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

by Frederick Nebel

  “So you’re the guy that killed my brother,” he said in a chill grave voice. “I remember you from the pool room. I been tailin’ you.”

  Cardigan had stopped, flat on his feet. “Look out, Carmen,” he said. To the tall thin man he said. “Listen, brother.”

  “To you?” the man asked. His face was drawn, pale, and there was a pale, mad look in his eyes. “I could ha’ shot you in the back but I ain’t that kind of a guy. I seen my brother die, I heard him moan and groan and wail, him all bloody. But I would never shoot a guy in the back. I could ha’, understand, but I ain’t gonna.”

  “Man, you’re wrong. I didn’t kill your brother. I never fired a shot. I can prove it.”

  “You can’t prove nothin’. But I can prove my brother’s dead and I mind how he died, him that was outta work six months and then just got a job on’y to be killed. I seen him die, and I told him—‘Eddie,’ I says, ‘I’ll get the heel that did it.’ I told him that. And I’m gonna.”

  “Don’t, don’t,” moaned Carmen Dunn. “He didn’t do it, I know he didn’t do it.”

  “I know, lady—you’re his broad and you like him and I hate to hurt you like this, but I gotta, lady, I gotta. I gotta kill him. He killed my brother.” His own breath was sobbing out now and a twisted grimace was on his face. “I gotta! I seen him in the pool room. The pool-room man seen him with the gun—”

  Nash was tugging at the manacle that held him to Cardigan’s wrist. Nash was trying to get as far away as possible. Cardigan’s face was beaded with sweat. His throat felt closed. It seemed so useless to try to reason with a man who was temporarily out of his mind. The thin man was shaking all over with the passion that pounded in his heart. His lips were wet, twisted.

  Carmen jumped between them. “No,” she choked.

  “Lady, get away!”

  “Scram, Carmen,” gritted Cardigan. “This lad’ll blow right through you.”

  She sobbed: “I thought I’d saved Billy. I didn’t. I can save Bill’s friend.”

  Cardigan thrust her aside so hard she landed in some shrubbery. His arm, still in motion, swooped. Closed on the barrel of the thin man’s gun and whipped it downward. Six shots thundered in rapid succession, the bullets chipping the pavement at Cardigan’s feet. The next sound was the click of a hammer on a spent chamber.

  NASH cried out and heaved violently and both he and Cardigan slammed down to the sidewalk. The thin man, pulling the trigger twice more, finding the gun empty, turned and started off. From across the street a gun blasted three times. The thin man’s feet dragged. He turned halfway around, his arms flailing. A fourth bullet knocked him against a house wall and he crumpled to the pavement.

  Britto came walking across the street with his gun smoking. He took a look at Cardigan, who was lying flat on his face, still stunned. Britto went on toward the man he had shot. A couple of cops came running around the corner.

  “What’s up?” one of them barked.

  Britto said: “This guy just polished off—” he nodded to where Cardigan and Nash lay. Then he said: “I got him, though,” and prodded the man on the pavement. “Got him plenty. Dead.”

  He turned aside, scowling up the street. He stalked up to where Nash and Cardigan lay, took Cardigan’s keys and unlocking the manacles put them and the keys into Cardigan’s pocket. He shook Nash. Then he heard a groan, turned. He saw Cardigan move. Cardigan opened his eyes.

  “Britto,” he said.

  Britto stared stonily at him.

  Nash stirred.

  “Where you hit, Cardigan?” Britto asked.

  “No place. Nash went screwy and yanked and we both slammed down and got knocked out.”

  Britto stood up and went back to where the cops were bending over the thin man.

  “Hey,” said one of the cops, “get an ambulance. This guy ain’t dead.”

  Britto’s stony dark eyes stared down fixedly at the wounded man. Then a shadow descended upon Britto’s face.

  “Ambulance,” he muttered. “H’m.”

  HOLMAN stood by his office window, absent-mindedly jangling loose change in his pocket and watching the sun go down.

