Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol.122, No. 6, October 1, 1938

Murder at Hand by Hugh B. Cave

Love came to Danny Phillips once in his life — and then it sent him to the Chair.

“Sure, I seen it,” Murdock said. “How could I help but see it, with him standin’ right beside me when the gun went off? But so help me, Captain, I never dreamed he’d do a thing like that!”

Danny Phillips hadn’t dreamed it either, exactly. With a brain like Danny’s you don’t elaborately plan things ahead of time, it would be a waste of effort.

Danny Phillips had a frail, sickly little body, an expert pair of hands, and a face freely decorated with pimples. Everyone knew Danny. He lived at Mrs. Macusker’s rooming house on Everett Street (three dollars a week for a bed, a chair, a bureau and four walls) and made his living by picking pockets.

It wasn’t much of a living. It could have been, of course, if he had worked at it, but unless there was a pronounced ache in Danny Phillips’ stomach the idea of picking a pocket or two seldom occurred to him. He preferred to hang around the boys at the Everett Street Social Club or take long aimless walks for himself down around the waterfront. Danny Phillips suffered vaguely from imagination.

He was merely out walking, for instance, the day he first saw the girl. He’d been down on Canal Street, watching a gang of husky stevedores at work, and as he ambled homeward his eyes had that faraway look in them and he was totally oblivious to his surroundings. He ran right into this stout lady with the armful of bundles.

Danny said, “Oops! Pardon me, lady,” and stood there looking helpless. The lady cussed him out, so instead of helping her pick up the bundles Danny ducked, ran, and buried himself in the midst of a crowd of people in front of a store window.

He came up the way a cork bobs up in a whirlpool, and when he did so, there was the girl right beside him.

Danny took one look at her and was sunk.

You didn’t run across girls like this one in the districts generally frequented by Danny Phillips. Most of those women were tough and looked tough. This girl was different. Oh, so different! She was just Danny’s height, and couldn’t have weighed an ounce more than he did, and she was pretty. Not just everyday pretty, but sweet and shy and lovely like something you’d see in the colored folders advertising the faraway places that Danny longed to go to.

Danny stood there beside her and sneaked looks at her. She had a faraway look in her eyes, too, he realized (people were always kidding him about the look in his own) and he wondered why until he saw what she and the rest of the crowd were staring at.

The store was a department store, and the big front window was made up to look like a country town in winter. There was snow on the ground, deep snow, and there were horses, miniature ones, pulling a sleigh, and there were kids walking along with skis over their shoulders. Off in the background there was a little pond where people were skating on the ice. It was all very real and peaceful. Looking at it, you almost didn’t realize it was just a scheme to advertise winter sports equipment. You just felt sort of wishy.

The girl looked wishy, and she looked sad about it, too. Danny decided there was something wrong with her. He decided all at once, the way he decided almost everything, that he had to know her name.

He couldn’t just ask her. If he did that, she would probably call the cops and have him pinched. But he had to know her name.

She wore a brown leather handbag draped from one wrist, and Danny’s gaze fastened on it. He had snatched a pile of handgags in his time, and most of them contained cards bearing the owner’s name and address.

All at once Danny had to have that handbag.

He snatched it. He ducked and ran before the girl even had a chance to get a look at him. Very fast on his feet was Danny Phillips, and very quick-witted when it came to emergencies. Before the girl had screamed twice, he was on the outer edge of the crowd, with the bag stuffed under his coat.

People on the outskirts of the crowd weren’t interested in what was going on near them. They pushed forward to find out why the girl was screaming. Danny just strolled away.

Later, in his room at Mrs. Macusker’s rooming house, he opened the bag and poured its contents out on the bed. He did that very gently, almost reverently, as if merely touching the bag were a privilege.

The little pile of stuff on the bed included a fifty-cent compact, a little ten-cent tube of lipstick, a soiled handkerchief, one dollar and thirty-three cents in cash, and a photograph. The photograph was tucked in a little inside pocket of the bag and might have been there for some time.

And, oh yes, a driver’s license — a New Hampshire driver’s license — with a name on it. The name was Dorothy Alton, the typewritten address was Ennis Falls, N.H., and in pencil under that was another address: 23 Dickson St.

But Danny was interested mainly in the picture.

“Why, hell,” he said aloud, sadly, “she’s just a tramp. It hurt him to say that, even to think it, but he knew it was the truth. No nice girl would carry a picture of Slick Merina around in her handbag, would she?”

