by Lester Dent
“It’s a guess! Yours is as good as anybody’s!”
“The bodies found in any particular oil tank?”
“Never in any tank!” Jaxon touched a button; a horn gave a cow-like moo. “They find the bodies in the damnedest places. One was leaning against a lamp-post as stiff as a board. Some of them have been in hotels, houses—all over.”
“That’s a hell of a note!” Nace drew on his pipe.
The roadster paused for the traffic light on Main, then made a turn.
“App left this message in the office mailbox!” Jaxon fished a finger daintily in the pocket of the tea vest, as if afraid of soiling it. He produced a strip of coarse white copy paper.
Nace took it, read:
Jaxon:
Lee Nace, a private detective, will arrive on the three o’clock plane. Meet him and bring him to the hotel Crown Block, room 1820.
The note, typewritten, bore only a typed signature—“App.”
Nace stiffened his brake leg instinctively as the gaudy roadster shaved another car. “Don’t they have any traffic laws down here!”
A moment later he said, “I hope App don’t think there’s anything secret about this! I’m sunk if he does!”
“Yeah, that’s right!” Jaxon agreed. Then he added, “Unless you sent some agents ahead?”
“Who do you think I am? The army?”
Jaxon grinned. “Well, I didn’t know! The A. P. has carried stories about you! You’re supposed to be good. I thought maybe you had help. You’ll need it!”
Nace nodded toward an up-and-down sign which said, Telegram, and asked, “That’s the plant, huh?”
“The sweat shop itself!” Jaxon maneuvered his roadster around a corner.
The wind was from the south, bringing a smell of distilling crude from West Tulsa refineries.
Jaxon asked unexpectantly, “What about the blond in the Robin Hood’s car?”
Nace looked interested. “Well, what about her?”
Jaxon laughed. “I see you didn’t get a close look! What a form she had! Oh, man!”
THE Crown Block Hotel was not quite the largest in the southwest, but it was generally conceded to be the most sumptuous.
When an oil man hits it rich, his first act was to take a suite in the Crown Block. It did not matter whether he made his strike in Seminole, Borger, Oil Hill, or East Texas. He took a suite in the Crown Block. It was sort of a ritual—a man’s way of telling the cockeyed world he was on top.
Jaxon swerved his roadster in to the curb. They got out, Nace with his canvas zipper bag. There was a flurry, then hard looks, when bellboys tried unsuccessfully to capture Nace’s bag.
They walked a gauntlet of doormen in Czaristic uniforms, and waded in a sea of rich, thick carpet. A silent elevator wafted them up, and they single-filed down the corridor, more rich carpets sponging underfoot.
The door of 1820 was massive, shiny, of mahogany, with a ponderous wrought-bronze lock.
Nace’s eyes roved with habitual alertness. Suddenly he grunted, lifted one foot off the carpet and hopped to the wall, propped against it, he began untying his shoe.
“Must’ve picked up a rock at the airport!”
His hand, apparently resting against the wall as a brace, made a slight rubbing motion.
There was a small, irregularly shaped chalk mark on the wall. This was almost unnoticeable to the casual eye.
When Nace took his hand away, the mark was gone.
Nace tore a bit of inner sole from his shoe, put it back on. Then he opened his canvas bag. He took several expensive looking cigars from a case and pocketed them.
The adder scar, seeming to come from nowhere, was once more coiling redly on his forehead.
“Let’s go!” His voice was dry, with a bit of a rattle.
Jaxon rippled knuckles on the door. A voice invited them in. Opening the door, Jaxon stepped back politely to let Nace in first.
Three men appeared suddenly, shoulder to shoulder, inside the room. The Robin Hood and his two followers!
Frontier six-guns bulked big in their fists.
The blond, without uncoiling herself from a chair in which she sat, said, “Come right in, boys! Cut yourself a piece of cake!”
Nace ambled into the room, hands held far out from his sides. He was so very tall that he instinctively ducked a little as he entered.
Halt Jaxon rolled his eyes, made faces. “So the note was a come-on!”
“Can the guff! Come on in here!” The Robin Hood made a meaningful gesture with his thumb and a gun hammer.
