Pulp crime, p.273
Pulp Crime, page 273
“I only want you to go.”
“Damn it, quit bothering me!”
“I won’t even report you to the sheriff,” she promised him. “I can find another hiding-place that will do until you are taken away to prison . . . Just go, sir. I don’t want to hurt you.”
The color receded gradually from the hand spread over the bills. He straightened out of his crouch and turned to face her.
“I’ll do that,” he said boisterously. “Yes, sir—I’ll go this minute! You just let me have my—”
“No.”
“It’s a kind of—kind of keepsake. I couldn’t just—”
“It would be as easy for me to believe you George Gholson as to believe you a sentimental man.”
She was standing close to the straight-backed chair on which he had laid the derringer. She looked from his face to the little gun, her lips white with revulsion.
He measured the distance between them. Three steps and a half at the outside. He took the first step.
“You won’t pick it up,” he said masterfully. “You’re afraid of them, you know—don’t forget that . . . Swede Hansen. Remember how he looked after the hunting accident?”
He watched Miss Morrow recoil down to her carpet slippers. He took another step. It was the last and deadliest phase of the parlor game.
“I shall,” she said. “I most certainly shall if—”
His mistake was that he took the step and a half too suddenly. He saw the error in the instant of motion, but Miss Morrow’s startled hand had already convulsed around the gun.
He was sure she would drop it. She did not drop it. She brought it up level with his chest, her whole body shrinking back from the hand that held it.
Almost inaudibly she said, “Just go away.” Gholson looked at the leaning tower of currency. The muscles banded around his mouth and he was not afraid. He walked deliberately toward the gun.
Miss Morrow retreated from him step by step until her shoulders were to Bonheur’s Horse Fair.
“Please,” she said.
“If you were going to kill me, you’d have done it in the kitchen. And you wouldn’t use a gun for it, either—remember Swede? How would you like to see another man look that way and know you did it? I’ll take the gun please. Hand it here.”
She edged along the wall. She said, “But you don’t understand. I’ve never wanted to hurt any living thing, great or small . . . But the calendars come and they have the wrong date, and it seems like the longest summer vacation I’ve ever waited through. I have to have something. I have to plan. I have to keep my hands busy. I have—”
“Got to take it away from you, have I? Give it up, you crazy old—”
His fingertips were at her wrist when Miss Morrow fired the double load of buckshot into his chest.
Moments later he opened his eyes and felt her tears on his face. Miss Morrow said desolately: “You remembered the Wordsworth sonnet finally, George. The World Is Too Much With Us. I had to prompt you again on the fourth line—We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.”
There was something soft pillowed under his head. He touched it with a groping hand and found it was the carefully reassembled buckskin cushion. “Am I dying?” said Gholson.
“Yes.”
“I don’t feel anything. There isn’t any pain. I—”
“Perhaps,” she said, “because even unimportant men can sometimes die majestically.” He could not see her face. He could only feel the tears. “Oh, but you aren’t!” Miss Morrow wept. “You can’t be! There’s some terrible mistake! If it’s true, then everything else is true—that the school-house is gone and there are no windows in my neighbors’ houses. The things people whisper behind my back—that I’m—But you aren’t George Gholson. Are you, sir? Are you?”
“No,” said Gholson painfully. “Just some damn’ thing I heard him reciting last year at the schoolhouse.”
In the last moment of clarity, he saw her shining face.
She’ll make you a cup of coffee. She makes good coffee. You go six blocks south along—Oh, I told you that.
You’d better drop in and talk to her a little just to get everything straight in your mind, but I wouldn’t say anything about it being George Gholson she killed. She wouldn’t believe you, and there’s no use upsetting her.
You see, it’s George Gholson she’s been saving the money for all summer long. She hasn’t anyone of her own, she says, and she wants him to have a college education when he gets out of high school . . . That was the way of it. That was why she had to kill the banker—to give George his chance in life.
VOICE OF THE DEAD
Ted Stratton
A good detective, Bill Frane figured, is one who can spot a murderer by instinct . . . But sometimes a little instinct, like a little knowledge, can be not only dangerous, but downright deadly!
