“These rats were crowding me,” she said. “I was near the Lanin Building. I thought of you. That casket had the evidence. I was afraid they’d lift it before I got to H.Q. So I dropped it with you.”
“And here we are,” smiled Perry.
Jerome’s face tightened. He wheeled on Lois Ward and grabbed her arm, twisting it slightly. “I don’t want no trouble,” he snarled, “getting answers. You talk and talk fast. Anyone else on the case with you?”
“My, my,” Lois Ward murmured. “Look at his face, Perry. He’s diabetic, don’t you think?”
“Oh,” sneered Jerome. “A bright girl, eh? Well, you talk fast, sister, or Scarotti will pull that trigger a couple of times and bank your boy friend on the floor.”
That got her. Lois Ward’s pretty face paled swiftly.
“I’ll talk,” she whispered.
“That’s better,” growled Jerome.
“Look,” said Perry, “mind if I smoke a cig?”
Jerome grinned. “I sure do, bright boy. I’ve heard about the tricks you pack up your sleeve. A cigarette makes a swell blowgun, don’t it?”
“Give me one of your own then. You wouldn’t refuse a fellow one last cig, would you?”
“Here’s your cig.” Jerome threw him one. “Watch him, Scarotti.” He turned back to Lois Ward. “Who’s with you on the case?”
“No one,” she said.
Perry cocked his head around at Scarotti, the cigarette in his mouth. “Give me a light,” he said.
Scarotti, still holding the Mauser against Perry’s back, let his left hand slip into his pocket and withdrew a packet of safety matches.
“Light it yourself. No queer tricks. Or I kill.”
“I don’t doubt it,” murmured Perry, striking a match.
In the movement, he had slowly turned himself so that he nearly faced Scarotti directly. As he lighted the match, Perry pressed the back of his right hand against the upper pocket of his coat.
Simultaneously, a wispy stream shot out into Scarotti’s beetle-browed face right out of the small pearl stickpin in Perry’s tie.
Scarotti gripped at his eyes, screaming at the torture which the gas sent through his body. Perry spun around like a top. One of his hands tore the Mauser out of Scarotti’s hairy paw. The other clipped the screaming man on the point of his jutting jaw and crashed him to the floor senseless.
There was a long thin bread knife on a small table in the room. Scarotti had been making a sandwich when they entered. Jerome snatched up the bread knife and threw Lois Ward back with him on the sofa, pressing the blade against the pale white skin of the girl’s throat.
For a second, Perry was lost. He didn’t know what to do. Lois Ward took matters in her own hands. In horror, Perry saw her twist her neck under the knife and sink her white teeth into Jerome’s hand.
She drew blood. Jerome howled, infuriated, and tried to pull the knife into her throat.
But Lois Ward was smart. She had thrown herself down, a little to one side.
Perry pounced on Jerome, swung his fist. He knocked him solidly back on the sofa, unconscious.
Lois Ward jumped around and looked at him. “Some wallop! I’m glad you didn’t shoot him.”
Perry sighed. He felt like a wilted lily. “Nice going, pardner,” he said in a small voice. “But you took a chance biting his hand.”
She got to her feet and smiled. “Not so much,” she said. “The fool had the dull edge of the blade against me. He didn’t know it.”
There was a battering at the door. The hollow reverberations of police clubs beat on it!
“You wanted him alive, eh?” Perry said.
“I’ll say,” replied the girl. “He’s just one of a chain. We’ll find out the others through him. Who’s outside?”
He unlocked the door and opened it. Inspector Lowery, his burly face crimson with excitement, burst wildly into the room with two homicide bureau detectives behind him.
“I thought so,” he cried. “All cleaned up! Damn you, Perry, you never give the cops a chance!”
Lois Ward’s mouth was agape. “How did the police find out?”
“The driver who brought Jerome and me here,” explained Perry. “I handed him a dollar bill. It’s a special one I have fitted up for emergency cases. It carries a little note that says: ‘Call Inspector Lowery at police headquarters and tell him Matt Perry is in trouble. Give any other information you know.’ I’ve used the gag before.”
