The Paul Cain Omnibus: Every Crime Story and the Novel Fast One as Originally Published (Black Mask)

by Paul Cain

  The first interesting thing that turned up was that it wasn’t Healey’s room—it was Miss Mackay’s room. His was next door. That probably meant that Healey had deliberately gone into her room; that she hadn’t surprised him in his room while he was getting something he’d forgotten.

  Number two was that the knife was Healey’s. Half a dozen people had seen him with it. It was an oversize jackknife with a seven-inch blade—one of the kind that snaps open when you press a spring. Somebody said Healey had a habit of playing mumblety-peg with it when he was trying to out-sit a raise or scare somebody into splitting a pot.

  Number three was the topper. The dough was gone. The sheriff and a couple of deputies searched Healey and went through both rooms with a fine-tooth comb. They weren’t looking for big money because they didn’t know about it; they were looking for evidence.

  All they found on Healey were four hundred-dollar bills tucked into his watch pocket, and the usual keys, cigarettes, whatnot. There were no letters or papers of any kind. There was one big suitcase in his room and it was full of dirty clothes. The roll he’d flashed on me was gone.

  In the next half hour I found out a lot of things. The girl had come to the hotel alone. No one else had checked in that day, except myself. The door to the girl’s room was about twenty feet from the top of the back stairs and there was a side door to the hotel that they didn’t lock until ten o’clock.

  It looked like a cinch for the man Healey had told me about, the one who was supposed to be Miss Mackay’s brother.

  Healey had probably gone upstairs to take care of the girl. I knew that his being scared of her was on the level because I know bona fide fear when I see it. She evidently had plenty on him. He’d arranged his getaway with me and then gone up to carve the girl, shut her up forever.

  The alleged brother had come in the side door and had walked in on the knife act and opened up Healey’s back with the automatic at about six feet.

  Then he’d grabbed the roll and whatever else Healey had in his pocket that was of any value—maybe a book of traveler’s checks—had tossed the gun on the floor and screwed back down the back stairway and out the side door. Something like that. It wasn’t entirely plausible, but it was all I could figure right then.

  By the time I’d figured that much out the sheriff had it all settled that Healey had knifed the girl and then she’d plugged him five times, in a ten-inch square in his back. With about three inches of steel in her heart.

  That was what the sheriff said so I let it go. They didn’t know about the brother and I didn’t want to complicate their case for them. And I did want a chance to look for that roll without interference.

  When I got out to the car the blue Chrysler was gone. That wasn’t important except that I wondered who had been going away from the hotel when it looked like everybody in town was there or on the way there.

  I didn’t get much information at the station. The agent said he’d just come on duty; the telegraph operator had been there all afternoon but he was out to supper. I found him in a lunch-room across the street and he said there’d been a half-dozen or so people get off the afternoon train from Salt Lake; but the girl had been alone and he wasn’t sure who the other people had been except three or four home towners. That was no good.

  I tried to find somebody else who had been in the station when the train came in but didn’t have any luck. They couldn’t remember.

  I went back to the car and that made me think about the blue Chrysler again. It was just possible that the Mackay girl had come down from Salt Lake by rail, and the boyfriend or brother or whatever he was had driven down. It didn’t look particularly sensible but it was an idea. Maybe they didn’t want to appear to be traveling together or something.

  I stopped at all the garages and gas stations I could find but I couldn’t get a line on the Chrysler. I went back to the hotel and looked at the register and found out that Miss Mackay had put down Chicago as her home, and I finagled around for a half hour and talked to the sheriff and the clerk and everybody who looked like they wanted to talk but I didn’t get any more angles.

  The sheriff said he’d wired Chicago because it looked like Healey and Miss Mackay were both from Chicago, and that he’d found a letter in one of Healey’s old coats from a Chicago attorney. The letter was about a divorce, and the sheriff had a hunch that Miss Mackay was Mrs Healey.

  I had a sandwich and a piece of pie in the hotel restaurant and bundled up and went out and got in the car and started for LA.

