by Jerry eBooks
This was the payoff. He had stuck his neck out to the limit, now. If his scheme failed, it was the electric chair for Sam McGee, and no fooling about it.
He had Jonathan Mainwaring’s body and he had attempted extortion. Whatever his motive, those were the incontrovertible facts as the law would see them.
And from those facts, a jury could deduce only one answer—“We find the defendant, Samuel McGee, guilty as charged!”
Suddenly the tension flowed out of McGee’s body, leaving him cold and ready. Somewhere, off in the near darkness, a faint splash had betrayed an incautious footstep. Someone was coming, walking quietly through the night.
His scheme was working! But so much still depended on the soundness of McGee’s guesses—and it was all crazy guesswork.
Quietly McGee stood up close to the wall, waiting. Now that he was listening in the right direction, he heard other tiny sounds. The figure was coming closer, closer.
Without warning it was there—a blacker blackness at the door of the shanty. McGee could hear muted breathing, then the soft scrape of metal against wood. He tensed himself, lifted the gun and leaped at the dark figure.
He slammed into a thick, muscular body. There was a quick grunt of surprise and the body jerked furiously. McGee felt the cold hardness of a gun and slapped it away with his left hand, an instant before its flaming thunder split the night. Cursing, McGee wrestled with his unknown victim, slipping and splashing through the rain-soaked clay. He was clinging to the man’s gun hand, fighting to keep the gun from exploding again, and his adversary was clinging with equal desperation to McGee’s gun. Neither spoke a word beyond grunted profanity.
Suddenly McGee’s foot slipped and he started skidding. The movement help jerked his own gun hand free. He fell onto the body before him and slammed the barrel of his gun at a spot where he figured the head would be. It connected with a solid, satisfying thock. The squirming body went limp and McGee fell on it. This time he used his free hand to locate the unseen head and struck it again, hard enough to insure a long period of inactivity.
Then, grunting and panting, McGee kicked open the shack door and dragged his victim inside. With the door shut, he struck a cautious match and stared at the blank face of the man he had jumped. A gasping curse rushed out of his lungs.
He was staring at a square, reddish, totally unfamiliar face. For a moment, a sick sense of failure flooded McGee. He had banked his life on a desperate gamble and had failed.
Suddenly he lit another match and fumbled at the stranger’s pocket, turning out a sheaf of papers and a small, black case. He looked inside the case and the sickness went out of his nerves. It bore the card with the name, “Martin Eckson, Insurance Investigator.” McGee got up suddenly, blowing out the match.
“One down and two to go,” he whispered softly. “The killer had better be one of those two, or . . .”
He started to turn away and swung his face full into the beam of an electric torch that suddenly flamed at him from the doorway. He had left the shack door ajar when he dragged the insurance investigator inside and this other man had slipped up to it without a betraying sound.
The flash beam caught McGee flatfooted. He blinked at it for a dazed moment while a man’s voice, harsh and scratchy with tension, cried:
“There you are, you murdering kidnapper!”
The words were still coming from the unseen lips when the gun went off. It flamed behind the light and something like a padded hammer slammed into McGee’s shoulder and spun him around. He felt his own gun go flying across the shack, then he was sinking down onto his knees, scrabbling for it with his left hand.
The man with the flashlight came leaping forward and crashed into him, sending lances of pain through McGee’s wounded shoulder. He went over backward, using his knees and his left hand to fight off the kicking, clawing fury of the attack. He was weak and dizzy from the wound, but he managed to get leverage for his knees and force the other man back so that he could swing a solid punch with his left hand.
The punch connected and the flashlight went rolling across the floor. McGee reared up, following his advantage, and punched again. The man grunted and rolled away from him.
A face flopped into the wash of the light and McGee’s breath caught as he saw the unmistakable dark Vandyke beard of Dr. J.L. Luger, the Mainwaring’s personal physician.
Luger still held the nickel-plated pistol with which he had shot McGee, but he was dopey from the blows, and slow getting up. McGee reared forward and punched again. The doctor went out for keeps.
“That ties it,” McGee panted, struggling to his feet and using the flashlight to find his own gun. “Now for the payoff.”
