“Accident it must’ve been,” the old clerk was sayin. “Oh, I know ’tain’t usual—a firin’ pin breakin’ off at the croocial moment, mind. But it’s been known to happen before, laddy. A flaw in the metal, belike, the snappin’ o’ the trigger on an empty cartridge after range practice… No, bhoy, if ye don’t understand some o’ the strangest things in the world kin go wrong wit’ weapons, and thim used every day, ye don’t know guns, that’s all.”
And if you think a professional gun-toter and Marine wouldn’t notice a flaw that serious, you don’t know Pink Nolan, old-timer, I thought. But all I said aloud was, “It’s a pretty far-fetched coincidence, that ‘accident’.”
* * * *
One other person I made it a point to see. Not because Candy Horn could possibly have fritzed the gun, but the memory of his resemblance to that blurred, boyish face in the rear of the bandits’ car was crying to be matched.
I had to make a frontal approach. I found him in a small cubbyhole off the city clerk’s office. His bright face and brighter raiment was out of place here as my neat grey uniform.
“I’m working for Acme,” I said bluntly. “I took over Pink Nolan’s job.”
His eyes looked up at me frankly, but it seemed they were watchful, too. I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that I had seen him before, and not too long ago. But there was nothing—absolutely nothing—to make me think it had been in the death-dealing gang car. He was no boy, close up; past thirty, I’d say.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand, Mr.—er—Evans, is it? Naturally, we were all shocked that so horrible a crime could be committed in our fair city, but—”
“They tell me Pink hated you. Why?”
Horn blushed rosily. “I don’t know. Honestly I don’t. I liked Pink, myself, even went to his funeral. But I can’t think of any reason… Unless it was because of that little tiff we had when Mayor Miller was running for re-election, before the war. I was a party worker, of course, and somehow Nolan got it into his head that I forced Luke Marcourt to contribute. Really, the whole thing was ridiculous. I told Nolan that.”
Hardly more ridiculous than the cock-and-bull story, I thought, looking down at his bland face. Still I couldn’t stir up any definite recognition. The sudden thrill I’d had when I saw Horn looking back over his shoulder by the door of that expensive convertible was dead. But thinking of that expensive convertible…
I looked around. “This job can’t pay too well,” I said, with plenty of meaning in my words.
“No, indeed,” he agreed easily. “But since I’ve a little money of my own, and have decided to make public service my career, it really doesn’t matter at this stage of the game.”
I couldn’t get to first base. All I could hope, as I took my leave, was that—if he was involved with whoever had jimmied Pink’s gun—I had appeared brash and stupid.
After that time began to drag. I began to drag with it; summer is no weather for riding in an armored car. Besides, I was continually fighting a losing battle against encroaching doubts. After all, what did I have to base my suspicions on, other than a knowledge of Pink Nolan’s careful habits? My idea that the gang would try again—what was that but a theory that when you get away with a good thing once, you try it again?
Everybody in the bureau was friendly enough, other than Long John Nehrbass, but I couldn’t allow myself to thaw toward them. In my search for clues to the inside man, I couldn’t afford to have my judgment clouded.
As things will, given time, the sharpness of my rage at the foul treachery of Pink’s killing began to dull. And then there was Pink’s widow. I had seen Jerry twice at the office, when she dropped in to arrange the compensation settlement. One day I called her and took her to lunch.
I was oddly glad to see her sorrow was fading. Radiantly alive and impulsive women like Jerry aren’t meant to mourn overlong, and nobody with feeling likes to see a butterfly in a net.
“Pink used to say I was a balloon, and he was my anchor,” she smiled, when I commented on her liveliness.
“How did you stay anchored when he was off in the South Pacific?” I asked, toying with my coffee.
I thought she looked troubled. “Not awfully well, Lieutenant—I mean, Mr. Evans—”
“Paul.”
“Paul, then. But that’s water over the dam. Let’s talk about you. Tell me all about the job. Pink used to.”
I told her, keeping back only my theories about her husband’s death. They were beginning to look a little silly, anyway. She knew all about the work. It never occurred to her to wonder why I—a machine-tool sales representative—had taken it over.
