Long Live the Dead (34 page)

With the gloves tucked carefully into my pocket, I went back to the house.

Edgar Standish was sitting on the piano-bench, glumly staring at the carpet. Someone had mercifully covered the dead girl with a shawl. Truett, parked in a chair, was saying to the cops:

“… unable to get in touch with her folks in Europe, so Mr. Standish generously offered to take her in. The young lady was definitely improving, gentlemen. I don’t for a moment believe this was done deliberately. It was a ghastly accident.”

“Guess again,” I said. “It was murder.”

Doctors don’t frighten easily. This one didn’t, anyway. He turned his head toward me, thinned his eyes a bit while staring at me, and then said: “I beg your pardon?”

I moved over to a chair and sat down. Grayson glared at me. I said: “In the first place, her name isn’t Grace Marvin. It’s Marge Something-or-other, and you know it. Moreover, if she has folks in Europe, they’re probably in the blackmail business, or in prison.”

I remember reading somewhere or other that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address met with a dead silence. My little speech won the same.

“What did she have on you, Doctor?” I asked.

He reacted to that. His face paled, and a space widened between the chair and his shoulder-blades. Then he shrugged, spread his hands in a gesture of bewilderment and said to Gray-son: “I’m afraid I don’t understand this man’s insinuations.”

“If you’ve got anything to say, Cardin,” Grayson snapped, “say it!”

“This girl and her boy-friend,” I said, “had some letters of vital importance to Doctor Truett. It’s a little involved. They began to put the pressure on Truett quite a while ago. He wasn’t the only one. They were really in the business.

“You wouldn’t remember it,” I said, favoring Grayson with a belittling smile, “but I was working on this blackmail setup just before my resignation. The gang evidently thought I was warmer than I actually was, because they went to a lot of trouble to put the skids under me. That is, Josie did. Then Josie skipped town, along with at least one other co-worker, leaving Miss Marvin and Nick with their hands full of the good doctor here.”

Compared with the vacuum that met this statement, the previous silence had been an Independence Day celebration.

“The trouble was,” I said, “Josie left in a hurry and took with her the letters. And the good doctor absolutely refused to play ball until the letters had been produced.”

T
he good doctor’s hands were wet with perspiration. “Well,” I said, “the letters arrived this morning. I’m turning them over to the commissioner.”

That did it. For one long moment Truett looked like a man watching the removal of his own appendix. Then he shuddered, shut his eyes and put his hands up to his face. And I knew the doctor was finished.

“What’s Miss Marvin’s real name, Doctor?” I asked him. “Marge what?”

“Margery,” he said. His voice belonged in one of those midnight radio dramas. “Margery Knott. She—used to be my nurse.”

This
was
something.

“Is there a ghost of a chance, Doctor,” I asked, hunching myself forward, “that the victims of this gang were all patients of yours?”

He nodded, refusing to look at me.

“Margery Knott had access to your files?”

He nodded again.

It’s really wonderful, how simple these things are—after you’ve solved them. For weeks I had tried in vain to find something that would tie those blackmail victims together, but blackmail is the meanest racket in the world to uncover, because those who get snared by it are never eager to talk. They prefer to pay up and shut up.

“Well, Doctor?” I said.

He thought I knew. He said helplessly, with a shuddering glance at those around him: “I made the mistake years ago, and she found out about it while she was working for me. She found the letters. God knows I should have destroyed them, but I hadn’t. She took them. Later on, I learned that she and her colleagues were blackmailing some of my patients. I tried to put a stop to it, but she had those letters to hold over my head. Then …”

“Then?” Grayson said, taking over.

“I suddenly realized that I had a hold over her, too. About six months ago, before any of this happened, she brought her brother to me—her brother Nick. Her brother was in a bad way that night. He told me he had been mixed up in a drunken brawl. I removed a bullet from his leg. There was nothing in the newspapers the following day about a drunken brawl, but there was an account of the wounding of a policeman in a gunbattle. I—I suppose I should have reported Nick’s wounds, but Miss Knott begged me not to, and I was quite fond of her at that time, and …” He sobbed a little. “It hardly matters now, does it?”

