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

  The black object fell writhing. A flutter of black sprang from it, mushroomed out, breaking the swift descent with a jerk.

  “A parachute!”

  The cry broke like a single word from the lips of the stunned watchers, a moan of mingled surprise and relief.

  The thud, thud of running feet as the nucleus of a crowd closed in.

  Slowly, silently the ‘chute floated down through the windless dusk, the figure suspended beneath it swinging back and forth in an ever-lessening arc.

  The group on the steps scattered from beneath it.

  A flash of sudden enlightenment burst upon the district attorney. His cry split the silence like the shrill of a siren.

  “Burke!”

  The kidnaper had kept his word.

  A ragged cheer rose. It changed to a gasp of horror, an instant later, as the ‘chute deposited its burden with a dull crash on the stone plaza and its black silken folds crumpled slowly over it.

  There it lay in a huddled heap, unmoving.

  The D.A. sprang toward it, followed closely by his men. Hands tore eagerly at the enveloping silk. A cordon of police appeared as if from nowhere to hold back the milling crowd.

  Dizzy Malone stood unnoticed in the excitement, watching slit-eyed.

  The black silk came away disclosing the still figure of a man crumpled on the pavement.

  It was Burke, district attorney of the city of Chicago.

  “He’s stunned by the fall!” Louden cried. “Broken bones, maybe! Call an ambulance!”

  Mitchell bent over the huddled body, fingers probing deftly.

  He straightened up again.

  “No need,” he said, simply. “Burke is dead— hung.”

  A spasm of rage swept him. He shook his fists at the sky overhead and cursed the vanishing plane and its pilot with blasting, withering oaths.

  “Hung him, the carrion!” he shrilled. “Burke was alive when he dropped. His body’s still warm. The parachute was attached to a noose around his neck. When it opened it hung him— hung him by the neck until he was dead!”

  He covered his face with his hands.

  An examination of the corpse proved that he was right.

  It was a clever job and timed to the second.

  The shrouds of the ‘chute had been fastened to a rope which ended in a noose. The noose circled the dead man’s neck, a knot like a hangman’s protruding from beneath one ear. His hands were wired together.

  When the plane went into a loop and hung there bottom side up, the man had been catapulted downward from his seat. The ‘chute opened automatically and snapped his neck with the dispatch of a hangman’s sprung trap.

  An ambulance jangled up.

  From Centre Street came the roar of a motorcycle. A police-runner elbowed his way to the district attorney.

  “Flash from Van Cortlandt Park, Chief. At 7:55, a black plane swooped down over the parade ground and scooped up the basket with the ransom. Got into the air again before anyone could get near him.”

  The D.A.’s big shoulders drooped.

  “And then he got wise to how we’d tried to frame him,” the big man mumbled. “Poor Burke. My God! Oh, my God!”

  His shoulders quivered spasmodically.

  In the confusion, Dizzy Malone edged her way in until she stood beside him.

  Her words dripped across his numbed mind— measured, stinging, calculated to cut with the bite of a steel-tipped lash.

  “Yes, hung by the neck until he was dead— like he hung Baldy Ross on a frame-up!” The voice went on, its words searing themselves across the district attorney’s soul. “And remember, big boy, you sealed the death warrant that sent the Kid to the Big House tofry!”

  CHAPTER II

  THE MOLL PAYS A VISIT

  Dizzy Malone nodded her way between the huddle of tables that shouldered each other for space around the El Dorado’s gleaming dance floor. With a crooked grin and a toss of her smoothly-waved blonde hair she dismissed half a dozen offers of parking space at as many tables.

  She wanted to be alone—to think—and it was in the strident, blaring heart of a night club that her mind worked best. About her beat waves of flesh-tingling, erotic sounds—rising and falling rhythmically from brazen throats, from tense, stretched strings, from the quivering bellies of drums—the swirling, clamoring pulse of Broadway’s night life.

  Dizzy loved it.

  She chose a table in the corner and sat down facing the writhing mass of lights and color.

  Against its bizarre background the scene in the district attorney’s office and the mad happenings in front of the City Hall that afternoon passed rapidly in review.

