The Corpse in the Crystal

Chapter I

By the time Abner Murder and I got on the death wagon, the kill fest was going strong and showing no sign of stopping. Every one of the deaths indicated that the grim reaper had gone on a whimsical spree — except that death is never whimsical.

Murder and I had no idea we would become involved in the affair. Subsequent investigation showed those initial deaths happened something like this:

We’ll take Frank Snow first, though no one is sure even now which victim received the first note. Snow was in the same business as the chief and I; he was a private detective.

We weren’t proud of that fact and didn’t regard him as an ethical member of the profession. Snow was the sort of slim, sleek man who didn’t care particularly how he made his dimes. A little blackmail in the course of regular business he regarded as a natural by-product of the operation of a private detective agency.

His secretary was at the courthouse that morning, looking up a trial in the court records that Snow was interested in. He was alone in his fifteenth floor office as he began opening his morning mail. He was tranquil, with a deep sense of well-being at the moment he opened the thin white envelope. He read the contents, and a slow frown furrowed his brow. He crushed out his cigarette abruptly, read the note again:

Frank Snow muttered, “The damndest crackpot note I’ve ever seen! Die by drowning before noon today!”

His laugh was hard, sure. He’d never heard of anything more ridiculous. He was alone, fifteen sheer stories above the street. The only water near him was in the decanter in the outer office. With an abrupt movement, his face mirroring a sense of high comedy, Frank Snow rose from his desk, crossed the office, and locked the door. No one, he was positive, could come through that door. He was quite alone, and he did not intend to leave this office until lunchtime, at one-thirty.

He laughed, crushed the note from the crackpot, Nostra, in his hands and threw it in the trash basket.

His blonde secretary finished her errand and returned to the office at eleven forty-five. Without removing her hat and coat, she hurried across the outer office to deliver the transcription of the court record to Frank Snow. She found his private office locked. She called his name. There was no answer. She waited, called his name again. She deliberated a few minutes, then called the superintendent of the building. The old janitor came up five minutes later.

“Mr. Snow is in his private office, locked in,” she told him. “He doesn’t answer. I want you to use your passkey on the door.”

“But, Miss, he might be—”

“I’ll accept responsibility if he blesses us out,” she said. She added emphatically, “He wanted this court record. A man is either sick or drunk when he wants something and doesn’t answer to his name!”

So the janitor unlocked the door. Frank Snow was neither sick nor drunk. He was lying in the middle of his office, dead. An hour later the medical examiner hesitantly rendered his astounding verdict. Death by drowning — with the victim sealed in the fifteenth floor office of a modern building with not a drop of water near him...

Loren “The Lion” Cole strode his swank office on the twentieth floor of the same building in which Frank Snow ran a detective agency. However, Loren Cole knew nothing of Frank Snow. Had never heard of him, in fact. Had he been told of Snow’s existence, he would have considered the imparting of the knowledge as so much wasted breath by the teller. It mattered not in the least that Frank Snow was dying five floors beneath him at that very moment. The Lion was upset. Some fool had written him a note, signing it, Nostra, Possessor of the Crystal.

The Lion stared at the paper again as he paced the inner sanctum that was his private office, from which grew a thousand tentacles of power belonging to an oil king worth eleven million dollars. The Lion roared a curse, read the note again:

“A pack of rats,” three of Cole’s battery of secretaries in the huge outer office reported him as roaring. “A pack of rats, sending a note like this, trying to get a man so upset they can best him in business!”

That’s the way he translated the note. A prank from a business rival who was dabbling in the application of a queer, negative psychology.

The Lion jerked open the teakwood door he’d imported when he first set up this suite of offices ten years ago. “I’m seeing no one,” he roared. Two secretaries swallowed their gum quite involuntarily.

The whole office force of a dozen people later swore that no one had entered that sanctified office. All twelve couIdn’t have been lying. The Lion was alone in that twentieth floor office until one of the secretaries tapped timidly on the teakwood door, a sheaf of letters in her hand that just had to be signed.

The usual roar did not greet her. Frowning, she took her courage in hand and eased the door open a crack. Her scream silenced every clattering typewriter. Twelve people were suddenly jammed in the door, staring at Loren “The Lion” Cole.

He was sprawled in the middle of his office, his neck twisted at a gruesome, grotesque angle. Clearly it was broken, and the Lion had died without a roar. The hands of the clock on his desk moved to twelve o’clock, noon. On the floor near the Lion’s foot was a little, red plastic toy automobile. It belonged to his son, who must have left it after a visit with his mother, forgotten. Such a ridiculous little thing for a man to trip on and break his neck...

Across the city Gregory Sloan gazed at the top of his desk. It was a magnificent desk, oval in shape, made of the finest walnut. But Gregory Sloan was not interested in magnificence at the moment. He was short, heavy, bald, with a greasy look about him, and a nose that looked as if it had been pushed up into his face from its base, making the nostrils prominent. He knew he resembled a fat pig more than any other creature, but even that did not bother him at present. The devil’s own share of worries was on his shoulders.

He had sunk every dime he owned in this place, his Forty Nine Club. Everything had been set for Gregory Sloan; then the fool voters of the city had changed things at the last election. Gregory Sloan’s man had been voted out. All his carefully laid plans had gone to the well-known pot.

