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

by Unknown

  He drew the paper back toward him again. It was in a little box down at the foot, in heavier type than the rest. “Reward,” it said, and then underneath: “The Daily Reflector, in a spirit of co-operation with the police, is prepared to pay the sum of $1,000 to anyone furnishing information leading to the identification and capture of the murderer of Robert J. Ranger. Members of police force not eligible. Information must be legitimate. No telephone calls. Apply City Desk, Daily Reflector, 205 East, etc, etc.”

  He turned back to the first page. He took a deep breath, pulled his chair up closer, and started to read his way through from the beginning, shading his eyes from the naked light overhead with one hand across them.

  When he’d finished, he got up, went into the kitchen, and brought the previous night’s paper back with him. They kept their back-number papers to start the fire with. He read that one exhaustively too. There was a photograph in it, of someone he had never seen before. “Robert J. Ranger,” it said under it. He studied it carefully, then he closed his eyes a minute, as though he were etching it into his memory.

  When he’d finally finished his recapitulation, there were three back numbers of the paper littered about the table before him, and he had obtained a composite and sketchy outline of what the whole thing was about:

  A prosperous investment broker named Robert J. Ranger had been found murdered by hammer blows in the living-room of his home, in the smart suburb of Northchester, the previous Wednesday—that is to say, four days before. There were signs of a terrific struggle, and it was obvious that the man had sold his life dearly. A priceless blue porcelain Ming vase standing near the door was shattered, tables and chairs were overturned, the carpet was furrowed into corrugated ridges by the two pairs of feet that had scuffled back and forth over it.

  It was fairly obvious to the police (they declared in print) that it had been committed by an intruder, someone unknown to Ranger. A nominal sum of money that had been on his person was missing, but a far larger sum within easy access had been overlooked. The intruder had apparently become terror-stricken at the sight of his own crime and fled the house without pursuing his search any further.

  Ranger had had an engagement to go to dinner and the theater with his wife, had already bought the tickets (Stars in Your Eyes, Row C), and then at the last minute had been prevented from going by a vicious headache. Not wishing to disappoint Mrs. Ranger, he had arranged to have his business partner, Allen Cochrane, escort her in his place, had phoned him to meet her at a restaurant in town.

  Mrs. Ranger had left shortly after dark, and distinctly remembered that the door of her car had been opened for her, unasked, by a seedy-looking individual of the type who performs that service for a pittance. It was highly probable, she thought (also in print) that this was the man who had later forced his way into the house under the mistaken impression that no one was home—Ranger had put all the lights out and lain down in the dark to ease his head—and murdered her husband when discovered ransacking it.

  Unfortunately, Mrs. Ranger was unable to furnish a very exact description of this man. The fact that she was wearing most of her jewelry, and his accosting her by her car like that, made her nervous, had caused her to start the car quickly and drive off without looking closely at him.

  Swanson read this passage through twice, tracing his finger under it.

  At any rate, the crime did not occur for some time after her departure. She had telephoned from the Majestic Theater at 8:25, just before the curtain went up, to find out how her husband was, and he had spoken to her himself and said he felt much better. Then when she returned at midnight …

  Swanson stopped reading.

  “Helen!” he said. “Helen!”

  She came to the door and looked out at him hopelessly.

  “Get the kid ready,” he said. “Start packing your own things, too. You’re taking him with you to Tucson—right tonight.”

  “But how are you ever going to clear yourself again, once you get into their clutches?” she said, when he’d finally beaten down her objections. “It isn’t just a case of spending a little time in jail for contempt of court or taking money under false pretenses. I mean, you’ll be in so deep by that time that you’ll never be able to explain your way out of it. They’ll go ahead and convict you, and—and maybe even execute you for it, Jerry. It’s too risky. Don’t do it, don’t do it!”

