Stockholders in Death

CHAPTER I Stockholders in Death

It was after one o’clock in the morning, but Joseph Crimm, semi-retired lawyer, was just walking home from his office on Lexington Avenue. It was the latest he had worked for a long time. Joseph Crimm, dapper and elderly and kindly-eyed, very seldom had anything important enough to work that late on.

He did now. Something very important. He was extremely thoughtful about it. Now and then he frowned a little.

It was dark here. Crimm had a beautiful house, remodeled, though the house was in a spotty neighborhood on the East Side. New York is like that — big, expensive apartments nest in the middle of slums; remodeled tenement buildings that house millionaires, right in the center of warehouse or loft districts.

Crimm’s place had a terrace overlooking the East River, and was as nice a home as you’d care to see, once you’d entered the front gate. But outside the wall, the street was shabby and as dark as the inside of a hobo’s hat.

Crimm didn’t usually notice the darkness and shabbiness. He did, tonight, because he was walking. He didn’t often walk from the office to his home. He hadn’t really intended to tonight.

His elder son, Tom, had promised to call for him at twelve thirty in his car. Tom hadn’t showed up, and when Crimm went outside, the night air was pleasant; so he had decided to walk, instead of flagging a taxi.

Now he was a little sorry. It was very dark. Also, he was aware of a chronic affliction that began to make itself noticeable in the form of extreme tiredness, as if he had walked ten miles instead of less than one.

He would have taken a cab, now, to go the last block or so to his home. But he was in a region where there were no cabs; so he plodded on—

To his doom!

A car came down the dark street. The car was dark, too, and melted in with the building shadows. Only its dim cowl lights were on. Crimm paid little attention to it, at first. Then he eyed it with sudden relief.

It was, he thought, Tom’s car. It was the same model and color as the sedan his son drove. Tom had been delayed, had found him gone from the office and was just catching up to him now.

Crimm’s relief faded into uneasiness.

He began to sense that this wasn’t his son’s car, after all. Something about the way the figure at the wheel wore his hat, sat in the driver’s seat, was different. It was someone else with the same kind of sedan.

The car whirled suddenly and came straight at the spot on the sidewalk where Crimm stood.

The elderly, retired lawyer thought at first that the driver merely meant to make a U-turn in the street and go back the way he had come. But the front wheel, instead of continuing cramped for a turn, straightened out, and the sedan continued to leap straight at him.

Crimm yelled and ran to the right.

The car jounced over the curb, screeched to a stop before crashing a building wall, and backed up. It tore at Crimm again.

Crimm began to run down the walk toward his own gate. After him, on the sidewalk instead of the street, came the sedan.

It was mad, nightmarish. It was the kind of thing you often dream might happen but know very well never actually will.

The car chased down the walk like a mad thing. It squeezed between hydrants and building walls, twisted out on the street and back up on the walk when some obstruction gave too narrow a lane for it to negotiate. But always it charged at Crimm.

After the first yell Crimm was silent. He needed all his breath. Needed it for running and ducking.

He side-stepped into a small doorway. The car plunged right at him. The door posts might or might not have held the bumper from nosing in and crushing him. He didn’t wait to find out. Instinctively he leaped out again and went back along the walk, away from the river.

The car came right after him.

The thing seemed like a live creature, insane with hate, motivated by just the one purpose of mangling Crimm’s spare figure. It was like a bull elephant charging at a victim, regardless of all obstacles, no matter where the victim should turn.

At no time did Crimm see the man at the wheel. He scarcely paid attention to the man. indeed. It was as if the car itself were the thing ramming at him, with no human will to guide it.

The crazy, horrible game could not go on long. For nearly three minutes Crimm doubled and wheeled and ducked, narrowly missed death a score of times by the flailing bumper.

Then he clutched at his chest, uttered a wheezing groan, and sank to the sidewalk.

Now the car could have rammed over him with no trouble at all. Now it had simply to go straight ahead. But, with an entire lack of sense, it did no such thing.

It stopped well away from the prone figure of the elderly man, backed into the street and went at a law-abiding, subdued pace back toward the center of Manhattan.

Crimm lay there. A rattling kind of gasping was coming from his bluish lips, but he was unconscious of that. He was unconscious of everything. And that was fortunate, for his kind of affliction carries pain so great that it is scarcely to be endured.

A woman came out of the building across the street, saw the body and ducked back in. Two men followed her out in a moment and carried Crimm into their apartment.

They took a wallet from his pocket, identified him, phoned the police and his home.

Joseph Crimm had two sons; Tom, the elder, and Wayne, the younger. Tom reached the house where his father was held in less than half an hour; Wayne in about an hour and a quarter.

Wayne was about twenty, looking impulsive and emotional with his rough blond hair and intense blue eyes. Tom was twenty-six, though he looked to be thirty. He was as dark as his young brother was fair, and had a disillusioned, cynical expression on his face. In fact the characters of the two were plainly to be read on their countenances.

