E. Hoffmann Price's Two-Fisted Detectives

by E. Hoffmann Price

  Carver had raised a window so that he would have a quick exit in case of surprise, but he had been on the alert only against someone coming in the door. And now, being shot as a housebreaker was a hot and immediate prospect. The shock of realization had such an impact that he could not become as shaky as a lesser danger would have made him. Though numbed by the knowledge of what the ensuing seconds promised, he had at the same time become keener, more aware of trifles. He was all sharpened up, as though he were an intensely interested spectator of what was about to happen to someone else: he knew that however quick he was, and sufficiently well coordinated to pluck mosquitoes out of the air with thumb and forefinger, he could not get at his shoulder holster in time.

  Barstow’s voice was too carefully controlled. There was something other than wrath in his eyes. Like the face, they radiated purpose and resolution. However, these were restrained by something which Carver had not yet perceived. Barstow had only to pull the trigger, and when it was over, his explanation would be simple and sufficient: he had surprised the housebreaker who had that morning resisted arrest, slugged him, and taken his shoes.

  That Barstow controlled the trigger-finger which he so plainly wanted to give a workout meant only that there was something he wanted to know; there was something about which he had to be sure.

  Carver’s acting on a wrong guess would set the automatic popping.

  “I said, turn around. You’re too quick to trust.”

  “Mind if I call Cornelia Lowry first? She sent me here, you know. To clear up some suspicions of hers.”

  “That’ll keep; do as I tell you.”

  As Carver turned, he picked up Barstow’s image in the wall mirror. The weapon shifted for an instant as Barstow straightened and stepped from the chest. That shift gave a hint as to the man’s muscular coordination; he had too much of it for comfort.

  That Barstow had not fired was significant. There was no telling how much the mention of Cornelia Lowry had contributed to that shred of indecision: yet, far as he could trust the mirrored image, there had been a change of expression, a subtle shading of momentary doubt, the evidence of an additional thread of restraint.

  Without twisting his head, Carver ignored the twitch between his shoulder blades and said, “Listen to why I’m here, and you might see things in a different way. In a way that concerns you plenty.”

  “All I know,” Barstow answered, “is that you’re wanted, and that you’re a housebreaker. Turn around now if you’ve got anything to say before I have them come and get you.”

  But as he faced about, Carver was more certain than ever that Barstow was doubletalking: he wanted the police only after the housebreaker was in no shape ever to give an interview. The encounter, as long as it lasted, would be a matching of pretense by pretense, for whichever one made it, the first mistake would be final. Carver did not need more than two shreds of time for him to get his gun from its spring clip holster, and he did not send engraved announcements.

  “When you came at me with a gun, in your office,” Carver said, blandly, “I had to work fast. I had to stay out of the pokey till I could use the information my client gave me.”

  “You were in such a hurry,” Barstow retorted, “that you took time to grab my shoes. What for?”

  That, then, was why Barstow had paused to parley, instead of firing at once. And that reference to shoes also made it more certain than ever that Carver was about to get a foreclosure on heavily-mortgaged time. Yet this warning, this confirmation of his danger, gave him a glimpse of the slender chance of getting clear, provided he did not upset Barstow’s balance. The man was keyed up. It was not a matter of waiting for cause or watertight legal excuse to shoot; instead, from the moment of Carver’s entry, it had been only a question of waiting until there was no longer any reason for not shooting.

  “Oh, the shoes?” Carver shrugged. “What Cornelia sent me for was to find the letters you took from Lowry’s house last night.”

  “What letters? I wasn’t at the house.”

  “He had written about the income tax swindle you pulled on him,” Carver explained. “He made an original and a copy. All Cornelia could find was the carbon paper itself, a sheet that had never been used before. It’s easy to read, but I told her that while that was enough to put you on the hook, the way to get you sewed up tight was to find the original and the copy, the two sheets you took out of the house. They’d both have your fingerprints—prove you had been there and had grabbed the unmailed letter. Much handier that way, to make you fork over what you chiseled from Lowry.

