“I was just planning to leave,” Serena explained nervously.
“So I see,” Malone said. “Can I help you with your baggage? This looks like the heavy one.”
With his left hand he reached down for the big metal-bound suitcase, while his right hand moved to his hip pocket. The lady was faster on the draw but slower on the rebound. With a swift lashing motion of his right arm Malone slapped the gun out of her hand. In the clawing, kicking, catch-as-catch-can wrestling match that followed Malone had no reason to revise his previous appraisal of Serena’s physical charms, but he realized how much he had underestimated her muscular development. It took most of what he had once learned from Dr. Butch (“The Killer”) Hayakawa about the gentle art of jujitsu to persuade the lady to listen to reason.
“I guess you could have handled that baggage yourself, after all,” he said, still breathing hard. Keeping Serena covered with his own gun he picked hers up off the floor and stuck it in his coat pocket. “If it’s Benson you’re waiting for, you can just take it easy,” he told her. “He’ll be along in due time — with the police right behind him. But maybe it isn’t Benson. If it were, you would have given him a better alibi. Or were you planning to double-cross him and let him take the rap while you made a fast getaway?”
Serena was silent, glaring at him with the pent-up fury of a cat waiting its opportunity to spring again.
Malone said, “No, I guess it wasn’t Benson, after all. Between eight and ten Sunday night you had as much opportunity to commit the crime as he had. You forgot that when you tried to short him on his alibi. All right, who was it? You didn’t handle this job alone, did you, or am I underestimating you again?”
“Malone,” she said, “there’s two hundred thousand dollars in that suit case. Don’t be a fool. There’s still time if you and I—”
“A generous thought,” Malone said, “and a flattering one.”
“Make up your mind, Malone. They’ll be here any minute—”
“So there were others,” Malone said. “And now you’re ready to double-cross them too, if I’ll split with you.” He reached for the telephone. “Get me Captain Daniel Von Flanagan at police headquarters,” he told the hotel operator.
Serena screamed, “Malone, don’t be a fool! Malone—!”
“Get over here right away,” Malone told Von Flanagan, after explaining the situation to him briefly. “And bring Benson with you.”
Von Flanagan and his squad had barely arrived on the scene and staked out to arrest the bandits when they arrived. Malone heard a knock on the door and then the shooting started. When it was over, two subdued bandits, one of them slightly wounded, were brought in. At sight of Serena Gates one of them shouted “Stool pigeon! Double-crosser!” and lunged toward her, but Von Flanagan’s cops restrained him.
“There’s the payroll haul,” Malone said to Von Flanagan, “and here’s the lady’s gun.”
“That makes three guns,” Von Flanagan remarked. “One of them should tell us who fired the shot that killed Petty. Nice work, Malone.”
“I was just doing my duty to my client, Mr. Algernon Petty,” Malone replied. “That’s what he retained me for.”
When he was finally alone in the apartment with Benson Malone said, “What are you going to do about the night watchman? Fire him, or lend him money to get his son-in-law out of a jam? And, speaking of money, here is your thousand-dollar retainer. I’m sorry, I guess I had you figured wrong all the time.”
“You’d better keep it,” Benson said, “I’m going to need a lawyer to defend me — in a divorce suit.”
“At your service,” Malone said. “Remember I never lost a client yet.”
He bent down and picked the flowers out of the waste basket. The card was still attached to them: “Flowers to the Fair, From John J. Malone.”
“I know a young lady who will appreciate these,” Malone said, “Her mother lives in Monte Carlo.”
Die Like a Dog
by David Alexander
I want to get this written down on paper fast, while there’s still some Sneaky Pete in the bottle, just in case my hand gets shaky and I need it. Not that I’m stooling, understand. When you’re a wino on Skid Row you don’t holler copper. But this is different from stealing the shoes off a mission stiff or jack-rolling a lush. This is murder.
I want to have this all written down on paper with a date on it and somebody to witness it, then I’m going to seal it up in an envelope and leave it with a character I can trust. Maybe a Holy Joe at the Sally Ann — the Salvation Army — or the bartender at Grogan’s gin mill on the Bowery. Just in case the cops get to smelling around with their big noses, understand. Because this is the first time that I was ever mixed up in a murder and I got to protect myself. I’m not really mixed up in it, I guess, but just kind of a witness. And I’m not even sure it’s murder.
Don’t start laughing and thinking I’m going off into the rams or counting the lavender leopards on the ceiling just because I’m a wino. This happened. It happened just today. And by now maybe they got the old doll that was chilled in the top drawer of the ice box at the morgue on East Twenty-ninth Street.
I’ll take another snort of the sweet wine I got right here beside me in the cubbyhole at the Castle Rooms I just paid the man six bits to occupy until tomorrow morning. Then I’ll begin at the beginning. There, that’s better. Stuff warms up your insides, know what I mean?
I woke up in this same flophouse this morning. Only I didn’t wake up in a six-bit private room. I woke up in what they call the dormitory where a bed costs thirty-five cents. I didn’t wake up until nine o’clock when they come around to fumigate the place. They run you out of here every day at nine so they can fumigate and you can’t get back in until four in the afternoon.
I felt awful, worse than I ever did feel before, but when the man started hollering to hit the deck I did all the usual things mechanically before I tried to get up. I felt for the Army shoes with the waterproof soles and they were tied around my neck like usual. I reached down inside the old gray sweatshirt and the little tobacco pouch where I keep what’s left from the stakes I make by bracing guys was there, pinned to me, but it was empty. That didn’t surprise me because I knew I’d spent my last cent on a pint of Sneaky to get up on. I felt my leg. I always tied the morning pint to my leg, inside my trousers, in a special way I had invented. I hadn’t even opened the bottle the night before, but it wasn’t there. Some mother-lover had split my trousers leg with a razor blade and got the pint while I was sleeping off my binge.
I damn near blew my top right there. I had the green-paint horrors and I didn’t have a cent and the brand new full pint that would have saved my life was poured down some mother-lover’s gullet. I tried to get out of bed and I could hardly stand on my own two feet, I was shaking so. I didn’t know what the hell to do. I’d be lucky to make the street without a shot the way I felt, and in order to brace enough of a stake for a drink I’d have to get off the Bowery. You can’t bum from bums. Maybe I’d have to walk up Fourth Street all the way to Washington Square and I couldn’t ever make it without a drink.
I staggered into the lavatory and splashed some water on myself and looked around at the empties on the floor, hoping maybe some guy might have left even a few drops in a bottle. I’d been on Skid Row long enough to know better. Somehow or other I managed to get down the steps and out into the street. I kind of leaned against buildings until I was outside Grogan’s Palace Bar about a block away. I’d been drinking there the night before. It’s funny how they give Skid Row pads and wino traps such high-faluting names. The Castle and the Palace, for instance. And just a little further on there’s a flea flop called the Berkshire Arms. The Bowery businessmen have got a funny kind of humor.