Gun snouts followed Nace and Jaxon, crowding them to the wall. The blond uncoiled from her chair, closed the door, and stood with her back pressing the panel.
Her blond hair was done in a flat patty on the back of her neck. She slid slender fingers under this, and brought out a tiny derringer, similar to Jaxon’s, but of smaller calibre.
The Robin Hood eyed the small gun with wolfish concentration. “Where’d you get that, sister?”
“From Monkey Ward!”
“Don’t get sassy!”
NACE put in, “Where’s the western chivalry I’ve been hearing about?”
The Robin Hood switched the tall private detective from head to foot with eyes which were unafraid and predatory. He growled, “You behave and keep that mouth shut, and maybe nobody’ll get hurt.”
He came over and slapped Nace’s arm pits, lifted coat tails. Frowning, he searched more intensively. “I’m a son-of-a-gun! You ain’t heeled!”
He fell to examining Nace’s bullet-proof vest. The thing seemed to fascinate him. He thumbed open his own vest and compared it with Nace’s.
“Where’d you get that?” he asked. “I might buy one like it!”
“Made it myself,” Nace advised. “Let’s get down to business.”
“Sure! Sure!” The Robin Hood turned to his two companions. “I want to talk to Nace alone. Take this over-dressed hombre away. Haul him off to that cabin north of Shell Creek. Hold him until you hear from me.”
Jaxon was standing beside a floor lamp. As the two men approached him, he elbowed the lamp violently.
The fixture slammed one man in the face. The fellow ducked back, startled. Jaxon flung upon the other, grasping the gun wrist with both pudgy hands.
The Robin Hood made a growling noise. He slapped his coat violently—two big sixes appeared as if by magic. He hesitated, growled again, then jabbed the guns back out of sight.
He leaped for Jaxon.
The blond, running toward Jaxon, got in the Robin Hood’s way and also in the way of the man the floor lamp had hit. She grabbed Jaxon by the throat and began choking.
Freeing one hand, Jaxon slapped her with the back of his fist. The blow reeled her away. She collided with a chair and went over, tangled with rungs and armrests.
“Beat it!” the Robin Hood rasped at her. “We’ll handle this!”
The blond, still mixed with the chair, fumbled at her nape for the gun under her hair.
Nace, leaping to her, harvested the gun with a single clutch. He pocketed it. Going on, he came up behind the Robin Hood. Both his hands went under the tail of the man’s coat. They grabbed a belt, pulled. There was a snap. Nace’s hands reappeared with the Robin Hood’s gun belt and both big revolver holsters.
The man the lamp had hit drew a gun. Nace flung the captured belt, whip fashion. Both six shooters flew out, but the holsters popped loudly on the man’s face. The fellow squawled, lost his weapon. Nace round-housed a fist to his middle. The man closed like a book.
The Robin Hood was whirling. Nace let knuckles fly at the scarred wolf jaw. They landed squarely.
Arms fanning spasmodically, the Robin Hood reeled toward the window. Unable to help himself, he popped head and shoulders through the sash. He all but fell to his death, eighteen floors below.
The Oklahoma badman wore cowboy boots. Clutching their narrow toes, Nace hauled their owner back in.
Jaxon and his opponent swore, swapped blow
s, on the floor.
The blond untangled from the chair, ran to a table on which her purse lay and scooped it up. She unclipped it, spaded a hand inside, then shoved purse and hand at Nace and Jaxon.
“Hold it!” she snapped.
Nace promptly jutted his hands above his head. Jaxon tore free of his dazed foe, lurched up and dived at the girl.
Nace tripped him. Jaxon tumbled end over end like a soft ball.
One of the Robin Hood’s men crawled for his fallen gun. Nace, his hand still raised, jumped sideways, and mashed his fellow against the wall.
Ducking, Nace scooped up the gun. Continuing the same movement, he fell behind the bed.
The Robin Hood and his two followers staggered out of the room. The girl followed, banging the door shut.
JAXON bounced up from the floor, screaming. “You tripped me! There’s ten thousand reward for that guy—and you trip me—”
“I kept you from getting a lead pill!” Nace snapped. Rapidly, he gathered the guns scattered around the room.
