The Complete Casebook of Cardigan, Volume 4: 1935-37
by
Frederick Nebel
Altus Press • 2013
Copyright Information
© 2013 Altus Press
Publication History:
“A Couple of Quick Ones” originally appeared in the June 1, 1935 issue of Dime Detective Magazine. Copyright © 2013 Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Argosy Communications, Inc.
“The Dead Die Twice” originally appeared in the August, 1935 issue of Dime Detective Magazine. Copyright © 2013 Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Argosy Communications, Inc.
“Death in the Raw” originally appeared in the October, 1935 issue of Dime Detective Magazine. Copyright © 2013 Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Argosy Communications, Inc.
“The Curse of Cardigan” originally appeared in the December, 1935 issue of Dime Detective Magazine. Copyright © 2013 Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Argosy Communications, Inc.
“Blood in the Dark” originally appeared in the January, 1936 issue of Dime Detective Magazine. Copyright © 2013 Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Argosy Communications, Inc.
“The Sign of Murder” originally appeared in the March, 1936 issue of Dime Detective Magazine. Copyright © 2013 Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Argosy Communications, Inc.
“Lead Poison” originally appeared in the April, 1936 issue of Dime Detective Magazine. Copyright © 2013 Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Argosy Communications, Inc.
“Murder By Mail” originally appeared in the June, 1936 issue of Dime Detective Magazine. Copyright © 2013 Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Argosy Communications, Inc.
“Make Mine Murder” originally appeared in the November, 1936 issue of Dime Detective Magazine. Copyright © 2013 Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Argosy Communications, Inc.
“Behind the 8-Ball” originally appeared in the March, 1937 issue of Dime Detective Magazine. Copyright © 2013 Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Argosy Communications, Inc.
“No Time to Kill” originally appeared in the May, 1937 issue of Dime Detective Magazine. Copyright © 2013 Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Argosy Communications, Inc.
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Designed by Matthew Moring/Altus Press
Special Thanks to Joel Frieman, Ron Goulart, Ken McDaniel, Will Murray, Rick Ollerman, Rob Preston & Ray Riethmeier.
A Couple of Quick Ones
Chapter One
Murder or Suicide
THE streets were empty at half past one. The cab sped down Center Street with nothing to stop it, not even a traffic light. After midnight they merely set the yellow caution signals. Portbridge’s main drag was, by day, a hive of activity. At this hour there were only low night-lights in the shops and an occasional cop pegging his post and letting the speed limit slide. The sound of a freight train hauling heavily out of the east yards, came sharp and clear across the city and, somewhere distant in the West End, a church bell tolled the half hour in a dull, heavy monotone.
The cab took a vicious right-turn into Elder Street, hummed through Elder and cut diagonally across Bannion Square. It turned right where a sign said No Right Turn and pounded down the long grade of South Bannion Street past dull, respectable rooming houses.
At the base of the hill the driver whipped left into Sumner Street, jammed on his brakes and stopped an inch from the red-tinted headlights of a parked ambulance. “Boy, some brakes!” he crowed.
Cardigan picked his hat up off the floor, put it on and opened the door. There were other cars parked along the curb and on the sidewalk were a dozen odd persons, men and women, some huddled in bathrobes. A couple of uniformed cops were hanging around in front of the three-storied frame rooming house and across the street some people were leaning on the windowsills of another house.
Cardigan handed the driver a bill and the latter said: “Hey—pst—d’ja notice me brakes?”
“I noticed them, buddy.”
“Funny, them brakes. Sometimes they catch and then again sometimes they don’t.”
“What happens when they don’t?”
“Well, y’ see, chief, I ain’t met nothin’ yet when they don’t, so I can’t say. But hot damn, would that ambulance ha’ been sore if they didn’t work that time!” He chuckled, slapped his knee. “It would ha’ been a joke on them, all right.”
