Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  “O.K. I’ll wait here.” I hung up the phone and said to Joe: “This is real trouble. We shouldn’t have let that gunman go.” I went over and sat down on the couch, feeling kind of sick . . .

  It sounds callous; but a half an hour later most of what I was thinking of while Wellwater questioned me was my dinner, which I had not had. We were not getting anywhere.

  Wellwater did make one crack that had some sense to it, though. After I had told him about Lamba, and about the mugg, and about the Chinese, and after he had said he didn’t believe me, he cracked: “Outside of traffic accidents and jealous wives, this town has about twenty homicides a year, Van Eyck. And you’re connected one way or another with about half of them.”

  “I know it,” I said. “The thing kind of snowballs on you, Adam. Like I was telling Harry Denuth today—the more publicity of this sort you get, the worse sort of people it attracts to your office.” Wellwater said: “Denuth!”

  “All right,” I said. “So I liked him, too. But I didn’t shoot him. I suppose it’s sacrilege for me to mention his name?”

  “Don’t shout at me,” Adam said. “It isn’t necessary.”

  I SAID something or other and went into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub. That was the only part of the apartment that wasn’t crawling with cops.

  After a while I calmed down enough to come out again. I was walking around the place looking for an unpoliced chair when the phone rang. Wellwater made a dive for it, and I growled at him and got there first. But it was for him.

  He spat a series of yesses into the phone and hung up, rubbing his bony hands. “This is good,” he said. “We’ve got Lamba. They’re bringing him up here.”

  I turned to him, shoved out my hands. “Listen, Adam,” I said. I was as serious as I’ve ever been. “You won’t be able to hold Lamba. No cop ever has. He has a mouthpiece in every State of the Union. You guys clear out, will you, and let Joe and me take him? We’re not cops; we don’t have to be strictly legal; and we can make him talk.”

  Adam just smiled in a superior sort of way, and didn’t bother to answer.

  “This isn’t a gag,” I said. “Honest. It’s the short-cut to getting the guys who got Harry and Edgelite. Give yourself a break, Adam.”

  He shook his head, and lit one of the stogies he offends nostrils with.

  I sat down, on the studio couch, shoving a lieutenant off the other end.

  The “they” who had got Lamba turned out to be a pair of Dolly Sisters from the uniformed radio patrol. They shoved the little man into the room, and came to attention. “He was eatin’ dinner at the Rockaway,” one of them told Well water.

  Adam pinched his nose, and looked wise, as though that meant something. The cops went away. That left only the whole detective bureau, Joe and me to handle Lamba. The ugly man hadn’t opened his mouth yet.

  Wellwater said: “Lamba, two of my best men were shot down tonight. One of them’s dead; one’s dying.”

  Lamba wrinkled up his face a little more. “That’s too bad, Inspector.” He put his hand in his pocket, and three second-grade detectives leaped forward. But he was only going for his wallet. “Allow me to contribute something to the purse for the widow.”

  Wellwater knocked the wallet out of the brown hand and went to tower over Lamba, his hands on his hips, his bony chest bent in two. “If you didn’t have anything to do with it, Lamba,” he grated, “you know who did. And you’re going to tell us if we have to break every—”

  Lamba laughed at him. “I’m sorry about your men, Inspector,” he said; “but really, this is rather extra-legal. And—er—talking about legality, that’s probably my lawyer outside now. You see, we were eating dinner together.”

  IT was his lawyer. And there was nothing Adam could do. The lawyer had followed Lamba to see where he was taken, and then got a judge away from a dinner-party to sign a habeas corpus. That’s what’s known as the majesty of the law.

  I crept around the room, and said to Joe: “Get out and get downstairs. Follow Lamba and find out where he’s living.” Joe faded, and I went back to watch the signing of the papers.

  When Lamba and the mouthpiece were getting ready to make their triumphant departure, Wellwater growled: “Just one question, Lamba: Have you retained Van Eyck or haven’t you?”

  The ugly man turned. “Why, yes,” he said. “Of course. The good Chief is going to act as my agent in a gambling matter. Agent and bodyguard and—associate.”

