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

by Unknown

  “That’s what you think,” Perry said. “That letter to the Bureau of Internal Revenue was a copy he’d made for his own lawyer. The other copy he’d mailed out that afternoon. So then they knew that Norval Avery had had more than seventy grand in cash in the house and that it was gone. Then they had the motive for his being knocked off.”

  My toes nudged one of the bundles on the floor. “I see,” I said. “When you got your hands on that dough, you couldn’t wait. You started splurging. You went out and bought yourself a lot of clothes. The coppers were shadowing all the suspects to see which one had become suddenly rich. You were the lad.”

  Perry nodded unhappily. “They piled on me. Wanted to know where I’d got the dough for all those clothes and why I’d bought so many suits at a time. I said I’d picked up a little in poker, a little on the ponies. You see, I hadn’t spent enough yet for them to prove it wasn’t so. They got a warrant and searched this apartment, but they didn’t rip off the molding. But they’re still watching me. Every time I buy a pack of cigarettes I got a feeling somebody’s watching how much I’m spending.”

  “Poor Perry,” I said sympathetically. “The local coppers aren’t bad enough. You got the Federals sniffing at you, too, because tax wasn’t paid on that dough.”

  “That’s just about it.” His arms hung dejectedly between his knees. “Now I know what Norval Avery went through with all that dough begging to be spent and him scared to spend it. As soon as I start spending heavy, the coppers will be sure enough to pull me in for murder and go to work on me. I’m not such a brave guy, Willie. I’m not sure I can stand up to their third degree. And the Federals will bring in their lie detectors, and I hear that intelligent, sensitive guys like me are pushovers for those machines. So like Norval Avery I’m being driven nuts by that dough which is no use to me.”

  “You don’t have to hang around New York,” I pointed out.

  “The Federals are all over the country,” Perry said bitterly. “They never let up on dough they haven’t collected tax on. And if they catch up with me on that, they’ll turn me over to the New York coppers to burn me. Maybe I can jump to South America, but they’ll be watching me if I try to take the dough onto a boat. Anyway, New York is the one place where I’d enjoy spending it. Only I can’t.”

  “Which is,” I said, “where I come in.”

  “That’s right,” Perry said. “You’re always talking about your brain. It’ll be worth ten per cent—seven grand—if you figure out how I can remain in New York and spend the dough and not have the coppers down on my neck.”

  “My brain,” I told him reflectively, “tells me that you’re going to give me the whole seventy grand.”

  His head snapped up. “You’re nuts!”

  “No, you won’t give it to me,” I corrected myself. “What I’ll have to do is gather up these ten bundles and walk out of here. I don’t think you’ll go yelling to the coppers that I relieved you of seventy grand.”

  Perry Pike looked at me and shivered. He was a little guy and I was a big guy. I could take him with one hand.

  He stood up. I watched him, but all he did was go as far as the bleached oak desk and lean against it. He looked sick. I felt a little sorry for him. He wasn’t a bad sort of lad.

  But there was work to be done. I stooped and came up with a bundle of money in each hand—and looked into the muzzle of a compact .38 automatic pistol.

  The gun was in Perry’s hand. “I think you’ll leave that dough where it is, Willie,” he said hoarsely.

  I stared at him in surprise. Perry wasn’t a firearms lad any more than I was. I wasn’t even sure that he knew how to use one. His hand wasn’t steady, but he was close enough to hit anything he shot at and too far away for me to take him.

  “Perry,” I said pleasantly, “there’s no point getting sore at your closest pal. Didn’t you just trust me enough to confide in me?”

  “Yeah, I confided in you,” he said grimly, “on account of you would’ve gone to the library and dug into newspapers and read how last month a guy named Norval Avery was knocked off in Queens and seventy grand missing, and you’d have added it up to me. Now beat it.”

  “Perry,” I said, “let’s sit down and talk. For a fifty-fifty split—”

  “Beat it,” he said.

