Black Mask (Vol. 22, No. 2 — Mary 1939)

Strictly for Suckers by Stewart Sterling

Murder’s no practical joke — even to Broadway’s toughest crowd.

In a way, it’s a belly laugh — if you care for your humor laid out cold on a slab. Only last week, ten thousand people put coin on the line to see this glamour guy dish out his super sex-appeal. And last night he plays his final performance to an audience of one. Me.

But what a show! Right out of his Romeo routine to climax a curdler! At that, I got paid to watch him die; otherwise he’d have staged that last act absolutely alone.

It so happens I wouldn’t trade the hide off a buffalo nickel to see him heat up a harem on the sheik’s night out, but a lad in this watchdog business has to gander at plenty of dizzy stuff to earn his sirloin and onions.

Which was why I was sitting alone in room 804 of the Metropole Hotel about two-thirty this ayem, nursing along a beaker of brew, a pocketful of panatellas and a loaded Police Positive.

I am watch-dogging it for the Louse and the Louse is definitely a right guy. His real name is Stanislaus Kraddakapalous; show me the gambler who’d risk his gilt fillings on a jaw-breaking tag like that! So he’s simply the Louse to the high-spade and bouncing-bones clan, though to look at his red-apple puss, his curly gray hair and those soft brown peepers behind their horn-rim windshields, you’d never guess he runs the biggest crap game in town. In that black string tie and starched collar he looks more like a professional undertaker’s mourner.

Now the Louse may not keep books exactly the way the revenue lugs would like; but he always keeps his nose clean. No cap-weights or geared dice, no house dough on the back line with a miss-out artist shooting against the customers. Of course, he is a floater; he has to shift his game every night to make it tough for stick-up heisters to locate him.

To make it still tougher, he lists me, for a hundred cookies per, to see everybody gets away from the game with whatever they win, if any. I don’t rate the century on account of I am a Sherlock or a Philo or even a regular licensed eye. I never could make any sense out of chemistry or locate a killer by the places he dumps his cigarette ashes, and the only deductions I am good at have to do with these income tax blanks. The Louse gives me shirt-and-sock money because I am a practical guy who knows some of the angles and because I have a rep for not getting nervous when I smell powder burning.

By all right and reason, I shouldn’t have had any serious trouble last night. It is not an open game, merely a group of top-billing show people celebrating the hundredth performance of “All The World Loves—”

From where I was sitting, across the corridor in 804, with my door open a couple of inches, I could hear a little laughing and horsing around once in a while, but nothing you could call out of line until this gunshot brings me up on my toes.

I am out in the hall before the echo stops, and though I put my ear against the door to 803, I can’t hear a murmur. There is no one in the corridor and none of the doors along the line are opening, so I figure no outsiders have been alarmed. It is only a matter of seconds before I drag out the duplicate key to 803 the Louse gave me and get the door open.

The room is dark, but with the light behind me I can see someone sidling along the wall at my left. I reach for the light switch and somebody smashes a chair over my head. I duck just in time to save a fractured skull; with the same movement I take a flying tackle into the dark.

I crash into this punk I can’t see, but I feel him, take my say-so. We hit the floor together with the busted pieces of the chair. I whale away at him with the muzzle of my gun instead of pulling the trigger, because there is always a chance in mix-ups like this that the lad who boffs me thinks I am a hijacker instead of a guard.

Anyhow, my sock doesn’t do him much damage because he slugs me over the head again — this time a glancing blow with a beer bottle. That makes me sore. I yank his feet out from underneath him, pin him against the wall and hook a solid left to where his chin ought to be. It must have been his mouth, because I cut three knuckles and feel some teeth give; I am getting ready to send in my Sunday punch when something clips me behind the ear like a hammer and I fall flat on my face.

I am not quite out, because I can hear dim sounds way off in the distance and I sort of sense someone using me for a doormat and doing a fast exit. When my ears quit ringing and the fireworks stop exploding in my brain, I stumble to my feet and put the lights on.

The room looks like something a bomb has been dropped on; table overturned, glasses smashed, bottles broken, chairs wrecked and two corpses stretched out stiff on the floor.

At least I think they are both dead, but a quick once-over shows me that my boss is unconscious but alive and that the other guy is conscious but nearly checked out. I have never seen this Larry Del Grave before, though he is the biggest drawing card on Broadway and his profile is familiar enough to me, from the newspaper pictures.

Maybe he is supposed to be handsome in the role of the Great Seducer, but he isn’t much to peer at now lying all twisted up on his side and groaning his guts out. The slick blond hair is all unstuck and the effect of the toothpaste teeth in the suntanned face is sort of spoiled by his contorted features.

He looks as if he is grinning, but I figure he can’t feel so ha-ha on account of the bullet hole that had torn open the knot of his fancy four-in-hand and made his breathing sound like a cross between a kid blowing soap bubbles and a peanut-vendor’s whistle.

I am wrong, though. He is laughing like crazy at some terrific gag. He looks up at me with his eyes kind of squinting as if he is trying hard to understand something that puzzles him. I lift him up, not that it is going to do him any good.

