Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  Grady could spread it on and make it stick when he was in the mood. He was out of his chair, waddling around his desk and apologizing all over the place.

  “Dumont! Oh, I’m sorry I kept you waiting! Tell you the truth, you completely slipped my mind.

  You see, we’ve caught the prowler who—”

  Gregory Dumont’s anger evaporated immediately. “Already? That’s good news. I can quite forgive you for forgetting my presence. Has he confessed the murder?”

  “Not yet, but—Well, as long as you’ve waited this long, I suppose we might as well have a stenographer take down your statement. It’ll only take a minute or two, and we’ll have it on record. That is, if you can spare the time.”

  Gregory Dumont positively beamed upon Grady. “Of course I can! All the time you want. Sorry I was so rude. I didn’t understand—”

  “It’s all right,” Grady said, patting him on the shoulder. “Help yourself to a chair and I’ll ring in a pencil pusher.”

  But, just as Grady gets back to his desk, Dead Pan Craddock sticks his neck in the door and says the man is here; so Grady nods and a couple of the homicide boys bring in Eddie Carlisle.

  He’s a pretty boy with the kind of profile that has made some guys rich and famous. Also, he’s got little touches of gray at the temples that give him an air of distinction. And he looks like he’s been getting a lot of everything but sleep.

  He shuffled into the room without seeming to see much of anything until Grady spoke to him; then he looked up. His mouth was trembling.

  “They say,” he appealed to Grady, “that Lola’s dead. I . . . I can’t believe it. Tell me. It’s just a gag, isn’t it? Lola’s all right . . . in the next room, maybe? She isn’t dead—”

  Grady muttered and chewed his cigar savagely, but he took Eddie Carlisle’s topcoat and steered him into a chair.

  “Just take it easy,” he advised. “When did you get in town?”

  “Eh? Oh, this morning. Drove all night because I was so damned crazy to see Lola. It’s been a year since we split up—”

  “You sent her a wire,” Grady said raspingly. “Said you were coming to get her.”

  “That’s right! She was coming back with me again! The dance team of Carlisle and Mendozo! We wowed ’em from coast to coast, and we could do it again! When she wrote me that she was fed up with the night-club racket, I closed my own show in Wichita and came after her, now—”

  “Take it easy,” Grady said. “Now you—”

  The office door banged open and Detective Hadjek swaggered into the room with the bum. They were both smoking cigars.

  “Here we are, chief,” Hadjek announced. “And he ate a dollar’s worth of grub. He still won’t talk. Still insists this Mendoza dame invited him up to her room and—”

  Eddie Carlisle lurched out of his chair, his hands knotted into fists and tears trickling down each side of his classic nose. He lunged across the room, making for the bum.

  “Is this the man? Did he kill Lola?”

  “None of that!” Grady said. He grabbed Carlisle by the arm and led him back to his chair.

  “You owe a lot to that guy,” he added. “If it wasn’t for him, we’d probably, have you charged with your wife’s murder. You ought to be more careful how you word your telegrams.”

  Gregory Dumont was cringing in his chair, eating his fingernails and wearing an expression of acute mal de met on his face.

  “This is terrible,” he expostulated. “Violence always upsets me. I’m sick. Mr. Grady, won’t it be all right if I come back—”

  “Oh, sit tight,” Grady drawled. “It’ll only take a minute or two to get your deposition. Save you all the trouble we can, Dumont. It’s just a matter of form, helps speed courtroom work.”

  “But we don’t need his statement,” said Hadjek. “We got it in the bag. Enough to hang this egg. He crawled through the window and sneaked—”

  “Hadjek!” Grady said sharply.

  “Yes, chief?”

  “Mr. Dumont told me the woman was afraid of prowlers. That means she prob’ly kept the fire-escape window locked.”

  “Well—Aw, what’s the sense of going into that? We got him dead to rights and I’ll get a confession out of him or—”

  Grady flopped into his chair after a warning glance at Carlisle.

  “Anyhow,” he said stubbornly, “she was sitting in front of her dressing table at the time. She could see the window in the mirror.”

  “Aw, what the hell, chief! Maybe she wasn’t looking in the mirror. You’re just making, mountains out of nothing.”

