The Complete Casebook of Cardigan, Volume 4: 1935-37

by Frederick Nebel

  “Find my hat,” Cardigan muttered.

  Geets found it and Cardigan put it on and then stumbled back to the cab.

  “Geets,” he said.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Drive to the Hotel Bangs.”

  “Geez! I mean—well, yes, I mean Geez! Look now—”

  “The Bangs, Geetsy,” said Cardigan, falling into the cab.

  Geets groaned, wrung his hands together and climbed in behind the wheel.

  The ride, the cold wind driving through the windows, cleared the cobwebs from Cardigan’s head. He stepped out when Geets pulled up in front of the Bangs and Geets also stepped out and got all set to make a speech.

  Cardigan laid a hand on his shoulder. “Geetsy, my pal, you’re the tops. I don’t know what I’d do without you. You’ll be a tip-top detective some day. Wait here.”

  Geets threw up his hands hopelessly and sat down on the running board with a bang.

  Cardigan batted open the hotel-lobby door, crossed the lobby with his chin down and a dark, threatening look in his eyes. He said to the clerk: “What was the idea of telling me that girl was in Four-nineteen?”

  “No idea. She is.”

  They looked at each other for a minute and Cardigan said: “Have you ever seen a tall, good-looking dark guy in a derby, a snappy long blue overcoat, and gray spats?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When?”

  “He took a room here this afternoon late.”

  “What room?”

  “Four-twenty.”

  “The one next to the girl, eh?”

  “He asked for Four-twenty, Four-eighteen, Four-nineteen or Four-twenty-one.”

  “Any baggage?”

  “No. He paid in advance. There’s his name in the register.”

  “Another ‘John Smith’, eh?”

  “A name’s a name to us.”

  CARDIGAN turned and walked away from the desk. His face was not pleasant. He climbed the stairway and went to the door of 420 and tried the knob. It was locked. One of his keys opened it and this time he entered with his gun drawn. When he snapped on the lights he saw a woman lying on the bed, bound and gagged.

  He closed the door, locked it, and put his gun away. Then he went over and sat down on the edge of the bed, took out a packet of cigarettes, lit one. He inhaled slowly and regarded the woman. Her hair was red, disheveled, and her eyes were wide-open, staring, full of fright and uncertainty. He took out his pocket knife, cut away her bonds, the towel that was wrapped around her mouth. He pulled out cotton which had been crammed into her mouth.

  “Hello, Rhea,” he said.

  For a full minute she lay breathing heavily, wordlessly. Then she choked, “Who are you?” in a terrified voice.

  “A finder-outer,” he said laconically.

  She was pretty but hard living had dulled the finer edges of her beauty. She would be plump, pudgy, within five years. But she still had lines, curves. Her lips were full and red but there was something cruel about them and she had a cruel jaw, incendiary eyes.

  “Get up,” he said.

  “Who are you? Where are you going with me?”

  He yanked her to her feet, pulled her to the door. He unlocked the door and hauled her out into the corridor and around into 419.

  “Your own room,” he said. “The dark guy was pretty smart to move you into his. Who is he?” He locked the door.

  “I don’t know,” she choked, falling onto the bed, crouching there with hunted eyes; and then again: “Who are you?”

  He said: “Who is the guy?”

  “I tell you I don’t know!” she cried. “He came in here and made me go out to the other room. He used a gun. He—he bound me up. I never saw him before.”

  “Why did you leave Wheelburgh after the death of Rosamund Dillon?”

  Her eyes wheeled in their sockets and her fingers clutched at the coverlet. She choked out: “To get away from the—from the publicity.”

  “Why’d you come back?”

  Her knuckles were white. “I—don’t know. I just—just came back, I guess.”

  “Broke, huh?”

  “My God, who are you?”

  “I told you: a finder-outer. Tell me about the night Sam Salva was killed and Rosamund Dillon ran away.”

  She groaned. She ran her hands up her cheeks, through her red hair. She whimpered: “Don’t, don’t. Don’t make me go all over that. Ask the police, the cops. They have it all.”

  “All, Rhea?”

