The Second Pulp Crime Page 6

  “Mr. Otis gave me twenty dollars to hush up about it.”

  “That kind of money wasn’t worth a whipping, Philomel.”

  “I know it wasn’t. But when he gave me the money he said he would kill me if I told on him.”

  “White-man talk.”

  “You wouldn’t think so, Cousin Belle, if you would of seen him with his razor-eyes slicing blood at me while Mr. Damon whipped. And now that he’s killed that doctor man from Fort Lauderdale I know I was right.”

  “You don’t make sense, boy. What would he kill the doctor for?”

  “Because Mr. Otis is the one in the family who is crazy—not Mr. Damon. I come back tonight right away when I heard of the murder. I want you to go to the law and tell them that Mr. Otis is the one who done it. Then they’ll juice him, and I won’t have to worry no more.”

  “No need to go looking for the law,” Selah said, as he joined them.

  “You heard us, Sheriff Conley?” Belle asked.

  “Yes, Belle. I’ve been watching, too. I’ve been listening from back a ways.”

  “Will you arrest Mr. Otis right quick, Sheriff, sir?” Philomel asked.

  “We’ll see. Which of the house doors is unlocked, Belle?”

  “The kitchen, sir.”

  * * * *

  Florence finally could stand it no longer.

  She got out of bed. She had no idea how long Carlotta had been away, but it seemed to her in her nervous condition that it had been hours.

  As she moved toward the door she remembered again the look that had been on Damon’s face. Surely, she thought, he would be different tomorrow, his nerves calmed by a night’s sleep, and once again the gruffly kind and considerate husband she knew him in his heart to be.

  She left the room and walked along the shadowy hall, feeling that perhaps Carlotta had not been able to find the pills and possibly she could help her locate the bottle.

  Otis. Well, it was faintly possible that Carlotta had been right about Otis, and that the proper answer was a trip abroad, even a whole year in Paris to study painting. The separation would hurt her, but Otis would be happy and—a voice, as she came abreast of the passage that led to the upper gallery, said quietly, “Flo.”

  She stood very still, all but unable to breathe. “Damon—are you all right?”

  “Certainly I am, Flo. What are you doing out here?”

  She thought, I must get him to bed, and not waste time in a long explanation about Carlotta and the pills, nor of her fears, what had been her deadly fears of him.

  “I went to talk with Carlotta,” she said.

  “Foolish. You know you should be in bed.”

  “I’ll go, Damon. And you must get some rest, too.”

  “I’ve tried. I can’t. It’s no use.”

  “Please.”

  “I tell you I can’t, Flo.” He took her by an arm. “I’ll go with you. I’ll stay with you, Flo, until you go to sleep.”

  Her unreasoning fear of him, of the very softness of his manner and the determined hold upon her arm, held her tongue-tied as he opened her living-room door. He switched on the ceiling lights, then guided her firmly toward the bedroom.

  He turned on the bedroom lights.

  He stopped short. “What’s Carlotta doing here?” he said. “What’s the matter with her?”

  It was peculiar. Her sister lying on the floor, evidently in a faint, with a throw from the chaise longue tangled about her. A scream rose in Florence’s throat.

  It was checked by Damon’s hand, clamped over her mouth. Then he took his hand away and said violently, “No, Florence! Wait—wait—”

  “But she’s dead. Oh can’t you see, Damon? Look at her tongue.”

  * * * *

  Philomel’s disclosure that Otis had made the snake whip removed the last vestige of uncertainty as to Damon’s sanity from Selah’s thoughts. It would, he believed, have seriously shaken Dr. Seibermann’s diagnosis as set forth in the concealed case history. No, Damon was a perfectly sane man, and Selah blessed the urge that had impelled him to come to Live Oaks at this ungodly hour of the night. A talk with Damon and Florence was of immediate, of vital importance.

  As he reached the foot of the curved staircase he saw Damon descending from the floor above. Damon moved, Selah thought, like a man in an abject bewilderment of plain despair. Damon saw him, and halted on the lowermost step. “Selah. I was about to call you up. Carlotta is dead. I killed her. Come with me, will you? She’s in Florence’s room.”

