The Second Pulp Crime Page 8

  “Excellent,” said Landry. “Take it, Mr. Slack.”

  Slack slowed down and edged into the exit lane, fie forced himself to keep his voice level when he said, “Okay, Landry, you and the kid here conned me. I admit it. You’ve got what you want out of me. So what happens now? You don’t think Bon Prince will buy from strangers, do you?”

  “Why not? If the merchandise is satisfactory, which it is. We’ll give it a try anyway.”

  Slack drove down the exit ramp from the interstate, very conscious of the prodding of the gun in his neck. “Turn east,” Landry directed him, “and pull up the first chance you get.”

  When the Chevy drifted to a halt on the shoulder of the narrow country road, Slack took his hands off the steering wheel and kept his foot on the brake. He didn’t try to turn his head against the urgent pressure of the gun. Doris reached over and switched off the motor.

  Slack said, “Listen. Landry, you’ve got to face the fact that you’re a rank amateur in the drug business. And it’s a very tough business, believe me. A guy as inexperienced as you are is going to need a professional to help you get anywhere at all.

  “A professional like you?”

  “Right. For instance, to absorb the production of that machine of yours you’ll need a lot of buyers, not just one. I can put you in touch with plenty of them.”

  “Mr. Prince could probably do that too,” Doris ventured.

  Slack fought down panic. He ignored Doris and said to Landry, “You and your fancy machine won’t last a month in the trade unless you know the ropes. You’ll be mixed up with the mob, remember. They’ll swallow you in one bite.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s theoretically possible,” Landry agreed. The prospect didn’t seem to worry him. “However, you realize, don’t you, Mr. Slack, that you have now become merely an embarrassment to us? As you say, we’ve already got what we wanted out of you.”

  Slack sat very still in his seat. “So what are you going to do with me?”

  “What were you going to do with Doris?” Landry’s tone had turned as cold as the wind off a glacier. “There’s your answer, Slack.”

  Slack gathered himself for action while Landry went on in an amused way. “You say I’m an amateur, and I guess you have a point, because who but a fumbling amateur would find himself without a gun in a situation like this? Who but an amateur would try to keep a hardened professional like you under control by merely pressing the end of a lead plumbing pipe into his neck?”

  A lead pipe? Slack ducked away from it like a striking snake and twisted savagely about in his seat, reaching over the seat-back for Landry. And he might have managed to seize the old man and render him harmless if Doris, at that moment, hadn’t leaned over and wrapped her arms around Slack in a fierce embrace.

  Slack’s last thought before Landry’s lead pipe thudded against his temple with crushing force was that Doris Lasswell richly deserved every black eye her father had ever given her.

  MIND OVER MAYHEM, by Mack Reynolds

  Originally published in New Detective Magazine, November 1950.

  The others had straggled out one by one and I was the only remaining customer. The bartender drifted down and wiped the bar in front of me listlessly, and yawned.

  “Why the hell don’t you go home, Jerry?” he asked conversationally.

  I put the tabloid I’d been glancing at to one side and grinned at him. “Haven’t got a home, Sam, just a hotel room with four walls and a bed and a chair or two and a couple hundred pocket books. I’d rather sit here and look at you.”

  He leaned on the bar before me and said, “You oughta get married, Jerry. Why don’t you ask that girl…what was her name? The blonde, pretty little girl.”

  “Frances.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Frances. Why don’t you ask her to marry you?”

  I twisted my glass on the bar, lifted it over to a new spot, twisted it again and then again, making small wet circles.

  “I did,” I said. “A couple of months ago I asked her, ‘Why don’t we get married, Frances?’”

  “Well, what’d she say?” Sam asked, yawning again.

  “She just laughed and said, ‘Who’d have either of us, Jerry?’”

  Sam snorted. “I’ve heard that one before.”

  “It’s almost two o’clock. You can’t expect me to be original this time of the night.”

  A guy came in and took a stool two down from me, and Sam walked over to him.

  “Only fifteen minutes to go,” Sam said. “What’ll it be?”

