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

by Unknown

  “He did,” Vick groaned. “So help me, I ain’t lyin’. Dubitsky did it. After gettin’ McKenna to open the safe with them papers in it Dubitsky had to kill him to keep him from ever identifying him.”

  Smith sighed. “It really doesn’t matter who shot him, because I’m going to tie the three of you up, Vick, and as soon as I’m out of here I’m going to phone the police. You won’t escape before they get here, Vick. Doing tricks with ropes is another of my little accomplishments, and you won’t even wiggle when I’m through with you. So the police will come and find you, Vick, and find those two guns on the table; and if either of those guns fired the bullet that killed McKenna, the police will know it. Ballistics, you know.”

  “Here,” Angel said, “are your ropes. Mr. and Mrs. Burdick were wrapped up in them, upstairs.”

  Smith went to work tying them up while Angel stood by with her gun trained on them. Finished, he stepped back and surveyed the results of his efforts, and grinned.

  He took Angel’s arm. “Let’s go, darling,” he said.

  That’s right,” Mrs. Burdick’s Teddy said timidly. “I got the job through Dubitsky and then a couple of months later he died. And then he came to life again, and came to see me.”

  “And told you he was a Federal agent?”

  “That’s right, Mr. Smith. He told me he was a Federal agent, working to break down a spy ring. And I believed him. I guess I’d been reading too many stories.”

  They sat, the four of them, in the tiny office of Trouble, Inc. Teddy Burdick, Mrs. Burdick, Angel and Smith. Burdick was limp with gratitude. Mrs. Burdick was exactly like her letter—small, scared, not too gifted with brains.

  “Dubitsky asked you then to help him. He told you the officials of the Glickman Company were under suspicion, and asked you to find out which of them had been entrusted with the safe-keeping of the formula. That it?” Smith asked.

  “That’s right. And when I did find out that Mr. McKenna kept it at home, he advised me to quit my job. He gave me a thousand dollars and told me to move to a small apartment somewhere and keep very quiet until the thing came to a head.”

  “What happened then?” Smith asked.

  “Well, at the last minute, just when we were all set to move, he sent for me. He called me on the phone and told me to come to that address on Canal Street. When I got there, those two men, Vick and Max, jumped on me.”

  Smith leaned back in his chair, smiling. “You see it now, Angel?” he asked gently.

  “There’s one thing,” Angel declared, “that still bothers me.”

  “Yes?”

  “Look, now. Dubitsky planned this business very nicely, but right smack in the middle of it he ‘died.’ There must have been, at that time, a fear in his mind that he was being watched. In other words, government agents were closing in on him.” She drew a deep breath and stared at the floor, marshaling her thoughts.

  “Well,” she continued, “he came to life again and went through with his plans. He got the formula. If Trouble, Incorporated, hadn’t landed right ker-smack on the back of his neck, he and his buddies would have disposed of Mrs. Burdick, to keep her quiet, and then murdered Teddy, making it look like a suicide to give the police an answer to the McKenna kill and steer the investigation away from Dubitsky and his pals. You follow me?”

  There was a knock on the door. Smith got up to answer it. “So far, yes,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  He opened the door and Plouffe stood there.

  “Well,” Angel said, scowling, “what I want to know is why the G-men, after getting close enough to scare Dubitsky into temporary oblivion, didn’t see through his phony death and ultimately get their hands on him.”

  Plouffe, blinking his gray eyes at her, said: “So help me, Miss Copeland, you’re clairvoyant. Meet my friend here, Mr. Toomey.”

  He stepped aside and a man walked past him. “Mr. Toomey,” Plouffe said, “is a G-man. It seems he’s been keeping an eye on me ever since Mrs. Burdick came to me for advice.”

  “On all of you,” Toomey said quietly. He was a tall, gray-haired man with a pleasant smile. “You see, Mr. Smith, we were just warming up to this case when you stepped into it.”

  Smith stood up, his face sheepish.

  “What Dubitsky was after,” Toomey said, “was the formula for a new explosive being manufactured for the government by the Glickman Company.”

  “And thanks to us,” Smith admitted, “he got it.”