  On the way upstairs and along the silent hall, with Damon a zombie at his side, Selah knifed through the data he had accumulated throughout the day and earlier that night.

  In Florence’s living room, with Florence in a state of numbed shock in a lounge chair, he took a thoroughly professional look at Carlotta’s body on the bedroom floor. Then he turned to Damon and said, “What makes you say you did it?”

  “Who else?” Damon’s face was infernally bleak. “You read the case history. You yourself suggested that I be examined again. I drank too much during the evening and I blacked out. I only came to just now, when I ran into Florence out in the hall.”

  Selah was thoughtful. He said, “What was she doing in the hall?”

  “She had gone to Carlotta’s room to talk, and Carlotta had left her there when she came here to get some sedative pills that Dr. Vanner had prescribed.”

  “Yes,” Selah said, “things begin to make sense.”

  “You’ll want to take me in, I suppose?”

  “No, Damon. I won’t. What I want you and Florence to do is this, and I can’t express to you too strongly that your exoneration and the solution to the case may hinge on the way that both of you carry these instructions out.”

  * * * *

  After telling Damon in explicit detail what he wanted done, Selah went downstairs and telephoned his office. He instructed the deputy on duty to alert the technical men and the medical examiner but—he stressed the point—they were not to start for Live Oaks until he gave the word.

  What he immediately did want was a tape recorder. Speed in getting it to Live Oaks was essential, but no siren was to be used. Its delivery was to be made with quiet.

  Twenty minutes later the recorder was installed in the library, with its microphone concealed on a bookshelf near the hearth. Selah arranged two chairs close by and then sent the deputy who had brought the machine upstairs to fetch Stefan. He waited until the door began to open before he turned the tape recorder on.

  “Sit down, Count Zaleski.”

  Selah took one of the hearthside chairs and gestured Stefan into the other. Stefan, again in his sunburst dressing gown, said with the chill bite of a man rudely forced to get out of a comfortable bed, “It is about Helmut, I dare say?”

  “About Dr. Seibermann, yes. About a racket, primarily, that he ran many years ago in Vienna—looting shipments of wealth and jewels sent out through the underground by persecuted Jews after Hitler with his anti-Semitism took over Austria. As a practicing psychiatrist Dr. Seibermann learned these men’s plans, their secrets, when they came to him as patients, and used them to the racket’s advantage. But surely you are familiar with all this, Count Zaleski.”

  “To an extent. I remain vague, however, as to what connection it could possibly have with Helmut’s death.”

  “It had this to do with it, Count. Briefly, one influential client—a Grafin von Hanseklorf—caught on and threatened exposure. Seibermann murdered her in a house in the Kartnerstrasse where the racket had its headquarters, with Seibermann operating under the alias of Smith. Nothing was known of his dual identity, which made it possible for him to pass our screening and become a citizen. His secret was known, however, by the good friend who became his accomplice-after-the-fact by helping him to dispose of the Grafin’s body. You were that friend, Count Zaleski.”
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br />   Stefan, outwardly, remained unimpressed. Certainly there was not, as yet, any crack in his armor. “My only comment,” he said, “is that you are relying entirely on conjecture.”

  “Count, that just isn’t so. Dr. Seibermann’s confession is completely annotated and signed by him at the end of Damon’s case history.”

  Stefan’s voice acquired a slight edge. “Why should it have been?”

  “He appended it because it was the leverage your wife used to force the doctor to declare Damon sane, to turn him loose—a potential homicidal maniac—to murder his wife. And we might say that that ends Miss Carlotta’s complicity in the deal. The spotlight now turns upon you, Count.”

  Stefan managed a polite smile. “Really, Sheriff?”

  “I believe that you personally were convinced of Damon’s mania, were you not?”

  “I still am. The murder of Helmut was the act of a madman.”

