Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  THE DOUBLE-CROSSING CORPSE

  Day Keene

  When is a murder not a murder? When does Death laugh at the best laid plans of lice and men? And what happens to a homicide case when a tough detective lieutenant goes all-out soft on a blonde and gorgeous torch singer—whose husband lies cooling in the morgue? . . . You’ll find the amazing answers in this compelling story.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sweet and Low

  IT WAS three o’clock in the morning when Jim Blade’s phone bell rang. He should have been asleep. He wasn’t. For hours he had lain staring at the ceiling, trying to find the answer to a problem seemingly impossible of solution.

  “Blade speaking,” he said quietly. “Listen, mug,” a voice said coldly. “Lay off the dame, see? She didn’t do it. I did.”

  “Did what?” Blade demanded.

  “You’ll find out,” the voice informed him. “And if you try to pin any false raps on the chickadee—so help me, I’ll kill you.”

  There was a sharp click on the other end of the phone line as the man replaced the receiver. Blade jiggled the cradle of his own phone.

  “Find out where that call came from, will you, Gertie?”

  “It came from Harve Exter’s Sweet and Low Club on Rush Street, lieutenant,” the night switchboard operator told him. “I checked while the party was speaking. And don’t hang up, please. I have another call waiting.” She plugged in a second line. “Go ahead, Inspector Rican. You are connected with Lieutenant Blade.”

  “Jim?” Rican demanded curtly.

  “Speaking. What’s up, Harry?”

  “Harve Exter has been murdered.”

  For a moment Blade was silent. Then he asked: “Would you repeat that, Harry?”

  “Harve Exter has been murdered. As I have the story so far, he was shot to death in a private dining room of the Sweet and Low. The other boys have just pulled out.” Inspector Rican hesitated briefly. “You want in on this or not?”

  “I want in.”

  There was relief in the other man’s voice. “I thought you might. McManus went out of here as officer in charge. You take over when you get there. I’ll send Pete to pick you up.”

  Blade thanked Inspector Rican and the other man hung up. “Gertie?” Blade said quietly.

  “Evesdropping,” she reported.

  “Mum is the word,” he told her.

  “I’ll keep it under my arms,” she assured him.

  Blade dressed carefully if quickly. A tall, big boned, man he moved with a seemingly effortless co-ordination of mind and muscle.

  Blade smiled grimly as he knotted his tie and slipped into his coat.

  Harve Exter’s death had been the only solution to his problem. The way that Blade felt about Mignon he had even considered murdering the man himself. The fact had been no secret, not even to the Department.

  On his way out he stooped at the switchboard to thank Gertie for tracing the call.

  The red-haired girl said, “Forget it. It is a liberal education to work your line, lieutenant. I presume you’ll be marrying the widow?”

  “Suppose,” Blade suggested, nettled, “that we bury her husband first, or at least find out who killed him.”

  HE STRODE out through the dimly lighted lobby. The red-haired girl at the switchboard nodded with approval as he turned up the collar of his overcoat before pushing on through the revolving doors. Then she studied her reflection earnestly and critically in the small hand mirror on the board.

  “And what,” she demanded, satisfied with her inspection, “outside of a jin-husky voice and another man’s son, has Mignon Exter got that Mrs. Covina’s little girl Gertie is lacking?”

  All of Chicago knew the answer to that one. The torch singing, willowy blonde with the faint French accent had Lieutenant Jim Blade of Homicide wound around her little finger.

  In front of the hotel, on wind-blown Dearborn Street, Blade cupped his hands against the cold blasts off the Lake and lighted a cigarette. More snow had fallen and the Sanitary Department plows were busily scooping it up against the morning rush hour traffic and piling it on top of the long and dirty windrows that already lined the street.

  A big car, coming fast, braked abruptly across the street. His head down against the wind, Blade crossed to intercept it before Pete should be tempted into trying a U turn and stalling in the drifts.

  It wasn’t Pete. The collegiate looking youth at the wheel rolled down the Window and said, “Hello, lieutenant.”

  The man on the seat beside the driver and the three men in the rear seat of the big car merely stared. There was a smell of well-oiled metal. It wasn’t from the motor.

