by Hugh B. Cave
Smith’s heel came down hard, piston-fast, on a shoeless foot that belonged to Max. At the same time he twisted, stabbed an arm out and caught the other man’s wrist. He was suddenly not drunk any more, and before his adversaries were over their amazement, Smith had the situation in hand.
You didn’t need a gun. All you needed was a slight knowledge of the fine art of Oriental wrestling, plus a fair to middling physique and a nickel’s worth of nerve.
Max yelped, bent double at the waist as pain streaked up from his tortured foot. He bent into an upthrust knee that smacked his chin and snapped his teeth together. He staggered against the table, dazed, and had sense enough left to reach gropingly for the pocket where his gun lay. But he was too slow.
Smith had hold of Vick’s wrist. He yanked Vick off balance, stooped, caught the arm above the wrist and pulled it. Not hard. Really not hard at all. But fast.
Vick’s feet left the floor. He lost his breath in an explosive grunt as his big frame looped through space. His hundred and eighty pounds crashed into Max and Max was finished. Vick sprawled to the floor, stunned, and Max fell over him.
Smith waded in. What little fight remained in Vick was dissipated quickly by a hard, clean punch to the button. For his trouble, Smith had nothing to show except a few minor beads of moisture on his face and forehead.
He stepped back and surveyed the wreckage, highly elated. Luck, he realized, had been with him. He turned then and strode into the bedroom. It was empty.
Scowling, he walked through the bedroom into a kitchen. That was empty, too …
He went back to Vick and Max, sorry now that he had knocked them so thoroughly out. There were questions he wanted to ask. Questions concerning the whereabouts of Mr. and Mrs. Teddy Burdick.
He stared at them for a moment, undecided what to do; then, stooping, he went through their pockets. Both men were armed. He removed the weapons and placed them on the table, careful not to blur any finger-prints that might be on them. One of those guns, Smith was reasonably certain, had murdered McKenna.
In Vick’s pocket he found a slip of paper. Penciled words, written in a stiff, marching hand, said: “Fix up the girl tomorrow night, provided the papers are in our possession by that time. The following night take care of the husband. Carefully now—suicide.”
Smith read it twice, then pocketed it. An ugly fear took hold of him. Fear that he might have come too late. That the thing had already been done. He went into the kitchen, found an empty tin can and filled it with cold water. Returning, he knelt beside Vick and poured the water over his face.
Behind him a voice said quietly: “We will omit that, please. We will stand up and put our hands high and turn around very slowly.”
It was a familiar voice. Quite a famous voice, in fact. Smith had heard it several times on the radio, had heard it also at university lectures. He knew, therefore, even before he obeyed the command, that at long last he had come face to face with the supposedly dead Dubitsky.
It was not a pleasant sensation. He turned, raised his hands, and stared glumly at Dubitsky’s face. The hall door was open and the professor stood just inside it, tall and stoop-shouldered and grim. The automatic in his hand was small but deadly.
“Your name, please?” Dubitsky said curtly.
“It’sh Percy Smith, mishter.” It was worth a try, anyway, Smith figured. “These two men shaid I didn’ live here an’ I had a dishcussion.”
“We will omit that, also,” Dubitsky snapped. “You were not drunk when you came from the kitchen!”
Smith sighed. “I’m not drunk now, either,” he said, hunching his shoulders.
“Why are you here?”
“Vick’s an old friend of mine.”
“Explain, please.”
“Sure. Back in the old days, Vick and I used to work together. So when I met him on the street a while ago, he invited me up here, just to talk over old times. Me and him and this other guy here, we got into an argument. That’s all.”
“You are lying,” Dubitsky said.
“So help me, it’s the truth!”
“Is it? Suppose, then, you tell me Vick’s full name.”
“Huh?”
“I thought so,” Dubitsky said. “You are an agent of the government.” He came a step closer, his eyes flashing. “Well, my meddling friend, you are too late. Most of the papers are already on their way to an agent of my government. Except for minor details, my work is finished. And you, my friend, will not interfere with those minor details, I assure you.”
