Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  Neelan studied the three of them, feeling cut off and alone. They wanted him out of there, and they wouldn’t give a damn if he were shot down on the sidewalk.

  He picked up his suitcase, nodded to them, and walked out into the night.

  There was a cool wind blowing through the tops of the trees, and the street seemed quiet and peaceful. Neelan found the Dodge and drove slowly through the city to Route 130, where he waited for a light and then joined the traffic moving along to the shore. When he came to a cluster of freshly painted hangars, he turned off into a lane, and parked beside an office on which there was the sign:

  IDLEWILD FLYING FIELD

  They were expecting him, all right; and after he signed the name Harvey Benson in the passenger book, he walked out to the plane, a single-wing Navion with tricycle landing gear.

  “We should be in Richmond in about two hours, Mr. Benson,” the pilot said. He was a stocky young man in his early thirties, with a confident bearing. “Ever flown before?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll probably enjoy this more than you would a bigger ship.”

  They taxied down the runway, gaining speed quickly, and when the plane lurched slightly and became airborne, Neelan was rather surprised by his calm acceptance of this phenomenon. The pilot banked the ship onto their course, and Neelan looked down and saw the lights of Camden blinking in the darkness. Across the river he could see the greater mass of Philadelphia, and already it seemed far, far away.

  He knew then that he would get away with it, that he would beat them all, Ramussen, Brewster, Dave Fiest, and that other Linda, the one who had sold him out.

  They landed at the Richmond airport two hours and twenty minutes later. Neelan paid off the pilot at the rate of twenty dollars an hour, and climbed down from the plane. The pilot waved to him, and he waved back; then the little plane taxied off to a hardstand to wait take-off permission.

  Neelan put his grip down. He was completely comfortable, hidden in the darkness about a hundred yards from the brightly lighted waiting-rooms. There were three big planes at various gates along the edge of the field. Red-caps were trundling baggage along the ramps, and overalled mechanics were checking and gassing the planes. There was a row of parked cars along the left of the control tower.

  He stood in the darkness, occasionally glancing at his watch. And then a loud voice broke the stillness:

  “Flight 231 is now loading at Gate Number Three. Flight 231, through flight to Dallas, is now loading at Gate Number Three.”

  Neelan picked up his grip and walked slowly through the darkness toward the four-engined ship. He watched the passengers streaming out of the waiting-room to board the plane. They waved to friends and hurried onto the field, with a brisk sense of their own importance.

  Neelan waited until the last person had gone up the mobile ladder and into the plane. There was another call for the flight, and finally, two minutes later, a third and final call. Only then did Neelan stride swiftly toward the plane.

  IN a parked car near the control tower three men were watching Flight 231. Slicker Robinson was at the wheel, a cigarette hanging loosely in his mouth, and beside him sat a paunchy little man who seemed constantly on the verge of smiling. In the rear seat, the bandage about his head gleaming whitely, was Hymie Solstein.

  “Now, this must be a very definite thing,” Slicker Robinson said. He was obviously speaking to the man at his side, but he didn’t take his eyes from the plane.

  “The boss is really burned up about Neelan. You might say it’s a matter of principle with him, Tommy.” The man called Tommy nodded thoughtfully. “I understand, Robinson. I know Mr. Espizito wants no mistakes or slip-ups. There won’t be, I can assure you.”

  “Mike doesn’t care where it happens, understand? Neelan is booked right through to Mexico City, so you stick with him, and take care of the job whenever you think it’s right.”

  “Of course.”

  “Also, Neelan has quite a piece of Mike’s money on him; and naturally, we want that back.”

  “Naturally. As a matter of principle.” The little man came close to smiling, but didn’t. “I have a good reputation, Robinson, although I am not so well known in the East. I do a good job.”

  Hymie Solstein leaned forward and tapped Robinson’s shoulder.

  “Well, where is he? Reynolds said he’d make this flight for sure.”

  “We can rely on Reynolds, I think,” Robinson said. They were silent, watching the plane. And then Hymie said softly, “There he is!” and his voice broke into laughter.

