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

by Unknown

  Spade said: “You thought Floyd would tackle him, and one or the other would be killed. If Thursby was the one, then you were rid of him. If Miles was, then you could see that Thursby was caught, if he didn’t go away then, and you’d be through with him. That it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And when you found that Thursby didn’t mean to tackle him, you borrowed the gun from him and did it yourself. Right?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “And then you thought Thursby would be nailed for the killing.”

  “Yes, and—and they’d hold him at least till after Jacobi had come and I’d had a chance to get the falcon.”

  “And you didn’t know then—you didn’t even suspect—that Gutman was here hunting for you; or you wouldn’t have wanted to shake your gunman. You knew Gutman was here when you learned Thursby had been shot. Then you knew you needed another protector, so you came back to me. Right?”

  “Yes, but, oh! Sweetheart, it wasn’t only that. I would have come back to you sooner or later. From the first instant I saw you I knew—”

  Spade said tenderly:

  “You’re an angel. Well, if you get a good break, you’ll be out of San Quentin in twenty years, and you can come back to me then.”

  She took her cheek away from his, drawing her head far back to stare up at him without comprehension.

  He was pale. He said tenderly: “I hope to —— they don’t hang you, precious, by that sweet neck.” He slid his hands up to caress her throat.

  In an instant she was out of his arms, back against the table, crouching, both hands spread over her throat. Her face was wild-eyed, haggard. Her dry mouth opened and closed. She said in a small parched voice: “You’re not—” She could not get more words out.

  Spade’s face was yellow-white now. His mouth smiled and there were smile wrinkles around his glittering eyes. His voice was soft, gentle. He said:

  “I’m going to send you over. The chances are you’ll get off with life. That means you’ll be out again in twenty years. You’re an angel. I’ll be waiting for you.” He cleared his throat. “If they hang you I’ll always remember you.”

  She dropped her hands and stood erect. Her face became smooth and untroubled except for the faintest of dubious glints in her eyes. She smiled back at him, gently.

  “Don’t, Sam, don’t say that even in fun. Oh, you frightened me for a moment! I really thought you— You know you do such wild and unpredictable things that—” She broke off, thrust her face forward, and stared deep into his eyes. Her cheeks and the flesh around her mouth shivered, and fear came back in her eyes. “What—? Sam!” She put her hands to her throat again and lost her erectness.

  Spade laughed. His yellow-white face was damp with sweat and, though he held his smile, he could not keep softness in his voice. He croaked:

  “Don’t be silly. You’re taking the fall. One of us has got to take it—after the talking Gutman and Cairo will do. They’d hang me sure. You’re likely to get a better break. Well?”

  “But—but, Sam! You can’t! After what we’ve been to each other you can’t—”

  “Like hell I can’t.”

  She took a long, trembling breath. “You’ve been playing with me? Only pretending you cared? You didn’t, at all? You didn’t—you don’t—l-love me?”

  “I think I do,” Spade said. “What of it?” The muscles holding his smile in place stood out like wales. “I’m not Thursby. I’m not Jacobi. I won’t play the sap for you.”

  “That is not just,” she cried. Tears glistened in her eyes. “It’s unfair. It’s contemptible of you. You know it was not that. You can’t say that.”

  “Like hell I can’t,” Spade said. “You came into my bed to stop me from asking questions. You led me out for Gutman and Cairo yesterday with that phoney call for help. Last night you came here with them, and waited for me outside, and came in with me. You were in my arms when the trap was sprung, so that I couldn’t have gone for a gun if I’d had one on me, and couldn’t have made a fight of it until too late if I had wanted to. And, if they didn’t take you away with them, it was only because Gutman’s got too much sense to trust you except for short periods when he has to, and because he thought I’d play the sap for you and, not wanting to do anything to hurt you, I couldn’t do anything to hurt him.”

  Brigid O’Shaughnessy blinked her tears away. She took a step toward him and stood there looking him in the eyes, straight and proud.

