Read Murder is the Pay-Off Online

Authors: Leslie Ford

Tags: #Crime, #OCR-Editing

Murder is the Pay-Off (6 page)

She patted Janey’s shoulder. “What if I worried all my life because there were a lot of pretty girls working the same place Dad worked? Good night, Janey. You better go and see that little Jane hasn’t kicked the covers off. It’s cold tonight.”

The front door closed behind her. Janey listened to her step on the frosty pavement until it was gone and the house was silent except for the hum of the oil burner in the basement and the icebox motor coming on and going off.

“You’ve never thrown away a thousand dollars,” she whispered. “You’ve never wished you could go to bed and go to sleep and never have to wake again—”

She pushed her chair back from the table and got to her feet. The black evening bag was on the table in the hall. Her feet were like blocks of frozen wood as she went over to it and picked it up. She held it for a moment and opened it. There were the thirty-two dollars in bills on top, that Constance Maynard had stuffed in there, with her handkerchief, and some quarters that dropped on the table as she took the bills out. One of them was the gilded quarter that Jim Ferguson had put in her bag. Somebody’s lucky piece. Her lucky piece, Jim had said. She turned it over in her hand, dropped it back in the bag, and put the other quarters with the bills on the table.

The other thing was in the bag, too. She shivered as she took it out. It was a piece of yellow cleansing tissue, the corners twisted together to make a small pouch. Her fingers trembled as she untwisted it and held it open in the palm of her hand under the lamp on the table. A dozen small oblong capsules glittered up at her, a dozen small evil orange-colored eyes.
Go to sleep and never have to wake up again—
She stared blindly down at them. Then she raised her head, listening up the stairs, and drew a sudden breath of sharp and passionate decision. She jerked her hand back and flung them violently away from her, knocking her bag after them onto the rug. The evil orange eyes rolled off the rug onto the waxed pine floor and lay winking up at her. The gilded lucky piece flew out of the bag, rolled off in a crazy half-circle and back near her feet. It winked up, too. She bent down breathlessly and picked it up. Maybe it really was her lucky piece. She pressed it in her closed palm an instant before she picked up her bag and dropped it in. Then very slowly she gathered up the orange-colored capsules and put them back in the square of tissue. She got to her feet and counted them. There were only eleven. She got down again to look for the twelfth. It must have rolled into the dining-room. She turned on the light and looked there, but it was nowhere in sight and she was suddenly too tired to look any more.

In the morning.
She folded the eleven up in the tissue and picked up her bag, too tired to find the last one now, too tired even to go out and turn off the kitchen light. She put her foot on the first step, and on the second. A thousand dollars— She might as well have flushed it down the bathroom drain, the way she was going to do with the orange-colored capsules. She clutched them a little tighter in her hand. A thousand dollars— It couldn’t be. It couldn’t possibly be.

FIVE

Gus Blake shifted
his hundred and ninety pounds from his left haunch to his right. He was trying actually to shift his mind so he could concentrate on the garishly lighted room he was now in, to get rid of the image in it, of the basement downstairs and the little man lying in front of the fuse box, the side of his head smashed in, the blood drying on the earth floor, oozing out of his head again as Swede Carlson, chief of the county police, turned him over. And his face—the black cobwebs plastered to it, covering it like a filthy obscene veil. The fuse box was above him on the grimy whitewashed stone foundation walls. The center fuse that had been taken out was back in again. It had controlled the center lights in this room. Gus squinted up at them now, and looked about the room. This was the battered roll-top desk where Wernitz had been sitting. A cigarette just lighted had burned down to an unbroken column of gray ash in the copper tray. An opened fountain pen lay on a paper beside it, the high-backed swivel chair was quarter-turned, facing the hall door. Doc Wernitz had been working there when the three lights in the room went off, leaving the hall light on. He had put down his cigarette and his pen and gone through the hall and down the basement steps with no idea that the momentary easily repaired darkness he’d left would turn in one instant to another irreparable darkness. It was ruthlessly and hideously simple.

Gus shifted his weight again. Beside him, Swede Carlson, his broad posterior propped solidly against the edge of the roll-top desk, listened stolidly as Gus listened with rising irritation to the county attorney, speaking officially and for publication to the representative of the
Smithville Gazette,
who stood, notebook in hand, taking it down. The county attorney was at the far end of the room, in front of the grimy barred window, hamming it just enough to make it look good in the picture the
Gazette
photographer was taking.

