The Marquis turned and ran down the stairs. Movement and excited conversation were audible in one or two occupied apartments of the house below, but so far no face had appeared in a doorway.
He flung open the front door, just as the radio cops came running up the steps, told them: “All right. Stay out here. I’ve got hold here. Block any more of your pals coming in, but let anybody else in that wants to come. But if anybody tries to get out, unless they’re with me,—stop them at any cost. Got that? Doc, come on upstairs quickly—man shot.”
The little doctor flew up the stairs, and the Marquis closed the front door on the swarming mob, outside. When he finally got back to the bedroom, the doctor was on his knees by the fallen man.
And in that instant, jagged, startling thoughts hit the Marquis between the eyes. He came to a dead stop, his eyes flaming crazily. He did not hear what the doctor, rising from his knees, said, or if he did, he made no answer.
For one instant, he stood poised there, then he swung his head round. An immense cupboard almost filled one wall of the bedroom. He darted to it, whipped it open. It was meagerly filled with the actor’s wardrobe. He whipped the hangers all to one end, snapped, “Doc, in here, quick! Never mind why—I can save this situation. Move! And don’t dare come out—no matter what happens—till I tell you. No matter what happens. You know me—I’m not a screwball. Never mind the patient. He’s not important any more. I know—I know—but get in here!”
He literally flung the protesting physician by the scruff of his neck, across the room at a run, jammed him into the cupboard, slammed it shut, found a key in the lock and turned it. Then he ran to the door, bit his lips, came back and knelt again by the wounded man, felt his pulse.
Then he reversed his gun and coolly smashed it down across the unconscious man’s forehead, ripping flesh. A little blood trickled down the man’s cheek. The doctor, inside the cupboard, began to bang on the door.
The Marquis whirled and raved at him, “Another sound out of you, and I’ll empty this gun through that door!”
From downstairs came the crash of plate-glass.
He ran out to the stairs. This would be Zeke Immerman—with his raiding-squad technique.
THE DOOR burst open below, and he heard Immerman’s harsh voice snap: “Get back there, you lugs. I’ll shoot any man who follows me!” Then his feet were racing up the stairs, his voice calling inquiringly: “Marty! Marty!”
“Here, hurry it up!” the Marquis told him, and the chubby little dick whirled into the broken doorway.
The Marquis snapped: “Stand right here. Cover that lug on the floor. He isn’t badly wounded. I had to conk him for safety’s sake. And for God’s sake don’t let anybody plug him from that window, or let him plug you either. This is the pay-off. He knows all the answers—both to the shooting at the San Mario Hotel and this thing tonight. If he so much as moves an eyebrow—jump him. Don’t kill him, if you can help it. And don’t get any closer to him. He’s dynamite. Stay right there!”
He turned and ran down one flight of stairs—and stopped.
From the room he had just left, came Immerman’s startled yell—and a shot.
The Marquis caught his breath, turned and ran up again.
Immerman still stood where he had left him but there was a thin wisp of smoke rising from the end of his pistol. The prone man lay where he had been, but there was a blue revolver clutched in his fingers now—and one of his eyes had been blown in. From the corner of his own eye, the Marquis noted that the bottom drawer of the bureau, previously closed, now stood open a foot.
Immerman stammered: “Hell, I—I’m sorry, Marquis. I don’t know where he got that gun. I turned to watch you go downstairs and when I turned back he had a bead on me. I had to shoot instantly to save—I didn’t have a chance to choose my spot.”
There was a second’s silence. Then the Marquis said tonelessly: “It’s all right, I guess. But there goes the last chance we had of getting the name of the man who engineered tonight’s little doings—the man who knew my schedule for coming down from the mountains, the man who knew all about my friendship with Sid Lajoie—who knew about Sid installing that camera—in fact, the man who must be a mind-reader, to know us all so well.”
Immerman stammered. “But—but the killer didn’t know about that camera. He was taken—”
“That was the part of the frame that was supposed to be the crusher. Damn the luck—this gent might have mentioned Sprackling, after all.”
“But Sprackling had an alibi!”
