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

by Unknown

  “Yah!” he agreed vehemently. “Now you talking! But you know vhat it cost to make the trip over there? Vhere vould I get the money?”

  “I guess it does come high,” said the man at the wheel, and the discussion was allowed to languish for the time being.

  They drew up finally before what, for a District Attorney’s residence, was a singularly isolated and poorly kept little bungalow, on a remote, wooded Northchester lane far from all the main highways and any neighboring habitation. To make it even more uninviting it was rapidly growing dusk.

  “In here?” said Lindquist, as the dick threw the car door open.

  “Yeah, get out,” was the taut answer. The detective’s hand slithered from the wheel down toward his own hip joint, as if he expected opposition, but Lindquist was evidently a trustful sort; he struggled acquiescently out without further ado. The detective followed him, again carrying his bag, and they went up toward the entrance together.

  The detective opened the door, motioned him through, closed it after them. He set the bag down, led him down the hall toward a room at the back. “Just wait in here,” he said tersely.

  “He issn’t here yet?” asked Lindquist.

  “No, he’ll be here in a few minutes.” He closed the door on him, left him in there alone.

  Lindquist moved toward the closed door with surprising agility and stealth for anyone so bulky; tried the knob. It was locked. That didn’t seem to disturb him particularly. He touched his hip bone, then crouched, put one eye to the keyhole, tilting his glasses out of the way. The key blocked the hole effectively.

  He straightened, put his ear to the door-seam instead. Voices came through, from one of the other rooms near-by. One was a woman’s, sharply recriminatory. “What’d you bring him here for? Now you’ll only have to take him out with you again, do it somewhere else!”

  “I’m going to try it another way first,” he heard the man who had met him at the train say. “I think I can fix it without having to do what we did last time.”

  Lindquist was seated in a large wing-chair at the far side of the room, patiently steepling his fingers together, when the lock clicked and the door reopened. The detective came back in alone, closed it behind him.

  “He didn’t come yet?” asked the doctor ruefully.

  “Forget about him,” said the dick curtly. “Now, Dr. Lindquist, just what form is this evidence in that your friend Swanson is so confident will clear him? Documentary, or just verbal?”

  “Vell, partly one, partly the other. I got my little book here, in which I keep my calls written, with his name and the date and the hour. But mostly it should be enough I tell them I vas vith him the whole time that night; I ain’t never told a lie in my life—”

  “Lemme see the written stuff,” said the dick. Lindquist placidly fumbled, brought out a dog-eared memorandum book.

  The detective glanced at it, raised his eyes craftily. “This won’t do him much good; it could have been written afterwards. It’s not worth a damn. On the other hand, it could be worth a good deal—to you.”

  “So?” said the doctor stupidly.

  “How would you like to go back to Sweden, all expenses paid, and stay there?”

  “Very mooch,” Lindquist admitted stolidly. “Who vould pay the expenses?”

  “I would.” The other man took out a wallet, shuffled bills out of it, dealt them rapidly on the table before them like playing cards. “Two thousand bucks. Enough to set you up for life in Swensky money.”

  Lindquist took it very matter-of-factly; nothing seemed able to surprise him. “Thank you very much.” He nodded. “So soon I see the D.A., find out vether I can do anything for this poor fellow Swanson, I take the next boat to Stockholm, you bet.”

  A single note of harsh mirthless laughter rasped in the other man’s throat. “No, you take the next boat to Stockholm-you-bet, right away, without going near the D.A. or Swanson or anyone else—that’s what the whole proposition is. You also leave this little appointment book of yours with me, and keep your mouth closed over on the other side.”

  Lindquist seemed to ponder the matter, took his time about answering. “But then if I don’t go and tell them vhat I know, Swanson might get the chair, and he’s an old friend of mine.” He looked up finally. “No, I can’t do it that vay,” he said imperturbably. “If I got to do vithout going back to Sweden, all right I got to, but I couldn’t turn my back on an innocent man.”

  “Is that your final answer?”

  “Yuss. I only give one answer, never two, to anyt’ing.”

