Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  “Hello, Palmer,” he said. Then he indicated his prisoner. “Know him?”

  “Yes. Nixon.”

  “Thought so. We caught him sulking around the grounds and he matched the description you phoned in. Looks like a nice quick clean-up, eh? No chase, no trouble at all. Funny, nabbing him here at the house. From what you told us, I figured he’d be long gone and far away.”

  Nixon’s shoulder twitched with nervous tic he had. “Now listen,” he said. “I was railroaded once. It’s not going to happen again.”

  “So you were railroaded,” I said. “By the Cartwain Committee. Actually by Marcus Cartwain. That’s why you hated him, hated his whole family. You got this job as his chauffeur for one reason only—revenge. A chance to get even. You knew he wouldn’t recognize you because he was blind. You were waiting for an opportunity to start a family massacre.”

  “It’s a lie. I told you I’d put all that out of my mind. When I met Lora I changed. All I wanted was to marry, settle down, forget the past.”

  “Lora?” Otto Kleinstadt said. “Who’s Lora?”

  “The maid here,” I told him.

  “I’m no killer,” Nixon said. “I didn’t murder Gerald Cartwain. I didn’t do it.”

  “But you knocked me unconscious,” I said.

  “I admit that.”

  “And stole my coat and my gun.”

  “You think I wanted to stick around while you framed me?”

  “And you disposed of Gerald’s body somehow,” I said.

  “Down a storm drain. It will turn up at the outfall, or Ballona Creek. I was a little bit crazy to do that, I guess. But I wasn’t thinking straight. I was cornered. Anyhow I know I didn’t murder him.”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  With that, he blinked at me as if doubting his ears. Lieutenant Kleinstadt blinked, too.

  “What the devil, Palmer!” he exploded. “You said he was guilty!”

  “That was before Lora confessed.”

  Nixon stiffened. “What?”

  “You made a mistake letting her back here for her wages.” I smiled him. “She walked into trouble she couldn’t cope with.”

  Then I took him into the den-library with Kleinstadt and the other two headquarters men trooping along behind.

  CHAPTER V

  A Good Trick—That Didn’t Work

  FORMER Senator Cartwain was sitting on the davenport with his head to one side the way a blind man always does, using his ears for eyes. Sylvia stood against a wall, leaning tiredly, but keeping my little automatic trained on the maid who was still in the chair where I had left her. Nixon took in the scene.

  “Lora,” he said harshly, “Palmer says you confessed you killed Gerald.”

  “Yes.” She was calm. “Yes, I confessed.”

  “But why—why do a thing like that!”

  “To save you from the lethal chamber, of course,” I said. “What other reason would she have for lying like that? She loves you. A woman will make any sacrifice for a man she loves.”

  Lora’s dark eyes met mine reluctantly. “I didn’t lie. I murdered Gerald Cartwain.”

  “Stop being noble,” I told her. “Your story was full of holes. You overacted it. The main discrepancy was, you said you followed the limousine to the airport by driving in the Cartwain convertible. I happen to know the convertible is as dry as a bone. It hasn’t been out in the rain at all. You should have said the station wagon. I might have believed you then, because it’s wet and its motor is still warm. You guessed the wrong car.” Nixon went toward her. “Lora! You mean you were actually willing to let them convict you of murder—for me?”

  “I wouldn’t have gone all the way through with it,” she answered him moodily. “I just wanted to give you a chance to get away.” Her lower lip trembled. “I was playing for time. I couldn’t stand the thought of them strapping you in a chair and—and starting the gas.”

  Suddenly her reserve broke. She wept, quietly and with big racking sobs. He touched her shoulder.

  “You thought they’d convict me, Lora? Because I wanted to run away, you thought I was guilty?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m innocent, Lora. I didn’t kill Gerald.”

  I took my gun out of Sylvia’s hand and backed toward the doorway.

  “He’s telling the truth, Lora,” I said. “He did a lot of foolish things, such as hitting me, getting rid of the corpse, coming here and taking you away, then letting you come back for your wages. He doesn’t stack high for brains, but he didn’t kill Gerald.”

