The stories come from that pulp period when the “bang-bang” style of writing — action-for-action’s sake — was being phased out in favor of character-driven stories. You can see it in the grisly motivation of Dr. Miles Murdock as fate forces him into a frightening new role.
So here they are — the full quartet all in one volume. Turn the page and learn the fatal secret of the unforgettable Purple Scar.
I
Medals of Murder
Chapter I
Man in the Morgue
John Murdock walked slowly in the darkness of midnight. His lips were clamped tightly on his cigarette. Abstractedly his eyes stared straight ahead.
The streets, so busy and crowded during the day, were now deserted. The tall office buildings stared across at each other like black, silent sentinels in the bleak gloom.
John Murdock did not see the limousine that came out of the alley not half a block behind him, a deadly spider crawling from its lair. If he had seen it, his hands would not have remained so deep and snug in his coat pockets. They would have flashed for the Police Positive holstered beneath his left armpit.
John Murdock had been wearing the blue too many years not to recognize rats and the way they acted when ready to strike, but he was engrossed in his own thoughts.
He was on his way to perform a disagreeable duty. He had to arrest someone tonight for murder, the climax to a case on which he and the entire Department had worked diligently for months. It was his good fortune to have tracked down the evidence he needed to convict this killer. It might mean a promotion, yet John Murdock did not like the task.
Rolling slowly, silently, keeping close to the curb, the car crept nearer. The man on the sidewalk didn’t even suspect he was being followed. And then, without warning, an automatic that poked through the window belched flame, lead, sudden death.
Six shots, sharp, staccato, rattled through the inky hollowness between the tall buildings. The sound bounced back and forth across the deep, dark chasm, magnified and distorted.
The six slugs found their mark in John Murdock’s spine. With a groan he fell against the brick wall of the building and collapsed to the ground with a sickening thud. He was dead before his head touched the sidewalk.
One of the killers leaped out of the car. He was a big, burly fellow with gorilla-like arms. He swept up the dead body of the detective like a sack of flour and dumped it into the back seat of the automobile, then piled in beside it.
The car streaked away with a nerve-shattering grind of gears. At the corner it turned right, at the next corner left, right again. Then it headed straight for the river.
It was a gloomy spot where they halted and snapped out the lights. Few people ventured this particular section at night. To one side rose a row of low-built, dilapidated warehouses. The other side, black and silent, vanished into the river. The only sound was the occasional toot of a tugboat groping through the night, the hushed lap-lap of the waves washing against the side of the bulwark.
The burly hood hopped out of the limousine and peered cautiously up and down the street. His short and ugly companion slid out the far side and came around.
“This sure is a creepy spot,” the second said uneasily, twisting his narrow, haunched shoulders under his topcoat.
“Then stop gassin’,” Burly Guy rumbled. “Gimme a hand with this stiff and we’ll beat it out of here.”
They reached inside the car, dragged the body of the man they had just murdered to the water’s edge and proceeded to strip off his clothing. They took every stitch off him, even down to his socks and shorts. He had a signet ring on his right pinky, a green gold band with an Old English “J” set in black onyx. They slid that off, too.
Then Short-and-Ugly took a small bottle out of his inside pocket. The label couldn’t be read in the dark, but it bore a skull-and-crossbones and said:
POISON!
Sulphuric Acid
“I ain’t got the stomach for this stuff,” Short-and-Ugly declined.
Burly Guy snatched the bottle, yanked out the cork with his teeth and poured the contents over the nude corpse’s face, hands and the soles of his feet.
Short-and-Ugly retched, but Burly Guy was unmoved about the whole business. He calmly tossed the empty vial into the water. He took a last look at the dead detective, made certain they hadn’t left any marks of identification on him, then nudged the body into the river with his blunt toe.
Making a neat bundle of the dead man’s clothes, he tucked them under his arm and started back to the car. Short-and-Ugly was already behind the wheel, waiting.
Burly Guy suddenly remembered the murder gun. He withdrew it from his hip pocket, held it in the flat of his hand and pitched it far out into the blackness of the river.
“Okay, Weak Stomach,” he sneered at the thug at the wheel as he climbed in. “Let’s go!”
Short-and-Ugly needed no engraved invitation. He threw the car into gear and gunned it on its way as if the dead man’s ghost were after them.
On the flood tide, two days later, the mutilated body of John Murdock came to the surface. One of the riders on the foredeck of the ferry that plied between the city of Akelton and Red Point spotted it floating just beneath the waves. The Harbor Police fished it out.
Six-thirty that same night, Dan Griffin stood in the autopsy room at the city morgue. Dan Griffin was captain of detectives of Akelton City’s police.
In the big room were a dozen or more operating tables, each under its own brilliant, individual domelight. On the white-topped table before him was sprawled the grisly remains of the man fished from the river.
Griffin’s face was rock-hard and lined with deep concern as he turned to the tall, white-haired man beside him.
“Been in the water two days, you say, Doctor Andrews?”
The chief medical examiner nodded in a slow affirmative.
“And he was dead before he even hit the water. Six bullets in his back.”
Griffin tried to study the mutilated face of the cadaver.
“Fish eat him away like that?” he asked.
“Sulphuric acid.”
Griffin rubbed his square jaw reflectively. His mouth formed a grim slash under square-shaped nostrils. His graying hairline was straight, separating flat temples and thereby forming another square. The square motif was broken only by round, snapping black eyes, but it was picked up again by his square shoulders and body. Griffin’s character matched his physique. He was an all-around square man.
“Any idea who it might be?” the medical examiner wanted to know.
Griffin lifted his eyes slowly from the almost inhuman face lying before him. There was unconcealed moisture in his eyes.
“Yes, Doc,” he said in a broken voice. “A very good idea.”
Griffin was sure that in life this mutilated corpse had been his best friend. True, there wasn’t a mark of identification on the body. The face was little more than a grotesque outline. But when a man works side by side with someone for more than fifteen years joking, fighting and philosophizing, there are some things that even sulphuric acid cannot wipe out.
“Don’t put him away,” Griffin said in a hollow voice. “I’ll be back.”
Gray-faced, he lumbered across the room and out the door. He had performed many painful acts during his career on the Force, but what he had to do now was the toughest of all.
When he clumped down the stairs, he had no usual joke for the keeper who sat behind the desk. He unwillingly took up the phone, dialed a number and waited.