  The job had all the ear-marks of the Ghost. She snarled the name hatefully into the drunken medley of sound. The Ghost must be back then, and broke.

  Yes, it all fitted in perfectly. A quick recoup of the stake—part of it hers—that he’d thrown away on that flossie, Spanish Lil—and—revenge. A double-barreled goal that would eat into his twisted mind like acid.

  It was like the Ghost to combine business with—revenge.

  First this bird Burke who had convicted Baldy, and then—

  A waiter with a broken nose and a livid scar that stretched from lip to ear bent over her solicitously, yet with an air of being in the know, of belonging.

  “Scotch,” Dizzy said, automatically.

  The waiter disappeared.

  Dizzy’s shrewd mind pieced together the scattered bits of the puzzle. With Burke out of the way who would be next? Who, but—

  The waiter again.

  He placed the drink before her, bent close to her ear as he smoothed the rumpled tablecloth.

  “I hear Spanish Lil is back.”

  Dizzy stiffened.

  “Where?”

  The words seemed to slip out of the corner of her mouth. Her lips did not move.

  “At Sugar Foot’s in Harlem, throwin’ coin around like a coked-up bootlegger.”

  “Thanks.”

  The grapevine! System of underworld news.

  The waiter moved away.

  Dizzy made a pretense of drinking, smiled woodenly at a shrill-voiced entertainer, and rose.

  Where Spanish Lil was, there the Ghost would be.

  Outside the El Dorado, Dizzy climbed into a low, nondescript hulk of a roadster. There was class about the roadster. Its dull, grey finish gleamed in the lamp light. Its nickle fittings were spotless.

  When she stepped on the starter, the car’s real class became apparent, for under her hand pulsed the steady flow of a V-16 Cadillac. The long, grey hood covered a sixteen-cylinder motor mounted on the very latest in chassis.

  The gears meshed and the iron brute rolled away with scarcely a sound.

  Dizzy swung the wheel and they turned south into Seventh Avenue, then west to skirt the uppermost extremity of Times Square, south on Ninth, then west again and the grey snout of the roadster buried itself deep into the heart of the sink of gangland—Hell’s Kitchen.

  Before an inconspicuous brownstone front in the odd Forties the car drew up. The motor hissed into silence.

  Dizzy climbed the battered stone steps and let herself into an ill-lit hallway. Two steep flights of stairs—another door. It yielded to her key and she stepped into her purple paradise and snapped on the lights. Behind her the door swung to with the solid clang of steel meeting steel and the snap of a double lock.

  The room was a perfect foil for Dizzy Ma-lone’s blonde, gaming beauty, and truly a purple paradise. It ran the gamut of shades of that royal color, from the light orchid of the silk-draped walls to the almost-violet of the deep, cushion-drenched divans that lined three walls. Into the fourth was built a miniature bar whose dark, blood-purple mahogany gleamed dully in the subdued light of innumerable silken-covered lamps.

  Cigarette tables on tall, slender legs flanked the divans; a massive radio was half-concealed by an exquisite Spanish shawl, worked with intricate mauve embroidery and surmounted by a silver vase holding a gi
gantic spotted orchid. There was not a book to be seen—not even “Indian Love Lyrics,” acme of chorine literary taste and attainment; or Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” which is now considered passe by Broadway beauties; or Durant’s “History of Philosophy,” displayed, but never read.

  Dizzy’s purple paradise was, indeed, an institution.

  She crossed its thick, soft carpet with a hurried step and entered the bedroom.

  It was done entirely in the same color-scheme as the outer room, but, unlike it, was strictly private.

  Dizzy tossed her hat on the square, purple bed that stood on a raised dias in the center of the room. From two wardrobes that squatted against the wall she took the flimsy garments she figured to need and spread them in readiness on the chaise-lounge stretching in luxurious abandon beneath the heavily-shaded casement window.

  Then the clothes Dizzy had on fell at her feet in a crumpled shower and she stood, stretching her arms above her head, in provocative marble-pink nakedness.

