The Mystery & Suspense Novella

by Fletcher Flora

  Gilda Jeffries, the judge’s yellow-haired wife, looked contrite. “I should have warned you. We had some trouble with the plumbing this morning. Some pipes had to be torn up. New cement was laid when they were repaired.”

  Wade sat down. In that tense, crackling atmosphere the four remained in strained silence: Judge Jeffries, dignified and aloof; the golden-haired Gilda Jeffries, nervously twisting a handkerchief; District Attorney Halloran, his lean face flushed with excitement; and Ben Wade, broad-shouldered, quiet, capable.

  Somewhere in the depths of the big old house a clock chimed ten times, like measured strokes of doom.

  Gilda Jeffries whitened under her heavy make-up. “It—it’s the hour!” she whispered ominously.

  Wade loosened his service .32 in its shoulder holster.

  Nothing happened.

  Five minutes passed. Ten. Twenty. The tension had noticeably relaxed. Judge Jeffries yawned ostentatiously.

  District Attorney Halloran rose. He was smiling a bit shame-facedly, “Looks as though Durkin’s threat was a false alarm,” he admitted. “I think I’ll move along.” He turned to Ben Wade. “You’d better stay here the rest of the night, sergeant. Keep your eyes open.”

  Wade nodded. “Okay.”

  Gilda Jeffries went with Halloran to the front door. After a moment Wade heard the door open and close again. Gilda Jeffries returned to the study.

  And then the telephone rang.

  In the stillness of the little room, its harsh jangle sounded like a warning tocsin. Judge Jeffries’ yellow-haired wife picked up the instrument. And then her face turned a sickly gray. She looked fearfully at her husband. “It’s—for you! It—it sounds like the voice that—that called you earlier tonight!”

  Judge Jeffries got up and took the telephone from his wife’s trembling hands. “Hello?” he spoke sharply into the transmitter.

  He seemed to listen for a brief instant. Then abruptly his whole body contorted in a sudden spasm of agony. His face became a grimacing mask of horror. The knuckles of the hand that gripped the telephone suddenly whitened. A thin wisp of steam-like smoke issued from his ear where the receiver was pressed!

  Ben Wade leaped to his feet. The odor of burning flesh reached his widened nostrils, nauseating, acrid. Abruptly the telephone clattered from Judge Jeffries’ nerveless, relaxed fingers. The jurist toppled forward to the floor and lay very still.

  “God Almighty!” Wade cried. He knelt over the prone form of the white-haired judge. He fumbled for the fallen man’s pulse. Then he looked up. “He—he’s dead! Killed before our very eyes!”

  Gilda Jeffries screamed once. Then she swayed forward. Wade caught her in his arms. He slapped her across the face. His fingers left a stinging print on her cheek. “Snap out of it!” he snarled. “Quick—go to the front door and yell like hell! This house is surrounded by detectives. Get ’em in here!”

  CHAPTER II

  The police surgeon looked up from Judge Jeffries’ body just as District Attorney Halloran, summoned from his own home, strode into the room. “Death by electrocution!” the medical man said succinctly. “He got a shot of juice as strong as if he’d been sitting in the electric chair!”

  Thirty minutes had passed since the jurist’s death. The whole house buzzed with somber, subdued activity as detectives moved about through the various rooms.

  Gilda Jeffries drew a sharp, agonized breath. Her dress drew tight with the sudden stiffening of her breasts. “God in heaven!” she moaned suddenly. “There was a telephone repairman here in the house this afternoon!”

  District Attorney Halloran said, “What?” in a sharp voice.

  “Yes! I let him in myself. He said there was trouble on our line. He worked on the wiring a long while. He even installed a new telephone!”

  Halloran looked significantly toward Detective Sergeant Ben Wade. “Joe Dunkin was a telephone repairman before he was convicted of murder!” he said grimly.

  Wade nodded. “We’ve been over his wiring job, Mr. Halloran. He replaced the regular telephone instrument with one whose receiver was made of black-painted metal instead of hard rubber. The metal receiver made a perfect electrical conductor—an electrode. Then he installed a new phone cord heavy enough to carry high voltage.”

