The Richard Deming Mystery Megapack

by Richard Deming

  “The first person who makes a move,” he said distinctly over the sudden hush, “gets a soft-nosed bullet right in the gizzard!”

  Stepping to the lieutenant’s side, Detective Gyp Fleming emphasized the threat with his own gun. Simultaneously other gunmen rose from the crowd and covered the spectators with guns.

  Quietly the door at the rear of the room opened and the neat gray arms of two state troopers passed under the chins of Morgan Hart and Gyp Fleming from behind. In unison the troopers’ free hands clamped over the gunmen’s wrists, forcing the two pistols to point harmlessly in the air. In the wake of the first two, a dozen gray-uniformed men armed with riot guns filed into the court and lined up along the rear wall.

  In a resonant voice the trooper with a strangle hold on Morgan Hart called, “Any other local gunnies who feel tough can step right up. You’ve got two seconds to drop your guns on the floor or get a load of buckshot.”

  There was a clatter as a half dozen pistols fell to the floor.

  “Carry on, Your Honor,” the spokesman for the state police called cheerfully.

  But for the moment his honor was beyond carrying on, being occupied with gaping like a fish at the riot guns of the men in gray.

  Quietly Dan Fancy left his seat, picked up “Exhibit A” and seated the full clip lying next to it. Working the slide once to throw a shell in the chamber, he dropped the hammer to quarter-cock and stuffed the gun in his pocket. He nodded to the judge who politely nodded back without seeing him, grinned at Adrian Fact and John Farraday, and winked at Adele Hudson as he strolled toward the door.

  The trooper holding Morgan Hart pulled both himself and the lieutenant aside from the exit and said, “Good hunting, Mr. Fancy.”

  “Thanks,” Dan said as he passed out of the courtroom.

  * * * *

  As Dan expected, the news of the crash of Big Jim Calhoun’s empire had not yet penetrated to the Downtown Athletic Club. The arrival of the state police at the courthouse had effectively blocked any envoys to Big Jim from there. When he entered the barroom on the first floor, Dan found it deserted except for the bartender and the baldheaded Stub, who were quietly playing gin rummy.

  The big man came in so suddenly that the gunman, Stub, barely had time to swing around on his bar stool and shoot one hand toward his shoulder when Dan was upon him. Grasping the burly man by both biceps, he lifted him bodily, and discouraged the bartender’s reach for a Billy club by tossing Stub over the counter on top of him. Both men disappeared behind the bar in a crash of bottles and glasses.

  Placing one hand on the surface of the counter, Dan lightly vaulted over, grabbed the bald gunman by the seat of the pants and the collar, and heaved him headfirst back to the customers’ side of the bar again. Stub traversed a short distance on his face, but stopped suddenly when his head, in cooperation with an iron chair leg, acted as a brake.

  Satisfied that one antagonist was safely out of the fight, Dan turned his attention to the bartender, who alone hardly constituted competition, being a consumptive-looking man in his fifties who weighed approximately a hundred and thirty-five pounds.

  Jerking the man erect by the shirt front and holding him at arm’s length with one hand, so that the bartender’s feet were six inches clear of the floor, Dan shook him gently.

  “Where is Big Jim?” he asked in a husky voice.

  The man’s eyes rolled upward and he said in a strangled tone, “Upstairs. Second floor.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes, sir,” the bartender whispered.

  The big man gave him another gentle shake. “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”

  “Hell, no!” the barkeep said, literally horrified by the suggestion.

  Satisfied that the man was too frightened to do anything but cooperate, Dan suddenly released his grip. The bartender’s feet hit the floor with a jolt which caused him to stagger against the back bar and add another bottle to the whiskey-reeking litter of broken glass on the floor. He regained his balance by embracing the cash register.

  “How do you get up there?” Dan asked mildly.

  The bartender stumbled all over his own feet in his eagerness to demonstrate the floor button which operated the door’s electric lock. Vaulting the bar again as gracefully as a cat, the big man waited for the buzz, then pushed open the door next to the bar.