“Sure—but the picture wasn’t taken at twelve-ten. Look at this.” He took a print of the damning black-light photograph from his pocket, handed it to the bewildered-looking Italian.
Immerman tucked his gun under his arm, held it stupidly.
“See how those steel bars shine and glisten?” the Marquis said. “That’s from the lights of the marquee of the Victoria theater across the street.”
“Well, yeah, sure, but—”
“The Victoria is a two-a-day, Zeke. At twelve-ten, their marquee would have been long dark.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!”
The Marquis repocketed it. “Well, we came awfully close to the answer.”
He reached out suddenly and snaked Immerman’s gun from under his arm.
The plump detective yelled, “Hey!”
The Marquis shot at him: “You have another, haven’t you?”
“Well, yeah, but—” Immerman’s hand went under his other armpit.
Then the Marquis’ gun was suddenly steady on Immerman’s throat. “Don’t draw it, Immie.”
The Marquis backed over quickly and unlocked the cupboard door. The doctor burst out, red-faced. “Doc,” the Marquis said mildly, “what condition was that man on the floor in, when Zeke here shot him?”
“He was stone dead,” the doctor said. “Dead before you locked me in there.”
“Then he could hardly have reached a gun out of that bottom drawer there?”
“Gun? My God, no!”
The silence that held the room was awful, odorous, unending. Immerman’s round face became grayish.
THE MARQUIS’ cold-blue eyes locked with Immerman’s hollow, long-lashed brown ones. “When you came to my gang from the raiding-squad,” the Marquis said gently, “I knew you were used to a lot more graft than you’d get from me. But I thought you’d have patience, work yourself up by degrees. It wasn’t fast enough, eh? You thought you’d move the head man aside and step into the real gravy at once.”
The Marquis shook his head. “I’m sorry, Zeke. You had the kind of brains that I could have used. The trick of solving that hotel murder—tying it to this Raymond Tracy and then realizing that he looked enough like me so that there was a racket in it, was no dead-head’s brain wave.
“Then the trick of setting the picture so it certainly looked like I’d killed old Sid, the rounding up of Sprackling both to give you an alibi, and so that he would be on hand to put his beak in the killing and make trouble for me—all very smooth. And there was nothing wrong with your gag of having the girl sent to pick up my alibi and hog-tie him, just for insurance.
“It’s too bad that your attempt to snuff me out and get that brass disk didn’t work. Naturally, you knew that when I tracked that down, I’d eventually come to Tracy here—so you beat it to close his mouth before I reached him. All very logical, Zeke.
“It’s too bad that a bit of burnt-out wiring in Croton, and a bit of extra light in that carefully snapped picture, let me out from under.”
He hesitated. “And it’s too bad that you fell for my gag about this man. He was dead when you shot him in the back—almost as soon as you had ducked down that fire-escape, into the vacant apartment below and thence out—to return through the front door as if you’d just got my message and come racing. If you hadn’t plugged him and stuck that gun in his hand, why, we never could have gotten the goods on you, Zeke. It’s too bad you gave yourself away.”
He hesit
ated again, sighed. “Immie, here’s a little thought that you can take to your grave. I’ve been handling your sort for eighteen years. I’ve got to have them. I’ve got no illusions about the muggs on my squad. I’ve got to have them ruthless—and I’ve got to have them with imagination. The combination usually winds up into speculation about stepping into my shoes. Well, they’re not dead man’s shoes, yet, Immie. I can still think a step faster than you apes.”
He was standing now on the far side of the dead man, having backed over to close the window while he was talking. He hefted the pistol lightly in his hand, his eyes never having left the other’s crawling ones. Now, he stepped forward—and everything happened at once.
He tripped across one of the dead man’s feet, was thrown heavily to his knees. He still kept his gun and eyes up, but there was a second when he was off balance.
That was enough for Immerman. He did not try to draw his other gun—even he knew that that was suicide. But his hand flashed out to the light-switch, just inside the open door, and he plunged the room into blackness. He dropped flat to the floor, in perfect timing. The Marquis’ pistol cracked once. Then Immerman shot like a streak out into the hall.
