The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (50 page)

“The barman and Maury and his pals grabbed the kid, but they didn’t knock him off right then. They held him down in the hideout room, in the basement of the joint. That’s what the spot was doing as a side-line – hiding out guys who were plenty hot and willing to pay for a place to stay.”

“That’s what the cops said.”

Whitey went on: “Well, the gal didn’t want to turn in her husband, even if she wasn’t living with him. She gets the idea that if somebody come looking for Harper they’d get scared and turn him loose. They didn’t – they knocked him on the head and buried him instead. He’d been nice to the girl – he’d even given her his frat pin after his girlfriend had given it back to him. That killing got the girl. She wanted to squawk, but she was scared of her husband.”

“She was going to talk to me,” I said.

“But she wasn’t going to let her husband know about it,” Whitey explained. “He caught her and they knocked her off. Anyway, the whole gang were in the hideout racket and they’re all going up. You know, Joe, I should have told you about Maury, but I didn’t have the guts. I knew the guy the minute I saw him in the can.

“He was a bad one years ago. He’d come to me when I was fighting and wanted me to throw a fight. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you, see? I figured you’d think maybe I was crooked or something. Say! You going to get in trouble with the cops over this?”

“Hell, no!” I told him. “Bryce got everything cleared. The cops act like I’ve got a medal coming. They figured it cleared out a bad bunch they didn’t know about. And then, Bryce pulls a lot of weight. It’s all okay.”

“Swell, Joe,” Whitey said, beaming at me.

“Tell me something,” I said.

“Sure, Joe.”

“Did you throw that fight that Maury Cullen wanted you to throw?”

Whitey stared at me and said: “Why – hell, yes! D’ya think I’m nuts?”

Slabbe lowered his after-lunch quart of beer long enough to rake in the busy telephone. “Yeah?”

Homicide Lieutenant Carlin answered. “That grifter you’re looking for, Max Lorenz – we got him.”

Slabbe changed the location of eight ounces of beer. “I should put you cops on retainer.”

“Oh, you pay your license.”

“Sure it’s him, Pat? Five feet eight, a hundred and sixty pounds, light complected—”

Carlin cackled: “Dark complected now.”

Slabbe’s big hand on the telephone hardened a bit. “That so,” he murmured.

“He was burned up,” Carlin said. “He went over Bleeker’s Canyon in a jalopy and it caught fire. Some Oybay Outscays found it this morning, what was left of it. Lorenz was in it – what was left of him.”

Slabbe’s meatblock face registered as much expression as a meatblock. “Accident, huh?”

“Am I a whirlwind?”

“They post him yet?”

“Doing it now.”

“I’ll be down.”

Slabbe drank to the last drop, left his office and walked for ten minutes and entered City Hall. The morgue was in the basement. He filled his lungs with the relatively sweet corridor air before turning the knob of the autopsy room door, held his breath, nodding to Carlin, a rangy, slope-shouldered cigar-smoker in blue serge, and squinted at the charred stuff on one of the three guttered tables.

He said: “Dark complected is right.”

Carlin never used a word when a grunt would do.

A pathologist who had rolled up his sleeves but hadn’t bothered to don a gown said to another who was acting as medical stenographer: “It’s a male. Been dead a while. Today’s Wednesday, two o’clock. Say about Monday afternoon or night. Five feet eight’ll do. Can’t guess the weight much from the ashes.”

Carlin tilted the stub of his cigar close under his long bony nose to mask the smells. “What else, doc?”

“Some lung tissues in fair shape. Tell you if he was breathing when the fire started.”

“Suppose you do that.” Carlin looked at Slabbe. “Any reason for him to have got knocked off?”

“No-o-o.”

Carlin snorted. “When you say it like that, you might mean—” He stopped; his snort had yanked the cigar stub from under his nostrils and he’d sucked in a good lungful. He gagged, covered it, whitening. He started for the door, controlling himself, then peeked at another operating table bearing something that had been picked off a tide flat and upon which the median incision had not yet been stitched. He ran.

“Sensitive for a cop,” murmured the pathologist.

“Don’t worry about him,” Slabbe said. “He can back me up any day.”

“He shouldn’t mind just one,” the pathologist said. “Monday we had – how many was it, Joe?” he asked the other medic.

“Twenty-six. Twenty passengers and the crew.”

Slabbe nodded. A Lockheed Constellation had cracked up on the take-off Monday at the airport and burst into flames. Everyone aboard had perished.

