Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  I rang off, and came out of the booth. Morris said: “I heard. I think it was swell.”

  “Do you think,” I asked humbly, “that Adam would let me drive around and see this chap?”

  “Sure,” Lieutenant Morris said. “Sure. Adam’s not such a bad fellow. As a matter of fact, Van, I think he rather likes you.”

  Adam was waiting outside. There was no more talk of handcuffs. I got behind the wheel of my car; Adam got in with me, and Morris went back to the police car. I even drove slowly, because I knew Adam was scared of fast driving. For the moment I loved the old icicle.

  IN front of Harry’s shop, they were waiting. Good old Lee, his suave appearance was gone! He had ripped up his coat till it looked like Joe Lavery’s, and his hair was all mussed.

  I jumped out of the car and embraced him. In the background, the two old gents leaned on their canes and beamed. Adam got out, and shook hands with Lee. “A close escape,” he said. Then he looked again. “Chinese!” he ejaculated. “That’s what Harry Denuth and John Edgelite ran into. John was killed in front of a Chinese laundry!”

  “Sure,” I said. “We were making contacts through laundries.”

  “They got too close,” Adam spat. “And Lamba’s heels—”

  “How is Harry?” I cut in. “Recovering. He’ll be all right.” Adam began rubbing his chin. “You know where this place is, Van? You can take us there?”

  I nodded. Then Lee cut in. “Plizz,” said the Harvard man, “me no lundehstan’. Whahffioh all this talkee?” Adam said: “We’ll explain later, sir. Van, do you think they want to come with us?”

  “They gave their personal word there would be no reprisals,” I said. _ “But me, Adam—I was careful not to give mine.”

  “Morris!” he barked. “Call Headquarters. I want two riot squads, and the reserves to throw a cordon around—what’s the address, Van?”

  I told him. Then I told the Chinese to go to my apartment and wait for me. Then we took off.

  The riot squads met us at a corner. They were big huskies, uniformed. It didn’t seem possible that all twelve of them had ridden in the patrol wagon that was backed up an alley.

  Adam Wellwater led them, on foot, through the dark and silent streets. I walked along at his side. A block from the garage a man stepped out of a doorway and looked at us. He had the-flat-capped silhouette of a cop.

  As we passed by, he stood there and watched us.

  Ahead of us the garage door suddenly creaked shut. Adam grinned., with his thin lips spreading back to show his eyeteeth. He flashed his searchlight on, for a moment, and answering lights told us the building was cordoned.

  Adam turned to his huskies. “This mob killed John Edgelite, one of our detectives. They tried to kill another, Harry Denuth. We want them for kidnaping.”

  Then he turned and trudged on again. Morris waved his hand, and two cops with sub-machines ran up and flanked the Inspector. Wellwater took out his pistol, and kept on walking.

  I filled each hand with a gun from my pockets, and followed him.

  In front of the closed garage door, Adam stopped, and raised his whistle to his lips. His other hand still held the revolver. He blew the whistle three times, then yelled: “Open up in there! Police!”

  Nothing happened. Adam yelled again; the little door inside the big one swung back, and the attendant who had let us in showed himself. “We’re all closed up for the night,” he growled.

  Adam disregarded this inanity, and said:

  “Come down with your hands high.”

  ONE of the huskies moved his submachine gun, and the light caught it. The garage kid got scared, and pulled the wrong move; he jerked at a gun under his coat.

  The sub-machine gun nearly cut him in half.

  I gulped, and told myself that I knew—though it could never be proved in a court of law—that these muggs had killed John Edgelite, a cop; that they had attempted to kill Harry Denuth; and that they’d beaten the tar out of Joe Lavery.

  We stepped over the kid and went inside. There was nothing on the floor of the garage but two cars parked at the back; no sign of life. Adam Well water said: “Easy, men. There may be some one inside those cars.” His revolver put lead through a windshield. When there was no answer to this, we went forward some more.

  NO one was in the cars, no one under them. Adam and Morris jerked up one of the hoods; there was a hand-grenade wired to the starter. I stopped feeling so bad about what was, after all, a frame-up.

