The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries
- Автор: Пауэлл Тэлмидж
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press LLC
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries». Краткое содержание книги:
The pipe bumped on the floor. I kneeled beside O’Leary. I’d padded the pipe with a wrap-around rag, and the skin on O’Leary’s scalp wasn’t even broken. He looked for all the world like a little kid dreaming happily as he lay there. His breathing was steady, and I figured he wouldn’t be unconscious for more than half an hour. It was time enough for our purposes.
He’d carried a heavy brown paper bag into the office. I opened it just long enough to make sure it was full of money.
When I crossed the bar and reached the front door, I clung to shadows, looking at the street. A car slipped past, then the wee-hours desertion returned to the street.
I worked quickly, going out, making sure the door spring-locked behind me, and then, the money stashed under my jacket, I strolled along innocently whistling a Bacharach tune until I had rounded the corner. There, I moved faster, using the next twenty minutes to put me into Clemmie’s apartment.
We had to tone down the celebration somewhat to keep from waking other tenants in the grubby old building. I spilled the bread in a lovely green mound on the coffee table. We laughed. We hugged. I picked her up and we went round and round. We kissed and kissed again. Then she popped the cork on a bottle of champagne she’d bought for the occasion.
We were just lifting the glasses when, quite without warning, a big brute in the hallway put a heavy heel against the door and kicked it open, tearing the lock into several dozen pieces.
The open doorway framed Sam Lagin, and Clemmie and I stood looking at him, two frozen stills cut from a movie by a film editor.
Lagin was breathing hard, and his eyes had color now. Deep pink was the hue, almost blood red.
I moved then, trying to shield the money from Lagin’s sight. But he’d seen it already. He heeled the broken door closed, crossed to Clemmie and me, and strangely enough, instead of touching the money, he picked up the champagne bottle and looked at the famed label.
He had his breathing steadied down. He set the bottle slowly on the table.
“Celebration’s kind of premature, isn’t it, kids?”
“Whoever you are,” Clemmie said angrily, “you can’t break in here and—”
“I can’t?” Sam Lagin said. He looked at the broken door lock, then all around the room. “But it seems I have, doesn’t it?”
“Throw the nut out of here, Freddie,” Clemmie’s voice was a suppressed shriek. “I’ll call the police and—!”
It was my turn to interrupt her. “Easy, baby. He’s Sam Lagin.”
“Your parole officer?” she choked.
“Awakened by a telephone call at an unearthly hour, which I don’t like,” Lagin added in venomous complaint. He cut those chilling eyes at me. “I told you, boy. I always keep close tabs on new members of the club.”
I looked from Sam Lagin to the money, and I went over to the couch, clutched the arm weakly, and sat down.
“How?” I asked. “You haven’t been around.”
“Spies, boy. I keep the club shot full of spies. You haven’t made a move without my knowing.”
My teeth clicked together. Feeling surged through me. Almost as great as my sense of loss was the anger I suddenly felt for Porter Attics. The rotten stoolie! Tipping Lagin off to everything I did or said.
Grizzly mean, Lagin stood before me, hands on hips. “I see you guessed about Porter Attics, boy. Now there’s a man who values his parole, just as you should. You lifted a few with him tonight.”
“You know I did!” I said, my throat filled with the bitterest frustration.
“And he figured, from your manner, that you were plenty up, boy. Planning something, maybe. He said good night and drifted out — and drifted back in again. He saw you slip into O’Leary’s hallway and not come out again. Enough to heighten his suspicions, wouldn’t you say, boy? So when the bar is closing and you still haven’t showed up, he drifts across the street and takes up a station in a dark doorway. He sees you come out at last — after everybody, except O’Leary, has left and O’Leary has locked up for the night.”
“That rat,” I said, clenching and unclenching my hands, “that scum of scum!”
Clemmie simply crumpled in a heap beside me and started crying.
Lagin let out a long sigh. “Don’t feel so hard at Porter, boy. Doing his job, that’s all. He sees you clutching that bulge under your jacket and he naturally assumes a heist. At least, he figures it’s enough to call me. And while I’m cranking up my car I hear the news on the police band. O’Leary has recovered consciousness and hollered cop. So all I had to do was to decide whether to head for your place or here.” He laughed, drily.
“You know the saying, Cherchez la femme,” he said. “So Clemmie’s place it was. And look what I find.”
He turned toward the coffee table and touched the money with a fingertip. “Boy,” he said, “a long time ago I decided I was on the losing end of a lousy, thankless job. That’s what I sure did decide, boy. Downtown they think I’m a great parole officer because my boys always beat the seventy-eight percent average who return to crime. It’s the way I handle them, boy, the way I do my job. The worst ones, murderers, rapists, I send back, boy, the minute they breathe wrong on the rules of parole. But there are others. Bright kids, the naturals — they’re the ones I work hardest with, boy, in private little efforts to preserve their paroles. That’s why I’m working so hard with you, boy.”
I inched to a tight, sitting position while I watched him drag a hassock over to the coffee table.
“Sam,” I husked, “what is it you want?”
He sat down, wet his fingertips, and began counting the money. “My half, boy. I always want my half — and if you value your parole you’ll always make damned sure you’ve got it ready!”
Welcome Home, Pal
Originally appeared in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, June 1973.
There were eight of us in the prison library. We’d drifted in one by one, choosing books and magazines and finding chairs at various tables. If a guard happened to look in he’d never suspect a meeting had been called to discuss a subject of the highest priority.
Murphy was the last to amble in. I watched over the edge of my newspaper as he fingered a Jules Verne from a bookshelf and shuffled over to sit down across the table from me.
Except for the missing face — Kowalski’s — all were present and accounted for.
I called the meeting to order by clearing my throat. There was a rustle of news print, book pages, and shifting bodies as one and all gave me his attention.
“You know the problem,” I said out of the side of my mouth in a whisper that razored all the way to Ordway, who sat furthest from me. “The parole board has met. And the lousy creeps have opened the front gate for Kowalski.”
A mutter of sullen anger slipped through the reading room.
“At least Kowalski can’t leave the state without breaking his parole,” Myrick said, not moving his lips. He was a member of the team by virtue of his inclinations to write stacks of checks with other people’s names on them.
“Beyond the walls and past the gate,” Ordway pointed out, “Kowalski is like on the moon, far as we’re concerned.”
Ordway is a soft-spoken little guy with big ears and large round eyes. His mama had masterminded a fur warehouse job. Mama had got the furs, Ordway the rap. I was fond of Ordway. How many guys would go to such lengths for their mama?
“I didn’t think the parole board would be so dumb,” Murphy said. “Anybody can look at Kowalski and tell he’s a ruffian.”
Murphy certainly didn’t look like one. He was a handsome, blue-eyed Irishman. He wasn’t a crook, in the sense that the rest of us were. With a big bat and sticky glove, Murph had once second-based his way almost into the majors. Trouble was, he loved women. Just about all women. And any woman he loved, he felt he should marry. Free love is one thing. But the courts still take a dim view of bigamy. Murph was doing time on three counts.