  But not for long. There was work to be done.

  Throwing a smock about her slender shoulders, she sat down before a make-up table that would have done credit to the current reigning dramatic favorite, and switched on the blinding frame of electrics that threw its mirror into a pool of dazzling brilliance.

  For several minutes her gaze concentrated on the reflected image of herself, then she rubbed the make-up off with cold cream and set to work.

  Dark shadows blended in skillfully around her eyes, made their grey depths even deeper, faint penciled lines gave them a slanting oval appearance. She blocked her eyebrows out with grease paint and drew fine, arching ones over them. Deft dabs of rouge close up under the eyes and flanking her nose aided in completely changing the round, youthful contour of her face. It was the long, smouldering, passionate countenance of the Slav. She clinched the impression by drawing out her lips in two, thin crimson lines.

  Dizzy gazed at the reflection and grinned. Even she failed to recognize herself. The make-up was perfect.

  To complete the illusion, she combed the smooth waves of her blonde bobbed hair flatly down on her little head, then searched through the drawers until she found a flaming red wig.

  It was a work of art, that wig, and so expertly made as to defy discovery of its artificiality.

  Carefully Dizzy fitted it into place.

  An exclamation of delight slipped between her lips.

  Perfect, indeed!

  Satisfied, Dizzy dressed slowly, choosing a scanty gown that hinted broadly at the palpitating curves beneath. Its vivid, jealous-eyed green threw into hot relief the flaming flower of her hair.

  Throwing a light wrap about her, she descended the stairs to her roadster, eased in behind the wheel and gunned the grey hulk toward the river. She swung north on deserted lower West End Avenue, breezing along easily. There was no hurry and she had no desire to run into the drunken crush that marked the three o’clock closing hour of most of Broadway’s night clubs.

  The blocks slipped past.

  At Cathedral Parkway she turned right, passed Morningside Park, and left into Lenox Avenue, the great pulsing artery of Harlem.

  Into the maze of side streets the roadster nosed and came to a stop at last before a row of lightless, grimy stone fronts.

  Dizzy climbed out and walked around the corner to where an awning stretched across the sidewalk.

  In its shadow towered an ebony doorman.

  He scrutinized her closely but at the mention of the name she snarled into his ear, he began to bow and scrape frantically. Flinging the locked doors behind him open, he admitted her to deep-carpeted stairs.

  Down them she went, and at the bottom there rushed to meet her the hot music, the din, the flashing movement and color that was the underworld’s basement-haven—Sugar Foot’s.

  Her eyes swept the crowded room in the split second before it was plunged into darkness punctured by a spotlight that picked out a brown-skinned girl in the center of the dance floor. The orchestra throbbed into a barbaric African rhythm and the girl flung herself into a writhing, shuddering dance.

  Under cover of it, Dizzy threaded her way to an empty corner-table near the door, which she had spotted in that brief instant, before the lights went out.

  When the lights flooded on again she was seated behind the table facing the room. She leaned one elbow negligently on its checked calico-top and joined in the applause. To all appearances she had been there for hours.

  A boisterous waiter came and hung over her shoulder.

  “Scotch!” Dizzy snapped.

  There was that in her tone which sent him away on the jump, respectful, in spite of the aura of flaunted lure that clung about her.

  In a moment he was on his way back, skipping, sliding, weaving his way across the dance floor in perfect time to the music. He lowered his tray and placed the drink before her, a tall glass, soda, ginger ale, a bowl of cracked ice, and melted away again.

  Slowly, lingeringly, Dizzy mixed the drink, sipped it and settled to the business of looking over the crowd that jammed the stifling room to capacity.

  Everyone was there—sporting gents flush from the race-track; sinister underworld figures, suave, shifty-eyed; a heavyweight contender with his wizened-faced manager; a florid police sergeant from the tenderloin; the principals of a smash colored review; a sprinkling of tight-lipped gamblers and individuals who fitted into no particular category. All their women—good, bad, and so-so.

