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

by Frederick Nebel

  “I might have done that myself,” Cardigan said, “if I’d been in your shoes—but I wouldn’t have sent McQueene. The thing is, Trent’s dead. I convinced the cops that it was an accident. The fact that Trent had hit the bank here for a lot of dough can’t remain a secret forever. Somebody’ll spill it. Likely McQueene, because he’s slamming around town tight as a tick now and the guy’s mouth is loose. And if the cops find Trent did have so much dough, there’s your motive—and the case of death by accident that I built up’ll backfire on me. Somebody’s going to pay through the schnozzle for this and I’m damned if it’ll be me.”

  BECKELS said: “Trent left here with the dough. He walked a block or so and went in the Dynamite and because he had so much dough on him he got panicky, so he phoned for a private cop to take him home.” Beckels finished his drink, shook his head. “Boy, you’re going to have something to talk yourself out of—if the cops find there’s a motive. You absolutely convinced them that no one could have got in that apartment after you left and that Trent would have been too drunk to reach the door to let anybody in. As the saying goes, you’ve made your bed.”

  Cardigan’s face got dull red. “Who’s to prove that Trent actually had the dough on him when he left here?”

  “If I have to come out in the open,” Beckels said, “I can get six prominent citizens summoned. Ordinarily they wouldn’t want it known that they were playing in a gambling casino. But if I have to come out in the open, I can prove that he left here packing the dough. And do you think he would have left the Dynamite without making sure, as he left, that the dough was in his pockets?”

  Cardigan’s lips tightened, curled. “So I’m holding the bag.”

  “You’re holding the bag, Cardigan,” Beckels said, “and the bag contains twenty-two thousand and three hundred berries. Take him, Dave!”

  The man with the lipless mouth was already on the draw when Cardigan kicked him in the stomach. The man looked very ill, his mouth twisting open, his knees breaking. Cardigan had his own gun out, a wicked, malevolent smile on his face.

  “Be nice, Beckels,” he said.

  The man with the lipless mouth said, “Ugh,” and fell on his face, writhing, groaning. Beckels’ face looked very white against the rusty color of his hair, but his eyes were steely.

  Cardigan said: “I’m going out, Beckels. You’ve got a lot of swells out in your rooms and I’d advise you and the punk to stay in here for five minutes, until I get out.”

  “Five minutes,” said Beckels, nodding.

  Cardigan put his gun into his pocket, opened the door and left the room. He did not hurry. He strolled through the rooms, was let out into the corridor and went down the staircase to the entrance hall. The woman was not there. He went to the rear of the hall, saw a door at the left, a small room beyond in which a lot of coats were hanging. At the rear of the room the woman was leaning out of a small window, cigarette smoke blowing around her head.

  “My hat and coat,” Cardigan growled.

  She spun about, startled. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, you—you frightened me!”

  “Tough.”

  She closed the window hurriedly.

  Cardigan put on his overcoat, slapped on his hat. He looked puzzled about something for a minute, but then shrugged and swung his legs up the corridor. The woman unlatched the front door.

  “Got a butt?” he asked.

  She seemed eager to please. She took a small green lacquered case from the pocket of the black silk jacket she wore. He looked down at a row of oval-shaped cigarettes, took one, lit up and said, “Thanks.”

  He drifted up the street, leaned against a pole, struck a match and looked at the cigarette he was smoking. Then he leaned against the pole for a few seconds, his brows wrinkled, the smoke curling from his lips. Suddenly he strode across the street, went down the opposite sidewalk and ducked into the alley alongside Beckels’ house. He found the window in which the woman had been leaning. It was closed now—a foot above his head. He bent down, sniffing. Then he picked up a cigarette on which a few strands of tobacco still glowed. He pinched them out and returned to the street, walked a block and stopped to strike another match and looked at the butt which he had picked up. He slipped it into his pocket, retraced his steps and stood at the entrance of an alley obliquely across the way from Beckels’ house.

