“Harv Costain was Gail’s lawyer,” he said. “Got the divorce for her on some grounds of brutality — stuff like that. I think she ought to have told you”
“Maybe it slipped her mind,” I said, quietly.
“Mazonik waited in your car after the ruckus in the bar out at Tony Zarsella’s place in the valley. That’s when he found your gun. Costain came out alone to get the car and Mazonik shot him. Zarsella never knew who killed Costain, but he didn’t want any trouble, so he had his boys move the body. It all seems rather simple, now, doesn’t it?”
He smiled politely again. I let him get on with it.
“It seems that you stirred up this flattie — Keever. He smelled some easy blackmail and put the bite on Mazonik. That tipped Mazonik off that you were on the prod. He gave you a scare-off call on the phone in a disguised voice, but it didn’t take. So he turned in your gun — the murder weapon — and let the law take its course with you. Then you told him, in some restaurant, that Keever was on your trail. So he decided that he would have to silence the guy, permanently. That left only me in his way.”
He watched carefully to see how I took that.
I took it fine, without a word.
“I was next on his list,” he said, somberly.
“Is that all in the confession, too?”
“No. But I saw him. And he hates my guts.”
“She works for you. Is that it?”
He came out with it then. “I’m planning to marry her,” he said, simply. “I’ll give her your best wishes and say good-bye to her for you.”
He put the hat on, very carefully, waited. A faint smell of ether drifted down the hall and into the room. I lay there and stared sleepily at him. He flushed and turned on his heel and went out.
Padlocked Pockets
by D. L. Champion
Watch your wallets, friends! Sackler, that parsimonious prince of penny-pinchers, is on the premises. This time it’s the case of the counterfeit killer — and the covetous coin-collector is running true to form.
Chapter One
Easy Money
I am a man who customarily eats a hearty breakfast. However, on this cold February morning the thought of oatmeal acted as an emetic and the idea of scrambled eggs completely unsettled me. All I craved was a pint of bitter black coffee.
There was a taste of old octopus in my mouth and my head was Gene Krupa’s drum. My fingers were unsteady and a damp load of remorse sat heavily upon my shoulders. I had, in short, a hangover.
After consuming my liquid breakfast, I staggered from the corner coffeepot into the windy street. I hailed a bus, jammed my miserable self into a horde of unhappy humanity and clung to a greasy strap for dear life as we rumbled downtown to Rex Sackler’s office.
Somehow I made my way into the elevator which rode skyward pitching like a destroyer in the North Sea. I emerged into the corridor, made my way precariously down it and opened the frosted office door.
I got over to my desk and sank into my swivel chair without bothering to remove my hat and coat. Sackler’s flinty voice cut into my consciousness.
“Good morning, Mr. Manville.”
I looked up, blinked and said, “Huh?”
“Manville,” he explained patiently. “Thomas Manville, the playboy who you seem to think you are.”
“Oh,” I said weakly. “Well, a guy’s got to let himself go every once in a while. All work and no play—”
“Makes jack,” he finished for me.
I knew that he’d stolen that one but I was in no mood to argue, even with Rex Sackler. I got out of the chair and with some effort took off my overcoat.
Sackler sat at his desk as I did so regarding me with chiding, disapproving eyes. He ran a thin white hand through his black hair and sighed.
“So,” he said, “I find myself the employer of a roisterer, a drunkard, a weak-willed tosspot. The life of a private detective should be above suspicion. We are aligned with law and order. We are the righteous sword of justice.”
“Always,” I said, “provided the price is right.”
He closed his eyes for a moment and looked like a long suffering man. “Joey,” he said, “invariably you reduce everything to a financial status. I am speaking to you not of money but of principle. You are spineless. You possess no will. You can not withstand temptation. The smell of whiskey, of a woman’s perfume, or the rattle of two dice cause you to sink into a slough of iniquity. Be influenced by your friends, some of whom are steel-willed, solid citizens.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Let me guess. Now, wait a minute. I’ve got it! It’s you!”
He frowned at me. “You are still frivolous. Yet you may well emulate me. My will is not putty. What temptation do I yield to?”
That was an easy one. It was true enough that Rex Sackler wallowed in no fleshpots. But steel will, rectitude and righteousness had nothing at all to do with it. The hard fact of the matter was, that in our industrial civilization there aren’t any free vices left.
Wickedness costs dough and there never was an O.P.A. on vice. And Sackler was not the boy to toss money away, whether on a loose woman or on the collection plate.
His regard for cash was a holy thing, beside which Nathan Hale’s affection for his country, Abelard’s love for Heloise, and a lyric writer’s emotional ties with the state of Alabama were as nothing at all.
He possessed more United States War Bonds than any three camels could comfortably carry. And he lived like an indigent Hottentot. His furnished room cost him every cent of four bucks a week and his diet was strictly sixty cent table d’hote.
The receiving department of the Salvation Army would have lifted its eyebrows at his clothes which were older than the twenty-first amendment to the Constitution and shabbier than a carpetbag.
I put all these facts into a few well chosen phrases and uttered them.
Sackler heard me out with growing indignation. When I had finished there was a long silence during which a gleam came into his black eyes. Had I been more alert that gleam would have warned me.
It was the expression he invariably wore when some money-making scheme evolved in his chiselling brain. He coughed slightly, took a sack of tobacco from his pocket and proceeded, most inexpertly, to roll himself a cigarette.
“Now, Joey,” he said, “you say I have no vices because vices cost money. That is not true. I am not a saint, nor do I begrudge expenditure for certain indulgences. For instance, do you realize that I smoke, perhaps, forty or fifty cigarettes a day?”
That was true enough. Of that number he rolled about half of them and bummed the rest. Figuring it rapidly, I estimated that the cost of this prodigal habit was every bit of four or five cents a day.
“Now,” he said, “to prove my point about will power, Joey, I am about to give up smoking as an object lesson to you.”
I looked skeptical. I have observed that for a normal man, smoking is the toughest habit to break. It is an automatic habit. Heavy smokers don’t even realize that they have lighted a fresh cigarette.
I said: “You can’t do it. That is, not for any period of time.”
“No? How about three months?”
I shook my head. “I still say you can’t do it.”
“You and how much cash, Joey?”
A red lantern on a railroad track could not have been plainer than that. In seven years I had not won a bet from Rex Sackler. Thirty percent of the salary he had paid me had found its way back into his own bank account through some kind of gambling device or another.