  “Then Dr. Seibermann’s declaration of Damon’s sanity must have puzzled you badly. You also knew that your wife had been to see him, and I believe that that puzzled you further. So you yourself went last night to see Dr. Seibermann. I think, Count, that he told you the entire truth about Miss Carlotta’s threats and made clear her obvious plan to place her sister in a position where she would be done away with.”

  “You’re getting in pretty deep, Sheriff. What would Carlotta’s motive have been?”

  “Money. She was desperate it. Both of you were. That is known.”

  Stefan’s little laugh was of the theater. “So she killed Helmut. Make sense, man. Make sense.”

  “I will. Dr. Seibermann not only told you of your wife’s threats to him, he also told you that he intended to confess his false diagnosis and the entire Vienna mess. You would have been, as you now are, implicated up to your neck as an accessory-after-the-fact to the murder of the Grafin. So you killed him.”

  Stefan’s control remained unmoved. It approached the abnormal. He said reasonably, almost as though he were reprimanding a child for some absurdity of imagination, “Your case is purely chimerical, Sheriff. If you were fool enough to press it seriously, the power, the legal talent that my wife’s wealth can command would blow it up in the prosecuting attorney’s face.”

  “There are details,” Selah said, “such as, among other strong evidence, the traces of blood you failed to mop up entirely in the Bugatti, when you brought the body here to the rockpit last night to point to Damon as the maniacal killer. You see, Count, you had then decided to attend to the death of Miss Florence personally, and you wanted it established that when you did kill her the crime would be blamed on Damon.”

  Selah stood up. His eyes tested the smooth veneer of Stefan’s face, the veiled wariness in his eyes. The moment had come, Selah decided, to play his trump.

  He walked to the hall door and threw it open.

  “Will you come in now, please?”

  Florence walked in.

  Rarely, Selah thought, had the nerves of guilt cracked so satisfactorily. Stefan’s shell of invincibility crumbled into rubble at the sight of this ghost, of this woman he had just killed, and while he did not exactly scream, his voice rasped shockingly in his throat as he cried, “No—not you, Florence. I strangled you. You are dead.” Emotion swept him in its seizure as he said, “Where is Carlotta?”

  “She is lying where you killed her,” Selah said. “It’s been a long time since you saw your wife after her preparations for bed were made, Count. With her chin strap and other night paraphernalia on, and with her being in Miss Florence’s rooms, it was only natural that you made the mistake.”

  “Carlotta—Carlotta—” Stefan’s voice was a babble.

  “She is lying where you left her, Count.” Then Selah gave a final ironic turn to the screw by adding, “And her wealth lies dead there, too.”

  PAPER CAPER, by James Holding

  Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, February 1979.

  Howard Slack had long since given up any hope of becoming a second Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade. As far as he was concerned, the private detective business was strictly a bummer. After eking out a bare living at it for twenty years, his clients usually petty criminals and their women, his detective work the gathering of unsavory evidence to be used for blackmail or divorce, he had no illusions left.

  Nevertheless, when Doris Lasswell walked into his shabby office, he rose from his swivel chair, bowed across his desk toward her and said politely, “Can I help you, Miss?” He was desperate for business.

  The girl was maybe fifteen years old, Slack guessed. And she looked not at all like a potential client. More like a typical sloppy high-school kid with her faded blue jeans, dirty T-shirt, thong sandals, long mouse-colored hair, aggressive chin, and uncertain expression. A typical high-school girl except for one thing: she had a black eye—a beauty, just reaching yellow-and-purple maturity. Definitely not a potential client. But since one of the few things Slack had learned for sure during his sleazy career was that appearances are usually deceptive, he continued to smile warmly at her until Doris said. “Are you Mr. Slack?” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the chipped lettering of his name on the office door.

  “I’m Slack, yes. What can I do for you?”

  She hesitated. “I’m not sure you can do anything for me.”

  “Neither am I,” Slack said, “until you tell me what your problem is. And whether you can pay me for my help. You have any money?”

  She shook her head.

  Slack sighed. He sat down in his swivel chair and gestured wearily toward the door. “No freebies here, Miss. I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t move.

  Slack said, “Do you understand what I’m saying? You got no money, you get no detective. So out. I’m a busy man.”

