The Richard Deming Mystery Megapack Page 10

  All that did was increase our speed. He took out after us, but we had too much of a lead on him. He was only halfway up the hill when we heaved our prize onto the creeper in the back of the station wagon. Stan tossed the tire iron in after it, then scurried to the wheel. I slammed the lower part of the back door shut, leaving the upper part still raised, and ran to jump in next to him.

  He had the engine started by the time I got in and took off without lights.

  * * * *

  Spooky Lindeman’s junkyard was on the edge of Old Chinatown, in a district where there was nothing but small businesses. They were all closed at this time of night, but the main gate to the junkyard faced a street on which there was occasional traffic even this late at night. There was a rear gate giving onto an alley. As we drove into the alley I said, “Pull over as close to the gate as you can get.”

  Cutting the lights, Stan parked within a foot of the gate. Within moments we had some company. Arab, the big German shepherd Spooky turns loose in the junkyard at night to devour burglars, came bounding over to the fence, showing his fangs and snarling.

  Arab’s defect as a night watchman is that he remembers daytime visitors to the junkyard or he loves being called by name. When Stan said, “Shut up, Arab,” he instantly stopped snarling and began to wag his tail.

  I got the tools from the car, put them in my pockets, and coiled the tow rope around my shoulder. Stan and I lifted the hi-fi innards and the creeper out onto the ground, closed the upper part of the rear door, and set the items back up onto the still-open lower half of the door. I climbed from there onto the car’s roof and Stan handed the metal framework and the creeper up to me.

  As I set the framework down, I noted with gratification that Bert Pinter had put the screws in a plastic sandwich bag and taped the bag to the frame.

  The top of the junkyard gate extended only about three feet above the roof of the car. As Stan was climbing up to join me I tied one end of the tow rope to the gate’s top bar and tossed the other end over inside the yard. Then I went over the fence and let myself down hand over hand.

  The moment I reached the ground Arab put his oversized paws in the center of my chest and tried to lick my face. Pushing him away, I said, “Down, Arab!”

  He got down but he continued to nudge my legs with his nose and wag his tail all the time Stan was handing me down the hi-fi innards and the creeper.

  When Stan climbed down we set the metal framework on the creeper, picked up the creeper, and carried it past the jumble of wrecked automobiles, piles of pipe, and other junk to the building in the center of the junkyard. There was no point in trying to roll the creeper, the ground was so full of embedded stones and potholes.

  What Spooky called the “warehouse” was a large square building of cinder blocks that housed his office and a storeroom for items that had to be kept out of the weather. We set the creeper down in front of the office door.

  Both Stan and I were fairly good with simple locks, but people as distrustful as Spooky Lindeman don’t use simple locks. After examining the one on the office door we agreed there was no undetectable way we were going to be able to get into the building. I picked up a large rock and bashed out the glass panel in the door.

  I tossed the rock off into the night. Since nothing was going to be missing from the warehouse—at least, nothing Spooky was aware had been there—it was likely he’d be more puzzled than suspicious of the broken window. I hoped he’d attribute it to a sonic boom.

  Reaching through the glassless upper panel, I opened the door and we carried the creeper and its cargo inside. Arab tried to follow us but Stan shooed him outside and closed the door.

  Stan located the light switch for the office, then opened the door to the storeroom off the office, found that switch, and turned it on. We carried the creeper in there and set it down. The huge room was lined with shelves loaded with everything from storage batteries to car radios. On the floor were hundreds of appliances, from toasters to color TVs.

  Because Stan had helped Spooky carry it in, he knew exactly where the hi-fi cabinet was. As soon as he pointed it out, I knelt behind it and removed the back.

  For some moments after I had taken the back off, Stan regarded the interior of the cabinet in silence. He was looking slightly sick. “That’s the first corpse I ever saw,” he said finally.

  “Me too, I told him. “Shall we pull him out of there?”

  There was another period of silence before he said, “I can’t touch him, Jerry.”

  “He’s got to come out of there,” I said.

  “You’ll have to do it alone,” he said in the same low voice. “I’m sorry. I can’t touch him.”

  “Well, at least you can help me carry the creeper over here,” I said grumpily, and went over to where we had set it down.

  We set the creeper down right behind the cabinet, lifted off the framework, and set it aside. I gripped the corpse by an arm and a leg and pulled.

  He didn’t budge. He was stuck.

  I continued to pull, but after a time I gave up and looked around for Stan. He wasn’t there. Then I saw him coming from a far corner of the room, carrying a four-foot crowbar.

  “Try this,” he said, handing it to me.

  I inserted the end of the crowbar beneath Mr. Stokeley’s neck and pushed it until it was wedged behind his left shoulder. When it was firmly in place, I put my foot against the end of the cabinet and drew back on the handle of the crowbar.

  There was a popping sound and Mr. Stokeley skidded across the creeper to land on his side several feet beyond it. His position remained unchanged. His knees were still jammed against his chest and his toes were still pointed straight forward.

  After staring at the corpse for a moment, Stan took the crowbar from me and carried it back to where he had found it. By the time he got back I had removed the small bag containing the screws from the metal framework. Together we lifted the framework into place. I screwed the four screws home, plugged in the wires, and screwed on the back.

