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

  “Who is it?”

  “I blowed my whistle plenty. It ought to satisfy you.”

  “Thanks, Rocco. You’re white.”

  “Think nothing of it,” said the racketeer breezily.

  Firpo Cole returned to the living-room.

  The tea party was in full session. All the lights were out but for a small, red bulb in a floor lamp. Firpo could distinguish the figures as they moved only to lift the reefers to their mouth for short, quick puffs. Mona Leeds reclined next to Jugger, in the easy chair that Firpo had vacated.

  An expensive phonograph was playing repeats of a swing record as slowly as it was able. The record was Armstrong’s version of Knockin a Jug and in one corner Monkey Harris was beating an accompaniment on a tom-tom. His slim, yellowed fingers beat rapidly. The test of a good musician, on these occasions, was the number of beats and variations the player could get in, between two chords—and Monkey Harris was rated highly.

  The effect was weird as the disk revolved and the tom-tom beat. The record was played slowly and the reefers themselves tended to slow and dull everything—thereby providing for a full appreciation of the music. And every so often a musician grunted or delivered an “Oh” or an “Ah” as he caught some new nuance in the music that he’d never before heard.

  The air was heavy with those pungent, cloying fumes and Firpo Cole began to cough. He didn’t have to look at his handkerchief to know it was becoming smeared with red. But he didn’t care. At last he knew what was what. That small item of information from Rocco Pace had done the trick. The coughing became worse and he walked into the kitchen.

  Evelyn Dorn was wolfing minced ham sandwiches. “I’d rather eat here than get sick in there,” she explained.

  Firpo Cole said: “Inside you were raving about star sapphires. Did you ever ask Tuttle to give you one?”

  “Sure. It don’t harm to ask—but I never got it.”

  “That’s what I thought. Tuttle did buy it for you, Evelyn, only he forgot it at the old place when it burned down.”

  “No kiddin’?”

  “He’s bought you a lot of stuff, hasn’t he?”

  “Some,” she said coyly. “Ephraim ain’t a tightwad.”

  “That’s what I figured—and on top of that he’s been playing the horses. That’s why he set that fire and later killed Ruth.”

  Evelyn Dorn stopped eating for a moment. “You mean it?”

  Firpo nodded. “He stole twelve hundred bucks in receipts from Jugger and then burned the joint down. He figured rightly that Jugger would think the money burned with the building and that he was making enough profit on insurance not to investigate too much.”

  “Well, what do you know?” marveled Evelyn.

  Firpo’s voice became bitter. “When Tuttle stole that dough from Jugger’s office he acci-dentlly left that brooch which he bought for you on Jugger’s desk—and that’s where Ruth found it. He made a too-big stink about losing his letter opener and then killed Ruth with it. He thought she was blackmailing him about the fire and wasn’t satisfied with a five-hundred-buck payoff.”

  “You can never tell about someone,” she commented. “Can you?”

  The double-hinge door swung open and Simms, the police detective, Max and Ephraim Tuttle came in.

  “All right, Firpo,” said Simms. “I know you got that jewelry you stole from Bailey’s body. Let’s have it.”

  The automatic appeared in Firpo’s hand. The safety catch was still off—the way he wanted it. “Stick your mitts up and line against the wall.”

  The three men did as they were bid. Evelyn Dorn gave a squeal and fled. They could hear the apartment door slam shut.

  “Now look here, Firpo,” Simms’ voice was hoarse. “This ain’t gonna help. If you just take it easy—”

  “Can it,” interrupted Firpo. “I suppose Tuttle told you I had the brooch.”

  Simms nodded.

  Tuttle said quickly: “I didn’t mean anything, Firpo. I just heard it was stolen and then when Jugger said you was talking about it I thought I better call the cops.”

  Firpo’s voice was as calm and as steady as the hand that held the gun. “Tuttle, all you figured was that you’d pin the killing on me and get out of it yourself. But there’s no chance of that because you’re paying for it now.” He took a bead on the pit of Ephraim Tuttle’s stomach.