This was beginning to have angles. There were a couple of questions I wanted, to ask, but Truett went on with his recital.

“I kept that bullet,” he said. “Later, when she threatened me with the letters, I was able to fight back. I told her I would turn the bullet over to the police, with a statement concerning it, unless she handed over my letters. But she didn’t have

the letters.”

“Josie had them,” I said.

He nodded. “So I forced Miss Knott to come here to the Standishes until the letters could be turned over to me. It seemed the best way to keep an eye on her. I lied to the Standishes about her and brought her here, and told her that if she attempted to leave, I would go straight to the police. You see, we—we were playing a kind of game of blind man’s buff,” he explained eagerly.

Grayson said darkly through a scowl: “This is all very ducky, isn’t it?” Glaring at me, he added: “Where do you fit?”

“Standish hired me,” I said. “He thought the girl was really goofy and needed watching.”

“Standish hired you. Now isn’t that a coincidence, him hiring you of all people?”

“Think what you like,” I said. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t such an astounding coincidence, when you stopped to analyze it. Men like Edgar Standish are not usually chummy with a horde of private detectives. Needing one, they wouldn’t know where to turn.
My
name had been smeared all over the front pages. If you wanted a private dick and the papers told you you could pick up an ex-cop cheap, what do you think you would do?

“Well,” Grayson growled, still eyeing me, “you were yelling murder a while ago. What about it?

“Truett pushed her,” I said.

The doctor began to cry. And I almost felt sorry for him.

“These gloves,” I said, carefully removing them from my pocket, “came out of the compartment in his car. They’re dirty because he used then to wipe up his footprints.”

W
e all looked at Truett. He came out of his trance, began shaking his head like a ventriloquist’s dummy and said rapidly: “No. No, I didn’t. She was standing there and I came up behind her and she was startled when I spoke to her. I didn’t push her. I had no idea of pushing her. She was startled. She didn’t know anyone was there and when I spoke, she was frightened. She slipped.” He stood up. Every inch of the man’s body was shaking. “Come here,” he said. “I’ll show you.” With quick, mincing steps he went across the room to a window. We watched him. It was a French window and a big one. Truett opened it. “Come here,” he said. “I’ll show you. She was standing there at the edge and—”

Then he leaped.

It was a fool thing to do. Even if he had landed on his feet, in full flight, there’d have been a broad lawn in front of him, then the stone wall to hurdle, then nowhere to go except down the road. He didn’t land on his feet, though. He stumbled, lost his balance, and went to his knees.

Someone began shooting.

The good doctor staggered to his feet and clutched at his chest. He screamed. His legs turned to rubber and he fell, but he was finished before he fell, and the last two bullets of the assassin were not needed. Truett collapsed, his toes tapping the turf, and I looked past him and saw his murderer.

The fellow was in full flight behind the stone wall, racing as fast as his legs would carry him, toward the road.

Grayson, though a heel, was a first-class shot. He fired twice, and the fleeing man folded.

We walked over. It was Nick. I dropped to one knee beside him, put my hands on his shoulders and was staring into his face when he opened his eyes. I said gently: “You’re in for it now, chum.”

He could take it, that boy. He’d been hit where there was no getting over it—the red stain spreading into view on his shirt was directly under his heart. But he made a fist of one hand and weakly aimed it at my face, and the blow actually hurt.

“I have a date with Josie,” I said “and Boston is a pretty big town. You could save me some trouble by telling me where to

find her.”

“You go to hell,” he snarled.

“This wouldn’t have happened,” I told him, “if Josie had been on the level with you.”

“What?”

“She didn’t send those letters, chum. No doubt she figured they were much too valuable to be wasted on you and your sister. Your little stunt in the post office was unnecessary. The box was empty.”

His lips curled and he whispered an unprintable epithet.

“All for nothing,” I said, “you killed Truett. You might as well tell me. Where do I find her, chum?”

“Peterboro Street,” he snarled. “She has an apartment. Mildred Blainey is the name … the name she’s using. Peterboro Street …” His lip formed the number.

He died while we were toting him to the house.

Grayson put his chin out at me. “I don’t get this,” he said darkly. “Why’d this guy kill the doctor?”

