The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age--The '20s, '30s & '40s

by Otto Penzler

  It was after ten when I got back to the Berglund and put my heap away and went upstairs to the apartment. I stood under a shower, then put pajamas on and mixed up a batch of hot grog. I looked at the phone a couple of times, thought about calling to see if Dravec was home yet, thought it might be a good idea to let him alone until the next day.

  I filled a pipe and sat down with my hot grog and Steiner’s little blue notebook. It was in code, but the arrangement of the entries and the indented leaves made it a list of names and addresses. There were over four hundred and fifty of them. If this was Steiner’s sucker list, he had a gold mine—quite apart from the blackmail angles.

  Any name on the list might be a prospect as the killer. I didn’t envy the cops their job when it was handed to them.

  I drank too much whiskey trying to crack the code. About midnight I went to bed, and dreamed about a man in a Chinese coat with blood all over the front who chased a naked girl with long jade ear-rings while I tried to photograph the scene with a camera that didn’t have any plate in it.

  V

  Violets M’Gee called me up in the morning, before I was dressed, but after I had seen the paper and not found anything about Steiner in it. His voice had the cheerful sound of a man who had slept well and didn’t owe too much money.

  “Well, how’s the boy?” he began.

  I said I was all right except that I was having a little trouble with my Third Reader. He laughed a little absently, and then his voice got too casual.

  “This guy Dravec that I sent over to see you—done anything for him yet?”

  “Too much rain,” I answered, if that was an answer.

  “Uh-huh. He seems to be a guy that things happen to. A car belongin’ to him is washin’ about in the surf off Lido fish pier.”

  I didn’t say anything. I held the telephone very tightly.

  “Yeah,” M’Gee went on cheerfully. “A nice new Cad all messed up with sand and sea-water … Oh, I forgot. There’s a guy inside it.”

  I let my breath out slowly, very slowly. “Dravec?” I whispered.

  “Naw. A young kid. I ain’t told Dravec yet. It’s under the fedora. Wanta run down and look at it with me?”

  I said I would like to do that.

  “Snap it up. I’ll be in my hutch,” M’Gee told me and hung up.

  Shaved, dressed and lightly breakfasted I was at the County Building in half an hour or so. I found M’Gee staring at a yellow wall and sitting at a little yellow desk on which there was nothing but M’Gee’s hat and one of the M’Gee feet. He took both of them off the desk and we went down to the official parking lot and got into a small black sedan.

  The rain had stopped during the night and the morning was all blue and gold. There was enough snap in the air to make life simple and sweet, if you didn’t have too much on your mind. I had.

  It was thirty miles to Lido, the first ten of them through city traffic. M’Gee made it in three-quarters of an hour. At the end of that time we skidded to a stop in front of a stucco arch beyond which a long black pier extended. I took my feet out of the floorboards and we got out.

  There were a few cars and people in front of the arch. A motor-cycle officer was keeping the people off the pier. M’Gee showed him a bronze star and we went out along the pier, into a loud smell that even two days’ rain had failed to wash away.

  “There she is—on the tug,” M’Gee said.

  A low black tug crouched off the end of the pier. Something large and green and nickeled was on its deck in front of the wheelhouse. Men stood around it.

  We went down slimy steps to the deck of the tug.

  M’Gee said hello to a deputy in green khaki and another man in plain-clothes. The tug crew of three moved over to the wheelhouse, and set their backs against it, watching us.

  We looked at the car. The front bumper was bent, and one headlight and the radiator shell. The paint and the nickel were scratched up by sand and the upholstery was sodden and black. Otherwise the car wasn’t much the worse for wear. It was a big job in two tones of green, with a wine-colored stripe and trimming.

  M’Gee and I looked into the front part of it. A slim, dark-haired kid who had been good-looking was draped around the steering post, with his head at a peculiar angle to the rest of his body. His face was bluish-white. His eyes were a faint dull gleam under the lowered lids. His open mouth had sand in it. There were traces of blood on the side of his head which the sea-water hadn’t quite washed away.

