The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original)

by Unknown

  He was speaking, and he finished his talk before he shifted his glance toward the door. His voice was soft, gentle, an even monotone, and there was no expression in it. It was his eyes which gave the expression, a cold, deadly intensity of purpose.

  “Yet you delayed the signal. In some manner he escaped, and he left by neither the front nor the rear.”

  The girl chose her words carefully, and there was a slight break in her voice, the faintest inkling of hysterical panic which she was fighting to control.

  “Perhaps … perhaps he was … hiding on an upper floor.”

  “Not unless he had been warned,” came the colorless tones of the man’s voice. “And if he was warned, who warned him?”

  The slight noise I had made in opening the door had been overlooked. Temporarily it had slipped the mind of this man with the eyes of ice. So engrossed was he in probing the mind of the girl that he had forgotten to raise his eyes. Had he done so he would probably have taken me for one of his guards. The light threw a sharp glare on the desk, but the rest of the room was in gloom.

  I advanced to the table.

  The girl was weakening. I could see her head droop slightly. What her face told I knew not, but that sag of her head and neck told me much.

  With an effort, scowling his impatience, the man with the eyes of ice tore his gaze from the girl and raised his glance.

  “Well?” he said, and his tone was as colorless as ever, notwithstanding the impatience which gleamed from his eyes.

  “Well,” I answered, “very well, thank you. In fact I am quite well, and I dropped in to say good evening.”

  I was watching him like a hawk, looking for that telltale start, that swift tightening of his facial muscles which would show that I had jarred his self-control; but there was nothing. His face remained as passive as though it had been so much pink putty. His eyes were so hard and flinty one would have expected no change there. His voice remained well modulated.

  “Ah, yes, Mr. Jenkins, himself. Come in and draw up a chair, Jenkins. We were discussing you.”

  I walked on in, my eyes on his hands. The rat-faced criminal lawyer had plunged his hand into a side pocket of his coat, but I had no fear of him. He wouldn’t have the nerve to shoot until the last minute, and I didn’t intend to let them get the lead. I was going to play my own cards for a while.

  “I dropped in to tell you that you’re all wrong. I waited outside this girl’s apartment for a second, just to see if there was to be any telephoning or signaling, and I heard the curtain roller go up and down three times. That meant a machine in front, and a machine in front probably meant a guard in the rear. That’s all there was to that.

  “However, I wanted to get in touch with you, and when I saw you were going to have this girl down here so you could throw a scare into her, I decided to trail along and have a little conversation on my own hook.”

  The big man at the desk brushed his hand slightly as though he was waving the girl with the mole entirely to one side, and his eyes never left my face.

  “Jenkins, I offered you once before, and I offer you again, a place with me, a place where you can make much money, have men beneath you to do the dangerous work, and can really find some market for the brains you have.”

  I nodded easily.

  “Just after you made that offer before you double-crossed me by holding out some papers on me.”

  This time there was just the faintest flicker of expression in the gray-blue eyes. It was a slight twinkle of appreciation. He had a sense of humor, this man with the dead-white skin and the ice-cold eyes.

  “You should talk of a double-cross. You slipped something over on us that time that was so fast no one ever caught it. It happened that I made a price for certain things in that case, the opening of a safe, let us say. The rest of it was up to the others. How you slipped it over on them I don’t know. The lawyer swore he destroyed the will with his own hands and that he watched you to see there could be no substitution, and yet …”

  I broke in.

  “Never mind all that. You double-crossed me at the start by holding out two papers on me. What came afterward was my method of registering disapproval. Now I want those papers and I want them right now, or I’ll register a hell of a lot more disapproval, and you’ll find yourself sitting in the gutter.”

  The eyes were cold and hard again.

  “Jenkins, I deliver those papers when and how I choose. However, you will throw in with me before you leave this room or you’ll leave it feet first.”

  I hitched my chair closer and let my own eyes bore into his.

  “Either you give up those papers or else you will suffer some very great inconvenience.”

