“Who’s drunk?” Lew Thayer asked belligerently. “Callin’ me drunk, you homely, monkey-faced hyena. Come on!”
Thayer assumed a fighting stance, fists raised. Frank Sargent got in his way. “Easy, Lew,” he said, “it’s Ben Chapman, the boss. This is his place.”
Thayer struck down Sargent’s hand. “Who’re you? I don’t remember your face, but your voice is familiar. Who you pushin’ around, huh? I don’t take pushin’ around from nobody. Nobody, understand?”
Chapman came forward. “Thayer, you drunken sot, I’ve taken enough from you. You’re fired, understand? You’re fired. Now, go home and—”
Smack!
That was Lew Thayer’s fist landing in the middle of the Hallowe’en mask. Ben O. Chapman sat down violently on the floor and a couple of the girls screamed.
Sargent stepped behind Thayer and locked him in a bear hug. “Cut it out, Lew. That was Chapman you hit.”
“Chapman, where’s Chapman?” cried Thayer.
Ben O. was picking himself up from the floor. He had stripped the mask from his face and was holding his nose with a hand. It was bleeding profusely.
“That was a dirty trick, Thayer, hitting me when I wasn’t looking,” he whined.
“Holey gee! I didn’t hit you, Benny. Honest, I didn’t. I hit a coon who was wavin’ a knife at me. Hell, Benny, you’re my pal, ain’t you?”
“Oh, Mr. Chapman,” cried Miss Prescott, “you’re bleeding!” She sprang to Chapman, whisked the handkerchief from his breast pocket and began dabbing it at his face. Another girl advanced on Chapman and between them they led him off to the bathroom.
Sargent released Thayer. The latter recognized Sargent then. “Say, you’re the new man at the office. How’s things?”
“Fine. And you?”
“Oh, swell. I landed Zuskind this afternoon and Ben’s going to give me a ten-dollar bonus.”
“You landed Zuskind this afternoon?”
“Yeah, sure, you know Zuskind, the penny scale man? He’s taking a full page a month, for six months, in The Slot Machine.”
“Wait a minute,” said Sargent. “You landed Zuskind on Tuesday, my first day with Business Journals. This is Thursday evening. Did you know that?”
“You’re kiddin’! Hell, I only stopped in for a drink on my way home. Celebrate, you know. Zuskind was a tough egg to land. And then the bonus Ben promised me...”
“You’ve been drunk for two days,” Sargent said bluntly. “Did you know...?” He gripped the advertising salesman’s arm and led him forcibly to a corner. “Do you know what’s happened at the office in the last couple of days?”
“Yeah, sure. He hired you to take Ernie Pelkey’s place. No hard feelings, fella, but Ernie Pelkey and me was like that.” He held up two fingers pressed together.
“Sligo’s been murdered,” Sargent said into Thayer’s ear.
Thayer cried out in consternation, “You’re kiddin’!”
“I’m not. He was found dead in his office yesterday morning, with a pair of shears piercing his heart. The police...”
“The police, gee! They been around the office?” The full import of Sargent’s information suddenly hit Thayer and he reeled. “Dan Sligo murdered. Holy Moses Mackerel! Sligo! I always thought it would be Ben Chapman—” He suddenly clapped his hand to his mouth. “Jeez, I didn’t say nothing! Holy Moses Mackerel! Sligo murdered — and me dead drunk and not knowing about it. Holy—”
“Moses Mackerel!” Sargent finished for him. “Here comes Chapman.”
Chapter Nine
Chapman rejoined the party, flanked by the two girls who had given him nursing treatment. The bleeding had been stopped but Chapman looked oddly pale.
“Let’s go on with the party, folks,” he said.
“Sure,” said Eli Crombie. “Put on your false face again and show us some more daggers. Maybe you’ve got an Australian whiffle-doofle, huh?”
Light suddenly pierced the fog in Lew Thayer’s head. “False face, hey! That’s what Ben was wearing, huh? Holy Moses Mackerel, and I didn’t know it. What the hell, Ben, I shoulda known. I’ve seen your act so damn’ many times. Ha-ha-ha!”
“You have a funny sense of humor, Thayer,” said Chapman coldly. “Sargent, I want to have a word with you.”
Sargent followed his employer into the kitchen, where Chapman faced him and asked eagerly, “Did you talk to the boys like I asked you, Sargent?”
“No,” Sargent replied briefly.
“But you’ve got to — and quick! My life is in danger, Sargent. Somebody wants to kill me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. If I did I wouldn’t be worrying. I’d have it out with the fellow one way or the other. But they all hate me: Robertson, Lawrence and Black. And you saw what Thayer did to me just a few minutes ago.”
“Thayer’s drunk. The false face and the sword scared him.”
“They did like hell. He’s seen them before. He hit me as a warning.”
“As a warning of what?”
“Just a warning. Maybe it’s Thayer.”
“What has Thayer got against you?”
“Nothing. Not a thing in the world. I’ve been the best employer he ever had. You know what he’s like, a drunken bum. No other publisher in the business would keep him one week.”
“Why do you?”
“Because he’s the best advertising salesman in the business, when he behaves himself. Why, Lew Thayer could sell advertising to another published. Last winter I sent him on a week’s trip to Ohio and he came back with signed advertising contracts totaling eight thousand dollars. He earned twelve hundred dollars for himself in those four weeks. Clear, because I paid his expenses. Then he went on a bat and I didn’t see him for three weeks.”
“But what has he got against you?”
Ben O. Chapman squirmed. “Nothing actually. I’m holding it out for his own good and he knows it. He’d spend it on whisky if I gave it to him.”
“His salary?”
“His commissions on that Ohio trip. I knew if I gave him the money he’d gamble it away or drink it up. So I’ve been saving it for him. He claims I’m trying to cheat him out of it, but he knows better than that.”
“Oh,” said Sargent. “And what has Grosvenor Black got against you?”
“Not a thing.”
“Do you owe him money?”
“Don’t be absurd, Sargent. Why should I owe Black money?”
“No reason, I was just asking. You said they were all down on you and I was trying to determine what motives they had for hating you.”
“They haven’t got any. They’re ingrates. Not one of them I didn’t practically pick up out of the gutter. You take Black; he was down and out when I hired him, absolutely down and out. He came in wearing a green suit that was out at the elbows. There was straw sticking on it and he’d evidently slept in a horse car. He didn’t have a nickel in his pocket and he was hungry. I gave him a job and put him on his feet. Why should he hate me?”
“I don’t know. And Jim Robertson?”
“A supercilious ingrate if ever there was one. I took him from a newspaper where there was no future and gave him an opportunity to learn an excellent profession and amount to something. And all the time he’s sneering behind my back. And Lawrence, did you see that article he published in Creep & Crawl a couple of issues ago?”
“No, I haven’t read any magazine other than Turkey Talk.”
“Read it then. It’s a disgraceful piece. Made me the laughingstock of the industry. The Manhattan reprinted extracts from it. ‘The Love Life of a Cockroach,’ he called it. Creep & Crawl is a business journal, catering to a legitimate business.”
“And what about Ernest Pelkey?”
Ben O. Chapman gave Sargent a sharp glance. “What do you know about Ernest Pelkey?”