Slick Merina was bad, all bad. You could forgive a man for making a living with his wits, for picking pockets and harmless stuff like that, but the kind of work Slick Merina went in for was unmoral. Only last week some poor guy over on Fanchon Street had been cut up and sent to a hospital by two of Merina’s gorillas, just for refusing to pay for “protection” for his lunchroom; and a year ago, or maybe two years ago, the Merina boys had tossed a pineapple into a South Side clothing store and killed two customers.

Slick Merina was smart all right, but he was no good. He had the wrong slant on life.

Danny could understand, though, why this girl, whose name seemed to be Dorothy Alton, had fallen for Merina. Merina was the kind of man a girl would go for. He was tall and husky and good-looking, with curly black hair and a face good enough for Hollywood. Lots of girls had sold their souls to Slick Merina.

Danny put the picture back in the bag, and the rest of the stuff with it, and lay down on the bed, feeling rotten. That was the way with all his dreams — they got punctured before he could even blow them up big enough to look like anything.

Well, it was tough, but this was the end of it. He’d forget her.

The trouble was, he didn’t. A couple of days later hunger took him into a crowded auction room on Dickson Street, and when he emerged — after acquiring a guy’s wallet — he found himself walking down the street and looking at numbers on doors. Number 23 Dickson Street was where she lived.

He should have been in a restaurant somewhere, pushing food into his stomach, because he was cold and wet and hungry. But he hiked on, looking for 23 instead. He just had to get another look at her.

He wouldn’t dare talk to her, of course. Not if she was Slick Merina’s girl. But if he could just see her again, he’d feel better inside. That ache inside him wasn’t all from hunger.

Number 23 was an apartment house, and he was disappointed. If it had been an ordinary tenement house, now, he might have seen her walk past a window — if she lived on the first floor. It would be dark pretty soon, and people would be turning their lights on, and he might have screwed up enough courage to sneak over to a window — but instead of that, it was an apartment house.

Danny stood in a sheltered doorway across the street, out of the drizzle, and watched the door of the apartment house, and waited. He wasn’t very hopeful, but he waited. She might come out.

After a while a cab drove up and stopped. The driver put his hand on the horn, then lit a cigarette. The front door of the apartment house opened and a man hurried down the steps and got into the cab.

The man was Slick Merina.

Danny felt a tightness in his throat when he saw that, for no reason at all he was angry. As if Slick Merina had no right to be coming out of the girl’s apartment! As if she were Danny’s girl! Anyway, he felt scared and sore and pathetically helpless all at once, and long after the cab had taken Merina away he just stood there, staring across through the drizzle at the apartment house.

Suddenly he was walking. He was walking across the street and up the steps, and he was looking at a list of names beside a row of bells.

Hers was there. Dorothy Alton. Apartment 27.

That was as far as his nerve took him. He didn’t have courage enough to ring the bell, even though, with her bag in his possession, he could easily say: “I found this, Miss, and I seen your name in it, so I’m returning it.”

He just stood there, looking at her name.

He didn’t hear any footsteps, but all at once the inner door opened and a lady was in the vestibule with him. The lady was painted up something awful, and she was old, too. She had a white cat snuggled in the crook of one arm, and she was talking baby-talk to it. She hardly noticed Danny.

The door had a device on it to keep it from slamming. It swung shut, almost shut, and the air pressure stopped it, then let it close the last six inches very gently.

Danny got to it before the lock clicked.

He was scared then. Scared at his own temerity. But he was inside, so close! And he couldn’t hold himself back, even though a little voice inside him kept warning him he would get into trouble. She was Slick Merina’s girl, and Slick was bad! Don’t be a fool, Danny!

He walked down the hall almost on tiptoe, went up the stairs, found the door marked 27 — and knocked. Knocked quickly, because if he hadn’t, his courage would have oozed out and left him quaking. No one answered.

He knocked again, and again, and still got no answer. He was angry then. She shouldn’t be out. What right did she have to be out, after a guy screwed up his courage that way, just to look at her?

He tried the door and it was locked.

“Well, anyhow, I could leave her bag,” he thought. “I could show her I ain’t no cheap crook like the guy she runs around with.”

It wasn’t hard. He had the right tool in his pocket and knew how to use it, and the lock was old, anyway. No one interrupted him. The door was at the end of the corridor, way down at the back of the house, and it was dark down there, and kind of gloomy. And in three minutes he was inside the apartment

A light was on in the living-room. And the place wasn’t deserted, as he’d expected. She was there.

Danny Phillips looked at her and almost couldn’t breathe, his throat got so tight. His mouth fell open and he felt cold, so cold inside that someone must have pumped ice-water into him. All he said was, “Gee!” and it was just a whisper, almost no sound at all. Then there were tears in his eyes.

