“Why—why, the front door opens into a living-room and the bedroom is to the right of that, and—and the bathroom. The—the dining-room is on the other side and—uh—the spare bedroom and the kitchen. That door—the service door—is in the kitchen.”
The Marquis said, “Give me your keys. You take that door, Johnny,” and they went in first, turning on all the lights in the apartment. It was in good taste, with perhaps a preference for family portraits that made the green-and-rust rooms a little flossy, but the furniture was of the best. Both doors had modern, stout locks. There was no fire escape.
When they had searched it thoroughly, they stood in the living-room. Prouty was running a finger inside his collar-band, big gray-blue eyes white-ringed, still sick.
He said: “I—you gentlemen have been very kind. I—if I only knew why anyone should do such a thing to me, I guess I wouldn’t be so—so childish, but—”
A clock on the mantel chimed five times—and almost on the last stroke, a telephone on a refectory table by the green couch pealed sharply. Prouty gulped “Excuse me” and crossed to it.
He said “Hello” absently and then, as he listened, he went suddenly stiff. He choked: “Yes. Yes…. Wait…. Your men downstairs…. But why…. What do you want…. Hello, hello….”
The Marquis snatched it from his hand, and knew he was on a dead wire. Prouty dropped to the couch, mopping his forehead.
“Who was it? What did he say?” the Marquis whipped.
“I—I don’t know who it was. He said—he said his men were downstairs—that I had just five minutes to—to live.”
Johnny Berthold ran to the side window, whipped it up and standing on tiptoe, leaned far out. “I don’t see nobody,” he said and ran through into the bedroom, repeated with the front window.
Then, of course, the Marquis understood.
He had become very still, his eyes alive, intense with thought. Prouty stumbled to his feet, weaved aimlessly, half in the big man’s wake, stopped in the entrance of the bedroom, looked desperately at the Marquis. “What—what shall I do?”
“We’ll do it,” the Marquis assured him. And after another moment’s thought. “There can’t be more than one person concerned here.”
Johnny Berthold came out of the bedroom hefting his gun. “Nobody there, either.”
Prouty suddenly clutched the big man’s arm as the Marquis unlocked the front door. “I—please don’t leave me alone here.”
“All right. Johnny will stay with you,” the Marquis said, and eased out into the hall, closed the door behind him.
He walked swiftly down the hall to the service door, and, using the bunch of keys which he still retained, let himself back into the apartment’s kitchen silently and swiftly.
He walked through the kitchen on noiseless, rubber-soled shoes, through the dining-room. The door of the living-room was barely ajar and he had to be infinitely careful to ease it fully open without a squeak, his gun in one hand.
Johnny Berthold was sitting hunched tensely on the edge of a chair, his gun covering the door. Prouty was standing behind the chair, his arm just whipping high a heavy Colt’s forty-five, his face a mask of desperation.
“Don’t move an inch,” the Marquis’ voice crackled—and he yelped. “Easy Johnny—it’s me!” as the big man’s gun whipped round.
THEN, the turning in the chair having brought the frozen Prouty’s upraised arm within the big man’s line of sight, Berthold suddenly ducked forward out of the chair yelling: “Hey—what the….”
There was a second of silence. Prouty’s face was starch-white now, his blue-gray eyes frantic green.
The Marquis said: “You gave your partner the wrong bid on that government contract. You made the mistake—let him submit a ruinous bid. There never was any of this political stuff. When you saw ruin inevitable, you decided to at least get your hands on what cash assets there were in the till and duck out.”
His voice was questioning. He came slowly into the room, as though he were groping it out.
“You had fired Smitz for dishonesty. You could threaten him with criminal prosecution, make him your henchman.
“You made him that fake federal badge. Why?”
Prouty’s stiff gray lips worked, but no sound came.
Swift, rushing thought was visible behind the Marquis’ somber eyes, intense reasoning.
