Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 2, March 19, 1938
- Автор: Clark Dale, 12627 Convict
- Год: 1938
- Язык: английский
- Год: The Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 2, March 19, 1938». Краткое содержание книги:
“Senator Weller has been murdered. We are about to get a confession. The murderer’s dying, I think.”
Greg Cooper was kneeling now beside the Japanese. Tim Weller had come unsteadily to his feet and was moving forward. A man with a doctor’s bag knelt on the other side of Hito. The Japanese smiled, almost happily.
“Very simple,” he said. “No money left. Insurance maybe, yess. Miss Boss come from hospital. No money. Very bad. Miss Boss come from hospital. Much insurance. Very good. You see. Yess?”
“All right. I’ve written your confession as you gave it. It says that you know that you are about to die. Can you sign it?”
“Yess.” Hito reached for the fountain pen and scrawled rapidly across the bottom of the sheet. His eyes had a swimmy look but he was staring up at Tim Weller. “Much better,” he said. “I have nobody. No family. Nobody.”
The police had their confession and they did not pay much attention to that. Greg Cooper did — because Greg Cooper knew that Hito had lied.
He looked at Tim Weller. The old man’s hands were clenching and unclenching. There were tears in his eyes and a vast hopelessness; the hopelessness, perhaps, of a man who sees himself chained to an endless responsibility and an unsharable secret. Greg Cooper knew, then, what he had suspected before. He bent above the Japanese.
“I understand, Hito,” he said softly. “Fidelity always.”
“Yess. Fidelity always. Good motto.”
Hito smiled and died. Greg Cooper came slowly to his feet. He wanted to take Vi Dawson in his arms but he couldn’t do that yet. He linked his arm to Tim Weller’s and drew him across the room to the chair that he had occupied before.
“You better sit down, Judge,” he said. “Your sister Emily will need you when she gets out of the hospital. You have to be fit for the job.”
The old man looked into Cooper’s eyes. “You know?” he said huskily.
Cooper nodded. “I know that you killed your brother, yes. And Hito knew that you did. He was dying and he took the load from you. He believed in fidelity. You have to carry on, Judge.”
Tim Weller’s eyes misted. “I will. I made Bradford, you know. I made a lawyer out of him. I made a politician of him. And I made him a senator.”
He was mumbling half to himself when Greg Cooper left him. Tim Weller had told his brother in this very room that no man had the right to destroy what he did not create. Tim Weller felt in his heart that he had made the man that Bradford Weller had been — and he had been consistent with his philosophy when he destroyed the man for what he considered the greater good.
Perhaps the officers of the law were entitled to the facts but Greg Cooper felt no obligation to tell them.
He was crossing the room and he saw the young policeman, Brennan. The blonde girl was gripping him by the arm. George Arlington was supporting himself on one elbow and looking at them.
“There’s nothing that we can be held for. Nothing,” the girl said.
Cooper’s jaw hardened. Here were the perpetrators of a callous and premeditated crime; a crime predicated upon the gullibility of an old man who believed that a young girl loved him. These two people would have stripped a family of money and lived at ease.
Now this precious pair thought that they could walk out. Cooper took a short step.
“No,” he said. “There isn’t a thing that you can be held for unless George Arlington took that money out of the senator’s safe tonight and hid it in your room. Take a look, Brennan.”
Cooper was watching the girl as Brennan left the room with another officer. The bravado was out of Mildred Harney now and she was wax white. In a few moments, Brennan was back. He opened a bag solemnly and stacks of money tumbled out — thick stacks of currency that were never intended for the fire. Cooper snapped his fingers.
“You killed that Japanese while you were engaged in a burglary, Arlington,” he said grimly, “and the girl was your accomplice. Maybe you think that you can’t be held for that.”
He turned his back and he was suddenly weary of it all.
He stepped out into the hall and Vi Dawson was waiting for him.
“I think I can get a good job in Cuba,” he said huskily.
She lifted her face to his. “Cuba would be lovely,” she said.
Mercy, Hijacked
by Dale Clark
A doctor diagnoses a stickup — and the patient dies.
Danny Lane muttered, “Now what the devil?” as the Flood Relief Special slowed clankingly to a dead halt. He peered through the night-blackened, rain-washed window of the smoker coach. Danny saw his own reflected face, nothing more than that.
A big, tropic-tanned, black mustached man came along the aisle. To the brakeman; who was adjusting the wick of his lantern, he said: “Where are we?”
“About twelve miles out of Riverside.”
The big browned man’s voice held a slight accent, probably Spanish. “What’s the trouble?”
“Must be a tree blowed onto the track,” the brakie said. “This-here’s the old quarry spur — it’s hardly been used for years.”
“Need any help?”
The brakeman said, “We’ll holler if we do,” and pushed through the vestibule door.
Shrugging, the tropic-skinned man turned to the water tap. He took a collapsible metal flask from its leather case, drained a thin vein of water into the flask.
It was very quiet in the smoking car. Grave-faced men spoke in low tones. They knew what lay ahead of the Special — there was suffering ahead, and destitution, and terrific threat of epidemic disease. There were a hundred thousand flood victims, some of them ill and more of them homeless — all deprived of sanitary sewage disposal, safe drinking water, milk for their children.
The worst flood in fifty years swung its five hundred mile scythe of destruction through the valley. Riverside lay isolated at the scythe’s tip. Tons of crashing water had smashed the city’s concrete highway outlets, boiled across the main railroad trackage and left the rusted quarry rails as a last link with the outside world. Thousands of lives depending on two threads.
Help from that outside world would come as the Red Cross and Army battalions fought through the destruction of half a dozen other cities up the river, as planes found landing sites on the rough hilltops.
The doctors in the smoking coach were volunteers, flocking in from the small towns of the state’s south-western tip. Bearded grandfathers called out of retirement sat side by side with young internes from the famous Randall sanitarium.
Dr. Randall himself was there — a tall man with a face that had once been ascetic, but was now fleshed out with success and good living. Sanitarium owner and race horse fancier, he was telling a weatherbeaten little country physician: “Now, my experience with typhoid has been—”
There was typhoid fever in Riverside, scourging those homeless folk huddled in the refugee camps.
“So I am lucky to see the new technique put to the test!” The speaker was Captain-Doctor Almonez, Randall’s guest. The public health director of a banana republic, Almonez was touring the United States; was specially interested in the oral vaccine technique perfected by Randall.
“He’s lucky?” thought Danny Lane. “What about the victims in Riverside—?”
Danny thought this, didn’t say it. Two years out of school, Danny was one of Randall’s glorified internes — “resident doctor,” so-called. The job didn’t pay much in money — paid mostly in experience. Danny, a dark-haired, clean-cut young chap, was building himself a future. But it wasn’t for him to rebuke Almonez’s callous expression. The man didn’t mean anything by the remark, anyway. People in those banana countries died like flies, anyway. Almonez was hardened to wholesale death.