  Cardigan said: “Farrell’s been dead damn near a week.” He leaned with his elbows on his desk and scowled morosely at his hands for a long minute. Then he leaned back. “Farrell was getting on the inside track when they nabbed him—they had to wound him to do it. They lugged him off to a dump on the East Side and Carmen Dunn—they got Carmen to nurse him. She fell head over heels in love with him. He got better and they took Carmen away and when she wanted to go back to see him, they stopped her. She blew up. Nash talked her down. ‘If you want that sweet man of yours to stay alive, you do what you’re told.’ She did. To keep Farrell alive. She was the one watching from the window in Station Street. She thought then that Farrell was alive. She would have done anything Nash said, to keep Farrell alive.

  “Farrell got caught and potted and held because he tailed down Max Kovac, the guy that made that big confession, in a creep joint in Wilson Street. Kovac had taken to happy powder but was on the jitters that night. So when Farrell tried to take him, Kovac swore that he never killed Nan Tuscany, that it was all a gag, that he was paid to confess and then be sprung from jail by a bought keeper. Nash paid him. Nash was working for James Donnelly, the candidate for governor. Truman Shay, through his outside men, gave Donnelly two hundred grand for campaign expenses on the understanding that when Donnelly got in office he would save Shay from the electric chair. It was that money that’s helped Donnelly so far to pile up his big potential vote. Meantime this Kovac gag was rigged up so that, through legal hocus pocus, Shay could be saved till after Donnelly got in office. The plan had to be arranged so that Kovac would escape soon after his confession, because they knew that if the state’s attorney began to bear down on him Kovac’s story would fall to pieces. So he escaped, making it seem more certain that he had killed Nan Tuscany. The element of doubt would have carried Shay safely into Donnelly’s administration.

  “Nash bought over Britto. Britto was bitter, he’d been demoted and demoted and there were hints that before long he’d be kicked off the force. So he took a Brody—for a thousand bucks, the fat-head. He was the one fired the shots at me when I met Nash in front of the pool room. I escaped that and he got scared. He made a good bluff in my hotel room. Nash had ordered him to pinch me and they figured on framing me into a sentence. But I got out of that.

  “Then Britto got desperate. He was scared to hell of me, of what I might find out. So the heel went to Figlar’s brother and said I was the man killed the brother. He said politics had got me out of it. Young Figlar began looking for me. But Britto tailed Figlar. His idea was that when Figlar killed me he would run off like the big brave cop he is and shoot down Figlar, kill him—thus, counsellor, sealing the younger Figlar’s lips. And so with me dead, and the younger Figlar dead, Britto would have breathed easier. His and Nash’s confessions dovetailed nicely.”

  Holman said absently: “Britto was always a rat. There was not a cop on the force liked him. He’s the kind that gives cops a bad reputation. Cops are pretty good guys—underpaid.” He patted down a yawn. “Well, I suppose you’ll be leaving soon.”

  “Yeah. I’m taking Carmen Dunn to New York.”

  “After business, then on the make, eh, old stuff?”

  “She was my pal’s pal, you bad-minded lecher. I’ve got to look after her.”

  Hell Couldn’t Stop Him

  Chapter One

  Manhunt

  CARDIGAN loomed in the doorway of the Cosmos Agency at eleven A.M., banged through the wooden gate, sailed past the secretary, the office boy, the two file clerks, and wound up in the private office of George Hammerhorn, who was studying a set of fingerprints.

  Patricia Seaward sat in one of the leather chairs, a patent-leather traveling bag beside her. Cardigan grunted “Hello” to both, went on to an alcove back of a screen, mixed baking-soda with water, downed the concoction. As he r
insed the glass, he burped, muttered, “Excuse me,” but to no one in particular. Then he said “Ah,” but this to himself, the ravages of indigestion having been put to sleep.

  He wore a baggy blue serge suit, no vest; a soft white shirt with collar attached and a badly arranged black bowtie. His bashed and battered fedora had once been steel-gray but now it resembled something that might have been kicked around the street and then left hanging in a tree during the rainy season. He took it as he reappeared from behind the screen and sailed it into a chair.

  George Hammerhorn, stocky, well-pressed, said without looking up: “Does it take you two hours to get from Thirty-seventh Street to Fifty-third?”

  “Did it take me two hours?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then it must take two hours, George.”