  Everybody was staring at me except Marcus Cartwain, who couldn’t see.

  “Somebody else followed Gerald and Nixon in the limousine,” I said. “Somebody who used the station wagon and waited until Nixon left Gerald alone and then knifed him. I’m aiming at the killer,” I added, and pointed my .32 at blonde Sylvia Cartwain.

  I had all the puzzle’s pieces neatly put together, in my mind at least, so that the pattern was clear and plain. But much of it still needed proving, which wouldn’t be easy.

  Sylvia stood speechless as my gun menaced her. Nixon and Lora breathed audible gasps. Otto Kleinstadt, flanked by his two plainclothes colleagues, started moving toward the goldenhaired girl, and over on the davenport her uncle dabbed at his milkily opaque left eye with a mussed linen handkerchief while adjusting and tugging at the black patch over the right one. He dislodged the patch briefly, snapped it hastily back in place.

  “Much obliged, Senator,” I said. “Eh? What? What?”

  I shifted my automatic to cover him. “Thanks for the confession. Thanks for helping me prove you murdered your nephew.”

  “I murdered my nephew? Are you insane? How could I have killed him? I’m blind.”

  “Blind only in the left eye,” I said. “Your right eye has perfect vision, barring that patch you wear over it. That’s why I used a little trick just now, to make you give yourself away. I announced that I was aiming at the killer, but I mentioned no names. It caught you off guard. In your own conscience, you knew you were guilty. You wondered if you were the one I was accusing.

  “With the patch on your good eye, you couldn’t see where I was pointing my automatic. Maybe at you, maybe at someone else in the room. You had to know, you had to find out. So you dabbed at your blind eye with a handkerchief and managed to move the patch from the other one, just for an instant. Just long enough to see that Sylvia was the person under my gun.

  “Then you let the patch drop back into position. I was watching you, waiting for you to make that move. I expected you to. And you did.”

  “You’re out of your head!”

  I STEPPED close to him.

  “Am I?” Then I yanked away the patch, and his perfectly sound right eye glared at me maniacally. “Look at me, Senator,” I said. “Take a good look and tell me now if I’m crazy.”

  “Curse you—curse you!”

  “Uncle Marcus!” Sylvia wailed, and the others in the room involuntarily stirred and muttered like a shocked audience at some corrupt melodrama. Cartwain cursed me again, thickly.

  “I think it must have been a long-range plan,” I said to him. “Something you plotted months ago, when your left eye went blind. With a patch on the right eye you could pretend complete blindness. That was the start of your murder plan.”

  “Curse you, curse you, curse you!” he repeated.

  “Next came Edgar Nixon,” I said. “Either accidentally or by design, you’d learned he was out of prison and in Los Angeles, jobless. You got rid of your former chauffeur, then, and somehow managed to get the news to Nixon that the position was open. You also made sure he heard that you were blind, so that he’d feel safe from recognition if he applied for the job. Clever psychology, Senator. You counted on him applying. As a political expedient you’d ruined him in Washington and he had good cause to hate you, to be vengeful. That’s why you wanted him in your household. It made him a logical fall guy for the murder you were planning.”

  He
swore at me again, over and over.

  “I first suspected you when I found you stabbed in your bed,” I told him. “You accused Nixon, said you had recognized him. How could a blind man recognize anybody? That was a minor slip of the tongue, a lie told blunderingly, a false note that started me thinking. And your wound was shallow, as it might be if self-inflicted, whereas Gerald had been stabbed once and deeply enough to cause death. If the murderer could kill Gerald with one stroke of knife, how could he possibly do such an incomplete job on you, a helpless blind man? It wasn’t in character for a killer, but it was characteristic of stage-dressing. Of fakery.”

  He seemed to shrink against the davenport’s leather upholstery. He looked a thousand years old.

  “And if you’d been really blind,” said, “how could you know a man came in your window? How could you tell? There was something else, too. You claimed you had been attacked five or ten minutes before. But the carpet under the window was barely damp. The way the rain was coming in, the carpet would have been soaking wet in five or ten minutes. That meant you had opened the window a mere moment before I knocked on your door. You lied. Everything you’d told me was a lie, including that wild yarn about receiving anonymous threats. I don’t believe there ever were any threats. That was a story you cooked up to keep me from guessing Gerald’s real reason for asking my agency to send me down here.”

