The Complete Cases of the Marquis of Broadway, Volume 1
Page 20
At the far end of the room, Titanic’s unshaven face was vicious and hard. He was rummaging in the desk.
“I—I swear it’s the truth,” Manson said desperately and took a quick little sliding step while the gambler was momentarily peering in a drawer. The Marquis’ eyes dropped to the floor. The shiny gun that the playboy had evidently dropped, was at the edge of an overstuffed club chair. He was obviously trying to inch toward it unseen. His eyes went round the room, bewildered. “I—it’s here someplace. I was tight when I came in. I was sure—”
The gambler’s eyes were hard, disbelieving. The playboy, shaking as he was, acted his part well. His forehead knit in concentration.
“How about in there?” Titanic asked and nodded at a door in the wall near him.
“No! No!” Manson said hastily. “It’s not in there. I’m positive!”
The gambler’s eyes narrowed and he said: “Is Max in there?”
“Max? My God, Max is dead! My wife shot him last night.”
The gambler’s expression did not change an iota. He said, “Yeah?” and stepped sideways toward the closed door.
The Marquis eased fully into the room as the playboy flung himself into action, scooped up the shiny revolver and dived behind the overstuffed club chair, all in one movement. The gambler’s gun boomed and the club chair jerked, but the crazy-eyed playboy was not touched. He whipped his own gun over the chair’s edge at the ducking gambler, and the Marquis fired once.
The playboy fell back, shrieked, his hand to his side, the gun flying up, to land on the throw rug on which the Marquis stood. Titanic’s gun whirled on the Marquis and the two men faced each other’s pistols. Without moving his eyes from the gambler’s bright blue ones, the Marquis said to Manson, out of the corner of his mouth: “Sorry, but I couldn’t have you shooting this gent.”
THE playboy was writhing, moaning, in a sitting position, his legs spread out. The Marquis said, “Take it easy, Titanic,” and in that second, he saw something else.
In his writhing the playboy was easing something from his pocket, slipping it under the edge of the rug as he pretended to fall over sideways. Then, as he tried to straighten himself up, Manson’s face suddenly contorted with terror and bewilderment. He sat bolt upright, staring at his legs. He suddenly screamed: “I can’t move them! I can’t move them!”
Titanic’s automatic sagged a little. “What is this, Marty?”
From behind the fallen playboy came a sudden burble. In his wild dive, the playboy had touched into life a small radio set on an end table. It hummed.
“It’s close to the end of the cleverest murder plot that you’ve ever seen,” the Marquis told Titanic. “Cooked up by a man with infinite patience, and infinite knowledge of psychology. But he made one mistake.”
The two men locked eyes. “Yes?” Titanic said.
The playboy was moaning. He suddenly cried out: “Somebody get me a doctor! A doctor!”
“Shut up,” the Marquis said. “I probably nicked your spine. There’ll be a doctor here presently.” He turned back to Titanic and said: “Yes, it was a beautifully elaborate scheme—a masterpiece of misdirection. Only a crooked lawyer could have the patience to think it all out. Such matters as poison pen-letters to people in no way connected with the situation—except indirectly. There were fake tips to a gossip columnist—after gaining his confidence with a real one. And the business of making up a lie sufficiently dramatic and startling, so that when Cynthia Manson heard it over the phone, she was upset enough not to eat for a day or so and to rush right to New York. Excuse me.”
Without warning, the Marquis took three quick steps across the room, snatched up two folded pieces of foolscap that the playboy had shoved under the rug, and was back in his place by the door in an instant.
He shook open one of the letters, glanced at it. He did not need to read it beyond the date-line and the Dear Max.
“Yeah,” the Marquis said. “Max Sokolow cooked up a beautiful scheme. It had only one flaw. His partner double-crossed him and killed him—to seal his mouth.”
The radio behind the fallen playboy suddenly warmed to life with a rasping crackle.
“… Mrs. America, let’s go to press…. Flash…. The latest rumor in the sensational shooting affair in which Cynthia Manson attempted to murder her husband, did murder his lawyer, and suicided herself, is that the whole terrible mess sprang out of an abortive plot by a well-known gambler, to collect a gambling debt….”
