Тэлмидж Пауэлл - The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™ - 25 Classic Mysteries

“And he figured, from your manner, that you were plenty up, boy. Planning something, maybe. He said good night and drifted out — and drifted back in again. He saw you slip into O’Leary’s hallway and not come out again. Enough to heighten his suspicions, wouldn’t you say, boy? So when the bar is closing and you still haven’t showed up, he drifts across the street and takes up a station in a dark doorway. He sees you come out at last — after everybody, except O’Leary, has left and O’Leary has locked up for the night.”

“That rat,” I said, clenching and unclenching my hands, “that scum of scum!”

Clemmie simply crumpled in a heap beside me and started crying.

Lagin let out a long sigh. “Don’t feel so hard at Porter, boy. Doing his job, that’s all. He sees you clutching that bulge under your jacket and he naturally assumes a heist. At least, he figures it’s enough to call me. And while I’m cranking up my car I hear the news on the police band. O’Leary has recovered consciousness and hollered cop. So all I had to do was to decide whether to head for your place or here.” He laughed, drily.

“You know the saying, Cherchez la femme ,” he said. “So Clemmie’s place it was. And look what I find.”

He turned toward the coffee table and touched the money with a fingertip. “Boy,” he said, “a long time ago I decided I was on the losing end of a lousy, thankless job. That’s what I sure did decide, boy. Downtown they think I’m a great parole officer because my boys always beat the seventy-eight percent average who return to crime. It’s the way I handle them, boy, the way I do my job. The worst ones, murderers, rapists, I send back, boy, the minute they breathe wrong on the rules of parole. But there are others. Bright kids, the naturals — they’re the ones I work hardest with, boy, in private little efforts to preserve their paroles. That’s why I’m working so hard with you, boy.”

I inched to a tight, sitting position while I watched him drag a hassock over to the coffee table.

“Sam,” I husked, “what is it you want?”

He sat down, wet his fingertips, and began counting the money. “My half, boy. I always want my half — and if you value your parole you’ll always make damned sure you’ve got it ready!”

Originally appeared in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine , June 1973.

There were eight of us in the prison library. We’d drifted in one by one, choosing books and magazines and finding chairs at various tables. If a guard happened to look in he’d never suspect a meeting had been called to discuss a subject of the highest priority.

Murphy was the last to amble in. I watched over the edge of my newspaper as he fingered a Jules Verne from a bookshelf and shuffled over to sit down across the table from me.

Except for the missing face — Kowalski’s — all were present and accounted for.

I called the meeting to order by clearing my throat. There was a rustle of news print, book pages, and shifting bodies as one and all gave me his attention.

“You know the problem,” I said out of the side of my mouth in a whisper that razored all the way to Ordway, who sat furthest from me. “The parole board has met. And the lousy creeps have opened the front gate for Kowalski.”

A mutter of sullen anger slipped through the reading room.

“At least Kowalski can’t leave the state without breaking his parole,” Myrick said, not moving his lips. He was a member of the team by virtue of his inclinations to write stacks of checks with other people’s names on them.

“Beyond the walls and past the gate,” Ordway pointed out, “Kowalski is like on the moon, far as we’re concerned.”

Ordway is a soft-spoken little guy with big ears and large round eyes. His mama had masterminded a fur warehouse job. Mama had got the furs, Ordway the rap. I was fond of Ordway. How many guys would go to such lengths for their mama?

“I didn’t think the parole board would be so dumb,” Murphy said. “Anybody can look at Kowalski and tell he’s a ruffian.”

Murphy certainly didn’t look like one. He was a handsome, blue-eyed Irishman. He wasn’t a crook, in the sense that the rest of us were. With a big bat and sticky glove, Murph had once second-based his way almost into the majors. Trouble was, he loved women. Just about all women. And any woman he loved, he felt he should marry. Free love is one thing. But the courts still take a dim view of bigamy. Murph was doing time on three counts.

“That don’t cut no ice,” Jellison said, a pickpocket without that finesse that separates the real pros from the better-than-average. Jellison was doing a long stretch this time, being a three-time loser. “What the parole board has done, the parole board has done. Bellyaching about it won’t help one damn bit.”

“I’ll give you a bellyache,” Murph said.

“You and whose army?”

I tapped the table with my knuckles in the library quiet, restoring order.

Determined to have the last word, Jellison said, “Curly, inform Mr. Murphy that he should offer constructive suggestions when he opens his big yap.”

I ignored the crack and Murph let it pass. Kowalski’s being on the outside was too important to waste time wrangling.

“The chair is open to suggestions,” I said. “How do we restore Kowalski inside these walls where we can keep an eye on him?”

Nobody had any offerings for several minutes. The silence was broken only by the fussing of a bluejay in the tree outside the west windows. If the warden had dropped in right then, he’d have smiled in satisfaction, seeing eight of his boys apparently wrapped up in good literature.

Byers was the first to venture an idea. “I can bust Kowalski! I’ll go to the warden and confess that Kowalski was with me on the last safe and loft job.”

Mirrored in seven other faces, contempt for his idea withered Byers a little. His neck reddened.

“You mean the job where you parked your heap by a fire plug and waltzed out with the loot while a cop was writing you a ticket?” Murph inquired disgustedly.

Byers shot a withering look of his own. “So you got a better idea, Pretty Boy? Maybe you could sick that little number, Darlene, onto Kowalski, the woman-crazy galoot.”

Like that. From the mouths of babes, or dummies like Byers. The sudden inspiration jolted through the room and everyone was suddenly looking at Murphy.

“Now wait a minute!” His library voice was rising almost to natural pitch. “I wouldn’t let a monkey like Kowalski in a thousand miles of a nice kid like Darlene!”

“So she’s nice,” Ordway said. “So is my mama. But Darlene knows the score. With his yen for feminine charms, Kowalski would be putty in her hands, to coin a phrase. She could lead him like Eve leading Adam to the apple tree.”

“Into busting his parole,” Jellison added, as if Ordway’s suggestion needed clarification.

Murphy looked at me for help. “Curly, you’re the brain in this outfit, the educated guy who could con his way into social circles, the keeper of the library. Tell these bohunks what a lousy idea it is!”

“Murph,” I said with a sigh, “wish I could agree with you. But I think Byers has displayed a rare stroke of genius, perhaps the highest moment of his life. Darlene is the one weapon we have on the outside against Kowalski. He has met her already. With the slightest encouragement from her, he would be foaming at the mouth.”

“You guys make me sick! I think I’ll go throw up. To ask me to ask a kid like Darlene—”

“Aw, come off it, Murph,” Granger said, a once-successful off-track bookie. “It ain’t like we was asking anything drastic. All Darlene has got to do is encourage him along a little until he breaks his parole.”