  THE evening had done nothing to make me patient or gentle; I got the little ape by the collar and whirled him around to look at my left fist. “That’s a lie,” I said. “You dirty little—”

  He said: “Please, Mr. Van Eyck. Don’t be naive enough to expect the police to think I left that five thousand dollars in your safe for storage.”

  “There’s no five—”

  Wellwater said: “And you were the guy wanted to help us, Van Eyck! I knew you were wild, but I didn’t know you were as big a heel as—”

  I said: “Let’s go down to my office. Come on—all of you.”

  We skip the next scene. Some things I can’t—well, anyway, the five grand was in my safe, and the mouthpiece had a list of the serial numbers in his pocket.

  There was absolutely nothing I could say. What I did do, finally, was insist on sealing the five grand in an envelope and giving it to Wellwater to hold. I said, when I handed it over: “I don’t understand this, Adam, any more than you do. I don’t expect you to believe me; but you might as well hear me out: this is one case I’m taking for nothing, free, gratis. And if I can tie the can on Lamba for you, it’ll be a pleasure.” Wellwater stared, all the hate he had ever felt for me coming out in his eyes. He was the deacon of his church, a teetotaler and an abstemious man in all ways; and I was the town’s wildest gambler, used profane language without noticing it, and spent most of my time in a barroom because I thought it was good for business. You couldn’t expect us to understand each other; and in addition, we were the two most prominent detectives in the State, and some day one of us was going to be a political figure. I didn’t underestimate either his ability or his hatred and distrust of me.

  Finally, he said slowly: “There’s no use arresting you, because you’d just get one of your gambling friends to sign your bond. But a report of this goes to the Attorney General.”

  I shrugged, and said: “Good night, gentlemen.” The dicks and cops with Adam were glad enough to leave; Adam followed them. He looked at Lamba, and said: “Let’s leave Mr. Van Eyck alone with his clients, boys.”

  A smile answered that, and the door closed behind the police force. I got up, stretched, and beamed at Lamba’s ugly, ugly face; then I went over and locked the door to the hall. He looked a little anxious, but I reassured him: “Seems like the time for a good chat.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “Sure, so long you got the name, you might as well go through with it. You keep that five grand. I tell you, Seppi Lamba’s a good guy; I give you some more if you—”

  “A good chat,” I said, “about what you mean, you dirty little fence, by dragging my name into your guttersnipe activities!” I socked him on the side of his brown face with the palm of my hand, and knocked him into a steel filing-cabinet.

  I went after him, and got most of his upper clothing into my left hand, lifted him off his feet. With my right fist I feinted at him. “Little louse,” I said, “you are about to have a very busy day. You are going to return that money to those Chinese, and then you are going to get out of this town, and stay out. And if—”

  The lawyer said: “Don’t do that, Van Eyck. Please, I wouldn’t.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “What’s to stop me?” I shook Lamba a couple of times, and said: “I wouldn’t mind breaking your neck, except that first—”

  “Please don’t,” the lawyer said again. “Please set Mr. Lamba down. I’m—I’m not very used to firearms, and this thing may go—go off.”

  I shot a look over my shoulder, and he was
holding a gun in a shaking hand. He had taken the safety-catch off, too.

  That is exactly the kind of gun I will not monkey with—the kind that is held by a scared amateur. A gunman won’t shoot you if he doesn’t have to; a man whose hand is shaking will shoot you without meaning to.

  I dropped Lamba, and said: “Put that gun away, and get out of here. Get out!”

  They got. I wiped my brow, and fished a can of beer from the water-cooler. When it was half down, I called the hotel. The desk-clerk said, first, that there had been no calls for me, which meant that Joe Lavery was still on the shadow. Then he said, in the supercilious tone that watching a hotel desk gives those chorus-boys: “There was a Chinaman here, though.”

  “What?” This was something like news.

  “He said he was your laundryman. He said he’d given you the wrong shirts, and had to see you right away. At his shop.” The ape giggled.

  “Was his name Harry Leong?”