Smith did not answer. His gaze was on the door and he was frightened. His upraised hands trembled and perspiration gleamed on his face.
Dubitsky misunderstood. He smiled. “You have good reason to be afraid of me, my friend,” he said.
Out in the hall, Miss Angelina Copeland placed on the floor the shoes she was carrying. They were her own shoes. She had removed them before ascending the stairs. She looked like little Red Riding Hood, except Red didn’t pack a gun. She measured the distance now between her outthrust hands and Dubitsky’s broad back, and still in a crouch, she set herself. Then she lunged.
The threshold creaked as she went over it, and Dubitsky whirled. He whirled too late. Angel threw herself at his knees and bucked him off balance. Smith closed in and caught him.
Smith’s hands closed over Dubitsky’s wrist and twisted. He hadn’t used that particular twist before. It was dangerous. In the gymnasium where he worked out, it was outlawed. You could break a man’s arm with it.
Smith put all he had into it, and the arm snapped. He stopped then and threw Dubitsky over his head, and when the professor crashed into the door frame something else snapped.
Dubitsky shuddered to the floor and lay in a sprawled, unlovely heap. Smith straightened, gasping for breath.
“Lord!” he said. “That was close! Angel, you were marvelous! Why didn’t you shoot, though?”
“I was scared to,” she declared, picking herself up and still clinging to the gun.
“I told you to keep out of here!”
“I know you did. So I drove the car up and parked it just across the street. You didn’t expect me to stay in the bleachers when the ringside was vacant, did you? Then I saw Dubitsky walk in here, and my woman’s intuition told me I’d be needed.”
Dubitsky had not moved. Scowling a little, Smith knelt beside him.
“Is it bad?” Angel asked.
“Bad enough,” he said, holding a hand over the professor’s heart. “I suppose he’ll live, though. They usually do.” Then he turned to her. “Put that silly gun away.”
“You’ll be answering a flock of awfully embarrassing questions, darling, if he doesn’t live,” Angel said, letting the gun swing loose in her hand.
He stood up, glancing at Vick and Max. “Speaking of questions, I still want to ask a few.” Vick, he saw, was coming to. The cold water had begun to take effect.
He put a hand on Vick’s neck, groped for a moment with one finger and then pressed.
“Hey!” Vick choked.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Smith said quietly. “Hurts a little.” He pressed harder.
Vick jerked clear of the floor and fell flat again with a spongy thud. There was a nerve back there that was really sensitive.
“You’re killin’ me!”
“I will, too,” Smith promised solemnly, “unless you cooperate. Tell me now—what have you done with the Burdicks.”
“I never heard of no Burdicks.”
Smith tickled the nerve. Not gently this time, but strenuously.
“They’re upstairs!” Vick gasped. “For Gawd’s sake, cut it out!”
“See if you can find some rope around here, Angel,” Smith said. “If not, rip up a bedsheet. Now, Vick, it’s my turn. I’ll tell you what I know, or guess, and you can supply the rest.”
“The place for that,” Angel said, “is not here. Too much might happen. Let’s take him with us. First thing you know, someone will walk in here with a machin
e gun, and then where will you be with your Chinese wrestling?”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“Yes, but even Steve Brodie didn’t try it twice, darling. I’m going upstairs and collect the Burdicks.”
She walked out. Smith glared at Vick and said grimly, “One thing I do want to know. What’s so all-fired important about those papers?”
“You go to hell,” Vick snarled.
Smith found the nerve again. Vick shuddered to the tips of his fingers.
“It—it’s a formula,” he gasped. “It’s some screwy formula for a new high explosive. That’s all I know. I swear it!”
“I think,” Smith said slowly, “I get it. At least, I begin to. Our friend Dubitsky was sent here by a foreign government. He took his time. He planned things carefully. Through him, Burdick and one or two other students obtained jobs at the Glickman Company. Through Burdick, the learned professor obtained information on the whereabouts of the formula. But things were hot. He decided to vanish. As Professor Dubitsky he did vanish. How right am I, Vick?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Vick mumbled. “Lay off of me, will you?”
