Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  Panelli had sent those men into Casey’s to start a fight and create a diversion, while Panelli had pulled the girl from the truck, and lost his pencil in the process. Later he had missed it, and had sent the thug to get the pencil and then bump Skid to shut him up.

  Skid, thinking hard, shook his head. If his guess was right—and it sounded reasonable—then he was in a jam. If he took such a yarn to the police, he would be accused of being Panelli’s fingerman in the snatching of the girl.

  To a suspicious cop his story would be so much eyewash. As it was, that trooper’s wink meant, of course, they were putting a tail on him, figuring the girl would be safer if he were free, and he would lead them to the hideout.

  It was a lucky break that the younger detective had called the rat one of Panelli’s hijackers. That had given Skid a stronger hunch that Panelli must be the man the Truckers’ Association wanted. But, between Panelli and the police, Skid’s spot would be too hot for comfort until Ursula Jensen was found, and Panelli’s mob was liquidated.

  Skid found paper and envelopes in a dresser drawer and wrote out all he knew and suspected. He pushed the pencil into a large cake of soap, covering it with more soap, and tossed the cake behind a pile of litter on the closet shelf.

  He went downstairs and gave the letter, addressed to the Riverton Police Commissioner, to Edna, asking her to mail it if she didn’t hear from him in twenty-four hours.

  He strolled to the warehouse district, well aware of the detective following him, and killed a couple of hours helping to load his wagon and checking his manifest. When he came out of the warehouse office for the last time, the tail had dropped out of sight, and Skid pulled his truck out of the terminal yard in a heavy rain.

  He stopped at Casey’s again, near midnight, but discreet questions brought no information about the girl, and he was boring through the storm a few miles beyond, before the weather really bothered him. A red-lanterned barricade blocked the road and a crudely lettered sign said “Bridge out.”

  He dropped out of the cab and walked forward to investigate—and wanted to kick himself when two men with rods appeared and barked: “Hands up!”

  One of the men got the lantern and the other took his gun and marched him to the truck. The first one climbed behind the wheel. Skid sat between them, a gun in his ribs.

  The truck bunted the barricade aside as the driver leaned out the window and yelled into the darkness, “Okay, Flo, come ahead.”

  Car lights flashed in the woods behind the truck and Skid pictured the girl from whose hand he had shot the automatic two nights before. The truck went on for ten minutes, turned off on a dirt road, then turned off this onto a little-used lane, over which it lurched and groaned for a few minutes, before stopping in the yard of a dilapidated old building on the bank of a stream.

  “Out,” the driver said.

  Skid got out, the gun always covering him. The yard was better illuminated now, by the lights of the car that had been following them, and he saw that the building was an old mill. He guessed that it was used as a storage place for goods from hijacked trucks. A girl got out of the car and stepped into the light. It was the same dame, Skid assured himself.

  The lights of both car and truck were turned off and the four people headed for the mill door. As the group paused at the door, Skid looked back at the truck, and with difficulty suppressed an exclamation.

  In a flash of lightning he saw a man climbing noiselessly out of the laced canvas backdrop.

  “Aha!” he thought, “So that’s where the copper disappeared to!”

  His captors, with flashlights, led him down into the cellar of the mill, along a short corridor lined with stolen tires and batteries, and into a stone-walled room with a solid-looking oak-beamed ceiling, and a lantern.

  PANELLI apparently had just finished a meal; he sat by a littered table in a corner, sipping coffee. He was swart and lean, with glistening hair, immaculate clothes, and slits for eyes. Two plug-uglies whom Skid recognized as the two drunks of Casey’s joint, sat with him, and off to one side a disheveled and dejected Ursula Jensen lay on a couch.

  She opened her eyes as Skid and his captors entered, and a spark of recognition flashed into them, but she said nothing.

  Panelli spoke to Skid in a voice as pleasant as the point of a fork scratching a plate.

  “Where is my pencil?” he said.

  Skid stood silent.

  Panelli got up and approached him. “When I ask you a question,” he grated, “answer me.” His open hand swung up and smacked Skid viciously across the face. “My pencil?” he repeated.

