The Essential Noir Bundle, page 177
Stumbling, staggering, he scrambled across the room.
Flora had a pair of guns—sprung suddenly in her hands. Her big body seemed to fill the room, as if by willpower she had become a giantess. She charged—straight at the guns Jack and Carey held—blotting the back door and the fleeing man from their fire.
A blur to one side was Andy MacElroy moving.
I had a hand on Jack’s gun arm.
“Don’t shoot,” I muttered in his ear.
Flora’s guns thundered together. But she was tumbling. Andy had crashed into her. Had thrown himself at her legs as a man would throw a boulder.
When Flora tumbled, Tom-Tom Carey stopped waiting.
His first bullet was sent so close past her that it clipped her curled yellow hair. But it went past—caught Papadopoulos just as he went through the door. The bullet took him low in the back—smeared him out on the floor.
Carey fired again—again—again—into the prone body.
“It’s no use,” I growled. “You can’t make him any deader.”
He chuckled and lowered his guns.
“Four into a hundred and six.” All his ill-humor, his grimness was gone. “That’s twenty-six thousand, five hundred dollars each of those slugs was worth to me.”
Andy and Mickey had wrestled Flora into submission and were hauling her up off the floor.
I looked from them back to the swarthy man, muttering, “It’s not all over yet.”
“No?” He seemed surprised. “What next?”
“Stay awake and let your conscience guide you,” I replied, and turned to the Counihan youngster. “Come along, Jack.”
I led the way out through the window and across the porch, where I leaned against the railing. Jack followed and stood in front of me, his gun still in his hand, his face white and tired from nervous tension. Looking over his shoulder, I could see the room we had just quit. Andy and Mickey and Flora sitting between then on a sofa. Carey stood a little to one side, looking curiously at Jack and me. We were in the middle of the band of light that came through the open window. We could see inside—except that Jack’s back was that way—and could be seen from there, but our talk couldn’t be overheard unless we made it loud.
All that was as I wanted it.
“Now tell me about it,” I ordered Jack.
“Well, I found the open window,” the boy began.
“I know all that part,” I cut in. “You came in and told your friends—Papadopoulos and Flora—about the girl’s escape, and that Carey and I were coming. You advised them to make out you had captured them single-handed. That would draw Carey and me in. With you unsuspected behind us, it would be easy for the three of you to grab the two of us. After that you could stroll down the road and tell Andy I had sent you for the girl. That was a good scheme—except that you didn’t know I had Dick and Mickey up my sleeve, didn’t know I wouldn’t let you get behind me. But all that isn’t what I want to know. I want to know why you sold us out—and what you think you’re going to do now.”
“Are you crazy?” His young face was bewildered, his young eyes horrified. “Or is this some—?”
“Sure, I’m crazy,” I confessed. “Wasn’t I crazy enough to let you lead me into that trap in Sausalito? But I wasn’t too crazy to figure it out afterward. I wasn’t too crazy to see that Ann Newhall was afraid to look at you. I’m not crazy enough to think you could have captured Papadopoulos and Flora unless they wanted you to. I’m crazy—but in moderation.”
Jack laughed—a reckless young laugh, but too shrill. His eyes didn’t laugh with mouth and voice. While he was laughing his eyes looked from me to the gun in his hand and back to me.
“Talk, Jack,” I pleaded huskily, putting a hand on his shoulder. “For God’s sake why did you do it?”
The boy shut his eyes, gulped, and his shoulders twitched. When his eyes opened they were hard and glittering and full of merry hell. “The worst part of it,” he said harshly, moving his shoulder from under my hand, “is that I wasn’t a very good crook, was I? I didn’t succeed in deluding you.”
I said nothing.
“I suppose you’ve earned your right to the story,” he went on after a little pause. His voice was consciously monotonous, as if he was deliberately keeping out of it every tone or accent that might seem to express emotion. He was too young to talk naturally. “I met Ann Newhall three weeks ago, in my own home. She had gone to school with my sisters, though I had never met her before. We knew each other at once, of course—I knew she was Nancy Regan, she knew I was a Continental operative.
