by Jerry eBooks
Its hands showed six o’clock.
“Do you know where you are?” The words came thickly through the mask, tones muffled by layers of cloth. As it spoke the figure with the gun moved backward slightly, toward the fire door.
Martin fell against the wall, remained there breathing with difficulty. He looked up, grimaced.
“Maybe you’d like to tell me,” he grated.
The figure chuckled. The muzzle of the gun moved into line with Martin’s middle.
“Why not? No harm in telling you now. Too late for you to do anything about it.” The figure paused. “You’re twenty stories above ground, in a concrete storeroom. In precisely what building is none of your business. The walls of this room are two feet thick. Beyond it are others—and other men. Escape is impossible. No one can hear you. There is no one who knows you are here.”
Martin cocked his head. That strange impression again, in the absolute silence. Was it sound, smell—or what? He couldn’t think.
“What are you going to do with me!” he asked slowly.
“For the present, nothing. You’ll be fed, of course. Later—another blow on the head, possibly fatal this time . . .”
Martin leaped. Every ounce of power in his not-inconsiderable body was behind it. He was weak, nauseous, but in that leap was the strength of desperation.
The gun fired, once, twice. Both bullets went wild. A third hit the light bulb. Then Martin’s fists were smashing against the figure’s chin. An instant later he had flung open the door, closed and locked it behind him, whirled to the left and dashed down a long passageway. At its end was an ordinary door. Trembling he laid his hand on the knob, pulled it toward him.
The soft glow of evening fell past the flight of steps that led from the basement in which he had been imprisoned and bathed his upturned face. Then swiftly and rubbing his head, Martin walked up the steps, emerged onto a well-known and busy street corner in a residential neighborhood and hailed a taxi. Noting the time by a clock in a store window he was hurried downtown to make an appointment he had almost missed.
THAT evening at his and Bryant’s club, Martin surveyed the circle of men who sat about the large table in one of the establishment’s famous private chambers.
They were his partners now, he reflected, for better or worse, in a giant enterprise created just in time to save him from utter ruin. All partners. Jackson, the city’s greatest banker; Hopkins, wealthy industrialist; Bryant, his own business partner who had separately managed to escape from an adjoining cell shortly after Martin trapped their captor in the original cell; Goldwater, eminent research chemist; Schroeder, affluent philanthropist; and Fownes, least known of the group, mysterious, supplied with money no one knew from where.
Martin lit a cigarette, flecked an ash from his lapel. For some moments now the assembled company had been waiting for him to speak. They were expectant, wondering why this additional meeting had been called after the conference earlier in the evening.
Schroeder poured himself a glass of water from the carafe on the table, turned quizzical eyes on Martin. “Well?” he demanded, abruptly.
“Someone in this room is a criminal, a kidnaper.” Martin’s eyes shifted purposely about the circle of faces. “Bryant and I were removed to keep us from signing that contract. It has to be one of us, for only in this group could exist the necessary motives.”
Goldwater giggled nervously, then fell silent, chewing the ends of his mustache.
The others looked at Martin with apprehension. A tension began rising in the room, charged and supercharged with fear. And Martin talked:
“It’s very simple, really. Bryant and I were slugged from the back seat of my car. We woke up in the place we told you about. It was a very silent place. The man who kidnaped us told me that the room was twenty stories above the ground. That was merely a lie. The walls were damp, not wet, but damp enough to have to be located underground. Although nothing could be heard, the vibration of passing trucks shook the walls. Not noticeably, not obviously. That’s why I knew that beyond the firedoor lay a street and people, not more concrete and then empty air.
“And your kidnaper?” Fownes’ voice was pointed. His flat, spatulate finger coiled and uncoiled. The atmosphere thickened.
“He had a motive—a good one. Delaying the conference for many days by keeping me a prisoner, making it necessary at last to go on without my signature would have ruined me, without ruining him. A lot of money was involved. Millions, as you all know.
“There is of course only one such man. He was in that room with me and he hadn’t been there more than two minutes before I knew who he was, knew because something about him identified him immediately. His confederate had brought me there. It was he who opened the door after Bryant and I first awakened.”