“You can say we’ve got all the angles covered, Miss Maynard. There’s never been any organized crime in Smith County, and there’s not going to be.”

Gus Blake was aware of a rasping in his left ear. It sounded like sandpaper taking rust off an iron grate. He heard it again and assorted it this time into words. “Get this dame out of here, Blake.”

“You can say we’re all on the same team, here in Smith County, Miss Maynard. We’re putting everything we’ve got in this. Every law-enforcement officer in Smith County has his nose to the grindstone and his shoulder to the wheel.”

The county attorney stopped, waited for the camera flash, and relaxed. He turned to Swede Carlson. “Anything you want to add, Chief?”

“I guess that about covers it, Frank.”

Hearing the faintly sardonic inflection, Gus remembered what Swede Carlson had said down in the basement about the Filipino boy Buzz Rodriguez now sitting out in the hall under guard, waiting to be thrown into the Smithville County Jail. The county attorney’s oblique glance across the room included both of them. He turned back to Connie Maynard. “One other thing. I want to make it clear that any rumors suggesting a scapegoat in this affair are false. The people of Smith County will have no doubt where they come from. And you can say Chief Carlson is in charge and giving the case his personal attention.”

He picked his hat up off a chair. “I think that’s all I can do here tonight. Can I take you back to town, Miss Maynard?”

“No, I’ve got my car, Mr. Hamilton,” Connie Maynard said. She closed her notebook and looked at Gus. “What now?” she was asking.

Swede Carlson’s elbow dug into his ribs. It was as eloquent as his low-rasped: “Get that dame out of here.”

Connie Maynard was still looking at him. “Go out and have a look at the kitchen and pantry, Con,” he said. “Woman’s angle. Bachelor Hall stuff.”

Her green eyes sharpened.

“Go on,” he said coolly. “And when you’re through you can run along home. The chief’ll take me in.”

For a moment as the suspicion changed to anger in her eyes he thought she was refusing. The county attorney had his overcoat on and his hat in his hand. “Come on, Miss Maynard. I’ll show you the kitchen. I’d like to have another look at it myself. Attention to detail is what counts, in cases like this.”

As the door closed a wintry smile passed through Chief Carlson’s bleak eyes. He said, “Never liked dames messin’ around where they don’t belong. Makes me nervous.” He moved his heavy, nerveless body off the edge of the desk. “Okay, fella. What do
you
know?”

“I came out to ask you.”

Gus looked around the room. It extended the length of the house, with two windows at the back and one at each side of the fireplace in the side wall. The back windows were barred with iron grids fixed solidly in the wall. The side windows were blocked, one with a heavy steel filing-cabinet, the other with an old-fashioned safe, open, and in careful order compared with the bulging pigeonholes of the desk. It was covered with gray powdery film where the police had dusted for fingerprints. The three electric bulbs that had gone off were strung down from the ceiling, one over the desk and two in opposite corners of the room.

“He liked a lot of light.”

Carlson nodded. “Had ’em all on tonight. On all over the place when the boys got here, ’cept those three. They came on when they put the fuse back.”

He let himself down into the creaking swivel chair. Gus looked at the battered desk against the wall at the front end of the room. It was crowded with papers, the surface as well as the pigeonholes. A padlock in the middle front hung by a short chain. Behind the desk two long windows were sealed from the inside with brown-painted iron shutters. Across them and the strip of wall between them, an old pier glass, turned lengthwise over the desk, was tilted forward so that Doc Wernitz, sitting there, could glance up and see the whole room—the barred windows at the back end, the brown steel filing-cabinet and the open safe blocking the side windows.

“Anything missing, Swede?”

“No idea. You can say in the paper I’ve only given it a cursory glance, so far.”

The chair creaked wretchedly as Carlson leaned back in it. He watched Gus cross the room to read the framed license on the dun-papered wall by the door. It acknowledged receipt of $3,500 and $1 by the Commissioners of Smith County, in return for which they authorized Paul M. Wernitz, operating as The Smith County Recreation Company, Inc., to distribute and offer for rent or lease recreational devices as defined in and in strict accordance with Chapter 482 of the Acts of 1944 and all regulations and amendments thereof. Gus glanced at the official signature at the bottom. It was always a little amusing to him to see Nelson Cadwallader Syms’s cramped signature authorizing the distribution and operation of the machines that Aunt Mamie, Mrs. Nelson Cadwallader Syms, girding up her ample loins, was hell-bent on banishing and destroying forever—along with one of the county’s most lucrative sources of cash income.

