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

by Frederick Nebel

  Poteska stood spellbound.

  KLAEBERG pointed at Gloria. “I came to New York to find you, to beg you to come back to Willy. I didn’t know where to look but I remembered how crazy you were about John Barrymore. So the day I arrived, there was a picture that had just started with John Barrymore in it. I went there and stood outside and never moved while it was going on. And on the second day, in the afternoon, I saw you go in with this fellow that was killed last night—Bourke. So I waited until you came out and then I stepped up to you and said, ‘Hello, Vivian.’ And you looked cold at me and said, ‘You’re mistaken.’ I tried to talk to you and Bourke shoved me away and you both got in a cab and I lost you. But I remembered the cab number and I looked the driver up and asked him where he’d taken you. He said he dropped you off at the corner of Park and Sixtieth but that he took Bourke to the Rio Club.

  “So I went there last night and hung around. I saw him come in. I followed him into the men’s room and told him I wanted your address. He laughed. Then I begged him, I told him why I wanted it, that Willy was dying and asking for you. He was tight, I guess, for he laughed again and I knocked him down. I was afraid I might get pinched, so I left in a hurry. But I waited outside and watched until he came out and then I followed him and he met you at the corner of Park and Forty-eighth and—”

  She screamed: “Gus, make that idiot leave!”

  “No he don’t,” said Cardigan.

  Vincent and Stew looked at each other.

  Cardigan said: “Go ahead, Klaeberg. What then?”

  “I followed them to that house in Thirty-fifth Street, where Bourke was killed.”

  “What time’d you follow them there?”

  “Eleven thirty. I saw them go in, I saw a light go on on the top floor. I figured that was where she lived, so I went away. All I wanted to know was where she lived. I went back this morning, to see her, talk to her—and found the police there when I knocked on the door. I knew by the talk downstairs that there was something wrong, and I didn’t want to get involved, so I said I was a magazine salesman.” He swallowed. “I didn’t answer your questions at the hotel because I wanted her—for Willy.”

  “You lie!” screamed the woman, shaking her fists.

  Cardigan said dully: “Sister, I got a sudden brainstorm. That was pretty neat this morning, the way you picked up that poker offhand and pointed it at Block. You picked it up because your fingerprints were already on it! You made it useless for the police by picking it up there—”

  “You—you—” she panted.

  “You,” he said, “socked Bourke with the poker.”

  She spun on Vincent and Stew. “My God, what are you waiting for?”

  Vincent said, “This,” and fired through his pocket at Eddie Shore. Shore stooped over, then crumpled. Poteska stood rooted, his hands pressed to his thighs, his eyes wide. The woman ran screaming behind a divan, then along the wall toward another room. Klaeberg dived after her, caught her by the wrist and held on grimly.

  Cardigan weaved under the second shot from Vincent’s gun and had his own out. He twisted and fired at the same time, upset Vincent and dodged Stew’s first blast by less than an inch.

  Gloria yelled: “Make him let me go!”

  STEW swung his gun toward Klaeberg and Cardigan fired and hit Stew in the leg, staggering him enough to make the aim on Klaeberg wild. A mirror shattered, its pieces flying, ringing against a window. Poteska had not moved. He did not move now. He seemed transfixed, his face white with terror. The woman was clawing at Klaeberg, kicking him. He held on, crying: “You killed Willy! You killed Willy!”

  Vincent threw himself behind the big cabinet radio, stuck his gun around a corner of it. Eddie Shore, sitting now beside a chair, fired into the radio. Mixed with the roar of his gun was the sound of something shattering inside the cabinet.

  Stew gave the bar-wagon a kick and sent it racing at Cardigan. Cardigan jumped aside and shot over it and Stew slammed back against the wall, clawed against the wall, yanked down a window drape. The bar-wagon scooted across the floor and knocked Poteska down. It toppled over on him and he fought his way through bottles and glasses.

  Cardigan took a running broad jump, hit the radio with both feet and piled in on top of Vincent. Eddie Shore fired across the seat of the chair and nailed Stew to the wall. Stew’s gun went off pointing at the ceiling. He collapsed with the window drape twisting around him. Cardigan put his foot against the overturned radio, gave it a shove and sent it tumbling to one side. Vincent raised his gun and Cardigan kicked it out of his hand. Vincent, white-faced, whipped out a knife and slashed at Cardigan’s ankles and Cardigan lifted his foot and took the slash across the sole of his shoe, then jammed his foot down on Vincent’s arm. He reached over and took the knife.

