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 well into the afternoon before Dizzy finally slid her roadster to the curb before the brown-stone front in the Forties that masked her purple paradise.

  A drizzling summer rain fell steadily.

  She climbed out and looked the iron-gutted monster over affectionately. It was spattered with mud and one of the rear tires was flat, cut to ribbons. Like its owner it seemed to droop with the fatigue of a sleepless night and almost continuous driving.

  As Dizzy turned wearily toward the house a smile of grim satisfaction creased the corners of her mouth.

  She knew all that she needed to know—now! It was the Ghost!

  Stiffly she plodded up the stairs and let herself into the purple salon. Slamming the door behind her, she crossed to the bedroom leaving a trail of sodden garments in her wake. Her white body disappeared into the bathroom to be followed almost instantly by the hiss of a shower.

  She came out in a few minutes, fresh, almost radiant, all traces of her character of the night before completely removed.

  It was a 100 per cent Dizzy Malone again who chose a quietly expensive street dress from a wardrobe and drew it on over her head.

  When she stepped into the purple salon once more she was as modishly dressed, as cool and collected, as any millionaire broker’s private secretary. And probably infinitely more beautiful. She looked, indeed, as though she had stepped out of the proverbial bandbox.

  But then, Dizzy was Dizzy, and just at the moment she was ravenously hungry.

  From the refrigerator behind the bar she salvaged half a grapefruit; set a percolator brewing coffee and made toast in a complicated electrical gadget.

  When breakfast was ready she disposed of it with neatness and dispatch. Into the second cup of coffee she poured a generous slug of cognac and sipped it leisurely. Then she lit a cigarette.

  At last Dizzy Malone was herself again and ready for whatever the day would bring, which, she figured, would be plenty.

  And in that she was right, as she usually was, although things did not begin to happen as soon as she expected.

  Calmly, at first, she sat smoking cigarettes and waiting while the rain dripped dolefully outside. Then she got up and began pacing the room, smoking with short nervous puffs.

  Finally the break came.

  An ominous rapping on the door.

  Dizzy started, pulled herself together and ground the cigarette into an over-full ash-tray.

  “Who is it?” she called.

  “Horowitz and Rourke from Headquarters. The D.A. says you should take a walk to see him.”

  “Just a second, boys.”

  The expected had happened.

  Dizzy straightened her hat in front of a mirror and opened the door. Outside were two plainclothes men.

  “Hello, Dizzy.”

  Dizzy grinned.

  Together they descended the stairs and made a dash through the rain for the black sedan with the P.D. shield on its radiator that was parked behind her roadster.

  Instantly the police chauffeur was on his way, siren shrieking.

  “What’s the big idea of the ride?” the girl asked.

  The dicks shrugged.

  “We don’t know ourselves.”

  And it was obvious to her that they didn’t, although it was evident, too, that they were laboring under an over-dose of suppressed excitement. But they offered nothing and Dizzy asked no questions.

  The remainder of the ride to the grim building on Centre Street was accomplished in silence. Once there she was conducted immediately to the office where she had had the futile conference exactly twenty-four hours before.

  The district attorney sat at his desk, Tom Louden beside him.

  “Fade!” the D.A. snapped at the plainclothes men and they backed out, closing the door behind them.

  Dizzy stood in the middle of the room, waiting, watching.

  Mitchell looked up at her out of eyes deep-sunken and blood-shot. His face showed lines of worry and strain. Even his grizzled hair seemed a trifle greyer. It was a cinch that his nerves were keyed close to the breaking point.

  What had happened to the big boy, Dizzy wondered. It would surely take more than that business in front of the City Hall to throw a veteran like himself so completely haywire.

  His eyes bored into her and a flush slowly rose to his cheekbones.

  “You damned little punk!” he roared, suddenly, springing to his feet.

  “But, Chief—”

  “Shut up!” he snarled at his assistant. “Let me handle this!”

  Seizing the girl’s arm he twisted it savagely.

  “Now come clean! What do you know about that Burke job?”

