Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  He found the fresh tracks of a shod horse and went on faster. Then he remembered that Fitz would have gone to sleep at dark. That meant he’d be awake at sunrise. He’d build a fire to make coffee, and there’d be smoke. He’d have to watch for smoke.

  He guessed he’d done about four miles when he saw a pool of water. He stopped to drink and wash his face and arms in the cool water. He saw trees ahead as he went on. Fitz would camp where there were trees and water and grass, if he could. He stopped and watched, and saw a faint gray wisp rising almost straight up in the windless air. Someone had a cooking fire.

  He turned into the brush and went on, trying to keep his eye on the smoke.

  He heard a thud and stopped, every muscle tense. He heard it again. It could be only one sound in the world—the sound of a horse stamping.

  He got down on his hands and knees and crawled through the chaparral. He wondered if the horse would smell him and whinny. He didn’t know whether horses whinnied only when they smelled other horses. Presently he saw the horse grazing at the end of a picket line. The horse raised his head and cocked his ears forward as he looked in Jim’s direction. But presently he began to graze again, as if he’d decided everything was all right.

  Jim wriggled on. He raised his head to get a better look ahead, and saw a man fifty yards away, sitting on his blankets, drinking coffee. His broad hack was turned so Jim couldn’t see his face. Jim stood up, and as he did so the man turned his head, and Jim saw that he was Fitz Jordan. And then he remembered that if he could see Fitz, Fitz could see him. He squatted on his heels and studied the ground. He saw Fitz’s saddle to one side of his fire, with a duffel bag thrown across it and a shotgun leaning on it.

  Jim saw that he had a revolver in a holster on his belt. Jim guessed that meant he was afraid. Quail hunters didn’t burden themselves with heavy revolvers. Jim figured his only chance was to rush Fitz. He’d have to get his hands on Fitz before he could pull that revolver or reach the shotgun. He waited until Fitz sat down again. He was pouring something out of a bottle into his coffee cup.

  Jim started slowly toward Fitz, all set to run the moment Fitz saw him. He was within thirty yards when Fitz turned his head. Jim ran at him.

  Fitz was on his feet and yanking at the gun in his holster. He got it out when Jim was still ten feet away, and fired. Something burned Jim’s side, and then he dived at Fitz like a football player making a tackle, and they went down together.

  Jim grabbed for the cylinder of Fitz’s gun, the way he’d learned to do. The hammer came down and the pin bit through the web between his thumb and forefinger. But the pin was cushioned by flesh, so it failed to fire, Fitz smashed his left into Jim’s face as they rolled over. Jim got Fitz’s wrist in his right hand and tried to use his body against Fitz for leverage. But Fitz was bigger than he was. He got his left arm around Jim’s neck, shutting off his wind. Jim threw himself desperately and they rolled over again and his weight came down on Fitz’s elbow. Fitz screamed with pain. The hand that held the revolver relaxed, and then the arm around Jim’s neck.

  Jim got up and pulled the hammer out of the web of his left hand. Fitz lay there, holding his broken arm. Jim held the revolver on him while he backed toward the saddle. He got the shotgun, found that it was loaded, and put the revolver in his pocket.

  “You lie there, Fitz,” he said. “If you move, I’ll blow your head off.”

  He held the shotgun poised with one hand while he reached into the duffel bag with the other. He brought out a packet of the kind he remembered. The counterfeit bills had been put up in packages of ten thousand dollars each. He found another packet, and another, and another. He counted nine packets and there was one more broken one.

  He stood watching Fitz and figuring how he’d get him to Carmichael’s.

  “Sit up,” he said.

  Fitz rolled into a sitting position.

  “Can you get on a horse by yourself?”

  “I don’t think so,” Fitz said.

  “Then you’ll walk to Carmichael’s.”

  “It’s four miles—maybe five. I couldn’t make it.”

  “All right, Fitz,” Jim said. “You sit there.”

  He picked up the lariat and pulled the picket pin and brought the horse up beside the saddle. He laid the shotgun down at his feet while he got the bridle on. He didn’t know whether Fitz was pretending to be worse off than he was. But he couldn’t do much with a broken right arm. Jim got the saddle on the horse. He put the packets of counterfeit money in the duffel bag and tied the drawstring and lashed the bag to the cantle of the saddle.