  “I told you so!” a voice said stridently from the doorway. A woman came slowly forward into the room. She was blond and might have been pretty ordinarily, but her face wasn’t pretty just then. “Now you see? You’ll have to!”

  “I’m going to, don’t worry,” he said softly out of the corner of his mouth. “Just take it easy, will you? This place is in my name.”

  He addressed Lindquist. “All right, Doc. Let’s forget the whole thing. Come on, get your bag; I’ll drive you back to town again, drop you off at a hotel. You better come too, Rose.”

  Lindquist, whom nothing seemed to surprise, went with them out into the hall, picked up his heavy bag, and carried it out to the doorstep. The woman came out on one side of him, her two hands thrust into a small barrel-muff now, the man on the other.

  “You sit in front, next to me, like before,” the detective said dryly.

  “I put my bag in the back, yah?” the doctor said, and waddled over with it. He heaved it in, set it on the floor, fingered its latches and straps carefully as if to make sure it was securely fastened. Then he climbed in next to the detective. The woman got into the back from the opposite side of the car.

  They started off, but instead of turning and going back the way they had come previously, they continued on up-country in the same direction as before.

  “This is far enough, Allen,” the woman remarked finally. “No use taking all night!”

  Reeling and scraping to a stop, the car turned off abruptly into an opening between the trees, climbing over half-hidden roots and spewing up dead leaves. The man at the wheel braked with a grim sound of finality, and there was a moment’s breathless silence after the car’s racket.

  Lindquist’s voice broke it, in calm interrogation. “Vhy are you stopping here? Vhat are you going to do here?”

  “Get out, you cold-blooded Swede, you’ll find out. I don’t want my car all messed up when I shoot you full of holes!”

  Nothing seemed able to get a rise out of the doctor. “But vhy are you going to shoot me? I never saw you before until you met my train this afternoon.”

  “Just to make sure you don’t horn into that Swanson case!”

  The doctor was evidently the type of man who becomes garrulous during crises. “But vhy don’t you vant me to help Swanson? Vhat have you got against him?”

  The man next to him had unleashed a gun. “Because he’s the guy that’s taking the rap for us, and we wanna make sure he takes it!”

  “Oh, so that’s what you did to Dr. Meredith, too?” The doctor’s voice suddenly lost its Swedish accent.

  “So you know that, do you?” The man’s face contorted violently. “Well, we’ll see that it doesn’t go any further!”

  “Will you get him out and finish him?” the woman screeched wildly, standing up in back of them.

  She swung the small pistol she had been carrying in her muff, backhand, brought it down butt-first toward his skull. But out of the corner of his eye he had seen the blow coming. He swerved his head aside and the reversed butt chopped down past his shoulder.

  He caught the butt with both hands, dragged it forward, twisted it around, her hand still pinned to it, into the other man’s face.

  “Now just drop that gun, Cochrane, or I’ll blow your pretty Greek nose off. If there’s going to be any shooting in this car, I’ll do it!”

  The woman had the more courage of the two, the courage of despair. Dragged
half across the top of the front seat, unable to extricate her own hand from the gun because of the intended victim’s stranglehold on it, she urged breathlessly: “Shoot him, Allen! Don’t be afraid of getting hurt! He’s some kind of a dick! Don’t you see it’s either him or us?”

  Butler, alias Dr. Lindquist, who could see Cochrane nerving himself to pull the trigger even in the face of the bore pointed straight at his own face, fired first, tilting it a little to avoid killing him if possible. It tore a long crease up Cochrane’s scalp. The heavier weapon he was holding thundered out by reflex finger-action, harmlessly puncturing one of the air bladders Butler wore under his balloonish Lindquist clothes.

  Cochrane fell over backwards across the front seat, with his head hanging down over the rim of the door, baying with the pain of the burning track across the top of his skull.

  Butler, who was momentarily in danger of losing his eyesight from Mrs. Ranger’s flailing left hand, swung a pulled but powerful fist straight under her jaw, as the easiest solution, and knocked her limp and passive across the back seat.

