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

by Unknown

  Gentry said gruffly: “My head’s going around. Maybe it’s this air down here.”

  In the big room upstairs, Shayne knelt beside the bottles and straw. “Do you know where this came from, Myrna?”

  “Certainly. Those men fished it up out of the lagoon this morning, all sewed up in canvas. They talked about it in front of me. I think they planned to kill me, so they didn’t care what I heard.”

  “What did they say about it?” Shayne was shaking the bottles free of their straw casings and lining them up carefully on the floor.

  “It’s all in the bottom of the lagoon. A whole boatload. Just where Captain Samuels and his crew dumped it overboard as he described in his log-book. That’s why the authorities could never find any liquor here when they raided the place, the men said.”

  Shayne got up with a bottle dangling from each bony hand. He slipped them into the side pockets of his pants as Detective Yancy came hurrying in to tell Gentry excitedly: “We got the whole story from that man before he died. Grossman is dead, Chief. Buried in the cellar. And the real guy is—”

  “I know,” said Gentry wearily. “Get to a telephone and have Guildford rounded up right away. Leroy P.,” he snapped.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded, as he turned in time to see Shayne slide a third and fourth bottle into his hip pockets.

  “Making hay while the sun shines.” Shayne stooped stiffly to get two more bottles from the floor. “With you horning in I won’t have any chance at all at that stuff underwater.” He put two more bottles in his coat pocket and stooped for two more, looking wistfully at the remaining bottles on the floor. “This is the only fee I’ll collect on this case.”

  Myrna laughed delightedly. “I can carry a few for you.”

  Gentry turned away and said gruffly: “There’d better be a couple of bottles left for evidence when the revenue men get here.” He strode out and Shayne began stacking bottles in Myrna’s arms.

  “You owe me something,” he told her, “for the turn I got when I went back to my apartment and found the back door unlocked and the place burgled. I thought you were mixed up in it and your feature writing story was just a blind.”

  She laughed as she swayed slightly under the weight of eight bottles. “I wondered if you’d suspect me after they found the key and I admitted that it was to the back door of your apartment. I’m afraid they thought I was an immoral girl. I hated to have them take it away from me,” she ended gravely.

  Shayne promised, “I’ll give you another one,” and they staggered out with as many bottles as both could carry.

  Sauce for the Gander

  Day Keene

  DAY KEENE, BIRTH NAME Gunard Hjertstedt (1904–1969), was born on the south side of Chicago. As a young man he became active as an actor and playwright in repertory theater with such friends as Melvyn Douglas and Barton McClain. When they decided to go to Hollywood, Keene instead opted to become a full-time writer, mainly for radio soap operas. He became the head writer for the wildly successful Little Orphan Annie, which premiered on NBC’s Blue Network on April 6, 1931, and ran for nearly thirteen years, as well as the mystery series Kitty Keene, Incorporated, about a beautiful female private eye with a showgirl past; it began on the NBC Red Network on September 13, 1937, and ran for four years. Keene then abandoned radio to write mostly crime and mystery stories for the pulps, then for the newly popular world of paperback original novels, for which his dark, violent, and relentlessly fast-paced stories were perfectly suited, producing nearly fifty mysteries between 1949 and 1965. Among his best and most successful novels were his first, Framed in Guilt (1949), the recently reissued classic noir Home Is the Sailor (1952), Joy House (1954, filmed by MGM in 1964 and also released as The Love Cage, with Alain Delon, Jane Fonda, and Lola Albright), and Chautauqua (1960, written with Dwight Vincent, the pseudonym of mystery writer Dwight Babcock; it was filmed by MGM in 1969 and also released as The Trouble with Girls, starring Elvis Presley and Marlyn Mason).

  “Sauce for the Gander,” the first of only two Keene Black Mask stories, ran in May 1943.