  I didn’t care for the look in his eyes or the way the gun was pointed right at my heart. I beat it.

  I sat in a restaurant eating breakfast and wondering where Perry Pike would stash the dough next. New York was the hardest place in the world to hide anything which had bulk. Especially if you wanted it where you could get your hands on it now and then, you were limited to the tiny area in which you lived hemmed in by dozens or hundreds of other people.

  No wonder Norval Avery had given up, and Perry was in the first stages of going nuts with worrying. The fact that he’d got himself a gun proved it.

  I gave him about an hour to cool off before I returned to the apartment. For a lad who lived by his brains, I’d been in too much of a hurry to grab off the whole seventy grand. Now I’d have to work at getting Perry’s confidence back, at convincing him that I was his one pal in a cold and hostile world.

  When I let myself into the apartment, I saw that Perry had straightened up the living room. The molding was on the wall and the daybed pushed back to where it belonged.

  “Perry?” I called.

  No answer. I started to feel sick. He’d beat it after all with the dough which had practically been mine, and I’d never again see him or, what was more to the point, it.

  I glanced into the kitchen, then into the bathroom, then opened the bedroom door.

  I saw something and heard something at the same time. What I saw was Perry lying motionless on the floor between the bed and the dresser. What I heard was a small sound at the side of the door. I was turning toward the sound when the ceiling fell on me.

  My knees buckled. A cloud whipped over my eyes, and through it I saw something move. It didn’t have form or substance, but in a vague way I knew that it was a human being and that he’d just conked me over the head with a blunt object.

  My shoulder hit the floor. The cloud thinned a little and I could see legs. Legs wearing pants, and they were moving toward me. Dully the thought ran through my aching head that he was going to hit me again, and this time he’d make sure to bash my skull in.

  I didn’t want my skull bashed in. I waved a hand at the legs. Above me there was a panicky yelp. The legs vanished from my line of vision. I heard them run out of the bedroom, across the living room. I heard the hall door open and slam.

  I lay back on the floor and closed my eyes. The door slammed again. He’s coming back to finish me, I thought, and twisted on my hip toward the door. I could see part of the living room; nobody was in there. I didn’t hear anybody.

  I pushed myself up to my feet and wobbled out of the bedroom. Nobody was in the apartment except Perry and myself. I must have dreamed hearing that door slam twice.

  I returned to the bedroom. Perry Pike hadn’t moved. He would never move under his own power. There was too much blood on his shirt and on the floor. And his eyes were open, staring up at me without seeing me.

  A knife had done it to him. An ordinary steak knife. The handle was still sticking out of one of the half dozen wounds in his chest.

  I felt very bad. I’d known a lot worse lads than Perry. While we hadn’t trusted each other in the matter of seventy grand, who would have? He’d still been a good pal.

  My eyes moved about the room. A weekend bag stood on the dresser. I opened it and found ten rectangular bundles. Seventy grand.

  Where Perry had intended to go with the dough nobody would ever know. He had dressed and then put it in the bag and then somebody had come into the apartment. Somebody whose nerves had made him strike again and again with the knife and then run in panic when I’d waved my hands at him.

  Sure, somebody. Why wouldn’t the cops be convinced that I was that somebody? Motive, opportunity,
everything pointed to me. Willie, I thought, you’re in a spot. Start thinking.

  I didn’t touch the money. I went into the bathroom and soaked my head. Then I sat in a living room chair which didn’t face the bedroom and lit a cigarette. Through the wall the radio which was never turned off sent soft music. It was too soft. It sounded to me like a funeral dirge—to my own funeral.

  Seventy grand in a bag in the bedroom.

  I could beat it with the dough. Then when the body was found, the police would check and find that last night I’d come back to live in the apartment with Perry. They were already pretty sure that he was in possession of Norval Avery’s seventy grand. Added up, my disappearance would mean that I’d knocked Perry off for the dough. Result: I’d be seventy grand richer, but I would have as good as confessed to a murder I hadn’t done. I’d be a fugitive for life. My fingerprints were on record, and any time I was picked up for anything anywhere, I’d be shipped back to New York to burn in the chair.

