Стюарт Стерлинг - Collection of Stories

By the time Vine reached the end of the cleared ice, there was only one figure plunging through the drifts between him and shore.

It was a hundred feet further on, before he came across a dark body lying in the snow with out-flung arms. It was Vezel.

He was groaning in agony. The snow was flecked with crimson beneath his mouth.

Vine bent over him. The man was beyond speech. There wasn’t anything that could be done for him. And, anyway, the others would be there in a minute. The detective ran on, but not until he had made sure the black skate bag was not beneath the dying man’s body.

The girl was fifty yards ahead, but making slow progress through deeper snow-banks at the edge of the lake. Vine ran with short steps, knees high, gained rapidly.

Above, on the shore, loomed the forbidding hulk of an abandoned icehouse. Down from the door cut into the lakefront wall of the dilapidated wooden structure, ran a steeply inclined ice-trestle up which the frozen blocks had once been hauled, Ilma readied the foot of the trestle, turned at bay.

She crouched low in the snow, against the gloomy shadow of the icehouse. She was almost invisible. Vine got to the bank, dropped to his hands and knees, crawled toward her cautiously.

She waited until he was within point-blank range, emptied her pistol at him as fast as she could fire.

He counted the shots. When the magazine of her automatic was empty, he sprang up, raced silently toward her.

She dodged around the base of the trestle, ran lightly up it, her skates making the wooden ties resound hollowly.

He followed, went up more slowly, testing the ties cautiously before he threw his weight on them.

From above, she spat vicious curses at him. Once, he had to dodge the hurtling automatic she threw. He put his own gun away. He’d never shot at a woman in his life and he didn’t intend to start now.

“Why you not come close?” she taunted, halfway up. “You big, strong man. Not afraid, no?”

“Sure,” he gritted. “I’m scared stiff, Ilma — of those skates of yours. They’re too close to my skull. I don’t want to wind up the way Corinth and Rachau and that messenger at Chamonix did.”

There were frantic yells from below, now. Prouty and Lagand had reached the shore, had seen them.

Their arrival made her desperate. If she could reach that high platform there, get through that door!

Vine reached out to grab her ankle. There was a dull splintering of rotten wood, a nerve-shattering shriek.

Then, after a split-second of terrible silence, a fearful thud from below.

When the detective reached the ground, he was drenched with sweat, despite the bitter cold. Prouty and the only remaining member of the four from St. Moritz were kneeling beside the still body.

“Broke her neck,” mumbled the booking-agent.

“Mille tonnerre!” whispered Lagand. “This little one, she kill three men? Incredible, non!”

After a brief inspection to confirm Prouty’s verdict, Vine busied himself with the skate-bag. From it he drew a pair of small red-leather boots and a pair of tubular speed-skates. He got out the hacksaw.

“Never knew a figure skater to use this sort of skate,” he said, sawing steadily. “When I first discovered she had them, carried them with her, it puzzled me — a figure skater carrying an extra pair — of tubular skates. Then, when I saw Vezel kneeling to tie her laces, I realized how she could have killed Bill Corinth — and I knew where she could be hiding those diamonds. That was why she always kept those useless skates near her! She hadn’t used them. They’ve never been worn.

“That must have made Wolf suspicious first, that’s what he was trying to do with the tool kit in his room. He’d doped out where she’d hidden the loot, borrowed tools from the janitor at the club, stole this bag. He was ready to get to work when she crept in his room and drove that cold-chisel into his brain.”

The saw whined shrilly. The end of one of the tubular runners dropped onto the snow. Vine held up the skate. A twist of cotton batting showed inside the hollow tube. He pulled it out.

Something gleamed like ice against the snow. He stuffed the cotton back, stood up.

“Took Rachau a long time to dope out where she’d hidden these rocks. He must have been the one who tipped off the customs she was bringing in diamonds with blood on them. When Corinth cornered her at the Plaza, she tricked him into bending down to fix her shoelace, and then kicked a hole in his head with her other skate.”

“Sure,” Prouty said. “That’s about the only way you could hit a guy square on the top of his head, with a skate,”

“Corinth probably talked with Rachau, first, at the Plaza, to make sure the tip was straight. After he was sure, he must have gone right after Ilma. But he wouldn’t have known how the jewel messenger died, at Chamonix. So he didn’t guard against those deadly skates of hers.”

“But Jon,” murmured Lagand. “If he had known where these jewels were, would he not have tried to get them before?”

“Probably Vezel only got wise today. She’d been rattled. She showed more anxiety to keep the skates near her, and since her partner would know she never wore them, he’d get suspicious.”

Lagand sighed, wearily.

“At the last, I’m glad she does not suffer, greatly.”

“Who says she doesn’t,” Vine began. Then, at their stares of astonishment, he added, apologetically. “Sorry. I was thinking of another ‘she.’ I’ve got to go and send a wire.”

Black Mask, March 1942

Lieutenant Teccard rocked back in his swivel chair. His fingers gripped the shiny oak arm-pieces tightly. It was an instinctive movement to get as far away as possible from the thing on his desk. Ordinarily, his office in the headquarters building seemed large enough. Now, suddenly, it was oppressively small and close. He kept his eyes away from the long, glass tray on the flat-top, as he reached for the phone. “O.K. for Sergeant Dixon.”

The woman who came in wouldn’t have been noticed in the average Manhattan lunch-hour crowd. She was pretty, but she hadn’t worked hard at it. A man might not have paid particular attention to her as he passed her on the street, unless he happened to meet her glance. Her eyes were gray and curiously calm — as if they had seen a lot they hadn’t found amusing.

She wrinkled up her nose. “My God, Jerry! A man can live without food for three weeks and without water for three days! But you can’t last three minutes without air!”

Jerry Teccard shoved his brown felt back off a harassed forehead. “Light a cigarette if it gets you, Helen.” He indicated the roll of checkered oilcloth resting in the photographic tray. “You don’t have to turn yourself inside out, gandering at this. You can take the medical examiner’s word for it.”

Acting Detective-sergeant Helen Dixon, second grade, regarded him grimly.

“After that year I put in at the Forty-seventh Street station, it’ll take something to turn my stomach,” she declared.

He lifted one corner of the oilcloth cylinder. “What’s left of a woman’s thigh. After the wharf rats worked on it awhile.”

Her lips compressed a little, but none of the color left her face.

“Where’d it come in?”

“Twenty-third precinct. East Hundred and Fourth.” He consulted a report sheet. “James Boyle, probationer, found a child trying to salvage the oilcloth that had been tied around it with some string. Boyle’s beat takes him along the Harlem docks, foot of Ninety-eighth. This thing was on the tide flat at the side of the Ninety-eighth Street pier.”