Drawn shades darkened Room 327 of the Hotel Benson. Bill Frane, second grade detective, sat in a straight chair inside a door that fronted the corridor. Within easy reach lay his revolver.
Outside a door opened. Voices resounded in the corridor. Bill grabbed up his gun and stared through a peephole low down in the door. A second man who lay on the bed sat up abruptly. “This it?” he asked tensely and his fingers gripped a gun butt.
Silence, then a voice growled: “So long, boys.”
Retreating steps along the corridor. Bill Frane relaxed. “Velinski’s hoods just left.” The man on the bed lay down again. Minutes passed. Then Duke DeRoche, first grade detective, said: “Someday you oughta run them hoods in, Bill.”
But Bill Frane bent to the peephole. Another door had opened. There were no voices from the corridor, just the tap-tap of a pair of rubber heels on the bare floor of the corridor. The Duke asked: “What gives this time?”
“Teddy Rugg left Velinski in a hurry. That means that Velinski is alone now in 328.”
The Duke sighed. “I don’t like hanging around here within a whisker of that gang. They’re killers. When is this case going to break?”
Bill Frane wondered too. He was a slender, alert man with wide forehead and quick blue eyes. You noticed the outthrust jaw. A solid jaw. The jaw of a man you’d like to have on your side if there was to be any shooting. But the Nocker Velinski case had Bill Frane stumped.
Velinski, an ex-rum runner during prohibition, operated a black market in meat, according to Captain Reddick at Headquarters. Room 328 in the Hotel Benson was the pay-off place. “Check who comes and goes from 328,” Reddick had ordered.
Bill and the Duke had checked the traffic in and out of 328 on five different days. Each time they’d checked, it had been the same old story. Only three people ever visited Velinski. Teddy Rugg, a high school kid who kept the books, and the two hoods, the Patanelli twins. How come? Bill wondered.
Did the hotel dick tip Velinski off? Did Velinski still retain a pipe line or two into Headquarters? Could be, of course. But Bill knew that if the case was to break they’d have to uncover the names of the people who did business with Velinski. How could they get names if only Rugg and the Patanellis entered Room 328?
The broad-shouldered Duke yawned and sat up. He smoothed the crease of his immaculate trousers. He had black hair, neatly combed to cover a faint baldish spot in the middle of the top of his head. His dark face gave him a dashing appearance, despite a bulge at the waistline. The Duke glanced at a solid gold strap watch.
“Four-fifteen,” the Duke observed. “I could eat.”
“You ate at one o’clock,” Bill said.
“Yeah, and I could eat again. Around the corner there’s a joint. Frenchy’s Presto Grille. Toasted sandwiches! Make mine ham-on-rye, Bill. And a quart of java.”
“We got a job to do.”
“Sure, sure, run along.”
“Reddick said to stick here together.”
“Reddick isn’t here.”
“I’m sticking.”
The Duke said: “I want two ham-on-rye, toasted. And java.”
“Phone the desk.”
“Frenchy’s, Bill, and make it snappy.”
Bill asked carefully: “You’re the boss here. Is that an order?”
The Duke shrugged broad shoulders carelessly. “Sure.”
Without a word Bill Frane stood up, moved the chair back, opened the door and walked noiselessly along the corridor. Down two flights of stairs, out a side entrance, then along the street to the Presto Grille. “Frenchy” looked as if the last time he’d seen Paris was one dark night on a Hoboken pier.
“Two toasted ham-on-rye and java,” Bill snapped. “To take a walk.”
“Comin-gup,” Frenchy answered.
Bill thought: “Damn the Duke. Sometimes he thinks he’s a lord and I’m a flunky. Nuts!” Abruptly he broke out a deck of cigarettes, lit one and puffed deeply while Frenchy loitered behind the counter.
Too monotonous, this Velinski case, Bill thought. A little dangerous, maybe, with those hoods across the hall. If Reddick would only say the word and send them across to take the gang in! Not that he’d get much help from the Duke. The Duke was the department’s glamor boy. He could shoot well enough, but the Duke didn’t like to get his neat clothes rumpled.
Frenchy squeaked: “Mustard?”
“Heavy,” Bill said grimly. “Maybe the Duke will choke!”
