Long Live the Dead (22 page)

“Yes, but even Steve Brodie didn’t try it twice, darling. I’m going upstairs and collect the Burdicks.”

She walked out. Smith glared at Vick and said grimly, “One thing I do want to know. What’s so all-fired important about those papers?”

“You go to hell,” Vick snarled.

Smith found the nerve again. Vick shuddered to the tips of his fingers.

“It—it’s a formula,” he gasped. “It’s some screwy formula for a new high explosive. That’s all I know. I swear it!”

“I think,” Smith said slowly, “I get it. At least, I begin to. Our friend Dubitsky was sent here by a foreign government. He took his time. He planned things carefully. Through him, Burdick and one or two other students obtained jobs at the Glickman Company. Through Burdick, the learned professor obtained information on the whereabouts of the formula. But things were hot. He decided to vanish. As Professor Dubitsky he did vanish. How right am I, Vick?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Vick mumbled. “Lay off of me, will you?”

“He found out,” Smith said, “that the custodian of the secret was McKenna. With that to work on, he planned to rob McKenna’s safe, and also, very cleverly, figured out an alibi because he knew he’d have to kill McKenna after he got him to open his safe. To cover up the murder Dubitsky planned that the police would discover after a while that McKenna was paying attention to Burdick’s wife, and that Burdick himself, soon after McKenna’s murder, had committed suicide. It would appear to be the usual sordid triangle, leaving Dubitsky and the real motive thoroughly obscured. I like to reason these things out, Vick. It’s half the fun.”

Angel, appearing in the doorway, said impatiently: “Mr. and Mrs. Burdick are now in your car, Mr. Smith. Could you cut it short, perhaps?”

“One more thing, Vick.”

“Huh?”

“Who murdered McKenna?”

“You go to hell!”

Smith caressed the nerve again.

“He did,” Vick groaned. “So help me, I ain’t lyin’. Dubitsky did it. After gettin’ McKenna to open the safe with them papers in it Dubitsky had to kill him to keep him from ever identifying him.”

Smith sighed. “It really doesn’t matter who shot him because I’m going to tie the three of you up, Vick, and as soon as I’m out of here I’m going to phone the police. You won’t escape before they get here, Vick. Doing tricks with ropes is another of my little accomplishments, and you won’t even wiggle when I’m through with you. So the police will come and find you, Vick, and find those two guns on the table; and if either of those guns fired the bullet that killed McKenna, the police will know it. Ballistics, you know.”

“Here,” Angel said, “are your ropes. Mr. and Mrs. Burdick were wrapped up in them, upstairs.”

Smith went to work tying them up while Angel stood by with her gun trained on them. Finished, he stepped back and surveyed the results of his efforts, and grinned.

He took Angel’s arm. “Let’s go, darling,” he said.

T
hat’s right,” Mrs. Burdick’s Teddy said timidly. “I got the job through Dubitsky and then a couple of months later he died. And then he came to life again, and came to see me.” “And told you he was a Federal agent?”

“That’s right, Mr. Smith. He told me he was a Federal agent, working to break down a spy ring. And I believed him. I guess I’d been reading too many stories.”

They sat, the four of them, in the tiny office of Trouble, Inc. Teddy Burdick, Mrs. Burdick, Angel and Smith. Burdick was limp with gratitude. Mrs. Burdick was exactly like her let-ter—small, scared, not too gifted with brains.

“Dubitsky asked you then to help him. He told you the officials of the Glickman Company were under suspicion, and asked you to find out which of them had been entrusted with the safe-keeping of the formula. That it?” Smith asked.

“That’s right. And when I did find out that Mr. McKenna kept it at home, he advised me to quit my job. He gave me a thousand dollars and told me to move to a small apartment somewhere and keep very quiet until the thing came to a head.”

“What happened then?” Smith asked.

“Well, at the last minute, just when we were all set to move, he sent for me. He called me on the phone and told me to come to that address on Canal Street. When I got there, those two men, Vick and Max, jumped on me.”

Smith leaned back in his chair, smiling. “You see it now, Angel?” he asked gently.

“There’s one thing,” Angel declared, “that still bothers me.”

“Yes?”

“Look, now. Dubitsky planned this business very nicely, but right smack in the middle of it he ‘died.’ There must have been, at that time, a fear in his mind that he was being watched. In other words, government agents were closing in on him.” She drew a deep breath and stared at the floor, marshaling her thoughts.

