Bardwell said not a word by way of breaking into Honest John’s reconstruction. After a pause, he looked up, shaking his head. “No, God, no, Carmody! It couldn’t have been Katras! He might have bashed my head in, but not Annette’s. It doesn’t make any sense, killing her. I’m sorry you told the police. After all, pawing a girl—well, he’s hot headed, impulsive—but he wouldn’t plot deliberate murder. I’d not have taken her up there if there’d been any hard feelings on my account. When Annette and I told him, months ago, how we felt about each other, he took it easy, and even opened champagne.”
Honest John reached for his hat. “I hope I didn’t talk out of turn. I’m sure sorry if I did. When’ll you be out of this place?”
“I’m getting out if I have to walk out in these pajamas. My leg’s a bit bad, but I can limp.”
When honest John took the wheel of his car, he drove automatically. Bardwell’s sudden change, from fury at Katras to assurance as to Katras’ innocence, was puzzling. It seemed that, after a moment’s reflection, the good-looking engineer had remembered some reason for protecting the Greek. What fear had caused this change of front?
There was no sense in quizzing Bardwell. The man would dummy up. The thing to do was to wait for him to leave the hospital; and in the meanwhile, be getting a good look at his apartment in San Francisco. Somewhere about the place there might be evidence pointing toward the reasons for his apparent fear of accusing Katras. And this was Honest John’s plan when he passed the Del Monte, and swung around the curve toward Salinas and the big city.
“Something she ate,” he muttered. “Never saw ptomaine freeze anyone’s face in that awful grip Annette had. Never saw a drunk look that way.”
He still saw the exposed teeth, the pinched, sardonic smile; an absolutely impossible expression on the face of one knocked unconscious and then slugged to death. It was a strychnine grin, and he wondered if the MD’s had noticed it. But then, they didn’t know Annette’s face as he did; she was just cold meat to them, a stiff didn’t have any expression as far as a doctor was concerned. Strychnine grin, and strychnine cramps? He’d seen a woman who had taken a dose of the stuff, years ago, when he was a young cop.
But before he spilled enough to have the coroner demand an autopsy, Honest John wanted a further play at prodding Katras and Bardwell. Both were now worried; let them simmer, and someone’s top would finally blow off. So, that night, he headed for Bardwell’s apartment on Pine Street.
The Chinaman at the elevator took him to the fifth floor; Honest John hoofed it to the sixth, found Bardwell’s door, and saw that prowling would be easy. He went up the stairs to the roof, replaced the trap, and then crossed to the fire escape, which was on the alley side of the building.
His approach was right. In a moment, he was on the landing, and at one of Bardwell’s windows. He took a thin jimmy of alloy steel and started to pry the window. Then he heard voices in the adjoining room; a man and a woman were both trying to talk at once. A thread of light reached across the Chinese carpet. A door, barely ajar, played tricks with the dialog. Though he could not hear them clearly enough to count, they would hear the snap of the window lock.
Impatiently, he waited. Across the alley, someone switched on a light. A shade rolled up. He wedged himself against the grille, hoping that no one in the adjacent building would see him. Then a street car came clanging up the cross street. Honest John put pressure on the jimmy, and with the metallic clatter at the corner, the snapping lock was just another little sound.
He eased the sash upward, slowly, soundlessly; he hurdled a hot radiator, crept over the thick carpet, and past a chesterfield. Bardwell was saying, “You got my letter? I did not write you about the accident.”
“But you did, darling. I’ve got it here.”
And that exchange was what made Honest John abandon stealth. He bounded toward the bedroom door. This was better than he had hoped!
His eagerness proved a snag. Street reflection had spotted the furniture, but not the suitcase in the middle of the room. He took a header, and the floor shook from the impact. Bardwell cursed, jerked the door open; the girl screamed, “It’s a burglar!”
Bardwell moved fast. Before Honest John could bolt for the hall door, the engineer was at the threshold of the bedroom, and cutting loose with a pistol. Honest John, though clear of the broad path of light, was in a tight corner. He yelled, “Cut it out, you fool, it’s me! Carmody!”
