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

by Unknown

  Keenan’s black brows drew together. “Why?”

  Feeney took a bottle of Scotch from a table drawer, put it in his overcoat pocket, and patted the flap down gently. “Company, Joe. Don’t worry about why. If we wanted to jolt you it could be done here, easy and nice, with a rope around your neck and no squawk. Since we ain’t doin’ that you oughta see we don’t want to crate you. Not unless you get tough and ask for it.”

  Outside a car horn honked twice. Feeney straightened the derby with his left hand and motioned with the automatic gently towards the door. They went down the steps in single file, and descended the outer stoop in the same order, meeting no one. There was a small sedan purring at the curb, with the back door open.

  “In,” Feeney grunted, the automatic close against Keenan’s back, where the shine of it was hidden. Keenan bent and entered, with the fat man right after him; from the front seat the driver leaned back and pulled the door shut.

  They drew away from the curb, swung south on Lexington Avenue, and began to slip smoothly by dark, empty streets. On Sixtieth they turned east, slipping under the black shadow of the elevated structure on Second Avenue to the ramp of the Queensboro Bridge.

  Feeney was half facing him, with the gun against his side, low, hidden by both their bodies. The dark span of the bridge unrolled before them under the long line of lights; moving very fast, they flashed off the Long Island side and threaded out Queens Boulevard. It was after one, store fronts dark, pavements empty.

  Joe Keenan’s mind tried to consider it all calmly, without fuss. It was possible that Feeney and his friend might be Jerome Peale’s men. If they were, how had they heard about his death so soon? And if he was to be killed in reprisal for Peale, why hadn’t they murdered him back in his apartment, where, as Feeney had said, it could have been done quietly, safely? Thinking it over, Keenan decided they weren’t Peale’s men; at least it didn’t seem likely. And if they weren’t, what did they want him for; what were they going to do?

  He couldn’t hit on any answers. In the front seat, keeping the speedometer gyrating uneasily at fifty-five, the hard-faced man swung left from the Boulevard to one of the Parkways, and they raced away from monotonous rows of two-family houses to dark open stretches of woodland. An hour went by; the road lost its wide smoothness, narrowed to a single lane affair with trees crowded close on either side. Joe Keenan’s sharp face tightened; his light-colored irises seemed to draw in and compact. In a day or two he’d be freed, Feeney had said. What was going to happen during that time? What was so important that he must be kept out of the way?

  His mind flashed to Ellen Bridges, to Major Russell. Were Feeney and his friend after the diamonds—and the thirty-five thousand in cash the girl was to bring to the Englishman tomorrow at twelve? For if Peale had known where the Englishman was hiding out mightn’t others know too? And if they knew, if they planned— A small lump of muscle formed along his jawbone. Ellen Bridges, alone, helpless—murdered, probably, as soon as they took the money from her.

  The thought roused him to a cold rush of anger, and in the wake of that, desperately and almost without hope, an insane determination. Under Feeney’s careful eyes he got a cigarette from his pocket, then fumbled for a match.

  Before them the road swung up the hill in a sharp S curve, indicated by a sign that flashed past his eyes. In the front seat the hard-faced man had not yet circled the wheel for the first turn; he was bent slightly forward, the base of his skull showing under close-cropped hair. Striking the match, Keenan saw it, and his plan clicked into place in his brain. Desperate, insane maybe—but a chance.

  Feeney watched him, wary, alert, as the tiny match flame speared up through the darkness. Holding the match cupped, his left hand concealing the right, Keenan got his middle finger under the sliver of wood and rested it there. When the man in front slowed for the turn—

  He slowed. Keenan lifted his face from his cupped hands, leaving the match still burning, and blew a thin funnel of smoke casually upward. The wariness in Feeney’s eyes relaxed—and at that instant Joe Keenan’s middle finger flipped the burning match straight between his eyes. With the same movement his left hand swung out and down with the weight of his body behind it to crash solidly against the base of the driver’s skull.

  Blinded by the match, the fat man fired twice. But Keenan’s lean body had flung itself forward and down the instant before the shots, to its knees against the front seat. Feeling the breath of the shots on his neck he whirled and brought his right fist up slashing, from the floor to the point of the fat man’s chin. It was a terrific blow that almost lifted Feeney completely out of his seat; his eyes lost focus, lost consciousness, as he slumped limply back.

