“Do you think it’s safe?” she asked.
“Certainly,” said the man. “I tell you I want to check some numbers. I have to have them.”
Without a word she reached behind the mantel clock, fumbled for a minute, and emerged with something that looked like a long spike. Straight to the French doors she walked. Jarnegan quit breathing. He could have reached out and touched her. She squatted quickly, picked with the point of the nail for a moment at a length of floorboard. The nail sunk into a hole, almost half its length in depth. She pushed against the nail, finally turned and said, “Help me.”
Eyes burning the man sank down beside her, brushed her hands aside, and pushed hard. The entire floorboard slid, moved slowly, its far end passing under the baseboard against the wall. An inch at a time, a black hollow was revealed. With a little cry, the man thrust his hands into the black gap, pulled them out loaded with papers. Eagerly he spread the bonds at his feet, his breath coming hard.
The woman moved slowly toward the bed, reached beneath the pillow.
She said, “Look!”
The man turned, big face paling as he saw the shiny little gun.
“Put your hands up,” said Mrs. Lawrence, “and step away from the window.”
Seconds later: “Did you think you were fooling me! My husband, James Lawrence, has ignored me for years. True enough we planned this thing out in exactly the way you’ve worked it! But you aren’t my husband! I don’t know who you are—don’t know where he is—and I don’t care!”
“What are you going to do? For God’s sake, don’t call the police!”
She laughed. “You know,” her voice was low, “it’s been nice with you around! If I was sure my husband wouldn’t turn up, you and I might make a deal ourselves!”
His eyes gleamed “He won’t turn up. He’s dead, Mildred, dead! I swear it. Let’s take this money and go away together. We’ll be happy! We’ll—”
She moved toward him, the gun hanging at her side. As his arms went about her and his lips met hers, it thudded to the floor.
The door opened softly.
“You damned rats! Both of you!” The lovers sprang apart. The red-headed maid stood there in the doorway covering them both with an automatic. “I heard what you said! I heard it all! How long do you think I’ll stand for this?”
Jarnegan started to get into action but her gun beat him to it.
The man in the red robe sighed softly, crumpled at the knees, and laid his check on the carpet. Then was a round blue hole between his eyes.
Step by step the maid advanced into the room, the blonde cowering back in terror.
“And now you, you cheap hustler!”
“Hold it,” said Jarnegan.
The maid whirled, the gun exploded, the bullet broke glass from the French doors.
Jarnegan crouched and fired. The maid screamed, dropped the gun and grasped her bleeding wrist. The blonde Mrs. Lawrence fainted. Jarnegan reached for the phone.
* * * *
Twenty minutes later Sheriff Tolliver looked up from the bonds he had been thumbing and said, “You have the luck of the devil!”
Jarnegan bristled. “Luck! I got brains, that’s what, and I play my hunches! When I saw that stiff down at the Palace Hotel, I knew something was stinking. Why would anyone shave the sideburns off a corpse? I’d just been out here and the only guy I ever heard of in town that had monkey side-burns like that was the Lawrence butler! Hell, I use my head!”
The sheriff looking bewildered, started to speak, but Jarnegan hurried on.
“Remember when I came out here the first day with you and kidded the butler? I got eyes, I have. The thing about him that tickled me most was that Adam’s apple of his! You could have hung your hat on it! The stiff at the hotel had the marks of shaved sideburns and an Adams apple just like that! But when I hurried out here the butler was alive! Made me feel mighty bad until I noticed the front of his throat was as smooth as mine! So I asked myself a question. If the real butler was dead, who was this on the job out here?
“Checking through those missing men dodgers was a break, I’ll admit that, but I had weights and measurements to go by and I used my head. I looked up three guys in this state that had checked out, and the last one fit. That guy was a plastic surgeon from over at Junction City with a shady reputation and a screwy wife. I don’t blame him for leaving her! I checked the note he left her with the signature on the Palace Hotel register. Are you beginning to see now?”