Cardigan tipped him a dime, said sadly, “If you wake up some day with the transmission in your hair, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” and stretched his legs toward the door of the brown frame house.
One of the cops blocked him. “Press?”
“No. Keenan called me. Cardigan.”
“O.K. Top floor.” The cop dropped his voice: “Take it slow, pal. Keenan’s got ants in his pants tonight.”
“Feeling his ants, eh?”
The cop rolled his eyes. “Hell, yes!” he muttered.
CARDIGAN climbed slowly, heavily, his big face saturnine beneath his lop-eared hat. In his deep dark eyes was a look that was half troubled, half angry. He paid no attention to the people grouped in the second-floor corridor; they were also wrapped in robes, one in a blanket. He went past them and climbed to the next corridor and saw at the end of it a door partly open. The door was splintered but still clung to its hinges. He pushed it wide.
The room was square, fairly large, cheaply but neatly furnished—a combination bedroom and living room. It was pretty crowded: cops, a couple of newspapermen, the ambulance doctor, the coroner, Lieutenant Keenan and Sergeant Brotski, both plainclothed and from headquarters. They were all standing around or lounging in the chairs. On a narrow studio bed, which stood against one wall, lay the dead man. Cardigan, his fists hanging heavily in the pockets of his shabby ulster, stared at the bed with a kind of rueful bitterness.
Keenan said in a voice low and lazy with sarcasm: “Put your dough on the wrong horse, didn’t you?” He was an incredibly tall and thin man of about fifty, elegantly dressed in dark clothes. His hair was the color of a silver-fox pelt, soft and silky and well groomed. His face was long, narrow, dead-white, with steely shrewd eyes, a mouth like a straight-drawn red line. His hands were covered with rings and a diamond glittered in his deep blue tie. He chuckled dryly. “Take a good long look, Cardigan, and if your face grows red, we’ll understand. The guy you went to bat for, the state’s star witness, pulled a quick one on you.” His slow dry voice was mocking. “It pains hell out of me to tell you that Walter Symonds committed suicide.”
Cardigan said: “You pain more than hell out of me. Suppose you skip the cheap comedy.”
“You wouldn’t get sore, would you?”
“If you think you rate a laugh, you’re screwy. Did I come over here to listen to a lot of warm air or to get the facts? If you think you’re funny, Keenan, I don’t see anybody rolling in the aisles.”
Keenan said in a low incisive voice: “I don’t think I’m funny, Cardigan. With the joke on you, I don’t have to be.” He held out a coil of rope. “That is what he hung himself with!”
Cardigan took the rope, looked
at it and said: “Greased, eh?”
“Sure. To make it slide, so it wouldn’t jam.”
“Where’d he hang himself?”
Keenan nodded to the window. “Stick your head out and on the left you’ll see an iron hook. I guess they used to hang a washline on it.”
CARDIGAN went to the open window, leaned out and saw on the left, imbedded in the outside of the building, a sturdy iron hook. Below, the back yard was a dark well of shadow and beyond a low board fence and a low shed, empty fields stretched away. Cardigan leaned on the windowsill.
Keenan was saying: “Patrolman Damiani found him. Damiani was heading across those fields back there, taking a short-cut. The only light in the building was this one and Damiani thought he saw something hanging there. He came over to make sure.”
“What time was that?”
“A quarter to one.”
“How long was Symonds hanging here?”
“We figure since about sometime between eleven and twelve.”
Cardigan backed into the room, turned and looked at the door. “What about the door?”
“We had to bust it in. It was locked and bolted on the inside.” Keenan smiled mockingly. “I suppose your idea is to make out that somebody came in and hung him out the window.”
“You couldn’t do my thinking if you tried.”
“I can guess as good as you, though. Too bad there’s no fire-escape outside the window, so you could say some guy came and left that way.” His voice was low, playful, malicious. He handed Cardigan a rumpled sheet of paper. “We picked this out of the wastebasket. He started to write a swan song and gave it up.”
