The Juarez Knife

by Richard Deming

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  “The Juarez Knife,” by Richard Deming, was originally published in Popular Detective, January 1948. Copyright © 1948, 2018 by Stacy Ford for the Estate of Richard Deming.

  CHAPTER I

  Personal Danger

  It takes a long time to grow used to having your right leg end in a stump below the knee. When the phone blared me into semi-consciousness, I automatically raised myself in bed, swung my legs over the side and tried to stand. I wound up lying half under the bed on a bruised right elbow.

  That knocked me awake. I had fallen on the cork, aluminum, and leather contraption I use for a leg during waking hours, causing it to skid under the bed out of sight. I started to grope after it, but the steady nagging of the bell so rattled me that I gave up and precariously hopped across to the phone on my remaining foot.

  “Moon,” I said.

  “This is Alvin Christopher, Mr. Moon. Secretary to Mr. Lawrence Randall. Mr. Randall would like you to call at his office this afternoon.”

  People who have their secretaries make phone calls for them irritate me. “Tell him not to hold his breath,” I said, and hung up.

  I was on my knees fishing under the bed for my leg when the bell sounded again. Dragging the leg by its leather straps, I crawled back to the phone. “Moon,” I said.

  “Lawrence Randall speaking. You have an independent nature, Mr. Moon.”

  I waited. He waited. Fifteen seconds passed.

  “Are you still there?” he asked sharply.

  “Yes.”

  His voice developed an edge of suppressed resentment. “I’d like to employ you. Can you drop in at my office this afternoon?”

  “Employ me at what?”

  “I’d rather not discuss it over the phone.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said. “I don’t take jobs you can’t mention on the phone.”

  “Don’t hang up!” he said quickly. “This is a delicate thing, Mr. Moon.” His voice became a struggle between vexation and tact. Anger nearly broke through his restraint, but tact won out. “I chose you because of your reputation for integrity and also because—ah—for some other reasons. There is nothing illegal about the work I wish you to do, but it is confidential, and a great deal of money is involved. That’s the only reason I’d prefer not going into details until we can talk privately. This matter also involves personal danger to me, and I understand you effectively discourage persons from—ah—harming your clients.”

  I grunted and waited.

  “I’m willing to pay a retainer of one thousand dollars if you agree to handle this for me, and an additional fee of five hundred if you satisfactorily complete the assignment. The work involved should take no more than a day or two.”

  I thought this over. The private investigation business is not good enough to ignore fifteen-hundred-dollar windfalls.

  “You mentioned personal danger,” I said. “Have you been threatened?”

  “No.” There was a pause. “I said the matter involved personal danger to me. If you settle it properly, there will be no danger.”

  “Except for me,” I said.

  “That doesn’t necessarily follow.”

  “I know,” I said. “You want to pay me fifteen hundred for two days of perfectly safe work. I’ll see you at one thirty?”

  “Then you’ll take the assignment?”

  “Maybe,” I said noncommittally. “We’ll talk about it.”

  The clock on my dresser registered ten, which is two hours earlier than I normally rise when unemployed. But once awake, sleep is finished for me, so I grabbed a quick shave and bath. Afterward I wrestled my trick leg into place and tried some tentative tap steps to check my control. It seemed to be improving.

  For a moment I thought ruefully of the original I had left overseas, remembering the ghoulish humor of the ward boy who had established an amputation cemetery immediately behind the huge hospital tent where I lay. I re-experienced the morbid fascination with which I watched his elaborate ceremony, complete with flowers, when he gave my leg a proper funeral. Afterward he had asked how it felt to have one foot in the grave. He was a little battle-happy.

  I shook my mood by grinning in the mirror and proceeded to dress. Clothes are my main extravagance. I have nearly as many as I would like. I chose a plaid sport suit and a maroon necktie to blend with it. The effect was not bad, I decided. My trouble was lacking the face to match the clothes.

  All ready, I looked around for what I might need before keeping my appointment.

  Maintaining an office would be needless expense in my erratic profession. What files I possess are kept in my bedroom. My cards read, “Manville Moon, Confidential Investigations,” and give my apartment number as a business address. I can be found there sometimes.

  I found Lawrence Randall’s name in the index of my cross annotated “Who’s Who” and turned to the proper page. It gave his age as fifty-four, birthplace St. Paul, marital status, single, occupation, attorney, and the schools he had attended. No hobbies were listed. Of more interest was the reference to a card in my crime file I had inked on the margin some time in the pre-war past.

  I closed the volume and pulled out the card. It read:

  Randall, Lawrence P. September 1936 indicted for blackmail of Mrs. Whitney Forrester, oil widow. Case dismissed for lack of evidence. No previous trouble. Background: front (or partner) of Louis Bagnell, race track operator and manager of El Patio gambling casino.

  I get interesting clients…

  * * * *

  Vance Caramand, Louis Bagnell’s Number One hood, turned into the main entrance of the University Building a step before I did. Ducking his bullet head, he pushed by without even a grunt of recognition. When I entered the same elevator behind him he faded to the rear, still pretending not to see me.

