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

by Frederick Nebel

  Cardigan decided on a novel course of action. Standing there on the curb, he figured it would be a good idea to hire a local private detective agency to shadow the three operators and the secretary and to get full data on their background and the people they associated with. Nothing would have to be said about why he wanted such information. He knew of a pretty good local agency.

  He put his head into the wind and strode down Central Avenue and on the corner of Tuttle Street a big hand landed heartily on his shoulder, a voice said: “As I live and breathe, my old bosom friend Jack Cardigan! The good old Cosmos Agency in person; hears nothing, sees nothing, knows all.”

  Cardigan stopped, turned. He made an effort at showing surprise and good humor. Detective-sergeant Hube Boggany was all grins. He was built somewhat along the lines of a rhinoceros, a leathery faced, huge man wrapped in a baggy raglan overcoat, with a sporty yellow fedora aslant on his blocklike head. Gray spats overlapped ruddy brown shoes.

  “Good old Hube Boggany,” said Cardigan trying to be hearty. “Where’d you get the outfit?”

  “Ain’t it the nuts, boy! Me wife thought the clothes I was wearing was too, she said, somber kind of. Clothes make the man, she says. I feel ten years younger since I been wearing these new models. I see by the Morning Express that you’re in town. I figured if I hung out around Tuttle Street I’d see you sooner or later.”

  “Anything particular you wanted to see me about?”

  Boggany waved his hand. “Nope, nothing—nothing at all. Just to say hello. Where you stopping, at the Bellman?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “The Dodge?”

  “No, Hube.”

  “Oh, prob’ly the Chester, then.”

  “Wrong again.”

  “H’m. Where, then?”

  “Oh, with a friend.”

  “Ah,” grinned Boggany, his bright little eyes jigging. “Well, I suppose you come up to see the auto show.”

  Cardigan chuckled. “Nope.”

  “M’m. Ah, I know. You come here to help organize that new railroad police.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  Hube Boggany looked crestfallen. He gave Cardigan a sly little glance, then stared at the pavement. Finally he heaved, grinned, slapped Cardigan on the arm. “Whatever it is, Jack, I know it’s O.K. I ain’t really interested in what you’re doing.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Cardigan.

  “Come on. I was just about to head up Tuttle. I’ll go along as far with you as you’re going.”

  “I wasn’t going up Tuttle, Hube.”

  Boggany looked pained. “Well, come to think of it, I got to go along Central here a ways. I’ll go along with you.”

  “I just remembered,” Cardigan said. “I’ve got to go up Tuttle.”

  Boggany looked very unhappy. He remained on the corner looking unhappy while Cardigan wheeled off and started up Tuttle Street. A couple of blocks farther on Cardigan could see in the rearview mirror attached to the spare wheel of a parked car that Boggany was following. The detective was worming his way among the cars parked along the curb.

  CARDIGAN turned and entered at random a five-storied rooming house four blocks from his own. The vestibule was dark and he could not be observed from the street. But he saw Boggany standing behind a parked sedan directly across the way. Cardigan killed about five minutes in the vestibule, then strode out and returned toward Central Avenue. A backward glance showed him Boggany crossing the street and entering the rooming house.

  He changed his mind about going to a local agency. He walked through the city until he found a street corner that was practically deserted. It was in a down-at-the-heel section of the city. There were crumbling abandoned buildings on three sides of the intersection; on the fourth was a board fence concealing what he discovered was an empty lot.

  He returned to Central Avenue and sent a note by special messenger to Clayburn. The note read—

  At about noon I’ll phone you and use my own name. I’ll tell you to meet me at two this afternoon on the corner of Race and Fillmore Streets. You agree to meet me there, but don’t do it. Just stay where you are.

  At eleven o’clock he telephoned police headquarters and asked for Hube Boggany. In a moment Boggany came on the wire.

  “Hube, this is Jack Cardigan. Will you meet me at two this afternoon on the corner of Race and Fillmore Streets?”

  “What’s up, Jack?”

  “I want to show you something around there.”

  “O.K., boy. I’ll be there!”

