Long Live the Dead (30 page)

Oh, come now, Miss Whitson. Surely the time for stubborn denials is past. You must have borrowed the tool. I don’t say you borrowed it with the intention of killing someone with it—but let’s say you wanted to punch some holes in a sheet of paper with it. Shall we say that? No? Well, some other time, perhaps.

As for the murder itself, I believe it was quite impromptu. I’m going to sketch a picture of it for you.

Here you are, Miss Whitson, in this very room, working on some papers. I see you have a desk here. We’ll assume, then, that you are sitting at the desk, with the lamp turned on and the rest of the room more or less in shadow. The house is very quiet. Mr. Lee has gone out. You are engrossed in your work.

Suddenly you hear a voice—the voice of—now wait a moment, Miss Whitson. Let me continue, please! The voice you hear is not that of Mr. Paine. Oh, no. It is the voice of a woman who hates you, who has tormented you with sarcastic innuendoes ever since a certain night, not long ago, when she happened to see you come in drunk.

Perhaps she has done more than torment you, Miss Whit-son. Perhaps she has threatened to write a letter to the school where you are employed. She knows, and you know, that such a letter would result not only in your dismissal, but in the dismissal of the young man with whom you got drunk that night. The assistant principal, I believe.

And now, suddenly, you hear the voice. Her voice. The voice of Mrs. Baylis. “So you despise people who get drunk, do you?” she says. “Well, well well.
You
wouldn’t touch the stuff, would you now?”

What happens, Miss Whitson? You stiffen on your chair. This is more than you can bear. It is the last straw. You lurch to your feet as the door opens. You snatch up the first thing that comes handy and rush toward the person who stands there. You
think
you are striking Mrs. Baylis.

But when this unfortunate person stumbles back, his face twisted with agony, his hands clutching at the engraving tool which you have plunged into his breast, you realize your mistake. You have not killed Mrs. Baylis. No. You have slain poor old Mr. Paine, who was a positive whiz at imitating people, and who probably thought it would be a fine joke to announce himself in the voice of Mrs. Baylis, using certain words he had overheard on some previous occasion.

Well?

O.K., lady. Let’s go. And by the way … that story of mine about Lee. A little white lie. We don’t know
where
Lee is.

THE NEW HAYDON TIMES, FEBRUARY 16

NOTES IN THE NIGHT BY J. C. OWLE

The boarding house murder of Alvin Paine, put on ice two days ago with a full confession from the guilty party, spawned a strange aftermath this fine February afternoon. Mr. George Alden Lee, new claimant to the title of Vanishing American, has been found!

“Found” is hardly the word, at that. What Mr. George Alden Lee did was “emerge”—even as The Groundhog.

It appears that Mr. George Alden Lee takes his annual vacation in winter, because, being a Floridian by birth, Mr. Lee finds our New England winters just too, too arduous. And Mr. Lee, when he vacations, takes a page from the book of The Groundhog.

Mr. Lee hibernates. He hibernates with a quantity of festive beverages sufficient to last him a full two weeks. In a comfortable little camp on Hidden Lake, less than eight miles from the heart of downtown New Haydon, Mr. Lee secludes himself from telephones, radios, and all the sordid troubles of the world without.

This afternoon Mr. Lee emptied his last bottle, closed the door of his

Sanctuary behind him, stepped into his car and drove to town. He was slightly bewildered by his reception.

“Me, a murderer?” Mr. Lee gasped. “Well, good gosh, i didn’t think i was that drunk!”

Ain’t murder wonderful?

This story, published in the February 1941
Black Mask
, is told in the first person, in a sometimes humorous fashion, by Detective Jeff Cardin. I seem to remember that i wrote several stories about Jeff Cardin, and he was a popular character with pulp-tale readers. This could be one of the better stories in the book you are now reading. Here’s hoping.

HBC

The lecher and the lady—that was the way the papers and the public regarded Jeff Cardin and the Anderson girl. The mere fact that it was the other way around—that she happened to be a tart and he a gentleman didn’t cut any ice with the cops who needed a fall-guy to preserve their “untarnished reputation.”