  “But for her having the carbon paper he used when he wrote his gripe to the Standard, you would look fine, claiming you had cooled me as a burglar. Begin to see what I mean?”

  Though it was plain that Barstow was catching on, the gun did not waver. “There was a dispute about his tax return, yes.”

  “Damn right there was. He sent you his check for the installment plus fee,” Carver set forth, according to his figuring of what must have been done to cause such a beef. “You made a faked return, putting in dependents and exemptions and deductions he had not claimed. Then you sent the Internal Revenue a draft in his name, for a smaller amount. You jerked down a couple of hundred bucks difference. I’m not the only one who knows that now.”

  Barstow’s voice remained calm.

  “I did nothing of the sort. And I make good any mistakes, or any penalties that come from them. My fee is insurance for that very thing.”

  “Sure it is,” Carver conceded. “Most people don’t have good memories, or a good head for figures. That’s why they hand the simple job to an expert. Lowry was different; when he got his bill for the next quarter, he saw it was a lot lower than it should have been—and instead of whooping with glee, like Joe Doakes would have done, he figured it out for himself, to find out how come he had been rooked on the first installment. Most people would’ve been so happy about the government making a mistake, they’d never dreamed of looking into it.

  “He didn’t intend to let you get away by just making good. He had it figured you were gambling that most clients would not catch on, and that each one who did not would be a clear profit.

  “So, you had plenty of motive to kill Lowry to keep him from exposing you to the public. You’d been cold-caulked with an indictment as long as a boxcar. You went to shut him up or buy him off. He wouldn’t listen to reason. He probably swung at you, and you slugged him to death. Getting rough now will do nothing but make it plain that you blew your top and tried to kill the story by settling me. So don’t waste any ammunition.”

  “You’re trying to blackmail me into not turning you over to the police.”

  “Sure, I am. And you are willing to make a deal to get that sheet of carbon paper from Cornelia Lowry so what her husband wrote about you won’t blow you up sky-high.”

  “Lowry told me about her and Wayland,” Barstow said. “Naturally anything she could use against me would get the heat off him.”

  “You’re catching on. And it’s just a question—” Carver deliberately reached for one of the partly smoked cigarettes in the ash try. “Question of getting that carbon paper.” He plucked the book of matches from the clip on the tray and jerked one loose. Before striking it, he paused, to add, “Once she takes a notion to—”

  He struck the match, without first having closed the cover; that the whole pack flared up was anything but an accident. He let out a yell and turned, making a slapping motion as though to beat out the hissing, flaming matches which had apparently “frozen” to his left hand, as they so often do in such case.

  But they were not stuck. He flicked them away, and as he did so, he reached for his gun.

  Startled, shaken by the frantic yell, Barstow fired, a split second after Carver’s shot. He staggered back, and stumbled on a wadded rug. Instead of shooting a second time, Carver clouted him with the barrel of his revolver.


  That flattened the tax expert. The automatic skated across the floor. Carver slumped back into a chair, and stretched out his legs. He laid the gun on the table. The main difference between him and the man who lay twitching on the floor was that the latter was totally unconscious.

  His cheek stung from flecks of unburned powder. That would help, in case Barstow did not pull through.

  There were voices outside, all a brawl and a gabble. Someone was coming in the bedroom window he had left open. Someone else was pounding at the door. He got up, and in the ensuing moment, saw that he had all the company he could handle.

  The neighbors were the chattering background. Alma and Pierre Livaudais lurched in over the threshold as Moreau, a plainclothes man Carver knew, stepped in from the bedroom. It turned out that he had trailed Cornelia to Livaudais’ office.

  And Barstow was sitting up before the saturnine detective had more than put through a call for ambulance and headquarters.

  Firing as he had, from a crouch, Carver had drilled the man high enough in the chest to leave him a very good chance of surviving; too good a chance, it developed, when he noted that the shot had been pretty much off center.