“So we went off by ourselves and talked things over. Then she took me to see Papadopoulos. I liked the old boy and he liked me. He showed me how we together could accumulate unheard-of piles of wealth. So there you are. The prospect of all that money completely devastated my morals. I told him about Carey as soon as I had heard from you, and I led you into that trap, as you say. He thought it would be better if you stopped bothering us before you found the connection between Newhall and Papadopoulos.
“After that failure, he wanted me to try again, but I refused to have a hand in any more fiascos. There’s nothing sillier than a murder that doesn’t come off. Ann Newhall is quite innocent of everything except folly. I don’t think she has the slightest suspicion that I have had any part in the dirty work beyond refraining from having everybody arrested. That, my dear Sherlock, about concludes the confession.”
I had listened to the boy’s story with a great show of sympathetic attentiveness. Now I scowled at him and spoke accusingly, but still not without friendliness.
“Stop spoofing! The money Papadopoulos showed you didn’t buy you. You met the girl and were too soft to turn her in. But your vanity—your pride in looking at yourself as a pretty cold proposition—wouldn’t let you admit it even to yourself. You had to have a hard-boiled front. So you were meat to Papadopoulos’ grinder. He gave you a part you could play to yourself—a super-gentleman-crook, a mastermind, a desperate suave villain, and all that kind of romantic garbage. That’s the way you went, my son. You went as far as possible beyond what was needed to save the girl from the hoosegow—just to show the world, but chiefly yourself, that you were not acting through sentimentality, but according to your own reckless desires. There you are. Look at yourself.”
Whatever he saw in himself—what I had seen or something else—his face slowly reddened, and he wouldn’t look at me. He looked past me at the distant road.
I looked into the lighted room beyond him. Tom-Tom Carey had advanced to the center of the floor, where he stood watching us. I jerked a corner of my mouth at him—a warning.
“Well,” the boy began again, but he didn’t know what to say after that. He shuffled his feet and kept his eyes from my face.
I stood up straight and got rid of the last trace of my hypocritical sympathy.
“Give me your gun, you lousy rat!” I snarled at him.
He jumped back as if I had hit him. Craziness writhed in his face. He jerked his gun chest-high.
Tom-Tom Carey saw the gun go up. The swarthy man fired twice. Jack Counihan was dead at my feet.
Mickey Linehan fired once. Carey was down on the floor, bleeding from the temple.
I stepped over Jack’s body, went into the room, knelt beside the swarthy man. He squirmed, tried to say something, died before he could get it out. I waited until my face was straight before I stood up.
Big Flora was studying me with narrowed gray eyes. I stared back at her.
“I don’t get it all yet,” she said slowly, “but if you—”
“Where’s Angel Grace?” I interrupted.
“Tied to the kitchen table,” she informed me, and went on with her thinking aloud. “You’ve dealt a hand that—”
“Yeah,” I said sourly, “I’m another Papadopoulos.”
Her big body suddenly quivered. Pain clouded her handsome brutal face. Two tears came out of her lower eyelids.
I’m damned if she hadn’t loved the old scoundrel!
It was after eight in the morning when I got back to the city. I ate breakfast and then went up to the Agency, where I found the Old Man going through his morning mail.
“It’s all over,” I told him. “Papadopoulos knew Nancy Regan was Taylor Newhall’s heiress. When he needed a hiding place after the bank jobs flopped, he got her to take him down to the Newhall country place. He had two holds on her. She pitied him as a misused old duffer, and she was—even if innocently—an accomplice after the fact in the stick-ups.
“Pretty soon Papa Newhall had to go to Mexico on business. Papadopoulos saw a chance to make something. If Newhall was knocked off, the girl would have millions—and the old thief knew he could take them away from her. He sent Barrows down to the border to buy the murder from some Mexican bandits. Barrows put it over, but talked too much. He told a girl in Nogales that he had to go back ‘to Frisco to collect plenty from an old Greek,’ and then he’d return and buy her the world. The girl passed the news onto Tom-Tom Carey. Carey put a lot of twos together and got at least a dozen for an answer. He followed Barrows up here.
