The Complete Casebook of Cardigan, Volume 3: 1934-35

by Frederick Nebel

  Hunerkopf came in next, hauling the two manacled men and looking very placid, fat and self-satisfied. He raised his hat an inch above his head.

  “Miss Seaward—”

  Cardigan lit a butt. “What’s the matter with Hull?”

  Pat said: “Oh, Mr. McGovern hit him.”

  “Where’s that Mr. Strang?” McGovern barked darkly.

  “Be up in a minute, Mac,” Cardigan said. “All the excitement upset his stomach. Then Augie gave him a fig and that made him worse, so he stopped downstairs in the drug store to get a sedative.”

  “Who are these two guys?”

  “We’ll probably get around to that later. They snatched Mr. Strang right in front downstairs, as he was getting out of a cab. Augie and I shooed after them. They won’t talk, but probably your records at headquarters will.”

  “Oh, they won’t talk!” exploded McGovern. He spun on the smaller of the two men. “Who are you?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Oh, insolent, eh?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why, you little punk, you—”

  “Mac,” said Hunerkopf, raising a hand. “Remember, there’s ladies present. Besides, you always get indigestion when—”

  “Hands up, everybody!” Hull was on his feet, a gun gripped in his hand.

  “Oh, I never knew he had a gun!” Pat cried.

  “I’m going out,” Hull said in a shaky voice. “Get out of my way. Get out of my way!”

  “Hughie!” cried Bernice, horrified.

  “Drop that, you fool!” Cardigan snarled.

  Hull’s face was dead white. “Get out of—”

  “Hughie!”

  Bernice jumped up, her eyes wide and stricken. “Oh, dear God, Hughie, don’t—”

  He snapped: “Get back, Bernice!”

  “But, dear, dear—”

  His left hand struck her down.

  Strang came walking in saying: “Well, I feel much better—”

  “Look out!” Pat cried.

  Strang’s face froze.

  McGovern made a dive for his service gun and at the same time took a lunge toward the window. Hull pivoted. Cardigan fired twice through his pocket and both shots made but one hole in Hull’s side. Bernice screamed and Hull crashed to the floor and McGovern yelled: “Sweet work, Cardigan!”

  Bernice ran across the office and fell on her husband, screaming again. “Oh, Hughie, Hughie…!”

  Cardigan pulled his gun out of his pocket, fanned it up and down. Deep wrinkles were on his forehead. He made a face as though a bad taste were in his mouth. He grimaced.

  He muttered: “I hated to do that.” Then he looked up at Strang. “Well, there’s your nephew, Mr. Strang.”

  Strang pointed. “That man,” he said, “is not my nephew.”

  “What?” McGovern exploded.

  “That—man—is—not—Husted Hull.”

  Bernice looked up, her face anguished, wet with tears. “What are you saying?” she cried passionately.

  A tight, breathless silence fell upon the office, and then there came the low groans of Hull. Bernice broke into fresh tears and bent over him, cradling his head in her arms.

  “What is this, what is this?” she cried. “What are they saying, saying, saying?”

  Strang said to Cardigan: “You have been deluded, Mr. Cardigan.”

  Cardigan’s face was dull red, a humid wrath moved far back in his eyes. He spun and took three strides and grabbed the smaller of the two manacled men by the throat.

  “Spill it!” he rasped.

  “Look out—”

  “Spill it! What’s the hook-up here?”

  “Ugh—look out—”

  “Spill it! Where’s Husted Hull?”

  “D-dead—”

  “Where?”

  “I—don’t—ugh—know—”

  “When was he killed?”

  “Ouch—over three years ago—somewhere—south—”

  Cardigan swung away from him. “Mrs. Hull!”

  “Yes?” she said weakly, sitting on the floor now, with her husband resting back against her breast.

  HIS face looked ghostly, his eyes were haggard. He said: “It’s no use. I killed him over three years ago. I met him in Caliente and we chummed together, took a little shack up the Coast. I got to know all about him, his family, all the details. I knew he got a thousand a month from his mother’s estate. I knew he never saw them and they never saw him. I’m good at forgery. I was able to copy his signature. I—once—back East—did a little time for forgery. So we went out fishing one night and I clipped him and tied an anchor with a steel cable to him and threw him over. The rest was easy. No one knew us around there—it was a lonely spot. I just picked up and left, taking all his things and mine. I sent a wire to the law firm that sent him his money regularly, giving a change of address. I went to Seattle and became Husted Hull and got the monthly checks and no one ever found out. I met and married Bernice—as Husted Hull.