  “His real reason?”

  I nodded. “I’m theorizing now. Something Lora said tipped me to it. You were supposed to be well-fixed if not wealthy. Gerald and Sylvia had a fair-sized fortune, and you were trustee of their estate. But the maid’s wages were past due. So were Nixon’s. Where was all the money you were supposed to have? What had happened to Gerald’s and Sylvia’s inheritance? Maybe you had been embezzling, gambling, dissipating everything. Maybe Gerald’s suspicions were aroused. Maybe he demanded an accounting that you didn’t dare give him. Maybe that was why you planned to kill him. He was on to you.”

  “Curse you,” Cartwain said monstrously. “Curse you to perdition.”

  “So finally he decided to send for me, hire me to investigate your finances. That brought it to a head. You’re the one who drove the station wagon tonight, followed the limousine, waited until your nephew was alone and then stabbed him. Perhaps you intended to kill Sylvia, too. I caught you groping over her, pretending to comfort her. Were you going to break her neck and pin that on Nixon, too? Then you wouldn’t have had to give an estate accounting to anybody.”

  CARTWAIN put a hand down between two of the leather cushions.

  “Come with me to Hades, Palmer,” he said, and brought up the long-barreled .22 target gun that I had last seen in Sylvia’s hand.

  She must have left it on the davenport when she rested there, earlier. And Cartwain had it now. He snapped a shot at me.

  He got me in the right arm. Then, behind me, Otto Kleinstadt fired his service .38 and destroyed the only good eye Marcus Cartwain had. Where the eye had been, there was now a bright red hole.

  “Save the State the cost of a trial,” Kleinstadt said, almost apologetically. Then, to Sylvia, “Sorry, Miss Cartwain. I guess I didn’t realize I was such a good marksman. But you’d have been out an uncle in the long run, anyhow.”

  She didn’t seem to hear him, didn’t even look at the former Senator’s corpse. She came running to me.

  “Mr. Palmer, your arm—your poor arm! It’s bleeding!”

  It was nice to know she cared. It was an incongruous time for such notions, but I kept thinking she was probably poor, now. Her estate had been squandered if my theories were correct. And then I thought that a private detective makes pretty fair money. Maybe I would never afford a chauffeur and maid like Nixon and Lora, but I could take care of a wife. I could take very good care of a wife with hair the color of new gold.

  I stopped daydreaming. That was looking too far into the future.

  “It’s all right, Sylvia,” I said. “Don’t worry about my arm. One of these days I’ll get in touch with you. I’ll be as good as new.”

  DEAR COLD RUTH . . .

  Henry Hasse

  Who can fathom the soul of a beautiful woman? Not Connor, whose plans for his wife’s murder were ruined—because she insisted on suicide!

  DEAR RUTH: I was never one for writing much, but anyway I thought you’d like to know that you’ll have a fine funeral. I was down to the mortuary yesterday. It was real swell the way they had you fixed out. Remember the dress, the pink one with the lacy frills that we got for you right after we were married? You never wore it much; you said you wanted to save it for special occasions. Well, they had you fixed out in that. They had your hair fixed different, too.

  You looked so pretty there, with the flowers and all, it made me feel real bad. I got all choked up. I want you to know that, Ruth. I remember thinking, well, I’m glad it was this way. No pain or anything. Just nice and easy, right in her sleep.

  Oh, yes—Mrs. Davis from next door was there. She’s the one who found you next morning, after that night I left the house. She put some flowers on your coffin, and she was crying real hard. That made me feel pretty had.

  She was crying and saying how she always felt sorry for you. “The poor little thing seemed so unhappy, but to think she would take her own life this way . . .”

  I wish you could have seen it, the way she cried. Honest, Ruth, I got a kick out of that.

  She didn’t talk to me. She never did like me much.

