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

by Unknown

  “I think so. Unless I’m very wrong. We’ll know soon, as soon as it will take to get all our friends here out to Doctor Sivaja’s—or Levy’s—cult place.”

  Kirkwood was looking very unhappy. He said, “But, Miss Jordan, I’d better not. If this gets into the papers—”

  “I think you’d better,” Sue said firmly. “Just in case. And don’t worry, there’ll be no reporters there.”

  Manners had been on his feet for a couple of minutes. He was leaning against a shiny walnut radio cabinet, looking pretty shaky. Now he stood away from the radio and took three steps in the direction of Harry Lake. His right moved fast and slammed Lake in the face. The punch didn’t seem to have been thrown very hard but there was a sound of bone snapping and cartilage smashing and Lake went down as though he had been tapped with a mallet. His broken nose was broken all over again and covered half his face.

  Manners slipped brass knuckles off his right hand and dropped them in his pocket. He grinned with his battered face and said, “That makes me feel a lot better.”

  irkwood had a big, expensive car downstairs and we all piled into it. Skip Morris and Harry Lake didn’t make any fuss about coming with us but maybe that was because Manners and I were holding guns on them.

  Kirkwood slid through traffic at fifty as though he was anxious to get the whole thing over with. I was busy clearing up some angles that had had me winging. Kirkwood admitted he hadn’t been at Mrs. Woodring’s place when I called; he’d gone over to see Sivaja but he hadn’t got there until after the murder, he said, and all the police cars had scared him away. Lake had phoned early that morning, given him a blackmail hint and set a meet for a certain corner. That’s how he’d got lured to the York apartment. He admitted he hadn’t tried to get me the way he’d agreed; he’d been willing to pay off and forget it all and I couldn’t blame him too much for that.

  Manners had put out some feelers and had located the York apartment spot the way I had.

  “And we both stuck out our chins,” he said. “Lake came along with Kirkwood and caught me just getting out of my car in front. He made me right away as Levy’s body-guard and the fireworks started.” He shook his head, remembering some of those fireworks. “Say, how about that job now?”

  I told him I hadn’t had a chance to speak to Tim Harper.

  Morris and Lake sneered at us largely but they were carefully not having any of the conversation.

  And neither was Sue. Whatever she had up her sleeve, she was keeping there. Personally, I didn’t think she had very much; the blackmail angle still looked plenty good to me.

  In daylight the House of No Evil looked like just what it was: a tired, old-fashioned place that had started out life in good society forty years before and had dropped out of the parade long ago. We went in, Manners and I keeping a peeled eye on Skip Morris and Harry Lake. They were meek as lambs.

  Inside the lecture room Cap Fisher was sitting on a chair only half big enough for him, talking to Jane College or Gerda Frake, Manners had said her name was when he told me he was engaged to her.

  A Homicide dick, named Malloy, was lounging with his hands in his pockets and there was another guy there that I didn’t know.

  Jane College looked around and saw Manners and her face went white and anxious. She jumped up, said, “Freddie, what’s happened? Oh, what have they done to you?”

  The way she looked at him, it was easy to tell they sort of liked each other.

  Manners grinned, said, “I’m O.K., Gerda. I just slipped and skinned my face on a knuckle.”

  “I’m a little late,” Sue said. “I’m sorry, Captain.”

  Fisher said, “It’s O.K. Us Homicide men aren’t supposed to get any sleep. Anyway, I wanted to go over some things here with Miss Frake.” He smiled, said, “I think I’ve got your drift, Miss Jordan. It sort of puzzled me when you phoned last night and said not to lose track of that packing case full of monkeys but when this lad”—he gestured at the guy I didn’t know—“showed up this morning, I began to figure things out. What made you think of it?”

  “It was just a hunch,” Sue said. “I couldn’t imagine why Sivaja—or Levy—would want six gross of the little figures. Then on the bottom of one of the figures was scratched a sort of a cipher, HI-M-N-3-7-S13.”

  She didn’t say what had become of that particular figure and, fortunately, Fisher was too interested in what was coming to ask.

  Sue continued, “I kept wondering and finally it occurred to me that maybe Sivaja hadn’t wanted the monkeys but he had wanted something the monkeys brought in with them from Japan—narcotics.”

  Fisher said admiringly, “You’re a smart girl.”