  At noon Cardigan telephoned Clayburn. He got the secretary first and she switched him over to Clayburn. He said: “This is Cardigan, Mr. Clayburn. I’d like you to meet me on the corner of Race and Fillmore Streets at two this afternoon. I’ll be wearing a light gray raglan coat, a yellow hat, brown shoes and gray spats.”

  “Very well, Mr. Cardigan,” replied Clayburn. “I’ll be there.”

  Cardigan hung up, rubbed his hands together, and went around to a grill room for luncheon. He drank three dry Martinis, four beers with the luncheon, and afterwards lighted a fat black cigar. He felt just about right. He figured it might be a good idea to take a gun along to the two-o’clock date, so he headed up Tuttle Street toward his rooms and went through the vestibule at exactly one o’clock. He went up the stairways three steps at a time, humming off-key. He got his door-key out on the way down the third-floor corridor and wiggled it in the keyhole while joggling the knob. The door opened easily and he barged in, slapped it shut and glanced up into the muzzle of an automatic. The man behind the automatic was Stormy Scholtz from the news room of the Morning Express.

  Cardigan growled: “Put it down, Scholtz. It’s a bad idea.”

  “For you, yeah. It’s your own gun, pal, and your choice in guns is swell. Tack your tail onto that chair there and be brighter than you look.”

  Chapter Three

  The Death Double

  CARDIGAN’S face wore a sheer, thin smile; it was fixed to his lips and had nothing to do with the dark unwavering light in his eyes. Scholtz stood lazily back on his heels, his heavy legs bowed, his stocky neck rooted firmly to his broad, powerful shoulders. His hat was haphazardly on the back of his head and a slab of yellow hair protruded and reached halfway down his forehead. His broad, well packed face was bare of any expression except one of gravity. His eyes were calm, certain, steady.

  “So it’s Baker here,” he drawled. “One of the lads at the office swore you were Cardigan. I found the address on a slip of paper in Mae’s apartment.”

  “She didn’t know the address.”

  “The hell she didn’t. She told me it last night but I wasn’t paying much attention so I forgot it. She gave a kid a quarter to follow you and see what house you went in, after you shook her yesterday afternoon.”

  “She’s too bright to live, that gal.”

  “That’s the conclusion I figured you might have come to after you read her puff in this morning’s Express.”

  Cardigan squinted, growled: “Clear that up.”

  “Mae’s disappeared.”

  Cardigan’s squint grew deeper. He used a hand to scoff at the remark; snapped out: “You’re drunk or screwy or both!”

  “Yeah? Suppose you find her then.”

  Cardigan made an impatient gesture. “Listen, put that gun down, will you! It’s practically on a hair trigger!”

  “What did I tell you about sitting down?”

  “All right, I’ll sit down. There—now I’m sitting down. Now be sensible and put that gun down.”

  Scholtz was imperturbable. “I’ll take care of this end, Cardigan. You take care of yours. Where’s Mae?”

  Cardigan wagged his head hopelessly. “Mae, Mae, Mae! How the hell do I know where she is? You saw her last night. You said so yourself. Then you saw her after I did.”

  “Skip all the bushwah, kid, and get down to business. I’m feeling businesslike as hell. You sailed into the office this A.M. mad enough to knock her teeth o
ut—”

  “I was, by cripes! By cripes, I was! That loose-mouthed dame has caused me to miss more tricks in the ten years I know her than any two police departments put together! Mae’s all right except that somebody once told her a newspaper reporter mustn’t keep anything from the public. I didn’t want anyone to know I was in town. Half the success of my business is based on the surprise move. She killed half of it by blabbing in her column that I was in town.”

  Scholtz regarded him with heavy stoicism for a full minute. The gun he held never wavered. He said presently: “All right, if that’s a prologue, let’s go into the story. Why did you come to this city? What’s your business here?”

  Cardigan stood up and said: “Horses, horses! You know damned well that if any business was important enough to bring me here it’s important enough to be my own business, not public property.”

