Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  “A new record,” he said. “It says on the label Nevada Hotfoot. Maybe you haven’t heard it, you two.” He crossed the room to the big console against the wall. He put on the record, switched a knob. The pickup arm descended.

  “Are you insane?”

  A softly haunting music filled the room. To Gomez’s ears it brought back memories as it does to anyone who hears it for the first time since the war.

  Gomez looked over at the woman, looked away, looked over at the man. “It plays a love song called Laura,” he said simply.

  GOMEZ SHUT OFF the console, lifted the record. “Smithers’s little irony,” he said. “Or maybe he was afraid of you toward the last. Maybe you threatened him in turn. Only you would know about that. He pasted a Nevada Hotfoot label on top of the Laura label. What was in between?”

  He raised his eyes to them, waiting. Neither spoke. He looked back at the recording, snicked his thumbnail along the edge of the paper label and pried carefully, like prying a stamp loose from an envelope. It came away, tearing. He dropped the pieces and held up what had been hidden between the labels.

  “The print,” he told them. “And the negative, the precious damning negative. Were you drunk at the time, Laura, or was he one of these under-the-shade operators?”

  Gomez was looking at the woman, not at the man. But he heard the man’s voice. It suddenly cut in, rasping and hoarse.

  “It was her idea! It was all her idea, Gomez! Let’s stop at this motel, she said, where nobody knows us, she said. And the other was her idea, too. It was her gun . . .”

  Gomez was still watching the woman. He was watching the utter and final hate coming down into her darkly venomous eyes. He was watching her dig an arm down under one of the sofa cushions. He was watching her bring up the arm with a gun in the hand. He was watching her flip it up, pull the trigger.

  The man with the mustache opened his eyes wide with the blast. They were dish-pan blue, Gomez noted. The highball glass bumped to the thick rug, rolled a little, lay still. It didn’t make much noise. The man followed it then, slowly. He didn’t make any noise at all.

  Gomez sighed. He carefully laid the record down, stuck the negative and tiny print in a vest pocket. Then he went over and took the gun away from the woman’s trembling hand. She was very drunk now, he saw.

  “Sam.” It sounded to Gomez like whimpering.

  “Where’s the phone, Laura?” he asked. There was no feeling at all in his voice.

  The woman said his name again.

  Gomez turned and looked around the room; at the big heavy rug, the fawn-colored sofa, the deep leather chair with the ivory wooden hand rests; at the huge brick facade—and the oil painting up there. Then he turned and looked at the woman herself.

  Captain Hart had said like a pickle in a bottle of brine, he remembered.

  STAND-IN FOR SLAUGHTER

  Grover Brinkman

  Johnny Chopin found a Fifth Avenue babe in the middle of the Arizona desert. And it didn’t take long before she tried to make him her . . .

  THE BRAKIE looked tough. He was a huge guy, at least six-two, possibly over two hundred on the hoof. He had long, ape-like arms, and he was juggling a club that looked like a section of gas pipe.

  He shuffled over the catwalk of the swaying rattler as oblivious to the sway and lurch of the train as a sailor on a pitching tanker. He was looking for trouble. Anyone could see that.

  Johnny Chopin spotted him four reefers away, with an empty flat in between, coming fast. Johnny’s first thought was of the kid hitchhiker in the next car, the kid with a game leg who was trying to get to L.A. on a shoestring.

  He scrambled down from the boxcar’s catwalk and crawled over into the open flat where the kid was sleeping on a pile of litter. He shook the kid until he woke, noticing how white and anemic the kid’s face looked even in the broiling semi-tropical sun.

  “Brakie’s coming—with a gas pipe,” he shouted. “He’ll never see you if you do as I say. Lie close to the wall, and I’ll cover you with this burlap. Don’t try to go over the side with that bum leg of yours, you hear? Be seeing you!”

  The kid raised up, looked around at the distant blue hills, the flats ahead.

  “Next town’s Millburg, ain’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” Johnny said. “Just keep still.” He covered the kid with all the loose burlap he could get his hands on, scrambled out of the flat and started running toward the head of the train. He knew the brakie was watching him, would no doubt pass the kid if he lay still. That kid couldn’t go over the side with that bum leg of his.

