“I got to his room almost as soon as he did. But the door was locked. I stood there listening, and all of a sudden I hear screaming. In English, French, and several other languages. I swear to you, it scared me silly.
“I started banging on the door. But it’s no use. Finally I beat it down after the manager. We’re back in five minutes. And we open the door.
“Well, the room is silent and empty.
“I stood staring for a minute. Then I saw something. The floor is covered with pieces of wood. Splinters, sticks. It’s Jimmy. Chopped to pieces, cut to smithereens. He’d murdered Jimmy, honest to God.
“We looked all around the room, and found the ax he’d bought in the hardware store. And then found that he’d lit out through the window. Made his getaway down the fire-escape.
“And that’s the last trace we could pick up of him. We hunted high and low. I had two men scouring the town. But he was gone, leaving everything behind him. Fled — like a murderer, a murderer fleeing from justice, so help me.
“I gathered Jimmy up and put him in a piece of wrapping paper. That’s how confused I was. And I carried him to the office and finally threw him in the wastebasket. And then I went home, and was unable to sleep for six nights.
“That’s almost the end of the story. Except that two years ago I come in here one night after the show, and I see somebody familiar sitting at a table. I can’t place him for a few minutes, and then all of a sudden I see it’s Gabbo — Gabbo the Great — with a gray toupee and the mustache shaved.
“I rush over to him and begin talking. And he stared at me — highty-tighty like.
“ ‘My name,’ he says, ‘is Mr. Lawrence. I am sorry you make a mistake.’
“Well, I’m not unusually dense, and as I stood there it dawned on me that Gabbo didn’t want to be known. That he’d come back after fleeing from justice for eight years — come back disguised and with a different name, so that the police wouldn’t pick him up for his great crime.
“And there he sits,” Ferris looked at me with a mirthless smile. “Everybody knows his story in this place, and we all kid him along, calling him Mr. Lawrence and keeping his secret. Yeah, and when we get funny we call him the Ax Murderer. You know, just a gag among ourselves.
“Wait till he leaves” — Ferris picked up his glass — “and I’ll take you over to the table where he’s sitting.”
This struck me as a rather empty offer.
“What for?” I inquired.
“So you can see what Jimmy looked like.”
Ferris suddenly laughed. “He always draws a picture of that damned idiotic dummy on the tablecloth — every night.”
The Old Lady Who Changed Her Mind
by Edgar Wallace
Much has been written of Edgar Wallace’s prolific and phenomenal popularity, and as was to be expected, many exaggerations have crept in to help build the Wallace legend. For example, it has been said that when he died in 1932 (in Hollywood, of all places!) the Wallace estate consisted of £130,000 — in debts! That we can believe, knowing the Wallace penchant for the ponies; but it has also been said that in a mere two years’ time Mr. Wallace’s continuing royalties not only wiped out all his debts but paid free-and-clear dividends to his heirs. It’s a tall story — but Edgar Wallace’s whole life was a tall story.
However, where there’s smoke there’s fact. Wallace was a prodigious producer. It is a matter of recorded history that ’way back in 1928, before the days of monumental reprint sales, before the era of the 25 cent bestseller, Mr. Wallace sold in a single year no less than 3,000,000 copies of his books throughout the world!
That too we believe, and in the light of that highwater mark, you would think that every one of Wallace’s books must have been printed both in England and the United States, to say nothing of Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and South America. But it is not so. One of Edgar Wallace’s finest volumes of detective short stories — a book worthy to stand beside the J. G. Reeder series — never appeared in this country, at least so far as publishing records indicate. That book is THE ORATOR, about Inspector O. Rater. Long, long ago we brought you one of the Orator’s exploits — “The Man Next Door,” in EQMM, September 1942 — and now we present another fine example of Rater’s ratiocination, another story by the man who for all his prodigal performance in print can still be called upon, fourteen years after his death, to produce a “brand-new” story for American readers.
Mr. Rater never took a job out of the hands of a subordinate unless there was a very urgent reason. The subordinate in this case was a humble police constable, and his job was to remove Mrs. Schtalmeister from the unconscious body of a rent collector. That the oblivion of this unfortunate man was entirely due to the stone jug this vigorous old lady had wielded was a tragic fact, for in an unguarded moment the disgruntled collector had threatened eviction unless the rent was paid. Possibly he was not too well acquainted with the tenants of 79 Keller Row and their peculiar methods — he most certainly did not know Mrs. Schtalmeister and her reputation, or he would not have turned away even as she was reaching for the pitcher.
She was nearer sixty than fifty, a tall and powerful woman with the grip of a navvy, and she had behind and about her the moral support of Keller Row and a people to whom rent collectors, school inspectors and policemen were anathema.
It was when a sympathizer of the old lady took a hand and a pick handle to deal with the interfering officer that Inspector Rater, a chance and interested spectator, decided that the moment had arrived when he might interfere.
It was he who hauled Mrs. Schtalmeister from the prostrate collector, his hard fist that persuaded the sympathizer to retire from view, and finally he who lifted the virago bodily on to the police ambulance and helped strap her; and when, half an hour later, Mrs. Schtalmeister was explaining in broken Dutch that she had been the victim of an unjustifiable attack, it was he who spoke tersely of her past record.
She was a grim, raw woman, the terror of her neighborhood; for fifteen years she had dominated the Swedes, the Dutchmen and the Scotsmen who for some extraordinary reason had congregated in Keller Row, Greenwich. They were seafaring people mostly; their men signed on at irregular intervals in the ships that go down Thames river from Victoria Docks. In the old days they lived in Poplar and Wapping, but once the County Council had driven a tunnel between Black-wall and East Greenwich it was inevitable that there should be a seepage of waste southward.
Seven Jascar brothers lived in one house; No. 43 held a shifting population of Chinese; a veritable German who had been interned during the war was established at No. 15; there were Norwegians, an Irish family, and at least one Finn in that cul de sac which ends blankly at the wall of a shipbreaking yard.
To Keller Row one must surely return, since it was the scene of one of the most remarkable cases that was ever handled by the Orator. For the moment, here is Mrs. Schtalmeister fulminating against the law and its representatives, but growing more coherent every minute.
“For fifteen year’ I lif in dis street — no quarrels haf I mit anyones. I lif like a lady — six pound a week I haf by my son... Nor bad tempers I haf: once, yes, in ’85 it is true. My brudder an’ I quarrels, but never since...”
And then, in perfect innocence, quite unconscious of the amazing breach of the law which she revealed, rather proud than otherwise of her deed, she told a story which Mr. Rater heard apparently unmoved.