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

by Unknown

  Under her breath, Sue said, “At least I win five bucks.”

  “It was an act,” I said. “Wait forty-eight hours and see.”

  We were half-way through the front door when things started to go boom-boom back in the study. There was one shot before I could get around, another while I was turning and a third by the time I got my feet going. Sue was behind me and I had a vague impression that Jane College was under way in our wake.

  I got through the black curtains and the picture smacked me in the face. The doc was on his knees by the desk, clawing at the top, trying to pull himself up. He didn’t have a chance of making it and while I was still a dozen feet away, he caved and went down in a heap. His clawing hand pulled objects off the desk onto him, among them the large figure of the apes. The phone was already on the floor, receiver off. The three small monkeys, the ones he’d been playing with a few minutes before, lay on the rug beside the phone.

  He coughed, retched and the brightness of blood jumped across his chin. And he died while I was easing him into a less tortured position. No wounds showed in front and I figured he’d been shot in the back, while he was sitting at the desk.

  Beside me, Sue said, “The poor guy!”

  “Anyway,” I said, getting up, “he was right on one angle. He’ll speak no evil from now on, not even about the guy that gunned him.”

  Behind us, Jane College was tuning up with hysterics. She had her hands over her eyes and her mouth open, making lots of noise. I thought what a swell thing it would be if she weren’t around, for more reasons than one, and I got ideas. Between her screams, I tried to find out from her if there was another phone in the house. She paid no attention until I grabbed her shoulders, shook her.

  “Is there another phone in the house, another outside wire?” I said.

  “W-what?”

  I said it over and she told me, still looking half-witted from fright, that there was a phone upstairs in the doctor’s bedroom.

  “Then get on it and call the cops,” I said. “We can’t use this one. We can’t touch anything in here until the cops arrive.”

  She looked as though she finally understood and I let go of her. She streaked out through the curtains.

  I gave Sue a shove, said, “Out there with her. Keep her away from this room as long as you can.”

  Sue didn’t argue. She went. I snapped on more lights, cased the room with my eyes in a hurry. Down the room a door was open, a door that hadn’t been open before. I looked through the doorway, saw the room was a small, bare one, furnished only with a big chair, a couple of straight-backed chairs, as though the doc had used it as a sort of confessional for folks who didn’t like talking in a big room. The thing that interested me was that the room opened to a patio and the patio door swung gently in the night wind. The picture was clear. Somebody—perhaps they’d been in this small room while we were talking—had opened the door to the study, shot the doc through the back and beat it through the patio.

  As I say, that was interesting, but what I had on my mind were letters, papers, anything that could hook up Mrs. Woodring with the doc. After all, International was being paid to keep her clear. I went through the doc’s big desk fast and found nothing I wanted. One of the pictures on the wall looked a little cockeyed and on a hunch I lifted it away. Behind it was a wall safe and I began to believe in luck. The outer door was ajar and keys dangled in the inside door.

  Inside I found cash, a sheaf of A-1 bonds and a thick package of letters held together with a rubber band. I got the rubber band off and leafed through the letters. He’d had ’em from socialites, top-flight picture people, even from big-shot business guys. I found five on the stationery of Helen K. Woodring, slid those in my pocket and stuck the others back in the safe. I knew the newspapers would have a lot of fun with those letters and their senders but la Woodring was my only lookout.

  When I had the picture back in place, I eased up a little. There might be other stuff around that would tie in the Woodring dame but I’d have needed hours to prowl the entire layout and I had to gamble on the letters being all there was. Just out of curiosity I got down on my knees and put my ear to the phone receiver. If the doc had merely unhooked the receiver by knocking the phone off the desk, I’d have got the dial tone. I didn’t. That meant he had been starting to dial a number when he was shot.