  He saw the smoke of a town up ahead. Desert air is deceiving, he knew. It might be ten miles away, fifteen, or even twenty-five. That meant a lot of hitchhiking, especially in midsummer, with the sizzling Southern Arizona sun baking the sap out of your brains. But a few miles of desert hoofing is better than no brains at all, Johnny assured himself.

  He scooped up his battered suitcase and swung down the hot rungs. The rattler really was highballing; the telephone poles ripped by like ducks in an arcade shooting gallery. They should be slowing down, for this was a long upgrade, but two Diesels were on front, and that evidently accounted for it.

  He threw the suitcase first, saw it strike and bounce like a kid’s rubber ball. Then he pulled in a lungful of the hot desert air, relaxed and let go. It couldn’t have been worse had he jumped off a two-story building to a cinder lot. The ground came up and slapped him hard. Then he jackknifed and rolled, like a tumbling weed in an Oklahoma duster. That’s about all he remembered.

  Until he woke up in a pipe-dreamer’s seventh heaven.

  The pipe-dream had a mop of reddish hair about as bright as the Arizona sun. Not to mention the sea-blue eyes that went with it, and a creamy, oval face that was finely chiseled out of hard, virgin clay.

  This could happen—in a movie, maybe.

  THE GIRL had his head cradled in her lap, dabbing at the grime on his face. Johnny blinked the cinders out of his eyes and looked again. Still there. One of the sweetest desert mirages he’d ever seen. He sat up with an effort, and finally the ground stopped spinning, the telephone poles climbed down out of the azure sky and took their proper place on the sun-baked terrain.

  Then he glimpsed the car. It was a snazzy number, evidently just off the Detroit line, a shiny convertible, long, low-slung, plenty of chromium, plenty of class. The paint job was even redder than her hair. The car was pulled up at the side of the highway that ran adjacent to the tracks.

  “I saw the brakie give you the rush act,” she said. “Brother, you came near beating your brains out when you slammed into that whistle post.”

  He should have informed her that he still was whistling—not at the post. But his mouth felt like the inside of a cinder pile and talking was out of the question.

  She got up, graceful as a cat, brushing the sand off her skirt. He saw she was tall, willowy, with the usual curves in appropriate places. Her clothes were the kind that ruin a heavy roll of folding lettuce, and she had them draped around her very effectively. It didn’t make an iota of sense—this Fifth Avenue babe out here in the cactus.

  A dozen questions jumped to the tip of his tongue as he watched this gorgeous redhead, but for some reason he let them die there. His head was spinning.

  “I’ll give you a lift into town,” the girl said presently, offering a smoke.

  Johnny needed the lift, all right. His head felt like an overripe melon that had rolled off the farmer’s wagon, and every so often came momentary blackouts.

  Near-concussion, possibly. He remembered sliding onto that leather-upholstered car cushion, then the fog came in again, tons and tons of it. He was trying to remember something. Oh yes, his suitcase.

  Then suddenly he was out cold. When he finally eased back to consciousness, his neck was stiff and his ears were drumming. Things cleared gradually, and he pushed up in the seat and looked around for the redhead.

  Funny. The redhead wasn’t around.


  But someone else was.

  He was a fat, flashily dressed bozo. He shared the front seat, taking even more than his half.

  He didn’t appreciate the fact that he was behind the wheel of a bus in the three-G class. He didn’t appreciate anything, even the wide-open spaces and the red rocks that comprised the Arizona terrain, for he was very, very dead.

  It needed only a cursory glance to see that. He was immaculately dressed in sport togs—a green corduroy shirt and chocolate-colored pants. He was so well groomed that he looked fastidious, especially out here on the bleak, cactus-studded desert.

  But there was a dark spot on the corduroy shirt, just below the heart, and his blood had seeped down to the waistband of his trousers. His eyes were wide-open and staring straight at the drab landscape. Death evidently had struck him swift and hard.

