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

by Unknown

  “You mean that when the accident happened at the track, Mr. Smith, or Andrews, or whatever his name was, told the police that Uncle Dave, the dead man, was named Andrews, while he pretended to be Uncle Dave?”

  “That’s it. Andrews and your uncle had actually met in that fishing camp, just as Andrews told me. They got to be friends and came to New Orleans together. Your uncle had told Andrews enough about his affairs for Andrews to know your uncle lived on an income, and that a good part of it was soon due. Andrews himself was in a tough hole financially. When the accident happened he saw his chance. He and your uncle were about the same size, both blond. They didn’t look particularly alike, but they looked enough alike for a vague description to fit either one of them. And nobody knew them.

  “Everybody took Andrews’ word for it that he was McCracken. He wrote his wife in New York, and when your uncle’s body arrived, Mrs. Andrews buried it just as if it were her husband, and collected his insurance. The insurance company didn’t investigate. They had the word of the New Orleans authorities that Andrews had been killed in an accident. Andrews was waiting for your uncle’s checks to arrive. He had some old signatures of your uncle’s which he could trace as endorsement—and that would be that. Then he could leave, change his name again, and your uncle would vanish. Or with good luck he could just keep on living on your uncle’s income.”

  “And then?”

  “Then this matter of the bonds turned up. Andrews wouldn’t go to Boston, so Blumberry came here. I think he came intending to kill your uncle, but he swears no. With your stubborn uncle out of the way it would have been easy to persuade you, the heir, to sign over the bonds. Unless he meant to kill your uncle, there wasn’t any need for having those skeleton keys that would open his hotel room, for walking up the stairs so he wouldn’t be seen, for having the knife ready.

  “What Blumberry didn’t know was that you had come to New Orleans two days before and phoned and frightened Andrews so bad he was hiding, but still trying to collect the mail with the checks in it. So Blumberry went up and waited in your uncle’s room for him to come. It was this Roscoe Jancey who came instead.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “He was a member of a New York firm that was interested in the bonds. For two days he’d been trying to locate McCracken, or the man he thought was McCracken. He’d hired a private detective. Finally he got the idea the desk clerk was lying and that McCracken was in his room all the time. So he went up and turned the doorknob and went in.

  “Blumberry says they argued and learned they were there on the same business and finally fought. Personally I think Blumberry was standing by the door and let him have it as he came in, thinking Jancey was your uncle, and not seeing his mistake until too late. Anyway, he killed him.

  “He must have just been slipping down the stairs as I came and he saw me. He was sure you saw him as he started across the lobby, and realizing that would break his story of not having been there, he marched up to the desk, asked for McCracken’s room number, and headed for the elevator. He knew I would probably still be in the room, and he might be able to make me a fall guy for the killing.”

  “But what was he doing on Andrews’ balcony later?”

  “He had begun to guess the truth after the redhead came in asking for Art. I’d forgotten about her saying, ‘Art, darling,’ until I found the drawings in that house near City Park. Then I remembered that Arthur Andrews had been a small-time artist.

  “Anyway, Blumberry figured if he was right, and if somebody was pretending to be McCracken but wasn’t, and if he could turn that fellow over to the police, all would be swell. He would have the real McCracken dead and he would have somebody convicted of Roscoe Jancey’s death—because it would look as if Jancey had recognized Andrews as a fake and Andrews had killed him.

  “Blumberry traced Andrews the same way I did, by his wife’s address in the paper. She’d given the cops her maiden name, but she’d had to give them her right address. Blumberry crawled up to the balcony to get a look; about that time I scared Andrews into hiding on the balcony, and there they were together, both listening to what I told the redhead.”

  Mary asked what they were going to do to Andrews.

  “I don’t know. A mild jail term. I’ll do what I can to help, because he came through for me on the balcony. He wasn’t a killer, not even when he had you and didn’t know what to do with you. He was afraid you’d find out he was pretending to be McCracken. Even after I arrived and we both knew he was a fake, he didn’t kill us.”

