Grant hopped into his car as if unaware that he was being shadowed. But he stepped on the gas, went back and forth through a maze of streets, and shook Ellis and his chartered cab in ten minutes. He arrived at his own apartment at a quarter of ten to find Linda Powers pacing the floor nervously. Her eyes were wide and frightened now.
“I—I was afraid you weren’t coming back!” she said hoarsely. “I’m nearly crazy! I know they’ll kill Stanley if I hand over those pebbles.” Grant took the girl’s arm and shook it gently. “Buck up, kid,” he said. “You put up a swell scrap when you fought me. Now you’ve got to fight some more, and I know you will. It’s almost time to meet Rinaldi. You’ve got to act as though everything was all right, as though you had the real stones. Be a little nervous if you want to. They’ll think it’s just because you’re afraid over your brother. But act as though you had the stones, and hand them over.”
“I don’t understand,” said the girl fearfully, “If they see anybody with me, they’ll think I’ve brought the police. They’ll kill Stanley.”
“They won’t see me,” said Grant, “even though I’m with you.”
“How—where will you be?”
“In the rumble seat of your car!”
* * * *
They went down to the street together. Grant opened the rumble quickly, took the cushion out, and got inside. He drew the cover down, said: “O. K. let’s go!”
It was the stuffiest, most uncomfortable ride Grant had ever taken. He had drawn his legs up to his chin and twisted his ankles around. The flivver seemed to have solid springs, and a million squeaks and rattles. Fumes from the exhaust filtered up and nearly choked him. He kept a tight grip on his gun, and wondered how soon he’d have to use it.
His right hand with the automatic was twisted up. He could see his wrist watch. The radium hands pointed to ten-five.
At ten-fifteen, after they’d gone a couple of miles along Harrison Road, Grant heard the brakes of Linda’s car squeak. He was thrown violently against the metal partition as she pulled into the curb. He heard the tires of another car swish, heard a car door open and shut.
He waited five tense seconds in the stuffy darkness, then went into action. He lifted the roadster’s rumble seat, twisted his neck, and saw a big car with its engine running drawn up alongside. There were two men in it; the driver and a man in the back seat, holding a machine gun. Another man had just come up to the side of the flivver, said something to Linda, and she had handed him the bag of pebbles.
Grant’s muscles were taut as steel spring. He threw the rumble-seat top back, thrust his head and shoulders up, and shouted an order to Linda. “Get down—quick!”
His gaze was riveted on the machine gunner and the driver of the sedan. They were the most dangerous. The other man had the bag and would probably sprint for it. He did, and the machine gunner, scowling savagely, thrust the nose of his weapon out the side window.
He didn’t have a chance to press the trigger, for Grant’s first bullet caught him in his hunched right shoulder. It spun him around, crippled him, and made him drop the deadly weapon.
The man with the black bag leaped to the sedan’s running board, and screamed a command at the driver. Grant’s second bullet crashed into his leg, made him lose his balance. It sent the man squalling and writhing to the street, with his gun and bag dropping as the car lurched ahead.
Grant fired two more shots in quick succession, ripping lead into the sedan’s rear tires. Air screeched and swished, rims bumped, and the big car became as unwieldy as a steelshod truck.
The driver, swearing fiercely, tried to steer with one hand, and fire back at Grant with the other. Grant, a human cyclone, had leaped out of the rumble compartment now. He fired with swift precision, sending a bullet into the driver’s arm. The sedan lurched over the curb, bumped fifteen feet farther. Then it struck a fence, and stopped with a clatter of broken glass and crumpled metal.
There was utter silence for a moment, until a cop’s whistle sounded down the block. The next second the officer came running into sight, and Grant and the girl had all the help they needed. But Grant had the situation well in hand.
The cop glanced at him, and touched his cap in recognition. Grant was bending over the fallen man in the street. He saw a dank head of hair, a long, thin face, a pair of close-set eyes with a scar above them.
“Rinaldi!” he muttered. “So—you came for the rocks yourself! Where’s Stanley Powers?”
Rinaldi did not answer. He only cursed sibilant Latin phrases. Grant pressed his gun closer.