  He wasn’t good-looking, but almost ugly, his broad face coarse and mottled with smallpox pits, his hair stringy, his ears sticking out like those of a prospector’s donkey.

  But Johnny wasn’t interested in his looks, or who he was. All that mattered was the fact that this bozo was now in the realm of the deceased, and Johnny shared the other half of the seat with him. And he was a nobody kicked off a freight train.

  Talk about murder raps! This was the great-granddaddy of them all. And he was the fall guy, a number one chump for a hot seat. Or did they give you gas in Arizona?

  Where was the redhead, and how had the dead man gotten into the car? Why was he in particular chosen as the fall guy? This was the first time he had ever graced the state of Arizona with his presence.

  JOHNNY looked at the sun, and suddenly got panicky. He’d been out for an hour or more, judging the position of that burning disc. That meant the sirens would be coming presently—for him.

  He reluctantly turned to the dead man and started going through his pockets. His hands were trembling and his thumbs kept getting in the way.

  He hadn’t even been frisked. That seemed unusual, too. His wallet was stuffed with greenbacks—the important kind, nothing under twenties. There were cards, too—identification, several fraternity things, an AAA membership. The name, according to the cards, was Abel Stunder, a resident of Millburg, aged forty-eight.

  That was all very nice to know—if you were a reporter. But it didn’t get him off the hot seat.

  One more thing. He pulled up the registration card on the steering column. Then he got another surprise. The car was registered in the name of the dead man.

  It came at last. Johnny glimpsed the winking red light miles up the slope, long before the wail of the siren. He took one last look at Stunder, wiped the clammy perspiration off his freckled, long-planed face and started to run.

  A dry wash was up ahead. The highway bridged it with a concrete culvert. The wash deepened as it led away toward the rolling foothills to the south. There was a possibility that he could find concealment in the broken country if he followed the wash away from the highway.

  Johnny ran to the end of the culvert and jumped off. Something buzzed a sibilant warning, and instinctively he threw himself to one side.

  Then he spotted the snake, one of those grandpa rattlers they grow out in Arizona. It was coiled in a sandy declivity right at the mouth of the culvert. He had landed within six feet of it. At least you could say this much for the snake; it gave him potent warning.

  The rattler gave him a sudden idea. With a stick he gingerly smoothed out the tracks where he had leaped into the soft shale and ran across the highway, to the far end of the culvert. This end was almost concealed, piled high with weeds and debris.

  He obliterated his tracks, slithered through the opening like a sewer rat, and got inside the culvert. He pushed up some of the debris until the opening was all but closed. It was cool inside the culvert, and he slowly crawled nearer the other end. About ten feet from the opening he stopped, eyes on the rattler coiled at the opening. He got to wondering what he would do if the snake decided to share his cool abode.

  He could hear the siren plainly now. The acoustics of the tunnel, if anything, amplified the sounds above. Then he felt the vibration of a car crossing overhead, and brakes thudded home. He could make out a babble of voices, but the men were too far away. After what seemed an eternity, the voices got closer.

  “He’s around some place,” a gruff voice said. “He can’t be too far away. Pete’s up in the Piper, combing the canyon.”

  “I can’t figure out why this kid—just a bum, according to what the tourists said—murdered Stunder. Looks to me like Stunder tried to give him a ride, possibly after he got kicked off that freight.”

  “Was he alone?”

  “Yeah. At least it looks that way. The brakie said there was another kid on the train, but he jumped off and disappeared.”

  “Think the guy could be in the culvert?” the first voice asked.

  “Let’s see.”

  There was a scramble above, then someone suddenly yelled “Look out!” and two shots came in quick succession.

  “Damned rattler, right at the entrance to the culvert. That was close!”

  “Yeah,” a shaky voice answered. “Hell, that scared the daylights out of me. No use looking in the culvert now. That snake’s been there since sunup.”

  The voices moved away. Johnny wiped clammy sweat off his face, and decided that if ever he got out of this mess he’d get a rattler for a pet.

  The voices were entirely lost, presently, then he heard the scraping of a tow-chain on concrete, a lot of motor roar, and finally quiet. He wasn’t taking chances, however. He remained in the culvert until the shadows grew long, and night clamped down.

