The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

McFee went along a broken cement walk to a drab side door. Two sloping boards with grooves in them led from the broken walk up to the door sill. McFee knocked. No one came. He was about to knock again when he sniffed the air. His eyes ran down the door. Folded newspaper showed between door bottom and sill. A keyhole was blocked. Moving fast, McFee pinched out his cigarette, picked up a piece of cement and shattered the window with it. He rammed the door with his shoulder. Lock and bolt gave and he fell into the room. A wave of combustible gas forced him back into the open, gagging.

A fat colored woman with a red handkerchief on her hair came up, running. She screamed.

McFee said, “Shut up. Go telephone the coppers.” The harsh fury in his tones spun her around, goggle-eyed.

McFee drew air deep down into his lungs and plunged into the gas-filled room. He shot up a window, hung his head outside, refilled his lungs. Facing inside he saw a gas heater, its cock wide open. Three cocks of a gas plate in one corner of the room were open. He shut off the gas flow and refreshed himself again.

Maggie O’Day lay in the middle of the floor. She lay on her side. Close against her was the wheel chair she had rolled herself home in for twenty years or more. But the last time she had come home she had come on her crutches.

Ranee Damon’s body was in the chair.

A rug tucked him into it. The five grand was still in his left hand. His right hung over the side of the chair, clutched in one of Maggie O’Day’s weather-beaten bony ones.

McFee bent over the woman. He felt at her heart, lifted an eyelid. “Tough,” he muttered. He went to the door and filled his lungs.

There were some rag rugs, a day bed, a couple of rocking chairs with antimacassars, a table, some framed pictures; near the gasplate was a wall cabinet. A door that led into the wall had been made tight with newspapers. Sheets of newspaper littered the floor.

A photograph of a large, fleshy, pallid man, still in his thirties, but already gross with high living, lay on the table. It was faded, had been taken perhaps thirty years before. The print had been torn in three, then carefully pieced together with adhesive tape.

McFee muttered, “The late Senator Gay-lord.” He chewed a knuckle, stared at the photograph, then looked at Damon and the woman. He said moodily, “Poor old girl!”

A bruise discolored Maggie O’Day’s left temple. One of her crutches lay on the floor, behind the wheel chair. McFee saw something else then. He saw a red smear some two inches long on a sheet of newspaper on the floor in front of the wheel chair. He picked up the sheet, his eyes fixed and cold.

The smear was crimson grease paint.

McFee inspected Damon’s shoes, the old woman’s shoes. Neither pair was daubed with grease paint.

Very softly McFee said, “Pretty!”

A couple of coppers came. An assistant coroner, named Ridley, came.

Presently, Ridley said, “The old girl’s been dead quite a while — ten or twelve hours. She cracked her head when she fell. It must have knocked her cold.”

“Maybe some’dy cracked her first,” McFee said.

“You mean, somebody else turned on the gas?”