  “Last week I met Proctor.” He pointed to the smaller of the two men. “I’d known him in prison back East. He wanted to come around to our apartment. I had to tell him I was married and living as Husted Hull. He was broke. I had to give him some money. He saw I was living well and wanted to know my racket. I refused. Then he said I’d have to tell him or else. So I told him. He wanted a cut monthly of five hundred. What could I do?

  “Then you came. I was scared stiff at first—but then I saw you couldn’t have known the real Husted Hull. I was desperate. I knew the uncle’d run across me. I called Proctor up while Bernice was out to the store. I said I was moving to a new hotel. I explained what had happened and said that if I stayed at the same address Strang might show up and then I’d lose out and so would he, on the split. He said all right. So Bernice and I moved.

  “Proctor must have come to the apartment after we’d left. Let himself in with a master key and waited for Strang. You can see it was a snatch. He knew I couldn’t say anything. He knew—he had me—where he—he—he….”

  His head fell forward.

  Strang murmured in a low, passionate voice, “Good… Lord!”

  Bernice fainted and fell to one side on the floor. Pat ran to her. Now Pat was crying: “Oh, you poor, poor girl—you poor, poor thing.”

  Cardigan said bitterly: “There’s life on the button for you.”

  Hunerkopf touched one of his eyes. “Yes, me, I always wanted a little farm— Can I do anything to help, Miss Seaward?”

  McGovern was on his knees. He said: “Well, he’s dead.”

  “It was either you or him,” muttered Cardigan.

  McGovern stood up, said in a low voice: “Thanks, kid. You’re pretty good.”

  “Oh, I’m not so good. There I had a red-hot killer under my nose all along and didn’t know it.”

  “Well, yes, you were pretty dumb about that.”

  Cardigan glared. “Oh, yeah! I suppose you would have known right off the bat!”

  “Sure.”

  “Yes, you would have! Why, everyone knows you won that sergeant’s badge at a raffle.”

  McGovern glared. “Now, look here, Cardigan—”

  Pat was standing now and glaring crimson-faced at both of them. “Oh, you idiots!” she cried. “You awful, awful idiots!”

  McGovern grimaced bitterly and held a hand against his chest. “My indigestion again,” he croaked. “My—”

  “See?” said Hunerkopf, pointing a broad index finger. “See?”

  Cardigan was lifting up Bernice and saying in a low, muffled voice: “Come on, little girl. It’s tough. Cripes, but it’s tough.”

  Not So Tough…

  Chapter One

  Maybe Murder

  IT WAS only a little past noon but it looked like twilight. Rain poured from a deeply overcast sky. It poured noisily, heavily, in thick, windless sheets. It jammed motor traffic and sent pedestrians scurrying beneath umbrellas, and it gushed down the gutters and smoked foggily over the San Francisco ho
usetops.

  When the cable car, grinding up Powell Street from its turn-table at Market, reached the high crest of the hill, Cardigan swung off and took long, bounding leaps through the rain. His shabby ulster ballooned and bagged about him and the hard drive of the vertical rain pounded down the shapeless brim of his ancient fedora. He galloped on, keeping close to the house fronts. He ran right past the address he wanted, cursed, turned about and bounded back half a block. Crashing into the quiet lobby of an apartment house he brought up short, stamping the wet from his shoes, taking off his hat and whipping it up and down, and making a lot of blowing sounds.

  The Negro boy standing outside the open elevator looked startled, then scared. Cardigan bore down on him, creating about as much noise as a truck horse, and without looking at him strode into the elevator.

  “Five,” he said. And as the car rose, he stamped his feet some more, beat his hat up and down, shook himself to rid his ulster of the wet. Getting out at the fifth floor, he swung his long legs down the corridor and blew his nose loud as a foghorn. The Negro looked after him, wagged his head and rolled his eyes and then took the car back down.