  “Now watch it,” said Simms rapidly. “Let us take care of it, Firpo. If he did the killing he’s entitled to a trial but sure as hell you’ll swing if you try it yourself.”

  “I know I will,” said Firpo Cole, “and this’ll be one condemned man that’ll really eat a damned hearty breakfast.”

  Then he sighted carefully and pulled the trigger six times.

  The Girl with the Silver Eyes

  Dashiell Hammett

  “THE GIRL WITH THE SILVER EYES” seems to be a story about the Continental Op, the unnamed private eye who stars in most of Hammett’s best short fiction as well as in his first two novels, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse. It is actually the story of the very beautiful young woman with long, lush brown hair who calls herself Jeanne Delano; in a previous adventure, “The House in Turk Street,” she was Elvira, with bobbed red hair. A lot of people died in the first story, and more deaths followed in the second. It is Jeanne and her scheme that sets into motion the events that bring about the involvement of the Continental Detective Agency and its fat but very tough operative. Like many of the women in the stories by Hammett (1894—1961), she is young, very pretty, feminine, an inveterate liar, and utterly without conscience. She is a chameleon, changing from a desirable kitten to someone so cold-blooded that she will allow, even encourage, the slaughter of innocent people for her own selfish and greedy ends. Think of Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon and you know all you need to know about Hammett’s femmes fatales and, in fact, just about every sexy girl in every noir book and motion picture.

  “The Girl with the Silver Eyes” is connected to “The House in Turk Street” in that it features Jeanne/Elvira as the catalyst for the ensuing action. It was originally published in the June 1924 issue of Black Mask. “The House in Turk Street” had been in the April 1924 issue.

  The Girl with the Silver Eyes

  Dashiell Hammett

  A BELL JANGLED ME into wakefulness. I rolled to the edge of my bed and reached for the telephone. The neat voice of the Old Man—the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco manager—came to my ears:

  “Sorry to disturb you, but you’ll have to go up to the Glenton Apartments on Leavenworth Street. A man named Burke Pangburn, who lives there, phoned me a few minutes ago asking to have someone sent up to see him at once. He seemed rather excited. Will you take care of it? See what he wants.” I said I would and, yawning, stretching and cursing Pangburn—whoever he was—got my fat body out of pajamas into street clothes.

  The man who had disturbed my Sunday morning sleep—I found when I reached the Glenton—was a slim, white-faced person of about twenty-five, with big brown eyes that were red-rimmed just now from either sleeplessness or crying, or both. His long brown hair was rumpled when he opened the door to admit me; and he wore a mauve dressing-robe spotted with big jade parrots over wine-colored silk pajamas.

  The room into which he led me resembled an auctioneer’s establishment just before the sale— or maybe one of these alley tea rooms. Fat blue vases, crooked red vases, vases of various shapes and colors; marble statuettes, ebony statuettes, statuettes of any material; lanterns, lamps and candlesticks; draperies, hangings and rugs of all sorts; odds and ends of furniture that were all somehow queerly designed; peculiar pictures hung here and there in unexpected places. A hard room to feel comfortable in.

  “My fiancee,” he began immediately in a high-pitched voice that was within a notch of hysteria, “has disappeared! Something has happened to her! Foul play of some horrible sort! I want you to find her—to save her from this terrible thing that …”

  I followed him this
far and then gave it up. A jumble of words came out of his mouth— ”spirited away … mysterious something … lured into a trap"—but they were too disconnected for me to make anything out of them. So I stopped trying to understand him, and waited for him to babble himself empty of words.

  I have heard ordinarily reasonable men, under stress of excitement, run on even more crazily than this wild-eyed youth; but his dress—the parroted robe and gay pajamas—and his surroundings— this deliriously furnished room—gave him too theatrical a setting; made his words sound utterly unreal.