  THE three men watched Neelan’s big figure emerge from the darkness behind the plane. They saw him glance around and walk swiftly toward the mobile stairway.

  “He’s all yours,” Robinson said.

  “Good night, gentlemen,” Tommy said, stepping from the car. He carried a briefcase under his arm. “You’ll probably hear from me in a week or so.”

  With precise, almost mincing, steps he walked toward the plane . . .

  Neelan turned at the entrance of the ship, swept his eyes over the waiting-rooms and the field. There was nothing to cause him alarm. A late passenger was hurrying to make the flight, he saw, a plump little man who wore glasses.

  The stewardess, a pretty brunette, smiled at him. “Are you Mr. Benson?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Fine. I have your tickets. Would you take a seat, please? We’re ready to take off.”

  The little man came hurrying up the steps, glanced at Neelan impersonally, and smiled at the stewardess. “I’m nearly late, aren’t I?” he said, apologetically.

  She smiled and took his ticket. “There’s no harm done, as long as you made it.”

  The little man smiled gratefully at her and went inside. Neelan stood for a last few seconds, staring at the brightly lighted waiting-rooms, and breathing slowly and deeply of the night air. Everything seemed suddenly calm and peaceful, and the pressures of the last few days were gone. He was Barny Neelan, who had taken what he wanted; and that was a sustaining thought.

  Unexpectedly, he saw a vision of Linda again, happy and smiling, coming to meet him somewhere, sometime, in Mexico.

  “You’ll have to take your seat now,” the stewardess said. “All right.”

  Neelan ducked his head and entered the plane. There was a seat halfway down the aisle and he sank into it, a small smile on his lips. The smile widened as the engines sputtered and thundered to life.

  The paunchy little man named Tommy was in the seat behind him, the briefcase resting on his knees. He looked at the watch as the plane taxied down the runway. Time for forty winks before they reached Dallas. Settling himself comfortably, he glanced once at the back of Barny Neelan’s head, and then closed his eyes.

  The plane climbed into the night.

  A LITTLE PSYCHOLOGY

  Arnold Grant

  Don’t let that long word scare you. You have no reason to fear it. unless like Mr . . . you’ve just committed a slight murder

  YOUNG JOHNSON practically exploded when I asked him the question: “Why don’t you try a little psychology?”

  “Psychology!” he said. “What I’d like to try is a rubber hose! If you could see him sitting there, calm as you please, claiming he didn’t do it, when everyone knows he did do it, and even her husband accuses him!”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Who’s claiming he didn’t do what? Whose husband?”

  Johnson glared. “Don’t tell me you don’t know the case I’m talking about. The whole city knows about it. That’s why the Chief is raising such a fuss.”

  I nodded. “All right, but I’d still like to have you tell me about it. Then maybe you’ll see why I suggested trying a little psychology.”

  “It’s like this,” Johnson explained. “The husband is Edward Rogers, the real-estate man. The victim was his wife. He reported the murder. I took the call and went out to the Rogers’. Mrs. Rogers was lying on the floor of the living room, beaten over the head. I di
dn’t need a doctor to tell me she was dead.”

  “How was she dressed when you found her?” I inquired.

  “She had on an old dressing-gown and her hair was in curl papers. Nobody could have called her a ‘beautiful blonde’, the way they like to do in these murder cases.”

  “Who was in the house when you arrived?” I asked.

  “Her husband was there, and so was our prime suspect, a lawyer by the name of Stevens.”

  “I’ve heard of him,” I said. “He’s got a good reputation.”

  Johnson sneered. “He may have a good reputation, but he’s got a very poor alibi.”

  “I’ll want to hear all about that,” I agreed, “but one thing at a time. What was Rogers’ story?”

  “Rogers’ story doesn’t matter,” Johnson said. “It’s Stevens’ story I’m interested in breaking down.”

  “Tell me Rogers’ first,” I insisted.

