by Unknown
“Middleman for Murder” was published in the November 1947 issue.
Middleman for Murder
Bruno Fischer
Poor Perry Pike! My old pal sure looked seedy—his hat battered, shoes scuffed, suit shabby. All Perry had was seventy grand in cold cash—too cold to touch!
PERRY PIKE WASN’T GLAD TO SEE me. He was wearing his hat and topcoat when he answered my knock, and he just stood there and scowled. He had a good face for scowling. It was pinched at the cheeks and his thin mouth turned down easily when he was displeased about something.
“Now this,” I said, “is a fine welcome home.”
“Home?” Perry said, and gulped. “You’re back for good?”
“That depends on business prospects.” Over his shoulder I looked into the living room. There wasn’t anything in sight to make him bar my way, though from where I stood I couldn’t see into the bedroom.
“You going to keep standing in the door?” I demanded.
“Oh,” he said, and stepped back so that I could get into the apartment.
The place looked pretty good after eight months of west coast rooming houses. A decent-sized living room, an adequate bedroom, a tiled bathroom, a kitchen you could practically turn around in. The furniture was mostly bleached oak except for the daybed and the brown leather chair.
A couple of years ago I’d bought that furniture after I’d picked up some change by selling half a dozen letters to a married banker which he’d written to a woman who wasn’t his wife. The lady didn’t give me the letters. I sort of borrowed them without her knowing it, and prevented her from using them dishonestly by returning them to the author for only five grand. A couple of days later I dropped the money in a crap game at Lou’s, less what I’d paid for the furniture I’d bought meanwhile. If I hadn’t made that purchase, I would have dropped that part of the money too, so I always figured I’d got the furniture for free.
“Where are you going to stay?” Perry Pike asked gloomily.
“Here in my apartment,” I told him.
I put down my bag and looked in the other rooms. Nobody else was in the apartment, hiding or otherwise. I returned to the living room.
Perry was sitting on the daybed, with his hands dangling forlornly between his bony knees. “Maybe you’ll be more comfortable in a hotel,” he suggested.
“Listen, pal,” I said, getting sore. “We rented this apartment together. The furniture is mine. I’ve come home, and I’m staying here even if I could afford a flophouse, which I can’t at the moment.”
“Broke, eh?”
“Flatter than the treasury of a European country,” I said. “Last month I hiked a couple of checks, but on the way home to New York I dropped the dough in a crap game.”
“You and your crap games,” Perry said disgustedly. He lifted his head. “You’re not hot, Willie?”
“Me hot!” I laughed. “The California bulls are looking for a small, dark foreigner around sixty years old.”
I was a big guy. I was blond. I could trace my family back to the Revolution. I hadn’t seen thirty-five yet.
“I’m kind of broke myself,” Perry said unhappily.
Well, I was home, so I decided to make myself at home. I took off my coat and went to the closet to hang it up. I’d glanced in there a few minutes ago to see why Perry Pike wasn’t giving me a rousing reception, but now as I searched for a hanger I had a good look at what hung there. The hanger rod was crowded with a couple of overcoats, a couple of topcoats beside the one Perry was wearing and seven suits. There were four hats on the shelf. Everything was expensive and his size.
I turned to him in surprise. “What’d you do, rob a bank?”
He got pale around the mouth. “Those clothes?” he said. “A fella gave them to me.”
Perry Pike could lie as smoothly as a diplomat, but he’d lost his touch. Or maybe he hadn’t had time to prepare a convincing story. But that wasn’t all of it. The topcoat he was wearing wasn’t fit for a rummage sale. His hat was battered. His shoes were scuffed and needed new soles. His suit had been old a couple of years ago.
Yet there in the closet were all those new suits and coats and hats.
“How’s about telling Papa?” I said.
He shoved his arms deeper between his knees. “Tell what?”
The best cops in New York hadn’t been able to make him talk on the two or three occasions they’d tried, so what chance had I? I went into the bathroom to wash up.
When I came out, Perry was still sitting dejectedly on the daybed in his hat and coat.
“Don’t let me keep you from going anywhere,” I said.
He seemed to wake up. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said, and stood up, removed his hat and coat and sat down.
I sat in the brown leather chair and looked at him.
After a while Perry said: “There’s no food in the house. Aren’t you going out to eat?”
“You going with me?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Neither am I,” I said, though I was. “Think I’ll hit the hay.”
Perry jumped up. “You take the bedroom. I’ll sleep here on the daybed.”
He was too generous. “The way I barged in on you,” I said graciously, “I wouldn’t think of taking the bed.”
He didn’t argue. I opened the daybed, fetched sheets and blankets, got into pajamas, stretched out. It was only nine p.m., the beginning of the evening, but Perry didn’t leave the apartment, though he’d been all set to a few minutes ago. He hung around the living room for a while and then went into the bedroom.
Time passed. A radio next door was turned on to the Giants game, and I lay listening to it. After the game, soft music came through the wall.
It wasn’t until an hour or two later that I heard Perry snore. I slipped out of the daybed.
