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

by Unknown

  “If I want you in the morning you won’t be busy.”

  As Eddy Bly walked out with Juno Worden, he said, over his shoulder: “In the morning I’m burying my sister.”

  The detective-sergeant gazed speculatively at the closed door and asked: “Who knows anything about that?”

  “I do,” replied Jerry Lake. “Some hit-and-run driver knocked over his sister. She died this morning.”

  “When was she run down?” asked Cellini.

  “Yesterday, on Wilshire.”

  “What difference would that make?” asked Haenigson.

  “I was wondering how long she was in pain.”

  “You got a heart as big as all humanity, Smith. Now, suppose you beat it and don’t start messing in this case, because as far as I can make out, you’re not representing anybody. I’ll be quite capable of managing everything.”

  Cellini said, “Bully for you,” and left.

  Duck-Eye Ryan was waiting in the corridor. “Cellini, what am I gonna do for that two hundred smackers?”

  Cellini said: “I recommend you marry the girl and borrow the money from her.”

  “It’d be a hell of a life,” Duck-Eye Ryan pronounced. “I’m going out to get drunk five bucks’ worth.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  CLIENT FOUND

  ellini Smith looked at his watch. It was a few minutes after one in the morning, so there was still time before he had to show up for the two-to-eight shift at the aircraft plant in the Valley. He could make out Dan Turner at the other end of the corridor and decided to try his luck again.

  “How’d you get along?” asked the gambler.

  “With Haenigson? Fine. We can’t stand each other from way back. I don’t think Jerry Lake or Eddy Bly approves of me, though.”

  “I would watch Lake if I were you.”

  “How about Bly?”

  “I don’t know much about him,” the gambler said.

  “I should think you did,” Cellini persisted. “You knew enough about him to win a lot of money on his fight.”

  “I never said I won money on him. I just said I bet on him. Besides, it’s none of your business, Smith.”

  “You’re right there. How’s your alibi for the killing?”

  “I’m not worried.”

  Cellini gave it up. Turner wasn’t using detectives today. He nodded to the gambler and went outside. On the street he paused to light a cigarette.

  A figure stepped from the shadows and said: “Hold the match.”

  As Cellini extended his arm to light the other’s cigarette he was wide open for the sudden, unexpected blow. The stranger’s right fist caught him on the side of the jaw and sent him sprawling. He leaped up, then stopped short. Maybe it was a pipe that the stranger was pointing through the pocket of his jacket—or maybe it was a gun. It wasn’t worth the chance to try and find out.

  With an effort, Cellini controlled himself. He rubbed his jaw and looked at the other as if carefully memorizing every line and detail of the hard, shrewd face. Finally, he said: “What was that for?”

  “I’m a meanie,” replied the other. “I send caterpillars up telephone poles.”

  “Who are you?” asked Cellini. “I remember the smell but I don’t seem to recognize the face.”

  “Now there’s no cause for personalities,” said the other. “You can call me Murph. All my friends do.”

  “I still want to know what this is all about?”

  “Oh, it’s kind of a message from Jerry Lake. He wants you should be more civil to him.”

  “What are you, his strong arm?”

  “In a way,” said Murph. “Lake’s made me a sort of vice president in charge of complaints. It makes me feel like a white-collar worker. It—”

  “Stop drooling. What does Lake want from me?”

  “I don’t know. Honest.” Murph sounded hurt. “He just told me to take you down a couple of pegs. By the way, I never got that light. Just throw them matches, if you don’t mind.”

  Murph caught the match book and struggled with one hand against his body until he had produced the light. “Thanks, Smith. I guess I’ll toddle along. And don’t try stopping me, because I can draw this rod real fast.”

  “It would never occur to me.”

  “Fine. No hard feelings, is there, Smith?”

  “No, Murph, no hard feelings.”

  “It isn’t like I had anything against you, personally, Smith. It’s just like I was a surgeon with a job to do.”

  “I said, no hard feelings.”

