Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  “Maybe I better take a quick look at the garage in the back before we ring the front doorbell,” he suggested.

  “No.” Carrie said. “I prefer to see our client first.”

  The grounds were thickly planted with shrubs and small birches. Beyond the driveway was a denser growth of scrub oak and pine. The house itself looked gaunt and lonely in the slant of the rain. It was three stories, with a high, peaked roof out of which poked a large square concrete chimney. It was dark except for the faint gleam of light from a shuttered living room window on the ground floor.

  Aleck had snapped off his lamps as soon as he turned into the driveway. He locked the sedan carefully and followed Carrie. He asked:

  “You sure you don’t want me to have a look in the garage for that Buick?”

  “No. There’s something of more immediate importance. Observe carefully every person we meet inside—and listen for the sound of my pencil.”

  Aleck grinned. “The pencil gag, eh? Okay.”

  IN another moment, the front door opened. A very pretty blonde stared out at the two dripping figures on the doorstep. Aleck did the explaining. The blonde’s pale face lighted with quick relief.

  “Thank God!” she said. “I was afraid the storm would keep you away. Come in.”

  She led them to an attractive living room where a big wood fire was crackling cheerfully in a perfectly enormous old fireplace. The room was warm, almost uncomfortably so.

  “Tell me about your father’s disappearance,” Carrie prompted.

  “Clarence Baylor isn’t my father,” the girl said. She had blue eyes and a shy, attractive smile. I guess I forgot to——”

  “Aren’t you Kate Baylor?”

  “No. I’m Mrs. Marjorie Baylor. Kate is my sister-in-law. I married her brother Ned. We both came here to help take charge, as soon as we learned of—of what happened. Kate is upstairs, asleep. She’s been terribly upset and nervous. She didn’t want me to call in a detective, but I——”

  Her voice broke off in sudden surprise. Stealthy footsteps sounded in the hallway. A girl appeared from the direction of the rear staircase.

  “Kate!” Marjorie exclaimed. “You startled me! I thought you were fast asleep.”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Kate replied. Her tone was hurried and sullen. “A little while ago I heard a queer noise that woke me up. It sounded like a distant explosion—perhaps down near the railroad.”

  Her eyes flicked toward Carrie Cashin.

  “Did you people come from that direction?” she added.

  “Yes,” Carrie said. She added coolly: “There’s a WPA road gang down there. They were blasting stumps.”

  “Oh,” Kate said.

  She sounded indifferent, but there was no indifference in her dark eyes. Her hair, too, was dark, almost blue-black. She was fully dressed. Carrie noticed, without glancing directly at her low-heeled shoes, that there was a film of fresh mud along the soles of Kate Baylor’s shoes.

  Aleck had noticed the mud, too. His eyes narrowed. Carrie took a notebook and a pencil from a pocket of her tweed jacket.

  “Suppose you tell me the facts of your father’s disappearance,” Carrie suggested.

  “Marjorie can tell you what little there is,” Kate Baylor said shortly. “I wasn’t in favor of calling in detectives. I’m not so sure there is any crime to investigate. My father may have vanished for perfectly sound reasons of his own. I—I——”

  She began to cry suddenly. She sat down, her tremulous hands over her eyes. Her blond sister-in-law begged her to go back to bed, but Kate refused. She kept sniffing softly while Marjorie told Carrie Cashin the facts surrounding the strange disappearance of her father-in-law.

  ONE week ago, Clarence Baylor had entered the rear door of his home while his daughter Kate delayed a few minutes outside to put the car in the garage. When Kate entered, she bolted the door on the inside, as she always did. She called to her father, but got no reply. Alarmed, she searched the ground floor, but found no trace of him. Nor was he in any other part of the house. He had simply entered—and vanished!

  “Why couldn’t he have slipped out by the front door, through one of the windows, or perhaps down the cellar?” Carrie asked.