  Sauce for the Gander

  Day Keene

  What did the puny little schoolmaster, Rheumatic Romeo John Cansdale, hide behind the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed bifocals? What sinister plan to bludgeon his wife to death? Careful, Cansdale! Take warning! Even a murder can be too perfect.…

  OR THIRTY-FIVE YEARS, six months, and seven days, ten of them mildly happy married years, John Benton Cansdale, A.B., M.S., respected chemistry instructor of the Laurell Park Senior High School, had lived a moral, upright, almost ascetic existence. That had been two years before she had come into his life.

  It was during breakfast on the morning after his return from the annual teachers’ convention in Detroit that he decided to kill his wife. It was strictly an economic move. Two years of playing hide-and-seek had proven conclusively to his modest savings that three cannot live as cheaply as two—especially when one of the three is demanding.

  The decision sufficed for the moment. It would be a simple affair. Cansdale prided himself on being too intelligent a man to erect an elaborate structure for Homicide to tear down. Too many murderers had tried to be too clever. When the proper moment had arrived he would simply hit her with a hammer, or whatever might prove handy.

  It had been a broken lock on the kitchen window and the headline in the morning paper that had given him his inspiration. His wife had asked him fifteen times to have the lock repaired. He had promised that he would. The headline in the morning paper stated in bold type: Killer Strikes Again.

  Cansdale read the details with morbid interest. For months a moronic killer had preyed upon the city, his victims always women. The police had sought for him in vain. No living person had ever seen him. The details of his crimes were revolting. Cansdale noted them with care. Passion was a strange and fearful thing. It warped and twisted a man from what he was into another being.

  He thought of the week just past, smiled grimly as his blood began to pound. The week had been most satisfactory. There could be no chance of scandal. He had been too circumspect. He was in love, but not a fool. He had read of too many carelessly conducted triangles that imprudence had turned into wreck-tangles leading to the divorce courts and the chair.

  He and Evelyn had been discreet. Both had their positions with the school board and their reputation to maintain. Still, they had managed. And once Mazie was out of the way—

  “Mazie.” He rolled the name on the tip of his tongue. It tasted bitter. Making full allowance for his youth, not to mention the ten-thousand-dollar dowry that she had brought him, most of which he had invested within the last two years in “little” things that Evelyn had wanted, Cansdale wondered why in the name of God he had ever married her.

  She had no soul, no intellect, no fire. She had never read Balzac, Boccaccio, or Rabelais. He peered furtively around his paper at his wife. He was her superior in every way—still at times he had a feeling he bemused her.

  She looked up as he peered at her. “More coffee, honey? Toast?”

  Tiny, dark, languid, after twelve years of his superior association, she still spoke with the unaffected southern drawl of the hills where she was born.

  Cansdale shuddered at the eager smile on her half-parted, too-full lips. He wanted it over with, wanted her dead.

  “No,” he told her curtly, “thanks. I’ll just make my first class as it is.” He folded his paper neatly and put it in his pocket so she wouldn’t see the headline.

  “I’ll get your hat and coat,” she offered.

  He watched her leave the room, her slim hips swaying beneath the outrageously tight dressing-gown that she affected because she believed it made her look like some movie actress or other. Confession magazines, the movies, bridge, they were her life. She had been a pretty girl. In a way, she still possessed a certain charm at thirty.

  “You’ll be home early t’night, honey?” she asked as she helped him with his coat.

/>   He wished that she wouldn’t call him “honey.” She called everybody “honey,” from shopgirls to the milkman.

  “No,” he told her primly as he took his hat. “You know that I always work on my book on Friday nights.”

  The book had been an inspiration. He had thought of it just after the school convention at which he and Evelyn had met. It was to be a new text book on modern chemistry that of necessity entailed a lot of research. Each Wednesday and each Friday afternoon he went directly downtown after school, asked for and received several weighty volumes, then promptly proceeded to lose himself among the shabby homeless and earnest students who always crowded the great reading-rooms. Five minutes before the closing hour he would return the volumes. What neither his wife nor the librarian could know was that he had slipped quietly out of the library to spend the intervening hours in a more pleasant study of human chemistry as applied to anatomical research.