“Huh, ha,” he burbles. “You can... tell ’em... the old one—” he gasps and whistles for air.

“What old one?” I ask him, feeling a bit queer playing straight-man to a dying actor.

He chuckles again, as if he is giggling and gargling at the same time. “The old one, you remember.” It’s a wrench for him to finish. “I didn’t... know it... was loaded.”

Let me wise you, there’s nothing funny about watching a man laugh himself to death!

The final spasm leaves him with a grimace like that clown that sings the solo while his heart is breaking. Blood is drooling, drop by drop, from the corner of his mouth, and it is the only thing that moves in all of room 803.

I pull myself together after making sure his breath doesn’t leave any moisture on the back of my watch. The first thing I naturally look for is a gun, but the only one on the premises is in my own hand.

On the floor, in a corner where they had fallen when the table had tipped over, are a couple of leopard cubes, but there is positively no currency in sight anywhere.

Now the Louse does not operate a game without plenty of folding money on the cloth, so I figure there is something screwy. A kill like Del Grave’s, with everybody taking a powder in a hurry, does not seem like a legitimate hold-up, if you can call it that.

I take a quick gander in the closet to make sure no one is lurking about to hang another clout on top of the headache I already have; then I grab the phone and ask for Mike Rubin.

Mike is the snoop-shoe who keeps the Metropole’s good name untarnished by demanding to see the license after the bellhop reports a couple have checked in with a suit-case full of old phone books. He is no Einstein, but smart enough.

“Mike,” I say. “This is Vince Mallie in 803.”

“What goes on, pal?” he growls back, hoping nothing has happened to break up his three ayem nap on the mezzanine.

“Nothing to call out the reserves for. You might put a collar on any cluck who seems anxious to get out of the hotel minus his benny or topper. Just do that and don’t run a fever and I’ll tell you all about it later.”

I’d seen the polo coats and chesterfields still hanging in the closet, as well as a shelf full of assorted felts and shinies; it was a cold night and anybody trying to scram out in a tuxedo would look a little silly.

I go in the bathroom and try the connecting door to 801; it’s locked on the other side. I click the light switch and get a load of myself in the mirror. My left eye is a trifle purple around the edges, but otherwise I am intact. Except there is an ugly smear right in the middle of my green and gray plaid cravat. If there is anything that burns me up more than a spot on a new tie, I don’t want to hear about it. I look at it close, though, and it isn’t blood. It’s red ink or something.

It must have got on the tie when I was holding Del Grave up from the floor. Sure enough, there is a blob of scarlet in the stiff’s left hand. It’s liquid paint, the sort actors use when they have a call for prop-gore on the stage. I found the capsule under the table.

Exactly what a gent who has just spilled a gallon or so of his own blood would want with a fistful of make-believe corpuscles I can’t dope out.

By now, the Louse is beginning to moan like a guy coming out of ether; someone has laid a turkey egg on top of his gray dome and his face is the color of stale oysters. A pitcher of ice water down the back of his neck, a half-tumbler of rye down his throat, plus a little slapping around and he sits up, spitting fire.

He has some trouble focussing his glims on the coffin candidate; when he gets the picture clear, he gulps like he is going to be sick to his stomach.

“Who... did that, Vince?”

“Don’t give me any double-talk, boss. You were here when it happened.”

He started to shake his head, put both hands up to make sure he still had his hair:

“I wasn’t, Vince. I’d just gone to see a man about a pup when I heard the shot. When I opened the lavatory door to get back in here, somebody dropped the ceiling on me. I didn’t see anybody.”

I made him sit down in a chair where he couldn’t see the body; it gave him the hiccoughs or something.

“How many were bucking their luck when all this happened? Beside you and Del Grave?”

“Three,” says the Louse. “Roy Zara, Meyer Levinson and Hipper Dipper.”

I know all of them. Zara is pit-leader for the “All The World Loves—” orchestra; Levinson is the composer who writes the hits and Harry Frinkey, billed as Hipper Dipper, is the most comical cluck in the world, in my private opinion. Now which one started the argument?

“I didn’t hear any argument, Vince. Zara was heavy loser, maybe two or three gees, but he wasn’t beefing about it. Levinson was making six and seven passes in a row and letting it ride; he had a nice stack of bills piled up, but he acted as if it hurt him to win. This one,” he indicates Del Grave with a thumb over his shoulder, “was working up to a swell snootful, but nothing nasty about it.”

I tell him what I run into when I unlock 803. He is more concerned with the loss of the shekels than with Del Grave’s death.

“I can understand a fellow shooting another, Vince. There are things that might make any man blow his top and turn killer. But I would bet my last ten years of life that none of those men is a thief.”

“You would lose, boss. Somebody snatched that lettuce; if you think he’ll tear it up and throw it out of the window to welcome the King and Queen, you’re slipping. I’m looking for a lad with a pocketful of engravings and I got a hunch he is not far away.”

The Louse sighs and reaches for the only quart of rye that hasn’t been shattered in the melee, and starts to tilt the bottle when a girl screeches loud enough so you could hear her in Newark.

She stands there in the doorway, staring down at the dead man as if she is seeing a ghost; maybe she is at that.

