The Complete Casebook of Cardigan, Volume 2: 1933

by Frederick Nebel

  “You first—then me—then you—then me—and so on.” He raised his voice: “O.K., you hard guys—start in. And we’re leaving the lights on. We want to see you as you come in—and go down.”

  There was low, tense muttering in the hall. Then a voice said: “Listen. All we want is the jane and Franks.”

  Bogart cocked an eye. “What say, Cardigan?”

  “Not while I’m in these pants!”

  “Right!… Come on fellows, start your party!” And in an aside to Cardigan: “Imagine those guys trying to proposition us!”

  There was a crash, and they saw the blade of an axe come through the door panel. Bogart raised his gun and fired. The room shook. There was a piercing scream in the hall.

  Then someone shouted: “What? What’s that?” And distantly, from below, a voice calling back.

  Feet scraped, hammered away from the door, and there was a medley of excited voices—shouts, some near and others far below.

  Bogart said: “What the hell?”

  “You got me,” Cardigan said.

  They crossed to the door, listened.

  Bogart sniffed. “I smell smoke.”

  “So do I—and it’s not gunsmoke. Listen!”

  Distant, but drawing nearer, coming to them through the walls and windows of the house, was the clangor of fire engines.

  “I got an idea,” Bogart said out of the side of his mouth, “that this dump is on fire.”

  ATCHISON came into his office next morning, swiftly, reading a newspaper. He found Cardigan and Pat Seaward on the carpet and said: “I understand you two played a big part in a carnival last night.”

  Cardigan pointed to the desk. “There’s a flock of evidence there you ought to hit the roof over. Three confessions—one by Saltpork Annie, one by Abel Franks, one by Marcella Wohl.”

  “I say! You mean—”

  “I mean,” said Cardigan, “that we crashed the whole shebang. The three I mentioned are in jail, along with a few other gentle folks inclined toward homicide. Abel Franks is the big poo-bah behind your sweatshop trouble. Marcella Wohl’s his lieutenant. Saltpork Annie ran the boarding house and knew what it was all about.

  “Do you know why no one could ever get those girls to come across—the ones slaved in these sweatshops? I’ll tell you. Because they’re all ex-convicts. They’ve all done time. Marcella Wohl had a flock of prison matrons on her list. She supplied them with dope which the matrons sold to the inmates. Likely inmates, when they were released, were tipped off—by the matrons—that they’d find shelter with Marcella Wohl and Saltpork Annie. So they went there to have a safe hideout.

  “They were put to work on the machines. Ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day. Two or three of them slept in a room at Saltpork Annie’s. They didn’t pay. But they never got more than a dollar a week from the sweatshops. They had prison records, and were afraid to squeal. Franks and Marcella got the big rake-off on what the sweatshops sold—shirts, dresses, underwear. Annie got a share too. Franks leased the rooming house and Annie ran it. He paid a hundred and fifty a month rent, furnished—and his intake in profits from the sweatshops was two thousand a week clear. Hanna Kropek went soft in the head and gave the racket away.”

  Atchison said: “It seems unbelievable!”

  Cardigan pointed. “It’s down in black and white—on those papers.

  “You see Bogart and I went into that place to clean it out. We got in a jam. We would have been shot to pieces if it hadn’t been for”—he jerked his thumb toward Pat—“the very demure little person you see right here.”

  “H’m,” Atchison mused. “I heard there was a fire—”

  Cardigan chuckled roughly. “Yeah. And keep this under your hat. When Pat saw the lights go out, she got scared—account of me. So she crept up to the front door, found it open. Then she went back to the sidewalk and hauled up a box of newspapers that had been set out for the refuse collector. She planked this in the hall and set fire to it. The newspapers were damp, made more smoke than fire. She rang in a fire alarm. About twenty firemen crashed the house and”—he spread his palms—“there you are.”

  “Priceless!” Atchison exclaimed. He leaned forward, and said in a lower voice: “What about Bogart?”

  “A swell guy. Tough, nasty, unreasonable—but a swell guy. He’s got, Mr. Atchison, what it takes. And what it takes he’s got.”

