The Big Book of Rogues and Villains

by Otto Penzler

  In the act, she caught sight of him. She was not at all abashed. Indeed, quite the contrary. She tripped daintily over to him, sat down on the edge of his bench and indicated with a propelling shove that he was to move over—not too much. She folded her hands primly on her little lace apron, regarded him under her lashes; a dimple appeared on the apple-tinted cheek she presented to his gaze. Then, in the sudden effulgence of being well met, they both fixed their eyes on the wood-box and sighed happily.

  An hour later, when his lady upstairs called for her motor, the red-headed mechanic—city bred—had changed his ideas about the attractions of the country.

  It was the little maid who handed his lady into the car. The lady had found some fresh sweet grief here among the bucolic penates of her departed spouse, and she was crying and blowing her nose under her veil. As the pert maid handed her in, the maid boldly—behind the weeping lady’s shoulder—pressed a tiny hand in John’s ample paw. The motor rounded the drive, and as it passed the gate city-ward, the maid rising on tiptoe tossed a kiss to the moon-struck sleuth.

  IV

  In West Broadway, among the spaghetti factories, the junk-shops, and the holes in walls where artificial flowers grow, the windows are always dingy, their ledges covered with a thick fall of grime. The Elevated trains growl all day and night, peering in, as they pass, on the upper floors where life is frankly uncurtained. The air is full of the aroma of roasting coffee from the warehouses near-by, and the sour smell of glue from the piano factories.

  A man in a seamy uniform and a brass-bound cap, with a number that proclaimed him an Elevated motorman, examined doorway after doorway, always with a glance at the upper windows, as he picked his way up the street. Finally he came to a halt at a broken-down stoop, and ascending three rickety steps he rang a bell. In response there appeared, after a wait, a capacious Sicilian woman with a baby squatting on one hip. She could understand nothing; with a twitch of a shoulder and an upturning movement of one hand, she conferred upon him the freedom of the house. Indeed there was nothing worth stealing. The motorman ascended a creaking flight of stairs, and on the first landing, after some hesitation, picked out a door towards the front of the house and rapped sharply. He listened in open-mouthed concern. Then he rapped again and again, louder, and louder. Doors above him opened and shut; tousled heads peered down on him over the banisters. But the door stared at him blankly.

  He retraced his steps to the street, walked briskly north a block, then turned and walked as briskly in the other direction. At a corner he sighted a policeman sampling the wares of a fruit vendor. The motorman whispered to the policeman.

  “What’s that?” demanded the policeman, bending his head. He gave more careful heed to the motorman’s rapid flow of words. Together they crossed the street swiftly. Their unusual pace attracted a crowd. Before they had gone a block their followers were looking at each other expectantly. Many halted and turned to watch. So slight an incident as a policeman moving faster than his wont will rivet the attention of the casuals of such a street.

  “There!” said the motorman, bringing the policeman to a halt. He pointed through the lattices of the Elevated structure. “I think that man is dead. He has been sitting in that window for thirty-six hours. At first,” he said, in the tone of one speaking of a long time ago, “he was reading a newspaper. But not lately.”

  He went on to explain that he had passed and repassed that face in the window on his day and night shift, at the controller of his train—until finally it got on his nerves so he had to come on foot to see what was up. He added that he hadn’t been able to sleep last night for seeing that face, and—— The policeman, businesslike, pushed his way through the halted traffic and stamped up the stairs. The crowd banked against the door like a swarm of bees. He put his shoulder to the door above and it fell with a weak, splintering smash.

  The man was dead—quite. The officer threw up a smeared window and blew his whistle, paying no more heed to the man in the chair. Shortly, other policemen appeared, running, and buffeted lanes through the rising throng below. A little while later a black wagon backed up to the door and carried away the man in the chair covered with a horse blanket. Another wagon bore off the fat Sicilian woman and her baby, and several other terrified denizens of the house. They said he had been a lodger for some months, a poor man. Oh, yes, very poor! It was his habit to sit in that window by the hour, by the day sometimes. Had he any friends come to see him? Who could say? The whole world might pass up and down that dingy staircase without question. The wagons moved off; in a moment the crowd was fluid again; in five minutes it was all forgotten.

  In a pawnshop, any pawnshop, timorous clients are apt to be made more timid by the stare of a six-foot man, 185 pounds, who lounges at one end of the counter idly puffing a cigar, and watching, as they beg and haggle. Well they may be: it is one of Parr’s invincibles.

  In the little building on the river front at the foot of East 26th Street, where black wagons drive up at all hours of the day and night, to deposit burdens covered with horse blankets, just such a man stands, smoking the same cigar, quite as idly, and quite as languidly interested as his brothers in the pawnshops. Dead souls come here; they must be inspected, suspected, like any object offered in pawn. Distraught people come here, anxious mothers, brothers, next friends, seeking. An attendant pulls out drawer after drawer for their inspection. Sometimes a shriek, heard in the street, tells the hangers-on that a quest has ended. Outside undertakers, like flies, flock about them when they emerge.