  “So important, maybe, that Mae got wind of it and you salted her away. Then you crash the office this morning looking for her, just as a stall. Sit down.”

  “I’m going to stand, reporter, whether you like it or not. And listen to this: if I knew where Mae was at this minute I’d be there boxing her ears. Two years ago in New York I was living at a hotel under an assumed name keeping tabs on a guy that was suspected of being in a fake-insurance swindle. Mae sees me in the lobby one day. I practically on bended knees beg her not to mention to anyone that she saw me there. So next day there appears in the paper she was working on then: ‘What big Irish private dick is stopping at an East Fifty-third Street hotel under a phony name?’ That was her idea of being mysterious. The guy I was tabbing bails out of that caravanserai so fast that he hasn’t been caught yet. Now I don’t know where she is, see? I haven’t set eyes on her since I saw her yesterday afternoon in Tuttle Street. Pull your brains up out of your socks, reporter, and cut out acting the clown with that gun.”

  SCHOLTZ allowed a dry, mysterious smile to crawl across his lips. “We’ll say you don’t know where she is. O.K., we’ll say that. But you know what you came here for and I don’t. Now I want to know, flatfoot. Mae may be a baked-ham reporter but she’s on our staff and that’s that. She’s missing. We want to find her. The general consensus of opinion is that the puff she gave you in her column is somehow connected with her disappearance. Now maybe some guys would like to know where you live. She mentioned that you lived in Tuttle Street but she didn’t give the number. Now suppose you break down and tell me who the guys are you’re working on.”

  “Nix,” said Cardigan. “For one thing, I don’t know. What you just said sounds reasonable but I can’t help you.”

  “Let me be the judge of that. I want to know, dumb ox, why you’re here in Danbridge. Who hired you? There—tell me that! Who hired you?”

  A lean measuring look had come into Cardigan’s eyes. “You heard me once on that question, reporter. Why I’m here is none of your sweet damned business.”

  Scholtz barked: “All right, tie your tongue up! Tie it up at police headquarters and see if you’ll tie it long! I’m going—”

  “Now listen—”

  “Back out! I’m going to trot you out and toss you into the loving arms of the first harness bull in the street! This dame has vanished and I’m going to find out where the connection is. Back out that door and keep your dukes high.”

  Cardigan did not budge. “Before you pack too much faith in that gun, cowboy, be sure of it. Did you jack it once before you swung it on me?”

  There was an instant flicker in Scholtz’s eyes; but he covered up, snapping: “Of course I did.”

  “Because if you didn’t, the firing chamber’s empty. I never jack a shell into the chamber until—”

  Scholtz jumped back, slapped his left hand on top of the gun, jacked open the chamber. Cardigan hit him on the jaw as a shell flew harmlessly out of the side of the chamber. Scholtz, seeing that he had been tricked, that there had been a shell in the chamber all the time, exploded ragefully. It was his undoing. A hard, able-bodied man, he might have done damage, but his rage and chagrin blinded him. Cardigan leveled him with two blows and slapped the gun out of his hand as the reporter went down. Scholtz did not quite reach the floor, for Cardigan grabbed him by the coat lapels and, still keeping him in motion, piled him onto the divan.

  Scholtz looked dazed but he none the less stood right up on his feet again and took a couple of wild swings. Cardigan slammed him in the belly with the muzzle of the gun, held it there, hard, and chopped off: “No kidding, reporter; it’s loaded!”

  Scholtz’s arms dropped to his sides. His chest and shoulders were heaving but there was still anger and fight in his eyes.

  He panted: “I ought to get kicked in the mouth for falling for a trick like that.”

  “You will if you don’t suddenly civilize yourself, baby. Now I’m not being tough. I don’t have to, with a gun in my mitt. So tame down. Pick up your hat and get the hell out of here.”

  Scholtz swung across the room, grabbed his hat, banged it on his head. He strode to the door, said, “I’ll be seeing you, Irish, in a big way,” and slammed out.