  While I was down on my knees, the small replica of the monkeys caught my eye. Light shone on the flat, solid bottom of the figures, showed me scratches that looked like letters. I picked the thing up, held it closer to the light. The scratches were letters and numbers reading: HI-M-N-3-7-S13. Underneath that in raised letters was the mold mark: MADE IN JAPAN. I didn’t have time to think about whether the letters and numbers might mean something or nothing because just then I began hearing siren noise. But, on the chance they might connect with Mrs. Woodring, I popped the three monkeys into my pocket.

  was looking wise and doing nothing when two cops came busting into the study like a rash. Jane College was looking a lot more collected than before but as though she could still have the weeps if someone would give her the right signal. Sue was her usual composed self.

  A big, red-nosed cop, in the lead, saw the body and started on us. “What’s happened here? Who’re you people? What’re you doing here?”

  I recognized the second cop, said, “Hello, Haggarty.”

  “Hi, Thorne,” said Haggarty. He was a thin, mouse-haired guy with uneven, yellow teeth and I’d met him a couple of times out fishing on the live-bait boats. He looked at the doc’s body, said, “Suicide or murder?”

  “Murder,” I said.

  “Better call Homicide, Oscar,” said Haggarty. His partner went out in tow of Jane College and Haggarty said, without bothering to fuss with the body, “What’s it all about, Thorne?”

  I gave him a few fragments, not mentioning the letters and the apes that I had in my pocket.

  “Umm,” Haggarty said. “Well, we’ll wait until the Homicide boys arrive. No sense in a dumb flatfoot doing any detecting and getting stuck for a week in court. Done any fishing lately, Thorne?”

  Haggarty and I cut up a lot of bait and made a tentative date to go after yellowtail in a couple of weeks. While we were doing it, Oscar came back and started to prowl the room, heavy-footed.

  He wound up at the packing case and I saw him fish around in it. He said, “Jeez, a zoo.”

  We all took a look inside and the case was full of small figures of the three monkeys, matching the one I had in my pocket. Apparently that had come out of the case because there was one missing from the top layer. I did some quick counting of the top layer and some estimating. There must have been at least six gross of the things in the case.

  “Jeez,” said Oscar, “what would a guy be wanting with all them monkeys? He musta been up to monkey business.”

  It was a pretty weak effort but nobody topped it so we let it lie.

  It wasn’t long before Captain Fisher of the Homicide squad, fat and gimlet-eyed and sloppy in a blue suit that hadn’t been pressed for a week, arrived with two dicks named Ahearn and Kirk.

  The minute Fisher saw me, he said, “Why’d you do it, Thorne?”

  I grinned. “Who’s been informing on me, skipper?”

  “Nobody. You’ve just got a naturally guilty look. What’re you doing around here?”

  That was something that had been on my mind from the moment I knew the situation called for cops. I couldn’t say that Sue and I had been putting the pressure on the doc in order to get him out of Mrs. Woodring’s pocketbook; the papers would get it and have a holiday with it.

  I said, “The dead man was the founder of a new religion, a cult. And the little lady here, Miss Jordan, was one of his followers. She wanted me to meet him and hear one of his lectures. You know how I am about the ladies, skipper, so I humored her even though I did think it was screwy.”

  Sue gave me a sweet glance and managed to look ga-ga, although I knew she wanted to tie me up by the thumb
s. She said in a coy, wounded fashion, “Why, Kerry, I thought you were really sincere.”

  Fisher looked as though he believed the act but I wasn’t too sure of it. He’s a long ways from being dumb. But all he said was, “I see. And what happened?”

  I gave him the bare physical facts, how we’d talked to the doc and been at the front door with the secretary when the blasting began. Fisher scouted around a little, looked into the small room, came back. He said, “That door was closed when you were in here first?”

  I said it had been.

  “All right,” Fisher said. “You and Miss Jordan and the other lady wait out in the next room. I’ll want to talk to all of you later.”

  Out in the lecture room I stalled until Jane College had picked a chair near the dais and then I ambled Sue down to the other end of the room. Oscar, the red-nosed cop, stood in the doorway and kept an important eye on us.

  “So I’m cult-screwy, am I?” said Sue. She had her voice low so Oscar couldn’t hear what she said, but not low enough to seem suspicious. “You’ll pay for that crack, Kerry. And, also, how about paying off on that bet?”