  It all happened in a moment, in a blur of motion, as the car yawed across the road. Keenan spun to the wheel, knocking the sprawled out form of the driver from it as the concrete guarding wall on the left side of the road shot into view. They crashed with a grating scream of sound from the front fender as it crumpled like paper against the solid barrier. Keenan was slammed forward, bruising his chest on the front seat; glass fell in a showery tinkle as one of the headlights smashed. Then he yanked back the brake, and they stopped.

  car topped the hill and raced down towards them as he clambered out to the running-board. Ten feet off it slowed, and a startled white face looked out at Keenan, at the automatic he picked from the floor, where the fat man had dropped it. Then the car was past, racing on again with an accelerated roar of sound.

  The fat man, Feeney, was moaning, rolling his head loosely from side to side as Keenan pulled him out. The driver was still out cold, and Keenan laid them flat on the grass, by each other, and went back to the car. When he slipped behind the wheel the motor responded readily enough, and he put it in reverse, circled it in the road, and left it facing back the way they had come.

  As he got out of the car again, Feeney was sitting dazedly up, propped by his arms. He cursed sullenly, indistinctly, as he rubbed his jaw. The coldness in Keenan’s gray eyes hardened and became more evident; looking up, Feeney saw that coldness and stopped suddenly.

  Keenan said in a quiet voice: “That’s fine. Be nice, fellow. Who wanted me snatched? Who hired you and your friend for the job?”

  “Go to hell,” the fat man snarled, with an attempt at bravado. He tried to hold Keenan’s stare and failed; after a moment his own flinched uneasily away. He began to lick his lips.

  Holding the grip of the automatic, Keenan weighed the barrel in his free hand. He went on in his quiet tone: “Maybe you’ve never been pistol whipped. It isn’t nice. Me, I’d talk. Who hired you?”

  Feeney did not answer. Joe Keenan’s eyes glittered and grew small. He asked again, curiously soft: “Who hired you?”

  “Listen,” the fat man wheezed, his eyes pathetically earnest. “I never had a thing against you, Keenan. I told you that. We weren’t going to hurt you. Honest to—”

  Down the road there was a faint motor sound that grew rapidly louder. As Keenan turned two motorcycles whined around the curve of the hill and squealed to a stop opposite the parked car. A big state trooper swung off one and crossed the road cautiously, his partner coming at the car from the side.

  “Drop your gun,” he told Keenan. “What’s going on here?”

  Keenan obeyed, gave his story briefly. The auto that had raced by five minutes before would have reported them in the next town, of course. And if he had had only five minutes longer with the fat man—Feeney would have talked; he’d have been glad to. And now nothing had been cleared up; the motive behind it all remained as vague, as apparently pointless as ever.

  In the troopers’ barracks Keenan gave his story again, presented credentials. But it was five o’clock before he was free to go, and the fat man and his friend had been led away to cells. They both kept obdurately silent; they knew nothing, could tell nothing.

  In the chilly station, where he had to wait two hours for the earliest commuters’ train, Keenan went over it again in hi
s mind. And presently it began to hang cloudily together. It was robbery, of course; get him out of the way and in the morning they could have picked up Ellen Bridges easily enough, after she had drawn the money from the bank.

  But who besides Russell knew of that? Of course, there was no surety that Peale had come to the house alone; perhaps some of his accomplices had been there, staying in hiding until he and the girl had gone. They could have murdered Russell last night and taken the stones; they could even be waiting there at the cottage for the girl to come.

  On the train he dismissed it tiredly. The vital part, the thing that would have made it jell, was missing. And, without that, it was useless racking his brains. At his own apartment he showered quickly, shaved, and changed his clothes. Then he got out his roadster and met Ellen Bridges at her store on upper Fifth Avenue.