I recognize her even out of make-up; which doesn’t exactly rate me as sensational, because she is generally admitted to be the best-looking frill on Neon Alley. Claire Marsh, the dancing darling of “All The World Loves—”. Black hair, sloe eyes and curves that keep the speculators doing O.K. with the first six rows. Fire on two feet, or money refunded.

She opens a rhinestone handbag and comes up with a pearl-handled hammerless, one of those damned things that are too small to be any real good but too big to overlook. She points it at the Louse, very calmly.

“You shot him,” she whispers. “You killed my husband.”

The boss doesn’t even drop the whiskey bottle when she pulls the trigger.

One reason is the Louse is too paralyzed to dodge; the other is I slam Claire’s hand up so the slug knicks plaster from the ceiling.

“Give the toy to papa,” I say, getting a grip on her wrist. “Give nicely, or papa will break your beautiful white arm.”

She lets loose of the gadget; I break it and find one empty in the chamber. I put the cartridges in my watch pocket, just in case. The pearl-handled shooter couldn’t have blasted that big hole in Del Grave’s throat, of course, but I hate to have loaded pacifiers around where someone might get excited.

“You got a rush of wrong notions to the brain, Miss Marsh,” I tell her. “Mister Kraddakapalous here didn’t bump your boy friend.”

“Then you killed him, you filthy big bruiser,” she starts to yell even louder than before.

Now I am fifty pounds under the heavyweight class; I have no mashed potato for a schnozzle and no cauliflower on my ears; also, I take a Turkish as often as the next lad, so there is no call for the dame to get abusive. But I don’t cuff her around until she starts to claw my eyes out with those needle-pointed crimson fingernails. Even then I am loath to clip her on that lovely chin but neither do I feel like posing for a skin-grafting job on my smush.

She is wearing one of those brushed-up hair-dos with a mop of jet curls on top of her head. I reach out and grab a fistful; try to hold her off at arm’s length.

We wrestle around in a clinch that gives me accidentally a hand-hold on parts of her anatomy which no gentleman should clutch without special permission; also a deep drag on some very persuasive perfume, the sort they advertise with a picture of a hammock, a full moon and a name like “Night of Naughtiness” or something. There is positively no doubt that what it is she has got nearly gets me.

She is whining now, for sympathy; but she offsets this tender appeal by kicking me in the shins with those blunt instruments they call Cuban heels. After collecting two jabs that nearly splinter the bone, I jerk sudden on her top-knot and really start the tears streaming from her eyes.

“Calm down, babe,” I warn her. “Or you’ll need a wig in your next show.”

She puts her hands over her face and shakes with convulsive sobs. I let go of her hair. She throws herself on the floor beside the dead man.

“Larry,” she moans. “Larry, darling, why did they do it? I’d have given them all the money they wanted, Larry, if they’d only have let you live!”

“Listen, sister,” I close the door and put my back against it, wondering why the John Laws have not busted in on our little party before this — we are making more noise than a hurricane — “neither of us murdered your husband, if he was your husband.”

“We were secretly married in Atlantic City last summer,” she whimpers.

“You don’t have to prove it to me, Miss Marsh. I just want you to get straight on this shooting business. I’m Vince Mallie; it’s my job to see this sort of thing don’t happen at Mister Kraddakapalous’s affairs.”

“I’m terribly sorry. Seeing Larry like this—”

“Sure, sure. That’s what I want to know about. How come you show up here, anyway? This was supposed to be an invitation meet, for men only.”

She stops blubbering and wipes the mascara out of the corner of her lamps.

“Larry told me. Just a few hours ago. He said I was to come to this room after half-past two and I would be in on the—” there is a little catch in her voice, “the biggest joke of the year.”

That throws me; in the first place it had to be true, because up to an hour before the game began, no one knew where the get-together was to be. Not even me. She had to get the address from Larry or one of the “All The World Loves—” crowd.

In the second place, this Joe-Miller joke talk checked with Del Grave’s dying words. Imagine a cluck with a sense of comedy like that; wanting his wife to pop in to see him turned into an order for the embalmer. Because if she had got there five minutes earlier, she would have been in time to watch him take the Big Dive. And what sort of screwball set-up is it when the victim knows the time-table for his own demise?

All this time, the Louse is trying to make some sense out of this, too, but he gives up and goes to work on the rye without benefit of ice or fizzy. The canary is leaning against the wall, her eyes closed as if she is suffering great pain. She is sort of careless about her clothes and her disclose, if you follow me, but this is certainly no time for a gentleman to be straining his optics, and besides I have a job of work to do.

Somewhere in the Metropole, unless Mike Rubin has slipped up, which I am pretty certain he hasn’t, is a murderer. And two other guys who know who this killer is. They made too tricky a getaway not to have planned it in advance; so I figure they have not gone very far.

Add that all up, multiply it by Del Grave’s dying words, and the prop blood on the corpse’s hand and then subtract five or six thousand seeds that must have been lying around on the table — and what did I get? What I had got so far was a punch in the eye, a smack on the head and an armful of tiger woman.