But Bardwell was frightened, shooting first, questioning later. Slugs thumped into the thick carpet. Honest John snatched the light suitcase and heaved it. The missile smacked the bandaged face and at the same time deflected the automatic. He followed up, lunging from a crouch; he connected and snatched Bardwell’s wrist before the gun could get back in line.
In the full light, the engineer recognized the intruder, and gasped, “I thought it was Katras—what the hell you doing here?”
That was hard to answer without tipping off his hand; but what kept Honest John silent for a moment was the girl who stood there, wide eyed and mouth open, trying to scream again. She wore a lacy slip, and she had beautiful legs. One hand was still at her bosom as though reaching for something hidden; that letter Honest John guessed but he said, “Here we go, Beatrice!” This was the redhead, the girl who had been trying to persuade Katras into a badger game to hook Bardwell. The engineer’s face changed as much as his bandages permitted.
He stepped forward and demanded, “What’s the idea, Carmody? You’re lucky I didn’t kill you for a burglar.”
“Tell you in a minute.” He saw that Beatrice was scared and red; he pocketed Bardwell’s automatic, and at the same time, snagged the redhead’s slip. She screeched as the lace and silk tore. Then Bardwell bounded in to floor him. Honest John sidestepped, pulled with the punch, and knocked the engineer back across the bed.
“Hold it, both of you!” Honest John opened his big fist. “Let’s look at this letter the gal says she got, and you say you didn’t write.”
It was addressed to Mrs. Cyril Bardwell, in Fresno, a little over three hours drive from San Francisco. “What the hell you doing with this?”
“I’m Mrs. Bardwell, why shouldn’t I have it?”
The engineer was sitting up, sputtering. Honest John glanced at the postmark; the letter had been mailed several hours before the fatal crash on the Monterey Highway. “And this tells about the accident, huh? Explaining how he and the boss’s daughter got cracked up on the way to the old man’s lodge in Carmel?”
“That’s exactly what it says, and what of it? He had to be nice to his employer’s daughter, didn’t he?”
“So you had to be nice to Ion Katras, I guess. I saw all that show, upstairs. I saw you dive for your car to hightail back to Fresno, in time to get this letter this morning. And the letter brings you back.”
Beatrice Bardwell choked, sank back into a chair. And then the cops arrived. Someone had reported the gun play. As they barged in, a hatchet-faced woman with white hair trailed after. “What’s the idea?” the prowl car men demanded. “Who got shot?”
“I thought it was a burglar,” Bardwell began.
Honest John cut in, “While you’re here, pinch this guy for the murder of Annette Gaynor. In a faked auto crack-up. He wrote about the accident before it happened. That’s what brought his wife up here.”
“I didn’t write it!”
The white-haired woman stepped up and said, “Why, that’s the very letter you left on your dresser, and when I came in to clean up and saw it was to your wife, I went and mailed it. While you were running around with another woman.”
Honest John handed the letter to the cops, then he said, “Beatrice Bardwell was worried about the way her husband was playing up to old man Gaynor’s daughter, getting engaged to the girl, trying to fix it up so he’d become a partner in the construction company. That’s all plain now, from what I saw last night, up
in the Sequoia Club. She came in from Fresno to put the heat on Ion Katras, figuring that Katras, who liked Annette, would just break the engagement and shut up. She don’t want to crab the good job.”
Beatrice said, “That’s right. And later, he could send for me, and pretend we’d been married after he broke up with Annette Gaynor.”
One of the cops asked, “How’d you start doping this out, Carmody?”
“Simple. Him and Annette were grappling in his car, he said she had cramps, I suspected strychnine. Also, she’d been beaten to death with a lug wrench, which would throw suspicion away from the poison angle. Finally, when I told him Ion Katras must have slashed the tire that supposedly caused the crash, he was all ready to hang it on the Greek, but when I spilled about the girl having been slugged to death with a wrench, he tried to cover Katras, because he didn’t want the Greek proving an alibi. Once Katras proved he wasn’t there, after the crash, to conk Annette, he’d probably get clear on the tire-slashing business. But ask the cops in Monterey; they got everything except that one point I was looking for—a bottle of strychnine around this house, which would settle Annette no matter how the crash worked out.”
