“Don’t let them till I get back.”
He ran out and jumped into his car, whirled it the few blocks down to the Fleur-de-lis Tavern.
He fairly ran down the black little alley. He found the door, whipped it open, closed it behind him, and hurried down stone steps, was again at the entrance to Leo’s office.
From the shadows at his side, Moe Feinberg leaped, jabbing a gun into the Marquis’ midriff and blurting: “High—quick, or—”
The Marquis took one look at his contracted pupils and put his hands up quickly. The dough-faced man was full of dope.
Inside the office, Leo, his eyes white-ringed with fear, stood behind the desk, holding a second revolver. His face looked set in stiff lines. The breast pocket of his tan topcoat hung down—a ribbon. It had been half torn from its moorings.
“Search him,” Leo said huskily. “Don’t move, Marty!”
HE felt Moe’s shaking fingers rip through his pockets, felt the gun he had borrowed from Johnny taken from his hip, felt himself expertly fanned—and then the hoarse cry of triumph as Moe found the sweepstakes slip.
“I told you! I told you!” he cried shrilly. “I told you he went in there alone right after the shot! I told you he’d find it and keep it to himself! You can thank me, Leo! You can thank me! They’d of traced it to you easy! Who was smart, huh? Who was smart? Who seen it was gone the minute you come out of the building? Who said the smart thing was to telephone? I knew we’d get him here before he could pass it on?”
“Not bad, for a hophead,” the Marquis said.
The dough-faced man backed away, holding the Marquis’ gun out to Leo.
“This is all he had on him, except a blackjack,” he said.
The weasel-faced saloon owner took the gun, hastily put it in a drawer and his own with it. He was trembling, almost as much as his brother was.
He croaked, “Marty—I don’t know what—”
“So you killed him—killed the blond actor in mistake for Ebie. You crazy louse—you’ll be torn to pieces when the boys get hold of you. Johnny won’t miss.”
A huge purple vein stood out in Leo’s forehead. He said, “Keep the gun on him, Moe,” hastily, then to the Marquis in one long blurted sob: “I didn’t kill him by mistake. I killed him because he was going to kill Ebie! I swear it! If he had killed Ebie, that woman would have got my note—and ruined me! She would of thrown me onto the street! I know. We looked her up—found out she’s money-mad—and she don’t like places like this! She’d of finished me.”
“What!”
“When you was here last night, we figured what’d happen if she—if Ebie died and she came into his property. She’d throw me out—like that! I had Moe follow that actor. I knew he was half-nuts about her. Moe saw him go to the hospital this morning, then he heard him phone and ask what time Ebie was coming home. We guessed what he was going to do—wait in the apartment and kill him, to get his wife. I knew what I’d get if I called you and tried to tell you that. I went there—went to Ebie’s place myself. I didn’t mean to kill him—the actor guy—I swear it. Moe was waiting outside for me. I put the gun on the guy, meaning to take him out. He fought and—the gun went off. When I got to the street I—Moe here saw my pocket was ripped and I knew he—the actor—must of tore it out of my pocket when he fought with me. We—we had to get you here to get the ticket away from you—and that’s the God’s truth.”
The Marquis thought it over and said: “I guess you must be crazy, at that. So now, what?”
“You know what’s going to happen now!”
The Marquis’ eyes narrowed faintly. “You’re going to give me the works? Think you can get away with it?”
Great beads of sweat were on Leo’s forehead as he said: “We’ve got to try, Marty. You know that. You know what would happen to us if we let you go.”
“Uh-huh, I know,” the Marquis nodded. “I’d put you two rats in the chair where you belong.”
“Well, there—there you are, then.”
The Marquis pursed his lips, nodded. “All right,” he said wearily, “let’s get it over with. Mind if I smoke one of your company cigarettes on the way?”
He stepped unhurriedly over and lifted the silver cover of the large cigarette box, reached in and took out the square little automatic he had left there earlier in the day and shot Moe through the right eye.
The hopped-up gunman screamed once as he was slammed back against the wall. Then he dropped like a sack of meal.
