Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  Before he submitted the scribbled words of Tina, the pin-up girl, Don Kemp separated the envelope from the other letters of Legs McCarthy. McCarthy stared at Kemp as the lieutenant made a swift pass of the letters to him, and then reversed his gun and handed it to Sergeant Reardon.

  A little later, Tony Walsh cleared himself. The tank plans were unearthed from under a rug in Carlos Carnes’ office.

  “Tina told us about a hidden safe behind her pinup picture,” explained Tony Walsh. “I tried to stop her. Bobby Lane’s reputed fortune has dwindled to nothing. But he had been getting regular remittances.

  “Bobby Lane was being paid as an Axis agent. I knew he was already acquainted with Carlos Carnes, here at the hotel. As soon as that stage stabbing stunt and the murder loomed up, I was convinced either Bobby Lane or Carnes was the killer. I kept quiet for the time, waiting to see how the frame-up might be pinned upon Lieutenant Kemp.

  “I congratulate you, lieutenant, on being smarter and quicker than these Axis stooges. I’ve an idea Carnes killed Bobby Lane and Tina. He would figure that Kemp would know or guess where the information had come from about his hidden safe. No doubt Carnes was planning to take quick leave of this place.”

  “You’re all technically under arrest,” announced Sergeant Reardon a little later. “However, we have checked with the F.B.I., and they are fairly certain Carnes is one of the Axis agents who slipped out of their trap up in Detroit nearly a year ago.”

  Don Kemp faced the C.O. a short time after that. “I should have you up and drummed out for keeping priceless information to yourself,” grunted Captain Morgan. Then his rugged face cracked into a grin.

  “However, if what Mary says is true, I’ll guarantee you’ll never again hide anything behind the picture of a pin-up girl,” added the C.O. “By the way, Mary is waiting up for you. After what she had been through, I ordered her to get to bed. So she’s waiting up. My boy, Mary doesn’t take orders and I’ve never known her to miss what she goes after.”

  Don Kemp smiled a little. He snapped a salute and stepped out into the room where Mary was waiting, her dark eyes lifted to meet him.

  Don Kemp heard Captain Morgan mutter, faintly, “An’ may the good gods have mercy on your soul.”

  CORPSES LEAVE ME COLD

  David X. Manners

  In the hell-red heat of a booming war plant, Tip Dolan was invited to cool off—with a corpse-cold bath of liquid air!

  CHAPTER ONE

  Hell’s Homecoming

  TOWNS are like people. To go on living, they sometimes have to change. Tip Dolan thought that as he walked up Main Street in the small midwestern town of Pleasantville. But the thought did not ease the tightening of his full mouth, or salve the disappointment inside him.

  If clean, shady Pleasantville had been a trim, stately lady before, now it had become a loose, gross slattern. A town just couldn’t mushroom to twice its size in hardly more than a year without evil effect. Tip kept moving up Main Street.

  Tall and rangy in close-patterned tweeds, Tip noted the many unfamiliar faces. The russet weekend bag he carried he knew marked him as a stranger—a stranger in a town that had been his home since boyhood, a town to which he’d sworn nothing could make him return.

  But the threat of a murder had brought him back.

  “I’m so glad you could make it here for your uncle’s funeral,” Webb Whiteheart, the ancient, toothless lawyer had said when Tip had stopped into the second floor office a half hour earlier. Tip had been named for his Uncle Andrew Tipton. “I’m glad you’ve forgotten all the old bitterness—and come back to Pleasantville.”

  Tip shook his head, studied the white-haired wisp who’d been his uncle’s lawyer. “There never was any bitterness between Uncle Andy and myself.”

  “The factory—” Whiteheart began. Andrew Tipton’s Spee-D Washmachine plant had once been the only industry giving subsistence to Pleasantville’s families. Now the war had changed things somewhat.

  Tip nodded. “Sure, Uncle Andy’s heart was broken when I wouldn’t go into his factory. He’d educated me for it, made bright plans. He had no kids of his own, and so I was his son. But afterwards he understood why I had to get away.” It had been a Pleasantville girl—and heartbreak—behind Tip’s leaving.

  The ancient lawyer blinked. “Pleasantville’s changed,” he said, as if seeking the thread of conversation. “Your uncle’s plant is three times the size it was. Will you take it over now?”

