Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 6, April 16, 1938
- Автор: Трит Лоуренс, Вулрич Корнелл
- Год: 1938
- Язык: английский
- Год: The Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 6, April 16, 1938». Краткое содержание книги:
“Once he got ashore Benedict was afraid to tackle Arnold. Benedict was a weakling and Buck Arnold was a strong, tough man. So Benedict made a deal with Hardesty. Hardesty took Gannon with him and caught your father at the hotel. They beat him up but did too good a job. At first your father was stubborn and wouldn’t tell, later he couldn’t. That stimied them.
“Hardesty gave it up and sailed with his ship. Gannon jumped ship, figuring on crossing both Benedict and Hardesty if he could find the pearls. He couldn’t. In the meantime Hardesty was due back. You got me on the job. Benedict tipped Hardesty to that and he was waiting for me. I guess that’s all.”
He righted the table that Benedict had knocked over and spread his handkerchief on it. He untied the bag and let the pearls roll out. There were an even dozen, huge, lustrous, perfect.
Laura put her trembling hands on the table. Her eyes were wide and unbelieving. Trina said in a hushed, tremulous voice, “Good gosh, Dell, they’re worth a fortune.”
Laura said suddenly, “But. Benedict was with father all the evening. How could he have been at the hotel?”
Dell said grimly, “It was a swell alibi. But I’ll bet there’s a fire-escape at your father’s window.” He smiled at her nod and went on. “He slipped out, went to the hotel to see if anything was happening. He got there just as I found the pearls. He bopped me, beat it back here, and crawled back by the way of the fire-scape. Evidently your father had gone straight to sleep.”
Laura shook her head. “I can’t believe it even yet.”
“Life is like that at times, kid,” Dell said soberly. “But you want to start thinking about other things. I’ll steer you to a reputable jeweler who’ll give you what those pearls are worth. Then you can have specialists look your dad over. I’ll bet he’ll be right as rain in a few months.”
Laura took the pearls and said shakily, “I don’t know how to thank you. I’ll be glad to have you handle the pearls. And your fee—”
Dell started to say, “Ah, now, Miss Arnold, don’t you worry about that.” Trina grabbed his arm and gave him a jerk. “I’ll take care of that, Miss Arnold. I handle all the business details.”
As they went down the stairs, Dell grumbled, “You women are all alike. All you think about is money, money, money.”
Trina snapped, “Somebody in the firm has got to think about money. In this business you don’t play for marbles.”
Boomer
by W. E. Brandon
A man’s revenge finds its own burial ground beneath ten tons of hot steel
Her name was Jenny Carver. She was good-looking and built like a lingerie model. She had long dark hair and deep blue eyes and a soft, slender white throat.
She’d been stabbed to death with a pocket knife; a knife that must have been as sharp as a razor because her throat had been slit with it, not ripped. They knew it was a pocket knife by examining the bruised flesh around the stab wound in her breast, and by measuring the depth and size of the incision.
She’d been dumped on the sidewalk in front of her house and the milkman had been the first one to see her lying there...
Lieutenant Pherson sat behind the carved Jacobean desk in the study of the old house and looked at his notebook. “You’re John Carver?”
“Yes.”
“Her brother.”
“Yes.”
“Father and mother not living, that right?”
“Yes.”
Pherson looked up for the first time. John Carver was skinny but well built; about twenty-four, a year or so older than his sister. There was a dazed look in his eyes.
Pherson said: “This has been a hell of a thing. I want you to know that we’re not calling it quits until we get her killer. Keep your head clear and try to tell me everything you can. That’ll help us.”
“If you don’t get him,” young Carver said, “I will.”
“Leave that for us, son. Don’t go off your head.” Pherson looked at his notebook again. “You and your sister Jived here alone?”
“Yes.”
“Your father left you both pretty well fixed, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“So you had enough money to go around some, and so did she... I suppose you knew about everyone she ran around with.”
“Most of them.”
“And who she was with last night?”
“No. She said she had a date with some guy she’d just met. He goes to college somewhere.”
“Where’d she meet him?”
“I don’t know. While she was with a bunch of girls she knew, I think.”
“We’ll, check up on him. You don’t know any more about him? Can you give me a list of most of the men she went out with? Good. Here, write their names here... We’ll get this guy, son. We’ll have him in a week.”
John Carver looked up from his writing. “If you don’t I will.”
Pherson came back a week later. He had a snapshot of a thickly built kid, about seventeen, in a bathing suit.
“This is him,” he said. “We found out where your sister met him. At Jane Warder’s house. And this Jane Warder says she met him at her brother’s college and invited him down to this house party. And her brother says he got kicked out of school about a week ago for some trouble about a girl, so he’s the guy.”
John Carver studied the snapshot. His eyes glowed, faded. “He looks young.”
“That’s an old picture. Only one we could get. His name’s Joe Redter and he comes from a steel town in Pennsylvania. He’d been going to this college for three years when they kicked him out. Before then and during the summers since, he worked in the steel mill in his home town, so that gives us a lead. He’s twenty-two now, and that picture is five years old. The only picture of him we could get our hands on anyplace. It comes from his home town.”
John Carver was staring at the picture. “Did you check up on everyone else?”
“No one else saw her that night. It was either this guy or some screwball that was a stranger to her. And this guy’s faded now, see, so my dough’s on him.”
“Faded? You mean he‘s got clear away?”
Pherson grinned. “You don’t get clear away from a killing like this, kid. We’re checking up every place he ever lived or hung out in, and we’re checking his relatives and his friends in his hometown and the guys he worked with in the mill there. We’re getting his habits lined up, we know what he looks like and what he likes to do. He won’t get away from us, boy. Not for this.”
Young Carver’s eyes were still clouded, filled with the strange expression Pherson had noticed the first day. He said: “He won’t, all right.”
The detective slapped his shoulder brusquely. “Thought a lot of your sister, didn’t you?”
“She’s all the family I had. It’s been eight years since our parents died. She was the swellest girl in the—”
“Unwind. It’s tough, but that’s what the world’s made of, son. Some people find it out one way and some people find it out another. We’ll have that guy in a month.”
It was three weeks later when John Carver looked Pherson up at Police Headquarters. The detective spread out his hands.
“We been doing everything we can. We checked on everyone applying for passports; he didn’t go that way. The Shipping Board gave us their record of everyone going to sea on American boats in any job. Not there. Not even a likely alias. We’ve contacted a dozen steel mills in the area near his home town and are getting their cooperation. Rolling mill — that’s what he’d get into. Hot-mill, they call it. That’s what he’s always done. We’ve watched the railroads and the buses and the highways. We’ve broadcast his description over the country and put what we’ve got on file with the Criminal Record Office. He’s hiding someplace now, but we’ll get him.”