Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  “The camera is inside the box,” I explained quickly. “It snaps through the fare window. You can’t see the lens.”

  I turned down Grant toward town. The meter ticked in my ear, like a loud clock. Time was running out. Now I had the body, the murderers, and the motive—but what to do with them? I considered running the cab into a lamppost, but I’m careful of company property, and Sever might have a quick trigger finger. All through the downtown section I looked for a policeman. Any other time a hundred would have been around, but now, no cops.

  I ran a red light, hoping the car behind was a prowl. Sever growled at me. “Do you want us to get caught? Be careful of those lights.”

  “I had my mind on the back seat,” I said.

  I knew it was thin ice, but I ran past the Owl Restaurant. Eddie Mason’s cab was parked at the curb again. I blasted the horn, and the dumb cluck waved. Sever leaned forward, but I beat him to the punch.

  “Pal of mine,” I said lightly. “I want everything to look kosher.”

  Then my scalp started tingling again. The street lights got thinner, the loft buildings rose, and the dank river smells seeped into the cab. At the street’s end the pier shed loomed. I bounced the DeSoto over the railroad tracks, past the watchman’s shanty, and onto the dock.

  I pulled into the shadows, switched off the lights and motor. The steering wheel felt damp and cold. “This is a good place. Nobody around.”

  The back seat lit up as Mr. Sever opened the door. I glanced through the glass partition, saw Mrs. Claredon take her feet off her dead husband’s torso. “Get that damned light out,” she said, “and make this fast. Let’s get out of here.”

  I wasn’t in any hurry. I took my time getting out of the cab. I looked up the dock and prayed as never before. Mr. Sever pulled Mr. Claredon to the wharf. He turned around and stuck the gun into my stomach.

  “This is where you get yours,” he said coldly. “You pulled a smart trick, and I didn’t catch it right away. You don’t have a camera concealed in the meter box. If you had, it wouldn’t have taken my picture when I killed Claredon. The light goes off when the door closes. And I had the door closed when I hit him.”

  The gun felt big as a 105-howitzer. “It took your picture when you got in the cab,” I said feebly. “You’ll have a tough time explaining that to the cops.”

  “I’ll explain nothing, cabby. After I fix you, I intend to plant Mr. Claredon’s watch and wallet on your body and put the gun in Claredon’s hand. The police will think he shot you during a robbery.”

  That’s when I saw the flashlight winking down the dock. The happiness started at my toes, and I grinned at Mr. Sever.

  “Not so fast,” I said. “There’s a guy coming up the dock behind you, and if he’s mad as a guy who’s been dumped in the river should be, he’s got a gun. You see, Mr. Sever, I brought Mr. Claredon’s body down here earlier tonight and the watchman spotted me. I thought he’d spot me again. You can tell him why you and Mrs. Claredon are riding around with Mr. Claredon’s body. It might be a bit difficult to explain.”

  “You’re full of corny tricks,” Sever said.

  “Don’t look,” I shrugged. “It’s your funeral.”

  Then Mona Claredon screamed as the flashlight beam outlined her frightened face in the rear window. Sever spun around, and his gun spat flame across the dock. I swung the wrench. Sure, I had the Stilson. I’d put it back under the cushion in case I ran into any belligerent customers, and Sever could sure qualify.

  The wrench thudded into his head and he crumpled. I let him have it again, not too hard. I didn’t want to kill the guy, but I was plenty sore, and I hoped Sever’s noggin would be that way, too, when he woke up. Folding-money tippers are rare birds. The dime guys are different. Some of them I could cheerfully murder, myself.

  Handcuffs clinked as the watchman rushed up—but maybe the public read the rest in the papers. They booked Jed Sever and Mona Claredon for murder and Mr. Claredon got a decent burial. I even attended the funeral.

  But I think the riding public will agree—it was unfair to union labor, when the company asked me to pay the twelvesixty fare run up by Mr. Claredon’s body.

  GRAVEYARD SHIFT

  Steve Frazee

  Dozing in front of the microphone in the radio dispatcher’s office, Joe Crestone blinked groggily when one of the heavy side doors downstairs whushed open and then started rocking back to center. Since midnight the building had been dead still.