  “His is perfectly straightforward,” Johnson continued. “He was at his office. His wife phoned. He was barely able to make out her words. She told him Stevens had come to see her and had beaten her and left her to die. She asked her husband to come right home. He says he did, and found her dead.”

  “Any confirmation of all that?”

  “Yes,” Johnson said. “His office switchboard reports a call for him at the time he says he received one.”

  “Was it from his wife?”

  “The switchboard operator says she thinks it was. She knew Mrs. Rogers’ voice. It was a woman, in any event.”

  “Any other women in Rogers’ life?”

  “None we’ve been able to find.”

  “How does Rogers account for Stevens having visited Mrs. Rogers in the first place?”

  “He claims his wife has been having an affair with the lawyer. He says it’s been going on for months.”

  “Any confirmation?”

  JOHNSON appeared irritated. “Not yet. They seem to have kept it pretty quiet.”

  “Going on for months and nobody but Rogers knew about it! Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

  “Stevens is a lawyer. He knows the angles.”

  “The law doesn’t teach that sort of angle,” I said, grinning. “However, let’s hear Stevens’ story.”

  “His is just what you might expect,” Johnson went on. “He admits going to call on Mrs. Rogers, but claims that he arrived to find her dead and Rogers already there with her. His sketch of the background is that Mrs. Rogers was planning to divorce her husband, and that she’d asked him to call to discuss the legal details.”

  “And you don’t like that story?” Johnson shook his head vigorously. “Not to a bit. It’s too pat. It’s the kind of story a lawyer would think up. And it doesn’t answer the question of that phone call to Rogers’ office.”

  “So what do you plan to do next?” I asked.

  “What can I do, except pound away at Stevens and see if he won’t break down?” Johnson said. “That’s the trouble with these cases where there’s practically no physical evidence to go on. You’re faced with a couple of conflicting stories, and you’ve just got to break down the person you think is lying. Unless the coroner or the fingerprint men come up with something new, that’s the only thing I can do.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” I said. “As I suggested before, you could always try a little psychology.”

  “On which one of them?” Johnson asked sarcastically.

  I laughed. “I meant on yourself. But perhaps it might be better if you tried some on Rogers first.”

  “On Rogers!”

  I nodded. “You go tell him that the switchboard girl now remembers that phone call, but that what Mrs. Rogers said on the phone was that she had asked Stevens to come and see her about a divorce. And she wanted first to have a talk with her husband, to see if they couldn’t patch things up.”

  “I’d be making a fool of myself,” Johnson complained. “I won’t do it. You’re just guessing.”

  “All right,” I said, “I admit that I’m guessing, but since your system doesn’t seem to be working, why not try mine? There’s nothing to be lost by it.”

  Johnson hesitated, then shrugged his shoulders wearily and left the room. In less than five minutes he was back, jubilant.

  “Wait’ll the Chief hears about this!” he exclaimed. “I’ve got a confession!” He turned a little red. “Of course, you deserve a lot of the credit.”

  “I don’t need it,” I said. “What happened?”

  “Well, I took Rogers aside and told him your story about the switchboard girl. He didn’t believe it, so I said I’d get the girl in to tell him, herself. That was just a bluff, but it worked. He broke down and confessed the whole thing.

  “He admitted that there hadn’t been any affair between his wife and Stevens. He and his wife just hadn’t been getting along, and she was thinking of a divorce, just as you guessed. After she called Stevens, she asked her husband to come home and talk things over.

  “The talk got a little rough, and one thing led to another, and finally he picked up a heavy lamp and hit her over the head with it. He hid the lamp and then, knowing that Stevens would be coming in, made up his story.”

  FINISHING his recital, Johnson stood staring down at the floor. “I guess I owe you a vote of thanks.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  He scratched his head. “I’ve been thinking, though. You said something about me trying a little psychology on myself. What’d you mean by that?”

  I smiled, “I just meant that if, instead of trying to break down two conflicting stories, you’d taken the trouble to apply a bit of psychology to the facts, you’d have saved yourself a lot of time and effort.”