Schroeder thoughtfully knocked ashes from his cigar. “You knew your kidnaper?”
Martin smiled grimly. “Let’s say rather that I knew the man who paid him to do his work—the second man in the room, the man with the mask. He was the real criminal. Dressed in a nondescript suit, muffled, absolutely disguised beyond recognition, except for one thing, his watch.”
Across the table nonchalant hands poured a glass of water, dropped a pellet within the glass, unobserved. Martin’s voice went on, inexorably:
“The room was silent. But there were sounds. My breathing. His. The tick of that watch sounded loudest of all. And I knew what it was, when I’d heard it the second time—a big, old-fashioned dollar watch, the kind one of us uses from eccentricity.
“A watch worn in the vest pocket of a man who had been with me in that room once before. A man who was an hour and a half late for the conference, because I locked him in the concrete room. He couldn’t get out until his hireling had come and enabled him to change back to the clothes he wore when he’d stretched himself out beside me feigning unconsciousness. He’d had a gun too, a .38.”
Martin plucked a lead slug from a vest pocket and threw it down on the table.
“His third shot, the one that shattered the light bulb fell into my coat pocket after it had hit the ceiling. You all know who uses the watch I’ve described, but only I know who owns a .38 pistol on a permit. It should be fairly easy to check the markings on the slug if he’ll surrender the gun—now. As for the watch, you can hear it ticking right now, even in this room, if you listen hard enough.”
Bryant’s head fell forward. His eyes, bulging with the poison he’d drunk, stared hideously in the glare of death. Then the body slipped sidewise and dropped like a sack of wet flour. As it hit the floor a shiny object spun from a vest pocket and shattered.
A dollar watch.
HOMICIDE AT THE 5 AND 10
Stewart Toland
The cost of Terry Grey’s Japanese dagger had come high in battlefield blood. But though Terry brought it back to a hometown dime store, the second fee that sinister souvenir demanded was equally deadly dear.
Terry Grey counted the new gold bars on his sleeve once again, four of them nestling close above his left wrist. Clean and shiny they were, and each one a passport to six months of hell. Two years overseas, and now he was back. He took the curved Japanese dagger out of its wrappings, laid it, bright and terrible across his knees. This was the blade that had been meant for him. Yet he’d lived to bring it home to Saucy Fields, because his own knife had been quicker.
He closed his eyes. He wouldn’t think about that now, he would think of redhaired Saucy Fields, with her dimples and her twinkling eyes and her red, red lips that promised to marry him when the world was sane again.
The taxi stopped. Terry slung a bill at the driver and jumped out without even looking. That’s how he happened to be left alone in front of the jagged chimney and the black, broken lumber that had once been a home. Terry ran up the weed-crowded walk where two years ago flowers had grown. But there was no use stopping and staring and letting this new fear freeze him cold.
He raced across the memory of a lawn to the house next door, a nea
t little white house where the Keslins used to live. It was Mrs. Keslin who answered the pounding.
“Why, Terry Grey, you’re back!”
“Tell me about the fire, tell me about Saucy. Is she all right?”
Mrs. Keslin frowned. “You mean Saucy didn’t write you? But perhaps it’s no wonder. She was in the hospital a month, and about out of her mind with grief ever since. Her father died in the fire. She’s an orphan now and a pauper at that. Mr. Fields didn’t believe in banks you know, everything he had burned up.”
“Saucy was in the hospital. Why?”
“Because she was burned, too. Her hand was the worst. They thought at first she’d lose her left hand, but they say it’ll be all right in time. Won’t you come in and sit down, you look terribly tired? How was it in the Pacific?”
“Where is Saucy now, where does she live?”
“At the Y, I believe. She works in the five and ten. It’s about the only job she could get with her hand still bandaged and all. She couldn’t type or model or be a nurse, but she can hand out rouge and lipstick and make change. They’re so hard up for help. Terry!” Mrs. Keslin screamed after the flying figure. “Terry Grey, you haven’t told me one word about the Pacific!”
