Long Live the Dead (11 page)

Dougherty did a lot of other things while staying home, but when the phone rang he was at ease in his shirt-sleeves, stockinged feet propped on a chair, and a newspaper in his lap. Without disturbing himself he reached for the phone.

“Is this Steve Dougherty?” It was the voice of Jake Bartell.

“Yeah.”

“Well, I’d like to have a talk with you. In person, I mean.

You gonna be home this evening?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I’ll drop around. The name’s Bartell. O.K.?”

“O.K.,” Dougherty said.

Bartell arrived about twenty minutes later, alone. He knocked, and Dougherty shouted, “Come in. Door’s unlocked. I figured you’d be around eventually.”

Bartell didn’t take a chair right away. He looked around first and seemed to think he might find something to justify the suspicions that were obviously gnawing him. He glanced through the open door to the bedroom and said, “I just gotta make sure, buddy.” His right hand stayed in his pocket all that time, and when he came back to the table Dougherty said, “Take it easy. I don’t bite.”

“This joint is too near Police Headquarters to suit me,”

Bartell muttered. “Anyhow, I guess you know why I got the jitters. I only found out today that—” His eyes widened.

“Sa—a-ay! Ain’t you the guy that brought in the pictures?”

“Yes.”

“Then there’s somethin’ screwy here! I was a sap to come here!”

“Take it easy,” Dougherty said softly. “You’ll be a bigger sap if you walk out. The pictures were just an idea, see? Just to find out what you and Solly Minkler knew about the fight game.”

Bartell sat down, but kept a hand in his pocket. Sweat glistened on his face and the corners of his mouth twitched. “What do you know?” he muttered.

“I know it all.”

“Yeah?” Bartell’s voice was not much more than a whisper. “Well, listen. You ain’t no sap, Dougherty. I been around, checkin’ up to find out what kind of a guy you are, and you ain’t no dumb cop. Anyhow, it wasn’t murder. The Nut was goofy, wasn’t he? He woulda croaked anyhow in a little while. It was an act of mercy, almost.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Now look, Dougherty. I ain’t no millionaire, but I got a little dough, see? I inquired around before I come up here, and the wise boys tell me you’re a regular guy. Even if you are a cop.”

“I might listen to reason,” Dougherty said quietly.

Bartell relaxed a little and seemed to gain confidence. Then with a crafty gleam in his narrowed eyes he said, “What makes you so sure I done it, anyway?”

“You were seen,” Steve Dougherty lied.

“Who seen it?”

“That’s my business.”

“Well, look. It coulda been an accident, that’s how easy I shoved him. So help me, I practically only slapped him on the back!”

“But the stairs were steep, Bartell, and that made it murder.”

“You can’t prove that!”

“You had the motive.”

“You can’t prove that, either!”

“No? You’re forgetting that the police know exactly what time DiConti’s store was robbed. Between ten of one and one. And at one o’clock, or a few seconds after, Tim came walking around the corner, Bartell. So …”

“I could twist that around to prove The Nut stole the stuff himself!”

“He wasn’t the type, Bartell. It proves only one thing: The Nut happened along and recognized you. You were scared. You knew he’d talk.”

Bartell’s lips were twitching again. “All right, all right. I said I’d pay you off, didn’t I? How much?”

“I been wondering. Why should you dig down for the whole of it?”

Bartell’s eyes narrowed. Apparently it hadn’t occurred to him that he might pass part of the buck to someone else. “Yeah, why should I? Minkler thought up the idea. I done the job alone, but he gimme my instructions. Why should I take the rap?”

“Who’s got the loot now?”

“He has! All I got was a measly five hundred for doin’ the job!”

“Well, how you handle Minkler is your own business,” Dougherty said. “I’ve got my end figured out, and I’ll give it to you straight.” His glance roved to Bartell’s hands, which were now in the open. “See this?” he said softly, standing up.

Pushing the newspaper from his lap, he exposed a small electric switch in his hand.A cord snaked from it down behind the couch and under the carpet to a large wastebasket under the table. Dougherty pointed to the wastebasket.

“There’s a dictaphone in that. I paid out ten dollars to rent it, so Police Headquarters could listen to you later.”

