The Second Pulp Crime

by Mack Reynolds

  I stayed in shadows and used back streets. I was still weak, and it took me thirty minutes or better to get from Lew’s house to my own. My place was dark, and I didn’t go in. I stood in the shadows of a row of royal palms across from the house watching, waiting. Expecting the two of them together.

  But she came alone. She swung the green sedan in the driveway, entered the house, and I saw lights flash on. She appeared in the living room window for an instant, going toward the phone alcove. I moved quickly across the street, into my own yard. I could see her through the window. She was across the expanse of living room, talking quickly with someone on the phone. Then a shadow, the shadow of a man, long, distorted, showed briefly against the living room wall. Before I could catch a breath the light in there snapped off, and then Vicky screamed.

  I hit the front door. It was locked. I fumbled for a key. A voice shouted from inside, “Stand back, or I’ll shoot her.” Sweat popped out on my face. I heard a door slam, and I ventured the key into the lock then. Another door slammed, and I tore toward the rear of the house. I heard the surging roar of the engine of the green sedan. I was hearing his words over and over, “Stand back, or I’ll shoot her.”

  I knew him. I’d recognized the voice.

  I hurled myself across the yard toward the driveway just as the big car careened out of the drive into the street with a scream of tortured rubber.

  I stood there a moment, gasping. Then I forced strength into my shaking legs and charged back into the house.

  My hands were shaking so badly I could hardly dial Lew Whitfield’s number. His phone screamed twice before anyone answered, and then it was Marge, not Lew. “I’ve got to talk to Lew,” I bellowed.

  “He’s not here, Doug. He just got a phone call from Vicky. He’s on his way over there now.”

  “He’ll be too late. Marge! Shoffner’s got her! He barreled away from here with her in my green sedan. Got that? Old man Wendel Shoffner, my yardman, has Vicky as hostage, at his mercy, in my green car. Call headquarters. Tell them to make it an all-car signal. That’s an order from the D.A.’s office!”

  She got it, she said, and I didn’t waste any more time. I slammed down the phone and pushed my reeling body back out of the house. The second car, the light coupe Vicky usually drove was still in the garage. There was a key for it on my ring.

  The sedan had disappeared by the time I got the coupe on the street. It had turned west, and I turned that way also. In the distance I heard a siren. Lew would get the call. A dozen cars would get the call. They’d pinpoint my home—and we would get him. But it would all be less than worthless if he harmed Vicky first.

  I heard another siren and then another. They were converging on the downtown area. I saw the swarm of cars when I skidded the coupe into Central Avenue. A fire truck rounded an intersection and clanged to a stop just ahead of me. Patrolmen were trying to move the crowds gathering on the sidewalk, and a searchlight threw its yellow tongue up the side of the six-story Parker Building.

  I’d stopped the coupe, but I couldn’t let go of the wheel when I saw that light snake its way up the face of the building. I knew then that he had her up there and we might never get her down alive.

  Somehow I crawled out of the car and was able to stand. I found Lew standing beside his own car. He was snapping orders. To firemen with a net. To the cops rigging a loudspeaker system.

  “For God’s sake, Lew, be careful!”

  He showed only brief, surprise at seeing me. “We’re doing that. Doug: If we wanted to take chances, we’d send men up after him.”

  I could see them now. Vicky and Shoffner, near the low parapet around the building roof.

  Shoffner’s voice rang out thin and high-pitched: “Go away! All of you go away, or I’ll push her over!”

  Lew’s shudder almost matched my own. “He’s cracked. He’s gone. Loony as they come. He’s Loren Sigmon’s father, Doug.” I stiffened. I had been the single eyewitness to Sigmon’s crime.

  Lew said, “He was probably out to get you from the minute he went to work for you. We found some dirt from your garden in your bedroom near the night table where you kept your gun. Ordinarily it wouldn’t have meant much to us—either you or Vicky could have brought it in—but to Vicky it suggested Shoffner. She remembered that Shoffner had been working in muck that afternoon, bringing it in for the flower beds. She slipped into his rooms, found some pictures of Sigmon in the old man’s things. She went to some of Sigmon’s old haunts last night and tonight with Keith Pryor. She was asking questions and must have got a few answers. She phoned me that she was certain of the old man’s identity. But before I could get to your house, he snatched her, found himself cornered, the street blocked, and dragged her in the building.”