  “That’s where you come in. You’re my living alibi. You know I wasn’t anywhere near Northchester last Wednesday night, that I was sitting here in the flat with you and the kid the whole time. Now here’s what you do: You take the boy out there and board him with someone. Then you sit tight and wait until you hear from me. When I need you I’ll send you a wire. Leave the kid out there—he’s got to have his chance—and you come on back and do your stuff.”

  “But I’m your wife; suppose they won’t believe me?”

  “Well, if worse comes to worst, I still have the doc to fall back on. He was up here, too, last Wednesday, treating the kid. He knows I wasn’t out murdering anyone. After all, look at it this way, Helen: All that connects me with the crime is my own say-so. That is, one person’s word. On the other hand I have two people’s words to clear me, in a pinch. One against two, those are fair enough odds. What more could anyone ask?

  “Another thing, the real murderer may be turned up long before they’re ready to try me, and I won’t even have to have any help getting out of it. The kid has to have his break. I’m willing to do a short jail stretch to see that he gets it, and that’s all that’s involved. So put out the lights and let’s get started.”

  He kissed them both good-by on the streetcar riding downtown, the kid bundled up in a blanket, his wife with a heavy suit-case beside her. “Now you wait there in the bus terminal until I send the money over to you. As soon as it reaches you, buy your tickets and take the next bus out; don’t stick around.”

  He swung down and the streetcar went rumbling past. He walked east until he came to a chunky-looking office building, rode up on an express elevator, stepped off it and went into a reception room. “I want to see the city editor,” he told the girl at the switchboard.

  “Another.” She sighed wearily. “All right, sit down over there with the rest of them.” She pointed to where three or four nondescript-looking people were ranged uncomfortably along the wall on hard wooden chairs.

  A blown-glass door in the three-quarters partition that walled the reception room opened and a woman came out, forcibly escorted by an office boy. “I did so see him, I tell ye!” she declared indignantly over her shoulder. “I saw him plain as day! I was on me way to get a pail of beer and—”

  A male voice came booming out after her above the clatter of typewriters: “Well, go back and get another pail; then you’ll see him twice!”

  The office boy said, “He ain’t wasting his time on any more of you false alarms, so give them chairs a breath of fresh air!”

  The sitters got up and drifted sheepishly out, with an air of “We didn’t think we’d get away with it, but no harm in trying anyway.”

  Swanson got up, too, but he went the other way, toward the inner door. “Take me in with you,” he said. “I’m no fake.”

  The office boy looked at him for a minute; there must have been something convincing about his taut manner. He hitched his head, led him across a great open barn of a place, subdivided by innumerable wooden rails and buzzing with typewriters, into a cubicle at the opposite end with City Editor blacked on the door.

  A disheveled-looking man was sitting in there, hair awry, coat off, elastics holding up his shirt sleeves. He swung his arm wearily. “Get out. Every crack-pot in town—” But Swanson’s silent tenseness got to him too. “Well, what d’you think you know?” he said impatiently. “You seen him? You know who he is?”

  “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t,” was the tight-lipped answer.

  “Well, d’you know where he is?” He wanted to save his paper a thousand bucks if he cou
ld. It had been his idea, after all.

  Swanson tapped a fingernail on the desk. “I know where he is at this very minute.”

  The editor jack-knifed his hands closed, then open again, in a grasping gesture. “Well, let me have it quick! If it’s any good we can still make the midnight final with it!”

  “Wait a minute. Just when, and in what form, do I get the thousand?”

  “Our check will be mailed to you just as soon as we’ve verified the information—and if it has resulted in the arrest of this guy.”

  Swanson narrowed his eyes. “I thought that was coming. Trying to welsh out of it, eh? Nope, I want it in cash, I want it right here and now while I’m in the office with you, I want a bonded messenger standing outside the door to deliver it to a certain place, and I also want your word that where it was delivered won’t be revealed to the police afterwards.”

  “I can’t do that. How do I know your information is valid? Our terms are the guy has to be apprehended first be—”

  “You’ll know how valid it is as soon as you hear it. You don’t have to worry about verifying it, it’s self-verifying. The whole works is bound up in it automatically, whereabouts, identity, and apprehension. Now take it or leave it. Because I can go across the street to the Daily Views office and get as much or more for it.”

