Black Mask Detective (Vol. 35, No. 2 — November, 1950)

Goons were busting out all over, making Mr. Moon regret — that he’d cracked a safe, kissed a blonde, and toppled a gambling czar’s throne!

Chapter One What Price Glory?

I was feeling pretty satisfied with myself. It isn’t every day that a private detective gets to nip a crooked politician’s career in the bud by exposing his crookedness. Nor every day that he makes a hundred dollars for three hours work.

But mostly I was feeling satisfied because my name wouldn’t enter into it. My fat client, Raymond Margrove, would take all the credit — and also any of the gangland vengeance that was handed out. Normally in a case as big as the expose of Gerald Ketterer, I would have welcomed newspaper publicity, for it is equivalent to free advertising. But when the exposed crook heads a city-wide gambling syndicate reinforced by numerous goons who carry guns, I would just as soon remain incognito. Free advertising won’t plug up a hole in your head when a mugg goes to work on you.

The story broke in an extra edition of the Morning Blade at midnight. Hailing a newsboy from a front room window of my apartment, I tossed him a coin. He folded a paper into a compact envelope and tossed to me in turn. Without a care in the world, I settled in an easy chair to read the account from start to finish.

Two inch headlines on the front page announced: REFORM MAYORALTY CANDIDATE EXPOSED AS GAMBLING HEAD. The story rated two columns plus a front page editorial. I read the news story first:

I stopped there to do a double take. And that is where I began to develop cares. Before finishing the item, I went into the bedroom, cleaned and loaded my P-38 and laid it on my bedside stand. Then I cursed the mental image of Raymond Margrove and returned to the paper.

The rest of the story was a biography of Gerald Ketterer.

The front-page editorial was one of those “We are deeply shocked to discover a viper in our bosom” things. I gathered that while the Morning Blade had innocently supported Gerald Ketterer for mayor, it was big enough to admit a mistake, and now wanted no part of him.

Reading it made me sleepy, so after checking the locks on both doors and making sure my P-38 had a shell in the chamber, I went to bed.

I was awakened at ten a.m. by another newsboy shouting, “Extra!”

Irritably I thought the Blade was certainly dragging its extra out, since the regular morning edition must have hit the street three hours before.

Rolling out of bed, I hopped to the bathroom on my left foot, my right leg consisting of a cork and aluminum contraption I don’t bother to wear when asleep. After a shave and shower, I hopped back into the bedroom again, fished my leg from beneath the bed and strapped it on.

While waiting for coffee water to come to a boil on the stove, I switched on the shelf-model radio in my kitchen. A musical program ended and the news came on.

“This is George Gross with the up-to-the-minute news,” said the commentator. “At eight o’clock this morning mayoralty candidate Gerald Ketterer was discovered to have committed suicide as a result of the sensational disclosures made by the Morning Blade last night. The body was discovered by Miss Antoinette DeKalb, the dead man’s secretary.

“Miss DeKalb had waited until the Rand Building, in which Ketterer maintained his office, opened at seven a.m.; then had obtained an extra key to Ketterer’s apartment from her employer’s desk, and arrived at the apartment about eight. The dead man was discovered in the bathroom, where he had slashed both wrists with a razor and bled to death.”

The rest of the report was a rehash of the exposé made by the Blade.

I was stirring my second cup of coffee when the phone rang. Carrying my cup with me, I went into the bedroom to answer it. It was Raymond Margrove.

“Hear the news?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, “Just now on the radio.” Then in a sour tone I added, “Thanks for the newspaper plug.”

Apparently he caught the sour note. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Good publicity, wasn’t it?”

“Sure. Every gambler in town will love me.”

For a moment he was silent. “I hadn’t thought of it like that,” he said finally. “I thought I was doing you a favor.”

“Don’t do me any more like that,” I said shortly. “That crowd moves fast and plays rough. You didn’t swallow that suicide story, did you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why should Ketterer commit suicide?” I asked. “And don’t tell me because he couldn’t become mayor and his racket was busted wide open. The most he could have gotten on a gambling rap is a five-hundred-dollar fine, and the guy had a fortune to pay it with. The syndicate rubbed him out for spilling the works.”

He was silent even longer this time, and I could hear his labored breathing as he thought things over.

“But it was obviously a suicide,” he managed finally.

“Nuts,” I said.

Suddenly his voice squeaked, “Do you think I might be in danger?”

“Not if you keep your mouth shut,” I told him peevishly. “They’ll be looking for a guy named Moon.”

I hung up on him and took my coffee back to the kitchen to finish.

Twenty minutes later I was still sitting there smoking a cigar and trying to promote enough energy to wash the coffee pot when a polite cough came from the kitchen door.

I turned to observe a dapper young man of about twenty-five exposing even white teeth in a grin. He was carrying a .45 automatic.

“I’m sure I left the door locked,” I said foolishly.

“I brought a friend who talks to locks,” he explained pleasantly.

From behind him a long, sad-looking face peered over his shoulder and said querulously, “Cut the humor, Hank.”

Without glancing around, Hank said, “Sure, Keys.” Then he jiggled the gun at me and said, “On your feet, buddy.”

“Nuts,” I said without moving, “You won’t let that thing go off in an apartment house with paper walls like this one. Incidently, my name is Mister Moon.”

His college-boy grin came back. “Don’t bank on the thin walls. People always think it’s a backfire, and I get a kick out of shooting this thing off.”

His left fist clenched and he moved toward me casually. I kept my eye on the clenched fist, but I under-estimated him. Suddenly his gun snaked out and crashed alongside my head.

Half-stunned, I toppled sidewise off my chair, landing on all fours.

“Now get on your feet, buddy,” he said in a quiet voice. When the room stopped reeling, I got on my feet...

Chapter Two The Big Flim-Flam

The first time I saw Raymond Margrove, the guy who got me in all this trouble, I didn’t believe him possible.

I don’t rent an office, since the only office work I do is interviewing clients, and renting space for that would be presumptuous for a private investigator with the few clients I get. I was sitting in my apartment listening to my bank account dwindle when he called.

He didn’t bother to knock, possibly because it would have required so much energy to lift his fat arm above the door knob. The door just opened and a stomach came into the room.

It wasn’t the biggest stomach I had ever seen, for once I saw a pregnant hippopotamus. But it was the biggest stomach I had ever seen outside of a tank of water.

“Have a seat,” I invited, gesturing toward the other easy chair, then changing my mind and pointing at the sofa.

The sofa was a better fit. He sat in the exact center, entirely covering the middle cushion and using up part of the one on either side. He must have weighed four-hundred pounds.

For a few moments he simply sat and wheezed, his multiple chins quivering and his huge stomach shaking with each breath. I waited for him to recover from the stupendous exertion of having climbed eight steps to my flat.

“Pardon my not knocking,” the fat man said when he had regained his strength. “Hope I’m in the right apartment. You’re Manville Moon?”

I admitted the charge.

“You know who I am, of course.”

I knew who he was. He was Raymond Margrove, the town Boy Scout. Specialist in good deeds. Every time a charity drive came along, Margrove’s picture appeared in the paper as fun chairman. He was also president of the Chamber of Commerce, secretary of a service club, and a director of the Business Men’s Association for Honest Government. In his spare time he eked out a living as president of the Margrove Business Equipment Company, Incorporated, which manufactured office safes and cash registers. He probably wasn’t worth a cent over a million dollars. I knew who he was, but didn’t particularly care for his assumption that I should.

“Never saw you before,” I said.

He looked completely surprised and slightly nettled. “I am Raymond Margrove.”

He waited expectantly until I said, “Never heard of you.”

This time his expression was amazed. But slowly the amazement died to be replaced by a faint smile.

“You’re putting me in my place, of course, Mr. Moon. I was warned you delight in deflating pomposity. And just yesterday my niece told me I had become a pompous old fool.” Heavy lips lifted to change the faint smile into a grin.

I said, “Now I like you better. Have a drink?”

“Thanks. Plain water, please.”

I moved to the sideboard, mixed two water highballs and handed him one. Then I lifted the lid of my cigar humidor and raised one eyebrow.

“No thanks,” he said. “Doctor’s orders.” He hefted his glass slightly. “Peculiarly enough, he says a little of this occasionally is good for my heart.”

As I set fire to my cigar, he dipped his hand in a side pocket, popped two chocolate creams into his mouth, munched them enjoyably and washed them down with a slug of his highball.