  There had to be a better way.

  Say I walked out of here with the dough and hid it somewhere. Just where I’d hide it I didn’t know yet, but I could work that out later. Then tonight I’d come back here and pretend I’d just found Perry murdered and I’d call the coppers myself.

  So what? They’d still wonder what had happened to the seventy grand. And they’d come to the same answer: I’d knocked Perry off for it.

  Only they wouldn’t be able to prove it. They’d take me to headquarters and sweat me, but eventually they’d have to let me go because merely knowing was not legal evidence. And I’d be free with seventy grand in small bills.

  And then? Then wherever I went, the coppers and the Federal agents would be sniffing at my tail, and if I was found with that money anywhere it would be all the evidence they’d need. Like Norval Avery and Perry Pike, I’d get heart failure every time I spent an extra nickel.

  Whatever you do, Willie, I told myself, you’re not going to be any too comfortable. Make with the brains.

  The music coming from the radio next door cut out and a man started to enthuse about furniture polish. Instead of thinking, I sat listening to that voice and idly wondering about two doors slamming.

  Two doors, I said to myself suddenly. Not one door, but first one and then another.

  I stood up and hunted for Perry’s gun. It was on the dresser behind the bag. I checked the clip. Fully loaded.

  I looked at the bag and sighed. I looked down at Perry and said aloud: “I’ll see what I can do for you, pal, and incidentally for myself.” Then I went out to the hall.

  Softly I turned the doorknob of the apartment next door. It was locked, of course. It so happened that a couple of years ago I’d borrowed the building superintendent’s passkey without him knowing it. I’d had a duplicate made and then put the original where the superintendent would find it and think he’d dropped it.

  I used that passkey now. I turned it in the lock and kicked the door open and plunged through behind Perry’s gun.

  I heard and then saw the radio—a small table model against the wall. The lad who liked to listen to the radio day and night wasn’t in the living room, but I heard him in the bedroom.

  “Who’s there?” he yelped frantically.

  I rushed into the bedroom. The man cowering against the bed was somebody I’d never seen before; he must have moved in recently. He was tall and thin. He needed a shave and had bloodshot eyes, possibly from listening to the radio instead of sleeping. His shirt and pants were on the floor. He’d taken them off because there was blood on them—blood that had spurted out of Perry’s wounds.

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “A door slamming twice. My door slamming when you ran out of my apartment, and your door slamming when you ran into yours.”

  He straightened his scrawny, half-naked body a bit. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “I’ll draw you a picture,” I said. “These walls are thin as paper. If I could hear the radio turned down very low in your apartment, you could hear us talking in my apartment. You heard Perry tell me the tale of the seventy grand. You waited till you heard me leave; then you grabbed up a knife and went next door and knocked. Perry figured you were a delivery boy or something like that and opened the door. When you didn’t seem to have any special business, Perry got leery and dashed into the bedroom for his gun. You went after him and stopped him with your knife.”

  “You’re crazy,” he said in a thin, small voice.

  “What’s that on your pants and shirt—red paint?”

  He looked down at his bloody shirt and pants and then up at my gun, and, except that he was breathing, he looked about as dead as Perry.

  “You must be an honest citizen,” I said. “No experience in crime and murder. You had to kill Perry because he knew your face, but you were too frantic and got blood all over yourself. After you conked me, I was more or less helpless, but when I waved a hand at you, you fled like a scared rabbit.” I shook my head disapprovingly. “Very sloppy work, mister. I bet that steak knife in Perry’s chest matches others just like it in your kitchen. The coppers ought to return their pay for solving this one.”

  What I’d said about the steak knives must have been true because he broke completely. He buried his face in his hands and rocked from side to side.

  “I was such a fool!” he moaned. “But seventy thousand dollars—”

  I nodded. “I know just how it is, mister.”

