Creeping Siamese and Other Stories (12 page)

“Make no mistake,” he whispered earnestly. “When that she-devil comes back into this room you will die—she will kill you certainly.”

Three more steps and I would be close enough to take hold of him and his gun.

Footsteps were in the hall. Too late for a jump.

“Yes?” he hissed desperately.

I nodded a split-second before Big Flora came through the door.

XIV

She was dressed for action in a pair of blue pants that were probably Pogy's, beaded moccasins, a silk waist. A ribbon held her curly yellow hair back from her face. She had a gun in one hand, one in each hip pocket.

The one in her hand swung up.

“You're done,” she told me, quite matter-of-fact.

My newly acquired confederate whined, “Wait, wait, Flora! Not here like this, please! Let me take him into the cellar.”

She scowled at him, shrugging her silken shoulders.

“Make it quick,” she said. “It'll be light in another half-hour.”

I felt too much like crying to laugh at them. Was I supposed to think this woman would let the rabbit change her plans? I suppose I must have put some value on the old gink's help, or I wouldn't have been so disappointed when this little comedy told me it was a frame-up. But any hole they worked me into couldn't be any worse than the one I was in.

So I went ahead of the old man into the hall, opened the door he indicated, switched on the basement light, and went down the rough steps.

Close behind me he was whispering, “I'll first show you the moneys, and then I will give to you those devils. And you will not forget your promise? I and that girl shall go out through the police?”

“Oh, yes,” I assured the old joker.

He came up beside me, sticking a gun-butt in my hand.

“Hide it,” he hissed, and, when I had pocketed that one, gave me another, producing them with his free hand from under his coat.

Then he actually showed me the loot. It was still in the boxes and bags in which it had been carried from the banks. He insisted on opening some of them to show me the money—green bundles belted with the bank's yellow wrappers. The boxes and bags were stacked in a small brick cell that was fitted with a padlocked door, to which he had the key.

He closed the door when we were through looking, but he did not lock it, and he led me back part of the way we had come.

“That, as you see, is the money,” he said. “Now for those. You will stand here, hiding behind these boxes.”

A partition divided the cellar in half. It was pierced by a doorway that had no door. The place the old man told me to hide was close beside this doorway, between the partition and four packing-cases. Hiding there, I would be to the right of, and a little behind, anyone who came downstairs and walked through the cellar toward the cell that held the money. That is, I would be in that position when they went to go through the doorway in the partition.

The old man was fumbling beneath one of the boxes. He brought out an eighteen-inch length of lead pipe stuffed in a similar length of black garden hose. He gave this to me as he explained everything.

“They will come down here one at a time. When they are about to go through this door, you will know what to do with this. And then you will have them, and I will have your promise. Is it not so?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, all up in the air.

He went upstairs. I crouched behind the boxes, examining the guns he had given me—and I'm damned if I could find anything wrong with them. They were loaded and they seemed to be in working order. That finishing touch completely balled me up. I didn't know whether I was in a cellar or a balloon.

When Red O'Leary, still naked except for pants and bandage, came into the cellar, I had to shake my head violently to clear it in time to bat him across the back of the noodle as his first bare foot stepped through the doorway. He sprawled down on his face.

The old man scurried down the steps, full of grins.

“Hurry! Hurry!” he panted, helping me drag the redhead back into the money cell. Then he produced two pieces of cord and tied the giant hand and foot.

“Hurry!” he panted again as he left me to run upstairs, while I went back to my hiding-place and hefted the lead-pipe, wondering if Flora had shot me and I was now enjoying the rewards of my virtue—in a heaven where I could enjoy myself forever and ever socking folks who had been rough with me down below.

The ape-built skull-cracker came down, reached the door. I cracked his skull. The little man came scurrying. We dragged Pogy to the cell, tied him up.

“Hurry!” panted the old gink, dancing up and down in his excitement. “That she-devil next—and strike hard!”

He scrambled upstairs and I could hear his feet pattering overhead.

I got rid of some of my bewilderment, making room for a little intelligence in my skull. This foolishness we were up to wasn't so. It couldn't be happening. Nothing ever worked out just that way. You didn't stand in corners and knock down people one after the other like a machine, while a scrawny little bozo up at the other end fed them to you. It was too damned silly! I had enough!

I passed up my hiding place, put down the pipe and found another spot to crouch in, under some shelves, near the steps. I hunkered down there with a gun in each fist. This game I was playing in was—it had to be—gummy around the edges. I wasn't going to stay put any longer.

Flora came down the steps. Two steps behind her the little man trotted.