Frenchy wrapped the snack. “Sixty cents.” Bill counted change, picked up the packet and said: “Took you long enough.”
Back in Room 327, the Duke ate rapidly. Bill eyed him glumly. No, the Duke wasn’t going to choke. “Anything happen?” he asked. The Duke mumbled: “Nocker’s still there.”
“He’s leaving late today.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Finally the Duke finished. “I could eat two more!”
“Then you’ll get ’em yourself!”
Steps resounded from the corridor. The Duke slid past Bill and bent over the peephole. Bill picked up the notebook on the bed and idly noted the entries. 4:10, the Patanellis left. 4:14, Rugg left, Nocker alone.
“Bellhop,” the Duke whispered. “He’s—no, it’s a she—she’s going in 328.”
Bill jotted the entry, noted the time at 4:44 P.M. A crash of breaking glass. A startled screech. The Duke yanked the door open. “Let’s go!” he bellowed.
Hastily Bill tugged at his revolver, then followed the Duke into 328. They met a slim girl dressed in a bellhop’s uniform. She shrieked a second time, a thin note of terror.
“What gives?” the Duke asked.
“I—I came in,” the girl moaned. “And—and—look!”
They looked. Nocker Velinski sat in a high-backed chair. The back of his head was against the chair-back. His feet were propped on the top of the desk. A white scar ran from one eye corner across a swarthy cheek. He had the blank eyes of a killer, a killer whose eyes seemed to ask one question. “Who’s next?” Weird, because Nocker Velinski would never speak those words again. Nocker was dead. Someone had cut his jugular vein neatly. Blood still dripped from the wound to his starched white shirt.
The Duke ordered: “Call Headquarters, Bill.”
Bill obeyed mechanically and asked for the hotel dick to be sent to 328. The Duke was saying to the girl: “You’re a cute trick. Why’d you come up here?”
“Bringing s-scotch and soda,” she faltered. “How come?”
“Mr. Velinski ordered it sent at five o’clock, the desk clerk said. I—I came a little early.” The Duke repeated: “You’re a cute trick. Now—”
Bill cut in: “You like new clothes and perfume and things to make you prettier, eh?” The girl flushed. “I—I don’t understand.” Bill said: “You could have tipped Nocker whenever we watched from 327.”
Fear brightened her eyes. “Oh, I wouldn’t do that!”
“It’s been done before,” Bill said.
A thickset man with sparse gray hair bustled into the room. He saw Nocker Velinski. “Cripes!”
“Hello, Sherlock,” the Duke said.
Bill volunteered: “A nice clean murder, shamus.”
The hotel detective muttered: “They got him this time.”
“Who?” Bill asked sharply.
“Why—why the gang he liquidated a couple of years ago. I mean, a couple Nocker didn’t kill! That scar—Nocker got that in the fight.”
“You got all the answers,” Bill snapped.
“I just thought—”
“Don’t.”
Bill Frane stepped close to the thickset man. Lean fingers shot out and gripped coat lapels. He shook the dick slowly and each time the man’s head snapped back and forth. “You rat! You tipped Velinski when we watched this joint!”
The Duke patted the girl’s shoulder. “I’ll be seeing you later, honey. Run along.”
The girl fled from the room.
Between jerks of his head, the hotel dick kept mumbling: “Not me—not me—I—”
“For money you’d do anything,” Bill said. “No—I—got—a job.”
“You’d pocket Nocker’s money!”
The Duke intervened. “Let the louse alone, Bill.”
Bill relaxed his grip. “I’m going to turn this hotel inside out, shamus. If you’ve crossed us—”
The man mumbled: “I’m shooting square.” A siren wailed faintly from the street. The Duke whispered to Bill Frane: “We were together, Bill.”
Bill nodded. They’d have to stick together on that point. The Duke continued: “Just so there’s no comeback, you ditch the stuff from Frenchy’s.”
Bill crossed the corridor to 327 and closed the door. He tossed the coffee container and sandwich wrapper into an alley. His eyes searched the room. Everything in order. Quietly he opened the door.