  Cellini watched Murph disappear down the street. The night was cool but he could feel the beads of sweat on his brow. Being thrown at walls by a lady wrestler and hit by a gambler’s bodyguard was a little too much to take in one night’s work. Certainly too much for a twenty-dollar job with no prospect of more to come. Cellini looked at his watch. It was nearing one-thirty. Maybe, he thought, he’d have a chance to stick around this mess. For one thing, he was anxious to meet Murph again.

  Cellini Smith did not reach his office till two the following afternoon. He sorted through his mail with bad humor. He had not had more than two hours of sleep and the events of the preceding night still stung him.

  There was the sound of heavy footfalls in the outside hallway and three men entered. The sight of Ira Haenigson did little to make Cellini feel better. The other two visitors were Boggs, Haenigson’s beefy, young assistant, and Dan Turner. They found chairs and ranged themselves in front of the desk.

  It was a long moment before the detective-sergeant spoke. “Smith, we haven’t got much use for each other but I’ve had the feeling that each of us respected the other in a way.”

  Cellini frowned. When Haenigson talked in circles it usually meant trouble.

  “That’s why,” the Homicide man went on, “I’m sorry I have to nail you on a thing like this. I know you, Smith, and I don’t trust you too much but I’ve always felt that there were some things even you wouldn’t do. Maybe I never liked the way you did things but you usually did them for the right reasons.”

  “You give me something to live for, Haenigson. Go on.”

  “This isn’t funny, Smith. If you lose only your license you’ll be lucky. Blackmail isn’t a minor offense.”

  “Blackmail?” Cellini looked at each of the faces in front of him and his frown deepened.

  Dan Turner said: “Ordinarily, I’d let a thing like this go by—especially with you, Smith—but the deal’s too big. In the kind of a spot I’m in, I can’t afford it.”

  “Wait a minute.” Cellini enunciated each word carefully, as though he were speaking to children. “This is supposed to have something to do with blackmail. In the first place, what have Haenigson and the Homicide Department got to do with blackmail? In the second place, what blackmail?”

  “Your letter happens to tie in with the murder of Hank Wheaton,” replied the detective-sergeant.

  “Now we’re getting someplace. What letter?”

  “Stop playing cat-and-mouse, Smith. Mr. Turner handed it over to me.” Haenigson reached into his pocket and tossed a sheet on the desk blotter.

  Cellini picked it. It was a piece of his own stationery and bore the preceding day’s date. It read:

  Dear Dan,

  Apparently, you don’t fully appreciate the dangerous position you are in as a result of Hank Wheaton’s murder. Your biggest mistake would be not to hire a private operative to watch over your interests. To put it mildly, the police would be very interested to know of your share in the killing.

  Naturally, when I recommend that you hire an operative, I’m thinking of myself but I’m also warning you as an old friend.

  Underneath, in its broad, typical lettering, was Cellini Smith’s signature. Cellini tossed the letter back.

  “It was a little too thick for me to let it pass,” said Dan Turner almost apologetically. “I couldn’t afford to ignore it.”

  “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen it,” stated Cellini.


  “That’s your signature, isn’t it, Smith?” asked Haenigson.

  “I said I never saw it before.”

  “Your signature and your stationery,” the detective-sergeant went on, “and Mr. Turner received it this morning in one of your envelopes. Now, what have you to say.”

  Cellini said: “Your slip is showing.”

  aenigson sighed. He nodded to Boggs. The young cop went over to the typewriter, inserted a sheet, typed a few words and then passed the paper over to his chief. Haenigson started comparing the type with that on the note to Turner. Finally, the Homicide man asked: “Have you got another typewriter, Smith?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you didn’t type this letter on your machine. That’s obvious. Where did you?”

  The knuckles on Cellini’s hands whitened on the edge of the desk. “Listen carefully, you animated septic tank, because I am repeating for the last time: I did not write that letter.”

  “That’s your signature, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t give a damn what it is!” Cellini grabbed at the letter. The signature, he had to admit, did look like his. He held it up to the light of his desk lamp, and asked: “Do one of you Philo Vances sport a magnifying glass?”