  “Still, she was wearing an evening gown—one of those things without much front and no back. And the wind that’s been blasting out of the northwest the last three days would chill a malemute.”

  Hadjek’s mouth was open. He shut it and swallowed a couple of times, looking from Grady to the bum and back again.

  “I get it, chief,” he muttered. “But look! You don’t believe the cockeyed yarn this guy told us? That the dame called him in—”

  “Why not? As I said before, he couldn’t tell a good lie.”

  One of the stenogs strutted in, pencil and notebook in hand. He looked superciliously at Grady and at his wrist watch.

  Gray said: “Oh, yes! You were going to give us your statement, Dumont. Go right ahead. You left the Casino Habana with Lola Mendoza at about twelve thirty last night. Took a taxi to her place. There was a telegram in her mailbox. Remember?”

  Gregory Dumont took his fingers out of his mouth.

  “I—Really, Mr. Grady, I’d better wait until some other time. I’m all confused, I can’t seem to collect my wits.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I remember what you told me this morning. You went up and had a drink or two, going over the Black Narcissus—”

  “I never said that! I didn’t go up, I went home!”

  “And Lola Mendoza read the telegram she’d received from her husband. She was going back to him. Remember? That meant you’d lost your Black Narcissus. You argued. Finally, in a frenzy of rage, you grabbed up the bottle—Remember? Then, after it was too late, you returned to your senses. You began to think desperately—to plan how you could escape the chair. You enticed this guy out of the alley—” Gregory Dumont hurtled suddenly from his chair. With his eyes flashing fire and his dainty hands clenched into trembling, impotent fists, he screamed hysterically at Hadjek’s prisoner:

  “Damn you! Why didn’t you take the jewelry and get out of town like any ordinary alley rat would’ve done? You’re the dumbest—”

  “Not dumb,” Grady said gently. “Just happened to be your hard luck to pick on a man out of a thousand—a man who was honest though starving.”

  So, after it was all over and Gregory Dumont had affixed his signature to a confession, I turned to Grady with my compliments and apologies.

  “It was a swell job,” I said. “And it’ll make a swell feature story. I’ll see that you get a lot of credit.”

  “You newspaper guys,” he sighed, wagging his head reprovingly. “Always making out like there’s something romantic and glamorous about solving crimes. I don’t know what you see in it; honest, I don’t.”

  DEATH LISTENS IN

  Arthur Leo Zagat

  Wolf Fesden had served eight years in Lornmere Penitentiary, and so no one knew better than he that its reputation as the toughest prison in the State was, if anything, an understatement. Yet he deliberately contrived to have himself nabbed driving a stolen car down Sea City’s principal thoroughfare, deliberately contrived to have himself sentenced to another long stretch at Lornmere.

  Fesden was a veteran crook, as hard as armor plate, as shrewd and cunning and elusive as the gray killer for which he was nicknamed. This self-planned sentence was only one step in his great scheme. The next was to manage being placed in Cell 6, Row C, of Lornmere’s Northeast Cell Block. This took some doing, but eventually he brought it off. Now he was Evar Galt’s cellmate and he started right in worming the o
ld man’s secret out of him.

  Galt proved a harder nut to crack than Fesden had figured. The weeks dragged into months and the months piled up into years and he was still at it.

  Many a night, lights out and the keeper nowhere near, Wolf Fesden’s long fingers itched to clamp on Galt’s scrawny neck and choke the information out of him. Then the thin, sexless voice would start babbling again about the old fool’s daughter Mary, about what a time she was having to keep herself and her three brats alive, and Fesden would settle back to listen to the blasted yarn all over again.

  He heard it so many times he could rattle it off in his sleep. How Mary’s husband Joe, “as fine a lad as ever lived,” had been crushed to death under one of Pierce Ramsdell’s limousines. How Mary couldn’t get to first base with her suit for damages. “No lawyer would take it,” Galt would whine. “She went to a dozen and they all said the same thing. ‘It was your husband’s fault; there was no negligence on the part of the chauffeur.’ But they all lied. The truth of the matter is, they were afraid of going up against Ramsdell.