He thought she was dead when he went down on his knees beside her. She looked dead. Her slim little body was draped over the end of a studio couch, with her head dangling over the edge, and her eyes were open, glassy, and her face was all out of shape. She’d been beaten up, and he thought she was dead.

She wasn’t, though. Her heart was beating.

Danny found the bathroom and soaked a towel in cold water and squeezed the water over the girl’s face. He didn’t know if that was the right thing to do, but that was what they did to prize fighters sometimes, after a knockout.

He went back and forth to the bathroom four times, and the last time, when he returned to the girl with his wet towel, she was conscious. Not wholly conscious, but able to stare at him and say: “Who... who are you?”

Danny said: “It don’t matter who I am, lady. All that counts is, we got to get you a doctor!” And he stood there wide-legged, staring at her, with the wet towel in his hands.

Up to that minute he hadn’t realized what he was doing, exactly. Now he did, and felt a sort of electric shock all through him. He was able to look at her! He’d even touched her!

The girl said: “No, I don’t want a doctor.”

“But you been beaten up!”

“No.” She shook her head, staring at him. “No. I... I was in an accident. I was — hit by a car — outside. I don’t know just what happened, but I must have lost consciousness as soon as I came in.”

Danny Phillips knew a beating up when he saw one, but he couldn’t tell this girl she was a liar. He just couldn’t.

“Who are you?” the girl said. “How did you get in here?”

“It ain’t important,” Danny mumbled. “I’ll be goin’ now.”

She didn’t tell him to stay. She just stared, not even thanking him for helping her. Anyhow, he didn’t want any thanks. He’d had his reward, hadn’t he? He’d — touched her. He’d been close enough to have her talk to him.

He went slowly down the hall, and out, and closed the door after him.

He didn’t have a chance in the world of getting her out of his mind after that. He went around all day, every day, with her face in front of him, bruised and battered by Slick Merina’s fists. He had no positive proof, of course, that Merina was responsible, but he would have gambled his life on it. Slick Merina had beaten up women before.

Danny couldn’t keep away from 23 Dickson Street, either. For hours at a time he hung around, hoping for a fleeting glimpse of her, even though that inner voice warned him he was playing with dynamite. So finally he did see her, one night around eight o’clock, and followed her. And that was how he found out she worked at the Braydon.

The Braydon was a restaurant on Park Street, a high-class place where you could eat high-class food without listening to the screech of an orchestra or paying extra money to watch girls dance without clothes on. Danny had never been inside it, but had heard of it. The place was really highbrow. He had been told about it, often, by Angelo Pucci, who worked in the kitchen.

So after he saw the girl go into the back door of the Braydon that night, Danny made up his mind he would have a talk with Angelo, and he did.

The very next day he went over to Angelo’s rooming house.

And Angelo told him about her.

“Why sure I know her!” Angelo said. “She work at the Braydon for two month now. Only her name is not really Dorothy Alton. That is just the name she work under: it was her name before she get married.”

Danny felt queer. “M-married?” he said.

“Why sure. She is married to Slick Merina. I thought everybody knew that!”

Married to Slick Merina. It was like a kick in the face. It was like the time the boys at Noland’s Gym had kidded Danny into putting on the gloves with Noland’s best lightweight, and the first punch had jarred something loose in Danny’s brain. He stared at Angelo but all he could see was the bruised face of the girl, and suddenly he was blazing with anger.

“If she is Slick Merina’s wife why does he let her work in a restaurant?” Danny screamed. “He has money!”

“Sure, but you think she gets any?”

“What do you mean?”

“Look,” Angelo said. “This girl, she is a good girl. She comes to the city only six months ago, from some little place in New Hampshire. She comes here to study at business school, nights, and she gets a job daytimes working as a waitress. Slick Merina, he gets a load of her and dates her up.

“Well, she falls for him. She is all alone in the city, and lonesome and how is she to know Slick Merina is the kind of man he is? After all, does he look like a killer? No! So she falls hook, line and sinker, and marries him — and then, when it is too late, she finds out the truth.”

Danny Phillips nodded, tears in his eyes.

“So naturally, being a good girl,” Angelo said, “she hates him. And he knows it. And it makes him sore. He says to her, ‘All right; you hate me, you get no money; you want to eat you go to work.’ So she gets a job at the Braydon, and that burns him up even worse. He abuses her. Only the other night he beat her up, and she comes to work with her face purple from bruises.”

Danny Phillips sat very still, except for his hands. His hands opened and closed, opened and closed, and were sweaty. “Why don’t she go home?” he muttered.

