Modern Masters of Noir

by Ed Gorman (ed)

  Soon the taxi wheeled left into a private driveway, and he braked to wait. When the cab returned, he drove on, taking a look at the house as he passed. It was a great library of a place, barely visible from the road. High and square and formal, it sat atop a knoll, neatly combed grounds spilling green around it.

  Just beyond, he maneuvered about and parked. As he sat thinking what to do next, a gardening truck slid out of the drive that had swallowed the cab and came toward him. He got out and flagged it down. The driver was an old guy with a craggy, pleasant face. Brock asked him if he worked for the people in the library-type mansion. He said yes, but only once a week. He was an itinerant gardener with other customers in the neighborhood. He had a crew and a couple of his men were on a job down the road. He was on his way to pick them up. Yes, he knew all about the people up there on the knoll, but he was in a hurry. Brock asked him if twenty bucks would buy about ten minutes. He grinned and cut the motor, then motioned for Brock to sit on the seat beside him.

  The lady who owned the place was a Mrs. Alberta Wilmont. Before he died, her husband ran a shipping company—freighters. He left her millions. No, the young woman who just arrived in a taxi was not Mrs. Wilmont, she was Marian Ainsworth, a kind of secretary-companion who was distantly related to Alberta Wilmont.

  “Did Mrs. Wilmont ever own a diamond ring that was stolen?”

  “You bet she did! The ring was worth a fortune. About a month ago, while everyone was away from the house, burglars broke in. How they did it without tripping the alarm system nobody can figure. The thieves drilled the safe, swiped the ring and some less valuable jewelry, and a few hundred in cash. It was front-page stuff in the paper.”

  Brock asked a few more questions, gave the gardener the twenty, and twenty more to keep his mouth shut. Then he hustled away to the newspaper office and combed back issues until he found the account of the burglary. This done, he made a number of calls and finally hit what could be the jackpot.

  Shortly before 9:00 that evening, with just a few magazines locked in his attaché case, he drove toward the address Carlos had given him. It was an apartment house in an old section of Hollywood on a narrow street above Franklin. The building was large and might once have been magnificent, but now its crusty facade cried neglect and despair, most of the windows dark, the entrance bleakly lighted.

  He found an alley that led to a subterranean garage below the apartment house and drove down the ramp. He was in a gloomy dungeon of pillared space, empty but for a pair of junkyard heaps in a corner, squatting beside a late-model black Cadillac. Parking next to the Cadillac he climbed out cautiously with the attaché case. Clutching the grip of a holstered .38 revolver, one of several weapons he had collected from a long string of bad boys, he stood motionless, listening. The silence was so dense within the cavernous garage he could hear a distant murmur of traffic, the bleating of a horn.

  Peering inside the Cadillac he circled quietly to the front and reached under it to test the radiator. It was warm, almost hot. Someone had arrived not long before.

  On rubber-soled shoes he crossed the garage and came to the mouth of a dim corridor. Pausing again to listen, he moved on—past the doorways of a shadowy boiler room and a gutted laundry to an elevator. The car was somewhere above, but there was no indicator to show its location.

  He pressed the button and heard the creak and whine of the elevator’s descent. In the wan light the scabby, cement walls displayed a nearly endless scrawl of graffiti. Cobwebs nestled in corners, a light fixture dangled, the rank odor of urine invaded the torpid air.

  When the approaching mutter of the car told him it was near, he stepped aside, out of range. But when it opened, the elevator was empty. Brock thumbed the 7 button, though Carlos’s slip of paper designated apartment 8E.

  The elevator rattled slowly up to the seventh floor and stopped. He was greeted by a dark, fetid corridor of doors flung wide open upon vacant apartments. Gaping in wonder, he crossed the threadbare remnant of a carpet, found the stairway, and mounted soundlessly to the eighth. Here he cracked the door and peeked out.