“Yeah,” said Inspector Lowery sourly. “Another one of Perry’s tricks, miss. Some day he’ll run outa them and—”
“I’ve got a million of them,” said Perry, grinning broadly.
HAIR OF THE CAT, by Robert Turner
Originally published in Crack Detective, June 1947.
He stood there in the small town police station, feeling scared and hot and awkwardly big. He tried to think, but all that kept biting into his mind was that this was wrong and crazy; it couldn’t happen like this.
Some of it was familiar, though; some of it was right out of his own mystery novels. Or maybe his play now running on Broadway. The dented spittoons and dirty, cracked walls, papered with Wanted posters, were familiar and the naked light bulbs cutting a fog of smoke.
But the rest was wrong. There was no third degree, no brutality. Police Chief Karlin was only a stodgy, gray-haired man in shiny serge. The town’s three policemen were just tired, middle aged men. Even he, Lee Parker, didn’t fit. He was no hard bitten character in a crime story. He was just the average small town Joe.
Janie, his wife, had been miscast, too. She was not beautiful; she was not crying. Her eyes were hot with unshed tears but that was all. Her quiet little face was pale and she perched primly on a chair, clenching a wadded handkerchief. She looked at the center of the floor and talked in a dull monotone.
She told how she and this Dade McCreery had gone together out west, before she was married to Parker. She told how McCreery came to see her tonight, first time in seven years. He had been drinking and she tried, but couldn’t get rid of him.
“Then,” she went on, “Dade grabbed me, tried to kiss me. I hit him in the face and tried to get away. I gave one yell before he got hold of my throat, I—everything went dark...When I came to—well—Mr. Jerome, our next door neighbor, was there. He had heard my screams, came running over. And Dade—Dade McCreery, was on the floor. He was very still and his eyes and mouth were open...Mr. Jerome, he was calling the police.”
Chief Karlin poked out his lip, closed his eyes. He said, tiredly: “You didn’t kill him, Mrs. Parker? I wish you’d tell us. You had reason, Lord knows!”
The balled handkerchief changed hands. She pushed at her hair. “No,” she whispered. “I told you, no.” She kept saying that.
Karlin insisted: “Think. You were terrified. You grabbed your husband’s golf trophy off the mantle. You didn’t know what you were doing. You hit McCreery—”
“Stop it!” Lee Parker said.
Karlin opened his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. He looked at the service button in Parker’s lapel, apologetically. “I have to do this, son. It happened. She ought to tell us.”
Parker moved toward his wife. He was shaking and his throat was choked up. Janie stood up, walked into his arms and the weeping that had been too long held back came upon her. He held her tightly while Karlin and his men looked away, fidgeting.
Waiting for her to quiet, Parker remembered, irrationally, that about now, across the Hudson River, in New York, people were coming out of the theatre, talking about his play...
“The biggest mystery thing to hit The Stem, since The Cat and The Canary,” Gilman, his agent, called it. It was making Parker a fortune. Hollywood had just paid seventy five thousand dollars for picture rights. All the years he and Janie had s
truggled along on small book royalties, and now Janie pulled away from him, dabbed at her eyes. “I—I’m sorry, Lee.” She tried to smile. “How about the lawyer—Crimmins, was it? Did you get him?”
He nodded. “He couldn’t make it here, tonight. He’ll come first thing tomorrow.”
“Yes,” she said. She turned away quickly.
Chief Karlin sighed. “That’ll have to be all tonight.”
Parker touched Janie’s shoulder, but she didn’t turn. “I’ll be here first thing tomorrow, baby,” he said. “Crimmins will get you out of this.”
“Yes,” she said “All right, Lee. I’ll be all right.”
He went into the hall. A half dozen city reporters swarmed around. “This on the level, Mr. Parker?” a tall, lean faced newsman demanded. “It’s a little hard to take—mystery writer’s wife mixed up in real-life murder. This isn’t just a press gag for your play?”
