by Jerry eBooks
Further conversation was brought to an abrupt halt as Corey came dashing around the corner of the building, gun in hand. In the front of the building a policeman’s whistle shrilled for assistance. Corey’s mouth dropped open as he saw Pierre holding the man at sword’s point against the wall. All the fight seemed to go out of the guard at the appearance of the detective, and the sound of approaching help. Pierre smiled.
“I am sorry, mon ami,” he told the excited detective. “I have failed to bring you the Blue Glass Chariot. It is gone beyond redemption.”
“Then what are you doing with this lug?” asked Corey, staring at Pierre as though he had gone crazy. “Ain’t he the guy that stole it?”
“No, he didn’t steal it,” Pierre told him sadly. “More is the pity. He destroyed it!”
“You’re nuts!” Corey told him succinctly. “A guy don’t bump other guys off to go out and break a piece of china that ain’t doin’ any harm.”
“One may do a number of things for profit, though,” Pierre told him gently. “This gentleman is an authority on Pharaoh Glass and has written a book about it. He destroyed the Blue Glass Chariot because he has counterfeited some models—not one, but many. Once the original is stolen the resulting publicity would make many unscrupulous collectors want to get the stolen object. Maybe he has already contacted more than half a dozen collectors, telling them that he would deliver the Chariot when he had stolen it. Even if the collectors later discovered the fraud, they would not be able to go to the police.”
BARODIN reached out and grabbed Wells, spinning him around and into Corey’s arms. “I think you will have no trouble in getting a confession from him. He should have studied some books on crime as well as on art if he didn’t want to get caught.”
Corey snapped the bracelets on the man. He knew better than to question Barodin’s judgment on matters dealing with art.
“Book this guy for murder,” he told a policeman who had come around the corner of the building, gun drawn for trouble. “I’ll explain to the sergeant later.”
Later, as he and Pierre grabbed a taxi and started downtown, Corey turned to Barodin, his eyes tortured with doubt as he surveyed the calm Frenchman.
“Well, spill it,” he said. “I stuck my neck out on this, for I’ll be an Egyptian banshee if I see what we can hold that guy on.”
Pierre smiled and smoothed his Menjou mustache into place.
“But it is clear, mon ami, as clear as the glass that was destroyed. The guard, Ryan, was murdered with a watchman’s key. One of those tee-shaped instruments that watchmen carry to check into the main office and the protection bureau. Did he have a key when you found him, mon vieux?”
Corey’s eyes popped open.
“I never thought of that one. It was with his own key that he was murdered. He musta known the guy, so you looked around inside for the killer!”
Barodin’s voice was gentle as though chiding a child.
“Much more than that, mon ami, the killer knew too much about the civilization of the Egyptians to suit me. That tee is the cross of the Egyptians, the scepter of all the gods of Egypt, Anubis included. Crime would be an offering to one god only, the god of crime. This man Wells couldn’t make duplicate chariots unless he could study the model at close range. He and Ryan were in this together—which is why the guard trusted him so much he could be struck down with ease.
“You see,” Pierre continued, “it was a mundane thing with a mysterious angle only. A man like Wells thought he was mysterious when he followed his thought suggestion and placed his offering at the feet of the god of crime.”
“Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!” Corey exclaimed. “You built up a theory like that on such a fragile bit of evidence?”
Barodin sighed.
“Fragile, yes. It is too bad the evidence was too fragile to be recovered for the world of art.”
WHITE HEAT
Arthur J. Burks
Fire Marshal Joe Drake Got His Fill of Danger When He Bucked Mobsters Who Pulled Two Simultaneous Crimes!
THE moment somebody pulled the fire-alarm box near Sixth Avenue and Twenty-third Street, Joe Drake, fire marshal, piled into his car and roared toward the scene. Outwardly the coupe looked like a Ford. But under the hood purred an engine which could hurl the vehicle along the pavement at better than eighty miles an hour.
Now as Drake weaved in and out of traffic at reckless speed, the old feeling of danger hummed along his nerves, and his dark eyes grew more brilliant.
Drake’s job was to find out how fires started in order to fix the blame and criminal liability, if any. It was an excellent school in which to learn detective work, and Drake had gathered knowledge and wisdom with uncanny rapidity.
He was clever even though he was only twenty-five. It took a lot of careful planning on the part of any firebug to set a blaze and not get caught and sent up the river for doing it.
Fires like last week’s tenement blaze on Eighth Avenue, in which a dozen people went to the hospital and three to the morgue, were sordid and ghastly. But that had been cut and dried, having been caused by an overturned kerosene stove.
It was the other conflagrations—those of mysterious and suspicious origin and started with criminal intent—that interested Joe Drake and filled him with the rich wine of adventure.
Careening around a corner on two wheels, Drake heard the wail of sirens. Fire engines: and police radio cars were on the way. But swift as they were, they failed to beat Joe Drake to the scene.
Tires screeched their loud protest as the young investigator skidded to a halt and leaped out of his car. He ran across the street as two radio cars pulled up. A curious crowd had gathered, and the police moved in swiftly to keep the people back.