  The girl came to a decision of some sort. She swallowed and said, “I think you’ll be interested in what I can tell you, Mr. Slack. Even if I have no money to pay you with—yet.” She added the last word softly.

  Slack felt a small spark of interest begin to glow. “Sit down then. And tell me who you are. And what you think I’ll be so interested in.”

  “I’m Doris Lasswell.” She sank bonelessly into the straight chair on the other side of Slack’s desk. “And I think I know something about a local crime. When Slack didn’t respond, she went on. “If you’re a detective, you’re supposed to be interested in crimes.”

  “That’s right,” said Slack. “But if you already know about this crime, whatever it is, you don’t need a private detective, kid. Go tell the cops about it, not me. I’ve got a living to make.”

  “I don’t want to tell the police.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if I told the police they wouldn’t help me with my problem. But if I tell you maybe you will.

  “What’s that mean?”

  She swallowed again and gazed rather desperately around his cramped, undusted office. Then she said in a small voice, “Maybe I better tell you about my problem first.”

  “I can see your problem from here,” Slack said. “Your boyfriend give you that beautiful shiner?”

  She ran a finger tenderly over the swollen discolored flesh around her eye. Her lips pulled down. “Not my boyfriend, no. I don’t have one. My father.”

  “Your father? Well, well.”

  “He’s not—not nice to me. Mr. Slack. Not like he used to be. Not like a father at all, really. He has a few drinks down at Casey’s Tavern, and—and usually ends up doing something like this to me.” She touched her eye again.

  “Why?” Slack asked without much interest.

  Doris scraped her sandal over the thin place in the rug at her feet. “Well, my mother left us a year ago, and my father was surprised and mad—he still is—and I suppose he tried to take it out on me, you know? Anyway, I’ve got to get away from him. Mr. Slack. As far
as I can. I can’t stand living with him anymore, he’s really impossible.” She broke off miserably.

  “Never mind,” Slack said. “So you want to get away from your old man because he beats you. I can understand that. Now what’s this crime you’d rather tell me about than the cops?”

  “I think it could involve a lot of money,” Doris said slowly, “for someone. A lot of money, Mr. Slack. But if I told the police about it, nobody would get any of the money, do you see? So I thought I’d tell you and maybe—” She let the sentence trail off.

  “You thought I might latch onto this money and give you enough of it to get away from your father, is that it?”

  “Oh, yes. Doris breathed. “That’s it, Mr. Slack. Exactly. Would you?”

  Slack leaned back in his chair. He was impressed despite himself by the girl’s earnestness. Yet there had to be a joker in her story somewhere. For this ugly beat-up teenager couldn’t possibly know any secret information about a lot of loose money, could she?

  “I can’t promise anything, Doris,” Slack said carefully, “till I know a little more about the setup.”

  Her battered face showed relief. “That means you’ll help me?”

  “Maybe. Tell me about the money.

  “Well,” she said, “my father and I live in Fernwood Mobile Home Park south of town. Do you know where that is?”

  “Sure. Out past the phosphate plant across from an A&P store.”

  She nodded. “That’s where my father works, the phosphate plant. Anyway, our next-door neighbor in Fernwood Park is an old retired man named Landry. He has one of those huge double-size trailers that take up two whole lots and have almost as much room in them as a regular house, you know?”

  “Never mind about the trailer,” Slack said.

  “But that’s where I saw the crime, Mr. Slack. So I have to tell you about it.”

  Slack sighed. “Okay, tell me about it.”

  “Well, Mr. Landry lives in half of his trailer and uses the other half as a sort of office and laboratory. He was a chemist for a paper company before be retired, and he still likes to fool around with experiments and things, he says. Anyway, he’s been real nice to me the few times I’ve talked to him. He’s only lived there for six months or so.” She paused. “When I do my homework after school, I sit beside a window in our trailer that faces the window in Mr. Landry’s laboratory. His window’s usually closed and has thick curtains inside, but last Thursday it was very hot, and Mr. Landry’s window was open and the curtains inside were apart a little way and I could see in.”