  “I lost it,” Skid said.

  Panelli’s cold eyes called him a liar, and his mouth said, “You know, you’re going to die. Tell me where my pencil is and you can die quick. Otherwise—”

  Skid replied calmly, “Oh, no, Panelli. Not tonight. I reckoned something like this might happen. A letter containing your name will be mailed to Commissioner Rankin by afternoon, unless I stop it.

  Look—turn me loose, release the girl, and lam. I stop the letter and keep quiet. If you can’t see that, remember the pencil and the letter will settle your hash.”

  He knew well enough that all this talk would not interest the gang leader. But he was consuming time, and time was what he had to have.

  Panelli stared at him with basilisk eyes. “I hate smart guys,” he snarled. His eyes flickered at the man behind Skid.

  Skid, warned by the flicker and a movement behind him, timed the descent of the blow exactly, ducking and rolling with it just enough so that the gun, instead of crashing solidly on his skull, scraped along the side like an explosion of rockets. He slumped to the floor, stunned and dazed, but not out.

  Panelli let him lie, and turned to snap orders to his crew.

  “Muggs and Pete, back to Riverton. Make that fat Edna talk. Don’t come back without the letter—and the pencil, if you can find it. This smart lug must have left the letter with her. The pencil may be hidden in the truck. Jack and I will look, but meanwhile you boys scram.”

  The two men who had captured Skid went out.

  Panelli addressed the other two. “Trig stays here to watch this shamus and the blonde. If either makes a break—plug ’em! Jack comes with me and if the pencil’s in the truck, we’ll find it.” Panelli went out with Jack, and Flo trailed along.

  Skid had by this time regained his senses. He had purposely fallen sideways, and flung out an arm as he fell, so that he was resting on his side, with his face partly shielded by the outflung arm. He heard the water gurgling in the mill-race behind him, and cautiously opened one eye.

  Trig took off his coat, revealing a .45 in a shoulder holster, and lounged at the table, indolently picking his teeth.

  Obviously, he could get his .45 into deadly action before Skid could even hope to get off the floor.

  The fine gravel and chaff of the dirt floor was hurting Skid’s cheek and he suddenly recalled a boyhood trick. Stirring a little, as a man does who is coming out of a daze, he managed to run out his tongue, invisibly, and pick up with it a couple of very small pebbles, like BB shot. Stirring again, he waited a moment, praying he hadn’t forgotten how to do it, and, controlling his facial muscles, ejected one pebble at Trig’s face, twelve feet away in the semi-darkness of the lantern-lit room.

  THE guard jumped, slapped his chin, and exclaimed, “Ouch! A hornet!” He snatched off his hat and slapped about in the air with it at the non-existent hornet.

  Skid thought, “I remember, all right,” and took advantage of the distraction to tongue up a mouthful of rubbish from the floor and after waiting a few minutes, began to toss and mumble.

  Trig came over, looked down at him, and was stiffening his leg to fetch Skid a kick in the head. Skid let one word escape clearly, among his groans: “Pencil.” Trig’s leg relaxed, and bending to hear better, rolled Skid on his back.

  Skid continued to mumble and groan—until he felt the thug’s breath on his face. Then, his tongue alrea
dy burning with the lime pellets his saliva had moistened, he propelled his mouthful of rubbish into Trig’s eyes, forcibly.

  The latter cursed, and tried to rub his eyes and reach the .45 simultaneously. It didn’t work; Skid swarmed over him, yanked the gun from the holster and, with grim satisfaction, slammed the barrel behind the man’s ear.

  The thin bubbling in Trig’s throat assured Skid that the gunman was finished. Stopping only to rinse out his mouth with a swig of coffee from the pot, he seized the lantern and pulled the gasping Ursula out of the room and upstairs.

  The outside door stood open and in the yard a pair of auto headlights shone on the truck. Panelli and the fellow called Jack were working in the glare, ripping open the truck seat cushions. Skid and Ursula stood behind the door, listening.

  “Chief,” a voice called from behind the car headlights. “Gas line’s okay. Must be ignition.”