  “By the way,” he said before passing all the way through. “When your bald-headed friend wakes up, tell him to sit down and relax. The joint is surrounded by state cops.”

  Which was not exactly a lie. Dan thought, for the troopers would be on their way as soon as they wound up their duties at the courthouse, and by the time Baldy regained consciousness, the place probably would be surrounded.

  Following the short hallway to the elevator, Dan entered the open door and pushed the button marked 2. As the car rose, he drew his automatic and raised the hammer to full-cock.

  The bartender had not mentioned the extra steel-grilled door which disclosed itself to Dan when the elevator door slid back, an oversight Dan attributed to his own hurried questioning rather than to the man’s lack of cooperation. He recognized it for what it was even before Big Jim recognized his visitor, however, and had his gun aimed through the steel latticework, the barrel steadied on one of the crossbars, before Jim could even begin to reach for a desk drawer.

  “If you so much as wriggle a finger, I’ll blow off the top of your head,” Dan said with husky relish. “How do you work this contraption?”

  The cherubic face of the giant behind the desk was an expressionless mask. “It’s an electric lock,” he said tonelessly. “The buzzer’s under my desk.”

  “Then you can move one foot,” Dan conceded. “But move it slow.”

  Through the open desk well he could see both of Big Jim’s legs, and he watched critically as the giant’s right foot cautiously slid forward under the desk. Then a buzz sounded, and a jolt of electricity passed from the steel door through Dan’s gun, hurling him back against the rear wall of the car. The automatic fell to the floor outside the elevator.

  Groggily Dan picked himself up as the steel door swung open and Big Jim beckoned him in with his own gun.

  “You have to wait until after the buzz before you touch it,” the giant said with a grin. “Otherwise you get one hundred and ten volts. I had it designed particularly to cover situations like this.”

  Dan watched the steel door clang shut again, then turned to face Big Jim.

  “The gun isn’t going to do you much good,” he said mildly. “Your frame blew up in your face, and the building is surrounded by state cops.

  “I hope,” he added mentally.

  Big Jim’s grin did not falter. Backing to the window, he cast a quick glance over his shoulder. Then his eyes returned to Dan’s. “How did you manage it, Dan?” Apparently the building was now surrounded.

  Big Jim’s grin had faded to a moody expression. “Did you do a thorough job, Dan? Have you really got me licked?”

  “You won’t be able to wriggle out, Jim.”

  The giant nodded, accepting Dan’s estimate as the truth. “How bad is it? For me personally, I mean.”

  “Well,” Dan said consideringly, “all your pet witnesses are going up for perjury. Morgan Hart is going to the chair for the murder of Larry Bull. You know how rats begin to squeal when they’re cornered. They’ll all shift as much as they can on to you. Only you know how much that is.”

  The giant thought a moment. “Ten years maybe. Twenty at the outside. I haven’t personally killed anybody.”

  “Going to start now?” Dan asked.

  Big Jim glanced down at the gun. “Possibly. You meant to get me, didn’t you?”

  Dan shook his head. “Not that way. I meant to make sure you weren’t armed, then finish the slugging match we started in my hotel room.”

  Big Jim exa
mined him curiously. “You’re a persistent guy, Dan. You’ve tried to take me at least ten times since the first time I beat hell out of you twenty-five years ago. And all it ever got you was more bumps.” Stepping behind his desk, Big Jim dropped the gun in a drawer, locked it and put the key in his pocket.

  “All right, sucker,” he said, grinning at Dan. “Come get your bumps.”

  During the short part of a minute between Dan’s last remark to the bartender and the actual arrival of the state police, the bartender took off like a jet-propelled plane, leaving Stub still unconscious. Consequently when the troopers arrived, trailed by Adrian Fact and Adele Hudson, they found no one to explain the combination of the knob-less door next to the bar. A husky trooper was just preparing to solve the combination with an axe, when the door opened from inside and Dan Fancy staggered out.

