E. Hoffmann Price's Two-Fisted Detectives

by E. Hoffmann Price

For a cop, Mac was one of the best. But a cop, like a soldier, has to do his job. As long as he could, he’d hold off on her account, but there was a limit.

  Before I could start for the rear, Bernice came out. “I heard it all, Cleve. Isn’t it awful?”

  I stood there like a goon. “How long were you gone, and where?”

  She answered, “I was awfully sore quick. So I came up here. You don’t think I knew?”

  “When you came in, I quit thinking.”

  “Cleve, you didn’t do it.”

  “I didn’t, but they got me where I live. That card made out in advance. That’s bad. You heard what he said.”

  She sighed. “I’d be in an awful jam, saying I was with you when it happened. Cleve, I just couldn’t! It’d be different if Grant hadn’t been—I mean, it’d be embarrassing any time, but tonight—”

  I wasn’t able to ask her how we’d know when it happened. I couldn’t believe she’d done it, and then come up here. But it wasn’t impossible. That fistful of twenties worried me.

  “Where’d you get all that money? He never gave you any. The whole neighborhood knows that.”

  Her eyes opened wide, her whole face changed. It was like when a dentist thinks the anesthesia is complete, only it isn’t.

  “Give me my keys, I’ve got to go. Before they catch me here. I’ve got to think.”

  I gave her the keys, but I said, “The smell of Tabu don’t prove anything, but you heard Mac. Suppose someone is waiting to see if someone leaves?”

  She began to wilt. “I didn’t think of that.”

  I found my hat. “Wait till I come back.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Out to think. Before they come back and corner me so I can’t think.”

  “Let me go with you.”

  “That’d be dynamite. You stay here. If I leave, they’ll follow me, if they’re really watching. You’ll be safe. Mac don’t want you caught here, not if he can help it. He’s a solid man.”

  So I checked out in my heap.

  She’d been to Coppa’s. I knew the place. A bit noisy, but OK, and the younger crowd liked it. So I headed in the back door and gave Ted the high sign.

  He came from the bar, and I asked, “Will you tell Bernice Hobson I’m waiting out in back for her?”

  “Hobson? I don’t know any Bernice. Come on in and look.”

  “Nuh-uh.” I winked. “Can’t. Got reasons.”

  “What she look like?”

  “Wearing a red hat. And a slick fur coat.” I made motions. “Built something like that, and dark haired. And she has legs.”

  People in the Hobson bracket just didn’t go to Coppa’s, they went to the Camino Grille. It was odd, Bernice coming to this un-swanky place.

  Ted squinted a bit and said, “That dame ain’t here, but she was here. Pal, I am going in mourning for you, you should weep, a gal like that walking out on you.”

  “You mean she’s been here and gone?”

  “Yeah, and it was funny. She was sitting alone in a booth. A guy came in and they had a huddle, and he paid the check, and checked out, and she went out, and the look on her face was something.”

  “You sure are observing.”

  Ted chuckled. “She had lots to observe. The haybags that hang around here, why wouldn’t I notice a new face and so forth like hers? The smell of her put me walking on bubbles.”

  He’d seen Bernice, all right. And she’d met some guy at Coppa’s because she didn’t want to meet him where she’d be known by name, like she’d been at the ritzy places. Hobson spent money all right, only he didn’t believe wives ought to ever have cash in their handbags, he said women couldn’t count over five anyway. “Well, who was the guy?”

  Ted gave me a sharp look. “No use fighting about a dame, where you’re going, there won’t be any to fight about. Nuts for her.”

  “Well, who was the guy? Quit stalling, is he a regular?”

  “Yeah. What are you figuring?”

  “Not making trouble for you. Give you my Word. I won’t conk him or anything. I just want to know.”

  “Say, Hobson—Hobson—that’s the real estate guy’s wife. Are you crazy, Cleve?” Then he laughed. “Well, it serves him right, and I wish you’d gotten the dame, and not—”

  “Well, spit it out, who?”

  “Larry Towne. Not so bad, not so good. Too smart, but he’s a customer.”

  “And he checked out. She bought a bottle. What with?”

