Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  The grinder sounded, as Lanigan came out of the office, gratingly, persistently, rising and falling in a monotonous dirge that seemed to announce over and over that this was a place of death.

  Lanigan shivered and walked back across the cement flooring to the room in the rear where the watchman worked. He believed that Gabrillo, if he came, would first overpower the watchman. He’d take no chances on being interrupted while he was opening the safe. But it might be hours yet before Gabrillo arrived. Lanigan moved forward, stealthily, planning to hide himself, wait in silence and catch Gabrillo red-handed.

  He jerked to a sudden stop. Every muscle in his body tautened. There was a deathly cold feeling along his scalp. He stood as though rooted. For something hard had been pressed against the middle of his back, and a harsh voice sounded plainly above the rumble of the grinder. “Don’t go for your gun, copper—or you’ll get it sure.”

  Lanigan turned his head ever so slightly. His tongue felt suddenly hot and dry in his mouth. He was conscious of rage and disappointment so keen that it seemed to numb his whole body. He knew that voice. The face of Mike Gabrillo, ugly, pockmarked, vicious, stared out of the gloom behind. Mike Gabrillo’s thick lips were drawn back over his cracked teeth in a mirthless grin. And in the peterman’s black eyes was a look of unholy, cruel triumph.

  For an instant, fury drove Lanigan to risk everything in a quick attack, regardless of the cold snout of the gun against him. But Gabrillo’s huge hand was steady as rock. Lanigan knew that the instant he flicked so much as a single muscle Gabrillo would send a bullet crashing into his spine.

  Gabrillo spoke between clenched teeth, softly, menacingly. “Lanny—the hero cop who got himself made into a detective! Lanny—who’d like to make himself a big shot by landing his old pal, Mike Gabrillo, in the chair. Frisk him, Johnny.”

  Another figure came softly out of the gloom carrying a satchel. He was a young, chalk-faced gunman with eyes as lifeless as a snake’s. He dropped the satchel. His thin hands passed over Lanigan’s clothing, removed his automatic, while Gabrillo still held the gun steady against his back.

  Gabrillo gloated, then scowled blackly. “That lousy dame squealed! I get it now. And little Lanny, the hero cop, thought he’d make a killing. He went around to the bank, snooped out about the dough and came here to park.” Gabrillo showed his fang-like teeth. “You didn’t figure how fast a worker I am. There’s an old saying, copper, that the early bird catches the worm.”

  The dead-eyed gunman who had frisked Lanigan stood waiting.

  “Get some rope, Johnny,” Gabrillo said. “We’re going to tie up this bum. Then we’ll tease him.”

  Sweat beaded Lanigan’s forehead. Helpless rage filled his heart. He stood waiting while Johnny disappeared. Gabrillo twirled Lanigan’s automatic, holding his own gun steady. “Ever since we were kids,” he said, “I’ve hated your guts, Lanny. This is a break for me. This is gonna be fun. You wanted to be a cop, and now you are one. That makes it still better. You’ve had it coming to you a long time, and tonight you’re gonna get it!”

  “You know what happens to cop killers,” said Lanigan through slitted lips.

  Gabrillo smiled hideously. “Sure, sure, I know. But even the best D.A. can’t do a thing if they don’t find a body. You came to the right place, Lanny, if you wanted to disappear. Hear that?”

  Lanigan heard it, the dull, steady throb of the grinder as the old watchman worked, unmindful of the thing going on so close to him. A look of sadistic hate filled the eyes of Mike, made them shine in the semi-darkness like a leopard’s. “I always was a neat worker,” he said. “Tonight it’s going to be two birds with one stone.” He kicked the satchel of tools that his assistant had dropped. “Those will fix up that box in there, and that grinder will take care of you—after I’ve bumped you.”

  Lanigan wondered, a little dizzily, what Gabrillo was waiting for, why he didn’t fire the slug that would end it.

  But Gabrillo seemed in no hurry.

  Johnny came back with a length of rope he had found somewhere. They bound Lanigan’s arms and legs securely. Gabrillo caught hold of a twist of it and dragged Lanigan forward, tripping him as though he were already a lifeless carcass. He pulled him as far as the door of the room that held the grinder.

  Lanigan twisted his head. He could see through it, see the old, cadaverous watchman still working. The man was almost finished with his second pile of bones. Now Gabrillo was bringing new grist for the hopper.