  Haenigson shook his head and Boggs said: “Never touch ’em.”

  “You use reading glasses, don’t you, Haenigson? Let’s have them.”

  “Sure, what’s mine is yours.” The detective- sergeant handed over a pair of spectacles.

  Again, Cellini held up the letter to the light and examined the signature, using the lenses as a magnifier. A faint line, cutting into the surface of the paper, could be clearly discerned underneath the inked signature. Ira Haenigson, looking over Cellini’s shoulder, whistled softly. “So somebody traced your name.”

  Cellini Smith leaned back and laughed mirthlessly. There was a moment of uncomfortable silence that was broken by the gambler.

  “I’m sorry about all this trouble I made for you, Smith, but you must admit I had no other choice. Do we forget the whole thing?” Dan Turner extended a hand, which Cellini took.

  “That goes for me, too,” Ira Haenigson said. “When I nail you, Smith, I want it to be on something clean and wholesome like grand larceny—not a chiseling blackmail stunt.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Cellini dryly. “Only next time wait till you hear my side of a story before you start licking your chops. All right, we’ll forget it but there’s something else I want to know. Who faked my name and wrote that letter?”

  Dan Turner nodded. “That’s what I’d like to know, too. I don’t care for its implications. Suppose you try your hand at finding the answers, Smith.”

  Cellini shook his head. “We can assume that the letter was written by someone closely connected with the killing or by the murderer himself. In that case he wants to involve me in this deal, so I’d be playing into his hands by taking the job.”

  “It’s more likely that he wanted me to go gunning after you, figuring he’d rid himself of two birds with one letter. In any event, I’ll give you five hundred dollars now to see how far you can get with this.” Turner took out a wallet and counted bills onto the desk.

  After a moment of hesitation, Cellini reached for the money. “Whoever sent that letter, Turner, must have known I’d be able to prove it was a fake.”

  With a casualness that fooled no one, Ira Haenigson said: “Maybe the signature was a fake and the rest of the letter wasn’t.”

  “Meaning,” asked the gambler, “that perhaps I did have a share in the killing?”

  “That’s right, Turner.” It was no longer Mr. Turner. “Where did you say you were when the shot was fired?”

  “In front of the stadium, looking for a cab.”

  The detective-sergeant tried to look mild and trusting and Cellini snapped: “Stop being clever, Haenigson. It’s out of character. You have plenty of others to work on before Turner.”

  “What others?”

  “Eddy Bly and that Blond Bomber of his, Juno Worden, were in a hurry to get away after the shot was fired.”

  “Bly had to go to his sister’s funeral this morning and he didn’t feel like staying around. Besides, he was in the corridor when the shot was fired, waiting for the girl to come out of the powder room, and he was talking to Jerry Lake at the time.”

  Cellini remembered Murph and said: “Lake might be lying.”

  “Why should he? He’s only sticking his own neck out.”

  “Besides,” Dan Turner added, “I happen to know that Jerry Lake was a friend of Hank Wheaton’s, so he’d have every reason to help find the killer.”

  “Then Bly and Lake are in the clear,” admitted Cellini, “if all that is so. But that doesn’t clear the girl. Instead of going to the powder room she might have gone around to the alley. And what about Wheaton’s handler I saw hanging around there?”

  “He’s out, too,” Haenigson replied. “He was in the middle of a crap game in the back.”

  “Then that would leave Wheaton’s wife, Prunella, alone in the dressing room. The window’s on street level and she could have climbed out into the alley, closed the window behind her, shot her husband and then reentered the room the same way and screamed.”

  “A woman as homely as all that,” Haenigson remarked, “would hold on to any husband. Besides, what excuse could she give Wheaton for wanting to go climbing out of windows?”

  “Any number of excuses. They probably didn’t know why I had been in there with Duck-Eye, so she might have told Wheaton she was going out by way of the alley to follow me and find out.”

  The detective-sergeant stood up. “All of which leaves us where it finds us. Don’t think that five hundred bucks and a client give you the right to pull any fast ones, Smith.”

