by Jerry eBooks
Sibyl hurried into the waiting room and went to a window overlooking the street. Gloria was a half a block away, walking toward the Strand with short, mincing’ steps. Sibyl sighed in relief when she saw Mister Blue Serge Suit trailing at a discreet distance.
AT FOUR minutes to four, Sibyl went to the Cherry Street ramp. There was a crowd there, red caps with the luggage of a dozen travelers. Cabs came up the ramp in a steady stream.
Carlos was early. His black convertible with the top up as she had requested, appeared at the bottom of the ramp. Sibyl hurried down the ramp. Carlos leaned across the seat and opened the door. Sibyl pressed her right forearm to the seat back and tilted it forward. She climbed into the gloomy rear seat of the convertible.
“I don’t want to be seen,” she explained icily.
Carlos closed the door. He turned around and grinned at her. He was a handsome devil. Small and dapper, his skin was a rich tan hue, his eyes black, his oily hair blue-black, a thin mustache so perfect that it looked painted.
“You have it, yes?” he asked. “The money?”
“I have it,” she lied. “And you may as well drop that phony accent.”
He laughed softly. “One must keep in practice.”
“Where are the pictures?”
Carlos reached out and tapped the glove compartment. “Negatives and all,” he said. “Ah, what one can do with invisible infra-red flashbulbs and a delayed shutter release!”
The traffic ahead cleared, and Carlos drove up the ramp and down the other side.
“Drive west on the boulevard,” Sibyl ordered. “Slow.”
“Of a certainty!” Carlos agreed mockingly.
She said, “I have found out that duplicate negatives can be made by printing a positive.”
“Is that a fact?” he said. “My! My! I didn’t know. One lives and learns, doesn’t one?”
Sibyl fought down her inner fury. “I’m sure you have other negatives.”
“You do me an injustice,” he replied with a soft laugh.
“I’m also sure,” she went on, “that you don’t intend to pay income taxes on the fifty thousand.”
Her guess hit home and Carlos shoulders stiffened. He said, “Why do you say that?” The sardonic humor was out of his voice.
“Don’t try to bleed me for more money!” she warned. “If you do, I’ll have a word with the treasury men.”
She could almost hear him think. The remarks about negatives and income taxes were part of her act to convince him that the deal was sewed up solid. She sat sideways in the left corner of the car so she could watch out the rear window. They weren’t followed. She was sure of it. Carlos Tuparo was rat enough to have a pal pull a fake holdup.
“Where do we make the deal?” he asked sullenly.
“The Glover Stove Works. I’ll direct you.”
“But why there?” he protested. “Grant Park would be—”
“Shut up!” she ordered. “I call the turn. I had half a notion to spill the whole thing to my husband. I can change my, mind, little man. This ride’s costing me fifty thousand, and I’ll have it my way.”
THE NORTH SIDE of the stove works faced a dead-end street. The diagonal parking spaces along the windowless wall of the assembly plant were allotted to company officials whose names were stenciled on the brick wall in white paint.
Sibyl said, “Park in the space for J. J. Stewart.”
Carlos did so, switched off the motor and stretched his arms in a big yawn. J. J. Stewart, the sales manager of the outfit, was away on a three-day trip. Company officials, she had reasoned, would think Stewart had lent his space to someone in the organization not important enough to rate special parking rights. Hazel Stewart was a friend of Sibyl’s, and Sibyl had been to the plant often.
Sibyl said, “I’m ready for business.”
Some quality to her voice made the hairs at the nape of Carlos Tuparo’s neck stiffen. He lowered his arms and turned around. The muzzle of the silencer was aimed between his eyes. She held the gun in her right hand with her wrist tucked against her stomach. The hammer was cocked, and the finger crooked through the trigger guard was tight and white knuckled. He looked at her face. Greyness spread out from the corners of her mouth, but her blue eyes were cold and deadly.