  With a start, Skid recognized the voice of Pete, who had driven Skid’s truck to the hideout, and whom Panelli had ordered to go to Riverton. Straining his eyes through a crack, he saw the man working on the engine of the car, with Flo and Muggs hovering about.

  He gestured impatiently in the dark. The city detective he had seen dropping out of the truck had disabled the thug’s car before going for help. Now what?

  Four men and a woman, all armed, in the yard. If Skid started shooting, and failed to get them all, in the dark, he might get plugged himself, and Ursula Jensen would be spirited off again or killed with him.

  He led Ursula back downstairs, relit the lantern, and went frenziedly to work on the stored tires and batteries, repiling them for several minutes, but leaving the door clear, and explaining his scheme to Ursula. Then he blew out the lantern and led her back upstairs to the spot behind the outside door. He pulled her close, whispered in her ear. “This is it!” and fired the .45 into the floor.

  The boom of the small cannon reverberated in the old mill. The echoes had not died away when the gang from the yard dashed through the door behind which he and Ursula were standing, and piled downstairs.

  Skid slithered down after them, and to the open doorway where he saw their flashlight beams swinging about inside the room. He slammed the door, jerked the key tire of the pile he had previously arranged, and was just exulting at the tumbling crash when for the second time rockets exploded around his head, and he went out cold.

  He woke up to find his head pillowed in a soft lap and three State Policemen, with the Riverton dick, shining their flashlamps on him.

  “What happened to you?” one of the cops asked.

  Skid winced. “I forgot to duck when the battery I put on top of the pile carne down. Where are those rats?”

  The cop chuckled. “Inside, waiting for us to clear this blockade of yours.”

  Skid looked up at Ursula. “These cops might as well earn their pay,” he said. “I think I’ll keep my head in your lap for a while, if you don’t mind.”

  FIFTY-GRAND FUNERAL

  David X. Manners

  To be through when you’re old and gray is bad enough, but to be counted a dead pigeon when you’re still young and supposedly prime beef is little short of tragic. That is the way Larry Quentin felt when he got the little manila post card from his draft board and read: Registrant has been continued by Board of Appeals by a vote of 5 to 0 in Class 4 F.

  A dead pigeon and 4 F are one and the same. “You,” Larry’s friend, the Army doc, had said in most unfriendly fashion, “have a once-fractured collarbone you sustained in a plane crash in Cuba. Then there are those two bullets Dutch the Gup put into your left lung. And how about those cracked ribs and multiple fractured vertebrae the Schmootz gang gave you when they tossed you out of a third-floor window? Why, you even use a stick to help you walk.”

  You are used up. Finished. No good. They told him that in not so many words. Why don’t you go back to your detective business like a good boy?

  That, on top of a case Larry hadn’t got anywhere on in the past months, was enough to get him down.

  Larry Quentin slumped in his chair in his private detective office, and was about ready to expire when a brisk rap came on his door. He turned his head.

  “Hello, good-for-nothing!”

  Janet Joyce, a blue-eyed goddess, walked into the room, taking a pencil and pad from her bag as she did.

  He did not like that “good-for-nothing”—especially coming from a gal like Janet. And especially coming on top of everything else. He liked Janet. He hoped to marry her someday. Janet’s features were beautiful, and unmarred by time and mayhem as his were not. Besides she had long blond hair that was silky to the touch. Her legs were silky too, and well-formed.

  Larry Quentin said, “If it’s about the scrap metal collection—I haven’t got any.”

  She heaved a sigh. “Larry, you are never going to snap out of it! You are never going to do anything for the War Effort!”

  There was a useless iron fence in front of the brownstone house where Larry lived. Larry had already made arrangements with an acetylene man to cut it down. There was only the little item of asking the landlady for her permission.

  But he knew better than to stall Janet with things he intended doing.

  He smiled, waved her to a chair. “The drive isn’t over till next week,” he said.

  “Your quota is due in tomorrow,” she said emphatically.