  But Gabrillo made a clucking sound and a sudden gesture to Johnny. He clapped a hand over Lanigan’s mouth to prevent any outcry, while Johnny crept forward. Silently as a stalking cat the chalk-faced assistant lessened the distance between himself and the watchman. The old man’s back was turned.

  Johnny was directly behind the unsuspecting watchman now. Lanigan saw him lift his gun by the barrel and bring it down on the old man’s head in a savage, skull-crushing blow. He saw the watchman pitch forward as a man does when life has left him. He saw ruthless murder done before his eyes.

  Gabrillo then dragged him into the room where the slain watchman lay, left him for a moment and walked to the switch, with which he shut off the motor. The rumbling ceased and Gabrillo looked around in gloating triumph.

  Horror pulsed through Lanigan’s veins like icy water as he heard the cracksman’s orders to his assistant.

  “Take off the old guy’s clothes, Johnny,” Gabrillo said. “Then we’ll lay his carcass up there on the block and put this copper beside him. I want to show him how we get rid of carrion. And”—a cunning gleam came into Gabrillo’s eyes—“we ain’t gonna leave any evidence. Take everything out of his pockets, cut off the buttons and burn the clothes in the furnace. Turn on the drafts. They can sift the ashes if they want to—and won’t find nothin’! And that grist won’t tell ’em anything either. That grinder chews too fine. I know—I used to work here.”

  They lifted Lanigan up on the big block beside the still, shriveled body of the old watchman. Gabrillo himself went through Lanigan’s clothes and removed everything from his pockets; his wallet, coins, key ring, and his watch and chain with the silver horseshoe. Gabrillo grinned sardonically as he ripped this off and dangled it. “Luck!” he gloated. “You’ll need it where you’re going! Maybe the devil will give you a break.”

  He tossed the gleaming horseshoe on the pile with the rest of Lanigan’s and the watchman’s belongings. He made sure that Lanigan’s head was turned, so that he could see the fearful work in hand. He picked up the crimson-stained cleaver.

  Even the dead-eyed assistant, Johnny, seemed nervous.

  Holding the cleaver tightly, Gabrillo stalked forward and threw the switch of the motor. The dull throbbing rumble of the grinder commenced again.

  Lanigan lay still and sickened, wondering if this horrible nightmare would ever stop. Yet every nerve in his body was screaming, and he was wide-eyed, alert.

  He saw the cleaver go up above the watchman’s leg. He heard it come down—chop. He closed his eyes, almost sobbing, opened them for a brief instant as Gabrillo leisurely put the cleaver down and tossed something white and wrinkled into the giant hopper.

  Lanigan’s blood seemed to congeal. He shrank within himself, in horrified loathing, as he heard again that vibrating, crunching crack. And, with a wave of dizzying nausea preceding it, his brain suddenly came clear.

  He drew up his trussed legs suddenly, fiercely; lashed out toward the end of the chopping table, with quick, deliberate aim. The instant he did so the grinder stopped with a clacking cough. The dim lights in the packing house went out.

  Gabrillo gave an angry bellow. Lanigan rolled over sidewise with desperate haste. His shifting weight almost tipped the table with him. It tilted. The body of the watchman slid sidewise and fell to the floor.

  Gabrillo was swearing madly. Lanigan heard the sound of striking metal close beside him. He hunched himself forward frantically, moved across the still warm body of the watchman. He groped near his feet
with his tied hands—groped and felt something sharp and sticky. He pressed his fingers under it, drew back and sawed frantically with slashing motions of his wrists. The rope strands gave way.

  With terror gnawing at his stomach, he lifted the cleaver and pressed its sharp edge down on the ropes at his feet. He sawed again quickly, desperately until they parted.

  He rose up trembling as the body of Gabrillo hurled against him in the dark. Fingers of steel clutched at his arm that held the cleaver. A light in the hands of the dead-eyed assistant flashed on. Lanigan looked for an instant into the sloe-black eyes of Gabrillo, face to face, again grappling in fierce combat, as they had when they were kids.

  Lanigan’s brain worked like lightning. A quick coup was his only chance. Johnny held a gun and was only waiting a chance to shoot. Physically Lanigan knew he was no match for Gabrillo. The man was twenty pounds heavier and built like a gorilla. Lanigan pushed the cracksman back in a sudden, calculated shove.