I
n case you are one of those who saw my name and picture in the papers about two months ago, and sadistically added your scornful voice to the weight of public opinion that put the skids under me, let me put you straight on a thing or two.

First of all, I’m not lecherous. That was a word applied to me in the
Tribune
, by some hop-head who probably came across it while thumbing the pages of a dictionary. I can’t be called a respectable married man, I’ll admit, because I’m not and never have been married. But unless I’m a somnambulist and do strange things in my sleep, I’ve never, to my knowledge, gone out of my way to make passes at young ladies on street corners.

They know this down at Headquarters.The commissioner knows it, too. But what they know and what they have to do to please the public—meaning you and you and you—are two different things.

The truth is, I was driving to Bayview at the time, to have another talk with Jerry Simms, the smart young Bayview cop who first smelled the stench of this blackmail business. Jerry had phoned to say he had uncovered still another victim of the squeeze, and if I’d come up there he would introduce me to the fellow—a break for me, it seemed, because after six weeks of tiresome plugging on the case I had got practically nowhere.

It was a nasty night.The roads were still lumpy and treacherous with the remains of last week’s blizzard, and the rain was so heavy you couldn’t see ten feet in front of the windshield.

So when the girl flagged me, just this side of the state line, I stopped to give her a lift.

Maybe that’s being lecherous. I wouldn’t know. All I know is that the poor kid looked drenched and frozen, and she thumbed me for a lift, and on that kind of night I’d have gone out of my way to pick up Frankenstein’s monster.

She climbed into the car and I asked her where she was going. Bayview, she said, when her teeth stopped chattering. We talked about the weather, as one does, and I guessed she was about nineteen or twenty—a sweet young thing and probably pretty, though for all I could see, under the enormous coat she was wearing she might be as fat as your Aunt Emma.

About half a mile over the state line, when we stopped for a red light at the Four Corners, she staged her act.

It stunned me, and I’m a city dick who has seen a lot of phoney business in my day. There we were, waiting for the light to turn green. A rotary traffic circle confronted us, and on both sides of us were big gas stations, brilliantly lit-up in the downpour. And she began screaming.

She turned on me like a crazy person and began clawing at me. She had nails for clawing, too. They raked my face and drew blood, ripped my collar, damn near tore my tie off, and pulled a couple of buttons off my coat.

She got the door open, but she didn’t get out right away—she kept clawing at me, and screaming for help.

That sort of thing would draw attention anywhere, and my sweet companion had picked a spot where there was an abundance of attention handy. A couple of fellows tore over from the nearest gas station, just as she shoved herself clear of me and sprawled out over the running-board. They laid hold of me.

You know the rest, if you read the papers:
Cardin fought viciously to escape—Get that? To “escape”—but was overpowered by men who rushed to the young woman’s assistance. The girl herself managed to stumble across the highway to a gasoline station, where she hysterically sobbed out her story of what had happened.

Her story. It was a beauty. I, Jeff Cardin, had offered her a ride to Bayview, and though she was not the sort of girl to accept such offers from strangers, she had welcomed the offer this time because of the weather. She had been on her way to visit friends in Bayview, and I had—looked like a decent, respectable sort of man—and so forth.

Probably I had been drinking. At any rate, after leading off with a most embarrassing line of talk, I had attempted to force my attentions upon her, and when repulsed had grown violently angry. Then I had assaulted her.

She didn’t endeavor to explain why I had picked the Four Corners, of all places, to do my assaulting. That was a minor point that Percy P. Public, meaning you and you and you, overlooked. You were more interested in devouring the descriptions of her disheveled clothing, and of how Jeff Cardin, The Beast, was given a thorough going-over by the lads from the gas station, which served him right.

A
nd no doubt you thought her little speech to the police a generous and beautiful thing when she said angelically: “I do not wish to take this man into court and be the means of costing him his job. No doubt he had been drinking and was not himself. He has learned his lesson. I want to drop the whole thing and forget it.” Nice of her. But if any of you had taken the trouble to go deeper into the matter—to check, for instance, on the young lady’s name—you might have shouted less vehemently for Jeff Cardin’s hide. Mary Anderson, she said her name was. From out of town, way out of town—Wheeling, West Virginia. Living in a respectable rooming house on Norton Street, and looking for a job.