  “You’re going to Carmichael’s,” he said to Fitz. “Do you ride or do you walk?”

  “I’ll try to get on the horse,” Fitz said.

  Fitz put a foot in a stirrup and caught the pommel of the stock saddle with his left hand and pulled himself up. He gasped with pain as he got himself in the saddle.

  “All right,” he said. “Give me the reins.”

  “I’m going to lead the horse,” Jim said, “But I’d like to get your tarp and blankets.”

  “Forget them,” Fitz said. “Somebody’ll come and get them. All I want is what’s left of that bottle of tequila.”

  “If I knew something to do about your arm, I would,” Jim said.

  “There isn’t anything but the tequila,” Fitz said.

  Jim gave him the bottle and Fitz drank.

  “You know I’m through, Jim,” he said. “All I want is to get to a doctor. I think you’ve broken my elbow.”

  “You’re going to a doctor by plane as soon as we get to Carmichael’s,” Jim said.

  He looked up at Fitz Jordan.

  Everything that had made the man so likable was gone. It wasn’t that he was in pain. He’d had something as a person and the something was gone.

  Jim started down the trail. It was a quarter to seven and he had at least four miles to go. He had never in his life found it so hard to keep on going, but he knew that that was what he had to do.

  He walked on, putting one foot after another with an effort of will, his head full of pictures of a girl with a head of blond curls, and eyes that were a deep blue against the golden tan of her skin.

  “Jim,” Fitz Jordan said, “what gave me away?”

  “I didn’t suspect you until they arrested me,” Jim said. “And then I knew it couldn’t be anybody else.”

  “If I hadn’t framed you, you wouldn’t have had a thing on me?”

  “No,” Jim said. “Not until you started passing the stuff. Then we’d have traced it to you.”

  “It wasn’t that I had it in for you, Jim,” Fitz said. “I thought I had to frame somebody and there wasn’t anybody else.”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “You don’t know how I got the stuff?”

  “No,” Jim said.

  “I used to live in the apartment you’ve got,” Fitz said. “I still have the key for it. They never bothered to change the locks. I came in late and was stopping to see you and have a drink, and when I stopped at the door I heard you and somebody else talking about the raid, so I waited.”

  “That made it pretty simple.”

  “Yes,” Fitz said, “that made it too simple.”

  Jim thought there must have been something wrong with Fitz all the time—or else he’d have said something about having lived in that apartment. He’d have turned in the key.

  JIM looked at his watch as he turned into the drive at Carmichael’s. It was eight o’clock, and he didn’t know whether he could make the last fifty yards or not. He led the horse through the gate and into the patio. He saw Sergeant Gomez at the door. It was only a few yards farther.

  “Señor,” the sergeant said, “the colonel is looking for you.”

  “If you will help this man off his horse, I will see the colonel,” Jim said.

  “Sí, Señor,” the sergeant said.

  Jim staggered into the big low-ceiled room. He saw Hope sitting at a table with Colonel
Ortega. He went toward them. Hope jumped up.

  “You’re hurt,” she said.

  “Not much,” he said, “I’m just tired.” He turned to Colonel Ortega. “Am I a minute late?”

  “Two minutes,” Colonel Ortega said. “Where have you been?”

  “I had a job to do, colonel, and I did it. I brought Fitz Jordan in.” Colonel Ortega jumped up. “Where is he?”

  “With your Sergeant, colonel.”

  “And the bad money?”

  “The money is there.”

  Colonel Ortega turned and called out, “Señor Johnson.”

  Jim saw the solid man at the other end of the room. He got up from his table and came forward with the rolling gait of a big-bodied man with short legs.

  “Come with me, señor,” Colonel Ortega said to Johnson.

  Hope picked up a cup of coffee and put it in Jim’s hands. “Drink it,” she said.

  He drank the coffee and they walked out to the patio.

  Fitz Jordan was sitting on a bench.

  “Good morning, Mr. Jordan,” Hope said.