  Dizzy looked him in the eye.

  “I told you what I knew yesterday,” she said coldly. “I made you a proposition purely on a hunch. The offer still holds. Give me a plane, a fast one, with a machine-gun on it, and your say-so to go ahead, and maybe I can get the Ghost for you. And when I say ‘get’ I mean ‘’get! That’s all.”

  “It is, huh?”

  The D.A. dragged her roughly to the desk.

  “Well, what about this?”

  He snatched a sheet of paper from its top and thrust it in front of her eyes.

  It was in the same handwriting as the Burke ransom letter and on the same type of paper.

  Dizzy read it hurriedly.

  “You see what happens when you try to double-cross us, Mitchell! Don’t try to chisel again. Unless you announce through the papers that you will comply with our demand for $500,000 as we shall direct, you will be dead by midnight!”

  “Well?”

  The district attorney pointed to a newspaper scare head.

  DISTRICT ATTORNEY DEFIES BURKE KILLERS

  “Now what have you got to say?” he asked fiercely.

  “My proposition is still open. And remember, big boy, you prosecuted the Ghost’s kid brother. You sent him up to fry in the chair”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes.”

  The D.A. stood over the girl threateningly.

  “Listen, baby, you know plenty and you’re going to spill it. Now are you ready to talk nice?”

  Dizzy shrugged.

  “You heard me the first time, big boy.”

  Mitchell’s big hand shot out and clamped over her slim arm.

  “You’re gonna come clean with what you know, see, baby!” he snarled. “Or else I’ll give you the works!”

  “I’m no squealer!” Dizzy spit the words in his face.

  The D.A. flung her savagely into a chair.

  “All right, then, you little punk, I’ll just sweat it out of you!”

  “Good Heavens, Chief! Can’t you see she’d had enough?” Tom Louden’s voice quivered. “Lay off her. She won’t talk.”

  The D.A. turned his back on the crumpled heap that lay whimpering piteously in the chair.

  “All right, Tom. Jug her then for safe keeping. She’s dangerous.”

  “Oh, go easy, Chief! Don’t do that. I’ll be personally responsible for her. I don’t think she’s in the know anyway.”

  Dizzy looked up gratefully at the young assistant D.A. out of a face that had become pinched and drawn. Racking sobs shook her, but she bit her lips to keep them back.

  Mitchell gave tacit consent to his assistant’s plea by ignoring it.

  “Well, guess I’ll call it a day,” he said gruffly, pulling out his watch. “Eleven-thirty. The buzzards have got half an hour yet to keep their promise, but they won’t get me!”

  Mitchell turned abruptly on his heel and left the room.

  When the door closed Louden crossed to the shuddering heap in the chair.

  “I’m sorry, kid,” he said with real emotion. “Feeling better?”

  Dizzy nodded and tried to smile.

  “Good, kid. Now promise that you won’t take it on the lam and I’ll run you home in my car.”

  “I won’t lam it—now!”

  “Let’s go then, Dizzy,” Tom urged as he helpe
d her gently to her feet. “We’ll just trail along behind the Chief to see that he gets home all right, then I’ll chance Hell’s Kitchen and drop you at your door.”

  Dizzy gulped her thanks and clung to his arm for support as they hurried to the street.

  What amounted to a riot squad had been called out to escort the D.A. to his home. It roared away from the big grey building while Dizzy and Tom climbed into his modest sedan. An armored motorcycle preceded and followed Mitchell’s limousine. On the seat beside him sat a pair of plainclothes men.

  Mitchell had boasted that the buzzards who knocked off his colleague from Chicago wouldn’t get him, but he was taking no chances.

  Tom Louden’s sedan stuck its nose into the drizzle of rain and scampered after the cavalcade as it streaked away northward.

  Into Fifth Avenue they raced, sirens shrieking; past red lights and green alike, the smooth wet asphalt flowing behind them like a black ribbon.

  Forty-second Street slid by and the rain-drenched statue of General Sherman dripping in its tiny park at Fifty-ninth.