Wayne was idealistic, generously honest, willing to trust people. Tom was realistic and hard-boiled. He would take nothing for granted, but would examine it from all sides, skeptically, before putting any faith in it. Then his faith would be lukewarm.

Tom and Wayne were bending over their father with stricken faces. The doctor was at a distance. No need to ask him how the patient was. Joseph Crimm was dying. That was plain enough.

The police had come and gone. They’d heard a tale of a car almost running this man down, then of his fainting with a heart attack. No license number of the car, nothing. What could they do? Even if they’d found the car’s driver, they’d have been helpless. According to the dying man’s own admission, the car had never touched him.

But Tom and Wayne were getting a different version and were forming different conclusions.

“I meant to leave you two a fortune,” Crimm whispered to his boys. “Now there is very little to leave. I’m sorry.”

“What’s this talk of leaving us anything?” said Wayne stoutly. “You’re going to stick around for years yet. You—”

His father’s slight smile, twisted suddenly with pain, stopped him.

“There was a large fortune, till a few days ago,” he whispered. “Then, I bought stock in the Ballandale Glass Corp. A great deal of stock. Enough to control the vote at the next meeting—”

A spasm wracked his body and stopped his words.

“Dad — we don’t care anything about money—” began Tom.

Crimm shook his head, just a little, in command for him to keep still and listen.

“Not much time left. Get this clearly. I bought the stock to swing control from the receivers of the Ballandale Corp., which recently went bankrupt. Those receivers, the Town Bank of New York principally, were going to smash the concern, again, to squeeze out minority stockholders. Then they’d buy it back cheap. I wanted to stop that.”

“You mean — the Town Bank where we’ve done most of your business?” said Wayne softly.

“That’s it. Bunch of thieves! I mean it. My stock was delivered to my account there. They stole it. I’d bought the stock secretly, in small lots, so no one would know I was getting control. The stock was still unsigned by me, held in dummy names. So there you have it. Town Bank stole over two million dollars’ worth of my stock — and no one on earth can prove it was my stock and that they took it.”

“But, Dad,” said Tom, “you said you distrusted Town Bank, yet you had your stock delivered to your account there—”

“I did not. There was a misunderstanding. My brokerage house was to deliver it to my home. They made a mistake and sent it to the bank—”

A suppressed scream came from Crimm’s lips, as he had the worst heart seizure of all.

Sweat came to the man’s clay-colored forehead as he stopped the scream and wrenched out a few words.

“Sorry I… no fortune for you… my own sons—”

Joseph Crimm was still. The supreme pain of angina pectoris was over. He was dead!

Tom and Wayne drew long breaths and stared, white-faced, at each other.

“I’m a murderer,” whispered Tom.

“Don’t say that.” Wayne caught his older brother’s arm. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“If I’d met him with the car, he wouldn’t have been walking. And that drunken fool of a driver he told about would not have had the chance to scare him to death—”

Tom was suddenly silent. He stayed that way for so long that Wayne started to say something. Tom held up his hand, and his face had become a mask of rage.

“Wayne — that driver wasn’t drunk nor crazy. This is deliberate murder!”

“I don’t see—”

“Look! Dad has just been robbed, in the coldest, crudest way robbery can be accomplished, by an unscrupulous bunch of business men. Now Dad is a fighter. He’d have made things hot for that gang; so they put him out of the way. It was well known that he had a very bad heart. All right! Chase him with a car; scare him; make him run and leap as even a well man of sixty-five should never do, let alone a sick one. Then, when he keels over with a heart attack, just drive away. There’s your victim, dead! But there isn’t a mark on your car, and even a witness could never make a charge stick, because you never actually touched him.”

Wayne’s blue eyes were wide and flaming.

“Dad’s death is cold-blooded murder,” said Tom furiously. “It’s up to us to prove it, though I haven’t the faintest idea how. And it’s up to us to get the Crimm fortune back from those highbinders at Town Bank.”

Wayne nodded, looking ten years older in the last ten minutes.

“We get the money back,” he said harshly, “and we pin murder on whoever drove that car. But — how do we do these things?”

“I don’t know, yet.” Tom’s hands went over his face. “If only I’d been able to meet him in the car! But I had a blow-out as I was coming to the office. A piece of glass or something cut a V-shaped lump out of the tire, clear to the fabric. The right rear. Then she blew.”

Wayne’s hand went impulsively to his older brother’s shoulder.

“Don’t feel like that. It wasn’t your fault. Come, let’s get Dad home.”

Joseph Crimm couldn’t have been moved before. He was so close to death that the attempt would have killed him, at once. He could be moved now that death had struck.

In a mournful procession, he was borne on down the block to the Crimm home. After him came Tom and Wayne, with shoulders bowed.

Murder — subtle, deliberate, clueless! They both felt sure that’s what it was. Someone would pay; both vowed that.

Someone would pay! But — by what means could they be brought to justice?