  Gabrillo’s heels came against the fallen body of the watchman. He tripped and Lanigan and he went down in a fighting, clawing heap.

  Gabrillo’s gun was out. He tried to use it, tried to twist up and shoot Lanigan in the stomach. Lanigan saw flame spurt, felt the hot lash of lead along his side. He got his right hand free for an instant, swung it around and brought the flat side of the cleaver against Gabrillo’s head.

  He felt Gabrillo shudder, wilt. Lanigan dropped the cleaver and plucked the gun from his flexing hand. He whirled and flung himself backwards as the gun in the fingers of the chalk-faced assistant belched flame twice.

  Something twitched at the side of Lanigan’s coat sleeve. He pressed the trigger of Gabrillo’s gun, saw flame spurt, and heard the chalk-faced assistant give a cry. The light dropped, and the next instant a falling body slapped the floor.

  Lanigan straightened, walked stiff-legged a dozen feet and picked up the flash. He sprayed it over Johnny’s torso, saw the hole in the cloth of the coat, and the soggy stain. He turned and pointed it at Gabrillo and saw that the cracksman was breathing but still knocked out.

  There came a sound of pounding fists on the door that led to the street. Lanigan opened it, and the cop he had spoken to outside barged in. He held a flashlight, too, played it over the room, while Lanigan spoke slowly.

  “Mike Gabrillo there almost got me,” he said. “He was going to feed me into the grinder the way he’d started to do with the watchman that his punk assistant killed. But the motor stopped, the lights went out, and I had a chance to fight it out with him in the dark.”

  “I saw them go and figured there must be something wrong in here,” said the cop. “Lucky for you that the fuses blew when they did.”

  “Lucky!” said Lanigan softly. A thin smile twitched his lips. He pointed to the control box of the motor that turned the grinder, pointed to the slot on top where the lever switch moved. He walked over suddenly, fished down with two stiff fingers and drew something out. It was a blackened pit of metal—a silver horseshoe. He wonderingly looked at it himself for a moment, shook his head.

  “Call it luck if you want to—but I kicked this and the rest of the stuff off the end of the table, figuring I might drop something in the right place, make a short circuit and stop the works. It was the only chance I had, so I took it. But the chief, old Cochran, is right. Even a horseshoe can’t bring a guy good luck—unless he goes out after the breaks himself.

  I’LL BE WAITING

  Raymond Chandler

  AT ONE O’ CLOCK in the morning, Carl, the night porter, turned down the last of three table lamps in the main lobby of the Windermere Hotel. The blue carpet darkened a shade or two and the walls drew back into remoteness. The chairs filled with shadowy loungers. In the corners were memories like cobwebs.

  Tony Reseck yawned. He put his head on one side and listened to the frail, twittery music from the radio room beyond a dim arch at the far side of the lobby. He frowned. That should be his radio room after one A.M. Nobody should be in it. That red-haired girl was spoiling his nights.

  The frown passed and a miniature of a smile quirked at the corners of his lips. He sat relaxed, a short, pale, paunchy, middle-aged man with long, delicate fingers clasped on the elk’s tooth on his watch chain; the long delicate fingers of a sleight-of-hand artist, fingers with shiny, molded nails and tapering first joints, fingers a little spatulate at the ends. Handsome fingers. Tony Reseck rubbed them gently together and there was peace in his quiet sea-gray eyes.

  The frown came back on his face. The music annoyed him. He got up with a curious litheness, all in one piece, without moving his clasped hands from the watch chain. At one moment he was leaning back relaxed, and the next he was standing balanced on his feet, perfectly still, so that the movement of rising seemed to be a thing perfectly perceived, an error of vision . . . .

  He walked with small, polished shoes delicately across the blue carpet and under the arch. The music was louder. It contained the hot, acid blare, the frenetic, jittering runs of a jam session. It was too loud. The red-haired girl sat there and stared silently at the fretted part of the big radio cabinet as though she could see the band with its fixed professional grin and the sweat running down its back. She was curled up with her feet under her on a davenport which seemed to contain most of the cushions in the room. She was tucked among them carefully, like a corsage in the florist’s tissue paper.