  “Money. Say, it is funny. Look here, Cleve, she don’t like him, it wasn’t sociable, and he didn’t look happy even when he came in, and—”

  “What’d she pay with?”

  “Well, a twenty, I don’t get many of them, not from our crowd.”

  I had some Community Chest money with me. I said, “Give me her twenty for these little ones. But I want hers.”

  “Only one in the till, that’s a cinch.” He snickered. “That’s sentiment, I say. And don’t raise the devil with Towne, she don’t like him at all, she had a five minute date with him.” When I got back to the alley, I whiffed the bill. It wasn’t new. And it didn’t smell like Tabu. But the one Bernice had given me did smell that way.

  I looked Towne up in the phone book. He lived right near the city limits, down in the flats, just short of the foothills. Maybe Bernice did conk Hobson, and hurried down to Coppa’s to make an alibi, ten minutes was all she’d need, and no one could cut it that fine when it came to saying when a man was knocked off. But why didn’t she stay there, why didn’t she stick with Towne, drinking? Why’d she come up to me, when she had a public alibi that wouldn’t embarrass her?

  Towne’s bungalow was dark. If he had a wife, I figured she must be out of town, hence this finagling around with Bernice. So I decided to risk prowling around. Something told me that Mac hadn’t pinched me simply because he’d rather someone else did it; or else, because he had some other hunch and was leaving me to sweat awhile, until I got jittery and told all. But if he didn’t have something on someone else, I was a cold duck.

  I fooled around at the back door, and used a pledge card to slip between frame and screen, and lifted the hook. It worked. Then I went back to get my flashlight, which I’d left in the car. Lord, what a chump, forgetting that! If the real criminal was only that dumb!

  After a bad case of shakes, I was back in the house again. It looked like the guy lived alone. The rubbish in the kitchen made that pretty clear. His kitchen wasn’t any dirtier than mine, though.

  But there was something fishy about it all. He must have given Bernice that money. The bill she gave Ted for the liquor didn’t smell of perfume, because she hadn’t kept it in her handbag. Those she gave me did smell sweet. Get my angle?

  Well, I remembered how detectives don’t know what they’re doing, but they try everything and finally they corner their man. So I began looking at Towne’s shoes. The FBI does it better with microscopes, but this was the best I could do.

  There were two bits of broken glass in the rubber heel of one shoe, a brown one. There was a pre-war brown suit in the closet. It had glass flakes in the cuff.

  But the payoff was a handkerchief in the breast pocket. It had a soot smudge, like he’d wiped a rod about the thickness of his finger. A poker, for instance, a square wrought iron poker, the corners had left sharp lines. The cops wouldn’t find fingerprints on the poker that’d conked Hobson, or else this was coincidence, for Towne didn’t have a fireplace in his bungalow.

  Pretty nice, pretty nice. I was just stuffing the handkerchief back into the pocket, and feeling smug, when a switch ticked, and someone said, “Hold it, don’t move.”

  There was a fellow pointing a gun at me.

  It looked like trapping the assassin had kicked back. They tell me that in the army, you learn to close in and cold-caulk a guy that has you covered
with a pistol, and confidentially, I’d rather have had some military training than a million dollars, a case of champagne, and five gallons of gas.

  “What you doing here?” the tough guy asked.

  “Um—just a bit of burglary, Mr. Towne. No hard feelings.”

  Then Mac stepped in. He looked glum and he said, “Cleve, what did you do this for, anyway?”

  I said, “Pinch Towne there. I got evidence against him. That was what I was looking for.”

  The guy with the gun flipped back his lapel and showed a star. “The name is Smith. Now turn around and keep your hands up. Mac, snap ’em on.”

  Mac did so. Do you know, they publish millions of pages, these days, about the beauties of liberty, but until you get a pair of handcuffs on you, you simply can’t understand what the word means. If I’d known what shackles are like, I think I’d’ve risked fighting for it even without a dime’s worth of training in disarming a fellow that had me covered with a gat. Some of my crowd weren’t any too keen about shouldering a musket. But I knew, then and there, that if I ever got a chance to tell them what I felt like with handcuffs on, they would think it was a downright treat to charge massed artillery.