  I went over to the elevator, and tried to open the door. It wouldn’t come.

  Somebody pushed the button while I was still working, and there was the whine of the elevator motor coming to meet us.

  The door came open suddenly in my hands, and everybody jumped back. Adam said: “Which floor, Van?”

  “Down,” I said. “There’s a special button.” We piled into the car, and pressed the button that had meant down before. There were about fifteen of us in the car.

  The button still meant down. But fast. The car fell from under us, and we all landed on each other in a piled-up heap of men and guns and uniforms.

  I shoved two cops off my chest and scrambled up, while some fool said: “They cut the cable.” We were in a trap, like rats, like foolish mice that had smelt the cheese. At the bottom of an elevator well, with a tough gang above us, and one that owned hand-grenades!

  I remember grabbing one of the machine-gunners, though terror had pretty well congealed my brain. I shoved him up, and shouted: “Cut that door open.” I pointed at the door that led out of the shaft. Then I kicked away a couple of other cops who were in the line of fire, and the Tommy-gun cut loose.

  Bullets went through that door as though it was paper. The gunner knew his business; he cut a neat hole where the lock should have been.

  It all must have happened pretty quick, because most of us had piled into the little room where the furnace was before that grenade landed on the floor of the car.

  Its blast caught one riot man’s back and sent him hurtling into us, which was just as well, because he knocked us down, and the fragments of grenade and elevator car went over us, by and large.

  We got up again. I remember seeing Morris bending over the cop who had taken the blast, but I went by them, back-tracking, and shoved my pistol hand up the shaft without looking and emptied the automatic. I dropped the gun then, and would have fired off the revolver in my other hand if my machine-gunner hadn’t jerked me aside and let a dozen rounds go up the shaft, blind.

  The boy named Tony who had cheated at solitaire came down the shaft, fast. He still had on the blue shirt and the yellow tie; red went nicely with the blue.

  The other Tommy-man cut down the door to the little hall, and we went on, all except the boy who had been knocked over by the bomb. He leaned against the furnace, sitting on the concrete, and smoking a cigarette, while curses dribbled out of his lips with the smoke. It couldn’t have been a very big or well-made grenade.

  We broke in all the doors with our shoulders, and I fetched Adam into the room where we had had our conference with Lamba.

  “This is where the money changed hands,” I shouted, over the noise of the riot cops. “I made a puddle of ink on the floor with my pen, so the fellow who carried the dough away would leave a trail. He didn’t take it far.”

  Adam looked at the mark my ink had made, and shouted back: “We can have the trail brought out later by chemists from the police lab. The ink will have dried into the wood.”

  “Yeah,” I shouted back.

  A cop roamed in, said, “They found a stiff down the hall, Inspector,” and roamed out again.

  We went down the hall. The corpse was Alphonse Awfulface; Joe had said he thought they’d gunned him out. Well, he was small loss; Adam looked at him, and said: “Moe Ginty, a safe-cracker. Nice work, whoever did it.” We went out, and watched the cops break the last door. It did not lead upstairs, but to the back yard.

  Adam held up his hand for silence, and said: “There�
�s no use going on—”

  Bullet noise behind us brought us all around. A mugg I had never seen before was crouching in the door that led from the furnace-room; he had a big riot-gun in his hands.

  He didn’t know how to use it, though, because he couldn’t keep it down; the cop nearest him shot it out of his hands, sapped him with a pistol-butt, and slapped handcuffs on him.

  “There’s no use going on this way,” Adam said. “They’re above us. Let’s get out of here and throw things on the roof till they come down.”

  Bullets peppered us as we ran across the courtyard, and two cops groaned. One of them had to be helped—a shot had cut a tendon in his thigh. Another was hit in the shoulder.

  Adam said: “Let’s try gas-bombs.”

  He picked out a husky who looked like Babe Ruth twenty years ago to throw the first tear-gas bomb. The kid stepped forward, wound up, and then jumped back, the bomb falling, as a gun barked upstairs. “They got me arm,” the kid howled, and let go, holding his pistol in his left paw.

  I guess he was mad enough to be lucky. There was a dull, thudding noise that turned my stomach, and a brief use of the flashlight showed me what was left of the lawyer.