Most coppers would have told Bartell about the dicta-phone after closing a cell door on him. Dougherty said later that he kept looking at Bartell’s big hands and kept remembering Tiny Tim Winters and, well, the desire to mangle that smug, fat face was just too much.

Bartell gaped at the cord. The color ran from his smug, fat face like paint from a cracked cup. It took about five seconds for the truth to seep home. Then he reached for his gun.

Steve Dougherty’s head and right shoulder caught him square in the chest at the end of a flying tackle. Bartell’s contorted body broke through the back of the chair and crashed to the floor.

The gun stayed in Bartell’s pocket. He couldn’t get to it, so he used his fists instead, and they weren’t good enough.

He knew the fight game from first-hand experience in the ring, and outweighed Steve Dougherty by thirty pounds. He used his knees, feet and elbows and even tried to get a grip with his teeth. But although he threw all he had into every effort, fair and foul, it wasn’t enough.

Dougherty said later he just kept thinking he was Tiny Tim Winters getting even. He kept remembering that small, broken body at the foot of the subway steps.

He rid himself of that memory with blows that put Jake Bartell on ice. Then in his boyish exuberance he yelled at the unconscious Jake while he waited for Carney to answer his call to Headquarters.

“They think I’m a crook down at Headquarters, see? First they called me crazy for not believin’ DiConti was guilty. Then they found out I was acceptin’ bribes. Well, I had to. It was the only way to get you. I’m new at this game and I had to plug along slow and easy, the hard way, with no mistakes.

“That money goes back now, Bartell. Back to the guys who gave it to me. But DiConti goes free and you and Minkler go up for murder, so it was all worth it.”

It was all over when Carney and the lads from Headquarters arrived on the scene. Bartell was still out cold on the floor and Dougherty was sitting near him, kind of groggy and dazed but making gestures and elaborately explaining the business of the dictaphone—as if Bartell cared!

“Thought you were smart, huh, when you looked the place over? Well, I didn’t think you’d be smart enough to look in a wastebasket. I wasn’t takin’ no chances with you.”

Carney and the others took Bartell to Headquarters, and it wasn’t long before Solly Minkler was brought in to keep him company. They poured a lot of hot coffee into Steve Dougherty, and after a while the kid stopped talking to himself.

“Well,” Carney said admiringly, “I guess the booby prize goes to me.”

Dougherty shrugged. “It had to be Solly Minkler,” he said, still a bit dazed. “You see, it couldn’t have been Gilson because policemen are honest. And it couldn’t have been Mr. DiConti because he wouldn’t have thrown all that stuff around and broken Mrs. Haggerty’s watch—not after he’d just finished repairing it. So it had to be Minkler or someone working for Minkler, and he had to know Tiny Tim, because if Tim hadn’t recognized him …

“Don’t you see?” the kid rambled on. “When I told you what Tim said about being followed, you just laughed at me. And now, you see, he was followed.”

“Kid,” Carney declared humbly, “you’re all right. You’re gonna be a first-class cop.”

This one appeared in
Black Mask
in November 1938, a month in which i had other stories in
Pulp Magazines ace g-man stories, Detective Fiction Weekly, thrilling Mystery,
and something called
Ten Story Gang.
but I was aiming some of my stories at this slicks, and by this time I had been published in a non-pulp called
Household magazine,
and 15 times in three Canadian slick-paper magazines,
The Canadian, Chatelaine,
and
National Home Monthly. The Saturday Evening Post
and other big slicks were just over the horizon.

HBC

Suicide or Murder? This cop plays out his strange hunch mercilessly

T
he trouble with you,” I said, glaring at Jojo Evans, “you think everything connected with the detecting business is funny. You’re like a lot of guys that write these dumb detective stories. Murder is just something to crack wise about.” I felt that way. It could have been the rain, and most likely part of it was but, whatever the reason or the excuse I was in a mood that morning to bite the head off a rattlesnake. And it didn’t help to have Percy Joseph Evans sitting there with his feet on my desk, kidding me about my attentions to a corpse.

I’m dumb. I admit it. Any other dick on the force would have taken one look at that corpse and scribbled “suicide” down in his hip-pocket notebook; but yours truly Thompson the Trouble Seeker, had to stand right up in public and call it murder.

Why? Because it should have been murder. This guy Vanetti had been begging for it.

Only it wasn’t. Or was it?