I am clamping down on the accelerator to my gray matter when there is a knock at the door. A very mean voice calls, “What’s wrong in there? Open up!”

Whatever I do, I get marked for an error. If this inquisitive lad turns out to be a Little Boy Blue, and I let him in, we are all sunk. The Louse loses a lot of clients who won’t play with a gambler who lands on page one; the frill collects some smelly publicity and I will rate a smudge on the precinct blotter which is pure poison to my business, where I have to kid along the coppers every now and again.

On the other hand, if I stall too long, somebody will be sending the riot squad around. So I whisper to the boss:

“Play stinko, quick. You’re as stewed as the spuds in a Dublin dinner. Holler at me; gimme the Bronx razoo, but make it sound as if you meant it and keep it going.”

The Louse nods that he understands. He has been coming through the rye pretty fast anyway and that helps. He begins to bawl me out in very untidy language. He calls a spade a dirty so-and-so of a shovel, with mud on it.

Then I grab the stiff by the shoulders and drag him into the bathroom and leave him there with his head propped up against a porcelain pedestal. I pull the dancing dollie up on her feet:

“Get this, sister. If the lug outside that door sniffs any real trouble in here, you are in a very blue spot. Your husband has been shot; no one knows who did it. You have a gun; you’re up here at a stag party where you’ve no business to be. Think what a Sunday supplement editor could do with that!”

She is scared, all right. I can see the whites of her eyes all around the pupils while I am firing this at her. I don’t stop to explain that I am more concerned about putting the cuffs on Del Grave’s murderer than in saving his widow from a scandal, but I am pressed for time. The guy outside the door is doing everything but use a battering ram.

“What’ll I do? Hide?” She starts for the closet.

“No-no-no,” I say, very soft so no one could hear me above the Louse’s fine, steady stream of cursing. “Go into your song and dance. You didn’t mean to stir up a rumpus between us; you didn’t know the Louse was so jealous; you think I’m not worth his little finger. Spread it on thick. But keep buzzing around the Louse. Let me handle the visiting fireman.”

I put on my Dempsey scowl, unlock the door, open it and snarl, “Whatsa idea alla racket out here?”

The dapper little man at the threshold is about to have kittens; his mustache is quivering with rage and his beady little eyes are hot with indignation.

“We’ve had complaints of shooting,” he squeaks.

“You’ve had complaints!” I plant my dukes on my hips and stand straddle-legged in the doorway, blocking him from seeing too much of the shambles. “You oughta be thankful if that’s all you had. I’m coming down with a bad case of leaping meemies, trying to keep them from setting fire to the joint. Those two are cuckoo.”

Behind me Miss Marsh and the Louse are laying it on thick and fast; he is working back to my distant ancestry and she is alternately pleading with him to forget everyone but her and explaining that I got her up there under false pretenses!

“We don’t allow this sort of thing.” The little man stands on tiptoe to look over my shoulder.

“That’s a niftie, mister! I wouldn’t allow it, either, if I could get rid of the kilkenny cats. Who are you?”

He produces a pasteboard saying he is Milton J. Amend, assistant manager, Hotel Metropole. I read it, reach out and pump his hand.

“You may be a manager to your owners,” I clap him on the back as if I was a shill at a street pitch, “but you’re a life-saver to me. Help me stagger the unkdray into his room.”

He is still trying to twist his neck in a knot so he can see into 803 while I am giving him the bum’s rush to 801.

I have been honing to get in the adjoining room of the suite ever since I find the bathroom door locked on the 801 side. Because it is a cinch that somebody left, through that bathroom, after Del Grave got burned down. Otherwise the light in the lavatory would have been on, when I crashed in the room. The Louse certainly left it on when he came out and one will get you fifty if he put it out as he was going down for the count.

So I figure someone is still in 801; there is a chance all three of the missing are using it for a hide-out. Except for a couple of minutes after the canary got hysterical, I could have seen anybody who tried to get out of 801.

“You have a pass key, Mister Amend? That’s the ticket! Open her up and I’ll toss this slap-happy in bed and let him doze it off.”

The manager isn’t quite sure about it but I am keeping up a line of chatter and standing close behind him so he can’t get back to 803.

He is expecting 801 to be dark and empty; he must get quite a jolt when he gets the door open. There is a man in his shirt-sleeves, crouching on the window ledge, getting ready to take off on an eight-story jump and I don’t notice any parachute strapped to his back.

I am too far away to take him and I have a limited experience with people who like to go against the law of gravity. But I don’t have to be a brain to realize that the only way to stop this suicide is to get his mind off himself long enough to let one of us put the clamps on him. So I holler, “Del Grave, Del Grave!” as loud as I can.

The lad on the sill swivels his head around; it is Meyer Levinson. How he managed to get his six-feet-three skeleton out on that narrow ledge I cannot figure, but the desperate grimness of his big, ugly mouth and the frantic light in his sad, blue eyes tells me he is not pulling a phony. His bald head is shining with sweat and his big bat-ears and that cerise scarf he has on makes him look like a scarecrow in a cornfield. He is way off balance, now; only the grip of his bony hands on the sill keep him from joining the obituaries.