  The footsteps swung out briskly on the tiles of the lobby. They made quick taps on the steel steps leading up towards the dispatcher’s room. Crestone was wide awake. The clock on the radio reeled up another minute. It was 2:17. He swung his chair to face the counter.

  She was close to six feet. Her hair was dark, her eyes soft brown: She wore a fur jacket and under that a green woolen dress caught high at her neck with a silver clasp. Her smile was timid. “I—I thought Mr. Walters would be here again.” She studied the work schedule of the Midway police department on the board.

  “He’s got the flu. It was my day off so I’m sitting in for him.”

  “I see.” She stared at the maps on the wall. “I—I just don’t know exactly how to start it.”

  She was white and scared. Crestone let her make up her mind. On the model side, he thought, the kind who pose in two thousand dollar dresses. Plenty of neck above the silver clasp, more gauntness in her face than he had observed at first.

  “Hit and run deal?” he asked, eyeing her sharply.

  Before she could answer, state patrol car 55 checked in from Middleton, eighteen miles north on Highway 315. A woman dispatcher in Steel City read a CAA flight plan to Bristol for relay to Cosslett. Webster came in with a pickup-and-hold on a 1949 blue Chev with three men. Crestone sent out the information on the pickup-and-hold.

  When he swung to the log sheet in the typewriter at his left, she asked, “Do the state cars patrol the old highway from the boarded-up brick works east toward Steel City?”

  “State 7? No, not unless there’s a crash out there.” He wrote a line on the log. “Did you have a wreck?”

  She hesitated. “In a way.”

  He turned back to the desk and pulled a pad to him. “Name?”

  “Judith Barrows.”

  “Address?”

  When she did not answer he twisted his head to look at her. He looked into a snub-nosed .38. For one fractured moment the bore was big enough to shoot a golf ball. Crestone sucked in his breath.

  “Give me the log sheet,” she said. “Don’t even brush your arm near the mike or you’ll get it in the liver.”

  He stripped the log sheet from the machine and put it up on the counter. She drew it to her with long, thin fingers that bent into carmine-tipped hooks. “Now, a copy of the code sheet, and not the old one with blanks behind some of the numbers.”

  Crestone took a code sheet from a folder. When he put it on the counter he saw that she had shrugged out of her fur jacket. He heard the power hum and then Bud Moore said in his bored after-midnight voice, “Seven fifty.” Crestone started to reach toward the microphone and then he stopped.

  “Acknowledge it,” she said softly.

  He stared at the .38. She was resting her hand on the counter. The gun looked down at his midsection. He gripped the long bar of the mike switch on the stem of the instrument. Under Transmit on the face of the radio a purple button lit up like an evil eye glaring at him. “Seven fifty,” he said, then automatically released his grip on the switch.

  “Going 10-10 at Circle 7365,” Moore said, which meant that he and Jerry Windoff were going out of service temporarily to get a cup of coffee at the Mowhawk Diner out on Sterling Pike.

  Crestone’s mind froze on 10-10: report back to this office. But then she would read it on the code sheet and—His head rocked sidewise. His left elbow jammed against the typewriter. There was a thin crack of tension in her voice when she said, “Answer the car, Buster.”

  He was still half stunned
from the crack on his head when he said, “Seven fifty, 10-4.” Okay, 750.

  “Give me the local code sheet now, Crestone.”

  He gave that to her. It held sixteen messages for local use, and then there were four blanks. She said, “Don’t get any ideas about using Code 17 or any other blank.”

  Code 17 was unlisted, strictly a private deal between Bill Walters and all cruiser cops: bring me a hamburger and a jug of coffee. She had found out plenty from old Bill, a friendly, trusting guy who liked to talk about his work.

  “Face the radio, Crestone. Don’t worry about me.”

  He turned around, staring at a transmitter which controlled all law enforcement in the area. It was worthless unless he had the brains and guts to figure out something.

  “Where’s state patrol 54?” she asked.

  “After a 10-47 on State 219.” It was on the log; there was no use to lie. He heard papers rustle.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Chasing a possible drunk. Keep everything you say right, Crestone, especially when you talk into that microphone.”