  Mary and I both got to thinking about how we felt when we thought he was going to kill us, and we polished off our drinks in a hurry.

  I felt better, then, and warmed up.

  “I think we’ll have another,” I said. “To McCracken.”

  “You mean Smith.”

  “Another one for Smith,” I said. “And then one for Andrews, so we’ll have him right under whatever name he prefers.”

  Her Dagger Before Me

  Talmadge Powell

  TALMADGE POWELL (1920–2000) was born in Hendersonville, North Carolina, and attended schools in North Carolina, Tennessee, New York, and California, studying creative writing at the University of North Carolina. He settled into a career as a professional writer fairly early, selling his first mystery story to 10-Story Detective, which ran in January 1944. Although he produced stories in various genres, more than two hundred of his pulp and digest-size magazine stories were in the mystery, crime, and detective field, both under his own name and using various pseudonyms, including Jack McCready, Anne Talmadge—for the novel Dark Over Acadia (1971)—Robert Hart Davis, Robert Henry, Milton T. Lamb, and Milton Land. For four novels about Tim Corrigan, he employed the familiar Ellery Queen byline used by several other writers. His short-story-writing career spanned four decades, and many of his original, character-driven tales were adapted for Alfred Hitchcock Presents; they were collected in Written for Hitchcock (1989).

  Of the nine mystery novels under his own name, five were about Ed Rivers, a tough but goodhearted Tampa-based private eye, including his first book, The Killer Is Mine (1959), followed by the much-praised The Girl’s Number Doesn’t Answer (1960), as well as With a Madman Behind Me (1962), Start Screaming Murder (1962), and Corpus Delectable (1964).

  He was the guest of honor at Pulpcon in 1996.

  “Her Dagger Before Me” was published in the July 1949 issue.

  EXCITING MYSTERY NOVELETTE

  Pleasure-hungry Allene’s gay step-mother had nothing but time, a gigolo, and money on her hands—Allene’s money!

  Her Dagger Before Me

  Talmadge Powell

  CHAPTER ONE

  COLD MEAT

  I HAD BEEN ON a divorce case, shadowing a man most of the night before; so I didn’t do anything about the screaming telephone for the first few seconds except try to swim back down in the sticky molasses of sleep and wish whoever was calling would go away.

  The phone kept snarling. After a minute I was wide awake and in that state going back to sleep in the muggy, noonday Florida heat was out of the question. I heaved myself on the edge of the bed and shouted at the phone, “All right, I’m coming!”

  The apartment was sodden with heat; I’ve been in Tampa a long time but I never got used to the heat.

  While I’m padding toward the phone, I might as well tell you who I am.

  The name is Lloyd Carter, age forty-four. I’m beginning to add an inner tube around my middle, and I don’t like to be kidded about the way I’m starting to bald on the crown of my head. I live in a run-down apartment on the edge of Tampa’s Ybor City. The bed is lumpy, the furniture old. It’s just a place to sleep. I got in the private detective business twenty-one years ago. I never intended to make it a lifetime career, but I guess now I will.

  I’ve never married, which is maybe what put the pickles in my disposition. I had a girl when I was young, in New York, that I might have married, but she ran off with a punk I was tryi
ng to nail. He was cornered in Indiana by state police, made a run for it, but a fast freight got in the way of his automobile. She was in the car.

  New York wasn’t the same after that, and I came south. I’ve been with Southeastern Detective Service over sixteen years.…

  I picked up the telephone.

  “Lloyd?”

  It was the old man’s voice. Henry Fayette, who ram-rodded Southeastern, should have retired a long time ago. He’s seen too much of the seamy side of life streaming through his agency. It’s in his voice. But he never could retire because he’s a spender and is always scratching hard to keep the wolf at arm’s length.

  “Lloyd,” his tired voice said, “I want you to come to the office right away.”

  I didn’t argue. He’d known how late I’d worked last night. If he hadn’t had to call me, he wouldn’t have.

