The Pulp Hero

by Theodore A. Tinsley

  “Are you sure of it?” Lacy’s voice crackled. “Did you actually see him? How do you know?”

  “I saw his hat, sir.” In spite of his anxiety Corning remembered automatically to “sir” the major in front of the men. “His hat’s stuck up in the open like a challenge, sir. They put it up there on purpose.”

  “His hat? Up where? What are you talking about?”

  “McManus’s grey snap-brim hat! It’s stuck up on a projecting cornice directly over the front doorway. I saw it the minute I peeked over the top of the stone wall. McManus certainly never left it there—not in a spot like that. Why should it be placed so carefully in plain sight?”

  “So we’d see it,” Harrigan snarled. “Why else?”

  “Hmmm—” The major’s forehead wrinkled.

  “Any signs of occupancy that you could see from the grounds?”

  “No, sir. The old joint is as quiet as a grave. Looks as though it’s been empty for years.”

  “Sounds like a trap,” Harrigan muttered somberly.

  “Trap? Certainly it’s a trap, or a grim invitation for us to come in and find a murdered McManus,” Lacy rejoined tartly. “I’ve been expecting something of the sort. However—”

  He glanced about the clearing, at the stolid veterans with the rifles, at the opened grenade boxes, at the two assembled Lewis guns with their squat businesslike little tripods. The spark in his roving eye stiffened each man like the galvanic touch of an electric current.

  “—However,” Tattersall Lacy’s slow drawl continued, “trick or no trick, we’re going to raid that house. Captain Weaver!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You will be in charge of the men. Scatter them through the grounds in the underbrush. Spot a machine gun to one side with its muzzle ranged on the front door panels. Put the other gun on the rear door. Detail two men as grenadiers. Keep everything covered and out of sight. Corning, you will assist Weaver. Place your men at once. I’ll give you five minutes.”

  Weaver led the men in a silent single file along the faint path to the weed-grown side wall that flanked the estate. They disappeared from sight like ghosts. No sound came from the grounds except the thin rustle of the breeze in the shrubbery.

  The slow minutes ticked by. Dillon, the driver of the staff car, wriggled with distaste in his seat. No matter how hot the scrimmage got, his orders were to stay behind the wheel.

  Finally Lacy glanced at his watch. “All right, Harrigan.”

  He squeezed past the empty bus and strode down the rutted lane with Harrigan at his side. Together they walked swiftly along the road until they reached the stone wall that fronted the estate. Thick shrubbery prevented a view of the house until they reached the front gateway.

  Harrigan breathed a faint rumbling oath.

  “By the Lord, Jack, there it is! See it? There’s poor McManus’s hat!”

  It was just where Corning had described it—a grey snap-brim fedora stuck carefully on an overhanging eave just above the front doorway, where it could easily be discerned from the road.

  The house itself looked dingy and tenantless; all the shades were drawn. There was a musty air of decay and emptiness about it. Grass sprouted in the cracks of the stone walk that led from the road.

  Lacy noted with a grim approval that there was no visible evidence of his eleven marines.

  He said curtly to Harrigan: “Wait here, Pat. I’m going up this path alone for a moment, if you please.”

  “But, Jack—”

  “Wait here,” the major repeated tonelessly.

  He walked slowly up the stone-flagged pavement with a silver whistle in his left hand and a .45 Colt, army model, in his right.

  Twenty feet from the front door he halted deliberately and surveyed the silent house from roof to ground. He didn’t look backward at Harrigan but his voice called softly: “All right, Pat. Follow on. Keep six feet behind me.”

  When he heard the crunch of Harrigan’s feet cease he started forward again.

  Pat called uneasily: “Look out for a volley from the window! They may have a Tommie in ambush.”

  “Quite so.” The major’s voice was dry. “I have my own small theory about that window and door. I rather think I’m right, too.” As he spoke he ran suddenly forward and his hand closed on the knob. With a swift motion he turned it and shoved.

  The door, as he had surmised, was unlocked. It flew inward with a bang and stayed wide open.