“Piece of candy?” he asked.

When I shook my head, he finally got around to his business.

“You are aware of the local mayoralty election coming up, I presume, Mr. Moon?”

I nodded.

“And the deliberate slander being circulated about the incumbent, Mayor John Cash.”

I elevated another eyebrow. “Slander?”

“The newspaper innuendos that His Honor is somehow connected with the gambling rackets — or at best neglects his duty by permitting them to flourish.”

“Is that slander?” I asked. “If you have time for a tour of the city, I’ll show you five-hundred wide-open bookshops, fifty dice and card games, and a one-armed bandit in every tavern.”

The fat man frowned, which pushed down the mass of fat beneath his jaw and produced another chin. “I am aware that the city is rife with gambling. However, I have reason to believe John Cash has no connection with it.”

I shrugged. “The police here are square. You couldn’t buy Chief George Chester with a million dollars. If the mayor gave orders, the cops would stop gambling in twenty-four hours. The only answer is, he hasn’t given orders. Personally, I intend to vote for Gerald Ketterer.”

He nodded agreeably, causing all his chins to quiver again. “Most people seem to favor the Reform Party candidate — and for the same reason you do. Until last night I intended to vote for Ketterer myself. In fact I have been instrumental in swinging him considerable support through the various civic organizations to which I belong. But last night I discovered there is a possibility that I and the rest of the public have been cleverly flim-flammed, and that Gerald Ketterer is an out-and-out criminal.”

He pursed his thick lips, and I waited with both eyebrows raised.

“Last night,” he went on, “Mayor Cash visited me secretly. He picked me because he felt I had sufficient influence to help him, if anyone could. After hearing his story, I decided influence was useless in a case such as this, and what we needed was an honest and discreet private investigator.”

“That’s me,” I said modestly.

He fixed somewhat bulging eyes on my face and said slowly, “Mayor John Cash is literally being blackmailed by Gerald Ketterer into losing the election.”

I asked, “How’s that again?”

“Somehow Ketterer got hold of some pictures taken at a party Mayor Cash attended about five years ago. A year before he became mayor. They show the mayor with a... ah... lady of some notoriety. Politically he could probably weather the storm even if they were published, for they aren’t actually damaging pictures. However, he was married at the time, and still is. He loves his wife deeply, and is sure she would leave him immediately if she saw the pictures. This is the hold Ketterer has over him. For three years Gerald Ketterer has forced John Cash to declare a hands-off policy on gambling, on the threat of sending his wife the pictures.”

I absorbed this along with the rest of my drink, leaned back and blew cigar smoke at the ceiling. “And now,” I said thoughtfully, “Ketterer is using the same lever to make Cash stand still under the accusation of being tied to the gambling ring. Sounds like the Reform candidate himself is the big wheel behind the gamblers.”

“Exactly my conclusion,” Margrove said. “And also what John Cash believes. As the situation stands, there is no doubt Ketterer will be swept in on the Reform ticket. He will make a gesture at cleaning up gambling; then when public interest dies, all the gambling places will quietly open again, more firmly intrenched than ever.”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Two things. First I want you to recover those pictures. Second, I want you to find evidence that Gerald Ketterer is actually behind the gambling rackets.”

“The second part sounds like a big order.”

“It is,” the fat man agreed. “But without it, the first is useless. Public sentiment is so in favor of Ketterer, only a complete expose could turn it back to Cash at this point. And election is four days off. You’ll have to work fast.”

I eyed him quizzically. “Frankly, I don’t think I could accomplish much in that time, but I’m willing to try. Incidently, Mr. Margrove, just what is your interest in all this?”

“Public service,” he said simply.

I nodded understandingly. The fat man was doing his good deed for the day. But while not as lofty as my client’s, I have a few principles too, and I don’t believe in by-passing them even when dealing with unselfish servants of the public.

I said, “I’ll undertake the job with one understanding, Mr. Margrove. I make it a rule when I’m hired to recover anything used for the purpose of blackmail, that if I get my hands on it, I turn it over to the person being blackmailed, regardless of who hires me.”

“I’ll see that His Honor gets it,” Mar-grove said.

I shook my head. “No sir. I hand it to the mayor personally. I know you are above suspicion and go to church every Sunday, but once I stole some letters from a blackmailer, turned them over to a friend of the person being blackmailed, and the friend went into the blackmail business.”

He started to frown, then turned it into a chuckle. “All right, Mr. Moon. If it will make you feel better, I have no objection. I will, however, expect you to turn over to me any evidence you find connecting Gerald Ketterer to the gambling ring.”

I rose and punched out my cigar. “It’s a deal. And since time is short, I may as well start right now. You can make out a retainer check while I get my hat. Four days at twenty-five dollars a day comes to a hundred dollars.”

When I returned from the bedroom, he was waving the check back and forth to dry it. As I thrust it in my wallet, he heaved to his feet and waddled toward the door. With his hand on the knob he turned back again.

“I know nothing of the detective business, Mr. Moon, and don’t presume to tell you your own job, but I suppose you plan to search Gerald Ketterer’s home and his office?”

“Possibly,” I said in a non-committal tone, not feeling it necessary to confess illegal entry even to a client.

“Then I’ll save you a little time. Ketterer is a bachelor and lives alone in suite 620 of the Plaza Apartments. His office is on the twelfth floor of the Rand Building. The office closes at five p.m., so it would seem the best time to examine his apartment would be in the daytime, and the best time for the office between five and six, after which the elevators stop running.”

I said, “You should have been a detective yourself.”

“I just happen to know his habits,” he said. “I do my investment business with Ketterer.”

Chapter Three Crusader’s Confession

Refusing my fat client’s offer of a ride in his chauffeur-driven car, I separated from him at the curb and walked to the public garage up the street where I kept the car the government had given me in exchange for my leg. It was an automatic drive specially equipped for left-legged driving, having the brake pedal left of the steering column instead of right.

I was nearly to the Plaza Apartments when I developed an intuitive feeling that I was being tailed. While waiting for a light to change, I glanced in the rearview mirror and caught sight of a blue coupe two cars back. I had not been watching for a tail, but subconsciously I was aware of having seen the same coupe in the mirror every time I looked.

When I drove into the Plaza’s parking lot, the coupe went on by and I got a look at the driver. He had the square scrubbed-looking face and crew haircut of a college athlete, and looked to be about college age. I wondered why I was becoming jittery and imagining college boys were tailing me.

Since it was after four, I had no intention of trying to enter Ketterer’s apartment that day and taking a chance he might knock off work early. I merely wanted to case the place. I rode a self-service elevator to the sixth floor, located suite 620 and rode the elevator down again.

From a drug store across from the parking lot, I phoned Jackie Morgan at the bed-bug haven he called home.

My association with Jackie originated years before in a saloon brawl. Two drunken heavyweights had been using his hundred and twenty pound frame for a punching bag, and I reduced the odds by banging their heads together. My motive in interfering had been interest in fair play rather than concern for his welfare, for at the time I didn’t even know him. But he never forgot it, and still considered his debt unpaid.

At sixty Jackie Morgan was a retired safe-cracker who had paid his debt to society with ten years of his life and now lived on an annuity left by a deceased brother. No police anywhere wanted him, but he got some kind of a kick out of maintaining contact with the underworld, and lived in a criminals’ hideout, where he seemed to be accepted as a harmless eccentric. I frequently called on his diversified talents, the most valuable of which was an almost supernatural ability with locks.

I told him to bring his kit and meet me at the magazine rack of the drug store in the Rand Building.

I couldn’t find a parking place near the Rand Building, and finally left my car on a public lot two blocks away. As I walked past the drug store where I had told Jackie Morgan to meet me, I glanced through the window and saw he had not yet arrived. But I did see another familiar figure.

Coming out of a phone booth was the same square-headed college boy I had imagined was tailing me. As I watched, he left the store, climbed into the blue coupe parked at the curb and drove away. If he was tailing me, he would have stuck around, I reasoned, and decided it was coincidence.

Across from the main entrance of the Rand Building I found a post to lean against from which I could both watch for Jackie to arrive and for Gerald Ketterer to leave. I had never met Ketterer, but since he had entered the mayoralty race his picture had been plastered on political posters all over town, and I felt sure I could spot him.

I started my vigil at twenty-five after four. At a quarter of five a taxi dropped three men at the entrance of the Rand Building. I knew all three casually, and if Gerald Ketterer really was king-pin of the gambling racket, these three must have been calling on him for a meeting of some kind, for they were the three biggest gamblers in town.