“I see it now. This was a government contract, for lifeboats. You made your henchman play the part of a federal agent, which must mean he came to threaten Jones with criminal procedure. That, in turn, must mean he pretended that the lifeboat engines were faulty—had shoddy material in them which gave way under stress, causing loss of life? That made Jones and you liable for criminal negligence at least. Yeah, it opens up now.
“He called you, asked you if it were true. You admitted that, in an effort to make the contract profitable, you had been using inferior material—what a neat plan that was.
“You had your henchman shake Jones down for everything he could lay his hands on and had it brought to you.”
After a second, the Marquis said softly: “But he found you out, didn’t he? He found you out the next day—Friday.”
Prouty seemed frozen in a trance. He said in a voice so husky that it rasped: “How in God’s name did you—”
“For once, I’m playing Sherlock Holmes. Your partner had made certain transactions with brokers. After considering every possible explanation for those transactions, I figured out the right one.
“His credit was good enough for him to get big orders executed on his telephone, order alone. Even though he had no cash, he called one broker and bought stock, the other and sold it. He was desperate too—trying to raise getaway money, because the fake federal agent had cleaned him out. His idea was that, if the stock went up, he would sell out at the broker’s who had bought for him, take his profit and go. If it went down, he would do ditto with the broker who had sold—that is, buy in and take his profit. One broker would be left holding the sack.
“But the next day, he found he didn’t have to—and he killed his trades. That must mean he had found you out—had found he could recoup the eighty-five thousand that had been taken, and that he really was in no danger of criminal prosecution.
“What did he do, demand that you call tonight and make restitution? And you go there determined to kill him and taking Smitz along in case Jones was too much for you?”
Prouty blurted hoarsely: “You are mad. I had nothing to do with any of this. I don’t know what you are talking about. The—the policeman didn’t say anyone was with Smitz. Smitz was alone. My God, you don’t think he’d kill for me simply because I held a charge of larceny over him….”
“That’s just silly,” the Marquis said. “Of course he wouldn’t. He didn’t. You killed your partner—but Smitz was with you. You came out of that door in Atwater Street together. He was ahead of you. Don’t interrupt. The minute I heard that rookie cop had been across the road, shooting up at Smitz and found Smitz with a hole in the back of his head, I knew someone had been behind him—been behind him and, after firing at the cop, shot Smitz in the head and shoved him out on his face. While the rookie was gloating over his marksmanship, it was no trouble for you to slip away in the dark, go home and get into bed.
“And it was not till now when Johnny leaned out the window that I realized where the fault in your scheme lay. The cash—the money. You didn’t know what to do with it. Johnny—put that number twelve hoof up and peel a trunk check off it that evidently stuck to it after you stepped in that chewing gum.”
THE big man gasped, complied, stood staring stupidly at the dirty baggage check.
“You didn’t know exactly what you were going to tell your partner to get him under the gun, eh?” the Marquis resumed at Prouty. “You thought you’d better have that check with you, in case of a tie. So you brought it along. After you’d killed him, shot Smitz and ducked home, you still didn’t dare leave it around here—in case of a search.
You didn’t know just how you were going to come out. By the same token when you did get down to your office, you were afraid to keep it on your person, so you ducked it—where?”
For a second, Prouty seemed unable to answer. Then he said, very slowly: “There was a pile of rubbish in the dark place on the stairs.”
“And Johnny’s big feet covered the entire stair, picked it up and you saw it in the office, on his foot. That made it necessary for you to keep us with you till you could invent an excuse to get it away from him. You arranged to have someone fake a phone call and hang up instantly—pretended that it was someone threatening you so you could get one of us out of the room. You even got your hands on Johnny so he’d be the one left with you.” Prouty suddenly collapsed in a chair, sobbing.
“Johnny, call Quackenbush and Fielding,” the Marquis said, “and tell them all their answers are right here. Then take that baggage check to the Penn Station and get eighty-five thousand dollars for it—or no, on second thought, I’ll get it. You stay here. You might get to pitching pennies or something.”
Natural Killer
The right killer but the wrong corpse. That was the mistake the master of Manhattan’s Main Stem made when he started out to protect the town’s prize playboy.
