Dan merely nodded.
Both men flashed badges, then slipped them back in their pockets.
“We got a tip you were arriving,” the tall man said. “I’m Lieutenant Hart of Homicide and this is Sergeant Bull.”
Dan examined the swarthy sergeant with interest. “Haven’t I seen your picture on a reward poster somewhere?” he asked mildly.
Sergeant Bull’s face reddened and his lips drew back in a snarl, but the tall lieutenant waved him aside and said quietly, “We don’t like gunmen in Lake City, Fancy.”
“So?” Dan asked.
“So let’s start by turning over your gun.” Swinging his huge suitcase slightly forward, Dan let it drop with a crash. The barrel-chested sergeant jerked his toes out of the way just in time, turned brick red and stepped toward the big man with one hand raised to deliver a back-hand slap.
Dan regarded the sergeant’s jaw with calm calculation, his lips grinning but his eyes narrowed ever so slightly. The barrel-chested sergeant hesitated, let his hand drop and contented himself with snarling, “You heard the lieutenant. Let’s see your heater.”
“Sure,” Dan said obligingly. His right hand flickered under his coat and reappeared with a forty-five automatic, which cocked with a distinct click. “Take a good look.”
For a moment the bore centered directly in the sergeant’s stomach, then Dan’s thumb dropped the hammer to quarter-cock and the gun disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared.
“For the information of you lads and any other hoods around here who wear badges,” Dan said huskily, “my permit to carry a gun is signed by the governor. So is my appointment as special investigator to find out what in hell’s going on down here.”
Unexpectedly both his big hands lashed out and grabbed a double handful of shirt-front. Jerking the two men off balance, he brought his fists together in front of his own chest so that one shoulder of each was clamped against one shoulder of his partner as they half-faced each other, and their other shoulders were crammed against Dan’s chest, a position which effectively immobilized their arms. Nor in their side-wise position was either able to bring a knee into play.
They hung helpless in the big man’s powerful grip, glaring up at him murderously as he grinned at them.
“Tell Big Jim Calhoun the war is on,” Dan said huskily. “And next time not to send boys to do a man’s job.”
A sudden thrust sent both men reeling backward to sprawl either side of the doorway. Sweeping up his suitcase, Dan took the girl’s arm and piloted her through the door. Without a backward glance he made for the group of taxi drivers, extended his suitcase to one by holding it with two sausage-like fingers through the strap, and grinned when the man was nearly jerked off center by its weight.
“You shouldn’t have done that to Morgan Hart and Larry Bull,” Adele Hudson said breathlessly. “They’re Big Jim Calhoun’s foremost hired killers.”
“Nice type to have on a police force,” Dan grunted.
As they followed the loping cab driver, Adele’s legs moved like twin pistons in her attempt to keep up with the big man’s long strides. “I wonder how they knew you were arriving,” she said.
Dan Fancy’s grin became even wider than usual. “I sent Big Jim Calhoun an anonymous wire from Pittsburgh saying a private dick named Daniel Fancy had been engaged by Martin Robinson to get young Robinson out of death row, and that Fancy would arrive on the eleven A.M. train today. I signed it ‘A Friend’.”
The girl stopped in her tracks. “Whatever did you do a thing like that for? Are you trying to get killed?”
“No. Trying to get framed,” Dan said cryptically.
Back in the waiting room, as the two plainclothesmen picked themselves up and began brushing themselves off, the sad-faced little man in the corner rose to his feet and unobtrusively left by the same door Dan and Adele had used. When he reached the group of taxi drivers, he surrendered his grip to one, nodded his head toward the retreating back of Dan Fancy, and said in a thin, reedy voice, “Five bucks if you keep the big fellow in sight without him catching on.”
* * * *
“What’s the hotel?” Dan asked Adele Hudson as he helped her into the cab.
“The Lakeview, but its rates are tremendous. We’re in the middle of the tourist season, you know.”
“With a millionaire paying expenses, I should quibble?” he inquired. To the driver he said, “Lakeview Hotel.”