  A stocky man, evidently a mason who had come directly from his work, was whispering to the attendant, trembling. They all whisper and tremble when they come here. The attendant knew the world only as fearful people who whispered and trembled. The attendant listened and nodded. He knew—yes, it was here; he hauled out a drawer. The mason inclined his head, brushing his eyes with a plaster-stained hand. His brother, he said. The attendant made a grimace over a shoulder; and the man with the cigar approached, eyeing the mason with a bleary look. He took out a note-book and they talked in low tones, the policeman making entries as the other answered.

  “You will have to be corroborated, of course,” said the policeman, not unkindly. “Anyone could come here and pick what they wanted, otherwise.”

  “But why?” ejaculated the mason, horrified at the idea of anyone having use for a dead body and going to the city morgue to pick out one to his liking. The policeman said he couldn’t say why—it had been done, and they must be careful. The mason produced his union card and other credentials to establish his identity.

  Outside the tip had gone forth. The grisly hangers-on lay in wait for him, and he gruffly selected one, who led him triumphantly to his near-by store. The next day a little funeral party departed from that side street “parlour” with what pomp the poor can give to their dead. There were four carriages, three of them empty, the blinds drawn and, in the first the only mourner, the mason. Drivers in battered silk hats urged decrepit black nags to a sharp trot over the bridge and far away. The service of the obscure dead must move at a sharp trot—there are hundreds between sunsets.

  On their return, the policeman with the cigar met the foremost carriage—there were some papers to sign for the records. When the mason stepped down he looked up and saw the porticoed door of a big building, with massive towers and turrets of red brick and terra-cotta. He drew back involuntarily; but the man with the cigar had a double twist on his coat-sleeve.

  “Come along quietly, and don’t start anything,” he said amiably, and led the mourner up the stone steps, down the corridor, and into a big room in which sat a man at a desk. The door closed behind him. The man at the desk was Parr, deputy commissioner of police.

  “Ha, ha! At last! Well, how did it go?” asked Parr, looking up.

  The mason crouched like an animal, one hand stealing behind him to try the door. He straightened up, breathing hard.

  “Sophie almost got away with it,” said Parr. “Knocking the old
duffer off like that, with arsenic in his dope! And turning the stiff over to us, to hand out to the first comer that identified it! You thought you weren’t even taking a chance, didn’t you, William?”

  It was William, the footman—William re-drawn, some lines erased, as plausible as a raised cheque, nevertheless, it was William. He swallowed hard.

  “Come over here. I want a good look at you,” commanded Parr.

  The man obeyed sullenly. Parr pointed to a glass paper-weight on his desk. “Did you ever see that before? Answer me!” he bawled, with sudden ferocity. William looked from Parr to the paper-weight, and back again, but maintained silence.

  “What did Amos P. Huntington call himself ten years ago, when he left his finger-prints on that paper-weight, in the Park Place murder?”

  Parr referred to a crime that had gone down in the annals as a celebrated mystery. It was a mystery no more. The obscure man who was found dead in his chair in West Broadway had the same finger-prints. That was why the man with the cigar had been so polite to the mason when he called on his sad errand. William did not answer. His eyes roved round the room, avoiding the one thing he feared.

  “What did you blow up in your rubber plant, William?” asked Parr. “Was it a basket of cats—or dogs—or did you borrow another of your brothers from East Twenty-sixth Street? Sophie put the remains through the crematory so fast we didn’t have a look-in.”

  Parr laughed. So did William. By that laugh Parr knew that questions were useless. At that moment the door opened and Oliver Armiston came in, back from Lakewood, in picturesque polo cloak and cap, swinging a stick.

  “Take him downstairs!” growled Parr to an attendant. “Charge him with—charge him with complicity in the murder of John Doe, alias Amos P. Huntington.”

  Armiston dropped his stick with a clatter and started back with such a genuine movement of amazement that the policeman who was ushering him in actually grabbed him, thinking him the murderer.

  “No! No! Not that one! This one!” said Parr. Parr’s eyes twinkled.

  When William had been taken away, he said to Oliver with some relish: “As a matter of fact, Oliver, you ought to be downstairs on that charge!”

  “But how—what—I got your wire. I came right in. Is there—did she——”

  “Certainly,” responded Parr, nodding. “You are a wonder, Oliver!” Parr rubbed his hands comfortably. “What put it into your head to start Sophie after her husband? Don’t tell me you didn’t,” said the deputy, as Armiston tried to break in with a word. “I heard you! You knew she was listening in, on the telephone, the other day, in your study, when you told me in a loud voice to go out and find her husband—that he had squealed on her. Squealed on her!” cried Parr. “On the level, Oliver, I could have strangled you at that moment. I thought you were squealing on me. Then it all came over me—just like that!” and he snapped his fingers to indicate the suddenness of light. He pounded Oliver on one knee. “You’ve got the goods! You’re all right, Oliver.”

  “Well, it was the obvious thing to do, of course,” agreed Oliver, now preening himself. “I knew you couldn’t find him. I knew the only way was to scare her into starting after him herself. Then you could trail along behind. It was—it made a very good ending of the story, I thought,” said Oliver, rubbing his hands. “Your men trailed her, of course?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact,” said Parr weakly, “she got the jump on us. You know Sophie! So we just sat back and waited.”