  The right-hand reel of the clock put up three more minutes. Now it was 2:25. She made no sound behind him. After another minute he could not stand it any longer. He had to look around. She was still there. The gun was still there too, slanted over the edge of the counter.

  “Face the radio.”

  He hesitated, and then while he was turning, the gun bounced off his head again. He sucked air between his teeth and cursed. For a tick of time his anger was almost enough to make him try to lunge up and reach her; but his sanity was greater. She struck him again, sweeping the barrel of the gun on the slope of his skull.

  “Don’t curse me!” she said.

  After a foggy interval Crestone was aware of the messages coming from both channels. Two stolen cars from Bristol. He added them to a list of twenty others stolen that day. Steel City sent a car to investigate a prowler complaint. Seventy miles away state patrol car 86 stopped to pull a dead pig off the highway. The dispatcher in Shannon sent a car to a disturbance at Puddler’s Casino. York asked Webster for a weather report on Highway 27.

  Then there was just the hum of the radio and the silence at his back. Where was it, one of the banks? No, blowing vaults was a worn-out racket. A payroll at one of the mills or at the automobile assembling plant? Wrong time of week. Besides, that stuff went from the banks by armored cars in daytime.

  At the other end of the narrow slot where he was trapped there was a desk, a big steel filing cabinet, and a rack with four sawed-off shotguns. The shells were in a drawer in the bottom of the rack. In another steel cabinet that he could almost reach with his right hand were five pistols and enough ammunition to last a year.

  The whole works was as useless now as the radio.

  Car 54 asked Shannon for an ambulance at the cloverleaf on State 219. “Two dead, two injured. Didn’t catch up with the dk soon enough.”

  “What’s dk?” Judith Barrows asked quickly.

  “Drunk.” Crestone’s head was aching. “Car 54 will be back here in about an hour. He’ll come in to write a report.” That was not so, but Crestone wanted to judge her reaction to the time. He leaned toward the radio and twisted his neck to look at her. The one-hour statement had not bothered her.

  When he straightened up, he ducked quickly. She laughed. When he raised his head again the gun banged against it. He rolled his head, grinding curses under his breath.

  Car 751 came in. Sam Kurowski said, “Any traffic? We’ve been out of the car a few minutes.”

  “Where are they?” the woman asked.

  Crestone pressed the mike switch.

  “10-20, 751?”

  “Alley between Franklin and Madison on Tenth Avenue.”

  When the transmitting light was off she said, “Code 6 them to the corner—the southeast corner—of River and Pitt.”

  Code 6 was boy trouble, kids yelling, throwing rocks—any of a hundred things. They could spot a cruiser a mile away. When Kurowski and Corky Gunselman got way out north on River and Pitt and found nothing, they would think nothing of it. Crestone followed the woman’s orders.

  Car 752 came alive. Dewey Purcell said, “Going east on Washington at Sixth Street after dk. Give me a 10-28 on K6532.”

  That does it, Crestone thought. Purcell was hell on drunken drivers. He and Old McGlone would be coming in with a prisoner in about five minutes.

  “Give him the registration he asked for, Crestone.”

  He pulled the vehicle registration book to him. K6532, 1953 Cadillac cpe., maroon, J. J. Britton, 60 Parkway. Jimmy Britton, the Hill itself. Damnation! You didn’t dump guys like him in the tank overnight; but he took hope from knowing that Purcell was in 752 tonight.

  “Give him the 10-28, Buster.”

  “When they stop. Old McGlone can hardly write, let alone in a car doing eighty after a stinking dk.”

  Purcell called again from Washington and Trinity. “We got him.” A woman’s shrill voice came from the background before the car mike was closed. Crestone gave Purcell the registration information.

  Crestone stared at the radio. Jimmy Britton would be drunk, affable, mildly surprised at being picked up. Among other things, when he fumbled out his driver’s license, he would show his honorary membership in the Midway Police Department. Old McGlone would say, “Ah now, Dewey, let’s take the lad home, shall we? No harm’s been done, has it?”

  But Purcell was tough and he did not give a damn for the social register and he hated drunken drivers. Crestone had been the same way too, and now he was working for a year as a dispatcher.