  “That’s right, Mr. Van Eyck. Isn’t it curious how they take America first—”

  I rang off and chewed my lip. I doubted very much if it was shirts that the Celestial wanted to see me about. I locked the office, and went down and caught a cab.

  Harry was ironing away furiously when I came into his shop. In the back room I could see his wife, darning something, and rocking a cradle with her foot.

  Harry said: “Yessuh, Mist’ Van Eyck. Evelyt’ing ho-kay, like you say. Please to dome this way?”

  I nodded, and he set the iron on its stove and led me into the back room. Mrs. Leong looked up and gave me a shy smile. The two middle kids were sleeping in a cot; the eldest was doing his homework; the baby, as I said, was in a cradle. Three Chinese gentlemen were standing in a corner, where they could not be seen from the street. Two of them were leaning on canes; one of them wore a silk hat. They bowed, politely, and the one without a cane said: “Chief Mr. Van Eyck, I trust?” His English was a lot better than mine.

  I SAID: “Yes, gentlemen. You wanted to see me?”

  The spokesman bowed again. “If you are not too inconvenienced. We wish to ask you a question, sir. Are you, or are you not, an associate of Mr. Lamba’s?”

  “I am not,” I said. His polite voice put a polish on mine. “I would like to see Mr. Lamba subjected to the death of the thousand tortures—to give this an Oriental note.”

  “You are, sir, very likely to see that,” the Chinese gentleman said. All this time Mrs. Leong did not look up, and the little boy went on with his homework. “Oh, quite likely, Mr. Van Eyck. You, sir, have an enviable reputation for veracity.”

  “It’s my business,” I said. “My racket. I couldn’t get to first base if people didn’t know I meant what I said. At that, there are doubters.”

  He leaned forward. “Sir, believe me, we are not among those doubters. I want to ask you again, are you in any way connected with Mr. Lamba?”

  “I am not, and I have never been,” I said.

  “Would you take your oath to that?”

  “It wouldn’t mean any more than my word. I’m not a religious man.”

  He sighed. “Quite. I believe you. We, Mr. Van Eyck, are the lottery committee of the Lee Chow Far Businessmen’s Association. Mr. Lamba has a good deal of money which our compatriots entrust to us.”

  “I know. I always thought the tongs were smart; I don’t see how—”

  “Please, Mr. Van Eyck,” this fellow said, “we are not a tong. You do not mind? We are simply a business organization; our phase of the business, the work of my committee, corresponds precisely to that of an insurance company in the Occidental scheme of pecuniary affairs.”

  “You guys are smart,” I said. “Why in the name of fate would you entrust money to a heel like Lamba?”

  One of the other members of the committee asked a question in Chinese. The spokesman answered him, then turned back to me. “My elder compatriots do not understand English. Mr. Gow simply asked what you said . . . In the conduct of our affairs, sir, it is often necessary to deal with people like Mr. Lamba. You see, sir, we have never got the lottery legalized. Really, sir, it is nothing but insurance; the buying of a ticket each week insures a man a coffin and a decent burial in China. But out of the profits of these tickets, instead of paying dividends, the way your stock insurance companies do, or rebates, as in the case of your mutual companies, we pay a large bonus in the form of lottery prizes weekly.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “But while we’re talking, Lamba is wandering around the city doing something strange and unholy. Where does he fit in?”

  My pal interpreted what I said to the other two Orientals, then turned to me. “You see, sir, we consider your United States income-tax entirely too high. Therefore we have to invest our money extra-legally to avoid turning our books open. In the past we have delved into such things as gambling, which we could handle ourselves; the importation of our fellow-countrymen into this nation, which we also were able to maneuver without too much Occidental interference or cooperation; and so on. A mechanic who now works for Mr. Lamba once worked for us, on the airplanes we cross the border in; he turns up cars for Mr. Lamba. He suggested—”

  “WAIT a minute,” I said. “You were going to finance Mr. Lamba—if you want to call him that—in an inter-State hot-car racket?”

  “If,” he said, “by hot, you mean stolen, why, yes.”

