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

by Unknown

  I walked by the house, which was all lighted up, although it was hardly dark. Then I went across the town and somehow found myself around the house where they used to live. Then I saw my old place on the fence doing nothing, so I climbed up on it. And I started wondering.

  I was wondering what was the sense in living, and I was just winning the argument, when I heard a little noise.

  I looked up and saw Irene standing there.

  “What are you doing on the fence?” she asked.

  “Just wondering.”

  It sounded silly, but I was. I was wondering now if it was too dark to see the color of a fellow’s cheeks and I was hoping it was. Your cheeks just couldn’t help acting funny if you saw a girl as pretty as Irene standing there.

  “And we were wondering, too,” she said. “We were wondering where you’ve been all afternoon.”

  “Why, you see,” I said, and commenced fidgeting, so that I almost fell off the fence, “you see—you see, Irene, I just couldn’t go into anybody else’s house dressed like this!”

  “Nobody asked you to go into anybody else’s house,” she said.

  That made me feel terrible. I knew I’d received an invitation, but I decided they’d made a mistake and sent it to me instead of the right party. I tried to think of something to say, but nothing happened. I was just wishing the fence would bust and send me flying, when Irene spoke again.

  “Nobody asked you to go to anybody else’s house,” she said again.

  Then she reached up and gently took my hand. And in a very, very soft voice, she said:

  “Come home, Jackie boy! Come home!”

  That was a year ago. But Al’s and Miriam’s and Irene’s home has been my home ever since. In another couple of years, though, when I start getting rich, there’s going to be a secession from that home and another one started up with just two in it.

  Two to begin with, Irene just said— But that’s another story.

  Body Snatcher

  Theodore A. Tinsley

  THEODORE A. TINSLEY (1894–1979) was a third-generation New Yorker who, after serving in World War I, began a prolific career writing for most of the major pulp magazines, including Black Mask, Munsey’s, Black Aces, Detective Book, All Detective, Action, and several ghostwritten novels for The Shadow and Crime Busters, for which he created Carrie Cashin, the most successful female character in the pulps. A gorgeous and sexy private eye, she was the senior partner in the Cash and Carry Detective Agency in a series that ran for more than three dozen stories. She made her debut in the first issue of Crime Busters (November 1937); when the magazine changed its name to Mystery Magazine with the November 1939 issue, Carrie continued her adventures until nearly the end of the pulp; her last appearance was in the November 1942 issue. Tinsley’s other successful series included Major John Tattersall, who formed Amusement Inc. to fight crime with equally stalwart companions, and Jerry Tracy, the likable, Walter Winchell–type gossip columnist for the Manhattan tabloid the Daily Planet. Three of the twenty-six Tracy stories that ran in Black Mask served as the basis for movies: Alibi for Murder (1936) starred William Gargan, Marguerite Churchill, and Gene Morgan, and was based on “Body Snatcher” (February 1936); Manhattan Shakedown (1937), with John Gallaudet and Rosalind Keith, was based on “Manhattan Whirligig” (April 1937). Murder Is News (1937) was based on an unidentified Tinsley story and also starred Gallaudet.

  Body Snatcher

  Theodore A. Tinsley

  Jerry Tracy tries to switch a murder tag.

  HE SHABBY SUBURBAN bus jolted to a teethjarring halt and the driver growled with patient boredom: “Locust Avenue!”

  Jerry Tracy fell over a couple of legs and swung off the bus, conscious that his lips were wreathed in a faint, somewhat silly grin. If the boys at Times Square could see the Daily Planet’s famous little columnist out here in the sticks, could guess what was inside the two paper-wrapped parcels he was carrying, a jeering laugh would go up that would stop the hands on the Paramount clock! Wise guy Jerry, the lad with the case-hardened front—pulling a sentimental pilgrimage to a has-been, because no one else in roaring Manhattan would remember that today was her birthday.