  “Bourbon,” the stranger told him. “You gents like to have one with me?”

  Usually the guy who comes into a bar the last few minutes before closing has already been drinking pretty heavy, he’s been put out of a place that shuts up early and he’s looking for that last drink that’s suddenly become so important. This guy was an exception, he was cold sober. About thirty, which makes him a few years younger than me and maybe twenty years younger than Sam, he was neatly dressed and had an air of sharpness that seemed out of place this time of night.

  “Thanks,” I told him. “I could use another beer.”

  Sam poured the stranger’s whiskey, drew my beer and then got himself a glass of vermouth, which is the only stuff I’ve ever seen Sam drink.

  Sam said, “Prosit.”

  The stranger said, “Skoal.”

  I said, “Here’s how,” and we all started working on our drinks.

  I said something about the weather and they both agreed and everybody lapsed into silence. After a minute or two, the stranger started looking at the tabloid I’d discarded.

  Finally he laughed and said, “Did you see this item about the old lady that socked some punk who was trying to hold up her liquor store? She slugged him with a bottle of Scotch.”

  Sam said, “Did it break the bottle? She would’ve saved money if she’d used something cheaper.”

  “Every once in a while you read something like that,” I said. “That old doll must be a terror. I’d hate to be her old man.”

  The stranger finished off his drink and ordered another. Sam glanced up at the clock, saw we had time, and said this one was on him. I had another beer.

  “The guy was an amateur,” the stranger said. “If he’d had any sense, he wouldn’t have tried anything on the old lady.”

  “Hell!” I said, “How’d he know, when he pulled the gun on her, that she was going to haul off and conk him with a bottle? It was just one of life’s little surprises.”

  “He should’ve sized her up before pulling the caper. If he’d taken his time, he could’ve seen she was the type that’d blow her top and start screaming, or throwing things or some such. Five minutes of analyzing her character and he would’ve seen he’d better go somewhere else.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Sam said argumentatively, “but how would he go about analyzing her character in just the few minutes time he’d have? He couldn’t hang around the store very long or it’d look suspicious and she’d be calling for the cops.”

  “You wouldn’t need very long,” the stranger told him. “You can size a person up in just a few minutes by the way they walk and talk and by their gestures—that sort of stuff.”

  I grinned. “Okay. Size me up. If you were analyzing my character, would you go ahead and stick me up or not?”

  He smiled back. “Sure I would. You’re the easy-going type. Even if you had much money on you, and you probably never have, you wouldn’t think it was worth taking a chance on getting yourself killed.”

  Sam grunted, “That sounds like Jerry, all right. How about me?”

  The stranger flicked his hand almost disdainfully. “You’re easy. I’d take a chance on you right off the bat. You’d be scared stiff at the first sight of a gun.”

  The old boy was irritated. “Where’d you get that idea?”r />
  “It’s the little things I watch,” the stranger said “Like the fact that you crook your little finger when you pick up your glass. A thing like that tells a lot.”

  Sam had been just about ready to take a sip from his vermouth. Sure enough, the little finger was crooked. It looked sort of ridiculous on the part of a big burly guy like Sam.

  Sam snorted.

  The easy-going smile left the stranger’s face. He put his right hand in a pocket and brought out a snub-nosed revolver.

  His voice was chilly now. “Let’s try the experiment out,” he said. “This is it. Fork it over, gents.”

  I said, “I’ll be damned!” and got my hands up in a hurry. “Take it easy, buddy—sometimes those things go off,” I told him nervously.

  He smiled a little, contemptuous smile at me and waggled the gun at Sam. “You too, big boy,” he snapped. “Put ’em up.”

  Sam stood there, his two beefy red hands on the bar, and stared blankly at the gunman for a long moment. Finally he gave a deep sigh, and began to make his way around the end of the bar.

  “Hold it,” the stranger said sharply. “Get back to that cash register and—”

  “In your hat,” Sam said, coming toward him.

  “Take it easy, Sam!” I warned him shrilly, expecting to hear the gun’s roar at any split second.

  But he kept advancing.