  Tattersall Lacy leaped sideways out of range. No Tommie gun flamed from the opening. Not a sound, not a motion came from the house. Lacy’s hand went over his head and he made a peculiar circling gesture. He blew three short blasts on his whistle. From behind trees and bushes men with rifles came flitting into life. They converged on the doorway.

  “Fix bayonets!” Lacy ordered.

  The rifles lengthened ominously in a dead silence.

  “I want this house mopped up from top to bottom, men. Forward!”

  Pat Harrigan dashed instantly for the open doorway. He rebounded from the calmly stiffened shoulder of his superior.

  Tattersall Lacy was the first man to jump through the opening.

  He sprang across the hall and peered into a room on the right. It was empty; covered with dust. But the major’s sharp eyes saw recent footprints in the dust. The prints led to one of the shaded windows. There was a small ragged peep-hole in the shade. Someone had been in this room at no very ancient date.

  Out in the hall Weaver’s commands echoed hollowly:

  “Parker’s squad up with me to the second floor. Temple’s men with Mr. Corning to the top floor. The rest wait here. No shots if you can avoid it. If you run into any gangsters wade into ’em with the long thrust. Pin ’em to the wall!”

  Ascending feet rumbled on the uncarpeted stairs. Lacy smiled wryly. He rather imagined he knew what they’d find. Unless Lacy’s forebodings were wrong they’d find nothing but the mutilated dead body of private McManus of Amusement, Inc.

  He ran back to the front hall in time to see Harrigan emerge from the room opposite.

  “Empty,” Harrigan snarled. “Nothing. Not even a rag of carpet on the boards.”

  With a trio of silent marines at their heels they searched the entire ground floor. It was the same wherever they looked—nothing. The cellar door was secured by a bolt and a huge padlock; both were cob-webbed and thick with accumulated dust.

  Suddenly they heard a faint shout from upstairs and the shrilling of Weaver’s whistle. They raced to the foot of the wide staircase and hurried upstairs.

  As the rush of their feet died away one of the oaken panels below the main staircase swung soundlessly open, disclosing a black square hole. A man wriggled swiftly through the opening. He tiptoed to the foot of the stairs and stood there listening. He laughed with a brief snarled sound.

  He had no face, this stealthy intruder. His hidden eyes gleamed through narrow silken slits. A close-fitting hood of scarlet covered skull and face and hung down below his collar. The mask fluttered faintly with the pressure of his heavy breathing.

  He stood there for an instant, quietly tense, like a cowled scarlet chessman. Then he whirled with another snarling chuckle and vanished through the yawning hole below the staircase. The panel closed without a click…

  Up on the top floor, at the head of the stairs, Lacy and Harrigan found a puzzled looking marine on guard.

  “Rear room, sir. Straight through to the back.”

  “McManus’s body in there?” the major snapped.

  “No, sir. No sign of him anywhere.”

  “What! The devil you say!” Lacy’s eyes looked suddenly thoughtful.

  “He ought to be here somewhere,” Pat muttered. “That hat of his outside—”

  It was a big attic room with a peaked ceiling and an enormous chimney on one side. Weaver’s finger pointed sil
ently and the major said with astonishment: “What’s all this?”

  The wide and enormous projection of the chimney was plastered a smooth white like the rest of the room; but the whole chimney width was covered with writing from the ceiling to the small fireplace opening.

  A mysterious and lengthy message. Hundreds of words in smudgy black crayon. It must have taken a long time to write.

  Below the last line of writing was a blood-red diamond, so freshly painted that it glistened. Two wavering threads of scarlet had trickled from it down the wall.

  Lacy’s eyes narrowed as he read the first sentence or two of the long message. It wasn’t a bit like the usual crisp challenges of the Ace. It was rambling, involved, almost meaningless.

  “I can’t make head nor tail of it,” the worried Weaver said. “It reads like the meanderings of a lunatic. What the hell does the thing mean?”

  Pat Harrigan read the first few words aloud in his gruff voice, staring closely to make them out: “Whereas and if and however, in justice to the supremely exalted character of the man who has chosen to call himself The Scarlet Ace, if those who stop to read will, perhaps, allow the personality involved…”

  Ed Corning shrugged. “Plain lunacy! He’s gone crazy, if you ask me.”