  Her jaw shook, then jutted, and her eyes flashed. “All, yes!” she shouted. “Everything! Get out! Get out!” she screamed. “I won’t be persecuted this way! You’ve got no right to hound me this way!” She jumped off the bed and ran into a corner, crouching there, her eyes blazing. “Get out, get out!” she screamed. “Let me alone!”

  He strode solemnly toward her and she ran from the corner and plunged into a shabby, windowless bathroom that once, obviously, had been a clothes closet. He went in after her and she picked up a whiskey bottle and struck with it. He ripped it out of her hand. She kicked him. She sobbed and groaned and kicked him again. She reached for another bottle. He caught her by the wrist and whipped her through the doorway. She half fell, half stumbled across the room and fell against the corridor door. Unlocked it. Yanked it open.

  Cardigan bounded after her.

  Dillon stood outside the door, his mouth crooked, a bitter smile on his face. He fired a gun twice and the explosions seemed to make the walls bulge, the floor bounce. Rhea slumped back in through the doorway, half-turned, her face struck with shock. She pitched against Cardigan and he stopped her, let her drop and leaped over her body into the hallway.

  DILLON was poised at the staircase. He raised his gun and fired and a long scar leaped upon the wall paper beside Cardigan’s head. Dillon vanished up the stairway and Cardigan took after him, took the first three steps upward at one leap. When he reached the next corridor, which was the last, he did not see Dillon. But he heard pounding footsteps, saw a door open at the end of the hall. There was a red globe of light above the door. He ran toward it.

  It showed a passageway to the roof and looking up he saw the stars and the scud sweeping across them. He climbed, stuck his head up through the opening and saw a figure skirting the far edge of the roof. He jumped up through the opening and fired. The bullet whanged off a small metal ventilator. Dillon dodged behind a chimney. The wind twisted Cardigan’s ulster around his body, tore at the hat on his head. A gun spat around a corner of the chimney, a bullet socked into the wooden housing above the roof stairway. Cardigan dropped to his knees as a second shot followed the first. He dropped still lower. Then he saw Dillon leap, flatten, vanish, and heard the sound of feet drumming on metal.

  He galloped across the roof, leaned over the edge and saw Dillon racing down a fire-escape. There was no point in firing. The metal rungs of the topmost switchback shielded Dillon. Cardigan started down, his big feet slugging the rungs, the tail of his overcoat ballooning, flapping. They were going down the back of the building. There was a broad square of earth below, the hotel parking lot. Dillon did not stop to fire. He was like a dark streak dropping down the fire-escape, and there were shadows, a chance of escape, below.

  Cardigan came to the last metal landing above the ground as Dillon reached the last step of the fire-ladder. Without a moment’s pause Cardigan vaulted over the iron rail and dropped the whole way to the ground. He reached it as Dillon reached it. He sprawled and Dillon fired and missed by a hair’s breadth. Cardigan fired from a sitting position. He did not miss. Dillon was turned half around by the impact of the slug and knocked off balance. As he regained his balance he turned to fire again but Cardigan was upon him. A terrific left caught Dillon under the right side of the jaw, lifted him—dropped him.

  Cardigan picked him up, heaved him over his shoulder and ran with him around to the front of the hotel. Geets was running up and down aimlessly in front of the hotel and looking toward the roof. When he saw Ca
rdigan he almost fainted with relief.

  “Take this to the hospital, Geets,” Cardigan clipped, piling Dillon into the back of the cab. Without waiting for a reply, he rushed into the hotel. When he got up to the fourth-floor corridor the clerk and a half a dozen other people were grouped in 419.

  Cardigan snapped at the clerk: “Call an ambulance.”

  “What is this?” demanded the clerk.

  “Get an ambulance. Step on it! You other people get out. Come on, get out! Listen,” he rasped at the clerk, “don’t stand there with your bare face hanging out! Get an ambulance!”

  HE SHOVED the clerk into the hall, herded the people after him and slammed shut the door. He dropped to his knees heavily beside Rhea Beach.

  “Hold everything,” he muttered. “The ambulance’ll be here in two shakes.”

  “I’m done for,” she gritted.