“Angel Grace was with him the morning he called on Barrows here—to find out if his ‘old Greek’ really was Papadopoulos, and where he could be found. Barrows was too full of morphine to listen to reason. He was so dope-deadened that even after the dark man began to reason with a knife-blade he had to whittle Barrows all up before he began to feel hurt. The carving sickened Angel Grace. She left, after vainly trying to stop Carey. And when she read in the afternoon papers what a finished job he had made of it, she tried to commit suicide, to stop the images from crawling around in her head.
“Carey got all the information Barrows had, but Barrows didn’t know where Papadopoulos was hiding. Papadopoulos learned of Carey’s arrival—you know how he learned. He sent Arlie to stop Carey. Carey wouldn’t give the barber a chance—until the swarthy man began to suspect Papadopoulos might be at the Newhall place. He drove down there, letting Arlie follow. As soon as Arlie discovered his destination, Arlie closed in, hell-bent on stopping Carey at any cost. That was what Carey wanted. He gunned Arlie, came back to town, got hold of me, and took me down to help wind things up.
“Meanwhile, Angel Grace, in the cooler, had made friends with Big Flora. She knew Flora but Flora didn’t know her. Papadopoulos had arranged a crush-out for Flora. It’s always easier for two to escape than one. Flora took the Angel along, took her to Papadopoulos. The Angel went for him, but Flora knocked her for a loop.
“Flora, Angel Grace and Ann Newhall, alias Nancy Regan, are in the county jail,” I wound up. “Papadopoulos, Tom-Tom Carey and Jack Counihan are dead.”
I stopped talking and lighted a cigarette, taking my time, watching cigarette and match carefully throughout the operation. The Old Man picked up a letter, put it down without reading it, picked up another.
“They were killed in the course of making arrests?” His mild voice held nothing but its usual unfathomable politeness.
“Yes. Carey killed Papadopoulos. A little later he shot Jack. Mickey—not knowing—not knowing anything except that the dark man was shooting at Jack and me—we were standing apart talking—shot and killed Carey.” The words twisted around my tongue, wouldn’t come out straight. “Neither Mickey nor Andy know that Jack—Nobody but you and I know exactly what the thing—exactly what Jack was doing. Flora Brace and Ann Newhall did know, but if we say he was acting on orders all the time, nobody can deny it.”
The Old Man nodded his grandfatherly face and smiled, but for the first time in the years I had known him I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that if Jack had come through alive we would have had the nasty choice between letting him go free or giving the Agency a black eye by advertising the fact that one of our operatives was a crook.
I threw away my cigarette and stood up. The Old Man stood also, and held out a hand to me.
“Thank you,” he said.
I took his hand, and I understood him, but I didn’t have anything I wanted to confess—even by silence.
“It happened that way,” I said deliberately. “I played the cards so we would get the benefit of the breaks—but it just happened that way.”
He nodded, smiling benignantly.
“I’m going to take a couple of weeks off,” I said from the door. I felt tired, washed out.
NIGHTMARE TOWN
A Ford—whitened by desert travel until it was almost indistinguishable from the dust-clouds that swirled around it—came down Izzard’s Main Street. Like the dust, it came swiftly, erratically, zigzagging the breadth of the roadway.
A small woman—a girl of twenty in tan flannel—stepped into the street. The wavering Ford missed her by inches, missing her at all only because her backward jump was bird-quick. She caught her lower lip between white teeth, dark eyes flashed annoyance at the rear of the passing machine, and she essayed the street again.
Near the opposite curb the Ford charged down upon her once more. But turning had taken some of its speed. She escaped it this time by scampering the few feet between her and the sidewalk ahead.
Out of the moving automobile a man stepped. Miraculously he kept his feet, stumbling, sliding, until an arm crooked around an iron awning-post jerked him into an abrupt halt. He was a large man in bleached khaki, tall, broad, and thick-armed; his gray eyes were bloodshot; face and clothing were powdered heavily with dust. One of his hands clutched a thick, black stick, the other swept off his hat, and he bowed with exaggerated lowness before the girl’s angry gaze.