  “But—but how—” Gilda Jeffries cried out.

  Wade explained tersely. “We’ve discovered a throw-switch outside, behind the garage. When the judge took the telephone, Durkin threw that switch. It disconnected the phone line and hooked it up to the power wire. The regular house current was stepped up to about twenty thousand volts through a transformer, and shot straight into the telephone!”

  A detective stepped into the room. He saluted. “We’ve just had a report from the fingerprint bureau. The prints on that switch behind the garage are the prints of Joe Durkin!”

  Wade nodded. “That cinches it!” He looked questioningly toward the district attorney. “The dragnet’s out for Durkin?”

  Halloran nodded. “Every avenue of escape is plugged. He can’t get away. We’ll have him before morning.”

  Two white-jacketed police-ambulance men entered with a stretcher. They covered the stiffening body of Judge Jeffries with a white cloth and placed it on the stretcher. They went out with their gruesome burden.

  Ben Wade followed them out of the house.

  He walked through the pelting rain, back along the wet gravel driveway to the garage. Grimly his mind reviewed the details of the case. He flashed his electric torch on the fatal throw-switch the murderer had used to disconnect the telephone line and hook it up to the high-voltage current. One thing puzzled him. For Joe Dunkin to have stepped up the house-current to a voltage strong enough to kill Judge Jeffries, a heavy transformer would have been necessary. Such a transformer would be too weighty for one man to carry alone. Durkin must have had some means of transporting the transformer to this spot behind the garage; yet there was no trace of wheel-marks behind the garage building.

  The detective sergeant flashed his light in a circle. Then he frowned. Something small and ghostly-white gleamed beneath some shrubbery to his left.

  Wade leaned forward and delved into the shrubbery. His fingers encountered the small white object. It was cold and clammy to his touch. He pulled it out. Then he said, “Good God!” in a strangled voice.

  The object was a hand—a man’s severed hand! A hand bloodless and pallid and gruesome, hacked off at the joint of the wrist!

  Ben Wade turned to run back toward the house. And as he turned, something hard and metallic crashed down against his head with sickening force. Brilliant lights flashed before the detective’s eyes. Then an overpowering blanket of blackness descended upon his numbed senses. He sank to the muddy earth, unconscious.

  CHAPTER III

  When Ben Wade opened his eyes he found himself in a hospital bed. He struggled weakly to a sitting posture. “What—where—?” he mumbled thickly.

  A white-clad nurse forced him back to the pillow. “It’s all right, sergeant. Just lie back and relax.”

  “What happened! How long have I been here?”

  The nurse looked at her wrist watch. “You’ve been here about an hour. You were found behind the Jeffries garage, unconscious. Someone had slugged you on the head. Your felt hat saved you from getting a fractured skull.”

  Wade cursed softly. “What time is it?”

  “It’s a little after one o’clock in the morning.”

  “And—and that hand—that severed hand—was it on me?”

  The nurse looked at him uneasily. “A hand? You—you must have been dreaming, sergeant. Maybe I’d better send for the doctor.” It was evident that she thought the detective’s mind wandering from the effects of that blow on his skull.

  He looked at her calculatingly. So the severed hand hadn’t been found! Then whoever had hit him on the head had also made away w
ith that gruesome clue. Wade widened his eyes in well-simulated delirium. “Stand back!” he roared suddenly. “Look out for that machine-gun!”

  The nurse gasped. Then she turned and ran out of the room.

  Ben Wade grinned. She’d gone for a doctor. That was just what he’d wanted. He leaped from the bed, unmindful of the throbbing in his head. He found his clothes and flung himself into them. He leaped out of the room and ran loping down the dimly-lighted, deserted hospital corridor. He reached the street door and launched himself out into the pelting rain.

  The heavy wet drops stung his face. He breathed great, unsteady gasps of the cool night air into his lungs.

  His head throbbed less sharply now. He saw a passing night-owl cab and hailed it. “Police headquarters—and step on it!” he barked, flashing his badge.

  Five minutes later the cab skidded on the wet paving and came to a halt before the forbidding gray-stone Headquarters building. “Wait for me!” Wade grunted. Then he ran into the gray-stone structure.