  “You’ve called me a liar,” she said. “Now you’re lying. You’re lying if you say that, in spite of anything I’ve done. Down in your heart you don’t know I love you.”

  Spade made a short, abrupt bow. His eyes were becoming bloodshot, but there was no other change in his damp and yellowish, fixedly smiling face.

  “Maybe I do,” he said. “What of it? I should trust you? You who arranged that nice little trick for—for my predecessor, Thursby? You who knocked off Miles, a man you had nothing against, in cold blood, just like swatting a fly, for the sake of ruining Thursby? You who’ve never played square with me for half an hour at a stretch since I’ve known you? I should trust you? No, no, darling. I wouldn’t do it, even if I could. Why should I?”

  Her eyes were steady under his, and her hushed voice was steady when she replied:

  “Why should you? If you have been playing with me, if you do not love me, there is no answer to that. If you did, no answer would be needed.”

  Blood streaked Spade’s eyeballs now, and his long-held smile had become a frightful grimace. He cleared his throat huskily and said:

  “Making speeches is no damned good now.” He put a hand on her shoulder. The hand trembled. “I don’t care who loves who. I’m not going to play the sap for you. I won’t walk in Thursby’s and Jacobi’s and God knows who else’s footsteps. You killed Miles and you’re going over for it. I could have helped you by letting the others go and standing off the police the best way I could. It’s too late now. I can’t help you, and—I wouldn’t if I could.”

  She put a hand on his hand on her shoulder.

  “Don’t help me, then,” she whispered. “But don’t hurt me. Let me go away now.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m sunk if I haven’t got you to hand to the police when they come. That’s the only thing that can keep me from being sunk with the others.”

  “You won’t do that for me?”

  “I won’t play the sap for you.”

  “Don’t say that, please.” She took his hand from her shoulder and held it to her face. “Why must you do this, Sam? Surely Mr. Archer wasn’t as much to you as—”

  “Miles,” Spade said hoarsely, “was a —— —— —— ——. I found that out the first week we were in business together, and I intended to kick him out as soon as the year was up. You didn’t do me a damned bit of harm by murdering him.”

  “Then what?”

  Spade pulled his hand out of hers. He no longer either smiled or grimaced. His wet yellow face was set hard and deeply lined. His eyes burned madly. He said:

  “Listen. This isn’t a damned bit of good. You’ll never understand me, but I’ll try once more, and then we’ll give it up. In my part of the world when your partner’s killed you’re supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it. Then it happens that we were in the detective business. Well, when one of your employees, or a partner, or anybody connected with your detective business is killed, it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it. It’s bad all around, bad for that one agency, and bad for every detective—bad all around. Third, I’m a detective, and expecting me to run any criminal down and then let him go free is like asking a dog to catch a rabbit and then let it go. It can be done, all right, and sometimes it is done, but it’s not the natural thing.”

  “But—”

  “Wait till I’m through and then you can talk. Fourth, no matter what I wanted to do no
w, it would be absolutely impossible for me to let you go now without having myself dragged in with Gutman, Cairo and the kid. Next, I’ve no reason in God’s world to think I can trust you, and if I did this, and got away with it, you’d have something on me that you could use if you ever happened to want to. That’s five of them. The sixth would be that, since I’d also have something on you, I couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t decide to shoot holes in me some day. Seventh, I don’t like the idea of even thinking that there might be one chance in a hundred that you’d played me for a sucker. And eighth—but that’s enough. All those on one side. Maybe some of them seem unimportant, but look at the number of them. Now on the other side we’ve got what? All we’ve got is the fact that maybe you love me and maybe I love you?”

  “You know,” she whispered, “whether you do or not.”

  “I don’t. It’s easy enough for me to be nuts about you.” He looked hungrily from her hair to her feet and up to her eyes again. “But I don’t know what that amounts to. Does anybody ever? But suppose I do: what of it? Maybe next month I won’t. I’ve been through it before—when it lasted that long. Then what? Then I’ll remember you and I’ll think I played the sap. And if I did it and got sent over, as I probably would, then I’d be sure I’d been the sap. Well, if I send you over I’ll be sorry as hell—I’ll have some rotten nights—but that’ll pass.”