I said: “He thought I had those letters. He figured the game was up and Truett’s next move would be to turn that bullet over to the police; in retaliation.”

“What do you mean, he
thought
you had the letters?”

“I haven’t them.”

“What?”

“It’s a funny thing,” I said,“but here we are, with most of this mess cleared up, and I still don’t know what Truett did to make himself a candidate for blackmail.” I gave him my best Sunday smirk. “Isn’t that odd?” I said, in a puzzled tone of voice.

He turned away and began talking to himself.

T
he end of the trail was in sight when I stepped into that apartment house on Peterboro Street and found the name Mildred Blainey in the list of tenants, but when I held a thumb against the bell, no one answered.

I had to round up the janitor, tell him a tall story about my being the girl’s uncle from Tuscaloosa. He finally decided to let me in.

The apartment was empty. The letters were in a suitcase, under a mess of soiled clothes. I read two or three of them and learned that the fatal mistake committed by Dr. Truett was an illegal operation.

For six hours I cooled my heels, awaiting Josie’s return. But when a key finally turned in the lock and the door opened, I found myself face to face with an officer of the law. He was a big, good-looking Irishman.

I was surprised. So was he. We talked it over and he informed me that Josie was in the jug. “Picked up,” he said, “for shoplifting, yesterday, and I’m just making a routine check. We found her address written out on a sales-slip in her purse.”

Half an hour later I was talking to her. “It’s all over,” I told her. “Nick’s dead, the doctor’s dead, the whole business is about to be spread out for the airing it needs. All I want from you is a statement about our little buggy-ride, the night you wore Marge’s scarf and very nearly wrecked my career and my reputation.”

Staring at me, she wet her lips and said mechanically: “Nick’s … dead?”

She couldn’t seem to believe that.

I nodded.

She went to pieces and I had to call the matron. It was the matron who got from her the statement I had wanted to get for a long time.

You’ll be reading that statement in the papers real soon, and unless the war takes some dazzling new turn, you’ll be reading it on page one. And a nice little story it will make, too.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Jefferson Cardin will go back to being a city detective. I sort of like this idea of being independent. And look at the publicity I’m getting.

So, if you want any murders unmuddled or a tail hung on your rich Uncle Abner, just look me up.

Published in April 1941. I’m not going to comment on this story. To do so might give it away, and I think it’s the best story in this collection. Never mind what else I was doing for the pulps at this time. I was a year away from doing my first novel,
Fishermen Four,
published by Dodd, Mead. And a year away from selling my first two American magazine stories, one of which, “Two Were Left,” has been reprinted more than 100 times in anthologies and schoolbooks. and in January 1944
The Saturday Evening Post
published the first of 43 stories of mine, an excerpt from one of five books I wrote as a correspondent in World War II. But you know something? I wish the paper shortage in that same war and the advent of pocket-books hadn’t killed off those grand old pulp magazines. They were great fun to read and to write for.

HBC

When a man knows there are killers after him that’s bad enough—but to be the unconscious clay-pigeon for a trio of sharpshooters—as Ed Corley was, knowing nothing of the why’s and wherefore’s that made him a target, then it’s really time to muster a miracle or two and take a lesson from the cat in adding extra lives to the ordinary span.

L
ink Latham was a big shot and looked it, wearing his two hundred pounds of beef as easily as he wore his transparent suspenders, his balloon-seated trousers, and the three-carat diamond on his left little finger. He paid no attention to the runt sidling up behind him.

Latham’s attention was centered in its entirety on the pool table against which he leaned, on the array of colored balls and the difficulty of the shot with which he was confronted. He considered himself good at this sort of thing. Difficult shots intrigued him. He seldom missed.

“Corley’s back,” the runt whispered, standing close behind him.

Latham grunted, “Don’t bother me!” and sighted across the cue ball, carefully, to the number twelve. The cue slid across his knuckles. The balls clicked. Number twelve lightly rubbed one of its neighbors, caromed off and plopped into the corner pocket. Not until then did the runt’s words strike home. Link Latham stiffened as though some part of his spine were a spring suddenly drawn taut.