  “You’re too damned vivacious for a recently bereaved widow!” the detective grunted.

  He detached the thick-lensed glasses, which were hanging from one ear by now, blew out his breath, leaned across the back of the seat, and switched off a little unobtrusive lever protruding from his bag.

  “It’s got about everything on it I need now,” he remarked to the writhing Cochrane. “They won’t care to listen to how loud you can howl just from a little nick in your dome.”

  He straightened him up by the shoulder. “So you were his friend—his business partner! I suppose you dipped into his money in the firm’s assets, played his wife, and then took the easiest way out of both predicaments. Came out and met her a block or two away from the house that night, instead of waiting for her in town; slipped inside and gave it to him.

  “Then the two of you calmly went in to the theater and pretended to phone him to see how he was. Well, that’ll all come out at the end of a garden hose. Now, hold your little handy up and pull your cuff back out of the way; I’ve got something for you.”

  “Is the paper going to bring charges against me for—for defrauding them?” Swanson asked apprehensively when he had been changed from the central figure of an impending murder trial to merely a second-string witness.

  “Probably not,” Butler assured dryly. “From what I know about papers, the sooner the public at large forgets the little transaction the better they’ll like it. And the only reason all of us down here at Headquarters don’t take turns giving you a good swift kick in the pants is because in a way you really helped to break this case for us.

  “If you hadn’t plumped yourself down in the middle of it and made them show their hands a couple of times more, it might still be unsolved. Y’better take my advice and don’t try anything like that again. Go out to your motherless kid in Arizona; he needs you. Leave crimes alone that don’t belong to you. There’s enough going around that have lost their rightful owners as it is.”

  “I’ll go,” Swanson said.

  PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Come and Get It” by Erle Stanley Gardner from Black Mask Magazine, April 1927. Copyright © 1927 by Erle Stanley Gardner, copyright renewed 1954. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Erle Stanley Gardner and Queen Literary Agency.

  “Cry Silence” by Fredric Brown from Black Mask Magazine, November 1948. Copyright © 1948 by Fredric Brown. Renewed. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and Barry Malzberg.

  “Arson Plus” by Dashiell Hammett writing as Peter Collinson from Black Mask Magazine, October 1923. Copyright © 1923, copyright renewed 1951 by Dashiell Hammett. Reprinted by permission of the Dashiell Hammett Literary Property Trust, administered by the Joy Harris Literary Agency, Inc.

  “Fall Guy” by George Harmon Coxe from Black Mask Magazine, June 1936. Copyright © 1936 by George Harmon Coxe. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc.

  “Doors in the Dark” by Frederick Nebel from Black Mask Magazine, February 1933. Copyright © 1933 by Pro-Distributors Publishing Company, Inc., copyright renewed 1961 by Popular Publications, Inc. Reprinted by special arrangement with Keith Alan Deutsch (keithdeutsch@comcast.net; www.blackmaskmagazine.com) proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Luck” by Lester Dent. This previously unpublished piece is an earlier draft of the selection “Sail” from Black Mask Magazine, October 1936. Copyright © 2010 by the Estate of Norma Dent. Reprinted by permission of Will Murray, Agent for the Estate of Norma Dent.

