Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  I concentrated on my task as I sent the powerful racer howling down the gently curving valley road. How long ago had they left? I didn’t think over twenty minutes. That wasn’t much of a lead. Not in a piece of Detroit iron.

  A long stretch of empty road came into view ahead. I floored the accelerator and went flat out. The tach read 7,400 r.p.m. The speedometer fluttered at 170.

  I passed only a few cars in the next fifteen minutes. I cut down to give the occupants a looking over and then zoomed on.

  A minute later I caught a glimpse of a green and black sedan careening around a curve about half a mile ahead. We were starting up a mountain and the road was getting dangerous.

  Hatred flared in my brain. That was their car! I knew it! The chase was over. I pressed hard on the accelerator.

  The Manzanni dove into a shallow dip in the road and flew out of it into the curve going too damned fast. Suddenly there were thick trees ahead and no more highway. I dropped from fourth straight into second gear in a split second. The tach rocketed up to 9000 and I tromped the brake hard. The tail slithered wildly and the wheels spurted gravel from the shoulder of the road as I went around. The trees whizzed by in a green and brown blur.

  I swore at myself. They were up ahead, closer now, in the palm of my hand. I didn’t want to take chances now. Not yet.

  The wild turn had shifted Jenny’s body up against my shoulder. The wind whipped the blanket up and away. She rode next to me, nude, her long blonde hair flying in the wind, her head lolling lifelessly with the motion of the car.

  “Don’t worry, darling,” I said. “We’ll get them in a minute. They can’t get away.”

  Three hairpin curves later I was on their tail. Their car rocked and strained as it sped at high speed around the climbing twists and turns. Yes, they knew who it was. They remembered the red foreign car. They remembered me and they remembered most of all the bloodless body which rocked in the narrow seat beside me.

  There was a tight curve coming up ahead at the end of a steep upward straightaway. The top of the mountain was coming up. I could see it, a springboard to eternity with a fragile white guardrail.

  A gentle increase of pressure on the accelerator and I had pulled up beside them on the inside. The speedometer registered 85. Willy’s head turned to look at us and then the road and back again like it was on a rocker arm. His face was disintegrating with fear. On the far side of the front seat Gloria aimed the revolver at me. I saw the gun buck in her hand but nothing happened. The sound was lost in the roar of our cars.

  The end of the road was near. The curve at the top sped toward us like a contracting rubber band. Stupidly, Willy tried to increase his speed and get in front of me. It was impossible.

  I saw the gun in Gloria’s hand buck again and again. Suddenly the windshield showed a million radiating cracks and a white hot branding iron tore against my chest. I gasped with pain as the road blurred for an instant.

  Willy tried to turn into me and I bounced him back. He saw the edge, the guardrail, the yawning chasm. I saw their mouths moving in terror. Willy hit his brakes.

  I slammed into second again and my foot hit the brake savagely. I twisted the wheel and had no eyes for the tach reading. I watched their car skid on burned rubber toward the rail. They drifted sideways and hit the edge broadside. The railing burst like the side of an exploding house.

  I paid no attention as my own car slammed against the wall with a neck snapping stop. I had a perfect view of their fall.

  They arched out and down in a beautiful curve toward the rocks far below. The car was spinning lazily. There was a dull crump as it hit an outcropping two thirds of the way down and lost a wheel and fender. It fell awkwardly then, like a wounded bird, and died in a rending crash of tortured collapsing metal. There was a puff of smoke and the car was enveloped in an orange ball of flame.

  I sat and watched it burn for a long time, completely oblivious of the gathering cars, the jabbering people and far away wail of an approaching state police car.

  Revenge wasn’t sweet for me. It didn’t make me feel any better. And I realized I’d never feel any better. Not until I raced into a curve going too fast on a mountain like this. Maybe in Sweden, Italy, France, or the big one in Mexico. Then I’d join my wife. Then I’d be with Jenny again.