  Now she was six stories above the street. This, then, was the ultimate torture…

  “You’ll never talk him down, Lew,” I said. “There’s only one way—let him know he isn’t guilty of actual murder. I’ll have to go up, alone—”

  A trooper was standing near me. I slid the carbine he was holding from his hand.

  Lew made no move to stop me. He knew that Shoffner might kill, me, but he knew too that this was something I had to do. For myself. For Vicky.

  The stairs upward were long, silent, manned by patrolmen who sucked in breath when they saw me, a man they’d believed dead. The last flight of stairs was steeper and narrower, leading up to the radio tower on the roof. I saw Shoffner and Vicky the moment I pushed my exhausted body out on the roof. The spotlight limned them, Shoffner behind Vicky, waving a gun, yelling threats.

  Shoffner must have been dropping quick glances behind him to make sure no one else was coming on the roof, for he saw me.

  “Don’t take another step,” he shouted, and his full intent was in his voice. “I’ll push her!”

  “I came to help you,” I said. “I don’t want you getting yourself into any worse trouble.”

  My voice brought a little cry from Vicky’s throat, and a startled gasp from Shoffner.

  “You can’t be Townsend!” he said in a thick, fearful voice.

  “But I am. Move away from her, Shoffner. And I’ll come toward the light. You can see for yourself.”

  I took another step. A little of the light caught my face. The old man screamed and started shooting. Vicky crawled aside. I hated to do it, but I squeezed the trigger of the carbine. The bullet hit him high in the chest. He stumbled back against the parapet.

  And then he was suddenly gone.

  The gun slid from my fingers as Vicky stumbled toward me. The boys who came to the roof found us locked in a tight embrace, Vicky’s face burrowed into my neck, hard sobs racking her. She was trying hard to tell me something about being a fool, about never having let a pipsqueak gigolo turn her head for a moment, but about having been lonely. But until I’d gone she’d never known what loneliness meant. She’d told Pryor that and he had understood; he had been willing to help her in any way he could in bringing her husband’s murderer to bay. Did I believe her?

  Her question echoed in my mind. Yes, I believed her. I knew that I would never doubt her again. I led her toward the stairs.

  “Darling, it’s time,” I said, “that we were going home.”

  A DEAD CLUE, by David Nowinson

  Originally published in Ten Detective Aces, September 1933.

  There was a timid knock upon the door. People who came to visit Nails Sperry didn’t usually knock. They walked right in and, if they weren’t welcome, they were carried out.

  Again a timid knock. Nails Sperry looked down the length of his cigar and grinned. There was only one man who would knock. “Come in,” Nails yelled.

  Young Roland Curtis slid hesitantly into the unprepossessing place. The room reeked with the merged fumes of cheap tobacco and cheaper liquor. The one electric light, placed near the door so Nails might see his visitors before the
y saw him, was covered with dust, casted a wan yellow light as if it, too, felt sick in that foul atmosphere.

  These things young Curtis sensed before he saw the man who had sent for him. Nails Sperry sat on the bed looking as hard as his name. He wore a pearl stickpin in his tie. Curtis noticed that.

  “Sit down and take a load off your dogs,” Nails ordered.

  Curtis sat down upon the one chair in the room.

  The racketeer stared contemptuously at his guest for a moment. This tall young fellow with the blond hair and the sensitive mouth he had long ago set down as “one of them pretty boys without guts.”

  “Have a shot of shellac,” he invited, dragging a bottle and two glasses from beneath the bed.

  He filled the glasses and gave one to Curtis. Curtis sniffed at it and shuddered. In the old days, when his father was alive, there had been bourbon and champagne on the table.

  He passed the glass back to Sperry. “Thank you. Don’t think I’d better. Too early in the day for me.”