  “Hello, Jerry,” Blade said. He put both hands in plain sight on the car door. “You boys looking for me?”

  “That’s right,” Shad Rorick’s second-in-command said crisply. “Shad is down in the Sweet and Low and it seems that there’s been a sudden demise down there?”

  “So—?”

  The youth at the wheel was no longer smiling. “So as„ soon as we found out that Inspector Rican had assigned you to the case we thought we’d drop out and see you.”

  “That was nice,” Blade said.

  SCHLITZ MURRAY on the seat beside the driver growled: “Why kick the ball around? We’ve been paying plenty, Blade. And while we don’t know that it was Shad, see, Shad was plenty high the last time that we seen him. And if he was the lad who cooled off Exter, he’s not standing any murder rap. We need him in our business.”

  “You’ve been paying me how much?” Blade asked.

  “Well, not you,” Jerry admitted. “But it’s been going through the usual sources to—”

  “I’d just as soon not know,” Blade cut him short. He slipped the handle of the door, pulled the hoodlum out from under the wheel and slapped him hard across the mouth. “But this is from me to you. You can’t buy immunity from a murder rap, not even in this town. And if it was Shad who knocked off Exter and I can prove that he did, he’ll fry.”

  The hoodlum stared at him, defiant: “And you’ll marry the widow, huh?”

  “Perhaps,” Blade agreed. “I hope so.” Still holding the struggling hoodlum by the collar he bent down and peered into the darkened interior of the car. “Are there any other of you lads who would like a beauty treatment?”

  The smell of oiled metal was stronger here. Blade could see the dull gleam of the barrels of a sawed-off shotgun resting across one of the hoodlum’s knees. He was answered by a surly silence. The tall, gangling, police lieutenant had a reputation of being as tough as he was honest. A former back-of-the-yards boy, he preferred to use his fists.

  Still twisting, helpless, in his hand, Shad Rorick’s second-in-command snarled: “Leave loose of me. Someday you’ll go too far.”

  Blade sat him back behind the wheel so hard that he bounced. “Let me know when I do,” he told him pleasantly.

  “Yah,” Schlitz Murray found his courage as the driver ground on the starter, “Listen to the honest cop. Him and the Lone Ranger.”

  The big car leaped forward and roared on down the street. Blade stood staring after it thoughtfully until the twin tail lights turned right toward the Outer Drive on East North Avenue. He was still standing in the middle of the street when Pete Cussack braked beside him.

  Blade nodded. “Hi, ho, Silver.”

  “You walking back from a ride, or just starting out on one?” the bald-headed, little squad-car driver demanded.

  Blade slid into the seat beside him. “I’ll be damned if I know,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Triple Murder

  THERE were three cars parked in front of the night club. One was Homicide. One belonged to the tech squad. The third was the coroner’s car.

  The large red neon sign that named the club had been turned off but small amber lights still spelled out Mignon on the marquee.

  Blade, followed by Cussack, pushed through the usual crowd of morbidly curious shivering in the cold and banged on the glass
door. A uniformed patrolman let them in.

  McManus was in the foyer arguing with a black-haired, flashing-eyed woman in her late forties. She had a wisp of starched lace in her hair and a shabby gray squirrel skin coat thrown cloak fashion over a pert maid’s uniform. The detective seemed relieved to see them. He tapped the woman on the shoulder and pointed to Lieutenant Blade. “You argue with him, see, sister? He’s the boss.”

  The woman tossed her head. “Comment?”

  “What’s the matter?” Blade asked. “She talks French and I talk English,” McManus told him earnestly. “I don’t get what she’s driving at.”

  “Her name’s Celeste,” the colored doorman offered from the corner where he was warming the back of his scarlet-and-gold uniform against a sizzling radiator. “She’s one of them refugees. Mr. Exter just hired her the other day.”

  “As near as I can make out,” McManus added, “she says that she’s only the ladies’ washroom attendant, had nothing to do with the murder, and wants the hell out of here.”

  Blade strode on into the club. “Nobody leaves,” he called back over his shoulder.

