Эрл Гарднер - The Adventures of Paul Pry

Inspector Quigley sighed.

“You,” he said, “will be pushing up daisies if you keep on.”

Paul Pry merely laughed.

The newspapers made much of the recovery of the Goldcrest diamonds. There was, it seemed, a great deal of credit due to Inspector Quigley. Also there was credit in an undisclosed amount due to an amateur who had posed as George Crosby, a gem collector, and trapped the criminals into dealing with him.

Unfortunately, the criminals had escaped, but the police expected to make arrests. The reward money would be paid. The necklace had been recovered.

Paul Pry read the papers and chuckled. Mugs Magoo read them and grunted. Inspector Quigley read them and a satisfied smile oozed from the corners of his mouth. At his palatial residence in the exclusive suburban district, Benjamin Franklin Gilvray, known in the underworld as Big Front Gilvray, read the papers and cursed.

Upon the table in front of him reposed one paste imitation necklace, five rolls of bills. Each roll of bills was backed by a fifty-dollar bank note. The interior of each roll consisted of fifty one-dollar bills. The total was the exact amount Big Front Gilvray’s gang had to divide as the result of a carefully planned coup.

Big Front Gilvray drew a piece of paper to him. Using his left hand, a coarse pencil, and printing the words so they would not betray him, he wrote a message to Paul Pry. The message read:

I KNOW NOW THE GUY TO DEAL WITH. YOU BEEN DROPPING MONKEY WRENCHES IN MY MACHINERY LONG ENOUGH AND YOU’RE GOING TO PUSH UP DAISIES.

Big Front Gilvray summoned a member of his gang.

“See that this gets slipped under the door of this guy Pry’s apartment,” he said. “We’ll give him a chance to get out of town.”

The gangster’s face distorted with rage.

“You just say the word, boss, and we’ll put him on the spot and—”

“No,” said Big Front Gilvray. “We’ve always avoided the rough stuff, and we’ll give this guy a break. But it’s a temptation to ventilate him with a Tommy. Think of all the trouble we went to!”

The other man’s face purpled.

“God yes! We took moving pictures of the damned butler so we could study his every gesture. We had Delano strutting around the streets copying his walk. We had to plant Mabel in the house to slip the drug in the cocktail. We had to—”

“Shut up!” snapped Gilvray. “Get started.”

The subordinate choked off his words and got started.

Precisely two hours later a collect telegram came for B F Gilvray. Thinking it related to some of his numerous liquor shipments, the arch-gangster paid the toll, receipted for the telegram and slitted the yellow envelope.

His incredulous eyes read the answer to his anonymous note.

THANKS FOR THE REWARD. YOU ARE A GREAT MEAL TICKET. PULL SOMETHING ELSE, I NEED THE DOUGH.

“Quick, get a squad here,” Paul Pry breathed into the transmitter. “There’s a gangster hiding in my clothes closet with a machine gun, waiting to shoot me.” And even as he spoke he stared straight into the empty closet. No, Paul Pry wasn’t cuckoo. His eyes were glittering slits of concentration as he laid the beginnings of his crafty trap.

Paul Pry’s piercing eyes stared into the glassy orbs of “Mugs” Magoo, the man who never forgot a face.

“So I’m to be put on the spot, eh, Mugs?”

Mugs Magoo, one-armed, ragged, unshaven, reached for the bottle of whiskey. His glassy eyes never left Paul Pry’s face.

“I’ll say! I warned you, warned you fifty times. Now it’s come, just like I said it would.”

Paul Pry crossed the room to a closet which was filled with drums. He selected a favourite, a Hopi ceremonial drum, sat down with the wooden cylinder between his knees and tapped the taut rawhide with a stick of juniper at the end of which was a padded ball of buckskin.

There boomed forth a muffled pulsation of sound, a deep, resonant sound in which there was mingled a vibration of that which is utterly savage and untamed.

“Warned me?” he asked, almost dreamily.

“I’ll say! Not once but fifty times. Remember, before that last job I told you. I was sitting right here in this room, and I told you if you kept on monkeying with ‘Big Front’ Gilvray, he’d have you bumped. And what did you do? Went out and copped the Goldcrest necklace after the Gilvray gang had spent weeks trying to pull the job. You got Inspector Quigley to turn in the necklace for the reward, but that didn’t fool Gilvray none. He knew who upset his apple cart.”

Paul Pry ceased his drumming and grinned. There was something boyishly appealing about that grin, yet his eyes were hard as twin diamonds.

“And Gilvray sent me a note telling me I’d soon be pushing daisies,” he said.

“I’ll say!” agreed Mugs Magoo, without enthusiasm. “Why you couldn’t have pulled your stuff with different gangs is more than I know. But you had to keep after Big Front Gilvray. Every time he pulled a job you slicked him out of the sway and copped a reward. No crook’s going to stand for that racket.”

And Mugs Magoo, shifting his glassy gaze from Paul Pry’s face to the whiskey bottle, hesitated, reached toward the bottle, sighed, withdrew his hand, sighed again and grabbed the bottle.

Paul Pry, his diamond eyes unblinking, snapped a question at his accomplice.

“Precisely,” he demanded, “what is the reason for your latest prophecy of doom?”

Mugs Magoo poured the whiskey into the glass.

“‘Woozy’ Wiker,” he said, then, after an interval, added, “from Chicago.”

Paul Pry laughed, and his laugh contained no note of apprehension. It was the laugh of one who derives nothing but enjoyment from life.

“Woozy Wiker? Really, Mugs, your friends do have the most delightful names! First it’s Benjamin Franklin Gilvray, who’s known as Big Front Gilvray because he likes to throw a big front. Now it’s Woozy Wiker! How does the estimable Mr. Wiker get his nickname?”

Mugs Magoo shook his head doggedly.

“Go ahead and laugh if you want to. I’ll tell the undertaker to pinch up your cheeks into a grin so you’ll look natural.”

Paul Pry’s laugh died into a chuckle.

“Come on, Mugs, be a sport. Have another drink if you must, but tell me about Woozy Wiker, from Chicago.”

Mugs Magoo regarded the whiskey bottle with a dour eye, sighed, shook his head, gazed at his empty glass, and then shifted his eyes to Paul Pry’s face.

“Woozy Wiker puts ’em on the spot,” he said. “He can pretend he’s drunk better than any guy in the world. When he’s working up a job he likes to act like he’s plastered. But he’s deadly. He bumped off Harry Higley, though they never proved it on him. He got Martha the Moll on the spot after she was suspected of telling the police all about the Dugan murder. They never even arrested him for that, but they know.”

Paul Pry tapped a few gentle notes on the drum.

“And now Big Front Gilvray has sent for him?”

“Yeah. He’s here. I seen him on the street this morning. Him an’ Gilvray was together. I tell you the Gilvray gang’s getting desperate. They used to be high-class workers that went in for slick stuff. You’ve been copping the gravy from their jobs and now they’ve got violent.”

Paul Pry nodded cheerfully.

“And they got Woozy Wiker, the one man who can pretend to be woozy, eh, Mugs?”

“I’ll say! And that ain’t all they’ve got. Did you read about the Marple hold-up?”

“Marple — Marple — let’s see, Mugs, wasn’t that the hold-up that was pulled yesterday afternoon? They killed an officer, I believe.”

Mugs Magoo sighed as he glanced at the whiskey bottle, then at his empty glass, and turned toward Paul Pry.