Collection of Stories
- Автор: Стерлинг Стюарт
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Collection of Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
“How was it?” The Demon felt the soggy spot at the breast pocket of the coat the murderer wore. “Did Brad Wistor have a handful of garlic when you jumped him? Grab your gun? When you shot him? That how it went?”
“The hat,” the dying man said painfully. “The hat Katie brought me — too big.” He struggled to sit up, succeeded only in rolling to his side. “Tried to grab a hat from that runty grocer. He put up a battle — had to give it — to him.”
“How’d you get by the road-block, Medini?”
“Hid — trunk compartment. Lifted lid — jumped out. Got back in other side.” He coughed again, weakly. “Get me — to a doc!”
“And leave your girl, like that?”
“She’s gone,” Medini gasped.
You won’t be far behind her, the Demon thought. But he said: “We’ll do what we can for you — Minnie and I.”
But by the time he’d checked on the girl to make sure she was beyond help, and had lugged Medini up to the highway, a patrol coupe came screaming in from the south.
Cap Matthews got out, cradling a submachine gun in his left elbow. Two other troopers piled down the hill to the sedan.
The Demon had his say.
When he’d done, the Captain grunted approval. “Not bad, for a one-man job. Not bad.” He regarded the Demon critically. “We’ll take the bodies in. You look a little blue around the gills. Better stop in somewhere and have something good and hot. There’s a nice spaghetti joint, couple miles south.”
“Not for me.” The Demon shook his head. “I’ve had all the garlic I can take, for one day.”
Alibi Baby
Popular Detective, September 1948
The patrol-boat Vigilant furrowed the oily blackness of the Sound like a plow turning soft mud. The probing finger of her searchlight groped past the rusty hulk of an anchored tanker, found the red nun buoy, slanting sharply in the ebb.
In the pilot house the big sergeant spun the spokes to circle the channel marker. “You’ll be havin’ your name on the promotion roster, sure, Steve.” In the dim glow flooding up from the binnacle bowl, his fleshy Celtic face had the appearance of an aggrieved Kewpie. “The powers that be can do no less than up you to a Captain’s berth after the neat way you pin a lily on that dock rat’s chest.”
“Ah, Sarge, I wouldn’t bust up our partnership like so.” Steve Koski’s lean, muscular figure relaxed against the port bulkhead. The reflection of the running light off the foredeck ruddied his long, narrow features, varnishing the prominent cheekbones with a weathered-oak effect which made him appear more like a stoical cigar-store Indian than the Harbor Squad’s most feared plainclothes lieutenant. “What’d a captain’s badge get me? Swivel-chair spread. Executives’ pot. Uh-uh, I’ll stick to a deck instead of a desk, long’s they’ll let me. Our trouble is, cops get no more chance than undertakers. Usually we don’t get called in until the corpse is cold. How often do we save anybody?”
Mulcahey protested. “Show me any boat in the Marine Division with a better record of rescues than the Vigilant, now!”
“I wasn’t referring to cock-eyed bargehands we drag out of the drink, or the desperate dames we fish out of the East River.” Koski held the white funnel of light on a floating object, about the size of a man’s head bobbing in a black eddy some thirty feet off the buoy. “Speaking of rescues, let’s peek at that.”
“ ’Twill likely be a half melon off a garbage scow. Or a rare, vintage derby blown off the night boat.” Mulcahey throttled the grumbling exhaust down to a hollow mutter.
The police boat lost way. The hrrrush of the bow wave fell to a whisper. Koski leaned but over the gunwale, dipped his boathook.
“I’ll score you fifty percent, Sarge. It is a hat. But no derby.” Koski turned the dripping headgear over in his knotty fingers beneath the glare of the searchlight beam.
It was a wool yachting cap of navy blue. Its patent-leather visor was cracked and split, its gold braid torn and tarnished. Above the visor and between the braided anchors was pinned a white celluloid button with bold black lettering: BATHING BEAUTY INSPECTOR’S LICENSE.
Around the button’s rim, in smaller type: Official Navel Inspector O! O! O!
Mulcahey grinned through the pilot house window. “Dost deem it worthy of listing in the log?”
Koski didn’t answer. He touched a dark spot about the size of a cookie on the cloth top. Under the bright white light his finger tip looked as if it had been smeared with ketchup.
Mulcahey let the motor idle, came back to the cockpit. “Wouldst crave to have us head back for Pier One so we can turn this in to the lab boys?” he asked. “They could put it under their microscopes, analyze it in their test tubes and so on and forth. Eventually comin’ up with the startling information that the owner thereof had a severe nosebleed or maybe cut his toe on some barnacles.”
“Oh, sure!” Koski answered sarcastically. “Top of a cap’s just the thing to use for stanching a nosebleed!” He turned the cap over, peered at the inside. Stuck to the underside of the bloodstain were two white hairs.
“That,” Mulcahey said, “don’t look so good, now. I wouldn’t kid about that!”
“Could be the owner lent the cap to his St. Bernard, or course!” Carefully the lieutenant pulled open the worn leather sweatband. Stuck against the stiff-wired fabric frame was a water-soaked and sweat-stained business card, which read:
“Top of the cap is dry,” Mulcahey pointed out. “With that air caught underneath it and the tide runnin’ fast, it might have been kept from sinkin’ — all the way from the Island.”
“Yair. Would mean it hasn’t been in the water more’n an hour. Figuring the current at two point five knots. Make it around nine p.m. it started to drift down here.” Koski examined the other side of the card. In purplish indelible ink were scrawled names:
Mulcahey whistled. “That last one sounds like a hot biscuit. Perchance this Lothario was fidoodling around with too many frails. Mayhap one of ’em found she was being crossed up and belted Casanova over the dome.”
“Boats,” Koski said irritably.
“Huh?”
“Not names of dames, Sarge. Names of boats. With the phones of owners. Gents who want to sell their craft. Plenty dough, every spring.”
“Oh, yeah.” Mulcahey nodded. “Lots of guys offering their boats as a bargain before they put the hulls in the water.”
“That Ansy Pansy. Sailboat, isn’t she? Comet class champ couple years ago, if I remember.”
“They’s quite a few of them one designs haul out at the Trident Yacht Club, Skipper.”
Koski took cap and card into the pilot house, deposited them carefully on the glass chart case.
“Give with that gas, Irish,” he said.
Mulcahey jammed the reverse lever ahead, revved the two hundred horses to a thundering roar. The Vigilant’s nose lifted. Her tail squatted. White wings of spray planed out from the quarters. The square green flag whipped taut in the rush of air as the blunt-bowed thirty-two footer overtook a long row of black dominoes silhouetted against the ghostly green of Stepping Stones light.
When the pilot house windows were abeam of the tug hauling the string of barges, Koski asked: