by Jerry eBooks
“You’ve got quite a collection of stuff,” I said.
“Yeh, I dabble around a little.” There were a couple of nice cameras, a graflex and candid, a sweet looking Winchester .22 Repeater, an old crystal radio set, some assorted boxes of shells, and a stack of fan magazines.
“What’s the rifle for?” I asked.
“I do a little target shooting down in the basement,” he replied. He pointed to the stack of scripts. “As long as you’re here, would you mind looking over a couple of these yarns—maybe you can tell me what’s wrong with them.”
I did mind. My thoughts were a thousand miles from story ideas. But I was in a spot. I had to string him along.
“Sure. Be glad to.”
I reached over and started thumbing through the pile. He got off the edge of the desk, rubbed his hands together nervously, and glanced toward the door leading to the rear of the flat.
“Would you like a drink? I’ll go and mix a couple.”
He didn’t give me time to answer. But a drink would go good anyway. He walked swiftly from the room. I laid my cigarette down and spread the scripts out. I glanced over some of the titles. Beasts of the Void; Stellar Mission; Vanguards of Eros; Havoc On the Moon . . .
Something clicked in my mind. It was like seeing a window shaded against the sun and suddenly having the curtain torn aside. I sat up in the chair and picked up one of the scripts with a trembling hand.
In the other room I heard the clink of glasses. I also heard something else. Was Weldon talking to himself out there? I heard a faint click which might have been the cap on a liquor bottle.
I glanced from the script over to the book case. Then my eyes were fastened on one of the shelves. The pieces suddenly fell into place!
“Here they are.”
Weldon walked into the room with two glasses. He placed one on the desk beside me. I didn’t touch it. I put the script down and picked up my cigarette.
“What did you do with that gas cylinder, Weldon?” I asked him.
He started. “I—I’ve got it in the other room—I didn’t know what to do with it—I wish I had never touched the damn thing!”
He took a deep swallow of his drink and pointed to the script I was holding. “Do you think it’s any good?”
“I think this one is very good, Weldon. Very good.”
He started talking. He kept talking for the next ten minutes. He seemed to want to talk, to keep my attention. I sat back and listened, and my pulses began to throb. I was waiting for something. Something that I was sure would happen soon. I wanted it to happen.
I didn’t have to wait much longer. Someone started pounding on the front door. “Open up!” I heard a shout from outside.
I looked up at Weldon and smiled. “Go ahead, Weldon, let the cops in.”
CHAPTER V
The Killer
Blaine strode into the room, gun in hand. Behind him came the same cop he had with him back at my place. I could see some others standing outside.
“We got your phone call, Weldon. Good work.”
Blaine had his hat pushed back and his beady eyes were cold and set. “Thought you’d take a runout, eh, Colter? Well, it won’t happen again. Come on, there’s a nice little cell waiting for you!”
I grinned up at him. “Hello, Blaine. I wondered how long it would take you to get here. Don’t worry, I’m not going to run this time. You see, I know who killed Hank Sayler—and why.”
I heard the cop laugh over by the door. But Blaine didn’t. He kept looking at me and I saw a frown crease his forehead under the hat brim. I looked over at Weldon. He was nervously licking his lips.
“You haven’t performed an autopsy yet on the body, have you Blaine?” I asked.
He shook his head. “We’ll get the report in the morning. So what—we know he died from a bullet wound.”
I told him everything. I started at the beginning when I walked into Art Stebber’s office with my story. I told him how Vince Parker had used the nitrous oxide on Sayler shortly before he was murdered, and how I walked in on the body. I told him that Weldon had found me there, picked up the gas cylinder and ditched it from the scene of the crime. Blaine gave Weldon a nasty look at that, but shrugged it off.
“So what? We’d have found all that out in routine checkup by tomorrow after we got the autopsy report. Your story only proves that you shot him. Weldon walked in just after it happened.”
I got up and picked a manuscript off the desk. “You made a careful check of everything that was in Sayler’s room?” I asked him.
The cop behind Blaine snorted. “Naturally! I’ve got the whole list in this notebook!” He waved a small black loose-leaf.
“Did you notice the sheet of paper in Sayler’s typewriter—the beginning of a new story he was working on?”
The cop thumbed through a couple pages. “Sure, here it is, a yarn called: Vanguards of Eros.”
I pushed the manuscript toward Blaine. “Take a look at this. It’s a story titled Vanguards of Eros, by George Weldon.”
Blaine looked at the script, over at Weldon, and then back to me. “I don’t see what you’re driving at, Colter. What difference does it make if this is the same story?”
“It makes this much difference,” I told him hotly, “that Hank Sayler had been stealing ideas from the Pulpateers and selling them as his own. What I didn’t know was that Weldon was having the same trick pulled on him by Sayler—Hank had stolen Weldon’s plot and Weldon knew it! He had a damned good reason to want to kill him!”
George Weldon laughed nervously. “Are you going to let him get away with all this? Sure, I admit Sayler stole my idea—but he stole some of Colter’s and Parker’s too. Besides, the evidence shows he killed Sayler—I knew he always kept a gun, everyone did, that’s why I called the police today and told—”
I walked over toward Weldon. He backed up against the bookcase. “Sure I had a gun, Weldon. And of course everyone knew I had it. You did—you were over at my place pestering me more than anyone else. You knew that Sayler was hated by the rest of us. You knew that he had been selling our plots, so when he took one of yours you wanted to get even with him—you thought your motive would be lost because everyone had the same reason to hate Sayler.
“On one of your visits at my place you managed to sneak out my gun. You knew I wouldn’t miss it for a few days. You loaded it, went over to Sayler’s this morning, found him unconscious on the floor, shot him, and left. But you forgot something, that’s why you came back. You remembered the sheet of paper in his typewriter with your story title. You wanted that so there wouldn’t be any possible clue to you. But I was there. You couldn’t get it.
“After we left, you went over to my place, wiped the gun off so your fingerprints wouldn’t be on it, and threw it through the open transom. It was a perfect setup.”
I knew Blaine was watching me. I was watching Weldon. His sallow face was writhing nervously.
“You can’t prove anything like that!” he shouted.
“I can.” I shoved him aside and pointed to the bookcase. One of the shelves had the .22 rifle and the boxes of shells. I pointed to one of the boxes.
“Why have you got a box of .38 caliber shells, Weldon? You don’t have a gun like that! You knew my gun wasn’t loaded. You bought this box of ammunition and stole my gun, and loaded it yourself.”
Weldon ran over to Blaine. “He’s trying to pin this on me! Those aren’t my shells—I never had them before—he put them there himself!”
Blaine nodded. “That’s a good story, Colter, but there’s nothing to back it up. Weldon’s right.”
“He forgot one little thing, Blaine. And I would have missed it too if it hadn’t been for Vince Parker’s gas cylinder.” Blaine raised his eyes. “Go on.”
“Weldon knew that the gas cylinder wouldn’t point to him. That’s why he didn’t hesitate to pick it up and get his fingerprints on it. But it was that one thing that is going to prove he killed Sayler—his fingerprint
s with the gun!”
Weldon laughed. I knew what he was thinking. Blaine snorted. “There were no fingerprints on the gun. It was wiped clean!”
“Sure it was. Weldon saw to that. But what about the bullets that were put in the cylinder—have you examined them yet?”
It was a long chance. I was banking on the neurotic tendencies of Weldon to crack him. I could see Blaine start visually. And then he had turned on Weldon.
Weldon was shaking. His eyes were bulging and his lips trembled in spasms. Then suddenly he let out a scream and ran through the door leading to the rear. Blaine and the cop were after him. I heard a door slam. Blaine’s bellow echoed through the night: “Stop him!”
There was the blast of a shot somewhere outside. Then silence. I sat down and for the first time noticed that I was wringing wet.
We were all over at Vince Parker’s. Stebber, Lane, Haskell, Betty, and I. Vince was handing out drinks, and for once the place wasn’t stunk up.
“I hear they got a confession out of Weldon down at the hospital.” Haskell was lounging against the desk and nursing a tall Collins.
