Black Mask (Vol. 22, No. 2 — Mary 1939)

McCall said, “Gardner double-crossed me and everybody else by getting rid of my blanks and putting back some loaded cartridges.”

“How did Gardner know about your plan, if I didn’t?” the warden asked icily.

“It looks now like he was keeping an eye on the ventilating shaft where the guns were planted. He wasn’t even supposed to be on that floor when I started substituting blanks for bullets, but he saw me and came over.” McCall wiped his moist face. “Anyway, I was so sure he was all right that I told him everything and asked for his help. I got it, all right — in the neck! Because no one else could have swapped the cartridges.”

“And then Gardner told Steward that I was in on it,” Baxter said.

“Is Gardner dead?” Dodge asked.

“That dirty lug is in hell, where he belongs!” McCall grunted savagely. “When I caught him sneaking toward the machine-gunner, he knocked me out with his rifle. And I’m pretty sure he was coming back to kill me when somebody shot him down. He and Steward must have figured on killing Baxter and me.”

“I shot him... He’ll never use any more of Steward’s dough. Why didn’t you shoot him yourself?” Baxter asked.

“I was awake, but I couldn’t move. Paralyzed, sort of.”

Nausea and weakness hit Baxter then, and his eyes dimmed. With a little sigh he passed out...

When he came to, everything seemed worth while. For Joan Dodge was sitting near his bed in a clean white room that looked and smelled like part of a hospital. And the soft expression in her liquid eyes, combined with a shy smile, told him she was waiting for him to get well.

Strictly for Suckers by Stewart Sterling

Murder’s no practical joke — even to Broadway’s toughest crowd.

* * *

In a way, it’s a belly laugh — if you care for your humor laid out cold on a slab. Only last week, ten thousand people put coin on the line to see this glamour guy dish out his super sex-appeal. And last night he plays his final performance to an audience of one. Me.

But what a show! Right out of his Romeo routine to climax a curdler! At that, I got paid to watch him die; otherwise he’d have staged that last act absolutely alone.

It so happens I wouldn’t trade the hide off a buffalo nickel to see him heat up a harem on the sheik’s night out, but a lad in this watchdog business has to gander at plenty of dizzy stuff to earn his sirloin and onions.

Which was why I was sitting alone in room 804 of the Metropole Hotel about two-thirty this ayem, nursing along a beaker of brew, a pocketful of panatellas and a loaded Police Positive.

I am watch-dogging it for the Louse and the Louse is definitely a right guy. His real name is Stanislaus Kraddakapalous; show me the gambler who’d risk his gilt fillings on a jaw-breaking tag like that! So he’s simply the Louse to the high-spade and bouncing-bones clan, though to look at his red-apple puss, his curly gray hair and those soft brown peepers behind their horn-rim windshields, you’d never guess he runs the biggest crap game in town. In that black string tie and starched collar he looks more like a professional undertaker’s mourner.

Now the Louse may not keep books exactly the way the revenue lugs would like; but he always keeps his nose clean. No cap-weights or geared dice, no house dough on the back line with a miss-out artist shooting against the customers. Of course, he is a floater; he has to shift his game every night to make it tough for stick-up heisters to locate him.

To make it still tougher, he lists me, for a hundred cookies per, to see everybody gets away from the game with whatever they win, if any. I don’t rate the century on account of I am a Sherlock or a Philo or even a regular licensed eye. I never could make any sense out of chemistry or locate a killer by the places he dumps his cigarette ashes, and the only deductions I am good at have to do with these income tax blanks. The Louse gives me shirt-and-sock money because I am a practical guy who knows some of the angles and because I have a rep for not getting nervous when I smell powder burning.

By all right and reason, I shouldn’t have had any serious trouble last night. It is not an open game, merely a group of top-billing show people celebrating the hundredth performance of “All The World Loves—”

From where I was sitting, across the corridor in 804, with my door open a couple of inches, I could hear a little laughing and horsing around once in a while, but nothing you could call out of line until this gunshot brings me up on my toes.

I am out in the hall before the echo stops, and though I put my ear against the door to 803, I can’t hear a murmur. There is no one in the corridor and none of the doors along the line are opening, so I figure no outsiders have been alarmed. It is only a matter of seconds before I drag out the duplicate key to 803 the Louse gave me and get the door open.