The Complete Cases of the Marquis of Broadway, Volume 1

by John Lawrence

  There was a soft gasp—from the opposite side of the alley, ten yards nearer the Marquis. Desperately, the Marquis dug his heels into the cobbles, slid on his back, his hands groping wildly, prayerfully—and the miracle happened. He found the gun.

  He was rolling over to whip it to him, when the flashlight beam hit him. He whirled and fired, in one movement. The shot was wild, but it sent the girl stumbling backwards, the flashbeam flying wildly away from him. He whirled himself over and over—back toward the theater wall, as the man’s gun pounded two fast shots. Wet stone splinters stung his face.

  Viciously, he hammered two shots himself, heard the whine of the ricochet against the building wall. The other gun was silent. In the second of quiet he could hear the girl’s racing footsteps, running away from him down the alley, splashing in pools of water. He set his teeth, turned the muzzle of his gun toward the sound and squeezed trigger, twice, waist-high.

  There was a thin scream. He half-started to his feet—and suddenly the gun ahead of him loosed a veritable volley. It banged five times—as fast as the trigger could be pulled—and the Marquis’ hat was snatched from his head. He flopped on his face ludicrously, hastily, fired once—and waited.

  In a sudden catlike movement, he flopped himself sideways to the theater wall and brought his feet under him. He straightened slowly. There was now no sound from the far end of the alley—yet a most unholy respect for the other’s marksmanship stung him to caution—to too much caution. He slid forward a few feet. Nothing happened. He stamped, jumped aside. He cursed in his throat, broke into a run, still hugging the theater wall.

  He burst out into the street, swinging himself around the corner with one hand on the wall-edge—and stopped, eyes hot. He looked in both directions. There was nobody in sight—not a moving thing for a block either way.

  And then there was.

  From Seventh Avenue, a hundred yards distant, a figure swung into the street, head down against the rain, walking swiftly toward him.

  The Marquis swore dully, lowered his gun, as he recognized the familiar chunkiness of Asa McGuire. The other two had melted completely.

  He gave McGuire the key in the alley. “Keep your head screwed on,” he warned him. “There’s a mean pair evidently want this key—and they don’t seem to care who they kill to get it.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I’d like to know.” He shoved the envelope back inside his coat pocket. “Get me some action on that key and maybe we’ll find out.”

  “Hey—are these the ones that killed that little sandy-haired guy?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I heard somebody down there say it was George Mahaffey. There’s nothing to that, eh?”

  “How do I know? Go to work on that key. And call me—fast.”

  “Where?”

  “At my place. I’m going home and change these clothes.”

  He rode home in a fog of rising, driving curiosity.

  IT DID not occur to him till he was in his bedroom, his blocky body stark naked, his sopping clothes in a pile on the floor, that he had been momentarily blind to the thing under his nose.

  He had tossed the contents of his pockets on the bureau. It was the juxtaposition of the wild report that George Mahaffey had written Toni O’Higgins, and the envelope which had contained the key—the special-delivery envelope addressed to Purley Rentz at the Frontenac—that woke him up.

  Half vaguely, he thought, “George Mahaffey didn’t send that key anyway. It’s not his writing….” The minute it was formulated, he pounced on it in quick concern—a forgotten clue. The handwriting must belong to somebody. If he could find who—it might answer a lot of questions.

  His eyes jumped alive, and he began hastily to pull on fresh clothes—identical with the ones he had just discarded. He could start some sort of elimination process, anyway. He could start with— And his lips suddenly pursed as an idea occurred to him.

  He sailed into the lobby of the Frontenac, twenty minutes later, again frightening the life out of the now half-dozing night clerk.

  He told him tartly: “Get me the original registration card that Purley Rentz signed when he checked in here. Come on—hurry it up.”

  The clerk gulped: “I—I’ll have to open the safe. They’re always filed—”

  “Well, open it!”

  Three minutes later the clerk laid the registration card—the kind that is held in a leather frame-pad for guests to write on—on the green-and-black counter.