And that was the way it did shape up. There was a poison bottle in the apartment, and strychnine revealed by the autopsy. The letter, mailed before the accident, told how Bardwell had escaped with sprains, and cuts in his scalp, while “poor Annette’s” skull had been fractured by the dive through the windshield.
Later, Honest John gave the D.A. his closing lines: “I was starting out on a hunch, but the more I saw of it, the less I thought Ion Katras did the job. He’d have conked Bardwell, not Annette. But Bardwell had a squawking wife, so he had to get rid of Annette. With a slashed tire making it look like sabotage, old man Gaynor wouldn’t fire the dead daughter’s fiancé for crazy driving. And the good job would be cinched. He’d have gotten away with it, hands down, if Annette hadn’t invited me to Carmel, and I hadn’t seen her throwing a fit, in that car.”
Then he drove down the Peninsula, and found Ion Katras at the club. He said to the worried Greek, “Look here, pal. I just turned up the guy that killed Annette. Neither one of us mugs had a chance with her.”
The Greek smiled somberly. “I got sore when she told me she and Bardwell had been married secretly, in Reno. I knew that secret stuff meant trouble. I tried to tell her, but she wouldn’t listen, and then I got light headed. All right, here we are again, from the case of the extra bride we get to that case of Amontillado.”
PRUNE PICKING PATRIOT
Originally published in Hollywood Detective, December 1943.
The Santa Clara valley sun blazed down through the foliage; the dead calm air was heavy with the scent of prunes freshly shaken down, and by now, Honest John Carmody hated prunes with a bitterness theretofore reserved for Grade A enemies.
His round face, always ruddy, had become beef-red. Shade or no shade, the sun got him. Sweat trickled in a steady stream as he scrambled about on hands and knees, picking prunes from the ground and putting them into the ten-quart pail.
His knees were pounded and bruised. His back was ready to break. Knives and flaming arrows seemed to tear between his shoulders.
How many million prunes to the ton? How many aches can you jam into a man’s carcass, a three hundred pounder?
But for the war, Honest John would have had his number twelves planted on the agency desk, and a long black cigar stuffed into his face, and a bourbon and soda wrapped up in a ham-sized fist. Private dicks, however, were a non-essential industry.
Each ten-quart pail weighed a ton. The Okies and Mexicans didn’t mind it. Neither did the high school kids, who had a lot of fun pelting each other with Santa Clara nuggets until crusty Virgil Bean threatened to boot them till their noses bled.
Orchard after orchard: mile after mile, and not enough help to go around.
When he heard voices near at hand, Honest John painfully straightened up. A file of pickers were coming from Gunnar Agard’s place, across the road. Virgil Bean was pointing, telling them where to start work, after they had made camp.
A bit of labor piracy, huh?
And then he saw Gunnar Agard: a lean, long-legged and leathery farmer with a white mustache; he was past seventy, the neighbors said, but he moved with quick, clod-hopping strides, and there was nothing senile about his voice when he shouted, “You rat, you can’t take my pickers!”
Virgil Bean was some twenty years younger; he was heavy, muscular, square-jawed. When he answered, he mocked Agard’s trace of Scandinavian accent: “They are coming because they vant to; I didn’t ask them. Vat you got is marbles, not prunes.”
That last was pretty nearly the truth. Agard’s fruit was smaller, it wedged in between lumps of earth; twice as much effort was necessary to pick a ton.
Honest John rose. The final straightening knifed him until he almost groaned. The ancient Swede’s bitter blue eyes blazed. His fists were knotty. Honest John, though sorry for the old fellow, was thinking, “I’d sure not want to’ve tangled with him thirty years ago!”
“I bust your damn’ head!” Agard yelled, and ploughed in.
He asked no odds for his years, and his first punch rocked the solid Virgil Bean. But Agard was bucking the calendar. He soaked up the first punch. He tried to come back after the second. His own wallop had lost steam, and then—
Whop!
Bean laid him out. “Get off my ranch, or I’ll fill your pants with shot!”