  In a brief interval he dashed out again. There was a pick and a sharp-bladed spade under his arm. He tossed them clatteringly into the tonneau of the cab and leaped in after them. “Get going!” he panted to the driver. “Corner of Adams and Crenshaw!”

  The cab lurched forward through the splattering rain.

  At the corner of Adams and Crenshaw, on the outskirts of the residential district, the taxi slewed the curb. It was less than a block around the corner to the house where Judge Jeffries had been murdered a few hours before. Wade tossed a crumpled bill to the cabby. Then he grabbed the pick and spade from the interior of the cab and started silently through the rain.

  He rounded the corner and slowed to a silent, cat-footed walk. He came to the dark, foreboding pile that was the Jeffries house. Silence brooded heavily over the two-story structure, punctuated only by the pattering raindrops that fell in a steady downpour from the lowering black clouds overhead.

  Wade crept to the Jeffries front porch and tried the door. It was locked. He went to a window. He inserted the thin, sharp blade of his spade between the bottom sill of the window and the wooden frame. Then he pressed his weight against the spade-handle, levering it gently. There was a single, sharp creak as the window-lock gave way. The detective raised the window and climbed in.

  He snapped on his flashlight and took an instantaneous mental snap-shot of the positions of the various articles of furniture. Then he clicked off his light and moved forward through the utter darkness, avoiding a table and two chairs by instinct.

  He reached the hallway and went silently toward the rear of the house. He found the kitchen and walked unerringly to the door leading to the cellar. He opened it and threw the beam of his electric torch down into the pitch-black abyss below.

  There was no sound, either from the cellar or the house proper. Wade’s jaws clenched grimly as he descended the cellar stairs.

  He reached the bottom. Noiselessly, he came to that patch of soft cement into which he had unwarily stepped earlier that evening when he had searched the house, before Judge Jeffries had died. His footprint was still outlined in the half-dry concrete. The detective sergeant smiled softly and set to work with his spade.

  There was no need to use the pick. The cement was still damp enough to come away in doughy chunks under the manipulations of the spade. At last he had completely removed the layer of still-plastic stuff, disclosing soft earth below. Wade dug into the ground with his spade, spooning away the earth with furious yet soundless energy. And then the blade met something gruesomely soft and resisting. Sweat stood out on the detective’s forehead as he redoubled his efforts. There was a look of grim horror in his eyes.

  Again his spade struck that softly resisting impediment. It was a man’s leg! Wade shoveled desperately. And at last he gazed down upon his harrowing, macabre find. It was the body of a dead man—a body from which the right hand had been brutally hacked away at the wrist—a body with a bullet-hole through the heart—the body of Joe Durkin, the condemned murderer who had escaped from the train en route to Folsom Penitentiary!

  Ben Wade looked at the stiffened corpse with its mutilated right wrist. He touched it. It was stiff and unyielding—the body of a man who had been dead at least thirty-six hours, rigid with rigor mortis.

  The detective smiled harshly. “I thought so!” he whispered to himself with grim satisfaction. He grabbed up his pick and spade and tiptoed back to the steps leading to the kitchen. He snapped off his flashlight and ascended in solid blackness. He crept through the kitchen and out into the first-floor hallway. He tensed suddenly.

  There was a dim, indistinct white blur before him at the foot of the staircase leading to the second floor. Silently he backed away. A harsh feminine voice said, “Stand where you are! If you move I’ll shoot!”

  A light-switch clicked. The hall’s blackness was changed to soft illumination from a wall fixture. Ben Wade stared into the unwavering black muzzle of a tiny automatic in the hand of Gilda Jeffries!

  The yellow-haired woman was clad in a sheer nightgown of peach-colored silk and lace. Her golden hair fell in waves over soft white shoulders. Wade could see the intimate curves of her voluptuous body through the clinging silk of her gossamer gown. Her bare feet were thrust in high-heeled, feathered mules. He could discern the curving sweep of flesh where rounded legs melted into firm, milky thighs and feminine, almost Oriental hips. Her breasts were high and full and prominent, their every detail plainly apparent through the gauzy lace of the nightgown. Her eyes widened when she recognized Detective Sergeant Ben Wade. She lowered the automatic.