  Poteska stood up and Cardigan turned and went across the room to where Klaeberg was holding the woman. Cardigan came up to her, took her by the throat.

  “If Ivy Bourke didn’t kill Steve, and she didn’t,” he said, “she had no cause to disappear. Where is she?”

  “You’re cho—choking—me—”

  “That’s what I thought,” he muttered. “You’re like a lot of other wise babies that didn’t touch third on the way home. Where’s Ivy?” he gritted, pressing harder.

  She dropped to her knees, gagging. He let her go and she sat on the floor, bent over, braced on her arms. Her eyes swept around the room, saw Stew lying mixed up in the window drape, Vincent lying heavy-eyed, droop-mouthed, against the overturned radio. She looked at Poteska. The little man stood with his heels together, his palms pressed against his chubby thighs. There was no recognition in his eyes. It was as though she did not exist. But suddenly rage flamed in his face and he flew across the room screaming: “You dirty double-crosser, after all I done for you!”

  His hands dug savagely into her throat.

  Cardigan grabbed him by the back of the neck, ripped him off. “I catch on, Gus. Only take it easy.”

  Poteska writhed and tussled in Cardigan’s grip. His hands clawed the air. He cried: “Let me at her! Let me—”

  She crouched on the floor, terror-mad.

  Cardigan said: “Do you talk, sister, or do I let Gus at you?”

  “Don’t—don’t let him at me!”

  Klaeberg was weakening. “Don’t let him at her. He—he’s raving! He’s—”

  “Exactly,” said Cardigan. “But I’m interested only in Ivy Bourke.”

  The woman drew shaking fingers across her gaping mouth. She nodded. “I—I’ll talk. Only don’t let him—let him—”

  Chapter Six

  Poison for Ivy

  CARDIGAN climbed the narrow stairway in the rank-smelling house on Eleventh Avenue. He stood for a moment in the upper hall, sweeping his flashlight beam back and forth, counting doors. He need not have counted them—all were open but one. The rooms were empty, damp. He went toward the door that was closed, stuck a rusty key into the keyhole, opened the door and stood in the doorway of a dirty, littered room.

  Ivy lay among the debris. Chains were round her wrists and ankles and a chain round her waist was fastened to a ringbolt on the floor. A dirty rag was lashed across her mouth. He muttered, “The bums,” and his big feet were hard, heavy on the floor as he crossed it. He sank to his knees. Her eyes fluttered.

  “Hiyuh, kid?” he mumbled.

  He had other keys with which to open the locks that held the chains. Then he cut away the gag. She didn’t stir but lay there with her eyes opening and closing. Wrists and ankles were bruised, swollen. It was bitter cold in the room.

  Cardigan didn’t say anything. He picked her up in his arms, took her out of the room and down the stairs and out into the street. There was a streetlight beneath which he stood for a moment looking down at her pale face.

  “Poor kid,” he muttered. “But I put ’em in the hospital….”

  A shade of a smile appeared for a moment on her lips. Then her eyes closed and he could tell that she had fainted. When a cab
came along he stopped it, said: “The nearest hospital.”

  She was unconscious when they took her in at the hospital. He gave his name, paid for a private room and a nurse, explained briefly and left his phone number.

  GEORGE HAMMERHORN was getting ready for bed when Cardigan walked in on him. Cardigan said: “I found Ivy.”

  “You look mussed up a bit, Jack. Drink?”

  Cardigan shook his head. “Gus Poteska’s gal, Vivian Klaeberg, killed Steve. People thought she was Gloria Bell—that was the name she used when she was on the stage for a while.”

  Hammerhorn put on his pajama coat and sat down. “What happened to Ivy?”

  “That’s it. Poteska gave Bourke the twenty grand to take South but Bourke and Vivian were going to run away with it, together. She was married to a guy named Willy Klaeberg, he was an invalid, out in Kansas City. She left him, taking some cash with her, and the poor guy went heart-broken. He got sicker and sicker and at last his brother Kenneth came to New York to find her and beg her to go back to Willy, just so’s he could die happy. Well, Kenneth found her—saw her on the street one day with Bourke. He spoke to her, called her Vivian, but she ignored him. But Bourke made her come clean. She admitted she was married, a thing Poteska didn’t know. That scared her. Poteska wanted to marry her but she was holding off and digging into him meanwhile for a fair living. She also had a crush on Bourke. With Kenneth in town, she was afraid Poteska would find out about her Kansas City marriage. She hated the little guy but she liked his dough.