Enough light came in from the street lamp five floors below the window to show me what I was doing. There wasn’t anything in the mattress or among the springs. The frame of the daybed was upholstered. I moved my fingers over the material.
When I straightened up to go to the other end of the daybed, my head turned, and Perry Pike in faded blue pajamas was standing in the bedroom doorway.
For a moment we just looked at each other. Then I said with a very small laugh: “I was hunting for bugs.”
“There aren’t any,” Perry said woodenly.
“That’s good.” I climbed back into the bed. “Good-night, pal,” I said.
Without a word he returned to the bedroom. A couple of minutes later I was fast asleep.
I awoke with the sun in my eyes. The moment I stirred Perry Pike came into the room. By the looks of him he hadn’t slept a wink all night.
“Fine morning,” I said heartily.
“Yeah,” he said glumly, and sat down in his pajamas.
He sat while I shaved, showered, dressed.
“Anything in the kitchen to make breakfast?” I asked him, though I knew the answer. I’d looked and found a bulging refrigerator.
“Not a thing,” he said. “I’ve been having all my meals out.”
“So dress and let’s go down for breakfast.”
He wriggled his bare toes. “I’m not hungry. I guess I’m not feeling so good.”
It would have been fun keeping up the torment, but I was getting almost as impatient as he was. I put on my hat, said, “I’ll be back in an hour,” and went.
I went as far as the self-service elevator. When it came up to my floor, I sent it down without me; then I returned up the hall, walking on my rubber heels. I listened through the door. In the apartment there was a heavy, scraping, dragging sound, like furniture being moved—the daybed, no doubt. Then a minute of silence, then a thinly harsh sound, not at all loud.
After listening to that for a while, I decided that a floorboard was being ripped up. But I couldn’t quite believe it. I couldn’t see a hiding place under a tongue-and-groove hardwood varnished floor in a modern apartment.
S
ilence returned to the apartment. I waited a full minute by my watch. He had, of course, locked the door, but I still had my key. I unlocked the door and entered.
He had moved the daybed to the middle of the room. Where it had been, he sat on the floor, a skinny little man in faded blue pajamas.
“So it wasn’t the daybed, Perry,” I said cheerfully. “It was behind the daybed.”
His eyes blinked and his lips quivered. I half-expected him to burst into tears. He didn’t say anything.
I walked over to where he sat on the floor and squatted beside him. It hadn’t been one of the floorboards I had heard him pry up; it was the eight-inch molding that ran along the base of the wall. The screwdriver he had used was still in his hand. There was an empty space behind the molding; probably he’d gouged it out of the plaster himself. I could see small rectangular bundles wrapped in newspaper in the hole. He had taken three of them out.
“I knew it,” Perry said bitterly. “I fooled the coppers, but the minute you walked into the apartment I knew I wouldn’t be able to fool you.”
“The way you acted, one would’ve got you ten it was in the daybed,” I told him.
“But you’d look and look till you found it,” he said, trying to break the screwdriver in two with his bare hands. “The coppers had a look, but living here in the apartment you would’ve done better, so I knew I had to get the stuff out of here quick.” He sighed. “You were always smarter than me, Willie.”
“Sure,” I agreed.
I unwrapped one of the bundles. The shape had told me what was in it, but when I saw that I was right, I was too experienced to give way to ecstasy.
“Queer money?” I asked him.
“See for yourself.”
I picked off the top bill—a fifty. I looked at it in the light, I crumpled it, I felt it. Beyond doubt Uncle Sam’s mint had manufactured it.
I shuffled through the rest of the money in that pile. The bills were in larger denominations, but not so large that you couldn’t cash them at a bank without arousing suspicion. I made a quick count. Six thousand bucks, about.
“How many bundles in all?” I asked him.
“Ten.”
I whistled. “Sixty grand!”
“Seventy grand,” Perry said miserably. “But the dough’s no good.”
“Hot, eh?” I said. “The banks have the numbers. The coppers will nab you as soon as you start passing them. That it, Perry?”
He shook his head. “This is strictly legitimate dough. No serial numbers on file. Only I can’t spend it.”
“Why not?”
Perry stood up and went to the daybed and sat down. “I know you, Willie,” he said. “You’ll ask questions all over town and find out what the coppers think they have on me and figure out the answers, so I might as well tell you myself.”
I settled myself on the floor, with my back to the hole in the base of the wall. It looked like merely an accident that I was between Perry Pike and the seventy grand.
“A guy named Norval Avery was in the white goods business,” Perry said. “He was a legitimate character, manufacturing white shirts and men’s underwear. Had a small shop off Seventh Avenue and maybe half a dozen workers. Lived in Queens with the missus and two kids in one of those attached brick houses where you can walk blocks and blocks and not tell one house from another. He wasn’t poor and he wasn’t in the dough—till the war came and the OPA and the white goods shortage.”
“You’re telling me,” I commented. “I used to pay twelve bucks for a white shirt worth no more than two.”