  “Oh—Sergeant Wade!” she breathed unevenly. “You—you frightened me so! I—I thought Joe Durkin—had come back—” Then she noticed the pick and spade he carried, and her eyes narrowed. “What are those for?”

  Wade smiled wryly. “I had an idea that the transformer Durkin used to step up the current to kill your husband might be buried somewhere behind the garage,” he lied. “I came back to do some digging. I noticed your front window open, and decided to sneak in and investigate.”

  Gilda Jeffries took a deep breath and exhaled as though in relief. “Then you—haven’t started to dig yet?”

  “No,” he lied again. He watched her.

  She came toward him. “I—I’m so nervous and upset,” she said plaintively. “Can’t you—postpone your digging until morning? Please stay here in the house with me until daylight. I—I’m afraid to be alone!”

  He looked at her. A heavy perfume seemed to emanate from her scantily-clad body. Her lovely breasts rose and fell seductively. Her eyes were dark and languorous and pleading. He grinned. “All right. I’ll stay with you.”

  She went into the comfortably furnished living room and switched on a single low lamp. He followed her. From somewhere in the hallway of the old house a board creaked. Gilda Jeffries gasped, “What was that?” and suddenly clung to the detective, her warm, pulsating body quivering against him.

  Automatically his arm went around her softly-pliant waist. “Just a creaking board,” he reassured her. She sank weakly to a studio couch, her sensuous body trembling as she caught at his arm and drew him down alongside of her. One shoulder strap of her thin silken nightgown had fallen over her arm. He caught a generous glimpse of her full, sweetly rounded breast, infinitely alluring now without its gossamer covering.

  She saw his eye resting on her exposed charms, yet made no move to shield her body from his appreciative gaze. Instead, she favored him with a sidelong, provocative glance and edged closer to him on the couch. “Hold me—hold me tight!” she whispered. “I—I’m not afraid when you’re close to me!”

  His arm encircled her body. She leaned against him, breathing in staccato gasps. She opened her passionate red mouth and drew his head down. “Kiss me…” she murmured.

  He kissed her. Somehow her negligee had slipped down over her swelling bosoms, bar
ing them to his caress. Gently he pressed his hot hand over one warm, creamy hemisphere of flesh and felt its firm, jutting mound grow hard against his palm. She stretched out side-wise on the studio couch, arms up-flung over her head to reveal the satiny smooth white curves of her delicious armpits. The lower hem of the peach-colored silk night-grown was drawn up above her knees. Wade could see the honey-smooth whiteness of her thighs.

  She undulated in a sudden excess of passionate desire. Wade rolled over the top of her, pinning her down. He grabbed at her wrists and imprisoned them. Then he grinned into her face, reached into his pocket, extracted clinking handcuffs and snapped them on her struggling arms. He got up.

  Her eyes were dilated and wild with rage. “You—you—” she screamed.

  Wade said, “Where is your lover—the man who killed your husband?”

  She paled to a sickly gray. “What—?”

  “You get me!” Wade snarled. “You know damned well what I’m talking about! You were in love with another man. You wanted to be rid of your husband, Judge Jeffries. So you plotted to kill him. Somebody bribed the guard who was taking Joe Durkin, a convicted murderer, to the penitentiary; and the guard allowed Durkin to escape. Then your lover, who was waiting at the prearranged spot, captured Durkin and killed him in cold blood. Durkin’s body was buried right here in your cellar—that was the least likely place in the world to secrete the body!”

  Wade lighted a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

  “Before Durkin was buried in the cellar, your sweetheart cut off the dead man’s hand. Then the telephone set-up was arranged. Tonight your husband got a phone call. Ostensibly it was from Durkin, threatening to kill the judge. But Durkin didn’t make that call—Durkin was dead! It was your paramour who phoned! And later your lover used Durkin’s severed hand to throw the switch—so that Durkin’s fingerprints would be found and Durkin accused of murdering Judge Jeffries! Now, will you confess—or shall I burn the word ‘Murderess’ right across your beautiful beasts?”