There was no sign of the guy he’d sent out ahead of us to keep it cased, and he swore under his breath, while my heart deflated. The place was dark and lifeless, but neither of us was foolish enough to believe they’d gone to bed yet. He took the front door and I took the back, with a gun he furnished me — he was on my side now, don’t forget. We blew the locks simultaneously and met in the middle of the hall that ran through the place. In three minutes we were downstairs again. Nothing was disturbed, but the birds had flown; suave Hessen, and the butler, and the pinch-hitting brunette. No incriminating papers, but a very incriminating short-wave set. Incriminating because of the place it was located. It was built into the overhead water-tank of a dummy toilet, not meant to hold water or be used. Gilman made the discovery in the most natural way possible.
“Spy-ring, all right,” he grunted, and phoned in then and there from the place itself.
That wasn’t getting me back Steffie. I was in such a blue funk that I didn’t notice it as soon as I should have; I mean, something had seemed to tickle my nostrils unpleasantly the whole time we were in there. It only registered after I came out into the open again with him, and we stood there crestfallen in front of it. Before I could call his attention to it, headlights slashed through the dark and a car drew up in front.
We crouched back, but it was only the spotter that was supposed to have been hung up there before. Gilman rushed him with a roar. “What the hell’s the idea? You were supposed to—”
“I tailed ’em!” the guy insisted. “They piled into a car, locked up the house, and lit. I tailed ’em the whole way, those were the only orders I got!”
“Where’d they go?”
“Pier 07, North river. They boarded some kind of a fuzzy tramp-steamer, and it shoved off in less than a quarter of an hour later. I tried to reach you at Head—”
“Was there a blonde girl with them?” Gilman rapped out.
“No, just the three that were in the house here when I first made contact; the two men and a dark-haired girl. There was no one else smuggled aboard ahead of them either; I pumped one of the crew—”
“Oh no they’re not,” Gilman promised viciously. “They may have cleared the pier; a police-launch can pull them off again at Quarantine.” He spilled in the house again, to phone in the alarm.
I went after him; that was when I again noticed that unpleasant tickling. I called his attention to it when he got through on the wire. “Don’t it smell as though they’ve had this place fumigated or some—”
He twitched the end of his nose. Then his face got drab. “That’s gasoline!” he snapped. “And when you smell it that heavy — indoors like this — it’s not a good sign!” I could tell he was plenty scared all at once — which made me twice as scared as he was. “Bill!” he hollered to the other guy. “Come in here fast and give us a hand! That girl they didn’t take with them must be still around these premises someplace, and I only hope she isn’t—”
He didn’t finish it; he didn’t have to. He only hoped she wasn’t dead yet. I wasn’t much good to them, in the sudden mad surge of ferreting they blew into. I saw them dimly, rustling around, through a sick haze.
He and I had been over the house once already — the upper part of it — so they found the right place almost at once. The basement. A hoarse cry from Gilman brought myself and the other guy down there after him. I couldn’t go all the way, went into a paralysis halfway down the stairs. She was wedged down out of sight between two trunks, she’d been loosely covered over with sacking. I saw them lifting her up between them, and she carried awfully inert.
“Tell me now,” I said, “don’t wait until you get her—” I waited for the axe to fall.
“She’s alive, kid,” Gilman said. “Her chest’s straining against the ropes they’ve got around—” Then he broke off, said to the other guy, “Don’t stop to look at her now, hurry up out of here with her! Don’t you hear that ticking down around here someplace, don’t you know what that gasoline-reek means—?”
I was alive again; I jumped in to help them, and we got her up and out of the cursed place fast. So fast we were almost running with her.
We untied her out by the car. She was half-dead with fright, but they hadn’t done anything to her, just muffled her up. The other guy wanted to go back in again and see if they could locate the bomb, but Gilman stopped him. “You’ll never make it, it’ll blow before you—”
He was right. In the middle of what he was saying, the whole house seemed to lift a half-foot above its foundations, it lit up all lurid inside, there was a roar, and in a matter of minutes flame was mushrooming out of all the lower-story windows.
“An incendiary-bomb,” Gilman said. “Turn in a fire-alarm, Bill, that’s about all we can do now.” He went off someplace to use a phone, and when he came back some time later, he had a mean face. A face I wouldn’t have wanted to run up against on a dark night. I thought he’d heard bad news. He had — but not for us. “They got ’em,” he said. “Yanked ’em off it just as the tub was clearing the Narrows. They’re earmarked for the FBI, but before we turn them over, I wouldn’t be surprised if they show wear and tear— She is pretty at that, kid.”
She was sitting there in the car by now, talking to me and crying a little. I was standing on the outside of it. I was standing up, that was my mistake.
“Well, I gotta go,” I heard him say. And then something hit me. It felt like a cement-mixer.
Our roles changed. When my head cleared, she was the one bending over me, crooning sympathetically, “—and he said to tell you, No hard feelings, but when anyone socks Dick Gilman on the head with a walking-stick, they get socked back even if they’re the best of friends. And he said he’d see us both down at Headquarters later in the night, to be sure and get there on time if we don’t want to miss the fun.”
I was still seeing stars, but I didn’t care, I was seeing her too. And now it was only twelve days off, we’d licked the thirteenth.
Too Many Enemies
by William Mac Harg
Tough, succinct and memorable — those are the words for the O’MALLEY stories which William MacHarg has been contributing for years to Collier’s. MacHarg shared in the creation of the scientific and intellectual LUTHER TRANT, then went on alone to portray the opposite and equally essential pole of police work, the shrewd solid hardworking copper DAN O’MALLEY. (For OFFICER O’MALLEY’S rarely used first name, see the story “The key man,” in which he tells a child witness to call him “Uncle Dan”) O’MALLEY’S best qualities have rarely come through more clearly than in this story of the man who had “Too many enemies.”
“This is one of them vengeance murders,” said O’Malley, “and in this kind of case plenty people know who done it but they all go blind and dumb. I’ll have no luck with it. This dead guy was named Vanelli, and he was only twenty-three years old but already he had so many enemies it was only a question who would get him first. They got plenty cops working on this case.”
“How was he killed?” I asked.
“He got beat up and then stabbed.”
“Where?”
“Right in his own home. This Vanelli got himself suspected of passing info to the cops about some guys he knew that done a little counterfeiting; and, besides that, a guy that he had went with for a long time but had had trouble with got knocked off and the guy’s family thought Vanelli had a hand in it; and when he already had two outfits trying to shove him over, Vanelli goes to Boston and runs off with a girl that was going to marry somebody else.”