  “Sure, I followed Lowry around from bar to bar,” Carver said, in answer to Barstow’s demand that the cop arrest the housebreaker. “He was howling about how he had been gypped. Did I make his return?”

  Barstow retorted, “I wasn’t at the house—he phoned me—I promised him I’d make good.”

  “You phoned him,” Carver countered. “And then went out and ended by killing him, kicking, slugging, or what not. Where’d you phone him from, and when?”

  “I phoned him back after I went over the records—about half-past nine or a bit later. From the Royal Family Liquor Store, on St. Charles. Ask Curley. I got change for phoning, and asked him if the clock was right. I called back—”

  “He answered?”

  “Certainly he did. I heard wrangling and quarrelling; the line went dead.”

  “Prove that, can you?”

  Barstow’s wound did not bother him enough to keep him from showing triumph. “Ask Curley. When I came from the booth, I kicked about not getting my money back, the line was dead.”

  Carver turned on the detective. “He’s cooked his own goose. That line—”

  And then Alma cut in, “That line was dead all day. Herb Lowry was beefing about it. Barstow couldn’t have phoned Herb. He killed Herb himself, tore out the phone, then made an anonymous call to put Denny Wayland on the spot. He must’ve known about Denny and Cornelia.”

  “But the shoes have it,” Carver said, when he got his chance. “Look in my tool kit and see the pair I took from Barstow. Go to Riley’s Loan Office on South Rampart. There’s a man there who’ll tell you he sold those shoes to Barstow. And if you look around this place you won’t find any of Barstow’s old shoes. He got rid of them on the chance that he’d tracked enough blood to leave a print, or stepped on soft ground in the garden. He could not take a chance that destroying just the pair of shoes he wore out there would save him. Any pair of shoes he had worn would give a good idea about the walk of the wearer, the way he threw his feet, the way he carried himself—the sort of things you can get from a moulage or a footprint in blood or tracked liquor.”

  “You can’t prove anything from shoes I haven’t got!”

  Carver turned to the fireplace. “I was going to phone Pierre, and then look in the grate. It had just struck me that he’d used a hell of a lot of charcoal, considering the weather we’ve been having. Two bags of it, and a spare.”

  He knelt, and dug into the grate, and under it. He produced shreds of warped leather, of charred cloth, and bits that had not been burned.

  “Can’t risk putting the stuff into the garbage; the collector frisks it for salvage. Throwing a package away is dangerous. But charred stuff like this seemed safe enough to dump into the rubbish can. So, it wasn’t burned carefully, and to a finish. If the lab technician can’t find blood in these samples, the guy deserves to be turned loose. And redouble it, if they can’t find blood smudges on the car upholstery. Judging from what the paper said, the Lowry place must have been a bucket of blood.”

  Then the ambulance arrived, and more cops, and some newspaper men. Moreau gave Carver a shrewd eyeing, and said, “I’m willing enough to let well enough alone, but if you didn’t put through that anonymous call, then I’m next year’s carnival king!”

  “A crack like that could get you a slander suit,” Carver retorted. “That’s a clear dig at my fitness to practice my trade, profession, business, or calling. It reflects on my character and integrity. You might as well turn Denny Wayland loose.”

  “He is loose. Not a blood smudge and he couldn’t possibly have cleaned himself up, and his car, too, in such a short time, between the killing and pickup. You ought to see the mess that place is in!”

  And that was enough to make Carver turn to his attorney.

  “Pete, drive me and Alma home, will you?” Then, as they got to the lawyer’s car, “Sure there’s room in front, particularly since Alma hadn’t developed career-girl hips. But we’re sitting in the back seat to talk about exemptions on the hoof, and the peeping Tom lion in the patio of the Two Brothers, on Toulouse Street.”

  “We’ll have dinner at my place,” Alma murmured, once they were under way. “I know Cornelia and Denny will be way too busy for sociability.”

  “Listen, honey,” he corrected. “You mean, we will be way too busy for sociability.” He raised his voice. “Get that, Pete? One drink, and you’ve got a date somewhere else!”