IT was not unnatural that one of the Marquis’ men should see it. It occurred at dawn, on bleak, deserted Fifty-second—well within the Broadway district. Eyes and ears in this instance were big Johnny Berthold.
Eberhardt Hastings—affectionately known as Ebie in every night spot on Broadway—trudged wearily and slowly around the corner from Seventh Avenue, and headed over east, toward the comfortable bachelor apartment he occupied.
No street on which Ebie Hastings’ expansive three hundred pounds was moving could really be called “deserted.”
He was a short, knock-kneed youngish man with the face—and almost disposition—of a blond cherub. Contrary to the usual, the ten years during which he had floated around the Stem on his dead father’s tobacco fortune, had put no lines in his chubby, cheerful moon-face.
He looked now for all the world as he had looked at twenty-five, when Broadway first knew his gentle, considerate dissipation.
He was going broke. Rumor was that within the past thirty days he had suffered a beating in the stock-market almost as bad as the one of ’29 and that suddenly, unexpectedly, the end of that seemingly inexhaustible fortune was in sight.
Johnny Berthold reached the mouth of the crimson canopy that gaudied up the entrance of an alleged nightclub down the street, just as Ebie Hastings was two buildings west of the Pylon printing shop. Hastings was plodding slowly, his eyes fixed glumly on the sidewalk ahead of him. It occurred to the big, raw-boned detective watching, that it was the first time he had seen the rotund playboy dejected.
The vicious attempt came at that point.
The building whose ground floor Pylon Printing occupied was of four ramshackle stories, built in the nineties. Three floors above the printing shop each presented to the street a solid slab of plate glass, with a To Let sign, pasted in the window.
They had presented this front to the street for months—until the moment when Ebie Hastings was directly abreast of the building. Then the third-floor window fell suddenly outward—a solid sheet of glass weighing half a ton.
The sheer, crushing weight of the window—had the would-be killer simply have permitted it to fall—would have mashed in the playboy’s head if it slammed down on him. But the killer wasn’t content with that possibility. In the second that the window came hurtling down, he yelled—and flung a large ball-head hammer.
The glass exploded into a hundred jagged, spinning slabs as it whistled down—some of them large enough to slice a man’s head from his shoulders—but the murderer had yelled a split second too soon. The frantic awkwardness with which the fat man threw himself aside, stumbling and diving in a wild, yelping sprawl out into the middle of the street, concealed the speed of his move. Yet he was rolling frantically when the thunderous crash of the glass to the sidewalk shook the block—and at that, he barely escaped with his life. A half dozen jagged, murderous splinters smashed within inches of him. He flung his arm up to shield his face—and a scimitar-shaped, wickedly jagged knife opened his forearm to the bone.
Johnny Berthold, roaring, was out in the middle of the road, running toward him, the service gun in his hand thundering, again and again, at the yawning maw above where the window had been where the man in the black slouch hat had stood to launch it. Throwing himself over the curb toward the building’s door Berthold caught a flash of the crimson spurting from the fat Ebie’s severed forearm. He gasped, whirled and dived out beside him. In the few seconds that it took him to improvise a tourniquet and twist it tight, the killer had made his escape.
THE news was all over Broadway in minutes—and Broadway growled angrily. Ebie Hastings was a right gent. He was a quiet, well-behaved youngster, without any exaggerated idea of his own importance, with a consideration for others that was phenomenal. The news that someone had attempted to murder him, made a thousand people furious.
Including the Marquis.
He was at the hospital within an hour—tight-lipped, immaculate, as always, in black—neat black shoes, knife-edged dark trousers, dark Chesterfield overcoat and tight black silk muffler, his small hands in black kid gloves. The nurse at the door did not recognize his somber, round, pink-cheeked face and deep-set china-blue eyes, his deceptively slight-looking, tailored figure, but when he told her “Lieutenant Marquis, of the Broadway Squad, I ma’am,” she jumped and said, “Oh, yes.”