When they ran into the hall, an elevator door was sliding shut.
“Gimme one of them guns!” Jaxon yelled.
“To hell with you—hothead!”
Jaxon made faces, ran back into the room.
Nace bore a staccato thumb on the elevator button. Time crawled. A minute! And still no cage came!
“Here they go!” Jaxon squawled from within the room. Nace ran to his side. Jaxon was hanging out of a window. On the sidewalk far below, the Robin Hood, his two men, and the blond, were legging it for a corner.
Jaxon tore at one of the guns in Nace’s hands. Nace held on tightly, would not give it up. The runners below disappeared.
Cursing, his round face purple, Jaxon squealed, “A fine cluck you are! I could have potted the Robin Hood from the window. Damn your hide! Ten thousand reward—”
Nace waved a fist under his nose. “Shut up, or I’ll feed you a mess of knuckles!”
Jaxon squared off belligerently. “Any damn time you feel lucky—”
“Just a newspaper fathead!” The adder scar above Nace’s eyes was red as ink. “You dope! You balled things up!”
“I did like hell!”
“The Robin Hood had something on his mind. He wanted to talk, and I wanted to hear him. But did you give us a chance? Yes, you did—not!”
Jaxon hardened his fists. “I don’t give a damn about that! You wouldn’t come across with the gun! That cost me ten thousand! It burns me up!”
He swung a fist at Nace’s face. Nace rolled back from the blow; his right arm came up; his hard knuckles smacked against Jaxon’s biceps. It was an agonizing blow.
Jaxon yodeled from the pain in his muscles. Nace collared him, hauled him to the door, and gave him the boot.
He slammed the door after the stumbling, enraged oil editor.
Nothing happened for a few seconds; then elevator doors clanged in the hall. Nace looked out. Jaxon was gone.
Going to his canvas zipper bag, Nace carefully replaced the cigars which he had taken out before entering the room. Two were broken. He disposed of these in the bath.
Carrying his bag, he descended in a tardy elevator and left the hotel. He took a cab to the new Union Station, changed to another, and went to a small hotel on Boston.
There was a derrick firm on one side of the hotel, a well-shooter supply house on the other. Walking up two flights, Nace found a room number. He knocked on the door. Silence answered.
Car horns honked in the street below. Over on Main, newsboys were yelling the Telegram.
Nace knocked again, a peculiar signal—two taps, then two more, widely separated.
The blond opened the door.
Chapter III
Drowned in Oil
NACE went in, closed the door. He lowered his bag, then opened it. From it he took a sensitive microphone, fitted with vacuum cups. He stuck this to the door. Wires led from the microphone to an amplifier in the bag, thence to headphones.
The device was a highly sensitive sound pick-up. It would amplify any noise from the corridor a thousand fold. Should anyone approach, the instrument would make the noise like that of an elephant stampeding.
“Any chance that they suspect you are my agent?” he asked the girl.
“Don’t make me laugh!” The blond patted her hair. “With this layout I don’t even know myself. Gosh, Nace! What if this platinum dye won’t wash off?”
“I guess I could stand that!” As he took out the pipe, and plugged it, Nace eyed her.
Her first name was Julia. Her last name was the same as his own—Nace. She was a cousin, very distant. She had not been an operative in his agency for long and she was already good, and getting better.
She had what it took.
“You didn’t lose any time getting lined up!” he said, making the words both a compliment and a question.
She laughed. “It was easy! Half the people in town know the Robin Hood by sight. But you can save your blarney! I haven’t learned anything!”
Nace fired his pipe, then clamped one receiver of the sound pick-up to an ear.
“What do they want with me?” he queried.
“A talky-talk!”
“What about?”
“Search me. The Robin Hood is all hot and bothered about nothing. When he learned you were coming to town, he said he’d go out and meet you. I didn’t know until later that he only wanted to talk.”
“Everybody in town knew I was coming, huh?”
“The Robin Hood has his ways of learning things! He must have a spy on the Telegram.”
“Is he mixed up in this hot oil?”