On the street Dan Fancy merely looked big, for his breadth was in proper proportion to his height except across the shoulders, and their width tended to make him seem shorter than he was. But in the close confines of a taxi his size was hard to conceal. He was not built for taxis. His heavy shoulders spanned half the back seat, crowding the girl against the far window, where she sat like a toy doll, the top of her head barely even with Dan’s collarbone.
“Tell me about the town,” Dan said.
“Well—” the girl started uncertainly. “I’m not sure how much Mr. Robinson told you. If I knew that—”
“Nothing about the town, except it’s as crooked as a Scotch walking stick. Just that his son was in the death house on a fake murder rap and I’m supposed to get him out. Also that you’re the kid’s fiancée, so presumably are trustworthy, and can give me the whole story.”
“I see.” She paused, frowning over her thoughts, then asked, “What was that you said to those detectives about being a special investigator for the governor? Mr. Robinson’s wire said you were a private detective.”
“The old man had an afterthought subsequent to wiring you. Seems another private dick he sent down here was arrested for vagrancy, beat up and kicked out of town two hours after he arrived. The governor is a personal pal of old man Robinson, so he armed me with enough authority to hit back in case any local cops start swinging. Makes it tough for the locals to work a vagrancy charge. Get on with your story.”
“It’s a rather long story,” she said doubtfully, looking at the back of the taxi driver’s head and then giving Dan a warning glance.
“Even the walls have ears, eh?” he said amusedly. “Look, Adele, there’s nothing subtle about me. All I know how to do is wade in slugging with both hands. I’ve got no secrets from anybody, so talk up.”
She glanced again at the driver, then said reluctantly, “The town is about fifty thousand population and it’s ruled completely by Big Jim Calhoun. He owns a good part of it. Literally, I mean. Property deeds and mortgages. Not any of the better part, or much of the main business district, but most of the property over east of the tracks is his. Saloons, amusement places, gambling houses. That sort of thing. He also owns the mayor, the city council, the police commissioner, the sheriff—this is the county seat, you know—the district attorney, the coroner and both city judges.”
“How about newspapers?”
“There are two. The Star and the Post. Big Jim owns controlling interest in both, and since the Star owns our only local radio station, he controls that, too.”
“In short, he’s got the town sewed up tight,” Dan said. “How does he use all this power?”
“To suck the lifeblood out of Lake City,” Adele said savagely. “To protect his crooked gambling houses, to allow everything to run wide open. To peddle dope to school children, to extort money from merchants. And to kill anyone who gets in his way.”
“H-m-m—” Dan remarked. “This is all general knowledge?”‘
“Everybody in Lake City knows the town is rotten to the core and that Big Jim Calhoun makes it that way.”
Dan said thoughtfully, “You mentioned the population is fifty thousand. That’s a lot of people to take a kicking around. Just figuring the adult males, you’d have the equivalent of at least one full infantry division, if somebody organized them. How come no honest citizen has tried?”
“Gene Robinson tried,” the girl said dully. “And so did George Saunders,
the man he was convicted of murdering. Others have tried and have ended up dead, or in the penitentiary on framed evidence. The civic leaders in the community are paralyzed with fear.”
The taxi pulled up before the marquee of a large white-stone hotel. Without getting out, the driver reached over the seat to unlatch the door. Helping the girl to the sidewalk, Dan opened the front door, swung his suitcase out and slammed the door again.
Then the driver slipped the car into low. “Aren’t you going to wait for your fare?” Dan asked huskily.
Throwing him a startled glance, the cabbie wet his lips and mumbled, “One-fifty.”
Dan gave him the exact change. “Your tip is the fifty bucks you’ll get for phoning Big Jim our conversation.”
“Huh?” the driver said.
“Tell him your passenger was Dan Fancy and he may make it seventy-five.”
He picked up his suitcase and escorted Adele Hudson into the hotel.
“Why do you keep doing things like that?” she asked.
“Like what?”
“Sending Big Jim messages. Letting him know every move you make.”