  He himself, when normal, should have been a rather nice-looking lad: his features were well spaced and, though his mouth and chin were a little uncertain, his broad forehead was good. But standing there listening to the occasional melodramatic phrase that I could pick out of the jumbled noises he was throwing at me, I thought that instead of parrots on his robe he should have had cuckoos.

  Presently he ran out of language and was holding his long, thin hands out to me in an appealing gesture, saying:

  “Will you?” over and over. “Will you? Will you?”

  I nodded soothingly, and noticed that tears were on his thin cheeks.

  “Suppose we begin at the beginning,” I suggested, sitting down carefully on a carved bench affair that didn’t look any too strong.

  “Yes! Yes!” He was standing legs apart in front of me, running his fingers through his hair. “The beginning. I had a letter from her every day until—”

  “That’s not the beginning,” I objected. “Who is she? What is she?”

  “She’s Jeanne Delano!” he exclaimed in surprise at my ignorance. “And she is my fiancee. And now she is gone, and I know that—”

  The phrases “victim of foul play,” “into a trap” and so on began to flow hysterically out again.

  Finally I got him quieted down and, sandwiched in between occasional emotional outbursts, got a story out of him that amounted to this:

  This Burke Pangburn was a poet. About two months before, he had received a note from a Jeanne Delano—forwarded from his publishers— praising his latest book of rhymes. Jeanne Delano happened to live in San Francisco, too, though she hadn’t known that he did. He had answered her note, and had received another. After a little of this they met. If she really was as beautiful as he claimed, then he wasn’t to be blamed for falling in love with her. But whether or not she was really beautiful, he thought she was, and he had fallen hard.

  This Delano girl had been living in San Francisco for only a little while, and when the poet met her she was living alone in an Ashbury Avenue apartment. He did not know where she came from or anything about her former life. He suspected—from certain indefinite suggestions and peculiarities of conduct which he couldn’t put in words—that there was a cloud of some sort hanging over the girl; that neither her past nor her present were free from difficulties. But he hadn’t the least idea what those difficulties might be. He hadn’t cared. He knew absolutely nothing about her, except that she was beautiful, and he loved her, and she had promised to marry him. Then, on the third of the month—exactly twenty-one days before this Sunday morning— the girl had suddenly left San Francisco. He had received a note from her, by messenger.

  This note, which he showed me after I had insisted point blank on seeing it, read:

  Burkelove:

  Have just received a wire, and must go East on next train. Tried to get you on the phone, but couldn’t. Will write you as soon as I know what my address will be. If anything. [These two words were erased and could be read only with great difficulty.] Love me until I’m back with you forever.

  YOUR JEANNE

  Nine days later he had received another letter from her, from Baltimore, Maryland. This one, which I had a still harder time getting a look at, read:

  Dearest Poet:

  It seems like two years since I have seen you, and I have a fear that it’s going to be between one and two months before I see you again.

  I can’t tell you now, beloved, about what brought me here. There are things that can’t be written. But as soon as I’m back with you, I shall tell you the whole wretched story.

  If anything should happen—I mean to me—you’ll go on loving me forever, won’t you, beloved? But that’s foolish. Nothing is going to happen. I’m just off the train, and tired from traveling.

  Tomorrow I shall write you a long, long letter to make up for this.

  My address here is 215 N. Strieker St. Please, Mister, at least one letter a day!

  YOUR OWN JEANNE

  For nine days he had had a letter from her each day—with two on Monday to make up for the none on Sunday. And then her letters had stopped. And the daily letters he had sent to the address she gave—215 N. Strieker Street— had begun to come back to him, marked “Not known.” He had sent a telegram, and the telegraph company had informed him that its Baltimore office had been unable to find a Jeanne Delano at the North Strieker Street address.

  For three days he had waited, expecting hourly to hear from the girl, and no word had come. Then he had bought a ticket for Baltimore.