The radio’s volume was going up and up. It blared, a deafening sound in which Lawrence Lockman’s gossip commentating was lost in roar. The Marquis saw the gambler’s gun-muzzle jerk up, saw the ugly twist to his mouth and saw his lips form snarling words.
“Shut that off!” the Marquis roared at the fallen Manson, and the playboy snatched at the dials.
THERE was abrupt silence. Titanic’s vicious voice said: “So you’re going to frame me as this partner of Max’s. Well, damn you—”
The Marquis timed his shot to the fraction of a second. It was a dull, polite bang! and he dropped to his knee as the gambler’s gun flamed. Titanic staggered back against the wall, his blue eyes red, his face contorted, holding a shattered wrist.
“You would have it,” the Marquis said. “Why don’t you—”
A sudden flaring of the gambler’s eyes warned him—too late. Even as he tried to whirl, the man who had entered the room at his back had scooped up the revolver at the Marquis’ feet and jammed it in his back.
“Don’t move!” A quavering old voice said. “I’ll shoot!”
The Marquis did not move.
The old voice blurted pleadingly: “Son—I followed you when you ducked out so quickly. Tell your daddy—what—what’s the matter.”
The playboy’s eyes were suddenly alive, mad. Sweat was streaming down his face.
The Marquis said calmly over his shoulder: “I’ll tell you what the matter is, Mr. Manson. Your son—with the assistance of a lawyer—murdered his wife because it was the only way he could get free of her to take on another—without your religious scruples interfering. Simple, isn’t it?”
Titanic Johnson’s face was a blank page of astonishment. The old man at the Marquis’ back gasped. “What—what are you talking about! You must be mad! My son’s wife shot herself! A hundred people saw her—”
“No they didn’t. What a hundred people saw was a neatly staged presentation with blank cartridges and a girl hired with much trouble and expense, especially for the occasion. Your son’s wife was smoked up with marihuana and made prisoner in a Village flat, then killed, just before that, and her body thrown where it would not be found for twenty-four hours, presumably.”
“Wha—what?” the old man whispered hoarsely.
The playboy’s eyes were hot, crawling.
The Marquis explained: “Max Sokolow needed money—in the worst way. He was willing to do anything to get it—and with good reason.” He nodded at Titanic Johnson. “He got this letter.” The Marquis crinkled the sheet he held in his hand. “It suggested a scheme for getting rid of your son’s wife to his wily brain, and he went and sold your son the idea. May I read the letter?”
The old man’s voice was a whisper. “Yes.”
“Dear Max:
I’m cooling out from a job in Frisco in this godforsaken tank town and what do I do but go to a church social and what do I see, so help me, but a girl who is a dead ringer for a little dancer I used to know, who married that playboy, Tommy Manson, Now, if that brain of yours can’t cook up some sort of a racket out of that, you’re not the guy I took you for. Incidentally, I could use a couple of yards to help out on a little South American jaunt, where the cooling-out is healthier.
Rgds,
Lefty.
P.S. This dame is innocent and kind of a ray of sunshine type. She don’t know what time of day it is and she lives with an aunt and uncle on a farm, and she seems kind of stage-struck.”
The letter was from Davenport, Iowa.
“That was what they banked on—that they could use the double, establish in the minds of a hundred witnesses the absolute certainty that they had seen the girl kill herself. Then when the murdered body of the real Cynthia Manson was found, in an identical dress and with the wounds exactly where the witnesses thought they had seen the girl shoot herself, there would be only one problem. And if it weren’t for that problem, the whole thing might have succeeded. The problem I refer to, is disposing of the double—the innocent little kid they tricked into coming here—and into cutting herself off from her folks.
“Obviously, she had to be killed, mutilated, disposed of—and that is what your son came here for tonight, Mr. Manson! I baited a little trap—knowing that he was listening to radio calls—pretended that his captive had succeeded in getting some sort of message to the police. Naturally, he came running, to put a stop to it. And—here we are. Mr. Titanic Johnson is only here to collect seven thousand dollars, which, I understand, is somewhere in a snakeskin leather case.”