Dan stopped and looked down at the girl. “Look,” he said gently. “Apparently both Mr. Robinson and you expected me to come down here and quietly nose around until I uncovered evidence that Gene Robinson is innocent. But in a setup like this there won’t be any evidence. And we’ve got just seventeen days to get the kid out of death row. Our only possible chance is to stir up Big Jim to the point where he sticks his neck out, and then try to step on it. I intend to start a war that will tear this town apart. Want to back out, or come along for the ride?”
The girl looked up at him with slightly frightened eyes. “I’ll come along,” she said in a small voice. “But you underestimate Big Jim. You don’t know him.”
“What makes you think I don’t?”
“Do you?” she asked in surprise.
“He was raised in Pittsburgh. As kids, we beat each other up and as teen-agers we worked in the same steel mill. Being a year and a half older than me, he could always lick me. I’m anxious to see if I’ve caught up to him yet.”
After registering, Dan said to the girl “I’m going to catch a shower before I do anything else. Want to wait in the cocktail lounge or come up and wait?”
“I’ll come up,” she decided.
As they entered the elevator, the little sad-faced man carried his grip through the front door. From the desk he watched the elevator indicator until it stopped at five. Then he turned his attention to the clerk, noted he was copying data from a registration card into a ledger, and read the room number of the card upside down. It was 512.
“I’d like a room with bath facing the lake on the fifth floor,” he said. “I had five hundred and fourteen once before.”
The clerk consulted a chart. “Five-fourteen is occupied, and so are the two rooms either side of it.”
“How about five-ten?”
Superciliously, the clerk examined the little man’s shabby seersucker suit. “That’s vacant, sir, but it’s a suite.”
“I’ll take it,” the little man said.
As the bellhop, a slim, towheaded boy with a pug nose and a cocky grin, laid the big suitcase on its stand, Dan asked, “What’s your name?”
“Billie.”
Dan slipped him a five dollar bill. “When I ask for room service, I want you, Billie. Take care of me right and you may get an extra dime when I leave. You can start by getting a shaker of Tom Collinses up here in ten minutes.”
“Yes sir, Mr. Fancy.”
The boy left the room with alacrity.
Tossing his coat on the bed, Dan followed it with his tie, shoulder holster, shirt and undershirt. Adele, seated on a chair near the window, watched him with startled, uneasy eyes. Happening to catch her expression, the big man grinned in amusement, then ignored her completely as he opened his bag and drew out some fresh clothing.
Stripped to the waist, Dan Fancy was a throwback to the Neanderthal man. From great shoulders like wedges of concrete to his fleshless waist, iron-hard muscle girded his frame. A light matting of black hair, covered his chest and arms like a sweater, and his deceptively deliberate movements, which could not quite conceal a catlike grace, added to the impression that he was a primeval being who would be more at home in a cave than a modern hotel room.
From nowhere the absurd vision of Dan Fancy dragging her into a cave by the hair popped into Adele’s mind. Angrily she shook it out.
Ten minutes later there was a knock at the door. Adele rose to answer it, then hesitated as she remembered the byplay with the taxi driver. Suppose instead of room service, it was one of Big Jim’s badged killers?
Glancing at the bed, she saw with surprise Dan’s holster with its heavy forty-five was gone, and realized he had taken it into the bath with him. Apparently the big man was capable of caution in spite of his tendency to ask for trouble. Relieved, she opened the door.
“The Collinses, ma’am,” Billie said, carrying in a tray containing a shaker and two frosted glasses.
The bellboy had hardly departed when Dan Fancy came out of the bathroom fully dressed. Over cool Tom Collinses she told him the story of Gene Robinson’s conviction for murder.
“Gene was relatively new in Lake City, you know,” she said. “About two years ago he came to town, and I guess I must have been the first person he talked to. I’m the owner and proprietor of Del’s Beauty Salon, and he asked me for a job. I gave it to him. I suppose you knew he was a hairdresser?”