  I could see his fingers gripping the edge of the desk, gripping until the nails were white, but, aside from that, there was no sign of emotion.

  “Jenkins,” he said in his quiet, well-modulated voice, “you interfered a few days ago and cost me a rake-off on fifty thousand dollars. I can’t allow you to be in a position to do it again. I have given you your chance.…”

  I didn’t let him finish. I had played my cards, had given him warning, had let him know that I could find him, could walk into his den at will. The next trick would have been his and I would have lost my lead—my lead and my life.

  I swung my wrist and the leather bag filled with packed, sandy loam crashed down upon the desk light. The bulb crashed and the room was in darkness.

  I jumped back toward the door, but didn’t make the mistake of opening it. The hall was lighted, and I would have been filled with lead before I had got over the threshold. However, I’d counted on that sleepy gunfighter who was supposed to be on guard, and I’d counted on the lawyer.

  I figured right both times.

  The lawyer fired at the chair in which I had been sitting, fired three times. Then there was sudden silence.

  “Fool!” exclaimed the man with the eyes of ice.

  There came running steps, and the door crashed open. The man with the two guns had burst into the room ready to go into action, and encountered a wall of inky darkness. The momentum of his rush carried him well past the sill, and I was standing by the door, ready, waiting, planning on just such a move.

  As the man plunged in I gave him a quick thrust from behind, pushed him farther into the room, and, shielded behind his stumbling body, I darted through the door and down the hall. The lawyer fired again. The mere fact that he might kill his own guard meant nothing to him. He was desperate. What the bullet struck I didn’t find out. I was on my way. It didn’t strike me. It would have taken sheer luck for that bullet to have stopped me as I darted around that doorway with the stumbling guard blocking the view.

  The man in the back was still asleep when I went past. I had handed him a pretty solid tap, and I figured he would be good for an hour or more. The dog barked again, but that was all. If the pistol shots had been heard in the neighborhood they had probably been taken for the back-fires of an automobile exhaust, for the windows were all dark.

  I chuckled to myself as I gained the street. The fat bird with the ice-cold eyes would have to change his headquarters again. Beyond doubt I was annoying him greatly. Also I had this to remember. He appreciated his danger now. It was either he or I. The city was too small for the both of us. One or the other was doomed.

  However, there was one thing in my favor. He had gone too far with his jewel exhibit to back down now and that gave me a trail that might be followed.

  My first problem was a place to hide out. Every rooming house, every hotel would be watched. Through some means he had set the police on my trail, that my California immunity meant nothing. If he could keep me in jail until after the looting of the jewel exhibit he would be satisfied. However, I didn’t intend to have either the police or the crooks get on my trail. I had money, and one can do much with money.

  I purchased a furnished house from a real estate agency, a bungalow out of the way in a quiet neighborhood.

  The police
and the crooks expected me to try some disguise, to go to a hotel or rooming house; but they hardly expected I would go and buy myself a little bungalow in the respectable residential district. That slipped one over on them, and disposed of that part of the problem.

  Shadowing Schwartz was different. They had tipped him off, and he was one cagey bird. I didn’t try to keep him in sight all the time, but tried to cut in on him at certain hours, particularly before he started his jewelry store canvass in the mornings, and after he had knocked off at night.

  The more I saw of that jewelry exhibit the more puzzled I became. The newspapers started to play it up big. Day after day they featured the show, mentioned the social distinction of the persons who had received invitations to the opening, wrote of the manner in which Edith Jewett Kemper would be gowned, and handed out a blah-blah of the usual slush.

  I sat snugly ensconced in the little bungalow and read the papers, read the frothings of the society editors concerning the importance of the coming show, and took my hat off to the man with the ice-cold eyes.

  One thing puzzled me. The newspapers featured the elements of protection which the exhibit was taking to safeguard their patrons from loss, and it was good.

  At night the gems were to be parked in a big safe which had been loaned from one of the prominent safe companies as an advertisement. This safe would be set in the middle of the floor, and at least five men would be constantly on duty watching the safe.