The sheriff shook his head dumbly. “Was the stiff at the Palace this missing doctor from Junction City?”
Jarnegan spat in disgust.
“Sap! How could a man beat in his own face and smash his own fingers! This stiff here on the floor is the missing doctor! He registered at the Palace, then came and got Hudson, the butler, and took him down to the hotel to knock him off. He had to get him out of the way. The red-head here is his sweetie, his nurse from back in Junction City!”
“But wouldn’t Mrs. Lawrence know he wasn’t Hudson, the butler?”
Jarnegan sighed. “Screwy, she was in on it. Lawrence looted the bank and was going to come back and play the part of the butler for the rest of his life after Doc Herrin fixed up his face. His wife knew that. And she knew from the first that the guy taking Hudson’s place wasn’t her husband. But she fell for him, see? She didn’t care. She liked him! Pretty clever scheme all the way through, except it didn’t work.”
“For Pete’s sake, don’t go,” said Tolliver. “I’m all mixed up. If this guy here is Dr. Herrin and this dame is his nurse and the stiff in the morgue is the real Hudson—the butler—where in hell is James Lawrence!”
Jarnegan lit a cigarette. “That was Junction City phoned me just before you left the office this afternoon. They followed my tip and dug up the new floor in Doc Herrin’s garage. There was a couple of decomposed bodies beneath the floor. I expect by now, they’re identified one of them as Lawrence. I’ll be seeing you—”
“Where are you going?” wailed the sheriff. “Wait, I need you! Listen—”
“Forget it,” said Jarnegan. “I’m a busy man. I got a date with a blonde.”
WAKE UP AND DIE, by Robert Turner
Originally published in 10-Story Detective, October 1947.
The little men were having a wonderful time with his head. There were two of them, zany little guys, about the size of your hand, with cherubic cheeks and bushy beards and they were dressed like wood nymphs in a Disney picture. They were tossing his head back and forth between them, like some huge, air-filled beach ball. Once in a while, for luck, they would give it a kick, or bounce it between them. They were having great fun. It wasn’t much fun for Dan Munson, though. It hurt his head to be kicked and bounced like that and it made it dizzy and sick to be tossed through the air. He didn’t like it. He wished the funny little men would stop.
It was almost as though they’d read his mind. They did stop and, with gales of squealing laughter, they disappeared into thin air. This happened as his head was floating midway between them and it suddenly dropped and landed on something with a terrible, painful jolt…
Dan Munson awakened right after his skull had smacked against the headboard of the bed. He sat up abruptly in the darkness and the pains and sickening dizziness came back to his head. And he realized now, conscious, that the sensations didn’t come from any little dream men kicking his noggin around, but were merely the brutal reality of a colossal hangover.
He groaned and rocked there in the darkness and muttered those famous words over and over: “Never again, Munson. Never again.”
He tried to think, to remember what had brought this on, but the gears seemed jammed in his brain. Nothing happened. No thoughts, no memories. Nothing but pain. He opened his mouth and smacked his lips, hoping some of the dark purple taste would escape, but it didn’t. So he just sat there for awhile.
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Somewhere, off in the darkness, Munson became aware of running water. It seemed that there was a lot of it, like a waterfall, almost. He tried to make some sense out of that, but all he got was a terrific, burning thirst, and a torturing picture of himself, sitting under a mountain waterfall, with his mouth open and thousands of gallons of icy cold, wonderful water cascading down his throat.
Slowly, the gears of his mind began to mesh and he reached out and touched the bedclothes, figured that he’d been asleep on a bed. Very good, so far. His hands ran down his body and found out that he was fully clothed. Then they explored the bed next to him, but it was empty.
Assuming that he was home, in his own bed, where was Laura, his wife? “Oh, Lord!” he groaned into the darkness. “She’ll kill me, getting crocked like that!” He got up off the bed and stumbled through the blackness of the room, fell over a chair. He picked himself up, rubbing bruised shins, and cursed Laura for moving the furniture again. There shouldn’t have been a chair in that particular place. He staggered toward the doorway and the light switch next to it. His fingers traveled up and down the wall but couldn’t find the switch.