  “What facts?” Johnson asked. “Specifically, the fact that when Mrs. Rogers was found dead she was wearing an old dressing-gown and had her hair done up in curl papers.”

  “What’s that got to do with it? A lot of women go around like that.”

  “They do,” I agreed, “but, according to the evidence you had, Mrs. Rogers was planning to greet either her husband or her lover. If you know anything about women, my boy, the fact that she had on an old dressing-gown, and had her hair in curl papers, proves beyond any doubt that it was her husband she was expecting.”

  HEAR THAT MOURNFUL WIND

  Dane Gregory

  CHAPTER ONE

  HELL’S ORCHARD

  When she is murdered, let no one mourn.

  This was destined when she was born:

  But save your tears for the slayer who

  Weeps on the very blade that slew.

  —Red-inked entry in Claybaugh’s

  Giant Scrap Book—probably by

  Claybaugh his own-self.

  Well, I don’t know. They held the services the second day after all this took place up on the Hill; but while that’s crowding things a little for these parts, I suppose it was thought best on account of the unseasonable weather. Anyhow, the news had traveled far enough so there was a very good attendance.

  Miss Eubanks had been a pleasant woman, given to a few whims in her later years (as who is not? I always say) but highly thought of by all.

  After the main service there was a long procession out to the cemetery and then a brief graveside service where they tell me the widowed Mrs. Crownover—she’d been Miss Eubanks’ dearest friend—created a little excitement by offering to throw herself in the open vault.

  I wasn’t there for that part of it, however. It being a Saturday morning, I had to get back to the barber shop.

  Most of the time the shop kept me pretty busy on a Saturday, and that had been especially true since Copeland Powers put away his apron to take a houseman’s job over at the Club. Not that I minded, you understand. I’ve always been one to like lots of company and baseball talk around me; and anyhow, it was just as Tookie used to say.

  That was the wife: her folks had named her Tucker after some relation on her mother’s side, but everybody called her Tookie.r />
  “Chigger,” she used to tell me in her laughing way, “a chink in the till is worth two in the plaster.”

  But I don’t know. It may have been the strange weather or it may have been that a big funeral procession always seems to drag the quiet of death through a town. Whatever it was, I never passed a longer, slower Saturday morning.

  It was not seeing Charlie at the shine-chair that got to me the worst. I put a good stiff edge on the razors and then I moved the Lucky Tiger calendar over to the south wall, but it seemed like the rest of the time there was nothing to do with my hands. Under the circumstances, I guess it was only natural I should think quite a bit about Charlie.

  Let’s see, now, he’d been working for me every Saturday—oh, it must have been all of six years—till the day he got his big hands on that axe. Charlie always did like sharp things, but of course nobody thought much about it then. It was six years, all right, because it comes back to me now that it was that terrible hot summer right after Tookie went to Wichita, Kansas.

  Well, I don’t know. As I was going to say, this particular Saturday morning I felt about as sorry for him as I had when he first came bawling into town with the slats of his dad’s whip across his forty-year-old shoulders.

  It’s not that I’m taking up for murder-most-foul, as Colonel Murfree likes to call it. Whether by Charlie or by Adam’s off-ox, it’s a crime against nature and I guess we all see eye-to-eye on that. But Charlie had been a great outdoor man, you know; and we don’t have Court Week here until late September. It gave me a shut-in feeling myself to think of spending three months in jail.

  I made up a little package out of some funnypaper books and then I put on my hat and coat and hung up the “Back Soon” sign. I went upstreet toward the county jail, which is four blocks south along Main in what some call the old pecan grove. That way the wind was in my face.

  It seemed like the wind would never let up. Six days steady now it had been blowing in from the south; but not hard and not hurried and not even hot enough that a man could break out in a good clean sweat. It had the smell of dying flowers on it, and it was slow and smooth. You could open your hand against it and it would run like a woman’s hand through your fingers; and in the night when it slipped along the eaves it was like a woman’s voice.