Weak and dizzy, he struggled across the shack and stumbled out into the darkness. He had taken two steps across the wet clay when his knees suddenly gave out and he went down.
He was still pitching forward when bright lights stabbed out from all sides, pinning him pitilessly in their glare. McGee knew the lights were on him and that men were pounding forward, but all he could do was sit in the mud and sob harshly. Then machine-guns in the hands of the sharply halting men were on him.
“You’re covered, McGee!” It was Inspector Eldritch’s voice, lashing at him out of the darkness. “One move and you’ll be blasted! Throw away your gun.”
McGee moved weakly and the gun tumbled into the mud. Then Eldritch and half a dozen of his men in plain clothes, followed by uniformed officers were swarming over and around him, covering him with machine-guns and pistols and automatic rifles as Eldritch slapped at his clothing.
“You crazy Irishman, you’ve really fixed yourself now!” shouted Eldritch. “I almost believed your insane yarn back there until you knocked me out. Then, when I came to and worked myself loose, I found out about your going to Mainwaring’s friends with a ransom demand and—”
“Sitting—on your—brains,” McGee gasped, then he managed a twisted grin. “You dope, I—”
“Hey, Inspector!” One of the uniformed men was racing back from an inspection of the shack. “Mainwaring ain’t there, but two other guys are—Doc Luger and an investigator named Eckson from Pinnacle Insurance.”
“Luger?” Eldritch whirled, staring at McGee’s grinning face through narrowed eyes. “Irish, what’s behind this, anyhow? What was Luger doing out—”
“Who called you?” McGee cut in, recovering some of his strength. “Lofting, the lawyer, wasn’t it?”
“Of course it was,” Eldritch snapped. “He’s right here with us now. Luger fell for your scheme and wanted to raise the money to save Mainwaring. Lofting did the right thing, though. He came straight to the police and told the whole story.”
“That’s right, McGee,” Lofting himself snapped, pushing his white face into the circle of light. “You ought to know better than to expect an attorney, sworn to uphold the law, to play along with your schemes.”
“You dope,” McGee growled, grinning at Eldritch. “Lofting’s the guy who shot Mainwaring. I got a good look at him as he fired through the window but I didn’t know who he was, then. Later, when I went around calling, I saw him and recognized him instantly as the killer I’d seen shooting lead into Mainwaring.”
“That’s a lie!” Lofting yelled furiously, his face contorted with rage. “You were out of sight in the hall—” He stopped short, catching at the words, staring wildly around at the circle of gaping faces.
“That was what McGee himself told me, tonight,” he creaked hoarsely. “He said he’d been out in the hall so he couldn’t see the killer. He—”
McGee laughed harshly. “That won’t buy you anything in court, Paul, but it points the way. You can see he’s the guilty rat, Inspector, and with that to go on you’ll be able to dig up evidence enough to burn him. Of course I didn’t get a look at the killer, or I wouldn’t have gone out on a limb like I did tonight. I had to smoke him out the hard way—and I did.”
“But—but Luger and that detective—” Eldritch cried, bewildered.
“My brains,” McGee said modestly. “I called on all three suspects with a wild yarn. But I first came out here and daubed myself with red clay. It’s the only red clay in this section and I took good care to parade around where they’d notice it. I could just see their eyes glitter when they spotted my ‘carelessness.’ This would make a good hide-out, so each one figured I had Mainwaring hidden out here at the clay pit. I wanted them to think that so their reactions would betray the guilty one. But I made it definite that any police interference would get Mainwaring killed.
“Ashley and Doc Luger both wanted Mainwaring found alive, if possible, so they kept away from the police. Luger showed the most nerve by coming out alone to try to ‘rescue’ his friend. Ashley brought in a clever insurance detective. But Lofting, here, didn’t want Mainwaring found alive. All he wanted was his corpse located, to establish evidence of death so the insurance money would be paid. So Lofting went straight to the cops—and wrote his ticket to the chair.”
Eldritch clenched his fists and looked at the sky.