  A few blocks further on they turned right, bumped across the car tracks at Madison Avenue, past the great church on the corner of the Park. It was dark except for the illuminated dial of the clock on its steeple whose hands quivered on the edge of midnight.

  Half way up the block the cavalcade stopped before the private residence of the D.A.

  Louden pulled in behind the limousine. The coppers leaped to their stations, guns drawn. The D.A. stepped out, chuckling, and headed for his door, waving aside the proffered umbrella of the plainclothes men who walked beside him.

  “The buzzards won’t get me,” he gloated. “Not tonight they won’t.”

  He reached the door and stood on the mat, regardless of the pelting rain, drawing out his key.

  The first stroke of midnight clanged hollowly from the church on the corner.

  “I fooled ‘em this time,” the D.A. laughed.

  He thrust the wet key in the lock.

  As it touched, a point of blue flame appeared, sputtered into a glow that ran hissing across his hand and up his arm. The D.A.’s body stiffened. Blue sparks cascaded from his feet. His bulky frame writhed in spasmodic jerks, thin spirals of smoke rising from his seared flesh. His features convulsed in agony.

  Then, its work done, the burning wave of electricity flung the charred body of New York’s district attorney shuddering to the sidewalk.

  When his bodyguard bent over him, Mitchell was dead.

  In Tom Louden’s sedan Dizzy’s white lips framed scarcely audible words— ”He fried— just like the Ghost’s kid brother!”

  CHAPTER IV

  ANOTHER DEMAND

  Dizzy Malone threw off the purple coverlet of her bed and reached for the morning papers. There was one thing she wanted to find out— how the trick had been turned.

  The papers exposed the ingenious device in detail. She lapped them up as she munched rolls and drank coffee prepared by her cleaning woman.

  A man had called at the D.A.’s house with the forged identification card of an inspector for the Electric Light Company. He wished to inspect the meter. He was admitted without question by an unsuspecting servant.

  The meter was out of order, he said. He would fix it. As well as the servant could remember he had mentioned something about the wiring of the doorbell fouling the house current.

  The bogus inspector set to work.

  What he really did was to install a transformer which stepped-up the house current to a deadly degree. Ingenious wiring of the metal door frame and the steel door mat completed the trap, which was set by simply connecting a wire outside the door. An apparently innocent passerby could stoop over and make the connection. That done the victim stepped on the mat, inserted the key and completed the circuit that electrocuted him. The rain, of course, aided the design materially.

  Dizzy shuddered at its utter hellishness.

  It smacked lustily of the Ghost, but a Ghost goaded by homicidal mania, a Ghost stooping to the exhibitionism born of illusions of grandeur, a Ghost whose twisted mind was disintegrating in a final burst of fiendish bravado.

  If it was the Ghost he had gone stark mad. And as such he was doubly dangerous.

  But even Dizzy had no real evidence to pin the two killings on her former partner. From long experience with his methods she sensed, however, that he would have executed them in practically the same manner as the unknown. And then, too, there was the element of poetic justice in the two slayings that she had hunched in the very beginning.

  She was two points up on the police any way you looked at it—she knew the Ghost was in New York and she knew his hideaway. And those two bits of information she intended to keep to herself, to be used to bring to a successful ending her vendetta of hate.

  She would put the bee on the Ghost, and she would do it herself—that was her right—but she was smart enough to realize there must be a semblance of legality about it or it would be bars, and possibly the chair, for her.

  The next move was up to the Ghost.

  It came even as she wondered what it would be.

  The faint buzz of the telephone.

  Dizzy snatched for the French phone in its recess under the bed.

  Tom Louden, acting district attorney for the city of New York, was on the wire. Mr. Louden’s compliments and would Miss Malone be so kind as to come to Headquarters immediately?

  Miss Malone would.

  She held the hook down for a few seconds, then called the garage around the corner for her car. Tumbling out of bed she made a hurried toilette and dashed down the stairs. The grey roadster was waiting at the curb, motor running.