  “I’ll be in the Army in a week. I didn’t come back here to stay. All I want to do is find out—why nothing’s been done about my uncle’s murder.”

  “Murder?”

  Lawyer Whiteheart’s rheumy eyes blossomed wide. . . . It was the same reaction Tip got a few minutes later from police chief Jules Parnell at the station house.

  Parnell was a hearty man—a tintype with a full, waxed moustache. A heavy gold ring was on his small finger.

  “Murder?” Parnell’s ears drew back as his eyebrows lifted. His voice was a stertorian boom. “Your uncle died of heart failure!”

  “EVERYBODY dies of heart failure,” Tip said humorlessly. His eyes, set deep behind bony cheeks were bleak. “I told you over the phone from New York two days ago of the letter Uncle Andy had written me. He knew his life was in danger. You told me yourself of a strange, unexplainable burn on his wrist when you found him, a small puncture.”

  That about ended the visit with Chief Parnell. Tip received a statement that a postmortem on Andrew Tipton had revealed nothing. The rotund, florid-faced chief was too busy handling a town turned boomcamp, to go looking for trouble.

  Tip Dolan thought of those two visits now—the one with old lawyer Whiteheart and the one with Chief Parnell—as he traversed Main Street.

  He passed a large, liquor “package” store. He barely glimpsed a redheaded girl inside, and stopped, a coldness spreading within his chest. Would Lois Treat have changed, he wondered. In his mind he saw her wide, cornflower-blue eyes, her wavy red flounce of hair, her smart, small-chinned, apple-cheeked face. And then, as if his thought had conjured her, that was the vision he saw stepping from the door of the package store.

  “I saw you,” Lois Treat said simply. “I work inside—and I saw you, Tippy.”

  The world stopped, and suddenly Tip was back three years to the time when he and Lois had agreed to call it quits. Who could analyze the objections of a girl’s family? For generations they’d been Army people. Perhaps they wanted a general for a son-in-law, Tip had mused. Now her folks had both been gone a year, victims of an airplane crash, and Tip soon would be an Army man.

  Tip saw the wedding band on the girl’s finger, and he forgot how to breathe. But she saw his glance. “I’m not married, Tippy. It’s just a ring.” And it was as if she said, Tippy, I’ve been waiting all this time.

  “I’m going out to the plant,” Tip said. “My uncle’s death—” He couldn’t untwist his tongue, or say the things he wanted said. “I guess I won’t know anyone there,” he finished foolishly.

  “You’ll know Dan Ford. He’s there now. He lives next door to us.” Lois’ eyes were bright. Her crimson lips parted with what seemed the pain inside her. “I’ll see you again, Tippy—”

  Tip wondered afterwards if it was only because she was afraid of the tears brimming in her eyes that she hurried back into the package store so fast. He hated himself if he had hurt Lois. He wouldn’t have come, except—And Tip’s thoughts returned to the more immediate business at hand.

  The Tipton Spee-D Washmachine Company, in Pleasantville’s industrial valley, had sprouted two new wings that dwarfed the original area of the plant. A high wire fence and armed guards were tokens of the plant’s conversion to wartime tasks. It was here the town’s newcomers worked, the residents of the jerry-built houses he’d seen from the train, the denizens of the trailer camp, with unfamiliar Southern-state dialects.

  Tip Dolan found some difficulty in winning admission at the Spee-D factory gate. But his face fin
ally proved to be his ticket. “A son,” an old proverb declared, “takes after his mother’s brother.” And Tip, remembering that, knew how closely his deep, gray eyes, his rangy build and high-boned cheeks must be a younger duplication of his uncle’s mold.

  Tip found his way to the plant laboratory. This had always been his uncle’s domain—a vast room of retorts, lathes, and apparatus-littered workbenches. This was the post the old inventor and manufacturer had hoped his only nephew would assume. To Andrew Tipton, science was a flaming torch, the beacon light of all humanity.

  Tip stopped beside a powerful compressor. Dewar flasks and frosted coils told him this was apparatus for the production of liquid oxygen. Remembering the new use of that frigid substance in explosives, Tip guessed the lab, too, had been converted to war work.