  She didn’t turn her head. She leaned there, one hand in a small fist on her peach-colored knee. She was wearing lounging pajamas of heavy ribbed silk embroidered with black lotus buds.

  “You like Goodman, Miss Cressy?” Tony Reseck asked.

  The girl moved her eyes slowly. The light in there was dim, but the violet of her eyes almost hurt. They were large, deep eyes without a trace of thought in them. Her face was classical and without expression.

  She said nothing.

  Tony smiled and moved his fingers at his sides, one by one, feeling them move. “You like Goodman, Miss Cressy?” he repeated gently.

  “Not to cry over,” the girl said tonelessly.

  Tony rocked back on his heels and looked at her eyes. Large, deep, empty eyes. Or were they? He reached down and muted the radio.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” the girl said. “Goodman makes money, and a lad that makes legitimate money these days is a lad you have to respect. But this jitterbug music gives me the backdrop of a beer flat. I like something with roses in it.”

  “Maybe you like Mozart,” Tony said.

  “Go on, kid me,” the girl said.

  “I wasn’t kidding you, Miss Cressy. I think Mozart was the greatest man that ever lived—and Toscanini is his prophet.”

  “I thought you were the house dick.” She put her head back on a pillow and stared at him through her lashes.

  “Make me some of that Mozart,” she added.

  “It’s too late,” Tony sighed. “You can’t get it now.”

  She gave him another long lucid glance. “Got the eye on me, haven’t you, flatfoot?” She laughed a little, almost under her breath. “What did I do wrong?”

  Tony smiled his toy smile. “Nothing, Miss Cressy. Nothing at all. But you need some fresh air. You’ve been five days in this hotel and you haven’t been outdoors. And you have a tower room.”

  She laughed again. “Make me a story about it. I’m bored.”

  “There was a girl here once had your suite. She stayed in the hotel a whole week, like you. Without going out at all, I mean. She didn’t speak to anybody hardly. What do you think she did then?”

  The girl eyed him gravely. “She jumped her bill.”

  He put his long delicate hand out and turned it slowly, fluttering the fingers, with an effect almost like a lazy wave breaking. “Unh-uh. She sent down for her bill and paid it. Then she told the hop to be back in half an hour for her suitcases. Then she went out on her balcony.”

  The girl leaned forward a little, her eyes still grave, one hand capping her peach-colored knee. “What did you sa
y your name was?”

  “Tony Reseck.”

  “Sounds like a hunky.”

  “Yeah,” Tony said. “Polish.”

  “Go on, Tony.”

  “All the tower suites have private balconies, Miss Cressy. The walls of them are too low for fourteen stories above the street. It was a dark night, that night, high clouds.” He dropped his hand with a final gesture, a farewell gesture. “Nobody saw her jump. But when she hit, it was like a big gun going off.”

  “You’re making it up, Tony.” Her voice was a clean dry whisper of sound.

  He smiled his toy smile. His quiet sea-gray eyes seemed almost to be smoothing the long waves of her hair. “Eve Cressy,” he said musingly. “A name waiting for lights to be in.”

  “Waiting for a tall dark guy that’s no good, Tony. You wouldn’t care why. I was married to him once. I might be married to him again. You can make a lot of mistakes in just one lifetime.” The hand on her knee opened slowly until the fingers were strained back as far as they would go. Then they closed quickly and tightly, and even in that dim light the knuckles shone like the little polished bones. “I played him a low trick once. I put him in a bad place—without meaning to. You wouldn’t care about that either. It’s just that I owe him something.”

  He leaned over softly and turned the knob on the radio. A waltz formed itself dimly on the warm air. A tinsel waltz, but a waltz. He turned the volume up. The music gushed from the loudspeaker in a swirl of shadowed melody. Since Vienna died, all waltzes are shadowed.

  The girl put her hand on one side and hummed three or four bars and stopped with a sudden tightening of her mouth.

  “Eve Cressy,” she said. “It was in lights once. At a bum night club. A dive. They raided it and the lights went out.”

  He smiled at her almost mockingly. “It was no dive while you were there, Miss Cressy . . . That’s the waltz the orchestra always played when the old porter walked up and down in front of the hotel entrance, all swelled up with his medals on his chest. The Last laugh. Emil Jannings. You wouldn’t remember that one, Miss Cressy.”