“Shut up,” I said. “To make me swallow the story, phony blackmail evidence was rigged to make it seem you had been blackmailed by Ketterer into permitting the syndicate to operate. Actually posed just for use in the frame. And to make sure I would swallow the story, you had Ironbaltz, Goodrich and Depledge put on an act to convince me they were pals of Ketterer’s. But I doubt that he had ever seen them before they all started shaking his hand in front of his office building.
“So what could the syndicate accomplish by this elaborate frame?” I asked, then answered myself. “It made your reelection a certainty, and under you it could begin to function again as soon as the heat died down. With Ketterer as mayor, it would have been out of business for good. The tip-off is that Ketterer’s so-called confession listed only little-shots in the racket, and the three straw bosses weren’t even mentiond.”
As I talked, Mayor Cash’s face had gradually turned green. Now he said in a shaking voice, “It’s all a lie! It’s nothing but wild hypothesis.”
I shook my head. “The posed pictures of you and Bumpsie Farrel give it away, Mr. Mayor. In the first place, you wouldn’t have given a hoot in hades whether your wife saw them or not. Your wife is a lush who flirts with every man she meets, and you probably have more on her than she could get on you in a million years. In the second place, those pictures were supposed to have been taken five years ago. Last New Year’s Eve I saw Bumpsie Farrel at El Patio Club, and she had on the same formal gown she wore in the pictures. Women like Bumpsie don’t keep the same gown five years. The pictures were made since Ketterer was nominated for mayor.”
“I can prove the whole thing is a lie,” Mayor Cash said to the inspector in a trembling voice. “I have written proof right here in my desk.”
He rose from his chair, ran to his desk and pulled open a drawer. When he spun around, a gun was gripped in his hand.
“Don’t anyone make a move!” he snarled.
A shot cracked out, a hole appeared in the center of the mayor’s forehead, and he pitched forward on his face.
All of us turned to stare at Raymond Margrove in amazement. The fat man looked down at the .25 caliber automatic in his hand, grunted and stuffed it back under his arm.
“I got a permit to carry this when Mr. Moon frightened me about gang vengeance,” he explained apologetically.
“Good shooting,” I said. “That deserves a handshake.”
Crossing over to him, I held out my right hand. As he clasped it diffidently, I heaved his vast bulk to its feet, spun him around.
“You might have saved the effort though,” I growled in his ear. “I hadn’t finished my story. John Cash was only one of your hired stooges.”
“Hey!” Warren Day said, opening his mouth for the first time.
I waited until Hannegan had cuffs on the fat man.
Then I told him, “Ketterer’s confession was planted in his safe, but the syndicate’s lock expert was a nitro-man and couldn’t have opened that safe without blowing it apart. Margrove had manufactured the safe and had its combination on file. He had the stuff planted, then obligingly passed the combination on to me so I could find it easily.
“Another thing pinning it on him is that the minute he hired me, the syndicate had a tail on me, and it was the tail phoning him a report that I was watching the Rand Building that gave him the idea of rushing the three straw-bosses over there to convince me Ketterer was the real boss.
“But the clincher is that the gang was out to get me even after I had unknowingly done them a favor. I thought they were after revenge because I exposed the gambling racket, but actually they wanted to shut me up because I knew Ketterer wasn’t a suicide and were afraid I’d expose the whole frameup.”
It took forty-eight hours to get a confession out of Margrove, but when it I finally came he spilled everything, including the fact that he personally manipulated the razor while Dan Ironbaltz held Ketterer’s legs and Jimmy Goodrich and Art Depledge each held an arm.
As a reward for my part in the affair, the state attorney sent me a pass to the executions, but I couldn’t get there. I was busy that evening getting my ears pulled out of shape.
Hell Is What You Make It
by Robert Turner
Laurie was bound to her handsome heel of a husband by a ring of guilt instead of gold...
She came out of the dream with perspiration cold all over her. Her heart was slugging against her ribs as though it would split. She lay there, stiff and cold, not moving, listening for the city sounds, the hotel sounds of other nights when she’d awakened like this from the same nightmare. But tonight those sounds were missing. The night was quiet, heavy with the silence, as only a country night can be. And she remembered. She was home. For the first time in seven years, she was home, sleeping again in the bed where she’d slept for eighteen years.
Pale moonlight flooded the room from the windows. She looked at the dim outline of the dresser, the chairs, the desk in the corner where she used to do her homework. Nothing had been changed. The folks had taken down the college pennants from the walls and the pictures of movie stars, but otherwise it was the same room. The old brass-ended bed even had the same lumpy mattress. Roy had complained about that tonight.
She shivered and raised up onto one elbow. She looked down on Roy’s sleeping face, marveling at how young he looked.
Even in the bright sunlight, Roy Willis never looked more than twenty-five. Now, with the moonglow softening his features, he looked boyish. His long black lashes lay shadowy against his check. There wasn’t a line in his face. His short-cropped unruly hair was touseled about his high forehead. If she ever told anybody that Roy was thirty-eight, they’d have laughed at her. If she told them that two nights ago she’d seen Roy kill a man in cold blood, they’d have shrieked with mirth. And if she told them how she and Roy made their money, all their money...
“Roy?” they’d say. “Oh, no, not Roy Willis.”
Not lovable, laughing, handsome Roy. Laurie, maybe. She always was a wild one. But not Roy!
She looked down on the man sleeping beside her like a baby. Roy, the miracle man, who could drink all night long and never get hung-over. Fabulous Roy who had broken all the commandments and just about every law there was, and still looked as naive as a choir boy. She didn’t get it. How could all that evilness not touch a man? It was crazy. It was like wallowing hip-deep through mud and coming out of it looking immaculate. It was super-human to be like that.
That was it, she decided. Roy wasn’t human. He was actually the devil, himself.
Some of the details of the nightmare that had awakened her began to sift through her mind. And now, awake, she realized that this time it hadn’t been that same recurring dream. Always before, the man Roy had killed had been faceless. The background had been nowhere in particular and there had been no ending to the dream; it had been just a fragment, without beginning, without end. But not tonight. That was because, tonight, it wasn’t a dream really. It had been a subconscious review, photographically clear, of something that had actually happened. And they said that dreams didn’t really come true.
Somewhere, far off, a hound dog bayed at the moon, a lonesome and eerie sound. Out in the yard a cat prowled, and the guinea hens perched in the trees set up their infernal racket. The old familiar night sounds that she’d known all her life up until seven years ago. But tonight they held terror. They seemed to sharpen that sense of ominous dread that had been building up in her for months.