I knew, even while I was talking shop, that I had fallen in love with Jerry Nolan. Searching back, I realized it was no new thing—I’d loved her ever since Pink had first shown me those crumpled, cracked photos of her. I had buried it then, not even knowing I had done so. Now it was in the open. Did she guess? She was looking at me strangely. I couldn’t say anything yet. Not now—less than five months after Pink’s killing.
* * * *
About a month later I got back to the office one afternoon to find Marcourt wanted me. It was three o’clock or so. As I hung my coat and holster belt in the deserted operatives’ locker room, I suddenly felt fed up. I went toward Marcourt’s office with the intention of telling him I was through.
Jerry was there. She smiled and said, “Hello, Paul.”
Old Luke shot quizzical glances at us from under his furry eyebrows. “Late transfer tonight,” he grunted around his cigar. “Shipment from the Union Trust for the Federal Reserve. Currency. Hundred grand or so. Want any more men?”
“What for?” I shrugged. “We’d only fall over them.”
He nodded. “Okay, then, get to the side entrance to the bank at nine sharp. They should have it ready by then, they said. Your time’s your own until then.”
“I’ve just had a marvelous idea!” Jerry gasped. “The dinner’s not out, after all. Couldn’t Bucky and Long John pick up Paul at my house in the battleship-on-wheels? It’d only be a couple of blocks out of the way, Luke.”
“What?” Marcourt growled. I looked puzzled.
“You see, Paul,” she said, “I dropped in to invite you for that dinner Pink…never arranged. But this meany”—she reached over and rumpled Luke’s white hair—“said you had to work. But you don’t have to work until later and—”
“Why can’t you make it another night?” Marcourt said, jerking back in mock displeasure. “And leave my hair alone!”
“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” Jerry looked at us. “I didn’t, I guess, I’m so excited! I’m leaving on the midnight plane for Miami. Going to spend the winter with an old school chum down there. And I do so want to have that dinner, Paul, if—”
“Do what you like! Do what you like!” Marcourt snarled. He didn’t fool me; I knew he loved Jerry like a daughter; that he, too, had been concerned for her sudden bereavement. “Just so the boys are on the job at nine, I don’t give a—”
“It’s almost right on the way,” Jerry said, whirling around the office. “I’ll go talk to Bucky myself. He’ll do it for me.” She flung open the door, blew Marcourt a kiss, smiled at me, saying, “About six-ish, all right?” and vanished.
Marcourt gave a fake cough. “Watch yourself,” he said, not looking at me. “She’s a great girl, but wild.” Then he grinned up like an old satyr. “Me, I always liked ’em like that.”
I didn’t grin back. The old man snorted suddenly.
“Look here, Evans, why don’t you loosen up? You don’t trust me, do you?”
“I don’t trust anybody in the bureau, Luke.”
He scowled. “Why not?”
“Pink Nolan trusted all of you.”
Marcourt took his cigar and flung it in the wastebasket. “Still got the bug biting you, huh? Evans, why don’t you drop out? It’s damn near six months, and—”
“You want me to quit?” I had forgotten I meant to quit when I came in here.
Marcourt nodded. “You’re not doing any good for the morale of the rest of the boys, you know.”
I went to the door. “All right, but mark my words, you’re going to have another loss one of these days, Luke. Just like the last. I tried to have it focus on me, but…”
“Bosh! Oh, maybe we will have another raid, someday, but it’ll be coincidence. Nothing ‘inside’ about it!”
I shut the door solidly behind me and went back to the operatives’ room. It was still deserted, but I had the idea someone had just been there. My locker was open, my coat and holster belt on a hook apparently the same as I left them. I unsnapped the leather flap and withdrew my gun.
The short hairs prickled at the nape of my neck with that premonitory chill. It wasn’t my gun!
I knew it even before I glanced at the serial number. Everything told me—the weight, the balance, even the slight difference in the feel of the grip. I snapped out the cylinder; the firing pin was intact, as far as I could tell.
I began to get into my coat. Maybe the pin was set to break at the first shot, I didn’t know. But one thing I did know—someone had learned about the Union Trust job, the biggest we’d had in months and a night job to boot. Things were breaking at last! The insider was showing his hand again!