  “But,” he wound up, “I was afraid to go. I know she’s in some sort of trouble—I can feel that—but I’m a silly poet. I can’t deal with mysteries. Either I would find nothing at all or, if by luck I did stumble on the right track, the probabilities are that I would only muddle things; add fresh complications, perhaps endanger her life still further. I can’t go blundering at it in that fashion, without knowing whether I am helping or harming her. It’s a task for an expert in that sort of thing. So I thought of your agency. You’ll be careful, won’t you? It may be—I don’t know— that she won’t want assistance. It may be that you can help her without her knowing anything about it. You are accustomed to that sort of thing; you can do it, can’t you?”

  I turned the job over and over in my mind before answering him. The two great bugaboos of a reputable detective agency are the persons who bring in a crooked plan or a piece of divorce work all dressed up in the garb of a legitimate operation, and the irresponsible person who is laboring under wild and fanciful delusions— who wants a dream run out.

  This poet—sitting opposite me now twining his long, white fingers nervously—was, I thought, sincere; but I wasn’t so sure of his sanity.

  “Mr. Pangburn,” I said after a while, “I’d like to handle this thing for you, but I’m not sure that I can. The Continental is rather strict, and, while I believe this thing is on the level, still I am only a hired man and have to go by the rules. Now if you could give us the endorsement of some firm or person of standing—a reputable lawyer, for instance, or any legally responsible party—we’d be glad to go ahead with the work. Otherwise, I am afraid—”

  “But I know she’s in danger!” he broke out. “I know that— And I can’t be advertising her plight—airing her affairs—to everyone.”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t touch it unless you can give me some such endorsement.” I stood up. “But you can find plenty of detective agencies that aren’t so particular.”

  His mouth worked like a small boy’s, and he caught his lower lip between his teeth. For a moment I thought he was going to burst into tears. But instead he said slowly: “I dare say you are right. Suppose I refer you to my brother-in-law, Roy Axford. Will his word be sufficient?”

  “Yes.”

  Roy Axford—R. F. Axford—was a mining man who had a finger in at least half of the big business enterprises of the Pacific Coast; and his word on anything was commonly considered good enough for anybody.

  “If you can get in touch with him now,” I said, “and arrange for me to see him today, I can get started without much delay.”

  Pangburn crossed the room and dug a telephone out from among a heap of his ornaments. Within a minute or two he was talking to someone whom he called “Rita.”

  “Is Roy home? … Will he be home this afternoon? … No, you can give him a message for me, though … Tell him I’m sending a gentleman up to see
him this afternoon on a personal matter—personal from me—and that I’ll be very grateful if he’ll do what I want… Yes … You’ll find out, Rita … It isn’t a thing to talk about over the phone … Yes, thanks!”

  He pushed the telephone back into its hiding place and turned to me.

  “He’ll be at home until two o’clock. Tell him what I told you and if he seems doubtful, have him call me up. You’ll have to tell him the whole thing; he doesn’t know anything at all about Miss Delano.”

  “All right. Before I go, I want a description of her.”

  “She’s beautiful! The most beautiful woman in the world!”

  That would look nice on a reward circular.

  “That isn’t exactly what I want,” I told him. “How old is she?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Height?”

  “About five feet eight inches, or possibly nine.”

  “Slender, medium or plump?”

  “She’s inclined toward slenderness, but she—”

  There was a note of enthusiasm in his voice that made me fear he was about to make a speech, so I cut him off with another question.

  “What color hair?”

  “Brown—so dark it’s almost black—and it’s soft and thick and—”

  “Yes, yes. Long or bobbed?”

  “Long and thick and—”

  “What color eyes?”

  “You’ve seen shadows on polished silver when—”

  I wrote down gray eyes and hurried on with the interrogation.

  “Complexion?”

  “Perfect!”

  “Uh-huh. But is it light, or dark, or florid, or sallow, or what?”