Cardigan scowled down at the unfinished letter.
Dear Laura: It seems useless for me to go on like this any longer. I’m only kidding myself. I know how you feel about it, and God bless you for it, but I feel that sooner or later someone will find out and I’d rather tell them now than wait and—
It ended there. Cardigan’s lips tightened and he felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle. He felt that all eyes were upon him—Keenan’s cool, mocking eyes and the eyes of the others, the cops, the newspapermen. Without raising his own eyes he passed the unfinished letter back to Keenan and muttered: “Who’s Laura?”
“I’d like to know.”
“Didn’t he leave an address book?”
“He did, but there’s no Laura in it.”
Cardigan turned to the window again. “Did you look around down in the yard?”
“Yeah. We looked in the shed, too, just in case there was a ladder there. There wasn’t.” He leered. “Listen, I didn’t put ideas in your head when I kidded you about you making up some other guy hung him out, did I?”
Cardigan said in a dull, preoccupied voice, “I wouldn’t give your ideas standing room,” and moved across to the bed.
He stared down at the dead man but hardly saw him. He was wrapped in thought, almost oblivious now to anyone in the room.
Keenan said: “That’s the trouble with you, Cardigan. You think everybody’s ideas stink but your own. You were the first to stand up and say I was cracked when I wanted to bear down on Symonds—”
“You landed on Symonds,” Cardigan said without turning, “because he happened to be the easiest guy to land on. He was the guy that carried the money and he was alone when it was stolen, and he didn’t see the guy that conked him and grabbed the bag and nobody else saw it, and because Symonds got the jitters you figured right away he framed the whole thing. The angle was so open-and-shut that I wouldn’t spit on it.”
Keenan’s eyes got very frosty. “No. What you had to do, you had to make a fancy case out of it. The writing was on the wall, but that wasn’t good enough for you; you had to turn your puss the other way and make out that I was a lousy blockhead.”
CARDIGAN turned and raked him with a head-to-foot look. “I got a big enough case against Mulvaney to rate an indictment, to bring him to trial. I placed him within a block of the crime—at the time of the crime. The bootblack saw him and identified him. The taxicab driver saw him. Mulvaney was carrying a Gladstone bag—it was big enough to hold the bag of money that Symonds had. Mulvaney was holding a handkerchief to his nose. It was bloody. When they picked Symonds up—those two truckmen—they swore there was blood on his knuckles. My contention was that, when Symonds was blackjacked, his hand flew back and accidentally socked Mulvaney in the nose. We know that, a week before the crime, Mulvaney had to move from the Flagg Hotel because he owed two months’ rent. We know he owed a liquor bill and food bill and bills for clothes. We know that, a week after the crime, he bought a new car. We know that he has a record a mile long for similar crimes. And with all that stuff in your files, it took me to find it. And before he was jugged an hour, who turned up as counsel? Tully Pomeroy, the criminals’ friend—at a price.”
Keenan’s smile was chill, satiric. “All pretty. All very pretty, Cardigan. Except that the day before the star witness is to go on the stand and testify he”—Keenan waved a hand languidly toward the corpse, then toward the window—“goes and hangs himself. He starts a letter to a gal and hasn’t the guts to finish it and chucks it in the basket.” He flexed his lips, bent his frosty silver brows. “The writing’s on the wall again, Cardigan, but you’re too damn stubborn to read it and take it on the chin.”
Cardigan looked at the wall. “There’s one thing I don’t see on the wall, bright eyes. And you don’t, either.”
“Tell me, teacher.”
“The money. The seventy grand that was stolen.”
Keenan made an impatient gesture. “You had Mulvaney brought to trial without showing the money!”
“Use your head, if that’s what you wear on your shoulders. When a guy commits suicide, he does it because he wants to clear things up. If a guy committed suicide because he yanked seventy thousand dollars, he’d tell where he bunked the money.”