  A dozen couples were sitting in sullen silence at the dimly lighted tables around the postage-stamp-sized dance floor. The musicians were huddled in an apathetic group at one end of the small bar.

  Blade strode past the closed doors of the row of private dining rooms to the one where flash bulbs were popping. He found Coroner Westman taking off his coat.

  “I just beat you by a minute,” the coroner told Blade cheerfully. “A hell of a night, eh, Jim?”

  “A hell of a night.”

  He stood looking at the corpse. It was, as always, difficult for him to reconcile a girl of Mignon’s beauty living with such a man. Harve Exter had been, in life, a pot-bellied little weasel. Death hadn’t added to his looks. The manner of exit from the world was seemingly clean cut. There were two brown stains on the front of his dress shirt in the region of his heart. The powder stains would seem to indicate that the death gun had been fired from a distance of not more than six inches. There was surprisingly little blood.

  After a quick glance around the room and at the table set for two, Blade knelt beside the dead man and felt underneath his arm pit for the holstered gun he knew was there. Exter had carried a heavy-calibered automatic. Both the chamber and the clip were filled.

  “Funny,” the lieutenant puzzled, “that Exter would let anyone with a gun in his hand get so close to him.”

  Pete Cussack said earnestly, “It must have been someone he trusted.”

  Blade shook his head. “Harve Exter didn’t trust anyone. He couldn’t. He had a finger in every dirty pie on the near north side. No one heard the shots, I suppose?”

  Hartley, a print man, looked up from the wine glass that he was dusting. “I heard one of the waiters tell McManus that he thought that he heard two shots just before three o’clock. But it being a pretty cold night outside, he figured them for backfires.”

  “And the body was found when and by whom?”

  “At five minutes after three, Jim. By one of the waiters.” McManus came into the room mopping at his forehead with his breast-pocket handkerchief. “Boy. Would I hate to be married to that dame. If some of them things that she called me in French mean what I think that they do—”

  “Wow!” Pete Cussack grinned.

  “Wow,” McManus agreed. He reported to Blade: “I’ve got the boys making the usual frisk and getting the names and addresses of everyone in the joint. You want what I’ve got so far, Jim, or do you want to prowl it on your own?”

  “I’ll take what you have,” Blade said.

  “Well, the joint is lousy with motive,” the homicide man admitted. “And whoever did it is still here. The doorman says no one has left since about two forty-five or ten minutes before the waiter thought that he heard two shots.”

  Blade picked up one of the wine glasses from the table and sniffed at it absently. “Go on.”

  McMANUS enumerated his suspects upon his fingers. There were four of them. The first, the dead man’s wife, he skipped over hastily in deference to Blade’s feelings. The other three were Slim Alcott, a gambler to whom the dead man had owed money, Shad Rorick the racketeer who owned one half of the club, and a little blonde dancer who had come to the club with Rorick and who felt that Exter had wronged her.

  “Where’s Shad now?” Blade demanded.

  “Passed out on the couch of the dining room three doors up the hall,” McManus told him. “But he hasn’t been passed out long. The bartender said that he made a phone call at exactly three o’clock.”

  “Let’s wake him up,” Blade said. McManus led the way down the hall. The second private dining room was identical with the first. The table was set for two. Shad Rorick lay on his back on a red leather studio couch snoring soddenly. A big, powerful, handsome black Irishman, he looked more like a Hollywood leading man than he did like the vicious racketeer and gunman that he was.

  A sultry-eyed, slightly disheveled, young blonde eyed the two detectives drunkenly, and slightly frightened, from the table where she was building up a terrific hangover by drinking rye whiskey straight with champagne as a chaser.

  “Thish ish a private dining room,” she informed them with drunken dignity. “So Harve Exter’s dead. So what? I didn’t shoot him. I haven’t got a gun. Now get the hell out of here!”

  Lieutenant Blade ignored her to jerk the sleeping man on the couch into a sitting position with one hand while he tried to slap him sober with the other. Either Rorick was a clever actor or his drunken stupor was genuine. His head lolled from side to side. His eyes opened blearily but there was no recognition in them. He sagged back limply to the couch when Blade released him.

  “You checked his gun?”