  “Thanks,” said Sue. “This morning I called the Customs at the harbor and found Sivaja had received two other similar shipments in the last few months, one of them aboard the Hideyoshi Maru from Nagasaki. That cleared up the letters HI, M and N, scratched on the one figure, and the clerk at the Customs said the rest was probably a date, Jap fashion. They date their year, it seems, from the coronation of the living Emperor, which made it read March 7 of Showa Thirteen, or March 7 of this year. And the clerk said the Hideyoshi Maru would be sailing from Nagasaki for Los Angeles about that date. Which indicates another shipment of apes is due to arrive here on that voyage of the Hideyoshi Maru.”

  The guy I didn’t know said, “I want to congratulate you, Miss Jordan, on an exceedingly clever piece of work. I sawed one of the figures open and found it contained approximately three ounces of heroin. If all the rest of the figures contain the same amount, it will be one of the largest seizures made by the Government Narcotic Bureau on this coast in a long time. Your agency has a nice amount of money coming by way of reward.”

  He showed a mutilated figure of the three apes and a little bottle full of snowy powder. A chunk had been sawed out of the ape that had its hands over its ears and there were traces of powder inside.

  Captain Fisher said, “Swell, but where do I come in? I still got a murder on my hands.”

  “We even thought of that, Captain,” Sue said. “We rounded up some lovely suspects for you. Introduce them, Kerry.”

  “Huh?” I said, looking up from the three apes. “Oh, yeah, skipper, meet Skip Morris and Harry Lake, ex-cons and pals of Doc Sivaja. They set him up in this racket here so I guess they can tell you plenty you want to know.”

  “Well, well,” said the skipper, putting a hard and happy eye on the two of them. “They’re the sort of lads I like to meet.”

  Harry Lake snarled through his busted nose but Morris was smooth, nonchalant. He said quietly, “We don’t know a thing about this, Captain. We’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  “There’s one thing you won’t have to worry about, boys,” the skipper told them, heavily humorous. “And that’s the dope-smuggling charge. After we run you through the gas chamber for murder, the Feds won’t be interested in you any longer.”

  Skip Morris still looked unworried. He had a very nice front. He said, “You’ll need a bit of proof, won’t you, before you can convict even two ex-cons of murder?”

  Fisher looked at Sue, at me. He said, “How about it? You got any proof these guys pulled the killing?”

  “Well,” I said, “all I know is they’d threatened to get him because he’d used their dough to set up the cult racket and then double-crossed them by believing his own stuff and turning holy on them. My guess is he’d turned so holy he was even going to tip off the law on the dope smuggling and they had to shut his mouth.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said the skipper, “but that’s guesses. Can’t you give me a tighter case than that against them?”

  Sue grinned. She said, “Am I to understand, Captain, that you want International to do all the Homicide Squad’s work?”

  Fisher reddened but he managed a grin, too. “I guess we can find out a few things ourselves from these boys.”

  He turned on Morris and Lake as though he meant to reach down their throats and drag the truth up
.

  I listened for a little and looked at the three apes in my hand for a while and thought I had never run into a screwier case. Three apes that could speak or see or hear no evil—and look what they’d accomplished along that line. I looked at them and again saw Levy lying dead on the floor of his study; I felt a slug of lead fanning my face in the darkness outside the Woodring home; I saw a blind girl and her man-crazy mother and her money-mad husband; I saw young Manners on the floor with his face battered to a pulp. The three apes had worked out swell for everybody—three apes that could speak no evil, could see no evil, could hear no evil. It was all very screwy.

  But presently I began to wonder if it really had been so screwy. I got up, caught Sue’s eyes and said, “Come here, sweetheart.”

  I walked her down the length of the room away from the rest of them.

  “Listen,” I said under my breath as we walked slowly toward the hall, “you were pretty smart. You figured this whole thing out all by your little self. Jordan the Magnificent!”

  “Don’t be sore,” Sue said. “I knew you could handle Kirkwood’s case without even drawing a deep breath. When I realized I probably had a big narcotic reward for International by the tail, I had to stay with it. I’d have tipped you off, Kerry, before it was all wound up. Honest!”

  “Skip it,” I said. “I’m not sore. But I’ve got to have my fun. I’ll give you ten to five I can pull one out of the hat right now that you never even thought of.”

  Sue said, “You’ve made a bet.”