  Hammerhorn made a small impatient gesture. “It’s damn funny that Pat can get down from Sixty-fifth Street, dressed and all, in forty minutes, whereas you—”

  “Her old man was a fireman. It’s in her blood.”

  Pat said: “All the time I’ve wasted waiting here. I could have got a manicure. I wish you’d think of someone besides yourself, for a change.”

  “Sorry, Patsy.”

  “All you think of is yourself and—”

  “I said I was sorry, didn’t I? What do you want me to do, set it to music?”

  She turned her back on him.

  HAMMERHORN said: “Now, now, cut that stuff out. There’s no use getting personal about it. Jack, you and Pat are going up to Stanfort. I’ve reserved two rooms at the Blackman Hotel, radio and running ice-water in each room.”

  “Why the Blackman?”

  “They give us a rate.”

  “They ought to, with the house dick they’ve got working there. A moron by the name of Hubbel. It’s the hotel where they have the solarium on the roof. Hubbel thought solarium was a kind of major operation. He’s always got an ear-ache from getting in drafts that come through keyholes and—”

  “O.K. I don’t want a lecture on Hubbel.” Hammerhorn pushed a photograph across the desk. “That’s a picture of Kenneth Drew. Take it and don’t lose it, because Kenneth Drew is the fellow you’re looking for. He’s thirty-two years of age, looks younger. He’s five feet nine, weighs a hundred and fifty-five. There’s good money in this job and because of the nature of it, the police are not to know about it. It’s absolutely on the level, but if the police catch on, that means the press catch on, and our client is engaging us primarily to avoid publicity, not so much for his own sake as for Kenneth Drew’s. You see, we begin on an angle of uncertainty.

  “Our client is James T. Lorrison, vice-president of the Surety Bank and Trust Company, this city; he not only handles Drew’s accounts, he’s a very close friend. Drew left the city twelve days ago, as near as Lorrison can figure it out. Where he went, no one knows. He took his car. There’s a description of the car, and its license number,” he said, passing a slip of paper to Cardigan.

  “Now here’s the gag. Checks made out to cash by Drew have been coming into the Surety. Here are five canceled checks, each made out to cash. The signature is authentic. The lot amounts to seven thousand dollars. These checks have been endorsed by a woman named Clara Rubio and deposited in the Stanfort State Bank. To date, all of that money has been withdrawn with the exception of five hundred dollars. Lorrison found that out by calling the State Bank.

  “Drew still has about fifteen thousand in his checking account. I understand he goes in for binges now and then; he’s a gay blade, comes of a very good family and at heart is a swell guy, though a little on the reckless side. Lorrison’s got a hunch something is wrong. You’re to go to Stanfort and find out. Pat’s going with you, because there’s a woman in the case. Lorrison spoke with the manager of the Stanfort bank and said you were coming up to look into the matter. He pledged the bank to secrecy. See if by a great effort of will power you can make the eleven-forty.”

  Pat stood up, said in an injured tone: “I’m sure I’m ready.”

  Cardigan was picking up the memoranda. “I like her, George,” he said. “I like her a lot. If I send her back to you wrapped in cellophane, don’t be surprised. Give me that suitcase, kid, and don’t act like Garbo denying herself. You’re a grand girl, you’re tops, but lay off a guy with a hangover.”

  Her face softened, she murmured: “I didn’t know you had a hangover. I’m sorry. I just thought—”

  “Now, now,” broke in Hammerhorn, “don’t go into a song and dance, Pat. You’ve got a train to make.”

  Cardigan said: “Pipe down. Stop yelling at her.”

  George Hammerhorn groaned, covered his face with his hands.

  THE afternoon sun blazed white above Stanfort. Heat danced on the streetcar rails. The shop awnings were down and pedestrians kept to the shadows of them in the busier streets. The hum of electric fans could be heard through open shop doors. The traffic cops had discarded their coats, wore light blue shirts. Many men carried their coats over their arms, mopped their faces as they walked. Cool waves flowed out of the screened doorways of butcher shops. The smash of the sunlight in Penfield Square was terrific.

  The State Bank was in a street off the square. It was a narrow building, two-storied. Cardigan went through the swing door into a small, cool interior at ten to three. There were four brass wickets, each with an identifying sign above it. Opposite, a fenced enclosure containing two desks. A small bank.