  Then I said, “Look here, I got a case against Towne. Get that handkerchief he used to wipe the poker that killed Hobson.”

  “I thought so,” Mac said, kind of sadly. “Not that I blame you for conking him, but it is illegal doing things like that.”

  Copper Smith snorted. “Foxy, stuffing your handkerchief in his pocket. Is it monogrammed?”

  It wasn’t. And it was new. No laundry marks. I felt sicker than ever. “How about the glass in his heels and pants cuffs? Glass from the busted decanter.”

  Smith looked, nodded. “Planted, huh? Buddy, you been making a nice confession, you know more about Hobson’s death than we do.”

  “I tell you, I don’t! Sure I lied about not going in. I saw him, and I was scared silly. Sure I told Old Man Sorenson I was going back to collect. But I always make out the pledge cards in advance, to stop sales resistance, his card being made out don’t prove I wrangled with him about his contribution and conked him when he tried to run me out with a gun.”

  Smith said, just as sadly as Mac, “This man is too smart for any good use.” Then, to me, “Young man, do not try to tell me that the pledge card we found was dropped the first time you went round and round with Hobson.”

  “Well, it was. You prove it isn’t. That’s the law. The burden of proof is on you, not me. This is a democracy, you can’t railroad me.”

  “Every crook pulls that, buddy. Listen here. The card we found had a blood stain on it. It fell on a little blood clot on the carpet and it stuck there. You dropped it the second time you went into Hobson’s house.”

  Mac sighed. “I am sorry, Cleve, but that is the way it is.”

  Mac was a gentleman. It seems he hadn’t told about Bernice’s bag and her perfume, in my shack. She was a lady, so he gave her the breaks. He just said, “It is illegal to kill a heel, even if he swindled your aged mother selling her a cracker box.”

  Was I fixed up with motivations? Smith nudged me. “Get going.” We didn’t go to jail. We went to Hobson’s house, Bernice was there. I knew from her eyes that Mac had gone to my place and told her to go home, and she was flagging me to shut up and not tell about her; I knew Mac wouldn’t spill that if he didn’t have to.

  They had another guy there. He wasn’t happy looking either. Smith said, “Mr. Towne, this man says one of your handkerchiefs wiped that poker. And that you have a pair of shoes with glass flakes, decanter glass, in your heels and pants cuffs.”

  Towne brightened up. He wasn’t little, he wasn’t big, he was too smart, too shrewd looking. He turned up his soles, one at a time, and turned his pants cuffs inside out. “Look and see.”

  Mac said to me, “Darrow, you might as well quit.”

  “Hey, how about looking at his other things?”

  “Planted. We found glass in your heels too, at your house. You changed your shoes. The handkerchief you showed us could be yours too, it is yours.” He turned to Towne. “I think that that is all, Mr. Towne, unless Mr. Smith has something to say.”

  Smith said, “Darrow needs locking-up. Take him away.”

  Then Bernice went wild.

  “You ask Towne why he met me at Coppa’s, ask him why he gave me $100 in twenties. You ask him what he said when I phoned him from Cleve’s house and told him he killed my husband!”

  Towne went wild. He made a dive, slapped Bernice down, and knocked her over an ottoman. Lucky, the glass had been swept up, or she’d been in deplorable shape as far as sitting down to meals.

  Then Mac conked Towne, and Smith conked Towne, and they both picked him up. I picked Bernice up, and she began shouting it out, “You can’t frame Cleve, I’ll tell everything. My husband would never give me a thin dime in cash money, so when he pulled just one final fast one, I told Towne, and he began to put the bee on Grant, and Towne and I split.”

  “You mean,” I yelled, “he pulled one so fast that the real estate board would blow up his license for keeps?”

  “That’s it. I had to blackmail my own husband, and do you blame me? After all—well, it was wrong but a woman feels awful, without one dime in cash, no matter how many charge accounts she has. Well, I was at Coppa’s to meet Towne and get my payoff and I was going to chip in for the Community Chest. I don’t know what happened before he met me, but I bet Grant quarreled with him and pulled a gun, and—”

  Things began to look different. With Bernice telling all. Anyway, Towne was sunk. Mac had followed me, I learned later, and heard me wrangling with Ted at Coppa’s, and he followed me to Towne’s, and meanwhile, another cop had located Towne.

