Эрл Гарднер - The Adventures of Paul Pry

Paul Pry smiled.

“Yes, inspector, you’re right. This is slick and clean. The location of the suitcase will be telephoned to you anonymously at precisely three minutes after midnight tonight. You can still make the morning papers with it.”

“Why at three minutes after midnight?” asked Inspector Oakley.

“So that you can have a witness or two present to verify your statement that the information was telephoned in from an undercover man or a stool pigeon, as you may prefer to make the explanation.”

Inspector Oakley shook hands.

Benjamin Franklin Gilvray occupied rather a pretentious dwelling in the more or less exclusive residential district. A well-kept lawn surrounded his house. The arch-gangster found that it was well to keep up a front, particularly during these troubled times when so many of his deals went sour.

He lay in his soft bed, covered by blankets of the most virgin wool, his pillow a mass of wrinkles where he had been tossing around and turning during the night. The morning sun was seeping in through the windows.

Big Front Gilvray had not slept well.

A hoarse combination of sound came from the front of the house. He waited for silence, tried to doze off again, but the sound was repeated.

He arose angrily, and flung up the curtain.

What the hell was the matter with the boys that they let things like this happen? They knew he wanted silence.

He looked out into the pale sunlight and saw a goose, tethered with a string to a peg driven in the lawn. The goose was strutting about with a neck crooked in suspicious uncertainty, a chest thrown well out, and a tail that wiggled from side to side with every web-footed stride.

To the neck of the goose was attached a metal band and from this band dangled a piece of paper.

Big Front Gilvray sounded the alarm.

Two choppers swung machine guns into place. The goose might or might not be a trap. He might carry an infernal machine for all they knew. The machine guns cut loose.

Bits of sod and dirt flew up from the lawn about the tethered goose. Then, as the guns centred, there was a burst of feathers, and the bird dropped into a limp heap.

Covered by one of the machine guns, a gangster sprinted out on the lawn, retrieved the dead bird, brought it into the house.

It was an ordinary goose. About its neck, attached to the metal band, was a bit of paper upon which was the message Big Front Gilvray had come to hate with a bitter hatred that transformed him from man to savage.

DEAR GOOSIE. THANKS FOR ANOTHER GOLDEN EGG.

The message was signed with two initials — P. P.

And the morning paper which reposed on the front porch of the big mansion carried screaming headlines announcing that Inspector Oakley would collect a twenty thousand dollar reward for the recovery of a third of a million dollars in negotiable bonds.

Big Front Gilvray, his anger transcending the bounds of sanity, grabbed the torn, bloody carcass of the bird and flung it across the room. It thudded to the wall with a splash of red, and a fluttering shower of feathers drifted through the room.

Big Front Gilvray tore the paper into small bits and stamped upon them. His gangsters looked at one another in consternation. The chief was usually so suavely certain of himself that to see him like this caused them to lose confidence and respect.

“Get that damned dude. Get him on the spot!” yelled Big Front Gilvray.

But Paul Pry, peacefully sleeping, assured that his bank account would be augmented by another ten thousand dollars, was beyond being troubled by the rumbled threats of the gangster.

As Inspector Oakley had so aptly remarked, the deal was “slick and clean”.

Against gangdom’s slickest pair “Mugs” Magoo had warned him, yet deliberately Paul Pry had laid his plans. Did he have nine lives, nine charmed lives that he dared disregard all warning — dared overstep hell’s danger signal unafraid?

Paul Pry noticed that the street seemed strangely deserted, and attributed the fact to a mere temporary lull in traffic.

He glanced at the opposite sidewalk where “Mugs” Magoo, ex-camera-eye man for the metropolitan police, was crouched against the wall of a bank building.

Mugs Magoo was waving his hand in a series of slow circles. That was the signal of danger — the danger sign that Paul Pry had instructed his lieutenant was to be used only in the event circumstances necessitated a hasty retreat.

It would, of course, have been the part of wisdom to have heeded that signal, for Mugs Magoo knew the underworld as perhaps no other living mortal. For years he had been on the force, merely tabulating crooks, filing their faces away in that card-index memory of his. Then a political upheaval had lost him his job; an accident had lost him his right arm at the shoulder; and, he had become a drifter.

Right at present he was taking the part of a cripple, selling pencils. His hat, half filled with pencils, and with just a few coins in the bottom, was balanced on the palm of his left hand. His face was covered with a two days’ growth of greyish stubble, and his glassy eyes seemed utterly uninterested in life.

But, as a matter of fact, Mugs Magoo catalogued the underworld as it flowed past, on the side street that was to the gangster what Wall Street was to the financier. And Mugs’ hand, making signals with the hat, checked off the gangsters as they passed and relayed the information to Paul Pry.

The danger signals increased in intensity.

But Paul Pry was curious. His eyes were diamond hard, and there was a taut alertness about his well-knit figure that showed he had seen and interpreted the signal. Otherwise he might have been merely a well-dressed lounger, idling away the late evening on the city’s streets.

A big car rolled around the corner, purred smoothly to the kerb, on the same side as that occupied by Paul Pry. The door opened, and a woman stepped to the pavement.

Paul Pry made his living by his wits. He loved excitement, and he had no mental perspective when it came to courting danger. Lately he had made his money, and a very great deal of money, through the simple process of shaking down gangsters, matching his wits against their brute force.

And Paul Pry had learned from bitter experience that gangsters are very resentful indeed, and wont to show their resentment with pellets which are belched from a machine gun. He had also learned that beautiful women are, by very virtue of their beauty, likely to prove exceedingly false and dangerous.

But none of those facts dimmed in the least Paul Pry’s appreciation of beauty. Nor did the danger curb his unique activities. So far, his agile wits had always kept him at least one jump ahead of those gangsters who wanted to remove him from the trials and tribulations of an unkind, but very interesting world.

This woman was particularly beautiful. But her beauty had a suggestion of smooth hardness about it, like the polished surface of a diamond. She was clad in evening gown and a white fur coat that should have made her seem like a pure snowflake. In reality, she resembled an icicle, glitteringly hard and utterly cold, despite the beautiful figure, the graceful curve of the chin, and the profile which might have been chiselled from the finest marble by the most skilled artist.

Paul Pry let his eyes slither over to the shadows across the street where Mugs Magoo crouched in watchful waiting.

Mugs had ceased to move his hat. The danger sign was discontinued. Either the danger had passed, or else it was too late for a warning to do any good.

The woman stared at Paul Pry, and there was nothing of virginal innocence in that stare. On the other hand, it was not the stare of one who wishes to make an acquaintance. It was merely that she wished to look at Paul Pry for reasons of her own, and she looked at him without seeking to disguise the fact.