“Now, wait a minute,” he said thickly. “Laura couldn’t have moved the light switch. Impossible.”
He went to walk out through the doorway into the hall and slammed his face against the wall, bouncing back with a little moan of surprise and frustration. The doorway was gone, too. No doorway. What was going on, anyhow?
And that sound of rushing, falling water, which he located as somewhere beneath him, now? It was beginning to annoy him. He wondered vaguely if this whole thing was some nightmare, one of those realistic ones. He shook his head vigorously and learned he wasn’t still asleep, not the way it hurt his head and put bells ringing in his ears and made his temples go in and out like a bellows.
Off to his right, there was the sound of a clock ticking. That was wrong, too. They had an electric clock that hummed a little, didn’t tick at all. He moved cautiously through the blackness toward the sound. His hands, outstretched before him, encountered what seemed to be a dresser, fumbled over it until they came to the base of a lamp. They climbed up the lamp and located a button switch, pressed it. Nothing happened. The lamp didn’t light.
His other hand explored the top of the dresser and found a package of cigarettes and what felt like a lighter. With great concentration, he made the lighter break into flame. He stared at himself across the little yellow light in the dresser mirror and winced.
It was the poor light, he figured. He couldn’t really look like that, even very much hung-over. He was thin all right, but the reflection leering back at him was ghastly, with burning, hollowed eyes and drawn mouth. The dark hair that should have been slicked down from a neat part, was a tousled mess. His shirt collar was open and his tie pulled awry.
“You dirty old drunk!” Dan Munson said to the reflection. “You should be ashamed.”
And then he almost dropped the lighter. He was looking at the clock and it said three A. M and it was an old-fashioned alarm clock that he’d never seen before. The rest of the paraphernalia on the dresser was strange, too. He backed away from it, horrified. He wasn’t home, at all. He was in a strange house, a strange bedroom.
He turned slowly around, holding the flickering flame of the lighter aloft. What he could see of the rest of the bedroom verified the fact of its strangeness.
The heavy, continuous sound of rushing, pouring water continued and he tried to identify that. Someone was taking a bath, maybe? At three o’clock in the morning, in a darkened house? Besides, it sounded like too much water to be just a faucet running.
He saw the doorway, and there was a light switch next to it. Weaving toward it, he flicked the wall switch up and down with his finger. Still no lights went on. The current must be turned off. What kind of a place was this, anyhow? He went out into the hall and saw the old grandfather’s clock out there and the umbrella stand and a clothes tree, with an old trench-coat on it. Memory came with a rush then, and he knew where he was.
It came clicking back into his mind like a motion picture running backward. When he’d left the office, he’d stopped in at a bar for a quick one with Lew Eshmont, their new insurance salesman. Eshmont was a nice guy in a slick, garrulous, flashy-dressed sort of way.
They’d had a few more on top of that quick one, and it had seemed like a good idea when Eshmont insisted he come home with him for dinner. Especially since he’d been faced with the prospect of eating out that night. Laura had told him that morning that she was going downtown to shop and intended to stay down for a hen-party dinner with girlfriends from her old office.
His memory balked then. The rest was vague, hazy. There was blurred remembrance of coming here with Eshmont, to the salesman’s home, a cozy little cottage in the suburbs. There was a not too clear picture of Betty Eshmont, Lew’s wife, a luscious blonde in a slinky black dinner dress. They’d had dinner and it seemed to him there was another man there, Eshmont’s brother, or cousin or somebody. There’d been more drinks after dinner, but that was all he could recall right now.
What had happened after that, Munson wondered. What was he doing still here, so late at night? Why were the lights out and where were the others?
Out in the hall, Munson called out weakly, “Hello, there! Anybody home?” His own voice sounded funny against the silence, hollow, unreal. When nobody answered, he tried again, louder this time, but the result was the same.