“I wish it was,” Parker said, and pushed toward the door. He knocked the hands from his arm and walked out of the jail building. Green doorway lights tinted his big boned face, a weird and sickly hue.
The street, as he crossed toward a cab, was shiny black with summer night rain that had come and gone in the past hour. He tumbled into the hack, murmuring his home address.
As the car lurched away, the lean-faced reporter jumped onto the running board. “Give us a statement, sir. Do you think she’s guilty? You going to stick by her?”
The cab driver shoved the reporter off the running board and Parker was glad of that. He wouldn’t have known; he really wouldn’t have known what to say.
He laced his fingers between his knees, tried to force order into his mind. He wondered why Janie had never told him about this Dade McCreery and the old days before she was married. She’d told him little of anything about her past, he realized now. She had been in town, working at the library, but a short time when he’d met her.
The cab passed through quiet, shadowed streets, lined with dripping trees. The tires on the wet pavement, made an hypnotic whine of sound and some of the events of the past couple of hours came back to Parker’s mind.
He had come from a Dramatist’s Guild meeting in New York, about ten-thirty. He’d begun to run when he saw the blinking red lights of the town’s only police car in front of his house. He saw his neighbors gathered in groups on the lawn, gasping, whispering. He’d never forget the way they’d looked at him. Inside, he ran, yelling Janie’s name, sick and weak in the middle. But Janie wasn’t there.
A policeman was there, dusting fingerprint powder around. Henry Jerome, the old gent who lived next door, was there, watching the cop and absently brushing at the cuffs of his tweed slacks, as though he’d just spilled something on them.
The furniture was tumbled out of place and an antique chair that Janie prized was broken. There was a great, dark stain on the blue rug he had bought the week before. The bronze statuette of a golfer was lying on the floor, its base discolored and sticky, the rest of it covered with fingerprint powder.
Unaware that Parker had come in, the policeman said to Henry Jerome, conversationally: “Her prints are all over that there bronze doohickey. Looks bad.”
Parker said: “What is this? Where’s my wife?”
While they told him, Parker stared at Spooky, his wife’s jet black cat, sprawled near the club chair. Spooky had been kicked or trampled to death. Queerly, Parker remembered how he had complained to Janie about the cat clawing up furniture, shedding its long black hairs. He felt small and mean that he had ever quarreled with Janie about keeping the pet.
Parker’s thoughts returned to the present as the cab halted in front of his house. He paid the fare and turned through the hedges, up the short path to the house. He went up onto the porch, banged open the screen-door and swung into the living room. He stopped cold, just inside the doorway.
The girl stood by the fireplace, hands flat on his hips. Her eyes, staring at him, were black as jet. She was pretty except for her mouth, which was too small and spoiled looking, turned down at the corners, bitterly.
Parker turned his gaze from her and sent it around the room. The room had been upset before; it was worse now. Sofa and chair pillows were strewn around the floor. Books were pulled from their cases. A trash basket had been emptied out, its contents poured through.
“What are you doing here?” he said. “Who are you?”
She didn’t speak. She took several steps toward him, stopped. Her hands kept clenching and opening. She moistened her lips, tossed a bang of black hair away from her eyes.
In a tight, brassy voice, she said: “You hid the letters damned well, didn’t you? Or did the police get them?”
He shook his head. “What are you talking about?”
She tried to run past him toward the door. He grabbed her wrist, flung her into a chair. He stood there looking down at her, breathing stertorously. “What letters?” he said. “Where do you fit into this?”
Her long white fingers clutched the chair arms. “All right,” she said. “I came here to get the letters, but I didn’t find them. I was going to use them to make you pay plenty. Just like Dade McCreery was going to make your wife pay, in the first place.”
He took a deep breath. “Suppose you start at the beginning. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She didn’t look at him. Through her teeth, she said: “Maybe I don’t need the letters. Maybe just knowing what I know will be enough.”