“By heck,” he groaned. “By heck, he’s done it again. I get that Irish imbecile ticketed for the last walk and he wiggles out of . . . Watch him!” Lofting, taking advantage of momentary inattention, was whirling away in a desperate bid for freedom. He kneed one bluecoat, butted another, and sprang out of the light.
A policeman off to one side raised his tommy-gun. It stuttered for a second and something heavy and limp went crashing down into the deep clay pit to land with a splash far below. There were no further sounds of movement.
Eldritch mopped his forehead.
“Oh, well. That’s the only kind of a trial where you can’t fix the jury. Listen, you screwball, where is Mainwaring’s body? We’ve torn the town apart tonight—”
McGee laughed. “You always said the only friend I had in town was Jake, the morgue keeper, Paul. Jake was a real friend, tonight. He helped me undress Mainwaring’s corpse, ticketed it as a floater out of the river, and stuck it in the John Doe cooler at the police morgue.”
ONE MORE MURDER
G.T. Fleming-Roberts
Star reporter Barney Ghent plans the perfect killing—and the girl he loves is caught in a murder trap.
CHAPTER ONE
Not Quite Dead
FROM across Martindale Street, Barney Ghent noticed that the door of the old Pomeroy house had opened. Somebody came down the short approach to the sidewalk. A woman. She turned north and ran, holding her purse up tight against her breast. She wasn’t Mrs. Taylor, Harry Pomeroy’s housekeeper. She was younger than Mrs. Taylor and her skirts were short. Barney hadn’t seen anything of her face in the darkness. He didn’t know who she was, didn’t think it was important anyway.
Inside his tan balmacaan, Barney Ghent’s shoulders shrugged. When there was nothing left of the fleeing woman except the skish-skish sound the toes of her shoes made on the concrete, he turned and moved without haste down the steps of Sam’s Subway, the basement cafe in the Martindale Apartment Building. The smell of food sickened him, but he opened the door and went in anyway.
The place wasn’t crowded. A woman sat a little apart from the table nearest the door, as though she waited for somebody. One of her knees was over the other and she dangled a blue kid pump from a silk-stockinged toe. She wore a black skirt and a blue-fox jacket that was open to reveal the frothy front of a white blouse. Pale gold hair rolled up from her brow and seemed to be important in securing a silly, brimless hat. A closeup might have discerned lines that were fortyish about her eyes and mouth and the shadowy prophecy of a double chin. But not even another woman could have made an uncomplimentary remark about her figure.
When Barney Ghent showed himself in the door, the woman uncrossed her legs, slid her foot into her pump. She gave the impression of standing erect without leaving her chair.
“Barney,” she said, and raised gloved fingers toward a pretty mouth. “Barney Ghent!” It was as though she was seeing a ghost. And possibly she was.
Barney kept his right hand in the pocket of his coat, his fingers on the still warm revolver there. He raised his hat with his left hand. He thought ironically that he was still “Gentleman” Ghent, formerly police reporter on the Evening Star, and there was still time for him to notice an attractive woman like Marsha Hopson. He might have been surprised at finding her here except that surprise was one of the emotions he was forced to deny himself in order to live a little longer.
He asked Marsha Hopson if he might sit down, and when she didn’t seem to hear him he sat down anyway. A dying man ought to have some privileges.
Marsha, he noticed, had not yet relaxed, as though she still doubted his substance.
“I—I thought you were—were—”
“Dead?” he concluded, smiling. “No, I’m not dead.”
Only dying. He had perhaps six days before that thin-walled bubble in the arch of his aorta would let go.
As Dr. Fritz Wulfing had explained it to him, the gunman’s bullet had nicked the big artery leading from the heart, causing a weakness in the wall. Under pressure of the blood surging from his ticker, a sort of blister had been formed at this point, growing larger all the time, like a tire’s inner tube getting ready to blow. An aneurism, Wulfing had called it. Death might come any time, with the next breath. Or then again, if the Ghent luck held out; he might live for nearly a week if he completely avoided every sort of excitement.
He wasn’t supposed to leave his apartment, or his bed for that matter. Yet this afternoon he had discharged his nurse, dressed himself, and here he was living on time borrowed from the undertaker.