The little doc yelled: “Catch him! Catch him! That’s an admission!” and as the Marquis snapped the lights back up, the doctor was snatching up the gun from beside the dead man.
The Marquis stood calmly, pocketing his gun. He snatched at the racing doctor, jerked him almost off his feet in stopping him. “Take it easy, Doc. Everything’s under control.” He suddenly raised his voice. “Hey down there in front—don’t let Immerman get out!”
The doc gasped, “My God—there’s other ways out—”
“I doubt it,” the Marquis said.
He walked over to the telephone unhurriedly, dialed a number. As he waited, he said gloomily, “Damn the luck. He was a smart operator.” Then he said into the mouthpiece: “Hello, San Mario Hotel? I want to talk to Mrs. Ludwig in Two-twelve, Waldo, but don’t ring her for a minute. Hold the wire.”
He held the hand-set in his lap, and, as the doctor tried to speak, turned pained eyes toward him. “Now, be quiet, like a good fellow.”
Downstairs, suddenly, there sounded a shot, at the rear of the house. Then a man’s scream. Then a crash.
The Marquis looked at the hand-set telephone. Then he put it to his ear. “All right, Waldo,” he said. “Put me on.”
Escape Mechanism
Patrolman Arkwright didn’t know he was bringing the famous master of Manhattan’s Main Stem into a murder tangle when he plugged the killer in Atwater Street. But that was before a dead man conked him on the head and made him swallow his own whistle just as he blew a blast for help!
PATROLMAN ARKWRIGHT had not, before now, fired his gun in line of duty. His two previous beats had been models of dullness. His complete police record consisted to date of: maintaining order at two fires, arresting one drunk-and-disorderly, one lush-roller, and vaguely assisting headquarters detectives in prying loose a bad-check expert who had chosen his beat for a hide-out. He was full of ambition, inexperience, and an agonized conviction that a rookie policeman who got into no more trouble than this would never even be heard of by promoting officers. Achieving a night beat in the lower section of the city, even if not Maiden Lane or Wall Street, had spurred his ambition and expectation to fever heat. He was alert enough to have heard the sound of a cat if it were out of place, and the faint stirring in Atwater Street poked his attention with an electric finger.
It was a narrow, utterly black slot of a street, leading uphill from West to Broadway and there were, on each side of the two-block-long street, one or two looming warehouses, half a dozen ancient, dilapidated office buildings, squeezing the cobbles together. Turning in from the bottom end, he had almost to grope to locate the sidewalk under his feet, so intense was the murk. No light whatever came from the top end of the street; halfway up elevated tracks criss-crossed, but he could not see them; it was like walking into a solid square of black. He was barely ten steps past the corner, when he heard the soft sound.
It was a door, closing softly, furtively—he tried to tell himself it was furtively—half a block ahead and on the opposite side of the street.
His hopes went up like a bursting rocket, and his mind was instantly full of plans, churning strategy, and—desperate prayers that the sound would not turn out to be of innocent origin. He whipped his well-oiled service gun from his hip in one smooth motion, did not, however, interrupt the measure of his quiet, unhurried tread, but he shortened his stride so that he was almost marking time. Hastily, he estimated the position of the sound, placed it as the entrance of a certain building—one of the least dilapidated, but one of the narrowest on the street.
Trying to control his trip-hammer heart-beats, he moved casually, trying to give the impression that he had heard nothing unusual—till he was ten yards below, and across from, the point in the black where he had pegged the door-closer. Then he whirled swiftly across.
He was slapped in the face by a blinding beam of light. A vicious, rattling voice told him, “Stand right there, copper—or take a bullet!” which was a new high for wasted breath. With long-yearned-for justification at last, the intoxicated rookie threw himself into flashing action; he tried to do three things at once—fling himself down and sideways, fire his service gun, and thumb his own electric torch to life in the instant that the other’s went black.