  Your sister was there. She didn’t talk to me either. She’s the one who made all the arrangements, because I just couldn’t do it. By the way, I guess you want to know where they’re taking you. Well, it’s to Hillcrest Cemetery. Isn’t that fine? Remember how you mentioned once, when we drove past, how quiet and peaceful it was up there?

  Ruth, I won’t be able to go to the funeral. I guess I better tell you about that It makes me feel pretty bad.

  It’s because of this little guy with grey hair who was at the mortuary. He stood over at the side of the room and kept looking at me, and I don’t know—there was something about him. When I started to leave, he came up to me. “It sure is a miracle,” he said, “the way they can fix them up. She looks so natural.”

  I said, “Yes, but look at her hair, they’ve got her hair fixed different. Can’t you tell that?”

  “Sure,” he said, “but that’s all right. She looks almost happy. You’re the husband?”

  I said, “Yes, I was the husband.” I said, “What do you mean, she looks almost happy? Please leave me alone. I feel pretty bad.”

  He said, “Yeah, I thought you were the husband. Where have you been, Mr. Connor? Why did you leave the house that night? I’d like to hear all about it.”

  I didn’t like him, and I said, “Who are you?”

  He showed me a badge, and he said, “I wish you’d come uptown with me. A few questions we’d like to ask. Now, now, nothing to worry about. Just routine.”

  WELL RUTH, I’ve got to tell you about this. On the way uptown Lieutenant Winter kept remarking what a marvel it was how these morticians could fix you up so that nothing even showed.

  “I remember a friend of mine,” he said. “A hot-rod racer. He went through a rail and turned over four times, and they say he was really mangled up. Later, when I went to look at him, you couldn’t even tell it.”

  I said, “So what?” I said, “Why don’t you shut up, because I feel pretty bad.”

  He said I didn’t look like I felt so bad I said, well, I did. “They fixed her hair different,” I told him. “I don’t see why they did that. She never wore it that way.”

  And right then, Ruth, he gave me a funny look. “A .45 slug through the temple,” he said, “leaves a pretty ugly wound. That’s what I’ve been telling you. They sure do fix them up.”

  Well, Ruth, I guess this will surprise you. That’s the first I knew about it. What really happened. Here all the time I thought it was the other way. I had no idea you would take that .45 out of the drawer
and use it! It was clever, all right. Still, it was just suicide, wasn’t it? What could they pin on me?

  Well, when we got uptown they took my fingerprints. Winter said it was just routine. Then they put me in a chair and this little guy Winter—Let me tell you about him. I never liked him, right from the first. Never trusted him. Especially the way he talks. Two others were there, but I didn’t mind them. It was this Winter. He sat very close, and his eyes kept boring in on me.

  But I was too smart for them. I only told them part of it. I told them about when I came home that night, and you were waiting up, and you were mad, Ruth. I never saw you mad very often. I guess you had decided on a showdown. For the first time in all those months you mentioned Elise. That kind of surprised me.

  I said, “All right, so you know. I’m glad it’s out in the open. What are we going to do about it, Ruth?”

  You said, “We?” and gave a funny laugh. Remember? You said, “I still love you, Jim. Heaven help me, but I do. In spite of this. In spite of everything.”

  That sounded silly to me. I’d been a heel, I told you. Probably always would be. Why should you stick to a guy like me?

  I was trying to get it out, and finally I said it. “I don’t love you any longer. Ruth, I want a divorce.”

  I’ll never forget your eyes, the way you looked at me. Big and startled eyes, like a sleepwalker. You just kept looking at me; then your eyes got kind of funny. You said real low, “Jim, I won’t give you a divorce. You’ll never have Elise. I—I’ll die before I see you go to her!”

  I guess you hated me then. I didn’t know what you intended to do. But that’s what decided me. I can tell you now, Ruth: I’d been thinking about it for some time. Killing you, I mean.

  So when you said you had a splitting headache, I offered to get you some aspirin. Remember? I came out of the bathroom with it, dissolved in a glass of water. I knew that was how you always took it. Only it wasn’t aspirin, Ruth. What do you think of that? It was those sleeping things. Barbiturate. I used plenty of them, enough to make it look like suicide. You drank it right down, and you never even guessed.