  I didn’t get up till around eleven o’clock Tuesday morning. I had breakfast in my room and wired a connection in Chi to send me all he could get on Miss Mackay and her brother. I called the desk and got the number of Gard’s room and on the way down stopped in to see him.

  He was sitting in his nightshirt by the window, reading the morning papers. I sat down and asked him how he was enjoying his vacation and he said swell, and then he said: “I see by the papers that our friend Healey had an accident.”

  I nodded.

  Gard chuckled: “Tch, tch, tch. His wife will sure be cut up.”

  I smiled a little and said, “Uh-huh,” and Gard looked up and said: “What the hell are you grinning about and what do you mean: Uh-huh?”

  I told him that according to my paper Mrs Healey was the lady who had rubbed Healey—the lady who was on her way back East in a box.

  Gard shook his head intelligently and said: “Wrong. That one was an extra. Mrs Healey is alive and kicking and one of the sweetest dishes God ever made.”

  I could see that he was going to get romantic so I waited and he told me that Mrs Healey had been the agency’s client in the East and that she’d come in from Chicago Monday morning by plane and that he’d met her in the agency office, and then he went on for five or ten minutes about the color of her eyes and the way she wore her hair, and everything.

  Gard was pretty much of a ladies’ man. He told it with gestures.

  Along with the poetry he worked in the information that Mrs Healey, as he figured it, had had some trouble with Healey and that they’d split up and that she wanted to straighten it all out. That was the reason she’d wired the Salt Lake office of his agency to locate Healey. And almost as soon as they’d found Healey he’d shoved off for LA and the agency had wired her in Chicago to that effect. She’d arrived the morning Healey had been spotted in Caliente and had decided to wait in LA for him.

  Gard said he had helped her find an apartment. He supposed the agency had called her up and told her the bad news about Healey. He acted like he was thinking a little while and then asked me if I didn’t think he ought to go over and see if he could help her in any way. “Comfort her in her bereavement,” was the way he put it.

  I said: “Sure—we’ll both go.”

  Gard didn’t go for that very big, but I told him that my having been such a pal of Healey’s made it all right.

  We went.

  Mrs Healey turned out a great deal better than I had expected from Gard’s glowing description. As a matter of fact she was swell. She was very dark, with dark blue eyes and blue-black hair; her clothes were very well done and her voice was cultivated, deep. When she acknowledged Gard’s half-stammered introduction, inclined her head towards me and asked us to sit down, I saw that she had been crying.

  Gard had done pretty well in the way of helping her find an apartment. It was a big luxurious duplex in the Garden Court on Kenmore.

  She smiled at Gard. “It’s very nice of you gentlemen to call,” she said.

  I said we wanted her to know how sorry we were about it all and that I had known Healey in Detroit, and if there was anything we could do—that sort of thing.

  There wasn’t much else to say. There wasn’t much else said.

  She asked Gard to forgive her for bothering him so much the previous evening with her calls, but that she’d been nervous and wo
rried and kept thinking that maybe Healey had arrived in LA after the agency was closed and that she hadn’t been notified. They’d been watching the trains of course.

  Gard said that was all right and got red and stammered some more. He was stunned by the lady. So was I. She was a pip.

  She said she thought she’d stay in California and she told us delicately that she’d made arrangements for Healey’s body to be shipped to his folks in Detroit.

  Finally I said we’d better go and Gard nodded and we got up. She thanked us again for coming and a maid helped us with our coats and we left.

  Gard said he had to go downtown so I took a cab and went back to the hotel. There was a wire from Chicago:

  JEWEL MACKAY TWO CONVICTIONS EXTORTION STOP WORKS WITH HUSBAND ARTHUR RAINES ALIAS J L MAXWELL STOP LEFT CHICAGO WEDNESDAY FOR LOS ANGELES WITH RAINES STOP DESCRIPTION MACKAY FOUR ELEVEN ONE HUNDRED TWO BLONDE GRAY EYES RAINES FIVE SIX ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIVE RED BROWN EYES STOP MAY LOCATE THROUGH BROTHER WILLIAM RAINES REAL ESTATE SOUTH LABREA REGARDS ED.