Flora had a gun in each hand. Her gray eyes were everywhere. Her head was down like an animal's coming to a fight. Her nostrils quivered. Her body, coming down neither slowly nor swiftly, was balanced like a dancer's. If I live to a million I'll never forget the picture this handsome brutal woman made coming down those unplaned cellar stairs. She was a beautiful fight-bred animal going to a fight.

She saw me as I straightened.

“Drop 'em!” I said, but I knew she wouldn't.

The little man flicked a limp brown blackjack out of his sleeve and knocked her behind the ear just as she swung her left gun on me.

I jumped over and caught her before she hit the cement.

“Now, you see!” the old man said gleefully. “You have the money and you have them. And now you will get me and that girl out.”

“First we'll stow this with the others,” I said.

After he had helped me do that I told him to lock the cell door. He did, and I took the key with one hand, his neck with the other. He squirmed like a snake while I ran my other hand over his clothes, removing the blackjack and a gun, and finding a money-belt around his waist.

“Take it off,” I ordered. “You don't carry anything out with you.”

His fingers worked with the buckle, dragged the belt from under his clothes, let it fall on the floor. It was padded fat.

Still holding his neck, I took him upstairs, where the girl still sat frozen on the kitchen chair. It took a stiff hooker of whisky and a lot of words to thaw her into understanding that she was going out with the old man and that she wasn't to say a word to anybody, especially not to the police.

“Where's Reddy?” she asked when color had come back into her face—which had even at the worst never lost its niceness—and thoughts to her head.

I told her he was all right, and promised her he would be in a hospital before the morning was over. She didn't ask anything else. I shooed her upstairs for her hat and coat, went with the old man while he got his hat, and then put the pair of them in the front ground-floor room.

“Stay here till I come for you,” I said, and I locked the door and pocketed the key when I went out.

XV

The front door and the front window on the ground floor had been planked and braced like the rear ones. I didn't like to risk opening them, even though it was fairly light by now. So I went upstairs, fashioned a flag of truce out of a pillow-slip and a bed-slat, hung it out a window, waited until a heavy voice said, “All right, speak your piece,” and then I showed myself and told the police I'd let them in.

It took five minutes' work with a hatchet to pry the front door loose. The chief of police, the captain of detectives, and half the force were waiting on the front steps and pavement when I got the door open. I took them to the cellar and turned Big Flora, Pogy and Red O'Leary over to them, with the money. Flora and Pogy were awake, but not talking.

While the dignitaries were crowded around the spoils I went upstairs. The house was full of police sleuths. I swapped greetings with them as I went through to the room where I had left Nancy Regan and the old gink. Lieutenant Duff was trying the locked door, while O'Gar and Hunt stood behind him.

I grinned at Duff and gave him the key.

He opened the door, looked at the old man and the girl—mostly at her—and then at me. They were standing in the center of the room. The old man's faded eyes were miserably worried, the girl's blue ones darkly anxious. Anxiety didn't ruin her looks a bit.

“If that's yours I don't blame you for locking it up,” O'Gar muttered in my ear.

“You can run along now,” I told the two in the room. “Get all the sleep you need before you report for duty again.”

They nodded and went out of the house.

“That's how your Agency evens up?” Duff said. “The she-employees make up in looks for the ugliness of the he's.”

Dick Foley came into the hall.

“How's your end?” I asked.

“Finis. The Angel led me to Vance. He led here. I led the bulls here. They got him—got her.”

Two shots crashed in the street.

We went to the door and saw excitement in a police car down the street. We went down there. Bluepoint Vance, handcuffs on his wrists, was writhing half on the seat, half on the floor.

“We were holding him here in the car, Houston and me,” a hard-mouthed plain-clothes man explained to Duff. “He made a break, grabbed Houston's gat with both hands. I had to drill him—twice. The cap'll raise hell! He specially wanted him kept here to put up against the others. But God knows I wouldn't of shot him if it hadn't been him or Houston!”

Duff called the plain-clothesman a damned clumsy mick as they lifted Vance up on the seat. Bluepoint's tortured eyes focused on me.

“I—know—you?” he asked painfully. “Continental—New—York?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Couldn't—place—you—Larrouy's—with—Red.”

He stopped to cough blood.

“Got—Red?”

“Yeah,” I told him. “Got Red, Flora, Pogy and the cush.”

“But—not—Papa—dop—oul—os.”

“Papa does what?” I asked impatiently, a shiver along my spine.

He pulled himself up on the seat.