  Chapter Four

  Too Hot to Handle

  IT was a long wait, and from time to time Cardigan shifted restlessly, resisting an impulse to drum his cold feet on the pavement. At intervals he saw people come out of Beckels’, singly or in pairs or groups. Midnight crawled past. A thin haze crept up the street and in a little while became a milky fog. At two o’clock lights went out here and there in Beckels’ place. At two fifteen the door opened and the woman came briskly down the steps, alone, and walked away down the street, her high heels clicking sharply on the pavement.

  Cardigan followed, though he did not cross the street. He saw the woman only as a shadow now in the fog, but he could follow the sound her heels made. Then the sound stopped. Cardigan stopped also, puzzled, but in a moment he was sure he saw the woman standing near a street light on the next corner, just the blur her form made in the dimly lighted fog. Five minutes later he heard a slight laugh, saw another shape join her; saw both shapes move dimly away, close together, with only the sound of the woman’s heels distinct.

  He followed the pair for a matter of four or five blocks, noticed a change of pace, then a change of sound. The heels were now striking on wood. He saw a lighted doorway and caught a glimpse of the two figures blurred vaguely against it. A frame house, a frame porch. He saw the door open, caught sight of a third blur, and then heard the door close, sending a small bang out into the drenched darkness. Two drawn window shades became illumined from behind.

  He went around to the back of the house, but found the basement windows protected by vertical iron bars. Up a flight of six wooden steps was the back door, and he found this locked. He entered the side alley again. It was very narrow. He looked up and saw a curtain blowing out of a second-story window of the house which the woman and her escort had entered. The house next door was of brick. Reaching the front, he peered at a sign nailed to the porch of the brick house—For Sale or Rent.

  He went around to the back of this house and tried to force a basement window, but did not succeed. Looking up, he thought he saw a hole in a window pane on the first floor. In the yard he found an old galvanized tin garbage bucket. He placed this on the ground below the window, climbed up and found that there was a hole in the window pane. He shoved up his coat sleeve, reached in and unlatched the window, raised it and climbed in. Using matches—he had no flashlight—he made his way to the second floor, found a window almost opposite the one in which the curtain was blowing. The intervening distance was about six feet.

  He returned to the basement again, hunted around until he came to a boarded coal bin. The planks that enclosed it he judged to be about six or seven feet in length. He used a long poker to pry off the top plank and carried the plank up to the second floor. Opening the window carefully, he shoved the plank out, rested it on the opposite windowsill. He had several inches to spare.

  Crossing on the plank on hands and knees, he pushed the blowing curtain aside and entered a darkened room. He lit a match, saw that he was in a bedroom. There was a door beyond, closed. He listened at it, then opened it and stepped out. Here a small light burned against the wall. There was a bathroom across the way, another room on the right. On the left was the head of a staircase. He sniffed at the tang of fresh coffee being made. They were having a late snack.

  His feet were big but he could make them fall lightly when he had a mind to. The padded runner on the steps helped. He made little sound on the way down to the lower hall. Voices were somewhere in other regions of the house. The woman’s—a brief, amused laugh—then a man’s low chuckle. The smell of bacon. Bacon and eggs, he supposed.

  THERE was a living room, small, spars
ely furnished but pretty comfortable. Beyond it a dining room, darkened; but beyond the dining room a swing-door with a small glass panel at the top and light beyond the panel. The kitchen.

  Cardigan crossed the dining room, paused before the swing-door, peered through the small glass panel. His brows came together. A puzzled expression took possession of his face. He remained standing there for a long minute, chewing on his lip, wrinkling the flesh on his forehead. And then the wrinkles vanished, the puzzled expression faded. His eyes steadied, his face looked very brown and heavy and almost sinister.

  He put his right hand into his overcoat pocket, placed his left against the door and pushed it inward until his left arm was out straight. “Hello, Miles,” he said.

  The woman started and her elbow knocked a glass of beer off the table. The glass shattered on the floor. Beside her sat a man with a rocky jaw, high cheekbones and a bald bony head. His sleeves were rolled up and his lank forearms were dark with hair. Miles O’Mara had stopped chewing on a piece of bread; it bulged his left cheek. He looked very immaculate. The woman’s teeth were chattering.