  Ordinarily, on a trip out of town, Jerry traveled in his very dodgy Lincoln, with Butch behind the wheel making delighted horn sounds like the Normandie going down the bay. But today the Daily Planet’s columnist had dived inconspicuously into the subway, ridden out to the end of the line and taken a bus the rest of the way. The big package under his left arm was a birthday cake with a pink, gooey trail on top from a baker’s cornucopia that said: “Hey, hey, Sweetie!” The flat, oblong package had come from a five-and-dime; fluted pink candles with tin shields to catch the grease and pins to stick ’em in the cake.

  Sweetie Malloy had once been a name to adorn the most famous of the Victor Herbert operettas! Beauty, brains and a velvet soprano voice gone at last—turned out to a forgotten pasturage in a punk suburb. It angered Jerry to think that a woman like Sweetie Malloy should be permitted by fate to settle down in a one-horse, out-of-the-way dump like this.

  Chilly raindrops spattered on Jerry’s face. He stared at the gray sky and knew with a wry dismay that it was going to be one of those sullen all-night soakers. By the time he had rung Sweetie’s bell, the dark pavement of the walk was a dull, glistening black.

  The sight of Sweetie’s face in the half-open door made Tracy’s throat catch, as it always would at each new sight of her. The singer was gone but the woman remained. The pale yellow entry light fluffed her soft hair, was kind to the threads of gray. Time had padded the once taut line of her throat, had put wrinkles around the clear, amber eyes without disturbing their serenity or their fine courage.

  “Jerry!” she gasped, with a quick, frightened inflection.

  “How about letting a little guy in out of the rain?”

  “Why—yes … Of course! Come—come in.…”

  There was something in the manner with which she closed the door that put Tracy instantly on the alert, made him study the woman. She was scared to a sickish gray pallor. Stealth! That’s what the careful click of the closing door had meant.

  “Anything wrong, Sweetie?” he asked her, with a level stare.

  “Wrong? Why, what a question! With you here?” Her voice steadied. “Everything is right, my friend. Come, let me take your coat and—and bundles. Gracious, what huge packages! Don’t tell me they’re for—for me?”

  “Happy birthday,” Tracy said gravely. “We’ll open ’em later.” He put his hands on both her shoulders as she turned tremulously. “Listen, keed. Do we have to put on an act—you and me? I’m not Ole Olesen or Jake Kazinsky. I’m Jerry Tracy. I came all the way out here tonight because—well, just because … I’m asking you as an old friend, is anything wrong?”

  Rain, drumming at the closed window, made a softly sinister sound.

  “Everything is very, very right, my friend!” Her laugh quivered. “As—as right as rain.”

  He let the subject drop for the moment. “The big package is a cake,” he said. “Biggest damn’ cake in the local cakery. Candles in the smaller bundle. Later on we’re gonna let you inflate the lovely bosom—and Lord help you if you don’t blow ’em all out with one big foooof! I thought that after dinner—”

  “Dinner? Of—of course.”

  “Corned beef.” Tracy grinned. “Same as it’s always been, same as it always will be. Cooked à la Sweetie Malloy, with gobs of hot English mustard—”

  “And—and chopped cabbage with plenty of salt and pepper, lots of b-butter—”

  Her voice stopped quite suddenly. Her mouth twisted, began making queer, choking sounds. She turned away towards the couch. Tracy didn’t move an inch from where he stood. The sound of her harsh weeping made his heart ache, but he let her alone, let her have the thing out by herself. After a while her fingers stopped bunching the covering on the couch’s arm.

  “Jerry, will you do something for me—if I beg you as an old friend?”<
br />
  The look in her eyes made him wary at once. He didn’t reply.

  “I want you to leave this house immediately and go back to New York.”

  “No.”

  “You don’t understand. For your own sake, Jerry, you’ve got to go! Just forget that you were here.”

  “No.”

  He winced at the sound of her tragic laugh. “In that case, you will have to be convinced. You see, you’re not the only one with a surprise this evening. I—I have one for you.”

  Her cold fingers touched his and held on. She walked silently towards the stairs, and Tracy with her. Upstairs in silence, past the bathroom, down a short, incredibly ugly hallway to a closed door which, being opened, disclosed a curtained bedroom where twin boudoir lamps burned softly atop a dresser.

  Tracy stared at the room’s quiet charm, doubly quiet by reason of the lash of the rain against the shade-drawn windows.

