by Don Wilcox
The sergeant led the party back down to the freight basement and Trixie had the bewildering impression of being surrounded by a swarm of stern-looking strangers. Some of the officers sat down on the trunks and boxes that surrounded the big red vehicle. Under the blaze of ceiling lights the honeycomb of crystal barrels in the rear of the machine glowed brightly.
Beyond the atom constrictor, not far from the open freight door, a patrol wagon stood menacingly.
“Young lady,” cracked the sergeant, “your husband has given us a mighty perty demonstration of how the silver discs in that machine puff up into whatever they’re supposed to be. He’s done us the kindness to roll out one disc after another and turn them into trunks and pianos and whatnot. He’s converted every disc but two. Then he gits stubborn and quits. Claims those last two ain’t labelled. Says you’re the only one that knows. Which is jist what we thought.”
“How do I know what they are?” Trixie gulped.
“Pretty thin,” one cop whispered to another.
“The discs or the gal?” his companion retorted sarcastically.
“You’d better know,” said the sergeant. “You were seen out joyriding between six and seven this evening—”
“I had an order to pick up at 706 Chestnut,” said Trixie. “It was a storage item. I haven’t a ghost of a notion what the contents were.”
“Correction,” the sergeant growled. “The address was 607 Chestnut.”
“It was seven-o-six!” Trixie snapped emphatically. Then she reddened. “Or was it?” The memory of the spotlighted door flashed back on her. “Wait a minute—”
“What’s the difference?” one of the officers muttered sarcastically. “Seven-o-six—six-o-seven. It’s all the same to her.”
“Just so it’s Chestnut street,” another cop chimed in, “it’s all chestnuts to her.”
Their asides were drowned by the sergeant’s harsh bark. “Never mind the address. That’s beside the point. The point is that she picked up Kiptoller’s corpse.”
Trixie’s fingers flew up. Her eyebrows leaped, her lips opened as if she were singing the high note in the opera. “Kiptoller’s what?”
“Corpse, lady, corpse. A body that has been made dead by being stuck with a poison needle. In this case, the body of J.P. Kiptoller that you and your friend the Cream Puff murdered between seven and seven-thirty this evening—”
“E-e-e-eek!” Trixie came through with the opera singer’s high note. It was a shrill wail that set up vibrations in the stacks of tin junk along the wall.
It also set up vibrations in Ebbtide Jones. He leaped as if his wife’s outcry were the signal for round one. His fists weren’t going to stand for such talk. But the two husky cops throttled him. Leave this to the sergeant, they said.
The sergeant restored a semblance of order. He made every one sit down. In addition to the swarm of policemen there were several plain-clothes men carrying on whispered conversations, now and then conferring with the sergeant on the side. Occasionally other officers or plain-clothes men would enter by the open basement door.
For all Trixie knew, this swarm of cops might lead her off to execution any minute. For all she knew, she deserved it. If she had just made a break for that atom constrictor while there was still time! Nothing could be more comfortable than to be tucked away in a crystal barrel, out of reach of these growling blood-thirsty cops.
The temperature inside those barrels, she reflected, was near absolute zero. Well, she was already frozen—
“You can’t talk that way about my wife!” she heard Ebbtide snarl. Boy, what a fighting eye he had! The sight of him, telling the cops off, brought the warm blood coursing back to her fingertips. “You’ve got nothing on her!”
“We will have as soon as we put the juice on these last two discs. Look ’em over, lady. Recognize ’em?”
Trixie gazed at the two bright discs. Wide as a car wheel, thin as paper, they gleamed with all the mystery of the scientist’s atom world. Trixie knew what no one else knew. One of those discs was an unknown man in an automobile. She also knew what the police seemed to know—that the other disc was a wooden crate. But inside it was—what?
“Stop puttin’ on the surprise act,” the sergeant growled. “You’re not so blank as all that. Let me refreshen your memory.” He shoved his sergeant’s cap to a cocky angle and began.
“Here’s your game, play by play.
“First you pulled the gold-digger act and got yourself married to Ebbtide, the Junk King.”
