Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  “I don’t quite follow you,” I said.

  “Well, you’ll soon begin to.” She was staring at the knot in my tie now. “Why would a man buy a girl an engagement ring—if he was married to a gold mine, and meant to stay that way?”

  “You mean he bought one for Lucille Taylor?”

  “That’s right. He bought it at Lormer’s, on Fifth Avenue. They made a mistake somehow, and sent the bill to the office. I opened it, right along with all the other mail, and put it on his desk. About ten minutes later I overheard him giving Mr. Lormer hell. He said he’d specifically told the clerk there not to send a bill, either to his office or his home. He was so mad that he was almost shouting. And then, about two or three days later, Lucille shows up with a big diamond on her finger. When I asked her who the lucky man was, she just simpered like the silly fool she was, and acted coy. I thought I’d have to go to the window and be sick.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said, “but it could have been a—”

  “A coincidence? Oh, no—it was no coincidence. Schuyler bought that ring for Lucille, and she wore it. And if you were a woman, you’d know from the way she acted around there that she thought she and Schuyler were going to get married.”

  I thought it over.

  “That’s the whole thing, can’t you see?” she asked. “Schuyler was after something, but he couldn’t get it without promising to marry her. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too. I mean he didn’t have any intention of giving up his wife’s money, but he wanted Lucille. So he told her he was going to divorce his wife and marry her. He was just sharp enough, and she was just dumb enough, and he pulled it.” Her eyes came up as far as my mouth, but no higher. “And that couldn’t go on forever, could it? When it came to a showdown, and Schuyler had to admit that he’d been playing her for all he could get—” she shrugged—“well?”

  “You didn’t care much for Lucille, did you?”

  “I loathed her.”

  “And Schuyler?”

  She took a deep breath. “I—I guess I was in love with him once. But no more. After Lucille had been there a couple of months, he called me in and fired me. Just like that. He didn’t even give me a reason—because there was no reason. He didn’t need two girls, and so he just kicked me out on the street. Why, it was all I could do to get him to write a few references for me. And that after I’d been there all those years . . .”

  I nodded. “A tough break, Miss Webb.”

  “When will you arrest him?”

  “We’ll talk to him again.”

  “But isn’t it plain enough? What more could you possibly want?”

  “We’ll talk to him,” I said again. I got out my notebook and took down Miss Webb’s address and phone number.

  “I see I’ve wasted my time,” she said.

  “Not at all,” I said, making it friendly. “I’m very grateful to you. As I said, we’ll—” But she had turned quickly and was walking off down Sixth Avenue. Once she hesitated a moment, as if she might turn back, but then she went on again, walking even more rapidly than before.

  I went into a drug store and called the Twentieth Precinct. Paul Brader told me that Vince Donnelly hadn’t opened his mouth, except to demand a lawyer. Paul had been able, through other sources, to establish that he was the same Vince Donnelly who had gone around with Lucille Taylor, but that was all. We had nothing at all on Donnelly, and unless we came up with something within the next few hours we’d have to let him go.

  “I got a feeling about this guy,” Paul said. “I think we’re on our way.”

  “Yeah? Why so?”

  “I just sort of hunch it, that’s all.”

  “Well, keep at him. I’m going to check out a couple things with Schuyler, and then I’ll be over to help you.”

  He laughed. “Schuyler—or the girl?”

  “Schuyler.”

  “Okay. See you later.”

  I hung up, located the after-business-hours number of the Lormer Jewelry Shop in the directory, and finally got through to Mr. Lormer himself. He lived in a hotel on Lexington Avenue, and asked me to come up. From him I learned that the diamond engagement ring, while large, had been of the lowest quality he carried. I asked if Schuyler had brought a young woman to the shop for a fitting, and Mr. Lormer said no. Schuyler had asked that the engagement ring be made up in the same size as a small intaglio he wore on the little finger of his left hand. And then—very reluctantly—Mr. Lormer told me that Schuyler had returned the ring yesterday morning. He had not wanted a cash refund, but had applied the refund value of the ring against two jewelled wrist watches, to be delivered to his two daughters.