Dan Ironbaltz, the biggest of the three, both in size and underworld importance, ostensibly ran a high-class eatery called the Penguin Club. There was nothing on the police blotter about him, for I had had occasion to check, but it was common knowledge in the underworld that the Penguin Club was an expensive and profitless front, and the income which kept him in cars and champagne came from his job as straw-boss of the bookshops. He was a huge, ugly man with coarse features and heavy eyebrows which met over his nose to form one solid line. His arms were long and hairy, and hung motionless in front of him when he walked in his slightly thrust-forward position, so that he resembled nothing so much as a gorilla in hand-tailored clothes.

James Goodrich was the smallest of the three physically, but probably second in criminal importance. It was rumored that if you owned a tavern and wanted some extra revenue to help pay the rent, Goodrich could arrange to have a slot-machine installed if you guaranteed him half the take. It was also rumored that if you installed a machine on your own hook, without Jimmy Goodrich’s permission, cops called and took it away the first night. He was a little thin-faced man with a beak nose and an expression like a weasel with a stomach-ache.

Art Depledge was an average of both the other two. Of medium height and stocky build, he had the round, pleasant face of a grocery clerk — the sort of face you would instinctively trust. That is, unless you knew he was one of the sharpest card and dice men in town, and had accumulated a fortune through having people instinctively trust him. I had always thought he gambled strictly on his own, and had heard nothing to tie him to the numerous professional games spotting the town. But seeing him in the company of the other two straw-bosses, it didn’t require genius to hazard the guess that he straw-bossed the dice and card games held at the local night clubs.

The trio entered the Rand Building together. At five minutes after five, a whole horde of office workers disgorged from the entrance, and in their center I spotted Gerald Ketterer. He was easy to spot, because he had a long, humorless face and wore his prematurely white hair long, like a Kentucky senator.

In the crowd on either side of him were Jimmy Goodrich and Art Depledge, and trailing immediately behind him was Dan Ironbaltz. Ketterer stepped to the curb to hail a cab just as little Jimmy Goodrich slapped him lightly on the back. When the Reform candidate for mayor turned toward him, Goodrich grasped his hand and wrung it warmly.

From across the street it seemed to me Ketterer showed no enthusiasm for the handshake. Almost immediately he withdrew his hand, and when big Dan Ironbaltz and Art Depledge each clapped him familiarly on the shoulder, he glanced both ways along the street, apparently to see if anyone was noticing. I hardly blamed him, for it would certainly have not won him many votes for mayor to be seen in that trio’s company.

At that moment a taxi pulled up, Ketterer entered it and drove off without even glancing back at the men who had bid him good-by so chummily.

The three gamblers managed to catch the next cab, and disappeared in the same direction taken by Ketterer.

Jackie Morgan had still not arrived at the drug store. Crossing the street, I pushed my way through the crowd still coming out of the building and entered one of the six elevators. It was an express piloted by a beautiful but expressionless blonde. Since everyone else was coming down, I had her to myself. But before I could work the conversation beyond the point of stating, “Twelfth floor, please,” the elevator went “Whoosh!” and there we were.

“Service stops at six o’clock, sir,” she said. Her voice was as expressionless as her face.

I said, “I’ll try to be through by then.”

The office of the reform candidate for mayor had Gerald Ketterer, Investment Broker printed on its stained glass door. I opened the door inward just in time to push it against a blonde not quite as pretty as the elevator operator, but with more expression. At the moment her expression was startled, for the door knocked her backward and she dropped her purse.

“Sorry,” I said, removing my hat and stooping to recover the purse. “Clumsy of me.”

She examined me thoroughly, starting with my face, estimating the breadth of my shoulders and moving her eyes slowly down to my feet. She couldn’t have been impressed by my face, so it must have been the shoulders that melted her.

“We’re closed,” she said in a soft voice suggesting she would have stayed open another hour had she known I was coming. “Did you want to see Mr. Ketterer?”

“Yes. I realize it’s after office hours, but I’ll only take a minute.”

“He’s gone home,” she said. “If you’ll tell me your business and leave your phone number and name, I’ll see if I can arrange an appointment and phone you tomorrow.” The way her full lips quirked at the corners, I got the impression that while we were on the subject of phone numbers, she would be glad to offer hers.

I held the door for her. “Never mind. I’ll ring him at home this evening. It wasn’t a business matter.”

As she passed through the door, my thumb pushed back the spring bolt at the same time my forefinger locked it open. Then I pulled the door shut and we were both in the hall.

It was wasted effort, for she didn’t depend on the night lock. Taking a key from her bag, she shot the main bolt home. We went down on the elevator together, neither speaking, but giving each other the eye and both liking what we saw. She was a cute enough kid to make me wish I had time to play, but unfortunately I had business to attend to. In front of the building we parted with mutual reluctance.

In the drug store at the corner of the Rand Building, I found that Jackie had finally arrived.

“What took you so long?” I asked.

“Hadda pick this up first,” he said, hefting a leather briefcase. “I loaned it to a friend who’s still in the profession.”

In his neat gray suit and with his briefcase, the contents of which would have made a locksmith drool with envy, Jackie looked like a dried-up insurance salesman. We caught the same elevator I had taken up before, but excited no comment from the operator.

When she let us out at twelve, she said in the same expressionless voice she had used before, “Service stops at six, sir.”

Though the office door next to Ketterer’s was open, no one was in the hall as we approached the door marked Gerald Ketterer, Investment Broker. Using a piece of spring steel no thicker than a coarse hair, it took Jackie about as long to open the door as it would have taken me with a key. I set the night lock and closed it again from inside.

With daylight saving the sun was still high, and lights were unnecessary. The office consisted of two rooms, a reception room and Ketterer’s private office. I spent fifteen minutes on the reception room, finding nothing of interest.

The inner office contained a locked safe bearing a metal plate below the door inscribed, Guaranteed Burglar-proof... Margrove Business Equipment Co., Inc. I put Jackie to work on it while I went through the desk and file cabinet. Drawing a blank, I slammed the last drawer closed in disgust.

“Quiet!” Jackie said petulantly.

He had on a stethoscope and was slowly turning the safe’s combination dial. Although retired, Jackie still kept his fingers in practice, and modestly admitted to still being the best cracksman in the country. I wouldn’t know, because I wasn’t acquainted with any other cracksmen, but he was a pleasure to watch.

Jackie straightened with a frown, drew a piece of fine sand-paper from his briefcase and set my teeth on edge by running his fingertips over it to make them sensitive. Then he went back to work.

Ten minutes later the safe which was guaranteed burglar-proof swung open.

The safe contained four compartments, which I tackled one by one. The first held about two-hundred dollars in bills and seven checks totalling eight-thousand dollars, all clipped to a bank deposit slip dated the next day. The second compartment contained several hundred stock certificates and bonds, all of them declaring the owner to be Gerald Ketterer, and none of them negotiable. If they were worth anything, Ketterer seemed pretty well fixed financially.

The last two compartments contained file folders, which in turn contained private correspondence, confidential market reports, contracts with clients and other matters such as any business man might not wish to keep in an open file accessible to anyone who happened to be in the office.

Concealed behind the folders in the bottom compartment I found what I wanted.

The pictures were in a plain envelope, unsealed. There were three of them and they showed His Honor, Mayor John Cash, attired in a dinner jacket and obviously very drunk. A woman in a low-cut evening dress appeared with him in all three: once on his lap with an arm around his neck and the other hand holding a champagne glass. Once sitting on a sofa with his head in her lap, and once with both standing while he administered what seemed to be a lingering kiss.

Aside from making His Honor look rather ridiculous, the pictures didn’t impress me as very hot stuff for blackmail — except for one thing. The woman was Anne “Bumpsie” Farrel, an ex-burlesque artist who had attained notoriety on three separate occasions by being named correspondent in divorce cases involving prominent men, each of which had ensconced her in what the papers delighted in calling “love nests.” I could understand how the mayor’s wife might react strongly to Bumpsie.

Slipping the envelope in my pocket, I examined the other item concealed behind the file folders. It was a plain cloth-bound notebook of lined paper. On the first page was written a statement that began: “This book has been prepared by me as a form of life insurance, since the enterprises in which I am engaged involve contact with various individuals who would like to replace me, and are not above murder as a means of accomplishing their end...”