  The Marquis’ eyes steadied, thinned. The writing on the card and on the envelope was identical. Purley Rentz had mailed this key to himself—special delivery—within the few hours preceding his murder!

  For a moment he was absorbed in hastily juggling, weighing, appraising that, trying to wring information from it. It was a moment before he really focused again on the card in his black-gloved hand.

  Rentz, in signing in, had evidently made a mistake. He had written his name, but in the space for his address, there was a huge oblong black blot, preceding the “Fletcherville, Mass.”

  A little knot came into the Marquis’ forehead. He reached quickly over the counter and dragged up the brilliant, green-shaded desk lamp from the shelf below, turned the bulb-side upwards. He pressed the registration card against the blazing, high-powered bulb.

  Now visible through the blot was writing underneath it. The writing was: Sound Falls, N.Y. The hard-headed, cautious little countryman, anxious to conceal his identity, had evidently been aware that it was illegal to sign a false name, but not so serious to sign a false address.

  In ten more minutes the Marquis had the local chief of police in Sound Falls on the telephone. When he asked him the same question that he had asked the sheriff in Fletcherville earlier, this official answered promptly.

  “Sure I know him. He’s a motorman for the Public Transit Commission. What in tarnation’s he got himself into up there? What—if you fellows would tell me the truth, maybe I could cooperate.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “What’s he done? Why all this beating around the bush? Like I told the other fellow—”

  “What other fellow?”

  “The fellow that called up at ten o’clock last night—or maybe you’d say night before last, on account it’s morning now—the fellow from your Identification Bureau.”

  “He asked the same as me?”

  “Yeah, yeah—like was Purley the brother of Elmer and all like that. I told him—”

  “Who is Elmer?”

  “Hey? Elmer was the groom for Pfluger—the groom that got hisself kicked to death.”

  “What! Wait a minute!” The Marquis felt the rise of excitement. “Take it slowly. Purley Rentz is the brother of Elmer Rentz. Elmer Rentz was a groom for who?”

  “Mr. Charlie Pfluger. He has an estate ’bout thirty miles from here. Elmer was his groom for a couple years—up till six-seven months ago.”

  “And?”

  “He was kicked to death by a horse in the stables. A new hunter they got. Elmer went for to groom him and the horse musta squeezed him in the stall, knocked him down and then kicked him in the head.”

  The Marquis held his brain open, waiting for the significance of this to strike him. Nothing seemed to happen.

  The police official said testily: “Hello! Hello! Are ye—”

  “Who is this Pfluger that he worked for? Where can I— Wait a minute! Do you mean Pfluger the check-room concessionaire?”

  “I don’t know about that last, but he’s in the check-room business—runs ’em in all the New York nightclubs and hotels like.”

  The Marquis hung up, his mind flailing. He scarcely needed the call to the Identification Bureau downtown to know that the other call had not come from there.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Angle Nate

  ENTIRELY apart from the significance of what he had just learned, he was nudged by the thought that someone else had learned it—from the same source. Who? George Mahaffey? On his
dizzy, hot-brained hunt for information? Yet—that would mean that the big Irishman had called in twenty-four hours before the time he wrote his wild report.

  Not that that was impossible, of course, if the ever-recurring theory of his having gone off his head were correct. A surprising cunning was not unusual in praecox….

  Then the full irony of that premise struck the Marquis. George Mahaffey, sane, a mental zero all his life. George Mahaffey, unbalanced, a shrewd, cunning, quick-thinking—and ruthless—mind. That would be one for the book.

  He stopped thinking about it. Whoever was at the bottom of this wild nightmare was shrewd, quick-thinking all right, ruthless too—he did not need any more proof of that.

  He turned his attention to the information garnered. He found himself hastily spinning all sorts of wild hypotheses, based on the “accidental” death of the groom six months ago. He checked that promptly. He had as yet no valid reason to believe it was other than accidental.

  He tried to bring this new light quickly to bear on the rest of the puzzle—but it did not seem to bear very much. Purley Rentz, brother of the dead groom, coming to New York—evidently with a key. Could it—could the key have belonged to the killed groom? Have come to the motorman, Purley, with his effects after he was dead?

