The Noir Mystery MEGAPACK ™: 25 Modern and Classic Mysteries

by Joseph J. Millard

“Well, maybe a little.”

  “Sure. But, on account of you were still wacky about the girl, you didn’t want to admit it—even to yourself. It’s a queer little yarn about a nice old Chinaman named Soo who had plenty of dough. Soo was in Mexico, but he yearned to get into this country. The only way to do that was to get smuggled in.

  “Our friend, Hop Ling, knows all about such things. There was a man on this side who Ling was in contact with. Ling worked through the contact man. Mr. Contact Man worked with Fench—through Edna. That kept Mr. Contact Man in the clear.

  “The scheme was this. Soo got on Fench’s truck, under the load, below the line. Fench drove him across to Calexico. That was easy. The hard part was to get him out of the desert country, since from there on the federal men are very watchful. So in Calexico, probably near the cotton gin there, Fench unloaded Soo. That is where Steve here picked him up. Right, my boy?”

  “Yes, sir. I didn’t know what it was all about. All I knew was that I was to pick up a man there and take him along to Curver’s place. Might have been a cantaloupe picker, for all I knew. He was a little guy. He had something over his face, but in getting into my car his face became exposed and I saw he was a Chinaman.”

  Rake said: “The idea was to take him to Curver’s ranch and watch a chance to get him aboard a night cantaloupe train. The boys at the shipping shed take lots of ice out of the refrigerator compartments at the end of the cars. Enough ice could be taken out of an end to make room for Soo. For protection, he could put a bunch of newspapers over the ice left in. In a few hours he would be out of the valley. The only trouble was that Soo had plenty of dough on him.” Rake whisked out the square of black silk cloth. “You really did see this, boy?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Steve Ongar. “The little old Chinaman was a good sport. He gave me an extra ten-spot when I got him to Curver’s old house. There is where I saw that cloth. He had all his money wrapped up in it!”

  “Sure. Soo was a good sport with Fench, too. That was what settled his fate. Fench saw all the money in the cloth and wanted it. So later he went to Curver’s old house, where the Chinaman was waiting, and took his dough. Some Chinamen don’t talk—the dead ones. The others will talk if there’s a good reason. Hop Ling talked to me when I told him where I’d found Soo buried. He was pretty sore about it, in an oriental sort of way. You see, there was something about that cloth that nobody knew.”

  Fench was sagging in a chair, still listless. But he jerked his head up to listen. The girl was listening, too. Steve looked over her shoulder and said: “What about that cloth?”

  Rake said: “When Soo reached his destination, he was to simply mail the cloth back to Ling as evidence that he had arrived safely. A nice little Chinese touch.”

  “Slick,” said Steve. “Well, I got curious about the Chinaman the night after I took him to Curver’s place and ran over there. It was late at night, after work. Nobody was around. I couldn’t see any sign of the Chinaman. Then, just outside the kitchen door, I found that cloth. I recognized it and it worried me. Next morning I spilled the works to Mr. Warnbecker.”

  Rake said: “And Warnbecker was worried, too. He figured Curver was trying to get him mixed up with the law. Serious stuff, smuggling Chinamen. He was afraid to call in the law because he had got himself tangled up with darling Edna. So he sent for me.”

  “But Fench couldn’t be in it alone,” Steve Ongar said. “There was—”

  The window smashed again. It smashed several times. In a few seconds there wasn’t much left of it. The shots from the back of the house sounded like a small war. Alan Rake knocked Steve over against the wall. The girl went with Steve.

  The only one hit was Fench. He got up at the first shot, and the second one took him. He was down on the floor now, bleeding generously at the chest.

  The shooting stopped suddenly.

  Silence. Then commotion somewhere back of the house. There was also a commotion at the front door, which broke open. Officer Cline of El Centro rushed in. Cline looked at Alan Rake and at Fench on the floor and at Edna and Steve.

  Rake said: “Someone out back shot Fench.”

  Cline nodded. “The shooting started just as we got here. Lagos went around back to see about it.”