It was signed: “Gerald Ketterer”.

The remainder of the notebook was a detailed list of nearly five-hundred bookshops, with addresses and proprietors, fifty-some dice and card games, and the locations of what must have been fifteen-hundred slot machines, though I didn’t bother to count. Every little-shot in the gambling rackets was listed by name, but nowhere was there mention of big Dan Ironbaltz, little Jimmy Goodrich or middle-sized Art Depledge.

We caught a down elevator at five minutes to six.

Chapter Four The Cash-and-Carry Corpse

From the drug store where I had met Jackie Morgan, I phoned Raymond Margrove. An oriental servant who pronounced his “r”s like “l”s and wasn’t at all sure his employer was home answered the phone, and we went through a long argument in pidgin English before I finally got to talk to my fat client. Then before I could say anything, Margrove began issuing instructions.

“I’ve been trying to reach you at your apartment,” he said aggrievedly, apparently resentful that I wasn’t on hand to pop out of the wall whenever he pushed a button. “I’d like you to drop over right away.”

“That was my idea,” I told him. “I just phoned to make sure you were in.”

Outside the drug store I parted with Jackie, who accepted the twenty I thrust on him only after I assured him it would go on my client’s expense account. Although his small annuity was his total income, Jackie refused to accept pay for his unique services if he thought it was coming out of my own pocket.

Raymond Margrove lived in the most expensive section along Lindell Boulevard, and his house was one of the city’s show places. It was of the modern school of architecture — eighteen rooms all on one floor, built mainly of plate glass and steel, so that it resembled a huge outdoor aquarium.

The oriental servant, who turned out to be a round-headed butler about five feet tall, but built like a wrestler, let me in. I followed him through a sitting room furnished with glittering tubular furniture and whose entire front wall was a sheet of heavy glass looking out on the front patio, through a game room containing a bar but no windows, the ceiling of this one being glass, and into a study with two glass walls and a skylight.

The butler said something that sounded like, “Mlistel Mlanville Mloon,” bowed formally and removed himself by backing out of sight into the game room.

Raymond Margrove sat with a book in his lap in an easy chair twice the size of an ordinary chair. It was geometrically set to bisect the right angle formed by the two glass walls, its back to the corner in order to catch the best light. The fat man’s slippered feet were on a footstool, and on an end table next to his chair was a nearly empty box of chocolates.

I glanced around the room, noted the two walls not glass were lined with hooks which looked well-handled, but the built-in desk in the center of one wall had the display-window appearance of never having been used. I had my choice of two chrome and hard leather straight chairs, or the cushioned swivel chair which went with the desk, and was also specially designed for my client’s bulk. I chose the latter.

“Will you have a drink?” Margrove asked.

“No thanks,” I said, surprising myself, for it was perhaps the third drink I had ever refused. I laid it to the feeling of unease all the glittering modernism engendered in me.

“Piece of candy?”

I shook my head and watched while he popped two fat chocolates in his mouth at once.

“I called you over because I may be able to make your task easier,” Margrove said. “It didn’t occur to me this afternoon, but my company manufactured the safe Gerald Ketterer has in his office. I have the combination for you.”

I said, “I won’t need it,” walked over and tossed the notebook in his lap.

He spent five minutes examining it, then raised his head and looked at me in amazement. “How... how the deuce did you get it out of the safe?”

“Who said it was in a safe?”

He thought about this, then admitted, “No one. Knowing he had a burglar-proof safe, I just assumed he’d keep important matters in it. Where did you find it?”

“In a gutter,” I said, and when he just stared at me blankly, added, “Even though Ketterer isn’t likely to complain to the police, I don’t make a practice of going around admitting felonies. And if I did, you’d become an accessory. I found it in a gutter at Fourth and Walnut. Right next to the pictures the mayor wanted.”

“I see,” he said agreeably. “Then you have the pictures too?”

I nodded. “I’ll drop them at the mayor’s house when I leave here. You might phone and tell him to expect me.”

He pressed a button set in the arm of his chair, and almost immediately the butler appeared.

“Phone His Honor, Mayor Cash,” Margrove instructed. “Tell him to expect Manville Moon with that material he wanted in twenty minutes.”

As the butler backed out, Margrove began to study the notebook in more detail. Ten minutes passed in silence, after which he snapped it shut and grinned at me happily.

“This is really much better than I expected, Mr. Moon. I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Try it with money,” I suggested. “There was an expense item of twenty dollars.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Yes?”

I shook my head. “You’ll have to take my word for it. Again if I told you, you’d become an accessory.”

Huge shoulders moving in a ponderous shrug, he grunted and strained for his wallet. Somehow he managed to find a twenty among the half-inch sheath of fifties and hundreds, and extended it to me. Apparently there was to be no bonus for rapid service.

“Thanks very much.” I said politely, and bid him good night.

Mayor john cash’s home was also on Lindell Boulevard, a scant block and a half from Margrove’s. He lived in one of the old “Quality” homes, as the mansions built by rich men in the Nineties are called locally. It was a rambling but solid structure of three stories, old but in perfect condition, and as comfortable-looking as an old shoe.

Mayor John Cash himself came to the door. He was a suave, middle-aged man with distinguished iron-gray hair and a bland face which perpetually wore a slight smile.

“Mr. Moon?” he inquired, and when I nodded he held the door wide. “Come in. The servants are off tonight, but I’ve been awaiting your ring.”

He led me into a study as comfortable as Raymond Margrove’s had been hard and unyielding, pushed a wall panel which swivelled to expose a small bar, and offered me a drink.

Liking the atmosphere of this study better, I accepted.

When we were comfortably seated with our drinks, I pulled out the envelope and gave it to him. Quickly he checked the contents, then glanced at me with a slightly embarrassed expression.

“Did you see these?” he asked.

“Naturally,” I said. “I had to make sure it was what I was looking for.”

“Of course. Excuse the silly question.”

Laying the pictures on a metal ash tray, he touched a match to them and watched them burn with a faint smile. He made no attempt to explain or apologize for his ridiculous appearance in the photographs, for which I admired him.

“Do I owe you anything, Mr. Moon?” he asked.

“I was retained by Margrove,” I told him. “He paid me. Settle with him, if you wish.”

Setting down my empty glass, I rose and told him I’d be running along. Courteously he held the door for me, followed me along the hall and opened the front door for me too.

But before I could pass through it, a woman entered. She was a tall willowy brunette in her early thirties, with more curves than a mountain highway and a full, sultry mouth. She was about three-quarters drunk.

“Hel-lo!” she trilled, steadying herself with one hand against my chest. She stared up into my face with wide-open invitation and asked, “Where’d you come from, you fascinating ugly man?”

“Elizabeth!” Mayor Cash said, attempting to take her arm.

Impatiently she shrugged him off. “What’s your name, ugly man?”

Before answering I walked over to a hall mirror and studied the drooping eyelid and bent nose I once gathered from a set of brass knuckles. I don’t think about my looks very much, but I guess I am ugly.

Turning back to her, I said, “Moon. Manville Moon. What’s your name, ugly woman?”

She laughed fit to kill. When she finally got back her breath, she said, “You don’t mean it, because you think I’m beautiful. But you really are ugly, isn’t he, John? Ugly and strong. Just the way I like men. You staying to dinner, Mr. Ugly Moon?”

“No thanks,” I said.

“Please, Elizabeth,” said the mayor. “Mr. Moon was just leaving.”

“Go away, spoil-sport,” she said. Moving toward me, she steadied herself against my chest again. “Come back after dinner and we’ll get ugly drunk together. My name is Elizabeth. Elizabeth Cash.”

“Mrs.?”

“Pooh,” she said. “Sure, Mrs. But who cares? We’ll lock old spoil-sport in his study and you and I’ll get ugly drunk.”

“Sure,” I said, sidling around her to the door. “Expect me about then, or maybe sooner unless I get held up. Nice to have met you both.”

I got out the door and closed it in her face before she could stagger after me.

But I didn’t return after dinner to get ugly drunk. I sat around my apartment until midnight waiting for the news to break, and at midnight I heard a newsboy calling, “Extra! Read all about it!”...

The tall, sad-faced gunman named Keys preceded us down the stairs. I went second and Hank, the college boy, followed in trail position, his gun centered on my back through the cloth of his coat.

Instead of the traditional black sedan gangsters are supposed to use when taking people for rides, their car was the same blue coupe I had imagined was following me the day before.