  Chains of Darkness

  Chapter One

  Death for Two

  THE loose, flat jangle of the telephone bell sounded in the darkened room. Eastward, over the rooftops, a post-midnight elevated train slammed south. The bell stopped ringing. Wind from the East River bellied white curtains inward, rattled the wooden rod of a half-drawn shade. The bell rang again.

  Cardigan moved in the bed, raised himself to his elbows, yawned boisterously, cocked a sleepy eye at the illuminated dial of the clock on the bed table. He muttered, cursed, reached out. A glass and bottle went down from the table with a crash. The clock followed. And then Cardigan got his hand on the telephone, yanked it savagely across to the bed.

  He barked: “Hello…. Yes; hello, Mike…. Who said so?… Did, did he? And so I suppose just because my name is alphabetically first, you wake me up out of a sound sleep!… Listen Mike; this is the second time in a week that tramp Murfree pulled this stunt!… I know, I know,” he grumbled; then he snapped: “O.K. I’ll go up.”

  He pronged the receiver, found the bed light and snapped it on. Getting out of bed, he took most of the covers with him. Two buttons were off his pajama coat and one leg of his pajama pants was hitched up past the knee. His hair, at no time a barber’s delight, was now a tousled shambles. He went growling and grumbling into the bathroom, gargled loud enough to be heard several apartments away. He dressed, slapped on his lop-eared hat, got the collar of his shaggy ulster inside instead of out, but went plodding down the corridor unaware. He was still only half awake by the time he reached the lobby.

  THE cold winter night helped to rouse him, but in the Napoli, in Fortieth Street, he drank a double Scotch that went much farther toward removing the cobwebs from his eyes. Then he took a cab, lounged back with a cigarette, and was whooped up and over the Park Avenue ramp. Five blocks farther north, in a side street off Park, the cab came to a halt. Cardigan flipped the driver a half dollar, swung his long legs across the sidewalk and punched in the heavy brass-and-mahogany swing door of the Hotel Gascogne. He was quite awake by this time, but he still wore the somewhat sour expression of a man who has been roused from a sound sleep.

  He made his way long-legged across the vast, opulent lobby, and reached the black marble and chrome desk where a dapper young man stood pensively pruning his fingernails.

  Cardigan said: “He get back?”

  “I beg pardon.”

  “Murfree—did he get back? I’m Cardigan, from the Agency.”

  “Oh, I see,” the man said; and then his face tightened irritably and he snapped: “This is the second time.”

  “I know. What time did he go out?”

  “At ten. And he said he would be right back—at least in time to make the midnight rounds. It seems to me—”

  “O.K., I’ll make ’em.”

  Cardigan went down a corridor back of the desk, entered a small office and hung up his hat and overcoat. The Agency had been supplying the Gascogne with a house detective for the past two months, and Murfree had been on the job nights for the past two weeks. Murfree, Cardigan knew, was a souse and something of a ladies’ man, and once before he’d gone out for a drink and not shown up until three hours later. Cardigan had wanted to fire him then, but his senior partner, George Hammerhorn, was by nature soft-hearted.

  It was ten past one when Cardigan started on his rounds. He took an elevator to the top—the twenty-second—floor, got off and walked the corridors trying doors. Every door was supposed to be locked after midnight, and if it wasn’t, it was the house officer’s duty to knock and tell the occupant to lock his door. Cardigan worked his w
ay down, poking into linen rooms, trying door after door. He found two unlocked by the time he reached the eighteenth floor. He toned down a drunken party on the seventeenth. On the fifteenth he helped a drunk find his room. On the thirteenth he found a husband who had been locked out by his wife.

  The tenth was all right until he came to one of the wings. The door of 1024 gave under his hand. He closed it again, then knocked. He received no response and he knocked again. He waited another minute, then palmed the knob, turned it and opened the door. Lights were glowing in a large apartment living room. He opened the door far enough to step into a small foyer, and then his bushy black eyebrows snapped downward. He reached behind him and pulled the door shut.

  There was a man lying face-down in the center of the living room, one arm beneath his body, the other stretched out ahead. He had an overcoat on, but no hat; the hat was lying several feet beyond. Cardigan started toward the body, then stopped as he saw, lying in front of a broad divan at the opposite side of the room, a woman in a negligé. There came to his ears a faint sound like the far-away humming of a dynamo. His eyes cruised the room, stopped on a radio. It was evidently tuned in on a station that had gone off the air.

