Fly Paper and Other Stories (3 page)

Fly Paper

Black Mask
,
August 1929

The “Continental” detective tackles a killer.

I

It was a wandering daughter job.

The Hambletons had been for several generations a wealthy and decently prominent New York family. There was nothing in the Hambleton history to account for Sue, the youngest member of the clan. She grew out of childhood with a kink that made her dislike the polished side of life, like the rough. By the time she was twenty-one, in 1926, she definitely preferred Tenth Avenue to Fifth, grifters to bankers, and Hymie the Riveter to the Honorable Cecil Windown, who had asked her to marry him.

The Hambletons tried to make Sue behave, but it was too late for that. She was legally of age. When she finally told them to go to hell and walked out on them there wasn't much they could do about it. Her father, Major Waldo Hambleton, had given up all the hopes he ever had of salvaging her, but he didn't want her to run into any grief that could be avoided. So he came into the Continental Detective Agency's New York office and asked to have an eye kept on her.

Hymie the Riveter was a Philadelphia racketeer who had moved north to the big city, carrying a Thompson submachine-gun wrapped in blue-checkered oil cloth, after a disagreement with his partners. New York wasn't so good a field as Philadelphia for machine-gun work. The Thompson lay idle for a year or so while Hymie made expenses with an automatic, preying on small-time crap games in Harlem.

Three or four months after Sue went to live with Hymie he made what looked like a promising connection with the first of the crew that came into New York from Chicago to organize the city on the western scale. But the boys from Chi didn't want Hymie; they wanted the Thompson. When he showed it to them, as the big item in his application for employment, they shot holes in the top of Hymie's head and went away with the gun.

Sue Hambleton buried Hymie, had a couple of lonely weeks in which she hocked a ring to eat, and then got a job as hostess in a speakeasy run by a Greek named Vassos.

One of Vassos' customers was Babe McCloor, two hundred and fifty pounds of hard Scotch-Irish-Indian bone and muscle, a black-haired, blue-eyed, swarthy giant who was resting up after doing a fifteen-year hitch in Leavenworth for ruining most of the smaller post offices between New Orleans and Omaha. Babe was keeping himself in drinking money while he rested by playing with pedestrians in dark streets.

Babe liked Sue. Vassos liked Sue. Sue liked Babe. Vassos didn't like that. Jealousy spoiled the Greek's judgment. He kept the speakeasy door locked one night when Babe wanted to come in. Babe came in, bringing pieces of the door with him. Vassos got his gun out, but couldn't shake Sue off his arm. He stopped trying when Babe hit him with the part of the door that had the brass knob on it. Babe and Sue went away from Vassos' together.

Up to that time the New York office had managed to keep in touch with Sue. She hadn't been kept under constant surveillance. Her father hadn't wanted that. It was simply a matter of sending a man around every week or so to see that she was still alive, to pick up whatever information he could from her friends and neighbors, without, of course, letting her know she was being tabbed. All that had been easy enough, but when she and Babe went away after wrecking the gin mill, they dropped completely out of sight.

After turning the city upside-down, the New York office sent a journal on the job to the other Continental branches throughout the country, giving the information above and enclosing photographs and descriptions of Sue and her new playmate. That was late in 1927.

We had enough copies of the photographs to go around, and for the next month or so whoever had a little idle time on his hands spent it looking through San Francisco and Oakland for the missing pair. We didn't find them. Operatives in other cities, doing the same thing, had the same luck.

Then, nearly a year later, a telegram came to us from the New York office. Decoded, it read:

Major Hambleton today received telegram from daughter in San Francisco
quote
Please wire me thousand dollars care apartment two hundred six number six hundred one Eddis Street
stop
I will come home if you will let me
stop Please tell me if I can come but please please wire money anyway
unquote
Hambleton authorizes payment of money to her immediately
stop
Detail competent operative to call on her with money and to arrange for her return home
stop If possible have man and woman operative accompany her here
stop
Hambleton wiring her
stop
Report immediately by wire
.