I said, “This thing was tailing me yesterday before I did anything to make anybody mad. Any particular reason?”

“Get in,” Hank said.

I sat in the middle between the door Keys, who drove, and Hank, who held the gun against my side. No one spoke while we drove leisurely across town, obeying all traffic rules. When we reached the city limits, Keys opened up to sixty.

As we rode along, I had been examining Key’s profile, which struck me as vaguely familiar.

“Haven’t I seen your picture on a poster somewhere?” I asked.

Immediately his sadness evaporated and he said proudly, “Two-thousand dollars reward.” After a moment he added with a faint note of complaint, “Not dead or alive, though. Only alive.”

“What are you wanted for?”

“Couple of bank jobs.” His proud expression returned. “Nobody in the country can match me at opening a crib.”

“You must never have heard of Jackie Morgan,” I said.

“Morgan!” He almost ran off the road swinging to peer at me. When he straightened the car again, he said. “He don’t count because he’s retired.” Without any conviction he added, “I top him anyway.”

“Shut up and find a side road leading to the river,” the young gunman on my right instructed.

Up to then I had hoped, without much confidence, they were taking me to be interviewed by whomever had replaced Gerald Ketterer as head of the gambling syndicate, or at most intended merely to mess me up a little.

I said, “I don’t know anyone at the river.”

“We’ll introduce you to some fish,” Hank told me dryly.

A mile farther on Keys turned left onto a dirt road.

“As long as I won’t be able to tell anyone,” I said. “Mind explaining who’s paying you for this?”

“The City Improvement Association,” Hank said. “They think you’re an eyesore.” He was quite a card.

I tried it another way. “It must be either Dan Ironbaltz, Jimmy Goodrich or Art Depledge. Which one steps into the king boss’ shoes, now that he’s dead?”

The young man looked at me curiously. “What makes you think he’s dead?”

That stopped me. I was still trying to figure it out when we passed the last farmhouse situated along the deserted road and caught a momentary glimpse of the river a half mile ahead.

“What kind of bullets do you use?” I asked Hank suddenly.

“Steel-jackets,” he said, grinning into my face.

“Interesting. Because I’m going to make a break in a minute.”

“What?” he asked, as though he hadn’t quite understood what I said.

“I’ll get knocked off,” I explained, keeping my voice casual in spite of the tight feeling in my stomach. “But I’m going to get knocked off anyway. This way I’ll at least have the satisfaction of lousing you up. A steel-jacket will go right through me and kill your driver, which at this speed will probably kill you too.”

“Hey!” Keys said, slowing the car.

The pressure left my side as Hank shifted in his seat to half face me, swinging the automatic around so that the muzzle was a foot from my stomach.

“Thanks for calling my attention to it,” he said with a grin.

“Don’t mention it,” I told him, suddenly smacking the heel of my right hand against the muzzle at the same time my left clamped over the slide.

I had learned that trick in Ranger training during the war, but never had a chance to use it before. I was as surprised as Hank that it actually worked. An automatic can’t fire when pressure is applied to the muzzle and kept there.

Since the gun was still pointed at my stomach, Hank wasted a second trying to pull the trigger. Then he started a left toward my jaw, which put me at a disadvantage since both my hands were occupied.

Luckily Keys picked that instant to jam on the brakes, jolting the car to a stop and killing the engine. The gunman lurched toward the windshield and his fist merely grazed my cheek.

Before he could swing again, I pushed my left hand outward until the gun pointed at Keys, and released the muzzle pressure. His finger must have been frozen on the trigger, for the gun blasted square into Key’s stomach.

Then I brought my right elbow against Hank’s jaw with such force that the back of his head shattered the door glass on that side.

He was still unconscious and Keys was still dead when I parked the blue coupe in front of Police Headquarters twenty minutes later. However, while there was no danger of Keys strolling off, I didn’t want to leave Hank alone even long enough for me to go inside for a cop, for I suspected if he awakened in the meantime he might remember he had an appointment somewhere else. Hefting him across my shoulders in a fireman’s carry. I staggered up the steps.

Big George Chester, the chief of police, was leaning over Desk-Sergeant Danny Blake haranguing him about something. He straightened when he saw me.

“Hey, Moon!” he said. “We’ve been looking for you.” He eyed my burden and asked, “What you got there?”

“Something for Homicide,” I told him, starting to lurch past toward the office of Inspector Warren Day.

“Wait a minute!” He moved his huge bulk in front of me to block my way. “You’re supposed to leave corpses at the scene of the crime.”

“This is alive,” I said. “And damned heavy. The corpse is in a blue coupe out front.”

I tried to move around him, but he jabbed a forefinger the size of a sausage in my stomach. “Just a minute, Manny. How come you turned that confession of Ketterer’s over to a newspaper instead of to us?”

Chief George Chester had been in my outfit during the war, and I didn’t have to be formal with him. I said, “I bring you a corpse and an unconscious gunman, and you yammer about a little thing like a gambling racket. Get out of my way before I give you the knee!”

He got out of my way, but called after me, “I still want an answer after whatever you got here is straightened out.”

The office door of Inspector Warren Day, chief of Homicide, was open a crack. Shouldering it the rest of the way open, I staggered in.

Warren Day was dictating something to his right-hand man, Lieutenant Hannegan. He raised his skinny bald head to stare at me over his glasses, started to generate a ferocious scowl, but let it deteriorate into an expression of amazement. Both men watched silently as I gazed around for a suitable place to rest my burden, saw nothing but wooden chairs, and eased it to the floor.

“This is a gentleman named Hank,” I explained. “He didn’t tell me his last name. In attempting to shoot me, he accidentally bumped off his partner, whom I left outside. Killing an innocent bystander while attempting a felony is murder, isn’t it?”

Day merely continued to stare at me. Finally he said, “When you come in this office, knock, damn you!”

It was nearly one p.m. when I entered Day’s office, and all the nourishment I had taken that day was a pot of coffee. By the time Hank was revived and installed in a cell, Keys was shipped off to the morgue and I had explained things to the partial satisfaction of Chief Chester and Warren Day, it was after two.

“May I go home and get something to eat now?” I inquired.

“Sure,” answered George Chester. “Soon as you explain why you turned that notebook over to the Morning Blade instead of to us.”

“I didn’t,” I said wearily. “I gave it to the client who hired me to uncover it.”

“Who’s the client?”

“Raymond Margrove, the only guy in town fatter than you are.”

The chief looked pained. “This seems to be in your department, Day,” he said huffily. “Release Moon when you’re through with him.”

He strode out of the room and slammed the door, leaving me with the inspector and Hannegan.

“All right, Moon,” Day said sourly. “Go home and fill your gut, if you got nothing to add.”

“There is one more item,” I said, suddenly remembering. “I asked Hank which one of the big three in gambling circles was taking over now that the big boss was dead, and he said, ‘What makes you think he’s dead?’ Did Ketterer recover?”

The inspector glanced at Hannegan, who shook his head, never believing in opening his mouth when a gesture would do.

“You sure the corpse was Ketterer?” I asked.

Day glanced at Hannegan again, and got a nod this time. That settled it, because Hannegan doesn’t even nod unless he’s certain.

“Maybe you can work out of Hank what he meant,” I suggested. “And if you can afford the time, I’d appreciate a word dropped into the ears of Ironbaltz, Goodrich and Depledge that you’d be grieved if anything happened to me.”

“Why should I tell a lie?” Day asked coldly.

I rose and stretched. “That’s why I never object to taxes. I know I have the full protection of the police department if gangsters decide to bump me off. At least you might dig a little deeper into Gerald Ketterer’s death.”

“Why?”

“Because guys like Ketterer don’t kill themselves when faced by a five-hundred-dollar fine. My hunch is he was rubbed out for blowing up the racket.”

“Horsefeathers,” Day said. “If the gambling crowd had done it, he’d have a bullet in him. They don’t go in for subtlety. You’re always having hunches.”

“O.K.,” I said, shrugging. “Keep it listed as a suicide. But if I commit suicide in the next few days, don’t believe it. I’ve got a hundred dollars, only two-hundred-dollars’ worth of bills, and a beautiful woman wants me to get ugly drunk with her. I have everything in the world to live for.”

Chapter Five Kiss a Little, Quiz a Little

Unless I have a client paying for my time, ordinarily I don’t make a practice of poking my nose into police matters. But since the police apparently accepted Ketterer’s death as suicide, and refused to see any connection between it and the attempt on me, I was forced to take some action in self-defense.