  They were afraid of what he’d do to them, with his money and his power.” He knew, Evar Galt did, all about how everyone feared the tycoon, for wasn’t he butler in Ramsdell’s very own house?

  “Look,” Fesden said the first time his cellmate got to this point. “Whether the lawyers were right or not, seems to me with all his millions your boss could’ve done something for her, seeing she was your daughter.”

  “He didn’t know Mary was my daughter. How could he? Her married name was different from mine. And even if it hadn’t been, that would have meant nothing. I was only a servant to him, not really a human being but a kind of machine.” There was no resentment in the old man’s voice; he was simply explaining something that to him was self-evident. “The only time he would have been really aware of me was if I made some mistake in performing my duties, and I never did. I was the perfect servant.

  “Yes,” Galt went on, “I’d served them more than twenty years and I was the perfect servant. Which was why, morning after opening night at the opera, madame didn’t think twice about sending me to put her jewel box back in the bank vault, like I’d done hundreds of times.” He chuckled toothlessly. “She handed me half a million dollars’ worth of Ramsdell’s jewels in a casket no bigger than one of those big cameras the news photographers use and I remembered how my Mary and her little ones were faced with starvation and misery because of what Pierce Ramsdell had done to Joe, so this time I didn’t take the jewels to the bank.”

  The blithering ass was nabbed right off, of course, but before he was caught, he’d managed to cache the loot. Nothing could get out of him where, not the cops’ grilling, not Rarnsdell’s bullying or daughter Mary’s tears. Not even the insurance company’s offer not to prosecute if he’d give up the jewels.

  The story had been all over the Sea City newspapers. Wolf Fesden had read everything printed about it, his mouth drooling as he studied the pictures of the stuff that was lying hidden somewhere, the secret of where known only to Evar Galt. When Fesden read about Galt’s being sentenced to Lornmere, he had remembered how first-termers nearly always spilled their guts to the first con who would listen, and the Great Scheme had started bubbling in his brain.

  The old man was anxious enough to talk. Night after night he would blabber his yarn—till it came to telling where he’d cached the jewels. Then a crazy glitter would come into his rheum-rimmed eyes. “When I get out of here,” he’d mumble, “I’ll go get them. Ten years isn’t too long for Mary to wait when there’s comfort, luxury, at the end of them.”

  Just about here he’d have a coughing fit, and when it was over, Wolf Fesden would go to work on him again. He would tell the gasping old man there was no need for Mary and the kids to live in want till he got out. The cunning crook would point out, over and over, that while Galt’s letters, his monthly talks with his daughter, were watched for any tip-off to the whereabouts of the jewels, a code message in his, Fesden’s communication would never be spotted. Again and again he would tell Galt about his imaginary friend on the outside who would go get the stuff and fence it and give the money to Mary, keeping only a quarter of it for his trouble.

  Always the answer was the same. “Maybe. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’ll let you arrange it for me. I’ve got to think about it.” And Fesden’s fingers would curl to fit Evar Galt’s neck.

  The only thing that stopped those fingers from taking hold of Galt’s neck, from squeezing till the bleary eyes popped out, till the wheezing breath stopped forever, was a picture that would come up in Fesden’s mind. Of an ugly, heavy-built chair dominating a bleak bare room. Of a man strapped in that chair, his body arced and straining agonizedly against the straps, a tiny wisp of smoke spurting out from under the contraption that covered his head and face.

  The picture would rise between Wolf Fesden and Ever Galt’s corded, thin neck, and a cold sweat would break out all over Fesden and his fingers would uncurl, and he’d start again trying to wheedle his secret out of Galt.

  More than three years that sort of thing went on in Row C, Cell 6, night after night, night after night. Then, one mid-winter night Galt’s coughing spell kept on and on till suddenly the scarlet blood gushed out of his mouth, all over him, and they took him away to the hospital.

  That morning Wolf Fesden laughed silently to himself as he swabbed blood from the cell floor. This was the break he’d been waiting for. Galt would never live to leave Lornmere. He’d know that, soon enough, and he’d know that if he didn’t tell somebody where the jewels were, Mary would never get a chip of them. Fesden was going to make sure he would be that someone. He started right off pulling wires for assignment to the detail of hospital trusties.