“Why you blasted devil-shark!” Ebbtide howled. But the officers choked him off.
“Next, you got him to sign those fake letters givin’ the instructions to Kiptoller and the porter. Oh, we’ve seen ’em. The signature’s genuine, all right, but it don’t make sense that Ebbtide Jones would steal his own jewels. It does make sense that you’d do it, especially after the Cream Puff ropes you into his clever scheme.
“So Kiptoller thinks Ebbtide Jones is sending a mummy back and wants it put in the safe at seven o’clock this evening. Come seven, the porter at Kiptoller’s building hears the freight-door bell ring, finds the case waitin’ on the platform. He wheels it through the main floor corridor to the inside door of the Kiptoller jewel shop, and calls in to Kiptoller, who is busy at the safe.
“Kiptoller opens the door and wheels the box in, and opens it up like your letter told him to. The minute he opens it, the mummy jumps out. It ain’t a mummy, it’s the Cream Puff!”
“Oh!” Trixie gasped.
“She’s still actin’,” a copper said.
“Doin’ a damn good job,” his companion retorted.
“The instant the Cream Puff jumps out,” the sergeant continued, “he jabs Kiptoller with a poison needle, and Kiptoller falls dead. Then the Cream Puff takes all he wants out of the open safe and locks it up. We’ve got experts drillin’ to get in and see how much of your husband’s stuff he made off with.
“Anyhow, he locks up. Then he dumps the dead Kiptoller in the mummy case and closes him up in the shipping crate and sets him outside the door. About seven-thirty the porter comes back. While the porter carts the crate back to the freight platform, supposin’ it to be empty, that’s when the Cream Puff walks out the main door of the buildin’ weighed down with jewels.
“Then you, Mrs. Jones, you come along in your big red atom go-buggy and you snatch up the crate and ramble off. We’ve got the porter’s eye-witness account and it’ll hold water. He was just curious enough to know why that crate had to be put back on the platform instead of dumped with the trash, that he and two scrub-women watched to see what happened to it. They all three saw you—”
“Hold on!” Ebbtide broke in. “That don’t prove nothing!”
“It proves that your wife was takin’ charge of hidin’ the corpse,” the sergeant grunted sullenly.
One of the plain-clothes men interrupted at this point. He complained that, according to the newspaper, the Cream Puff had intended for the crate containing the corpse to be dumped in the fountain at Chestnut Square.
“That’s all right,” said the sergeant, yielding not an inch. “Mrs. Jones meant to carry out that instruction. But by the time she came to Chestnut Square the first reports of the Cream Puff’s news story had already leaked out, and there was a handful of people, includin’ two police, waitin’ at the fountain. She took one look and turned the other way. Didn’t you, Mrs. Jones?
. . . Didn’t you?”
“Why—I—that is, the traffic on Chestnut was crowded and I—” Trixie turned purplish.
“You turned off before you come to Chestnut Square!”
“Yes.”
“Now we’re gettin’ places,” said the sergeant in a voice as suave as a nutmeg grater. “So you seen you was stymied, so you give the corpse the works and turned it into a frozen disc and figured it would be safe hid until the Cream Puff told you what to do next . . . Hold that bid!”
The command was directed at the police who were trying to su
bdue the enraged Ebbtide; but it had the effect of preventing Trixie from attempting an answer.
“One moment,” said one of the plainclothes men to the sergeant in a low off-side conversation. “A few questions before we open the evidence of those discs.”
The sergeant and three or four others went into a huddle with the plainclothes man to make sure all points were clear. No, the Cream Puff hadn’t been seen at any time by the porter; in fact, the porter had never actually seen Kiptoller at the time of delivering the crate. He had simply carried out the orders of the letter he had supposed was from Ebbtide Jones. But he had seen Ebbtide’s wife make the pick-up—he and the two scrubwomen. Beyond this, all the information had come through the newspaper article itself.
“The Cream Puff’s news service is always a sure shot,” one of the reporters declared. “Dependable as a calendar. You police will probably never hear of him again after this job. Looks to me like he played Jones’ wife for a sucker.”