  Cardigan drummed his knuckles on the door numbered 518, ran his hand through his shapeless mop of hair as if to straighten it out, but he only made it worse. It was a minute before the door opened. It opened slowly, remained on a crack while a large round eye peered through the aperture. Then it went wide and Larry Briggs pulled Cardigan in, slammed the door shut and turned the latch.

  Cardigan said with a dry, tight smile, “Hocus-pocus, huh?” and swung his big feet into the living room. He scaled his hat onto a divan, heaved out of his ulster and hung it on the back of a chair. He pivoted on his heels, smacking his hands together, grinding them dry. His shaggy brows came together as he bent dark, quizzical eyes on Larry Briggs. Round his wide mouth there was the ghost of an amused, good-natured smile.

  BRIGGS was tall, slender, handsome. Dark preoccupation lay on his lean face as he crossed the room, rolled ash from his cigarette into a tray and turned to say a little reproachfully: “You thought I was kidding on the phone, eh? Well, don’t kid yourself, Jack. I’m in a jam.”

  The shadow of worry deepened on his face, spreading from his troubled eyes down to his mouth, tightening his jaw.

  “I’ve been pacing this damned room since nine this morning. Up and down—up and down. It’s a wonder I haven’t worn it out. Every time I heard somebody in the hall”—his eyes swung toward the door—“I expected to hear a knock. I expected to see a flock of cops walk in. It’s got me ga-ga, Jack!”

  Cardigan chuckled with rough, throaty, good humor. “You sure look like something the cat’s been dragging around. What did you do, kid, try to drink the town dry?”

  Briggs flung himself into the divan and snapped: “For crying out loud, bozo, quit kidding me! Take me seriously!”

  “Sure,” nodded Cardigan, “when you stop pulling a Hollywood interlude and get down to cases. What do you want me to do, get down on my hands and knees and pant like a hound dog or something?”

  “Sit down, Jack, will you?”

  Cardigan sat down, jogging one leg over the other and saying, “Take it easy, pal. Just take it easy and tell the old maestro what’s got you going ga-ga.”

  Briggs leaned forward, his eyes haunted but a deadly seriousness gripping his mouth. “I went on a tear last night, Jack. I got stinko. You know I won ten grand on the Caliente races and you know how a fellow wants to celebrate. Well, O.K. I got togged out and went over to the Razzle Dazzle to do a bit of elbow-bending and see the sights. There was a big crowd there and they were all making hey-hey and hi-de-ho. I was downing ’em fast when I met a girl at the bar named Josie. I remember her name was Josie. I danced with her and we got a table and I guess we had a lot of fun. I don’t know how it wound up. I don’t remember leaving the Razzle Dazzle at all. Can’t to save my soul, Jack. But I must have left it sometime because I woke up here in bed with all my clothes on—overcoat, hat, shoes and gloves. And what a head! At about nine this morning.

  “So I got up, my head spinning like a top, and the first thing I did of course was take off my gloves. And”—he gulped and his tormented eyes strained toward Cardigan—“I found my hands were all bloody. That scared me and I took off my coat and”—he touched his chest—“my shirt was covered with dried blood too! Then I reached in my hip pocket. I knew I was carrying a twenty-two automatic. I’ve got a license to carry it, you know. Well, the gun was gone. Gone, Jack! I looked all around—in my other pockets—under the bed—all around the apartment. But”—he shook his head, breathless—“the gun was gone. The first thing I did then was wash my hands and then I burnt the shirt and the gloves in the bathroom and washed the ashes down the drain. My God, Jack, I killed somebody!”

  He stood up, ran a hand across his forehead, then planted it against his forehead and took a turn up and down the room. Cardigan, slouched in a chair on the small of his back, chewed on his lip and stared at the carpet.

  He said dully: “Don’t you remember a fight at all?”

  “Not a thing! Not a damned thing! I remember getting tight at the Razzle Dazzle and I remember dancing and eating with this girl named Josie—but beyond that it’s all a blank.”

  Cardigan frowned. “Tough, Larry, tough. But where do I come in? What can I do?”

  “That’s what I wondered.” Briggs sat down again, his face pale with worry and his eyes harried. “It’s staying in this apartment and not knowing just what I did, who I must have shot. I had about three thousand on me last night, but that was gone when I woke up. Maybe I got in a card game somewhere and there was a fight and I went nuts and yanked my gun on somebody. But how do I know? All I know is that when I woke up my hands were bloody and there were bloody fingermarks on my shirt, as though I tried to wipe them off on it.