  A BURNING CLUE

  Originally published in Ten Detective Aces, May/June 1933.

  “Do you mean to say,” demanded Claire Dennison of her newly widowed sister, Martha Jarvis, “that the insurance company refuses to pay off, simply because you can’t prove that Jarvis died before 12 noon instead of some time after that hour?”

  “That’s exactly it,” affirmed Martha, sighing wearily. “You see, the premium hadn’t been paid for some time. The extension expired at 12 noon of the very day that his latest playmate called with her pearl-handled light-housekeeping pistol and demanded a showdown. With no insurance, and the house mortgaged to the last shingle, I’m left absolutely broke.”

  “If that red-headed good-for-nothing hadn’t become penitent a minute after she did the first good deed of her life, and then shot herself, we might prove that Jarvis died before noon,” thought Claire; but she said to her sister, “Can’t you find anyone who heard the shots?”

  “Not a soul. There’s so much shrubbery around the house, and it’s so far from the street—and, you know, a .25 automatic is hardly louder than the snapping of a stick. Claire, there’s just no use!”

  “But we’ve got to figure it out, Mart!” insisted Claire. “Let’s see—old Aunt Julia says she left the house about half past eleven that morning. How did you know the time?”

  “The radio was announcing a domestic science lecture, and Jarvis said, ‘Shut the damned thing off!’ They checked the broadcasting station, and got the time. She also remembered she had just loaded his pipe. That’s it, over there.”

  Claire followed her sister’s gesture, and saw a Turkish water-pipe with its brass fittings, and flexible stem, nearly two yards long, coiled about the neck of the glass water jar.

  “She told the coroner all about loading the pipe,” resumed Martha. “And how she came back, finding them both ‘all daid,’ and the pipe turned over, and a hole burned in the rug.”

  Claire noted the clean-cut, square hole burned through to the warp of the old Persian rug.

  “How did that happen?” she wondered.

  “When that woman shot him,” explained Martha, “he had the pipe stem coiled about his wrist, like he always did. They’d been quarreling before Aunt Julia left. Anyway, she opened fire. And it didn’t ta
ke much of a move on his part to pull the pipe off the table. The cake of charcoal that keeps the tobacco burning just ate its way into the rug.”

  Claire’s fingernails were turning from rose to dark brown from the smoke of her disregarded cigarette.

  “Mart,” she said, finally, “call Aunt Julia. I want to talk to her.”

  For several days Claire pondered on the elusive problem, but in vain.

  “Good Lord!” she exclaimed a dozen times over, “why couldn’t one shot have stopped his watch, like in a story mystery? All those details, and not one thing to prove he died before noon!”

  The deep brand of that last pipe stared up at her from the rug, and mocked her. There was a record of the crime; but it was as vain as the fleeting, spiteful crack of that tiny, deadly pistol which no one had heard. But how to use it?

  Claire questioned old Aunt Julia over and over again; but the old negress recollected only irrelevant details. But finally, out of the confusion, Claire picked a bit of hope. She phoned her sister’s lawyer.

  “Mr. Cartwright,” she said, “bring the insurance adjuster, and a copy of the testimony of the coroner’s inquest—yes, I have something up my sleeve… Please try, anyway… Thank you.”

  * * * *

  They called the following morning: Cartwright, politely humoring a woman’s whim, and utterly hopeless of deriving any benefit from it; and Bartlett, the adjuster, courteous, suave, and determined that his company would not pay $50,000 on any policy that had expired, even if only by five minutes.

  “Mr. Cartwright,” began Claire, “when did Aunt Julia turn off the radio, the day Mr. Jarvis died?”

  The lawyer consulted his file of testimony.

  “At 11:32 A.M.,” he answered. And then, to Bartlett, “Here it is.”

  The adjuster nodded. “I’ll accept that. It’s official.”

  “And according to the testimony,” resumed Claire, “she set his pipe before him at practically the same time.”