  O’Mara asked conversationally: “How’d you get in?”

  “I rang the doorbell. No answer. The door was open and I walked in.”

  O’Mara leaned back, chewed, swallowed. “Any reason?”

  “Sure. I was walking along in the dark feeling very hungry. I smelled the smell of bacon and eggs and coffee and I couldn’t resist it. It’s a complex I have. Whenever I smell bacon and eggs and coffee, I go all weak all over. I think I inherited it from my father.”

  The bald-headed man looked around the table resentfully and said in a hoarse, angry voice: “I locked that door! Don’t I know when I lock a door?”

  Miles O’Mara looked thoughtfully at him. The woman’s teeth had stopped chattering and now she sat with her hands clenched in her lap, her face dead white but for a splotch of high red color on either cheekbone. Her back was arched inward, her breath drawn in and her lips peculiarly hueless.

  Miles O’Mara smiled drily, started to get up.

  “Uh-uh,” said Cardigan, shaking his head, motioning O’Mara to remain seated.

  “What’s the matter?” O’Mara asked, still smiling, but remaining seated.

  “Plenty,” Cardigan said slowly, dully, threateningly. He withdrew his gun from his overcoat pocket and held it in his big hand with a deceptive negligence—the way a man who is used to a gun holds one. “I came especially for the bacon, Miles. You can keep the eggs and the coffee. I’ll take the bacon. Twenty-two thousand dollars’ worth of bacon.”

  Miles O’Mara drew a crooked, amused smile across his lips. “Will you take it with you or should I wrap it up and send it around?”

  “We’ll skip the comedy, Miles. I may be a thick Mick but every now and then I even surprise myself by the bright ideas I get. I got a bright idea tonight. I figured the whole thing out. I figured there would have had to be three people to play the game that rolled Trent for his dough. It doesn’t figure any other way. I’ve eliminated McQueene, the cheap dick I put to sleep in your spot tonight. I’ve eliminated Beckels and that guy of his with the forgotten lips. I’d eliminated you until I saw you here. The only one I was sure of when I came here was the woman—”

  THE woman’s lips tightened down and there was a queer shimmer in her eyes. The bald-headed man’s jaw was thrust forward and his face looked like wet cement. His shoes scraped on the floor.

  “You be nice, funny face,” Cardigan told him. “The cops’ll probably want you especially.” He said to the woman: “When I left Beckels’ place tonight—when I went to get my coat—you were leaning in that little window on the alley and I saw smoke around your head. When you turned away from the window you weren’t smoking a cigarette. I asked you for a butt when I left, because I thought when I startled you at the window yours might have fallen out of your mouth. But it didn’t. You weren’t smoking. You were talking with somebody in the alley. I went around in the alley a minute or so later and found a dropped butt still burning. It was not the kind you gave me. It was a self-rolled cigarette. I see,” he said to the bald-headed man, nodding to a packet of cigarette papers and a sack of tobacco, “that you roll your own.”

  The man snarled hoarsely: “Suppose I did—I do?”

  Cardigan paid no attention to him. He spoke to O’Mara. “The woman really pulled the boner. For one thing, she was the only person who looked at all scared when I went to Beckels’ place. Now let’s take Trent. Trent had only one hand—his left. His right was false and he wore a glove on it. When I took him home, he fished around in his left-side pockets for his door key. He was quite drunk, so I reached in his right overcoat pocket and found it. I only began to remember this when I saw the woman leaning out off that little window in the cloakroom. Trent would never have carried his key in his right overcoat pocket because he would have had to be a contortionist to get to it. Maybe a right vest pocket—but not an overcoat pocket.