  Nails spat upon the floor and drank both glasses down. “Never too early for me,” he said.

  “I don’t know why you sent for me,” ventured Curtis nervously, “but if it’s money, I haven’t a cent. You promised me the last time that you wouldn’t ask for any more.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said Nails. “I’m not asking yet, see? So don’t get wise or tomorrow the rags’ll be yelling it all over town how your old man chiseled money from the bank before he bumped himself off.”

  Young Curtis clenched his fists and said nothing. Too late he had discovered how a little knowledge may be a very dangerous thing in the hands of a man like Sperry.

  “You still got the pearl necklace, ain’t you?” shot out Nails suddenly.

  “Yes, but I’m not permitted to dispose of it—as I told you. The will—”

  “Yeah, you sobbed out all that hooey before. Well, I don’t want you to give me the pearls, see? I just want the use of ’em for a while.”

  “But why—”

  A crafty look came over the racketeer’s face.

  “Pearls come from oysters, don’t they? Oysters are dumb, see? I’m going to send them pearls back to the oysters.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The rocks are insured, ain’t they?”

  ‘Why, yes.”

  “How much?”

  “Fifty thousand dollars. The Runtham Company.”

  Nails Sperry licked his thin lips. “Fifty grand! Sweet, sweet. Fifty grand from the oysters.” His voice changed, took on a menacing note. “Now here’s what I want you to do, see? Telephone your jeweler you’re sending the pearls through the mail—registered letter, see?—to get the clasp fixed. Then you appoint me your agent to collect and handle all your insurance, see? That’s all. I do the rest.”

  “But the pearls?” protested Curtis weakly.

  “You scram home and get ’em for me. I’ll give ’em back in three days. Might even give you a cut on my take.”

  “But how—”

  “That’s something you wouldn’t get hep to,” said Nails. “Ever see Mickey Mouse?”

  “Of course. Why?”

  “Good guy to watch,” said Sperry in a tone of dismissal. “Now scram and cart the rocks right up.”

  * * * *

  When Roland Curtis returned, Nails Sperry ran his hands covetously over the gleaming pearl necklace. Then he handed Curtis a thick brown envelope.

  “What’s in it?” Curtis inquired.

  “That’s your pearls, see?” Nails leered. “You’ll have that letter registered and you’ll send it to your jeweler. Don’t try to open it because I know how I fixed it up and you’ll screw the works if you fool around, see? Just phone the jeweler and send it right out. In three days you get your pearls and I get my fifty grand, see?”

  Roland Curtis didn’t see, but he said nothing.

  “It’s fool-proof, this scheme,” boasted Sperry. “It took some work in the old noodle. Now do what I told you.”

  The blond young man left the room for the second time that morning…

  * * * *

  Curtis wanted to open that envelope. A nameless fear stopped him. He wasn’t afraid for himself. For Nails to expose what he had threatened, however, besmirching his dead father’s name, seemed to Curtis the rankest kind of sacrilege.

  The envelope, he thought, was rather thin to hold anything almost as valuable as the necklace. There was something soft inside, as if rolled in cotton. He wondered.

  At home, Curtis phoned his jeweler as Nails had instructed. He did something Nails had not instructed, too. He placed the envelope under a large unabridged dictionary to fasten it so that an address might be written more easily. And he signed not his own, but Sperry’s name and address before having the letter registered and mailed.

  * * * *

  There were three in the delegation that visited Nails Sperry’s room next day. Young Roland Curtis led the way. Admitted, he entered, followed by the other two.

  Sperry’s face darkened as he saw them. “What’s the big idea?” he snarled. “Who are those guys?”

  “Sorry,” said Curtis apologetically. “Awfully rude of me. This is Postal Inspector Danney and this is Federal Agent Smith.”

  The men bowed. Nails Sperry scowled. He didn’t appreciate good manners.

  “Well, what do they want here?”

  “It’s about that letter you sent, Mr. Sperry,” said Federal Agent Smith who was a mild little man with sandy hair.

  “Me? You’re screwy! I didn’t send no letter,” snarled the racketeer.