  “I’ve got to know, Jack. I’ve got to know what happened. Can’t you find out? You know your way around. Can’t you find out on the q.t. where this Josie lives and if I knocked her off or somebody else or just what did happen? I’ve never been mixed up in anything like this in my life. I don’t know what to do.”

  He jumped up again, mopping his face, and took long strides up and down the room.

  CARDIGAN didn’t look happy. He looked morose, his face dull and brown and heavy with thought, and steady sharp lights in his eyes. He didn’t say anything for a long time.

  It was Briggs who spoke first. “Well, forget it, Jack. I shouldn’t have called you up in the first place but I was just at my wits’ end and I—”

  “Lay off,” Cardigan growled, shrugging. He stood up. “I was thinking,” he said. “Don’t jump at conclusions. Do you think I’d let a pal down? The thing is, kid, you hand me a lulu. I walk in here feeling like the old maestro I am and you toss me something as hard to handle as a hot potato. Would the elevator boy know what time you came in?”

  “No. After midnight you either walk up or run the car yourself, if you’re able to. I probably crawled up. How a drunk ever gets home is a mystery to me anyhow.”

  “And you lost the gun.”

  “I lost the gun.”

  “That,” said Cardigan, “is not so swell. This pick-up, Josie—what did she look like?”

  “Black hair. She wore it back of her ears and I remember it was made up in a roll on her neck, pretty low down. She had on a blue dress with a very low-cut back. She was a knock-out to look at, but she knew all the answers. She was about five feet six and a swell dancer. I remember she wore blue ear-rings—not the kind that hang but the kind you clamp on the lobe of the ear; they were shaped like a half-moon. That’s all I remember about her. She was lots of fun. If I—shot her—” He put his hands over his eyes.

  Cardigan’s low voice muttered: “The Razzle Dazzle, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What time did you float into the joint?”

  “I think about ten.”

  Briggs was still holding his hands to his eyes.

&
nbsp; Cardigan scooped up his hat and coat and started past Briggs but paused to lay a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Don’t let it get you down, pal. If the cops show up, play dumb—play dumb as long as you can. Don’t get indignant and say you didn’t do this or you didn’t do that. Just play dumb—you know—you don’t remember a thing.”

  “That’s where the joke’s on me—I don’t!”

  PATRICIA SEAWARD, the smart feminine touch to an otherwise hard-boiled agency, was smacking the typewriter keys when Cardigan came in under a soaked, dripping hat. His baggy ulster had that pungent smell of good wool when it is wet.

  “Well, what are you so down-hearted about, chief?”

  “Who’s down-hearted?” Cardigan demanded.

  “I suppose you think you look like dawn over the ocean.”

  “Every time you go to the hair-dresser’s you come away like that. I wonder what they do to your head. Never mind the incidental music, chicken. Grab the phone and locate Barney Corday.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Tell him to report here pronto.”

  “Yes indeedy, my lord.”

  “My eye!” he growled and swung his big feet into the inner office, hung up his things, sat down and sighed heavily.

  In a minute Pat came in to say: “He’ll be over in an hour.”

  “Swell,” Cardigan muttered.

  “Honest, chief,” Pat said anxiously, “what’s wrong?”

  He told her.

  “Oh, how awful!” Pat said, when he had finished.

  “Larry’s a good guy,” Cardigan said moodily. “He’s no rat and I’ve known him about a dozen years. Knew him first back East, when he had Dark Arrow, the three-year-old that won the Preakness at Pimlico one year. He’s a good horse man. He just picked up ten grand at Caliente. He hardly ever touches liquor, only once in a while he goes off on a bender and does it up brown.”

  She said: “How will Barney Corday fit in?”

  Corday was one of the agency’s undercover men. Not even the police knew he was connected with the agency. When he went on a job he never carried any identification that would connect him with the Cosmos.

  Cardigan said: “They know me at the Razzle Dazzle too well. I want to send around a guy they don’t know. They don’t know Barney and besides he doesn’t even look like a dick. If I dropped in there for some drinks it’d be all right, but if I started asking questions that’d be another matter.”