  “You looked into that place on Curver’s ranch?” asked Rake.

  “Yeah. They made a graveyard out of a partly filled garbage pit. The little old Chinaman was in there.”

  The back door opened. Lagos came in with Slummer. Between Lagos and Slummer was Pete Torlan. Torlan looked wild-eyed and very dusty, as if someone had been kneading him into the dirt.

  Rake said: “Good work, boy.”

  Slummer’s grin was reluctant and fleeting. He said: “Well. I seen him show up. I caught up with him just about the time he was popping at the window. Then the copper came.”

  Cline was still puzzled and so was Lagos. Cline said: “I don’t get all this yet.”

  “You will,” Rake told him. “There was a scheme to smuggle the Chinaman you found. Fench robbed the Chinaman and murdered him. Fench also killed Warnbecker to keep him from starting an investigation. Fench tried to put me on the spot in Mexicali. He was afraid of what Steve might spill—and so was Torlan. So tonight he tried to put Steve on the spot, too. I brought Fench in here and then Torlan showed up. Torlan got a load of what was going on, so he grabbed the rifle and blasted at all of us.”

  “So Torlan was in it,” said Cline.

  “Pete Torlan was the good old mastermind. He did everything indirectly, though. He kept in touch with Fench—and maybe with others—through Edna. That was what started the talk that Edna was romancing with Torlan. It wasn’t romance. Just business. Edna was still playing with Fench. Right, sugar?”

  The girl was weeping. She didn’t like looking at Fench, on the floor. Yet she didn’t seem so very unhappy. She smiled at Rake through the tears and whispered: “Yes.”

  “Probably no one but Torlan was close enough to Warnbecker to know he had wired me. And Torlan was the most likely man to know where Curver kept his rifle.”

  Cline looked at Lagos. Lagos said, “Well, I guess we can get this all fixed up at headquarters.”

  “All right, boys,” Rake said. “I’ve got to make a trip across to Mexicali. See you in El Centro in an hour or so.”

  He motioned to Slummer and they started out. As Rake passed the girl she looked up long enough to say in a low voice: “I still like you.”

  Rake said: “Behave yourself, sugar. See you later.”

  Out in the car, Slummer looked at Rake queerly. “I still don’t see where you’re coming out of this thing.” he said. “Where’s that five grand you were going to make?”

  Rake said: “Hop Ling told me that the grieving relatives of old Soo would gladly pay that much to avenge Soo’s murder. So we’re going to Mexicali. Hop Ling will pay in cash. That’s another nice Chinese touch.”

  Slummer had turned the car into Second Street. He said: “So you’ll have five grand to take along with you, huh?”

  “No,” said Rake. “I’ve got to take that dough back up to El Centro.”

  “Good gravy! Why?”

  “So that I can go Edna’s bail!”

  Slummer swung the car south, toward the little customs houses on the line. He seemed almost startled. He said: “Say, you ain’t gone and fallen for that dame, huh?”

  Alan Rake was silent for a moment. He stared somberly across the international ditch at the nearing lights of Mexicali. Then he said: “I wouldn’t say that, boy. As soon as I’ve liberated that beautiful female rascal, I’ll be leaving for the north where Mrs. Alan Rake will receive me with brisk words. She is very different from Edna. She makes me stick to business.”

  Slummer looked relieved. “So how about Edna?”

  “Edna? Why, some day she’ll
get away and marry a guy in a service station and he’ll make her change her ways.” Alan Rake, inclining his head in a gesture of sadness, added: “And I’m not so sure that it’s a good idea.”

  TIME TO KILL, by Leo Hoban

  Originally published in Crack Detective, Jan. 1945.

  There I was, sitting in my office in Manhattan and minding my own business, when the bald-headed guy walked in and tossed five C notes on my battered desk.

  If there had been any business save my own to mind, I probably would have been more particular. But five C’s—when you were just contemplating if Shanty Sam around the corner would go on the arm for another couple of hamburgers—definitely was real kush.