There was nothing else in the room to look at except the brown linoleum on the floor, cracked in places and worn to the boards in front of the desk and safe, and two wooden armchairs. There was also a calendar topped with a seminude bit of November cheesecake and the compliments of the Smithville Consumers Coal Company. Gus stopped in front of it, studying it with concentrated interest. He was trying to figure out what Swede Carlson was sitting there watching him for. He knew Carlson was a shrewd cop, for all the slow-molasses and owl’s-grease technique, tough and canny, and honest within the pragmatic limits of his calling. At least he had never known him to be dishonest, and he had known him to go out of his way to help people when not doing it would have seemed the smarter tack. Like the Filipino boy waiting outside now—unless that was a little political warfare and Carlson was just seeing to it the county attorney wasn’t making the first arrest. Why, he wondered, was the Swede apparently so interested in him right now? He studied the lady on the calendar a moment longer and turned back.

“Think this is an out-of-county job, Swede? A mob killing?”

It had none of the marks of the two mob killings he’d covered in New York, nor any he’d ever heard about.

Chief Carlson brought the swivel chair creaking back into position. “Might be,” he said. “And again it mightn’t. I don’t know much about it, Gus. Just got here a little before you did—been down in the other end of the county all evenin’ talkin’ to a guy that knifed his wife. Least that’s the way it looks. Looks like a mighty lot of trouble for anybody else to go to.”

He got heavily to his feet. “Sort of looks the same way here. But I don’t know much about mob killin’s, ’cept what I see in the movies when I ain’t got my nose to the grindstone, or read about when I got my shoulder off the wheel. When I’m not carryin’ the ball, or keepin’ my eye on it, that is. Keeps a fella pretty busy, not bein’ an acrobat.”

Gus grinned at him. “Why does this look the same?”

Chief Carlson glanced bleakly off in the general direction of the kitchen. “Can’t say, Gus. Not considerin’ the people you’re runnin’ with here lately.”

“Miss Maynard?” Gus looked at him intently, surprised. “She works on the paper, Swede.”

“Sure she does.” Carlson agreed amiably. “Come to think of it, her old man owns it. Used to was, Gus, a fella could tell the
Gazette
somethin’ off the record and it was off the record. It’s different now. Tell the
Gazette
somethin’ and Miss Maynard hot-foots it home and spills it to John. Not that he didn’t know it already, mind you, but there were times he didn’t know anybody else did. And I’m not sayin’ she’s out here tonight because he sent her. He’s too smart for that.”

Gus Blake’s gaze was still intent. “If you’re saying John Maynard’s mixed up with Wernitz—”

“Okay, Gus. He’s your boss. Loyalty’s a fine thing. All I know is old Doc here gives him a quarter machine for Christmas. Doc Wernitz never gave presents just for fun. I’ll tell you somethin’, Gus. When Doc Wernitz told me he was pullin’ up stakes and gettin’ out of Smith County, he came personally round to headquarters and took me five miles out on a country road to do it. He didn’t want anybody else to know he was pullin’ out. He mentioned everybody in general and several in particular he didn’t want to know. John Maynard was one of ’em. Funny thing, Gus, you were another.”

“Me?” Gus gave him an alerted glance. Then he shook his head. “Unless you mean the editor of the paper.”

“No. Not the editor of the paper. He meant you, personally.”

“You’re nuts, Swede. Or he was. I didn’t even know the guy. I made a point of not knowing him.” He grinned suddenly. “That’s why you’ve been watching me as if you thought I’d get in the safe?”

“Sure, Gus. One of the reasons.”

The bleak eyes rested steadily on him.

“No, I’m goin’ to play ball with you, Gus. I’ll play ball with you if you’ll keep your mouth shut and keep that dame out of this. Hear? Maybe I’m a fool to do it, but I know damn well you didn’t slug Wernitz. Even if it—” Chief Carlson stopped a bare instant, and went on. “Even if it should look like you might have had some reason to.”

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