  “The thing figures out like a blueprint. No one followed Trent home. No one could have got through that lock, which I snapped as I left. I’ll swear to that. And I’ll swear to it that Trent was too shaky on his legs to ever have got to the door to let anyone in. There’s only one answer. Someone was hiding in the apartment when we arrived. In a closet, say. Someone who knew Trent would have a lot of dough on him. I left. The guy came out of the closet, got his hands on the dough. But Trent struggled, got the bed-table drawer open and got his gun out. The guy pulled his own gun and smacked Trent and Trent fell off the bed. Then the guy, seeing Trent was dead, rubbed some of Trent’s blood on the foot of the bedpost, to make it look like an accident, and placed Trent’s body so his head would be near that post. The woman wasn’t in the room. No—and you weren’t, Miles—not then. The woman was on her job at Beckels’ and you were at the Dynamite. But I’ll bet you funny face here can’t produce an alibi as to where he was, say, at half past one and maybe a couple of hours straight before that. Why? Because he was waiting in Trent’s apartment for Trent to come home.”

  The bald-headed man’s shoes scraped on the floor. The woman’s face was dead white.

  O’Mara said quietly: “How’d he get in the apartment when you yourself say it was locked when you got there?”

  Cardigan grinned without humor. “The woman knew Trent was taking the roulette wheel for a killing. This thing wasn’t planned on the instant. You’d laid the plans and were just waiting for the right guy with enough dough won to make it worth while. Trent was the guy. There were cards of his in his overcoat pocket. His key was there too. She took the key and passed it out to funny face, through the alley window, after phoning you or him. She gave him the address. She must have known he lived alone. You joined funny face and both of you went to Trent’s apartment. In a car you can make it in ten minutes from Beckels’. You unlocked the apartment and funny face went in and stayed there. You locked the door, Miles, from the outside and brought the key back to the alley window and the woman put it back in Trent’s overcoat pocket—but in the wrong pocket. Funny face rolled Trent and killed him!”

  Cardigan felt something hard jammed against the small of his back. “That’s just what I was waiting to hear,” croaked McQueene. “Put ’em up, Cardigan.”

  CARDIGAN’S eyes slid to the sides of his sockets and he raised his hands. McQueene took his gun away, kicked him to one side so that Cardigan stumbled, stopped against O’Mara, who was still seated. He made, ironically enough, a perfect shield for O’Mara. The eyes of the bald-headed man almost popped from his head. The woman looked terrified.

  A gun in each hand, McQueene looked gross, deadly, his eyes crowded down to two dangerous glints between his pulpy lids, and fastened on the bald-headed man.

  “So you didn’t get the dough,” he snarled slowly. “You told me you didn’t get the dough. You told me you were hiding in the closet and when you finally looked out Trent was on the floor, dead, and there was no dough. So that’s the way it was, huh? You sai
d that Cardigan must have got the dough. You just up and double-crossed old McQueene, huh? And I followed Cardigan tonight, thinking he still had it, and where do I follow him to? Here! And I damn near broke my neck coming across that plank! Kabe,” he ground out desperately, his lips wet, “I want that dough. Not a split. The whole dough! Get it! I’m drunk and I don’t give a damn who I knock off! Get it!” he screamed. “Tell your sister to get it and if she ain’t back here with it in two minutes I’ll blow your block off!”

  The woman stood up, shaking, terrified. “I—I’ll get it,” she breathed out.

  She left the room and the bald-headed man waited, his eyes bulging, fixed on the two black muzzles. In a couple of minutes the woman came back with a large brown envelope. McQueene put his own gun in his pocket, took the envelope from her, glanced at its contents.

  He said: “Now go around back of your brother, Belle, and take his gun out of his hip pocket. Put it on the table. I’ll not trust a shot in the back.”

  She did this, placing a .38 automatic on the table. McQueene stepped over, picked it up, stepped back as far as the doorway, his face contorted in a mad, crazy grin.

  “So you double-crossed me, eh? You double-crossed the guy who thought up the plan, who went with you, Kabe, to Trent’s place and brought the key back. Well, I’ve got Cardigan’s gun now and I’ve got yours. I’m going to knock off Cardigan with your gun and I’m going to knock off the rest of you with Cardigan’s gun. And I’m not smart, huh? The cops’ll think Cardigan came here on a tail and you all shot it out.”

  The woman cried out and clapped her hands to her cheeks. McQueene laughed, shook his head. “Cardigan first, sister,” he said. “The guy that thinks I’m all ham and a yard wide.”