  He said, “So why are you ranting? That is still twenty-four hours off. When I act, I’ll act fast and take care of it all at once. You forget I am a busy man. There is a case I’m working on. A case involving a friend of mine who has been treated unrighteously. Who—”

  Her snicker broke him off. “You haven’t had a client since Cain conked Abel,” she said. “You know you only use this office as a convenient place to snooze.”

  Larry reached under his desk for the bell-button. He had it rigged to stimulate the phone ringing, and it was a convenient device for just such an occasion as this. He would show Janet if he was busy or not.

  He jumped when the telephone’s bell really went off before his knee found the button. He fumbled in his hurry to get up the receiver.

  “Is this the International Detective Agency?” the voice at the other end rumbled in his ear. “Can you send a man over at once to the Republican Bank and Trust Company? There’s the strangest, weirdest, uncanniest—My God, he’s—”

  THE wire went dead. Larry jiggled the hook. It did no good. Finally, he replaced the receiver, got up at once, took his hat and his walking stick.

  “A client?” Janet’s mouth puckered in amazement. “I don’t believe it!”

  Larry picked up a dog’s leash that was draped over the door knob. “Sniffa!” he called. He whistled, urgently.

  An uncombed Scotty had been sleeping under the desk all the while. He scampered out, claws rattling on the floor. Larry snapped the leash on the twelve-year-old dog. “A client, Sniffa,” he said. He looked up at Janet and his smile was tight. “One last client, and then—the junk-heap!”

  Then he hurried out the door so fast he had to call back to Janet to ask if she’d lock up for him.

  The Republican Bank & Trust Company is one of New York’s smaller institutions, but it is by no means small. Its home is a staid fourteen-story building in the financial district. After the way the phone call had been cut off, Larry Quentin was expecting to find the bank’s foyer sprinkled with assorted corpses. Instead he was greeted by a placid-looking little brunette nifty who said, “Mr. Rolle is expecting you.”

  Banker Rolle was built like the head of the Truck Drivers’ Union. He was a big, silver-tipped bear who got up from behind acres of desk and ambled over to greet Larry. Sniffa, the Scotty, growled, and his hackles rose.

  Larry rested his stick against a chair, picked Sniffa up and held him so he would not take a chunk out of Banker Rolle’s rump, and said, “What gives? Why this mysterious phone call that gets cut off in the middle like somebody is being choked or something?”

  Bank
er Rolle said, “Blame Fingers.” He indicated a thin, nervous-looking man who was standing near the desk. “He just touched the phone wire and, believe it or not—it went dead!”

  “I don’t get it,” Larry said. “I don’t get it either,” agreed the banker. “Neither does Fingers understand it. It’s a strange power. We were just wondering if his bridgework might not be acting as a radio or something. All Fingers has to do is touch a phone wire, and he can hear what the people are saying. Or he can touch the outside of a closed book and tell you what’s inside it. Sometimes he even picks up stuff right out of the air.”

  “That’s right,” said this man known as Fingers, and his voice had the music of a squeaking door hinge. He was a scarecrow of a man with neatly pressed new clothes that didn’t seem a part of him. “I got magic in my fingers. I been reading fortunes and selling horoscopes in a Five and Dime store, when I got this message out of the air about Mr. Rolle’s health, and I come to tell ‘im.”

  Larry Quentin looked sharply at Fingers, and then something in his mind began to click. It was the recollection that Fingers had once been the guest of the police because his hands had been too smart about getting into safes. Surely, Rolle wasn’t falling sucker to Fingers’ gag, whatever its purpose.

  “Let me demonstrate,” Banker Rolle urged. “What can you show us, Fingers?”

  Fingers went over and touched the wall. He made his scrawny face look holy for a minute and then he said, “Your secretary has just begun writing a letter. It—le’s see—it says: ‘Darling Johnny . . . I am writing this while the boss is busy, so—”

  Larry walked quickly to the office door and pulled it open. He observed a quick sleight of hand by the little nifty who had ushered him in to Banker Rolle’s presence.

  Larry walked over and before she could object, he pulled out the beginning of a letter that she had quickly slid under her blotter. She blushed and tried to stammer an excuse as Larry read it, handed it back to her.