“End of the line, stinker,” she said, her voice bitter with contempt. “You tagged the wrong gal this time, little rat. I’m not a soft society dame. I wasn’t brought up in a forty-room mansion on caviar and champagne. I’m a coal-regions blonde. Nine kids in the family. Five girls in one bedroom. I’m tough. I killed the chicken for the Sunday dinner. I stuck the family pig every fall. Think I’d let a greasy-haired perfumed monkey like you make a sucker out of me?”
Carlos’ pasty face sheeted with sweat. He licked his icy lips and his Adam’s apple bobbed. “You can’t bluff me!” he blustered. “I got extra negatives, just like you said.”
“Hold it!” she warned. “I’m not stupid. I thought this out. You wouldn’t dare keep blackmail stuff at your apartment where a guy with a gun could sweat it out of your cowardly soul. I figure a safety-deposit box in a bank.”
Carlos’s teeth were chattering. “All right! All right!” he whispered. “Sure. Sure! What happens when I don’t pay the rent?”
“What’s in your box would be turned over to the police.”
“Yeah! Yeah!” he agreed. “The cops would tell your husband. Then what?”
“No, little man,” she corrected. “The police destroy blackmail evidence and notify only the person involved. I read it in a detective novel. So I asked the district attorney at a dinner party one night. It’s true.”
Carlos was breathing hard and little beads of saliva flew from his pale lips. “Look!” he implored. “We go to the bank. You get everything. You wait in the lobby of the bank. You can trust me. . . .”
Her brittle laughter stopped him cold. The conversation was played out and it was the time for action. Sibyl was a resolute woman. But she couldn’t kill a man without provocation.
She gave the purse in her lap a small push. It slid across her left thigh and struck the floor with a thud. She bent over as if to pick it up.
Carlos made a frantic grab for the gun. She shot him through the head. The .22 spat a jet of flame and gave forth a muffled cough. A red spot appeared on Carlos Tuparo’s forehead above his right eye. Sibyl closed her eyes. The cordite fumes stung her nostrils. She opened her eyes. Carlos had sprawled across the front seat. The windshield was intact, therefore the bullet had ended up in his brain. She had bought cartridges with a light powder charge for that very reason.
The pictures were in a manila envelope which she transferred to her purse. She was in luck. Carlos’ left jacket pocket held the key to the safety deposit box. The luck was phenomenal. The key was attached to a cardboard tag that read: “1st Nat. A.J. Grant.” So he had more than one deposit box under phony names Now all she had to do was go to the First National Bank and keep the box rent paid as A. J. Grant’s secretary. Things were coming her way, they really were.
She pushed Carlos off the seat. He collapsed limply on the floor and was obscured by shadows. There was no blood on the seat. Sibyl took a pair of fur-lined gloves and a rag from her bag. She put on the gloves and wiped everywhere within the convertible she might have touched. Then she settled back and waited. The craving for a cigarette grew intolerable. But she sweat it out.
AT EXACTLY one minute to five, she took the keys, got out and locked the car with the windows up tight. She removed the gloves and put them back in the purse, also the rag. The concrete apron wouldn’t show footprints. She turned and walked slowly toward the corner of the building.
Although she was expecting it, the factory whistle frightened her somewhat. She stepped out on the sidewalk of a side street just as the doors to the office burst open and spewed out a chattering crowd of office girls; Sibyl stepped behind two matronly women bound for the bus stop and tagged along as if she was part of a threesome.
It was thirty-three blocks to the terminal. She walked the distance, slowly, like a woman early for a date. The sidewalks were crowded with men and women in a hurry to get home after the day’s work. Sibyl felt sort of numb, but her nerves were steady. It had worked to perfection. Carlos Tuparo was dead. And every person he had blackmailed would be a prime suspect. There must be many, many persons with a motive to kill Carlos Tuparo.
The Union Terminal was a madhouse of commuters. Sibyl was about to go into the newsreel theater, then decided against it. The commission of the murder had been an emotional shock that had numbed her nervous system. Now a reaction set in and she couldn’t keep still. She walked the breadth of the train shed many times, smoking furiously and trying not to think of the hundred and one accidents that could befall Gloria Hays and the vital red dress.