  Dan’s coat was gone and the whole left side of his shirt hung from his belt in shreds, exposing half his hairy chest and one naked arm. One of his trouser legs was ripped from cuff to hip, and flopped open to disclose blood welling from a perfect set of teeth marks in the fleshy part of his calf. His left eye was tightly closed and the other was slowly swelling shut. Blood from both nostrils dribbled across his mouth and seeped from the end of his chin.

  Supporting himself with one hand against the door jamb, he focused his remaining eye blearily on Adrian Fact and opened the other hand to exhibit a large yellow molar, obviously not his own.

  “I finally grew up to the big bum,” he said in groggy triumph.

  Then he pitched forward on his face…

  * * * *

  Martin Robinson stood stiff and straight as his son approached the group waiting for him at the prison gate, but something yearning in the old man’s expression told Dan he would bow right down to the ground for a smile from his son.

  Eugene Robinson glanced without interest at Adrian Fact, swept his gaze curiously over Dan Fancy’s bruised features, then flashed his dazzling smile as he took both Adele Hudson’s hands and gave them a light squeeze. Apparently he considered it too public a place to exhibit more affection.

  Last of all the young man turned to his father. “Hello, Dad,” he said tonelessly.

  The old man winced. “Are you ready to come home now Gene?” he asked.

  In a careless tone Gene said, “I rather thought I’d get married instead.”

  Martin Robinson smiled eagerly. “Your wife will always be as welcome as you are, son.”

  Watching, Dan Fancy’s stomach sickened in sympathy for the lonely old man. He turned to Adrian Fact.

  “Mr. Robinson’s check clear through yet, Ade?”

  The little man glanced at him in surprise and nodded. Dan directed his next question to Adele Hudson.

  “You don’t think it would be unfair to take advantage of a young man who wasn’t in death row, do you, Adele?”

  Puzzled, she asked, “What do you mean?”

  “Just this.”

  Raising one large palm, he covered the face of Eugene Robinson with it and pushed. The young man staggered backward, tripped over a hedge and sat in the dust with a thump. Swinging Adele up in his arms like a baby, Dan strode toward the taxi which had brought him and Adrian to the prison.

  “What I want with a woman stupid enough to fall for a twerp like that is beyond me,” he growled. “But maybe eventually I can train some sense into your head.”

  He stopped to begin the training.

  “Dan!” she squealed. “Kissing in public! What will Eugene think?”

  HOUSEBOAT

  Originally published (originally appeared in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine, April 1966.

  Mike Faraday sensed something wrong about the two men shortly after they came aboard the houseboat. They were too well dressed for vacationing fishermen, a little too suave and their English too precise. They simply didn’t behave as New England businessmen. They impressed him as Europeans who had learned English somewhere, such as Harvard or Yale.

  Mike Faraday didn’t look like a professor of theoretical mathematics. He was only thirty-two years old, wore a crew cut which made him look about twenty-five, and had the build of an Olympic swimmer. He had spent most of his life on the Mississippi, and was at home in the water as he was on land.

  His wife Ellen, five years younger, had a swimmer’s body too, though hers was less muscular and more softly curved. She too had grown up on the river and knew it as well as he did.

  They met the two strangers on the river bank near Vicksburg, where they had anchored the houseboat overnight in a small cove. The men were standing on the bank, casting with bass plugs, when Faraday came on deck shortly after sunup.

  He wondered what in the devil they expected to catch in the Mississippi with plugs, especially so close to shore. There wouldn’t be anything but mudcat here, and they didn’t hit plugs.

  Both men were dressed in well-pressed slacks, shined shoes, light cotton jackets over white sport shirts and Panama hats. Their fiberglass rods looked brand new and there were identical, shiny new tackle boxes at the feet of each.

  Faraday threw them a friendly greeting and both men raised their hands in polite acknowledgment.