“Yeah.” Dan grunted. “One of the reasons he never got along with the old man. His father thought he was a sissy.”
“He isn’t!” Adele said hotly. “Lots of men are in the beauty business. It’s a perfectly honorable profession.”
“All right,” Dan said mildly.
For a moment the girl looked at him suspiciously, then went on with the story. “I knew, of course, that Gene was the son of Martin Robinson, the millionaire steel man, but I doubt that anyone else in town did. Gene was bitter about their break and never mentioned his father. Mr. Robinson disowned him, you know, when he refused to enter the steel business.”
“I know,” Dan said.
“Until the trial it never came out who Gene was, or I don’t think they would have tried to frame him. It’s one thing to push around citizens of a town you own, but quite another to pick on the son of a nationally known figure. I imagine Big Jim Calhoun had a few uneasy moments when those big-time defense lawyers from Pittsburgh began to arrive in town. I think probably they would simply have killed Gene and made it look like an accident, had they known who he really was.”
“The advantage of having a big-shot parent,” Dan said dryly. “You get killed instead of framed.”
“Of course as it turned out it didn’t matter anyway, because Gene refused to accept any help from his father and wouldn’t even talk to the lawyers he sent down. The court finally had to appoint a defense lawyer, and that ended Gene’s chances, for the lawyer he appointed was just another tool of Big Jim’s.”
“Tell me about the killing,” Dan said.
“It happened about a month ago. George Saunders, the man who was killed, was a tavern owner in the same block where I have my beauty salon. He was a fiery, soapbox type of man, and I never liked him particularly. I don’t believe Gene did either, but he worked with him on the citizens’ committee because he believed in what Mr. Saunders was doing.”
“What was the citizens’ committee?”
“It was something George Saunders got up. A sort of vigilante outfit composed of merchants who wanted to break Jim Calhoun’s power. It was supposed to be secret, but George Saunders was constitutionally incapable of keeping his mouth shut, and practically everyone in town knew he was the leader and Gene was second in command.”
Dan looked interested. “So
the chief of the citizens’ committee gets killed, and his first lieutenant takes the rap for it? Convenient for Big Jim. What happened to the committee?”
“It collapsed.” Adele said bitterly. “All the light went out of it and the members scampered for their holes like frightened rats.”
The big man said, with a strange air of tolerance, “Don’t be bitter at them, Adele. Even brave men sometimes rout without leadership. How was the frame worked?”
“With Big Jim’s usual efficiency,” Adele said in a weary voice. “At the trial a half dozen witnesses testified George Saunders made a practice of teasing Gene about being a hairdresser. That wasn’t true, incidentally. The same witnesses testified the two had come to blows over it the day before the murder, and Gene threatened to kill George. A pawnbroker testified Gene bought the gun identified as the murder weapon. Five witnesses testified they were customers in Saunders’ saloon when Gene entered and fired five shots into Saunders’ body. The arresting officers, who happened to be the same two you met at the station, said they heard the shots, rushed into the tavern while Gene was still firing, and overpowered him. What could the jury do? They convicted him.”
“The kid have any defense?”
“None anyone would believe. I was off that day and Gene was responsible for closing the shop. He said he had just locked the front door when two masked men entered the back way, covered him with pistols and kept him there for three hours. About eight p.m., just as it began to get dark, they forced him out the back door and down the alley to the rear of Saunders’ tavern, where they all entered through the kitchen. The two masked men told him to walk straight ahead into the barroom, but they themselves stayed back in the kitchen out of sight, and presumably left again by the back door as soon as Gene obeyed them. Gene said several men were in the tavern, apparently awaiting him, and two of them were Lieutenant Morgan Hart and Sergeant Larry Bull. At the time George Saunders was lying dead behind the bar, but Gene didn’t know this. Lieutenant Hart thrust a gun at Gene by the barrel and said. ‘Here. Take this.’ When Gene refused, the lieutenant slapped him twice, so Gene took the gun. Then he was arrested for murder.”
The Richard Deming Mystery Megapack Page 21