  A muscle was twitching in the gunman’s neck, his finger began to tighten on the trigger. “You’re asking for it,” he snarled.

  “And over your ears,” Sam said, and reached out suddenly and hit the guy sharply across the wrist with the edge of his hand. The gun dropped to the floor, and Sam stooped quickly and scooped it up with his left hand.

  “Call a cop, Jerry,” Sam told me softly, keeping the gunman covered. He made his way around the end of the bar again, and took his old place.

  I went down to the other end of the room, where Sam has a pay phone booth, and shakily made the call.

  By the time I came back I was boiling, I was so mad. “You conceited crackpot,” I snapped at Sam. “Just because he said you’d be yellow in an emergency, you didn’t have to show off like that.”

  The gunman had slumped back onto a stool, perspiration standing out heavily on his forehead. He started to say something, but then shut up.

  Sam shrugged. “There wasn’t any danger of his shooting. Any guy with enough brains to figure out that character analysis stunt before pulling his stickups has too much sense to kill a man. He wouldn’t want to risk a murder rap. As it is, he’ll only get sent up for a year or so.”

  He picked up his vermouth glass and finished his drink. I noticed that he still crooked his little finger. He saw my eyes on it and grinned wryly. He held it out so that I could see a small white scar running along the knuckle.

  “Piece of shell fragment creased it back during the first war. Haven’t been able to bend that finger properly ever since,” he said.

  LOOSE ENDS, by Fletcher Flora

  Originally published in Manhunt, August 1958.

  A woman wanted to see me about a job. Her name, she said, was Faith Salem. She lived, she said, in a certain apartment in a certain apartment building, and she told me the number of the apartment and the floor it was on and the name and the address of the building it was in. She said she wanted me to come there and see her at three o’clock that afternoon, the same day she called on the telephone, and I went and saw her, and it was three o’clock when I got there.

  The door was opened by a maid with a face like half a walnut. You may think it’s impossible for a face to look like half a walnut, and I suppose it is, if you want to be literal, but half a walnut is, nevertheless, all I can think of as a comparison when I think of the face of this maid. She wasn’t young, and she probably wasn’t old. She was, as they say, an indeterminate age. Her eyes smiled, but not her lips, and she nodded her head three times as if she had checked me swiftly on three salient points and was satisfied on every one. This gave me confidence.

  “I’m Percy Hand,” I said. “I have an appointment with Miss Salem.”

  “This way,” she said. Following her out of a vestibule, I waded through a couple acres of thick wood pile in crossing two wide rooms, and then I crossed, in a third room, another acre of black and white tile that made me feel, by contrast, as if I were taking steps a yard high, and finally I got out onto a terrace in the sunlight, and Faith Salem got up off her stomach and faced me. She had been lying on a soft pad covered with bright yellow material that might have been silk or nylon or something, and she was wearing in a couple of places a very little bit of more material that was just as shining and soft and might have been the same kind, except that it was white instead of yellow. Sunbathing was what she was doing, and I was glad. Her skin was firm and golden brown, and it gave the impression of consistency all over, and I was willing to bet that the little bit of white in a couple of places was only a concession to present company. Nine times out of ten, when someone tries to describe a woman who is fairly tall and has a slim and pliant and beautiful body, he will say that she is willowy, and that’s what I say. I say that Faith Salem was willowy. I also say that her hair was almost the identical color of the rest of her, and this seemed somehow too perfect to have been accomplished deliberately by design, but it may have been. You had to look at her face for a long time before you became aware that she was certainly a number of years older than you’d thought at first she was.

  “Mr. Hand has arrived, Miss Faith,” the maid said.

  “Thank you. Maria,” Faith Salem said.

  I stepped twice, and she stepped twice, and we met and shook hands. Her grip was firm. I liked the way her fingers took hold of my fingers and held them and were in no hurry to drop them.

  “Thank you for coming, Mr. Hand,” she said. “You must excuse me for receiving you this way, but the sun is on this terrace for only a short while each afternoon, and I didn’t want to miss any of it.”

  “I’d have been sorry to have missed it myself,” I said.