I decided to go down to the NRA gallery for my gun-testing, rather than to the police range. And I went out of the bureau without even requisitioning extra .38 shells from Paddy. No one was going to learn from me that his sleight of hand had been discovered.
* * * *
The Nolan bungalow sat in a row of similar homes, squat, deep-porched and friendly. A few yellowed leaves spotted the pocket handkerchief of a front lawn. I went up the walk.
Jerry answered the first ring, eyes alight and cheeks flushed. “Right on the button, Paul. Hang your cap and harness on the hall tree, there. Everything’s just about ready to come out of the oven, but we’ll have time for one cocktail if we hurry. Will you mix it or shall I?”
I looked around the cozy entry, slipping the Sam Browne shoulder strap over my head. “Thanks, but I believe I’ll take a raincheck, if you don’t mind.”
Jerry had been heading back past the polished staircase toward a bright kitchen. She turned abruptly, eyes shadowed. “None at all? Paul, you don’t believe you’ll have trouble?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “Just that I’m plenty stimulated anyway, dining with you. I don’t want to overdo it, Jerry.”
She started to laugh, then broke off, watching me. I thought she was going to say something, but she turned away.
“Upstairs to the right, if you want to wash up,” she called, clanging open the oven door in the kitchen.
My hands were still a little oily from cleaning and assembling the gun. I went up the stairs, noting how much the place looked like a doll’s house. I couldn’t picture the broad-shouldered Pink being at home here. There were two doors to the right, both closed. I grabbed the knob of one; it was locked. The other opened into the tile-and-chrome bathroom.
The dinner was a success, from the beef roast to the baked pudding. As in all things about her, Jerry had mastered the difficult art of cooking and serving attractively. I had a couple of bad moments when I recalled she was going away, perhaps out of my life for good. I wanted to talk to her about us, but something held me back. Instead we got to talking of the house, and I wondered if there wasn’t someone to share it with.
“Oh, my brother George stays here occasionally, but he’d rather live in a big hotel downtown, where there’s lots of life. He and Pink didn’t get along well. I guess I got out of the habit of depending on him. I don’t miss him.”
She talked on about George—I got the impression he was a selfish and self-sufficient sort—and about her friends and her schooldays. I studied the sapphire blueness of her eyes, only half hearing. I didn’t hear the telephone interruption.
“Luke Marcourt,” Jerry said, coming back from the front hall. “He said to tell you the bank will be ready sooner than they thought. Bucky’ll getting here a little before eight instead of nine… Oh, good grief!” she wailed, looking at the clock over the dining nook, “it’s almost seven-thirty now!”
I insisted on helping with the dishes—clowning with one of her tiny aprons, although I didn’t feel much like it—and we were just finishing up when I heard the blast of the armored car horn out front. Jerry went to the door with me, watching as I got into my Sam Browne, buckled it.
I tucked my cap under my arm and took both her hands in mine. “If I come—” I started to say. “If I come out of this,” then changed it to, “If I come back before it’s time for you to leave, may I see you to the plane, Jerry?”
She looked up at me; there was no more laughter in her eyes, only shadows.
“Of course, Paul,” she said.
Bucky Newsome gave me a tough, friendly grin as I got into the cab with him. “Have a lovely dinnah?” he ribbed.
I started to answer in kind when I caught sight of something that changed the whole trend of my thoughts. As the truck swung away from the Nolan bungalow I just barely saw the open garage behind it and the rear of a cream-colored car!
My throat felt tight, dry. Behind me, through the steel walls, I could hear Long John knocking his pipe on a rivet. My hand went to the holster, settled on the butt of my gun.
My gun! Not the one that had been substituted in the operative’s locker room that afternoon, but my own gun-formerly Pink’s. I couldn’t be mistaken, but I drew it forth anyway, peered at the serial number under the dash lights.
“Matter?” Bucky asked, glancing at me curiously. “Get somebody else’s cannon, Evans?”