  After breakfast Faraday planned to replenish their drinking water supply at a yacht club they had spotted the evening before about a hundred yards back up the river. He pushed the board they used as a gangplank over the river bank, which was only about six feet away. The two men reeled in their plugs, picked up their tackle boxes and came over nearer to examine the houseboat.

  The taller of the two, a lean six-footer of about forty with a thin, sharp-nosed face, said, “That is an interesting boat. Where are you going?”

  “New Orleans,” Faraday said. “We started from St. Louis.”

  The other man, a bulky, wide-shouldered fellow of about thirty-five with a square, expressionless face, looked at the outboard motor on the stern. “That engine hardly looks powerful enough to push a boat that size.”

  “Oh, we only use it for steering,” Faraday said. “We just drift with the current until we’re ready to anchor at night. The current’s only four miles an hour, so we only make about fifty miles a day, but we’re in no hurry. It’s just a leisurely fishing trip.”

  “How are you going to get it back upstream?” the thin-faced man asked.

  “That’s not our problem,” Faraday said with a grin. “It’s rented. The outfit that owns it will have it towed back to St. Louis at the end of the voyage.”

  The two men looked at each other. The taller said, “Now there is what we should have done, Martin. Would not something like this make a wonderful vacation?”

  The bulky man nodded. “What is the name of the company which rents these boats?”

  “Callaway Houseboat Rentals in St. Louis. You can rent them for as short or long a trip as you wish. They charge fifty cents a mile, which works out to four hundred dollars in our case. That isn’t bad when you consider that it costs that much to rent a beach cottage for a couple of weeks.”

  Both men looked the boat over with growing interest. Finally the taller said, “Mind if we come aboard to see it?”

  “Sure, come ahead,” Faraday said cordially.

  The two men mounted the narrow gangplank and stepped on deck. Ellen stuck her golden blonde head from the galley at that moment.

  “Breakfast,” she called, then saw the strangers. “Oh, we have visitors.”

  She came the rest of the way out on deck, with typical femininity looking a little self-conscious about her worn denim jeans, white cotton sweatshirt and bare feet. She needn’t have been self-conscious, Faraday thought with pride. Even in fishing clothes she was beautiful.

  He said to the visitors, “My name is Mike Faraday and this is my wife Ellen.”

  Both men set down their fishing gear, removed their hats and offered Ellen formal bows, which gave Faraday
the first inkling that there was something strange about them. He had already noted their precise, unaccented voices, but had merely assumed they were probably graduates of some Ivy League school. Now it struck him that Americans don’t normally bow to women when introduced.

  He wondered why a pair of obviously cultured Europeans would be fishing with the wrong gear from a muddy bank of the Mississippi.

  Both men offered their hands to Faraday. The taller man said his name was Albert Johnson, the bulky man introduced himself as Martin Smith.

  “Your name is Michael Faraday?” Smith said. “The same as the famous English scientist?”

  “I was named after him,” Faraday said. “I’m supposed to be descended from him.”

  Ellen said with wifely pride, “Mike is a greater scientist than his ancestor. He’s a professor of theoretical math at Washington University in St. Louis, and is internationally known for his work in that field.”

  The thin-nosed Albert Johnson said, “I have read of you in the science sections of various news magazines. Have you not just developed a revolutionary new rocket fuel?”

  “Not quite,” Faraday said. “Merely a new mathematical theorem which may lead to the development of a new type of fuel, among other things. I’m a theoretical scientist. I work with computers instead of test tubes.”

  “We have something in common,” Johnson said with a smile. “Mr. Smith and I are partners in an electronics firm in Massachusetts.”

  “Oh?” Faraday said, wondering if perhaps their accents were merely New England after all. “I’m afraid practical science is beyond me. Aside from computers, about the only scientific equipment I use is a pencil.”

  “He’s just being modest,” Ellen said with a grin. “What he means is that he’s beyond the practical scientists. Only a half dozen men in his own field understand him. Have you gentlemen had breakfast?”

  The bulky Martin Smith said, “We ate before dawn, but I would appreciate a cup of coffee.”