  His hands flopped away from his face. A remote hope came into his eyes. “Listen,” he said tightly. “The money’s still there. You take it and let me go.”

  I smiled. “Wouldn’t you like that? Because the lad who has the seventy grand will be burned as the killer.” I stroked the barrel of the gun and added reflectively: “For my part, that bag could be full of rattlesnakes instead of currency of the realm and it would be the same thing.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  I looked at him for a moment and then asked: “What’s your name, mister?”

  “Thomas K. Allenby,” he muttered.

  “Think of that,” I said, and I backed into the living room and, keeping him covered with the gun, reached for the phone.…

  It was an experience having coppers shake my hand.

  “That solves two murders at one shot,” Detective-Lieutenant Goldblatt told me. “Finding that seventy grand on Perry Pike proves that he was the one knocked off Norval Avery in Queens last month, and you handed us Pike’s murder all wrapped up and sealed. That was an honest and courageous thing you did, Mr. Turner.”

  Nuts, I thought. But I didn’t say it out loud. I smiled with becoming modesty. I shook hands with cops and posed for newspaper cameramen. Then I went to a restaurant to catch up on my eating. It wasn’t much of a dinner because my financial status couldn’t afford better.

  But the bean soup and corned beef hash tasted better than I’d eaten in even the best of jails. And when I washed it down with coffee and lit a cigarette, I felt pretty good.

  Willie, I told myself, you’ve got your freedom and your health, which is a lot more than Norval Avery and Perry Pike and Thomas K. Allenby have. Willie, I said to myself, who the hell wants seventy grand anyway?

  The Man Who Chose the Devil

  Richard Deming

  RICHARD DEMING (1915–1983) was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and received his B.A. from Washington University, St. Louis, and his M.A. from the University of Iowa. Soon after, he served as a captain in the army during World War II, then worked for the American Red Cross in Dunkirk, New York, from 1945 to 1950, after which he became a full-time freelance writer.

  It was an understood verity of the pulp-writing community that practitioners had to be prolific in order to survive financially, and Deming was one of the most prolific of the later toilers of the craft. He came to the field as it was dying and moved to the new markets for such professionals, including the digest magazines, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Manhunt, and paperback originals,
of which he wrote more than sixty under his own name, as Max Franklin, and as a ghostwriter for Ellery Queen’s Tim Corrigan series. He wrote novelizations of popular crime shows of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including Starsky and Hutch and Charlie’s Angels under the Franklin byline and, as Deming, Dragnet and The Mod Squad. His short-fiction output exceeded two hundred titles, and he provided stories for several television series, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Suspicion, and the Gruen Guild Playhouse. His novel The Careful Man (1962) was filmed as Arrivederci, Baby! (1966, written, produced, and directed by Ken Hughes, starring Tony Curtis).

  “The Man Who Chose the Devil” was published in the May 1948 issue.

  The Man Who Chose the Devil

  Richard Deming

  ’Twas mighty odd for my satanic fat friend Longstreet to be swearing oaths on a sacred locket—oaths which would surely send him straight to hell. But perhaps that was the idea.

  WHEN I THOUGHT ABOUT IT AFTERWARD, it seemed the fat man must have been puzzled that I paid no attention to his standing on my foot. But I was actually unaware of it until I tried to slide off the bar stool and found one foot pinned to the floor.

  Of course, he didn’t realize there was no feeling in my right limb, that instead of flesh it was an intricate contrivance of cork and aluminum strapped to a stump below my knee. The government paid me $180.00 a month for not having a right leg. They were also going to buy me a brand-new car—when they got around to it.

  Just before I tried to leave my stool, I caught a glimpse of Anton Strowlski in the bar mirror. The dapper gunman approached with one hand negligently carried in the pocket of his tailored suitcoat. Since I had never rubbed against Anton, I knew he wasn’t looking for me, but I automatically grow observant when gunmen, even friendly gunmen, get behind me with their hands in their pockets.