Shortly before the zero hour, Sibyl went into the lobby of the ladies lounge. A glance into the bathroom section of the washrooms reassured her. A new attendant was on duty. The old lady went off at six, but there had been a risk that she might work overtime. Heartened, Sibyl sat in an armchair and managed to relax.
Gloria Hays came in at 7:32. Sibyl did a repeat act with the new attendant and they were again closeted in the bathroom.
Nerves tight, Sibyl asked, “Okay?”
“Like a dream,” said Gloria Hays, smacking her gum juicily. “A cinch. The pictures weren’t bad either. Gee, what a dress! I could have picked guys up right and left.”
“You didn’t?”
“Naw. But it gimme an idea. I’ll latch on to a dress like this out on the coast,” said Gloria with avid interest. Her eyes glinted. “Look! Maybe I can have the phony bracelets, huh?”
“No!” Sibyl said. “The detective would notice.”
“Just one from each wrist?”
Sibyl relented. “All right, take any two!”
They traded clothing. Sibyl adjusted the hat. Then she checked her purse. Accidentally switching purses had been a nightmare that had haunted her all week. She gave the bug-eyed Gloria Hays the five hundred dollars and the airline ticket.
“You’re swell!” Gloria gushed. “You don’t know how glad I am to get away from here. The men around here make me sick.”
Sibyl said, “Give me a couple of minutes, then leave. Good luck, honey. You’ll set Hollywood on its ear.”
The rest was easy. Sibyl went out into the waiting room and was again conscious of being the target of masculine eyes. She stopped and admired a florist’s display that used a big mirror as a back drop. Blue Serge stopped across the way and bought cigarettes.
She went out to the taxi ramp and waited her turn. When her cab arrived, she gave the driver her address loudly enough to be heard ten feet away.
JORGENSON was the perfect butler.
Tall, lean, always immaculate, he oozed self-confidence and had the deadpan expression of a professional gambler. Nothing short of an atomic bomb could have shaken his composure. He ignored the wicked red dress.
“Good-evening, Madame Van Arsdale,” he said. “The master is dining with the board of directors this evening.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” she said. “I’ll dine on the terrace. In an hour.”
“Very good, madame,” said Jorgenson, and seemed to melt away like a genie.
Sibyl went into the redwood-paneled den. She placed the purse on the desk and stood studying it moodily. Her next and final problem was to dispose of the kill gun and the pictures. Then she would relax.
Jorgenson announced his presence in the doorway by clearing his throat. “A man to see you. madame,” he said. “He is most insistent.”
Sibyl looked out the window so he wouldn’t see the sudden fright in her eyes. Her knees went shaky and breathing became difficult—like the first time she’d done a strip at a stag beer bust.
“Show him in.” Her voice was firm, though a trifle loud. She walked woodenly to the liquor cabinet and took a drink of brandy. The liquid heat ironed some of the kinks out of her insides. She assumed the facial expression she wore in the blue spotlight—remote, aloof, contemptuously hostile.
The man came in and closed the door. Tall, thin and stooped, he resembled a rat, with his sharp nose and close-set black eyes. His brown hair was slicked down and exposed areas of bare scalp. The grey suit had baggy knees and the coat cuffs were frayed. He rubbed his palms together.
“You do good in black,” he said. “You really do. It took me a while to tumble to the clothes switch.”
“Speak your piece!” she said, face impassive.
“Okay, baby, okay! I’m Nick Wyatt. I’m a private detective. I’m the crummy kind of private dick. I can be had. I don’t turn down no chance to make a fast buck. A hat-check cutie named Gloria Hays has a fast-and-fancy twirl with a married guy, see! The ever-loving wife hires good old Nick to shadow the cutie and get the goods.”
Sibyl pressed against the desk, and the beveled edge bit into her thighs. The irony of the situation did not escape her. Poetic justice. Birds of a feather. . . . She said wearily, “Get on with it.”
Nick Wyatt settled himself in a red-leather armchair. “You’re running a gravy train, honey, and I’m a passenger. So you killed a guy. So what? If the cops come close, we toss Gloria Hays to the dogs. A blonde dame in a back suit plows under a guy in a black “convertible. That I can prove. So the hat-check cutie takes the rap.”