  Dizzy craved action and she got plenty of it from the crowds of early bargain-shoppers on the drive to the big grim building on Centre Street.

  It was the third time in three days that she had crossed the threshold of the district attorney’s office, but this time she entered with a perky smile and a jaunty step, for she realized that she was master of the situation. It was her turn to dictate.

  Tom Louden greeted her with a harassed smile.

  “There’s hell to pay, Dizzy,” he said, running his hand wearily through his hair. “Look!”

  She took the extended sheet of paper, recognizing with an ominous shiver the soiled foolscap of the two previous ransom letters.

  “This just queers everything,” Tom Louden groaned. “Read it.”

  Dizzy’s eyes swept back and forth across the paper.

  “You see we mean business! The ante is raised to $1,000,000. Follow these instructions exactly. Wrap the dough (grand notes only) in a bundle and attach same to an automatically opening parachute. A pilot is to take a single-seater up from Roosevelt Flying Field with the dough and parachute today at 2 p.m. and head due east out over the ocean, flying 100 miles an hour at 5,000 feet. Plane is to be plainly marked with alternating black and white stripes. When pilot sees a yacht whose decks are similarly painted he is to descend, drop the parachute and return. Bets are off if any attempt is made to follow plane or discover yacht. No tricks this time! We see all, know all!

  “If these directions are not followed to the letter within twenty-four hours we will bump offtake Levine!”

  A cry of horror burst from Dizzy’s lips at sight of the sinister name.

  Jake Levine—Boss Fixer of gangland, human octopus in whose tentacles danced dip and judge alike, maker and breaker of politicians, super-fence, master blackmailer, banker for anything from petty larceny to murder if the return was not less than fifty per cent, chiseler and double-crosser feared from the lowest sink in the tenderloin to the highest holder of the public trust.

  “You see what I’m up against on my first job, Dizzy,” Tom growled hopelessly. “Levine got a duplicate of this letter. He’s been down here already—he’s here yet. Says he’ll blow the lid off, knock the legs out from under the administration—and he will, too—if something isn’t done. The party leaders have been on my neck since
daylight, and I’m half crazy.”

  He looked up to the girl appealingly.

  “What I heard of that dope of yours about the Ghost sounded pretty sensible and I’d like—”

  The door of the office burst open and an undersized, rat-faced man burst into the room.

  “What the hell you going to do about this, Louden?” he demanded, his voice high pitched with panic.

  He was trembling violently. The sickly sallow pallor of fear showed through his natural swarthiness. His eyes, beady and set close together, jerked furtively about the room. The aggressive loudness of his clothes even had lost their swagger and he stood revealed as the yellow rat he was.

  “You’ve gotta do something, I say!” he almost screamed. “Listen, you heel! When I got that letter I fixed it so there’ll be hell to pay for certain parties”—he emphasized the words slyly— ”if anything happens to me, and they know it. Have they come through with the dough that bum wants?”

  “Why—a—not yet, Mr. Levine,” Louden stalled. “You see—”

  “The hell I see! That guy means business. Look who he’s bumped off already. He ain’t fooling, and if you don’t do something for me damn soon I’ll start talking and break every punk in this administration.”

  His yellow teeth showed in a snarl.

  “And don’t make a false play either, boy. Remember—if I go on the spot, I wreck the grafters just the same. Nobody ever made a heel outa Jake Levine. Now what kinda protection you givin’ me?”

  “I can lock you up in a cell, Mr. Levine,” Louden suggested. “You would be safe there.”

  “In a cell—a cell!” the man shrieked. “Listen to him! Maybe that bum’s got somebody planted to get me there—some lousy screw maybe. I don’t trust nobody.”

  He paused a moment.

  “I know where I’ll go!” he burst out again. “I’ll stick to one of those certain parties until he gets me out of this.”

  Turning abruptly he flung himself through the door.

  “Well, it won’t be long now before the axe falls,” Tom muttered.

  “And it won’t be long before the time set by that letter is up, too,” Dizzy cut in from where she had flattened herself against the wall. “It’s almost noon now.”