“Better talk! You’re due to burn, anyway, for the man you bumped off in Van Horn’s office. What did you do with Powers?”
But Rinaldi remained silent. He glared at Grant with murderous hatred, refusing to speak.
It was one of his men, the driver of the sedan, who talked, when Grant explained patiently that the game was up and that the only chance he had to save himself from the chair was to turn state’s evidence.
The man gave the address of a cheap rooming house, then muttered: “You’ll find Powers there, but he ain’t feelin’ good. We beat him up after he double-crossed us.”
“What do you mean—double-crossed you?”
“Well, he tipped us off about the ice, then grabbed it, and tried to walk out on us after the raid. We got him, but he’d hid the sparklers somewhere. He was too punch-drunk to talk straight.
“How did he tip you off?”
“Over the phone. He told the boss that a bunch of rocks had just come in and that he’d help us lift ’em if we’d make it look right and split afterward.”
Grant turned and took Linda Powers’ arm.
“Come on,” he said grimly. “I know where your brother is now. Let’s go get him.”
Another cop had run up. They had the prisoners covered; Grant didn’t care about Rinaldi now. He wanted two things—to see what Stanley Powers had to say, and to locate the stolen diamonds.
They reached the address that Rinaldi’s man had given, but Grant didn’t ring. He used a skeleton key in his pocket and entered a dark hall. A nervous voice called down from a room above.
“Is that you, boss?”
Grant saw a gun gleam dully. He whispered to Linda, made her wait, and ascended the stairs first. He got the drop on the man above, who had been left behind to guard the prisoner. Grant disarmed him, backed him against the wall, and entered the room where Stanley Powers lay.
Young Powers’ head and face were covered with bruises. He had been cruelly beaten, knocked unconscious, possibly given a fractured skull; but he was still alive.
When Grant called her, the girl gave a little moan and ran to her brother’s side. She knelt beside him, passed her trembling hands gently over his battered face, and Powers began to mutter feverishly.
“She’ll know where to find them. Linda’ll know! I dumped them where we used to play when we were kids. I didn’t double-cross you, boys—honest. I never tipped you off. It must—have been somebody else. You’ve got me wrong!” Grant was frowning. He touched Linda’s shoulder, jerked his thumb toward the guard, said: “Keep that mug covered. Give him a dose of lead if you have to. I’m going to take your brother out of here. He’ll be all right, but we’ve got to get him to a hospital.”
While the girl held a gun grimly against the back of Rinaldi’s man, Grant lifted Powers and carried him downstairs. He signaled a cop at the corner, asked him to take charge of the guard, then with Linda and her brother, he went to the nearest hospital. The interne’s superficial examination was enough to convince Grant that Powers would recover. He nodded and hurried out into the street.
Linda had forgotten about the diamonds now, but Grant hadn’t. He knew the law would be waiting to hound young Powers when he got well enough to talk. The testimony of Rinaldi and his men would put him in a bad light. He’d have a tough time explaining, unless the stones were found—and so would Linda Ellis, the company detective, would be certain Powers was guilty, and would m
ake his life miserable.
Grant returned to Van Horn’s office with the black bag in his hand. He smiled grimly when he saw that Ellis had returned also. There was another company dick with him. Their faces tensed as Grant came through the door. Van Horn’s eyes bulged at sight of the black bag.
“Der stones!” he cried. “You’ve got dem, Grant. I know der bag!”
Ellis’ fat face got red. His big hands opened and shut. He clamped his teeth on his cigar.
Grant opened the black bag quietly and lifted the tissue paper package out. His face was grave.
“I wish I did have the diamonds,” he said grimly. “But there’s been a slip somewhere. I’ve located Stanley Powers. He’s in the hospital now, and Rinaldi and his bunch have been rounded up. But the diamonds are still missing. All I’ve brought you are these!”
He flung the worthless contents of the tissue-paper package rattlingly over Van Horn’s desk. The Dutchman’s eyes bulged out still more.
“Pebbles!” he screeched. “You pring me a lot of pebbles! Vat good are dose? I vant my diamonds!”