  Jim had to smile, because her manner was so exactly that of a private secretary to her boss.

  “Hello, Hope,” Fitz said, and made a gallant effort to smile his old smile.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Jordan,” she said.

  She came back and stood close beside Jim, and he saw that there were tears in her eyes.

  “Where is the money?” Colonel Ortega asked.

  “In the duffel bag behind the saddle,” Jim said.

  “Señor Johnson,” Colonel Ortega said, “who has Jim Howard made a sucker of now?”

  The solid man unlashed the duffel bag and pulled it off the horse and began to drag packets out of it. When he had counted them, he stuffed them back in the bag and straightened up. Jim saw him brace himself. But he was game.

  “He has made a sucker out of me, Colonel Ortega,” Johnson said.

  “Forget it, Señor,” Colonel Ortega said. “We all make mistakes.” He turned to Jim Howard. “Even I make mistakes, do I not, Jim?”

  “The boys in the department will feel pretty good about this,” Johnson said. “They all like Jim Howard.”

  “Mr. Johnson,” Hope said, “you’re so nice about it you make me feel sorry for the paperweight.”

  “Forget it, lady,” Johnson said. “I’ve been conked so often I don’t think much about it.”

  They took Fitz Jordan inside to give him breakfast. Jim sat at a table with Hope.

  “You’ve got to go to bed and sleep,” she said. “You’re dead.”

  “You’re wearing the dress you wore when you came into the Fiore di Alpíni, years and years ago.” Jim said.

  Colonel Ortega stopped to speak to them. “We are taking Fitz Jordan to Ensenada,” he said. “I’ll come back for you two whenever you like—or would you rather drive your car back?”

  “I’d like to drive back,” Jim said.

  “If the señorita doesn’t mind.”

  “I’d like to drive,” Hope said, “if you aren’t in such a hurry as you were coming down.”

  “There is no hurry, señorita,” Colonel Ortega said. “I ask only that you two dine with me when you get back to Ensenada.”

  “We will be delighted,” Hope said. Colonel Ortega held out his hand to Jim. “Maybe I am not sentimental about Harkness, Jim. Maybe it is all true.”

  Jim went out across the patio to the landing field with Hope to watch the plane leave.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were going out after Fitz?” she asked.

  “I was afraid you might think it was a bad idea. And the slightest thing would have stopped me.”

  “I wouldn’t have tried to stop you if you’d let me go with you,” Hope said. “I can’t help feeling sorry for him, but I wanted you to get him.” They saw Fitz Jordan go aboard the plane with Johnson following close behind him.

  “I know,” Jim said. “He’s got it coming to him. But I wish he didn’t.”

  The plane taxied across the field, rose, circled and turned north. They watched it until it was out of sight and then they turned to each other and he took her in his arms.

  THE END

  DETOUR TO DEATH

  John Lawrence

  Eddie hated Brickner. He meant to ruin him as Brickner had ruined Eddie’s father. But Fate took a hand before Eddie’s plans were complete. It all started with the girl from Iowa, who got caught on a . . .

  IT WAS in the third month of Eddie’s grim vigil in the garage that the break finally came.

  Brickner brought the shining-eyed girl in.

  He nosed his convertible in from the dimmed-out street around theater time, just as Eddie was coming out of the little gray-painted front office, buttoning the throat of his dungarees. The long, sparkling car stopped four feet from him and Brickner popped out, waddled around to hand the girl elaborately out. “Hi, Eddie! Vivian—this’s Eddie Barrington—best damn mechanic in New York City. Eddie—any time Miss Donald comes in—give her the car. ‘Sperfectly all right, see?”

  She was mostly blue eyes, blue-black hair. The intense shine of her eyes made her look eager, excited. She had a trim, small figure in a modest black silk-and-net evening gown, a white bolero of anonymous fur. She gave Eddie a hesitant smile and, to his own startled disgust, he found himself thinking in slow wonder: Why, she’s all right. . . .

  He smothered it sourly, quickly assumed his habitual obsequiousness. “Yes, sir, Mr. Brickner. Any time.”