“For one thing, it costs money. For another, she is scared he would follow her. This Slick Merina is bad. He says to her, ‘You go home, you run away from me, and you’ll be sorry. You and your folks, too. You go back to that jerk town in New Hampshire and I’ll make you wish you was dead.’ So she is afraid to go home.”

Danny Phillips took all that with him when he left Angelo’s rooming house. He took it back to his own rooming house and gnawed on it, brooded over it, almost as if the problem were his own. That night be slept with it.

For two days, Thursday and Friday, Danny thought of nothing else. He knew now the reason for that faraway look in the girl’s eyes when he first saw her in front of the department store. He knew, too, why she had lied about being beaten up. A girl like that had pride. She wouldn’t tell her troubles to everyone. All this information Angelo had, he had picked up piece by piece, over a long period of time.

Saturday afternoon Danny emerged from the subway with two fresh wallets in his possession, two wallets containing, together, over eighty dollars. He hadn’t had an easy time getting hold of that money. For some strange reason — probably because he wanted the money so very badly — his hands had acquired a tendency to twitch, and he’d really been scared.

But he had it, and after getting rid of the empty wallets in a refuse can he headed for Abanico’s pawn shop on Kelsey Street. It didn’t matter that Abanico knew him and might wonder things.

He got what he wanted in Abanico’s for twenty dollars and then did another errand, and returned to his rooming house. It was about five-thirty then. From Mrs. Macusker he obtained an envelope and a sheet of writing paper, and then upstairs in his own room, with the door shut, he composed a letter

It was hard work, writing that letter. Not only was it hard work spelling the words out so they could be read, but he had to be careful what he put into it. So it was almost six-thirty when Danny arrived at 23 Dickson Street.

You could have asked Danny Phillips then what his plans were, and he wouldn’t have been able to tell you. Not in detail. All he really had was a vague idea of what he thought ought to be done, and a belief in his own ability to accomplish it. But he didn’t know how he was going to accomplish it. His brain wasn’t thorough enough to pigeon-hole a sequence of ideas and say, “This is step one, this is step two, this is step three and so forth.” So when Danny arrived at the apartment house he hadn’t any definite idea of what to do when he got there.

So far, he had gone along step by step in a kind of groping fashion, not worrying about the ultimate consequences. Now, however, he saw the end in sight and appreciated the obstacles still to be hurdled. For one thing, he had to be sure that Slick Merina was not in that apartment.

Getting past the downstairs door was not difficult, even though the door was locked. He merely punched the bell marked Janitor and mumbled into the speaking tube: “Let me in, please. It is Mr. Merrill. I have forgot my keys.” A man named Anthony Merrill occupied apartment number 4, according to the directory.

The door buzzed, and Danny went in.

When he approached the door of her apartment, though, he felt shaky. All he had to do was bend down and push under the door the envelope he had prepared at his rooming house, but he had to be sure Slick Merina would not get it. So he stood beside the door and listened, thinking that if Slick Merina were inside there would be some talking going on.

There was. And it was not ordinary talk, either. And it was not Slick Merina doing the talking; it was the girl.

And it was not Slick Merina doing the listening, because why would the girl be telling him about how she came to the city and got a job in a restaurant and so forth?

It was funny, but Danny Phillips could hear every word of it, almost as if there were no door in front of him. He put his left ear against the door and plugged up his right ear with a finger, and the words seemed to crawl right up inside the wood, as if they were coming out of a phonograph. That was because the girl was hysterical, sort of, and talking in a loud voice.

Then Danny heard a man’s voice, deep and gruff, saying: “I don’t care what Merino threatens! You’re coming with me! You never should have left home in the first place!”

The girl started to cry then, and the man’s voice lost some of its gruffness, but still Danny could hear what he was saying. He said: “Listen, darling, you can’t go on living like this. You just can’t. You were my girl back home, and you loved me. I know you did. And you can learn to love me again, after this mess is cleared up. We were kids together, Dorothy. We grew up loving each other. What kind of a man would I be if I went back home and left you here, knowing what I know about the hell you’ve been through?”

The girl didn’t answer. She just cried. Danny Phillips, listening, didn’t know whether it was her tears or the man’s words that made him feel so dry and tight and twisted inside. Most likely it was the stuff the man was telling her. He was her sweetheart. Danny hadn’t counted on any such complication as that.

The man said then: “Dearest, you’ve got to give me an answer. Will you go home with me?”

“I... I can’t, Jim,” she sobbed.

His voice, answering that, was so loud all of a sudden that Danny actually jumped away from it. You could hear it out in the hall, even without putting your ear to the door.

“Then I’ll settle one thing before I go home!” he shouted. “I’ll rid you of that beast and his brutality! I’ll kill him!”