We checked all that, and it was phoney. No Mary Anderson had ever been known at the Wheeling address she gave us. And as for the Norton Street rooming house, she had resided there just four days, and was listed among the alumni when a couple of the boys went down, the day after the fracas, to ask her a few more pertinent questions.

In short, she pulled her little stunt and then flew the coop. But public indignation is a peculiar thing. Once aroused, it goes thundering along like a steamroller, and is as difficult to stop as a bull elephant with a bad temper.

Most of you didn’t read the follow-ups in the papers. Most of the papers, for that matter, didn’t lean very far over backward to print them, there being sensational war news on the front pages at the time. So, with an ear to the ground and an eye on the political horizon, the commissioner sent for me.

A fine man, the commissioner. Oh yes. The papers tell you so, and the papers never play politics. Oh my, no! We should all be thankful for having such an upright man at the head of our police department.

He fired a cigar and folded his hands over the balloon he calls a stomach. He cleared his throat. “Er—Cardin,” he said to me.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Er—about this business in the papers, Cardin. They’ve made a lot of it. It’s ridiculous, of course. We on the inside know that the whole thing was a put-up job. But—er—public opinion has to be handled with kid gloves, Cardin.”

I said: “I’m going to get that girl, commissioner, and when the papers print my picture again, the musical accompaniment will be in a different key.”

He cleared his throat. “Er—quite right, Cardin. Quite right, of course. But for the present—that is to say—you know, with elections in the offing—I suggest a short vacation.”

I said: “The quickest way to get rid of a bad smell, commissioner, is to throw open the windows. I don’t want any vacation. I want to clear this up.”

“Later, Cardin,” he said.

“But it’s my reputation you’re sending on a vacation! I’ve been a dick for ten years, commissioner. My rep is clean. I can’t let this thing drag on!”

“I’m sorry, Cardin,” he said, frowning at his cigar, “but I advise a vacation.” He cleared his throat for the third time. “The—er—the papers will call it a suspension, of course, but we on the inside will know what it really is, and that’s all that matters. I know best, Cardin.”

“This,” I said, “is final?”

“That’s right, Cardin.”

“Well,” I said, on my feet and glaring at him, my temper climbing like the mercury in a hot thermometer, “it isn’t. You’re not throwing Jeff Cardin to the wolves, not for politics or any other cheap reason!”

“Now, now, Cardin,” he said. “There are times when—”

“There are times when the stink in this department is more than a decent man can stand!” I snarled. “My resignation goes into effect right now. Good-day to you, commissioner, and to hell with you!”

I walked out.

They didn’t call it a resignation in the papers. They informed the general public, meaning you and you, that Detective Cardin had been relieved of further duty with the police department. The commissioner, sore with me, spread a layer of smelly ointment to the effect that the department must at all cost be kept free of any smudge of suspicion. “We have one of the finest police departments in the world,” he wrote. “Nothing ever has tarnished, or ever will be permitted to tarnish, its splendid reputation.”

“It serves him right, the heel,” said you and you and you. Now you know the truth.

I
didn’t expect any business, except perhaps some shady business, until the hue and cry died down. The thought occurred to me that maybe I should change the name, shedding my now odorous reputation along with it, but something else in me rebelled, and I’d be damned if I would.

So there it was on the door of my dingy office on the eighth floor of the Baker Building—
JEFF CARDIN, INVESTIGATIONS.
And there I was, cooling my heels and nursing my hate.

With only a paltry hundred dollars to my name, I couldn’t very well go combing the country for Mary Anderson, much as I wanted to, and I’d already exhausted all local leads that pointed even a flimsy finger in her direction. So that would have to wait.

My first visitor was a charming little old lady who wanted to know if this was the eighth floor or the ninth. I told her it was the eighth. She looked annoyed and asked where the stairs were. I walked her down to the elevators, put her on a car, received a nice “Thank you, young man,” for my trouble and went back to my brooding.