  “I wonder,” Lacy said harshly.

  He reached forward and touched the tip of his finger to the freshly painted ace of diamonds. His finger came away red.

  He looked at the ugly stain. It wasn’t gritty or greasy to the touch. An expression of stony horror came into his eyes. He placed the tip of his finger against his tongue. A faintly salty taste. It was blood! Freshly spilt human blood!

  “What is it, sir?” Corning asked. “What’s the matter?”

  Lacy didn’t answer. He stood there as though frozen, with that queer baffled look of horror in his eyes, mechanically reading the jumbled nonsense of the long, close-written message on the white plaster.

  “It’ll take hours to read that junk,” Weaver complained. “We’ve got no time to—”

  Lacy shouted aloud. “Time!” He roared it savagely. “That’s what it is! He’s lured all of us here together and he wants time!”

  He sprang away from the scrawled nonsense, whirled, and pointed toward the open doorway and the dusty stairs beyond.

  “Out!” he trumpeted. “Out—all of you! Downstairs and out into the open—for your lives!” He shoved fiercely at the nearest marine and sent him staggering. His whistle blew a shrill retreat summons.

  There was no gainsaying his savage command. They ran helter-skelter from the room and clattered down the stairs. All except Harrigan. The big Irishman was staring obstinately at the wall. Lacy’s fist doubled and he swung viciously against Harrigan’s ribs.

  “Out! Get out, you!”

  He shoved Harrigan ahead of him. They raced madly toward the ground floor. Pat had to take the stairs in a series of giant leaps to keep ahead of the plunging major.

  The marines were bunched out on the grass in front of the entrance as Lacy sprang from the door. His big Colt menaced them. He certainly seemed like a madman. “Get back to the road! Run—you fools!”

  He set the example by racing past them, and they followed obediently in awkward and jostling haste.

  Suddenly a great blast of wind struck at the backs of the fleeing men and hurled them flat on their faces. A thunderous roar shook the earth. Dazed and bewildered by the terrific detonation they lay where they had fallen; and pieces of wreckage whizzed from the sky and gashed the ground all about them. Their eardrums ached. It was like the end of the world.

  Tattersall Lacy crawled dizzily to his knees and stared over his shoulder.

  The whole upper part of the house had melted away. It was wide open to the sky like the crater of a volcano. A greasy pall of black smoke hung sullenly above the ragged ruin. Flames licked in and out like orange serpents, snapping hungrily in the dust-laden air.

  There was no trace whatever of the top-floor room where the marines had been crowded a few moments earlier. It was gone. Dissolved, exploded to atoms.

  “Jeeze!” a voice whispered weakly.

  Somebody coughed hackingly. A man pressed his hand against his ribs and groaned.

  “Anybody hurt?” Corning called.

  Lacy was upright on his feet now. “Weaver! Line up your men quickly! Are they all here?”

  An uneven double rank moved together on the cluttered lawn. “Here! You! Present! Here…”

  “All present, sir,” Weaver gasped.

  “Good enough. Pick up your scattered equipment and rush the detachment back to the truck. Double quick! Drive off at once. Follow the planned route back to headquarters. Oh—Weaver!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have Dillon bring the staff car around to the front here. There’ll be some awkward explaining to do if we don’t all get the hell out of here in a hurry.”

  The marines vanished. Suddenly Harrigan ran across the grass to the stone walk. He had seen something. He stood there, staring down.

  “Look at this damn thing! Jack!”

  There was a message on the stone. He pointed. Three crisp words scrawled on the pavement:

  YOURS VERY TRULY

  A playing card lay face upward in the grass nearby. The ace of diamonds. “That wasn’t here when we went inside the house,” Ed Corning said slowly.

  “You’re damn right is wasn’t!” Harrigan grunted. “It was done while we were upstairs.”

  Lacy nodded. “The Ace must have been here in person. Came here to witness the explosion with his own eyes and make personally sure that he had wiped out the entire personnel of Amusement, Inc. Damn him—he can’t be far away right now. He must have fled just before we came pouring out of the house.”