  He crawled over the dead snake at last, and stretched his aching, cramped muscles. Nothing was in sight—just the vast emptiness of the desert, still warm from the sun’s rays, and the blue-black outlines of the distant hills.

  Johnny crossed the road and went down the tracks, hunting his suitcase. He found it presently, caved in but still serviceable, and started for the distant lights of the town.

  THE NAME of the town was Millburg, like the kid said, Johnny found out as he neared the corporate limits. It was a sprawling, tourist-infested town, one of hundreds along the main drag to L.A. Motels, trailer parks, curio shops and cafes were strung along the highway for a mile or more, and there seemed to be plenty of gaudy neon to attract the tourist dollar after dark.

  Possibly ten or eleven thousand, plus the tourists, he guessed. Plenty of night clubs, a big drive-in movie at the edge of town. The streets were fitted with noisy people.

  Johnny hung to the shadows. He found the name of Abel Stunder on the nightclub marquee; farther down the street he found it again on a window that said “Stunder Enterprises.” It looked as if Abel Stunder had been quite a figure in this town.

  And Abel Stunder, Johnny realized with a queer, sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, was a hunk of lifeless flesh. Abel Stunder, despite the fact that he was a leading citizen of Millburg, was cold turkey, and that fact made him hotter than some of the red rocks back in the canyon.

  Johnny wished now that he had remained on the rattler and let the brakie beat his ears down. It couldn’t have been worse than this. He wondered what had happened to the kid with the game leg and the washed-out face.

  He took a chance, used one of his few remaining greenbacks to get a cubbyhole of a room in a second-rate hotel in the Mexican quarter of the town, and started working on the cinders under his skin. With a change of clothes, and a new, shaved face, possibly he could keep from being recognized for an hour or two.

  He opened up his battered suitcase—and stood there in the dim light, staring like a six-year-old kid under a toy-laden Christmas tree.

  There was a package of nice, new money inside the suitcase—a big package. Thousands and thousands of dollars in nice crisp twenty-dollar bills. He grabbed up one of the twenties, took it over to the fly-specked bulb in the dropcord. It didn’t take long to analyze it. As phony as the eyelashes on a movie quee
n.

  Something didn’t jell. Someone had planted the phony money in his bag. Possibly the same guy—or dame—who put the slug into Stunder. But a skirt was back of it all?

  Johnny felt himself getting madder. The anger welled up in him slowly, to override the fear that ate at him. Somewhere in this rejuvenated cowtown was a redheaded, creamy complexioned dame he wanted very badly to talk to. He had a few questions to ask her, and each one had a dynamite fuse attached to it.

  After he bought four beers for a frousy-headed barfly old enough to be his mother, he had exactly eighty-five cents left. But this beer-waddie was just drunk enough to be talkative, and he found out a few things; namely, Abel Stunder owned a lot of property in Millburg, and lived in a rambling ranch house at the north edge of town. Stunder’s wife, quite a bit younger than he, was definitely a redhead.

  Stunder’s right-arm man was a big blond fellow by the name of Max Crook, who had quite a reputation as a flyer. At least so frousy-head said. Johnny skidded the salt shaker over to her, and she emptied about half of its contents in her beer. He started to ask another question, then frousy-head jerked her head toward the front door.

  A big blond fellow came inside and started whispering to the bartender.

  “That’s Max Crook,” frousy-head said, blowing the suds off her salted beer.

  Johnny hung over the bar, watching Crook out of the comer of his eyes. Finally the big blond man started for the door. Johnny waited a moment, then headed for the men’s room in the rear, figuring there’d be an outside door to the alley.

  He got around to the front of the building just in time to see Crook slide behind the wheel of a black convertible parked across the street. He gunned the car away from the curb in a savage thrust of speed, and Johnny caught a glimpse of a woman huddled low in the seat beside him.

  Crook, evidently, was all steamed up about something—probably Stunder’s murder. The convertible roared up the street two blocks, and squealed to a stop. Johnny mixed with the crowd, kept in the shadows, and worked ahead.