  “No. He never would have got it. What he took from McKenna was the original formula, long ago proved to be worthless. I doubt if Dubitsky even knew that the original has twice been revised, and that the only existing copy of the approved, final formula has never been out of government hands. What you did do, Mr. Smith, was save the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Burdick and save us a lot of work.”

  “Oh,” said Smith.

  “He’s really very smart,” Angel cooed.

  “Thanks to you, Mr. Smith,” Toomey said, “the dangerous Dubitsky and his two associates are in custody. I’m here simply to offer congratulations.”

  He thrust out his hand. Smith took it. Angel beamed.

  “You know,” Plouffe said, “he’s really a pretty good guy. Maybe we should ought to tell him the truth, Toomey.”

  “Truth?” Smith said.

  “You owe me some money,” Plouffe declared, pacing forward to the desk behind which Smith stood. “I’ll match you to see whether I get it or not.”

  He took a coin from his pocket and flipped it. Slightly bewildered, Smith did likewise.

  “Heads,” Smith said.

  Plouffe thrust out his hand with the coin on the back of it. It wasn’t a coin. Not exactly. It was a gold identification disc of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Smith gaped at it.

  “A lot of things,” Plouffe said softly, with a smile, “are not what they seem. Believe it or not, when I let you hire me I thought you were after that formula, too. I deliberately let you believe I was impersonating an F.B.I. man so you’d feel you had something on me. That way I might get onto a lot of things. Sorry, pal.” He turned to Toomey. “Well, Toomey,” he said, “let’s go. And you and your wife, Mr. Burdick, if you’ll come along, too, and answer a few questions, you can go home afterward.”

  They went out. Smith looked solemnly at Angel. “I,” he declared slowly, “will be damned.”

  She said, “Nothing surprises me anymore.”

  “I’ve another surprise for you,” Smith told her, smiling.

  “Really?”

  “I’m going to pay you for all the work you’ve done.”

  “No! You don’t mean it!”

  “But I do.” He put his arms around her.

  “Like this,” he said, and kissed her.

  Blood, Sweat and Biers

  Robert Reeves

  ROBERT REEVES (1912–1945) was born in New York City and raised on the south shore of Long Island. He received an A.B. in history, english, and anthropology from New York University and worked as a driver of an armored post-office department truck, carpenter, cabinet maker, candy maker, reader for Fox Films, and in various jobs for Broadway theaters, including casting director, play doctor, stage manager, and assistant producer. He moved to Hollywood in the late 1930s, probably hoping to break into the movie business, as so many writers of the time did. In 1942, he joined the army, serving in the air corps, and was killed a month before the end of World War II, being buried with four other soldiers in a common grave, suggesting they died together in a single plane.

  His career cut short, he is less remembered today than some of his contemporaries, having produced only three novels and eleven short stories, nine of which ran in Black Mask and two in Dime Detective. He wrote three stories about “Bookie” Barnes—not a gambling nickname but one earned because he went to college and, unusual for pulp characters, actually read books. But most of his work—all three novels and seven stories, were about Cellini Smith, a private eye, most of whose cases take
place in Los Angeles. The first Smith adventure was the novel Dead and Done For (1939); the last the posthumous story “Alcoholics Calamitous” (September 1945).

  “Blood, Sweat and Biers” was published in the January 1945 issue.

  Blood, Sweat and Biers

  Robert Reeves

  A CELLINI SMITH NOVELETTE

  The Bly-Wheaton fight lasted thirty-five seconds and ended in a one-punch knockout. Cellini Smith’s job was to find out if the fight had been fixed, but his talents were soon diverted by more important matters—Murph, strong-arm man for gambler Jerry Lake, Bly’s wrestler girl-friend, the Blond Bomber, “so round, so firm, so fully-packed,” and a three-time killer who felt equally at home using a .38 automatic, an andiron, and sulphuric acid.

  CHAPTER ONE

  RINGSIDE FOR MURDER

  T WAS A GOOD prelim. Two boys—one called Lopez, the other Sanchez—were trying to beat each other into a jelly, and with a marked degree of success.

  It was a good fight because the boys were young, with strong biceps and backs, because they were evenly matched and because they didn’t mind getting hurt for the customers. They stood flat-footed, in the center of the ring, hammering away blindly on the theory that one of those hard-thrown punches would sooner or later connect for a knockout.