Slabbe pointed a frankfurter-thick finger at the operating table “That his thigh?”

The pathologist peered. “Yeah.”

“Bullet in it?”

“See for yourself.”

“Hard to tell,” Slabbe said. “How about an X-ray? A slug, even if it was there, could fall out or melt up. There’s supposed to be one in his left thigh, though.”

“Oh, this is the right one. Here’s the left.”

“Still can’t tell,” Slabbe shrugged. “Check it, will you? Check too, if he was pushed around, slugged or like that before he died. A good sock knocks loose fat deposits and the blood takes ’em to the lungs, right?”

The medic looked up sharply. “How did you know?”

“Read it in a book,” Slabbe said. He left.

Carlin had his pacing area of the corridor blue with cigar smoke. He grimaced. “I helped out with those bodies at the airport Monday and didn’t even flutter, but today I had kidneys for lunch. Come on upstairs.”

In his gopher-hole-sized office upstairs in the Homicide Bureau he went to the window and nursed two tall green bottles of ale in off the outside sill. He dealt one to Slabbe, fished for an opener.

Slabbe absently uncapped his bottle with his teeth. “How did you make him, Pat?” he asked. “Car license?”

“You’re gonna bust your teeth some day.” Carlin caught foam. “Yeah,” he said. “The jalopy had a Pennsylvania license tag and I phoned Harrisburg and it was registered in Lorenz’s name Saturday: ’41 Chevvy, two-door sedan. What was he up to?”

“Well, I can’t just say.”

“That’s dandy.”

“Don’t pop off now. He was a grifter and that’s for sure, so he didn’t just come here for the mountain air; but why he did come, I don’t know. He got out of Lewisburg Saturday, which accounts for him buying a jalopy in Pennsylvania. This is good ale.”

“What little bird told you this?” Carlin murmured.

“No little bird, an old buzzard – the New York manager of the Zenith Detective Agency. How come I had the weather eye out for Lorenz is I got a sort of tie-in with Zenith. No retainer, no contract or anything, understand. It’s just that I passed along some dope on a guy they had on one of their readers once and they sent me a check for fifty bucks and said I was an alert investigator that they’d remember if ever they were interested in this neck of the woods again. So last week they wanted a line on Lorenz and called me. They don’t want him for anything he
did
, they just want to keep him spotted for whatever he
might
do. Big outfits like Zenith find it pays to get there first sometimes.”

“Don’t educate me,” Carlin sniffed.

Slabbe drank. “They probably had a plant at Lewisburg and found out that Lorenz was heading this way, and the old buzzard in the New York office remembers that I’m an alert investigator—”

“You said that.”

“If I don’t, who will? Anyhow, I didn’t find out what Lorenz was up to here. I didn’t even see the guy in the flesh.”

“You saw the flesh, though. What was his rap in Lewisburg for?”

Slabbe held up an open palm, not quite as heavy and gray as a small granite grave marker. “The Zenith telegram didn’t say. All it said was he was about forty, probably armed, always dangerous. Five feet eight, a hundred and sixty pounds, light complected, blond, natural teeth, brown eyes, a limp in the left leg from a slug in the thigh picked up in a heist of some kind, years back. I told the medics to X-ray for the slug.”

Carlin stopped drinking abruptly. “You think it ain’t him?”

Slabbe’s shoulders moved like ponderous sides of beef, in a shrug that said nothing. “Today’s Wednesday. He was sprung Saturday morning. It would take time to buy the jalopy and transfer the tags and about ten hours to drive here from Lewisburg. He could have hit here late Saturday night or Sunday morning, but I put some lines out as soon as I got the Zenith telegram Saturday and none of my people saw him . . . or so they say. That’s why I contacted you and asked did you spot any strangers in town.”

Slabbe put his bottle on the scarred desk. “The doc says Lorenz fluffed off Monday. Maybe the guy wasn’t in a hurry to get here. Maybe he got drunked up along the road to celebrate and took his time, and never got to town at all. We should find out if he was in and did his stuff, whatever it was, and was on the way out again when he piled up, or if he was just heading in. Which way was the car going?”

Carlin’s dark eyes were as gloomy as his voice. “No can tell. Bleeker’s Canyon is a seventy-foot drop from the road. A car turns over going down and you can’t say where it was heading unless skid marks show on the road, which they don’t. The guard rail is gone in a couple spots and there’s curves that if you come around too fast, blooie. The fire sure as hell made smoke and a blaze, though, but nobody reported it.”