  Under the subdued light from overhead fixtures, the eighth and top floor seemed clean and tidy enough, the carpet in good repair, the brown doors to the apartments sealed. Puzzling it, Brock concluded that the rest of the building was probably abandoned. As he stopped to consider his strategy, he saw Carlos hurry around a bend in the corridor and come to stand, head inclined, at the elevator.

  He looked so foolishly ineffectual and unfrightening that Brock wanted to laugh out loud. Instead he moved quietly up behind him and dropped a heavy hand on his shoulder.

  Carlos snapped around, wild-eyed, his jaw dropping in terror.

  “Looking for me Carlos?” Brock grinned.

  Carlos groaned. “What the hell you doing, man! I thought you were—”

  “An undercover agent of the SS. Right, Carlos?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, something like that. I am looking to see why you don’t show,” he said.

  “I couldn’t find 8E,” Brock said. “I must’ve been going the wrong way.”

  “Ah, well—no problem,” Carlos answered. “Come—” He had been staring with fascination at Brock’s case and as they moved down the hallway he asked nervously, “You have brought the money?”

  Brock gave the case an affectionate pat. “Thirty big ones. And you have the queers?”

  “The queers?” His expression flickered, brightened. “The phonies, ah yes, of course!” He gave a dental exhibition. “They are in the apartment, where we shall make the exchange.”

  He led Brock to the rear of the building and turned into a narrow passage. It terminated at the point where the doors to apartments 8E and 8F faced each other across a faded strip of carpet. The hall, lit by a single naked bulb, was dim. The air had a musty smell, tainted with something indefinable, like molding garbage.

  They were at the door to 8E, Carlos bringing out a set of keys, Brock telling himself that he would not go into the apartment unless he entered with an arm locked about Carlos’s neck, the .38 visibly pressing his head, when he sensed a movement and turned swiftly. Behind him, the door to 8F had been opened and an enormous Latin towered above him, grimacing fiercely as he hoisted a baseball bat and slammed it down.

  Brock had begun to duck out of range or the blow would have crushed his skull. Instead, it glanced thunderously off the back of his head, dropping him to the floor.

  Vaguely focused, his eyes opened upon a hazy scene. He was floating above a shimmering landscape. There was a blur of twinkling buildings and streets while below, dim and far away, a pool of white circled and tilted. It appeared to grow toward him, then recede, as if seen through binoculars that would not adjust. And he could feel the hard thrust of something against his chest.

  In the background voices drifted to him, as from a radio badly tuned. Carlos was pleading with someone called Mario, saying it wasn’t necessary to kill the man, just take his money and run. But Mario said no, it was too risky. “No, Carlos, this mama is gonna commit suicide. He’s gonna fly down from that window and—squash!—you got a bird who sings no songs!”

  Brock got the message. And fear jabbing him to life, he brought it all into focus. He was draped over a windowsill, gazing down a perpendicular wall to a moon-washed court eight stories below. The tilting, spinning face of the court, composed of unrelenting cement, winked at him.

  But even as this understanding jolted and sickened him, Mario reached down and scooped him up with ridiculous ease. Poising himself, aiming Brock at the open mouth of the window, he did not notice that while one of Brock’s hands dangled limply the other was under his jacket, bending the barrel of the .38 toward the great mass of his chest.

  Brock squeezed the trigger—once, twice, and again, knowing that while the big ones may fall harder, they do not always fall faster. No doubt the first bullet was an incredible surprise, for Mario simply stood rooted, as if considering the impossibility of it, his eyes dilating with aston
ishment. The second shot caused him to stumble backward, and the third buckled him slowly to the floor. Only then, with a mortal sigh, did he liberate Brock from the clutch of his arms.

  Carlos tried to run, but Brock caught him at the door and ordered him at gun point to empty Mario’s pockets and bring him the contents. The dead man was carrying $6,700 in hundred-dollar bills that proved, after close examination, to be genuine U.S. green. Carlos, on the other hand, was in possession of only ninety dollars.

  “Carlos,” Brock said sternly as he pocketed the bills, “I’ve been thinking seriously of killing you, and this doesn’t help your cause.”