She twisted her wrist from his grip, but didn’t attempt to get up. She went on: “It’s going to cost you plenty, Lee Parker, your wife killing my man. With some of that money, maybe I can give Dade the biggest, best funeral a guy ever had.” Her eyes got dull. “That will be something, won’t it?”
“Don’t you understand,” Parker told her. “I don’t know any of this. You’ve got to tell me the whole thing.”
She looked at him, suspiciously. Finally, she said: “Maybe you don’t at that. Maybe she would have kept that from you.”
She told him, then. Unknown to Janie, Dade McCreery had been a small town bad man when she met him. One night after he robbed a filling station, police picked him up while Janie was with him. Dade claimed he’d been with her at the time of the crime. Foolishly, she’d tried to help him, reaffirmed the lie. She took a jail sentence as his confederate.
For a short while she believed that they had both been framed, wrote to Dade from prison. But soon after, other inmates made her see the truth. She finished her sentence, left that part of the country, never saw Dade McCreery again.
“Until tonight,” the girl finished up. “Last week, Dade saw pictures of you and your wife in the paper, about you getting all the money from the movies. He still had Janie’s letters. He came out here tonight to blackmail her.”
Lee Parker didn’t answer right away. He knew what the police would think about this. It looked like Janie had killed McCreery to stop his blackmail, get the letters. She could have faked her faint when she heard Henry Jerome enter, cooked up the other story so that the police would believe that there had been a third, unknown party, who had been the killer, or that Janie had killed McCreery in self defense. If the blackmail letters were brought into it, it might become premeditated murder. It would go hard with Janie, then.
“I see,” Parker said, finally. “So now you are going to blackmail me?”
The girl’s lids half closed over her black pin-pointed eyes. Spots of color came into her cheeks. “Listen, mister! I was waiting outside in the car. I heard your wife scream. I saw a neighbor come running over. I waited a few minutes and then I went around to a side window and peeked in. Dade was—Dade was lying on the floor...” She shook her head as though to clear the sight from her mind. Her voice rose and she went on:
“Then I heard Janie tell the neighbor her story and I turned and ran to
the car, drove away. I didn’t want to get mixed up in it. Half way back to New York, I realized that your wife must’ve just cooked up that story. So I came back. I—”
Lee Parker didn’t hear the rest. He was looking around the room. Every once in awhile he sculled his foot at the black hairs on the rug, shed by the dead Spooky. He got to thinking about the blackmail letters. The police hadn’t mentioned them, so they had not got hold of them. This girl here had been searching for them, obviously had not found them. She had covered the room pretty well, so they could not have been hidden here.
He remembered that he had not talked with Henry Jerome, the next door neighbor who had been in on the thing. Perhaps Jerome had seen the letters, could tell him something about them.
“Look,” he said to the girl. “I’m going next door for a few minutes. Stay here. Don’t try to run away, I’d only call the police and they’d pick you up in nothing flat.”
She just stared at him with her dark, wild looking eyes. She didn’t say anything. He turned away from her and went out of the house, cut across the lawn to Jerome’s property. Lights were still on in Jerome’s house. He moved around some shrubbery, passed the window of a lighted room.
Inside, Parker got a glimpse of Jerome, a tall reedy old bachelor, in his pajamas, ready for bed. Jerome was holding a pair of tweed slacks under a living room lamp, brushing industriously at the cuffs with a whisk broom.
Something clicked then, in Parker’s mind. Cat hairs! Earlier tonight, when he had come in and found out about the murder, Henry Jerome had been there, brushing at the cuffs of his slacks. He was doing the same thing again, now. Jerome must have got Spooky’s hairs all over his trousers? That meant something now.
Thoughts whirled through Parker’s brain. He remembered the sweet gentleness of his wife, Janie, and knew that she had not lied. She couldn’t have done the murder. Yet somebody had. He remembered the missing letters—and that Janie had never mentioned them. The little pieces began falling into place like the pattern of a jigsaw puzzle, almost complete, so that you can visualize how the whole will look.
The Walt Whitman MEGAPACK ™ Page 14