  So when he put the valise, about four-by-three feet, on my desk alongside the five centuries, Mike Grady wasn’t in any mood to argue.

  “Just deliver this to me in the St. Francis in San Francisco,” he said. “There’s nothing hot about it. It’s only a piece of wood, harmless and inanimate.”

  Boy, what a soft touch this was, boy, oh boy!

  “What’s in it?”

  “A dummy,” he mumbled. “Just a dummy. One of those things a ventriloquist uses. You know—a dummy?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Dummies. I know them—lots of ‘em.”

  ‘Well, deliver it safely and I’ll pay you one thousand more—provided it’s safe delivery, of course.”

  “Of course,” I nodded, my eyes still being riveted on the five C’s. “But why don’t you take it to ‘Frisco yourself?”

  He shifted feet on that one, studied the flyspecks on the ceiling, and said: “People, you know, lose things...on trains...they’re very careless… And there’s a radio program this—er—dummy must sound off on. He’s very important. Let’s say like Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen, He rates. He’s worth about five thousand a week. He must be delivered safely. Fifteen hundred is not much to get it across country.”

  Well, that seemed logical enough. What harm would there be in a dummy? Who would want it? Where would be the danger? A dummy cannot hurt anyone.

  I gave some thought to that, but the main thought was that Shanty Sam and his hamburgers had been outgamed in the stretch by a miraculous five C’s that represented steaks—big, luscious ones.

  “It’s a deal,” I said, holding out my hand. “He’ll be in San Francisco in five days.”

  The guy gave me one of those enigmatic grins, bobbed his head, and departed.

  Just before the door closed a voice from the valise said: “Sucker. I’m going to knock off a guy!” I grabbed the valise, shook it—and its weight seemed heavy enough to be an actual body.

  I began to sweat. The locks on the valise wouldn’t open; I wasn’t sure just what I had in there. The voice had sounded too human to be a dummy’s—yet it was out of this world.

  On top of it—although stupid—I’m a conscientious private dick. I’d committed myself to safe delivery of the valise—so the only thing was to follow through.

  The five C’s and the thought of steak had a great deal to do with that decision. I picked up the valise, pocketed the dough, and was humming “California Here I Come” as I left the office and headed for the elevator.

  I pressed the down buzzer and turned around, still humming. A short and nonchalant—almost demure guy—a vicious scar running down his right cheek—sauntered up to the elevator. I turned from him shifting the valise from right to left hand. To all appearances he wasn’t dangerous.

  That shift of hands saved my life; a knife, aimed at my ribs, made a slight ripping sound as it went into the top corner of the valise.

  I whirled. The mug—looking disconcerted, shoved his feet out like a runner sliding into second. I went down, clenching the valise against my chest. The mug’s foot lifted once, lashed out catching me flush on the chin. The world spun, I felt him tug at the valise, but hung on. The elevator hissed to a stop and the mug’s feet pattered swiftly down the hallway. I got up, groggily.

  The elevator man said: “Service ain’t so bad that tenants gotta go ‘round lying on floors. What’s the idea, Mister?”

  I got on the elevator, looked at the valise and also wondered.

  Here had been attempted murder. For what? A wooden-headed, wooden-bodied image of nothing in particular, created for nothing more than amusement to the multitudes.

  Or was he? The hunch was inborn that the thing in the valise was far more than that. There was something about him—or it—that called for killing.

  Kill! Kill! Kill!

  It kept going through my mind—dumb Mike Grady, a dick who is always a step or two behind current events. I just seem to get those kind of cases, like a kid gets cereal for breakfast. He protests a little too late, and to no avail.

  But five C’s is five hunnert (in Brooklyn) and five hunnert to me, coming from Brooklyn, was five more than the ten more I would get in San Francisco.

  So I grabbed a train.

  Well, everything was okay—peaceful like—until we rolled into Denver on the Transcontinental.

  Boy! Had I met a blonde! She had stumbled into my compartment accidentally.

