“Five thousand dollars!” Neil Grant pressed his lips far out, then drew them together into his cheeks in a grimace that resembled a smile. “I don’t know that I—”
Drake roared with sudden violence: “Then to hell with you! I don’t have to beg the tip. Do I have to beg it? Do I, Brannigan? No piker money goes down with Chicago Drake.” He got off the bed, said again, bitterly: “To bell with you!” and lurched for the door. “Let’s go down for a drink, Brannigan.”
Neil Grant’s voice and smile were conciliatory. “Don’t be like that, Drake. I’ll get it. A minute—”
He went over to the closet, entered it, was concealed by its door for thirty seconds. When he came out there was a large manila envelope in his hand, bulged out thickly in the center. Without speaking he placed a sheaf of bills on the table, looked up sidewise at Drake, the brown glitter in his eyes amused and tolerant.
Drake was boisterous and his voice was loud. “Tip on Gallant, boy. You got it now. Five grand there, Brannigan?”
Proctor took up the bills, flipped each one straight in the center like a bank teller, and counted them out upon the table. There were three five-hundred-dollar-bills, the rest hundreds, older, more used, than the others.
Proctor reached three thousand, four. They all watched him. He droned: “Forty-five hundred—”
Drake said: “Wait a minute.” His face hardened, became clear, and he lost his drooling smile. He reached over and picked up the hundred dollar bill Proctor had just put down; he brought it close to his eyes, nodded, looked up at Neil Grant. He said: “You killed Joe Madigan.”
The blond man kept smiling; his eyes kept bright. He said softly: “You’re not drunk, Drake. You tried to trick me.”
“I’m not drunk,” Drake said. He held the bill taut between fingers, read off the serial number. “06091113. That was Madigan’s getaway money — his lucky bill. Ended in thirteen; Joe was superstitious about it. He’d had the bill for years, and everyone that knew him knew that. This afternoon in the train you saw him take it out of his vest pocket and kiss it and put it back. He said something — I forget. But when you went back to kill him you didn’t forget to take it, after you’d taken the bag. Pretty cheap, Grant. So cheap it’s going to hang you.”
Neil Grant said, shaping his mouth: “No.” He leaned forward, soft voiced, smiling, triumph relaxing his mouth, making merry glitters of light in his brown eyes. “No, Drake. Shall I tell you why?” He chuckled, looking around at each of them in turn. “Because it isn’t Joe’s getaway money. The killer might have known that, too — known the thirteen Joe was superstitious about. But they’ll find Joe’s bill in his vest pocket when they search his suit. That’s the one thing you didn’t know, Drake.”
Drake said slowly: “I didn’t know, Grant. Only one man did know. The man that murdered Madigan.”
Neil Grant looked thoughtful, not concerned, nodded after a moment. “Yes,” he said. “You’ll call as witnesses Brannigan, your tout? Nicky, your friend? Yourself?” He laughed aloud. “We know it, Drake. We three. Unfortunately there isn’t a judge, a jury, to hear. So—”
Proctor lost his cheerfulness; his voice grew surly, his face hard. “Uh-huh,” he said. “You got me wrong, mister. My name’s Proctor; I’m a detective on the city homicide squad.”
He lunged for Grant, staggered back with blood flowing from his nose at the snapping of the blond man’s arm, swift and keen like a rapier. Nicky staggered, went down under a kick; only Drake, his lean body shooting from the chair, barred the corridor door.
But Neil Grant didn’t move for that; he raced back, his handsome face sullen, hard, with dark horror coating the eyes. Proctor’s body contorted by the table and drew up, and shots — one, two — crashed over one another in the narrow walls of the room.
Neil Grant made the bathroom door — staggering, he made it, and clicked it behind him. Proctor, squinting, brushing the red stream away from his nose, went over to it. He said to Drake: “A way out from here?”
Drake shook his head, coming across, and together with the short man threw his body against the door. There was a sound from inside. The scraping whine of a raised window.
Proctor grunted breathless: “Fire-escape?”
“No,” Drake said. “But I think he knows that.”
Proctor looked at him, pulled down his mouth corners, said: “I should worry.” He placed his revolver close to the door, fired twice, again, then pushed out the lock and went in.
The room was empty. Thin curtains fluttered lightly in the night breeze from the open window. When Drake crossed to it and looked out he saw, far below, long lines of small things like ants scurrying along the light-splotched stone canyon. There was a knot of them below him, and the long lines converged on this. But there was an open space in the center, with something spread out, and this the ants did not touch.
In the elevator Nicky said: “How did you figure him in, boss? After Mayo tried to croak you—”
Drake’s tired face moved irritably. “My throat hurts like hell,” he said. He put up fingers and rubbed it tenderly. “They got a name for men like Pete Mayo, but I don’t know what it is. The act of death means something to him that life itself doesn’t. He loves death too much to be quick about it. He wouldn’t have shot Madigan on the train — too abrupt for his fancy, too dangerous. He’s a professional. He saw right off what I was trying to pin on him, and, catching me where it was all on his side, he would have killed me. If he wasn’t a little insane he would have shot me at once.
“I wasn’t sure it was Grant; but when I figured it wasn’t Mayo, the odds were it was Grant and I was certain it couldn’t have been Jimmy Harris. So I took the chance. Miss Carrigan thought I was drunk; when Grant got off the elevator I knew he thought the same. I played it up.”
Sirens screamed as they crossed the lobby; a heavy car slid past the front windows and braked, whining, to a stop. Two men came out of it with a stretcher.
The Thrill Is Gone
by Fulton Oursler and Rupert Hughes
From Colliers, copyright, 1942, by Fulton Oursler and Rupert Hughes
Fulton Oursler (alias Anthony Abbot), creator of Thatcher Colt, detective, and Rupert Hughes, creator of Dirk Memling, criminal, combine their rich talents on the strange story of Henry Dawkins, the member of a murder jury who went to extraordinary lengths to live dangerously...
The news in yesterday’s papers was not the beginning of a new life for Henry Dawkins, as many of his friends supposed, but the logical next step in a strange and long-concealed pattern that stretched from his cradle to the courtroom.
The hidden passion of Henry’s heart was a desire for excitement, a dream of adventure and danger. He was a small, freckled man with volcanic blue eyes and he worked in a piano factory in one of the distant and almost uninhabited reaches of the Bronx. He lived not far from the plant in the third floor front of a rooming house. In his room was a grand piano and a shelf filled with secondhand detective and Western novels. Henry could not play the piano and had bought his instrument merely to make the proper impression on his employer. Neither was he a detective or a cowboy, but he lived in a storybook world, always hoping that some day something would happen to him. And one day something did.
There came in Henry’s mail a summons for jury duty. As he was not acquainted with the defendant, had never been arrested, and had no prejudices against capital punishment, he was acceptable to both sides, and so became a member of the jury.