II

The Old Man gave me the telegram and a check, saying:

“You know the situation. You'll know how to handle it.”

I pretended I agreed with him, went down to the bank, swapped the check for a bundle of bills of several sizes, caught a street car, and went up to 601 Eddis Street, a fairly large apartment building on the corner of Larkin.

The name on Apartment 206's vestibule mail box was J. M. Wales.

I pushed 206's button. When the locked door buzzed off I went into the building, past the elevator to the stairs, and up a flight. 206 was just around the corner from the stairs.

The apartment door was opened by a tall, slim man of thirty-something in neat dark clothes. He had narrow dark eyes set in a long pale face. There was some gray in the dark hair brushed flat to his scalp.

“Miss Hambleton,” I said.

“Uh—what about her?” His voice was smooth, but not too smooth to be agreeable.

“I'd like to see her.”

His upper eyelids came down a little and the brows over them came a little closer together. He asked, “Is it—?” and stopped, watching me steadily.

I didn't say anything. Presently he finished his question:

“Something to do with a telegram?”

“Yeah.”

His long face brightened immediately. He asked:

“You're from her father?”

“Yeah.”

He stepped back and swung the door wide open, saying:

“Come in. Major Hambleton's wire came to her only a few minutes ago. He said someone would call.”

We went through a small passageway into a sunny living-room that was cheaply furnished, but neat and clean enough.

“Sit down,” the man said, pointing at a brown rocking chair.

I sat down. He sat on the burlap-covered sofa facing me. I looked around the room. I didn't see anything to show that a woman was living there.

He rubbed the long bridge of his nose with a longer forefinger and asked slowly:

“You brought the money?”

I said I'd feel more like talking with her there.

He looked at the finger with which he had been rubbing his nose, and then up at me, saying softly:

“But I'm her friend.”

I said, “Yeah?” to that.

“Yes,” he repeated. He frowned slightly, drawing back the corners of his thin-lipped mouth. “I've only asked whether you've brought the money.”

I didn't say anything.

“The point is,” he said quite reasonably, “that if you brought the money she doesn't expect you to hand it over to anybody except her. If you didn't bring it she doesn't want to see you. I don't think her mind can be changed about that. That's why I asked if you had brought it.”

“I brought it.”

He looked doubtfully at me. I showed him the money I had got from the bank. He jumped up briskly from the sofa.

“I'll have her here in a minute or two,” he said over his shoulder as his long legs moved him toward the door. At the door he stopped to ask: “Do you know her? Or shall I have her bring means of identifying herself?”

“That would be best,” I told him.

He went out, leaving the corridor door open.

III

In five minutes he was back with a slender blonde girl of twenty-three in pale green silk. The looseness of her small mouth and the puffiness around her blue eyes weren't yet pronounced enough to spoil her prettiness.

I stood up.

“This is Miss Hambleton,” he said.

She gave me a swift glance and then lowered her eyes again, nervously playing with the strap of a handbag she held.

“You can identify yourself?” I asked.

“Sure,” the man said. “Show them to him, Sue.”

She opened the bag, brought out some papers and things, and held them up for me to take.

“Sit down, sit down,” the man said as I took them.

They sat on the sofa. I sat in the rocking chair again and examined the things she had given me. There were two letters addressed to Sue Hambleton here, her father's telegram welcoming her home, a couple of receipted department store bills, an automobile driver's license, and a savings account pass book that showed a balance of less than ten dollars.

By the time I had finished my examination the girl's embarrassment was gone. She looked levelly at me, as did the man beside her. I felt in my pocket, found my copy of the photograph New York had sent us at the beginning of the hunt, and looked from it to her.

“Your mouth could have shrunk, maybe,” I said, “but how could your nose have got that much longer?”

“If you don't like my nose,” she said, “how'd you like to go to hell?” Her face had turned red.