  Seated on the floor, hands laced behind his neck, Carlos had been watching with resignation, as one who hopes for nothing but to survive. His face flashing alarm, he said tremulously, “I have little money because in the organization of the counterfeiting I am only a passer of the bills. Mario was in charge of the passers and the money in his wallet was to pay us our humble percentage.”

  Brock made a clucking sound. “How sad.” Gingerly, he felt the lump on the back of his head. “You may lower your hands now, Carlos, and you may smoke. A condemned man is always entitled to a last cigarette.”

  Carlos gave him a look of such gaping horror that Brock decided to ease off a bit. “However,” he added, “if you can find some way to repay me for this night of treachery, I might be persuaded to change my mind.”

  “Anything—anything at all that you wish,” Carlos said feverishly.

  “What did you do with my case, Carlos?”

  He pointed. “Over there in the closet. It is locked and we could not open it.”

  “And where is the three hundred thousand in bogus?”

  Carlos hesitated and Brock leveled the .38. “Hurry, Carlos, I’m aching to kill you!”

  “No, no! The bills are down in the trunk of Mario’s Cadillac. He was supposed to distribute them to the passers later tonight.”

  Brock reached for a set of keys resting on the floor with the assorted items Carlos had taken from Mario. “You’d better not be lying,” he warned. “Let’s go and see.”

  Toting his attaché case, he descended with Carlos to the garage. One of Mario’s keys opened the trunk of the Cadillac, and when the lid was raised there was indeed a carton holding three hundred grand in bogus bills. Brock ordered Carlos to transfer the carton to the trunk of his rented sedan. When this was done he locked the attaché case in with the counterfeits and gave Carlos the keys to the Cadillac.

  “Because you tried to prevent Mario from killing me,” he told Carlos, “I’ll make you a present of his car. You’re a pussycat in a jungle and I’d advise you to get out of this racket and into plumbing, or something equally suited to your talents. At heart, Carlos, you’re not a bad little fellow, and in fact I’ve become rather fond of you.”

  “You are fond of me? Truly?”

  “Truly.” Brock nodded solemnly. He opened the door of his rental, climbed in, and wound the motor.

  “You are a strange man,” said Carlos. “Most remarkable. But really, who are you, sir?”

  “There’s a tax on evil, and I’m the devil’s own collector,” Brock answered with a wisp of a smile. He backed and drove off.

  Marian Ainsworth, alias Mila, phoned him the next morning on the dot of nine. “Three hundred thousand,” he said.

  “No.”

  “In cash.”

  “Well—”

  “It’ll take time for the bank to get that much money together. Be here at four this afternoon.”

  “I can’t make it until eight this evening.”

  “At eight sharp, then.” He cut the connection.

  She was a few minutes early. When he opened the door and she stepped in, he spied her accomplices lingering in the shadows. A hundred to one they were the burglars who stole the ring—with her blueprint of the alarm system, and at a time when she told them the mansion would be empty.

  She was wearing a black lace cocktail dress. She looked stunning. Was there to be a little party to celebrate the split of a hundred grand apiece?

  She stood fidgeting at the center of the room, her eyes screaming her haste.

  Enjoying it, he said, “A little drink? To toast our transaction?”

  “I told you, I don’t drink!” she snapped.

  “All, that’s right. Too bad.”

  “Have you got the cash?”

  “Have you got the ring?”

  She dipped into her black-beaded evening bag and passed him the velvet box. It was the same diamond, he determined that immediately, but pretending to suspect otherwise he tested and inspected it with even more care than he had the first time.

  “The money is in that overnighter,” he told her finally, pointing to the chair where he had left it. “You may keep the bag—I’ll toss it in as a bonus.”

  Counting the cash, she was intensely concentrated, her face taking on a feral quality. Before she began, she selected several bills from random stacks and examined them closely. But, apparently satisfied, she went on to count the bills with furious speed, then nodded and said with a hectic smile, “Well, it seems to be all here!”

  She picked up the bag and all but bolted for the door, where she turned and said, “Now you own a diamond valued at more than half a million dollars, Mr. Brock. All you have to do is find someone to buy it. Mmm?”