  His eyes dropped back to the man. He moved swiftly now, bent down. A grunt chopped out between his teeth. The man on the floor was Murfree—pale and handsome even in death. Cardigan gripped his body, lifted it, and saw that the hand beneath held a revolver; and he saw a large red blotch on Murfree’s chest, and on the carpet. He eased the body back to the floor.

  Cardigan stood up, his jaw hardening, a black shimmer coming into his eyes. The thick carpet muffled his footfalls as he crossed rapidly to the woman. She was young, slender, with a fine head of jet-black hair, and she must have been very beautiful, alive. She was very dead now, a caked smear across her breast. Her negligé was torn in many places.

  Rising, his eyes took on a glassy, introspective stare. On a small table at one side of the divan, the side nearest the wall, he saw a shattered bowl. He leaned over, and saw on the floor a square, leather-backed clock. He reached down and picked it up and found the lower part of it pierced. The hands had stopped at three minutes to eleven. He set the clock down on the table.

  He crossed to the radio, made a mental note of the station at which it was tuned but did not touch the dials, nor did he turn off the switch. He found no other gun in the room. Crossing to the telephone, he picked it up and called the desk.

  “Who’s registered in Ten Twenty-four?… I see. You’d better call the police…. Dead…. Yeah—dead…. Murder, I guess.” He hung up quietly.

  MOLLY SHANE had lived a lifetime in twenty-two years. From the age of fifteen onward she had kicked, pirouetted and cartwheeled her way across more stages than most people see in a normal lifetime. At various times she had been the darling of Paris, London, Rio and New York—a score of other cities. She had completed a circle. She had begun in New York and ended in New York. A bullet put an end to Molly Shane.

  Doake, the plainclothes sergeant, said: “It went right through her.” He juggled the twisted lead slug he had picked up from the floor beneath the end table by the divan. He nodded. “Went through her and busted that bowl and busted that clock. Stopped that clock at”—he nodded again—“three of eleven. It smacked her high between the breasts; she could have been sitting or standing—sitting on the divan, I mean.” He tossed the slug, caught it. “It’s a thirty-eight,” he said dully. He was a dour, disillusioned looking man, with a hard medium-sized body, a hard white nape.

  The man from the medical examiner’s said “Ah, so” while bending over the body of Murfree.

  Dirigo, holding Murfree’s gun by the end of the barrel, said: “Murder and suicide,” and threw a sly, droll look toward Cardigan.

  Cardigan snorted and walked away into the bedroom, came back into the living room again, a mutinous dark look in his eyes.

  The medical examiner’s man said cheerfully: “You can see this fellow’s coat is powder-burned.”

  “Two shells in this gun exploded,” Dirigo drawled. “One in the jane. One in Murfree.”

  “It looks like suicide,” the medical examiner’s man sighed.

  Doake said to Cardigan: “Did Murfree know her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sure he did,” a voice rose from the depths of an armchair. It was Barney Evans’ voice; he represented The Daily Call. His hand floated a cigarette around languidly. “Saw him. Mean, saw him with her.”

  “Where?” Doake growled.

  “Here and there. The Falstaff, for instance. She was dancing at the Falstaff, you know. Saw her at his table. He always got himself nice janes.”

  Cardigan snapped: “He made forty bucks a week. How the hell could he travel in this company?”

  “He had looks,” Dirigo said. “And bedroom eyes.”

  The medical examiner’s man stood up. “The bullet’s in him, of course. Ballistics will have to check up when we get it out of him.”

  “How long’s he been dead?” Cardigan asked.

  “Let’s see. It’s one-thirty now. Oh, for the past two or three hours. We’ll check up better, later.”

  Dirigo was smiling. “Sure.” He turned the radio on. “These rooms are supposed to be pretty soundproof, and the radio helped. A jazzband was on that station at that time. Not so swell for the dear old Cosmos Agency, huh, Cardigan?”

  “Why don’t you bust out laughing and be done with it?”