  I went in the bedroom and dressed. Baggy slacks, sweaty sport shirt. And the knife under my left armpit. I’m naked without the knife. My work puts me across the tables now and then from Ybor City characters. The only weapon some of those lads understand is a knife.

  I was going to have to get my laundry out today. I wrote a note for the girl, left it on the kitchen table. I opened the icebox, drank a pint of beer, and headed for the office. The heat was terrible. Already beads of sweat were like a film of hot oil all over me.

  The agency’s offices are in a sagging brick building that was young when Tampa was young, on the lower end of Franklin Street. I opened the door to Henry Fayette’s office. He was behind his desk, a tall, gaunt, rawboned gray man in a gray tropical suit. He stood up. The girl sitting at the end of his desk watched me cross the office. Without looking directly at her, I sized her up.

  She wasn’t exactly plain, but she wasn’t beautiful, either. She was tall and slim, with a nice enough figure and face and rather drab brown hair. Just a girl who could lose herself in a crowd, with a sort of hungry look on her face that might mean she was hungry for food—or love. Her clothes, white linen frock and bag, indicated she had enough money to eat regularly.

  The chief introduced us. Her name was Allene Buford.

  “Lloyd,” Henry Fayette said with a small, tired gesture of his hand, “Miss Buford wants us to do something about her step-mother and a chap named Buddy Tomlinson. You might repeat the details, Miss Buford, to Lloyd as you told them to me.”

  She sat on the edge of her chair, hands in her lap, and gave me the details. Her voice was calm, even, but it was belied by the cold fire deep in her eyes.

  It was about the average sordid mess. This Allene Buford’s father had been a fairly wealthy man. Allene’s mother had died ten years ago, and her father had remarried six years later, all of which was normal enough. But the sordid part began when the old man died. In his will, he left provisions for Allene to have an income, not too large. The bulk of his fortune, Emagine Buford, Allene’s step-mother, was to hold until the girl was thirty—seven years from now.

  “My father seemed to have some foggy idea that I wouldn’t be capable of handling almost a million dollars until I was at least thirty.”

  “And what happens then?” I asked her.

  “Emagine is to come into two hundred thousand. I am to have the rest of the money.” Her face tightened, and I leaned back with a sigh, knowing that now we were getting around to the sordid part.

  Emagine Buford and her step-daughter had come south for the winter, to St. Petersburg, the resort city across the bay from Tampa. She had joined the throngs, a woman who had outlived her responsibilities. Who had nothing but time, money, and restlessness on her hands. She’d met Buddy Tomlinson. From Allene’s description, he was one of those boys who had perpetual youth, a husky physique that, at forty-five, was still trim, a disarming smile, coal black hair, and one of those little-boy faces.

  The fact that she was almost fifteen years Buddy’s senior hadn’t worried Emagine any. “She’s like a school girl,” Allene said, “with her first beau. She’s buying bathing suits and evening gowns and seeing Buddy Tomlinson constantly.”

  “And where do I enter? What do you want me to do?” I looked at her over the flame of my lighter as I touched it to a fag.

  Allene looked steadily at me. “I want you to mark up Buddy Tomlinson so he’ll never be handsome to any woman again!”

  A second or two ticked away. She saw the old man about to speak. “Of course,” she said, “I know you can’t be hired to do that. But I know Buddy’s trying to marry Emagine. He has plenty of chance of success. My money is melting away fast enough in her keeping, and if Buddy marries her, there won’t be anything for me when I’m thirty!”

  “Could Tomlinson and Emagine manage that?” I asked the old man.

  “You know anything can be managed with enough money and the right lawyers,” he stated flatly.

  “But it’s my money!” For the first time a bit of panic showed in Allene’s face. “He was my father; he made the money. Now it’s my money! You can’t let them do that to me!”

  “Will you wait outside for a minute, Miss Buford?” Fayette asked. The girl looked at him, then got up and went out of the office.