Amend, the hotel manager, makes a rush for the window; I stick out a shoe and trip him so he takes a header.

“Leave him alone,” I growl. “Mister Levinson knows what he is doing.”

Levinson squints at me suspiciously. “Larry,” he says, and has to wet his lips with his tongue before he can say anymore, “Larry’s gone.”

“Not yet,” I stretch a point. “You ought to see him, before he goes.” I couldn’t be sure if he had been key-holing on 803 and knew Del Grave was cold meat. “Unless you’re afraid.”

“Afraid?” He looks blank for a second. “Yes. I’m afraid. But not of that.” He indicates the hundred foot drop an inch behind his heels.

“Of course not,” I mutter. It gives me queer sensation in the middle of my appetite just to think about that dizzy drop, but I have to stooge for him, don’t I? Here is one of the greatest musical geniuses in the land and a very popular person, too, getting ready to smear himself over the sidewalk. “You ought to be careful about who’s below. You wouldn’t want to hurt anybody.”

“No,” he agrees and turns to look down. I am waiting for this and I take a sprint start and lunge for his scrawny neck. He hears me coming and nearly topples off trying to wriggle out of my reach. But I hook my fingers onto that wacky cerise necktie and brace myself. Levinson waves his arms around like a windmill; I make a stab and hang onto a wrist.

He comes in off the sill, flopping like a fish on a river bank. And a forty-five automatic spills out of his hip-pocket to the carpet.

I pick it up by the smoky end, use my handkerchief to cover the butt while I investigate. There is one empty case in the magazine; by the smell of the muzzle, the heater has been used within an hour. Unless I am badly off center, this is what the newspapers will term “the lethal weapon.”

Levinson picks himself up, wearily; goes over to the bed and sits on it. Amend is twittering around like a damned sparrow, wanting to know why Levinson tries to give his hotel a bad reputation, where Del Grave is; so on and forth.

I wrap the automatic up for Exhibit A.

“Yours?” I don’t have to ask; I can see the answer in the composer’s eyes.

“Mine. And it’s the one Larry was shot with.”

“Oh. You didn’t jerk the trigger?”

He shakes his head.

“Who did?”

He does a ditto on the headshake. Amend is getting white around the gills as he realizes there is a murdered man practically under his nose.

“The killer’s finger-prints will be on it, Mister Levinson. It’s only a matter of hours before we know. Might as well take it the easy way.”

“Mine,” he mumbles. “My prints. They’ll be on it. That’s all.”

‘“If someone else had this forty-five in his hand, his prints will be on it, too. Under yours in spots, naturally. But good enough to take off, in other places. You might save a lot of trouble if you put a name to him.”

The muscles of Levinson’s jaw are all knotted up; his lips are bloodless, he is pressing them together so hard.

“You’ll have to be held as an accessory,” I get up and motion him to go out in the hall. “And we’ll pick up Zara in an hour or so.”

“It wasn’t—” he snaps out and then thinks better of it.

“Oh, then it was Hipper Dipper, huh?”

The musician marches into 803 without another word. He keeps his eyes away from the corner where Del Grave was lying before I lugged him into the lavatory. Miss Marsh is as astonished to see him as he is to find her there, but they do not say anything to each other.

I go over to the Louse, who looks as if he has been sleeping on a junk pile for a week. I hand him my Police Positive. “Keep an eye on this bird, boss. Don’t let him get close to a window; he might fly away. I’m going hunting for Harry Frinkey.”

“Frinkey?” The manager was hopping up and down with rage at the condition of 803, but even more excited at the thought of harboring a homicide suspect. “Did you say Frinkey? I checked in a Mister Frinkey tonight. In 705.”

“No fooling.” Imagine a stupe who has the most humorous man in the world in his hotel and does not even recognize him! “Let’s truck down to the seventh floor.”

Before I depart, I frisk Levinson. The heavy winner has no important money on him, anywhere.

When Amend and I get to the door, the dancer chirps:

“If you feel like jumping out the win-down, Meyer, I’ll be glad to open it for you.”

Amend and I take the stairs three at a time; the manager muttering to himself like a straight-jacket subject; me with a very crummy taste on my tongue. Because, if it turns out the Hipper Dipper gave Del Grave a dose of lead medicine, the comedian will crisp in the chair or maybe, if he gets the breaks, he will merely go nuts playing stir solitaire. In either case, a large group of guys who take their laughing straight from the stomach, will miss him like hell. Harry Frinkey can dish out the old chuckle-berries like nobody; I hate to be the mugg who. shoves him out of circulation...

But business is business and a watchdog can’t be choosy about who he puts the bite on. So I march in 705, Amend creeping along behind me like a quarterback behind his interference.

The room is as empty as Mother Hubbard’s frigidaire. A gladstone bag is open on the bed; some black pajamas and bed slippers say the Hipper Dipper planned to sleep off his bout with the bones.

There is no liquor in sight, and only a couple of cigarette stubs. But on the night table by the head of the bed there is a pack of flat paper matches all burned out together. None of the matches has been torn from the pack. That gives me a memory nudge. I peer around on the table and on the carpet but draw blank.