  She greeted him coolly, and said she did not need his help. Without answering her, Joe Keenan grasped her arm and drew her out to his roadster. He drove to the bank and went inside with her, studied the street outside carefully before allowing her to emerge again, for that disturbing sense of uneasiness still clung to him. But nothing untoward happened; they wound their way downtown and caught the eleven-o’clock ferry. On the ride across Keenan told her the events of the previous night, and before he was half through her coolness vanished in a swift rush of solicitude.

  “They might have killed you, Joe. You shouldn’t have—”

  “But they didn’t,” he pointed out. “And I’ve got a hunch that I’ve figured the lay all wrong. I’m going to drop you on the other side, Ellen. If they’ve killed Russell and are waiting there—”

  She said, firmly, “I’m going with you. And it’s not going to do you the slightest bit of good to argue about it.”

  It didn’t. Three-quarters of an hour later, when he stopped the car before Major Russell’s bungalow, she was still sitting determinedly by his side. In a moment the major himself appeared in the doorway, younger, more somber, against the morning sunlight. He bowed to Ellen, gave Keenan a quick, hard grip. Leading a way to an inner room he took a chamois bag from a wall safe and upended it on the table. “The stones are there, my dear. If everything else is ready—”

  The girl nodded. “I have the cash. We were afraid something had happened to you, Major. I was nervous all the way down.”

  “To me?” White teeth flashed in a smile. “Why should it? No doubt that unpleasantness last night worked on your mind. Now if you would like to examine the stones—” He pushed them across the table to her.

  Keenan watched him, the uneasiness, the sense of mistrust, moving in his mind again. When the girl began: “That’s hardly—” he cut in emotionlessly: “Examine them.”

  “By all means.” The major’s voice was hearty. “We must be businesslike, my dear.” His hand flung out, tossed over the huge tawny diamond Keenan had seen the night before. “Begin on that beauty.”

  Looking at Keenan, the girl flushed angrily. “Of course I know, Major, that—”

  “Examine them,” Joe Keenan said.

  She gave him a cold, annoyed glance. Major Russell bowed, his blue eyes amused. “Perfectly all right, my dear. Mr. Keenan is merely being a good business man. Please do as he suggests.”

  Her head bent for a long moment; when she raised it again and put away her glass her tone was apologetic. “Of course it’s the one I saw last night.” From the leather portmanteau at her side she drew neatly rectangular folds of bills. “And here is your money. Count it if you wish.”

  The major bowed gallantly. “I never doubt a lady, my dear. Perhaps”—his eyes dwelt with a thin trace of mockery on Keenan—“I am not what you call a smart guy over here.” Carelessly he riffled fingers through the heap of diamonds, and Keenan, his gaze lowered, watched them, fascinated by their flickering swiftness. “You may get in touch with me this week at the Savoy. I’ll do all I can to help in case of any difficulty.”

  Ellen Bridges flashed him a smile, but Joe Keenan’s sharp face was set in an ugly scowl. Smart guy! Last night Jerome Peale had said something like that. What was it? He had figured Joe Keenan was like him, dumb enough to—Russell had shot him there, before he could finish. Dumb enough to what?

  he major was smiling at him, offering his hand. Joe Keenan ignored it. He asked out of straight lips: “You’re a good shot, Major?”

  Russell smiled faintly, his eyes puzzled. “Tolerable. I’ve won a match here and there. Nothing spectacular.”

  “Yeah.” Keenan nodded slowly. “You’re a good shot, maybe a swell shot. Last night you killed Peale, although a good shot wouldn’t have had to do that. He could have shot Peale’s arm, his side.”

  “Forgive me,” Russell said coldly, “if I don’t see the point.”

  “You’ll see it,” Keenan said grimly. “You killed Peale because he was going to talk. He was saying he figured I had been dumb enough to—then you shot him. If he’d finished I think he’d have said dumb enough to let you fool me the way you did him. And you killed Peale to shut his mouth, not to protect yourself. Winging him in the arm would have done that.”

  Gravely, without surprise, the Englishman faced him, a big man, tanned and quiet, calm, steady eyed. “So you see a catch,” he said. “Are you sure there is one?”

  Keenan growled: “It was there from the start. You’re pretty fast with your hands. I’ve seen worse sleight of hand men on the stage. Maybe you were in that racket at one time but this paid you better. Every time you pulled it off it meant thirty or forty grand. I never figured out how you could get a gun out so fast while Peale was swinging his around; but say it was in your sleeve—it was plenty small enough to fit there—and a decent magician could flick it out faster than light.