The five and dime was crowded. Women seethed through the swinging doors, stood six deep around the candy counter, and about as thick at the cosmetics. And there was a woman screaming here, too. Almost as loudly as Mrs. Keslin had screamed, only the words weren’t the same. They were quick and wild with hysteria:
“I laid it down for just a minute! It was in a brown box. It’s worth three hundred dollars!”
“I’m sorry, madam, we can’t be responsible for lost articles.”
“Lost? It was stolen! That girl stole it!” There wasn’t a sound in all the store. No one asked for candy, no one went out the doors. They just stood like lumps of putty staring at the accusing finger, at the red-haired girl it pointed to. The breath whooshed out of Terry Grey’s lungs. He had come home to Saucy Fields, the one he loved, and to the man standing beside her, Pat Munsen, the one he hated.
Munsen was tall and thin, so thin the bones stuck out on his cheeks like the twin crossbars to giant T’s. There were sunken, dark circles under his eyes, and he looked like death. None of it was necessary. He’d gone on a hunger strike _n when the draft was first announced. He hadn’t had a square meal since, just enough to keep him alive. He’d been quite proud about it, boasting to all the boys they could go out and march and crawl and die, but he’d stay home and live.
And he had. He was a walking skeleton, but he was home and alive. A lot of Terry Grey’s friends weren’t. Pat Munsen smiled and patted the lady customer on the shoulder. He had on yellow suede gloves. There was a brown coat over his arm and a brown fedora.
“Now, madam, I’m sure there’s some mistake. I’m assistant manager, perhaps you’d explain it to me. Just what was it that was lost?”
“Stolen. It was stolen, young man! My family heirloom teapot, three hundred dollars it’s worth. I was taking it down to the antique show. I stopped in to buy some lipstick, and laid the box on the counter. This girl just a minute after took a lot of boxes from here and went through that door. When I turned around my teapot box was gone. She took it, I tell you! She took it and ran away with it!”
“But I didn’t run away, I came back!” Saucy was so white, so very white. There were tears in her eyes.
Pat Munsen frowned. “Where were you going with the boxes, Miss Fields?”
“Up to the stockroom. I’d just brought them down and they were the wrong kind. They were all lipstick when we needed rouge. So I took them back up and got the rouge. I never once touched her old teapot or even saw it!”
The lady customer bounced, as though she had been a rubber ball she bounced. The two red spots in her cheeks grew redder. “I want the police, I want my teapot!” She grabbed at the counter, started throwing things. A bottle of perfume crashed on the floor. Another hit the edge of the counter, splashed on Pat Munsen’s neatly turned vest, left a dark, wet stain.
“See here! Lady, stop that!” The man who pushed through the crowd was short and fat, and had two eyes bright as parrots. “I’m Mr. Lighman, manager of the store. Madam, if you will just be quiet a minute!” She was, as quiet as a woman can be crying into her handkerchief. Mr. Lighman frowned.
“What is this, Munsen?”
“The lady has lost a silver teapot. She thinks Miss Fields took it upstairs with some boxes of stock.”
“Did you?”
“No, sir.” Saucy was very sure, very defiant.
“Go bring the boxes back, let the lady look for himself.”
Saucy Fields left the counter, her chin high, her eyes black with anger. The crowd parted to let her through. Terry could see the door she was heading toward. It was closed. There was no admittance on it, and a fire axe shackled to the wall beside it. Saucy was almost there. Once on the other side of that door she would be alone. Terry had waited two years to be alone with Saucy; he wasn’t going to wait any longer. He slid quietly along the edge of the crowd, closer and closer to the door swinging shut behind Saucy Fields.
Then that mad, fool woman was screaming again. “Go after her! Don’t let her go alone! She’ll hide my teapot, and we’ll never see it!”
For a minute all eyes had turned back to the hysterical customer. No one saw Terry Grey grab the door and pull it open. But the woman did. Oh, she couldn’t miss that, the door opening, and Terry Grey sneaking through with the Japanese dagger still cold and bright and forgotten in his hand.