“Well,” she continued, “he came to life again and went through with his plans. He got the formula. If Trouble, Incorporated, hadn’t landed right kersmack on the back of his neck, he and his buddies would have disposed of Mrs. Burdick, to keep her quiet, and then murdered Teddy, making it look like a suicide to give the police an answer to the McKenna kill and steer the investigation away from Dubitsky and his pals. You follow me?”

There was a knock on the door. Smith got up to answer it. “So far, yes,” he said. “Go ahead.”

He opened the door and Plouffe stood there.

“Well,” Angel said, scowling, “what I want to know is why the G-men, after getting close enough to scare Dubitsky into temporary oblivion, didn’t see through his phony death and ultimately get their hands on him.”

Plouffe, blinking his gray eyes at her, said: “So help me, Miss Copeland, you’re clairvoyant. Meet my friend here, Mr. Toomey.”

He stepped aside and a man walked past him. “Mr. Toomey,” Plouffe said, “is a G-man. It seems he’s been keeping an eye on me ever since Mrs. Burdick come to me for advice.”

“On all of you,” Toomey said quietly. He was a tall, grayhaired man with a pleasant smile. “You see, Mr. Smith, we

were just warming up to this case when you stepped into it.”

Smith stood up, his face sheepish.

“What Dubitsky was after,” Toomey said, “was the formula for a new explosive being manufactured for the government by the Glickman Company.”

“And thanks to us,” Smith admitted, “he got it.”

“No. He never would have got it. What he took from McKenna was the original formula, long ago proved to be worthless. I doubt if Dubitsky even knew that the original has twice been revised, and that the only existing copy of the approved, final formula has never been out of government hands. What you did do, Mr. Smith, was save the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Burdick and save us a lot of work.”

“Oh,” said Smith.

“He’s really very smart,” Angel cooed.

“Thanks to you, Mr. Smith,” Toomey said, “the dangerous Dubitsky and his two associates are in custody. I’m here simply to offer congratulations.”

He thrust out his hand. Smith took it. Angel beamed.

“You know,” Plouffe said, “he’s really a pretty good guy. Maybe we should ought to tell him the truth, Toomey.”

“Truth?” Smith said.

“You owe me some money,” Plouffe declared, pacing forward to the desk behind which Smith stood. “I’ll match you to see whether I get it or not.”

He took a coin from his pocket and flipped it. Slightly bewildered, Smith did likewise.

“Heads,” Smith said.

Plouffe thrust out his hand with the coin on the back of it. It wasn’t a coin. Not exactly. It was a gold identification disc of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Smith gaped at it.

“A lot of things,” Plouffe said softly, with a smile, “are not what they seem. Believe it or not, when I let you hire me I thought you were after that formula, too. I deliberately let you believe I was impersonating an F. B. I. man so you’d feel you had something on me. That way I might get onto a lot of things. Sorry, pal.” He turned to Toomey. “Well, Toomey,” he said, “let’s go. And you and your wife, Mr. Burdick, if you’ll come along too and answer a few questions, you can go home afterward.”

They went out. Smith looked solemnly at Angel. “I,” he declared slowly, “will be damned.”

She said, “Nothing surprises me any more.”

“I’ve another surprise for you,” Smith told her, smiling.

“Really?”

“I’m going to pay you for all the work you’ve done.”

“No! You don’t mean it!”

“But I do.” He put his arms around her.

“Like this,” he said, and kissed her.

We jump to April 1940 with this long story. I had spent two winters in Florida and was using Florida settings in stories for several magazines. This one is laid more or less in the Florida Keys and I think you’ll agree it’s one of the better yarns in this collection—a fast-moving tale with an ending that, although perhaps no longer politically correct, may still bring a smile. Incidentally, I had 11 stories in detective
Fiction Weekly
that year, also stories in
Double Detective, Detective Short Stories, Detective Tales, Dime Detective,
and
Red Star Detective
. But though I seemed to have become a writer of crime stories only, about every fifth story I attempted was aimed at the
Big Slick
magazines, and their doors were about to open.

HBC

Who was the girl in the crashed plane? Whose brain plotted to wreck a tycoon’s empire? How does a dick find a girl who won’t be found?