  The disheveled one got even more disheveled than before, if possible, at this last threat. He did a good deal of hectic telephoning, to the managing editor at his home, to the treasurer, to the press room in the basement.

  Fifteen minutes later twenty fifty-dollar bills lay on his desk in a manila envelope, a messenger’s form was silhouetted outside the glass of the door, and the typewriters were breathlessly holding their fire all over the place as though esoterically aware something momentous was in the air.

  “This better be good.” The editor heaved an exhausted sigh. “O.K., O.K., now spill it! Where is this Ranger murderer at the present time?”

  “He’s standing right across your desk looking square at you,” said Swanson calmly.

  “Wha-at? Y-y-you mean you?” The editor jolted his chair back, partly in surprise, partly in sudden precautionary retreat.

  “I’m turning myself over to you. Here I am. Now come on with your money.”

  The editor dazedly picked up the manila envelope, partly extended it toward him. But he held on to a corner of it tightly without letting go. “Where you been hiding out since then?”

  “Movie shows from morning to midnight, the subways from midnight to morning. If I gotta read another cough-drop ad I’ll go wacky!”

  “Well, just a minute, I gotta be sure; what was on the left side of the living-room doorway up at the Ranger place, as you went in?”

  “A big blue vase; I knocked it over and busted it in the scrap.”

  “What’d you do with the hammer?”

  “I slanted it against the curb about a block away from their place. Then I jumped on it and snapped the handle off short with my foot. I shoved the wooden part down a sewer opening; it must be floating outside the harbor by now. I carried the hammer head around in my clothing for a while, wrapped in a piece of paper so—you know, it wouldn’t leave any stains. I finally got rid of that in a refuse can on one of the subway platforms. Don’t ask me which one. I’ve got a headful of arithmetic from watching them tick past the last few days.”

  “I guess you’re the ticket, all right,” the editor said ruefully. “But why did you do it?”

  “For dough. What else? Didn’t get much, though.” Swanson jerked the envelope out of his reluctant grasp. “Call the messenger in here. Is he bonded?”

  “Don’t worry about him, he’s O.K.”

  Swanson sealed the gummed flap of the envelope. He drew the messenger aside out of earshot, said in a low voice: “Take this down to the Transcontinental Bus Terminal. There’ll be a woman in the waiting-room, with a kid wrapped up in a blanket. Give it to her. That’s all. Don’t talk to her; come right back.”

  The messenger hurried out. The editor looked after him longingly. “Your moll—er, sweetheart, that who’s getting it? Gee, that would make a swell human-interest angle.”

  “The agreement was that’s to be kept from the police and out of the paper,” Swanson said harshly. “I haven’t got any girl; I’m a lone wolf. I’ll tell you as a man, but not as an editor, just so you won’t think there’s any mystery about it. It’s—it’s a conscience fund, to try to make amends before I take my medicine. I told him to give it to the first needy-looking mother and child he came across at a certain place. Now go ahead, bring on your cops, I’m ready.”

  “Whoa!” The editor semaphored alarmedly, both arms in air. “We want an exclusive on this first, we can’t keep you to ourselves forever.” He grabbed up a phone, barked into it: “Rip out your first page down there! Get ready for an extra. I’m sending you down a slue of pictures!” He jumped over to the door, bawled out: “Rewrite man! Pix! Tearjerker! All of you! Everybody in here! I’ve got the Ranger murderer with me in my office!”

  The small office was suddenly gorged with people, jostling, staring over one another’s shoulders, banked solidly around Swanson, who was passively seated now in a chair. They were all talking at once to him, elbowing one another aside, jockeying to get next to him.

  “Quiet, everybody! What is your name, we haven’t even got that yet.”

  “Jerome Swanson.”

  “All right, let’s get going. The presses are waiting. Stand back and give him air. Let’s have it, Swanson.”