  I took Mr. Lormer to his shop, impounded the ring, signed a receipt for it, and took him back home. Then I drove to Seventy-second Street and got a positive identification of the ring from Lucille, Taylor’s aunt and uncle.

  I located Schuyler’s home address in the directory, picked up Paul Brader at the Twentieth, and we drove downtown toward Schuyler’s apartment house.

  8.

  In his office, Schuyler had been as cool as they come. Standing in the doorway of his apartment, with his wife and daughters just behind him, he was something else again. We had counted on surprise and the presence of his family to unnerve him, and we weren’t disappointed. He had divided his life into two parts, and we had suddenly brought the parts together. He stared first at Paul and then at me, moistening his lips.

  I had the engagement ring in the palm of my hand, and now I opened my fingers slowly and let him see it.

  “What is it, dear?” his wife asked, and one of the girls moved a little closer, her eyes questioning me.

  “I—I can’t talk here,” Schuyler said, in what he probably thought was a whisper. “My God, I—”

  “Get your coat,” I said.

  He nodded rapidly. “Yes, yes—of course.”

  We rode down in the self-service elevator, phoned in a release for Vince Donnelly, and crossed the street to the RMP car. Paul got behind the wheel and I got into the back seat with Schuyler. Paul eased the car out into the heavy Lexington Avenue traffic.

  “We have the ring, Mr. Schuyler,” I said. “We got a positive identification of it. You returned it after Lucille Taylor had been murdered. We’ll have no trouble taking it from there. Not a bit. We’ll put a dozen men on it. We’ll work around the clock. We’ll get a little here, and a little there—and pretty soon we’ll have you in a box. The smartest thing you can do—the only thing you can do—is make it a little easier on yourself.” I paused. “And make it a little easier on your family.”

  “My girls!” Schuyler said. “My God, my girls!”

  “Tell us about the other girl,” I said softly. “Tell us about Lucille.”

  It was a long moment before he could keep his voice steady. “She threatened me,” he said at last. “She said she was going to my wife and daughters and tell them about—about us. I knew I could have patched it up with my wife, but—my daughters . . . God, I—”

  “You admitted to Lucille that you’d never intended to divorce your wife and marry her?”

  He nodded almost imperceptibly. “I had grown a little tired of her. She was pretty, but so—so immature. I told her, and she became enraged. I was surprised. I hadn’t thought she was capable of so much fury. We had walked down Seventy-second Street to the river. We were sitting on one of those benches down there, watching the tugboats. When I told her, she began to curse me. She was almost screaming. I couldn’t see anyone else nearby, but I was afraid someone would hear her. I tried to calm her, but she got almost hysterical. Then she slapped me, and I grabbed her. I—I don’t know just what happened then, but somehow I made her head hit the back of the bench. And then I kept doing it—kept beating her head against the back of the bench.” Suddenly he covered his face with his hands and his body slumped. “And then—and then I carried her to the railing across from the bench and threw her into the water.”

  I watched the neon streaming by.
“But not before you stripped that ring off her finger, Schuyler,” I said. “You sure as hell didn’t forget the ring, did you?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  As we neared the Harbor Precinct, I could hear a tugboat whistle, somewhere out there on the cold Hudson, a deep, remote blast that was somehow like a mockery.

  “God,” Schuyler murmured. “My poor girls, my poor little girls . . .”

  And don’t forget poor little Lucille Taylor, I thought, while you’re feeling sorry for your victims.

  THE KILLER

  John D. MacDonald

  We certainly got sick of John Lash. A lot of the guys stopped coming after he started to attend every meeting. It’s a skin diving club—you know, just a few guys who like to swim under water in masks and all, shoot fish with those spear guns, all that. We started originally with six guys and we called ourselves The Deep Six. Even when it got up to about fifteen, we kept the name.