K
imm swung himself out of the chartered plane almost before it stopped rolling. With an upward fling of his hand and a “Nice work, buddy!” to the pilot, he began running across the field, his heavy tweed overcoat sailing in the breeze behind him. Kimm did everything that way. Small and wiry, with a body thinned by too much smoking, he moved, when he moved at all, with an impetuous rush that kept the dust flying. When thinking, he preferred to be flat on his back with his shoes off, smokes and a drink handy, a little soft slow music teasing his ears. But the same shoes, when attached to his feet, were forever taking him somewhere in a hurry.

He was in a hurry now, and mouthed a snort of disgust when he got to the waiting car and found it empty. He put a hand on the horn and the hot, sleepy afternoon shivered to the blast. Kimm didn’t know the afternoon was hot. He wore a brown felt hat slapped shapeless by New York wind and sleet; he wore rubbers and the overcoat, and he was not warm. This was Florida but he had not been in it long enough to thaw out.

He smacked the horn again and a big man, loose with fat, came waddling in no hurry from a tin-roofed building nearby. Wearing slacks and sneakers and a polo shirt, the fellow looked askance at Kimm’s overcoat, scowled and rubbed a chin black with stubble “You Mr. Kimm? Mr. Abel Kimm?” Sunlight, dancing on the hangar’s tin roof, frolicked no less wonderfully on the big man’s hairless head.

Kimm nodded.

“I’m Henry Crahan,” the man said.

Kimm said, “Good,” and stepped into the car. He was tired but taut. After his talk with Julius Macomber in the latter’s Park Avenue apartment, he had hurried at once to Newark Airport, hired the plane and proceeded to put miles behind him. He was hungry. He was thirsty.

Crahan carefully eased his hulk behind the wheel and put the car in motion. “You have a nice trip down, Mr. Kimm?”

“Mmn.”

“Been in Florida before, have you?”

“Twice.”

The car rolled out to the Dixie and proceeded south. It crawled, and Kimm said impatiently, “Can’t you make this crate go a little faster?”

“I don’t reckon there’s a whole lot of hurry,” Crahan shrugged.

“Why?”

The big man shrugged again and let it go at that. He didn’t have to talk. He was a cop, Kimm supposed. A town constable or local hick cop. In some parts of Florida—those parts not dependent on tourist trade for sustenance—strangers were looked upon as unwanted outsiders.

The car made a right turn off the main highway and Henry Crahan said matter-of-factly, “This here is Kelver City.”

Kimm didn’t see any city.

He saw a widish road flanked by leaning palms and weedgrown sidewalks. He saw a few big houses, most of them for sale, and a large ugly brick building evidently designed to be a town hall. Farther on he saw a handful of mangy stores and a gas pump or two, but the whole thing looked like an old movie set long since abandoned to the elements.

Kelver City was a ghost town, a relic of the boom. It depressed Kimm.

The car stopped in front of a stucco house a little less seedy than some of its neighbors, and Crahan said, “Doc Wardley’s house. They brought the girl here right after she crashed.”

“Don’t you have a hospital?”

“In West Palm Beach, sure. But she couldn’t be moved to no hospital.”

Kimm got out. He hated things blue and Doc Wardley’s house was a washed-out shade of blue that made him wince. He trotted to the steps and went up them into a screened porch. A brown lizard the length of his middle finger streaked off the sill and shot between his legs and vanished. The air reeked of jasmine.

Crahan came up behind him and opened the door. “Go on in.”

Wardley was an odd duck, Kimm thought. Thin as a straw, pasty-pale behind dark horn-rimmed spectacles that belonged on a man fifty pounds heavier, he had a trick of holding his eyes wide open that made him appear startled. He wasn’t startled. He said gently, “Ah, yes. Mr. Macomber’s representative, ah, yes. I—er, I’m afraid Mr. Macomber will be shocked.”

He turned gravely and walked down the hall to a closed door and turned again to say, “This way, please.” He had another trick of walking on his toes, soundlessly. The whole house was soundless, Kimm thought. The silence came at you in a wave, the moment you stepped inside. It was as tangible as the stink of jasmine on the porch, and as unpleasant.

Wardley stood aside, waiting, and Kimm went past him into a small blue room that reeked of medicines and antiseptics. Except for a couch and a couple of chairs, the room was empty. Kimm paced to the couch and stared without blinking at a pair of upturned toes. Bare toes. A sheet covered the rest of the body, but, even so, the outlines were attractive.