  I got the number of Raines’ real estate office from the telephone book and took a cab and went down and looked it over. I didn’t go in. Then I told the driver to take me to the Selwyn Apartments on Beverly Boulevard. That was the place the telephone book had listed as Raines’ residence.

  It took a half hour of jabbering about spark plugs with the Bohunk in the Selwyn garage to find out that Mister Raines had gone out about ten o’clock with another gentleman, and what Mister Raines looked like and what kind of a car he drove. The gentleman who had been with him was tall—or maybe he was short. Or maybe it had been a lady. The Bohunk wasn’t sure.

  I jockeyed the cab around to a good spot in the cross street and went into the drug store on the opposite corner and drank Coca-Colas. Along about the fifth Coca-Cola the car I was looking for pulled up in front of the Selwyn. A medium-sized middle-aged man who I figured to be the brother got out of the driver’s seat and went into the apartment house. The other man in the car moved over into the driver’s seat and started west on Beverly. By that time I was back in the cab and after him.

  Of course I couldn’t be sure it was Raines. It looked like a little man. I had to take that chance.

  We followed the car out Beverly to Western, up Western. I wondered what had become of the blue Chrysler. Then we drew up close behind Raines’ car at an intersection and I nearly fell out the window. The man in the car ahead turned around and looked back; we looked smack at one another for five seconds.

  I’d seen him before! I’d seen him the night before in Miss Mackay’s room at the Pine Hotel in Caliente! He’d been one of the raft of people who’d busted in with the Sheriff and stood around ah-ing and oh-ing. The man had guts. He’d come in while Healey and the girl were still warm to see what a neat job he’d done.

  The traffic bell rang and I knew he’d recognized me, too. He went across that intersection like a bat out of hell, up Western to Fountain. He lost us on Fountain.

  I talked to my driver like a father. I got down on my knees and begged him to keep that car in sight. I called him all the Portuguese pet names I could think of and made up a few new ones, but Raines ran away from us on Fountain.

  On the way back to the hotel I stopped at the Hollywood Branch of the Automobile Club and had a friend of mine look up the license number of the car. Of course it was the brother’s car, in the brother’s name. That didn’t get me anywhere. I was pretty sure Raines wouldn’t go back to his brother’s place now that he knew I’d spotted him; and it was a cinch he wouldn’t use that car very long.

  He didn’t know what I wanted. He might figure me for a dick and scram out of LA—out of the country. I sat in my room at the hotel and thought soft thoughts about what a chump I’d been not to go to him directly when he’d stopped with his brother in front of the Selwyn, and the speed of taxicabs as compared to automobiles—things like that. It looked like the Healey case was all washed up as far as I was concerned.

  I went out about five o’clock and walked. I walked down one side of Hollywood Boulevard to Bronson and back up the other side to Vine and went into the U Drive joint and rented the car again. I was nervous and jumpy and disgusted, and the best way for me to get over feeling that way is to drive it off.

  I drove out through Cahuenga Pass a ways and then I had an idea and drove back to the Selwyn Apartments. The idea wasn’t any good. William Raines told the clerk to send me up and he asked me what he could do for me and smiled and offered me a drink.

  I said I wanted to get in touch with his brother on a deal that would do us both a lot of good. He said his brother was in Chicago and that he hadn’t seen him for two years. I didn’t tell him he was a liar. It wouldn’t have done any good. I thanked him and went back down to the car.

  I drove down to LA and had dinner in a Chinese place. Then I went back by the Santa Fe and found out about trains—I figured on going back to New York the next day.

  On the way back to Hollywood I drove by the Garden Court. Not for any particular reason—I thought about Mrs Healey and it wasn’t much out of the way.

  The blue Chrysler was sitting squarely across the street from the entrance.

  I parked up the street a little way and got out and went back to be sure. I lit a match and looked at the card on the steering column; the car was registered to another U Drive place, downtown, on South Hope.