  “So what?” he said in a puzzled voice. “Where’s the surprise come in?”

  “It’s—on the other side of the bed.”

  “It better be a good one, because— Oh!”

  He stopped short. His voice sounded like dried peas rattling in a tin pan. “How did this happen?”

  “It—it happened.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “I did.”

  Tracy said very softly: “I knew a guy once who used to lie the same way you do. The more he lied, the more truthful he looked. He never could fool me worth a damn.”

  erry Tracy bent downward above the sprawled body and surveyed it with narrowed eyes. The man had taken a small-calibered bullet almost exactly through the navel. The corpse was on his back, with his legs together, one arm trailing stiffly towards the dresser. The sleeve of the extended arm, Tracy noted, was quite rumpled. Black, silky hair, a little thin on top; a small black mustache that accented the curve of petulant lips. Eyelids shut tightly. Ears without lobes.

  Tracy straightened. “You killed this fellow, Sweetie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “For—for reasons I’d rather not discuss, Jerry.”

  “We’ll skip the reasons. You killed him about a half hour ago, eh?”

  “No,” Sweetie Malloy said calmly. “I killed him early this afternoon.”

  Tracy’s chuckle held no amusement. “Smart woman refuses to be tripped by cunning columnist.” He shook his head. “It’s no use lying, Sweetie. Too many other things to explain away. Corpse bled like a pig when he took the slug in the belly—but your rug’s nice and clean. The gun on the rug could have done it—maybe did do it—but not here, Sweetie. And you should never try to bend an arm after rigor mortis has set in; it makes a lot too many wrinkles in the sleeve and sets the mind of a bright little guy galloping with the proper answers.”

  “Nevertheless, I killed him here in my bedroom,” she said, stonily.

  “What were you planning to do if I hadn’t butted in?”

  “I was going to call the police and confess.”

  “Mmmm … Going to, eh? Since this morning?”

  Composure fled from her. “My God, Jerry—stop grinning at me like a—a hyena! Did you ever murder anyone—and—and try to decide what to do? Did you ever stare all day at a dead man and think—and think—till you almost went mad with terror and despair? And then, just when you had nerved yourself to take what you deserved—to have the doorbell ring and—and be tortured by a well-meaning friend who—”

  Tracy strode grimly forward as her voice mounted shrilly. With deliberate brutality he shook the hysteria from her.

  “Stop yelling. Do you want to get me into trouble, too?”

  “No, no!” she gasped. “Please go—please, Jerry! I—I brought you up here to show you how dangerous, how suicidal it would be for you to remain until—”

  “Save your breath. I won’t budge an inch. Who you trying to shield?”

  Sweetie didn’t reply.

  “Who’s the lad on the floor?”

  “A—a man named Phil Clement. He was a—lover of mine. If you’re familiar with the movies we were—living in sin.” The hard desperation went out of her voice suddenly. “Jerry, you must believe me! Phil Clement found out something that I couldn’t bear to have exposed, and he—he tried to blackmail me.”

  “I happen to know,” Tracy reminded her, “that the income you live on, Sweetie, wouldn’t attract a grasshopper.”

  “For your own sake, leave before I call the police.”

  “I’m staying here until I find out the truth.”

  There was a telephone on the low night table and Sweetie sprang towards it. Jerry wrenched the receiver out of her hand before she could utter a word. He slammed it back on the prong and held the sobbing woman motionless for an instant. Something in the wild stare of her eyes gave him a sudden idea.

  “If I promise to leave here in ten minutes, will you have one drink with me as a—a substitute for the birthday cake and the—the candles?”

  Sweetie Malloy nodded haggardly.

  “Where do you keep the liquor?”

  “Downstairs. Kitchen. There’s a bottle of Scotch in the little closet off the dinette.”

  She had sunk into a chair, her eyes closed. He closed the bedroom door softly, his mind grimly on the bathroom and the medicine cabinet. A sedative! There must be a sedative there! He was betting shrewdly on the habit that must have been a part of Sweetie Malloy at the height of her Broadway glamour. He had never known a celebrity yet who wasn’t an insomniac. Jerry was one himself. Late hours and the constant whirl of excitement made a sedative as familiar as breakfast food. And where would it be but in the medicine cabinet?

