His words were hard-boiled; but his eyes were blinking queerly and he was holding himself in cold check by a tremendous effort.
“Stop looking at me like that, Pat.” His teeth clicked and his voice steadied. “Remember, gentlemen, that Caxton may still be alive. We can’t help the dead. We’ve got a quick chance of rescuing a living man if we hurry!”
He turned on his heel and his long legs sprinted toward the waiting staff car. Pat and Ed piled in behind him; and the alert Dillon meshed gears promptly and shot away like a streak.
Lacy leaned forward with his face a stiff mask and whispered directions to Dillon.
The afternoon was rapidly fading into dusk, but Dillon didn’t switch on any lights. He kept the car hurtling along side a torpedo. At the infrequent crossroads he slowed barely enough to catch a quick glimpse of the vanishing street signs.
He turned left at a place marked Cunningham Road. He drove very slowly now. The road wound downhill toward the Hudson. It became a paved street, lined on both sides with neat and utterly respectable two-story cottages.
“Far enough, Dillon!” the major rasped.
Dillon slammed on the brakes and relaxed. The rest alighted. They walked down the darkened street and the major glanced at the dim house numbers. The house he was seeking was the last one in the row; the one nearest the river.
There was a grass lawn surrounding it and a neat hedge of green privet along the edge of the sidewalk. The lawn sloped away on one side toward the misty river and ended in a sheer bank at the water’s edge.
The major’s shadowy figure led the way toward the front porch of the cottage.
“What’s the program, Jack?” Corning whispered.
“Shoot anybody that gets in your way,” was the low response. “If Caxton is a prisoner in there he’s coming out with us. Either he comes out or we stay in.”
He pressed the bell button and stood aside in shadow. There was a brief wait.
“Who is it?” a thick voice growled hoarsely. Lacy laid a calm finger on his lips. Corning and Harrigan couched watchfully. Under cover of his coat Lacy’s right hand gripped a big rocklike .45.
“Who is it?”
The door opened slightly and a face peered. There was a sharp exclamation and a gun rammed through the narrow opening. Lacy leaped straight at the muzzle. Before the gangster’s finger could press trigger, the major’s fierce thrust sent the opened door crashing inward and spilled man and gun headlong.
A thin jet of flame spat from the Army .45. The sprawled thug on the floor coughed, threshed over on his face and died.
The major hurdled the body, raced swiftly down the hall and threw open a door. A bullet from within the room whizzed past his head and buried itself in the door frame with a harsh thhhwaaaack! He dropped to one knee and fired again. The coolly aimed bullet caught his foe squarely in the groin and toppled him with a crash.
With the sound of that fall Lacy was up again and into the room.
There were two more snarling thugs inside. They rushed promptly. A chair smashed against Lacy’s head and beat him down. Pat Harrigan’s gun blew a hole through the belly of the chair swinger. The fourth gangster fired almost pointblank at the redhead. Pat leaped sideways a second before the flash. Before he could recover a second bullet creased his neck with flame and he felt the hot blood spurt.
Lacy fired upward from the floor at the swearing thug and missed. But Ed Corning didn’t! There was a crashing echo from Ed’s gun. Silence flowed into the reeking smoke-filled room.
“That makes four by my arithmetic,” Ed said dryly. “I guess that’s all, folks.”
They were like cold eyed automatons. No mercy in their taut faces. Lacy swayed back to his feet.
“Are you hurt, Jack?”
“No.”
“Four of ’em,” Ed remarked. “Three here and one in the hall. Not bad shooting.”
“Listen!” Lacy said sharply
From the rear of the cottage they heard a sudden sliding, scuttling sound and the dull bump of a heavy body striking solid earth.
“Somebody’s just slid down the extension roof,” Pat whispered. “Somebody scrammed out an upper window and jumped.”
With one accord the three crime discouragers dashed from the room. They ran like deer down the hall and threw open the rear door. In the soft earth behind the extension of the kitchen shed they saw the deep imprint of feet.
“Look!” Corning shouted.