Panicky, Munson staggered into the living room, tried the wall light switch there, but without success. The power seemed to be off all over the house. The pale, flickering glow from the lighter he held in his hand spread over most of the small living room. He saw that it was unoccupied so he went out back into the hall and along to the kitchen.
He stood in the kitchen doorway and looked around the small room, illuminated by the wan flame of the cigarette lighter.
The room was a wreck. The kitchen table and a couple of chairs were overturned. On the floor was a litter of broken dishes, spilled ash trays, and shattered highball glasses. In the center of the mess was an empty whisky bottle, one side of it stained with ketchup or something.
“Lord!” Munson gasped. “What a wingding we must have thrown! I don’t—”
He broke off. He had suddenly moved the lighter and sent the long shadows leaping to another part of the room. Part of the light fell on the other side of the turned-over table and Munson felt his eyes straining almost out of his head. He shut them fast, leaning against the door jamb, his stomach tossing and reaching up toward his throat. He shook his head violently and hardly even noticed the pain of it this time. Then he opened his eyes and looked again.
It wasn’t any trick of the D.T.s nor any optical illusion brought about by the shadows and dull light. It was there, sure enough, a man sprawled out on the floor, behind the table. The man’s face was turned toward the wall, but Munson didn’t have to see that. He saw the pink silk shirt and the loud, checkered slacks and pointed yellow shoes and the shiny black hair and knew that it was Lew Eshmont lying there.
Only now, part of the back of Eshmont’s head wasn’t shiny black, it was smeared and matted with a sticky, reddish substance. There was a pool of it under his head, too. Munson knew now that the red smear he’d seen on the whisky bottle hadn’t been ketchup, either.
Somebody had conked Lew Eshmont over the head with that bottle. They’d done a real job of it. From the way Eshmont lay, with one leg doubled under him, the stillness of him, Munson knew he was dead.
Some more of the blur cleared from Munson’s mind and he remembered other things that had happened this evening. He remembered the eyes of Lew Eshmont’s wife, Betty, green and long and slightly slanting-provocative, flirting eyes. He remembered the deep, ripe red of her mouth and the way it had smiled at him. He’d tried to pay no attention to the open way she had flirted with him all through dinner. He’
d tried to tell himself that she was just being friendly, nice, to one of her husband’s friends. But it hadn’t turned out that way.
Several times, he remembered, after dinner, she’d insisted on dancing with him. At least she had called it that. He’d been plenty embarrassed, too, with Eshmont sitting right there watching them. Eshmont had pretended not to mind, had made joking remarks about it. But there had been an undercurrent in his tone and something in his eyes that made Munson know that Eshmont was not taking it all so lightly.
Several times Munson had told them he was leaving. He wanted to get away before there was any trouble. But each time somebody had insisted on one more drink. The last time he recalled, Betty Eshmont had insisted on going out into the kitchen and making the drink herself and she had pulled Munson out there with her. But as soon as she got into the kitchen, Betty hadn’t bothered making any drink. She had flung herself into his arms.
He could remember now, with little guilty thrusts of conscience, the clinging softness of her, the warmth of her round arms around his neck and the heat of her mouth, pressed against his.
He’d been too dumbfounded, taken by surprise, to do anything for a moment. Then when he started to break away, it was too late. He heard a great roar of rage and looking over Betty’s shoulder he saw Lew Eshmont standing there, his face purple with anger, his fists clenched.
The other man—Magraw, his name was, Munson remembered, Eshmont’s cousin, who lived with them—was with Lew. He’d tried to grab Lew, hold him back. But Lew Eshmont had broken free from Magraw’s grasp and thrown himself at Dan Munson. They had crashed over backward across a chair to the floor. That was all Dan Munson remembered.
As that terrible scene flooded back into his memory, Munson wondered why he didn’t recall any of the rest of it? Had he hit his head against the floor, been knocked out? Or was it just that his mind had blacked out over that part of it? Maybe in the drunken fight that had followed, he’d killed Eshmont. In self-defense, maybe, but even so—
The Second Pulp Crime Page 36