  “Me pay off? Listen, I bet the doc would be out of town inside of forty-eight hours. He is, isn’t he?”

  “So you’re going to quibble. I’ll remember that. Did you find anything in there while I was phoning the cops?”

  “You phoned?”

  “Miss Frake was too occupied with her jitters to do it. Did you find anything?”

  “Some of Woodring’s letters.”

  She smiled. “And three apes on the floor?”

  I said, “Damn clever, these Jordans.”

  “I saw the thing on the floor before I went to the phone. It was gone when I got back.”

  “It probably didn’t have any bearing,” I said, “but I didn’t know. The way I looked at it, the doc might have been more stirred up about being exposed than he seemed on the surface. We know he pulled that crack about Kirkwood regretting it and I know he’d started to dial a phone number when somebody let him have it. That call might have been about Kirkwood, and the chicken tracks on the figure of the apes might have counted in some fashion. A lot of ‘mights’ but I grabbed the apes on the strength of them.”

  “What chicken tracks?”

  I told Sue about the numbers and figures that had been scratched on the bottom of the monkeys. She made me repeat them slowly. I said, “You got any inkling?”

  “None. Who do you think killed him?”

  “I’m not thinking. That’s the Homicide Squad’s headache. We’ll turn these letters over to Kirkwood and then we’re out of the case.”

  “How about the apes you have in your pocket?”

  “On those we’ll wait. If it seems the cops should have them, the cops’ll get them. Where were you to reach Kirkwood tonight?”

  “At Mrs. Woodring’s home.”

  “Oke. As soon as Fisher turns us loose, we’ll go out there and turn over the letters.”

  She looked at me sort of queerly, said, “Suppose we pretend. Suppose we pretend Kirkwood had a lot to do with this killing. It will look swell for International to be playing on his side against the cops.”

  I chewed over that one. “What makes you think he might have?”

  “Nothing. But possibilities are possibilities. We’ll have to watch our step, Kerry.”

  There was some kind of a disturbance at the front door and then Haggarty came through the lecture room, towing a tall, young, blond guy. The blond saw me and nodded, said, “Hello, Thorne.”

  For a moment I didn’t place him. Then I did. I said hello and Haggarty took him on into the study.

  “Who?” said Sue.

  “His name is Fred Manners. He’s a kid who angled himself a private license some time ago. I ran into him on the fringes of a case a year ago and then never saw him again until now. I thought he’d probably faded into something that was more his speed.”

  A few minutes later one of the dicks came to the curtains and beckoned to Jane College. She went to the study with him and we waited. We waited some more and then we kept on waiting. It was pretty close to an hour before Fisher came out of the study. He didn’t look unhappy when he sat down beside me.

  I said, “Don’t tell me, skipper, that you’ve already got it all untangled.”

  “Not exactly,” he said, “but we’ve got a pretty nice lead. Did you know this guy, Sivaja, was really an ex-con named Eddie Levy?”

  “What?” I said. Then I looked reproachfully at Sue. “A nice spot you led me into, Miss Jordan—associating with ex-cons.”

  Sue choked but she managed to mutter something about she hadn’t known and she was sorry.

  “Yeah,” said Fisher. “An ex-con. We got that out of this secretary gal and the private dick that showed up a while ago. It seems this guy went up for mail fraud from St. Louis after taking some old Dutchman there for his life’s savings. The kraut never got over it and he located this Eddie Levy here six months back and took a shot at him. Levy kept it quiet but he hired this shamus, Manners, as a body-guard. The Dutchman hasn’t shown around here since then but he’s written Levy a lot of threatening letters. We found those in a wall safe in the study. So tonight Manners takes the night off and it looks to me like the kraut took the opportunity to get square. Anyway, we’re putting out a teletype on him.”

  “Here’s luck,” I said. “And now how’s about letting Miss Jordan and me go places and get some drinks? I need two or three or seven.”