  That fitted. And, in sudden inspiration, the Marquis saw something else that fitted. The phrase from George Mahaffey’s wild report came back to him—‘stands out in front, shaking like a leaf, with this letter in his hand, or under his coat….’

  It suddenly made direct sense. The little countryman, evidently in New York on some business concerning the key, had been frightened of—something. Afraid for the safety of the key, he had enclosed it in a self-addressed, special-delivery envelope before he started out—indubitably with the idea of dropping it in a mailbox if his danger became too great! And he had done just that!

  That made the key highly important—if it had not already proved itself so. He swung back to the phone quickly, tried to locate Asa McGuire, but the redhead was off about his business in some unknown quarter. He called big Johnny Berthold to find if anything had happened at the girl’s office.

  “Not a thing, chief. We just been sittin’ here watching the clock tick. Hey—what am I here for, anyway? What’s liable to happen?”

  “Maybe nothing. Maybe George Mahaffey will come there. If he does, there’s a chance that he’s off his rocker and is gunning for the girl. Don’t take any chances if that should happen. And—” the Marquis never knew why he added this— “don’t think of George as the dumb-bell he used to be. If he has gone bugs, he’s got awfully smart.”

  “Wha—at? Hey, Marty, did you hear what you said…?”

  The Marquis hung up on the big detective’s yammering.

  He stood a moment in quick thought, then called his apartment. To his Jap, he said: “If Mr. McGuire calls up, tell him I’ve gone to see Mr. Charlie Pfluger. Get a pencil. I’ll spell it for you.”

  IT WAS the first rift in the cloud of mystery—and he drove at it. A cab set him down in front of Pfluger’s Central Park South Hotel, and he was ushered into the hat-check czar’s luxurious suite within minutes.

  For the inventor of the sleeveless and pocketless uniform for his legion of girls, Pfluger was surprisingly benign-looking. He had a red, wizened face with a puff of powdery hair on top, other puffs over his ears. His eyes were light-blue and surprised-looking. He had dinner-clothes on his plump, middle-aged little body. He was standing behind a table, with his hands behind his back when the Marquis strolled in, and was speaking petulantly even before the door was closed. “Now, Marty—if this is about those two girls at the Silver S—”

  “Skip it,” the Marquis said. “It’s not about your squad of hustlers. You’ve got a place near Sound Falls?”

  “Why—yes.”

  “You had a groom named Rentz there. He was killed six months or so ago.”

  The light blue eyes were concerned, wary. “Surely you’re not going to try and frame something out of that—”

  “Just answer me, Charlie.”

  “Well—sure. He was killed—by accident.” He hesitated, searched the Marquis’ eyes for a minute. Then he said abruptly: “I think he went a little crazy, if that helps you any.”

  “Crazy? How?”

  “He used to ride with me. I ride every morning. For two years he was first-class in every way. About a month before he got killed, he started acting funny. All right, I’m telling you.

  “You know I’m pretty careful of myself—I have to be. I have that estate damn well guarded. I don’t move anywhere without a bodyguard. That’s what Rentz was supposed to be, as well as a groom—a sort of bodyguard. We never rode very near the edge of my property, for obvious reasons.

  “About a month before he was killed, Rentz started playing cowboy—or something. He’d be riding along with me—and all of a sudden he’d be heading like a blue streak off toward the fences, as though he couldn’t control his horse.”

  The Marquis eyes were bits of glass. “You didn’t ride after him?”

  “Hardly. I’m not anxious to get where some of these smart hoodlums—”

  “What sort of show did he put on after he came back—I mean these times when he ran away like that?”

  “Eh? Well, he was sort of sullen, cursing the horse and that sort—”

  “Was it the horse’s fault?”

  The red-faced man hesitated, frowning. “Well—it could have been. If it were anybody else but Rentz, I’d say quite possibly. But he was an expert—and he knew all my horses well. All except the new hunter, of course—”

  “The one that killed him?”

  “Yes. And that was an accident.”