“He found out,” Smith said, “that the custodian of the secret was McKenna. With that to work on, he planned to rob McKenna’s safe, and also, very cleverly, figured out an alibi because he knew he’d have to kill McKenna after he got him to open his safe. To cover up the murder Dubitsky planned that the police would discover after a while that McKenna was paying attention to Burdick’s wife, and that Burdick himself, soon after McKenna’s murder, had committed suicide. It would appear to be the usual sordid triangle, leaving Dubitsky and the real motive thoroughly obscured. I like to reason these things out, Vick. It’s half the fun.”
Angel, appearing in the doorway, said impatiently: “Mr. and Mrs. Burdick are now in your car, Mr. Smith. Could you cut it short, perhaps?”
“One more thing, Vick.”
“Huh?”
“Who murdered McKenna?”
“You go to hell!”
Smith caressed the nerve again.
“He did,” Vick groaned. “So help me, I ain’t lyin’. Dubitsky did it. After gettin’ McKenna to open the safe with them papers in it Dubitsky had to kill him to keep him from ever identifying him.”
Smith sighed. “It really doesn’t matter who shot him because I’m going to tie the three of you up, Vick, and as soon as I’m out of here I’m going to phone the police. You won’t escape before they get here, Vick. Doing tricks with ropes is another of my little accomplishments, and you won’t even wiggle when I’m through with you. So the police will come and find you, Vick, and find those two guns on the table; and if either of those guns fired the bullet that killed McKenna, the police will know it. Ballistics, you know.”
“Here,” Angel said, “are your ropes. Mr. and Mrs. Burdick were wrapped up in them, upstairs.”
Smith went to work tying them up while Angel stood by with her gun trained on them. Finished, he stepped back and surveyed the results of his efforts, and grinned.
He took Angel’s arm. “Let’s go, darling,” he said.
That’s right,” Mrs. Burdick’s Teddy said timidly. “I got the job through Dubitsky and then a couple of months later he died. And then he came to life again, and came to see me.” “And told you he was a Federal agent?”
“That’s right, Mr. Smith. He told me he was a Federal agent, working to break down a spy ring. And I believed him. I guess I’d been reading too many stories.”
They sat, the four of them, in the tiny office of Trouble, Inc. Teddy Burdick, Mrs. Burdick, Angel and Smith. Burdick was limp with gratitude. Mrs. Burdick was exactly like her let-ter—small, scared, not too gifted with brains.
“Dubitsky asked you then to help him. He told you the officials of the Glickman Company were under suspicion, and asked you to find out which of them had been entrusted with the safe-keeping of the formula. That it?” Smith asked.
“That’s right. And when I did find out that Mr. McKenna kept it at home, he advised me to quit my job. He gave me a thousand dollars and told me to move to a small apartment somewhere and keep very quiet until the thing came to a head.”
“What happened then?” Smith asked.
“Well, at the last minute, just when we were all set to move, he sent for me. He called me on the phone and told me to come to that address on Canal Street. When I got there, those two men, Vick and Max, jumped on me.”
Smith leaned back in his chair, smiling. “You see it now, Angel?” he asked gently.
“There’s one thing,” Angel declared, “that still bothers me.”
“Yes?”
“Look, now. Dubitsky planned this business very nicely, but right smack in the middle of it he ‘died.’ There must have been, at that time, a fear in his mind that he was being watched. In other words, government agents were closing in on him.” She drew a deep breath and stared at the floor, marshaling her thoughts.
“Well,” she continued, “he came to life again and went through with his plans. He got the formula. If Trouble, Incorporated, hadn’t landed right kersmack on the back of his neck, he and his buddies would have disposed of Mrs. Burdick, to keep her quiet, and then murdered Teddy, making it look like a suicide to give the police an answer to the McKenna kill and steer the investigation away from Dubitsky and his pals. You follow me?”
There was a knock on the door. Smith got up to answer it. “So far, yes,” he said. “Go ahead.”
He opened the door and Plouffe stood there.
“Well,” Angel said, scowling, “what I want to know is why the G-men, after getting close enough to scare Dubitsky into temporary oblivion, didn’t see through his phony death and ultimately get their hands on him.”