  From far down the road came the rumble of the departing bus-load of marines. There was a shriller hum and the staff car, driven by Dillon, halted outside the entrance gate with a squeal of its powerful brakes.

  “Keep your engine running, Dillon,,” Lacy shouted. “Be ready to shove off fast in the next couple of minutes!”

  His words spurted to Corning and Harrigan: “By God, we’re not going to leave here without a last quick search of the grounds for poor McManus! He must be here somewhere. That bloody signature on the plastered chimney was wet and sticky. It was freshly made…”

  He glanced at his watch. It was barely three minutes since the explosion had roared.

  “Still time if we’re lucky,” he muttered grimly. “Come on!”

  They separated swiftly and ran through the grounds in a desperate last minute search for the missing McManus. They peered under torn shrubbery, ripped through vines and creepers; batted thorny branches away from their red-rimmed eyes.

  It was Lacy himself who found the bodies. There were two of them. Sprawled on their backs in a tangled copse of birch trees in the rear of the burning dwelling.

  It was easy to see how the Ace had gotten them there; the force of the shattering explosion had cracked the smooth earth away from the sides of a grass-grown slab of timber. The mouth of a slanting tunnel yawned in the ground.

  Lacy bent over the victims. They had both been stabbed repeatedly. They were slimy with their own blood. The eyes of private McManus were wide open and staring. He was dead.

  But the other man still lived; and Lacy’s mouth tightened viciously as he saw the dying face. Hogan’s assailant! The man who had jumped! “Caxton, by God!” the major breathed.

  It was and it wasn’t! Caxton’s scalp seemed to have slipped queerly.

  The major reached down and with one jerk he plucked off the black wig. Underneath it the man’s real scalp showed—close-clipped, prickly, blond.

  His mouth and chin were not Caxton’s. In his death weakness the man’s whole face had relaxed and was utterly different. Lacy marveled that he could ever have mist
aken the fellow for Caxton. The dying man jeered faintly.

  “Fooled you—not a bad—actor—am I? Fooled the whole pack—of—”

  “Who stabbed you?”

  No answer. Blood trickled from the tight corners of the fake Caxton’s mouth.

  “You’ve got guts,” Lacy whispered to him. He leaned closer. His voice was friendly, fatherly. Full of a subtle flattery. “I would never have dared to make that chute jump into a city street. I admire your courage, my friend; but what did it get you? A knife in your back!”

  “I—got—plenty—guts,” he groaned. “I played ball with the—the—Master… But I didn’t kill you up there—in—the Cloud Building—and—he—”

  “Exactly. You’re dying like a rat, my friend, as a reward for high courage and loyalty. The Ace stabbed you.”

  “He—he killed me—damn—him…”

  “Where’s the real Caxton? He’s a prisoner, isn’t he? Where has the Ace got him hidden?”

  The eyelids closed.

  “Where? Tell me, man! The Ace didn’t play square with you. You did your best and he killed you for it. You’re dying. Here’s your last chance for revenge. Where’s Caxton?”

  “He’s—he’s—”

  Tattersall Lacy laid his ear against the faintly quivering lips. Pat and Ed were like frozen shadows behind the major, staring, trying vainly to catch the stream of inaudible syllables that dribbled into Lacy’s bent ear. The major listened like a carved Sphinx.

  The dribbling whisper ceased. The dying head lifted suddenly by itself clear off the ground.

  “So long, pal!” he jeered suddenly in a strong voice.

  His head dropped. A flicker wrenched his body. He lay stark.

  “You’re a louse, my friend,” said the major’s calm voice. “But you had guts; you weren’t lying when you said that. And you did talk finally. Thank you for that, anyway.”

  Rapidly he emptied the dead killer’s pockets. He did the same with McManus—ripped the tailor’s label from the ex-marine’s coat, removed swiftly all telltale marks of identification.

  “Can’t afford any publicity yet,” he said coolly to the scowling Harrigan. “An hour or two in the morgue can’t possibly make any difference to McManus. I’ll have his body removed to headquarters the minute I can get into confidential touch with Mr. Saturday of the Emergency Council.”