  I think I must have staggered back a step or two. I counted on my fingers. All the elegant English I had put on to answer his, left me. “Wow!” I shrieked. “Inter-State cars! Tax-evasion! Using the mails to run a lottery! Smuggling! I—Mister, do you realize those are all Federal charges? Haven’t you ever heard of the old man with the whiskers, Uncle Sam? Post Office inspectors, G-men, Secret Service, Border Patrol—well, by golly, you boys don’t care what you do, do you? The only Federal offense you’ve left out is kidnaping, and pulling the Supreme Court’s whiskers.”

  “But we intend,” said my suave interlocutor, “to do a little kidnaping. We are going to catch Mr. Lamba, and conduct him to New York. We think he’ll tell us there where our money is.”

  I gulped and said: “I was joking.” And the gent without the cane turned and translated that to the two gents with canes. They stared at me as though I were some new kind of bug.

  “Of course,” said the spokesman, “we should expect to pay you for your services.”

  “Oh, of course,” I said. I raised my voice. “I wouldn’t walk into a mess like—” I gulped, and stopped. I had forgotten that I was already in the mess—in it up to my ears! I had declared war on Lamba, who certainly didn’t love me. The cops had declared war on Lamba and me. And the Chinese—well, they were out for Lamba, and they meant as much business as the rest of us.

  It seemed that any combination of two in that mess was going to have the inside position.

  I said: “Gentlemen, a decision given in the heat of the moment is often regretted in the cool of the grave.”

  The spokesman raised an eyebrow, and translated this. They all three bowed. “We are glad to see,” said the spokesman, “that we are dealing with a philosopher. We shall call on you wherever you say tomorrow morning.”

  “Call me at my apartment before nine,” I said, and got out of there, pretty well convinced that I’d got off an epigram. It made me feel better, but not for very long. When I got back to the hotel, Joe Lavery had not yet called.

  I WALKED the carpet until it was nearly worn out. Joe and I have been partners for a long time. We were on the cops together, and he quit to work for me. If it hadn’t been for me, he’d be toasting his shins before a radiator in some station-house now, instead of trotting around a city running my errands with a horde of top-hatted Chinese and armed gorillas and cops looking for the blood of any of Van Eyck’s friends.

  He had a wife. I’d never married, though that was not my fault; I’d asked Elizabeth often enough. But Joe had, and up to now that hadn’t seemed wrong. Our profession is not as tough as it sounds. I get into trouble once
in a while; but then, I’m the top man, and thus the target; and even so, I don’t get into any mess that I don’t think I can control.

  But Joe—well, he was not very quickwitted. He had let me do the brain-work too long, while he was content to be the legs, the guy who tackled the hard details that I’m too lazy to take care of.

  But tonight I had sent Joe out on an assignment that was loaded with a lot worse than dynamite. The odds were against his coming—

  Just when my heavy feet had gone through the carpet to the floor, a rap came at the door; it was a commentary on the way I felt that I pulled my gun before I even asked who was there.

  The man’s voice through the door sounded a little sick. “Joe,” it said.

  I opened the door, and Lavery lurched in. I caught him just as he was about to fold up; I lugged him to the couch and laid him out. His collar was gone, ripped away; the buttons of his vest hung from one long strip of cloth. One sleeve was nearly off his coat.

  But his face was the worst. It was dark brown with clotted blood.

  He lay on the couch and mumbled: “Van, I’m sorry. You can fire me. I missed—”

  “Shut up,” I said, “and take it easy.” I went and got a washcloth and some ice-water, and a drink of brandy out of the medicine-chest. I made him drink the brandy, and then I washed his face with the ice-water. It was only cut in two places, on the cheekbone and the forehead.

  I lit a cigarette and put it in his mouth. I had to use three matches to do it; my hand was shaking, and not with fear, either. He puffed the cigarette, and tried to grin. “Florence Nightingale Van Eyck!” he said.

  I growled: “Stop trying to steal my stuff. The boss makes the jokes.”

  “I played the sucker,” he said bitterly. “I walked right into their trap.”

  “Lamba’s boys?”

  He said: “Yeah. They—they did this to me, and told me to take it back to you and see how you liked it.”