  That was impossible, Marjorie declared. The sobbing Kate lifted her face for an instant and nodded agreement. The house was an old one, with old-fashioned bolts on the inside of all the doors. Kate had bolted the kitchen door on the inside when she had come in. The front door was likewise barred. So was the door leading to the cellar. And there were steel, burglar-proof catches on all the windows, none of which had been tampered with. Obviously, Clarence Baylor couldn’t have slipped out and then rebolted a door or a window behind him.

  Somewhere inside the house he had swiftly dissolved into nothingness!

  “Do you know any reason why your father should deliberately disappear?” Carrie asked Baylor’s darkeyed daughter.

  “No. He was a retired broker with an ample income and no worries.”

  Kate had stopped weeping. She relapsed into silence, staring at the roaring flames in the fireplace, as if she found the questioning a nuisance.

  Marjorie described how she and her husband Ned had called in the local police to search the house, after arriving in response to Kate’s telegram. The police had tapped every inch of the old structure in a hunt for secret rooms or passages. They found no hollow spot. The walls were solid from cellar to garret. And the scuttle to the roof was nailed tight from the inside!

  “By the way,” Carrie asked casually, “is Ned here tonight?”

  “He went to town on an errand,” Marjorie smiled wanly. “We call it town; it’s really just a village.”

  “A bad night for driving a car,” Aleck drawled.

  “Ned didn’t take the car. There’s something wrong with it. He told me he was going to use his motorcycle.”

  CARRIE’S pencil began to tap idly against the cover of her notebook. Aleck leaned forward, listening.

  “Any servants in the house?” Carrie asked.

  Kate Baylor’s dark eyes swung away from the fire before Marjorie could reply.

  “We used to have an old fool here named Peter. A man of all work. He was impudent and lazy. Father fired him last week.”

  Without being asked to, she got up suddenly and rummaged in the drawer of a desk. She handed Carrie a faded snapshot of the discharged servant. Peter was an untidy, powerful-looking man with tousled gray hair and a stubble of beard. His eyes were clear and alert. He didn’t look at all like an “old fool.”

  Carrie’s pencil began again its idle tapping against the cover of her opened notebook. She was calmly tapping out dots and dashes in the Morse Code. Her message was terse:

  Examine garage. Check on condition of Buick. Look for black slicker and slouch hat worn by girl at railroad crossing.

  Aleck rose to his feet. “I forgot to close the window of our sedan to keep out the rain,” he told Carrie. “I’ll be back in a few moments.”

  He put on his hat and raincoat and went out the front door.

  He had scarcely left when Clarence Baylor’s daughter swayed suddenly on the sofa. She got up with a smothered gasp. Marjorie went over to her with a murmur of concern.

  Kate’s face was pale under her dark hair.

  “I feel a little faint. If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go upstairs to my room and lie down again.”

  She disappeared toward the rear staircase. Carrie Cashin made no comment. She was staring into the dancing flames in the fireplace. There was a faint smile on her lips. But her eyes were enigmatic.

  ALECK went first toward his own sedan, in case anyone might be watching from the house. Instantly, he made a startling discovery. There was a pool of spilled gasoline on the rain-soaked earth behind the car. A few lazy drops were still oozing from the bottom of the tank.

  The tank had been deliberately pierced with a sharp-pointed tool!

  The inference was plain. Someone had made grimly certain that
the two detectives would remain at the Baylor house.

  Shielded by the car, Aleck studied the house through the pelting rain. His eyes lifted slowly toward the roof. Suddenly, he stiffened with amazement. A crouching figure was dimly visible on the peak of the slanting roof.

  The dark figure rose to its feet. A knotted rope hung downward from the stout branch of an oak tree that swept diagonally above the roof. The man caught at the rope and began to climb with swift agility. He disappeared into the thick foliage of the tree, drawing the rope up after him.

  Aleck tiptoed along the edge of the driveway. He moved cautiously, taking advantage of the cover afforded him by clumps of dripping bushes. Reaching the foot of the oak in the rear of the house, he waited, his gun steady under the flap of his raincoat.

  No one descended from above.

  Nearly five minutes went by before Aleck realized the truth. Having made sure that the oak was sturdy and its trunk solid, without any hollow, he stepped backward and glanced aloft.