  We had a twenty-minute stopover—and the blonde said she wanted some fresh oranges. The oranges on the train seemed fresh to me, but for a nice dame like the blonde maybe they weren’t fresh enough. A dumb dick like me gets along with those kind any time—especially when he’s got dough in the kick and time to kill.

  I walked up 17th Street, bought a dozen oranges, and walked back under the Welcome Arch leading to the station plaza.

  It happened when I was going down the ramp to the trains.

  I was blissfully unaware of the crowds shoving this-and-that way around. After all, I just was killing time. We were still a good day and a half from San Francisco. I was thinking about the blonde. In a day and a half-anything can happen.

  It did.

  A tall, skinny guy in a down-pulled beaverskin stepped up to me as I was going down the ramp. I side-stepped, quick-like, pulling up the valise. I bumped right into an old and fat dame. She was puffing up the ramp and had her head down, plunging like a fullback bent on making three yards to goal.

  Her shoulder smashed into the orange bag, splitting it, and the oranges went here and there, rolling down the ramp. I bent over, balancing the valise, trying to rescue one for my blonde doll.

  That’s when I found out that this time to kill between trains was the McCoy. A slug went “whoof” right past where my head had been, smashed through the valise, and pinged against the wall to my right.

  I pivoted, bending low, and got a quick glimpse of the mug in the black beaverskin triggering his silenced revolver—and getting no result. That’s one thing about silencers—half the time they’ll jam after the first shot.

  Bent on a tackle, I jumped forward.

  I didn’t make it, landing flush on my puss instead, driven there by a wicked rabbit punch. My chin smacked the concrete, and there was a small blackout until I rolled over on my back and looked up at the fat dame who was ready to wallop me again with her umbrella.

  A guy grabbed the umbrella and said: “Wotinell, lady? Why conk the guy?”

  “The fresh thing!” she shrilled, pulling an orange from her bodice. “The nasty fresh thing! And me a respectable woman! I was only minding my own business.”

  She was struggling to bring down the umbrella again, but the guy holding the other end of it had it bent back over her shoulder and was giving me the bad eye.

  I turned over on one elbow and reached for the shoulder holster. The mug in the beaverskin was backing away in the crowd. He gave me one frightened glance and swung behind the gaping apes that were ringing me in—and then was gone.

  When I did get my gun clear my pal on the other end of the umbrella nonchalantly kicked the automatic out of my mitt. His knee
prodded the fat dame on the caboose, shunting her to the sidelines.

  “Get up,” he barked, and I found myself looking into the business end of a .38 police positive.

  I’m dumb, but I’ve been around long enough to know when a serene-eyed guy can be dangerous and too calm for other people’s good. And I didn’t want any part of this guy. He was too calm.

  I got up, very cautiously.

  Being sensible, I couldn’t mention that I didn’t know the mug who had missed with the slug, that there was no reason for him to take a crack at me, that I’d never been in Denver before.

  “What’s it all about?” he said. “A man takes a punch, eh?”

  That was my out. He didn’t know about the silenced bullet, and I wouldn’t tell him. That would have meant an investigation of several hours; the train was due to leave in five minutes.

  So I played it smart, pulled out my wallet, and showed credentials as a New York private detective.

  “I’ve been looking for a guy—a guy that had a want on him.”

  “What guy?”

  I thought quick. “We’ve got him as Michael Eagle, a Brooklyn hood. It might be something else, but we got him as Eagle.”

  “Never heard of him. What did he do?”

  “Liquor hi-jacker,” I croaked. “Maybe there’s some murder mixed up in it.”

  He made up his mind suddenly. “Okay, son. Go after him. Your train’s about ready to pull off.”

  I went, lugging the valise.

  Now I’m not one that worries as a rule, but the small hole in one side of the valise—and a larger hole to starboard—had me worried. After all, instructions had been to deliver it intact—and unharmed.

  Already the outer casing had been slashed with a knife; and now a slug had gone entirely through it. And in all my experiences I’ve never known of a slug passing through something that didn’t do some harm. It’s a habit, a vicious habit, like eating tacks and nails.