  She went out.

  She was right, of course. It would be difficult to find anyone who would buy the ring at full price, no questions asked. But then, he had never intended to sell it. He hunted his rental in the parking area, found it, backed, and turned to drive away.

  Just then Marian Ainsworth’s accomplices loomed up out of the darkness. One at each side of the car, they aimed pistols at him. “OK, buddy, let’s have the ring!” barked the one at his window.

  “Don’t get nervous, boys,” he soothed. “I’ve got it right here in my pocket.”

  It was suicide to reach for his gun, so he brought the box out and started to hand it over. But then, with a trembling hand, he faked dropping the box to the floor. Bending to recover it, he rammed the pedal and gunned off blindly. They both fired at him, almost together. But they were too late.

  He sat up just in time. The car was veering off toward a tree as it raced down the drive to the street. He straightened the wheel, braked a bit, and glanced into the rearview mirror. They were jockeying the white Ford out of a parking slot, coming after him.

  He cut north into a cloistered residential section of fine old houses, squealing around a series of corners.

  It was no use. They were trailing him through every turn, hardly a block behind. He thought of braking suddenly and leaping out with his gun to fire at them, but changed his mind when, losing them for a moment as he wheeled around a tight curve, he spotted the tip of a driveway that vanished between a gateway of tall hedges. He swung into it at reckless speed, yawing dangerously, correcting, erasing his lights, slowing as he climbed and swept around to the house, a pillared old colonial.

  There was a garage with its door open and a vacant space inside. He slid into it, cut the motor, and listened. Nothing. He had lost them. But now, from a window somewhere above, came the shrill voice of a woman calling, “Is that you, Walter?”

  He was seated at a partitioned booth in a secluded corner of the restaurant atop the hotel where he had his getaway room. He had told the hostess that a Mr. Arnold Bevis would be looking for him shortly, and now he was sipping a Manhattan, winding down, feeling good.

  He had just ordered another when a plump little man with a Vandyke beard bustled over at the heels of the hostess. “I’m Arnold Bevis,” he said and flashed a smile. They shook hands and Bevis squeezed in across the table, setting a briefcase on the cushion beside him. The waitress delivered Brock’s second Manhattan and he asked, “Will you have one with me, Mr. Bevis?”

  Bevis shook his head. “No, thanks. I have an appointment with Alberta Wilmont and there isn’t time.”

  The waitr
ess departed and Brock said, “You told Mrs. Wilmont you’ve recovered the ring?”

  “I told her we thought we had recovered it. And now, if you will, Mr. Brock, let’s see if we have.”

  Brock produced the velvet box, opened it, and slid it across to Bevis, who brought implements from his briefcase and, after testing to be sure the diamond was genuine, removed it from its setting, weighed, and measured it. “Did you know, Mr. Brock,” he said, “that like fingerprints no two diamonds are alike? When we insure a diamond, we chart all of its individual characteristics. That way, there can be no mistake about its identity.”

  He wrote figures in a notebook, fixed a loupe to his eye, and, studying the diamond in the light from the table lamp, continued to make notes. Finally, he took an insurance appraisal form from his case and compared it with his notations.

  Nodding, he said, “Yes, this is our baby all right.” He returned the stone to its setting, put his tools away, and stared curiously at Brock. “I looked up your ad in the Times and I can see how it would attract those two who stole the ring. But how did you get it away from them without giving them the money?”

  “That’s a trade secret, Mr. Bevis. But I’ll say this much—I had to do some fast shuffling to escape them. And if I didn’t have the devil’s own luck, I wouldn’t be sitting here waiting for you to bless me with the reward.”

  Bevis took a check from his case and passed it to Brock with a release form. “Fifty thousand is a very large sum. We seldom pay rewards in excess of five percent and I had a tough time getting approval from my company—especially since you were in a hurry.”

  Brock looked at the check and signed the release. “I’m always in a hurry, Mr. Bevis. The coals are hot and I have to jump fast.”