  The foliage was thick. It spread like a dark, interlaced curtain in the rain. Other trees were close by. A powerful man, moving quietly aloft, could easily swing from one limb to another and make his way overhead to some point farther back in the grounds.

  Crossing the driveway, Aleck discovered something else. The print of a tire mark on the soft earth! Just a single impression, and narrower than the tire of an automobile would make. A motorcycle track!

  Beyond the edge of the drive a pale face seemed to peer for an instant as the wind lashed at the thickly planted shrubbery. Aleck made a wide circle toward the spot. He cursed under his breath when he reached it. The thing he had noticed was the pale, whitish bark of a birch. The swaying bushes had made it seem like the glimmer of a peering face.

  But there was a narrow dirt path winding past the birch. The mark of the motorcycle tire was plainly visible. Aleck followed the trail deeper into the grounds. It ended at the door of a small shack that looked like a tool house.

  Aleck hesitated. Carrie Cashin’s tapping pencil had directed him to search the garage and examine the automobile which Kate Baylor’s sister-in-law had said was damaged. From the heavily wooded spot where he now stood, Aleck could no longer see either the house or the garage.

  But he fought down his uneasiness. He decided to examine the tool house first.

  CHAPTER III.

  CARRIE’S CLUE.

  IN a moment or two, he had the wooden door open. Closing it behind him, he snapped on his torch. The first thing he saw was a motorcycle. It stood near the wall, supported by the metal stand beneath its rear wheel. The engine was warm. Someone had driven it recently through the rainy fury of a black, unpleasant night.

  Aleck’s mind veered instantly to the man he had seen climb upward from the Baylor roof to the overhanging oak tree. It could be none other than the mysteriously absent Ned Baylor! Aware of Aleck’s accidental discovery of him, Ned Baylor had beaten a hasty retreat from the roof in order to hide his motorcycle. He had hidden it in the one spot where it was reasonably safe from discovery—the abandoned sleeping quarters of a man who no longer lived on the estate.

  The hut belonged to the grayhaired man of all work, Peter. There was a bed, a cheap bureau and a chair in the room.

  Two or three snapshots of the old handy man were stuck in the corner of a bureau mirror, that stood alongside the bed. The bed was neatly made up, its covers folded back. The only jarring note to the effect of neatness was the pillow. Someone had dripped two or three blobs of muddy water on it.

  Aleck turned back the bed covers. Underneath was a hidden rifle.

  Aleck examined the weapon. For a moment, he was mystified. One shot had been fired very recently. And yet Aleck had heard no sound. The weapon itself provided the answer to the riddle. The rifle was operated by a powerful spring, its mechanism released by the pressure of compressed air. The lever under the barrel was an air pump. Someone with a knowledge of firearms had converted the small-caliber rifle into a grimly silent air gun!

  The discovery prompted Aleck to make a swift and complete search of old Peter’s room. He didn’t find anything more until he moved the bureau away from the wall. Then he discovered the very objects for which Carrie Cashin had ordered him to search. A black slicker and a gray felt hat were wadded in a tight ball behind the bureau. They were still soggy from rain!

  Sniffing the inside of the slicker, Aleck smelled the faint odor of perfume. He was aware, with sudden tension, that he had found the garments worn by the disguised girl who had tried to blow up Carrie and himself at the railroad crossing!

  Snapping off the torch, he stepped out into the storm. There was no sound except the beat of the rain and the rustling of wind-tossed branches above his head. He raced onward like a flitting black shadow, emerged in the clearing between the rear of the Baylor house and the garage.

  THE garage door was locked. A powerful padlock protected it. But Aleck grinned as he slipped a short, tapering bar of steel from an inner pocket. He attacked, not the padlock, but the hasp which held it in place. People always forgot that a lock was no stronger than the hasp which secured it. This one was cast iron, and rusted from long service. It snapped under evenly applied pressure, leaving the expensive padlock hanging uselessly.