  We had come to the archway between the lecture room and the hall. I said, “O.K. Stand right where you are. Don’t turn around.”

  She didn’t turn but I did. Facing her, I could see the group down at the other end of the lecture room. I could see Kirkwood watching us out of the corner of his eye and Gerda Frake talking to Manners and Cap Fisher shaking his fist in Skip Morris’ face and the Homicide dick helping him and the Narcotic man watching us in a bored fashion.

  I merely wagged my chin and twisted my lips around at Sue for about thirty seconds and Sue said, “You make beautiful faces, Kerry, but so what?”

  “Wait and see,” I muttered, and dodged past her and walked down the room fast. I got half-way down the room before the break came.

  Gerda Frake said something to Fred Manners and then she screamed on a high, sustained note that rippled my spine. Manners spun like an open-field runner, caromed off the Narcotic man and knocked him down. The Narcotic man fell into Gerda Frake, who was running toward the study doorway, and she fell flat on her face.

  Manners was already in the doorway. I have to give the kid credit; he could still have made his getaway alone because everyone but myself was paralyzed with surprise. But he wasn’t going to leave Jane College.

  He stopped in the doorway, his gun out and swinging, and he shouted, “Gerda,” and waited.

  I made the mistake of continuing to come at him and his gun blasted in the room, the bullet shaving hair off my head just above my left ear. I ducked and the room boomed to another shot and when I looked up, Manners was just beginning to fall forward. He fell on his face beside Jane College but by the time I got there, he had squirmed over on his back.

  Fisher stuck his gun, still smoking, back into his holster and looked down at Manners. He said in an amazed voice: “For cripes sake!”

  The skipper’s slug had slammed through Manners’ belly. I could see a little blood oozing out, staining his shirt front. I said, “I’m sorry, Manners.”

  “Yeah,” Manners said, making heavy weather of it. “I’m sorry too, Thorne. Now—now I—don’t get that International job. And, hell, I wanted to be a shamus—with a good—agency. But no job—now, eh?”

  ne hour later a deputy jailer let me out of the prison ward at the receiving hospital. On the street I caught a cab and lit a cigarette as the cab started rolling. The cigarette didn’t taste good but that was because I didn’t feel so good. I never did like seeing guys die.

  When I got to the office, I walked to Tim Harper’s office, stuck my head in. Tim was there, looking not so sour now, and Sue was there, too.

  She said, “Well?”

  “As well as you could expect,” I said. “Manners died but they got a yarn out of him before he kicked off.” I sat down and put my feet on Harper’s desk. He was too interested to bawl me out about it. “Manners was the guy who thought up the gag of getting heroin in by ordering the apes, supposedly for the cult, and loading them with dope. Sivaja found out about it when he overheard Manners making a phone call from the house a couple of days ago about the shipment that was due.

  “Sivaja beat Manners to the shipment at the Customs and told him he was going to turn him in to the Narcotic folks. So Manners had to shut his mouth. He told us plenty more, too. He was the guy that took a shot at me outside Mrs. Woodring’s house. He wanted to get the figure of the apes away from me and he took everything else off me to cover up that it was just the apes he wanted. He told us how he knew I had the figure and that I was heading for the Woodring place.”

  “I’ve guessed that all by my little self, now,” Sue said. “Gerda Frake is deaf. She reads lips and I remember that she was in the room with us after the murder when we were talking about the letters and the figure of the apes.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “She told Manners and he beat me to the Woodring place. Then, having the letters and knowing about Morris and Lake, he thought up a fast one. His smuggling game was washed up and he really did have a yen to be an op for a good agency, so he figured he’d plant the letters and my gun in their place, tip me off and cinch a job with us. Also, as he doped it out, if the cops had them to play with, it would divert suspicion from him. So he beat it to their place, watched them leave, got in and planted the stuff. Lake caught him outside by his car but made the mistake of thinking Manners had just climbed out of the car instead of being about to get in. But that made the planted letters and gun just as good as though Lake hadn’t caught Manners. And he was willing to take a beating to let it stay that way.”

  “You didn’t have this under your hat all the time,” said Sue.