  “I did,” McManus said. “And it wasn’t his rod that killed Exter. It was as clean as a whistle. I looked.”

  “How about a hide-a-way?” Blade’s big hands fanned Rorick’s body deftly as he asked.

  He found the second gun, a pear handled .32 calibered automatic, in Rorick’s cummerbund. Using his handkerchief to handle it, he slipped the clip and pumped it. The firing chamber reeked of freshly discharged powder. Assuming the clip had been filled, two shots had been fired.

  “Okay. That’s a horse on me,” McManus admitted. “I should have thought of a hide-a-way.”

  Blade showed the gun to the blonde. “You ever see this before, sister?”

  “No,” she said quite soberly, “I never have. And it wasn’t Shad who killed Harve Exter.” She spoke like a small and somewhat frightened child who had memorized a piece. “Shed has been here in this room with me ever since two thirty.”

  “Without even leaving it once?”

  “Without even leaving it once.”

  Blade and McManus exchanged glances. “We’ll be back,” Blade told the girl. In the hall he called Pete Cussack and posted him at the door. Then he took the automatic into the room where the print men were still working. “See what you can give me on that, will you, Hartley?” He turned back to McManus. “Now what’s this about Mignon?”

  “Well,” the detective admitted unwillingly, “when I first got here one of the waiters, a lad by the name of Allier, told me that Harve and Mrs. Exter had a hell of a row.”

  “Let’s talk to Allier,” Blade suggested.

  They found the waiter in the kitchen eating a liverwurst on rye and washing it down with coffee. A new man to the Sweet And Low he didn’t know of the torch Jim Blade was carrying.

  “Yair. Sure I heard ’em fighting,” he admitted. “Mr. Exter says that he’s got his belly full of being two-timed by a cheap little chiseling tramp. He says he is going to toss her out on her ear without any alimony and is going to keep their kid with him on account of she was an unfit mother.”

  “Go on,” Blade said grimly.

  “That’s all I heard,” the waiter shrugged, “except that Mrs. Exter said, ‘I’ll kill you first.’ I didn’t think anything
about it at the time. But Mr. Exter was shouting and swearing something awful. And when Mrs. Exter comes out of the room she has the makings of a beautiful black eye.”

  “I—I’ll talk to Mignon—alone,” Blade told McManus.

  “I thought you might want to,” he said.

  Blade strode out of the kitchen and rapped sharply on the door of the star’s dressing room.

  MIGNON EXTER was admittedly half French, half Irish. She had come to Chicago from New York five years before. Her first job on the near north side had been behind a green baize counter of a twenty-six game. Then Harve Exter had discovered she could sing. Six months later he had married her. In due time a son had been born. For a year they had been happy. For the last two years, or so Mignon had told Blade, Harve Exter had made her life a living hell.

  “It’s Jim,” Blade called as he rapped. The door opened immediately. Tall, beautifully formed, in her middle twenties, the platinum-haired torch singer clutched a wholly inadequate negligee together with one hand. She released it entirely to throw her arms around Blade’s neck and kiss him passionately. “Oh, Jim,” she whispered huskily. “I am so glad you got here.”

  Blade closed the door behind him. “You didn’t do it, did you, honey?”

  The singer looked at him reproachfully with one eye. The other, a swollen, almost shut, was beginning to turn purple. “You know better than that, Jim. But Harve was raising hell about us tonight just before he was killed and—” she broke off and began to sob quietly.

  “He had nothing to raise hell about,” Blade said truthfully. “We shot square with him all the way.” He smiled ruefully. “Hell. When I came in just now—it was the first time that you ever kissed me.”

  The girl stopped crying to nuzzle his cheek. That wasn’t my fault, Jim.”

  “No,” Blade admitted, “it wasn’t.”

  A few stolen minutes together, a few drinks, a few furtive hand clasps had been the sole extent of their affair. Mignon had been willing to go further, but Blade hadn’t. He wasn’t a prude but neither was it in his code to make love to another man’s wife. Carrying a torch was one thing, two-timing was another. He had gone to Harve Exter openly and asked him to agree to a divorce. The pot-bellied, little night club owner had laughed at him.