  M’Gee backed away slowly, made a noise in his throat and began to chew on a couple of the violet-scented breath purifiers that gave him his nickname.

  “What’s the story?” he asked quietly.

  The uniformed deputy pointed up to the end of the pier. Dirty white railings made of two-by-fours had been broken through in a wide space and the broken wood showed up yellow and bright.

  “Went through there. Must have hit pretty hard, too. The rain stopped early down here, about nine, and the broken wood is dry inside. That puts it after the rain stopped. That’s all we know except she fell in plenty of water not to be banged up worse; at least half-tide, I’d say. That would be right after the rain stopped. She showed under the water when the boys came down to fish this morning. We got the tug to lift her out. Then we find the dead guy.”

  The other deputy scuffed at the deck with the toe of his shoe. M’Gee looked sideways at me with foxy little eyes. I looked blank and didn’t say anything.

  “Pretty drunk that lad,” M’Gee said gently. “Showin’ off all alone in the rain. I guess he must have been fond of driving. Yeah—pretty drunk.”

  “Drunk, hell,” the plain-clothes deputy said. “The hand throttle’s set half-way down and the guy’s been sapped on the side of the head. Ask me and I’ll call it murder.”

  M’Gee looked at him politely, then at the uniformed man. “What you think?”

  “It could be suicide, I guess. His neck’s broke and he could have hurt his head in the fall. And his hand could have knocked the throttle down. I kind of like murder myself, though.”

  M’Gee nodded, said: “Frisked him? Know who he is?”

  The two deputies looked at me, then at the tug crew.

  “Okay. Save that part,” M’Gee said. “I know who he is.”

  A small man with glasses and a tired face and a black bag came slowly along the pier and down the slimy steps. He picked out a fairly clean place on the deck and put his bag down. He took his hat off and rubbed the back of his neck and smiled wearily.

  “ ‘Lo, Doc. There’s your patient,” M’Gee told him. “Took a dive off the pier last night. That’s all we know now.”

  The medical examiner looked in at the dead man morosely. He fingered the head, moved it around a little, felt the man’s ribs. He lifted one lax hand and stared at the fingernails. He let it fall, stepped back and picked his bag up again.

  “About twelve hours,” he said. “Broken neck, of course. I doubt if there’s any water in him. Better get him out of there before he starts to get stiff on us. I’ll tell you the rest when I get him on a table.”

  He nodded around, went back up the steps and along the pier. An ambulance was backing into position beside the stucco arch at the pier head.

  The two deputies grunted and tugged to get the dead man out of the car and lay him down on the deck, on the side of the car away from the beach.

  “Let’s go,” M’Gee told me. “That ends this part of the show.”

  We said good-bye and M’Gee told the deputies to keep their chins buttoned until they heard from him. We went back along the pier and got into the small black sedan and drove back towards the city along a white highway washed clean by the rain, past low rolling hills of yellow-white sand terraced with moss. A few gulls wheeled and swooped over something in the surf. Far out to sea a couple of white yachts on the horizon looked as if they were suspended in the sky.

  We laid a few miles behind us without saying anything to each other. Then M’Gee cocked his chin at
me and said:

  “Got ideas?”

  “Loosen up,” I said. “I never saw the guy before. Who is he?”

  “Hell, I thought you was going to tell me about it.”

  “Loosen up, Violets,” I said.

  He growled, shrugged, and we nearly went off the road into the loose sand.

  “Dravec’s chauffeur. A kid named Carl Owen. How do I know? We had him in the cooler a year ago on a Mann Act rap. He run Dravec’s hotcha daughter off to Yuma. Dravec went after them and brought them back and had the guy heaved in the goldfish bowl. Then the girl gets to him, and next morning the old man steams downtown and begs the guy off. Says the kid meant to marry her, only she wouldn’t. Then, by heck, the kid goes back to work for him and been there ever since. What you think of that?”

  “It sounds just like Dravec,” I said.

  “Yeah—but the kid could have had a relapse.”