  The Marquis stood up. “I believe you. I—”

  A phone on the bookcase in the corner rang. Pfluger excused himself, answered, then held it out to the Marquis. “For you.”

  Asa McGuire’s cheerful voice came over the wire. “Got it, Marty—the little bronze key. Though I can’t get any farther. It’s one of two issued on a joint P.O. box in the Suffolk Post-office Station. I can’t open the box without the other one—and the post-office folks laugh in my face when I ask for anything.”

  “Can you see in the box? Is there anything there?”

  “It hasn’t a glass front. It’s chased steel. We’ve got to get a Federal Court order to see what’s in it. Why is the box important, Marty?”

  “The little bird that was killed outside our spot tonight had that key. He was the brother of a groom who apparently died in the middle of helping snatch Charlie Pfluger. The groom had the key first.”

  “Oh-oh.”

  “Where are you?

  “At your apartment.”

  “Stay there.”

  Pfluger was on his feet, excited light in his pale eyes. “By God! That’s it! Why in the world didn’t I see it! The pup sold me out! It’s as plain as the nose on your face now I look back—”

  “Yeah,” the Marquis said. “When he was dead, did you ship all his effects to this brother in Sound Falls?”

  “I—I presume so. My secretary—”

  DROPPING forty floors to the street, the Marquis’ mind flew. A leaden worried feeling struck him, as he suddenly woke to the fact that he had run out of moves—and there was something inside him warning ominously that this was no time to run out. Maddeningly, his scraps of information were just not enough.

  Elmer Rentz, the groom—mixed with a kidnap scheme. The bronze key to the joint P.O. box—probably part of that scheme somehow. The groom killed—accidentally—before the kidnap worked out. The key—sent to his brother with his belongings.

  It was a straight line to there. Even further. The would-be kidnapers—after a safe interval, communicating with the brother, trying to retrieve the key. The trip to New York with the key. Even the hiring of George Mahaffey to check on the countryman’s movements for a day or two to ensure against the doublecross was reasonable.

  Then a great gap—onl
y partly filled by the super-cautious little Rentz with his precious key all ready to drop into a letter-box if alarmed—and his doing just that. Another gap. Their suspecting that the key might be in his hotel room—their descent on the Frontenac, their cool blackjacking of Witherspoon to try and get a passkey to the room—their being driven off by the Marquis’ own visit—their following him and ruthlessly attempting to shoot him down—all in order to get back the bronze post-office key.

  It would take a day—or more—for the Marquis to get into that box through the courts—and he knew he didn’t have a day—that whatever was going forward here would be all over before that. Somehow, he had to answer the still unanswered questions—the supremely important ones, at least. Who actually killed Rentz? If the kidnapers—who had already proven beyond doubt their expertness and ruthlessness—why had they so bungled the job as to let Rentz almost reach the Marquis alive? Why were they so desperate to reach the key to the joint post-office box? Who were they?

  And last—but not least—where was George Mahaffey?

  He was so absorbed in flailing his brain for a route to the answers that he came to a stop in the middle of the luxurious lobby, stood there, dark-blue eyes unseeing, gloved hands flat in his pockets.

  THE answers didn’t come. Nor did anything remotely approaching a move. He squeezed his brain, as he began to realize how maddeningly he was up against it. In full career, he seemed to have run himself to a complete standstill. He picked up, discarded, a teeming score of ideas. Not any of them would help. He couldn’t seem to find one that would help. He was left hanging in mid-air—with no place to go and, undoubtedly, with two murderous wolves still prowling around looking for him. He began then to wish they would catch up to him—take him. That way, he might possibly glean some information—some line to follow. Unfortunately, judging from what he had seen, he would never get much chance to use anything learned that way. The prospect of trying to slip through their fingers was not an encouraging one.

  Maybe it was this flitting thought that finally nudged him into the wild, desperate one that he finally squeezed out. When it first occurred to him, he scorned it instantly. It was a story-book idea and nothing else. And then, in more minutes, he found, in maddening consternation that it seemed about the only one he could lay hands to. And urgency was jabbing at him so strongly that he was at the point where even a thousand-to-one chance seemed worth a gamble.