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:
“What’ll we do?” he asked hoarsely.
Dolores shrugged. “Better put him away, Jack,” she said. “He’s the only one that knows I had a chance to go into the office. It would be just as well if he — disappeared.”
“Yeah. I’ll take him down cellar and put him away.”
I laughed. “Everybody knows I’m here,” I said. “I told Kelly I was coming. So you didn’t stab Mangy, Dolores? This mug did, eh? He was in the closet when the others were with the boy friend. He stepped out and knifed him while he was phoning Mrs. Barrett. He nabbed Mrs. Hyde’s necklace and you let him out through your office. Nice work, but—”
The mug kept his gat against my back, socked me behind the ear. It stung.
Dolores said, “How absurd!”
“Not half as absurd as the arrest of Ronald,” I told her. “Who is this thug back of me?”
The guy growled. “She’s my daughter,” he said. “And if you think I’d let Mangasarius doublecross her an marry—”
“Jack!” Dolores protested.
“What the hell, kid?” he growled. “He won’t be the first dick I’ve put away. You guess too good, feller. Yeah, Mangasarius was in college with me — Quentin. He read some books up there an’ doped out this racket. When he got out, I told him to look up the kid, give her a boost. He was goin’ to marry her until this rich dame—”
“Daddy Jack! Don’t talk!”
“Okay! Come on, cop. We go downstairs.”
There was satisfaction in knowing I was good at guessing games, but I was heading for the door and the cellar, with Jack’s gat pushing me along.
“Rufus is only paying me five grand for clearing Ronald,” I said. “Why don’t we make a deal?”
“No deals with cops,” Jack muttered.
But Dolores checked him. “If you took him for a trip, Jack, you know where, until this blows over, that might be the best. You have to duck anyway. I have proof. They won’t question that I was his niece. His will still stands. Whether they hang Ronald or let him off, we’ll be on top.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll take him up to the mine, then.”
“I worked in a mine once,” I cracked. “I don’t like ’em. I won’t go.”
That made Jack mad. I hoped it would. He shifted his gat to his left hand and swung with his right. During the shift, I ducked and socked. He tried to swing with the gun, but I had him winded and half down. I butted him with my head and sent him to the floor. The gun popped and Dolores yelled for help.
I got him by the wrist as he was twisting the gun around. But he was strong, too strong. The gun barrel moved steadily toward my ribs, and in another minute I’d have been out.
I was half-dazed, but I heard a sweet voice. “As you were!” Rose said, and hit Jack over the head with the stubby barrel of an automatic.
He slumped under me like a dead man, I grabbed his gun and got up.
The taxi driver had come in with Rose — he was armed with a monkey wrench — and Dolores and the servants were lined up against the wall.
“I told you to wear your galoshes,” Rose told me.
“And I told you to stay put!” I growled.
Dolores went all to pieces and cried hysterically. I phoned* Kelly and told him to come and get ’em. He was there within fifteen minutes, and he started cussing me for holding out on him. I laughed at him and we went away, Rose and I and the taxi driver.
“Where to?” he asked.
“Just keep drivin’,” I said. “Anywhere.”
It was tough making Rufus pay up. He was one of those guys who wants to settle ten cents on the dollar. But when I got his check, I said to Rose, “Kid, you and I ought to be partners. Let’s start with this.”
“Why, Mister Burke!” she said. “I am blushing in confusion.”
Jack went back to college — Folsom, this time — for life. He took it on the chin, covered up Dolores, and she got off. You couldn’t expect a male jury to send her up. The last I heard of her, she was in Frisco town, selling the Miracle Way.
And Mrs. Rufus still contributes to the cause!
Who Lives by the Axe
by James W. Booth
The amassing of sufficient funds with which to purchase return passage to his native Oslo eventually became an obsession with stumpy, hard-vistaged, black-haired Ludvig Halvorsen Lee, caretaker of a stolid, brownstone Brooklyn rooming house.
It led him, on July 4, 1927, to murder his employer, 76-year-old Mrs. Sara Elizabeth Brownell, one-time seamstress who had become a rooming house proprietor when the gray film of cataracts dimmed her vision. After slaying the defenseless woman with an axe, he dissected her body with gruesome precision, and hid the pieces.
And then Lee murdered a second woman in much the same fashion as he had the first, and disposed of her body in the same way. She was Mrs. Alfred Bennett, formerly owner of the brownstone house, who had come to pay Mrs. Brownell a friendly call. Lee killed her because he feared her suspicions would be aroused if she failed to find his aged employer at home.
But two women can not vanish suddenly and completely without suspicions being aroused and questions asked. Their strange disappearance was reported to the police and detectives commenced a search for them.
They questioned, of course, but their questions and the answers to them threw no light on the strange case. The bullnecked caretaker replied to their interrogations in a manner which indicated he would be one of the last persons in the world to contemplate murder.
There was no plausible explanation for the disappearance of the two women and apparently no clues to what had befallen them. Numerous such cases are annually entered upon the records of the Bureau of Missing Persons. They vanish and that is all that is ever learned regarding them, although the authorities make every human effort to fathom the mystery of their disappearance.
But no such “unsolved” notation was destined to be listed against the Brownell-Bennett case for, in Battery Park, at the tip of Manhattan Island, several miles from the stolid brown-stone house where Lee had wielded the murder axe, a white wing came upon a blood-soaked paper bundle. In it were pieces of two human legs.
Even before the Medical Examiner had time to determine whether they were pieces of a woman’s legs, instinct told the police that they had found the gruesome answer to what had happened to the two missing women.
But who had murdered them? They still had not the slightest idea.
To find the answer to the riddle of the horribly hacked pieces of limb, they began another methodical and painstaking search for clues in the neighborhood of the brownstone dwelling.
And then, on a Sunday morning while the church bells were ringing, they stumbled on a chemical link which started an amazing chain of evidence that ended with Lee in the electric chair.
On the floor of a dark, foul-smelling cellar close by the East River, detectives were attracted to several pools of water. The water had seeped into the cellar during a recent rain. It had a dark, oily look.
Bending over, a detective wet a fingertip and touched it to his lips. “Lye!” he announced significantly. At Police Headquarters, analysis of samples of the water proved the detective to be correct.
What proved of even more significance, however, was a brown paper bag with figures penciled on it that totaled up to $2.04, which was picked up in one corner of the damp cellar. On the chance that this slender clue might lead them to the murderer, the police commenced making the rounds of nearby shops. In a chain store, a clerk recognized his own figures and recalled that the customer who had made purchases totalling that amount had bought ten cans of lye a few days before. More important still, he was able to furnish an accurate description of the customer.