I walked into the private sanctum of W. J. Reynolds, my boss, and said morbidly: “You sent for me, Chief?” He scowled at me.

“Close the door, Thompson.”

“Sure.” I closed it.

“Sit down.”

“Sure.” I sat. Two other men were sitting, too, and both gave me a good looking-at. One was Detective Inspector Bill Donahue; the other was Mr. Nick Lomac. Putting those two together in the same room was like parking St. Peter alongside the devil’s number one furnace stoker. Bill Donahue was big, gray at the temples, middle-aged and honest. Nick Lomac was small, slick, black-haired and vicious. A politician.

The Chief narrowed his gray eyes at me and pulled a scowl across his mouth. He was a good man, Reynolds. He’d been around a long time and without him Kolb City would have been a heap crookeder than it was.

He said, “The papers have printed statement by you, Thompson, about the death of Leon Vanetti. An unauthorized statement and a most embarrassing one. Perhaps you can explain.”

“You know these newspaper reporters as well as I do,” I muttered.

“Meaning?”

“I spoke out of turn and some squirt scribbled it down.”

“Then you don’t actually believe Vanetti was murdered?”

“Listen,” I said, hauling in a breath because it was going to take a bit of time. “I’ll tell you exactly what happened. I was around here last night with Joe Evans, waiting for curfew, when this call came in from the joint where Vanetti had a room. I took the call myself. It was Vanetti’s landlady.

“She was in a lather about something but she talks with a spaghetti accent and it took me at least five minutes to unravel the spaghetti. What she was trying to tell me was this: Some woman telephoned and wanted to speak with Vanetti. So Mrs. Fretas the landlady hoffed upstairs to Vanetti’s room and knocked and got no answer. She figured he must be asleep because she herself d been sitting out on the front steps when he came in an hour ago and he hadn’t gone out again since. So she knocked again.”

I was deliberately dragging it out, not to hear myself talk but to see what the story would do to Nick Lomac.Apparently it did nothing. Lomac sat there with indifference warped all over his swarthy face and listened to me. The way you’d listen to a Sunday morning sermon after being out on a binge the night before.

“So Mrs. Fretas,” I said, “put an eye to the keyhole, to see if Vanetti
was
in, and she saw him hanging there.”

“You and Evans went over there?” the Chief said.

He knew we’d gone over there. He was just pulling it out of me for the benefit of Nick Lomac. It didn’t take a swami to size this thing up. Nick Lomac was sore because of my murder talk, and he wanted a complete, detailed explanation, and he was influential enough to get it.

“When we got there,” I said, “we had to bust in the door. Mrs. Fretas didn’t have an extra key because, so she says, she gave her spare to Vanetti, a couple of days ago. He lost his and asked for another. So we broke in and found him hanging there.”

Nick Lomac opened his mouth for the first time. “What was he hung with Thompson?”

“Fishline.”

“Fishline?”

“Yeh. The kind you catch cod on. Heavy stuff, tarred. It seems Vanetti did a lot of fishing in his spare time and had a couple of tackle boxes under his bed.”

Nick Lomac had an imagination. He put his fingers up to his throat and rubbed them around the edge of his starched collar, and winced. I didn’t blame him. That line had almost sawed Vanetti’s head off.

“So you and Evans walked in,” the Chief said, “and found him hanging there. The door was locked. The windows were locked. On the floor you found the chair on which Vanetti stood while adjusting the noose. That’s right, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“You cut him down?”

“We cut him down.”

“Then what?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just police routine.”

“But when the reporters arrived, you told them it was murder.”

“That’s not so,” I insisted. “I just warned them to leave things alone because it
might
be murder.”

“But damn it, Thompson they quoted you as saying it
was
murder!”

“That was their mistake.”

The Chief glared at me then let me have it. He possessed a nice vocabulary most of which he picked up while handling mules in the War. Ordinarily I’d have grinned at him but with Nick Lomac there I didn’t. Because the lacing I was getting was solely for Lomac’s benefit and I knew it.

When it was over I muttered under my breath and got up and walked out pretending to be sore.

Jojo Evans still had his dogs on my desk. He grinned at me. “Way out here,” he said “I heard the biggest part of it.

There’s one word he uses that really gets me. That ‘scurrilousness.’ Some day I’m gonna look that up. What’s it mean?”