In my own mind I was sure Ketterer had been murdered by his three lieutenants, or at least on their order, and I decided my best defense would be to prove it and get them behind bars before they could get me.

Curiously, none of the three had been mentioned in Ketterer’s confession, and actually there was no evidence aside from underworld talk that Dan Ironbaltz was overseer of the bookshops, Jimmy Goodrich managed the slot-machine racket, and Art Depledge ran the house-games.

And since all over town slot-machines and gambling equipment had disappeared the minute the Morning Blade expose hit the streets, leaving the cops who began raiding a few hours later nothing to examine but empty rooms and slot-machineless taverns, there was little chance that any real evidence connecting the three with gambling could now be uncovered. I hardly blamed Warren Day for refusing to waste time questioning the trio.

But with me it was a matter of wanting to stay alive.

As soon as I got some food into myself, I looked up Antoinette DeKalb’s address in the newspaper account of Ketterer’s confession, and drove to 324 Center Street. It proved to be a four-family apartment in a middle-class neighborhood. According to her mailbox, Ketterer’s secretary occupied the lower right flat.

I rang three times before the door opened a crack and the blonde secretary’s voice inquired, “Are you a reporter?”

I said, “No. I’m a suitor.”

The door opened another inch and a suspicious eye looked me over. The suspicion turned to a mixture of surprise and what I hoped was welcome. Apparently it was, for the door opened wide. She wore a green housecoat, carried a towel, and damp blonde hair was twisted in a loose knot above her ears, which made her look about sixteen.

“You’re the man who hit me with a door,” she accused. “How did you find where I live?”

“Love will find a way,” I said noncommittally. “May I come in?”

She stepped aside long enough for me to pass, then shut the door and leaned her back against it. “You caught me in the shower.”

“A good thing, too,” I told her. “Probably saved me from jail.”

She frowned. “How’s that?”

“With your grown-up makeup washed off, I can tell your real age. They put you in jail for playing with kids under eighteen.”

“I’m twenty-four!” she said indignantly, but the indignation was all in her voice. Her eyes said she was pleased at the compliment. For a moment she examined me appraisingly, then she said, “I’m not sure I should have let you in. I don’t even know you.”

“Manny Moon,” I said, bowing formally.

She grinned and dropped a mock curtsey. “Antoinette DeKalb. Toni for short. Sit down while I get some clothes on.”

She moved past me and disappeared into a bedroom. I made a circuit of the living room, examining a set of prints on the wall, and was just preparing to sink into a soft chair when the bedroom door flew open again. Not two minutes had passed, and though she now wore a form-fitting green dress in place of the housecoat, her hair was still pinned up and her face free of makeup.

“Did you say Moon?” she demanded. “Manny Moon?”

“Yes,” I said, abandoning plans to sit.

“Is that the same as Manville Moon?”

“That’s my full name,” I admitted.

Her full skirt swished as she strode over to me, planted a fist on each hip and thrust out a round jaw. The top of her head just came even with my chin, I noticed.

“You’re the man in the newspaper!” she snapped. “The private detective who found that notebook!”

“Right,” I snapped back, placing fists on my own hips and shoving my jaw out just as far as hers.

Thrusting her head upward until her nose was an inch from my own, she said bitterly, “You didn’t come to see me. You came to ask questions, just like the reporters.”

“Not entirely,” I said, imitating her bitter voice.

“Then what do you want?” she yelled.

“This,” I said, dipping my face one inch and kissing her square on the lips.

We stood there at least thirty seconds, our hands still balled against our hips, nothing touching but our mouths. I was conscious of the clean odor of soap and the fresh taste of her lips without makeup. At first they were firm and unyielding, but suddenly they turned soft.

Ordinary women put their arms around your neck when they get interested in a kiss. Toni was no ordinary woman. The first indication that she really enjoyed it was when she used my ears as handles. So help me, she did. She grabbed one in each fist and pressed my mouth so hard against hers, I started to lose balance, and prevented both of us from tumbling to the floor only by grabbing her around the waist. Just before my ears came off, she let me go.

Feeling the mere loss of a pair of ears was worth it, I reached for her again.

“No you don’t,” she said, pushing a hand at my chest. “You came to ask questions, so ask your questions.”

“All right. Where did you learn that ear-hold?”

“I mean questions about Mr. Ketterer.”

“The hell with Ketterer,” I said. “Come here.”

Pushing me off again, she stamped one foot. “You listen to me, Manny Moon! You came here to pump me about Mr. Ketterer, didn’t you?”

“Well, partly,” I admitted.

“Well, I won’t have you kissing me while your mind is half on trying to pump information. You ask your questions, and maybe if I still feel like it afterward, you can kiss me again — once.”

I considered this, found no flaws in the arrangement and asked without any particular interest, “When did Ketterer put that notebook in the safe?”

“What safe?”

I put one hand on each of her shoulders, looked down into her eyes and said, “His own.”

“Is that where you found it?” she asked indifferently, reaching up and touching one ear.

I gave her a reproachful shake. “You said you wanted to get this over with. It stated right in the confession you had instructions what to do with the notebook in case Ketterer died. How could you obey them if you didn’t know where it was?”

“I had no such instructions,” she said dreamily, raising her other hand to touch my other ear. “I never heard of the notebook until I read about it in the paper. For that matter, I didn’t even know the combination to Mr. Ketterer’s safe.”

“But you identified the notebook!”

She shook her head, and a hand closed over one of my ears. “I identified Mr. Ketterer’s handwriting. I never saw the notebook before, and it was as much a shock to me as everyone else that he headed a gambling syndicate.”

Even with my attention more on Toni’s lips than on my questions, and only half-listening to the answers, this roused some interest in me. “Listen,” I said. “The three biggest gamblers in town visited your boss at a quarter to five the day he committed suicide, and left his office with him. Didn’t you know who they were?”

A fist gripped my other ear. “You’re a terrible detective. Mr. Ketterer was dictating to me from three-thirty until he left at five that day. He never made appointments later than three. Any more questions?”

“One,” I said. “Why are we wasting all this good time over a dead man?”

I still had my ears when I left the apartment, but I left most of my wits with Toni. Had any of the gentlemen who wished me dead encountered me between the time I left her and the time I reached the nearest tavern, where I stopped my head from spinning with a jolt of rye, it would have been a pushover. I doubt that they could have gotten me without anti-aircraft, however. I was too high in the air.

When I came back to earth, I made straight for headquarters to check on what had been gotten out of the young gunman who tried to kill me. There I learned nothing of interest except that the dead Keys had been a rather sloppy safe-cracker who specialized in nitroglycerine, and the young gunman, Hank, had refused to talk about anything at all.

As I passed the desk on the way out, I saw that Sergeant Danny Blake was booking a thin-faced little man who was still manacled to a policeman twice his size.

Blake looked up and called to me cheerily. “Look what we found living as big as you please at the Jefferson Hotel, Manny.”

I paused. “What?”

“Sammy Cutler. The hottest forger in the country.”

Suspecting that other gunmen employed by the gambling syndicate would lose little time trying to finish the job Hank and Keys had bungled, I observed the proper precautions. All afternoon I had kept one eye on the rear-view mirror while driving, and had kept under observation everyone within pistol range when afoot. Every muscle of my body was tensed for instant action, and I carefully kept my right hand out of my pocket and in the open, ready to dive at the P-38 under my arm.

I was rather glad to get home, where I could relax.

After locking the door from inside, I remembered the ease with which Keys had managed to pick the lock, and on the off-chance the syndicate had other lock experts on its payroll, I wedged a straight chair under the knob. Then I completely relaxed.

I relaxed too soon.

When I turned around, gorilla-like Dan Ironbaltz was regarding me sardonically from the hall doorway, the .38 revolver in his hand trained where my heart would have been had it not suddenly jumped to my throat.

He said quickly, “Turn around, Mr. Moon.”

The voice from that hairy throat was incongruously bell-like, almost a clear tenor. It was polite, too, but the expression in his eyes was faintly eager, as though he almost wished I wouldn’t obey.

When the expression began to turn to triumph, I turned about hurriedly, holding my hands shoulder high.

I may have imagined it, but it sounded as though he let out a sigh of disappointment. Then I heard him step heavily away from the hall door. Lighter footsteps followed behind his. A small hand groped beneath my arm from behind and slid my P-38 from its holster. The same hand patted my waist and hips for other concealed weapons.