Johnny Berthold met him in the fourth-floor hall. The big, shaggy blond detective was red-faced, grim-looking. Without preliminary, he held out a long sheet of paper, half-covered with his own scrawl—names and, opposite the names, amounts of money.
“The poor guy was out trying to collect some of the dough he’s been touched for,” Johnny said hoarsely. “I found a flock of notes and I.O.U.s in his pocket when they took his clothes off. He don’t know I’ve got them.”
The Marquis’ blue eyes ran down the list. There were thirty-odd names. Opposite them were sums ranging from fifty dollars to two thousand—with one exception, which read twenty thousand dollars. The name beside this amount was Leo Feinberg.
THE Marquis walked into the hospital room, to meet the anxious eyes of the pudgy Ebie. “Marty,” he burst out, “for God’s sake, call that big baboon off me. He thinks somebody tried to kill me.”
“Don’t you?”
“Naw. For Pete’s sake, it must have been an accident. Who in hell would want to kill me, old Ebie? I haven’t an enemy in the world.”
“Well, all right,” the Marquis said carelessly, “but we’ll have to go through some motions. Who gets your dough if you did die, Ebie?”
The fat man blinked a minute, then in a surprised tone said: “My wife. I guess I never changed my will.”
Berthold boomed: “What? You got a wife?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Where is she, Ebie?”
“Eh? Well, I dunno, exactly. She—well, we didn’t get on so well, y’understand. She’s a fine girl—a fine girl. She—well, she comes from New England and she’s—well, she was brought up pretty strict and—well, I got to confess, when I came into Dad’s money she didn’t like to see me spend it around like I did—”
“Where is she, now, Ebie?”
The fat man squirmed. “I don’t know, exactly. I put a five-hundred-dollar check in the Wheat Exchange Bank down in the Village every month— Hey, look, Marty, you’re not going to make any trouble for her? If you do, I’m off you, no kidding. If you’ve got any bright sappy ideas—”
“Don’t get excited. Where were you tonight?”
“Eh? Oh, here and there. I was at Leo Feinberg’s Tavern just before I started home.”
“How’d you come to lend that rat money, Ebie?”
“What? I didn’t lend…!”
“Don’t kid me, Eb
ie. I know you did.”
“Well, in a way, I guess you might say so.” The playboy squirmed. “But he gave me a note—a legal note, all secured by his assets and everything.”
“Assets! What assets has that pup?”
Ebie winced. “Marty—you cops think everybody’s a crook. Leo’s not so bad.”
The Marquis shrugged, “Anything you say, Ebie. Well, get well quick. They say you lost quite a bit of blood, so take it easy. We’ll see no more ‘accidents’ happen to you.”
“Now, Marty, you ain’t going to put any cops on guarding me, or—”
“Just till you go home,” the Marquis soothed.
THE Marquis was driving his own powerful maroon convertible. He piloted it through the still-almost-deserted streets, from a fire-plug in front of the hospital to a fire-plug just east of Fifth Avenue in the Forties, in ten minutes.
Across from them, the only lighted window in the block glowed faintly against the dawn. An electric sign over the door, now dark, spelled out—Fleur-de-lis Tavern.
“I knew this rat would come to it, sooner or later,” the Marquis growled as they got out of the car. “I had him spotted a year ago as a natural killer—and I never make mistakes that way.”
The door of the tavern opened and two men came out, a white-coated figure bidding them good-night in the background. Berthold said suddenly: “Hey, that’s Harry Angus of the Safe-and-Loft Squad!”
The Marquis said, “Harry!” and the two men turned back.
“Hell, it’s the Marquis. Wha’s a matter, Marty?”
“How long have you been in there, Harry?”
“Huh? Say, wha’s it to you? We—”
“Behave. I want to check on Leo’s movements for a certain reason.”
“Huh? Well, it won’t be hard. He’s been sitting at a table with us for four solid hours. We always make the rat sit with us and then hang him up for the check.”
“Four hours! Could he have slipped out for half an hour?”
They chorused, “No.”
The Complete Cases of the Marquis of Broadway, Volume 1 Page 10