Twenty yards away a figure was racing across the sloping lawn toward the Hudson. Lacy’s gun elevated with a snap of his wrist and he fired.
As he ran forward he saw a crumpled smear of scarlet on the grass. A silken cowl with blank, ugly slits like empty eye-sockets; dropped in mad flight by the fear-stricken criminal ahead of him. It was the telltale disguise of the Ace!
The Ace had whirled and stopped short. In his terror he screamed shrilly like an animal. He sent three flaming stabs backward through the dusk.
Crouched at bay, he was a hideous sight. In the darkness Lacy couldn’t be sure of the features; but he saw a powerfully shaped head, a gaunt face with wildly gleaming eyes. In the half-light the face was vague, a distorted blur of greenish shadow. Dank black hair lay plastered smoothly on the broad skull; it hung down in unkempt strands over the tops of the ears. The sight filled Lacy with a queer, loathing hate. He had a sudden sickish desire to swing the edge of a spade against that matted skull and smash it to pieces like a rotten melon. He felt repulsion, a crawling fear.
As Lacy hesitated, the Ace turned again and sped away.
The major fired steadily as he pursued. The criminal “Master” seemed to bear a charmed life. Bullets sang above his head, cut the turf under his flying feet.
He reached the high bank above the river. His arms arched over his head. He dived. They heard the deep water splash as his body hit the surface.
A second later Lacy reached the edge of the steep bank. He reloaded hastily. He saw the dripping head emerge from the surface of the river, far out in the swirling current. He sent white spray flying all about it with the spat of his reckless bullets. Ed was emptying his gun; so was Pat.
They saw the Ace’s gaunt arm lift and his dripping gun flamed once at them from the murky river. Then a second arm lifted. The head vanished swiftly out of sight. It didn’t come up again. Nothing but the rip of the tide and the formless swirl of gathering darkness.
Was he dead? Had they killed him? Was he a corpse rolling gently along in muddy depths? The three marine officers stared at one another and none of them voiced their thoughts.
Suddenly Corning gave a brisk cry. He sounded relieved about something.
“Listen to that! There’ll be hell popping in a minute!”
They could hear the faint shrilling of a police whistle, the sound of shouting.
“Back to the house!” Lacy snapped in his old crisp tone. “We can’t stop here. We’ve got to search that house. A quick search for Caxton and a prompt getaway or we’ll have Dillon and the staff car out of action. We can’t afford that.”
They went through the cottage like madmen on a spree. A locked door on the upper floor went in like matchwood under their assault. Within the room a man lay gagged and bound on a narrow bed. Caxton! He was emaciated and half delirious.
Lacy’s knife snapped the taut bonds with a few swift cuts. Pat and Ed raised the semiconscious man between them and dragged his limp feet down the stairs to the street.
They piled into the staff car. They flopped Caxton upright on the rear seat and held him. “Double quick, Dillon!” Lacy barked.
Dillon crossed the trunk highway like a streak and continued inland. He had studied the regional maps till he knew the place like a book. He stopped at the side of the road for a few seconds and sprang out.
Changing the license plates was a simple process; Dillon simply tore of
f the topmost plate and another number appeared instantly in its place. It was like tearing a sheet from a calendar. The plates looked like metal but weren’t; they were pressed one above another like leaves in a book.
The staff car resumed its flight at a more sedate speed. Dillon snicked on the dash lights.
“Well, we got the Ace,” Harrigan said in a funny voice.
“We know damn well we got the Ace,” Corning said harshly.
“Do we, Ed?” The major sounded tired. “I wonder.”
“Men don’t stay under water indefinitely and live, Jack.”
“They don’t usually,” Lacy admitted. “Let’s think about something else.” He sighed.
Lacy lit a cigarette with an unsteady hand. In the light of the match his face gleamed sharply-cut like a cameo.
“I did something today that wrenched my heart,” he said in a jerky voice. “I mean when I stripped McManus of identification marks and left him for strangers to stare at. And yet—”
His voice steadied. It cut at his brother crime destroyers with a grim sincerity.