  A good scrap, thought Cellini Smith as he watched from his aisle seat in the second row, but a lousy boxing match.

  The customers, too, thought that each of the boys was earning his fifty bucks for the night’s work. Most of Hollywood’s sporting crowd had shown up at the stadium. The ringside seats were filled with sports jackets, low-cut gowns and a sprinkling of uniforms.

  Stately young starlets, hiding behind sun glasses, screamed delightedly as Sanchez or Lopez would go down for a couple of counts and bounce back. Some of the girls shielded their faces with a program as the soggy gloves connected and threw out a spray of sweat. Others, as if they welcomed the spattering, didn’t bother with a program but sat forward on the edge of the seat, looking up into the ring.

  As the bell was called on the final round, Cellini turned to his companion and asked: “What do you think, Duck-Eye?”

  Duck-Eye Ryan shrugged gloomily and stared at nothing with those round, unblinking eyes. “Toss-up,” he finally replied.

  Cellini Smith frowned. “What’s the matter with you? Did you get up on the wrong side of the whiskey bottle this morning?”

  Duck-Eye merely shrugged again. He was a huge, powerful man whose limited mental gifts had been limited still further by a long succession of beatings received in prizefighting rings during his youth. He had followed Cellini to L.A., from the East Coast, with a blind devotion and loyalty that Cellini did not fail to appreciate.

  Duck-Eye Ryan’s ring-scarred face relaxed for a moment as he sighted something, then returned to the grim task of concentrating on some inner problem. Cellini looked around to find the cause of Duck-Eye’s momentary interest.

  Two women had just come down the aisle and taken ringside seats. The large, eagle-beaked one, who could have smoked a cigarette in the rain, looked as if she belonged on a broom. It was the other who must have caught Duck-Eye’s attention. She had a full, hard, youthful body, a round, full-lipped, clear-skinned face. She was small, very blond and her beauty was inviting and accessible—a relief from that of the gilded starlets.

  Someone behind Cellini clicked twice with his tongue and murmured: “So round, so firm, so fully-packed.”

  The referee lifted two tired arms. The fight was a draw. The crowd roared approval, Sanchez and Lopez began hugging each other and the seconds started arguing the decision. The lights went on for a fifteen-minute intermission.

  Cellini turned to his huge friend. “Snap out of it, Duck-Eye. You’ll be out of here in an hour.”

  “It don’t make no difference where I am, Cellini. I got a problem.”

  “You stick to the problem I gave you,” Cellini advised him.

  Cellini Smith made his way up the aisle as the customers stood up and stretched their legs before the main bout that featured Eddy Bly and Hank Wheaton. Bly and Wheaton were both newcomers to the City of the Angels and Cellini wondered how the betting was going.

  It wasn’t going too well. The betting section was located high up in the back rows, next to the bandstand, and usually showed a lot of quiet activity before a main bout. There wasn’t much activity this time and Cellini found it strange.

  Ordinarily, betting was pretty heavy on new boys because no one had seen them box locally and the odds had to be set on the basis of records that could be phony. It gave the suckers the idea that they might outsmart the gamblers.

  A few bets were being made and some greenbacks were changing hands but it looked mostly like small fry. The big gamblers like Dan Turner or Jerry Lake sat back and waved away anyone who tried to place a bet. Cellini tried to catch Dan Turner’s eye and the gambler suddenly became interested in the label on his cigar.

  Cellini approached Jerry Lake and asked, “Who you betting on in the next one?”

  “I’m not having any,” was the reply.

  “Why? Is it fixed?”

  “I told you I’m not betting,” Jerry Lake said. Then he added: “Any more.”

  “O.K., but what are the odds?” Cellini persisted. “Who’s the favorite? Bly or Wheaton?”

  The gambler hailed a passing candy butcher and bought a bottle of pop. Cellini let the matter drop. Once again he tried unsuccessfully to catch Dan Turner’s eyes and then returned to his seat. Duck-Eye Ryan was still the picture of a man who had lost his best dope sheet.

  “You shouldn’t eat so much chocolate,” Cellini said. “It’ll always stuff you up.”

  “It ain’t that, Cellini. It’s my problem.”

