Ричард Деминг - The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

Too late I saw the small round sheriff’s department insigne on the front door. Before I could reach for my gun, I was covered by the deputy seated next to the driver.

I let the sack fall and raised my hands.

On the way back to the sheriff’s office, I asked bitterly, “What went wrong?”

“A couple of things,” the deputy who had handcuffed me said. “For one, while it was smart of you to lock Sam and his bartender in the office, you neglected to notice the phone on his desk. He was phoning us about you as you walked out the door.”

After glumly considering this, I said, “What was the other thing I did wrong?”

“Your choice of a partner. Andy Carr is locally known as the gutless wonder. The minute we realized the false alarm had been turned in to clear the tavern, we knew Andy had to be your accomplice. It took us roughly two minutes to break him down and get the whole story.”

“But how did you catch up with him?” I inquired.

The deputy laughed. “We didn’t have to. He waited for us. We’ve had so much trouble with false alarms around here, the fire department just installed a new type of alarm box. When you pull the hook, a manacle automatically closes around your wrist and holds you there until the battalion chief arrives with a key.”

Originally published in The Saint Mystery Magazine , March 1965.

“Do you have to go out again tonight?” Phyllis Stroud asked petulantly.

Barney Stroud tilted up her chin to give her an apologetic kiss on the nose. “Do you think I like leaving you alone, baby? You know I’m nuts about you.”

This wasn’t just husbandly flattery. Even after two years of marriage Barney was still astonished at having managed to snare a wife such as Phyllis. She was not only the most beautiful woman he had ever known, with a lovely, sensitive face surrounded by a halo of honey blonde hair, and possessing a figure which popped men’s eyes, but she had class. Though her parents were now broke because of some unwise investments by her father, Phyllis was a Caldwell, and in St. Vincent the name Caldwell was equivalent to Cabot or Lodge in Boston.

Phyllis was a Vassar graduate. Barney had grown up in the slums of St. Vincent and had quit school at sixteen. He not only loved his wife, he was deeply awed by her background.

A lot of people were. If they hadn’t been, Phyllis could hardly have lifted her racketeer husband into her own elite social set, but instead would have been summarily dropped from the social register for marrying so far beneath her. But in St. Vincent a Caldwell could do no wrong. Barney was quite aware that he was tolerated by St. Vincent high society solely because he was Phyllis’ husband.

The only thorn in his Garden of Eden was that he didn’t know how to handle his wife when she became condescending. Before he met and married Phyllis, Barney had always practiced the role of the dominant male. If one of his old flames from the south side had ever spoken to him half as belittlingly as Phyllis often did, he would have slapped her silly. But you can’t treat a goddess the same way you treat a tramp. Even when his wife sometimes informed him that the only reason she had married an unschooled racketeer was because he had money, it only made him miserable instead of angry. He wasn’t about to do anything which might cause Phyllis to walk out on him.

“What is it tonight?” she asked with a touch of ice. “More errand running for Johnny Nash?”

Barney had given up trying to explain to Phyllis that as third man from top in the Drennan-Nash combine he was considerably more than an errand boy. Because she disliked Johnny Nash, she seemed to have the peculiarly fixed idea that the man deliberately cut in on Barney’s evenings by dreaming up unnecessary chores for him to perform.

Oddly, she never made similar objections when he was called out at night by Nash’s partner, Mark Drennan. She seemed to like Drennan, or at least to accept him socially.

Of course Drennan had a veneer of breeding which put him at ease in Phyllis’ social set, while Johnny Nash looked and talked like what he was: a successful gangster. Furthermore Mark Drennan, who was a bachelor, never showed up at Phyllis’ social affairs with a feminine partner who didn’t fit in, whereas Johnny Nash always did on the rare occasions he was invited. He couldn’t avoid it, because his feminine partner was always his wife, a beautiful but ungrammatical woman who gave away her ex-stripper background every time she opened her mouth.

As one of her husband’s bosses, Johnny Nash and his wife had to be invited to at least some of Phyllis’ parties, but she hated to have either one in the house.

Barney said pacifically, “Johnny’s not even in town. I have to drop some tally sheets by Mark’s place.”

“Oh,” she said, mollified. “Will you be long?”

“Not more than an hour,” he assured her.

As he drove away from the house, Barney thought aggrievedly that he wasn’t as bad a catch as Phyllis liked to make out. Maybe he didn’t have the education and social grace of her friends, but he was more of a bargain physically than any of them. He stood six feet two, without an ounce of fat on him, and the girls on the south side had considered him about the handsomest guy around. Anyway, under Phyllis’ tutelage, he had managed to develop enough surface polish and to straighten out his grammar enough so that her friends seldom, any more, looked down their noses at him.

And he certainly had more money than most of her friends. Phyllis had a hundred-thousand-dollar home in which to entertain, she drove her own Lincoln convertible, wore Paris fashioned clothes, owned a couple of minks and nearly as much jewelry as Tiffany’s. Which wasn’t bad progress for a young man of twenty-six who had owned only one pair of pants ten years before.

Of course, as Phyllis liked to point out, he had come to a dead end. The only move upward left to make would be to take over top spot from the Drennan Nash partnership, and neither partner was likely to retire voluntarily for at least another twenty-five years.

At sixteen Barney Stroud had started running numbers for the Drennan-Nash combine, which at that time was just beginning to organize the city’s divergent rackets into a single centrally-controlled organization. Mark Drennan and Johnny Nash, respectively only twenty-four and twenty-five themselves, had moved in on existing rackets with a combination of brashness, muscle and organizing knowhow which left the combine in undisputed control of local rackets by the time Barney could vote.

He had moved right along with it, rising from runner to muscle man, then to district manager and, finally, to “thumb man” in charge of all collections and payoffs.

Barney was already third man from top when he met and married Phyllis. He had been pretty proud of that position until she began belittling him as an “errand boy.” But now he did considerable dreaming about eventually moving into top spot. His dreams weren’t inspired by ruthless ambition, for actually he was quite content with his lot. It was just that he envisioned commanding his wife’s respect if he was in a position to give orders instead of taking them.

It was only idle dreaming, though. Mark Drennan was now only thirty-four and Johnny Nash thirty-five. By the time either decided to retire, Barney would be in his mid-fifties himself.

Of course premature retirement could be effected with a gun, but this was impractical.

The dream had become persistent enough to make Barney think of resolving his problem with a gun, but he had discarded the idea almost as soon as he thought of it. This wasn’t the roaring twenties, when an ambitious young hood could blast his way to the top. Modern rackets were conducted as businesses, with a minimum of headline-making violence. The general public no longer stoically accepted gang killings, and the politicians, without whose protection rackets couldn’t exist, were leery of aroused public opinion. The local officials who accepted the combine’s payoff to prevent the police from interfering with its activities would never stand still for anything even remotely resembling old-fashioned gang warfare.