Ричард Деминг - The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

“I guess you know who I am,” he said between his teeth, stepping behind the counter and aiming the gun at the proprietor’s belt buckle.

“Yes,” the plump man said without fright, but still wearing a wary expression. “I won’t give you any trouble. The money’s right there in the drawer.”

Contemptuously Cannon motioned him through a door immediately behind the counter, followed as the man backed into the storeroom, his hands still at shoulder height. After a quick glance around the room to make sure no one else was there, Cannon pushed the door partially shut to block the view from the street but still allow him a view of the main part of the store.

“Turn around,” he ordered.

The man presented his back. “You won’t have to shoot me,” he said quietly. “I’m not going to try anything.”

“You think I shoot people for nothing?” Cannon inquired sourly.

When there was no reply, Cannon said in a sharp voice, “Well, do you?”

“I know you have shot people,” the plump man said carefully. There was no fear in his voice, but it was extremely cautious. “I was merely pointing out that you have no cause to shoot me. I intend to cooperate fully.”

“Well, now. Then you can start by putting your hands down.”

Slowly, carefully, the man lowered his hands to his sides.

“Get on your stomach,” Cannon directed.

Without haste, but without delay either, the man dropped to hands and knees, then stretched full-length on the floor.

“Stay there until I tell you different,” Cannon directed.

Glancing through the partially open door of the storeroom, he saw that no one was passing on the street. Opening the door wide, he thrust the gun into his belt and stepped out to the cash register.

The counter blocked the view of the prone man by anyone who might pass the front window, or even come into the store, but Cannon could still see him from the register. He kept flicking glances that way as he scooped bills from the open drawer and stuffed them into his suit-coat pockets. He ignored the change.

When the register was empty of bills, Cannon stepped back into the storeroom and partially closed the door again.

In a cold voice he said, “I guess you’ve read about me in the papers, haven’t you, mister?”

“Yes,” the man admitted.

“Tell me what you’ve read.”

After a momentary hesitation, the man said, “They call you the Nose Bandit.”

“I mean everything you’ve read.”

“Well, you’ve held up a lot of places. I believe you’ve killed three people.”

“You’d better believe it. What else?”

“The police advise not to resist you in any way.”

“That’s right. Why?”

The prone man said quietly, “I have no desire to make you angry.”

“The only way you’ll make me angry is not to do exactly as I say. Why do the cops advise people not to resist?”

With a sort of resigned caution, the man on the floor said, “They say you’re a psychopathic killer. That you’ll kill on the slightest provocation.”

“Now you’re coming along,” Cannon said with approval. “Do you believe that?”

“I only know what I’ve read. If you want me to believe it, I will. If you don’t, I won’t.”

“I want you to believe it,” Cannon said coldly. “That psycho stuff is window dressing because the fuzz is too dumb to catch me, but you’d better believe I’ll kill you if you give me any lip. You know why we’re having this little conversation?”

“I have no idea.”

“Because I figure it will save me a lot of time in the long run. You wouldn’t refuse to tell me anything I wanted to know, would you, Mr. Gilbert?”

“I doubt that it would be safe,” the proprietor said quietly.

“You are Arthur Gilbert, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I cased this job real thoroughly, Arthur. You keep a money box with the real cash in it. That chicken-feed in the register was just today’s receipts. You bank once a week, on Friday, and this is Thursday night, so that money box ought to be real full. I figure I’ll get to it faster if you tell me where it is than if I have to hunt for it while you lie here dead on the floor. But it’s up to you. I’m going to ask you once. If I don’t get a fast answer, I’m going to blow your brains out. Understand?”

“Perfectly. It’s behind the cognac on the bottom shelf over there in the corner.”

“Point,” Cannon instructed. Raising one hand from the floor, Gilbert pointed.

Cannon had to remove two rows of cognac bottles before he found the square metal box behind them. It wasn’t locked, so he was spared the irritation of having to make Arthur Gilbert produce the key. There was nearly five hundred dollars in bills in it, plus a stack of checks. He pocketed the bills only.

Walking over to the storeroom door, he glanced out, then drew back again when he saw a young couple slowly walking past the plate-glass front window. He waited a few moments, looked again and saw that the street in front was now clear of pedestrians. Pulling the door wide open, he momentarily turned back to the man on the floor.

“You stay in that position for five minutes, Arthur,” he instructed. “If I see your head above the counter, I’ll blow it off. Understand?”

“I understand,” Gilbert said.

Without hurry Cannon walked from the store, climbed into the car in front of the store and drove away. A quarter block away he removed the fake glasses and false nose, folded them and put them into his inside breast pocket. Six blocks farther he abandoned the car in an alley across the street from a subway entrance, first carefully wiping the steering wheel and shift lever with a handkerchief. Ten minutes later he was on a subway to Brooklyn.

Within a half hour of the time he had left the liquor store, Cannon was ascending to the street from the Fulton Street station. He found his car parked where he had left it, a dozen yards from the subway entrance. He parked in front of his rooming house exactly at ten p.m. Tiptoeing past his landlady’s room, he went up the stairs without her hearing him. He always left for a job surreptitiously and returned as quietly. You never knew when a landlady’s testimony that you had been in your room all evening might come in handy.

In his room he counted the take. It came to five hundred and sixty-two dollars. It wasn’t exactly in a class with the Brinks robbery, he thought, but with his simple needs it would carry him for weeks.

Part of the enjoyment Harry Cannon derived from his chosen profession was the newspaper writeups he got. There was a scrap-book in a suitcase at the back of his closet containing news clippings of every job he had pulled. There were twenty-two news accounts in all, the coverage on each progressively more detailed. The first, dated a little more than two years earlier, was a back-page, one-paragraph item describing a Bronx drugstore stickup by a man wearing a dime-store false nose and lensless frames. The latest was a full-column front-page spread headlined: NOSE BANDIT STRIKES AGAIN.

Cannon spent many quiet evenings in his room reading over his scrapbook. He particularly enjoyed comparing the sensational treatment his more recent exploits received with the routine coverage of his early jobs. Three kills had made him about the hottest news copy in town.

On Friday morning he was up early to buy all the New York papers. Back in his room again, he went through them one by one with growing puzzlement.

There wasn’t a single mention of last night’s robbery.

After some thought, it occurred to him that it was possible Arthur Gilbert had died of a heart attack after he had left the store, his body had been found and no one knew there had been a robbery. The man hadn’t appeared particularly frightened, but that may have been mere surface control. Beneath it, he may have been scared to death. Then too, he had read that fat people were more subject to heart attacks than others.