  “I won’t. What about the gun?”

  “You were right there. No fingerprints and it doesn’t seem likely that it can be traced.” Haenigson lifted himself from the chair, said bitterly: “Nobody’s giving me five hundred dollars to work on this case,” and stalked out, followed by Boggs.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ODDS AND NO ENDS

  hen the door had closed, Cellini Smith reached into a desk drawer and hauled out a bottle of some blended whiskey and two glasses. He poured, gave one of the glasses to Dan Turner and asked: “Was there any truth at all in that letter?”

  “I didn’t kill Hank Wheaton,” said the gambler, “and even if I had, I expect you to play it my way. You’re working for me now.”

  Cellini’s grunt was noncommital. “We’ll try it another way. Could you have had any reason or desire to kill Wheaton?”

  “Perhaps you didn’t hear me, Smith. If you have wax in your ears, don’t use a toothpick. The corner of a handkerchief—”

  Cellini interrupted: “I’ll patronize my corner druggist for such advice. You claim I’m working for you and you’ve paid for it, so act like it. I’ve got to get some kind of lead to work on and if you’re not willing to cooperate, then—” Cellini caught himself. He had almost offered to return the five hundred.

  “All right, Smith. I didn’t kill Wheaton and I had nothing against him. Happy?”

  “Frightfully. You said, last night, that you bet on Eddy Bly but didn’t make any profit. How come?”

  “A lot of Wheaton money suddenly showed up and I got scared. I covered my bets and played both sides.”

  “Where do you think the Wheaton money came from?”

  “I’m not sure but I know why it came. Bly’s sister was run over by a car and some of the boys must have figured that Bly would be too upset to know what he was doing in the ring.”

  Cellini poured refills. “But that had nothing to do with your thinking the fight was fixed. You wrote asking me that I check on that two days before the fight, and that was one day before the girl was run over.”

  “That’ll be your headache, Smith. Some friends dropped a few hints and I promised to keep them to myself. It’s a matter of keeping my word. I couldn’t stay in
this racket if I didn’t.”

  “So be it. Do you know a goon called Murph who tags after Jerry Lake?”

  “I’ve seen him around. Lake picked him up a couple of days ago. The idea of having a bodyguard probably builds up his ego.”

  “And what about this Blond Bomber?” pursued Cellini. “Do you think she might be married to Eddy Bly?”

  “No, but she ought to be. She’s married to a milquetoast called Forsythe Worden. He’s well-named.”

  “There might be something there. I’d like to meet him.”

  “He’ll probably be over at my house with his wife tomorrow,” Turner said.

  “I sleep late Sundays.”

  “This is a party and it’ll keep going all afternoon. I throw them occasionally for the gang, to keep up with the latest gossip. If you want to come around, you’ll find me in the phone book.”

  Cellini tried more questions and the answers became progressively less satisfactory. Dan Turner finished his drink and left. Cellini stayed at his desk, stabbing at the blotter with a letter opener. There was no place from which to start, no definite lead from which to work. That was the trouble. The only sure thing was that Duck-Eye could get his two hundred dollars now. He’d first have to know exactly how it would be spent—if he gave it to him.

  After a while, Cellini locked the office and went down to his car. None of the bookie joints, gambling places or so-called poker clubs he visited seemed to know or care about who had won or lost on the Bly-Wheaton fight. The back numbers of newspapers, found in a library, revealed only that an eighteen-year-old girl named Jeanette Bly had been run over by a hit-and-run driver near the corner of Wilshire and La Brea. She had died a few hours later in the hospital.

  It was nearing six when Cellini Smith entered the Main Street Gymnasium and not many of the boys were around. Someone was sweating over a rowing machine and Duck-Eye Ryan was earning a few cents by sparring with a fighter Cellini didn’t recognize. Candido Pastor, one of the better welters, idly skipped rope in one corner. An old man, called Cyclops because of an eye lost in the bare-knuckles days, wandered about under the impression he was tidying the place.