Johnnie Lane looked at me through his thick lenses and shook his head. “Why the hell can’t you create a detective smart enough to figure these things out in your yarns, Larry? Personally, I think you’re in the wrong racket.”
I looked up at Betty. She was sitting on the edge of the lounge chair where I was sprawled contendedly.
“He’s going to enter a new racket very shortly, Johnnie,” she said smiling.
Johnnie let his eyebrows raise. “Oh? When’s the ball going to be welded on?”
I looked over at Stebber. “As soon as Art raises my rates,” I said.
Art Stebber grinned. “Oh, an early wedding, eh?”
Johnnie grinned. “That reminds me: I’ll tell you a funny story I heard today. It’s so funny you’ll die laughing!”
But it wasn’t that funny.
THE BLUE STEEL SQUIRREL
Frank R. Read
Prologue
In a silver flood of moonlight, a group of people laughed and talked together on a terrace in a high-walled garden. The occasion was a happy one—a betrothal party. The soft June air, still fresh from a sundown shower, was heavy with the scent of roses. A mockingbird, perched high atop a chimney, trilled a liquid melody.
The bride-to-be, radiant with happiness, sat in a cane garden chair, watching the familiar scene. Her eyes lingered over each precious beauty, the playing fountain, the full moon. They rested on the face of the man she loved, Michael Collins.
Mike, toying with the dials of a portable radio, paused as the familiar hum of a station fried in the loud-speaker. He smiled at his fiancée, and absent-mindedly turned up the volume.
A mighty roar rolled over the terrace as a brassy swing band crashed into a hot tune. Guests and host, jolted by the discordant notes, stiffened and glared at the young man. Mike mumbled apologies, and snapped off the radio.
The guests sank back in their chairs with a sigh of relief, all but the bride-to-be. She stiffened, slumped forward in her chair, and tumbled forward to the flagstone flooring.
A silver bullet had pierced her heart.
There had been no sound, no outcry, no flash of gunfire. Stupidly, the members of the party looked from one to the other. The spell of inactivity was broken only when one of the woman screamed.
A year later, there was a bulging file at police headquarters, titled:
“Corinne Bogart—Homicide (Unsolved)”
I
The long, sun-bronzed young man, wearing an impeccable dark-blue tropical worsted suit, leaned back in his swivel chair and studied his name lettered in reverse on the ground-glass door of his office—Jefferson Hunter. Just that, nothing more.
There is no trade term, unless, perhaps, “Confidential Commercial Agent”, that could be applied to him. That, too, would be a misnomer, for Jefferson Hunter, home again after solving a foreign reconstruction problem, looked into anything that intrigued him, with or without permission. The fees he demanded and received from corporations were known to have made boards of directors shudder. Yet his services were in immediate demand as soon as he reopened his office.
“Anything exciting in the morning mail, Smitty?” he asked Z. Z. Smith, his small, wiry assistant.
“Yes.” Smitty slid a small pile of letters across his boss’s desk. “The top note has me stumped.”
Jeff’s eyebrows rose. “Interesting?”
“Could be. It’s from a guy named Bogart.”
“What?” Jeff sat up. “What did you say?”
“I said it’s from a guy named Bogart. Wendell A. Best clubs and so on. Director of this and that. Smells of do-re-mi. He wants you to come to see him about something personal and confidential. He says Wagner, the man you helped on the oil deal in Iran, recommended you.”
Jeff leaned back in his chair, his gray eyes hardening. “It’s foolish,” he told himself, “to keep avoiding Pamela Bogart.” Sooner or later, he was bound to meet her. Why postpone the inevitable?
“OK, Smitty, make an appointment.”
“I have. Bogart is waiting for us at his home.”
“Um-m-m! Didn’t give me a chance to refuse, did you?”
Smitty, like all valuable assistants, knew his boss like a book. He anticipated his wishes, needled him into action, and restrained his enthusiasms. Smitty, in short, was invaluable.
The sleek yellow convertible, carrying Jeff and his Man Friday, purred into the Valley, the town’s exclusive suburb.