“Papadopoulos,” he repeated, with an agonizing summoning of the little strength left in him. “I tried—shoot him—saw him—walk 'way—with girl—bull—too damn quick—wish …”

His words ran out. He shuddered. Death wasn't a sixteenth of an inch behind his eyes. A white-coated intern tried to get past me into the car. I pushed him out of the way and leaned in, taking Vance by the shoulders. The back of my neck was ice. My stomach was empty.

“Listen, Bluepoint,” I yelled in his face, “Papadopoulos? Little old man? Brains of the push?”

“Yes,” Vance said, and the last live blood in him came out with the word.

I let him drop back on the seat and walked away.

Of course! How had I missed it? The little old scoundrel—if he hadn't, for all his scariness, been the works, how could he have so neatly turned the others over to me one at a time? They had been absolutely cornered. It was be killed fighting, or surrender and be hanged. They had no other way out. The police had Vance, who could and would tell them that the little buzzard was the headman—there wasn't even a chance for him beating the courts with his age, his weakness and his mask of being driven around by the others.

And there I had been—with no choice but to accept his offer. Otherwise lights out for me. I had been putty in his hands, his accomplices had been putty. He had slipped the cross over on them as they had helped him slip it over on the others—and I had sent him safely away.

Now I could turn the city upside down for him—my promise had been only to get him out of the house—but …

What a life!

$106,000 BLOOD MONEY

Black Mask
,
May 1927

The Big Knock-Over
told of the looting of two banks by a large band of crooks gathered from all parts of the country for that purpose. Following the successful getaway with the plunder, a number of well-known members of the underworld of various cities are found murdered. These men were seen before the holdup and were suspected leaders of small groups participating in it. It becomes evident that the division of spoils is to be made among a few rather than between many. Murder succeeds murder, as the Continental detective narrows his search for the unknown head of the huge plot. In the end he finds him, only to let him escape, as the price of his own life, without knowing him to be the man he was after.
$106,000 Blood Money
is a sequel to
The Big Knock-Over
.

I

“I'm Tom-Tom Carey,” he said, drawling the words.

I nodded at the chair beside my desk and weighed him in while he moved to it. Tall, wide-shouldered, thick-chested, thin-bellied, he would add up to say a hundred and ninety pounds. His swarthy face was hard as a fist, but there was nothing ill-humored in it. It was the face of a man of forty-something who lived life raw and thrived on it. His blue clothes were good and he wore them well.

In the chair, he twisted brown paper around a charge of Bull Durham and finished introducing himself:

“I'm Paddy the Mex's brother.”

I thought maybe he was telling the truth. Paddy had been like this fellow in coloring and manner.

“That would make your real name Carrera,” I suggested.

“Yes,” he was lighting his cigarette. “Alfredo Estanislao Cristobal Carrera, if you want all the details.”

I asked him how to spell Estanislao, wrote the name down on a slip of paper, adding
alias Tom-Tom Carey
, rang for Tommy Howd, and told him to have the file clerk see if we had anything on it.

“While your people are opening graves I'll tell you why I'm here,” the swarthy man drawled through smoke when Tommy had gone away with the paper.

“Tough—Paddy being knocked off like that,” I said.

“He was too damned trusting to live long,” his brother explained. “This is the kind of hombre he was—the last time I saw him was four years ago, here in San Francisco. I'd come in from an expedition down to—never mind where. Anyway I was flat. Instead of pearls all I'd got out of the trip was a bullet-crease over my hip. Paddy was dirty with fifteen thousand or so he'd just nicked somebody for. The afternoon I saw him he had a date that he was leery of toting so much money to. So he gives me the fifteen thousand to hold for him till that night.”

Tom-Tom Carey blew out smoke and smiled softly past me at a memory.

“That's the kind of hombre he was,” he went on. “He'd trust even his own brother. I went to Sacramento that afternoon and caught a train east. A girl in Pittsburgh helped me spend the fifteen thousand. Her name was Laurel. She liked rye whisky with milk for a chaser. I used to drink it with her till I was all curdled inside, and I've never had any appetite for
schmierkäse
since. So there's a hundred thousand dollars reward on this Papadopoulos, is there?”

“And six. The insurance companies put up a hundred thousand, the bankers' association five, and the city a thousand.”

Tom-Tom Carey chucked the remains of his cigarette in the cuspidor and began to assemble another one.

“Suppose I hand him to you?” he asked. “How many ways will the money have to go?”

“None of it will stop here,” I assured him. “The Continental Detective Agency doesn't touch reward money—and won't let its hired men. If any of the police are in on the pinch they'll want a share.”

“But if they aren't, it's all mine?”

“If you turn him in without help, or without any help except ours.”