  She raised her hands to his cheeks and drew his face down.

  “Look at me,” she said, “and tell me the truth. Would you have done this if the falcon had been real, and you had been paid your money?”

  “What difference does that make now? Don’t be too sure that I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be. That kind of a reputation might be good business, bringing in high-priced jobs and making dealings with the enemy easier.”

  She looked at him, saying nothing.

  He moved his shoulders slightly and said: “Well, a lot of money would have been at least one more item on the other side of the scales.”

  She put her face up to his face. Her mouth was partly open, with lips thrust a little out. She whispered: “If you loved me you’d need nothing more on that side.”

  Spade set the edges of his teeth together and said through them: “I won’t play the sap for you.”

  She put her mouth against his, slowly, her arms around him, and came into his arms.

  She was in his arms when the doorbell rang.

  Spade, left arm around Brigid O’Shaughnessy, opened the corridor door. Lieutenant Dundy, Detective Sergeant Polhaus and two other detectives were there.

  Spade said: “Hello, Tom. Get them?”

  Polhaus said: “Got them.”

  “Swell. Come in. Here’s another one for you.” Spade pressed the girl forward. “She killed Miles. And I’ve got some more exhibits—the boy’s guns, one of Cairo’s, a black statuette that all the hell was about, and a thousand-buck bill that I was supposed to be bribed with.” He looked at Dundy, drew his brows together, leaned forward to peer insolently into the Lieutenant’s face, and then burst out laughing. “What the hell’s the matter with your little playmate, Tom? He looks heartbroken.” He laughed again. “I bet, by God, when he heard Gutman’s story he thought he had me at last!”

  “Cut it out, Sam,” Tom grumbled. “We didn’t think—”

  “Like hell he didn’t,” Spade said merrily. “He came up here with his mouth watering, though you’d have sense enough to know I’d been stringing Gutman.”

  “Cut it out,” Tom grumbled again, looking uneasily sidewise at his superior. “Anyways, we got it from Cairo. Gutman’s dead. The kid shot him up just before we got there.”

  Spade nodded.

  “He ought to have expected that,” he said.

  Effie Perine put down her newspaper and jumped up from Spade’s chair when he came into the office at a little after nine o’clock Monday morning.

  He said: “Morning, angel.”

  “Is that—what the papers have—right?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He dropped his hat on the desk and sat down. His face was pasty in color, but its lines were strong and cheerful, and his eyes, though shot with blood, were clear.

  The girl’s brown eyes were peculiarly enlarged and there was a queer twist to her mouth. She stood beside him, staring down at him.

  He raised his head, grinned, and said mockingly: “So much for your woman’s intuition.”

  Her voice was queer as the expression on her face. “You did that, Sam, to her?”

  He nodded. “Your Sam’s a detective.” He looked sharply at her. He put his arm around her waist, his hand on her hip. “She did kill Miles, angel,” he said gently, “offhand, like that.” He snapped fingers of his other hand.

  She moved away from his encircling arm as if it had hurt her.

  “Don’t, please, don’t touch me,” she said brokenly. “I know—I know you’re right. You’re right. But don’t touch me now—not now.”

  Spade’s face became pale as his collar.

  The corridor door’s knob rattled. Effie Perine turned quickly and went into the outer office, shutting the door behind her. When she came in again she shut it behind her.

  She said in a small, flat voice: “Iva is here.”

  Spade, looking down at his desk, nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “Yes,” he said and shivered. “Iva. Well, send her in.”