  “It ought to work,” I said. “Do you want to carry it into the office and try it?”

  “No,” Stan said in a definite tone. “I prefer to have faith. Let’s get out of here.”

  Replacing my tools in my pockets, I said, “O.K., but I can’t lift Mr. Stokeley all by myself. You’ll have to help me get him on the creeper.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not touching him. ’

  In a reasoning tone I said. “You’re going to have to help me carry him after he’s on the creeper even if I get him on there by myself.”

  “Then I’ll only have to touch it, not him.

  I gave in. Setting the creeper next to Mr. Stokeley’s back, I rolled him over onto it. He was stiff as a colonel s spine. He lay on his side on the creeper, still folded into a cramped capital N.

  I stooped to grasp the end of the creeper where the head lay. Reluctantly Stan took the other end.

  After we carried it outside, we set the creeper down while I closed and relocked the office door. Arab took a sniff of the dead man, tucked his tail between his legs, and slunk off.

  Back at the gate I tied the tow rope around Mr. Stokeley before climbing up on top of the station wagon. I hauled him up then lowered him to the ground on the other side of the automobile. Stan handed up the creeper. I set it down, climbed down onto the rear door, lifted it from the roof, and jumped down to the ground. After untying the corpse and rolling it back onto the creeper, I tossed the rope back over the top of the gate to Stan. He pulled himself up over the gate, untied the rope, and came down. Together we loaded the laden creeper into the back of the station wagon.

  What we should have done next, of course, was simply to dump the body in an alley. But you don’t do your best thinking on cheap bourbon, and we were both still stoned enough to have it fixed in our minds that tidying things up required everything being ret
urned to its proper place. In the frame of mind we were in it seemed logical that we should return the contents we had just removed from the hi-fi to the place where we had obtained its present contents.

  It was around midnight when we again parked on the crest of Benedict Canyon Drive. The green stucco house at the bottom of the hill was still ablaze with lights, but the only other lights along the street were here and there behind drawn drapes. There was no sign of life outdoors.

  We both got out and walked to the rear of the station wagon. When a glow of headlights appeared beyond the crest of the hill I paused on the sidewalk instead of continuing my journey to the back of the vehicle, but Stan had already stepped behind it and raised the upper part of the rear door and lowered the bottom.

  When the creeper started to roll out, Stan held out a hand to stop it. Then his hand touched the corpse’s head and he emitted a gasp and jumped out of the way.

  The creeper rolled all the way out, dropped to the street, and started down the hill. It had a ten-foot lead before I could react and start after it.

  The squeal of sixteen un-oiled roller-skate wheels was gratingly loud from the moment the creeper began to roll, but as the thing picked up speed it grew progressively louder.

  By the time it was halfway down the hill the neighborhood was resounding with an unearthly squeal as penetrating as the scream of a fire siren.

  I was conscious of the glare of headlights behind me as the car that had been coming up the other side of the hill topped the crest and started down this side.

  But I neither glanced over my shoulder nor took any evasive action.

  I was too intent on catching the speeding creeper.

  I was overmatched. It accelerated so rapidly that it reached the curb at the bottom of the hill when I was only hallway down, jumped the curb without even slowing down, and headed along the walk toward the front door of the green stucco house.

  No one in the neighborhood could have avoided hearing the piercing squeal of those wheels. It was therefore not surprising that Bert Pinter jerked open the front door to see what was going on.

  At that very moment the creeper crashed into the six-inch-high concrete stoop where it came to an instant halt—but the law of inertia caused the body to continue on at the same speed. Still on its side and cramped into the shape of a capital N, it shot headfirst at the man in the doorway. Instinctively he leaped aside.

  Through the open doorway I could see Mr. Stokeley skid across the front-room and disappear into the central hallway, where he was met by a feminine scream.

  By then I had reached the bottom of the hill and was racing up the walk.

  As I scooped up the creeper and spun back to race away again, an authoritative voice called. “Hold it right there, mister!

  A black-and-white sedan with a rotating red light on top of it had pulled over to the curb in front of the house. Two uniformed cops were getting out.

  I zoomed past the front of the car before either of them was all the way out. I had a ten-yard lead before the one who had emerged on the driver’s side started to lumber after me.

  I had enough of a glimpse of him as I shot by to see he was middle-aged and overweight, so I really wasn’t terribly worried about being brought down by a flying tackle. I could tell I was steadily increasing my initial lead by the distance of his voice behind me as he periodically yelled, “Stop or I’ll shoot!

  I took the chance that he wouldn’t. There was no way he could know at that point what crime, if any had been committed, and cops aren’t supposed to shoot people on suspicion, even when they refuse the order to halt.

  Stan was already in the car and had the engine going. I threw in the creeper, dived in on top of it, and grabbed the back of the center seat to keep from rolling out again.

  Stan took off like a rocket.

  I looked back to see the pursuing cop coming to a halt halfway up the hill. The other one was pounding on the door of the green stucco house.

  I pulled the lower section of the back door closed, reached up to click the upper section into place, then climbed over into the center seat and on into the front seat.