“I'll do that.” The words were casual. “So much for the arrest. Now for the conviction part. If you get him, are you sure you can nail him to the cross?”

“I ought to be, but he'll have to go up against a jury—and that means anything can happen.”

The muscular brown hand holding the brown cigarette made a careless gesture.

“Then maybe I'd better get a confession out of him before I drag him in,” he said off-hand.

“It would be safer that way,” I agreed. “You ought to let that holster down an inch or two. It brings the gunbutt too high. The bulge shows when you sit down.”

“Uh-huh. You mean the one on the left shoulder. I took it away from a fellow after I lost mine. Strap's too short. I'll get another one this afternoon.”

Tommy came in with a folder labeled,
Carey, Tom-Tom, 1361-C
. It held some newspaper clippings, the oldest dated ten years back, the youngest eight months. I read them through, passing each one to the swarthy man as I finished it. Tom-Tom Carey was written down in them as soldier of fortune, gun-runner, seal poacher, smuggler and pirate. But it was all alleged, supposed and suspected. He had been captured variously but never convicted of anything.

“They don't treat me right,” he complained placidly when we were through reading. “For instance, stealing that Chinese gunboat wasn't my fault. I was forced to do it—I was the one that was double-crossed. After they'd got the stuff aboard they wouldn't pay for it. I couldn't unload it. I couldn't do anything but take gunboat and all. The insurance companies must want this Papadopoulos plenty to hang a hundred thousand on him.”

“Cheap enough if it lands him,” I said. “Maybe he's not all the newspapers picture him as, but he's more than a handful. He gathered a whole damned army of strong-arm men here, took over a block in the center of the financial district, looted the two biggest banks in the city, fought off the whole police department, made his getaway, ditched the army, used some of his lieutenants to bump off some more of them,—that's where your brother Paddy got his,—then, with the help of Pogy Reeve, Big Flora Brace and Red O'Leary, wiped out the rest of his lieutenants. And remember, these lieutenants weren't schoolboys—they were slick grifters like Bluepoint Vance and the Shivering Kid and Darby M'Laughlin—birds who knew their what's what.”

“Uh-huh.” Carey was unimpressed. “But it was a bust just the same. You got all the loot back, and he just managed to get away himself.”

“A bad break for him,” I explained. “Red O'Leary broke out with a complication of love and vanity. You can't chalk that against Papadopoulos. Don't get the idea he's half-smart. He's dangerous, and I don't blame the insurance companies for thinking they'll sleep better if they're sure he's not out where he can frame some more tricks against their policy-holding banks.”

“Don't know much about this Papadopoulos, do you?”

“No.” I told the truth. “And nobody does. The hundred thousand offer made rats out of half the crooks in the country. They're as hot after him as we—not only because of the reward but because of his wholesale double-crossing. And they know just as little about him as we do—that he's had his fingers in a dozen or more jobs, that he was the brains behind Bluepoint Vance's bond tricks, and that his enemies have a habit of dying young. But nobody knows where he came from, or where he lives when he's home. Don't think I'm touting him as a Napoleon or a Sunday-supplement master mind—but he's a shifty, tricky old boy. As you say, I don't know much about him—but there are lots of people I don't know much about.”

Tom-Tom Carey nodded to show he understood the last part and began making his third cigarette.

“I was in Nogales when Angel Grace Cardigan got word to me that Paddy had been done in,” he said. “That was nearly a month ago. She seemed to think I'd romp up here pronto—but it was no skin off my face. I let it sleep. But last week I read in a newspaper about all this reward money being posted on the hombre she blamed for Paddy's rub-out. That made it different—a hundred thousand dollars different. So I shipped up here, talked to her, and then came in to make sure there'll be nothing between me and the blood money when I put the loop on this Papadoodle.”

“Angel Grace sent you to me?” I inquired.

“Uh-huh—only she don't know it. She dragged you into the story—said you were a friend of Paddy's, a good guy for a sleuth, and hungry as hell for this Papadoodle. So I thought you'd be the gent for me to see.”

“When did you leave Nogales?”

“Tuesday—last week.”

“That,” I said, prodding my memory, “was the day after Newhall was killed across the border.”

The swarthy man nodded. Nothing changed in his face.

“How far from Nogales was that?” I asked.

“He was gunned down near Oquitoa—that's somewhere around sixty miles southwest of Nogales. You interested?”

“No—except I was wondering about your leaving the place where he was killed the day after he was killed, and coming up where he had lived. Did you know him?”