Then I spot the little drawer where they tuck those Gideon Bibles. In the drawer, I find what I am after — a spoon. With a little brown stain in the hollow of the bowl. I don’t need to sniff at it to catch that peculiar odor, but I do, anyway.

“Snow,” I explain to Amend. “Used this to melt up a mix for his joy needle.”

“Cocaine?” he squeals, astonished.

“Right, dope.” I don’t mind which way he takes my reply. “The spoon’s still warm. That means Frinkey was in here, taking a ski-ride, in the last three-four minutes.”

I go to the open window and look up. 705 is close enough under 801 so Frinkey probably heard Levinson doing his ledge juggling and got the jeebies for fear it is his turn next.

Amend has a brain-wave. “He couldn’t have used the elevators; they’re being watched. P’raps he sneaked into one of the service closets.”

It was worth a look-see. We comb the cleaning closet, the broom-alcove and the linen-room in that order. We find nothing except a heap of soiled sheets and pillowslips on the floor of the linen-room. The manager hisses he will fire every maid on the floor for leaving this stuff out of the laundry. It seems to be a rule that all dirty linen must be in the hamper before employees go off duty in the evening.

“Where do they keep this hamper?” I inquire.

“Why,” he seems startled, “out by the service elevator. You don’t imagine—”

I tell him imagination is strictly for suckers; I have a hard-rock diploma and a yen for solid facts.

We locate the green-enameled metal hamper. It is about five feet tall, three feet square and open on top; it stands on a low-wheeled trolley ready to roll on the down-car. I tilt it up on one side.

“Somebody must of dumped the plates and knives in with the dirty table cloths, fella. This thing feels like it is packed with pig-iron.” I put my shoulder to it and heave. It topples off the trolley and hits the cement floor with a smack that must have jarred the janitor in the subbasement.

A heap of rumpled cloth spills out; inside the mound of sheets and towels gleams a pair of bright and frightened eyes.

I peel off the coverings and am I sorry for that Hipper Dipper! He is higher than an altitude record; the drug has dilated his pupils and made the muscles in his roly-poly face twitch like a frog on a stove-lid. His red hair is all stringing down over his face; his snappy yellow and red butterfly bow is untied and he has a set of shakes that puts Brother Vitus in the also-ran class.

“What were you doing in there?” Amend is backed up against the elevator, scared there is going to be shooting. “How did you get in there?”

“The maid just gathered him up and threw him away, dummy. How do you think he got there?”

The manager puts on an injured air and sulks in the background.

Frinkey doesn’t offer any argument; he is so flabby and limp when I lead him up the stairs to the eighth, that I feel like the warden lugging a condemned man to the cooker.

“You shot Del Grave?” I ask as a matter of form.

“Yuh. I shot him.” His voice quavers, uncertainly.

“I’m no flatfoot floogie, Mister Frinkey. I’m just a hired hand the Louse pays to guard the game. So if there’s anything I can do to make it easier—”

Tears are streaming down his face, but he is staring straight in front of him, his cheek muscles jumping and jerking.

“I see you on the stage, many’s the time,” I add, figuring he will know I am pulling for him. “To me, you rate.”

“I shot him,” he goes on, as if he is in a trance. “But it wasn’t my fault.” He turns to me as if he doesn’t expect to be believed. “I didn’t know it was a real bullet.”

I remember Del Grave’s curtain line and the crack the girl made about the biggest jest of the year. “What were you doing? Playing cops and robbers?”

“Yes. It was a practical joke, that’s all.”

“Your lawyers will have a very tough time finding twelve good men who will split their sides over it.”

“It’s the truth. We all thought the thing was full of blanks. Larry was in on the frame-up. We were going to scare the pants off Meyer Levinson who gets deathly sick when he sees blood.” He shivers all over, though it’s over seventy in the stairwell.

“We arranged to fake a quarrel. Larry was to claim I’d been cheating, and I was supposed to resent it and fire at him point-blank. Larry planned to fall across the table and splash some red across his shirt front. Then Zara and I were to beat it into 801 and leave Meyer with Larry.” He laced his fingers together to keep them from quivering. “It didn’t — come out that way. Larry is dead and I’m going to get mine.”

The elevator door interrupts him; it clangs open and the house dick, Mike Rubin, stamps out, dragging another lug with him.

“Here,” he hollers, “here’s your runaway buddy.”

Mike’s face is the color of raw beef; his tie is a little on the soiled side, but you should get a close-up of Roy Zara.

He must of been run through a mangle. He has a cut on one of his thin cheeks; his nose is swollen and he needs a couple of new chewers in the front row. His coat collar is torn and that silk shirt with the freak long-collar points is just something for the ashcan.

“I catch him trying to run to the nearest exit,” growls Mike. “I hadda teach him to walk, like the sign says. He had a wad of dough on him big as a house.”

Up to now, the only thing I had against Roy Zara is those black drapes they call Windsor ties, which label him a phony from scratch. A crook can have his map altered as easy as Europe these days, so it’s no bargain being a camera eye. Me, I play a different system. I never forget a tie or the neck it’s on. And right now, I remember brushing against something soft and silky when I take that nose dive a ways back. It must of been Zara’s arty neck piece.