“He’s clean,” came the husky voice of little Jimmy Goodrich.

“You may face this way now, Mr. Moon,” said Dan.

Facing around, I allowed my hands to drop. I discovered my guests totaled three, Art Depledge, the third member of the trio, now stood in the doorway where Dan Ironbaltz had been. His bland face was the picture of friendliness.

“You boys flatter me,” I said. “With all the hoods you hire, how come I get personal attention?”

“This time we want it done right,” Jimmy Goodrich said huskily.

“You can’t get away with it,” I said.

Dan Ironbaltz looked pained. “From you I expected better repartee, Mr. Moon. That line went out with the Rover Boys.”

I said, “I meant it literally. If anything happens to me, Warren Day knows right where to look. Knock me off and he’ll also reopen the Ketterer case, which he currently has tabbed as a suicide. I’m safer for you alive than dead.”

From the hall door Art Depledge commented cheerily, “Unless there’s no corpus delicti.”

I felt the hair rise along the edge of my scalp. “Listen, can’t you fellows take a joke? Just because I loused up your racket, so you had to rub put your boss, is no cause to get unreasonable. Lots of businessmen have setbacks, but just pitch in and start over. Why don’t you take your profits and open up in some other town? Moscow, for instance.”

Art Depledge emitted a genuinely amused horse-laugh, which made him look more like a good-natured grocery clerk than ever.

Modestly I said, “It wasn’t that funny.”

He stopped laughing to scowl at me. “I wasn’t laughing at your bum humor, stupid. I was laughing because you think you loused up our racket. You’ve been helping us.”

“Shut up!” Ironbaltz ordered. “You go first, Jimmy. Then you, Moon.” He paused to bow ironically. “Mr. Moon, I mean. You follow me, Art.”

So we held another procession down the stairs, across the curb and into a car. This time it was a regulation gangster’s black sedan, however. I sat in the back between little Jimmy Goodrich and hairy Dan Ironbaltz, while Depledge drove.

Chapter Six Eclipse of Manny Moon

By the assured way Dan held his gun, and by the faintly eager look still in his eyes, I knew it was hopeless to try anything such as I had pulled on young Hank. No one said a word while we drove across town to the waterfront, turned down an alley and pulled into the basement garage of a warehouse.

Jimmy got out of the car and Dan prodded me after him. All three of us waited while Art Depledge pulled shut the garage doors, then Dan motioned toward an open door at the rear of the garage, and emphasized the gesture by prodding me in the ribs with his pistol. The door opened onto a set of cement stairs leading downward.

Again Jimmy went first, I followed, and Dan and Depledge brought up the rear. The stairs ended in a low, vault-like room with stone walls and no windows. The floor was concrete except for a circular section of iron about three feet wide in the center of the room, which on second examination proved to be an oversized manhole cover. Illumination was furnished by a lone bulb hanging from the ceiling.

The room was bare of furniture. Against one wall stood two galvanized scrub pails without handles, a larger bucket with the end of a long coil of rope tied to its handle, two wooden stakes and an overturned soap box on which lay a large bag labeled: Plaster of Paris — 100 lbs.

“Stand over there,” Dan ordered, pointing at the wall opposite this interesting equipment.

I leaned against the wall indicated, and watched as Jimmy and Art heaved open the manhole cover. Through the open hole came the murmur of sluggishly moving water just beneath.

Sweat was beginning to stand out on my brow, but I managed to keep my voice steady. “That the river?” I asked politely.

All three glanced at me, but no one said anything.

Art Depledge crossed to the large bucket attached to the rope, carried it to the hole and dropped it in. It disappeared with a gurgle, and he played out the coil of rope for what seemed an interminable length of time, but probably was only seconds. When it finally stopped sinking, he glanced at the remaining dozen feet of rope and said, “About twenty feet, I’d guess.”

“Can’t you remember the depth between killings?” I asked in a voice that surprised me by not cracking.

Again all three glanced at me.

“It changes,” Depledge explained kindly. “Silt sifts in and out. I’ve seen it thirty feet, and I’ve seen it nearly to the cover. We’d look silly dropping you in two feet of water, wouldn’t we?”

“I think two feet is a nice depth.” I said. This time there was a slight crack in my voice.

Hand-over-hand, Art pulled the bucket up again. When it stood brim-full next to the hole, Jimmy brought over the two pails without handles, and carefully poured half the muddy water into each. Then together the two of them heaved the hundred-pound sack of plaster of Paris over to the pails, ripped it open and poured half into each. They used the wooden stakes to stir it into a thick solution, tossing both the stakes and the empty bag through the hole when they finished.

Art Depledge said, “You see, we leave no evidence at all. Must have been twenty or more go through this hole over the years. They are all buried under silt now.”

“You talk too much,” Dan Ironbaltz said in his bell-like tenor. Then to me, “Over here please, Mr. Moon.”

I walked over to the hole and looked down. The water drifted by a scant two feet below it.

“Stand in the buckets,” Dan said.

I looked at him in amazement. “Why should I do a silly thing like that?”

“Because I’ll blow your head off if you don’t.” His voice was still polite.

I shrugged, but I doubt that my indifferent expression fooled anyone, for my face was beaded with sweat. “Blow away. What’s the difference?”

“The difference is you live fifteen minutes longer while the stuff sets. Either way your feet go in it.”

He began to raise the revolver, and I said, “All right. I’ll take the fifteen minutes.”

Slowly I raised my right foot and let it descend into one of the buckets. It made a squishing noise as the gray-white fluid rose half-way to my knee. Then quickly, as though wanting to get it over with, I raised the left foot, pretending to lose balance, and brought my heel down on the edge of the other bucket with my full weight behind it. The bucket tilted, teetered on the edge of the hole and plunked into the water with a dull splash.

My arms gyroscoped in a struggle to regain balance, and I would have followed head-first into the river had not Jimmy Goodrich grabbed my arm.

All three of them stared at me irritably.

Finally Depledge said, “One will hold him down just as well.”

I felt a surge of hope. A lot of people know I have a false leg, but a lot of others don’t. Apparently these three were in the latter group.

The big gorilla with the gun sank my hope. “We’ll play it safe. Get upstairs and bring another bucket and a fifty pound sack of stuff.”

“How much do you stock?” I asked.

“About ten sacks and a dozen buckets,” Art told me. “But you won’t get a chance to kick another overboard.”

He and Jimmy went upstairs together. They were gone ten minutes, and by the time they had returned, drawn another pail of water from the river and mixed it with plaster of Paris, the mixture around my right foot had set.

This bucket they placed well away from the hole in the floor.

“Shove yourself over here,” Dan suggested.

Turning as nearly toward the fresh bucket as I could with my right foot imprisoned, I scraped my bucket forward a half inch, then stopped and glanced at the doorway with an expression of pleased surprise.

“Why if it isn’t Warren Day!” I said.

Involuntarily the heads of all three snapped toward the door. I gave my bucket a mighty shove, for an instant it hung in space, then both the bucket and I plunked under water like a dropped stone.

I had my trouser leg jerked up and was fumbling at the straps of my artificial leg before we hit bottom. The pressure grew unbearable. Down, down I sank. The water ground against my ears, tried to force open my mouth. Then almost gently the bucket touched bottom.

One strap I had loose by then, but I knew I would black out from the terrible pressure before I could release the other. Placing my left foot on top of the bucket, I shoved with all my strength.

The stump below my knee rasped loose from the encircling leather, leaving some skin inside the loop.

I rose vertically until decreased pressure lessened the pounding in my ears and the constriction in my chest, then turned and made three long underwater strokes downstream, again changed to a vertical direction, and popped to the surface an instant before my mouth opened involuntarily to gasp for air.

For a few moments I simply treaded water and recovered my breath. When I was again able to notice my surroundings, I discovered I was under a long concrete pier, upon which the rear of the warehouse was apparently set. A dozen feet away I could see the hole through which I had fallen.

I slipped out of my coat and remaining shoe and let them sink. Then skirting a concrete piling, I swam to the edge of the pier, dived and swam underwater around an outcropping twenty yards away. When I surfaced, I was hidden from the warehouse.

A hundred yards farther down-river the precipitious bank ended and I came into shallow water. I dragged myself out of the river onto a trash-littered stretch of rocky beach containing nothing but a lone and deserted tarpaper shack.