  “Trouble with you, Irish, you can’t take it.”

  “I’d call you a lousy Dago if I was sure that’s the only kind of blood in you.”

  Dirigo’s eyes snapped, his nostrils quivered.

  Doake chopped in: “Both you guys lay off!”

  THE medical examiner’s man pointed downward at the body. “He was wearing a wrist watch on his left wrist. When he fell, I guess he smashed it.”

  Cardigan took three long strides, knelt down. The glass face was gone, so were the hands. He found splinters of glass in the carpet where he had first seen Murfree’s outstretched left hand lying. Later he found the hands—broken, twisted. The watch on Murfree’s wrist was also shattered, soundless—a corner of it had dug into his wrist.

  The medical examiner’s man was saying: “Of course, he had been drinking.”

  “Sure,” Dirigo snarled, still bristling under Cardigan’s last taunt. “He got tight and tried to make her and when he couldn’t he let her have a slug. And then he saw what he did and he put one into himself. I’m not surprised. The Cosmos Agency seems to pick its men up out of the gutters anyhow.”

  Cardigan stood up, red color flooding his face. “You keep your dirty mouth shut!”

  “You don’t like that, do you? Swell!”

  “Keep your mouth shut till you know more about this! And lay off the Agency! We have to live on our salaries and we don’t ride around in swell cars that are bought with shake-down money.”

  “Watch your lip, Irish.”

  “I’ll watch it when you watch yours. You ought to go back to South Brooklyn where you made your first dough shaking down the burlesque houses.”

  “Shut up!” Doake barked.

  Cardigan spun on him. “Then tell this white trash to lay off me! I’ll kick his face in if he opens it again!”

  Dirigo was licking his lips. “You’ll—”

  “Damn it, you shut up too!” Doake hammered out.

  Cardigan said crisply: “I’m staying here till you get a fingerprint man up. When Murfree’s taken to the morgue, I want his clothes and effects.”

  “Yes,” sighed the medical examiner’s man, “I’d say it’s murder and suicide. There’s powder burns on Murfree’s coat—and the way he fell, the way he was lying here, with his gun hand doubled beneath him—” He shrugged, sighed again. “Of course, we have yet to see if the bullet inside him was fired from this gun. If it was, then of course that will—practically, so to speak—convince me that it was murder and suicide.”

  “Of
course!” Dirigo snapped. “This guy was hot after the dames, he was tight when he came in here—”

  “I’ll tell you something,” Cardigan cut in savagely. “I’ll tell you this: even if you find that the bullet in his body was fired from his own gun, and the bullet that killed her was fired from the same gun—I tell you that even then, I won’t believe it’s murder and suicide!”

  “And why?” sneered Dirigo.

  “Because—simply because Murfree was a ladies’ man. Because he had too many dames on the string to lose his head over one.”

  “Nuts! That logic’s nuts!”

  Cardigan said: “Sure it is—to you. You can’t see beyond your nose, Dirigo—and you’ve got a damned small nose at that.”

  Chapter Two

  Cardigan Discovers Poetry

  George Hammerhorn, the broad, blonde and bland head of the Cosmos Agency, was a man who affected gray tweeds and a stick. His cheeks were fleshy without being fat, and they were pink, and he had a kindly blue eye, a sound and genuine air about him. He came into the inner sanctum of the agency next morning more rapidly than was his custom.

  Patricia Seaward was at his desk sorting his mail, separating the chaff, the crank letters, from the important matter of the day.

  “Ah, Pat,” he sighed gravely, hanging up stick, hat and overcoat, “that was a tough one.”

  Pat was grave too. “Murfree you mean?”

  He nodded, sighed again, ran broad palms back over the speckled gray above his ears. He tossed a newspaper on the desk. “See that song-and-dance?”

  “I read it over the tomato juice. That’s dirty.”

  He ground the heel of one hand into the palm of the other, stared hard at the desk. “I don’t like the implications. Certain parties in this city have been trying for a long time to paint this agency as a collection of crooks. And it looks,” he added, dropping his voice, “that this time they get a break.”

  “Dirigo, huh?”

  He nodded.

  She said: “I was speaking with Cardigan on the phone about an hour ago.”