  THE DEADLY MRS. HAVERSHAM

  Helen Nielsen

  The lettering on the door was clear and black: LT. O’KONSKY—HOMICIDE. The woman outside the door hesitated, one neatly gloved hand resting on the doorknob, while her eyes studied the words as carefully as if she were silently spelling out each letter. She was a small woman—slender, smartly dressed in black, and with a certain poise that suggested she might have been a debutante—and a lovely one—some thirty years earlier. Her face was soft, her eyes were sad, and a ghost of a smile touched her lips as she turned the knob with a determined gesture.

  Detective Lieutenant O’Konsky sat at his desk reading a newspaper with a lurid headline: HAMMER SLAYER SOUGHT. The door opened quietly, but O’Konsky was suddenly aware of the incongruous aroma of expensive cologne. He looked up and stared at the woman, a mixture of surprise and apprehension struggling with the long-practiced objectivity in his eyes. The newspaper dropped to the desk as he came slowly to his feet. There were occasions when O‘Konsky subconsciously remembered that a gentleman was required to rise in the presence of a lady, in spite of the scarcity of ladies encountered on his job.

  There was over six feet of O’Konsky standing, but he might have been invisible. The woman came to the desk and looked down at the headline on the abandoned newspaper.

  “A terrible thing,” she said in a barely audible voice. “A wicked thing!”

  O’Konsky inhaled the cologne.

  “Yes ma’am,” he said.

  “Murder is such a wicked thing—and this one with a hammer.” She shuddered inwardly. “So untidy.”

  O’Konsky hadn’t taken his eyes from the woman, and his eyes weren’t happy. She raised her head and gave him a faint smile.

  “Do you remember me, Lieutenant?”

  O’Konsky nodded.

  “The fireplace poker murder last June,” she said brightly.

  O’Konsky cleared his throat.

  “And the rat poison in July,” he added.

  “July? Was it really July?” The woman frowned over the thought—then nodded. “Yes, you’re right. It was July—but it wasn’t rat poison. It was insecticide. Nasty fluid. I’ve warned our gardener time and time again—” Her voice faded as she looked around the room. A side chair stood on the far side of the lieutenant’s desk. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

  O’Konsky remembered the rest of his manners. He bounded around the corner of the desk and came back with the chair. He even held it in place for her while she sat down.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I was just surprised, Mrs. Haversham—”

  “To see me again? Thank you, Lieutenant. Yes, that’s much better. I’m a little tired. The stairs—”

  “And the heat,” O’Konsky suggested.

  “Yes, it is warm for September, isn’t it? I remarked to my brother only yesterday—”

  O’Konsky was back in his own chair by this time. One hand furtively pressed the buzzer on his desk. The woman’s eyes caught the action and clouded momentarily, but her voice remained unchanged.

  “Do you remember my brother, Lieutenant?”

  O’Konsky’s eyebrows huddled over the question.

  “Brother—he mused. “Thin chap—pale moustache—not much hair.”

  The woman nodded.

  “Charles began losing his hair when he was a very young man. It upset him terribly. He never mentioned it to me, of course. Charles isn’t the communicative type—but I could tell. I’ve often wondered if he might not have married and been quite different if only he hadn’t lost his hair. Men are so sensitive about such things.”

  The woman paused—suddenly embarrassed.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. No offen
se, Lieutenant.”

  O’Konsky’s hand came back from the receding hairline he’d unconsciously caressed.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I gave up this battle long ago.”

  “But you’re a married man—and a police officer. I don’t suppose police officers are troubled by a sense of inferiority. But poor Charles—and his sister married to such a handsome and successful man!”

  A door at the back of the room opened and a man came over to O’Konsky’s desk. O’Konsky turned in his chair to greet him.

  “Sergeant Peters, you remember Mrs. Haversham, don’t you? Mrs. Harlan Haversham—widow of the late Harlan Haversham.”

  There was a note of pleading in O’Konsky’s voice. Peters stared hard at the woman on the chair, and then his gaze dropped momentarily to the headline on the newspaper spread across O’Konsky’s desk.

  “Oh, that Mrs. Haversham!” he said.

  O’Konsky sighed as if he’d just made the last payment on the mortgage, and then he scribbled something on a slip of paper and handed it to the man.