The Marquis’ gun was steady on the unarmed Leo. “Want some, too? You rat, I knew I wasn’t wrong when I pegged you as a killer. Even if I had the wrong body in mind. I never make a mistake on your kind. You’re a natural killer with a murderer’s heart—all yellow.”
Boomerang Blastout
Old Kastner, czar of Manhattan’s stolen-drug traffic, had a date with death. Why should crook-hating Marty Marquis, tyrant of the Tenderloin, go to bat for the slimy gaffer—put himself on the kill-spot when he was already under fire by the new reform administration that was “cleaning up” his Broadway squad along with the underworld?
THE Marquis of Broadway sat at the desk in the niche in the rear of the theater ticket agency, somber deep-set blue eyes on the newspaper headline. It was a cold, bleak afternoon. For him, it was a cold, bleak column of type that followed.
By no stretch of imagination could this be considered anything but a crisis—the greatest in the twenty years of his sojourn on Broadway. After a decade of “organization” rule a “reform” administration was in the saddle.
Nevertheless, the Inspector’s jet eyes, bloodshot, peering in through the plate-glass window at the dapper, cool little tyrant of the Tenderloin, melted almost with relief. He had seen enough panic that day. There was not a ranking officer in his command who was not in trouble—or would be, if their affairs were suddenly spotlighted.
It was a cold certainty that this brilliant, super-honest new prosecutor would strike—and strike hard—at the police. Whether he would realize and consider the pressure under which honest officers had labored during the past twenty years—organization pressure which forced “angles”—remained to be seen. Where the lightning would strike first—which sections would be impaled at once—which precincts could find time to clean house, no one knew. The whole town was a griddle on which every brass hat in the department was cooking, even while they tried hastily to mop up.
THE Marquis couldn’t even mop up. No situation exists anywhere such as that on Manhattan’s Main Stem. In twenty years, the Marquis—with twenty-two irregulars—had built up an unorthodox routine of policing it that would bring shudders to any law-and-order league. He’d had to. Ten thousand greedy eyes—those of the cream of the world’s thieves—were constantly beating down on the greatest easy-money mine in the world. A million fools a year came to Broadway to make asses of themselves. It was a question of supply and demand. The laws of the commonwealth meant nothing to either. Courts and processes were ignored; the iron hand of the Marquis was not. He dictated to exactly what extent the laws could be broken. He dictated who could and who could not operate in the White Light District. He, and he alone, decided how much lawlessness had to be permitted. He laid down rules to cover the situation as he saw it, and his edicts were backed with instant, ruthless, personal enforcement. He had long since given up worrying that they were mostly illegal.
He had a code of conduct that no one but himself could possibly understand. Certain lawbreakers can be more easily ruled by power of dollars. The Marquis could not have read a psychological paper to prove it—or anything else, for that matter—for back of his painfully-acquired, dapper, dark polish, there was a childhood in the tenements of Avenue A. But he knew to his own satisfaction, that it was so, and he did not disdain the method. He was not a dishonest officer. Nothing was of the slightest consequence to him beside his rigorous job. He ran it as twenty years had taught him to run it, and he knew in his heart that it could be run no other way.
Ye
t in court, today, he could be damned, ruined, dismissed, if the new regime wanted to play it that way. And there was nothing he could do about it. His system was solidified, established. He was as rigidly bound by it now as the thousands of vultures whom it held in check. He had to proceed as he always had. The storm-cloud that had rolled up would not, for him, be dissipated by time. He was—and would be for months—at the mercy of the personal understanding of the new prosecutor.
Still he sat cool, blue eyes somber, round, pink-cheeked, weathered face vaguely eager, vaguely cheerful under his imported hard hat. He was as immaculate, unperturbed, as though posed for a picture—tight black silk scarf, expensively tailored black Chesterfield, black gloves, knife-edged dark trousers carefully crossed, gleaming black shoes.
The Inspector went in. It was the first stop on his rounds where he had not met a scared man. “What? No wail?”
“Would that help?”
“How are you set?”
“You know how I’m set.”