The gambling rooms cm the floor below were closed. Gregory Sloan had, in fact, narrowly missed having the Forty Nine Club dice in the office of the D. A. at this very moment. Then that fool girl who’d got drunk and committed suicide. Bad publicity, cops hounding him.

Every dime he owned tied up in the spacious, luxurious club that, in its entirety, occupied the two floors below him. A club that would not pay its own way without the gambling rooms and the sucker traps. He was going broke. There was nothing he could do to stop it. The City knew he was going broke, watching him and laughing. It was hell to come up the ladder from small-time punk and gunman to the crest, then lose it all.

With a grunting, heavy sigh, he turned his mind from his money problems to the maddening, crank note before him; the note that had arrived in his morning mail three hours ago.

Gregory Sloan had neither Frank Snow’s cold brutality nor Loren Cole’s blustering courage. Gregory Sloan found that the implications of that note had been growing in his mind since he’d first read it and tried to shrug it off. He found the note crowding everything else from his mind.

Gregory Sloan grunted a curse. Poison — before another thirty minutes had passed, for it was now one-thirty. The devil take this fool Nostra! It was impossible, for Gregory Sloan had not been out of his office since he’d received that note. He did not intend to go out of it. Furthermore neither did he intend to touch anything that might conceivably contain poison. Death was one way out of his financial dilemma, but Gregory Sloan did not welcome that avenue of escape.

He crushed the note in his thick fingers. Few people, those few only the most trusted, even knew of the exact location of this office. Gregory Sloan was well hidden, quite alone, and he’d touched nothing that might poison him.

Yet even as the thought was going through his mind, he felt his stomach begin to burn. Eyes staring, he clutched the edge of his desk, hauled himself erect. It was exactly one-thirty. Even a slow-acting poison might do its work in the space of half an hour.

Gregory Sloan tried to cry out against the impossibility of it. It couldn’t happen — yet he fell to the floor, his body twisting, jerking in the sort of convulsion that came from the administration of strychnine...

So that’s the way things stood be-fore Abner Murder and I got our feet to the mess. We read the scare headlines, of course. As far as we could see the case would never concern us. Until the little pocket arrived from Frank Snow in the afternoon mail.

I was going through some old records while the chief sat at his battered desk, his baby-pink, Santa Glaus face lighted while he devoured cream puffs and read a magazine.

The lanky mailman came in, screwed up his eyes at Murder. The mailman had never quite reconciled himself to the fact that the dimpled, dumpy, mild, blue-eyed, little guy at the battered desk had a monicker like Murder. The mailman deposited a bundle of. mail on my desk. The first thing I noticed was the manila envelope with Frank Snow’s return address. The mailman closed the door behind him, and I picked up the envelope.

I was on the point of opening it, when the door opened again and two men came in. I knew them both by sight and police record. It only took one glance for me to reach around where my shoulder rig and thirty-eight were hanging on the back of my chair. They were that kind of lads. The short one was Rick Duvarti. The tall yegg was a bloody hophead named Burt Krile.

I didn’t get my gun. Krile had a flat automatic in his own fist. He slammed it across the back of my hand. Duvarti stood in the middle of the office, covering his pal with a wicked looking thirty-eight on a forty-five frame.

I sat very easy-like and the chief laid aside his magazine. “What is this, boys?”

“Just a sociable little call,” Duvarti said. “We been watching the mailman. He just came out of this office. We want something left here.”

Burt Krile’s eyes lighted as his gaze swept my desk. He matched the envelope with Frank Snow’s return address. “I got it, Duvarti,” Krile said with a nasty laugh that came from the bottom of his beanpole frame. Krile crammed the envelope in his coat pocket.

I knew Abner Murder would suddenly trade his eye teeth for a look at the contents of that envelope. He said, “That’s a Federal offense, Krile.”

Duvarti, short, squat, chuckled. “You wouldn’t go yelling for the Feds, would you, Murder? Later on, it might go hard with you and this Luke Jordan ape.”

I don’t like being called an ape. But there was nothing I could do about it. With another short laugh, Krile struck with his automatic like a viper. I tried to duck, but he was fast. Duvarti, I saw out of the corner of my eye, looked awful unsteady on the trigger.

My head exploded against the fiat of Krile’s gun. I felt myself falling, saw in a haze the chief trying to get to the gun in his desk drawer. Duvarti said something in a nasty tone. Krile moved fast. His automatic lashed again, right on the crown of Murder’s sandy head. Then I quietly went to sleep.

I blinked my eyes open with the chief slapping my cheeks. I sat up; the chief said, “As the strongarm half of this detective agency, Jordan, you’re a bust.”

“Nuts,” I said. “I didn’t notice you thinking your way out.” I got to my feet, nursed my head with my hand. “What did our playmates take?”

“Nothing,” Murder said, “but the letter. They conked as to give them plenty of time to make a getaway, not to have time to search the office. Finish the mail, Luke, something tells me this climate is unhealthy for two boys named Duvarti and Krile.”

He checked his gun while I ripped through a few letters. Then I handed him a square sheet of paper. I watched his face while he read:

Murder folded the paper very neatly in his pudgy fingers. “It looks,” he said, “like we’re into something!”