The building, a narrow, three-storied structure squeezed in between two taller buildings on Sixth Avenue, was already a roaring furnace.
Ruddy flames leaped into the sky, the heat of them washing across the street in a torrid wave.
A HUGE hand was pressed against Drake’s burly chest as he worked his way to the edge of the crowd.
“Get back, feller! Do you want to have your eyebrows burned off?”
The fire marshal grinned at the copper. “Hello, Barnes. Is this a private show, or can I sit in on it?”
Officer Barnes answered the grin with one of his own.
“Excuse me, Mr. Drake. The shine of the fire on your face kept me from recognizing you right off. Go ahead.”
Any further words were utterly drowned out by the noise of the onrushing fire trucks as they jammed into position to put out the blaze with their usual clocklike regularity.
Drake looked at his watch. Between the pulling of the alarm and the arrival of the engines less than two minutes had elapsed. When a New York engine company was ordered to roll, it rolled.
Officers nodded to Drake. He was a six-footer, looking more the college athlete than the criminologist, and his red hair made him stand out as though he himself had been on fire. .
“How did it happen?” yelled someone.
But Drake hadn’t started to find out. One couldn’t get into that seething inferno, so any information pointing to foul play had to wait until the fire had been extinguished, which meant that all clues might easily be erased by the flames.
Firemen gripped the hose lines, and with heads down, dashed to the door of the building which was red from pavement to roof. Water surged through the huge hose, making it hard as iron under the tremendous pressure.
Drake turned his back on the scene and his eyes played over the faces of the crowd. There was a woman who gloated over fires. She might easily be a firebug, Drake decided, but it required more than a suspicion to make an arrest.
Besides, he wasn’t ready to make an arrest. There were a dozen faces in a row, each expressing a certain grim eagerness.
“Every last one of ’em is hoping that lives have been lost in the fire and that they’ll see the corpses dragged out!” thought Joe.
But it
wasn’t these faces—whose counterparts pressed against the life lines at every fire—that Drake was seeking. He was looking for faces which expressed real concern and shock.
Finally, he found one. It was that of a man in late middle age, with gray at his temples, wearing worn working clothes. Since it was nine o’clock, Saturday night, the man had obviously been working late somewhere.
Even as Drake looked at the man, he saw the despair engraved on his face and heard him mutter:
“There goes my job up in smoke!” Drake walked over to him.
“Who owns this place?” he asked.
The old man gave a nervous start.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, who pays you then? I heard you say something about your job going up in smoke, so you must work in the building. Do you know how the fire started, or if it was accidental or not?”
THE old man’s face blanched, and his eyes dilated. “I work for an estate,” he said, lowering his voice as Drake led him away from the noise and commotion of the fire. “My check comes to my house regularly through the mail. I haven’t even bothered to ask who supplies the funds, so long as the check is good.
“I must give satisfaction, or they wouldn’t pay me twenty-five a week to act as building watchman, would they? Now this fire ruins everything—and me goin’ on for old age.”
“Was the building occupied?” persisted the fire marshal.
“No. That is, not yet. It’s been vacant a long time, but a couple of weeks ago it looked as if the place had been leased and some business were preparing to move in.
“Boxes were carted to the curb and packed into the storerooms on all three floors. I’m not curious and didn’t ask what was in any of the boxes.
“It couldn’t have been much, though, for I’ve bumped against some of the boxes, cIeanin’ up, and they moved as easily as if they were empty.”
Drake was listening with growing interest, already guessing as to how it had been done—knowing even now that the fire had been deliberately started. But why? That would come later.
“I didn’t see the renter,” went on the caretaker of the doomed house, “but everything seemed to be in order, including the trucks backin’ up to the curb. Knowin’ how badly the place needed to be rented, I didn’t ask questions for fear of scarin’ the people off.”
“What sort of business do you think these people were starting?” demanded Drake, oblivious of the excited clamor all around him.
“I couldn’t even guess, but somethin’ wholesale, I’m sure, for there weren’t any counters or desks. Aside from a small table and chair, there was nothin’ but those light boxes.”
“Did you hear anybody say when the place would be opened for business?”
The old man hesitated for a moment.
“Well, I did hear somebody say that it would be opened sometime tonight.”
“Did they say what hour the place would be opened?”
“No.”
“Weren’t you curious?” queried Drake, a firm tenacity in his voice.
The caretaker shuffled his feet in embarrassment, reddened a little.
“Well, yes, I was curious,” he said, “and so—”
“You came back, sort of quietly and carefully so the people wouldn’t ask embarrassing questions, to see what was going to happen here,” Drake concluded.
The old man looked up, now plainly frightened.
“Say, are you a detective? I didn’t start the fire, if that’s why you’re askin’ me so many questions.”
“I don’t suspect you of anything,” replied Drake with a reassuring smile, “but tell me something. Do you have Saturday afternoons off?”
“Yes, because I work half a day on Sundays.”
“Where were you when the fire started?”
LIFTING his chin courageously, the old man met Drake’s stiff, speculative gaze.
“Maybe it looks bad for me,” he said, “but I was at the door of the place when the fire started. I was goin’ in.”