The prospect of a clean getaway for the Cream Puff annoyed the sergeant and his fellow officers. They fairly breathed fire. More determined than ever were they to slap the pressure on Trixie.
“Get the juice on those discs!” the sergeant snarled. “I’ll bet my hat we get something pretty darned interesting out of them. Pretty interesting . . .!”
CHAPTER VII
Murder Will Out
Stan Kendrick, the ingenious inventor of the two-dimensionalizing machine, should have been there. Never in his thousands of scientific experiments that had made this atom constrictor possible had he ever been surrounded by an audience so deeply engrossed in watching objects return to their normal dimensions as this excited group.
Ebbtide officiated. He caught the frightened consenting nod from Trixie and went to work. He brought the two discs out and let them clang to the concrete floor. When the clang died there was not a murmur. Tense silence gripped the spectators. The only sounds were the echoes of distant street noises and newsboys’ cries of “Extra! Extra! Cream Puff does it again!”
Disc number one swelled rapidly. Soon, before all gaping eyes, it grew into a vast heap of dark metal. The officers began to shake their heads and mutter. This was not the wooden shipping crate they were after.
A few seconds more made it apparent that this object was mushrooming into an automobile. Suddenly it was an automobile—with a driver in it. And the drived was Pokey!
On the instant that the bell jangled the signal that the atoms were back to normal, the car gave a sudden jump—the way a car does when its engine starts in high—and roared into action.
Pokey gave one swift scared look at the band of policemen who jumped out of his way. He spun the steering wheel and headed for the open door.
Whether Pokey, upon his sudden awakening, was responding to a suspended determination to continue what he had been about before blackness had engulfed him, or whether this was a fresh determination inspired by Pokey’s feeling toward policemen, may never be known. Pokey jammed down on the throttle.
But Pokey never got to the door. Ebbtide Jones saw to that. Ebbtide, boiling over like a race horse on a diet of T.N.T., sprang at the car, caught the open window with one hand and Pokey’s head with the other.
“Come back here, you dumb codfish!” Ebbtide yelled.
The car swerved. BLAM! Clang! Clang! Clatterrr! The car came to a stop half buried in a stack of junk.
“What the devil! Are you blind as well as dumb?” Ebbtide roared. “What are you running off for? Come over and explain yourself in your damned sign language. What do you mean, being clam-shelled up in that machine?”
For the five seconds that it took Ebbtide to divest himself on this tirade, Pokey stood in the open doorway of the car, his eyes passing over its twisted hood, over Ebbtide, over the line of uniformed police looking on in amazement. His eyes came to rest on the open door.
Pokey tried to make a dash for that door—this time on foot. But Ebbtide, whose suspicions had suddenly caught fire, ran after him like a long-legged all-American tackle and brought him down.
There was a blurred tangle of arms and legs, a furious thudding of fists. Ebbtide hadn’t set out to pick a fight, but simply to capture a possible witness. However, the first swing of the husky office-boy’s fist found Ebbtide in a ripe mood to reply at the rate of three or four to one. Ebbtide was famous for his bargains, and he knew when to give full measure. He gave.
“Aaf! Ugh! Stop it!” the dumb office boy shouted in lusty voice.
The cops plunged into the fracas and settled it with two pair of handcuffs. The two combatants, snorting and puffing and dusty, were forced to sit down on trunks.
Trixie crowded close to her steaming sweating husband.
“If I spend the rest of my life in jail,” she breathed, “I’ll never forget how wonderful you’ve been, Ebbtide.”
Ebbtide blinked at her with bleary eyes, and his long boney face grew long with incomprehensibility. Then the tense hard silence of the spectators caught their attention. Everyone’s eyes were on the bright object within their semicircle—the last disc.
It swelled. It assumed an angular, rectangular shape, box-like. It became a shipping crate. From the seals it bore, one might have been deceived into thinking it had come from Egypt by air freight. But none of this crowd was so deceived.
The bell rang. Someone detached the electric cord. The sergeant went to work with a small bar, ripping the box open as if he were wrecking a house. The bug-eyed policemen made each other stand back.