“There’s the house, Jeff!” Smitty pointed. “Nice dive! There’s a ten-foot brick wall around the back garden. Cripes, the house is built of white marble.”
“I hate to disillusion you, Smitty,” Jeff said, as they stopped under an ornate porte-cochere, “but this pile has only a one-inch marble face, probably over cinder block or tile. It’s typical of the late twenties. Built for show. Two bits says Bogart’s a pain in the neck.”
“No takers, Jeff. You’re too often right.”
Wendell Bogart did not look up when the butler showed them into the library. He was examining six gayly feathered darts spread out on the desk before him. He gathered them into his hands, turned in his chair and smiled at the thin, bespectacled young man standing beside him. Effortlessly, one of the darts flew from his hand and thudded into a target across the room. The other five followed in rapid succession.
Jeff’s eyes widened when the darts came to rest. One, double one, triple one. Two, double two, triple two.
“I wouldn’t want to play you for more than a beer,” Jeff said.
Wendell Bogart didn’t answer. The studious-looking young man beside him smiled, nodded to Jeff and left the room. Bogart spun in his chair, raising his dark-brown eyes to meet Jeff’s level gray ones. For a moment, neither spoke, each studying, measuring the other. It was the older man who broke the silence.
“My only niece, Pamela Bogart, must not die.”
The words, spoken flatly and matter-of-factly, startled the visitors.
Jeff looked narrowly at the man. “Why? What’s the story?”
“Story?” Bogart rose to his feet, shook his shaggy white head and glared at Jeff. “Surely, you must have heard of the tragic death, last June, of Pamela’s sister, Corinne?”
“No, I didn’t. I was in China at the time. I’ve been home less than a week. What happened to Corinne?”
“Corinne was shot through the heart.”
“I’m sorry, Mr Bogart”—Jeff rose to his feet—“this is out of my line. If Miss Bogart were being held for ransom by Mexican bandits, or Argentine insurrectionists, I might be able to do something. Murder, per se, is police business and I leave it to them. Come along, Smitty.”
“Wait!” Bogart slapped the desk top. “Wait until you hear what I have to say.”
“There is nothing—”
“Corinne was shot with a silver bullet, in the close company of seven friends and relatives. The case ha
s never been solved. The only clue is the bullet that killed her.”
Jefferson Hunter sat down again. He nodded to Smitty, who flipped open his notebook on the corner of the desk.
“Mr Bogart,” Jeff spoke slowly, “why are you apprehensive about Pamela? Skip the details about Corinne.”
Bogart sank back in his chair and looked questioningly at the younger man. He opened a mahogany humidor, extracted a cigar and jammed it into his mouth. He glanced annoyedly at Smitty and dropped the cigar back in the humidor. Reaching into the ash tray, he picked up a large butt and clamped it between his teeth.
Jeff rose, flipped his lighter and held its flame to the end of the cigar.
“Pamela”—Bogart drew contentedly—“is about to announce her engagement. It is customary in our family for the oldest member to give the dinner at which an engagement is to be announced. It doesn’t mean much any more. The family is reduced to Pam and me. However, she has set her heart on following the tradition.”
“Why shouldn’t she?”
“Because, at a similar dinner I gave for Corinne and Professor Collins last year, Corinne died. I don’t want to risk a repetition of that. Incidentally, that was Professor Michael Collins, the seismologist, who just left.”
“Why should there be a repetition?”
“No reason at all, except that Corinne’s death has never been cleared up.”
“What do you expect me to do? Clear it up?”
“No. I just want you to see that murder doesn’t happen again. Pam is obstinate and insists that I have the dinner. She is very headstrong, very willful. Er . . . I believe, Hunter, that you are acquainted with Pam?”
“I— Yes, I’ve met her. When do you plan to have the dinner, Mr Bogart?”
“Tonight.”
“That doesn’t give me much time to take precautionary steps.”
Jeff stooped over and picked up the slip of paper that had fluttered to the floor from Smitty’s notebook. He glanced at the hurriedly scrawled message advising him not to get involved, and handed the sheet back to his assistant.