“In a like case, gentlemen, I expect and want you to do the same thing to me. The cause we espouse is paramount; the individual life nothing. McManus was a good soldier. If his spirit is still near us he’ll salute, click his marine heels and say, ‘Yes, sir!’ to that. I—”
He said no more. The wheels of the staff car whirred monotonously along the dark road.
Thoughts drummed within Tattersall Lacy’s brain with the same deadly monotony:
“I’ve put my hand to the task of uprooting crime and I’ll never stop till the Emergency Council dissolves forever. If the Scarlet Ace is indeed dead, so much the better for me. If he’s still alive so much the worse, by God, for the Scarlet Ace!”
It was fifteen long years since the war in France ended; but the bronzed profile in the fitful gleam of the cigarette looked curiously youthful—curiously like that younger man of the A. E. F that a mud-caked battalion of hellions had given a proud nickname. Jack Lacy—the Iron Major!
SCARLET ACE: THE HOUSE OF CRIME, by Theodore A. Tinsley
Originally published in All-Detective Magazine, October 1933.
John Tattersall Lacy strolled leisurely out of the ornate foyer of the Cloud Building and walked to the corner. The sunlight was warm and bland. Fifth Avenue was a gay riot of moving color. Lacy smiled as he surveyed the teeming thoroughfare; loveliest street in the world, he thought. He crossed the avenue and swung aboard a northbound bus.
He looked almost foppish in his well-tailored suit of soft gray with a fresh white carnation at his lapel. A close observer would detect a hint of the military in his erect carriage, the keen eyes, the set of his shoulders. No one, however, except a handful of trusted men, would ever dream that behind the smiling eyes of this quiet ex-major of marines was the keen, ruthless brain that had organized Amusement, Inc.
High up in the pinnacle of the Cloud Building, in a duplex penthouse that was guarded like a fortress, was the major’s headquarters. From that penthouse originated all of those secret smashing raids that had brought fear and hate to the criminal underworld.
The exploits of Amusement, Inc., were never chronicled in the newspapers. The ordinary citizen in the street took it for granted that the sudden death epidemic that had been striking left and right among the city’s thugs and killers was due to the clever police work of a reform commissioner.
Tattersall Lacy was well content to let the police department take all the credit it wanted. It suited the major to have his real mission cloaked. He had accepted as a patriotic duty the invitation to fight organized racketeers with the only weapon they understood—bullets against bullets, death against death.
One after another the snarling denizens of the underworld were being quietly exterminated. Now John Tattersall Lacy found himself locked in a deadly life-and-death grapple for mastery with the criminal chief of them all—a man of whom the crooks themselves spoke only in whispers. Step by step the major had climbed over the bodies of lesser rogues toward this master of organized crime. He was facing at last the mysterious unknown who wore a blood-red mask and left a sinister calling card on the stark bodies of his victims. The dreaded Scarlet Ace!
As he rode northward on the top deck of the bus Major Lacy’s smile deepened. Amid the bright sunshine and the hurrying Fifth Avenue crowds the threat of the Ace seemed something fantastic, unreal. Yet it was real enough! Charlie Weaver, the major’s grim-faced little chief of staff, had urged Lacy with all seriousness to take an armed bodyguard with him to the art gallery.
Lacy’s reply was characteristic. “My dear Charles, don’t be an utter ass! I assure you that I haven’t the faintest intention of doing anything bloodthirsty this lovely spring morning. I’m merely going to have a preview of some remarkably fine etchings and, if my modest pocketbook can stand it, to buy one or two.”
“The invitation to attend the exhibition might be a trick,” Weaver said stubbornly. “We’re all marked men, Jack! Why not let Ed Corning or Pat Harrigan go along with you? It won’t do any harm.”
Harrigan’s massive red head nodded. “My feeling, Jack, is that it’s highly dangerous for any of us to go out of headquarters alone. I mean that!”