  “This is why I buzzed you,” he said. “Mrs. Haversham and I are having a little chat just now, so I thought maybe you could take care of this for me.”

  Peters scanned the paper and then shoved it into his coat pocket.

  “Right away,” he said. But at the doorway he paused to cast one long look back at Mrs. Haversham. He didn’t appear any happier than O’Konsky.

  Mrs. Haversham endured the interruption in patient but observing silence. When it was over, she continued the conversation as if nothing had taken place.

  “Did you know my husband, Lieutenant?”

  “I never had the pleasure,” O’Konsky answered.

  “That’s a pity. You would have admired him—everyone did. He was so intelligent and kind, but his heart . . .”

  Her voice broke off huskily. In the brief silence that followed she seemed almost at the verge of tears, and then, as if remembering that grief was a private matter not to be aired in a police detective’s office, her back stiffened and her chin came up higher.

  “But then,” she continued, “I believe I asked you if you knew my husband the first time we met. Let’s see now, that was the time when—”

  “A man fell down an elevator shaft,” O’Konsky broke in. “Accidental death.”

  A fleeting smile crossed Mrs. Haversham’s lips.

  “According to the police,” she said.

  “Now, Mrs. Haversham—”

  “Oh—” One gloved hand drifted up in protest. “I won’t argue the point, Lieutenant—not now. After all, the case is closed.”

  “And the poker case is closed,” O’Konsky said, “—and the rat poison.”

  “Insecticide,” Mrs. Haversham corrected. Her glance fell to the headline again. “But not the hammer murder,” she added. “There were no fingerprints, of course.”

  “No fingerprints,” O’Konsky sighed.

  Mrs. Haversham spread her hands out on her lap—palms up and then palms down. She wore extremely smart gloves. Black.

  “So few women wear gloves any more,” she said quietly, “but I always have—even before Mr. Haversham’s tragic death. It’s a matter of the way in which one has been reared, I suppose.”

  O’Konsky took a handkerchief out of his breast pocket and patted his neck. He was beginning to squirm in his chair.

  “There were no fingerprints on the poker, either,” Mrs. Haversham reflected.

  “The case was open and shut—” O’Konsky began.

  “—or on the bottle of insecticide.”

  “Mrs. Haversham—” O’Konsky’s voice was troubled. The handkerchief was now a wadded ball in his hand. “—I know that you must have read all about this new murder in the newspapers.”

  She smiled vaguely.

  “Oh, I have, Lieutenant, but they haven’t reported all of it right. Newspapers never do.”

  “Then—” O’Konsky’s face was haggard. “—I don’t need to ask why you’ve come to see me.”

  “I always try to cooperate with the police,” she said quietly.

  “That you do, Mrs. Haversham. That you most certainly do!”

  At that very moment the door opened and Sergeant Peters returned with another man—older, taller, dressed in an expensively tailored suit. The newcomer smiled at Mrs. Haversham, and she returned the smile in recognition.

  “Dr. Armstrong! How well you’re looking!”

  “Thank you,” the doctor said.

  “And your wife? She’s well, too?”

  “Never better.”

  “That’s nice. I’ve been meaning to drop a card, but I’ve been so busy.”

  “I’ll bet you have, Mrs. Haversham. Do you want to tell us about it now?

  The woman hesitated. She looked at the doctor; she looked at O’Konsky. For the first time, her eyes were anxious.

  “Where’s the other one—with the notebook?” she asked.

  “I don’t think that will be necessary this time,” the doctor said.

  “Oh, yes. Things must be done in an efficient manner. That’s one of the things my late husband taught me. I didn’t learn too well, I’m afraid. But then, I have Charles. He’s so very efficient about everything.”

  Mrs. Haversham paused. One hand went to her forehead in a meaningless gesture; then she noticed the sergeant and smiled again.

  “Oh, you do have a notebook,” she said. “That’s better, now we can proceed.” She wriggled straight in her chair while O’Konsky wriggled down in his. Then she began to dictate in a calm, clear voice:

  “I, Lydia Haversham, being of sound mind and under no duress whatsoever, do hereby confess to the hammer murder . . .”