  Mazie opened the hall door and raised her lips to be kissed. “It’s just that I don’t like to be alone,” she told him.

  Cansdale told her not to be a little fool. But he was pleased. Her fear of being alone had become a phobia that fitted perfectly into his plans. Her fear was well known to the neighbors. On the nights he was away from home she double-locked and barred both the front and the rear doors of their first floor apartment. On several occasions, when she had fallen asleep awaiting his return, he had been put to no little inconvenience trying to wake her up to let him in.

  “Perhaps I won’t work on the book next Wednesday night,” he relented.

  His wife seemed pleased. She smiled, almost shyly. “I do get so frightened here all alone.”

  Cansdale stooped to kiss her, paused to view his reflection in the hall glass. It wasn’t bad, he decided. With his new-grown wisp of mustache he looked something like Ronald Colman might have looked if he had been a little man and wore horn-rimmed, thick-lensed, bifocal glasses. He tried to read murder in his eyes and failed. His decision didn’t show. He, John Cansdale, had resolved to kill his wife and he looked no different than he looked on any other morning.

  The adjoining hall door opened and Cansdale kissed his wife full on the lips with more feeling than he had shown in months. It would be the last time that he would ever have to kiss her.

  Sergeant Mack, the detective sergeant who lived in the next apartment with his aged and widowed mother and who was just emerging from their door, apologized. “I’m sorry.”

  Mrs. Cansdale blushed. Cansdale smiled. “Not at all. We shouldn’t have been kissing in the doorway.”

  He kissed Mrs. Cansdale again, closed the apartment door, and opened the outer hall door for the sergeant. He had never liked his neighbor. The policeman was as stupid as his wife, and of a type. He was uncouth, common, vulgar. Still, Cansdale accepted the chance meeting as an omen. He could envision the sergeant’s testimony at the inquest.…

  “… yeah. Yeah. Sure. Perfectly happy as far as I know. Why, he was kissing and hugging her goodbye when I stepped out in the hall this morning.”

  The little teacher walked beside the big detective to their cars parked at the curb, pointing to the headline in his paper. “Terrible, isn’t it,” he demanded primly, “that such a fiend should be at large?” He snapped his fingers as in sudden recollection. “I must remind the janitor again to fix that lock on the kitchen window.” He explained, his hand on his car door, “I worry so about Mrs. Cansdale when she’s alone.”

  The big detective seemed embarrassed. “Yeah, yeah. Sure. I can imagine.” He climbed into his car and swung out into traffic.

  The little chemistry teacher smirked smugly. “The man is a moron,” he thought. “He was afraid that I was going to ask him why the police haven’t caught the killer.”

  The morning was warm with spring. It was pleasant to be alive. The weather forecast prophesied fair and rising temperature. The moon wouldn’t rise until ten. It would be a lovely night for murder.

  cuffing of feet, and the scratch of chalk on the school board, were the only sounds in the classroom as the students worked out the problems that Cansdale had given them, in order to work out his own.

  Having a late-shift program, his last class would be over at five. Cansdale wrote the figure on a piece of paper after making certain that there was no other sheet beneath it and that the hard surface of the marble laboratory slab retained no impression.

  At five thirty he could be in the Loop eating in the little one-armed restaurant near the main library on Wabash. By five forty-five he would have received and signed for his books at the library desk. By six he could be lost in the north-bound, rush-hour traffic on the outer drive.

  He made a neat time-table of the figures.

  By six thirty, six forty-five at the latest, just when the evening dusk was blackest, he could be on his own back porch opening the window with the broken lock.

  By seven his wife would be dead, her head battered in with some handy object and her nude body tossed on the bed to simulate an attack by the moronic killer. The absence of strange fingerprints wouldn’t be a stumbling block. The killer always wore gloves. Both doors of his apartment would still be double-locked and barred if he left in the same manner as he entered.

  He doubted if Mazie would scream when she saw him. She would be pleased. She could have no idea what he had come for. He continued with the writing of his schedule.