  Ten Carats of Lead

  Stewart Sterling

  STEWART STERLING, THE PSEUDONYM of Prentice Winchell (1895–1976), was born in Illinois but lived for many years in Florida. He began his career as a journalist and editor of trade publications before becoming the writer and producer of more than five hundred programs for radio, mostly mystery series, as well as writing for film and television. Among his many radio shows were Bill Lance (which ran on West Coast stations in 1944 and 1945) and the early series The Eno Crime Club, which first aired on CBS on February 9, 1931, as a five-times-a-week show; it underwent several format and title changes during its five-year run. Written by Sterling, it featured pure detective stories about Spencer Dean, known as “the Manhunter”; beginning in 1954, Sterling wrote a series of nine mysteries under the Spencer Dean pseudonym. His best-known screenplay was Having Wonderful Crime (1945), very loosely based on the 1943 John J. Malone novel by Craig Rice, starring Pat O’Brien, George Murphy, and Carole Landis.

  Of his more than four hundred mystery stories, forty are about Chief Fire Marshall Ben Pedley, the tough investigator who hunts down arsonists with single-minded intensity; he also starred in nine novels, beginning with Five Alarm Funeral (1942). His other major series detectives are Gil Vine, a hotel dick at the Plaza Royale, in eight books, and department store detective Don Cadee in the Spencer Dean novels. Other Winchell pseudonyms are Jay de Bekker and Dexter St. Clair.

  “Ten Carats of Lead” was published in the August 1940 issue.

  A “SPECIAL SQUAD” STORY

  Ten Carats of Lead

  Stewart Sterling

  It was a case for the Homicide men according to all the rules, but Mike Hansard of the headquarters hockshop squad knew it had germinated under the three gold balls of his own special province, and that it could only end when he pulled the correct “blue card” from his “suspected” file.

  CHAPTER ONE

  DEATH ON THE DIAMOND EXCHANGE

  IKE HANSARD STOOD just outside the door as two white-clad interns wheeled the operating carriage into the wardroom. They left the room silently without bothering to transfer the man in the short-sleeved hospital shirt to the cot.

  A grave-eyed nurse touched Hansard on the sleeve. “He won’t be out of it for half an hour. You might have a little while with him, then.”

  The plainclothesman eyed the strained, weather-beaten face on the pillow. “No chance to pull through?”

  She shook her head. “An ordinary man would’ve died on the table. He …”

  “Yeah.” Mike’s jaw was rocky. “Guy gets toughened up after twenty ye
ars on a beat. Makes it that much harder to check out.”

  The nurse moved quietly down the long corridor. Mike sat down on the cot.

  The dying man groaned, stirred a bandaged arm uneasily. Mike had a similar bandage on his own arm, where they’d made the transfusion. But he didn’t have three bullet holes in his guts, the way Tom MacReady did. Mike would have given a lot more than a pint of blood to help Tom, if he’d had the chance.

  MacReady had gone to bat for him plenty of times. There was that night when Mike was new to harness, and the Cassati crowd had cornered him in a blind alley and put the lead to him. Tom hadn’t even been on duty, but he’d heard the gunfire and come in blasting, just as Joe Cassati was about to dot Mike’s eye. There would be a three-inch scar, somewhere on MacReady’s chest, under those bandages, that the older man had carried ever since as a memento of Cassati.

  Mike had been close to Tom in those rookie days. They both reported to the reserve-room in the same precinct house. Both had similar ambitions. But Mike had passed his qualifying examinations and gone on up. Tom just couldn’t seem to make the grade, but that was just because some of the gold-braid boys couldn’t get it through their thick skulls that MacReady had what it takes to be a first-class detective and then some.

  They knew now—too late. And they’d be out in force at the funeral, to give honor to a cop who’d faced a murderous pistol fire in performance of his duty. Hansard ground out his cigarette and cursed helplessly. A hell of a lot of good official honors would do Tom’s widow and ten-year-old kid!

  he man on the pillow muttered incoherently and rolled his head from side to side. He opened his eyes, stared vacantly up at the detective. It was another five minutes before there was a light of recognition in his gaze; then he reached out feebly for Hansard’s hand.

  “Hello, Mike,” he whispered hoarsely.