  But nowhere on the dance floor could Dizzy find the sunken, grey, cadaverous face of the Ghost, or the long, gangling stretch of his emaciated limbs. He would surely be there. He loved to dance, almost as much as Dizzy herself.

  The saxophones sobbed their quivering “That’s All!” and the dancers made for their tables.

  The lights went out—the spotlight fell upon a black Amazon in a glittering, skin-tight gown. Swaying sensuously to the beat of the music, she broke into a wailing, throbbing blues. Wild applause.

  Lights again—the beat of the music quickened—couples left the tables for the dance floor and locked themselves in shuddering embraces to the fervent tempo of the band.

  Dizzy’s eyes swept the tables.

  There—ah! Dizzy’s fists clenched. The pink nails went white.

  At the ringside table sat Spanish Lil, high-bosomed, languorous, drunk.

  The shimmer of new steel gleamed out from the slits that were Dizzy’s eyes. They probed at each of the faces that swarmed around Spanish Lil, each one a worthless hanger-on scenting dough. For an instant they paused at a bloated face faintly reminiscent of the Ghost.

  Her heart flopped over and beat wildly.

  But no! The man’s nose was small and straight, nothing like the Ghost’s colorless, almost transparent hooked beak. His shoulders were square, not round and sloping; his eyes puffed and bleary.

  A keen stab of disappointment tore at her throat.

  Her eyes passed on.

  Everywhere she met hot stares, pleading, offering, suggesting unmentionable things. Her own swept them coldly.

  A pie-eyed newspaper reporter slouched over her table and began to talk. Dizzy knew him, but to add authenticity to her changed character she sent him away with a stinging rebuff that made even his calloused sensibilities writhe.

  Darkness and the spotlight again. A dusky chorus hurled itself into an abysmal jungle dance. A roar of applause.

  Lights.

  Dizzy rose and made her way toward the ladies’ room, taking care to pass close to the table where Spanish Lil and her satellites clustered.

  The man with the bloated face looked up and caught her eye for an instant as she went past.

  On the way back he was waiting for her. When she came abreast of the table he swayed to his feet.

  “Dance, kid?” he mumbled thickly.

  Something made Dizzy hesitate instead of brushing quickly by him. Misinterpreting it for assent he insinuated his hand under her elbow.

  Spanish Lil leap
ed to her feet.

  “Lay off that, you—you—!” she shrilled.

  Her eyes burned with anger and liquor as she seized the man’s arm and dragged him away.

  “Come on, we’re going home.”

  Dizzy eased out of the jam and returned to her table. She sat down watching every move of Spanish Lil and the man with the bloated face as they stumbled toward the door.

  Suddenly, with a half-stifled cry, Dizzy sprang upright.

  There was no mistaking that shuffling gait, that gangling length of limb. A plastic surgeon could chisel away the hooked beak, booze and coke could bloat the sunken, cadaverous face, a tailor could pad the round sloping shoulders; but nothing could disguise that shuffling, long-legged gait.

  It was the Ghost.

  Dizzy flung a bill down on the table and plunged after them, fighting her way through the crowd, taking the stairs two at a time.

  As she burst through the outer door to the sidewalk faint streaks of dawn were silvering the sky.

  Spanish Lil and the Ghost were in the back of a waiting taxi. The driver slammed the door and spurted away.

  Dizzy dashed round the corner, wrap trailing—scrambled into the grey roadster without opening the door—clawed the ignition switch— kicked the starter.

  The iron brute leaped ahead—swung— backed into the curb—hurtled ahead once more—bumped over the opposite curb—and took the corner into the avenue with a screaming skid.

  A red tail-light was just visible in the distance.

  Dizzy booted the accelerator to the floor and the sixteen cylinders responded with a lurching burst of speed.

  The red light drew rapidly nearer and she eased off the terrific pace.

  A slit-lipped grin broke across her face, mirthless, cruel.

  She was on the trail of the Ghost at last, the only man who had ever double-crossed her.

  “There’s only one person that can put the skids under him,” she muttered through clenched teeth. “And I’m that baby!”

  CHAPTER III

  IN THE DISTRICT ATTORNEYS OFFICE