Danny Phillips was pretty good at putting sounds together to form pictures, and by listening carefully he had a fair idea of what was happening. The girl was pleading with the man — with this Jim — and telling him he couldn’t do things that way, and the man was refusing to listen. She probably had her arms around him, trying to hold him back, because when he came toward the door where Danny crouched, her voice came with him, sobbing and pleading with him. Then the door opened and they were out in the hall.

Danny got a look at the fellow then and was surprised. The voice had suggested someone big, fairly old, but this Jim guy was just a kid, no older than the girl herself. Just a kid, but flushed with anger and a little bit crazy.

“I tell you I’ll kill him!” he stormed. “If I can’t have you, I’m damned if he’s going to torture you the rest of your life! I’ll kill him!”

The girl clung to him, begging him to listen to reason, but he shook himself loose and headed for the stairs.

“And don’t think I don’t know where to find him!” he flung back. “I know a lot more about him than you suspect. I made it my business to find out!”

He was gone then, and the girl sagged back against the door, crying her heart out. She loved him; you could see that. She wasn’t afraid for Slick Merina. She knew Slick could handle himself. And she knew what would happen when this wild-eyed kid came up against Slick in a fight.

She didn’t see Danny. Jim hadn’t seen him, either. Danny was back in the shadows, flat against the wall, and didn’t move.

He didn’t move until the girl went back into the apartment. She went quickly, leaving a little sob behind her, as if all at once she had made up her mind to do something to save her Jim. She’d call the police, maybe, or go out looking for Merina and get him out of the way. Danny didn’t quite know what she would do, or what he would do if he were in her shoes. All he knew was that the envelope in his pocket was no good any more, because the girl had a sweetheart.

He felt queer. He felt again the way he had felt that night when the boys at the gym coaxed him into the ring with that fighter. He put his chin on his chest and slouched down the stairs, out to Dickson Street. He thought maybe he would get drunk, good and drunk, and then go away somewhere. Maybe he would never come back.

He walked up Dickson Street to the avenue and along the avenue to the bright light district, because he thought it would be nice to hear a lot of people talking, and to hear automobile horns and noise. He was wrong, though. When the noise swirled around him it made him feel worse. There were too many people, and some of them were laughing.

He turned into the first side street he came to, and it happened to be Melton Street. Slick Merina owned a night club on Melton Street, a place called the Crazy Club. The big neon sign over the club’s entrance hurt Danny’s eyes, and he crossed the street to get away from it.

Someone said, “Hello, Danny,” and he stopped.

“Hello, Mr. Murdock,” Danny mumbled.

Murdock, who was a cop, said: “What’s eatin’ you? You look like the bottom of the world fell out.”

Danny didn’t answer that because something was happening. A cab had pulled up and stopped in front of the Crazy Club, and a man and a girl were getting out of it. The man was Slick Merina, and the girl was a ravishing blonde, all wrapped up in ermines. The girl strolled toward the entrance while Slick paid the driver.

She was almost knocked over by the young man who ploughed from the doorway and strode toward Merina. You could see by the man’s fists that he meant business, and nothing was going to stop him, not even a beautiful blonde.

He started shouting something, and Merina’s name was part of it, and Merina turned quickly to face him. Merina must have realized, too, that the kid meant business. He stepped back and jabbed a hand to his coat pocket.

That was when Danny Phillips acted.

Later, at Police Headquarters, Murdock wagged his head back and forth, back and forth, and said: “Sure, I seen it. How could I help but see it, with him standin’ right beside me? But so help me, Captain, I never dreamed he’d do a thing like that! Imagine it, him standin’ there lookin’ like the bottom of the world had dropped out, and the next thing I know he’s got a gun in his hand and he’s pourin’ lead into Merina.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Nor neither do I. Nor neither are we ever goin’ to, unless I’m sadly mistaken. I’ve talked to him, Captain. All the rest of the boys have talked to him. And you know what he does? He just looks at us, wise like an owl, and smiles. Smiles, with the chair starin’ him in the face!”

“And the letter in that envelope. The letter and the railroad ticket to Ennis Falls, New Hampshire. He won’t explain them?”

“I got the letter right here, Captain. All it says is: ‘This will get you to where you want to go, and I promise you there won’t be no trouble come after you.’ Half the words are spelled wrong, and it isn’t signed. As for the railroad ticket, we gave it back to him. He begged for it with tears in his eyes, and after all — hell! — he’s a nice little guy even if he did rub out that rat Merina. And you know what he did with that ticket, Captain?”

“What?”

“It’s glued up on the wall of his cell, and he just sits there — just sits there — smilin’ at it.”