  Cardigan, listening at the door, heard his feet club down the two flights of stairs, heard the hall door slam shut. He hopped to the window, looked down and saw Scholtz striding away down the street. He turned from the window with a sour, disgruntled face. It was twenty past one by his watch. He relighted his dead cigar and tramped out of his rooms, down the stairs. In the main corridor he found a back door, unbolted it and stepped into a yard. There was a low wire fence which he scaled easily; dropped into an alleyway and came out on the street beyond. It was half past one when he came to Race and Fillmore Streets. He waited until a woman wheeling a baby carriage had passed and then swung up and over the board fence. In a few minutes he found a knot hole that gave him a pretty generous view of the intersection.

  AT five minutes to two Hube Boggany appeared on the corner puffing energetically on a cigar. He rocked comfortably back and forth on his heels, the wide brim of his yellow hat flapping in the wind, his brightly polished shoes flashing in the sunlight. He looked well fed, happy; he looked like a man who was anticipating some good fortune. But as he glanced again and again at his watch, and as the minutes passed and welded finally into half an hour, he began to look displeased, No more than a dozen pedestrians had passed during that half hour. At twenty to three Hube Boggany stamped his foot impatiently, looked up and down the street, snorted, and rocked off.

  Cardigan saw him vanish beyond range of the knot hole, but the stout detective’s footfalls were still very audible. And presently there were other footfalls. A man appeared walking past the knot hole; he was headed in the same direction which Hube Boggany had taken. Cardigan could not see much of his face, for his coat collar was turned up. He waited until the man had passed on. Then he stood on his toes and looked over the top of the fence. Boggany was two blocks up Race Street, with the man a block behind him.

  Cardigan cleared the fence and landed on the sidewalk and instantly jumped behind a large tree. Cautiously he peered round the edge of it and the skin on the back of his neck tightened. He saw Hube Boggany standing on a corner, his hands on his hips, the broad back of his coat wrinkled. He saw the man with the turned-up coat collar in the act of kneeling down behind an ashcan and drawing a gun from his overcoat pocket. There was no doubt about what he intended doing; he intended taking a shot at Hube Boggany.

  Cardigan knew that his stunt had worked, but right now it was on the point of taking an awful tangent. By phoning Clayburn and describing himself as Boggany he had drawn what he had hoped to draw—somebody connected with the person in the office who was obviously giving out information; somebody who was connected with the disappearance and strange editorials of Silas Mackworth. But he hadn’t looked forward to what was taking place now.

  He shouted, “Hey, you!” but did not move from behind the tree. He saw the man with drawn gun duck down behind the ashcan. He saw Hube Boggany turn around slowly, stare in one direction, the
n in another. The man behind the ashcan could not be seen by Boggany. The headquarters detective sniffed the air, scratched the back of his neck, then shrugged and turned off into the side street, vanishing. Cardigan mused that Hube Boggany would never know how close he had come to death.

  The Cosmos op had his hand on the gun in his pocket. The man behind the ashcan was still motionless, his attitude tense, alert. After a minute he began cautiously to peer around, his head moving slowly, his eyes roving warily. They stopped suddenly, fastening on the tree. Cardigan must have stuck his head out farther than he thought. The man instantly whirled, facing the tree. There was a short block between them. He must have known that he had been caught in the act of pulling a gun on Boggany. He began slowly to work his way around the ashcan, to put it between himself and the tree.

  Cardigan could have shot the man during that inept move but he had no desire to kill a man who doubtless was potent with information. He remained behind the tree. In a few minutes he could tell that the man was working backward from the ashcan. A woman carrying a market basket came round the corner and the man took advantage of her appearance to stand up and walk swiftly away. The woman was now between him and Cardigan. He kept walking swiftly away.

  CARDIGAN stepped from behind the tree, turned up his overcoat collar, yanked down his hat and started. His hand was still on the gun in his pocket. The man was two blocks beyond and when he glanced round and saw Cardigan following on the opposite side of the street he strode even faster. He turned right at the next block and Cardigan broke into a run, running on the earth between the sidewalk and the curbstone. When he reached the corner he saw the man striding down the side street, only half a block away. This street was for the moment deserted, and it happened that at that instant the man was not looking round.