  The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett from Black Mask Magazine, September-December 1929, January 1930. From the novel The Maltese Falcon. Copyright © 1929, 1930 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., copyright renewed 1957, 1958 by Dashiell Hammett. Reprinted by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “Ten Carats of Lead” by Stewart Sterling from Black Mask Magazine, August 1940. Copyright © 1940, copyright renewed 1968 by Popular Publications, Inc. Reprinted by special arrangement with Keith Alan Deutsch (keithdeutsch@comcast.net; www.blackmaskmagazine.com) proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Murder Is Bad Luck” by Wyatt Blassingame from Black Mask Magazine, March 1940. Copyright © 1940 by Pro-Distributors Publishing Company, Inc., copyright renewed 1968 by Popular Publications, Inc. Reprinted by special arrangement with Keith Alan Deutsch (keithdeutsch@comcast.net; www.blackmaskmagazine.com) proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Her Dagger Before Me” by Talmadge Powell from Black Mask Magazine, July 1949. Copyright © 1949, copyright renewed 1977 by Popular Publications, Inc. Reprinted by special arrangement with Keith Alan Deutsch (keithdeutsch@comcast.net; www.blackmaskmagazine.com) proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  “One Shot” by Charles G. Booth from Black Mask Magazine, June 1925. Copyright © 1925 by Pro-Distributors Publishing Company, Inc., copyright renewed 1953 by Popular Publications, Inc. Reprinted by special arrangement with Keith Alan Deutsch (keithdeutsch@comcast.net; www.blackmaskmagazine.com) proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  “The Dancing Rats” by Richard Sale from Black Mask Magazine, June 1942. Copyright © 1942, copyright renewed 1970 by Popular Publications, Inc. Reprinted by special arrangement with Keith Alan Deutsch (keithdeutsch@comcast.net; www.blackmaskmagazine.com) proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Bracelets” by Katherine Brocklebank from Black Mask Magazine, December 1928. Copyright © 1928 by Pro-Distributors Publishing Company, Inc., copyright renewed 1956 by Popular Publications, Inc. Reprinted by special arrangement with Keith Alan Deutsch (keithdeutsch@comcast.net; www.blackmaskmagazine.com) proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Diamonds Mean Death” by Thomas Walsh from Black Mask Magazine, March 1936. Copyright © 1936 by Pro-Distributors Publishing Company, Inc., copyright renewed 1964 by Popular Publications, Inc. Reprinted by special arrangement with Keith Alan Deutsch (keithdeutsch@comcast.net; www.blackmaskmagazine.com) proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Murder in the Ring” by Raoul Whitfield from Black Mask Magazine, December 1930. Copyright © 1930 by Pro-Distributors Publishing Company, Inc., copyright renewed 1958 by Popular Publications, Inc. Reprinted by special arrangement with Keith Alan Deutsch (keithdeutsch@comcast.net; www.blackmaskmagazine.com) proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publicat
ions, Inc.

  “The Parrot That Wouldn’t Talk” by Walter C. Brown from Black Mask Magazine, January 1942. Copyright © 1942, copyright renewed 1970 by Popular Publications, Inc. Reprinted by special arrangement with Keith Alan Deutsch (keithdeutsch@comcast.net; www.blackmaskmagazine.com) proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Let the Dead Alone” by Merle Constiner from Black Mask Magazine, July 1942. Copyright © 1942, copyright renewed 1970 by Popular Publications, Inc. Reprinted by special arrangement with Keith Alan Deutsch (keithdeutsch@comcast.net; www.blackmaskmagazine.com) proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Knights of the Open Palm” by Carroll John Daly from Black Mask Magazine, June 1923. Copyright © 1923 by Pro-Distributors, Inc., copyright renewed 1951 by Popular Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Argosy Communications, Inc., agency for Jay Daly, heir of the Carroll John Daly Estate.

  “Waiting for Rusty” by William Cole from Black Mask Magazine, October 1939. Copyright © 1939 by Pro-Distributors Publishing Company, Inc., copyright renewed 1967 by Popular Publications, Inc. Reprinted by special arrangement with Keith Alan Deutsch (keithdeutsch@comcast.net; www.blackmaskmagazine.com) proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

  Rainbow Diamonds by Ramon Decolta. Copyright © 2009 by Keith Alan Deutsch. Originally published in Black Mask Magazine in six parts as: “Diamonds of Dread” (February 1931); “The Man in White” (March 1931); “The Blind Chinese” (April 1931); “Red Dawn” (May 1931); “Blue Glass” (July 1931); “Diamonds of Death” (August 1931). Copyright © 1931 by Pro-Distributors Publishing Company, Inc., copyright renewed 1959 by Popular Publications, Inc. Reprinted by special arrangement with Keith Alan Deutsch (keithdeutsch@comcast.net; www.blackmaskmagazine.com) proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.