerous pseudonyms in his career, mostly for short stories; many of his novels were coauthored with Judith Merril (Outpost Mars, 1952, and Gunner Cade, 1952) and Frederik Pohl (The Space Merchants, 1952, and Search the Sky, 1954), and many stories were completed after his death.
“Beer-Bottle Polka,” one of his two Black Mask stories, ran in the September 1946 issue.
Beer-Bottle Polka
C. M. Kornbluth
A private eye is supposed to be in the know. That was where the blow came to Tim Skeat’s pride—he was supposed to be, but that was all. A carved-up corpse, a punk with a gun, and a mob at his heels for a secret he didn’t have—tough-guy Skeat took and gave a lot of punishment before the ugly picture began to make sense. And he was almost sorry when it did.
Y PHONE RANG.
“T. Skeat, private investigations, Skeat speaking,” I said.
“This is Angonides, Skeat. I’m at 3609 Columbus Avenue. Get down here right away.”
“What about?”
“I said, get down here right away. It’s a killing.” He hung up. I locked the office, put on an overcoat and caught the first taxi I could get.
It was a crummy address, in the heart of the brownstone-furnished-room neighborhood. There were cops in front of the place. They sent me up to the third floor.
Detective Lieutenant Angonides was waiting for me in the corridor. He handed me a dirty bit of paste-board.
“This your business card?” he asked.
I looked it over. “Of course it is. How’s it figure?”
“We found it in the hatband of the guy in there. Go on in.” The big Greek gave me a push that I didn’t like.
The little hall bedroom was full of people. An M.E. was mumbling to himself as he filled out his forms. Two photographers were yapping to each other about film grain. A fingerprint man was swearing at a uniform cop who had sat in his powder.
One of the people in the room wasn’t making any noise. He was lying naked on the bed. He was tied down with clothesline.
Somebody had tied him down, gagged him with paper toweling and slowly, nastily and completely had shredded him with the broken base of a beer-bottle. Blood soaked the dirty, rumpled blanket and pillow; blood stained the floor. It looked black and unreal under the photographers’ lights.
“Do you know him?” asked Angonides.
“Can you wipe the blood off his face?”
He looked at the photographers and they nodded. He wiped, standing at arm’s length.
“I know him,” I said.
“Name?” asked Angonides, taking out his note-book.
“I don’t know that. He’s just a nut who stumbled into my office last Tuesday. He said he had a secret to sell me for five hundred. I told him what he could do with his secret and he stumbled out again. That’s all.”
The big Greek closed his note-book with a snap and shoved it into his pocket. He began to bully me in a tired sort of way: “What the hell are you trying to tell me, Skeat? You got a client and didn’t even take his name?”
“I don’t take the brush-man’s name when he calls. This guy wasn’t even a brush-man. He was just a nut.”
“How about the card he had?”
“My cards are all over the city. That doesn’t mean a damned thing and you know it.”
“Maybe I do,” he said, and his head swiveled around to the stiff. He picked up the beer-bottle and hefted it.
The slashes on the body were none of them very deep and not one was in a vital place. He had died of shock and blood-loss. Some of the cuts were in exquisitely painful places—the inside thigh, soles of the feet and others—but I couldn’t guess whether those were part of the random pattern or intentional.
“The killer changed hands at least once,” said Angonides. “And he worked from both sides of the bed.” He studied the cuts, his brows wrinkled.
“What the hell,” I said, “you’ll trace him by his papers and then you’ll get his buddies and one of them’ll be the killer.”
“He didn’t have any papers except your card,” said the detective. “He was a skip.”
“How do you know?”
“He tried to lose himself. Five laundry-marks on his clothes, different one each week. Different restaurant every day. This is the third rooming-house we’ve traced him to. His trail’s so completely doubled back on and loused up that he’s been dropped from the books.”
“Then you’ll get a flimsy from some M.P.B. in Idaho or Maine and you’ll be on his tail.”
“If he’s a fugitive from justice. If he’s just on the lam from a mob—well, this means the mob caught up with him.”
The M.E. mumbled to himself and the photographers yapped at each other about photometers. The fingerprint man whistled “Annie Laurie” as he packed his kit. I felt sick. The blood on the stiff and the blanket and the pillow and floor stank hotly.
“Come down to Center Street with us,” said Angonides.
“That a request?”
“Yes,” he said, slowly and unwillingly. “You’re the one and only lead, Skeat. If you’re holding something out we’re going to get it, one way or another.”
“Don’t muscle me, George. You’ll be sorry if you do.”
“I’ve got to be sure,” he said, staring at me.
We rode down to Center Street in a squad car. In one of the old-fashioned paneled offices I filled out an affirmation repeating my story. Then Angonides and his boys politely and coldly ushered me into a basement room.
“This the place?” I asked, looking around. The walls were stone, the ceiling was low and ominous. There were no windows. In one corner stood a big, heavy chair screwed to the floor with angle-irons. There weren’t straps nailed to it; that wouldn’t have looked good.
One of the boys held me by each arm and Angonides went to a wall switch. The ceiling light clicked out and a photo-flood in a kid’s magic lantern went on. The detective lieutenant lowered it so it glared into my eyes. I closed them and the light went right through.
“You’ll never get away with this, George,” I said.
“Maybe not, but I’m going to try.”
“In the funny papers I’d get to sit down,” I said, wiping my eyes.
“This isn’t the funny papers,” said Angonides flatly.
I took out a pack of cigarettes and somebody’s hand held my wrist while another hand took the pack out of my fingers.
“You don’t smoke when you’re being sweated,” said Angonides from th
e darkness. “Didn’t you know that?” I heard a match explode on somebody’s finger-nail and smelled the sulfur, then the reek of a cheap cigar. The smoke drifted into the cylinder of light.
I brought my watch up to my eyes. “Another day shot to hell,” I said. “How long do you keep this up, George?”
“How long do you, Skeat?” he asked.
“I’ll tell it again,” I said. “Turn off the damned light.”
“Nope.”
“Then I’ll tell it anyway. The character came into my office on Tuesday—” I finished the story. “Now turn off your damned light.” My eyes were streaming. When I wiped them they just got sorer.
“Nope. Not good enough.” He whispered something in the darkness and the two boys holding my arms held them tighter. Angonides’ face came between me and the light. He had a curious, thoughtful look—a couple of short, vertical wrinkles between the eyes. He was slowly wrapping a towel around his right hand.
“George, for God’s sake!” I yelled at him, sweating.
“Tell it again,” he said, drawing the towel tight and smooth, not leaving a wrinkle in it, tucking the end under.
I told it again, almost babbling.
He hit me just under my bottom rib, on the left side. It was a pile-driver. It jarred my guts and shot up and down my backbone like chain lightning.
He pounded me again. And again. And again. He wasn’t standing like a boxer but like a big-league batter, very square and steady. His right hand pumped forward and back at his hip level. There was silence in the room except for my breathing and his.
He stopped and said: “I can keep this up all night, Skeat. Can you?”
I tried to talk and found that I couldn’t. But I didn’t have anything to say that he hadn’t heard. So I nodded my head to say, Yes, I can keep this up all night, you brainy detective lieutenant.
He sighed and began again. He pounded me slowly and methodically and with all the steam he had, six times, twelve times, eighteen times, always in the same place, as if he were trying to chop down a tree with his fists. The tissues of the spot just under my bottom rib began to whimper, then to shriek at every blow. Finally the spot felt soft and ice-cold and hurt just as much between blows as when he landed.