I had to crawl all the way to Front Street, a distance of one short block from the river. There I found a section of two-by-four in the gutter, improvised a crutch and managed to make Second Street by a kind of staggering hop. Though it was barely after five o’clock, and not yet dark, not a soul was on the street, this section of the waterfront consisting largely of condemned warehouses.

At Second Street I found the loveliest taxi cab I have ever seen.

For reasons known only to himself, the cabbie asked not a single question. When I fished a wet wallet from my hip pocket and handed him a sopping ten-dollar bill, he shrugged as though all his customers tipped like that, watched me labor toward the front door of my apartment house on the two-by-four, then drove off.

This time I checked the whole apartment before relaxing. Then I took a shower, affixed a couple of band-aids to the raw places on my stump, and dug from the back of my closet the temporary leg the Veterans Administration had furnished me while I waited for them to build the custom-made job. It was wood instead of cork and aluminum, much heavier and about a quarter-inch too short, but at least I could walk with a slight limp.

When I had dressed, downed a sandwich and two highballs and was settled with a cigar, I stared at the ceiling and figured everything out. Just like that.

Seeing no point in keeping the solution a secret, I phoned Warren Day at his home.

“I’ve got the whole answer to the Ketterer affair,” I told him. “And it will curl your hair.”

“What hair?” he asked sourly, “Listen, Moon. My day ends at five. And even if it was before five, I don’t want to hear any more about Ketterer.”

I said, “Would you be interested to know that since I saw you at five, Dan Ironbaltz, Jimmy Goodrich and Art Depledge did their damnedest to kill me? Personally — not through hired guns.”

For a moment there was silence. “All right. Let’s have it.”

“They dropped me in the river with one foot set in a bucket of plaster.”

Again there was silence, this time longer. Finally he said in a bored tone, “You drowned, of course.”

“This is no gag!” I yelled. “They picked my false leg. It’s still on the river bottom.”

Eventually he began to believe me. When I had recounted the whole story, he said, “I imagine they still think you’re dead, and haven’t taken to cover. I’ll send out a call for them.”

“Good,” I said. “When you get them sewed up, drop by and I’ll take you calling on the guy who had Ketterer murdered — the real head of the gambling syndicate.”

“What’s that?”

I said, “You’ll find out when you get here,” and hung up.

It was nine-thirty before my door buzzer sounded.

Not wanting to get caught off guard a third time in my own home, I called through the door, “Who’s there?”

“Me,” growled the voice of Lieutenant Hannegan, economizing on words as usual.

Opening the door, I found him alone.

“Where’s Day?” I asked.

He jerked his head toward the street, turned and started down the stairs. Following behind, I found Warren Day in a squad car at the curb.

I said, “Round up the three would-be killers all right?”

“Yeah. They’re thinking over their sins in separate cells.” He eyed me sourly. “This better be good, Moon.”

“It will be,” I promised. To Hannegan I said, “Run us over to Lindell and Forest Place.”

There was no conversation until we almost reached our destination. Then I said, “Second house from the corner.”

Day studied the big old-fashioned building, recognition dawned in his eyes and he turned on me sputtering. “Ye gods! That’s the mayor’s house! What you trying to pull, Moon?”

“A killer out of the hat,” I said, and started up the walk.

After a moment of hesitation Day followed, and Hannegan trailed him. This time a middle-aged maid answered the door.

“Inspector Warren Day of Homicide and party,” I informed her.

“Did she kill somebody?” she asked, interested. “She’s not home, sir.”

“It’s the mayor we want to see,” I said.

The woman let us into the hall, went away and returned almost immediately.

“This way, please,” she said, leading us to the same study where I had sat with His Honor once before.

We discovered that Mayor John Cash already had one visitor. Fat Raymond Margrove was wedged into an easy chair in one corner.

Mayor Cash rose with a welcoming smile. “Well, well, Inspector. This is a pleasure.” Then he saw me and the smile froze on his lips.

I didn’t waste any time. “Surprised to see me alive, Your Honor?” I asked.

He sat down, licked his lips and said in a queasy voice, “What do you mean?”

Without preamble I gave it to the whole group. “This is the end of the line, Mr. Mayor. Gerald Ketterer never was the head of the gambling syndicate. He was just what he pretended to be: an honest man pledged to run the syndicate out of town. He would have too, and the syndicate took desperate measures to protect itself. It planted forged evidence that Ketterer headed the rackets, hired a private detective it figured wasn’t smart enough to catch on to the phony setup to uncover the evidence, and arranged for Ketterer’s ‘suicide’ when the news of his disgrace broke.

“It was a good forgery — good enough to fool Ketterer’s secretary. I wouldn’t be surprised if a little forger arrested this afternoon, and in the clink right now, was hired to do the job. He’s one of the best in the country, but handwriting experts will blow it wide open when they put that notebook under a microscope.” The mayor squeaked, “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Shut up,” I said. “To make me swallow the story, phony blackmail evidence was rigged to make it seem you had been blackmailed by Ketterer into permitting the syndicate to operate. Actually posed just for use in the frame. And to make sure I would swallow the story, you had Ironbaltz, Goodrich and Depledge put on an act to convince me they were pals of Ketterer’s. But I doubt that he had ever seen them before they all started shaking his hand in front of his office building.

“So what could the syndicate accomplish by this elaborate frame?” I asked, then answered myself. “It made your reelection a certainty, and under you it could begin to function again as soon as the heat died down. With Ketterer as mayor, it would have been out of business for good. The tip-off is that Ketterer’s so-called confession listed only little-shots in the racket, and the three straw bosses weren’t even mentiond.”

As I talked, Mayor Cash’s face had gradually turned green. Now he said in a shaking voice, “It’s all a lie! It’s nothing but wild hypothesis.”

I shook my head. “The posed pictures of you and Bumpsie Farrel give it away, Mr. Mayor. In the first place, you wouldn’t have given a hoot in hades whether your wife saw them or not. Your wife is a lush who flirts with every man she meets, and you probably have more on her than she could get on you in a million years. In the second place, those pictures were supposed to have been taken five years ago. Last New Year’s Eve I saw Bumpsie Farrel at El Patio Club, and she had on the same formal gown she wore in the pictures. Women like Bumpsie don’t keep the same gown five years. The pictures were made since Ketterer was nominated for mayor.”

“I can prove the whole thing is a lie,” Mayor Cash said to the inspector in a trembling voice. “I have written proof right here in my desk.”

He rose from his chair, ran to his desk and pulled open a drawer. When he spun around, a gun was gripped in his hand.

“Don’t anyone make a move!” he snarled.

A shot cracked out, a hole appeared in the center of the mayor’s forehead, and he pitched forward on his face.

All of us turned to stare at Raymond Margrove in amazement. The fat man looked down at the .25 caliber automatic in his hand, grunted and stuffed it back under his arm.

“I got a permit to carry this when Mr. Moon frightened me about gang vengeance,” he explained apologetically.

“Good shooting,” I said. “That deserves a handshake.”

Crossing over to him, I held out my right hand. As he clasped it diffidently, I heaved his vast bulk to its feet, spun him around.

“You might have saved the effort though,” I growled in his ear. “I hadn’t finished my story. John Cash was only one of your hired stooges.”

“Hey!” Warren Day said, opening his mouth for the first time.

I waited until Hannegan had cuffs on the fat man.

Then I told him, “Ketterer’s confession was planted in his safe, but the syndicate’s lock expert was a nitro-man and couldn’t have opened that safe without blowing it apart. Margrove had manufactured the safe and had its combination on file. He had the stuff planted, then obligingly passed the combination on to me so I could find it easily.

“Another thing pinning it on him is that the minute he hired me, the syndicate had a tail on me, and it was the tail phoning him a report that I was watching the Rand Building that gave him the idea of rushing the three straw-bosses over there to convince me Ketterer was the real boss.

“But the clincher is that the gang was out to get me even after I had unknowingly done them a favor. I thought they were after revenge because I exposed the gambling racket, but actually they wanted to shut me up because I knew Ketterer wasn’t a suicide and were afraid I’d expose the whole frameup.”

It took forty-eight hours to get a confession out of Margrove, but when it I finally came he spilled everything, including the fact that he personally manipulated the razor while Dan Ironbaltz held Ketterer’s legs and Jimmy Goodrich and Art Depledge each held an arm.

As a reward for my part in the affair, the state attorney sent me a pass to the executions, but I couldn’t get there. I was busy that evening getting my ears pulled out of shape.