“He was pointed out to me in Nogales as a San Francisco millionaire going with a party to look at some mining property in Mexico. I was figuring on maybe selling him something later, but the Mexican patriots got him before I did.”

“And so you came north?”

“Uh-huh. The hubbub kind of spoiled things for me. I had a nice little business in—call it supplies—to and fro across the line. This Newhall killing turned the spotlight on that part of the country. So I thought I'd come up and collect that hundred thousand and give things a chance to settle down there. Honest, brother, I haven't killed a millionaire in weeks, if that's what's worrying you.”

“That's good. Now, as I get it, you're counting on landing Papadopoulos. Angel Grace sent for you, thinking you'd run him down just to even up for Paddy's killing, but it's the money you want, so you figure on playing with me as well as the Angel. That right?”

“Check.”

“You know what'll happen if she learns you're stringing along with me?”

“Uh-huh. She'll chuck a convulsion—kind of balmy on the subject of keeping clear of the police, isn't she?”

“She is—somebody told her something about honor among thieves once and she's never got over it. Her brother's doing a hitch up north now—Johnny the Plumber sold him out. Her man Paddy was mowed down by his pals. Did either of those things wake her up? Not a chance. She'd rather have Papadopoulos go free than join forces with us.”

“That's all right,” Tom-Tom Carey assured me. “She thinks I'm the loyal brother—Paddy couldn't have told her much about me—and I'll handle her. You having her shadowed?”

I said: “Yes—ever since she was turned loose. She was picked up the same day Flora and Pogy and Red were grabbed, but we hadn't anything on her except that she had been Paddy's lady-love, so I had her sprung. How much dope did you get out of her?”

“Descriptions of Papadoodle and Nancy Regan, and that's all. She don't know any more about them than I do. Where does this Regan girl fit in?”

“Hardly any, except that she might lead us to Papadopoulos. She was Red's girl. It was keeping a date with her that he upset the game. When Papadopoulos wriggled out he took the girl with him. I don't know why. She wasn't in on the stick-ups.”

Tom-Tom Carey finished making and lighting his fifth cigarette and stood up.

“Are we teamed?” he asked as he picked up his hat.

“If you turn in Papadopoulos I'll see that you get every nickel you're entitled to,” I replied. “And I'll give you a clear field—I won't handicap you with too much of an attempt to keep my eyes on your actions.”

He said that was fair enough, told me he was stopping at a hotel in Ellis Street, and went away.

II

Calling the late Taylor Newhall's office on the phone, I was told that if I wanted any information about his affairs I should try his country residence, some miles south of San Francisco. I tried it. A ministerial voice that said it belonged to the butler told me that Newhall's attorney, Franklin Ellert, was the person I should see. I went over to Ellert's office.

He was a nervous, irritable old man with a lisp and eyes that stuck out with blood pressure.

“Is there any reason,” I asked point-blank, “for supposing that Newhall's murder was anything more than a Mexican bandit outburst? Is it likely that he was killed purposely, and not resisting capture?”

Lawyers don't like to be questioned. This one sputtered and made faces at me and let his eyes stick out still further and, of course, didn't give me an answer.

“How? How?” he snapped disagreeably. “Exthplain your meaning, thir!”

He glared at me and then at the desk, pushing papers around with excited hands, as if he were hunting for a police whistle. I told my story—told him about Tom-Tom Carey.

Ellert sputtered some more, demanded, “What the devil do you mean?” and made a complete jumble of the papers on his desk.

“I don't mean anything,” I growled back. “I'm just telling you what was said.”

“Yeth! Yeth! I know!” He stopped glaring at me and his voice was less peevish. “But there ith abtholutely no reathon for thuthpecting anything of the thort. None at all, thir, none at all!”

“Maybe you're right.” I turned to the door. “But I'll poke into it a little anyway.”

“Wait! Wait!” He scrambled out of his chair and ran around the desk to me. “I think you are mithtaken, but if you are going to invethtigate it I would like to know what you dithcover. Perhapth you'd better charge me with your regular fee for whatever ith done, and keep me informed of your progreth. Thatithfactory?”

I said it was, came back to his desk and began to question him. There was, as the lawyer had said, nothing in Newhall's affairs to stir us up. The dead man was several times a millionaire, with most of his money in mines. He had inherited nearly half his money. There was no shady practice, no claim-jumping, no trickery in his past, no enemies. He was a widower with one daughter. She had everything she wanted while he lived, and she and her father had been very fond of one another. He had gone to Mexico with a party of mining men from New York who expected to sell him some property there. They had been attacked by bandits, had driven them off, but Newhall and a geologist named Parker had been killed during the fight.