  I said: “I think that’s all but Lamba.” At the same time the ugly man’s voice screamed: “I give up, I give up.”

  A dozen flashlights picked him out, standing on the parapet of the roof. He was holding his hands high, and his twisted brown face was yellow with fear.

  A parapet is no place to stand when you’re shaking. He shook once too much, lurched, and—

  THERE isn’t much more to tell. With Adam wanting to believe our story, and Lee talking pidgin-English so that they couldn’t trip him on details, the whole thing was written off as a kidnaping, with the gang dead. The only one we had taken alive, the clumsy gunner, was too scared to give a coherent story; he was willing to accuse Lamba of anything, so long as he could cop a minor plea. He got twenty years, later, which was less than he deserved.

  My trick of shaking the fountain-pen helped, too. Because when the cops found a safeful of money, and the chemists showed that there was a trail of ink, from my fountain-pen—or of the same brand, to be legal—from the little room to the safe in the office, it showed I had been there.

  And as the sole survivor who would talk English, my explanation went.

  That night, though, when I went back to my apartment, I guess I looked pretty bad; I’d certainly fallen down often enough. A bullet had taken away one of my lapels, too, which was a freakish thing. I informed the three Chinese that their twenty thousand dollars had been recovered, along with some other money, and that the cops would transmit it to me to send to them as soon as possible.

  Mr. Lee translated that to his elder colleagues. One of them whistled something in Chinese, and Lee said: “My elder colleague wishes to know, please, what is your fee, Chief Van Eyck?”

  “I’m going to charge you a little more than I usually do,” I said. “The work has been hard. Five hundred dollars. I have to buy two new suits out of that.”

  LEE translated that. The other old man grunted something, and Lee told me: “It is not enough. That small a fee would leave us indebted to you.”

  “All right. Five hundred and whatever the suits cost. And by the way, anybody want a beer?”

  The oldest of the elder colleagues stopped leaning on his cane, and said: “If you have any light beer. I loathe dark beer, don’t you, Gow?”

  The other one said: “Yes, I have no use at all for dark beer. But before you get the beer, Chief—do you play poker?” I gulped and said I did. And for the rest of the evening we played. They had to wait for their train, you see, and I didn’t feel like going to bed at five in the morning.

  As a matter of fact, they won more than five hundred bucks from me. Don’t ever let anyone tell you Chinese can’t play poker.

  So I was pretty surprised when my fee came a week later; it was five hundred one-dollar bills—and they were encased in a solid gold box.

  There was a note in it: “From the Lee Chow Far to Chief Van Eyck—Who Always Tells the Truth.”

  I don’t know whether they were kidding me or not. But from the time I me: Lamba till the time the case was closed. I never told anyone a single lie.

  If they chose to misunderstand the truth I handed them—that’s their fault.

  KILLERS MUST ADVERTISE

  H.H. Stinson

  Detective Hennessy knew that Mileaway Hackett was a killer. But to establish the gangster’s guilt, the detective had to taunt Hackett into murdering him.

  WHEN the coppers released Harry “Mileaway” Hackett after the killing of Gloria Forbes, it made the fifth straight time they had felt certain of his connection with a crime and been unable to do anything about it.

  When a man injects foresight and clever planning into the matter of having an alibi, he expects to reap the benefits of hard work. And the nickname “Mileaway” had been earned by his ability to prove—well enough to satisfy legal requirements—that he had been at least a mile away from the scene of each of the five crimes at the moment each had happened.

  So Gloria Forbes had been buried, and Mileaway had gone back to his private concerns, which the police suspected had something to do with dope-peddling. But they weren’t able to prove that.

  Mileaway was a smart guy, too smart for the coppers. And they didn’t like that.

  One of the coppers who particularly didn’t like it was ham-handed, red-headed Detective Lieutenant Hennessy, who at ten o’clock one evening stood in the darkness across from the York Hotel.

  At quarter to eleven, Hennessy saw Mileaway step from the hotel and roll away in a taxi. Ten minutes later, Hennessy picked up a suitcase that had been out of sight in a darkened doorway and walked across to the York.