  Swanson’s eyes sought the ceiling, which was the only clear space there was in the cubicle, in search of fluency. “Last Wednesday night, about six p.m. in the evening …” he began, and a sudden reverent hush fell on the yapping pack.

  Policemen came in with a fine authoritative surge at about two in the morning, streaming across the newspaper office like a tide that has been held back past its time. Two plainclothesmen in the lead pounced on a haggard unshaven reporter by mistake, first of all.

  “No, no, no!” wailed the city editor. “That’s one of my feature writers. Him—over there.”

  They desisted and came on at Swanson, but not without a backward look of suspicion at their first objective. Swanson was the only calm person in the place, still sitting there on the chair, smoking quietly, one ankle hoisted to the opposite knee.

  “So this is the guy, eh?”

  They all said it in turn, with slight variations. A manacle clicked and fastened itself around his wrist. He looked down at it fascinatedly, changed the impeded cigarette he was holding over to his other hand.

  He was jerked to his feet by the man on the other end of the manacle, with a proprietary “Come on, baby!” They formed themselves into a phalanx around him, one on each side, one leading the way, one behind him.

  The Reflector staff followed them in a body as far as the elevator bank. He looked around, and a scrub woman had climbed up on one of the desks to look over everybody’s heads at him. His last impression was of the long lines of luminous white bowls in the ceiling converging toward a distant point.

  They took him far down below the lighted theatrical and night-life district to a gloomy, castellated silhouette on a dark, lifeless street, and in through various shabby rooms and along bleak corridors, where the few denizens to be met with were all uniformed. The surreptitious excitement among them in his wake was only less than up at the newspaper office; policemen turned to stare after him, sergeants at desks leaned out across them to get a better look as he went by.

  The momentum of the arrest finally came to a stop in some sort of a back room, with windows that hadn’t been washed in years and a green-shaded light throwing the upper half of it into dismal shadow. The handcuff was detached, and he was deposited on a chair under the circle of light like a package that has been brought in.

  Finally the disconnected activities crystallized once more, and he found himself again at their center. A high official, hastily summoned from bed and non-uni
formed, came in and seated himself before him, but outside the radius of light. Other figures, some new, some already familiar, ranged themselves about. The atmosphere became charged with impending drama, gathered to a head, and finally dissolved into a downpour of questions.

  His complete lack of reticence, his willingness—even overanxiety—to answer them all to the best of his ability, threw them off-key time and again. That is to say, they would gather themselves up to batter into denial, contradiction, and then flounder when nothing met them in opposition.

  His rehearsal in the newspaper office stood him in good stead, but even so he got into a number of uncomfortably tight places. Such as when one of them asked him, although in a minor key immediately after a far more leading question, “But if you spent all that time riding the subways, how is it your clothes ain’t more rumpled than they are?”

  Helen had always worked hard to keep this one suit of his in as good shape as she could. He got good and frightened for a minute, held his breath while the whole structure he’d laboriously built threatened to come toppling down around his ears.

  “Well, you see, I didn’t lie down and sleep in the cars, I was afraid I’d attract the guards’ attention if I did; I rode them sitting up. It was the movie houses where I slept, and they’ve got upholstered seats, not as hard on the clothes.”

  “Why’d you kill him?”

  “I went in to rob him. He caught me at it, put up a battle. I had to. And all for a few lousy bucks!”

  All in all, he was glad when it was over, as glad as a man attempting to prove his innocence instead of his guilt would have been. A police stenographer came in and they ran through the whole thing again, with his help. When he went astray once or twice, they put it down to fatigue. Then there was a wait while it was being typed. It was brought in and read back to him, and a few final polishing touches were added, in which he again cooperated. Finally he was brought forward to sign it.

  They took him out now and stood him up before one of the desks, and he had to give his name and address. He took the precaution of not giving the one he and Helen had been living at until tonight. He gave the one they’d been dispossessed from three months before. “My last address,” he qualified it; let them think he’d been homeless since then.