  “Sure,” Fisher agreed. “I can reach you at the agency. And what’s your address, Miss Jordan?”

  Sue gave him the name of her hotel and we got under way.

  s I pulled my roadster around the corner from the side street into North Figueroa, I said, “When we get out to the Woodring place, Sue, we will go—”

  “Not ‘we,’ Kerry.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you can handle it from here. Why should I lose sleep?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Lone wolfess stuff.”

  She said sweetly, “Why, Kerry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Listen, babe, I know all about you and the way you like to show us pants-wearing ops up. You think you’ve figured out a hot angle on this and you want to work it all by yourself and grab all the credit.”

  “I’m hurt, Kerry.”

  “Yeah,” I jeered. “Nothing short of a solid crack in the jaw would hurt you. But if you want to make it a contest, we’ll make it that way.”

  “Make what a contest?”

  “I don’t know but you probably do.” I’d been watching the lights of a car in my mirror. When the car behind jogged through the radiance of a streetlight, I saw it was a squad car. I said, “Some cops are tailing us. I guess Fisher didn’t believe everything I told him. Now my feelings are hurt.”

  I took the next dark cross street, unlatched the door on my side and told Sue to get ready to slide under the wheel. Around another corner, I made the street and let the impetus of my jump carry me across the curb and into some shrubbery. The roadster slowed for an instant and then spurted. The police car tagged along, and as soon as it was out of sight I walked back to Figueroa, found a drug-store and got on the phone.

  I had Sue Jordan on my mind nearly as much as the phone call I was going to make. She had an angle on the fire. I felt pretty sure of that and I wasn’t too pleased. She’s a nice gal but she has a way of wandering off by herself and “stumbling” onto some hot lead in a case, thereby making the guy who’s working with her look and feel like a first-class jackass. Not that she ever hogs the credit with the bosses; but no guy likes to feel he’s a jackass.

  It took a while but finally a low British voice at the other end of the wire admitted that I was connected with the home of Mrs. Woodring. I told the voice I wanted to speak to Kirkwood.

  “That,” said the voice, “will be impossible. Mr. Kirkwood cannot come to the phone at the moment. What is it about, sir?”

&
nbsp; I asked who was talking.

  “This is Osgood, Mrs. Woodring’s butler.”

  “O.K., Osgood,” I said. “Just tell Mr. Kirkwood a detective by the name of Thorne has something he’ll be interested in and that this same guy named Thorne will be ringing the front doorbell in about twenty minutes.”

  Another phone call landed me a cab.…

  The Woodring place was no less than an estate. It stood in an acre of lawns and semi-tropical shrubs out on West Washington, the whole of it surrounded by a high, balustraded wall that had cost as much dough as the average guy’s entire home. There were bronze gates in the wall but they weren’t closed and between them a graveled drive headed up toward a huge, white blur of house.

  A block past the place, I paid the cab off and walked back to the gates. West Washington was fresh out of pedestrians at that hour but a streetcar clanked along noisily three blocks away and automobiles whirred by at wide intervals, going fast and sucking at the macadam with drawn-out, whining sounds.

  Inside the gates I got off the gravel, walked on the grass. Streetlights were cut off by the wall, trees and distance, and it was dark, almost completely black. That, I guess, was the only thing that saved me from stopping a nice hunk of lead.

  A clump of bushes half-way to the house swayed a little just as I came abreast of them, although there wasn’t any breeze. I hadn’t been expecting any rough stuff and if I ducked my head and shifted my feet fast, it was due entirely to the involuntary nerve reflexes of being damn good and scared. The clump of bushes snapped a flat, jarring explosion at me, along with a burst of blue and orange flame. The clanking streetcar was going by at that exact moment, so the shot didn’t seem very loud. But it seemed plenty in earnest.

  My feet, doing a rhumba as I tried to get around to face the clump of bushes and drag out my gun at the same time, tangled with the head of a lawn-sprinkler system. I went into the air, spread-eagled, and made a one-point landing on my chin. At least, I think it was my chin because I was picking blue grass out of my teeth for two days afterward.