  M’Gee had silvery hair and a knobby chin and a little pouting mouth made to kiss babies with. I looked at his face sideways, and suddenly I got his idea. I laughed.

  “You think maybe Dravec killed him?” I asked.

  “Why not? The kid makes another pass at the girl and Dravec cracks down at him too hard. He’s a big guy and could break a neck easy. Then he’s scared. He runs the car down to Lido in the rain and lets it slide off the end of the pier. Thinks it won’t show. Maybe don’t think at all. Just rattled.”

  “It’s a kick in the pants,” I said. “Then all he had to do was walk home thirty miles in the rain.”

  “Go on. Kid me.”

  “Dravec killed him, sure,” I said. “But they were playing leap-frog. Dravec fell on him.”

  “Okay, pal. Some day you’ll want to play with my catnip mouse.”

  “Listen, Violets,” I said seriously. “If the kid was murdered—and you’re not sure it’s murder at all—it’s not Dravec’s kind of crime. He might kill a man in a temper—but he’d let him lay. He wouldn’t go to all that fuss.”

  We shuttled back and forth across the road while M’Gee thought about that.

  “What a pal,” he complained. “I have me a swell theory and look what you done to it. I wish the hell I hadn’t brought you. Hell with you. I’m go in’ after Dravec just the same.”

  “Sure,” I agreed. “You’d have to do that. But Dravec never killed that boy. He’s too soft inside to cover up on it.”

  It was noon when we got back to town. I hadn’t had any dinner but whiskey the night before and very little breakfast that morning. I got off on the Boulevard and let M’Gee go on alone to see Dravec.

  I was interested in what had happened to Carl Owen; but I wasn’t interested in the thought that Dravec might have murdered him.

  I ate lunch at a counter and looked casually at an early afternoon paper. I didn’t expect to see anything about Steiner in it, and I didn’t.

  After lunch I walked along the Boulevard six blocks to have a look at Steiner’s store.

  VI

  It was a half-store frontage, the other half being occupied by a credit jeweler. The jeweler was standing in his entrance, a big, white-haired, black-eyed Jew with about nine carats of diamond on his hand. A faint, knowing smile curved his lips as I went past him into Steiner’s.

  A thick blue rug paved Steiner’s from wall to wall. There were blue leather easy-chairs with smoke stands beside them. A few sets of tooled leather books were put out on narrow tables. The rest of the stock was behind glass. A paneled partition with a single door in it cut off a back part of the store, and in the corner by this a woman sat behind a small desk with a hooded lamp on it.

  She got up and came towards me, swinging lean thighs in a tight dress of some black material that didn’t reflect any light. She was an ash-blonde, with greenish eyes under heavily mascaraed lashes. There were large jet buttons in the lobes of her ears; her hair waved back smoothly from behind them. Her fingernails were silvered.

  She gave me what she thought was a smile of welcome, but what I thought was a grimace of strain.

  “Was it something?”

  I pulled my hat low over my eyes and fidgeted. I said:

  “Steiner?”

  “He won’t be in today. May I show you—”

  “I’m selling,” I said. “Something he’s wanted for a long time.”

  The silvered fingernails touched the hair over one ear. “Oh, a salesman … Well, you might come in tomorrow.”

  “He sick? I could go up to the house,” I suggested hopefully. “He’d want to see what I have.”

  That jarred her. She had to fight for her breath for a minute. But her voice was smooth enough when it came.

  “That—that wouldn’t be any use. He’s out of town today.”

  I nodded, looked properly disappointed, touched my hat and started to turn away when the pimply-faced kid of the night before stuck his head through the door in the paneling. He went back as soon as he saw me, but not before I saw some loosely packed cases of books behind him on the floor of the back room.

  The cases were small and open and packed any old way. A man in very new overalls was fussing with them. Some of Steiner’s stock was being moved out.

  I left the store and walked down to the corner, then back to the alley. Behind Steiner’s stood a small black truck with wire sides. It didn’t have any lettering on it. Boxes showed through the wire sides and, as I watched, the man in overalls came out with another one and heaved it up.