  I admitted I hadn’t. “I pulled it out of the air just about thirty seconds before I walked you down that room. I wasn’t satisfied with the thing as we had it. Morris and Lake were taking it too easy, there were too many loose ends. Why were they wasting time on a shakedown when they should have been worrying about a hundred grand worth of heroin? While I was wondering about that, I kept looking at the three apes who couldn’t speak evil or see evil or hear evil. And suddenly the thing popped out of the blue. We’d had a guy that wouldn’t speak evil, a girl who couldn’t see evil. So why couldn’t we have somebody who couldn’t hear evil—a deaf person?

  “Some deaf folks can read lips so well that you’d never suspect they were deaf. If that hunch was on the level, I knew I had something. Kirkwood and the Woodring household certainly wouldn’t be in on the dope setup but they were the only ones, outside of you, that I’d told about heading for there.

  “Then I began to figure who had seen me talking to you about it and that pointed the finger right at the Frake girl. I started remembering things. She and Manners had worked for a medical laboratory and that put them on the fringes of the drug racket. And Manners had as an alibi only his claim that he was at the Lotsatime Café when the shooting took place and in a crowded joint like that, who’s to say just what minute a guy leaves?”

  Nobody answered me. I went on:

  “Also I recalled how the Frake girl hadn’t seemed to hear me when I told her to call the cops, not until I shook her out of her hysterics and made her look at me. Even then she had finagled it so you did the calling because she probably can’t hear well on the phone. So I decided to pull my little gag on them and it worked!”

  Sue said, “You certainly made the nastiest faces. What were you saying?”

  “I didn’t say anything but I made my lips work as though I was saying: ‘We’ve let this thing go far enough.
I’m going to put the finger on Manners and the girl and get cuffs on them before they know what it’s all about.’ I knew she was watching me, and I figured if my hunch was right, she couldn’t help slipping Manners a warning and he’d be so startled that he’d do something to give himself away. You know the rest.”

  Sue got a five-dollar bill out of her purse and handed it to me. She said, “Gee, Kerry, but you’re wonderful.”

  “Thanks, sweetheart,” I said. “You’re wonderful, too.”

  Tim Harper had been listening, not saying anything. He growled at us now but he did it with a twist to his mouth. He said, “Wonderful, my eye. All the detective work you both did on this could be put on the end of a sharp needle. Scram and make out your reports.”

  Sue and I got to the outside office and the office boy lugged a big package toward me and slammed it on a desk. Mailed in the Orient by my aunt.

  Sue said, “Ah, another elephant from Aunt Frieda.”

  “If it is,” I said, starting to unwrap the thing, “I’ll go nuts. I’ve already got Aunt Frieda’s elephants strung around my apartment like a circus parade. So help me, I’ll go nuts.”

  I got the thing unwrapped and reached in and pulled out three big brass monkeys, holding mouth, eyes, ears.

  Sue laughed and laughed. She said, “You lucky, lucky boy! It isn’t an elephant, after all. In case you don’t know what it is, it’s three apes from the East.”

  “Pardon me,” I said, “while I go nuts anyway.”

  “I’ll help you,” Sue offered.

  Death Stops Payment

  D. L. Champion

  D(’ARCY) L(YNDON) CHAMPION (1902–1968) was borne in Melbourne, Australia, and fought with the British Army in World War II before emigrating to the United States. His first published work was a serialization under the pseudonym G. Wayman Jones, a house name, of Alias Dr. Death in the February to October 1932 issues of Thrilling Detective; it was published in book form later in the same year. In 1933, he created the character of Richard Curtis Van Loan, better known as the Phantom Detective, under another house name, Robert Wallace. He wrote most of the early episodes of the Phantom Detective, the second hero pulp to come out after the Shadow. It ran for 170 issues between 1933 and 1953, the third-longest-running hero pulp, ranking just behind the Shadow and Doc Savage. Under his own name and as Jack D’Arcy, he created several other memorable characters. Mariano Mercado is a hypochondriac detective who appeared in eight novelettes between 1944 and 1948 in Dime Detective. Inspector Allhof, a former New York City policeman who lost his legs while leading a botched raid, is retained by the NYPD because of his brilliance and in spite of his arrogance. Allhof appeared in twenty-nine stories from 1938 to 1945, mainly in Dime Detective; twelve of the tales were collected in Footprints on a Brain: The Inspector Allhof Stories (2001). Perhaps his most popular series featured Rex Sackler, known as the “Parsimonious Prince of Penny Pinchers.” The hilarious series began in Dime Detective, then moved to Black Mask.