  “All right. Let’s have it.”

  “I need money.”

  Cellini extracted a five-dollar bill from his wallet and handed it to his companion. “Now relax and watch this next clambake. I’ve got to know if it’s fixed.”

  Duck-Eye moodily wound the bill around his fingers and said: “This ain’t enough, Cellini. I need a fortune of money. Two hundred bucks I need.”

  “What would you do with it?”

  Duck-Eye sighed. “Cellini, I’m gonna be a father.”

  “Congratulations. I suppose you want all that dough for a Father’s Day card.”

  “No, Cellini, it’s—”

  “All right, Duck-Eye. Let me use my imagination. We’ll discuss it later. Right now try to concentrate on the next fight. Something smells about it.”

  From his pocket Cellini took a plain envelope that bore no return address. He extracted the typewritten note it contained and studied it once again: Let me know if you think the main event isn’t on the level.

  The envelope had been addressed to Cellini’s office and also contained a crisp twenty and two tickets to the fight. That was all. But Cellini didn’t have to guess its source. It had to be Dan Turner, the gambler. Turner trusted him, Turner had thrown jobs his way before. Turner had an occupational disinclination to sign his name to anything and, finally, only Turner was sufficiently tight-fisted to think that a twenty was adequate pay for a job like this.

  elebrities took bows and the lights were dimmed. After a while, the two fighters came down the aisles and ducked through the ropes. They were lightweights, with Eddy Bly weighing one forty and giving Hank Wheaton two pounds.

  Bly was from Fresno and Wheaton was a Seattle product. Both had excellent records, with a fair quota of knockouts, but they were records made against local, hometown talent. They had the long, loose arms of natural boxers and they looked ring-wise. The substantial blonde, who had come in just before intermission, yelled something to Eddy Bly and he waved a greeting.

  Cellini said to Duck-Eye: “Pay attention, daddy.”

  Duck-Eye shuddered. The bell sounded for the first round and the stools were whisked from under the fighters. Wheaton rushed for the center of the ring and stopped short when he saw tha
t Bly wasn’t coming to meet him. For a long moment, Eddy Bly leaned against the ropes and measured his opponent. Then slowly, deliberately, he walked forward.

  As they closed, Wheaton’s left arm shot out and Eddy Bly took three jabs to the face in rapid succession. Bly did not step back, did not even bother to defend himself. He kept moving in and took a rapid one-two to the heart. The shoulders of the two men were now almost touching. Suddenly, Bly’s right hand shot up. It moved no more than six inches but it was sure and powerful. Wheaton’s mouthpiece flew into the air and he sagged to the floor.

  The count was hardly more than a formality and people began leaving before it was finished. Bly helped Wheaton to his corner and watched anxiously till the fighter was fully revived.

  “Well,” asked Cellini Smith, “what do you think?”

  “That sock was no fake,” said Duck-Eye Ryan.

  “I suppose not,” Cellini conceded, but he was worried. Perhaps Wheaton had left his chin hanging out on purpose. It wasn’t easy to detect a fix in a fight, let alone in one that lasted only thirty-five seconds.

  The stadium was nearly empty before Cellini finally moved. He said: “Come on. And stick close because there might be trouble.”

  “Where will I get the two hundred bucks?”

  “Right now I’m trying to earn just twenty.”

  They left the building, walked down an alley to its left and reentered the stadium from the rear. A few fight fans were still in the corridor arguing the night’s card.

  Cellini decided that he’d let someone else take the chances for twenty dollars and said: “I’ve got another job for you, Duck-Eye.”

  “Sure, Cellini.”

  “I want you to hit somebody when I tell you to and to stop hitting him when I tell you to. Is that clear?”

  “Sure.” It never occurred to Duck-Eye to question or to doubt his friend.

  They walked down the corridor and stopped by a dressing room. Through the half-open door they could see Hank Wheaton buttoning his shirt and they entered. There were three others in the room, watching as the scowling fighter dressed himself. Emphasizing his every word with a cigarette holder, Jerry Lake was talking to Wheaton in a high-pitched, angry voice. A handler, who had seconded the fighter, listened interestedly. The third member was the over-sized, unhandsome woman who had escorted the small blonde into the stadium.