  If the safe had been placed in one end of the room, so that only its doors were visible to the watchers, that would have been one thing. Putting it in the middle of the floor was another. I’m a handy man with boxes myself, but if there was any way of crashing into that lead-box with all those precautions, then I sure was a back number. I couldn’t figure one out, and that’s where I shine, figuring out ways of springing boxes that are seemingly impossible.

  Schwartz was a hard baby to handle, and I didn’t get the line on him I wanted until the day before the exhibit was to open. That afternoon he slipped out to a downtown garage and inspected an armored truck. This truck was plastered with a sign that was painted on cloth and hung clean across both sides, JEWEL EXHIBIT ARMORED TRUCK. It was the real thing, too, that truck. Steel sides, bulletproof glass, railroad iron bumpers protecting it on all four sides, protected radiator and hood and solid rubber tires. It would take a stick of dynamite to faze that truck.

  I didn’t dare stick around Schwartz or the garage. Just a quick once-over and I was on my way, stepping on the gas of a car I rented by the week. Automobile shadowing was all I dared to do with the whole gang laying for me, and watching Schwartz in the hope that they’d get track of me through him.

  Time was getting short and I was stumped. I could tell that there was something big in the wind, but I couldn’t tell what. The head of that organization wasn’t going to monkey with any small stuff. The eight or ten thousand dollars that might be made from the exhibit wouldn’t prove interesting. What they intended to do was to get the cream of all the fancy jewelry in the city gathered in one place so they could make a regular haul. An organization the size of that wasn’t interested in small profits.

  I went back to my bungalow and sat down at the table to do some figuring. For once in my life I was worried. I was going up against a game I couldn’t fathom. The other man was holding all the cards, and he was holding ’em close to his vest. My only hope of dominating him was to bust up this proposed gem robbery; and my only hope of being able to live or to get the papers for Helen was in dominating that man with the icy eyes.

  I sat and thought, a pencil in my hand tracing aimless lines along a sheet of paper which I had spread before me, and then, suddenly, the answer came to me, came in a flash, and made me want to kick myself all up and down the main street of the city. It was so absurdly simple that there was nothing to it.

  When a magician walks down through the audience, borrows a watch from the man in the center aisle, and then turns his back to walk up to the stage, he has an interval of several seconds during which his hands are concealed from the audience. He can switch that watch a hundred times over, and yet, when he appears on the stage, facing the audience, waving a gold watch in his hand and asking the spectators to keep their eyes fastened upon it, no one thinks of questioning the fact that it is the original watch he is holding; no one wonders if perhaps he has not already performed the trick, if the substitution has not already taken place.

  It was the same way with the jewelry exhibit. The precautions for taking care of the gems after they had arrived were featured so elaborately that one always thought of the possibility of a robbery taking place then and at no other time. There was a two-fold reason for that. One reason was that it would tend to make the jewelry stores send but one clerk to act both as clerk and guard, and the other, and main reason, was that no one would pay too much attention to the armored truck that was going to take the jewels there. The words “armored truck” had a potent significance, a lulling sense of absolute security. An “armored truck” was like a bank vault. The very words suggested probity, safety, integrity, and yet, after all, an armored truck was merely an inanimate something. It was the driver of the armored truck who had the power of directing the car as an agency either for good or evil.

  Even as the details of the scheme were formulating themselves in my mind I was working on a counter scheme, and busying myself with proper preparations. A suit of overalls and jumper from under the seat of my car, a little grease smeared over my bare arms, a derby hat stuck on my head at an angle, and I was ready. A couple of good cigars also came into the picture.

  Thirty minutes later and I was at the garage where the armored bus was stored.

  “Howdy,” I told the night man.

  He was a sleepy-eyed, loose-lipped, single-cylinder sort of a bird, and he squinted a suspicious eye at me. I fished out a cigar, handed it to him, took another for myself and squatted beside him while I tendered a match.