“That's not the point. It's a swell nose, but it's not Sue's.” I held the photograph out to her. “See for yourself.”

She glared at the photograph and then at the man.

“What a smart guy you are,” she told him.

He was watching me with dark eyes that had a brittle shine to them between narrow-drawn eyelids. He kept on watching me while he spoke to her out the side of his mouth, crisply:

“Pipe down.”

She piped down. He sat and watched me. I sat and watched him. A clock ticked seconds away behind me. His eyes began shifting their focus from one of my eyes to the other. The girl sighed.

He said in a low voice: “Well?”

I said: “You're in a hole.”

“What can you make out of it?” he asked casually.

“Conspiracy to defraud.”

The girl jumped up and hit one of his shoulders angrily with the back of a hand, crying:

“What a smart guy you are, to get me in a jam like this. It was going to be duck soup—yeh! Eggs in the coffee—yeh! Now look at you. You haven't even got guts enough to tell this guy to go chase himself.” She spun around to face me, pushing her red face down at me—I was still sitting in the rocker—snarling: “Well, what are you waiting for? Waiting to be kissed good-by? We don't owe you anything, do we? We didn't get any of your lousy money, did we? Outside, then. Take the air. Dangle.”

“Stop it, sister,” I growled. “You'll bust something.”

The man said:

“For God's sake stop that bawling, Peggy, and give somebody else a chance.” He addressed me: “Well, what do you want?”

“How'd you get into this?” I asked.

He spoke quickly, eagerly:

“A fellow named Kenny gave me that stuff and told me about this Sue Hambleton, and her old man having plenty. I thought I'd give it a whirl. I figured the old man would either wire the dough right off the reel or wouldn't send it at all. I didn't figure on this send-a-man stuff. Then when his wire came, saying he was sending a man to see her, I ought to have dropped it.

“But hell! Here was a man coming with a grand in cash. That was too good to let go of without a try. It looked like there still might be a chance of copping, so I got Peggy to do Sue for me. If the man was coming today, it was a cinch he belonged out here on the Coast, and it was an even bet he wouldn't know Sue, would only have a description of her. From what Kenny had told me about her, I knew Peggy would come pretty close to fitting her description. I still don't see how you got that photograph. Television? I only wired the old man yesterday. I mailed a couple of letters to Sue, here, yesterday, so we'd have them with the other identification stuff to get the money from the telegraph company on.”

“Kenny gave you the old man's address?”

“Sure he did.”

“Did he give you Sue's?”

“No.”

“How'd Kenny get hold of the stuff?”

“He didn't say.”

“Where's Kenny now?”

“I don't know. He was on his way east, with something else on the fire, and couldn't fool with this. That's why he passed it on to me.”

“Big-hearted Kenny,” I said. “You know Sue Hambleton?”

“No,” emphatically. “I'd never even heard of her till Kenny told me.”

“I don't like this Kenny,” I said, “though without him your story's got some good points. Could you tell it leaving him out?”

He shook his head slowly from side to side, saying:

“It wouldn't be the way it happened.”

“That's too bad. Conspiracies to defraud don't mean as much to me as finding Sue. I might have made a deal with you.”

He shook his head again, but his eyes were thoughtful, and his lower lip moved up to overlap the upper a little.

The girl had stepped back so she could see both of us as we talked, turning her face, which showed she didn't like us, from one to the other as we spoke our pieces. Now she fastened her gaze on the man, and her eyes were growing angry again.

I got up on my feet, telling him:

“Suit yourself. But if you want to play it that way I'll have to take you both in.”

He smiled with indrawn lips and stood up.

The girl thrust herself in between us, facing him.

“This is a swell time to be dummying up,” she spit at him. “Pop off, you lightweight, or I will. You're crazy if you think I'm going to take the fall with you.”

“Shut up,” he said in his throat.

“Shut me up,” she cried.

He tried to, with both hands. I reached over her shoulders and caught one of his wrists, knocked the other hand up.