Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  “Do you have anybody in particular in mind?”

  “You’re damned right I do! A guy and a motive. He’s one of the contestants. Fella named Ben West.”

  I knew what he had in mind regarding Ben West, because I’d thought of it myself. West, the single, had till midnight tonight to pick up a girl partner from the contest. So unless some male dropped out, his physical suffering through forty-three days would be a failure.

  Forty-three days of marathon grind, the only rest coming in brief ten-minute sleep periods from each hour, taking your meals while dancing, the blare of the music night and day, the sprint dances intended to throw a heavier burden on the contestants, the shouts and cries of the mob—all that, forty-three torturous days of it, was enough to turn even a normal mind to desperation. Sleeplessness, exhaustion, muscles stiffened, legs swollen. And the mind itself would be affected.

  So it was not beyond reason that Ben West, with only the lack of a partner standing between himself and the goal of triumph—that thousand-dollar prize—would seek even a means of violence to win his victory.

  Lieutenant Ballantyne thought so, and at eleven o’clock that night he ordered Ben West out of the contest, for questioning.

  West staggered wearily into the corridor, smelling of sweat, his eyes bright as glass.

  “Lemme alone,” he begged, in the cracked emotional voice of fatigue. “I still got an hour to pick out somebody.”

  Ballantyne threw at him the challenge: “Pick out somebody? I think you already picked somebody out. Larry Gilroy. You picked out his girl for a dance partner, and then you picked Larry out of the dance.”

  Ben West stood back dazed, as the lieutenant stabbed him with a blunt forefinger and bored into him with accusing eyes. “It was a cute trick, Ben. In a dark corridor. With an ice pick from the refrigerator. But it didn’t work, see? We’re next to you, Ben. You want to confess right now? Or do you want no sleep down at headquarters—no sleep night and day—no sleep till you talk. We’ve cracked tougher guys than you, Ben.”

  “You mean you think that . . . that I—”

  Ballantyne waved a hand to one of the uniformed cops. “Let’s run him downtown, Jim. He’s tired, but he wants to stay awake for another couple of weeks.”

  I didn’t remain in the corridor to listen to any more of it. Ballantyne was bluffing, for bluff’s sake, the way a hard cop usually does. I felt sure he had no more information on Ben West than his suspicion that Ben was a possibility.

  I’d thought of the same possibility myself, but now, after talking to Loretta, I saw before me a much stronger possibility. And with that in mind I left the corridor, passed around the black drapes of the orchestra platform, behind the high staggered tiers of seats, behind the noisy spectators, around to the main entrance of the ballroom.

  Here there was an inner foyer where you could buy hot dogs, cokes, coffee. Beyond this, through swing doors always standing open to let in fresh air, was a small ticket booth like you see outside a movie theater.

  I stood behind this for a moment, then looked back through the open doors. I could see straight across the inner foyer, where a uniformed cop stood on duty, past the hot-dog stand, to the dance floor and the orchestra stage. The orchestra was playing “I can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby,” while the remaining eight couples danced wearily in the square arena and the crowd hooted and yelled.

  I saw the uniformed cop order a hot dog, wait for it to sizzle on the griddle; then, munching it, stroll over close to the roped arena to watch the dancers.

  There was little sign now that a murder had taken place in this ballroom. As the hour approached midnight there was just the usual drifting in of new customers, buying tickets at the box office, passing inside.

  Out on the curb there was a police car with no cops in it, a press car with no reporters in it. And no activity on the street except the gentle fall of spring rain, a newsboy hawking a late edition at the next corner. The city, as yet, hadn’t learned of the events at the Paradise Ballroom.

  I rapped on the glass door of the little ticket booth and Doc Miller unlocked it for me.

  “Hello, Jack,” he said. “How’s it going inside?”

  “About the same.”

  “The cops didn’t nail anybody yet, huh?”

  “They’ve dropped the beef against Loretta Ward. Temporarily. Trying Ben West now.”

  “Ben?” He snapped his fingers. “Never thought of him. But if Ben got rid of Larry, then he could have Loretta for a partner. That it?”