  When it started we just had masks and fins and crude rigs. We live and work on the Florida Keys. I work in a garage in Marathon. Dusty has a bait and boat rental business in Craig. Lew manages a motel down on Ramrod. That’s just to give you an idea of the kind of jokers we are. Just guys who got bitten by this skin diving bug. We tried to meet once a week. Dusty had an old tub that’s ideal for it. We meet and pick a spot and head for it and anchor and go down and see what’s there. You never know what you’ll find. There are holes down there that are crawling with fish.

  Once the bug gets you, you’re hooked. There are a lot of little clubs like ours. Guys that get along. Guys who like to slant down through that green country, kicking yourself along with your fins, hunting those big fish right down in their own backyard.

  We got better equipment as we went along. We bought snorkel tubes when those came out. But the Aqua-lungs were beyond our price range. I think it was Lew who had the idea of everybody chipping in, and of putting in the money we got from selling the catches. When we had enough we bought a lung and two tanks, and then another. In between meetings somebody would run the four tanks up and get them refilled. There was enough time on the tanks so that during a full day everybody got a crack at using one of the lungs.

  It was fine there for quite a while. We’d usually get ten or twelve, and some of the wives would come along. We’d have food and beer out there in the sun on that old tub and we had some excitement, some danger, and a lot of fish.

  Croy Danton was about the best. A little guy with big shoulders, who didn’t have much to say. Not a gloomy guy. He just didn’t talk much. His wife, Betty, would usually come along when she could. They’ve got some rental units at Marathon. He did a lot of the building himself, with the help of a G.I. loan. Betty is what I would call a beautiful girl. She’s a blonde and almost the same height as Croy, and you can look at her all day without finding anything wrong with her. She dives a little.

  Like I said, it was fine there for a while, until Lew brought this John Lash along one day. Afterward Lew said he was sorry, that Lash had seemed like a nice guy. In all fairness to Lew, I will admit that the first time John Lash joined us he seemed okay. We let him pay his dues. He was new to the Keys. He said he was looking around, and he had a temporary job tending bar.

  One thing about him, he was certainly built. One of those guys who looks as if he was fat when you see him in clothes. But in his swimming trunks he looked like one of those advertisements. He had a sort of smallish round head and round face and not much neck. He was blonde and beginning to go a little bald. The head didn’t seem to fit the rest of him, all that tough brown bulge of muscle. He looked as if a meat axe would bounce right off him. He’d come over from California and he had belonged to a couple of clubs out there and had two West Coast records. He said he had those records and we didn’t check, but I guess he did. He certainly knew his way around in the water.

  This part is hard to explain. Maybe you have had it happen to you. Like at a party. You’re having a good time, a lot of laughs, and then somebody joins the party and it changes everything. You still laugh, but it isn’t the same kind of laugh. Everything is different. Like one of those days when the sun is out and then before you know it there is a little haze across the sun and everything looks sort of funny. The water looks oily and the colors are different. That is what John Lash did to The Deep Six. It makes you wonder what happened to a guy like that when he was a kid. It isn’t exactly a competitive instinct. They seem to be able to guess just how to rub everybody the wrong way. But you can’t put your finger on it. Any of us could tell Dusty his old tub needed a paint job and the bottom scraped and Dusty would say we should come around and help if we were so particular. But John Lash could say it in such a way that it would make Dusty feel ashamed and make the rest of us feel ashamed, as though we were all second rate, and John Lash was used to things being first rate.

  When he kidded you he rubbed you raw. When he talked about himself it wasn’t bragging because he could always follow it up. He liked horseplay. He was always roughing somebody around, laughing to show it was all in fun, but you had the feeling he was right on the edge of going crazy mad and trying to kill you. We had been a close group, but after he joined we started to give each other a bad time, too. There were arguments and quarrels that John Lash wasn’t even in. But they happened because he was there. It was spoiling the way it used to be, and there just wasn’t anything we could do about it because it wasn’t the sort of club where you can vote people out.