“Sure! But there’s a catch to that, Nace! I don’t know how he stands—whether he’s in the ring, or out of it.”
Nace eyed a fly-specked telephone. “Do you think you’re safe, kid?”
“Believe it or not, this Robin Hood is the McCoy. He packs two guns and he’s killed his men. He’ll fight anybody. But he doesn’t shoot in the back, doesn’t shoot unarmed men, and respects women.”
“Chivalrous, huh?”
“That’s straight, Nace! Not one of the gang has made a pass at me; I haven’t heard any dirty stories, and they make their eyes behave. Different from our eastern mobs, eh?”
Nace took off the listener receiver. He went to the telephone, picked up a directory, and thumbed through it.
“Who did you tell ’em you were?”
“Just a little girl who got turned out of the California pen a few weeks ago! For fifty dollars a New York printer faked me a newspaper clipping with my picture and everything.”
Nace found his number. He placed a finger in the dial nobs. When the selector had made his connection he requested, “Ebenezer App, please!”
Probably twenty seconds later, he began, “This is Nace. I just got into town…. Oh, Jaxon told you, did he…. It was a fake note that led us to the hotel.”
A metallic gobble of words poured from the receiver. Nace listened to them for some time, asked, “Who was it?” twice, and hung up.
“App says he found out who’s behind the hot-oil ring,” he told the blond. “He said he accused the fellow and made him admit it—and for me to come over and make the pinch.”
“Who is it?”
“App said he’d spill that when I got there. He flatly refused to name the fellow over the phone.”
TULSA was a town of a hundred and fifty thousand. Unlike large cities of the east, alleys ran behind the business houses.
Leaving the hotel with his zipper bag, Nace stepped from the rear door into an alley. He swung rapidly for the corner. Newsboys on the street were shouting, “Oil scandal grows! Last oil drowning victim still unidentified.” Every paper bore App’s Santa Claus picture. “Mr. App pushes investigation.”
Nace ignored them, striding toward the Telegram Building. His eyes roved alertly. He saw men in field boots, Osages in bright blankets, pasty-faced clerks with puckers between their eyes that meant eye-strain.
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The Telegram was a tall narrow building of brick. Extremely pretty girls ran the elevators.
Nace thought of Julia as he rode up. Ordinarily she was a red-head. The combination of her looks and her brains was hard to find. She had been under his instructions for a month now. Numerous methods of signaling had been part of the training. Sun flashing with the compact mirror was one.
The tiny chalk marks, which he had stopped in the corridor of the Crown Block Hotel to erase, was another. They had warned him of the ambush in the room.
Nace swore. He had gone into that room deliberately. The reckless Jaxon had defeated his chances on learning something—perhaps something valuable.
Nace found a door bearing the name, “Ebenezer App, Publisher.”
He went in and found himself in a reception room—green carpeted, tan walled, fitted with leather chairs and a reception desk.
A girl with stringy brown hair lay across one of the chairs. She wore square-toed shoes and a brown frock with a starched white collar. She had a very long nose.
Blood was drip-dripping from her nose to the carpet.
Nace opened a door marked, “Mr. App—Private.”
The office beyond reeked of emptiness. The furniture was expensive and in good taste.
App’s picture hung on the wall. The Shavian beard bristled. His cheeks were ruddy. His eyes were fenced with little wrinkles. With the addition of a big white moustache, he would have made a perfect Santa Claus.
Coming back, Nace examined the girl with the long nose. When he moved her, her mouth fell open and let a little crimson come out. But she had only been struck on the jaw with a fist or a blackjack.
The fifth paper cup of ice water from the cooler revived her.
Jaxon came in when she was rolling her eyes and gurgling. He had combed his hair, put on a fresh shirt. Once more he looked as if he were right out of a bandbox.
He demanded, “What the hell’s going on here, Nace!”
At this, the girl leaped up. She dropped her cup, pointed both hands at Nace, screamed. “He’s the man who hit me!”
Jaxon sneered, “I wouldn’t put it past him.”
Nace laughed at Jaxon, fists up and hard. The oil editor spun and fled from the office like a frightened peacock.