  “It had your name and address on it,” said the mild-mannered Smith. “And besides, what about San Francisco?”

  “Well, what about it?”

  “In 1929,” said Smith reminiscently, “a similar situation occurred in Frisco—with a diamond ring. An insurance company there paid you four thousand dollars because the letter in which you’d mailed the ring for repairing, arrived with a hole in the envelope, explaining the ring’s absence. Very neat. There was no substantial evidence at the time, Mr. Nails Sperry, but we’ve kept you in mind.”

  The racketeer edged towards the bureau.

  “Keep away from there,” ordered Smith. A gun flashed in his hand. “You want to give me a chance to finish my story. Inspector Danney will take care of your gun.”

  Inspector Danney opened the bureau drawer and obliged.

  “This letter that should have contained the pearl necklace,” continued Smith, “arrived this morning at the Townsend Jewelers. Oddly enough, it contained a dead mouse.”

  “Dead!” cried Nails hoarsely.

  “Yes, it had smothered somehow. Strange, wasn’t it? Normally a live mouse gnaws its way out of a letter in a hurry.”

  “Mickey Mouse would have done a better job,” contributed Curtis.

  The racketeer wheeled upon him. “Smart, ain’t you? Maybe you won’t be so smart when I get done talking about what your old man—”

  “Where you’re going,” interrupted the Federal agent softly, “you won’t have a chance to talk for a long time. Uncle Sam will see to that. And people don’t trust convicts these days.”

  Inspector Danney, who had been rummaging about the bureau, handed Curtis a string of pearls now.

  “Thanks,” said Curtis as they led their prisoner away. “You know, they say that pearls come from oysters.”

  “That’s right,” agreed Federal Agent Smith. “But oysters are pretty dumb.”

  WHEN DOUBLES CROSS, by George V. Miller

  Originally published in Spicy Detective Stories, November 1935.

  Bart Stanley, one time detective, barged into his private dressing room with a curse. He was sore. He’d just been pushed off the payroll of Cordex Pictures, fired at the request of Stewart Hayes, the star for wh
om he had been doubling. That didn’t leave any rainbow in the clouds. He slammed the door behind him. And the walls trembled.

  “Why the stealth, big boy?”

  Bart stopped, stared with rapidly evaporating anger at the girl perched nonchalantly on the corner of his table, leg drawn up to display a charming view of shimmering silk and a flash of pink flesh. Betty Dale, the only regular female reporter for the Star, always affected him that way.

  He raised his eyes, gazed appreciatively at the V-neck of a thin frock that was cut low enough to give him an enticing glimpse of a satin smooth hollow between the pouting firmness of two mounds, camouflaged rather than hidden by the gauzy dress.

  She wrinkled a pert nose at him. “You should wear sun glasses.”

  Bart folded his long frame on the table beside her, put his arm around her and let his fingers slide gently toward one cupped enticement. She wriggled out of his grasp. “Nix, Romeo, this is business—and not that kind.”

  She reached around behind her, picked up something, and extended her hand toward him. There was a small card in her fingers. “Get a load of this.”

  Bart grabbed it, pulled it up before his eyes. He read, “Clifton Detective Agency.” He wriggled an eyebrow, wondered. He turned it over.

  Somebody had scribbled: “If you are interested in more work doubling for Stewart Haynes, report to the address given—immediately.”

  Bart grunted. “Yeah, posing for that—” He broke off, his eyes narrowed. There was something funny about this offer, coming as it did just after he’d been fired. Like catching him on the rebound. He looked at the girl suspiciously “Where’d you get this?”

  “Here between the drawer and the top of the table, sticking out. But don’t worry about that. Just get your fairy frame—”

  “Listen!” Bart barked. “Lay off that line. I may look like Haynes, but that doesn’t mean anything, see! But, sa-ay, what the devil are you doing here?”

  She wriggled seductive hips naughtily, provocatively. “Little Betty, Star reporter, calls on Haynes, flicker star. Just misses him. Big bad double, Bart Stanley, balls up works.”