Brett Halliday - Black Mask Magazine (Vol. 27, No. 2 — September 1945)

“You’re not very bright, Sprigley. You said Howard told you this afternoon that I was a detective. Howard himself didn’t know that till early this evening when he listened in on the dictaphone — and he wouldn’t have told you.”

Haenigson stood up. “Let’s go. Coming Smith?”

“Not for about a week,” replied Cellini. “I’m going to take Howard’s Cure in reverse.”

“You and me both,” cooed Ivy Collins.

It wasn’t nice to look at, and come to think of it, I don’t really know why I had to look at it. I guess it was just one of those things a cop is supposed to do. I’d been sent all the way from the attorney general’s office at Capital City, to Midtown to investigate the Ed Ditson case, and taking a look at his corpse seemed a routine thing to do.

Not that looking at it told me anything I hadn’t learned from reading the papers. They’d said that Ditson’s body had fallen from the twelfth floor of the Maramoor Hotel, and that meant a messy corpse. The papers had also described how the body had fallen into a parked convertible. A girl, Sheila Brown, had been sitting in the convertible, and that meant that her body wouldn’t be nice to look at, either.

“Was she smashed up as bad as this?” I asked, indicating what was left of Ditson. Doc Barrett, the county coroner, shook his head.

“No, not nearly so much. Ditson struck her a glancing blow. It was his falling across the car door that practically cut him in two like that. Sheila’s family insisted on having the body right away, and I saw no reason to object. A whole undertaking establishment has been working on her trying to fix her up for the funeral.”

“You knew her, did you?”

“Oh, yes. Sheila was a lovely girl. One of the most striking brunettes I’ve ever seen. Fine family. Lots of money. It’s just a damn shame that this thing had to happen. Ditson I have no sympathy for. If he wanted to take his own life, O.K. Why did he have to take Sheila’s too?”

I said I didn’t know why things like that had to happen and gestured to Barrett that he should shove Ditson back into the cooler. He did, and we went on out of the morgue to my car. Maybe you wonder why a suicide rated an investigation from the office of the attorney general. The answer to that one was available in the headlines of not only the local papers but all those in the state. Ditson’s dive from his hotel window had busted wide open the whole gambling racket in the state.

“As near as I can gather from the stuff in the papers,” I told Barrett as I drove away, “Ditson came over from beyond the state line with thirty thousand dollars in his kick that he’d made out of selling his real estate holdings. So his first stop after he gets here is the Silver Dollar. Four hours later the thirty grand was gone. Right?”

“I don’t think those facts are in dispute, Mr. Corbett. Everybody knows about the Silver Dollar, and it’s known that Ditson did have that much money on him when he arrived in town. He certainly didn’t have any on him when he made his dive. And there wasn’t any money left behind in his hotel room.”

“What kind of cretin-brains are running the gambling in this town?” I asked. “If they’d used a couple ounces of sense, Ditson would never have committed suicide, and the fat wouldn’t be in the fire. Ditson’s death has made so much stink that not only is gambling battened down tight in Midtown, but there’s nothing open in the entire state.”

Barrett nodded. “But it’ll blow over. When the heat’s off, maybe three or four months from now, everything, including the Silver Dollar, will be open again.”

“Sure, but in the meantime the racket won’t take in a five-dollar bill. I’d think the lame brains running the set-up in this town would have been able to figure out with pencil and paper that it would be cheaper to give Ditson back his thirty grand and quiet his beet Especially when he’d advertised in the newspapers that he was going to do the Dutch.”

“Yes, Mr. Corbett, I agree with you. But I’m certainly not worrying about the racket people in this town. I for one am glad this thing has brought the situation out into the open. I hope you do something about it. The local authorities won’t. That’s why the Reform Committee went to the attorney general’s office.”

I stopped for a red light and gave Barrett a look out of the corner of my eye. He was nearly forty — he looked intelligent, and he should have known better.

“Look here, Doc, you said yourself that after the heat was off, all the joints would open up again. Or words to that effect.”

“But I meant that’s what would happen under normal conditions, Mr. Corbett. But conditions aren’t normal. The tragic death of Sheila Brown, a lovely girl from one of our best families, has aroused public indignation against the rackets. I have great hopes for you, Mr. Corbett. I’m sure you’ll get the goods on Spain Westfall, the man at the head of all the rackets. He’s the one really responsible for Sheila Brown’s death.”

I shifted gears and got through the intersection.

“Suppose I do get the goods on Westfall? So he gets a couple of years in the pen. Then one of two things happens. Either he keeps his fingers on the controls or somebody else moves in and takes over. Three months after he’s said hello to the warden, the town’s going full blast again.”

“You are very cynical, Mr. Corbett.”

“The hell I am. I’m just practical. People will always gamble. They’ll gamble probably a little bit more so long as it’s a crime. And it probably always will be a crime in our state because two powerful classes of people will keep the anti-gambling laws on the books. I mean the church people and the racket people, both in and out of uniform.”

Barrett looked horrified. “But certainly you can’t mean that you favor legalizing gambling any more than you favor abolishing the laws against the use of narcotics!”

“Oh, but I do! There’s a difference between gambling and using drugs. People have no instinct to use drugs. But they do have a mania for any form of gambling, and the only sensible solution is to let them gamble legally. Then their gambling can be controlled, and it won’t be in the hands of a slimy bunch of crooks. And law enforcement officers won’t be working for the same slimy bunch. Now don’t pretend that any gambling joint can stay open five minutes if it isn’t paying off to the local law!”

“I’m not pretending any such thing,” Barrett said earnestly. “But I do think that the pressure of righteous public indignation can prevail over dishonest policemen.”

“Sure it can, but not for very long stretches. The racket boys know that — they merely crawl back under their rocks till it’s safe to come out. The point is they always come out.”

Barrett sighed deeply, and I let it go at that. I dropped him off at his office, then cut across to police headquarters. I’d already introduced myself there and had gotten a colder reception than a petticoat salesman at a nudist colony. It seemed the Chief was in northern Michigan for his health, and the place had been left in charge of a captain named Hinchman.

Hinchman looked up sourly when I appeared in his office.

“Well, the boy wonder is back again! I suppose you’ve found out by this time that Ditson wasn’t any suicide at all but that he was pushed out of that window at the Maramoor!” Hinchman stood about six-feet-four, and he had the weight to go with the height. He looked rugged and tough, and something in his eyes indicated that he could teach a Jap when it came to low blows. But I promised myself that before I left the corporate limits of Midtown, I’d hit Hinchman at least once.