“I guess I do,” the Inspector said wearily, then, more quickly, “You’ve put the lid on the district? It’s your only hope, you know. They’re looking for bear now. The newspapers never liked you much. Give them half a chance—some sensational unsolved mystery—and it’ll be the blow-off.”
“I thought of that.”
The Inspector got up. “Marty—keep the spot quiet. If you can only sing small, keep from attracting attention, this D.A. may get educated before he gets to you.”
WITHIN six hours the Inspector himself had run into the business of the girl—and the weird picture. Bud Leland’s gambling-joint was on his regular rounds. He made it about ten o’clock. The dark, low-ceilinged room was noisy, droning. Milling crowds surrounded all the six dice tables that ribboned down its narrow black length. Each table was a bright-green island in a sea of smoke haze.
The dimness all but swallowed the girl’s tiny figure. She wore a tailored black suit, black tricorne hat and black gloves. Her wistful, appealing little face and blond hair, plus a white stock and white at her wrists, seemed to be standing disembodied by the second table when the Inspector caught sight of her. Her long-lashed, deep-blue eyes searched the ring of absorbed faces around the table.
She stood there for maybe three minutes, then suddenly floated away to slowly materialize again in the fog around the next table. No one paid her the slightest attention—except the Inspector. His hickory-lean figure was against the wall, completely invisible, and his jet eyes need make no pretense of concealing their curiosity.
His attention was taken, not because she was the only woman in the place. No woman had to be afraid of being seen in Leland’s places. But her winsome beauty did not conceal her smartness and big-town daintiness. She was definitely not the type of Bud Leland’s regular hard-bitten, horsy clientele. He operated only a few weeks out of the year in each city, almost entirely for the benefit of the nomadic company who troop around the country with the race-meets. Vaguely, the girl was out of place. It took her ten minutes to reach the fourth table in line. This placed her not more than thirty feet from the Inspector and made her every move quite visible.
She found the face she was seeking. Her little body stiffened almost unnoticeably, and she retreated quickly backwards a step into the gloom.
Presently, she eased quietly around the table behind the ring of backs, stood motionless. At least, it seemed so, till a white square blossomed in her hand and the Inspector realized she had taken it from her black handbag.
She waited another second. The Inspector strove to identify the player in whom she was interested, but he could not pick him out until a thin-backed man in a long, dark-greenish overcoat suddenly reached far down the table, to place a bet. One of the slash side-pockets of his coat turned into view as he stretched. The girl’s black-gloved fingers moved nimbly—surprisingly so.
When the thinnish man straightened again, the white envelope had slipped easily into his pocket and the girl was backing silently, unhurriedly away. Presently the shadows swallowed her completely. The Inspector’s vaguely puzzled eyes focused on the face of the man whose coat had been invaded—a white-haired, stringy old man, fairly well-dressed, with lines of discouragement in his thin seamed face and dull disinterest in grape-like blue eyes. He had few counters before him.
After a while these few were gone, and the old man turned dully away from the table. Standing a foot or two behind the instantly closed-in ring of backs, he watched one or two throws before he slid his hands absently into his coat pockets and discovered his acquisition.
It was not the envelope, nor the writing on it that hit the old man. It was when he ripped the envelope open and took out the stiff, square enclosure—white from the Inspector’s side—that he went to pieces.
In an instant, his eyes went suddenly terrified, shrunken. One skinny hand crawled up to his throat. He went stiff in a glaze of fear. For three heart-beats, his white-ringed eyes clung to the thing in his hand. Then he suddenly came to himself, high color rushing in to his temples as he flung wild eyes around to see if he were watched. At the same instant he crumpled envelope and contents savagely in one fist, whipped his arm down, flinging them blindly away behind him. For a minute, he looked around him, then fairly bolted—white-ringed eyes still probing—for the exit.
The Inspector half started after him, then reconsidered. His black eyes drifted down to the floor, to the crumpled envelope and what had been in it. He stooped slowly over and retrieved them.
IN THE vastness of an empty Broadway theater, two hours later, he stood anxious-faced beside the Marquis, his jet eyes and the Marquis’ somber blue ones staring at the picture.