  Towne, conking Hobson in what he called self-defense, got scared and wouldn’t touch Hobson’s new bills. We found out later that he’d cashed a check to get the cut Bernice was waiting for.

  They’d been bluffing me about thinking I’d planted the handkerchief and the busted glass. I had dropped the pledge card, it slipped out of my kit when I stumbled in and found Hobson’s corpse. But Mac didn’t quite believe I was guilty, so he followed through.

  Well, that’s the way it turned out. They couldn’t indict Bernice for blackmailing her own husband. They couldn’t even get far by nailing her for conspiracy. I don’t know what they’ll give Towne. I don’t give a darn, I’m in the army, and with what I learned about liberty, I am all for armies, and don’t try to poke a gun at me. I know the answers now, I’ll take your gun and shove it down your throat and pull the trigger.

  And I like the army just a bit more, and for a reason you can guess. Bernice figured it’d be silly, not dropping in every so often until my date with the draft board. I don’t know what’ll happen to her while I’m gone, but a date with her in the meantime makes a date with the army look brighter!

  DRAFT DODGER

  Originally published in Speed Detective, July 1944.

  Norma was curled up on the porch hammock, her feet tucked under her, and her slim hands clasping her knees. Moonlight brought out the reddish sparkle of her hair; she was so close that I could see the filigree of her ear pendants, and smell her perfume blending with the honeysuckles that screened the porch. As near as all that, but miles away from me, and getting further every minute.

  All of a sudden, she was on her feet, so quickly that the move left me gaping. We stood there, face to face; her eyes weren’t natural, and her voice was strained when she said, “Dennis—I think—we—I’d better say—good-bye.”

  She was in the full moonlight now. There was nothing lovely about her face except its outline. I’d had my last look at the glow that’d built up, evening after evening. But pretending not to get the point, I caught her hand and said, “Heck, darling, it’s not late.”

  It was like grabbing something dead. She didn’t ev
en yank it away. “I didn’t say goodnight. It’s good-bye—we’d better—well, we’ve been seeing too much of each other—and—”

  She didn’t have to finish. She’d been trying to think a nice way out of it all evening, and being too honest to string anyone along, she’d blurted it out at last.

  In other words, she knew all about me. It was as final as the slam of the screen when she ran into the house.

  Well, the rest of the town figured me for a louse that was taking advantage of the agricultural workers’ exemption, so why shouldn’t Norma Cheney join the crowd?

  While I wasn’t a war-dodger, explaining my 4-F rating would’ve made things even worse, so all I did was look for a second at the door that wouldn’t open for me any more, and then hoof it back to Carver’s bunk-house.

  My job was bossing the Mexicans who worked old man Carver’s date grove, just outside of Bagdad, in the Mojave Desert. After miles of sand and rock, there was the town, an oasis of blue-green umbrella trees, gray-green tamarisks, and tall date palms.

  No use trying to figure who had knifed me. Every time I went to town, the leathery and dried-out natives began thinking of their sons in the SWP and in Italy; you’d hardly expect them to cheer my bullet-proof essential job. And Norma, being a young widow who owned a big chunk of the oasis, shouldn’t be getting too interested in a bullet-dodger from up north. Just that simple, and what’d you do about it?

  Nothing at all. You’re lucky to be alive. But a couple nights later, I went to hoist a few beers at the Oasis Bar, where I planted myself at a corner table and made a stab at reading the out of town papers. Ray Saddler got them from all over, and sent them to the bar as fast as he read them, which was plenty quick. Keeping informed was his business, and being postmaster was just a side line. He was an expert on foreign and military affairs; he’d won the World War, and he knew how to win this one; and he hated draft-dodgers. Probably not a bad guy; just an old buzzard, forty-five anyway, and sore because he couldn’t get back in uniform.

  Hanging around a bar all by yourself wears thin in a hurry so I barged out into the shadows of the arcade that ran half the length of the block. Nice timing. Norma and Saddler were coming from the movie, way ahead of time. Soon they’d be sitting behind the honeysuckle vines on her front porch.