  She smiled gravely, taking my meaning, and then released my fingers and walked over to a yellow chaise lounge on which a white hip-length coat had been left lying. She put on the coat and moved to a wrought iron and glass table where there was a single tall tumbler with alternating red and yellow stripes. The tumbler was empty. Holding it against the light, she stared through it wistfully as if she were regretting its emptiness, and I watched her do this with pleasure and no regrets whatever. There is a kind of legerdemain about a short coat over something shorter. It creates the illusion, even when you have evidence to the contrary, that it’s all there is, there isn’t any more.

  “I like you, Mr. Hand,” she said. “I like your looks.”

  “Thanks. I like yours too.”

  “Would you care for a drink?”

  “Why not? It’s a warm day.”

  “I had a gin and tonic before you came. Do you drink gin and tonic?”

  “When it’s offered. A gin and tonic would be fine.”

  She set the red and yellow tumbler on the glass top of the table and turned slightly in the direction of the entrance to the black and white tiled room.

  “Gin and tonic, Maria,” she said. I had thought that the indeterminate maid with a face like half a walnut had gone away, and I felt a slight shock of surprise to discover that she had been standing all the while behind me. Now she nodded three times exactly, a repetition of the gesture she had made at the door, and backed away into the apartment and out of sight. Faith Salem sat down in a low wicker chair and crossed her feet at the ankles and stared at her long golden legs. I stared at them too.

  “Please sit down, Mr. Hand,” she said. “Maria will bring the gin and tonics in a moment. In the meanwhile, if you like, I can begin explaining why I asked you to come here.”

  “I’d appreciate it.” I folded myself in
to her chair’s mate. “I’ve been wondering, of course.”

  “Naturally.” The full lower lip protruded a little, giving to her face a suggestion of darkness and brooding. “Let me begin by asking a question. Do you know Graham Markley?”

  “Not personally. Like everyone else who reads the papers, I know something about him. Quondam boy-wonder of finance. No boy any longer. If he’s still a wonder, he doesn’t work at it quite so hard. Works harder nowadays, from reports, at spending some of what he’s made. Unless, of course, there’s another Graham Markley.”

  “He’s the one. Graham and I have an understanding.”

  There was, before the last word, a barely perceptible hesitation that gave to her statement a subtle and significant shading. She had explained in a breath, or in the briefest holding of a breath, the acres of pile and tile in this lavish stone and steel tower with terraces that caught the afternoon sun for at least a little while. Delicately, she had told me who paid the rent.

  “That’s nice,” I said. “Congratulations.”

  “It’s entirely informal at present, but it may not remain so. He’s asked me to marry him. Not immediately, which is impossible, but eventually.”

  “That’ll be even better. Or will it?”

  “It will. A certain amount of security attaches to marriage. There are certain compensations if the marriage fails.” She smiled slowly, the smile beginning and growing and forcing from her face the dark and almost petulant expression of brooding, and in her eyes, which were brown, there was instantly a gleam of cynical good humor which was the effect, as it turned out, of a kind of casual compatibility she had developed with herself. “I haven’t always had the good things that money buys, Mr. Hand, but I’ve learned from experience to live with them naturally. I don’t think I would care now to live with less. With these good things that money buys, I’m perfectly willing to accept my share of the bad things that money seems invariably to entail. Is my position clear?”

  “Yes, it is.” I said. “It couldn’t be clearer.”

  At that moment, Maria returned with a pair of gin and tonics in red and yellow glasses on a tray. She served one of them to Faith Salem and the other to me, and then she completed the three nods routine and went away again. The three nods, I now realized, was not a gesture of approval but an involuntary reaction to any situation to be handled, as my arrival earlier, or any situation already handled, as the serving of the drinks. I drank some of my tonic and liked it. There was a kind of astringency in the faintly bitter taste of the quinine. There was also, I thought now that it had been suggested to me, a kind of astringency in Faith Salem. A faintly bitter quality. A clean and refreshing tautness in her lean and lovely body and in her uncompromised compatibility with herself.