  “It’s what they think,” I said. “But they’re wrong. Tell me what happened, doc, when those two guys held you up last night.”

  “Last night?” He gave me a puzzled, owlish look. “Last night don’t have much importance—compared to what happened tonight.”

  “It does to me,” I corrected. “These two guys that held you up—what did they look like?”

  “Well—” He fished a cigarette from a crumpled pack in his pocket and lit it. “I didn’t get a good look. It happened so fast.”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “Well, I was just standing in here, selling tickets. Then along about midnight, like always on Saturday night, I got the heavy currency in bundles and put it in a cardboard box, along with a bunch of the silver I wouldn’t need for change. Like always, on Saturday night, I lock up the cage and take the box back to the manager’s office. There’s a safe back there. No use leaving all that stuff out here in the cage. “So what happened?”

  “Well, like I told the cops after the robbery.”

  “What?”

  “Just that I open this door with the box under my arm, and a couple of guys jump me. Couple of big husky guys, like gorillas. One of them has a gun and shoots it into the floor.” He pointed a toe to splinters in the pine planks at his feet. “You can see where the bullet hit. Right there. The other guy grabs the box from me, and starts slugging with a short piece of lead pipe. The guy with the gun reached into the booth here and pulled the wires in the fuse box. That cut off all the lights. Not just here in the foyer; in the ballroom, too. All the wires come in here, because this is where the electric meter is.”

  “Then what?” I asked.

  “You know the rest. They slugged me, kicked me, even when I was down on the floor in the dark. They even kicked me in the jaw and the back of the neck. Look”—he bent down, twisted away from me, showing me the bruises, the bandaged cuts.

  “So that’s how it happened. Jack. Finally, the janitor came out here with a flashlight, threw the main switch while he got the wires back on, then connected the lights in the ballroom. In the meantime, those two guys got away. I couldn’t do a damn thing. Hell, they caught me by surprise.”

  “Yes?” I said doubtfully.

  “All morning the cops had me downtown looking at pictures in the mug-book. But I couldn’t pick out those guys. You understand what I mean?”

  “I understand why you couldn’t find them in the police mug-book,” I said.

  “Sure. Even if they’d been arrested before, and their pictures were in the book, I wouldn’t be able to tell.”

  “Of course not,” I agreed, but I agreed with him in a deep kind of sarcasm. “They weren’t in the police book, doc. They’re probably not in any police book—not anywhere in the country. In fact, they probably don’t exist at all.”

  The newsboy had come strolling up from the corner, through the thin fall of rain, and a wave to him brought him hurrying up the foyer to me. “Paper, mister?”

  I shook my head. “How’d you like to make a dollar?”

  The newsboy frowned skeptically. “Doing what?”

  “Just delivering a message inside the ballroom. Won’t take you but a couple of minutes. Is it a deal?”

  “A closed deal,” the kid said. “What’s the message? Who to?”

  I pointed across the empty inner foyer, across the dance floor to the distant orchestra platform where the boys played fast, gay music and Phil Thorndike talked enth
usiasm through the speaker system.

  I said: “That man at the microphone is the master of ceremonies. Tell him to step out here; I want to see him. It’s a matter of life and death. Mostly death. In fact, it’s about the death of a fellow named Gilroy.”

  Doc Miller stared at me with wide, puzzled eyes and a mouth that couldn’t quite close, not even to drag on his smoke. He flipped the butt away, nervously lit another, saying: “What’s eating you, Jack? This is no time to bother Phil; he’s gotta keep the show going.”

  “That’s the point,” I continued to the newsboy. “When you deliver the message be sure to tell the master of ceremonies we don’t want this private little interview to interrupt his announcements. Tell him to bring the microphone with him.” The newsboy didn’t get it. “You mean he should disconnect the mike?”

  “Definitely not,” I said. “That mike’s on a long cable that rolls off a drum-wheel on the platform. So when he brings the mike with him, the cable will pull along, and he can keep talking to his audience. Tell him that. Tell him exactly what I told you. Deliver the message in full. You got it?”