He succeeded in the first two. His gun exploded as his knees hit the gutter—exploded in exact unison with the savage jab of flame that came from the darkness before him. His torch did not go on because it was numbingly smashed out of his hand by the other’s bullet, sent clattering in the roadway. More orange flame mushroomed and Arkwright felt wind whip his cheek. He did not lose his head; deliberately, he pumped four crashing shots from his service gun. There was a scream from the darkness, a last blasting shot, a heavy fall—and something metallic skidded across the opposite sidewalk.
Then dead silence.
Breathing hard, Arkwright ran four steps sideways, huddled down and shrilled, “All right. You had enough?” then sprang nimbly three more yards away, but there was no answering gunshot. As the street grew even more silent, he strained his ears desperately, heard—or imagined he heard—one broken whimper—almost a sigh.
Eyes flaming, he kept backing on his hunkers, hopeful to grope his own flashlight from the roadway and, by a stroke of luck, did. By a further stroke of luck, the bullet score across its black-painted metal had not put it out of commission and he sent a quick stream of light at the building entrance opposite.
A small man in shabby clothes lay face downward, spread-eagled, blood pouring from his close-cropped bullet-head, toward a shabby fedora hat and a nickeled pistol in the gutter. The man wore black gloves and by the time Arkwright had run over and snatched at his wrist, had no pulse, a bullet having entered at the base of his brain and torn out through his left antrum. He looked like an undersized workman of some sort.
Dizzy with excitement, Arkwright half swung away from him, back toward his call-box, remembered sharply that he should not leave the body. Or should he? An instant he struggled wildly with the fogs of rules and regulations, finally thought of his whistle and clawed it out, blew one piercing, shrill blast….
Then the building collapsed on top of him.
THAT, anyway, was his first impression. The next was that a dozen arms, legs and torsos had dropped from the sky, smashed him to the sidewalk, broken every bone in his body and was now jamming him to unconsciousness, strangling him. There was roaring in his ears, a wild red haze, the world disintegrating in sharp flashes. He felt himself flop around wildly, felt his back muscles bunch in a frantic, desperate heave—and the weight was no longer on his back but the constricting, agonizing pressure was still on his throat—no, it was in his throat, crushing in his chest, squeezing him unmercifully, searing his throat with red-hot talons. Agonized, tearing unconsciousness came for what seemed a se
cond, then he heard a voice bawl in his face: “Open your yap, you half-wit, will you…?”
He opened his pain-racked eyes to see a uniformed cop kneeling beside him, felt the whistle being jerked from his mouth; his throat felt slashed and there was salty blood in his mouth. He sat up, choking, spat it out. He saw two prowl cars at the curb, two huddled dark bodies on the sidewalk, spotted in the floodlights of the cars. The building above him was alight and, far down the street, two flashlights were methodically darting around.
The street-level door of the building was open and as he tried desperately to crawl to his feet, he could hear a man inside, telephoning, yelling: “Send M.E. and Homicide. Yeah. There’s a gent named Miles Jones of the firm of Jones and Prouty, his pockets say, which they make small engines—according to their office door—lying on the sidewalk cold. It looks like he was slugged to death and then propped in an open second-story window so sooner or later he’d fall out. He had his toes stuck under a radiator. Looks like they hoped it would come out as a suicide. Only the cop on the beat heard the killer ducking out of the building and shot it out with him, dropped him. Then—get this—the dead guy fell out just as the flatfoot blew his whistle, damned near squashed him flat and knocked the whistle down his throat. Charlie’s getting it out now…. What? Well, this Jones guy is a homicide or I’ll eat him; he was hammered with something sharp if I ever see it and landing on this flatfoot didn’t mark him up as much as if he’d hit the pavement raw…. Horses to you. Send Homicide, like I say.”
It was as the uniformed telephoner came striding out through the street-level doorway that one of the darting flashlights down the street suddenly centered, dropped down and the patrolman behind it gave a startled, “Hey!”
“What is it?” the one who had been telephoning asked.
“Can you beat that,” came the awed voice of the patrolman. “A D-J badge. It’s a phony, but a damned good phony. It’s made of solid gold.”
The Complete Cases of the Marquis of Broadway, Volume 1 Page 8