  The lettering on the door was bright gold: DR. J.M. ARMSTRONG—PSYCHIATRIST. Behind the door, a thin, middle-aged man with a pale moustache and little hair on his head sat nervously on the edge of a chair. His light blue eyes, worried but attentive, were focused on the doctor’s face. Only occasionally did he cast a quick, apprehensive glance in the direction of his sister—deep in a leather armchair alongside the doctor’s desk. The conversation was about Lydia Haversham, although it seemed hardly to concern her.

  “It all goes back to the shock of your brother-in-law’s tragic death, Mr. Lacy,” the doctor explained. “The implication of violence—”

  Charles Lacy reacted in immediate protest.

  “But there was no violence. Harlan Haversham suffered a heart attack. My sister knows that. He’d had these attacks several times prior to his death. We all knew—”

  Dr. Armstrong’s voice remained calm. “I said the implication of violence, Mr. Lacy. Unfortunately, this last attack occurred on a staircase. Mr. Haversham collapsed and fell over the balustrade, plunging a possible eight floors—”

  The doctor raised the clip-end of his gold-plated pen in a gesture of silence as Charles Lacy opened his mouth to protest again.

  “No, we do not run away from things any more. We do not pretend this horror hasn’t occurred. Your sister and I have been having some very frank talks these past few days, and she’s a much stronger person now.”

  Charles Lacy looked toward his sister for reassurance. She sat very small in the huge chair, an expression of tired resignation on her face.

  “Harlan plunged eight floors,” she repeated dully. “He was crushed and bleeding. It was because the elevators weren’t running and he had to take the stairs.”

  “The elevators,” Dr. Armstrong repeated. “Do you see the significance? A few months after her husband’s tragic death, your sister came to the police and confessed to having pushed a man down an elevator shaft. There was no murder at all—it was merely an accident—but she’d read the account in her newspaper and a subconscious feeling of guilt compelled her to that ridiculous confession.

  “For better or for worse, in sickness and in health—” Lydia murmured.

  The doctor nodded sympathetically.

  “A wife always feels an exaggerate
d responsibility for her husband—especially a wife who loves deeply. The confession was ridiculous, and your sister knew that, but it fulfilled—temporarily—her need for punishment stemming from this mistaken sense of guilt.”

  “It was Saturday,” Lydia recalled. “The repair men were working on the elevators because it was Saturday. Harlan shouldn’t have been in his office when they started working, but I had asked him to go—”

  She spoke slowly and deliberately—like a child talking to herself. Dr. Armstrong caught Charles Lacy’s eye and nodded. A signal of understanding passed between them.

  “A month later a second confession,” the doctor continued. “This time to a crime of a violent nature. A brutal slaying with a poker—”

  “Eight floors,” Lydia repeated. “Crushed and bleeding.”

  “—and then, a month later, another confession. Unfortunately, Lt. O‘Konsky didn’t call me in for consultation until this third disturbance. He thought then—and I concurred as you will recall—that the confessions were merely a manifestation of loneliness—an attempt to draw attention to herself.”

  Charles Lacy fidgeted on the edge of his chair. Lydia was watching him. She’d been watching him all this time. He’d just become aware of that.

  “I’ve tried to follow your suggestions,” he said defensively. “I’ve tried to get Lydia to go out more—and to have friends in. I’ve made sacrifices, too. I’m a busy man, doctor. Since my brother-in-law’s death, the business keeps me working all hours.”

  “Charles always worked all hours,” Lydia remarked, “—even before Harlan’s death. He was Harlan’s secretary—his right hand man. Harlan used to tell me that he wouldn’t know how to find anything in the office if it weren’t for Charles.”

  Nobody noticed her. Dr. Armstrong didn’t so much as turn his head.

  “I’m not blaming you, Mr. Lacy,” he insisted. “If anyone’s to blame it’s myself for not going into this matter more thoroughly at the time of the last confession. I took too much for granted. I’ve worked with the police on such cases before, but never—” He hesitated. “—never with one of your sister’s sensibilities. I should have probed deeper.” And then he smiled and leaned back in his chair.