  “There’s something wrong with the feed line, Eddie. Give it a look-see. We’re going to a show and then maybe a spot or two. Be back around two or three.”

  “Right, Mr. Brickner.”

  He watched somber-eyed while the red-faced, sloe-eyed playboy palmed the girl’s arm and strutted out, but it did not occur to him that he finally had the touchstone. He did make a vague, hasty effort to see the girl as the center of some scheme by which he might finally put the noose around Brickner’s fat neck, but this was indefinite and automatic. He would have done the same had Brickner come in carrying a pair of roller skates or a fly-rod.

  That, of course, was the flaw in his whole program—he did not know what to do, now that he had caught up to the fat crook. The blazing rage that had, eighteen months ago, sent him flying on the slippery swindler’s trail, had eventuated into cold, vengeful—but stumped—fury, now that he had his finger on him.

  HE RAN the beautiful convertible upstairs, went to work on the feed line with his hands, and with his mind—for the thousandth time—on the stinging impasse through which he seemed unable to break.

  Murder—although he thought of it undisturbed—was out. At one time—just after reaching San Francisco and learning of his father’s nervous explosion and subsequent death—lie was enraged enough to consider nothing but getting his hands on Brickner. Conceivably, at that point, grief and rage might have stung him to killing, had Brickner—or Helmuth as he was then known on the Frisco Diamond-Traders’ register—been in reach. But he was long gone. The investigation was long over. The letter carrying the grim news to Eddie’s last known address in the Orient had simply never arrived, and when, in the ordinary course of events, he returned, it was to hear the bitter news from the lips of his father’s lawyer, long after the event.

  There was nothing particularly new about the story. Eddie’s father, his small, one-man jewel business already seriously hurt by the long depression, had extended trust too far—even in a trade where exaggerated trust is the rule. He had “consigned” a matched set of emeralds, valued in six figures, to Helmuth overnight. There had been—or was supposed to have been—a burglary. Helmuth was cleaned out, leaving him a bankrupt. Eddie’s father’s capital was wiped out and more than wiped out and he was pulled down by the other’s fall. The old man’s nerves and heart had given way.

  Every jeweler in town was unequivocally certain that the burglary—an ancient dodge of the trade—was synthetic. But there was nothing of a provable nature that c
ould be shown in court. Helmuth had stood up under all the grilling the district attorney could give him, had been reluctantly discharged, and had dropped from sight.

  It remained for Eddie to ferret out the fact that, prior to the “burglary” Brickner—or Helmuth—had been spending recklessly in the border towns—spending, and gambling disastrously, to the point where threats were supposed to have been made to him, to induce him to cover his obligations. If Eddie had run into him at the time he was finding this out, his feelings might have overruled his good sense. But he hadn’t—hadn’t found him for eleven gruelling months—identified him as Billy Brickner, a hometown product of New York who had dropped out of sight a few years back, evidently because of matrimonial trouble.

  The frenzy was out of his fury by now, and cold-blooded killing does not come natural to a well-brought-up American youth of twenty-seven—particularly one quixotic enough to go direct from M. I. T. to China, to tinker with the pitifully few war engines with which that gallant army was attempting to stem the Nipponese steam-roller.

  Furthermore, the element of preserving his own safety had re-established itself as a factor now. Having journeyed all the way back across the ocean with the aim of tinkering with his own country’s war engines—now that they were actually engaged—he had no urge to feel a policeman’s hand close on his shoulder. Uncle Sam does not issue uniforms to jailbirds. He loathed and despised the very heart of the four-flushing craven who had palmed off his piperpaying on an innocent third party and scuttled for cover. He had an unshakable determination to take it out of the fat skulker’s hide, but he was depending on his brains, not his hands, for the blueprint of bringing it about.

  To date, maddeningly, he was still clutching at air. The pitiful best that he could muster was to have Brickner fired from his job—he was now a salesman for a large New York importing firm, and, ironically enough, riding a mounting wave of prosperity—on the basis of his Coast performance. It was too puny a move to be considered, of course, and he went from day to day in a sort of feverish hope that, among his still-swelling, painfully-pieced together scraps of information about the fat man, he would come on the proper stratagem.