Plouffe, blinking his gray eyes at her, said: “So help me, Miss Copeland, you’re clairvoyant. Meet my friend here, Mr. Toomey.”
He stepped aside and a man walked past him. “Mr. Toomey,” Plouffe said, “is a G-man. It seems he’s been keeping an eye on me ever since Mrs. Burdick come to me for advice.”
“On all of you,” Toomey said quietly. He was a tall, grayhaired man with a pleasant smile. “You see, Mr. Smith, we
were just warming up to this case when you stepped into it.”
Smith stood up, his face sheepish.
“What Dubitsky was after,” Toomey said, “was the formula for a new explosive being manufactured for the government by the Glickman Company.”
“And thanks to us,” Smith admitted, “he got it.”
“No. He never would have got it. What he took from McKenna was the original formula, long ago proved to be worthless. I doubt if Dubitsky even knew that the original has twice been revised, and that the only existing copy of the approved, final formula has never been out of government hands. What you did do, Mr. Smith, was save the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Burdick and save us a lot of work.”
“Oh,” said Smith.
“He’s really very smart,” Angel cooed.
“Thanks to you, Mr. Smith,” Toomey said, “the dangerous Dubitsky and his two associates are in custody. I’m here simply to offer congratulations.”
He thrust out his hand. Smith took it. Angel beamed.
“You know,” Plouffe said, “he’s really a pretty good guy. Maybe we should ought to tell him the truth, Toomey.”
“Truth?” Smith said.
“You owe me some money,” Plouffe declared, pacing forward to the desk behind which Smith stood. “I’ll match you to see whether I get it or not.”
He took a coin from his pocket and flipped it. Slightly bewildered, Smith did likewise.
“Heads,” Smith said.
Plouffe thrust out his hand with the coin on the back of it. It wasn’t a coin. Not exactly. It was a gold identification disc of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Smith gaped at it.
“A lot of things,” Plouffe said softly, with a smile, “are not what they seem. Believe it or not, when I let you hire me I thought y
ou were after that formula, too. I deliberately let you believe I was impersonating an F. B. I. man so you’d feel you had something on me. That way I might get onto a lot of things. Sorry, pal.” He turned to Toomey. “Well, Toomey,” he said, “let’s go. And you and your wife, Mr. Burdick, if you’ll come along too and answer a few questions, you can go home afterward.”
They went out. Smith looked solemnly at Angel. “I,” he declared slowly, “will be damned.”
She said, “Nothing surprises me any more.”
“I’ve another surprise for you,” Smith told her, smiling.
“Really?”
“I’m going to pay you for all the work you’ve done.”
“No! You don’t mean it!”
“But I do.” He put his arms around her.
“Like this,” he said, and kissed her.
Lost—And Found
We jump to April 1940 with this long story. I had spent two winters in Florida and was using Florida settings in stories for several magazines. This one is laid more or less in the Florida Keys and I think you’ll agree it’s one of the better yarns in this collection—a fast-moving tale with an ending that, although perhaps no longer politically correct, may still bring a smile. Incidentally, I had 11 stories in detective Fiction Weekly that year, also stories in Double Detective, Detective Short Stories, Detective Tales, Dime Detective, and Red Star Detective. But though I seemed to have become a writer of crime stories only, about every fifth story I attempted was aimed at the Big Slick magazines, and their doors were about to open.
HBC
Who was the girl in the crashed plane? Whose brain plotted to wreck a tycoon’s empire? How does a dick find a girl who won’t be found?
Kimm swung himself out of the chartered plane almost before it stopped rolling. With an upward fling of his hand and a “Nice work, buddy!” to the pilot, he began running across the field, his heavy tweed overcoat sailing in the breeze behind him. Kimm did everything that way. Small and wiry, with a body thinned by too much smoking, he moved, when he moved at all, with an impetuous rush that kept the dust flying. When thinking, he preferred to be flat on his back with his shoes off, smokes and a drink handy, a little soft slow music teasing his ears. But the same shoes, when attached to his feet, were forever taking him somewhere in a hurry.