  “Sure, I got it. Who shall I tell him is sending the message?”

  “No name,” I said. “Just tell him it’s somebody who’s stretched his imagination, and now wants to see a cable stretched. Can you remember that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then go to it, kid. You’re ripe for a dollar.”

  When the newsboy left on his errand, Doc Miller’s nervousness increased to such an extent that I didn’t like to take my eyes off him. He threw away the new cigarette after only a few puffs, and his hands trembled when he tried to light another.

  He said tensely: “I don’t get this, Jack.”

  “Just try to relax,” I suggested, and shot a quick glance into the ballroom.

  I saw the newsboy skirt the roped-off dance floor, saw him come up to the side of the orchestra platform and wave a hand.

  Phil Thorndike went over to the edge of the stage, bent down to hear what the kid had to say. At the same time he pressed the microphone against his chest, to silence it.

  I turned my eyes back to Doc Miller. His face was pale now; no color at all to it. His cheeks went as white as his phony doctor’s coat.

  He said lamely: “You’re sure acting bugs, Jack.”

  I didn’t answer that. The newsboy had returned, got his dollar from me, assured me the message had been accurately delivered. Then he was off down the street, striding fast through the rain, hawking his edition.

  Inside the ballroom Phil Thorndike’s voice barked through the speakers: “—and now, ladies and gentlemen, I will turn this mike over to our band leader, Slim Walters, who will announce the next dance in this marvelous, colossal, spectacular show, at the famous Paradise Ballroom. Talk to ’em, Slim. Let there be music!”

  The voice of the band leader spoke cordially, announcing a number. The band began to play: “There I Go . . . Leading With My Heart Again” while the audience applauded heavily.

  Then Phil Thorndike came rapidly through the inner foyer, and out to us. His face was even a shade paler than Doc Miller’s. He eyed us both worriedly; then attempted to dismiss his worry with a casual grin.

  “Hi, Jack. Hi, doc. What goes on?”

  Doc Miller said nothing, just stared solemnly at his shoes.

  I asked: “You get my message, Phil?”

  “That your message?”

  “It was. Why didn’t you bring the mike with you?”

  “I don’t get it,” Phil said.

  “Wouldn’t the cable stretch this far tonight, Phil? Maybe it’s not as elastic on Sundays, as on Saturdays.”

  There was a second in which nothing at all happened, in which no remark was made, in which the very silence was like the tightness of a drawn bow—an instant before the arrow is sped on its way. From the corner of my eye I saw Doc Miller lift solemn eyes upward from his own shoes, saw the glance of decision he gave briefly to Phil Thorndike. Then Miller snaked a hand to his hip pocket, snatched out a leather-covered sap, and whipped it at me with the force of an Indian cleaving a skull with a tomahawk.

  I ducked under the swish of it, and only lost my hat in the ducking. I slugged Miller with a haymaker that knocked him hard against the booth of the ticket office, then wheeled to face Phil Thorndike, but Phil had already gotten into action. He’d yanked a flat automatic pistol from under his coat and now he jabbed it against my side.

  “Easy!” he barked, casting a swift glance over his shoulder to make sure nobody saw us. Then to me: “Stay still, Jack; otherwise, you get it in the ribs.”

  I stayed still, feeling like a sucker, but I said: “Maybe I won’t feel it. Maybe it’ll go in easy, like an ice pick.”

  “The smart stuff won’t buy you any chips,” he said, and nodded to Doc Miller. “Come on, doc. We’re walking around the corner.”

  Again Miller had the leather-covered sap in his hand, holding it close to his side. His right ear was red and ringing where I’d slugged him.

  “Walk,” Phil Thorndike said to me, edging me onward, the gun now a lump in his pocket, his hand on it. “We’ll take a little walk, Jack.”

  IV.

  We walked out into the fresh rain, the cool night, and there was nobody else on the street. We walked down to a deserted corner—even the newsboy wasn’t there—passed a corner drugstore, and around to an auto park where Phil Thorndike kept his car. The park had lots of cars in it, empty, and no attendant. We walked back, where it was very dark now, with the rain falling, and we came to an old green Buick sedan, the car that belonged to Phil.