  Aleck was opening the door cautiously when a sudden feeling that he was under observation caused him to whirl and peer backward. The rear of the Baylor home loomed dark and silent. But lifting his eyes, Aleck saw sudden movement at one of the windows on the second floor. There was a gap of six inches or so at the bottom of the window, where the shade had been lifted. The shade descended as Aleck peered.

  But in that quick instant, he recognized a vanishing face. It was the pale countenance of Kate Baylor. Hidden in her bedroom, she had been watching Aleck’s movements through a pair of opera glasses! The same dark-eyed girl whose shoes had been filmed with mud when she had appeared with a yawn in the living room, to announce that she had been fast asleep! : “Asleep hell!” Aleck thought.

  He moved grimly inside the garage. As he had expected, the car parked inside was a blue Buick, the same one that had passed him and Carrie on the road just before they had halted at the railroad crossing.

  Aleck tried the motor as soon as he discovered the car was not locked. The engine didn’t work! He lifted the hood and found that the stalled engine was merely the result of a hasty attempt to provide an alibi. Someone had tampered clumsily with the distributor points. The moment they were adjusted, the engine purred with power.

  Aleck sniffed inside the car, hoping to get a whiff of the same perfume he had smelled on the slicker he had found hidden in Peter’s sleeping shack. He was disappointed. But he smelled something equally unusual—the faint reek of kerosene.

  He backed out of the Buick.

  “Stand still!” a voice snarled behind him. “If you move, I’ll blow your spine apart!”

  ALECK could see the reflection of his enemy in the glass of the open car door. The man was standing near the rear, wall of the garage. He had entered from the back without sound. The gun in his hand was grimly steady.

  “Drop your pistol!”

  Aleck obeyed. He had plenty of courage, but he was not a fool.

  “Okay. Kick it toward me.”

  Aleck turned slowly, both hands raised above his head. He had never seen his captor before. A young man with a lean, taut face and eyes as hard as his aimed pistol. He said:

  “Caught you, eh? Where the hell did you drive that car tonight?”

  “I didn’t drive it anywhere. I found it here.”

  “You lie! You stole it. It was missing a while ago.”

  He circled warily behind his prisoner. His gun muzzle prodded into Aleck’s back.

  “What were you doing up on the roof?” Aleck asked softly.

  “Huh?”

  “Where did you learn to climb trees like Tarzan?”

  “Damn you, what are you talking about!”

  The pressure of the gun in Aleck
’s spine lessened for an instant. It was all the break Aleck needed. He knew his captor was not a professional crook the moment the gunman had stepped directly behind his victim. No professional crook would have ever made that mistake—and Aleck proved it with lightning speed.

  His right leg kicked fiercely backward. The heel of his shoe crashed against the gunman’s shin. There was a howl of pain and the man bent over in agony.

  Aleck’s fist cocked itself as he whirled. The blow crashed against his captor’s jaw dropping him in a tangled huddle, Aleck, grabbed the fallen gun and picked up his own.

  “Get up on your feet! Walk ahead of me into the back door of the Baylor house—or I’ll do a little spine-smashing with a bullet!”

  They crossed through the dark slant of rain and climbed the short flight of wooden steps that led to the Baylor kitchen, The door was bolted on the inside. Aleck yelled.

  THERE was a quick rush of feet inside, then the door opened. Carrie Cashin was visible, her businesslike little palm gun ready for instant action.

  Her red lips hardened at sight of the prisoner.

  “Take him into the living room, Aleck!”

  There was a scream as Aleck prodded his captive into the warm room where flames leaped cheerfully in the big fireplace. The scream came from Marjorie Baylor.

  “Ned! What in heaven’s name

  “Is this man your husband?” Carrie asked evenly.

  “Yes.” Marjorie Baylor’s eyes were suddenly sick with apprehension. “Ned, what have you done? These people are here to help us. They’re detectives!”

  “Detectives?” Ned’s eyes blinked and became suddenly veiled.

  “I—I guess I made a mistake. I thought this guy had stolen our Buick. I—I caught him out in the garage”—his face twisted into a ghastly smile—or rather, he caught me.