  I went across the street and walked by the desk with my nose in the air. The Spick elevator boy didn’t even look at the folded bill I slipped him; he grinned self-consciously and said that a little red-haired man had gone up to four just a couple minutes ago. Mrs Healey was on four and there were only three apartments on a floor.

  I listened at the door but could only hear a confused buzz that sounded like fast conversation. I turned the knob very slowly and put a little weight against the door. It was locked. I went down to the end of the hall and went out as quietly as possible through a double door to a fire escape platform. By standing outside the railing and holding on with one hand and leaning far out I could see into the dining room of Mrs Healey’s apartment, could see a couple inches of the door that led, as well as I could remember, into the drawing room. It was closed.

  There is nothing that makes you feel quite so simple as hanging on a fire escape, trying to look into a window. Particularly when you can’t see anything through the window. After a few minutes I gave it up and climbed back over the railing.

  I half sat on the railing and tried to figure things out. What business would the guy who shot Healey have with Mrs Healey? Did the blackmail angle that Raines and Mackay had hold over Healey cover Mrs Healey, too? Was Raines milking his lowdown for all it was worth? It was too deep for me.

  I went back into the hall and listened at the door again. They were a little louder but not loud enough to do me any good. I went around a bend in the hall to what I figured to be the kitchen door and gave it the slow turn and it opened. I mentally kicked myself for wasting time on the fire escape, tiptoed into the dark kitchen and closed the door.

  It suddenly occurred to me that I was in a quaint spot if somebody should come in. What the hell business did I have there! I fixed that, to myself, with some kind of vague slant about protecting Mrs Healey and edged over to the door, through to the room I’d been looking into from the fire escape.

  The door into the drawing room was one of those pasteboard arrangements that might just as well not be there. The first thing I heard was a small, suppressed scream like somebody had smacked a hand over somebody else’s mouth, and then something like a piece of furniture being tipped over. It was a cinch someone was fighting in there, quietly—or as quietly as possible.

  There wasn’t much time to think about whether I was doing the right thing or not. If I’d thought about it I’d probably have been wrong, anyway. I turned the knob, swung the door open.

  Mrs Healey was standing agains
t the far wall. She was standing flat against the wall with one hand up to her mouth. Her eyes were very wide.

  There were two men locked together on the floor near the central table and as I came in they rolled over a turn or so and one broke away and scrambled to his feet. It was Raines. He dived after a nickel-plated revolver that was lying on the floor on the far side of the table, and the other man, who had risen to his knees, dived after it, too. The other man was Gard.

  He beat Raines by a hair but Raines was on his feet; he kicked the gun out of Gard’s hand, halfway across the room. Gard grabbed his leg and pulled him down and they went round and round again. They fought very quietly; all you could hear was the sound of heavy breathing and an occasional bump. I went over and picked up the gun and stooped over the mess of arms and legs and picked out Raines’ red head and took hold of the barrel of the gun. I took dead aim and let Raines have it back of the ear. He relaxed.

  Gard got up slowly. He ran his fingers through his hair and jiggled his shoulders around to straighten his coat and grinned foolishly.

  I said: “Fancy, meeting you here.”

  I turned around and looked at Mrs Healey. She was still standing against the wall with her hand across her mouth. Then the ceiling fell down on top of my head and everything got dark very suddenly.

  Darkness was around me when I opened my eyes, but I could see the outlines of a window and I could hear someone breathing somewhere near me. I don’t know how long I was out. I sat up and my head felt like it was going to explode; I lay down again and closed my eyes.

  After a while I tried it again and it was a little better. I crawled towards what I figured to be a door and ran into the wall and I got up on my feet and felt along the wall until I found the light switch.

  Raines was lying in the same place I’d smacked him, but his hands and feet were tied with a length of clothesline and there was a red, white and blue silk handkerchief jammed into his mouth. His eyes were open and he looked at me with an expression that I can only describe as bitter amusement.