  Stan switched on his headlights.

  “Do you think we ought to pick up another bottle before we go back to your room?” he asked.

  “Definitely.” I said. “That race up the hill sobered me up.”

  I could tell that Stan hadn’t even started to sober up though, when he said. “Let’s get a quart instead of a fifth. If Mrs. Sull is still awake, we could invite her in for a drink.

  MR. OLEM’S SECRET

  Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, August 1971.

  When United Security advertised for retired men to serve as security guards on the newly formed Merchant Patrol, I jumped at the chance. The pension of a retired bus driver, even supplemented by social security, doesn’t permit many luxuries.

  The job was made to order for a retired man who needed a little extra income but wasn’t interested in overworking. My trick ran only four hours a day, from eight p.m. until midnight, and the work was so easy I was almost ashamed to take the money. All I did was stroll along the street in my assigned area, checking the doors of business establishments and peering through windows to make sure night lights were burning and no intruders were inside. I was also supposed to keep an eye on stores still open for business, but as none in my area stayed open beyond nine p.m., I only had this duty for the first hour of my trick.

  Of course, theoretically, there was some risk in the job, because my beat was in the heart of a section of Los Angeles that was rated as a high-crime area, but the risk was more theoretical than real. While police uniforms were so unpopular around there that cops answered calls only in pairs, the Merchant Patrol was accepted right from the beginning.

  One reason was that United Security wisely hired only residents of the areas they were assigned to patrol. Probably an equally important reason was that we neither were regarded as cops nor acted much like them. Our gray uniforms were deliberately designed so that we couldn’t be mistaken for members of the LAPD, and the community quickly came to understand that we had no intention of noticing crime that had no bearing on the business establishments we were hired to protect. Pushers and numbers runners, for instance, didn’t have to worry that any member of the Merchant Patrol might finger them to the cops.

  Even in the event that we ran into a burglary or robbery in progress, the risk wasn’t great. Although we all carried guns, they served mainly to deter muggers from selecting us as targets as we made our lonely rounds. We were instructed to use them only in self-defense, and never to attempt personally making an arrest. If we spotted a crime in progress, all we were supposed to do was head for the nearest phone.

  United Security never explained this policy, but probably the fact that all of us were over sixty and some were pushing seventy had some bearing on the regulation.

  Mr. Olem took over Sol’s Delicatessen only about a week after the Merchant Patrol was formed. It had been common knowledge for some time that Sol Rubin had been trying to unload it. The place did a brisk enough business, but for the past couple of years most of the profit had gone to heist artists and burglars. Poor Sol had been held up nine times and had been burglarized four times, with the result that his insurance had long since been canceled. Shortly before Mr. Olem bought him out, he had privately informed me that one more knock-over could bankrupt him.

  Sol probably held the record in that area for being held up the most times, but there were a number of runners-up. Heists and break-ins were so routine in the neighborhood, businessmen had stoically come to accept them as an unavoidable hazard of staying in business. Before the formation of the Merchant Patrol, that is. It was their first real effort to fight back.

  I got to know Mr. Olem several weeks before he took over the delicatessen, because when he came to town in answer to
the ad Sol Rubin had placed in a national food-retailing magazine, he moved into the same rooming house where I had lived ever since my wife died. A lean, hawk-beaked man of indeterminate age, withered but still sprightly, with closely-cropped snow-white hair that made him look as though he were wearing a fuzzy woolen skullcap, he might have been a well-worn sixty or a well-preserved seventy-five. He deftly avoided letting anyone know which, if either.

  He also deftly avoided letting anyone know much of anything else about his personal life, even our inquisitive landlady, Mrs. Martin. He never disclosed if he were a bachelor, a widower, or had a wife somewhere, although he did deign to give Mrs. Martin a negative answer when she once bluntly asked if anyone would be joining him after he took over the delicatessen. He never even disclosed his first name, always formally introducing himself to new acquaintances simply as Mr. Olem. I’m not sure that this was another symptom of his reticence, though. I got the curious impression that perhaps he had no first name.

  What his nationality was, I have no idea. His name seemed vaguely Mid-Eastern, and his dark, hawk-nosed visage seemed to confirm it, but he once casually mentioned that he had grown up in Australia and he still had a slight Australian accent.

  He also casually dropped a few other items of information about himself to me that he didn’t divulge to the other roomers or to Mrs. Martin. When he first arrived at the rooming house, I had not yet started working for the Merchant Patrol, and we fell into the habit of smoking our pipes together on the front porch each evening. Possibly because I never attempted to pry, he became much less reticent with me than with the others.

  At any rate, I learned from his casual remarks that he had been all over the world and had done a bit of everything. He had punched cattle in Australia, had prospected for gold in New Guinea and had been the chef of an exclusive restaurant in Hong Kong, just to mention a few of his more exotic adventures. He also let drop that his most recent venture had been operating a commercial fishing boat on Lake Champlain. It was quite obvious that none of these claims were mere braggadocio, because he spoke with too much authority about each of his many vocations. For instance, his claim of having been a chef was bolstered by an encyclopedic knowledge of the gourmet dishes of many lands.