Ellis sneered and spoke with heavy sarcasm. “Clever work, Grant! You’ve got the boy and the crooks—everything but what you went after—the diamonds. That’s success for you!”
But Grant’s face had suddenly become expressionless. He didn’t seem to take offense at the fat detective’s sneers.
He said: “Linda Powers found that bag with the pebbles inside it in a park. Her brother had thrown them there after he got away from Rinaldi’s mob, and before they grabbed him again and beat him up. If anybody had found the bag with the diamonds in it by chance, they wouldn’t have bothered to substitute pebbles. They’d have gone off with the whole thing.”
“Yeah!” sneered Ellis.
“Yeah! That means the pebbles were in it when Powers threw it there.”
“The first thing you’ve said that ain’t dumb!” Ellis grated. “It means the boy has got ’em, or knows where they are! It means I’m gonna put the finger on him.”
Grant shook his head slowly. “He doesn’t know any more about those diamonds than you do, Ellis—maybe not as much!”
“Look here! What the hell!”
“Powers was out of his head when we found him. He said he hadn’t tipped Rinaldi off, that it must have been someone else. And delirious people don’t lie. Remember that, Ellis!”
“Then the girl got the rocks. You say she found the bag. Well, she musta slipped the pebbles in. She wouldn’t have sneaked off if she hadn’t known—”
But Grant shrugged and turned away. He picked up a couple of the pebbles from Van Horn’s desk, fingered them, and sauntered toward the window. Then he stooped and sniffed at the bowl of paper-white narcissi standing on the black settee.
“Nice flowers you’ve got, Van Horn,” he murmured, and his knee brushed clumsily against the settee, knocking it and the bowl over with a crash. Water and white pebbles spilled out on the carpet as Grant made a seemingly ineffectual grab to save the wreckage he had caused.
Van Horn’s pink face went deathly white. He made a clutch at his desk, staggered toward the flowers, stopped when he met Grant’s eyes. Ellis was staring stupidly, but suddenly an amazed cry came from his lips and he bent down. The other company man was with him. Something among the white pebbles on the floor sent out prismatic gleams.
“Look! Those are—diamonds!”
Van Horn had yanked open his desk drawer fiercely. His fat face was convulsed in sudden anger. He brought a gun into sight, swung it up, but Grant’s hard right fist crashed against his face before he could shoot. Grant spoke coldly.
“I thought so, Van Horn. It was you who tipped Rinaldi off—after you’d taken the diamonds out of the safe and stuck pebbles in the bag. It looks like an airtight trick to steal your own ice, and fix it so Rinaldi would come and grab the pebbles.
“You figured he’d think Powers had doublecrossed him when he found them, and bump Powers off the way he did the other clerk. That would have made it sweet for you. Diamonds are hard to sell these days, so you thought you’d collect the insurance and keep the ice, too.
“But Powers spoiled your stunt without knowing it, when he staged a getaway from Rinaldi long enough to hide the bag. And you tripped up yourself, when you used these pebbles to replace the ice. After what happened the sight of your flowers here began to put me wise. Those pebbles, and that cut-glass bowl—well, they looked like a swell hiding place!”
Ellis, on his hands and knees gathering up the diamonds, growled:
“There’s something phony somewhere. Guys don’t come that smart!”
“I had to have the reward cash,” said Grant, grinning. “There’s somebody I want to split with—a little lady who can swing a mean gun and a meaner fist. I wouldn’t have found the rocks if she hadn’t found the pebbles first.”
DEATH OF THE FLUTE, by Arthur J. Burks
China had left her mark upon Dorus Noel. He thought of that now as he sat musing, in his house on Mott Street, in New York’s Chinatown. From somewhere out in the street, or perhaps in a store next door, a clock sounded the hour of three in the afternoon. At the same time some of his own priceless clocks began to strike. One of them he especially loved because it always gave him a smile. It was a beautiful gem incrusted thing which had been given to Emperor Ch’ien Lung by Louis Fifteenth of France…and when it struck the hour eight tiny human figures in blue came out on its top and danced a tinkling minuet.