  It took over a month and when Wolf Fesden got his way at last, he found that another trusty, a convict by the name of Bert Corbett, had gotten the inside track with Galt.

  A tight-mouthed, poker-faced fellow was this Corbett, kind of young to be in long enough to be made a trusty. Fesden didn’t remember ever having seen him around the yard or the workshops, either this stretch or the one before. But then Lornmere was a big place and no one could know all of the more than two thousand convicts it held, so that didn’t mean anything. What bothered Wolf Fesden was the way Corbett hung around Evar Galt’s bed, the way he’d give the old man an extra alcohol rub whenever he had the chance, or sneak some extra titbit to him from Doc Lowrey’s lunch tray in the kitchen.

  If it weren’t that Dr. Lowrey made the trusties alternate among the three wards—the surgical, medical, and tuberculosis—for night duty, Fesden would never have had a chance to talk to Galt without Corbett hanging around somewhere within earshot. So when Fesden’s turn in the T. B. ward came, he’d get the other patients bedded down and snoozing and then he’d bump the old man’s cot or drop something on him, to wake him up.

  Galt’s eyes would open, down at the bottom of their bluish sockets, and they’d look at Fesden for a minute. Then they’d close again, tiredlike, and no matter how long he sat there whispering, they’d never open.

  “You’re going to die,” Fesden would whisper. “You’re going to die soon, Galt. You can’t ever go get the jewels yourself. If you don’t tell me where they are, they’ll stay buried and Mary will never get anything out of them.”

  The first few months Fesden wasn’t any too anxious for Galt to come through, because he needed time to build a new set-up for the next step in his Great Scheme, his break-out.

  Lornmere was surrounded by two great walls. The cell blocks and the shops were all within the inner one, a pile of grim, gray granite surmounted by a fence of barbed wire. The outer wall was twenty feet high to the other’s fifteen. Between the two there stretched a fifty-yardwide strip of concrete sun-washed by day and brilliantly flood-lighted by night. The prison hospital, where Fesden and Galt now were, stood in this space and the only other structure that occupied it was the administration building.

  Only the barbed wire p
rotected the top of the inner wall, but the outer one was studded by little stone towers that gave it the appearance of some medieval battlement. From within these, armed guards constantly watched every inch of the outer wall and of the space between them.

  The guards were changed every four hours of the twenty-four, so as to make certain they would be on the alert. They worked in eight-hour platoons and the patrol of each platoon not on the wall at any one time was held on reserve in the one-story guardhouse that formed one side of the tunnellike main gate, about a quarter of it projecting into the space between the walls. The towers could be reached only from within this guardhouse, by a steel ladder that rose from the roof of this projecting part.

  Wolf Fesden got the guards of the four-to-eight-a.m. patrol into the habit of coming over to the hospital kitchen for coffee right before they took their stations on the wall. He did one other thing during those first few months he was a hospital trusty. From the doses that were intended to bring healing sleep to the prison-crazy patients who composed more than three quarters of those in the medical ward, he stole, grain by grain, enough veronal to fill a discarded pillbox he cached behind the kitchen sink.

  After these two matters were accomplished, Fesden had nothing to do but wait till he was alone with Galt in the dim half light of the sleeping T.B. ward, so that he could wake up the old man and whisper to him.

  For all the response it made, the head on the pillow might have really been the corpse’s skull it kept looking more and more like.

  The thing began to get Wolf Fesden.

  He couldn’t sleep any longer. Whether he was on day shift or night shift, he kept prowling the hall all the time he was off duty, kept prowling into the T.B. ward. But the worst times were when he was night orderly in the medical ward tending the convicts the prison had turned into raving maniacs, because those nights he knew Bert Corbett was in with the lung cases. With Galt.

  Evar Galt came to be nothing but a skin bag of bones, more dead than alive except when he started coughing. Wolf Fesden began to get a queer idea that when he gave the old man his morning sponge-off, he could look right through the hot, dry skin, could look right into the big holes in Galt’s lungs and see the little bugs that were eating away what was left of the old man’s lungs and his life.