“What made you decide to do that, when you were doubtful about coming back?”
“The place was dark, when I’d expected it to be light. So I intended goin’ in to see what had been done durin’ Saturday afternoon. I was tryin’ to unlock the door—the lock is old and has to be pampered—when I heard somethin’ that sort of startled me.”
“Yes?” Drake lifted his chin, his eyes eager. He was like a war-horse scenting a battle. “What was it?”
“The ringin’ of a telephone inside the store.”
“What was there about that to scare you?”
“There hadn’t been a telephone in the place since the last tenant moved out, and there hadn’t been one when I had left the place at noon. Of course, it had been put in Saturday afternoon, but I wasn’t expectin’ it so I stopped a few seconds with my foolin’ with the lock. Then I couldn’t go in.”
“Why not?”
“Because the inside of the building practically exploded into flames.”
Drake’s face became thoughtful. The caretaker studied him anxiously, obviously expecting to suffer dire consequences for something he had done or failed to do.
His was the abject fear of the old man who is afraid of losing his livelihood. Drake looked at his watch. Only five minutes had passed since he had started talking with the old man.
And now something else was happening.
From up Twenty-third Street, toward Fifth Avenue, came the sound of police sirens. The spectators at the fire craned their necks, scenting a new thrill.
Drake peered grimly at the blazing building and decided he would be unable to enter and conduct an examination for at least twenty minutes.
Leaving the old man, he hurried to Twenty-third Street. He was just in time to see a police car slide to a stop in front of a jewelry store, midway of the long block.
Drake, always interested in police work, had time to spare, and since he had police powers he would be allowed to see what was going on.
A tall, slender man, his pale cheeks streaked with blood dripping from a cut on his scalp, met Drake and the police inside the establishment.
“I’ve been robbed, gentlemen!” gasped the jeweler. “Roughly, I’ve lost over a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gems!”
The coppers—and plainclothes men who had followed them in—stared at one another. Drake’s heart jumped, then settled down to a rapid, excited beating.
“How could that happen when the store must have been filled with a Saturday night crowd?” demanded a police lieutenant.
“It was filled, but when the engines began to arrive on the scene of the fire down at the corner, my place was emptied like magic. You know how people are about fires. Well, a couple of minutes passed, maybe. Then a car stopped at my door and three men came in. I was putting away my trays of stones. I had a tray of uncut diamonds in my hands.”
THE jeweler broke off a moment and dabbed at the cut on his head with a handkerchief.
“The three men smiled at me. They looked like money, though I’d never seen any of them before. They suddenly pointed weapons at me. I dropped the tray.
“One of them picked it up, emptied the contents into a sack. One fellow held me covered while the others grabbed everything in sight.”
“Describe the three men.”
“I was so scared I didn’t notice much,” murmured the jeweler. “One thief stayed behind until the other two reached their car. One of the two running men I bumped into someone on the sidewalk and I’m sure some of the stones were jostled out of his hands.
“The pedestrian started to run when the robber said something to him. The two got into their car. Then the fellow who had been covering me hit me with the muzzle of his weapon. As soon as I came to, I telephoned the police.”
Drake waited for no more. He dashed out to the sidewalk and began to search the gutter for stones, clues, anything which might show him the way to the solution of this robbery.
It wasn’t in his line, but h
e still had a few minutes before he could get into the burning building on the corner.
“Darned funny it should all happen together like that,” mused Drake.
A copper grasped him roughly by the shoulder.
“Looking for something?” he enquired belligerently.
Drake glanced up, noticing that the police had acted swiftly. The crowd which passed the scene of the robbery was not allowed to pause. Anyone attempting to loiter in the vicinity was instantly chased away while a cop would carefully study the area at which the pedestrian had paused to stare.
It was quite obvious that an effort was being made to find the stones the jeweler believed had been dropped in the hurry of the robbers’ flight.
Drake didn’t argue with the policeman whom he didn’t know. If he explained himself the copper might naturally ask him what business it was of a fireman that a jeweler had been robbed, and Drake wasn’t ready to tell him.
Instead, his mind racing at top speed, he hurried back to the scene of the fire. At the corner nearest to it he happened to look back.
The policeman who had challenged him in front of the jeweler’s was following him. Did the fellow suspect him of something? Why did he follow? And if he did suspect, why didn’t he close in and make the collar?
Shrugging his broad shoulders, Drake mingled with the crowd, most of whom had remained at the fire and didn’t yet know about the robbery. If the jeweler had been murdered, the crowd would have been in front of his place.
Crowds sensed tragedy as vultures sensed carrion. Drake knew that and shivered despite the fact that he was so close to the waning flames. What tragedy would be disclosed when it was possible to enter the building?
A hand touched Drake on the shoulder. He turned and looked into a pair of cold black eyes—those of the copper who had challenged him.
The man’s uniform fitted him snugly. He was soldierly in bearing. He looked the part of an efficient officer. But his eyes were as cold as ice and there was a bleak deadliness to his craggy profile.
“I’m wondering about you, fellow,” said the policeman. “If you don’t mind I’ll stick around a bit. Don’t try to duck away from me.”