  Without the lung, with just the mask, he could stay downstairs longer than anybody. Longer than Croy Danton even, and Croy had been the best until John Lash showed up. We had all tried to outdo Croy, but it had been sort of a gag competition. When we tried to outdo John Lash some of the guys stayed down so long that they were pretty sick when they came back up. But nobody beat him.

  Another thing about him I didn’t like. Suppose we’d try a place and find nothing worth shooting. For John Lash there wasn’t anything that wasn’t worth shooting. He had to come up with a fish. I’ve seen him down there, waving the shiny barb slowly back and forth. The fish come up to take a look at it. A thing like that attracts them. An angel fish or a parrot fish or a lookdown would come up and hang right in front of the barb, studying this strange shiny thing. Then John Lash would pull the trigger. There would be a big gout of bubbles and sometimes the spear would go completely through the fish so that it was threaded on the line like a big bright bead. He’d come up grinning and pull it off and toss it over the side and say, “Let’s try another spot, children.”

  The group shrunk until we were practically down to the original six. Some of the other guys were going out on their own, just to stay away from John Lash. Croy Danton kept coming, and most of the time he would bring Betty. John Lash never horsed around with Croy. Croy, being so quiet, never gave anybody much of an opening. John Lash never paid any special attention to Betty. But I saw it happen. Betty wasn’t going to dive after fish. She was just going to take a dip to cool off. John Lash had just taken a can of beer out of the ice chest. He had opened it and it was a little bit warm. I saw him glance up to the bow where Betty was poised to dive. She stood there and then dived off cleanly. John Lash sat there without moving, just staring at the place where she had been. And the too-warm beer foamed out of the can and ran down his fingers and dropped onto his thigh, darkening and matting the coarse blonde hair that had been sundried since his last dive. I saw him drain the can and saw him close his big hand on it, crumpling it, before throwing it over the side. And I saw him watch Betty climb back aboard, sleek and wet, smiling at Croy, her hair waterpasted down across one eye so that as soon as she stood up in the boat, she thumbed it back behind her ear.

  I saw all that and it gave me a funny feeling in my stomach. It made me think of the way he would lure the lookdowns close to the barb, and it made me think of the way blood spreads in the water.

  After that, John Lash began to move in on Betty with all the grace and tact of a bulldozer. He tried to
dab at her with a towel when she came out of the water. If she brought anything up, he had to bustle over to take it off her spear. He found reasons to touch her. Imaginary bugs. Helping her in or out of the boat. Things like that. And all the time his eyes burning in his head.

  At first you could see that Croy and Betty had talked about it between meetings, and they had agreed, I guess, to think of it as being sort of amusing. At least they exchanged quick smiles when John Lash was around her. But a thing like that cannot stay amusing very long when the guy on the make keeps going just a little bit further each time. It got pretty tense and, after the worst day, Croy started leaving Betty home. He left her home for two weeks in a row.

  Croy left her home the third week and John Lash didn’t show up either. We sat on the dock waiting for latecomers. We waited longer than usual. Dusty said, “I saw Lash at the bar yesterday and he said today he was off.”

  There were only five of us. The smallest in a long, long time. We waited. Croy finally said, “Well, let’s go.” As we took the boat out I saw Croy watching the receding dock, no expression on his face. It was a funny strained day. I guess we were all thinking the same thing. We had good luck, but it didn’t seem to matter. We left earlier than usual. Croy sat in the bow all the way back, as if in that way he’d be nearer shore, and the first one home.

  2.

  Croy came around to see me at the garage the next morning. I was trying to find a short in an old Willys. When I turned around he was standing there behind me with a funny look on his face. Like a man who’s just heard a funny sound in the distance and can’t figure out just what it was. He looked right over my left shoulder, and said, “You can tell him for me, Dobey, that I’m going to kill him.”