The bow completed, he tossed his hat carelessly into the street, and grinned grotesquely through the dirt that masked his face—a grin that accented the heaviness of a begrimed and hair-roughened jaw.
“I beg y’r par’on,” he said. “ ’F I hadn’t been careful I believe I’d a’most hit you. ’S unreli’ble, tha’ wagon. Borr’ed it from an engi—eng’neer. Don’t ever borrow one from eng’neer. They’re unreli’ble.”
The girl looked at the place where he stood as if no one stood there, as if, in fact, no one had ever stood there, turned her small back on him, and walked very precisely down the street.
He stared after her with stupid surprise in his eyes until she had vanished through a doorway in the middle of the block. Then he scratched his head, shrugged, and turned to look across the street, where his machine had pushed its nose into the red-brick side wall of the Bank of Izzard and now shook and clattered as if in panic at finding itself masterless.
“Look at the son-of-a-gun,” he exclaimed.
A hand fastened upon his arm. He turned his head, and then, though he stood a good six feet himself, had to look up to meet the eyes of the giant who held his arm.
“We’ll take a little walk,” the giant said.
The man in bleached khaki examined the other from the tips of his broad-toed shoes to the creased crown of his black hat, examined him with a whole-hearted admiration that was unmistakable in his red-rimmed eyes. There were nearly seven massive feet of the speaker. Legs like pillars held up a great hogshead of a body, with wide shoulders that sagged a little, as if with their own excessive weight. He was a man of perhaps forty-five, and his face was thick-featured, phlegmatic, with sunlines around small light eyes—the face of a deliberate man.
“My God, you’re big!” the man in khaki exclaimed when he had finished his examination; and then his eyes brightened. “Let’s wrestle. Bet you ten bucks against fifteen I can throw you. Come on!”
The giant chuckled deep in his heavy chest, took the man in khaki by the nape of the neck and an arm, and walked down the street with him.
Steve Threefall awakened without undue surprise at the unfamiliarity of his surroundings as one who has awakened in strange places before. Before his eyes were well open he knew the essentials of his position. The feel of the shelf-bunk on which he lay and the sharp smell of disinfectant in his nostrils told him that he was in jail. His head and his mouth told him that he had been drunk; and the three-day growth of beard on his face told him he had been very drunk.
As he sat up and swung his feet down to the floor details came back to him. The two days of steady drinking in Whitetufts on the other side of the Nevada-California line, with Harris, the hotel proprietor, and Whiting, an irrigation engineer. The boisterous arguing over desert travel, with his own Gobi experience matched against the American experiences of the others. The bet that he could drive from Whitetufts to Izzard in daylight with nothing to drink but the especially bitter white liquor they were drinking at the time. The start in the grayness of imminent dawn, in Whiting’s Ford, with Whiting and Harris staggering down the street after him, waking the town with their drunken shouts and roared-out mocking advice, until he had reached the desert’s edge. Then the drive through the desert, along the road that was hotter than the rest of the desert, with—He chose not to think of the ride. He had made it, though—had won the bet. He couldn’t remember the amount of the latter.
“So you’ve come out of it at last?” a rumbling voice inquired.
The steel-slatted door swung open and a man filled the cell’s door. Steve grinned up at him. This was the giant who would not wrestle. He was coatless and vestless now, and loomed larger than before. One suspender strap was decorated with a shiny badge that said MARSHAL.
“Feel like breakfast?” he asked.
“I could do things to a can of black coffee,” Steve admitted.
“All right. But you’ll have to gulp it. Judge Denvir is waiting to get a crack at you, and the longer you keep him waiting, the tougher it’ll be for you.”
The room in which Tobin Denvir, J.P., dealt justice was a large one on the third floor of a wooden building. It was scantily furnished with a table, an ancient desk, a steel engraving of Daniel Webster, a shelf of books sleeping under the dust of weeks, a dozen uncomfortable chairs, and half as many cracked and chipped china cuspidors.
The judge sat between desk and table, with his feet on the latter. They were small feet, and he was a small man. His face was filled with little irritable lines, his lips were thin and tight, and he had the bright, lidless eyes of a bird.