“Lonely stretch there,” Slabbe reminded. “You might see smoke in the daytime, but the way the road overhangs the cliff along there, at night you wouldn’t see any flames unless you had your head out the car window and had giraffe blood in your neck.”

Slabbe got his bulk vertical again, tossed a gumdrop into the air and caught it on his tongue. “I’ll talk to my people again. Maybe with Lorenz dead, they’ll remember something.”

“You’ll also phone Zenith and say that the circumstances of Lorenz’s death are highly suspicious, that the local police are baffled and that the services of an alert investigator are for hire.”

“You’re a cynical so-and-so, Pat,” Slabbe said mildly, and went back to his office and did it.

The voice of the Zenith Detective Agency’s New York City manager, one Enoch Oliver, purred as smoothly over the wire as one of the phone company’s dynamos. It informed Slabbe that it would be most gratifying indeed if Max Lorenz were really kaput – but by all means to make sure.

Lorenz had first attracted Zenith’s attention in 1922 when he burgled a New Jersey warehouse protected by them. He was committed to the New Jersey state reformatory May 8, 1922, and paroled December 20, 1925.

On August 12, 1928, he was committed to Elmira reformatory from Dutchess County, N.Y., for five years, for grand larceny. He was transferred to Dannemora, Auburn and Clinton prisons, being paroled from the latter March 10, 1931. Declared delinquent of parole, he was returned to Sing Sing September 16, 1931, transferred to Clinton and reparoled July 7, 1932. He was again declared delinquent of parole December 9, 1932, and returned to Sing Sing where he made an unsuccessful attempt to escape.

Transferred back to Clinton and paroled November 22, 1933, he was taken in custody by Dutchess County officers and sentenced to five years for burglary. Again he was paroled, on September 23, 1935.

He was arrested February 9, 1936, by Troy police for the Saratoga Springs headquarters, charged with grand larceny and the possession of a concealed weapon in connection with a hot car setup. He went the circuit of prisons and was released by commutation November 19, 1940.

“Busy little bee, wasn’t he?” Slabbe told the phone.

Mr Oliver agreed absently, concluded the biography with: “In June 1942, Lorenz was arrested in Pennsylvania in connection with black market operations in nylon hose, sentenced September 12 to from four to seven years in Lewisburg, from which penitentiary he was released July 6, 1946.”

A Zenith man planted in Lewisburg for the express purpose of welcoming strayed sheep back into a world of light – and incidentally learning their attitude and plans for the future, when possible – had tried to shake Lorenz’s hand at the pen gate. He’d got the hand but in the stomach, together with Lorenz’s “Scram, gum heel! You don’t have nothing on me and you ain’t gonna get nothing. You won’t even see me around in a couple days.”

Being the usual fearless type of Zenith operative, the man had oozed along in Lorenz’s wake, nonetheless, had seen him buy the ’41 Chevvy, had talked with the used-car dealer, learning that Lorenz hadn’t been at all critical of the car, though he’d paid cash. Lorenz had said that he wanted a car for only a few days and then the hell with it.

While the tags were being transferred, Lorenz had gone to a respectable enough saloon and taken on a cargo of gin and bitters. At one point he had asked for a road map and had drawn a pencil line on it from Lewisburg to Treverton, and this was how the Zenith operative – snitching the map later – had surmised Lorenz’s destination.

Slabbe clucked admiringly at the Zenith sleuth’s ingenuity and inquired if the man had by any chance checked back with prison officials to learn who had visited Max Lorenz lately, and so on.

Mr Oliver said quietly: “We have been established in this business since 1872, Mr Slabbe.”

“Excuse it,” Slabbe said.

“It’s excused,” Mr Oliver murmured. “Lorenz’s last visitor, on June 28, just eight days before he was released, was a man who operates a private detective agency in your town, Mr Slabbe.”

Slabbe sat up.

“The name is Jacob George,” Mr Oliver continued, “and it was he who deposited five hundred dollars with the warden to be paid to Lorenz upon his release, which, of course, explains how Lorenz was able to buy an automobile for cash. The price, incidentally, was three hundred and seventy-five dollars plus the cost of transferring the license tags.”

Slabbe managed something about Zenith being quite a neat outfit. Mr Oliver passed this and purred that perhaps with this information in his possession Mr Slabbe might now do a bit more than he had in the past few days, if he hoped to be considered an alert investigator by the Zenith Detective Agency. The phone clicked.