Two of them lifted the mummy case out of the crate. The sergeant went to work on the lid. The coffin-like shape of the thing altered his mood. He ceased to be a one-man wrecking crew and became a tiptoeing undertaker. While he pried at the lid another officer bent down to the breathing window and shot a flashlight beam inside.
“Corpse, all right,” the officer muttered. His low words sent a shudder through the tense onlookers. He added in a spine-chilling half-whisper: “There’s a cream puff on his chest.”
The sergeant burst the lid open. The contents lay revealed. Everyone craned for a glimpse of the dead Kiptoller. The encased figure was as mo tionless as a chunk of concrete. On its chest lay a tempting cream puff. In the fingers of one hand was a small silvery instrument with a needle point.
“That ain’t Kiptoller!” Ebbtide Jones blurted.
“Hell, no, it’s the Cream Puff!” the sergeant yowled, leaping backward as if the case was full of rattlesnakes all set to strike.
“How do you know?” the dumb office boy blurted through his missing teeth. A hard glare from Ebbtide made him pull in his neck; but no one else paid any attention to him. Everyone was talking, and everyone knew that here, by some odd chance, was the long lost Cream Puff. There had been a slip somewhere, all right. But the Cream Puff’s own news story about the poison needle clinched his identity.
“Stand back, men!” the sergeant shouted. “He might be playin’ possum.”
Several police stood with guns ready and glued their eyes on the silver needle in the motionless fingers.
“Watch him, there. He’ll come to life in a minute. The other guy did.”
But a long minute of frozen waiting brought not the slightest movement from the dark overstuffed man in the open mummy case. The silence gave way to puzzled murmurs. Where was Kiptoller? Was he dead or alive? Had Kiptoller and the Cream Puff struggled? Had the Cream Puff accidentally jabbed himself? The plain-clothes men stooped closer to the case but could see no signs of blood.
“This fellow hasn’t been in no scuffle,” Ebbtide declared, craning over the shoulders of the officers. “He’s as fresh as that cream puff sitting on his chest.”
The sergeant put Ebbtide’s statement to a test by munching the cream puff, an exercise which presently sharpened his mental processes.
“Kiptoller’s got to be somewhere,” the sergeant observed.
“He is,” said Ebbtide, beginning to pace back and forth past the fresh mummy, jerking awkwardly at the
handcuffs behind his back and gesturing with his elbows. “And as soon as I can figure where that pearl-setting rooster of a Kiptoller is, the rest is easy.”
The sergeant, after a hurried whispered conversation with his plainclothes men, gave a nod to Ebbtide. “Okay, berserk, give us your version. If we like it we’ll undo your handcuffs.”
“To start with,” said Ebbtide, “Kiptoller was out”
Pokey started to interrupt, but he caught a look from Ebbtide, swallowed hard, and stayed dumb.
“Kiptoller was out,” Ebbtide continued, “so there wasn’t no one to let the Cream Puff out of the case. That’s what let him down. The rest that happened makes no difference. The Cream Puff never got out, so he never’ killed nobody, and he never robbed no safe.”
“Go on,” said the sergeant.
“Well, at the appointed time the porter came back to the inside jewelry shop door like he was supposed to. He never saw Kiptoller. There was the case. He wheeled it out to the rear door like he thought he was supposed to, according to that faked letter. The Cream Puff never hollered for fear of getting caught. He knew he was in a jam, but he figured he’d get his chance to break out after someone or other was carting him away—”
“A taxi driver,” an officer put in. “We’ve cleared up that end of the setup.”
“And he probably figured,” Ebbtide went on, “that as quick as he got out of his jam he’d take his murdering out on whoever let Kiptoller slip through his fingers,” Ebbtide shot a searching look at the burly battered office boy. “I think you’re lucky to be in handcuffs, Pokey.”
“On with your story,” cracked the sergeant.
“That’s about all,” said Ebbtide.
“Except that my wife happened along in the atom constrictor and swallowed up box, Cream Puff, and all—”
“She was tryin’ to hide him away!” the sergeant growled.
“Nothing of the kind,” broke in a plain-clothes officer authoritatively. “She got her addresses mixed.”