There were two newcomers in Room 328. Bill knew them. They were the same build. They each wore pale gray suits, tight at the waist, and pale gray felt hats with dark green bands. Bill couldn’t see their faces. He didn’t have to. But they had expressionless eyes. The Patanelli twins . . .
The Duke stood stiffly by the desk, his face a mask. By his side was the hotel detective, hands raised above his head. Bill glided across the room, his footsteps muffled by the rug. He gripped his gun by the barrel. One of the twins said: “You killed Nocker.”
The other twin turned toward Bill. Bill swung. The butt caught the twin alongside the temple. Blood spurted and the twin dropped to the floor. The other Patanelli snarled, started to turn.
Bill flipped his gun, catching the butt expertly and slid off the safety. Two guns spoke simultaneously. The twin collapsed, one leg twisted under his body. A drop of blood stained his lips. He breathed heavily. A single bloody bubble grew on his lips and when it broke, he died.
The bullet from Patanelli’s gun had creased the back of Bill Frane’s gun hand. He wiped it mechanically, then sheathed his gun. The Duke wiped perspiration from his forehead. “Right in the belly,” he grunted.
Bill’s eyes were cold. “That’s the place to plug a rat.”
“You’re hard, Bill.”
“Sure.”
The room filled up with men. A trim man with sharp eyes—it was Captain Reddick, walked through the crowd.
“We got two, captain,” the Duke said. “Looks like an abbatoir,” Reddick grunted. “What happened?”
The Duke explained.
“Nice work,” Reddick told Bill Frane, and added to the Duke: “Did you search Nocker yet?”
“Yes.”
The Duke pointed to a pocketbook, gold watch and chain, a black notebook, and a handful of silver and several crumpled bills on the desk.
“Funny about Nocker’s cash,” the hotel detective said. “Nocker always carried a big roll.”
Reddick faced him slowly. “How do you know?”
“Young Rugg told me.”
“Rugg?”
“The kid what kept Nocker’s books.”
Bill said: “You know a hell of a lot about this case.”
The dick shifted uneasily as if his feet hurt. “I’m trying to help you guys. I gotta know what goes on around here.”
“Anything else?” Reddick prompted.
“Just that we don’t like this any better than you, captain. Hurts our high class trade.” Bill growled: “He could have tipped Nocker off when we watched.”
Reddick nodded. “You check him close, Frane. Who visited 328?”
“Rugg and the Patanellis,” the Duke said. “How’s it look to you?”
“Like two and two, captain. We heard Nocker talking to the Patanellis when they left. Five minutes later when Rugg went, we didn’t hear Nocker, did we, Bill?”
Bill nodded slowly. “That’s right, and Rugg was in a hurry.”
Open-and-shut, Bill thought. From the comfortable way that Nocker still sat in the high-backed chair, he knew that the killer had been in Nocker’s confidence. Only a friend could outflank Nocker. Anybody could see that the evidence pointed at the kid. He was on Nocker’s payroll and the last person to be in Room 328. Murder for plenty of cash, an open-and-shut case.
Reddick ordered: “Search the room.”
No bankroll turned up. Reddick said: “Get out a teletype for Rugg. Description?”
The Duke whipped out a notebook and intoned slowly while a stenographer wrote down the description. “Five feet, seven inches. Weight, one-forty. Sleek black hair parted on the left. Dead white face. Light blue eyes. Blue suit, white shirt, white-striped blue tie, tan shoes, no hat. Shifty-eyed. Walks with a limp on the port side.”
“Can you work?” Reddick asked Bill Frane. “Sure, it’s only a scratch.”
“You and DeRoche check Rugg’s house.” Bill drove the car and the Duke lounged in the front seat. At 318 Robbinson Lane, they rang the bell. A wispy, elderly woman answered.
“Mrs. Rugg?” the Duke asked politely.
“Yes.”
“Teddy in?”
She hesitated. “He’s just left town.”
“Know where?”
“A defense—” She stopped. “You’re police?” she whispered.
The Duke’s voice was casual. “Where to, Mrs. Rugg?”
One thin hand fumbled at the neck of her faded housedress. “I didn’t want Teddy to work for that man,” she faltered. “We needed the money until Teddy could get another job. Teddy hasn’t done anything wrong!”