“Merciful heavens, look at that knife!” Look they did. A whole store full of people, to make it quite plain to the police afterwards that a young soldier, a sergeant with brown hair and a white scar across the back of his neck, went inside the No Admittance door carrying a dagger. The same dagger found by the bodies not five minutes later.
The stair well was dark. Dark, narrow, very steep, and filled with smells, cabbage and onions and boiling soup. A thousand nauseous whiffs of a thousand ancient meals hung there in that locked passage. Terry took the stairs three at a time. Still there was no sign of Saucy. On the top landing there were four black doors and a white-faced time clock. For just a moment Terry hesitated, which way?
Suddenly there were feet on the stairs below. Mr. Lighman’s old, high voice, “Snap the bolt on that door, Munsen, and stay on guard. I’ll go to the safe and get my gun. We’ll stop that soldier doing any harm, with that knife of his. The idea of the Army letting a boy wander around loose with a weapon like that! I don’t know what the world is coming to!”
The world was falling, at least Terry Grey’s was. He had turned quickly toward the nearest door. He didn’t see the pencil lying on the floor. It rolled under his foot, sent him flying back down those dark, steep stairs. It was strange how he wasn’t frightened; it was all too quick, too unreal. He remembered noticing the time, five of two. He remembered how Mr. Lighman screamed. And that was all.
It was the pain in his head that bothered him most when he awoke. The pain in his heart and the aching in his arms. Then it was his heart. The way it wouldn’t beat, the way he couldn’t breathe. For he was looking at Mr. Lighman crumpled by the door at the foot of the stairs. They were all three there, at least their bodies were, for Mr. Lighman was dead.
He had to be dead. There was blood all over him, and on the walls and floor. And Pat Munsen was lying in the blood, with the Japanese dagger still sticking into his side.
Terry Grey crawled up the stairs. He couldn’t stand upright, not with the nausea, and he couldn’t stay back there. Not with the screeching on the other side of the door.
“Look at the blood! Look at the blood seeping over the sill!” As though it were an exclamation point, the fire axe bit a piece out of the center panel, then another and another. Finally Terry reached the top landing with its three doors and the clock. It was just then one minute to two.
Only four minutes had passed. Four minutes
to bathe his hands in red. The screaming was louder and the pounding. It had to be murder, there were too many blows for an accident. He could see the blood on his hands.
The door beside him opened. Saucy Fields was standing there with her boxes and with the wonder of a smile just dawning on her lips. The distant pounding of the axe stopped. A man’s voice cut through the silence:
“Shut the store and call the police! That crazy soldier has killed Mr. Lighman and Mr. Munsen!”
The smile twisted into agony. “No! No, Terry! No!” When she fainted, Saucy Fields’ eyes were on Terry Grey’s red-streaked hands.
The soldier darted into the stockroom, he ran now with fleet, cunning feet. There wasn’t time to stop and think, he had to get away. He had to hide before those feet pounding on the stairs caught up with him.
The stockroom was cold, and as poorly lighted as the stairs. It was a huge cavern laced with a maze of narrow passages between boxlike shelves on either side, hundreds and hundreds of shelves higher than a man’s head, filled with china and toys and nameless cartons. There was yet another smell in here, like a clear, sharp cloud, the odor of mothballs.
Terry Grey ran to the very back of the room, to a red exit sign. He was clear out on the fire escape when he saw the police below. So he didn’t go down and he didn’t go up. He went back, back into the dismal shadows and the cold, tart smell of mothballs.
There were people in the stockroom now, stealthy, whispering people coming closer and closer. He climbed one of the sets of shelves, carefully, slowly, past dozens and dozens of china cups. One or two rattled. It was like thunder in his ear. But he reached the top and slid in that small, dark space between the ceiling and the shelves.
For an hour men searched. They threw caution away and cursed. They brought flashlights and looked into every corner. One even suggested they hunt on top of the shelf cabinets as well as in them.
“In that little crack? No man could squeeze in there.”