There was a tense silence. Then the old man croaked: “Is that all?”
“That’s all.”
“How—how do you know all this is true?”
“I know there were two girls because one of them ate two portions of shrimps at the expense of the Broadway Squad last night and the autopsy on the other showed she’d eaten nothing in twenty-four hours.” He half turned toward the closed door beside Titanic Johnson. “Furthermore, if you’ll step—”
The old man husked. “Don’t move! I’ll shoot you! How—how does it happen this little country girl—this innocent girl as you call her—lent herself to such a plot?”
“Why not? There was nothing criminal about what she did—just put on a show according to a written scenario. No, the tricky man in that case was your upstanding, clean-cut son. He was a little too smart for Max Sokolow. The scenario didn’t call for Max to be on hand at all—he was supposed to use an out-of-town train trip for an alibi and this starving actor was going to do the gun scene in front of the theatre. Then his accidental death forced Max to come back into the picture. However, he wasn’t booked to be supposedly wounded. Your son ad-libbed that—pretended that the lawyer had been hit, simply and solely so that, the minute he got him away from the scene, he could shoot him, and still have an alibi. No, there is no reason why the girl had to know anything about the criminal plot she was engaged in—till it was too late. And even if she had known—she was in a tough spot—cut off from home—no money—no job—nowhere to go. If they offered her enough, she might have gone through with it anyhow. However, that’s very easy to find out. If you’ll step—”
“Stand still!” the old man almost shrieked. “Throw your gun on the floor. Quick—I swear I’ll shoot you dead!”
The Marquis blinked. “My God—don’t you realize your son is guilty, yet?”
THE old man’s breath whistled through his nostrils. He said with distinct emphasis on every word: “Throw your gun on the floor, I said, or—”
When the Marquis tossed his pistol onto the rug, it bounced almost into the hands of the playboy on the floor.
There was just a split second of the old man’s breathing. Then his old voice said huskily: “Yes, I know it. But nobody else knows it—outside this room.”
The Marquis’ eyes were thick, incredulous. “You’re not going to—to try and let him get away with it by killing us?”
The old man said nothing.
The playboy on the floor cried out crazily, tears streaming down his face: “Dad! Dad! I knew I could count on you! I knew you’d help me out!”
The Marquis said, almost with awe: “I suppose, after the spoiling you’ve given this rat for over forty years, a thing like this isn’t impossible to you, even. However—”
His head whipped sharply toward the window behind Titanic Johnson and he bit: “All right, Johnny—let him have it!”
He sensed, rather than felt, the old man’s gun swing away from his back. The Marquis jabbed his heels forward into the little throw rug on which both he and the old man were standing. He jabbed forward far enough to throw himself off balance and, falling, he spun and dived at the old man.
The millionaire’s gun thundered, knocked glass from the window. The Marquis was on him, even before the other had reached the floor, wrenched the gun away from him and clouted him on the chin with it.
He heard Titanic’s warning, “Marty—look out!” and whirled himself on his stomach like a fish, just as Tommy Manson, now completely crazy, leveled the Marquis’ own gun and began pumping bullets with his eyes shut.
He got two wild shots out before the Marquis nailed him through the throat.
Johnny Berthold broke in the door at the head of the radio cops. The Marquis climbed to his feet, picked up his own gun and pocketed it. “You horse’s neck,” he told Berthold, “why didn’t you come when the shooting started?”
“Well, you told me to stay—to cover the back.”
The Marquis made a rasping noise in his throat, flung over his shoulder, “Keep these flatfeet out of this apartment,” and walked through the closed door beside Titanic Johnson.
IT WAS a tiny, windowless bedroom, cheaply furnished. The girl’s pitiful overnight case, piled with fluffy pink, was on the bureau and she lay on the bed, spread-eagled, a red stain above the left breast of her white sequin evening gown. She was tied by each hand and each leg, adhesive thickly plastered over her mouth.
When he had freed her and her hysterical sobbing was under control, the Marquis asked her kindly: “How much did they offer you—after they’d kidnaped you from Derosier—to go through with the act?”