  At the fourteenth floor I moved aside to let a woman off first, and Caramand followed her out. Stepping out immediately behind him, I studied the room numbers across the hall to determine the direction of No. 1408. Caramand turned a corner at the right of the elevator bank and I decided 1408 lay in the opposite direction.

  I passed a stairwell next to the elevator bank and made a left turn into a short hallway which had but a single office on either side. The glass to my left read “1408” and below that “Lawrence Randall, Attorney at Law.”

  The entrance led into a large reception room overfurnished with plush chairs and two settees, all empty. Thick rugs and Venetian blinds impressed me only because they emphasized the apparent lack of business. Behind a heavy-set blonde maple desk at the far end of the room sat a heavy-set blond young man with his back to a door labeled, “Private.” The rug’s nap was so deep it bounced you like a mattress when you walked on it. I waded through it to the muscle-bound blond and announced: “I’m Moon.”

  He stared at me as though I were a waiter who had burned his soup and tried to get my goat with:

  “I see you decided to come after all.”

  “Tell Randall I’m here,” I said.

  He wasted a few seconds superciliously looking me over to show what he thought of people who hung up phones on him, then flipped the switch of the interoffice communication box on his desk.

  “Mr. Moon for an appointment.”

&nbs
p; The box squeaked back half intelligibly. “Ask him to wait until I see Miss Garson. She here yet?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Send her in soon as she arrives.” Blondie switched off. “You’ll have to wait,” he said in a satisfied voice.

  “You wait in my place,” I suggested. “I never learned how.”

  I started for the door. My jerk on the knob caused the girl who had just grasped the handle on the other side to plummet through and crush against my chest. Before the collision I caught a fleeting glimpse of startled black eyes and curved firmness and, never one to sidestep opportunity, I let my arms tighten across her shoulders until she stared up.

  “Hello,” I said.

  She moved her head like a kitten shaking off a fly, causing dark hair to tickle my nose. I sneezed, dropped my arms, and stepped back.

  Sun-browned and sleek, she was assembled with ball-bearing grace. She was beautiful in an intangible, non-photogenic way. You could not have analyzed her beauty, could not have reconciled it with a too small, slightly aquiline nose and over-full lips, but it was there. Perhaps it was the aura of fire invisibly shimmering around her.

  “Mr. Randall?” she asked, and ice gleamed through the fire.

  I shook my head.

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  The ice vanished and she flashed small white teeth in a smile designed to make my toenails curl. They failed to curl, but I liked the smile anyway.

  She moved past me to the male secretary’s desk while I admired the smooth shift of her hips in walking, and the perfect taper of her legs. The secretary rose at her approach.

  “Go right on in,” he said, and opened the door marked “Private” for her.

  I regarded the door thoughtfully. I could hardly blame Randall for preferring such a lovely woman’s company to mine. I shrugged off my anger, sank into one of the soft sofas, and lit a cigar.

  “Who was that?” I asked the tallow-headed secretary.

  “Joan Garson.”

  “I’ve seen her picture somewhere.”

  “Probably rotogravure,” he said indifferently. “She came out about two years ago.”

  “Came out?”

  He looked up impatiently from what: he was doing. “In society. She’s a two-year-old débutante.”

  I decided to wait. Randall’s crack about my having an independent nature was more accurate than I like to admit. I am probably more arrogant than I can afford to be. I badly needed a fifteen-hundred-dollar fee, but the prospect of again seeing the brunette in Randall’s office had more to do with my waiting than the money did. I dislike waiting. I dislike it so much I would not have waited for fifteen hundred dollars. Maybe that catalogs me as a booby hatch candidate, but that’s the way I am.

  I picked a magazine from the stock lying on a table and was studying pictures when a buzzer sounded at the big blond’s desk. He pressed the intercom switch. A rasping cackle, unintelligible from where I sat, issued from the speaker.

  “Yes, sir,” said the secretary. He took a file folder from his desk and entered the door marked, “Private.”

  I started a story in my magazine and had finished five pages when he returned. Two pages farther the buzzer went off again. Lawrence Randall’s voice over the intercom was incoherent as usual, but louder and apparently excited. Unable to make out what he said, the change in tone nonetheless startled me into raising my eyes.

  “Yes, sir,” said the burly blond. To me he said, “Miss Garson is leaving by the back door. Mr. Randall will see you in just a minute. He’ll buzz.”

  “Back door?” I said. “Why?”

  “His office has a rear entrance closer to the elevators than this door.”

  I smothered my disappointment at missing a second look at Joan Garson. “I’ll give him two minutes,” I growled.

  CHAPTER II

  The Corpse in The Private Office

  When I finished my magazine story and punched out my cigar, I suddenly realized I had been waiting a long time. I rose and started for the door marked, “Private.”

  The white topped secretary said, “No, you don’t!” and scurried in front of me. When he bounced back from the wall, I stepped over him and went on through the door.