  By seven thirty his car would be parked back on Wabash Avenue and he would be in the crowded library reading-room, perhaps exchanging his volume on chemistry for others, to call attention to himself. Shortly after the closing hour of nine he would return to his apartment to find both front and rear doors double-locked and barred. The police, perhaps the stupid fool next door, would help him batter down the door and find the body.

  His alibi would be perfect. The thin-lipped, prim, old-maid librarian from whom he always got his books would swear he had been there between the hours of five thirty and nine. She had no reason to doubt it. But no suspicion would be attached to him. He was, in the public eye, a dutiful, loving husband. He had no known motive for wanting Mazie dead. He and Evelyn had been too circumspect. But for the convention week just past he had never seen her oftener than twice a week. They had never appeared in public together. In school they merely nodded and exchanged an innocuous morning note disguised as division business.

  The little man’s pulse began to pound as he allowed his thoughts to dwell on the charms of the blue-eyed, blond history teacher. She was a greedy little piece of baggage, combining intelligence with fire. But she was worth the sacrifice, if it could be called a sacrifice, that he was making. With Mazie’s insurance, rings, and furs, there would be enough to satisfy even Evelyn’s capricious tastes for quite some time.

  Cansdale stroked his wisp of a mustache and smiled. Most murderers were fools. A lesser man with his knowledge of chemistry would undoubtedly have poisoned his wife and have wound up in the chair. The very manner of the murder he had planned would serve to divert suspicion from him.

  Well pleased with his own intelligence the little man memorized the table of figures that he had drawn up, touched the paper to a Bunsen burner, watched it crumple into ash, then sat grinding it to pieces with a pestle.

  Unknown to him, as he sat smirking, pleased with himself, one of his student seniors at the rear board wrote in tiny letters beside the table of elements that she was compiling: Our romantic Romeo and his mental strip-tease Juliet must have phffttt. He isn’t going to send her his morning sonnet disguised as “Where was Johnny Jones of your division as of last period? Worried!”

  The boy beside her sniggered, then wrote, as she erased her words: Who do they think they’re fooling? The whole school knows that he’s carrying a torch.

  The girl added: Chlorine—C1—35,457—17, to her list of elements, symbols, and atomic weights and numbers, then wrote beside them in small letters as before: He’s carrying a torch but she isn’t. She’s just taking him for whatever she can get. She wa
s out at the Hi-Ho Club with the new football coach last night—and were they high and howling.

  Yeah? The boy underscored the word before erasing it.

  Yeah, the girl answered him with chalk. They—jiggers! The old dodo’s coming out of his trance.

  John Cansdale took another sheet of paper, wrote:

  “My dear Miss Parker:

  In response to your inquiry concerning the progress of the pupil of whom you wrote me yesterday, can only report that matters are progressing satisfactorily and should come to a conclusion shortly. In fact …”

  He changed his mind and touched the paper to the burner. Evelyn had thought that he was joking when he told her what he planned to do. It might be best if she knew nothing of the matter until the entire affair was over. Perhaps he would never tell her. It might be best to let her think, as the police would think, that it had been the killer who killed Mazie. He watched the hour hand of the clock creep around the dial. The day, it seemed, would never end.

  he warmth of the day had disappeared with the setting of the sun. A cold wind blew off the lake. John Cansdale considered a drink as he parked his car against the Wabash Avenue curb and then decided against it. Drink muddled the mind and he must keep his clear. He checked back, as he had checked a dozen times, and could find no flaw in his plan. Still his throat was suddenly dry and his hands had begun to tremble. Perhaps murder wouldn’t prove as simple as he thought.

  “This is silly,” he reproved himself. “In two more hours she will be dead and I’ll be free.”

  He bought a paper from a boy before entering the lunchroom and read it thoroughly while toying with his poached egg, corn-beef hash, and toast. The one detail that might possibly invalidate his plan had not occurred. The police, as yet, had not apprehended the killer. Rumor was rife as to when and where he might strike again.