She sobbed desperately: “Five—hundred—dollars. But I didn’t know—I didn’t know—”
“I believe you,” the Marquis said. “I’ll see that you get the five hundred.”
Her sobs suddenly choked in her throat. She jumped to her feet, her streaming eyes unbelieving, frantic. “Oh! Oh! If—if I had all that money—I could go home! They’d let me come back if I had all that—”
“You want to go home?”
“Oh, God, yes! I—I’m frightened of the city—it’s evil and wicked! I—oh, you’ll let me go home?”
“On the late train tonight. We’ll have to spend an hour at the district attorney’s office but I think we can make it.”
When he led her, carrying her tiny bag, out through the other room, a doctor was bandaging Titanic Johnson’s wrist. Johnny Berthold said to the wincing gambler: “There ain’t no snakeskin”—he popped in and searched the bathroom and the girl’s prison, came out again—“leather envelope. Forget your pay-off, you chiseler.”
“You’re lucky you’re alive,” the Marquis told him as he let the girl out into the hall. To the cops he said: “Hold Mr. Manson—Senior. You won’t need to hold the junior. Come on Johnny.”
WHEN they stood on the train platform at Grand Central, she choked, unable to find words to thank them. Her tiny, appealing face was tear-stained, her pansy-purple eyes luminous, dark with more tears.
The trainman made his last call and, suddenly, she set her overnight bag down, hung her arms around the Marquis’ neck and kissed him full on the mouth.
For a minute she held him and then the train started to move. She gave a little sob, ran, and hopped on the moving platform, threw them another kiss.
“What’s wrong with me?” Berthold wanted to know. “Have I got leprosy?”
They stood unmoving, till the train thundered out of sight. “I must see Iowa, some time,” Berthold said.
They turned to leave and the Marquis stepped on the girl’s forgotten overnight bag. She had left it in her excitement.
“A little keepsake—for the five hundred you got her,” Berthold grinned.
The Marquis opened the
bag. They each peered curiously in at a heap of puffy silken things. On top of them lay a long, beige-colored, snakeskin leather envelope. It was quite empty.
For a long minute, they both stared at it. Then they turned and stared after the vanished train.
“I wonder how she does at home?” Berthold mused.
Witness! Witness!
The Marquis didn’t want any piece of the Leroy Mills murder case. The kill had occurred miles from his beat on the heart of Manhattan’s Main Stem and he wasn’t even faintly interested in the bump-off. But a bunch of vultures from the newspapers jobbed him into the middle of the ghastly mess, put him on a spot where he’d have to play Witness, Witness, Who’s Got the Witness? with the rest of the cops and crack the case—or else.
IT GREW out of an ugly, though quite ordinary, eruption of sidewalk justice. The facts of the sordid little drama were never at any time in question or doubt. However, there was a witness.
At two-thirty in the morning, 125th Street was a bare, empty thoroughfare. A chill, queer wet—not exactly mist, not exactly rain—had been sifting down stickily since midnight. Even the muffled, tinny music that seeped faintly into the barren night from the third-floor Shanghai Danceland, barely reached the street below and seemed so distant as to only intensify the quiet.
It was exactly on the half-hour when the hollow footsteps of Leroy Mills and the blond girl with him, thumped down to the bottom of the Shanghai’s bare wooden staircase, at street-level.
Popilado, fat, pasty-faced manager of the dance-hall, was watching dully from one of the Shanghai’s dim windows above. He had no particular reason for doing so. He was merely wishing vaguely that seventeen-year-old Doris Larsen had gone sweet on one of his other customers. He did not care much for Leroy Mills. He did not know anyone who did care much for the sleek, bony-faced, black-eyed, black-mustached grifter—except, apparently the little blonde.
Admittedly, however, she was not very bright. Popilado figured candidly, or she wouldn’t be working in his drum in the first place. She had a slightly plump, curved little body, with a winsome, small face and real honey-colored hair. She was still young enough and peaches-and-cream enough to get by despite her plain features and unintelligent cornflower eyes. She got a good play among the patrons and could have done better for herself than Leroy Mills.