  “And a decent magician,” he went on, “could let Miss Bridges look at the big diamond now, the genuine one, and then switch it with a fake that looked exactly like it when you took it away from her to replace it in the pile. Satisfy us that one was good and you knew we wouldn’t bother to look at the rest.”

  There was a pause. Ellen Bridges’ dark eyes flickered from Keenan to the bearded man, to the stones. She reached out to the tawny one and silence lasted for three breaths. Then she cried: “Oh, it isn’t the same. It’s paste!”

  Keenan’s smile was grim. “A swell racket, Russell. You had two ways to work it. The first was to get rid of me and slug the girl when she came here alone with the money. The other was to switch the stuff, and when your punks missed up on me last night you had to work it this way to get the money. You fooled Peale and lots of others. When he started to squawk last night, kidding me for being a smart guy before he gave the inside, probably, on how you had switched the stuff on him too, you fed him a steel slug to shut his mouth.”

  Russell said: “Yes,” in a clipped, hard sound. His eyes had lost all depth, become pinpoints of blued metal. His right arm was before him, raised slightly, the sleeve hanging loose. “You are right. I’m fast with my hands, Keenan—fast enough to kill you before you can wink an eye. That’s why you and the girl will get up very carefully and back into the closet. That’s why you’ll keep your hands over your head.”

  Russell was standing close against the other side of the table. Keenan sat directly across from him, carelessly slouched in his chair, long legs doubled.

  “Get up,” Russell said softly. “You and the girl. Don’t move your hands.”

  “Please,” Ellen Bridges whispered. “Do what he says, Joe. The money isn’t—”

  Joe Keenan remained still. One of his hands was on the table—the other, the right, was hooked by a thumb in the top pocket of his coat. His gray eyes, narrowed and hard, watched Russell’s face. He did not answer him.

  There was a silence with only the sound of the girl’s breathing in it. There was something impassive but alert and poised in the stiff erectness of Russell’s body; he looked at Keenan for a long moment, expressionlessly. He said: “You’re a fool,” and his lips drew back slightly, tautly, into the lean brown c
heeks.

  Keenan saw the flicker in his eyes that preceded motion. Keenan made a little sidewise shrug as if about to get out of the chair. Watching Russell, his long legs, beneath the table, straightened, spread a little. Then, suddenly, he shot his body, feet first, beneath the table.

  Keenan’s toes hooked around Russell’s ankles. He jerked inward, and the Englishman slammed over backward on to the floor.

  Keenan scrambled upward, pushing with his left hand, the table before him as lead smacked lightly into the wood. Keenan flashed a glance around the table edge. Russell, on his back, the tiny pistol in his right hand, swung it for a second shot, and again the lead smacked without weight into the table. Keenan flipped his hand out and the big automatic spouted flame.

  The blue eyes emptied suddenly of light, of life—for an instant they looked back at Keenan with a blank, dead glitter. Then he collapsed fast, limply, and did not move at all.

  Keenan’s lean dark face stared down at him. He put his automatic back and got up and crossed to the phone in one corner.

  “Police headquarters,” he said, into the mouthpiece, winking solemnly at Ellen Bridges’ white face over it.

  It was late afternoon when he got into the roadster with the girl, reversed it around the police car parked outside it, and swung out to the road. Shaking a little, she pressed into his arm.

  “You—you’re a fool,” she whispered, looking up at him. “He might have shot you—killed you. I’m still shivering inside. Why did you do it?”

  “Why?” Keenan moved his shoulders slightly. “Maybe just because I didn’t like the guy. There was a contraption inside his sleeve that held the small pistol—all he had to do was jerk his elbow and a spring snapped the gun down into his hand faster than you could watch it. An outfit like that is part of the equipment of a sleight of hand man, only usually guns aren’t in them. Close enough a toy like that could kill any man the way it killed Peale.”

  “It could have killed you,” Ellen Bridges said softly. “And the money wouldn’t have meant that much to me, Joe.”