  A door opened and a tall broad young man with blond hair and heavy, blond brows stepped out. The man’s face went suddenly taut and pale, then what seemed relief washed it.

  “Tippy Dolan,” Dan Ford exclaimed hoarsely. “Am I glad you’ve come!”

  Tip found himself staring. He’d hardly recognized the bulky fellow with the lax jaw, the sloppy manner that a brilliantly crisp mind contrasted. Dan Ford had been a football hero in college. He and Tip had been fraternity brothers. Tip had always liked him. But this was a strangely different Dan.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if your uncle was murdered,” the young research expert said in answer to Tip’s explanation of his visit. He stepped with Tip to a small room that was off the lab, closed the door. “You don’t know how things have become here. I—I wouldn’t be surprised—if I were murdered next!”

  Tip paused a moment to let that sink in. “What do you mean?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Masked Death

  DAN FORD’S bulky body quivered. He was no older than Tip, but the lines in his thick-featured face were now those of an old man. “I think your uncle—if he was murdered—might have been murdered because he was mistaken for me!”

  Dan turned nervously away, then confronted Tip again. “This town is different. You can’t realize how different. It’s impossible to know what’s going on any more—or even know your own neighbors!”

  “I think I understand what you mean.” Tip’s gray eyes shadowed.

  “Six months ago, a couple men moved in the house next door to mine. Sam Water and Alvin Barr.” The big ex-footballer quivered as he seemed to relive it. “Waters and Barr acted suspiciously from the start—men coming and going to their house at all hours. For all I knew they might be spies or saboteurs. I had to know. I planted a dictaphone. They’re criminals, Tip, using the unusual war-boom conditions to hide out here in Pleasantville. Their names are aliases. They were liquor hijackers back in prohibition days. The scarcity of liquor and the high prices have made it profitable for highway pirates again. Now these hijackers have found out I know what their game is—”

  “You accused them?”

  “They found the dictaphone.” Dan Ford shook his head miserably. “First, they warned me over the telephone to get out of town. Last night, two shots were fired at me—as I walked down Elm Avenue!”

  “This is a case for the police!”

  Tears of frustration gleamed in the young research scientist’s beetle-browed eyes. “How can I go to the police, Tip? I can’t get involved in any scandal. You know—”

  “Yes, I do know, Dan.” Tip did know. It was strange that he’d almost forgotten. Dan Ford had been something of an enigma in his college days. A brilliant engineering student, and a football star, the big blond boy had on two occasions narrowly escaped expulsion from school for petty thievery. It was then found that a head injury suffered in a football game was causing pressure on the brain. That, apparently, had been causing the trouble, and an operation took care of it.

  “I understand,” Tip said softly. “I’ll see what I can do. Meanwhile, you better stick to cover. If they killed my uncle, mistaking him for you, next time they’ll likely take precautions.”

  “I have a gun,” Dan said. “They’ll have a hell of a fight.”

  “That’s the spirit. Now tell me a few details I’ll have to know.”

  Tip Dolan had no opportunity to do anything that afternoon. First, he had to find a hotel, leave his bag there. Then the funeral services for Andrew Tipton were held, attended by business associates, old friends and townspeople. The bulk of the estate was going to found a research institute for practical science. That had been decreed after Tip had forsworn claim to any part of the fortune, when he’d broken with his uncle.

  Tip, walking down Elm Avenue that night, was glad the interment was done. He didn’t like funerals. He didn’t like to think of Uncle Andy as gone. Gone, apparently, when he should still be alive. All his life that he remembered—up to three years before—he had lived with his uncle. The roots went deep . . .

  Dan Ford had blamed Uncle Andy’s death on an error on the part of two hijackers. Tip knew hijacking had come to the fore again as a menace on the highways. Only recently he’d read in the paper of insurance companies raising their rates on shipping because of the piracy increase. . . .

  The figure moved slowly about the dark house with the padding stealth of a cat. Tip didn’t see the prowler until he was quite close. Then he realized that dark house was the same one he was headed for—the home of Sam Waters and Alvin Barr, whom Dan Ford had named as his two hijacker neighbors. Was this lurking figure either of them? Waters had been described as the older of the two, a big, bay-windowed man, with a cigar continually gyrating at his mouth corner. Barr was younger, smooth, handsome with a dark moustache.