Agard tried to get up and fight some more. His hands closed about a clod. Bean booted him, laid him out cold.
Honest John said, “You know he wasn’t going to heave that clod and if he had, what of it?”
“You don’t like it, huh?”
Honest John was just tired and griped enough to have but one answer: it popped like a pistol, and Bean toppled, glassy-eyed. The newly arrived prune pickers cheered, and so did some of the old crew. Honest John boosted Agard to his feet. The old Swede muttered, “Keep your hands off, I don’t need no help—”
“I’m going to pick your prunes, irregardless.” He turned on those who had walked out. “And you, you heels, how are you going to play it?”
“Who’s a heel?” someone demanded.
“Aw, go get your zoot suit!” Carmody kicked over his bucket of prunes. “Let’s go, Agard, we’re working for you.”
Half a dozen of the deserters trailed after them.
The Swede grumbled, “All these years, we been friends, he lent me money, too; now this turns up, you never know what kind of stinker a man is till he’s dead.”
When he got a look at Agard’s prunes, Carmody saw that he had talked himself into something worse than he’d expected. And that evening, as he limped to his jalopy, Honest John faced more grief. It kept him awake in his tourist cabin, just outside of San Jose. Alma, old man Bean’s daughter, would be griped when she heard about the quarrel.
* * * *
Alma Elwell, after quitting a no-good husband, had come back home, and now she was working on the night shift at the cannery. Each morning, on his way to work, Honest John had been detouring to pick her up when the night shift ended at six. That beat the crowded bus.
Well, the gal was still married, and anyway, she was young enough to like ’em tall and handsome, instead of dumb-looking and baldheaded. Nevertheless, he decided to get in a first word. Alma, having gone to town that afternoon, and then directly to work, had not heard of the quarrel.
Some of the girls who came from the cannery wore their white uniforms. Others had changed, mostly to slacks. But Alma, who was blonde and shapely enough to get away with slacks, was still smart enough to have voted for skirts.
“Oh, hello!” She waved, left the chattering crowd of fillies and battleaxes, and headed for the car. “You look tired.”
“You don’t. Wish I were your age.”
H
e meshed the gears. Alma eyed him, speculatively, then retouched her make-up. After a moment, she said, “I hope you weren’t really annoyed because I couldn’t go to the movie with you last night.”
He forced a chuckle. “After all, you’re bound to have dates.”
Alma sighed. “Funny calling that a date. I met my husband.” Silence for some yards. Then, “The usual sales talk.”
“Going to try it again?”
She shook her head. “The folks say I’d be crazy to.”
Near the end of the short run, Carmody pulled up beside an orchard, and told her about the quarrel. He concluded, “So I socked your father, which was just about as lousy as him socking old Agard.” Then, leaning over to open the door: “We’re almost here, and I guess you’ll want to hoof the rest of the way.”
“So that’s what made you act so funny. Well, I’m sorry it happened, but I certainly won’t refuse to ride with you; don’t be silly! Dad’s just hot-tempered.”
They were swinging into the drive when Alma screamed. Though orchards blocked the view, a column of flame rose high above the trees. Virgil Bean’s house was ablaze. From a distance, Carmody heard the yells of the prune pickers, who were dashing from their distant camp.
Agard, a pail of chicken feed in one hand, came running from across the road. Carmody booted the throttle.
The house was just about gone. A man in an old fashioned night shirt lay in the dusty clearing. He was bloody and scorched; he twitched as though trying to get further from the heat.
Honest John bounded from the wheel. “Stay where you are,” he said to Alma. “I’ll handle this.”
Then Agard joined him.
Though Bean’s skull had been hacked three times with an axe, the man still lived. His eyes opened, dazed and unfocused. He made a warding gesture as Carmody and Agard bent over him. In a vacant monotone he muttered, “Come back to finish me—you—you—”
The half a dozen prune pickers who had arrived heard all too clearly, and eyed each other. Honest John didn’t like that, but he didn’t skip a beat: “Phone for an ambulance, he’s still alive. Bean, who did it?”
E. Hoffmann Price's Two-Fisted Detectives Page 21