A Latin-looking girl was strapped to a bed. She had vague traces of beauty, but something had happened. Her lips, her ears were swollen, thick, gigantic. Her eyes had the frantic, burning light of madness. Her hands and feet were hideously enlarged, ghastly. She was a sickening monstrosity.
Across the picture, scrawled in red ink, was the assurance— For this you shall pay with your heart’s blood. Pray that the Saints shall show you mercy, for you shall taste deeply of hell before you die. As you made it to her, death shall be a welcome relief to you.
“If there’s anything at all to it,” the Inspector said, “it could raise hell.”
The Marquis nodded.
“It’s in your district.”
The Marquis reached a small, black-gloved hand for the crumpled envelope, also red-scrawled.
Silas Kastner, c/o Golding & Co., West Fifty-seventh St., N.Y. City, was what he read.
THE stringy old man stood on the hearth. The Marquis’ small sitting-room was conservative in old oak and leather. One green-shaded table-lamp and the flickering grate fire supplied all the illumination. The frightened old man twisted his hat between stiff fingers.
From the gloom the Marquis said: “I’m not fooling. Come clean.”
“I—I—Marty—I’m not asking for anything. Just let me go. I can—can take care of myself.”
“Can you?”
“Well, what if I can’t?” the other blurted shrilly. “What’s it to you?”
“Nothing, personally,” the Marquis assured him. “But for certain reasons, I want my district quiet. There’s enough hubble-gubble in this, to attract the newshawks. If you’re going to die—I want a killed quick. Who was the girl?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s this all about? Who sent the girl—and the picture?”
“Marty—I swear—”
“I swear, too. I swear I’ll have it beaten out of you, if you stall for one minute longer.”
The other’s eyes were desperate. He set his teeth.
“Don’t get heroic,” the Marquis warned him, “if it’s a matter of your nephew.”
“Of—of—” the other stammered.
“Of your nephew. Of the type of business you do. Of worrying that talking will affect his fortunes.”
“You—you—”
“We
know all about you, yeah,” the Marquis said. “Henri!”
The door of the bedroom swung open, to reveal two armchairs almost in the lighted entrance. Big Johnny Berthold, the blond giant and the dapper little dancing-eyed, black-moustached Henri sprawled in the chairs. The little Frenchman read from a long paper.
“Golding & Company: One of the oldest and most reliable names in the wholesale drug field. Founded in seventy-seven by Grandpa, passed to Papa in nineteen hundred and to son in twenty-four. This little pig went to market—the stock market—and was stripped in twenty-nine. Dutched it. The family had trouble getting anything for the firm. Bought by Silas Kastner, for two thousand dollars. He’s a queer duck, who ought to know the answers. Born in Michigan, worked in lumber camps, sold balloons in a circus—short-change stuff—bellhop in a Detroit hotel, ran errands for Doc Brady the gambler, sold mining-stock, worked for an outlaw race-track in Des Moines, labor-trouble spy. Maybe other things, but never, apparently, got into law trouble.
“At time of purchase, Kastner, and one Buell, had a retail drug store in Dayton, opened just one month. They closed it and came immediately to New York. Buell, an expert pharmacist, handles the drugs. Kastner handles all contacts, buying and selling.
“For six years, Kastner has traveled all over the country, contacting the best fences in each city and offering a market for stolen drugs—as far as I know, the first well-organized market for hot stuff of this sort in the country.
“Hospitals, on the strength of the old name, buy freely and the prestige allows these babies to undersell competition with no questions asked.
“They handle only the very finest drugs—absolutely first-grade. No narcotics or poisons. Legal advice the very best and accounting set-up probably a honey.
“My opinion that it would take two years to build up a case against them, considering their legal and accounting set-ups and the patience with which they have gone to town. I don’t believe they have made expenses in five years—they seem to realize they have a good racket and are willing to treat it carefully, nurse it along. Some day they sure as hell will have something and they are careful to keep their noses scrupulously clean.
The Complete Cases of the Marquis of Broadway, Volume 1 Page 12