“Tosh!” said the major softly. “I grant you that our mysterious friend, the Ace, is a devilish shrewd customer. But I hardly think he’ll pump lead at me in a public art gallery. I don’t think that either the Ace or any of his thugs will turn up there.”
Lacy’s laugh was gently amused at the thought.
“I doubt very much if the fellow really knows an etching from a mezzotint.”
At this time, of course, the major hadn’t the faintest suspicion of the existence of the charming Zita. Afterwards he admitted with a wry smile that she had tricked him rather neatly. The odd affair of the wedding ring should have warned him. Perhaps he should have recognized her voice at once. But the damned etchings were so lovely and Zita herself so warmly beautiful a woman that for once Lacy’s watchfulness wavered.
He first noticed her at the curb in front of the ornate Fifth Avenue building that housed the art gallery. She was stepping out of an expensive looking limousine. A chauffeur in dark livery held the door obsequiously open and bent toward her for a moment. To Lacy’s amazement he saw the chauffeur hand the woman a circlet of smooth platinum—a wedding ring—which she immediately slipped onto the third finger of her left hand. It was done so swiftly and smoothly that the major wasn’t absolutely sure whether the chauffeur had really handed the ring to her or whether she had withdrawn it deftly from her own handbag.
For possibly ten seconds or so Tattersall Lacy stood stock-still on the sidewalk, staring at the woman. Her beauty was of the type that compels attention. She was no ordinary pretty girl in a smart Fifth Avenue frock. She was the serene embodiment of what most pretty girls never become—a really beautiful woman. Her hair and eyes were dark, her skin flawless, the curve of her figure a smooth, graceful perfection.
She flushed faintly and lowered her eyelids as she noticed Lacy’s frank, unabashed stare. Lacy flushed himself as he turned away. It was not like the well-bred and sophisticated major to gawp at people like a country bumpkin. He walked briskly into the building’s lobby and waited for the elevator.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the woman cross the tiled floor from the street entrance and approach the bank of elevators.
A white light bloomed and bronze doors slid apart. Lacy entered the car and the woman followed. The operator’s voice was a bored grunt:
“Floor, please?”
“Eight,” Lacy said.
The woman hesitated. In a low voice she asked: “On what floor are the etchings being exhibited?”
“Eight,” repeated the operator.
“Thank you.” The woman glanced at Lacy and their eyes met for an instant.
At the
eighth floor the major stepped courteously back and allowed her to pass ahead of him into the gallery. A sleepy looking attendant glanced up from his desk and Lacy’s companion purchased a catalogue.
In another moment he forgot all about her in his pleasure over the really remarkable collection of etchings. In the back of his mind, however, lurked a faint feeling that the voice of the woman was vaguely familiar. Something in the low, modulated tone, something in the calm, clear enunciation… With a shrug he dismissed her from his mind.
His eyes encountered a slim little nude by Dedagne on the wall in front of him. Lovely, by gad! He studied the etcher’s inscription: Silver Birch. Beside a young birch tree the artist had etched a slim virginal figure with bud-like breasts, wind-tossed hair and arms flung aloft. The major sighed as he looked at the price…
He became aware, suddenly, that someone was standing close behind him. The thick carpet had deadened the sound of footfalls. Without turning his head, Lacy squinted backward out of the corner of his eyes. Instantly he relaxed. It was the woman of the elevator. She was staring over his shoulder at the little nude, her eyes bright with appreciation.
Lacy felt a faint stirring of his pulse. She was so close to him that he was conscious of the warmth of her body. A faint perfume enveloped him. A disturbing scent, something oddly unlike perfume.
To his amazement a mist seemed to float in front of his eyes momentarily and the etching on the wall wavered and dissolved. He seemed suddenly to be falling endlessly through space—queer, green space. The sensation was not unpleasant.
Dimly he felt something strike him on the back of his skull. The green fog cleared for a second and he realized that he was flat on the floor. He was conscious of a faintly familiar voice. It seemed to be calling to him—
With an effort he forced up heavy eyelids. He was aware of a lovely face bending over him.
The Pulp Hero Page 10