I swallowed hard. “No,” I said, and I was surprised to hear my voice so composed. “No, this is mine, all right.” Mine. I knew without looking that the tiny round knob of the firing pin didn’t project under the hammer. The gun had been taken for the express purpose of breaking it off; in a vise, perhaps, or by smashing with blunt tools. My head was in a whirl as I shoved it back into the holster.
So it’s Jerry, I told myself, over and over. It must be her. She was at the office this afternoon—knew about the shipment, knew about my gun in my locker. But even if others had the same chance then, none did tonight. None! Only Jerry…probably when she went to answer the phone. If she hadn’t had that opportunity, she would have made one.
* * * *
We parked in the narrow street beside the Union Trust. One of the bank guards opened the side door for us, the door nearest the gaping vault where clerks were sweating under brilliant lights, checking, making up packets of currency, packing and locking wooden, rope-handled strong boxes. Long John carried a riot gun under one arm, and shifted it as we each seized one of the handles of those cases ready to go. I didn’t even come to enough to tuck back the flap of my holster.
She was responsible for Pink’s death! I realized groaning. That was the bitterest thought of all—and in the brief instant of its thinking, I passed from love to hate. Just as responsible as if she’d fired the burst that killed that defenseless, blindly devoted carrot-top. I thought then my memory jerking backwards, “Maybe she did! She was in that car. It was her face I saw at the rear window. Her’s!
We carried out the cases and stacked them in the van, Bucky Newsome standing guard, opening and closing the doors for us. He was whistling some tune between his protuberant teeth and holding the submachine-gun cradled in his left arm.
Candy Horn’s car in her garage, I lacerated myself. What’s between them? Did Pink suspect? Was that why he hated Horn? Had Jerry been two-timing Pink all those months he’d been yearning over those grimy photos? And did he find out when he got home? I hoped not. And, recalling Pink’s pouter-pigeon chest when I last saw him, I didn’t think he did.
We were half finished with the loading before my dazedness began to give way to sickening despair which in turn became reckless, cold fury. I became a killer, pure and simple, wanting nothing more than to meet up with Jer
ry’s cutthroat gang—the sooner the better. If I came out of it I meant to go back to that sweet, homey little bungalow and take that white throat between my hands and—
There was a sudden glare of light in that gloomy side street, a blare of sound! A huge car came lancing down on us, tires screaming. I was caught in the cone of the headlights and dropped to one knee beside the steps, my hand slipping inside my shirt to where a flat automatic had been slung in my armpit for nearly six months.
“Get down, you fool!” I yelled at Long John. He was making for the rear of the armored truck—the fortress. Then I began to hear the shots, although none seemed directed at me. I saw Nehrbass go down, clutching at his chest. At first I thought it was another fainting spell—he was still protected from the swerving car when he fell—but I saw his hand wetting red.
The car was heading to cut us off from the truck. The rear doors were opening. Where in hell’s Bucky? I thought. I held my fire until the car was close, then sent three shots through the windshield. The driver’s shadowy form jerked, then slumped. The car mounted the curb and smashed against a streetlight standard.
“Bucky!” I yelled, directing my fire at the sedan’s open doors. A burst of laughing death came, then, but at me! Chips flew from the stone steps, dust blinded me. I felt a rap on my forehead and saw whirling lights. A warm, sticky trickle crossed the outside corner of my eye and I wiped at it, backhandedly.
“Damn you!” I cursed Bucky. That burst was no wild accident, no panic occurrence. Bucky was trying to kill me!
A bank guard was in the door, firing over my head at the sedan. The stuttering machine-gun ate across the plate glass and reached him. His partner dragged him back and slammed the grill-barred portal. Their first duty was to protect the bank.
Retreat cut off I was once more a jungle fighter, knowing I could survive only so long as I kept my head. Keeping in the shadow of a trash can, I slithered toward the car, firing carefully and picking off both the gunmen making crouched dashes for the armored car.
My clip was empty. I dropped it, shoved another into the butt and ran for the gang car. A small, white hand was reaching from the bottom of the open door. I kept going until I brought up against a front tire. “Gotta get outa here! Let’s get outa here,” a high-pitched voice cried from the interior.
The Murder Megapack Page 15