“You put it beautifully,” Sibyl agreed. “We can even alibi me by a high-class private detective my husband hired to trail me.”
“Baby, now you’re talking,” said Nick Wyatt gleefully.
“But did it occur to you,” she went on, “that I killed a man who was going to blackmail me over a sordid love affair?”
“So what?” he asked. “It’s a different shake, honey. All the other guy could do was have your hubby heave you out. I can jockey you straight into the electric chair. Think it over.”
Sibyl sighed, said, “An affectionate young woman marries a man forty years her senior. A trying situation, don’t you think?”
“What are you yakkin’ about?” he growled.
“Reducing the problem to its simplest equation,” she said, “I’m thinking in terms of a jury, little man.”
She slipped the revolver out of her purse, cocked it, aimed it at Nick Wyatt’s midriff.
“I’m batting in the wrong league,” she confessed. “Flying around here in the big time warped my judgment of people. I was wrong on Carlos. If I’d been my old self I’d have known a hat-check girl in a clip joint would be playing around with married men.”
Nick Wyatt yawned. “Put the heater away, sis!” he ordered. “Don’t try to scare a tough monkey like me. You’re wasting your time.”
She shot him three times—through the chest. He never knew what hit him. He fell off the chair and curled up on the floor like a sleeping dog, his legs twitching slightly. Blood seeped into the dark carpeting.
SIBYL sat down at the desk. She placed the revolver in front of the ornate pen set. The room was very quiet. Blue smoke swirled ceilingward and was sucked into the ducts of the air-conditioning system The push button was under the desk edge. She depressed it.
Jorgenson didn’t bat an eye. He stepped into the room and glanced at the body on the floor with just the barest trace of disapproval.
“Yes, madame?” he asked.
She said, “I just killed the man on the floor. I killed that slimy Tuparo character earlier this afternoon. Tell my maid to get out a dress more suitable for the occasion. Something demure. Then phone the police.”
“If I may be so bold, madame, I suggest that I call a lawyer before the police are notified.”
“Of course!” she agreed. “Do you have anyone in mind?”
“I recommend a Mr. Ben Monkwitz, madame. In legal circles he is known as Quick-Acquittal Monkwitz.”
“Tell him to hurry,” said Sibyl, glancing at the purse. “I have some evidence he might want to use.”
Jorgenson backed to the doorway. “M
adame,” he asked, “may I make a personal observation?”
“Of course.”
He looked her straight in the eye, and his face broke out of its mask of indifference to register prideful admiration and respect. “In the parlance of the underworld, madame,” he said, “I am positive that you will beat the rap.”
“Thank you, Jorgenson!” she cried. “Thank you very much.”
GEMS GLOW WITH BLOOD
Joseph Commings
I’m not too honest a private dick, but I draw the line when MURDER lines up on the wrong side.
The babe was going to soak her feet and ruin her shoes if she kept running through puddles. I followed her through the rain from the Greyhound Bus Terminal. I could go for a girl like that. She was a come-hither blonde. She was carrying a quarter-million dollars’ worth of stolen rubies. And every cop in twelve states was looking for her for murder.
I didn’t mind walking in the rain. I was wearing my old waterproof coat and GI brogues. I had to walk fast to stay behind her. But she had to stop running at the next street crossing to wait for the traffic light to change. I came up beside her and put my arm through hers. I could feel a startled vibration electrify her. I said politely, “Need someone to carry your bag?”
“No—thank you!” she said in the hard, icy kind of way that’s supposed to freeze a masher. She yanked her arm away. But I had my defrost unit working. When she started across the avenue without waiting any longer, dodging traffic, I followed and took her arm again.
She turned her head to glare at me from under the dripping brim of her felt hat. She had almond-shaped jade-green eyes, cheeks sunken just enough to torment a man, and a full-lipped burgundy mouth that was at present trying to scold instead of look scared. “Is this supposed to be a pickup?”
“Do I look like the kind of man who tries to pick up beautiful blondes?”
“Yes!”
“Would you prefer this to be a pinch—Gertie Sale?”