  I went back to the Boulevard. Haifa block on, a fresh-faced kid was reading a magazine in a parked Green Top. I showed him money and said:

  “Tail job?”

  He looked me over, swung his door open, and stuck his magazine behind the rear-vision mirror.

  “My meat, boss,” he said brightly.

  We went around to the end of the alley and waited beside a fire-plug.

  There were about a dozen boxes on the truck when the man in the very new overalls got up in front and gunned his motor. He went down the alley fast and turned left on the street at the end. My driver did the same. The truck went north to Garfield, then east. It went very fast and there was a lot of traffic on Garfield. My driver tailed from too far back.

  I was telling him about that when the truck turned north off Garfield again. The street at which it turned was called Brittany. When we got to Brittany there wasn’t any truck.

  The fresh-faced kid who was driving me made comforting sounds through the glass panel of the cab and we went up Brittany at four miles an hour looking for the truck behind bushes. I refused to be comforted.

  Brittany bore a little to the east two blocks up and met the next street, Randall Place, in a tongue of land on which there was a white apartment house with its front on Randall Place and its basement garage entrance on Brittany, a story lower. We were going past that and my driver was telling me the truck couldn’t be very far away when I saw it in the garage.

  We went around to the front of the apartment house and I got out and went into the lobby.

  There was no switchboard. A desk was pushed back against the wall, as if it wasn’t used any more. Above it names were on a panel of gilt mail-boxes.

  The name that went with Apartment 405 was Joseph Marty. Joe Marty was the name of the man who played with Carmen Dravec until her papa gave him five thousand dollars to go away and play with some other girl. It could be the same Joe Marty.

  I went down steps and pushed through a door with a wired glass panel into the dimness of the garage. The man in the very new overalls was stacking boxes in the automatic elevator.

  I stood near him and lit a cigarette and watched him. He didn’t like it very well, but he didn’t say anything. After a while I said:

  “Watch the weight, buddy. She’s only tested for half a ton. Where’s it goin’?”

  “Marty, four-o-five,” he said, and then looked as if he was sorry he had said it.

  “Fine,” I told him. “It looks like a nice lot of reading.”

  I went back up the s
teps and out of the building, got into my Green Top again.

  We drove back downtown to the building where I have an office. I gave the driver too much money and he gave me a dirty card which I dropped into the brass spittoon beside the elevators.

  Dravec was holding up the wall outside the door of my office.

  VII

  After the rain, it was warm and bright but he still had the belted suede raincoat on. It was open down the front, as were his coat, and vest underneath. His tie was under one ear. His face looked like a mask of grey putty with a black stubble on the lower part of it.

  He looked awful.

  I unlocked the door and patted his shoulder and pushed him in and got him into a chair. He breathed hard but didn’t say anything. I got a bottle of rye out of the desk and poured a couple of ponies. He drank both of them without a word. Then he slumped in the chair and blinked his eyes and groaned and took a square white envelope out of an inner pocket. He put it down on the desk top and held his big hairy hand over it.

  “Tough about Carl,” I said. “I was with M’Gee this morning.”

  He looked at me emptily. After a little while he said:

  “Yeah. Carl was a good kid. I ain’t told you about him much.”

  I waited, looking at the envelope under his hand. He looked down at it himself.

  “I gotta let you see it,” he mumbled. He pushed it slowly across the desk and lifted his hand off it as if with the movement he was giving up most everything that made life worth living. Two tears welled up in his eyes and slid down his unshaven cheeks.

  I lifted the square envelope and looked at it. It was addressed to him at his house, in neat pen-and-ink printing, and bore a Special Delivery stamp. I opened it and looked at the shiny photograph that was inside.

  Carmen Dravec sat in Steiner’s teakwood chair, wearing her jade earrings. Her eyes looked crazier, if anything, than as I had seen them. I looked at the back of the photo, saw that it was blank, and put the thing face down on my desk.