  We smoked in silence for a minute or two, and then a man came in for his car and the night man had to do ten minutes’ work moving and shifting. By the time he came back he looked on me as an old acquaintance.

  “Mechanic?” he asked sociably.

  I nodded and jerked my head toward the armored truck.

  “Yep, that’s my baby. I’m the bird that the agency sends out to go over this elephant every ten days and see that it’s in runnin’ order. I understand it’s goin’ out tomorrow, and I’ve been a little slack lately.”

  The suspicious look came into his eyes again.

  “Orders is not to let nobody get near that bus.”

  I nodded and blew a smoke ring.

  “Sure, they have to be careful. There’s a guy named Schwartz that’s got it rented and you can let him get into it or drive it out, but don’t you let nobody else get near it, not unless he’s got a written order from Schwartz—or from me.”

  That registered. He looked me over again with a new respect. I said nothing further but smoked on in silence. Another man came in after a car, and the night man started moving and shuffling the stored cars about. That was my cue! I parked my stub on the bench and sauntered over to the armored bus.

  Schwartz had the key to the thing and it was locked tight as a drum, and that bothered me. I had been hoping against hope that it would be open. As it was, I melted around behind it and plastered myself between the rear of the car and the wall of the garage. The gas tank was protected by a sheet of armor, but the cap was in plain sight, and so was the gauge. The tank was full of gasoline. All set, ready to go.

  All in all it didn’t look like an easy job, and I had a hunch the guy that was acting as night man, car mover and watchman all combined would be curious enough to come over to see what I was doing. It was going to require quick thinking, and quick action. Somehow or other I had to get that car fixed so it would only run about a certain distance.

  A little faucet-like arrangement at the bottom of the gas tank proved the best bet. It was the
faucet which turned on an emergency gas tank when the big tank ran out. I had a kit of tools with me, and I set to work.

  In ten minutes I had short-circuited the emergency gas tank, and had inserted a tight-fitting length of copper tube in the gasoline line to the carburetor. This tube was carefully measured and stuck up to within half an inch of the top of the gasoline level in the main tank. I figured out the approximate gas consumption of the mill, and was willing to bet that bus would run just about three miles and then stop. When that pipe was pulled out it would start going again, but until that was done the armored bus would be anchored. It wasn’t as smooth a job as I’d have done if the bus hadn’t been locked up, but I fancied it would do. The fact that the sign advertising the car as that of the jewelry exhibit was printed on cloth was a big clue. I fancied I knew what was going to happen all right, and if I was right there was going to be a little surprise party the next day.

  Next I went and purchased a siren, one of the kind that are limited by law to the use of police and fire cars. I installed this on my rented car myself, and was ready to go.

  Sometime after midnight I woke up with an uneasy feeling that everything wasn’t just as it should be. The house was dark and still, a clock ticking away the seconds in the living room, a gentle night breeze coming in through the open window and swaying the white lace curtains. At first I thought that it must have been one of those curtains which had brushed across my face, and had awakened me with that strange feeling that danger was present.

  I looked out of the window, feeling the cool breeze on my face. The yard showed faintly in the weird light of a distant street lamp. The stars were blazing steadily overhead. The gray shapes of other houses loomed like intangible shadows … and then came the sound again.

  It was a faint scraping noise, a gritting, cutting sound which meant much to my trained ears. Someone was cutting a hole in one of the glass windows of the adjoining room, with a diamond glass cutter.

  Hurriedly, noiselessly, I arose, got into my clothes, arranged the pillows in the bed so that they represented a sleeping form, and slipped into the closet. There was a shelf in that closet, just over the door, and I climbed up on it silently, swiftly. I was unarmed, but I really needed no weapon. Above that shelf was a small trap door which led into the space between the ceilings and the roof. If necessary I could get through there; but I wanted to see what was in the wind. On that shelf I could stoop and peer into the bedroom. If anyone should enter the closet I could drop on his shoulders as a cougar drops from a tree upon a passing deer.