No doubt about it; this mussed-up musician put the dot on my eye. Those teeth he lacks match the cuts on my dukes. The dough-ray-me Mike took off him was probably the ducats he picked up off the table when Del Grave was shot. Zara’d been big loser; probably he figured this was a chance to get it back.

I shove Hipper Dipper ahead of me into 803 and Mike drags the orchestra leader after us.

The Louse is sitting on the sofa with the quart in one clutch, my gun in the other. The gun is pointed at Levinson, who is sitting with his elbows on his knees, studying his shoe-tips. He glances up when we come in, but goes right back to inspecting his shoes.

The frill stares at Zara’s mashed-up face and goes two shades paler under the new make-up she’s put on. She shrinks away from Hipper Dipper as if he had smallpox. The comedian doesn’t even know she’s in the room; and Zara is too bug-eyed, trying to see where Del Grave’s body has been put, to pay her any attention.

I point to the bathroom. “Peek in there on the tile, Mike.”

The big gumshoe gets a glimful and turns green around the gills. “I better call the wagon and put away the dog who done that.”

“Keep your shorts on, fella. The Medical Examiner would only mark him dead on arrival and that’s no scoop. The homicide squad would just tie us all in tanglefoot and mumble in their long gray beards about expecting to make an arrest within twenty-four hours.”

“Can you do better, Vince?”

“I can take a crack at it.” I produce the automatic. “Now this is the heater that croaked Del Grave. It belongs to the long drink of water acting moody over there on the couch. Name is Meyer Levinson.”

“Did Levinson shoot him?” Mike asks.

“According to Mister Frinkey, here,” I give Hipper Dipper a dig in the ribs, “he is the bright boy who held the shooter in Del Grave’s puss and tickled the trigger. Mister Frinkey says it’s all a mistake; he thought the gun was stuffed with blanks.”

“Anyone who would point a pistol at a pal, press the button and call it accidental,” puts in the Louse, who by this time is plastered right up to the ceiling, “would stab you in the back and claim he was only sharpening his knife.”

Hipper Dipper clears his throat, nervously. “It was a gag. We were ribbing Levinson.”

Mike snorts disgustedly, so I fill in some of the details for him:

“It seems Levinson gets crawly when he sees blood; the boys figured he’d do nip-ups if the gun went boom and Del Grave fell down and spilled a lot of red paint on his shirt-front.”

“Didn’t you ever hear of a practical joke before?” snarls Zara, nasty-like.

“They got one up-river,” Mike comes back. “Gives you the hot-foot in a great big way.”

“What I am getting at,” I keep right on, “is this: How come one cartridge in this automatic had the sting left in it?”

“The gun was in Levinson’s overcoat.” Zara swears at Mike, who is giving him the old knuckles-in-the-neck treatment. “We knew Meyer kept one there for fear of a hold-up. So I went to the closet, while Mister Kraddakapalous was rolling the dice. I took the loaded cartridges out of the gun and put them in my overcoat pocket.”

“Sure you got ’em all?” I ask.

“Every single one. Then I filled the magazine with a clip of blanks I brought with me.”

“Took the gun with you and slipped it to Frinkey, huh?” I am trying to punch a hole in his story.

“No. I put it back in Levinson’s coat. Then I gave the high-sign to Frinkey that everything was set.”

“Which pocket did you put it back in, Zara?”

“Same one I took it out of. The left.”

I punch Frinkey again; he is all over the twitches now but is getting glassy-eyed. I don’t want him to fall apart, just yet.

“How about it, Hipper Dipper? You went and got the gun out of Levinson’s coat when you were ready to spring this frame-up?”

“Yes.” The funny man sounds as if he is very sleepy. “That was how it was.”

“Remember which pocket you found it in?”

“Right hand.”

Zara curses him but Mike gives the musician the elbow twist and rumbles: “So far as I can make out the wacky talk, all these guys is guilty, Vince. They conspire to do a deed which results fatal—”

“No.” It is Levinson. He gets to his feet slowly and he is breathing as if he is suffering a lot. “There was no conspiracy. Neither Frinkey nor Zara had anything to do with it. I overheard them talking about the joke. I slipped in the closet and put back one of the loaded cartridges that Zara’d taken out.”

It sounds screwy to me. “Why’d you do it?” I inquire.

Levinson swings around to face Miss Marsh. She gives him the stony glare.

“Claire knows,” the composer says, coolly. “I... I was in love with her.”

He staggers as if he is blind drunk; puts out a hand as if to steady himself on the Louse’s shoulder. Instead he snatches the gun away from the boss. Before I can get to him, Levinson opens his mouth, sticks the muzzle between his teeth and fires!

That tears it.

Amend rushes out of the room, screaming for the cops; the Louse chases after him to see can he keep the manager quiet. I lock the door. Mike throws a coat over Levinson’s body. The frill is whimpering in a corner, like a whipped puppy.

“That winds up the wake,” says Mike.