  He found a bottle of veronal on the lowest shelf. Soundlessly he tiptoed down the carpeted stairs, hurried to the kitchen. He made two stiff highballs. Into the glass with a slight nick at its edge he put a double dose of veronal. He placed both glasses on a tray and went back upstairs.

  Sweetie Malloy reached out listlessly as he touched her shoulder and presented the tray. She took the glass without the nick.

  “Whoa!” Tracy said humorously and plucked it from her fingers.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Ginger ale in the other one. Did you think I wouldn’t remember?”

  “Oh—thanks.”

  She took the one with the cracked rim and drank deeply. Finished it with a second long gulp. Tracy emptied his, too.

  “Bum Scotch,” she said faintly. “It’s the best I can afford.”

  “That’s all right, Sweetie.”

  She sat there holding the empty glass. Gradually the tense lines were smoothing out in her face. “You’re the best friend I have in the world,” she said dreamily. “I wouldn’t drag you into a mess like this for a million dollars. On my birthday—that’s funny, isn’t it?”

  “Pretty funny,” Tracy agreed.

  Rain drummed with insistent sound on the windowpanes. The overhang of the bedclothes hid the corpse from view. Tracy’s lowered gaze watched the relaxing fingers on the empty glass. Sweetie clutched sluggishly as the glass dropped into her lap. It bounced off to the floor and she regarded it for an instant with a blurred grimace. Suddenly her eyes widened, knowledge brightening them.

  “Jerry … What—what—”

  “Take it easy, keed.”

  She swayed unsteadily to her feet, her eyes struggling to retain their fleeting look of tragic accusation.

  “You’ve—you’ve doped—”

  “Sure,” Tracy said softly.

  e caught her weight as she pitched forward. Holding her limp body in his extended arms, the Daily Planet’s wise little columnist stared down at one of the few really fine women he had known in his life. Sweetie Malloy harboring a blackmailing lover? Sweetie Malloy killing a man—for any reason whatsoever? The idea was preposterous, sheer lunacy.

  Sweetie wasn’t that kind. She had had no furtive lovers—and only one marriage. It w
asn’t her fault that Jack Malloy was a rotter and a total loss. He didn’t even have dough! But she loved him, married him, stuck with him till the hour he died. She had saved enough from her own savings to purchase this cheap house in the suburbs and provide her with a meager income. Finished with the stage, forgotten by the blatant Broadway crowd, she had moved gallantly into obscurity. And this was the woman who was trying to assume the guilt for a sordid murder, who would have leaped into black, scandalous headlines but for Jerry’s providential arrival in the rainy dusk.

  He carried her sagging weight across to the bed and dropped her with a soft grunt. He had turned back towards the murdered man when he heard the peculiar sounds Sweetie Malloy was making. The high-necked dress was cutting into her throat, purpling her unconscious face. For an instant Tracy hunted unsuccessfully for hooks or buttons; then with a sibilant oath he whipped out his penknife and slashed the neck of the dress open.

  The tiny gold links of a locket chain were rising and falling with her labored breathing. Tracy frowned, reluctant to pry into her personal possessions. But the thought of the corpse on the rug swept away his sympathetic instincts. He drew the locket gently upward from the white cleft of her bosom.

  He snapped the flat case open and stared at the scrap of photograph inside.

  Sweetie herself. Taken evidently when she was a child of about fourteen. Self-possessed, mature-looking, very lovely.

  He was clicking the locket shut when a peculiar thought stayed his hand. The eyes—they weren’t Sweetie’s eyes. Even in the child’s face, they were harder, clearer, devoid entirely of that shy reticence that had always been Sweetie Malloy’s chief charm. He saw now that the hairdressing was too modern; the scrap of dress that showed in the photo was a fairly recent style that was not more than five or six years outmoded. Sweetie’s own childhood belonged way back in the early nineties; it couldn’t possibly be her. Then who was this clear-eyed, defiant little beauty? Tracy’s memory told him he had seen this kid somewhere, was dimly familiar with the contour of the face, especially the reckless flame of the eyes. She’d be about twenty now. A grown woman.