Ричард Деминг - The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

Finally he settled on the innocuous action of going to the post office to see if he and Helen had any mail.

Though the post office was only three blocks from their apartment on Carlton Avenue, a factor in their deciding to keep the box even after they had a permanent address, it was fifteen blocks from Mrs. Weston’s rooming house. Harry took a streetcar.

There was some mail. An envelope containing a coupon worth ten cents on the purchase of a large box of soap flakes, a card addressed to Miss Helen Lawson from Helen’s aunt in Des Moines, who had not yet been informed her niece was married, and a slip informing him there was a package at the package desk.

As he started toward the package desk, two men crowded against him from either side. Politely he waited for them to move out of the way, but neither moved. Instead he felt the prod of something hard and round in his left kidney.

The man on his left, a tall lank individual with a gray face said, “Yeah, it’s a gun. Just move toward the door like we was three pals, or it’ll go off.”

Slowly, Harry glanced from the gray-faced man to the plump, round-headed man on his right. The latter gave him a happy grin.

“There’s another one right close to your right kidney. Do like the man says.”

At a gentle prod from the man on the left, he began to move without hurry toward the door. All about them people were waiting in queues, stamping letters or exasperatedly trying to write with post-office pens, but no one paid the slightest attention as the closely grouped trio left the building. The sidewalk was full of hurrying people too, but not one so much as glanced at them.

At the curb, in a space marked, Reserved for Post Office customers — Ten minute parking only , stood a green Buick sedan. The round man on Harry’s right opened the rear door and the gray-faced man prodded Harry in. He followed behind Harry to sit beside him, while the plump man rounded the car to slide behind the wheel.

As he pulled away from the parking place, the man behind the wheel said breezily, “We been waiting for you since the post office opened at eight. We figured you’d come after your mail eventually.”

Harry asked, “What do you want with me? If this is a holdup, all I’ve got with me is twelve dollars.”

The plump man laughed. Harry’s seat companion said nothing, merely quietly holding his gun pointed casually in Harry’s direction.

Harry grew conscious that he was still gripping his mail in one hand. As he stuffed it into his inside breast pocket, the gray-faced man glanced at him sharply, but made no comment.

The rest of the trip was made without conversation. It was not a long trip, about twenty-five blocks, but the plump man drove leisurely and obeyed all traffic regulations. When the car left the downtown business district, they passed through a middle-class residential district then through a poorer class district and finally through the slums, always moving in the general direction of the river.

In the waterfront area, on a street consisting largely of vacant warehouses and decrepit office buildings which had been condemned by the city to make room for a waterfront parkway which never materialized, the car suddenly swung through the open truck entrance of what looked from the outside like an unoccupied warehouse. As his seat mate backed from the car and gestured with his gun for Harry to alight, the plump driver returned to the truck entrance and closed the doors.

Then the two men urged him up a flight of stairs and into a barnlike room large enough to office at least fifty clerks. There were no longer any desks in it, however, its furnishings now consisting of only a kitchen table and a few straight chairs, three folding canvas cots containing single blankets and a packing case with a table model radio on it.

One corner of Harry’s mind noted that two men sat at the kitchen table and a third sat on one of the cots, but the notation was merely automatic, for his attention centered on the figure stretched full length on a second cot. It was Helen and she was alive.

Ignoring the sharp command of the gray-faced man, Harry ran to his wife and took her in his arms. She looked up at him wonderingly, her face drawn with fatigue and streaked with dried tears, then buried her head in his shoulder with a little whimper.

After a moment she exhaustedly lay back on the pillow and looked up at him with sorrow. “I hoped they’d let you alone,” she whispered. “Why did they have to involve you?”

“Have they hurt you?” Harry demanded.

“My feet,” she said. “Just my feet.” She closed her eyes with an expression of pain.

Twisting in his seat on the cot, Harry stared down at his wife’s feet. Both were encased in bandages.

An almost insane rage engulfed him. Slowly he rose to his feet and glared through a crimson haze at the five men in the room. The man seated on the other cot was thin and pock-marked and had cold eyes which stared back at Harry indifferently. Of the two men seated at the table, one was huge and red-faced and carried about him an air of bluff good humor. The other was slim, and distinguished-looking, with a thin, austere face and iron-gray hair which curled upward over his ears. The two men who had brought him in stood just inside the door.

Harry took a step toward the table. “Which one of you…?” he said with muffled incoherency. “I’m going to—”

Casually, the pock-marked man on the cot produced a knife with a thin six inch blade. He balanced it on his palm and studied Harry appraisingly. Harry swung his gaze to the man. “Are you the one?” he asked softly.

The knife flipped in a small arc and landed back in the man’s palm. His eyes remained on Harry. “Yeah,” he said. “Cigarettes on the soles, if you’re interested. Tape on the mouth, to keep her from yelling. Make you mad?”

Harry’s muscles bunched for a blind rush, then he froze as a voice from the table cracked like a pistol shot. “Hold it, Nolan!”

Harry twisted toward the voice. It was the big, red-faced man who had spoken.

In a reasonable tone the man said, “Ripper can slice the edge of a playing card with that thing at thirty feet. On top of that my two boys at the door have cocked pistols aimed at your guts. Nobody wants to harm either you or your wife. Let’s talk things over like reasonable human beings.”

He waved a hand at one of the vacant chairs around the table. Harry glanced back at the knife, then at the two guns centered at him from the doorway. Finally he looked down at Helen, who gave him a smile full of pain and shook her head hopelessly.

Harry’s shoulders slumped and he walked over to seat himself at the table.

“Let me introduce myself,” the big man said. “I’m John Gault, and this is my assistant, Gerald Crane.”

Without preamble, Big John Gault announced what he wanted the black ledger mentioned in Dale Thompson’s column. He was convinced Helen knew where it was, but had been unable to persuade her to tell. Harry had been brought in to aid the persuasion. If he could talk his wife into disclosing where the ledger was, Big John was willing to pay them five thousand dollars and put them on a train for Des Moines, with the stipulation that neither ever return to Wright City.

The alternative Big John did not mention, but the implication was obvious.

Harry suppressed his rage enough to remark, “This ledger must be important.” He turned toward Helen. “What’s in it, honey?”

Lifelessly Helen said, “A complete record of payoffs in Wright City for the past ten years. Publication would have put John Gault and his whole crooked gang behind bars.”

“And you know where it is?”

The distinguished looking Gerald Crane answered for her. “We talked to the elevator operator at the Newbold Arms. Your wife arrived for work Friday at eight-thirty, and left the building again ten minutes later with a package the size of the ledger under her arm. She was gone twenty minutes and returned without it. In the interim my friend Ripper and I…ah…called on Mr. Thompson, so when your wife returned, she walked right into our arms. Obviously Thompson suspected we might try to recover the ledger and had your wife secrete it somewhere. She’s wasting her time and ours by insisting she doesn’t know where it is.”