  “Waited?” ejaculated Armiston, his jaw dropping.

  “Oh, Sophie did her part—she produced him all right,” said Parr. “Dead!” he added grimly. He related swiftly how the bogus Amos P. Huntington, who had been blown up by synthetic rubber and cremated, in the end came to his death and burial in so obscure a manner that the police would never have known who he was, except for one thing that Sophie overlooked.

  “My window washer,” said Parr, “he’s a wonder, too. He managed to borrow a razor, among other personal effects of Amos P. Huntington. Sophie had packed it away in a box. We found finger-prints on it that corresponded to that,” he said, pointing at the glass paper-weight, grisly souvenir of the famous Park Place mystery. “When his dead body turned up, with the same finger-prints, the rest was simple enough. We merely sat on the doorstep and waited.” And Parr, who had complacently compassed the murder of a murderer, by neglecting to follow Sophie too closely, leaned back in his chair smiling in a grim way. “Oh, they all come to pot sooner or later,” he said, in his philosophic mood again.

  “But—Sophie——”

  “Oh, she is on her way down-town now,” said Parr. “Sit still. You will see her.”

  The Dresden china widow, an hour before, had set out on her afternoon drive to air her red-headed mechanic. At Forty-second Street a policeman said gruffly, “Drive up to the curb, young fellow,” and the red-headed mechanic had obeyed with alacrity, not knowing at the moment if he was wanted for some infraction of the traffic rules, or by his Chief. “Let me have your keys,” commanded the traffic policeman. He took the proffered keys and calmly locked the door of the candy-box tonneau. Sophie could not escape now, except by smashing glass. “Take her to Headquarters!” commanded the traffic man, who had his instructions.

  While Parr and Oliver sat talking, Sophie was announced. A graceful little woman clothed in a cloud of black entered, weeping, and sniffling in her handkerchief under her veil.

  “Lift up the curtain, Sophie,” said Parr, with a full breath of elation. “This is where you stop for the night, Sophie.”

  She lifted the veil, disclosing a tear-stained face pathetically pretty. Parr, with an oath, lifted himself out of his chair. His hands strained at the arms till the veins stood out like whipcords. He stared like a wooden man.

  “What’s the joke, Hanrahan?” he bawled at the red-headed mechanic.

  “Joke, sir? Joke!” protested Hanrahan.

  “Look at her, you fool!” snarled the deputy, coming out from behind his desk. “Look what you have brought here—this rag doll done up in crêpe.”

  The lady here burst into a torrent of words.

  “I not understand!” she wailed, in French accents. “I am Madam ’Untington maid! She move—I come to town—three—four days—to make ready! She move. This afternoon I go out—to get littl’ air! The policeman—he lock me in! Oh, he lock me in! I scream! I cry! I knock the window! I come here! This man he say ‘don’t start nothings—’ ”

  But Hanrahan was holding his head. He was reviving that episode in the kitchen that made the country seem so attractive to him a few days gone by. If this was the maid, who then was that piece of pert prettiness with whom he had philandered?

  “Where did you get those clothes?” demanded Parr roughly.

  “Madam—she give them to me—she no want them any more—my ’usband, he is dead—Il est mort!”

  “Take her away!” roared Parr.

  “What is the charge?” asked the meek Hanrahan.

  “Oh, anything—anything,” snarled Parr, “to keep it out of the papers! You a detective! You on the Sophie Lang case! Oh dear, oh dear!”

  When the door closed on the two figures it was Armiston who broke the painful silence.

  “After all,” he said dreamily, fingering his grey lock, “it was a signed masterpiece! Eh, Parr?”

  That was the end of the Sophie Lang case. There were loose ends of course, such as William, and the maid, and the jettisoned quarter of a million dollars. The underlings proved to be very faithful ignorant tools of the lady, who took their medicine, slight doses, maintaining to the end their lack of knowledge of such a purely legendary person as Sophie Lang.

  Villain: Mr. Ottermole

  The Hands of Mr. Ottermole

  THOMAS BURKE

  THE BIRTH OF THE MYSTERY/DETECTIVE STORY is generally conceded to have occurred in 1841 with the publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” It is probably impossible to count the number of stories i
n the genre that were published in the ensuing century. A few years after that centenary, in 1949, a panel of twelve experts was called upon to name the greatest of them all, and the story given that extraordinary honor was “The Hands of Mr. Ottermole” by Sydney Thomas Burke (1886–1945), a tale inspired by the Jack the Ripper murders.

  Burke was born in the London suburb of Clapham, but when he was only a few months old his father died, and he was sent to the East End to live with his uncle until the age of ten, when he was put into a home for respectable middle-class children without means. Burke sold his first story, “The Bellamy Diamonds,” when he was fifteen. His first book, Nights in Town: A London Autobiography, was published in 1915, soon followed by the landmark volume Limehouse Nights (1916), a collection of stories that had originally been published in the magazines The English Review, Colour, and The New Witness. This volume of romantic but violent stories of the Chinese district of London was enormously popular and, though largely praised by critics, there were objections to the depictions of interracial relationships, opium use, and other “depravities.”