Perry nodded. “And a large slice of the difference went into Norval Avery’s own pocket. So there was Norval Avery suddenly rich out of the black market, living high, sending his wife and kids to Florida every winter all winter long, buying everything he’d always hankered for. Of course he paid for everything in cash on account of all that black market dough he got was in cash. Then the war ended and a year later white goods started coming back into the stores and business went back to normal or worse, and Norval Avery found himself with better than one hundred grand in cash.”
“Very nice,” I said.
“Think so?” Perry said. “Wait and see. Of course this Norval Avery didn’t pay income tax on this black market dough. Even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t on account of his tax would be so high, the OPA would start asking him how come he made so much in just a small shop. But he also had the Treasury boys to worry about. And Norval Avery was a guy who worried plenty. Like when he had all that cash in a bank safety deposit box and then read in the papers that maybe Congress would pass a law to open all safety deposit boxes for a look, he grabbed the dough out and then didn’t know what to do with it.”
“Spend it,” I suggested.
“Sure, he spent it here and there, but not too much. Like when he visited his missus and kids in Florida and started plunging at the racetracks and then heard how Treasury agents were hanging around the tracks to get a line on heavy bettors who hadn’t paid heavy income taxes. So after that he was scared to buy even a two-dollar ticket. Then, just before the OPA was kicked out by Congress, they nabbed some guys who were in the white goods black market and they sang plenty. One of the lads they sang about was Norval Avery. And so the OPA boys asked him this and that, such as how come he was richer than he should be. But they didn’t know the half of it on account of all the transactions had been in cash and they hadn’t any idea about the pile of it he had socked away. But they couldn’t do anything to him. That got the Treasury boys on his tail, and even after the OPA was no more, Norval Avery had the unpaid income tax to worry about. All they had to do was know about all that cash and they’d have him good.”
“Cute,” I said. “That’s what happens with legitimate lads having illegitimate dough. Now if I had it …”
“Yeah?” Perry ran the back of a hand over his mouth. “So there he was with all that cash and scared to spend more than a few bucks of it now and then. Scared to invest it, buy a house, play the horses with it. And he had another headache—where to hide it. Once he buried it in his backyard, but he started thinking that one of the neighbors might’ve seen him, so next night he dug it up again. He hid it in his mattress, and then thought he was cooked when the cleaning woman cleaned the room and made the bed. He hid it in the cellar, but next week a plumber came to repair something down there, and he was sure the plumber would find it. He nearly died waiting for him to leave. Every couple of days he hid it somewhere else.”
“But he didn’t hide it where you couldn’t get it,” I observed.
Perry Pike was silent for a long minute. We both listened to the music coming through the wall. The radio in the apartment next door hadn’t been turned off for a moment since last night.
“Last month I was playing poker in Norval Avery’s house,” Perry went on. “It wasn’t the first time. The way I figured it, he had an idea that if he went in for heavy poker, he could say he’d won the dough. Only the trouble was he was a hunch player, and he never won even once. This night I’m talking about he played like he didn’t care if he took a pot or not, like he was just going through the motions of playing on account of a week before he’d made the date for that game. I wasn’t doing so good myself, but that’s got nothing to do with the story. After a while it so happened that I left the game for a few minutes to go upstairs to the bathroom. I happened to look into a room that was fixed up like a study, and I happened to go in.”
“To see if anything valuable wasn’t nailed down,” I said.
Perry didn’t care for the interruption. He scowled darkly at me. “There was a letter face down on the desk,” he told me. “I turned it over and saw it was addressed to the Bureau of Internal Revenue, so I read it. He’d written them the story I’ve just told you, a confession, and at the end he said he was going nuts worrying over that dough and was ready to pay the tax and fines and hoped they wouldn’t start criminal action against him on account of he was telling all. After I read the letter, I
went back to the poker game.”
“How’d you find it?” I asked.
“The dough?” He practically smiled. “You’re not the only smart cookie, Willie. After the game broke up, I hung around the house. Norval Avery’s missus and kids were in Florida and he was alone in the house. I waited an hour after all the lights went out and then slipped into the house. The first place I looked was the right place. There was one of those artificial fireplaces, but with real bricks in it, and I knew that sooner or later he’d hide the dough there because sooner or later anybody would. And sure enough there was a loose brick. When I pulled it out there was the dough. While I was counting it, the light went on and I looked around and Norval Avery was in the room.”
I ran my tongue over my lips. I had a pretty good idea what was coming.
“What could I do?” Perry complained shrilly. “I grabbed a book-end from a table and socked him with it before he could yell. It wasn’t such a hard sock, but the book-end was iron or something, and he …” Perry stopped.
“So you killed him,” I said softly.
“I just wanted to keep him quiet for a few minutes.”
“Murder,” I said softly.
“I guess so.” He wiped his nose on the sleeve of his pajamas. “Well, I was almost out of the house with the dough when I remembered that letter upstairs he’d written to the Bureau of Internal Revenue. So I went back for the letter and took it with me.”
I stood up and stuck my hands in my pockets and leaned against the wall. “I can finish it,” I said. “When the body was found, the coppers pulled in everybody who was at that poker game for questioning. But they had to let them all go, including you, because they couldn’t prove anything, especially no motive.”
