Fredric Brown - The Second Fredric Brown Megapack

Of course that was the end of Martin Blue. After showing up before Zatelli at headquarters, he might as well have been dead in an alley for all the good he was going to do.

Bela Joad told Chief Rand, “Well, anyway, now we know.”

“What do we know?”

“We know for sure the detector is being beaten. You might conceivably have been making a series of wrong arrests before. Even the evidence I gave you against Girard might have been misleading. But we know that Zatelli beat the machine. Only I wish Zatelli had come out the front way so I could have tailed him; we might have the whole thing now instead of part of it.”

“You’re going back? Going to do it all over again?”

“Not the same way. This time I’ve got to be on the other end of a murder, and I’ll need your help on that.”

“Of course. But won’t you tell me what’s on your mind?”

“I’m afraid I can’t, Dyer. I’ve got a hunch within a hunch. In fact, I’ve had it ever since I started on this business. But will you do one other thing for me?”

“Sure. What?”

“Have one of your men keep track of Zatelli, of everything he does from now on. Put another one on Gyp Girard. In fact, take as many men as you can spare and put one on each of the men you’re fairly sure has beaten the detector within the last year or two. And always from a distance; don’t let the boys know they’re being checked on. Will you?”

“I don’t know what you’re after, but I’ll do it. Won’t you tell me anything. Joad, this is important. Don’t forget it’s not just a case, it’s something that can lead to the breakdown of law enforcement.”

Bela Joad smiled “Not quite that bad, Dyer. Law enforcement as it applies to the underworld, yes. But you’re getting your usual percentage of convictions on nonprofessional crimes.”

Dyer Rand looked puzzled. “What’s that got to do with it?”

“Maybe everything; It’s why I can’t tell you anything yet. But don’t worry.” Joad reached across the desk and patted the chief’s shoulder, looking—although he didn’t know it—like a fox terrier giving his paw to an Airedale. “Don’t worry, Dyer. I’ll promise to bring you the answer. Maybe I won’t be able to let you keep it.”

“Do you really know what you’re looking for?”

“Yes. I’m looking for a criminologist who disappeared well over two years ago. Dr. Ernst Chappel.”

“You think—?”

“Yes, I think. That’s why I’m looking for Dr. Chappel.”

But that was all Dyer could get out of him. Bela Joad left Dyer Rand’s office and returned to the underworld.

And in the underworld of Chicago a new star arose. Perhaps one should call him a nova rather than merely a star so rapidly did he become famous—or notorious. Physically, he was rather a small man, no larger than Bela Joad or Martin Blue, but he wasn’t a mild little man like Joad or a weak jackal like Blue. He had what it took, and he parlayed what he had. He ran a small night club, but that was just a front. Behind that front things happened, things that the police couldn’t pin on him, and—for that matter—didn’t seem to know about, although the underworld knew.

His name was Willie Ecks, and nobody in the underworld had ever made friends and enemies faster. He had plenty of each; the former were powerful and the latter were dangerous. In other words, they were both the same type of people.

His brief career was truly—if I may scramble my star-nova metaphor but keep it celestial—a meteoric matter. And for once that hackneyed and inaccurate metaphor is used correctly. Meteors do not rise—as anybody who has ever studied meteorology, which has no connection with meteors, knows. Meteors fall, with a dull thud. And that is what happened to Willie Ecks, when he got high enough.

Three days before, Willie Ecks’s worst enemy had vanished. Two of his henchmen spread the rumor that it was because the cops had come and taken him away, but that was obviously malarkey designed to cover the fact that they intended to avenge him. That became obvious when, the very next morning, the news broke that the gangster’s body had been found, neatly weighted, in the Blue Lagoon at Washington Park.

And by dusk of that very day rumor had gone from bistro to bistro of the underworld that the police had pretty good proof who had killed the deceased—and with a forbidden atomic at that—and that they planned to arrest Willie Ecks and question him. Things like that get around even when it’s not intended that they should.

And it was on the second day of Willie Ecks’s hiding-out in a cheap little hotel on North Clark Street, an old-fashioned hotel with elevators and windows, his whereabouts known only to a trusted few, that one of those trusted few gave a certain knock on his door and was admitted.

The trusted one’s name was Mike Leary and he’d been a close friend of Willie’s and a close enemy of the gentleman who, according to the papers, had been found in the Blue Lagoon.

He said, “Looks like you’re in a jam, Willie.”

“Hell, yes,” said Willie Ecks. He hadn’t used facial depilatory for two days; his face was blue with beard and bluer with fear.

Mike said, “There’s a way out, Willie. It’ll cost you ten grand. Can you raise it?”

“I’ve got it. What’s the way out?”

“There’s a guy. I know how to get in touch with him; I ain’t used him myself, but I would if I got in a jam like yours. He can fix you up, Willie.”

“How?”

“He can show you how to beat the lie-detector. I can have him come around to see you and fix you up. Then you let the cops pick you up and question you, see? They’ll drop the charge—or if they bring it to trial, they can’t make it stick.”

“What if they ask me about—well, never mind what—other things I may have done?”

“He’ll take care of that, too. For five grand he’ll fix you so you can go under that detector clean as—as clean as hell.”

“You said ten grand.”

Mike Leary grinned. “I got to live too, don’t I, Willie? And you said you got ten grand, so it ought to be worth that much to you, huh?”

Willie Ecks argued, but in vain. He had to give Mike Leary five thousand-dollar bills. Not that it really mattered, because those were pretty special thousand-dollar bills. The green ink on them would turn purple within a few days. Even in 1999 you couldn’t spend a purple thousand-dollar bill, so when it happened Mike Leary would probably turn purple too, but by that time it would be too late for him to do anything about it.

It was late that evening when there was a knock on Willie Ecks’s hotel room door. He pressed the button that made the main panel of the door transparent from his side.

He studied the nondescript-looking man outside the door very carefully. He didn’t pay any attention to facial contours or to the shabby yellow suit the man wore. He studied the eyes somewhat, but mostly he studied the shape and conformation of the ears and compared them mentally with the ears of photographs he had once studied exhaustively. And then Willie Ecks put his gun back into his pocket and opened the door. He said, “Come in.”

The man in the yellow suit entered the room and Willie Ecks shut the door very carefully and locked it.

He said, “I’m proud to meet you, Dr. Chappel.”

He sounded as though he meant it, and he did mean it.

It was four o’clock in the morning when Bela Joad stood outside the door of Dyer Rand’s apartment. He had to wait, there in the dimly luminous hallway, for as long as it took the chief to get out of bed and reach the door, then activate the one-way-transparent panel to examine his visitor.

Then the magnetic lock sighed gently and the door opened. Rand’s eyes were bleary and his hair was tousled. His feet were thrust into red plastic slippers and he wore neonylon sleeping pajamas that looked as though they had been slept in.