  Cardigan said to the uniformed guard: “Where’s the manager?”

  The guard pointed to the fenced enclosure, squinted curiously at Cardigan. Doubtless with reason, for the hot train ride had wrinkled the big op’s suit and criticism could have been leveled at his shirt, his half-undone tie. A rectangular brass sign said Mr. Floom on the flat-topped desk behind the mottled marble fence.

  “I’m Cardigan, Mr. Floom, Cosmos Agency. Mr. Lorrison phoned you about me.”

  “Yes, of course. Come in,” Floom said, opening the gate. He was a thin, slight man, middle-aged, dressed in lightweight dark clothes, crisp linen, cool nose-glasses. He had the prim, small mouth of a cautious man. “Sit down, please. Rather curious, this business. Now what can I do for you?” He clasped thin, dry hands together, not tightly.

  Cardigan had slapped his disreputable hat down upon the desk. Now he was drying his forehead. “I won’t bother you a hell of a lot, Mr. Floom. I’ll want, naturally, that address of this woman, this depositor of yours, Clara Rubio.”

  Floom spoke to his secretary, who departed.

  “And how long she’s been a depositor here,” Cardigan added. “I’d also like to know what she looks like, approximate age.”

  “I don’t believe I ever saw her,” Floom replied with his small, cautious lips. “We have, however, only two tellers. I daresay they’ll know.”

  The secretary returned with a card which she placed upon the desk. Floom glanced at the card, leaned over and laid it down before Cardigan. Cardigan read it, took an old envelope from his pocket, wrote down the address and the date on which Clara Rubio had become a depositor.

  “Were her monthly statements mailed, or did she call for them?” Cardigan asked.

  “There were instructions left to hold them. She called for them.”

  Cardigan said: “Now let’s see if the tellers know her.”

  FLOOM pressed one in a row of electric buttons and in a minute a short, bushy-haired man appeared. Floom said to him: “Do you remember a Miss Clara Rubio, one of our depositors?”

  “No, sir, I don’t. I think she always went to Mr. Cable’s window.”

  “That’s all,” Floom said, dismissing him with a gesture, pressing another button.

  Cable was younger, a fair-haired man of about twenty-five with very bright blue eyes.

  Floom said precisely: “This is Mr. Cardigan, representing the Surety Bank and Trust of New York. Describe to him one of our depositors, a Miss Clara Rubio.”

  Cable bent his brows in thought, placed a finger on the poi
nt of his chin. “Let me see,” he said presently. “Rather short, rather stout. In her forties, I’d say. Fat face, with red cheeks and, I believe, a gold eyetooth. Yes, I’m sure. Whether it’s on the left or right, I can’t remember. Quite a deep voice, almost like a man’s.” He shook his head, adding, “Not very good-looking. Oh, yes—a distinct mole on the side of her chin; I think the left side, though I can’t remember.” He put his bright blond face on one side, asked: “Anything else?”

  “That’s enough, thanks,” Cardigan said.

  Floom sent Cable away. To Cardigan: “If there is any way in which I can help you—”

  “I’ll let you know, you bet. Thanks a million, Mr. Floom. If I ever get in your hair, say so.”

  Mr. Floom, who was bald, bowed.

  Cardigan left the bank, crossed Penfield Square in the welter of sunlight, his hat poked down to his eyebrows. It was five blocks to the Hotel Blackman and as he swung his big feet into the cool, air-conditioned lobby he took off his hat, blew out a breath of relief. As he cut sharply around a pillar he collided with a man who had begun to move from behind it. The man grabbed for his dislodged straw hat, smacked it instead of catching hold of it and sent it spinning through the air. The hat landed definitely on the silvery hair of a dignified old gentleman who was snoozing in one of the high-backed lobby chairs. The old man popped awake, panic-stricken, while the hat rolled away across the floor, its owner in clumsy pursuit.

  Cardigan, slightly annoyed by the whole business, leaned against the pillar and stuck a rumpled cigarette between his lips, exploded a match on his thumbnail and immersed the end of his cigarette in the flame.