  At the desk, a dark, sleek young man presented the register.

  “Just a minute, friend,” Hennessy said, lowering his voice so that the clerk had to lean over to hear him. “I’m superstitious about hotel rooms. Any room is good enough for me as long as it’s number Four-twenty-one. Get it?”

  The clerk said coldly: “Sorry. Room Four-twenty-one is occupied.”

  “You’re wrong,” Hennessy said, palming the gold and enamel of his badge. “Pete Vasconi did occupy it, but he left tonight on a two weeks’ vacation. He left from the police court where the judge gave him two weeks for vag. So I’ll move in and save him the rent.”

  He fixed the clerk with cold blue eyes. “This is all under cover, see? So give me the room and then keep your trap shut or you’ll be in trouble.”

  The clerk hesitated and then, overawed by the chilly fire in Hennessy’s gaze, reached for the key to room 421. He gave it to a bellhop with orders to remove Vasconi’s belongings, and Hennessy and the bellhop went to the elevator.

  As soon as the elevator shot up, the clerk got on the phone. It took him thirty minutes to locate Mileaway, and when he did, he said into the phone, low-voiced: “Listen, Mr. Hackett. This is Sam at the hotel. Listen, there’s a dick chiseled his way into the room next to yours. . . . No, sir, I don’t know, but I thought I ought to warn you. He’s up there now. . . . Don’t let him know I told you, Mr. Hackett.”

  INSIDE of fifteen minutes, a taxi drove up the alley behind the York. Mileaway and two men got out of it. One of the men didn’t look out of his early twenties but he had dead-gray eyes in a sulky, pastyskinned face. The other was older with graying hair and a flat expressionless face.

  They went into the hotel through the service entrance, walked up four flights of stairs without encountering anyone. In front of 419, Mileaway gestured for silence.

  “Stick around out here,” he whispered to the gray-haired man. “If you hear any uproar in my room, you and Eddie know what to do.”

  He put his key in the lock noisily, opened the door and pushed up the light switch. The lights revealed Hennessy on his knees beside the wall that separated 419 and 421. He looked startled. His red hair was rumpled, and there
were beads of sweat on his forehead.

  His huge hands held a small brace and bit, and there was crumbled plaster on the floor behind the dresser which had been pushed out from the wall. The plaster came from a circle of small holes that had been drilled in the wall.

  Mileaway, dark and sleek and well-dressed, stood in the doorway, grinning. “Don’t mind me, Hennessy,” he said. Hennessy looked chagrined. He put the brace and bit down alongside a small leather box, a loop of wire, and a flashlight.

  “Hello, Mileaway,” he said.

  “In the wrong room, aren’t you, Hennessy?” Mileaway’s tone was light, but there was no mirth in his eyes. His well-barbered head was thrust forward, and the tiny dark mustache on his upper lip heightened the tightness of his mouth.

  “I still have an idea,” Hennessy told him, “that you were mixed up in that Gloria Forbes killing.”

  “You still think I bumped her, do you?”

  “No, but you know who did and why.”

  Mileaway’s eyes took in the litter on the floor. He touched the brace and bit with a patent-leather toe and stooped to pick up the leather box. A flat black apparatus slid out into his hand, and he nodded.

  He said scornfully: “A dictograph, hunh?”

  Hennessy shrugged. “They work sometimes.”

  “This one won’t work any more,” Mileaway said.

  He dropped the dictograph ear on the floor. It rolled a few inches and came to rest. Hennessy bent for it, but Mileaway’s heel came down on the apparatus first. He bore down, and it snapped.

  His right hand balled into a fist. “I’ve got a notion to slap you around for that.”

  “Then get over the notion,” Mileaway snapped. “If you got a warrant for me, serve it. If you haven’t—get out! You got no legal right in my room and you know it.”

  Hennessy shrugged and began to collect the wire, the pieces of the dictograph ear, the brace and bit, the flashlight.

  Watching him, Mileaway said: “Hennessy, I knew cops were dumb, but you’re the dumbest of the lot. Did you think you could get anywhere crashing in here and planting a dick on me?”