  “Nuts! You’ll be swell—”

  “No, I’m done for. Ned killed me. Listen. Listen close. Rosamund never killed Sam. Ned’d been playing around with Sam Salva’s wife and Salva’d threatened to kill him. When he walked in the house that night, Rosamund knew what he’d come for. He said, ‘Where’s Ned?’ And she said, ‘In bed.’ Then Salva headed for the stairway. He didn’t show a gun or anything. But Rosamund took a gun out of the desk and got in front of him. ‘Put it away, lady,’ Sam Salva said. ‘I’ve got no fight with you, lady,’ he said. And she said, ‘You’re not going upstairs.’ And he said, ‘Lady, I am.’ And she said, ‘If you move, I’ll shoot you.’ He wasn’t a very strong-looking guy. Little and pale and he must have had a bad heart. But he moved and she fired and he fell down and didn’t move.

  “She wasn’t drunk. That was a story. Ned came down the stairs with the maid. Rosamund got the shakes. ‘I killed him,’ she groaned. And then she went haywire and ran out of the house. I pulled her back in and she fainted and Ned sent the maid for some smelling salts. Before the maid came back, Rosamund came to. She ran out again and I found her in the garage trying to start one of the cars. I said I’d get the key. I went back and Ned was dressed and he was taking blanks out of the gun and putting in real bullets.

  “Well, me and Ned were in love with each other. He said, ‘They were only blanks. Sam’s not dead. He fainted. Baby,’ he said, ‘Rosamund’s a pain in the neck. I’m crazy about you. Let’s do it up right and go away together, eh?’ I was nuts about him and I said, ‘Anything you want, Ned.’ Then he took a wet towel and wrapped it around the gun and shot Sam Salva where he lay. He said then, ‘Stay here. When the maid comes back, tell her I’ve gone to look for Rosamund.’ But Hilda came in, so he told her himself.

  “He ran out, first taking along some of Rosamund’s jewelry. He drove one car and told her to drive the other to a little shack he owned out on Webster Road that nobody knew about. They drove there and he told her that Sam was dead, she’d killed him, and that Sam was unarmed. He told her to stay there. Living at the Richmond Hotel, a cheap little place on Tait Street, was a girl named Hazel Stone that’d just got in a week before. She’d followed Ned from Detroit, where he’d promised to leave Rosamund and go off with her. That was before he met me. Hazel was gone on him and she’d come to see him.

  “Well, he left Rosamund in the shack, phoned Hazel, told her to pack and meet him right away at a certain street corner. She did. He told her he’d left his wife. He drove her back to where the other car was parked and told her to drive it—he’d drive the other one and they’d go up to his camp. He gave her a couple of rings and she put them on. On the Sky High Drive he braked his car and she tried not to hit him and went over in the one she was driving. He had the bags in his. He hid them and then faked that accident, to cover up a busted fender he’d got driving Hazel off.”

  “Why’d he go to all the trouble of knocking off Hazel when he could have done it with Rosamund?”

  “Because Hazel was going to make trouble for him if he didn’t go off with her. She had something on him. Some kind of stock swindle. He knew Sam Salva was bent on killing him, so he killed Salva. He knew that if Rosamund was arrested she would probably get ten years and he knew there was money coming to her and that her being in prison would tie it up and he’d never get his hands on it. So he helped her hide out, and then afterwards told her what he’d done with Hazel. ‘For your sake,’ he told her. And when the body was washed up Ned and me identified it as Rosamund’s, showing the rings on the fingers. You couldn’t have identified it any other way. Then Ned sent me away. He said he’d join me. He never did. I—I came back.”

  Cardigan stared at the floor. “He figured then, that with Rosamund unable to come out in the open again, without facing a charge of killing a man, she was as good as dead. He figured the money would go to the kid, and he’d have the handling of it.” He stared at Rhea. “Then Rosamund Dillon is not dead!”

  “No.” It wasn’t Rhea’s voice.

  Miss Hoyt, the girl from the home where young Philip Dillon was staying, stood in the doorway, tears in her eyes.

  Cardigan stood up. “Where is she?”

  “I am Rosamund Dillon.”

  “Rosamund Dillon has black hair. I—”

  “I bleached mine. A plastic surgeon changed my face. I got a job in the home to be near my adopted boy. I was the one who phoned you saying he was an adopted child. I heard everything, Rhea. I don’t suppose you were to blame. Ned had a way with women.”

  She came into the room. Her place in the doorway was taken by the knotty-faced man in the Guards overcoat.

