Тэлмидж Пауэлл - The Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™ - 20 Classic Mysteries!

“Cripes, boss, I was wondering...”

“Where I was? Merely taking care of you, Willie. That headstone over there made a nice hiding place.” He looked down at the caretaker. “Someone here last night, eh? How interesting!” Then he told me, “Keep working, Willie. This is no holiday.”

I went back at it. It was hot work. The closer I got to the coffin, the hotter it seemed to get.

I got the lid off the pine box with a screwdriver the boss had brought along. I handed the lid up to him. He was getting all in a huff.

“Hurry, Willie! Get busy — open the casket!”

That took longer. My hands had too much sweat on them to do what Smith wanted them to do.

This had been one more night, I thought. Nothing could floor me now. But when I opened that casket, I damn near passed out.

The moonlight that came into the grave made things plain enough to see. I wish it hadn’t. There was a Great Dane dog stuffed in the casket. Blood was all over the inside, on the shiny white cloth. Somebody had cut the dog’s throat wide open...

Smith got down in the grave so fast I thought he had fallen. He pushed me back, which was fine, and started messing around in the casket with his hands. I shut my eyes on that.

In a minute he stood up. He was holding a white pillow that had been dyed in spots with blood. He crammed the pillow under his coat and it made stiff, cracking noises.

Percival Smith laughed, reached in his vest pocket, and got out a calling card, his own card.

“It began with a card, Willie. It might as well end that way.” It looked goofy to me, but he put the card on the dead dog’s head, right in sight.

We climbed out of the hole. “Do we fill the grave back, boss?”

“No, but we’ll have to tie the caretaker and hide him somewhere. I don’t want him to find that card.”

The caretaker was still out. We tied him up with our neckties and gagged him with Smith’s handkerchief.

We got out of the graveyard fast, went back over the fence. We walked a block or two, and Smith flagged a cab that passed. “The Jackson Building,” he told the driver.

When we got back to the office, Smith turned on the light just like he was going to read awhile. He put the bloody pillow he had got from the casket on the desk. I looked in the closet to make sure Hannrihan had got Joe Dance’s body out of there. He had.

Smith smoked a cigarette, walked around the office. He lighted another smoke from the old butt.

When he got through with that one, he looked at his wrist watch. “It’s been five minutes since we came back, Willie. You can turn off the light now.”

He pushed a couple of chairs together over in the corner. I turned off the light.

“Sit over here, Willie,” Smith said.

I went over and parked beside him in one of the chairs.

“Well,” I said, “this is all okay, I guess. But what’s the idea?”

“I’m hungry,” he said.

“Cripes, boss, who the hell are we waiting for?”

“Whoever finds my calling card.”

“And who’ll that be?”

“Perhaps the police,” he said.

“Oh, Lord!”

“Or perhaps the mild gentleman who left Joe Dance in the closet.”

“That’s better.”

Smith didn’t talk anymore. He leaned back in his chair. I knew we were in for a long wait.

After what seemed like a hundred years, I started to tell the boss it was no soap. I wanted to get out of here. This hanging around didn’t make me feel any too good.

But Smith caught my arm before I could say anything. And I heard it too — somebody putting a passkey in the lock.

The door swung back, covering us. The guy waited a minute, then came in. He was good-sized. I made a guess — Pete Lorentz, the bookie who had taken a powder.

He saw the bloody pillow in the light from outside. His breath made a funny sound. He jumped at the desk, got his hands on the pillow.

Smith turned the light on.

The guy wheeled around. Smith covered him with his automatic. I’d been all wet. This guy wasn’t Pete Lorentz.

Smith made a little bow. “You almost got away with it,” he said, “and it was a scheme worthy of a genius.” He grinned at the guy. He said, “Mark Droyster — the man who wouldn’t stay dead!”

Droyster didn’t look so good. He hadn’t had any sleep, and he needed a shave badly.

He didn’t say nothing. He just looked at Smith and the Spanish in Smith’s hand.

“Come on, Willie,” the boss said, “we’re taking him in.”

But I didn’t move. Somebody else had come in the office. He gave the orders, “No, Smith, you’re not taking him in. Drop your gun. You, Aberstein, line up beside him.”

The boss let the gun go. It bumped on the floor. Me and the boss turned around. Al Newell was bent over a little from the slug he had taken. There were two guys with Newell. Ike Clark, a little hophead, and Harry Haines, a skinny, tall gent who had shot his own brother a couple of years before.

Newell pushed the door shut. “You can scram in a moment, Droyster. If I let Smith take you in, people will know you are alive and I lose my dog track. So I’ll help you, even though you did plug me earlier tonight.”

My head was spinning. I finally got my jaw back up where it ought to be. “I thought that was Droyster’s stiff in the storage house. I—”

“So did a lot of people, monkey,” Newell said. “It was a fine plot, the nicest business deal Droyster ever cooked up. And I’m going to help him push it through. I’ll take you to Hannrihan, Smith. Think he’ll ever believe you when you claim Droyster is still alive?

“You’ll tell him that the corpse in the storage house is not Droyster but Pete Lorentz. But will he believe it? Can you prove it? We’ll claim the corpse really is Droyster. So the only mystery the cops will have is why wasn’t Droyster’s corpse in the grave?”

It looked plenty bad. If Droyster got away from here, no telling where he’d be this time tomorrow.

Newell nodded to Ike Clark and Harry Haines. “Let’s get a move on.”

The two torpedoes pulled their rods. The boss fired a smoke. “Are you quite sure, Newell, that you and Droyster haven’t overlooked anything?” The way he said it and the way he looked at Newell sort of did things to the slim punk.

“‘What do you mean?” Newell said. He held out a hand to slow Clark and Haines down.

“Shall we go back to the beginning?” the boss said. “Back to what drove Droyster to this?”

Newell and Droyster looked at each other. Droyster said, “Talk fast and it had better be good. If I’ve slipped I want to know it, but if you’re stalling...”

“In the first place,” Smith said, “you were slipping all around. Your house was mortgaged, your business enterprises — thanks to men like Newell handling the books — were shot to hell. Your whole life was exploding in your face, money evaporating, your wife giving you the air for Doctor Lawrence Jordan. You were losing, had lost, everything. You had been a big shot, now you were sinking to the level of a tramp.

“No man who has had your money and power, Droyster, would give it up without a fight. It hurt to see yourself as an old, broken bum, with people laughing and shaking their heads behind your back.

“But you had fifty-seven grand that no one knew about.” The boss laughed, puffed his fag. “This is the first case on record where a man killed other people for his own money. That’s exactly what you did. You were finished. There was only one way out — get away, start over. For a start you needed money. And the only way to keep your fifty-seven grand was to die here and be another man someplace else. That fifty thousand dollars wouldn’t have lasted long, what with all your debts, if you’d tried to leave in a legal manner.”