  Instead of leading directly into the inner office as I had expected, the door opened into a short foyer at the opposite side of which was a stained glass door repeating, “Private.” I took two steps and opened that door.

  I had seen too much death in battle for a cleanly murdered corpse to stir even an eyelash. But this body, sprawling sideward in its chair with a silver-hafted knife glittering from the center of its chest like an oversize shirt stud, made anger course through me. I felt that this blob of flesh which had been a man had no right to make a murderess of the loveliest girl I had ever seen. I also felt it was inconsiderate of him to become a corpse before he had a chance to write my retainer check.

  I moved across to the body and gazed down at it. Randall had been a paunchy, fiftyish man with thin gray hair. He made an ugly corpse. His head lolled back at an acute angle, causing the eyeballs to roll upward so that only whites showed. Thin lips sagged loosely under a beak nose. He looked like a dead buzzard.

  The knife handle protruded upward and to the right from the center of his chest. Leaning over the body, I breathed gently on the smooth metal. It misted over evenly and before the mist faded I could see there were no finger marks. It had been wiped clean.

  I surveyed the room in one quick glance. Three windows, all open from the bottom, let in still autumn air from behind Randall’s desk. A door was on either side of the room. Opening first the one on the right, I looked into a closet. A lone coat hung on a hook and the shelf contained a hat, a few papers, and a bottle of ink. Otherwise it was empty.

  The other door, the rear entrance referred to by the secretary, closed with a spring lock so that it could not be opened from outside. Setting the lock so I could get back in, I followed a short corridor and came out into the main hall.

  Directly across from me was a mirror-topped door marked, “Men.” To my right the hall came to a dead end where there was a fire door. About ten yards to the left the hall made a ninety-degree bend and the only other door in sight was a storeroom next to the men’s room. I pulled open the fire door, glanced at the empty stairs and let it swing back into place.

  The men’s room was empty. I noticed with surprise that the glass of the door was the type transparent from inside, but opaque from the hall.

  Four cigarette stubs, all carefully flattened, lay on the floor. One I would have passed, but four indicated someone had spent some time here. That, added to my realization that the one-way transparent door looked directly into the narrow corridor leading from Randall’s office, made me pick them up for examination. The brand was El Toro, imported from Cuba. I found an old letter in my pocket, flushed the pages down the drain and dropped the butts into the envelope.

  All this had taken no more than a minute and a half. Next I tried the storeroom door and found it locked. When I turned the hall corner and arrived at the elevator bank, the center car was just opening its door. A middle-aged, too-powdered woman wearing expensive clothes stepped into the car without glancing up at my approach. While her back was still toward me I flashed my tin badge and motioned the operator out. Simultaneously I punched the signal buttons of the other two cars. The woman had moved far back in the car and when I drew the operator to one side we could not be seen.

  “Did you take down a sleek, beautiful brunette any time recently?” I asked.

  “I haven’t seen a beautiful dame in two days,” he said.

  I let him go and he disappeared with his middle-aged passenger just as the other two elevators slid to a stop. More came of these conferences. One operator positively remembered taking down Joan Garson.

  “If she’s beautiful as you say, this must be the dame,”
he said. “There couldn’t be no two dames that good looking. She was sort of hot-looking, kind of.”

  “She’s the one. How long ago?”

  He thought a minute. “Quite a few trips back. Maybe ten minutes. Maybe half-hour. Not more than a half-hour.”

  I had to be content with that. I let them go.

  Randall’s office was as I had left it. I went on through and said to the secretary, “Hey!”

  He swiveled in his chair and threw me a baleful glare. His jaw was beginning to swell. “Your boss is dead,” I announced. “Ring the police.”

  I left him to absorb that while I returned to the inner office. This time I made a more careful examination of the room. Aside from the desk, a row of law books on the window ledge, a small safe, and an extra chair, the office contained no furniture. The windows and two doors were the only possible means of entry. The file folder the secretary had taken in to Randall lay open on the desk in front of him. Its tab was marked simply “Garson” and it was empty.

  Leaning across the law books on the window ledge, I stuck my head out the middle window. A six-inch flat stone coping ran horizontally beneath the window at floor level. Dubiously I filed this in my mind as a possible means of entry to the room. An acrobat could have worked his way along the outside of the building from another office on the same floor. But fourteen floors above the street no ordinary person could have maintained balance on that six-inch shelf of stone.

  On my second examination of the closet I noticed nothing new except a six-volt dry cell in one corner of the shelf. I had not seen it on my first hurried look.

  The battery furnishing juice for the buzzer on the secretary’s desk was mounted over the outer door. This apparently was a spare.

  The office door opened and the secretary came in.

  “What’s your name?” I snapped.

  “Alvin Christopher.” He wet his lips when he saw the body. “Did you do that?”

  “Yeah. I always kill clients who offer me thousand-dollar retainers before they can write the check. I don’t like money. You phone the police?”