A second clock was all of glass, save for its works, which were surrounded like a serpent by a circular staircase. When this clock struck three it did it in odd fashion. A gold ball came through a hole in the fourth step and rolled down three steps, making a tinkling noise. At four o’clock the ball fell a step further, taking the additional hour to travel back up the circular stairway.
Now the one clock danced the minuet, the other rolled its golded ball down the three steps, thus striking the hour. Dorus Noel sighed.
“Thank all the gods,” he murmured, “that Chu Chul is dead. He must be. With my own eyes I saw his clutching yellow hand sink under the muddy waters of the Pei Ho at Tientsin, and I waited for two months for his resurrection, which did not transpire. My work here in New York will be easy compared to the years-long game of hide and seek with The Cricket.”
Noel had formed the habit of talking to himself because he found it easier to think, and he did not speak in Chinese because, in China, anybody who listened might have been a minion of Chu Chul. Now he rose from his desk and strode to a mirror on the wall, threading his way through the many treasures which filled his study. He passed the red lacquer screen with its decorations of tiny bird feathers. He circled the crooked screen just inside the door, which kept out evil spirits because they could only travel in a straight line.
He faced the mirror, before which his “boy” Liu Wong had placed two burning joss sticks for some strange reason of his own. Noel leaned forward, staring at his own handsome face, which looked far too old for his twenty-six years. He had lived three lifetimes in that age, and Chu Chul was responsible for most of his aging. His brown hair, almost red, should, he decided, have been gray. He lifted his hands, one of which was oddly twisted—memory of Chu Chul’s pincers of torture—and pulled the shirt away from his chest, exposing it.
Then he stared long at the mark on his white skin. It was three parallel, horizontal bars, perhaps an inch in length, crossed by a diagonal transversal. They frere the Chinese character “wong” which means “ruler,” or “master of men.” They were not Noel’s chop. They had been burned into Noel’s skin on the one occasion when Noel had fallen into the hands of The Cricket, in the cat-and-mouse game they had played. Even now Noel could remember every word The Cricket had spoken to him in Tangku when he had wielded the branding iron:
“So that you shall never forget, Dorus Noel, that The Cricket is your master, your ruler…as he is master and ruler of many men…and women. If it happens that you live you will go through life be
aring my mark. And never, alive or dead, will you ever win over me. I never forget or forgive…and I pay my debts of vengeance!”
Right now Noel could hear the singsong voice of The Cricket speaking. He shook himself to dispel the fancy.
“Thank God that’s over, and The Cricket is dead.”
Noel returned to his desk…thinking back…recalling, planning on how he should perform his secret tasks in Chinatown. Here he must learn all over again. Here he would have what he had always hoped to have; contact with China, however slight, and contact with his own kind.
He didn’t realize how the hours had fled until his stomach told him it was time for dinner. The two clocks struck. The eight little figures danced their minuet. The golden ball rolled down from the eighth step. It was seven o’clock…and vague shadows were creeping into the study. Liu Wong should long since have summoned him to dinner. Oh, well, perhaps the “boy” had forgotten that dinner was at six-thirty instead of nine as in Tientsin. He would remind him. Liu Wong should long since have summoned him by making his strange music on the “wooden fish”—a hollow fish made of wood, suspended from the kitchen ceiling, and used as a gong.
But only silence came from the kitchen. Noel did not even smell the enticing odor of food. Strange, strange indeed. In China the circumstance would have put him instantly on guard. But this was the United States. He started to rise. Then his hands fell back from the desk and he sat bolt upright in his chair. All the color drained out of his face. Perspiration beaded his forehead swiftly. His eyes went wide, mirroring horror, a premonition of disaster…for at last there came a sound from the kitchen. It never should have come from there, yet it came…and it sounded a tocsin of warning to the brain of Dorus Noel. For the sound which came was the note of the five-note Chinese flute. How well Noel remembered the five-note flute! Two Chinese musicians who knew the flute and the secret code of the Classics, could even talk with one another on their flutes, in a weird telegraphy which no “foreigner” could ever hope to understand.
The Detective Megapack Page 83