  “You turned out to be a curse, Cardigan, on several people,” he said in his dry steady voice. “I tried my best to keep you from getting to Rhea Beach. Not for Rhea’s sake—for Rosamund’s. Rosamund happened to be in a beauty parlor under some towels when she heard your woman operative get a line on Rhea. When you went to the home and asked about the boy—”

  The girl turned. “I shouldn’t have phoned you, Peter.”

  “That,” said the man, “made me realize I had to do something about it. I knew Rhea was drunk, scared. I was afraid she’d break.”

  The man put his arm around Rosamund’s waist, said: “Now I guess we can get married. You didn’t kill Salva after all, Rosa.”

  Outside, an ambulance siren wailed.

  Geets drove Cardigan to the Hotel Kingman. The big op slouched in the corner of the seat. When the cab stopped he looked up and saw the Kingman facade. He got out. “What’s the bill, Geetsy?”

  “Well, chief, six twenty-five for taxi fares and, well, I will go easy and say ten buckos for the other.”

  “What other?”

  “Oh, you know, for services, as of this date, as assistant detective, to wit.”

  Cardigan thrust a twenty-dollar bill into his hand. “Cheap at half the price.”

  There was a ping and then a long-drawn-out s-s-s-s-s-s-s.

  Geets stared at his left rear tire; cried out: “Them dirty gyps—excuse me language—them dirty gyps! Blow-out-proof tires they tell me! Puncture-proof tires I am told! Swindlers! Am I humiliated! I am, b’ Geez, humiliated definite!”

  Blood in the Dark

  Chapter One

  Greetings—Big Boy

  THE regular afternoon plane from New York was due at Danbridge at three ten. At three five it was two thousand feet above the West End Viaduct and the factories. At three six it was dropping down across Mohican Park and the Post Road Parkway. At three seven it crossed over the business district and at three eight the pilot throttled down above the Fair Grounds. The airport was beyond. The pilot got the O.K. flag from the administration-building tower and at three ten he spun his wheels on the landing field and waddled up to the cement ramp.

  Cardigan was the third to get off. The lean wind driving across the field bagged the skirt of his shaggy old ulster against his legs, wrestled with the shapeless brim of his battered fedora. Four persons got off after him and inside the gate a group was waiting for the arrivals. There were shouted greetings. There was the dry nasal voice o
f a uniformed telegraph messenger.

  “Telegram for Mr. Cardigan…. Telegram for Mr. Cardigan.”

  Cardigan raised his big head, opened his mouth, started a gesture upward. But he caught himself instantly, dropped his head, jammed his hand into his overcoat pocket. His other hand lugged a scarred Gladstone. He tramped through the terminal and was the first to climb into the airport bus. He could still hear, but faintly now, the nasal-voiced messenger intoning his name. He paid no attention. Other passengers entered the bus. The driver got in last, tooled the bus off the cinder parking space and hit the wide cement road to town.

  IT WAS a fifteen-minute ride to the airways office on Central Avenue, in the heart of the city. Cardigan did not go to a hotel. Hefting his bag, he started walking, his shoulders rocking and his big feet hitting the pavement hard. In Tuttle Street, ten minutes later, he came to a short row of rooming houses, chose one at random and climbed six stone steps to a glass-enclosed vestibule. He got a bedroom and sitting-room on the third floor.

  “It’s clean and comfortable,” said the sharp-eyed, sharp-nosed man.

  “How much?”

  “How long does the gentleman want it for?”

  “Make it a week.”

  “Then I would have to have twelve dollars.”

  Cardigan scooped up his bag and said, “Good-by.”

  The sharp-eyed man swallowed. “How much would the gentleman like to pay?”

  Cardigan stopped on the threshold. “Eight bucks.”

  “Ten would be the minimum.”

  “Nine.”

  “At nine fifty I lose money.”

  Cardigan skated his bag across the floor and paid the man nine fifty. He gave the name which he had used on the flight from New York: John Baker. The man explained that there was a pay-telephone on the wall just outside the door, and left. Cardigan did not remove his overcoat. He lit a cigarette, hauled a bottle of Irish whiskey out of his bag and took a long swallow. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he finished the cigarette, took two more swallows of whiskey, slapped the cork into the bottle and went out.