Keenan looked amazed. “You mean to stand there and tell me that Symonds didn’t commit suicide.”
“I mean to stand here and tell you that I don’t know whether he did or not—and neither do you.”
Keenan spread his hands wearily toward the reporters. “The door bolted from the inside, the unfinished letter, no fire-escape, no ladder or marks of a ladder in the yard, the guy hanging by the neck outside his window—and he didn’t commit suicide.”
“Take it easy,” Cardigan warned. “I said I didn’t know.”
“I know!” Keenan snapped. “And if the press wants a statement, there it is. I believe Symonds committed suicide. And as for you,” the lieutenant rasped in a voice hard with scorn, “the only thing you’re trying to do is get out from under the boner you pulled when you collared Mulvaney.” Color actually came into his thin face and his pale eyes shimmered. “You talked the state’s attorney’s office into such a sweat over Mulvaney that anything I said about Symonds was given a swift kick in the pants. I was just a horse’s neck. Symonds took that money!” he ripped out. He leveled a long arm at the corpse and chopped off: “There’s your answer.”
“Yours,” Cardigan said, going to the door. “Not mine.”
Keenan leveled an arm after him. “It’ll be yours too, baby, before you’re much older. I’m no flash-in-the-pan. I began learning how to be a cop twenty-five years ago and—”
“When do you expect to be one?” Cardigan said, pulling open the splintered door.
Keenan said, in a stony voice: “I can take that kind of crack, too, and laugh.”
“Well, I don’t see you taking it and if that’s a laugh on your kisser, I’ve been kidded all my life.”
Sergeant Brotski, scowling beneath his black porcupine hair, said, “A push in the face might do that guy good,” and came halfway to the door, impressed with the idea, adding: “If I had you alone in a room, guy, I’d take you apart.”
“If you had me alone in a room, Brotski, you wouldn’t have the guts to try.”
Keenan clipped: “Cut that nonsense, Hank. Come back here. T
here’s other ways to make that wiseacre say uncle.”
“Be thinking them up,” Cardigan said contemptuously, and went out.
He went down the stairs slowly, a great deal more slowly than he had climbed them. His forehead was wrinkled with doubt, his eyes dark with anger and frustration. When he reached the lower hall he paused and ground his palm thoughtfully on the newel post, chewed on a corner of his mouth. Then he turned and strode to the rear of the hallway, unbolted the back door and stepped out into the darkness of the yard. The night air was damp, cold, but the sun had shone brightly during the day and the ground was soft, cushiony. He made his way through short, ragged grass to the shed, entered and turned on his small pocket flashlight. He went around inside the shed, following the flashlight’s beam; snapped it off finally and stood for a long minute in the darkness, sunk in unhappy thought.
With a low sigh he again returned to the yard, looked up and saw the lighted window of Symonds’ room. Going to the ground beneath it, he bent and sprayed his flashlight around, saw no ladder marks in the soft earth. Still bent over, he moved awkwardly, used his free left hand to rummage in the tattered grass; tossed stone after stone out of the way. Presently he tossed away an object that was not a stone, and realizing his oversight, hastened to recover it. It was a small, straight-stemmed briar pipe with an oddly shaped bowl.
Chapter Two
Seventy-Grand Hunch
THE Bearcat was an all-night bar and snack place between the theater district and the tony West End. The Bearcat itself was pretty tony, but in a nice way. It was small, snug, paneled in oak, with brown leather chairs in the room where the tables were and high chairs with little curved backs at the bar. Cardigan stopped for a Swiss-on-rye and a bottle of beer and went into the bar to get it.
Sam Sheffield, the Cosmos Agency’s local attorney, was sitting on one of the stools and sucking dreamily at an absinthe frappé.
“I figured you’d be here, counsellor,” Cardigan said, climbing onto a chair without further ceremony.
The Complete Casebook of Cardigan, Volume 4: 1935-37 Page 1