  The moving figure was vague, indistinct in the shadow pools cast by spreading elms. The figure stopped, seemed to stoop by the foundation of the house, then moved on to another spot.

  Tip’s bony face went taut, his rangy body tense. “Hello!” he called to the figure, starting across the law toward it. As best he could see, it might be the big fellow Dan had mentioned—Sam Waters. “Waters!”

  THE figure dipped into the darkness. It couldn’t be Waters, Tip realized suddenly, seeing that furtive movement. Tip ran around the dark house. He saw movement in a privet hedge. He lunged, arms outstretched to seize the man breaking from cover.

  He grabbed the man’s shoulder, swung him around. He glimpsed a black-masked face, with slits for eyes, as gloved hands closed on his throat. The prowler kicked his knee into Tip’s midsection.

  Then it happened.

  The Waters and Barr house exploded with a tremendous blast of flame! With a hollow roar, the explosion pounded Tip downward, knocked him free of the masked man. Tip sprawled, as night was suddenly transformed to lurid, bright day. The house had become a raging inferno!

  Tip staggered up, glimpsed his quarry disappear into the black night beyond.

  A second blast tore the house apart. Timbers, plaster, brick, flew upward in wild confusion. Again Tip went flat as debris rained about him. He knew now what the intruder had been up to. He must have been spreading gasoline, planting explosives around the house.

  Tip rose again, saw a complete wall of the house was blasted away. Fire greedily ate the remaining structure as if it were a dry packing box.

  A sedan braked to a violent stop at the curb at that moment. From everywhere, people seemed to be running toward the scene. Three figures stepped out of the sedan, brilliantly lighted by the firelight. The first figure, Tip saw, was the beefy police chief, Parnell. Behind him a dark, moustached man in a chalk-striped gray suit whom it wasn’t hard to recognize as hijacker Alvin Barr. The third figure was that of—Lois Treat!

  Lois saw Tip, but her young face was too distraught with terror to give any sign of the fact. “Jim,” she cried, wildly pointing at the blazing house, “could Jim be in there?”

  “If he is, it’s the end of him,” Chief Parnell said grimly, while the dark-moustached Alvin Barr embraced the redheaded girl with a protecting arm.

  Tip came up. “Jim Waters?” he asked the P
leasantville police chief. “Is that who you’re talking about?” He jerked his head meaningfully toward the fire.

  “He’s been missing since morning, Dolan. A little while ago we found his clothes behind his liquor store.”

  “How can you be sure he’s missing if he’s only been gone since this morning?”

  “His clothes were thrust through with a knife—a bloodstained knife.”

  A fire siren sheered the night air.

  Tip said to Parnell and Barr. “I saw the man who set the fire! He went that way.” Tip pointed.

  In his mind Tip was trying to fit together thoughts that refused to go together. When Dan Ford, that afternoon, had spoken of liquor hijackers, Tip hadn’t associated them with the liquor store in town where Lois said she worked. And now here was Lois with one of the men, and the other man—well, it certainly looked as if he, Jim Waters, had been murdered.

  The burly, old-fashioned chief looked coldly at Tip. “What were you doing here?”

  “Passing by,” Tip said. He couldn’t say he’d come to visit Waters or Barr. “I saw someone skulking about the lawn. I started after him. Then the fire broke—and the blast.”

  The officer’s waxed moustache seemed to bristle. Firelight made dark pockets of his eves.

  “You came here to town, Dolan. You popped off about something having happened to your uncle. Now, you’re chirping about a fire-bug. I’ve got a job to do enforcing law and order in this town. I’ve got a smaller force than when I had half the territory to cover. You’re raking for trouble that doesn’t exist—and if you don’t watch out, you’ll end up getting it!”

  Tip said coolly, “I want to look around a bit.” And he turned away.

  THE fire department was still throwing water when Tip returned to the scene. The spectators had dwindled. The rangy engineer from New York saw Lois shivering in the cool fall evening, a man’s overcoat thrown about her shoulders.

  Her blue eyes brightened when she saw Tip. “Tippy, where have you been? I was too upset when I first got here even to speak to you. What have you found?”