“Care to pinch me?” he asked Marsha.
A smile trembled on her mouth. “I’m glad, Barney,” she said and sounded as though she was. “When Mat came back from visiting you, he sounded awfully pessimistic about your chances.”
Mat Hopson was attorney for the Evening Star, and Marsha’s second husband. Her first was Harry Pomeroy, who lived just across the street.
This was Sunday night, and Mat had visited Barney Ghent on Friday. Barney remembered Friday particularly, because that was the day that Fritz Wulfing had brought him the revolver—the revolver that was at moment in Barney’s right coat pocket, its barrel still warm. He’d asked Wulfing for the gun as a protective measure, he claimed; he didn’t want some other hophead killer to steal the fragment of life that was still left to him.
Barney Ghent laughed with less restraint than at any time since Dr. Wulfing had told him the bad news about himself.
“That was because I told Mat I couldn’t smoke,” he said. “Mat ably figured that a Ghent without cigar is a Ghent without hope.”
Marsha shuddered. “It must have been terrible.” She referred to shooting, of course, “They got the guy, didn’t they?”
Barney nodded. The gunman was in jail, maybe praying that Barney Ghent would live, so that he might escape the chair. The joker was that probably no one had told the killer that Barney Ghent was going to die.
“What was it all for, Barney?” Marsha asked.
He gestured without lifting his hands completely from the table. “One of those things. A newspaperman uncovers somebody’s protected racket, blows the story into headlines, thus ruining somebody’s chance for re-election. And the newsman’s byline turns out to be a death warrant.”
“Well, it’s not something that happens twice,” she said. “I mean, you’ll take precautions.”
He grinned, thinking, No, it won’t happen again. And the dead don’t have to take precautions. They don’t even care.
“What are you doing here?” he asked aloud. “Haunting the old haunts?” He meant the Pomeroy house across the street, her home when she was married to Harry Pomeroy.
Marsha lowered her lids and he noticed that the blue of her eye shadow was startling against the sudden pallor of her face.
“I’ve been waiting here for over an hour for Mat,” she said and studied the designs she drew on the tablecloth with a pointe
d fingernail. “This is our first wedding anniversary.”
“Congratulations,” Barney said.
“And Mat and I met here, you know,” she went on anxiously. “That night Harry Pomeroy and I had gone round and round. I slammed out of the house and came over here to eat. Forgot my purse, of course. Mat was here and came to the rescue.”
Marsha raised her blue eyes above Barney Ghent’s face and to the door.
She smiled a little. “He’s been my hero ever since,” she concluded quietly.
Barney Ghent looked over his own thick shoulder and saw Mat Hopson coming in the door. He was a tall, trim man with a certain sort of dignity that was not overbearing. He could get by with a Chesterfield overcoat, a derby, and mustache wax. He could carry a cane in the Middle West without exciting suspicion. Women looked from him to Marsha and envied her. To the Evening Star, Mat Hopson was the sort of personality who could settle a libel suit out of court without losing the newspaper subscription of the plaintiff.
Barney Ghent stood up, put out his right hand to Mat Hopson’s gloved fingers.
“You’ve made a remarkable recovery,” Mat said, pumping Barney’s arm. “Downright startling! Look, here, old man, aren’t you pushing things a little too fast?”
Barney looked from Mat to Marsha. He forced a laugh. “Fifteen minutes with your charming wife and I’m a well man. The doctors ought to discover her!”
Then he turned so that Marsha could not see his face and put a finger on his lips. Mat Hopson understood and nodded almost imperceptibly. Hopson knew that Barney was going to die, but Barney didn’t want Marsha to know it. He didn’t want sympathy. He didn’t need it. He was having a hell of a good time tonight and sympathy mustn’t spoil it.
Barney declined to join Mat and Marsha at dinner, lifted his battered hat to Marsha, and left the basement cafe. That was at thirty-eight minutes after eight. He took four full minutes to walk to the end of the block, where he stood on the corner and listened to the approaching wail of a police siren. His pulse quickened, and he knew that was danger to the thin-walled sack of his chest.