  It was Old McGlone who spoke the next time. “We’ll be going up the hill now to 60 Parkway.”

  No lucky breaks tonight, Crestone thought. Tomorrow he would think of a dozen things he could have done, and every man out there in the cars would do the same. That was tomorrow. The gun was behind him now. She could reach him when he swung, and she could not miss if she shot.

  There was a drawer in the desk full of stories of tough private-eyes who took bushels of guns away from dames clad in almost nothing, and then slapped them all over the joint or made love to them. Joe Crestone sighed. His head was aching brutally. He did not feel like taking any guns away from any dames.

  Car 750 came back into service. Moore and Windoff had drunk their coffee. Then 752 went out of service temporarily at the Sunset Drive Inn. Crestone knew how Purcell was feeling now, the to-hell-with-it attitude. Old McGlone would be telling him, “There’s some things, Dewey boy, that you’ve got to learn about being a cop.” Old McGlone knew them all.

  Car 751 signalled arrival at River and Pitt. A few minutes later Kurowski said, “10-98.” Assignment completed. There was no use to elaborate on nothing.

  Judith Barrows said, “Send 751 to the Silver Moon on Oldtown Pike to look for a ’49 green Ford sedan with front-end damage.”

  Crestone obeyed. He studied the map. She wanted 751 north and east all the time. Then where in the southern or southeastern part of Midway was any heavy money? There was a brawl at the Riverview country club tonight, maybe a few thousand loose in pockets and a handful of jewelry, but—

  The phone at Crestone’s elbow and the extension on the desk near the big filing cabinet spilled sound all over the room.

  “Don’t touch it until I say so!” the woman said.

  She went around the counter and backed into the chair at the other desk. She crossed her legs and steadied the .38 on her knee. She raised the phone and nodded.

  “Police station, radio dispatcher,” Crestone said.

  “Ten cents, please,” the operator said.

  Crestone heard the pay phone clear. A man asked, “You got a report on State 312?”

  “Just a minute.” Crestone had never heard of 312.

  “Just tell him it’s all clear, Buster.” Judith Barrows was holding the mouthpiece against her thigh.

  “All clear.” Crestone held on to hear a jukebox, the clatter of a cafe—anything
to help position the call. The man hung up. A booth, Crestone thought. He put his phone down, staring at the woman’s legs. They were beautiful. He did not give a damn. She got up carefully, standing for a moment in a hip-out-of-joint posture. A model, he thought. It was in her walk too when she went around the counter again.

  So they knew this end of it was set now. Where was the other end? Somewhere in the southern part of the district covered in normal patrol by Car 751. Anybody could read the red outlines on the map. It struck him then: the Wampum Club. Big business, cold and sure, with a fine patina of politeness, free drinks, free buffet and other incidentals for the regular suckers. The green-and-crackly on the line at Sonny Belmont’s Wampum Club. Let the cops take Jimmy Britton home and tuck him in, but Belmont never took his check, drunk or otherwise.

  The job would take at least four fast, tough men. Making Sonny’s boys hold still for a deal like that was not for amateurs. There was a lot of dough around the Wampum; the income tax lads had been wondering how much for a long time.

  So I think I’ve got it doped, and what good does it do? Belmont could stand the jolt. Why should men like Corky Gunselman and Sam Kurowski risk catching lead to protect money in a joint like the Wampum?

  That was not the answer and Crestone knew it.

  He looked at the last two stolen cars on the list. A ’52 blue Mercury and a ’53 green Hornet. That Hudson would go like hell and the Mercury was not so slow either. Both cars stolen around midnight in Bristol. He wondered which one was outside right now. He could be way off, but he had to figure he was right.

  Since the Hornet and the Merc were already aired as hot, they would probably be used only to make the run to another car stashed close. East was the natural route. Old State 7 was narrow and twisting, but the farmers who used it would all be sleeping now. Say a half hour to reach the web of highways around Steel City, and then road blocks would be no more than something to annoy whiz kids on their way home with the old man’s crate. She had asked about State 7.

  Car 751 came in. Kurowski said, “Nothing at the Silver Moon with front-end damage. What’s the dope on it?”