The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK™: 23 Classic Mystery Stories
- Автор: Деминг Ричард
- Год: 2016
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press
- ISBN: 9781479423507
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK™: 23 Classic Mystery Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
Standing up, I drew my gun and said, “Freeze, both of you!”
Both stared at me with their mouths open. The barkeep slowly raised his hands.
“Drop the bag, Sam,” I said, aiming the gun at the fat man.
The sack hit the floor with a plop, and his hands shot overhead.
“Into the office, both of you,” I ordered, gesturing with my gun.
They didn’t give me any trouble. Both scurried into the room, eager to please.
Standing in the doorway, I glanced around the room. The only window was identical to those in the barroom, high and barred.
I said to Sam, “Get up the key to this door. And do it fast.”
He dropped his right hand, still leaving the left raised, and felt in his pants pocket. Producing an old-fashioned key, he tossed it to me.
Backing out, I locked them in and dropped the key into my pocket.
When I hit the street, carrying the canvas sack, no one at all was on this side of the square. The opposite side was jammed, though.
Unhurriedly I walked up the alley. The car was parked exactly where I had left it.
But Andy Carr wasn’t in the driver’s seat, and the car was still locked.
I turned cold. Even if I had been able to get into the car, I had nothing with which to make an ignition bridge. Rapidly I strode back down the alley and gazed at the crowd across the square. What the devil had happened to the idiot?
Returning to the car, I stood next to it in frustrated indecision for a couple of minutes. When Andy still failed to appear, I started checking cars parked nearby. All of them were locked.
Too much time was passing for it to be safe to linger any longer. At any moment the first customers would be drifting back into Fat Sam’s.
In desperation I headed on foot up East Central, hoping that I could flag down a ride and take over the car at gunpoint.
There was a lot of traffic on East Central, but it was all heading for the square. I had plodded six blocks before a shiny black sedan going in my direction came along. When I signaled with my thumb, it pulled over to the curb.
Too late I saw the small round sheriff’s department insigne on the front door. Before I could reach for my gun, I was covered by the deputy seated next to the driver.
I let the sack fall and raised my hands.
On the way back to the sheriff’s office, I asked bitterly, “What went wrong?”
“A couple of things,” the deputy who had handcuffed me said. “For one, while it was smart of you to lock Sam and his bartender in the office, you neglected to notice the phone on his desk. He was phoning us about you as you walked out the door.”
After glumly considering this, I said, “What was the other thing I did wrong?”
“Your choice of a partner. Andy Carr is locally known as the gutless wonder. The minute we realized the false alarm had been turned in to clear the tavern, we knew Andy had to be your accomplice. It took us roughly two minutes to break him down and get the whole story.”
“But how did you catch up with him?” I inquired.
The deputy laughed. “We didn’t have to. He waited for us. We’ve had so much trouble with false alarms around here, the fire department just installed a new type of alarm box. When you pull the hook, a manacle automatically closes around your wrist and holds you there until the battalion chief arrives with a key.”
Errand Boy
Originally published in The Saint Mystery Magazine, March 1965.
“Do you have to go out again tonight?” Phyllis Stroud asked petulantly.
Barney Stroud tilted up her chin to give her an apologetic kiss on the nose. “Do you think I like leaving you alone, baby? You know I’m nuts about you.”
This wasn’t just husbandly flattery. Even after two years of marriage Barney was still astonished at having managed to snare a wife such as Phyllis. She was not only the most beautiful woman he had ever known, with a lovely, sensitive face surrounded by a halo of honey blonde hair, and possessing a figure which popped men’s eyes, but she had class. Though her parents were now broke because of some unwise investments by her father, Phyllis was a Caldwell, and in St. Vincent the name Caldwell was equivalent to Cabot or Lodge in Boston.
Phyllis was a Vassar graduate. Barney had grown up in the slums of St. Vincent and had quit school at sixteen. He not only loved his wife, he was deeply awed by her background.
A lot of people were. If they hadn’t been, Phyllis could hardly have lifted her racketeer husband into her own elite social set, but instead would have been summarily dropped from the social register for marrying so far beneath her. But in St. Vincent a Caldwell could do no wrong. Barney was quite aware that he was tolerated by St. Vincent high society solely because he was Phyllis’ husband.
The only thorn in his Garden of Eden was that he didn’t know how to handle his wife when she became condescending. Before he met and married Phyllis, Barney had always practiced the role of the dominant male. If one of his old flames from the south side had ever spoken to him half as belittlingly as Phyllis often did, he would have slapped her silly. But you can’t treat a goddess the same way you treat a tramp. Even when his wife sometimes informed him that the only reason she had married an unschooled racketeer was because he had money, it only made him miserable instead of angry. He wasn’t about to do anything which might cause Phyllis to walk out on him.
“What is it tonight?” she asked with a touch of ice. “More errand running for Johnny Nash?”
Barney had given up trying to explain to Phyllis that as third man from top in the Drennan-Nash combine he was considerably more than an errand boy. Because she disliked Johnny Nash, she seemed to have the peculiarly fixed idea that the man deliberately cut in on Barney’s evenings by dreaming up unnecessary chores for him to perform.
Oddly, she never made similar objections when he was called out at night by Nash’s partner, Mark Drennan. She seemed to like Drennan, or at least to accept him socially.
Of course Drennan had a veneer of breeding which put him at ease in Phyllis’ social set, while Johnny Nash looked and talked like what he was: a successful gangster. Furthermore Mark Drennan, who was a bachelor, never showed up at Phyllis’ social affairs with a feminine partner who didn’t fit in, whereas Johnny Nash always did on the rare occasions he was invited. He couldn’t avoid it, because his feminine partner was always his wife, a beautiful but ungrammatical woman who gave away her ex-stripper background every time she opened her mouth.
As one of her husband’s bosses, Johnny Nash and his wife had to be invited to at least some of Phyllis’ parties, but she hated to have either one in the house.
Barney said pacifically, “Johnny’s not even in town. I have to drop some tally sheets by Mark’s place.”
“Oh,” she said, mollified. “Will you be long?”
“Not more than an hour,” he assured her.
As he drove away from the house, Barney thought aggrievedly that he wasn’t as bad a catch as Phyllis liked to make out. Maybe he didn’t have the education and social grace of her friends, but he was more of a bargain physically than any of them. He stood six feet two, without an ounce of fat on him, and the girls on the south side had considered him about the handsomest guy around. Anyway, under Phyllis’ tutelage, he had managed to develop enough surface polish and to straighten out his grammar enough so that her friends seldom, any more, looked down their noses at him.
And he certainly had more money than most of her friends. Phyllis had a hundred-thousand-dollar home in which to entertain, she drove her own Lincoln convertible, wore Paris fashioned clothes, owned a couple of minks and nearly as much jewelry as Tiffany’s. Which wasn’t bad progress for a young man of twenty-six who had owned only one pair of pants ten years before.