  “So Bourke suggested they run away together when he found out Poteska was going to send him South with twenty grand. She met Bourke last night on a street corner and he had quite an edge on. She’d checked her bags at the Grand Central but he had to go home for his. She didn’t want to go there with him but he said his wife was out and wouldn’t be home and he was tight enough to insist.

  “Meantime Kenneth Klaeberg was tailing him, thinking that he was the guy was living with Vivian. He tailed them to Bourke’s apartment, saw them go in and then left, planning to come back in the morning to see Vivian. Bourke packed his bag, staggering around a bit, and according to Vivian’s story she tried to get him to hurry. Then they heard footsteps coming up the stairs and Vivian ran over and shot home the bolt. Ivy tried to unlock the door but she couldn’t.

  “Bourke yelled through the door that he wouldn’t let her in. He told her if she couldn’t come home early, she couldn’t come in. She argued, trying to pacify him, according to Vivian. Then Vivian sneezed and Ivy said, ‘Steve, you’ve got a woman in there. This is the final insult. I’ll go. Slip me five dollars under the door, so I can get a hotel room.’ He was just drunk enough to refuse it. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll go down the street and borrow it from a friend. I’ll be back here in the morning and see that you’re out.’ So she left. She came down to my place.

  “Vivian was sore. She bawled Steve out. But then he was getting sore at something else. He began to drink some more. He fell down and cracked his wrist watch—that was at twelve twenty. Vivian wanted him to hurry up and finish packing, so they could get out. Then he said, ‘I know where she’s gone,’ and called my place. Vivian didn’t know it was me he called. He just phoned and Ivy happened to answer it and he recognized her voice and hung up. Then he was all for coming down to my place and beating me up. He was blind drunk. He picked up Ivy’s engagement ring off the bureau and chucked it. Then Vivian tried to stop him from going to my place. She finally picked up the poker and chased him into the kitchen. She hit him with it between the eyes and he pitched out the window.”

  CARDIGAN butted his cigarette in an ash tray and continued.

  “She was plenty scared and ran out and nobody saw her. But she was afraid Ivy might have seen her come in with Steve, or known about them. So she called up two heels named Vincent Bates and Stew Morgan, met them and offered them a thousand each to pull a little trick. She knew that Ivy would return to the apartment in the morning, so Stew was to stand at one end of the block and Vincent at the other, and they were to ask every woman that turned in that block if she was Ivy Bourke. She also gave them a description of Ivy. She figured the cops would suspect Ivy if she vanished.

  “Stew was the one that picked Ivy up. He held a pocketed gun against her, walked her to a roadster he had parked a couple of blocks away and drove her to a dump on Eleventh Avenue. Then he contacted Vincent and Vivian. Vivian wanted them to feed Ivy poison or chuck her in the river, to make it look like suicide. But these boys wanted the cash first. She promised it to them in forty-eight hours. They said when they got the cash they’d get rid of Ivy, and not before.

  “Then they made Ivy tell them if she’d got in touch with anybody from the time she left the apartment last night until the time Stew picked her up. She said she’d written me a note, nothing important. But Vincent went down to my place to look for it. Whitey Fife, Block’s partner, had a tail on my place. He recognized Vincent as a punk and followed him in and it was in my apartment that Vincent knifed him. The letter he was looking for didn’t arrive till later, and I got it. It was that letter that made me feel Ivy wasn’t guilty.”

  He paused for a drink and finished his story as he finished the drink. He added: “Eddie’s wound’s not serious.”

  Hammerhorn said: “Well, there was plenty double-crossing all around.” He chuckled. “But they had you guessing!”

  Cardigan reached for his hat. “Ivy’ll be O.K. tomorrow.”

  Hammerhorn held up his finger. “Oh, before you go, Jack. I was over at the club tonight and—” He crossed to a desk, picked up a small rectangular book, held it out. “Take a chance. It’s only two bits and you might—”

  “Don’t tell me,” cut in Cardigan.