  He opened the rear door and said: “Get in, Jack.”

  I got in. He climbed in beside me and handed the keys to Doc Miller. “You drive, doc.”

  “Where?”

  “A long ways. The farther the better.” Then he put stony eyes on me in the dark of the sedan. “Who else has the same ideas, Jack?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” I said, bluffing. “This gangster stuff, taking me for a ride, won’t gain you a thing, Phil. It’s out of your class.”

  “You want some money, Jack?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “How about a grand? Cash. Right “Don’t be generous,” I said. “The haul last night was fourteen hundred. If you have to pay a grand hush money out of it, that only leaves two hundred apiece for you and doc. It’s small pay for a couple of guys that pulled a fast one.” Thorndike still had the muzzle of the gun pressed hard against my ribs, through the cloth of his pocket. In the dark we sat there, Phil beside me with the gun, Doc Miller up front under the wheel; in a dark sedan at the back of a graveled parking lot, with rain pattering lightly on the roof.

  Phil said: “What gave you the idea we pulled a fast one?”

  “A lady named Loretta,” I said. “But she didn’t know the real facts of it herself. She gave me the hint without knowing it.”

  “What hint?”

  “One she got from Larry this morning. While they were dancing through breakfast, he told her he had an angle on the box-office stick-up last night. He got the idea, he told her, when he tripped on something in the dark, during the time the lights had been out. He also told her he’d keep the idea to himself and that Couple No. 13 was a cinch to win the contest. Loretta didn’t make any sense out of that. I did.”

  Thorndike’s eyes became black pools of bitterness, his lips compressed in a tight line. “What sense. Jack?”

  “You ought to know. Listen, the police already have the idea the murder of Larry was an inside job. And when Loretta gets around to telling them what Larry said to her this morning, they’ll realize last night’s holdup was also an inside job. One led to the other.

  “You and doc got your brains together and decided to pull a fast one. The way it worked, doc just waited for a time when the inner and outer foyers were empty—to make sure there’d be no witnesses. Then he unlocked the cage, with the money under his arm—fourteen hundred bucks—and he fired a sh
ot into the floor, and pulled all the lights in the ballroom.

  “The firing of the shot was a smart move. It would freeze the audience in their seats. Nobody’d come prowling through the darkness to investigate that shot, unless it was a cop, and I guess you had the cop’s beat timed so he wouldn’t be around there.

  “So doc stands out at the ticket cage, waiting for you. And you come to him fast. You cross the dark dance floor, carrying your mike with you. I know how those mike’s work. It’s like talking into a silenced office telephone. No sound comes at the mike itself, and your voice still booms from the loudspeakers. That was your alibi. It made everybody think you were still up on the orchestra platform.

  “Instead of that, you came out through the dark empty foyers and you took the money and the gun from doc. It’s probably the gun you’ve got in your pocket right now. Then you slugged doc several times, to bruise him up, to make it look like an outside job. You probably used the same blackjack doc now has in his pocket.

  “The whole job took only a few minutes; in total darkness. You retreated back through the foyer to ditch the money and the gun, letting the microphone cable reel in on its drum. The reason it’s rigged up like that is so you can leave the platform to get down among the contestants during the show. But last night you used it for a little secret show of your own. Maybe you added extra cable to it for last night’s special performance.”

  Neither Phil nor doc said a word now as we sat there in the car, in the rain. Doc had the key in the switch, but he hadn’t yet started the motor. His head was turned, staring back at me, his eyes as narrowly bitter as Thorndike’s.

  “The thing that went sour,” I continued, “was that Couple No. 13, Larry and Loretta, got tangled up with your cable; Larry tripped on it, and got wise.

  “You’d no doubt figured the possibility that somebody might tangle with it, one of the contestants, but you didn’t think they’d ever figure how far you went with it, and you could always explain that you’d just jumped down on the dance floor to keep the contestants in order.