  “Lloyd,” Fayette said when she had closed the door behind her, “I want you to drive over to St. Pete with her. This is a sort of personal thing with me. I’ve known Emagine Buford for a long time. She used to live in Tampa. Then she went north to work, met and married Ollie Buford. Since she’s been back in Florida I’ve visited her a time or two at her place in St. Pete. That’s why the girl came here to us, I guess.

  “Emagine’s going through a phase in her second childhood, to my way of thinking, but I don’t want anything to happen to her. I want her to have a chance to wake up. See what kind of man Tomlinson is. See if he’ll scare. Then scare him.”

  “I’m flat,” I said.

  He grimaced, pulled out his wallet, hesitated, and handed me the lone twenty from the worn leather sheath. “Use my car. It’s parked in back of the building. See Buddy Tomlinson, phone me back, and take the rest of the day off.”

  I said thanks. When I left his office, he was punching tiny holes in his desk blotter with the tip of his letter opener.…

  The girl rode with her head slightly back, catching the breeze that blew in the gray sedan. Her hair rippled. Her lips were parted a little as she looked out over the bay. “Tomlinson has a beach place,” she said. “On Coquina Key. We’ll probably find him there.”

  That was about all the talking we did. But I kept looking at her. She wasn’t beautiful. Yet there was—something.

  Coquina Key isn’t the real name for the island, but we’d better call it that. It’s one of that long chain of islands west of St. Petersburg, all connected by bridges and causeways, that separate Boca Ciega bay from the Gulf of Mexico.

  We drove through the snarled, slow traffic of St. Petersburg, took the Central Avenue causeway, stopping once at the toll gate and then driving on across the white, four-lane parkway that had been pumped up out of Boca Ciega bay. Then we were on the keys.

  The islands are a lot alike, long fingers of land stretching north and south for miles, but just wide enough crosswise to separate Boca Ciega from the Gulf. Where they’re settled, the keys are built up heavily, with cabanas, frame boat houses, frame cottages, and a development here and there of bungalows. But in the unsettled stretches, the islands are desolate, white sand and shell and, closer to the boulevard, grown over with weeds, scrub pines, cabbage palms, and palmetto. Over the whole put a vast blue sky, torrid sun, surround with sparkling blue water and whispering surf on the white beaches, populate with easy-living people, put a fleet of fishing boats in the inlets, with a fine cabin cruiser at a private pier on a private beach here and there—and you’ve got the picture.

  Toward the lower end of Coquina Beach we turned off the boulevard on Sunshine Way. The street was wide, white concrete, curving gently toward the cluster of squat bungalows half a mile down the island. It looked like a brand-new development, the white land s
o clean it was barren. Here and there small Australian pines and royal palms had been set out.

  Buddy Tomlinson lived in the CBS—stucco over cement block—near the end of the street. The whole row of houses was painted a light pink. I opened the car door. Allene opened hers.

  “Hadn’t you better wait out here?”

  “No,” she said, “I’m coming in.”

  I shrugged and we went up the walk together. I rang the chimes on the oak-stained door. Nothing happened. In the bungalow next door I could hear warm laughter, and in the background a radio playing softly.

  I rang four times in all. Then I walked around the side of the bungalow and looked in a window. I looked away quick, closed my eyes for a second. The first thing I saw when I opened them was Allene’s profile. She was standing close to me, looking through the window, as I had done.

  “He’s dead,” she said calmly.

  I didn’t ask if it was Buddy Tomlinson crumpled in there in the living room. The description fitted like a glove. Allene had her wish. He’d never be beautiful to any woman again.

  “Well,” Allene said, “we won’t have to worry about him any longer.” Then her eyes rolled up in her head. Her face was very white. And before I had time to think, she was keeling over.

  I caught her, carried her out to the car. There was a half-empty pint in the glove compartment. I figured that ought to bring her to. “You,” I told her limp form, “are one hell of a funny sort of dame!”

  I was tilting the pint bottle to Allene’s lips when a nearby male voice said, “Anything wrong?”

  I looked at the bungalow that was next door to the one in which Buddy Tomlinson lay dead. I remembered the music and casual laughter I’d heard.