“Like hell it does.” I go over to the closet. “Levinson was lying, except maybe about falling for the dame. He didn’t switch those cartridges.” I am still holding the automatic. “This model is an eight-shot. If you took eight loaded shells out, Zara, and put eight duds in, then there ought to be eight slugs in your overcoat now. Which is your benny?”

“Polo-coat.” The orchestra leader is panicky, now.

I feel in the pocket of the camel-hair. Seven shells, all with steel-jacketed bullets.

“One missing,” I announce. The room is quiet as a morgue. “It’s my idea,” I go on, “that the person who substituted that missing cartridge for a blank, is hanging onto the extra blank.”

“Let’s frisk ’em,” snarls Mike.

“Let’s,” I agree.

Mike starts to turn Zara’s pockets inside out and Frinkey waits for me to give him the touch system; so the only person who is expecting my next move is the frill.

I snatch her handbag, tear it open. It takes two seconds for me to come up with that dummy shell. The babe makes a grab for it, but I shove her away and I am not so polite about it as I might be.

“You were the wisey who switched the slug for the blank,” I tell her. “You were hiding behind the overcoats in that closet, all the time this monkey business about the cartridges was going on.”

“You’re a liar,” she screams. “I’ve never been near the closet.” She yanks a diamond bar-pin off her dress, jabs at my eyes with the point. I twist her wrist until she drops the pin on the floor. Mike, Zara and Frinkey are too flabbergasted to do anything but stare.

“I might believe you, Miss Marsh, if you hadn’t left each a trail of perfume in there. First time I open the closet door, I sniff if, but it took me a while to get around to wondering why the place should smell like a boudoir when there were only men’s coats in there. That was before you were supposed to have shown up here, at all.”

I get the skirt quieted down; she sees the rough stuff won’t get her anywhere, so she turns on the weepers.

“You fooled me at first,” I explain to her, “when you put on that wailing-wall act, after you saw Del Grave lying there on the floor. Then it bothered me that you were so certain he was forever past the Pearlies, even before you got close to him.”

“You must be crazy,” she hangs her head and sobs like her heart is breaking, “accusing me of murdering my husband, when... when Meyer Levinson’s already confessed he did it.”

“I’ll tell you why Levinson claimed he did it.” I put a fist under her chin, make her look at me. Her eyes are dry; also they are blazing with hate. “Levinson did love you. And he knew you’d done the double-crossing with the cartridges. He was afraid you’d be found out; decided the best thing he could do would be to take the rap himself. He tried it once before, by jumping out the window.”

“Maybe Levinson saw her hiding behind them coats,” suggests Mike. “But why didn’t Zara and Frinkey see her? And how does she get in and out of the closet without everybody getting wise?”

Zara doesn’t speak up and Frinkey, the world’s greatest comedian, is standing there with his eyes shut and tears streaming down his face, but not making a sound.

“Zara was probably too busy fixing the gun, to notice anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if Frinkey did spot her, Mike. She came in through 801, the room Larry had taken next door when the gag was planned. She must have waited in the little boys’ room, while Larry was having a drink with the Louse in 801 before the others got here. And she came out of the closet after I’d busted into the room. Zara’d turned out the light; he and I were doing a rough-and-tumble on the floor.”

I rubbed a bump on my head. “Just to make sure I wouldn’t fix Zara’s wagon and come chasing after her, she beaned me with a beer bottle. Then I figure she had the gall to hide in 804, my room, right across the hall, until she heard me talking to the Louse. Then she rushes in, as if she’d just stepped off the elevator.”

Mike let go of Zara. The musician walked over to the frill.

“He’s telling the truth, Claire. You meant Larry to die! You’ve been trying to get rid of him for months so you could get your hooks into Hipper Dipper. Another thing, Larry told me about your urging him to take out that big insurance—”

She slapped at him, viciously. “You leave Harry Frinkey out of this, you scabby little—”

Frinkey stops her. He doesn’t open his eyes and he doesn’t stop crying, but says, very quiet:

“It doesn’t make any difference, Claire.” He has a hard time finishing. “It’s all over, anyway.”

Mike is bewildered. “Can you tie that, Vince? All this just because the dame is nuts about one guy and married to another!”

“Oh, no,” I say. “She could have gotten a divorce, but easy, if she wanted it that way. But then she’d have no share in Del Grave’s big insurance.”

Zara spits out: “Are you right! She’s the gold-diggingest little — that ever broke a decent man’s heart. It was the insurance she was after, all right. Larry sure had plenty of it.”

That makes sense, all around, but I am having a little difficulty looking at it from a strictly reasonable angle. The babe is trying a new tack.

She throws her arms around my neck and sobs:

“Don’t let them hurt me, please don’t let them.” She even gives me a little of the suggestive knee. I might have relented, because I am a sucker for the old flesh appeal and, anyway, it is going to be tough to convict her of first degree, but the bulls are banging at the door and Mike is letting them in...

So I push her away and say: “Save that leg-art for the prosecutor, kid. Even in court, the show has to go on. You’ll need all the pretty pink things you’ve got if you’re going to keep that cute figure out of a numbered uniform.”

Then the cops came in. It is about time.