  “Don’t tell you what?”

  “That I might win a round-trip airplane flight to Chicago.”

  Hammerhorn blinked. “How’d you guess it, boy?”

  Cardigan slammed out.

  Lead Poison

  Chapter One

  Chop-Spot

  CARDIGAN dribbled tobacco from a cotton sack into a piece of rice paper, nipped the sack’s drawstring between his hard teeth and yanked the sack shut, let it drop to the table. He rolled the cigarette into a neat cylinder and looked out through the window of the Pearl of Nanking Café, down onto Grand Avenue. A few pedestrians dug head-down through the raw wind of a dark San Francisco night.

  Cardigan’s eyes were idly focused on as much as he could see of the man who had been standing across the street for the past half hour. The shadow of a wooden awning masked the man as far down as the hips; below that, Cardigan saw the skirt of a dark overcoat, trousered legs, a pair of shoes that sometimes reflected the light of a nearby street-lamp. The Cosmos op figured that if the man were waiting for someone he’d be much warmer back in the recessed doorway between the two shop-windows.

  “All right,” he said, “I’ll try again. Where’s Tom Gow?”

  THE girl sitting across the table from him was Chinese, dressed exquisitely in American clothes. They were the only ones in the small second-floor dining-room of the Pearl of Nanking Café. Mae Ling had a smooth triangular face, penciled eyebrows, neatly rouged lips. She said, for the sixth time, “I don’t know,” her eyes averted, her hands clenched in her lap.

  Cardigan flashed a match on his thumbnail and lit up. His eyes, dark, probing, moved beneath shaggy brows. “I told you to come to my agency office in Market Street,” he said. “You begged off. You made the date for here, when I said you’d bounce into trouble if you didn’t see me. Why here?”

  Her pretty lips contracted. “I—I just didn’t— I was afraid, I guess. In a public place, like this, I feel safer.”

  “What was there to be afraid of?”

  “I didn’t know you.”

  He leaned heavily on his elbows. “Tom Gow was running around with Berkman and Finger in Los Angeles a month ago. We got that tip from the L.A. branch of the agency. This Siamese throne-chair was shippe
d up from Los Angeles two weeks ago, after that movie company took some shots of it. It was put on exhibition here in the Jerris Gallery. Three days ago it was bought by Ludwig Hertz. He paid down a three-thousand-dollar binder, with the understanding that the rest of the amount, ninety-seven grand, was to be paid on delivery at his place.

  “The chair was called for by the express company in an armored truck. The truckmen wore regulation uniforms but they’d held up and conked the real truckmen and taken the necessary papers away from them. Bushman, the guy at the gallery, had no way of knowing. The two men seemed O.K. They carried out the chair. Now Bushman’s a nut on taking pictures. The removal of that throne-chair was a big event to him, and he leaned out the window and took a picture of it being lifted into the truck. The picture shows only the tops of the truckmen’s heads, the tops of their caps—no faces. But standing on the curb near the truck, it shows a Chinese and part of his face—a snappy dresser. He’s blurred a bit, but if it ain’t Tom Gow I’ll eat my hat. I want to know where he is. You know.”

  “I don’t.”

  Cardigan said: “Sam Chang, our only Chinese op, cased your apartment. Down between the pillows on your sofa he found a Pullman stub for a berth from Los Angeles to here. The stub’s dated the day after the throne-chair was shipped north. You didn’t go to Los Angeles at that time, I can prove it. A check-back shows Tom Gow packed up and left his hotel room in Los on the same date as the Pullman stub. Things add—they add up, kid.”

  Her eyes were fixed on his tie. “They add up because you make them add up. I tell you I haven’t seen Tom in two months. I don’t know where he is. That’s final.”

  “Your neck, it is!” he growled. “Listen, Mae, you ain’t a bad charmer. You’ve got no police record. We’ve figured it out that you make a pretty good living posing for illustrators. But you’re going to get a record, Mae, if you don’t come clean with me. You’re going to get it quick. We know Tom Gow likes to drink Pernod—he drinks nothing else. We know that the morning of the day he arrived you went around to a store and bought a bottle of Pernod. Next day a tailor cleaned a suit for a guy of Tom Gow’s description. The suit had Pernod stains. It adds, Mae!”